Meredith Makes His Last Play

I’ve never been a fan of American football, so even though Joseph Don “Dandy” Don Meredith played nine seasons with the Dallas Cowboys, and went on from there to become one of the early stars of the Monday Night Football broadcasts, I knew him principally as an actor. After reading about his death yesterday at age 72, I visited Meredith’s page in the International Movie Database, just to remind myself of his screen credits.

His roles were mostly in western and crime dramas. Meredith guest-starred with Angie Dickinson in Police Woman and with Dennis Weaver in McCloud, appeared in an episode of the short-lived western The Quest, and had a recurring role on the acclaimed anthology series Police Story. He also featured in TV movies such as Banjo Hackett: Roamin’ Free (1976), Undercover with the KKK (1979), The Night the City Screamed (1980), and Terror Among Us (1981).

According to The Dallas Morning News, “Meredith had battled emphysema in recent years and suffered a minor stroke in 2004.” He passed away as a result of a brain hemorrhage. Meredith had been living in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with his third wife, Susan Lessons Dullea, the former spouse of actor Keir Dullea (2001: A Space Odyssey).

READ MORE: “Don Meredith on Police Woman,” by Marty McKee
(Johnny LaRue’s Crane Shot).

Keeping Us in Suspense

The half-dozen original members of Top Suspense--crime, mystery, horror, and western novelists who hope to promote their work (and that of others) in e-book formats--have today launched a round-robin short story in their group blog. As member Dave Zeltserman explains:

For the next 12 days we’ll be posting a story segment written by the original members of the Top Suspense Group (Max Allan Collins, Vicki Hendricks, Ed Gorman, Bill Crider, Harry Shannon and Dave Zeltserman). After 12 days the story will be finished (one way or the other), and we’ll be offering free books to the first five people who can match each segment to the author who wrote it!

The rules for us in writing this story: no planning, no coordination, no safety nets. Each day one of us wrote up to 250 words of a short story and passed it on to the next writer, with each writer eventually working on two segments. The only leeway was the last writer got to go past the 250-word limit to try to finish up the story, and the only editing done was for consistency errors.

Installment No. 1 can be found here.

READ MORE: “Announcing Top Suspense” (A Writer’s Life).

Parks’ Wolfe Connection

Congratulations are due today to Brad Parks, author of Faces of the Gone (Minotaur), who has won the 2010 Nero Award. The Nero is given annually by The Wolfe Pack to “an author for the best mystery written in the tradition of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe stories.” Also contending for that prize were The Fleet Street Murders (Minotaur), by Charles Finch, and The Crack in the Lens (Minotaur), by Steve Hockensmith.

Parks was presented with his commendation last evening during the Black Orchid Banquet in New York City. At that same affair, writer Brad Crowther was given the Black Orchid Novella Award for his story, “Politics Make Dead Bedfellows,” which will soon be published by Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine.

This has been a very good year for Virginia novelist Parks: Faces of the Gone previously won the 2010 Shamus Award for Best First Novel.

(Hat tip to Mystery Fanfare.)

His Terrible Swift Sword

London author Ian Ayris has contributed this week’s crazy little yarn to Beat to a Pulp. It’s called “By the Dim and Flaring Lamps.”

Press Freedom and Personal Restraint

As some readers of this blog know, one of the proudest moments in my life came when former California Governor Edmund G. “Pat” Brown (aka Governor-elect Jerry’s much-missed dad) asked me to co-author a book with him about the death penalty, Public Justice, Private Mercy: A Governor’s Education on Death Row (1989).

I was just sent a piece from The Huffington Post about what looks to be an important new film touching on that same subject.

Put together by a young director named Jacob Simas, the documentary is called Inside Story and has much to do with The San Quentin News--“the first newspaper in 20 years to be written by and for inmates and published inside a California prison.” Take a look at this video sample and let me know what you think in the Comments section below, or by writing to me at dickadler@mail.com.

Something I Stumbled Across Today

Psycho-Noir blogger Heath Lowrance’s series of “essential noir” posts, in which crime writers list their favorite noir novels.

Donna Moore, Dave Zeltserman, Patti Abbott, Keith Rawson, and Jonathan Woods are among those who’ve made their choices known so far. Lowrance doesn’t label these posts for easy access, but most of them should come up if you click here. Let’s hope this series continues.

The Book You Have to Read: “Street of the Lost,” by David Goodis

(Editor’s note: This is the 109th installment of our ongoing Friday blog series highlighting great but forgotten books. Today’s selection comes from Michael Lipkin, a Chicago freelance writer and editor, who spent 13 years as the literature editor for a major publishing company. Lipkin now edits Noir Journal.)

How seriously do you take your noir?

David Goodis’ Street of the Lost (1952) is as down and dirty as noir gets in its depiction of depressed, lost souls on the road to nowhere. No cynical, wisecracking detectives here. Existential angst is too fancy for these characters--more like the very depths of hopeless, day in, day out misery.

But Street of the Lost offers the possibility of redemption, of escape, of explosive revenge. It offers suspense and action, as well as finely crafted settings of ugliness and depravity.

The main character, Chet Lawrence, works as a welder in Philadelphia and is married to a sad, forlorn woman named Edna. But an equally central character is Ruxton Street, a local road that traps residents into lives of crime, violence, drunkenness, drugs, and emptiness.

The enemy was the Street.

For the Street was like those big snakes he’d seen once in the zoo. Everyone it touched, it swallowed ...

And it glimmered and glistened like a snake. The Ruxton Street pavement was always wet with saliva and phlegm and urine and spilled wine and whiskey and homemade powerhouse. There was always dirty water in the gutters.

It was a street of wooden shacks and decaying tenements. Of broken windows and splintered doors. Of three poolrooms and four taprooms ...

Twenty years earlier, Lawrence had decided that he needed to detach from the Street. Growing up as a Ruxton “alley cat,” he’d once tried to break up a knife fight but got his gut slashed. He vowed never again to get involved in people’s troubles.

He had it deeply planted in his mind that the Street would never touch him. Yet planted equally deep was the knowledge that he couldn’t get away.

Since then, except for a stretch in the Pacific theatre during World War II, Lawrence has trudged regularly from his job to his bleak home, uninvolved and empty.

Street of the Lost opens with an incident that may force an end to Lawrence’s detachment. As he walks home one night, he sees a Chinese girl lying in the filthy water of the Ruxton gutter, bloody and bruised, her skirt torn. Lawrence passes, but then turns to help her up.

The girl thanks Lawrence but refuses to talk about what happened. He assists her on her way, and then continues on home.

What Lawrence doesn’t know is that the girl was attacked by his old buddy Hagen, leader of the Ruxton mob. It’s not a powerful, organized mob; it’s made up of former “alley cats,” now into more serious crimes such as murder, rape, and drug dealing.

Hagen, the leader by intimidation, is an ex-boxer, 250 pounds, with fists that can beat opponents to death.

A few hours after Lawrence’s encounter with the Chinese girl, he and Edna are out at a diner called Sam’s. Hagen soon finds Lawrence there. He enters the diner and corners Lawrence, thinking Lawrence knows that it was he who attacked the girl. But Hagen feels solidarity with old street cats like Lawrence. He simply wants the welder to join him in the Ruxton mob and show that he is scared of Hagen. That’s the way he can gain Hagen’s trust.

But Lawrence doesn’t have it in him to act scared. For years, he’s held back his temper--a rage that twice caused him to fight entire gangs of hoodlums who attacked him, putting a few in the hospital. The reader gets a hint that Lawrence might be a match for Hagen.

Later, at a bar, Lawrence learns from Hagen of his “feelings” for the Chinese girl, as well as his plans for her.

“She’s like a flower, a Chinese lily. ... Extra special, that’s what I call it. A thing I’ve wanted as long as I can remember ...”

Hagen’s demented plan is to kidnap the girl and keep her prisoner, raping and torturing her. But, he says, “Maybe she’ll get used to me, get to like me, and really want to stay with me. I’ll do my best to go easy on her.”

Can Lawrence let all this happen? Will he stand up against the kidnapping, rape, and torture of the Chinese girl--stand up to Hagen’s murderous rule of the Street? Or will he stay uninvolved, detached. That’s the core of the story.

A gripping plot is only part of Goodis’s mastery, though. Few writers do noir with Goodis’ dark, moody fluency. The reader lives this story of Ruxton Street through the author’s evocative prose, feels the hopelessness, drowns in the misery and emptiness.

Goodis’ characters and settings are unforgettable. A prostitute named Tillie provides only one example:

She stood there in the doorway, five feet six, 430 pounds, a shapeless boulder of flesh with the face of a cow and big ears that stood out almost at right angles to her skull ...

His eyes pretended to be fascinated by the mountain of female flesh, the famous massive torso that for all its flabby shapelessness was Ruxton Street’s most expensive candy. They came here constantly, the seekers of off-beat thrills. In terms of poundage she was the summit of their frenzied climb toward some uncanny kind of pleasure or conquest or whatever the hell it was they were looking for. But sometimes he’d see them walking out of this shack with an utterly beaten look on their faces, as if they’d arrived on the summit only to find that it was lower than any other level on the map of unrighteousness.

Goodis is unmatched when it comes to putting emotion and precision into fictional fight scenes.

He moved in and put all his power into a left to the midsection and he heard the grunt, the wheezing, and saw Hagen doubling up, elbows trying to protect his belly. He kept moving in, and hauled off with his right and told himself that this was going to be the finish. But just then Hagen grabbed again ...

The author can even make death lyrical. In a later scene:

He pulled himself off the corpse and took out a handkerchief and stood there wiping the blood from his knuckles. Then he let the handkerchief fall onto the cot. It landed on the chest of the corpse. Some blood dripped off the edge of it and sprinkled the hand of the corpse, the red drops glimmering on the dark fingers that still seemed to be groping for the blackjack.

For anyone who can handle a dark tale of hopeless souls--souls who long for escape and redemption--Street of the Lost is truly a “great but forgotten” work.

Definitely forgotten--for the most part, anyway. Street of the Lost is long out of print, and the 30 or so copies currently available online--old musty editions that will likely break apart in your hands--range in price from $40 to $150. There are a few copies of the novel in French, as well, but it’s hard to imagine any translator equaling the quality of Goodis’ writing. Rue Barbare (Barbarous Street), directed by Gilles Béhat, an obscure, undistinguished 1984 French film, was based on Street of the Lost.

I’d like so much to share this noir classic, that I am willing to send my copy free of charge to anyone who wants it--just so long as you promise to pass it along to somebody else who’s interested. (Drop your contact info into the Comments section at the end of this post.) Yes, my copy is mildewed, underlined, and held together with a rubber band--but that doesn’t take away from the quality of this masterful work of noir.

(The author would like to thank Goodis expert Lou Boxer for discussing Street of the Lost with him.)

READ MORE: “David Goodis’s Hard-boiled Philadelphia: Street of the Lost and Moon in the Gutter,” by Jay A. Gertzman (Noir Originals).

Hard Case’s Hardcover Helpings

Mass-market paperback imprint Hard Case Crime has provided plenty of news headlines over the past several months, after its longstanding association with Dorchester Publishing collapsed, and editor Charles Ardai signed a new distribution deal with UK-based Titan Publishing. Yesterday there were still more developments, this time involving the Hard Case line’s re-launching next September with a new hardcover work by Lawrence Block:

Titled Getting Off: A Novel of Sex and Violence, the book tells the story of a beautiful and self-confident young woman who sets herself a mission and carries it out with ruthless single-mindedness--to track down and murder every man she’s ever slept with. (And it’s not a small number, especially since she finds herself sleeping with a few more along the way.) The character is one of Block’s most memorable, the first new series character he’s introduced since J.P Keller in Hit Man a dozen years ago. Like Keller, she first appeared in a short story Block found himself writing, and after she’d stuck around for a second tale and then a third, he realized he had a novel-length story to tell about her. Thus was Getting Off born.

After seeing a couple of bloggers describe Getting Off as Hard Case’s first hardcover release, I started to wonder how this jibed with a previous and much-heralded announcement, from this last August, about HC resurrecting “a pair of early Lawrence Block novels,” 69 Barrow Street and Strange Embrace, as a double volume--also in hardcover--for publisher Subterranean Press. That announcement said those two Blocks in one would see print during “the first half of 2011.” Wouldn’t that timing make the double volume, rather than Getting Off, HC’s first hardcover release? Or has the Subterranean book been postponed?

I put these questions to editor Ardai, who responded earlier today:

No, the Subterranean book is definitely still coming--we’re all very excited about that one--but [Subterranean] generously agreed to push it back from mid-2011 to the start of 2012, to give Getting Off a window in which it can take the spotlight as the debut title of our re-launch. Better, we all agreed, to have one Block hardcover in 2011 and then another in 2012 than to crowd the two together back-to-back in one season.

Incidentally, the Subterranean double wouldn’t strictly speaking have been Hard Case Crime’s first hardcover release--Subterranean previously published a hardcover edition of my own Fifty-to-One, and Otto Penzler brought out a small hardcover edition of Donald Westlake’s Memory. It would have been the first Hard Case Crime book that we’d have published initially in hardcover, but it might have been a little funny to describe it as a “hardcover original” given that the two books it contains are both reprints, and specifically reprints of books that came out as paperback originals back in the sixties. Getting Off, on the other hand, is clearly a hardcover original in every sense. So it makes sense for it to take that spot.

None of which matters from a reader’s point of view, of course. All readers will care about is that they’ve got two great Lawrence Block books to look forward to! (Three, really, since one’s a double.)

Regarding schedule, we’ll be putting out two books in September (Getting Off and one other we haven’t announced yet) and two more in October (Quarry’s Ex [by Max Allan Collins] and Choke Hold [by Christa Faust]). No further delay for those two.

And after the four books in 2011? We’re currently planning to do four more in 2012 (and then four more the year after), but we haven’t decided yet whether that means one per quarter or two at a time twice a year, or what. We’ll be talking with Titan about those questions over the coming months.

It’s also possible we might wind up doing more than 4/year--we’ll see. But I do want to keep it down from the punishing 12-13 books/year I was doing at the end with Dorchester. That schedule--a new book every 4 weeks!--is physically exhausting for me and would make it hard for me to work on all the other projects I’ve got underway, such as the TV series Haven and some books of my own I’ve been putting off writing. It’s the curse of being a one-man operation! You can’t do absolutely everything, however much you might want to. But I love Hard Case Crime, and I’m very happy that we’ve found a pace that enables me to keep it going while also working on a few other things.

So I guess that clears up that.

Meanwhile, Ardai has announced that the sixth volume in his Gabriel Hunt adventure series, written by Raymond Benson and titled Hunt Through Napoleon’s Web--which had originally been slated for release last month--will now come out sometime in 2011. However, it will appear in trade-size paperback, rather than the series’ original mass-market size.

Crime by Candlelight

Although it’s the second day of Hanukkah already, there’s still plenty of time available over these next seven days for you to investigate some of the holiday-appropriate crime novels editor Janet Rudolph has listed in Mystery Fanfare. Go look there now (but please come back).

More on the Marsh

Blogger Craig Sisterson actually broadcast this news on Tuesday, but he’s out today with the official announcement that pseudonymous author Alix Bosco has won New Zealand’s first-ever Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Crime Novel. You can read the full news release here.

Rip Tidings

It just had to happen. Today marking the start a new month, there is a fresh edition, in Shots, of Mike Ripley’s “Getting Away with Murder” column. Up for consideration this time ’round are John Gardner’s 1964 classic, The Liquidator; a “quite magisterial two-volume study, Icons of Mystery and Crime Detection: From Sleuths to Superheroes”; Scottish writer Doug Johnstone; the forthcoming crop of Spanish mysteries; and a prequel to the late R.D. Wingfield’s acclaimed Inspector Jack Frost series, coming in January from Bantam UK and penned by the pseudonymous James Henry.

What’s more, the columnist is finally announcing his Shots of the Year Awards for 2010. “These are unique awards in the world of crime fiction,” Ripley writes, “as they come with little fanfare, no large cash prize, no attempt at a transparent judging process, very little publicity and precious little prestige.” Nonetheless, reading recommendations from such an authority as The Ripster deserve attention.

Read more here.