Crime Pulp Archives - Black Mask

Give A Good Guy A Really Bad Bad Guy

Crime Pulp, crime story, crime writing, Fiction, fiction writing, Robert W. Fisher, suspense, thrillers, thrillers and mysteries, Uncategorized, writer tips 2 Responses »

Mar 262013

Interception City, Published by Black Mask, March 15, 2013

The best thing any crime writer can do to make his protagonist more sympathetic and far stronger is to provide a worthy (think: very strong, horribly bad or genuinely psychotic) antagonist in the mix.

Endlessly taught in most of the creative writing classes I’ve had, the villain provides the steel spine to any good thriller or action piece. You can make the protagonist as pure or as interesting or even as damaged as you like, but his adversary in evil better be virtually unstoppable.

And evil in ways most of us would rather not even imagine. But as crime or thriller writers, we must. Ask Stephen King.

Anyway, looking back quite a few years, the most obvious example of this to me is the first Dirty Harry movie, called (unsurprisingly) Dirty Harry.

In it, a young Clint Eastwood is excellent as rogue cop Harry Callahan, a legalized killer with a .44 Magnum, but his stature was greatly elevated (as far as the audience was concerned) when he came up against the shockingly savage villainy of the psychotic Scorpio Killer, played with manic intensity by Andy Robinson.

Andy Robinson did such a great job, in fact, playing a murderous and almost-unstoppable lunatic, that it was said producers and casting directors in Hollywood wouldn’t meet with him for a long time afterward, fearing he was too much in real life like the part he’d so brilliantly played.

And when he was blasted away by Dirty Harry’s .44 Magnum in the last act, it was a feeling, I’ll admit, of great satisfaction. The Scorpio Killer finally, after getting away with so damn much, paid for his horrifying sins with his life.

Justice. Or just a need on the audience’s part for a form of simple revenge. For being such a terrible person. Seriously.

The bad guy’s antics are, after all, much of the reason (unsavory or not) that we continue to watch, or to turn the page, waiting for that final moment when the villain’s either blasted into oblivion or, at the very least, arrested and hauled away.

In other words, something inside of each of us can’t stand to see the son of a bitch get away with it.

Ten years later, another of the great bad guys, also played with brilliant savagery, was James Remar as Albert Ganz, the psychopath of 48 Hours (the violent but hilarious feature film debut of Eddie Murphy, not the TV news show).

Ganz killed as easily as he breathed, and went off like a Chinese firecracker at the slightest provocation, again providing all of us in the audience with a great sense of relief when Nick Nolte eventually shot him multiple times.

Which brings us, in my opinion, to one of the greatest feat(s) of film villainy in many a year, performed by the superb actor Alan Rickman.

Within four years, Rickman managed to play three of the coldest, yet wittiest, villains the screen has ever seen, thus adding that steel spine to three great thrillers.

In the original Die Hard, 1988, as Hans Gruber, he was the brilliant but murderous killer who masterminded the almost-murder of an entire office building full of people, thus giving Bruce Willis a chance to be exactly what a real hero should be.

In Quigley Down Under, 1990, as Elliot Marston, he was the evil Australian ranch owner who was systematically committing genocide against the aborigines until American gunman Tom Selleck shot him down, along with his two evil cohorts, in Marston’s own front yard.

And last, but not least, in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, 1991, Rickman was the mercilessly evil but wisecracking Sheriff of Nottingham, a part played to the hilt by a truly gifted actor, until Kevin Costner ran him through. And through again, I think.

It’s been a while.

In any case, none of the movies above would’ve been as thrilling, or would’ve played out or ended as strongly, had it not been for the superb villains that each provided.

Which reminds me.

When it comes to superb villains, I have to mention the greatest recent villain to calmly (and sometimes humorously) murder his way across a huge expanse of silver screen:

Javier Bardem as the epitome of heartless and pure evil, Anton Chigurh, in the Coen Brothers’ masterpiece, No Country For Old Men, 2007.

A terrifyingly realistic but somehow subdued performance in every way, Javier Bardem’s bad guy even terrified all the other bad guys in the film. And rightly so. And at the same time gave the film such brilliant forward momentum that it rocketed through to the shocking end.

And if you haven’t seen it yet: shocking is the right word.

In any case, my newest crime thriller, Interception City, written under my pseudonym Parker T. Mattson, is now out in paperback, published by the great folks at Black Mask, and will soon be available as an e-Book as well.

And, yes, I’ve tried to make the bad guys very, very bad, heartless and genuinely evil, even hatefully so, just in case some bad things finally happen to them in the final chapters.

Which would be justice, believe me. And will probably happen, but I’m giving away nothing here. It’s a thriller, after all, and I might’ve (or might not have) broken some rules.

Here’s the link on Amazon, in case you’re interested: http://www.amazon.com/Interception-City-Parker-T-Mattson/dp/1608726894/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1364324620&sr=1-1&keywords=Interception+City

If you read it, let me know what you think.

Stupidest Member of Mensa?

Crime Fiction, Crime Pulp, crime writing, Robert W. Fisher, Writing 2 Responses »

Nov 042012

Because there must be a World’s Tallest Midget and a World’s Shortest Giant, there must also be a Stupidest Member of Mensa.

My wife Ellen says it’s me. And it’s hard to argue.

First off, I barely graduated from Cherry Hill High on the westside of Detroit, with a 1.1 average: that’s a D+, by the way, folks. I preferred reading Mickey Spillane and SciFi paperbacks hidden behind my schoolbooks while everyone else was learning something.

Yet I did graduate. I think they just wanted me out of there.

Second off, in those long-ago days when we all received a yellow map pin from Mensa to wear as a form of covert identification, I lost three in a row. If you remember (or ever knew), those little yellow map pins were handed out so that secret geniuses could recognize each other on the playground while getting the hell beat out of them by the tough kids.

Add the sad fact that my middle name was Wellington and you’ll understand why I had to pick the roughest, toughest bullies in school to be my friends (“Judo, can you lean on the gym teacher for me? He wants me to participate!”)

Of course, my nickname back then, further indicating clear intelligence, ended up being Carp.

This name was bestowed on me by a good friend, a criminal mastermind actually, who I’ll call Dave (because that’s his name), who I believe is currently serving about a hundred years for crimes he committed when barely out of high school.

And I mean out of high school, since he was expelled the moment the shop teacher and the police paid a surprise visit to Dave’s home and discovered more of the school’s tools and equipment in his basement than were left at the actual school.

Seriously, about $10,000 worth. Of course, at least Dave was using all those tools for a good cause: to make money.

Literally.

In those long ago days, it was possible to get a regular-sized candy bar out of a machine for the miracle sum of 5 cents, a nickel. And, because those simplistic machines would also give out a nickel in change for a dime inserted, it was an easy matter for any criminal mastermind to C-clamp ten or so pennies to a work bench to grind down into fake-dimes.

Which worked just fine in the candy machines. And gave back a nickel.

Because Dave and I were decent guys (except for his criminal mastermind status), we talked about giving all the free candy bars to less fortunate kids. It was a nice gesture, but in the end we just ate all the candy bars ourselves.

Even today, I have a slightly guilty feeling whenever I eat a Snickers bar.

Also, there were so many imprints of pennies lining the edge of the workbench returned to the school, it caused a bit of concern. And confusion. Yet no one ever figured out why.

I guess no one else in the school system at that time belonged to Mensa.

In any case, I use a lot of my long-ago weirdness and adventures in my fiction, giving it a certain edge (I’d like to think) that normal people couldn’t possibly come up with. With my youthful background, I don’t have to make up very much.

I just call it fiction and hope the statute of limitations has run out. And I guess I should check out that statute of limitations thing on whatever I write, but I haven’t figured out how to do it yet.

I suppose my wife (who often calls me Mensa-Boy, but never in a nice way) could be right.

Anyway, if you get a chance, check out my latest book, Killing Liberty, filled with more off-beat truth than Black Mask (the Publisher) would like me to admit.

Here’s one of the links: http://www.amazon.com/Killing-Liberty-Parker-T-Mattson/dp/160872607X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1352040830&sr=1-1&keywords=killing+liberty

Struggling Screenwriter or Starving Novelist?

Crime Fiction, Crime Pulp, crime story, Robert W. Fisher, Writing, writing books 1 Response »

Sep 262012

What a choice. But a valid one.

In 2011, approximately 350 studio and independent films were produced and distributed from original screenplays in the United States, although well over 50,000 new screenplays were registered with the Writers Guild that year.

Some claim the number’s closer to 100,000, but the Guild isn’t saying.

And that same number of new scripts (50,000 to 100,000!) were registered every year before that. And will continue being registered, every year, year after year, after that. Quite a pile.

Making for some pretty long odds.

In the book world, over 300,000 books were published in the U.S. in 2011, although a few sites are quoting a much higher number. In any case, the odds of getting a book published far exceed the likelihood of having a film company put up $30 million or so to produce even a low-to-mid-budget version of a writer’s first screenplay.

That said, and having only a few scripts produced (Darkroom, a piece of crap horror film, was my first written, in Syd Field’s screenwriting class), and a few other scripts optioned, I’ve discovered it’s far more fun (and profitable) to write a novel and have it published within a matter of months.

Compared to spending years waiting for an optioned screenplay to get produced. Even those screenplays optioned by well-meaning, well-connected and otherwise successful movie producers.

Supposedly, the average time span from writing a screenplay to seeing it on the big screen for an already-produced screenwriter is eight (8!) years.

In other words, that new BMW you bought with your option money will be over by the time the picture gets made, far too weird/clunky to park anywhere near the premiere where anyone can see you crawling out of it.

The Writer! It’s Him! Holy crap, look at that piece of shit he’s driving! What a loser! Did his mom buy him that thing when he was still in school or what?!

Yes, in Hollywood, believe it or not, like it or not, hate it or not, what you drive is who you are. Absolutely true. So scrape together your last few dollars to rent a new Bentley for the damn night. That is, if you even get invited to your own movie premiere. For reference on how nicely screenwriters are treated, see Robert Altman’s The Player.

In any case, another choice emerges: convert your movie scripts into novels.

If your book version does get published, you’ll already have the screenplay ready to go (even though they’ll pay you to get lost and will instead hire the hot young writer who already has a three-picture studio deal).

Anyway, after my first crime novel, Killing Liberty, was published by the great people at Black Mask, and before I finish Killing Time, the second book in the five-book Derek Raiford series Black Mask asked for, I’ve decided to quickly turn my favorite unproduced screenplay, Interception City, into a crime novel. Also to be written as Parker T. Mattson.

How hard could it be?

Admittedly, it’s been a frustrating adventure trying to get it made. As a racially-charged murder & mayhem thriller taking place in a terrible little shithole city buried deep in the Florida Everglades, it’s been called too much of a hot potato by more than one Hollywood movie producer.

One dashing young movie producer’s father, an older Academy Award-winning screenwriter living abroad, read the script and called it great fun, suggesting his son option it. Nothing much happened but it was very exciting for several long months.

Next.

A successful director I know read Interception City on a cross-country flight and told me the premise was far too dark, even with the snappy and fun dialogue I’d provided, to interest him. Six months later he called to say he did want to direct it, after a second read, but thought financing would be difficult.

I’ll say.

For those of you older folks, think In The Heat Of The Night meets any thriller taking place in a terrible little shithole city buried deep in the Florida Everglades.

Friend Michael Winslow (sound effects wizard Larvell Jones in all the Police Academy movies) said it was a great read (fun, too) but too controversial to be produced as a movie without a book first proving its commercial appeal.

I reluctantly agreed.

But (as always with such critiques that require further effort) in response I simply hid the script in my underwear drawer so it’d eventually be found (and produced, to great critical acclaim and shocking financial success) long after I died.

That’s how it works, folks – ask Phillip K. Dick.

Anyway, here goes: turning your own screenplay into a book. It can’t take much time, right? Maybe three weeks, then back to finish Killing Time.

I mean, the hard work on Interception City’s already been done, long months of writing it in Key West between long afternoons of poolside drinking, spicy shrimp at A&B Lobster House and general frolicking until 4:00AM. After all, the story’s there. The characters are there. The dialogue, of course, is there (that’s mainly what a screenplay is, after all, plus some minimal stage directions).

I’ll just throw in a few descriptions of trees, cars, sky, swamps, rooms, dead bodies, etc., etc., etc., and it should be ready to go.

Consider it an experiment. And I’ll definitely let you know…

BTW, and again, Killing Liberty is getting some decent reader reviews, even by people I’ve never met or heard of (really), plus it will be soon reviewed by The Key West Citizen’s Solares Hill section.

I’m hoping for the best.

http://www.amazon.com/Killing-Liberty-ebook/dp/B008LMI6PK/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1348672188&sr=1-1

New Book: Killing Liberty

Crime Pulp, crime writing, noir, Robert W. Fisher, Writing 2 Responses »

Jun 282012

You might want to listen to the great Warren Zevon’s take on Down South before reading this…

www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsJlqgoSC_Y

Killing Liberty, my new crime thriller (soon available through Disruptive Publishing in print and as an e-book), is a disturbing novel. Much of that fact comes from the background setting I chose: a swamp of an unnamed city tucked into a far corner of the exceptionally Deep South.

I’m certain many of the residents will recognize the place, although I’d never admit that city’s name to anyone. Why risk getting punched in the mouth (or worse?) when it’s just as easy to keep the place unnamed?

The story I’ve written is fiction, after all, not a documentary nor an expose’ in any sense of the word.

In any case, this unnamed city is so far away from anywhere it’s in a world all its own. You have to drive through seemingly endless miles of timberland from any direction to find the place. I spent 10 months there in a beautiful bed & breakfast a few years ago, and the city was a different-enough location (meaning filled with on-going corruption & decadence, never boring) that I immediately decided to set my next murder & mayhem story there.

Without giving away too much of the plot, I’ll say (just as an aside) that in the actual city three police officers were caught having a sex party with three high school girls. They were fired, of course, but because the age of consent is sixteen in that particular part of the country, and their argument in front of the judge was that “…the girls were all in the 10th grade, Your Honor, the 10th grade,” all three officers could only be charged with keeping the girls out past their curfew.

A misdemeanor, not worth even filing. At least, that’s the story I was privately told.

The police chief himself was sometime later caught in a similar set of circumstances (entirely different underage girl weirdness), but he wasn’t fired or even charged. Instead, he was quietly appointed fire chief, at no loss of pay, pension or seniority. The earlier fire chief was given a very generous early retirement, complete with a nice surprise party.

Like I said, interesting place. Or, at least, not boring.

The entire county is dry, but with a back-country liquor store located just outside the county line. That’s about a 40-mile drive through thick woods from the city itself. Whenever anyone (anyone not a resident, that is) stocked up with enough booze for a decent-sized party and headed back into the county, the store owner contacted the sheriff’s department so the purchaser could be stopped along the way. The store owner and the sheriff then split whatever liquor had been confiscated.

Again, I have my sources.

Also, the sheriff who won the last election (he’d been charged but not convicted with taking bribes from bootleggers) only narrowly defeated the current sheriff (who was serving a prison term for taking bribes from drug dealers).

You can’t make up stuff like this. Well, you can but it often lacks the ring of truth. Anyway, what a great place to insert a displaced homicide cop from Detroit. And a particularly gruesome murder.

Or several. Have fun.

Shock Corridor

1963, Crime Films, Crime Pulp, crime writing, film noir, Robert W. Fisher, thrillers, Writing 1 Response »

Jun 192012

The paperback

After reading the James Reasoner piece on Michael Avallone (The Return Of Ed Noon, June 18, 2012), I dug out my copy of Avallone’s novel based on the screenplay of Shock Corridor, the jolting 1963 movie that Sam Fuller wrote, produced and directed.

It’s been a long while since I’ve thought about either the movie or the book, but I believe they’re both worth tracking down. Even today, the story holds up, though it’s a little creaky in places (what isn’t, from 1963?), due to the Cold War paranoia throughout.

The book was a great read, the movie itself so harsh and chilling and in-your-face that it couldn’t be ignored. There isn’t a politically correct scene in it. There’s also not a boring step. Cigar-chomping Sam Fuller was just that kind of screenwriter and director.

And, of course, it’s a cult favorite with film students. For those who care what critics say, Shock Corridor still has a 93% on Rotten Tomatoes, in its 15 reviews from 2002 to 2011.

I first saw Shock Corridor in the 1970’s, well before I became good friends with actor James Best, who played Stuart in the film. It was one of the first films of his we discussed, along with The Left-Handed Gun, Firecreek, Rolling Thunder and Sounder. Years later, when I showed him I had the Shock Corridor paperback, he immediately signed it, ‘The most fun in my career, James Best.’

And it was the greatest fun to make, James said.

They shot it in 10 days flat, with almost no re-takes, entirely inside. To make the small asylum set look larger (and longer), Sam Fuller hired midgets as extras to move around at the end of the relatively short hallway. Several of the hallucination scenes were borrowed from Fuller’s earlier movies. Yet it’s far more than merely a schlocky 60’s picture.

In case you’re not familiar with the storyline, it’s very much high concept:

Peter Breck (Nick Barkley in The Big Valley) is a reporter willing to do anything to earn a Pulitzer Prize, so he has himself committed to a mental institution so he can solve a murder. To do so, he has his stripper girlfriend, Constance Towers, pretend to be his sister, who he’s sexually attracted to. In addition, he’s got a thing for her braids. Shocking (again), especially for 1963. Ka-blammo. He’s put away! And through a series of jolting electro-shock treatments he can’t avoid, he slowly goes crazier than any other lunatic in the joint.

When early in the second act he suddenly finds himself in the middle of a violent thunderstorm taking place in the hallway, you realize there’s not going to be a happy ending. Or when he gets trapped and almost killed by sex-crazed female inmates in the Nympho Ward. That’s right: the Nympho Ward.

Do they still have those?

Anyway, to solve the murder, he has to interview (during rare lucid moments) three wildly vocal lunatics:

Trent (Hari Rhodes), the first black student attending an all-white Southern university. Driven insane by racism, he thinks he’s the leader of the KKK and hates black people.

Boden (Gene Evans), a Nobel prize-winning nuclear scientist driven insane by guilt due to his work on the A-bomb and H-bomb. He’s reverted to his childhood. Mental age: six.

Stuart (James Best), a POW soldier in the Korean conflict who committed treason by joining the Red Chinese, then was traded back to our country. He believes he’s General Jeb Stuart, the Confederate army hero, fighting the damn Yankees.

I won’t say more, or give away any other twists, but the gradual character arc that occurs in Peter Breck, transforming him from a ruthless crime reporter into a raving, mindless psychotic, is more unnerving than many sophisticated folks today might imagine possible.

You can get the re-mastered Shock Corridor on Amazon. I believe it will linger with you.

CHICAGO LIGHTNING

Colins, Crime Pulp, Heller Comments Off

Dec 312011

CHICAGO LIGHTNING

The Collected Nathan Heller Short Stories

By Max Allan Collins

Thomas & Mercer

373 pages

Sixty three year old Max Collins has been at this writing game for a while coming onto the mystery private-eye scene with his 1994 Shamus Award winning “True Detective,” published the year before. Since that monumental debut, Collins has gone on to produce several continuing series both in comics and prose; these include his comic book female P.I. Ms. Tree and the morally ambiguous hit-man, Quarry. The one fictional character Collins is most recognized for is Nathan Heller from his historical crime novels. Heller is a Chicago based investigator who over the course of his career rubs shoulders with personalities such as Al Capone and Eliot Ness and worked on such mysteries as the Lindberg baby kidnapping and the disappearance of aviatrix Amelia Earhart. His most recent Heller case was the critically acclaimed “Bye Bye Baby” wherein the fiftyish shamus becames involved with the death of Marilyn Monroe. All of these books are excellent and worthy of your time and attention.

Over the years Collins, at the request of anthology editors, also penned short stories featuring Heller. With the assistance of his research colleague, George Hagenauer, Collins adapted true crime stories and then wove his tough guy hero into their fabric so that the history and fiction elements become indistinguishable. This volume has taken that baker’s dozen and for the very first time presented them in chronological order from the first which occurs in 1933 to the last set in 1949. The settings range from Chicago to Cleveland and Hollywood. Here is a sampling of what is included between the covers.

“Kaddish for the Kid,” Heller is hired to protect a retailer from a crooked union scam in reality a protection racket. During a street shootout, his young partner is killed and the angry private dick goes after the killers with a vengeance.

“The Blonde Tigress,” has Heller investigating a trio of stick-up artists led by a female boss who tries to manipulate him into aiding her escape justice.

“Private Consultation,” has a well known Chicago doctor accused for murdering her daughter-in-law and her son hires Heller to investigate. What he uncovers is a sad testimony to a loveless marriage where none of the participants are innocent of wrong doing.

The Perfect Crime,” finds Heller in Los Angeles to help a friend. Before he can pack up and head home, he’s hired by the beautiful blonde star, Thelma Todd to act as her bodyguard. Miss Todd suspects mobsters wish to do her harm for refusing to allow Lucky Luciano to use the top floors of her famous restaurant as a casino. When she is found dead in her garage from carbon monoxide poisoning, Heller knows the coroner’s accidental death ruling is pure bunk. He decides to extend his trip to catch a killer.

In “House Call” a caring doctor is brutally murdered while answering a night summons to aid a sick child. This time Heller joins forces with the Chicago P.D. to hunt down the vicious killers and bring them to justice.

“Marble Mildred” tells the story of woman trapped for fourteen years in a loveless marriage who discovers a humiliating secret which she’d rather go to the electric chair rather than having it made public. A tragedy Heller is helpless to prevent.

“The Strawberry Teardrop” is based on the case of Cleveland serial killer, the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run and how he was finally caught by the famous lawman Eliot Ness.

There is not a lemon in the batch. Collins writing style is terse and economically efficient. He uses words like a scalpel carving up the psychological motivations that induce people to do bad things. All the while Nathan Heller is his surgeon, meting out equal doses of justice and compassion. The title, “Chicago Lightning,” is gangster slang for gunfire and is only fitting as this book comes heavily loaded with pure pulp pizzaz. Don’t miss it.