It was fifty years ago today, on October 27, 1966, that the Halloween special It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown debuted on CBS. It was actually the third of the Peanuts specials to air, after A Charlie Brown Christmas in 1965 and Charlie Brown’s All-Stars earlier in 1966. Alongside A Charlie Brown Christmas it would arguably become the most popular of the Peanuts television specials. …You can read all of Canote’s note here. And if you can’t find time to watch It’s a Great Pumpkin this year (it is scheduled for broadcast again tomorrow night, October 28, at 8 p.m. ET/PT on ABC-TV), you can always watch the full, half-hour episode on YouTube.
It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown would not only be historic as the first time in the Peanuts TV specials in which the Great Pumpkin was referenced. It was also historic as the first TV special that portrayed Snoopy’s recurring fantasy of fighting the Red Baron, a running joke that had been introduced only a little over a year before the special aired (on October 10, 1965).
On October 1, the mystery world lost Clark Howard, a five-time winner of EQMM’s Readers Award, an Edgar winner for best short story with five additional Edgar nominations in that category, and a recipient of the Edward D. Hoch Memorial Golden Derringer for Lifetime Achievement from the Short Mystery Fiction Society. Clark was also a noted writer of true or “fact” crime, and was twice nominated for the best-fact-crime Edgar. He had a larger-than-life personality, and he was generous to a fault—treating his editors and friends to elaborate dinners at five-star restaurants on the few occasions when he traveled to mystery events. Clark’s life is chronicled in his autobiography, Hard City, published by Dutton in 1990. It’s painful reading: As a boy he was parentless and homeless for a time, concealing himself in a bowling alley before closing each night so he’d have somewhere to sleep. While still a teenager, he served in the Korean War. Out of those tough beginnings he rose to become one of the best short story writers of his generation. He was one of a kind, and a friend to me and everyone else he knew at Dell Magazines.The Gumshoe Site adds that the Ripley, Tennessee-born Clark “wrote 16 novels, six non-fiction books, and many short stories. His first sold story was ‘The Last Gunfight,’ published in the January 1956 of Stag Magazine, while his first sold mystery story was ‘Handcuffed,’ in the January 1957 [edition] of Crime & Justice. His first novel, The Arm (Sherbourn, 1967), became the 1987 movie The Big Town, starring Matt Dillon. Two of his non-fiction books were nominated for … true-crime Edgar[s]: Six Against the Rock (Dial, 1977) and Zebra (Marek, 1979), while five of his short stories were Edgar-nominated.” Clark was 84 years old at the time of his demise.
Although Larry lived in the Seattle [Washington] area for much of his life, he grew up in [Paterson] New Jersey, as one might have guessed from the slight accent he retained. He began his career as a physician, specializing in high-risk and complicated pregnancies. He founded the Prenatal Diagnostic Center at the University of Washington as well as the Department of Perinatal Medicine at Swedish Medical Center. Residents of the Family Practice Programs at both Swedish and Providence hospitals voted him Teacher of the Year.(Hat tip to In Reference to Murder)
For years, Larry wrote articles for medical journals as well as three non-fiction works, two of which dealt with medicine and one that explored his passion for antique music boxes.
When Larry retired from medicine in 1995 he plunged into writing the mystery novels he loved, producing both standalones and two series; the Music-Box Mysteries and a trilogy of Ragtime mysteries. They are not only beautifully written, but meticulously researched. To the delight of many, he also authored a children’s book dedicated to his grandson Simon and illustrated by his friend Vic Hugo. Seymour’s First Clarinet Concerto exemplifies Larry’s versatility as a writer. He recently completed a historical biography of Brun Campbell (Brun Campbell: The Original Ragtime Kid) and the book dearest to his heart—a mystery co-authored with his son Casey Karp. The RagTime Traveler will be available in April 2017.
Lee Child. But there are no new Agatha Christies or Ian Flemings, and both for Dick Francis (now Felix Francis) and Lee Child one has to wait two years for a new two-day read.
After all, if things go well, I’ll be employing his name, as well as the names of his close associates, in my fiction for some time to come.It took me a while to learn that Ed rarely traveled, and that he was in fact something of a hermit. Because we both lived in Iowa, and had writing styles that were not dissimilar, I for a time had the honor of being accused of using “Ed Gorman” as a pseudonym. What a writer that would make me.You can, and should, read the whole piece here.
“Is it true,” people would ask me, “that you’ve actually met Ed Gorman?” I actually had.
The thing is, being around people made Ed nervous. This still strikes me as strange because he made his pre-writing-career living as an ad man, PR guy and also writer of political speeches (politics being a lifelong interest, even obsession).
Stranger still is how charming and effortlessly social he was on the telephone. Scores of writers are bound to now come forward and say how well they knew him, but admit that they never met him. …
Once, responding to my efforts to get him to a Bouchercon, Ed told me didn’t like driving long distances because he’d once been in a car crash. I asked him why he didn’t fly there. He said he’d also been in a plane crash. I asked him why he didn’t take a train. He said he’d been in a train crash. Asking him why he always took the stairs in tall buildings, he said he’d once been in an elevator when it fell. There’s also a story about an escalator, but you get the drift.
Was he kidding me? I’m not sure. Really I don’t think so. He was a self-described bundle of neuroses, yet as grounded a writer as I’ve ever known. He worked hard and well and fast, and never compromised his craft and art. Now and then he would rail on about some writer whose work he disliked, but never in public, and no one had more generous, enthusiastic things to say about other writers and their work than Ed.
“We were married for 34 years, and he was still one of the most interesting people I know,” [his wife] Carol Gorman said. “He was very funny, he had quirky tastes and made everyone laugh. Even the people at the oncology department, he loved them all and they loved him.”FOLLOW-UP II: Gravetapping blogger Ben Boulden, who knew Gorman both as a colleague and a friend, writes this about the late author:
[Iowa City author and book reviewer Rob] Cline, who worked at a Cedar Rapids used bookstore years ago, first met Gorman as a frequent customer there—buying new authors, selling his old books and wanting to chat about what he was reading.
“As much as I loved his writing, what I’ll always remember is how much I liked him,” Cline said.
Ed Gorman was a great writer. It is true he was a great mystery writer. A great western writer. A great suspense, both dark and straight, writer. He was all that, but he was, simply, a great writer. He could write anything and he frequently escaped the genre where he wrote and created something very much like literature. His stories always said something about the human condition, the world we live in. His characters, always vivid, were three dimensional. He never wrote a wholly good hero, or a completely stained villain. He wrote about us—our experience in the world—in stories that were larger than life with players so real we can very nearly see them in our bathroom mirrors.READ MORE: “R.I.P., Ed Gorman,” by Mike Stotter (Shotsmag Confidential); “We’ve Lost Ed Gorman, a Great Friend to Writers,”
“Ed Gorman was a national treasure.” While a third added that “Ed had a huge heart, genuine humility, and an immense talent.”
He leaves behind a great literary legacy. I hardly know which titles to recommend to you. Just about anything has sharp writing, empathetic characters, and a deep compassion for flawed people. Sometimes, as in the western werewolf novel, Wolf Moon, he pulls off something you’d think nobody could. His series of Sam McCain mysteries is a wonderful portrayal of an era of the recent American past. If you’ve never read one of his books [before] this week, honor his memory by giving one a try. Just about anything you pick up will reward you.So this is the first weekend in a changed world, the first weekend A.E. (After Ed), the first weekend I live with his gentle, encouraging voice silenced. Despite the fact that I have myriad newer novels to read and review, I have just cracked open my copy of The Autumn Dead. Reading it again seems like a small way of paying Gorman back for all he’s done for crime fiction, and for me. But, humble man that he was, I know he would enjoy the gesture.
mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time”), the work of Burroughs (“I could feel the Federals moving steadily closer”) is much different. Junky is sinister and wary, an episodic, illuminating, and sometimes ennui-producing book.
about child-addicts and senators demanding the death
penalty for dope peddlers. It didn’t sound right to me. Who wants kids for customers? They never have enough money and they always spill under questioning.”Three young hoodlums from Brooklyn drifted in, wooden-faced, hands-in-pockets, stylized as ballet. They were looking for Jack. He had given them a short count in some deal. At least, that was the general idea. They conveyed their meaning less by words than by significant jerks of the head and by stalking around the apartment and leaning against the walls. At length, one of them walked to the door and jerked his head. They filed out.Norman Mailer nailed it when he famously called Burroughs “the American Genet,” Jean Genet being a fellow traveler of Burroughs, a French writer, criminal, homosexual, and public conscience of a sort. Of lawbreakers and their milieu, Genet, like Burroughs, had much to say, including: “Repudiating the virtues of your world, criminals hopelessly agree to organize a forbidden universe. They agree to live in it. The air there is nauseating: they can breathe it.”
fiction, and the co-editor of a forthcoming history of late-20th-century pulp fiction and youth counter-culture, Nette writes the blog Pulp Curry and has penned two novels: Ghost Money [2012] and the brand-new Gunshine State, which has won review plaudits here and here.)
concentrate heavily on the mechanics of planning and conducting each crime. Parker is a craftsman. It just so happens his chosen trade is illegal, and Westlake was expert at portraying him at work.“Well, there is always the promise that it might go right for a Wyatt or a Parker. There’s also the tension of the actual crime, and when it falls apart when he robs a bank or whatever and things go wrong. Can Wyatt retrieve the situation? Can he get the money back? Can he find out who betrayed him? That’s where the tension lies. Wyatt finding out where it has gone wrong and how he is going to get his revenge or get the money back or both.”One of my favorites among the early Parker books is The Sour Lemon Score (1969). In it, Parker pulls a heist, but one of his gang members, George Uhl, steals the take—$33,000—and kills all of his partners except for Parker. Parker then spends the rest of the novel traveling up and down the eastern U.S. seaboard searching for Uhl and the cash. As is usually the case, things get complex when a couple of hoods pick up on the scent of the money and try to muscle in.
The Guardian profiled the new line of crime comics from Hard Case Crime and Titan Comics. The stellar lineup starts off today with the release of Triggerman, the tale of a convict in Prohibition-era Chicago on a mission to save the girl he left behind, from Walter Hill, director of 1979 cult classic gang movie The Warriors. That will be followed a week later by Peepland, written by crime authors Gary Phillips and Christa Faust (herself a former peep show employee) about the seedy goings-on at 1980s Times Square peep show booths.READ MORE: “CIS: Christa Faust and Gary Phillips Interviewed”
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