• Michael Wiley, whose book, The Last Striptease, won the 2006 Private Eye Writers of America award for Best First Private Eye Novel, talks with Sons of Spade about psycho sidekicks, the future of the gumshoe genre, and his second Joe Kozmarski story, The Bad Kitty Lounge, which he says “involves a dead nun with an inconvenient past and an indiscreet tattoo.”
• Meanwhile, Ben Hunt of Material Witness chats briefly with comic crime writer Marshall Karp (Bloodthirsty, The Rabbit Factory) and comes away convinced that the author is a bit “[w]acky, with a mind that is slightly off the beaten track and ... not afraid to speak in defiance of the tedious conventions of political correctness.” Read more about their exchange here.
• Is this what happens to a reviewer who’s fallen out of love with Robert B. Parker’s novels?
• Zoë Ferraris submits her new, Dagger Award-nominated novel, Finding Nouf (aka The Night of the Mi’raj) to Marshall Zeringue’s notorious Page 69 Test. “Oh, how I wish p. 69 had landed in the middle of a sex scene!,” she begins. More here.
• What? Sean Connery’s autobiography isn’t going to be an autobiography, after all?
• A quick reminder: The second season of the USA Network spy spoof Burn Notice debuts tomorrow night. Teaser here.
• Bill Peschel reminds us that it was 56 years ago today that the U.S. government came down hard on novelist Dashiell Hammett for refusing to cooperate with Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Communist witch hunt. “In a New York courtroom,” Peschel writes, “the author of ‘The Maltese Falcon’ and other detective novels refused to testify about the whereabouts of four Communist Party members who had jumped bail after their convictions under the Smith Act. Because Hammett was president of the Civil Rights Congress, which paid the bail, the judge held him and three other members of the group’s bail fund committee responsible. For refusing to testify, they were found guilty of contempt and sentenced to six months in prison, which they were to begin serving immediately.” Good for Hammett. The full story is here.
• While most of the convention news this week centers around ThrillerFest, which begins today in New York City, Left Coast Crime 2009 is already drumming up publicity for its events next March--one of which involves Charlie Chan. The LCC Web site explains:
The 19th annual Left Coast Crime mystery convention will be held for the first time in Hawaii. So, appropriately, its “ghost-of-honor” is Earl Derr Biggers, who created the Chinese police detective from Honolulu in six novels, beginning in 1925 with The House Without a Key. As part of the convention’s tribute to Biggers, LCC ’09 will present a one-act stage play of The House Without a Key, and each registration includes a free ticket to the show.• And will fashion designers never run out of ways to titillate men and make women feel ridiculous in their clothes?
In the 1920s, when newspapers were warning of a “yellow peril,” and most Chinese characters in fiction were villains, Biggers crafted a street-smart and perceptive Chinese sleuth. Though Chan affects a deferential persona, and speaks with an accent, he is always--in the words of film scholar Peter Feng--“the smartest man in the room.”
The House Without a Key is one of the two Chan novels that are set in Hawaii--in this case, on the mostly undeveloped Waikiki Beach. And although both a silent film and an early talkie were made from it, there are apparently no surviving prints; and none of the dozens of subsequent Charlie Chan movies were based on it, either. So mystery writer Hal Glatzer, who now lives in Hawaii, has adapted it into a one-act play. His production will be the first time the story is presented on stage, and (one silent film excepted) the first time that Chan will be portrayed by an Asian-American actor.
1 comment:
From the Wiley interview:
"He has high standards for himself and he constantly fails to live up to them. He’s a man of 2008 and a detective of the 1930s."
That right there is whats wrong with P.I. novels today
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