Klatch & Buzz 9-26-18

For the past few years, I’ve been remiss in keeping this blog alive. Since my last entries here, I’ve become a published author with Oghma Creative Media (my novel Back Then is shown as a link to Amazon and Barnes & Noble) and I’ve spent my time writing for publication. My second novel, The Most Intangible Thing, is in the works and I’ve just handed my third, The Shike Stories, to my editor. But during this time I didn’t give up my blog completely. I’ve been writing for Mind At Play off and on and am starting a new series of plays, essays, book reviews and short fiction which will be continuous from now on.

About a year ago, I happened upon WRVO’s late night Tuned to Yesterday here in the Ithaca, New York area at 90.5FM. It’s two hours (10pm to midnight) of old-time radio with everything from Groucho Marx’s You Bet Your Life, science fiction’s X Minus One, comedies such as Our Miss Brooks and The Jack Benny Show to hour-long dramas such as Lux Radio Theater and Radio City Playhouse. Most of the programming is from the late thirties through the late fifties.

I was especially taken with mystery and noir programs such as The Adventures of Philip Marlowe, The Adventures of Sam Spade and Richard Diamond, Private Detective and the lighter Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar, Dragnet, and Box 13. In fact, I purchased a collection of Box 13 episodes with Alan Ladd and when transmission of Tuned to Yesterday is lousy because of the weather, I listen to these for my old-time radio fix. Since then, I’ve invested in several CD collections and fear I’m on my way to an addiction! The interesting juxtaposition of yesteryear’s nationalism, clear-cut plot and good-bad characterization with our current ambiguity and reality crime had me hooked. I have no longing to return to those days when I sat in front of the radio listening to Skye King, The Cisco Kid and Challenge of the Yukon (yeah, I know this dates me, but what the heck) mainly because I’ve outgrown the simplistic approach to the battle of good and evil like everybody else. I’m pretty certain Mad Max: Fury Road and Atomic Blonde haven’t provided me with a better moral code or assessment of reality, but at least they make allowances—very large allowances—(this is my contemporary-politicized, socialized mind talking now) for questioning and downright hostility toward authority and cultural norms. It’s a long, vigorous discuss for another time, no doubt, but there is a tremendous allure in this old-time, well, old-times! The racism and misogyny we all can do without, but there is an underlying ease with hope—the belief in the triumph of the good over the bad, a belief that things can be figured out, understood with a little work.

So with all this in mind, I decided to have fun with “updating” some noir while still attempting to keep to that old-time recipe used in long-ago detective, crime and mystery shows. I’ve soaked myself in the noir writings of Cornell Woodrich who wrote for Detective Fiction Weekly, Argosy, Dime Detective and Black Mask during the thirties and forties. (These magazines sold for ten and fifteen cents. But then, my dad’s payment on our new house built in Oklahoma in 1941 was seventeen dollars a month with this house costing around six thousand bucks.) I enjoyed establishing my own detective-sleuth, Crandall Weir, and the development of his romantic interest with the waitress in the Main Street Diner on the square of Tutterton, New Jersey, and his protective watch over his city. So far, there are four in this series, which I’ll post intermittently with other short story fiction and non-fiction works.

I enjoy your comments, so let me know what you think. Here’s to a new blogger connection.