There Are No Saints in St. Petersburg

One of the historical crime novels I’ve been looking forward to most this winter is R.N. Morris’ A Gentle Axe. It imagines analytical police detective Porfiry Petrovich (resurrected from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment) tackling the murders of a peasant and a dwarf, their bodies found in a park in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1866. So far, no kind publicist has sent me the book, but I hold out hope. In the meantime, I can dine gratefully on two new entries on the UK blog It’s a Crime! (or a Mystery ...): a lengthy interview with Morris (who has also written a previous novel, Taking Comfort, as “Roger Morris”) and a review of his new book.

My favorite two parts of the interview come when Morris says that the tale he’s concocted in Axe isn’t meant to remind readers of anything familiar from the present-day ...

“I didn’t want to come up with an abstract murder story that could have happened at any time, in any setting and was then just inserted into the setting. I wanted it to be something that came out of the ideas and themes of the time. However, it’s true, I think, that every generation re-interprets the past according to its own priorities and preoccupations, in the same way that every generation re-imagines the future. But it was not a conscious aim of mine to write something that had a contemporary relevance. I’m sure though, being a person of my time, that what I have chosen to focus on in this story somehow reflects the society I’m a product of. I just can’t tell you how!”

... and when Morris says he’s used Crime and Punishment only as a literary springboard, creating his own story using Dostoevsky’s setting, plus a character or two:

“Basically I’ve nicked a character from a masterpiece of world literature and taken massive liberties with him. If I ever do get to meet Dostoevsky in another place (though I don’t think I’ll be let into the bit he’s no doubt residing in) I will obviously be very ashamed of myself. I will have to get down on my knees and beg forgiveness. I know he has a sense of humour, though--I mean, I think he can be a very funny writer, which is sometimes overlooked because people tend to have this idea of his work being relentlessly grim. He is an incredibly humane writer and humour is part of humanity. Anyhow, it’s meant to be a playful idea, you know. And I would hope that he would appreciate that aspect of it.”

You can read the whole interview here.

A Gentle Axe has just been released in Britain by Faber and Faber. Unnecessarily retitled The Gentle Axe, it’s due out in the States from Penguin Press in late March.

I Am Woman, See Me Kill

The topic of why women are not only big consumers of dark, often violent crime fiction, but also writers of the same material, has been dealt with before. Many times, in fact. But the approach is usually flatter, more blandly journalistic than what Julie Bindel offers today in Britain’s Guardian newspaper.

“Given my work as a feminist activist and writer,” Bindel remarks, “you might expect me to hate the crime genre. I have spent the whole of my adult life fighting male violence, and much of my work involves researching topics such as rape, child sexual abuse, pornography and murder. I talk regularly to women who have survived sex attacks, and have had to look at crime-scene photographs showing mutilated corpses of women who have been raped, tortured and murdered. It was as a direct result of the hideous brutality of a serial killer--Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper--that I became a feminist in the first place. Yet, when it comes to fiction, the serial killer genre is my favourite.”

Nowadays, notes Bindel, “over half of all novels in the genre are written by women, and their books are most popular with a female audience--which is useful for the authors, since women read considerably more books than men.” For her part, Scottish novelist Val McDermid (The Torment of Others, The Grave Tattoo) contends that “[w]omen are far more in tune with violence than men”--a point echoed by newcomer Tana French (In the Woods), who is quoted as saying that “women make good crime writers because we ‘are made aware of the constant threat of violence in a way that men are not ... From childhood we know that there are people out there for whom [our sex] is enough to transform us from a person into prey.”

A reasonable point, though men are probably more prone to have actually engaged in some form of violence, whether as boys trading blows with bullies, or as adults mixing it up in alcohol-fueled barroom confrontations or defending their girlfriends from the unwanted attentions of rivals. Women, then, may see more terror in aggression than men typically do, which can also make it easier for them to portray the visceral fear provoked by violent acts. Jo-Ann Goodwin, author of the novel Sweet Gum (2006), adds that female novelists might also have another advantage over men. “[W]omen have historically done the dirty jobs, wiping the blood, snot and mucus of the wounded, sick and dying. ...,” she tells The Guardian. “Caring for the old, and coping with the physical and very visceral agonies of childbirth, we simply have stronger stomachs out of necessity, and far closer contact with the secrets of the body. Women can’t faint at the sight of blood. They would spend several days a month on the carpet.” Those experiences could add depth to their crime-scene-setting.

Bindel ends her article with a wonderful anecdote from author McDermid:

It seems that violent fiction is an odd sort of comfort to many female readers. McDermid was told a story by a librarian, about an elderly woman who came to visit her each week and would leave with a heavy armful of violent crime thrillers. One day she asked for a romantic novel instead. When the librarian asked why, she replied: “My husband died last week. I don’t need those books any more.” It seemed she had been channelling her anger towards her husband into the books. “Perhaps reading them stopped her from killing him,” notes McDermid. Wouldn’t that be ironic?

You can read the whole piece here.

Lawyers, Guns, and Money

As I’ve remarked before, life can often seem somewhat surreal, as if taut invisible strands link our lives, and every so often they reveal themselves, showing their chains and connections that were previously hidden from view. (Yes, you guessed it: I’ve been reading Philip K. Dick again.)

Back in 2000, I held a senior role in a multinational engineering company (my day job), and had cause to hire a lawyer--a specialist lawyer, to boot. I asked my brother for advice on who to contact, as he also worked at a senior level in the corporate world. He recommended a lawyer from a Manchester, England-based firm called Mace & Jones. The case I needed handled was a tricky and potentially difficult one, but the solicitor assigned to it proved to be tough, and the affair was settled out of court (thankfully).

What has all this do with crime fiction? I’ll get to that in a second. But let me just say that it concerns the practice of law. And day jobs, which crime novelists often have to supplement their writing, but that they don’t necessarily talk about in public. (We’d all like people to believe that we support ourselves through our prose alone.)

Martin Edwards is a lawyer, when he isn’t penning novels--the most recent of which is The Arsenic Labyrinth (being released this season on both sides of the Atlantic). And I’ve always enjoyed his work. I’m not the only one; fellow Rap Sheet blogger and Chicago Tribune critic Dick Adler has said that “Martin Edwards uses the lovely landscape of the [UK’s] Lake District to fine effect ... clean prose and an engaging love for the territory.”

Apart from penning his Hannah Scarlett-Daniel Kind Lake District novels and a series of Harry Devlin thrillers (First Cut Is the Deepest), Edwards also edits anthologies for the British Crime Writers’ Association (CWA). The most recent of those, ID: Crimes of Identity, featured stories from Robert Barnard, Peter Lovesey, Edward D. Hoch, French legend Tonino Benacquista, and others.

I often bump into Edwards (pictured here, with Geoff Bradley from CADS [Crime and Detective Stories] magazine on the left) at CWA functions in London, and in fact I moderated a panel discussion he participated in at Bouchercon 2003 in Las Vegas. He’ll be winging his way off to Seattle shortly to attend this weekend’s Left Coast Crime (LCC) convention, where--like Rap Sheet editor J. Kingston Pierce--he will be speaking. While in the States, Edwards will also be promoting The Arsenic Labyrinth during a February 6 event at the Poisoned Pen Bookshop in Scottsdale, Arizona. (Poisoned Pen Press is Arsenic’s U.S. publisher; Allison & Busby is bringing the novel out in Britain.)

Martin Edwards can go on at some length about the Lake District as an evocative backdrop to crime fiction, and he describes The Arsenic Labyrinth--his third Lake District novel--thusly:

This is the set-up: Guy, a drifter with a taste for deception, has returned to Coniston in England’s Lake District after a gap of ten years. The story demanded a credible setting in the vicinity of old copper mines, so Coniston was an obvious choice. There is, in fact, no arsenic labyrinth to be found in the fells above Coniston (and if the term is new to you, do read the book to discover what an arsenic labyrinth is ...), nor any relics of an arsenic works, but arsenic was mined elsewhere in Cumbria, at Caldbeck, and again it seemed right to blend a recognisable locale with made-up events, Lakeland history and even a legend of my own devising. Because the dictates of the story made it essential to utilise Coniston village as a setting, rather than a make-believe village like Brack or Old Sawrey, I took various liberties with the local topography, to make it clear that this is emphatically a work of fiction, not an account of the misadventures of real-life characters. When I was interviewed about the Lakes books by Peter Holland for a feature on BBC TV’s regional news, the pier at Coniston (which plays a part in the climax to The Arsenic Labyrinth) proved an excellent setting for conversation and filming--the search for a suitably accessible ‘coffin trail’ proved more of a challenge ...

So now we come back full circle, to the matter of surreal linkages and my legal case.

Last year, during the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival, Edwards’ first Lake District novel, The Coffin Trail, was shortlisted for the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award. (But Val McDermid’s The Torment of Others wound up winning, instead.) After the awards ceremony, Edwards and I sat in a bar and started drinking and talking. We eventually got onto the topic of “day jobs,” as I knew that he toiled in the legal profession--a more suitable co-occupation than most for a crime writer.

As we quaffed more wine, and as the clock ticked along, Edwards revealed that he worked as a lawyer for a Manchester firm called Mace & Jones. I could only laugh, and then tell him about the tenacious solicitor who had worked on my legal case. Well, it turns out that the solicitor in question reported to Edwards, so he knew her quite well--a disclosure that caused me, in my surprise, to spill wine all over the table. Such are the strands that connect us, those storied six degrees of separation.

As he prepared to embark for Seattle and LCC, Edwards told the Manchester Evening News, “It’s hugely exciting to be going to America. Crime fiction holds a special place in the history of American literature and it is wonderful to be a part of it.” If you happen to bump into him at LCC this weekend, be sure to say that Ali sends his regards.

Baby, It’s Cold Outside

Today brings two conflicting reports about plans to adapt thriller writer Greg Rucka’s much-praised graphic novel Whiteout (1998) for the silver screen.

The story I prefer is that the lovely British actress Kate Beckinsale (known for her roles in Pearl Harbor, The Aviator, and Underworld, and rumored to be in the running for a star turn as Wonder Woman) is set to play U.S. Marshal Carrie Stetko, who in Whiteout investigates a murder at McMurdo Station in Antarctica. Cinematical reports that this film “is pegged to begin shooting in mid-March,” with Dominic Sena (Swordfish, Gone in Sixty Seconds) directing.

However, the Crimespree Cinema blog insists that “Kate Bosworth (Blue Crush, Superman Returns) is in negotiations” to portray Stetko, instead, though it at least concurs with the choice of Sena as the movie’s director.

Maybe both rumors bear some credibility, and a decision simply hasn’t been made yet. This is Hollywood we’re talking about, after all. But whether it’s Beckinsale or Bosworth who gets the Stetko assignment, Rucka (who first came to my attention with his Atticus Kodiak series (Shooting at Midnight, Critical Space) would seem to be well served in the leading lady department.

Nothing Lasts Forever

It’s funny what you can learn about a famous person only after he or she dies. Take, for instance, writer Sidney Sheldon, who passed away this afternoon, at age 89, of complications from pneumonia.

My only knowledge of Sheldon until today was that he’d produced a series of thrillers, all of them fronted by slinky, reclining young women clad in provocative attire. (This is a good example.) However, he also wrote Broadway musicals and the Shirley Temple-Cary Grant film, The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer (1947), the latter of which won him an Academy Award. And he claimed to have penned “almost every single episode” of The Patty Duke Show (1963-1966). He went on to create an even better-remembered TV series, I Dream of Jeannie (1965-1970). In addition, Sheldon created and then wrote episodes of Hart to Hart (1979-1984). It wasn’t until age 50 that he turned to composing novels, soon becoming a bestseller, with several of his books being adapted for screens large and small (including Bloodline, Master of the Game, and Memories of Midnight). Oh, and did I mention that his very first novel, The Naked Face (1970), won him an Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America?

Sheldon packed a lot of successes into 89 years. Would that we could all be so productive.

READ MORE: “Sidney Sheldon, 89; Master of Flashy, Trashy Bestsellers,” by Bettijane Levine and Valerie J. Nelson (Los Angeles Times); “Obituary: Sidney Sheldon (1917-2007),” by Steve Lewis (Mystery*File).

Can We Now Move on to 2007?

This comes a bit late in the game, but it’s nonetheless welcome: Crimespree Magazine has finally produced its favorite books of 2006 list, a reader-solicited rundown that comprises a number of ties, but two pretty clear winners. Here’s the full list:

■ Favorite Book of the Year

1st Place: The Cleanup, by Sean Doolittle

2nd Place: The Blonde, by Duane Swierczynski

3rd Place: (tie) The Book of Lost Things, by John Connolly, and The Night Gardener, by George Pelecanos

4th Place: (tie) Dope, by Sara Gran; Escape Clause, by James O. Born; No Good Deeds, by Laura Lippman; Saturday’s Child, by Ray Banks; and Shotgun Opera, by Victor Gischler

5th Place: (tie) American Skin, by Ken Bruen; A Dangerous Man, by Charlie Huston; The Drummer, by Anthony Neil Smith; A Necessary Evil, by Alex Kava; and The Two Minute Rule, by Robert Crais

■ Best Contribution to an Ongoing Series

1st Place: The Hard Way, by Lee Child

2nd Place: (tie) All Mortal Flesh, by Julia Spencer Fleming, and Echo Park, by Michael Connelly

3rd Place: (tie) Kidnapped, by Jan Burke, and The Last Assassin, by Barry Eisler

4th Place: (tie) A Necessary Evil, by Alex Kava, and No Good Deeds, by Laura Lippman

5th Place: (tie) Dying Light, by Stuart MacBride; The Next Time You Die, by Harry Hunsicker; A Stolen Season, by Steve Hamilton; and An Unquiet Grave, by P.J. Parrish

Ken Bruen of the Year: American Skin

The Workaholic as Critic

The Internet is a funny old place, if only because it allows us to interact with people we might never otherwise meet. For instance, one guy I’ve communicated with for many, many years--but only via e-mail--is Bev Vincent, who last year launched a new Web site called Onyx Reviews, which I have found to be a useful resource, especially since Vincent and I seem to share similar reading tastes.

I thought I was a busy guy, but that was before I got to know Vincent. He makes me feel like a pathetic slacker. You see, Bev Vincent’s a writer and reviewer, as well as a columnist with Cemetery Dance, a Maryland-based magazine that covers horror and dark suspense fiction. He also writes a special Stephen King news page for the CD Web site. (Vincent, you may know, is the author of The Road to the Dark Tower: Exploring Stephen King’s Magnum Opus [2004], which was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award.)

Vincent launched Onyx Reviews as a forum for his own crime-fiction criticism, as well as a place to install occasional author interviews. Currently, the site features his exchanges with Tabitha King and Owen King, both of whom--as you might expect--are related to a certain other writer named King. Elsewhere on the site, you’ll find detailed reviews of Hollywood Station, by Joseph Wambaugh, The Naming of the Dead, by Ian Rankin, Hannibal Rising, by Thomas Harris, and Echo Park, by Michael Connelly. Vincent’s critiques are always insightful, honest, and well-written, demonstrating his knowledge of mystery, horror, and general fiction. (More of his reviews can be found here.)

I’m exhausted just trying to list everything Bev Vincent does. Oh, and did I mention that he’s also become a blogger? Where does he find the time?

The Corpse Shall Rise Again

Tommy Lee Jones playing Louisiana detective Dave Robicheaux in an upcoming big-screen adaptation of James Lee Burke’s 1993 novel, In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead? That’s the word from ComingSoon.net.

Let me lay my cards out early: I like Jones for this role. I always thought he deserved another crack at playing a sleuth, after his fine turn in the 1988 teleflick Gotham (which co-starred a particularly lovely Virginia Madsen). And I suspect he’ll help us to forget Alec Baldwin’s less-than-engaging interpretation of Robicheaux, in Heaven’s Prisoners (1996).

Music to Murder By

Editor Tony Burton is out with the February issue of Crime and Suspense, which includes short stories by Mike Driver (“The Mistletoe Kiss”), Clair Dickson (“Small Favors”), and Brian C. Petroziello (“Tatters”), as well as the second installment of Gary R. Hoffman’s four-part serial, “No Motive for Murder,” and Burton’s own tribute to the late author Barbara Seranella.

By the way, after I complimented him last month on replacing the altogether cheesy theme from The A-Team with that of The Avengers on C&S’s front page, Burton asked that I pass along other noteworthy TV crime drana themes with which he could welcome visitors to his site. Well, how ’bout we start with Henry Mancini’s exhilerating intro to the NBC Mystery Movie? Or Jerry Goldsmith’s Barnaby Jones theme? Or Perry Mason’s atmospheric opening tune? Or even the theme from Get Smart? (Most of those, and others, are available at a site called TV Themes Online.)

Any other suggestions? Send them to editor Burton here.

Head in the Clouds

Last year the young turks at Quercus Publishing in London pulled off an interesting coup: they were the first to release Thomas H. Cook’s 16th novel, The Murmur of Stones. I loved that cerebral and slow-paced look at madness and who it can hide within a family. Truly, it was a fine follow-up to Cook’s 2005 novel, Red Leaves.

Murmur has finally been released in the United States and Canada, but under the title The Cloud of Unknowing, and I’m pleased to see that others are raving about this wonderful work, too. Bruce Desilva of The Vancouver Sun writes,

“The Cloud of Unknowing,” Thomas H. Cook’s 16th novel, is a superbly structured tale written in an elegant, literary style. Although it is being marketed as a crime novel, it doesn’t resemble anything you are likely to find on bookshop mystery helves.

This is a book that examines family mythology, genetic determinism, the line between sanity and madness, the difference between intuition and hallucination.

Ask yourself: If Diana hears voices whispering that her son was murdered, is she crazy if the voices are right?

Meanwhile, Leslie McGill of The Kansas City Star seems to understand why Cook’s latest novel was published in the UK first:

The barely controlled hysteria surrounding Cook’s narratives feels more British than American. Although a crime seems to have been committed, there’s none of the police procedural or forensic elements so common to American mysteries.

Although Cook has been nominated for the Edgar award six times in four categories, including winning for Best Novel for The Chatham School Affair, his name is not as well known as that of other mystery writers. This is a shame, because he’s one of the best authors writing today.

Billy Watkins of The Clarion-Ledger, in Jackson, Mississippi, probes deeper and discovers something about Cook’s writing process:

The 59-year-old Cook, who grew up in Ft. Payne, Ala., is one of those rare writers who lets his imagination take the story wherever it wants to go on that particular day--and still wind up with a nonwandering plot line. He calls it “frightening” but says it’s the only way he can work.

“I have (author) friends who have 200-page outlines,” says Cook ... “I have none. Another writer once said that writing without an outline is sort of like driving your car on a road you’re not familiar with ... your lights illuminate a curve here, a curve there. But you don’t know what’s around any of them. I find that an exciting way to develop a book.”

Let’s leave the last word on Cloud/Murmur, though, to Marilyn Stasio of The New York Times. She writes:

But while the suspense is minimal in this first-person account of an underachieving small-town lawyer who fears for the sanity of his gifted but unstable sister, the narrative is sustained by its thematic richness and the subtlety of its psychological portraits of tormented characters.

The only peculiar thing about Stasio’s critique, which at one point chides the author for allowing “his lyrical style to swamp his story,” is that I can’t tell whether she actually likes this book. Maybe she’s just conflicted, like a Cook character herself.

“Men’s Adventure”Chapter 1: The Cards Are Dealt

A Crime Novel in Installments,
by Dick Adler

The high desert wind sliced through their city clothes. Up ahead was the virtually deserted town of Los Alamos, where they hoped the man they had come for was still alive. Then a row of very bright lights burst into life, followed by another. Men with guns, wearing watch caps and heavy gloves, exploded out of Quonset huts. The guns were all pointing at them ...

* * *

It began with a poker game.

They had hired a boozed-out magazine writer named Jim Thompson with a couple of pulp crime novels to his credit as managing editor of Saga downstairs. Thompson lasted about six months; he eventually got fired for trying to start a union of writers and editors, and moved on to the same job on the less-demanding Police Gazette.

Meanwhile, people like Ivan Davis, who worked a few floors above for Worldwide Publications--including a men’s adventure magazine called Viking, for which he toiled as articles editor for $150 a week--served under a burly ex-Marine named Morgan McLennon, a managing editor who hid beneath his rough exterior a surprising streak of sensitivity and intelligence. He’d spent a year in Paris, where he became friendly with Brendan Behan, and was a champion freeloader of food and travel. He was also a deadly gin rummy player, and more often than not took lunch money from Ivan while Davis cursed and kicked his filing cabinet.

Neither Thompson nor McLennon played in the Friday night poker games--Morgan because he had a socially demanding wife, and Thompson because he sent his money back to Los Angeles, where his family lived. It was a colorful group--mostly men’s adventure magazine writers and editors whose hopes for literary fame and fortune surged with every week’s New York Times Book Review.

Although Worldwide employees and the gang from Saga made up its core, a sizable band of would-be tough-guy types also took the weekly after-work journey from Magazine Management to the building on the corner of Third Avenue, across 42nd Street from the Daily News with its giant golden globe in the lobby, and just down the street from Tim Costello’s famous bar and restaurant.

The assembly this Friday included Barry Sternberg and Dick Harris, the two top editors of Sport; Saga’s suave and ambitious art director, Hal Goldman; three would-be novelists from Male and Stag--Bruce Pronzini, Billy Freeman, and Josh Green; plus Ivan’s friend and new housemate, Viking’s fiction editor, Ross Calhoun. And of course Davis, nothing like as good a poker player as he thought he’d become in the hills of Korea.

The telephone at the receptionist’s desk had been ringing all evening; now it went off every five minutes. Finally, Dick Harris, having already won his tiresomely predictable $75, folded an unpromising hand and got up to answer it.

“Maybe you’d better take this,” he said to Ivan when he came back to the three desks they’d pushed together to make their table. “He says he’s one of your writers--Saul Cooperman?”

Cooperman was the author of a prize-winning novel from the 1930s, An Immigrant’s Diary--a book that Ivan’s freethinking (on almost all other subjects) socialist father had objected to his son bringing home, because of its sex scenes. So Davis read it with awe and jealousy in the library at James Monroe High School, and he began to think about writing for a living.

Drink and a vanishing talent for fiction had reduced Cooperman: he now wrote true-crime stories for the men’s adventure magazines. Most of his work for Viking involved research for the Court of Final Justice, publisher Louis Erickson’s attempt to add class to his sleazy product by assembling a team of experts to solve famous crimes.

“Saul, what’s up?” Ivan asked, after deciding that his chances of drawing to a flush were slim.

“Ivan , I need to reach Morgan,” Cooperman answered in his boozy but still oddly impressive voice. “I’ve got a great lead into this story I’m working on, but I’ll need some dough to make my contact.”

“How much are we talking about here?”

“Five hundred should cover it. Can Morgan get me that much as soon as possible?”

Erickson was a notorious penny-pincher who once said to Davis, after he told him that one of their top writers--who had two stories unpaid for and a wife dying of cancer--was begging for a check, “Pay him for one.” So the chances of McLennon getting Erickson to lay out that kind of cash in a hurry were nonexistent.

“I can’t reach Morgan until tomorrow,” Ivan lied. “What story is this--the Lopez murder?”

“That’s it. I’ve got a source, a guy in Santa Fe who says he knows what really happened. But he won’t hang around waiting: you guys have to move on this right away.”

“I’ll do what I can,” Ivan told him. Noticing that a new hand was being dealt, he hung up and returned to the table.

An hour later, he was down to two bucks in his wallet, plus his uncashed paycheck. They decided to call it a night. For a moment Ivan blanked out and thought about going home on the IRT to the West Bronx, where until two months ago he’d been living in his old bedroom in his parents’ railroad apartment in Castle Hill. Then he remembered he was now a Manhattan guy, renting (for $30 a week) a one-bedroom place in the house on East 82nd, where Ross Calhoun also lived. Owned by a rich old widow and furnished in dusty 1930s plush grandeur, it was close to the Metropolitan Museum, where artistic young women seemed impressed by Ivan’s job. These, plus the stewardesses he met on the flights that Morgan’s heavy freeloading schedule made him pass down reluctantly to Ivan, added up to a sex life which was definitely occasional but often interesting.

“I was going to suggest a beer at Costello’s,” Ivan said to Ross. “But then I’d have to borrow subway money from you, plus twenty bucks for the weekend.” They walked out onto 42nd Street, nearly deserted at midnight, and headed for the subway on Lexington.

* * *

STAY TUNED: Next Monday, find out what happened to Saul Cooperman, and what Ivan and Ross do about it--after they give their sex drives a workout with the help of a female peacenik, some Smith graduates, and the odd stewardess.

© Copyright 2007 by Dick Adler

Not the Sharpest Knives in the Drawer

Today in January Magazine, critic David Thayer inspects the brightness and sharpness of The Blade Itself, the debut novel from “Killer Year” author Marcus Sakey. “The set-up of The Blade Itself is simple,” explains Thayer. “Two childhood friends, Danny Carter and Evan McGann, plan to rob a pawnshop.” But nothing else about this new book is so simple, as Sakey explores issues of trust, honesty, temptation, and personal values. “The promise of his debut effort bodes well for this novelist, and for readers, too,” concludes Thayer. “Sakey is another gifted wordsmith exploring the urban terrain he knows and so obviously loves.”

Read the full review here.

Sage of the Old Sod

“I’ve fallen for the work of few crime novelists as quickly and completely as I have that of Irish author Ken Bruen,” writes John Kenyon at Things I’d Rather Be Doing. “From a first dip into his work in late 2004 with The White Trilogy that gathered the first three books about his character Brant, through to the point of being pretty well caught up with all of his U.S.-released work to date, I have blazed through 16 novels without finding one clunker in the bunch.” Now, Kenyon has the chance to interview Bruen, and the two discuss everything from rage as a work-motivator, to how Bruen alternates his series stars, to his collaborations with Jason Starr.

Read their exchange here.

The Creed of a Sleuthing Philosopher

Being an enthusiastic reader of historical crime fiction, I find that more and more of the novels I pick up feature appearances by real-life figures out of the past, whether those folks are taking cameo turns or playing larger roles in the drama. From my list of favorite crime novels of 2006, half were books prominent for their inclusion of genuine characters: Critique of Criminal Reason, by Michael Gregorio; The Interpretation of Murder, by Jeb Rubenfeld; The One from the Other, by Philip Kerr; The Pale Blue Eye, by Louis Bayard; and Red Sky Lament, by Edward Wright. And on my nightstand can be found three more novels in which historical personages take some part: David Dickinson’s Death on the Nevskii Prospekt, William Landlay’s The Strangler, and an April release, Black Hats, written by Patrick Culhane (aka Max Allan Collins) and starring ex-Old West lawmen Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson.

Some readers don’t like the intrusion of genuine characters into their fiction. For instance, I had an argument recently with a fellow member of my book group, who dismissed Elizabeth Gaffney’s 19th-century New York City novel, Metropolis (2005), in general, because she couldn’t get past her dislike of the fact that this story of luck, love, and power politics at all levels of society featured a variety of genuine players. I, however, find it thrilling when a modern author manages to capture the character of a real-life historical figure in his or her stories, without being thoroughly inhibited by the demands of “accurate representation.” (This, after all, is fiction we’re talking about here, not simply reporting.) And I frequently find myself thinking that this or that actual personage from long ago would make a dandy player in a 21st-century mystery.

Guardian books critic Ned Beauman has his own ideas about that last prospect, which he spelled out in a recent column:

Although the insertion of real historical figures into novels like E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime is often thought of as a uniquely postmodern trick, we find Johnson and Boswell picking up the magnifying glass in a story by Lillian de la Torre as long ago as 1943.

That was a promising start, but, since then, when mystery writers have looked for a real historical figure to add gravitas to their novels, they’ve usually gone for the very mighty, from Julius Caesar in Steven Saylor’s Rubicon to John F. Kennedy in James Ellroy’s American Tabloid. This makes sense--a lot of murders are about power--but what’s much more interesting is the clash between the brutal, messy world and someone who lives mostly in their own gentle, ordered mind, like a philosopher or a novelist.

The supreme example of this is probably an out-of-print, 1978 novel called The Case of the Philosopher’s Ring by Randall Collins, in which Bertrand Russell despatches Sherlock Holmes to find out who has stolen Wittgenstein’s mind. In the same year, Margaret Doody published Aristotle Detective. But writers tend to be more popular than philosophers, perhaps because philosophers don’t get out much ... So instead we’ve had murders solved by Chaucer, Shakespeare, Defoe, Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Mark Twain, Poe again, and even, of all people, Jane Austen and Beatrix Potter.

I’ve always thought [Jean-Jacques] Rousseau was a natural choice for this kind of book. After writing some unpopular anti-religious tracts in 1762, the philosopher found himself in exile for several years, first in Motiers in Switzerland and then in Wootton in Staffordshire. Both these little towns, like Miss Marple’s St. Mary Mead, could have seen regular poisonings and stabbings, and Rousseau, with his insight into human wickedness, would have been just the man to unravel them. But which great thinker could you see as the next Sherlock Holmes?

Read all of Beauman’s short piece here.

(Hat tip to Campaign for the American Reader.)

The Lure of the New

I’ve never been much of a follower. But the Blogger folks have been after me for weeks to covert The Rap Sheet over to their “New Blogger” software. So I finally did it today. So far, I don’t see much difference, other than that I now have the ability to create categories of posts for easy subject-matter searches (something I may or may not do). But please let me know if you spot any technical problems with this page in the near future. They’re probably not my fault; however, I’ll do my best to fix ’em.

“Men’s Adventure” Debuts on Monday

Unlike some people we know, “stay the course” has never been our catchphrase or limitation at The Rap Sheet. We think it’s important to try new things, whether they be online polls or guest bloggers (see here and here). So when Dick Adler, who reviews mysteries and thrillers for the Chicago Tribune, and is a Rap Sheet contributor, proposed writing a crime-novel-in-installments for this blog, we jumped at the opportunity.

That work, titled Men’s Adventure, will begin its exclusive first run in The Rap Sheet on Monday. We’ll offer new chapters each Monday after that until the story reaches its conclusion. Adler says the finished product should run “about 60,000 words altogether--which means 50-plus chapters.” Weekly installments will be archived, so that readers coming to the story late can catch up.

As you may already be aware, the 69-year-old Adler, a resident of Ventura, California, has been penning book reviews for the Trib for the last decade and a half. He’s also the author of one previous novel, an e-book called The Mozart Code (1999), which Tom Nolan reviewed favorably in January Magazine. And he was the co-author, with former California Governor Edmund G. (“Pat”) Brown, of Public Justice, Private Mercy: A Governor’s Education on Death Row (1989). Adler’s most recent book is Dreams of Justice: Mysteries as Social Documents (2005), a collection of his reviews and essays. His writing has appeared over the years in magazines such as Los Angeles, New York, the London Sunday Times Magazine, American Heritage, Playboy, Life, and TV Guide. He’s worked as a newspaper and magazine editor in New York City, London, and Los Angeles. But he started his editing career at Argosy, a fiction periodical turned “men’s magazine,” in 1956. That, Adler says, was back in the days “when Erle Stanley Gardner (of Perry Mason fame) was heading up a section called The Court of Last Resort, which used writers like James T. Farrell (author of the Studs Lonigan trilogy) to help unjustly convicted prisoners.”

Adler will draw on his experiences at Argosy during the ’50s to compose Men’s Adventure. He explains that, in this serial novel, “Gardner becomes Perry Marcus, Farrell turns into Saul Cooperman, Argosy transforms itself into Viking,” and his editor-detective protagonist from The Mozart Code, Ivan Davis, “joins a cast which includes such other real-life people as Harvey Matusow (one of the strangest figures of the Joe McCarthy witch hunt) and writers like Mario Puzo, who wrote The Godfather while he was churning out stories for the world of pulp magazines.” At the same time as Men’s Adventure introduces readers into the colorful and arcane realm of New York-based pulp publications, it will explore the damage done to so many lives by U.S. Senator McCarthy (R-Wisconsin) in his obsessive pursuit of alleged Communists both inside the federal government and without. (Anyone who’s read Edward Wright’s most recent historical novel, the Ellis Award-winning Red Sky Lament, should recognize the potential delights and drama of such a yarn.)

Asked what inspired him to develop Men’s Adventure in The Rap Sheet, Adler points to another serial novel, Jezebel’s Tomb, currently rolling out in the pages of The Washington Post. Written by David Hilzenrath, an investigative reporter on the Post’s financial news staff, Jezebel’s Tomb weaves together historical mysteries (the tale of an “unusual text found in a cave near the Dead Sea” and the suicide of a Jerusalem merchant) with the modern-day bombing of one of Jerusalem’s premier archaeological museums, supposedly by Palestinian terrorists. The 2,000-year-old missing document, last seen toward the end of 19th century, may hold a dangerous secret for the 21st century. New installments of Jezebel’s Tomb are being posted each Monday and Thursday.

Hilzenrath admits that, after researching his novel in the United States and the Middle East for more than a decade, but being turned down by publishers, he resorted to electronic distribution as a final resort. Adler, on the contrary, hasn’t yet shopped Men’s Adventure to publishing houses, though he would like to see interest generated by its appearance in The Rap Sheet. “I’m hoping they’ll call me,” he says. “If not, I’ll give it to an editor or agent.”

For the time being, Men’s Adventure simply gives Adler a chance to revisit an era and environment that he remembers with some nostalgia. “I was [at Argosy] for four years, then went over to True for another two years,” the author recalls. “What I learned from both was that there were many ways to tell an exciting story, which--in an age before TV series--really caught readers’ attention.”

We trust you will find some of that same excitement in the coming weeks, as Men’s Adventure takes shape on this page. Please let us know what you think.

(Photograph by Jane Adler)

Casing the Neighborhood

• Bill Crider, spirited blogger and Edgar Award-nominated author of the new Sheriff Dan Rhodes novel, Murder Among the OWLS, will be the guest this coming Monday, January 29, on Elizabeth Foxwell’s It’s a Mystery, a weekly production of WEBR radio in Fairfax, Virginia. The show is set to be Webcast at 11 a.m. ET. Click here to listen. (If you miss hearing the show live, you should be able to catch the audio clip later at Foxwell’s It’s a Mystery Web site.) In coming weeks, Foxwell will welcome to her studio Deanna Raybourn (Silent in the Grave), Deborah Crombie (Water Like a Stone), and Steve Hockensmith (On the Wrong Track).

• In a two-fer for the week, Lance Carter interviews both Irish writer Ken Bruen (American Skin, Slide) and Sean Doolittle (The Cleanup) at his Murder & Mystery Books 101 blog.

• Meanwhile, the British Webzine Shots offers up Ian Rankin (who’s likely to be all over the news this year, and not just because the anticipated “final case” for Inspector John Rebus is due out in October) and Carol Anne Davis (Couples Who Kill).

• It seems like I’ve been writing a lot about television’s Lieutenant Columbo lately. But now Steve Lewis, of Mystery*File fame, has posted an excellent chronology of Columbo’s evolution from The Chevy Mystery Show, an NBC anthology series, to stage play, and back to television as one of the rotating NBC Mystery Movie series. In a separate post, Lewis recalls the novels generated by Columbo, one of which I recognize from own collection: Alfred Lawrence’s simply titled Columbo (1972). To see more of the covers from those various novels and novelizations, click here.

• At his Book/Daddy blog, critic Jerome Weeks delivers a thoughtful reassessment of historical spy novelist Alan Furst (The Foreign Correspondent, 2006):

Initially, his writing felt strained, a patently movie-ish attempt to evoke atmosphere, not create it but borrow it, remind us of it from other places. ...

But Furst calmed down, gained confidence, his writing became smoky yet lean. And he began using dry, throwaway humor. In the midst of all the suspense and violence, it lends a cosmopolitan feel that aids immensely in making his typical main character appealing. These are sadly experienced men, often expatriates with conflicted loyalties or they’re émigrés from smaller countries, the perennial losers in the big European wars. They’re men who are reluctant to fight but know they must--they’re not natural warriors or raging idealists, then, but men who would frankly be much happier eating good food and staying in bed with a lover. Even the military or espionage operations they get involved in are not the grand affairs like Overlord or Barbarossa. They’re more the nuts-and-bolts clandestine effort: smuggling weapons or people or information, sabotaging the enemy’s oil shipments, trying to sway a political situation one way or the other. Yet, we learn, everything counts. Rather than an easy nostalgia for some time of supposed moral clarity, his novels give us a feel for the murk of warfare and espionage, and it’s often the murk that is as dangerous as any enemy.

All of this leads to that very Furstian effect: His novels are at once sardonically anti-heroic and quietly heroic, exotic yet matter-of-fact, elegant and earthy. I can’t get enough of them.

Read the entirety of Weeks’ Furst commentary here.

• The late actor Jerry Orbach, who played Detective Lennie Briscoe in the original Law & Order series, recently had one of his living wishes come true: The corneas of his eyes were donated to help two other men with sight problems.

• I noted recently that Dave Zeltserman, editor of the Webzine Hardluck Stories, is soliciting noir fiction for an upcoming “Truthiness Issue,” a tribute to Comedy Central star Stephen Colbert, who popularized the term “truthiness.” In his editor’s note regarding that edition, Zeltserman admits that he’s hoping to be noticed by the Comedy Central folks, and have them publicize his site to the “millions of viewers of the Colbert Report.” Well, it seems he got his wish. The blog Comedy Central Insider quotes Zeltserman’s pitch at length, adding: “There are a million stories in the Naked City. Make sure your submission gets to Hardluck’s big boss before the August 1 deadline.”

• And from a strictly male (and, therefore, undoubtedly sexist) perspective, this is bad news.

NBC to ABC to DVD

As regular readers of this blog know, I’m a huge fan of older TV detective series. And, much to my wife’s consternation, I have been buying up DVD versions of those productions as they can be found. But I thought I already had all the episodes of Columbo (seasons one through seven) that were likely to be released. Not so, it seems. TV Squad reports today that the Columbo movies Peter Falk made for ABC-TV (after the cancellation of the series’ original home, the NBC Mystery Movie) are starting to be released, as well. The first set, from 1989, is due in stores on April 24.

According to TV Squad, the movies in that set will be “Columbo Goes to the Guillotine (with Anthony Andrews), Murder, Smoke, and Mirrors (Fisher Stevens), Grand Deceptions (Robert Foxworth), Sex and the Married Detective (Lindsay Crouse), and Murder: A Self Portrait (Patrick Bauchau). The set will be three discs and probably won’t have many (if any) extras on them.”

I remember a couple of these, though they weren’t as worth remembering as the original series. As Falk aged within his rumpled raincoat, he started to play his L.A. police lieutenant character more for laughs, and that detracted from the story intrigue. Nonetheless, ABC continued to turn out Columbo features, first as part of its ABC Mystery Movie rotation and later as teleflick specials. The last Columbo made, from what I can tell, was Columbo Likes the Nightlife, which came out in 2003 and guest-starred Matthew Rhys and Jennifer Sky. Whether Universal Classic Television will release all 24 of the Columbos made after the NBC Mystery Movie went off the air is as much a question as whether I really need to own them all.

READ MORE: “‘Enough Rope’--The Very First ‘Columbo’” (The Ultimate Columbo Site).

Of Politics and Plagiarism

The death earlier this week of 88-year-old Watergate burglar and spy novelist E. Howard Hunt continues to generate headlines as well as less prominent insights.

Former Washington Post investigative reporter Carl Bernstein sat for an online chat at the Post Web site on Wednesday, answering readers’ questions about everything from Hunt’s theory that George H.W. Bush and Lyndon Johnson were complicit in President John F. Kennedy’s 1963 assassination (“I would judge it preposterous and not worth further examination”) to the “lying and mendacity” practiced by the current White House occupant (“As a [Republican] bumper-sticker of the day proclaimed, ‘Nobody died at Watergate.’ If only we could say that about the era of George W. Bush ...”) to Hunt’s “distinguished” pre-Watergate career (“He had a certain erudition, he could write [spy novels] he liked to see himself in a heroic, Cold War tradition ... but his accomplishments were meager ...”). Especially for people who aren’t old enough to have lived through the nightmare of Watergate, it’s interesting to hear what Bernstein has to say about Hunt’s role in that scandal.

Also intriguing is a post that author Mark Coggins (Candy from Strangers) put up on his blog yesterday. It recalls how Hunt “once corresponded” with Raymond Chandler. Explains Coggins:

In 1952, Chandler wrote a two page letter in response to--of all things--charges from Hunt of ethical violations of “self-plagiarism.” Hunt had written to complain that several of Chandler’s 1930s Black Mask short stories, anthologized in the 1952 collection The Simple Art of Murder, had been the cannibalized to provide the plot lines for his first four novels.

Coggins goes on to quote the full text of Chandler’s response, as lifted from editor Frank MacShane’s Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler (1981). While it seems remarkable that the creator of Philip Marlowe should have bothered to respond to any such accusations from a then-unknown such as Hunt, what makes Chandler’s missive worth reading is the bitterness he shows toward other fictionists who would imitate him:

I have a further remark. As you may know, writers like Dashiell Hammett and myself have been widely and ruthlessly imitated, so closely as to amount to a moral plagiarism, even though the law does not recognize anything but the substantial taking of a plot. I have had stories taken scene by scene and just lightly changed here and there. I have had lines of dialogue taken intact, bits of description also word for word. I have no recourse. The law doesn’t call it plagiarism. Against this background you must pardon me if I find it just a little ludicrous that you should object to my using what is mine in the way that seems to me most suitable and most convenient. If my early stories had been published in a magazine of prestige and significance, the situation would have been rather different, and I would have been much more reluctant to do what you complain of. But as it is, I wish I had carried the process much further and used more of my old novelettes as material instead of republishing them with all their crudities, some of which crudities I know find almost unbearable.

Read all of Coggins’ post here.

READ MORE: “His Name Was Conspiracy,” by John Nadler (Contemporary Nomad); “Bill Pronzini on the Early E. Howard Hunt,” by Steve Lewis (Mystery*File); “Paperback 79: Stranger in Town/Howard Hunt,” by Rex Parker (Pop Sensation).

Realism vs. Romance

Speaking of Raymond Chandler and The Simple Art of Murder, the British blogger who signs himself as “De Scribe” has posted, at Bookends, a well-thought-out review of that 1950 short-story collection. It’s noteworthy for the way it contrasts Chandler’s prescriptions for detective fiction with those spelled out by S.S. Van Dine (Willard Huntington Wright) in the latter’s 1928 article, “Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories.”

You’ll find De Scribe’s critique here.

READ MORE: “The Simple Art of Murder,” by Don Napoli
(Reading California Fiction).

Oh, Horrors!

Joe R. Lansdale (Sunset and Sawdust, Lost Echoes), who has written not only within the crime fiction genre, but also in the fields of horror, westerns, and even science fiction, has been named as the Grand Master of the 2007 World Horror Convention, to be held in Toronto, Canada, from March 29 through April 1.

(Hat tip to Bill Crider.)

Uncovering Hunt’s Past

Although most news accounts of former Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt’s death yesterday failed to mention much about his having been a spy novelist, bloggers Steve Lewis and Bill Crider are endeavoring to make up for that slight. Lewis’ Mystery*File has a lengthy rundown of Hunt’s fiction, written both under his own name and under a variety of pseudonyms (including Robert Dietrich). Meanwhile, Crider--whose impressive collection of pulp paperbacks must be threatening the integrity of his home’s foundation by now--has posted cover scans of the Hunt books at his fingertips. I’m particularly fond of the fronts from End of a Stripper (1960) and Curtains for a Lover (1962), both of which, Lewis points out, starred “two-fisted, hard-drinking CPA detective, Steve Bentley, a former agent for the Treasury, but whose nose for trouble led him into the exact same situations as any two-fisted, hard-drinking private eye would find himself in.”

READ MORE: “Paperback Warrior Primer—Howard Hunt” (Paperback Warrior); “Ex-Spy Crafted Watergate, Other Schemes,” by Patricia Sullivan (The Washington Post); “E. Howard Hunt,” by Ed Gorman; “A PQ Interview with E. Howard Hunt” (Bill Crider’s Pop Culture Magazine); “E. Howard Hunt’s The Towers of Silence,” by dfordoom (Vintage Pop Fictions).

“This World Is Full of Broken Things”

For those of you who are waiting impatiently for the release of Irish crime novelist John Connolly’s next P.I. Charlie Parker novel, The Unquiet, in May, note that Connolly has posted the book’s prologue at his Web site. You can read it here.

READ MORE: “John Connolly News,” by Mike Stotter (Shotsmag Confidential).

Of Stars, Send-ups, and Spies

First of all, let me thank Megan Abbott, author of the noirish new historical thriller, The Song Is You, for her generous contributions to The Rap Sheet over the last seven days. Her perspective on writing, film, and period atmospherics were much appreciated--not just by those of us at The Rap Sheet, but by readers, who flocked here in rather extraordinary numbers last week, just to see what Megan had to say. And I’m quite pleased to repeat her news from yesterday, that--after a brief but necessary hiatus to promote The Song Is You--she will be joining this blog as a regular contributor.

Second, having finally escaped from other responsibilities for the time being, I can report a variety of other news related to this genre:

• Is this the face of Philip Marlowe, the hard-drinking and cynical, yet philosophical Los Angeles private eye introduced in Raymond Chandler’s 1939 novel, The Big Sleep? Hollywood apparently thinks so. Drawing from an interview with film producer Marc Abraham, which appeared earlier this week in Louisville, Kentucky’s Courier-Journal newspaper, Cinematical confirms rumors that 43-year-old English actor Clive Owen will play Marlowe in a feature-length film based “on one of Raymond Chandler’s detective stories,” though Abraham “didn’t specify which story would be adapted ...” Now, I haven’t been big on the prospects of bringing Chandler’s soiled knight back to television, especially if he’s to be “modernized” and played again by Elliot Gould. But Owen, despite his being a Brit, might have the grit, depth, and faint charm necessary to step into the scuffed shoes of L.A.’s most famous fictional detective. True he isn’t James Garner, who I think did the best job of portraying Chandler’s P.I. (in 1969’s Marlowe); nor is he David Strathairn, who one reader of Cinematical suggested for the part (and who I agree would be an excellent choice). However, Owen has at least shown his chops in a couple of previous sleuthing roles, as Detective Chief Inspector Ross Tanner in the UK psychological thriller Second Sight (1999), and as author Mark Timlin’s doped-up South London gumshoe in the 1996 series Sharman. And he’s won plaudits for his role as an anti-hero in Children of Men, the recent film adaptation of P.D. James’ 1992 novel of the same name. My fingers are crossed that he can bring new and appeal life to the iconic Marlowe.

• As part of his Monday series of author interviews, John Kenyon reaches out to Spokane, Washington, novelist Jess Walter--sometime crime novelist and author of the National Book Award finalist The Zero--to talk about how Walter’s journalism background informs his fiction, his feelings about the term “literary crime fiction,” and having Richard Russo pen the screenplay of his 2005 novel, Citizen Vince. Their exchange at Kenyon’s Things I’d Rather Be Doing blog can be found here.

• A year after Comedy Central star Stephen Colbert delivered a brilliant knee-capping to George W. Bush during the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner, the event’s organizers have decided to invite the much-less-controversial comedian and impersonator, Rich Little (“basically a Republican, whose jokes are reminiscent of Ronald Reagan’s, though without the edge,” as he says of himself) to their dinner this April, instead. With Bush’s public-approval ratings having once more tumbled below 30 percent, and with at least two-thirds of Americans opposed to the prez’s planned escalation of the Iraq conflict, it seems that Washington, D.C., journalists (who should have more backbone than this) are concerned about piling on to Bush’s woes. Nonetheless, “truthiness,” the Colbert-popularized term defined as “the quality of stating concepts one wishes or believes to be true, rather than the facts,” lives on at the fiction e-zine Hardluck Stories. Explaining to would-be contributors his theme for a future “special issue,” editor Dave Zeltserman writes:

What I’m looking for are the same typically brilliant noir stories that Hardluck routinely publishes, but stories that are somehow inspired by the Colbert Report show, possibly even by the concept of “truthiness.” These could be stories featuring a Colbert-type character or inspired by an episode of Colbert Report or capture the essence of what Colbert is doing or whatever else your imagination can concoct as long as Colbert, his show or “truthiness” is a key element of the story. ...

So is this is a ploy on my part to have Hardluck mentioned to millions of viewers of the Colbert Report, or am I trying to pay tribute to a national icon in a manner most befitting him--with stories of despair, crime and degradation? I think the answer is obvious.

• Michael Caine is writing “a contemporary thriller about terrorism”? Shotsmag Confidential’s Mike Stotter has the lowdown.

• Novelist-critic Mike Ripley is back with his latest “Getting Away with Murder” column in Shots, and this time he’s writing about novelist Martyn Waites’ sideline as “a practising thespian,” mystery-writer muses, Walter Mosley’s move into penning sexually explicit fiction, and the resurrection of early 20th-century crime-fictionist Raoul Whitfield in Walter Satterthwait’s newest novel, the beautifully packaged Dead Horse.

• I reported recently that the prolific Max Allan Collins and illustrator Terry Beatty are collaborating on a Hard Case Crime novel called Deadly Beloved, featuring their comic-book detective, “Ms. Tree.” But that seems not to be this pair’s only project for the year. The Berkley Publishing Group’s summer 2007 catalogue includes word about a collaboration called A Killing in Comics, due out in May and starring a former striptease artist, now in charge of her late hubby’s newspaper syndicate (distributor of the Wonder Guy superhero comic strip), who has to “find a killer among cartoonists, wives, mistresses, and minions of a different sort of ‘syndicate’--suspects with motives that are anything but heroic.”

• Finally, Bill Crider’s blog brings news that E. Howard Hunt, who along with G. Gordon Liddy engineered the first break-in at Washington, D.C.’s Watergate complex in 1972--a crime that lead in part to President Richard M. Nixon’s notorious Watergate scandal--died earlier today at age 88. What’s the crime-fiction relevancy here? It’s that Hunt was a CIA operative turned spy novelist before he became a Republican White House “plumber.” Among his books: East of Farewell (1942), Limit of Darkness (1944), The Violent Ones (1950), The Berlin Ending (1973), and Evil Time (1992). According to the “who’s who”-like Web site, NNDB,

... Hunt was a proficient writer of spy and hard-boiled genre novels, drawing on his knowledge of CIA operations and techniques. None of his books were particularly popular until Watergate gave his name an added mystique, and several of his earlier titles were republished to fairly brisk sales. In a review, Publishers Weekly once described Hunt’s fiction as “violent, sexist and xenophobic.” He wrote more than 30 novels under his own name, thirteen as Robert Dietrich, ten as David St. John, four as Gordon Davis, and three each as John Baxter and P.S. Donoghue.

Several of his novels featured a fictional protagonist named Peter Ward, who seems to be Howard Hunt. Ward and Hunt both attended Brown University, both became polished Washington socialites, and Ward frequently traveled to overseas nations where Hunt had been stationed. Another series of Hunt novels centered on Steve Bentley, an accountant who is repeatedly drawn into foreign intrigue. In response to a long litany of negative notices about his books, Hunt once said that too many reviewers had “chosen to criticize my life rather than professionally appraise my work.”

Intriguingly, Hunt claimed that he was the real-life inspiration for the character of “Jim Phelps” in the TV series Mission: Impossible.

Lead and Bologna

Although the name of the program doesn’t inspire thoughts of haute cuisine, it seems likely that the International Thriller Writers’ Brunch and Bullets program will prove every bit as successful as previous ITW-executed efforts. And perhaps even more tasty.

Brunch and Bullets, according to an ITW release, “will feature a terrific meal at a top-flight venue where the true main course promises to be an ITW member author seated at every table, rotating through the course of the program.”

So think Tony n’ Tina’s Wedding, without the theater sports and with authors standing in for 1980s wedding accoutrements. Two Brunch and Bullets luncheons are planned for 2007. The first will be held on March 17 at the Renaissance Hollywood Hotel in Los Angeles. Authors Sandra Brown, Heather Graham, Gregg Hurwitz, John Lescroart, Gayle Lynds, David Morrell, and Christopher Reich will be on hand to break bread and sign books. Additionally, Lynds and Morrell will be announcing the 2007 Thriller Award nominees at the lunch.

The second 2007 Brunch and Bullets event will take place on May 5 at the Hyatt Regency Greenwich in Greenwich, Connecticut. At press time, Stephen Coontz, Linda Fairstein, Joseph Finder, Michael Palmer, and Douglas Preston were slated to be among the attending authors, though that lineup may change.

During both events, the brunch will conclude with a book-signing by all authors in attendance.

The ITW has announced that 25 percent of the net proceeds from each of these brunches will be donated to Reading Is Fundamental, “a group whose wondrous work in support of the written word makes them the perfect partner for an organization that lives by it.”

To find more information about the ITW’s Brunch and Bullets program, click here.

Barbara Seranella Dies

As usual, Kevin Roderick of LA Observed says it best when he notes the death this last weekend of crime novelist Barbara Seranella, the 50-year-old author of the Miranda “Munch” Mancini series (An Unacceptable Death, Unwilling Accomplice, etc.):

The best-selling mystery author from Laguna Beach died yesterday in Cleveland while awaiting a liver transplant. She had received two livers in 2005 and spent much time since at USC’s University Hospital. On December 31, the L.A. Times’s Current section ran a piece from Seranella about her health issues and hope for a better 2007:

“I have dedicated every shooting star, broken wishbone and blown-out birthday candle to the same thing during the last year: I want my health back. You see, I have been chosen. Don’t get too excited or wish that it could have been you. I’m one of those people in the midst of a ‘courageous battle,’ the kind you read about in the obits once the battle is over (read: ‘lost’) ...

“Please Mr. Wizard, I want to go home. I am ready to be healthy again. I am having another transplant soon. It will restore my health. I will no longer have yellow eyeballs, or hippopotamus legs. I will have the stamina to stay awake all day and play with my friends and my dog. I will travel and not need a wheelchair. I will be a sightseer in my own town and take walking tours of Los Angeles. I have never seen the Watts Tower or Disney Hall. I will go treasure hunting at the beach and maybe try to learn salsa dancing.”

Oh, the places I’ll go and the things I’ll do.”

Seranella’s latest novel, Deadman’s Switch--featuring a new protagonist, Charlotte Lyon--is due to be published by St. Martin’s Minotaur in April.

READ MORE: “Barbara Seranella--An Appreciation,” by Denise Hamilton (LA Observed); “Mystery Writer Dies at 50,” by Robin Hinch (The Orange County Register).

Noir, Vintage, and Neo

Friday, January 26 marks the beginning of Noir City 5, the annual film festival in San Francisco led by noir titan (and Chronicle crime fiction columnist) Eddie Muller. One of this festival’s joys is that it doesn’t just trot out the usual suspects (the closest it gets to the noir canon in this year’s schedule is The Big Combo and Scarlet Street). Instead, audiences are gifted with rarities such as Abandoned, which chronicles a baby-adoption racket and stars Dennis O’Keefe and, deliciously, Gale Storm of television’s My Little Margie (as well as Mike Mazurki, so memorable as Moose Malloy in Murder, My Sweet), along with Hell’s Half Acre, billed as “tiki noir,” featuring Evelyn Keyes as a taxi dancer and with a script by Steve Fisher (author of the great noir novel, I Wake Up Screaming). For my part, I won’t miss the Charles McGraw double feature scheduled for January 29.

While many (though not all) of these less-lauded noir gems lack the visual lushness of classics such as Out of the Past or The Killers, they bring countless other pleasures, including rich variations on noir themes of desolation and betrayal. Those themes have been fresh in my mind, having just watched the first two seasons of the television series Wiseguy (1987–1990), which may lack the visual panache of, say, Michael Mann’s TV work of the period but offers just about everything else. In fact, in light of Thursday’s post about top shows of the 1980s, I’d argue for Wiseguy as possibly being that decade’s best show. While contemporary viewings suffer a bit from moments of distracting “Eighties-ness,” not the least of which is the size of Annette Bening’s hair in her guest role, Wiseguy held up better for me than my beloved Crime Story (1986–1988). Loaded up with talent and a clever early ’60s-meets-’80s aesthetic, Crime Story started far more promisingly (the first few episodes, including two directed by Abel Ferrara, are dazzling) but, for me, disintegrated quickly under the weight of its own strenuous style. (Of course, Wiseguy too fell quickly.)

With The Sopranos and The Wire, among others before them, we have become very used to long story arcs that allow for both plot and emotional complications, and Wiseguy offers just those strengths, boasting a moral complexity that deepens with each episode of its first gangbuster season and into its second (with the famously creepy brother-sister combo of Kevin Spacey and Joan Severance). For every dated moment (the music, the freeze-frame explosions), there are a 100 more that endure, especially those provided by the knotty relationship between Ken Wahl (as undercover federal agent Vinnie Terranova) and charismatic Atlantic City crime boss Sonny Steelgrave (Ray Sharkey, in a truly bravura performance).

* * *

Finally, I want to thank J. Kingston Pierce and all the Rap Sheet contributors for sharing their wonderful space with me this past week. I’ve loved every minute of it, and I am thrilled that I’ll be staying on as an occasional contributor. After a few weeks of running around the country, jabbering about my new book, I’ll return to post periodically in this space. See you back soon.