TOC: 'The Avenger: The Justice Inc Files' Edited by Joe Gentile

Coming in one month!
TOC: 'The Avenger: The Justice Inc Files' Edited by Joe Gentile and Howard Hopkins.

And yes, they should be listing just my initials, saw Joe at Windy City!

Great Review and History of RAVENWOOD at BLACK GATE!

A very informative history and review of RAVENWOOD, STEPSON OF MYSTERY, at BLACK GATE MAGAZINE by William Patrick Maynard. Your blushing author and his pals fare well!

Review: SLAMMER by Allan Guthrie

Do you like your thrillers with a little bit of psycho thrown in? Head twisting plot turns? Bent psyches, sad, funny and frightening?

Honest to God, about once a year some book comes along, I devour it in a day or two, and I’ll just be stunned. Some of these I’ll get to in the future, not to mention some stuff that’s just plain strange—even by Science fiction standards. But this, this jewel of a novel, crawled right up out of the muck and strangled me with a sardonic wit so beautiful I didn’t even mind.

If you’re not familiar with Allan Guthrie you should be. While I haven’t read all his stuff, his book HARD MAN had me laughing and cringing at the same time, and its follow-up, SAVAGE NIGHT, was an Edgar Award Winner. (For my money HARD MAN’s the better book, but I’m weird that way.) Or, you can just pick up SLAMMER and see what you’ve been missing.

To support his wife and newborn child, twenty-four year old Nick Glass has a crappy new job in Edinburgh, Scotland, as a prison guard. In fact, he gets along with some of the inmates better than the other guards; in particular a blind inmate named Mafia whose crime was so sick no one will talk about it.

While in the midst of being given all the worst assignments by his co-workers, Glass is blackmailed into becoming a drug mule by one of the prisoners; if he doesn’t somebody on the outside will kill his wife and child. Meanwhile, his wife is now out of a job, had an affair some six-months ago, and is hitting the bottle again. Glass is estranged from his mother and sister, and his wife’s side of the family thinks he’s worthless. Needless to say our hero/protagonist has more than his share of stressors, and we’re invited to watch him crack. But the crack up is beyond what the reader might predict.

Like the best of Noir novels, we can see the lights of the locomotive in the distance, but we’re so busy dodging bullets we forget about the train—until it’s right on top of us. Then we lay right across the track with our hero and laugh sardonically while the wheels tear us ribbons. And, by the end we realize we should have known it all along.

I found the overall feeling of this book reminiscent of Charles Perry’s Portrait of a Young Man Drowning, which might give away too much, but is also high praise coming from me. I’d love to tell you by the ending what’s exactly going on—but, I won’t. Let’s just say one morning our hero awakes with a splitting headache, a finger missing, and no memory of what happened. He accepts it as if it were nothing and goes on with his plans.

And then it starts to get really weird.

How Noir Saved My Life

WHY NOIR IS IMPORTANT

I just finished writing what has to be the darkest DAN FOWLER G-MAN story ever, and I got to thinking…

Back in the twentieth century I pretty much lost everything. Career, money, health, hope, sanity—all those were behind me. Seriously, I learned about how low the human soul can sink, the lengths to which some people will go and the power that some wield unthinkingly—until some miserable bastard who just doesn’t care anymore comes along and throws a wrench in the works, or at somebody’s head.

Yup, clinically depressed and alcoholic, I resided in a fleabag hotel, and waited for the world to end. I was at the stage normal people call NO HOPE. And a man who’s got nothing has nothing to lose. I was the guy with the wrench, and I laughingly chucked it into the wheels of your favorite machine, hoping I could see the jaws drop before the explosion. The only thing that hurt was caring.

Well, pain is growth, and eventually I decided to grow because, well, the universe just wasn’t ending the way I’d planned. Now, in the past I’d always been a reading fool, but somewhere in my vodka-is-a-food-group-lifestyle I’d forgotten about that. So I started reading again. A lot.

Except a lot of the stuff I’d read before didn’t do it for me. I’d pick up the books where the heroes were bigger than life, and I’d still realize they wouldn’t last ten minutes in my city. They couldn’t survive here, because they didn’t have to. They had money, fast cars boats, women…hope. Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammet were but appetizers, along with a healthy helping of other detectives… So I started searching…

I started reading Donald Westlake’s PARKER books again and actually coped, using that character’s emotional disassociation to deal with the world. I’d get up, do my job like a machine, then go home and write. It even worked for a little while. And sent me searching for something more…

Now, I’m the first to admit that Jim Thompson and David Goodis may not be the best reading for a guy trying to sober up, but I was at the library and, somehow, a copy of Lawrence Block’s A Dance at the Slaughterhouse wound up in my hand. And Matt Scudder was a recovering alcoholic, who went to AA meetings and had seen more than I ever hope NOT to.

And while I know and care next to nothing about “the beautiful people” and the sexual affairs of suburban housewives that the literary world was shoving at me—noir touched my heart. The losers that lived there, lived outside the regular world; and whether forced there knowingly or unknowingly, by fate or by choice—if they did not change, they were doomed. And I felt that. The random private-eyes had already been blessed with the gift of a perspective outside the norm—most likely by a life that pushed them there. They knew when things were too good to be true, and they knew the foibles of man. And, their version of justice seemed a lot more right than the system I’d seen, where promotions are based on how many people you can put in corporate, for-profit jails.

Sure they didn’t all have happy endings; that just made it more real. Plus, if you go into a story thinking there’s no way it’s going to have a happy ending, and it actually has a one? Well, damn. There’s hope.

So in a horribly lonely, isolated, not-talking-to-anybody-on-the-street-for-days sort of way, noir spoke to me. Me, the person nobody and nothing spoke to.

And damned if I didn’t find a little more hope.

***

Ravenwood Interview on The Book Cave!

RAVENWOOD, STEPSON OF MYSTERY: Want to hear me get kicked out of The Chicago Library right in the middle of an interview? Listen to this podcast on THE BOOK CAVE.
See how fellow authors FRANK SCHILDINER and BOBBY NASH handle it. Also join us as we discuss Rex Stout, research in period pieces, the characters relation to DOCTOR STRANGE, SUN KOH--the German DOC SAVAGE, H.P. LOVECRAFT... Oh, and try to guess who's doing the podcast naked!

More Fun in the New World!

Big plans for 2011, Gang!
I'm currently working on another Dan Fowler: G-Man story. Just coming up with a big "sock finish." If you haven't already read my DFG-Man tale "Harvest of Crime" in Vol 1, shame on you! Click that Airship 27 link (should be just right over here-->)and pick up a copy.

I've been working on a licensed character's short-story for a project with Moonstone you might be familiar with; more will be revealed!

I just signed on to do the story I was born to write, for the good people over at Pro Se Productions. This one features a Black Mask-style gangster tale, heavily-influenced by the works of pulp great Paul Cain, author of Fast One  and Seven Slayers. This should prove to be both challenging, and more fun than I'm probably allowed to have. Of course if I had written the above P. Cain's style it would read: "Signed on for a story, for some Pro Se mugs. A gangster yarn." And that would be it. Regardless, it's going to be great. Like freakin' Shakespeare with machine guns!

And, finally, the big news: I'm working on a full length BAGMAN novel even as you read this. I've had a few people ask, and I've been plotting this thing out in my head for a year. This one has Mac, Crankshaft, Coco, Hunts, and a whole new cast of deep city denizens. Not to mention The Chicago World's Fair, Belly Dancers, John Dillinger, The Real King of the Theives, a team of Gypsy pickpockets, and, The Bagman's first super villain--even as Mac begins to learn more about his strange new powers and propensity for prediction! .

Yes, 2011 is going to be one big, wild ride! Let's have fun with it!

Just Released: Ravenwood--Stepson of Mystery

Airship 27 Productions & Cornerstone Book Publishers bring back another classic pulp hero from the 1930s in an all new collection of fast paced, macabre adventures of the supernatural.  Meet Ravenwood – Stepson of Mystery!

He is an orphan raised by a Tibetan mystic known only as the Nameless One.  As an Occult Detective he has no equal and is called upon by the authorities when they are challenged by supernatural mysteries.  One of the more obscure pulp characters, Ravenwood – The Stepson of Mystery appeared as a back-up feature in the pages of Secret Agent X magazine.  There were only five Ravenwood  stories ever written, all by his creator, the prolific pulp veteran, Frederick C. Davis.

Now he returns in this brand new series of weird adventures, beginning with this volume in which he combats Sun Koh, a lost prince of Atlantis, battles with monstrous Yetis in Manhattan and deals with murderous ghosts and zombie assassins.  Four of today’s finest pulp storytellers Frank Schildiner, B.C. Bell, Bill Gladman and Bobby Nash offer up a quartet of fast paced, bizarre thrillers that rekindle the excitement and wonder that were the pulps.

With a stunning cover by Bryan Fowler and dramatic interior illustrations by Charles Fetherolf, Ravenwood – Stepson of Mystery was designed by Rob Davis and edited by Ron Fortier.  Once again Airship 27 Productions presents pulp fans with another one-of-kind quality pulp reading experience like no other on the market today. 

AIRSHIP 27 PRODUCTIONS – Pulp fiction for a new generation!

ISBN:  1-934935-82-4

ISBN 13:  978-1-934935-82-8

Produced by Airship 27

Published by Cornerstone Book Publishers

Release date: 31 Dec. 2010