The Man Who Shot Lewis Vance by Stuart M. Kaminsky (1986)

When I opened my eyes, I saw John Wayne pointing a .38 at my chest. It was my .38. I closed my eyes.

The inside of my head seemed to be filled with strawberry cotton candy with little unnamed things crawling through its sickly melting strands. Nausea forced my eyes open again. John Wayne was still there. He was wearing trousers, a white shirt, and a lightweight tan windbreaker. He was lean, dark, and puzzled.

“Don’t close your eyes again, Pilgrim,” he said.

I didn’t close them. He was standing over me and I was slumped in a badly sprung, cheap, understuffed hotel chair. I tried to sit up and speak but my tongue was an inflated, dry pebbly football.

Down for the Count by Stuart M. Kaminsky (Mysterious Press 1985)

I tried to ignore the shadow over me, but you can’t do that when it belongs to the heavyweight champion of the world.

“He dead?” Joe Louis said, breathing heavily. Louis was wearing blue shorts and an extra-extra large white T-shirt stained with sweat. His feet were bare.

“Down for the count,” I said.

About a quarter-mile down the shore some girls were giggling in the surf, the late sun hitting their tanned bodies, their voices bubbling through the white waves hitting the beach and the corpse I was kneeling next to. I looked away from the girls and out over the ocean at the sun heading for Japan. I wondered how I was going to tell Anne about the massive brown figure in the wet sand casting his shadow over me and the badly beaten body. There wasn’t much face left on the body, but there wasn’t any doubt about who it was.

Ralph Howard had always dressed tastefully, conservatively. Even now with sand, salt water, and pinkish blood staining the tan panama suit, the corpse had Ralph’s touch.

The Fala Factor by Stuart M. Kaminsky (Mysterious Press 1984)

The little black dog on my desk wanted to play, but with a corpse sitting in the corner and a murderer on the way up to my office on the elevator I just wasn’t in the mood. I patted his head, tried not to smell his breath, and said, “Maybe later.”

This didn’t please him. The Scottie lay down, covering the letter telling me where I was to pick up my sugar ration stamp book, put his head on his front paws, and looked up at me sadly. I checked my .38 automatic to be sure it was loaded, aimed it tentatively at the door to my office and hoped that I wouldn’t have to use it,  and, if I did, that it would work. It had never proved particularly reliable in the past.

A Crafty Cigarette – Tales of a Teenage Mod by Matteo Sedazzari (Zani Media 2015)

Luckily for my father Theo did not press charges for criminal damage. Later my mother explained to him about my father’s problem with Charlie Cairoli. Theo, being the wise man that he is, totally understood and told my mother that he was once in The Kinks for a brief time, as 2nd guitar and backing vocals. They did a gig in Acton, this was before they made it big, by the way. Theo broke his strings during a song and Ray Davies never called him again, or so he told my mother. Now Theo can’t listen to any records by The Kinks and has to leave the room the moment their music comes on. 

Shit, both Vinnie’s father and my father could have been huge stars, that’s quite depressing.

He Done Her Wrong by Stuart M. Kaminsky (Mysterious Press 1983)

“A few members of the staff now believe that the constant reign of terror to your anatomy is causing a building up of resistance by your body. Not that you are immune to damage but that your body has somehow said, ‘What the hell, I can take anything.’ Your skull no longer deserves the anatomical right to be referred to as a skull. We are not quite sure what to call it.”

I tried to sit up and made it to one elbow. I was in a hospital gown.

“The closest thing I have seen to what we are laughingly calling your cranium belonged to a punch-drunk fighter named Ramirez who, when his career was finished, made an occasional fifty cents by battering down doors with his head. Mr. Ramirez was incapable of coherent speech by that time and seemed to think he was a robot. Are you following the allegorical level of my tale, Mr. Peters?”

“If I continue to get hit in the head, my brain will turn to Junket pudding,” I said.

“Your brain is almost certainly pudding by now,” said Dr. Melanks. “I simply want you to sign it over to me on your death. I am sixty-seven and suffering from arthritis, a weak heart, mild sclerosis, and a very poor hereditary profile, but I should outlive you by a comfortable margin.”

Confessions of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell (Profile Books 2019)

FRIDAY, 6 MARCH

Online orders: 2
Orders found: 2

Nicky in. She has hijacked the shop’s Facebook page again and left this typically bewildering post:

Good morning everyone!
With a song in my heart, I skip in to work only to be berated for buying books off a customer for £45, whereas the BGC would have paid £175. Happy customer, happy me, disgruntled tube, sorry, I meant to say ‘boss’.

BGC is Nicky’s current nickname for me, and stands for Big Ginger Conundrum. ‘Tube’, for the uninitiated, is a Scottish insult, the politest interpretation of it being ‘idiot’.”

Love Me Do!: "Beatles" Progress by Michael Braun (Graymalkin Media 1964)

The New Statesman printed an article by Paul Johnson called ‘The Menace of Beatlism’. He wrote that: ‘Bewildered by a rapidly changing society, excessively fearful of becoming out of date, our leaders are increasingly turning to young people as guides and mentors – or, to vary the metaphor, as geiger-counters to guide them against the perils of mental obsolescence.’ During the following week the paper received nearly 250 letters about the article. The correspondents were three to one against Mr Johnson, and one reader suggested he try monkey glands.

The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry by Legs McNeil, Jennifer Osborne , Peter Pavia (Harper Collins 2005)

 

If You Can Make It There, You Can Make It Anywhere

NEW YORK CITY

1969–1970

HARRY REEMS (PORN STAR): In 1969, everybody in the East Village was going to make it as an actor. Whether you went to an anti–Vietnam War rally or a macrobiotic restaurant, all the talk was about auditions.

 

MARILYN CHAMBERS (PORN STAR): I grew up in Westport, Connecticut, about fifty miles west of New York City. When I was about sixteen, I learned how to write my mother’s name on notes to get out of school—and then I’d take the train into the city to go to auditions.

My whole growing up consisted of me in front of a mirror playing records like West Side Story and Bye Bye Birdie. I really wanted to be Ann-Margret, to tell you the truth.

 

ERIC EDWARDS (PORN STAR): While I was in college in Waco, Texas, I got a scholarship from ABC Television to go to New York to study at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. They auditioned twenty thousand people from all over the country, and I think they picked sixteen people. I mean, this was the big point in my career, it was like a stepping stone—I was getting letters from Lillian Gish, from the president of ABC, from all these top executives saying, “You have received a scholarship to come to New York.”

In fact, Lillian Gish handed me my diploma. Henry Fonda was there backstage; I spoke to him in awe. I was, like, melting.

 

GEORGINA SPELVIN (PORN STAR): One of my first experiences in New York was when the state employment office sent me to see about a modeling job. It was a big, high-class studio, and I had to see someone with one of those hairdresser names: “Mr. Charles” or “Mr. Gary.”

After everyone else had left, he brought me into the studio and—through the course of taking many pictures—he eventually got me very drunk and nude and then he balled me. I don’t even remember how I got home; I passed out midway through the thing. But I never got the chance to tell him I had the clap, and I wondered how long it took him to find out and connect it to me.

With Clough, By Taylor by Peter Taylor (Biteback Publishing 1980)

 

Harry’s message about being the boss, finding the best players and standing no nonsense was so simple  that it went unheeded, but not by me. I was Storer’s pupil. He taught me what to look for in a player and I disagreed only with his emphasis on defence and overemphasis on physical courage and bodily contact. Joe Mercer, when manager of Sheffield United, phoned Harry to protest after a bruising visit by Derby.

‘I don’t know why you bothered to bring a ball,’ said Joe. ‘Two of your players didn’t need one. They kicked us, instead.’

‘Which two?’ snapped Harry, who had missed the match to go scouting. ‘Give me their names.’

Joe, always the nice guy, demurred. ‘Oh, no. I don’t wish to get them into trouble.’

‘Give me their names!’

Joe considered it. ‘Only if you promise not to punish them.’

‘I’ll do nothing to them,’ cried Harry. ‘I’m going to crucify the other nine!’

Harry admired skilful footballers provided they also shaped like prospective VCs. I can still hear him musing, ‘Yes, I agree that lad can play – but can he play when some big, angry bloke is trying to stop him?’ He scouted for Everton as an old man when he was out of management and they still remember receiving from him the shortest possible report on a player. It was one word in capitals  across the reporting form: COWARD.

I was fascinated by Storer and would go out of my way after leaving Coventry to consult the oracle, often in just a few minutes of conversation on railway platforms as our teams waited for Saturday night trains – but I disliked his prejudice against cowards and told him so. I prefer to sign brave footballers but have always seen plenty of scope for those who are less foolhardy; indeed, the word coward is one that I never apply to players. Harry remained adamant, though, that a footballer was useless if he shrank from challenges and the risk of injury. He said, ‘There’s never been a player who enjoyed being kicked but some endure it better than others. They are my kind of player.'

The Basketball Diaries by Jim Carroll (Penguin Books 1978)

 

FALL 63

Today was my first Biddy League game and my first day in any organized basketball league. I'm enthused about life due to this exciting event. The Biddy League is a league for anyone 12 yrs. old or under. I'm actually 13 but my coach Lefty gave me a fake birth certificate. Lefty is a great guy; he picks us up for games in his station wagon and always buys us tons of food. I'm too young to understand about homosexuals but I think Lefty is one. Although he's a great ballplayer and a strong guy, he likes to do funny things to you like put his hand between your legs and pick you up. When he did this I got keenly suspicious. I guess I better not tell my mother about it. I don't want to describe the first game; I played bad and we lost anyway. I was nervous, I took my girlfriend Joan to the game which was at 153rd St., a Negro church called Minisink. Our team is from Madison Sq. Boys Club on E. 29th St. The starting team consists of two Italians, two spades and me.

When the game was over and we were waiting on the subway platform at 155th, Tony Milliano started a fight with Kevin Dolon. Tony is a huge monster who loves to fight; Kevin is a wise ass little prick. Some guys tried to break it up but Tony wouldn't let them and kept on yelling, "I want blood!" It was scary but interesting; I don't like to fight but I love watching others fight. Kevin asked me to jump Milliano from behind but he was too big for me to get involved. Who wanted to help that little fucker anyway? He's forever getting me in trouble down at St. Agnes grade school, where we go. Just today he snitched to Sister Mary Grace about me spitting on the first graders from the lunch room window.

Pretty, Pretty, Pretty Good: Larry David and the Making of Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm by Josh Levine (ECW Press 2010)

 

An Unfunny Kid

“I never thought I would be involved in anything successful,” Larry David once said. “My plan was to try and get by. Maybe at some point I’d get involved in a bank robbery or something.”

Born on July 2, 1947, he was the second son of Morty David, a Brooklyn clothier who would later retire and become president of his condo association, like Jerry’s dad on Seinfeld. Larry’s mother went to work for the Bureau of Child Guidance. Later she wanted Larry to take the civil service test, figuring that he better get himself a secure job — postal worker, teacher — with good benefits. (On Seinfeld, when George moves back into his parents’ house, his mother has the same idea.) His parents were both Democrats, sharing their values and eventually turning Larry into one too.

Larry shared a room with his older brother, Ken, who would later move to Oregon and give advice on computers and investments. Larry went to P.S. 52 and then Sheepshead Bay High School where his report card was filled with average marks because he didn’t much care. (Later an obnoxious comic in a Seinfeld episode would come from Sheepshead Bay. “We were right on the water. The whole atmosphere stank of fish.”) There was always a lot of yelling — between his aunts and uncles, the families of his friends, and in the apartments next to their own. In just the same way, yelling would be a major form of communication on Curb. Larry liked sports and was considered a good athlete by other kids. His parents also forced him to go to Hebrew school, which he detested. He didn’t much hide his feelings and got kicked out for laughing at the rabbi who was telling him off for some infraction. (Even now, when someone is yelling at Larry on Curb he can barely keep himself from laughing.) But his parents, horrified that he wouldn’t be able to have a bar mitzvah, talked him back in.

“We’re both from kind of middle-earth Brooklyn,” said Larry Charles, who would become a producer, writer, and director on both Seinfeld and Curb. “You know, Brighton Beach, Coney Island, lower middle class, under the train tracks. We both understand that sort of Lord of the Flies sensibility that requires you to be very aware as you grow up. It’s a very savage environment, in a lot of ways a very cruel and sadistic environment.”

He was never known as funny, not by his family and not by his friends. But he liked to laugh, and he was a fan of Abbott and Costello, Bob and Ray, and especially the Jewish comic actor Phil Silvers.

I Believe In Miracles: The Remarkable Story of Brian Clough’s European Cup-winning Team by Daniel Taylor (Headline 2015)

The only player Clough doted on was the podgy little Scot he once described as ‘the Picasso of our game’. When Clough walked into Forest’s dressing room for the first time, John Robertson had a chip-fat grin, a slapdash attitude and a packet of Polos strategically hidden in his back pocket to help cover up his fag-breath. Robertson’s career was drifting and it took a “while for the chemistry between him and Clough to work. Yet he has never forgotten Clough’s first day and the instinctive feeling that something better might be on the way. It wasn’t anything Clough said that resonated. It was the aura. It was the moment the dressing-room door almost flew off its hinges. It was the way, before uttering a single word, that in one swift movement Clough was already taking off his jacket and flinging it at a wall peg, as if he had been there years. Clough being Clough, it landed plum on the hook. ‘It was like a whirlwind coming in,’ Robertson says, with the awe still apparent in his voice. ‘I’d never seen anyone in my life with so much charisma. All I could think was: “Jesus, this guy means business.” Right from the very first minute.

Catch a Falling Clown by Stuart M. Kaminsky (Mysterious Press 1981)

The gorilla was sleeping.

When he woke up he’d find a clown in his cage. There would be no reasoning with Gargantua. He was not a reasonable gorilla. Maybe there are no reasonable gorillas. This was the only nonhuman one I had ever met, and if fate didn’t step very gently in and let me out, it was the only gorilla I would ever meet.

His keeper had told me that Gargantua was so mean that they had to throw live snakes into his cage just to get him to move out so they could clean the floors.

“But gorillas, they don’t eat people,” said the keeper, a knotty twig named Henry Yew. “That is a misnomer. They rends ’em apart or chomps ’em sometimes, but they don’t eat ’em.”

So when Gargantua woke up looking for some succulent head of cabbage to bend or chomp, he would find instead a private detective named Toby Peters. With the war in the Pacific going badly and reports of the Japanese bombing Los Angeles and Seattle, I’d just make a curiosity item in the entertainment section of the Los Angeles Times: FAMOUS CIRCUS GORILLA RIPS PRIVATE DETECTIVE. “Maybe the Times would wonder why I had been in his cage dressed as a clown. Maybe not.

High Midnight by Stuart M. Kaminsky (Mysterious Press 1981)

Both the sun and Mrs. Plaut were in my room when I woke up. The sun was full of energy and pride, having broken through a week of stubborn, cold clouds. Mrs. Plaut’s energy “was no less determined. She stood on a wooden chair and was either adjusting or removing the portrait of Abraham Lincoln from my wall.

“What are you doing?” I asked. Fortunately she didn’t hear me. As it was, she nearly toppled from the chair.

“What are you doing?” I shouted when she made it safely to the floor, portrait in hand. She heard that and turned to me with her lips in a straight, resolute line.

“I am removing the portrait of Uncle Ripley,” she said. “I am also removing the bedspread and the doilies from the sofa. These are precious items for me, and it is not safe for them in this room, especially if you plan to continue to stab people and do who knows what else.”

She scooped up the doilies and the bedspread. I was happy to see them go.

“And another thing,” she said, marching to the door. “You will have to buy your own knives.”

Never Cross a Vampire by Stuart M. Kaminsky (Mysterious Press 1980)

When we were in the car with Seidman driving and Phil next to me in the back seat, Phil put down the report and said, “Now talk. No jokes, no lies, no errors and you’ll have a no-hitter.”

I talked as we shot through the early morning darkness, headed I didn’t know where. I told him the truth from start to finish including the Shatzkin and Lugosi material.

“So,” said Phil, “what do you make of it?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “There’s no link between the two cases. It’s crazy.”

“There’s a link,” said Seidman from the front seat. I could see his sunken-eyed skull of a face in the rearview mirror.

“Yeah,” I said. “Me. I’m the missing link.”

“And …?” said Phil.

“I’ll work on it,” I said.

“How’s your knee?” Phil said, turning his head away from me out the window.

That was the blow I almost couldn’t handle. My mind went blank, and I reviewed more than four decades of life with Phil. There had never been anything like this.

“Ruth told me,” he explained.

“Told you?”

“The money,” he said.

Seidman pretended to hear nothing.

“I thought you’d break my head if you found out,” I said.

Phil’s hands were in his lap. They wanted to do something, but his mind was stopping him.

“I don’t like it,” he said, “but I need it.”

The Howard Hughes Affair by Stuart M. Kaminsky (Mysterious Press 1979)

“Don’t you want to hear what Hughes wants?” I said.

“I want to hear,” she said softly, “but I don’t want to pay the price for it. Your price is always too high, Toby. You can make a person live a century in fifteen minutes.”

“And you used to love it,” I tried.

She shook her head.

“I never loved it. I accepted it. We’ve been all through it, Toby. I’m almost 40 years old. I have no family, no kids. I’ve got a career and some hope. You don’t cheer me up when you come around. You just remind me of everything I’ve missed.”

“You sent me a perfumed letter,” I said, getting up and moving toward her.

“I pay my gas bill with perfumed letters,” she said. “I buy it by the box. Come on, Toby, I’ve had a bad day. My feet hurt and I have to look in the mirror soon.”

“You’re beautiful, Annie.”

She shook her head and smiled sadly.

“I’m holding on, Toby,” she said. “I heard someone in the office describe me as a handsome woman today. That depressed me almost as much as this visit is. Please take your needs someplace else. I’m not an emotional gas station that can keep pumping it out.”

You Bet Your Life by Stuart M. Kaminsky (Mysterious Press 1978)

Chico and Harpo were playing gin rummy, smacking the cardboard rectangles on the table. Chico beamed through the game, uttering uhs and delighted ahs while we waited for a phone call.

Groucho lay on the bed reading the newspaper. He looked at me and shook his head.

“We’re an anachronism, a relic of the past, a clown for people who’ve never been to the circus, a dialect comic for people who don’t remember vaudeville, a fast-talking, baggy-pants comic with a leer for those who were afraid to go to burlesque. We’re a trio of dinosaurs, an endangered species lying around a hotel in Chicago waiting for someone to come through the door and shoot us.”

“No one’s going to shoot you, Grouch,” Chico said, without looking up from his cards. “They’re going to shoot me.”

“That’s consoling. If I’m lucky, and they don’t miss, all I’ll lose is my brother instead of my life. I may be tired of playing that character in our movies, but I’m not tired of playing.” He raised his eyebrows suggestively.

Murder on the Yellow Brick Road by Stuart M. Kaminsky (Mysterious Press 1977)

Someone had murdered a Munchkin. The little man was lying on his back in the middle of the yellow brick road with his startled wide eyes looking into the overhead lights of an M.G.M. sound stage. He wore a kind of comic soldier’s uniform with a yellow coat and puffy sleeves and a big fez-like blue and yellow hat with a feather on top. His yellow hair and beard were the phony straw color of Hollywood. He might have looked kind of cute in a tinsel-town way if it hadn’t been for the knife sticking out of his chest. The knife was a brown-handled kitchen thing. Only the handle was visible.

Bullet for a Star by Stuart M. Kaminsky (Mysterious Press 1977)

My face was in my favor. I badly needed a haircut, but sometimes the slightly wild look was just what a client wanted in a bodyguard. My nose had been broken at least three times, once by a baseball thrown by my brother, once by a wind-shield and once by a fist thrown by my brother, in that order. But at five foot nine, the nose was a valuable asset. It announced that I had known violence.

Maigret by Georges Simenon (Penguin 1934)

'You have to admit,’ ventured Amadieu, tugging at his moustache, ‘that your method is impossible to apply in a case like this one. The chief and I were arguing about it earlier.’

Well, well, the chief really was taking a close interest in the case!

‘What do you mean by my method?'

'You know better than I do. Usually, you get involved in people’s lives; you try to understand their thinking and you take as much interest in things that happened to them twenty years earlier as you do in concrete clues. Here, we’re faced with a bunch about whom we know pretty much everything. They don’t even try to put us off the scent. And I’m not even sure that, in private, Cageot would even bother to deny having killed.'