“THE DOWNTOWN DEAL” IS NOW AVAILABLE

Kindle coverFinally, THE DOWNTOWN DEAL has gone live. It’s the latest entry in the Jack Barnett/Las Vegas Series, centering around a reluctant ex-private eye in Sin City, USA. Here’s a brief description:

October, 2003. Sandra Blake is dead. A bullet in her forehead. Her ex-husband wants former private investigator Jack Barnett to find the killer. The investigation leads Barnett into a high-powered world of shady characters and a rising body count, all for control of a seemingly unimportant slice of vacant land in a seedy area of downtown Las Vegas. A mysterious case of wine rests at the center of it all, and everyone wants it. Can Barnett find the killer before the whole thing blows up in his face?

THE DOWNTOWN DEAL is a novel, the third hardboiled entry in the Jack Barnett / Las Vegas series, once again dragging the reader alongside the reluctant ex-PI down the darkest streets of Sin City, USA.

It’s on Kindle right now, and Nook as well. The paperback is now available on CreateSpace. Please check it out.

 

NOT EXACTLY YOUR FATHER’S PRIVATE EYE

51ay9+H5jvL._SL300_The folks at Lyrical Lip Service have hired me to perform voiceovers on audio versions of short stories and books. My first one just went live the other day and I’m pretty juiced about it. It’s a hardboiled-private eye-erotica short story called Sam Spank and the Wild Widow, written by Molly Synthia, and now available on Amazon’s Audible.com.Check it out here. And while you’re at it, check out the warning that comes with it.


THE DEAL OF THE YEAR, AND IT’S ONLY JUNE

It's a sin to killThe BratCall Me KillerNight RaiderSlay Ride for a LadyPACKER-Come-Destroy-MeBlondes are Skin DeepMurder Me for Nickels

I usually don’t shill for corporate interests, but this is one time I’m making an exception. Prologue Books, which has rereleased the works of many of the great noir/pulp writers of the past, is running a special on Amazon Kindle, selling all of their titles for 99¢ each. I’m talking about Gil Brewer, Dan J Marlowe, Orrie Hitt, Day Keene, Harry Whittington, and many more. I’ve gone on a binge over there, and so should you. A few of their covers are shown above. Go here and check it out. How can you refuse?

“CULT”? IS THAT WHAT THIS IS? THEN GET ME A PURPLE ROBE AND SOME KOOL-AID.

Rob W Hart recently wrote this article for Salon in which he calls self-publishing “a cult”. He claims to have “happily” self-published a novella while trying to traditionally-publish his novel. I would venture his “happiness” with self-publishing stems from the likelihood that the legacy publishers steadfastly refused to publish his novella due to its short word count. Meanwhile, his novel — or, as I distinctly gleaned from the article, his “real” writing — is seeking an agent and ultimately, a traditional publisher.

Salon, by the way of perspective, is not exactly wrapped in tradition itself. Included in this particular issue were articles such as “I Was A Liberal Mole At Fox News” and “Sex In A Hospital Bed”. And these articles are in the “news” section. So you kind of get the idea of where their heads are at.

Meanwhile, Rob says: I know self-publishing offers the best royalty rates, but if you got into this game with the sole intent to make money, you got into the wrong business.

To which I reply: If you got into the trad-publishing game with the sole intent to make money, Rob, you got into the wrong business. Even if you got into it for the “cachet” (your word) of being “in bookstores” (your words), you got into the wrong business, since you have less than a 1% chance of succeeding. And if you do succeed, it will far more likely be the result of insider contacts than a cold, dispassionate decision by an editor that your book was worthy of admission through the pearly gates. Even then, you will probably never earn back your advance, small though it certainly will be, since your book will wither on Barnes & Noble shelves. spine outward, until it gets returned and ground into pulp. And even if your publisher goes out of business, which looks likelier for a lot of them with each passing day, you never get your rights back.

However, your chance of making money as a self-published writer is far greater than <1%. I’m certainly not making a living at it, since my books are fairly well-buried in the Amazon rankings, but the money I do make is a lot more than most of my trad-pubbed colleagues, who toil away on a midlist somewhere, receiving indecipherable royalty statements every six months (for a period often one year earlier). These statements never show any money earned beyond their advance, while they sweat out their next deadline, wondering if the publisher will drop them from the “family”.

Rob, you’re not a “heathen”, as you say your friends are calling you. Far from it. But you are still laboring under the myth that being traditionally-published is somehow a real badge of acceptance which is utterly unattainable in the world of self-publishing. It sounds as if you still believe the “gatekeepers”, as they so loftily refer to themselves, are primarily concerned with only allowing the best of the best to slip through the door into their world of eternal sunshine. Kind of like being upgraded from coach, solely on the basis of your ability, to the hidden, curtained world of first class.

Well, all I can say is, go for it. A few years from now, when your novel makes its brief appearance, you’ll be struck by the reality of it all.

MEMORIAL DAY, 2013

Memorial_Day_Art_American_Soldier_Salutes_Half_Mast_US_Flag-01-225x300TO ALL U.S. SERVICE MEN AND WOMEN:

THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR YOUR SERVICE TO OUR COUNTRY. WERE IT NOT FOR YOUR EFFORTS AND THE EFFORTS OF THE FALLEN HEROES WHO CAME BEFORE YOU, WE WOULD NOT BE THE GREATEST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD. THIS CITIZEN THANKS YOU.

LET US TAKE A MOMENT TO REMEMBER THOSE HEROES WHO GAVE EVERYTHING THEY HAD.

 

REVIEW: “FIRES THAT DESTROY”

FIRES THAT DESTROY (1951) by Harry WhittingtonFires That Destroy

Some guys have all the luck.  Blondes have more fun.  You’ve heard the cliches.  But at the faceless corporation where Bernice Harper works, pretty girls get all the promotions.

And it pisses her off.

That’s the central theme in Fires That Destroy, a tight little noir novel from 1951 by Harry Whittington.

Year in and year out, she watches through her thick-lensed glasses as sexy babes in tight skirts use their attributes to glide effortlessly up the ladder while Bernice, plain and stringy-haired, stays mired in the steno pool.

She builds up a reservoir of resentment, which eventually morphs into self-hatred when her boss recommends her for the position of private secretary in the home of an important client.  Problem is, he’s blind.

She knows they foisted her off on a blind man, almost as a joke, and she doesn’t like it.  Things are made worse when she learns he’s a heavy drinker who never tires of making passes.  This intensifies her hatred, as she knows that he wouldn’t come near her if he could see.

And so begins her descent into hell.

In a masterful stroke, Whittington takes the reader deep into Bernice’s mind, as she slowly disintegrates into “the most depraved and sinful woman on the face of the earth”.  Her interior dialogue with herself evokes Jim Thompson at his most dangerous.

Whittington wrote over 170 novels in his astonishing career, hopping around through various genres.  Most of his work, unfortunately, is out of print, but noir aficionados should make a point of locating a copy of Fires That Destroy.

 

 

CAN I GET A WITNESS? “SETUP ON FRONT STREET” HITS #1 IN KINDLE FREE STORE

 

I really didn’t think this would ever happen, but Setup On Front Street has just edged into the #1 slot in the entire Kindle Free Store. It’s 12:08 AM, EDT, and I’m breaking out a bottle of wine. So if you’ll excuse me …

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I DIDN’T THINK IT WOULD BE THIS SOON


In my previous post, which chronicled the meteoric rise of Setup On Front Street to the top of the crime fiction charts in the Amazon free store, I said it was also #4 in suspense, and that I would post again if it rose to #1 in that category. Well, less than 1 hour later, at 6:13 PM, EDT, it did exactly that. It now rests at #1 in both categories and is actually #3 in the entire Amazon free store!

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“SETUP ON FRONT STREET” GOES TO #1

Easy, easy now. Not #1 on all of Amazon. No chance. Not while all the “Fifty Shades” clones are buzzing around out there. But as of today at 5:15 PM, EDT, it is #1 in the free store among crime fiction novels. And don’t be like, “Oh sure. It’s #1 in free crime fiction novels. How many are there? Two?” No, there are at least 100, because they list the top 100 in every category.

As a matter of fact, #100 is something called Revenge by Kim Tomsett. All the books in between are by writers as equally unknown as myself and Kim Tomsett. All, that is, except #53, which is The Drop by Michael Connelly. Now, before you go rushing over there, I should tell you what is free is only the first eleven chapters of Connelly’s book. Naturally, with Setup On Front Street, you not only get the whole book, but a sneak preview of the second gripping novel in my Key West Nocturnes series, The Ghosts Of Havana.

Meanwhile, over on the “paid” side, the top 100 crime fiction novels are all by the usual suspects: Robert Crais, David Baldacci, Connelly of course, Patterson, Child, blah blah blah.

Back on the free side, though, Setup On Front Street is also #4 in suspense, so if it hits #1 there, you’ll be seeing another one of these. Additionally, it’s #114 overall in the free store, and if it hits #1 there, it’s drinks all around!

It’s not often I see one of my books at the top of any list, so forgive me for crowing about this one. I’ve waited a long time to see it.

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REVIEW: “THE PLACE BEYOND THE PINES”

Place-Beyond-the-Pines-dropI read somewhere that Ryan O’Neal only had 354 words of dialogue in Walter Hill’s underrated The Driver (1978). I would bet Ryan Gosling has even fewer words in The Place Beyond The Pines. Of course, O’Neal was in his movie from start to finish, whereas Gosling is only in the first one-third of his.

And that was my initial problem while watching this film. It seemed like three distinctly different movies carelessly strung together because the producers and director Derek Cianfrance couldn’t agree on a coherent script. The operative words here are “initial” and “seemed”. In fact, when it was all over and the credits were rolling by, I realized The Place Beyond The Pines was a wildly ambitious, mostly successful attempt at transcending typical Hollywood boundaries. I had just watched a multigenerational epic which examined the complex relationship between fathers and sons in a most original way.

Gosling, a stunt motorcycle rider in a second-rate carnival, has had a fling with Eva Mendes while the show is on a stop in Schenectady, New York. A year passes, which is skillfully shown by Cianfrance in a brief, lyrical sequence, and when Gosling returns to Schenectady (the Indian name for which, by the way, is the title of the movie), he learns Mendes has given birth to his son and is now living with another man. He then decides to quit the carnival and stay in town to be part of his son’s life. Mendes and her new lover, however, have other ideas. The plot is now jumpstarted.

Ben Mendelsohn scores big in a supporting role as a hermit-like auto mechanic, as does Emory Cohen as a wiseass high school kid looking for trouble, while Ray Liotta appears in a small role and steals every scene he’s in. But the real stars of this film are the laconic Gosling, all tattoos and dangling cigarettes, and Bradley Cooper as a cop who’s maybe a little too political for his own good. Gosling’s stunning presence is undeniable, eliminating the need for a lot of dialogue. His face, his tattoos, his hair, his wardrobe, the way he moves on camera … they say more about him and about what he’s feeling than any words written on a manuscript page.

But back to the three-films-in-one notion. The transitions between the segments could have been done with a little more care. As it is, the viewer is jolted from one segment to the next, and it’s not comfortable. Having said that, though, it wouldn’t surprise me if this film got some buzz at Oscar time.

Recommendation: Make an effort to see this one before it leaves your local theater.

 

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