Sunday, July 30, 2006
The Homes of Holmes and Papa
Arthur Conan Doyle’s home in Hindhead, England, Undershaw (seen above), is under attack by a developer who has owned the property since 2004 and wishes to build on the 3-acre site. Previous attempts to subdivide the 36-room residence itself have met with resistance from fans and the local government. Undershaw was built in 1896 as a place where Conan Doyle’s wife, Louise (suffering from consumption), could end her days, which she did, 13 years after her diagnosis. Bram Stoker was among the literary luminaries who stayed at Undershaw. Read the news report here.
In a related story, though one step removed from crime fiction, Ernest Hemingway’s home in Key West, Florida, which has withstood God knows how many hurricanes, is under siege from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The problem seems to be cats.
Hemingway’s home is sanctuary to more than 50 six-toed cats, many of which are reportedly descended from Hemingway’s original polydactyl, given to him by a sea captain.
The USDA claims that Papa’s home, a major tourist attraction in Key West, is in effect an “exhibitor” of cats--which means it needs to have a USDA Animal Welfare License. But that drunk-with-power bureaucracy has repeatedly refused to grant such a license, and now threatens “to charge the home $200 per cat per day for violating the act.” The whole story can be found here.
The Hemingway matter is now in the hands of a federal judge.
Then Roll the Closing Credits
46. Dead Again (1991)But the movie with the most “classic ending,” according to FilmCritic.com? Dr. Strangelove (1964).
45. Pulp Fiction (1994)
44. Fargo (1996)
39. The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
29. Wait Until Dark (1967)
21. The Usual Suspects (1995)
15. The Godfather (1972)
9. Don’t Look Now (1973)
5. Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
3. Chinatown (1974)
Read the whole rundown here.
These Blondes Are No Joke
“It’s ironic,” said Ardai. “You could show a completely naked woman on a paperback cover in the 1950s, as long as she was facing away from the viewers, but today, covers that risqué wouldn’t fly with at least some retailers.”I was reminded of that comment just recently, as I was fishing through an online collection of cover illustrations by renowned artist Robert McGinnis. Among the many wonderful--dare I say “alluring”?--jackets I discovered was that of a 1967 Signet paperback called The Blonde, by Carter Brown (the pseudonym of Australian writer Alan G. Yates, whose myriad works were always big on sex, action, and humor). Sure enough, it shows a naked woman facing away from her viewers (click on the image at left to enlarge it). Brown’s story, according to his book’s teaser, is plotted around a “party girl [who] was going to tell everything about the Hollywood scandal, the orgies, and so on. Right on TV. But she was scooped--by her own murder.”
Now, as it happens, I’ve just finished reading another novel called The Blonde, this one by Philadelphia writer and newspaper editor Duane Swierczynski, and due out in November from St. Martin’s Minotaur. (One of the perks of being a critic is you get to read books way before everyone else does.) Swierczynski’s yarn is a tumbling-paced thriller that begins with a beautiful young woman--a blonde, as you might’ve guessed--allegedly poisoning the drink of an airport bar patron; leads to a beheading, self-replicating nanomachines, and wild craziness in a Philly swingers club; and concludes with healthy doses of revenge all around. It’s a crackling account of love, loss, and lunacy; and though it requires that the reader accept a rather outlandish premise, once started, The Blonde is as hard to put down as chilled beer on a sultry day.
Swierczynski declares himself thrilled with the “kick-ass cover” of his latest novel, in part because it bears a stylistic resemblance to the jacket of his previous book, The Wheelman. And yeah, there’s something very cool about how the designer has employed handcuffs in spelling out the title. But what might sales have been like, had Swierczynski’s The Blonde been allowed to sport a front as artistically racy as Brown’s older book by the same name? Too bad we live in a time and country where people resign themselves to White House domestic spying and lying about war, but where showing a little skin on the cover of a book will incite protest. There’s something backward about that, don’t you think?
READ MORE: “Blast from the Past #2: The Blonde” (The Nick Carter & Carter Brown Blog).
Miami Voice
Read the article here, while you can.
Saturday, July 29, 2006
Back from Blazes
At one point, through all of this writing about fires, I asked if the freakish winds we were experiencing on the day the fire broke out might have been caused by the fire itself.
Dave Hugelschaffer, a novelist and ex-firefighter in Alberta, e-mailed me with an answer:
If the fire was large enough, it certainly could create its own wind. In fact, firefighters sometimes use the wind effect as a tool--the fire will suck air into itself after a convection column is created in the center. Smoke flares are placed in front of the fire, along a dozergaurd, and when the wind shifts and begins to pull into the fire, a line of new fire is ignited along the inside of the guard. This new fire is pulled into the main fire, obliterating the intervening forest fuels and starving the mainfire, while creating a wide, black firegaurd--the best kind. This is literally fighting fire with fire.Hugelschaffer’s recently released novel is Day Into Night, and its cover is so graphic, I can barely look at it right now, after all we’ve been through. I hope to read the book sometime soon, but, meanwhile, here’s the synopsis:
When a raging forest fire cannot suck in air quickly enough, smoke turns black, blotting out the sun and turning day into night. To a firefighter, this false dusk is a sign of conditions turning rapidly from bad to worse. But [protagonist Porter] Cassel has more than just fires to contend with--he is a man with a tragedy in his past and the situation becomes more complex when he is framed for the murder of a suspect.It might be a while before I can read it, but author Nevada Barr (Hard Truth) doesn’t share my hang-ups. She blurbed the book enthusiastically, saying, “It was the Forest Rangers’ equivalent of CSI. I liked the realistic descriptions of the work and an interesting plot. A good read.”
Day Into Night is available in trade paper from Cormorant Books.
Keeping It Reel
The Disappointed Fans
Your fans are out here waiting ...
Friday, July 28, 2006
Turn It Up, Jake. It’s Chinatown.
Blanchard was born in New Orleans in 1962, and paid his musical dues playing trumpet with the Art Blakey Jazz Messengers. Unfortunately for Blanchard, that nearly damns him to obscurity, as Wynton Marsalis has nearly an identical pedigree. Blanchard started setting himself apart by getting involved in film music, first as a featured musician on films like Do the Right Thing, eventually progressing to composing scores such as one for Spike Lee’s Malcolm X. Blanchard’s association with Lee continues to the present day, with the 2006 heist-gone-awry film Inside Man.
In 1999, Blanchard released Jazz in Film, which featured his interpretations of classic film scores, three of them from crime films--Anatomy of a Murder, Clockers, and Chinatown.
Anatomy of a Murder, the 1959 Otto Preminger film, featured music by Duke Ellington. The story is the quintessential courtroom drama, and Ellington gave it an urban feel with the driving beat of his score. Blanchard’s take starts with the trombone of Steve Turre, best known to Saturday Night Live fans as the guy who occasionally plays conch shells. The music bustles with activity, and you can almost hear someone say that there are eight million stories in the naked city. It jumbles, it cartwheels, and it propels the listener forward--just like a crime film should.
Blanchard takes his score for Clockers (directed by Lee and based on the Richard Price novel) out for a second spin. Kenny Kirkland sets the stage with ominous left-hand bass chords, followed by Blanchard and tenor sax great Joe Henderson in near unison duet. The restlessness of the characters comes through as Henderson takes over, wailing plaintively and sounding as though he’s sitting on the stoop of a Brooklyn townhouse. Blanchard returns periodically for musical conversations with Henderson. Two friends looking for something to do.
The crown of this CD, though, is the treatment Blanchard gives to Jerry Goldsmith’s main theme from Chinatown. Kirkland once again opens with delicate keyboard work, letting us know the fragility of the story that’s about to unfold. (Kirkland, a ferociously talented musician who worked with band leaders as diverse as Marsalis and Sting, died soon after completing his work on this CD, and it is dedicated to his memory). Blanchard’s soft trumpet fades in and manages to both cry and soar. You hear it all--the hopeless situation of Evelyn Mulwray, the grinning ghoul that is Noah Cross, and the great pawn J.J. Gittes, whose good intentions are not only futile, they’re destructive.
There are other fine cuts on this CD from films as diverse as Taxi Driver, A Streetcar Named Desire, and another Ellington selection from the uncompleted Degas’ Racing World. It’s a marvelous disk, perfect for a summer night with stars in the background and wine in the foreground.
Mr. Monk Meets “Longstreet”
Thursday, July 27, 2006
Femmes Fatales Go to the Wall
McGinnis, an Ohio kid who began illustrating paperback covers for Dell way back in 1958, has recently gained a whole new set of fans, thanks to the work he’s done on several Hard Case Crime fronts, including those of Plunder of the Sun, The Girl with the Long Green Heart, and The Last Quarry. But, now in his 80th year, he already has more than 1,500 paperback covers to his credit, produced for series by Erle Stanley Gardner, Brett Halliday (aka Davis Dresser), John D. MacDonald, Carter Brown (aka Alan G. Yates), and many others. (An outstanding array of his past covers is available here. For more, check out the artist’s own Web site.) In addition, McGinnis has painted movie posters for Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), Barbarella (1968), and the 1971 James Bond flick Diamonds Are Forever. In 1993, he was elected into the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame, to join the likes of Norman Rockwell, Maxfield Parrish, Winslow Homer, Frederic Remington, Al Hirschfeld, and Maurice Sendak. More recently, two books have celebrated his artistic contributions--Tapestry: The Paintings of Robert E. McGinnis (2000) and The Paperback Covers of Robert McGinnis (2001).
Since McGinnis is best known for his illustrations of slinky, seductive, and often perfidious women, it’s not surprising that a wall calendar of his work would boast the appearance of a pin-up scheduler. But “Dangerous Dames,” described by retailer BudPlant.com as “a hard-boiled collection of femme fatale paintings,” shouldn’t get your wife’s or girlfriend’s panties in a twist. Its dozen illustrations, borrowed from the covers of novels such as Take a Murder, Darling, Girl in a Shroud, and No Tears from the Widow, are a tribute to American pulp fiction of the mid-20th century. This isn’t about sexual exploitation; it’s about history. If they ever existed, most of the women McGinnis based his paintings on are probably grandmothers by now. That’ll dash cold water on one’s fantasies about these “Dangerous Dames,” if nothing else does.
Copies of the calendar can be had here for $12.99 apiece. Cheap for a year’s entertainment.
Prose and Cons
And while we’re on the subject of conventions, Olen Steinhauer (author of the forthcoming novel Liberation Movements) has posted, on the Contemporary Nomad blog, a series of reports from last week’s Harrogate Crime Writing Festival. You can read them here, here, here, and here.
Um, Let’s Try That One Again
Wednesday, July 26, 2006
Fletch Reborn
The site reports that “Spin City co-creator and Scrubs creator Bill Lawrence will write and direct the next two Fletch films for The Weinstein Company, of which the first remains Fletch Won,” based on Mcdonald’s 1985 novel of the same name (the eighth in a series that began with 1974’s Fletch). Screenwriter/director Kevin Smith (Clerks, Dogma) had previously been associated with the project, but has apparently tossed it over. ComingSoon adds, “Smith had wanted to cast My Name is Earl star Jason Lee in the title role, but Scrubs star Zach Braff was reportedly also a frontrunner for the role. Now that Lawrence is indeed on board, Braff definitely has an edge over other actors.” Shooting on the film--Lawrence’s first big-screen effort--is expected to begin in April 2007, while the producer is on hiatus from Scrubs.
It’s always dicey to translate a character familiar from books onto the screen, and Chase--while I respect much of his work--didn’t measure up to my vision of Fletch. He was broadly comic, rather than understatedly so, as Mcdonald’s tales really demand. I could see Lee in the part, sure, with his look of perpetual bewilderment at being caught up in the whirlwind of life. But I can imagine, too, Braff stepping into Fletch’s shoes. Although he strikes me initially as rather too young-looking, his role in Scrubs over the years has helped distinguish that NBC-TV sitcom as a smarter-than-average example of a pretty atrocious breed. What’s more, his work with the lovely Natalie Portman in Garden State (2004) shows he has the chops to pull off the sort of nuanced performance that could set Fletch Won apart from its more slapstick predecessors.
(Hat tip to Sarah Weinman.)
READ MORE: “Will Fletch Finally Be Made, Starring Zach Braff?” by Jen Creer (TV Squad).
Mansions and Murder
There are back streets in every town, and Southampton is no exception. It just amazes me that some people refuse to believe that the East End of Long Island has a seedy underbelly simply because it’s a playground for the wealthy three months out of the year. Like the wealthy are somehow above crime. And Southampton really isn’t all mansions and polo grounds. Working-class people live there year round--struggle to live there, to make a living and raise their kids and keep their homes. When I was out there I lived in border-line poverty, a wannabe writer scrambling to make rent. I saw my share of desperate people, felt my share of desperation. So for me writing about the back streets isn’t working against type, it’s telling it more or less how I saw it.Read the whole interview here.
Two Sides of the Coin
But that was then. After Paperback Mysteries appeared, a small but loud contingent of folks complained that they never read “mysteries”--and where were all the great thrillers? An equally small but even more noisy group said, how dare I pollute the crystal waters of the mystery genre with thrillers? So I’ve tried to solve the problem by starting another blog, called Paperback Thrillers.
The line between mystery and thriller is certainly a vague one: as I said in my introduction to Dreams of Justice, to my mind, mysteries most often have continuing casts of central characters who reach some solution to the crimes committed by a mixture of rational deduction and inspiration. Thrillers more often deal with larger, single events, occasionally political, and usually end in scenes of violence. The folks over at the International Thriller Writers Saloon seem to agree.
When Diane Vogt of ITW asked me, I said that I think readers love thrillers because of 1) The “What If?” factor: what if a famous painting held a clue to the fact that Jesus and Mary Magdalene had a baby? and 2) The “What the Hell Do We Do NOW?” syndrome: those damned dinosaurs in the theme park seem to have developed minds of their own. One hopeful trend is “The Thriller as Samidzat” (or perhaps “The Thriller Writer as Tom Paine”): a growing realization that just because our government says something is true, it ain’t necessarily so.
Does that mean thrillers are the wave of the future, and that mysteries will disappear? You tell me ...
UPDATE: In response to Dick’s comments on mysteries vs. thrillers, novelist John Shannon (Dangerous Games) writes:
Here’s another definition for you, not really universal but interesting--from a one-minute corridor seminar at a Bouchercon given me by Barbara Peters [of Poisoned Pen Press]. Mysteries are about something that has gone wrong and then hunting down the big rock that caused it and turning it over to find out what happened--or something like that. A thriller is a duel. You know the good guy and bad guy at the beginning and you watch them both move toward each other and a final collision. As I say, not universal, but it does account for a lot of them.
And from my point of view, the best mysteries are rooted in place and deal with the social history of the time and place. Thrillers tend to exoticism rather than place and almost never touch on social history. Thrillers are fundamentally more conservative, about crushing some “other” so we can return to the status quo (as are police procedurals.)
Pelecanos and What It Means to Write
Rich’s piece is about more than facts and figures, however. It is about heart and soul. He covers brief bits on Pelecanos’ private life, and his desire to write characters that matter and stories that are authentic. He mentions that the novelist finally got permission to spend time with a homicide unit, and the value that leant his fiction in depicting detail. But this article also brings out the heart of the writer: the man laboring away in an attic room, writing stories, all the while wondering if he should be separating himself from his family for a pursuit that is giving back scant reward. That’s what Pelecanos’ early days were like, and his experience resonates with all beginning (or not so beginning) writers who work to be recognized: the soul of the author determined to write fiction that challenges, his unwillingness to change that style, and clearly how much he loves both writing and his family. Jim Born talks a bit about family on his Web site. Pelecanos talks about family, too (he keeps hardback editions of his books on a living room shelf, each with a picture of his three children taped inside its front cover). Family matters to Pelecanos and to his fictional creations.
You’ll learn much about Pelecanos from this article. And you’ll maybe get to challenge yourself, as well. How much are you willing to sacrifice as a writer? How long will you be willing to deal with low (or no) money and meager sales? How high will you place commercialism over craft? Pelecanos does have critical recognition--duh. He writes brilliant novels--duh. He did eventually find the bigger money, and he wrote for the critically successful HBO-TV series The Wire. Still, that elusive commercial success factor is not in his pocket. Is that what really matters?--Anthony Rainone
(A version of this post appeared originally here.)
Hit Me, Baby, One More Time
Tuesday, July 25, 2006
Watching the Detectives
All that said, however, the Sleuth crew has put together a generally decent list of nominees:
• Detective Sergeant Joe Friday from Dragnet
• Lieutenant Columbo from Columbo
• Lieutenant Theo Kojak from Kojak
• Jim Rockford from The Rockford Files
• Lieutenant Tony Baretta from Baretta
• Dr. R. Quincy from Quincy, M.E.
• Thomas Magnum from Magnum P.I.
• Jessica Fletcher from Murder, She Wrote
• James “Sonny” Crockett & Ricardo “Rico” Tubbs from Miami Vice
• Irwin M. “Fletch” Fletcher from the Fletch movies
• Detective Lenny Brisco from Law & Order
• Sam Spade from The Maltese Falcon
• Harry Callahan from the Dirty Harry movies
• Martin Riggs & Roger Murtaugh from the Lethal Weapon films
• Sherlock Holmes from various movies and TV series
• Remington Steele from Remington Steele
• Detective Andy Sipowicz from NYPD Blue
• Fox Mulder & Dana Scully from The X-Files
• Clarice Starling from The Silence of the Lambs
• Marge Gunderson from Fargo
• Maddie Hayes & David Addison from Moonlighting
• Lieutenant Frank Drebin from Police Squad
• Gil Grissom from C.S.I.
• John Shaft from the Shaft movies and TV series
• Sabrina Duncan, Jill Munroe, & Kelly Garrett from Charlie’s Angels
Had I been consulted, I would undoubtedly have added some names to this rundown, not the least among them being Harry Orwell from Harry O, Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin from films and television, Mike Hammer from Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer, Detective Chief Inspector Endeavour Morse from Inspector Morse, J.J. “Jake” Gittes from Chinatown, and Nick and Nora Charles from both films and television. I might even have salted the mix with Pete Ryan and Frank McBride from Switch, Moses Wine from The Big Fix, Paladin from Have Gun, Will Travel, Spenser from Spenser: For Hire, Thomas Banacek from Banacek, Mike Longstreet from Longstreet, and, because I think this tally needs a bit more female representation, Claire McCarron from the underappreciated Leg Work and Honey West from--you guessed it--Honey West. Oh, and what about Philip Marlowe, who’s appeared in both TV series and films? How in the hell could Sleuth have put together this poll without including Raymond Chandler’s flawed knight errant? The only reason I’m not suggesting Travis McGee here as well, is that the character hasn’t been represented on screen either often enough or well enough (although I did have high--and ultimately dashed--hopes for a 1983 teleflick of The Empty Copper Sea, starring Sam Elliott). Same goes for Lew Archer, who was denied his own surname in Paul Newman’s Harper (1966), the best-yet interpretation of one of Ross Macdonald’s private detective yarns, and wasn’t done justice either by Peter Graves (in the 1974 TV movie The Underground Man) or Brian Keith (who starred in the short-lived 1975 series Archer).
Of course, installing any of these characters on Sleuth’s ballot would require booting off one or more existing nominees, if the total number is to remain at 25. OK, fine. Start by getting rid of Baretta (who didn’t wear well with me, week to week, although I liked Baretta’s theme song, by Dave Grusin). Then pitch Police Squad’s buffoonish Drebin from the bus, and, right behind him, Fletch (who was much better in Gregory Mcdonald’s series of novels than he ever was in the two Chevy Chase films). Joe Friday always came off as too damn wooden (heck, the guy didn’t even know how to run without looking like he had a stick up his butt!), so out he goes, too. And don’t get me started on Jessica Fletcher, who never measured up to another, more eccentric (but considerably less heralded) pair of TV novelist-detectives, the irrepressible Ernesta and Gwendolyn Snoop from The Snoop Sisters.
Even making all of my changes, however, doesn’t alter the fact of who deserves to win Sleuth’s survey: Los Angeles private investigator Jim Rockford, created by Roy Huggins and played by one of the smoothest-appearing actors in the biz, James Garner. With the exception of Sherlock Holmes, who was so ably portrayed by British actor Jeremy Brett in a decade-long (1984-1994) series of telefilms from Granada Television, and Spade, who has since become synonymous with Humphrey Bogart’s performance in The Maltese Falcon (1941), the nominees who were born in books haven’t fared as well on television or in films as those whose careers began on the screen. And Rockford is by the far the best of that latter bunch. He was resourceful when necessary, understandably self-protective (no rash heroics for Jimbo), and while he fit the profile of American P.I.s being successful with the opposite sex, Rockford never disrespected or took for granted the women with whom he kept company. In a medium that has sprouted copycat gumshoes by the closetful, Rockford was, and remains, an original.
After Rockford, my four other nominees from Sleuth’s line-up would have to be Columbo, Spade, Holmes, and Crockett and Tubbs--in that order. If I had a sixth choice, it would probably be Sipowitz (played by Dennis Franz), who grew from being a co-star on NYPD Blue to being the rock on which the whole show found its balance.
To vote in Sleuth’s poll, simply click here. This may be an example of a TV promotion masquerading as “news,” but that doesn’t mean there isn’t an element of fun involved.
Taking on Crais
Read the whole interview here.
All Mystery. All the Time.
It’s astonishing how prescient Bruce Springsteen has turned out to be. Remember “57 Channels (And Nothing On)” from way back in 1992? Now, a lot of us actually have hundreds of channels available via cable and satellite, not just a piddling 57. And lots of the time? Still nothing on.
But mystery enthusiasts found their selection improved earlier this year with the launch of NBC Universal’s new crime and mystery cable channel, Sleuth.
The Sleuth Channel brings viewers a blend of classic mystery and crime programming--The A-Team, Knight Rider, Simon & Simon, The Equalizer, and Miami Vice among them--as well as movies such as Casino and The Take, and original programming.
A 90-minute show called America’s Top Sleuths is currently in development and will premiere on the Sleuth Channel this coming fall. You can help with the selection process by throwing your two cents into the mix. The Sleuth Web site is currently hosting an online poll that allows visitors to choose their five favorite sleuths from television and film, out of a shortlist of 25. (Though, inexplicably, options like “Sabrina, Jill, & Kelly” and “Mulder & Scully” only count as one sleuth apiece. So, feasibly, your five choices could buy you nine favorite sleuths, if you chose right. Also, I’m sorry: it’s very difficult for me to think of Crockett and Tubbs as sleuths. But that’s likely a personal thing.)--L.L.R.
If at First You Do Succeed ...
Keep up the good work, Dick.
Monday, July 24, 2006
Doing Boucher Proud
Best Mystery Novel:
• Bloodlines, by Jan Burke (Simon & Schuster)
• Lincoln Lawyer, by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown)
• Mercy Falls, by William Kent Krueger (Atria)
• Red Leaves, by Thomas H. Cook (Harcourt)
• To the Power of Three, by Laura Lippman (Morrow)
Best First Mystery:
• The Baby Game, by Randall Hicks (Wordslinger Press)
• Die a Little, by Megan Abbott (Simon & Schuster)
• Immoral, by Brian Freeman (St. Martin’s Minotaur)
• Officer Down, by Theresa Schwegel (St. Martin’s Minotaur)
• Tilt-a-Whirl, by Chris Grabenstein (Carroll & Graf)
Best Paperback Original:
• The Good Girl’s Guide to Murder, by Susan McBride (Avon)
• The James Deans, by Reed Farrell Coleman (Plume)
• A Killing Rain, by P.J. Parrish (Pinnacle)
• Kiss Her Goodbye, by Allan Guthrie (Hard Case Crime)
• Six Bad Things, by Charlie Huston (Ballantine)
Best Short Story:
• “Driven to Distraction,” by Marcia Talley (in Chesapeake Crimes II, edited by Donna Andrews and Maria Y. Lima; Quiet Storm)
• “House Rules,” by Libby Fischer Hellmann (in Murder in Vegas, edited by Michael Connelly; Forge)
• “Killer Blonde,” by Elaine Viets (in Drop-Dead Blond; Signet)
• “Misdirection,” by Barbara Seranella (in Greatest Hits, edited by Robert J. Randisi; Carroll & Graf)
• “There Is No Crime on Easter Island,” by Nancy Pickard (Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, September-October 2005)
Best Critical/Nonfiction:
• Behind the Mystery: Top Mystery Writers Interviewed, by Stuart M. Kaminsky; photography by Laurie Roberts (Hothouse Press)
• Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her, by Melanie Rehak (Harcourt)
• The Heirs of Anthony Boucher: A History of Mystery Fandom, edited by Marv Lachman (Poisoned Pen Press)
• The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes: The Novels, edited by Leslie S. Klinger (Norton)
• Writing and Selling Your Mystery Novel, by Hallie Ephron (Writer’s Digest)
Best Fan Publication:
• Crimespree Magazine, edited by Jon and Ruth Jordan
• Deadly Pleasures, edited by George Easter
• Mystery News, edited by Lynn Kaczmarek and Chris Aldrich
• Mystery Scene Magazine, edited by Brian Skupin and Kate Stine
• Mystery Readers Journal, edited by Janet Rudolph
Special Service to the Field:
• George Easter, Deadly Pleasures
• Janet Rudolph, Mystery Readers International
• Maddy Van Hertbruggen, 4 Mystery Addicts
• Sarah Weinman, Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind
Winners will be announced on Saturday, September 30, during the Bouchercon festivities in Madison, Wisconsin.
Color Him Memorable
In 1984, Mystery Scene editor Ed Gorman asked the author what he would like his epitaph to say. MacDonald’s response: “He hung around quite a while, entertained the folk, and was stopped quick and clean when the right time came.”
READ MORE: “John D. MacDonald’s Lush Landscape of Crime,” by Jonathan Yardley (The Washington Post).
Sunday, July 23, 2006
Razing the Bar
Yet More Mickey
Back home, at Cohn’s Newsland, I’ve been eyeing the lurid covers of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer novels--“I, the Jury,” which ends with a striptease (“And she was a real blonde!”) and “Kiss Me, Deadly” (“The flames were teeth that ate, ripping and tearing!”). Back home I didn’t dare a purchase. Here I risked “One Lonely Night,” with its cover of a mostly nude damsel, her wrists bound, hanging helpless.(This reminds me of the time, as a pubescent nerd in the early 1970s, that I went to buy a paperback copy of Spillane’s The Erection Set, the standalone novel fronted by a photo of the author’s second wife, model Sherri Malinou, naked. As I stood in line at the sales counter, I was relieved to see a teenage boy not so many years older than I was, manning the cash register. But then, as the customer right before me completed her purchase, the teen was suddenly replaced by an older woman with half reading glasses strung around her neck and a face so pinched that it probably restricted her breathing. I thought I would die from shame, as she pulled from my reluctant grasp what I was sure she presumed to be a soft-core porn novel. She didn’t whistle up any cops, but as she took my money and bagged the book, the cashier shot me a glance I’m sure she reserved for sexual deviants and habitual wearers of miniskirts.)
“How old are you?” the vendor asks.
“Sixteen!”
“Are you sure?”
I throw down 35 cents and soon am devouring fever-dream prose in the backseat of a Pontiac. The vacation, I forget. The ride of the Spillane novel stays with me.
In an accompanying Times piece, “A Shot to the Gut of Fiction,” novelists Robert B. Parker, George Pelecanos, and Janet Evanovich are asked to assess Spillane’s influence on modern crime fiction. But the best quote may actually come from the article’s author, Scott Martelle, who at one point muses on “the coldblooded toughness of Spillane’s work”:
[I]t’s likely that had Spillane not spilled the literary blood, someone else would have. Art is propelled by its edges, and about the only edge left to the genre [in the 1950s] was to make it sharper, and harder. In that regard, Spillane was to detective fiction what punk would later become to pop music--a hard kick at the door of social convention that in retrospect seems inevitable.Based on this, a cheeky chap might wish to tack an addendum onto Raymond Chandler’s statement, from “The Simple Art of Murder,” in which he says that “Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse ...” Spillane, in turn, gave the kind of people who commit murder permission to do so without either guilt or emotion. “I, the Jury” means never having to say you’re sorry.
Both punk and Spillane coarsened their art forms but also centered them. In [Dashiell] Hammett’s books, scant sexual encounters were mostly implied. In Spillane’s books, the sex was overt, often more an act of aggression than love. And when Spillane’s characters were shot, they bled painfully and profusely.
READ MORE: “Mickey Spillane Wrote Here,” by Alexa James (Times Herald-Record).
The King in Perpetuity
Although he was born in Chicago in 1888, Raymond Thornton Chandler moved with his divorced mother, Florence, to England in 1895. After attending preparatory school in London, he studied international law in France and Germany before returning to Britain and embarking on a literary career that produced, early on, mostly book reviews and bad poetry. However, he did manage to publish 27 of his poems, as well as a short story called “The Rose-Leaf Romance,” before returning to the States in 1912. He then labored at a variety of jobs (including as a tennis-racket stringer and as the bookkeeper for a creamery in Los Angeles) until 1917, when he enlisted as a private in the Canadian Army and was sent to the French front lines during World War I. Discharged at Vancouver, Canada, in 1919, he moved back to L.A., and in 1924, wed Pearl Eugenie “Cissy” Pascal. Already twice married and divorced, she was also 18 years older than the future novelist, yet “was a lively, original, intelligent, mature, youthful-looking woman who seemed precisely right for a man of Chandler’s age and experience ...,” according to biographer Jerry Speir. By this time, Chandler was on the payroll of a Southern California oil syndicate, just as the oil industry around L.A. was starting to, well, gush. He originally signed on with that syndicate as a bookkeeper, but--despite his distaste for an industry he believed was dominated by corrupt opportunists--eventually rose to the position of vice president.
However, as business pressures intensified during the Depression, and Cissy’s health began to fail with age, Chandler commenced drinking heavily and engaging in affairs with office secretaries. In 1932, he was fired from his job with the oil syndicate. To ease the consequent drain on his savings, he turned back to fiction writing, and in 1933 saw his first short story published in Black Mask, the most noteworthy of America’s cheap, mass-market “pulp magazines.” Speir explains:
It was an 18,000-word story called “Blackmailers Don’t Shoot” and caused the editorial staff to wonder if this unknown man were a genius or crazy. The story was so well polished that not a phrase could be cut, thus the praise for his “genius.” But in his compulsive drive for perfection, [Chandler] had also tried to “justify” the right margin, as printers say. He had tried to make the typed page appear with even margins on both the left and right, like a printed page--thus the concern for his possible “craziness.”Chandler relished mystery writing because it seemed to lack pretension, and the pulps’ restrictions on word length and subject matter compelled him to master the art of storytelling. Never a past master of plotting, Chandler found his own strengths instead in creating emotion through description and dialogue, and in presenting a prose idiom that melded the precision of his prep-school English with the vigor of American vernacular speech.
His first novel, The Big Sleep (which he wrote in three months), hit bookstores in 1939 and introduced the character who would come to be synonymous with, and long outlive, his creator: wisecracking, chess-playing, late-30s L.A. private eye Philip Marlowe. Marlowe embodied the author’s conception (spelled out in his classic 1944 essay, “The Simple Art of Murder”) of the gumshoe as “a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor--by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and good enough for any world. I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things.”
Chandler hadn’t intended to write mysteries for the rest of his life, but that’s exactly what he did. Thank goodness. After Sleep, he penned six more Marlowe adventures, including what are arguably his finest two: Farewell, My Lovely (1940) and The Long Goodbye (1953). He also took a turn in the early ’40s as a Hollywood scriptwriter, contributing to such films as Double Indemnity (1943) and writing The Blue Dahlia (1946), the screenplay of which received an Oscar nomination, before he soured on the whole enterprise. (He later worked with Alfred Hitchcock on a movie adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train; but the renowned director was apparently not fond of the results, and replaced Chandler.) In 1954, just a year after The Long Goodbye was published, Cissy died from fibrosis of the lungs, sending her then 66-year-old husband into a “long nightmare” of mourning that left him with severe depression and resulted in at least one suicide attempt. Biographers like Frank McShane (The Life of Raymond Chandler, 1976) have remarked on the mixture in Chandler’s stories of toughness and sentimentality, and how “the emotional sensitivity that made [Chandler’s] literary achievement possible also made him miserable as a human being.” That miserableness was much in evidence during the last five years of Chandler’s life. He survived it, in part, through the ministrations of Helga Greene, his London literary agent and friend (and, in the months prior to his death, his fiancée), and went on to compose Playback, which was based on a screenplay he’d written in 1947. That novel reached bookstore shelves just 16 months before he passed away on March 26, 1959.
When Raymond Chandler died, he left behind an unfinished manuscript titled The Poodle Springs Story, which Robert B. Parker (a novelist who shows distinctive Chandlerian influences in his own novels, featuring a Boston P.I. named Spenser) would complete and see published, as simply Poodle Springs, in 1989. The author left in his wake, too, a stylistic legacy that has inspired successive generations of detective novelists; without Chandler (along with Hammett and Macdonald) having shown them the way, people such as Parker, Michael Connelly, Timothy Harris, Arthur Lyons, Max Allan Collins, Robert Crais, Walter Mosley, Sara Paretsky, Paco Ignacio Taibo II, and Loren D. Estleman might never have found their way into writing crime fiction. The success of movies made from Chandler’s stories (especially Humphrey Bogart’s 1946 The Big Sleep and James Garner’s Marlowe, a 1969 flick based on The Little Sister), as well as radio shows, television series, and even comic books based on his work makes us forget that he only ever published seven novels and 24 short stories during his lifetime.
The impact of his legacy has far exceeded the limits of his artistic fabrication. He gave the world an indelible image of mid-20th-century Los Angeles as a city where lawlessness and luxury were old drinking buddies, and trust was a rare commodity--a rather different place from what Chandler himself had encountered during his first, pre-World War I foray to Southern California. (In The Little Sister, he has Marlowe say, “I used to like this town. A long time ago. ... [It] was just a big dry sunny place with ugly homes and no style, but goodhearted and peaceful.”) This author also bequeathed us an archetype of the fictional private eye as a tired latter-day knight who, though he has traded his helmet for a fedora, still knows how to rescue a damsel in distress. That archetype has been altered in the decades since Chandler’s demise, but its shadow can still be seen behind many of the crime-novel protagonists working today.
As McShane put it in his introduction to the wonderful 1988 anthology, Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe: A Centennial Celebration, “Chandler was a real artist. He created a character who has become a part of American folk mythology, and in writing about Los Angeles, he depicted a world of great beauty and seamy corruption--the American reality. He made words dance, and readers continue to respond to his magic.”
So, on the occasion of the man’s 118th birthday, let us drink a toast to Raymond Chandler: an unusual man, but one of the best writers in his own world and good enough for any world.
READ MORE: “Raymond Chandler: An Appreciation,” by George Pelecanos (Your Flesh Magazine); “45 Calibrations of Raymond Chandler,” by Peter Straub.
Saturday, July 22, 2006
An Actor of Class and Character
Warden’s film career spanned five decades, beginning with a role in 1951’s The Man With My Face and followed quickly by a three-year stint on the TV sitcom Mr. Peepers. His first memorable role, however, came in 1957 when he played a salesman who was anxious for a quick decision in a murder case, in the film 12 Angry Men.
The Washington Post brought a personal note to its own coverage of Warden’s death. The actor had played a Post editor in 1976’s All the President’s Men, the film version of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s book about their breaking of the Watergate scandal.
Harry M. Rosenfeld, the Post metropolitan editor played by Mr. Warden, recalled last night how the actor “sat in my office” in the newsroom, watching him at work as part of his preparation. ...Over the course of his long career, Warden had roles in over 100 movies, including including From Here to Eternity (1953), The Thin Red Line (1964), Shampoo (1975), The Verdict (1982), Heaven Can Wait (1978), The Presidio (1988), While You Were Sleeping (1995), Bulworth (1998), and The Replacements (2000).
While in Washington, Rosenfeld said, Mr. Warden made friends quickly and beat the editor badly at tennis. He said news of the death left him “deeply saddened.”
POSTSCRIPT FROM J. KINGSTON PIERCE: Despite all the prominent film roles Jack Warden had, probably my fondest memories of this actor come from a pair of TV crime series in which he starred. The first was 1976’s short-lived Jigsaw John, a Carroll O’Connor production in which Warden acted the part of Los Angeles Police Department special investigator John St. John (“called Jigsaw because of his methodical way of piecing together clues,” recalls Richard Meyers in TV Detectives). Introduced in a 1975 teleflick called They Only Come Out at Night, St. John was supposed to be famous for his crime-solving acumen, but audiences didn’t find his escapades quite as awe-inspiring as the crooks he put behind bars; Jigsaw John was cancelled after 25 weeks. Warden, though, came back to series television a decade later in Crazy Like a Fox (1984-1986). Here, he played a seat-of-his-pants, almost-anything-goes, adventure-loving San Francisco private eye named Harrison “Harry” Fox Sr., who was always looking for legal help and free legwork from his son, the far more conservative attorney Harrison Fox Jr. (John Rubinstein). The pairing of these two characters was absolutely terrific, even if the plots of their comedy-drama series tended toward the outrageous at times. All Harrison Jr. wanted, it seemed, was to put food on the table for his wife and young son, while Harry was all about the thrill of the chase and the clever con that would expose a criminal--and inevitably cause his son to cringe before his white-shoe lawyer buddies. For his Crazy Like a Fox work, Warden was twice nominated for Emmys in the category of Leading Actor in a Comedy Series. He should’ve won.
READ MORE: “Jack Warden, 85; Prolific Film, TV Actor,” by Valerie J. Nelson (Los Angeles Times); “Jack Warden,” by Ed Gorman (Mystery*File).
Rookie of the Year
is perhaps the finest, most eloquent portrayal of life on “the Job,” disdaining heroics for the give-and-take of unforgiving streets. ... An intelligent man who can combine the grandiosity of police theory with the nuts-and-bolts daily grind of the street cop, Conlon articulates not merely the gruff law officer’s take on things, complete with police vernacular and acronyms, but he’s unafraid to offer a glimpse into the gamut of emotions that cops go through, as well. One learns quickly that the Job is frequently mundane and fraught with red tape; that the “bosses” hold their officers accountable at all times; and that most cops hope for a good collar, which usually translates into a gun arrest. Conlon is a dedicated policeman with good instincts, and he makes enough collars (including successful gun arrests) and has connections with the right people in the department--often the only way to rise up through the NYPD hierarchy--that he achieves detective rank in one of the city’s busiest precincts. Blue Blood is filled with accounts of frustration (a gun raid that turns out bogus, due to a lying informer), horror (having friends killed in the World Trade Center attacks) and elation (the chance to work directly for the police commissioner). ... Ed Conlon showcases the humanity of the NYPD in all of its glory and with its abundant foibles, and the reader gains a truer sense of what it really means to carry a gun and a shield--and the awesome responsibility it puts upon men and women who, more often than not, are just like you and me.Given that FOX tends to seriously underestimate the intelligence of its audience (with a few notable exceptions, including the Hugh Laurie series, House), and that X-Men III drew very mixed reviews, there’s every reason to be cynical about the prospects for this series. Also, because decent TV cop shows come few and far between; for every Homicide: Life on the Street or Crime Story, you get five or six T.J. Hookers. Still, Blue Blood gives Ratner and his writing partner, Neil Tolkin, good “bones” to start with--a behind-the-scenes perspective on life as a rookie cop--and viewers might finally be hungry for a police drama that’s not a Law & Order or CSI spin-off. Cross your fingers.
Friday, July 21, 2006
Evidently Worth the Torment
In association with her victory, McDermid received £3,000 and a handmade oak beer cask (fortunately, not a full-size specimen).
The Torment of Others was one of five books shortlisted for this year’s commendation. The other nominees were: Strange Blood, by Lindsay Ashford; One Last Breath, by Stephen Booth; The Coffin Trail, by Martin Edwards; The Various Haunts of Men, by Susan Hill; and Fleshmarket Close, by Ian Rankin. Votes for the winner were cast online by interested readers.
My Wit Is Quick
If you’re unable to listen to the show, the audio should be available here at about 3 p.m. ET.
(Thanks to Bill Crider for the heads up.)
Thursday, July 20, 2006
Welcome, Amanda!
Congratulations, David and Maili!
Amanda shares her birthday--July 20--with some other noteworthy women, including Scout Larue Willis (daughter of Bruce and Demi, 1991), Julia Syriani, Miss Universe-Lebanon 1996 (born 1977), marathoner Jenny Spangler (born 1963), actress Donna Dixon, aka “Mrs. Dan Akroyd” (1957), singer Kim “Betty Davis Eyes” Carnes (1946), Dinner Party artist Judy Chicago (1939), actress Natalie Wood (1938), U.S. Senator Barbara Mikulski (1936), British historian Cicely Veronica Wedgwood, (1910) and silent-film-era sex symbol Theda Bara (1890).
Happy birthday, Amanda, and thanks to Brainy History for the dates.
Ali’s Excellent Adventure
I confess, when January Magazine contributing editor Ali Karim (shown on the left in this photograph, with novelist James Rollins) sent me his 5,792-word report on the first annual ThrillerFest, hosted earlier this month by the International Thriller Writers, I was at a loss as to how best to treat it in either The Rap Sheet or January proper. However, George Easter, editor of Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine, has saved me the trouble by publishing Ali’s piece in its entirety on his own Web site. Although much has already been written about ThrillerFest (see examples here, here, and here), I think you’ll agree that this account is among the most comprehensive, as well as the most entertaining. Included in its numerous highlights: Jeffery Deaver’s admission that he’ll likely be remembered best for his 2004 historical thriller, Garden of Beasts; Lee Child’s witty comment about how he “names most of his secondary characters from stationary items”; and Ali’s clever scheme to shoot a photograph of ITW Lifetime Achievement Award recipient Clive Cussler sitting down to lunch with Easter. All in all, a delightful recap.
Read Ali’s ThrillerFest report here.
Mrs. Peel, You’re Still Needed
Boy, do I feel old all of a sudden ...
READ MORE: “Top 10 Kick-Ass TV Divas” (E! Online); Memorable Quotes from The Avengers (International Movie Database).
Wednesday, July 19, 2006
The Verdict on Spillane
’Nuff said.
ADDENDUM: Actually, there’s a wee bit more. In light of Spillane’s death, Jiro Kimura of The Gumshoe Site asks whether a much-anticipated 18th Mike Hammer novel, The Shrinking Island (“in which Hammer is supposed to marry [his secretary/partner] Velda”), will see print in the near future. Does anybody have more information about this book? If it’s unfinished, perhaps Spillane pal Max Allan Collins could take a whack at completing the story and bringing it to the reading public. Just a thought ...
Who Knows What Novels Lurk ... ?
Lucky bastard. And he says he’s working on a second novel now, again featuring a prominent historical author: Jack London. “In some ways, he was the first writer to become a huge success because of the magazine industry,” Malmont explains. “It was a new mass media and he sold and sold and sold and made a lot of money. So in researching these writers and their macho manly adventures, I found they all had their roots in Jack London, who had done it first and better. ... So I’m going to tell the story of his last year. Here’s this incredibly famous man--the first writer celebrity--and [he] makes a fortune, loses a fortune, and is dead at the age of 40. Today he’s mostly known as “the wolf guy,” but he wrote science fiction, fantasy, sports tales--he was a Socialist with an agenda, and I think there’s a great love story to be told there.”Well, I don’t. I do it when I get up. I used to be a 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. writer, but when our son was born, I had to give that up fast. After about a year, he got into a groove where he would wake up at 5 a.m. consistently, and I’d get up with him so my wife could sleep before I went to work. After about a couple of weeks, I saw that my laptop wasn’t doing anything so I thought I’d sit down and write Chapter 1 just to see how it would come out. If it matched the idea I had been kicking around in my head for a couple years, I thought maybe I’d keep trying. Because I had never written a novel before.
I didn’t even tell my wife I was doing it. I had involved her in too many crazy schemes already, so I just kept it secret and wrote from about 5:30 to 7:30 a.m. Finally, after a year, I gave her the title page on Mother’s Day. She looked it at and said, “You’re writing a book?” And I said, “No, I already wrote it! It’s finished.” Before I had thought about making it into a screenplay, but that’s the wrong kind of medium for telling this story. I’d have to give up too much. But I finished it in May 2004, had an agent in October, sold it April of 2005 and it just came out in May.
I look forward to finding out.
Now You See It
Explains writer David Robinson: “Some small part of her latest novel, The Bullet Trick, began the first time she visited Berlin. She had another novella to write first, and Tamburlaine Must Die meant steeping herself in 17th-century London. She wasn’t thinking about Berlin, about cabaret, and a trick--like the one in the title for which the magician’s assistant has to catch between her teeth a bullet aimed at her head--that could so easily turn to murder. She was, however, dreaming of it. ‘I had this recurring dream about the last scene of the book for well over a year,’ she explains. ‘These things are a bit odd, but your mind doesn’t shut down when you go to sleep, so maybe it’s natural.’”
Read the whole article here. And The Scotsman offers an “exclusive extract” from The Bullet Trick here.