Articles

It was a real-life mystery that could have been a film noir. Between 1966 and 1972, a writer by the name of John Lange published eight paperback suspense novels. These were the kind of books with racy and sexy covers once found in drug stores, airports and bus stations. One of them even got nominated for an Edgar Award in 1971. Then John Lange just disappeared, apparently vanishing right off the face of the earth. His books soon followed and fell out of print for decades, perhaps showing up now and then in a garage sale or used bookstore.

Tom Clancy’s success was the type for which every potential author dreams. Write a novel (THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER) that is accepted by the first publisher to which it is submitted. It becomes a bestseller, helped to some measure by the recommendation of the sitting President of the United States, and is adapted for film.

Elmore Leonard didn’t write crime fiction, westerns, historical thrillers or mysteries. He wrote Elmore Leonard books. No, that’s not quite right. He wrote Elmore Leonard books. You can bring an Elmore Leonard book to someone totally unfamiliar with genre fiction, say “try this” and make a believer out of them within the first few pages. When they run through everything from THE BOUNTY HUNTERS to MR. MAJESTYK (“hey...didn’t they make a movie of this?”) to FIFTY-TWO PICKUP to, yes, RAYLAN, they come back to you and ask, “Can you recommend anything else like this?” And you can, with the admonition that it will be almost, but not quite, as good as the real thing.

As I grow older, I have more frequent cause to think of a quote from the Oscar-winning movie Harry and Tonto. It’s from Harry Coombes, who was played by the truly immortal Art Carney: “You never really feel somebody’s suffering; you only feel their death.” Right now I’m feeling the death of Vince Flynn, one of our era’s top thriller authors and a terrific guy who passed away in the first hours of June 19, 2013. I first met Vince at ThrillerFest in New York several years ago, where he very graciously signed and personalized several of his books for my son Michael, who is a major fan of his. Vince was an easy guy to talk to, a skill he undoubtedly acquired in his prior vocational lives as a bartender and a commercial real estate agent. I never bought a drink or leased an office from him, but I did read every one of his books. From first to last, beginning to end, they were...well, I could run out of adjectives. Let’s start with riveting and thrilling, and go on to addicting, to name but three.

Ralph Lagana is a sixth-grade reading specialist at Gideon Welles School in Glastonbury, Connecticut. As Ralph describes it, “It’s a single-grade building with a student population of around 525.” It’s also a school with an open-minded approach to teaching comics in the classroom.

Helen Gurley Brown was witty and smart. She was known for writing some of the sexiest headlines in magazine publishing. But while she loved talking about sex, she also was committed to empowering women in the boardroom as well as the bedroom. Here are 10 of her quotes worth discussing over cocktails or a glass of wine.

The months of research and testing for atomic weapons, which had started out of curiosity by the world’s most brilliant minds, led to the momentous and terrible bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This critical period in modern history is expertly detailed in Jonathan Fetter-Vorm’s brilliant debut graphic novel, Trinity: A Graphic History of the First Atomic Bomb.  

While watching an early morning news show on Wednesday morning, I learned some very sad news. Screenwriter/director/author --- and all-around great lady --- Nora Ephron had passed away. No simple Facebook status or 140-character tweet could ever effectively convey her influence or talent. How subdued the world seems now that she’s gone. It’s like the light in the room just got slightly dimmer.  

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