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- Cordell Logan Series
The other day, my wife and I were flying near Sedona, Arizona, heading home to California after visiting relatives in Colorado, when we experienced something that felt a bit like “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” though I’d be the first to admit I’m not exactly sure what it was we experienced. Please permit me a brief, airplane-geek digression to offer some technical context and to better...
If you’ve read any of my Cordell Logan mystery novels, you’ll know that Logan flies an old, cantankerous, four-seat Cessna 172 Skyhawk. Ditto in Logan’s latest adventure, Deep Fury, set for release Dec. 17. The plane, nicknamed the Ruptured Duck, has unreliable radios, hail-dimpled wings, and a faded orange, yellow and white color scheme that practically screams 1970’s, which makes sense, considering that’s when the Duck first took wing from Cessna’s...
Writing a mystery novel is not unlike piecing together a jigsaw puzzle. Each element must fit seamlessly to reveal the big picture. Introducing humor to this process while navigating tone and plot can be difficult, to say the least. Indeed, I’m often reminded of what actor Edmund Gwenn is purported to have remarked on his deathbed: “Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.” Drop the mic, Mr. Gwenn....
I don’t remember the moment I learned to float in a swimming pool, or to ride a bike without training wheels. The first time I tasted a fresh strawberry has been lost to antiquity. I do, however, remember like it was yesterday the first time I flew as pilot in command of an airplane. We’d practiced landings that clear August morning, my flight instructor, Bert J. Colter, and...
Flight (2012) With a thunderstorm directly along his route of fight, alcoholic, coke-snorting airline Capt. William “Whip” Whitaker (Denzel Washington), doesn’t ask ATC for a different heading or new altitude, like any actual commercial pilot would. Instead, he accelerates straight into the storm “to get through it faster”. The jet subsequently suffers a major mechanical malfunction requiring Whitaker to fly upside down before making a crash landing and...
10. The Great Santini (1979) Robert Duvall plays Marine Lt. Col. “Bull” Meechum, a hard-charging F-4 Phantom pilot caught between wars in 1962. With no enemy to dogfight, Meechum takes out his aggressions on his family, and especially his emotionally sensitive, teen-age son, played by Timothy Hutton. Blythe Danner poignantly plays his wife and the mother struggling to keep her family intact amid Bull’s at-times frightening, alcohol-fueled irascibility....