Category: Crime

Ace Atkins Talks Crossroad Blues and a Lot More!

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Ace Atkins is a Pulitzer Prize-nominated novelist who has written 23 novels.  Perhaps best known for being selected to carry on Robert B. Parker’s Spenser series, Atkins has series characters of his own (Nick Travers and Quinn Colson).  If you dig his Spenser yarns, then you ought to give Travers and Colson a go.

Crossroad Blues is Atkins first Nick Travers novel.

The disappearance of a college professor investigating rumors of previously unknown recordings by renowned blues musician Robert Johnson, murdered more than fifty years earlier, leads football player-turned-blues historian Nick Travers along a dangerous trail as he seeks to unravel the dark truths behind an old mystery.

Crossroad Blues has been adapted into a graphic novel by Atkins along with artist Marco Finnegan.

“Thrillkill” by Jim Stenstrum and Neal Adams!

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If you’re not familiar with Thrillkill by Jim Stenstrum and Neal Adams, you’re in for a real treat.  Originally published in Creepy #75, by Warren in November 1975,

Thrillkill is one of Neal Adams’ most beautifully illustrated stories and Stenstrum was ahead of the times looking at mass murders.  (You have to remember that they were almost unheard of in 1975.  These days, they happen regularly.)

Click over to The Bristol Board to see the full Thrillkill story in a format that’s easy to read.

Lawrence Block’s Eight Million Ways to Die Adapted & Illustrated by John K. Snyder III

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John K. Snyder III has adapted Lawrence Block’s Eight Million Ways to Die into a graphic novel and it is looking great!  There have been 17 novels about Block’s unlicensed detective, Matthew Scudder, and Eight Million Ways to Die is a great place to start.  Here’s the skinny…

In crime-ravaged 1980s New York, a troubled ex-cop turned unlicensed detective takes on his most dangerous case, hunting down a serial killer-hitman, and ultimately coming face-to-face with his deadliest enemy…

Matthew Scudder is dying, one bottle at a time. A young prostitute named Kim Dakkinen is dying too, her life measured out in tricks. She wanted out, had asked for Scudder’s help, but suddenly she wasn’t dying anymore, she was just dead. The former cop turned P.I. promised to protect her, but he failed. Now his atonement is to find her killer. But the secrets in the dead hooker’s past are dirtier than her living, and searching for a killer in a city where everyone’s a victim is a good way to make the role permanent.

 I’m a huge Lawrence Block fan and his Scudder novels are my favorite Block yarns.  I’m looking forward to Snyder’s adaptation.  If you’re still on the fence, check out this interview with Snyder where he talks about bringing the novel to life!

‘Thief’: How Michael Mann’s Cinema Debut Stole the World’s Attention

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Thief: How Michael Mann’s Cinema Debut Stole the World’s Attention.  That’s right, amigos, Michael Mann’s Thief gets the Cinephilia & Beyond treatment.

Click on the link and you’ll find…

  • Mann’s final draft script for Thief
  • Thief the first heist video
  • James Caan on Thief
  • Omar Ahmed’s video essay on Michael Mann’s Thief
  • Michael Mann on Filmmaking (video)
  • An Evening with Michael Mann (video)
  • Many Behind-the-Scenes Photos
  • and more!

Stephen Franck’s Silver Coming to Free Comic Book Day!

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May 5, 2018 is Free Comic Book Day.  Dark Planet is making Stephen Franck’s Silver #1 available.  Franck summarizes Silver as…

… an original universe built around Bram Stoker’s original Dracula, and it begins 40 years after the events of the novel, into the noir/pulp era of the 1930s. You meet James Finnigan, who is the most notorious conman/gentleman-thief of his day, as he teams up with Rosalynd “Sledge” Van Helsing (granddaughter of the original Van Helsing, and altogether the last of the Van Helsings), to steal a mystical treasure hidden in Dracula’s castle. Finn, of course, brings his known associates—a fun assortment of conmen and grifters of all kinds—as well as the kind of amoral attitude that puts him immediately at odds with Sledge. Lastly, the team enlists Tao Leu (or more accurately, he enlists himself), who is a 10-year-old boy with the gift of second sight and who might be the biggest scoundrel of them all.

If this sounds like something you’d like or you’d like to see more click over to Free Comic Book Day’s Interview with Stephen Franc or to see a bigger preview of Silver.

CROSSROAD BLUES: A NICK TRAVERS GRAPHIC NOVEL

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CROSSROAD BLUES: A NICK TRAVERS GRAPHIC NOVEL by Ace Atkins and Marco Finnegan is set to drop May 1st and I can’t wait.

After a New Orleans college professor goes missing while searching for the rumored lost recordings of bluesman Robert Johnson—who, as legend has it, sold his soul to the devil at a Mississippi crossroads—Nick Travers is sent to find him. Clues point to everyone from an eccentric albino named Cracker to a hitman who believes he is the second coming of Elvis Presley.

I first discovered Atkins writing when he was tapped to continue the Robert B. Parker Spenser novels.  I was so impressed I searched out more of Atkins work and this led me to his other novels as well as the first Nick Travers graphic novel, Last Fair Deal Gone Down.  Needless to say, I was hooked.

Source: Comicosity.