I confess I’ve lost touch with many of my old buddies from “back in the day.” I suppose this is a common phenomenon; you get married, have kids, build your career, and maintaining old friendships becomes impractical, or is simply no longer a priority. Besides, revisiting the past might not be a good idea. Regardless, […]

Recently, a reader pointed out that I misspelled Ely (I spelled it “Eli”) in one of my novels. This was much to my chagrin, as Ely is a town I’ve visited, and remember well. My trip to Ely was back in the days before the Internet, before police agencies had much access to computer technology. […]

I lived in an apartment off Bascom Avenue in San Jose when I was a teenager. My roommate was a guy named Jan Beers, a cook at the restaurant where we worked. If you assume a man with that last name might be a drinker, you’d be right, but Jan swilled mostly liquor rather than […]

“The Last Good Kiss” and “The Wrong Case”, by James Crumley are two extraordinary detective novels. The Last Good Kiss, written in 1978, is a novel many fans of crime fiction have never heard of. The novel did not sell particularly well, nor did Crumley’s six other novels.  But three of today’s most notable and […]

Like Chuck Norris, Steven Seagal’s route to action hero stardom came via his martial arts teaching. After training in Japan and achieving a 7th dan rank in aikido (highly unusual for a foreigner), Seagal returned to the US and opened a dojo (a Japanese style martial arts training center) in Southern California. He also served […]

Bruce Lee made four movies in the early seventies that left a permanent mark on the motion picture industry, and also on American culture. Lee’s astounding kung fu performances captured the imagination of an entire generation, and launched an enduring American fascination with Asian martial arts.   But Lee was not only a martial artist; […]

For actors of his generation, I always think of Chuck Bronson as second only to Eastwood. When he was at his best (in the 1970s), Bronson was nearly as good as Clint. Unfortunately though, Bronson’s tough guy career got off to late start. He didn’t really hit the big time until The Mechanic, at age […]

The tough guy action movie genre covers a lot of ground – from sci-fi movies like The Terminator, to war pictures, to Mafia films (Goodfellas, The Godfather), to cop movies, to boxing flicks (the Rocky series), to Bruce Lee’s kung fu movies. Kick ass stuff, all the above. You might think, geez, there are tons of […]