Buy a Book, Save a Shop

Let’s face it: bookstores have had a pretty rough ride this year. Between the (cheerfully monikered) economic meltdown (cue scary music now), the rising tide of electronic books and the hardcover price wars that took place earlier this autumn, there must have been at least a few days in 2009 when some booksellers just didn’t want to get out of bed.

All of this leads us to the Publishers Weekly-sponsored National Bookstore Day, the idea being that bookstores will be front and center today, November 7. Says PW:

Event organizers are hoping promotions tied to the day will attract local and national media coverage--and, in turn, draw new customers into bookstores. “The number of stores already signed up meets our rosiest hopes for this first year. Many of the stores celebrating National Bookstore Day are recognized nationally as leaders, so we’re gratified that this idea has been endorsed by these savvy booksellers,” said Ron Shank, PW group publisher. Among the offerings that bookstores are planning are author signings, children’s activities, discounts, extended hours, free refreshments, marathon “read-aloud” events, raffles and writing contests.

Although this idea is certainly laudable, as National Bookstore Day kicks off, it doesn’t seem to possess the same sort of traction achieved earlier this year by American thriller author Joseph Finder’s grassroots “Buy Indie Day.”

Even so, every conscious step taken moves us in the right direction. The message is one to cherish and remember: books are important. So are the people who buy, make, and sell them. The place books have in our lives is of value: it’s meaningful to us. And if we take all of this as read, it behooves us to do everything in our collective power to keep independent bookstores not only in business but thriving. And how do we do that? We try to raise awareness. We raise readers. We spread the word.

And then we shop.

Pros with Pens

Two soon-to-be-published novels by fine crime writers recently arrived in my mailbox, and were very much enjoyed:

The Morning Show Murders, by Al Roker and Dick Lochte (Delacorte; November). Network television can be murder, as Today show weather guy Roker knows. Just ask his hero, Billy Blessing, famous for his smile, charm, and ability to survive the shark tank that is high-stakes morning broadcasting. While Roker may have personally enriched the terrain where this tale takes place, a lot of the book’s smarts obviously come from Lochte, a longtime crime-fiction reviewer for the Los Angeles Times and the Nero Award-winning author of mysteries such as Blue Bayou, Croaked!, Laughing Dog, Sleeping Dog, and The Neon Smile.

The Traitor in Us All, by Robert S. Levinson (Five Star; February). Says Jeffery Deaver about best-selling author Levinson’s latest: “Absolutely top-notch ... a delicious blend of the best in thriller writing.” No surprise here: Levinson has been stirring up delicious blends for many years. His series starring a Hollywood movie and music couple, Neil Gulliver and Stevie Marriner, reflects the author’s earlier career as an ace publicist. Such previous works as Hot Paint, The Elvis and Marilyn Affair, The James Dean Affair, and The John Lennon Affair are wonderfully bitchy reads.

The Book You Have to Read: “The First Deadly Sin,” by Lawrence Sanders

(Editor’s note: This is the 70th installment of our ongoing Friday blog series highlighting great but forgotten books. Today’s must-read choice comes from L.J. Sellers, an award-winning journalist, editor, novelist, and occasional standup comic based in Eugene, Oregon. She writes the Detective Wade Jackson mystery series. Two of those novels are already in print--The Sex Club and Secrets to Die For--and two more are in the works. Thrilled to Death will be released in 2010, along with a standalone thriller, The Baby Thief.)

The First Deadly Sin (1973), by Lawrence Sanders, is why I love police procedurals. It’s probably why I write them. I read the story my first year in college on a break between terms. Sanders’ characterizations of the cop, the killer, the conspirator, and the victims blew me away. His characters were so unlike anyone I had ever known or read about. The details were so intimate that I completely lost my sense of self at times while I was reading. It was one of the first and only books in which that happened for me.

The novel was called “shocking and boldly original” when it first came out. It was labeled a “psychosexual thriller,” and some reviewers say it set the standard for all the psychological thrillers to follow. After five months on the New York Times Bestseller List, The First Deadly Sin was still at number five. Eventually, it was made into a movie that most people agree was badly casted and not worthy of the novel.

Sanders’ writing in this first book (in what would become a series) is precisely crafted, beautifully detailed, intellectual, and leisurely, unlike many of today’s mysteries and thrillers (including my own) that rush along to a tumultuous ending. If your only exposure to Lawrence Sanders’ work is the Archy McNally series, which he developed late in his career, put that out of your mind. Because this novel--and the other Deadly Sin/Edward X. Delaney stories--is so different from that series, it’s almost as if they had different authors.

The First Deadly Sin is not a traditional mystery. The reader knows the killer, Daniel Blank, from the beginning. This tale’s suspense is built in the pitting of one man against another, good against evil. You turn the pages quickly, eager to know even more about each man, what he will do next, and who will triumph in the long run.

Although Daniel Blank is evil, he is not sadistic. He doesn’t want his victims to suffer, and he’s disturbed when one of them lies in the hospital for days before he dies. In fact, Blank loves his victims for the joy they give him (“he felt that sense of heightened intimacy, of entering into another, merging, so far beyond love that there was no comparison”). Blank is a fascinating study of a killer who is intelligent and compassionate, meticulous in the details of how he lives, sexually adventurous, and ultimately twisted. Naming him “Blank” is a clever mischaracterization, for the slayer in these pages is anything but a blank slate.

Sanders does equal justice to New York Police Captain Edward X. Delaney (previously introduced in 1969’s Edgar Award-winning novel The Anderson Tapes. His characterization is so perfect, that for me, Delaney will always be the ultimate homicide investigator. His tenacity, intelligence, compassion, and humanity set the bar for all subsequent investigators to reach. Sanders wrote The First Deadly Sin in an era before it was common to give detectives and FBI agents serious character flaws, and Delaney has none, save an occasional smart-ass comment.

He’s also more than just a great investigator. He’s a family man, who tenderly cares for his sick wife, Barbara, and a dedicated detective who takes on a case while on leave of absence. In addition, Captain Delaney is the first male investigator I encountered--back in the ’70s--who truly respected women. At one point, Sanders writes:

He wished with all his heart he could discuss this with Barbara, as he had discussed every important decision in his career. He needed her sharp, practical, aggressive, female intelligence to probe motives, choices, possibilities, safeguards. He tried, he strained to put himself in her place, to think as she might think and to decide as she might decide.

There were so many things I admired about the protagonist that I’m a little ashamed to confess that whenever I visualize Delaney, I see him standing at the kitchen sink, eating a sandwich made of rare roast beef, red onion, beefsteak tomato, and garlic-spiced mayonnaise. He stood at the sink, because his creations were often messy and he was a man on the move.

Yet Delaney’s investigation is not perfect. Daniel Blank kills three men, including a police officer, before the investigator discovers his identity. Even then, Delaney does not have the evidence to prove anything. So he taunts the killer, first by coercing the widow of one of Blank’s victims to call him, then by contacting Blank directly. The psychological tension in the final pages is nerve-racking.

This novel is not for everyone, but readers who enjoy great writing, carefully developed characters, and a story that slowly, steadily pulls them in deeper and deeper should read, or re-read, The First Deadly Sin. I also recommend the story to writers as a model for some of the best characterization they’ll ever encounter.

Not So Forgotten Anymore

After you have enjoyed L.J. Sellers’ critique on this page of The First Deadly Sin, by Lawrence Sanders, look up a few of the other “forgotten books” being touted around the blogosphere. Among today’s crime-fiction choices: Six Deadly Dames, by Frederick Nebel; We All Killed Grandma, by Fredric Brown; Murder at the Villa Rose, by A.E.W. Mason; Blackstone’s Fancy, by Richard Falkirk; Have Gat--Will Travel, by Richard S. Prather; A Death for a Dancer, by E.X. Giroux; One Lonely Night, by Mickey Spillane; Diamond Head, by Charles Knief; and Who Goes Hang? by Stanley Hyland.

Click on over to Patti Abbott’s blog for several more choices from the dusty back stacks, including David Goodis’ Black Friday. She also provides a full list of today’s participating writers.

Let the Accolades Begin!

Here comes the annual onslaught of year-end “best books” lists, beginning with Publishers Weekly. There’s plenty of controversy surrounding the fact that none of the titles on PW’s top-10 rundown was written by a woman. But what’s lost in all of that is the fact that so many choices in the Fiction and Mystery categories are crime fiction: Michael Connelly’s The Scarecrow, Thomas H. Cook’s The Fate of Katherine Carr, Gillian Flynn’s Dark Places, George Dawes Green’s Ravens, Reggie Nadelson’s Londongrad, Craig Johnson’s The Dark Horse, and more.

Meanwhile, one book from the crime-fiction/thriller field--Stieg Larsson’s The Girl Who Played with Fire--finds a place on Amazon.com’s top-10 choices. But a number of others have made it onto the site’s rundown of 100 favorites from 2009, including The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, by Alan Bradley; The Defector, by Daniel Silva; Blood’s a Rover, by James Ellroy; Nobody Move, by Denis Johnson; and Inherent Vice, by Thomas Pynchon.

Get It--or Else

This past April, Atlantic Monthly Press released a frightening and unusual thriller called Ultimatum, by a British physician writing under the pseudonym Matthew Glass.

My son, who operates a non-profit company called CALCEF (California Clean Energy Fund), read a review of Ultimatum in The Economist, and because of its subject matter bought an Advance Review Copy from AbeBooks. He was immediately gripped--as was I when I began to read the same novel on my new Kindle.

This book is set in 2032, when a new Democratic president is elected after years of unemployment, growing public anger, and failed environmental promises by a Republican who sounds very much like George W. Bush. Shortly after his election, the Democrat is summoned by the outgoing president to a private meeting. There he receives the news that greenhouse gas emissions have begun to increase at an alarming rate. The Republican chief executive and his aides have tried to open secret negotiations with China, the world’s worst polluter of the atmosphere, but the Chinese government wants to wait on those until the new president finally takes office.

To put it simply, Ultimatum is an amazing piece of work, a
political thriller that is unusually full of both believable politics and genuine storytelling thrills.

So why in the world has this book received so little notice since its original publication? There have been no reviews in either The New York Times or the Los Angeles Times, and Ultimatum’s sales ranking on Amazon is lower than a Philly fan’s spirits.

Do yourself a favor and find a copy of this most worthy thriller. It’s available in a Kindle version, a few copies can be found at BookFinder, and a paperback edition is due out in February. Now you know why it’s worth reading.

Driven to Choose

Hard to believe, isn’t it. TV.com has put together a list called “Our 10 Favorite TV Cars.” Selections include Starsky and Hutch’s Gran Torino, The A-Team’s “badass” GMC van (can a van ever reasonably be called “badass”?), The Green Hornet’s Chrysler Crown Imperial, and Batman’s winged Lincoln Futura concept car ... but there’s no mention whatsoever of the gold Pontiac Firebird in which James Garner screamed around Los Angeles on The Rockford Files.

How much credibility can a list like this have, if it doesn’t include private eye Rockford’s signature wheels?

“It Feels Like Forever”

Congratulations to Double O Section on its third “blogiversary.”

All the Nudes Fit to Print

At the conclusion of a interesting post about various smartly designed editions of Patricia Highsmith’s five Tom Ripley novels, the Caustic Cover Critic blog notes: “Highsmith, by the way, is the only serious writer I can think of who had the dubious honour of getting a nude photo of herself put on the cover of her biography (and not by her choice, given that she was dead several years before it was published) ...” He includes that shot in his post.

The Story Behind the Story: “The Big Wake-Up,” by Mark Coggins

(Editor’s note: The last time most Americans heard much about Argentina, it was in relation to South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford’s fiction about hiking the Appalachian Trail, when in fact he was visiting a mistress in Buenos Aires. But even that Republican’s scandalous adventures weren’t as dramatic as the plot of The Big Wake-Up, Mark Coggins’ fifth novel, due out in bookstores this week. The novel’s synopsis reads this way: “When San Francisco private August Riordan engages in a flirtation with a beautiful university student from Buenos Aires, he witnesses her death in a tragic shooting and is drawn into the mad hunt for [former Argentine first lady Eva Perón’s] remains. He needs all of his wits, his network of friends and associates, and an unexpected legacy from the dead father he has never known to help him survive the deadly intrigue between powerful Argentine movers and shakers, ex-military men, and a mysterious woman named Isis who is an expert in ancient techniques of mummification.” Below, Coggins tells us about his new novel’s inspiration.)

The genesis of The Big Wake-Up came from a tour I took of Buenos Aires’ famous La Recoleta Cemetery on Christmas morning in December 2007. My wife and I decided to spend the holidays in Argentina, and we had arrived the evening before. That morning I was eager to get out the door and into the capital city to do things, but I had been warned that there was in fact very little to do on a Christmas day in Buenos Aires.

All government offices, museums, and most restaurants were closed. The one tourist attraction that remained open was La Recoleta. And quite an attraction it is--assuming you can get past the fact that it’s populated with dead people. An immense place covering more than 13 acres, the cemetery is laid out like a city with paved walks subdividing blocks and blocks of house-like mausoleums, statues, and monuments, some of which date from the 1800s. If the architecture isn’t enough of a draw by itself, there are the residents. La Recoleta is the final resting place for innumerable Argentine presidents, scientists, military leaders, and captains of industry. It is also home to Maria Eva Duarte de Perón: Evita, to those of you who’ve seen the play or the movie. (Left: The Duarte tomb.)

My guide that morning was Robert Wright. He’s a tour guide, guidebook researcher, and writer in Europe for travel authority Rick Steves, and at that time was making his home in Buenos Aires. Wright has a special interest in La Recoleta and has spent considerable time and energy documenting it for his blog and the comprehensive map he has made of the burial grounds.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from his tour, but I found it an intriguing mix of Argentine history, politics, art, and architecture. It was from Wright that I first heard the story of Evita Perón’s incredible “afterlife” following an early death from cervical cancer in 1952. I learned how her body was specially preserved like those of Vladimir Lenin or Mao Zedong; how it fell into the hands of the military dictatorship that overthrew her husband, Juan Perón; and how the military leaders decided to bury her under a false name in Milan, Italy, to avoid having her grave become a shrine and a rallying point for government opposition.

I also visited the last resting place of one of those leaders: Pedro Eugenio Aramburu. In 1970, he was kidnapped and executed by a Peronist guerrilla group seeking the return of Perón to power--and the return of Evita’s body (right) to Argentina. Aramburu was buried in La Recoleta, but the same Peronist group pried open his crypt and seized his corpse, holding it hostage until Evita’s body came home to a secured underground vault in Recoleta, just a couple hundred yards from his desecrated grave. When Aramburu’s remains were finally released, authorities thought it prudent to pour concrete over his coffin before closing the lid to the crypt to ensure that he was never disturbed again. I saw the hardened concrete oozing from the seams.

Returning to the United States in the new year, I decided that the story of Evita’s afterlife would provide an excellent foundation for my next novel, so I abandoned plans to write about the (fictional) discovery and theft of an unknown Jack Kerouac manuscript (The Dead Beat Scroll). I found a book called Santa Evita, by Tomás Eloy Martínez, that provided more bizarre details about the efforts of the military to hide her body, such as the fact that there were duplicates made of it to mislead the Peronist groups searching for it, that strange misfortunes seemed to befall the men guarding her before she was buried in Italy, and that some of her guards may have engaged in necrophilia.

In spite of all the research into the specifics of Evita’s afterlife in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, I set The Big Wake-Up in present-day San Francisco. I didn’t attempt a fictional dramatization of historical events. What I did attempt to do was answer the following question: What if Evita was actually buried in the Bay Area (and the body in La Recoleta is a duplicate)?

That scenario--and the implications of it for groups in modern Argentina--is what my private eye protagonist, August Riordan, and his sidekick, Chris Duckworth, struggle to come to grips with. And although I’ve eschewed re-creation of past events, as you can see from the excellent cover artist Owen Smith did for The Big Wake-Up, I’m not above duplicating a little old-fashioned grave robbery.

Bullet Points: Post-Spooks Edition

Halloween turned out to be a lot more exciting at my house than I’d expected. We welcomed at least 45 trick-or-treaters, which is about twice as many as we usually see. (Maybe it was the double pumpkins and Christmas lights that drew those crowds.) Fortunately, I had plenty of sweets on hand--enough to give everybody generous helpings (which led one tyke in superhero garb to bellow out to his compatriots on the street, “This guy’s giving away handfuls of candy!”). During the height of the night’s frenzy, I saw robots and vampires and the occasional ballerina, but it was the pretty long-legged blond teenager, maybe 19 years old and dressed in a skimpy outfit not dissimilar from the one topping this post, who really made me glad to have gone all-out for the occasion.

Now, though, it’s time to return to the “real world” of crime fiction. A few developments worth mentioning:

• As the free-TV Web site Hulu prepares to begin charging its customers (perhaps as early as next year), another similar site--AOL’s SlashControl--enters the market. SlashControl’s offerings are pretty skimpy right now (unless you’ve been dying to gander at old episodes of Scarecrow and Mrs. King, Spenser: For Hire, or CHiPs), but maybe with some expansion it can make up for the loss of Hulu. And I do mean loss. I have enjoyed revisiting such Hulu-hosted programs as Peacemakers, The Fall Guy, Deadline, Charlie’s Angels, Hill Street Blues, It Takes a Thief, K-Ville, Raines, Moonlighting, L.A. Dragnet, Miami Vice, Simon & Simon, The Rockford Files, and Lou Grant. But would I pay to keep it up? Not a chance. I may be watching lots of Hulu before January 1.

• National Public Radio’s Glen Weldon examines the current boomlet in crime-centered comic books for adults.

• Fans of the 1965-1966 British TV show The Baron, which was based on stories by John Creasey and starred Steve Forrest as “an antiques dealer and undercover agent working in an informal capacity for the head of the fictional British Diplomatic Intelligence,” will be glad to hear that the complete series has been released on DVD.

• I was sorry to hear about the recent death of UK thriller writer Lionel Davidson. Although not well known on this side of the Atlantic, he won three Gold Dagger Awards from the British Crime Writers’ Association, the first of those for his 1960 novel, The Night of Wenceslas. There’s more on Davidson and his career here and here.

• Bill Crider directs my attention to a new site called iPulp Fiction. There you can purchase short fiction by well-known writers at very minimal cost online. The multiplicity of genres covered is pretty impressive already, with more tales to come.

• I didn’t even know there were words to the theme song for Kojak, Telly Savalas’ 1973-1978 TV series, much less that Sammy Davis Jr. could have been persuaded to sing them.

• Brian Lindenmuth is right when he says that artist Aly Fell ought to get more work from publishers of pulpish paperbacks. Wow!

• I don’t know about you, but I’ve certainly been enjoying the chance to listen to classic Sam Spade radio adventures, courtesy of Evan Lewis at Davy Crockett’s Almanack. The latest installment is called “The Vaphio Cup Caper.”

• This 1960s TV commercial makes the game Twister look all innocent. I guess it wasn’t really meant to be played in the nude ...

• Sarah Weinman brings the news that Don Winslow, the California author of last year’s “surf noir” novel, The Dawn Patrol, has been tapped to write the prequel to Trevanian’s 1979 thriller, Shibumi.

• Frankly, I’d be overjoyed simply to watch Chuck actress Yvonne Strahovski unscrew a can of peanut butter. But she gives us considerably more in this video clip from TV Squad, talking about her surprise that Chuck was renewed and filling us in a bit on where the comedy-spy series is headed in its coming third season.

• Two new crime novels have been put through the Page 69 Test at Campaign for the American Reader: Derek Nikitas’ The Long Division and Charles Kipps’ Hell’s Kitchen Homicide.

• There’s a nice, if short, profile of novelist Philip Kerr in The Scotsman. Kerr, who just picked up the British Crime Writers’ Association’s Ellis Peters Historical Award for his 2009 Bernie Gunther novel, If the Dead Rise Not, tells the paper: “This is my best book, to be honest. Some of them have been better than others. The CWA is the first crime-writing award I have won in this country. I’ve been at it for 19 years.”

• Ali Karim has collected all of the video trailers for the forthcoming Martin Scorcese film adaptation of Dennis Lehane’s creepy 2003 novel, Shutter Island. He has also posted a few other videos of Lehane speaking. See them all here.

• And I don’t think I mentioned this before, but that the Fall 2009 issue of Mysterical-E has been posted. The contents include short stories by Stephen D. Rogers, Dave Siddall, and Dee Stuart; Gerald So’s look at recent animated crime films; and Byron McAllister’s advice on avoiding dated-ness in fiction.

Some Thoughts on Today’s Voting ...

... if you’re in the mood for a politics fix.

The Plundering Po8

(Editor’s note: I usually reserve my writing about history for one of my other blogs, Limbo. But today marks an anniversary that is potentially as interesting to readers with a taste for crime as it would be to students of western Americana. It was 126 years ago that the California highwayman known as Black Bart [left] stopped his last stagecoach, intent on robbing it. I recalled that incident in my 1995 book, San Francisco, You’re History! For those of you not conversant in the legend and curious truth about this masked man, I offer my entire essay--with small additions--below.)

This legend begins at a desolate spot between what was then known as Punta Arenas and Duncan’s Mills on the Russian River, just north of San Francisco. It was there, on August 3, 1877, that a lone highwayman wearing a long, soiled white linen duster and a flour sack over his head, with slits cut out for his eyes, stepped boldly in front of a stagecoach, pointed a 12-gauge shotgun at the driver, and forced him to halt. With the horses still sweating and the stage’s dust settling in whorls about them all, the bandit gave the four-word instruction that would become infamous in Northern California over the next six years of his criminal career: “Throw down the box.”

It was a “deep and hollow” voice, as the coach driver later explained, the sort of voice that brooks no disobedience. But the shotgun was even more commanding. Without hesitation, the stage man tossed over the pine-and-iron strong box he was carrying for Wells, Fargo & Company, and he was relieved when the bandit, with peculiar politeness, told him to ride on. The masked man made no attempt to rob either the driver or his passengers.

The box was later found--empty. The mysterious brigand had escaped with $300 in coins and a check for $305.52, drawn on the Grangers’ Bank of San Francisco. But he had left something behind--a splenetic rhyme, penned on the back of a waybill, each sentence scribed meticulously in a slightly different manner, as if to confound handwriting analysis:

I’ve labored long and hard for bread--
For honor and for riches--
But on my corns too long you’ve tred,
You fine-haired sons of bitches.

The quatrain was signed “Black Bart, the Po8.”

Most people who heard about this crime must have gotten a hoot out of Bart’s clean getaway and his pretensions toward “Po8try.” Wells, Fargo, however, was anything but amused. Company managers put their offices up and down California on the lookout for this robber-poet, but their description of him could have fit thousands of men. The Grangers’ Bank check was never cashed. And Bart let his trail cool for almost a year before he reappeared.

* * *

This time he struck high in the Sierras, leveling his shotgun at the driver of a stage headed through the Feather River Valley, from Quincy to Oroville. Again, he told the driver to surrender his strong box, only this time Bart’s take was better--$379 in currency, a diamond ring allegedly worth another $200, and a $25 silver watch. He also absconded with a U.S. Mail bag, but the contents of that have never been delineated.

Bart’s doggerel on this occasion seemed more confident than confrontational:

Here I lay me down to sleep
To wait the comming morrow,
Perhaps success, perhaps defeat,
and everlasting sorrow.
Let come what will I’ll try it on,
My condition can’t be worse;
And if there’s money in that box
’Tis munny in my purse!

California Governor William Irwin posted a $300 reward for Bart’s “capture and conviction.” Wells, Fargo added $300, and postal authorities threw in another $200. The price on his head only led Bart to take more chances, not fewer. He held up three more stages over the next week, all of them northwest of San Francisco. But contrary to legend, never again did he leave a calling card of verse, as if he was either suffering writer’s block or worried that his literary pretensions might offer some clue to his identity.

Bart’s modus operandi rarely changed. He made the 28 stagecoach assaults of his career in wide-open territory, near the crest of steep grades, where horses would be winded and slower than normal. He always had his loose coat and his flour sack mask, but there’s some dispute as to whether he also wore a derby on top of the sack or underneath it to make him appear taller. His rifle was in evidence but never fired. (It was later learned that he never even loaded the gun.) He always cut the mail sacks with a “T,” and he used an old ax to open the strong boxes, then left the ax behind.

Many of his victims described him as a gentleman. As the story goes, a frightened woman once tossed Bart her purse after he had ordered her stage driver to “throw down the box!” He kindly returned it to her, insisting that all he wanted was the Wells, Fargo strong box and the U.S. Mail bag. Such yarns made Black Bart a darling of the San Francisco press and, later, fine grist for penny-novel writers.

Although his crimes were committed far away from civilization, Bart never rode a horse, but instead walked with a blanket roll and camped out when necessary. Yet he covered a lot of ground, in three separate districts of Northern California: north of San Francisco, in Shasta County, and to the north of Sacramento. Even Wells, Fargo was impressed by his stamina, describing their masked adversary as a “thorough mountaineer.”

* * *

Ending this highwayman’s career would be difficult, but James B. Hume, chief investigator for Wells, Fargo, was determined to carry out the task. His first big break came in finding some people who thought they’d seen or even dined with a man who might be Black Bart. They’d encountered him walking cross-country in the general vicinity of Bart’s crimes. One said the stranger had graying brown hair, with patches of baldness at the temples, two missing front teeth, a mustache, and slender hands that showed no evidence of hard work. They all remarked upon his gentility and added that, surely, such a well-mannered soul could not be a bandit. Could he?

Hume’s second break came after what would prove to be Black Bart’s last holdup, on November 3, 1883.

In the predawn of that fateful morning, Reason E. McConnell, a driver for the Nevada Stage Company, left the town of Sonora, en route west to Milton. Along the way, he stopped first at Tuttletown, where he picked up 228 ounces of gold amalgam from the Patterson Mine and locked them into his strong box, which already contained $550 in gold coin and about 3.25 ounces of raw gold dust. Then McConnell made a second stop, for breakfast, at Reynolds Ferry, where he took on a passenger--a 19-year-old named Jimmy Rolleri, who wanted to do a little small-game hunting down the stagecoach road.

McConnell was happy to have the company. But Jimmy wasn’t seeing any animals, so when the stage had to go up one particularly steep hill, the teenager grabbed his repeating rifle and said he would rather walk around it, maybe flush some dinner out of the brush.

The driver, then, was alone at the top of the hill when Black Bart confronted him from behind a shotgun’s double barrels.

Bart, concealed as always beneath his flour sack, sensed immediately that things were wrong. First, he’d watched the stage coming and knew there had been two men, not one on board. Second, there was no strong box to be seen.

McConnell lied about Jimmy. He said the boy had gone off in search of stray cattle. Bart wasn’t satisfied with the answer, but had no time to ponder its implications. He had made friends with men at the Patterson Mine, knew there was gold to be had on board this stage, and if it wasn’t up top, then it must be secreted inside. So he ordered McConnell down from his perch and told him to unhitch the horses and lead them over the hill.

While McConnell was doing this, listening all the while to the sounds of Bart ransacking the stage for gold, he spotted Jimmy Rolleri coming around the hill with his rifle. McConnell couldn’t believe his luck! He immediately signaled Jimmy over, and together they crept back up the knoll.

Bart was just backing out of the stagecoach with the hidden booty when the sound of three shots exploded over the countryside. Bart sprinted for the brush, clutching his loot but dropping a bundle of papers. By the time the driver and his sidekick could hustle down the hill, the robber-poet had skedaddled. But there was fresh blood on the papers. Black Bart’s blood.

There was more, too. Bart had dropped his derby and failed to pick up some belongings that he’d sequestered behind a nearby rock--bags of crackers and sugar, a pair of field glasses, a couple of flour sacks, three dirty linen cuffs, a razor, and a knotted handkerchief filled with buckshot. Without too much trouble, the Calaveras County sheriff located the woman who had sold Bart his provisions, along with two other men who had seen a stranger matching the highwayman’s physical description. But the clue that broke the Black Bart case was a laundry mark on that abandoned handkerchief--F.X.O.7.

* * *

It took a week of searching through San Francisco’s 91 laundries before detective Hume’s special agent on the Black Bart robberies, Harry N. Morse, turned up an owner to correspond with that mark: C.E. Bolton, a resident of the Webb House, at 37 Second Street, Room 40. And that wasn’t all the luck Morse could claim. As he was talking with the owner of the laundry where Bart had taken his linens, who should walk by but the man himself.

At 54 years of age, Bart stood 5 feet 8 inches tall, bore his 160 pounds of weight in an arrow-straight posture, and had a light complexion. His deep-sunk eyes were bright blue. He sported a broad white mustache and an “imperial” (a pointed beard growing beneath his lower lip). He had small feet--size 6. Photographs show him looking very much like his pursuer, the dogged James B. Hume.

Morse later told reporters that his initial impressions of the unmasked outlaw were of a man “elegantly dressed, carrying a little cane. He wore a natty little derby hat, a diamond pin, a large diamond ring on his little finger, and a heavy gold watch and chain. ... One would have taken him for a gentleman who had made a fortune and was enjoying it.”

That was exactly the case, of course, although Bolton--whose real name was Charles E. Boles, according to a Bible found in his room--denied initially that his gains had been ill-gotten. (“Do you take me for a stage robber?” he said in mock amazement. “I never harmed anybody in all my life, and this is the first time that my character has ever been called into question.”) He claimed to be the proud owner of a mine on the California-Nevada border. Not until he was identified by people he had encountered during the planning of his final crime did the bandit admit that he’d stopped and robbed the Sonora-Milton stage. And even then, it was only because he surmised that with one confession he might escape sentencing for many others. The judge proved him right on that account: Bart-Boles was given just six years in San Quentin Prison for a crime spree that should’ve kept him imprisoned until his death.

* * *

Reporters slowly filled in the details of Charles Boles’ life. He had been born in Norfolk County, England, in 1829, but at 2 years old had moved with his family to Alexandria township, Jefferson County, in upstate New York. He had served with the 116th Regiment of the Illinois Infantry during the Civil War, either as a captain or a sergeant--the facts grew fuzzier each time they were given. When asked what sort of education he’d received, Boles dismissed thoughts of schools or grades and answered simply “Liberal!” in a proud manner that was characteristic of him. Coming west first to Montana (where he’d failed as a miner) and then to California, he had evidently left behind a family in the Midwest, including a wife, Mary, who for years before his arrest had thought her husband dead. After learning of his Black Bart incarceration, though, she began corresponding with him from her home in Hannibal, Missouri.

But there were still many questions remaining by the time Bart-Boles was released, after serving only four years and two months of his sentence. So it was no surprise that he was mobbed by ink-spotted newspaper reporters on January 21, 1888, as a prison boat ferrying him south from Marin County finally landed at San Francisco. Had prison life hurt him? they wanted to know. No, Bart said, he felt very well, although he was becoming a bit deaf and now required reading glasses. Did he intend to rob stages again? Bart shook his head almost violently and turned to go. One final question, said a newsie: Had he any more verses up his sleeve? At this, Bart seemed to perk up, to regain a bit of the self-confidence that prison had tried to sap from him. “Young man,” the old highwayman replied archly, “didn’t you hear me say I would commit no more crimes?”

At final report, the man who’d once been Black Bart was heading south from California’s Bay Area. He got as far as Visalia, where he stayed for a short while at a hotel, leaving behind a valise that contained some containers of food, a couple of neckties, and a pair of cuffs bearing the laundry mark F.X.O.7. He was last spotted on February 28, 1888. After that, the Po8 disappeared forever.

READ MORE: “Legend and Lore,” by Isaac Levinson (Bohemian.com).

Seeing the Light

Coloradan Tom Piccirilli has submitted to being interviewed by Hard-boiled Wonderland’s Jedidiah Ayres. Perhaps the most interesting part of their exchange comes when blogger Ayres asks the author whether he faced any “unforeseen challenges” in writing for a blind protagonist in his new novel, Shadow Season. Answered Piccirilli: “I’ve been wearing glasses since I was 10, and the older I get the thicker they get. So at its heart, Shadow Season is about my own fear of blindness. Again, I did a smattering of research but, and this might sound a little Afterschool Special-ish, I wrote most of the novel with my eyes shut. Sounds goofball, I know, but imagining having to deal with certain issues in the dark really started to spook and frustrate me.” The complete interview is here.

The “Thief” in Your Machine

For me anyway, this is no less good news than that TNT has picked up the cancelled NBC series Southland. According to the Web site TV Shows on DVD, “the classic Robert Wagner series It Takes a Thief, which ran on ABC for three seasons (from 1968 [to] 1970), is finally going to come to DVD. ... Right now the DVD is just gossip, officially, but it comes from a source that has always proven to be right on the money.” Let’s hope that holds true this time, too.

I missed seeing It Takes a Thief during its original run, but watched it with great relish (and sometimes behind my mother’s back) when it was broadcast on weekend afternoons later in the 1970s. Had a genie given me three wishes back then, I almost certainly would’ve spent one of them turning myself into Wagner’s suave thief, Alexander Mundy.

(Hat tip to Spy-fi Channel.)

Cops on the Move

Excellent news for fans of the Los Angeles-based police drama Southland, which was suddenly canceled last month by NBC-TV. From Jeremy Lynch at Crimespree Cinema:

It is official: TNT has picked up Southland. After weeks of speculation, the cabler has purchased the 13-episode second season of the canceled NBC crime drama. ...

“This is a great win for fans of Southland and a perfect opportunity to introduce the series to new viewers,” said Steve Koonin, president of Turner Entertainment Networks. “It’s also another outstanding example of how TNT has established itself as the go-to place for the best dramas on television.”

Lynch’s whole piece is here. Meanwhile, Pop Crunch reports that TNT will begin broadcasting Southland in January 2010. Plans are to “re-air the series’ original seven episodes plus the six new hours that NBC ordered but chose not to air.” Watch for it on Tuesday nights at 10 p.m., opposite NBC’s beleaguered Jay Leno Show.

It seems all those viewer pleas to save Southland really worked.