The 'Black Panther' Animated Series Arrives On DVD - Check Out An Exclusive Clip & Interview!
"Black Panther has this incredibly hot chick who's going to become his wife, so why wouldn't we throw her into this thing. Marvel gave us the permission, and I took a little of the Eric Jerome Dickey "Storm" story, which I loved, and worked a little of that back story in."
Times are tough. You’ve tightened your belt so much that you don’t have any notches left. You’ve cancelled everything cancelable, given up all but the necessities, stopped going out and started going desperate. You don’t know what to do next to save your un(der)employed self. It’s decision time.
How up-the-creek are you? Would you pick up a gun to pay the bills? In the new book “Tempted by Trouble” by Eric Jerome Dickey, a man learns that firepower is not foolproof.
There was once a time when Dmytryk Knight and his wife, Cora, were bringing down a six-figure income between them. But that was before Detroit’s factories started laying off workers, before money dried up and entire neighborhoods were bulldozed. It was before Cora started dancing naked in gentlemen’s clubs, just to pay the mortgage.
When Eddie Coyle came to the club and took Cora to Canada for the weekend, Dmytryk was ashamed and jealous until Cora told him that Eddie Coyle needed help. Coyle was looking for a trustworthy wheelman to travel with his team of bank robbers, someone who thought fast and kept his mouth shut.
Eddie Coyle needed someone steady. Dmytryk needed a job.
The work was easy and the money was good – for awhile. Dmytryk and Cora caught up on bills and did a little traveling. When money ran out, there was always another job. Another trip to another city for another brief wait in the car, while Dmytryk’s teammates, Robert and Sammy, coolly walked in to a bank and walked out with cash.
Yes, the money was good… but it wasn’t enough for Cora, and when Dmytryk came home from a job one night, she was gone. That distracted Dmytryk some, but he had no choice but to work. He needed the money to find Cora, and besides, Eddie Coyle would never let him off the team alive. Dmytryk had seen too much. No witnesses, Coyle said.
But there were plenty of witnesses when the Los Angeles bank job went sour. Plenty of people saw Sammy take a bullet to the face and Robert, one to the chest. But nobody saw Dmytryk as he sped away from the bank, or as he drove to Georgia toward another job and another devastating surprise.
Though I’ve read other novels by author Eric Jerome Dickey, I’ll admit that I’m not always a fan. For me, his work runs hot-or-cold. With this book, I just about burned my fingers. “Tempted by Trouble” sizzles.
I loved that this book felt like a paper equivalent of Reservoir Dogs or a 1930s noir movie, with action that’s bullet-fast. I loved that this novel’s characters act like real people (albeit violent, immoral, brutal ones) in situations that aren’t beyond belief. And I loved the ending of this book, which is so perfect it took my breath away.
Throw out your bookmarks, cancel your plans, and settle in this weekend with this first-rate crime novel. Once you start “Tempted by Trouble”, you’ll have a tough time letting it go.
If the name Eric Jerome Dickey doesn’t ring a bell, you probably haven’t looked at the bestseller list in the last 15 years. And unless you’re a fan of fast-paced genre fiction — the kind with shootouts, chase scenes and pole-dancing strippers — you probably also won’t be among the fans at the Sandhills Books-A-Million Thursday evening at 7 p.m. when Dickey reads from his latest romantic thriller, Tempted by Trouble.
And that’s OK. The ultra-prolific Dickey has built up an enormous fan-base without you.
The author of 18 novels (including 12 New York Times bestsellers), Dickey has moved more than 3 million volumes to date and shows no sign of letting up. He has been called “one of the few kings of popular African-American fiction for women” by the Times and is sometimes referred to as “the male Terry McMillan,” though he is resistant to being so easily pigeonholed and, in fact, switches genres more frequently than critics give him credit.
The McMillan comparisons, for example, arise from Dickey’s string of urban relationship novels, including titles like Cheaters (2000) and Milk in my Coffee (2006). However, Dickey’s popular Gideon series features an international hit man whose adventures take him to such faraway locales as Trinidad and Argentina, and in 2007 the author even collaborated on a six-issue graphic novel series for Marvel Entertainment featuring the black superheroes Storm (from the X-Men comics) and the Black Panther.
“I don’t pay attention to labels,” Dickey told Free Times in anticipation of his upcoming Books-A-Million appearance. “I simply write.”
“Someone else says something and it just kind of sticks, and that’s unfortunate,” he adds. “But that’s more marketing than anything else. Overall, I just try to be a writer, but they keep adding adjectives, and every adjective puts you in a smaller box.”
Still, quite a few adjectives could be used to describe Tempted by Trouble, which Dickey calls “a tale of desperation and capitalism.” The novel follows the unraveling fortunes of Dmytryk Knight, an out-of-work auto executive who gets mixed up with a gang of bank robbers on a cross-country holdup spree after his wife Cora — who works as a stripper (stage name: ‘Trouble’) — hooks him up with a high-rolling gangster named Eddie Coyle.
It’s a violent book told from the perspective of a morally conflicted narrator who loves his wife (even after she dumps him), who puts himself at risk in order to protect strangers and who stubbornly refuses to use profanity — but who isn’t afraid to blow off a few heads when the situation dictates.
The Knights call recession-era Detroit home — and that’s where the action starts, with the quite literal bang of a gangland execution — but the blood spills from Atlanta to L.A., and at breakneck speed. In between, one character swills vodka, another pops Vicodin like it’s candy and, sooner or later, everyone winds up in the sack.
Dickey says he reads “a lot” and rattles off a long list of books he’s been lugging around on his current book tour — a list that includes such marquee genre authors as Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Sidney Sheldon and crime writer Robert B. Parker, who died earlier this year.
“I’m reading the books that I wish I had written,” Dickey says with a laugh. “Robert B. Parker was just amazing, you know. Just studying his dialogue, it’s like, wow — it’s just amazing.”
Dickey’s appetite for mass-market genre fiction has certainly influenced his own novels, but stylistically, Tempted by Trouble may owe a larger debt to the comic books the author read as a kid —“growing up, I loved comics,” he says — and to the crime films with which he’s still obsessed. Indeed, if the name Eddie Coyle sounds familiar, that’s because it’s lifted from a 1973 gangster movie, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, starring Robert Mitchum. Dickey likewise saves his readers a lot of time and trouble by simply nicknaming a wannabe Pam Grier character Jackie Brown.
Ultimately, though, Dickey’s subject matter and thematic concerns are “ripped from the headlines,” as he bangs out nightmarish scene after nightmarish scene in a quick-sketch effort to depict the contemporary American predicament that makes his characters do the bloody things they do.
“Every one of my novels, going back to 1996, is a snapshot of what was going on at that moment in time, in our history or whatever country the novel’s set in,” Dickey says. “Right now, we’re in a depression. Writing a contemporary novel that pretends we aren’t would be the biggest lie. I mean, look at the front page of the paper today.”
Two minutes is long enough to save a life—or end it, as a desperate husband finds out when he takes to a life of crime.
Dickey (Resurrecting Midnight, 2009, etc.) starts this bleak tale of a robbery gone wrong with a bang. “Sometimes the only choices a man had left were bad ones,” says Dmytryk Knight, a former white-collar executive at a Detroit automaker. Eventually, Knight gets to telling us the circumstances that put him in a room with a hardened criminal named, weirdly enough, after the main character in George V. Higgins's seminal crime novel The Friends of Eddie Coyle. But first, Dickey puts his man on the run. Dmytryk is introduced in the midst of an L.A. bank robbery straight out of Heat, and he watches in horror as a wounded guard blows away his partners in crime. Yet it’s obvious from the start that Knight is a different kind of desperado. “John Dillinger,” he muses. “That criminal knew there were only two ways to get money in the land of free enterprise: you earned it, or you took it at gunpoint. That was about as American as a man could get in the land of red, white, and the blues. Dillinger wasn’t my American hero.” Knight’s reason for being is his estranged wife Cora, who took to exotic dancing to make ends meet before encouraging her husband to get into a dirtier business. After an ill-advised liaison with a dead man’s mistress, Dmytryk flees for the South, hoping to escape his dire straits and finally reunite with Cora. But as Knight learns, trouble is hard to shake.
Not as stark as the work of Walter Mosley, but Dickey’s novel embraces its noir influences.
Los Angeles WAVE
Bestselling author Eric Jerome Dickey will be signing at Eso Won Bookstore in Los Angeles
Story Published: Aug 3, 2010 at 3:33 PM PDT
Event Details Date: August 23, 2010
Time: 7:00 p.m.
Location: Eso Won Bookstore 4331 Degnan Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 90008
Event Description
With 12 New York Times bestsellers and more than 3 million total copies sold, Eric Jerome Dickey is beloved by fans and critics alike. “Dickey pushes romance and deceit to the next level,” praised USA Weekend. The Chicago Defender hailed, “Eric Jerome Dickey is an excellent writer at the top of his game”. And the New York Times raved “[Dickey has] perfected an addictive fictional formula”.
Now Dickey takes a break from his Gideon series and harkens back to two of his most beloved and top selling earlier novels Thieves Paradise and Liar’s Game. TEMPTED BY TROUBLE (On sale: August 17, 2010) is set in an all too familiar world of high unemployment rates and desperation. This pulse-pounder about love, betrayal, and the lengths we will go to survive in a ruthless world will delight fans old and new.
In an interview, Eric can discuss:
• Why he chose to set TEMPTED BY TROUBLE in modern times against a backdrop of recession and unemployment.
• His unique writing process and how he maps out the many car chases in his books by driving the route and videotaping the street and then writing in the action at home.
• His adventures traveling around the country and world for research. TEMPTED BY TROUBLE sent him on a cross-country road trip. He traveled to Antigua for Dying for Revenge, to Argentina for Resurrecting Midnight and will be going to Paris for his next book.
• How and why he strives to make his novels as diverse as possible, introducing different cultures and languages to his readers.
Sex scenes that will make you hot, action scenes better than the movies and revenge plots that will make you cringe. All these make Dying for Revenge by Eric Jerome Dickey a sexy, provocative read. The main character, Gideon, tries taking a break from his dangerous lifestyle as a world-renowned assassin, but gets sucked back in. His vacation is cut short after a person Gideon calls “Grim Reaper” makes an attempt to end his life on a sunny beach in the Cayman Islands. As the third installment to Dickey’s Gideon series, Dying for Revenge makes the big-budget blockbuster movie look insignificant. Not only does this book have a sultry edge it also takes thrilling to a new level. Dickey’s character Gideon seems to be the right mix of villain-and-hero, violence-and-love to make women melt and men think twice before approaching. No reader can deny that once getting into this character’s head he is hard to hate even with the job of a killer. What makes this book special besides its intense action and passionate sex scenes is the book’s intricate detail. Dickey builds vivid scenes into the ever-thickening plot. When looking for a book for pure pleasure no reader can go wrong with this book. What is a better way to end a day of stressful classes, boring reading assignments and typing papers than with a killer book?
Cayman will be welcoming New York Times Bestselling Author Eric Jerome Dickey to the island next week when the writer will make a special appearance at Books & Books on Wednesday evening to discuss and sign copies of his summer novel, Resurrecting Midnight (Dutton Books). Dickey worked as a computer programmer, a middle school teacher, actor, and stand up comic before becoming a full-time novelist and hitting the best seller list. He is the author of twelve novels, including the bestsellers Genevieve, Drive Me Crazy, Naughty or Nice, The Other Woman, and Thieves' Paradise. Due to venue space and the author’s popularity tickets will be required for the book discussion. These are now available at Books & Books with the purchase of any Eric Jerome Dickey book. Tickets are limited so stop by Books & Books today to get yours. If you do not get a ticket you can still meet the author; the book discussion will be immediately followed by a book signing, which is free and open to the public. This event which starts at 7:30pm on Wednesday 26 august is part of the Books & Books International Visiting Author Series, which is generously sponsored by Ogier and Sunshine Suites.
