Early Bird Special

If you’re already planning to attend the 2011 Bouchercon in St. Louis, and would like to save some money on registration, here’s your chance. Register for the convention by December 31 of this year, and you pay only $150. As of January 1, the fee will shoot up to $175.

For further information, click here.

Sandwiching Sessions in Philly

Continuing their fine coverage of this weekend’s NoirCon in Philadelphia, both Cullen Gallagher and Peter Rozovsky have now recapped Day 3. Gallagher’s write-up (complete with what has to be the least flattering photo of Megan Abbott and Anthony Neil Smith seated behind a table) can be found here, while Rozovsky’s report (which includes that immortal question, “Does bitch slapping take a hyphen?”) is here.

It sounds like all those who attended this event enjoyed themselves.

READ MORE: “NoirCon Day 4,” by Cullen Gallagher (Pulp Serenade); “NoirCon Report, Part I,” by Christa Faust (Deadlier Than the Male); “NoirCon 2010: Stuff I Learned,” by Steve Weddle (Do Some Damage); “The Hendrick’s and Tonic Crime-Convention Cost-of-Living Index,” by Peter Rozovsky (Detectives Beyond Borders); “NoirCon Postmortem,” by Jared Case (A Case of Murder); “A Few NoirCon Photos” (Pattinase); “NoirCon Pictures” (Pulp Serenade).

For Your Viewing Pleasure

Tonight’s season conclusion of Masterpiece Mystery! on PBS-TV will also bring the last of three installments of Sherlock, BBC One’s remarkably entertaining update of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes detective saga. There’s a great deal to digest in this 90-minute episode, titled “The Great Game,” but I think it’s the second-best of the stories so far (the opening show, “A Study in Pink,” ranking tops in my book).

Here’s the episode description:

Sherlock Holmes ... is bored. And he’s not just staring at the wall, he’s shooting at it. London is quiet and peaceful, and for Holmes, that is nothing short of maddening. An explosion rocks Holmes and Dr. John Watson ... out of their doldrums and into a series of deadly puzzles conceived by a brilliant bomber. It starts with a pair of shoes left in the center of an empty room--shoes connected to a case that caught Holmes’s interest twenty years ago as a boy. Soon a blood-soaked car, a television star and a recovered classic painting figure into an ever-widening cat-and-mouse game. As fast as Holmes can deduce answers, more cryptic clues arrive from his intelligent and violent adversary. After many surreal twists and turns, the outcome of the game may be uncertain, but for once, Sherlock has found a worthy opponent.

Check your local listings for broadcast time and channel.

READ MORE: “Remembering Jeremy Brett” and “Studies in Sherlock #5,” by Nicolas Pillai (Squeezegut Alley).

Philadelphia Stories

Reports continue to trickle in from this weekend’s NoirCon, being held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Brooklyn-based blogger Cullen Gallagher has a couple of new posts up, one a wrap-up of Day 2 events (including Gallagher’s conversation with “the great William Heffernan”), the other a video of critic-poet Robert Polito reading two poems by Kenneth Fearing (The Big Clock, 1946).

Meanwhile, Detectives Beyond Borders blogger Peter Rozovsky has launched a short post that features some statements he heard voiced on Day 2 of the convention. His coverage should continue at this link.

And novelist Duane Swierczynski (who, like Rozovsky, hails from Philly) promises to keep readers informed of con doings in his own blog.

SEE MORE: “NoirCon Video 2: George Pelecanos Reads David Goodis” (Pulp Serenade).

The Book You Have to Read: “Rose,” by Martin Cruz Smith

(Editor’s note: This is the 107th installment of our ongoing Friday blog series highlighting great but forgotten books. Today’s pick comes from San Francisco Bay Area science writer and novelist Ann Parker, author of the Silver Rush Mystery Series, the most recent installment of which is Leaden Skies.)

I’ll begin by saying I’m not certain that Martin Cruz Smith’s Rose is a “forgotten book.” But if you, like me, somehow missed it when it originally came out in 1996, and you love historical mysteries, well-defined unusual settings, and/or complex and well-drawn characters, then put it on your to-be-read list.

I was first alerted to Rose about 10 years ago, when I was thrashing through early drafts of the first book of my series set in the 1880s silver-mining town of Leadville, Colorado. A friend commented, “Your setting is a 19th-century mining town? So you’ve read Rose, of course.”

Well, no, I hadn’t. Which was a little odd because I was (and still am) a major fan of Smith’s books, beginning (as probably many others did) with Gorky Park and gobbling up every Arkady Renko book from there on out. Yet, I hadn’t heard of, much less read, Rose. I corrected that error in short order, and, in the process, discovered what a gem Rose is.

In that novel, Smith turned for inspiration to 1872 Wigan, an English coal-mining town. Smith’s sense of time and place is always “spot on” and his writing reinforces the setting, resonating in ways that few can equal. As a 1996 Time magazine book review of Rose said, “[T]he setting drives the plot and makes the crime.”

Every description and turn of the plot pulls the reader into the world Smith has created. For instance, there’s this passage, which takes the reader on a queasy ride down a mining shaft with protagonist Jonathan Blair and a cage full of miners:

The cage started slowly, down through the round, brick-lined upper mouth of the shaft, past round garlands of Yorkshire iron, good as steel, into a crosshatched well of stone and timber, and then simply down. Down into an unlit abyss. Down at twenty, thirty, forty miles per hour. Down faster than any men anywhere else on earth could travel. So fast that breath flew from the lungs and pressed against the ears. So fast that nothing could be seen at the open end of the cage except a blur that could whip away an inattentive hand or leg. Down seemingly forever.

… At its fastest, the cage dropped so smoothly that the men almost floated. In a shaft it was always the moment of greatest danger and greatest bliss. Blair thought that with their massed lamps they might resemble a meteor to a spectator, to a dazzled worm.

It’s no surprise to read in a 1996 Salon interview with Smith that while doing research for Rose, he actually went to Wigan and journeyed down into a mine: He captures it all--sight, touch, sound, and that drop-down feeling right there in the pit of the stomach.

Smith brings the same richness in writing to his plot and characters. The protagonist, down-on-his-luck American mining engineer Jonathan Blair, has been “conned” (emotionally, financially) into a single-handed search for Wigan’s missing curate, John Maypole. Bishop Hannay, who owns the town and its mines, is the one who makes the initial proposition and dangles the reward: uncover Maypole’s whereabouts and earn a one-way trip back to Blair’s beloved Africa, all expenses paid. To solve the mystery, Blair must steer through the various social strata of Wigan, from the lowest to the highest, and navigate Wigan’s crooked ancient alleys and vast underground tunnels and drifts, as well as the posh ancestral Hannay estate. He is, like the dazzled worm in the passage above, an outsider to this complex world, but of it as well. (To say more than that would give some of the mystery away).

As Blair ferrets about, trying to unravel what happened to the missing cleric, the people who he assumes would be the most eager to help him seem instead to ignore or actively work against his efforts. Those folks include Charlotte Hannay, Maypole’s fiancée and Bishop Hannay’s daughter; Reverend Chubb, Maypole’s superior; and the miners and “pit girls”--including the mysterious Rose of the title--that Maypole longed to convert. Through it all, Smith weaves in details about 19th-century mining life, the status of women, African exploration, and more (including some of the nasty concoctions for alleviating symptoms of malaria—arsenic and quinine, anyone?). Smith wraps a whacking good mystery and a surprising romance into this world he’s built, using prose that reads like poetry, in description and dialogue alike.

In the Salon interview, Smith says, “We all love the rhythm of English speech, probably for the same reason we love the King James version of the Bible, the up and downness of it.” Throughout Rose, Smith’s voice is pitch perfect, and the end result is a perfect jewel of a book.

Found Again

Because series organizer Patti Abbott is away, participating in Philadelphia’s NoirCon, this isn’t an official “forgotten books” Friday on the Web. However, there are a few crime-fiction submissions. In addition to The Rap Sheet’s write-up about Rose, by Martin Cruz Smith, you will find recommendations of The Coast Road, by John Brady; Heir Presumptive, by Henry Wade; Whiteout and Black Camelot, by Duncan Kyle; and The Godwulf Manuscript, by Robert B. Parker.

Todd Mason lists other forgotten books pieces for the week.

“I’m Crazy About Baseball”

Following my Halloween post of last Sunday, in which I embedded the trailers for a few of Bud Abbott and Lou Costello’s classic monster-comedy films, several people requested that I also post the pair’s famous “Who’s on First?” routine. Abbott and Costello performed that delightfully twisted sketch on a number of occasions, including once at the behest of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. But apparently, the recorded version they liked best was one they did in the 1945 film The Naughty Nineties, featured below:

Fortunately, the names of players on the San Francisco Giants team--who (hurray!) walked away with this year’s World Series win, weren’t so difficult to keep straight.

Highlighting Mystery History

Congratulations to editor Elizabeth Foxwell, whose ever-readable blog, The Bunburyist, celebrates its fifth birthday today. Drop her a note of encouragement for work well done.

Goodis and Plenty

Blogger Cullen Gallagher reports from the first day of NoirCon, in Philadelphia: “The four-day event fittingly kicked off with Larry Withers’ terrific new documentary, David Goodis ...To a Pulp. When Withers’ mother, Elaine, passed away, he and his family discovered a family secret that had been locked away for nearly half a century: Elaine had been married to a young pulp writer named David Goodis.”

More updates are promised.

READ MORE: “The Long Goodis Friday,” by Jedidiah Ayres
(Hard-boiled Wonderland).

Goldbug Variations

I never ceased to be amazed at the odd bits of news and tittle-tattle those folks at Boing Boing manage to collect. Does it sound from this item as if someone’s trying to buy the British government?

Charlie Stross links to an official transcript of the Nov. 1 debate in the UK’s House of Lords in which the Tory life-peer Lord James of Blackheath (a respected industry magnate and financier) claims to have been contacted by a secret foundation with more gold on hand than all the world’s bullion reserves combined. This group, “Foundation X,” apparently has offered to give the UK £5 billion right away, no strings attached, with another £17 billion to follow before Christmas for works on hospitals, schools and London’s crossrail project. Lord James seems to be totally serious about this, and he claims to have brought other respected Lords to meet with these shadowy goldbugs.

More to come? I certainly hope so.

Clements Nabs the Ellis Peters Award

During an event held tonight in the library at the headquarters of publisher Little, Brown on London’s Victoria Embankment, the 16th-century thriller Revenger (John Murray), by Rory Clements, was named the winner of the 2010 Ellis Peters Historical Award for crime fiction. Critic Barry Forshaw made the announcement, which was followed by an emotional speech by author Clements.

(Left) Rory Clements with his agent, Teresa Chris, during tonight’s event.

The runner-up for this award was Heartstone (Mantle), by C.J. Sansom. Also shortlisted for the commendation were Washington Shadow (John Murray), by Aly Monroe; Heresy (HarperCollins), by S.J. Parris; The Anatomy of Ghosts (Michael Joseph/Penguin), by ; and To Kill a Tsar (John Murray), by Andrew Williams.

Sponsors of this year’s Ellis Peters Historical Award were the British Crime Writers’ Association, the Estate of Ellis Peters, Headline Book Publishing Company, and the Little, Brown Book Group. Clements will receive £3,000 as part of his prize.

(Photograph by Ali Karim.)

READ MORE: “Thoughts on the 2010 Ellis Peters Award,” by Uriah Robinson (Crime Scraps).

The Prizes Just Keep Coming

In other awards news, the Romantic Times (RT) Reviewers’ Choice Award nominations include contenders in five crime fiction categories. They are:

Best Contemporary Mystery:
• 212, by Alafair Burke (Harper)
• Pray for Silence, by Linda Castillo (Minotaur)
• Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, by Tom Franklin (Morrow)
• On the Line, by S.J. Rozan (Minotaur)
• Moonlight Mile, by Dennis Lehane (Morrow)

Best Historical Mystery:
• City of Dragons, by Kelli Stanley (Minotaur)
• An Impartial Witness, by Charles Todd (Morrow)
• Royal Blood, by Rhys Bowen (Prime Crime)
• The Demon’s Parchment, by Jeri Westerson (Minotaur)
• Dark Road to Darjeeling, by Deanna Raybourn (Mira)

Best First Mystery:
• Blacklands, by Belinda Bauer (Simon & Schuster)
• The Ark, by Boyd Morrison (Touchstone)
• Still Missing, by Chevy Stevens (St. Martin’s Press)
• Murder at Mansfield Park, by Lynn Shepherd (St. Martin’s Griffin)
• Devoured by D.E. Meredith (Minotaur)

Best Suspense/Thriller Novel:
• Eight Days to Live, by Iris Johansen (St. Martin’s Press)
• Broken, by Karin Slaughter (Delacorte)
• Live to Tell, by Lisa Gardner (Bantam)
• They’re Watching, by Gregg Hurwitz (St. Martin’s Press)
• One Grave Less, by Beverly Connor (Obsidian)

Best Amateur Sleuth Novel:
• Ghouls Gone Wild, by Victoria Laurie (Obsidian)
• Bone Appetit, by Carolyn Haines (Minotaur)
• Cat in an Ultramarine Scheme, by Carole Nelson Douglas (Forge)
• The Quick and the Thread, by Amanda Lee (Obsidian)
• A Nose for Justice, by Rita Mae Brown (Ballantine)

Click here for lists of contenders in all of the categories. Winners will be announced during the 2011 RT Book Lovers’ Convention, scheduled for April 6-10 in Los Angeles.

* * *

Meanwhile, Spanish blogger Jose Ignacio Escribano reports that “Andreu Martin has won the VI Pepe Carvalho Prize (2010) for crime fiction. The award ceremony will take place during the BCNegra crime festival in Barcelona, Spain, next February.”

And the replacement event for the presentation of New Zealand’s first-ever Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Crime Novel has finally be rescheduled for November 30 in Christchurch.

Another Fine Mess

Earlier today, blogger-author Bill Crider complained that his long-standing subscription to Dorchester Publishing’s Hard Case Crime Club, which used to bring him copies of the latest Hard Case paperbacks, is now being fulfilled with older books he doesn’t want, thanks to Dorchester’s recent business divorce from Hard Case.

Now comes this news release from Hard Case editor Charles Ardai:

As most of you know, for the past several years Dorchester Publishing offered a subscription service they called the “Hard Case Crime Book Club.” If you signed up for this service, you received each new Hard Case Crime book automatically by mail. Now that Dorchester is no longer publishing our books, they can’t ship new Hard Case Crime books to book club members anymore (or use our name on the club), but they’ve indicated that they would like to keep the club going. Their solution: They plan to find books from other publishers that fans of Hard Case Crime might enjoy and send those books out, under the new, generic name “Hard Boiled Crime Book Club.”

There’s nothing wrong with this idea in principle--there are a lot of great crime novels out there, and not all of them were published by Hard Case Crime. I think Dorchester could do a nice job of selecting other books you might enjoy. In fact, just as a favor to them, I even offered to help them do so; I suggested some books by Hard Case Crime authors Lawrence Block and Donald Westlake, for instance, as well as some authors that we haven’t published, such as Loren D. Estleman and Robert B. Parker. And just this past week, Dorchester started shipping some of these books (one by Parker, I believe, and maybe one by Westlake).

Unfortunately, Dorchester doesn’t seem to have communicated clearly to book club members just what it was they were doing, or reminded members about their right to cancel their subscription if they no longer wanted to be part of the club in light of the changes. Instead, I get the impression that Dorchester simply started shipping the new books without any explanation. Naturally, this left book club members confused and in some cases upset, and I can understand why. I wish Dorchester had handled this better.

That’s why I’m sending this message: I want you to know what’s going on, and also let you know what you can do. If you’re a book club member and don't want to receive any more books from Dorchester, you can call them at 1-800-481-9191 or write to them at customerservice@dorchpub.com and tell them you want to cancel your subscription. I’m not saying that you should cancel--if you stay with the club, you might get some terrific books from them. But if you want to cancel, that’s how you can do it.

There’s also another reason I’m writing to you. Many of you have contacted me to ask whether our new publisher, Titan Publishing, plans to offer a similar subscription service when they start publishing new Hard Case Crime books in 2011. And I’m glad to report that the answer is yes. They haven’t worked out all the details yet and it’s possible that it’ll turn out to be harder than they expect--but right now, they are planning to do it.

If you think you might be interested in signing up for Titan’s new subscription service in 2011, please let us know. Just send an e-mail to bookclub@hardcasecrime.com and we’ll send you more information about the service as soon as it’s available. Please note, sending an e-mail to us does not commit you to anything--it just puts you on a list of people who want to know more. If you’re currently a Hard Case Crime Book Club member and would like to continue getting our books by mail, it's very important that you let us know, since we don’t have any information about who the members of the book club are--the club is owned and run by Dorchester and we have no access to any member information. So if you don’t write and tell us, we have no way of knowing that you’re a member.

And if you’re not currently a book club member but think you might like to become one when the new books start coming next year, that’s great--just let us know that.

Bit by bit we’ll get this all sorted out. I apologize for any confusion along the way. The most important thing in a situation like this is clear, prompt and forthright communication, and in Dorchester’s enthusiasm to start shipping books again, I’m afraid they didn’t communicate the way they should have. Hopefully they’ll do better in the future--they’re good people and I know they mean well. In the meantime, though ... please do write to us right away if you’re a current book club member, or if you’re not but might want to become one when Titan launches their subscription offering next year.

And please do contact Dorchester at 1-800-481-9191 or customerservice@dorchpub.com if you want to cancel your membership in their club.

I hope this explanation will end some reader confusion.

Digitizing 007

Amid all the talk about e-book publishing taking over from paper, and with some authors having turned evangelical on this topic, I was interested to see that Ian Fleming Publications has finally decided to publish the James Bond catalogue in electronic form, even bypassing the Penguin Group, the novels’ longtime English-language publisher.

As Britain’s Telegraph reports today:

The digital versions of the 007 books will be published by Ian Fleming Publications, which administers the rights to the Bond books. The 14 titles, including Dr. No, Moonraker, and Diamonds Are Forever, will launch on November 4, and will be made available via online e-booksellers such as Amazon.co.uk and Waterstone.com.

The deal has come about because Penguin did not own the digital rights to the Bond novels--a concept that was never considered when Ian Fleming was writing.

There are many authors still working that have not signed away the digital rights to their books, allowing them to cut out their traditional publisher if they chose to. Agents said they had grown increasingly irritated by the low royalty rates offered by publishers for digital rights.

Philip Jones, the deputy editor of The Bookseller, the industry publication, said: “This has big implications for the established publishing houses, which are already under threat from Internet retailers, who are pricing very aggressively.

“They could be missing out on millions of pounds worth of revenue in the future because they never signed up the digital rights to their authors. There are also issues around new books, with publishers insistent that digital rights have to be included as part of any deal, otherwise they could end up paying for all the marketing, while the upstart owner of the digital rights reaps the benefits.”

Commanderbond.net has its own take on this subject here.

Meanwhile, Jeffery Deaver--who has been hired to produce the next James Bond novel--talks about that project with USA Today:

The family-owned Fleming business took notice when Deaver won the UK’s Crime Writers’ Association’s coveted Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award for Garden of Beasts (2004), a thriller about an American assassin sent to Berlin during the run-up to Hitler’s rise to power.

In his acceptance speech, Deaver talked about Fleming’s influence on his work.

Deaver’s initiation into the Bond family--more than 100 million 007 novels have sold worldwide--could significantly raise his profile.

Other novelists have written Bond novels since Fleming’s death in 1964--including Kingsley Amis, John Gardner and, most recently, Sebastian Faulks (his 2008 book, Devil May Care, reached No. 38 on USA Today’s best-seller list)--but they all took place in the original era. Deaver is taking a new approach.

“There’s no more Cold War to fight,” says Deaver, so his new Bond, of the Fleming estate, will fight “post-9/11 evil.”

“I want to stay true to the original James Bond, who many people don’t know much about,” he says, referring to the secret agent Fleming portrayed in 14 novels, and not the movie Bond. “People know Daniel Craig, they know Pierce Brosnan, they know Roger Moore and Sean Connery, all of whom brought a great deal to the stories of 007. But the original Bond was a very dark, edgy character.”

Otto Penzler, proprietor of The Mysterious Bookshop in New York, says Deaver’s writing style can only enhance the Bond franchise.

“The main thing he can bring is a greater sense of suspense to the books,” Penzler says. “A lot of the books and movies are becoming basically chase plots, and Jeff really has the ability to create suspense better than almost any writer working today.”

Explaining why Deaver was tapped for the latest Bond adventure, Fleming’s niece Kate Grimond says: “He has a great understanding and appreciation of Fleming’s original creation. We feel sure that he will produce an exciting page-turning 21st-century Bond mission--and a Bond for the present day.”

I am delighted that it was Garden of Beasts, my favorite Deaver novel, that got the Bond folk interested in his continuing Fleming’s series.

Pursuit of Happiness

Irish academician, writer, and blogger Rob Kitchin today contributes the fifth part of Patti Abbott’s entertaining round-robin short-fiction challenge. His chapter is called “It’s a Dog’s Life.” If you need to catch up, Part IV is here, Part III is here, Part II can be found here, and click here to read Abbott’s story that started it all.

Quote of the Day

You tell him, Roseanne Cash!

The Devil Rides Again

Here’s some intriguing news: Actor Leonardo DiCaprio’s production company has purchased the film rights to Devil in the White City (2003), author Erik Larson’s best-selling non-fiction book about civic magnificence and shocking murder at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893.

This project holds great promise. Larson’s work features twin storytelling paths, one of which follows the fair-building escapades of big-dreaming Chicago designer Daniel H. Burnham, the other of which tells about a prolific serial killer working his malevolence on the edge on that exposition. As I wrote in a review for Seattle Weekly, Larson “employs fictive techniques, complex character studies, and cliff-hanger devices to turn what might have been a parched account of architectural ambition and convergent malevolence into a historical thrill ride.”

The question is, of course, whether the bigger-than-life character of Burnham, the predatory deviance of slayer H.H. Holmes (who DiCaprio intends to portray), and the naïve optimism represented by one of America’s foremost world’s fairs can be sufficiently translated into a two-hour motion picture. We shall see.

Off Topic: Have You Voted Yet?

Allow me to echo Patti Abbott’s call on everyone to go out and vote in today’s U.S. midterm elections, if you haven’t already mailed in a ballot.

This election season has been dominated by right-wing extremists, who hope to do everything from privatize Social Security and Medicaid, to undermine President Obama’s health-care reforms, intensify hatred against immigrants, increase the dominance of corporations, discontinue needed economic reforms, and start a war against Iran. Those extremists are depending on voters who disagree with their positions to stay home, stay quiet, and let them have their way.

Now is not the time to ignore your responsibility as a citizen to vote.

READ MORE: “The Limited Value of the ‘Vote for the Person’ Maxim,” by Steve Benen (The Washington Monthly); “A Record to Be Proud Of” (The Progress Report); “The End of the ‘Do-Something’ Congress,” by Ezra Klein (The Washington Post); “‘A Rare but Clear and Unobstructed View of What that Party Stands For,’” by Steve Benen (The Washington Monthly); “It’s Not the End of the World,” by Paul Waldman (The American Prospect); “A Tea Party Rant,” by David Terrenoire (A Dark Planet).

Profusion Reigns

A new month, a new installment of “Getting Away with Murder,” British critic-author Mike Ripley’s column in Shots. Among the topics under discussion this time: John le Carre’s just-released novel, Our Kind of Traitor (“Le Carré’s writing is a world, possibly a galaxy, away from much of the ham-fisted, thick-eared prose which seems to be required for many a ‘thriller’ these days …”); Joseph Wambaugh’s forthcoming Hollywood Hills; publisher Serpent’s Tail’s resurrection of Horace McCoy’s novels; and Louisiana detective Dave Robicheaux’s candidacy as the “most slappable hero in crime fiction.” You’ll find it all here.