Of Stars, Send-ups, and Spies

First of all, let me thank Megan Abbott, author of the noirish new historical thriller, The Song Is You, for her generous contributions to The Rap Sheet over the last seven days. Her perspective on writing, film, and period atmospherics were much appreciated--not just by those of us at The Rap Sheet, but by readers, who flocked here in rather extraordinary numbers last week, just to see what Megan had to say. And I’m quite pleased to repeat her news from yesterday, that--after a brief but necessary hiatus to promote The Song Is You--she will be joining this blog as a regular contributor.

Second, having finally escaped from other responsibilities for the time being, I can report a variety of other news related to this genre:

• Is this the face of Philip Marlowe, the hard-drinking and cynical, yet philosophical Los Angeles private eye introduced in Raymond Chandler’s 1939 novel, The Big Sleep? Hollywood apparently thinks so. Drawing from an interview with film producer Marc Abraham, which appeared earlier this week in Louisville, Kentucky’s Courier-Journal newspaper, Cinematical confirms rumors that 43-year-old English actor Clive Owen will play Marlowe in a feature-length film based “on one of Raymond Chandler’s detective stories,” though Abraham “didn’t specify which story would be adapted ...” Now, I haven’t been big on the prospects of bringing Chandler’s soiled knight back to television, especially if he’s to be “modernized” and played again by Elliot Gould. But Owen, despite his being a Brit, might have the grit, depth, and faint charm necessary to step into the scuffed shoes of L.A.’s most famous fictional detective. True he isn’t James Garner, who I think did the best job of portraying Chandler’s P.I. (in 1969’s Marlowe); nor is he David Strathairn, who one reader of Cinematical suggested for the part (and who I agree would be an excellent choice). However, Owen has at least shown his chops in a couple of previous sleuthing roles, as Detective Chief Inspector Ross Tanner in the UK psychological thriller Second Sight (1999), and as author Mark Timlin’s doped-up South London gumshoe in the 1996 series Sharman. And he’s won plaudits for his role as an anti-hero in Children of Men, the recent film adaptation of P.D. James’ 1992 novel of the same name. My fingers are crossed that he can bring new and appeal life to the iconic Marlowe.

• As part of his Monday series of author interviews, John Kenyon reaches out to Spokane, Washington, novelist Jess Walter--sometime crime novelist and author of the National Book Award finalist The Zero--to talk about how Walter’s journalism background informs his fiction, his feelings about the term “literary crime fiction,” and having Richard Russo pen the screenplay of his 2005 novel, Citizen Vince. Their exchange at Kenyon’s Things I’d Rather Be Doing blog can be found here.

• A year after Comedy Central star Stephen Colbert delivered a brilliant knee-capping to George W. Bush during the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner, the event’s organizers have decided to invite the much-less-controversial comedian and impersonator, Rich Little (“basically a Republican, whose jokes are reminiscent of Ronald Reagan’s, though without the edge,” as he says of himself) to their dinner this April, instead. With Bush’s public-approval ratings having once more tumbled below 30 percent, and with at least two-thirds of Americans opposed to the prez’s planned escalation of the Iraq conflict, it seems that Washington, D.C., journalists (who should have more backbone than this) are concerned about piling on to Bush’s woes. Nonetheless, “truthiness,” the Colbert-popularized term defined as “the quality of stating concepts one wishes or believes to be true, rather than the facts,” lives on at the fiction e-zine Hardluck Stories. Explaining to would-be contributors his theme for a future “special issue,” editor Dave Zeltserman writes:

What I’m looking for are the same typically brilliant noir stories that Hardluck routinely publishes, but stories that are somehow inspired by the Colbert Report show, possibly even by the concept of “truthiness.” These could be stories featuring a Colbert-type character or inspired by an episode of Colbert Report or capture the essence of what Colbert is doing or whatever else your imagination can concoct as long as Colbert, his show or “truthiness” is a key element of the story. ...

So is this is a ploy on my part to have Hardluck mentioned to millions of viewers of the Colbert Report, or am I trying to pay tribute to a national icon in a manner most befitting him--with stories of despair, crime and degradation? I think the answer is obvious.

• Michael Caine is writing “a contemporary thriller about terrorism”? Shotsmag Confidential’s Mike Stotter has the lowdown.

• Novelist-critic Mike Ripley is back with his latest “Getting Away with Murder” column in Shots, and this time he’s writing about novelist Martyn Waites’ sideline as “a practising thespian,” mystery-writer muses, Walter Mosley’s move into penning sexually explicit fiction, and the resurrection of early 20th-century crime-fictionist Raoul Whitfield in Walter Satterthwait’s newest novel, the beautifully packaged Dead Horse.

• I reported recently that the prolific Max Allan Collins and illustrator Terry Beatty are collaborating on a Hard Case Crime novel called Deadly Beloved, featuring their comic-book detective, “Ms. Tree.” But that seems not to be this pair’s only project for the year. The Berkley Publishing Group’s summer 2007 catalogue includes word about a collaboration called A Killing in Comics, due out in May and starring a former striptease artist, now in charge of her late hubby’s newspaper syndicate (distributor of the Wonder Guy superhero comic strip), who has to “find a killer among cartoonists, wives, mistresses, and minions of a different sort of ‘syndicate’--suspects with motives that are anything but heroic.”

• Finally, Bill Crider’s blog brings news that E. Howard Hunt, who along with G. Gordon Liddy engineered the first break-in at Washington, D.C.’s Watergate complex in 1972--a crime that lead in part to President Richard M. Nixon’s notorious Watergate scandal--died earlier today at age 88. What’s the crime-fiction relevancy here? It’s that Hunt was a CIA operative turned spy novelist before he became a Republican White House “plumber.” Among his books: East of Farewell (1942), Limit of Darkness (1944), The Violent Ones (1950), The Berlin Ending (1973), and Evil Time (1992). According to the “who’s who”-like Web site, NNDB,

... Hunt was a proficient writer of spy and hard-boiled genre novels, drawing on his knowledge of CIA operations and techniques. None of his books were particularly popular until Watergate gave his name an added mystique, and several of his earlier titles were republished to fairly brisk sales. In a review, Publishers Weekly once described Hunt’s fiction as “violent, sexist and xenophobic.” He wrote more than 30 novels under his own name, thirteen as Robert Dietrich, ten as David St. John, four as Gordon Davis, and three each as John Baxter and P.S. Donoghue.

Several of his novels featured a fictional protagonist named Peter Ward, who seems to be Howard Hunt. Ward and Hunt both attended Brown University, both became polished Washington socialites, and Ward frequently traveled to overseas nations where Hunt had been stationed. Another series of Hunt novels centered on Steve Bentley, an accountant who is repeatedly drawn into foreign intrigue. In response to a long litany of negative notices about his books, Hunt once said that too many reviewers had “chosen to criticize my life rather than professionally appraise my work.”

Intriguingly, Hunt claimed that he was the real-life inspiration for the character of “Jim Phelps” in the TV series Mission: Impossible.