Monday, March 18, 2024

From Ed Gorman's Desk: Richard Neely

from ED GORMAN’S Desk



Richard Neely
Nov. 10, 2005

 

The first time I ever spoke to Richard Neely, suspense novelist extraordinaire, he kept trying to place my name. “It’s so damned familiar—wait a minute, you’re the guy who called me the de Sade of crime fiction.”
    Loose lips sink ships. So can old reviews. I figured that our business would sink if he ever remembered that long ago review. But he laughed. “I think I was just ahead of my time.”
     Actually, I’d meant that remark as a compliment because I was pointing out that Neely, despite the Irish name, took a very French approach to the psychological machinations of sex in his books. Two of his books became French movies. Somebody apparently agreed with me.
     Neely, a very sleek and successful advertising man, is gone now and so, undeservedly, are his books. The Walter Syndrome, his bestselling suspense novel, was almost ruined for me when I guessed the ending on page two, something I never do. But I pressed on and it was well worth it. This was a take on Psycho set in Thirties and the storytelling is spellbinding. The voice is worth of Fredric Brown at his best.
     I was thinking of Neely last night because I was finishing up his novel The Plastic Nightmare, which became an incomprehensible movie called Shattered. Neely loved tricks as much as Woolrich did and Plastic is a field of land mines. He even manages to spin some fresh variations on the amnesia theme. It’s as noir as noir can be but mysteriously, I’ve never seen Neely referred to on any noir list. My theory is that his books, for the most part, were presented in such tony packages, they were bypassed by mystery fans.
     The Damned Innocents became a fair French flick. What it missed was the sorrow. Neely always caught the sorrow of sexual betrayal with a kind of suicidal wisdom. While his books aren’t kinky by today’s measure, they’re dark in the way only sexual themes can be. Love kills, baby.
     Not that he didn’t have a sudsy side. He wrote a couple of big sexy workplace novels that I could never plow through but he also wrote The Ridgeway Women which was SUPPOSED to be a big sexy workplace book that was undermined in a good way by the riveting neuroses and desperation of all his best books.
     A Madness of the Heart suffers from a style Neely seemed to have invented from scratch for this particular novel. It’s another dazzler—a really convincing story about a rapist and the human debris he leaves in his wake—but the cadence of the prose gets in my way every once in awhile. It isn’t that it’s fancy-schmancy, it’s just that it gets in the way sometimes and seems to fall short of its purpose.
     I liked Neely, man and writer, and I liked his books, too. Somebody should bring him back. He’s my kind of noir writer—down and out in the dark underbelly of the success-driven American middle class, like non-Trav John D. MacDonald only doomed without hope of salvation.
 

Stark House Press has recently released The Plastic Nightmare, in a collection with Neely’s While Love Lay Sleeping. Click here to see Stark House’s Richard Neely collection on Amazon, or click here to see it at Stark House’s website.

This article originally appeared on Ed Gorman’s blog, Ed Gorman Rambles, Nov. 10, 2005. It is reprinted here by permission. Ed wrote dozens of novels in a variety of genres, but his most popular work (and my favorite of his work) was in the crime and western genres. His ten Sam McCain mysteries—set in the fictional Iowa town of Black River Falls during the 1950s, ’60, and ’70s—are suspenseful, mysterious, and often funny excursions into small town America. The New York Times called Sam McCain, “The kind of hero any small town could take to its heart” and The Seattle Times called McCain “an intriguing mix of knight errant and realist…”

But Ed was also a tireless reader and promoter of other writers’ work. His blogs—there were three, none of them operating at the same time—are treasure troves for readers of crime, horror, and western fiction both old and new. Ed died Oct. 14, 2016.

 

Click here to check out Ed Gorman’s Sam McCain novels on Amazon.

 

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Review: "Top Secret Kill" by James P. Cody (The D.C. Man)

 


Top Secret Kill
by James P. Cody
Brash Books, 2024

 

Top Secret Kill—originally published as a paperback original by Berkley-Medallion in 1974—is the first of four titles in the short-lived series, The D.C. Man, by the pseudonymous James P. Cody. Brian Petersen is a Washington, D.C. lobbyist-turned-troubleshooter that describes himself as a “former college football bum, former Army intelligence type” that found contentment with a “domesticated” life. Petersen’s happiness is shattered when his young daughter and wife are killed in an automobile accident that sent him to the Florida Keys on a six-month bender. At the coaxing of his father-in-law, a former senator, Petersen sobered-up, returned to the District, and reopened his lobbying office.
     But, as Petersen explains, his work “started to drift into other, nastier and less public, services for clients, services you wouldn’t want anybody to know about.” Which is where Top Secret Kill begins. First with Petersen warning off a blackmailer for a congressman and then—the real meat of the narrative—his full-throttle investigation into the identity of the person leaking classified intel from a Senate committee developing cost estimates for specific types of military conflicts. It is a big job for a solo act like Brian Petersen, but a job befitting his unrestrained, sometimes violent, and always secretive style.
     Top Secret Kill is a cool thriller. It reads like a hybrid of men’s adventure and a private eye yarn; perhaps 75-percent of the former and 25-percent of the latter. There is a little mystery, including a calculated murder that sets Petersen on a vengeance trail, a bunch of Cold War paranoia, a touch of commentary about the D.C. of the 1970s, and a solid stream of action. With that said, the opening third of the book is slowed by Petersen’s backstory, but stick with it because it picks up in a hurry and by the midway mark the narrative sparks and slams home with a satisfying bang. Top Secret Kill will appeal more to readers of men’s adventure—think Don Pendleton’s Mack Bolan—than general mystery readers, but it is a cut (or two or three) above the standard in that too often (and usually unfairly) maligned genre.

All four of The D.C. Man books are back in print from Brash Books. These new editions include an Introduction, written by Tom Simon, detailing his excellent work uncovering the identity of James P. Cody—a former Roman Catholic priest named, Peter Rohrbach.

 Click here for the Kindle edition and here for the paperback at Amazon.

Monday, March 11, 2024

"I Was Meant to be Heavy" — Bill Conrad of Cannon, 1973

 

 

Did you say, Cannon? Yeah, I did, and this sweet write-up about William Conrad appeared in the December 16, 1973, issue of TV Week, included in the Salt Lake TribuneWhile it’s not exactly an endorsement for the show, Cannon had its moments. Cannon aired for five seasons (1971 – 1976) on CBS. If you’ve never seen Conrad throw a clothes-line, you need to remedy it.

 

[Click the image for a larger view.]

Wednesday, March 06, 2024

Review: "The Sleeping City" by Marty Holland

 


The Sleeping City
by Marty Holland
Stark House, 2023

 

 

The Sleeping City is a hardboiled novella-length crime tale by Marty Holland originally published in the Fall 1952 issue of Thrilling Detective. Holland, born as the very feminine Mary Hauenstein, has a knack for capturing the post-World War 2 male tough guy persona; which is on steady display in this nicely executed undercover cop / heist story. Wade is a sergeant with the Gangster Squad in an unidentified, but likely LAPD, police force. When Jim Cox, an habitual criminal from Chicago, is nabbed by the police and admits he is in town to participate in a heist, Wade’s boss, Captain Roberts, assigns him to go undercover as Cox.
     All Cox knows about the job—since his partner Les Ties, who was murdered days earlier in Chicago, set it up—is how to contact the crew pulling the job. So Wade says goodbye to his fiancĂ©, takes a deep breath, and heads to meet Cox’s contact at the White Lion Club. Wade finds is an over-the-hill gangster, Louie Thompson, and a handful of toughs planning a risky armored car heist worth a cool million. What Wade doesn’t count on is falling for Thompson’s beautiful and hard-as-nails girl, Madge.
     The Sleeping City has all the best elements of mid-century crime fiction: concise, tight plotting, bitter and desperate criminals, a hard-tongued and beautiful moll, and a hero with a dilemma. And what a dilemma! $200,000 and a gorgeous and poison dame or Wade’s settled and quiet life. A dilemma that could easily twist into noir, as is foreshadowed by an early passage where Wade is wondering about moths and flames: “…what screwy quirk of nature attracted them [moths] to light—to the point that it killed them.”
     
The heist is revealed slowly, as slowly as Wade’s dilemma tightens around his guts, and those last dozen pages pop and sizzle with action. The Sleeping City is an above average pulp story featuring some fine writing. A couple passages that really crackled:

“But then I knew that we both realized that last night couldn’t be repeated. To go on meant hanging on to a straw in mid-ocean.”

“Everybody in the world should be a cop, I thought wildly! Everybody should know the elation of turning some poor weak bastard over to the law! Or a dame—a dame that somehow had crawled into your blood stream, a dame that was afraid of the dark.”

     If you enjoy these old crime stories, you will like The Sleeping City.
 

The Sleeping City is the second half of Stark House Press’ The Glass Heart / The Sleeping City, by Marty Holland (2023).


Click
here for the Kindle edition and here for the paperback at Amazon.
Click here to purchase The Glass Heart / The Sleeping City and other titles by Marty Holland at Stark House’s website.

Monday, March 04, 2024

"Introducing the Author... Edmond Hamilton" — from Imagination

 

 

This autobiographical essay by science fiction writer Edmond Hamilton appeared in the April 1956 issue of Imagination alongside Hamilton’s novella, “The Legion of Lazarus”. It’s fun to think of Hamilton as a fanboy, which is exactly what he sounds like when describing the magazines, stories, and authors he read as a boy. His and Leigh Brackett’s Ohio home sounds enticing, too.

Click the Image for a larger view.

Wednesday, February 28, 2024

Review: "Is Betsey Blake Still Alive?" by Robert Bloch

 


“Is Betsey Blake Still Alive?”
by Robert Bloch
Ivy Books, 1987

 

A couple things I like: 1) stories written by Robert Bloch; and 2) stories about Hollywood. So it was inevitable I’d love Bloch’s “Is Betsey Blake Still Alive?”—which was originally published in the April 1958 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine—since it satisfies both criteria nicely. Steve is a struggling Hollywood writer with a handful of production credits, but without a steady gig or paycheck. His life is tough, but as the third-person narrator says:

“Then he met Jimmy Powers, and things got worse.”

Jimmy, at 23 years-old, is just a kid but he drives a late-model Buick, wears silk suits, and has a regular job as a studio public relations hack pulling down two bills a week. The death of an aging starlet in a boating accident, the titular Betsey Blake, puts a major Hollywood studio in a bind. Betsey’s next picture is set for a November release, but without the starlet around to push the film, they’re afraid it will flop. This potential disaster for the studio provides Steve—through his new pal and neighbor Jimmy—a big opportunity to save the film with some slight-of-hand and outright dishonest P.R. stunts like creating a sensation about Blake’s private life and even questioning whether she is dead. Well, it plays out as one would expect, until it doesn’t…
     “Is Betsey Blake Still Alive?” is a sharp tale with a nice twist. The narrative is crisp with Bloch’s shiny prose and the characters, both Jimmy and Steve, are expertly sketched into what I think of as post-WW2 sunshine boys—bright and ambitious in a world ripe for harvest—with a grimy corruption about them. “Is Betsey Blake Still Alive?” is a solid piece of mid-century crime that, almost seventy years after it was written, had the audacity to surprise this 21st century reader.



“Is Betsey Blake Still Alive?” appeared in the excellent 1987 anthology,
Suspicious Characters, edited by Bill Pronzini and Martin H. Greenberg, along with 12 other crime stories written by the likes of John D. MacDonald, Sara Paretsky, Ed McBain, John Lutz, and Brian Garfield.
     According to the official Robert Bloch website, “Is Betsey Blake Still Alive,” has also been published with the title, “Betsy Blake Will Live Forever” in volume two of the Selected Stories of Robert Bloch.

Monday, February 26, 2024

Review: "A Night at the Shore" by Tony Knighton

 


A Night at the Shore
by Tony Knighton
Brash Books, 2024

 

 

Tony Knighton’s third Nameless Thief crime novel, A Night at the Shore, is a fast-driving, exciting, and downright cool heist tale where everything goes wrong in a hurry. Nameless—or the man of many names and none of them his own—takes what he thinks is a low-risk burglary job in the Jersey shore town of Margate; a stone’s throw from Atlantic City. Buddy, a hardnosed poker dealer at an A.C. casino, a fence, and a planner, throws the job to Nameless without many details.
     The target is a degenerate gambler named Charlie. Buddy doesn’t know his last name, but he, Buddy, is convinced Charlie’s gambling stake—maybe as much as $10,000—will be an easy snatch from his home. But for it to work, the job requires a quick turnaround to be timed with a big Atlantic storm forecasted in two days, on a Friday night. Nameless, distracted by his girlfriend’s sudden announcement that she is going away for an extended period (and maybe forever), neglects to research Charlie on his own. A big mistake since Nameless, after being interrupted searching Charlie’s house for valuables, spends the entire night running for his life—from a wicked storm and a cadre of extremely angry and homicidal cops—while trying to figure out why a simple burglary has made him so hot.
     A Night at the Shore is pure adrenaline; from its laconic, muscular prose, to it is compact and tight plotting, and to its lightning-fast pacing. Nameless is an anti-hero in every sense—he is violent, emotionless, and pitiless—but, much like Richard Stark’s Parker, his actions are governed by what is necessary for the situation. He only hurts those who threaten him and his violence never exceeds what is required, which gives the reader permission to root for the villain. Even better, Nameless takes his own lumps along with everyone else. A Night at the Shore is my first experience with Nameless and Tony Knighton’s writing in general, but it certainly won’t be my last.

Click here for the Kindle edition and here for the paperback at Amazon.