Tuesday, June 30, 2009

I’ve Been Gormanized!

Over the last couple of days, several people have sent their compliments on an interview author-editor Ed Gorman did with me for the Summer 2009 issue of Mystery Scene magazine. The public mails must be slow way out here in Seattle (blame it on all our recent sunshine--the local postal carriers just aren’t used to it), because my copy of that issue arrived only this afternoon.

As usual with Mystery Scene, there’s plenty of great reading to be found here. I want to draw your attention especially to Oline H. Cogdill’s interview with Tom Rob Smith, author of the much-praised historical thriller Child 44 and its new sequel, The Secret Speech; Cheryl Solimini’s profile of George Dawes Green, who wrote the Edgar Award-winning The Caveman’s Valentine (1994) as well as the forthcoming thriller, Ravens; Michael Mallory’s look back at the too-oft-forgotten work of Stuart Palmer, the creator of Hildegarde Withers, a “fictional schoolteacher turned sleuth who had a talent for tripping over bodies”; and Kevin Burton Smith’s wrap-up of five worthy American women private eyes who have sprung unto the scene since the “female P.I. boom of the ’80s and ’90s”--a selection that includes Diane Wei Liang’s Mei Wang, Mary Wilbon’s Cassandra Slick, and Libby Fischer Hellman’s Georgia Davis.

Then, of course, there’s that interview with yours truly.

I’m usually reluctant to blow my own horn. But Ed Gorman is a nice guy, a persistent promoter of this genre, and an unabashed admirer of The Rap Sheet. So when he requested an interview with me for Mystery Scene ... well, how could I say no? There was some editing done to the 3,000 words worth of responses I sent to Gorman, though not as much as I expected; and all of the best stuff made it to the printed page. I don’t want to inhibit Mystery Scene’s single-issue sales by posting the entirety of our exchange here. However, I think my response to one query might be interesting (with links added).
This would seem to be the true Golden Age of detective and crime fiction; so many fine writers. Would you agree?

Yes and no. While there are indeed many fine writers, bottom line oriented publishers aren’t always willing to pay those authors enough to keep them working. And not everyone can write a book a year. So publishers concentrate their resources on big-name wordsmiths who keep producing, even though they may be churning out the same sort of yarns over and over again. (Sadly, readers don’t always notice this betrayal.)

And while I’m thrilled to have so many reading options in crime fiction, I am disappointed with many of the myriad books hitting the shelves. Too many try to copy previously successful works, or they run a good theme to death. How many more books, for instance, can I be expected to read about serial killers? You would think that such murderers were running rife in the United States, when in fact they’re fairly unusual. And does every mystery story have to be about murder? There are other crimes of sufficiently absorbing magnitude, other ways to build up tension than having somebody new die every two or three chapters.

But then, editors and publishers would have to encourage such innovation. And I don’t think they do, at least not strongly enough.

I’ve found myself lately looking back at older works in this field, books by mid-20th-century writers who were searching for new veins of writing gold, trying to do something unlike what their fellows were up to at the time. Admittedly, there was a lot of trash, but I think no more trash being turned out then than what is being published now. And occasionally, I come across real gems, such as Stanley Ellin’s The Eighth Circle (1958) or Harold Q. Masur’s Bury Me Deep (1947) or Erle Stanley Gardner’s series about mismatched gumshoes Bertha Cool and Donald Lam. All of those--as well as the works of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Thomas B. Dewey, Ed McBain, and of course [Ross] Macdonald--provide the source material mined by today’s crime fictionists. But some of that older stuff still boasts an air of novelty, rather than the reek of repetition.

So, while I am happy to see crime fiction be so popular today, I fear that we’re not getting everything we could from this genre. The willingness of publishers and authors to emphasize profits and productivity over creativity may ultimately be the genre’s undoing. And maybe that’s a good thing, to let the genre burn itself out now and then lie fallow and recoup its innovation in preparation for some future renaissance.
Read the full piece in the Summer 2009 issue of Mystery Scene.

UPDATE: Scans of the pages containing my interview appear below. Click on the images to bring up enlargements in new windows.



’Nuff Said

The funeral for Charlie’s Angels star Farrah Fawcett was held today. A bit more information is to be found here.

From the Artful to the Awful

This is hardly a new question, but it’s still a good one: If you could order up DVD sets of any old TV series that aren’t currently available in that format, what would you choose? My own selections would include Harry O, Hec Ramsey, Banyon, The Name of the Game, It Takes a Thief, City of Angels, Assignment: Vienna, Private Eye, and Search--none of which feature among PremiumHollywood.com’s alphabetized picks. Instead, we get AfterM*A*S*H, CPO Sharkey, Flying Blind, James at 15, Manimal, and When Things Were Rotten. A pretty rotten list altogether, though the site’s choices also include L.A. Law (why the hell isn’t that on DVD already?) and The Quest, both of which I’d be happy to sit down and watch again.

Click here to see--and ruthlessly judge--all of the site’s choices.

(Hat tip to TV Squad.)

READ MORE:What’s On YOUR Wish List of TV Shows That Ought to Be Out on DVD?” by David Bianculli (TV Worth Watching).

LCC Does L.A.

Registration is now open for the 2010 Left Coast Crime conference, which will take place in Los Angeles from March 11 to 14. As “fan guest of honor” Janet Rudolph reminds us, “This will be the 20th Left Coast Crime Mystery Convention.”

Now with Twice the Punch

Don’t let the “Spring 2009” label fool you: the latest “double issue” of Spinetingler Magazine is all new and has just been posted. Actually, this appearance is part of a relaunch, turning Spinetingler into an element of BSCReview (BookSpotCentral). It also brings a masthead shift, with author Jack Getze being named as editor, while Sandra Ruttan assumes the title of “executive editor”--a change that is less significant than it seems. “Spinetingler is still Sandra’s baby,” Getze assures me in an e-mail note. “She’s the boss!”

Contents of this new edition can either be read online or downloaded in PDF format. They include new short stories from Anthony Rainone (“Fall to Pieces”), Fiona Kay Crawford (“Successful Surgeon”), and Graham Powell (“The Ins and Outs”); interviews with Russel D. McLean, Brian McGilloway, Phyllis Smallman, and Craig McDonald; and book reviews, as well as a tribute to Southwestern mystery novelist Tony Hillerman, who died last October.

Welcome back, Spinetingler. We’ve missed you.

Best of the Worst

This is a joyful annual task: announcing the winners of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. Inspired by English novelist and playwright Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, who is infamous for having come up with the much-ridiculed opening line, “It was a dark and stormy night,” this lighthearted competition invites writers and aspiring humorists to create the worst opening sentences for books that (thank goodness) will never be completed. The contest has been held ever since 1982 and is sponsored by the English Department at California’s San Jose State University. As newspaperman-blogger Dave Knadler once characterized it, the Bulwer-Lytton challenge is “a sobering reminder on the perils of handling dashes and subordinate clauses without parental supervision.” Well phrased, indeed.

Top honors this year go to David McKenzie, described as “a 55-year-old Quality Systems consultant and writer from Federal Way, Washington.” His groan-producing parody reads:
Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin’ off Nantucket Sound from the nor’east and the dogs are howlin’ for no earthly reason, you can hear the awful screams of the crew of the “Ellie May,” a sturdy whaler captained by John McTavish; for it was on just such a night when the rum was flowin’ and, Davey Jones be damned, big John brought his men on deck for the first of several screaming contests.
However, there are also winners in several individual categories. From the “Detective” division comes this bit of egregious overwriting, produced by Eric Rice of Sun Prairie, Wisconsin:
She walked into my office on legs as long as one of those long-legged birds that you see in Florida--the pink ones, not the white ones--except that she was standing on both of them, not just one of them, like those birds, the pink ones, and she wasn’t wearing pink, but I knew right away that she was trouble, which those birds usually aren’t.
Actually, though, I think I prefer the runner-up pick in that category, submitted by Los Angeles resident Tony Alfieri:
The dame sauntered silently into Rocco’s office, but she didn’t need to speak; the blood-soaked gown hugging her ample curves said it all: “I am a shipping heiress whose second husband was just murdered by Albanian assassins trying to blackmail me for my rare opal collection,” or maybe, “Do you know a good dry cleaner?”
And then there are several delightful “dishonorable mentions” (the best kind, in this competition), including this criminal misuse of clichés submitted by Lynn Lamousin of Baton Rouge, Louisiana:
Darnell knew he was getting hung out to dry when the D.A. made him come clean by airing other people’s dirty laundry; the plea deal was a new wrinkle and there were still issues to iron out, but he hoped it would all come out in the wash--otherwise he had folded like a cheap suit for nothing.
You’ll find all of this year’s winners and runners-up here.

Monday, June 29, 2009

“Three Heaven-sent Hell Raisers”

Funny. I was of prime-time TV-watching age when the Aaron Spelling series Charlie’s Angels debuted in 1976, but I have no memory of tie-in novels having been published. Then again, I wasn’t a regular Angels watcher, and when I did take in an episode, I was probably too distracted by the generous displays of skin (they didn’t call this “Jiggle TV” for nothing) to wonder whether I could purchase books that would force me only to imagine what Kate Jackson, Farrah Fawcett, and Jaclyn Smith looked like while carrying out their undercover investigations for Los Angeles’ Charles Townsend Agency.

It wasn’t until after Fawcett’s death last Thursday that I happened across the cover of one of five Angels novels published between 1977 and 1978, and then went looking for the rest. These slender volumes were penned by “Max Franklin,” which was one of several pseudonyms employed by Richard Deming, a prolific writer of novels, short fiction, and stories for television. Deming/Franklin also composed novels based on episodes of Dragnet, Starsky & Hutch, The Mod Squad, and Vega$. The first four of his Charlie’s Angels books were adapted from Season One installments of that Wednesday-night series, though the fifth and last one, Charlie’s Angels: Angels on Ice, was based on an episode from Season Two, after Fawcett had left the show and been replaced by the equally blonde Cheryl Ladd.

These book covers offer nothing spectacular in the way of design. They’re simply decorated with photographs of the series’ three female investigators and catchy lines about “TV’s Troubletracking Trio” and the show’s “Three Curvaceous Crimestoppers.” But they are part of American TV crime-drama history--a history that seemed to become even more distant and gauzy last week.

Click on any of the covers for an enlargement.





READ MORE:It’s All in the Game: TV P.I. Tie-ins” (The Thrilling Detective Web Site); “Spying, Anyone?” by Marty McKee (Johnny LaRue’s Crane Shot).

Sunday, June 28, 2009

Epitaph for a Spy Novelist

Had he not died all of 11 years ago, British espionage novelist Eric Ambler would today be celebrating his 100th birthday. As I explained on this date back in 2006:
The son of entertainers, Ambler studied engineering at London University and wrote plays, before embarking on a career composing novels. As noted in The Oxford Companion to Crime & Mystery Writing, “In the mid-1930s Ambler set out to redeem the then-lowest form of popular fiction, the thriller, by making it a vehicle for serious treatment of the European political situation, increasingly polarized between fascism and communism. ... In six novels between 1936 and 1940”--beginning with The Dark Frontier (1936) and concluding with 1939’s The Mask of Dimitrios (aka A Coffin for Dimitrios)--“Ambler revolutionized the thriller, bridging the gap between ‘popular’ and ‘serious,’ ‘entertainment’ and ‘literature.’”

Although he wrote two dozen books over his career, including Epitaph for a Spy (1938), Passage of Arms (1959), The Light of Day (1962), and Waiting for Orders (1991), some of which were turned into films, it’s usually Dimitrios that’s remembered as his greatest work--“one of the classics of spy fiction,” to quote Bruce F. Murphy from The Encyclopedia of Murder and Mystery.
I don’t really have anything to add to that short bio of the author. So let me instead direct you to some other pieces about Ambler that have appeared in The Rap Sheet and on other sites:

Pulp Valentine: Eric Ambler and the Invention of the Spy Novel,” by Stephen Metcalf (Slate)

Dangerous Games,” by Thomas Jones (The Guardian)

Beyond the Balkans--Eric Ambler and the British Espionage Novel, 1936-1940,” by Brett F. Woods (California Literary Review)

The Book You Have to Read: Journey into Fear, by Eric Ambler,” by Charles Cumming (The Rap Sheet)

The Book You Have to Read: A Coffin for Dimitrios, by Eric Ambler,” by Ali Karim (The Rap Sheet)

Why Eric Ambler’s A Coffin for Dimitrios Is a Masterpiece,” by Sarah Weinman (The Wall Street Journal)

• “Eric Ambler’s Obituary from The Guardian, 1998
(The Marxism List)

“Sleight” Scores Sasher

In case you weren’t paying attention, what with all the news focus on the deaths of actress Farrah Fawcett and pop star Michael Jackson, the two-day Deadly Ink Convention was held this weekend in Parsippany, New Jersey. Lincoln Child was the guest of honor, with Jeff Cohen held forth as toastmaster.

Also during that conference came an announcement of this year’s recipient of the David G. Sasher Sr. Award for Best Mystery Novel. As attendee Jack Getze reports, Robin Hathaway walked away with that commendation for her third Dr. Jo Banks mystery, Sleight of Hand (Minotaur). Nominated as well for the Sasher were: Antiques to Die for, by Jane K. Cleland (Minotaur); Pushing Up Daisies, by Rosemary Harris (Minotaur); Death of a Cozy Writer, by G.M. Malliet (Midnight Ink); A River to Die for, by Radine Trees Nehring (St. Kitts Press); and Death Will Get You Sober, by Elizabeth Zelvin (Minotaur).

Saturday, June 27, 2009

Rip, Rip, Hooray!

Someday I am really going to have to track down more of British author Mike Ripley’s Fitzroy Maclean Angel novels (including Angels Unaware), because I’ve come to appreciate his humor--which, I should say, is always amply on display in “Getting Away with Murder,” the monthly column he writes for Shots. In his July column, Ripley talks about Cambridge’s upcoming “Bodies in the Bookshop” event, author George Dawes Green’s Ravens, a new interview with the reclusive spy novelist Len Deighton in CADS: Crime and Detective Stories, and the publication of David Armstrong’s new Frank Cavanaugh/Jane Salt mystery, Written Out.

Read it all here.

Schwegel Owns Chicago Crime

My review of Chicagoan Theresa Schwegel’s tense new Sloane Pearson novel, Last Known Address, was posted today in the Chicago Tribune. The piece begins:
Chicago is the crime fiction capital of the world. Just ask any of the great writers (Sean Chercover, Barbara D’Amato, Michael Allen Dymmoch, Kevin Guilfoile, Libby Hellmann, Sara Paretsky, Marcus Sakey and others) who gather regularly at a blog called The Outfit.

Theresa Schwegel isn’t a member of The Outfit, but the author (who won an Edgar for her first book, “Officer Down”) appears to have put her unique vision of Chicago on virtually every page of “Last Known Address.” The mention of such sites as Wrigleyville, Ukrainian Village, Humboldt Park and Garfield Park transports us to their locations.

It’s the 2300 block of West Erie that gives the book its ironic title. It’s the address of a vacant building, one of several where a very nasty serial rapist has been attacking his victims and forcing them to fight--knowing, of course, that he’ll win.

When a real estate agent whom Detective Sloane Pearson knows is attacked by this violent predator, Sloane finds herself taking a case that threatens her plans to leave her longtime lover. Sloane is new to the Sex Crimes Division but no stranger to being treated like an incompetent blond by her hardened male co-workers.
Read the full story here.

Friday, June 26, 2009

The Book You Have to Read:
“Trent’s Last Case,” by E.C. Bentley

(Editor’s note: This is the 54th installment of our Friday blog series highlighting great but forgotten books. Today’s selection comes from Stefanie Pintoff, the New York author of In the Shadow of Gotham, a historical mystery introducing early 20th-century police detective Simon Ziele. That book, the debut of a new series, won the first Minotaur Books/Mystery Writers of America First Crime Novel Competition. To learn more about Pintoff, click here.)

The book was written on a dare.

The author was a British newspaper reporter named E.C. Bentley, and when his friend G.K. Chesterton (of Father Brown fame) challenged him to write a story about a new kind of detective--an antithesis to Sherlock Holmes--he complied. Bentley wanted his sleuth to be a realistic character, not an idiosyncratic mix of mannerisms. His detective would not be an analytical master of deduction. On the contrary, he would be so fallible that he might actually get the crime’s solution wrong. As Bentley explained in his 1905 autobiography, Those Days,
It should be possible, I thought, to write a detective story in which the detective was recognizable as a human being and was not quite so much the ‘heavy sleuth.’ ... Why not show up the fallibility of the Holmesian method?
Bentley met Chesterson’s challenge, and the result was Trent’s Last Case, first published in 1913. The novel was wildly popular; in Britain, it sold out four editions in its first five months. In the United States, it was published as The Woman in Black and performed well. And over the years, both critics and mystery writers have offered generous praise of the book, with many even citing it as the first modern detective novel.

Here are the blurbs printed in the 1978 Perennial Library edition:
“One of the three best detective stories ever written.”--Agatha Christie

“The finest detective story of modern times.”--G.K. Chesterton
And in the same edition’s introduction, Dorothy L. Sayers wrote that Trent’s Last Case was “startlingly original ... when it first appeared. It shook the little world of the mystery novel like a revolution, and nothing was ever quite the same again. Every detective writer of today owes something, consciously or unconsciously, to its liberating and inspiring influence.”

Yet, for a book so highly praised, it is surprisingly under the contemporary mystery reader’s radar.

I read it myself in graduate school, because of its place in the history of the detective novel--and because it provided useful material for my dissertation on narrative form in the early detective novel.

But is the book still worth reading today for reasons other than its historical appeal? I believe it is.

Certainly Trent’s Last Case is far from a perfect crime novel. Modern readers may be unaccustomed to its flowery Edwardian language and slower pacing. In addition, the prejudices of Bentley’s era are present in the story: the racism, sexism, and anti-Semitism, in particular. Putting aside those historical markers, however, there’s much to enjoy and appreciate about the book--particularly in the character of “gentleman sleuth” Philip Trent and the plot’s triple twist of an ending.

After Sigsbee Manderson, a financial magnate, is found murdered on the grounds of his English country estate, Trent is called in to investigate. He is an artist who freelances as a newspaper reporter; in fact, he’s gained a reputation for publishing solutions to tough criminal cases that baffle the police. The Manderson murder case promises to be difficult: the victim was found shot through the eye with bruising on his wrists, indicating a struggle; his odd appearance suggests he dressed in haste, not even taking time to put in his dentures; and there are numerous suspects. They include his wife, Mabel (who was unhappy in her marriage), her uncle (who had quarreled with the victim), several servants, and a number of jealous business associates. As Trent puts it: “Here’s a man suddenly and violently killed, and nobody’s heart seems to be broken about it, to say the least.” Trent solves the case in three days--or so he believes. But he withholds the solution because of an unusual complication: he has fallen deeply in love with Mrs. Manderson, the dead man’s widow. Though his motivation for keeping the solution to himself is deeply personal--he wants only to protect Mabel--it leads to a fortunate result. Trent had gotten it wrong, and his “solution” would have doomed an innocent man to the hangman’s noose.

Yes, Trent is fallible. And yes, his weakness in falling in love with a prime suspect is a device that is later borrowed with great success by future crime novelists and filmmakers. But the protagonist’s appeal also lies in his unique gift of perception. In that, Trent is different from--but not wholly unrelated to--his antithesis, Sherlock Holmes. In explaining why his own analysis succeeds, Holmes tells Watson: “You see, but you do not observe.” Trent is an artist, and he observes his case with an artist’s perceptive eye. As he tells it, what’s needed to find out the truth is a “delicacy of perception”:
The law certainly does not shine when it comes to a case requiring much delicacy of perception. ... [W]hat would twelve red-faced realities in a jury-box have done to [young John] Marlowe? His story would, as he says, have been a great deal worse than no defence at all. It’s not as if there were a single piece of evidence in support of his tale.
This novel’s other strength is its clever plot, filled with enough twists to astonish and satisfy even today’s mystery fiction fans. Even as evidence builds that the victim himself played some role in his own demise, the final twist takes Trent (and likely the reader) by complete surprise. The real murderer confesses to Trent during the course of a celebratory dinner, secure in his belief that no legal consequences will follow. Based on the circumstances of the murder--and Trent’s own opinion of the killer--there is no question of involving forces of the law. Both Trent and the killer believe private justice has already been done.

Trent merely tells the man:
... I am cured. I will never touch a crime-mystery again. The Manderson affair shall be Philip Trent’s last case. ...” Trent’s smile suddenly returned. “I could have borne everything but that last revelation of the impotence of human reason. ... I have absolutely nothing left to say, except this: you have beaten me. I drink your health in a spirit of self-abasement. And you shall pay for the dinner.
With its unique detective figure and complex plot, Trent’s Last Case stands the test of time--and may even change the way existing fans of Golden Age classics view their favorite novels.

* * *
End note: Trent’s Last Case was not, in fact, his last case. E.C. Bentley eventually wrote more about Philip Trent, but not until 1936 when Trent’s Own Case was published, followed by Trent Intervenes in 1938. In the meantime, he penned and published several collections of clerihews (a type of short, comic biographical poem that he also invented).

READ MORE: The entire text of Trent’s Last Case can be found here.

Forgotten? Neglected? Neither Is Good

There’s a wide diversity of works being considered in today’s installment of the blogosphere-wide “forgotten books” series. In addition to Stefanie Pintoff’s recommendation on this page of Trent’s Last Case, those picks include: The Lodger, by Marie Belloc Lowndes; You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up, by Richard Hallas; Murderous Remedy, by Stella Shepherd; Road to Purgatory, by Max Allan Collins; Praying Mantis, by Hubert Montheilet; The Takers, by Jerry Ahern; and the Name of the Game tie-in, Los Angeles: A.D. 2017, by Philip Wylie (a book I didn’t even know existed before now, but that I must now search out). Patti Abbott hosts several additional recommendations in her own blog, plus a full rundown of today’s participating bloggers.

On a related note, it seems that Sally Owens, who works at the famous Mysterious Bookshop in New York City, has begun a series in the bookstore’s blog about “neglected authors.” She has addressed only two candidates so far--Lillian O’Donnell and E.X. Ferrars--but we’re looking forward to seeing more in the near future. (Hat tip to In Reference to Murder.)

Bullet Points: News and Nostalgia Edition

• My, how time flies. Johnny Depp’s new movie, Public Enemies, in which he plays notorious Depression-era bank robber John Diillinger, will debut next week. Now, I’ll always look back most fondly at Warren Oates’ portrayal of the same real-life character in Dillinger (1973), which found Ben Johnson playing FBI agent Melvin Purvis; but Depp sure looks good with that machine gun in his hand. And actor Christian Bale may not be Ben Johnson, but after seeing him in the Batman movies, I expect he can hold his own here. French beauty Marion Cotillard is just a wonderful bonus. Mystery Scene’s Oline H. Cogdill has more to say about Public Enemies here.

• On a related note, Elliott Gorn, who teaches history and American Civilization at Brown ­University and is the author of Dillinger’s Wild Ride: The Year That Made America’s Public Enemy ­Number One, picks what he thinks are the five best books about criminals for The Wall Street Journal. See all his choices here.

• Matt Beynon Rees, the author so far of three Palestine-based mysteries (including The Samaritan’s Secret), offers up his five favorite novels for a Dutch newspaper.

• John Douglas Marshall explains in The Daily Beast that American author Alan Furst (The Spies of Warsaw) “had it in mind to write a series of novels in a genre he was soon calling ‘historical espionage,’ literary works set in 1930s Europe amid the gathering thunderclouds of fascism and war. But he had no illusions that these novels would be his ticket to fortune or fame. ‘I was going to be the best failed novelist in Paris,’ Furst says. ‘That was certainly not the worst thing in the world that one could be.’” Read more of this story here.

• In a follow-up to yesterday’s obituary of actress Farrah Fawcett, I came across a terrific quote in the TV Confidential blog. Apparently, TV Guide asked Fawcett in 1977 to explain the success of Charlie’s Angels. “When the show was number three,” Fawcett quipped, “I thought it was our acting. When we got to be number one, I decided it could only be because none of us wears a bra.”

• Four more tributes to Fawcett: here, here, here, and here.

• Wow, I never thought I’d see the main title sequence from Jack Palance’s old TV detective series, Bronk, again--yet here it is.

• More forgotten things: The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. books.

• Due to my recent travels, I neglected to mention that David Cole’s series about “cool Canadian crime” has continued in Mystery Fanfare. Catch up with that series here.

R.I.P., Kodachrome.

• Kevin Burton Smith apparently can’t say enough good things about Ray Banks’ latest novel, Beast of Burden. “[T]his is, hands down, one of the most affecting books I’ve read in a long time,” he writes in his blog.

• Megan Abbott is working on her first graphic novel?

• The eighth and final season of Monk doesn’t even begin on the USA Network until August 7, but star Tony Shalhoub is already getting nostalgic for that series about an obsessive-compulsive detective working the never-clean-enough streets of San Francisco.
He admits, “We all love to work, and we all love to have work, so to step away from something so strong and successful--of course there’s a risk involved.” Still, “I’ve spoken with the writers, and I think we’ve all agreed there’s only so much you can mine out of this character. Nobody wants to move into the area where it starts to feel stale or the quality starts to drop. Since everything does have to come to an end, we want it to happen in the right way, where we’re in control of it, not a situation where the plug gets pulled. I think it honors the audience this way.”
(Hat tip to Learning Curve.)

• There’s more Law & Order UK on the way.

• Clea Simon (Probable Claws) is the newest subject of January Magazine’s “Author Snapshot” series. Read more about her here.

• And Booked for Murder has launched a contest to find the “best Ross Macdonald imitations.” Blogger R.T. writes: “Anyone out there with a flair for hard-boiled tropes? I dare you to come up something as good as Macdonald’s description of a woman’s face or his description of the landscape (or maybe he was confusing the woman’s luscious landscape with the lovely view outside the glass wall).” More details here.

Thursday, June 25, 2009

An Angel Gets Her Wings

This comes as no surprise, given all of the reports about her declining health over the last couple of years, but the news is sad nonetheless: Farrah Fawcett, the blond and bright-smiling, Texas-born model and actress who starred in the 1970s TV hit Charlie’s Angels, died today in Santa Monica, California, at age 62. She succumbed to anal cancer.

I was never a big fan of Aaron Spelling’s Angels series. But I did enjoy watching Fawcett--then credited as Farrah Fawcett-Majors, because of her marriage to The Six Million Dollar Man’s Lee Majors--on the mid-’70s David Janssen TV series Harry O (she played private eye Orwell’s bouncy next-door neighbor, Sue Ingham). And I remember appreciating her in the lead role in a 1989 teleflick called Margaret Bourke-White, about the famous 20th-century U.S. photographer. During the late ’70s and early ’80s, a poster of Fawcett wrapped up in a red bathing suit made her the No. 1 sex symbol in America, rivaled only by The Fall Guy’s Heather Thomas.

Even sadder than word about Fawcett’s passing this morning may be reports that she and her longtime love, actor Ryan O’Neal, who had planned to wed while she remained on her deathbed, weren’t able to follow through on that wish. “There just wasn’t time, and Farrah wasn’t in any condition to do it,” O’Neill is quoted in People magazine as saying.

In fond memory of Fawcett, here’s a video tribute to the actress in her best-remembered role, as Jill Munroe on Charlie’s Angels:



READ MORE:What Was It About Farrah?” by Mary Elizabeth Williams (Salon); “Hollywood Pays Tribute to Farrah Fawcett,” by Mike Fleeman (People); “Farrah Fawcett Dies at 62; Actress Soared with, then Beyond, Charlie’s Angels,” by Valerie J. Nelson (Los Angeles Times); “Farrah Fawcett, Actress and Iconic Beauty, Dies at 62,” by Susan Stewart (The New York Times); “Good-bye Farrah,” by Sandra Stephens (You Call Yourself a Writer--Me Too); “Former Charlie’s Angel Farrah Fawcett Dies,” by Jesse Baker (NPR); “Farrah Fawcett (1947-2009),” by Edward Copeland (Edward Copeland on Film); “Why We Loved Farrah Fawcett,” by James Ledbetter (Slate); “Farrah Is Dead at 62,” by Marty McKee (Johnny LaRue’s Crane Shot); and video tributes to the actress can be found here, here, and here.

Brain Reign

There are already plenty of group blogs addressing crime-fiction-related topics, as Mystery Scene’s Oline H. Cogdill has noted recently (see here, here, and here). But now here’s another one: Criminal Minds, launched earlier this month, gathers together the talents of C.J. Lyons, Rebecca Cantrell, Kelli Stanley, Tim Maleeny, and others. Worth visiting.

On a Wing and a Scare

Do you remember The Caveman’s Valentine (1994), which earned its author, George Dawes Green, loads of rave reviews plus an Edgar Award for Best First Novel? After that, he wrote a murder-trial suspenser called The Juror--which, along with Caveman, is being reissued by Grand Central Publishing in spiffy trade-paperback format, to coincide with the hardcover release next month of Green’s latest novel, a terrific thriller called Ravens.

The ravens in this tale are two scary birds named Shaw McBride and Romeo Zderko. They had planned on pulling over from Interstate 95 in Georgia just long enough to put some air into the leaky tire of their car; but when a convenience-store clerk reveals that a winning ticket to the latest multimillion-dollar jackpot has just been sold, Shaw and Romeo change their plans and hatch a scheme. It seems the clerk made the mistake of giving away the winner’s home address, and Shaw and Romeo go there to take the family hostage.

Like Caveman and The Juror, Ravens is beautifully written. It has already moved high up on my list of the year’s best books.

“Get Carter”: A Re-examination

If English writer Derek Raymond exercises an influence in death that’s disproportionate to that which he achieved in life (and I believe he does), then his cinematic counterpoint is certainly director Mike Hodges’ 1971 production of Get Carter, based on the obscure novel Jack’s Return Home, by Ted Lewis.

This film, in fact, was lost to the British public for many years, only resurfacing when--much to Hodges’ chagrin--the magazine Loaded adopted it as the epitome of mid-1990s lads culture. It’s a reading of the film that is either entirely insensible or willfully incorrect. Because Get Carter is a purposefully sour vision of Britain at the dawn of the ’70s, providing as desolate a perspective on the country as post-punk would offer towards that decade’s conclusion.

The narrative itself concerns mobster Jack Carter (Michael Caine), a native of Newcastle, now living in London and working for a local “firm.” As the film opens, we see Carter pour himself a drink, clearly bored with the pornographic movie his bosses are watching. It’s an important beat; we see that Carter is a nowhere man. He’s not with these men, not really; but he’s not apart from them, either. As he sits back down, the camera voyeuristically slides over the supple curves of Anna (Britt Ekland) and we sense the implication: they’re conducting an affair. Momentarily distracted from his porn, Carter’s boss asks Jack not to return home, to let the police handle “it” (the supposed car-crash death of his elder brother, Frank), and we gather that these two are at cross-purposes.

It’s a strong scene, precisely because Hodges imparts so much information through so little effort; it feels naturalistic despite its density. As such, it sends a message to the audience: this is a film you either pay close attention to, or you’ll be left behind. And then we see Carter on board a train, bringing pain, both physical and personal, to everyone involved in the unfolding tragedy. The score, a key part of Get Carter’s artistic success, warrants a mention here. British jazz man Roy Budd brings a propulsive funk to the film that heightens the already intensifying sense of storm clouds gathering.

Carter’s return to Newcastle is ostensibly to attend his estranged brother’s funeral, although it’s not until we visit the family home that we realize this. In a grubby house, with chunks of wallpaper missing from the walls, we find the corpse of Frank Carter. It’s there that one of the core themes of the film is introduced: decline. This house had once been a comfortable abode, where Frank lived with his wife and Doreen (Petra Markham), his daughter. But nobody’s paid attention to the décor in years and, certainly, nobody lives there. Finding it hard to credit his sibling’s passing to accidental circumstances, Carter begins to question the people in his brother’s life: Frank’s daughter, his mistress, his workmates. This exercise, coupled with the fact that Jack Carter was reading a Raymond Chandler paperback novel on the train north, informs us that far from being classified as a gangster film, which it often is, Get Carter can be viewed as a British private eye movie. And, as is commonly true of works in that genre, Get Carter is less about the case and more about the nature of the man working it.

The gangster elements of this 38-year-old film are, in point of fact, fairly conventional: the London firm that employs Carter has interests in Newcastle, and there’s a war brewing between the Newcastle firms, both of which become increasingly nervous about Carter’s presence in their city and try to recruit him through both obvious and covert means. The question of whether brother Frank was involved with those local gangsters, and to what extent they were responsible for his death, is, of course, one of the things driving Carter. As a piece of narrative, this tale is not dissimilar from Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest (1929). Unlike Hammett’s novel, however, there are innocents in Get Carter’s world, and the film is careful to take note of when they’re injured--such as when Keith, a local barman who is slightly in awe of Carter, is left to take a beating meant for the visiting gangster. It’s this attitude towards violence, that you simply need to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, that really marries the worldviews of Ted Lewis and Derek Raymond and, therefore, positions this film as the cinematic equivalent of one of Raymond’s “black novels.”

Another key theme of the film is escape. This is brought to particular prominence when Carter interrogates Margaret (Dorothy White), his brother’s mistress, on the swing bridge. He explains to her that he’s only returned to this “crap house” to find out what became of his brother, and the viewer is forced to consider that this is a man who fled Newcastle for London only to become a lieutenant in a firm. But he might have taken the same dangerous path had he remained, and now he and Anna are planning to escape to South America: he’s a man who’s never stopped running. “We are what we are, like it or not,” Margaret says. If we didn’t recognize it before, we see it now: Carter has been quietly imploding for some time.

Such hints about Jack Carter unraveling are confirmed in the next major scene, during which we join him and a local gang boss’ “moll,” Glenda (Geraldine Moffat), as they make love under a coverless duvet, our eyes drawn to the mirror at the head of the bed in which their reflections can be seen, intentionally recalling the voyeurism of the pornographic movie running at the start of the film. When Glenda excuses herself from the bedroom, Carter gets up to turn on another projector. In a cinematic tour de force, the camera settles on Caine’s face and we are allowed to observe the action of that film he’s viewing both in the reaction of his features and the reflection of the mirror behind him. It’s another pornographic picture. Only this one, to the horror of the audience as well as Carter, does not feature some anonymous young woman; instead, it stars Doreen, his niece (who, it’s suggested, is actually his daughter). Having a personal connection to the subject matter, Carter can no longer marshal the professional detachment of the P.I. First he crumbles and then, with discernible effort, he exerts control.

As with all noir protagonists, Jack Carter is ultimately doomed. This is grimly and obviously played out across the last third of the film as the audience finds Carter, once an individual informed by his self-imposed control, being informed instead by his directed anger. The film ends with the now feral Carter, who had become a liability to the criminal institution he serves, being executed upon a beach. As nihilistic an ending as could be imagined.

Unlike the majority of crime cinema works, Get Carter isn’t a celebration of flawed masculinity or triumphant individualism. It’s an interrogation of lives at the margins of human society, margins populated by the increasingly desperate. (It’s significant that director Hodges has a background as a reporter for the old British investigative program World in Action.) The world of Get Carter is one where people simply prey upon one another and in so doing render whatever victories they may achieve pyrrhic.

* * *

Here’s the theatrical trailer to Get Carter, which has been hailed by film critics as the greatest British movie of all time:



And let us add a little bit of news, excerpted from the Comments section of this post. The writer is Maxim Jakubowski, celebrated British editor and former bookstore owner:
You might all be interested to learn that Mike Hodges, who is a good friend, has recently written his first novel. “Watching the Wheels Come Off” is a noir comedy about a day in the life of [a] failed con man when everything goes from bad to worse. It has just appeared in France from Rivages and the English-language edition will appear in March of next year in the UK from my new list, Maximum Crime, from John Blake Publishing.
We’ll undoubtedly have more to say about this later.

READ MORE:A Conversation with Writer/Director Mike Hodges,” by Maxim Jakubowski (Mulholland Books); “Ted Lewis: Noir Maverick,” by Brian Greene (Criminal Element).

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Short Shrift

• Following up on recent posts here that addressed the infamous “four play meme challenge,” novelist Max Allan Collins today presents his own list of favorite movies, places he has lived, etc. His selections can be found on his Web site’s front page. By the way, I thought Collins’ rundown of “4 things you want to do before you die” was particularly entertaining:
Get an Edgar
Direct at least five more movies
Complete the Nathan Heller saga
Not die
• More following up: Last week, I wrote about the MyThemes.TV Web site, where you can listen to the theme songs from many old small-screen programs. Subsequently, I’ve discovered one piece of music that was noticeably missing from Mark Little’s expansive collection: the Isaac Hayes number that introduced ABC-TV’s The Men, a Thursday-night “wheel series” from 1972-1973 that featured three crime/espionage shows--Robert Conrad’s Assignment: Vienna, Laurence Luckinbill’s The Delphi Bureau, and Jigsaw, which starred the sadly underappreciated James Wainwright as a missing-persons investigator with the California State Police. Although I remember happily watching The Men when it was first broadcast, I couldn’t have whistled its main theme if you’d asked me to do so just two days ago. However, I just stumbled across that number on a music site called Last.fm. Click here to download the piece. The four-minute work is obviously too long for it all to have been used under the ABC series’ credits, but it will take an expert more knowledgeable than I am to say with part made it onto the air.

• Could Daniel Craig’s James Bond be ready to tangle with an updated Ernst Stavro Blofeld? Permission to Kill weighs the rumors.

Sam Peckinpah directed a Batman movie? If only it were true …

• And there are several new online interviews worth reading: Jedidiah Ayres talks with Todd Robinson, the creator-editor of ThugLit and the man behind the new short-story collection Sex, Thugs, and Rock & Roll. Lesa Holstine chats with Robert Fate, author of the Baby Shark series, which includes Baby Shark’s Jugglers at the Border, due out in September. (Curiously, there’s yet another exchange with Fate here.) Les Hurst takes on South African writer Deon Meyer (Blood Safari) for Shots. Introducing his latest blog, Coffee with a Canine, Marshal Zeringue of Campaign for the American Reader fame taps Chris Knopf (whose latest Sam Acquillo/Hamptons mystery, Hard Stop, recently reached bookstores) to write about his work … and his Wheaten terrier. And Rap Sheet contributor Declan Burke investigates John Connolly’s demons, while he talks with the Irish wordsmith about his latest thriller, The Lovers, and a young adult novel Connolly has planned that “involves Satanism and quantum physics.”

Twice Shy

Wow, I didn’t know I had so much power. ;) Novelist-editor Sandra Ruttan writes in her blog:
I think most authors who blog now live in fear of saying they like their new book cover, only to find it picked up on The Rap Sheet as a copycat cover.
For more about such duplicated cover designs, click here.

Ed’s Dead

I’m very sorry to hear this morning that Ed McMahon, who spent three memorable decades as Johnny Carson’s good-humored sidekick on The Tonight Show, has died in Los Angeles at age 86. Baltimore Sun TV critic David Zurewick writes:
With all the change in late-night TV theses days, it is hard to remember what a reliable, inviting and reassuring place McMahon and Carson made their faux couch and desk set seem like from 1962 to 1992--one of the longest and most successful runs in TV history. McMahon played a large role in that popularity with his deep voice, ready laugh and trademark “Heeeeeerrrrrreeee’s Johnny” nightly introduction.

While Carson was a perfectionist who made life difficult for those who worked with him, McMahon said in repeated interviews over the years that his job as sidekick was “the world’s greatest job.’”

“You can’t imagine hooking up with a guy like Carson,” McMahon said a 1993 AP interview. “There’s the old phrase, hook your wagon to a star. I hitched my wagon to a great star.”
Interestingly, McMahon’s demise comes close on the heels of the launch of Hiyoooo.com, billed as “the world’s first virtual sidekick.” When you need a pick-me-up, just go to that site, click on Ed’s smiling noggin, and let his full-throated call herald the significance of your every thought or utterance.

(Hat tip to TV Squad.)

READ MORE:Heeeeyyyyyooooo!!!” by Ivan G. Shreve Jr. (Thrilling Days of Yesteryear); “Conan O’Brien and Tonight Pay Tribute to Ed McMahon” (The Huffington Post); “Ed McMahon: Sidekick on Tonight for 30 years famous for his cry of ‘Heeeeeere’s Johnny!’” by Michael Carlson (The Independent).

Reduce Your Carbon Footprint--or Else

My review of C.J. Box’s new novel, Below Zero (Putnam), has been posted on the Barnes & Noble Review page. Here’s how it begins:
Blue Heaven, Box’s last book, was a terrific standalone thriller about rogue L.A. cops retired to Idaho. Below Zero is a return to the Joe Pickett series, Box’s ongoing dissection of crime in Wyoming as seen through the eyes of a game warden whose favorite big game is human villains.
You’ll find my full critique here.

Sunday, June 21, 2009

Happy Father’s Day

Appropriate to this occasion, Janet Rudolph has posted a list of Father’s Day-related mysteries for your reading pleasure. I’m almost ashamed to say that I have read none of those works. However, I can at least add another title to her list: John Calvin Batchelor’s 1994 political thriller, Father’s Day, which has to do with a U.S. president who temporarily relinquishes his office under the 25th Amendment to the Constitution, only to be blocked by his ruthless vice president when he tries to return to the Oval Office. It’s not the most relaxing weekend read, as I recall.

This being Father’s Day in many countries, I got to musing on the subject of dads as fictional detectives. There aren’t very many, as compared with the number of loner gumshoes and dysfunctional bachelor cops out there. The explanation for this may simply be that the demands of fatherhood can conflict too severely with the rigors of dogged detection. Tying one’s sleuth down to a wife and children limits the character’s ability to become intimately involved with femmes fatales, and it makes him consider something beyond his fervid pursuit of malefactors. He may not as willing as the socially unconnected investigator to compromise his life in order to resolve a case.

I started to make a list of detectives in crime fiction who are also fathers, or whose fathers are connected with their professional work. But in the course of it, I realized that most such characters come from television, rather than books.

As I recall from my recent reading of Rennie Airth’s third and latest John Madden novel, The Dead of Winter (an excellent work that’s due out in the States next month), his protagonist, a former Scotland Yard inspector, has reared two children with his wife since he was first introduced in River of Darkness (1999), yet he continues to involve himself in perilous investigations. Pre-World War II German Detective Inspector Nikolai Hoffner, who made his initial appearance in Jonathan Rabb’s Rosa (one of January Magazine’s favorite books of 2005), also has a couple of boys, both of whom are given intriguing larger roles in his second adventure, this year’s Shadow and Light. “Gumsandal” Gordianus the Finder, featured in Steven Saylor’s 10-book series of 1st century B.C. Roman whodunits, is responsible for one natural daughter and a couple of adopted sons. Novelist-snoop Ellery Queen--the brilliant but quirky creation of cousins Manfred B. Lee and Frederic Dannay--might have been a much less compelling character without his pater and sidekick, Inspector Richard Queen of the New York City Police Department. Private eye Tom Hickey, who made his debut in Ken Kuhlken’s The Big Adios (1991), has since relinquished his mystery-solving duties to his son, Clifford Hickey (The Do-Re-Mi, 2006). And let’s not forget that “salvage expert” Travis McGee discovered, at the end of his 21st adventure, John D. MacDonald’s The Lonely Silver Rain (1985), that he had a teenage daughter, Jean (the progeny of his long-ago love affair with Puss Killian in 1968’s Pale Gray for Guilt), about whom he’d known nothing. The supposition is that Jean Killian would have reappeared in MacDonald’s subsequent McGee novels, and had some impact on that troubleshooter’s development. But of course, there were no later McGee stories (despite rumors to the contrary).

If crime novels have given us few examples of father-offspring relationships, television has been rather less stingy. Consider, as an excellent example, The Rockford Files (1974-1980), in which Los Angeles P.I. Jim Rockford (James Garner) was alternately annoyed and assisted by his papa, retired truck driver Joseph “Rocky” Rockford (Noah Berry Jr.). Or Crazy Like a Fox (1984-1986), which found the wonderful actor Jack Warden playing a private dick who was a bit too prone to soliciting help from his less adventurous son, attorney Harrison Fox Jr. (John Rubenstein). We can’t forget, either, about Tenafly (1973-1974), the promising and too-short-lived NBC Wednesday Mystery Movie segment that starred James McEachin as an ex-cop turned corporate detective, who also happened to be a family man, with a much-forgiving wife and two young children, as I remember it. There was also The Feather and Father Gang (1977), in which Stefanie Powers played a successful lawyer, Toni “Feather” Danton, who solved crimes with the aid of her con-man parent, Harry Danton (Harold Gould). No doubt just as forgotten by now was Faraday and Company (1973-1974), another short-run NBC Wednesday Mystery Movie series. It found dancer-actor Dan Dailey portraying Frank Faraday, a 1940s shamus who, after he escaped from a quarter-century of unjustified incarceration in a South American prison, entered into a sleuthing partnership with the illegitimate son he never knew, Steve Faraday (James Naughton). In the third and final season of It Takes a Thief (1968-1970), another prominent dancer, Fred Astaire, joined the cast as Alistair Mundy, the equally light-fingered father of protagonist Alexander Mundy (Robert Wagner). E.G. Marshall and Robert Reed played father-son attorneys in the acclaimed 1961-1965 TV drama, The Defenders, while in the 1996-2001 police drama Nash Bridges, Don Johnson’s San Francisco police inspector lived with (and had to periodically protect) his retired longshoreman father, played by James Gammon.

I’m sure there are other examples of fathers figuring prominently in crime novels and TV series, but they escape me at the moment. Give me some help in the Comments section of this post.

What’s in a Name?

Having recently read and enjoyed UK author Robert Wilson’s The Ignorance of Blood, his fourth and evidently final modern crime novel featuring Spanish Inspector Jefe Javier Falcón (a series that began with The Blind Man of Seville, one of January Magazine’s favorite books of 2003), I confess to being ... well, a little jealous of blogger Julia Buckley’s new interview with the author. What a treat! I was particularly fond of this exchange:
I’m always interested in the naming of a detective, and yours, Inspector Jefe Javier Falcón, has the name of a bird of prey. In your latest novel you describe Falcón and his friend as “alive as hunting hawks.” Is a predator an apt metaphor for a homicide detective?

I chose the name because the intention of the books was to be all about ‘seeing’. That is: discovering the capacity to distinguish between the appearance and reality of both people and situations. The initial irony is that, of course, Falcón, and many of the other characters do not see things at all clearly. By the time he reaches the last book Falcón is as perceptive as he’ll ever be, and his friend, Yacoub, given his situation as a spy, perhaps even more so. A homicide detective is always trying to see the reality of things beyond the endless deception that is put before him. In Spanish the word for ‘falcon’ is in fact ‘halcón’, so the one audience that might miss the significance of this metaphor is the Spanish themselves.
You can read all of Buckley’s interview with Wilson here.

Pedals to the Metal

Since I just got through showcasing a memorable car chase scene from the John Wayne crime thriller McQ (1974), which was a follow-up to my previous post about Steve McQueen’s more famous chase sequence in Bullitt (1968), it’s only right that I now revisit another on-screen pursuit, this one ... well, not quite so renowned. It comes from the 1971 tailored-for-TV film Once Upon a Dead Man, which was the pilot for the Rock Hudson-Susan Saint James mystery series, McMillan & Wife. I can only assume director-writer Leonard B. Stern had McQueen’s automotive acrobatics in mind when he conceived of this two-wheeled race, also through the streets of San Francisco.

Saturday, June 20, 2009

Bullet Points: Catching Up Edition

First of all, let me thank my colleague Linda L. Richards, who steered The Rap Sheet with impressive skill during my recent trip to Minneapolis. Second, there’s a little catching up to do, as far as recent developments are concerned. To wit:

From the fine film blog, Cinematical: “How’s this for a shocking piece of news: Seventeen years after Kyle MacLachlan last appeared as Special Agent Dale Cooper in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, WENN reports that the actor wants to resurrect the legendary show on the Internet. The actor says: ‘I have a crazy idea to bring back Twin Peaks on the net as five-minute webisodes.’ Should this become a reality, it will be without David Lynch, whose ‘focus is more on transcendental meditation now.’”

• It’s interesting to see, on a list of the Top 50 TV Westerns of All Time (compiled by the Western Writers of America), at least three vintage series that can also be classified as crime fiction: Have Gun, Will Travel (#5), The Wild Wild West (19), and the oft-overlooked 1972-1974 NBC Mystery Movie segment, Hec Ramsey (which, like Have Gun, starred Richard Boone). By the way, the top four places on the WWA’s roster are occupied by Gunsmoke, Maverick, Rawhide, and Bonanza. Deadwood placed 11th, but should’ve been higher.

Here’s your Man from U.N.C.L.E. fix for the day.

• Over at Mysteries in Paradise, Kerrie Smith compares the recent nominees for a variety of high-profile crime-fiction awards. “Even if you are one that says you are not influenced by awards, and are often profoundly disappointed when you read the winner,” Smith writes, “it gives pause for thought when the same authors and titles crop up again and again doesn’t it?”

• I’m looking forward to seeing the film Whiteout, which debuts in September and stars the ever-lovely Kate Beckinsale as a deputy U.S. marshal investigating murder in Antarctica. My interest has been piqued further by the recently released trailer for that movie, which has been adapted from Greg Rucka’s 1998 comic-book series.

• Speaking of films, I am definitely adding this forgotten gem to my Netflix list: Hickey & Boggs (1972), which reunited I Spy stars Bill Cosby and Robert Culp in a plot about ill-fortuned gumshoes on the hunt for a missing girl. As author Duane Swierczynski remarks, “if you love your private eyes pushed to the point of oblivion, if you think the best crime films were made in the 1970s, and love a good neo-noir that plays out in broad daylight, I very much recommend tracking down Hickey & Boggs.”

• Amid rising tensions in Iran, following last week’s disputed re-election of the nation’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Tom Gabbay submits his third thriller, The Tehran Conviction, to the notorious Page 69 Test. The results are here.

• Funny. I had almost forgotten that espionage novelist Alan Furst (The Spies of Warsaw) once contributed football columns to Seattle Weekly, the “alternative newspaper” for which I also labored in a previous life. And I’m with Sarah Weinman in being puzzled as to why Furst prefers not to talk about his early novels. I liked both The Paris Drop (1980) and The Caribbean Account (1981).

• Over at Pulp Serenade, Cullen Gallagher assesses the “dark, brooding poetry” of David Goodis’ opening lines.

• “Readers should be warned that I am going to write a positive review of one of the most excoriated books in the thriller genre, and I should know since I have been among those excoriating it,” writes David L. Vineyard in Mystery*File. “That said, I think someone needs to point out why Sapper (Herman Cyril McNeile) and Bulldog Drummond have lingered so long in the public imagination and are still read today by some--myself included.” This is an excellent piece, well worth your reading.

In a sprightly exchange for Pulp Pusher, Anthony Neil Smith and Victor Gischler “shoot the breeze ... about rural noir, tacos, and their literary heroes.” Quite the pair, indeed.

• Could Hawley Harvey Crippen, the American homeopathic physician found guilty of murdering his wife in London in 1910, have his name cleared 99 years later? The publicity would certainly be good for Martin Edwards, whose 2008 novel, Dancing for the Hangman, is finally due out in the States later this year from Five Star Press.

• Another thing I missed while I was away in the Midwest: Last week’s episode of the KSAV Web radio program TV Confidential featured a conversation with 82-year-old Emmy Award-nominated producer Everett Chambers, who worked on the original NBC series Columbo during four of its seven seasons (1971-1978). Fortunately, I--and you--can still listen to that exchange here.

• And among the books I saved from my father’s shelves after his death five years ago was a collection of the black-and-white, 1930s Secret Agent X-9 comic strips written by Dashiell Hammett and drawn by Alex Raymond. What I didn’t know, though, until reading about them in Christopher Mills’ Spy-fi Channel blog, was that two film serials were made from those strips. “The 1937 serial has Agent X-9 functioning pretty much as a standard movie G-Man, chasing after a ring of international jewel thieves ...,” Mills explains. “The 1945 serial, on the other hand, is a genuine espionage adventure. This one stars a young, up-and-coming Lloyd Bridges as Phil Corrigan, Secret Agent X-9. The charismatic and talented Bridges was a far better actor than most other serial heroes, and his nascent star quality really infuses the 13-chapter serial with energy. Unlike some other chapterplays of the era, you don’t get bored between fistfights and car chases.” Hmm. More DVDs to track down ...