The news that actor Steve Forrest died on May 18 at age 87 put me immediately in mind of his two most prominent leading roles--in the 1966-1967 British crime drama The Baron (on which he played an antiques dealer who is also a sometime undercover agent “working in an informal capacity for the head of the fictional British Diplomatic Intelligence ...”); and in the 1975-1976 ABC police drama S.W.A.T. (which cast him as Lieutenant “Hondo” Harrelson, the head of a Southern California Special Weapons and Tactics team).
However, I also remember Forrest--the younger brother of actor Dana Andrews--for a variety of his guest-star roles over the years. His résumé was extensive, including appearances on Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Arrest and Trial,
Burke’s Law, The Name of the Game, The Streets of San Francisco, Ironside, McMillan & Wife, Cannon, Columbo, and … well, this list could go on and on. Interestingly, one of my strongest memories of Forrest is of his playing a condemned killer who was scheduled to die in an early electric chair, in “Hangman’s Wages,” an episode of Hec Ramsey. He did a splendid job defining his character’s long and mutually respectful relationship with small-town Oklahoma lawman Ramsey, played by Richard Boone.
Who even knew there was a subgenre of “barbecue mysteries,” let along enough such yarns to make up a good-size list? With Memorial Day approaching on Monday, and Americans breaking out their outdoor grills to celebrate the start of summer cooking season, editor-blogger Janet Rudolph has collected more than a dozen works of barbecue-related crime. Surely, there’s something here to keep you entertained while you’re waiting for your steaks or burgers to get a proper char.
Despite contentions that blogging is dead, having been supplanted by Twitter and Facebook and other vaunted social media that don’t require people to string more than two sentences together at a time, I still get out of bed almost every morning of every week in order to check my e-mail (which I’m told is also dead as dinosaurs) and a regular assortment of other blogs and Web sites, and then ponder what to write about next in The Rap Sheet. With today marking the seventh anniversary of this blog’s launch back in May 2006, that means I’ve been following this routine for most of 2,555 successive days.
And what do I have to show for that steady effort?
Well, at least the following: a number of friends I’ve accumulated only as a result of my writing and editing The Rap Sheet; a few high-profile prizes and awards nominations; an abundance of opportunities to talk formally and informally with authors, illustrators, and critics associated with crime and thriller fiction; the chance to also write about this genre for Kirkus Reviews; and of course a blog of which I’m immensely, though mostly modestly, proud. The Rap Sheet is now close to racking up its 5,500th post, and depending on which calculator you watch (one posted on the blog sometime after its debut, or another, perhaps more precise tally maintained by Blogger), this page has clocked in between 1.41 million and 1.69 million page views.
Sure, blogging has presented me with some frustrations over the years. The pay is dreadful and the work hours (including many weekend hours) are long. I cringe every time some recreational scribbler suddenly loses interest in his blog, and kills the thing, leaving links to his posts dead on The Rap Sheet. (I periodically try to catch those and eliminate or replace them, but I am sure there are still more to be found.) Being a professional journalist myself, I’m embarrassed by the marginal quality of many blogs and their tendency to reprint press releases without stating the fact, repost other people’s prose without permission or attribution, and report as true what is nothing better than loose talk. I try not to feel guilty when some aspiring young author sends me her new novel, and I can’t possibly read it because I’m only one person with limited leisure time. And while I’m pleased with what The Rap Sheet has become, I know that if I weren’t devoting such effort to this venture, I’d have many more hours in which to complete that first novel I’ve been plunking away at for years.
But I have done some of my best writing in The Rap Sheet, and that’s an accomplishment that raises a smile on my face every day.
I want to thank everyone who has read, contributed to, helpfully commented on, and otherwise enjoyed this blog over these last seven years. Without your attention, The Rap Sheet might have folded like so many other Web resources before it.
* * *
To celebrate this milestone, I have arranged for a special book giveaway. Publisher Random House/Vintage Canada has set aside, on The Rap Sheet’s behalf, seven copies of Miss Montreal. This is Howard Shrier’s fourth novel featuring Toronto private investigator Jonah Geller, but the first to be set primarily in the author’s native Montreal, Quebec. I would like to make those copies available--for free--to this blog’s readers.
First, though, a little information about Miss Montreal. Synopsizing the plot of that book--which is due out next week and is the sequel to last year’s Boston Cream--its publisher explains:
After what happened in Boston, P.I. Jonah Geller can’t show
his face in the U.S. again. Which is fine with him. He’s got a new case in
Montreal, one of the world’s most colorful and downright scandalous cities. An
old [journalist] friend has been brutally murdered there, and the police
investigation is stalled. With an election looming and tensions seething, Jonah
and former hit man Dante Ryan have to battle religious fanatics, gun runners,
and a twisted political dynasty to get to the truth.
I’m still in the midst of reading Miss Montreal, but I can tell you that there’s an abundance of humanity and humor in Shrier’s tale. There are also some thoughtful observations about the titular city--Canada’s second largest (after Toronto, Ontario)--which I recently had the opportunity to visit for the first time. Gumshoe Geller and the perpetually armed Ryan make an interesting pair of opposites, and the former’s childhood friendship with that slain journalist, “Slammin’ Sammy” Adler, lends this new novel a dimension of personal commitment and association that’s not often been so credibly offered in detective fiction. I’ve only read one other Shrier book,
but if Miss Montreal remains as creative and compelling as it is now, I shall
undoubtedly want to find the other two.
So here’s how you can win your very own copy of Miss Montreal. Simply e-mail your name and snail-mail address to jpwrites@wordcuts.org.
And be sure to write “Miss Montreal Contest” in the subject line. Entries will be accepted between now and midnight next Wednesday, May 29. The seven winners will be chosen completely at random, and their names listed on this page the following day.
Sorry, but at the publisher’s request, this contest is open only to residents of the United States and Canada.
On this anniversary, I can’t think of a better way to thank Rap Sheet readers than to send at least a few of you free new books to help expand your knowledge of and interest in crime fiction.
I never have trouble remembering Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s birthday, for it coincides with the anniversary of my founding The Rap Sheet (a subject about which I shall have more to say anon). Had that physician turned author not died in July 1930, he’d be celebrating his 154th birthday today, having been born in 1859.
On this occasion, let me direct you to a fairly good biography of Conan Doyle here, a video
of the author talking about his life and career (which I’ve posted before
on this page, but which many readers probably have not seen), and David Abrams’ review of the 2007 bookArthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters, by Jon Lellenberg, Daniel Stashower, and Charles Foley. Oh, and if you didn’t see it before, here
is James McCreet’s Rap Sheet piece looking back at some of the more preposterous deductions made in the Sherlock Holmes stories.
I have previously
noted that the British historical whodunit Foyle’s War will return to PBS-TV’s
Masterpiece Mystery! line-up in September. Before then, however, that umbrella series’ summer schedule offers one old favorite--Inspector Lewis--and a few new dramas worth watching, including Endeavour and Silk. Learn more here.
Ivan G. Shreve Jr. has posted a nice remembrance, in the blog Radio Spirits, of Canadian-born actor Raymond Burr--the star of Perry Mason and Ironside--who would have celebrated his 96th birthday today. Unfortunately, Burr died in 1993 at age 76.
Now entering its sixth year, the Web-wide “forgotten books” series is also proving open to themes and other new ideas to help keep its coverage both lively and relevant.
To that end, organizer and short-story author Patti Abbott has announced that Friday, June 28, will be Elmore Leonard Day. If they would like to, contributors are encouraged to comment on any works--“a western, a crime novel, a short story or two”--by Detroit’s hard-boiled poet of plunder and perfidy. As usual, Abbott is willing to post mini-reviews by writers lacking their own blogs or Web sites.
To let Abbott know that you’ll be participating in this themed event, simply drop her an e-note at aa2579@wayne.edu.
A weekly alert for followers of crime, mystery, and thriller fiction.
The Black Country, by Alex Grecian (Putnam):
I was fond enough of Midwestern novelist Alex Grecian’s premiere
Murder Squad tale, The Yard, that I chose it as one of the top crime novels of 2012. Naturally, my expectations of its sequel were high. Although The Black Countrylacks some of the attractions of its predecessor, it still secures Grecian standing as somebody whose work is well worth following.
This sophomore outing for Inspector Walter Day of Scotland Yard’s Murder Squad opens in the spring of 1890. Day and his rather eccentric associate, Sergeant Nevil Hammersmith, have been dispatched to the beleaguered coal-mining village of Blackhampton, in the British Midlands, from which three members of the Price family have gone missing. Concerns about their fate have only been heightened by a child’s recent discovery--in a tree’s upper branches, of all places--of an eyeball. As if these factors didn’t make the case weird enough, a seeming plague has struck the town, the foundations of houses and other buildings there have been undermined by aged mine shafts, and a gruesomely disfigured stranger appears to be lurking in the vicinity. Being a superstitious lot, Blackhampton residents take these turns with some equanimity; but Day and Hammersmith want answers and aren’t willing to leave
villagers with any secrets unexcavated. As the village is slowly swallowed by the
earth, Hammersmith is struck down by the advancing plague and a long-festering
vengeance threatens to trim Blackhampton’s population still further.
The Yard made excellent use of its London backdrop and the displeasure Victorian-era Londonders exhibited toward Scotland Yard, which had failed to protect them from Jack the Ripper, the city’s deadly scourge of 1888. The rural setting of The Black Country proves less captivating (and reminds me overmuch of Charles Todd’s better-known Inspector Ian Rutledge novels). And though Day’s colleague, progressive pathologist Dr. Bernard Kingsley, eventually rolls into Blackhampton to aid in sorting out the mysteries at hand (together with his dim but endearing assistant, Henry Mayhew), the absence of other Scotland Yarders and the police-procedural atmosphere they helped impart to The Yard is keenly felt in these pages. I hope that by their third adventure, Grecian’s gang of colorful historical crime-solvers will have found their way back among the belching smokestacks and ribald underworld corners of the British capital.
* * *
New in stores as well is Reed Farrel Coleman’s Onion Street (Tyrus), which winds back the clock for series protagonist Moe Prager. We see him here in 1967, when he was still a college student, feeling lost in his own life and struggling to figure out who beat his girlfriend and left her to die in Brooklyn. ... Meanwhile, the celebrated Charles McCarry offers us The Shanghai Factor (The Mysterious Press), about an American spy in Shanghai, whose recent, heated affair with a young woman may leave him vulnerable as he tries to discern the secrets of China’s seemingly impregnable new intelligence agency.
During an era when readers are being seduced away from bookstores (if they even have any such shops nearby anymore), this news comes as a wonderful and welcome surprise:
In a move to bump up physical book sales, Stephen King will
not release an e-book version of his new novel, Joyland, The Wall Street
Journal reports.
It’s something of a radical move for the man who stood onstage with Amazon’s Jeff Bezos in 2009 to introduce the Kindle 2.
This time King has decided to throw his support behind brick-and-mortar booksellers. “I have no plans for a digital version,” King told the Journal “In the meantime, let people stir their sticks and go to an actual bookstore rather than a digital one.”
However, the print book is still available for pre-order from online retailer Amazon.
The announcement has been warmly received by bookstores, which have been hurt by the lower price of e-books, sales of which are up across the board.
• I’ve tried to remain optimistic about the reboot of the 1960s series Ironside, which
NBC-TV has finally added to its fall 2013 schedule. However, a new video preview has raised my doubts. I’m particularly disappointed in the idea that “tough, sexy but acerbic”--and wheelchair-bound--former chief of detectives Robert Ironside (played here by Blair Underwood) has been moved to New York City, rather than keeping him and his crew in San Francisco, where the original Raymond Burr series was set. Watch the trailer for yourself here.
• In the aftermath of the poorly received 1998 movie version
of The Avengers, I haven’t heard of any other serious efforts to adapt that durable, 1961-1969 British TV spy series for the big screen. However, if someone
does decide to take on such an endeavor at any time soon, I hope he or she will
consider a recommendation--spread recently on Facebook--to hire English starlet
Jenna-Louise Coleman
into the role of Emma Peel. The 27-year-old actress, currently appearing as
Clara Oswald in Doctor Who, has demonstrated the requisite sass and style for the part (created by Diana Rigg), and she sure knows how to wear a black leather catsuit.
• And Black Scat Books, the small press started by California artist/author Derek Pell (of Missing Mysteries fame), has just released a paperback collection called Nickle Noir: The Art of John Nickle. Even if you’re not familiar with Nickle’s name, you may well know his artwork: he created the covers for Black Lizard’s line of Martin Beck novels, for instance. Nickle Noir contains the illustrator’s “best cover art and illustrations produced over the past 25 years,” including “moody crime scenes for novels by the likes of Ross MacDonald, James Swain, [Maj] Sjöwall and [Per] Wahlöö, and many others.” Examples of pieces from the book can be enjoyed here.
(Editor’s note: British correspondent Ali Karim has been somewhat absent from this page for the last couple of months, busy with his day-job responsibilities. But he recently submitted the interview with author Thomas Kaufman that appears below. Welcome back, Ali.)
Rap Sheet editor J. Kingston Pierce (left) and Thomas Kaufman attend the Shamus Awards ceremony in St. Louis, 2011.
I’ve been following the work of Thomas Kaufman ever since the publication of his first novel, Drink the Tea, which introduced laconic Washington,
D.C., private eye Willis Gidney and won the 2008 Private Eye Writers of America/St. Martin’s Press competition for Best First P.I. Novel. Kaufman’s follow-up, Steal the Show (2011), was even more engaging. There is
compassion and dry wit in the oft-troubled world of Willis Gidney, which
makes Kaufman’s stories a pleasure to read.
In synopsizing the plot of Drink the Tea, Kaufman’s publisher, Minotaur Books, described Gidney thusly:
Willis Gidney is a born liar and rip-off artist, an expert
at the scam. Growing up without parents or a home, by age twelve he is a
successful young man, running his own small empire, until he meets Shadrack
Davies. That’s Captain Shadrack Davies, of the D.C. Police. Davies wants to
reform Gidney and becomes his foster father. Though he tries not to, Gidney
learns a small amount of ethics from Shad--just enough to bother a kid from the
streets for the rest of his life.
Now Gidney is a P.I., walking those same streets. So it’s no
surprise that when his closest friend, jazz saxophonist Steps Jackson, asks
Gidney to find his missing daughter, Gidney is compelled to say yes--even
though she’s been missing for twenty-five years. He finds a woman who may be
the girl’s mother--and within hours she turns up dead. The police accuse Gidney
of the murder and throw him in jail.
Maybe Gidney should quit while he’s behind. But when his
investigation puts him up against a ruthless multinational corporation, a
two-faced congressman, and a young woman desperate to conceal her past, Gidney
has no time left for second thoughts. In fact, he may have no time left at all.
In an overcrowded genre, Kaufman’s gumshoe is a most refreshing
and watchable player. But what also makes this series enjoyable is the author’s cinematic storytelling style. He comes by that style
honestly: for years Kaufman has been laboring behind the lens of a movie camera, primarily as a director of photography but occasionally as a director/cameraman. His many credits include work on
Discovery Channel productions, Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, and the very popular NBC-TV series The
West Wing.
I’ve met Kaufman at Bouchercons over the years, including the 2011 event in St. Louis and again at last
year’s Bouchercon in Cleveland, and have learned a number of interesting things about this now 57-year-old novelist, filmmaker, and musician (in his spare time, he plays upright bass and bass guitar). During the 2012
Shamus Awards banquet, however, we took the opportunity to chat at greater
length about his life in film, the influences on his prose-writing, the genesis
of Willis Gidney, and much more. Then recently, I asked him some extra
questions, including about his brand-new e-book, Erased and Other Stories. The results of those exchanges are posted below.
Ali Karim: Tell me, what compels you to write?
Thomas Kaufman: This whole writing thing, it’s like a
sickness. I blame it on the airline industry. Working as a cinematographer, I
travel a lot. If the airlines hadn’t kept me waiting endlessly in terminals, or
sitting on the tarmac, or wasting hour upon hour in soul-sucking tedious
travel, I might never had reached the frustration level necessary to say, screw
this, I have to use this time somehow. I got a laptop and started writing Drink
the Tea.
AK: Do you come from a family of readers?
TK: Yes, and quite a few writers too. My aunt Carole
wrote opening monologues for Steve Allen on The Tonight Show before
turning to non-fiction books. My uncle Ted wrote several non-fiction books as
well. My brother Pete has a novel out, and will soon have a true-crime book
about identity theft during the Yukon gold rush. And my niece Miriam has a book
of poetry. A number of librarians in the family as well.
AK: During your early education, what were the books and authors that influenced you most, steering you toward the writing world?
TK: I read a lot of science fiction growing up--starting with Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, graduating to [Arthur C.] Clarke and [Isaac] Asimov, then Harlan Ellison, Fred Pohl, Cyril Kornbluth, Alfred Bester. Around 16, I read Dickens, Thackery, Thomas Wolfe, Ken Kesey, and Somerset Maugham. At 18, I was given a copy of Farewell, My Lovely, and that’s when the penny dropped. I decided that somehow, some way, I was going to write a P.I. novel.
AK: Do you read widely in the P.I. genre, and what do you see as pivotal novels featuring private eyes?
TK: I read all of [Raymond] Chandler and [Dashiell]
Hammett, of course: they’re the Louis Armstrong and Sidney Bechet of American
detective fiction. Then there was Cornell Woolrich, Horace McCoy, Frederick
Brown, Chester Himes, Ross Thomas, Charles Willeford, Donald E. Westlake, and
Lawrence Block. Plus lots of others I’m not naming, of course.
AK: Americans usually consider P.I. fiction a
U.S. creation. But credit must certainly be given to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, as
well. Are you a fan of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson?
TK: You have to credit Conan Doyle for creating what
is arguably the most memorable character in detective fiction. As to origins,
Holmes came about 40 years after Edgar Allan Poe wrote the first
private-detective story, but you don’t see Robert Downey Jr. playing [C.] Auguste Dupin, do
you?
AK: Given your interest in cinematography, what do
you make of the various big- and small-screen incarnations of Holmes and
Watson, from Basil Rathbone to Benedict Cumberbatch?
TK: The current BBC series with Cumberbatch and [Martin] Freeman is great fun. The director, Paul McGuigan, seems to have taken a page from the Guy Ritchie playbook, in terms of the way the programs are directed. It has a modern feel,
and that’s fitting because the show makes Holmes and Watson modern characters.
The tools of cinematography have changed a lot since Basil
Rathbone first appeared as Holmes. Still, the aesthetics have changed very
little. It’s all about story. The cinematographer’s job--like the director’s,
the editor’s, and the sound recordist’s--is to help tell that story. If you
compare the relatively static camera of those early Holmes films with the
moving, variable frame-rate work in the most recent Holmes movies and TV shows,
you see a world of difference. You can’t deny the commercial success of the
newer Holmes films, but there’s something about Rathbone as Holmes that’s
compelling.
AK: From whence did your interest in cinematography spring?
TK: Well, in addition to a family of writers and
musicians, we also have photographers. My mother, Joanne, was a graduate of the
Eastman School, and taught aerial photography to the Army Air Force during
World War II. My cousin Jordan Klein won an Academy Award in technical achievement for designing underwater camera housings (he shot the underwater sequences for [1954’s] Creature from the Black Lagoon). My uncle and brother were still photographers. So it felt natural at an early age to fool around with still cameras. At age 10 I had built a darkroom and thought that was the bomb, until I discovered an old 8mm motion-picture camera in our attic, and taught myself how to shoot with it. No idea what I was doing, of course. I just knew I was having fun.
AK: That eventually led you to study film production
at the University of Southern California. Can you tell us a little about that
experience, and were you also writing fiction during your student years?
TK: I was writing all through high school, and wrote
my first novel at age 22. I loved being 22, and thought I had written something
perfect. I couldn’t understand why no publishers wanted it. When I read it now,
I see that it’s not fit to line a birdcage. As to living in L.A., it was like a
six-year out-of-body experience, apart from the traffic jams.
AK: Tell us a little about some of the film productions you have been involved in. And I see that you have some awards on your mantelpiece.
TK: I’ve been very lucky, in that I’ve worked with
great documentary directors--Charles Guggenheim, Barbara Kopple, Michael Moore,
and Mark Jonathan Harris, to name a few. Just as I’ve tried to learn from the
writers I admire, I’ve also tried to learn from the directors.
Sometimes people tell me how hard my job is, that as
director of photography, I’m in the hot seat. But it’s nothing compared to
being the director. In a way, being a director is like being the
author--whether a project succeeds or fails is on you.
When I moved to Washington, D.C., I found out about Gallaudet University,
the world’s only university that serves the deaf and hard of hearing. They also
have education from pre-school through high school. When I visited their
pre-school, I grew fascinated with how quickly children learned sign language,
and decided to make See What I’m Saying, which won an Emmy Award. I’ve
also worked on three Academy Award-nominated feature documentaries. One of
them, Promises to Keep, is about homelessness, and informed my writing Drink
the Tea.
AK: A personal favorite among the productions in your canon is 2010’s chilling look at the legacy of the Cold War arms race, Countdown to Zero. Can you tell us about working on that project?
TK:Lucy Jane Walker directed Countdown, and she had some great ideas
about how to shoot the film. Basically, she wanted a similar look to The Bourne Identity. I think I
achieved some success there, but for budget reasons they had to scale back, and
I wound up shooting far less of the film than I would’ve liked. Working with
Lucy was great fun, and we filmed what I believe is the last interview with
[former U.S. Secretary of Defense] Robert McNamara. He gave an impassioned plea for the world to eliminate all nuclear weapons. It’s a great film, and a worthy topic. [Editor’s note: At least for the time being, you can watch all of Countdown to Zero on YouTube.]
AK: You’ve labored on these documentaries, but have you ever wanted to film a piece of fiction? Working behind the camera can be akin to creating your own view of a situation, as a novelist tells a story.
TK: Ali, I knew you’d get to that eventually! First, I have shot fiction. I won the Gordon Parks Award for my work on an adaptation of Cinderella called Ashpet (1990]. I’ve also been a camera operator on The
West Wing, and shot behind the scenes for The Wire, 24, and [the TV miniseries] John Adams.
As to writing, there’re many parallels between filming a scene and writing a
scene in a novel. For instance, where does the camera go? It’s a basic
question, relating to point of view. Is the camera looking up at a character,
making the character seem powerful and important? Or is the camera looking
down, making that character seem weak, powerless? Is the camera moving or
static? Does the camera use a wide-angle lens to emphasize the spaces between
people, or a telephoto lens that seems to stack people close together?
When you write a scene, you have to consider point of view,
and where your audience/reader is in relation to the characters. After so many
years behind the viewfinder, I tend to visualize the scenes I’m writing. Where
are my actors? How do they move? What’s the staging?
You want to see some great staging, check out the opening of
Sullivan’s Travels [1941], by Preston Sturges. Early in the film, there a three-minute continuous take with three actors in a small space that’s incredibly dynamic. It’s visual, yet so subtle. Imagine getting that into a book!
AK: You have carried out a good deal of research with cops during your documentary filming. Could you share some of your experiences?
TK: I got to be friends with a producer who was doing crime shows for a cable channel, and he asked me to direct and shoot a number of episodes. I had a blast. The policemen and -women I met were natural storytellers, and they had great stories to tell. I’m still in touch with four of five of them.
One of the stories I did involved a guy who killed his
girlfriend, burned her remains in a 55-gallon drum over three days, then
emptied the remains into a nearby stream. He still had to dispose of the drum,
so he drove it to a construction site and left it there, among all the other
drums. The problem? At dawn, the foreman noticed that all of his drums were
green, but someone had left a blue one. You see, in the dark, the colors looked
much the same. So the foreman called the cops, who found bone fragments. A
forensic anthropologist was able to tell from the fragments that the victim was
a Caucasian woman, early 20s, between 5-foot-4 and 5-foot-8, and weighed about 120
pounds. Given time, I think the forensics guy could’ve told the cops how much
change she had in her pocket when she died. Anyway, the cops were able to locate the victim’s boyfriend ...
Here’s the thing, though--after the boyfriend gets rid of the
55-gallon drum, he goes to a bar, gets pissed, and tells the victim’s
brother-in-law what he did. He confesses everything! The brother-in-law tips
off the cops, who arrest this scumbag.
Now, do you think the confession made it into the show?
Guess again. As the producer explained it to me, for the show to work, all
the criminals had to appear to be geniuses, so that the cops looked even
smarter when they caught the bad guys. This helped me realize that “reality TV”
isn’t real, and it’s often barely TV. I think Donald Westlake had fun satirizing it in Get Real, the last Dortmunder novel.
Author Kaufman reads from his novel Steal the Show at Washington, D.C.’s renowned Politics and Prose Bookstore. You can watch all of his presentation, beginning here.
AK: You share a similar background with Lee Child, who worked in TV film production before becoming a novelist. Do you think that both of you share that cinematic sense of perspective in your
storytelling?
TK: What’s funny is we both worked for Granada Television, though Lee worked full-time as a director in the UK, while I shot only the occasional job in the U.S. Lee’s books are cinematic, I really enjoy them.
When I write a scene, I tend to see it happen. That’s the
result of years behind the camera viewfinder, watching life unfold. So I
visualize where the actors are, how they move, what the lighting is like, but
I’m aware of the other senses, too. Unlike film, a book can involve all
the senses. Does a place have a unique smell, taste, or touch? George
Orwell excelled at combining all the senses to bring his world to life in
the reader’s mind. In Nineteen Eighty-Four [1949], Orwell gives
the reader an all-too-real look at what the future may bring.
The other thing is, I keep yelling “Cut!” when I finish
writing a scene. This really upsets the people at Starbucks.
AK: Did you have one of those wonderful “eureka moments” when you consciously applied yourself to writing fiction?
TK: More like a “get off your ass” moment. After [composing] that first novel [at 22], I knew I wanted to write another, and wanted it to be a private-eye novel. But I put it off, concentrating on film work. When my first child was born, I realized the clock was ticking. So I started writing on a more regular basis.
Most of Drink the Tea
was written in airplanes or hotel rooms, while I was traveling on shoots. I
still write outside my home, but now find I don’t have to be on an airplane to
get a chapter done. So long as I sit in a cramped position, drink coffee, and
eat little bags of peanuts, I can pile up the chapters.
AK: Other than
that first, youthful novel, do you have a drawer with other early work, all
gathering piles of dust? And did those efforts prove to be learning experiences?
TK: That first book taught me what not to do, and showed me what I didn’t know. I’m a better writer because I wrote it.
As a teenager I took a week-long workshop with jazz pianist George Shearing and his
group. I had lessons in the morning with his bass player, Andy Simpkins, who
was terrific. And in the afternoon we all got together, Shearing would hear us
play and talk with us. Driving to the first day of the workshop, I thought I
was God’s gift to jazz. By the end of the week, I realized I knew nothing at
all.
So on the very last day, Shearing sensed that some of us were
feeling pretty down. He said, don’t worry, if you feel that you know nothing it
means you’ve learned something this week. The thing to watch out for is the
feeling that you know it all, that you’ve got it all under control--that’s when
you’ll stagnate as an artist. I think that’s true for writers as well as
musicians.
AK: Two years before it actually appeared in print, Drink the
Tea won the Private Eye Writers of America/St. Martin’s Press contest for Best First P.I. Novel. Tell us about that experience and also about what Robert
J. Randisi and the PWA [he founded] mean to you, since you seem to have a fascination
with the private-eye genre.
TK: Each year St. Martin’s has four different competitions for different mystery genres. For the P.I. genre, it works with the PWA. I applied and was instructed to send my book to Robert Randisi as my judge. I thought I was screwed. I mean, Randisi knows the P.I. genre better than anyone. Drink the
Tea is not a conventional P.I. story. So I figured there was no way I could
win the competition. In fact, when I sent the manuscript to him, I distinctly
remember thinking I was throwing away $6 in postage. It was a shock to learn I’d won. I still think some ghastly
mistake was made, though I’d never admit that publicly. This is all off the
record, right?
AK: Tell us a little about you series lead, Willis Gidney. Where did he spring from? And why use Washington, D.C., as the stories’ backdrop?
TK: Let’s answer your question with a question: Are you
troubled by unsightly back story? Do you wish those troubling details could all
be erased?
That’s what I thought when I was creating Willis Gidney. Why
bother with back story? Just invent a guy who doesn’t have one. So Willis
Gidney is a product of an author’s laziness. I decided to make his early life
forgotten. Since I’d worked on Promises to Keep, I thought it’d be a good idea for Willis to have grown up homeless. Traumatic childhood, memory gone. Problem solved, right?
Wrong. It turned out I had quite a bit of research to do, relating not only to homelessness, but also D.C.’s juvenile justice system. Of course, this was a good thing in the long run, but lots of heavy lifting. Hey, I got into this racket for the easy money and loose women. Still waiting for both, I’m afraid.
AK: I hear that George Pelecanos, another writer who uses the U.S. capital as a backdrop, enjoys your work.
TK: George has
said nice things about what I’m doing. He’s one of the best writers in America,
in my humble opinion. He’s also a neighbor, and over the years he’s offered
solid suggestions and insights about what I’m writing. George’s D.C. is
different from mine, but that’s because we’re different people. I love his
work, and reading his descriptions of D.C. is like reading great reportage. The
only other writer I've read who is as insightful about D.C. is Edward P. Jones (check
out his Lost in the City).
AK: Recently, Scottish author Ian
Rankin, when he was being interviewed by the BBC about the return of
protagonist John Rebus [in Standing in Another Man’s Grave], said that he might not get on with Rebus if he
actually met the man. Might that same thing be true if you encountered Willis Gidney in a bar?
TK: Willis has
got some issues, but it would be hard not to like the guy. I often think of him
as a nephew who doesn’t take advice terribly well. But I think we’d get along.
We’re a lot alike. In fact, if I were taller, younger, better looking, and had
faster reflexes, we could be twins.
AK: Are you a detailed plotter, or do you allow your imagination to take you on a journey traversing the high-wire?
TK: I talk to writers about this from time to time. The bottom line is, whether you outline or do it on the fly, you’re going to spend time staring at a blank page. I think outlines are terrific, I just suck at writing them.
The P.I. story is primarily an American invention, and so is jazz. So
it feels right to forgo an outline and riff my way through a book. I once
heard jazz bassist Rufus Reid
talk about playing a song. He said that once you learned the melody and knew
the chord structure, the song becomes a playground. The melody and chords are
like the rules of the playground, so once you know them, you can have lots of
fun. I think the same is true of a mystery, or of any genre, for that matter.
Writers just want to have fun.
AK: There’s a lot
of pathos in Gidney’s back story and also in his investigations, and in both Drink the Tea and
its follow-up, Steal the Show, you
pepper the narrative with social commentary, which adds a dimension to the tale.
Would you care to comment?
TK: The great thing about the P.I. novel is how adaptable it is, how much you can do with it.
It can be funny, dark, a thriller, a whodunit, a puzzle piece--whatever you
want it to be, provided you know the rules of the playground, right? This
includes social commentary, and who better to talk to the reader about
disparities than the private eye? He crosses all boundaries--social, economic,
political, and in Willis’ case, ethical. Plus, D.C. is a great town to write
about, because it’s the home of the federal government, which controls the
purse strings for what’s really a small Southern town, where people work and
live and pay taxes. So the conflict is built in.
AK: Was it hard to follow up Drink the Tea, which was a remarkable tale of the dark side of family dynamics, with Steal the Show?
TK: I began a story arc that covers three books, starting with Drink the Tea. My P.I. finds an abandoned child and the smart thing is to turn her over to D.C. juvenile services, but he can’t bring himself to do it, since he barely survived D.C.’s system himself. In Steal the Show he’s trying to do right by this kid, and it leads to
unforeseen complications in his life. I thought it was a good story, and I liked
Willis getting antagonized from all sides. The next [still-untitled] Gidney book continues
this particular arc, and the reader gets deeper into Gidney’s character.
I think family conflicts spring up like mushrooms in a
forest. Steal the Showhad it’s genesis in a story a friend told me about a father, a son, and a third man, who became partners selling an electronic device. They became successful, and the father and the other man squeezed the son out of this business. The son had signed a non-compete clause, and he used that time [away from work] to
redesign the device so he could compete with his father and run him out of
business, which he eventually did. I thought that was an interesting family
dynamic, and used it in Steal the Show.
AK: Did you plan that Drink the Tea would lead to a series?
TK: It wasn’t until I finished Tea that I realized how much I had come to know Gidney, and how much I liked him. I knew I wanted to write more about him. One of the things people tell me is that they love spending time with Gidney, and that to me is a fine compliment.
AK: Did the film backdrop for Steal the Show come from
your own experiences in that industry? And do you believe in the old adage, “write
what you know”?
TK: It’s certainly easier to write what you know, but it’s also important to write about what most people don’t know. When we read, we like to feel we’re getting an inside look at something, so I did that with Steal the Show. I’d done quite a lot of work at the National
Institute for Standards and Technology [NIST],
and was fascinated by cryptology and the digital revolution’s impact on it.
Plus, it was fun to use people I’ve known from the film business as characters
in the book.
AK: I enjoy the wit in your Gidney novels, as I think dark tales with striated morality often need a bit of humor to keep their narratives from becoming too gloomy. But tell us your own views on the deployment of humor in fiction.
TK: It’s tricky, because humor can undermine you if you’re trying to generate suspense. So I wind up cutting a lot of funny stuff in successive drafts, because I think it’s misplaced. Willis uses humor as a coping mechanism, so it’s OK in a tense situation, to an extent. But when he or someone he loves is threatened, it’s no time for jokes.
That said, I love humor mixed in with dark tales, and some
people can do it perfectly--Donald Westlake and Carl Hiassen, to name two.
AK: One thing I
really enjoy about the Willis Gidney novels is that they contain a sense of
awareness of the problems weaker members of society face amid the randomness of
life. I’m assuming that you must be of the liberal political persuasion. So
what were your thoughts about last year’s U.S. elections?
TK: Ali, I’m not sure one needs to be a liberal to write about other people’s problems, but yeah, I am a liberal. A few years ago I had lunch with Lee Child and a dozen of his fans at Bouchercon, and I told him how appreciative I was for his anti-war views in Nothing to Lose [2008]. History will judge whether the U.S. invasion of Iraq accomplished anything worthwhile, but in the
short run I can’t see that it did.
As to our election in 2012, I was petrified. In the summer
of that year, I thought [Republican] Mitt Romney might actually become the next
president. So I went out and canvassed door-to-door, I drove people to the
polls (and wrote a short story about that, “Four More Years”), and I worked a
phone bank--in short, I became the thing I hate, an odious pustule who calls
you up while you're resting in the evening to ask impertinent questions, like
who you’re going to vote for! But I was frantic, I knew I had to do this. If
Romney won and I did nothing to help stop him, I’d hate myself for the next
four years.
AK: So where are you with your follow-up to Steal the Show? And what has Gidney been up to since we last read about him?
TK: Gidney’s a lazy sod, I can tell you. I have to do all of the heavy lifting. He did form a jazz band, the Willis Gidney Quintet. It’s a skilled group of musicians, if you don’t count the bass player. We’re playing in clubs around D.C. and it’s great fun, even though
Willis has yet to show up for a single rehearsal or gig.
Still, Gidney has condescended to appear in two of the short
stories in my new collection, Erased and Other Stories. ... In addition to Gidney, I also have two stories that relate to the Holocaust. Years ago I shot a TV [special] with Walter Cronkite, Holocaust: In Memory of Millions, and
interviewed people who survived the Nazi death camps. They told stories I’ll
never forget. One of them was the basis for “Erased.”
Readers tell me they love Gidney, so I’m hard at work on the
third novel about him, his girlfriend Lilly, and the bizarre Washington, D.C.,
scene that surrounds them. This new book goes deeper into both of their
characters, and I hope readers will like it.
AK: Finally, can you tell us about some of the books you’ve read and been excited about recently?
TK: Lately? I’ve
been reading Reed Farrel Coleman, Steve Hamilton, John Lutz, Allison Leotta,
Laura Lippman, Daniel Stashower; and re-reading Ross Thomas, Donald Westlake,
and Lawrence Block.
AK: Thanks for your time, Tom. And you’re much better-looking in person than in your pictures.
Flavorwire recently asked Max Allan Collins--whose penultimate completion of a “substantial” Mickey Spillane novel, the espionage-tinged Complex 90, is now on bookstore shelves--to name his 10
favorite Cold War-era spy novels. The results of that exercise won’t surprise
many people (though it is fairly unusual to see Peter O’Donnell’s The
Impossible Virgin mentioned). But for anyone who hasn’t yet enjoyed these books,
this might be a good reminder to check them out. Collins’ list is here.
• This could be pretty interesting: Among the “scripted development
projects” for American TV network TNT announced this week is a series based on Ross Macdonald’s
string of Lew Archer private-eye novels. Less hopeful is a “re-imagining” of Peter
Gunn, Blake Edwards’ iconic 1958-1961 series starring Craig Stevens.
Really, does anyone believe that the original Gunn can be outdone?
• And this in indisputably good news: The Michael Kitchen-led historical mystery series Foyle’s War will return to PBS-TV’s Masterpiece Mystery!this coming September. Three new episodes, all of which are set in the post-World War II years of 1946-47 (and have already been broadcast in the UK), will be shown.
• Organizers of the 2013 Tony Hillerman Writers Conference, scheduled to take place in Santa Fe, New Mexico, from November 7 to 9, put out the word this week that the faculty for this year’s event will feature authors Margaret Coel, Craig Johnson, and David Morrell, along with Kirk Ellis, Emmy-award winning writer of the HBO mini-series John Adams, James McGrath Morris, the recipient of two New Mexico Book Awards, and Hillerman’s author daughter, Anne.
• Among the latest “Top Notch Thriller” releases from Ostara Publishing is Tightrope,
Antony Melville-Ross’ 1981 novel set in Britain and the United States. For added interest, sometime Rap Sheet contributor and Top Notch editor Mike Ripley notes that
Melville-Ross had “a pretty thrilling family history (originally American) back
to Moby Dick via Pancho Villa and a possible inspiration for Indiana Jones. I
couldn’t make this up!”
• Ace Atkins’ second Spenser novel, Robert B. Parker’s Wonderland, was only just published by Putnam, but already there’s word that Boston’s best-fed gumshoe will make an encore appearance this year in Silent Night, a holiday-theme work apparently left
unfinished at the time of Parker’s death in early 2010. The book was completed by Helen Brann, Parker’s longtime literary agent. It’s due out in late October.
• Stephen King’s latest novel, Joyland, is being readied for paperback release by Hard Case
Crime in early June. But “special limited editions” of the book, including one
featuring “nine gorgeous illustrations from master artist Robert McGinnis and a
map of the Joyland amusement park,” are also being made available. Presumably at a steeper price than the regular $12.95 edition.
• A few months back I wrote on this page about the failed 1972 TV pilot film A Very Missing Person, which sought to bring author Stuart Palmer’s “meddlesome old battleaxe” of an amateur sleuth, Hildegarde
Withers, to small-screen audiences. Now comes word that publisher
Mysterious Press/Open Road Media is releasing e-book versions of 17 Palmer
novels, including such Withers outings as The Penguin Pool Murder (1931), Murder on Wheels (1932), and 1969’s Hildegarde Withers Makes the Scene
(from which A Very Missing Person was derived). Blogger Les Blatt, who has reviewed nine of Palmer’s novels within the last few years,
describes
the Withers books as “well-plotted and told with some nice humorous touches.” If you’d like to check out Open Road’s Palmer re-releases, click here.
Images from Vienna, 1900, with music by Johann Strauss II.
In case you haven’t noticed it yet, the first part of my
recent interview with historical novelist J. Sydney Jones was posted this morning on the Kirkus Reviews Web site. This is of course timed to correspond with the release of Jones’ fourth and latest Karl Werthen “Viennese Mystery,” The Keeper of Hands (Severn House), the plot of which
its publisher describes this way:
Vienna, 1901. With the police seemingly indifferent to the
murder of a 19-year-old prostitute known as Mitzi, brothel-keeper Frau
Mutzenbacher turns to lawyer Karl Werthen to find out what happened and bring
her killer to justice. Yet the more he discovers about the mysterious Mitzi,
with her secret past and impressive roster of clients, the more questions
Werthen’s investigation throws up.
At the same time, Werthen undertakes a second commission: to find out who
viciously assaulted playwright Arthur Schnitzler. Schnitzler believes his
latest controversial play might have been the motive for the attack--but is
there more to it than that?
As he navigates the highs and lows of Viennese society in dogged pursuit of the
truth, Werthen finds himself drawn into a conspiracy of espionage and affairs
of state.
That’s a pretty simplistic breakdown of what is actually a rather complicated and propulsive yarn involving important officials with secrets to hide, competing espionage agencies, and a killer practiced in the diabolical art of shutting people up for good. Viennese lawyer/private eye Werthen, last seen in The Silence (2012), tackles all of the questions and dangers involved here with the assistance of his increasingly resourceful spouse, Berthe Meisner, and real-life criminologist Doktor Hanns Gross. Jones’ careful pacing, attention to historical detail, and self-assured prose make The Keeper of Hands--like the previous entries in this series--well worth the time it takes to read.
As is so often the case with my author interviews for Kirkus, I gleaned considerably more material from Syd Jones than I had any hope of fitting into today’s column. The 64-year-old author--who grew up in a “little beach town” on the Oregon coast but now resides in the Santa Cruz, California, area with his wife and young son,
Evan--responded at satisfying length to my numerous questions about his past, his
writing career, and his reading preferences. Rather than file away what I
couldn’t fit into Kirkus, never to be seen by the reading public, I am posting the greater part of our exchange below.
J. Kingston Pierce: When and why did you first visit Vienna, and what were your earliest impressions of that city?
J. Sydney Jones: I initially went to Vienna as a junior in college in 1968. I had planned on attending the University of Stirling in Scotland as an occasional student. But those were the years of the Vietnam War and the draft and student deferments; my draft board did not go along with the non-graduating status I would have in Scotland, so I looked around for a school abroad that did not have a language requirement. I’d studied German at university, but had no real desire to go to school full time in that language. A junior-year-abroad program in Vienna fit the bill--and it turned out to be a terrific fit all around, quite by accident. Some of my best
friends are from those days. That year in Vienna changed my life.
JKP: For how many years did you later live in Vienna?
JSJ: I went back to Vienna following graduation, newly married, and stayed there on and off throughout the 1970s and most of the ’80s. This was the high point of the Cold War and a good time to be in the spy center of Vienna and also a good time to be away from the U.S., if the fashions say anything of the times. I had already determined as a student to become a writer; Vienna became my Paris, my school
of life.
JKP: One of your previous, non-fiction books, Hitler in Vienna, 1907-1913: Clues to the Future
(2002), looked at Austrian-born Adolf Hitler’s experiences in the imperial capital. What did you learn about Hitler and Vienna by focusing your research this way?
JSJ:Hitler in Vienna was indeed a labor of
love. It took five years of research and writing. I had initially intended the
book to be a popular narrative history of Vienna 1900 and its amazing
renaissance: think Freud, Mahler, Schoenberg, Klimt, Schiele, Loos, Otto
Wagner, Wittgenstein--the list goes on and on of those who helped to shape the
modern sensibility. At that time (mid-1970s), New York publishers were most
definitely not interested in Vienna 1900; now it has become a cottage industry.
Publishers were, however, interested in Hitler, so I paired the two--“a tale of
genius versus malignancy” as a melodramatic blurb. Hitler scratched out a
living of sorts in those years painting pictures that would be sold to frame
shops. It was the frame that was of interest, not the picture, much like you
might buy a small frame today with a photo already in it just for advertisement
sake. Hitler worked mostly for Jewish frame dealers when he wasn’t living rough
on the streets, a failed wannabe artist who was gaga for opera, especially the
works of Wagner.
I used the eyes of an outsider to research that book and it was ultimately published in German first. The Hitler angle took my rose-colored glasses off vis-à-vis Vienna: not all schlagobers and waltzes. Anti-Semitism was a deep and ugly vein in the landscape of Central Europe, and Vienna was no exception. An early pre-Nazi National Socialist Party had its start in turn-of-the-century Austria.
JKP: The shorthand version of your biography is that you produced several non-fiction books about Vienna, and then began writing your current series of Viennese Mysteries. But in fact, you penned two standalone historical thrillers before delivering your first Viennese Mystery, The Empty Mirror(2009). What were those novels about, and how did they prepare you to compose the Karl Werthen novels?
JSJ: I wrote two thrillers for NAL back in the early 1990s. The first, Time of the Wolf, is available now as a Kindle (with a wonderful cover by the talented Peter Ratcliffe). It should have been titled In Death’s Time, as it came from a dream I had about this person--obviously a police inspector--coming down an immense flight of marble stairs and thinking to himself: “Only one more death in death’s time. Who will care?” The novel has a Gorky Park sort of feel to it, featuring a Viennese police inspector in 1942 who uncovers documents proving that the Final Solution is being carried out. He resolves to get the secret out to the Allies, but his mission is compromised and soon the SD, German security services, is on his tail. Publishers Weekly called this novel an “exciting intellectual game of cat and mouse ... [that] offers driving tension from beginning to end.” The book is a bit edgy vis-à-vis sex and violence. It remains one of my favorites.
The other thriller, The Hero Game, is set in Ireland during World War II. Its premise is that the Nazis mount a secret mission to Ireland to foment a second uprising, which will distract the Brits just at the time of a planned
German invasion of Old Blighty. It also has my biggest howler--I have the Irish
leader, a good Catholic, attending mass in a Protestant church. Those thrillers
were my education in pacing and writing action scenes, both of which have come
in handy in the Werthen books. They are also powerfully character-driven for
thrillers.
JKP: What is it about the setting of Vienna in the diapered days of the 20th century that so attracts you as a novelist?
JSJ: I have to admit, it took me a good half-minute to figure out “diapered days”--nice.
I love the time, simple as that. I feel at home in that
time. I have since first encountering it as a student. There is terrific
resonance with our own times, there are fascinating personalities with quirks
and dark sides. Lovely material. Plus, Vienna, when I first went there, was not
so far removed from those times: the buildings, the feel of the society. All
from another age.
JKP: And what can you accomplish as a novelist writing about Vienna in the late 18900s, early 1900s that would not be possible to do as the author of non-fiction works?
JSJ: It’s funny: I thought that writing this material as fiction would free me up from the obsessive constraints of getting every little historical nuance right. Wrong. I use actual historical characters in each book of the series, and I continue to feel an obligation to getting things right about them in the fictional format, as well. In Requiem in Vienna[2010], for example, featuring the composer Gustav Mahler, I had the appropriate volume of excellent Henry-Louis de la Grange Mahler bio (Vienna: The Years of Change) ever at my side to double-check for
Mahler’s daily movements. It’s the same for all the books. If I have a real
character speak, I want to know that this is a good facsimile of what they
actually talked about.
I only every wanted to be a fiction author; I started with
non-fiction as I figured that would be the easiest way to break into print.
From travel articles to travel books to narrative non-fiction and then, voila, I could make the leap to fiction. It sort of worked that way, but it is not necessarily a recipe for success. But what the hell, I was young and definitely not a MFA grad--I had to figure these things out for myself. So there is no great moral purpose in my choosing to use this rich Vienna material in a fictional format rather than non-fiction. I am simply being selfish--this is the kind of book I want to write. Werthen and company are just plain fun.
JKP: Do you spend a lot of effort trying to immerse yourself in 1900-1901 Vienna while you’re writing the Werthen books? If so, what do you do to get yourself in the right mind space to recapture life in Vienna during that period?
JSJ: Actually, the Werthen books are planned to cover the era from 1898 to 1915. I am still in 1901 with the fifth book, the same year as The
Keeper of Hands. But the books are planned to progress year by year, the
characters aging with a sell-buy date. And yes, there is a great deal of
immersion in the times. Besides reading tons of history for each book, and
focusing on the particular real-life person from the time, I also do a daily
bit of time travel via photos and newspapers. Bless the Internet. Time was, if
you wanted to do any real research on Vienna 1900, you had to be in Vienna and
go to the National
Library and request actual newspapers one by one or visit their photo
archive and present credentials to show that you deserved a look-see. Now that
library has put such information online. I can browse several newspapers for
the very day I am writing about over a century ago, see what was in the news,
the weather, the social gossip. I can stroll down the street I am writing about
in Vienna via the online photo archive. It is a wonderful resource.
Apropos this resource, one of my recurring minor characters
in the series is Karl Kraus,
of whom I lovingly referred to in one interview as “the intellectual pit bull
of Vienna.” Kraus was a cultural critic, grammar policeman, and word maven of
Vienna 1900. A frail-looking man, Kraus beavered away for over three decades,
single-handedly publishing his magazine, Die Fackel (The Torch). In this journal he took on the hypocrisies of the day, stood up to the rich and the powerful when need be, fought crime and societal stupidity, and generally pissed off everybody. The ultimate aphorist, Kraus termed Vienna 1900 a “laboratory for
world destruction.” And guess what, the entirety of his publication can also be found online.
JKP: How realistic is Werthen’s role as a lawyer/private investigator? Have you read about other people in Vienna at the time who engaged in comparable endeavors?
JSJ: Werthen is spun out of whole cloth, though a few months ago I did run across an obscure reference to a private investigator at the time working on Praterstrasse. I could find no further information, however. Werthen and his wife, Berthe, are at the heart of the books, and I do not want their creation to be limited by any real-life forebears.
JKP: Your new novel, The Keeper of Hands, follows a
rather complicated plot course. It starts out as a whodunit, with a murdered
young brothel employee, but soon expands into a work of intrigue about rival
European intelligence agencies and the criminal consequences of seeking to
cover up indiscretions among “important” people. What led you to concoct this
tale, and how do you think it represents growth in your series?
JSJ: Actually, most of the books in the series follow this arc from mystery to thriller; from whodunit to stop-them-from-doing-it. The first in the series, The Empty Mirror, sets up this format:
it begins with the death of an art model and the trail ultimately leads to the Hofburg [Palace] and the
secrets involving the deaths of an archduke and an empress. Keeper is this format on steroids. I very much wanted to deal with the espionage agencies of the times and also to create a vile antagonist. I love vile antagonists. Herr Schmidt from Keeper will be making reappearances.
(Right) J. Sydney Jones
JKP: The plots of each of your Viennese Mysteries start with a cultural luminary or two from the city’s colorful past--future philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein in The Silence, for instance, and composer Gustav Mahler in Requiem in Vienna, and authors Arthur Schnitzler and Bertha von Suttner in The Keeper of Hands. One real-life figure keeps coming back, though: Hanns Gross, the so-called
father of criminology. How has Gross found a regular role in your series, when
other authentic characters have not? Is it simply because he has an expertise
in criminal analysis, or is there something else he contributes to your
storytelling?
JSJ: Gross is one of the team, not merely an incidental player. ... He is ... instrumental in finding a sort of informal justice, as in The
Silence. Gross’ ongoing role is part of the reason why the series is called
the “Viennese Mysteries” and not the Werthen series. Besides, my private
inquiries agent’s name is a strange one: Americans are going to be pronouncing
it”wurthan” when it is actually “vairtun.”
JKP: Are there other authors currently penning mystery or thriller fiction who you think do a particularly good job of capturing their chosen historical time periods?
JSJ: Where do I start? Philip Kerr nails Germany before and after WWII. Jacqueline Winspear ditto for post-WWI England. Alan Furst, especially in his first novels, transports you to Central Europe and the Balkans in the 1930s. You want Shanghai and the People’s Republic of China in transformation during 1990s? Read Qiu Xiaolong. This list could go on with a number of excellent writers.
JKP: Is it true that, beyond composing your Viennese Mysteries, you’re also working on some new standalone thrillers? What can you tell us about those? And will we be seeing any of them in the near future?
JSJ: Glad you asked. My novel Ruin Value will be
out this October from Mysterious Press/Open Road. It’s a suspense thriller set
in Nuremberg just before and during the War Crimes Trials. It
features an ex-OSS agent whose job it is to track down a serial killer (they
were called multiple murderers at the time) in that city of ruins. He enlists a
German, a former Kripo (criminal police) agent in the hunt. And there is also a
well-connected American journalist who is out after the scoop of her life. I am
very excited about this, working with [editor] Otto Penzler and with the
excellent folks at Open Road. This is, to my mind, exactly what the e-book
business needs--a house with proven editorial oversight and professional
packaging and marketing.
JKP: In what ways do you still need to grow as a writer?
JSJ: I must confess to a very non-professional desire: at this stage of my career I am much more concerned about improving my backhand than I am my writing hand. Which is not to say that I do not still try to grow with each book--I think Keeper is the best of the series thus
far--but such growth is on the macro scale, not the micro. I do not consciously
atomize the writing process while I am at it. Some of that comes, of course,
with revision. But when I sit down to work in the morning it’s all about the
story and the characters and giving them room to live.
JKP: You’ve previously
cited the works of Gerald Seymour and John le Carré as being particularly
strong in their quality of dialogue. Is that the part of writing fiction you
find most difficult?
JSJ: Let's put it this way: I think my sense of plotting and character development are my strong suits.
JKP: Whose books are you reading right now?
JSJ: On the non-fiction side is Daniel M. Vyleta’s Crime, Jews and News: Vienna 1895-1914; a re-reading of Edward Crankshaw’s superb The Fall of the House of Habsburg; and Maria Hornor Lansdale’s Vienna and the
Viennese, a book published in 1902 and full of delicious slice-of-life
apercus about Vienna 1900. For fiction there is William Boyd’s Ordinary Thunderstorms (Boyd is my favorite contemporary author: his Any
Human Heart is at the top of all my lists--that guy can write) and Laura
Ingalls Wilder’s These Happy Golden Years, which I am reading with my son at bedtime. I had never read the Wilder books before and I must confess to [their being] a guilty pleasure. Among all the other joys of having a child at my time of life is discovering all those books one should have read as a youth and did not.
JKP: Finally, when you first visited Vienna back in the late ’60s, you were intending to establish a career as an attorney, not as a wordsmith. Are you glad now that you gave up those aspirations to practice law, and became a man of letters instead?
JSJ: I have only partially given up those dreams. Remember that Werthen is a lawyer, the protagonist of my [never-published] mainstream Irish novel, Yanks
in the Glen, was a lawyer, and, as you will discover, the protagonist of Ruin Value studied the law.
A weekly alert for followers of crime, mystery, and thriller fiction.
Little Green, by Walter Mosley (Doubleday):
At the conclusion of Mosley’s 10th Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins novel, Blonde Faith (2007), we found his Los Angeles private eye drunk, depressed at the loss of his longtime girlfriend, Bonnie Shay, and wheeling his automobile over a cliff on the Pacific Coast Highway north of Malibu, California. “The back of my car hit something hard,” Easy told readers, “a boulder no doubt. Something clenched down on my left foot and pain lanced up my leg. I ignored this, though, realizing that in a few seconds, I’d be dead.” It was hardly unreasonable to think that Mosley had thereby delivered his final Rawlins outing.
Six years later, though, Easy is back, if not in great condition--the plummet from that precipice had thrown him free, but it took most of a day for his old buddy, the ever-armed-and-dangerous Raymond “Mouse” Alexander, to locate him and get him medical attention. After spending two months in bed in a semi-coma, the detective finally reawakens to the world of 1967 ... only to have Mouse ask that he take on a new assignment: locating Evander “Little Green” Noon, a man of 19 or 20 (“but he’s immature for his age”) who disappeared after calling his mother to tell her that he’d met some girl on the Sunset Strip.
A lesser, perhaps smarter man might have said no way, that he needed considerably more bed rest before tackling anything so difficult. But Easy has never been one to fail a friend, and so, bucked up by a “voodoo elixir” supplied by “Southern witch” Mama Jo, he sets off in a bright red 1965 Plymouth Barracuda to bring Evander home--and in the meantime, protect the young man from folks who would rather he ceased breathing immediately. All of this, despite risks to his own life. (“It’s always been my opinion,” Easy tells us at one point, “that if a man’s going to be a fool he should go all the way.”) As the case unfolds, Rawlins will rub elbows (and more intimate body parts) with free-spirited hippie chicks, run afoul of gun-wielding thugs, do his best to hide a small fortune in tainted cash, and try to figure out why Evander’s mother hates Mouse so, despite the lengths Mouse is willing to go to rescue her oldest child. There’s a secondary plot here, too, which has Easy helping another longtime pal, Jackson Blue, squeeze out from under a blackmail threat.
Walter Mosley may have taken a half-dozen-year break from his man Easy, but in the course of it he lost none of his sure footing with this series. Little Green ranks as one of the finest Rawlins novels to date, and that’s no small compliment. These pages are filled with the author’s typically incisive characterizations and careful attention to historical detail. (You can almost
smell the patchouli oil and pot smoke so beloved by America’s sexually liberated generation.) While this tale is certainly a mystery, challenging “research and delivery” man Rawlins to sort out why Evander vanished and remains in danger, it also boasts strong social commentary. Easy is always sensitive to the unfairness and insults any black resident of the United States experienced during the mid-20th-century; yet he senses things might be changing a little, that in the age of Martin Luther King Jr. and the African-American civil-rights movement, blacks may see more acceptance and evenhandedness in their future. For a guy who recently died, such revelations can be powerful incentives to go on living.
* * *
Also worth looking for at your local bookshop: Robert B. Parker’s Wonderland (Putnam), the second of Ace Atkins’ remarkably successful efforts--following last year’s Lullaby--to extend Parker’s best-selling Spenser series. This time out, the Boston P.I. and his sometime sidekick, Zebulon “Z” Sixkill, rush to the aid of gym owner Henry Cimoli, who faces mounting pressure and threats from a commercial developer intent on purchasing his condominium at Revere Beach, once the site of an oceanfront amusement park and dog-racing track. ... Complex 90 (Titan), by Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins, in which take-no-shit shamus Mike Hammer (last spotted
in 2012’s Lady, Go Die!) precipitates an international incident by, first, traveling with a conservative politician on a fact-finding mission to the Soviet capital, Moscow, and then being arrested for murder. ... Steve Ulfelder’s Shotgun Lullaby (Minotaur), which finds his redemption-craving series protagonist, Conway Sax, trying to help a recovering substance abuser named Gus Biletnikov stay sober--and also stay alive, amid what look like pretty clear threats to the life of Gus, someone who reminds Sax a bit too much of his estranged son. ... And Original Skin (Blue Rider Press), David Mark’s second novel
featuring Yorkshire Detective Sergeant Aector McAvoy. The Scottish-born
McAvoy--previously seen in The Dark Winter--and his fellow members of the Serious and Organized Crime Unit start by probing the apparent suicide of a “swinger,” only to have that lead them to the trail of a killer linked to the local erotic sex scene and powerful politicians who would think nothing of breaking a too-curious copper.
Send Us News:
The Rap Sheet is always on the lookout for information about new and soon-forthcoming books, special author projects, and distinctive crime-fiction-related Web sites. Shoot us an e-mail note here.
The Rap Sheet accepts books sent free of charge from publishers, publicists, and authors. Those works may inspire comments on this page. However, in no case is there any promise given that a book will be the subject of an endorsement or review, either positive or negative.
From time to time, The Rap Sheet features short video clips. Use of these is for historical and entertainment purposes only, and is not meant to establish ownership of such materials. Rights to those clips stay with their owners/creators.
The One Book Project
In honor of The Rap Sheet’s first birthday, we invited more than 100 crime writers, book critics, and bloggers from all over the English-speaking world to choose the one crime/mystery/thriller novel that they thought had been “most unjustly overlooked, criminally forgotten, or underappreciated over the years.” Their choices can be found here.
The Wayback Machine
Before The Rap Sheet was a blog, it was a monthly newsletter in January Magazine. To find all the old editions of that newsletter, just click here.
Those of us responsible for The Rap Sheet try to get everything right, and we work to keep our Web links up to date. But we’re not perfect. So, if you spot any errors (typographical or otherwise) in this blog, or discover links or embedded videos that aren’t functioning properly, please let us know via e-mail.
