It’s Time to Mann Up

(Editor’s note: Today we welcome to The Rap Sheet Brendan M. Leonard, a writer living in New York City, whose work has previously been published in CHUD.com. His favorite films noir include Out of the Past, Nightmare Alley, and Bunny Lake Is Missing.)

For fans of film noir, there’s no better place in New York City than Film Forum, the arthouse theater that’s celebrating its 40th anniversary this year. Alongside its recent Akira Kurosawa and Victor Fleming retrospectives, the theater has also highlighted lesser-known pictures in the film noir genre. I found myself blown away by the psychosexual and haunting The Prowler (a 1951 movie that is reportedly author James Ellroy’s favorite), and Nightfall, a quick-witted 1957 chase film from Jacques Tourneur (Out of the Past) that makes for better summer viewing than most of what’s showing in theaters right now. The Prowler is not yet available on DVD, but Nightfall was just released in that format by Columbia Pictures. (Film Forum also ran the restored 50th-anniversary print of Breathless, which is not so much a film noir as it is a movie by and about people who have seen every film noir in history.)

Film Forum continues its streak of greatness with its Anthony Mann retrospective, playing through next Tuesday, July 13. The films by Mann (shown above) can be divided into three periods: his early work, which consisted largely of B-pictures and film noirs; his Westerns, known for adding rich subtext and themes to the genre; and his epics, including films such as El Cid and The Fall of the Roman Empire.

Mann is a director who understands obsession, one of the touchstones of classic noir. Whether it’s Jimmy Stewart in Winchester ’ 73 (1950) or Dennis O’Keefe in Raw Deal (1948), Mann’s protagonists seem to be driven, brutal men. What impresses me most about Mann’s work, though, is the way he illustrates those characters’ propulsion, as well as the “crushing inevitability of fate” (a very familiar noir theme), through his cinematography. Raw Deal, supported by a chilling performance from Raymond Burr, is filled with such shots. The landscapes of other pictures such as Winchester or The Naked Spur (1953) are gorgeous, sweeping, but they’re also overwhelming and oppressive--especially when they are viewed on the big screen.

Watching these pictures for the first time, as I have, illustrates just how influential a director Mann was. Raw Deal contains a scene that filmmaker Fritz Lang would later borrow for The Big Heat (1953). Winchester ’73 is a proto-Searchers that might be as good as director John Ford’s 1956 classic. T-Men (1947) stands alongside The Naked City (1948) as an early police procedural whose grandchildren are the CSI and Law & Order TV franchises. Mann also directed He Walked by Night (1948), which features a young Jack Webb of Dragnet fame--and the ’50s run of NBC-TV’s Dragnet owes a huge debt to directors like Mann and Naked City’s Jules Dassin.

Film Forum has already screened, during its retrospective, a large chunk of Mann’s Westerns and two of his noirs. But there’s still a chance for you to catch the rest. Many of these films are double features, which is quite the bargain in New York’s $13-a-ticket world. You can find a full listing at FilmForum.org, but here are some highlights of what’s coming up:

The Tall Target (July 9 and 10)--A “period noir” about two men who team up to stop Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. Tall target, get it?

Desperate (July 11)--Another villainous performance from Raymond Burr of Raw Deal and Rear Window fame.

He Walked by Night (July 11)--Although uncredited, Mann shot the major scenes for this procedural about a cop killer.

The Great Flamarion (July 12)--Flashbacks and backstage drama abound in this tale of murder at a Mexico City vaudeville joint.

Strange Impersonation (July 12)-- Brenda Marshall stars as a girl whose plastic surgery makes her look like a murder victim ... whose death she is then accused of engineering. That bizarre premise makes this film a can’t-miss.

Reign of Terror (July 14)--“Period noir,” part II, this time set in Robespierre’s 18th-century France.

Side Street (July 14)--The screw-ups of a disgruntled postal worker lead to what is, by all accounts, an epic chase through lower Manhattan.

“The Most Famous Train on Earth”

This Sunday, July 11, PBS-TV will premiere the first of three new episodes in its Hercule Poirot series as part of PBS’ Masterpiece Mystery! That episode--based on Agatha Christie’s famous 1934 novel, Murder on the Orient Express, and starring David Suchet as the brainy Belgian sleuth--will begin at 9 p.m. ET/PST. Episodes to follow will be based on Third Girl (July 18) and Appointment with Death (July 25).

To build up interest in these new Poirots, PBS has assembled a documentary, David Suchet on the Orient Express, which will air tonight (check you local TV listings for start times). Mystery Book News supplies some background on this TV special:

Commissioned by ITV, the documentary will touch on the incident in 1929 that inspired Christie’s book: the train was stuck in a snowdrift for 10 days, 60 miles outside Istanbul, carrying a full complement of passengers who survived only with the assistance of nearby Turkish villagers.

With insight and charm, Suchet leads an epic journey on this iconic train. From London, he travels to Calais in northern France to board the Venice Simplon Orient Express, and begins his 2,000-mile journey through six countries, with a breathtaking stop in Venice on the way to Prague. The delightful Suchet revels in the artistry and beauty of the train, and explores its attraction for Agatha Christie, who used it as the setting for one of her most recognized novels. [The documentary] will also use archive material to tell the train’s history from its inaugural “Express d’Orient” journey across Europe in 1883 to its role in both world wars.

You can watch a brief preview here.

The Shatman Strikes!

Have you been keeping up with the William Shatner Blogathon, spearheaded by Stacia Jones of She Blogged by Night? Anyone who’s fascinated (or even repulsed) by the former star of Star Trek and T.J. Hooker will likely find something of interest in this Web-wide encomium.

A master list of posts can be found here. Jones’ own contributions are available here. The blogathon runs through Friday of this week.

A Nose for Murder

When two renowned food and wine authorities (Mario Batali and Anthony Bourdain) join a pair of prominent writers (Jim Harrison and Jonathan Raban) in praising a debut mystery novel, it must be something especially delicious. Indeed, Dead in the Dregs (Counterpoint), by Seattle-based restaurateur Peter Lewis of Campagne restaurant fame, lives up to its jacket blurbs in spades.

Lewis’ hero, Babe Stern, was once a rising young star of the wine industry in and around California’s Napa Valley. Now he’s retired from grape-growing, and runs a bar and grill called Pancho’s. “If I’d thought of the wine scene as silly before,” he says to himself, while reading an industry journal, “by now it was ridiculous ... [L]ifestyle was the new thing: wine country decor, wine country entertaining, wine country markets, wine country bistros. I was reminded why I’d quit the game and congratulated myself, even if it had been a downwardly mobile slide.”

But when an acerbic and powerful wine critic named Richard Wilson disappears after a tasting at Napa Valley’s Norton Winery, his sister Janie looks to her ex-husband, Babe, for assistance. She is worried because so many people hated her brother. “They don’t hate him. They’re afraid of him,” Stern tells her. He knows, however, that “Wilson could make or break a wine, make or break a fortune, there had to be at least a dozen people who would happily stuff his face in a barrel, and that was just between Napa and Sonoma ...”

Then Wilson’s body is found floating in a vat at Norton, and Babe’s search turns into a hunt for the killer. Warned off by the police but desperate to please his ex-wife, Stern digs further and finds himself following his only lead--to France’s Burgundy region. In cellars and tasting rooms from Beaune to Nuits-Saint-Georges, Babe tracks the troubled son of a family of vignerons, one of the few people in the winery on the night that Wilson died. But the wine families of the Côte d’Or are secretive and entangled, and the further Stern goes to discover the truth, the more he becomes their ultimate target.

Lewis’ love of the California wine country comes across strongly throughout this gripping book, which I hope is just the start of a series. Babe tells us at one point:

I decided to take the long route home. I wanted to soak in the air, the light. With harvest nearing completion, the vineyards looked skeletal, their leaves golden and browned. I took the Rutherford Cross past the Silverado Trail and followed Sage Canyon Road around Lake Hennessey. ... The sun played on the hills as I cut through to Pope Valley. The farms were peaceful here, and its tranquility seemed a world away from the monstrous egos and petty vendettas that gripped Napa.

Dead in the Dregs also contains an occasional and welcome zing of humor, which any wine-loving mystery reader should appreciate. “Delicious,” says Babe, tasting a famous but overpriced vintage (paid for by his dinner host). “It had been a while since I had tasted this caliber of French juice. The scent of violets rose to my nostrils ... the flavors unfurled on my tongue. All the pretentious vocabulary came flooding back and suddenly seemed perfectly appropriate: sweetly roasted game laced with black cherries and chocolate.”

This is a novel to sip and savor.

Final Call for Kastner

I was saddened to read about the passing of legendary film producer Elliott Kastner. He died in London on June 30 at age 80, after an extended battle with cancer.

Fans of thrillers and crime fiction have no doubt stumbled across many of the films Kastner made during his career. He adapted several novels by Alistair MacLean for the screen, including Where Eagles Dare (1968) and Breakheart Pass (1975). He was also behind the 1966 movie Harper, based on Ross Macdonald’s first Lew Archer novel, The Moving Target (1949), and turned three of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe investigations into films. Kastner deserves credit as well for the 1987 adaptation of William Hjortsberg’s novel Falling Angel into Angel Heart. One of his less well-known but certainly interesting projects was director Donald Cammell’s The White of the Eye (1987), which was based on a 1983 work by Andrew Klavan (writing with his playwright brother, Laurence, as “Margaret Tracey”), with an added splash of Russ Meyer.

The New York Times offers its own précis of Kastner work:

Mr. Kastner, who began his professional career as a literary agent, was known for drafting accomplished novelists and playwrights into the screenwriting trade. He produced films from novels by Vladimir Nabokov (“Laughter in the Dark,” 1969) and Iris Murdoch (“A Severed Head,” 1970).

His first film, “Bus Riley’s Back in Town” (1965), about a young man who returns to his small town from Navy service to find that his former girlfriend has married another man, was made from an original screenplay by the playwright William Inge (though Inge took his name off the finished product). For his next (made with Jerry Gershwin, one of his frequent producing partners), he bought the rights to “The Moving Target,” a detective novel by Ross Macdonald, and hired an up-and-coming novelist, William Goldman, to write his first solo screenplay. The finished film, “Harper,” starred Paul Newman in one of his star-making roles. (Mr. Goldman went on to win two Oscars for screenwriting, for “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and “All the President’s Men.”)

“Where Eagles Dare” (1968), a World War II drama starring Richard Burton, about the rescue of an American officer captured by the Nazis, was the first screenplay written by the novelist Alistair MacLean. “Rancho Deluxe” (1975), a comic western starring Jeff Bridges, was the first screenplay by the novelist Thomas McGuane, and the first of three films on which Mr. Kastner collaborated with Mr. McGuane. The others were “92 in the Shade” and “The Missouri Breaks,” which starred Marlon Brando as a highly eccentric killer hired to dispatch a band of cattle rustlers led by Jack Nicholson.

Mr. Kastner relished many of his partnerships. He made three movies with Brando and five with Burton, including “Equus” (1977), based on the psychological stage drama by Peter Shaffer, who wrote the screenplay.

In the 1970s, Mr. Kastner also indulged an affection for noir material, producing (with others) adaptations of three of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe novels: one with Elliott Gould as Marlowe, a contemporary update of “The Long Goodbye” (1973), and two with Robert Mitchum, “Farewell, My Lovely” (1975)--a remake of the 1944 film “Murder, My Sweet” with Dick Powell--and “The Big Sleep” (1978), another remake, set in England, of the 1946 original with Humphrey Bogart.

The full Times piece can be found here.

Bullet Points: Independence Day Edition

• Don’t forget: ThrillerFest V begins this Wednesday in New York City.

• The fact that I’ve already read three books this year by South African crime novelists makes me wonder if blogger Peter Rozovsky is correct, when he writes that “South Africa is the next Scandinavia” when it comes to turning out mystery fiction worthy of international acclaim.

• If you haven’t experimented with African crime fiction yourself, Michael Stanley (the joint pseudonym of Michael Sears and Stanley Trollip) has put together a list of 10 top African crime novels for The Guardian. I’m pleased to say that I have at least read half of them. (Hat tip to Campaign for the American Reader.)

• I read about this year’s winners of the infamous Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest with more than a bit of disappointment. I really thought that last year’s winners were funnier.

• The latest short-story offering in Beat to a Pulp is a World War I-era yarn titled “The Path to Brighton,” written by David Pilling.

• Congratulations to Martin Edwards on his 1,000th blog post.

• “I think ‘Write what you know’ is one of the worst pieces of advice you can give an aspiring writer,” opines Timothy Hallinan in the blog You Would Say That, Wouldn’t You? “Unfortunately, it’s also one of the most common pieces of advice given to aspiring writers.” Read more here.

• In an interview for the Gutter Books blog, author Bill Crider answers questions about Texas messes, Anna Nicole Smith’s biology education, and the future of e-books.

• Meanwhile, John Connolly talks with Powell’s Books about his latest novel (The Whisperers), his most unusual job, his fondness for Ross Macdonald’s work, and more.

• New books by Marcus Sakey and Andrew Williams, Jeffery Deaver’s James Bond future, and the rise of crime fiction in both New Zealand and (again) South Africa are among the topics addressed in Mike Ripley’s droll new “Getting Away with Murder” column.

• I’m glad I could do my part in the search for old Batman tie-in novels.

• A programming note from Hard Case Crime editor Charles Ardai: “This coming Friday--July 9th--is the premiere of Hard Case Crime’s first ever TV series, Haven, on SyFy. It airs at 10 p.m. on Fridays in the U.S.; check your local listings for times and dates if you’re in another country. The series is based on our bestselling book of all time, Stephen King’s The Colorado Kid, and I’ve been fortunate to get to work on it as a writer and producer. Yes, being a SyFy show it contains more supernatural elements that you’d normally associate with Hard Case Crime--but it’s also a mystery show at its core (the main characters are an FBI agent, a cop, and a criminal), and I promise we’ve got some great stories up our sleeves.” I must remember to tune in.

• Count me among those people who aren’t impressed with Wonder Woman’s less revealing new costume. Yes, it beats her horrendous “mod” makeover of the 1960s, but the new suit is rather dowdy compared with her previous star-spangled swimsuit. Steve Holland puts on offer a couple of WW’s old accessories, just for nostalgia’s sake.

• I often refer in The Rap Sheet to posts found in another blog, Thrilling Days of Yesteryear, by Ivan G. Shreve Jr. But I’ve never known much about Mr. Shreve--until now. Click here for an interview he’s done with the Only Good Movies Blog.

• Don’t expect to see a 23rd James Bond film at any time soon.

• For Bookgasm, Doug Bentin looks back fondly at the short stories of Herman Cyril McNeile, who is better known under his nom de plume, “Sapper,” as the creator of military officer turned private detective Hugh “Bulldog” Drummond.

• As support increases for the new Affordable Care Act, the Obama administration has launched what seems to be a very useful new health-care reform Web site called Healthcare.gov.

• Wow!

• Karin Slaughter picks half a dozen “best books” for Britain’s Express newspaper. Does anyone else, though, find it strange that all of those volumes have been published within the last couple of years? Surely, she has some older favorites ...

• I love quirky history books.

• The author of Mysterious Manners has realized that while he may think he chooses reading material based on the author, plot, and title, what really draws him to one book over another could simply be “nice-size type, a good amount of leading, and fairly short chapters.” Read his whole essay here.

• Elizabeth Foxwell alerts me to the print comeback of Hildegarde Withers, “the angular schoolteacher with a talent for solving homicides.”

• The theme of the latest edition of Mystery Readers Journal is paranormal mysteries. Editor Janet Rudolph provides that issue’s lengthy table of contests here.

• I wasn’t aware that Argosy, one of my maternal grandfather’s favorite magazines, had generated so many books with its serialized fiction.

• To improve my waistline, it seems I ought to move back to Colorado.

• And this seems appropriate for Independence Day: A poll of 238 presidential scholars, ranking the best and worst presidents in American history, brings good news for the ghosts of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson. Other White House occupants, though, including the last one, fare much less well.

Unholy Water

You might remember my particularly glowing review of reporter-turned-novelist Michael Koryta’s Envy the Night, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Best Mystery in 2008. “You can’t always tell a book by its cover blurbs,” I wrote back then, “but the ones decorating Envy the Night bear the crystal ring of truth and admiration. Michael Connelly and George Pelecanos are not often generous to a fault, but their recommendations of Koryta’s first standalone thriller--after three books in his excellent series about Cleveland private eye Lincoln Perry--might just make you rush out to obtain it, and then lock yourself in a room until you finish reading the thing.”

Koryta’s Perry books were splendid slices of Midwestern noir. And having just finished reading his new non-series novel, So Cold the River (Little, Brown), I’m aglow once more with admiration for this young author.

Koryta has ventured into Stephen King territory this time out, and seems to have been heavily influenced by The Shining. But his book is an homage, not a rip-off. Cinematographer Eric Shaw is back home in Chicago after a disappointing stint in Hollywood, now making ends meet by shooting videos of weddings and parties. But a rich client offers him $20,000 to travel to the resort town of West Baden, Indiana (just down the road from Larry Byrd’s hometown of French Lick), the childhood home of her dying father-in-law, Campbell Bradford, and shoot a video history of his life. She gives Shaw an old bottle of Pluto Water, the once-famous mineral water of West Baden. The bottle is mysteriously cold and smells almost too bad to drink. But Shaw--obviously forgetting the Alice in Wonderland message “Drink Me,” which meant just the opposite--takes a swig, and his troubles begin: headaches, weird visions from some forgotten past, the whole ball of wacko characters and events that make him start to doubt his sanity. A sudden flurry of leaves stirred by the wind changes into the roar of a train and then to the haunting chords of a violin. And, like The Shining, So Cold the River offers a wonderful old hotel as its centerpiece.

“So cold,” says the dying old man to Eric on their first meeting.

“What was?”

“The river.”

“What river are we talking about?”

Eric was staring into the man’s face and unable to believe that any drama school on earth had ever produced a talent like this. He wasn’t acting. He was lost in some frozen memory. One that terrified him.

Toward the end of the book, an old weather watcher named Anne McKinney tells Shaw, “You’re too worried about figuring out what you can believe about all off this, and then figuring out how to control it. That’s how most people approach their lives. Way I feel, though, after a lot of years of living? Not much of what matters in the world is under your control. ... So stop trying to control this, and start listening to what it’s telling you.”

Excellent advice, in an equally excellent work tinged with supernatural elements. And judging by a preview of his next book, The Cypress House, which was included in my Kindle version of So Cold the River, Koryta has only begun to experiment with ghost stories.

Trainspotting with the Nazis

In January Magazine today, British author and critic Mike Ripley reviews Potsdam Station, the fourth World War II-era thriller by David Downing. Like the previous books, this one stars Anglo-American journalist John Russell, his actress girlfriend, Effi Koenen, and his son, Paul. Of Postdam’s captivating plot, Ripley writes:

Russell has not seen or been able to contact his beloved Effi or his estranged son for more than three years, but both are alive and still in Berlin, though far from safe: the teenage Paul serving in an anti-aircraft battery, Effi living under a false identity and now actively involved in the anti-Nazi resistance.

Once he learns that the Americans and British will leave the taking of Berlin to the Russians, Russell is frantic with worry, having no illusions about the treatment awaiting German prisoners and female civilians at the hands of their vengeful conquerors. He flies to Moscow in an attempt to have himself “embedded” (as we would now say) as a journalist with the advancing Soviet war machine, knowing that his request is something of a long shot. It is, but by striding into the offices of the NKVD and demanding to see his former Soviet “handler,” Russell wins his chance.

He will be allowed to enter Berlin, not with the Red Army but actually ahead of it, and to search for Effi and Paul, but only after he has helped a Soviet team secure scientific papers from a Nazi research center--highly secret documents which will help Russia’s atomic research. Therein lies another balancing act of conscience for Russell--providing, that is, he survives the parachute drop into enemy territory, Allied bombing, Russian shelling and the NKVD hit man with orders to leave no loose ends.

You’ll find the full review here.

Time Out for the Fourth

By the decree of organizer Patti Abbott, the Web-wide “forgotten books” series is officially taking this Friday off, in honor of America’s Independence Day weekend. The Rap Sheet will follow suit. We’ll wait until next Friday, July 9, to post our 100th entry in that series.

However, a few other blogs are plowing ahead with their own contributions to this series. Among the few crime-fiction-oriented works being touted elsewhere today are Possessions, by Julia Kristeva; The Kissed Corpse, by Asa Baker; Shroud of Canvas, by Isobel Lambot; Red Dragon, by Thomas Harris; and the deliciously named The Telltale Tart, by Peter Duncan.

Fireworks, Festivities, and Felonies

Janet Rudolph has posted a list of crime and mystery novels in which the Fourth of July--Independence Day--“plays a major part.”

Second Elimination Round

Back in May, we brought you the longlist of 20 nominees for the 2010 Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award. Readers were invited to vote online for their favorites, and today comes an announcement of the eight finalists. They are:

• In the Dark, by Mark Billingham (Little, Brown)
• The Surrogate, by Tania Carver (Little, Brown)
• A Simple Act of Violence, by R.J. Ellory (Orion)
• The Crossing Places, by Elly Griffiths (Quercus)
• Dead Tomorrow, by Peter James (Pan Books)
• Gallows Lane, by Brian McGilloway (Pan Macmillan)
• Doors Open, by Ian Rankin (Orion)
• Child 44, by Tom Rob Smith (Simon & Schuster)

From this shortlist, readers are now being asked once more to state their preferences. Click here to cast your ballot.

According to press materials, “The eventual winner will be decided by combining the result of this public vote with the votes of a panel of expert judges.” We’ll learn that name of the victorious novel on Thursday, July 22--the opening night of the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate, England. Its author will receive £3,000 in cash, plus a handmade, engraved beer barrel provided by Theakstons Old Peculier.