100 Years Ago in Philadelphia

Strikers attack a horse-drawn car in Kensington, late February, 1910.

(Photo from the Bain Collection at the Library of Congress. For a super-nifty higher-res version, click on the photo.)

Blockheads, Rejoice!

I know I'm still supposed to be sore at Amazon.com, but yesterday the cold hard ball of ice in the middle of my heart melted a little when I received an email newsletter from Lawrence Block. Seems that Mr. Block has unleashed a virtual treasury of his work for the Kindle, including a new Kindle-only collection of intros and afterwords called Introducing Myself and Others. It's a fantastic idea, because Block is one of those writers whose intros/outros, etc. are alone worth the price of admission. (The others who come to mind are Harlan Ellison and Jack Ketchum.) This new collection is only $3.98, and includes introductions for books that haven't even been published yet -- namely, forthcoming reprints of Block's early smut pulp novel Campus Tramp and Hellcats & Honey Girls, a collection of three "erotic" novels he co-wrote with Donald E. Westlake.

Block's also released other rarities, such as Cinderella Sims, Ronald Rabbit is a Dirty Old Man, and my favorite of the lot, his pulp action thriller The Specialists. All $3.98 each, all highly recommended. My Kindle is officially allowed back in the house.

Legends of the Underwood #19: John Hughes

"Writing was, for Hughes, not so much a profession as a condition of life. The thoughts that germinated in his brain took a direct path to his hands, which filled notebooks, floppy disks, and hard drives with screenplays, stories, sketches, and jokes. When he wasn't writing creatively, he was writing about how much writing he was doing. A spiral-bound logbook from 1985 finds Hughes keeping track of his progress on Ferris Bueller. The basic story line, he notes, was developed on February 25. It was successfully pitched the following day. And then he was off: '2-26 Night only 10 pages... 2-27 26 pages... 2-28 19 pages... 3-1 9 pages... 3-2 20 pages... 3-3 24 pages.' Wham-bam, script done. All in one week."

--from David Kamp's "Sweet Bard of Youth," his piece on late director John Hughes in the current Vanity Fair (February 2010).

(Nineteenth in a series.)

The Whole Amazon eBook Price War Came to Mind...

... when I read this passage in Gavin Lambert's short story, "The Slide Area":

She scratches her nose with a jewelled and freckled finger. "Are you sure you haven't read The Case of the Black-Eyed Blonde?"

"Absolutely."

"Then I shall have to take it on trust. With an opening paragraph like that I think..." She breaks off vaguely, fumbling in her crocodile bag and giving the assistant a quarter.

The assistant says: "Thirty-five cents, please."

She takes an alarmed step backwards. "You mean it's one of the expensive ones?"

"It's thirty-five cents."

The Countess replaces the book in the Westerns rack. "Much too expensive," she says firmly, "when no one knows if it's really good. I adore pulp literature but one must retain one's sense of values. Where is your selection of twenty-five cent crime novels, please?"

Reprinted in David L. Ulin's Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology (Library of America, 2002).

The Blonde Goes to France

Here's the cover of the French edition of The Blonde, just out from Rivages/Noir. As usual, I'd love to hear what you guys think of the cover.

Me? I'm loving it. Shots of booze, most likely scotch or whiskey. Stark, elegant design. Moody, too. They even made my long-ass name look somewhat cool. What's not to love about this? So, strangely enough, there are two books out in France right now with my name on them, the other being the French edition of Level 26 (my collaboration with Anthony Zuiker) -- which is already a bestseller over there. I think this means I need to take the Bride to Paris, pronto. Right? (Thanks to Frédéric Fontès for the tip.)

Legends of the Underwood #18: Samuel Fuller

"We went to work on the script on a Monday morning... As [Hank Wales] paced back and forth feeding me local color, I pounded away on my Royal. By talking it out we piece together the action, plot twists, and dialogue. The first ninety-page draft was finished before breakfast on Saturday morning. After eggs, bacon and hash browns, we found an agent, Charles Feldman, who happened to be in his office on the weekend. He sold our script to Twentieth Century Fox on the following Monday morning for fifty grand."

--legendary director Samuel Fuller, on writing Confirm or Deny (1941) in his autobiography A Third Face (Applause, 2002).

(Eighteenth in a series.)

Amazon Hostage Crisis: Day Six

As reported elsewhere, Amazon and Macmillan (my publisher) are in the middle of a brutal e-book price war. Now I'm not a business reporter, nor do I understand the intricacies of the economics of book publishing, but it seems pretty clear that Amazon is acting like a bunch of petulant, greedy assbags.

It pains me to say this, because I love all booksellers, great and small. If you sell books, you're on the side of the angels as far as I'm concerned. I've been a happy Amazon customer since 1997. I even remember the first book I ordered: Walter Mosley's Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned. And that was the first of many, many Amazon orders. Just ask my wife.

But last Friday night, Amazon unceremoniously ripped the "buy buttons" from every single Macmillan title, including my three novels from St. Martin's (The Wheelman, The Blonde, Severance Package) and my fourth, out in April (Expiration Date). There were early rumors that Amazon might restore those buttons, but as of now (8 a.m., Thursday morning), there's nothing doing.

What's gone unreported thus far are the hundreds of thousands of victims of this price war -- the collateral damage, if you will.

I'm not talking about writers or readers. Though they, too, suffer.

I'm talking about the books.

Imagine pallets and pallets of unsold Macmillan titles, waiting for a reader to 1-Click them to life. Yes, of course you can purchase Macmillan books from other chain stores, indie shops and online dealers. Which is great, and I encourage you to do so. The books sold in those stores are lucky. They have the chance to be sold and enjoyed. Polybagged and shelved lovingly. Even loaned to friends and family.

Not so with copies held hostage by Amazon.

So for the past two days I've tried to mount negotiation/rescue efforts using the popular social network "Twitter." You can follow my earliest attempts below. But I encourage you to also make your voice heard. Do not let these books go gently into the remaindered good night. Free my books! Free all Macmillan books! And God have mercy on the souls of their captors.

My opening volley, from early on Day 5.

There are reports of hostages being freed, but not my books.

The first reports of mistreatment of captive titles.

Here, I follow the advice of a hostage negotiator.

I attempt to bargain with the captors; my requests are met with stony silence.

A report from inside the Amazon compound reveals shocking conditions.

And then... nothing.

The movement to free the hostages expands to local churches.

The exact number of hostages is impossible to determine.

A request to send in supplies and bibliophiliac aid goes unanswered. Amazon, why do you want these innocent books to suffer?

For more updates, check my Twitter page. And pray this is resolved soon.

UPDATE: War is over. If you want.

New Comics Today: Metal!

I have two things on the racks at finer comic shops everywhere: Cable #23, which is the next-to next-to last issue, as well as an 11-page story called "Brainchild" in The Indomintable Iron Man #1. The latter is one of those cool, oversized, all black-and-white anthologies Marvel has been putting out lately, which so far have included Shang-Chi, Master of Kung Fu and Rampaging Wolverine. This is a thrill, because I'm a huge fan of b&w comics in general, going back to the Warren and Skywald horror mags from the 1970s, and of course, more recent crime comics like Sin City and Torso. For some reason, the Marvel catalog listing only mentions Paul Cornell and Howard Chaykin, but Alex Irvine and I are in there, too! (Honest!) Hope you give it a shot.

Legends of the Underwood #17: James Cameron

"Cameron took both jobs. This meant that, in a three-month period in 1983, he had to write three scripts. Cameron approached the dilemma schematically, as a Terminator might, scanning the scene with a computer readout in its head. He decided each script would be two hours long and 120 pages, for a total page count of 360. He divided the total number of waking hours he had during that three-month period by 360 and figured out how many pages per hour he had to write. 'And I just wrote that many pages per our,' he says. Cameron wrote longhand on yellow legal pads, mostly starting in the evening and going into the early morning hours, so that he could attend to preproduction duties on The Terminator during the day... He downed pot after pot of coffee, ate plenty of junk food, and... didn't really finish."

--From Rebecca Keegan's new Cameron bio, The Futurist (Crown, 2009). The three scripts were a Terminator rewrite, Alien 2, and Rambo: First Blood Part 2. Of course, he eventually finished.

(Seventeenth in a series.)