Remember our outlandish list of mystery mash-ups? Did we forget to put the Lone Ranger versus Werewolves on there? Deadline reports that the Walt Disney live-action production of The Lone Ranger was cancelled and production halted due to a ballooning budget that already exceeded the $200 million that Disney expected to spend. The movie was…
Everybody loves a good vanishing act. Literally hundreds of mysterious disappearances lurk in American history. What happened to Amelia Earhart, the famous female aviator of the 1930s? Or to Judge Joseph Force Crater, who disappeared in the summer of 1930? Or to Jimmy Hoffa, the Teamsters chief who went to meet a union official and…
Because many of us may meander to see the spy Bond and patriot Jack Ryan take on E.T. in Cowboys & Aliens this weekend (and in honor of our Longmire news from yesterday), I present to you Brisco County Jr. Yep, before he was working with spies…
Once upon a time there was a group of UK writers known as The Piccadilly Cowboys. They were Terry Harknett, Angus Wells, Kenneth Bulmer, Mike Linaker, Laurence James, Fred Nolan, and John Harvey. Among them, they wrote nearly 300 western novels and a lot of other things. Bulmer, for example, wrote well over 150 novels,…
There was a time when TV, while it didn’t exactly kill crime movies, certainly offered them a Kevorkian-style euthanasia. Routine programmers, which sometimes ran only sixty minutes themselves, were pushed off the big screen and into living rooms in the form of hour-long TV dramas like Perry Mason, where the inevitable good-guys-win stories were more…
Ida Lupino would rank high on any list of the most important people in film noir. First, she was one of the great performers of the classic period. She starred in no less than eight noirs, including important films like On Dangerous Ground, Road House and While The City Sleeps; worked for essential directors like…
Like most of the rest of Texas, Blacklin County is being overrun with feral hogs that destroy farmland and crops. A mother and son have opened an animal shelter in the county and they welcome the pests. Someone’s threatened them by leaving a slaughtered animal on their doorstep. Then, while searching the woods for a…
Yet another, um, niche cozy offering you may have missed? A Stick In The Mud (A Cowboy Proctologist Mystery) By Buck Masterson As a retired cowboy who finally has time to indulge his lifelong interest in amateur proctology, you could safely say that Gert Minkslapper’s been in more than a few rugged canyons in his…
Actor James Arness, who played U.S. Marshal Matt Dillon, 6-foot, 7-inches of don’t-mess-with-Miss-Kitty on Gunsmoke, passed away this week at 88. Based on a popular, earlier radio program of the same name, Gunsmoke is the longest running dramatic TV series in history, and it’s still broadcast and online at TVLand. Arness has the distinction of…
A beautiful cover must deliver a better quality papercut, because all of these hurt me with their greatness. I buy lean, yellowed “vintage” paperbacks of all genres. I like reading them, even though the pages are often brittle and fragile. To me, they're kind of Velveteen Rabbits that don't mind having lost ears and button…
