The Thrill of the New

How in the heck did founder-editor Kevin Burton Smith arrange to have it snow over at The Thrilling Detective Web Site? You’ve got to see it to believe it can happen! I definitely want to know what he did to change the climate in his little corner of the blogosphere, and how I can steal that brilliant idea for The Rap Sheet next winter.

Meanwhile, Thrilling Detective fans will want to know that my friend Smith is in the midst of piecemealing out the latest update of his almost 9-year-old site. The cover illustration is up, as are short stories by Jack Bludis (“Blondes, Blondes, Blondes!”), Karl Koweski (“The Last to Know”), and Stephen D. Rogers (“Last Call”), with promises of an additional fourth, to be delivered by the suddenly everywhere-to-be-seen Duane Swierczynski (The Blonde). “Already,” Smith writes in his blog, “I think that, possibly, this is the best and strongest bunch of stories we’ve ever done.” He goes on to note that on top of those original yarns, “we’ve also got excerpts from two new releases for you to sample”: Michael Siverling’s The Sorceror’s Circle (“a good old-fashioned P.I. romp with a few decidedly modern touches”) and Frederick Zackel’s Cocaine and Blue Eyes (“a classic; a stone-cold slice of seventies private eye fiction that has been criminally out of print for far too long”). Smith promises, too, to post the results of his year-end Cheap Thrill Awards “in the next few days.”

Personally, though, I look forward most to Smith’s “What’s New on the Site” column, in which, with each issue, he lists all of the new or expanded entries in the Thrilling Detective database of crack, crappy, and downright creepy fictional sleuths. Whenever I am in the mood to idly browse the Web, it’s to this database that I go first, assured that even an old crime-fiction hand like me can learn something new and interesting.

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Speaking of new issues ... the December/January edition of Mystery News arrived the other day at Rap Sheet world headquarters. Its contents include a satisfyingly in-depth interview with Southern crime novelist Ace Atkins, the author of this year’s White Shadow, a book based on the real-life murder in 1955 of a Tampa, Florida, rackets boss; Stephen Miller’s check-in with some of the authors (Libby Hellman and Victor Gischler among them) he has profiled in the recent past; and another interview, this one with award-winning Icelandic mysterymaker Arnaldur Indridason (Voices). Oh, and Marv Lachman reintroduces us to Lillian de la Torre (1902-1993), who early on wrote tales for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine starring 18th-century lexicographer--and, it seems, part-time sleuth--Dr. Samuel Johnson, and later penned three historical crime novels, perhaps the best known of those being Elizabeth Is Missing (1945).