Book ahead: 'Hard-Boiled Christmas Stories' authors sign books Saturday
BY Staff Reports
Sunday, December 09, 2012
12/09/12 at 3:11 AM
John Brooks Walton will be at Steve's Sundry, Books and Magazines on Thursday to sign copies of his latest book in his "Tulsa Historic Homes" series.
Walton will be at the store, 2612 S. Harvard Ave., beginning at 7 p.m. Thursday to sign copies of "Circa 1920," a photographic tour of some of Tulsa's neighborhoods in the early part of the 20th century.
Most stories that get told this time of year are soft and sweet - happy tales of dreams coming true, of angels getting wings, of even the worst sort of people finding something good within themselves.
If that's not your cup of tea - or perhaps we should say, "your slug of rotgut" - then the first book in a new venture by Oklahoma writers John Wooley and John McMahan might be in order.
"Hard-Boiled Christmas Stories" is a collection of crime stories with a holiday setting drawn from the pages of 1930s and '40s pulp-fiction magazines such as Dime Detective, Detective Fiction Weekly and Gangster Stories.
The 10 stories include ones by some of the better known practitioners of pulp fiction, such as Steve Fisher, John K. Butler and Johnston McCully (best known as the creator of Zorro), as well as authors whose names aren't quite so well-preserved in history.
The book also includes an original story by Wooley, titled "Santa's Slay Ride," written in the style of Robert Leslie Bellem and featuring Bellem's series character, Dan Turner.
"In all of the 300 or so Dan Turner, Hollywood Detective stories that ... Bellem wrote, we weren't able to find even one with a Christmas setting," Wooley said. "So I wrote one in his style. It's the first new Dan Turner story in more than 40 years."
Wooley has long been a proponent of Bellem and his uniquely jazzy way with the English language, and was the screenwriter for the filmed-in-Tulsa movie "Dan Turner, Hollywood Detective" (sometimes called "The Raven Red Kiss-off") that starred Marc Singer as Turner.
Wooley and McMahan will be at Steve's Sundry, Books and Magazines from 1 to 3 p.m. Saturday to sign copies of the book. It is the first in a proposed series of anthologies of pulp magazine stories.
Original Print Headline: Book ahead
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