Cry at Dusk is part adventure pulp and part hardboiled crime novel. Pulp writers from the golden age like Lester Dent tended to always write adventure serials even when writing PBOs for Gold Medal. Another case that comes to mind is Cornell Woolrich's The Savage Bride which owes more to Rider Haggard than to his crime novels of the 40s.
What was interesting about the first half of Cry at Dusk--and the cover suggest this as well--is that it reads pretty much like a typical GM crime novel, but then turns into an exotic adventure of lost treasure.
Sometimes Fredric Brown's premises are a little far-fetched. But, if you buy into them you're generally rewarded with a good read. We All Killed Grandma is a classic example. A man discovers the body of his murdered grandmother and immediately lapses into amnesia leaving him to try to solve a murder of which he himself might be guilty.
Wow, started off the year with a bang! This one from 1957 by Jonathan Craig is truly an undiscovered treasure of the Gold Medal era. It has all the necessary elements to make for a hardboiled crime novel. Especially the femme fatale, in this case a 15-year-old girl, and the twist ending.
One of my favorite authors/songwriters/cartoonists/producers of the 60s and 70s was Shel Silverstein. I was skimming through a book recently, called 100 Great Poems for Boys, and reading some to my son when I had to stop and chuckle over the inclusion of the lyrics to Silverstein's A Boy Named Sue. It was a fairly big hit for Johnny Cash in the late 60s. Silverstein would go on to write many songs for Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show, including their biggest hit, Sylvia's Mother.
Here's a clip of Shel Silverstein on the Johnny Cash Show:
A Boy Named Sue
My daddy left home when I was three
And he didn't leave much to ma and me
Just this old guitar and an empty bottle of booze.
Now, I don't blame him cause he run and hid
But the meanest thing that he ever did
Was before he left, he went and named me "Sue."
Well, he must o' thought that is quite a joke
And it got a lot of laughs from a' lots of folk,
It seems I had to fight my whole life through.
Some gal would giggle and I'd get red
And some guy'd laugh and I'd bust his head,
I tell ya, life ain't easy for a boy named "Sue."
Well, I grew up quick and I grew up mean,
My fist got hard and my wits got keen,
I'd roam from town to town to hide my shame.
But I made a vow to the moon and stars
That I'd search the honky-tonks and bars
And kill that man who gave me that awful name.
Well, it was Gatlinburg in mid-July
And I just hit town and my throat was dry,
I thought I'd stop and have myself a brew.
At an old saloon on a street of mud,
There at a table, dealing stud,
Sat the dirty, mangy dog that named me "Sue."
Well, I knew that snake was my own sweet dad
From a worn-out picture that my mother'd had,
And I knew that scar on his cheek and his evil eye.
He was big and bent and gray and old,
And I looked at him and my blood ran cold
And I said: "My name is 'Sue!' How do you do!
Now your gonna die!!"
Well, I hit him hard right between the eyes
And he went down, but to my surprise,
He come up with a knife and cut off a piece of my ear.
But I busted a chair right across his teeth
And we crashed through the wall and into the street
Kicking and a' gouging in the mud and the blood and the beer.
I tell ya, I've fought tougher men
But I really can't remember when,
He kicked like a mule and he bit like a crocodile.
I heard him laugh and then I heard him cuss,
He went for his gun and I pulled mine first,
He stood there lookin' at me and I saw him smile.
And he said: "Son, this world is rough
And if a man's gonna make it, he's gotta be tough
And I knew I wouldn't be there to help ya along.
So I give ya that name and I said goodbye
I knew you'd have to get tough or die
And it's the name that helped to make you strong."
He said: "Now you just fought one hell of a fight
And I know you hate me, and you got the right
To kill me now, and I wouldn't blame you if you do.
But ya ought to thank me, before I die,
For the gravel in ya guts and the spit in ya eye
Cause I'm the son-of-a-bitch that named you "Sue.'"
I got all choked up and I threw down my gun
And I called him my pa, and he called me his son,
And I came away with a different point of view.
And I think about him, now and then,
Every time I try and every time I win,
And if I ever have a son, I think I'm gonna name him
Bill or George! Anything but Sue! I still hate that name!
Fire and Rain is a great book on a pivotal year in rock music, 1970. The subtitle is The Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel, James Taylor, CSNY and the Lost Story of 1970. It not only covers the aforementioned musicians and, in most cases, the disintegration of the groups, but also the political climate of the times. In many ways it is a "lost story" or, at best, an often overlooked story of that year. We tend to forget or, maybe, try to forget, the bombings by radicals and the campus unrest and shootings.
This book dovetailed nicely with two other books I've read recently. It was like a sequel to Michael Walker's Laurel Canyon, picking up right where that book ends and being about many of the same musicians. It also covered the accidental bombing of a Fifth Avenue brownstone by the Weathermen that was part of the history of Greenwich Village by John Straugsbaugh, The Village: 400 Years of Beats and Bohemians, Radicals and Rogues, which I'd read just three weeks ago.
Last summer it was the Tom Collins, a refreshing summer drink, but this summer I've moved on to the equally refreshing Moscow Mule. As you can see by these ads from the 60's, featuring Woody Allen (left) and Robert Morse (right), lately of Mad Men fame, that the Mule was served traditionally in frosty copper mugs.
The recipe is simple: Just remember 1-2-3. 1 part Rose's Lime Juice, 2 parts vodka, and 3 parts ginger beer.
In an attempt to revive the popularity of vodka in the late 1950s, manufacturers were thinking of creative ways to overcome the stigma of a liquor long associated with communist Russia. In the midst of the cold war and the space race, Americans were shunning vodka and sales, although never as high as whisky in this country, were slumping. It wasn't until the mid-60s and the advent, and help, of James Bond, who order vodka martinis "shaken, not stirred" in the Bond movies that started in 1963 that sales started to revive.
One of the better books of New York history I've read in a few years. It's actually the second book I've read in the past year about a specific neighborhood, the first being Laurel Canyon, another interesting read.
Although the books covers a lot of ground, it does give short shrift to some interesting aspects of Greenwich Village history, most notably the Off-Off Broadway shows Three Penny Opera and The Fastasticks, which had a profound impact on, not only New York, but the rest of the country. There is only a mention of the cast of Three Penny Opera and nothing of the music.
The paragraph on the Fantasticks was a complete missed opportunity. Not only was the name misspelled--without the "k"--which could have been the result of over-zealous editing--but it only got slightly more attention than Three Penny Opera. Strausbaugh mentions one song, "Try to Remember," in addition to the cast and the fact that it was the longest running show in New York History.
He neglects to mention the fact that the show itself was a victim of 9/11, with the line "Try to remember the kind of September when life was slow and oh, so mellow," which New Yorkers and its few visitors in the aftermath found to poignant a reminder of the city before the disaster. To mention that would have helped fill another void in the book, that of the impact of the 9/11 tragedy on the neighborhood. It gets less attention than Robert Moses' attempt to run an expressway through it.
To a non-New Yorker these things might seem trivial, but the majority of his readership will likely be New Yorkers. But, since its strengths far outweigh it weaknesses, I'll still give it five stars.
This is one of those cult books that was in my TBR pile for decades. The Dice Man is part Been Down So Long It Looks Up to Me and part Naked Lunch. This was my second attempt at reading it, the first being in the mid-90s when I saw a pile of copies in a bookstore with a sign that read, "This book will change your life . . ." I thought, boy I should really get around to reading it if people are still so enthusiastic about 20 years later. I could only get about 80 pages into it. This time I stuck out and it paid off--a little--a little more than I expected, at least. But it did take me a month to plow through it.
It's an interesting premise--a psychiatrist who decides to add randomness to his life by assigning the options for every decision in his life to numbers on a die and then casting the die and allowing it to dictate which option to choose. He then starts to treat his patients with his dice therapy to some spectacular success but, mostly, to dismal failure. But the dice therapy idea catches on and becomes a cult, a kind of religion, eventually becoming a national phenomenon, despite being discredited by leading authorities.
The novel is a bit dated, written as it was in 1971, but does accurately reflect the time period of the book, specifically, August 1968 to April 1971, when the world seemed obsessed with finding new ways of living and elevating spiritual awareness though drugs or different religions. The Dice Man is essentially a satire of the time.
Cry at Dusk by Lester Dent
