Ed Gorman (1941–2016)

Sam McCain is a young lawyer in Black River Falls, Iowa in the late 1950s. Unfortunately, Black River Falls already has more than their fair share of lawyers so McCain is forced to do detective work for Judge Esme Anne Whitney who represents all the wealth, power, and eccentricities of Old Money. Sam has just arrived home after attending the final concert by Buddy Holly, when he is ordered by the judge to go to her son’s house. McCain hates the son who has always been a bully and a snob show more but what he discovers there makes him feel only sorrow for the man. Now, Sam finds himself embroiled in what looks like a murder/suicide. However, he has his doubts. Unfortunately, the sheriff disagrees and Sam is on his own to discover what really happened.

McCain is an extremely likable character. He is witty and smart but he is also empathetic and nonjudgmental. He recognizes his own flaws as well as those of others but, for the most part, accepts people for who they are while despising all the myriad large and small injustices that permeate the town and the decade. He likes rock’n’roll, hot rods, and has loved the wrong girl since the fourth grade. He also loves his parents and his little sister and will do anything to protect them. The judge is wonderfully eccentric and, although most of the rest of the characters lack much depth, they make for some very interesting reading.

Author Ed Gorman is easily the best living writer of noir today in the tradition of Dashiell Hammett. His style of writing is clean and sparse and his characters and his plots tend to lean toward the darker side of life. The book may be set in the 1950s but this is definitely no Norman Rockwell picture of small town Americana. Set against the backdrop of the plane crash that killed Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and the Big Bopper and which inspired the Don McLean song, The Day the Music Died, author Ed Gorman’s fifties display all the racism, inequality, and hatred of the decade. In this, the first of the McCain series, Gorman looks at racism, domestic violence, adultery, and the human cost of illegal abortions.

Due to the content of this book, it will clearly not appeal to everyone. As in most historical fiction, there are some minor inconsistencies in the history but not enough to effect my enjoyment of the tale. However, for fans of noir and who like their mysteries with a touch of social commentary and the cerebral, I can’t recommend it highly enough. show less

Exploring and colonizing the stars is the theme, a classic science fiction idea. But only a couple of stories here have any chance of becoming classics. Many are bland and mediocre
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Two classic science fiction tales, A.E. van Vogt's "Far Centaurus" and Arthur C. Clarke's "The Sentinel, provide the inspiration for a mediocre story and a bland story. The mediocre one is Robert J. Sawyer's "The Shoulders of Giants" with a starship racing to a frontier already settled by humanity. The bland story show more is Eric Kotani's "Edgeworld" with its discovery of an alien artifact.

Also on the bland side are Jack Williamson's "Eden Star", with family conflicts played out on a planet with light-worshipping aliens, and Edo van Belkom's "Coming of Age" about colonists who discover that their children are doomed to permanent pre-pubescence. The weakest story, in terms of originality, is the entirely predictable "Full Circle" by Mike Resnick and Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Even humor can not save this old plot about futilely trying to get rid of one noxious pest by importing another.

On the marginally interesting edge of the spectrum are Paul Levinson's "The Suspended Fourth", about a planet where birdsong may hold the key to avoiding disasters, and Alan Dean Foster's "The Muffin Migration", another of those stories where colonists rue ignoring the natives' advice about the local fauna. Dana Stabenow's "No Place Like Home" has a few plot holes but its black humor and mean-spiritedness make up for it in a tale weighing the relative values of human life and that of alien bacteria.

Both Allen Steele's "The Boid Hunt" and Tom Piccirilli's "I Am a Graveyard Hated by the Moon" are character centered stories. The Steele tale is a deadly coming of age story and an examination of courage before and during a hunt for alien predators. Piccirilli's mixture of virtual reality, nanotechnology, characters who think they're gods, and landscapes haunting characters doesn't quite work but is an enjoyable story reminiscent of Roger Zelazny.

Peter Ullian's "The Vietnamization of Centauri V" is not a strict retelling of the Vietnam War on an alien world but, rather, how three soldiers are differently affected by the carnage around them to which they sometimes contribute, sometimes balk at. Its plot may not be that original, but it rings psychologically true.

The best stories of the anthology, both very much worth reading and both sharing settings from their authors' novels, are Robert Charles Wilson's "The Dryad's Wedding" and Pamela Sargent's "Dream of Venus". Set on the same planet as the setting for his BIOS, "The Dryad's Wedding" features a woman's whose memories and personality were re-set by a trauma that almost killed her when she was sixteen. Nineteen years later she is set to again marry her old husband. Wandering the planet Isis, with its ecosystem lethal to any one not genetically engineered to live there, she has began to notice some strange things . . . like a mound of talking spiders. Set in the same universe as her trilogy about terraforming Venus, Sargent's "Dream of Venus" is about the conflict between artistic integrity and political realities. Rich, aimless, and young Hassan hopes producing a propagandistic "mind-tour" on the Venus project will be a ladder to the kind of Earth-side job his father wants for him. He's partnered with brilliant Miriam, a poor woman from the North America provinces. She has something different in mind other than a simple celebration of the centuries-long terraforming project.

This collection is worth reading despite the bland and predictable tales. There are enough interesting, if flawed, stories here, and a couple of very good ones, to make it worthwhile. show less

This was an odd mixture of great story-telling, catchy style, appealing main characters, poor research, rotten editing and abrupt ending. I was really caught up in the story, thinking I had found a new author I could turn to when I just wanted to lose myself for a couple hours, but then he threw me right out with an anachronism that no man born in 1941 should be guilty of. Mentioning his parents' attitude toward black people, the main character referred to his mother getting tears in her show more eyes when she saw "little Negro kids blasted off the streets with fire hoses" on the nightly news. My civil rights time-line tells me that happened in 1963. If your title makes a point of the precise date when your story begins, (that’s February 3, 1958, just so you don’t have to go look it up), it just doesn't do to get your historical facts wrong. Gorman also has one of his characters, a Judge, suggest that the Democrats had recently put John Kennedy forward as a potential Presidential candidate; again, the history I know about that is that Kennedy started looking pretty strong for the nomination when the New Hampshire State Democratic Committee endorsed him late in 1959, but in February of 1958 was he considered a strong contender already? In Iowa, a Republican stronghold? I don’t know, but it doesn’t feel right. Another reviewer has pointed out a couple of minor cultural goofs that I didn't even notice, so there may be other references that should have been vetted more closely by someone before this book went to print. There were also at least two instances of a character referring to the content of a conversation that had taken place earlier in the book, by way of saying “aha---that was a clue!”. The only trouble is, the clue wasn’t mentioned in the version of the conversation the reader got. Finally, and fatally, partly due to those missing clues, the revelation of who the murderer was came almost completely out of the blue. This is the first in a series, but not the author’s first novel, by any means. I’d like to read more of his stuff, because I like his setting and his characters, and love his titles. But I don’t trust him now. show less

Sam McCain—everyone calls him just McCain—is a young man who finished law school and instead of striking out for new territory, returned to the little Iowa town where he grew up. There he moons after the beautiful girl he fell in love with in high school, who is in love with someone else. He tries to be nice to the girl who’s loved him since high school, meanwhile being bullied by his boss the judge and by the police chief. Some of us would think of suicide at this point, and in fact show more one of McCain’s old schoolmates does commit suicide in the first chapters of the book, thus starting an investigation that no one seems to think McCain capable of finishing.
The book begins on the night of February 3, 1959, as McCain drives back from the last concert given by Ritchie Valens, Buddy Hollly, and the Bog Bopper, J. P. Richardson. Gorman captures the late fifties in small town America and its mix of innocence, provinciality, racial bigotry, complacence, and Cold War tension. He neglects neither the good side of the social cohesion of small town life fifty years ago, nor the ugly side that included coat-hangar abortions and the aggregation of power in the hands of two or three moneyed families.
One of the town’s plutocrats, a spoiled and alcoholic do-nothing, has apparently killed his wife and himself—McCain arrives on the scene before the suicide. But McCain discovers that the guns for the two killings were different, and as he searches for the wife’s real killer, his own family, his boss, and his old friends from high school all become part of the story.
I won’t quibble that it was a yellow, not a pink polka-dot bikini, that the record players ought to be Hi Fi rather than stereo, or that the car in Route 66 was a Corvette rather than a Thunderbird. For the most part, Gorman gets it right. His picture of 50s life is hardly sugar-coated: his people are not happy and terrible things happen. Yet the book will still feed nostalgia for the 50s. If you have that old-time feeling and want to go back when Ike was still in office, J. Edgar Hoover was railing about the Communist menace, John Kennedy was a rising Senator, and poodle skirts were just beginning to lose their fashion edge, you’ll like The Day the Music Died, and probably the other McCain books Ed Gorman has written, Wake Up Little Susie, Save the Last Dance for Me, Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool, and Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?. show less