theinferior4+1

Time for another card from my friend Susan!  She always finds the coolest cards for any occasion, but she goes all out at Xmas.  Here we have a faux-iconic fairy-tale setting, seemingly derived from Hansel & Gretel, Oz, Narnia, and other archetypal flights of fancy.  Yet despite the wondrousness of it all, isn't there something faintly ominous about the scene?  What lies at the end of this snow-covered path?  Father Christmas?  Or the gingerbread house?



(Posted by paulw) 

[Click on either image to enlarge]

THE BIG FIX, Roger L. Simon, Straight Arrow Books, 1973

As we saw in our previous entry on Martin Siegel, genre writers responded to the tumult and changes of the Sixties just as deeply as mainstream writers did, and perhaps even faster, always having an eye to trends that would sell books. Today's case is an example of how the Sixties swept over the mystery field. Just reading the back-cover copy illustrates that we're not in Chandler's LA anymore.

The author is almost too well-known to be considered in our string of one-hit wonders. In the entry on Simon in Mike Ashley's THE MAMMOTH ENCYCLOPEDIA OF MODERN CRIME FICTION, Ashley says that the novels in this series form "a chronicle of of American society over the last 30 years." Simon's alive and well and still productive today. Learn more about him here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_L._Simon

Posted by Paul DiFi.

[Click to heal the leper]

Ben Peek's comment in Lucius's CLOVERFIELD thread about hanging out with Jesus at Xmas reminded me of one of my favorite Glenn Barr paintings, reproduced above.

I tried to convince Mike Bishop to license this as the cover image for his anthology CROSS OF CENTURIES, but for some reason he felt it might be detrimental to sales.

Posted by Paul DiFi.