So I’m watching VH1 Classic, and the video for Judas Priest’s Heading Out To The Highway just came on.

And I’m wondering - how did anyone every thing Rob Halpern was not gay? He’s a great singer in a great band, but dude, he looks as gay as Liberace.

Here’s the video.

Just got my most recent LinkedIn network updates, which included this fantastic piece of logrolling:

Let’s say you’re trying to win an Olympic swimming event. Let’s say it’s the 100 meter freestyle. And let’s say your main opponent is the world record holder.

Not hard enough? Let’s give him a head start.

That’s essentially what Jason Lezak, anchor leg of the American 4×100 Freestyle Relay team, faced when he hit the water. France’s Alain Bernard was handed the lead by third-leg swimmer Frederick Bousquet, who swam his leg in 46.63 seconds, fastest split of the relay to that point and the only swimmer to swim below 47 seconds.

After 50 meters, Lezak trailed Bernard by a little over half a length. He later admitted that for a moment he thought “there’s no way” he was catching the Frenchman, who ended up with the third-fastest split of the relay at 46.73. But he pushed those thoughts away and swam the race of his life.

With 30 meters to go, the announces said that the USA should be able to “hold on to second place”, but Lezak had other ideas. He proceeded to chase down Bernard and out-touch him by eight hundredths of a second. For his hundred meters he swam 46.06, fastest split ever by over half a second. I just got finished watching the video and I end up yelling every time I do. There’s no way that Lezak should have been able to win, but he dug deep and pulled it out, reminding me of nothing so much as Billy Mills’ dash to the finish at the 1964 Olympics.

I guess there’s a good reason that Lezak, and not Michael Phelps, is the closer on this team.

Unlicensed private eye Jim Hardman and his buddy and sometimes partner Hump Evans are at a boxing match when Hump happens across a discarded invitation to a private party. He decides to crash it, but Hardman takes a pass. Turns out that was a good idea - the party was a set-up, for a robbery. Most of those invited were the kind who’d carry large sums of money, and who couldn’t tell the cops just how much they’d been take for.

The thieves were young and inexperienced, and didn’t think their clever plan through. The kind of people they robbed were not the kind of people who could go running to the cops, but they were the kind of people who had other options. And they brought in the Charleston Knife.

Hardman is hired by the mother of one of these baby-faced criminals to save him from the Knife. The Knife doesn’t just kill for money, it’s also his hobby, and Hardman is able to use this to his advantage, as he tracks his quarry and sets up a final confrontation.

The Hardman books by Ralph Dennis make up one of the most unappreciated crime series of the 70s. The writing is direct and unpretentious, the situations believable, and Dennis makes good use of Atlanta color, including Hardman’s hangout, the Stein Club, which was still in operation at least twenty years after this book came out.

The friendship between Hardman and Hump has been compared to that between Robert B. Parker’s Spenser and Hawk, but to me it seems more like the relationship between Joe Lansdale’s Hap Collins and Leonard Pine. In both Dennis’ and Lansdale’s books the protagonists are solidly blue-collar, usually struggling to make their way through life, and both authors make use feel that the sidekick has a life outside of the series.

The Charleston Knife is Back in Town is a great read, and if you find a copy, be sure to pick it up.

There’s an interesting discussion going on over at Crimespace about “lean” or “muscular” prose, what it is and why it’s used. Gerald So has also weighed in on his own blog..

I think that this misses the point of writing. To me, writing in a particular style is not a goal. My goal is to write in the style that fits the story, whatever that may be. I recently sold a story in which the narrator is an over-educated, almost hysterical neurotic, and just finished another in which the narrator is a laconic cowboy. Each is written in a style that would not be appropriate for the other. Now, it’s true that some styles do come more naturally to me than others; for example, I had trouble writing with a story that was intended to be in a loose, objective third-person point of view, in which narrative summary would substitute for much of the dialog.

In a broader sense, I think that prose should generally appear effortless. It should serve only to further the story and should not call attention to itself needlessly. When I say “further the story”, I’m not just talking about plot, but also character, setting, tone - if possible, each sentence should further more than one of these, for example pushing the plot forward while giving insight into a character.

This type of writing is very common in genres such as mystery or science fiction, less so in literary fiction. Sometimes literary fiction seems to be like Olympic gymnastics: capable of amazing feats, but certainly not effortless. I personally believe that this striving for effect weakens the overall work and should be disposed of quietly.