Greetings loyal airmen.  My week long trip to Florida was much fun and the sun never let us down the entire seven days we were there.  It was all of 83 degrees when we left Orlando Monday morning and a cold, rainy 44 when we landed in Manchester, NH three hours later.  Oh yeah, welcome back to New England.  Then to add insult  to injury, it started snowing Wednesday afternoon.  The weather forecasters kept saying it wouldn't amount too much but what they failed to take into account was that warm air from the south began to mix in with the snow overnight. At two-thirty in the morning, heavy, wet white stuff started bringing down powerlines all over southern New Hampshire and we woke up Thursday morning with no electricty and a good six inches of packed snow.
               

The shot above is our backyard looking like an alien landscape.  Note how the limbs of the pine trees are bowed over by the heavy snow accumulation.   Trees were down all over our neighborhood.  What a mess!  By eight oclock, I'd bundled up (having to go to the basement closet and once more dig out the winter gear Valerie had stored away two weeks earlier).   My only compensation, I still had gas for the snowblower.
   
      

That's a shot of yours truly attacking the snow one more time, while mumbling “I was on a beach two days ago!  Aaghh.” An hour later I walked into the kitchen, sweat drenching all my clothes, and unable to take a shower because we had no hot water.   Today I have the sniffles.  Hmm, wonder why?  Talk about an endless winter.  Come on, Mother Nature, enough is enough!

      Of course the one ray of light that entire day was the power came back on twelve hours later, in time for us to watch the Red Sox's new pitcher, Daisuke Matsuzaka take out the Kansas City Royals by a score of 4 to 1.  This 26 year old kid has got an arsenal of pitchers that worked extremely well and you could see the confusion on the faces of the ten batters he struck out.   One more and he would have tied a rookie strike-out record for the Sox.  Of course Curt Schilling was horrible on opening day and lost that one, whereas Josh Beckett came out in game two and won that one, though he did struggle.   So it is still way early in the season, but Daisuke's first outing was a true ray of sunshine in an otherwise very dismal, gray day.

On as yet another sad note, Hard Case Crime publisher, Charles Ardai, informed me just a few days ago of the passing of writer, Donald Hamilton.   Hamilton was as yet another one of my favorite writers that I enjoyed so much growing up as a teenager in the 1960s.   At the height of the James Bond craze in America, Hamilton created an American operative who was tougher, grittier and a hell of a lot more believable than Fleming's playboy agent.   Matt Helm burst on the scene in a series of Gold Medal paperbacks, starting with 1960s DEATH OF A CITIZEN and ending with 1993's THE DAMAGERS.  The books were amazing, writting in a very tight, economic fashion that left little time for anything but tough, in-your-face action prose.  I loved them.  Two years ago, while browsing through a second-hand book store, I found beat of copies of two books from the series and bought them for 25 cents each.  Re-reading them was like a time travel trip to my high school days.  Nobody did it better than Hamilton.   According to Ardai, he died in Sweden, where he originally came from, at the age of 90.  He was living with his son, Gordon.   Hamilton now becomes the fourth of writers that I cherished to have passed.  He follows Ed McBain, Mickey Spillane and Richard Prather.   It's been a truly rough year for crime/mystery lovers.   A final story about Hamilton that I think you'll appreciate.   Upon the success of  the Matt Helm series, Hollywood came knocking.  They gave him lots and lots of money for the rights to the books and turned them into spy-spooks starring Dean Martin.  I believe four were filmed.   I was very dissappointed after seeing the first, as I, and many other fans, was upset at how much Hollywood had changed our cold-blooded hero into a buffoon.  A few months later, in a trade journal, I came across an interview with Hamilton wherein the reporter asked him if he was angered how his character had been changed on film.   Hamilton's wry reply,  “Oh, yeah.  I cried all the way to the bank!”   Rest in peace, tough guy.

While I was in Florida, Moonstones fantastic new anthology THE SPIDER CHRONICLES finally went on sale in book stores and comic shops everywhere.  My copies were waiting for me when we go home.  It is a great book and a tip of the fedora to edtior/publisher, Joe Gentile, for this awesome collection.  My story is called THE INVISIBLE GANG and I hope all of you will check it out.  One note, for whatever reason, one of the assigned writers was dropped and the above ad is incorrect.  The volume contains 19 stories, as is reflected on the actual cover.   The book retails at $16.95, a bargain for 19 fast paced, pulp tales of the mysterious Master of Men.  Don't miss this one!

And there we have it for another week.  Today is Good Friday and I sincerely want to wish all of you a very joyous and blessed HAPPY EASTER.    For those of you of the jewish faith, HAPPY PASSOVER.  Looks like we will be missing as yet another update next Friday.  Couldn't be helped.  Val and I are driving to Rochester N.Y. to attend our nephew Scott's wedding.  So, once again, airmen, take care, have a pleasant week, and please, pray for Spring Weather.

Ron, over and out.