Last week, I mentioned that I wrote over 40,000 words about Archie Goodwin and Nero Wolfe enduring Stay at Home together. And that the series was inspired by how I felt on the day that Ohio postponed its Primary Voting Day. That scene is below. So, if you’re a Nero Wolfe fan, read on. If not – well, you’re here for my weekly column, so read on anyway! The elevator made its usual groans of protest as it carried Wolfe’s…
And so 2020 comes, mercifully, to an end. We all dealt with issues that impacted our lives – beyond just ‘The Pandemic.’ In January, my wife and I separated. I also left my job of twelve years. December brought a dissolution to start the month, and a hard drive failure to finish it (and no, even though I’ve had two of them fail before, I still didn’t adequately back things up – I’m working on fixing that). For much of…
I think that Groucho Marx was one of the funniest men who ever lived. And I laugh out loud a the movies he made with his brothers. Well, most of them, anyways. I strongly recommend his book. The Groucho Letters. When word was making the rounds around 1944 that the boys were going to make a movie called A Night in Casablanca, Warner Brothers threatened legal action. Jack and the boys felt that this intruded in the territory of their…
I say Erle Stanley Gardner, and you say…Ed Jenkins? Lester Leith? Paul Pry? Stop that!! All correct, but we were looking for Perry Mason. Probably the most famous defense lawyer in fiction, Mason made Gardner the best-selling author in the world at the time of his death. Raymond Burr is forever linked in minds as the picture of Mason. But my favorite books from Gardner are those featuring his duo of Cool and Lam. And Hard Case Crime has released…
I have talked about Conan pastiches in a couple of prior Black Gate posts; and I’ve linked to them at the bottom of this one. Here’s something from one of them: From 1982 through 2003, eight authors (though primarily four) cranked out 43 new Conan novels for Tor. At two per year, the quality varied wildly, as you can imagine. John M. Roberts’ Conan the Rogue is an homage to Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest and one of my favorite Conan…
I’m not a Star Wars fanboy. I’ve seen the movies, and most of the cartoon shows. Though I’m pretty spotty on The Clone Wars, which my son Sean can cite chapter and verse. I read books by Alan Dean Foster and Timothy Zahn way back when, but that’s about it. But I like Star Wars. And I’m fairly open-minded. I thought that a few of the movies, like The Phantom Menace, weren’t that great. And The Last Jedi just about…
The pay phone on the wall by the door into the dungeon…cellar…basement…journalist’s suite below Chicago’s permafrost layer rang at the Black Gate World Headquarters. I vaulted over the wood plank that rested on two sawhorses, which served as my desk. The last person who hadn’t answered before the third ring had been sent downstairs. ‘Downstairs’ was rumored to be the lair of a beast that Conan wouldn’t be able to defeat. “Black Gate World Headquarters. Home of the world’s preeminent…
I’m a Jack Higgins fan. I’ve got 49 of his books on the shelves, and one more on my Kindle. He writes page-turning adventures which I usually tear through pretty quickly. I haven’t read all of the books of his which I own, but I’ve read most. And the ones set in WW II, more than once. After reading James Lee Burke’s Swan Peak, which was my first Dave Robicheaux book in over a decade (and still a fantastic series),…
Today, I’m going to write about James Lee Burke and Dave Robicheaux. It’s not going to be like my look at Tony Hillerman and his Navajo Tribal Police series, where re-read the first nine books and dug into his autobiography. This column is due in about 36 hours. But I put Burke back on my radar Friday night, and I’m glad I revisited him. Two days after my birthday in 1987 (giving you the opportunity to do some research, find…
I could not figure out what to write about today. I re-watched Paul Newman’s Harper, and thought about a post on that – especially since I recently re-read the autobiography of screenwriter William Goldman. And I saw Unholy Partners, a good hardboiled newspaper flick with Edward G. Robinson and Edward Arnold. I re-watched three versions of The Hound of the Baskervilles (Ian Richardson, Peter Cushing, and Jeremy Brett), and Bruce Campbell’s My Name is Bruce. I read Mark Latham’s Sherlock…