The Good Old Stuff

The header comes from the great John D McDonald's title for a collection of his pulp writing, energetic, reader-centred fiction of which he was particularly proud, and it seemed like an appropriate way to introduce this guest post from Lee Goldberg.

I've met Lee in person, so I can testify that there's only one of him. Though you'd never guess it from the sheer variety and energy of his output; novelist, TV writer, tie-in champion, film-maker, blogger, leading commentator on the developing (exploding?) eBook market... Lee is also closely involved with the Top Suspense group, a cadre of experienced writers who have banded together in a branding operation that I suspect is going to become more common as readers seek some kind of guidance and filtering for eBook titles.

More on that subject soon. The venture he describes here is in the McDonald spirit, and sounds like a lot of fun.

The Dead Man: Face of Evil is the first in a new series of ebooks and paperbacks that we like to think of as cross between Stephen King’s The Gunslinger, George Gilman’s Edge, and Don Pendleton’s The Executioner... and a blatant attempt to recapture the flavor of those “men’s action adventure paperbacks” of the 60s, 70s, and 80s.

Those paperbacks were short and tightly-written, with hard-boiled heroes, outrageously sexy women, and gleefully over-the-top plots. Nobody would ever mistake them for great literature, but they were enormous fun to read...and to write. I know, because I broke into publishing in the mid-1980s writing one of those series - 357 Vigilante by "Ian Ludlow" - while I was still in college.

Sadly, the "men's action adventure" genre is virtually extinct now, an early victim of the narrowing of the paperback marketplace. But I’ve never lost my affection for the genre... and the Kindle is the perfect medium for it. So, I figured, why not try it again?

Which is where The Dead Man comes in.

The idea actually began as a TV series that Bill Rabkin & I started pitching around Hollywood over 20 years ago. The pitch went something like this:

There is good, and there is evil.
On November 12th, Matthew Cahill died, buried in an avalanche of snow.
On February 20th, Matthew Cahill came back to life.
Nothing has changed.
There is still good, and there is still evil.
Only now... he can see it.

Each day has becomes a journey into a dark world he knows nothing about...a quest for the answers to who he is and what he has become...and a fight to save us, and his soul, from the clutches of pure evil.

Execs always seemed to love the pitch, but we were never able to clinch the sale, and gave up on it a few years back. But lately I’ve had some success reviving my out-of-print books on the Kindle – particularly The Walk – and it occurred to me that The Dead Man would make a kick-ass series of “men’s action adventure novels.”

It took me 30 seconds to convince Bill to go along with idea...and I even managed to cajole a bunch of other writers to pen future novels in the series. Not just any writers... but some of the very best western, horror, mystery, and science fiction scribes out there, including Marcus Pelegrimas, Joel Goldman, Bill Crider, James Reasoner, David McAfee, Matt Witten, Burl Barer, James Daniels, Matthew P. Mayo, Jude Hardin, and Harry Shannon.

The first book, Face of Evil, is out now in the U.K. and will soon be followed by Hell in Heaven by Bill Rabkin and me, Ring of Knives by James Daniels, The Dead Woman by David McAfee, Crucible of Fire by Mel Odom, Lust for Blood by Harry Shannon, and many more, a new book in the series coming out every month or so.

We are all having a great time writing these books and indulging our great affection for the genre. Hopefully, The Dead Man can be the gateway drug that gets you hooked on it, too.

Origin

I've been waiting for a hook on which to hang a mention of Danny Stack's slick, thoughtful and entertaining short-film debut, and it now arises in the form of screenings at Jersey's Branchage Film Festival on September 26th and at London's Raindance Festival on October 7th.

Danny's Scriptwriting in the UK blog has been a resource and point of entry for many a new screenwriter trying to get some orientation on the business. Now he's collected together the best of the blog posts, along with downloadable material, on the newly-created Scriptwriting in the UK website.

Squawk Like A Pirate

I've got mixed feelings about the jail terms and fines passed by the Swedish courts on the operators of the Pirate Bay filesharing setup. I'd have more sympathy over the sentencing if the guys in question weren't such clanging assholes.

Piracy is, by its very definition, a parasitic act, and the successful parasite is the one that doesn't damage the health of its host. The parasite that taunts, defies, derides and generally abuses what it feeds on is an evolutionary dead end. If you cause pain when you feed, you'll get swatted. If you dance around, hooting and flicking V's, you can be sure you'll get swatted first.

And a kind of evolution is surely what's happening here. Not so much in movies, where the ripping and redistribution of DVDs is hard to defend as anything other than freeloading. But with TV... and TV drama especially... I believe the pirates have set up a genuine model for the future. It's really just a question of the industry catching on to the fact that, just as the pirates stole product from them, they can now steal something back in the form of some free R&D.

Broadcast TV is only good for soaps, news and reality now - background stuff, stuff you can keep one eye on while you do something else, stuff you can dip in and out of, stuff you can talk through. The truly ephemeral stuff with a 24-hour shelf life, or no shelf life at all.

Drama, being immersive in its nature, struggles to thrive in that environment. And, sure enough, it isn't thriving. Even the best dramas don't get ratings these days, because no one wants to settle in for that long, or focus that much, at a time that doesn't necessarily suit them. There's always going to be an appetite for TV drama, but people have definitely lost their taste for being scheduled.

A few short years ago, I can remember celebrating because ITV shifted News at Ten and made all of its nine o'clock dramas ninety minutes long. As a writer I thought that it was going to be a great move - every script would be a feature!

But I was wrong, and it wasn't great. As a viewer, I hated it. Even the slightest story had to be a seven-act marathon. Night after night after night. Imagine if every single meal had to be Christmas f***ing dinner in five courses. The only person who'd be happy would be that mad guy who shows up on the news each December for celebrating Christmas every day (and, frankly, I'm beginning to think he only does it for the attention).

Imagine if the pirates' distribution model was the legitimate one. It's already open to all, but finding and downloading material requires a smidgen of geekiness that excludes the majority. Imagine a global TV market, with fresh product coming in all the time, and with a legal, user-friendly, micropayment-driven interface where you'd pick your shows from a searchable menu and download them to watch, ads-free, at a time of your own convenience. A new season of House begins... you buy it from the source, right away, for buttons. What's not to like?

That's how it's got to go, I reckon. I'd tolerate a sponsored logo or watermark in the corner of the screen, if that were the only way to monetise the copying and passing-on of downloaded files. But the point of micropayments is to make it all too cheap to bother. I reckon that network TV showings will serve the same function that used to be served by hardcover publication in the book trade, where the hardback would sell very few copies but give the book a profile which would pay off in the paperback edition. Indie stuff will be offered straight to market, with no network involvement at all, and live or die by its merits.

You know, once I would have thought it scary. That the reliable, steady stream of broadcast product from the BBC or my regional ITV station might not always be a part of my life. That it might be replaced by a mosaic of my own choices, continually refreshed and revised. But now I can't wait.

And at last we'll be spared the apologists for piracy, with all their talk of Fat Cats and corporate greed and how much they're being ripped off.

For that alone, roll on the future.

Life in Transit

Chapter 9 of David Mace's unfolding online story is now up and available.

“So,” said Dr Catenary, “there we are.”
There, indeed, they were.
He swivelled from whiteboard to class. “Now we get down to the nitty gritty, the nuts and bolts, the perspiration and even a hint of inspiration. Or rather…” His head turned and his mirror shades moved from face to face as he scanned his students.
Vicky didn’t like being scanned by Dr Catenary. You were never quite sure exactly what lay behind those sunglasses. How icy cold – or altered – were his eyes?

Modesty forbids me from telling you who gets a namecheck along with this episode.

Life in Transit

The first people to find Transit found it by mistake. They got lost in the fog and, literally, stumbled inside. For centuries the only way in and out – the only known way – was on foot. As time went by the feet doing the finding included mule train hoofs, camel hoofs and, allegedly, elephants. Once the existence of the place became more widely known, of course – it had been a dark and mysterious secret of the there-be-dragons variety – entrepreneurs drove through a road. Nowadays the main route in and out is by train. You can't fly. No one's sure why not.

Life in Transit is a new online project from David Mace, author of Shadow Hunters, Frankenstein's Children and The Highest Ground. It's an unfolding story in weekly parts published exclusively on his website. When last I looked - which was about five minutes ago - he was up to part four. They're bite-sized chunks of narrative, full of wit and invention, in a form that well suits the medium.

David and I collaborated on an ambitious online project of a different kind, a few years ago. Life on Mars - no, not that one, this was in 2001 - was a 28-day 'real time' narrative about a Red planet landing that... well, obviously everything goes horribly wrong. It was made by Mark Gorton's Multi Media Arts for E4, and was structured around a daily video feed from the lander backed up by a mass of explorable online content in the form of mission data and company communications that revealed all kinds of stuff that the crew weren't being told.

Mark had the idea, I roughed out the main story developments and the character arcs, and then cunningly left the scene while David did all the actual work. The spacecraft stuff was shot inside a WWII submarine. Hey, Galactica, eat my shorts.

It was, frankly, too much ahead of its time. It relied on a version of the Flash player that almost no one had and called for a reasonably fast connection, which no one had either. The planned five-minute videos were cut down to one minute each, and it went online in May-June of that year without fuss, fanfare or promotion.

I've never even seen it. But I don't feel too left out because nor has anyone else, as far as I can tell. I suppose the material must be stored somewhere, encoded in some form... I wonder if it could ever be revived and rerun? Or, even better, remade at its originally intended length.

Give Life in Transit a try, though. An altogether more accessible piece of online storytelling!