Angel in Black, by Max Allan Collins


The bright lights of Hollywood Boulevard took on a shimmering radiance, neon burning in the coolness of dusk, the hard, unpleasant edges of an ugly one-industry town blurred into blemish-free beauty. Like an aging screen queen with a great makeup artist, a gauze-draped key light, and a Vaseline-smeared camera lens, Hollywood didn’t look half bad.

Continuing my random-order reading of the novels in Max Allan Collins’s Nate Heller historical mystery series, I came to Angel in Black, his treatment of the Black Dahlia murder.

1947 finds Nate Heller newly married and honeymooning in Los Angeles. He’s riding along with a newspaper reporter when they follow a police radio call and become the first two people (after the murderer) to see the naked, bisected female corpse that will soon become a national sensation.

Heller, a former cop and well-known private eye, is invited by the chief investigator to help out. He agrees, for reasons he keeps secret. Continue reading Angel in Black, by Max Allan Collins

Web Salmagundi

1. John takes a gorgeous photo of a sunset over the Pacific ocean and pays $6,612 for it.

2. An app for iPad of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is barely more than an ebook of the same. … “[t]o have turned a profit so quickly, however, may say as much about The Waste Land app’s production budget as its undisclosed sales figures.”

3. Dining After ‘Downton Abbey’: Why British Food Was So Bad For So Long

4. More Republicans (8x more) than Democrats are impressed (or positively influenced) when a political candidate expresses his religious convictions. (via Trevin Wax)

5. Venerable literary magazine, The Paris Review, is on Pinterest. In other news, Google has announced an official retroactive alliance with the once-and-future Soviet Union.

“It didn’t seem natural, nohow…”

When I was a boy, every school child knew about this, but I suspect they don’t teach it in schools anymore. In honor of Presidents Day, a snippet from Carl Sandburg’s Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years:

Having learned to read Abe read all the books he could lay his hands on. Dennis [Hanks], years later, tried to remember his cousin’s reading habits. “I never seen Abe after he was twelve ‘at he didn’t have a book some’ers ’round. He’d put a book inside his shirt an’ fill his pants pockets with corn dodgers, an’ go off to plow or hoe. When noon come he’d set down under a tree, an’ read an’ eat. In the house at night, he’d tilt a cheer by the chimbly, an’ set on his backbone an’ read. I’ve seen a feller come in an’ look at him, Abe not knowin’ anybody was round, an’ sneak out agin like a cat, an’ say, ‘Well, I’ll be darned.’ It didn’t seem natural, nohow, to see a feller read like that. Aunt Sairy’s never let the children pester him. She always said Abe was goin’ to be a great man some day. An’ she wasn’t goin’ to have him hendered.”

They heard Abe saying, “The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who’ll git me a book I ain’t read.”

When the Question is “natas”, the Answer Is What?

I have thought of myself as a citizen of the Internet, but yesterday I took a step deeper into the swamp of Netdom. I made a video response to a You Tube video. I’ve been watching the online morning show, Good Mythical Morning, by the singing comedians Rhett and Link. Last Friday, they asked what the best board game ever is according to their fans, and I recorded for them my story of playing a few minutes of Backwords with a some friends in college. Backwords is not the best board game ever by far, but I thought my story would add to the conversation.

See my response here, and if you want to watch the original video, go here.

Faces in the Fire, by T. L. Hines

I have to give T. L. Hines a lot of credit. In Faces in the Fire he has, first of all, broken with standard Christian genre fiction in making his message implicit, not explicit. You’ll search in vain here for a conversion moment or an explanation of the way of salvation.

Secondly, he’s messed with the form. It’s not that nobody has ever written a story out of sequence before, it’s just that Christian novelists, in general, don’t have the confidence to do something so experimental. Faces in the Fire begins with Chapter 34, and proceeds to tell the major characters’ stories out of sequence, showing us the consequences before we see the causes. He does this pretty well, with the result that the reading experience closely approximates the mystery that is all of our lives.

Also, it’s the rare Christian novel that features a hit man, an e-mail spammer, and a drug addicted tattoo artist as sympathetic main characters.

We’re talking grace here, not works.

The story begins with Kurt Marlowe, a metal sculptor and sometime over the road trucker, who hears ghostly voices (he calls them “spooks”) in the used clothing he buys at estate sales. He does not respond to the voices, but uses their messages as inspiration for his art. Then one day he picks up a pair of shoes that put a picture in his mind more compelling than any he’s seen before. It’s an image so compelling it scares him. So he tries to throw the shoes away. But they keep coming back to him.

He meets a woman in a truck stop, who gives him a ten digit number written on a napkin, in a plastic bag. Then the story switches to her background, and passes from her to yet another character…

It all comes together pretty neatly in the end. The plot strains a bit at points, I think, but that’s almost inevitable in a tightly woven story of this kind. All in all, a very good read.

Recommended, with cautions for adult subject matter.

Inception Park in Buenos Aires

If this were The Thinklings site, this would be filed under Awesomeness and This is Freakin Bizarre. Uber-kudos to Black Sheep Films for their skills in putting together this amusement park footage.

A niche in a Nook

If you’re a faithful Barnes & Noble customer, and have been waiting for Troll Valley to appear on their site, I have wonderful news for you. B&N is now carrying the e-book for the Nook.

Alas, we haven’t been able to include the cover art with this file. So here’s a nice big version, which you can save to your favorite device and have for your very own:

Tell your friends. Tell your acquaintances. Tell your co-workers and courteous, trained service providers.

I haven’t gotten a new review in a couple days. Feeling a little antsy.

Fun Impressions in Shakespearean Monologue

Impressionist Jim Meskimen performs Clarence’s speech from William Shakespeare’s Richard III using the voices of George Clooney, George W. Bush, Woody Allen, Jimmy Stewart, Boris Karloff, Morgan Freeman, and many, many other public figures. I love it. I’m sure the Bard would love it too.

Blood and Thunder, by Max Allan Collins


Like the rest of the country, I’d seen in the papers that Huey had, on the floor of the Senate, accused FDR of aiding and abetting a murder plot against him; something about conspirators meeting at some hotel somewhere. But I’d really merely read the headlines, skimmed the stories. Nobody was taking it very seriously. After all, Huey made a habit out of such accusations. He was a wolf who kept crying little boy.

I’m delighted to have rediscovered Max Allan Collins’s Nate Heller novels. They’re textured and well-written, and something like George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman novels in providing entertaining, excellently researched history lessons. I knew almost nothing about the death of Louisiana governor and senator Huey Long before I read Blood and Thunder, but now I do.

The novel starts in 1935. Chicago private eye Nathan Heller has been persuaded by Senator Long (who met him on an earlier visit to the windy city) to become one of his bodyguards. After a visit to the Oklahoma State Fair they return to Louisiana, and Nate is introduced to the continual circus that is Huey Long’s presidential campaign. Formerly a supporter of the New Deal, Long has broken with Roosevelt, and dreams of taking his populist wealth redistribution campaign to a national stage. He entertains visitors and reporters in his hotel suite dressed in green silk pajamas. He writes music. He parties hard. He has connections with organized crime. Heller has about had his fill of it all (in spite of an enjoyable affair with one of Long’s ex-mistresses) when Long is shot to death. According to eyewitness reports he was killed by an angry dentist who was then riddled with bullets by Long’s furious bodyguards (Nate is off on an errand at that moment). Nate goes home. Continue reading Blood and Thunder, by Max Allan Collins