BITS & PIECES

Openers:

TERROR FROM THE SKIES

As the rate of disappearances increase to epidemic

proportions, New Yorkers look to the skies in fear

"Stay indoors" is the advice from the police department as the recent spate of missing persons reaches an all-time high.  There are now over fifty reported disappearances on Manhattan Island, spanning the entire festive season, and this reporter has been told that the police department is in a state of panic, and has already run out of leads.

It is understood that each of the missing persons disappeared in what's thought to be identical circumstances -- whilst walking the streets of the city -- and eyewitness accounts refer to "terrible flying creatures" that pluck their victims indiscriminately from the sidewalk, dragging them away into the sky, never to be seen or heard from again.

These creatures are said to resemble human skeletons with "bat-like wings and glowing red eyes.  They swoop silently out from the shadows to abduct the good people of New York and carry them away for nefarious purposes that are not yet clear.

Committed

This, however, offers little comfort to the families of the fifty missing people, of whom nothing whatsoever has been heard since their abductions.  There have been no ransom notes, no demands, and no bodies.  mothers, fathers, husbands, and wives all over the city are holding constant vigil in the hope that news will come soon and that their loved ones will be returned safely.

-- The Ghosts of War by George Mann, 2011

The time is January, 1927.  The place, an alternate steampunk New York City, complete with coal-powered automobiles, self-igniting cigarettes, and dirigibles.  a lot of dirigibles.  Gabriel Cross, a wealthy socialite, is the angst-ridden costumed hero known as the Ghost, who has taken it upon himself to protect the city.  While trying to get a lead on the abductions, he comes across two of the bat creatures swooping down to grab prey.  One of the creatures gets away, carrying his male victim.  The Ghost manages to grab the other creature as it has a young woman in its talons.  The bat-creature turns out to be some of sentient robot, constructed of brass, with some sort of large, translucent material covering its wings, and razor sharp deadly talons; there are two propellers attached to its back to allow it speed in its flight.  He wounds the creature but has to let it get away in order to save the female victim it had dropped from the sky.

The Ghost has an ally in police inspector Felix Donovan, the one person outside of Gabriel's butler who knew his secret identity -- every other cop in the city wants to arrest the Ghost as a vigilante..  Donovan, however, soon has his hands full trying to track down a British spy who supposedly had knowledge that could start a war between America and the British Empire.  (In this reality, the two superpowers are engaged in a cold war.)  In reality, the British spy has information the he must get back to his government in order to prevent a war, but an evil Senator with with an agenda of his own is using every resource available to stop him, as well as stopping any investigation into the multiple disappearances.

And there's a mad scientist who is replacing his own leprosy-ridden body parts with mechanical limbs and organs.  And the giant interdimensional blood sucking squid monsters that would decimate life on Earth.  And, surprise! surprise!, Gideon's fomrer girlfreind shows up after years of being away and is now a raging alcohiolic.

Just your typical fun times in an alternate New York City...

This is the second of four pulp-inspired novels Mann wrote about the Ghost.  Mann is also the author of Newbury & Hobbes Investigation urban fantasy series, the Wychwood series, and numerous entries in the Dr. Who, Warhammer, Sherlock Holmes, and other franchises.  He ;provides a lot of fun reading.

Incoming: 

•  Edward S. Aarons, Assignment Silver Scorpion.  A Sam Durrell spy-guy novel, the 35th in the series (of the original 42 by the author; six additional titles were ghost-written and published under the name of the author's brother, Will B. Aarons).  "Sam Durrell had survived oin this business by taking no one for granted.  Long ago he had learned to live alone, hunt alone, depend on himself alone.  Now hw wasn't alone and he wished her were.  For the presence of Georgette Finch, an attractive young woman agent for K Section, complicated the job of recovering a stolen three hundred million in American money.  It was hidden somewhere behind the smoke curtain of civil was in Boganda, a newly emerged African nation.  Sam figured he was better off without Finch, until he ran into a couple of deadly female pirates who were out to increase their fortune by -- you guessed it -- three hundred million.  And since they had an army, Sam decided he needed all the help he could get.  but trusting Finch was a bit more than he counted on."
• "Piers Anthony" (Piers Anthony Jacob), Pornucopia.  Humorous erotic fantasy.  "Pornucopia is a picaresque black comedy that transgresses all bounds of everyday good taste.  It begins in a near-future world where sex-vending machines  and genital transplants are taken for granted.  Prior Gross, the hero and sex object of this wild adventure, thinks his fantasies have all come true when a beautiful young woman seduces him on a public beach.  she turns out to be a succubus, beginning his initiation in a realm populated by demons that are not merely horned, but horny.  He encounters a perverse cast of characters that includes a satyr, a vampire, and a pair of luscious sisters, one of whom tricks him out of his manhood.  So Prior Gross sets out on a perverse odyssey, taking him to a distant planet where discovers the key to the return of his property and, ultimately, the origin of the universe itself."  In an afterword, Anthony explains that he had begun the novel in 1969 for Essex House, a softcover publisher of literate sexual fantasy (they published Philip Jose Farmer and Michael Perkins, among others), but his editor was fired and the line was shut down, leaving him with a completed book with no market.  Fifteen years passed and Charles Platt liked the book and set up a publishing company to produce, but he could not get a printer to print it, so the publishing company died aborning.  Later, the book was published by another new publisher, Tafford, and ran through three printings, despite not being available for anyone under 21.  But Tafford then bite the dust.  Then another prospective published shut down.  By this time used copies of the book were selling for $150...and there was also a pirated edition.  Finally, the book was published by another new outfit, Mundania Press, which is where my copy came from.  And Anthony wrote a sequel, titled (Lord help us) The Magic Fart.  I have made no secret that Anthony is not one of my favorite fantasy and Science fiction authors, but I do have to give him credit for his stick-to-it-iveness.
• Fred Blosser, Sixgun Vixens of the Terror Trail.  Robert E. Howard-influenced Lovecraftian weird western.  (Blame George for this one.)  "Treachery and violence in the Old West as a mysterious gunfighter and two dangerous, desirable women pursue a treasure deep in Apache country.  But Apaches and bandits may be the least of their dangers as they face grisly horror at a lost mission."    Surprisingly, this was never considered for the Booker Prize.  Go figure.
• Lin Carter, The City Outside the World.  Carter playing with Edgar rice Burroughs-Leigh Brackett-Jack Williamson tropes.  "Mars:  A skull of a planet picked clean by the wind of time.  North.  Beyond the desert of Meroe:  past the ancient cliffs of the dust-locked continents, past the dry wharfs of a city that was old when Earth was new, the caravan crept  into the unmapped waste called 'Jmbra.  It was into this shadowed land that the lost nation of the People had hidden -- and vanished -- in a time beyond memory.  It was here that the outworlde Ryker followed the golden-eyed Valaroa and found the Child of the Stars."  Fanboy Carter writes this sort of thing as well as anyone else.
• Gardner Dozois, editor, the Year's Best Science Fiction:  Fourteenth Annual Collection.  Year's best selection covering 28 stories from 1996.  Authors include Gregory Benford, Michael Swanwick, Nancy Kress, James P. Blaylock, John Kessel, Paul Park Robert Silverberg, Bruce Sterling, Mike Resnick, Charles Sheffield, Robert Reed, Gene Wolfe, Jonathan Lethem, and Stephen Baxter.  As always with these collections, Dozois provides a varied and literate selection.
• Simon R. Green, Ghost of a Smile.  Fantasy, the second novel of six in the Ghostfinders series.  "Meet the operatives of the Carnacki Institute -- JC Chance:  the team leader, brave, charming, and almost unbearably arrogant; Melody Chambers:  the science geek who keeps the antisupernatural equipment running; and Happy Jack Palmer: the terminally gloomy telepath.  Their mission:  Do Something About Ghosts.  Lay them to rest, send them packing, or just kick their nasty ectoplasmic arses...A distress call was received from the private research centre of one of the biggest drug companies in the world.  The police went in -- and never came out.  A national security team stormed the place.  No-one's heard anything further from them, either.  Now it's in the hands of the Carnacki Institute's rising stars.  They have the wrong equipment.  They have no idea what awaits.  And they have the clock ticking in the background.  But they also have a secret weapon:  JC's very lovely -- and very dead -- girlfriend."  No urging needed; they grabbed my attention with Carnacki Institute.
• Donald Hamilton, five Matt Helm spy thrillers:  The Silencers.  Number 4 in the series.  "The undercover agent with a killer instinct  and a weakness for the wrong woman takes a long day's journey into the New Mexico mountains and finds -- god help us all -- crumbling ghost-town church which conceals one of the most ungodly devices ever conceived for man's destruction."  The Ambushers.  Number 6 in the series.  "A quiet mission of assassination is no sweat for Matt Helm -- till the man whose special talent is killing suddenly has to play God to a beautiful, beat-up girl, tortured half out of her mind in the Costa Verde jungle...Until a shapely foreign agent he never got around to finishing off lures him into a strange trek in the wilds of northern Mexico...Until a Russian missile smuggled out of Cuba falls into the hands of a political fanatic -- very, very close to home..."  The Ravagers.  Number 8 in the series.  "It was not a peaceful way to die -- but there was nothing Helm could do for him now.  Scratch one agent.  Cross off the pretty boy with the face women just couldn't resist.  The poor bastard was lying dead in a Canadian motel room, with no face at all.  It had been eaten away with acid, corroded beyond all recognition.  And the most likely patsy was a woman Helm had orders to protect -- no matter what the cost."   The Devastators.  Number 9 in the series.   "On a bleak and lonely heath in northern Scotland they recovered the body of the third agent sent out on this mission.  He had died -- been murdered -- of bubonic plague.  m to take it from there.  For somewhere among those desolate Scottish moors was a half-crazed scientific genius who could devastate entire populations with one hideous, raging plague.  It was Helm's job to get him...with the help of a beautiful American operative who was supposed to be his wife, and a beautiful Russian operative made it clear she was his deadly enemy."  And, The Interlopers.    Number 12 in the series.  "Matt Helm finds out just how fatal blond hair can be when he takes over another man's identity, fiancee, and fate.  I  this mixed doubles counter-espionage mission, Helm plays decoy an assassin's dream.. to kill next President of the United States."  This is not your Dean Martin movie abomination Matt Helm.
• E. Hoffmann Price, six e-books collections of public domain pulp stories:  E. Hoffmann Price's Exotic Adventures MEGAPACK, 11 short stories and novelettes, mostly from 1935-1945, "full-blooded, two-fisted tales of warriors throughout the ages, seeking glory and triumph"; E. Hoffmann Price's Fables of Ismeddin, 19 stories from Weird Tales, Oriental Stories, and other pulps about a Kurdish holy man -- a "darvish," or dervish -- who is half-crazed, a master swordsman, and good at stirring up trouble;  MEGAPACK, E. Hoffmann Price's Pierre D'Atrois Occult Detective & Associates MEGAPACK:  20 Classic Stories, most, if not all, from Weird Tales, so they would be available online in the individual issues, but it's nice to have them all in one collection; The E. Hoffmann Price Spicy Adventure MEGAPACK:  14 Tales from the "Spicy" Pulp Magazines, the stories here cover multiple genres and multiple decades --detective, western, adventure, and fantasy; E. Hoffmann Price's Two-Fisted Detectives MEGAPACK: 19 Classic Stories, stories feature Honest John Carmody, Cliff Cragin, and Pawang Ali, among others, and includes two collaborations with "Ralph Milne Farley"; and E. Hoffmann Price's War and Western Action MEGAPACK:  19 Classic Stories, which came with the warning that "this volume, as with much of pulp fiction of the era, is not politically correct by modern standards."  Price (1898-1988) was a West Point graduate.  "real-life soldier of fortune," a champion fencer and boxer, an orientalist and linguist, an astrologer, a Theosophist, and a practicing Buddhist who published hundreds and hundreds of stories in his 64-year career.  He was the only pulp writer who meet Robert E. Howard in person, and also knew and met H.P. Lovecraft (with whom he collaborated) and Clark Ashton Smith.  If my math is correct this haul gives me 92 stories by Price, just a drop in the bucket compared to his total output.
• Elizabeth Walter, The Spirit of the Place & Other Strange Tales:  The Complete Short Stories of Elizabeth Walter.  Collection of 31 supernatural stories, first published in five volumes:  Snowfall & Other Chilling Events (1965), The Sin Eater & Other Scientific Impossibilities (1968), Davy Jones's Tale & Other Supernatural Stories (1971), Come and Get Me & Other Uncanny Invitations (1973), and Dead Woman & Other Haunting Experiences (1975).  Amazing stories from one of the best writers in the genre.  The author was also the editor of the Collins Crime Club from 1961 to 1991.
• Leonard Wibberley, Feast of Freedom.  Satire.  "A new nation's primitive dietary habits make trouble for everyone from the Prime Minister of Great Britain to the President of the U.S.A."  What happens when the Vice President visits a tribe of cannibals on a small south Pacific island and ends up in a stew -- literally.  In my mind, I'm filing this one under wishful thinking.

Sometimes You Need a Little Joy in Your Life:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yNewNtXahk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQBr2Vxvg0E

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzhFqG-gJTo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1QtEC5oBX4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQBr2Vxvg0E

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_hlvRNgGOQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qHClLZVc6k

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2rG9joNzmE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xctzp0dp9uc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9YvB9FmR3E

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHRNrgDIJfo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHRNrgDIJfo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9doHKq4F3o

[and I can't let Christine Lavin go without some baton twirling} https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98JnAxGZi0s

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCSiAJaJVNw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xc5MrBGqWZg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQADcAm3lqU&list=RDEMhVCyaMIEsVdI1V4yKF3Ulg&index=2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Es3Vsfzdr14

Eiffel:  Today marks the one hundred thirty-sixth anniversary of the official opening of the Eiffel Tower.  Let's celebrate with our old friend Inspector Maigret with the 1950 film The Man on the Eiffel Tower, based on Georges Simeon's 1931 novel La tete d'un homme (A Man's Head, also published as A Battle of Nerves. The Patience of Maigret, and Maigret's War of Nerves).

Maigret investigates the murder of a rich Paris widow and ends up chasing the killer up the Eiffel Tower's girders. 

Charles Laughton plays Maigret.  Also featured are Franchot Tone, Burgess Meredith, Robert Hutton, Jean Wallace, Wilfred Hyde-White, and the city of Paris.  Directed with Burgess Meredith, with an uncredited assist from Laughton.  Screenplay by Harry Brown.  Co-produced by Franchot Tone and Irving Allen.

The movie received mixed reviews.  It was made in Anscocolor, aa experimental German color process  that made it seem as if you were watching through yellow cellophane -- which may have something to do with the reviews.

What do you think?

https://archive.org/details/1949-the-man-on-the-eiffel-tower-burgess-meredith-vose

Today Is International Transgender Day of Visibility:  A good time to mention the online auction now taking place:  Crime Writers for Trans Rights, to benefit the Transgender Law Center.  Over 250 noted crime writers are donating such great things as signed books, character names, professional research assistance, fun crafts, conference registrations, audiobook narration, manuscript review, book club visits, zoom calls, and much much more.  Check it out, but hurry: the auction ends tomorrow, April 1. Here's the link:   https://www.32auctions.com/writers4transrights

  

These are perilous and turbulent times and we all need to support out shared humanity

I've already been outbid (twice!) on one item I am interested in.  Time will tell if I win it.  (Fingers crossed.)

Everyone's a Critic:  Today is also the anniversary of the infamous Skandalkoncert held by the Vienna Concert Society in the Great Hall of the Musikverein in Vienna in 1913.  The concert -- perhaps inadvisedly -- consisted of music by composers of the Second Viennese School and was conducted by Arnold Schoenberg. The audience did not appreciate the expressionism or the experimentation of the concert...and began rioting!  The performance ended prematurely.

In the confusion, concert organizer Erhard Buschbeck was said to have slapped a concertgoer, leading to both a lawsuit and another name for the concert -- the Watschenkoncert, or the "Slap Concert."  One witness to the alleged assault was operetta composer Oscar Straus, who said the slap had been "the most harmonious sound of the evening."

The fourth item on the program was Alton Berg: two of the Five Orchestra Songs on the Picture-Postcard Texts by Peter Altenberg, Op. 4 Nos. 2 and 3.  This performance led to the audience calling for both the composer and the poet to be committed-- despite the fact that it was common knowledge that Altenberg had already been committed to an insane asylum.  It was during Berg's performance that the riot began  Berg's songs were not performed again for 49 years, and the full score did not appear in print until 1966.

The final piece on the program -- Mahler's Kindertotenleider -- was not performed.

Two months later, the famous fracas at the premiere of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring took place in Paris.

Ha-Ha  (Fine Print Dept.):  My brother bought a shirt the other day and when he got home, discovered a huge tear in it.  He went back the next day and demanded his money back.  The storekeeper said, "I'm sorry, sir, but we don't give refunds."  My brother pointed to a sign on the counter:  "money refunded if not satisfactory."  "And we stand by that, sir," he was told, "There was nothing wrong with your money."

  in the back.

Today's Poem:

Wind, Water, Stone

Water hollows stone, 

wind scatters water,

stone stops the wind.

Water, wind, stone.

Wind carves stone,

stone's a cup of water,

water escapes and is wind.

Stone, wind, water.

Wind sings in its whirling,

water murmurs going by,

unmoving stone keeps still.

Wind, water, stone.

Each is another and no other:

crossing and vanishing

through their empty names:

water, stone, wind.

-- Octavio Paz

(translated by Eliot Weinberger)

 

(for Roger Caillois)