Art Scott;Greg Shepard; Peter Rabe

Ed,

I'm sorry to send to 2 emails, but don't know offhand which works. I'm glad you're pleased with your new home at Blogspot, but I strenuously object to their scheme by which in order to simply comment on a posting I am FORCED to set up my own blog on their site. I don't wanna have no steenking blog! (Bill, same problem with yours). Is there any way around this?

Anyhow, what I wanted to say in response to your nice piece about illustrators is that you and anyone else who loves this stuff should be subscribing to Dan Zimmer's Illustration Magazine www.illustration-magazine.com. It is a superbly produced labor of love and in recent issues has profiled great paperback artists like Robert Maguire, Ernie Chiriaka, Bill George, Bob Bonfils, Mitchell Hooks, Gerald Gregg. Plus important pulp artists, magazine illustrators, movie poster artists and the like.

And nice to see that Bob McGinnis has done a second cover for Hard Case Crime: David Dodge's Plunder of the Sun. And thanks for the plug, Bill.

Cheers,
-- Art

Ed here: Art Scott is one of the great guys of mystery fiction--writer, commentator and editor of the The Paperback Covers of Robert McGinnis, which can still be ordered. It is an exemplary collection of art. And I certainly agree about Illusration magazine. I go back through each issue five or six times. The electic collecion of illustration is astonishingly good. Man, I miss the days of slick and pulp mags. I was old enough to still buy a few pulps on the stands in the mid-Fifties. I believe in fact that I bought the final issues of both Thrilling Wonder and Startling Stories. Somehow the great Robert Lowndes scrounged enough money to keep Science Ficion Quarterly till, I believe, 1959. I bought Ranch Romances until 1960 (as I recall). It carried al the top western writers--it was the only western pulp left and they had no other place to send their stuff. Fortunately the editor (Babs something) didn't go in for treacle. Most of the stories were excellent. Gold Medal did a collection of them in the 1970s. For western fans (all six of you) it's an oldie worth picking up.

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Peter Rabe

Greg Shepard's new Stark House double book of Peter Rabe's Murder Me For Nickels and Dig My Grave Deep got a boxed and starred review in Booklist today. Both are major Rabe and the book is a fine looking, sturdy trade pb. I remember Barry Gifford telling me how Peter choked up when Barry called to say that he was putting new editions of three major Rabes in the mail that day. Peter was the same way when I dedicated a book to him. I sure wish he was alive so I could tell him about the starred and boxed review. Greg Shepard is doing a truly remarkable job of bringing back forgotten writers who deserve rediscovery. Another Vin Packer double is of the way soon. And the new Elizabeth Sanxay Holding arrived yesterday. I'll start on it tonight. Remember Raymond Chandler (and I believe he was sober at the time he said it; I think there's even a notarized piece of paper attesting to the fact of his sobreity)--Ray called her "the best suspense writer of my generation." Packer, Rabe, Holding and the super-stylist Douglas Sanderson--Stark House has an impressive list.