What’d You Say Your Name Was Again?

While sick for a couple of days this week, I used my downtime to rewatch some favorite episodes of the 1972-1974 NBC Wednesday Mystery Movie series Banacek, starring George Peppard. So this collection of clips naturally drew my attention. Enjoy!

Sharing the Love for Lucy

Today marks the 100th anniversary of actress Lucille Ball’s birth in Jamestown, New York. To celebrate, True Classics has organized a blogathon covering the redheaded star’s big- and small-screen career, as well as her radio work and her life in general. The list of participating bloggers can be found here.

Although Ball wasn’t known for her appearances in crime and mystery dramas, as co-founder (with her husband and TV co-star, Desi Arnaz) of Hollywood’s Desilu Productions, she deserves some credit for bringing to the screen that studio’s TV series, which included Star Trek, The Untouchables, I Spy, Mission: Impossible, and Mannix. That last show was also Desilu’s final series project, and Ball has been credited with saving Mannix from an early cancellation by CBS-TV. For that effort, at least, we owe her our thanks.

READ MORE: “Critic's Notebook: Lucille Ball, 100 and Ageless,” by Robert Lloyd (Los Angeles Times); “Happy 100th Birthday, Lucille Ball! 15 Things You Never Knew About TV’s Funniest Lady” and “Lucille Ball Turns 100: 10 Ways to Celebrate Lucy’s Birthday,” by Kim Potts (AOL TV).

So Happy in SoCal

The Southern California Independent Booksellers Association (SCIBA) today announced the list of finalists for its 2011 awards. These include a quartet of contenders for the T. Jefferson Parker Book Award for Mystery and Thrillers:

• The Sentry, by Robert Crais (Putnam)
• San Diego Noir, edited by Maryelizabeth Hart (Akashic Books)
• The Informant, by Thomas Perry (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
• Savages, by Don Winslow (Simon & Schuster)

Look for nominees in all the categories here.

Winners will be declared on October 22.

Ned Ahead

The Crime Writers’ Association of Australia has announced its shortlist of nominations for the 2011 Ned Kelly Awards as follows:

Best First Fiction:

• Prime Cut, by Alan Carter (Fremantle Press)

• Line of Sight, by David Whish-Wilson (Penguin)

• The Old School, by P.M. Newton (Penguin)

Best Fiction:

• The Half-Child, by Angela Savage (Text Publishing)

• The Diggers Rest Hotel, by Geoffrey McGeachin (Penguin)

• Bereft, by Chris Womersley (Scribe Publishing)

S.D. Harvey Short Story:

• “Southern Hemisphere Blues,” by Robert Goodman

• “Hemisphere Travel Guides: Las Vegas for Vegans,” by A.S. Patric

True Crime:

• Abandoned: The Sad Death of Dianne Brimble, by Geesche Jacobson (Allen & Unwin)

• Wasted, by Ross Honeywill (Penguin)

• Honeymoon Dive, by Lindsay Simpson and Jennifer Cooke (Macmillan)

While these finalists pat themselves on the back, there’s a bit of controversy brewing over the choices, especially in the category of Best (Crime) Fiction. “Given there were 23 novels nominated for the 2011 Ned Kelly for Best Fiction,” writes New Zealand blogger Craig Sisterson, “there were always going to be plenty of good books and great authors that missed out on the short-list. But I imagine few would have predicted that not a single one of the ‘big names’ like Peter Corris, Kathryn Fox, Leah Giarratano, Kerry Greenwood, Katherine Howell, Adrian Hyland, Colleen McCulloch, and Malla Nunn would make it. I’m surprised--especially given the great things I’ve heard about Gunshot Road by Hyland, in particular.”

Undoubtedly, such disagreements will fuel the conversation when the Ned Kelly Awards are presented on Wednesday, August 31, as part of Australia’s Melbourne Writers’ Festival.

The longlist of this year’s contenders is here.

Dunn Deal

The international news media often make much of the “special relationship” between Britain and the United States on matters of geopolitics, especially when it applies to the covert world of espionage and “black operations.” We all know about the rumored links between the UK’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, aka MI6) and America’s Central Intelligence Agency, with analogous alliances between those organizations’ “eyes and ears,” the GCHQ and NSA, respectively. And who can forget how ex-White House occupant George W. Bush and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair talked up that special relationship while forming the military coalition that brought wars to both Afghanistan and (based on lies about “weapons of mass destruction”) Iraq?

This week, though, the UK/U.S. special relationship enjoys fictional treatment in Matthew Dunn’s debut work of “espionage noir,” Spycatcher (Morrow)--or as it’s known on this side of the Atlantic, Spartan (released under publisher Orion’s new Swordfish imprint).

I was initially put off Dunn’s novel by the clichés in its jacket copy:

At the height of the Iranian revolution, a British MI6 agent, James Cochrane, gave his life for his two closest friends--one a fellow British officer, the other a senior CIA operative. Caught in a sting, he chose to walk into the trap set for them so that his friends could escape. The man who set up that sting was then a young Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Today he is better known as Megiddo--the world’s most wanted international terrorist mastermind. Thirty years later, Will Cochrane may work for M16 but he doesn’t enjoy playing by the rules his bosses set him. His controller Alastair knows that Will is a wild card and should be thrown out of the service, but his very unpredictability may be just the weapon the West needs to bring down its most ruthless enemy, particularly when Will discovers that Megiddo was the very man responsible for his own father’s horrific death. When Will discovers that M16 have tracked down a woman who once had an affair with the young Iranian guard, he knows that he can use her to set a trap. She has to be persuaded to lure Megiddo out from the shadows in which he moves, but he may have other plans, for as per his biblical namesake, he is planning an attack on the West the likes of which the world has never seen. The stakes could not be higher.

But as a big reader of espionage fiction (especially works by writers who have come from the looking-glass world and try to portray the realistic angle of spying), I was intrigued by the explanation of the author’s history:

Matthew Dunn was trained by SIS in all aspects of intelligence collection and direct action including agent running, deep-cover deployments, small-arms, explosives, military unarmed combat, surveillance, anti-surveillance, counter-surveillance, advanced driving, infiltration and exfiltration techniques and covert communications. He used his skills extensively on operations. Although typically he worked alone, ... in conducting near seventy missions, he also had significant experience of working with highly specialized units from the SAS and SBS as well as conducting joint-operations with MI5, GCHQ and the CIA. Medals are never awarded to modern MI6 officers, but Dunn was the recipient of a very rare personal commendation from the Foreign Secretary for actions that directly influenced the successful conclusion of a major international incident. He lives in England.

What finally persuaded me to grab up Spycatcher/Spartan from my maddeningly lofty reading pile was a conversation I had about the book with novelist Lee Child during the recent Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival, and his blurb emblazoned on the jacket: “Great talent, great imagination, and real been-there, done-that authenticity make this one of the year’s best thriller debuts.”

Without understanding the consequences, I made the mistake of starting Dunn’s novel at 10 o’clock last evening. In no time flat my mind was trapped by the turns of this intense thriller. The storytelling was as dark as the coffee I sipped through the night, keeping myself awake in order to discover how the tale would be resolved. I must say, this is one of the most startling thriller debuts I’ve encountered in years. Spycatcher/Spartan is right up there with Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Nick Stone’s Mr. Clarinet, Charlie Charters’ Bolt Action, and Linwood Barclay’s No Time for Goodbye, all of which scored award nominations (or wins) and became international best-sellers. I predict Matthew Dunn will find a place among that line-up of genre stars.

Due to my present weariness, I have to catch up on lost sleep before penning a review of Dunn’s novel. But I should have one ready soon for The Rap Sheet’s sister publication, January Magazine. In the meantime, click here to read this book’s opening chapter. It might make you look forward to a little sleep deprivation yourself.

Pros at Con

For the blog Mystery*File, Walker Martin has filed a report from PulpFest, which was held this last weekend in Columbus, Ohio. For more on the winner of this year’s Munsey Award, Anthony Tollin, click here.

Escape Her Never

If you haven’t noticed already, there’s a two-day Ida Lupino Blogathon going on around the Web. Honoring the memory of the late, great English-born actress-director (who was also once married to the man who gave his voice to Sam Spade--listen here), this tribute has been engineered by none other than the Ida Lupino blog.

Among the participants are: Stacia Jones writing about the 1955 film, The Big Knife; Ivan G. Shreve Jr.’s recollections of Lupino’s contributions to The Twilight Zone; and Forever Classics’ look back at the co-starring appearances of Lupino with Humphrey Bogart.

Click here for a list of who’s taking part in this blogathon.

If you would simply like to reacquaint yourself with Lupino’s lengthy résumé of big- and small-screen work, refer to The Internet Movie Database (IMDb). She had roles not only in such films as High Sierra (1941), The Hard Way (1943), and On Dangerous Ground (1952), but also in numerous TV crime dramas, including Burke’s Law, The Mod Squad, The Streets of San Francisco, Columbo, and Ellery Queen.

Star Meets Czar

If you’re going to be in San Francisco on Thursday, August 18, don’t miss seeing author Dennis Lehane interviewed by Eddie Muller, the so-called Czar of Noir, at the Herbst Theatre on Van Ness Avenue. This presentation is co-sponsored by Litquake and the Film Noir Foundation.

Nightmare Shift

Issue No. 7 of the revitalized Webzine Crimefactory has been posted, with contributions from Sean Doolittle, Todd Robinson, Joelle Charbonneau, Edward A. Grainger, Jordan Harper, and many others.

Miss Marple with a Hatchet

To commemorate the anniversary of a quite grisly crime from the late 19th century, I have devoted my Kirkus Reviews column this week to Miss Lizzie, a pretty much forgotten novel from 1989, written by Walter Satterthwait. As I explain:

The timing here is ideal. It was 119 years ago this week, on Aug. 4, 1892, that Lizzie Borden, a 32-year-old spinster living in Fall River, Mass., is said to have discovered her father’s bloody corpse sprawled across a settee in the sitting room of their family home. Shortly afterward, the resident maid and a neighbor found the body of Lizzie’s stepmother lying facedown in a guest room upstairs. Both decedents had evidently been struck fatally about the head with a hatchet. Nine days later, Lizzie was arrested for double murder, her supposed motive having been to prevent her father from making a new will that would’ve left most of his wealth to his second wife.

Satterthwait’s novel doesn’t re-create the Borden murders; instead, it employs the notorious Lizzie as an amateur sleuth in a 1921 coastal town mystery that also revolves around a hatchet murder.

You’ll find my Miss Lizzie post--the latest of my “rediscovered reads” series for Kirkus--right here.

READ MORE: “Lizzie Borden,” by Russell Aiuto (TruTV).

Dissecting and Debating the “Girl”

Something happens when a book goes all mega-seller. Take, for instance, Stieg Larsson’s Millennium series. It just seems that, without much apparent effort, all of a sudden people want to start running in your tracks and scraping off a bit of what you’ve created.

This has happened before. Remember the craziness that followed in the wake of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (2003)? But The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a much, much better book. In terms of being in position to spawn derivative and far inferior works, Larsson’s Millennium series is the whole and complete package. A runaway international bestseller with a broad appeal and a large and growing following, plus an author shrouded in mystery who died even before the first book was published. Stir in a greedy family and a heartbroken life partner, and you’ve got the recipe for a bestseller with coattails so long, you just know that everyone and his uncle Sven is going to try and ride them. A lot of books like, about, and evoking Larrson’s trilogy have already been published and you get the feeling that the turnout has only just begun.

Now all of that said, and despite its derivative title, The Tattooed Girl (St. Martin’s Griffin) is not actually one of those books. Rather, author Dan Burstein has enlisted a few people in the know, along with several others claiming strong voices, strong opinions or both, to throw their two bits into the hat on the topic of some aspect of Larrson-ese or Dragon Tattoo lore. Burstein and writing partner Arne de Keuzer have used this approach before, including (gasp!) several books on aspects of Da Vinci Code-ishness. Truth be told, if you take a close gander through Burstein’s backlist, you see what looks like someone starting to make a career out of Dan Brown-ishness and Da Vinci Code-relatedness.

But then, here we are in a whole new ballgame, albeit one that looks as though it might have legs. Note this, though: The Tattooed Girl actually stands alone, functioning as a collection of writings on and about and even somewhat near Steig Larsson and his phenomenal, posthumously published series. The contributors to this new book are either connected with the author and/or his work or are willing to share their judgments regarding, as the subtitle of this volume states, “The Enigma of Stieg Larsson and the Secrets Behind the Most Compelling Thrillers of Our Time.” From the Introduction:

Other unique insights and thought-provoking sidelights await you, from commentaries about the efforts to turn The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo into a Hollywood film (premiering in December 2011), to an interview with the U.S. ambassador to Sweden, to a talk with the real-life champion boxer, Paolo Roberto, who, after Larsson’s death, suddenly discovered himself a character in the novels.

Do you really need to know any of this stuff? Probably not. But if you are one of those fans who can’t get enough and really wishes there were more to look forward to, The Tattooed Girl might sate your appetite. For a moment. Let’s face it: whatever you think of his series, Larsson didn’t create it by being derivative.