Let’s Go for a Spin

• Judith Freeman, author of The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved, is interviewed at the American Heritage Web site (soon to be associated once more with a print magazine of the same name). My favorite answer of hers comes in response to questioner Allen Barra’s inquiry into Chandler’s “strange on-again, off-again affair with the City of Angels”:

He had a definite love-hate relationship with L.A. I think he loved it when he first arrived, in 1913, and it must have been a pretty idyllic place then, very different from London, the city where he’d spent much of his childhood. He really took to driving and loved automobiles. But L.A. was a place that got despoiled quite rapidly, and the banality and lack of taste in a population composed increasingly of transplanted Midwesterners--the so called hog-and-hominy crowd--began to disgust him. On the one hand, you had religious nuts of every stripe, and on the other, you had bunko artists bilking the ignorant rubes, as well as gangsters, bad cops, and corrupt politicians. Smog arrived, and stupid fads, and objects with built-in obsolescence. After a while L.A became Paradise Despoiled for him, a grotesque and impossible place to live. California, he said, was the department-store state--everything in the catalogue you could get better somewhere else. He lost it as a place to set his fiction, because he had to either love a city or hate it to write about it, or maybe both, he said, “like a woman.” Eventually L.A. bored him. It became “just a tired old whore” to him. Still, he put it on the literary map. His relationship with L.A. was very symbiotic. The city gave him his material, and in return he gave it a lasting identity. No one wrote better about L.A. or captured more of its unique essence.

The complete interview can be found here.

• Mike Stotter has finally resurrected his Shotsmag Confidential blog, after its lengthy period of fallowness. He reports today that the “Féile Fidelma, an international gathering of enthusiasts of [Peter Tremayne’s] Sister Fidelma Mysteries, will be held in Cashel, [County] Tipperary, Ireland, from September 5 [through] 7, 2008.” Stotter adds that “Registrations for the event have already begun and are accessible via http://www.cashelartsfest.com/ and http://www.sisterfidelma.com/. The registration fee, for three days of lectures and the dinner is U.S. $195 or equivalents. There is a 10 percent discount for registrations before May 1, 2008.”

• Marshal Zeringue’s latest guest at Writers Read is Maureen Jennings, author of the Detective William Murdoch historical series (A Journeyman to Grief), as well as The K Handshape, the second of her Christine Morris books (due out in February). Jennings has apparently had a very diverse reading pile of late, including a biography of Adolf Hitler and Linwood Barclay’s new thriller, No Time for Goodbye. You’ll find her complete list here.

• A whole book of crime-fiction short stories by Max Brand (aka Frederick Schiller Faust), the early 20th-century writer best remembered for penning tales of the Old West? That’s almost as unusual a discovery as last year’s The Evidence of the Sword and Other Mysteries, a collection of 13 brief yarns and a couple of novelettes by Italian-British writer Rafael Sabatini, who also wrote The Sea Hawk (1915) and Captain Blood (1922). More about Masquerade, the new Brand collection (published by Crippen & Landru and edited by William F. Nolan) can be found here.

• After falling hard for Falling, John Connor’s fourth Detective Constable Karen Sharpe novel (after A Child’s Game, 2006), Material Witness blogger Ben Hunt fires 10 questions off to the author, their subjects ranging from Connor’s favorite authors to his favorite read of 2007. Look here for his answers.

• Craig McDonald answers questions from Cameron Hughes of CHUD.com (and January Magazine) about his new novel, Head Games. During their exchange, McDonald talks about connections between Pancho Villa, Osama bin Laden, and George W. Bush; the roots of his protagonist, writer Hector Lassiter; and his second collection of crime-novelist interviews, Rogue Males. Read it all here.

• We don’t often see “double format” novels these days, two books packaged together (although Hard Case Crime has a double scoop of Robert Bloch works due to be published in April). But Bookgasm’s Bruce Grossman wishes there were more, as he considers a trio of two-for-one novels by Max Allan Collins, Ellery Queen, and Edgar Rice Burroughs. Click here to find his full critique.

• I haven’t yet laid my hands on the December issue of Men’s Journal, but it evidently contains a piece titled “Crooks, Spies, and Private Eyes,” in which one Jonathan Miles selects what he thinks are the 15 best thrillers ever written. His picks:

15. Havana, by Stephen Hunter
14. Red Lights, by Georges Simenon
13. From Russia With Love, by Ian Fleming
12. The Last Good Kiss, by James Crumley
11. Hard Revolution, by George Pelecanos
10. The Thirty-nine Steps, by John Buchan
9. Dog Soldiers, by Robert Stone
8. The Deep Blue Goodbye, by John D. MacDonald
7. Freedomland, by Richard Price
6. The Great Escape, by Paul Brickhill
5. The Tears of Autumn, by Charles McCarry
4. The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler
3. Killshot, by Elmore Leonard
2. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, by John le Carré
1. Rogue Male, by Geoffrey Household

Let the debate begin.

• Speaking of subjects that might stimulate heated discussion, historical novelist Allen Massie contends in The Spectator that Agatha Christie was “more serious than Chandler and [Dashiell] Hammett, simply because murder horrifies and disgusts her (even while she employs it for our amusement) as it doesn’t apparently horrify them.” (Hat tip to Petrona.)

• The Woman Chaser? Wow, I’ve never even heard of Noir of the Week’s latest movie pick, a 1999 picture starring Patrick Warburton (you know, from The Tick), much less seen it. How ’bout you?

• And finally, although it has nothing whatsoever to do with crime fiction, I found this post at Jaime J. Weinman’s Something Old, Nothing New blog quite amusing.