Today’s blogpost by Joe Konrath, titled Exploited Writers in an Unfair Industry, is perhaps the most compelling piece ever written on the subject, and Joe alone has written about it on innumerable occasions. I’m not going to rehash it for you here. You’re better off clicking the link and reading it yourself.

I will, however, show you these two paragraphs (regarding the Big 6 publishers in New York), which lay at the heart of his argument. This is about as concise as it gets, folks. It hits the bullseye from 500 yards.

The Big 6 fear (rightfully) that Amazon is using ebooks to sell Kindles and Prime memberships. This is scary because people are becoming conditioned to buy directly from Amazon using their devices. 

That doesn’t give the Big 6 a reason to collude. It gives them a reason to compete. But they can’t compete, because they treat authors poorly, treat readers poorly, don’t innovate, and are only familiar with an archaic business model.

Do yourself a big favor and go read this whole post.

It’s hot in the Florida Keys in August. For Teddy Myles, it’s even hotter as he tries to outrun both the law and his partners in crime. He flees to Key West to set up a new identity and an escape to the Caribbean. But he meets up with Gail, a sexy local, who has other things in mind for him.

Soon he finds himself trapped into pulling one more job, this one for over a million. His former partners are tracking him, the cops are onto him, and a hurricane is coming.

Time is running out, but will it be on his side?

As you can see, the front cover is sensational, another knockout punch from designer Jeroen ten Berge. And as you can also see, it carries a blurb from Max Allan Collins. Needless to say, I’m thrilled at this.

For those of you who are familiar with this series, this novel takes place in the present, and features some of the same secondary characters and locales as the first two books in the series. Of course, like the others, it’s set in the shadows of Key West, where the tourists never go, and like each of the others, it features a different central character.

Next up is the fourth installment in this series, The Guns Of Miami, which probably won’t be released until sometime in 2013.

Man-Slaughter is available as an eBook. The paperback version can be found here.

“The Ghosts Of Havana will keep you riveted. Author Dennis nails both noir tone and thriller plotting perfectly!”

I mean to tell you, it doesn’t get much better than that. A blurb like that from Deaver, who ranks as the #1 thriller author in America, and maybe the world, means a lot to a struggling writer like myself. His credentials would take forever to unfurl, but his latest novel is Carte Blanche (007 James Bond), written at the behest of Ian Fleming Publications. He has over 25 novels to his credit and numerous short stories, as well as a slew of awards.

If you want to read books you can’t put down, buy a couple of his. And while you’re at it, pick up a copy of The Ghosts Of Havana.

Thanks, Jeff.

What really surprised me about this powerful 1951 noir classic is that not only had I never seen it, I had never even heard of it. It had sailed completely under my radar all these years. So when it came on TCM one middle of the night a few weeks ago, I recorded it, not expecting much. And what I saw blasted me right between the eyes.

Ginger Rogers, whose dancing career was in her rear view mirror at this point, is a big-city dress model on her way to a big show. She gets off the bus en route in the small town of Rock Point to pay a one-day visit to her sister, effectively played by Doris Day. Within minutes, she witnesses a murder by the Ku Klux Klan. What follows is a descent into Klan terror and the grip that organization had over Rock Point and so many towns like it back in those days.

Storm Warning is not like any other movie in which the Klan plays a role. The murder victim is white, and the subject of race never comes up. Race is only hinted at on one occasion, and even then very obliquely. Ginger is slowly drawn into a conspiracy to cover up the murder and to stymie the investigation, headed up by the anti-Klan district attorney, played with remarkable skill by Reagan in a surprisingly solid performance.

From the moment Ginger gets off the bus two minutes into the film, the tension never lets up. Under the confident hand of director Stuart Heisler, this film takes unpredictable turns every sweaty step of the way, aided immensely by a literate script, penned by no less than Richard Brooks and Daniel Fuchs. The final result deftly avoids all the usual stereotypes associated with Klan movies. The characters don’t even speak with Southern accents, letting the viewer know in no uncertain terms that such terrorism is an American phenomenon, not confined to the backwaters of Dixie.

Doris Day is clearly warming up her cutesy persona which would later bloom in the Rock Hudson comedies at the end of the decade, but her role here is a serious one and she handles it well. Her thick-witted husband, played by Steve Cochran, is one of the Klan killers. This is unquestionably Cochran’s finest performance. During his twenty-year career as a character actor, he was usually called upon to play gangsters and other assorted typical tough guys, but his portrayal of Hank Rice is utterly three-dimensional. Playing “stupid” requires an actor to walk a fine line, to flesh out a believable character without lapsing into stereotype, and Cochran pulls it off without one false note, making it look easy.

Despite the presence of all this talent working at the top of their game, the real star of Storm Warning might well be director of photography Carl Guthrie. His dizzying play of shadows and light rivals the best of the film noir cinematographers. In lesser hands, this potent story could easily lose a lot of its punch.

When the Klan’s Imperial Wizard, played by Hugh Sanders, says at one point, “We’re the law here,” a chill runs up your spine, because this movie is making you realize how true that was. Ordinary people were frightened out of their wits at the thought of snitching on any Klan crime, and no one, not even right-thinking law enforcement, dared stand up to them. Today, we can all be thankful that organization has gone into deep decline and is no longer a factor in American society.

Storm Warning is one of those rare B-movie gems that is seldom on TV. You should make every effort to see this film, one way or another.

BUY THE EBOOK

McCoy’s hardboiled noir classic, about an Ivy League graduate’s criminal rampage through the seedy underground and glitzy high society of an unnamed American city

To escape prison, Ralph Cotter uses the same genius for planning and penchant for cold-hearted violence that helped earn him a spot in the slammer in the first place. On the lam in a city where he knows nobody, Cotter has nothing to lose, no conscience to hold him back, and no limit to his twisted ambition. But in the midst of a criminal spree, a grift leads him to the boudoir of wealthy heiress Margaret Dobson, a woman with the power to peel back the rotten layers of his psyche and reveal the damaged soul beneath.

Vicious and thrilling, Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye is a look at one man’s relentless attack on American society, conjuring one of the most memorable antiheros of twentieth-century noir fiction.

This ebook features an extended biography of Horace McCoy.

• Biography
  • Horace Stanley McCoy (1897–1955) was an American author whose hardboiled novels documented Americans’ hardships during the Depression and post-war periods. His most famous work, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, was made into a film starring Jane Fonda and directed by Sidney Pollack.McCoy was born on April 14, 1897, in Pegram, Tennessee, and grew up in Nashville. His father was a traveling salesman, and the family didn’t have much money. Although he was an avid reader, McCoy never finished high school. After a move to Dallas, Texas, he joined his father in sales at age sixteen.McCoy worked as a traveling salesman through his teens, then joined the United States Army Air Corps. During World War I, he flew missions in France as a navigator and aerial photographer. He earned the Croix de Guerre from the French government after piloting a plane safely home despite suffering two bullet wounds. After the war, McCoy returned to Dallas and took up journalism. As a reporter, he exaggerated and invented details to make his stories more interesting, leading to frequent dismissals from Dallas papers. During this time he also met and married his first wife, Loline Sherer, with whom he had one son. He would later divorce and marry twice more, and had two children with his third wife, Helen Vinmont.By the mid-1920s, McCoy’s interest in storytelling led him to publish his first fiction. Through the 1930s, he published more than a dozen crime and detective stories in Black Mask, a popular monthly pulp fiction magazine that was also printing the work of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett at the time.In 1931, McCoy moved to Hollywood to try his hand at acting. Though he failed to gain much notice as a leading man, the author did have some success writing script scenarios for the big studios. One such project described characters participating in a dance marathon; that scenario became the basis of his first novel, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1935). The novel distills many hallmarks of McCoy’s writing, including a tough style, wry observations of class disparity in the 1930s, and a hard look at the dehumanizing effects of poverty. They Shoot Horses fared better with European audiences than with American readers, a trend that McCoy would see throughout his writing career.After the publication of They Shoot Horses, McCoy returned to screenwriting, churning out scripts for successful westerns such as The Trail of the Lonesome Pine and brooding noirs such as Persons in Hiding. He also continued writing novels, most notably Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (1948), considered one of his best. That same year, McCoy suffered a mild heart attack. Though he resumed working, his health declined and in 1955, he died of a third heart attack while at home in Beverly Hills.
  •  

    EXCERPT

    Chapter One

    THIS IS HOW IT is when you wake up in the morning of the morning you have waited a lifetime for: there is no waking state. You are all at once wide awake, so wide awake that it seems you have slipped all the opiatic degrees of waking, that you have had none of the sense-impressions as your soul again returns to your body from wherever it has been; you open your eyes and you are completely awake, as if you had not been asleep at all. That is how it was with me. This was the morning it was going to happen, and I lay there trembling with accumulated excitement and wishing it would happen now and be done with, this instant, consuming nervous energy that I should have been saving for the climax, knowing full well that it could not possibly happen for another hour, maybe another hour and a half, till around five-thirty. It was now only a little after four. It was still so dark I could not see anything distinctly, but I could tell by the little of the morning that I could smell that it was only a little after four. Not much of the morning could get into the place where I was, and the portions that did were always pretty well mauled and no wonder: they had to fight their way in through a single window at the same time a solid shaft of stink was going out. This was a prison barracks where seventy-two unwashed men slept chained to their bunks, and when the individual odors of seventy-two unwashed men finally gather into one pillar of stink you have got a pillar of stink the like of which you cannot conceive; majestic, nonpareil, transcendental, K. But it never intimidated that early morning. Ever indomitable, it always came back, and always a little of it got through to me. I was always awake to greet these fragments, hungrily smelling what little freshness they had left by the time they got back to me, smelling them frugally, in careful precious sniffs, letting them dig in the vaults of my memory, letting them uncover early morning sounds of a lifetime ago: bluejays and woodpeckers and countless other birds met like medieval knights and thrusting at each other with long sharp lances of song, the crowings of roosters, the brassy bleats of hungry sheep and the mooing of cows, saying, ‘No-o-o hay, No-o-o milk’, that is what my grandfather said they were saying and my grandfather knew. He knew everything there was to know about everything that was completely unimportant. He knew the names of all Hadrian’s mistresses and the real reason, hushed-up by the historians, why Richard took the Third Crusade off to the Holy Land and the week the Alaskan reindeers would mate and the hours of the high tides of Nova Scotia; my grandfather knew everything except how to run the farm, lying there deep in the featherbed in the side room where Longstreet once spent the night, buried under the quilts that hid me from old John Brown of Osawatomie, dead and gone these many years, but who, they said, still clumped the foothills of the Gap gathering up disobedient little boys; smelling the morning and hearing the sounds, smelling and hearing, hiding from old John Brown (but hiding from something else too, although I did not then know what it was), frightened with little-boy fright (which, I also was to find out, was not so annihilative as grown-man fright), waiting for the daylight…

    The darkness began to fade slowly at the window, and a few men turned over, rattling their chains, waking up; but you did not need these noises to tell you that there was movement any more than any other wild animal needs noises to tell him there is movement; the pillar of stink which had been lying in laminae like the coats of an onion was now being peeled and a little of everybody was everywhere. There was coughing and grunting and hawking and much spitting, and then the man in the next bunk, Budlong, a skinny sickly sodomist, turned on his side facing me and said in a ruttish voice: ‘I had another dream about you last night, sugar.’

    It will be your last, you Caresser of Calves, I thought.

    ‘Was it as nice as the others?’ I asked.

    ‘Nicer …’ he said.

    ‘You’re sweet. I adore you,’ I said, feeling a fine fast exhilaration that today was the day that I was going to kill him, that I was finally going to kill him as soon as I got my hands on those pistols I was going to kill him. I hope Holiday knows what the hell about those pistols, I thought; I hope they’re where they’re supposed to be, I hope Cobbett doesn’t let us down. Cobbett was the clerk of the farm who doubled on Sundays as the guard in the visitors’ cage, an old man who had spent his life as a chain-gang andprison-farm guard, now too feeble to have a squad of his own, and pensioned off to sinecures. He had taken a shine to Holiday the first time she had come to visit us, and from then on he had been less and less strict in the matter of her visiting hours, and now she had gotten him to help us make the break. He was to have met her last night and got the pistols and stashed them for us. They were to be sealed in an inner tube and hidden in the irrigation ditch that ran along the upper end of the cantaloupe patch where we were working. The exact spot of their submergence was to be marked with a rock the size of a human head, on which there would be a dab of white paint, placed in line with the pistols but on the other side of the ditch where it would be less likely to attract attention. This was all that Cobbett had to do. I hoped he had done it. If he had, if the pistols were there I was going to kill this swine Budlong, as sure as God made little apples I was going to kill him…

    All of a sudden the door banged open and there was Harris, the sergeant, standing in the gloom no eyes, no nose, no mouth, just a great big hunk of obscene flesh standing there in the doorway with his arm hooked under a Winchester, yelling for us to hit the deck. Always he stood there in the same way and always he yelled the same thing and always the prisoners in the rear of the barracks called him the same names. But I never called him names. I was too busy being glad that the door was finally open. I lay there waiting for him to come and take the manacles off my ankles, and the fresh morning rushed through the door like children coming into the living-room on Christmas morning.…

And what was not to love? The tale of  inter-class lovers aboard the doomed ship, itself a microcosm of Amerian society during the fast-moving 1910s, was overlaid quite nicely against the story of class, arrogance, and tragedy that literally no one could make up.

But as time passed, revisionists popped up, pointing out clunky dialogue, plot inconsistencies, weariness with Celine Dion, and a general I’m-over-it attitude. You know what I’m talking about. This line of thinking caught on, and for the last eight or ten years, Titanic couldn’t get no respect.

Until now.

Sign me up in the “new revisionist” movement. Titanic 3D is here and it has reminded me of why I loved the movie in the first place, why I paid to see it five times in the theaters, and why I hated it on television.

This is probably the most blatant example of why they still show movies in theaters. Why people will still pay outrageous admission prices ($26.50 for two, in my case) and the well-known ripoff popcorn prices to sit in the dark with a roomful of strangers and watch a story unfold on a really, really big screen. This is how such films were intended to be seen.

There are no additional scenes here, no director’s-cut ego exercise, no alternate ending regarding the diamond necklace. It’s the identical film you saw fifteen years ago. The 3D process doesn’t even provide much extra wow factor, like it does in other movies. That’s because  the original film didn’t allow for any such moments–no animals leaping out of the screen, no spears flung into the audience, no spaceships exploding into our laps. The third dimension effect in Titanic 3D is not intended to blow our minds, but to make the whole story much more real, to obliterate the final cinematic gulf between the ship and the audience.

During the pre-iceberg half of the movie, the 3D allowed me a new familiarity with the unlikely tale of the Titanic and drew me deeper into the narrative. Toward the end, the escalating shipwide panic became far more palpable, and I almost felt as though I were actually clinging to the rail with Leonardo DiCaprio and the impossibly beautiful Kate Winslet when the broken half of the ship headed downward.

The incredible drama surrounding this ill-fated vessel and the era in which it was built made for a blockbuster movie in 1997. It’s almost certain not to repeat that boxoffice performance in 2012, but there’s no denying that Titanic 3D is a worthy addition to the collection of retellings of this century-old epic tale, a powerful story which is sure to resonate for centuries to come, a story that will never die.

]]> http://mikedennisnoir.com/review-titanic-3d/3016/feed/ 0 http://mikedennisnoir.com/easter/3013/ http://mikedennisnoir.com/easter/3013/#comments Sun, 08 Apr 2012 14:01:18 +0000 Mike Dennis http://mikedennisnoir.com/?p=3013 I’d like to take this brief moment to wish everyone a very Happy Easter. This holiday, associated primarily with bunnies and chocolate, somehow gets shuttled to the rear of the major-holiday conga line, but I was born on Easter Sunday, so it means a little more to me. I’ve never been able to grasp the formula for deciding when Easter takes place, but I know my birthday has fallen on Easter once since I was born (my 11th birthday), and it won’t occur again for centuries.

Anyway, enough of the trivia. Happy Easter, everybody! Hope your day is filled with joy.

And when you get your new Kindle app, go here to download my new short story, The Session. I mean, it’s only 99¢. There’s, like, no downside. Not only that, it’s a great story. Once you’ve read it and left a brief review on Amazon, then you can go here and download the first novel of my Key West Nocturnes series, Setup On Front Street. It’s a novel, so it’ll take you a little longer to read, but again, time well spent. Following that indoctrination, you then might be tempted to go for the second novel in that series, a little opus called The Ghosts Of Havana. That one can be found here.

The rest of my books await you, all sterling examples of the cream of noir fiction. You just have to get that free Kindle app. Do it now.

Jeff Dryden is a top recording session guitarist in LA. Makes big money. Has a beautiful wife and a big house. Life is good.

But one night, he’s awakened by a phone call from a record producer who needs him for a session right away. The money is good, so he agrees, but this late-night session will dredge up long-buried memories and dreams, and wind up changing his life forever.

THE SESSION calls together Mike Dennis’ past as a professional musician and his present as a noir fiction author in a harrowing portrayal of a man who can’t quite grab the brass ring.

This is a good story, if I do say so myself. And it’s only 99¢. Come on, what are you waiting for. Go here and pick it up.