will star Welles--who’s pictured at left--in the role of Lamont Cranston, aka “The Shadow,” while the other (originally aired in 1952) will have him playing con artist Harry Lime (who he’d originally portrayed in the 1949 film The Third Man). It’s a Mystery is set to be Webcast at 11 a.m. ET. Click here to listen in on the show.• In preparation for the centenary of Daphne du Maurier’s birth, on May 13, British gothic fictionist Patrick McGrath writes in The Guardian about how much he appreciates the ways in which du Maurier addressed “the dark side” in her short stories.
• Deadly Pleasures editor George Easter brings this news about the next book from Edward Wright, whose third novel, Red Sky Lament, last year won the Ellis Peters Historical Crime Award. According to Easter, Wright has a new standalone mystery-thriller, Damnation Falls, due out from Orion in the UK come September.
Plot: Randall Wilkes, his big-city journalism career in ruins, has returned after twenty years to Pilgrim’s Rest, the Tennessee hill town where he grew up. He has taken on a lucrative but low-prestige writing job for Sonny McMahan, a former governor and Randall’s boyhood friend, whose own career is under a shadow and who needs a ghost-written autobiography to ease his way back into politics. Faye McMahan, Sonny’s mother, is addled with age, imagining that her dead husband is alive and worrying that her son might be in danger. Amid a violent autumn storm, Randall finds Faye hideously murdered, hanged by the neck from a bridge over the town landmark called Damnation Falls. Within days, another person connected to the McMahan clan is murdered in an even more grisly fashion. And the bones of a third, long-buried murder victim--a young woman--have emerged from the earth.No word on a U.S. publication date yet.
• Miami Vice’s Michael Mann and Leonardo DiCaprio are apparently teaming up again (they previously worked together on The Aviator) for a period film based around a Hollywood murder investigation. Cinematical reports that “The film will take place in the 1930s on the MGM lot and will apparently feature cameos from people like Judy Garland and Bugsy Siegel (people playing them, anyway). The plot will likely follow the detective as he is hired by the studio to clean up a scandal involving a starlet who may or may not have murdered her husband. The only other part of the script that has been revealed is that there will be a major shootout that takes place in the Trocadero nightclub on Sunset Boulevard. Despite the fact that no studio is yet confirmed (New Line has been revealed to have bid, but too low), the film will start shooting in February.”
• I, for one, am considerably more optimistic and intrigued by this Mann-DiCaprio match-up than I am by Mel Gibson’s recent proposal to shoot a sequel to the 1994 film Maverick. While I greatly enjoyed and even own a DVD copy of that movie, which was of course based on the 1950s James Garner TV series Maverick; and while Garner has allegedly expressed interest in reprising his role as “Pappy” Beau Maverick in the sequel, Gibson has proved himself in recent years to be a religious nuthead and anti-Semite. As a result, I’ve avoided his films of recent date. However, if Garner--a proud liberal--can stomach Gibson as Bret Maverick once more, then I guess I can, too.
• Soon there will be no one other than me left to interview Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon, author of the new more-or-less crime novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (as well as the 2004 Sherlock Holmes homage The Final Solution). The Sydney Morning Herald’s takes a crack at him here; The New York Times visits with Chabon in Sitka, Alaska, here; and National Public Radio’s Terry Gross talks with the novelist about his story’s premise and his writing process here. Meanwhile, Salon contributor Sarah Goldstein asks Chabon the obvious question:
The book is set in Sitka, Alaska, which you have made the temporary home to Yiddish-speaking Jews, in a world where Israel doesn’t exist. Why make it a detective story on top of all that?All of Salon’s conversation can be found here.
I wanted to find a way, narratively, to range as freely as I could across the whole of this place and every level of this society. I just kind of felt it as an intuitive leap that a detective, a policeman with a badge, would be able to go everywhere, see everything. He would be informed, he would understand how the world operates--the written and the unwritten rules.
Some moment around the time that I was conceiving of this book I reread Isaac Babel’s short stories and I just felt like there was a stylistic link there between Babel and [Raymond] Chandler. Isaac Babel was a hard-boiled writer; he was tough and deliberately so. He almost wore his hardness as a badge of honor in a way that I felt like I recognized also from Chandler and [Dashiell] Hammett. And he was writing around the same time as Hammett and Hemingway; it just didn’t feel like a totally ridiculous comparison to make.
I was also reading a lot of Ross Macdonald while I was writing this and I noticed not only did he have short chapters but he would sometimes break a scene right in the middle into two chapters, right on a line of dialogue.
• And speaking of Chabon, The New York Times Magazine’s today published the concluding, 15th installment of his serial novella, Gentlemen of the Road, a swashbuckling historical adventure. If you haven’t been keeping up, Chapter 1 is located here. The author answers a few questions about this novella here. Next week, Scottish crime writer Ian Rankin debuts in the Times Magazine’s Funny Pages with Doors Open, a supposedly “light” thriller (not starring Inspector John Rebus) that revolves around “an audacious art heist.”
Chapters of this serial will appear in the Times for 14 weeks. A hardcover edition of Doors Open is already slated for publication by the UK’s Orion in the fall of 2008.• Why weren’t there comic books like this one, back when I was still a kid? I would likely have become a crime-fiction fan much sooner than I did.
• Donald E. Westlake talks with Scott Butki in what we’re promised is only the first section of a two-part interview having to do with Westlake’s latest novel, What’s So Funny? Read their exchange here.
• Bill Crider wrote about mystery-western crossovers a few years back in January Magazine. Now, author Chap O’Keefe offers still more about this convergence of genres at the Black Horse Westerns site. (Hat tip to Grumpy Old Bookman.)
• Finally, Mystery Scene co-publishers Kate Stine and Brian Skupin have blitzed the crime-fiction blogosphere with a plea for help in nixing a proposed U.S. postal rate hike that they say “unfairly targets small magazines to the considerable advantage of larger ones. It’s going to put a number of magazines out of business and cause considerable hardships for many others.” More information about this rate hike, which is evidently being pushed by media giant Time Warner, can be found here. And a petition to kill this rate-hike proposal is available here. I’ve already signed. How about you?
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