Whew!

Back from a week away, visiting family and friends, I’m still trying to catch up with everything that happened during my mini-vacation. It’s usually the case that Thanksgiving week is slower than molasses in the Yukon. But there was a lot going on over the last seven days to miss, and more matters of note since.

• Marcus Sakey’s first novel, The Blade Itself, made Esquire magazine’s list of the “Year’s 5 Best Reads.” Writes contributor T. Jefferson Parker:

This book landed on my desk uninvited. With it was a letter from the book’s editor saying that he had never published a better debut crime novel. I looked at the stack of manuscripts sent to me for quotes. There were spiderwebs on them. I decided to read one page. Just one. Three hundred pages later I put it down. It’s smart, sad, relentless, and believable. It has style and attitude. I love Sakey’s Chicago. I love the way his characters fight the riptides of place and time that carry them so far from their good intentions. They remind me of people I’ve known.

• Speaking of “best of the year” lists, we neglected to mention that San Francisco Chronicle crime-fiction critic Eddie Muller has published his list of 10 faves from 2007. They include Christine Falls, by the pseudonymous Benjamin Black; Queenpin, by The Rap Sheet’s own Megan Abbott; In the Woods, by Tana French; and one novel that caught me completely off-guard: De Niro’s Gate, by Beirut-born author Rawi Hage. You’ll find all of Muller’s picks here.

• I was getting tired of my old computer wallpaper (tulips--yeah, I know, weak) so I was happy to find a pair of old paperback book-cover collages assembled by Bookgasm’s Bruce Grossman. One combines the fronts from works by Ellery Queen, Richard S. Prather, Mickey Spillane, and others. The second--which is the image I chose for my own screen--concentrates on Brett Halliday’s Mike Shayne novels, all of which were illustrated by the talented Robert McGinnis. You’ll find both desktop alternatives at The Big Adios.

• Barry Forshaw, author of The Rough Guide to Crime Fiction, provides the London Times with his list of “six American noir masters.” No real shockers here, although lumping David Goodis and Jim Thompson together with Ross Macdonald and Donald E. Westlake isn’t always done. (I wonder what distinction Forshaw makes between “noir” and “hard-boiled” fiction.) Meanwhile, Allan Guthrie (Hard Man) offers up his own “idiosyncratic” list of 200 noir novels, published between 1929 and 1997. Find Guthrie’s rundown here.

• How did I miss the memo about HarperCollins reissuing (in mass-market paperback size) Lawrence Block’s eight novels featuring sleepless spy Evan Tanner? Luckily, Bookgasm has been keeping up with the roll-outs. See here and here.

• While I was out of town, pseudonymous blogger CrimeFicReader continued collecting recommendations from noteworthy British and Irish crime writers of books that really ought to be placed in “the crime aficionado’s stocking” this Christmas. Since we last checked in, she’s added picks from Chris Ewan, Declan Burke, John Baker, Bernard Knight, Margaret Murphy, Steve Mosby, Brian McGilloway, Donna Moore, and our friend R.N. “Roger” Morris.

• Sad news comes from Jiro Kimura of The Gumshoe Site: Peter Haining, a onetime reporter in Britain who went on to edit anthologies of fantasy, horror, and mystery fiction, died from a heart attack on November 19. He was only 67 years old. Kimura notes that Haining “wrote a number of books about Dr. Who, Sherlock Holmes, James Bond, Hercule Poirot, Jules Maigret and pulps” (a list of his numerous works can be found here). But I remember Haining best for a wonderful overview of this genre’s development called The Classic Era of Crime Fiction. Shortly after the publication of that book in 2002, I remarked in The Rap Sheet:

Finally, let me tout a handsome new volume of cultural history, The Classic Era of Crime Fiction (Chicago Review Press). Written by Peter Haining, it traces the evolution of the modern mystery story from the 19th century through the 1950s, covering Sherlock Holmes and Britain’s “yellow-back” thrillers, as well as America’s Black Mask period and the rise of more literary yarns.

Like last year’s excellent The History of Mystery, by Max Allan Collins, Haining’s book shows both an appreciation for and an infectious curiosity about this genre’s colorful development. Even people who consider themselves well read in crime fiction are likely to discover authors they’ve never heard of--such as Peter Cheyney, whose hard-boiled novels featuring British private eye Lemmy Caution (including This Man Is Dangerous, 1936) were precursors to Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer books. And who remembers the exploits of professor-sleuth Craig Kennedy, “the American Sherlock Holmes,” who appeared in more than two dozen novels (such as The Exploits of Elaine, 1915) written by Arthur B. Reeve? In addition to excavating the roots of detective fiction, Haining devotes an intriguing--what else?--chapter to the maturation of the spy story, from James Fenimore Cooper’s The Spy (1821), starring Revolutionary War agent Harvey Birch, all the way through John Buchan’s renowned The Thirty-nine Steps (1913), Herman McNeile’s Bulldog Drummond series (including The Female of the Species, 1928), Eric Ambler’s espionage classics (such as The Mask of Dimitrios, 1939) and, of course, the best-selling titles by Ian Fleming and John le Carré.

As good as its text is, though, The Classic Era of Crime Fiction probably wouldn’t attract nearly so much attention were it not for its abundant original magazine and book jacket illustrations, from the startling (the cover of George Manville’s 1899 A Crimson Crime shows a frilly-hatted woman shooting a man in the head) to the suggestive (Bevis Winter’s Redheads Are Poison, 1948, is fronted by a long-legged beauty in a dress so sheer that one’s imagination hasn’t far to leap).

Mr. Haining will definitely be missed.

UPDATE: UK novelist Martin Edwards has posted a short tribute to Haining in his blog, ‘Do You Write Under Your Own Name?’ You can find his contribution here.

• If you need an escape from the chill and psychological blues this winter, New York magazine recommends picking up a spy novel set in some distant corner of the planet. Among its 10 selections: The Midnight Choir, by Gene Kerrigan (Dublin, Ireland); Salamander Cotton, by Richard Kunzmann (South Africa); and Hidden Moon, by James Church (Pyongyang, North Korea). Read the whole list here.

• Novelist Richard Helms is back with the second edition of his crime-fiction Webzine, The Back Alley. Included this time are stories by Bryon Quertermous, Megan Powell, and Keith Gilman. There’s also a good chunk of Frank Norris’ “classic noir” tale, McTeague, which Helms promises will “be continued in the next issue.” Look for the full Back Alley contents here.

• Here’s an odd development. Reports the Associated Press:

Deployed on high-stakes missions across the globe and surrounded by glamorous admirers, James Bond should be the perfect recruitment tool for Britain’s intelligence agencies.

But the icon gives a disorted impression of MI6’s work and may be hampering its drive to hire more minorities, Muslims and women, the service’s chief recruiter said in an interview Monday with British Broadcasting Corp. radio.

Read the full story here.

• We’re very late to the party on this one, we know ... but writer-editor Anthony Neil Smith reports that the once-popular Webzine Plots With Guns, which posted its “final issue” at the end of 2004, “will go back online in the new year, as soon as I get enough good stories to fill an issue.” Smith adds:

I’ll be doing quarterly issues. The pay will be ... well, it’ll be me buying you your drink of choice the next time I happen to see you. The standards will be higher than ever, and I’ll be pickier than ever. Looking for hard-boiled, noir and transgressive crime fiction. Every story has to have a gun in it somehow, some way (doesn’t have to play a big role. Just needs to be there). No pastiche. It’s got to feel right to find a home in PWG. ...

In 2008, we’re starting over with Issue #1. Send me your best (e-mail only). You know how to get in touch. And I promise you this won’t be a Ross Perot thing (he’s running, he’s not, he’s running again, he’s not). This time, I’m sticking around for the long haul.

It’ll be good to have Plots With Guns back in the game. We’ll let you know when the first new issue is posted.

• And British writer Mark Billingham (Death Message) is Angie Johnson-Schmit’s latest victim ... er, interviewee on the In for Questioning podcast. “In this episode,” she says, “Mark talks about his Tom Thorne police procedurals, his upcoming stand-alone novel, In The Dark, and the foreword he wrote for the fab anthology, Expletive Deleted. He also joins in the debate about genre vs. literary novels and how much sex/violence/cussin’ is too much. Find out what's on Mark’s iPod, the perks of mentioning favorite restaurants in your novels and what celebrities are reading his books.” Click here to listen in.