The late Peter Graves as a fictional PI--

As I flipped through the new Time magazine, I ran across a brief article about the recent passing of journeyman actor Peter Graves. A star of the hit "Mission Impossible" TV series, Graves did have a long and successful career which includes one role I'm mention here. Here's a googled pix of the actor.

My recollection for an old TV movie clicked when I thought of Graves. He did star as a fictional private investigator from a successful book series in a 1974 movie which I remember watching way back then. "The Underground Man" which was based on a book by the same name featured writer Ross MacDonald's PI Lew Archer. A Wikipedia article says the movie was a pilot for a TV series.

And although MacDonald's work was written and published mainly in the 50s and 60s, it has been resurrected recently in paperbacks including some titles in our local library system.

Updating "About Me"

When I started this blog, I did not think about incorporating myself as a focal fixture within the blog. The blog is about the book club, mystery books and books in general. So, I had decided to skip a photograph of myself and to have a very short "About Me" entry. And in case you've never noticed, About Me is on the right hand side of this blog page at the bottom.

However, it you look at the revised "About Me" entry--you can see I changed my mind. Recently, I read about the advantage of providing a fuller entry for readers to understand why the blog exists. Point taken. As a result, I decided to give more background about how the book club started with my involvement.

Hope it's interesting.

Now regarding the photo--that comes from playing copycat to the writer's photos which accompany their books (some are quite showy). In particularly, I'd say I roughly modelled my picture on two writer's photographs featuring Ross McDonald (in the hat) and Robert Crais (in the shades) as shown here.

God bless you, Paul Newman

I enjoyed going to Paul Newman movies over the years (Slap Shot, Fort Apache the Bronx and The Verdict anyone?) and I was saddened to hear of his recent death. I still find it a little odd to see his pix on salad dressing bottles but he was blessed to have mulitple careers and ventures.

I do give him partial credit to directing me to mysteries as a genre when I discovered his version of writer Ross McDonald's private eye Lew Archer in the films Harper and years later The Drowning Pool. In the Newman movies, a character's name was changed to Harper--and I've read two different accounts why that is the case--and Harper is based on the novel, The Moving Target while The Drowning Pool is the same title of the book. As it happened, the movies lead me to reading the books and I enjoyed McDonald's strong narrative of the lone wolf California PI.

The two Harper movies are in the new Newman collection DVD set and the photo on the cover case (shown here) is from the first movie.