Nostalgia City Mysteries

Mark S. Bacon

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About mbaconauthor

Mystery writer and journalist; former newspaper police reporter.

7:33 am - March 26, 2014 -

Today’s flash fiction

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In honor of the start of baseball season, we take a break from crime and mysteries with today’s flash fiction about the grand old game.

Platitudinous Pronouncer

“That was a clutch hit,” said the color man. “Eaton hit a rocket. He really came to play. Showed mental toughness.”

Gawd, thought Dick, the play-by-play announcer, was that four in a row? Where’d they dig this guy up?

“You know all the clichés, don’t you, Ron?” Dick said during a commercial break, hoping he’d get the message.

“I call ‘em as I see ‘em,” Ron said slapping Dick on the back.

A week later, Ron was downcast. “They canned me,” he told Dick. “Said I was too trite. Can you beat that?”

“Your career just took a bad hop.”

Category: New story Tags: , , , ,
7:58 am - March 20, 2014 -

Is new Marlowe novel too literary?

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“From thirty feet away she looked like a lot of class.  From ten feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from thirty feet away.”

–Raymond Chandler, The High Window

There’ll never be another Raymond Chandler.  Or will there?  Irish novelist John Banville, writing under the name Benjamin Black, has written The Black-Eyed Blonde, a Philip Marlowe detective story.

It’s so authentic, says New York Times reviewer Olen Steinhauer that it “could be passed off as a newly discovered Chandler manuscript found in some dusty La Jolla closet, leaving only linguistic detectives to ferret out the fraud.”  Apparently the book is too authentic as Steinhauer writes that he had hoped for “something fresher.”Black Eyed Blonde

Bob Hoover, writing in the Dallas Morning News, did not agree that the novel sounded like Chandler.  “He’s [Black] too literary, for a start, to create a scene without calling attention to the common techniques of a ‘serious novelist,’ a state Chandler disdained.”

Mark Lawson reviewing The Black Eyed Blonde for The Guardian seems to like the more literary style.  “What Banville, through Black, brings to Chandler is perhaps an enhanced literary sensibility.”  The more literary take doesn’t put him off and he concludes that “the protagonist of The Black-Eyed Blonde is easy to visualise as an older [Humphrey] Bogart.”

THE BLACK-EYED BLONDE

Benjamin Black / 290 pp. / Henry Holt & Company / $27

Hyperlinks:

Marlowe Reviews in:

The Guardian

The Dallas Morning News

The New York Times

Categories: Mystery novels, New mystery book Tags: , ,
8:55 am - March 12, 2014 -

New crime books briefly noted

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Way to Go

Jennifer Moss
Black Opal Books  294 pages
$3.99 Kindle    $10.55 trade paper

When motivational speaker Jessica Way entered the squad room, she stopped to smile at every cop who was staring at her.  When Det. Ryan Doherty asked her to sit down “she scrutinized Ryan from head to toe in a way that made him feel almost violated.”   She told the detective she thought someone was trying to kill her, but he didn’t take her quite seriously.  A day later she was dead, shot in the face.  This novel is the second in the series.

 

City of Darkness and Light

Rhys Bowen
Minotaur Books   320 pages
$11.04 Kindle    $19.99 hardcover

I got my first introduction to Ms. Bowen in her earlier, delightful Constable Evans books that take place in Wales.  You learn about Welsh customs, geography and language while you’re solving a mystery.  This new book is the 13th in the Molly Murphy mystery series featuring feature an Irish immigrant woman in turn-of-the-century New York City.

 

Drowning Barbie 

Frederick Ramsay
Poisoned Pen Press  250 pages
$6.99 Kindle  $21.20 hardback  $13.46  paperback

The intriguing title of this mystery is exceeded in bizarre only by the name of the first murder victim: Ethel Smut.  This is the nineth in Ramsay’s Ike Schwartz series of police procedurals.

 

Pinkerton’s Great Detective:  The Amazing Life and Times of James McParland

Beau Riffenburgh
Viking  384 pages
$32.95 hardback

McParland was a top man in Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency and a tough character.  In creating this biography Riffenburgh used recently released Pinkerton archives.  He tells, among other things, how McParland became famous breaking up the Molly Maguires, an infamous gang of coal miners accused of murder, arson and other crimes.   McParland was, according Ben MacIntyre’s review in The New York Times, “the prototype of a character that has become an adored part of America’s cultural landscape, the hard-boiled gumshoe, the lone sleuth in search of justice.”

 

Jeff Parker’s reissues

When was the last time you read a crime story by T. Jefferson Parker?  Four of his relatively recent novels, Storm Runners,The Fallen, California Girl and Cold Pursuit have been reissued. Parker’s latest is The Famous and the Dead, the conclusion to his series about Los Angeles County sheriff ’s deputy Charlie Hood, attached to the ATF, working along the U.S.-Mexican border.  The Washington Post said the book was, “not only well-plotted and suspenseful, but subtle, surprising and endearingly perverse.”  Three-time Edgar winner Parker rarely disappoints.

Categories: Mystery novels, mystery writers, New mystery book, paper books, Reviews of mystery/suspense books Tags: , , , , , , , , ,