The Book You Have to Read: “New Hope for the Dead,” by Charles Willeford

(Editor’s note: This is the 112th installment of our ongoing Friday blog series highlighting great but forgotten books. Today’s pick comes from Irish writer Kevin McCarthy, author of the historical crime novel Peeler--one of January Magazine’s favorite books of 2010. McCarthy is currently at work on a Peelers sequel, which he says is “tentatively titled Irregulars and set during the [Irish] Civil War.”)

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“We may divide characters into flat and round … In their purest form, they are constructed round a single idea or quality; when there is more than one factor in them, we get the beginning of the curve towards the round. The really flat character can be expressed in one sentence ...” -- E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel

The crime-fictional detective is burdened with clichés--a conflicted man of predictable, stubborn brilliance; necessarily grim, comfortingly violent, hard drinking, roughly noble. Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid ... The best of them are, in Forster’s words, effectively “flat,” bearing this commonality of attributes to serve the primacy of plot. To the reader he is a seeker of truth, a rogue, a lone wolf. But for the writer, he is a rather more domesticated animal, easily yoked to the fixed poles of plot and genre.

Charles Willeford’s Hoke Moseley, in New Hope for the Dead (1985)--the second installment in a four-novel series that started with Miami Blues and ended with The Way We Die Now and Willeford’s death in 1988--is an altogether stranger, rounder beast.

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“A plot is ... a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality.” -- E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel

In New Hope for the Dead, Miami homicide detective Sergeant Hoke Moseley solves a murder, of sorts, with Forster’s notion of causality entering by means of an unwelcome, impromptu prostate massage. What Hoke seeks, though, in a profoundly mundane and yet hilarious way, is not the truth, as would his flatter, plot-indentured stable mates in the genre, but a place to call home. However, it is not only a home, in the metaphysical sense, he seeks; he roams this novel in search of an actual house, a legal residence--for himself, his pregnant (police) partner, and his two teenage daughters--that is within Miami city limits as defined by the new chief of police. New Hope for the Dead is nothing if not a fictional testament to the conflict between the utilitarian and the pursuit of the profound. It is a novel that boldly allows the banal to triumph over crime fiction’s bonds of causality. To wit:

But it still bothered Hoke that an experienced user, with a large sum of money and more drugs available, would take a deliberate overdose, or even OD accidentally. It just didn’t fit the pattern.

Hoke returned to U.S. 1, and then stopped at an Eckerd’s drugstore to buy a package of Kools. After he paid for the cigarettes, he showed the clerk his shield and asked if he could use the telephone. Since the pay phone rates had jumped from a dime to a quarter a few years back, Hoke, as a matter of principle, had never paid to use a phone again. He called Ms. Westphal at the house-sitting service ...

“I’m now willing,” he said, “to take a short-time sitter’s job, even if it’s only a couple of weeks ...”

From speculating on the strange circumstances behind a drug user’s death to buying cigarettes and scamming phone calls to ring a house-sitting service. The banal wins hands down, particularly as the scene continues with Hoke and the house-sitting agent haggling over terms and locations, and Hoke wondering whether or not he will need to bring his hotplate with him when he moves. Yet the quality of the writing, the humor and humanity behind the dialogue, brings us willingly along.

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The primitive audience was an audience of shockheads, gaping round the camp-fire, fatigued with contending against the mammoth or the woolly rhinoceros, and only kept awake by suspense. What would happen next?--E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel

Willeford teases us--neo-primitives, fatigued with contending against tailbacks on the I-95 or negative equity--with the template of a conventional crime novel: Hoke and his partner, Ellita Sanchez, respond to the scene of a heroin overdose. A crime may or may not have been committed. What will happen next?

Soon after this, Hoke, Ellita, and the ever-cheerful redneck detective Bill Henderson are assigned to investigate cold-case murders. This is Willeford again inviting the reader into the comforting confines of narrative events defined by their causality--What will happen next? (and why?)--before slowly, through his depiction of Hoke’s days as a series of quotidian digressions and ambling, conversational encounters, beginning to push us out.

Large portions of this novel find Hoke using “comp days” to seek out rent-free accommodations, encountering along the way a Bajan sculptor’s garage, filthy shoe store toilets, original Chagall sketches, a sexy widow’s suppository-strewn bungalow, and a house-sitting gig that requires masturbating the owner’s dog.

Yet we follow Willeford on his crooked, anti-plotted path because of the quality of the writing. Hoke and his interlocutors speak the way real people speak, often about nothing, and occasionally, when speaking about nothing, about everything. Willeford writes so well that we continue to want to know what happens next, even if what happens next has very little to do with the conventional crime-fictional detective’s search for truth and justice.

Take this scene, for instance, a meeting in Hoke’s boss’ office:

[Major] Brownley dropped the burnt match into an ashtray made from a motorcycle piston, looked at Hoke, shook his head, and smiled. “Hoke, you must be the last man in Miami wearing a leisure suit. Where’d you find it, anyway?”

“There was a close-out in the fashion district. I got this blue poplin and a yellow one just like it for only fifty bucks on a two-for-one sale. I like the extra pockets, and with a leisure suit you don’t have to wear a tie.”

“You don’t wear a leisure suit to court, do you?”

“No, I’ve got an old blue serge suit I wear to court. Is that what this meeting’s about, Willie? My taste in plain clothes?”

“In a way. What I’m doing is what they suggested in the Dale Carnegie course I took last year. I’m putting you all at ease by developing a relaxed atmosphere. You all relaxed now?”

Hoke shook his head, Henderson smiled and Ellita said, “Yes, sir.”

Through this office banter, Willeford tells us all we need to know about Hoke Moseley, from his obstinately practical fashion sense to his straitened financial circumstances. He tells us a great deal about Major Willie Brownley, Henderson, and Ellita Sanchez as well, with great economy and humor. This is a rare gift and New Hope for the Dead is full of such gems. Indeed it is full to the point that the plot is more often than not subsumed by the rich characterization and gritty, funny, raunchy, and occasionally quite moving dialogue. Causality is riding in the back seat in New Hope for the Dead and we don’t mind a bit. What happens next? Hoke happens.

If New Hope is about anything, it’s about Hoke Moseley.

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“The characters arrive, when evoked, but full of the spirit of mutiny. For they have numerous parallels with people like ourselves, they try to live their own lives and are consequently often engaged in treason against the main scheme of the book.”--E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel

Moseley is one of crime fiction’s great creations, a literary Everyman, a character so far up the curve towards “round” that he is identifiably human in a way so many fictional detectives are not. Willeford, in a bold and experimental move that one feels would simply never be published today, allows his character Hoke his full range of “mutiny” against the demands of the “main scheme” required by conventional detective fiction. It is Hoke’s personality--so rounded, so strangely principled and callous and loving and corrupt all at once--that carries the reader happily through a “crime novel” in which cold-case crimes are solved mainly by accident and corruption is far from the city hall variety and infinitely more mundane, more human.

Whereas more standard crime-fiction protagonists are driven by a righteous rage at, say, the abuse of women and children or bureaucratic obfuscation, Willeford’s Hoke takes a principled stand against the raised price of public pay phones and for free tongue sandwiches (“once a month was just about right. He didn’t want to abuse the privilege”).

There is humor in these pages, but none of it forced. We learn why house sitting just won’t suit. We hear Hoke give advice to Bill Henderson on how to convince a 12-year-old boy to shower after gym class. We watch as Hoke’s partner is thrown out of her house for becoming pregnant and Hoke takes her in, unable to understand her parents’ objections because to Hoke, getting pregnant is “what women do. They get pregnant.”

Hoke is a sexist (“Her quiescent moodiness had been going on for more than a week now. At first, Hoke had attributed it to her period--if that’s what it was--but a week was a long time. How long did a period last?”) but he does not judge. He is critical of his partner’s Shalimar perfume but not her actions. She is a good cop and, moreover, can type faster than he or Bill Henderson.

Hoke’s daughters are foisted upon him by his ex-wife, who has decided to find happiness (sans filles) in the arms of Curly Jackson, a professional baseball player she encounters during Florida spring training. Meeting his daughters for the first time in many years, Hoke is stunned, standing in the lobby of the rundown retirement (and Mariel boatlift refugee) hotel in his off-duty wear of tan Bermuda shorts, shoes with no socks, and gray gym shirt. He listens as his daughter describes the man his ex has abandoned her daughters for:

“Who’s Curly Peterson?” Hoke said.

“That’s the man mom’s been living with--you know, the pinch hitter for the Dodgers. Sometimes he plays center field. He just renegotiated his contract, and he’ll get three hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars a year for the next five years.”

“... I don’t follow baseball much anymore. There’s too many teams anyway.”

Aileen looked at the floor and made a circle on the carpet with her right foot. “He’s a black man.”

“He isn’t real black, though,” Sue Ellen said. “He’s lighter than a basketball.”

Hoke’s mind was frozen. For a moment he had difficulty getting his thoughts together.

“What’s his batting average?” Hoke said, clearing his throat.

“Two-ninety, and he’s got a lot of RBI’s.”

“That’s pretty good for a pinch hitter ...”

But Hoke is not shocked by the fact that his ex-wife has abandoned her daughters to run off with a black baseball player. (Hoke is prone to Floridian, good-ol’-boy racism at times; he is possibly the late-20th century’s least PC protagonist, but he is also oddly accepting of what he perceives to be human weakness.) But he is shocked--and shocked to delight--by the fact that he will now no longer have to pay child support for his daughters. This is Hoke in a beautifully drawn scene of believable dialogue and very mixed human emotion; selfish interest and opportunism combined with the very real joy he feels at the chance he now has to be a father to his daughters.

And it is not long before Hoke begins to exercise what he feels to be his paternal responsibilities to his 14- and 16-year-old girls. Here he offers a lecture on responsibility and the value of honest labor:

“I’m out of cigarettes,” Sue Ellen said, “and the machine in the lobby takes six quarters for a pack. Can I have some change for cigarettes?”

“No.” Hoke took two Kools out of his pack and handed them to her. “Better make these two last. If you can’t support your habit on the allowance I gave you, you’ll just have to stop smoking till I can find you a job somewhere.”

Sue Ellen poked out her lower lip. “I don’t like the menthol kind.”

Hoke snatched the two Kools back from her and returned them to the pack.

Later, Moseley gives the girls a hilariously inappropriate lecture on the birds and the bees:

“A dose of clap’ll make an old man out of you before you’re thirty.”

Both girls laughed.

Hoke grinned. “That’s what my old first sergeant used to tell us every payday, when I was in the army. So it won’t make an old man out of you girls, but clap’s harder on a woman than it is on a man because it can make you sterile. Got any questions?”

The girls looked at each other. Aileen smiled; Sue Ellen studied the tip of her cigarette. “Can I let the hair grow under my arms? Like Ellita?”

“Not yet. Wait until you’re eighteen. Okay? And any questions you have, ask me, and if I don’t know the answer, I’ll find out for you. If you can’t trust your father to give you the straight goods about sex, who else have you got? Okay, run along now. I’m going to stay up here for a while.”

The girls kissed him and took the elevator down. Hoke lit a cigarette and walked to the parapet. The sun was down, but the entire western sky was still a watercolor wash of red, purple, and orange. Low on the horizon, there were darker, slanting shafts of blue-black, indicating the rain that was passing through the Everglades.

All in all, Hoke thought, his little talk had gone fairly well, but he was glad it was over. He had left out a lot, but there were some things the girls weren’t ready for, even though they were brighter than he had thought they were. They had made it easy for him, too, by not asking a lot of dumb questions. But he still didn’t know what he was going to do about a place to live.

Hoke treats his daughters like adults when they should be treated like children and like children when they should be given the respect young women deserve, but he does his Southern best by them. He is not a “good father,” in the conventional sense--nor is he a “good detective” in the conventional crime-fictional sense--but he is a strangely good man, and Willeford is a wonderfully warm writer, accepting of human failure and ever cognizant of the humor inherent to this failure.

Note also the powerful description of the Florida sky at dusk in that last passage. This shift--from humor to reflective, descriptive silence and back again to humor--calls attention, in the character of Hoke as Everyman, to the futility of all of our best-laid plans against the blithe majesty of nature. This is great writing.

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“All I will do is state a possibility. If human nature does alter, it will be because individuals manage to look at themselves in a new way. Here and there people--a very few people, but a few novelists are among them--are trying to do this.”--E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel

In a superficial, perhaps commercially knowing way, Willeford’s title, New Hope for the Dead, refers to the cold cases Hoke, Ellita, and the ever-cheerful Sergeant Bill Henderson are assigned to work. But it is the new hope provided by Hoke’s ad hoc family and (finally) dubiously acquired domicile--well within the Miami P.D.-regulated city limits--that motivates Hoke and makes this book so bizarrely enjoyable and, in its own way, quite profound.

Would it be published today, New Hope for the Dead? One would like to think so, such is the quality of the writing, but it is doubtful. Mass-market crime fiction is recruiting only “flat” men these days and Willeford has given us in Hoke Moseley--a leisure-suit-wearing, menthol-smoking, “blue-gray” dentures-sporting good ol’ boy of a Miami homicide detective--a protagonist so “round” he bounces, and in New Hope for the Dead a novel so offbeat and contrary to cliché that it just might be a small work of genius.

The three other Hoke Moseley novels, Miami Blues (1984), Sideswipe (1987), and The Way We Die Now (1988), ain’t half-bad either.

READ MORE: “The Book You Have to Read: The Woman Chaser, by Charles Willeford,” by Kathryn Miller Haines (The Rap Sheet).

Rerun Reads

Following a brief hiatus to accommodate the holidays, the very popular “forgotten books” series has returned to the Web--if not with a vengeance, then at least with verve.

In addition to Kevin McCarthy’s remarks on this page about New Hope for the Dead, by Charles Willeford, today’s Web-wide crime-fiction-associated suggestions include: Fire in the Flesh, by David Goodis; Murder Among Friends, by Elizabeth Ferrars; Halo in Blood, by John Evans; Hag’s Nook, by John Dickson Carr; Dreadful Sanctuary, by Eric Frank Russell; Dreamsicle, by W.L. Ripley; The Ax, by Donald E. Westlake; A Dream of Drowned Hollow, by Lee Barwood; the Harry Fannin novels, by David Markson; “A” Is for Alibi, by Sue Grafton; Paper Doll, by Robert B. Parker; and Suspects, by David Thomson.

To find a complete list of unjustly overlooked books being touted today, click over to organizer Patti Abbott’s blog. There you will also find five further recommendations of reading material worth rediscovering.

Scoop on “Snoop”

Crime-writing and -solving siblings Ernesta and Gwendolyn Snoop are heading back to your TV set. That’s right, the characters played by Helen Hayes and Mildred Natwick in The Snoop Sisters, a short-lived mystery-comedy element of the NBC Wednesday Mystery Movie back in the mid-1970s, are being primped and readied for delivery to consumers come mid-March. That’s when the DVD set, The Snoop Sisters--The Complete Series, is set to be released in Canada by Visual Entertainment Inc. (VEI) at a cost of CA$49.95.

Now, in this case, “complete series” means only a two-hour pilot film and four 90-minute episodes on three discs. But considering I thought this show would never be officially made available on DVD, its release is worth cheering. Hayes and Natwick were splendid in The Snoop Sisters, despite its sometimes weak plots. The pilot, which co-starred Art Carney, best showcased Sisters’ potential for charm and cleverness.

The Web site TV Shows on DVD reports that no U.S. release date has yet been confirmed, “but VEI expects to have this title set up for sale on Amazon.com on or before the Canadian street date, at similar pricing.”

Front and Center

With the voting now closed and the ballots counted in The Rap Sheet’s surprisingly heated competition for the title of Best Crime Novel Cover of 2010, we finally have a winner: it’s the front of Villain (Pantheon), acclaimed Japanese author Shūichi Yoshida’s gritty story about a young insurance saleswoman’s strangulation and the exposing of personal lives that follows her slaying. Villain’s eye-catching jacket design, built around the embossed image of a handgun shaped from the major bones of the human body, was put together by Chip Kidd, the associate art director at publisher Alfred A. Knopf, using a photograph by Francois Robert.

Out of the 1,039 votes registered in this contest, Villain captured 212 (or 20.4 percent). In addition, it receives high acclaim from The Rap Sheet’s judges. “Creepy but effective,” says David Middleton, a graphic artist, illustrator, and photographer who serves as the art and culture editor of January Magazine. “Understated typography lets the bold image take center stage. Really grabs your attention so that you want to keep looking to figure it out.” Meanwhile, Kevin Burton Smith, the editor and creator of The Thrilling Detective Web Site, calls this cover “simple, unnerving, [and] potent. It almost feels like we’re looking at something forbidden, something taboo. Some people will absolutely HATE this.” Maybe so, but there were obviously not enough such naysayers to prevent Villain from taking top honors.

(Click on any of the covers here for an enlargement.)

Coming in at No. 2 in our contest (with 202 votes, or 19.44 percent) is the deliberately exotic front of City of Dragons (Minotaur Books), Kelli Stanley’s first novel featuring Miranda Corbie, an ex-escort and female private investigator working the streets, gambling dens, and Chinatown alleyways of 1940s San Francisco. The work of designer David Baldeosingh Rotstein, City of Dragons offers a composite of stock photographs that judge Linda L. Richards, a novelist who’s also the editor of January, says “evokes the elements of the novel perfectly.” Smith seems particularly impressed by Rotstein’s ability to work so much into his cover, without the result being too busy or off-putting: “[It] evokes perfectly a time, a place, a mood. Or two. The hustle and bustle of a vibrant city versus the tired resignation/optimism of a working girl. Hope versus cynicism. Light versus dark. Places to go versus going nowhere. And perfect color choices. They even work in a neon sign.”

Rounding out the top three vote-getters for 2010 (with 141 votes, or 13.57 percent) is the eerie skull-in-dots jacket on Adam Ross’ Mr. Peanut (Knopf/Borzoi), an alternately frightening and poignant story about men who are obsessed with, and guilt-ridden by the deaths of their wives. That jacket is credited to one of Kidd’s colleagues, Knopf associate art director Peter Mendelsund (whose other recent work includes the familiar but relatively understated U.S. fronts of Stieg Larsson’s three thrillers).

Not long ago, I took the opportunity to interview Mendelsund on the subject of his Mr. Peanut dust jacket. He joked about how it was “hard to marry the idea of peanuts to death,” so he wound up creating an image that conveys danger and mortality but employs the color palette of Jimmy Carter’s favorite legumes. “We spot-glossed those dots [in the skull image],” Mendelsund explains, “and that gives a bit of luster to it. But really, if you put [Mr. Peanut] on a store shelf next to other colorful books fighting each other for customer attention, it doesn’t need so much color to stand out.” Judge Middleton concurs: “This cover would really grab you by the lapels from across the room ’cause that’s where you would fully see the image. It’s not until you get up close that you realize what little it takes to convey a message and how well it has been pulled off.” Richards cheers Mendelsund’s work as “brilliant in its simplicity.” And though Smith contends that Mr. Peanut’s cover is “a little generic--it could just as easily be for a Philip K. Dick novel or a social media handbook”--he’s impressed by its “cold ... eerie, off-kilter” nature.

Two other covers also made it into Rap Sheet readers’ top five choices.

The first is Will Staehle’s design for The Sherlockian (Twelve), a debut work by Graham Moore, which received 115 votes, or 11.07 percent. That novel tells the parallel stories of a modern-day search for Arthur Conan Doyle’s missing diary and the investigation, by Sherlock Holmes’ creator himself, into the deaths of three suffragettes at the turn of the last century. On its dust jacket, Staehle delivers a clever combination of a pipe, upended like a question mark, with the dot being a splotch of blood. The reader needs no further clues to realize that inside, he will find a mystery story relating in some regard to the world’s most famous “consulting detective.” Judge Smith cheers Staehle for a “brave use of some of the most iconic language of the genre (the pipe, the blood, the question mark). It doesn’t talk, it swears. [The cover is] rendered without apology, but held in check by its simple, just-what’s-needed, classy, traditional composition.” Middleton calls The Sherlockian’s front “brilliant. [I’m] surprised this has not been done before, or if it has, maybe not quite so well.”

Finally, the No. 5 spot in our contest goes to The Vanishing of Katharina Linden (Delacorte Press), by London-born Belgian author Helen Grant. Designed by Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich, its cover features the type-filled silhouette of a cat--a coy reference to Grant’s strange story about a pre-teen girl whose vanishing stirs up talk of the supernatural and witches taking on feline guise. “An absolutely perfect contemporary rendering on an Art Nouveau theme,” declares judge Richards. “This could so easily have been a disaster, but it’s not. Lots of work but not overworked. And the whiskers are genius!” Although he usually tries to put a good deal of distance between himself and cat covers, even Smith is charmed by Vanishing’s façade. He applauds its “clever, stylish, deliberately ornate typography and witty design that teeters on the edge of being gimmicky but never succumbs.”

We would like to thank everyone who took the time to participate in this year’s race for Best Crime Novel Cover of the Year honors. It paid off: the 1,039 votes cast in this competition far exceeded last year’s count of 634. It would be nice to think that each time we hold this contest, there will be greater interest. But much will likely depend on the quality of jackets we have to choose from in 2011 and beyond. There are plenty of skilled book designers working today. As long as focus groups and marketing execs don’t inhibit their creativity too greatly, we expect to be cheering some of their latest efforts 12 months from now.

AN INVITATION TO READERS: If, between now and December, you spot any crime novel covers you think are especially stylish, we’d welcome your alerting us to their existence. Simply drop an e-mail note here.

So Much for That Marriage

Well, this is an interesting development, coming less than five months after Tyrus Books announced that it was acquiring Busted Flush Press. In a release posted earlier today in Bill Crider’s Pop Culture Magazine, Tyrus Books publisher Ben LeRoy wrote:

McKenna Jordan and I would like to announce the following:

“In early September of 2010, Tyrus Books, Incorporated entered into an agreement to acquire Busted Flush Press, LLC. Unfortunately, before the deal could be finalized, David Thompson, the owner of Busted Flush Press, died unexpectedly. The continued process of settling Mr. Thompson’s estate necessitated substantial reconsideration and subsequent termination of the proposed deal. McKenna Jordan, Mr. Thompson’s widow, will assume full legal and financial control of Busted Flush Press. Tyrus Books will no longer be involved with the operation of Busted Flush Press.

It’s too bad that what might have been a good deal for both independent publishers has perished, due to probate-settling problems.

In Hammett’s Footsteps

People generally think of Dashiell Hammett in relation to San Francisco, California, where he wrote his numerous short stories about the Continental Op as well as his most famous novel, The Maltese Falcon (1930), starring private eye Sam Spade.

But the future author was born on his grandfather’s tobacco farm in southern Maryland on May 27, 1894, and soon thereafter relocated with his family to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, before moving on to Baltimore, Maryland. It was in Baltimore in 1915 that Hammett answered an enigmatic want-ad for men “free to travel and respond to all situations.” This led him to the Continental Building (now One Calvert Plaza) downtown and the local headquarters of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, where he was hired into a sleuthing post that he loved--even though it meant his being shot at, clubbed, and knifed (“I was never bored,” he would say of the job).

With the 50th anniversary of Hammett’s death coming up on January 10, Baltimore runner and blogger Patrick Maynard is busy putting together a route through the city that includes “key places” in both Hammett’s young life and later fiction. As Maynard writes in The Baltimore Sun’s Exercist blog, “Some time within the next week, I’m hoping to jog or bike through a bunch of Dashiell Hammett-related places around the city ... I’ll write about the results in detail ...” So far, his list includes Baltimore Polytechnic (“where Hammett studied for a semester before dropping out”), the former B&O Railroad headquarters on Charles Street (“The railroad was one of Hammett'’s non-Pinkerton employers in Baltimore”), and Mount Royal Station (“through which a missing character’s baggage was tracked in ‘The Girl with the Silver Eyes’”).

But he’s still looking for suggestions of sites to include. If you have any thoughts on this matter, drop Maynard a note here.

(Hat tip to Read Street’s Dave Rosenthal.)

You Can Go Holmes Again

According to literary legend, today would be “consulting detective” Sherlock Holmes’ 157th birthday. Since The Rap Sheet has commemorated this date in previous years, I’ll refrain from going on at length about the subject. Instead, I would just like to offer what might be termed a “highlights reel” from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, the Granada Television series that, between 1984 and 1994, adapted many of author Arthur Conan Doyle’s Holmes yarns for the small screen.

Although I’ve been won over by BBC One’s Sherlock, a still-new updating of Conan Doyle’s famous characters and tales, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman, when I am in a mood to re-enter Holmes’ classic world--the Victorian age of hansom cabs, gaslighted thoroughfares, street urchins, and calabash pipes--it’s either to the books or Granada’s series that I turn. Jeremy Brett seemed to have been made for the eccentric, often-spiky Sherlock role, and both men who portrayed Dr. John H. Watson--David Burke and, later, Edward Hardwicke--provided excellent, down-to-earth balance against Brett’s nervous-energy-driven sleuth.

Just watching this rousing trailer below makes me want to abandon work and settle in for another showing of the Granada films.

Should all of this put you in mind to further celebrate Holmes’ alleged birthday, then heed this new notice in In Reference to Murder:

This Friday, January 7, from 11 a.m. to 12 noon, [Laurie R.] King and [Leslie S.] Klinger will take part in a book-signing event at The Mysterious Bookshop in New York City, an event capping off the weeklong celebration of Sherlock Holmes’ birthday and held in conjunction with the Baker Street Irregulars’ annual banquet.

But wait--there's more! Graham Moore will be on hand to sign copies of his best-selling mystery The Sherlockian, and publisher/Mysterious Bookshop owner Otto Penzler will also be at the party signing copies of his newly-released Sherlockian book, Bohemian Souls.

It’s only too bad I cannot be in Manhattan this week.

Moe for Your Reading Pile

Today in January Magazine, Jim Winter reviews Innocent Monster, the sixth and latest Moe Prager novel by Reed Farrel Coleman. He writes:

It’s now 2006, six years since Moe’s ex-wife, Katy, was murdered (in Empty Ever After, 2008). He is divorced again and doesn’t even know where to find his lapsed P.I. license. That doesn’t stop daughter Sarah, though, from approaching him to help out a childhood friend in need.

Candy Bluntstone is the mother of Sashi Bluntstone, the art world’s latest little darling. Sashi is not even 12 years old yet, but already she produces paintings that are favorably compared to those of Jackson Pollack. Or she did, anyway. Sashi has disappeared, and the police are stumped as to her whereabouts. Moe agrees to help Sarah’s friend Candy find her child, if only to get his own daughter back into his life.

You’ll find the full critique here.

Writing for Godot

To start off this brand-new year, here are a couple of presents for the writers among you (yeah, we know who you are).

First, a wonderful video trailer for what seems to be a “missing movie,” Bad Writing, which was allegedly released last month. If the film is showing out there someplace, it hasn’t received much publicity. And, sadly, it’s not yet available to rent or buy. There’s nothing at Netflix, and when I clicked on the “Rent this at Blockbuster” button on the International Movie Database (IMDb) site, what popped up was a link to the 2008 film Marley & Me. (Hmm. Is that supposed to be a hint about that other picture’s quality?)

Gift Numero Dos offers less mystery but more fun. Carolyn Kellogg, whose Jacket Copy blog may be the only thing worth reading these days in the Los Angeles Times, one of my (many) former employers, asked dozens of writers to reveal their resolutions for 2011. A few highlights:

Janelle Brown, author of the novels “This Is Where we Live” and “All We Ever Wanted Was Everything”: Stop reading Amazon and Goodreads reader comments about my books. For really reals this time.

Janet Fitch, author of “Paint it Black” and “White Oleander”: My book-related resolution for 2011: To converse more with my books. To write in the margins. To read books that irritate me, inspire me, challenge the way I write, or in some way cast new light on this crazy life we lead. And I also resolve to shape these conversations into essays for the new L.A. Review of Books, starting up this spring.

Dani Shapiro, author of “Devotion: A Memoir”: I am determined not to blog, tweet, check e-mail, or shop for boots online before beginning each day working on my new novel. If I can’t manage this, I’m going to pull a Franzen and disable my laptop so that it best resembles a Smith Corona.

Joseph Mattson, author of the novel “Empty the Sun”: In 2011, maybe I’ll work on only three books at once instead of five--crawl out of the wormhole a little bit and see your and everyone else’s beautiful faces more often. Though I’m widely considered to be a dangerous whiskey-soaked hellraiser, I really don’t leave the house much, and I think I need a little more sun, you know, Vitamin D, ward off the rickets. Shatter my own myth. I would say, thin the book collection a little, but that would be a lie, for it is the holy addiction that keeps the other good/bad stuff at bay. That, and I might read a Stephen King novel. I’ve never read one, for no particular reason, and I do believe I have some respect for the man. Eye exercises, too.

Antoine Wilson, author of the novel “The Interloper”: My resolution, for the second year in a row, is not to talk smack about books (or authors) I haven’t actually read.

Neal Pollack, author of the memoir “Stretch: The Unlikely Making of a Yoga Dude”: I’d like to resolve to read at least an hour a day, every day. That’s not so much, really. It used to be a bad reading day if I read an hour. Now it’s not quite a rarity, but definitely not a routine. If I’m going to make my son read an hour a day, I should keep to a similar program. Less Fruit Ninja, more reading, that’s what I say.

However, my favorite one of these resolutions comes from David Kipen, a former NEA director of literature and the owner of Libros Scmibros bookstore: “Find my Kindle.”

Deadline Fast Approaching

Voting in The Rap Sheet’s Best Crime Novel Cover of 2010 contest will end at midnight Wednesday. That means you have a day and a half left to cast your ballot for the handsomest jacket of last year.

What are you waiting for? Click here to voice your opinion.

Unforgettable Ugliness

Seamus Scanlon, a librarian and professor at The City College of New York, who has written occasionally for The Rap Sheet, has a review up in January Magazine this afternoon of Best American Crime Reporting 2010. He calls that collection, edited by Stephen J. Dubner, “a must-read for anyone interested in first-class journalism and reportage, great writing, criminology, true-crime tales and the human (criminal) condition.”

You’ll find the review here.

Paging Ahead

With the start of every new year, I look forward to reading more books than I was able to enjoy in the previous 12 months. More books, in fact, than any two or three human beings might consume annually--with the exception, perhaps, of speed reader and critic Sarah Weinman. Knowledge of this tendency on my part does absolutely nothing to dampen my optimism. As in previous Januarys, I have made my list of books I would like to get through, and there’s no way to convince me that I won’t devour at least most of them by the time turkeys go on sale next Thanksgiving. Not until September or thereabouts will I suddenly wake up in a panic, realizing that I shall have to trim my expectations once again. Mortal limits can be so damnably hard to accept.

In 2010, my consumption of crime, mystery, and thriller works was fairly evenly divided between vintage and new novels. My preference would be to follow a similar course during the coming 12 months. Copies of old-reliable authors such as Erle Stanley Gardner, Thomas B. Dewey, Ellery Queen, Robert Martin, and Talmage Powell already await my attention. However, as I find my leisure hours becoming more and more limited, I may have to set aside classic or historically obscure books in favor of new ones.

As it stands, my list of most-anticipated new crime-fiction reads being published over the next four months looks like this:

JANUARY (U.S. releases):

• Quentin Bates, Frozen Assets (Soho Crime)

• Robert Crais, The Sentry (Putnam)

• P. L. Gaus, A Prayer for the Night (Plume)

• Peter Helton, Falling More Slowly (Soho Constable)

• Steve Hockensmith, World’s Greatest Sleuth! (Minotaur)

• Michael Koryta, The Cypress House (Little, Brown)

• Laura Lippman, The Girl in the Green Raincoat (Avon)

• Bradford Morrow, The Diviner’s Tale (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

• T. Jefferson Parker, The Border Lords (Dutton)

• Robert J. Randisi, I’m a Fool to Kill You (Severn House)

• Jed Rubenfeld, The Death Instinct (Riverhead)

• Wallace Stroby, Cold Shot to the Heart (Minotaur)

• William G. Tapply, The Nomination (Skyhorse)

• Scott Thornley, Erasing Memory (Random House Canada)

• Ronald Tierney, Bullet Beach (Severn House)

• Charles Todd, A Lonely Death (Morrow)

• Jill Paton Walsh, The Attenbury Emeralds (Minotaur)

JANUARY (UK releases):
• Belinda Bauer, Darkside (Bantam Press)

• Susanna Gregory, The Body in the Thames (Sphere)

• James Henry, First Frost (Bantam Books)
• Jim Kelly, Death Toll (Penguin)

• Stuart MacBride, Shatter the Bones (HarperCollins)

• Barbara Nadel, A Noble Killing (Headline)

• Jo Nesbø, The Leopard (Harvill Secker)

• Frank Tallis, Death and the Maiden (Century)

FEBRUARY (U.S. releases):

• Noah Boyd, Agent X (Morrow)

• Alan Bradley, A Red Herring Without Mustard (Delacorte)

• Sam Eastland, Shadow Pass (Bantam)

• Martha Grimes, Fadeaway Girl (Viking)

• Victoria Houston, Dead Deceiver (Tyrus)

• Graeme Kent, Devil-Devil (Soho Crime)

• Chris Knopf, Bad Bird (Minotaur)

• Craig McDonald, One True Sentence (Minotaur)

• Brad Parks, Eyes of the Innocent (Minotaur)

• Jonathan Rabb, The Second Son (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)

• Gerald Seymour, The Collaborator (Overlook)

• Zoë Sharp, Fourth Day (Pegasus)

• Kelli Stanley, The Curse-Maker (Minotaur)

• Randy Wayne White, Night Vision (Putnam)

FEBRUARY (UK releases):

• Tony Black, Truth Lies Bleeding (Preface Publishing)

• Ann Cleeves, Silent Voices (Macmillan)

• Charles Cumming, The Trinity Six (HarperCollins)

• Alex Gray, Sleep Like the Dead (Sphere)

• Tarquin Hall, The Case of the Man who Died Laughing (Hutchinson)

• David Hewson, The Fallen Angel (Macmillan)

• Matt Hilton, Blood and Ashes (Hodder & Stoughton)

• Simon Kernick, The Payback (Bantam Press)

• James McGee, Rebellion (HarperCollins)

• Guy Saville, The Afrika Reich (Hodder & Stoughton)

MARCH (U.S. releases):

• Kate Atkinson, Started Early, Took My Dog (Regan Arthur)

• Louis Bayard, The School of Night (Henry Holt)

• Cara Black, Murder in Passy (Soho Crime)

• C.J. Box, Cold Wind (Putnam)

• Chelsea Cain, The Night Season (Minotaur)

• Harlan Coben, Live Wire (Dutton)

• David Dickinson, Death in a Scarlet Coat (Soho Crime)

• Jasper Fforde, One of Our Thursdays Is Missing (Viking)

• John Galligan, The Wind Knot (Tyrus)

• Lou Manfredo, Rizzo’s Fire (Minotaur)

• Peter May, Blowback (Poisoned Pen Press)

• Russel D. McLean, The Lost Sister (Minotaur)

• A. Scott Pearson, Public Anatomy (Oceanview)

• Ian Rankin, The Complaints (Regan Arthur)

• Keith Thomson, Twice a Spy (Doubleday)

• James Thompson, Lucifer’s Tears (Putnam)

• Laura Wilson, An Empty Death (Minotaur)

• Jacqueline Winspear, A Lesson in Secrets (Harper)

MARCH (UK releases):

• Patrick Easter, The Watermen (Quercus)

• Gordon Ferris, The Hanging Shed (Corvus)

• Robert Goddard, Blood Count (Bantam Press)

• Camilla Läckberg, The Gallows Bird (HarperCollins)

• Henning Mankell, The Troubled Man (Harvill Secker)

• Andrew Martin, The Somme Stations (Faber and Faber)

• M.J. McGrath, White Heat (Mantle)

• Ian Sansom, The Norfolk Mysteries (Fourth Estate)

APRIL (U.S. releases):

• Michael Connelly, The Fifth Witness
(Little, Brown)

• Janet Dawson, Bit Player (Perseverance Press)

• David Downing, Potsdam Station
(Soho Crime)

• Martin Edwards, Hanging Wood (Poisoned
Pen Press)

• Philip Kerr, Field Gray (Putnam)

• Jassy Mackenzie, Stolen Lives (Soho Crime)
• Jean-Patrick Manchette, Fatale
(NYRB Classics)

• Bill Moody, Fade to Blue (Poisoned Pen Press)

• Robert B. Parker, Sixkill (Putnam)

• John Shannon, A Little Too Much (Severn House)

• Julia Spencer-Fleming, One Was a Soldier (Minotaur)

• Norb Vonnegut, The Gods of Greenwich (Minotaur)

• Don Winslow, Satori (Grand Central)

APRIL (UK releases):

• Stephen Booth, The Devil’s Edge (Sphere)

• Mo Hayder, Hanging Hill (Bantam Press)

• M.R. Hall, The Redeemed (Mantle)

• Susan Hill, The Betrayal of Trust (Chatto & Windus)

• Lee Jackson, The Diary of a Murder (Snowbooks)

• Mari Jungstedt, The Dead of Summer (Doubleday)

• Peter Lovesey, Stagestruck (Sphere)

• Edward Marston, Blood on the Line (Allison & Busby)

• Andrew Pepper, Bloody Winter (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)

• Mehmet Murat Somer, The Wig Murders (Serpent’s Tail)

• Fred Vargas, An Uncertain Place (Harvill Secker)

• S.J. Watson, Before I Go to Sleep (Doubleday)

Remember, this rundown represents only my crime-fiction interests in the first quarter of 2011. On top of all these books, I’m hoping to read more mainstream fiction in 2011 than the strangely paltry amount I did last year. And there are a number of forthcoming non-fiction works that have caught my eye, including Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America, by John Campbell McMillian (February); The Band that Played On: The Extraordinary Story of the 8 Musicians Who Went Down with the Titanic, by Steve Turner (March); The Siege of Washington: The Untold Story of the Twelve Days That Shook the Union, by John Lockwood (March)--one of what will be many books released this year in association with the 150th anniversary of the outbreak of America’s Civil War; The Hollywood Sign: Fantasy and Reality of an American Icon, by Leo Braudy (March); and Unfamiliar Fishes, by Sarah Vowell (March).

Sorry, but I have to cease writing now and step away from the computer. I’m already starting to feel behind in my reading.

READ MORE: “New Year’s Resolutions: Anticipated 2011 Releases,” by Brian Lindenmuth (Spinetingler Magazine).

Of Resolutions and Reminders

• The formal announcement of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine’s 2010 Readers Choice Award recipients won’t be available until that mag’s next issue hits newsstands in February. But author Dave Zeltserman made it known this last weekend that “my second Julius Katz story, ‘Archie’s Been Framed,’ has won first place” in the competition. Zeltserman’s 2010 novella, Julius Katz, introduced the title character and received a Shamus Award, a Derringer Award, and other acclaim.

• Sarah Weinman interviews Michael Koryta, author of the soon-to-be-released (and quite chilling) novel, The Cypress House, for American Express’ Currency site.

• Richard Robinson, who writes the Broken Bullhorn blog, suggests an interesting New Year’s resolution for 2011. He resolves to “read what I have.” Robinson elaborates:

That may not be entirely clear, so let me elaborate somewhat. I have a lot of books here, right now mostly in boxes but they will get out onto shelves in time. A heck of a lot of them have been here a long time and are still unread. I continue to buy books, sometimes only a few, sometimes many, while what’s here occupies shelf space. While I go through periods of keep them all--no, get rid of some of them--no keep them all, the main thing is I want to read the books I have. Once they have been read, I can decide if I’ll keep them, which means I think I’ll want them to reread, or for reference, or something, or if I’ll dispose of them (book swap, donate, gift, etc.).

So for 2011, my resolution is that 3 out of every 4 books I read will be ones I have in my possession right now--on January 1, 2011.

I have often boasted that I could be locked in my house for a couple of years, and never run out of new books to enjoy. Maybe I ought to embrace Robinson’s suggestion myself ...

• I’m always in the mood for a solid reminder of the 1974-1976 ABC-TV series Harry O, and Lee Goldberg provides one with the latest installment of his “TV Main Title of the Week” series.

• Speaking of reminders: Blooging for a Good Book looks back at The Devil in Music, the fourth and last of Kate Ross’ mysteries starring dandy Julian Kestrel and set in Regency-era England. Ross died in 1998.

• “He was showered with cries of ‘Betrayal!’ from some of his allies,” Salon writes of President Obama, “but he achieved more [in 2010] than you might realize.” Meanwhile, Washington Monthly contributors suggest what the president should say in this month’s State of the Union Address.

• Is this the most oddly titled radio mystery of all time?

• And I am sorry they’re not label-linked, so there’s no perfect way to pull up all the components of Chris Rhatigan’s “Top Five for 2010” series in Death by Killing. But they’re worth looking over, when you find some free time. Rhatigan has asked a diverse group of short-fiction writers and others to identify their five favorite crime-fiction short stories from the last year. At least most of those lists are accessible here.

We’ll Miss You, Honey, Good-bye

Anne Francis, the New York-born actress who first gained widespread attention through her co-starring role in the 1956 science-fiction film Forbidden Planet, but later played the sexy title role in ABC-TV’s Honey West (1965-1966), died on Sunday at a retirement home in Santa Barbara, California. She was 80 years old.

As the Los Angeles Times recalls,

A shapely blond with a signature beauty mark next to her lower lip, Francis was a former child model and radio actress when she first came to notice on the big screen in the early 1950s.

She had leading or supporting roles in more than 30 movies, including “Bad Day at Black Rock,” “Battle Cry,” “Blackboard Jungle,” “The Hired Gun,” “Don’t Go Near the Water,” “Brainstorm,” “Funny Girl” and “Hook, Line and Sinker.”

She also achieved cult status as one of the stars of “Forbidden Planet,” the 1956 MGM movie costarring Walter Pidgeon and Leslie Nielsen and featuring a helpful robot named Robby.

Francis, however, never became a major movie star and was more frequently seen on television as a guest star on scores of series from the late ’50s and decades beyond, including an episode of “The Twilight Zone” in which she played a department store mannequin who comes to life at night.

But it’s as the star of “Honey West,” the first female detective to be featured in a weekly TV series, that Francis may be best remembered.

Francis picked up a Golden Globe award as best female TV star and was nominated for an Emmy Award for her portrayal of Honey West. Despite being denied another leading role in a TV series, she racked up an impressive résumé of guest-starring roles in everything from The Name of the Game and Banacek, to Ellery Queen and Columbo, Search, Assignment: Vienna, Archer, Barnaby Jones, Murder, She Wrote, Riptide, Without a Trace, and ... well, the list could go on and on.

The actress had been treated for lung cancer, but cause of death was attributed to complications of pancreatic cancer.

WATCH MORE: At least for the time being, “The After Hours,” that June 1960 episode of The Twilight Zone in which Anne Francis played a peculiarly active mannequin, can be seen in three parts on YouTube.

READ MORE: “The Late Great Anne Francis,” by Mercurie (A Shroud of Thoughts); “Honey West: Anne Francis, R.I.P.,” by Jason Whiton (SpyVibe); “Honey West Kicked Open the Door for Female Action Stars on American TV,” by Rick29 (Classic Film and TV Café).

Best Crime Film of 2010?

The year just ended was no golden age for action, adventure, or crime flicks. Green Zone was honest, frightening, and well-acted. The Book of Eli had its moments. Australia’s Animal Kingdom was an interesting experiment. What am I forgetting?

Maybe only The Town, which was released in September and was based on Chuck Hogan’s 2004 novel, Prince of Thieves. Directed by and starring Ben Affleck, this film was largely ignored by everyone except those who saw it and felt the same tightening fist of rage that I did. As critic Roger Ebert (the best in the business) explains: “Affleck plays Doug MacRay, the next generation of a bank-robbing family in the Boston area of Charlestown. This square mile, we’re told, contains more thieves and bank robbers than anyplace else in the country. It’s a family trade, like cobbling or the law. The Town shows, as [Affleck’s] first film, Gone Baby Gone (2007), did, that Affleck has the stuff of a real director. Everything is here. It’s an effective thriller, he works closely with actors, he has a feel for pacing ...”

Working closely with his actors, in this case, seems like it must have been a pleasure--and perhaps also a cinch--for Affleck. There’s a prison scene featuring Chris Cooper as his father that grabs you by the throat. The underused Pete Postlethwaite (remember him from The Usual Suspects?) gets what’s coming to him. And Jon Hamm (who plays it cute in AMC-TV’s Mad Men) is surprisingly good as an FBI agent.

The New York Times’ A.O. Scott wrote of The Town: “[T]he sense of place--of topography and architecture, if not of actual social life--is vivid and enjoyable. A climactic caper at Fenway Park ... is fast and exciting all the same, perhaps especially for Yankees fans.”

If you haven’t already welcomed The Town into your movie-going life, get it now and clasp it to your bosom. (Though not too hard--you wouldn’t want to crack it.)

Here’s the picture’s official trailer:

READ MORE: “Pete Postlethwaite, Actor, Dies at 64” (AP).

New Year, Fresh Tidbits

• Only one more week remains until the 2011 David Goodis memorial, to be held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on Sunday, January 9. According to the Noir Con blog, participants will congregate first at the Goodis mausoleum in Roosevelt Memorial Park (2701 Old Lincoln Highway), and then take a “brief tour” of Goodis-related sites in the city. Address questions to info@noircon.com.

• The 18th installment of Dick Adler’s serial novel, Forget About It: The First Al Zymer Senile Detective Mystery, has now been posted here. If, for some odd reason, you haven’t been keeping up with that story and need a refresher, you will find a full archive of the chapters here.

• Good news for Robert Wagner fans: The word from TV Shows on DVD is that home-video producer eOne will bring the debut season of It Takes a Thief (1968-1970), Wagner’s first series, to stores this coming summer. The site reports, “we’ve also heard rumors that [Wagner’s] 1975 series with Eddie Albert, Switch, is also coming to DVD in the future (albeit from a different studio than Thief).”

• Anyone interested in buying The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. on DVD?

• It seems President Obama has set aside a bit of time for fiction reading while vacationing with his family in Hawaii this holiday season. The White House reports that the president has packed along copies of both David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet and John le Carré’s latest spy novel, Our Kind of Traitor, in addition to a biography of Ronald Reagan. As The New York Times notes, “The president’s wife makes a brief guest appearance in the Le Carré book; in one passage, characters cannot visit the gardens of [Paris’] Champs-Elysees because ‘Michelle Obama and her children are in town.’”

• It’s taking a while, but the blog Where Danger Lives has been counting down the “100 Greatest Posters of Film Noir.” The latest batch covers numbers 60 to 51, including the placards for Ride the Pink Horse, Pickup on South Street, and I Died a Thousand Times. Look here for numbers 70-61; here for 80-71; here for 90-81; and here for 100-91.

• Those Sexy Vintage Sleaze Books celebrates the “handful of titles” Donald E. Westlake wrote in the mid-20th century under the pseudonym Edwin West. They were published by Monarch Books and carried “lesbian, collegiate, and incest themes.” Learn more here and here.

• In the blog Two-Fisted Tales of True-Life Weird Romance, Joe Ackerman recalls the excellent work of pulp illustrator Hugh Joseph Ward. (Hat tip to Bish’s Beat.)

• Kevin Burton Smith’s Thrilling Detective Web Site has offered some excellent covers over its dozen-year history. But this first one for 2011 has got to be one of the best yet.

• Shots contributor Michael Carlson and Bob Cornwell of Crime Time offer contrasting views on the TV movie adaptations of Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander stories. Read their comments here, here, and here.

• Check out these last “best books of 2010” lists from John Kenyon, Vince Keenan, Dan Fleming, Donna Moore, Jochem van der Steen, Spinetingler Magazine, Rob Kitchin, and Bookgasm.

• The seventh series of the BBC One’s Hustle will premiere this coming Friday. Robin Jarossi provides an overview in Crime Time Preview.

• I’ve never once thought to screen the 1968 British-French film Girl on a Motorcycle, but seeing the promotional poster leaves me craving an immediate viewing.

• The new year brings more U.S. health care reforms.

• R.I.P., Agathe von Trapp, Geraldine Doyle, and Kodachrome film.

• The group blog Do Some Damage continues its eminently readable Christmas Noir series of short stories with a tale from British author Col Bury. Click here to read his yarn, “Snakes ’N’ Ladders.”

• This last Friday, New Year’s Eve, was supposed to mark a rare week off for Patti Abbott’s “forgotten books” series. But several regular contributors made reading suggestions, anyway. Among the titles suggested were Epitaph for a Tramp, by David Markson; Enemy’s Enemy, by Jan Guillou; Summer of Sin, by Orrie Hitt; and Bragg’s Hunch, by Jack Lynch. The very popular, Web-wide forgotten books series should recommence this coming Friday.

• And even though it wasn’t mentioned as part of Abbott’s series, Merry Christmas, Murdock (1989)--reviewed by Ben Boulden in Dark City Underground--certainly counts as a long-neglected work of crime fiction. It was one in Robert J. Ray’s five-book series featuring Orange County, California, gumshoe Matt Murdock.