Old friends

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, […]

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Degrees of debauchery in Ely, Nevada

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. […]

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The Neon High Life Sign

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 […]

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James Crumley’s two brilliant novels

“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 […]

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Gotta Love Charles Bronson

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 […]

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Long live Clint Eastwood

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 […]

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