As I’ve said before, Richard Matheson has probably influenced more writers than any other author alive. Three generations of men and women have borrowed both his singular storytelling skills and the peerless ways he structures his fiction, short and long alike. Barry Hoffman at Gauntlet Press has created a unique Matheson library of TV and film scripts, short novels and short stories new and old. Now he’s begun MATHESON UNCOLLECTED: VOLUME ONE.
Here, we have a range of short stories, all of them excellent, plus an aborted novel from the 1950s about a married couple aboard a transport rocket ship headed to a moon colony where humans have already set up shop The richness of ideas and emotions make for an unfinished piece of writing that makes you wish Matheson had finished it.
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It’s fitting for two reasons that Max Allan Collins (here writing as Patrick Culhane) should quote Herman Wouk at the start of his new novel RED SKY IN MORNING. Wouk’s quote concerns his naval service in WWII for one thing, and it is naval service and the second World War that is the heart of this story.
And quoting Wouk, the greatest popular storyteller of his time, signals the reader that this is among the most ambitious novels Collins has written to date. RED SKY is not a crime novel. It is a big, riveting mainstream novel that happens to include a crime. It is very much in the traditon of Wouk.
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The problem with mystery series — at least for me — is that too many of them go on past their prime. Part of this is because readers don’t seem to notice the fall off that begins with adventure number 31 and continues all the way through adventure number78. The writer is on autopilot and so is the reader. The whole thing becomes a ritual, like mass.
You’ll note that I said “for me.” I’m in the minority in the mystery world where series are concerned. But that said, I’ve read all the Nero Wolfes twice over and I’m perfectly willing to read them through again. Happily there are exceptions, like Bill Pronzini’s Nameless Detective series, of which FEVER is the latest.
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Allan Guthrie’s new novel SAVAGE NIGHT opens with a page that dares you not to keep reading. I lost the dare and I’m glad I did. In prose almost ruthlessly simple, Guthrie tells us the tale of two Edinburgh small-time crime families who visit enough violence on each other to please Dick Cheney and all people named Scooter.
Former convict Andy Park needs money to to help his invalid wife. His daughter Effie (violent ward material for sure) suggests that they blackmail a sleazebag named Tommy Savage who helped kill her boyfriend’s father. Or something. They demand 50K from Mr. Savage and tell him how they want the money delivered. It is at the money drop that the relentless violence begins with Park’s family threatened. Park defends them with brutal cunning.
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Quick takes and capsule reviews from the dark suspense master himself, Ed Gorman!
