Jayne Says

The Film Forum in NYC is throwing a three-week heist film festival this October, and tucked away in the middle is an an unofficial David Goodis Heist Novel Mini-Fest: a double feature of both Nightfall and The Burglar (starring Jayne Mansfield and Dan Duryea, above). Both are new 35mm prints. God, I wish Bouchercon weren't the same week.

Time Travel at 21st and Pine

Check out Matthew Styer's "Rephotographing Philadelphia," where he takes vintage city images from PhillyHistory.org, then photographs the same location in the present. Amazing stuff.

Fredric Brown: The Taos Years

This summer's cross-country trip took us to Santa Fe, New Mexico, which is only 90 minutes away from Taos, where one of my favorite writers, Fredric Brown, lived for a couple of years. So of course I dragged my family up there. (Longtime Secret Dead Blog readers will be familiar with my slightly-obsessive attempts to trace Brown's former addresses in El Segundo and Venice, CA. One day, I will collect them all. Oh yes, I will.)

Anyway, we headed to Taos, but I wasn't armed with much in the way of research. My copy of Happy Ending -- the Dennis McMillan collection which includes Elizabeth Brown's memoir of living in Taos -- was at home in Philly. I had no address. But I did remember that Brown used to drink at a joint called El Patio. And sure enough, just off the town square, I encountered a place called The Alley Cantina, which used to be El Patio until the late 1990s. Did I drag my family inside for lunch? Hell yes I did. Here's the view from the inside:

So I can finally say I threw back a beer (Sierra Nevada Pale Ale) in the same room where Brown tossed one (probably not a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale) back. No idea if the place has been significantly remodeled since Brown's day (1949-1950), but there was a nifty vintage menu posted in the hallway. Ah, those prices:

As cool as that was, I was still hoping to pin down the actual Fredric Brown residence. I tried doing a little Google searching on my phone, but no dice. After cursing myself for not packing that copy of Happy Ending, I checked out the rest of Taos. Not far from the former El Patio was a place dedicated to a grisly bit of local history:


Seems this is where the first governor of the New Mexico Territory, Charles Bent, got his ass scalped and killed by a band of angry Mexicans and Pueblo Indians. ("Hey, kids, check this out!")

Only later, when I returned home and consulted my copy of Happy Ending did I realize:

This is where Fredric Brown lived.

Seems a writer pal named Walt Sheldon knew that an apartment in the Governor Bent House was open, and urged Fred and Elizabeth to take a look. In the words of Elizabeth Brown:

There was a legend... that the governor's ghost walked in the patio at night. The whole story made me shudder. But on seeing the place in bright sunshine one did not think of Indians and war whoops and murder and ghosts in the patio.

They moved in soon after. So, mission accomplished, in a strange way.

I also wandered by a place featured in Brown's (highly recommended) novel The Far Cry: the Hotel La Fonda.


The kids did not complain, as there was a Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory on the ground floor. (Probably not there in Brown's day.)

Robert Heinlein on Philly Corruption

I've been reading William H. Patterson Jr.'s bio of SF legend Robert A. Heinlein and came across an interesting passage about my hometown. Seems Heinlein worked at the Philadelphia Navy Yard for a few years, but really disliked his commute:

There was subway service in Philadelphia, but it did not go all the way to the Navy Yard. You had to take a shuttle bus from the subway. "Robert told me," Virginia Heinlein recalled, "that [the Philadelphia City Fathers] had stolen the money for the subway continuation down to the Navy Yard." Philadelphia's municipal politics had never seriously been challenged by reformers, operating instead by good, old-fashioned graft. In the meantime, commuters carpooled to the Navy Yard from the suburbs.

(Photo courtesy PhillyHistory.org.)

A Public Service Announcement...

... from your friends at Secret Dead Blog.

(This was the headline treatment for a piece on Prohibition-era bootlegger Mickey Duffy, who worked in Philly and Southern New Jersey.)

Bogie's Hiding Out

And so am I.

I'm finally back home from my six week trek to California, and there photos and stories and general fits of insanity to share. But there are also deadlines to meet, so I'll post here and on Twitter (twitter.com/swierczy) whenever I need a break from the action.

But man, do I have stories.

In the meantime, you should definitely visit the brand-spankin' new Mulholland Books site, because John Schoenfelder and Miriam Parker and the crew have been posting one hardboiled/noir goodie after another. Don Winslow! Lawrence Block! Joe R. Lansdale! I can't even begin to tell you how happy I am to be part of this outfit. (If you dig around the site, you'll find a few words about my forthcoming trilogy for Mulholland.) So follow 'em, friend 'em, cut your palms and become blood brothers with 'em. You won't regret it.

(Photo: A third-floor apartment in the Malloch Building on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco, a main setting for the 1947 noir, Dark Passage, based on the novel by David Goodis.)

Kayo With Me

So I've been on this cross-country road trip (which is why this blog hasn't been updated since June 1973, or something) and while I have many, many adventures to recount... I thought I'd share a list of books I picked up today at Kayo Books on Post Street in San Francisco, just a block east of Dashiell Hammett's old apartment. I've been dying to visit this shop--which sells all vintage paperbacks, all the time--since Bill Crider mentioned it on his blog. I spent an hour shopping, though I easily could have disappeared inside this place for days on end.

My purchases fell into two categories: lurid true crime, and lurid fiction. The true crime:

Sintown U.S.A., a beat-up (but entirely readable) Lion pb. The real skinny on mid-century sin palaces like... Buffalo! Pittsburgh! Oklahoma City! Er... Fresno! (Edited by Noah Sarlat.)

Hollywood R.I.P, by I.G. Edmonds, a Regency paperback from 1963 detailing all kinds of grisly L.A. death stories. Harlan Ellison was a Regency editor for a brief while; I wonder if this was one of the titles he acquired.

Patty/Tania by Jerry Belcher and Don West and The Strange Case of Patty Hearst by John Pascal and Francine Pascal. What can I say? In a Patty Hearst mood.

Sudden Endings by Vin Packer (a.k.a. Marijane Meaker). An upbeat Gold Medal about 13 infamous suicides. How could I resist?

The "Dutch" Schultz Story by Ted Addy. Yeah, I can't seem to pass up gangster paperbacks, either.

The Girl in Lover's Lane by Charles Boswell and Lewis Thompson and The Girl in the Death Cell by Fred J. Cook. Apparently, Gold Medal had this "classic murder trials" series, all of which focused on girls, judging from the titles. The latter, Death Cell, covers the infamous Ruth Snyder/Henry Judd Gray case that inspired James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice.

As for the fiction:

A Man Called Spade. Hammett, of course. A Dell mapback, too. Beat to shit, but only $10... which is a great price for this edition. Had to own it.

As Tough As They Come, edited by Will Oursler. One of those great hardboiled anthologies, up there with The Hard-Boiled Omnibus. Also a beat to shit copy, but only $3 for a thick little hardboiled bible.

The Big Kiss-Off by Day Keene. There's always room for more Keene.

Suddenly By Shotgun by Norman Daniels. Hollywood starlet noir.

The Deadly Desire and Run for the Money by Robert Colby. Pretty sure Crider mentioned these. At $3 a pop, worth the risk.

42 Days For Murder, by Roger Torrey. Not a vintage paperback, but a Dennis McMillan reprint from 1988. Still, I couldn't resist, because it's about an SF PI who goes to Reno. (Coincidentally, I am a nerd currently in SF, and headed to Reno in the near future.)

Anybody out there ready any of these?

For All You Body Double Fans Out There

Here's a shot of the famous Chemosphere, as featured in that trashy-but-awesome Brian De Palma classic. If you squint, you can see Craig Wasson, staring back down at you with a telescope.