Review: "Homicide: Saigon" by Stephen Mertz

Homicide: Saigon
by Stephen Mertz
Wolfpack Publishing, 2021

 

Homicide: Saigon, by action maestro Stephen Mertz, is as fast as a bullet and as much fun as a summer afternoon. It is 1970. The United States’ war in Vietnam is near its height and more unpopular than ever. As a public relations gimmick, the Army brass embeds journalists with select “in-country” units hoping for positive publicity. Maj. Cord McGavin is a hot-shot U.S. Army CID investigator stationed in Saigon. Cord is unhappy with the idea of a photojournalist following him around. He is even more so when he discovers the photographer is his wife, Kelly. An assignment Kelly had to go undercover to get and it could threaten McGavin’s career.
     But McGavin’s career worries disappear when he is confronted with a drug trafficking operation that began as street rumors and then escalated into a dockside firefight. On one side are a handful of American servicemen and on the other side is an ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) cop and McGavin. The ARVN cop doesn’t trust any of his American counterparts, including McGavin, because the drug ring appears to have deep roots within the U.S. Army. McGavin’s instincts tell him something big is going down, but Kelly’s presence is disturbing in two ways: she’s beautiful; and she’s in danger every second she spends in Vietnam.
     Homicide: Saigon is a sharply plotted and laconic action thriller with a rich setting and just enough characterization to make it interesting. It is less police procedural, or mystery, than it is an arrow-straight action tale. McGavin is a big and tough hero without many visible flaws—other than the distracting presence of Kelly—with a knight errant-like passion for justice. A step above most of it’s competitors, Homicide: Saigon, will appeal to anyone who enjoys those old-school masculine thrillers so popular in the 1970s and 1980s.

Check out Homicide: Saigon at Amazon in paperback here and in Kindle here.

Tales of the Macabre by Jim Kjelgaard & Robert Bloch

 

Introduction to Tales of the Macabre by Jim Kjelgaard

[now available from Vintage Lists in the Tales of the Macabre / The Black Fawn collection]

 Jim Kjelgaard was a regular contributor of short stories to pulp magazines in the late-1930s and throughout the 1940s. His first known published fictional tale, “River Man,” appeared in the November 5, 1938 issue of Argosy, and his byline regularly popped-up in diverse magazines like Street & Smith’s Western Story Magazine, Black Mask, 10 Story Western, The Phantom Detective, Thrilling Adventure, Argosy, Adventure, and others. It wasn’t unusual for 20 or more of Kjelgaard’s stories to reach print each year; his best annual output was in 1946, which saw an astonishing 36 of his tales hit newsstands across the country.
     While the genre Kjelgaard was writing for changed—Western, romance, mystery, adventure—his stories were charmingly consistent and familiar to his regular readers. They often featured animals and thoughtful protagonists living in wild places. A genre Kjelgaard rarely visited was horror, but that changed when a tale of the supernatural, “The Thing from the Barrens,” appeared in the September 1945 issue of Weird Tales. This story, and the three others published by Weird Tales over the next ten months—“The Fangs of Tsan-Lo” (Nov. 1945), “Chanu” (Mar. 1946), and “The Man Who Told the Truth” (July 1946) —had Kjelgaard’s traditional hallmarks, but were also dependent on their supernatural elements: a stalking creature from the wastelands of the Arctic, an ancient dog, a sinister hybrid ape-man, and…
     While the stories all appeared under Jim Kjelgaard’s name, a young Robert Bloch—the writer that gave us Psycho (1963)—revised the stories for publication. Both Bloch and Kjelgaard belonged to a writing group, the Milwaukee Fictioneers, which included the Western writer Lawrence A. Keating, the golden age science fiction writer, Ralph Milne Farley, and the cult-favorite science fiction writer Stanley G. Weinbaum. In Bloch’s 1994 autobiography, Once Around the Bloch, he mentioned his work with Kjelgaard and another of the group’s members: “I rewrote and sold stories which appeared under the bylines of Ralph Milne Farley and another member, Jim Kjelgaard.”
     Robert Bloch was a supernatural horror specialist and his participation in the stories can be seen from the eerie descriptions— “I seemed to hear the rustle of leaves, to see snarling, man-beast faces” —but the concepts and plotting are in the classical vein of Jim Kjelgaard. Things changed a bit for the fourth tale, “The Man Who Told the Truth,” which is less Kjelgaard and more Robert Bloch. In fact, this story was included in Bloch’s posthumous collection, Flowers from the Moon and Other Lunacies (1998). These collaborations often appeared alongside stories under Bloch’s own name. “The Thing from the Barrens” appeared with Bloch’s “The Skull of the Marquis de Sade”; “The Fangs of Tsan-Lo” with “Soul Proprietor”; and “Chanu” with “Bogy Man Will Get You.”
     For the first time in more than 70 years, Jim Kjelgaard’s first three tales of the macabre are back in print. And we’re betting you’ll enjoy them as much today as their original readers did so long ago.

Got to Amazon for the paperback version (here) or Kindle version (here).

Reviews: "Best American Mystery and Suspense, 2023" and "Fire-Hunter"

There are a couple new reviews of mine out in the world. Unfortunately, none of them are here, so I figured I’d point them out anyone interested enough to jump to a few websites.
     The first is a review of the terrific The Best American Mystery and Suspense, 2023, edited by Lisa Unger. It can be found at the Mystery Scene website.
     The second is a review of a cult classic (and still enjoyable) young adult title from long ago: Jim Kjegaard’s 1951 novel, Fire-Hunter. It is available at the new Jim Kjelgaard blog.
     For my U.S. readers, have a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday! For everyone else, have a great week!

Frankie: A Street Cat's Journey Home

Something a little different at the blog this evening—and forgive my shameless familial promotion—but…

      My sweet and kind and beautiful wife has a children’s picture book live and on the streets. Frankie: A Street Cat’s Journey Home is the true story of our little housemate and family-member, Frankie. It is lovely, the artwork is beautiful. And it is perfect for every kid, especially those between 2 and 6!

Here is what the publisher had to say about Frankie: A Street Cat’s Journey Home:

Meet Frankie! She was born a stray kitten. She hurt her eye early in life and lived in fear. One day, Frankie was taken to the animal shelter— Scared, in pain, and alone. What would happen next? Could a new home, happiness, and love be just around the corner for one small kitten?

Written and illustrated by professional artist and graphic designer, Kara Boulden, Frankie: A Street Cat’s Journey Home is a full-color picture book perfect for every child. Parents and grandparents, too! Vintage Lists called it “a heart-warming tale about friendship, love, and acceptance that will appeal to every child” and “an absolute winner!”

Share Frankie: A Street Cat’s Journey Home with a child you love today!

Kara Boulden has been a professional artist for more than 25 years. She has worked on projects for major Hollywood studios, Fortune 500 companies, New York publishing houses, and many other clients. She lives in Vermont’s Green Mountains with her husband, daughter, a dog, and, of course, Frankie.

      Of course I’m biased, but I think Kara’s book is marvelous! It can be purchased at Amazon, by clicking here or by clicking the fancier link below. 

"Introducing the Author... Philip K. Dick" — from Imagination

A marvelously self-effacing biographical essay from Philip K. Dick. It appeared in the February 1953 issue of Imagination alongside his short story, “Piper in the Woods.”

 

Review: "Crown Vic" by Lee Goldberg

 

Crown Vic
by Lee Goldberg
Cutting Edge Books, 2023

Crown Vic is different from what novelist and screenwriter Lee Goldberg is known for writing – easy going, well-plotted, and general audience mysteries like his brilliant Eve Ronin series – but the two villain-as-hero tales included in this collection are hardboiled and naughty fun. In the novelette length, “Ray Boyd Isn’t Stupid,” we find the eponymous character rolling into a lakeshore resort, Granite Point Park Resort, in Washington, fresh out of prison for stealing cars in his used police cruiser Crown Vic Interceptor. He takes a liking to the place (after some persuasion) and accepts a job: $10 an hour, along with room and board. The local Sheriff’s Deputy takes an immediate dislike to Ray, but the women all love Ray, including his boss’s wife, which is where all the trouble starts.
     The second, and the shorter of the two stories, “Occasional Risk” begins where the first left off. Ray is back in his Crown Vic moseying around Arizona’s southern desert and killing time at a seedy roadside motel in a nothing town. Ray Boyd isn’t stupid, and so when a glossy big-moneyed woman seduces him in the motel’s swimming pool he knows she wants something more than sex from him, but he’ll take the sex just the same…
     Crown Vic’s stories are a marvelous mash-up of Dan J. Marlowe’s early Earl Drake novels – The Name of the Game is Death, Endless Hour – and the erotic thrillers so popular in video stores during the 1990s. But Ray, even with all his failings, is a Lee Goldberg character: observant, witty, at times downright funny – for the reader at least – and a heck of a good escape for all of us drab work-a-day slobs.

Go here for the Kindle version and here for the paperback edition at Amazon.

Story Tellers' Circle: "Jim Kjelgaard" (Short Stories, Nov. 10, 1945)

An interview, of a sort mostly about fishing and outdoor fun, with Jim Kjelgaard that appeared in the Nov. 10, 1945 issue of the pulp magazine Short Stories with Kjelgaard’s short-short, “Cheena”; a clever story about a Filipino accused of collaborating with the Japanese. 

The Story Tellers’ Circle

From Milwaukee come these words from Jim Kjelgaard. Jim has something to say on ‘‘Cheena” and a good deal more to talk about on northern pike and ducks:

“I really haven’t very much to say about ‘Cheena’ except that I met and talked with a Filipino, and he impressed me as being a great little guy. He told me one thing and another, and ‘Cheena’ grew out of the mass of information. That’s the way it is with stories, you hear something you just can’t forget and by and by—you write the yarn. I will say, though, that I wouldn’t want any Filipinos mad at me. The one I met was tough as whalebone and strong as an ox as well as being a great little guy. And he himself told me that he was just a blushing daisy compared to some of the other fellows he knew!

“ ‘Cheena’; except for that, is a wholly imaginative story and I used the character as is just because I thought he’d fit in better than any other. He’s strictly my own invention.”

So much for business. Now about pleasure—the fishin’ and huntin’ kind.

“The weather’s already turned cold out in this neck of the woods—on the 14^th of September a fire doesn’t feel bad and we’ve kept one for the past four days. But, from one angle, that’s exactly the right way to bring in this time of year. ‘There ain’t no gas rationin’ no mo’,’ and you can really get around to all the places that you thought you’d like to get around to while you couldn’t. Well, maybe not all of ’em. The old jaloppy distinctly is not what she used to be and maybe she never was. But she still rolls when you want her to, and next week I expect to start for one of the nicest places I ever saw.

“It’s a stretch of river, and probably there isn’t another one exactly like it in the whole world. I never measured it, but at a guess it’s three hundred feet wide. Cattails and rushes, a thick mat that you couldn’t even pole a skiff through, extend about forty feet out from the east bank. Then you run into weeds, all sorts of water weeds, everything from lily pads to those long, mossy streamers that catch on the oars and keep your speed down almost to nothing an hour. But there’s a knack to rowing through ’em, and after floundering around in the darn’ things for two hours one day a fourteen-year-old kid told me how to work the oars. You take a long stroke, stop your oars a second on the back stroke, and the weeds roll off. But the center of the river— Ah and double ah!

“Theres an open channel there about twenty feet wide, and the last time I was there I saw at least a hundred and fifty pounds of great northern pike and wall-eyes come out of that channel. Some of those fish weren’t any babies either. One fellow snagged a wall-eye on a four-ounce fly rod, and fought it around for forty-five minutes before he got it even close to the boat. Then he made a stab, missed with the gaff, and the fish went away from there as though nothing was holding him. Anyhow, the cold weather should inspire those pike to strike soon—and thus my remark about ideal weather. You do a lot of shivering, but you have a lot of fun. Some day some smart bird will invent a lure with which you can fish those weeds—and that day you’d better be along.

“Besides, its handy to have a shotgun when you go up there. Possibly there won’t be any flight ducks down, but a lot of natives nest around there. All this—and mallards too!”

 

Jim Kjelgaard

 

“Cheena” is included in the Jim Kjelgaard collection, The Spell of the White Sturgeon / Dusky & Other Tales.

 

Story Tellers Circle © 1945 Short Stories, Inc. / No renewal

This Red-Handed Wretch: Bill Hickman and the Murder of Richard Yates

 This Red-Handed Wretch:

Bill Hickman and The Murder of Richard Yates

by Ben Boulden

 

 

In the dying minutes of October 18, 1857, the notorious lawman, lawyer, and admitted murderer, William Adams Hickman – labeled, “this red-handed wretch,” by the New York World and popularly known as Wild Bill – “used up” the mountaineer Richard E. Yates. The Mormon militia, called the Nauvoo Legion, had arrested Yates on a charge of spying for the approaching U.S. Army during the Utah War. Hickman claimed Yates’s killing had been ordered by Mormon prophet Brigham Young. A claim contradicted by the men Hickman implicated in Yates’s murder, and by Mormon historians ever since, but the conditions in Utah at the time, gives a ring of possibility to Hickman’s claim anyway. ...

[Read the rest of “This Red-Handed Wretch: Bill Hickman and the Murder of Richard Yates” at Dark City Underground]

Misogyny & Murder: Betty Webb’s Polygamy Mysteries

 Misogyny & Murder: Betty Webb’s Polygamy Mysteries

by Ben Boulden 

Mystery writer and journalist Betty Webb made a literary splash when her second Lena Jones detective novel, Desert Wives, was published by Poisoned Pen Press in 2002. The likable Lena – an orphan and socially-conscious private eye working the upscale Phoenix, Arizona suburb of Scottsdale – finds more than murder while undercover in the fictional polygamist town of Purity on the Utah-Arizona border. This swath of arid desert is called the Arizona Strip and home to more sheep than people, and more religious sects practicing polygyny – a form of polygamy where one man marries multiple women – than anywhere else in the United States. Including the infamous Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (FLDS), headquartered in Colorado City, Arizona, and its outlaw “prophet” Warren Jeffs. Publishers Weekly called Desert Wives, “a searing exposé of the abuses of contemporary polygamy,” and then added, “[it] could do for polygamy what [Stowe’s] Uncle Tom’s Cabin did for slavery.”
      Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times’ well-respected mystery critic, wrote:

“If Betty Webb had gone undercover and written Desert Wives as a piece of investigative journalism, she’d probably be up for a Pulitzer.”

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

Jim Kjelgaard's Adventure Magazine Stories

Jim Kjelgaard’s Adventure Magazine Stories

by Ben Boulden

Jim Kjelgaard (pronounced kel-guard) is best remembered for his young adult adventures featuring dogs, young boys, and always set in the outdoors. A few of his best-known books are Big Red (1945), Irish Red (1951), Outlaw Red (1953), and Stormy (1959). But Kjelgaard was also a regular contributor to pulp and slick magazines in the 1940s and 1950s, including Black Mask, Argosy, Western Story, Weird Tales – it’s reported he and Robert Bloch cowrote “The Man Who Told the Truth,” but the byline in the magazine identifies only Kjelgaard – Short Stories, Collier’s, Saturday Evening Post and many others. He had a particularly good relationship with Adventure where (by my count) 36 of his stories appeared between 1942 and 1963.
      Of those, 16 chronicled the exploits of a Native American poacher, Charley Hoe Handle, outwitting a game warden named Horse Jenkins....

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

A Little About Jack Higgins: A Life in Writing

 A Little About Jack Higgins: A Life in Writing

by Ben Boulden

Jack Higgins is a familiar name to most readers. His thrillers have routinely appeared on international bestseller lists since his breakout novel, The Eagle Has Landed, was published in 1975. A book that has been printed more than 50 million times. But Jack Higgins, whose real name is Harry Patterson, wrote 35 novels before The Eagle Has Landed made him a household name, and many of those early novels, especially those published between East of Desolation (the first book with the name Jack Higgins attached) in 1968 and The Run to Morning in 1974, are quite good. At their best, a Jack Higgins novel is linear, well-plotted, exciting, and with a style that is lyrical, and characters that are wonderfully romantic. At their worst, they are bland and lifeless. Higgins’ weakest novels, on average, are those published after 1990, which is about the same time his character Sean Dillon appeared on the scene. Many, but certainly not all, of the Sean Dillon books are weighted by interchangeable plots, characters that are more caricature than realistic, and a stark style that, at its worst, sinks into dullness.

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

Review: "Domino Island" by Desmond Bagley

Domino Island – published in 2019 by HarperCollins – is Desmond Bagley’s “lost” novel. The manuscript (ms) was discovered by the researcher Philip Eastwood at Boston University’s Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center where Bagley’s papers are housed. Along with the ms – titled Because Salton Died by Bagley – were letters between Bagley and his editor at Collins, Bob Knittel, and handwritten notes on the ms, identifying planned changes for publication, but Bagley pulled Because Salton Died back from Collins and the changes were never made. There are a couple hypotheses about why Bagley stopped work on the book. The first and most obvious is perhaps Bagley decided it was a hopeless project and there is some evidence supporting this. In the letter to his editor accompanying the ms, Bagley wrote, “I had a bad case of ‘writer’s block’[.]” He had started and abandoned four “standard Bagleys” – adventure thrillers – and he decided to try something entirely new to get his creative energy going....

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

Review: "The Spotted Cats" by William G. Tapply

       William G. Tapply’s tenth Brady Coyne novel, The Spotted Cats, is a measured affair defined by its rich characters and Coyne’s sense of loyalty and justice. Coyne is a Boston lawyer with an aversion to work and a proclivity for fly fishing. He grudgingly accepts an invitation to spend a weekend in the Cape Cod home of his client and friend, Jeff Newton. Newton was a professional big game hunter until being mauled by a Zambian leopard, called Nyalubwe by the natives. The encounter left him permanently disabled, bitter, and angry.

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

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.