The Story Behind the Story: “The Ninth Step,” by Gabriel Cohen

(Editor’s note: In this latest installment of our “Story Behind the Story” series, we welcome to The Rap Sheet novelist Gabriel Cohen. A resident of Brooklyn, New York, he has written for The New York Times, Poets & Writers, the New York Post magazine, and assorted other publications. His first novel, Red Hook (2001), was nominated for an Edgar Award, and he has since penned three more featuring Brooklyn South homicide detective Jack Leightner. The newest of those is The Ninth Step, which was released last month by Minotaur Books. In the essay below, Cohen recalls some of the genuine historical incidents that inspired The Ninth Step.)

A few years back, when I was working on a waterfront article for The New York Times, I took a boat tour of little-known spots in New York Harbor. A brief note in the accompanying leaflet mentioned that the El Estero, a munitions ship packed with millions of pounds of explosives (and docked next to other similarly laden ships), caught fire there back in 1943. It casually noted that “An explosion would have destroyed Jersey City, Bayonne, northern Staten Island, and much of lower Manhattan.”

My jaw dropped--I couldn’t believe that I had never heard of this incident. When I began to research the story, I discovered that my beloved city had very narrowly escaped what could have been the worst disaster in human history. Next to the ships crammed with explosives stood railroad cars, also full of bombs. And one of the biggest oil refineries in America was just a stone’s throw away. What’s more, the harbor was crammed with a convoy of warships ready to head out the next day to the European theater of World War II. If the El Estero had exploded, the resulting blast would have sent a shock wave out across the harbor, killing hundreds of thousands of people and smashing those ships, and possibly even changing the course of the war (because of all those munitions that would never have arrived).

Like all Americans, and especially all New Yorkers, I can never forget what happened here on September 11, 2001. I breathed the ash in the air that terrible morning, and tried to donate blood. And I felt awed and humbled by the courage of the first responders who rushed into those burning towers when everyone else was fleeing.

Now I was learning that a similar act of incredible heroism had taken place here 58 years earlier. A small band of young Coast Guard crewmen was charged with supervising the dangerous loading of the munitions ships. When the fire broke out, they were in their barracks getting ready to go on Easter leave. As sirens began to blare, their commander asked for volunteers to fight the fire. A number of them immediately jumped on a truck and headed for the harbor.

Later on, I traveled up to Ossining, New York, and interviewed Seymour Wittek, an 88-year-old former Coastie who had been one of those astonishingly brave youngsters. Along with a few longshoremen and the crews of a couple of local fireboats, they boarded the burning ship. The blaze was down in the engine room; Wittek told me that they could feel its heat in the soles of their shoes as they raced across the upper deck. Those boys were not naïve: they had been solemnly warned of the danger of such a fire, and told of a massive explosion that had happened under similar conditions in Halifax, Nova Scotia, back in 1917. (It sent railroad cars flying more than a mile through the air.) Even so, they stayed to fight when others would have run.

(If you’re wondering, as I did, why you’ve never heard of this incident, there may be a couple of reasons. First of all, unlike 9/11, it was a disaster that didn’t happen. Second, it occurred during the middle of a war, and the U.S. Navy was understandably wary of releasing information about the vulnerability of such an important port.)

I was deeply moved by the story, and thought it would make a terrific scene for one of my novels. I write about a Brooklyn South homicide detective named Jack Leightner. Jack grew up in Red Hook, a neighborhood right on the waterfront, and his father was a longshoreman. As I was dreaming up the plot of The Ninth Step, the fourth novel in the series, it occurred to me that it would be exciting to place Jack’s father aboard the burning El Estero.

That wasn’t the only true story that made it into my new novel. Throughout his life, my detective protagonist has been profoundly influenced by the murder of his younger brother back in the 1960s. I decided to revisit that story in The Ninth Step, and once again I began to research the real background. 1965 was an amazingly eventful year: civil-rights activists were sprayed with fire hoses down in Selma, Alabama, college kids burned draft cards in Berkeley, and Watts went up in flames. An astronaut took the first walk out into the black void of space, and the first U.S. combat troops sailed off to Vietnam. Locally, the world’s fair took place in Flushing Meadows, the Beatles rocked Shea Stadium, and Malcolm X was assassinated up in Washington Heights.

And Red Hook? I interviewed natives about what life was like on their streets that year. I learned about youth gangs such as the Black Chaplains and the Kane Street Midgets, how to make a homemade “zip gun,” and how the local Mafia capos essentially replaced cops and politicians in the running of the neighborhood. I heard about Armando the Dwarf, who guarded the entrance to the Gallo brothers’ headquarters, and about “Leo,” the mangy lion they kept in their basement to intimidate victims of their loan-sharking operation. That may sound funny, but I also heard first-hand about the pain and suffering those mobsters wreaked on their fellow citizens.

Last but definitely not least, I included a real story even closer to home. In all of the books in my series I’ve loved to explore genuine Brooklyn neighborhoods and real ethnic communities. I live just several blocks away from an area known as Little Pakistan. As I began to explore the neighborhood, I learned that its population had dropped by almost half after 9/11. Why? That seemed like an interesting mystery. As I dug deeper, I learned about overzealous government raids back in those panicky days, and of disturbing events that occurred at a detention center in nearby Sunset Park. I felt a powerful sense of chagrin and sadness about the mistreatment of a lot of my neighbors.

All too often, research can weigh down a novel, sitting in the reader’s stomach like undigested food. But what all of the events above have in common is that they’re heavily freighted with some of the deepest human emotions: fear, shame, awe, and courage. My challenge was to weave the real incidents into the histories of my fictional characters, but--above all--it was to take the emotions I felt when I learned about them, and to transplant those into my characters’ hearts.

Bullet Points: Hither and Yon Edition

• Although it’s not a long clip, Crimespree Cinema (in addition to several other sites) has posted a thrilling teaser for the Tom Thorne series being put together by Sky1 and based on UK author Mark Billingham’s popular succession of crime novels. The series will star David Morrisey, and as Crimespree Cinema notes, Sky1 has so far bought rights only to Sleepyhead and Scaredy Cat, the first two Thorne books.

• If I’m not mistaken, this is a first for the Webzine Beat to a Pulp: Its story offering this week comes in the form of a poem, “Collision,” by British writer David King.

• Congratulations to A Shroud of Thoughts on its sixth anniversary.

• Speaking of anniversaries, the British periodical CADS (Crime and Detective Stories) is celebrating 25 years in business. Martin Edwards and Xavier Lechard remind us of CADS’ significance.

• For New York magazine, editor and bookshop owner Otto Penzler picks his 10 favorite thriller novels, from Charles McCarry’s The Tears of Autumn to Eric Ambler’s familiar A Coffin for Dimitrios. (Hat tip to Campaign for the American Reader.)

• R.I.P., David Markson.

• Is The Sweeney really “the best cop show ever”?

• TV Shows on DVD finally has the box art and amended release date for Ellery Queen--The Complete Series. Fans can now look for it on September 28. The Rap Sheet has more about that 1975-1976 series.

• Meanwhile, this week will bring the release of Tales of the Gold Monkey--The Complete Series. For those who don’t remember, Gold Monkey was a 1982-1983 ABC-TV show, launched after the first Indian Jones film, Raiders of the Lost Ark, proved to be such a success. It starred Stephen Collins as a former fighter pilot who, in the 1930s, finds cargo to ferry, romance to partake of, and adventures to test his mettle in the South Pacific. Gold Monkey was not a bad program, if I remember correctly. It could be well worth seeing again. UPDATE: Gerald So reviews Gold Monkey here.

• Mannix--then and now.

• Jeffery Deaver talks more about his forthcoming James Bond novel.

• Here is new, longer trailer for the Hawaii Five-O remake. Still the best thing about it, though: Grace Park in a bikini.

• Don’t forget about this month’s Deadly Ink conference ...

• ... or the New England Crime Bake, coming up in November.

• Maybe it’s time that BP (British Petroleum) redesigned its logo to reflect the company’s new reputation as a rampant and arrogant polluter of the Gulf of Mexico.

• The company should at least take to heart its own warnings.

• Swedish author Henning Mankell talks with Kate Connolly of The Guardian about his recent experience of being captured by Israeli armed forces aboard a relief ship bound for the Gaza Strip. He’s anything but contrite. “I think the Israeli military went out to commit murder,” says the 62-year-old crime novelist. “If they had wanted to stop us they could have attacked our rudder and propeller, instead they preferred to send masked commando soldiers to attack us.”

• Interviews worth your reading: Attica Locke (Black Water Rising) talks with The Independent; Craig Sisterson quizzes Martin Edwards (The Serpent Pool); J. Sydney Jones engages Colin Cotterill in a conversation about the latter’s Dr. Siri Paiboun series; Euro Crime chats up Leigh Russell (Road Closed); Publishers Weekly fires a few questions at Dennis Tafoya (The Wolves of Fairmount Park); Ed Gorman turns the spotlight on Simon Wood (Terminated); and Sons of Spade quizzes Steven Gore about Graham Gage, the star of his new novel, Final Target.

• Looking back on the roots of the Stieg Larsson phenomenon.

• Astonishing as this seems, Arizona manages to look even worse than it did. And so does scandal-plagued South Carolina.

• Himan Brown, a radio pioneer who created the famous Inner Sanctum Mysteries and The CBS Radio Mystery Theater, as well as myriad other programs, passed away last Friday at the ripe old age of 99. UPDATE: There’s more about Brown in A Shroud of Thoughts.

• Here’s something I didn’t know until today: Elizabeth Montgomery, the American actress best known for her nose-twitching role in the TV sitcom Bewitched, was the daughter of Robert Montgomery, who starred in that uniquely shot 1947 film, The Lady in the Lake, adapted from Raymond Chandler’s novel of the same name.

• Will actor Daniel Craig, most recognizable nowadays for playing James Bond, Agent 007, in a pair of movies, take one of the biggest roles in an English-language adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s bestselling first novel, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo?

• From In Reference to Murder: “The sequel to the recent Sherlock Holmes movie with Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law seems to have been given a release date: December 16, 2011. So mark your calendars now.”

• Jason O’Mara, the Irish actor who’d hoped to star in an ABC-TV series based on Chandler’s Philip Marlowe stories, before capturing the lead in the short-lived American version of Life on Mars, now looks to be headed back to the small screen in another time-traveling drama, Steven Spielberg’s Terra Nova.

• Just short of her 90th birthday, and after a trailblazing career in which she covered 10 U.S. presidents, it’s sad to see White House reporter Helen Thomas leave the stage on such a sour note, following her recent comments about how Israeli Jews should “get the hell out of Palestine” and “Go home. Poland. Germany. And America and everywhere else.” However, it was probably inevitable. It’s only too bad Thomas’ sudden retirement can be seen as scalp-taking by right-wingers given to no less offensive remarks, but who won’t be following her out the door.

• And Steven Hockensmith drops a few clues about his fifth novel starring cowboy brothers Otto “Big Red” Amlingmeyer and Gustav “Old Red” Amlingmeyer. He writes: “A detectiving contest brings Big Red and Old Red to Chicago during the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. Unfortunately, someone commits a dark deed in ‘the White City’: The man behind the competition is found dead. Old Red knows it’s murder, but no one seems to believe him but his brother and an old friend who could hold the key to the mystery--and their future.” I, for one, look forward to reading more.

Swift Action, Over Too Soon

“And so we come to the end, the third book in Swedish writer Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy,” begins Tony Buchsbaum in his review--published today in January Magazine--of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest. He goes on to note that

Hornet’s Nest has all the signature elements that have made this series so magnetic and unforgettable. The dark government plot. The twisty action sequences. The crisp, abrupt dialogue. The technology. But most of all, this book is all revenge, all the time.

You can read all of Buchsbaum’s critique here.

Now with Extra Pulp

Members of the organizing committee for PulpFest, a celebration of classic pulp fiction and artwork, have announced the names of 16 nominees for the 2010 Munsey Award. That commendation is presented annually to “a deserving person who has given of himself or herself for the betterment of the pulp community, be it through disseminating knowledge about the pulps or through publishing or other efforts to preserve and to foster interest in the pulp magazines we all love and enjoy.” Among this year’s contenders are graphic and Web designer Chris Kalb; Howard Wright, the longtime publisher of the Doc Savage fan magazine, The Bronze Gazette; and Don Herron, creator of San Francisco’s famous Dashiell Hammett Tour.

The winner will be declared during this year’s PulpFest, which is scheduled to take place from July 30 to August 1 in Columbus, Ohio.

The Middle Way

The 11th annual Mayhem in the Midlands crime-fiction conference was held this past Memorial Day weekend, May 27-29, in Omaha, Nebraska.

The conference guest of honor was Deborah Crombie, author of the Duncan Kincaid and Gemma James series; the toastmaster was Marcia Talley, who writes the Hannah Ives and Chesapeake Crimes series; and the Caroline Willner Special Guest was Steve Hamilton, author of the Alex McKnight series and several standalones, including his newest novel, The Lock Artist.

Unlike the schedules of past years, this conference began a day early, on Thursday, May 27, and eliminated the customary closing Sunday morning brunch. This was done to accommodate travel plans, but it doesn’t matter to this writer what the schedule ultimately ends up being. Mayhem in the Midlands is simply too good to pass up, no matter the chronology of events.

As has been the case in the past, there were many highlights to this exceptionally well-organized and thoroughly informative conference. Kudos to Sallie Fellows, Manya Shorr, and Evelyn Whitehill, as well as the unnamed others who pulled it all together.

My personal highlights? They began on Friday morning, as I stood at the entrance to the Embassy Suites hotel lobby, collecting my thoughts for a panel discussion I was supposed to participate in that afternoon. I glanced to my side and saw novelist Alex Kava heading toward the entrance. I introduced myself, and we talked about writing for a few minutes. It was a special moment for me, because I make no bones about admiring this Nebraska-born author’s books (among them, 2007’s Whitewash). I later attended Kava’s panel, “Clinging to the Edge of the Page: The Art of the Thriller,” which was moderated by Michael A. Black, a Chicago police officer and the author of many thrilling police novels, including Hostile Takeovers. Besides Kava and Black, the other panelists were Shannon Baker and Robert Doerr. Baker made the case that something has to happen on nearly every page, or shortly thereafter, if a writer wants to keep tensions high. Black mentioned that when he employs real-life events in his fiction, he likes to mix the settings up, so the connections are less obvious.

My own panel later that Friday afternoon was called “The (Not So) Glamorous Life of a Writer,” which was moderated by Michael Allen Dymmoch, and also featured David Walker and Nancy Pickard. (Those panelists are pictured above in the same order, with yours truly on the far right.) Pickard and Walker had the glamorous part down, recounting their first trips to New York City to either meet with agents, or to attend the Edgar Awards banquet. The not-so-glamorous part? We all know that: write every day, no matter what.

On Saturday, I attended “Research: What You Didn’t Expect to Find,” which was moderated by Minneapolis-based author Gary Bush. Other panel members were Steve Hamilton, Chris Everheart, and Mark Bouton. Hamilton recounted some of the research he did for The Lock Artist. He stated that the best safe-crack artist today is not a criminal but rather a man who flies around the world, opening safes for various individuals or corporations for a fee. Do the math. Hamilton made the logical reference that you have to have constant practice to be the best, and criminals are either in jail or only occasionally trying to crack safes. I later asked Bouton, a former FBI agent who was part of the team that arrested Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, whether or not there was a third person, besides McVeigh and Terry Nichols, behind that 1995 bombing. Conspiracy theories revolve around a third man with either Hispanic or Middle Eastern features. But Bouton stated that there were “only two.”

I took part in a second panel discussion on Saturday, this one titled “Good to be Bad: Is It More Fun to Write the Hero or the Villain?” Moderated by Sue Senden, it also featured J. Mark Bertrand, Carl Brookins, and Radine Trees Nehring. If memory serves me correctly, while we all stated that we enjoyed writing a kick-ass villain, we mainly preferred writing the good guys. At one point Senden asked us if we had murderers in our families, and all of us said “no”--with the exception of Bertrand, who told the story of a bloody suit hanging in his grandmother’s closet. I suspect that tale will make it into one of his books someday.

There were non-panel activities too, of course, including a bus tour of the seedier side of Omaha. That excursion focused on the historical grittiness of this Midwestern city in its formative years. It seems there were lots of prostitutes, illegal gambling operations, and booze-running in Omaha’s past. After being shown the location of some of the houses of ill repute, I know I’ll never see the town the same way again.

During the conference, I also had the opportunity to talk with several authors, among them Sean Doolittle, who is currently working toward deadline on his next book. He recently moved to Council Bluffs, Iowa, which is just to the east of Omaha, across the Missouri River. Subsequently, I took a trip to Council Bluffs myself, though not for literary reasons--I went to visit the town’s floating casinos. And I won!

Finally, I must thank the bartender at the Sisters in Crime buffet dinner on Friday night, who was generous in pouring my whiskey--several times.

Next year, Mayhem in the Midlands is scheduled to take place from May 26 to 28, with Laurie R. King as guest of honor, and S.J. Rozan as toastmaster. Just as important as supporting independent bookstores, it is vital to support smaller conferences such as Mayhem. I hope to see you in the Midwest next year.

Cops Out

Following his previous weekend-long celebrations of The Saint and Sherlock Holmes, The Tainted Archive’s Gary Dobbs is now deep in the midst of a tribute to TV cop shows from both sides of the Atlantic. Already posted are pieces applauding Columbo, Fabian of the Yard, The Andy Griffith Show, Starsky & Hutch, 77 Sunset Strip, The Professionals, and Sheriff of Cochise. Also included in Dobbs’ package is an interview with a real-life law enforcer, Paul Bishop, who--in addition being an author and blogger--is also in charge of the LAPD’s Mission Division Special Assaults Unit. Bishop lists his favorite small-screen cop series and talks about which he thinks have been the most realistic.

Click here to keep up with the series, which will continue through Sunday.

As an addendum to Dobbs’ project, writer Evan Lewis has posted a full episode of 77 Sunset Strip (starring Efrem Zimbalist Jr.) in his own blog. Titled “ The Widescreen Caper,” that ep was originally broadcast on October 14, 1960, during the show’s third season.

Counting Down to the Anthonys

I was away from Rap Sheet headquarters all day yesterday, so missed announcing the rundown of this year’s Anthony Award nominees. But for the record, here they are.

Best Novel:
• The Last Child, by John Hart (Minotaur)
• The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death, by Charlie Huston (Ballantine Books)
• The Girl Who Played with Fire, by Stieg Larsson, translated by Reg Keeland (Quercus/Knopf)
• The Brutal Telling, by Louise Penny (Minotaur)
• The Shanghai Moon, by S.J. Rozan (Minotaur)

Best First Novel:
• The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, by Alan Bradley (Delacorte)
• Starvation Lake, by Bryan Gruley (Touchstone)
• A Bad Day for Sorry, by Sophie Littlefield (Minotaur)
• The Ghosts of Belfast (aka The Twelve), by Stuart Neville (Soho Press/Harvill Secker)
• In the Shadow of Gotham, by Stefanie Pintoff (Minotaur)

Best Paperback Original:
• Bury Me Deep, by Megan Abbott (Simon & Schuster)
• Tower, by Ken Bruen and Reed Farrel Coleman (Busted Flush Press)
• Quarry in the Middle, by Max Allan Collins (Hard Case Crime)
• Starvation Lake, by Bryan Gruley (Touchstone)
• Death and the Lit Chick, by G.M. Malliet (Midnight Ink)
• Air Time, by Hank Phillippi Ryan (Mira)

Best Short Story:
• “Last Fair Deal Gone Down,” by Ace Atkins (from Crossroad Blues; Busted Flush Press)
• “Femme Sole,” by Dana Cameron (from Boston Noir, edited by Dennis Lehane; Akashic Books)
• “Animal Rescue,” by Dennis Lehane (Boston Noir)
• “On the House,” by Hank Phillippi Ryan (from Quarry: Crime Stories by New England Writers, edited by Kate Flora, Ruth McCarty, and Susan Oleksiw; Level Best Books)
• “Amapola,” by Luis Alberto Urrea (from Phoenix Noir, edited by Patrick Millikin; Akashic Books)

Best Critical Non-fiction Work:
• Talking About Detective Fiction, by P.D. James (Bodleian Library/Knopf)
• The Line Up: The World’s Greatest Crime Writers Tell the Inside Story of Their Greatest Detectives, edited by Otto Penzler (Little, Brown)
• Haunted Heart: The Life and Times of Stephen King, by Lisa Rogak (Thomas Dunne Books)
• Dame Agatha’s Shorts: An Agatha Christie Short Story Companion, by Elena Santangelo (Bella Rosa Books)
• The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith, by Joan Schenkar (St. Martin’s Press)

Winners will be announced during a special awards brunch to be held on Sunday, October 17, as part of Bouchercon in San Francisco.

The Book You Have to Read: “Caleb Williams,” by William Godwin

(Editor’s note: This is the 97th installment of our ongoing Friday blog series highlighting great but forgotten books. Today’s selection comes from British crime and historical novelist Andrew Taylor, last year’s winner of the Crime Writers’ Association’s Cartier Diamond Dagger Award for lifetime achievement and the author of The Anatomy of Ghosts, which is due out this coming September from Michael Joseph/Penguin.)

If today’s readers and writers of crime fiction look over their shoulders, who are lurking in the shadows behind Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Wilkie Collins? Edgar Allan Poe, of course, and Charles Dickens. As it happens, those two authors met once, in Philadelphia in March 1842, and by a quirk of fate we know one of the subjects they talked about--a third writer, William Godwin, who had died six years before.

It’s an odd, maybe significant coincidence. Godwin is best known today for his novel Caleb Williams, which stands in the shadows behind the shadows--it’s a book that invisibly underpins the genre, The Rap Sheet, and much else. You can even argue that, with Caleb Williams, Godwin invented crime fiction, and that he was the first noir author.

Noir? It’s a big claim, but it holds up.

A cozy crime story takes place in an ideal world where the detective restores perfection by rooting out the murderer who has briefly imposed a blemish on it.

Noir, on the other hand, has the opposite dynamic. It’s set in a fundamentally corrupt world that’s wall-to-wall blemishes, a place where the investigator, for all his flaws, is the best thing available to a morally upright individual. A noir hero can never make the world a wonderful place. Faced with a crime, he can only do his best, according to his lights, and hope he’ll maybe survive until next time. It’s a job description for Caleb Williams.

William Godwin was remarkable by any standards. He was an English anarchist at the time of the French Revolution (which he naturally supported). His first wife, Mary Wollstonecraft, wrote a seminal feminist text. His daughter Mary married poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and wrote Frankenstein (1818). His stepdaughter had an illegitimate child with Lord Byron. Godwin wrote novels partly to make money and partly as vehicles for his philosophical beliefs.

He published Caleb Williams in 1794, five years after the Revolution. It’s not a whodunit, and it’s only a mystery for the first third of the story. But it centers on a crime and murder in Britain, and on the methods and consequences of investigating that murder. It’s a novel of considerable and often uncomfortable psychological penetration. And it’s full of incredibly vivid and realistic snapshots of the world in which its author lived. It’s one of the prototypes of the crime novel not only in the way it concerns a murder but also--as Poe himself noted--in the way it was constructed, from effects back to causes.

The rest of this piece describes the bones of the story. But the bare summary won’t spoil your enjoyment if you read the novel afterwards. It’s the body of this book that counts, not the bones that support it.

Caleb Williams is poor but intelligent. Orphaned at 18, he’s given a job as a secretary by the local squire, Ferdinando Falkland, a man of great refinement who is drawn into a feud with a boorish neighbor. When that neighbor is murdered, Falkland is the chief suspect--but he’s so gentlemanly that his fellow magistrates can’t believe he could commit a sneaky little slaying. Two local farmers are hanged instead.

In the second part of the book, Caleb investigates the murder and, with growing horror, realizes that Falkland not only killed the neighbor but let two innocent men hang for his crime. For many authors, the revelation of the real murderer would be the climax. In fact we’re not even halfway through, and the real climax is yet to come.

At this point, the narrative switches: until now, Caleb has pursued Falkland; but now it’s the other way round. Falkland treats his hapless secretary with increasing hostility: it’s almost as if he transfers the hatred he feels for himself to Caleb, the man who won’t let him forget what he has done.

Caleb’s attempt to expose his master backfires, and he’s flung into jail without trial. His experiences as a prisoner are described in harsh, documentary detail. At last Caleb escapes. But he’s friendless and penniless. The resources of the state and of society are in league against him. And the worst is still on the horizon.

In the last part of Godwin’s novel, Caleb is on the run. Falkland mobilizes the full weight of government authority to hunt down the entirely innocent secretary--and everyone else joins in. There are even broadsheets and ballads that portray him as a master criminal.

Caleb falls in with a gang of thieves living wild in a ruined forest mansion presided over by the landlady from hell. It’s interesting how Godwin describes these dangerous criminals--some are also victims, and deserve a bit of sympathy despite their crimes; but others are essentially corrupt, a sort of lawless mirror image of the sinister authority figures who control the country for their own benefit.

With the world against him, Caleb ranges across England, taking a variety of disguises. He becomes a beggar, a farmer’s son, a watchmaker, and a math teacher, an Orthodox Jew--and he even ekes out a living as a hack writer on Grub Street, which will strike a grimly familiar chord for many of The Rap Sheet’s contributors.

Despite his ingenuity, his perseverance and his abilities, Caleb can never escape the past: sooner or later Falkland or his avenging agents catch up with him. The great irony here is that Caleb, who has investigated and solved a crime, finds that no one will believe him: on the contrary, he’s treated as the criminal.

Finally, Caleb’s story reaches its end. In fact two of them, neither of which is exactly cheery. One of the endings is the standard, published version; but an earlier, gloomier variant was published in the 1960s, and is included in the excellent Penguin edition of this novel.

Neither conclusion makes for easy reading. Caleb is a flawed hero, just as Falkland is a flawed villain. Everyone is guilty. In the end, everyone has to pay for his sins.

William Godwin created a monster he did not entirely understand: Caleb Williams grew in ways he neither planned nor expected, and the result is too powerful, too quirky, to fit neatly inside the philosophical envelope he planned for it.

In other words, Godwin set out to write a philosophical tract and ended up inventing Noir.

Warming Up Some Cold Cases

After a couple of weeks under the able direction of George Kelley, Patti Abbott--back from vacation--has once more taken her seat as manager of the Friday “forgotten books” series. In addition to Andrew Taylor’s endorsement on this page of Caleb Williams, by William Godwin, today’s crop of unjustly neglected crime-fiction-related works includes: 77 Sunset Strip, by Roy Huggins; Eight Black Horses and Fiddlers, by Ed McBain; Cassidy’s Girl, by David Goodis; A Night at the Cemetery, by Anton Chekhov; The Big Bow Mystery, by Israel Zangwill; Death in Dreamtime, by S.H. Courtier; A Cool Breeze on the Underground, by Don Winslow; and the non-fiction book, Julian Symons Remembered: Tributes from Friends, compiled by John Walsdorf and Kathleen Symons.

Abbott has a full list of today’s participating writers, plus a trio of additional books worth remembering, in her own blog.

And because I didn’t make note of last Friday’s entries in this series, here’s a recap of some of those write-ups for your delectation: Drink to Yesterday, by Manning Coles; The Slavers, by Richard Telfair; This Is a Bust, by Ed Lin; The Greenway, by Jane Adams; Girls on Sin Street, by Larry Maddock; The Cambridge Murders, by Adam Broome; The Valley of Creeping Men, by Rayburn Crowley; Ritual in the Dark, by Colin Wilson; A Nun in the Closet, by Dorothy Gilman; and Of All the Bloody Cheek, by Frank McAuliffe; plus a collection of the vintage comic strip Secret Agent X-9, by Dashiell Hammett and Alex Raymond, and a Secret Agent X-9 novel, Kingdom of Blue Corpses, by the pseudonymous Brant House; and a biography, Erle Stanley Gardner: The Case of the Real Perry Mason, by Dorothy B. Hughes.

Past Tense? Or Just Tense?

When I implied in my recent post about the thriller 61 Hours that protagonist Jack Reacher seemed to be dead at book’s end, I neglected to take into account the amazing staying power of author Lee Child. A short new note on Child’s Web site reads:

Does Reacher survive the explosive ending of 61 Hours? You bet your sweet bippy!

Are we going to tell you anything more about the story of Worth Dying For? Not yet we’re not.

OK, Jack. But couldn’t you at least have called the lovely Susan Turner in Virginia? Or is Worth Dying For (due for release in Britain in September, and in the States in October) about an earlier Reacher adventure?

Making the Leap

You might remember writer Michael Harris for the sharp mystery reviews he did for the Los Angeles Times. Now comes word of Harris’ next endeavor from our mutual friend, author John Shannon:

Mike is doing pretty well with his writing. He’s got a small publisher for his magnum opus--The Chieu Hoi Saloon: an anarchist outfit in [San Francisco] called PM Press that Gary Phillips turned him on to (and [that] is reissuing Gary’s The Jook).

Who says the publishing industry is dead?

Gone Quietly

Details are sketchy, and the news media don’t seem to have any confirmation of this yet, but Chicago author Libby Fischer Hellmann dropped the following note into the DorothyL listserv earlier today:

I’m sorry to pass along the news that Eleanor Taylor Bland passed away this afternoon. She had been ill for a long time. I don’t know any of the arrangements yet, but will post them when I do.

The 65-year-old Bland was born in Boston, Massachusetts, but was living most recently in Waukegan, Illinois, on Lake Michigan north of Chicago. According to Wikipedia, she was “diagnosed with cancer in the 1970s and given two years to live, [but] she overcame the disease.” She later worked as an accountant. Bland was the author of 13 police procedurals--beginning with Dead Time (1992), and concluding with A Dark and Deadly Deception (2005)--that featured African-American Chicago police homicide detective Marti MacAlister. Synopses of most of her books can be found here. And there’s a good Mystery One Bookstore interview with Bland here.

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

UPDATE I: Although the Chicago Tribune gets her age wrong (she was born on December 31, 1944, so could only have been 65), it at least confirms the news that Bland has passed away.

UPDATE II: According to The Gumshoe Site, author Bland passed away “after a long battle with cancer.”

READ MORE: “Eleanor Taylor Bland, 1944-2010,” by Libby Fischer Hellmann (The Outfit); “A Glimpse of Eleanor Taylor Bland,” by Elizabeth Foxwell (The Bunburyist); “Marti MacAlister: Good Cop, Bad Cop--Fact vs. Fiction,” by Eleanor Taylor Bland (Mystery Readers Journal).

Fiddling with Neros

The Wolfe Pack, a New York-based fan organization, has announced its nominees for the 2010 Nero Award, “presented each year to an author for the best mystery written in the tradition of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe stories.” The contenders are:

• The Fleet Street Murders, by Charles Finch
• The Crack in the Lens, by Steve Hockensmith
• Faces of the Gone, by Brad Parks

(Curiously, all three of these titles come from St. Martin’s Minotaur.)

The winner will be named during the Black Orchid Banquet, which is traditionally held on the first Saturday of December in Manhattan.

Teach Your Children Well

Having grown up in a household filled with books, and with parents and grandparents who were dedicated readers, it seems so obvious to me that having written works around promoted my boyhood interest not only in reading, but in learning, in general. However, it may take myriad academic studies to convince other people of the same thing. If so, they should look to these findings, reported in Salon:

A study recently published in the journal Research in Social Stratification and Mobility found that just having books around the house (the more, the better) is correlated with how many years of schooling a child will complete. The study (authored by M.D.R. Evans, Jonathan Kelley, Joanna Sikorac and Donald J. Treimand) looked at samples from 27 nations, and according to its abstract, found that growing up in a household with 500 or more books is “as great an advantage as having university-educated rather than unschooled parents, and twice the advantage of having a professional rather than an unskilled father.” Children with as few as 25 books in the family household completed on average two more years of schooling than children raised in homes without any books.

According to USA Today, another study, to be published later this year in the journal Reading Psychology, found that simply giving low-income children 12 books (of their own choosing) on the first day of summer vacation “may be as effective as summer school” in preventing “summer slide”--the degree to which lower-income students slip behind their more affluent peers academically every year. An experimental, federally funded program based on this research will be expanded to eight states this summer, aiming to give away 1.5 million books to disadvantaged kids.

Perhaps the most intriguing part of the USA Today article comes at the very end, where one Chicago schoolteacher tells the reporter that the importance of getting books into the house “seems so simple, but parents see it differently.” They’re as “excited” as their kids are when the books come in the door. It’s not that the parents are hostile or even indifferent to books. Most likely, books and reading feel like the privilege and practice of an unfamiliar world: a resource that’s out there somewhere, but not entirely accessible.

I started out reading comic books, then progressed quickly through teenage novels to adult works (science fiction first; later, general fiction and crime novels), and have since amassed thousands of volumes--and read many more besides. Don’t even bother trying to tell me my family’s bookish example didn’t make me the voracious reader I am today.

Parents who make books available to their young children are seeding their desires for lifetime learning and promoting rich imaginations. There’s absolutely no substitute.

“You See, the Thing That Makes Sense of This Crazy World Is Rock ’n’ Roll”

I may actually be the last person in the whole English-speaking world to see the 2009 film Pirate Radio (released in Great Britain as The Boat That Rocked), but it was worth the wait. What an outstanding, if underappreciated bit of moviemaking.

The story, set in 1966, has to do with misfit, rebel disc jockeys, who--much to the disgruntlement of Her Majesty’s government--are broadcasting contemporary pop music from a ship anchored in the North Sea to listeners tired of hearing tamer tunes every time they switch on their radios. The picture is alternately hilarious and poignant, and for my money, it’s thoroughly worth watching, if only for the performances of Bill Nighy (as the station’s dissolute boss), Nick Frost (as unlikely sex symbol “Dr. Dave”), and Chris O’Dowd (whose DJ character, “Simple Simon” Swafford, is a nice but naïve guy who loses his wife of 17 hours--portrayed by Mad Men’s January Jones--to a more famous record-spinner). Philip Seymour Hoffman is not bad, either, as the egotistical DJ, The Count, but his character isn’t as satisfyingly nuanced as some of the rest of them.

One of the real standout scenes from the filming of Pirate Radio, though, was left behind on the cutting room floor. Fortunately, it’s among the extras available on the DVD release of this picture, and can be found as well on YouTube (at least for the time being). In that four-and-a-half-minute segment, Welsh actor Rhys Ifans, who plays megastar DJ Gavin Canavagh (a Tom Petty lookalike if ever there was one), explains to the station’s newest young member (Tom Sturridge) why he left radio broadcasting for a while ... and what brought him back. It’s a scene that actually encapsulates the movie’s entire message--that rock ’n’ roll is so important, it can’t be ignored or silenced--and yet was excised to reduce the run time. A mistake, if you ask me.

I think I could watch this scene 100 times in a row, and smile the whole while. I only wish I knew who plays the “old Guatemalan guy” and Canavagh’s thoroughly entrancing girlfriend.



If you’re ever stuck for what movie to rent for an otherwise quiet Saturday night, or even for a date with somebody who’s not afraid to be seen laughing, try Pirate Radio.

READ MORE: “And I Was Crazy to Think I Could Ever Leave It All Behind,” by Chris La Tray (Stumbling the Walk).

Caught in the Web

• The fourth installment of Crime Scene’s exceptional series about international mystery and crime fiction, this newest one focusing on works from Italy, has finally been published. Click here to see all of the installments so far, or go directly to the Italy edition. Bob Cornwell, who manages this series, tells me that information for the Italy edition “has been compiled by Gian Franco Orsi, an ex-director at Mondadori, respected anthologist, and a regular on the jury for the major Italian award for crime fiction, the Scerbanenco Prize.”

• Today marks the last chance for members of Mystery Readers International to nominate their favorite crime novels of 2009 for one of the annual Macavity Awards. Recommendations should be made in the following categories: Best Mystery Novel, Best Mystery First Novel, Best Mystery Biographical/Critical, Best Mystery Short Story, and Sue Feder Memorial Historical Mystery. Send your choices to Rudolph via e-mail. Winners will be announced in October during Bouchercon.

• Following up again on yesterday’s story about Henning Mankell being captured by Israeli armed forces during a raid on a flotilla of Turkish ships bound for Gaza with relief supplies, Canada’s National Post reports that the 62-year-old Swedish crime novelist “has been released by Israeli authorities after being detained.” Good news.

• Book covers that really should exist.

• It’s June 1, and that means it’s time for young men’s fancies to turn to ... bikinis! Specifically, swimwear of the “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini” variety.

• Forget about a Veronica Mars film. It’s dead.

• I haven’t yet listened to this myself, but on Sunday Evan Lewis posted a four-part 1950 radio dramatization of Raymond Chandler’s 1939 short story, “Pearls Are a Nuisance,” starring Ray Milland. Click here to listen.

• Irish novelist Declan Burke reviews the forthcoming film, The Killer Inside Me. He has more on Killer author Jim Thompson here.

• Just how far out of the mainstream are the right-wing Tea Partiers? Now they want to take away your right to elect U.S. senators!

• I have to admit, over the years I have become less and less interested in what shows the American television networks intend to debut in the fall. But there might be a few watchable programs among this year’s flood of series hungering our attention. I’ve already mentioned the rebooted Hawaii Five-O as a decent bet. And I’m willing to at least try J.J. Abrams’ Undercovers, even though it seems to borrow heavily from the 2005 theatrical release Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Meanwhile, TV Squad suggests a few other, non-crime shows that might not suck from the get-go. Good to know we have possibilities ...

• In case you missed this news before, Janet Rudolph lists the winners of the 2010 Lambda Literary Awards for lesbian and gay mysteries.

• This week’s short-story offering in Beat to a Pulp is called “Miles to Go.” It comes from Maine writer Edward A. Grainger.

• Get ready for a teenage Sherlock Holmes.

• A new edition of ThugLit has just been posted.

• The second series of Gary Phillips’ mystery Web comic, Bicycle Cop Dave, is set to begin tomorrow at the FourStory Web site. For those folks who aren’t familiar with this series, Phillips reminds us that it is “set in a downtown Los Angeles where gentrification displaces the working poor, where loft dwellers walk their little dogs past dark alleyways from which the sickly sweet smell of something else wafts, [and where] police officer David Richter patrols this mixed area on his trusty bike.” Responsible for the illustrations and lettering is Manoel Magalhães. If you would like to catch up by reading the first series of Bicycle Cop Dave, click here.

• Stefanie Pintoff submits her new historical novel, A Curtain Falls, to Marshal Zeringue’s infamous Page 69 Test. The results are here.

• U.S. Representative Mark Kirk, who was hoping to win President Obama’s old Senate seat from Illinois in November, seems to be having some trouble telling the truth.

• Wow! Last week marked 40 years since the release of Cotton Comes to Harlem, the film based on Chester Himes’ 1965 novel.

• Simon Wood talks with Paul D. Brazill about his dog, his aspirations to be a spy, and his brand-new novel of workplace rage, Terminated.

• And if you’ve never had a chance to explore New Zealand crime fiction, take note that Crime Watch’s Craig Sisterson is giving away a brand-new copy of Cut & Run, a well-reviewed debut thriller by Kiwi writer Alix Bosco. Sisterson says it’s “available to anyone around the world, no matter where you live (I will ship the prize internationally).”

“A Writer of the Old School”

If you were wondering over this last lazy weekend what had become of me, I hope your questions were answered by last evening’s posting, in my Killer Covers blog, of my rather lengthy (and thus hard to put together) profile of once-renowned author William Campbell Gault.

After being asked to write about Gault and half a dozen other wordsmiths for an upcoming encyclopedic work, 100 American Crime Writers, I started gathering and reading Gault’s novels, most of which feature one of two Southern California private eyes: Joe Puma or Brock Callahan. In addition, I began researching this author’s background, which is interesting in its own right. (He apparently managed a hotel in Wisconsin before embarking on a literary career.) When I found that my knowledge of Gault could never be contained within the limited space of the piece I had been commissioned to write, I decided to try my hand at a longer article for Killer Covers, and then use that as the starting point for my shorter encyclopedia entry.

One thing I haven’t been able to find out about the author, and which I hope somebody reading this post can supply, is the correct date of Gault’s death. It’s supposed to have been sometime in 1995, probably after March of that year, but I don’t find the date anywhere. If you know the answer to this question, please don’t hesitate to e-mail me here.

Meanwhile, why don’t you take a detour over to Killer Covers to learn more about an author who, though now largely forgotten, was once touted by Bill Pronzini as “a living legend.”

The Life of Ripley

Shots contributor Mike Ripley must find it exhausting, once a month, to sit down in front of a computer with his piles of notes and his vague memories of cocktail-hour conversations, and try to concoct the latest “Getting Away with Murder” column. It’s quite a diverse compendium of matters both trivial and trenchant.

Consider Ripley’s June column, for instance. In addition to remarks about new series on offer from Deryn Lake, Adrian Magson, and Peter Guttridge, he applauds the lengthy career of Lindsey Davis (whose 21st Marcus Didius Falco novel has been released), reveals the true identity of the mysterious author “Rebecca Chance,” cheers Reginald Hill’s forthcoming standalone (The Woodcutter), and teases us with news about the sequel to Stuart Neville’s award-winning debut novel, The Twelve (aka The Ghosts of Belfast). He also publicizes the latest crop of print-on-demand “Top Notch Thrillers” he’s editing for Ostara Publishing. Among those releases of too-good-to-be-forgotten works is Geoffrey Household’s Watcher in the Shadows (1960). Ripley tells me that making Watcher easily available again to readers is the satisfactory conclusion to “a personal quest for me, which began two years ago when I [wrote about that novel in a] Friday ‘Books You Have to Read’ [essay] for The Rap Sheet--a copy of which I sent to Household’s daughter to prove I was a fan!” (Never doubt the power of persistence.)

You will find all of Ripley’s tidbits and touts here.