Search Results for: book club

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Milton F. Perry’s ‘Harry S. Truman, Sherlockian’

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It’s well known in Sherlock Holmes circles that Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 32nd President of the United States of America (now THERE was somebody worthy of that office) was a great fan of the world’s first private consulting detective, even having written about Holmes more than once. The third of his three Vice Presidents, and his successor at the Oval Office, was Harry S. Truman. Truman was also a follower of Holmes and like FDR, was granted membership to The Baker…

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Read an Original Short Story in the World of The Lazarus Gate and The Iscariot Sanction at the Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi Blog

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Mark Latham’s new novel in The Apollonian Case Files, The Iscariot Sanction, was published by Titan Books on September 20. It’s the follow-up to The Lazarus Gate and, in honor of the occasion, the popular Sci-Fi and Fantasy Blog at BarnesandNoble.com has posted a brand new story set in the same world, “The House of the Dead.” Mark Latham’s two novels of The Apollonian Case Files, The Lazarus Gate and The Iscariot Sanction, take place in an alternate Victorian Age in which…

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A Long-Overdue Retrospective: The Best of Michael Moorcock

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Tachyon Publications released The Best of Michael Moorcock, edited by John Davey and Ann & Jeff VanderMeer, back in 2009, and I finally bought a copy last month. I don’t know what took me so long. Moorcock has an enormous back catalog of fantasy; so vast I’ll never be able to read even a fraction of it. But this book finally gives me the opportunity I’ve wanted for years: to sample the full range of Moorcock’s storytelling craft in one compact volume,…

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Mixing Hardboiled Film Noir and Magic: Cast a Deadly Spell

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Cast a Deadly Spell stars Fred Ward, Julianne Moore, and David Warner Director: Martin Campbell; Writer: Joseph Dougherty HBO 1991. 1 hours 36 minutes Philip Lovecraft (Fred Ward) is a hardboiled Los Angeles private eye who is hired by Amos Hackshaw (David Warner) to find the Necronomicon, a book which contains the knowledge to destroy the world when the stars line up at midnight in two days. It was stolen from Hackshaw by his ex-chauffer, Larry Willis (Lee Tergesen).

Fantasia 2016, Day 6: Twice-Told Tales (The Throne and The Lure)

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Sometimes the movies I get to see on a given day at Fantasia have an obvious common theme. Sometimes not. Sometimes there’s a commonality binding two otherwise different movies, but it’s tenuous. So it was that on Tuesday, July 19, I watched a Korean historical drama called The Throne (originally Sado), and followed it with a Polish musical-fantasy-tragicomedy called The Lure (originally Córki dancingu). They’re both films based on older stories, in the first case recorded history from the eighteenth…

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I Am Not a Serial Killer Film Drops (Someplaces) Tomorrow

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I am not particularly active on Twitter lately, but today I had a bit of time and hopped on, only to see the following headline shared by Dan Wells: Retro-horror mashup ‘I Am Not a Serial Killer’ has an unexpectedly warm and fuzzy side The tweet included a link to an LA Times review of the film I Am Not a Serial Killer which, according to IMDB, is set to release tomorrow, on August 26. Another review, over at the A.V. Club,…

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: A Century of John D. MacDonald

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It’s no surprise, given the title of this column, that I’ve written more Sherlock Holmes-related posts than about any other topic. What is surprising to me, given that I know myself fairly well, is that I’ve only done one post about John D. MacDonald. You can read some stuff I’ve written about him over on my own blog, Almost Holmes, here and here and here. But perhaps because I haven’t been able to delve deeply enough into re-reading and analysis,…

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Thinking about the Evolution of Marvel Comics’ Star-Lord

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I’ve been doing a bit of thinking lately about puzzling characters in comics and how they change over time. In the last couple of weeks, I decided to reread they comics I’ve got around with the Marvel Universe’ Peter Quill, also known as the Star-Lord. Now, for those who’ve been living in a hole for the last decade, or for those who only know Peter Quill from the Guardians of the Galaxy movie, Peter Quill made his first appearance in…

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Kurt Busiek’s Astro City. Also Joyce, Hemingway, Faulkner, and a Tangent on Modernism

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This is mostly an homage to Kurt Busiek and Astro City, and to one story in particular, but buckle in because we’re going to cover a lot of rambling ground getting there in a sort of stream-of-consciousness way, taking in stuff by random association — sort of like the streets of Astro City itself… Kurt Busiek’s Astro City is one of my favorite superhero comics. It consistently delivers brilliant, funny, poignant, human stories in a colorful, wonderfully idiosyncratic comic-book world….

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Noise About Xignals

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I took a break from cutting the grass around the house. It was a hot day, and the chore always took a while. “Look what I found,” my aunt greeted me, as I went indoors and dropped into a chair. She’d been cleaning up, preparing to move into the cottage, and she’d been discovering things tucked away and forgotten long before, as one does. She handed me a copy of Xignals. Years ago, back in the twentieth century, Xignals had…

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