If you’re in the mood for something completely different, you might want to catch an episode of Mrs. Davis on Peacock. Imagine blending The Flying Nun with James Bond!  Damon Lindelof and Tara Hernandez’s 8-episode series Mrs. Davis, starring Betty Gilpin as an action-hero nun, is the rare TV series that feels confusing at first but makes sense as the twisty plot untangles with plenty of surprises.

Betty Gilpin (aka, Lizzie) is now Sister Simone. We first meet Simone as she rides into a situation on a white horse! We soon learn the world is now run by an Artificial Intelligence called Mrs. Davis who Simone wants to kill because she blames Mrs. Davis for her father’s death.

What chance has a nun with few resources have against an all-powerful AI? A better chance than you think. Four of the eight episodes are available now. I’m intrigued by the innovative aspects of Mrs. Davis. GRADE: INCOMPLETE but trending towards a B+

Stark House’s latest omnibus edition of Carter Brown’s Al Wheeler mysteries collects #19, #20 and #21: The Temptress (1960), Lament for a Lousy Lover (1960), and The Stripper (1961). And yes, I read all three of these mysteries when they were first published in the U.S.–I was 12 years old. I’m sure the covers had something to do with my fascination with Carter Brown’s Al Wheeler series.

Last year, Greg Shepard–the Editor and Publisher of Stark House–asked me if I would like to write an introduction to this latest volume in the Al Wheeler mystery series. I immediately accepted his kind offer and wrote “How Carter Brown Sold 100 Million Books.” I used to teach a college course in Marketing and several excellent marketing strategies resulted in the sale of millions of Carter Brown titles. Before I sent Greg my Introduction, I asked Art Scott to read my work and comment on it. Art’s suggestions for improvements enhanced the final draft. Thanks again, Art!

In The Temptress, Leutenant Al Wheeler, assigned to solve the murder of the private detective, discovers the P.I. was hired to follow a rich woman’s rebellious daughter and her druggie boyfriend. Add to the mix a strange uncle, and shake well. GRADE: B

Lament for a Lousy Lover–my favorite mystery in this volume–features both Lieutenant Al Wheeler and dipsy yet sexy Mavis Seidlitz in an investigation of the murder of a TV western actor. You’ll love the comic interplay between Al and Mavis! GRADE: A

Al Wheeler has his hands full with Deadpan Doris in The Stripper. A young woman’s apparent suicide leads Wheeler to probe a suspicious lonely hearts club run by Mr and Mrs Arkwright. The action alternates between the strip club and the lonely hearts club until Wheeler cracks the case. GRADE: B+

If you’re a Carter Brown fan, this is a must-buy! If you’re looking for mysteries with humor and sexy shenanigans, don’t miss The Temptress / Lament for a Lousy Lover / The Stripper!

I liked James Taylor’s music early on. This 2-CD live recording from 1993 includes most of Taylor’s hits from the Sixties, Seventies, and Eighties. I like Taylor’s cover of an old favorite, “Handy Man.” I also like Taylor’s singing on Art Garfunkel’s cover of “(What a) Wonderful World” in 1978 with Paul Simon which isn’t on this collection.

James Taylor also wrote many of the songs on this live recording. I love “Mexico” and

• Rainy Day Man” (1967) …
• “Something in the Way She Moves” (1968) …
• “Carolina in My Mind” (1968) …
• “Sweet Baby James” (1970) …
• “Steamroller” (1970) …
• “You’ve Got a Friend” (1971) …
• “Walking Man” (1974) …
• “A Junkie’s Lament” (1976)

Are you a James Taylor fan? Is your favorite James Taylor song on these CDs? GRADE: B+

TRACKLIST:

Michael Gallatin, a werewolf, first showed up in The Wolf’s Hour,  a 1989 World War II horror novel by American writer Robert R. McCammon. The British secret agent is sent behind German lines to stop a secret weapon from being launched against the Allies. The fact that the British agent is a werewolf spices up the dangerous mission.

In 2011, Subterranean Press published The Hunter From the Woods, a collection of stories about Gallanin including “The Great White Way,” Gallatin’s origin story. You might wonder why a werewolf would agree to become a British secret agent and risk his life fighting the Nazis. McCammon provides a suitable rationale. He also creates a sympathetic werewolf who takes a lot of punishment in his missions against the Third Reich.

My favorite story in The Hunter From the Woods is “Sea Chase” where Gallatin’s mission is to protect a German arms expert and his family who are defecting while the tramp freighter they’re on is pursed by an armed German ship. I loved the desperate crossing across the English Channel with the German ship closing in for the kill. Very suspenseful!

“The Wolf and the Eagle,” with its horrific scenes of survival in the desert, and “The Room at the Bottom of the Stairs,” where Gallanin falls in love with a beautiful Nazi journalist, show the range of McCammon’s story-telling. AMAZON offers this Subterranean edition for $80. But, your local Library might have a copy. GRADE: B+

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

The great white way — 11

The man from London — 23

Sea chase — 41

The wolf and the eagle — 135

The room at bottom of the stairs — 201

Death of a hunter — 315

The Box Office for The Super Mario Bros. Movie, after a mere two weeks, is $700 million dollars. That just demonstrates the power of nostalgia and ILLUMINATION’s style of animation.

Directed by Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic and written by Matthew Fogel, The Super Mario Bros. Movie blends aspects of the Super Mario video games. The ensemble voice cast includes Chris Pratt, Anya Taylor-Joy, Charlie Day, Jack Black, Keegan-Michael Key, Seth Rogen, and Fred Armisen. The film begins with an origin story for the brothers Mario and Luigi, Italian-American plumbers who are transported to an alternate world and become entangled in a battle between the Mushroom Kingdom, led by Princess Peach, and the Koopas, led by evil Bowser.

My favorite part of The Super Mario Bros. Movie was the Battle for Brooklyn. And, of course, the music. Are you a Super Mario fan? Are you planning to see this movie? GRADE: B

SOUNDTRACK LIST:

“In support of his job application, he lectured at at the Unisersita del Popolo on Robinson Crusoe. That talk may be the single greatest lecture on an individual novel ever given. Its final lines are as loaded with treasure as anything in his novels: ‘Saint John the Evangelist saw on the island of Patmos the apocalyptic collapse of the universe and raising up the wall of the eternal city splendid with beryl and emerald, onyx and jasper, sapphires and rubies. Crusoe  saw but one marvel in all the fertile creation that surrounded him, a naked footprint in the virgin sand: and who knows if the latter does not matter more than the former?’ He wrote that and it didn’t matter. The invigilators in Padua denied him the diploma beause they didn’t recognize his Irish degree.” (p. 25-26)

The “he”–as you might have guessed–is James Joyce. Joyce struggled to get his work published because few people understood his masterpieces.

From Dostoevsky–who was almost executed in front of a firing squad–to Hemingway and Fitzgerald–who drank themselves into depression–to Nabokov who had Lolita rejected so many times he had to agree to let a French pornography publisher print it, Stephen Marche illustrates his link between failure and writing with all of these sanity-crushing examples of great writing and great writers dealing with disappointment and disinterest.

Legendary rejections (multiple times!) of Harry Potter, Animal Farm, Herman Melville’s work. Jane Austen never saw her name on one of her novels…only identified as “By a Lady.”

I was most moved by Marche’s description of Samuel Johnson’s grueling life of never making enough money to support himself and his wife so he took every writing assignment that came his way–no matter how trivial–in order to pay his bills and stay alive.

On Writing and Failure: Or, On the Peculiar Perseverance Required to Endure the Life of a Writer proves to me at least that Writing is, and always will be, an act defined by failure and rejection. GRADE: A

I’ve read a couple of Aliette de Bodard’s SF novels set in her Xuya Universe. My favorite was The Tea Master and The Detective (you can read my review here) which was a 2018 Nebula Award winner.

The Red Scholar’s Wake is subtitled “A Xuya Universe Romance” which is clarified by Katee Robert’s blurb on the cover: “Lesbian Space Pirates. Enough said!” And, she’s right. Tech scavenger Xich Si is attacked by space pirates and her ship is destroyed. Sich Si is captured and imprisoned…but then she’s offered an incredible proposition. Rice Fish, the sentient spaceship, needs an expert to investigate the death of her first wife, the Red Scholar. But first, the human and the AI need to be married.

The future is just as greedy and messy as the present as the various pirate bands compete against each other. Assassinations are common. What makes this mashup of Space Opera and detective fiction different is the marriage of Xich Si and Rice Fish.

I suspect some readers will be puzzled by the romance. I know I became impatient with all the political maneuverings with the pirates. A little more action and fewer sighs would have suited me just fine. GRADE: B-

The musical series’ sophomore season picks up with Josh (Keegan-Michael Key) and Melissa (Cecily Strong) after they found love in Schmigadoon in Season 1 (you can read my review here). In this second part of their story, Josh and Melissa find in Schmicago, the “reimagined world” of ’60s and ’70s musicals.

Returning cast include Cecily Strong, Keegan-Michael Key, Ariana DeBose, Martin Short, Dove Cameron, Jaime Camil, Kristin Chenoweth, Alan Cumming, Ann Harada, Jane Krakowski, and Aaron Tveit. New cast members include actors Tituss Burgess and Patrick Page.

If you’re a fan of Broadway musicals, this series of six episodes features plenty of songs and dancing and fun! GRADE: INCOMPLETE but trending towards an A

Most readers would identify Bill Pronzini as a mystery writer best known for his “Namless Detective” series. But, as Pronzini points out in his PREFACE, he started reading Science Fiction and Fantasy early in his youth and started publishing SF and Fantasy stories early in his writing career. High Concepts, just published by STARK HOUSE, collects 34 of Pronzini’s SF and Fantasy stories, some with his writing collaborator, Barry N. Malzberg.

I enjoyed reading these stories–about 70% were new to me. “The Screwiest Job in the World” centers around an agent who investigates oddities that his employer, a multi-millionaire, collects. Of course many of the oddities turn out to be frauds that the agent exposes. But, in this episode, the investigation concerns a talking bear in the wilderness of Alaska. The agent finds the bear…and something else just as strange.

My favorite stories in High Concepts are the “Tales of Luna Immigration” with Barry N. Malzberg. A customs inspector solves some baffling mysteries involving the galactic aliens who go through Luna Immigration facility on their journey to Earth. In “The Lyran Case” the inspector penetrates a scheme involving alien pornography. In “Wither Thou, Ghost” the inspector deals with an alien ghost that escapes into the Luna Immigration facility. If you enjoy locked room mysteries, you’ll going to love “Vanishing Point” where an alien who committed a murder is locked up in a holding cell…and disappears! “Transfer Point” might be the trickiest story of them all and highlights the brilliance of the customs inspector.

Barry N. Malzberg, in his AFTERWORD, asks: “How can a pair of writers really merge a narrative?” High Concepts provides several excellent examples of Pronzini and Malzberg merging their ideas to product first-rate stories. Working together on 75 stories and four novels, Malzberg concludes: “We were thus able to manage collectively what neither could have done alone and it is that which defines good collaboration.”

Of Bill Pronzini’s 20 collections of short stories, High Concepts ranks with his best! GRADE: A

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Preface — 11

• Shadows — 13
• Toy — 22
• High Concept (with Barry N. Malzberg) — 26
• Thirst — 34
• The Screwiest Job in the World — 39
• Reunions (with Barry N. Malzberg) — 51
• I Wish I May, I Wish I Might — 59
• It’s So Wonderful Here — 62
• Eve of Beyond (with Barry N. Malzberg) — 66
• Purple Cow — 74
• Tales of Luna Immigration (with Barry N. Malzberg) — 77
• The Lyran Case — 77
• Whither Thou, Ghost — 80
• Vanishing Point — 84
• Transfer Point — 92
• He Keeps Coming Back — 100
• Ancient Evil — 103
• And Then We Went to Venus — 112
• A Clone at Last (with Barry N. Malzberg) — 120
• The Hungarian Cinch — 122
• Tom — 140
• Pieces (with Barry N. Malzberg) — 146
• Peekaboo — 154
• Paradise Last (with Barry N. Malzberg) — 159
• The Rec Field — 164
• Dry Spell — 170
• Intensified Transmogrification (with Barry N. Malzberg) — 172
• The Coffin Trimmer — 179
• Stretch’s Quirls (with H. L. Gold) — 186
• Never to Happen Again — 193
• Holes — 198
• In the Mists (with Barry N. Malzberg) — 203
• The Being — 210
• Olaf and the Merchandisers (with Barry N. Malzberg) — 214
• The Evergreen Library (with Jeffrey Wallmann) — 221
• AFTERWORD by Barry N. Malzberg — 229
• BIBLIOGRAPHY — 231

How much you like The Byrds might determine which of these Greatest Hit collections you’d prefer. Surprisingly, The Byrds Greatest Hits came out in 1967–early in their career. The Byrds Turn, Turn, Turn: The Ultimate Collection came out in 2015 and features many of the songs on the first Greatest Hits album…plus many more songs I’d never heard of before I listened to this 48 song 3-CD set.

I like most of the covers The Byrds did of Bob Dylan songs. The Byrds benefited from the Folk-Rock movement in the Sixties. But, once that faded out…so did they. The Byrds formed in Los Angeles, California, in 1964. The band underwent multiple lineup changes throughout its existence, with frontman Roger McGuinn (known as Jim McGuinn until mid-1967) remaining the sole consistent member. In 1973, The Byrds produced their last album, Byrds, and flew away. Are you a fan of The Byrds? Any favorite songs here? GRADE: B+ for both CDs

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