Watch Those Light Fingers, Friends

As a book lover, it’s hard to resist this recent article in Britain’s Daily Telegraph, written by prison doctor Theodore Dalrymple. It begins:

Books have long been the object of desire, a desire that in intensity (among the susceptible) is stronger than for sex. Bibliomania, the obsession to possess books, was first recognised as a disease by doctors at the end of the Eighteenth Century, and many learned tomes--themselves now the object of bibliomanes’ desires--have been written on it.

Not long ago I bought a small volume, Book-lovers and Book-thieves, that suggested that the two types of person were very similar, and often one and the same, covetousness easily defeating honesty. Everyone knows that to lend a book, even to someone whom you know well, is to risk losing it. People who are scrupulously honest in all their other dealings don’t think that failure to return a book to its owner is theft in the usual sense of the term.

Perhaps it is the cultural importance of books that allows us to think this and to exculpate ourselves: that by appropriating a book that is not ours we are somehow serving the cause of culture, our own at any rate. By retaining such a book, do we not demonstrate that we appreciate it more than its owner, who hasn’t looked at it for years?

You’ll find the full piece here.

Hard Case Sticks to Its Guns

Yesterday’s news that depressed sales have convinced Dorchester Publishing, “one of the country’s oldest mass paperback publishers,” to give up producing traditional print volumes and instead make its titles available “in digital format and print-on-demand only” was more than a little surprising. It raised questions among many crime-fiction enthusiasts, because although Dorchester’s print list consists largely of romance works, it also distributes the Hard Case Crime line of new and classic hard-boiled fiction.

We asked Hard Case Crime editor Charles Ardai for his reaction to this news. He sent back the following note:

“As a lover of books, I am always sad to see a strong and long-lived publisher go through hard times, doubly so in this case because the people at Dorchester are good people and friends of mine. Triply so because the challenges they face to their business model are challenges all publishers, big and small, are facing these days. I wish book publishing were more robust than it is. I also wish peace would finally come to the Middle East. About equally likely, I’d say.

“As for Hard Case Crime, specifically, its fate is not particularly tied to this situation; I own Hard Case Crime, and if Dorchester is no longer in the business of printing and distributing our sort of books, we can hook up with another publisher or distributor who is. I am having conversations with several, and I imagine things will become clearer in terms of what options we have over the coming weeks and months. In the meantime, the two books of ours that are on our Web site but haven’t yet been published will no doubt be delayed, and when they do come out it’s likely to be in collaboration with a company other than Dorchester, but I do expect they will come out, and that other Hard Case Crime books will follow.

“One caveat: Even before this development with Dorchester, I’d chosen to scale back our list (from 13 books in 2009 to just 4 in 2010), not because of anything to do with Dorchester but simply because of my schedule. I’ve been publishing essentially a book a month for the past six years and doing the vast majority of the work involved singlehandedly, and it’s left me precious little time for anything else. (It’s a miracle I somehow managed to also write four books in that time!) More recently, I started working as a writer and producer on the TV series Haven, and that has also consumed a lot of my time--in the most wonderful way, it’s true, but there’s no way I could have done that and kept up the book-a-month schedule. And I have other books I want to write, other TV and film projects I’m working on, etc., etc.

“So Hard Case Crime is likely to continue for at least the next few years in a scaled-down form--a few books each year, not a ton. But as Spencer Tracy once said of Katharine Hepburn, what’s there will be cherce.

“That’s pretty much all there is to say at this point. I have no interest in turning Hard Case Crime into an e-book-only or e-book-first publisher--nothing against e-books (some of my best friends are e-books), but that would just defeat the point of Hard Case Crime, which is to celebrate a particular sort of physical artifact, the mid-century paperback crime novel. I’d be happy to explore other ink-on-paper formats, such as trade paper or even hardcover--back in the Golden Age there were all sorts of book sizes and shapes, include those weird, long military editions and various bigger and smaller trim sizes of paperback, and of course a wide range of hardcover styles, from pocket bible to leatherbound tome. But paper is paper and pixels are pixels and Hard Case Crime is about paper.”

Commenting on another mention of Dorchester’s news, this one in Bill Crider’s Pop Culture Magazine, Ardai notes that the Hard Case publishing delay caused by this development will most affect two titles “currently planned for this October and next March.” The first of those titles is apparently Max Allan Collins’ Quarry’s Ex, while the other is Christa Faust’s Choke Hold.

We wish Ardai and Hard Case good luck in resolving this situation.

UPDATE: Author Robert J. Randisi points out in the Comments section of this post something that has not been made clear in most of the reporting on Dorchester’s decision: that while the company will stop producing mass-market paperbacks (presently more than 80 percent of its business), it will continue to publish trade-size paperbacks, along with e-books. Unfortunately, all of Hard Case Crime’s many books are, by design, mass-market paperbacks.

READ MORE: “Hard Case Crime Update from Charles Ardai” (Bill Crider’s Pop Culture Magazine).

Wild About Harry

This week’s critique of the 1975 TV tie-in novel Harry O, in August West’s Vintage Hard-boiled Reads blog, reminded me of how much I enjoyed watching the 1974-1976 ABC-TV series on which it’s based. As some of you older Rap Sheet readers may recall, Harry O starred David Janssen (previously the peripatetic protagonist of The Fugitive) as Harry Orwell, a cop turned private eye in San Diego, California, a compassionate character more in line with Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer than some of the other, tougher sleuths who were popular on American TV screens during the 1970s. As Janssen told Francis Murphy, TV critic for the Portland Oregonian, in 1974:

Harry Orwell is a dropout private detective who lives in a small beachfront house on a disability pension, which sometimes slows him down a bit. ... He’s building a boat in his back yard. He gets a haircut when he feels like it, wears a suit he’s had for 20 years which he gets cleaned occasionally.

He has a bullet in his spine from his days on the police force, so he does a lot of stretching and groaning getting out of bed in the morning, something that comes to me naturally.

His base will be San Diego, which hasn’t been photographed much. It’s virgin territory as far as TV cameras go. He’s not an affluent man, so he won’t be traveling much. I like the role and I like the people involved in it.

By the end of the first season, Orwell had moved his boat and business to other beachfront digs in Santa Monica (apparently as a result of higher production costs in San Diego), and had traded in his original police contact, Lieutenant Manny Quinlan (Henry Darrow), for Lieutenant K.C. Trench (Anthony Zerbe). He had even acquired a curvaceous neighbor-cum-girlfriend, airline stewardess Sue Ingham (Farrah Fawcett-Majors), and repossessed his broken-down sports car, so could stop taking buses to meet prospective clients. But the tone of the series didn’t change. Orwell was an often irritable guy, who took nobody’s shit and, despite being impecunious as hell, rarely avoided helping somebody in real trouble. Together with James Garner’s The Rockford Files, Harry O ranks as one of the top two P.I series ever shown on television.

The video clips I have embedded here should remind fans of Janssen’s too-short-lived show what it was like. At the top of this post you’ll find the series’ original main title sequence, taken from its first regular episode, “Gertrude” (September 12, 1974). The rather haunting theme music was composed by Billy Goldenberg, but was later re-recorded with a harder edge. The clip featured below is the opening scene from “Smile Jenny, You’re Dead,” the two-hour, second Harry O pilot film, which co-starred actress-singer Andrea Marcovicci and a then very young Jodie Foster. (An earlier, one-hour pilot, titled “Such Dust as Dreams Are Made On” and featuring Martin Sheen, was broadcast in March 1973, but failed to impress ABC programming execs.)



That Harry O is still not available in DVD format is a crime, if you want to know my opinion.

A Gamble that Really Paid Off

As a businessman myself, I was most interested to hear an interview on one of BBC Radio 4’s financial reports this week with Mark Smith, the CEO of independent British book publisher Quercus. He was responding to news that his house’s release over the last three years of the late Swedish author Stieg Larsson’s “Millennium Trilogy” has significantly boosted Quercus’ bottom line. From Marketwire:

As a result of this strong trading, [Quercus’] unaudited management accounts for the six months ended 30 June 2010 show:

• Revenue of £15.0 million (compared with revenue of £5.55 million in the same period in 2009).

• Group operating profit for the period rising to £3.40 million (against a loss of £0.10 million in the same period in 2009).

• Improvement in Group margins, despite the continued decline in the UK book retail market and the wider economic and financial issues.

Mark Smith, chief executive of Quercus said: “Our results continue to be driven by double-digit growth across the business and, most significantly, by the continued success of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy, for which we own the global English language rights. These books represent the three best selling fiction titles in the UK over the last six months, and Larsson is the first to have sold more than 1 million Kindle e-books through Amazon.”

This is a very solid result, considering the general condition of the book-publishing world right now and the far less-optimistic news recently about bookseller Barnes & Noble being put up for sale.

Meanwhile, The Independent’s Nick Clark looks back at Quercus’ short history but dramatic growth as a player in publishing, and the role Larsson’s fiction had in its success:

“Before Larsson, we were constantly having to prove ourselves. As a new start-up we weren’t high up agents’ lists and had to work really hard to convince authors to sign. It was difficult,” Mr. Smith says. “Everyone dreams of signing the next blockbuster, the next Harry Potter--and we did. I’ve had colleagues who have been waiting 25 years for such a hit.”

The Millennium Trilogy, which started in 2005 with the release [in Sweden, of what would become The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo], has sold millions of copies and made Swedish author Stieg Larsson a household name. ... Movie deals, including an upcoming English remake set to star Daniel Craig, have helped turned Quercus into Britain’s fastest-growing publisher, emulating the success of Bloomsbury, which rocked the industry when it signed J.K. Rowling and the Harry Potter books.

Quercus started life modestly in 2004 after Mark Smith and Wayne Davies defected from Orion Publishing Group. Suitably, for a company that would later publish a phenomenon in crime fiction, they rented a small office round the corner from the fictional premises of Sherlock Holmes on Baker Street.

“I wanted to start my own business and foolishly thought it would be easy,” Smith recalls. The company focused on non-fiction books that could be nicely illustrated. Its first success [in 2008] was Universe [by Nicolas Cheetham], followed by Speeches that Changed the World [by Simon Sebag Montefiore].

But Smith had an appetite for risk and two years after launch moved into fiction, signing 10 titles from first-time authors. One of its early successes was The Tenderness of Wolves by Stef Penney, a mystery set in the snowy wastes of Canada in 1867. The novel won the Costa Book Award in 2007, driving it up the bestseller charts and allowing its publisher to expand. What had been a staff of 15 people has since grown to 40.

The turning point for Smith came when he recruited Christopher MacLehose, who had a reputation as a master at finding foreign fiction by writers such as Henning Mankell and Haruki Murakami and turning them into English-language hits.

MacLehose’s first signing was a Swedish crime thriller called Men Who Hate Women written by a journalist who had died in 2004. The deal handed Quercus the global English-language rights for the book that would turn into The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Larsson’s books had already “gone crazy” throughout Scandinavia, Mr. Smith said, with sales hitting 3 million in Sweden and outselling the Bible in Denmark.

But British publishers got cold feet. “That Larsson had passed away was a problem, as publicity is very important in getting a new book off the ground,” Smith explains. “There are tough themes in the book and many were put off by the title. It’s also rare that a European success translates into the English-speaking market.” While he regrets never meeting the author, he admits that “if he was alive, we probably would never have snapped up the rights.”

The hardback edition of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo failed to cause much of a stir when it was published in January 2008, selling around 8,000 copies. “The paperback that followed in the summer did okay but was nowhere near as popular as elsewhere in Europe,” Mr. Smith added.

The publisher failed to get the books into prominent positions in the shops, and some refused to stock it. One prominent retailer, who Mr. Smith declined to name, said its customers “don't like authors with funny names.”

Who’s laughing now, huh?

You can read The Independent’s full article here.

Come Again

My favorite (and, well, only) nephew is getting married tomorrow, and I’ve been enlisted in a number of associated activities. Therefore, I have less time for blogging at the moment. But I want to be sure to alert readers to today’s crop of “forgotten books” posts.

In the way of crime fiction, this Friday’s offerings include the following recommendations: The Eyes of Buddha, by John Ball; Cat Catcher, by Caroline Shaw; Yellowthread Street, by William Marshall; They Don’t Dance Much, by James Ross; 120 Rue de la Gare, by Léo Malet; Green Grow the Tresses-O, by Stanley Hyland; A Study in Terror, by Ellery Queen; One for Hell, by Jada Davis; Client, by Parnell Hall; The Immaculate Deception, by Iain Pears; The Rising of the Moon, by Gladys Mitchell; Homicide My Own, by Anne Argula; Ringmaster of Doom, by Brant House; Murder Among Children, by Tucker Coe; and Supernatural Sleuths, edited by Peter Haining.

You’ll find a full accounting of today’s associated posts in Patti Abbott’s blog, plus three other suggestions of oft-overlooked novels.

Lives on the Edge

There’s a great wave of international crime films--Red Riding, Farewell, A Prophet, the upcoming Animal Kingdom, not to mention that picture about the girl who did that thing one time (like nobody’s made that joke before)--making the rounds this year. But even amidst one of the worst summers ever for mainstream movies, you can still find a couple of features worth your time. One might be the best American film of the year; the other is just OK, yet still worth a look.

The Sundance Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic Film winner, Winter’s Bone, is the aforementioned “possible best American film of the year” (at least until The Town comes out this fall). Based on the novel of the same name by Daniel Woodrell, this picture finds 17-year-old Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) tracking her missing meth-dealer father through the Missouri Ozarks after the man puts their house up for bond without her knowledge. Described as “hillbilly noir” or “Ozarks noir,” the movie weaves noir tropes with simple, breathtaking scenes of life in an economically depressed region. Working with cinematographer Michael McDonough, director Debra Granik has created a beautiful-looking film that reminded me more than once of the communities in the Catskills where I lived for a time, or of the summer I spent in West Virginia.

Anyone who’s seen the kind of poverty depicted here will be moved by both the details and the film’s overall tone. A scene in which Ree investigates a burned-out meth lab gets equal time to one that finds Ree teaching her siblings how to hunt squirrels. Plot lies buried in scenes of people just scraping by, offering each other food or care--a care that extends to even the movie’s most horrifying moments. The film moves at a elegiac yet brisk pace, and when the story explodes in violence, it doesn’t feel unjustified.

More than the technical aspects of Winter’s Bone, what makes this film a must-see are the performances. It’s a motion picture about people living both in and out our time--the meth of the plot could just as easily have been moonshine--but Granik never makes her characters caricatures. Everyone in the cast appears authentic and lived-in; Granik used non-actors and locals in a few roles, which pays off wonderfully. There’s haunting weariness in these folks’ eyes and in their faces that lends the film an added authenticity. But it is actors Jennifer Lawrence and John Hawkes (playing Ree’s uncle, Teardrop) who anchor the film. Their work here is the best reason to watch Winter’s Bone. Yes, even more than to see legendary Garret Dillahunt as the local sheriff.

Lawrence is the Carey Mulligan (An Education) of 2010, a young actress delivering a subtle performance that refuses to make obvious choices. Ree Dolly could easily have been a stereotypical “tough chick” in the Lisbeth Salander mold; but instead Lawrence imbues her with a fear and naïveté that sells the performance. While Ree’s got a smart mouth like the great noir heroes, the fact that she’s a teenage girl adds another layer of menace to scenes in which she’s facing a roomful of bearded giants. Lawrence never lets you forget who Ree is--or who Ree wants to be, or thinks she already is--and it makes you root for her even more.

There’s already Oscar talk for Jennifer Lawrence’s performance and the film itself, and while both are deserving, I’d really like John Hawkes to pull a nomination for Best Supporting Actor. Hawkes is best known for his work as Sol Star on the HBO-TV series Deadwood, but I remember him too as the convenience-store clerk in From Dusk Till Dawn (he never said “help us!”) and Kenny Powers’ brother on Eastbound and Down. Those quiet, sometimes goofy roles were Hawkes’ bread and butter for a long time, which is why his performance as Uncle Teardrop--a convict looking out for himself until he can’t live with himself any longer--knocked me on my ass. He fills the role with a ferocity that I didn’t know he was capable of--and I love it when an actor can surprise me like that. Teardrop is a tough character. I’ve read comparisons to Omar Little from The Wire, and find them apt. Teardrop is a figure other characters are afraid of, and even though we don’t see much of his fearsomeness on-screen, Hawkes makes you believe it with his stillness and his posture and his eyes of pure steel. This is a man who has seen things, and that attitude carries over into the quiet moments as well. Weeks after watching Winter’s Bone, Hawkes’ final line stays with me, and I hope this leads to more work for him--because, gosh, he’s so good.

Not as first-rate as Jennifer Lawrence or John Hawkes is Bill Pullman in The Killer Inside Me. In fact, this onetime president of the United States isn’t very good at all, giving a ranting and raving performance as West Texas lawman Lou Ford’s lawyer only in a couple of scenes at the end of the picture. But if his acting isn’t the reason to see The Killer Inside Me, director Michael Winterbottom’s adaptation of the famous 1952 novel of that same name by Jim Thompson, it’s certainly one of them, if only because it left me wondering, Was Pullman bad, or did he loop around to being so bad, it’s good? I opted for the latter.

Fortunately, the film isn’t as bad on the whole as Pullman’s role in it. Too flawed to be a classic but strong enough to avoid a one-way trip on the failboat, Killer is, like Winter’s Bone, a movie that arrives from Sundance surrounded by much buzz. Or, in this case, much controversy over its graphic violence and nihilistic tone. Despite James Ellroy and serial-killer documentaries on A&E-TV being my gateway drug to the world of crime fiction, I’m a pretty squeamish guy--which is a long-winded way of saying that I thought the violence was shocking, but nowhere near as shocking as I had heard before seeing the movie.

Killer’s impact comes from Winterbottom’s tight cinematic focus on Deputy Sheriff Lou Ford (Casey Affleck). Sometimes he allows Ford to hold our attention a little too long, long enough for the character to really get under your skin. For me, the two most frightening moments in this movie involve Ford’s face. In one case, the deputy gleefully describes a murder he’s committed, while in the other he looks on as one of his victims dies, Ford’s visage cold and utterly lifeless.

In the annals of modern crime fiction, Lou Ford is a more iconic character than Patrick Kenzie in Gone, Baby, Gone and less iconic than Robert Ford (no relation) in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Of the three Affleck performances, however, I like this one more than I did his Robert Ford but not as much as his Patrick Kenzie. Lou Ford could easily be Patrick Bateman (American Psycho) in 1950s Texas, educating hooker Jessica Alba on the merits of Bob Willis and the Texas Playboys. Instead, Affleck chooses to be an “aw-shucks, ma’am” sociopath, going about his life as a small-town lawman until an encounter with Alba leads him into an S&M affair and a revenge scheme. It’s never about money for Ford, though--he’s in it for the fun of tweaking people he knows he’s smarter than, and thinks he’s better than.

That approach, reminiscent of charming serial killers such as Ted Bundy, whose reign of terror was still on the horizon back in the ’50s, makes The Killer Inside Me a companion piece to 2007’s No Country for Old Men, especially when it comes to law-enforcement’s response to Lou Ford’s violent deeds. (Consider why Ford’s boss does what he does.) Thankfully, this film never asks you to empathize with the serial killer, even when you’re presented with the reasons why he might behave the way he does.

Affleck, like Lawrence in Winter’s Bone, is supported in this picture by a rock-solid cast--excepting, of course, the aforementioned Mr. Pullman. Ned Beatty, Simon Baker, and Elias Koteas all do solid work, as do Jessica Alba and Kate Hudson. Hudson, as the woman who loves Ford without actually knowing him, is the standout among the supporting players; this was my favorite presentation of hers since Almost Famous (2000). She delivers a very adult performance that takes her to some dark places, and I hope we see more work like this from Hudson in the future.

Despite its strengths and the fact that it is a period offering that doesn’t feel like one, The Killer Inside Me has problems, though not enough to prevent me from recommending it to other moviegoers. It’s never clear whether we’re watching actual events, Ford’s interpretation of those events, or both at the same time; and the plot that wraps around those actions can be hard to follow at times. I’m a big fan of ambiguity in film endings, but not unearned ambiguity. And while the last act or so of this movie seems like Winterbottom is having fun with the genre à la his earlier films Tristram Shandy (aka A Cock and Bull Story) and 24 Hour Party People, the fact that he doesn’t make that clear left me scratching my head over the apocalyptic note on which The Killer Inside Me ends--and not in a good way.

Just like Bill Pullman. Because really, what was he doing here?

The Killer Inside Me and Winter’s Bone are both good alternatives to the summer doldrums, and proof that the indie film industry in America is far from dead. They’re also nice reminders that, during this new wave of international crime flicks, those of us in the States can still produce a pretty damn good crime picture from time to time.

Just Thrilled to Be Included

With the votes all cast and tallied, National Public Radio this morning broadcast the results of its online poll to determine America’s “Top 100 Killer Thrillers.” There are not a lot of surprises here, though it’s interesting to see James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans and Bram Stoker’s Dracula lumped in with Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men and Ira Levin’s The Boys from Brazil.

“Who is the NPR audience’s favorite thriller writer?” asks reporter Joe Matazzoni in his introduction to the list. “It’s the King, of course--Stephen King, who landed six titles in the top 100. Lee Child comes next, with four winning books. And, at three titles each, Michael Crichton, Dennis Lehane, and Stieg Larsson tie for third.”

For what it’s worth, you’ll find the full roster of 100 choices here.

READ MORE: “NPR List Fails to Thrill,” by Xavier Lechard
(At the Villa Rose).

Mentionable Morsels

• Mike Ripley’s latest smörgåsbord of perspicacity and frivolity--otherwise known as his Shots column, “Getting Away with Murder”--has been posted.

• Actor Jeff Goldblum has decided to leave Law & Order: Criminal Intent because of doubts about that show’s future.

• Walker Martin recaps this last weekend’s PulpFest.

• CrimeSquad’s “Fresh Blood” profile for August looks at John Verdon.

• Beware the PAC mentality.

• Rob Kelly, in whose blog I often find brilliant mock-up book covers and movie posters (such as this one), was interviewed at Movie Morlocks.com last September, however I only just discovered the piece.

• I couldn’t agree more. From the blog Vintage Paperback Cover Art, this quote attributed to comic book writer James Van Hise: “What is it about pulp art that makes it stand out as unique, different from the kind of cover art featured on books and magazines today? Only its outrageousness. It dared to be wild, and too much was never enough.”

• Useful for this year’s Bouchercon attendees.

• J. Sydney Jones fires questions at Michael Atkinson (Hemingway Cutthroat), while Julia Buckley goes one-on-one with Beth Groundwater (To Hell in a Handbasket).

• And happy birthday, Mr. President: Barack Obama turns 49 today.

The Man Behind Chan

If you haven’t seen it yet, there’s a splendid piece in this week’s edition of The New Yorker about Chang Apana, the real-life turn-of-the-last-century Honolulu police detective on whom author-playwright Earl Derr Biggers based his famous aphorism-spouting sleuth, Charlie Chan. As writer Jill Lepore recalls, Apana “was born, around 1871, in Waipio, a village outside Honolulu,” to a Chinese immigrant father and Sandwich Islands-born mother.

In 1898, the United States went to war with Spain, a war waged mainly in the Pacific, and Hawaii became a territory of the United States. Chang Apana was recruited by the Honolulu Police Department, which was growing, because of those two developments. In a force of more than two hundred men--the officers mainly Hawaiian and the chiefs mostly white--he was the only Chinese. He excelled, and was promoted to detective. In the nineteen-tens, he was part of a crime-busting squad. His escapades were the stuff of legend. He was said to be as agile as a cat. Thrown from a second-floor window by a gang of dope fiends, he landed on his feet. He leaped from one rooftop to the next, like a “human fly.” When he reached for his whip, thugs scattered and miscreants wept. He once arrested forty gamblers in their lair, single-handed. He was a master of disguises. Once, patrolling a pier at dawn, disguised as a poor merchant--wearing a straw hat and stained clothes and carrying baskets of coconuts, tied to a bamboo shoulder pole--he raised the alarm on a shipment of contraband even while he was being run over by a horse and buggy, and breaking his legs. He once solved a robbery by noticing a strange thread of silk on a bedroom floor. He discovered a murderer by observing that one of the suspects, a Filipino man, had changed his muddy shoes, asking him, “Why you wear new shoes this morning?”

Lepore’s piece is linked to the coming publication of a biography titled Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and his Rendezvous with American History (Norton), by Yunte Huang. And while she seems generally approving of the book, she cautions:

At times, Huang gets a little carried away by the legend, caught up in the perfumed, tropical romance of it all. “Apana once climbed up walls like a pre-Spiderman sleuth and slipped into an opium dive,” he writes. But, more often, Huang’s history is bracing and expansive, moving from Chang’s exploits to chronicle the squalor of Honolulu’s Chinatown and the miseries endured by each wave of immigrant workers--Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Filipino--in a world of brutal and unbending racial hierarchy. (Between 1917 and 1957, the year Hawaii outlawed the death penalty, twenty out of the twenty-six civilians executed on the islands were Filipino, two were Korean, two Japanese, one Puerto Rican, and one Hawaiian; as Huang observes, “not a single white man was among them.”) One of Chang’s jobs was to capture lepers, for forced transport to a leper colony on the island of Molokai, to die. Hawaiians called leprosy mai pake, “Chinese sickness,” because it came to the islands in the eighteen-thirties, and appeared to have arrived with the Chinese. Chang got that scar above his right eye while trying to capture a Japanese man who had contracted leprosy and who, armed with a sickle, refused to be sent to Molokai, on a journey over what came to be called the Bridge of Sighs.

Regardless, Huang’s book sounds delightful. You can read all of Lepore’s New Yorker article about it here.

Down for the Count?

Here’s some unfortunate news to start out this week. At the same time as ThugLit editor Todd Robinson puts up a brand-new edition of his Webzine (featuring work by Joe Clifford, Dermot Owens, Mike Wilkerson, and others), he has announced that the site is taking “a break ... A loooong break. Like a ‘maybe forever’ break. Right now, we’re calling it an indefinite hiatus.” He adds:

We’re gonna keep the archives up in the meantime, while we figure some shit out. Maybe a message or two. Dunno. What I DO know, is that this is gonna be it.

For now.

At the same time as I’m pleased to hear that the site’s archives will remain in place (so people can catch up on what’s already been posted), I regret seeing the publication disappear as a writing market. ThugLit has been a pretty reliable source for good, tough fiction over what Robinson terms the last “five mostly-good years.” It has already spawned three collections of its short fiction, with the potential for more. It would be a damn shame to see ThugLit go away forever. But if there’s one thing we have learned after watching the rise and fall of fiction-oriented Webzines, it’s that holes don’t go unfilled for long. If this is the end for ThugLit, what will punch in next?

Who’ll Score the T.J. OK?

Earlier today, the Southern California Independent Booksellers Association (SCIBA) announced its three nominees for the 2010 T. Jefferson Parker Award, which honors crime novels that “reflect Southern California culture or lifestyle.” Those contenders are:

• Boulevard, by Stephen Jay Schwartz (Forge)
• The First Rule, by Robert Crais (Putnam)
• Silver Lake, by Peter Gadol (Tyrus)

Book nominations were made as well in five other categories. The names of the winners will be pronounced on October 23 during the Author’s Feast & Trade Show in Los Angeles.

(Hat tip to The Gumshoe Site.)

The Story Behind the Story: “The Queen of Patpong,” by Timothy Hallinan

(Editor’s note: In this latest entry in our “Story Behind the Story” series, we once more welcome to The Rap Sheet novelist Timothy Hallinan, author of the Poke Rafferty thriller series, the new installment of which is The Queen of Patpong [Morrow]. In the essay below, Hallinan explains his inspiration for this fourth Rafferty adventure, and also his personal association with the illicit trade at the heart of that tense tale.)

The room is small--a bed, a couple of chairs, a table stacked with mismatched dinnerware. The only light comes through a window that’s been covered in wax paper against the rains. Sitting on a metal stool in the middle of the room, her back bent into the letter C as though the weight on her shoulders were too heavy to allow her to straighten her spine, is a Thai girl of 16. At the moment the picture was taken, she had just learned that her grandmother was planning to sell her into prostitution.

The girl’s name means “water” in English. Her hair is chopped to her ears in a schoolgirl cut. She is studying the floor. You can almost hear the shrilling in her ears as the weight of her grandmother’s words sink in.

I have an autobiography the girl wrote. It’s in two parts: a photograph of the original, written in Thai in a careful blue ballpoint script on blue-lined school paper, and an English translation, which reads, in part:

Grandma doesn’t pay a lot of attention to me. She’s busy drinking and when she’s drunk she hits me. I thought about running away but didn’t have the courage. I want to run away every time grandma tells me to drop out of school because she doesn’t have any money to support me. She tells me to go to work in Bangkok so that I can send her money. I say to her that I want to stay in school because I dream to become a doctor one day so that when I have a job I can take care of her. But she always says why stay in school. My father is dead. I have no mother. What would I study for!

If I have scholarship to study, I will work very hard to realize my dream. To get a good job. Then I can repay grandma. When I have a job I will repay my debt of gratitude to her until her last breath.

This girl is lucky. In the room with her and her grandmother is the girl’s schoolteacher, who got word of the planned sale--one 16-year-old girl for 60,000 baht, or $1,500 U.S.--as well as the woman that teacher called, who has come up from Bangkok in order to offer the grandmother a small amount of money (about $100 per month) to keep the child in school. In this case, the grandmother accepts.

Often, such an offer is refused, and so some Thai girl will begin a journey that’s undertaken by thousands of young Thai women every year--a journey that’s just a few hundred miles geographically, but a matter of light years internally.

In my series of thrillers set in Bangkok, my protagonist, Philip “Poke” Rafferty, is an expatriate American travel writer who’s now married to a former bar girl who worked under the name of “Rose” and whose resilience--acquired the hard way--gets them through some tough spots. I’d always known that sooner or later I would back up and tell Rose’s story--how she came to Bangkok, and how she was transformed from a shy village girl into the “queen” of Patpong Road, long the most lurid of Bangkok’s remarkably lurid red-light districts.

But I didn’t know how to begin the story. And then I received a letter that contained the autobiography and photographs described above. They were sent to me by a friend in Bangkok who’s a member (as am I) of a small group of people who pool some money each month to keep at least a handful of young Thai girls out of the sex trade. The fund is informal and anonymous, and the way it works is simplicity itself: a few schoolteachers in northeastern Thailand keep their ears open, and when they hear something, they call Bangkok. A wife of one of the group members heads up-country and, with the schoolteacher, goes to the girl’s house to make the offer.

I’m really happy to say that quite a few girls have remained in school--some have even gone on to college--as a result of this effort.

Left: A snippet from the Thai girl’s diary that led Hallinan to write, in his new novel, about Bangkok’s sex trade. This is hand-written in Thai but trimmed so the girl’s name doesn’t show. (Click to enlarge.)

The letter galvanized me. It became the beginning of Rose’s journey in the book that was eventually titled The Queen of Patpong (to be released on August 17). I used everything, even the stool, even the curve of the girl’s back. And in writing the scene, I realized it depicted a moment in which every certainty in a young person’s life had been stripped away and the world was revealed in a mercilessly new light--as a place where a person has to take firm command of her own fate, because malign influences are at work.

The rest of the tale came relatively quickly. But since this is, in a very real sense, a true story, true of tens of thousands of young women, it had to come carefully, too. As hard as I worked to present the story through the filter of Rose’s feelings, I knew (as David Sedaris has said) that “Writing gives you the illusion of control, and then you realize it’s just an illusion, that people are going to bring their own stuff into it.” I wanted to make certain that anyone who tried to read the story for titillation would have a difficult time finding it.

Rose and Poke have an adopted daughter, Miaow, who they took in off the street and who is based on a real Bangkok street child whom I knew for several years until she vanished--to where, I have no idea, but I doubt it was to anyplace happy. So the previous books in the series (A Nail Through the Heart, The Fourth Watcher, and Breathing Water) have paid a lot of attention to the lives and the exploitation of Bangkok’s street kids. And last year’s Breathing Water, especially, looked at the gulf between rich and poor as it manifested itself in the political movement that eventually led to this year’s riots.

But none of those books got as close to its subjects as The Queen of Patpong does to Rose. The book begins at a time when things look good for the whole family, and then, out of nowhere, comes a nightmare figure from Rose’s life in the bar. His appearance puts the family in physical danger, but also threatens to break them apart as past secrets emerge. Eventually, Rose has no alternative but to tell her story, and we follow her through it. I’ve been extremely pleased that the book has been enthusiastically and seriously reviewed, and especially satisfied that some of the kindest reviews have come from women. Considering everything Rose and her thousands of real-life sisters have gone through, I’m glad that I seem to have avoided exploiting them on the page as well.

My goal was to present these women as they are, as real individuals who have been given a very narrow range of choices. I think that most of them cope with their difficult situation with a certain amount of grace.

I don’t know that we can ask much more of anyone.

Bullet Points: Start of Summer’s End Edition

• Issue No. 4 of Crimefactory has gone live here. Contents include an interview with Hard Case Crime editor Charles Ardai, a look at Bangkok-based crime films, an excerpt from Allan Guthrie’s forthcoming novel, and serial fiction from Kieran Shea.

• In commemoration of P.D. James’ 90th birthday today, Kiwi crime-fiction blogger Craig Sisterson has posted an interview with the baroness and best-selling novelist.

• Speaking of birthdays, tomorrow will bring the 70th birthday of Martin Sheen, certainly best known for his dramatic role as President Josiah “Jed” Bartlett in NBC-TV’s much-lauded series, The West Wing. In celebration of Sheen’s 70th, TV Squad looks back at some of his most memorable roles in TV series, films, and mini-series.

• The latest short-story offering in Beat to a Pulp comes from Maine coast writer Matthew P. Mayo. His tale, titled “Someone to Watch Over Me,” can be found right here.

• More markets for short-fiction writers.

• Here’s a book I would certainly like to own.

• The TNT-TV series Leverage, which stars Timothy Hutton as the leader of a group of justice-minded thieves and con men, has already been renewed for a fourth season.

• Meanwhile, In Plain Sight, the series starring Mary McCormick and Frederick Weller as U.S. marshals attached to the Witness Protection Program, has been granted two more seasons on the USA Network.

• Steven Benen laments the decline of intellectual seriousness among conservatives. Prime examples of the trend here, here, and here.

• Spinetingler Magazine has video interviews with both Sophie Littlefield (A Bad Day for Pretty) and Gary Phillips (Orange County Noir).

• The American Bar Association’s ABA Journal has chosen the 25 greatest fictional lawyers (who are not Atticus Finch), a list that includes Frank Galvin (Paul Newman) of The Verdict, Paul Biegler (Jimmy Stewart) from Anatomy of a Murder, Lawrence Preston (E.G. Marshall) from The Defenders, Alan Shore (James Spader) of Boston Legal, and Forrest Bedford (Sam Waterston) from I’ll Fly Away. Click here to find notable characters who didn’t fit make the cut.

• An excellent illustration of Daniel Craig as James Bond.

• Here’s a Donald E. Westlake novel you’ve probably never read.

• No wonder Fox “News” isn’t worried about offending minorities.

• Lawyer-turned novelist Richard North Patterson (In the Name of Honor) chooses Advise and Consent, Allen Drury’s 1959 novel, as one of his favorite political thrillers.

• Love those Charlie Chan movie posters!

• Law & Order honcho Dick Wolf will try his hand at thriller-writing.

• A century after the horrendous murder that sent homeopathic physician Hawley Harvey Crippen to the gallows in Britain, the Los Angeles Times has resurrected newspaper reports about that long-ago crime. It’s fascinating to read such contemporaneous accounts.

• I love this spy novel cover.

• A grave worth visiting during Bouchercon in San Francisco.

• Wow! The TV pilot film made from Ken Bruen’s Shamus Award-winning 2001 novel, The Guards, looks pretty terrific. Scottish actor Iain Glen seems splendid in the role of detective Jack Taylor (though Declan Burke disagrees). Learn more about the project by clickety-clicking here.

The People’s Choices

After soliciting nominations from the reading public, Crimespree Magazine today announced its list of contenders for the 2010 Crimespree Awards in three categories:

Favorite Book of 2009:
• Bury Me Deep, by Megan Abbott (Simon & Schuster)
• Tower, by Ken Bruen and Reed Farrel Coleman (Busted Flush Press)
• Trust No One, by Gregg Hurwitz (St. Martin’s Press)
• The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death, by Charlie Huston (Ballantine Books)
• The Amateurs, Marcus Sakey (Dutton)

Favorite First Book 2009:
• The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, by Alan Bradley (Delacorte)
• Running from the Devil, by Jamie Freveletti (Morrow)
• Even, by Andrew Grant (Minotaur)
• A Bad Day for Sorry, by Sophie Littlefield (Minotaur)
• The Ghosts of Belfast, by Stuart Neville (Soho Crime)

Best Book in an Ongoing Series for 2009:
• The Silent Hour, by Michael Koryta (Minotaur)
• Shatter, by Michael Robotham (Doubleday)
• The Shanghai Moon, by S.J. Rozan (Minotaur)
• Walking Dead, by Greg Rucka (Bantam)
• Truth, by Peter Temple (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

The winners of these three commendations, plus this year’s recipient of the Jack Reacher Award (presented to authors who “give back to their communities”) will be declared during opening night ceremonies at Bouchercon in San Francisco (October 14-17).