May 20th, 2013 by Ed Gorman
Ed here: One day back in the eighties when I was editing Mystery Scene the phone rang and it was Richard Sale. I don't remember exactly how this came to pass--maybe I contacted his agent and said I'd like to interview him for the magazine. Anyway we talked for a long time about the pulps, his time in Hwood (he was very successful there) and some of the writers he'd known. He was a treat to listen to. And he wrote one hell of a memoir for the magazine.
And then last night I reread one of my favorite mystery novels (one of R Chandler's too) Lazarus #7, which I heartily recommend. Here's a piece about Sale from what-when-how. BTW His most famous script as for "Suddenly"with Frank Sinatra.
(1911-1993)
The man once known to his readers as “the Dumas of the pulps,” Richard Sale was one of the top journeymen writers in the 1930s and 1940s. He was not a superstar like Max brand or Edgar Rice burroughs, but his name was on countless magazine covers in the golden age of the pulps. Sale guaranteed to developers a reliable supply of first-rate fiction and to readers the certainty of an hour or two well spent. He was barely out of his teens when his name started appearing in Detective Fiction Weekly, Dime Detective, Argosy, Bluebook, Thrilling Mystery, Double Detective, and more.
“From the start . . . even as a small kid,” he told this author, “I sold some stuff to the New York Herald Tribune. Poems, and I mean bad. But I had no other ambition except to write.” Sale studied journalism at Washington and University, in Lexington, Virginia. While still at school, he began sending out stories to magazines. He sold one to Street & Smith’s College Stories: “I got $100 and that was a lot of money in those Depression days.” He sold a second story with a school setting, and then got nothing but rejections for two years. He left school before graduating, got married, and worked for a couple of New York newspapers, but mostly devoted himself to trying to make a living from his fiction. Before long it happened. His stories for the pulps started selling—and selling. In a 10-year period Sale published around 500 stories, nearly one a week. But at his busiest, Sale’s schedule was actually more grueling than that. “A story a day. A story was 3,000 words, 5,000 words. It depended how it flowed. I’d do it in a day, sometimes it carried over to the next day. If you were doing novelettes, that would be 12,000 words and that would carry over into the next day . . . First draft was a last draft,” he said.
Sale took his place among the speed demons of the pulps, the legendary million-words-a-year men like Brand, Arthur J. Burks, and Lester dent. Sale wrote mysteries, exotic adventures, horror and terror tales, air war stories, and sea stories week after week, throughout the depression and into the first years of World War II. “You couldn’t sit around and wait for ideas to come. Sometimes you’d sit there and just look around the room and pick an object . . . Or think of something impossible and then solve it.” Sale was such a reliable storytelling machine at this time that an editor thought nothing of grabbing him in the hallway as he was leaving the developer’s office and demanding a publishable story on the spot: “He needed a story in a hurry. Emergency. So he sat me down and I knocked out a 3,000-word story. I came up with a story about what goes through a man’s mind when he drifts down in a parachute. Turned out to be a good story. I gave him the story, went to the window and they issued me a check right then and there and I went home.”
for the rest go here:
http://what-when-how.com/pulp-fiction-writers/sale-richard-pulp-fiction-writer/
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May 19th, 2013 by Ed Gorman
From Cinema Retro
Ed here: This is based on a fine little Jack Finney Dell pb original. BTW Lee is right is citing Brian Keith for his work here. He really never did get his due as a dramatic actor. I caught him recently in a anold "Fugitive" as a wife stalker would be-killer and he was chilling.SCROLL DOWN
By Lee Pfeiffer
Sony has released the 1955 crime drama 5 Against the House as a burn-to-order DVD. The little-remembered film is interesting on a number of levels and boasts an impressive, eclectic cast. The low-budget flick depicts four young ex-G.I.s who fought in Korea who return to the States and enroll in college. Al (Guy Madison) is a straight-as-an-arrow type who is engaged to sultry nightclub singer Kay (Kim Novak). Ronnie (Kerwin Matthews) is a brainy upstart with delusions of grandeur and a superiority complex. Roy (Alvy Moore) is an affable joker who is very much a follower, not a leader. Brick (Brian Keith) is the most troubled of the group. He bares psychological problems from his combat experience and has a hair-trigger temper. The guys' only vices are taking an occasional trip to Reno, Nevada and engaging in some minor gambling and womanizing. However, Ronnie concocts an audacious plan to prove he can outwit the authorities and rob a casino.
for the whole piece go here:http://www.cinemaretro.com/index.php
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May 18th, 2013 by Ed Gorman
From Huffington Post
Max Allan Collins:
The success of the first four film adaptations of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels, beginning with Dr. No (1962), ignited a world-wide explosion of spy movies, fueled by the realities and anxieties of the Cold War. But movies made from spy novels had been around since the silent days.
E. Phillip Oppenheim (1866-1946), the Ian Fleming of his era, had several dozen of his works adapted to the screen before the advent of sound. In 1936, both Joseph Conrad and W. Somerset Maugham were source material for Alfred Hitchcock during his British years -Sabotage from Conrad's Secret Agent (1907) and, confusingly, Secret Agent adapted from Maugham's Ashendon: Or the British Agent.
British author Eric Ambler - more the John Le Carre of his day than the Ian Fleming - provided the source novels for such films as The Mask of Dimitrios (1939), Journey into Fear (1943) and Topaki (1964), parodied in The Pink Panther (1963). A screenwriter himself (notably A Night to Remember, 1958), Ambler's success as a master of fictional espionage undoubtedly inspired many other novelists and filmmakers, but did not spark a craze in the manner of Fleming. Of course, in fairness to Ambler, neither has anyone before or since.
Fleming had little if any basis in the espionage novelists just mentioned. Despite Fleming's own WW 2 service in counter-espionage, James Bond was derived in large part from fanciful UK sources - the jingoistic adventures of Sapper's Bulldog Drummond, the sophisticated crime-fighting of Leslie Charteris' the Saint, and the super-villainy of Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu. American tough guy fiction played a big role, as well, in the development of Bond - Fleming was much an admirer of Raymond Chandler and his private eye Phillip Marlowe, though the guns-and-girls approach of Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer was the major commercial influence.
for the rest go here:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/max-allan-collins/memorable-spy-novel-film-_b_3294130.html
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May 17th, 2013 by Ed Gorman
Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959)Beneficiary of more than its fair share of critical brickbats, Ed Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959) is not onlynot the worst film ever made, it's not even the worst Ed Wood film ever made. Written and shot around existing footage of aging Dracula star Bela Lugosi in the sad days leading up to his 1956 death and cobbled together with enthusiasm, determination and whatever Hollywood leavings could be scavenged, Plan 9 has become the whipping boy of midnight movies for its technical gaffes, flat acting, continuity errors and tautological dialogue ("Future events such as these will affect you in the future"). Guilty as charged-- but the film deserves honorable mention as an unsung milestone in American independent filmmaking.
Highly personal, brazenly cross-pollinated from a genre standpoint and openly critical of the Western atomic stockpile, the self-financed Plan 9 also utilizes the non-professional actors and guerilla production tactics that distinguished the Nouvelle Vague in France a few years later. However risible Wood's script may be, his dialogue is endlessly quotable and images of Tor Johnson and Vampira doing the zombie shuffle are forever burned into the retina of horror fandom's collective eye. While few would argue its artistic superiority, Plan 9 is viewed, discussed and quoted more times in any given year than John Cassavetes' Shadows (1959), Hal Hartley's Trust (1990) or Darren Aronofsky's Pi (1998), none of which have, for all their indie credibility, inspired so much as a single refrigerator magnet. Could respected A-list filmmakers such as Nora Ephron, Neil LaBute or even Tim Burton, if denied the studio perks on which they rely to facilitate the creative process, produce a work as enduring as Plan 9 from Outer Space, which is still being discussed and enjoyed fifty years after it was made?
Director: Edward D. Wood, Jr.
Producer: J. Edward Reynolds
Screenplay: Edward D. Wood, Jr.
Cinematography: William C. Thompson
Editing: Edward D. Wood, Jr.
Cast: Bela Lugosi (Ghoul Man), Gregory Walcott (Jeff Trent), Mona McKinnon (Paula Trent), Tor Johnson (Inspector Clay), Paul Marco (Patrolman Kelton), Duke Moore (Lt. John Harper).
BW-79m.
by Richard Harland Smith
BACK TO TOP
Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959)As a condition of the contract between Ed Wood and a Baptist organization covering production costs, many of thePlan 9 from Outer Space cast and crew had to be baptized in a swimming pool in Beverly Hills.
Producers J. Edward Reynolds and Hugh Thomas, Jr. appear in the film as gravediggers.
A Hollywood chiropodist and hypnotist named Thomas R. Mason was hired to double for Bela Lugosi.
The footage featuring Bela Lugosi was shot for an aborted project called The Vampire's Tomb. The house belonging to Lugosi's "Old Man" was owned by Swedish wrestler-turned-actor Tor Johnson, who had performed with Lugosi in Wood's Bride of the Monster (1955) and Reginald Le Borg's The Black Sleep (1956).
During principal photography, Plan 9 from Outer Space was called Grave Robbers from Outer Space, which was considered blasphemous by the film's Baptist financiers. The original title is still used in Criswell's opening monologue.
Maila Nurmi was paid $200 for one day's work on Plan 9 from Outer Space and rode to and from the shoot on the Santa Monica Boulevard bus in full Vampira makeup and costume.
After an argument with Ed Wood, veteran makeup man Harry Thomas insisted that his name not be used in the film's credits. Thomas' assistant, Tom Bartholemew, received sole credit.
Location footage of an actual graveyard was shot in a San Fernando Valley cemetery slated for relocation.
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May 16th, 2013 by Ed Gorman
How Like an Angel
How Like an Angel
I've always held the opinion that some writers are just too good for the mass market. This is a true of a number of literary writers but it's also true of at least one writer of crime fiction, the late Margret Millar. For all her many deserved awards, she never became the enormous commercial success she deserved to be.
For me she's the single most elegant stylist who ever shaped a mystery story. You revel in her sentences. She used wit and dark humor in the direst of novels long before it was fashionable in the genre. And she was a better (and much fairer) bamboozler than Agatha Christie.
I recently reread her How Like and Angel and its richness, its darkness, its perverse wit make me repeat what I've said many times before--if this isn't the perfect mystery novel, it comes damned close.
The story, complex as it becomes, is simple in its set-up. Private eye Joe Quinn, having gambled away all his money, begins hitchiking from Reno to Caifornia. Along the way he sees the Tower, the symbol of a religious cult that eventually offers him not only shelter but a chance to put his skills to use. Sister Blessing asks him to find a man named Patrick O'Gorman. The man is dead. Which makes Quinn suspicious of why they want him located.
Among its many pleasures is the way this novel, published in the early sixties, anticipates some of the fringe cults that would grow out of the flower power days. There's more than a touch of ole Charlie Manson in the Tower.
Call your favorite mystery bookstore for this one. If they don't have it, I'm sure they can get it. I think you'll be as amazed by it as I am. This is one of the most artfully rendered novels of any kind I've ever read.
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