Of necessity, I’ll be taking a break from blogging for the next week or so. My doctor and I are working on the problem. With thyroid disorders, it’s awfully tough to keep the dosages right. Lots of hills and valleys, as you’ll know if you’ve been following this blog long enough.

If I owe you an email, and I probably do if you’ve emailed me since the middle of last week or so, I’ll respond directly as soon as I get caught up a little.

Best wishes for the holiday season. I’ll be back when I can.

— Steve

   Sylvia Orman was my wife Judy’s mother, and she died this morning around 9 am.

   She was 96 years old. Every year you expect there will be another birthday, but this year there won’t be. We never lost hope, but when you’re that age and small problems begin, they start to add up quickly. She’d had a pacemaker installed about three weeks ago and was doing well in physical therapy until she got a viral infection which turned to pneumonia, and she had to return to the hospital.

   We saw her yesterday afternoon, which is when we said our last goodbyes. She was heavily sedated but she squeezed Judy’s hand when she talked to her, so we think she knew we were there.

   We’re sad today, of course, and still shaken up a little, but we’re glad that we had her living close by for so long. She lived in an assisted living facility, but until the end she was very independent and did everything pretty much on her own.

   Did the usual mother-in-law jokes apply? Not once. Not ever.

    “There’s an old story about the person who wished his computer were as easy to use as his telephone. That wish has come true, since I no longer know how to use my telephone.” (Bjarne Stroustrup)

    I spent a good deal of yesterday and most of this morning trying to read my email. I probably shouldn’t still be using Eudora, but I’m comfortable with it. Yesterday it was a bad certificate, whatever that it is. Cox.net, of course, had no idea, but after I finally spoke to a sympathetic tech support fellow for a lengthy time — though he claimed the problem was not at all at their end — five minutes after I hung up, the problem quietly disappeared.

    This morning I couldn’t log in. Needed a password. First time in six years. Was there a way to find out what it was? No. To change it? No. The online east cox mail server was down, at least for me — was yesterday, too — and the west server really didn’t want to know me either. A little finesse, which took a couple of hours, did the trick. I’d done something I really shouldn’t have the day before, but who knew? The two passwords match now, and I wrote it down someplace safe, believe you me.

    Thanks to my daughter Sarah and her husband Mark for keeping me cool. Otherwise the computer would have been out the window, as per Steve Wozniak.

    What a waste of time.

    But me, bitter? Nah. Not a chance in the world.

    “It has been said that the great scientific disciplines are examples of giants standing on the shoulders of other giants. It has also been said that the software industry is an example of midgets standing on the toes of other midgets.” (Alan Cooper)

   Jim Goodrich, a good friend of mine died this morning. He died peacefully in a Albuquerque hospice around 1 a.m. His daughter Jill and her husband Kevin were at his bedside. He was 81 years old.

   Jim was an avid mystery reader and an equally avid movie buff, and he had been all his life. I’ve known him for something like 35 years, and while he never wrote any long articles or reviews for Mystery*File, he was always a strong supporter of my efforts from the first issue on. He invariably had something to say about the previous issue in the letter column of the next one.

   I met him in person the first time at the 1977 New York City Bouchercon, and we became even closer friends as time went on. We drove together to a PulpCon in Cherry Hill NJ in 1981 — he still lived in New Paltz NY at the time, where he was an academic librarian — and we attended several Friends of Old Time Radio conventions in Bridgeport CT and Newark NJ together, always having many many things to talk about and to catch up on. After he retired and moved to New Mexico, we only saw each other at PulpCons, either in Bowling Green or Dayton OH once a year, but we kept in constant touch, first by letters and postcards, then by email.

   Our interests overlapped in mystery fiction and pulp magazines, although his centered primarily on the hardboiled kind; old-time radio, movies, traditional jazz, religion, politics, and you name it, pop culture and nostalgia of every kind and variety.

   Jim had been undergoing radiation and chemotherapy treatments for the past several years, but he was a cheerful survivor. He was, in fact, planning to attend PulpCon again last year, but he was hospitalized the weekend before, a sore blow to him. He wouldn’t have missed it otherwise.

   He never went home again. He was transferred to a hospice within a week, but he rallied and was moved to a place where he could receive physical therapy, and he spent the last six months of 2008 there. From December on, his condition deteriorated again rapidly.

   Jim, I’ll miss you.

       ____

   From the online edition of the Albuquerque Journal:

GOODRICH — James R. “Jim” Goodrich, 81, of Albuquerque, died February 7, 2009 after a three-year battle with cancer. A retired librarian, Jim was an aficionado of Jazz, Cinema, Art, Pulp Fiction, Mysteries, and Comics; and an active supporter of numerous progressive causes and candidates. His intelligence, dry sense of humor, and patronage of numerous local restaurants, bookstores, and other establishments earned him many friends and admirers in the area. Jim was born in Toledo, Ohio, on September 12, 1927, the son of the late J.R. and Florence Goodrich. He earned a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Toledo and a Master’s of Library Science from Rutgers University. In 1990 he retired after more than 20 years as a librarian at the State University of New York at New Paltz and moved to Albuquerque. Jim is survived by his daughter, Jill Goodrich, and her husband, Kevin O’Connell, of Silver Spring, Maryland; his son Victor Goodrich of Philadelphia; his sister and brother-in-law, Lois and Edward Betts, of Northridge, California; his nephews, Tom Betts and Terry Betts, of California; and his niece, Ellen Betts, of Arizona. He was predeceased by his son Scott in 1974. Burial will take place at a date to be determined in New Paltz, New York. Donations in Jim’s name may be made to Presbyterian Healthcare Services (Albuquerque) Hospice division, the American Cancer Society, Planned Parenthood, or any environmental or wildlife charity.

   Thanks to Terry Betts for allowing me the use of the photo above.

   You may recall, if you’ve been reading this blog long enough, that I had to find a new doctor to handle my chronic thyroid problems after I fired my old one. Thanks to a fellow patient of my primary care physician, one was recommended to me, and I finally saw him two weeks ago yesterday.

   The experience was very positive. I’ll say that first. Not only had he had my complete file sent over from the fellow who shall remain nameless — but whose name I will tell you in order to avoid him if you live anywhere in this area — but he (the new doctor) had actually read it.

   As we talked through the problems I’d been having — and he went back in detail over the past 10 or 12 years — he came up with 8 or 10 different possibilities that should be checked out, only one of which had ever been suggested to me before. So progress was made, right then and there.

   I went to have blood tests taken the next morning, nine different ones. The bad news is that here it is two weeks later, and not all of them have been completed. I don’t know why the lab can’t send over the rest of the results, though, and I’ll see if I can find out later today.

   In the meantime, I’m still going through the ups and downs of not having enough adrenalin and thyroid hormones at the right time — neither my body nor the meds I’m taking are up to the task — and the problems have gradually worsened again over the past couple of months.

   I hate to say it, but I’m going to have to keep off the computer a lot more than I have been. Being at the computer for such long stretches may be contributing, so we’ll see if staying away helps.

   So the upshot is that things are going to be quieter here for a while, maybe for the rest of the month. I intend to stick around, though, and keep an eye on things and not disappear completely. I’ll be responding to comments, for example, and reposting some, as I’ve been doing recently, and perhaps the odd review now and then, so neither I nor the blog will be completely idle.

   That’s the news, both good and bad. I’m hopeful that this new doctor will come up with something that will help, but even if he does, it’s doubtful that things will improve immediately. In the meantime, I think I’ll stop typing and simply say thanks for stopping by — and I hope you’ll keep on doing so. There’ll be some changes made, but I’m not closing up shop.

             — Steve

Do you know what? This is the 1000th post to appear on this blog. Two years, one month and five days later.

I know, I know, if you check the URL for this one, it says it’s the 1005th, but I’ve written five that are still in limbo and have never been posted. They’re semi-ready, though; maybe I’ll get back to them someday and finish them up.

Some of the remaining 1000 have been deleted for one reason or another. I wrote one after I’d the flu for a day or so, and in it I described the dream I kept having over and over again — something about bricks in a wall — but I was still feverish when I wrote it and when I recovered, I decided that some things are best mentioned only once and then forgotten.

But not entirely. Even though you probably don’t remember it, I think it’s obvious that I still do.

I wish I knew when I started what I wanted to do with this blog, but in recent weeks I think it’s getting closer to whatever goal I didn’t have in mind back then.

I don’t know if that makes sense or not, but it does to me.

— Steve

   Whoever it is in New England who’s dreaming of a White Christmas, would somebody wake him or her up?

   Eight inches of snow on Friday, impossible roads yesterday, and six more inches today. Come on. Enough is enough.

   But other than that, and a certain cooped up feeling, all is fine here, and I hope it is where you are, too.

         Happy holidays, everyone!

               —Steve

   All of the books I reviewed in Mystery.File 1 are now online (and the reviews are all that Mystery.File 1 consisted of). I printed out two copies of this particular version of Mystery*File in January 1987. One went to my good friend and fellow mystery enthusiast, the late and greatly missed Ellen Nehr, in a letter dated January 16th, and I found the other here in a file folder not too long ago.

   It’s possible I used the reviews in a DAPA-Em zine after that, but if I didn’t, they’ve seen the light of day for general consumption for the first time here on the M*F blog.

   I didn’t add a letter grade to the books I reviewed in that issue, but to close out the issue, I ranked the books in order, according to how I enjoyed them at the time. “Keep in mind,” I said, “that this is very subjective — and subject to change from moment to moment ….”

   The reviews in full can be found by using the search box in the column to the right of the text, if you so wish. (Rankings can tell you something, but not as much as you might think.) I enjoyed reading what I had to say back then, some 22 years ago, and I hope you have, too.

   But there is nothing unusual in pointing out reviews that I’ve written that may have been seen by only two people. I have many reviews in my “archives” that have been seen by only one person (me), while others have been seen by up to a 100 or so, and when I was reviewing for the Hartford Courant (back in the 1970s), a hefty multiple of that, one hopes.

   The very first issue of Mystery*File was dated only by the year, 1974. The second gave the month also: July 1974. The first version of M*F ran only 8 issues, including one numbered 5A, for what reason I no longer recall. Number 7 was dated May 1975.

   There have been many start-ups and shutdowns along the way since then, including several changes of title, with Fatal Kiss being the most common. While of course there were articles and checklists in each that were contributed by other people, a good chunk of them had reviews in them that I’d written, usually a dozen or more at a time.

   When I wasn’t publishing my own zine, my reviews appeared in Guy Townsend’s The MYSTERY FANcier and other zines, hundreds of them. (One full issue of TMF has been cannibalized, so to speak, with a big chunk of it having appeared here on the blog over the past year or so — not only my stuff, but by others who I’ve been able to track down and persuade that their past activities need not be hidden forever.)

   And when I was between zines willing to print my reviews, I wrote them anyway, of movies as well as books, and they’re all in my files, never seen by anyone by me.

   So with all of these old reviews of mine on tap and available, I’d never have to read another book or watch another movie to keep this blog going in the direction it’s been heading over the past few months.

   I’ve never had a clear focus or goal in mind since I started the blog version of Mystery*File, and I think it’s about time I established one. I seem to be running out of steam in writing reviews of books I’ve recently read, but (as you may have noticed) I’ve found a whole new world of interest in collecting and watching movies on VHS or DVD, both old and new. And if not all of them have crime-related components, so be it.

   (I suppose I could start another blog to review movies which aren’t criminous, but a number that aren’t have already been covered here, so it’s too late. A precedent has been set.)

   Mixing them in with any new ones that I write, I’ll continue postng older, “archived” reviews and short articles (like George Kelley’s recent one about the Joe Gall series). Taken from old fanzines (of which I have a great supply on hand), most of this material has never been read by more than a couple of hundred people at the most, and with permission of the various authors, it’s time to make it available to the whole world via the Internet.

   I’d love to do longer articles and author profiles, but I have too many interests and other obligations, and I no longer have the time. I’d gladly publish them here, but they’re going to have to be done by someone else.

   So that’s the plan. It’s subject to change, but what in this world isn’t?

   As I often do before heading out of town, I’ve been doubling up on posts this week, as you may have noticed. Rich Harvey’s Pulp Adventurecon #9 is an all-day show on Saturday in Bordentown NJ, and I’ll be there:

   I’ll be leaving tomorrow morning with Paul Herman. We’re planning on doing some bookhunting along the way, then stopping at noted pulp collector Walker Martin’s home in NJ in the afternoon and staying overnight with noted paperback collector Dan Roberts over in nearby PA. (Paul of course is also noted, and so am I.)

   It’s always a great trip, and I’m looking forward to it.

   Back from Michigan, that is, where a wonderful time was had by all, as expected, and back from Gary Lovisi’s paperback show in New York City yesterday. Attendance was up slightly and a lot of money seemed to be changing hands, but of course the even greater attraction was seeing and talking to many, many friends I’ve known for a long time.

   I hope none of them will feel slighted if I mention only one of them, writer and pulp historian Ron Goulart, author most recently of Cheap Thrills, a profusely illustrated history of the pulp magazines, and Good Girl Art, also profusely illustrated, and even more so. I recommend both to you very highly.

   Recent health problems kept Ron from this year’s Windy City pulp and paperback show, where he was to have been this year’s co-guest of honor. We’ve known each other for well over 30 years, and it was good to see him again.

   Lots of people asked me about the recent absence of posts on this blog. I’m still not sure in what direction I (and it) will be going next, but until I find out, I have a large backlog of reviews that need to be uploaded, and I think you’ll see one here sometime in the next few minutes.