Author of the Week, Raymond Chandler, March 6

Author of the Week, March 6, 2023

Raymond Chandler

(Novelist and Screenwriter, Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction)

 

“In writing a novel, when in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.”

“Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can do it even better. An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to.”

“The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the most valuable investment a writer can make with his time.”

“The perfect detective story cannot be written. The type of mind which can evolve the perfect problem is not the type of mind that can produce the artistic job of writing.”

“I don’t mind if you don’t like my manners. They’re pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter evenings.”  The Big Sleep.

“Breeze looked at me very steadily. Then he sighed. Then he picked the glass up and tasted it and sighed again shook his head sideways with a half smile; the way a man does when you give him a drink and he needs it very badly and it is just right and the first swallow is like a peek into a cleaner, sunnier, brighter world.” The Lady in the Lake.

 

Good plots. Great scenes. Memorable characters. A unique voice and a classic distinctive style of writing.  Everybody loves Chandler; his stories are still read today. He published his first novel at age 50.

Raymond Chandler (1888 – 1959), an American author is considered a  pioneer for hard-boiled crime stories. His novels include The Big Sleep, The Long Goodbye, Farewell, My Lovely,  The Lady in the Lake, countless short stories.

Bogart and Bacall. Who doesn’t love that couple drenched in mystery.

 

Great screenwriting, too: Strangers on a Train, an Alfred Hitchcock classic. Marlowe, based on The Little Sister, a dangerous game of cat and mouse.

Chandler wrote nonfiction as well: The Simple Art of Murder, Writers in Hollywood, Critical Notes.

 

 

Visit Chandler’s Amazon page:

https://www.amazon.com/stores/Raymond-Chandler/author/B000AQ4ZNW

Collection of Short Stories

[I will note that I’ve had a fascination with Chandler’s crime fiction for years, so much that Chandler appeared in my novel Greylock associated with the main character Alexei Georg, a classical pianist living in Boston. Alexei contemplates murder himself in the opening pages of Greylock, in Philip Marlowe style. Murder, a music phantom, and a romance-laced mystery.]

This is my favorite Philip Marlowe line:

“It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.”  Farewell, My Lovely.

Please join me in my reading nook and discover an author on Mondays at Reading Fiction Blog!

Browse the Index of Authors’ Tales above to find over 250 free short stories by over 150 famous authors. Once a month I feature a FREE short story by contemporary or classic authors. Audios too.

Thank you for supporting Reading Fiction Blog

© 2012 Paula Cappa, Reading Fiction Blog

 

 

Crime of Passion and a Curse

The Canterville Ghost by Oscar Wilde (1887)

Tuesday’s Ghost Story   March 29, 2022  READING FICTION BLOG 

 

 

Oscar Wilde is most famous for his The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), his comic masterpieces Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). Like much of his work known for its satirical brilliance, and even if you are not drawn to ghost stories, this one will brighten your day.

The Otis family members are spending the summer at the castle in Canterville, previously owned by British aristocrats Lord and Lady Canterville. A good part of the narrative is from the ghost himself Sir Simon de Canterville. And what a guy! Prepare yourself for a parody of Gothic fiction. Lightning storms, strange laughter, blood stains, hidden passages, crows that cry havoc, tea in the library with a secret hatch, and dashes of romance—and, of course, a murder. All this will beg the question: Is love stronger than death?

Very entertaining classic literature at its best. Oscar Wilde’s wit and realism, and his engaging characters are memorable both on the page and on the screen.

Read the short story here at Gutenberg.org

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/14522/14522-h/14522-h.htm

Listen to the audio on You Tube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0iIV9zSuDI

 

Watch the FREE film on You Tube (1:20 minutes). This 1997 movie was directed by Crispin Reece, starring Ian Richardson, Celia Imrie,  Sarah-Jane Potts, and James D’Arcy. There is another version, 1996, with Neve Campbell and Patrick Stewart, but this version I feature here is far better.

 

 

Oscar Wilde was born of professional and literary parents. His father, Sir William Wilde, published books on archaeology and folklore. His mother, who wrote under the name Speranza, was a revolutionary poet and an authority on Celtic myth and folklore.

 

Don’t forget to view the INDEX OF AUTHORS’ TALES above for more free reading at Reading Fiction Blog. This is a compendium of over 250 short stories by more than 150 famous storytellers of mystery, suspense, supernatural, ghost stories, crime, sci-fi, romance, ‘quiet horror,’ and mainstream fiction.

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one short story every month. 

Comments are welcome!

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Discover Author of the Week posted on Mondays!

Author of the Week, Susan Hill, February 7

AUTHOR OF THE WEEK   February 7   Monday

Susan Hill

(Novels/Short Stories, Mystery and Ghost Fiction)

 

“Ghost stories … tell us about things that lie hidden within all of us, and which lurk outside all around us.”

“I wrote ghost stories because I’d always enjoyed reading them, and they seemed to be fizzling out… I don’t take them terribly seriously. It’s like a cake, with ingredients.”

“Though they don’t always have to be set in fog, weather is incredibly important in ghost stories. As is suspense: you’ve got to turn the screw very, very slowly.”

“I have only read very classic traditional English ghost stories, other than Henry James, who wrote some magnificent short ones as well as the longer ‘Turn of the Screw.’ He, Dickens, and M.R. James are my influences.”

 

 

Dame Susan Hill, Lady Wells, DBE is an English author of fiction and non-fiction works. Her novels include The Woman in Black, The Mist in the Mirror, and I’m the King of the Castle, for which she received the Somerset Maugham Award in 1971. Other awards include Whitbread Novel Award for The Bird of Night (1972); and the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for The Albatross (1971), a collection of short stories.

Her Simon Serrailler Crime Mysteries are popular novels, beginning with the first in the series The Various Haunts of Men.

Reviews:

“A gripping whodunnit and a subtle study of the mind of a psychopath”  Daily Mail 

“I loved this book. Masterly and satisfying” Ruth Rendell 

“This book must be judged as a potential successor to the great sequences of detective writing by PD James and Ruth Rendell…excellent” Daily Telegraph 

“She has the priceless ability to construct a solidly-researched narrative that keeps the reader turning the pages”  Independent  

Interview with Susan Hill speaking about wickedness, her dark new novella – and why she would never read the latest Man Booker winner.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/25/susan-hill-books-interview

Interview about ghost stories:

 

Here is the trailer for The Small Hand, a short story by Susan Hill

Visit Susan Hill’s Amazon Book Page: https://www.amazon.com/Susan-Hill/e/B096X8W23Z

 

 

 

Please join me in my reading nook and discover an author

on Mondays at Reading Fiction Blog!

Browse the Index of Authors’ Tales above to find over

200 free short stories by over 100 famous authors.

Once a month I feature a FREE short story by contemporary and classic authors, audios too.

 

Jasper Peacock, A Short Story, New Release

JASPER PEACOCK, A Short Story

January 10, 2022

I am happy to announce my new release!

 

Welcome art lovers, to the Art of Darkness. 

Fans of The Twilight Zone will enjoy JASPER PEACOCK, a short story flavored with Rod Serling’s Night Gallery themes. You might even hear Serling’s voice-over on the last page.

“You’re traveling through another dimension—a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind.”

Jasper Peacock is an accused murderer. Ben Samm is a struggling art journalist who doesn’t believe in ghosts, haunted dimensions, or supernatural powers in art—until he meets the famous painter Jasper Peacock. Ben is desperate to get a revealing interview about this genius’s award-winning portrait Rabbles, a horrific devilish-pointed figure—the reported living muse who inspires the artist.

Rabbles resides inside Peacock’s isolated Hampshire estate in the country where Ben conducts the interview. When the meeting goes awry, Peacock coerces Ben into his attic studio. Here the supernatural dimensions of Jasper Peacock’s artistic creations not only threaten to seize Ben’s mind, body, and soul, but reveal Rabble’s dark menacing powers.

This is not your ordinary painting on a canvass; this is a mystery of light and shadow that needs cracking. Does Ben have the courage to resist the force of the almighty Rabbles?

“Jasper Peacock” was originally published by Coffin Bell Literary Magazine, 2019.

Some early reviews:

“Is Horror ever Magical?” Don’t the two neutralize each other’s possibilities? And yet … ‘The invisible becoming visible and then invisible.’ Paula Cappa writes with a supernatural cadence, not just an inexplicable rhythm: she writes in a way that makes the unseen real (and logical) … in a way that the merely physical world could never approach. And her paranormal mysteries do induce—relentless—horror.  —Rob Dunbar, author of The Pines and The Streets.

“This marvelously dark, immersive tale draws you in with icy fingers until you’re enveloped in horror by the end. You’ll never look at art the same way again.”  —Teri Polen, scifi, horror, and fantasy author of Subject A36,  The Gemini Connection, and Sarah.

“Like so many of her stories, author and multiple award winner Paula Cappa has mightily captured an understanding of the world between reality and the paranormal. Jasper Peacock is a tale of the supernatural and mysterious underpinnings. It is also astounding in its imagery. The evil antagonist in this stellar tale is clearly visible through Ms. Cappa’s words. His unbearable behavior is evident from the start, but is he or is he not the murderer of his wife, Cassandra? Paula Cappa is at the top of her craft with this tale. She captured the supernatural and exposes the world of the unexplored. Jasper Peacock is an exhilarating read.”  —Linda Spear, mystery author of corporate thriller The Ice Man Checks Out, and I Know You By Heart. Also, When It Hurts, Inside a Pain Management Doctor’s Office by Sabrina Shue, M.D. and Linda Spear (release date February 2022).

Grady Harp, Amazon Hall of Fame Reviewer Gives Paula Cappa 5 Stars: “A talent that will draw even those who are not keen on supernatural stories into her fold.”

You can find this new release on Amazon.com, a Kindle Single.

Also available on Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1124420

 

While many of you know my novels and short stories here at Reading Fiction Blog, this story JASPER PEACOCK became an exploration in writing a chilling narrative that would take the reader into another dimension of mind, mystery, and imagination. What powers reside inside this country estate in Hampshire? Only the key to your imagination will unlock the mystery.

 

Author of the Week, Anthony Horowitz, July 5

AUTHOR OF THE WEEK   July 5

Anthony Horowitz

(Mystery, Suspense, Crime Novelist, Screenwriter, and Television Series Author)

“My writing has always been what you call ‘narrative fiction’ in the sense that it’s got very strong plots and twists at the end.”

“Throughout history, story-telling was at the very beginning of life.”

“I fear dying in the middle of a book. It would be so annoying to write 80,000 words and not get to the end. I’m phobic about it. So when I’m writing a book I leave messages all over the house for people to know how the story ends, and then someone can finish it for me.”

“I had three brilliant English teachers at secondary school. They found the writer in me.”

 

 

Anthony Horowitz (born 1955),  English novelist, screenwriter, and children’s novelist, has written more than 50 books including The Magpie Murders,  The Power of Five series, the Alex Rider series, The Diamond Brothers series, and has adapted many of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot novels for TV.  He is the creator and writer of  Foyle’s War, Midsomer Murders, Collision, and Injustice.  Also the Hawthorne and Horowitz Mysteries: The Word is Murder; The Sentence is Death; A Line to Kill. In October 2014, the Ian Fleming estate commissioned Horowitz to write a James Bond novel, Trigger Mortis, and Forever and A Day. A third Bond novel is expected to be released sometime in 2022. An underachiever at school, Horowitz started writing at the age of 8 or 9 and he instantly “knew” he would be a professional writer.

 

Interview with Anthony Horowitz about Magpie Murders, film to be released in 2022:

 

Quickfire interview with Horowitz:

https://www.anthonyhorowitz.com/journalism/article/quickfire-interview-anthony-horowitz

 

 

 

 

View his profile page on Amazon.com: https://www.amazon.com/Anthony-Horowitz/e/B000AP7TDG

 

Please join me in my reading nook and discover an author on Mondays at

Reading Fiction Blog!

Browse the Index of Authors’ Tales above to find over 200 free short stories by over 100 famous authors. Once a month I feature a

FREE short story by contemporary and classic authors.

Author of the Week, David Baldacci, May 10

AUTHOR OF THE WEEK   May 10

David Baldacci

(Fiction: Thrillers, Mysteries, Crime, Adventure)

“If I worried too much about publishers’ expectations, I’d probably paralyze myself and not be able to write anything.”

“What I do in my thrillers is to try and tell a story with characters you care about. A thriller can’t be just plot or just characters, it has to be a combination of both. I could concoct a really great plot but if I put in characters readers don’t really care about, they are not going to finish the book.”

“Why waste time trying to discover the truth, when you can so easily create it?”

Writing Tip: “Don’t know the ending before you start.”

 

David Baldacci (born August 1960) published his first novel, ABSOLUTE POWER, in 1996. A feature film followed, with Clint Eastwood as its director and star. In total, David has published 41 novels for adults; all have been national and international bestsellers and several have been adapted for film and television. His works of fiction include  The Camel Club, and The Innocent. Baldacci has also published six novels for younger readers.

 

David Baldacci Speaking at Book Event (20 minutes):

Baldacci’s Amazon’s page:

https://www.amazon.com/David-Baldacci/e/B000AQ0STC

Please join me in my reading nook and discover an author every week at Reading Fiction Blog!

Browse the Index of Authors’ Tales above to find over 200 free short stories by over 100 famous authors.

Once a month I feature a FREE short story by contemporary and classic authors.

Author of the Week, Susan Wittig Albert, Jan. 4

AUTHOR OF THE WEEK  January 4, 2021

 

Susan Wittig Albert

 

“Sharing our stories can also be a means of healing. Grief and loss may isolate us, and anger may alienate us. Shared with others, these emotions can be powerfully uniting, as we see that we are not alone, and realize that others weep with us.”

 

Susan Wittig Albert is an American author of mystery novels. She is author of New York Times best-selling the China Bayles series, Thyme of Death, the Cottage Tales of Beatrix Potter, and the Darling Dahlias series. Also she wrote memoir, Together, Along: A Memoir of Marriage and Place. She and her husband Bill coauthor a series of Victorian-Edwardian mysteries under the name of Robin Paige. She was born in 1940.

 

Read an interview with the author at this link here at Cozy Mystery:

Susan Wittig Albert Interview

“As a writer, I work in three genres, mystery, historical fiction, and memoir.”

Discover an Author Every Week at Reading Fiction Blog!

Bullet In the Brain

Bullet In the Brain  by Tobias Wolff  (1995)

Tuesday’s Tale of Suspense   November 24, 2020

Murder, nostalgia, understanding life. Bullet In the Brain is a fast read (15-minutes), unforgettable, and will draw you into the story immediately and hard. Do you love stories that explore language? Author Tobias Wolff has a reputation as a sharp academic. In this story, Wolff has crafted his narrative with fast tension and then redirects into an irresistible slow motion that keeps the readers hanging on every sentence. Truly a master writer.

Anders, a bitter literary critic by trade (a lover of literature), walks into a bank. He engages the other customers with sarcasm and wit when two bank robbers enter the front doors. For Anders, language has always provoked wonder (he is quite the entertaining logophile)—but  a jaded one. You’ll love the cynicism laced with humor. In this story Anders discovers that even danger holds a disdain for him. Read it slowly to enjoy Wolff’s chills, the humor, and this extraordinary character who jumps off the page into your mind. Savor the last lines. Say them aloud, because they have quite a slap.

Read it here:

https://pov.imv.au.dk/Issue_27/section_1/artc2A.html

Listen to the audio here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtcQ_Uk47MI

 

 

Tobias Wolf is the author of novels The Barracks Thief and Old School, the memoirs This Boy’s Life and In Pharaoh’s Army. Also short story collections In the Garden of the North American Martyrs, Back in the World, and The Night in Question. His Our Story Begins, won The Story Prize, 2008, and he received the PEN/Malamud Award and the Rea Award, both for excellence in the short story, and the PEN/Faulkner Award. His work appears regularly in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, and other magazines and literary journals.

 

Listen to an short interview with Tobias Wolff speak about short stories:

 

Don’t forget to view the INDEX above of more free reading at Reading Fiction Blog. This is a compendium of over 200 short stories by more than 100 famous storytellers of mystery, suspense, supernatural, ghost stories, ‘quiet horror,’ crime, sci-fi, romance, and mainstream fiction.

 Follow or sign up to join me in

reading one short story every month. 

 

Comments are welcome!

Feel free to click “LIKE.”

 

Other Reading Web Sites to Visit

Kirkus Mystery & Thrillers Reviews

Books & Such    Bibliophilica   NewYorkerFictionOnline

 Lovecraft Ezine    HorrorNews.net   Fangoria.com   

Slattery’s Art of Horror Magazine 

  Chuck Windig’s Terrible Minds

   Horror Novel Reviews    HorrorSociety.com     

Monster Librarian       The Story Reading Ape Blog

For Authors/Writers:  The Writer Unboxed

Murder Is a Messy Business

I’ll Be Waiting  by Raymond Chandler (1939)

 

Tuesday’s Tale of Crime Mystery   May 19, 2020

 

A sexy red-headed lady, foxy hotel detective, and bad boys with guns in the L.A. underworld. You’ll love this sleek little noir with its evocative language by Raymond Chandler.

Here is our femme fatale, Eve Cressy lounging on a sofa listening to the radio:

“She was all curled up with her feet under her on a davenport which seemed to contain most of the cushions in the room. She was tucked among them carefully, like a corsage in the florist’s tissue paper.”

 

Tony Reseck, hotel dick, is a slick guy with a bad history:

“He smiled his toy smile. His quiet sea-gray eyes seemed almost to be smoothing the long waves of her hair.”

The art of description, right? Nobody writes like Raymond Chandler, the way he plays the reader with his sassy style and wit. Every line has a bang to it: richness of texture, intriguing subtext in the dialogue, and  hard prose. I love this writer. I fell in love with his novels The Big Sleep, The Long Goodbye, Farewell My Lovely when I was researching my mystery Greylock. My main character Alexei Georg had an obsession with Philip Marlowe—and so did I.

 

In today’s short story, we are at the Windemere Hotel in Los Angeles at one a.m. Tony Reseck finds a woman in the Radio Room. Eve Cressy has been waiting for her man for 5 days, stashed inside her hotel room with a balcony. Her man was just let out of prison.  Tonight she ventures out to the lobby to listen to Benny Goodman music. No sunset, no deep kisses, but boy is this story hot. And, there’s $25,000 and others waiting for “her man” too. Murder is a messy business.

“You like Goodman, Miss Cressy?” Reseck asked.

“Not to cry over.  This jitterbug music gives me the backdrop of a beer flat. I like something with roses in it.”

 

 

Read the short story at AE Library:

http://www.ae-lib.org.ua/texts-c/chandler__ill_be_waiting__en.htm

 

Watch the short film, a steamy one directed by Tom Hanks, starring Bruno Kirby, Marg Helgenberger, Dan Hedaya on YouTube: 30 minutes and it’s wonderful.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_SonDdkG10

 

 

Raymond Chandler was an American author of detective fiction, the creator of the private detective  Philip Marlowe, characterized as a poor but honest upholder of ideals in an opportunistic and sometimes brutal society in Los Angeles.

“The most durable thing in writing is style.”

 

 

 

 

Don’t forget to view the INDEX above of more free reading at Reading Fiction Blog. This is a compendium of over 200 short stories by more than 100 famous storytellers of mystery, suspense, supernatural, ghost stories, ‘quiet horror,’ crime, sci-fi, and mainstream fiction.

 

Follow or sign up to join me in reading one short story every month. Comments are welcome! Feel free to click “LIKE.”

 

Other Reading Web Sites to Visit

Kirkus Mystery & Thrillers Reviews

Books & Such    Bibliophilica   NewYorkerFictionOnline

 Lovecraft Ezine    HorrorNews.net   Fangoria.com   

Slattery’s Art of Horror Magazine   Chuck Windig’s Terrible Minds

   Horror Novel Reviews    HorrorSociety.com     

Monster Librarian       The Story Reading Ape Blog

For Authors/Writers:  The Writer Unboxed

Literature Blog Directory   

Blog Collection

Blog Top Sites

 

 

 

Jasper Peacock, Mystery of the Unknowable

Jasper Peacock by Paula Cappa

READING FICTION BLOG

Published at Coffin Bell Literary Journal of Dark Literature

Tuesday’s Tale of Mystery    September 3, 2019

 

 

What is the mystery of the unknowable? Is it the inner realm of consciousness? And might there be a ghost residing there?

Come meet Jasper Peacock, a famous artist, who knows how to make the darkness conscious.

 

 

Click on this link at Coffin Bell   https://coffinbell.com/jasper-peacock/

to read my newest short story online. If you love dark fiction, I encourage you to read the other shorts published in this literary journal as well.  And don’t be shy about LIKING or SHARING! Thanks to everyone who reads this blog regularly, reads my novels and short stories, and supports my work!

 

Coffin Bell is a new quarterly online journal of dark literature, which reaches readers in 104 countries.

Editor-in-Chief Tamara Burross Grisanti is a writer, editor, and two-time Pushcart Prize nominee. Her poetry and fiction appear or are forthcoming in New World Writing, Eunoia Review, Chicago Literati, Former Cactus, Corvus Review, Pussy Magic, The New Mexico Review, and The Literary Hatchet. She lives in Buffalo, New York, where she spends her summers dreading the winters.

“Coffin Bell publishes new and emerging voices alongside established writers. I’m a believer in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s assertion that “fiction reveals truth that reality obscures. We [at Coffin Bell] nominate for the Pushcart Prize, the Best Small Fictions, and the Best of the Net Awards.”  —Tamara Burross Grisanti

 

Don’t forget to view the INDEX above of more free reading at Reading Fiction Blog. This is a compendium of over 200 short stories by more than 100 famous storytellers of mystery, suspense, supernatural, ghost stories, ‘quiet horror,’ crime, sci-fi, and mainstream fiction.

 

Follow or sign up to join me in reading two short stories every month. Comments are welcome! Feel free to click “LIKE.”

  

Other Reading Web Sites to Visit

Kirkus Mystery & Thrillers Reviews

Books & Such    Bibliophilica   NewYorkerFictionOnline

 Lovecraft Ezine   Parlor of Horror

HorrorNews.net   Fangoria.com   

Slattery’s Art of Horror Magazine   Chuck Windig’s Terrible Minds

HorrorAddicts.net     Horror Novel Reviews    HorrorSociety.com     

Monster Librarian      HorrorTalk.com 

 Rob Around Books      The Story Reading Ape Blog

For Authors/Writers:  The Writer Unboxed