In today’s Hartford Courant, Bob Englehart’s editorial cartoon summarizes the state of the state very nicely, as usual:

   On his blog, Englehart adds the following:

    “As a rule, I don’t do memorial cartoons about victims of crime, but this is too much. This goes too far.

    “This is an argument for an arsenal of guns in every home, a pit bull kennel in the basement of every house, armed security guards, gated communities and the death penalty. The temptation is to fight evil with evil.

    “A cooler head will prevail in time, but not today. Today I vent with prose and cry with my cartoon, as does Connecticut.”

   The home of Dr. William Petit in Cheshire CT was invaded yesterday, and he and his family were held hostage for several hours before the attack ended in deadly fashion. As you may have read about or learned from TV or the Internet, his wife and two daughters were killed, and he was severely injured.

   A noted diabetes specialist in the state of Connecticut, Dr. Petit has been treating me for my thyroid problems over the past six years. I’ve had appointments with him only twice a year, and I did not know him personally, but I’m very much shaken by this. He’s a tall, affable man who always greeted me with a hearty handshake. As someone something like this could happen to, it does not seem possible.

   Last night I dreamed I went to Pulpcon again. In retrospect, getting on the hotel shuttle bus on early Sunday morning on the way back to the Dayton airport, it seemed as if the four preceding days had simply flown by, and it still does.

   Attendance was down once again, but not significantly, I’m told, from last year. The convention began the day after July 4th, and that was suggested as having a good deal to do with it. Sales were down also, or so I heard, but perhaps that was due to prices generally being up, on the pulps at least. With eBay as a backup, no dealer wants to sell his wares too low.

   And the selection was limited, mostly because the supply of pulp magazines not already in collectors’ hands is diminishing at an ever-increasing rate. But there were plenty of pulp reprints in the dealers’ room, for those who want only to read the odd-ball titles, and tons of paperbacks, hardcover books (mostly science fiction), and other reading material in the room. When I say tons, I am not exaggerating.

   Martin Grams had his usual pair of tables filled with DVDs of vintage TV shows, of which I resisted and bought only three: an obscure series on ABC in 1960, Dante, starring Howard Duff. I ought to look, but I believe that means I have 24 of the 26 total episodes. It’s a crime show in which night club owner Willie Dante (Duff) is trying to go straight, but his past keeps interfering.

   Coincidentally enough, as you’ll see in a minute, Martin has just published his latest book on Old Time Radio, this one a history of the Sam Spade series, starring (for the first part of the run) none other than Howard Duff. I bought a copy, and if you were to happen to ask me, I’d tell you that you should too.

   Most of the time at the show itself, disregarding periodic intervals for eating and visiting area bookstores, is spent by most everyone by walking around the dealers’ room and stopping for long talks with people on either side of the tables, fellow collectors you see perhaps only once or twice a year. Lots of discussion going on about what author’s works are going to be reprinted next, what big finds were made, how’s the family, and what are you looking for now?

   Randy Cox (editor of Dime Novel Roundup) made his first appearance in three years. Six of us, Randy, Jim Goodrich, Paul Herman, Walter and Jim Albert, and I, spent much time dining out and catching up with each other’s lives at great lengths. By the way, one piece of crushingly bad news was the demise of the Breakfast Club, a small café we’d discovered and frequented many mornings over the past five or six years.

   Mike Nevins also appeared, as full of bountiful energy as ever and promising me a new column for this blog as soon as he can do it. I also talked at length with Walker Martin, John Locke, Al Tonik, Ed Hulse and many others, including Jim Felton, whose enthusiasm for Robert Martin continues unabated and without bounds. Ed Hulse, publisher of Blood ’n’ Thunder magazine, won this year’s Lamont Award for his outstanding contributions to the hobby of pulp collecting. It was a popular choice.

   Guests of honor were David Saunders, son of famed pulp artist Norman Saunders, and Glenn Lord, a long time administrator of Robert E. Howard’s estate.

   And believe it or not, I bought a pulp, the one whose cover you see here. I was sorely tempted many many times, with hundreds of others I thought about, thought again, but did not buy. Every time I almost pulled the trigger, I thought of all the boxes of unread pulps I have in my basement and garage, and asked myself (foolishly, I know), do I really want to buy more?

   In all but one case the answer was no, but the one case is an example of one that I do not have boxes and boxes of, Black Mask for April 1930. You can’t tell from the cover, which mentions only Frederick Nebel and J. J. des Ormeaux, but this issue also contains two Raoul Whitfield stories, one as by Ramon Decola, and an installment of “The Glass Key,” by Dashiell Hammett.

   The condition is fairly iffy, but the stories are good. Maybe I’ll pick up Part Three next year. One can only dream, can’t one?

   Rather than be in town on the 4th for hamburgers and hot dogs, not to mention barbecue ribs, I’ll be flying to Dayton tomorrow for this year’s Pulpcon, where collectors of old pulp magazines, vintage paperbacks and all kinds of similar items gather to buy, swap and tell yarns of the ones that either they hooked or got away.

   I’m sure I’ll see some of you there, or if you don’t read this until you get back, I’m sure you had a good time, too.

   But I’m going to stay away from computers for a while, and there’ll be no postings until I’m home again, which will be next Sunday. The mid-summer hiatus may even be longer than that, I’m sorry to say. My son Jonathan is leaving home again. Next week he’ll be moving into a new place of his own a couple of towns north of here, and I’m the one who’ll be loading the SUV, driving the SUV, and unloading the SUV, not to mention waiting around for the real movers to bring his major stuff up from Maryland. (Well, he’ll help.)

   My scanner’s gotten cranky on me, too. I’m not too happy with the sharpness on the images included in that last post, and I certainly don’t feel like dealing with it any more this evening. It’s time to take a break all around. You may as well assume I’ll be off for a week or so. I hope it’s no longer than that. In the meantime, don’t do anything rash and stay cool.

[UPDATE] 07-11-07. I’ve done some work on the images I was unhappy about last week. I think there’s some improvement, but maybe it’s wishful thinking. I’ll take another look tomorrow, but at the moment it’s ten in the evening, and there’s a book calling my name…!

   My time for the Mystery*File blog will be restricted over the next few weeks, if not for most of the summer, but have no fear. I’m not going away. I have a large archive of book reviews to choose from, many of which have never been published anywhere else, until now. You’ll be seeing them soon.

   I also have loads of reviews I did starting back in the 1970s, when they were appearing in both The Mystery FANcier and the Hartford Courant, and (without looking too closely at them yet) I see no reason why I shouldn’t start posting them here too.

   You’ll already have noticed the greater frequency of reviews in the past week or so. Most of them have already been written, and the time it takes to get them posted is comparatively minimal. While there’ll always be a steady amount of current mystery fiction that I’ll continue cover, along with the older books and authors, there are any number of mystery-oriented blogs which primarily review and discuss only what’s new and recent. There aren’t as many of them that talk about older books and authors with any degree of regularity, and then within their own selected limits. Maybe I’m simply finding my own niche.

   A recent post was called The Compleat INIGO JONES, which I hope you saw, but if not you can always go back and take a look. It’s a format that I like and I think is workable without taking a lot of effort, especially for authors who wrote only a small handful of books before ending their careers, for whatever reason.

   If I continue, and I think I will, this series of such short profiles will not be restricted to unknown writers of the 1940s. I’ll cover the gamut. There’s no reason why unknown writers of the 2000s can’t be included, too. Can it really be over seven years since everyone was worried about Y2K? That’s plenty of time for a mystery writer to have come along, produced three or four good books, and then have disappeared again without too much notice — and more crucially, without a contract for more.

   I’ll also stay busy working on the online Addenda for Al Hubin’s Revised Crime Fiction IV and uploading covers to the online Supplement to Bill Deeck’s Murder at 3c a Day.

   So — without making promises I cannot keep — this is what I will be doing this summer, along with cataloguing and organizing my own collection. I know, I say this every year, but this time I mean it.

   Uploaded this morning was Part 15 of Allen J. Hubin’s Addenda to the Revised Crime Fiction IV. Once again most of the data in this installment consists of identifying authors who have entries in the online Contemporary Authors, not previously noted.

   Some of the other information — deaths, added settings, series characters and so on — has already appeared here on the Mystery*File blog, but hardly all. Even though Al has limited the coverage of CFIV to the year 2000 and before, additions and corrections continue to come streaming in.

   As for me, I’m waaaay behind on everything I have in mind to do for this blog. Whatever manages to show up here comes to only maybe 10% of what I’d like to do, if only I could.

   And to think that when I started I didn’t think that I had anything to say. Mostly what I had in mind was to have a place where the stories behind the data in CFIV could be told. That’s still its primary function, and if you’re not taking a look at the Addenda, you’re missing out on the basic reason that I revived M*F once again, this time in the blog format. (First time viewers should go to the main page first. That’s where you’ll see more of what the final product is intended to look like, with annotations, links and lots of cover images.)

   I don’t know about you, but for me writing is the hardest thing in the world. I have nothing but admiration for the storytellers whose works and words we mystery readers follow so avidly. They make it look so easy – and every once in a while, I imagine that it is.

   Because maybe they’re human like you and me, and they spend their days struggling to put the words on the computer screen in the right order, and not only that, but the right words in the right place and at the right time, and if the wrong word is used, it just throws everything out of whack, like a single grain of sand in a well-tuned BMW engine.

   I’ve been writing reviews of mystery fiction since the early 1970s, when I was the “Courant Coroner” for the local Hartford paper, and every once in a while I’ve run out of words, and I’ve had to quit for a while. This latest consecutive streak of books reviewed has been going on for nearly seven years now – and do you know what?

   It’s still a struggle to put the right words down and in the right order and with the right punctuation. Case in point. I was reasonably happy with my comments on the John Whitlatch book I recently reviewed – until I read them the next morning.

   You probably haven’t noticed – and I sincerely hope not – but I’m constantly tweaking and changing little things here and there on this blog until either (a) I get it right or (b) I concede defeat – in a good sense, that is. I can only hope.

   But every once in a while, I look at something I wrote and say to myself, for example, what is really he trying to say here? Or could he possibly be more convoluted than this to get his ideas out? And look at what he says here. If changes are going to be made, they’re going to have to be big ones this time. Case in point. After considerable inner struggle and debate, I’ve revised the Whitlatch review and I’ve posted the result and I don’t think I will read it again for a week. (My fingers are crossed when I say that, though.)

   My opinion is the same, and some of the words are the same, but some of them aren’t and the punctuation is different too.

   Next up, a review of Death Turns the Tables, by John Dickson Carr. It’s turned out to be a tough book to comment on, and I’ve been putting it off for a couple of weeks now. I’d better get to it, before I forget the story altogether. (This has happened before.)

   I wonder what I’m going to say about it.

   Kurt Vonnegut died yesterday at the age of 84. In many ways, he was the Mark Twain of our time, and there are many other websites which will discuss his life, his writings, and his awards and accolades. What follows in this blog entry will be less an obituary, however, than a personal note or two about the author, no more or no less.

   Back in the mid-1960s, I responded to a poll in a science fiction fanzine which wished to know my Top Ten SF novels. I remember only my top two choices, Number One on my list being The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick, which won the 1963 Hugo award for Best Novel of the Year.

   Number Two was Cat’s Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Thinking about the book as soon as I heard the news last evening about Mr. Vonnegut’s death, I realized that besides being about the mysterious substance “ice-nine,” a dangerous alternative form of water, I no longer remember very much else about the book. I probably do not remember the details of very many other books I read 40 to 45 years ago, but no matter; this realization is jarring, and it means that I shall have to do something about that.

   From the Wikipedia page for Mr. Vonnegut, I have excerpted the following passage:

   That the author gave himself an “A plus” for Cat’s Cradle reassures me somewhat, that as a critic at the young age I was at the time, my judgment on a book’s worth was not entirely lacking.

   Very soon after writing Cat’s Cradle, Mr. Vonnegut declared himself not a science fiction writer, as I recall, nor (I suspect) did he ever consider himself to be a crime fiction writer. But one of his books, Mother Night (Gold Medal s1191, paperback original, 1962) is included in Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin.

   I have to confess that I’ve never read the book, and my records reveal that I do not even own a copy. Nor do I remember the movie made from it, a 1996 film starring Nick Nolte, Sheryl Lee and Alan Arkin. It seems to have come and gone having made impression on me whatsoever. Whether this was due to a limited release to a diminishing number of “art” theaters in the country, or my own lack of attention, I do not know, but once again, here is a situation that I see needs remedying.

   I’ve tried to understand the detailed synopsis of Mother Night which I found on Wikipedia, but perhaps Mr. Vonnegut’s are too complex to be summarized in a short detailed synopsis. Either you write a book about one of his books, or you try not at all. Or maybe you resort to only one line – this one, perhaps, from the IMDB page for the movie:

   One thing I’m sure of, or maybe it’s two. Mother Night was certainly not a typical Gold Medal book, nor was Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., a typical American author.

If I followed his instructions correctly, my son-in-law says the M*F blog “is now mobile ready. Access mysteryfile.com/blog/ from your web capable mobile device and you’ll get a specially formatted page with all the same info.”

I’d try it out myself, but I don’t even own a cell phone yet. If it works where you are, let me know.

   Al admits to being 71 years young today. Happy Birthday, Al!