Free Jami Shuey CD ... Casanegra ... Caine Black Knife

Saw Jami Shuey at the Cinema the other night -- she was apparently getting over a cold, but was in as good a voice as ever. I bought 2 of her CDs -- one of them is free to the first person who sends me a street address at danmoran909@yahoo.com asking for it. Listen to (at least) her song "Wrong Girl" over at her MySpace page first -- the CD's free to a good home, but make sure you like the sort of folk/country she sings before I send it off.

http://www.myspace.com/jaimishuey

Finished the Underwood/Due/Barnes novel, Casanegra, and Matt Stover's Caine Black Knife. I'm not going to comment on Matt's book, except to say it lived up to my extraordinarily high expectations -- I'll talk about it at more length when it's available to be purchased, but he knocked this out of the park. It's the first of a trilogy, too.

Casanegra's a 3-person collaboration between Blair Underwood, Tananarive Due (spelled correctly) and Steve Barnes. It is on sale and it's the first book of a noir series about former gigolo, part-time actor and bodyguard Tennyson Hardwyck. It's a surprisingly touching novel for noir (Due's influence, maybe) -- the fight sequences are trademark Barnes, and I'm not even going to speculate about who wrote what in the really explicit and lengthy sex scenes -- this is the first noir novel I've ever come away from knowing the actual size of the viewpoint character's penis. (Who's based on Blair Underwood. Which means -- well, good for him.)

It's a successful collaboration, and I'm not a big fan of multi-author collaborations -- I always liked the stuff Barnes wrote with Larry Niven, but the 3-way collaborations he did with Jerry Pournelle and Niven always felt cobbled together -- I always thought I could spot which passage had been written by which writer, sometimes down to the paragraph. With a couple rare exceptions I can't do that here -- maybe it's the first-person voice that helps unify things, but I was never aware of dueling authors at any point. This is good stuff and I'm looking forward to the sequels -- I'm a sucker for stories that never stop moving, literary sharks, and this qualifies and still manages to glide through the grace notes that make you care about the characters -- early in the book Hardwyck tells his father, a heroic ex-cop who's had a stroke, that Hardwyck is going to take him out of a nursing home and care for him personally, at his house -- things go sideways, Hardwyck-the-screwup-son is in trouble ... and he has to call his father and tell him no, dad, I'm sorry: you're staying in the hospital. It's as wrenching as it sounds.

The last line is a nice grace note, too -- I was waiting for it, but credit to them for getting it right.

Apparently the sequel concerns the murder of OJ Simpson. That sounds interesting.

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Saw Fantastic Four on Father's Day with my kids and two of my nephews. If you have small children, it's not a bad way to spend a couple hours. Otherwise I wouldn't bother, and I like the Silver Surfer.

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According to Variety there's a Cowboys and Aliens movie coming -- this was the plot of my first novel, which I wrote when I was 16. It wasn't supposed to be a novel; it was supposed to be a short story about a man playing poker with an alien in the old west. But I didn't know how it ended, and it kept getting longer and longer and longer ... finally finished it several hundred pages of single-spaced text later. I've got a very-poorly-scanned copy on my hard drive -- it's awesomely bad, but I am eager to see the basic idea done by someone with (presumably) more competence -- anyway, I'll be there on opening weekend.

Matt Stover sent me the new Caine novel ...

"Caine Black Knife"

I have a bunch of stuff I revisit every decade or so -- Mary Stewart's Merlin trilogy, a half dozen of the best Heinlein's, John D. MacDonald, Gregory McDonald, Roger Zelazny. (Every now and again I look longingly at the "War Against the Chtorr," and I'd dive back into that in a minute if David Gerrold would ever finish the fucking thing. And yes, I get the irony there.)

And I have a much smaller set of works that I read over and over and over again -- it's the stuff listed in my profile. Larry McMurtry's "Lonesome Dove" – the best novel I personally have ever read. "The Perfect Thief," by Ronald J. Bass; the Vimes and Granny Weatherwax novels by Terry Pratchett, and "Heroes Die" by Matt Stover.

My wife bought Matt's first novel and I read both of his first two Caine novels in manuscript – I can remember Amy passing the first manuscript to me with the comment, "Let me know what you think of this, it seems your style of thing." And I sat on the bed all night long, unable to put the manuscript down. I remember thinking there were a couple of minor things wrong with it – I'm not being nice to Matt when I say I no longer remember what they were, I just don't remember – but when the book saw print I picked it up again and read it out of curiosity, and man, it had gotten better – I found myself sitting up all the night long reading the book again. And six months or so later, doing it again –

The sequel came, "The Blade of Tyshalle" – which in an unrelated note has probably my favorite cover art of all time – I'd pay real money to hang that painting on my wall. And I read that in manuscript, and it was brilliant – a richer and more ambitious work than Heroes Die – and over the course of the years I've read that book maybe 3 times now (maybe 4) …

I can't tell you how many times I've read Heroes Die, because it's turned into one of my touchstone books – it's by my bedside. I pick it up and browse a chapter, and find myself lost and reading for an hour – put it down, come back the next day and start from the first scene, come back a month later and start from wherever I vaguely remember leaving off –

Last night Matt sent me the manuscript for the 3rd Caine novel, "Caine Black Knife." I read the first 75 pages last night when I hadn't slept more than 4 hours a night in 3 straight days and damn well needed to catch up – and I'll be done by this weekend, despite all the crap swirling around me at the moment. John D. MacDonald's dead, Zelazny's dead, Heinlein's dead, Gregory McDonald's last few novels have disappointed, Larry McMurtry's last few have disappointed, Bass only writes screenplays, Mary Stewart is really old and I'm going be as old as Mary Stewart is before David Gerrold finishes the damned Chtorran series …

But I have a new Caine novel. Every day on the right side of the dirt is a good day.