Review: "The Revenger" by Jon Messmann

The 1970’s men’s fiction market was rotten with revenge tales populated by veterans of America’s unpopular war in Vietnam. These isolated, disaffected, and angry men brought a new war of vigilante justice to the crime ridden streets of America’s cities. The literary movement began with Don Pendleton’s multi-million copy selling War Against the Mafia [Pinnacle, 1969] featuring Mack Bolan, an Army sniper, home from the war to bury his family: father, mother, and sister. Their deaths were ruled as murder-suicide, which was true since Mack’s dad had pulled the trigger, but Bolan knew the context of his father’s violence. After losing his job, he had borrowed money from the mafia and their pressure for repayment drove him to murder. Bolan is a righteous hero, never doubting his mission, losing focus (even to look at a beautiful woman), or showing regret for his actions.

[For the rest of the article click here to go to Dark City Underground...]

“If You Have Another Hobby, Take That Up”: The Thrillers of Harrison Arnston

“If You Have Another Hobby, Take That Up”: The Thrillers of Harrison Arnston

by Ben Boulden

Harrison Arnston – Harry to his friends and pretty much everyone else – wrote nine published novels between 1987 and 1994. The critic Jon L. Breen, in his Armchair Detective column “Novel Verdicts” called Arnston’s 1991 legal thriller, Act of Passion, “unusually well plotted” with a trial that “is expertly covered…with some terrific Q-and-A along the way.” Arnston followed Act of Passion with another excellent legal thriller, Trade-Off, in 1992, but his work wandered across the genre in unexpected ways. He turned the 1991 techno-thriller The Big One – where a super-secret government agency is covering up a new discovery for predicting earthquakes – into an enjoyable and outlandish detective story, and The Venus Diaries, Arnston’s final published novel, is a swift tale about an extraordinarily beautiful and brutal assassin for hire, raised in post-World War 2 France by an embittered veteran of the communist partisans.

[For the rest of the article click here to go to Dark City Underground...]

Professional Tennis, Amateur Spying: Jack M. Bickham’s Brad Smith Thrillers

 Professional Tennis, Amateur Spying: Jack M. Bickham’s Brad Smith Thrillers

by Ben Boulden

The six Brad Smith espionage thrillers, published by Tor between 1989 and 1994, are Jack Bickham’s most mature work. The critics were enthusiastic. The New York Times’ thriller review columnist, Newgate Callendar, was a consistent champion. He compared the Smith books to Dick Francis’s mysteries: “Bickham is doing for tennis what Dick Francis has done for horse racing.” He called the books, “skillful,” “smooth,” “highly enjoyable,” and “exciting.” Wes Lukowsky, in Booklist, called the series “deftly plotted.” Publishers Weekly, in its review of The Davis Cup Conspiracy, said, “Bickham deftly flips from tennis lore to the spying game in his customary style, nailing another ace.”

[for the rest of the article click here to go to Dark City Underground…]

Hot Off the Presses: "The Tenth Virgin" by Gary Stewart from Brash Books

 

      A new edition of a great mystery novel is officially on the street: The Tenth Virgin, by Gary Stewart. Set in Salt Lake City and Southern Utah in the mid-1980s, The Tenth Virgin introduces New York private eye Gabe Utley, as he searches for the missing teenage daughter of his high school sweetheart. The trail takes him from Salt Lake City to the poverty-stricken polygamist clans in Southern Utah. The Tenth Virgin is richly detailed with a vivid setting, believable characterization, and sizzling mystery.
      The new Brash Books edition, bringing The Tenth Virgin back into print after more than 30 years, includes an Introduction by an unsung writer – I think his name is Ben Boulden – and is available as a trade paperback and on Kindle.
      Check out my critical article about Gary Stewart at Dark City Underground, which is suspiciously similar to The Tenth Virgin’s Introduction, and (more importantly) read the book! 

Go to Amazon's page for The Tenth Virgin

Dark City Underground

      Any readers kind enough to frequent Gravetapping have noticed an eerie quiet has settled in over the past several months. I was bored with blogging and things slipped and slipped until it was easy for me to ignore the blog. But things are changing. I’ve started blogging again, but the address where I’m appearing has changed. The new place is Dark City Underground. So far, I have 21 posts at the new label and from my perspective the work is bigger and better. I have a couple detailed critical author profiles I’m particularly proud of (and more coming soon):

Polygamists, Outlaws & Mormons: The Crime and Western Tales of Gary Stewart

“If You Have Another Hobby, Take That Up”: The Thrillers of Harrison Arnston

I’ve posted an essay – The Cat & The Cowboy – about my late-cat Pete, along with a hybrid fiction/non-fiction story about the outlaw Bill Hickman: Honor Among Horse Thieves: Wild Bill Hickman’s Christmas Day Shootout. The first of several stories I have planned featuring the horse thief, murderer, and self-proclaimed Mormon Destroying Angel that roamed the western frontier from the 1850s to the 1870s.
      I’ve also been doing my regular routine of reviewing books, both old and new.
      If you’ve enjoyed stopping in at Gravetapping, I think you’ll like Dark City Underground even more. And if you’ve been kind enough to link your blog or website to Gravetapping, would you mind linking Dark City Underground, too? And if I haven’t linked to your blog or website from Dark City Underground, send me a reminder and I will.
      Thanks, and we’ll be talking soon…

A STIR OF ECHOES by Richard Matheson

      Richard Matheson’s 1958 novel, A Stir of Echoes, is more than a horror story. The plot is speculative—Tom Wallace, after being hypnotized at a neighborhood party, is able to read people’s thoughts and see events in the near future. He thinks his new abilities are connected with a ghostly woman who visits his home in the night’s quiet hours, but nothing is as simple it seems.      Matheson paints the 1950’s Southern California suburban setting vivid with a lucid and cinematic style. The characters are full-bodied. Tom’s neighbors look  and act genuine. They love, dream and live. At least that’s how it appears on the surface, but what Tom discovers with his new abilities is much darker because he now also sees their lust and hate, anger and fear, betrayal and vindictiveness; all those unsavory emotions and actions we do our best to hide.
      There’s a mystery, too, that is rife with Cold War paranoia. The paranoia reflects the attitude of the American society in the 1950s: Everything’s great! Except we’re all going to die (figuratively through communist assimilation and literally with the hydrogen bomb). But it’s the humanity Matheson uncovers that provides the power and longevity of the work and the great thing about A Stir of Echoes is, it can be read as illuminative literature or as a straight horror novel, and even better, as both.

Coming Soon: Killers, Crooks & Spies: Jack Bickham's Fiction

       

      My companion to the late-Jack Bickham’s novels, titled Killers, Crooks & Spies: Jack Bickham’s Fiction, is coming out next Tuesday, April 13. Bickham wrote in every popular genre, except horror and romance (although he did write a few “sleaze” novels for Midwood that may be a touch romantic). He started in Westerns in 1958, and finished with a posthumously published traditional mystery in 1998. Bickham wrote The Apple Dumpling Gang, which Disney translated into a 1975 box office hit. He wrote six espionage thrillers, featuring aging tennis pro Brad Smith, and so much more.
      Killers, Crooks & Spies includes a brief overview of Bickham’s life. A detailed look at his writing career, including articles about his significant books, series, and publishers. There is a bibliography, and a bunch of book reviews.
      Here is a snippet from the Introduction:

Breakfast at Wimbledon was my first experience with Jack Bickham’s writing. I purchased the paperback on a rainy summer afternoon in 1992. I was in my teens, lonely and scared, as my mother battled a cancer that would kill her in less than two years. I escaped this bleak reality by slipping between the covers of books. I traveled the world with the superhero-like characters populating the thrillers of David Morrell, Jack Higgins, and Tom Clancy, and with philosophical outsiders like Travis McGee.

The cover blurb comparing Breakfast at Wimbledon with one of my favorite writers— “Jack M. Bickham is doing for professional tennis what Dick Francis has done for horse racing.” —encouraged a closer look. Those first few paragraphs bounced off the page. I walked out of the store five minutes later with a new book and a jolt of excitement to get home and start reading.

For now, Killers, Crooks & Spies is an Amazon Kindle exclusive, but that may change in the coming weeks.
      Follow this link to visit the Amazon selling page: https://amzn.to/2Q5AVYm

Shameless Self-Promotion: A New Short Story in Honor of Bill Crider

   

    The Bill Crider tribute anthology, Bullets and Other Hurting Things, edited by Rick Ollerman (Down & Out Books), hit the street a few days ago. It features 20 original stories written in honor of the late Bill Crider. I’m honored that my story, “Asia Divine”, somehow made the cut since there are a bunch of great contributing authors. Joe R. Lansdale, Charlaine Harris, William Kent Krueger, Bill Pronzini, James Sallis, James Reasoner, are only a few. 

“Asia Divine” is set is Utah’s West Desert, from the Great Salt Lake’s Stansbury Island to somewhere near the Bonneville Salt Flats. 

Here are the first few lines of “Asia Divine”:

 

Detective Mike Giles gagged on the stink as the Maglite’s glare bobbed across the dim and ragged interior of the bus. He leaned against the pock-marked pole next to the torn-out driver’s seat, a hand cupped over his mouth and nose.

From the back of the bus a disembodied voice said, “It gets worse.”

A bright white light exploded and retreated, fireworks popped in Giles’ eyes.

The simulated whir and click of a digital camera saturated the confined area, and the dull ache in his head blossomed into a roar.

As his vision recovered, another flash bounced. The camera clicked.

“Jesus, Danny.” Giles stroked his throbbing head. “Hold off on the photos until I have a look, huh?”

Click Here to go Amazon

DOUBLE FEATURE by Donald E. Westlake

Double Feature, a 2020 release from Hard Case Crime and originally published as Enough in 1977, includes a short novel and a novella. The novel, A Travesty, is a slanted whodunit, which is more of a can-he-get-away-with-it since the protagonist – a film critic – is the murderer doing anything he needs to do to stay out of prison. A humorous story that begins with the genre’s usual, but grows into something quite original. The unexpected, but perfectly ironic ending, gives it a smile-inducing appeal.

The novella, Ordo, is more hardboiled than its pairing, and my favorite of the two because of its working class narrative. A career navy man, Ordo, discovers his short-time wife of fifteen years earlier has become a Hollywood sex symbol. She is unrecognizable as the girl he knew, and Ordo wants to figure out how his ex-wife became someone else. What he discovers is painful and melancholy, but has a purely American vibe of creating your personal mythology; similar to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, but much less sinister.

Double Feature is a great pairing of tales, told in different styles and with contrasting themes, that showcase Westlake’s brilliance as a storyteller.

Thrift Shop Book Covers: "Hollywood Nocturnes"

Hollywood Nocturnes, by James Ellroy, was published in hardcover by Otto Penzler Books in 1994. The edition that caught my eye is Dell’s paperback reprint published in 1995. The bright and rich colors of the 1990s – orange and pink and that rich and deep purple – are exciting and enticing. And, there’s that accordion player to add a bit of “hmmh?” The artist: Unknown (to me at least)

The first sentence of the story, “Out of the Past”:
 

“A man gyrating with an accordion – pumping his ‘Stomach Steinway’ for all it’s worth.” 

Hollywood Nocturnes is a collection of seven of James Ellroy’s crime stories.

THE NICKEL BOYS by Colson Whitehead

This is review is for a book different from the usual fare at Gravetapping, but it is a marvelous and important novel that satisfies on every level of good literature. It entertains, it educates, it illuminates.

Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys is as brilliant as it is uncomfortable. Elwood Curtis, a black teenager living in 1960s Tallahassee, is sent to a segregated reform school, The Nickel Academy, after the police catch him in a stolen car. Elwood was hitchhiking for the first day of his early-entry college class in the next town, when the car thief picked him up. His pleas of innocence go nowhere with the police or the judge.

Nickel’s staff trade the boys’ state allotted food to local businesses for kickbacks. They beat and whip any of the “students” perceived as trouble-makers. A few of the boys disappear into unmarked graves after severe beatings, the staff claiming they ran away. The boys are offered to local bigwigs as free labor. The pedophiles on staff have unlimited access to the boys.

The school’s degrading atmosphere is more than Elwood can stand. He wants to fight, in a similar way that his hero Martin Luther King Jr. confronts segregation and racism, but the more he struggles against Nickel, the harder his life becomes. The Jim Crow South setting is vividly drawn, uncomfortable, and for this naïve reader, startling. Elwood's journey from a hopeful boy, listening to King’s sermons in his grandmother’s house, to his descent into Nickel is both tragic and disturbing.

The Nickel Boys is fiction, but it was inspired by the very real Dozier School for Boys, which operated in Marianna, Florida, between 1900 and 2011. The beatings, killings, and everything else actually happened at Dozier, but the story and the characters are the invention of Whitehead.

Books in Film: "Dark Passage"

 When books appear as set background in film and television, I spend more time identifying the books than paying attention to the story. When a book gets actual screen time, it makes me happier than something so insignificant should.

This happened with David Goodis’ Dark Passage in the 1991 film, Past Midnight. A film I haven’t watched enough of to decide if a connection exists between novel and film, but man do I dig that featured Dell edition and, even more, its prominence the scene.

Past Midnight was directed by Jan Eliasberg, written by Frank Norwood (it is rumored Quentin Tarantino heavily revised the script), and stars Rutger Hauer, and Natasha Richardson.

Thrift Shop Book Covers: "Condominium"

Condominium, by John D. MacDonald, was published in hardcover by J.P. Lippincott in 1977, but the edition that caught my eye is Fawcett Crest’s paperback reprint published in 1978. Broken sunglasses, a tipping skyscraper, water surging across open sand, and the gold foil title always makes me look twice. The artist: Unknown (to me at least)

The first paragraph:

Howard Elbright finally found Julian Higbee, the condominium manager, lounging against a concrete column, staring toward the pool area where two young women were taking turns diving from the low board.

THE TENTH VIRGIN by Gary Stewart

The Tenth Virgin, by Gary Stewart (St. Martin’s Press, 1983), is the best mystery novel set in Utah I have read. It is a private eye novel starring Gabe Utley. Gabe was raised on the east-side of Salt Lake City. He is a big city private eye, New York City, back in Utah as a favor to his high school sweetheart, Linda Peterson. Linda’s teenage daughter ran away, leaving a note that she joined a violent polygamist sect. Gabe is doubtful he can track the girl down, but his sense of obligation keeps him on her trail. The investigation takes Gabe into the wealthy and powerful Mormon hierarchy in Salt Lake City and then into the depths of the poverty-ridden polygamist clans of Southern Utah.

The Salt Lake City setting details a town that no longer exists—it is so much bigger now, less homogeneous—but it is done with a vivid and accurate hand. The narrative is crisp. The characters, from newspaper reporters to mean-spirited bigamist husbands, are nicely drawn with enough depth to make them familiar to the reader. The plot is nicely executed and the cultural examination of Mormonism (the culture, and not the religious doctrines) is spot-on. 

The Tenth Virgin is truly something special.  

TIEBREAKER by Jack M. Bickham

In 1989 a midlist writer named Jack Bickham published the slim suspense novel Tiebreaker. It was the first of six novels featuring aging professional tennis player, current teaching pro, sometime magazine writer, and former CIA asset Brad Smith. Brad is a step beyond the tail of his career and, after investing his prime years’ winnings unwisely, earns a living as a teaching pro at a club in Richardson, Texas. The novel’s opening is too good not to share—

“The last thing I had on my mind was somebody breaking into my condominium and dragging me into the past.”

It wasn’t on his mind because he was playing the finals of his tennis club’s first annual Richardson Charity Tournament against a hotshot college player acting like John McEnroe and threatening to clean the court with Brad. A battle between age and arrogance. When Brad makes it home, so both he and the reader can discover who and what is going to drag him into the past, he finds his old agency contact, Collie Davis, watching a western on television with a beer in his hand.

The agency has an assignment requiring Brad’s specialized credentials; a young Yugoslavian tennis star named Danisa Lechova wants to defect to the west, but her passport has been confiscated, and the UDBA (Yugoslavia’s version of the KGB) is openly watching her. Brad agrees, reluctantly, to act as Danisa’s go-between for the defection, using his cover as a tennis writer. 

The Brad Smith novels rank as my favorite featuring a serial character. Brad is uniquely American. He does odd jobs for the agency due to a perceived debt he owes—

“ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country”

—but he often doesn’t like the assignments, or the agency’s work overall. In a sense he is supporting the lesser of two evils—meaning the CIA against the KGB and the Soviet Union. He is a patriot, but it stops somewhere short of murder, coups, criminality, and E. Howard Hunt. He has a conscience and a well-defined ethical awareness that is unique to spy thrillers. He is also likable, admirable, mostly, and has more trouble with women than imaginable.

The novels, and Tiebreaker is no exception, are written in both first and third person. Brad’s perspective is in first, and an assortment of characters, including good guys and bad, are in third. The alternating perspectives give the novel a hybrid feel—Brad’s narration is more closely related to a private eye novel with social commentary making it more personal, and the third person expands it into a broader and larger suspense-spy story.

The tennis is an integral element to the story, and it is described so well it becomes a secondary character—

“Somehow I got my Prince composite on the yellow blur and bounced it down the line, hitting the back corner, close. He glided over to get it and I thought I saw the angle and guessed, chuffing up toward the net.”

The suspense is expertly designed around the story questions—a clue is identified, but its impact and relevance is not revealed for several pages. It is done without any annoying tricks or contrivance. The characters—both Brad Smith and the secondary folks—are well defined without any doubts about motivation or outcome. There are no crazy monsters, or unexplained actions. Everything is logical and smooth.

I like Tiebreaker and its five sequels so well that I re-read the entire series every few years, and if I was any more weak-willed I would probably read them more often.

Thrift Shop Book Covers: "Never Live Twice"

Never Live Twice, by Dan J. Marlowe, was published as a paperback original by Fawcett Gold Medal in 1964. The edition that caught my eye is Black Lizard Press’s 1988 reprint. A disappearing sun, palm trees, a cool car, what appears to be a dead guy, and a woman in distress, or perhaps a femme fatale, grabs with a promise and a curse. The artist: Kirwan

 

The first paragraph:

The white Cadillac rolled up the curving pebbled driveway, passed the brightly lighted clubhouse, and went around to the parking lot in the rear of the country club. The car’s windows were up and its airconditioning purred quietly against the humidity of the south Florida night. Low clouds drifted across the face of a quarter moon, and a few drops of rain fell on the windshield. The Cadillac came to a stop with its headlights beamed out over a practice putting green; the driver leaned forward, cut the lights, then turned to his companion. “You sure you know what to say afterward?” he asked urgently.

Thrift Shop Book Covers: "The Burning Sky"

The Burning Sky, by Ron Faust, was published in hardcover by Playboy Press in 1978, which is the very edition that caught my eye. The cover has a hardcover simplicity that pulls the me into a wild place with towering pines and an orange and red sky. The artist: Unknown (to me at least)

 

 The first paragraph:

Ben was telling the Texan about the cats.

There were four cats left, he said: two fine adult mountain lions, a male and a female, that he had trapped near Chama; an immature jaguar that he had smuggled across the Mexican border—“tranquilized so deep with Sucostrin I thought I’d killed her”—and a big, amber-eyed god-damned leopard that he’d bought from a small roadside zoo east of Gallup. He’d read in an Albuquerque newspaper about the outfit going bankrupt and had driven down to see if he could buy any of their cats at a good price. They had a mangy old lion, a living rug; a diseased mountain lion; an ocelot—“all apathetic, not paranoid like real cats”—and the leopard. The leopard was half starved then, wormy and diarrheic, but even so you could see that it was a magnificent animal, a cat of cats, a god of cats.

Ron Faust published 15 novels across four decades. He died in 2011 with little fanfare. What his work lacked in quantity was made-up for by its high level of quality. He was compared to Ernest Hemingway, Peter Matthiessen, and even Hunter S. Thompson.

Bargain Friday: Three Freebies!

It’s bargain Friday, and this time around I’ve collected a few free ebooks for your consideration.

The first is W. Glenn Duncan’s Rafferty’s Rules:

Rafferty ain’t in the revenge business.

So when he gets told to gun down the low-lifes who kidnapped Vivian Mollison and put her into a drug-induced twilight zone, it’s no can do.

No matter how much money Vivian’s mother is willing to throw at him.

But stirring up trouble amongst five outlaw bikers who picked on the wrong girl?

Now that’s more like it.

Next is Three on a Light, by Victor Gischler:

Detective Dean Murphy isn’t your normal shamus. Because of a cursed Zippo lighter, Dean finds himself taking cases involving werewolves, witches, vampires and other things that go bump in the night. A fun, pulpy mashup of the detective and dark fantasy genres. A novel of linked short stories, all of Dean Murphy’s supernatural adventures. A good selection for those who enjoyed Gischler’s VAMPIRE A GO-GO.

A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: Three On A Light represents my first efforts as a student in creative writing at the University of West Florida. It’s being offered to readers as an example of my early work and to tide readers over until my next novel comes out. I’d like to dedicate it to my former professors Dr. Carlos Dews and the late Laurie O'Brien.

The final is Jonathan Janz’s Witching Hour Theatre:

On a cool October night at the Starlight Cinema, an all-night horror movie triple feature is about to begin: Witching Hour Theatre. It’s the one exciting thing in Larry Wilson’s life, not counting the lovely brunette who works the concession stand. Settling in, he loses himself in the atmosphere of the old place: the crowd, the screams, the popcorn and the blood.

But when the second feature ends, only thirteen moviegoers remain. Among them, a woman of nineteen with a fondness for piercings and the macabre, a cop and his wife, a trio of bad-tempered bullies, and a solitary figure sitting silently in the shadows of the back row.

On this endless October night, Witching Hour Theatre will become Larry’s worst nightmare. For the movie on the screen is growing stranger by the minute. His fellow theatergoers are disappearing one by one.

And the figure from the shadows is advancing.

NIGHT CALLER by Daniel Ransom (Ed Gorman)

Ed Gorman is best remembered as a crime and western writer, but he wrote eight horror novels between 1986 (Toys in the Attic) and 1996 (Night Screams) using the pseudonym Daniel Ransom. The results were mixed; most are entertaining, but Gorman thought one of the books was so bad he wouldn’t allow a copy to cross the threshold of his home. The second Daniel Ransom novel, Night Caller (1987), is my favorite of Gorman’s Ransom novels for its perfectly cheesy 1980’s setting and its sharp plotting.

While vacationing in the Midwest with her teenage daughter, Jamie, Sally Baines’ car breaks down on a rural highway. A gentleman farmer gives them a ride into a nowhere town called Haversham. Their rescuer treats them well, but Sally is unsettled by the way he looks at Jamie, and later her unease grows when she sees the farmer pointing Jamie out to another townsperson. The two women check in to The Royal—Haversham’s only hotel—after the mechanic tells them the car won’t be ready until the next day. And when the sun goes down, things really get weird.

Night Caller is a small town horror with a smattering of Psycho and a dash of Stephen King. The characters are strange and amusing, especially a local doctor and a disgraced national television news reporter. The mother-daughter team of Sally and Jamie are easy to root for, and become more likable as the story unfolds. Ed Gorman, as he did with everything he wrote, adds a layer of mystery and ratchets the suspense with admirable craft. Night Caller is a hokey and fun light horror novel. It would make a perfect television movie—something similar to the campy-Stephen King television films made in the 1990s—but until an enterprising producer makes that happen, at least we have this appealing novel.

Night Caller was revised and reissued under the title The Girl in the Attic. I’ve never read the revised edition, but it’s available as an ebook and as an audio book.

Bargain Friday: "The Book of Skulls"

A bargain on Robert Silverberg’s dark masterpiece, The Book of Skulls, and it’s in time for the socially distanced weekend. For a limited time it’s available for Kindle for $1.99.

Here is the publisher’s description and further down is a handy link to Amazon:

After Eli, a scholarly college student, finds and translates an ancient manuscript called The Book of Skulls, he and his friends embark on a cross-country trip to Arizona in search of a legendary monastery where they hope to find the secret of immortality. On the journey with Eli, there’s Timothy, an upper-class WASP with a trust fund and a solid sense of entitlement; Ned, a cynical poet and alienated gay man; and Oliver, a Kansas farm boy who escaped his rural origins and now wants to escape death.

If they can find the House of Skulls where immortal monks allegedly reside, they’ll undergo a rigorous initiation. But do those eight grinning skulls mean the joke will be on them? For a sacrifice will be required. Two must die so that two may live forever . . .

Stretching the boundary between science fiction and horror, Robert Silverberg masterfully probes deeper existential questions of morality, brotherhood, and self-determined destiny in what Harlan Ellison refers to as “one of my favorite nightmare novels.”