Essays and Stories

By all accounts Humphrey Bogart was not an avid reader of mysteries and his meetings with Raymond Chandler were filled with cordial, cocktail hour small talk. But Chandler saw something unique in him long before the nostalgia cult grew out of the Sixties counter culture.

Shortly after the 1946 release of the Howard Hawks film version of Chandler's The Big Sleep, he wrote...
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For over forty years Dave Etter has been creating poetry that belongs intrinsically to Illinois. His poems are populated with characters from the cross-section of the State's population: blue-collar laborers, housewives suffering the blues, angst-ridden teens, and struggling farmers. He claims he never writes about real people, but like many writers, his creations are pieced together with a generous sprinkling of reality tempered by a dash of imagination.
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I once met Mickey Spillane at a convention in Chicago where he was signing autographs with Max Allan Collins and promoting Mike Danger, his new comic book. In my enthusiasm that morning I stuffed a pile of Spillane paperbacks into my backpack. Then I grabbed a few more. Thus armed, I made my way to the convention hall where I waited in line for over an hour with countless fans.
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I was sitting in a bar on Beale Street in Memphis with Russ Begitschke, sipping a cold beer and pondering the vagaries of a dead icon's life. Everywhere I looked Elvis looked back. He watched me with the emotionless, air-brushed stare of a young greaser hoodlum, his upper lip curled into a perpetual pout. Twenty years after his death Elvis Presley had been reduced to an endless stream of pastel lithographs, smiling, young, and unblemished. No hint anywhere of the bloated man who died on his toilet, gurgling with excess.
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People are constantly asking me what writers have influenced me. I'm happily influenced by any piece of good writing, no matter if it's fiction or non-fiction. Since the 1970s I developed the habit of reading no less than one book a week (often more), and I refuse to limit my reading to a specific genre. I read everything I can get my hands on. And if you haven't read any of these books I suggest you begin tracking them down.
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The suffocating heat clung to her flesh like a hot whisper. They all felt it. One of them wanted her. She sensed it as a group of young men approached. She had her kiosk set up midway between the food concessions and the gaming booths. Rowena cast a spell. Just a small one, she said to herself, to make certain he's bewitched.
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