Why King Is the Queen

Laurie R. King’s new standalone novel, Touchstone, receives the royal treatment today in January Magazine, in a review by former Chicago Tribune crime-fiction critic Dick Adler. In case you can’t tell (ahem!), Adler really likes this novel, which he calls “a terrific combination and culmination of [King’s] work so far.”

The story takes place in post-World War I Great Britain, where Harris Stuyvesant, “a tough, shrewd agent with J. Edgar Hoover’s new American Bureau of Investigation” (later to become the FBI) is pursuing an anarchist bomber by the name of Richard Bunsen. Stuyvesant’s probe soon puts him into the company of both Captain Bennett Grey, a man whose severe injuries have gifted him with “extraordinary mental powers,” and Aldous Carstairs, “a power-mad military intelligence officer” who for years has been exploring “how powerful [Grey’s] gifts could be in the intelligence and political world.” What follows from this combination of explosive characters in a combustible environment is a thriller that already has Adler hungering for a sequel.

You can read his whole review of Touchstone here.

Maybe It’s Time to Re-read the Book

Yowza! I don’t remember this particular passage from Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man (1934).

Fleming’s Law

Around this same time last year, I wrote in detail about the death of maverick film-maker Kevin McClory, who was one of James Bond creator Ian Fleming’s co-writers (with Jack Whittingham) on Thunderball (1965). I had to be careful in the piece, as McClory was a veteran litigator and I had no wish to get involved in my own legal confrontation--even though he was dead. The story about establishing the rights to both the Thunderball novel and subsequent film, in my view, contained as much intrigue as a Bond thriller. So it’s hardly surprising that in 2008--the centenary of Fleming’s birth, and the year in which his super-spy creation returns to the printed page--we should look forward to a book detailing the Thunderball courtroom saga.

That work, The Battle for Bond: The Genesis of Cinema’s Greatest Hero, has led its author, Robert Sellers, to once more recount the messy legal proceedings involving Fleming and McClory. Writing today in The Times of London, Sellers says:

It’s the most fascinating and controversial episode in the history of James Bond. So, why has nobody written before about the collaboration between the maverick Irish film producer Kevin McClory and Ian Fleming to make what would have been the first 007 film, back in 1960--with Richard Burton as Bond, and Alfred Hitchcock directing? Instead, it led to Fleming being accused of plagiarism, a bitter court case, betrayals, deaths and broken lives.

Over the years, writers have been put off delving too deeply into the issues thrown up by this story because of the fear of lawyers descending. Cubby Broccoli, who launched the Bond series with Dr. No, in 1962, along with Harry Saltzman, always tried to ignore McClory. Intrigued by this murky subject, I hoped to pursue my own book on it, but I had to get the facts right. The problem was, nobody really knew what the facts were; the truth has always been elusive.

Then one day, I found it. Or, rather, her: Sylvan Whittingham Mason, the daughter of Jack Whittingham, the man hired by McClory in 1959 to write an original James Bond screenplay after Fleming himself had tried twice and failed. Fleming was no screenwriter, as he confessed in a letter to McClory. “The trouble about writing something specially for a film is that I haven’t got a single idea in my head.” So it was Whittingham who produced the first 007 screenplay, Thunderball. My contact with Sylvan led to a significant discovery: several official-looking cardboard boxes. Inside were all the documents relating to the infamous 1963 plagiarism case involving Fleming: the actual papers used by McClory’s legal team, unseen for more than 40 years. And private letters, several hundred of them, written by Fleming, McClory and other important players in this sad tale.

I find it particularly sad to read that the fight for the rights of ownership and credit to Thunderball may have taken their toll on all those who found themselves in court. Again from The Times:

For years, McClory fought with the Bond producers to prove he had the right to his own 007 franchise. Most audacious of all were his claims that, because Thunderball was technically the first Bond screenplay, it influenced every subsequent 007 picture, meaning he had played a significant role in the creation of the cinematic Bond and thus deserved a share of the series’s estimated $3 billion profits. Had this been substantiated in court, it would have turned the movie-making world of 007 upside down, even threatened its existence. The claims were thrown out of a Los Angeles court in 2001.

McClory’s final battle was played out on November 20, 2006, with his disease-ravaged body. Despite earning millions from his profit share in Thunderball, he died virtually penniless, his fortune squandered on court cases and dodgy funding of things happening in the north of Ireland. His cremation took the form of a Viking funeral.

Whittingham was abandoned by McClory, despite promises that he would benefit from any eventual production of the Thunderball film. It was a particularly cruel betrayal considering the sacrifice the writer made during the trial to give his beneficial evidence. The two men hardly ever spoke to each other again. Whittingham died in 1972, his contribution to Bond forgotten.

As for Fleming, he left the High Court in 1963 a wounded and humiliated man. “I feel Bond would have done something to liven it up,” he said about the case. “Like shooting the judge.” Friends tried to cheer him up. In a letter, [British poet and broadcaster] John Betjeman urged: “Write on, fight on.” But on August 12, 1964, nine months after the plagiarism trial, he suffered a huge heart attack and died. He was just 56. He died at the height of his earning powers, with his books selling in undreamt-of quantities. And, while he witnessed the popularity of the earliest 007 movies, he never lived to see his creation become a phenomenon, which was thanks to the unprecedented success, ironically, of the story that had caused him many of those health problems in the first place: Thunderball.

You’ll find the whole Times piece here.

The Post-Christmas, Pre-New Year’s Wrap-up

• Sandra Ruttan has taken mercy on everyone (including yours truly) who’s been tardy in sending her their votes in the inaugural Spinetingler Awards competition. The deadline was supposed to have been tomorrow, December 31, but she’s now extended it to next Saturday, January 5. “I’ve already received 580 e-mails,” Ruttan writes in the Crime Zine Report. “If yours isn’t one of them, you’ve got a few more days to have your say.” The shortlist of nominees features choices in eight categories, including Best Novel by a Legend, Best Novel by a Rising Star, Best Short Story on the Web, and Best Cover. The complete shortlist can be found here. Send an e-mail note with your picks to sandra.ruttan@spinetinglermag.com.

• One of January Magazine’s gift book choices for this recent holiday season, The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes: The Life and Times of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, by Andrew Lycett, has been put to Marshal Zeringue’s Page 69 Test. Read the results here. Meanwhile, Lycett clues the London Times in on “10 Things You Didn’t Know About [Arthur] Conan Doyle.” Actually, there are only maybe five things here I didn’t know before, and at least one that I’d forgotten:

His first Sherlock Holmes story “A Study in Scarlet” was published in Beeton’s Christmas Annual 1887--exactly 120 years ago. In draft form the story was known as “A Tangled Skein”. Before publication it featured a detective called Sherrinford Holmes who shared rooms at 221B Upper Baker Street with a character called Ormond Sacker.

I’m sure Doctor John H. Watson was grateful that Conan Doyle didn’t make him spend his entire fictional life with the name Sacker.

• Speaking of anniversaries, I can’t let December 2007 go by without mentioning that it was 85 years ago this month that detective-turned-writer Dashiell Hammett made his first appearance in the pages of Black Mask magazine. His initial short-story sale there, “The Road Home,” was published in the December 1922 issue under the nom de plume “Peter Collinson.” Two months before that, his very first short story, “The Parthian Shot,” had seen print in The Smart Set. It wasn’t until 1923 that Hammett’s work began appearing in Black Mask under his own moniker.

• Scottish author Louise Welsh answers questions about The Bullet Trick and other subjects, all put to her by Pulp Pusher. That interview is available here.

• I don’t know how many “Best Books of 2007” Declan Burke intends to write about in his blog, but he’s already up to eight, the most recent being Two-Way Split, by Allan Guthrie, and The Bloomsday Dead, by Adrian McKinty. Look here for all of his choices.

• Finally, shooting begins tomorrow on the as-yet-unnamed 22nd James Bond film, the successor to 2006’s Casino Royale. You’ll find a briefing on the subject here.

Heade of the Class

Any regular reader of this page knows what a fan I am of “book cover porn”--that is, vintage novels that were ... well, up-front in their commercial enticements. U.S. illustrator Robert McGinnis is a particular favorite of mine (see a gallery of his work here). But I’ve also developed a fondness for R.A. Maguire and Walter Popp, as well as some of the artists currently working for Hard Case Crime (notably Greg Manchess, who did the front of Gil Brewer’s The Vengeful Virgin, and Glen Orbik, responsible for George Axelrod’s Blackmailer). Oh, and let me not forget to mention Richie Fahey, who created the seductive jacket of Megan Abbott’s The Song Is You, chosen by Rap Sheet visitors as one of the best covers of 2007.

But somebody I’ve said less about is Reginald Heade, who’s been described as “probably the best British ‘girlie’ paperback cover artist of the 1950s.” According to a quite wonderful site called Vintage Paperbacks: Good Girl Art,

[Heade] was born in 1902 or 1903--there is no record of his birth in England. He died in 1957, leaving no children, no will and no evidence of his existence other than his signatures on those gorgeous covers he produced. And in 1954, he even stopped signing his work, when the publisher of the books he illustrated went to jail on obscenity charges. Heade produced over 300 covers, most of them impossible to find. He is not listed in any British standard artist references--no one even recalls meeting him. A true man of mystery.

He’s hardly been forgotten, though. Independent Crime’s Nathan Cain has showcased several of Heade’s pulp jackets as part of his “book porn” series. And there’s an abundance of his lurid work on the Web. There was also, apparently, a digest-size book published in 1991--Reginald Heade: England’s Greatest Artist, by Steve Chibnall--that contains “[a] biography of this prolific artist, plus a complete checklist of his work.” It’s long been out of print, but I have given serious thought to buying one of the last-remaining used copies, even if it’s at a premium.

Not all of Heade’s efforts went into pulp crime novels; titles such as Sinful Sisters, Plaything of Passion, and Spoiled Lives were commissioned by a digest publisher called Archer, which did its best to fill the demand for mild eroticism--about as far into “sleaze” as most book houses were willing to venture during the 1940s and ’50s. Other publications--such as Paul Reville’s The Street of Shame (shown above) and Michael Storme’s Dame in My Bed--might belong in either genre camp, though they were likely intended to appeal to the same men who were buying those sexier stories. No matter what sort of tale he was illustrating, though, Heade had what blogger Cain calls “a knack for drawing women with gravity-defying clothes,” seductresses whose decency was preserved (more or less) solely by the resilience of a nipple--or two.

Yet it may be his crime-fiction covers that are best remembered these days. Heade did the jacket for the 1946 British edition of Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason novel, The Case of the Half-Wakened Wife. And during the 1950s, he created covers for a variety of short detective novels featuring Sexton Blake (“the poor man’s Sherlock Holmes”), including The Crime in Room 37, The Case of the Criminal’s Daughter, and Secret of the Suez Canal. (Heade had previously lent his artistic talents to Blake’s comic-strip adventures in the late ’40s.) He also worked up memorable fronts for Coffin for a Cutie, Death for a Doll, This Way for Hell, and other books by Spike Morelli (apparently the pseudonym of William Newton); and had illustrated the controversial novels of Hank Janson (né Stephen D. Frances), a British book publisher who, recalls Steve Holland (author of The Trials of Hank Janson, 2004), subsequently “set himself up as a one-man writing and publishing industry, first of all banging out westerns on his typewriter before his distributors suggested that the market was awash with westerns.” At which point, Janson was born.

Remarking on the collaboration between Janson and Heade, Britain’s Guardian newspaper noted two years ago:

Once billed as “England’s best-selling author,” Janson wrote more than 300 stories for a post-war British paperback market high on U.S.-style gangsters and hot dames.

In their day, Janson’s covers were considered so obscene the Home Office [the British government’s internal affairs department] seized copies from newsagents and his publishers went to jail.

Artist Reginald Heade’s work from Janson’s early 1950s series on New Fiction Press, epitomise the classic sex-kitten pulp cover.

There’s certainly no questioning that last statement. Whether it’s the jacket from Blonde on the Spot (1949), The Jane with the Green Eyes (1950), Broads Don’t Scare Easy (1951), Skirts Bring Me Sorrow (1951), or other of Janson’s crime novels (a number of them thankfully reprinted by UK publisher Telos earlier in this decade), Heade set a high bar over which other book illustrators were expected to jump. At least those, like McGinnis, Maguire, and the still more blatantly erotic Paul Rader, who continued to find markets for their revealing artwork. (Not always an easy thing, especially in America during the sexually repressed post-war era.)

If, when I sat down to write this post, I was intrigued by Reginald Heade, I now find myself still more curious about him and his work. He was a standout, bringing passion and talent even to controversial projects. In our modern age, it’s hard to imagine a publisher producing a title such as, say, The Filly Wore a Rod, much less hiring an illustrator to provide it with a cover that’s at once compelling and sexy as hell. That Filly or any of the others books mentioned here is remembered today has at least as much to do with their outsides as their innards. Such is Heade’s legacy.

READ MORE: “Heades We Do,” by J. Kingston Pierce (Killer Covers); “Hank Janson: The Man Who Taught a Generation About Sex: His Luridly Salacious Thrillers Were Every British Schoolboy's Guilty Secret--But His Greatest Work of Fiction Was His Own Life Story,” by Colin Dunne (The Daily Mail).

She Does Get Around, Doesn’t She?

For those of you who’ve been too busy over the recent holidays to keep up with developments in the blogosphere, here’s the link to Rap Sheet contributor and author Linda L. Richards’ week’s worth of postings at St. Martin’s Minotaur’s Moments in Crime blog. She ended her stint there today.

You May Not Know Dicks, But They Do

For the second edition in a row, The Thrilling Detective Web Site has borrowed its cover art from a Hard Case Crime novel. The fall 2007 issue featured Arthur Suydam’s illustration from Dead Street, the first posthumous novel from Mickey Spillane. Now comes the Holiday 2007 issue, introduced by Terry Beatty’s jacket art for Deadly Beloved, the first Ms. Tree novel from Max Allan Collins. This signals, of course, that there’s an excerpt from Deadly Beloved to be found in these cyberpages, along with other short fiction by Dick Stodhill, R. Narvaez, and Paul Sundeson.

On top of all those, you’ll find here the latest Cheap Thrills Awards poll, with its wonderfully titled prize categories, including: “By the Balls: The P.I. Book That Grabbed You Hardest in 2007,” “Wisdom of the Ages: The Best Thing I Ever Learned from a P.I. Novel This Year Was ...,” and “The Limp Dick Award: Biggest Disappointment.” There’s an additional suggestion box at the end, asking how The Thrilling Detective Web Site should celebrate its 10th anniversary (has it really been that long?), coming up this spring.

The goodies--and baddies--are all to be had here.

Delayed Action

Well, sometimes media attention really can make a difference. About a month and a half ago, we referenced a piece in The Washington Post that complained about how the 1967-1975 TV series Mannix still wasn’t available on DVD, even though so many other, considerably less influential P.I. shows have made the jump. Today, the Web site TV Shows on DVD has good news for fans of that Mike Connors series:

We’ve received word from our friends in the retail industry that the first season of Mannix’s eight years as a TV gumshoe is finally coming to DVD! Yes, we’ve been told by a source, who spoke on condition of remaining anonymous, that Mannix: Season 1 has been put on the schedule for release this coming June 3rd!

No more details are available--at least not yet. But you’ll remember that the first season of this show stood out from the rest, as Joe Mannix was then working for a high-tech investigative agency, rather than as a lone wolf private eye. It should be interesting to watch those first 24 episodes again.

Give It a Hand

We’ve barely finished with our Best of 2007 lists, and already I’m thinking about what might make the Best of 2008. I started thinking that way when I opened a package today and the U.S. edition of Minette Walters’ latest novel tumbled into my hands. It was so beautiful, I gasped.

I have not yet read The Chameleon’s Shadow, but if I’m to judge the book by its striking chartreuse cover--far shinier and more elegant than the reproduction here can indicate--I’d judge it gorgeous.

In the UK, the book was published by Macmillan back in September and the cover was attractive. A piece of crumbling statuary is superimposed over a pair of striking male eyes. (Or perhaps it’s the other way around?) Either way, it’s a cover that makes you look. But publisher Alfred A. Knopf’s edition, which will reach bookstores early in January, takes my breath away. I’m hoping Walters’ prose does, as well.

The Shadows of Genre

Was Raymond Carver a noir novelist? Steve Allan makes the case.

Lists? We’ve Got Your Frickin’ Lists

Reviewer Clayton Moore, aka Bookslut’s “Mystery Strumpet,” reveals his three favorite (mostly crime) novels of 2007, though even he admits they aren’t much of a revelation. “I don’t keep too many of my affections for books to myself, so naturally most of these titles have made it into my Bookslut columns.” His picks: Dead Boys, by Richard Lange; The Raw Shark Texts, by Steven Hall; and Blonde Faith, by Walter Mosley.

Meanwhile, David J. Montgomery continues his survey of (mostly American) crime fictionists and critics, asking them for their own trio of faves. Catch up with the whole lot here. And Sons of Spade blogger Jochem van der Steen offers five choices of his own.

Finally, for something different, check out the first installment of Noir of the Week’s rundown of the “Best Film Noir of All Time.” Covering the period from 1941 to 1945, the list includes Double Indemnity, The Maltese Falcon, and Detour. “These years are tricky,” explains blogger Steve-O, “because the film style was still being defined and perfected in these five years.” Today’s selections come complete with promotional trailers--which should help get you going on this last halfway-productive business morning of 2007.

A Giant Turns 93

With a palpable intensity and a face that seemed just one empty eye socket from skeletal--hardly the classic look of a leading man--American actor Richard Widmark captured the attention of moviegoers early, with his performance as a cold-blooded killer in Kiss of Death (1947), and maintained it through a variety of film noirs and western pictures over the next 40 years. For his efforts, he received an Academy Award nomination, a Golden Globe Award, and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Yet as he turns 93 years old today, I still remember Widmark best for a film that earned him not a single prize: Madigan, director Don Siegel’s 1968 feature about flawed cops and the inner workings of the New York Police Department.

Widmark was born on this date in Minnesota in 1914, but grew up in Illinois. He evidently fell in love with films early on (“I’ve been a movie bug since I was 4,” he said later in his life. “My grandmother used to take me.”) and went on to study acting at Lake Forest College. He made his Broadway stage debut in 1943, in Kiss and Tell, and followed that with roles in a number of other stage productions in which he “generally played sympathetic good guys,” according to film writer Brian W. Fairbanks. Being cast as giggle-prone, sadistic killer Tommy Udo in Kiss of Death was a marked change of course for him, but a fortuitous one. “Fan clubs for Tom Udo sprang up overnight,” recalls Fairbanks, “and, in addition to an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor (he lost to Edmund Gwenn’s Kris Kringle in Miracle on 34th Street), Widmark became the first recipient of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s Golden Globe for Most Promising Newcomer. Only two years later, the actor was placing his hand and foot prints in cement outside Grauman’s Chinese Theatre.”

Kiss of Death won Widmark a seven-year contract with 20th Century Fox, and he went on to star in dozens of additional feature-length pictures over the next quarter century, among them Night and the City (1950), Panic in the Streets (1950), Pickup on Noon Street (1953), Run for the Sun (1956), The Alamo (1960), Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), How the West Was Won (1962), and John Ford’s Cheyenne Autumn (1964). Then, in ’68, Siegel chose him to play opposite Henry Fonda in Madigan.

Adapted from a 1962 novel--The Commissioner, by Richard Dougherty, a onetime deputy police commissioner of New York City and former vice president of the Metropolitan Museum--Madigan follows a pair of parallel tracks. The first finds New York police detective Daniel Madigan (Widmark) and his partner, Rocco Bonaro (Harry Guardino), losing their guns to a fleeing hood and having to capture that fugitive, even though it’s supposed to be their weekend off. The second story line concerns Fonda, who plays Police Commissioner Anthony X. Russel, a by-the-book reformer who’s unsettled both by rumors that his childhood friend, Chief Inspector Charles Kane (James Whitmore), has taken a bribe, and by his married mistress’s announcement that she’s ending their illicit romance. “If [Cheyenne Autumn] was [Widmark’s] best film of the mid to late ’60s,” Fairbanks writes, “Madigan gave him his best role.” The title character is a jaded cop who only fakes a real life away from the precinct; his willingness to risk life and limb on a regular basis and to put in extra hours leaves his beautiful, younger wife (played by Swedish actress Inger Stevens), feeling abandoned. Yet the stoic and ever-lonely Madigan isn’t about to change his ways. That the reward for his dedication is a bullet at this movie’s end, only makes Mrs. Madigan as angry at her hubby as she is at his killer.

Wikipedia notes that Madigan was adapted from Dougherty’s novel “by two writers who had been blacklisted in the 1950s: Abraham Polonsky and Howard Rodman,” the latter of whom is credited under the nom de plume “Henri Simoun.” (Rodman would subsequently write, under his real name, the screenplay for another Siegel film, Coogan’s Bluff, which inspired Dennis Weaver’s crime series, McCloud; and he later created the David Janssen TV serial Harry O.) The film started out moody and gritty, with a piano-heavy theme (by composer Don Costa), and never slackened. A few years back, Mystery Readers Journal dubbed Madigan one of the 10 best New York cop flicks. (You can watch a trailer for that film here.)

In 1968, the year of Madigan’s release, Widmark turned 64 years old. He’d enjoyed some plum roles over the decades, but was starting to see the supply dry up. If he was to continue performing, he figured he had to branch out. Like other aging stars of the Watergate-scandal era--Rock Hudson, Jimmy Stewart, Helen Hayes, and Glenn Ford among them--Widmark was lured by the prospect of appearing in one of a new crop of crime dramas spreading across the small screen. He’d eschewed TV work in the past, agreeing only to a guest spot on a 1955 episode of I Love Lucy. But in 1971, Widmark accepted the lead in a then rare two-part TV suspenser called Vanished, playing the president of the United States. He went on from there to film Brock’s Last Case, an NBC “World Premiere Movie” in which he portrayed a Manhattan cop who, disgusted with the urban jungle in which he’s fought for so long, retires to a small California farm, where he intends to grow oranges. Predictably, of course, his character, former Lieutenant Max Brock, is soon drawn into an investigation involving a Native American accused of murdering a sheriff. Brock’s Last Case was hardly the worst teleflick of the early 1970s; but it also wasn’t the best, and it didn’t spawn the series that its developers hoped it would. Instead, NBC asked Widmark to reprise his standout role as Dan Madigan.

The fact that the character had gone to his grave at the end of Madigan, the movie, didn’t even slow the TV spin-off down. Widmark’s man wasn’t only resurrected, he was promoted to sergeant. And on September 20, 1972, Madigan debuted as one of three detective series rotating under the NBC Wednesday Mystery Movie umbrella title (the other two being Banacek, with George Peppard as a roguish Boston insurance investigator, and Cool Million, in which James Farentino played a jet-setting former CIA agent turned private eye).

Madigan was somewhat darker and more urban than the usual Mystery Movie fare. As TV Guide described the graying-blond Dan Madigan in its September 1972 “Fall Preview” issue,

He’s a tough New York City cop, soured by years of unrewarding toil as a detective sergeant. You can imagine how thrilled he is when they assign him a new partner who’s a recent sociology graduate, eager to “build bridges” to the troublemakers on their beat.

Reactions to the series were mixed. Shortly after it premiered, The New York Times’ Robert Berkvist described Widmark’s protagonist as being “in a class by himself. Funny thing about Madigan and his way of life,” Berkvist remarked. “You can tell he thinks about what he’s been asked to do, and worries about doing it right, and tries to hold down the wear and tear. The thing is, the wear and tear is there in his eyes and on his face, that great face lined like a map of the soul. You can practically hear his ulcer bleed.” Just a month later, though, and also in the Times, novelist and former New York deputy police commissioner Robert Daley chided Madigan for its “stupidities,” particularly its ignorance of real police procedures. “At another point,” Daley wrote in his critique of the show,

Madigan-Widmark reads the Miranda warning to a suspect before tossing him for weapons. Is Madigan attempting to commit suicide, or what? There isn’t a cop in New York who doesn’t know enough to start with a quick, brutal toss, followed by pinioning the prisoner’s arms behind his back; on go the handcuffs, and after that perhaps the Miranda warning. It’s legal that way. And also much safer.

“Short-tempered and blunt to the point of rudeness, Widmark’s detective was a breath of fresh air on network television,” critic Fairbanks opines now. That novelty wasn’t enough; only six 90-minute episodes of Madigan were broadcast before the series was canceled. “The Park Avenue Beat,” the final installment, showed on February 28, 1973. I’ve never been able to find this series again, either on cable-TV or on DVD (commercial or bootlegged). However, I have sat through the 1968 film Madigan several times over the last 20 years, and continue to be impressed by its depth--a reminder of what the series could have offered, perhaps in different hands.

Richard Widmark went on to appear in a variety of theatrical releases, from Murder on the Orient Express (1974) and Twilight’s Last Gleaming (1977), to Bear Island (a 1979 film adaptation of the Alistair MacLean novel by that same name) and the teleflick Cold Sassy Tree (1989). He never again appeared in a TV series. According to the International Movie Database (IMDb), his last theatrical performance was in the 1991 film True Colors, starring John Cusack and James Spader. Wikipedia says that Widmark has been married to theatrical producer and socialite Susan Blanchard since 1999 (his previous wife, with whom he’d stayed for almost 55 years, died in 1997), and that he currently lives in Roxbury, Connecticut. In 2005, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association gave him its Career Achievement Award.

Although numerous others with whom he came up in Hollywood have long since passed away--including John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Bette Davis, Jack Palance, and Barbara Stanwyck--Widmark remains. On this, his 93rd birthday, do yourself a favor: go out and rent, or buy, Madigan. It’s worth the effort.

READ MORE: “A Cult Figure Now, With His Gallery of Reprobates,” by Stuart Klawans (The New York Times).

More Large Books from Smaller Houses

I’ve been talking recently about the importance of smaller houses to the crime-fiction publishing scene. Here are two more current examples of books which deserve wide attention.

Keep It Real, published by Bleak House and one of Sarah Weinman’s picks these days, is a debut novel by Bill Bryan, a television writer who claims he has “stolen vast sums from all the major media companies.” It’s about a TV veteran who is reduced to producing a reality show called The Mogul, and winds up investigating a crime using that genre’s techniques.

Imagine Kafka crossed with Woody Allen and you’ll begin to see why Pushcart Prize-winning writer Jack Pendarvis’ stories are so highly praised. The Mysterious Secret of the Valuable Treasure, from MacAdam/Cage, is a collection of stories as funny as they are weird.

Let’s hear it for the little guys ...

10 More for Your Consideration

Bruce Grossman’s top-10 list of crime novels from 2007 is the only one on which you’re going to find The New Destroyer: Guardian Angel, by Warren Murphy and James Mullaney--I guarantee it. He also, though, has good things to say about Sean Chercover’s Big City, Bad Blood, James Reasoner’s Dust Devils, and The Electric Church, by Jeff Somers. Read all of his comments here.

Of Bosomy Blondes and Rich Reads

• Am I the only one who noticed the astonishing similarity between the cover of the seventh issue of The New Black Mask magazine, which Mark Coggins wrote about yesterday, and the jacket from the 1984 Quill Mysterious Classic paperback edition of Harold Q. Masur’s novel Bury Me Deep (1947)? Of the two, though, I definitely lean toward the Masur cover, the design of which is credited to Irving Freeman and Steve Macanga. It’s based on the novel’s opening:

It was a cold Thursday evening when I first saw the blonde. I had just come home from Penn Station and I opened the door to my apartment and I found her there. She was curled upon on my sofa, listening to my radio, and sipping her own brandy. At least I assumed it was her own because I dislike brandy and never buy it.

I stood there, rooted. Her costume had me floored. She was wearing black panties and a black bra and that was all. She sat with one leg folded comfortably under her and she smiled at me. ... She was a leggy, bosomy number, flamboyantly constructed, with bright jonquil-yellow hair and pearly skin that contrasted startlingly against the black underthings. She looked up at me, and the alcoholic glassiness in her eyes didn’t keep her from making them warm and cordial. Women have looked at me like that before, but never in church.

Bury Me Deep was the first novel in Masur’s series featuring “fast-living” lawyer-detective Scott Jordan. I remember buying the Quill edition decades ago, mostly because of that eye-catching cover (who wouldn’t have done the same?), which was apparently an artistic tribute to the first, 1948 Pocket Books edition of that novel.

• More than three months after the first edition went live, the second Web edition of Astonishing Adventures! (with extra pulp, we’re promised) is available. The PDF version can be read immediately; a print version should soon be obtainable.

• After soliciting “Best Books of 2007” nominations from many other writers, Chicago Sun-Times crime-fiction critic David J. Montgomery--along with other contributors to that newspaper’s book pages--reveals his own favorite read of this last year: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, by J.K. Rowling. “I know it doesn’t make me look high-brow like most critics try to do,” Montgomery remarks somewhat acidly in his blog, “but I was being honest. I flat out loved that book to pieces.” You can read all of the Sun-Times’ “good reads” selections for the year here.

• If you haven’t noticed, Euro Crime’s Karen Meek has been running a series of short write-ups about Christmas-related crime fiction. In case you need a literary distraction from the droning-on of relatives who choose this time of year to share all of their physical and economic complaints ... Meanwhile, blogger CrimeFicReader, from It’s a Crime (or a Mystery ...), has concluded her series in which she asked British crime writers to select books that they would themselves give out for Christmas. Her most recent respondents were Matt Beynon Rees, Debi Alper, Anne Brooke, and Joanna Hines. CrimeFicReader has also posted the list of her own favorite books from 2007, which include John Lawton’s Second Violin and L.C. Tyler’s The Herring Seller’s Apprentice.

• Novelist Martin Edwards has posted on his Web site an essay, “The Detective in British Crime Fiction,” that he wrote originally for the not-yet-published Harcourt Encyclopedia of Crime Fiction. It’s a useful survey, especially for readers who want to branch out beyond American mysteries, but aren’t sure where to start in the crowded, diverse UK set. The piece can be found here.

• Oh drat! I missed celebrating yesterday’s Second Annual Graham Powell Appreciation Day. So let me send out my belated thanks to Mr. Powell, who operates the ever-useful aggregator site CrimeSpot.

• Another thing I missed doing, what with all of the holiday planning and end-of-year deadlines on my plate lately, was mentioning the latest stop for the Carnival of the Criminal Minds. Ben Hunt of Material Witness played host this time around, with a mix of seasonal crime-fiction notes from all over the blogosphere. Read his entire submission here. The next stop on this Carnival, around January 1, will be the BookBitchBlog.

• Editor, critic, and anthologist Otto Penzler--riding high on the acclaim for his Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps--talks with John J. Miller about the history of pulp fiction, in an interview on the National Review magazine site. I don’t usually read the conservative National Review, so I have to thank David J. Montgomery for passing this link along.

• Two recent “Page 69 Test” participants that caught my eye: Michael Dobbs applies the test to his latest work, The Lords’ Day, and Gabriel Cohen follows with an examination of his own page 69 from The Graving Dock, one of the last books I am likely to get through in 2007.

• I received, but have not yet had time to dig much into Wolf Woman Bay, the new collection of “notable novellas” from editors Ed Gorman and Martin H. Greenberg. However, Bookgasm’s Rod Lott has mostly high praise for this anthology.

• Finally, since we’re so close to Christmas, I couldn’t help but notice this mention in today’s edition of The Writer’s Almanac:

On this day in 1823, an anonymous poem entitled “A Visit from St. Nicholas” was printed in the Troy (New York) Sentinel. It is known better by its first line: “’Twas the night before Christmas ... “ Though attributed to Clement C. Moore, it is likely that the original poem was written by Major Henry Livingston. Many of the modern qualities associated with Santa Claus grew out of “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” which described Santa as “chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf.”

Happy Holidays, everyone. Due to the usual array of family obligations, The Rap Sheet will be running on a reduced-posting schedule over the next few days, but those of us here want to wish all of you good cheer and good fortune as 2007 comes to a close.

Down to the Wire

This is just a reminder that you have only one week left in which to vote for who you think ought to win the inaugural Spinetingler Awards. The deadline is next Sunday, December 30. The shortlist of nominees features choices in eight categories, including Best Novel by a Legend, Best Novel by a Rising Star, Best Short Story on the Web, and Best Cover. The complete shortlist can be found here.

It turns out that yours truly is among the six nominees in the Best Services to the Industry category. But I’m not going to make a plea for you to vote for me; that feels rather undignified. Besides, all of the nominees in that category ought to win. Simply vote for who you think deserves the commendation most.

If you haven’t voted yet, you can do so in an e-note to sandra.ruttan@spinetinglermag.com. Just don’t wait too long.

Back to Black, Part VII

(Previous installments of author Mark Coggins’ look back at The New Black Mask magazine can be found here.)

In 1986, Ed McBain celebrated the 30th anniversary of the publication of his first 87th Precinct novel, was elected a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America, and captured the cover spot in the seventh issue of The New Black Mask (NBM) with an excerpt from his 39th 87th Precinct book, Poison. The excerpt is a chapter titled “Honesty,” and it describes an interview that police detective Hal Willis has with Marilyn Hollis, an attractive, flirty murder suspect who offers him a drink and ends up getting more information from him than he from her.

In the interview that accompanies this excerpt, McBain (aka Evan Hunter, aka Salvatore Lombino) talks about how he got started with the famous police-procedural series: “Erle Stanley Gardner ... was getting old, and Pocket Books was looking for a replacement, to be blunt about it, and [the editor] asked me if I had any ideas for a series character.” The interview ends on a somewhat bitter note, especially in light of McBain’s death in 2005. When asked about any involvement in the (then popular) Hill Street Blues TV program, he responds, “No, they did not come to me. It continues to amaze me that anyone developing a police series, a series with a conglomerate hero in a mythical city, had never heard of the 87th Precinct. My only consolation is that Hill Street Blues will be off the air one day, and I’ll still be here writing my novels.”

The next story in NBM No. 7, “Busman’s Holiday,” by Josh Pachter, is quite a treat--as much for the story as for the back story behind it. Pachter is primarily known as a short-story writer and “Busman” is a story that sneaks up on you. It head-fakes you into thinking it is a rather mundane recounting of a businessman’s two-week vacation, and then ends up being something quite different. The back story is also a surprise. Apparently, the piece Pachter originally sold to the editors was a parody of McBain’s 87th Precinct novels, but the publisher decided at the last minute that parodies were not appropriate for NBM. The editors bought “Busman” instead, and as Pachter exalts, “I somehow got billed above Joyce Carol Oates and Tony Hillerman on the back cover of this book. Eat your heart out, Oatesy! And bite me, Hillermeister!”

Speaking of “Oatesy,” what follows “Busman” is a Joyce Carol Oates piece with the ponderous title of “Little Moses/The Society for the Reclamation and Restoration of ‘E. Auguste Napoleon Bonaparte.’” Excerpted from her 1998 novel, My Heart Laid Bare, which the introduction says is “planned for publication in 1988 or 1980,” “Little Moses” gives us two well-written episodes in the scam-ridden career of con man Abraham Licht and his adopted black son, Elisha. In the first, Licht travels the rural backroads of early 20th-century America selling and reselling Elisha into slavery for $600 cash. In the second, Licht concocts a scheme to peddle shares in a legal defense fund for the recovery of the inheritance of Emanuel Auguste Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon I’s last-born (illegitimate) child. After raising more than $1 million dollars by convincing American “heirs” of Emanuel Auguste that they will receive a slice of the nearly $200-million inheritance that is moldering in the vaults of the Bank of Paris, Licht deems it wise to shut down the scheme before anyone tumbles to his fraud, with a clever stunt that plays upon the “heirs’” racism and fears of mixed blood in their own ancestry.

The Hillermeister, as Josh Pachter calls him, is next. (But note that he declined to use that sobriquet when he signed my copy of NBM No. 7, shown at right, preferring a simple Tony Hillerman.) His story, “Chee’s Witch,” involves the younger of his two series characters, Navajo Tribal policeman Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee. In “Witch,” Chee butts heads with a Caucasian FBI agent sent to pick up a witness under protection for a car-theft investigation. Chee decides that what the agent doesn’t know may hurt that agent as well as the federal government’s case, but won’t bother Chee or the people on the reservation who’ve been reporting incidents of witchcraft.

The fifth story in this edition of NBM is “The Blue Book of Crime,” by Jerome Charyn, author of 37 books, including three memoirs about growing up in New York City and several detective novels. In a way, this story combines elements of both the memoirs and the detective novels, concerning as it does the friendship of two boys growing up in New York who are caught with goods stolen from a department store--even though they’ve made a point to study the “Blue Book” (a primer put out by the FBI) in order to allude capture. It’s a clever coming-of-age tale about betrayal, karma, and frustrated dreams--with a generous bit of nostalgia for the golden age of Hollywood thrown in.

Peter Heyrman follows with a noirish yarn called “One for the Money.” Written in an no-nonsense style, “Money” features tantalizing femme fatale Deborah Usher, who hires Key West, Florida, charter boat skipper Mark Kane for a trip that involves more than fishing for marlin. (Can you say “cocaine,” children?) Kane finds out what it’s like to have his hands full when his first mate comes down with an appendicitis, the boat runs into a squall line with 30-knot winds and high seas, and Ms. Usher’s “representative” on the trip breaks free from the chair he’s been tied down in and goes after Kane with a sap.

“The Death of the Tenth Man” comes next in this issue’s lineup, and it is Steve Oren’s first publication. The title refers to the minyan (a quorum of 10 Jewish males over the age of 13) that must be present to perform a Kaddish--a public prayer that is often used as a memorial for the dead. In “Tenth Man,” the Kaddish is being performed for the father of Mike, the narrator, and getting a minyan together proves especially difficult when one of the chosen males is found dead in the basement of the synagogue with a knife through his heart. Because of the advanced age of the other people present, and the fact that Mike is a Vietnam veteran, suspicion quickly falls on him in this creative variant of a traditional locked-room mystery.

Irish writer Maurade Glennon serves up “Murder, though it has no tongue …” in the following story, which reminded me a bit of the Stephen King novel Misery. The protagonist, Jay Simpson, wakes up in a Mexican hospital, paralyzed and mute from a stroke with his wife whispering in his ear, “I’m going to kill you.” She’s as good as her word, feeding Simpson doctored blood-pressure medicine to induce a second stroke. Simpson’s only hope is to find a way to alert his doctor before her fiendish plan succeeds.

Isak Romun (aka Gordon Bennett), who also had a story in the third NBM, bats ninth with “Capriccio.” Told once again from the point of view of newspaperman Oscar Monahan, this yarn deals with the hurt feelings and murderous impulses that can surface when the work of a temperamental artist is changed by another--in this case the work of a composer as altered by a conductor. Although Romun says that the “story resulted from the author’s thoughts, while attending a concert, about the different performances of the same composition,” you can’t help but wonder if Romun was really inspired by the actions of an editor.

Clark Dimond, who seems to have contributed as much or more to the field of music as to mystery, provides the penultimate story in the issue, “You Can’t Fire Me for Doing My Job.” While “extremism in the defense of liberty” may not be a vice, “You Can’t Fire Me” proves that extremism in the defense of copper tubing on a construction site may just qualify.

The final author in this issue, Ron Goulart, has a background as a historian of pulp fiction and hard-boiled detective characters. He puts that knowledge to good use with a tongue-in-check send-up of a quintessential pulp plot, wherein the main character suffers amnesia and his unremembered past comes back to haunt him. In “Hollywood Detective,” the main character in question is a writer who wakes up with no memory and a copy of an obscure detective novel in his pocket. Because of his admiration for the author, he is inspired to try his hand at writing private-eye fiction himself. He succeeds in grand style, but is always haunted by the desire to find and meet the person responsible for the book in his pocket. It’s a fun story, and in a weird way, it reminded me of William Hjortsberg’s Falling Angel, due to the narrator’s lack of self-knowledge.

(To be continued)

Another Best of the Year List

This one from Ray Banks, author of Donkey Punch (which is one of January Magazine’s favorite crime novels of 2007).

If a Tree Falls in the Forest of Blogs, Does Anybody Care?

A lot is expected of the modern author.

It’s not enough to just write a book anymore. Not enough, even, to visit bookstores and make nice with the people who buy books and the people who sell them.

It is insufficient to develop a personal mailing list--and/or e-mail list--in order to send postcards or bookmarks or (in the case of e-mail) carefully crafted spam.

And having a Web site? That’s so basic, it should get listed with paper, pens, and steno pads. We’re way beyond that into social networking-- a la MySpace and FaceBook and Second Life.

The thing, though, that continues to be a debatable point in terms of an author supporting a book is blogging, in general, and guest-blogging in particular. That is to say, does blogging matter? Blogging can be fun. It can be cathartic. It can even be entertaining for both bloggers and bloggees. But is it valuable to the author? Does it help said author flog books? The jury is out. Is, in fact, likely to stay there. And, trust me: nothing I say here is likely to help.

Unlike, say, a book-signing, where you can see the results with your own eyes (if 56 people show up and buy 76 copies of the book, no one needs to tell you the evening was a big success), blogging is impossible to quantify. In the case of guest-blogging, we don’t even know how big the potential audience might be. (Is it 7,000? Or 70? Or three?) And even if your guesting takes place on a site usually popular with readers, do you have a message that will reach that particular audience? Are you going to say anything that will make them care?

More: a lot of the things authors are expected to do in order to support their books don’t demand much of them intellectually. At least, that’s been my experience. It’s fun to do bookstore visits. Sure: traveling can take it out of you, but to stand there while people ask you questions about a topic you know well--your book--is not really very hard.

To be effective as a blogger, however, you have to reach inside yourself. At least, that’s what I think. You have to go deep and scratch at things people care about. Those things are more difficult to write about than housing starts and the price of gas. They have a cost. It’s not one everyone is willing to pay.

And there’s a risk too, right? There’s a risk that if you dig too deep and look too far and share too much, there won’t be anything left. Because nothing--and I mean nothing--takes it out of you the way writing a novel does. It takes everything you’ve got. How can you write a book and still have enough juice left to blog?

I’m writing this just as my fourth novel is about to be published. The official publication date is January 8. At this stage in my career, I’m about as blogged up as a girl can be and still find head space to write anything at all. I contribute here at The Rap Sheet, as you know. And I edit January Magazine. But neither of those things demands a lot from my secret stash, most of the time. I’m a journalist, so I can write news items all day without breaking a sweat. You learn early on how to look at a story, pick up the salient bits, then string them together in a way that will help other people understand.

I have a personal blog, too. Though I sometimes go deep there, most of the time I do not. Because I’m working on a book almost all the time, my personal blog has come to be a repository for all the silliness I see in the world that I just want to share with whoever cares to listen. Or interesting tidbits I come across while doing research. Or silly or critical things that happen in my everyday life. As I’ve said there on more than one occasion: “This is my blog, so I get to say whatever I want.” As any marketing expert worth her salt will tell you, that is not the way to build a blog’s readership. For that, you pick a topic and then stick to it: you don’t deviate from the central plan. I’m not so good at that when it comes to my blog.

Now, with this new book out, another blogging possibility has presented itself. Something new to me, but possibly not to you: the guest blog. That’s where you gather all your thoughts and wisdom and take it on the road. The idea, I guess, is that by occupying a guest spot, you expose yourself to new readers. Readers who, presumably, will flock to buy your books when they get up close and personal with the contents of your skull. The pressure to be scintillating is extreme.

Beginning today, for instance, I’m guest blogging for a whole week--Christmas week, no less--at the newish St. Martin’s Minotaur blog, Moments in Crime. It’s a gig that would seem to demand deepish thought, but since it’s also Christmas week, I’m not quite sure what I’ll end up with. I’ll possibly have to talk about stuffing a turkey and accommodating the vegan guests expected at my table this year, because those are the things concerning me right now.

Oh dear. What have I done here? I intended this to be an interesting and perhaps informative post on the state of blogging as it is now. But it isn’t, is it? I mean, I could write that piece, but this isn’t it. Maybe I’ll write that piece next week. Maybe even next year. That too is in the nature of blogging, I think. Everything is important. Everything is now. But will anyone care? You tell me.

Akashic -- God Bless You

Although its name sounds like a sneeze, Akashic is really a marvelously inventive paperback house run by musician Johnny Temple, the bassist of the rock group Girls Against Boys. Akashic is a Brooklyn, New York-based independent company dedicated to “publishing urban literary fiction and political non-fiction by authors who are either ignored by the mainstream, or who have no interest in working within the ever-consolidating ranks of the major corporate publishers.” Its deliberately maverick motto is “Reverse-gentrification of the literary world.”

Three of its recent titles show off Akashic’s range and originality. Queens Noir, edited by Robert Knightly, walks in the urban footsteps of Chicago Noir and Bronx Noir, offering sharply edited collections of stories by writers who know the turf. Denis Hamill, Megan Abbott, and Maggie Estep lead this present parade.

You Must Be This Happy to Enter is the third collection of Elizabeth Crane’s remarkable stories to be published under Akashic’s Punk Planet label--emotional, weird, and very funny stuff.

And The Duppy is also something rare, a book by Jamaican-born Londoner Anthony C. Winkler about a Jamaican shopkeeper who dies one morning and is transported to Heaven (which looks very much like Jamaica) in a crowded mini-bus.

Just in Case You Don’t Find Enough Books Under the Christmas Tree This Year ...

I was unable to attend last month’s launch party for the 2008 Harrogate Crime Writing festival. But I’ve gone to the festival for many years now, including this last summer (more on that here and here). And I heard recently from British novelist Simon Kernick, who is the event’s latest programming chair, a little about what is being planned for next July.

Special guests will include Sam Bourne, Robert Crais, Jeffery Deaver, Tess Gerritsen, Andy McNab, and Peter Robinson.

2008 will also mark the fourth year of the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award. Previous winners have included Mark Billingham, Val McDermid, and Allan Guthrie (who picked up the commendation this year for his 2005 debut novel, Two-Way Split). The UK brewing company T&R Theakston recently signed up to sponsor the Harrogate festival for another five years.

Finally, the organizers are holding a little competition to drum up early interest in this event (as if anyone’s paying attention to anything but holiday present buying right now). As a new press release explains,

This is your opportunity to win some great winter reading, including:

Andy McNab’s Crossfire, signed
Simon Kernick’s Severed, signed
Peter Robinson’s Friend of the Devil, signed
Robert Crais’ The Watchman, signed
Jeffery Deaver’s Devil, book-plated
And finally Tess Gerritsen’s The Mephisto Club

To win all you have to do [is] answer two questions correctly:

1. The Festival is 6 years old--but how many Programming Chairs has the Festival had and who were they?
2. Which three critically acclaimed authors have won the prestigious Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award, and in what year?

E-mail your answers to crime@harrogate-festival.org.uk, and tell the Harrogate gang that The Rap Sheet sent you.

This competition closes on Friday, January 4, when the name of a winning contestant will be extracted from a hat.

Next year’s Harrogate Crime Writing Festival will run from July 12 to 20. More information is available here.

Last Call, Folks

From Dave Zeltserman, author and editor of the crime-fiction Webzine HardLuck Stories:

After a five-year run Hardluck Stories will be shutting down, but we’re going to go out with a bang with one final issue. The theme is ’30s Pulp Noir, editors are Ed Gorman and Dave Zeltserman, and illustrations will be by the incomparable Jean-Pierre Jacquet. Maximum story length is 4,000 words, deadline: May 1st, 2008.

We’re sorry to see HardLuck disappear (let’s hope the archives at least remain in place), but glad to know that at least it’s going out in style. For those who’d like to participate in the last issue, Zeltserman supplies more submission specifics here.

Talk of the Tube

While speeding about on the London Underground (more familiarly known as “The Tube”), I often see passengers reading. Those who are not engrossed in novels of one sort or another, frequently have their noses in the free newspaper Metro, which is handed out at Tube station entrances. But it seems the paper wants to expand its riders’ reading horizons. It has just published contributor Jonathan Gibbs’ list of his favorite crime novels of 2007.

Winning the top spot--no surprise here--is Ian Rankin’s Exit Music, which is apparently his final Inspector John Rebus novel. Of that work, Gibbs writes:

Ian Rankin’s bloody-minded DI is only ten days away from his carriage clock when a Russian dissident poet turns up dead in an Edinburgh side street. What with a final showdown with his long-time nemesis Big Ger Cafferty, this is a fitting send-off for Rebus, and quite right too. He’s the reason for the phenomenal success of this series, the kind of loveable rogue who’s not above picking up a few signed copies of a victim’s last book to punt on eBay. Pure class.

I like Rankin’s worldview, which comes across in his novels, and I have to agree with the author’s recent comments about how terrorism fears are being exploited by certain politicians “to keep the population under control.” The result could be the sort of society George Orwell warned us about.

So which other books win Metro’s mention? Well, there’s Mark Billingham’s Death Message, Val McDermid’s Beneath the Bleeding, and Nick Stone’s King of Swords. The lone American cited on the newspaper’s list is James Lee Burke, author of this year’s extraordinary The Tin Roof Blowdown.

You’ll find all of Metro’s picks here.

When Does ‘Old’ Become ‘Vintage’?

New to the crime-fiction blogging scene is August West, who’s just opened a site called Vintage Hardboiled Reads. A New Yorker who says he works in the technology industry, West promises that his blog will showcase “vintage paperback novels from the hardboiled, noir and western era. Many published by Gold Medal, Signet, Avon, Ace, Dell, etc.” He’s off to a good start, reviewing books and stories by Bob McKnight, Richard Jessup, and John Evans. And right out of the box, he declares the work of Ross Macdonald “perfection!” West certainly has my attention.

I’ve added Vintage Hardboiled Reads to The Rap Sheet’s blogroll. I look forward to seeing what more it can offer.

A Case of Grand Larsson

Pardon me if I seem a bit dazed, but I just came away from reading an amazing crime novel called The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Swedish author Stieg Larsson. It’s a huge, 500-plus-page opus, a multilayered, multi-character tale by a writer of some considerable power. Full of social conscience and compassion, with great insight into the nature of moral corruption, Tattoo just knocked me out. During the time I had my nose stuck in its pages, I was thoroughly consumed by the work, and in those periods when I had to put the book down, I found myself grumpy and anxious to return to Larsson’s narrative. I read the novel in two sittings, with the final stint a five-hour marathon of arm-strain and strong coffee that took me into the very early hours of the morning. And when I finally put the book down, I was still unable to sleep, my head filled with the high-definition world that this author has crafted, and which Reg Keeland translated from the Swedish language. On the one hand, this book drained me emotionally; but it also filled me with emotion.

The new year hasn’t even begun yet, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo isn’t scheduled for its British release, by upstart publisher Quercus, until January 10 (with Vintage planning a U.S. edition for next fall); but already I’m thinking this could be remembered as the best crime novel of 2008.

What’s most interesting about Tattoo is the vast array of characters with which Larsson populates it. Captivating, as well, is the unfamiliar landscape against which this yarn unravels to its unexpected and chilling conclusion. The two principal characters here are a disgraced journalist and publisher, Mikael Blomkvist, 43, and his 24-year-old partner, the enigmatic and deeply troubled Lisbeth Salander. In the spirit of the approaching year, let me make a prediction: This pair will soon join the pantheon of great crime-fiction protagonists.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo finds Blomkvist being hired by wealthy 82-year-old Henrik Vanger, a former corporate exec, to determine whatever became of Harriet, his brother’s teenage granddaughter, who vanished four decades ago from a family reunion being held on the Vangers’ private and secluded island. No corpse was found. No witnesses came forward. And no evidence of Harriet’s fate ever turned up. Her disappearance is a complete mystery; nonetheless, Vanger believes the girl was murdered by a member of his own clan. Blomkvist, in a bad odor since losing a libel defense against a Swedish industrialist, and seeing Millennium--the magazine he publishes--suffer as a result, decides to take this case on. His incentives? Vanger’s offer of financial assistance and his suggestion that he has proof of the smugly victorious industrialist’s corruption.

So begins this twisted tale of family secrets, dastardly motives, and compassion that transports Blomkvist and Salander from a desolate Swedish island during a frigid winter, to London and then on to Australia. It isn’t long before both characters find themselves as much the hunted as they are the hunters, and it will demand all of their combined skills to untangle themselves from the wickedness imbuing the events that have shaped the Vanger clan.

Larsson’s fondness for crime fiction is evident in the fact that his chief investigator, Blomkvist, reads the works of Sue Grafton, Val McDermid, and Elizabeth George. And he flavors this story with elements quite familiar from mystery’s various subgenres--a bit of courtroom drama here, suggestions of private-eye conventions there, plus techno-thriller intrigue involving Lisbeth Salander’s electronic skills and contacts in the computer-hacking community. Finally, what would a crime novel be without serial killing and horrific torture? (The most blatant nod to this genre’s heritage is directed at Thomas Harris’ The Silence of the Lambs, which did not surprise me, as Larsson’s work contains some very strong female characters; Lisbeth Salander, in fact, is one of the most original creations in the genre since Clarice Starling.) Fortunately, this author tries to hone a fresh edge on these traditions of crime fiction, and blends them in a way that is as mesmerizing as it is insightful.

Moved as I was by The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, I did a bit of research about its author. Stieg Larsson was a name familiar to me, though not from crime fiction. I had come across his writing through my interest in totalitarianism and extremism as it has shown up in human history. Human nature at the extremes is cause for concern, and we need people to watch those extremes. I think the Anglo-Irish politician Edmund Burke was spot-on when he said, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”

Larsson, it seems, fought evil all his life by monitoring right-wing extremist groups in his native Sweden, as well as throughout Europe. I first read his work in Searchlight, a British periodical devoted to monitoring the politics of the radical right, particularly the neo-Nazi movement. I knew he had passed away in late 2004, at age 50, due to a massive heart attack. What I didn’t know then was that this very shy and reserved journalist was also a crime-fiction enthusiast, and to amuse himself he often wrote his fiction late into the evenings. Friends and colleagues, when they discovered that he penned tales of crime and intrigue, were amused and amazed, since he was tireless in his reporting as well as his devotion to exposing the sinister shadow cast across Europe by right-wing extremists (a passion that led to his life being threatened). How did he ever find the time to compose novels?

In the Larsson obituary he wrote for Searchlight, the magazine’s European editor, Graeme Atkinson, wrote that

He will be terribly missed by all who had the unforgettable privilege of knowing him, working with him and being one of his friends and comrades.

Stieg managed to pack a vast amount of experience into his all-too-short 50 years, beginning with his poor upbringing in the forests of northern Sweden. His horizons were unlimited and, after enthusiastically doing military service, he travelled widely in Africa, witnessing bloody civil war in Eritrea at first hand.

On his return to Sweden, he took up his profession of journalism, working as a news journalist, feature writer and brilliant graphics artist for the Swedish news agency TT. To his work he brought a razor sharp mind, and covered every major world news story as it broke and unfolded for almost two decades. His artistic abilities extended into the realms of painting and layout. ...

It is an alarming irony that Stieg was taken from us just as he achieved his greatest ambitions: the consolidation of Expo [and anti-fascist magazine he co-founded) and the development of its staff, and the publication of his crime novels--he had just signed a major contract to have a series of novels published. Those who read them will see Stieg’s integrity, fearlessness and sense of justice in his young heroine, Lisbeth Salander, though her ways of putting things right are a far cry from Stieg’s thoughtful and gentle manner.

Given my own reaction to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, it didn’t surprise me to learn that the book is already being turned into a film (planned for release in 2009). Disappointing, however, is the realization that Larsson produced only two more novels in his “Millennium Trilogy”: Flickan som lekte med elden (The Girl Who Played with Fire) and Luftslottet som sprängdes (Castles in the Sky). Quercus plans to publish both of those latter novels in Britain.

If my own endorsement of Stieg Larsson’s work isn’t enough, consider the words of Christopher MacLehose, who manages Quercus’ new imprint, MacLehose Press:

Over time I have published David Morrell’s First Blood, Martin Cruz Smith’s Gorky Park, Peter Hoëg’s Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow [aka Smilla’s Sense of Snow], and the Gold Dagger-winning crime novels of Henning Mankell, Arnaulder Indridason, and Fred Vargas. The sales of the Millennium Trilogy in Sweden far exceeded the fabulous successes of these wonderful storytellers and their central characters ... Every Swedish publisher I have met in the last months has been--and this is as interesting as it is unusual in the jealous world that is publishing--unstinting in their praise for the novels as every one of them has read them or listened to the tapes. There is no more reliable recommendation.

This book shows how exhilarating crime fiction can be. Look for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo--which already won the Crime Writers of Scandinavia’s Glass Key Award for best Nordic crime novel of 2005--to make a mark on international award nominations for 2008.