Saturday, October 31, 2009
Grave Doings
“Vampires are after me,” announces Dracula star Bela Lugosi in “One Night Near Hangtown,” the latest short-story offering at Beat to a Pulp, written by James Reasoner.
READ MORE: “My Bela Lugosi Story,” by Patti Abbott (Pattinase).
READ MORE: “My Bela Lugosi Story,” by Patti Abbott (Pattinase).
Boo!
If you’re in the mood this Halloween for some frightful reading, there are plenty of stories from which to choose. Book Sense offers its top 10 list of Halloween books. Brad Leithauser, editor of The Norton Book of Ghost Stories, made up a list for The Wall Street Journal of his five favorite ghost tales. Britain’s Guardian newspaper has a fang-tastic rundown of the top 10 vampire tales, while London Times reviewer offers her own selection of six vampiric yarns. And Mystery Readers Journal editor Janet Rudolph has her own choices of Halloween-appropriate reading matter. More suggestions are available from MyShelf.com, the Springfield (Massachusetts) City Library, Classic Mysteries, and Suite 101.
Perhaps the scariest thing of all, though, is the idiocy being propagated this Halloween by people such as those at Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network, who wrote in a blog post yesterday: “During this period demons are assigned against those who participate in the rituals and festivities. These demons are automatically drawn to the fetishes that open doors for them to come into the lives of human beings. For example, most of the candy sold during this season has been dedicated and prayed over by witches.” Who is being tricked here, I ask you.
(Hat tip to Campaign for the American Reader.)
Perhaps the scariest thing of all, though, is the idiocy being propagated this Halloween by people such as those at Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network, who wrote in a blog post yesterday: “During this period demons are assigned against those who participate in the rituals and festivities. These demons are automatically drawn to the fetishes that open doors for them to come into the lives of human beings. For example, most of the candy sold during this season has been dedicated and prayed over by witches.” Who is being tricked here, I ask you.
(Hat tip to Campaign for the American Reader.)
Friday, October 30, 2009
The Book You Have to Read:
“The Dolly Dolly Spy,” by Adam Diment
(Editor’s note: This is the 69th installment of our ongoing Friday blog series highlighting great but forgotten books. Today’s must-read choice comes from the pseudonymous British journalist-turned-author Tom Cain. Cain has so far produced 
three well-received thrillers: The Accident Man [2007], No Survivors [2008, published in the UK as The Survivor], and this year’s Assassin. His original and controversial, three-part short story, “Bloodsport,” appeared in The Rap Sheet in August.)
Four years ago, or so, when I was really struggling with the first 30,000 words of what would become The Accident Man (and I do mean struggling: it took two years to come up with anything even vaguely suitable to show to publishers), my long-suffering agent, Julian Alexander, suggested I should read some books by a British writer called Adam Diment. They’d been written back in the mid- to late-1960s and they featured a posh, dope-smoking, babe-shagging, terminally fashionable young spy called Philip McAlpine. Julian thought I’d enjoy them and maybe get some inspiration, too. I said I’d check them out.
That was easier said than done. After he published his first book, The Dolly Dolly Spy, in 1967, Diment was very briefly very hot. The London Sunday Times told its readers that “Adam Diment is 23; his hero, Philip McAlpine, is based on himself. That is to say he’s tall, good-looking, with a taste for fast cars, planes, girls, and pot.”
The following year, like the Beatles, Diment hit the hippy trail to India where he studied at an ashram. By 1971 he was living in Rome. After that: nothing. But I am getting ahead of myself ...
Desperate for something, anything to get me out of my unproductive rut, I trawled the Internet for Diment’s books. And the first thing I discovered was that he gave great title. The Dolly Dolly Spy was followed by The Bang Bang Birds (1968), The Great Spy Race (1968), and Think Inc. (1971). Something about those names took me right back to the London of my childhood, and the covers were more outrageous and evocative still. The Dolly Dolly Spy’s jacket is, like Philip McAlpine himself, a neat combination of James Bond (blood, bullet holes, and a blonde in a bikini) and the counterculture (a block of hash resin, a razor blade, and two smoked joints). But the cover of The Bang Bang Birds (shown at left) is
entirely original. It features a chorus-line of machine-gun-toting girls, naked except for knee-length boots, drawn as a psychedelic cartoon.
This was real time-capsule stuff, a perfect evocation of the look and attitudes of its era, and I loved it. Within a week I’d bought hardback first editions of all four of Diment’s books. When they arrived, I discovered to my delight that the writing matched the packaging. Diment is the lost boy-genius of British thriller writing.
The first thing that’s great is the attitude. Diment was educated at Lansing, a private boarding school in West Sussex, right on the south coast of England, where he must have been an almost exact contemporary of the lyricist Sir Tim Rice. So, like the Old Etonian Ian Fleming, he writes in a slick, slangy style that never quite disguises the classical education--Diment would have studied Latin from the ages of 8 to 15--that lies behind it. And, like Fleming, Diment is cloaked with that confidence, tipping over into arrogance that marks the English public schoolboy.
He writes in the first-person and his character of McAlpine is not afraid to say precisely, caustically, and often very wittily what he thinks of anything or anyone he encounters. But right from the start of The Dolly Dolly Spy--written, remember, by a 23-year-old first-timer--there are passages that suggest Diment had the makings of a seriously good novelist. Here McAlpine is, for example, describing his on-and-off girlfriend Veronica Lom:
Rupert Quine is really not at all like M.
And that, for me is the really fascinating thing about Diment’s work. His stories are thoroughly Bond-esque: his first assignment is to go undercover as a pilot in an airborne smuggling operation run by former members of the Waffen-SS. But everything else about him reminds one why Ian Fleming’s death in 1964 was--from the point of view of his literary reputation and Bond’s survival as a global icon--so astonishingly well timed.
Bond is a man of the ’50s, whose attitudes can be traced back to Fleming’s days as a fashionable young man in pre-World War II, 1930s London. Had he kept writing into the mid-’60s, Fleming would have been utterly overtaken: Agent 007 would have been clueless in the world of the Beatles and the Stones, miniskirts, Flower Power and demonstrations against the Vietnam War. Adam Diment, however, was utterly in his element and his four books are to Bond what Sgt. Pepper was to The Sound of Music: a signal of something clearly rooted in the past that is, at the same time, utterly new.
Or to put it another way, Diment’s man McAlpine is Austin Powers, but for real ... and played by a cool, handsome, upper-class Englishman, not some irritating little tit from Ontario.
READ MORE: “Adam Diment,” by Steve Holland (Bear Alley); and in Glorious Trash, Joe Kenney reviews all three of the Philip McAlpine novels released in the United States.
three well-received thrillers: The Accident Man [2007], No Survivors [2008, published in the UK as The Survivor], and this year’s Assassin. His original and controversial, three-part short story, “Bloodsport,” appeared in The Rap Sheet in August.)Four years ago, or so, when I was really struggling with the first 30,000 words of what would become The Accident Man (and I do mean struggling: it took two years to come up with anything even vaguely suitable to show to publishers), my long-suffering agent, Julian Alexander, suggested I should read some books by a British writer called Adam Diment. They’d been written back in the mid- to late-1960s and they featured a posh, dope-smoking, babe-shagging, terminally fashionable young spy called Philip McAlpine. Julian thought I’d enjoy them and maybe get some inspiration, too. I said I’d check them out.
That was easier said than done. After he published his first book, The Dolly Dolly Spy, in 1967, Diment was very briefly very hot. The London Sunday Times told its readers that “Adam Diment is 23; his hero, Philip McAlpine, is based on himself. That is to say he’s tall, good-looking, with a taste for fast cars, planes, girls, and pot.”
The following year, like the Beatles, Diment hit the hippy trail to India where he studied at an ashram. By 1971 he was living in Rome. After that: nothing. But I am getting ahead of myself ...
Desperate for something, anything to get me out of my unproductive rut, I trawled the Internet for Diment’s books. And the first thing I discovered was that he gave great title. The Dolly Dolly Spy was followed by The Bang Bang Birds (1968), The Great Spy Race (1968), and Think Inc. (1971). Something about those names took me right back to the London of my childhood, and the covers were more outrageous and evocative still. The Dolly Dolly Spy’s jacket is, like Philip McAlpine himself, a neat combination of James Bond (blood, bullet holes, and a blonde in a bikini) and the counterculture (a block of hash resin, a razor blade, and two smoked joints). But the cover of The Bang Bang Birds (shown at left) is
entirely original. It features a chorus-line of machine-gun-toting girls, naked except for knee-length boots, drawn as a psychedelic cartoon.This was real time-capsule stuff, a perfect evocation of the look and attitudes of its era, and I loved it. Within a week I’d bought hardback first editions of all four of Diment’s books. When they arrived, I discovered to my delight that the writing matched the packaging. Diment is the lost boy-genius of British thriller writing.
The first thing that’s great is the attitude. Diment was educated at Lansing, a private boarding school in West Sussex, right on the south coast of England, where he must have been an almost exact contemporary of the lyricist Sir Tim Rice. So, like the Old Etonian Ian Fleming, he writes in a slick, slangy style that never quite disguises the classical education--Diment would have studied Latin from the ages of 8 to 15--that lies behind it. And, like Fleming, Diment is cloaked with that confidence, tipping over into arrogance that marks the English public schoolboy.
He writes in the first-person and his character of McAlpine is not afraid to say precisely, caustically, and often very wittily what he thinks of anything or anyone he encounters. But right from the start of The Dolly Dolly Spy--written, remember, by a 23-year-old first-timer--there are passages that suggest Diment had the makings of a seriously good novelist. Here McAlpine is, for example, describing his on-and-off girlfriend Veronica Lom:
Her experience, which includes a large number of love affairs, modelling jobs, minor television appearances, two abortions and a wide range of kinky and interesting episodes, hangs around her like a halo. There, you would say on seeing her, is a girl who has seen life. Paddington pot parties, a hundred odd secretarial jobs like her present one--which end because her boss starts to twitch his fingers a bit--a film part which curled up and died on the cutting room floor. Following the flotsam of the jet set across Europe: Paris, Cannes, St Tropez, Venice, Sardinia, Baden Baden, Paris, Rome and back to Paris. The modern, cuffed airport waiting rooms. Dull flights, indigestible high altitude food and the grimy bodies of travel.That paragraph is 124 words long. And it tells me precisely who this girl is. McAlpine’s MI6 boss, Rupert Quine, is an even finer character. He’s snide, vicious, utterly camp, and quite willing to resort to blackmail to make McAlpine do what he wants. When McAlpine first meets him, the diminutive, gnomic Quine is wearing a light green suit: “the impression he gave was of a dandified mouling stoat.” Quine looks McAlpine up and down and says, “Well, it’s nice to see you after reading so much. Your picky doesn’t do you justice, luv.” Then he produces some drugs, found in McAlpine’s flat, and explains that if McAlpine doesn’t accept the assignment he is about to be offered, he will be sent to jail for drug-dealing. Along the way, he calls McAlpine, “lovey,” “sweetie,” and “honeychile.”
Rupert Quine is really not at all like M.
And that, for me is the really fascinating thing about Diment’s work. His stories are thoroughly Bond-esque: his first assignment is to go undercover as a pilot in an airborne smuggling operation run by former members of the Waffen-SS. But everything else about him reminds one why Ian Fleming’s death in 1964 was--from the point of view of his literary reputation and Bond’s survival as a global icon--so astonishingly well timed.
Bond is a man of the ’50s, whose attitudes can be traced back to Fleming’s days as a fashionable young man in pre-World War II, 1930s London. Had he kept writing into the mid-’60s, Fleming would have been utterly overtaken: Agent 007 would have been clueless in the world of the Beatles and the Stones, miniskirts, Flower Power and demonstrations against the Vietnam War. Adam Diment, however, was utterly in his element and his four books are to Bond what Sgt. Pepper was to The Sound of Music: a signal of something clearly rooted in the past that is, at the same time, utterly new.
Or to put it another way, Diment’s man McAlpine is Austin Powers, but for real ... and played by a cool, handsome, upper-class Englishman, not some irritating little tit from Ontario.
READ MORE: “Adam Diment,” by Steve Holland (Bear Alley); and in Glorious Trash, Joe Kenney reviews all three of the Philip McAlpine novels released in the United States.
Once More to the Fore
In addition to author Tom Cain’s endorsement on this page of The Dolly Dolly Spy, by Adam Diment, today’s blog-wide crop of “forgotten books” deserving of renewed attention includes the following crime-fiction-related works: The Killing, by Lionel White; Fallen into the Pit, by Ellis Peters; The Whispering Master, by Frank Gruber; First Blood, by David Morrell; Mr. Calder and Mr. Behrens, by Michael Gilbert; Hot Cargo, by Orrie Hitt; Bird Dog, by Philip Reed; The Man Who Killed Himself, by Julian Symons; The Anastasia Syndrome and Other Stories, by Mary Higgins Clark; and Whodunit? Houdini? edited by Otto Penzler. There’s a pick ideal for this Halloween Eve, too: The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson.
Look to Patti Abbott’s blog for more prime choices from the back stacks, plus a full accounting of today’s participating writers.
Look to Patti Abbott’s blog for more prime choices from the back stacks, plus a full accounting of today’s participating writers.
“Ladies and Gentlemen, This Is the Most Terrifying Thing I Have Ever Witnessed ...”
It was on this date back in 1938 that actor-writer Orson Welles “vaulted into stardom by narrating his famous radio presentation of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds,” notes the blog Pulp International. “In adapting the [1898] novel, which concerns an invasion by malevolent Martians bent on the total destruction of humanity, Welles decided to use fictional news bulletins to describe the action. These were presented without commercial breaks, leaving listeners to decide whether the familiar-sounding news flashes were truthful. Since a radio show had never used the news flash for dramatic purposes, many people were confused. The public reaction was described at the time as a panic,” though such reactions were not far-reaching.
Put a pre-Halloween scare into yourself by listening to that dramatic, 71-year-old broadcast. The Mercury Theatre on the Air Web site has it ready for free downloading here, along with other radio episodes.
READ MORE: “The War of the Worlds Radio Script from October 30, 1938” (Wellesnet); “Book Review: Waging the War of the Worlds,” by Feliks Banel (I Still Love Radio).
Put a pre-Halloween scare into yourself by listening to that dramatic, 71-year-old broadcast. The Mercury Theatre on the Air Web site has it ready for free downloading here, along with other radio episodes.
READ MORE: “The War of the Worlds Radio Script from October 30, 1938” (Wellesnet); “Book Review: Waging the War of the Worlds,” by Feliks Banel (I Still Love Radio).
Picking Favorites
Prolific American mystery novelist Stuart M. Kaminsky died three weeks ago today. Ever since then, The Rap Sheet has been polling readers to see which of his three series protagonists they like best: 1930s Los Angeles private eye Toby Peters; modern Moscow Police Inspector Porfiry Rostnikov; unlicensed South Florida peeper Lew Fonesca; or Chicago police detective Abe Lieberman.
The results are now in. Out of 214 votes cast, the greatest number went to Rostnikov (66). Second place is held by Peters (60), with Fonesca (49) and Lieberman (39) bringing up the rear. For our money, though, all of these guys are winners.
Thanks to everyone for participating in this survey.
The results are now in. Out of 214 votes cast, the greatest number went to Rostnikov (66). Second place is held by Peters (60), with Fonesca (49) and Lieberman (39) bringing up the rear. For our money, though, all of these guys are winners.
Thanks to everyone for participating in this survey.
NBC Turns to Magic for Help
Being a big fan of the 1973-1974 TV series, The Magician, which starred Bill Bixby as a wealthy, mystery-solving illusionist, I was struck by this report from Variety:
NBC is conjuring a drama series revolving around a crime-solving magician.The “stage fright and agoraphobia” character traits make me think NBC is hoping to be brought something more like Tony Shalhoub’s Monk than Bixby’s long-ago, more earnest show (or even the slightly more tongue-in-cheek 1986 Hal Linden/Harry Morgan series, Blacke’s Magic). But it might behoove NBC, which could really use a couple of hits right now, to look toward its own past for inspiration. “Why Doesn’t NBC Just Remake The Magician?” asks TV Squad’s Bob Sassone. An excellent question, indeed.
Untitled project hails from Universal Media Studios, scribe Dan Fesman (“NCIS”), producer David Percelay and helmer Jon Amiel (“Entrapment”). Fesman is writing and will exec produce with Percelay and Amiel, who will direct if the project is picked up to pilot.
The concept centers on a master magician whose career is in ruins after he develops stage fright and agoraphobia; an elite law enforcement agency recruits him to take an unusual approach to cracking tough cases.
“It won’t be as much of a whodunit as a ‘how the hell do we catch him,’” Amiel told Daily Variety. Percelay approached Amiel with his one-line description of the project, which felt “totally in my wheelhouse,” Amiel said. The two developed it together and then scouted for a writer.
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Kerr Wins the Ellis Peters Award
After failing to capture last year’s Ellis Peters Historical Award, given out by the British Crime Writers’ Association, Scottish wordsmith Philip Kerr has received that commendation for his 2009 Bernie Gunther novel, If the Dead Rise Not (Quercus).
Also nominated for this year’s award: The Dead of Winter, by Rennie Airth (Macmillan); The Redemption of Alexander Seaton, by Shona MacLean (Quercus); The Information Officer, by Mark Mills (HarperCollins); The Interrogator, by Andrew Williams (John Murray); and An Empty Death, by Laura Wilson (Orion).
Calling in from the London reception at which Kerr’s win was announced, Rap Sheet contributor Ali Karim noted that the author gave “a lovely thank-you speech,” which he claimed had been gathering dust ever since last year, when he’d first hoped to deliver it. In the course of his address, Kerr noted that Ellis Peters (née Edith Pargeter), after whom the CWA’s annual historical prize is named, had produced dozens of novels before she became a best-seller; he is apparently looking for similar late-career fame.
To my mind, at least, Kerr is well deserving of this reward. I’ve been reading his Gunther novels ever since 1989, when I picked up the first entry in that series, March Violets, and found myself transported into the darkness of pre-World War II Berlin. The author turned out two more Gunther books in close succession--The Pale Criminal (1990) and A German Requiem (1991)--but then went off to compose standalone works for more than a decade, before returning to the troubled, dangerous, and sexually active life of his first protagonist in The One from the Other (2006). Last year’s A Quiet Flame, which dispatched cop-turned-private eye-turned-fugitive Gunther to Buenos Aires, Argentina, in pursuit of an ex-Nazi killer, was one of my favorite books of 2008. And If the Dead Rise Not is more than likely to feature on my favorites list for 2009.
So, while all of this year’s Ellis Peters nominees are deserving of congratulations, I am especially pleased to hear that the prize has finally landed in Kerr’s hands.
In other news from tonight’s event, Karim tells me that Janet Laurence, the present chair of the Ellis Peters Award judging panel, has decided to step down from that post. And two new judges--critics Jake Kerridge of The Daily Telegraph and Barry Forshaw--will be added to the panel next year.
Also nominated for this year’s award: The Dead of Winter, by Rennie Airth (Macmillan); The Redemption of Alexander Seaton, by Shona MacLean (Quercus); The Information Officer, by Mark Mills (HarperCollins); The Interrogator, by Andrew Williams (John Murray); and An Empty Death, by Laura Wilson (Orion).
Calling in from the London reception at which Kerr’s win was announced, Rap Sheet contributor Ali Karim noted that the author gave “a lovely thank-you speech,” which he claimed had been gathering dust ever since last year, when he’d first hoped to deliver it. In the course of his address, Kerr noted that Ellis Peters (née Edith Pargeter), after whom the CWA’s annual historical prize is named, had produced dozens of novels before she became a best-seller; he is apparently looking for similar late-career fame.
To my mind, at least, Kerr is well deserving of this reward. I’ve been reading his Gunther novels ever since 1989, when I picked up the first entry in that series, March Violets, and found myself transported into the darkness of pre-World War II Berlin. The author turned out two more Gunther books in close succession--The Pale Criminal (1990) and A German Requiem (1991)--but then went off to compose standalone works for more than a decade, before returning to the troubled, dangerous, and sexually active life of his first protagonist in The One from the Other (2006). Last year’s A Quiet Flame, which dispatched cop-turned-private eye-turned-fugitive Gunther to Buenos Aires, Argentina, in pursuit of an ex-Nazi killer, was one of my favorite books of 2008. And If the Dead Rise Not is more than likely to feature on my favorites list for 2009.
So, while all of this year’s Ellis Peters nominees are deserving of congratulations, I am especially pleased to hear that the prize has finally landed in Kerr’s hands.
In other news from tonight’s event, Karim tells me that Janet Laurence, the present chair of the Ellis Peters Award judging panel, has decided to step down from that post. And two new judges--critics Jake Kerridge of The Daily Telegraph and Barry Forshaw--will be added to the panel next year.
Have You Voted Yet?
If you have not already made your opinion known in our latest poll, which asks that you name your favorite among the late Stuart M. Kaminsky’s four fictional series sleuths, then you’d better do so right away. Tomorrow morning (Friday) is the cutoff time, when I’ll announce which character won.
So go directly to the silver-tinted box in the upper right-hand corner of this page, and let your voice be heard.
So go directly to the silver-tinted box in the upper right-hand corner of this page, and let your voice be heard.
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Brief Encounter
One of my favorite memories from this year’s Crime Writers’ Association Dagger Awards presentation (now sponsored by Specsavers, Cactus TV, and ITV3) was 
catching up with best-selling Scottish author Ian Rankin prior to the festivities. While I was waiting in the Grosvenor House’s Red Bar, Rankin arrived and spotted me seated behind one of my signature gin-and-tonics (my first of the night, actually, and at the Red Bar’s prices, there was little fear of my putting away many more). Rankin’s interruption was welcome. I hadn’t seen him for a while, and as every Rap Sheet reader knows, he has a new work of fiction out in Britain--The Complaints, his opening entry in a post-John Rebus series.
Like the majority of Rankin’s work, The Complaints is set in his hometown of Edinburgh. In relation to that book, P.D. James wrote recently in The Guardian:
It wasn’t long before we were sharing memories of all sorts. When I mentioned that I was attending this evening’s awards presentation as a guest of the organizers of Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate, England, Rankin reminded me that he was one of the guests of honor at the very first Harrogate event back in 2003. (His fireside chat during that conference with novelist Peter Robinson still resides pleasantly in my memory.) And we agreed that it was largely because of the 2003 festival--and, in particular, Ann Cleeves’ championing of a special track of panel discussions about Scandinavian crime fiction--that works from Sweden, Iceland, and elsewhere have come to widespread notice in Britain.
2003 was a signal year in other respects. It was at the 2003 Bouchercon in Las Vegas, Nevada, that Jon Jordan whispered to me over breakfast one morning, “Hey, Ali, we’re thinking of starting a magazine ...” (Crimespree debuted in the summer of 2004.) It
was during the same convention that I introduced Gayle Lynds to David Morrell, and the seeds of the International Thriller Writers organization were planted.
“Life was simpler then,” I mused, before acquainting Rankin with my present hectic schedule. He mentioned, in turn, that he’s about to embark on a lengthy tour of India, China, and Southeast Asia--travel destined to consume many of what might otherwise be valuable fiction-creating hours. “When do you get time to write?” I asked him. Rankin gave me an anxious smile, then remarked, “Ali, it’s getting harder and harder to get the momentum with all the travel, and of course I need the sights and smells of Edinburgh” [for inspiration]. He mentioned, though, that he’d just penned a piece for the Sunday Observer. Apparently, Rankin’s hometown won the No. 1 position--again--in a survey asking Observer readers to name their favorite UK city. Who better than Rankin to decipher the enduring appeal of the Scottish capital? In the article, Rankin tries to explain his city’s attractions by citing one of its lesser-known destinations, the Oxford Bar on Young Street:
Our drinks done, our stories swapped, it was time to move on to our respective commitments. He had a Hall of Fame award to receive, and I had a table to find, from which I could watch that prize handed his way. We said our good-byes, and then he was gone--our meeting another memory to catalogue, without complaints.
catching up with best-selling Scottish author Ian Rankin prior to the festivities. While I was waiting in the Grosvenor House’s Red Bar, Rankin arrived and spotted me seated behind one of my signature gin-and-tonics (my first of the night, actually, and at the Red Bar’s prices, there was little fear of my putting away many more). Rankin’s interruption was welcome. I hadn’t seen him for a while, and as every Rap Sheet reader knows, he has a new work of fiction out in Britain--The Complaints, his opening entry in a post-John Rebus series.Like the majority of Rankin’s work, The Complaints is set in his hometown of Edinburgh. In relation to that book, P.D. James wrote recently in The Guardian:
Rankin is predominantly a crime novelist of realism. He eschews even the convenient convention that a detective does not age and may talk of retiring but seldom does. Each book is set unambiguously in place and time. In The Complaints we are given precise dates at which the narrative moves forward. The story is told chiefly in dialogue which is terse and realistic. We meet [Inspector] Malcolm Fox on Friday 6 February 2009, and part company on Tuesday 24 February. We travel with him through the sinister underground of the city and the haunts of the rich and powerful, knowing the pubs, the offices, the hotels he enters, what he eats when he is alone, where he does his shopping and the food he buys. And always human lives are seen against the thread of history.I congratulated Rankin on his induction--destined to take place that night--into ITV3’s Crime Writers “Hall of Fame.” But being the modest sort, he immediately changed the subject and inquired whether I was in the running for some kind of award myself (after having been nominated repeatedly for an Anthony Award for Special Service, only to be denied the prize). Alas, I was not. So I turned the subject around once more and passed along regards from Jon and Ruth Jordan of Crimespree Magazine, who I’d only just left at Bouchercon in Indianapolis. There is a very strong bond between Rankin and the Jordans, because it was the Scotsman who introduced Ruth to Jon Jordan, at the 1999 Bouchercon in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. (“Crikey, that was years ago,” Ian said when I recalled this fortuitous encounter.) And he was pleased to learn that the Jordans had just won their third Anthony Award for services to the genre.
Rankin is a master at what, for me, is one of the important aspects of a crime novel: the integration of setting, plot, characters and a theme which, for Rankin, is the moral dimension never far from his writing. Here it is unambiguously stated on the cover of The Complaints: who decides right from wrong? Fox is so fully realised and interesting a character, his job in “the complaints” so fraught with fascinating possibilities, that we can surely hope to meet him again. And somewhere in Edinburgh is John Rebus, retired, but for Ian Rankin readers very much alive.
It wasn’t long before we were sharing memories of all sorts. When I mentioned that I was attending this evening’s awards presentation as a guest of the organizers of Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate, England, Rankin reminded me that he was one of the guests of honor at the very first Harrogate event back in 2003. (His fireside chat during that conference with novelist Peter Robinson still resides pleasantly in my memory.) And we agreed that it was largely because of the 2003 festival--and, in particular, Ann Cleeves’ championing of a special track of panel discussions about Scandinavian crime fiction--that works from Sweden, Iceland, and elsewhere have come to widespread notice in Britain.
2003 was a signal year in other respects. It was at the 2003 Bouchercon in Las Vegas, Nevada, that Jon Jordan whispered to me over breakfast one morning, “Hey, Ali, we’re thinking of starting a magazine ...” (Crimespree debuted in the summer of 2004.) It
was during the same convention that I introduced Gayle Lynds to David Morrell, and the seeds of the International Thriller Writers organization were planted.“Life was simpler then,” I mused, before acquainting Rankin with my present hectic schedule. He mentioned, in turn, that he’s about to embark on a lengthy tour of India, China, and Southeast Asia--travel destined to consume many of what might otherwise be valuable fiction-creating hours. “When do you get time to write?” I asked him. Rankin gave me an anxious smile, then remarked, “Ali, it’s getting harder and harder to get the momentum with all the travel, and of course I need the sights and smells of Edinburgh” [for inspiration]. He mentioned, though, that he’d just penned a piece for the Sunday Observer. Apparently, Rankin’s hometown won the No. 1 position--again--in a survey asking Observer readers to name their favorite UK city. Who better than Rankin to decipher the enduring appeal of the Scottish capital? In the article, Rankin tries to explain his city’s attractions by citing one of its lesser-known destinations, the Oxford Bar on Young Street:
This isn’t a random starting point. I discovered it as a young writer. I’d invented a character called Detective Inspector John Rebus, and he needed a place to hang out. The Oxford Bar is central (Young Street is a two-minute walk from Princes Street), yet hidden. It is small, but contains the widest possible cross-section of Edinburgh life.(For a longer version of that feature story, get your hands on the November issue of Lonely Planet Magazine.)
As I walk in, there are a few nods of greeting (nothing too effusive). Kirsty behind the bar has guessed that I’ll want a pint of Deuchars India Pale Ale. Edinburgh at one time had more than 40 breweries--the Scottish Parliament sits on the remains of one of them. These days, though, there is just the one. It’s called the Caledonian Brewery, and that’s where my IPA was made--about two miles from here as the crow flies.
The “Ox” is run by Harry Cullen. Harry used to sing in a folk group (though he won’t thank me for publicising the fact), and has a fund of stories of his own. In fact, everyone I have ever met in the Oxford Bar has a story to tell. I ask Harry today if any Rebus fans have been in. He rolls his eyes.
“Two of them took photos--without buying a drink!” He then asks me if I’m having another. I shake my head.
“Things to do,” I say by way of apology.
“That’s my profits shot,” he mutters, polishing a glass.
With a shrug and a wave, I head out, crossing nearby Charlotte Square (home to the First Minister) and emerging on a rain-soaked Queensferry Street. The shops soon disappear as I approach Randolph Cliff. I cross the road and head down Bells Brae, turning right at a signpost announcing that Leith is two-and-three-quarter miles away. This path, deserted apart from the odd dog-walker and jogger, runs along the
Water of Leith.
Robert Louis Stevenson once called Edinburgh a “precipitous city”, and he was absolutely right. Whether you’re peering down on to Princes Street Gardens from the castle, or craning your neck to look up from the Cowgate at George IV Bridge above, you sense that Edinburgh contains an intensity of heights and depths.
Our drinks done, our stories swapped, it was time to move on to our respective commitments. He had a Hall of Fame award to receive, and I had a table to find, from which I could watch that prize handed his way. We said our good-byes, and then he was gone--our meeting another memory to catalogue, without complaints.
Triple Play
• This coming Thursday will bring word about who has won the latest Ellis Peters Historical Award. But blogger Uriah Robinson (aka Norman Price) has already handicapped the field.
• I very much enjoyed NBC-TV’s political drama, The West Wing, during its seven-year run. But I am not convinced that an American version of House of Cards, the 1990 BBC series based on Michael Dobbs’ novel of the same name and starring Ian Richardson as a nefarious Parliament climber, will either satisfy my jonesing for West Wing-like political fiction on the tube or live up to the excellence of the original. But we will see. (Hat tip to Crimespree Cinema.)
• And there’s a new flash-fiction contest being put together by the proven team of Patti Abbott, Aldo Calcagno, and Gerald So. “What I would like to propose,” writes Abbott, “is a 750-800-word story that is set, or at least partially set, in a Wal-Mart store.” The possibilities may be as numerous as shopping aisles. Tales are supposed to be readied for posting on November 30.
• I very much enjoyed NBC-TV’s political drama, The West Wing, during its seven-year run. But I am not convinced that an American version of House of Cards, the 1990 BBC series based on Michael Dobbs’ novel of the same name and starring Ian Richardson as a nefarious Parliament climber, will either satisfy my jonesing for West Wing-like political fiction on the tube or live up to the excellence of the original. But we will see. (Hat tip to Crimespree Cinema.)
• And there’s a new flash-fiction contest being put together by the proven team of Patti Abbott, Aldo Calcagno, and Gerald So. “What I would like to propose,” writes Abbott, “is a 750-800-word story that is set, or at least partially set, in a Wal-Mart store.” The possibilities may be as numerous as shopping aisles. Tales are supposed to be readied for posting on November 30.
A New Den for Wolfe
How curious. Despite dire warnings that the once very popular Internet domain Yahoo GeoCities would go dark for good yesterday, all of the crime-fiction-oriented Web sites mentioned in my previous posting appear still to be in operation.
In the meantime, however, Winnifred Louis, the creator of Merely a Genius ..., a site devoted to author Rex Stout and his fictional detectives, Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, is moving her material over to the Web site of The Wolfe Pack, a New York-based Stout fan organization. Already updated are a page devoted to the A&E Nero Wolfe TV Series and the Nero Wolfe Reading List. Still to come: “Updates to Book Synopses on the covers page for each book, including Winnifred’s great selection of a priceless quotation per story”; “More Pastiche References”; and “Wolfe Whistle References.” All valuable resources.
Again the Wolfe Pack site can be found here.
In the meantime, however, Winnifred Louis, the creator of Merely a Genius ..., a site devoted to author Rex Stout and his fictional detectives, Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, is moving her material over to the Web site of The Wolfe Pack, a New York-based Stout fan organization. Already updated are a page devoted to the A&E Nero Wolfe TV Series and the Nero Wolfe Reading List. Still to come: “Updates to Book Synopses on the covers page for each book, including Winnifred’s great selection of a priceless quotation per story”; “More Pastiche References”; and “Wolfe Whistle References.” All valuable resources.
Again the Wolfe Pack site can be found here.
Monday, October 26, 2009
Welcome to Marlowe’s World
OK, so I was a bit snarky about Raymond Chandler recently. But it’s time to forgive and forget ... and give our attention instead to the publication of an oversize new paperback book called
Daylight Noir: Raymond Chandler’s Imagined City (Charta). Inside its covers are photographs by Catherine Corman, the daughter of filmmaker Roger Corman and the editor of Joseph Cornell’s Dreams (2007).
Corman has taken excellent black-and-white shots of many of those menacing, memorable Los Angeles locations described by Chandler in his novels. From Lido Pier to the iconic Hollywood sign, from MGM Studios to Musso and Frank’s Grill, from Union Station to Bullocks Wilshire, these locales were integral to the L.A. of Chandler’s rich imagination. They also conjure a world that has not yet entirely vanished. Of Chandler’s fascination with his adopted hometown, author-critic Clive James once remarked: “[W]hen he said that it had as much personality as a paper cup, he was saying what he liked about it.” The creator of private eye Philip Marlowe was especially attracted to L.A.’s Hopperesque loneliness, all the “anonymous multitudes whose solitude fills the city,” to quote from Corman’s introduction.
Corman’s images, paired with quotes from Chandler’s novels, give us what Jonathan Lethem, in his preface, calls “a supremely evocative catalogue of haunted places ... these streets and buildings we have erected in order to give order to our solitudes.”
Daylight Noir: Raymond Chandler’s Imagined City (Charta). Inside its covers are photographs by Catherine Corman, the daughter of filmmaker Roger Corman and the editor of Joseph Cornell’s Dreams (2007).Corman has taken excellent black-and-white shots of many of those menacing, memorable Los Angeles locations described by Chandler in his novels. From Lido Pier to the iconic Hollywood sign, from MGM Studios to Musso and Frank’s Grill, from Union Station to Bullocks Wilshire, these locales were integral to the L.A. of Chandler’s rich imagination. They also conjure a world that has not yet entirely vanished. Of Chandler’s fascination with his adopted hometown, author-critic Clive James once remarked: “[W]hen he said that it had as much personality as a paper cup, he was saying what he liked about it.” The creator of private eye Philip Marlowe was especially attracted to L.A.’s Hopperesque loneliness, all the “anonymous multitudes whose solitude fills the city,” to quote from Corman’s introduction.
Corman’s images, paired with quotes from Chandler’s novels, give us what Jonathan Lethem, in his preface, calls “a supremely evocative catalogue of haunted places ... these streets and buildings we have erected in order to give order to our solitudes.”
Prizes and Surprises
• Debra Ginsberg has won the 2009 T. Jefferson Parker Mystery Award for her novel The Grift. This commendation is given out annually by the Southern California Independent Booksellers Association (SCIBA). To see a full list of nominees in the Mystery category, click here. If you’re looking for a rundown of all the SCIBA winners for 2009, click here.
• It looks as if the third set of Columbo telefilms (1991-1992) on DVD is working its way to stores, though there’s no release date yet.
• Meanwhile, Crippen & Landru’s compilation of new Columbo short tales seems to be sloooowly moving toward publication. What was originally titled The Columbo Stories, featuring 14 new cases for Los Angeles’ scruffiest but smartest police lieutenant--all penned by William Link, co-creator of the 1970s Peter Falk series--is now being promoted as The Columbo Collection, and is said to be in the “proofs” stage. Is Crippen & Landru trying to build up anticipation for this book, in the same way that producers of the TV series built up suspense around just how Lieutenant Columbo would catch his man ... or woman? Not a bad idea.
• Sad news from The Gumshoe Site: “Ray Browne died on October 22 at his home in Bowling Green, Ohio. He was a professor at Bowling Green State University, who was credited with coining the phrase ‘popular culture’ and establishing the first academic department of popular culture in the U.S. at Bowling Green in 1973. He and his wife, Pat Browne, launched several publications devoted to popular culture, such as Clues: A Journal of Detection. When Clues started with the Spring/Summer 1980 issue, it was published semi-annually by Bowling Green Popular Press and edited by Pat Browne, with academic articles on mystery fiction and writers by academic professors including Ray Browne. (Now Clues is published by McFarland & Co. and edited by Elizabeth Foxwell.) He was 87.”
• Actor Benjamin Bratt, who played New York Detective Rey Curtis on TV’s Law & Order from 1994 to 1999, is set to return to that series--but only briefly. And another member of the L&O alumni, Angie Harmon, who portrayed Abbie Carmichael of the District Attorney’s Office for three years, has been cast as Boston homicide detective Jane Rizzoli in a possible series based on Tess Gerritsen’s novels. Let’s hope it’s better than her last TV venture, in the short-lived Women’s Murder Club.
• Boston novelist George V. Higgins, who died 10 years ago next month, is honored in a report by Beantown’s WBUR-FM radio.
• There’s more talk that the recently cancelled NBC-TV series Southland may be headed to TNT--and soon.
• New at Beat to a Pulp: “Hunter’s Moon,” by Charles Gramlich.
• And in this week leading up to All Hallows’ Eve, blogger Craig Clarke of Somebody Dies is posting a series of “reviews ... of Halloween-related stories: five books, one movie, and one novelty that can only be called ‘other.’” Look for the whole series here.
• It looks as if the third set of Columbo telefilms (1991-1992) on DVD is working its way to stores, though there’s no release date yet.
• Meanwhile, Crippen & Landru’s compilation of new Columbo short tales seems to be sloooowly moving toward publication. What was originally titled The Columbo Stories, featuring 14 new cases for Los Angeles’ scruffiest but smartest police lieutenant--all penned by William Link, co-creator of the 1970s Peter Falk series--is now being promoted as The Columbo Collection, and is said to be in the “proofs” stage. Is Crippen & Landru trying to build up anticipation for this book, in the same way that producers of the TV series built up suspense around just how Lieutenant Columbo would catch his man ... or woman? Not a bad idea.
• Sad news from The Gumshoe Site: “Ray Browne died on October 22 at his home in Bowling Green, Ohio. He was a professor at Bowling Green State University, who was credited with coining the phrase ‘popular culture’ and establishing the first academic department of popular culture in the U.S. at Bowling Green in 1973. He and his wife, Pat Browne, launched several publications devoted to popular culture, such as Clues: A Journal of Detection. When Clues started with the Spring/Summer 1980 issue, it was published semi-annually by Bowling Green Popular Press and edited by Pat Browne, with academic articles on mystery fiction and writers by academic professors including Ray Browne. (Now Clues is published by McFarland & Co. and edited by Elizabeth Foxwell.) He was 87.”
• Actor Benjamin Bratt, who played New York Detective Rey Curtis on TV’s Law & Order from 1994 to 1999, is set to return to that series--but only briefly. And another member of the L&O alumni, Angie Harmon, who portrayed Abbie Carmichael of the District Attorney’s Office for three years, has been cast as Boston homicide detective Jane Rizzoli in a possible series based on Tess Gerritsen’s novels. Let’s hope it’s better than her last TV venture, in the short-lived Women’s Murder Club.
• Boston novelist George V. Higgins, who died 10 years ago next month, is honored in a report by Beantown’s WBUR-FM radio.
• There’s more talk that the recently cancelled NBC-TV series Southland may be headed to TNT--and soon.
• New at Beat to a Pulp: “Hunter’s Moon,” by Charles Gramlich.
• And in this week leading up to All Hallows’ Eve, blogger Craig Clarke of Somebody Dies is posting a series of “reviews ... of Halloween-related stories: five books, one movie, and one novelty that can only be called ‘other.’” Look for the whole series here.
Service Permanently Unavailable
As wonderful a resource as the Internet can be at times, the thing I dislike most about it is its impermanence. Web sites shut down, YouTube videos are prone to disappear, blogs go out of business, and suddenly all those links the rest of us created to interesting, valuable, or entertaining information don’t work anymore. The carnage will be wholesale today, as GeoCities, “once the Internet’s third most visited domain,” closes up shop.
Not many GeoCities sites feature on The Rap Sheet’s lengthy blogroll. But there are certainly some there that we’ve come to respect, among them The Nick Carter Page, Pulp and Adventure Heroes of the Pre-War Years, Shamus: A Tribute to Philip Marlowe, and the Rex Stout appreciation page Merely a Genius ... It’s sad to see these sites suddenly vanish from our radar. I hope they all find other domain homes in the near future, and that their authors will contact The Rap Sheet with their new URLs. (My e-mail address is available in the All Points Bulletin blurb at the top of this page.)
For the moment at least, all of these sites appear still to be operating. Visit them while you can.
Not many GeoCities sites feature on The Rap Sheet’s lengthy blogroll. But there are certainly some there that we’ve come to respect, among them The Nick Carter Page, Pulp and Adventure Heroes of the Pre-War Years, Shamus: A Tribute to Philip Marlowe, and the Rex Stout appreciation page Merely a Genius ... It’s sad to see these sites suddenly vanish from our radar. I hope they all find other domain homes in the near future, and that their authors will contact The Rap Sheet with their new URLs. (My e-mail address is available in the All Points Bulletin blurb at the top of this page.)
For the moment at least, all of these sites appear still to be operating. Visit them while you can.
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Triumphs, Troubles on Webcon’s First Voyage
(Editor’s note: Yesterday saw the unveiling of the Poisoned Pen Press Webcon, the first completely online conference for crime-fiction writers and fans. While there were many satisfied attendees, there also seemed to be a few people disappointed by technological problems. We asked one of the event’s organizers, 
Mary Reed [who, with her husband, Eric Mayer, writes the John the Eunuch historical mystery series], to look back at the highs and headaches of this one-day Webcon, and tell us what she learned that would make such endeavors easier in the future. Her report follows.)
As clocks keeping track of U.S. Pacific Daylight Time struck 7 a.m. on Saturday, October 24, the world’s first Virtual Mystery Conference was launched and set sail in a blizzard of confetti and streamers, not to mention crossed fingers down in the engine room.
Co-sponsored by Scottsdale, Arizona’s Poisoned Pen bookstore and Poisoned Pen Press, the attractions of this one-day event included a most reasonable cost, no need for travel, appearances by an international cast of authors, and casual dress code, for even if registrants attended in fuzzy jammies and bunny slippers, nobody could stare at them in the virtual hallways.
Provided they were not among those participating via video, that is.
The PP Webcon’s Guests of Honor were Dana Stabenow and Lee Child. Behind the Scenes Guests of Honor were Kate Miciak (editorial director, Bantam Dell), Kate Stine (editor-in-chief, Mystery Scene magazine), and Tom and Enid Schantz (Rue Morgue Press). Adrian Muller, the co-organizer (with Myles Allfrey) of Britain’s annual CrimeFest, was Fan Guest of Honor, and many familiar mystery authors appeared on the program.
The conference turned out to be truly global. Participants logged in from Brazil, Portugal, Iceland, England, France, Australia, Botswana, and Northern Ireland as well as Canada and locations across the United States, from Hawaii, Colorado, Washington state, and Massachusetts to Maine, North Carolina, Vermont, Texas, Alabama, and New York. The modest $25 cost of attendance didn’t seem to frighten anyone off, especially since $20 of that was returned in the form of a book voucher redeemable at The Poisoned Pen bookstore.
This first Webcon strove to provide good value for money, offering an eclectic mix of text, live, and pre-recorded audio and video panels, talks, and author presentations. There were dozens of author interviews and book trailers, and a day-long chat room. In addition, 20 attendees won a chance to pitch their novel to an editor!
Perhaps the venture’s most unusual feature was the electronic goody bag. Its contents included short stories, sample chapters and excerpts, a collection of essays, author notes and samplers, a couple of e-books--and instructions for a pair of ancient Greek party games.
The conference sailed forth with a skeleton crew of organizers. Webmistress Janice Hally managed the electronic side of things from France, I served as a general deck-hand in Pennsylvania, and oversight was provided from the bridge of Poisoned Pen Press in the southwestern United States. A number of authors also generously assisted by participating in panels, serving as hosts in the coffee shop, and donating material for the goody bag.
What useful pointers did this trial run provide for future Webcons?
Navigating a sea of raging lists is to be expected. We were making lists of lists at one point, aided by lots of muttering and the perking of ever stronger pots of robusto coffee. It’s wise to allow twice as much time as thought necessary to complete any given task. Even so, it will doubtless be necessary to engage in gentle flourishing of the cat-o’-nine tails at stragglers as deadlines approach and the clock starts ticking ever louder in ominous High Noon fashion.
Having said which, scheduling live events went more smoothly than anticipated, for whereas land-based conferences know their participants will be in the same place at the same time, we had to allow for ours residing in different national and international time zones. The possibility of confusion made my nose bleed, but the Gordian Knot was cut by declaring that the conference was going to be held on “PPWebcon Time.” Webmistress Janice then created and uploaded a time-zone grid to the Webcon site, matching PPWebcon Time to local hours and providing a universal reference point.
It was when we arrived at the panel-scheduling stage that we had to deal with a looming shipwreck. It was a difficulty unique to a Web-based conference. Moderators waiting to book slots on Blog Talk Radio could not make arrangements until the live schedule was firm. Although that was accomplished at top speed, some fancy tap-dancing was necessary to obtain the right broadcast times for a couple of presentations, achieved by swapping around panel slots.
As with all conferences, no doubt, organizing panels was a delicate task. Panelists and moderators were all volunteers and the latter had full control over who they invited to participate. Some unevenness was experienced, so a more balanced result will be reached in the future by organizing panels according to a different method, perhaps by limiting panelists to participate in only two panels until all volunteers are appointed to at least one. Another possibility is the method used by land-conference organizers, whereby authors suggest topics and a committee does the rest.
Needless to say, small fires had to be stamped out. For example, because this was an Internet-based event, concerns relating to loss of access cropped up. One moderator was anxious about losing power during their broadcast, so it was switched from a live event to an on-demand recording. Ironically, my power went out overnight but, fortunately, returned an hour before the Webcon set sail. Coffee shop segments were given co-hosts to guard against all eventualities. Only one co-host could not get into the coffee shop, as it turned out. One attendee lost e-mail service for about 24 hours and in another case a registrant’s network went missing for a similar period not long before the Webcon began. Alternative e-mail addresses for organizers and moderators are therefore vital, and if they are available for all attendees, so much the better.
In this connection, a few did not always open Webcon e-mail notes and others paid their registration fees but failed to complete the process. Several registrants changed e-mail addresses mid-ocean and at least two notes were found hiding in recipients’ spam folders. On another occasion a moderator did not receive an important e-mail message and it never returned, so it’s still meeping around somewhere out there. Several attendees had to have their passwords resent. One or two received their book vouchers but not their passwords. So it is important to closely monitor the attendee list and send notes from personal e-mail addresses as necessary. Since communication was established via Constant Contact, which provides notification of unopened e-mails, keeping registrants informed was easier than it might have been.
The need to use particular Web tools to access certain presentations meant some attendees feared they might not be able to participate in such events. However, for those registrants the Webcon provided numerous other offerings accessible without special equipment even if on dial-up, and the coffee shop chat room was text based.
A voice from the back row just asked, How, then, did this first crime-fiction Webcon fare?
It was anticipated that there would be glitches and problems and gnashing of teeth. This proved to be the case, but almost all difficulties involved individual computers or the Web tools in use, and so were beyond the control of the organizers. Most issues seemed to be resolved fairly quickly. The popularity of the chat room meant there was a queue to get in at times, since it apparently limited the number of attendees. From an informal count, an acceptable number appeared to be 25. So booking a larger chat room is advisable in years to come. There were also some problems with guests being booted out of the chat room for no apparent reason, though just about everyone had at least one experience of that, so it was nothing personal! One panel had to be moved to its right channel, but that was done within about five minutes of its start.
The chat room was lively and attendees seemed happy with the program. The satisfaction survey in circulation as I write has had 52 responses thus far and everyone says they want another Webcon. On an overall scale of 1-10, we have a 8.1 rating at present.
So all in all, yes, I would say the Webcon did very well on its
maiden voyage.
Whew!
An archive of Saturday’s events can be found and enjoyed here.
Mary Reed [who, with her husband, Eric Mayer, writes the John the Eunuch historical mystery series], to look back at the highs and headaches of this one-day Webcon, and tell us what she learned that would make such endeavors easier in the future. Her report follows.)As clocks keeping track of U.S. Pacific Daylight Time struck 7 a.m. on Saturday, October 24, the world’s first Virtual Mystery Conference was launched and set sail in a blizzard of confetti and streamers, not to mention crossed fingers down in the engine room.
Co-sponsored by Scottsdale, Arizona’s Poisoned Pen bookstore and Poisoned Pen Press, the attractions of this one-day event included a most reasonable cost, no need for travel, appearances by an international cast of authors, and casual dress code, for even if registrants attended in fuzzy jammies and bunny slippers, nobody could stare at them in the virtual hallways.
Provided they were not among those participating via video, that is.
The PP Webcon’s Guests of Honor were Dana Stabenow and Lee Child. Behind the Scenes Guests of Honor were Kate Miciak (editorial director, Bantam Dell), Kate Stine (editor-in-chief, Mystery Scene magazine), and Tom and Enid Schantz (Rue Morgue Press). Adrian Muller, the co-organizer (with Myles Allfrey) of Britain’s annual CrimeFest, was Fan Guest of Honor, and many familiar mystery authors appeared on the program.
The conference turned out to be truly global. Participants logged in from Brazil, Portugal, Iceland, England, France, Australia, Botswana, and Northern Ireland as well as Canada and locations across the United States, from Hawaii, Colorado, Washington state, and Massachusetts to Maine, North Carolina, Vermont, Texas, Alabama, and New York. The modest $25 cost of attendance didn’t seem to frighten anyone off, especially since $20 of that was returned in the form of a book voucher redeemable at The Poisoned Pen bookstore.
This first Webcon strove to provide good value for money, offering an eclectic mix of text, live, and pre-recorded audio and video panels, talks, and author presentations. There were dozens of author interviews and book trailers, and a day-long chat room. In addition, 20 attendees won a chance to pitch their novel to an editor!
Perhaps the venture’s most unusual feature was the electronic goody bag. Its contents included short stories, sample chapters and excerpts, a collection of essays, author notes and samplers, a couple of e-books--and instructions for a pair of ancient Greek party games.
The conference sailed forth with a skeleton crew of organizers. Webmistress Janice Hally managed the electronic side of things from France, I served as a general deck-hand in Pennsylvania, and oversight was provided from the bridge of Poisoned Pen Press in the southwestern United States. A number of authors also generously assisted by participating in panels, serving as hosts in the coffee shop, and donating material for the goody bag.
What useful pointers did this trial run provide for future Webcons?
Navigating a sea of raging lists is to be expected. We were making lists of lists at one point, aided by lots of muttering and the perking of ever stronger pots of robusto coffee. It’s wise to allow twice as much time as thought necessary to complete any given task. Even so, it will doubtless be necessary to engage in gentle flourishing of the cat-o’-nine tails at stragglers as deadlines approach and the clock starts ticking ever louder in ominous High Noon fashion.
Having said which, scheduling live events went more smoothly than anticipated, for whereas land-based conferences know their participants will be in the same place at the same time, we had to allow for ours residing in different national and international time zones. The possibility of confusion made my nose bleed, but the Gordian Knot was cut by declaring that the conference was going to be held on “PPWebcon Time.” Webmistress Janice then created and uploaded a time-zone grid to the Webcon site, matching PPWebcon Time to local hours and providing a universal reference point.
It was when we arrived at the panel-scheduling stage that we had to deal with a looming shipwreck. It was a difficulty unique to a Web-based conference. Moderators waiting to book slots on Blog Talk Radio could not make arrangements until the live schedule was firm. Although that was accomplished at top speed, some fancy tap-dancing was necessary to obtain the right broadcast times for a couple of presentations, achieved by swapping around panel slots.
As with all conferences, no doubt, organizing panels was a delicate task. Panelists and moderators were all volunteers and the latter had full control over who they invited to participate. Some unevenness was experienced, so a more balanced result will be reached in the future by organizing panels according to a different method, perhaps by limiting panelists to participate in only two panels until all volunteers are appointed to at least one. Another possibility is the method used by land-conference organizers, whereby authors suggest topics and a committee does the rest.
Needless to say, small fires had to be stamped out. For example, because this was an Internet-based event, concerns relating to loss of access cropped up. One moderator was anxious about losing power during their broadcast, so it was switched from a live event to an on-demand recording. Ironically, my power went out overnight but, fortunately, returned an hour before the Webcon set sail. Coffee shop segments were given co-hosts to guard against all eventualities. Only one co-host could not get into the coffee shop, as it turned out. One attendee lost e-mail service for about 24 hours and in another case a registrant’s network went missing for a similar period not long before the Webcon began. Alternative e-mail addresses for organizers and moderators are therefore vital, and if they are available for all attendees, so much the better.
In this connection, a few did not always open Webcon e-mail notes and others paid their registration fees but failed to complete the process. Several registrants changed e-mail addresses mid-ocean and at least two notes were found hiding in recipients’ spam folders. On another occasion a moderator did not receive an important e-mail message and it never returned, so it’s still meeping around somewhere out there. Several attendees had to have their passwords resent. One or two received their book vouchers but not their passwords. So it is important to closely monitor the attendee list and send notes from personal e-mail addresses as necessary. Since communication was established via Constant Contact, which provides notification of unopened e-mails, keeping registrants informed was easier than it might have been.
The need to use particular Web tools to access certain presentations meant some attendees feared they might not be able to participate in such events. However, for those registrants the Webcon provided numerous other offerings accessible without special equipment even if on dial-up, and the coffee shop chat room was text based.
A voice from the back row just asked, How, then, did this first crime-fiction Webcon fare?
It was anticipated that there would be glitches and problems and gnashing of teeth. This proved to be the case, but almost all difficulties involved individual computers or the Web tools in use, and so were beyond the control of the organizers. Most issues seemed to be resolved fairly quickly. The popularity of the chat room meant there was a queue to get in at times, since it apparently limited the number of attendees. From an informal count, an acceptable number appeared to be 25. So booking a larger chat room is advisable in years to come. There were also some problems with guests being booted out of the chat room for no apparent reason, though just about everyone had at least one experience of that, so it was nothing personal! One panel had to be moved to its right channel, but that was done within about five minutes of its start.
The chat room was lively and attendees seemed happy with the program. The satisfaction survey in circulation as I write has had 52 responses thus far and everyone says they want another Webcon. On an overall scale of 1-10, we have a 8.1 rating at present.
So all in all, yes, I would say the Webcon did very well on its
maiden voyage.
Whew!
An archive of Saturday’s events can be found and enjoyed here.
* * *
Did you participate in this first Webcon? Were you pleased or frustrated with the results? Either way, we’d like to hear from you. Just leave your thoughts in the Comments section of this post.
Are Women Too Often Prey?
I was pleased last week to congratulate Selina Walker, editorial director at Transworld Publishing, on one of her charges, Swedish author Johan Theorin, having walked away with this year’s John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger award for his poignant thriller, Echoes from the Dead. I first met Theorin at the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival in 2008, and have followed his work since. It’s good to see his talent recognized by the British Crime Writers’ Association (CWA), which chooses the annual Dagger winners.
Joining Walker for Wednesday’s Specsavers Crime Thriller Awards presentation, during which the winners of the Dagger awards and others were named, was her Transworld colleague Sarah Turner, who edited Inger Ash Wolfe’s “debut” novel, The Calling. For my money, it seems the Transworld folks are particularly adept at spotting raw talent in crime fiction. Yet some would argue that this Random House UK imprint is also among those responsible for turning out the genre’s darkest works. Reports today’s Sunday Observer:
The issue of sexism and violence is nothing new; even Ian Rankin was drawn into this debate a couple of years ago. I guess a genre that tries to peer into the darkest corners of human behavior will always court controversy. But could there be a commercial motivation for female wordsmiths to commit violence against their own kind in crime fiction? As author and former CWA chair Natasha Cooper, siding with Mann, told The Observer: “There is a general feeling that women writers are less important than male writers and what can save and propel them on to the bestseller list is if they produce at least one novel with very graphic violence in it to establish their credibility and prove they are not girly.”
READ MORE: “Getting Re-sensitized to Violence,” by Sarah Weinman (Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind); “Book Reviewer Quits Over Increasing Sexist Violence,” by Amy Willis (The Daily Telegraph); “Violence in Fiction Has Reviewer Saying No” (UPI); “‘Dead, Brutalized Women Sell Books,’” by Kate Harding (Salon).
Joining Walker for Wednesday’s Specsavers Crime Thriller Awards presentation, during which the winners of the Dagger awards and others were named, was her Transworld colleague Sarah Turner, who edited Inger Ash Wolfe’s “debut” novel, The Calling. For my money, it seems the Transworld folks are particularly adept at spotting raw talent in crime fiction. Yet some would argue that this Random House UK imprint is also among those responsible for turning out the genre’s darkest works. Reports today’s Sunday Observer:
Crime fiction has become so violently and graphically anti-women that one of the country’s leading crime writers and critics is refusing to review new books.In that same article, Selina Walker took issue with Mann’s assertions. “Readers like to be vicariously frightened by stories of what’s going on in the wicked world outside but closure is always a total given,” she said. “The sales figures of authors such as Tess Gerritsen, Mo Hayder, Karin Slaughter and Kathy Reichs would indicate that female readers enjoy reading scary novels--and in impressive numbers.”
Jessica Mann, an award-winning author who reviews crime fiction for the Literary Review, has said that an increasing proportion of the books she is sent to review feature male perpetrators and female victims in situations of “sadistic misogyny”. “Each psychopath is more sadistic than the last and his victims’ sufferings are described in detail that becomes ever more explicit, as young women are imprisoned, bound, gagged, strung up or tied down, raped, sliced, burned, blinded, beaten, eaten, starved, suffocated, stabbed, boiled or buried alive,” she said.
“Authors must be free to write and publishers to publish. But critics must be free to say they have had enough. So however many more outpourings of sadistic misogyny are crammed on to the bandwagon, no more of them will be reviewed by me,” said Mann, who has written her own bestselling series of crime novels and a non-fiction book about female
crime writers.
She said that when a female corpse recently appeared on the jacket of a crime-writing colleague’s new book, the author pointed out to her publisher that the victim in the story was actually a man. Mann said the publisher replied: “Never mind that. Dead, brutalised women sell books, dead men don’t. Nor do dead children or geriatrics.”
Mann said the most disturbing plots were by female authors. “The trend cannot be attributed to an anti-feminist backlash because the most inventive fiction of this kind is written by women,” she claimed. “They are, one author explained to me, best qualified to do so because girls grow up knowing that being female is ‘synonymous with being prey’.” The British market for crime fiction is worth more than £116m a year, with almost 21 million books sold. Women account for almost 60% of the genre’s market, with females aged over 55 the most avid readers.
The issue of sexism and violence is nothing new; even Ian Rankin was drawn into this debate a couple of years ago. I guess a genre that tries to peer into the darkest corners of human behavior will always court controversy. But could there be a commercial motivation for female wordsmiths to commit violence against their own kind in crime fiction? As author and former CWA chair Natasha Cooper, siding with Mann, told The Observer: “There is a general feeling that women writers are less important than male writers and what can save and propel them on to the bestseller list is if they produce at least one novel with very graphic violence in it to establish their credibility and prove they are not girly.”
READ MORE: “Getting Re-sensitized to Violence,” by Sarah Weinman (Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind); “Book Reviewer Quits Over Increasing Sexist Violence,” by Amy Willis (The Daily Telegraph); “Violence in Fiction Has Reviewer Saying No” (UPI); “‘Dead, Brutalized Women Sell Books,’” by Kate Harding (Salon).
The Roots of Genius
Yesterday marked the 75th anniversary of the first Nero Wolfe novel. Rex Stout’s Fer-de-Lance, in which he introduced that “Falstaff of detectives,” Montenegro-born Wolfe, and his more handsome and significantly more energetic associate, Archie Goodwin, was published by Farrar & Rinehart on October 24, 1934. It’s a complicated novel spinning out from the disappearance of a metalworker and the bizarre demise of a college president on a golf course, but is definitely worth reading and a fine introduction to the rest of this acclaimed series.
Just a few weeks ago, I took the opportunity to re-read Fer-de-Lance myself (in a new, double-feature paperback edition from Bantam) and was as delighted with the experience as I remember being when I originally consumed that book 25 years ago.
Thank you, Mr. Stout.
Just a few weeks ago, I took the opportunity to re-read Fer-de-Lance myself (in a new, double-feature paperback edition from Bantam) and was as delighted with the experience as I remember being when I originally consumed that book 25 years ago.
Thank you, Mr. Stout.
Friday, October 23, 2009
The Book You Have to Read: “Freak,”
by Michael Collins
(Editor’s note: This is the 68th installment of our ongoing Friday blog series highlighting great but forgotten books. Making today’s selection is Russell Atwood, a former managing editor of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine 
and the author of two novels featuring New York City private eye Payton Sherwood: East of A (1999) and Losers Live Longer, the latter of which was released just recently by Hard Case Crime and features a fabulous cover by Robert McGinnis.)
The best part of this assignment was that I got to re-read one of my favorite novels of all time. And I don’t just mean “mystery” novels--though Freak is that, full of straightforward detective work, intriguing clues, and several corpses--but one of my favorite novels, period. I had a distinct memory of reading this book for this first time and being blown away by its ending. It completely changed my ideas of what a mystery novel could accomplish, because its final twist has nothing to do with crime and criminals, but instead the way we live our lives in the modern world.
Often, when re-exploring a novel that has had an impact on us years ago, we find the experience a bit of a letdown, perhaps because we’ve already assimilated the knowledge it provided and so it’s not quite as relevant the second time around. I half-expected, half-feared, this would be the case with 1983’s Freak. But no way: all the original thrills were in perfect working order and on top of that, new hidden treasures were discovered. Possibly this is because I’m now closer to the age of the narrator and main protagonist, Dan Fortune, so that what he’s thinking and feeling is no longer an abstract concept, but vital news from the front.
A few words about private eye Dan Fortune then. He began his life as Dan Fortunowski. His policeman father deserted his wife when Dan was still a young boy, leaving her to raise their son alone. As a result, Dan grew up a juvenile delinquent, committing petty crimes, which eventually would’ve developed into bigger, more serious crimes if not for a life-defining moment: he lost his left arm in an accident at age 17, while he and some of his friends were looting the hold of a docked freighter. The experience changed Dan forever, as illustrated by this quote from Freak:
I don’t know precisely how the author--whose real name was Dennis Lynds (“Michael Collins” was just one of many pseudonyms he employed over his career)--came up with this protagonist, but I do know that Fortune has partial origins in an earlier character Lynds created, a man called Slot Machine Kelly. Kelly began as a pastiche of the hard-boiled private eye, his biggest connection to Fortune being that each had only one arm. But from that broader character developed a very specific person.
Dan Fortune feels real. This is due in large part to his handicap. But while the single arm may have been a gimmick with Slot Machine, it makes Fortune more human, closer to being one of us. He is tough, but also vulnerable. And when he feels fear, we know it isn’t out of cowardice, but because he’s a realist, aware of practical matters. Hell, Fortune’s only got one arm, so he doesn’t even consider taking on two guys at once without some kind of edge in his favor. It serves to heighten all the perils he--and we, the readers--face. But at the same time, the handicap doesn’t define him. His debilitating accident happened so far in the past that he’s almost unconscious of the loss. Only when Fortune meets a new client or interrogates a witness face-to-face for the first time does he become aware of other people’s reactions to his empty sleeve. At times throughout Lynds’ long-running series, Fortune even uses his handicap to his advantage, styling the “story” about how he lost his limb to get the maximum response from whoever he’s questioning. (For instance, if he is seeking information from a war vet, he’ll let the man assume that he lost his arm in combat.) Essentially, Dan Fortune takes a minus and turns it into a plus, a tool of his profession.
The handicap also forces Lynds’ protagonist to rely more on his brains and compassion than on brute strength. “[M]uscles are a lost hope for a one-armed man anyway,” he says. “For any man, really. There is always someone bigger, stronger, faster, or meaner. That’s why weapons were invented.”
Now back to the meat of this novel. One of the biggest mysteries in Freak is the title itself. Why is the book called Freak? It is not set amid a carnival sideshow or a crazy art community; instead, the case involves the president of a computer software firm hiring Dan Fortune to find his missing son and the son’s new bride, who cleaned out their bank accounts and sold the house the father gave them as a wedding present, and then left the small upscale New Jersey town they had settled in. And gone where? That’s the job: just locate the son, nothing else! But Fortune is more intrigued by why the couple has run off, and the only clue to this seems to be a memo pad on which the missing wife had written over and over again the single word: freak. It’s not until the final chapter that this mystery--and the book’s title--is explained, and it hits you like a kick in the stomach. As twists go, it is not what most readers of detective novels will be prepared for, not what we’ve come to expect from a work of mystery fiction. It is a climax that resonates back through the entire book.
One of the hidden treasures I discovered upon my recent re-reading of Freak is the following story, which Dan relates during pillow-talk with his lady friend:
I only had one chance to meet author Lynds, who died in 2005. I was fortunate enough to share a book-signing table with him at a Bouchercon, and so I got to tell him how much the Dan Fortune series meant to me. At that time he inscribed a copy of his novel Chasing Eights (1990) with the words, “To Russell, Welcome to the game.” In light of the above passage, those words now strike me as slightly ominous. But they also make me feel hopeful and a little proud that he saw in me a kindred spirit: another loser who nonetheless still enjoys playing the game.
READ MORE: “Michael Collins: A Score’s Worth of P.I. Dan Fortune,” by Ed Lynskey (Mystery*File).
and the author of two novels featuring New York City private eye Payton Sherwood: East of A (1999) and Losers Live Longer, the latter of which was released just recently by Hard Case Crime and features a fabulous cover by Robert McGinnis.)The best part of this assignment was that I got to re-read one of my favorite novels of all time. And I don’t just mean “mystery” novels--though Freak is that, full of straightforward detective work, intriguing clues, and several corpses--but one of my favorite novels, period. I had a distinct memory of reading this book for this first time and being blown away by its ending. It completely changed my ideas of what a mystery novel could accomplish, because its final twist has nothing to do with crime and criminals, but instead the way we live our lives in the modern world.
Often, when re-exploring a novel that has had an impact on us years ago, we find the experience a bit of a letdown, perhaps because we’ve already assimilated the knowledge it provided and so it’s not quite as relevant the second time around. I half-expected, half-feared, this would be the case with 1983’s Freak. But no way: all the original thrills were in perfect working order and on top of that, new hidden treasures were discovered. Possibly this is because I’m now closer to the age of the narrator and main protagonist, Dan Fortune, so that what he’s thinking and feeling is no longer an abstract concept, but vital news from the front.
A few words about private eye Dan Fortune then. He began his life as Dan Fortunowski. His policeman father deserted his wife when Dan was still a young boy, leaving her to raise their son alone. As a result, Dan grew up a juvenile delinquent, committing petty crimes, which eventually would’ve developed into bigger, more serious crimes if not for a life-defining moment: he lost his left arm in an accident at age 17, while he and some of his friends were looting the hold of a docked freighter. The experience changed Dan forever, as illustrated by this quote from Freak:
[A] one-armed man learns patience, does most things in two steps not one. It’s made me an unhurried man, careful if not always cautious. With two arms I’d be running all the time, but I don’t have two arms so I walk.Dan decided to go straight. He served briefly as a merchant marine, but eventually returned to his old stomping grounds of New York City and his old neighborhood, Chelsea. There he set himself up as a private investigator in his own one-man agency, a profession he went on to practice for more than three decades, even after he moved his operation to Southern California.
Or I sit and think.
I don’t know precisely how the author--whose real name was Dennis Lynds (“Michael Collins” was just one of many pseudonyms he employed over his career)--came up with this protagonist, but I do know that Fortune has partial origins in an earlier character Lynds created, a man called Slot Machine Kelly. Kelly began as a pastiche of the hard-boiled private eye, his biggest connection to Fortune being that each had only one arm. But from that broader character developed a very specific person.
Dan Fortune feels real. This is due in large part to his handicap. But while the single arm may have been a gimmick with Slot Machine, it makes Fortune more human, closer to being one of us. He is tough, but also vulnerable. And when he feels fear, we know it isn’t out of cowardice, but because he’s a realist, aware of practical matters. Hell, Fortune’s only got one arm, so he doesn’t even consider taking on two guys at once without some kind of edge in his favor. It serves to heighten all the perils he--and we, the readers--face. But at the same time, the handicap doesn’t define him. His debilitating accident happened so far in the past that he’s almost unconscious of the loss. Only when Fortune meets a new client or interrogates a witness face-to-face for the first time does he become aware of other people’s reactions to his empty sleeve. At times throughout Lynds’ long-running series, Fortune even uses his handicap to his advantage, styling the “story” about how he lost his limb to get the maximum response from whoever he’s questioning. (For instance, if he is seeking information from a war vet, he’ll let the man assume that he lost his arm in combat.) Essentially, Dan Fortune takes a minus and turns it into a plus, a tool of his profession.
The handicap also forces Lynds’ protagonist to rely more on his brains and compassion than on brute strength. “[M]uscles are a lost hope for a one-armed man anyway,” he says. “For any man, really. There is always someone bigger, stronger, faster, or meaner. That’s why weapons were invented.”
Now back to the meat of this novel. One of the biggest mysteries in Freak is the title itself. Why is the book called Freak? It is not set amid a carnival sideshow or a crazy art community; instead, the case involves the president of a computer software firm hiring Dan Fortune to find his missing son and the son’s new bride, who cleaned out their bank accounts and sold the house the father gave them as a wedding present, and then left the small upscale New Jersey town they had settled in. And gone where? That’s the job: just locate the son, nothing else! But Fortune is more intrigued by why the couple has run off, and the only clue to this seems to be a memo pad on which the missing wife had written over and over again the single word: freak. It’s not until the final chapter that this mystery--and the book’s title--is explained, and it hits you like a kick in the stomach. As twists go, it is not what most readers of detective novels will be prepared for, not what we’ve come to expect from a work of mystery fiction. It is a climax that resonates back through the entire book.
One of the hidden treasures I discovered upon my recent re-reading of Freak is the following story, which Dan relates during pillow-talk with his lady friend:
“I knew a man who played in a regular poker game and lost most of the time. Not much, but a little almost every time. He began to feel like a fool playing regularly and losing most of the time. He wondered if he was a pigeon, a sucker. He talked of quitting. But he loved the game, enjoyed it almost more than anything. Then he found an answer. He decided that he simply didn’t take the game as seriously as two of the players. He wasn’t as disciplined as a third. That meant he would always be the fourth best player in the game no matter how well he played. He would always be, over the year, among the losers, if the smallest loser. When he worked that out he was happy. It gave him the justification he needed to lose and still go on playing. He knew why he lost, he knew the truth, therefore he wasn’t a sucker. As long as he knew, understood, it didn’t matter if he won or lost.”I can’t help but wonder if Dennis Lynds was talking about himself--although, by all accounts, he was an excellent poker player--because here I am recommending what I consider to be his greatest novel, yet you’ll have to seek out a copy of this out-of-print book in order to discover whether I’m just blowing smoke. I believe Lynds acknowledged what he, as a writer and as a human being, was facing--obscurity--and yet he still played on.
I only had one chance to meet author Lynds, who died in 2005. I was fortunate enough to share a book-signing table with him at a Bouchercon, and so I got to tell him how much the Dan Fortune series meant to me. At that time he inscribed a copy of his novel Chasing Eights (1990) with the words, “To Russell, Welcome to the game.” In light of the above passage, those words now strike me as slightly ominous. But they also make me feel hopeful and a little proud that he saw in me a kindred spirit: another loser who nonetheless still enjoys playing the game.
READ MORE: “Michael Collins: A Score’s Worth of P.I. Dan Fortune,” by Ed Lynskey (Mystery*File).
Better Read Than Dead
In addition to Russell Atwood’s recollection on this page of Freak, by Michael Collins (aka Dennis Lynds), the blogosphere is filled today with other “forgotten books” recommendations.
Among the mystery and crime fiction offerings are Point of Honour, by Madeleine E. Robins; Faces in the Dark, by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac; Night & Fear, by Cornell Woolrich; Plunder the Sun, by David Dodge; Maigret and the Madwoman, by Georges Simenon; It’s Always Four O’Clock and Iron Man, by W.R. Burnett; and About the Murder of the Clergyman’s Mistress, by Anthony Abbot.
Series organizer Patti Abbott has several more fine book picks in her own blog, as well as a complete list of today’s participating critics.
Among the mystery and crime fiction offerings are Point of Honour, by Madeleine E. Robins; Faces in the Dark, by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac; Night & Fear, by Cornell Woolrich; Plunder the Sun, by David Dodge; Maigret and the Madwoman, by Georges Simenon; It’s Always Four O’Clock and Iron Man, by W.R. Burnett; and About the Murder of the Clergyman’s Mistress, by Anthony Abbot.
Series organizer Patti Abbott has several more fine book picks in her own blog, as well as a complete list of today’s participating critics.
Soupy’s Final Bow
Another character from my boyhood has passed on to that great entertainment venue in the sky: Milton Supman, better known as the “rubber-faced” comedian and TV personality Soupy Sales, has died at age 83 in New York City.
The Web site Television Obscurities notes, “During the 1950s and 1960s he hosted a children’s show titled Lunch with Soupy Sales; at various times it aired locally and nationally. He was also a regular fixture on game shows like What’s My Line? and The Hollywood Squares.” Variety adds that Sales’ “anything-for-a-chuckle career was built on 20,000 pies to the face and 5,000 live TV appearances across a half-century of laughs.”
READ MORE: “The Hat Squad: Soupy Sales, Pie-oneer,” by Toby O’B (Inner Toob).
The Web site Television Obscurities notes, “During the 1950s and 1960s he hosted a children’s show titled Lunch with Soupy Sales; at various times it aired locally and nationally. He was also a regular fixture on game shows like What’s My Line? and The Hollywood Squares.” Variety adds that Sales’ “anything-for-a-chuckle career was built on 20,000 pies to the face and 5,000 live TV appearances across a half-century of laughs.”
The comic’s pie-throwing schtick became his trademark, and celebrities lined up to take one on the chin alongside Sales. During the early 1960s, stars such as Frank Sinatra, Tony Curtis, and Shirley MacLaine received their just desserts side-by-side with the comedian on his television show.The Los Angeles Times, USA Today, TV Squad, and Ivan G. Shreve Jr.’s Thrilling Days of Yesteryear all carry substantive obituaries.
“I’ll probably be remembered for the pies, and that’s all right,” Sales said in a 1985 interview.
READ MORE: “The Hat Squad: Soupy Sales, Pie-oneer,” by Toby O’B (Inner Toob).
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Raiding the Ivory Tower, Part II
(Editor’s note: This is the second and concluding installment of Megan Abbott’s conversation with British educator and crime-fiction authority Lee Horsley, 
author of The Noir Thriller, recently released in paperback by Palgrave Macmillan. Part I can be found here.)
Megan Abbott: In your new chapter, “Literary Noir in the Twenty-First Century,” you talk about how contemporary noir novels are very much aware of the weight of their predecessors, particularly with regard to gender. You point to a “motif of men in pursuit of a lost, treacherously illusive notion of masculinity,” such as in the works of Craig McDonald, Allan Guthrie, and Ray Banks. Do you see this as new, or as a natural extension of some of the tensions in classic noir? Given that noir is traditionally the genre of the outsider, the marginalized, is this gender alienation another version of the economic or social alienation of noir male heroes of past eras?
Lee Horsley: Yes, I think it’s very much an extension of elements that characterize classic noir. One of the critical texts that influenced me most in my reading of noir was Frank Krutnik’s In a Lonely Street: Film, Genre, and Masculinity, which argues that the “tough” thriller of the 1940s was very much driven by challenges to masculine cultural authority and psychic stability, producing what he called a pressurized mode of hero-centered fiction. I suppose what I was speculating about was whether the 21st-century political climate, in which there are often unsettling echoes of Cold War rhetoric, has fed into crime fiction that often seems to share some of the main preoccupations of mid-century noir, particularly its accentuation of fractured masculine identity. As with economic themes, the image of traumatized masculinity is ever-present in noir, but this has a more pronounced impact when the entire narrative is structured around such anxiety. Al Guthrie’s novels are, as you say, a good example of what I mean here. They get an enormous amount of their narrative drive and darkly comic effect from their focus on the traumas and insufficiencies of his psychologically damaged men--Greaves, who “stopped taking his medication” on the first page of Two-Way Split; the conflicted enforcer for an Edinburgh loan shark in Kiss Her Goodbye; Wallace and Pearce and the other “crazy fuckers” in Hard Man, in which even the wee three-legged dog is pronounced at the end to be a “proper little hard man.”
MA: You write that, for many contemporary noir characters, gender itself is an exhausting performance. Male noir characters frequently must over-compensate with high levels of violence for fear they won’t live up to expectations. Similarly, female characters feel the need to publicly perform a hyper-femininity, even when it means a loss of identity (the mask that becomes the face). Gender, in both cases, is less a bodily fact than a show, high theater. In some ways, this notion feels subversive, but in others it seems old-fashioned in our increasingly gender-free world. Is this a response to contemporary life or the genre’s own complicated past?
LH: Again, I’m sure it’s centrally related to “the genre’s own complicated past.” Noir has been a source of fascination for feminist critics--for example, in the book that E. Ann Kaplan edited on Women in Film Noir, which discusses things like noir’s “absent family,” the female destroyer/redeemer, and women’s roles in narrative structure. A lot that’s been written on the representation of the femme fatale and also on the “chick dick” of contemporary hard-boiled fiction has been very much influenced by 1990s ideas of gender performativity, genders as cultural fictions, etc. Following on from this, post-’90s, we’re undoubtedly more aware of the instability of gender roles and are, as you say, less gender-bound; but at the same time, I think, we’ve also become increasingly fascinated with the nature of gender performance, with what you’ve called the performance of hyper-femininity, with the challenge of sustaining carefully constructed identities. Several of the 21st-century novels I’ve read satisfy this fascination by reworking the tropes of
earlier noir, combining them with a very contemporary take on the sexual dynamic and gendered power relationships. Sometimes the past itself is rewritten, e.g., in your own retro noir novels, with their explorations of the female subjectivity behind the mask. In novels like Queenpin and Die a Little, we see the cost of asserting effective agency and the loss of self involved in mastering a chosen role. Authors of female-centered narratives that use contemporary settings--for example, Christa Faust and Vicki Hendricks--achieve similar ends by constructing their novels in relation to earlier noir patterns, imagining female performances from the inside and removing them from the male-centered narrative structures of traditional noir. Whether the setting is retro or contemporary, there is a revision of earlier representations of gender roles, but also, as you imply, a nostalgia for the “high theater” of classic noir narratives.
MA: Who are the “lost” noir authors that you feel are most
in need of recovery?
LH: The list I jotted down, probably not too surprisingly, consisted mainly of mid-century American crime writers--the writers who, along with such better-known contemporaries as Jim Thompson and Mickey Spillane, made this the great age of literary noir. A quick survey of books available on Amazon suggested that a few of them are--just possibly--in the process of becoming less lost than they were before. Charles Willeford’s Pick-Up has again fallen out of print, but others of his early novels--e.g., Wild Wives, High Priest of California, and The Woman Chaser--have all been reissued post-2000, as have his Hoke Mosley novels. Peter Rabe has been well-served by recent Black Mask and Hard Case Crime editions (Stop This Man!, Dig My Grave Deep, etc.). Another of my all-time favorites, Dorothy B. Hughes, has achieved at least partial visibility: Ride the Pink Horse was reprinted by Canongate Crime in 2002; and In a Lonely Place and The Expendable Man are both in print as well.
But many of the other great mid-century noir authors seem altogether more in danger of disappearing. Sadly, this is only a fantasy rescue mission, but should some obliging (and obviously discerning) publisher give me carte blanche to choose a list of six mid-century noir classics that I could save from obscurity ...
• Margaret Millar, The Iron Gates (1945): The Iron Gates was reissued in the 1990s, and another of Millar’s strongest novels, Beast in View, in 2002, but neither is in print any longer. Her psychological melodramas are powerful explorations of the “subjective” experience of women trapped in socially constructed roles.
• William Lindsay Gresham, Nightmare Alley (1946): Published in the same year as Hughes’ Ride the Pink Horse, Nightmare Alley uses a traveling carnival to create an intense and surreal evocation of existential despair. Sometimes described as a cult classic, Nightmare Alley is nevertheless out of print, although there is a 2003 graphic novel adaptation by the underground cartoonist Spain Rodriguez, and the 1947 film of the novel has finally been made available on DVD in the Masters of Cinema series.
• Charles Williams, Hell Hath No Fury (1953): Williams specializes in creating narrators whose self-delusion and moral turpitude are the substance of the narrative--a strategy central to Hell Hath No Fury, adapted for the screen by Dennis Hopper as The Hot Spot in 1990. A Touch of Death was reissued by Hard Case Crime in 2006 and about a dozen of Williams’ books have been filmed, but he ought to be much better known: his novels only rarely surface, and I think Hell Hath No Fury has been out of print for nearly 20 years now.
• Day Keene, Sleep with the Devil (1954): Al Guthrie and I included a “Day Keene double” on the Pulp Originals site that we set up to make out-of-print paperback originals available in e-book form, and there are a couple of his novels currently available (from, of course, Hard Case Crime and Black Mask). One of the novels Al and I included would be particularly good to see in print: Sleep with the Devil, the protagonist of which opens by declaring his intention to commit murder and has no hesitation in admitting that he’s a heel--“The heel is the lowest thing in the human nervous system and, consequently, has no conscience.”
• Harry Whittington, Web of Murder (1958): You can still buy, at a fairly exorbitant price, The Dimes of Harry Whittington (issued in three volumes by Disc Us Press around 2000); and The Devil Wears Wings was published as an e-book by Pulp Originals. But Whittington deserves the sort of bold-cover, single-novel reissues that, say, Hard Case
Crime does. Web of Murder is one of his very best, following its protagonist along a road to Hell that’s very much of his own making.
• Gil Brewer, Wild to Possess (1959): From 1951 on, Brewer produced some of the most successful of all the paperback originals, but there is only one of his novels in print, The Vengeful Virgin, issued with a fantastic vintage cover by Hard Case Crime in April 2007. I’m very partial to 13 French Street and Nude on Thin Ice, but think perhaps I’d suggest Wild to Possess, which centers on an aggressively male protagonist who repeatedly reveals himself to be unscrupulous, devious, and wholly deserving of the fate that befalls him.
MA: Do you think the perception of noir fiction in academia has changed since 2001?
LH: I think there’s been a significant shift in attitudes towards genre fiction as an academic subject. This is often, of course, derided outside academia--The Thrilling Detective Web Site supplied my favorite comment on our CrimeCulture site [which Horsley edits with her daughter Katharine]: “At last! Something for people with too many initials after their names!” And it probably goes without saying that genre fiction is still sometimes seen as not quite a proper subject within the academy. But during the period since I launched my first course on popular fiction (The Noir Thriller, an M.A. module set up in the 1990s), Lancaster University’s Department of English & Creative Writing has seen a proliferation of popular-fiction courses--the Gothic, science fiction, a crime fiction course for undergraduates, children’s literature. And other colleagues are writing and lecturing on the romance, the Western, and the horror film. This kind of critical focus has been further encouraged by the establishment of courses in which literature and film are taught alongside one another. All of these things, of course, have
attracted a lot of students, and joint research projects have also begun to take shape. In a context like this, film noir and literary noir have started to seem like much less eccentric preoccupations. I’ve had discussions over the past few months with one of my colleagues who specializes in the Gothic about the relationship between crime fiction (particularly noir) and the Gothic, have gone to a crime conference with another colleague who is fascinated by the noir Western, and have begun discussions about a collaborative book on criminal confessions.
So I guess, in answer to your question, yes, I do think that the academic perception of noir has changed a lot since I first decided that it was something I wanted to write about. In the 1990s, it was part of a research project I started because I thought, Why not? It interests me, I’m getting close to retirement ... who will care if I spend my time reading crime novels? Now, in 2009, I’m still at the university a year past retirement age, and the huge amount of academic interest in popular fiction is one of my main
incentives for staying on.
MA: When you originally wrote The Noir Thriller, many of the books you discussed were out of print and very hard to find. To what do you attribute the recent resurgence of interest (e.g., Hard Case Crime’s reissues, which you discuss in your new chapter)?
LH: As my online search for some of my favorite writers suggests, a lot of the best mid-century crime novels are still out of print, but some publishers have clearly worked very effectively to rescue the lost writers of the paperback revolution and in doing so have fostered a growing interest in noir--Hard Case Crime, Serpent’s Tail, Black Mask, No Exit Press. The current resurgence will probably not re-establish the “lost” noir writers any more securely than did the publishing efforts of the 1970s and ’80s, when Black Box Thrillers and Vintage/Black Lizard, for example, first made their mark. But all of these imprints have contributed to the marketing of noir as noir, and to a sense that literary noir is as deserving of popular and critical attention as cinematic noir. It is during these last three or four decades that the label “noir” has begun to float free of its exclusive association with the canonical film noirs of the 1940s and ’50s. As James Naremore writes (in More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts), “Whether classic noir ever existed, by 1974 a great many people believed in it,” and since then it has come to be “a major signifier of sleekly commercial artistic ambition.” Not unlike the contemporary Gothic, 21st-century noir has a contradictory appeal, compounded of familiarity and subversiveness. It is dark, disruptive, and dangerous, but at the same time draws on a reassuring iconography ... which perhaps brings us back to the image of Bogart’s worn face that we started with. Things are bad, but then--they always have been.
author of The Noir Thriller, recently released in paperback by Palgrave Macmillan. Part I can be found here.)Megan Abbott: In your new chapter, “Literary Noir in the Twenty-First Century,” you talk about how contemporary noir novels are very much aware of the weight of their predecessors, particularly with regard to gender. You point to a “motif of men in pursuit of a lost, treacherously illusive notion of masculinity,” such as in the works of Craig McDonald, Allan Guthrie, and Ray Banks. Do you see this as new, or as a natural extension of some of the tensions in classic noir? Given that noir is traditionally the genre of the outsider, the marginalized, is this gender alienation another version of the economic or social alienation of noir male heroes of past eras?
Lee Horsley: Yes, I think it’s very much an extension of elements that characterize classic noir. One of the critical texts that influenced me most in my reading of noir was Frank Krutnik’s In a Lonely Street: Film, Genre, and Masculinity, which argues that the “tough” thriller of the 1940s was very much driven by challenges to masculine cultural authority and psychic stability, producing what he called a pressurized mode of hero-centered fiction. I suppose what I was speculating about was whether the 21st-century political climate, in which there are often unsettling echoes of Cold War rhetoric, has fed into crime fiction that often seems to share some of the main preoccupations of mid-century noir, particularly its accentuation of fractured masculine identity. As with economic themes, the image of traumatized masculinity is ever-present in noir, but this has a more pronounced impact when the entire narrative is structured around such anxiety. Al Guthrie’s novels are, as you say, a good example of what I mean here. They get an enormous amount of their narrative drive and darkly comic effect from their focus on the traumas and insufficiencies of his psychologically damaged men--Greaves, who “stopped taking his medication” on the first page of Two-Way Split; the conflicted enforcer for an Edinburgh loan shark in Kiss Her Goodbye; Wallace and Pearce and the other “crazy fuckers” in Hard Man, in which even the wee three-legged dog is pronounced at the end to be a “proper little hard man.”
MA: You write that, for many contemporary noir characters, gender itself is an exhausting performance. Male noir characters frequently must over-compensate with high levels of violence for fear they won’t live up to expectations. Similarly, female characters feel the need to publicly perform a hyper-femininity, even when it means a loss of identity (the mask that becomes the face). Gender, in both cases, is less a bodily fact than a show, high theater. In some ways, this notion feels subversive, but in others it seems old-fashioned in our increasingly gender-free world. Is this a response to contemporary life or the genre’s own complicated past?
LH: Again, I’m sure it’s centrally related to “the genre’s own complicated past.” Noir has been a source of fascination for feminist critics--for example, in the book that E. Ann Kaplan edited on Women in Film Noir, which discusses things like noir’s “absent family,” the female destroyer/redeemer, and women’s roles in narrative structure. A lot that’s been written on the representation of the femme fatale and also on the “chick dick” of contemporary hard-boiled fiction has been very much influenced by 1990s ideas of gender performativity, genders as cultural fictions, etc. Following on from this, post-’90s, we’re undoubtedly more aware of the instability of gender roles and are, as you say, less gender-bound; but at the same time, I think, we’ve also become increasingly fascinated with the nature of gender performance, with what you’ve called the performance of hyper-femininity, with the challenge of sustaining carefully constructed identities. Several of the 21st-century novels I’ve read satisfy this fascination by reworking the tropes of
earlier noir, combining them with a very contemporary take on the sexual dynamic and gendered power relationships. Sometimes the past itself is rewritten, e.g., in your own retro noir novels, with their explorations of the female subjectivity behind the mask. In novels like Queenpin and Die a Little, we see the cost of asserting effective agency and the loss of self involved in mastering a chosen role. Authors of female-centered narratives that use contemporary settings--for example, Christa Faust and Vicki Hendricks--achieve similar ends by constructing their novels in relation to earlier noir patterns, imagining female performances from the inside and removing them from the male-centered narrative structures of traditional noir. Whether the setting is retro or contemporary, there is a revision of earlier representations of gender roles, but also, as you imply, a nostalgia for the “high theater” of classic noir narratives.MA: Who are the “lost” noir authors that you feel are most
in need of recovery?
LH: The list I jotted down, probably not too surprisingly, consisted mainly of mid-century American crime writers--the writers who, along with such better-known contemporaries as Jim Thompson and Mickey Spillane, made this the great age of literary noir. A quick survey of books available on Amazon suggested that a few of them are--just possibly--in the process of becoming less lost than they were before. Charles Willeford’s Pick-Up has again fallen out of print, but others of his early novels--e.g., Wild Wives, High Priest of California, and The Woman Chaser--have all been reissued post-2000, as have his Hoke Mosley novels. Peter Rabe has been well-served by recent Black Mask and Hard Case Crime editions (Stop This Man!, Dig My Grave Deep, etc.). Another of my all-time favorites, Dorothy B. Hughes, has achieved at least partial visibility: Ride the Pink Horse was reprinted by Canongate Crime in 2002; and In a Lonely Place and The Expendable Man are both in print as well.
But many of the other great mid-century noir authors seem altogether more in danger of disappearing. Sadly, this is only a fantasy rescue mission, but should some obliging (and obviously discerning) publisher give me carte blanche to choose a list of six mid-century noir classics that I could save from obscurity ...
• Margaret Millar, The Iron Gates (1945): The Iron Gates was reissued in the 1990s, and another of Millar’s strongest novels, Beast in View, in 2002, but neither is in print any longer. Her psychological melodramas are powerful explorations of the “subjective” experience of women trapped in socially constructed roles.
• William Lindsay Gresham, Nightmare Alley (1946): Published in the same year as Hughes’ Ride the Pink Horse, Nightmare Alley uses a traveling carnival to create an intense and surreal evocation of existential despair. Sometimes described as a cult classic, Nightmare Alley is nevertheless out of print, although there is a 2003 graphic novel adaptation by the underground cartoonist Spain Rodriguez, and the 1947 film of the novel has finally been made available on DVD in the Masters of Cinema series.
• Charles Williams, Hell Hath No Fury (1953): Williams specializes in creating narrators whose self-delusion and moral turpitude are the substance of the narrative--a strategy central to Hell Hath No Fury, adapted for the screen by Dennis Hopper as The Hot Spot in 1990. A Touch of Death was reissued by Hard Case Crime in 2006 and about a dozen of Williams’ books have been filmed, but he ought to be much better known: his novels only rarely surface, and I think Hell Hath No Fury has been out of print for nearly 20 years now.
• Day Keene, Sleep with the Devil (1954): Al Guthrie and I included a “Day Keene double” on the Pulp Originals site that we set up to make out-of-print paperback originals available in e-book form, and there are a couple of his novels currently available (from, of course, Hard Case Crime and Black Mask). One of the novels Al and I included would be particularly good to see in print: Sleep with the Devil, the protagonist of which opens by declaring his intention to commit murder and has no hesitation in admitting that he’s a heel--“The heel is the lowest thing in the human nervous system and, consequently, has no conscience.”
• Harry Whittington, Web of Murder (1958): You can still buy, at a fairly exorbitant price, The Dimes of Harry Whittington (issued in three volumes by Disc Us Press around 2000); and The Devil Wears Wings was published as an e-book by Pulp Originals. But Whittington deserves the sort of bold-cover, single-novel reissues that, say, Hard Case
Crime does. Web of Murder is one of his very best, following its protagonist along a road to Hell that’s very much of his own making.• Gil Brewer, Wild to Possess (1959): From 1951 on, Brewer produced some of the most successful of all the paperback originals, but there is only one of his novels in print, The Vengeful Virgin, issued with a fantastic vintage cover by Hard Case Crime in April 2007. I’m very partial to 13 French Street and Nude on Thin Ice, but think perhaps I’d suggest Wild to Possess, which centers on an aggressively male protagonist who repeatedly reveals himself to be unscrupulous, devious, and wholly deserving of the fate that befalls him.
MA: Do you think the perception of noir fiction in academia has changed since 2001?
LH: I think there’s been a significant shift in attitudes towards genre fiction as an academic subject. This is often, of course, derided outside academia--The Thrilling Detective Web Site supplied my favorite comment on our CrimeCulture site [which Horsley edits with her daughter Katharine]: “At last! Something for people with too many initials after their names!” And it probably goes without saying that genre fiction is still sometimes seen as not quite a proper subject within the academy. But during the period since I launched my first course on popular fiction (The Noir Thriller, an M.A. module set up in the 1990s), Lancaster University’s Department of English & Creative Writing has seen a proliferation of popular-fiction courses--the Gothic, science fiction, a crime fiction course for undergraduates, children’s literature. And other colleagues are writing and lecturing on the romance, the Western, and the horror film. This kind of critical focus has been further encouraged by the establishment of courses in which literature and film are taught alongside one another. All of these things, of course, have
attracted a lot of students, and joint research projects have also begun to take shape. In a context like this, film noir and literary noir have started to seem like much less eccentric preoccupations. I’ve had discussions over the past few months with one of my colleagues who specializes in the Gothic about the relationship between crime fiction (particularly noir) and the Gothic, have gone to a crime conference with another colleague who is fascinated by the noir Western, and have begun discussions about a collaborative book on criminal confessions.
So I guess, in answer to your question, yes, I do think that the academic perception of noir has changed a lot since I first decided that it was something I wanted to write about. In the 1990s, it was part of a research project I started because I thought, Why not? It interests me, I’m getting close to retirement ... who will care if I spend my time reading crime novels? Now, in 2009, I’m still at the university a year past retirement age, and the huge amount of academic interest in popular fiction is one of my main
incentives for staying on.
MA: When you originally wrote The Noir Thriller, many of the books you discussed were out of print and very hard to find. To what do you attribute the recent resurgence of interest (e.g., Hard Case Crime’s reissues, which you discuss in your new chapter)?
LH: As my online search for some of my favorite writers suggests, a lot of the best mid-century crime novels are still out of print, but some publishers have clearly worked very effectively to rescue the lost writers of the paperback revolution and in doing so have fostered a growing interest in noir--Hard Case Crime, Serpent’s Tail, Black Mask, No Exit Press. The current resurgence will probably not re-establish the “lost” noir writers any more securely than did the publishing efforts of the 1970s and ’80s, when Black Box Thrillers and Vintage/Black Lizard, for example, first made their mark. But all of these imprints have contributed to the marketing of noir as noir, and to a sense that literary noir is as deserving of popular and critical attention as cinematic noir. It is during these last three or four decades that the label “noir” has begun to float free of its exclusive association with the canonical film noirs of the 1940s and ’50s. As James Naremore writes (in More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts), “Whether classic noir ever existed, by 1974 a great many people believed in it,” and since then it has come to be “a major signifier of sleekly commercial artistic ambition.” Not unlike the contemporary Gothic, 21st-century noir has a contradictory appeal, compounded of familiarity and subversiveness. It is dark, disruptive, and dangerous, but at the same time draws on a reassuring iconography ... which perhaps brings us back to the image of Bogart’s worn face that we started with. Things are bad, but then--they always have been.
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