What makes this great beginning great?

Here's how Lester Dent opens Chapter Three of his 1956 novel Honey in His Mouth:

"The hospital was as noisy a place as Harsh had ever been in."

To my mind that's one of the best opening sentences ever. Do you agree? If so, why? Disagree? If so, why?

© Peter Rozovsky 2017

Port Richmond Books — For all your Bouchercon shopping needs

I needed a Doc Savage novel for one of my Bouchercon  panels, and I thought Port Richmond Books might have one or two if anyone did. "Oh, yeah," owner Greg Gillespie said, with a solemn nod. He ducked into an office and fetched not one, not two, but a box full of Docs and then, before I could pick my jaw back up from the floor, he handed me another armful, some omnibuses, some single-novel volumes, mostly 1960s reprints of the books, which first appeared in the 1930s and 1940s. (I bought two books, not two boxes of books.) Port Richmond Books  — Your Doc Savage Headquarters.

I also bought 77 Sunset Strip, a novel by Roy Huggins, who created the television series of the same name.  Max Allan Collins will discuss Huggins on the same moderated-by-me Bouchercon panel where Sara J. Henry talks up Doc Savage's main author, Lester Dent. Port Richmond Books — For all your Bouchercon shopping needs.

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The panel in question is Beyond Hammett, Chandler, and Spillane: Lesser Known Writers of the Pulp and Paperback Eras, and it happens at 3 p.m., Friday, Nov. 14, at the Hyatt Regency, Long Beach. Gary Phillips, Charles Kelly, and Sarah Weinman will join Max and Sara on the panel. See you there.

I took some photos on the way to and from Port Richmond.  Can you detect a theme common to my photography ad my shopping?

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Sara J. Henry joins Team Detectives Beyond Borders for Bouchercon 2014 panel

Sara J. Henry has joined the "Beyond Hammett, Chandler, and Spillane: Lesser Known Writers of the Pulp and Paperback Eras" panel that I'll moderate at Bouchercon 2014 in Long Beach, Calif.

Sara is the author of the novels Learning to Swim and A Cold and Lonely Place, the latter of which will be up for the best-novel Anthony Award at Bouchercon. For my panel, she'll discuss Lester Dent, the prolific principal author of Doc Savage, with a few remarks about Charlotte Armstrong, whose A Dram of Poison won the best-novel Edgar Award in 1957.

I met Sara at Bouchercon 2008 in Baltimore, where she made her first big crime-fiction splash when everyone but me mistook her for Sarah Weinman. That's why I'm especially tickled that Sarah Weinman will also be on the panel. (Get a sneak peak at Sara and Sarah here, and see what all the confusion was about.)

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Beyond Hammett, Chandler, and Spillane: Lesser Known Writers of the Pulp and Paperback Eras happens at 3 p.m., Friday, Nov. 14, at the Hyatt Regency, Long Beach. Not everyone on the panel is named Sara or Sarah, spent formative years in Ontario, or is haunted by a crime-fiction doppelganger. Max Allan Collins, Charles Kelly, and Gary Phillips will also take part. 

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Cut!: Popular anxieties in crime novels

Even if I hadn't known that postwar masculine anxiety was one of the staples of American pop culture and psychology, I might have guessed it from Lester Dent's Honey in His Mouth (1956) and Charles Runyon's Color Him Dead (1963); each has a castrated character.

From the same period, Invasion of the Body Snatchers is famously supposed to have played on the era's political fears. Were movies and crime novels of the 1950s and 1960s especially rife with political, sexual, and social anxiety? What crime novels (or movies or TV shows), whether from that time or any other, make contemporary fears and anxieties part of the story?

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Celebrate Mystery Month over at Booklist's Likely Stories blog, which will feature posts from a wide variety of crime fiction blogs, journals, and magazines throughout the month. Guest posters talk about their publications and what they have to offer, and they point readers' way to even more blogs and websites. Have a look, won't you? Support your local library, and let it support you!

 © Peter Rozovsky 2012

Nipples and Spinoza

Donald E. Westlake's The Comedy Is Finished put me in a Hard Case frame of mind. I'm reading Lester Dent's Honey in His Mouth now, with Westlake's Memory on deck.

Dent wrote Honey in His Mouth in 1956, toward the end of a career spent largely writing Doc Savage, and the book is full of South American dictators, tight dresses that stay on, and frank one-word delineations of what lies beneath. It also shows an intellectual streak reminiscent of Woody Allen's essays and hard to imagine in popular culture today:

"Harsh listened with a black expression. Jesus, he thought, who had ever heard of such stuff being sprung on a man. However, Miss Muirz had a reading voice that was low and cultured and musical, and her dress had an interesting way of snuggling up when she took a deep breath so that her nipples stuck out at him. But he did not care greatly for Spinoza."

The book is obviously a product of its time, in other words, but without seeming dated. How does Dent manage this? With a light touch, a wild plot, and a grifter protagonist, Walter Harsh, refreshingly upfront about his life's goal: money.

More, perhaps, later.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012