World of the Weird, Part III

(This is the third and final post in Rafe McGregor’s series. Part I can be found here, while Part II is here.)

I was pleased to receive an advance copy of the sequel to Dave Zeltserman’s Bad Thoughts, entitled Bad Karma (Five Star, 2009), while I was still writing my review of the former. Bad Karma is set five years on and finds protagonist Bill Shannon living on his police disability pension in Boulder, Colorado. He has been happily reunited with his ex-wife, Susan, and--after her--his main interest in life is studying meditation and doing dream work therapy. He is a licensed private investigator, but rarely takes cases, and then only minor ones … until now. This novel is a fascinating and competent read, and it worked on three levels for me: part clever murder mystery, part personal spiritual journey as Shannon tries to heal his psychological scars, and an informed and impartial commentary on the New Age Movement, presenting both the positive and negative aspects of that subculture. Like so much of Zeltserman’s fiction, Bad Karma is ingenious and original, but what really interested me was the way he dealt with the supernatural element: the exact opposite of his treatment in Bad Thoughts.

In Bad Karma we are told from the outset that Shannon inhabits a world where out-of-body experiences and astral projection are possible. The prospect is handled in a summary of the events from the preceding book, which basically does exactly what Orson Scott Card suggests for speculative-fiction writers: Zeltserman establishes the parameters of Shannon’s universe, and sets out the rules for his particular version of the game of detection. This not only gives Bad Karma an interesting New Age theme--and sets up Shannon as a counterpart to the traditional “occult detective”--but it’s also essential to the solution of the mystery.

I suspect that Zeltserman’s change of direction was because Bad Karma is a sequel, so anyone who had read Bad Thoughts would already know Shannon’s universe; and anyone who hadn’t, needed to be brought up to speed on his back-story, which is impossible to relate without reference to the supernatural. Even more interesting from a writer’s perspective, however, is that both of these approaches work well. In fact, if handled with skill, the revelation of a supernatural plot can be successful at all three potential places: the beginning, middle, and end of a tale. Weird crime films provide popular examples with Fallen (1998), The Ninth Gate (a 1999 adaptation of Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s much-lauded 1993 novel, The Dumas Club), and Angel Heart.

I’ve already discussed Angel Heart, which keeps the supernatural denouement until the very end. Fallen makes it fairly obvious from the beginning--not to mention the advertising--that Denzel Washington’s character will be hunting a demon rather than a serial killer. Pérez-Reverte’s novel was actually a post-modern thriller celebrating Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers, rather than a weird crime story. Director Roman Polanski increased the original occult theme in The Ninth Tale to the point where the supernatural element dominated the film, and the adaptation provides a fresh take on an excellent book. The realization that otherworldly forces are at play comes in the middle of the film, when Johnny Depp’s protagonist sees Emmanuelle Seigner’s enigmatic character perform some impossible acrobatics. I was going to make the point that what I’ve called “supernatural crime fiction” has been served better on the big screen than in print, but my recent reading of S.T. Joshi’s The Weird Tale: Arthur Machen, Lord Dunsany, Algernon Blackwood, M.R. James, H.P. Lovecraft (1990, University of Texas Press) caused me to reconsider.

My own introduction to H.P. Lovecraft was through The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (first published in Weird Tales in 1941). That novella isn’t one of his more popular stories, but I was instantly hooked. Only after reading Joshi did I realize why: “This novel is, quite simply, a detective story; it may be the greatest supernatural detective story ever written.” Joshi points out that Lovecraft follows the conventions of the Golden Age mystery, and presents the story as a puzzle, with the rigorous placement of clues for the reader. I think he’s quite correct, and the tale unfolds in a similar fashion to William Hjortsberg’s Falling Angel (1978), with the supernatural twist being unexpected, unless readers have deciphered the clues accurately. Joshi’s interpretation of Charles Dexter Ward shouldn’t really have come as a surprise to me, as several of Lovecraft’s stories unfold as mysteries, and The Horror at Red Hook (Weird Tales, 1927) is pure supernatural crime, and even has a police detective as the protagonist. I’d also argue that “The Haunter of the Dark” (Weird Tales, 1936), my favorite Lovecraft short story, is as much crime fiction as it is horror fiction.

All of which proves that while supernatural crime, like occult detective fiction, is a tiny field compared to other subgenres of the crime, mystery, and thriller market, it is very much worth visiting.

Of Orchids and Oratory

Many folks look at the presentation of “the Nero Award for best American mystery” as the start and close of the annual Black Orchid Weekend, hosted in New York City by the Nero Wolfe fan organization, The Wolfe Pack. However, as this year’s event schedule makes quite evident, there will be a lot more going on that weekend, December 4-6, including book discussions, scholarly presentations, a Sunday brunch, and a quiz based on Rex Stout’s first Nero Wolfe/Archie Goodwin mystery, Fer-de-Lance (1934).

The naming of the 2009 Nero Award winner will take place during the Black Orchid Banquet, scheduled for Saturday, December 5. If you don’t remember the names of the three nominees, click here.

Going Her Own Direction

Critic and blogger Sarah Weinman devotes the first edition of her new Barnes & Noble Review column, “The Criminalist,” to William Hjortsberg’s classic 1978 novel, Falling Angel. And she adds this note in her blog:

As for the future direction of “The Criminalist,” the opening salvo should provide a clue to its dual linked aims: “to talk about new books that I love and hope others will love as well, and to shine a light on unjustly neglected books and authors from the past. My focus will always be crime, but it might not always be fiction, nor always for adults, nor books entirely in prose.” And expect a few other surprises as the column develops over the next little while, too.

Let me borrow here a quote from Mel Brooks, something he said to a very young and beautiful Frank Langella in The 12 Chairs, but that applies to Ms. Weinman as well: “You’re not only smart, you’re gorgeous, too.” Just check out the illustration (by Thea Brine) at the top of “The Criminalist.”

“I’m Against It”

Finally, a unifying theme song for America’s flailing Republican Party, aka “The Party of No.” Hit it, Groucho ...

What Happened to Edgar?

(Editor’s note: In 1998, while working for American History magazine, I reviewed a then new non-fiction book called Midnight Dreary: The Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe, written by John Evangelist Walsh. I also had the chance to speak briefly with Walsh about his longstanding interest in Poe. With today being the 160th anniversary of the American macabrist’s perishing, I’ve decided to republish both pieces here for your entertainment.)

Midnight Dreary: The Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe
by John Evangelist Walsh
(Rutgers University Press, 180 pages)

It seems only fitting that the demise of 19th-century writer, poet, and critic Edgar Allan Poe--the man who was so instrumental in creating mystery fiction as we know it today--should itself be shrouded in mystery.

The bare facts of the case are these: In the fall of 1849, Poe, then 40 years old, left Richmond, Virginia, bound for his home in New York City. He was in the midst of a lecture tour, designed to introduce audiences to his planned new literary magazine, The Stylus, but his Richmond stopover combined business with pleasure: While there, he had been visiting the widow Elmira Shelton, a childhood friend he was soon expected to marry. Only his need to complete a minor editorial commission and retrieve an elderly guest for the wedding had sent him from Elmira’s embrace back to New York. He was expected to be gone a couple of weeks, returning to Virginia in plenty of time to complete the nuptial preparations.

But he never made it back. In fact, after departing Richmond, he disappeared. Only a week later did he resurface in Baltimore, in “shocking condition”--dressed shabbily and suffering from severe inebriation. He died a few days later, after periods of “violent delirium,” never saying where he’d been since he started north ... or with whom.

For the last century and a half, it’s been thought that Poe perished from complications of an alcoholic debauch (despite his having just sworn to his fiancée that he would remain sober). Or, more incredibly, that he’d been drugged by political thugs and forced to vote at multiple Baltimore polling booths in a congressional election, before being abandoned to overexposure. However, literary sleuth John Evangelist Walsh, author of the award-winning Poe the Detective: The Curious Circumstances Behind the Mystery of Marie Roget (1968), makes thorough use of the scant evidence available to arrive at an unexpected--but well thought out and articulated--solution, one that blames both Poe and others for the writer’s fate. Midnight Dreary is a fine piece of scholarship, with twists and turns and hidden agendas enough to keep even veteran whodunit readers enthralled.

* * *

Although John Evangelist Walsh has written biographies of other historical figures, from Robert Frost to Emily Dickinson to Abraham Lincoln, Midnight Dreary is his third study of Edgar Allan Poe. Why does this 71-year-old Wisconsin resident find Poe so intriguing? “It’s hard to say exactly,” Walsh remarks. “I think I read my first Poe story when I was about 12 years old, and I’ve appreciated him ever since. I believe he was a great writer, and if he had lived even another 10 years, he might now be considered America’s greatest literary talent. He had that much potential.”

Walsh explains that he has been thinking for “at least 20, 30 years” of writing a book about the peculiar circumstances of Poe’s death in 1849. “But I didn’t start investigating the case way back then. The idea just sort of grew on me, and occasionally I would do a few weeks of study on the matter, then the project would fade into the background as I wrote other books. It’s remarkable that more people haven’t been interested in this subject before, considering that Poe is probably the most actively studied American literary figure.”

Even after all his years of research, though, Walsh admits that one question about Poe’s death still haunts him: “In the book, I say that alcohol was forced on him at the end, and that he died in part from a head injury, perhaps as a result of a fight. But I’ve often wondered if the men who made him drink didn’t also give him a beating. And did they realize that he might die from his injuries? In that case, it wasn’t just manslaughter. It was murder.”

Oh No, Not Again

Yet another person to add to the list of suspects in London’s 1888 Jack the Ripper slayings. “An historian claims to have uncovered the identity of Jack the Ripper by using modern police forensic techniques,” reports The Daily Mail.

Mei Trow also believes that the notorious Whitechapel murderer was responsible for the deaths of an additional two women.

He has concluded that Robert Mann, a local morgue attendant, was the killer who terrorised east London in 1888 and who was officially credited with dismembering five prostitutes. ...

Mr. Trow said: ‘I wanted to go beyond the myth of a caped man with a top hat and knife, and get to the reality, and the reality is simply that Jack was an ordinary man.’

The piece goes on to quote professor Laurence Alison, a forensic psychologist at Liverpool University, as saying, “In terms of psychological profiling, Robert Mann is the one of the most credible suspects from recent years and the closest we may ever get to a plausible psychological explanation for these most infamous of Victorian murders.”

We shall see.

(Hat tip to Bill Crider’s Pop Culture Magazine.)

Evermore, Mr. Poe, Evermore

Nine months ago we celebrated the 200th anniversary of Edgar Allan Poe’s birth in Boston, Massachusetts. Today marks 160 years since that author’s mysterious demise in Baltimore, Maryland.

In commemoration (and perhaps also to firm up Baltimore’s claim to Poe’s legacy, which has been disputed by Philadelphia in the recent past), the city has scheduled a series of appropriately eerie events honoring the great man’s passing. Today, from noon to 11 p.m., the public is invited to an open-casket viewing of “Poe’s body” at the Baltimore Poe House and Museum. At midnight begins an all-night vigil at downtown’s Westminster Hall and Burying Ground, where the author’s grave can be found. (A photograph of yours truly and January Magazine editor Linda L. Richards at the gravesite, taken during last year’s Bouchercon in Baltimore, is available here.) And this coming Sunday, October 11, beginning at approximately 11:30 a.m., a funeral procession will transport “Poe’s casket” through the city streets from the museum to the burial ground. “There,” reports The Baltimore Sun, “actor John Astin will serve as host for a memorial service featuring eulogies from a host of Poe fans.” While no big deal was made of Poe’s interment 160 years ago, this time multitudinous well-wishers--including performers dressed as Arthur Conan Doyle, H.P. Lovecraft, and Alfred Hitchcock--will be on hand to usher Poe off to the Great Beyond. Tickets for this event go for $35 in advance and $40 at the door; seating is limited.

On top of all this, the Baltimore Museum of Art has mounted a presentation titled “Edgar Allan Poe: A Baltimore Icon.” Explains the museum’s Web site: “This dramatic exhibition brings together 80 prints, drawings, and illustrated books drawn largely from the BMA’s distinguished collection. These rarely shown works of art explore the enduring legacy of Poe’s uniquely dark fiction through the themes of Love & Loss, Fear & Terror, and Madness & Obsession. See how ‘The Raven,’ ‘The Black Cat,’ ‘The Tell-tale Heart,’ ‘The Pit and the Pendulum,’ and other Poe classics inspired some of the greatest artists of the 19th and 20th centuries.”

For a complete listing of Baltimore’s Poe-related events, click here.

READ MORE: “Death of a Genius, Revised,” by Michele Emrath (Southern City Mysteries).

Cash and Carey

I’m too young to have seen Philip Marlowe when it was originally broadcast, and I’ve never been able to watch it since. (So far, there’s been no DVD release of the show.) Nonetheless, I have long been aware of this 1959-1960 ABC-TV series, which placed New Jersey-born actor Philip Carey in the role of Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles private eye. It debuted 50 years ago today, on October 6, 1959, with an episode titled “The Ugly Duckling.”

By 1959, Marlowe had a solid history of appearing in motion pictures. The character had also enjoyed a fairly long run on radio dramas, starring in 119 episodes of The Adventures of Philip Marlowe between 1947 and 1951. (Many of those episodes can be heard--free of charge--by clicking here.) Van Heflin and Gerald Mohr both played the jaded gumshoe over those years. But when game-show producers Mark Goodson and Bill Todman (What’s My Line?) decided to take on Chandler’s popular protagonist, they selected Carey for the role. A veteran of big-screen westerns, TV anthology series, and the 1956 show Tales of the 77th Bengal Lancers, Carey was already at work on other projects, but abandoned those in favor of what he hoped would be a longer lasting, more lucrative career in Goodson-Todman’s Philip Marlowe (“I was only into money,” Carey conceded in an Archive of American Television interview available online; his recollections of portraying Marlowe begin at about the 10:52 mark).

As Kevin Burton Smith of The Thrilling Detective Web Site explains, Carey’s Philip Marlowe

ran for 26 episodes from 1959-60 on ABC, and [there were] no memorable stories about it to make it stand out. Philip Carey, a big, tough and usually watchable actor, would seem to have been a decent choice to play Marlowe in 1959. Carey’s Marlowe differed from the books in at least two (and probably more) ways in that he sported a scar on one cheek and apparently had a marina apartment and his own boat. The latter two changes prompted Time magazine, in an article on the glut of TV detectives at the time, to question if Carey’s Marlowe might be on the take from some “wrongos.” ... The line producer and frequent scripter was Gene Wang, a radio/television veteran who was also the first story editor on the Perry Mason television series. Frank MacShane’s biography of Chandler indicates that E. Jack Neuman, a top-drawer radio-television writer who later developed such long-running series as Dr. Kildare and Joseph Wambaugh’s Police Story, may have written for the series. Other writers included Charles Beaumont, best known for his work on The Twilight Zone, and James E. Moser, creator of Ben Casey and Medic. Obviously, some good talent behind the camera, but the show didn’t distinguish itself ...

Other than Marlowe, the only recurring character in the series seems to have been an L.A. police lieutenant named Manny Harris, played by William Schallert (later of The Patty Duke Show and The Nancy Drew Mysteries). The program’s jazzy theme music was composed by Richard Markowitz, who also created the more famous theme for The Wild Wild West. And if this series “didn’t distinguish itself” among private-eye dramas in the late 1950s/early ’60s, it was at least popular enough to inspire the creation of a board game (shown at left).

Raymond Chandler actually died six months before Philip Marlowe debuted, so he never saw even one of the series’ half-hour, black-and-white installments. However, in Creatures of Darkness: Raymond Chandler, Detective Fiction, and Film Noir (2000), author Gene D. Phillips recalls that “Chandler had for a long time shied away from authorizing a Marlowe television series, explaining, ‘To me, television is just one more facet of the considerable segment of our civilization which never had any standard but the soft buck.’ He referred to television producers as ‘lunatics’” and said, “I simply can’t afford to have the character [of Marlowe] murdered by a bunch of yucks.” Yet, when Goodson and Todman “approached him about a Marlowe series in late 1958, Chandler felt that he had held out long enough and finally relented. After all, the emolument he would regularly receive for the use of his character was too substantial to pass up.” Phillips goes on to quote Carey’s recollections of his encounters with Chandler:

Carey remembered that Chandler wanted the series set in the 1940s, the time frame of all of the Marlowe feature films that had been produced up to that time. But the producers countered that the Marlowe movies were set in the 1940s because they were made in the 1940s and held out for a contemporary setting for the series. Chandler was subsequently vindicated when the series was later criticized by television critics for not sticking to the forties time frame of the Marlowe films.

Before the series was premiered, Carey had a conference with Chandler, during which Chandler “asked me what I thought of some of the people who played Marlowe in films. ... He wasn’t very coherent, but he liked the way I looked.” Chandler agreed to help promote the series by appearing on some television talk shows with Carey; these rare appearances by the reclusive Chandler testified to his overall willingness to help the series succeed. Carey looked back on Chandler in the last year of the novelist’s life as “rather crusty, and not a very nice man to be around”--a comment often made by those who crossed Chandler’s path in Hollywood through the years. As with the radio series, Chandler did not wish to supervise the television scripts; “but as long as he felt some involvement,” he was content, Carey concluded. Chandler was no doubt pleased that each segment included a statement in the opening credits that the series was “created by Raymond Chandler.”

Philip Marlowe’s cancellation in the spring of 1960 turned out not to be the worst thing for actor Carey’s career. He went on to guest parts in 77 Sunset Strip, Ironside, McMillan & Wife, Banacek, McCloud, and Kolchak: The Night Stalker. He broke ground in an episode of All in the Family, playing an ex-pro football player who admits to Archie Bunker (Carol O’Connor) that he’s gay. Carey spent two years starring in the NBC western series Laredo, and put in more than two decades on the ABC soap opera One Life to Live, playing Texan patriarch and self-made billionaire Asa Buchanan.

Carey died in February of this year at age 83. By that time, Philip Marlowe probably merited just a minor mention on his résumé. Yet, other than Powers Boothe’s 1983-1986 series, Philip Marlowe, Private Eye, Carey’s show represents television’s sole long-term attempt at translating the dark but vivid world of Chandler’s P.I. to the small screen. A commendable effort worth noting today, half a century after Carey first trod those mean streets in Marlowe’s shoes.

READ MORE: “Review and History--The 1959-60 Philip Marlowe TV Series, by Michael Shonk” (Mystery*File).

A Saintly Baker

Maybe its age catching up to me, but I seem to be more aware of people who dominated my younger life passing away. One such figure is Robert S. Baker, who died on September 30. Baker’s name became familiar to me in the late 1960s and early ’70s during the heyday of British TV crime on Lew Grade’s ATV/ITC network. Baker was an accomplished cameraman, director, producer, and writer, probably best remembered for his partnership with the late Monty Berman. Those two specialized in injecting an American “feel” into crime thrillers such as The Saint, The Persuaders!, and The Baron. I loved the shows that Baker and Berman produced, especially Steve Forrest’s The Baron, which lives on only in my memory.

The London Times featured a Baker obituary this last weekend:

With Monty Berman, Robert S. Baker was a prolific producer of cheaply made British B-films that enlivened the first half of many a double bill during the 1950s, before turning to television with shows including The Saint and The Persuaders!

The adventures of Simon Templar, alias the Saint, had successfully featured on radio and in the cinema but not on the small screen, and it was a notable coup for Baker and Berman to acquire the TV rights to “the Robin Hood of crime” from his creator, Leslie Charteris. Baker and Berman first offered the project to Associated Rediffusion, which turned it down as too expensive, but it was taken up and generously financed by Lew Grade’s ITC.

Although Grade preferred Patrick McGoohan, and Charteris favoured David Niven, the leading role went to Roger Moore, whose easygoing charm proved to be perfect casting. The Saint was a huge popular success in Britain, where it ran between 1962 and 1969, and was sold to more than 60 countries.

The son of a furrier, Baker was born in the East End of London in 1916. He was given the name Sidney but adopted Robert when he was in the Army and found himself surrounded by Sidneys. After leaving school he won prizes as a photographer, made amateur films and went travelling before joining up at the start of the Second World War.

He became a member of the Army Film Unit and met Berman while they were both serving as sergeants in the Eighth Army. At the end of the war he was one of the first British soldiers to enter the ruined Reich Chancellery in Berlin, a moment captured in a photograph held in the Imperial War Museum.

In 1948 he and Berman formed their own production company, Tempean. Relying initially on finance from friends and relatives, including Berman’s father, their first film was Date with a Dream, an evocation of the wartime concert party, which starred Terry-Thomas and Jean (later Jeannie) Carson and gave Norman Wisdom his first film role.

Baker and Berman went on to produce more than 40 films, often two or three a year, with Baker also on occasions acting as writer, director and cameraman. They were made on small budgets, rarely more than £20,000, and locations were used instead of more expensive studio sets. To avoid hotel bills the locations were usually near London.

A Tempean speciality was pacy, unpretentious thrillers for which Baker and Berman imported American actors on the wane, including Mark Stevens, Forrest Tucker, Arthur Kennedy and the blacklisted star of The Jolson Story, Larry Parks. Baker and Berman admired the moody style of the American film noir and tried to adopt it in their own work.

Meanwhile, The Guardian’s report can be found here.

As sad as I am to hear about Robert S. Baker’s passing, I like to think that it will reunite him with his former partner, Monty Berman. And maybe in Heaven they can find the financing necessary to bring this character back to life.

A Mixed Bag

• Crimespree Magazine editor Jon Jordan screens the UK and U.S. versions of the time-travel TV detective drama Life on Mars, released recently in the States, and declares himself pleased with both--though for different reasons.

• To celebrate the publication of their second issue, editors of The Lineup: Poems on Crime and some of their contributors have scheduled a reading at New York City’s KGB Bar on Thursday, October 22, from 7 to 9 p.m. More details here.

• If you enjoyed Otto Penzler’s great smorgasbord of guns-and-gams fiction, The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps (2007), and have been looking around ever since for something else to ... well, sink your teeth into, then you might consider his new follow-up, The Vampire Archives: The Most Complete Volume of Vampire Tales Ever Published, an ideal accompaniment to the coming Halloween. Within this volume’s 1,056 pages you’ll find pre- and post-Dracula yarns by Edgar Allan Poe, Sheridan Le Fanu, H.P. Lovecraft, Dan Simmons, Anne Rice, Ed Gorman, Roger Zelanzy, and many more. “To me,” writes Rod Lott in Bookgasm, “the mix is a nice balance between revisiting classics; catching up on stories I’ve always heard about, but never read; and being exposed to new ones. I’ll be working on this one through the New Year. It’s probably best that way--if you tried to read this cover to cover without some breaks for other books in between, your blood sugar would go wonky.”

• This is the dumbest idea I’ve heard in a long time. More here.

• Max Allan Collins and his tech-savvy son, Nathan, have been tinkering with the author’s Web site, F.O.M.A.C. (aka Friends of Max Allan Collins). Its been transformed into a friendlier hybrid of blog and conventional Web site, with the author penning weekly updates (posted on Monday nights), but also plenty of back-matter about his books, movies, and musical ventures. (Nathan explains it all better than I can here.) This week, Collins Sr. updates his fans on the DVD release of The Last Lullaby, a fine film based on his short story “A Matter of Principal,” and the debut later this month of his new Hard Case Crime novel, Quarry in the Middle.

• How would Louise Penny cast a movie adapted from her latest Chief Inspector Armand Gamache novel, The Brutal Telling? She tells all in Marshal Zeringue’s My Book, the Movie blog. “[S]uddenly, unexpectedly while watching a film I found my Gamache,” the author enthuses. “I wasn't looking--but there on the screen he was. It was while watching this wonderful, fairly modest British film called Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day. It stars Amy Adams and Frances McDormand, as Miss Pettigrew, a middle-aged British nanny in the late 1930s, who finds herself taken on by a giddy American singer. It’s hilarious, and wonderful. There’s a character named Joe. And I suddenly realized Joe was Gamache, in slightly different circumstances. The same warmth, dignity, humour but with a touch of sadness.” So who’s the performer who caught Penny’s eye? You’ll have to go here to find out.

• Off-topic but still interesting: Warner Bros. today releases DVD versions of two Gene Roddenberry TV pilot films, both produced in the 1970s and having to do with a NASA scientist who returns to a radically changed Earth after being in suspended animation for 150 years. I remember these projects fondly, and was disappointed at the time that neither was picked up as a series. More here.

• Expect changes in the fees associated with submissions to the UK Crime Writers’ Association’s annual Dagger Awards competition.

• While I couldn’t really care less whether health-care reform in this country is passed overwhelmingly by Democrats, or with some begrudging Republican acceptance that Americans require this sort of help, it’s still good to see that GOPers are peeling off in favor of President Obama’s top domestic priority.

• And the latest edition of Clues: A Journal of Detection has just been published. Managing editor Elizabeth Foxwell reports that this themed issue about lesbian crime fiction includes work on “American author Katherine V. Forrest, British author Stella Duffy, French author Maud Tabachnik, German author Thea Dorn ... and Spanish author Isabel Franc.” Click here for the table of contents.

Back, Baby, Back

As much as I pumped Dennis Lehane earlier this year when he made a rare trip to the UK, he was loath to reveal any significant details concerning his next novel, which brings back Beantown private detectives Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro (last seen in Prayers for Rain, 1999). But this morning, Lehane spills a few beans in the pages of The Boston Herald:

Boston mystery man Dennis Lehane is going back to the future. His next book is a sequel to his [1998] best-seller “Gone, Baby, Gone,” and is set 11 years after detectives Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro’s toughest case.

“I thought I would never write about them again,” Lehane told the Track. “Then all of a sudden I thought, what would it be like if a girl walked back into your life that was part of the most guilt-inducing decision you had ever made.”

“It’s 11 years later, and that same girl goes missing again. And now he’s gotta find her again,” he said. “Initially he doesn’t want to, but then he finds himself chasing this part of the past that almost destroyed him and every relationship he’s ever had. It’s something he never made peace with.”

The Herald adds: “The new novel, due next summer or early fall, will also answer the question of what became of some of Lehane’s most compelling supporting characters: kidnap victim Amanda McCready, who was 4 years old when she vanished in ‘Gone, Baby, Gone,’ and would be 15 in the new book, her screwed-up mother, and the police detective who tried to rescue Amanda from her sorry lot.”

You will find the full story here.

A Puzzle of Motives

Colin Harrison’s Risk (Picador) ranks as one of my favorite thrillers of the year so far. Here’s what I said about it recently in The Barnes and Noble Review:

If you missed Harrison’s delightful thriller when it ran as a serial in The New York Times Magazine last year, forget about it. This new paperback edition is sharper, longer and much more fun to read.

Harrison is a master of imperfect central characters. George Young is an attorney for a top insurance firm. It’s his long-running job to expose suspicious claims. But Mrs. Corbett, the rich, eccentric wife of the firm’s founder, wants to put George’s skills to a special, non-insurance assignment. With only a few months to live, her one desire is to know the true circumstance of her son Roger’s violent death--hit by a truck as he walked out of a bar. George’s investigation leads him to Roger’s mistress, an elusive Czech hand model named Eliska Sedlacek, whose motives for latching on to Mrs. Corbett’s son may have gotten him killed.

George Young is a perfect Harrison hero. “The work can be exciting, and a little nasty,” he says about his job. “Which I confess is interesting.”

His wife, Carol, also a lawyer, works in the compliance division of “a huge New York bank ... Being a naturally suspicious person, Carol has done well at her job.”

The Youngs turn out to be a formidable couple of detectives (“Now and then I am reminded that my wife is smarter than I am. This was one of those times,” George tells us when Carol spots an important clue.) Aided by a shrewd bartender and a friendly gangster, they uncover a tangled plot involving valuable metals hidden in cheap Christmas decorations. But not even such shrewd investigators can imagine what old Mrs. Corbett is really looking for.

It’s a work well worth your reading time.

Bullet Points: Monday Mystery Tour Edition

• Two years ago, when The Rap Sheet asked more than 100 crime novelists, book critics, and bloggers from all over the English-speaking world to choose the one crime/mystery/thriller novel that they thought had been “most unjustly overlooked, criminally forgotten, or underappreciated over the years,” George Pelecanos selected Hard Rain Falling (1966), by Don Carpenter. He called it “a stunning, brutally honest entry in the social realist school of crime fiction.” Now, after many years out of print, Carpenter’s book is available from NYRB Classics--with an introduction by Pelecanos. NYRB editor Edwin Frank talks with the Washington City Paper about his decision to reissue Hard Rain Falling. (Hat tip to Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind.)

• Good news for Mannix fans: The third season of that 1967-1975 private-eye drama, starring Mike Connors, is due out in DVD format on October 27. Having already worked my way through Seasons 1 and 2--and finding the show to have worn well over the decades--you can bet I have my Netflix request in for this new release.

• While we’re on the subject of DVDs, you should note that the first four (of eight) Rockford Files teleflicks--broadcast on CBS-TV between 1994 and 1999--will be released as a package on November 3. I was never as fond of the Rockford films as I was of the original 1974-1980 series. However, pretty much anything with James Garner in it is a cut above the norm. So count me in for a re-watch.

• A terrific retrospective on Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles.

• And a related note: Tonight will see the debut on PBS-TV of what looks like a fascinating two-hour documentary called Inventing L.A.: The Chandlers and Their Times. The Chandler of this title isn’t Raymond, but is instead the Chandler family that for nearly 100 years controlled the Los Angeles Times--a newspaper from which the author discovered so much about his adopted Southern California home. “Anyone interested in Los Angeles is by definition interested in the Chandlers,” writes Times TV critic Robert Lloyd, “since the way the city looks and works, and doesn’t work, was formed in no small part by the family’s own myth-making, empire-building agenda, the main instrument of which was the Times itself. From San Pedro harbor to the Hollywood sign to the houses of the San Fernando Valley, their prints are all over this place.” There’s still more on this documentary here. Check your local listings for broadcast times.

• Another new Webzine--and it’s looking for submissions!

• Novelist and blogger Rafe McGregor posts the second installment in his trenchant series about Sherlock Holmes’ associate, Dr. John H. Watson. The first installment can be found here.

• Another multipart post: Uriah Robinson (aka Norman Price) has put up the first two segments of his recent interview with British crime novelist Philip Kerr, author of the quite extraordinary new novel, If the Dead Rise Not. At one point in their exchange, Robinson asks what inspired March Violets (1989), Kerr’s first Bernie Gunther detective story, and whether he created Gunther as “a tough guy to appeal to women readers.” The author responds: “The original inspiration was not Raymond Chandler, as a lot of people think, but Gorky Park [by Martin Cruz Smith]. And I made Bernie a tough guy to appeal to myself. But I’m from a pretty tough part of Edinburgh and I am told I can be quite threatening. The window cleaner is terrified of me. I speak nicely, with received pronunciation but that’s just to hide the Easterhouse thug I really am. Underneath my smooth exterior I am really a gangster. I think I would have made a very good gangster, quite frankly. Teddy Bass? Don Logan? I could shit them both.” Part I of their discussion can be found here. Part II is here, and there’s still more to come.

• Have you seen the new trailer for director Martin Scorsese’s forthcoming film, Shutter Island, based on Dennis Lehane’s 2003 novel of the same name? It looks frightening enough that I’m not sure I can convince my wife to sit through it on a big screen.

• Pennsylvanian Barbara J. Mitchell won one of the three copies of Even Money, by Dick and Felix Francis, that The Rap Sheet gave away recently. She wrote me last week to say that she’d finished reading the book and had reviewed it--favorably I should mention--in her own blog, Views from the Countryside. Way to go, Barbara.

• Bad planning by the Dalton Gang.

• If you’re in San Francisco next week for the Litquake literature festival, you might want to attend this event on Thursday, October 15: “Subterranean SF: Hard-boiled Writing with an Edge,” described as “an evening of darkly inspired readings exposing San Francisco’s sinister underbelly. Join a hard-hitting roster of literary and crime fiction masters as they delve into the shadowy realms of mayhem, murder, and much, much more.” Hosted by Peter Maravelis, the event will feature readings by Robert Mailer Anderson, Cara Black, Craig Clevenger, David Corbett, Don Herron, and Peter Plate. It all gets started at 7 p.m., with a venue still to be decided. The Litquake schedule is available here.

• I want to wish Scottsdale, Arizona’s Poisoned Pen bookstore, and its owner, Barbara Peters (as well as her husband, Robert Rosenwald), a happy 20th anniversary. (Hat tip to B.V. Lawson’s In Reference to Murder.)

• I talked with Hard Case Crime editor Charles Ardai not long ago for one of my other blogs, Killer Covers. But now North Carolina’s News & Record newspaper offers a multi-part audio interview with Ardai, in which he recalls his introduction to adventure films and how the Indiana Jones series influenced creation of HCC’s new sister line, The Adventures of Gabriel Hunt. Listen to the interview here.

• And while you’re in a listening mood, check out a full episode from the post-World War II radio drama series, The Adventures of Sam Spade. For his blog, Evan Lewis has chopped into four parts a June 8, 1947, episode called “The Calcutta Trunk Caper,” starring the gruff-voiced Howard Duff. The full ep runs about 25 minutes.

• An Erle Stanley Gardner Weekend? Get ready, Temecula, California. “In honor of Erle Stanley Gardner Mystery Weekend,” reports the newspaper in nearby Fallbrook, “the California Chamber Orchestra will entertain its November 7 audience with classical favorites and a completely new composition written especially for the occasion. The weekend, which honors the famous mystery author--best known for writing the Perry Mason novels, spawning the Perry Mason TV show--will also offer aspiring writers of all ages the opportunity to participate in a mystery-writing contest and attend writers’ conferences, all designed to help understand the mystery genre.” (Another hat tip to In Reference to Murder.)

• Mike Knowles applied Jeff Foxworthy’s humor to Mickey Spillane and came up with an entertaining list of scenarios entitled “You Might Be in a Spillane Novel If ...”

• Who remembers the theme from the first Columbo pilot film, “Prescription: Murder” (1968), composed by Dave Grusin?

• Someday, perhaps the 1968-1969 CBS-TV series The Outsider, created by Roy Huggins and starring Darren McGavin, will be released in DVD format. And maybe in the meantime someone can dig up the footage cut from that series to purge it of violence in the aftermath of presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination.

• Northern Ireland’s Sam Millar (The Dark Place) is Crime Squad’s October “Author of the Month.”

• Steven Steinbock tracks down Jacques Futrelle, the early 20th-century creator of “The Thinking Machine,” fictional detective Professor Augustus S.F.X. Van Dusen. It’s not a new piece, but a good one nonetheless.

• The only film of World War II teenage diarist Anne Frank?

• You tell ’em, Paul Krugman!

• “With all of the remakes going on in Hollywood these days,” opines Marty McKee in Johnny LaRue’s Crane Shot, “I truly cannot believe nobody is considering doing a new version of The Fall Guy. Not only was a hit during the 1980s and well remembered today by those viewers who helped make it one, but it also has a fantastic premise.” And it featured the curvaceous Heather Thomas in a leading (and oft-under-dressed) role.

• And you have only nine days left if you want to enter Jim Winter’s big Road Rules book giveaway contest. Here are the rules.

Dashiell and George

The North American Branch of the International Association of Crime Writers has announced that American author George Pelecanos is the winner of this year’s Hammett Prize--given for “literary excellence in the field of crime writing”--for his novel The Turnaround (Little, Brown; 2008). On Sunday evening, during a banquet at the New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Trade Show in Baltimore, Pelecanos received a bronze trophy.

Other nominees for the 2009 Hammett Prize were Leading Lady, by Heywood Gould (Five Star); The Finder, by Colin Harrison, (Farrar, Straus & Giroux); City of the Sun, by David Levien, (Doubleday); and South by South Bronx, by Abraham Rodriguez (Akashic).

(Hat tip to The Gumshoe Site.)

New and Noteworthy

With seemingly little if any fanfare, the September/October issue of ThugLit has suddenly appeared online. Among its contents are new short stories by Jimmy Callaway (“Your Own Saturday Night”), Joe Boz (“A Certain Type”), and Johnny Zephyr (“I Pump Gas”).

Meanwhile, Michigan writer Andy Henion provides this week’s short crime-fiction offering at Beat to a Pulp: “The Devil Wears Carhartt.”

And although Seth Harwood’s CrimeWAV.com has been rather quiet of late, this weekend finally brings a new podcast, this time an excerpt from Tower, the new novel by Ken Bruen and Reed Farrel Coleman. It’s read by Coleman himself. Listen here.

The Book You Have to Read: “The Last One Left,” by John D. MacDonald

(Editor’s note: This is the 65th installment of our ongoing Friday blog series highlighting great but forgotten books. Today’s pick comes from Portland, Oregon, novelist Bill Cameron. The author of Chasing Smoke and Lost Dog [both finalists for the Spotted Owl Award], Cameron has seen his short stories published in Spinetingler Magazine, The Dunes Review, the Killer Year anthology, and Portland Noir. His next novel, Day One, is due out from Tyrus Books in 2010.)

John D. MacDonald entered my life at age 13 via the Travis McGee novel, A Tan and Sandy Silence (1971). A woman is buried up to her neck at the shoreline as the tide comes in. The waves wash over her head and pull her long hair back across her face as they retreat, saving the bound and helpless McGee from having to watch her take her last breaths.

I’ve seen the case made that A Tan and Sandy Silence is one of the lesser McGee novels, and I don’t disagree. Still, after cutting my teeth on lighter mystery fare--Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, and Rex Stout--that book was my first taste of fictional darkness. With the gentle and deadly caress of the tide, MacDonald awoke in me a lifelong love of cynicism, battered idealism, and human corrosion. I devoured the Travis McGee series, then moved on to other purveyors of hard-boiled and noir fiction.

It would be years before I returned to MacDonald and discovered what I now consider to be his masterpiece, the standalone thriller The Last One Left (1966). Though not a McGee novel, MacDonald dedicates it to “Travis McGee, who lent invaluable support and encouragement.” Oh, that it took me so long.

The story centers around a bundle of cash, $800,000 assembled by a corrupt Texas businessman to bribe the board of directors of a Bahamian development company in exchange for a sweetheart real-estate deal. But the scheme goes horribly awry through the machinations of as cold-blooded a femme fatale as has ever graced the pages of crime fiction. Crissy Harkinson is an ex-call girl and professional kept-woman whose soul is so dark it crackles. Aware that her looks and power are finally fading, she sets out to make the big score which will keep her in Planters Punches and tanned sailing instructors well into her twilight years. She doesn’t care who gets hurt in the process.

MacDonald doesn’t limit himself, though, to the inner workings of a single malefic vixen. His distinctively terse prose brings to life a rich array of characters, from the attorney who’s seeking balance in his hyper-controlled existence (while also searching for his missing sister) to a damaged refugee from the Cuban Revolution who now works as maid for Harkinson. Everyone has a story, and all are painted in intriguing detail. As each new figure comes on to the scene, we gain insight into how they came to be who and where they are. Yet none of these background set-pieces slow the book down. MacDonald is masterful at weaving disparate histories into a single breathtaking tapestry.

In all of his work, MacDonald was an effective chronicler of the banal malevolence of wealth and entitlement, and The Last One Left is no exception. The casual indifference of characters for whom the term “villain” is too tame infuses the book. But MacDonald does not limit himself to the explication of evil. The novel covers a wide range of human experience. One of my favorite players is Walter Corpo, a brain-damaged veteran of World War II who finds a seriously injured girl drifting in a speedboat and cares for her. Even as Corpo struggles with memory loss and his sense of exactly who he is, he reflects a humanity not found in Crissy Harkinson and so many others in MacDonald’s grim world. He serves as an expression of a foundational idealism seen in much of MacDonald’s work. Travis McGee, the knight in tarnished armor, may not make an appearance in this book, but his essential character does.

I return to The Last One Left again and again. Complex and varied, each reading is a chance to see something new. With the inexorable pace of a beating drum, with the rich palette of an Impressionist master, MacDonald crafted a remarkable novel which draws you in and doesn’t let go until its stunning finish. At times introspective, at others harrowing, it’s all MacDonald at the top of his form. The Last One Left is a book you’ve gotta read.

Remembering the Forgotten

How can you tell it’s Friday? Because of the proliferation of “forgotten books” posts in the crime-fiction blogosphere. Among today’s recommended reads: The Princess Stakes Murder, by Kin Platt; The Lime Pit, by Jonathan Valin; Dupe, by Liza Cody; The Assassinator, by David Vowell; The Brass Go-Between, by Oliver Bleeck; The Perfect Murder, by H.R.F. Keating; The Mind Thing, by Fredric Brown; and Rogue Male, by Geoffrey Household. There are also a few non-crime novels being talked about today, including John D. MacDonald’s Wine of the Dreamers, Edgar Rice Burrough’s The Beasts of Tarzan, Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, Dudley Dean’s Trail of the Hunter, and Used and Rare, by Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone.

Series organizer Patti Abbott hosts a few more reading choices in her own blog, among them Danger Is My Business, by Lee Server. She also provides a complete list of today’s participating blogs.

Of Publishing and Partying

In his latest spirited overview of the British crime-fiction scene, Shots’ Mike Ripley writes about new books by Dick Francis, Aly Monroe, and Colin Bateman; old favorites from Francis Clifford and John le Carré; and the latest publishing venture, which will pair legendary editor Maxim Jakubowski with leggy model-turned-novelist Tara Moss. You will find the entirety of Ripley’s new “Getting Away with Murder” column here.

“This Is the Dimension of Imagination”

It was 50 years ago today that Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone debuted on CBS-TV. You can read and hear more about this anniversary here, here, here, here, and here.

READ MORE: “Thirteen Overlooked and Underrated Episodes of The Twilight Zone,” by Stephen Bowie (The Classic TV History Blog).

The Brickbat Boys

There’s been much talk recently about how uncivil American discourse has become. Insults have been flying right, left, and center--on Capitol Hill and off. But as Ivor Davis (whose update of his landmark book, Five to Die, about the Charles Manson murders, is selling well) makes clear with this set of classic insults, today’s verbal abusers have nothing on their predecessors:

“He had delusions of adequacy.”--Walter Kerr

“He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.”--Winston Churchill

“I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.”--Clarence Darrow

“He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.”--William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway).

“Thank you for sending me a copy of your book; I’ll waste no time reading it.”--Moses Hadas

“I didn’t attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I
approved of it.”--Mark Twain

“I feel so miserable without you; it’s almost like having you here.”--Stephen Bishop

“He is a self-made man and worships his creator.”--John Bright

“I’ve just learned about his illness. Let’s hope it’s nothing trivial.”--Irvin S. Cobb

“He loves nature in spite of what it did to him.”--Forrest Tucker

“His mother should have thrown him away and kept
the stork.”--Mae West

“Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever
they go.”--Oscar Wilde

“I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn’t it.”--Groucho Marx

“There’s nothing wrong with you that reincarnation won’t cure.”--Jack E. Leonard

“He can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any
man I know.”--Abraham Lincoln

More such splendid slights can be found here.

Bullet Points: The No More Summer Edition

• PEN USA, a Los Angeles-based organization of professional writers, has announced that it will give Elmore Leonard (Road Dogs) its lifetime achievement award at a ceremony in December. Past recipients of that same commendation include Ray Bradbury, Woody Allen, Walter Mosley, Jane Smiley, Robert Towne, Gore Vidal.

• ABCtales, in association with the e-zine Shots, is hosting a “brand-new literary competition designed to take the art of thriller writing into new territory for the Internet era.” According to a Shots press release, “Entrants are being asked to write 10 episodes of a serial thriller, each of around 1,800 words, or 10 minutes in length when the story is read aloud. Each episode must have a cliffhanger ending and be written to create maximum tension and suspense.” Best-selling novelist Lee Child will judge the entries, and the winner will have his or her “full story read by a professional actor and be published as a serialized podcast, available for download from anywhere in the world, on www.abctalesradio.com. The winner’s work will also be introduced by Lee Child ... to his publisher and agent.” Full details are available here.

• The A-Team movie “is up and running.” Does anyone care?

• Do you remember 87th Precinct, with Robert Lansing?

• Canadian mystery author Lyn Hamilton died on September 10. But only today has Mystery Fanfare posted a collection of tributes to the late author, put together by David Cole.

• French mystery fan Xavier Lechard has inaugurated a new, irregular series in his blog, At the Villa Rose.” The focus, he explains, is on “lost” French crime-fictionists, writers who, “despite being popular and/or celebrated in their country, have never made it in the Anglosphere. Some had a handful of their books translated but failed to build an audience. Others were initially acclaimed then slipped into obscurity. Still others were too original. Most, sadly, were just never given a chance. Have you ever heard of Frédéric Dard, Michel Cousin, Noël Vindry, Madeleine Coudray, Jean-François Coatmeur, Jacques Decrest, Pierre Siniac, S.A. Steeman, or Martin Méroy? No? That’s what ‘Lost Translation’ sets to correct.” Lechard’s first subject: René Reouven.

• Happy 85th birthday, Jimmy Carter!

• I’m surprised that John Mullan’s list of “10 of the best tattoos in literature” doesn’t include mention of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. But it does feature “The Red-Headed League,” by Arthur Conan Doyle, and Val McDermid’s The Grave Tattoo.

• If you’re new to Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes short stories, you might want to begin reading them according to their popularity, rather than their publication dates.

• This re-edit of the main title sequence for Tomorrow Never Dies, Pierce Brosnan’s 1997 James Bond film, makes me sorry that K.D. Lang’s “Surrender” wasn’t chosen to introduce the movie, instead of Sheryl Crow’s aptly named Tomorrow Never Dies.”

• Whaddya know. Rather than provide necessary health care for all Americans, it seems that conservatives in the U.S. Senate would rather spend $50 million a year on abstinence-only programs that don’t work. What a waste.

• The four-day conference “TZ @ 50: A Celebration of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone” begins today in Binghamton, New York. Serling, who gave tube watchers not only The Twilight Zone but also Night Gallery, grew up in Binghamton. (Hat tip to Elizabeth Foxwell.)

• American TV network NBC, which recently made the mistake of giving over its once-fertile 10-11 p.m. slot on weeknights to the not-so-funny Jay Leno, appears to be in a general world of hurt. To improve its fortunes, maybe it should take a page from its own past, and start generating quality crime and mystery fiction series again. It was NBC, after all, that gave us Columbo, Miami Vice, Banacek, Crossing Jordan, and so many more.

• It seems that some people are making money on the Web.

• Gee, you’d think that someone who wants to be the governor of California would at least have registered to vote before she was 46.

• From our “Bad Book Covers” file.

• And if you haven’t been watching documentary filmmaker Ken Burns’ new PBS-TV mini-series, The National Parks: America’s Best Idea--which began last Sunday night--then you’re really missing out on some wonderful small-screen storytelling. Although the series title doesn’t make it sound like scintillating entertainment, Burns and producer/writer Dayton Duncan have put together a feast of modern landscapes, historical photography, and character sketches that are both inspiring and tragic. The first couple of episodes, which focused on naturalist and author John Muir and President Theodore Roosevelt (an unusually conservation-minded Republican who used his office to broaden the scope and possibilities of park development), set a fine precedent for succeeding installments, which have talked about early park promoters Stephen Mather and Horace M. Albright, and Standard Oil heir John D. Rockefeller Jr., whose philanthropy did much to save what might have been lost natural treasures in the United States. If you’d like to catch up with the series so far, click here. This six-part series ends tomorrow night.

The Story Behind the Story: “Smasher,” by Keith Raffel

(Editor’s note: This is the fifth installment of our “Story Behind the Story” series. Today we hear from Keith Raffel, author of the brand-new Silicon Valley thriller, Smasher. A former counsel to the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee and the founder of UpShot Corporation, an Internet software company, Raffel previously wrote Dot Dead [2006], which was also set in California’s high-tech corridor. He’s a contributor to the Inkspot blog, but writes a blog of his own as well, called Dot Dead Diary.)

My wife and children are careful to correct anyone who calls me a native of California. Seventh- and eighth-generation Californians, respectively, they view me as a greenhorn just off the boat. Although I’m Chicago-born, I have lived in Palo Alto in the midst of Silicon Valley since I was 8 years old, before it was Silicon Valley, when it was still known as the Valley of Heart’s Delight. Back then, two-thirds of the nation’s apricots were grown here and San Jose, now one of the 10 largest cities in the United States, was a sleepy canning town.

Still, while I was growing up, I did have some clues as to the wondrous things that were happening hereabouts. My dad worked on the first videotape recorders as an engineer at Ampex. I went to high school with the children of Hewlett and Packard. Bob Noyce at Intel was developing the microprocessor, Doug Engelbart was putting together a wooden prototype of the computer mouse, and Bob Metcalf and Dave Boggs at Xerox PARC were coming up with the Ethernet networking protocols. Today these achievements make up whole chapters of the Valley’s creation story.

Something else was going on back then that I didn’t notice at all. Over at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), physicists were discovering what our universe is made of. You’ve seen that picture of an atom with spheres clustered in the middle representing neutrons and protons and electrons whirling in orbit around them? It’s employed as an icon to symbolize cutting-edge science. But everything in the picture is wrong. Protons and neutrons are not balls; they’re made up of three particles called quarks (which come in six flavors: up, down, top, bottom, strange, and beauty). I know your new Mac, PC, or iPhone with the incredible user interface and fast graphics accelerator chip is cool. And for all I know, you thank the gods of Silicon Valley everyday for developing its underlying technology. But is it cooler than the building blocks of the universe, the leftovers from the Big Bang?

I took a tour of the building at SLAC where quarks were discovered four decades ago. And you know what? It’s a warehouse. Thomas Edison’s lab is a national historical park. The Wright Brothers’ Kitty Hawk is a national memorial. But in the midst of Silicon Valley, the very place where scientists identified key building blocks of the universe is filled with dusty boxes.

What kind of people made that discovery? Shouldn’t they be celebrated? Maybe, but in a work of fiction, cautiously. As a thriller writer, my main job is to entertain. But I figured I could sneak in a fictionalized story of the discovery of quarks. Fun physics? Sure. What if someone were zapped by an electron beam moving at more than 99 percent of the speed of light? The key was focusing not on the particles, but on the people.

So how could I tell the story in compelling fashion? Nothing makes even a crotchety man like me a feminist faster than having daughters. And I have three of them. Somewhere along the way, I picked up a book on Rosalind Franklin. Her work provided the key that opened the door to the discovery of the structure of DNA. But James Watson, who won a Nobel Prize for this discovery, disses her badly in his book Double Helix. He wrote: “The real problem, then, was Rosy. The thought could not be avoided that the best home for a feminist was in another person’s lab.” In fact, Dr. Franklin was one of the top experimental scientists of the last century. Her lab colleague showed Watson an X-ray she had taken, and it was that picture that demonstrated to Watson the double helix topography of DNA. Franklin died at 37, never knowing the vital role her research had played in that discovery. Now there’s a story fraught with intrigue, personalities, and high stakes. I borrowed from the outlines of Rosalind Franklin’s life by giving Smasher’s protagonist, Ian Michaels, a great aunt who made a key discovery about quarks in the 1960s at SLAC. She died young and without the Nobel Prize her colleagues received. It falls to Ian to win her posthumous justice. I try not to be too preachy or didactic and focus on the plot, rather than the physics or the lessons learned.

But injustice two generations old was not a big enough hook to hang a thriller on. I also wanted to infuse Smasher with some of what I’d experienced--as a child and an entrepreneur--in Silicon Valley. At times, I wax nostalgic for the Eden-like Palo Alto of my youth where doors remained unlocked, cherry and apricot orchards abounded, children frolicked, and the sun always seemed to shine. Still, I wouldn’t go back to those days of yore. I’ll opt for 21st-century excitement every time. Palo Alto now sits at ground zero of the high-tech world. Hewlett-Packard and Facebook are headquartered here. Google is just to the south of us, Oracle a few miles to the north. Companies in the Valley consistently receive about a third of all the venture capital invested in the United States.

Priests look to the Vatican, financial whizzes want to be in New York City, aspiring actors head to Hollywood. For entrepreneurs, the sun rises and sets in Silicon Valley. This is the major leagues, filled with smart players from all over the world. Too many novels to count have featured Rome, Manhattan, and Hollywood. A lot fewer have been based here in Silicon Valley.

How the Valley operates reminds me of the scene in The Godfather where a gangster excuses a murder by saying, “It’s not personal, Sonny. It’s strictly business.” Here in the Valley, “it’s strictly business” justifies almost anything. If there’s a chance for an investor to extract some more shares of stock from the founder of a company, go ahead-- it’s business. If one corporate director hires a private investigator to spy on a fellow board member--well, that’s business, too.

As the founder of a Valley company, I have lived with real-life drama. One Friday, for example, money arrived from a customer just 15 minutes before our payroll checks would have bounced. That disaster could have taken down the whole company. Now, Ian Michaels of Smasher is not me. He’s better looking, smarter, more resourceful, richer, and more attractive to women. But I wanted him to live some of the real-life drama of being an entrepreneur. In today’s harsh financial environment, good companies fail because venture capitalists lose their nerve or run out of money. The stakes are high. Certainly, in a fictional world, high enough to kill for. I had to use all of that in Smasher.

It’s against this background that Smasher’s Eddie Frankson operates. He’s the CEO of Torii Networks and the second richest man in California. I’ve met some of the Valley’s biggest names, but he’s not based on any one of them. Smart and ruthless, Frankson sees it’s a good time for “a smash and grab” of Ian’s company. That’s the way these things work.

So now I had two story lines. In the first, Ian seeks to obtain recognition for his great aunt’s seminal discovery. At the same time he is fending off a predator who’s ready to wolf down his company. In the midst of all this, Ian’s wife, Rowena Goldberg, a deputy district attorney, is trying her first murder case. It’s a frenetic combination of events, but that’s how things work in Silicon Valley.

I had the characters and the setting for the book then. All (?!) I needed was a plot. Where would that come from? I waited for inspiration to strike. And then it did.

I’ve long wondered where inspiration comes from. If I wake up in the middle of the night with the answer for the plot twist, did it come from my subconscious? The gods? I don’t know. Smasher was a new experience, because this time I know the source of the spark. I was walking down Castro Street in the town of Mountain View talking to my polymathic friend Brian Rosenthal (who’s been an auto mechanic, a psychologist, and a high-school science teacher), when he said something about Nobel Prizes. A supernova exploded in my brain. Bingo! Smasher starts when someone in a black car runs down Ian’s wife. Who was driving that vehicle? Why was Rowena the target? Sorry to be coy, but I don’t want to spoil the book for any potential purchasers. As they say in the movies and here in Silicon Valley, “It’s not personal. It’s strictly business.”