James Reasoner

Ed here: I was always a fan of Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine. I still  remember when it first appeared in the late Fifties. Cool covers and name writers. Little did I know that a decade or so later people like Bill Pronzini and James Reasoner would be writing the "Mike Shayne" short novels that appeared in each issue. In fact James wrote all of them for a number of years.

"The Man in The Moon" is a first rate private eye story--you wanna know how to write one? outline this--starring a p.i. James did a number of stories about in Shayne. At Kindle 99 cents it's the equivalent on a nice big very cold ice cream cone on a hot summer's day. Very nice work.

Here's an excerpt from an interview with James from Storyteller's. Fascinating. 
StoryTeller’s 7   1.  I downloaded a novel the other day called TEXAS WIND, your debut novel, published in 1980. I’ve read that it’s considered one of the finest private eye novels ever written. Quite an achievement for a first novel. What kind of pressure did that put on you? 

JR: I don’t think it really put any pressure on me because it took a number of years for the book to develop that reputation. When the book came out it got very little distribution because the publisher was about to collapse (I didn’t know that was going to happen when I sold the book to them). So, for a long time it was just an obscure first novel that became something of a cult item because the few people who read it kept beating the drum for it. And while that was going on, I kept writing other things, so I didn’t really look back. Now, of course, I’m very pleased and gratified by the response TEXAS WIND has gotten over the past 33 years since it came out. I was so young when I wrote it that anything good in it is just pure instinct on my part. I didn’t really know what I was doing. (Most days I still feel like that.) 

2.  You’ve written over 200 novels in a broad range of genres and under numerous pen names. If you were asked to name your top three favorite novels which ones would they be and why?

 Actually, I’m closing in quickly on my 300th novel. The one I’m working on now is #298. But as for my favorites, in no particular order:  UNDER OUTLAW FLAGS, my Western/World War I novel, for a couple of reasons—I really like the narrator’s voice in that one and think I hit most of the notes I was trying to hit, and also because I wrote myself into it as a character (I’m the fat little kid eating popsicles and reading comic books in the framing sequence).   - See more at: http://www.tomrizzo.com/storytellers-7-james-reasoner-words-by-the-million/#sthash.4UWf02rk.dpuf

The Face by Ed Gorman

ROC, 1995 Edition

From Gravetapping by Ben Boulden  http://gravetapping.blogspot.com/"The Face" by Ed Gorman

Ed Gorman is one of the most undervalued writers of his generation.  His work, at its best, is seemingly simple, but has a subtlety and power rarely approached in genre fiction, and his characters tend to the real rather than the flamboyant and over the top.  Mr Gorman’s 1990 story “The Face” won a Spur Award for best short story, and it truly deserved the honor.

“The Face” is a Civil War story.  It is a first person narrative of a young Confederate doctor who can see the end of the war, and the true situation of the decaying Confederacy—

“As a young doctor, I knew even better than our leaders just how hopeless our war had become.  The public knew General Lee had been forced to cross the Potomac with ten thousand men who lacked shoes, hats and who at night had to sleep on the ground without blankets.  But I knew—in the first six months in this post—that our men suffered from influenza, diphtheria, smallpox, yellow fever and even cholera; ravages from which they would never recover; ravages more costly than bullets and the advancing armies of the Yankees.”

The Confederate army is disintegrating from the costly war, and its men—in fact mostly young boys of 13 or 14—are beginning to desert.  The narrator’s camp is different; none of the men have yet to desert, and its preparations for war continue.  This changes when a single soldier is brought into camp.  He has no visible wounds, but he is comatose with a disconcerting look on his face.  When he is brought into camp the commanding general physically flinches at the sight of his face and immediately puts him in quarantine. 
The soldiers face is never completely described in the story beyond the camp’s priest’s description— 

“It’s God’s face.  I had a dream last night.  The man’s face shows God’s displeasure with the war.”

The men of the camp sneak into the tent to look at the face, and each sees the horror of the war, specifically the horror of his own war, on the soldier’s face.  The men begin to desert, and even sabotage the camp.  The doctor, whose name we never learn, also begins to dream about the battlefields he has witnessed and worked. 

Leisure, 2004 Edition

“The Face” is a difficult story to categorize.  It is certainly an historical story, which captures the ugliness of war as well as any narrative I have read, but it is also something akin to straight up horror—its soft edged, almost dream like setting, creates an atmosphere of the purely gothic.  It is also reminiscent of a superior episode of The Twilight Zone, but it is also as much a piece of literature as anything currently being written and published.  

“The Face” is a story that will survive the ages.  In a brief note included in The Moving Coffin collection, Mr Gorman explains, “The Face” was inspired by a Civil War surgeon’s journal, and it has been reprinted more than any other of his stories.  It will surely continue to be anthologized long in the future because it is truly one of the best short stories written in the past twenty years; genre or literary. 

“The Face” was originally published in the 1990 anthologyConfederacy of the Dead edited by Richard Gilliam, Martin H. Greenberg, and Edward E. Kramer.  It has been reprinted numerous times in both anthologies and author specific collections, including The Moving Coffin (PS Publishing, 2007), and The Long Ride Back (Leisure Books, 2004).  It is currently available in an eBook collection titled Dead Man’s Gun & Other Western Stories (The Western Fictioneers, 2013).            

Th Kidnapper by Robert Bloch

THURSDAY, MAY 15, 2008

The Kidnapper

A few times a week Keith Olbermann runs stories about Dumb Criminals. Ignorant and/or Stupid people doing stupid things. The stories never involve anybody being killed.

In a certain way the narrator of The Postman Rings Twice has always struck me as deserving of a slot on the Olbermann show. Of course he went a little beyond being stupid. He killed somebody.

What Bloch has done is write a journal authored by one of these people, in this case an arrogant murderous drifter who constantly calls attention to his own supposed genius. He latches on to a nineteen-year-old maid who falls so blindly in love with him that she reulctantly agrees to help him kidnap her charge, the four-year-old daughter of a very decent wealthy couple.

The book worked on me in two serious ways. It made me examine my own class anger, number one. The slickie who tells this story believes that he has the right to hurt anyone who has more than he does. Two or three times he makes a passionate case for this. I remembered that in the sixties when an ROTC building was torched by demonstrators in Iowa City how sickened I was by the jubiliation the street. Rich or poor doesn't make any difference. Pigs is pigs. I grew up in a union family and generally agreed that American workers were exploited (if only we could have seen then just how exploited they would be a few decades later). But as always there were a few guys who had to push too far, never understanding that they were in the process of becoming very much like their enemy and the rent-a-cops who bullied them on the picket lines.

Number two is the realism of its setting, especially the first act which involves the narrator working in a factory and heading out for taverns after work. Bloch gets it down just right, a slice of Brit Kitchen Sink drama (Sunday Night and Sunday Morning told but told by a sociopathic murderer) before the Brits caught on to it.

The plot goes over the top a few times, yes, but somehow that only enhances the delusionary tone of the killer. He is a superior being therefore his entire life is over the top. No mere mortal can claim that.

I see so many crime stories on the tube that push me to wishing I was in favor of capital punishment. Some asshole marches six employees into the back of a supermarket and kills them for less than a grand? Or a wife and her tattoo sleazy boyfriend murder her husband for twenty grand's worth of insurance? Or a suburban Chicago cops kills (allegedly of course) two maybe three wives and peddles his ass on every show that will have him, grinning ghoul every time out?

Somehow all these rotten bastards are in this memoir of a really terrifying guy. No serial killer antics. No booga-bogga. Just hard core pure one hundred per cent evil.

And that's just what Robert Bloch got down in this masterful little novel.