For anyone who is a mystery fan and happens to be in N.Y.C. this Wednesday, April 30, you should check out the Edgar Awards Symposium. It’s going to be chock-a-block with guest panels and speakers.
(Fwiw, I will be on a panel at 10:00!)
I’ts not too late! Click here to register!
When I saw Michael Mann’s brilliant film The Insider in 1999, one of the many highlights, for me, came in a pivotal courtroom scene. The film’s co-protagonists, Jeffrey Weygand, is trying to testify against the tobacco industry with the help of a Mississippi attorney, Ron Motley, played by Bruce McGill. McGill gives a great, over-the-top performance, but it’s matched by that of the guy playing the evil tobacco attorney. When I realized who this second actor was, I almost shouted at the screen, “That’s Wings Hauser!”
It thrilled my heart to see Hauser in an A-list movie, at last. And he was giving an A-list (if brief) performance! On this blog, I write a lot about great B-Movies, and Hauser appeared in more B-movies than any other actor I can think of (except, perhaps, Michael Caine in his “I-need-money” phase). With his country-boy good looks and imposing physique, Hauser ended up playing a lot of villains. Most notably, he played the psychopathic pimp Ramrod in 1982’s Vice Squad with sadistic panache. (Fun fact: that film also features Season Hubley, Kurt Russel’s then-girlfriend, who also appeared in Escape from New York.)
Whatever role he played, though, Hauser was always great. As an actor, he had that rarest and most coveted of gifts—the ability to seem completely real. That is, you never noticed he was acting. He was always convincing, and magnetic, too.
He also did a great turn in 1987’s noir film Tough Guys Don’t Dance, which was critically panned but which I really liked; it’s one of the most gleefully perverse films ever released by a major studio.
Sadly, Hauser passed away last week. He was a great character actor. I’ll miss him.
My privious entry in this continuing “Classic Sci-Fi Book Covers” series was also devoted to Roger Zelazny, so please forgive me for double-dipping into the Zelazny well. But I couldn’t resist talking about one of Zelazny’s other great novels, …And Call Me Conrad—published in 1966 as This Immortal. Most people have never heard of it, but it’s an interesting book for several reasons.
For one, it was Zelazny’s first novel, and it has many of his signature obsessions (e.g, ancient mythology mixed with science fiction; a wise-cracking anti-hero who is also an Übermensch; epic fight scenes; etc.). For another, it actually won a Hugo Award, tying in 1966 with a slightly better-known book…Frank Herbert’s Dune. And finally, it’s just a hell of an entertaining adventure tale.
I chose this cover (by fantasy artist Rowena Morrill) because it really captures the sense of the book’s main character, Conrad Nomikos, a world-weary man-of-mystery who might be immortal. (The text suggests that he is at least a century old, and hints that he might be several thousand years older still.) He works as director of a government agency tasked with protecting and preserving the surviving relics of a destroyed earth. A nuclear war referred to by the characters as “The Three Days” has occurred many decades before, leaving most of the planet uninhabitable. The survivors, which include a wide variety of mutants both human and animal, live mainly on islands like Greece, Conrad’s home.
And that’s not even the main subject this wild, wild little book. Conrad is assigned the duty of escorting a group of VIP tourists—including Cort Myshtigo, an alien from the Vega star system whose race has purchased earth as a kind of vast museum—as they tour the planets once great sites (now ruins). Conrad soon realizes that another of the tourists, an Egyptian assassin named Hassan with whom Conrad has befriended in the past, is secretly on a mission to kill the Vegan. Hassan, it seems, has been hired for this task by an obscure, underground political group who want to reclaim earth for humanity. So, Conrad finds himself not only being a tour-guide but also an unpaid protector of Myshtigo—who he hates.
It’s a crazy book, and the cover conveys this craziness well. Though the edition is from 1980, the cover really feels like a 1970s cover, with its vaguely photorealistic painting of a ruggedly handsome dude with great hair (think Roger Staubach in his prime). I also like how Morrill works in the other tropes of the book—its setting among Greek ruins, as well as the presence of some mythological creatures in the background (which, the reader eventually learns, are actually just animals that have been mutated by radioactive fall-out).
It’s a very dated cover, but still a really cool one. Classic, one might say…
Some years ago, my son Connor and I were watching the movie Dunkirk on DVD. It’s a very good movie, telling the story of that fateful week from multiple points-of-view. Of course, the most compelling thread of the narrative is that of the lone RAF pilot (played by Tom Hardy) doing his heroic best to protect the stranded British troops.
These scenes inevitably led to a geek-worthy discussion between Connor and me about the relative merits of the RAF’s Spitfire versus the Luftwaffe’s Messerschmitt 109. Believe it or not, such discussions are becoming more common between fathers and sons (and mothers and daughters, for all I know), mainly because of online games like War Thunder, whose popularity has breathed new life into the study of military history by the Millennial generation.
Anyway…. At some point during the discussion, I offhandedly commented that I had once flown in Adolf Hitler’s airplane.
Continue reading “Synchronicity for Bookworms: Martin Caidin”It’s hard to believe, but it’s been a year since the launch of my mystery novel, Twice the Trouble. It’s been a wild ride! To commemorate the launch, I’m re-posting this very long (three chapters!) sample of the audiobook version on Youtube from Google Play.
*** SPOILERS BELOW ***
It feels a little silly, writing SPOILERS BELOW considering I am discussing a novel that came out 123 years ago. Is it possible that any reader of this blog—or, for that matter, any book nerd over the age of thirty—is not already familiar with the plot of The Hound of the Baskervilles? Even those who haven’t read the book have probably seen the movie in one of its many incarnations over the decades. I first saw the Basil Rathbone version from 1939 (which is free on Youtube) when I was about ten years old. This was about the same time my mom gave me a faux-leather bound edition of the complete Sherlock Holmes collection, which I read and re-read many, many times. And the work I re-read the most was The Hound of the Baskervilles (henceforth, HOTB).
Which might lead one to ask: Why would anybody re-read a mystery? After all, the whole point of a mystery is to figure whodunnit, right?
For the average mystery, this is largely true. But the great mysteries—like great books of any kind—operate on many levels and hold different kinds of appeal. For me, the very best mystery novels are character-driven, with a vivid setting and a lot of drama that stands above mere plot mechanics. HOTB is such a novel.
Continue reading “Great Mystery Novels: “The Hound of the Baskervilles””If you took the entire West-Coast noir mystery genre and made it into a great 1980s song, “Welcome to the Boomtown” by David and David would be the result. When I first heard it on the radio in 1986, I went straight out and bought the album. It’s one of the most haunting rock songs ever made, right up there with “Hotel California” (another song about California’s own particular kind of purgatory).
I love the way David Baerwald’s dark, ravaged voice seems to meld with David Rickett’s equally dark, slightly atonal guitar playing. And the lyrics sound like something Ross Macdonald might have written. “Welcome to the Boomtown” is a minor classic.
Enjoy, and rock on…
I’ve read a lot of trippy science books in my time, but Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light is probably the trippiest. The only one that sort of comes close is Frank Herbert’s Dune, which makes a lot of sense considering both were written in the 1960s by two extremely smart and talented writers. (One of Zelazny’s other books, This Immortal, actually shared the Hugo Award with Dune in 1967.)
In fact, there’s not really a name for what Lord of Light is. Technically, it’s science fiction fantasy (a sub-genre I’ve written about before). That is, it looks and feels like a fantasy novel (as does Dune) until you realize that the plot has a sci-fi underpinning. Lord of Light is set on an alien world in which the population is stuck in a pre-industrial state, ruled over by gods of the Hindu pantheon. These gods interact with mortal humans on a daily basis, using magical powers and objects to control their destiny. Throughout the novel, however, Zelazny drops carefully crafted clues that the “gods” are actually the crew of a starship called The Star of India, which crash-landed on the planet centuries before.
These faux-deities use high-technology to set themselves up as gods, complete with a kind of immortality (they can transfer their consciousness to new, young bodies when the old ones wear out). They rule over the common people (who are revealed to be the descendants of the passengers of the ship) with an iron fist, doling out justice and retrobution from a floating, anti-gravity city (“heaven”). This reign is, ostensibly, for the people’s own good (tyrants always say this, right?). But when one of the last democratically-minded crew members, Sam, takes on the role of Siddhartha, he poses a threat to the status quo, which has kept humanity stagnant for generations.
This 1987 edition from Avon was the one I read in college, and I still own it. Its cover was done by an English illustrator named Tim White. I really like it because it captures that essential trippiness. At first, it looks like a pop-religion book, depicting figures dressed like Hindu gods. But what’s with the blue electric bolts? Or the floating city? And why is one of the Hindu “goddesses” blonde?
Ahhh, it’s really a sci-fi novel.
Yes, it is.
I had a really good time this week doing a Q&A with Bianca Vendenbos of Book Notions. Check it out here when you can!
One of my favorite movies of the last twenty years is Ridley Scott’s The Martian. It’s a science-fiction/adventure movie about an astronaut (Matt Damon) who becomes stranded on Mars after his comrades leave him for dead. Marooned on a barren, hostile world, he has to use his brains and ingenuity to survive until his friends come back to rescue him. By the end of the movie, he has survived dust storms, explosions, freezing temperatures, and starvation.
How does he overcome all these challenges?
Science.
The story is familiar, of course. It has many antecedents, including with the original stranded-on-an-island novel, Robinson Crusoe, and also (more directly) to a great B-movie Robinson Crusoe on Mars. In that classic 1964 cheese-fest, the hero survives by finding a Martian cave full of air where plants still grow, water still flows, and there’s a steady source of light (which is never explained). He even befriends an alien who is also trapped on the planet.
Continue reading “The Scientist Hero: Our Newest Cinema Archetype”
Ash Clifton, Writer 