High Priest of Crime Fiction

"Willeford's novels portray the weird and evil as no more of a spike on the EKG of everyday life than eating breakfast or reading a magazine. With very few exceptions, the violence in his fiction has little psychological impact on those who commit it. It doesn’t break them, because there is nothing in them to break. Taken as a whole, his bibliography reads like his attempt to dramatize a quote from Blaise Pascal, which Willeford used as an epigraph twice, in New Hope for the Dead and Grimhaven: 'Man's unhappiness stems from his inability to sit quietly in his room.'"

At The Bulwark, Bill Ryan discusses the career of writer Charles Willeford.

The Greatest Live Album of All Time

"You know, Sam was what we've come to call a crossover artist. You know, he crossed over from gospel to pop, which was controversial enough in its day. But once he became a pop artist, he had a certain mainstream image to protect. And the fact is that, you know, when he was out on the road, he was playing to a predominantly, almost exclusively black audience. And he was doing a different kind of show. You know, a much more down home, down to earth, gut bucket kind of show than what he would do for his pop audience."

In 2013, Scott Simon on NPR's Weekend Edition talks with Gregg Geller about Sam Cooke's Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963.

To Have Great Leap 109

The New York Times runs obits for record producer Henry Stone, actress Lauren Bacall, scholar Pierre Ryckmans, and boatman Eroni Kumana.

"With the Exception of Las Vegas, There Is no American City as Deeply Silly"

"Henry Flagler. Al Capone. Meyer Lansky. Frank Sinatra. The Fontainebleau. Old Jews. The Cubans. 'Scarface.' Edna Buchanan. Cocaine cowboys. More old Jews. More Cubans. Don Aronow. The Forge. Carlos Lehder. Crooked cops. Art Deco. More old Jews. The South Beach revival. Gays. Discos. Fewer old Jews. Real estate developers. Madonna. Gianni Versace. That mobbed-up Staten Island kid with the nightclubs. And, of course, Crockett and Tubbs. There must be Crockett and Tubbs."

Bryan Burrough in The New York Times reviews Gerald Posner’s Miami Babylon: Crime, Wealth, and Power—A Dispatch From the Beach.