Another Shot of Archer?

This is certainly interesting news, courtesy of Tipping My Fedora:

Ross Macdonald’s immortal private investigator Lew Archer is apparently set to make a return to cinema screens. It has been announced that Warner Bros. and producer Joel Silver have bought the rights to The Galton Case, very much the turning point in the series (and which I reviewed here), with a view to starting a new franchise, which is good news for lovers of the hard-boiled mystery genre onscreen.

The same studio first brought the character to the screen in the shape of Paul Newman in the 1966 adaptation of The Moving Target, the debut book in the series. However, the movie was re-titled Harper when the main character’s name was changed, though screenwriter William Goldman otherwise remained pretty faithful to the novel. The next book in the series was belatedly adapted some nine years later with Newman still in the role for The Drowning Pool (1975) ...

Being a longtime Macdonald fan, I sure hope that Silver, together with executive producers Andrew Rona and Alex Heineman, can deliver a film that’s both faithful to the author’s intentions and appealing to modern viewers. Yet I’m skeptical, because I’ve seen Hollywood’s interest in Archer wax and wane over the decades.

Tipping My Fedora rightly observes that in addition to Newman’s attempts to bring Lew Archer to the silver screen (see clips from Harper here and here), there have been a couple of efforts to make Macdonald’s Los Angeles private eye a TV star. The first was a pretty good 1974 pilot film, The Underground Man, adapted by screenwriter Douglas Heyes from Macdonald’s 1971 novel of the same name and starring Peter Graves. Unfortunately, Graves’ teleflick--introduced with a fabulous theme composed by Marvin Hamlisch--failed to spawn a weekly series. But the idea was revived just one year later in Archer, a NBC-TV mid-season replacement series that cast Brian Keith in the lead. Sadly, Keith’s Archer lacked the compassion or psychological understanding of the original, and the stories offered in Archer were nothing better than typical TV P.I. fare. (Keith proposed further divorcing Archer from its source material by moving the action from Southern California to Hawaii and setting the detective up in a houseboat, à la Travis McGee.) Few people were sorry to see Archer--with its far inferior opening theme by Jerry Goldsmith--go bye-bye after just six episodes.

Joel Silver, with his evident fondness for action pictures, doesn’t seem the natural fit to make a film or series of films about an introspective, old-school gumshoe who doesn’t always have the answers his troubled clients demand. However, with the right scriptwriter and a credible star, The Galton Case might have a shot. We shall see.

A question for readers: Following in the footsteps of Paul Newman, Peter Graves, and Brian Keith, what actor do you think would be the best choice to play Lew Archer next?

Bullet Points: More Treats Than Tricks Edition

• Mystery and thriller writers often hold contests for readers who are interested in having their names used in upcoming novels. But this marks the first time I have heard of a competition among crime writers to have a new morgue named in their honor, this one to be established at Scotland’s University of Dundee. BBC News reports that

Crime-fiction fans can vote for their favorite author online--with each vote contributing £1 to the appeal.

Dundee University has committed £1m to the project, but another £1m needs to be raised.

The new morgue will adopt a “revolutionary” way of embalming--called the Thiel method--which keeps bodies flexible for longer.

This gives medics and researchers a more realistic way of testing techniques and practicing procedures, as well as developing new equipment and approaches.

Authors taking part in the “Million for a Morgue” campaign are: Tess Gerritsen, Kathy Reichs, Lee Child, Harlan Coben, Mark Billingham, Jeffrey Deaver, Jeff Lindsay, Stuart MacBride, Peter James and Val McDermid.

There’s more information about this morgue-building campaign here. And you can cast your vote and make a contribution to the new facility by clicking here. (Hat tip to James Gracie.)

• Anyone want to buy Erle Stanley Gardner’s old suitcase?

• The November edition of Mike Ripley’s “Getting Away with Murder” column for Shots has just been posted. Included in it are notes about Britain’s upcoming Reading Festival of Crime Writing, old works by Victor Canning and C.S. Forester, new works by Q.R. Markham and Elizabeth Wilson, and the end--“after 18 years of solid entertainment”--of Veronica Stallwood’s Kate Ivory series.

• The HMSS Weblog compiles the many rumors spread about the next James Bond movie, along with their original sources.

• Anyone lucky enough to be in New York City in mid-November should consider participating in the 8th annual Festival of New Literature from Europe. According to its Web site, the festival will feature “a series of readings and discussions in Manhattan and Brooklyn from November 15-17, 2011, with writers Caryl Férey (France), Zygmunt Miłoszewski (Poland), Ana Maria Sandu (Romania), Stefan Slupetzky (Austria), José Carlos Somoza (Spain), and Jan Costin Wagner (Germany), joined by U.S. guest author Dan Fesperman.” A concurrent film series will offer “both adaptations of crime novels and new approaches to the genre that play with the conventions of film noir.” The literary events are free and open to the public, but you’ll need tickets to the film screenings, available here.

• Meanwhile, crime-fiction fans in the Chicago area can look forward to two “Love Is Murder” mini-conferences scheduled to take place at their local libraries in November.

• “Free Mercury” is the title of Jodi MacArthur’s new short-story offering in Beat to a Pulp.

• Yvette Banek celebrates Halloween with a fine selection of classic book and magazine covers.

• There continues to be talk about how Republicans are destroying the U.S. economy for their own political gain.

• Damn, another Ellery Queen novel I have neglected to read. And this one is even a locked-room mystery, though the Puzzle Doctor says, “I can’t bring myself to recommend it except for a completist.” Hmm. I think I’ll have to find a copy, nonetheless.

• By the way, Ellery Queen is still big in Japan.

• Since I’ve become a fan of the new ABC-TV series Pan Am, my eye was caught this morning by an interview, in The Huffington Post, with Michael Mosley, who plays first officer Ted Vanderway on that show set amid the Jet Age of the 1960s.

• Wow, I didn’t know that Herbert Asbury ever wrote fiction.

• Virginia will soon have its first national monument.

• And given that Halloween is all about costumes (well, that and candy both), it seems appropriate today to highlight Scott D. Parker’s post, from Criminal Element, examining the evolution of Batman’s costume. He notes that, with his latest DC Universe incarnation, “Batman, with his beginnings in the dark days of the Great Depression, is now again the grim avenger of the night. And he’s got the costume and tools to do whatever it takes to bring criminals to justice.”

The Devil Only Knows

Think of The Exorcist, and you’re likely to recall images of a young Linda Blair’s head turning completely around, or perhaps two priests being pelted with vomit, or maybe even a bed levitating a few feet off the floor. Of course, those indelible images belong to the award-winning film released in 1973 and starring Ellyn Burstyn, Linda Blair, Max Von Sydow, and Lee J. Cobb. Yet, before the film started raising the neck hairs of the viewing public, there was William Peter Blatty’s novel--a book that’s just now celebrating its 40th birthday with a special anniversary edition.

The Exorcist initially came together under desperate circumstances. In a hand-out distributed by his publisher, Blatty states that

In January 1968, I rented a cabin in Lake Tahoe to start writing a novel about demonic possession that I’d been thinking about for many years. I’d been driven to it, actually. ... My breaking point came ... when at the Van Nuys, California, unemployment office I spotted my movie agent in a line three down from mine.

After several false starts, the author finally went back “home” to

a clapboard raccoon-surrounded guest house in the hills of Encino owned by a former Hungarian opera star who had purchased the property from the luminous film actress Angela Lansbury, and where I finally overcame the block ... Almost a year later, I completed a first draft of the novel. At the request of my editors ... I did make two quick changes ... but because of a dire financial circumstance, I had not another day to devote to the manuscript ... I left my novel to find its fate.

And what a glorious fate it found. After it was published in 1971, The Exorcist spent 57 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, including 17 consecutive weeks in the No. 1 position.

Even four decades later, the novel still retains its raw power to scare the bejesus out of readers. Sure, there are the familiar images such as those mentioned above, but there are other frightening moments in the tome that director William Friedkin did not incorporate into his film, such as when the possessed child, Regan MacNeil, contorts her body to look like a spider and silently stalks her nanny. This reader got serious goose bumps while going through that section. Whether or not you believe evil walks this earth, you will give in to the horrors contained in these pages. And if you are reading this book at night, you’ll want to turn on all the lights.

Beatty beat his writer’s block 40 years ago by correctly realizing that his novel should open in northern Iraq. It’s there that we first meet Father Lankester Merrin, an old Jesuit priest on the site of an archeological dig. A relic depicting the demon Pazuzu is uncovered from amongst the ruins.

It was a green stone head of the demon Pazuzu, personification of the southwest wind. Its dominion was sickness and disease. The head was pierced. The amulet’s owner had worn it as a shield. “Evil against evil,” breathed the curator.

Merrin is filled with a sense of foreboding as he walks around the dig site one last time, “his heart encased in the icy conviction that soon he would be hunted by an ancient enemy whose face he had never seen. But he knew his name.”

We quickly shift to the tony Washington, D.C., suburb of Georgetown. Film star and mother Chris MacNeil is living there temporarily while she’s shooting her latest role. At first, her 12-year-old daughter, Regan, is the epitome of a happy child living in privileged circumstances. The house is large and comfortable, there is a household staff catering to the mother and daughter’s needs, and at night there are parties with powerful and accomplished guests. It all seems golden. Then, shortly after Regan discovers a Ouija board in the basement of the house, her bed starts shaking one night and she has to go sleep with her mother. Things only go downhill from here.

Both the novel and the film (Blatty penned the screenplay too and won an Oscar for his efforts) do a brilliant job of building an aura of increasing dread, though the new anniversary edition of the book--revised, polished, and slightly added to by Blatty--provides a greater foundation for what is afflicting Regan. The author offers ample religious and psychological background, so that the reader can do some of the detective work in deciding for him- or herself if Regan is indeed possessed by a demon, or undergoing some type of psychotic breakdown.

(Right) The original Exorcist cover

After the anguished Chris MacNeil watches her daughter develop skin lesions and start speaking in strange voices, and sees Regan's bed levitate while MacNeil tries to hold it down, she seeks medical help. Unable to resolve Regan’s symptoms either physically or mentally, a psychiatrist finally suggests that MacNeil try an exorcism--but only in order to trick Regan into believing she’s been “cured.”

MacNeil turns to a Jesuit priest and psychiatrist, Father Damien Karras--a man suffering from both the death of his neglected mother and a doubting faith that results in his reassignment within the church. In the anniversary edition of The Exorcist, Blatty has provided an additional scene introducing the tortured priest. Leaving his mother alone in Brooklyn years earlier, the athletic Karras had earned a medical degree in addition to taking religious vows. But his continued neglect of his mother weighs heavily upon him, and after she is briefly hospitalized, she dies. Karras begins to lose his faith. Into this picture steps Chris MacNeil. She has seen Karras around the Georgetown campus where she is filming. She’s intrigued by his boxer physique and brooding manner. When she asks him to perform an exorcism on Regan, though, he initially resists.

“And how do you go about getting an exorcism?”

There was a pause while Karras stared.

“Beg pardon?” he said at last.

“If a person’s possessed by some kind of a demon, how do you go about getting an exorcism?”

Karras looked off, took a breath, then looked back to her. “Oh, well, first you’d have to put him in a time machine and get him back to the sixteenth century.”

Puzzled, Chris frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Well, it just doesn’t happen anymore.”

“Oh, really? Since when?”

“Since when? Since we learned about mental illness and schizophrenia and split personality; all those things that they taught me at Harvard.”

In the middle of the maelstrom surrounding Regan, there is also a bona-fide murder investigation. When Burke Dennings, the director shooting Chris MacNeil’s flick, is killed, homicide detective Lieutenant William Kinderman picks up the case. Dennings’ body was discovered at the bottom of the stairs outside MacNeil’s home, and Kinderman at first suspects MacNeil’s servant, Karl, of the crime. Parallel to the murder, someone has been desecrating statues at a local church, and through recovered evidence, Kinderman links it to the MacNeil household. Near the end of this book, Kinderman comes to the astonishing conclusion that Regan could be behind Dennings’ death. Kinderman is a great crime-fiction character. He presents a befuddled front, but his engines are really at full-throttle. Only Karras catches onto his shtick.

Eventually, Karras puts aside his analytical evaluation of Regan and goes to his bishop to ask permission to perform an exorcism. The priest understands that this is perhaps his last chance to do good in the world. The bishop has other ideas, however, and he calls in Father Merrin, who has more experience in such matters. When Karras offers to give the elderly priest background information on Regan’s affliction, Merrin cuts him off. He has no doubt who he is dealing with: the demon Pazuzu. It is the showdown that Merrin foresaw back in Iraq. And for his part, Pazuzu has been waiting for Merrin.

Suddenly, Chris flinched at a sound from above, at the voice of the demon. Booming and yet muffled, croaking, like an amplified premature burial, it called out “Meriiiiinnnnnn!” And then the massive and shiveringly hollow jolt of a single sledgehammer blow against the bedroom wall.

The exorcism itself encompasses only a small portion of the last part of this novel, but it is packed with tension: a room so cold the priests’ breath can be seen, objects levitating and flying around, Regan emitting strange animal sounds, and the priests physically wearing down under the assault. Before he arrived at the MacNeil house, Father Merrin knew he would not survive the exorcism. But the ending includes a shocking twist that the reader never sees coming.

Long before the glut of vampire books arrived on the scene with their themes of the undead, William Peter Blatty brought us the realm of everlasting evil colliding with modern culture. With its mix of psychology and religion against the backdrop of film, The Exorcist is a fascinating draw. Moreover, it assures us that things going bump in the night are truly horrific. Father Karras is never certain until the end whether he is truly dealing with a demonic possession. No such dubious claims can be made against the novel, though. The Exorcist was a bestseller 40 years ago and it hasn’t lost an ounce of its power to entertain and enthrall readers. I suspect the publisher will be issuing anniversary editions for many decades to come.

READ MORE: “After 40 Years, Grisly Exorcist Book Gets a Rewrite” (National Public Radio); “20 Facts About The Exorcist on Its 40th Birthday,” by Jennifer M. Wood (Mental Floss).

Alert the Copy Desk

Given my career background in the print media, it should come as no surprise to anybody that I was interested to read The Wall Street Journal’s selection of the five best books about writing for newspapers. And the headline is a classic: “Ink-Stained Riches.” I wish I’d been the one to think of that one!

Also check out Los Angeles historian Larry Harnisch’s report, in his excellent Daily Mirror blog, showing how newspapers have shrunk in physical dimensions over the last four decades, due primarily to the escalating costs of newsprint.

(Hat tip to Campaign for the American Reader.)

San Francisco on the Page

For the benefit of those (many) of us who could not attend the recent “Bullets Across the Bay” panel discussion at the University of California, Berkeley Library, a video of that event has now been posted on YouTube. Moderated by editor-blogger Janet Rudolph, the discussion examines the San Francisco area “as a popular setting for mystery and detective novels.” Joining Rudolph for this presentation were wordsmiths Eddie Muller, Kelli Stanley, and Lucha Corpi.

Fully Loaded

The Fall 2011 issue of Plots with Guns is now available online. Contributors this time out include Art Taylor, Patricia Abbott, Matthew C. Funk, and the wonderfully named M. James Blood.

Grilling Garner

Chalk this up as the highlight of my year: my recent opportunity--which, of course, I took--to interview James Garner.

Yes, that James Garner, the manifestly self-effacing American actor who became the star of such TV series as Maverick and Nichols, The Rockford Files and Bret Maverick. The same James Garner I grew up watching on television with my father, and who made himself famous and beloved for his roles in films on the order of The Great Escape (1963), The Americanization of Emily (1964), Grand Prix (1966), Hour of the Gun (1967), Support Your Local Sheriff! (1969), Marlowe (1969), Support Your Local Gunfighter! (1971), Skin Game (1971), Victor, Victoria (1982), Murphy’s Romance (1985), Sunset (1988), Maverick (1994), and Twilight (1998). The same James Garner whose works over the last six decades make up about half of all the DVDs I own.

A couple of months ago, when I received an advance copy of the actor’s first-ever memoir, The Garner Files, I sent a note to one of the publicity contacts at his publisher, Simon & Schuster. I wanted to know from her whether--despite Garner’s previously voiced antipathy toward press Q&As (“I’d rather dig a ditch than do an interview”)--he’d be willing to talk with me about his book for Kirkus Reviews. She didn’t know the answer to that--it seems nobody had yet asked about such things--but said she’d find out. The next thing I knew, I was hooked up with The Garner Files’ co-author, quote collector Jon Winokur (The Portable Curmudgeon), who explained that he would be willing to field my questions via e-mail and obtain responses from Garner.

In the end, I put together two dozen queries about Garner’s boyhood, his acting career, his political views, and his health. Many of his answers can be found in a piece posted today on the Kirkus Web site.

* * *

However, I had far too much interesting material for Kirkus Reviews alone. So I’m going to go ahead and post the remainder of it--much of which covers The Rockford Files--below.

But first, let me say a few words about The Garner Files.

This is not your typical memoir or autobiography. Garner didn’t pen it all by himself in some garret. As he explains in my Kirkus post, the book is the product of extensive interviewing: “Jon Winokur and I met twice a week over a period of about 18 months. We’d spend a few hours, with Jon asking questions, making notes, and recording everything.”

Winokur has known James Garner since 1988. In that year, the performer was given a copy of The Portable Curmudgeon to read while recovering from heart surgery, and he liked it so much that he plugged the book during an appearance with Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show. The author and actor subsequently got to know each other pretty well, and over a lunch in November 2009, Winokur suggested they work together on what would become The Garner Files. “He was reluctant at first,” Winokur tells me, “because he didn’t think anyone would be interested in his life, but he was eventually convinced to do it.”

The memoir is generally chronological, beginning with Garner’s distinctly trying childhood in Norman, Oklahoma. He was the youngest of three boys and was born on April 7, 1928, as James Scott Bumgarner. (Only much later, after they moved to the West Coast, did he and his middle brother, Jack, shorten their last name.) His mother died from a “botched abortion” when he was only 4 years old, and afterward his store-owning father--who “couldn’t handle the responsibility of raising three young boys”--parceled those sons out to relatives of uneven merits. Fortunately, in his mid-60s and after marrying several more times, Garner’s dad finally swapped rings with a “sweet woman named Grace,” whom the actor

now says was “the closest I ever came to having a mother.”

(Left) James Garner appears on the October 25, 1964, episode of What’s My Line?

Garner’s voice--wry, witty, country-fied, and frequently self-critical--comes through clearly in these pages as he looks back over more than eight decades’ worth of experiences, many of which took place under public scrutiny. He remembers being “the first Oklahoman drafted for the Korean War.” He remembers the serendipity involved in his becoming a Hollywood performer (“The only reason I’m an actor is that a lady pulled out of a parking space in front of a producer’s office”). He remembers meeting and falling in love with his wife-to-be, Lois Clarke, in 1956 during an Adlai Stevenson for President rally. (They’ve been together ever since, save for an 18-month separation in the late 1970s that he attributes to his own physical and mental exhaustion.) He talks about the other film stars he’s admired (especially Marlon Brando and Gene Hackman), his occasional battles to get a fair deal from entertainment studios, the health problems he’s endured as a result of on-screen stunts and years of racing cars, his love/hate relationship with the game of golf, his dislike of the glitzy Hollywood lifestyle, the constant pain from arthritis he’s lived with since the 1960s, his attendance at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (Garner was seated in the third row at the Lincoln Memorial, when Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech), his political maturation (“the first time I voted, in 1952, it was for [Dwight] Eisenhower. ... Never voted for a Republican again”), and--last but certainly not least--his careful choice of screen roles over the decades (“A reporter asked once if I would ever do a nude scene. I told him I don’t do horror films”).

Garner also admits to being unlike the easygoing, lighthearted, self-confident, and sometimes self-interested characters he’s played on screens large and small. He says in the book that he’s “scared of public speaking”; that he’s no kind of macho guy (“I don’t like macho guys”); that he’s “not temperamental, but I do have a temper”; that he can be loyal to a fault, and that he’s “a pessimist by nature.” He insists he’s “really an old curmudgeon.” But then, some of his characters have been too, and viewers have found them no less watchable because of it.

Winokur, who’s come to know this actor better than most of us ever will, has nothing but fond words for him. “They say no man is a hero to his valet, or to his biographer,” Winokur tells me, “but I learned that James Garner is just who you think he is. Only better.”

Garner may be “a very private person,” as actress (and onetime Rockford Files guest star) Lauren Bacall describes him in her tribute--one of many from his family and friends--at the back of The Garner Files. But he chose to live his life in the most public of professions. It took him only six decades in Hollywood before he was willing to step out from behind the characters he’s brought to vivid life on-screen and show himself, in print, to be a character worth knowing in his own right. I’m thrilled to have been around to ask him a few questions when that happened.

J. Kingston Pierce: Is there anything about Jim Rockford, who you played in The Rockford Files, that you wish was true of you, as well?

James Garner: I wish I could have quit smoking as easily as Rockford did: During the first season he smoked, but we decided it was a bad example so we had him quit. Aside from getting beat up by thugs and stiffed by clients every week, Rockford didn’t have a care in the world. That’s the difference between television and real life.

JKP: You say in your book how much you loved the relationship between Jim Rockford and his father, Rocky, played by Noah Beery Jr. What was so special about that relationship?

JG: Our head writer, the late Steve Cannell, based it on the loving relationship he’d had with his own dad, Joseph Cannell. “Pidge,” as everyone called [Berry], was perfect in the role of Jim Rockford’s dad because he was not only

a fine actor, he was also a gentle man. I think the relationship between them was the emotional core of the show.

(Right) Garner being interviewed by Bob Costas

JKP: You write that when Rockford was cancelled in the middle of its sixth season, there were 10 episodes still unfinished. Does that mean there are 10 never-used Rockford scripts still kicking around someplace, or were those scripts used in other ways?

JG: Not that I know of. There may have been one or two new scripts, and maybe a few new stories lying around, but I doubt if the number would be 10. There may also have been two or three abandoned scripts that were never shot for one reason or another.

JKP: You made a succession of Rockford Files reunion movies for CBS-TV between 1994 to 1999. Why did you give up making those?

JG: We’d contracted to do eight two-hour shows and the studio didn’t order any more. I have to admit that I was relieved, because the physical demands became too great.

JKP: One of the funny things about Rockford was that, in its first year at least, your private-eye character only handled ostensibly “closed cases,” those in which the cops no longer took an active interest. Yet that story point seemed to vanish after the introductory season. Was the concept no longer considered necessary or viable?

JG: I don’t remember specifically, but I think the writers just ran out of cold-case plots.

JKP: Let’s talk about a couple of your earlier TV series, beginning with Nichols (1971-1972), a modern-style western. In that show, set in 1914, you played the motorcycle-riding sheriff of a small Arizona town who didn’t like using violence to solve his problems. I’m surprised that after the then-recent successes you’d had with Marlowe, Support Your Local Sheriff!, and Support Your Local Gunfighter!, television audiences didn’t flock to Nichols.

Was that really your favorite TV series? And why did it fail to catch on?

(Left) The main title sequence from Nichols

JG: I have a special place in my heart for Nichols. But I wouldn’t put it in the same category with the Support Your Local movies, which were broad comedies. Nichols was more subtle, more character driven. I don’t know why it didn’t catch on. Maybe it needed more time to find its audience: We were preempted eight out of 24 shows by the 1972 presidential election campaign. Plus, NBC put us up against Marcus Welby, M.D., the top-rated show on television at the time. And it didn’t help that our sponsor, Chevrolet, wasn’t behind the show: When we screened the pilot for them in Detroit, the wife of one of the executives said, “It’s not Maverick!” I should have known we were finished then and there. They thought they were getting Maverick and they were disappointed.

I think Nichols was ahead of its time. I put it right up there with Maverick and Rockford, even though it ran less than a year. It wasn’t like anything else on the air at the time.

JKP: You write at one point that your efforts to recapture the magic of Maverick only “beat it to death.” This leads me to ask what you thought of Bret Maverick. That 1981 revival--which I loved, by the way--seemed to be honoring the brand. Yet it didn’t succeed. Do you think you shouldn’t have done Bret Maverick, after all?

JG: Bret Maverick was a well-produced show, with great writing and a fine cast that included Stuart Margolin, Ed Bruce, and Darleen Carr. Young Maverick [the CBS-TV series spawned from 1978’s The New Maverick] was the disaster. It only lasted a few episodes.

JKP: Two people seem to come off in your book as tragic figures: Harry O star David Janssen and your Maverick co-star, Jack Kelly, both of whom you say drank too much. Do you also think of them as tragic figures?

JG: I don’t think Jack was a tragic figure. He always seemed to be enjoying himself and he had a life beyond acting--after Maverick he became a successful real-estate broker and was elected mayor of Huntington Beach, California.

I think the demands of doing a television series killed David. While he was making The Fugitive, he’d call and say, “Jim, I don’t know if I’m going to make it.” Well, he didn’t, he died in 1980 at the age of 48, and that was a tragedy.

JKP: Reading through The Garner Files, I was reminded that you suffered a stroke a few years back. Did you recover completely from that health scare, or do you still experience some lingering effects?

JG: Fortunately, there was no permanent damage.

(Right) A bronze statue of Garner, unveiled in Norman, Okla., in 2006

JKP: You seem to still love Oklahoma, where you were born in 1928. As a proud, life-long Democrat, are you surprised by that state’s increasing tilt toward right-wing politics?

JG: I’ll always love Oklahoma. I’m surprised by any tilt toward right-wing politics, because I don’t understand that way of thinking. When I was growing up in Norman, everyone I knew was a Democrat.

JKP: Is there one acting job you passed up, but now wish you hadn’t?

JG: I’ve never regretted “passing” on a part, because I always figured another would come along as good or better, and it usually did.

JKP: Are there types of roles you’ve refused to take over the years?

JG: ... [F]or a long time I was reluctant to play heavies. I just didn’t want to be a bad guy on the screen. I didn’t want to be a superhero either--didn’t want to go to either extreme. Maybe I should have been more adventurous.

JKP: Are you still taking on-screen acting jobs?

JG: I’m officially retired, and you can quote me on that. (Unless something really juicy comes along.)

JKP: Where were you last month when you heard that your brother Jack had passed away? It was always fun to spot him on the screen with you. [He played Captain McEnroe in Rockford and Jack the Bartender in Bret Maverick, among other roles.] I hope he had a fine send-off.

JG: I was home in Los Angeles. Jack and I were pals as well as brothers. We always had fun working together--one of the things Jack was proudest of was that he’d earned a SAG [Screen Actors Guild] pension. And we played a lot of golf together over the years--Jack was also a golf professional and a very good player.

There was a wonderful memorial service where people got up and told stories about him, most of them funny, because Jack had a great sense of humor. I miss him.

JKP: Finally, what’s the most important thing you’ve learned in 83 years?

JG: I’m still learning!

READ MORE: “Hometown Maverick” by Gene Triplett (NewsOK).

Sweet Abandon

“What Your Halloween Candy Says About You.”

The author of this article in Gawker thinks that giving out one small-size candy bar is “fair and just”? C’mon, tightwad! I buy bags full of small candy bars and let the children who show up at my door take a couple of handfuls. That is fair and just--and loads of fun for me, too.

READ MORE: “The Twisted History of Candy,” by Felisa Rogers (Salon).

Never Too Old to Be Enjoyed

If it’s Friday, that means it is another opportunity for celebrating “forgotten books” on the Web. Today’s selection of crime novels worth rediscovering includes: The Gathering Place, by Jon L. Breen; Mother Finds a Body, by Gypsy Rose Lee; Bad Faith, by Aimee and David Thurlo; The Death Wish, by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding; The Hand in the Glove, by Rex Stout; Hallowe’en Party, by Agatha Christie; The Nine Wrong Answers, by John Dickson Carr; Bucket Nut, by Liza Cody; and three novels by Day Keene.

You will find a full rundown of today’s participating bloggers here.

Keep Watching This Space

If you’ve thought postings here have been a bit light of late, it’s because I have been working on a rather exciting but time-consuming project: an interview with James Garner, the star of The Rockford Files and Maverick, and the author (with Jon Winokur) of a new memoir, The Garner Files. That book is officially due out next week, but my interview will appear in two parts on Friday morning.

Meanwhile, to whet your appetite, I’m embedding below two video clips from Garner’s work. The first is one of my favorite scenes from the 1974 Rockford pilot film, also featuring William Smith (as tough guy Jerry Grimes) and Garner’s elder brother, Jack (as the guy who comes in after the fight hoping to use the restroom).



The second one comes from the 1981 introductory episode of Bret Maverick. In this scene, Tom Guthrie (Ed Bruce), the sheriff of Sweetwater, Arizona, disarms participants in a high-stakes poker game--the notoriously well-outfitted Maverick (Garner) among them.

Winslow Wins?

I am putting this post up with some hesitation, as I don’t find any corroborating information on the Web. But Jiro Kimura reports on The Gumshoe Site that Southern California novelist Don Winslow has won the 2011 T. Jefferson Parker Book Award for his novel Savages (Simon & Schuster). I sent an e-mail note to Winslow, hoping for confirmation of this news, but have not yet heard anything back.

Other contenders for this same 2011 prize in the mystery/thrillers category were: The Sentry, by Robert Crais (Putnam); San Diego Noir, edited by Maryelizabeth Hart (Akashic Books); and The Informant, by Thomas Perry (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).

Winslow’s win was supposedly announced on October 22, in San Diego, by the Southern California Independent Booksellers Association.

FOLLOW-UP: Here’s confirmation of Winslow’s award pick-up. Thanks to Lance Wright of Omnimystery News for sending along the link.

“We Had Joy, We Had Fun ...”

Really, I don’t think that Terry Jacks’ “Seasons in the Sun” belongs on Rolling Stone’s list of “The 10 Worst Songs of the 1970s.” Heck, it’s one of the few songs from that era that I can still sing by memory.

This Should Be Good

“Thomas Perry’s 2010 crime novel, Strip, is being adapted for film,” according to Omnimystery News. “Aaron Stockard (Gone Baby Gone, The Town) will write the screenplay.”

The Story Behind the Story: “Darkness All Around,” by Doug Magee

(Editor’s note: For this 27th entry in our “Story Behind the Story” series, we welcome to The Rap Sheet Doug Magee, an author, filmmaker, and former freelance photojournalist living in New York’s Spanish Harlem. His second novel, Darkness All Around, was published recently by Touchstone. In the essay below, Magee looks back at his own history and experiences to find some of the sources for the story he tells in that book.)

My new novel, Darkness All Around, is about Sean Collins, who, after 11 years existing as a drunk on the streets of New York City, suffers a traumatic brain injury, survives it, and then begins to have horrible memories of a murder he committed before he left his Pennsylvania hometown. Sean tries to turn himself in for the murder, but since another man already confessed to the crime and is serving a life sentence, the district attorney and the town in general turn him away. His ex-wife, Risa, finds herself caught between Sean’s wild claim and her new husband Alan’s desire to run Sean out of town. Dark corners of the town become exposed and Sean and Risa find themselves in very hot water.

So, what’s behind this story? I don’t outline my fiction before I begin to write. I have an idea, perhaps a couple of plot points, and one or two characters, but for the most part I just take myself on a journey of exploration for the time I’m writing the book. Revising that first draft is usually more technical than it is introspective. And so when the finished book arrives in the mail I’m presented with a little mystery. How the hell did this thing come about?

In the case of my first novel, Never Wave Goodbye (2010), the mystery wasn’t so deep. The story--about a woman who puts her daughter on a bus to summer camp, goes back in her house, and then the real bus arrives--came from an ah-ha moment and was intended to be a screenplay first. The rest of the novel unspooled organically from that first “what if.” I suppose that if I looked deeply there would be some autobiographical elements to Never Wave Goodbye, but in general the book is, well, an open book.

Darkness All Around is a little more obscure in its origins. The seed idea, that a man recovers memory of a murder, was also intended as a screenplay at first. I revived it years later when I saw its potential as a novel. Before I sat down to write, I remembered a chapter in Oliver Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat in which Sacks recounts the story of a young man who had killed his girlfriend and had no memory of it until he had a traumatic brain injury years later. I didn’t want details from Sacks’ account to color my story, so I didn’t go back to that book until after I’d finished writing.

As the story in Darkness All Around developed, Sean’s horror at his own deed grew and his torture was such that he felt suicide was the only way for him to rid himself of the deep guilt he was suffering. Looking at the book whole after its completion I saw the centrality of this guilt to the narrative, based a trailer

for the book (embedded at right) on Sean’s anguish, and wondered just where that part of the story came from.

My first answer was that a recurring dream I have was responsible for the emphasis on guilt in the book. Every now and then, for years, maybe decades, I will have a nightmare in which I realize I have committed murder and there is nothing I can do to reverse that fact. In the dream I don’t actually see myself carry out the murder, but it’s as if I wake from some sleep or blacked-out condition and have this horrible, sinking feeling of having committed the worst crime one can commit.

OK, so perhaps the dream was behind the writing, behind my subconscious coughing up that particular part of the story. But what was behind the dream? It didn’t take too much sleuthing for me to figure that one out. I do have a hair-trigger guilt response, but it was something more specific than that.

In 1980 I wrote and had published my first book, Slow Coming Dark, a non-fiction collection of interviews with death-row inmates. I was actively opposed to the death penalty (and still am) and my attempt in the book was to put a human face on those men and women we had demonized by sentencing them to death. I went to a number of death rows around the country, mainly in the South, and tape-recorded and photographed inmates, usually in a special visiting room or in their cells.

As I went about this project, a curious thing developed. Although I was often alone in a small, enclosed space with men who had committed atrocious acts of violence, sometimes locked inside with them and no guards, I was never afraid of them, never feared for my own safety. But when I began editing the interviews and writing about the inmates, I began to fear myself and my own capacity for violence. Part of the work of the book was to give the men a more universal cast than daily journalism offered, a there-but-for-fortune slant that I felt accurately described their lives and dilemmas. In doing this I found myself identifying with the men and had many cold-sweat moments imagining being in their shoes, waking to the reality that I had killed and the killing could not be reversed or absolved.

That may sound extreme, but if you eschew, as I did, the black hat/white hat, good guys/bad guys, us-versus-pure evil understanding of murderers, you leave yourself open to the possibility that with only small tweaks or twists of fate it could be you sitting in the cell and your interviewee in your shoes. These very visceral feelings left me after a while but, as I’ve said, they seem to have popped up in dreams, and now in Darkness All Around.

In this new book, Sean Collins’ response to the awful knowledge that he has killed someone is to want to kill himself in return. He comes very close to doing so a couple of times, but stops himself when he realizes that this solution would be a dreadful legacy for his son. In my dreams, in the feelings I had 30 years ago, I can’t say that I thought suicide would be an answer to anything, but the worst part of the dream for me was the certain knowledge that I would never in my life be able to overcome the horrible guilt.

I suppose it’s up to the reader of Darkness All Around to see if this strain in the novel is something he/she can identify with, if I’ve managed to convey Sean’s--and my--horror, but at least I’ve unraveled one small mystery about the book’s origins for myself.

Perhaps as an antidote of sorts to what Sean went through, I’ve been working on a true-crime story recently, involving two men who have spent 35 years in prison for a murder they did not commit. Their nightmare is one I think we all can understand and fear.

READ MORE: “Doug Magee’s Darkness All Around”
(My Book, the Movie).

Archies Acquired

Thanks to blogger Les Blatt, we learn that the New York City-based Wolfe Pack, a fan organization devoted to Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe tales, last night gave out its biennial Archie Awards for lifetime achievement. Blatt writes, in Classic Mysteries, that “three (four, actually) authors were named as Archie Award recipients: Dashiell Hammett, Robert B. Parker, and both halves of Ellery Queen (Frederick Dannay and Manfred B. Lee). We think Archie Goodwin would have approved.”

It’s hard to argue with that.

Substance Over Sales, Please

What does it say about either the need for people to make their existence known online, or the ridiculous extremes to which advertising efforts will go nowadays, that blogs like The Rap Sheet are flooded with pointless comments? I simply delete comments left on posts that really have nothing to say about the content of those blog entries, but are designed to lead readers to other sites. Here’s one I received yesterday:

Hi Author,

Details are very true and factual, I do really learned something new upon reading this interesting post. Good job! and Thanks!

Nobody who screens their blog’s comments would be justified in allowing through such vacuous remarks. But the person who sent it obviously hoped I wouldn’t look at it closely, because it also carried a link to a site where hair-care products can be purchased.

Clothes Make the Murder

On the Kirkus Reviews Web site today, I review A Bespoke Murder, the opening installment of Edward Marston’s new “Home Front Detective Series,” set in Britain during World War I. As I write in that post:

A Bespoke Murder follows a long line of mystery and thriller novels in which World War I or its aftermath are integral to the storytelling. Robert Goddard’s In Pale Battalions (1988), Charles Todd’s A Test of Wills (1996), Rennie Airth’s River of Darkness (1999) and Max Allan Collins’ The Lusitania Murders (2002) are merely a few that have come before. This being the opening chapter in a new series, however, Marston--who’s best known for his Elizabethan theater mysteries and more recent succession of books about “Railway Detective” Robert Colbeck (The Excursion Train)--should have opportunities to explore the war’s impact on life and politics beyond the battlefield in a way those other writers did not. He certainly seems to have the motivation to do so.

You will find the full critique here.

Bullet Points: Waiting for Halloween Edition

• The Rap Sheet wasn’t able to participate in this last Friday’s celebration of “forgotten books,” but others contributed some fine picks to the series. Among those were The Crooked Hinge, by John Dickson Carr; The Puzzle of the Blue Banderilla, by Stuart Palmer; Call Mr. Fortune, by H.C. Bailey; and Seance, by Mark McShane. Series organizer Patti Abbott offers a full list of participating bloggers here.

• Peter Rozovsky of Detectives Beyond Borders points me to Melville House’s Web site, where you can hear the late British writer Derek Raymond (aka Robin Cook) read from his 1984 Factory Series novel, He Died with His Eyes Open. Click here to locate that sound file.

• I featured the earlier trailer for Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows here, so it seems only right that I should now offer you the revised version (on the left). The cinematography looks fabulous. I only hope the rest of the movie isn’t a disappointment.

A Game of Shadows, starring Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law, is scheduled to be released in mid-December of this year. (Hat tip to The Moviefone Blog.)

• Meanwhile, I’m making my way slowly but surely through Nathanael Booth’s splendid write-ups about each of the dozens of episodes from Jeremy Brett’s classic British television series, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. You’ll find Booth’s multiplying posts in More Man Than Philosopher.

• Between this poll on the Random House Australia Web site, and this cartoon in a recent New Yorker, I’m starting to wonder whether Scandinavian crime fiction hasn’t become too popular for its own good.

• Bradley Cooper to play Napoleon Solo?

• Elizabeth Foxwell provides a pretty neat breakdown of mystery fiction’s numerous subgenres here. But it falls to TV critic Robin Jarossi to explain the (new to me) concept of “sightseeing crime dramas” in his blog, Crime Time Preview.

• For the Mystery Scene blog, Oline Cogdill looks at the British TV series Case Histories, the second episode of which will be shown tonight under PBS’ Masterpiece Mystery! umbrella, beginning at 9 p.m. ET/PT.

• Here’s a headline that drove me to read more: “Bram Stoker’s Notebook Offers Cryptic Clues to Dracula.” As The Guardian explains, the “100-odd-page notebook,” discovered in an attic on the Isle of Wight, “covers the period when Stoker was a student at Trinity College in Dublin and a clerk at Dublin Castle, [and is] written in a clear precursor to the journalistic style of Dracula ...” It’s said also to contain “the author’s earliest attempts at poetry and prose.”

• A couple of months ago, I asked Hard Case Crime editor Charles Ardai what had become of a long-promised joint packaging of two early (and pseudonymously published) Lawrence Block books, 69 Barrow Street and Strange Embrace. He told me, “it’s still coming, probably next May.” Thankfully, we don’t have to wait that long to get a gander at the artwork for this back-to-back “double.” Click here to see Robert McGinnis’ illustrations for both sides of the volume.

• Issue #8 of Crimefactory is now available online.

• One of the few new programs I think worth watching this season is Pan Am, an early 1960s-set drama about airline stewardesses--and spying--that’s directed by West Wing alumnus Thomas Schlamme. (See trailer here.) Stylish and sexy, with delightful performances by Christina Ricci and French-Canadian actress Karine Vanasse, the show is still finding its audience in ABC’s 10-11 p.m. slot on Sundays. (Tonight’s episode takes the crew to Monte Carlo). But it has also generated some nostalgia for that era before Homeland Security checks, when passengers still enjoyed in-flight food service and weren’t hustled in and out of planes like cattle. (Who knew, when we were all whining about mediocre airline service 20 years ago, that it could actually get worse?) One “stew” who worked for Pan Am in its heyday shares her memories with the Omaha World-Herald. And click here to read about the huge stock of Pan Am memorabilia housed at the San Francisco International Airport’s Aviation Library and Louis A. Turpen Aviation Museum.

• Omnimystery News offers this intriguing item: “The Center for Fiction in New York City has announced a new program devoted exclusively to crime fiction. Called, appropriately enough, the Crime Fiction Academy, it will be the first on-going, rigorous program dedicated to crime writing in all its forms.” Authors Megan Abbott, Lawrence Block, Lee Child, Thomas H. Cook, Dennis Lehane, Laura Lippman, Val McDermid, and S.J. Rozan are among the authors slated to participate. Crime Fiction Academy is supposed to open in February 2012.

• So much for the lie that tax cuts create jobs.

• Amazing! “Brothers Keith and Brian Collins say they discovered [Wyatt] Earp’s personal photo album while picking through a Hesperia [California] antique shop,” reports the Los Angeles Times. “Inside the worn, leather-bound album were more than two dozen tiny tintype and carte de visite pictures showing Earp as a child, a teenager and a young adult, they say. They say the album also contains photos of his mother and pictures of two of his three wives.”

• The latest short story featured in Beat to a Pulp is called “Intervention,” and it comes from Texas writer William Dylan Powell.

• Oh, damn! The DVD release of It Takes a Thief: The Complete Series is being delayed from October 25 until November 15.

• I don’t care that others may wish to do away with punctuation. As a veteran editor with a bent toward formality, I shall fight the battle for correct English usage for as long as I am able. So there ...

• And Criminal Element lists its “favorite spooky or creepy stories”--ideal for reading as All Hallows’ Eve approaches.

Our Kind of Author

Please join us in wishing espionage novelist John le Carré (né David Cornwell) a happy birthday. The author of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974), The Russia House (1989), and, most recently, Our Kind of Traitor (2010) turns 80 years old today. The Writer’s Almanac notes that Cornwell/le Carré

got a job in Her Majesty’s Secret Service as a young man, but he found the actual work of a spy pretty boring. He said, “[It was] spectacularly undramatic.”

Since he was disappointed in his life as a spy, le Carré decided to entertain himself by writing novels. He had to keep his identity secret, so he used the pen name John le Carré. He said, “I wanted something three-syllabled and exotic.” Le Carré means “the square” in French. His third novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), was so successful that he quit his job as a spy and began to write full time.

“Completing a book, it’s a little like having a baby,” he told the Telegraph in 2010. “There’s a feeling of relief and satisfaction when you get to the end. A feeling that you have brought your family, your characters, home. Then a sort of post-natal depression and then, very quickly, the horizon of a new book. The consolation that next time I will do it better.”

(Hat tip to Adam Woog.)

READ MORE: John le Carré at 80,” by Cavershamragu
(Tipping My Fedora).

Caught in the ’Net

• Among the nominees for the 2011 Galaxy Awards are half a dozen books in the Thriller & Crime Novel of the Year category:

Before I Go to Sleep, by S.J. Watson (Doubleday)
The Fear Index, by Robert Harris (Hutchinson)
Heartstone, by C.J. Sansom (Pan)
The Family, by Martina Cole (Headline)
The Impossible Dead, by Ian Rankin (Orion)
Trick of the Dark, by Val McDermid (Sphere)

• Because there can never be too many smartly penned posts about the 1941 movie version of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon--which celebrated its 70th anniversary earlier this month--critic Edward Copeland weighs in with yet another assessment.

• “The thing about Kojak, its genius and its curse,” writes Stephen Bowie in The Classic TV History Blog, “is that the show was television’s ultimate star vehicle. It started with Telly Savalas, he of the overwhelming personality and the deep metallic voice and the startling afro-era chrome-dome, and very little else. The showrunners of Kojak were first-rate, veterans of Ben Casey (executive producer Matthew Rapf and supervising producer Jack Laird) and Night Gallery (Laird and story editor Gene Kearney). But nobody was asking them for a

new spin on the television police drama and, at first, none of them tried to come up with one.” (Just for fun, I’ve embedded the intro from Kojak at right.)

• Two years ago, Raymond Chandler authority Robert F. Moss wrote an excellent piece for The Rap Sheet about that detective novelist’s famous fondness for gimlets. Now critic David J. Montgomery returns to the topic in his blog, Crime Fiction Dossier.

• London Boulevard, the 2010 British film adaptation of Ken Bruen’s 2001 novel of that same name, is finally scheduled for a limited U.S. release, beginning next month.

• Max Allan Collins pays tribute this week to his friend, actor Michael Cornelison, who he says “played such a key role in my adventures in indie filmmaking that it’s hard to imagine ever making another film without him.” Cornelison passed away on October 15 at age 59.

• The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent says major U.S. news organizations are doing a disservice to voters by not looking more closely at the disparate jobs-creation ideas presented by the country’s two political parties. “[President] Obama and the Senate GOP have both introduced jobs plans,” Sargent writes. “In reporting on the Senate plan, many news organizations described it as a ‘GOP jobs plan.’ And that’s fine--Rand Paul said it would create five million of them. But few if any of the same news orgs that amplified the GOP offering of a jobs plan are making any serious effort to determine whether independent experts think there’s anything to it. And independent experts don’t think there’s anything to it--they think the GOP jobs plan would not create any jobs in the near term, and could even hurt the economy. By contrast, they do think the Obama plan would create jobs and lead to growth.” More here.

• Good news for Robert R. McCammon fans: Nine of that horror writer’s classic titles are being released in digital format this week.

• Todd Ritter, author of Bad Moon, is Jeff Rutherford’s latest guest on the Reading and Writing podcast. Click here to listen.

• Are John Burdett’s Thai police thrillers bound for the big screen?

• R.I.P., Flint costume designer Ray Aghayan.

• If I owned an e-reader, I’d probably get this short-story collection.

• Forget the Harry Potter films. Daniel Radcliffe certainly looks more interesting in The Woman in Black, a film based on Susan Hill’s supernatural thriller of the same name and due for release in February.

• How do we define “great literature”?

• And erotic novelist Victoria Janssen sings the praises of the 1980-1988 TV series Magnum, P.I. in a post for Criminal Element. “I loved the mixture of drama and humor on the show,” she writes, “as well as the fantasy elements ... well, not fantasy to some people, but certainly to me, who had never been to Hawaii, never ridden in a fancy sports car, and never lived on a beachfront estate, let alone free of charge. It’s worth watching just for the gorgeous scenery. Plus, I must admit I never found Tom Selleck difficult to look at. Ahem.”

Canvases of Crime

Entries in Patti Abbott’s Reginald Marsh flash fiction challenge are being posted all around the Web today. Each of those tales is supposed to be based on a work by Marsh, who was a “social realist” painter known best for his portrayals of New York City during the 1920s and ’30s.

Abbott offers her original story, “The Ohrbach Girl,” in her own blog, together with a yarn by Daniel Moses Luft and links to the rest of the participants in this challenge.

Rankin Does Battle with the Blank Page

As The Impossible Dead, Ian Rankin’s 31st novel, makes it ways to UK bookshops, the author who put the Tartan in Noir talks to The Independent about process, production, and that deadliest of all fears: staring at the blank page.

“No matter how many awards you’ve won or how many sales you’ve got, come the next book it’s still a blank sheet of paper and you’re still panicking like hell that you’ve got nothing new to say,” he admits. “I still panic that the ideas aren’t going to come, it’s not going to be as good as my previous book, I’ve got nothing new to say, people are fed up with me, younger writers are doing better work. There are all kinds of fears that keep pushing at you. Thank God, otherwise you’d just sit back and write any old crap.”

It certainly doesn’t seem as though the second book to feature Rankin’s internal affairs cop, Detective Inspector Malcolm Fox, would fit that description. Again from The Independent:

The action in The Impossible Dead is set mostly in Fife, the region just over the Forth Bridge from Edinburgh, and the place where Rankin himself grew up. Like all Rankin’s work, it’s impeccably plotted, and what seems like a simple case of police corruption gradually spreads its tendrils back to the mid-Eighties, a period of recent history involving a brief outbreak of Scottish nationalist terrorism. It’s loosely based on the real-life story of Willie MacRae, an SNP activist with alleged links to extremists, who was found dead in his car one night in suspicious circumstances. This linking of past and present is a familiar theme in Rankin’s work, something that gives it a depth and resonance sometimes lacking in rival crime fiction.

The Independent points out that although Rankin is an international bestselling author now, he was anything but an overnight sensation:

It’s hard to picture these days, but there was a time when Rankin’s name wasn’t ubiquitous at the top of the bestseller list. In fact, Rankin didn't have any kind of breakthrough until the eighth Rebus novel (and his 15th book in all), Black and Blue, won the Macallan Gold Dagger for fiction in 1997. And even then he didn't have a bestseller until two years later, with Dead Souls.

“My publishers were taking a punt on me for a long time,” he says. “That probably wouldn’t happen now. I was having panic attacks, I was driving through the French countryside where we lived at the time, screaming at the top of my voice just to get it out my system. I was waking up in the night with this adrenalin rush like a heart attack. It was a pretty horrible time.”

And it was around the time, in 2000, that Rap Sheet editor J. Kingston Pierce interviewed Rankin for January Magazine. You can read that interview here. More recently, Pierce selected Rankin’s newest novel as his reading pick of the week.

The Impossible Dead, out now in the UK and Canada, will be available in the States come November.

Get Your Fixler Here

Paperback illustrator Fred Fixler (1923-2010) wins some much-overdue attention today in my Killer Covers blog. Check out that post.

Take Me with You, Mr. Fogg!

It was 55 years ago today that the movie Around the World in 80 Days, based on French novelist Jules Verne’s 1873 novel of the same name, and produced by Michael Todd, premiered at the (now long-gone) Rivoli Theater in New York City.

Is That the Case?

Stay tuned tonight for the PBS-TV debut of Case Histories, a quirky and quite entertaining mini-series based on the first three of Kate Atkinson’s highly regarded novels featuring gumshoe Jackson Brodie. Shown originally on the UK’s BBC One, this drama will be televised in the States under the Masterpiece Mystery! umbrella.

Tonight’s two-hour episode gives the whole series (which ran in Britain in six one-hour segments, rather than three parts) its title. It’s based on the 2004 novel Case Histories, and finds former police detective Brodie--played by English actor Jason Isaacs--becoming involved in a trio of

ostensibly unlinked family tragedies: the disappearance of a 3-year-old girl from her family’s back garden 30 years ago; the supposedly random killing of a solicitor’s daughter; and the long-ago slaying of a husband. The story rolls out in a somewhat complicated, interweaving manner that demands attention from its audience, but the rewards of that attention are great. Brodie has his own troubled family past (he lost a sister in boyhood, and his brother has since been institutionalized), plus present-day woes--his wife is threatening to relocate to New Zealand with their 8-year-old daughter, Marlie, who longs to be her father’s investigative sidekick. Los Angeles Times TV critic Robert Lloyd explains further that

Brodie is a man whose need to do right has gotten him kicked off the police force--some old colleagues regard him as “a nutter”--whose resources he nevertheless continues to employ, courtesy reluctantly [of] accommodating Detective Constable Louise Munroe (Amanda Abbington). Munroe, who regards him both with trust and expectation of disappointment, calls him “the most irritating man north of Hadrian’s Wall and a better cop” than any of his critics--which is to say they might be in love. They are, at least, lovely to watch together.

Case Histories will continue for the next two Sundays. Its second installment, adapted from Atkinson’s One Good Turn--and the least satisfying of these three episodes--is scheduled for broadcast on October 23; with episode three, about a resourceful and charming teenage nanny looking for her missing employer, set to show on October 30. Masterpiece Mystery! begins each Sunday at 9 p.m. ET/PT.

You needn’t have read Atkinson’s books to enjoy or understand this mini-series (although if you have read the books already, you’ll notice right away that Brodie’s turf has been moved from Cambridge to Edinburgh). Between its engaging cast, led by Isaacs, its sometimes-unexpected story turns, and its layerings of humor, Case Histories is a welcome addition to PBS’ Masterpiece Mystery! line-up.

READ MORE: Criminal Element’s Leslie Gilbert Elman reviewed all three episodes of this first Case Histories series--“Case Histories,” “One Good Turn,” and “When Will There Be Good News”; “This Is the Good News, Right Here,” by Ali Karim (The Rap Sheet).

Saturday’s Spread

• Britain’s Crime Writers’ Association has announced the rules and restrictions for its 2012 Debut Dagger competition, open to any authors who have not yet had a novel published commercially. Entries will be accepted between October 22, 2011, and January 21, 2012.

• Time is running out to get in on Patti Abbott’s Reginald Marsh flash-fiction challenge. Stories are supposed to be posted on Tuesday of this coming week. If you don’t have a blog in which to put up your own story, send it to Abbott by Monday.

• I’m pleased to hear about the release, in November, of Beat to a Pulp: Hardboiled. I was so fond of the previous compilation, Beat to a Pulp: Round 1, that I agreed to blurb it.

• Don Herron visits the Los Angeles apartment building where pulp writer Jim Thompson was living when he died in 1977.

• Today marks the 60th anniversary of the TV debut of I Love Lucy, starring Lucille Ball and Desi Arnez. There’s still more to read about that classic comedy series here.

• Britain’s Sun newspaper says that the 23rd James Bond movie (Skyfall?) will begin shooting next month, with a theatrical release expected in November 2012. (Hat tip to The HMSS Weblog.)

• John Avlon, a senior columnist for Newsweek and The Daily Beast, delivers an ode to independent bookstores and a list of some of his (mostly Manhattan) favorites.

• The Obama administration’s decision last week to abandon a program that would have subsidized long-term elderly care--part of the president’s history-making health-care reform legislation--represents the U.S. government working well and “exactly the way it ought to,” contends Mother Jones’ Kevin Drum.

• No surprise in this headline: “ABC Cancels Charlie’s Angels.”

• But this is too bad. The “original” Hamburger Hamlet, on L.A.’s Sunset Strip, is set to close on December 19. I think I consumed one of my first meals in the City of Angels at that fine establishment.

• I’m also sorry to hear that Canada’s Citytv has cancelled the television series Murdoch Mysteries, based on Maureen Jennings’ crime novels based in 19th-century Toronto, after five seasons.

• Yvette Banek picks her five favorite Mission: Impossible episodes.

• Meanwhile, San Francisco author Ronald Tierney (Mascara) uses the announcement by GOP presidential hopeful Herman Cain of his dumb “9-9-9” economic plan to suggest some of his own favorite nines: “Top Nine Crime Films,” “Top Nine Crime Honorable Mentions,” and “Top Nine Crime Dramas/Series.” Tierney introduces those lists here.

• The Gumshoe Site’s Jiro Kimura reports that Mildred Savage, “famous as the author of her first novel, Parrish (Simon & Schuster, 1958), which was turned into a popular movie of the same title starring Troy Donahue,” passed away “on October 7 at her home in Norwich, Connecticut.” She was 92 years old. More here.

• Although I agree with series co-creator William Link, that the final Columbo movies weren’t as good as earlier ones, or as the original NBC Mystery Movie series, it’s still nice to know that Universal Studios Home Entertainment will soon finish off its Columbo releases with a DVD release of the last seven teleflicks. Those movies, shown between 1994 and 2003, will go on sale on January 10 of next year.

• And the Web-based art and culture magazine Zoom Street is preparing to launch a noir-focused edition on November 1. Stay tuned.

Pride and Prejudice ... and Murder!

This news release from U.S. publisher Alfred A. Knopf brings word of a novel that you might not expect to receive from 91-year-old P.D. James, but could nonetheless look forward to reading:

Best-selling British novelist P.D. James has written a new book that picks up where Pride and Prejudice left off and introduces a decidedly sinister twist to the Jane Austen classic: a deadly crime. Death Comes to Pemberley will be published by Knopf on December 6th ...

Set in 1803 at Pemberley, the Darcy family estate, five years after Austen concluded her original story, James’ new novel finds Elizabeth and Darcy happily married, with two fine sons, and enjoying regular visits from Elizabeth’s sister Jane and her husband Bingley. There is talk about the prospect of marriage for Darcy’s sister Georgiana, lingering resentment over the elopement of Elizabeth’s sister Lydia with the dishonorable Wickham, and rumors that war will soon break out between England and France.

Still, life continues at Pemberley, and preparations are being made for the annual ball. But on the evening before it is to take place, the idyll is suddenly shattered. There are gunshots and screams, a body is discovered in the woods, and all at once the story evolves into a murder mystery--one recognizable as P.D. James at her best, yet conveyed with all the charm and wit of Jane Austen.

“I have to apologize to Jane Austen,” says James, “for involving her beloved Elizabeth in a murder investigation. It has been a joy to revisit Pride and Prejudice and to discover, as one always does, new delight and fresh insights. This fusion of my two enthusiasms--for the novels of Jane Austen and for writing detective novels--has given me great pleasure.”

Knopf obviously has high hopes for Death Comes to Pemberley. It’s ordered a first printing of 300,000 copies. The same book will be published in Britain on November 3.