3 results for "Mystery"

Phoenix Without Ashes

Harlan Ellison,Edward Bryant
Written as a collaboration between the multi-Nebula Award winning Ed Bryant and Harlan Ellison, one of the Grand Masters of science fiction and a multiple Hugo-, Nebula-, and Edgar Award-winner, PHOENIX WITHOUT ASHES is the novel edition of Harlan's famous, award-winning teleplay. (Please note this book is the novel edition, not the graphic novel.) The year is 2785, and Devon, a farmer banished for challenging his community's Elders, discovers a secret that changes everything he knew about the world, leading him on a quest to solve a mystery beyond his understanding before his entire world is destroyed in a cataclysm. With a Harlanesque introduction by Harlan Ellison. Harlan is very graciously donating his author's income to Ed for this book. THANK YOU, HARLAN! Because of Ed's financial needs, almost all the profits from this book go directly to Ed. Donations to help with Ed's medical and other financial needs are also most appreciated via www.FriendsOfEd.org. Thank you! About the Author Edward Bryant is the multi-Nebula Award winning author of over a hundred short stories, over a thousand essays and reviews, and one novel with Harlan Ellison, PHOENIX WITHOUT ASHES.
CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform 2014-01-22 246 pages

Again, Honorable Whoredom at a Penny a Word

Harlan Ellison
You will not find "'Repent, Harlequin ' Said the Ticktockman" in this book. Nor will you find "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream," "A Boy and His Dog," or "The Deathbird," or any of Harlan Ellison's myriad masterpieces. What will you find herein? The front cover might give you a nasty clue: stories of crime and amorality, of sex and violence. What the cover might not have conveyed was that the award-winning tales enumerated above were forged in an imagination stoked for the preceding decade by the need to trade tales to the pulps and slick men's magazine to make the rent ($7 a week). You hold in your hands the work of a writer painfully crawling forward, tale by tale, honing his craft in an industry where every word counted...of course, you knew all that; you got it from the title. AGAIN, HONORABLE WHOREDOM AT A PENNY A WORD kicks off with "Typewriters & Pipe Lighters," a collection of anecdotes from Ellison recalling the writing of these stories, which span his first full year as a professional writer (1956) to 1968, when he still dashed off the occasional thriller while making his name with the iconic fantasies listed above. A further essay-"Naked Deranged Psycho Thrill-Demon Or, Bitch-Slut Gun-Crazy Homicidal Rat" (1996)-discusses pulp editor W.W. Scott's propensity for re-titling Ellison's works for publication in such publications as Guilty and Trapped. Most of the stories are straight-forward thrillers never-before collected in an Ellison anthology: "Her Name Was Death" (1957), "Thirty Miles to Death Junction" (1957), "The Teaser with a Knife" (1967), "Don't Mind the Maid" (1957), "The Girl in the Red Room" (1964), "Hunchback" (1957), "Goodbye, Eadie" (1956), "The Clean Break" (1956), "Boss of the Big House"(1957), "Drive a Girl to Kill" (1957), "Hell's Holocaust" (1957), "Willie Just Won't Kick Off" (1968), "Mad Dog " (written with Henry Slesar, 1957), "The Women in the House" (1957), "Taxi Dancer"(1967). "The Music of Our Affair"(1963) features the author experimenting with style, to cacophonous effect. "Find One Cuckaboo" (1960) is a never-before reprinted novelette originally included in the paperback anthology THE SAINT MYSTERY LIBRARY, No. 11. "Clobber Me, Moogoo " (1956) and "McManus's Mental Mistress" (1968) exhibit a fantasy-tinged approach to stories of sex. "Only Death Can Stop It" (1960) compelled Harlan to add a disclaimer to the table of the contents. "The Final Push" (1957) is one of the author's three Westerns. While "Saddle Tramp" (collected in HONORABLE WHOREDOM AT A PENNY A WORD) was more tramp than saddle, this story has more in common with "The End of the Time of Leinard" in its evocation of a genre Ellison adores. "Night on the Mug Beat" is a never-before published cop story, appearing herein for the first time. The main body of the collection closes with "The Steep Road to the Gutter" (1965), an overlooked masterpiece of early Ellisonia that the editor is overjoyed to expose to a wider audience. But wait, there's more In preparing AGAIN, HONORABLE WHOREDOM AT A PENNY A WORD for publication, the editor stumbled across a file headed A WOMAN NAMED MIDNIGHT. After confirming that "A Girl Named Poison" (found in the author's 2013 collection PULLING A TRAIN) hadn't changed her name upon reaching maturity, the editor brought the forty-page typescript for an unfinished novel-credited to "Ellis Daye" on the first page, and written while Ellison lived in the treehouse on Bushrod Lane-to its author. Harlan read the story but had no recollection of writing it, nor why it had never been completed and published, but nevertheless gave his blessing for it to make its debut herein.
Edgeworks Abbey 2014-09-29 256 pages

Honorable Whoredom at a Penny a Word

Harlan Ellison
Five years in the making, the Edgeworks Abbey Archive represents Harlan Ellison's last word on his written legacy. Researched and edited by Ellison's long-time associate, Jason Davis, under the supervision of Harlan and Susan Ellison, this collection assembles the preferred texts of each story and essay along with previously uncollected and unpublished material to create the definitive edition.HONORABLE WHOREDOM AT A PENNY A WORD collects the hard-boiled fiction Ellison wrote for the mystery/suspense digests of the 1950s, along with a few later contributions to the genre from the men's magazines of the 1960s. In these pages, you will find Ellison's only recurring character, insurance investigator-turned-fixer Jerry Killian, as well as the diminutive private dick Big John Novak, a character intended to continue, but only appearing in one suspenseful outing. His aborted second appearance, "In Small Packages," makes its debut herein, alongside a pair of first drafts that showcase the rapid development of Ellison's craft across his first years as a professional writer-a time when pros were paid a penny a word.
Edgeworks Abbey 2022-01-31 266 pages