Stone-Faced

In Cooperstown, NY, yesterday, on some unrelated to the writing agenda when Denise spotted the glum James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) sitting all stone-faced, seeming to ponder why everyone these days is more absorbed in talking no-hitters and stolen bases. His statue safeguards the grounds where his treasured Otsego Hall, the home his father built, once stood before it burned to the ground a few years after his passing. There was no parking so my charmer willingly hopped out to snap these photos while Ava and I looked on.

The Passing of David Price

We are deeply saddened to learn of the passing of David Price on March 1, 2011 and have decided to re-run his "last story" (Angel of Mercy, first published in January 2010) as a tribute to him.

On March 3, 2011, his short story was selected as a finalist for a 2011 Derringer Award.

Condolences can be sent to friend William Swank at wgswank@san.rr.com.

I hope everyone will take another look at this award-nominated story and leave a comment.




From Bill Swank:

Dave signed this for my son, Billy, when he was two or three years old. Dave went to Clairemont High School in San Diego, but didn't play football until he went to Cal Western where he made Little All-American. Billy went to Clairemont where he lettered in football.











Dave is in the back row, far right...

Agatha Christie – 35 Facts

Link here for thirty-five facts regarding the famous author.

Congratulations Hilary!

I'm very pleased to see that Hilary Davidson won the 2010 Spinetingler Award Best Short Story on the Web for "Insatiable." Elaine, dMix and I say a hearty congratulations to Ms. Davidson for entrusting BEAT to a PULP with such a fine story. I hope everyone drops a kudos to her either here or on the Spinetingler site. And don't forget her debut novel, THE DAMAGE DONE, is coming out a little later this year.

Norbert Davis

I’m re-running an old post today to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Norbert Davis’s birthday. Looking back, I borrowed heavily for this post and have attempted to include all the links below. I’ve never considered myself a strong reviewer, so please check the links of those who are.

Hard-boiled Wit: Ludwig Wittgenstein and Norbert Davis by Josef Hoffmann

Thrilling Detective

Rue Morgue Press

Black Mask

Norbert Davis is one of the great pulp writers whose name has fallen by the wayside, overshadowed by giants like Hammett and Chandler. But thanks to Otto Penzler's The Black Lizard Big Book Of Pulps, two great stories by Davis have been revived, The Price of a Dime and You'll Die Laughing, and received with great enthusiasm.

Norbert Davis, sitting, right;
Dashiell Hammett, standing, right;
Raymond Chandler, standing, second from left.

Penzler explains in the forward to Dime that Black Mask editor, Joseph T. Shaw, published only five stories by Davis because Shaw didn't appreciate Davis's Thurber-esque approach to hard boiled fiction. Yet, it’s the whimsy mixed with violence that gives Norbert Davis his signature style. A perfect example is in Sally’s in the Alley (1943) where the protagonist, detective Doan, gets into a tussle with a good-looking Hollywood actress, and her concerned agent calls out:

“Hit her in the stomach!”
“What?” said Doan, startled.
The shadow jiggled both fists in an agony of apprehension. “Not in the face! Don’t hit her face! Thirty-five hundred dollars a week!”

But Davis also proves he can keep up with Hammett and Chandler in stylistic cynicism. In Sally:

"The Mojave Desert at sunset looks remarkably like a painting of a sunset on the Mojave Desert which, when you come to think of it, is really quite surprising. Except that the real article doesn’t show such good color sense as the average painting does. Yellows and purples and reds and various other violent sub-units of the spectrum are splashed all over the sky, in a monumental exhibition of bad taste. They keep moving and blurring and changing around, like the color movies they show in insane asylums to keep the idiots quiet."

It’s this combination of gifted prose, hard boiled action, sprinkled with humor that has compelled me to read Davis. However it can be difficult to find his work. His major novels and the Max Latin anthology are available from Amazon and I have ordered some of them. Still, there are many short stories from Detective Tales, Black Mask, Phantom Detective, etc. that have yet to be compiled.

So what happened to Norbert Davis? Perhaps, success came a little too quickly and at an early age. Davis began selling stories while attending college at Stanford. During a writing class, an instructor criticized one of Norbert’s efforts to which Norbert stood up and countered, “Sir, this is a check for $200 from Argosy. The editor didn’t find much fault with my story.” But the professor derided Davis by saying they were there to learn ‘literary merit.’ When Davis finished college, he continued to pursue his writing. His stories quickly turned to gold and his potential seemed limitless. In the mid 1940s, he left the pulps and exclusively wrote for magazines like The Saturday Evening Post where he could make more money. But that success was short lived and the ‘slicks’ began rejecting his work. John D. MacDonald pointed out that even though Davis produced some exceptional writing, it was mixed with segments that were lackluster. He goes on to say Davis could have learned more if he had stuck longer with the pulps. [Rue Morgue Press]

From what I found online, there seems to be some confusion concerning his death, but it's known that Davis was going through several stressful events. He was grieving over his son who was stillborn, he was increasingly frustrated with his career and he had received a diagnosis of cancer. On July 28, 1949, Norbert Davis, the man who had brought humor to the world of hard boiled writing, committed suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning. He was only forty years old.

Novels:
The Mouse in the Mountain (1943)
Sally's in The Alley (1943)
Oh, Murderer Mine (1946) ...
Murder Picks the Jury (1947; written with W. T. Ballard)

Collections:
The Adventures of Max Latin (1988)...

See also http://www.mysteryfile.com/NDavis/Wit.html

Donald E. Westlake

I dropped by Bill Crider's site and was floored by the news of Donald Westlake's passing. Of all his work, the Richard Stark novels are among my favorites and I'd be hard pressed to pick just one at the top of the list as I've never read a bad book from Westlake. He has left behind an incredible legacy and it goes without saying, he will be missed.

It's Meme Time

I GOT MEMED! Brian Lindenmuth challenged Patti Abbott who in turn named yours truly. I need to list writers I’ve read who were new to me this year and then tag some others. This is easy because I’m sitting on a bunch of submissions for Beat to a Pulp (shameless plug), so I’ll name a few of these and then several gone but not forgotten authors.

Kieran Shea’s "Backing the Stakes" will be featured in mid-January in BTAP. His writing is sharp and concise. No words wasted. His hard boiled yarn hits you with both barrels center mass.

Jack Martin's’s "A Man Called Masters" is in the tradition of western giants like Zane Grey. A wonderful story and I will be looking forward to his full length Black Horse western coming out next year.

Charles Gramlich and I ‘met’ through James Reasoner’s blog. After we both survived Hurricanes Gustav and Ike, I decided to drop him a message on the Razored Zen. I was impressed with his horror offerings in October and still think he should start a monthly magazine. I contacted him about a story for my e-zine and he delivered "Whiskey, Guns, and Sin." Great title and extraordinary pulp. If you have never read his work before, you’ll be hooked after this.

And for the golden oldies: Luke Short, Eugene Cunningham, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, Will Eisner.

And now, I hope they don’t mind. I'll pass the torch on to Scott D. Parker and Chris, The Louis L’Amour Project, if they would like to give it a try.