New York lawyer-turned-novelist Joseph Teller has won the 2009 Nero Award for his novel The Tenth Case (Mira). That announcement came during the annual Black Orchid Weekend, hosted in New York City by the Nero Wolfe fan organization, The Wolfe Pack. The other two crime novels in contention were The Dark Tide, by Andrew Gross (HarperCollins), and The Fault Tree, by Louise Ure (Minotaur Books).
This prize commemorates Nero Wolfe, the large, mostly house-bound but brilliant detective who made his debut in 1934’s Fer-de-Lance and went on to feature in more than 40 novels. Wolfe was created by author Rex Stout, who was named as a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America in 1959. The Wolfe Pack was founded in 1978 and is dedicated to celebrating the very best of Nero Wolfe, not only his fiction but also his notorious likes and dislikes.
Also given out this last weekend was the Black Orchid Novella Award, presented jointly by The Wolfe Pack and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine “to celebrate the novella format popularized by Rex Stout.” The 2009 winner is Steve Liskow for his story “The Strangle Hold.”
(Hat tip to Mystery Fanfare.)
Monday, December 07, 2009
Sunday, December 06, 2009
Mother of Mercy, Is This the End?
Bryant & May on the Loose (Bantam), the seventh installment in the series, could be the last book Christopher Fowler ever writes about Scotland Yard’s weirdest and most endearing fictional duo.
With their special Peculiar Crimes Unit shut down, mostly because of budget cuts, Detective Arthur Bryant is feeling withdrawn and depressed, while his partner, John May, is
considering taking on work as a private investigator. May is the more affable of this pair, while the socially inept Bryant takes every opportunity to anger his bosses at the Yard. When a former team member stumbles on a beheaded corpse in London’s King’s Cross neighborhood, May uses the discovery to gain the unit a brief new lease on life. He persuades the higher-ups that unsolved gang crimes in the area could threaten the economic benefit anticipated from the 2012 Summer Olympics. Given one week to solve the case, without any official sanction or access to police resources, May pulls Bryant out of his doldrums and reassembles the unit. To May’s dismay, his colleague is more interested in reports that a man wearing a stag’s head has been seen in the area.
Issued in tandem with Bryant & May on the Loose is the paperback edition of The Victoria Vanishes (Bantam), my favorite book in this under-appreciated series, first published last year. In that story, Bryant watches a popular pub disappear during the course of his chasing after a serial killer who preys on middle-age women in London’s most popular watering holes. He and May discover a connection between the victims, but the most critical clues, it turns out, are embedded in the histories of the saloons themselves (including the long-gone Victoria Cross, where Bryant swears he saw one of the victims just moments before her death).
Fowler’s Bryant and May series comprises seven novels so far, including 2003’s much-lauded Full Dark House. If anyone can keep these two grand geezers alive, it’s their British creator. Let’s all keep our fingers crossed ...
READ MORE: “Golden Years of Detection,” by Sarah Weinman
(The Barnes & Noble Review).
With their special Peculiar Crimes Unit shut down, mostly because of budget cuts, Detective Arthur Bryant is feeling withdrawn and depressed, while his partner, John May, is
considering taking on work as a private investigator. May is the more affable of this pair, while the socially inept Bryant takes every opportunity to anger his bosses at the Yard. When a former team member stumbles on a beheaded corpse in London’s King’s Cross neighborhood, May uses the discovery to gain the unit a brief new lease on life. He persuades the higher-ups that unsolved gang crimes in the area could threaten the economic benefit anticipated from the 2012 Summer Olympics. Given one week to solve the case, without any official sanction or access to police resources, May pulls Bryant out of his doldrums and reassembles the unit. To May’s dismay, his colleague is more interested in reports that a man wearing a stag’s head has been seen in the area.Issued in tandem with Bryant & May on the Loose is the paperback edition of The Victoria Vanishes (Bantam), my favorite book in this under-appreciated series, first published last year. In that story, Bryant watches a popular pub disappear during the course of his chasing after a serial killer who preys on middle-age women in London’s most popular watering holes. He and May discover a connection between the victims, but the most critical clues, it turns out, are embedded in the histories of the saloons themselves (including the long-gone Victoria Cross, where Bryant swears he saw one of the victims just moments before her death).
Fowler’s Bryant and May series comprises seven novels so far, including 2003’s much-lauded Full Dark House. If anyone can keep these two grand geezers alive, it’s their British creator. Let’s all keep our fingers crossed ...
READ MORE: “Golden Years of Detection,” by Sarah Weinman
(The Barnes & Noble Review).
That Certain Sommer
Christopher Mills concludes his week’s worth of Spy-fi Channel tributes to “spy vixens” with a post about the once seemingly ubiquitous Elke Sommer, “a 36-22-36 Teutonic stunner.” You’ll find all seven of his posts here.
Taking a Step Off the Pace
Sorry, folks, but postings in The Rap Sheet will be a bit lighter than normal over the next two weeks, as I work to complete a feature assignment and ready my contributions to January Magazine’s “Best Books of 2009” package. However, we should be back to our usual operating strength by the end of the month.
Friday, December 04, 2009
The Book You Have to Read: “He Died with
His Eyes Open,” by Derek Raymond
(Editor’s note: This is the 73rd installment of our ongoing Friday blog series highlighting great but forgotten books. It is also, however, the first entry in a special miniseries honoring all five of the Factory novels penned by British writer 
Derek Raymond. Today The Rap Sheet welcomes Tony Black, the Australia-born Edinburgh author of the Gus Dury series [Gutted and Paying for It], who has a few things to say about Raymond’s He Died with His Eyes Open.)
I arrived at the genius of Derek Raymond too late. But, as the adage goes, better late than never. If memory serves, I’d been struggling with a reading slump. One of those dispiriting patches where nothing I picked up seemed to be what I wanted to read. Everything was too wordy, too writerly, or the voice grated, the story took too long to start, the prose lacked sparkle. I turned to the recommendations of well-meaning friends but struggled to get past the first few pages of anything I picked up. I couldn’t re-read, either. Even old favorites seemed unappealing. The printed word was dead to me.
I’d been at that point before. When I was a nipper, anything beyond comic books was a struggle for me, seemed like hard work, or worse, school work. It took an overly dramatic primary teacher’s enthusiasm for Huckleberry Finn and Treasure Island to get me reading; after discovering Mark Twain and Robert Louis Stevenson, I never looked back. I devoured those books, and, if truth be told, had been looking for that heady fix ever since ... This latest reading slump was a sure sign that I needed to up the dose once more.
I’d taken reading advice from friends before but it’s a tricky business; as any writer knows, everyone’s reading is subjective, what one person takes from a book won’t necessarily be the same as another; everyone filters the page through his or her own worldview, tastes, and assumptions. Taking a book to read from a friend is like letting someone else pick your dinner from the menu.
At least three close friends had recommended Derek Raymond’s work to me before; they were all Londoners. Somehow, I made the association in my subconscious that Raymond was “a London writer.” I’d tried putting Irvine Welsh books on people and got looks askance and comments such as “It’s very Edinburgh”; I anticipated the same would happen with Raymond.
Then there was the mythology: Raymond’s privileged upbringing courtesy of a textile-magnate father; his running long firms for the criminal Krays; his rebirth as an author and his Rimbaud-esque abandonment of the form; bad marriage after bad marriage; the wholesale praise from latter-day noirist masters like Ken Bruen and Cathi Unsworth; and the gaunt-thin, world-weary, well-lived-in face with piercing eyes that crept after you and yelled, “I’m the man, doubt me?”
I first cracked the spine on He Died with His Eyes Open (1984) on a typically dreich, gray, Saturday morning in my then cold-water Edinburgh flat with the sound of jakeys fighting over the spoils of supermarket dumpsters below my window. There had been a fire in a new-build block of yuppie apartments just the night before and the blaze had been abandoned by the fire brigade, spreading an ominous gray pall over the horizon that added to the already dystopian air at my end of town.
Raymond, or to give him his proper name, Robin Cook, wrote the first book in his acclaimed Factory series after a writing hiatus of around 10 years. He had been living peripatetically in Europe and, legend tells, was challenged to write again by a friend who taunted him that he had penned his last. He adopted a pseudonym to avoid confusion with the truck-stop thriller writer who shared his real name, and the rest is history.
By the time I got to this book, Raymond’s reputation was unassailable. I’ve always been wary of heady praise. Popularity is no marker of quality and I’ve got a finely tuned hype detector which goes off, it seems, at least once a month these days. But it was clear from its opening lines that He Died with His Eyes Open was something special:
What followed was unlike any other crime novel I’d read before. On the surface, He Died with His Eyes Open is a police procedural, but the unnamed officer from the Met’s A14, Department of Unexplained Deaths, follows little or no procedure. He barely follows his nose; his assumed task is a psychological investigation. A stripping of the thin epidermis of respectability that covers a rotten society.
Even while studying the corpse of a man who had been “systematically beaten” to death, Raymond’s world-weary detective can’t help commenting on the shittiness of 1980s London, with its mass unemployment and air of faded grandeur:
An early exchange with the cocky Chief Inspector Bowman from Serious Crimes shows what the investigating officer is up against.
As the case proceeds, the investigating officer uncovers Staniland’s tape-recorded journal, an eerie voice from beyond the grave which brings two disparate strands of the story together, unites victim and avenger and delves deeper into the heart of darkness. A pained relationship between the victim and a woman called Barbara is revealed; she is a classic femme fatale, but Raymond’s detective turns the tables on her, beginning a relationship to ferret out information about the murder. Barbara’s connection to a man called Harvey Fenton, whom Staniland refers to as the “Laughing Cavalier” on his tapes, contains the vital key to solving the crime. From Staniland’s recordings:
Derek Raymond offers us disillusioned mean streets. His detective no more cares for upholding the mores of a diseased corporate body than he does for playing a role in the chaos; he’s trying simply to make sense of it all. To find some understanding. It’s an existential quest for meaning. Pure undiluted noir from a man who knew the life, and wrote the book on it.
NEXT UP: The Devil’s Home on Leave (1985)
Derek Raymond. Today The Rap Sheet welcomes Tony Black, the Australia-born Edinburgh author of the Gus Dury series [Gutted and Paying for It], who has a few things to say about Raymond’s He Died with His Eyes Open.)I arrived at the genius of Derek Raymond too late. But, as the adage goes, better late than never. If memory serves, I’d been struggling with a reading slump. One of those dispiriting patches where nothing I picked up seemed to be what I wanted to read. Everything was too wordy, too writerly, or the voice grated, the story took too long to start, the prose lacked sparkle. I turned to the recommendations of well-meaning friends but struggled to get past the first few pages of anything I picked up. I couldn’t re-read, either. Even old favorites seemed unappealing. The printed word was dead to me.
I’d been at that point before. When I was a nipper, anything beyond comic books was a struggle for me, seemed like hard work, or worse, school work. It took an overly dramatic primary teacher’s enthusiasm for Huckleberry Finn and Treasure Island to get me reading; after discovering Mark Twain and Robert Louis Stevenson, I never looked back. I devoured those books, and, if truth be told, had been looking for that heady fix ever since ... This latest reading slump was a sure sign that I needed to up the dose once more.
I’d taken reading advice from friends before but it’s a tricky business; as any writer knows, everyone’s reading is subjective, what one person takes from a book won’t necessarily be the same as another; everyone filters the page through his or her own worldview, tastes, and assumptions. Taking a book to read from a friend is like letting someone else pick your dinner from the menu.
At least three close friends had recommended Derek Raymond’s work to me before; they were all Londoners. Somehow, I made the association in my subconscious that Raymond was “a London writer.” I’d tried putting Irvine Welsh books on people and got looks askance and comments such as “It’s very Edinburgh”; I anticipated the same would happen with Raymond.
Then there was the mythology: Raymond’s privileged upbringing courtesy of a textile-magnate father; his running long firms for the criminal Krays; his rebirth as an author and his Rimbaud-esque abandonment of the form; bad marriage after bad marriage; the wholesale praise from latter-day noirist masters like Ken Bruen and Cathi Unsworth; and the gaunt-thin, world-weary, well-lived-in face with piercing eyes that crept after you and yelled, “I’m the man, doubt me?”
I first cracked the spine on He Died with His Eyes Open (1984) on a typically dreich, gray, Saturday morning in my then cold-water Edinburgh flat with the sound of jakeys fighting over the spoils of supermarket dumpsters below my window. There had been a fire in a new-build block of yuppie apartments just the night before and the blaze had been abandoned by the fire brigade, spreading an ominous gray pall over the horizon that added to the already dystopian air at my end of town.
Raymond, or to give him his proper name, Robin Cook, wrote the first book in his acclaimed Factory series after a writing hiatus of around 10 years. He had been living peripatetically in Europe and, legend tells, was challenged to write again by a friend who taunted him that he had penned his last. He adopted a pseudonym to avoid confusion with the truck-stop thriller writer who shared his real name, and the rest is history.
By the time I got to this book, Raymond’s reputation was unassailable. I’ve always been wary of heady praise. Popularity is no marker of quality and I’ve got a finely tuned hype detector which goes off, it seems, at least once a month these days. But it was clear from its opening lines that He Died with His Eyes Open was something special:
He was found in the shrubbery in front of the West of God House in Albatross Road, West Five. It was the thirteenth of March, during the evening rush-hour.The reader is dropped into the action immediately. This is a murder story, in case you’re in any doubt. Raymond covers some territory in those two sentences--the brutality of a killing contrasted with the gentility of a shrubbery; a body uncovered in the rush-hour. My imagination was fired already, without the allusions of “Albatross,” “West of God,” or the unlucky number “thirteen.”
What followed was unlike any other crime novel I’d read before. On the surface, He Died with His Eyes Open is a police procedural, but the unnamed officer from the Met’s A14, Department of Unexplained Deaths, follows little or no procedure. He barely follows his nose; his assumed task is a psychological investigation. A stripping of the thin epidermis of respectability that covers a rotten society.
Even while studying the corpse of a man who had been “systematically beaten” to death, Raymond’s world-weary detective can’t help commenting on the shittiness of 1980s London, with its mass unemployment and air of faded grandeur:
Inside the ambulance the ruined face of Charles Locksley Alwin Staniland screamed silently up at its white roof which a British Leyland operator had sprayed one day when he happened not to be on strike and needed the overtime.Perhaps because he is on the lower rungs himself, the investigating officer--languishing in “the most unpopular and shunned branch of the service”--treats the murder of a 51-year-old down-on-his-luck writer with a degree of probity his fellow officers find laughable.
An early exchange with the cocky Chief Inspector Bowman from Serious Crimes shows what the investigating officer is up against.
“I like to see justice.”The victim, Staniland, as an upper-class writer, currently living down-at-heel, shares some biographical baggage with Raymond; undoubtedly an effective resource to draw on as the murder victim is portrayed as one of the most fully rounded and carefully executed characters I’ve encountered. And he’s dead. As an exploration of the crime, Raymond’s purview covers the full 360 degrees; he misses nothing, getting under the skin of all his characters with a skill I still find is unmatched.
“Justice? You‘re a berk,” said Bowman. “You’re forty, you’re a sergeant, and you actually despise promotion.”
“I’m not on my way upstairs like you are,” I said. “Not with cases like this one.”
“It won’t even be reported.”
“No, I know,” I said. “And that sort of thing matters to you.”
“Of course it does.”
“But the trouble with you is, it shows.”
“Have it your own way,” said Bowman, “You can stay on at Unexplained Deaths till you rot, for all I care ... ”
As the case proceeds, the investigating officer uncovers Staniland’s tape-recorded journal, an eerie voice from beyond the grave which brings two disparate strands of the story together, unites victim and avenger and delves deeper into the heart of darkness. A pained relationship between the victim and a woman called Barbara is revealed; she is a classic femme fatale, but Raymond’s detective turns the tables on her, beginning a relationship to ferret out information about the murder. Barbara’s connection to a man called Harvey Fenton, whom Staniland refers to as the “Laughing Cavalier” on his tapes, contains the vital key to solving the crime. From Staniland’s recordings:
Last night I met the Laughing Cavalier again in the Agincourt. I don’t know if I can really stand going in there much longer, in spite of my determination. Barbara was with me. This terrible man hates me. He gives off waves of hatred towards me, even when his back is turned. It’s strange to be the object of raw, naked hatred, it glares out of the person at you like the truth, or a disease.In these two, barely socialized psychopaths, Raymond’s detective confronts the failures of a rotten, brutal society which had turned on itself like a mad dog chasing its tail. As Britain’s Conservative Thatcher government of the ’80s was starving the miners and breaking union power to facilitate the transition to all-out consumerism, those people at society’s low end were of little value; life was cheap.
Derek Raymond offers us disillusioned mean streets. His detective no more cares for upholding the mores of a diseased corporate body than he does for playing a role in the chaos; he’s trying simply to make sense of it all. To find some understanding. It’s an existential quest for meaning. Pure undiluted noir from a man who knew the life, and wrote the book on it.
NEXT UP: The Devil’s Home on Leave (1985)
Going for the Old
Following last Friday’s hiatus from the “forgotten books” series, The Rap Sheet is back today with Tony Black’s recommendation of He Died with His Eyes Open, by Derek Raymond.
Meanwhile, there’s lots of older crime fiction being touted elsewhere on the Web. Look for write-ups about Dick Tracy, by William Johnston; Roadside Night, by Erwin N. Nistler and Gerry P. Broderick; Murder Wears a Halo, by Howard Browne; The Tooth and the Nail, by Bill S. Ballinger; A Different Kind of Summer, by Gwendoline Butler; The Case of the Velvet Claws, by Erle Stanley Gardner; Dr. Syn Returns, by Russell Thorndike; Love & Glory, by Robert B. Parker; and The Satan Bug, by Alistair MacLean. Scott D. Parker has reviewed A Study in Scarlet, by Arthur Conan Doyle, to start his miniseries about the (not so forgotten) Sherlock Holmes novels. And Martin Edwards is touting a non-fiction book this week, Detective Fiction: The Collector’s Guide, by John Cooper and B.A. Pike.
Series organizer Patti Abbott offers more reading suggestions in her own blog, plus a list of all of today’s participating bloggers.
Meanwhile, there’s lots of older crime fiction being touted elsewhere on the Web. Look for write-ups about Dick Tracy, by William Johnston; Roadside Night, by Erwin N. Nistler and Gerry P. Broderick; Murder Wears a Halo, by Howard Browne; The Tooth and the Nail, by Bill S. Ballinger; A Different Kind of Summer, by Gwendoline Butler; The Case of the Velvet Claws, by Erle Stanley Gardner; Dr. Syn Returns, by Russell Thorndike; Love & Glory, by Robert B. Parker; and The Satan Bug, by Alistair MacLean. Scott D. Parker has reviewed A Study in Scarlet, by Arthur Conan Doyle, to start his miniseries about the (not so forgotten) Sherlock Holmes novels. And Martin Edwards is touting a non-fiction book this week, Detective Fiction: The Collector’s Guide, by John Cooper and B.A. Pike.
Series organizer Patti Abbott offers more reading suggestions in her own blog, plus a list of all of today’s participating bloggers.
Taking in the Views
• Tre Sekunder (Three Seconds) by Anders Roslund and Borge Hellström has won the 2009 Best Swedish Crime Novel Award. Meanwhile, Andrew Taylor’s excellent Bleeding Heart Square picked up the Martin Beck Award for translated fiction.
• The November/December issue of ThugLit is now available online, with contributions from Ryan Zimmerman, Taylor Brown, Scott Wolven, and David Keaton.
• A last-minute warning, just in case you’ve been living under a moonrock and don’t know this already: The concluding episode of Tony Shaloub’s eight-year-old TV series, Monk, will air tonight at 9 p.m. ET/PT on the USA Network. UPDATE: More on the Monk finale can be found in The Huffington Post.
• Sarah Weinman has announced her favorite crime novels of 2009.
• No wonder the original theme for Lee Majors’ The Six Million Dollar Man was dropped when ABC-TV picked it up as a series. Yuck!
• Matt Houston on DVD?
• There are still three weeks left before Christmas, but already Mystery Readers Journal editor Janet Rudolph is talking about crime fiction appropriate to the holiday.
• Australian writer Joanna Challis, whose first Daphne du Maurier mystery, Murder on the Cliffs, was just released, seems to be making the blogging rounds. She’s been interviewed not only by In Reference to Murder’s B.V. Lawson but also by Lesa Holstine of Lesa’s Book Critiques. And she has contributed a guest post about the background of her new series to the Euro Crime blog.
• I’ve never even heard of “butt makeup” before.
• Keith Rawson and Cameron Ashley will launch a new crime-fiction e-zine in January, inspired by the defunct Australian print magazine Crime Factory.
• Novelist Mark Billingham is among the celebrities Britain’s Daily Telegraph has coerced into talking about their investment strategies. You can read more here.
• I, too, have fond memories of this CBS-TV holiday promo.
• I feel ashamed--deeply ashamed--by the fact that I’ve not read a single volume mentioned on The New York Times’ “10 Best Books of 2009” list. And I have only read a handful of the paper’s “100 Notable Books of 2009.” Surely, this means I shall be banished to some remote island with only a toothbrush and a towering stack of books to be consumed post haste. Oh, goody ...
• Did you know that New York author S.J. Rozan has a new book of Lydia Chin short stories out from Crippen & Landru? It’s called A Tale About a Tiger and Other Mysterious Events, and would make a fine Christmas gift for yours truly. Just in case anyone in my family happens to be reading this note ...
• By the way, if you haven’t noticed, Rozan has relaunched her (very) short fiction Web site, Six Stories, and is looking for more submissions. Anyone up for the challenge?
• What lengths new crime novelists must go to these days.
• Early, black-and-white episodes of the UK spy series Callan, starring Edward Woodward, are due out on DVD in February 2010.
• I rather imposed myself on author John Lutz at Bouchercon last year, interrupting a conversation he was having with his wife at the bar in order to tell him how much I appreciated his Fred Carver private eye series (Tropical Heat, Scorcher, etc.). It felt good to do, though, and he seemed ultimately not to mind the intrusion. I was reminded of our conversation today, when I saw the mention, in Marshal Zeringue’s Writers Read blog, of the two books Lutz has been reading lately. Both terrific picks.
• Can we expect an explosion of Chinese crime fiction?
• The TV series Leverage is due to return to TNT next month.
• And this is interesting: Lawyer-turned-crime novelist Erle Stanley Gardner once carried on a correspondence with “Nathan Leopold, who along with Richard Loeb was convicted for senselessly killing a 14-year-old boy in 1924.” (Hat tip to Elizabeth Foxwell.)
• The November/December issue of ThugLit is now available online, with contributions from Ryan Zimmerman, Taylor Brown, Scott Wolven, and David Keaton.
• A last-minute warning, just in case you’ve been living under a moonrock and don’t know this already: The concluding episode of Tony Shaloub’s eight-year-old TV series, Monk, will air tonight at 9 p.m. ET/PT on the USA Network. UPDATE: More on the Monk finale can be found in The Huffington Post.
• Sarah Weinman has announced her favorite crime novels of 2009.
• No wonder the original theme for Lee Majors’ The Six Million Dollar Man was dropped when ABC-TV picked it up as a series. Yuck!
• Matt Houston on DVD?
• There are still three weeks left before Christmas, but already Mystery Readers Journal editor Janet Rudolph is talking about crime fiction appropriate to the holiday.
• Australian writer Joanna Challis, whose first Daphne du Maurier mystery, Murder on the Cliffs, was just released, seems to be making the blogging rounds. She’s been interviewed not only by In Reference to Murder’s B.V. Lawson but also by Lesa Holstine of Lesa’s Book Critiques. And she has contributed a guest post about the background of her new series to the Euro Crime blog.
• I’ve never even heard of “butt makeup” before.
• Keith Rawson and Cameron Ashley will launch a new crime-fiction e-zine in January, inspired by the defunct Australian print magazine Crime Factory.
• Novelist Mark Billingham is among the celebrities Britain’s Daily Telegraph has coerced into talking about their investment strategies. You can read more here.
• I, too, have fond memories of this CBS-TV holiday promo.
• I feel ashamed--deeply ashamed--by the fact that I’ve not read a single volume mentioned on The New York Times’ “10 Best Books of 2009” list. And I have only read a handful of the paper’s “100 Notable Books of 2009.” Surely, this means I shall be banished to some remote island with only a toothbrush and a towering stack of books to be consumed post haste. Oh, goody ...
• Did you know that New York author S.J. Rozan has a new book of Lydia Chin short stories out from Crippen & Landru? It’s called A Tale About a Tiger and Other Mysterious Events, and would make a fine Christmas gift for yours truly. Just in case anyone in my family happens to be reading this note ...
• By the way, if you haven’t noticed, Rozan has relaunched her (very) short fiction Web site, Six Stories, and is looking for more submissions. Anyone up for the challenge?
• What lengths new crime novelists must go to these days.
• Early, black-and-white episodes of the UK spy series Callan, starring Edward Woodward, are due out on DVD in February 2010.
• I rather imposed myself on author John Lutz at Bouchercon last year, interrupting a conversation he was having with his wife at the bar in order to tell him how much I appreciated his Fred Carver private eye series (Tropical Heat, Scorcher, etc.). It felt good to do, though, and he seemed ultimately not to mind the intrusion. I was reminded of our conversation today, when I saw the mention, in Marshal Zeringue’s Writers Read blog, of the two books Lutz has been reading lately. Both terrific picks.
• Can we expect an explosion of Chinese crime fiction?
• The TV series Leverage is due to return to TNT next month.
• And this is interesting: Lawyer-turned-crime novelist Erle Stanley Gardner once carried on a correspondence with “Nathan Leopold, who along with Richard Loeb was convicted for senselessly killing a 14-year-old boy in 1924.” (Hat tip to Elizabeth Foxwell.)
Thursday, December 03, 2009
Not Everybody Loves Raymond
Beginning tomorrow, and running through early January 2010, The Rap Sheet will interrupt its usual catch-all succession of “forgotten books” posts in order to roll out a mini-series concentrating on the work of novelist Derek Raymond (1931-1994). 
Raymond, whose real name was Robin Cook (not to be confused with the still-extant American medical thriller writer), is frequently credited as “the Godfather of British neo-noir,” and has many big-name admirers, among them James Sallis and Cathi Unsworth. But, despite a number of his books having been reissued this decade by Serpent’s Tail, his work is unknown to many crime-fiction readers, especially those in the States. We hope to correct that deficiency with our mini-series, which will focus on Raymond’s succession of five “Factory novels,” bleak and often violent police procedurals of a sort, that reflected Great Britain’s changing political and social orders during Margaret Thatcher’s time as prime minister.
Earlier this year, the Los Angeles Times’ Richard Rayner gave a good accounting of Cook/Raymond’s evolution as a crime novelist:
Brooklyn writer Charles Taylor went further, in a piece published last year by The Nation, toward explaining what it is that motivates Raymond’s central character:
I hope all those shades will be shown clearly over the next month.
Our series about Raymond’s work was the brainchild of British Rap Sheet contributor Gordon Harries, who recruited a stellar collection of notable novelists to ponder the strengths and bleaknesses of the five Factory books. Tomorrow’s opening entry, about He Died with His Eyes Open, was penned by Tony Black, the Australia-born Edinburgh author of the Gus Dury series (Gutted and Paying for It). It will be followed by Diamond Dagger Award winner John Harvey’s reconsideration of The Devil’s Home on Leave; a tribute to How the Dead Live, written by Scottish novelist Russel D. McLean (The Good Son); a fervent defense of I Was Dora Suarez, composed by Cathi Unsworth (Bad Penny Blues); and No More Heroes author Ray Banks’ admiring essay about Dead Man Upright, the “anticlimax to the Factory series.”
Thanks again to Harries for his inspiration and dogged efforts to make this project happen. And I hope that Rap Sheet readers will enjoy the results, and learn from them as much as I did in reading all of these excellent essays.
READ MORE: “Obituary: Robin Cook,” by John Williams (The Independent); “Derek Raymond and a Few Upcoming Titles,” by Glenn Harper (International Noir Fiction).
Raymond, whose real name was Robin Cook (not to be confused with the still-extant American medical thriller writer), is frequently credited as “the Godfather of British neo-noir,” and has many big-name admirers, among them James Sallis and Cathi Unsworth. But, despite a number of his books having been reissued this decade by Serpent’s Tail, his work is unknown to many crime-fiction readers, especially those in the States. We hope to correct that deficiency with our mini-series, which will focus on Raymond’s succession of five “Factory novels,” bleak and often violent police procedurals of a sort, that reflected Great Britain’s changing political and social orders during Margaret Thatcher’s time as prime minister.Earlier this year, the Los Angeles Times’ Richard Rayner gave a good accounting of Cook/Raymond’s evolution as a crime novelist:
Cook, married five times, was the son of a millionaire British textile magnate, born with the silver spoon and all that. He went to school at Eton, “the assembly line for rulers and bastards” (as he called it). Then, rather than proceed to Oxbridge or the army, he rebelled against his background, drifting into a world of petty, and sometimes not so petty, crime--his affable manners and toff accent were useful in ways that he hadn’t expected. He was an excellent con man.Published in 1984, He Died with His Eyes Open was the first of Raymond’s Factory novels (“factory” being a colloquial term for cop-shop). The Guardian calls that series “a master-class of noir,” in which the author places “his unnamed detective sergeant protagonist within the framework of the worst possible despair and blind rage that would fell most men. But Raymond, through his anti-heroic alter ego, makes the point again and again that there must be someone to speak for the dead, to answer the bellow of justice from beyond the grave even if they didn’t directly seek him out. The shitty end of the stick may be where the truth is, to paraphrase Raymond, but it also signified a welcome change of direction and voice that won him many admirers in London literary circles.”
In the early 1960s, Cook ran gaming tables in Chelsea and sold pornography in Soho. His name was splashed across the front pages because of a scam involving a stolen Rubens or two. He rubbed shoulders with aristocrats and gangsters and wrote books--comedies, but always with a nasty edge--about the dangerous demimonde he’d chosen to inhabit. The Crust on Its Uppers, Bombe Surprise and A State of Denmark are novels that feel as much a part of their time as those by Iris Murdoch--except that Cook wrote about tarts, thugs, chancers, rent boys and Fascists, not the sexual rondelays of academic Oxford.
The Crust on Its Uppers (a great title) is memorable for its slang and linguistic freshness. Going crazy becomes, in Cook-speak, “he lost his pedals in a serious manner.” By 1970, Cook had a career going, five or so novels written--and then something happened. He too lost his pedals. A marriage broke up and London became too hot, or maybe just too boring. He went to live abroad, first in Italy, then in remotest rural France, where he quit writing altogether for almost a decade, working on farms and in vineyards. Robin Cook had vanished, or died, it seemed to most people, and
maybe he had.
By the time he reappeared in London in the early 1980s, his already slender, rakish form had become almost skeletally thin. Beady eyes stared at you from a skull that belonged on a cadaver. His hair was filthy and his teeth were best not to think about. His haggard face was craggy and lined, and his sheet-like pallor suggested perpetual hangover. Yet there was unmistakable charisma too. He wore a black leather jacket and a beret and pronounced himself miffed by the existence of the new Robin Cook, referring to him as “the Coma bloke. Cheeky sod’s taken over my name. Bit much that.” So he was forced to publish the novel he’d just completed, He Died with His Eyes Open, under a pseudonym, Derek Raymond.
Brooklyn writer Charles Taylor went further, in a piece published last year by The Nation, toward explaining what it is that motivates Raymond’s central character:
The nameless cop hero of the Factory novels--we’ll call him No Name--is one of those denizens of detective stories and police procedurals who get into trouble because they break the rules and rub the top brass the wrong way. No Name has no time for niceties or regulations or respect for his superiors (one book ends with him breaking a supervisor’s jaw). He’s an outcast, but not because he’s a brutal bastard. Rather, he’s an outcast because, in a society that has given up nearly all notions of justice or service, he takes his job seriously.I also like something Jeff VanderMeer wrote in the blog Ecstatic Days about the Factory series’ nameless narrator:
The police division No Name works for is Unexplained Deaths, the sinkhole reserved for the cases that will bring the cops who solve them no publicity, no promotion. “We work on obscure, unimportant, apparently irrelevant deaths of people who don’t matter and who never did,” says No Name in He Died with His Eyes Open. “We have the lowest budget, we’re last in line for allocations, and promotion is so slow that most of us never get past the rank of sergeant. ... No murder is casual to us, and no murder is unimportant, even though murder happens the whole time in a city like this.”
The voice may sound familiar to readers of detective fiction: it’s the hard-boiled hero, cynical on the outside, wounded on the inside. But pay attention to the stray lines: “people who don’t matter and who never did” and "”we’re last in line for allocations.” Then consider these seemingly tossed-off remarks about the deaths No Name investigates over the course of the books: “There was nothing about Staniland in the paper. Staniland wasn’t news.” “Nobody was ever caught for her, and Mrs. Mayhew made four lines in the Watford Observer.” No Name on his superiors’ reaction to a double murder: “It’s the press that bothers them up there ... not the bodies.” The England of the Factory series is a place where the idea of government service has become, at best, quaint, and where murder has become a convenient means of disposing of the undesirable.
He often clashes with his superior, Bowman, and has turned down promotion at every turn. His wife is in a lunatic asylum and is responsible for the central tragedy of the detective’s life--as is an earlier relationship with a woman who will always retain a gravitational pull on his heart but who can never be brought back to him. He has a sister he wishes he were closer to, but otherwise, at the time of the cases related in the novels, the detective is utterly alone.As Mike Ashley said of the Factory series in his must-have 2002 non-fiction resource, The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Modern Crime Fiction, “Although these books are bleak and noisome--I Was Dora Suarez has been called “one of the most gruesome books ever published”--they are also honest and portray a life too many traditional crime novels try to avoid. [Raymond] painted the underbelly of London in all its shades of black.”
This isolation is key to understanding the inner psychology of the Factory novels. The detective literally lives through his work, and feels most fully engaged and connected to the world when he can inhabit the lives of the victims. Although the detective alludes to other cases, ones not related in the novels, the reader has the sense that he wasn’t as invested in those victims. He can recite the details, but there’s no emotional life to them.
But the cases in front of him--they’re all about an inner life, of bringing back the dead. In each case, to greater and lesser extents, the detective reanimates the victims, attempts to identify with them, attempts to honor them, to memorialize them through his efforts.
I hope all those shades will be shown clearly over the next month.
Our series about Raymond’s work was the brainchild of British Rap Sheet contributor Gordon Harries, who recruited a stellar collection of notable novelists to ponder the strengths and bleaknesses of the five Factory books. Tomorrow’s opening entry, about He Died with His Eyes Open, was penned by Tony Black, the Australia-born Edinburgh author of the Gus Dury series (Gutted and Paying for It). It will be followed by Diamond Dagger Award winner John Harvey’s reconsideration of The Devil’s Home on Leave; a tribute to How the Dead Live, written by Scottish novelist Russel D. McLean (The Good Son); a fervent defense of I Was Dora Suarez, composed by Cathi Unsworth (Bad Penny Blues); and No More Heroes author Ray Banks’ admiring essay about Dead Man Upright, the “anticlimax to the Factory series.”
Thanks again to Harries for his inspiration and dogged efforts to make this project happen. And I hope that Rap Sheet readers will enjoy the results, and learn from them as much as I did in reading all of these excellent essays.
READ MORE: “Obituary: Robin Cook,” by John Williams (The Independent); “Derek Raymond and a Few Upcoming Titles,” by Glenn Harper (International Noir Fiction).
Neville on Top
Last week, author and blogger Declan Burke presented the six contenders on his shortlist for the Crime Always Pays Irish Crime Novel of the Year Award. Today he’s announced the winner of that competition, chosen in a vote among Irish crime writers. It’s The Twelve, by Northern Irish wordsmith Stuart Neville (a book published in the States as The Ghosts of Belfast).
The runners-up, in this order, were: The Lovers, by John Connolly; Dark Times in the City, by Gene Kerrigan; Winterland, by Alan Glynn; All the Dead Voices, by Declan Hughes; and Fifty Grand, by
Adrian McKinty.
“Personally,” Burke remarks in today’s post, “I think all six are terrific novels, and I’m not just woofing: I think that any country, regardless of its size, should be proud of producing six novels of that quality (in any genre or none) in a given year. The bar has been well and truly raised, and it augurs well for 2010.”
The runners-up, in this order, were: The Lovers, by John Connolly; Dark Times in the City, by Gene Kerrigan; Winterland, by Alan Glynn; All the Dead Voices, by Declan Hughes; and Fifty Grand, by
Adrian McKinty.
“Personally,” Burke remarks in today’s post, “I think all six are terrific novels, and I’m not just woofing: I think that any country, regardless of its size, should be proud of producing six novels of that quality (in any genre or none) in a given year. The bar has been well and truly raised, and it augurs well for 2010.”
Tuesday, December 01, 2009
45 Reasons to Go on Living
Yeah, yeah, I know: 2009 has almost a month yet to go, and if you’re like me, you’re still reading books that were published earlier this year. At a time when folks are contemplating which novels in print they can wrap up and hand out for the holidays, is it really appropriate 
to begin talking about works of crime-fiction that won’t be available in stores for weeks, or even months? Well, of course it is. Since when did the fact that your to-be-read pile is already high enough to justify attaching aircraft warning beacons stop you from coveting books not yet in print?
Just to whet your appetite for what’s coming down the pike in 2010, I trolled today through several sites that compile lists of soon-to-be-published crime, mystery, and thriller fiction. For new U.S. releases, I turned primarily to Ashley McConnell’s The Bloodstained Bookshelf and the new hardcover releases page at Stop, You’re Killing Me! It seems that, among the treats we can all look forward to in the near future are the American version of Martin Edwards’ Dancing for the Hangman (December); Jonathan Gash’s new Lovejoy novel, Faces in the Pool (December); Alone, by Loren D. Estleman (December); I, Sniper, by Stephen Hunter (December); Paganini’s Ghost, by Paul Adam (January); The Godfather of Kathmandu, by John Burdett (January); Skin, by Mo Hayder (January); The First Rule, by Robert Crais (January); The Lock Artist, by Steve Hamilton (January); Gone ’til November, by Wallace Stroby (January); Requiem in Vienna, by J. Sydney Jones (January); Stuart M. Kaminsky’s last Porfiry Rostnikov novel, A Whisper to the Living (January); City of Dragons, by Kelli Stanley (February); Print the Legend, by Craig McDonald (February); A Night Too Dark, by Dana Stabenow (February); Let It Ride, by John McFetridge (February); The Fourth Assassin, by Matt Beynon Rees (February); Do They Know I’m Running? by David Corbett (March); Blood Hina, by Naomi Hirahara (March); The Weed that Strings the Hangman’s Bag, by Alan Bradley (March); The Spellmans Strike Again, by Lisa Lutz (March); Martin Cruz Smith’s new Arkady Renko novel, The Golden Mile (March); The Bad Kitty Lounge, by Michael Wiley (March); The Black Cat, by Martha Grimes (April); Eight for Eternity, by Mary Reed and Eric Mayer (April); and A River in the Sky, by Elizabeth Peters (March).
In search of forthcoming British titles of note, I surfed over to the Future Releases section of Karen Meek’s Euro Crime site, and then picked up a few more ideas from the Web pages of London’s Goldsboro Books. They turned me on to A Murder on London Bridge, by Susanna Gregory (December); Bad Penny Blues,
by Cathi Unsworth (December); A Question of Motive, by Roderic Jeffries (December); The Last 10 Seconds, by Simon Kernick (January); Loss, by Tony Black (January); The Man from Beijing, by Henning Mankell (January); Deadly Communion, by Frank Tallis (January); Death by Design, by Barbara Nadel (January); Blue Lightning, by Ann Cleeves (February); Deathwatch, by Jim Kelly (February); The Detective Branch, by Andrew Pepper (February); The Snowman, by Jo Nesbø (March); 61 Hours, by Lee Child (March); A Room Swept White, by Sophie Hannah (March); Stephen Booth’s seventh Ben Cooper/Diane Fry mystery, Lost River (April); Free Country, by Jeremy Duns (April); The Bulgarian Claimant, by Jason Goodwin (April); The City of Lost Girls, by Declan Hughes (April); and R.N. Morris’ third Porfiry Petrovich investigation, A Razor Wrapped in Silk (April).
Whew! I haven’t even seen most of these novels, much less been able to crack their spines, and I’m already feeling overwhelmed by the prospect of having to read them.
to begin talking about works of crime-fiction that won’t be available in stores for weeks, or even months? Well, of course it is. Since when did the fact that your to-be-read pile is already high enough to justify attaching aircraft warning beacons stop you from coveting books not yet in print?Just to whet your appetite for what’s coming down the pike in 2010, I trolled today through several sites that compile lists of soon-to-be-published crime, mystery, and thriller fiction. For new U.S. releases, I turned primarily to Ashley McConnell’s The Bloodstained Bookshelf and the new hardcover releases page at Stop, You’re Killing Me! It seems that, among the treats we can all look forward to in the near future are the American version of Martin Edwards’ Dancing for the Hangman (December); Jonathan Gash’s new Lovejoy novel, Faces in the Pool (December); Alone, by Loren D. Estleman (December); I, Sniper, by Stephen Hunter (December); Paganini’s Ghost, by Paul Adam (January); The Godfather of Kathmandu, by John Burdett (January); Skin, by Mo Hayder (January); The First Rule, by Robert Crais (January); The Lock Artist, by Steve Hamilton (January); Gone ’til November, by Wallace Stroby (January); Requiem in Vienna, by J. Sydney Jones (January); Stuart M. Kaminsky’s last Porfiry Rostnikov novel, A Whisper to the Living (January); City of Dragons, by Kelli Stanley (February); Print the Legend, by Craig McDonald (February); A Night Too Dark, by Dana Stabenow (February); Let It Ride, by John McFetridge (February); The Fourth Assassin, by Matt Beynon Rees (February); Do They Know I’m Running? by David Corbett (March); Blood Hina, by Naomi Hirahara (March); The Weed that Strings the Hangman’s Bag, by Alan Bradley (March); The Spellmans Strike Again, by Lisa Lutz (March); Martin Cruz Smith’s new Arkady Renko novel, The Golden Mile (March); The Bad Kitty Lounge, by Michael Wiley (March); The Black Cat, by Martha Grimes (April); Eight for Eternity, by Mary Reed and Eric Mayer (April); and A River in the Sky, by Elizabeth Peters (March).
In search of forthcoming British titles of note, I surfed over to the Future Releases section of Karen Meek’s Euro Crime site, and then picked up a few more ideas from the Web pages of London’s Goldsboro Books. They turned me on to A Murder on London Bridge, by Susanna Gregory (December); Bad Penny Blues,
by Cathi Unsworth (December); A Question of Motive, by Roderic Jeffries (December); The Last 10 Seconds, by Simon Kernick (January); Loss, by Tony Black (January); The Man from Beijing, by Henning Mankell (January); Deadly Communion, by Frank Tallis (January); Death by Design, by Barbara Nadel (January); Blue Lightning, by Ann Cleeves (February); Deathwatch, by Jim Kelly (February); The Detective Branch, by Andrew Pepper (February); The Snowman, by Jo Nesbø (March); 61 Hours, by Lee Child (March); A Room Swept White, by Sophie Hannah (March); Stephen Booth’s seventh Ben Cooper/Diane Fry mystery, Lost River (April); Free Country, by Jeremy Duns (April); The Bulgarian Claimant, by Jason Goodwin (April); The City of Lost Girls, by Declan Hughes (April); and R.N. Morris’ third Porfiry Petrovich investigation, A Razor Wrapped in Silk (April).Whew! I haven’t even seen most of these novels, much less been able to crack their spines, and I’m already feeling overwhelmed by the prospect of having to read them.
Nobody Does It Like Bogey
Which will be made clear during TCM’s monthlong celebration of Humphrey Bogart’s cinematic work, beginning tomorrow. Learn more in the Thrilling Days of Yesteryear blog.
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