Wednesday, February 12, 2025

Syndicated Action Shows from the 1990s

Back in the ’90s cheesy syndicated action television series were everywhere. And man, I was a fan. One of my favorite channels of the era was Salt Lake City-based KJZZ, Channel 14. Its Saturday night lineup was Kung Fu: The Legend Continues, Renegade, and the uber ridiculous but entertaining game show, American Gladiators. So when I saw this advertisement from an old issue of the Salt Lake Tribune (Nov. 7, 1993), I had to share.

My favorites from the ad were Renegade, Time Trax—filmed in Australia with the cool premise of a cop from the future tracking down time fugitives in the USA of the 1990s—Kung Fu: The Legend Continues, and Cobra. I’ve always thought Baywatch was a turd and Acapulco H.E.A.T. is even worse.

Maybe this Saturday night I’ll make a replay of those Saturdays evenings I gleefully watched away so long ago.

 

 

Monday, February 10, 2025

Review: "The Longest December" by Richard Chizmar

 




“The Longest December”

by Richard Chizmar

Cemetery Dance, 2023

 





Richard Chizmar’s crime novella, “The Longest December”—which is a revised and expanded version of Chizmar’s 2016 story, “A Long December”—is an original and inventive take on the serial killer tale. Bob Howard is a middle-aged sales rep living the suburban dream with a son in college and his marriage, to the beautiful Katy, comfortable and rewarding. But his carefully curated life is shattered when a detective knocks on his door on an early December morning asking about Bob’s best friend and next-door neighbor, James Wilkinson.

Wilkinson, a part-time history lecturer at a local University, is suspected in a series of killings dating back years. Bob and Katy insist the police have made a mistake. Wilkinson has been their neighbor for eight years and he is their son’s honorary godfather. And he, Wilkinson, has never shown any behavior to suggest he may be a killer. Of course, Wilkinson has disappeared—which makes him look guilty—and the news media pick up the story with frenzied zeal.

“The Longest December” is a bullet of a crime thriller with a psychological element—could Wilkinson have played Bob and Katy for so long, and would he come back and hurt them now?—wrapped in a tense and atmospheric narrative. Chizmar’s sense of pacing is alarmingly perfect but the tale’s essence is the intrinsic suspense as the reader watches Bob circle the truth of what James Wilkinson truly is, on both an emotional and intellectual level, moving from denial to fear and then to something altogether different. “The Longest December” is a thrilling tale with a little Alfred Hitchcock and the film Seven blended into Chizmar’s own secret sauce. And it really works!

“The Longest December” was published as one-half of a “double” with Stephen King and Stewart O’Nan’s story, “A Face in the Crowd.”

Check out A Face in the Crowd / The Longest December at Amazon—click here for the hardcover.

Friday, February 07, 2025

Magnum, P.I.: "Don't Eat the Snow"

This advertisement for the Magnum, P.I. pilot, “Don’t Eat the Snow in Hawaii” (air date, Dec. 11, 1980), appeared in the Davis County Clipper (Utah) on Dec. 3, 1980. I’m not sure Magnum and Higgins ever worked out their issues, but it was fun watching them try.

 

 

Wednesday, February 05, 2025

Booked (and Printed): January 2025

Booked (and Printed)

January 2025

 


January was a cold mother bear in my wooded paradise. The air temperature dropped below zero for several days and the wind chill nosedived into the –20-degree range. Plus there were the ten consecutive days it snowed. Sure, it was light snow, but still… Add a splash of inky black nights and everything about the month screamed: READ! And so I did.

I finished six books—five novels and a single non-fiction work, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, which all of us Americans thoroughly ignored this past November—and four shorts. One of these shorts, “The Longest December,” by Richard Chizmar, was a pretty terrific novella. While some were better than others, I liked something about everything I read.

With every new year I make broad, often malleable reading goals, which are usually meant to mitigate what I see as reading deficiencies from the prior year or years. This year I decided one such area—for the past several years—was my intake of literary works, both old and new. So, my first novel of 2025 was John Steinbeck’s THE MOON IS DOWN. Published in 1942, The Moon is Down, was written as anti-Nazi propaganda and it shows. The characterizations lack Steinbeck’s usual richness and the setting is painted with a duller brush, but—and this is important—The Moon is Down is much more than mere propaganda and it can and should be read as literature. Read my detailed review here.

Next up was the spanking new thriller, THE MAILMAN, by Andrew Welsh-Huggins (2025). This speedy and entertaining escapist thriller is something like Lee Child’s Jack Reacher, but in place of a retired Army M.P., is a highly trained and outrageously persistent independent deliveryman named Mercury Carter. I liked it a bunch and if you are of a mind, you can read my review here.

As for that solitary non-fiction work, ON TYRANNY, by Timothy Snyder (2017)—who is a professor of history at Yale—it satisfied another of my goals for 2025: read more non-fiction. On Tyranny is a slim but fascinating book about 20 specific things we can learn from authoritarian regimes of the twentieth century—Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, etc.—that can help us stymie those with autocratic designs in our own time. A few of my favorites from this excellent book are: do not obey in advance; defend institutions; beware the one-party state; remember professional ethics; and contribute to good causes. If you’re worried about the future and want to read something smart and lucid, try On Tyranny. I bet you can find it at your local library.

BITTERFROST, by Bryan Gruley (2025), is an uneven legal thriller with a crime novel vibe and a cool (pun intended) rural Michigan wintertime setting. There are many things I liked about this one, but the narrative lost some of its drive in the first half as characters and subplots were introduced. Bitterfrost is scheduled for release on April 1, and I’ll have a detailed review posted on March 31.

The sophomore entry in John Keyse-Walker’s Teddy Creque mystery series, BEACH, BREEZE, BLOODSHED (2017), is as good as the freshman outing. Teddy Creque, now promoted to a full constable in the Royal Virgin Islands Police Force, is called to the neighboring island of Virgin Gorda to help track down the shark that attacked and killed a medical researcher. Teddy makes quick work of the job, but he finds something not quite right about the young woman’s death. So, as usual, he goes against his immediate supervisor and keeps investigating. On the way, he finds a new paramour, a unique smuggling operation, and a murderer. It’s great fun from the first page to the last and it, simply because it is so laid back and warm, is my favorite read of the month. I’m definitely going to read the next book in the series.

THE DISPATCHER, by science fiction master John Scalzi (2016), is a wildly entertaining pulp novella about a future world where murdered people reappear (very much alive) in their own home wearing only their birthday suit. Tony Valdez earns a living as a dispatcher—he mostly works high risk surgeries where he can “dispatch,” or murder, the patient if the surgery goes wrong, which gives the patient and their doctors another shot at getting things right. When Valdez’s friend, Jimmy Albert, goes missing, Valdez is roped into helping the police find him. The investigation leads the reader into the seamy underbelly of the dispatch business. It’s a fun ride all the way through.

 

As for short stories, January was a middling month. Not for quality, but rather for quantity. I only read four, but I enjoyed them all. Stephen King and Stuart O’Nan’s A FACE IN THE CROWD (2012)—which I read in a double format with the Richard Chizmar novella we’ll look at next—is a Twilight Zone-style tale about death and baseball. It didn’t quite meet my expectations, I mean King and O’Nan, right?, but it was still pretty good.

THE LONGEST DECEMBER, by Richard Chizmar (2023), is a sweet crime novella with an inventive take on the serial killer tale. It reminded me of Alfred Hitchcock and the film Seven blended with Chizmar’s own secret sauce. And it really works! I’ve reviewed this one, but it hasn’t been posted yet…so check back soon.

I’m embarrassed to admit that MARIJUANA AND A PISTOL (1940), is my first experience with the writing of Chester Himes. This dizzying little story—it’s probably only about 2,500 words—reads like anti-marijuana propaganda, but its hardboiled prose and stark view of humanity give it punch. It originally appeared in Esquire and I read it in Hard-Boiled, edited by Bill Pronzini & Jack Adrian (1995).

Finally, Robert Sampson’s TO FLORIDA (1987), is a noir gem with an unexpected ending and a brutal vision of humanity’s lowest instincts from the first page to the last. I liked it. You can read my review here.


Monday, February 03, 2025

Review: "The Friends of Eddie Coyle" by George V. Higgins




The Friends of Eddie Coyle

by George V. Higgins

 

 

reviewed by Mike Baker

 


 

Eddie Coyle is a low-level Boston criminal, and he has a problem. After getting arrested for driving a hijacked truck through Vermont, he was convicted and is now out on bail, awaiting sentencing. His solution to the prospect of going to jail? He’s willing to snitch on a fellow criminal.

But the police want more from Coyle—they want him to roll on even more associates, which creates a whole new problem for him.

Meanwhile, Phil Scalisi is in the bank-robbing business with three other mob-connected hoods, and business is good. Eddie knows about Phil’s bank job, so you can probably see how this might develop into a problem for both Phil and especially for Eddie.

And you can already guess how things might unfold. The cops and robbers dynamic heats up, and shenanigans ensue.

This book gets a lot of praise—Best Crime Novel Ever. Best Dialogue Ever. I won’t go 100% on either of those claims, but it’s pretty goddamn good. The dialogue never feels stilted or expository. It never gets cumbersome.  Also, it has a loose narrative structure, shifting from character to character without getting bogged down in unnecessary details.

George V. Higgins leaves a lot of the work up to the reader. He doesn’t say much explicitly, and pieces of the story are intentionally left out. It’s enough to keep the plot moving, but an engaged reader will start to make assumptions. These gaps—these moments of narrative uncertainty—create a sense of wobbling momentum as things start to unravel.

The reader is taken on a perilous ride, with the plot hurtling forward, sometimes faster than you can keep up.

If you’ve seen the movie Killing Them Softly, you might get a sense of what I’m talking about. That film is based on Cogan’s Trade, another Higgins classic, and sticks closely to his narrative style. Friends of Eddie Coyle is, in my view, the best example of lessons learned from Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.

Is this book the best? I don’t know. But what I do know is that every word rings true, every sentence flows into the next*. It feels like the end of the night at a bar, and some guy is telling you a story that you’re sure is bullshit—right up until the end, when he hits you with the twist and you realize you just spent the evening getting drunk with Elvis.

*            *            *

*There’s a phenomenon where, when reading a text, if you come across a word you don’t know and can’t figure out from context or don’t bother to look up, your understanding of everything else becomes slightly diminished. Every unknown word in the text that you can’t decipher or don’t take the time to understand compounds this effect. I believe there’s a similar concept in fiction. False notes, off-putting inconsistencies, or unintentional character flaws—these things pull us out of the narrative and create a kind of psychic drag that slows us down. Look, I read Cormac McCarthy slowly because his writing is dense and complicated. But I read Nick Carter slowly because every other sentence feels fake and hollow.

Check out The Friends of Eddie Coyle at Amazon—click here for the Kindle edition and here for the paperback.

 

Wednesday, January 29, 2025

Playing Roulette with Minotaur Books

 

Playing Roulette with Minotaur Books

 



If you’ve been paying attention to the blog, you’ve already noticed my recent devotion to the writings of David Housewright; especially his long-running series about unlicensed Twin Cities P.I., Rushmore McKenzie. Back in February, 2024, I noticed the library had a shelf full of the McKenzie books in hardcover, which jangled my memory of when the long gone and fabled Leisure Books—fabled at my house, anyway—was reprinting the series in mass market during the second half of the ’00s. A title that had caught my attention back then was the second book in the series, Tin City (2005). I bought it but never read it, lost it in one move or another, and utterly forgot about both the series and Housewright.

But this library bookshelf rekindled my interest in the series. So being a studious kind—and never really caring if I start with the first or twentieth title in a series—I studied each book, mostly looking at the blurbs from trades like Publishers Weekly (which I agree with often) and Kirkus (which I agree with less often) and settled on the eleventh book, The Devil May Care (2014), because it had received a starred review from PW. And wow did that book hit every note just right. To say I was hooked is an understatement. After turning the last page, I rushed to the library to retrieve the first book in the series, A Hard Ticket Home (2003), which of course wasn’t in the collection and so I rolled to the second, Tin City. The very same title that had caught my eye nearly two decades earlier.

 

After racing through a handful of the McKenzie’s, an idea jittered and popped. An idea that went something like this: the library has a bunch of mysteries published by Minotaur Books—the same house that has brought out all twenty-one of the McKenzie books—in the late ’00s and throughout the ’10s; so, I decided, I would concentrate much of my non-mandatory reading to the Minotaur Books sitting on the library’s shelves. And it went well, even though it was kind of like playing roulette with my reading since I often knew nothing about the books or authors before picking them up. Although I’ll admit I took too much advantage of the McKenzie’s since they accounted for eleven of the nineteen Minotaur titles I read. All eight of the authors were new to me and I have every intention of reading more books by at least five of those writers: David Housewright, Sasscer Hill, Brian McGilloway, John Keyse-Walker, and J. D. Rhoades.

Due to sheer meanness, I chose not to finish two of the titles: Ranchero, by Rick Gavin (2011), and L’Assassin, by Peter Steiner (2008).

As for 2025, I’m thinking of sticking to the game plan for at least the first few months, but after that, who knows? Maybe I’ll schedule my reading around Golden Books or maybe HarlequinNASCAR romance series or….

Here’s the rundown of the Minotaur Books I checked out from the library and read in 2024 (click the titles for the review, if I wrote one):

February

The Devil May Care, by David Housewright (2014) – McKenzie #11

Tin City, by David Housewright (2005) – McKenzie #2

March

Pretty Girl Gone, by David Housewright (2006) – McKenzie #3

Madman on a Drum, by David Housewright (2008) – McKenzie #5

The Taking of Libbie, SD, by David Housewright (2010) – McKenzie #7

April

Flamingo Road, by Sasscer Hill (2017) – Fia McKee #1

Bleed a River Deep, by Brian McGilloway (2010) – Ben Devlin #3

May

Man in the Water, by David Housewright (2024) – McKenzie #21

The Territory, by Tricia Fields (2011) – Josie Gray #1

June

Highway 61, by David Housewright - 2011 – McKenzie #8

Ranchero, by Rick Gavin (2011) – Nick Reid #1

July

Curse of the Jade Lady, by David Housewright (2012) – McKenzie #9

September

The Last Kind Word, by David Housewright (2013) – McKenzie #10

November

The Dark Side of Town, by Sasscer Hill (2018) – Fia McKee #2

Unidentified Woman #15, David Housewright (2015) – McKenzie #12

December

Sun, Sand, Murder, by John Keyse-Walker (2016) – Teddy Creque #1

Breaking Cover, by J. D. Rhoades (2008) – Tony Wolf

Stealing the Countess, by David Housewright (2016) – McKenzie #13

L’Assassin, by Peter Steiner (2008)

Trivia – My short story, “Asia Divine,” appeared in the same anthology, Bullets and Other Hurting Things (2021), as David Housewright’s tale, “Best Man.” A connection I didn’t realize I had with McKenzie’s creator until a few months ago. “Asia Divine” is available in my collection, Casinos, Motels, Gators (2024).

Monday, January 27, 2025

Review: "The Mailman" by Andrew Welsh-Huggins

 




The Mailman

by Andrew Welsh-Huggins

Mysterious Press, 2025

 


 


The Mailman, by Andrew Welsh-Huggins—best known as the author of the seven books in the Andy Hayes, P.I. series—is a peddle-to-the-metal thriller with a nod to Jack Reacher but with a wholly original character in freelance deliveryman, Mercury Carter. While delivering a package to attorney Rachel Stanfield, Merc finds Rachel and her husband, Glenn, being questioned, tortured really, by four men looking for Stella Wolford, the complainant in a seemingly meaningless wrongful termination lawsuit against Rachel’s corporate client.

Rachel hasn’t seen Stella since her deposition weeks earlier, and Rachel has no idea where Stella lives. But the men, led by the menacing Finn, are determined that Rachel can tell them where Stella is hiding. Merc reacts quickly—and very un-deliveryman-like—and incapacitates two of the men before Finn stands Merc down by threatening Rachel and Glenn. Finn, with his entourage, leaves Merc and Glenn behind and takes Rachel as a hostage. With Glenn in tow, and a hunch Finn is going after Glenn’s daughter at a Chicago boarding school, Merc goes after the kidnappers with a single verbalized goal: his night won’t be over until the package is delivered to Rachel.

The Mailman is a multi-layered chase thriller—there are a bunch of moving parts that are handled marvelously by Welsh-Huggins—with a handful of surprises and a likable, if somewhat stiff, hero. Merc’s backstory, including his motivation to help people, is told in short and interesting snippets in the first half of the narrative. The action moves across the Midwest, from Indianapolis to Chicago and places in-between, without much importance of the where—instead it is the what and the why of the villains’ activities (and Merc’s reaction to them) that give the tale interest. The Mailman is a nail-biting escapist thriller with twists and whirls and everything else the genre promises. It’s damn fun, too.

Check out The Mailman  on Amazon—click here for the Kindle edition and here for the hardcover.

Wednesday, January 22, 2025

Review: "To Florida" by Robert Sampson

 




“To Florida”

by Robert Sampson

from Hard-Boiled

ed. by Bill Pronzini & Jack Adrian

Oxford, 1997

 




Robert Sampson is a name I’m unfamiliar with, but if his story, “To Florida”—originally published in 1987—is representative of his body of work, it’s a serious deficiency in my reading. “To Florida” is a marvelous piece of noir about a low-life named Jerry Teller. When Teller’s girlfriend, Sue Ann, walks into the couple’s apartment with an armload of groceries, Teller is counting a stack of cash and watching cartoons. Sue Ann asks him where the money came from and if they could pay Mr. Davidson, the landlord, since their rent is late again.

Teller responds, “He gave me this.”

Sue Ann is confused, a condition that’s natural for her, and her confusion only increases when she stumbles across Mr. Davidson’s corpse on the kitchen linoleum. Her confusion turns to excitement when Teller asks if she wants go to Florida with him, in their former landlord’s car (of course). Thus their journey begins with a dazzle of Bonnie and Clyde and a shiver of Natural Born Killers—but very much its own self from beginning to end.

“To Florida” is a ride on a dark street with a single, and obvious, destination. Teller is a straight-up crazy f*ck and Sue Ann is—while not truly bad—a lost girl from a bad home with no possibilities and nowhere else to go. Sampson’s narrative is linear perfection with a tight, laconic prose, and a measured, suspense building, pace. While the plot goes where it’s expected, there are surprises along the way and even better, the open ending leaves a little something for the reader’s imagination.

“To Florida” is the best short I’ve read so far this year and honestly, it will take something special to overtake it.

There’s not much about Robert Sampson on the internet. The introduction to the story in Hard-Boiled, written by Jack Adrian, tells us he was “fascinated by pulp magazines” and wrote seven books and “countless” articles about the pulps. Several of his articles were published by The Armchair Detective. Sampson wrote for radio and placed shorts with Planet Stories, Science Fiction Stories, Asimov’s Science Fiction, the Weird Tales revival from the 1990s, and his story, “Rain in Pinton County”—published in New Black Mask—won the 1986 Edgar for best short story.

Robert Sampson was born in 1927 and died in 1992.

Monday, January 20, 2025

Review: "The Moon is Down" by John Steinbeck

 



The Moon is Down

by John Steinbeck

Penguin, 1995

 




John Steinbeck wrote The Moon is Down, as an anti-Nazi propaganda piece for the U.S. Foreign Information Service (FIS)—which means it is one of Steinbeck’s minor works but it is far from lifeless propaganda and very much worth reading as literature. It was rejected by the FIS because it believed its depiction of an American town occupied by a foreign power would demoralize American readers during the early days of World War 2.

Steinbeck reworked the setting, placing it in a nameless town in a nameless European country, but—as Donald V. Coers wrote in his Introduction to the edition I read—a place “cold and stern like Norway, cunning and implacable like Denmark, reasonable like France.” It was published by The Viking Press in 1942, and clandestine editions—The Moon is Down was illegal in all occupied Europe—were distributed throughout the continent (including Norway, Holland, The Netherlands, and France) and in smaller numbers in China as it fought against fascist Japan. Steinbeck had intended The Moon is Down “as a celebration of the durability of democracy” and it succeeded.

The Town is overrun by conquering soldiers with only a whisper—a Quisling-like businessman had arranged for its small contingent of soldiers and its mayor to be away at the precise time of the invasion. The townspeople are stunned into something like a stupor. No one knows what to do. No one talks. Rather they walk in the streets with their faces turned down, their minds numbed with shock. The invaders came for the town’s coal mine and it is imperative it speed up the processing and coal shipments for the war effort. But as days and weeks pass, the Town’s citizenry regains their balance and begin rebelling in small ways. They are always polite to the invaders, but never friendly; a strategy that intensifies the loneliness and misery of the occupying soldiers. Their work in the mine is intentionally slow and when they can, they make small sabotages.

The Moon is Down—a title borrowed from MacBeth—truly is a celebration of democracy. The townspeople are rendered with realism—there are collaborators, cowards, profiteers, and resistors. Rather than dehumanizing the invading soldiers, Steinbeck paints them in a genuine manner, as simple men following orders with a mindless allegiance to an authoritarian system. A system with a single head and no room for its subjects to question their great leader’s portrayal of reality.

The Moon is Down is as relevant today as when it was written so many decades ago. It has the power to build morale in our darkening world where fascism and authoritarianism are rising. It is a blueprint for quiet defiance. And it showcases fascism’s primary flaw—an inability for anyone other than the leader to think—which is the opposite of democracy’s greatest strength.

Find The Moon is Down on Amazon—click here for the Kindle edition and here for the paperback.