Going for “Rogue”

One of the reasons I switched from reading science fiction to mysteries in my teens was that crime fiction allowed me to visit real places I might not otherwise get to see.

For instance, Jonathan Valin’s private eye Harry Stoner books (The Lime Pit) showed me a Cincinnati I never visited, even as a devout baseball fan. Robert Irvine, who in the 1980s and ’90s wrote a great series featuring Moroni Traveler, a Mormon detective in Salt Lake City, was another excellent guide. So was Miriam Grace Monfredo, as she sent her librarian heroine, Glynis Tryon, out from Seneca Falls, New York, on Civil War-era adventures--one involving abolitionist John Brown. And Dianne Day’s lovely books about intrepid typist Fremont Jones, who became an early female (and feminist) sleuth in San Francisco right after the 1906 earthquake, whetted my appetite for Laurie R. King’s Mary Russell historical thrillers, as well as the wonderful series about a midwife in post-Revolutionary War Maine written by Margaret Lawrence, who more recently delivered Roanoke.

But Providence, the capital city of little Rhode Island, was never really a part of my crime education. The closest I came were a couple of Mark Arsenault’s books (Gravewriter), in which journalist Billy Povich left his pitiful post with a Providence broadsheet to solve crimes and unearth corruption for another paper in Charlestown, to the south.

More recently, though, I stumbled (albeit late) onto a debut gem called Rogue Island, which was published last October by Forge. All of the usual suspects--and some surprisingly unusual ones--were buzzing madly about this book in ads and jacket blurbs. “A tense, terrific thriller and a remarkably assured debut from Bruce DeSilva, an author to watch,” said Dennis Lehane. “Rogue Island is a stunning debut in the noir tradition,” gushed Harlan Coben. And Michael Connelly, arguably the best modern writer of mysteries involving newspaper reporters, added this cherry: “Writing with genuine authority, a dose of cynical humor, and a squinting eye on the world, Bruce DeSilva delivers a newspaper story that ranks with the best of them.”

Rogue Island lives up to those plaudits, and even exceeds them. Its protagonist is L.S.T. Mulligan (only a few childhood friends know that his first name is Liam), a studly, just-turned-40 reporter and troublemaker working for the only newspaper in town, The Providence Journal. Born and reared in Providence’s Mount Hope neighborhood, he’s an old-school newsy with a clever patter and curious romantic draw. When one of the several women who’ve fallen for him asks Mulligan how his tiny, Mob-infected state got its name, he tells her, “Rhode Island is a bastardization of Rogue Island, a name the sturdy farmers of colonial Massachusetts bestowed upon the swarm of heretics, smugglers, and cutthroats who first settled the shores of Narragansett Bay.” Who knew?

In this fast-moving introductory tale (nominated recently for an Edgar Award for Best First Novel), we find Mulligan investigating a series of arsons that are destroying his old neighborhood and killing his lifelong friends. It becomes harder and harder for the reporter to take a dispassionate view of events. “While I waited, I looked over at what was left of 188 Doyle Avenue, where I’d played cops and robbers with the Jenkins twins when I was a kid,” Mulligan tells us at the scene of a particularly sad and nasty blaze. “Now half the roof was gone ... I stared at the unblinking third-story window on the southeast corner where old Mr. McCready, the teacher who’d first introduced me to Ray Bradbury and John Steinbeck, had been strangled by the smoke. The arsonist was reducing my childhood to ashes.”

Before he’s able to put this horrific story to bed, Mulligan will receive a bruising, weather threats from the Mob, be arrested, and face disciplinary action by his newspaper employer. In his pursuit of justice, he’ll ultimately win help from some unlikely sources.

Mulligan, a reformed drunk with an ulcer, drips ink from his veins the way all lifelong newspaper people do. He muses at one point: “Seems like I’m always hustling for something--a lead, a quote, a free parking space, space above the fold ...” And he has obviously been at a lot of fire scenes, which he describes with frightening perfection: “A sheet of flame climbed the front of the duplex. Black smoke boiled from cheap asphalt siding, mixing with gray smoke that curled from the eaves ...”

I could go on for page after page, quoting from Rogue Island. Then I’d probably spend almost equal time extolling author DeSilva’s skill at creating memorable characters with a tap on his keyboard. One of those fictional players is a young reporter (the son of the Journal’s owner), who chooses Mulligan to be his mentor. The older man responds by calling his new protégé Thanks, Dad.

Oddly enough, DeSilva appears to be harboring a grudge against a criminal defense attorney named Brady Coyle, who he casts as the prime villain in this entertaining yarn. Those of us who remember with affection the late William G. Tapply’s Boston-based series about a lawyer and fisherman named Brady Coyne can only laugh and shake our heads. Surely there’s an inside joke here, that DeSilva may let us in on one day.

READ MORE: “The Fascinating, Edgar-nominated Bruce DeSilva,” by Toni McGee Causey (Murderati).

Crime Bytes

• The British crime-fiction Webzine Shots has just undergone an extensive redesign, which makes it look a good bit sharper than it did before. The basic contents, though, don’t seem to have changed. Mike Ripley’s latest “Getting Away with Murder” column has just been posted there, as has an interview with James Gurbutt and Henry Sutton, the co-authors (under the pseudonym James Henry) of First Frost (Bantam), a prequel to R.D. Wingfield’s acclaimed Inspector Jack Frost series.

• If, after watching today’s Super Bowl, you feel like reading some football-based crime fiction, Janet Rudolph has just the list for you.

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

• Happy second anniversary to SpyVibe!

• Following news that a previously unknown Dashiell Hammett story will be published in the Winter/Spring 2011 edition of The Strand Magazine, there comes talk about that and 14 other Hammett yarns (unearthed in Texas) being collected in book form in the near future.

• Novelist-screenwriter Lee Goldberg talks with Spinetingler Magazine about the future of e-publishing. It’s actually one in a series of interviews Brian Lindenmuth has put together.

• On the occasion of what would have been Ronald Reagan’s 100th birthday, The Washington Monthly’s Steve Benen and Salon both look back at how the mixed legacy of Reagan’s time as the 40th U.S. president often conflicts with right-wing mythologizing. (More here.)

• The blog Where Danger Lives has finally finished posting its countdown of the “100 Greatest Posters of Film Noir.” The last batch covers numbers 10 to 1, including Night and the City, This Gun for Hire, and ... well, I won’t reveal #1. To take in the whole series, click here.

• Beat the Dust’s new issue focuses on crime and noir fiction.

• This week’s new short story in Beat to a Pulp is called “Mercy Street” and comes from crime and horror writer Richard Godwin.

• Meanwhile, Part III of “Black Lens,” the Ken Bruen and Russell Ackerman story being serialized in the Mulholland Books blog, is here.

• And this proves once again that (sadly) there are absolutely no new ideas in broadcast-TV land. Omnimystery News reports that American network NBC has revived plans to remake the popular 1991-2006 British series Prime Suspect. “The original Prime Suspect, which aired seven ‘seasons’ over a period of 15 years,” Omnimystery News recalls, “stars Helen Mirren as Detective Chief Inspector (and later Detective Superintendent) Jane Tennison, and was created by crime novelist Lynda La Plante. NBC’s remake is scripted by Alexandra Cunningham (Desperate Housewives, Fastlane).”

Don’t Forget

You have only until midnight tomorrow, Monday, to enter The Rap Sheet’s contest to win one of four free copies of Brad Parks’ new mystery novel, Eyes of the Innocent (Minotaur), the sequel to Faces of the Gone (2009).

If you’d like a shot at picking up one of these copies, all you have to do is e-mail your name and snail-mail address (no P.O. boxes) to jpwrites@wordcuts.org. And please be sure to write “Brad Parks Contest” in the subject line. Winners will be chosen at random, and their names will be announced on this page come Tuesday.

Click here to learn more about Parks and his latest book.

The New “Mechanic”: Fixing What Ain’t Broke

Trailer for 1972’s The Mechanic (aka Killer of Killers)

(Editor’s note: The following review of the freshly remade crime/action film The Mechanic comes from Wallace Stroby, author of the new novel Cold Shot to the Heart [St. Martin’s/Minotaur]).

I grew up on a steady diet of 1970s crime and action movies. Many a day of my preteen and teenage years was spent in a darkened movie theater, watching films like The Seven-Ups, Rolling Thunder, and Magnum Force. Those days remain some of the fondest memories of my youth. I went to a Catholic high school where football was almost a religion, but I couldn’t tell you a single thing about one of those games. On the other hand, I can sharply recall an afternoon in 1975 spent at a double feature of Sam Peckinpah’s The Killer Elite and the original The Taking of Pelham One Two Three at the Shrewsbury Cinema in Shrewsbury, New Jersey.

As befitting the era, I saw a lot of Charles Bronson movies, some excellent (Hard Times, Mr. Majestyk), some good (Death Wish, Telefon), and some awful (Death Wish 2). The Mechanic (1972, alternatively titled Killer of Killers) fell somewhere in the middle, a slick action movie about a hit man (Bronson) grooming a young protégé--played by Jan-Michael Vincent--to take his place. It was capably directed by Brit Michael Winner (who later reteamed with Bronson for Death Wish), and was much talked about at the time for its ironic and effective twist ending.

Although it wasn’t the best of the ’70s Bronsons, much of The Mechanic is still etched in my mind. It was the perfect role for the craggy, weathered actor, who at that point was the biggest box-office star in the world. His Arthur Bishop was a cool assassin with a fondness for classical music and fine living. But he also radiated an implacable, almost primitive menace. He could kill you with his gray-eyed squint alone.

Given my history, I was skeptical when I sat down to watch the 2011 retooling of The Mechanic, directed by Brit Simon West (Con Air), and starring newly minted action hero, and fellow Brit, Jason Statham. The big surprise--in addition to Statham being quite good, if humorless, as Bishop--is that the first 45 minutes of the remake are infinitely superior to the original. West keeps the story solidly centered on interpersonal relationships, chiefly between Bishop and his avuncular-but-wily employer, played by Donald Sutherland. The updates to Lewis John Carlino’s original script are smart and convincing. A scene in which Bishop gets a target to circumvent his own high-tech security, and then stages his murder to look like a random carjacking, is brilliant. In the Jan-Michael Vincent role, Ben Foster steers clear of the twitchy histrionics that made his

performance in 3:10 to Yuma so distracting. He’s believable as a tough kid with anger and substance-abuse issues, a better-drawn character than Vincent’s pretty-boy sadist.

But about an hour in, this new Mechanic takes an unfortunate detour into, if not Michael Bay Land, at least one of its neighboring islands. When the explosions start and the futuristic automatic weapons come out--wielded by an inexhaustible supply of faceless bad guys in suits--all nuance goes out the window, along with any semblance of logic. By the end of the film, the supposedly under-the-radar Bishop is engineering multi-car accidents, plowing into limousines with a stolen garbage truck, blowing up buses, and machine-gunning bad guys in the middle of a public street, with shell casings spewing everywhere, and the police nowhere to be found.

That the film features the exact same twist ending, almost beat for beat, as the original is more of a head scratcher. Were the producers/director/writers confident no one remembered the original? Was it a gesture of respect for Carlino’s script? (That’s a little harder to believe.) There must have been any number of alternative narrative paths to reach that same place. As it is, when Foster’s character climbs into Bishop’s restored Jaguar (a Ford Mustang Mach 1 in the original), it’s clear what’s coming.

Would my 12-year-old self have enjoyed the 2011 Mechanic as much as he did the original? Maybe. But I think even then, he would have known something was missing. That more is often less. And that Charles Bronson’s steely glance and world-weary authenticity might just have more impact than a hour’s worth of fireballs, gunfights, and careening public utility vehicles.

READ MORE: “Double Barreled,” by J. Kingston Pierce (Killer Covers).

Not to Be Neglected

Particularly appealing among today’s selections of “forgotten books” are these mystery and thriller works: Backfire, by Dan J. Marlowe; Mike Dime, by Barry Fantoni; Monkey Puzzle, by Paula Gosling; Mystery at Friar’s Pardon, by Martin Porlock (aka Philip MacDonald); The Canvas Prison, by Gordon DeMarco; Fly Paper, by Max Allan Collins; Murder in Black and White, by Evelyn Elder (aka Milward Kennedy); Wild Night, by L.J. Washburn; Operation: Sex, by Kimberly Kemp (aka Gilbert Fox); and Reader, I Murdered Him, edited by Jen Green. Highlighted as well is a non-fiction book that should be of interest to crime-fiction readers: The Illustrious Dunderheads, compiled by Rex Stout.

A full list of posts can be found here.

Chandler in Your Ear

Beginning tomorrow, BBC Radio 4 will present 90-minute weekend dramatizations of all of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe novels, with Toby Stephens playing the “insubordinate, loner detective.” First up on the broadcast schedule is The Big Sleep, based on Chandler’s 1939 book, followed by The Lady in the Lake (Saturday, February 12), Farewell, My Lovely (February 19), and Playback (February 26).

Later in the year Radio 4 will present episodes based on The Long Goodbye, The High Window, The Little Sister, and Poodle Springs (which Chandler abandoned before dying in 1959, and which was completed much later by Robert B. Parker).

If you’re in Britain, turn your radio to The Big Sleep tomorrow at 2:30 p.m. Everybody else should be able to find the link to that episode and future ones here.

“A Battle I Do Not Plan on Losing”

American political thriller writer Vince Flynn (American Assassin) has announced the following personal news on his Web site:

In November, at the end of my last tour, I was diagnosed with Stage III metastatic prostate cancer. Just a few years ago, this diagnosis would have been a death sentence. Today, specialists are making great strides in the areas of hormone therapy and immune response, and there are several very promising drug trials that are changing the landscape of how prostate cancer is treated.

My treatments are working very well, and my near-term prognosis is extremely good. In other words, I have more than a few [Mitch] Rapp novels left in me. My attitude is strong, and I feel better than I have in years. I am blessed to be surrounded by a wonderful wife, family, and great friends who have been extremely supportive. My faith has seen me through the darkest moments, and early on, when the diagnosis was not entirely accurate, things were very dark indeed. I am also blessed that I live in a part of the country [Minnesota] that is known for great medical care. I have a wonderful group of doctors who are confident that I can beat this thing. For those of you who have gotten to know me, it will not be a surprise to you that this is a battle I do not plan on losing. As with any cancer, this is serious, but the good news is that I have lots of options for slowing this thing down, and then hopefully killing it.

I am currently working with Brian Haig on our joint novel and have started the next Rapp novel that should be out in October of 2011. Please keep me and my family in your thoughts and prayers, and I will try to keep you posted as things progress.

We wish Mr. Flynn the best of luck.

The Story Behind the Story: “Eyes of the Innocent,” by Brad Parks

(Editor’s note: This week’s entry in The Rap Sheet’s “Story Behind the Story” series comes from Virginia author Brad Parks, whose debut mystery, Faces of the Gone [2009], was the first book ever to win both the Nero Award and Shamus Award, two of crime fiction’s most prestigious prizes. His second novel, Eyes of the Innocent, is being released today from St. Martin’s Press/Minotaur Books--and is the subject of his essay below. Library Journal gave Eyes a starred review, calling it “as good if not better (than) his acclaimed debut.” You can follow Parks on Twitter or become a fan of Brad Parks Books on Facebook.)

In my mind, I can still see the spot where I was standing when the plot for my new book, Eyes of the Innocent, began forming in some deep fold of my brain.

Thanks to the wonders of the modern Internet, you can get pretty close to it, too. Just do a Google Maps search for “66 Norwood Street, Newark, New Jersey.” Ask for the satellite view and then zoom in. Switch to the street view if you want. Take a good look.

As you can see, 66 Norwood Street is in the midst of the dense urban tangle that is Northern New Jersey. The street view shows a narrow, three-family house with yellow siding and brown trim.

From memory, I can tell you it was a bit more fire-singed than that when I first tripped on it as a reporter for The Newark Star-Ledger in 2008.

I was putting together a series of stories about the wave of mortgage foreclosures then beginning to crash across urban areas. It was being referred to as the subprime mortgage crisis, because so many of the loans that were going into default had been given to subprime borrowers, people with imperfect credit or the kind of financial history banks had historically avoided.

Back then, in those halcyon days when the stock market was above 14,000 and unemployment was below 5 percent, we didn’t understand how the trouble at places like 66 Norwood Street was going to affect all of us, or that the sickness in this one small part of the housing sector would infect the entire global economy.

No, at that point, I thought I was doing reporting on an urban issue. I had zeroed in on this one block--Norwood Street, from South Orange Avenue to Abinger Place--where 11 of the 57 houses had gone into foreclosure during the previous two years. Located midway down that block, 66 Norwood Street was also a poster child for the subprime mortgage scandal. Its story, told in retrospect, is typically heartbreaking--a clinic in real-estate speculation gone wrong.

Part of a ragged working-class neighborhood in the western part of Newark, a place where property values had been in a roughly 50-year slump, the house had been bought for $130,000 in January 2001. During the next five years, as investors discovered there was money to be made in Newark real estate, it changed hands three times.

On July 7, 2006, a woman named Stacey Anderson--who I never did succeed in finding, despite dogged efforts--bought 66 Norwood Street for $325,000, an astonishing sum to people who remembered the days when you couldn’t give houses away on that block. What, if anything, had been done to the property to deserve a near tripling in value over the previous five years remained something of a mystery.

Nevertheless, in the craze of the biggest real-estate boom in American history, it may have actually seemed like a good deal. Real estate was supernova hot, and July 2006 was a heady time for Newark. It had just elected a charismatic young mayor named Cory Booker. And, for all its ills--unemployment, drugs, a stubbornly high murder rate--it was still a short train ride to Manhattan. To Stacey Anderson, it probably seemed like a great time to buy.

Not knowing the bubble was about to burst, she took out a loan from Countrywide, a now-defunct lender that was among the industry leaders in subprime mortgage origination. Her loan for $308,750 was a particularly exotic subprime beast, an “interest only” loan--meaning none of her $2,090.49 monthly payment went toward the principle.

Then again, that soon became something of a moot point. According to court records, Stacey Anderson didn’t make a single payment. The mortgage went into default on August 1, 2006. In December of that year, Countrywide began foreclosure proceedings against her.

Anderson never answered the complaint. The court system had no more luck finding her than I did, despite a series of certified letters and court summonses. The case sailed through uncontested. In July 2007, a judge signed the foreclosure order. In November 2007, the Essex County Sherriff put the property up for sale.

Except, of course, no one wanted it--not with $330,089.62 in debt now attached to it. The property thus reverted to the Federal National Mortgage Association, otherwise known as Fannie Mae, the government-sponsored enterprise that secured the original note and was therefore stuck holding the bag.

In accordance with its policies, Fannie Mae began preparing the property for sale. Part of that meant getting rid of the tenants, Joann and Tanesha Brown, who had been living on the second floor. They were evicted March 5, 2008. I never found them, either.

But it’s not hard to guess what happened next. Empty houses in urban areas are magnets for trouble--for vagrants, drifters, and drug fiends, who quickly move in and begin using them for their own shady purposes. And it sure didn’t take long for 66 Norwood Street to be invaded.

On March 7, two days after the tenants vacated, the house caught fire.

On March 10, it caught fire again.

That last date was a Monday. As I recall, it was three or four days later, either Thursday or Friday of that week, when I first walked inside. It wasn’t hard to gain entry: the front door had been left hanging open, literally swinging in the breeze.

On the first floor, I found the usual detritus of addicted human habitation: crack vials and lighters, old rags and junk-food wrappers, piles of trash and scraps of plastic. The eviction notice was still hanging on the door to the second-floor apartment. I took a picture of it with my cell phone (see that photograph on the left—click the image to enlarge it).

The door had been left open by the fire department, so I poked my head inside. The tenants had obviously left in a hurry. Or maybe they had just come home one day to find the door padlocked. There was still furniture in there--the big stuff, like couches and chairs and tables, things that were too cumbersome for any of the squatters to steal.

The third story, where the worst of the fire had hit, was mostly a charred mess, blackened and acrid-smelling. I went up the stairs to have a look but didn’t venture too far, unsure if the floor could support my weight.

Going back outside, I went next door to 68 Norwood Street and talked to the man who lived there, Donald Barrett. He was a nice guy, an amiable 56-year-old with a Caribbean accent. He had owned his house for eight or nine years, and worked two jobs to keep up with the mortgage payments--one as a baggage truck driver at Newark Airport, the other as a driver for a local rehabilitation center. He told me he had watched the chain be put on the front door of No. 66, all the while knowing it wasn’t going to do any good. No one had bothered to secure the back door. He knew it would only be a matter of time until the place burned.

“I’m only hoping they demolish it before it catches fire again,” Barrett told me. “If I had another option, I would have been out long ago. But where else can I go?”

That was the final quote in the story I ended up writing about Norwood Street, “Mortgage Crisis’ Block of Despair.” The piece ran in the Star-Ledger on May 18, 2008, and delved into many of the issues that had fueled the foreclosure problem--greed, speculation, house-flipping, etc.

And obviously it was still kicking around in my thoughts on July 8 of that same year, when my literary agent, Jeanne Forte Dube, called me with two pieces of news: 1) My manuscript featuring investigative reporter Carter Ross, which later became a book called Faces of the Gone, had sold to St. Martin’s Press; and 2) It was a two-book deal, and the next one was due in January 2009.

That didn’t leave me much time for dawdling. So I began writing what was in my head: a book that somehow dealt with the consequences of the subprime mortgage scandal.

It quickly became a mix of fiction and non-fiction. Little of the exhaustive reporting I inventory above--going through real-estate records and court documents and the like--enters the narrative, because frankly that stuff gets a little tedious. But there are seeds of real-life experience that I took and grew into something entirely invented.

The result is Eyes of the Innocent, which is due out in U.S. bookstores today. As I look at it now, remembering Norwood Street, I see so many of the things I bumped across on that block.

There’s a fire. There’s a subprime mortgage. There’s house-flipping. There’s greed. There’s real-estate speculation. There’s a character who works two jobs to make ends meet.

Above all, there’s a newspaper reporter who has to get the story.

* * *

WIN A FREE COPY: To help introduce Eyes of the Innocent to crime-fiction enthusiasts, publisher Minotaur Books has kindly agreed to give four free copies of Brad Parks’ new novel away to Rap Sheet readers. If you would like to be in the running to pick up one of those freebies, all you need do is e-mail your name and snail-mail address (no P.O. boxes) to jpwrites@wordcuts.org. And please be sure to write “Brad Parks Contest” in the subject line. Entries will be accepted between now and midnight next Monday, February 7. Winners will be chosen at random, and their names will be listed on this page the following day.

READ MORE: “10 Things Crime Fiction Writers Can Learn from Taylor Swift,” by Brad Parks (Do Some Damage); “Brad Parks, Guest Blogger” (Lesa’s Book Critiques).

Keeping It Short

• Spinetingler Magazine’s Brian Lindenmuth has announced the winners of his first annual Fireball Award, “meant to honor great opening lines in crime fiction”--and it’s a three-way tie!

• After the moderate success of her “World’s Greatest Detective” poll last year (I say “moderate,” because the results held few surprises), blogger Jen Forbus is requesting nominations for a new crime-fiction tournament, this one focusing on part-time investigators. “Many cozy novels feature amateur sleuths,” she writes, “but this year’s theme week is not confined to cozies. Any newspaper reporters, TV journalists, sports agents, cowboys ... you get the idea. Anyone who isn’t licensed or elected for law enforcement, isn’t a legal practitioner (i.e., judge, attorney), and isn’t a medical practitioner (i.e. nurse, doctor, M.E., coroner) [is] eligible for participation.” Click here to pick your favorite characters.

• William Johnston, a veteran author of film and TV tie-in novels (including nine based on Get Smart), has died.

• Some interviews worth reading: “Dark fiction” writer Richard Godwin talks with the multi-talented Patti Abbott for his terrifically titled blog, Chin Wag at the Slaughterhouse; Kelli Stanley submits to questioning by J. Sydney Jones; Irish writer Gerard Brennan turns the hot lights on C.J. Box; Chris Fedak, co-creator of the TV series Chuck, defends himself, in TV Squad, against charges that “the charm is gone” from the once-distinctive spy comedy; and for Publishers Weekly, Karen Abbott, author of the burlesque-backdropped biography American Rose: A Nation Laid Bare--The Life and Times of Gypsy Rose Lee (OK, not crime fiction, per se, but of interest to many readers of this genre, I think), examines the “conflicted, tortured relationship” the actress had with her greatest creation--herself.

• Rap Sheet contributor Dick Adler offers up a few thoughts on why he began composing his latest serial novel, Forget About It: The First Al Zymer Senile Detective Mystery.

• Things really seem to be coming together for the USA Network’s planned Burn Notice prequel, starring Bruce Campbell as spy Sam Axe.

• And critic Vince Keenan is busy looking back at Burt Reynolds’ cop films, including Sharky’s Machine (1981) and Fuzz (1972).

Action and Anecdotes

Salon critic Matt Zoller Seitz delivers a fine introduction to tonight’s installment of the PBS-TV documentary series, Pioneers of Television, which will look back at classic crime and spy dramas. He writes that

The “Dragnet” section is the highlight. Producer-star Jack Webb built a distinct aesthetic during the show’s early run on radio--uninflected lines delivered in rat-a-tat tempo. When the program migrated to TV, Webb kept the “Dragnet” sound and developed a visual style that complemented it. He figured out that while puny early TV sets were bad at capturing scenery and action, you could push in for close-ups and trade intimacy for scope--a lesson that had an enormous impact on other shows. Webb also insisted that his actors read dialogue off TelePrompTers to cut down on production time and stop them from acting too much. (Veronica Cartwright--who guest-starred on a late incarnation of the series, “Dragnet: 1967”--says she holds the dubious honor of being the first “Dragnet” actor to be allowed to memorize lines.) The “Dragnet” section is a great illustration of the phrase “form follows function.” If “Pioneers” had done a whole hour just on Webb and his baby, I wouldn’t have minded.

You can read all of Seitz’s piece here.

Pioneers of Television begins on PBS stations at 8 p.m. ET/PT. In Reference to Murder notes that it will be followed tonight by an episode of Frontline titled “Post Mortem,” “which looks into the dysfunctional system of forensic death investigation in the U.S. where ‘there are few standards, little oversight and the mistakes are literally buried.’” Sounds like great entertainment for crime-fiction fans.

READ MORE: “Don’t Do the Crime If You Can’t Do the Time,” by Ivan G. Shreve Jr. (Thrilling Days of Yesteryear).

Who Will Be Hosting the Rat Pack?

Just over a week ago, The Rap Sheet announced its first book-giveaway contest of 2011 and invited readers to enter. The prizes were two copies of Robert J. Randisi’s new Rat Pack Mystery, I’m a Fool to Kill You. Today we have our winners, their names selected at random. They are:

• Kathy Simpson of Simi Valley, California
• Max Eisenberg of Forest Hills, New York

We extend our congratulations to both lucky Rap Sheet readers.

Oh, and we want to let the rest of you know that, even if you weren’t able to pick up a free book this time, you will have another chance soon. In fact, very soon. We’ll be kicking off our latest book-giveaway competition on this page later today. Stay tuned.