“More than anyone, you’ll see Hemingway’s influence in Elmore’s early prose. When my father was just staring he told me he would put a blank piece of paper of the page of a Hemingway story and rewrite the scene his way. It how he learned to write.” (p. vii).
Peter Leonard, Elmore Leonard’s son, relates stories about his father’s work ethic as he struggled to become a writer: “While my father was writing the stories in this volume he worked at Campbell-Ewald, an advertising agency, writing Chevrolet ads. For almost a decade he got up at 5:00 A.M. and wrote two pages of fiction before he went to work. His rule: he couldn’t turn the water on for coffee, until he wrote a page.” (p. viii)
Elmore Leonard died in 2013 and this collection of Leonard’s unpublished stories, published in 2015, includes both crime stories and western stories–the two genres Leonard excelled in. The title story, “Charlie Martz,” features a showdown between Martz, an overworked sheriff, and a gunman from his past who wants to kill him. “Siesta in Paloverde” concerns another Martz confrontation with another unsavory character who wants to shoot Martz dead. My favorite story in Charlie Martz and Other Stories is “Evenings Away From Home” from 1959. The narrator is an ad executive assigned to work with a flamboyant photographer. The photographer attracts a beautiful airline stewardess and talks her into modeling for him on this assignment. Of course, the atmosphere is sexually charged and Leonard navigates the crisis moments with flare…and a couple of surprises.
Sure, these unpublished stories don’t have the polish Elmore Leonard gained later in his career. But even a mediocre Leonard story is better than many writers’ best stories. Are you an Elmore Leonard fan? Do you have a favorite novel or story of his? GRADE: B
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Elmore Leonard; foreword by Peter Leonard — vii
One, horizontal — 1 Charlie Martz — 19 Siesta in Paloverde — 33 Time of terror — 47 A happy, lighthearted people — 67 Arma virumque cano — 81 Confession — 91 Evenings away from home — 109 For something to do — 125 The Italian cut — 141 The only good Syrian foot soldier is a dead one — 155 The line rider — 171 The trespassers — 183 The bull ring at Blisston — 203 Rebel on the run — 219
The death of Nichelle Nichols, who played the iconic Nyota Uhura in the original Star Trek series, comes at a time when the Star Trek franchise is looking backwards to prequel to the series Nichols starred in. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is the 11th Star Trek series and was launched in 2022 as part of Alex Kurtzman’s expanded Star Trek Universe. A spin-off from Star Trek: Discovery, it follows Captain Christopher Pike and the crew of the starship USS Enterprise as they explore new worlds throughout the galaxy during the decade before Star Trek: The Original Series.
Anson Mount, Ethan Peck, and Rebecca Romijn respectively star as Pike, Spock, and Number One, all characters from The Original Series. I especially like Celia Rose Gooding as a young cadet Nyota Uhura. This 10 episode series captures much of the Sense of Wonder of the original Star Trek series. Yes, some of the episodes are better than others. But, all in all, I enjoyed this series and can’t wait for Season Two. Are you a Star Trek fan? GRADE: B+
It’s a bit ironic that David Thomson started writing Disaster Mon Amour just before the Covid-19 Pandemic hit the U.S. in 2020. Thomson starts his book on disaster movies with an analysis of San Andreas (2015), but as the Pandemic progresses, Thomson focuses more on The Road (2009) and Cormac McCarthy’s novel of the same name which won a Pulitzer Prize. McCarthy’s book details the bleak journey of a father and his son after a catastrophic event that destroys pretty much everything.
Thomson makes some odd detours into a discussion of Laurel and Hardy movies and his obsession with Rachel Maddow. He’s on firmer ground when he sticks with films like The Birds, The Grapes of Wrath, and Heaven’s Gate.
If you’re a fan of movies of all types, David Thomson always provides intelligent and witty commentary. Do you have a favorite disaster movie? GRADE: B
There’s a shortage of women in the sciences and reading A Portrait of the Scientist As a Young Woman gives you some clues why that is. Lindy Elkins-Tanton is a smart, unrelenting woman. But when she was going to school, Lindy received very little encouragement to pursue her interest in science.
But everything changed in 1982 when physicist and Nobel Prize winner Hans Bethe visited Ithaca High School and Lindy heard him speak. Bethe lit a fire in Lindy and she applied to MIT (although the teacher who wrote a recommendation for her assured Lindy she would not get in).
Lindy was accepted to MIT but struggled in her early years. Many of the male students looked down on female students (and, sadly, so did some of the professors). Lindy graduated from MIT but then decided to try a business path. She got married and had a child. But the marriage didn’t work out and Lindy decided to return to MIT to get her PhD. More struggles. Her mother and father had mental problems. Her favorite brother, Tom, dies in an accident with a drunk driver.
Each step Lindy took in her career came with hurtles. Sexual harassment, conflict, doubts about her ability were just some of the problems Lindy had to overcome. Then, Lindy found out a male counterpart–with less experience and less education–was being paid much more than she was!
Reading about Lindy’s struggles both saddened me and inspired me because no matter what obstacle Lindy faced, she found a way to overcome it. I highly recommend A Portrait of the Scientist As a Young Woman. Today, Lindy is in charge of a NASA mission to send a probe to the massive asteroid Psyche. Living well is the best revenge. GRADE: A
Our Lady of Mysterious Ailments is the second book in the Edinburgh Nights series. You can read my review of the first book, Library of the Dead, here. These books are narrated by Ropa Moyo who has the ability to speak with ghosts. She’s a struggling teenager in Edinburgh, Scotland who supports her aging grandmother and younger sister by delivering messages to and from ghosts.
Because of the events in Library of the Dead, Ropa becomes the intern in Magic to Sir Callander, Edinburgh’s most powerful magician. But, since the internship doesn’t pay any money, Ropa takes on a case at the magical hospital Our Lady of Mysterious Ailments. Two students are in mysterious comas and Ropa is hired to find how how that happened…and how to reverse their conditions.
So, basically, Our Lady of Mysterious Ailments is a detective novel as Ropa and her friends follow the clues and use their magical powers to discover a secret society of Monks and users of Dark Magic.
Our Lady of Mysterious Ailments is perfect for Summer Reading. I suspect the target market is the Young Adult market, but I enjoyed the twisty plot and off-beat characters, too. GRADE: B
Burt Wulff, Barry N. Malzberg’s agent of vengeance on the drug trade, extends his violent damage in Havana Hit and Chicago Slaughter. Wulff, obsessed with avenging the death of his fiancé by targeting the operations of the drug cartels, travels from city to city as an agent of destruction.
Yes, Wulff’s attempts at exterminating the drug gangs resemble Whack-A-Mole. As Wulff’s brand of carnage captures many of the elements of the 1970s: corrupt politics, sluggish economy, and increasing number of Americans turning to drugs to deal with Nixonian Reality.
Havana Hit continues the Wulff’s violent adventures from Desert Stalker. Martin Wulff is flying out of Las Vegas on route to NYC with a valise full of heroin worth over a million dollars. Somehow this heroin was removed from the NYPD evidence room and got into the hands of organized drug traffickers. And during his last escapade in Vegas, Wulff went on a killing spree and blew up a hotel casino to get it back. No TSA and drug-sniffing dogs back in 1974!
The plane Wulff is on is hijacked and forced to land in Cuba. Taken into custody by a Cuba official named Delgado, Wulff’s valise is seized and he is sent to be executed. Delgado plans to keep the uncut heroin, sell it, and leave Cuba to live it up. But of course Wulff escapes and sets out to get the valise back again.
With a little help from a cowardly American helicopter pilot, Wulff kills Delgado along with scores of other people and destroys the headquarters building. But the valise of heroin isn’t there. Delgado turned it over to DiStasio, who is the head of Cuban Intelligence. DiStasio has the same plan as Delgado had, take the heroin and get out of Cuba. More mayhem results! GRADE: B
In his Afterward to Chicago Slaughter, Barry N. Malzberg writes about hitting his stride in this book, the sixth in the series (with 8 novels to go in The Lone Wolf series): “It was stern and flagrant impetus as Chicago Slaughter burned on, as Nixon flailed at the release of the tapes, as Goldwater and several grim accounting Republican Senators trudged upstairs to deliver Tchaikovsky the news.” (p. 227)
Chicago Slaughter takes The Lone Wolf series to a whole new level of corruption with Wulff dealing with the Mob and dirty cops…debasement caused by the drug trade. Malzberg creates a world slipping into double-dealing, decay, and festering immorality. And Wulff’s strategy–burn it all down–doesn’t seem so strange. Don’t miss this one! GRADE: A
In July of 1972, Curtis Mayfield’s soundtrack to the movie Superfly became a landmark in exposing the threat of drugs to the Black Community. A year after Marvin Gaye’s What’s Goin’ On, Mayfield’s songs on Superfly showed how the impact of heroin, cocaine, and the rampant abuse of other drugs resulted in significant deadly repercussions on Inner City residents.
Marc Myers of the Wall Street Journal recently wrote about this iconic album:
In December 1971, Curtis Mayfield was movin’ on up. After 10 years of writing and recording hits for the Impressions, such as “Keep on Pushing,” “People Get Ready” and “We’re a Winner,” the lead singer caught a big break. He was approached backstage after a solo concert at New York’s Philharmonic Hall by a screenwriter and film producer who invited him to write and record the soundtrack for a feature film called “Superfly.”
Jetting home to Chicago the next day, Mayfield leafed through the script about a Harlem drug dealer’s struggle to quit the business and sketched out several songs. But when Mayfield saw the film’s rushes a short time later, he recounted in Peter Burns’s 2003 biography, the movie had become a “cocaine infomercial.” Rather than quit, he wrote lyrics that exposed what the film ignored—the punishing impact of drugs on black inner-city neighborhoods and families.
When Mayfield’s “Superfly” soundtrack was released 50 years ago, in July 1972, a month before the film’s debut, the music was smarter and more sophisticated than the movie itself. The record spent four weeks at No. 1 on Billboard’s album chart, sold a half-million copies in two months and was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1998, a year before Mayfield’s death. It also inspired soul albums to address the deterioration of black urban life. The record’s sales were remarkable given that “Superfly” played like a public-service ad. For the soundtrack, Mayfield had created a series of soft-funk hope songs designed to counter the movie’s glamorization of cocaine and the playboy lifestyle of dealers.
The album arrived at a pivotal moment in black music. It came out two years after Mayfield’s first solo album, “Curtis” (1970)—a socially conscious record that predated Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” and Gil Scott-Heron’s “Pieces of a Man” (both 1971). In turn, “Superfly” set the tone for message albums by artists such as Stevie Wonder, Lou Bond and Sam Dees.
As for black film, the so-called blaxploitation genre had just emerged in Hollywood with the success of Melvin Van Peebles’s “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song” and Gordon Parks’s “Shaft” in 1971. Both featured black leading actors and casts taking on police corruption and, in the case of “Shaft,” organized crime’s grip on black communities.
Growing up in Chicago, Mayfield had witnessed the corrosive effects of drug and alcohol addiction and thought “Superfly” required a fresh approach to lyric writing. “General statements [in songs] are all very well,” Mayfield told British journalist Roger St. Pierre in 1972, “but [if you] fit the statement into a personal context which the listener can place himself into, you have something with much more impact.”
Shot on location and directed by Gordon Parks Jr. , son of the “Shaft” director, “Superfly” provides a fascinating pigeon’s-eye view of a crumbling New York on the cusp of recession. While the film today sags under the weight of wooden acting, clichéd dialogue and stereotypes, Mayfield’s songs and cooing falsetto remain exceptional.
The record’s orchestral drama was created by Johnny Pate, a leading Chicago jazz-soul producer and arranger who had worked with Mayfield and the Impressions since 1963 and gave their hits and albums a brassy urgency.
“Superfly” opens with organ chords, a restless conga and wailing electric guitar on “Little Child Runnin’ Wild.” Mayfield’s lyrics address the demand side of the drug epidemic: “Broken home / Father gone / Mama tired / So he’s all alone . . . Don’t care what nobody say / I got to take the pain away / It’s getting worser day by day / And all my life has been this way.”
The supply side comes next on “Pusherman,” and features Joseph “Lucky” Scott’s funky electric bass line, which captures the dealer’s seductive personality: “Want some coke? Have some weed / You know me, I’m your friend / Your main boy, thick and thin / I’m your pusherman.”
Supply and demand collide on the third track, “Freddie’s Dead.” The hit song features a catchy bass riff with a flute on top, strings and fuzz guitar—all reminiscent of Isaac Hayes’s “Theme From Shaft”: “Everybody’s misused him / Ripped him up and abused him / Another junkie plan / Pushin’ dope for the man.”
“Eddie You Should Know Better” chastises the dealer’s partner, who doesn’t want to quit: “Must be something that’s freezin’ his mind / That has made him, through greed, so very blind / And I don’t think he’s gonna make it this time.”
Musically, “No Thing on Me (Cocaine Song)” is reminiscent of Gaye’s “Mercy Mercy Me”—a lush, upbeat recap, with the lead character finally free of dealing: “I’m so glad I’ve got my own / So glad that I can see / My life’s a natural high.”
The album ends with the track “Superfly,” which hammers home why a dealer is a predator, not a patron: “This cat of the slum / Had a mind, wasn’t dumb / But a weakness was shown / ’Cause his hustle was wrong.”
Despite its inability to eliminate the drug culture, “Superfly” is one of the finest expressions of social-realist messaging in a soul soundtrack. In the years that followed, the album became a model for dozens of blaxploitation film scores, yet none of them could top Mayfield’s sincerity, empathy or success.
—Mr. Myers is the author of “Rock Concert: An Oral History as Told by the Artists, Backstage Insiders and Fans Who Were There” (Grove Press).
I was very moved the first time I heard “Freddie’s Dead” on the radio in 1972. Curtis Mayfield’s music was ground-breaking for the early Seventies. But, 50 years later, we’re still battling the destruction drug abuse inflicts on our society. And more Freddies are dead. GRADE: A
I’ve been reading Matthew Hughes’s delightful Jack Vance Dying Earth pastiches for over 20 years. Hughes created a number of characters like Luff Imbry, a master thief who can steal just about anything to generate the funds that allow him to indulge in his obsession for exquisite food. Imbry’s adventures in “Arboghasz Dal Xander Rides Again” display his cleverness and cognitive skills. It’s my favorite story in Mixed Bag (2022), Matthew Hughes’s latest Print on Demand volume available on AMAZON (there’s also an e-book).
Other Old Earth stories in Mixed Bag include “The Friends of Masquelayne the Incomparable” that features a battle of wizards. I enjoyed “Hapthorn’s Last Case” where a mystery is solved while Reality is being transformed. Erm Kaslo, Hughes’s Sam Spade of the Future, plies his investigative skills in “Thunderstone” and “The BiColor Spiral.”
Mixed Bag delivers plenty of thrills, sly humor, and detection. Perfect Summer Reading! GRADE: B+
“Star Trek: No Man’s Land is a rich, fully dramatized Star Trek: Picard adventure as Michelle Hurd and Jeri Ryan pick up their respective characters once more. Written for audio by Kirsten Beyer, a cocreator, writer, and producer on the hit Paramount+ series Star Trek: Picard, and Mike Johnson, a veteran contributor to the Star Trek comic books publishing program, this audio original offers consummate Star Trek storytelling brilliantly reimagined for the audio medium.
In addition to riveting performances from Hurd and Ryan exploring new layers of Raffi and Seven’s relationship, Star Trek: No Man’s Land features a full cast of actors playing all-new characters in the Star Trek: Picard universe, including Fred Tatasciore, Jack Cutmore-Scott, John Kassir, Chris Andrew Ciulla, Lisa Flanagan, Gibson Frazier, Lameece Issaq, Natalie Naudus, Xe Sands, and Emily Woo Zeller, and is presented in a soundscape crackling with exclusive Star Trek sound effects. Drawing listeners into a dramatic, immersive narrative experience that is at once both instantly familiar and spectacularly new, Star Trek: No Man’s Land goes boldly where no audio has gone before as fans new and old clamor to discover what happens next. “
I found Star Trek Picard: No Man’s Land a mixed bag. Michelle Hurd (Raffi) and Jeri Ryan (Seven of Nine) sound great! Raffi and Seven of Nine get involved in a Romulan scheme to find immortality. This audio drama has plenty of cool sound effects–phaser blasts, alarms, and pounding background music–but there’s a soapy love story subplot. If you can put up with the mushy stuff, the adventure and excitement should entertain you. GRADE: B
Put Agatha Christie and Ed McBain and John Le Carre in a blender and the result will be Peter Spiegelman’s astonishing A Secret About a Secret (2022). Set in a creepy rural campus of what was a private school in England, the shadowy Ondstrand Biologic company alerts the Government when one of its key researchers, the beautiful Dr. Allegra Stans, is discovered dead in a walk-in refrigerator.
Because of the secret projects at Ondstrand Biologic, the murder is not reported to the local police. Instead, an agent of the dreaded Standard Division arrives to investigate the murder. Agent Myles starts by putting together a profile of the murdered scientist. Allegra Stans was a brilliant, gifted researcher who also was an obsessive runner. She formed a runners club and other scientists joined. Allegra Stans slept with many of the members of the runners club. Myles discovers a trail of ex-lovers–some who loved Allegra…and some who hated her.
Learning what Allegra Stans did a Ondstrand Biologic proves problematic. The high security of the campus provides Myles will plenty of documentation and video of the comings and goings of various staff members. But, nothing shows how Allegra entered the building on the morning she was murdered.
Myles also finds clues that suggest Allegra Stans engaged in suspicious activity after she was transferred to a different lab in Ondstrand Biologic seven months before she was killed.
You can read A Secret About a Secret as a police procedural or a spy novel–it has elements of both. The plot includes some of Agatha Christie’s tricks so you’ll be mislead by red herrings more that once (I was!). I’m hoping Peter Spiegelman writes more novels featuring Agent Myles who possesses elements of Hercule Poirot and Jack Reacher. A Secret About a Secret is the best mystery I’ve read this year! GRADE: A
