Trawling Through The Thrift Stores with Joseph Finn

Happy Thursday, everyone!  Here in the USA we had Labor Day (because goodness fortend we have our appreciation of labour on May Day like everyone else because of our weird thing about socialism) so I've lost track of the days already.  But anyway, college football has started, the NFL starts on Sunday and now we're in the homestretch of major league baseball as the White Sox have almost sewn up the division for the first time in...a decade, maybe?  But enough with that, on to my weird thrift store finds!

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So, I only know Sharyn McCrumb from her work on goofy science-fiction-adjacent work.  For instance, her wickedly funny Bimbos Of The Death Sun, a murder mystery set at a science fiction convention.  Of course, that novel is from 1988 and there's a bunch of explaining what nerd culture was while also gently mocking it.  But it's a ton of fun, the victim is Absolutely Not Harlan Ellison (the second time he was murdered in a novel by a friend after Isaac Asimov's Murder at the ABA) and actually has a pretty good murder mystery at the heart.  So hell yeah, I grabbed this which looks like a more conventional mystery.

Now please enjoy the absolutely terrible original cover for Bimbos, which does center around a math professor who wrote a sci-fi novel as a goof that becomes a cult classic so he gets dragged to a con by his girlfriend to promote the novel.  (Note that the sticker isn't messing around and this did win an Edgar!  It's delightful.)

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Not one woman in this anthology.  But do I still want to see what the hell Tennessee Williams is doing here?   Yes.

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So sue me, this is a Virginia Woolf I've never read.  I've seen the movie a couple of times and I love that Tilda Swinton, an actress who can use her combination of beauty and a certain level of androgyny in very specific ways, made her breakout here.  It's a fantastic piece of work from director Sally Potter that you should totally check out while I check out this novel.

Orlando is currently streaming on Prime.

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I think I always confuse this with Scaramouche and Cyrano de Bergerac, but this is apparently a little more modern than Cyrano, being published in 1905 and about a British spy during the French Revolution.  Maybe a little less of a swashbuckler than I was thinking,  But flipping through, it seems just goofy enough for me.

Also, check out the 1952 movie of Scaramouche.  It's a hoot.

Scaramouche is for sale or rent at the usual places.

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I'll admit, I have no idea.  But I love the cover.

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So this week's recommendation!  Look, I'm a simple man who loves a good video game.  So when I see there's a Frank Grillo* movie where he keeps waking up and trying to survive a band of assassins again and again while he tries to figure out why, I'm absolutely there.  It's kind of goofy, bloody as hell and a darn good time.

Boss Level is on Hulu.

*Maybe best known to audiences for playing Crossbones in the Marvel movies, especially for trying to take down Cap in the elevator scene of Winter Soldier, I want to really recommend his work in The Purge: Arnachy and absolutely for Wheelman, a movie where he's in a car for 99% of it and sells the hell out of it.

Wheelman is on Netflix.