Robert McGinnis

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Gun Honey–Sexy arms supplier is action anti-heroine in new stylish, international espionage crime noir series

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October 5, 2021

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Review by C.J. Bunce

You’ll want to check out the end of the first issue of Titan Comics and Hard Case Crime’s new series Gun Honey to learn how writer/creator Charles Ardai came up with the title. Gun Honey is a new comic book series about a woman who can get the weapons you want for the right price. The series is a mix of international locales a la James Bond, with the style movie audiences saw and heard in Guy Ritchie’s 2015 movie The Man from U.N.C.L.E.–you can almost hear the soundtrack. She’s the latest of a long line of anti-hero, badass femmes fatales in comics dating back to Miss Fury. And artist Ang Hor Kheng does the character and the genre justice, providing a sexy new character in a world of intrigue, duplicity, and the need for an alter ego.

Check out a preview of the first issue below, along with a preview of several of the series’ incredible cover variants from the likes of Bill Sienkiewicz, Robert McGinnis, Adam Hughes, Kendrick Lim, Jay Anacleto, Chris Wahl, Kendrick Lim, Ivan Tao, Warren Louw, Lesley Li, Fay Dalton, Andrea Camerini, and more.

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Retro review–Erle Stanley Gardner’s Shills Can’t Cash Chips, a twisty, fun, hard-boiled crime story

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March 16, 2021

Review by C.J. Bunce

If you can’t imagine the greatest noir crime story you ever read was about a firm of private investigators researching a claim of insurance fraud, you’d better get ready. The fifth–and what appears to be final–retro re-issue of a classic work of crime fiction by Erle Stanley Gardner (who was, at his death, the best-selling American writer of all time) is now available from Hard Case Crime. One of the novels Gardner penned under his pseudonym A.A. Fair, the author mastermind known for dozens of Perry Mason novels (60 in total) and Cool & Lam novels (30 total) penned Shills Can’t Cash Chips sixty years ago, and it’s as exciting, current, funny, and full of intrigue as any modern bestseller. Gardner’s Bertha Cool and Donald Lam are back at it again. Although Hard Case Crime notes this is the last of their series of Gardner books (with this review I’ve reviewed all but one, including Turn on the Heat, The Count of 9, and the first ever publication of Gardner’s “lost,” Cool & Lam novel, The Knife Slipped)–which is a sad thing–that just means it’s time to begin tracking down the rest.

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Tags: Bertha Cool, Best of the Best, Best of the Best retro review, Cool and Lam, crime noir, Donald Lam, Erle Stanley Gardner, Hard Case Crime, Laurel Blechman, pulp noir, pulp novels, Retro review, Robert McGinnis, Shills Can't Cash Chips, Shills Can't Cash Chips book review, The Count of 9, The Knife Slipped, Top of the Heap, Turn On the Heat

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Retro review–Erle Stanley Gardner’s unpublished, “lost” Cool & Lam novel, The Knife Slipped

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June 23, 2020

Review by C.J. Bunce

If there is a better writer of pulp crime fiction in the long history of the genre than Erle Stanley Gardner, I don’t know who it is. Yes, Mickey Spillane and Donald E. Westlake are in the running, too, but even if you push aside Gardner’s more than 60 novels featuring Perry Mason, you’re going to be challenged to find a better duo of detectives from the 1930s onward than Gardner’s Bertha Cool and Donald Lam. Gardner wrote 29 novels published in his lifetime featuring the larger than life Bertha of the B. Cool Detective Agency and loyal and well-trod upon employee Lam, the narrator of the tales who lost his license to practice law and uses his smarts to keep money coming in to the agency. Where the Hard Case Crime imprint is at its best is finding lost gems, and they have one in The Knife Slipped, written by Gardner and intended to be the duo’s second case, the publisher kicked it way back in 1939 because of Bertha’s brash, bombastic, and profane style. Maybe that attitude just reflected the era of the day, but reading the novel now it’s clear Gardner was ahead of his time.

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The Many Lives of Bond–Filmmakers, actors, writers, and artists share how they designed the elements of James Bond

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December 6, 2019

Review by C.J. Bunce

Sometimes you can align the right fan with a project and come up with something great. Add Mark Edlitz to that list and his fascinating, broad look at the James Bond franchise in The Many Lives of James Bond: How the Creators of 007 Have Decoded the Superspy. As audiences get ready for 2020’s No Time to Die, the franchise continues to be as popular as ever, through new fiction and non-fiction books, comics, music, posters, and more. But how do you translate the master British spy from Ian Fleming’s original stories into new stories, or adapt the character to the big screen, to audio books and radio plays, and to spin-off comic books and novels? Mark Edlitz is a long-time fan who took his tape recorder along to Bond conventions over the years and interviewed everyone he could find in front of and behind the camera, then expanded that into people behind the books and everything else he could find. The result is the largest collection of Bond oral histories anywhere. The result is The Many Lives of James Bond, now available for the first time, from Lyons Press.

Supplemented with sketch art (from artist Pat Carbajal) and peppered with black and white photographs of the interview subjects, Edlitz makes up for some of the big creators he was unable to interview by interviewing people close to them. Interviewing people is not easy: Sometimes the subjects aren’t good at being interviewed, and oftentimes subjects are evasive for whatever reason. But most subjects in the book said they felt a certain family connection to the honor of working on a Bond project, and were open with their thoughts. It’s full of all kinds of surprises, and more insights than you can imagination about being Bond, from interviews with Roger Moore and George Lazenby, a stunt double, Hoagy Carmichael and David Niven’s sons (Fleming’s initial visions for Bond), and Glen A. Schofield, who provides his account of working with Sean Connery as voice over actor in a video game 20 years after his last Bond performance. The Many Lives of James Bond also looks back to some early, pre-Bond film era performers.

Edlitz covers casting the role and directing Bond (from movie directors Martin Campbell (GoldenEye, Casino Royale), Roger Spotiswoode (Tomorrow Never Dies), and editor and unit director John Glen (who worked on eight films with four Bond actors)), writing words and working with the famed producers who own the Bond legacy (from interviews with more than a dozen writers, including three-time Bond screenwriter Bruce Feirstein), creating music for Bond (from songwriters Leslie Bricusse (Goldfinger, You Only Live Twice) and Don Black (who wrote songs for five films)), creating clothes for Bond (from Jany Temime (Skyfall, SPECTRE)), and even marketing Bond (in movie posters created by Robert McGinnis (Diamonds are Forever, Live and Let Die), Rudy Obrero (Never Say Never Again), and Dan Goozee (Moonraker, Octopussy, A View to a Kill)), all while trying to be faithful to Fleming’s vision while adapting when necessary to changing times.

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Oakley Hall’s dark tale So Many Doors sees its first reprint in 60 years

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April 14, 2019

Review by C.J. Bunce

Crime novels tend to include an element of mystery. Usually the attraction for the reader is going along for the ride with the detective, the cop, the private eye, or the wrongly accused. Some novels have variations on the theme, but few are purely character studies that begin with the reveal of the murderer and then take readers on the pathway of whydunit. That’s not 100% what’s going on in Oakley Hall′s So Many Doors, but it’s close. First published in 1950 and reprinted by Hard Case Crime for the first time in 60 years, So Many Doors centers around Vassilia Baird, a teen girl who, despite her father’s best efforts, ends up in the arms of a bad boy, resulting in a downward spiral that leads to her death. Hall’s writing has a storytelling quality that may make it a good study for writers, but, despite his quick prose, it is bogged down with ugly characters in the obscure world of Depression era bulldozer operators.

At first Baird is the obvious character whose cause needs championed–an innocent. But without explanation, she’s transformed overnight into a femme fatale. Hall does not give the reader enough access to her to understand anything personal, any motivation, any reason other than she’s in the position of the novel that a reader should ordinarily be sympathetic toward, until she isn’t. Hall never gets into her head, instead choosing to provide access to others who were part of her life, including an odd father, a would-be friend, a creepy much older neighbor, and her murderer. Readers will not likely find those characters as particularly real either, or follow common sense (or decency toward others in many cases), or participate in the average person’s experience with the human condition. And the single twist is predictable. It’s unfortunate, because the set-up is brilliantly introduced upfront: A public defender is assigned to the bad boy, who refuses his services and admits to murdering Baird (known throughout the story as “V”). But that’s followed by 300 pages of waiting for something exciting to happen and the action never again matches the first chapter.

The fact that So Many Doors saw acclaim in 1950 is unfortunately telling about the era, a story full of shockingly smarmy or cowardly men on the one hand and stock naïve and stock evil women. It wants to be Vera Caspary’s Laura, but isn’t. Instead the leads are caricatures of characters with little chemistry out of The Great Gatsby, embedded in a setting from The Giant and East of Eden and unpleasant interactions and relationships like those found in On the Waterfront and Dangerous Liaisons. That kind of tale may very well still have an audience out there, but the sum of the parts may not add up for modern readers.

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Tags: Charles Willeford, crime drama, Dangerous Liaisons, East of Eden, Giant movie, Hard Case Crime, Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer, Laura, Legends of the Fall, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Oakley Hall, On the Waterfront, Robert Maguire, Robert McGinnis, So Many Doors, So Many Doors book review, Understudy for Death, Vera Caspary

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Retro review–Ed McBain’s “Cut Me In,” the old is new again with Hard Case Crime

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February 23, 2016

Review by C.J. Bunce

Some writers know how to suck you right in from the first page. Take the late author Evan Hunter aka Ed McBain. In his 1953 novel The Proposition (published under another pseudonym, Hunt Collins) McBain gave his lead character Josh Blake a timeless voice that conjures a confident, put-upon literary agent melting in the sweltering summer city heat, trying to cut himself in on a big deal that will land him the good life–like a million dollar home and a big swimming pool. Blake is like a mash-up between Jack Nicholson’s J.J. Gittes in Chinatown and Nicholson’s Will Randall in the film Wolf–written decades before either character was created. Think Gittes because of the pulp noir mystery, and Randall because we’re maneuvering the politics of the literary world.

Why single out a 1950s crime mystery by Ed McBain? Because the folks at Titan Books’ Hard Case Crime found this gem, and have released it this year for the first time in more than 60 years. Originally published as The Proposition by Hunt Collins, it was later published as Hunt Collins’ Cut Me In–a great title that fits the story much better. The new edition, labeled as a McBain novel, features a classic style pulp cover by Robert McGinnis with a dead ringer for Suzanne Somers. She sits by the pool, the pool that is the target of Josh Blake’s affection. So if you’re like this reader, you’re seeing Nicholson and Somers play out this great movie that never was.

And you can read the first chapter of Cut Me In right now. First, just the facts.

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Tags: Book review, Chinatown, Cut Me In, Cut Me In book review, Ed McBain, Evan Hunter, Hard Case Crime, Hunt Collins, J.J. Gittes, Jack Nicholson, Joe Gillis, Joshua Blake, Robert McGinnis, Sunset Boulevard, The Proposition, Titan Books, Wil Randall, Wolf, Wolf Jack Nicholson

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Book Review–Stephen King’s new novel, Joyland

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June 3, 2013

Review by C.J. Bunce

Tomorrow Stephen King’s newest novel, Joyland, hits the shelves already a pre-release #1 Bestseller. Come back to borg.com Friday, June 7, 2013, for information on how to win copies of an exclusive edition of Joyland or canvas cover prints of the novel’s artwork from Titan Books, publisher of the Hard Case Crime imprint, as part of the Stephen King-Joyland online book tour.

As a fan of many Stephen King movies and TV series based on his books, strangely enough I never made it through a Stephen King novel before now. Because King’s adapted visual works have been so consistent, I found the easy-going storytelling in Joyland to be very familiar. Joyland contains themes found in the innocence of Stand By Me (based on King’s novella The Body) and Silver Bullet (based on King’s novella Cycle of the Werewolf), the supernatural of The Green Mile (based on King’s serial novel of the same name), and the Northeast U.S. town-life found in the TV series Haven (based on King’s The Colorado Kid) and The Dead Zone (based on King’s novel). King’s storytelling is very recognizable–you’d know his style anywhere. And Joyland is not horror, but a blend of true crime-type drama mixed with King’s signature violent/explicit/graphic accounts of not just the crime that is the focus of the story but the life of the protagonist. Yet it is also a coming of age story for the 20s set–written in a manner similar to classic middle grade and young adult works, like S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders and Tex, and even some of Judy Blume’s works.