"Sherlock Holmes": The Official Trailer

I don't care what the stuffy Sherlock Holmes buffs think. As a revisionist-loving Sherlockian of more than 40 years, I think this trailer for the new Guy Ritchie movie looks like a whole lotta fun. And the film will probably result in tens of thousands of new Conan Doyle readers by year's end.

The naughty side of Sherlock Holmes

The cover of this 1950s paperback edition of Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles is sooooooo odd, so '50s, so pulp, and so, well, naughty, that it's one of my favorites.

Coming this Christmas

Things I miss about the 1960s

Classic private eye literature like this.

Gregory Mcdonald RIP

Author Gregory Mcdonald died from cancer last Sunday. He was 71.

Besides writing for newspapers, Mcdonald wrote the Fletch series of crime thrillers. If your only experiences with Fletch are the horrible two movies starring Chevy Chase, do yourself a very big favor and get hold of Mcdonald’s first three books, all published in the ’70s — Fletch; Confess, Fletch (which introduced another series character, Flynn); and Fletch’s Fortune. Over the past thirty years, I’ve read each of those novels at least five times. They are all massively entertaining, and they taught me a lot about writing.

Mcdonald wrote eight other novels in the Fletch series, two of them about Fletch’s son. Unfortunately, none of them are as good as the original three.

I’ll miss Gregory Mcdonald.

Your Tuesday night moment of noir

Some novels’ opening sentences are so goddamn fantastic, you just gotta share ’em. Hat tip to Duane, who’s written some brilliant opening sentences himself.

“When his girlfriend greeted him at the door dressed only in a T-shirt and thong, then kissed him hard on the mouth without a word before pulling him into her ground-floor bedroom, she was so worked up she didn’t even notice that he was wearing gloves.”

Deadline
by Simon Kernick
(Corgi, 2008)

Who is Kent Allard?

Here’s big, big, very big news for fans of The Shadow. The August 8, 1937, pulp novel “The Shadow Unmasks,” by Walter Gibson (aka Maxwell Grant), has finally, for the first time ever, been reprinted, complete with its original art. This is the notorious story that rocked the pulp magazine world when it revealed once and for all the true identity of The Shadow. For six years, Gibson had told readers that Lamont Cranston was just one of the crime-fighter’s public faces, a disguise The Shadow adopted only when the real world-traveling Cranston was out of town. So who was The Shadow really? He turned out to be aviator-adventurer Kent Allard, WWI aviator hero and adventurer, thought lost in Central America. This was a very cool revelation in its day, I imagine, and it’s great to be able to read the story for the first time. “The Shadow Unmasks” is paired up with “The Yellow Band” in The Shadow Vol. 15, part of Nostalgia Ventures’ terrific pulp reprint series. The volume also includes bonus articles about the famous Shadow “identity reveal” and a short bio of Colonel P. H. Fawcett, the explorer who inspired Gibson’s creation of Kent Allard.

Amazon claims the book is not yet available, but I found it at my local Borders last Friday.