Surveillance Report

• How in the heck did I miss mentioning that there’s a new, February-March issue of ThugLit available on the Web? I must be losing it. In any case, the contents include stories by Michael Penncavage (“The Cost of Doing Business”), Stuart Neville (“ The Last Dance”), and Sophie Littlefield (“Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon”). The full set of offerings--and another great piece of cover art, this one looking like something dragged out of the Five Points photo file--can be found here.

• Having read Steve Hockensmith’s new novel, The Black Dove--the third in his Holmes on the Range series--and enjoyed both its humor and its 1890s San Francisco setting (the Chinatown chapters are especially dark and mysterious), I was delighted to see that the author had submitted his book to Marshal Zeringue’s Page 99 Test. The results are here. By the way, I happened today to exchange e-mail messages with Hockensmith, complimenting him on his San Francisco atmospherics and asking him whether he intended to keep his protagonists, “deducifying” brothers Gustav and Otto Amlingmeyer, in the Bay Area for one or two novels more. His reply:

Actually, my original plan was to do two S.F.-based books back to back: one set primarily in the Barbary Coast, the other in Chinatown. There’s certainly enough material for a whole *series* set in S.F. at that time. The place was nuts! But eventually I decided that I needed to keep Big Red and Old Red on the move, so the two books got squished into one (with a short story to spare--my latest EQMM story about the guys is based on some of my Barbary Coast research). Assuming the series continues for a while, I’m sure the brothers will make their way back to San Francisco sooner or later.

• Good news from writer-editor Gerald So: “Patrick Shawn Bagley, Richie Narvaez, Anthony Rainone, and I have finished scoring submissions for the inaugural issue of The Lineup: Poems on Crime, which will be a 6x9-inch, 40 to 42-page chapbook of work by 14 poets.” This quartet already have a blog up to promote their publishing venture, and have made available the names of the poets to appear in Issue #1, a list that includes Patrick Shawn Bagley, Ken Bruen, Daniel Hatadi, and Sandra Seamans.

• In the wake of this week’s announcement of nominees for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Irish novelist-blogger Declan Burke confesses to being puzzled.

In the 10 months or so since Crime Always Pays has been running, Tana French, Benjamin Black, Ken Bruen, Declan Hughes, Brian McGilloway, Siobhan Dowd and Derek Landy have all been short-listed for various prestigious awards. Meanwhile, one writer remains conspicuous by his absence. Not only does John Connolly ... write superbly, he also pulls off the very difficult feat of blending crime and horror genres in novels that offer far more than the sum of their parts. He’s also the finest stylist currently working in Irish crime fiction. So where are all the John Connolly nominations, people? Wild conspiracy theories on the back of a used €50 note to the usual address at CAP Towers, Cape Wonga, please.

• Wouldn’t you know it? Out of all the Mickey Spillane books I’ve read in my life, I have only ever admired the cover of his 1972 novel, The Erection Set (which features a wonderful nude photo of his second wife, nightclub singer Sherri Malinou). Never read it. Yet here comes August West of the blog Vintage Hardboiled Reads, declaring it and The Last Cop Out (1973) “Mickey Spillane’s best pieces of work.” As if I didn’t have enough books on my to-be-read stack ...

• Elizabeth Foxwell reminds us that today would have been the 91st birthday of screenwriter-novelist David Goodis, “probably best known for Dark Passage (1946; film with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, 1947) and Down There (1956; filmed by Francois Truffaut as Shoot the Piano Player, 1960).”

• Rap Sheet contributor and former Chicago Tribune critic Dick Adler has an excellent piece in the Trib about Windy City newspaper writer and author Fredric Brown and his 1947 novel, The Fabulous Clipjoint, one of just seven novels featuring private eyes Ed and Am Hunter. After complimenting Brown on his prose, Adler asks, “Why then has Brown not been accorded the iconic status of a Dashiell Hammett or a Jim Thompson?” His answer:

As many critics have pointed out, Brown is far less a classic noir writer than Thompson; his stories are not nearly as dark and perverse, and his style is far more polished. “Brown was a craftsman plying his hard-boiled trade, whereas Thompson was an open wound bleeding on the page,” a Booklist reviewer wrote.

And part of the problem was Brown himself, a man who often told his wife he hated writing. Brown liked booze as much as he disliked the act of writing, and given his choice he’d prefer to sit in a bar or at home, drinking, playing his flute and indulging in one of the dozens of other hobbies he enjoyed, including chess, poker and the works of Lewis Carroll.

To read all of Adler’s article, click here.

Speaking of author Brown, I just heard from novelist, editor, and blogger Ed Gorman, who says, “I’ve spent the last ten years trying to get some of Fred Brown’s material back in print. I’ve now arranged with Barry Malzberg (who represents the estate) to work with a small limited edition hardback house, Milipede Press (http://millipedepress.com/), in bringing back three of Brown’s novels. (I wish it were mass market but it’s a start.)” The first two of those three books will be Madball (1953) and The Far Cry (1951).” Adler is going to write an introduction to the former, with Gorman providing the intro to The Far Cry.

• Matt Eagan of The Hartford Courant tries to explain why the National Endowment for the Arts chose Dashiell Hammett’s 1930 private eye novel, The Maltese Falcon, as its latest Big Read book. His piece is available here, but more on the NEA’s nationwide program can be found here, here, and here.

• Finally, congratulations to Book/Daddy’s Jerome Weeks on his new job with KERA, the NPR/PBS station for Dallas-Fort Worth.