Thought for the day ...

"To buy books would be a good thing, if we also could buy the time to read them."
- Arthur Schopenhauer 1788-1860

Summer (and fall) in Asbury

And if you didn't take my word that the Asbury Park Boardwalk came back in a big way this summer (and continues to this fall), here's another Shore native to give it his endorsement. That's the Wonder Bar behind him. No word if he stopped in for a cold one.

Also, to update the availability issue, signed first editions of both THE BARBED-WIRE KISS and THE HEARTBREAK LOUNGE are now available at the Asbury Galleria, inside the Grand Arcade between Convention Hall and The Paramount Theatre.

The Galleria also has an ongoing Morro Castle exhibit, in honor of the 75th anniversary of the fire that claimed 137 lives on the passenger liner. The smoking hulk beached just outside Convention Hall on Sept. 8, 1934 and remained there for six months until it was hauled away and cut up for scrap metal. A monument to the disaster was unveiled on the boardwalk last month, along with some rare home movie footage (below) shot from the beach after the ship came to rest.

Home movie footage of the luxury liner Morro Castle disaster

Marlowe and more

I've been on a campaign recently - not always a successful one - to stop bringing more books into the living quarters, at least until I've created additional shelf space. Things are already out of control, and though I've been gradually selling books off on eBay, it doesn't seem to have made much of a dent in the overall situation. So why did I go to this year's NYC Collectible Paperback and Pulp Fiction Expo this weekend? Just to look, I told myself, walk around a little, enjoy an Indian Summer day in the city.

Of course, it didn't quite work out that way. Instead, I walked out with the above. No regrets though, especially since, as the expo wound down, the dealers were eager to strike bargains before packing up. It was tough to turn away from these, all vintage Fawcett Gold Medals with McGinnis covers, from two of the hardest of the hard-boiled writers.

They are:

THE BLACK ICE SCORE By Richard Stark (Donald E. Westlake). (1968). First printing of the 11th Parker novel. The third after Westlake/Stark moved over to Fawcett from Pocket Books.

OPERATION FIREBALL By Dan J. Marlowe. (1969). The third in the "Earl Drake" series, after THE NAME OF THE GAME IS DEATH and ONE ENDLESS HOUR. With FIREBALL, Drake began his transformation from professional criminal to government agent.

FLASHPOINT By Dan J. Marlowe. (1970). The fourth Drake book, and the winner of that year's Edgar Award for Best Paperback Original.

I'd read the Stark before, in another edition, but neither of the two Marlowes. This time, unfortunately, neither of them were autographed.

INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS (or however it's spelled)

My Quentin Tarantino jones is fading.

Late to the party as always, but I finally got around to seeing INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS this week (I'm still not sure what the deal is with the wonky spelling). Despite the mostly glowing reviews, I'd shied away at first, worried it would follow the trend of recent QT films, ie. non-stop homages to other movies and directors and lots of "cool" flashy violence, none of which seemed to involve characters recognizable as actual human beings.

I thought RESERVOIR DOGS was brilliant when I first saw it (though I watched it again recently and didn't feel it aged well, perhaps a consequence of it having been imitated so often). I thought PULP FICTION was one of the best films of 1994 - and one of the best dark comedies ever. I loved JACKIE BROWN, in which it looked like QT was moving in a new and exciting direction, marrying his hotwired idiosyncratic direction and dialogue to a story about real people. Samuel Jackson's Ordell Robbie is funny and profane through much of the film, but by the end, he's scary and dangerous - as he should be (that's the film Jackson should have won an Oscar for. It's a beautifully nuanced and textured performance). Sure, there were references to other films (including borrowing the title song from 1972's ACROSS 110TH STREET), but they never got in the way of the story.

I found the two KILL BILL films diverting but empty. My friend, film critic Matt Zoller Seitz, perfectly summed them up when he said it was like having Tarantino show you scenes from his DVD collection at random. Look, there's a reference to Brian DePalma! Hey, it's got the old Shaw Bros. logo! Isn't that the theme song from LADY SNOWBLOOD? Wow, he's using Ennio Morricone's NAVAJO JOE score here!

Like the cliche about Chinese food, KILL BILL 1&2 mostly left me wanting to see a real movie an hour later. Or just watch LADY SNOWBLOOD again.

Then came DEATH PROOF, QT's half of GRINDHOUSE, which, despite some great car stunts and authentic '70s ambiance, seemed endlessly dull and talky, filled with dialogue no one would ever speak except in a Tarantino film (when was the last time you heard a sweet 20-something make a ZATOICHI reference in casual conversation?).

So I approached INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS with some trepidation. Well earned, as it turned out. I thought parts of it were brilliant in a meta sort of way, especially the idea of cinema as a metaphor for war ("Film is a battleground," director and WWII vet Sam Fuller used to say). The performances were almost uniformly excellent, especially Christoph Waltz (right) as Col. Hans Landa, "The Jew Hunter," who all but steals the film. That opening scene in a French farmhouse is a brilliant model of quiet suspense punctuated with humor. If it feels a little familiar, it's probably because it seems to be patterned after an early scene from Sergio Leone's THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY, in which Lee Van Cleef quietly menaces a Mexican family on their sleepy farm. Tarantino even layers some Morricone on the soundtrack to cement the connection.

A scene in a basement tavern midway through the film is another terrific set piece, building the tension as a clever German officer become suspicious of a soldier at a nearby table whose accent is just a little off. It's a great scene, even if it doesn't make a lot of sense (why would a double agent plan a secret meeting with undercover Allied commandos in a rathskeller that just might be full of German soldiers at the time?)

Not that I expected the film to be much concerned with verisimilitude. It begins with the title card "Once upon a time in Occupied France ...." so we know right away what we're getting into. Certainly, 64 years later, there's no reason not to make a fairy tale about WWII, or, more accurately, about WWII movies (though the nod is to Leone as well). The film never really overtly references the Holocaust though, and wisely so. The whole ridiculous souffle would collapse in the context of that reality. Instead, we have a troop of mostly Jewish-American commandos killing, scalping and mutilating German soldiers as revenge for the generic crime of "killing Jews."

Despite the title, INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS doesn't really spend much time with the commandos themselves. And what we see is pretty thin. They're essentially ciphers led by a caricature, Brad Pitt as "Lt. Aldo Raine." The only one we see much of is Sgt. "Donny" Donowitz, played by HOSTEL director Eli Roth (in fact, we see too much of him, while real actors like Til Schweiger are mostly wasted in minor roles). In an early scene, Roth's character graphically beats a helpless German soldier to death with a baseball bat, and then cheers as if it were a home run at Yankee Stadium. All that's missing is a 1940's-era high-five with his fellow GIs. Are we supposed to laugh at this? Cheer him on? Should we be equally amused when Pitt uses a bowie knife to carve a swastika into the forehead of a pleading prisoner who's already given them the information they want? (I'm curious how the film plays in Germany). Is that sort of cruelty on the part of the film's ostensible heroes meant to be entertaining? Invigorating? Instead, it reeked to me of the phony fanboy violence so many of Tarantino's imitators have indulged in for the last 15 years.

It's obvious Tarantino is aware of these ironies. He gives the doomed soldier some moments of silent bravery before the bat connects with his skull, and a later scene has a German audience cheering and laughing at a propaganda film depicting American soldiers being gunned down by a German sniper. But is INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS "morally complicated," as QT maintains in interviews? Or just "morally bankrupt," as my former colleague Stephen Whitty would have it? I'm leaning toward the latter.

Almost a book

Also, I'll be dusting off and updating the site over the next couple months. If you have any suggestions for something you'd like to see more (or less) of there, or have ideas for possible additional features, drop me a note either here or there (I'll be turning comment moderation back on for this one. I'm no fool).

Jim Carroll 1949-2009

Teddy sniffing glue, he was 12 years old
Fell from the roof on East Two-nine
Cathy was 11 when she pulled the plug
On 26 reds and a bottle of wine
Bobby got leukemia, 14 years old
He looked like 65 when he died
He was a friend of mine

Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died

– Jim Carroll, "People Who Died"

Who would have thought a punk song reciting a litany of tragic deaths could be so macabre and touching at the same time?

"People Who Died" was the best-known song from Jim Carroll's 1980 album "Catholic Boy," and sadly it's the one that springs to mind after hearing of his death from a heart attack Sept. 11 at age 60. A privileged prep school kid and star athlete who fell into heroin addiction and gay hustling before resurrecting himself as a poet and punk rocker, Carroll wrote songs about surviving. There's nothing ironic about "People Who Died." All the names belong to real people, and the song is Carroll's tribute to them. He lived the same lives they did. He just lived long enough to tell about it.

Most people know Carroll - if at all - from the 1995 film THE BASKETBALL DIARIES, based on his 1978 autobiography of the same name (Leonardo Di Caprio played him in the film). In addition to two memoirs, Carroll published six books of poetry. And although he made a half dozen albums, his first, "Catholic Boy," is the rawest expression of his talent. The playing isn't always inspired (it sometime sounds a little too much generic bar band proto-punk), but the lyrics snap and tear. I haven't listened to the album in years (I only have it on vinyl), but complete verses are still lodged in my memory.

For example, from the title song:

"I make angels dance and drop to their knees
When I enter a church the feet of statues bleed
I understand the fate of all my enemies
Just like Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane ....
I was a Catholic Boy
Redeemed through pain, not through joy."

Why Abel Ferrara didn't work this into the soundtrack of BAD LIEUTENANT will always be a mystery to me.

Carroll's history and past lives are well documented. He hung out with Andy Warhol, partied with Lou Reed and was close friends with Patti Smith, who encouraged his music. Allegedly, it's Carroll's voice that can be heard during between-song chatter on The Velvet Underground's classic "Live at Max's Kansas City" album from 1970, inquiring after some Tuinals and a double Pernod. Though he'd kicked heroin in 1973 after nearly 10 years (he'd started at age 13), Carroll was always gaunt and pale, and had become even more skeletal and haunted in recent years. If anyone had been casting a film about the last years of noir writer Cornell Woolrich, they would have needed to look no further.

But what I'll always remember Carroll best for is a poetry reading he gave at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J., in 1983. The buzz over his first two albums had died out and he was still in the studio recording the third, so he'd faded from public view. The reading was held in a tiny room in the old College Avenue Student Center, about 30 chairs in all, only half of which were occupied when he took the small stage. To everyone's surprise, he brought along Lenny Kaye, guitarist with the Patti Smith Group (and a Rutgers grad), who'd been working with him in the studio that afternoon.

After reading several poems (the one I remember best was titled "Your Clitoris," the final lines being "Your clitoris/Is a monument/To my boredom"), Carroll brought Kaye on stage. He plugged his electric guitar into a small amp and they proceeded to premiere songs from the still-in-progress album, "I Write Your Name." This to a room of 15 people, Carroll gripping the mike and prowling the stage, Kaye playing scorching guitar behind him through a single tiny amp. When the power outlet to the stage blew out with the overload, Carroll continued to sing a cappella, moving out into the audience, snarling his lyrics, any dividing line between poet and rocker long shattered. It was one of the seven top music moments of my life.

**** Above, Patti Smith, left, and Jim Carroll in 1969. Photo by Wren D'Antonio.

Just an American Boy

It's a brief scene, barely four minutes long, but it's one of the most memorable in American film.

A slowly unraveling New York City cab driver (Robert De Niro) meets a sleazy, motor-mouthed gun dealer in a cheap hotel room. The dealer reels off the attributes of his various armaments (".380 Walther ... isn't that a little honey?") while the camera lovingly lingers on all that gleaming steel and wood. De Niro's character buys four guns and accoutrements, to the tune of $900. But even while the dealer's packing them up in a handy gym bag, he continues a steady stream of pitches for other contraband ("Crystal meth? I can get you crystal meth. Nitrous oxide, how about that?").

The movie of course, is Martin Scorsese's 1976 classic TAXI DRIVER, and the scene offers one of the few laughs in the film. The dealer - referred to as "Easy Andy, the Traveling Salesman" - is played by Scorsese's friend and collaborator Steven Prince, a non-actor whom the director brought in for a cameo, and in doing so immortalized in film history. But Scorsese wasn't done with him. The following year he made Prince the subject of a documentary, AMERICAN BOY, filmed over the course of a single evening at the L.A. home of actor and Scorsese regular George Memmoli.

Shot handheld by cinematographer Michael Chapman (who also lensed TAXI DRIVER), the documentary is essentially 55 minutes of unfiltered Prince, interspersed with home movies and photos from his childhood. He talks about being a 21-year-old road manager for Neil Diamond, a nightclub and concert promoter and all-around show business jack-of-all-trades. He speaks equally candidly about his years as a heroin addict, recounting an incident where a woman overdosed at a shooting gallery and he revived her with an adrenaline shot to the heart, a story Quentin Tarantino borrowed in its entirety for a scene in PULP FICTION. Most harrowingly, Prince recalls shooting a man to death at a Barstow, Calif., gas station, where he worked during an Easter vacation from college.

For many years, AMERICAN BOY has been Scorsese's lost film. It didn't get a theatrical release and, outside of poor-quality bootlegs, hasn't been available on home video since the days of laserdisc. Plenty of filmmakers have seen it though. In addition to Tarantino's lift, director Richard Linklater got Prince to repeat the gas station story verbatim for his 2001 digitally rotoscoped film WAKING LIFE.

For the last year, AMERICAN BOY has been available in its entirety on YouTube, divided into six parts. It's compulsive - and compelling - viewing, especially for its behind-the-scenes look at Scorsese and company (in addition to Memmoli and Chapman, also visible on screen is MEAN STREETS and RAGING BULL co-writer Mardik Martin). It's of a piece with Scorsese's 1974 doc ITALIANAMERICAN, and was often paired with it at film festivals.

Thirty years later comes director Tommy Pallotta's follow-up, AMERICAN PRINCE. A sometime Linklater collaborator, Pallotta stumbled upon Prince by accident in Austin, Texas, a couple years back. Pallotta befriended Prince - who now works as a general contractor and manages a medical marijuana shop - and eventually convinced him to sit for another filmed storytelling session.

As opposed to the rail-thin, hollow-eyed Prince of 1977, the 2009 version is amazingly healthy-looking and youthful (he's 61). His nasal New York whine has softened somewhat, but he's as animated as ever when it comes to talking about his eventful life, his friendship with Scorsese and Band frontman Robbie Robertson (at one point all three shared a house on Los Angeles' Mulholland Drive) and his own responses to the 1978 documentary. He also dishes some less-than-flattering stories, especially one about star Liza Minnelli having affairs with both Scorsese and De Niro while shooting 1977's NEW YORK, NEW YORK, a film Prince appeared in and crewed on.

Without a distributor or theatrical release (or rights clearances), Pallotta's film has been kicking around on the web, and is on-and-off YouTube (currently on, you can see it here).

The two films are excellent companion pieces. Both are light on biographical details, aside from the brief unconnected anecdotes Prince relates about his childhood and parents, but the stories speak for themselves (watch BOY first though, as Pallotta's film contains spoilers for stories in the original documentary). Seen back-to-back, they're amazing time capsules as well as oral histories. And for anyone interested in Scorsese or Hollywood in the 1970s, they're required viewing.

Big Apple Time Capsule Pt. 4: SHAFT'S BIG SCORE!

The fourth in an occasional series of posts about New York City in the 1970s as seen through the prism of that decade's shot-on-location crime dramas ... (for the complete series so far, click here).


"Stay outta Queens!"

- A gangster's warning in SHAFT'S BIG SCORE!
Fortunately, the makers of SHAFT'S BIG SCORE! (1972), the sequel to the previous year's blockbuster SHAFT, didn't heed that warning. This time, instead of restricting their cameras to lower Manhattan and Harlem, they ventured into the Outer Boros for some gritty on-location filming along the Brooklyn/Queens waterfront during a snowy New York winter. With director Gordon Parks Sr. again at the helm, the film was shot by Urs Furrer, the DP on SHAFT as well as another essential '70s N.Y. film, THE SEVEN-UPS.

SHAFT'S BIG SCORE! is far from a great movie. It lacks some of the first film's freshness, and seems to have been hastily shot and edited (it opened in June 1972, less than a year after the first film was released). In addition to directing, Parks also composed the jazzy score (and has a cameo as a croupier at a mob casino). Unfortunately, though Isaac Hayes contributed an already-recorded instrumental ("Type Thang") to the soundtrack, his iconic "Theme from Shaft" is nowhere to be found.

What did get better this time around was Richard Roundtree in the title role. He's much more confident and natural here than in the first film (his debut), really coming into his own as leading man and action hero (he also gets to show off a lot of great '70s leatherwear and turtlenecks). Also returning were Moses Gunn and Drew "Bundini" Brown as Harlem mob boss Bumpy Jonas (loosely based on real-life gangster Bumpy Johnson) and his sidekick Willy, who provides much of the film's comic relief.

Not all the performances are at that level though, and the film sometimes seems indifferently directed. There's an odd extra beat after many of the line readings, and what should have been a brutal and kinetic hallway fight is shot in slow motion. Some of this may be due to the film's relatively low budget and tight schedule. After the success of the first film, one imagines the race was on to have a sequel in theaters by the following summer (in the liner notes to the soundtrack album, Parks says the entire score was "conceived, written and recorded in a little over two weeks, an exhausting two weeks.")

The screenplay was written by Oscar winner Ernest Tidyman, Shaft's creator, who later novelized the script and went on to write five more Shaft novels as well. As in the first film, a brewing white-black mob war is at the center of the plot. A pre-credits bomb blast kills a Queens funeral home director and numbers kingpin, who also happens to be Shaft's girlfriend's brother. Soon, gangsters are after her as well, and Shaft suspects her brother's shady partner is as much to blame as the white mobsters "from downtown" who want to move in on the Queens numbers racket (in the novel, the bombed office is located on Myrtle Avenue).

The chief mafioso is played by soap opera star Joe Mascola (whose character is named, cleverly, "Gus Mascola"). His right-hand man is played by the late, great character actor Joe Santos, a familiar face on television for nearly 40 years, most recently in the 2004 season of THE SOPRANOS. Mascola gets to show off his clarinet-playing talents in the film, as well as model an assortment of dressing gowns and smoking jackets. The imposing Julius Harris pops in occasionally as the obligatory hard-boiled police captain trying to get Shaft to cooperate with the authorities.


Though much of the film takes place in Queens, we also get another look at Shaft's ridiculously large Greenwich Village apartment, complete with fireplace, spiral staircase and a bookshelf well-stocked with African-American literature (Frank Yerby's novel FAIR OAKS, Henry Seaton's LION IN THE MORNING and Earl Shorris' OFAY are visible, along with Theodore White's THE VIEW FROM THE FORTIETH FLOOR). Behind the bookshelf is Shaft's Secret Stash, including a new-at-the-time-but-now-obsolete High Standard HS-10B automatic shotgun, which he unleashes on the mobsters during a chilly standoff at Queens' Cypress Hills Cemetery (in the novelization, he wields a plain old sawed-off 12-gauge pump).
At times, SBS! is more James Bond than Shaft, a shift in tone emphasized by the film's poster (top). But whatever its flaws, the movie redeems itself in its final half-hour, with an expertly filmed car chase along the Brooklyn waterfront (with Shaft riding shotgun - literally - in a red 1972 Plymouth Sebring) that turns into a boat chase and ends with a Bondian man-vs-helicopter duel in the old Brooklyn Navy Yard.



Though it may not have had the cultural impact of its predecessor, SHAFT'S BIG SCORE! is actually a very entertaining New York crime/action film. In some ways, it's looser and livelier than the first film, downplaying the racial aspects and avoiding some of that film's stiffness. And Roundtree is a pleasure to watch - cool, calm, collected and dynamic. Even without Isaac Hayes' theme behind him, he's still the man.


**** Above right: Roundtree and Parks on location filming the Cypress Hills Cemetery shootout.



NEXT TIME: "The French Connection"

Black Lizard Lounge #4: THE OUT IS DEATH

The fourth installment of my ongoing occasional look back at some vintage Black Lizard paperbacks from the late 1980s and early '90s (for the others, just click on "Black Lizard Books" in the labels at bottom).

THE OUT IS DEATH by Peter Rabe

BLACK LIZARD EDITION: December 1988

ORIGINAL PUBLICATION: Fawcett Gold Medal, 1957

THE STORY: Ex-mobster comes to the aid of an aging safecracker being manipulated by a gang of young thugs.

THE BOTTOM LINE: Classic hard-boiled pulp from one of the masters.

I've written about Peter Rabe before, most recently for one of Patti Abbott's Forgotten Book Fridays. THE OUT IS DEATH was Rabe's third novel featuring masterless hood Daniel Port (I think it's the third, they were written and published in such a short period of time that it's hard to tell). A sort of American ronin, Port first appeared in 1956's DIG MY GRAVE DEEP, and TOID continues his adventures after leaving "The Stoker Mob" in some unnamed major American city. An amoral gangster battling even worse bad guys, Port is one of the predecessors of Donald E. Westlake's Parker, who would come along six years later, in 1962's THE HUNTER. Westlake often sang Rabe's praises in interviews, and rightly so. Along with Dan J. Marlowe, Rabe was one of the architects and greatest practitioners of post-war hard-boiled paperback-original noir.

In THE OUT IS DEATH, Port tries to rescue an old and infirm safecracker named Dalton from the clutches of a brutal young thug named Corday, who wants Dalton to go on one last job for him. It's a generational thing, as it turns out, with old school gangster Port going up against the '50s-style juvenile delinquents of Corday's gang. Doesn't take much to figure out who comes out on top. Suffice it to say that there were five Port novels in all, the last being 1959's TIME ENOUGH TO DIE. Black Lizard reprinted three and most have remained out of print since, though some are now showing up on Kindle.

TOID does bear similarities to Westlake's 1965 Stark novel THE JUGGER, the sixth book in the series, in which Parker travels to Nebraska to find out what happened to his contact and go-between, an aging safecracker named Joe Sheer, who's fallen prey to a corrupt small-town cop (in that sense, THE JUGGER also owes a debt to Marlowe's THE NAME OF THE GAME IS DEATH). In THE JUGGER, though, Sheer is dead before Parker arrives (and Parker was prepared to kill him as a security measure anyway). In TOID, Port comes to Dalton's aid in time to save him from that fate, though he also has selfish reasons for getting involved, including Corday's va-va-voom girlfriend.

Here's a slice of classic Rabe understatement, as Port barrels his way through some thugs blocking his exit from a nightclub:

Port headed for the nearest exit guarded by only one man. The band stopped before he made it, and the sudden quiet was unearthly. After the silence there was bedlam again; chairs scraped, people laughed, and a buzz of voices rose from the tables.

The kid at the door saw Port coming, but he didn't expect much from a man running away.

Then the kid's arm was suddenly bent double. The pain grew like a fire running up his arm and bursting hot and big in his shoulder.

"It hurts less if you walk," said Port's voice close beside him, and they moved out of the door and into the alley.

If, like me, you've read and reread all the Stark books many times over (and sadly, there will be no more), be on the lookout for Rabe's Daniel Port novels. They're worth the effort.

Next time at the Black Lizard Lounge: Lionel White's THE KILLING (aka CLEAN BREAK)

The Book of books

Back in June 1982, when I was attending college and living in St. Augustine, Fla., I decided to begin keeping an ongoing log of every book I read, noting the title, author and whether it was fiction or non-fiction.

Why I did it, I'm not sure. But I still have that original black-and-white composition notebook - even though it's falling apart slightly - and list every new book as I finish it. I break the lists up by year, drawing a demarcation line every June to make it easier to keep track of the titles and be able to tell what books I'd read in a given (June-to-June) year. Nowadays though, when I look back at earlier pages, I sometimes see titles I have no memory of reading at all - they ring not even the slightest bell.

Looking through the lists now, I can see that I read a lot of junk over the years - paperback action series, movie tie-ins and the like - but a lot of good stuff too. It's also a walk down Memory Lane. I can remember where I was and what I was doing in specific years based on the books I read. I see the first book I ever reviewed (Stephen King's THINNER, review published in the Asbury Park Press in Feb. 1985, shortly after the news of the "Richard Bachman" pseudonym broke). I also see books I remember vividly - as if I'd read them yesterday, instead of 20 years ago - listed right next to books I have absolutely no recall of whatsoever, and if you'd asked me if I'd read them, I'd answer no.

Here are some sample pages (click on images to enlarge):

From 1987-'88:



From 2001-'02:


And here's a quick by-the-numbers run-down:

Total Number of Books (June 1, 1982 to Aug. 10, 2009): 1,358

First Book Listed (June 1982): THE WAGES OF FEAR by Georges Arnaud (French suspenser about dynamite-hauling truck drivers, basis of 1953 film).

Most Recent Book Listed (Aug. 10, 2009): BREAKFAST IN THE RUINS by Barry N. Malzberg (a collection of essays by the N.J. science fiction/mystery author).

Most Read Year: June 1985 to June 1986, 81 books. (I had a lot of free time on my hands, I guess).

Least Read Year: June 2005 to June 2006, 20 books (Hey, I had other things going on).

Yearly Average: 50.2 books

Ratio of Fiction to Non-Fiction: 21 to 1

Complete Listing of Titles From a Single Page Chosen at Random, in the Order I Read Them:

From 1983-'84:

THE SIEGE OF TRENCHER'S FARM (source of the Peckinpah film STRAW DOGS) - Gordon M. Williams
THE RIGHT STUFF - Tom Wolfe
THE TIN CRAVAT - Jack D. Hunter (second sequel to THE BLUE MAX)
THE REVOLT OF THE COCKROACH PEOPLE - Oscar Zeta Acosta (fictionalized memoir by Chicano activist immortalized in FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS)
I MARRIED A DEAD MAN - Cornell Woolrich (deep into my Woolrich phase by this point)
ASSIGNMENT: BLACK VIKING - Edward S. Aarons (No. #25 in the Sam Durell action series published by Fawcett Gold Medal)
MASTER-AT-ARMS - Rafael Sabatini (one of my favorite novelists)
TOMOE GOZEN - Jessica Amanda Salmonson (samurai fantasy fiction)
THE OUTRIDER - Richard Harding (first of a futuristic series in a ROAD WARRIOR vein)
SCOUNDREL TIME - Lillian Hellman
THE STRANGER - Albert Camus
GONJI #3: SAMURAI COMBAT - T.C. Rypel (more samurai action)
THE TAKING OF PELHAM ONE TWO THREE - John Godey
THE BIG GRAB - John Trinian (pseudonymous caper novel by screenwriter/author Zekial Marko. Filmed in France as ANY NUMBER CAN WIN)
THE HUNTER - Richard Stark
THE MAN WITH THE GETAWAY FACE - Richard Stark (the Avon Stark reprints were starting to come out)
THE DOGS OF WAR - Frederick Forsyth
HORRIDO! - Col. Raymond Toliver and Trevor Constabile (profiles of WWII Luftwaffe fighter pilots)

I guess it doesn't get more eclectic than that. And that's just one page.

Anybody out there do something similar?

Signed firsts and summer in Asbury

For those who've asked about signed copies of my first two novels - THE BARBED-WIRE KISS and THE HEARTBREAK LOUNGE (both of which have slipped out of print in recent months) - I'm told that Don Stine at Antic Hay Books still has some in stock, in both hardcover and paperback editions. I signed all of Don's stock back when he still had a physical store on Cookman Avenue in Asbury Park, the site of one of my favorite signings ever, as part of a late night Asbury Park "Art After Dark" festival in 2005.

Though Antic Hay no longer has an actual storefront, Don continues to stock books on Shore authors and topics though, and has an extensive collection of memorabilia from the city's glory days (he'll probably have some signed firsts of GONE 'TIL NOVEMBER come January as well).

If you haven't been to Asbury lately, it's definitely worth the visit. The revitalization that has taken place, on the beachfront at least, is amazing. Where the boardwalk area was once a ghost town of ruined buildings and empty storefronts that brought to mind CARNIVAL OF SOULS, it's now lined with restaurants, shops, food stands and a water park.

Because of the stunted economy, not everything has come to fruition (an unfinished condo building on Ocean Avenue stands on the site of a previous unfinished condo building), but this has been the most concerted effort to bring Asbury Park around in decades. You can find hundreds of people on the boardwalk and beach any given day this summer. There's even talk of reopening the legendary Upstage coffehouse at Cookman and Bond, which should have been named some sort of musical landmark years ago if nothing else. Instead it sat empty and deserted for more than three decades.

So, to quote another Shore resident, here's one for Asbury, hoping that the best may be yet to come.

GONE 'TIL NOVEMBER: The Video (sort of)

Courtesy of Newark's own Wyclef Jean. This song, from his 1997 album "The Carnival," was a sort of spiritual inspiration for the novel in the very early days.



A remix can be found here. And here's a live version of the song featuring Soul Asylum.

Cover preview

It won't be out until January, but here's an early look at the cover of the new novel (due out Jan. 19.), courtesy of the good folks at St. Martin's/Minotaur. Thoughts?

Mann's world

Over at THE HOUSE NEXT DOOR (and originally at the Museum of the Moving Image site), Matt Zoller Seitz concludes "Zen Pulp," his five-part series of video essays on the work of director Michael Mann. The final installment is devoted to my favorite pre-WIRE TV crime series, CRIME STORY.

Matt's entertaining and incisive essay (which, in full disclosure, I did contribute to slightly and I mean slightly) looks back at Mann's retro crime drama, which ran only two seasons in the mid-'80s, but whose multi-episode story arcs helped pave the way for shows such as THE SOPRANOS, DEADWOOD and the above-mentioned WIRE (echoes of it can also be seen in Mann's own HEAT).

The show made a star of Dennis Farina (above), and rightly so. As Chicago Major Crimes Unit Lt. Mike Torello, Farina brought just the right combination of charm and toughness to the role. In general, it had to be one of the best-cast series ever. Both seasons were packed with actors who went on to major careers, including Julia Roberts, Kevin Spacey, David Caruso, Gary Sinise, Ving Rhames, Lili Taylor, Michael Madsen and dozens of others. And, of course, the two-hour pilot (startlingly violent for network TV at the the time), was directed by the great Abel Ferrara.

I used to own the entire show - both seasons - on VHS. A few years back, during a bad attack of the flu that left me wiped out and sleepless for more than a week, I watched almost all the episodes back-to-back from my living room couch. I think if my downstairs neighbors heard "Runaway" one more time they were going to kill me.

I'd always hoped there would be a follow-up two-hour TV movie tying up the show's loose ends (the second season ended with a silly cliffhanger that felt like it belonged in a 1930s serial), but it was not to be. All we're left with is a not-so-great DVD set with poor picture quality, almost no extras and some of the original music removed for legal reasons. Hopefully, someone will get around to doing this right someday. It deserves it.

Matt's previous entries in the series look at MIAMI VICE, Mann's iconic male heroes, the role of women in his films, and Mann's use of doppelgangers and mirror images, especially in his film MANHUNTER. If you're even a moderate Mann fan, they're all worth checking out.

New short story

My short story "Heart" appears in the new (Aug. 2009) issue of INSIDE JERSEY magazine, currently on N.J. newsstands and home-delivered (in certain zip codes) with today's (7/19) copy of the Newark Star-Ledger. Individual copies are also available by calling (800) 876-2326.

The story is a prequel of sorts to the new novel, GONE 'TIL NOVEMBER, which will be published Jan. 19 by St. Martin's/Minotaur. They both feature Morgan, an aging enforcer for a Newark drug gang. "Heart" is set at N.J.'s Monmouth Park during a summer stakes race. It's accompanied by a terrific illustration from artist Andre Malok.

Readers with good memories will recall an earlier version of a short story with the same title that appeared in Maggie Estep and Jason Starr's excellent anthology BLOODLINES a few years back. The new version is much improved, albeit slightly cleaned up in terms of violence and profanity. Many thanks to INSIDE JERSEY editor Rosemary Parrillo for taking a chance on it. It's the first piece of fiction the magazine has published, though hopefully not the last.


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And totally unrelated:
There have been many great interpretations of the songs of Bruce Springsteen. But this one, from actress Mary-Louise Parker, has to be among the best. She does leave out a few verses though. 

Thought for the day ...

... from the new album, "Dave Alvin and the Guilty Women," featuring Alvin and seven of America's premiere female folk musicians and songwriters. The lyrics are from Alvin's soulful version of "These Times We're Living In," written and originally recorded by the late singer/songwriter Kate Wolf:

If I could, I'd tell you now,
There are no roads that do not bend
The days, like flowers, bloom and fade
And they do not come again.

Sisters in crime

For those in the N.J./N.Y. area, two of the brightest new voices in crime fiction will be hosting a launch party/signing event Tuesday, July 7 at 6:30 p.m. at New York's Mysterious Bookshop. Appearing will be Megan Abbott, author of the new BURY ME DEEP (Simon & Schuster), and Theresa Schwegel, whose novel LAST KNOWN ADDRESS (St. Martin's Minotaur) is just out as well. Both are Edgar Award winners (Abbott for Best Paperback Original for last year's QUEENPIN, and Schwegel for Best First Novel for 2005's OFFICER DOWN) as well as being lovely and charming. The Mysterious Bookshop is at 58 Warren Street in Tribeca, a short walk north from the WTC Path station. (212) 587-1011.

Black Lizard Lounge #3: VIOLENT SATURDAY

The third installment of my ongoing occasional look back at some vintage Black Lizard paperbacks from the late 1980s and early '90s:

VIOLENT SATURDAY by W.L. Heath

BLACK LIZARD EDITION: 1985

ORIGINAL PUBLICATION: Harper, 1955

THE STORY: A bank robbery throws a small Alabama town into chaos.

THE BOTTOM LINE: A major Southern novel disguised as a crime thriller. Or maybe the other way around.


"The three men arrived in Morgan Friday afternoon on the two-thirty train from Memphis. They were the only strangers to get off the train that day, and several people noticed them but didn't pay them much attention. They might have been salesmen or minor businessmen of some sort. They only reason they were noticed at all was because there were three of them."

So begins W. L. Heath's VIOLENT SATURDAY. The three aren't salesmen, of course, or minor businessmen. They're big city bank robbers who descend on the small town of Morgan, Ala., to plunder the local Savings and Loan. As their plans proceed and the titular day looms closer, the town itself seems to tremble with anticipation, as if a storm were gathering on the horizon. But before that happens, Heath delves "Peyton Place"-like into the passions and private dramas of Morgan's citizens, none of whom are very innocent themselves. When the run-up to the robbery leads to the kidnapping of the book's ostensible hero, an "expediter" for the Fairchild Chenille Company, things start to go badly wrong. And the book earns its title in a climactic shoot-out that's startling in its realism, especially by 1955 standards.

One of the great things Black Lizard did during its original run was bring near-forgotten novels like this back into print (even if they promptly fell out again), and VIOLENT SATURDAY is maybe the best of the bunch. Unlike most of their reissues, it wasn't first published as a paperback original. Though it was Heath's debut novel, it was bought and published in hardcover by Harper, and the film rights sold almost immediately. It was filmed later that year at 20th Century Fox, directed by Richard Fleischer and starring Victor Mature, Ernest Borgnine and Lee Marvin in an early role. The story was transplanted to Arizona, with Borgnine as an Amish farmer (!) who helps foil the robbery. The film isn't available on DVD, but can be seen in its entirety on Hulu.

VIOLENT SATURDAY is very much a novel of its time, and the casual racial epithets can be a little jarring, even in context. But the finely nuanced social observations and expert build-up of suspense put it right in the forefront of American crime novels of the 1950s.

William Ledbetter Heath has become something of an enigma in the decades since the book was published. He wrote at least eight novels, three of those for younger readers, but all remain out of print. The Black Lizard edition of VIOLENT SATURDAY also contains a great introduction by Ed Gorman, with plenty of biographical details about Heath, who was still alive at the time (he died in 2007). Black Lizard also reprinted Heath's follow-up, the excellent ILL WIND, which again takes place in the fictional town of Morgan, though it's only marginally a crime novel. Last year, browsing in a used book store, I found a British edition of Heath's third novel BLOOD ON THE RIVER, which, as far as I can tell, has never have been published in the U.S. at all. Like those two earlier books, it's an almost flawless merging of character and action, deeply evocative of small-town communities in the rural South.

Next time at the Black Lizard Lounge: Peter Rabe's THE OUT IS DEATH

Chasing "Something in the Night"

And speaking of Cornell Woolrich ...

It may seem a stretch to equate noir master Woolrich's doom-laden novels and stories with the music of Bruce Springsteen, but they actually share a lot of common ground. Along with their fondness for nocturnal imagery, the best of Springsteen's earlier songs often had that haunted - and haunting - quality found in Woolrich's work. The narrator of Springsteen's "Stolen Car" (from 1980's "The River") is an archetypal Woolrich character, mourning a lost love while driving a stolen car "through a pitch-black night," wracked by guilt and fear that "in this darkness, I will disappear."

And just look at some of those other song titles - "Darkness on the Edge of Town," "Downbound Train," "Point Blank" "Because the Night," "New York City Serenade" (Woolrich had his own "Manhattan Love Song"). And years before Springsteen came along, Woolrich found his own muse in Asbury Park, setting several stories in that once-glamorous but forever-fading seaside resort. The best-known of these is probably 1935's "Boy With Body," which was reprinted as "The Corpse and the Kid" in the 1988 Woolrich collection DARKNESS AT DAWN. Woolrich always had a fondness for citing popular song lyrics in his stories as well. If he were alive and writing today, he'd probably be quoting Springsteen.

Probably the most Woolrichesque of all Springsteen titles is "Something in the Night," from his 1978 album "Darkness on the Edge of Town." It's one of the great but lesser-known Springsteen songs, filled with evocative lyrics and existential angst. It's also one of his most geographically specific songs, set on Asbury Park's Kingsley Street, which at one time formed a oval with Ocean Avenue known as "The Circuit," where aimless teenagers cruised on hot summer nights. The Circuit is also mentioned in that other Springsteen song with a quintessentially Woolrichesque title, "Night," from 1975's "Born to Run." At the south end of The Circuit was Palace Amusements, the ramshackle beachfront arcade immortalized in that album's title song.

While listening recently to some archival Springsteen shows, I came upon the first-ever version of "Something in the Night," from a concert at the Monmouth Arts Center (now the Count Basie Theatre) in Red Bank, N.J., on Aug. 1, 1976. Springsteen and his E Street Band were performing a six-night stretch there, debuting new material while an ongoing lawsuit kept them from recording (other songs premiered that week included the equally haunting "The Promise." )

This earliest version of "Something in the Night" is even more Woolrichian than the one on the album. Slowed down, with only a simple keyboard accompaniment, the Red Bank version is radically different from what was released, with bleak impressionistic lyrics and references to a night when the devil "will walk these streets like a man."

Springsteen refined the song further through the years, leading up to the "Darkness" version, which is the one he currently performs, albeit infrequently. The various live versions also offer an insight into his songwriting process, as he gradually reshaped both the lyrics and mood of the song. By the time of a widely-bootlegged performance at New York's Palladium in November 1976, Springsteen had added a mournful trumpet to the arrangement, along with a new final verse. The album track lyrics can be found here. The Aug. 1, 1976 Red Bank version follows (all lyrics are copyright Bruce Springsteen, of course).

Well, I'm riding down Kingsley figuring I'll get a drink
I turn the radio way up loud so I don't have to think
And I ease down on the gas, looking for a moment when the world seems right
And I go tearing into the heart of something in the night

I picked this chick up hitch-hiking, she just hung her head out the window and she screamed
Said she was looking for someplace to go, to die or be redeemed
Well, you can ride this road 'til dawn, without another human being in sight
'Cause baby, everybody's gone looking for something in the night

And me I gotta stop running, I gotta stop my fooling around
Well, I got this stuff running around my head, I can't live with or live down
She wants me to push this machine until the whole world disappears out of sight
And just me and you baby, we'll surrender to the kindness of something in the night

Now tonight no sins are forgotten, no sins are forgiven
And when I look out on these streets sometimes I can't tell the dead from the living
Just winners and losers, mumbling about some vague wrong and right
And kids like us, rumbling over something in the night

And now you people out on the island, lock your doors and take your children by the hand
Put on your black dress, baby, because tonight the devil will walk these streets like a man
I don't know about you, but I'm gonna bring along my switchblade, in case that fool wants to fight
If he wants me I'll be running down the highway, chasing something in the night.

An audio version of the Palladium version can be found below.

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Above, an Asbury Park Press ad promoting the Red Bank shows, and a ticket from the Aug. 1, 1976 performance.

Random Readings, Vol. 7

This installment of Random Readings is from Cornell Woolrich's beautifully written - if highly fictionalized - unfinished autobiography BLUES OF A LIFETIME, the existing chapters of which were assembled and edited by Mark T. Bassett for a 1991 Bowling Green State University Popular Press edition. In this excerpt from the first chapter, titled "Remington Portable NC69411" (after one of Woolrich's early typewriters), an aged, infirm and deeply depressed Woolrich, sensing he hadn't long to live looks back nostalgically - and painfully - on his days as a young writer. "It makes me blue to look back at the past," he writes. "But I want to look back 1ce more, before it's gone forever." He recalls long happy nights on the second floor of a Manhattan brownstone shared with his mother, grandfather and aunts, crafting his first novel, 1926's COVER CHARGE, in a white-hot rush, reveling in the fierce joy of his art and talent:

"It had become such a fixed habit by now, such a part of my daily routine, I was so hooked on it, that I couldn't have given it up for love nor money. So every evening after my meal was over I'd sit there, anywhere from nine to eleven-thirty or twelve, in the room on the second floor that had the grand piano in it, with the white cicatrices on its lid where spilled gin from my pocket flask had eaten into the ebony patina, the door closed, the family out or inaudible, a single lamp lit behind me on a pedestal in the corner ... bending over my knee, scribbling away ... . Every now and again I'd take a breather, lean back to rest my back and ease my neck, and put out even the one light, to facilitate the gathering of new thoughts for the pencil bout to come.

"I never forgot those chiaroscuro seances in that second-floor room. Lights up, writing; lights out, getting ready to write some more; lights up, at it again. I like that kid, as I look back at him; it's almost impossible not to like all young things anyway, pups and colts and cubs of all breeds. But I feel dreadfully sorry for him, and above all, I wish and pray, how I wish and how I pray, that he had not been I. He might have had a better destiny, if he hadn't been, he might at least have had a chance to find his happiness."

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ABOVE: Artist Larry Schwinger's evocative cover for the 1982 Ballantine paperback edition of Woolrich's 1941 novel THE BLACK CURTAIN.

Out of the past: More on Dan J. Marlowe

As a follow-up of sorts to last week's post about Dan J. Marlowe's 1962 novel THE NAME OF THE GAME IS DEATH:

A couple of years back, I was browsing through the paperback mystery racks in a used book store in south Florida when I came across a rare find - a copy of Marlowe's hard-boiled caper novel FOUR FOR THE MONEY, published by Fawcett Gold Medal in 1966 and never reissued. I'd read most of the Marlowes Black Lizard reprinted in the mid-'80s, including TNOTGID, THE VENGEANCE MAN and STRONGARM, but I'd never come across this one before.

I was even more surprised when I turned to the title page and found this:

It reads: "To that sterling character, Bill Bell - fellow worker with words - Dan Marlowe."

Yup, an autographed first edition out-of-print Marlowe Gold Medal, in excellent condition, hiding there in the stacks along with the dog-eared James Pattersons, Rex Stouts and Agatha Christies. I bought it immediately, along with a handful of other books (I think I paid $10 for the lot), and when I got it home - or at least to the motel serving as home - I found the following typewritten note tucked into the pages midway through the book:

I've been back to that store many times since, but no other Marlowes have ever turned up, and 1960s Gold Medals alone - from any writer - are becoming increasingly difficult to find. The note dates the inscription to sometime before November 1966. Had it sat unmolested within those pages for 40 years? And why and how did the book suddenly appear in that store after all that time? (I'd been there previously and never seen it).

These are all mysteries, of course, which will never be solved (Marlowe died in 1986, at age 72). But boy, I'd love to learn the backstory there. As it is, the book feels like a strange time capsule from a long-gone era. If anyone out there (Bill Crider?) can offer any clues as to context - or the identity of Bill Bell, "fellow worker with words" - I'd love to hear from you, either here or at my site.

ALSO: Reading Francis M. Nevins' introduction to the Cornell Woolrich collection TONIGHT, SOMEWHERE IN NEW YORK this week, I stumbled on another interesting Marlowe anecdote. In a letter he sent to Nevins in 1968, Marlowe recounts the night in the late 1950s when he drove down from Connecticut to Manhattan to go out drinking with Woolrich, whom he knew only casually, though both were writing for Avon Books at the time (the episode is recounted in full in Nevins' 1988 Woolrich bio FIRST YOU DREAM, THEN YOU DIE). "We had our evening, which turned out to be a disaster," Marlowe wrote. "He didn't drink much, but I learned quickly that any amount was too much for Woolrich. He simply went to pieces, and I learned later that this was his pattern... I never saw him again, although we did exchange a few notes from time to time. There was a wit in his notes sadly lacking in his person ..."

Black Lizard Lounge #2: THE NAME OF THE GAME IS DEATH

The second installment of my ongoing occasional look back at some vintage Black Lizard paperbacks from the late 1980s and early '90s:

THE NAME OF THE GAME IS DEATH by Dan J. Marlowe

BLACK LIZARD EDITION: 1988

ORIGINAL PUBLICATION: Fawcett Gold Medal, 1962

THE STORY: Amoral professional criminal infiltrates small-town America, finds it rotten to the core.

THE BOTTOM LINE: The good stuff, 100 proof

I first read this novel about ten years ago and enjoyed it. Reading it again, I think it's some sort of twisted masterpiece. Written in first person, it's the story of a ruthless professional heister who travels cross-country to a rural Florida town to investigate the disappearance of a former partner, who was holding the mutual proceeds from a Phoenix bank robbery. Once there, he runs afoul of a crooked cop, a larcenous postal employee and other out-of-town criminals on the trail of the money.

The book begins in media res during that bank job, with bullets flying. The getaway driver is killed and the nameless narrator - who uses the aliases of "Chet Arnold" and "Roy Martin" in the course of the book - dispassionately guns down two bank guards before taking a bullet himself. He and the surviving bandit split up, the partner taking the money to squirrel away while the narrator hides out and recovers from his injuries. When the partner drops off the radar - and the monthly packages of cash stop arriving - the narrator heads east to find out what happened and try to recover what's left of the money.

A lot has been written about Dan J. Marlowe, so I won't go into much of it here. Suffice it to say that TNOTGID is about as hard-boiled as they come. While on his trek east, the narrator reflects on his past life and abusive childhood, the injustices done to him by bullies and brutal cops, and how it all forged a bitter rage and alienation that can't help but explode when triggered. But he loves animals, if not people, and even adopts an injured dog after he sees it intentionally run over on a Florida street. He also has a casual relationship with a big-framed barmaid, and forges a friendship with a local real estate salesman, all in hopes of getting to the bottom of what happened to the partner and the cash.

TNOTGID does bear similarities to Donald E. Westlake's THE HUNTER, the first of the "Richard Stark"/Parker books, published that same year, though it lacks the forceful focus of that novel. Instead, it gives us an almost textbook study of an anti-social, misanthropic outlaw who kills without compunction and has a mean-on for the world that can't be slaked. It does meander a bit midway, with passages devoted to horse racing discussions, the specifics and tools of tree surgery and the narrator's fondness for women with large bottoms. But the ending is a genuine surprise, with the narrator's anger and determination only fueled by the catastrophic events that overtake him.

Marlowe's nameless narrator returned in 1969's ONE ENDLESS HOUR, in which he was rechristened Earl Drake "The Man With Nobody's Face." In this new incarnation, he became an international adventurer and secret agent and the hero of 11 more Fawcett Gold Medal titles. These new books (and slightly revised versions of the first two) were reconfigured to fit in with the mens adventure series boom of the '70s. Although one of them, 1970's FLASHPOINT (later reprinted as OPERATION FLASHPOINT) won an Edgar Award for Best Paperback Original, most were far removed in tone and content from TNOTGID, and the books were clearly running out of steam by the time of the last one, 1976's OPERATION COUNTERPUNCH. Marlowe died in 1986. One of his final novels was 1982's GUERILLA GAMES - an installment in the Executioner spin-off series PHOENIX FORCE - written under the house name "Gar Wilson."

Though Marlowe did water down his signature character to make him more palatable (and marketable) in later books, Arnold/Martin/Drake is at his full sociopathic glory in THE NAME OF THE GAME IS DEATH. In contrast to the barking dogs of most pulp paperback crime fiction of its era, this book is a wolf howl in the night.

Next time at the Black Lizard Lounge: W.L. Heath's VIOLENT SATURDAY