“Vice” on DVD, Ellroy on Hammett

Still feeling a bit under the weather, and recovering from last evening’s memorial to a late friend (which I attended along with hundreds of other people), I’m going to confine myself to a round-up column this afternoon. With any luck, I shall feel better mañana.

• Do you have a couple hundred extra bucks burning a hole in your pocket? Then you might want to plunk them down on one of two complete TV series sets scheduled to become available on DVD between now and Christmas. According to the site TV Shows on DVD, the five-season run of Miami Vice will go on sale November 13. That set comprises 27 discs, including a number of bonus features. And then, 10 days later, the much anticipated, 41-disc, 105-episode boxed set of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. is scheduled to reach stores. Although there were fears that this latter set might be short on bonus material, the rundown looks pretty generous to me: nine featurettes; Solo, the original color U.N.C.L.E. pilot; 17 on-camera interviews with stars David McCallum and Robert Vaughn, director Richard Donner, and others; plus much more--10 hours of extras in all.

• While we’re on the subject of televised crime dramas, Law & Order: Criminal Intent fans will want to remember that this series will have its fall season debut tomorrow night, Thursday, at 10 p.m. EST/PST on the USA Network, rather than on its former home, NBC. Fortunately, both Vincent D’Onofrio and Kathryn Erbe will be returning this year as partners, but alternating lead Chris Noth will be assigned his third new partner in as many years, in the rather lovely form of Alicia Witt (formerly of Cybill).

• Crime Always Pays blogger Declan Burke draws my attention to a piece in this last weekend’s Sunday Tribune newspaper about Ireland’s “sudden blossoming” of crime fiction, “a genre not normally considered a staple of Irish literature.” The piece mentions the work of Tana French, Declan Hughes, Paul Charles, Andrew Nugent, and others. The paper concludes:

We now have a successful genre responding not just to a particular society but to a literary heritage that is punchy and almost symbiotically linked with the society it's written in.

It’s a trick previous Irish crime novelists couldn’t master.

Thankfully, that doesn’t appear to be a problem anymore.

Strangely, there’s no mention in this article of Ken Bruen, who seems to get more attention in the States than he does in his native land.

• The British Crime Writers’ Association hasn’t even declared the winner yet of its 2007 Short Story Award, but it’s already welcoming entries for its 2008 Dagger Awards competition. Karen Meek has more details in her Euro Crime blog, along with a list of “possible candidates for the International Dagger.”

• From the “Better Late Than Never” file: I don’t want to forget (as I have previously) to make mention of James Ellroy’s intriguing recent article in The Guardian about Dashiell Hammett. In it, Ellroy argues that Hammett’s fiction was informed by his guilt over being a Pinkerton detective. He observes that the disjuncture between the operative-author’s willingness to stick with his work and his recognition of the sometimes dubious ethics inherent in that job

explains why Hammett’s vision is more complex than that of his near-contemporary Raymond Chandler. Chandler wrote the man he wanted to be--gallant and with a lively satirist’s wit. Hammett wrote the man he feared he might be--tenuous and sceptical in all human dealings, corruptible and addicted to violent intrigue. He stayed on the job. The job defined him. His job description was in some part “Oppression”. That made him in large part a fascist tool. He knew it. He later embraced Marxist thought as a rightwing toady and used leftist dialectic for ironic definition. Detective work both fuelled and countermanded his chaotic moral state and gave him something consistently engaging to do.

The critic David T. Bazelon wrote of Hammett: “The core of his art is the masculine figure in American society. He is primarily a job holder. He goes at his job with a blood-thirsty determination that proceeds from an unwillingness to go beyond it. This relationship to the job is perhaps typically American. The idea of doing or not doing a job competently has replaced the whole larger issue of good and evil.”

Hammett lived and wrote in the agitated condition this implies.

You can read Ellroy’s full piece here.

• Another thing I forgot to mention: Hard Case Crime’s Charles Ardai has inaugurated a new discussion group at the Barnes & Noble Web site. “The goal,” he explained in Crimespace, “is to have discussions on various crime fiction-related topics in a way and a location that draws in not only hardcore aficionados and professionals like us, but also the wider mass-market audience of mystery readers that visit B&N’s site. Scheduled participants on the ‘pro’ side include Jason Starr, Ken Bruen, Allan Guthrie, Megan Abbott, Duane Swierczynski, and Charlie Huston (and me) ... and needless to say, all of you are welcome to chip in as well.” This new discussion site (which seems very much a competitor to Tom Piccirilli’s The Big Adios) can be found here.

• And did you know that English comedian-novelist Stephen Fry has a blog of his own? Yeah, neither did I. But the proof is here.