Everybody’s Doing It

When the folks behind Mystery Scene magazine move into the blogging world, they do it suddenly and in a big way. Editor Kate Stine sent an e-note around today, announcing that “There’s now a Mystery Scene MySpace page, a Crimespace page, and two new Mystery Scene blogs.” Those community Web pages will just have to get by on their own, without my comment. But the blogs ... now, those are interesting enough to remark upon.

The new Mystery Scene Blog is the more traditional of this pair, as it’s apparently going to draw on the talents and knowledge of Stine and her husband/co-publisher, Brian Skupin, as well as some of the mag’s contributors for posts about the history and current state of crime fiction. This blog allows the editors and writers a forum where they can remark on all things mystery-oriented, without concern about page space and word count, or waiting out a magazine production schedule and having to feature artwork with every entry. Of course, this is essentially what The Rap Sheet and other crime-fiction-oriented blogs do already, except that our content providers are usually fewer in number than what Mystery Scene might be able to field. (I wonder if Mystery Scene is actually paying real dough to its blog posters, unlike what the rest of us can do.)

That said, this Mystery Scene Blog makes a good showing straight out of the blocks with Kevin Burton Smith’s recap of a feature he wrote for the latest, 100th issue of the magazine, “100 Eyes of the Mystery Scene Era.” I commented on that piece last month, and am pleased to see that it can now reach readers beyond Mystery Scene’s circle of subscribers. The phenomenally talented Smith, who’s also the editor-creator of The Thrilling Detective Web Site, a contributing editor of January Magazine, and an irregular poster to The Rap Sheet, acknowledges in his personal blog that his list of fictional private eyes who have become prominent and/or important over the last two decades wasn’t comprehensive enough:

The problem, as Bob Seger once put it, was deciding what to leave in, and what to leave out. I wanted the list to be wide-ranging, including the expected, the unexpected and the inexplicable, a list of eyes whom I felt had somehow bent, folded and mutilated the genre--or otherwise stuck in my craw.

But I’ve been kicking myself ever since I first sent it off. How could I forget so-and-so? Why on earth did I include whatzizname? Why, why, why?

But worse are the other people--authors, fans, readers, many of whom I consider friends--who have volunteered to help out in the kicking department. And in some cases, I agree with them.

I was puzzled myself at some of the characters Smith excluded (I mean, how could he have left out Kris Nelscott’s Smokey Dalton, or Edward Wright’s John Ray Horn?). Nonetheless, his rundown represents an excellent primer for readers still relatively new to this genre, providing plenty of works--written, televised, or presented originally in theaters--that are worth catching up with, when one can lift his or her nose from the grindstone.

I’m only hoping that in the future, the Mystery Scene Blog will go well beyond what’s available in the magazine.

Already quite a bit more novel is Skupin’s Bookflings. To me, it’s most interesting elements are: (1) “Rolling Reviews”--two or three critical postings about a book as the reviewer is actually in the process of reading it, rather than just a comprehensive commentary at the end; and (2) “Something Old, Something New” reviews, which pair two books that have some similar characteristics but were published at markedly different times. For instance, Skupin critiques David Morrell’s Scavenger (2007) along with Tony Kenrick’s Blast (1983), in each of which a “former New York police detective ... is deliberately sucked into a drama he wants no part of, and ends up fighting to save the life of the woman he loves.” This is a terrific concept, designed to broaden people’s book-buying habits. As Skupin observes in his introductory note, “A lot of readers only read contemporary books, and don’t want to try something old-fashioned or out-of-date. And a lot of other readers are mired in the Golden Age, reading only tried-and-true books by their favorite writers. The contemporary group is missing out on some of the best books ever written, and the classic group is running out of things to read.” These “Something Old, Something New” reviews provide excellent literary bridges.

Both blogs have been added to The Rap Sheet’s right-hand-column roster, and we’ll keep you apprised of anything we see there that’s worth your reading, too.