Relay For Life May 9, 2008
Posted by eviljwinter in Cincinnati, Life, Standup Comedy.4 comments
As most readers here know, I am both a writer and a comedian. In my role as comedian, I have joined several other local comics in Comics Care, a way for us to share our talents while helping worthy causes. Our first event will be the American Cancer Society’s Relay for Life June 12-13 in Harrison, Ohio. I and several of the comics will not only be performing but walking the Relay as well.
How can you help?
Check out my personal web page for the event:
There you can find details about my part, my team, and the Relay itself. You can also donate online if you like.
This event is a personal one for me as I’ve lost two grandparents to cancer, one at a very young age. My paternal grandmother was a cancer survivor. This is my way of remembering them. Please considering donating.
Thank you
The Forgotten: Blunt Darts May 9, 2008
Posted by eviljwinter in Books.3 comments
Gerald So tagged me last week for Patti Abbott’s Friday Forgotten Books. So for my pick, I choose Jeremiah Healy’s Blunt Darts. It’s Healy’s debut work and the debut of his John Francis Cuddy. Cuddy, we learn, is a former MP who had it all. He could have been a top executive at an insurance company, except he had this thing called… um… What’s the word I’m looking for?
Oh, yeah. Ethics. They fired him for having ethics.
The story itself is one you’ve heard before. Wealthy family, lots of secrets, corrupt small town police force. But all that serves to introduce us to one of the PI genre’s best characters. We meet Cuddy in the unemployment office, BSing the entrenched bureaucrat about his employment prospects. At first, it seems he’s given up and is milking the system. As it turns out, he’s just become a private investigator, and revealing that might cost him his unemployment check before he can build a client base.
It was that initial scene that endeared me to Cuddy. His MP past serves more as background fodder than a means to make him a tough guy. (Lee Child successfully takes the opposite tact with Jack Reacher, but then we want Reacher to be a tough guy, don’t we?) Cuddy also has an unusual conscience in his late wife, whom he regularly converses with at her graveside.
Cuddy is very much a work in progress in this one. We don’t hear his wife’s side of the conversation, a surprisingly believable plot device in later books. Cuddy’s new lover, Nancy Meagher, does not appear. And Healy spends more time differentiating his creation from fellow Boston PI Spenser.
I always thought the Cuddy series, and its Detroit counterpart, the Ben Perkins series, were grossly underrated and underappreciated. Alas, both series are out of print. Too bad, because I think it’s time to revisit Cuddy’s Reagan-era Boston.
