Reasons to Give Thanks, 2007

More than a bit of trouble has taken place in the world since my last Thanksgiving post: fires in Southern California, a cyclone in Bangladesh, the president/general’s seizure of “emergency powers” in Pakistan, a souring U.S. economy and the troubling decline of the American dollar, worsening turns in George W. Bush’s budget-busting war on Iraq, more weird Republican scandals in Washington, D.C.--and those are just the disasters that come immediately to mind.

Some sorry things happened, too, in the crime-fiction sphere during these last 12 months: writers Sidney Sheldon, Richard S. Prather, Donald Hamilton, Michael Dibdin, Philip R. Craig, R.D. Wingfield, John Gardner, Magdalen Nabb, Joe L. Hensley, Marc Behm, and Ira Levin perished--as did actors Ian Richardson, Barry Nelson, and Robert Goulet, all of whom had contributed to this genre; our friend Dick Adler got sick and had not only to relinquish his crime-fiction critic’s post at the Chicago Tribune, but abandon a serial novel he was writing in The Rap Sheet; two prominent Manhattan stores specializing in mystery literature, the Black Orchid Bookshop and Murder Ink, both closed; the Maltese Falcon was stolen--again--only to be replaced; Inspector John Rebus and reluctant private eye Easy Rawlins apparently concluded their literary runs; and a couple of worthy crime dramas, Crossing Jordan and Raines, were cancelled.

But this is Thanksgiving Day in the United States, traditionally a chance to recap for ourselves, if not also others, the things we ought to be thankful for from the last year. So allow me to propose the following causes for celebration:

• Murdaland and Out of the Gutter. Stylistically, these two short-story publications are quite different. The former, a bi-annual launched last fall, is more elegant in appearance and rather more professional in the tone of its tales, which often come from familiar writers. The recently released second issue of Murdaland, for instance, includes work by Scott Phillips (The Ice Harvest), Harry Hunsicker (Crosshairs), and Henry Chang (Chinatown Beat). Out of the Gutter, meanwhile, demonstrates its editor’s taste for “pieces of fiction with tremendous amounts of attitude.” On occasion, that attitude can result in work with a sophomoric edge, but there are enough stories in each thrice-annual edition that you’ll find something else worth reading. Issue No. 3, which goes on sale this month, carries a “War Is All Hell” theme (see a video promotion here). “We’ve got the Iraq War, the Civil War, WWI, WWII, and the war many of us call life right here at home,” the mag explains on its Web site. “We examine moral degeneration in the federal prison population, we have our way with Homeland Security, and we take on the official account of 9/11.” Read in tandem, these pubs show the remarkable diversity of modern crime fiction.

• The Maywrite Library. If, like me, you’re an avid wanderer through the Web’s electronic alleys, you’ve stumbled across classic crime and mystery yarns--or occasionally entire books--that are available for your viewing pleasure at no cost whatsoever. These works are old enough that their copyrights have fallen into the public domain. Some aren’t to be found anywhere but on the Web these days. Mary Read--the co-author, with her husband, Eric Mayer, of the John the Eunuch mysteries (Seven for a Secret, 2008)--is slowly compiling links to all of this free fiction at The Maywrite Library. It’s not an easy task, as she told us a few months back, “since some titles are buried in sites and less easy to find, particularly if the authors’ names are lesser known.” Yet she’s persevered, compiling links to dozens of memorable mystery yarns, developing subsidiary lists of narratives (such as her Halloween-appropriate Stories of the Supernatural page), and every once in a while reviewing these dusty delights for the Mystery*File blog. If they can still clap in their graves, largely forgotten wordsmiths such as Ernest Bramah, Octavus Roy Cohen, and R. Austin Freeman must be giving Read a supine ovation for her efforts to keep their work in view.

• The expansion of crime-fiction sites. Just over the last year, we’ve added Independent Crime, In Reference to Murder, Bang!, Crime Always Pays, Femmes Fatales, Dave’s Fiction Warehouse, Poe’s Deadly Daughters, Pulp Pusher, Hey, There’s a Dead Guy in the Living Room, and a resurrected NoirBlog to our right-hand-column rundown of daily references. Oh, and how could we forget the social-networking site Crimespace? It debuted only last spring, but has already grown into a hot spot for mystery writers seeking either assistance or the company of like minds.

• Old TV on DVD. With the exceptions of Life and K-Ville (the latter of which is already endangered by the Writers Guild of America strike), and of course the redundant forensics-based dramas, the current U.S. TV season doesn’t offer much for crime-fiction fans. Which is why, on many an evening of late, I’ve slipped a DVD of some classic gumshoe or cop show into my player, rather than be disappointed with what the networks have scheduled. As I’ve written here before, I was a huge TV-head in the 1970s; yet I thought those programs I once enjoyed would never be shown again. And, indeed, although TV production companies have, over the last few years, released DVDs of some interesting older crime series--Ironside, The Rockford Files, Columbo, and The Mod Squad, to name a few--they’ve dragged their feet on distributing many more. But where commercialism falters, capitalism leaps ahead. Thanks to Web sites such as TV Addicts, Old Time Favorites, iOffer, and TV of Your Life (about which I wrote last year), numerous old shows are available once more. Yeah, I know: these are mostly bootleg products, and the screen-image quality can be less than ideal. However, until the Hollywood studios get around to selling authorized and digitally enhanced versions--if they ever do--at least the opportunity exists to revisit shows on the order of Burke’s Law, Dan August, Hawkins, 77 Sunset Strip, Search, The Name of the Game, and yes, even the elusive Mannix. While some of these classic series hold up better than others (I was mildly disappointed, for instance, in seeing James Franciscus’ Longstreet again), others remind us of why we appreciated them in the first place. Just this week, the mail brought me the entire 13-episode run of City of Angels, the hard-to-find 1976 series that had Wayne Rogers (M*A*S*H) starring as a 1930s Los Angeles shamus. That now joins other recent acquisitions, among them Hec Ramsey and The Snoop Sisters, as well as a pair of teleflicks I thought were lost to me forever: Goodnight, My Love (1972), a noirish movie featuring Richard Boone and Michael Dunn as unlikely 1940s detective partners; and The Adventures of Nick Carter, an unsold 1972 pilot in which Robert Conrad played the once wildly popular 19th-century detective and adventurer. With my backlog of classic programming, I have no concerns about weathering today’s Writers Guild strike--even if it drags on for the next month. Or two ...

• Sherlock fans fight to save Holmes’ home. I’d like to report that the case of Undershaw, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s former residence in the Surrey village of Hindhead, is closed. But, sadly, that’s not so. As we’ve explained before (see here, here, and here), the three-story, 14-bedroom, redbrick house in which Conan Doyle lived from 1897 to 1907 with his first wife, Louise--the same dwelling in which he penned The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902), and where he allegedly commenced an affair with the woman who would become his second wife--is under threat by developers. At one point, there was a proposal to subdivide the improperly cared-for structure; however, that was stopped by order of the local borough council. Britain’s Victorian Society (which, oddly, does not include Undershaw on its roster of the top 10 endangered buildings in England and Wales) wants Conan Doyle’s home to be turned back into a hotel, which it was between 1924 and 2004. But at present, it’s being offered for sale by Guildford real-estate agents Lambert Smith Hampton. My fingers are crossed that somebody with deep pockets and an appreciation for Conan Doyle’s literary heritage can be found to purchase and refurbish Undershaw. In the meantime, though, I believe thanks should be given to all those Holmes fans--including big shots like novelist Ian Rankin--who refused, without a fight, to let this bit of crime-fiction history be razed or redeveloped out of all recognition. It’s heartbreaking to see any such site at risk--whether it be the rectory in which Dorothy L. Sayers grew up or an Edinburgh bar once frequented by Robert Louis Stevenson. But Undershaw boasts particular significance.

• The Rap Sheet’s growing up! I’d be remiss in not acknowledging some of the remarkable things that have happened with this blog over the last year. We celebrated its first anniversary in a big way, by inviting more than 100 crime novelists, book critics, and bloggers from all over the English-speaking world to choose the one crime/mystery/thriller novel that they thought had been “most unjustly overlooked, criminally forgotten, or underappreciated over the years.” (The results of that “One Book Project” are archived here). Then, to commemorate the publication of Tom Nolan’s The Archer Files: The Complete Short Stories of Lew Archer, Private Investigator, we featured on this page one of the never-before-seen Archer story fragments, “Heyday in the Blood,” that Nolan had discovered among the late novelist Ross Macdonald’s papers. Additionally, we held a contest to give away one free, signed copy of Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing; dug up or were referred to a passel more copycat crime novel covers; and continued our infrequent hosting of guest bloggers, adding Megan Abbott, R.N. “Roger” Morris, and most recently, Mark Coggins. All that, and we somehow found time to interview authors such as Linwood Barclay (No Time for Goodbye), Zöe Sharp (Second Shot), Simon Kernick (Severed), and several of the writers responsible for composing chapters of the new audiobook thriller, The Chopin Manuscript. Not a bad year for the ol’ Sheet, don’t you think?