A Novella Affair

This is apparently the final day of voting in Spinetingler Magazine’s contest to choose the best crime-fiction novella of 2011. There are 10 stories vying for this honor, including works by Raymond Embrack, Nigel Bird, Jack Tunney (aka Paul Bishop), Kio Stark, and Tom Piccirilli. Click here to back your favorite.

Meanwhile, nominees are still being solicited for this year’s Spinetingler Awards competition. There are nine categories--among them Best New Voice, Best Single-Author Short Story Collection, and Best Book Cover--awaiting candidates. Click here to fill out the survey. A list of finalists will be announced on Saturday, March 31.

Pierce’s Picks: “Defending Jacob”

A weekly alert for followers of crime, mystery, and thriller fiction.

Defending Jacob, by William Landay (Delacorte):
Prior to his writing Mission Flats (2003) and then The Strangler (2007), Landay was an assistant district attorney in New England, so he understands the procedures and pressures involved in that position. Which lends genuine authority to his portrayal in this book of Andy Barber, a 51-year-old suburban Massachusetts ADA whose teenage son, Jake, becomes the prime suspect in the slaying of a fellow high-school student, a bully named Ben Rifkin. Even his friends think Jake might be guilty. Andy and his wife, Laurie, have their own doubts about their antisocial, sometimes strange son, but they struggle to keep him out of prison, even disposing of crucial evidence. The case weighs heavily on the Barbers’ marriage--especially when a pattern of violence in Andy’s ancestral past comes to light, a pattern that may boost the prosecution’s case against the boy. Defending Jacob is an emotional roller-coaster ride through a family’s slow destruction.

READ MORE: “No Easy Answers in Landay’s Legal Thriller,” by J. Kingston Pierce (Kirkus Reviews).

Poison and Promise

This could certainly prove beneficial to some unpublished writer hoping to make a name for him- or herself in the crime-fiction field: Scottsdale, Arizona-based publisher Poisoned Pen Press has announced its first annual Discover Mystery Award contest.

“Entries of unpublished manuscripts between 60,000 and 90,000 words must be received by the publisher by April 30th, 2012,” reports Omnimystery News, “and an entry fee [of $20] does apply. Entries will be judged by members of the Poisoned Pen Press editorial staff, along with celebrity guest judge crime novelist Dana Stabenow. The Discover Mystery Award will be presented on May 31st, 2012.” In addition to bragging rights, the winner will receive $1,000 in prize money and a publishing contract from Poisoned Pen Press.

The guidelines for entering this competition are here.

Friends of the Mystery

This year’s list of finalists for the Minnesota Book Awards, organized by the Friends of the Saint Paul Public Library, doesn’t include a separate category for crime and mystery fiction. However, the four “Genre Fiction” contenders all qualify as mysteries. They are:

• The Bone House, by Brian Freeman (Minotaur)
• Northwest Angle, by William Kent Krueger (Atria)
• Death of the Mantis, by Michael Stanley (Harper)
• Big Wheat, by Richard A. Thompson (Poisoned Pen Press)

Winners in this and seven additional categories will be announced during the 24th annual Minnesota Book Awards Gala on Saturday, April 14, at the Crowne Plaza Hotel, in downtown Saint Paul. The opening reception will commence at 7 p.m., to be followed by the awards ceremony an hour later. Click here for ticket information.

(Hat tip to Omnimystery News.)

Enter Stage Left

Organizers of this year’s Left Coast Crime convention--which is scheduled to take place in Sacramento, California, from March 29 through April 1--have announced the nominees in four awards categories. According to a press release, “The awards will be voted on at the convention and presented at a banquet on Saturday, March 31, at the Sheraton Grand Hotel.” The first two prizes are given out annually; the latter pair--the Golden Nugget Award and Eureka!--are special to this Sacramento gathering.

Here’s the rundown of contenders:

The Lefty Award (for best humorous mystery):
• The Real Macaw, by Donna Andrews (Minotaur)
• Getting Old Can Kill You, by Rita Lakin (Dell)
• October Fest, by Jess Lourey (Midnight Ink)
• Magical Alienation, by Kris Neri (Red Coyote Press)
• Dying for a Dance, by Cindy Sample (L&L Dreamspell)
• The Albuquerque Turkey, by John Vorhaus (Crown)

The Bruce Alexander Award
(for best historical mystery set before 1960):
• Naughty in Nice, by Rhys Bowen (Berkley Prime Crime)
• A Game of Lies, by Rebecca Cantrell (Forge)
• Mercury’s Rise, by Ann Parker (Poisoned Pen Press)
• A Killing Season, by Priscilla Royal (Poisoned Pen Press)
• Troubled Bones, by Jeri Westerson (Minotaur)
• A Lesson in Secrets, by Jacqueline Winspear (Harper)

The Golden Nugget Award
(for the best mystery set in California, in recognition of the
location of this year’s convention):
• Disturbance, by Jan Burke (Simon & Schuster)
• The Drop, by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown)
• Bit Player, by Janet Dawson (Perseverance Press)
• V Is for Vengeance, by Sue Grafton (Putnam)
• City of Secrets, by Kelli Stanley (Minotaur)

Eureka! (for the best first mystery novel):
• The Baffled Beatlemaniac Caper, by Sally Carpenter (Oak Tree Press)
• Nazareth Child, by Darrell James (Midnight Ink)
• Dead Man’s Switch, by Tammy Kaehler (Poisoned Pen Press)
• Who Do, Voodoo?, by Rochelle Staab (Berkley Prime Crime)

The Guests of Honor this year will be John Lescroart and Jacqueline Winspear. James Rollins has been selected as the Special Guest, while Noemi Levine is lined up as the Fan Guest of Honor. Oh, and author Harley Jane Kozak has been tapped as Toastmaster.

I Said, “Oh Oh, Domino”

To paraphrase Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) in Goodfellas, “As far back as I can remember, I wanted to be a domino player.”

When I was a kid and I’d go with my dad over to his cousin’s house to visit the relatives (who were originally from Kansas City and Bigfoot country, Seguin, Texas), the men at some point would depart to what would be termed a Man Cave today, a room off the garage really, to play “bones”--dominoes, that is. Us kids weren’t allowed back there unless one of the wimmin’ folk had a message for one of us to deliver. When I got to do it, I’d just stand there in the doorway to their room, watching the fancy set of ivory dominoes, face down, getting mixed over the surface of the card table. The men would be smoking Camels or Lucky Strikes, my dad’s brand, with cans of Hamm’s or Pabst beer at the elbow of each one of them.

I didn’t know then how they figured out, what with all those dots on those tiles, their scores. But the men would call out “ten” or “fifteen,” and sometimes one of them would be ecstatic and slap down a domino with gusto and yell out “twenty,” to the consternation of the others. I can’t remember now if it was Pop who taught me, or how I picked it up; but, wow, once I learned the game, I found out it was part luck--you draw your dominoes face down so you don’t know what you’ve got until you got ’em--and part strategy, as there are moves when you can block another player from putting down a tile or you can lock up a frame if you think you have the lowest amount left in your hand, then you receive the points of the others.

The game of dominoes, or so I’ve cobbled here from them Internets, is believed to have originated in China in the 12th century, though Egyptian or Arabian origins are also theorized. Dominoes appeared in Italy in the early 18th century, and spread to the rest of Europe throughout the remainder of the 1700s, becoming one of the most popular games in family parlors and pubs alike.

The word domino appears to have derived from the traditional appearance of the tiles--black dots on a white background--which is reminiscent of a “domino,” a kind of hood, worn by Christian priests.

Unlike chess, playing dominoes isn’t a metaphor for other aspects of life. But puffing on a good cigar, maybe a short glass of rum or scotch at your elbow, some Coltrane or John Lee Hooker on the juke, three or four other players around the table, coupled with some mild trash-talking, and you’ve got yourself an afternoon of fun and frolic, my friend. And as you can see from the graphic to the left here, there are various domino tournaments sponsored by diverse entities. There’s this one that seems to be a combination of playing the Madden 11 NFL game on Xbox and dominoes. I wonder if, like so-called Chessboxing, you have to play the video game, gain a level, then freeze the game and play a round of dominoes, going back and forth. Then there was also a domino tournament in Houston sponsored by La Gloria Cubana cigars, which makes a fine product, as far as I’m concerned.

But the best tournament has got to be the one in Abkhazia. A place that sounds like one of these countries you’d make up for your thriller novel. It’s on the Black Sea, and apparently the people there see themselves as independent, though others would say they are part of Georgia. Anyway, skipping lightly over that deep bone of contention, it turns out they get down in Abkhazia. They had themselves their eighth domino championship go-round last October. The Dominican Republic took the top honors, with a team of Abkazian and U.S. representatives coming in 14th place.

So--snap!--I know what I’m doing this coming October. Getting myself ready for the ninth annual worldwide smackdown camp-peen-ship. Abkazia, here I come!

(Editor’s note: Readers of Gary Phillips’ work will recall that the game of dominoes figures in a couple of his Ivan Monk detective adventures, particularly in “Boom, Boom,” one of the tales included in his soon-to-be re-issued book, Monkology: 15 Stories From the World of Private Eye Ivan Monk.)

Hearses to Horses

Cullen Gallagher, best known for writing Pulp Serenade, a blog devoted to crime fiction, is apparently readying the launch of a new short-fiction Webzine. Called Fires on the Plain, it will feature Western tales “with an edge,” as he explains on the still barely developed site. “Hard-boiled. Noir. Gritty. Dark. Tough. Stuff that Harry Whittington, Clifton Adams, H.A. DeRosso, or Brian Garfield would have written.”

Short story, novella, and serial submissions, as well as author interviews, are now being sought. Click here for more information.

Phantoms, Pirates, and Platt

My friend Matt, over at Just Wondering, is extolling what he calls “the best young adult mystery book I ever read”: 1966’s Sinbad and Me, by Kin Platt. Matt recalls that, when he read it as a boy, Platt’s novel “had everything I wanted in a story: a one-hundred-and-fifty-year-old mystery, the ghost of a sea captain, a spooky old house on a cliff, pirate treasure, secret passages and secret codes, riddles written on gravestones, a friendly but sad old lady with a secret past, a dangerous tidal cave, and invisible ink! And the hero was a twelve-year-old boy. Actually the hero was his pet English bulldog Sinbad. They solved the mystery together.” You can enjoy his full post here.

Delights Behind the Dilys

The Independent Mystery Booksellers Association has announced the five nominees for its 2012 Dilys Award. This commendation is given out annually to “the mystery title of the [previous] year which the member booksellers have most enjoyed selling.” The contenders are:

• Faithful Place, by Tana French (Penguin)
• Wicked Autumn, by G.M. Malliet (Minotaur)
• Tag Man, by Archer Mayor (Minotaur)
• A Trick of the Light, by Louise Penny (Minotaur)
• Ghost Hero, by S.J. Rozan (Minotaur)

As most readers of this blog probably already know, the Dilys Award is named in honor of Dilys Winn, an author and the “founder of the first specialty bookseller of mystery books in the United States” (Murder Ink, which closed in 2006).

The winning novel and author will be announced during this year’s Left Coast Crime convention, to be held in Sacramento, California, from March 29 through April 1.

Last year’s Dilys recipient was Louise Penny’s Bury Your Dead.

(Hat tip to Mystery Fanfare.)

Lights Out for Two Stars of My Youth

This was not the best news to hear on an overcast Seattle day:

Actor James Farentino, named Golden Globes’ most promising newcomer in 1967, died Tuesday in a Los Angeles hospital, according to a family spokesman. He was 73.

Brooklyn-born Farentino, who appeared in dozens of movies and TV shows and even earned an Emmy nod for his performance as Saint Peter, died of heart failure at Cedars-Sinai Hospital after a long illness, said the spokesman, Bob Palmer.

The CBS News obituary goes on to mention that the once-handsome Farentino starred opposite Patty Duke in Me, Natalie (1969); was part of the cast of notables in Jesus of Nazareth, a 1977 TV miniseries; featured with Kirk Douglas in the 1980 science-fiction film The Final Countdown; was married and divorced four times; and fell into trouble in his later life, including being prosecuted for “stalking his ex-girlfriend Tina Sinatra.

However, it glosses over the two series that really brought Farentino to my attention: The Bold Ones, on which he played lawyer Neil Darrell for three years (1968-1972); and Cool Million (1972), a short-lived component of the original NBC Wednesday Mystery Movie, which cast him as Jefferson Keyes, “an enterprising former CIA agent who set himself up in business as a private eye willing to take any case or solve any problem for a flat fee of one million dollars (refunded if he fails),” recalls The Thrilling Detective Web Site.

Later, Farentino also starred in ABC-TV’s much-hyped high-tech helicopter series, Blue Thunder, a spinoff from Roy Scheider’s 1983 film of the same name. However, it’s as Darrell and Keyes that I shall always remember him best.

Good night, Mr. Farentino. We didn’t know you well enough.

* * *

More unfortunate news, this time from The Boston Globe:

Nicol Williamson, the British actor best known for his role as the wizard Merlin in the 1981 film “Excalibur,” has died of esophageal cancer, his son said Wednesday. He was 75.

His son Luke said the actor died Dec. 16 in Amsterdam, where he had lived for more than two decades.

I don’t believe I ever saw Excalibur. But I remember Williamson well from his starring role as Sherlock Holmes in The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, a 1976 film adapted from Nicholas Meyer’s wonderful 1974 novel of the same name.

When that movie came out, I was living in Portland, Oregon. And I somehow managed to win two free tickets (it might have been through a contest on the radio) to see the film, but didn’t know anybody to invite along with me. So I sat through the entire picture, engrossed by Williamson’s performance as a cocaine-addled Holmes, as well as Robert Duvall’s turn as the indulgent Doctor John Watson and Adam Arkin playing neurologist Sigmund Freud, with my bin of popcorn keeping the seat warm beside me.

In the end, it turned out to be a good memory.

More, Always More

A few things I forgot to mention in my last news wrap-up.

• After almost five years in business, Richard Helms’ fiction Webzine, The Back Alley, is finally closing up shop. But editor Helms says he’s open to offers from anybody else who’s interested in taking up The Back Alley’s reins. “ ... I will happily sell the domain name and rights to produce the ’zine,” he writes. “How about twenty bucks and bottle of Patrón Añejo tequila?” That sounds like a deal for some aspiring editor out there.

• Fans of the old CBS Radio Mystery Theater, the late-night drama series broadcast from 1974 to 1982, will be interested to know that all 1,399 episodes are now available for your listening pleasure here. (By the way, I’ve added this site to The Rap Sheet’s blogroll, under “Characters/Series,” so you can easily find it again in the future.)

• Scottish novelist Val McDermid recounts the roots of her popular Dr. Tony Hill series in a piece for Mystery Readers Journal.

• The good folks behind PulpFest, the annual pulp-fiction convention--to be held this coming August in Columbus, Ohio--sent along the following name-change alert:

As a result of the recent death of one of the organizers and stalwarts of the pulp hobby, PulpFest has decided that henceforth the Munsey Award will be called The Rusty Hevelin Service Award, or, in short, The Rusty. Hopefully, this will be accepted as a tribute to a man who was influential in making PulpFest and its predecessors as successful as they are today.

Information about nominating somebody for The Rusty can be found here. The deadline is April 30 of this year.

• You haven’t been keeping up with It Couldn’t Happen Here ..., the blog devoted to that 1970s cult-TV series Kolchak: The Night Stalker? Then you’d better start checking in. It’s already up to critiquing episode 15, “Chopper” (aka “The Headless Harleyman”).

• Also worth your following: Pulp Serenade’s Cullen Gallagher is in the midst of critiquing the diverse fictional works of Vin Packer (née Marijane Meaker) as well as Ed Gorman’s regrettably under-appreciated Sam McCain series.

• And is that really George W. Bush on the cover of Honey Gal, the 1958 Beacon Books paperback original edition of Charles Willeford’s fourth novel? Sure looks like him ...

Back in the USSR

My column this week for Kirkus Reviews is devoted to an interview with William Ryan (shown above), the Irish former corporate lawyer, now residing in London, who’s written two historical crime novels set in the Soviet Union of the 1930s. The first of those, The Holy Thief (2010), was nominated for the British Crime Writers’ Association’s John Creasey Award and was shortlisted for both a Barry Award and the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award. Its new sequel, The Darkening Field (Minotaur), continues the investigative exploits of Captain Alexei Dmitriyevich Korolev of the Moscow Militia’s Criminal Investigation Division, a man described by The Irish Times as “an ordinary plod, meticulous and thorough, working in an extraordinary time: in Stalin’s Russia, [where] fear reigns supreme, and every line of inquiry could lead the detective on a one-way trip to the gulags.”

You’ll find my Kirkus column here.

* * *

As a bonus, I’m posting below the parts of my exchange with Ryan that didn’t make it into Kirkus, due to space limitations. Here he talks about his dramatic career transition, his fascination with the era of the 1930s, and Korolev’s rebellious religiosity.

J. Kingston Pierce: Why in the world did you give up a successful existence as a corporate attorney in London to chase after a career as a crime-fiction writer?

William Ryan: I’ve always written in my spare time and it just felt like the right time to give it a chance. I’d been working as a lawyer for 15 years or so, and I’d probably become a little bored with it and a little frustrated that I seemed to have less and less time to do this thing which I really enjoyed--which was writing. I was lucky enough to get a spot on the Creative Writing Masters course at St. Andrews University in Scotland, and the next thing I knew I was a student again.

Some people are a bit ambivalent about the usefulness of creative writing courses, but I think you get out of them what you put in, and I was very lucky that the tutors on the course were writers like A.L. Kennedy, Don Patterson, Douglas Dunn, and John Burnside--all of whom were happy to encourage me when they thought I was on the right track and more than delighted to kick me in the behind when they thought I was going wrong. Don Patterson, in particular, was brutally honest when he didn’t like something--but it’s that kind of criticism that teaches you to look at your writing objectively and become ruthless with yourself, which is what you have to do if you’re going to write as well as you can.

When I finished the Masters I sat down to write “the novel,” as you do, and was about halfway into a very literary effort when I took one of those objective and ruthless looks at what I’d done and realized (a) it wasn’t very good at all and (b) it wasn’t something I’d ever pick up if I came across it in a bookshop. So I stopped and began The Holy Thief, the first of the Korolev novels, which is absolutely the kind of book I’d read. I only hoped other people would like my work as well--which, so far at least, seems to be the case.

JKP: Are you a big reader of historical thrillers? Which books from that subgenre would you most recommend?

WR: Two books that have stood out for me recently are R.N. Morris’ The Cleansing Flames and Jason Goodwin’s An Evil Eye. Both are part of a series--Morris’ being set in 19th-century St. Petersburg and Goodwin’s at the same time but in Istanbul. Morris and Goodwin have a lot of qualities in common--they know their stuff, they write elegantly, and they tell great stories. I highly recommend them.

JKP: Was your choice of a Russia-based detective series influenced by, say, Martin Cruz Smith’s Arkady Renko novels? Stuart M. Kaminsky’s Inspector Porfiry Rostnikov novels? Or other such works?

WR: I’d say the biggest influences were probably Dashiell Hammett, Georges Simenon, and Raymond Chandler. I've always been fascinated by the 1930s in general, and those three were certainly very useful in trying to create the atmosphere in the Korolev novels. I didn’t read Martin Cruz Smith until I was pretty much finished with The Holy Thief, but I think he’s a great writer and I wish in some ways I’d read him earlier. Alan Furst would probably be another author who is in the back of my mind when I write, and maybe Boris Akunin as well.

JKP: Why have you “always been fascinated by the 1930s”?

WR: I suppose it’s partially because we have quite a vivid idea of what it was like to live then, as for the first time we have films with sound. Obviously it’s also a time of enormous political and economic upheaval, on top of which there was the expectation in Europe that another war was imminent--at a time when the First World War was still a very recent memory. It’s also when [Joseph] Stalin and [Adolf] Hitler are at their most powerful--and looking back on it, it seems completely incredible to me that those men ever reached the positions they achieved or were allowed to commit the crimes they did.

JKP: Why include the real-life Russian journalist-writer Isaac Babel in your stories as Korolev’s “good friend and neighbor”? You don’t integrate a lot of other genuine historical characters into your stories. Why did Babel make it in?

WR: Well, he was indirectly responsible for the novel in that the work I did for a screenplay about him formed the basis of the research for The Holy Thief. I didn’t intend to have him in the book, but he slid in somehow or another and he solved a few plot problems for me by doing so, which I’m grateful for. He isn’t the only real person in the books, though. The Starostin brothers played football for Spartak in the 1930s before they ended up in the Gulag system, and the poet Ginzburg in The Holy Thief is based on Osip Mandelstam, whose wife, Nadezhda, wrote two brilliant memoirs--Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned. In retrospect, perhaps I should have changed Babel’s name as well, because it seems a little disrespectful in some ways. But on the other hand, I hope it will inspire some readers to search out his work. I don’t think they’ll be disappointed if they do.

JKP: I, for one, will be interested to see what you do with Babel in your future books. After all, A Darkening Field was set in 1937. Later installments in the series will move the action closer to 1940, when Babel was executed as an alleged spy, after returning voluntarily from a trip to Paris. I can imagine your integrating that episode into a future Korolev novel, giving you the chance to use that research you once did for the screenplay. Is that an idea at the back of your mind?

WR: A similar idea is bubbling away, but with Korolev instead of Babel. I’m planning to send him to New York in the book after next to investigate a killing that has implicated a senior Soviet diplomat. I think it will be interesting to look at American through his eyes and obviously, at the end of the novel, he’ll face the same dilemma--whether to return or not--and know that any decision will have adverse implications for the friends and family he has left behind in Russia.

But your question also highlights that, when you have real people in historical novels, you don’t have much flexibility when your fiction runs up against fact. I can play around with most elements in the books, but not when it comes to Babel. Although if I could rewrite history by some strange, magical turn of events, I’d like to do it for him--it’s such a great tragedy that he wasn’t able to write more than he did.

JKP: Alexei Korolev is a secretly religious man, who hides his Bible beneath the floorboards of his quarters because the Soviet state sought to eliminate religion. Does this character facet exist simply to demonstrate the captain’s maverick nature, or for some other reason?

WR: One of the fascinating things about Russia is how the oppressed religions have come back so strongly since the end of Communism. The only explanation is that belief in God and the Orthodox tradition never went away. There are plenty of diaries and memoirs that talk about Party members publicly attacking the church while allowing their children to be baptized, but it’s still surprising that this underground belief survived for 70 years. It’s that public/private split again--which I find fascinating.

JKP: How do you establish period authenticity in historical fiction without showing off too much research and thus retarding the storytelling pace?

WR: When we read novels written in the past--like, for example, Chandler’s The Long Goodbye--there naturally isn’t much explained and, as modern readers, we don’t expect there to be or even really notice. So I’ve tried to get to grips with ’30s Moscow as much as possible and then written the books as if for someone who actually lived there at that time. Obviously there are things that have to be explained, but I try to keep the explanations as short as possible and build them into the storytelling. I have a glossary and other useful materials on my Web site for readers who want to know more.

JKP: What is your response to critics who have said that your storytelling pace can be rather, well, slow?

WR: A few have picked up on pacing, but others think it moves along at a good pace--it seems to be a matter of personal opinion. I tell the story the way it feels it should be told and it seems to work for most people, but there will always be some who take a different view. That’s the great thing about writing, though--every writer has a different approach and every reader has different priorities. All the same, it probably doesn't help the pace that a lot of the tension in the Korolev novels is caused by his uncertainty. Quite a lot of the time Korolev knows that taking the wrong approach can have fatal consequences for him, so he has to consider carefully what action to take. So if someone is looking for action scene after action scene, that might frustrate them. It’s probably also a result of writing about a very, very different society--even though I do my level best to keep the research off the page, things do have to be explained and that may slow things down as well. It’s a shame, perhaps, that the novels have been described as “thrillers,” which probably gives rise to certain expectations. But I’m pretty sure they’re page-turners, and I think most readers appreciate that novels don’t always have to follow set rules or hit certain marks.

JKP: Finally, I must ask: Has The Holy Thief been released yet in Russia? If so, what responses have you received from readers there?

WR: It’s just about to come out there, so no responses as yet. I’m nervous, though--I can only imagine how the average Russian is going to react to some Irish guy telling them about their own history.

READ MORE: “Author R&R with William Ryan,” by B.V. Lawson (In Reference to Murder).

Not Available on Any Magazine Rack

With the myriad “punny” titles already available in cozy mysteries these days, it was only a matter of time before somebody published a novel with this groaner of a name: Deader Homes and Gardens. The book was written by Joan Hess and will be released next month by Minotaur Books. Here’s the plot description:

Back from her somewhat unusual honeymoon, Claire Malloy must face the harsh reality of life with her new husband, police chief Peter Rosen, and her teenage daughter Caron--three people simply can’t fit into her cozy two bedroom apartment. After a week of fruitless looking, she finally finds the perfect place--a well-preserved large house on a large plot of land in an area called Hollow Valley. There are only a few problems. Such as the real-estate agent disappeared mid-showing and hasn’t been seen since. And the last owner died in circumstances labeled “accidental” but were actually both “mysterious” and “dubious.” The family that owned the estate is now suing the lover of the dead owner over the rights to the property. Oh, and it isn’t really for sale. When the previous owner’s lover dies practically at her feet, Claire decides to take matters into her own hands. After all, to get the house of her dreams, first she has to find a killer. And all’s fair in love, war, and real estate.

What will be the next “shelter magazine” title to be corrupted? Anyone for Hearse Beautiful? Hell Decor? Or maybe Southern Dying?

Pierce’s Picks: “Those Who Love Night”

A weekly alert for followers of crime, mystery, and thriller fiction.

Those Who Love Night, by Wessel Ebersohn (Minotaur):
Author James McClure’s 1970s lead in producing South Africa-based crime fiction has more recently been followed by such writers as Deon Meyer (Thirteen Hours), Jassy Mackenzie (Stolen Lives), Michael Stanley (Death of the Mantis), Roger Smith (Wake Up Dead), and Wessel Ebersohn. The October Killings (2010) introduced Ebersohn’s latest protagonist, Abigail Bukula, a young attorney with the South African Justice Department. Now he follows that up with Those Who Love Night. This tale finds Abby trying to rescue a previously unknown cousin (who’s vanished into one of Zimbabwe’s nastiest prisons), while she seeks to discover what led to her aunt’s terrible demise. Help from an intelligence agency chieftain might ultimately prove detrimental to her cause, but Abby at least has veteran prison psychologist Yudel Gordon (the star of an earlier Ebersohn series) working her corner.

Touring the Web

• Harlan Coben is adapting his soon-forthcoming novel, Stay Close, for Hollywood, together with screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan. According to Omnimystery News, “they expect to have [the screenplay] completed to coincide with the publication of the book in mid-March.”

• I was very sorry to read at The Gumshoe Site that onetime Edgar, Agatha, and Anthony awards finalist Margaret Lawrence (aka Lorrain “Margaret” Keilstrup) “died on January 15 at her home in Fremont, Nebraska,” at age 66. Gumshoe editor Jiro Kimura writes further:

Ex-playwright Margaret Keilstrup started writing, under the M. K. Lorens pseudonym, the mystery novels featuring Winston Marlowe Sherman, mystery-writing Shakespeare professor, beginning with Sweet Narcissus (Bantam, 1990) and ending with Sorrowheart (Doubleday, 1993). After the fifth and last Sherman novel, she wrote three midwife Hannah Trevor historical novels, starting with Hearts and Bones (Avon, 1996) and ending with The Burning Bride (Avon, 1998) under the Margaret Lawrence name. ... Her last novel was Roanoke (Random House, 2009).

• Further bad news, this time from pseudonymous blogger Mercurie in A Shroud of Thoughts: “Film and television writer Robert Dozier passed on 6 January 2012 at the age of 81.” His many credits included episodes of Have Gun--Will Travel, Dan August, Batman, Harry O, and The Devlin Connection. Mercurie notes that “Throughout his career Robert Dozier wrote many fine scripts which upheld the underdog. It’s for that he will be remembered as a television and movie writer.”

• More opportunities to take up a 2012 reading challenge.

• One more challenge, this one coming from a Canadian broadcaster: “CBC Radio’s Day 6 is asking listeners to write a single sentence that breaks as many of Elmore Leonard’s famous Ten Rules for Writing Fiction as possible,” reports Shotsmag Confidential. “The five finalists will be featured on Day 6, and have their sentences published in The National Post. They will also win a three-book set of Elmore Leonard’s ‘Raylan Givens’ novels: Riding the Rap, Pronto, and the brand-new Raylan.” Entries will be accepted until midnight on Wednesday, February 1. Full submission details here.

• No wonder the Republican Party is freaking out at the prospect of disgraced former House Speaker Newt Gingrich becoming its 2012 presidential candidate. “Establishment Republicans,” writes one pundit, “[are] now saying things like, ‘Newt means losing 45 states.’”

• I used to own one of these James Bond Aston Martin Corgi cars, but lost it when my brother cleaned out our late parents’ home. Shoot!

• Speaking of Agent 007, The HMSS Weblog muses on the unlikely similarities between the James Bond of film and the comic book protagonist Batman.

• And bad typos appear even in New York Times photo captions.

Cross-border Rivalry

The North American Branch of the International Association of Crime Writers has released its nominees for the annual Hammett Prize, given to “a work of literary excellence in the field of crime writing by a U.S. or Canadian author.” This year’s five contenders are:

• Feast Day of Fools, by James Lee Burke (Simon & Schuster)
• Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead, by Sara Gran
(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
• The Cat’s Table, by Michael Ondaatje (McClelland & Stewart/
Canada; Knopf/U.S.)
• The Informant, by Thomas Perry (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt/
Otto Penzler)
• The Killer Is Dying, by James Sallis (Walker & Company)

A winner will be named during the Bloody Words Conference, scheduled to be held in Toronto, Canada, June 1-3.

(Hat tip to Mystery Fanfare.)

Triple Feature

Amazing as this seems, my Killer Covers blog--which focuses mostly on paperback cover illustrations--turns three years old today. To celebrate, I’m “showcasing three covers by three different illustrators I discovered during the last 12 months: Britain’s Sam Peffer (aka ‘Peff’) and American artists Lu Kimmel and Tom Miller.”

Click here to enjoy more of the scenery.

Now With More Pulp

Following directly on the heels of this morning’s announcement of nominees for the 2012 Edgar Awards comes the less-expected release of the ballot for this year’s Pulp Ark Awards. Those prizes will be handed out during the Pulp Ark convention, to be held in Batesville, Arkansas, from April 20 to 22. I must admit that I’m not familiar with many of the books, short stories, graphic novels, and authors included on this list, though I do recognize Paul Bishop, Barry Reese, and Howard Hopkins (who just died).

The complete ballot is here. Voting is supposed to conclude on February 20, with winners to be declared soon after that.

Edgars Out of the Box

Today being poet-author Edgar Allan Poe’s 203rd birthday (though he is no longer around to blow out any candles), it’s only appropriate that the Mystery Writers of America (MWA) should have chosen this morning to announce its nominees for the 2012 Edgar Allan Poe Awards, “honoring the best in mystery fiction, non-fiction and television published or produced in 2011.” Here are the contenders:

Best Novel:
• The Ranger, by Ace Atkins (Putnam)
• Gone, by Mo Hayder (Grove/Atlantic)
• The Devotion of Suspect X, by Keigo Higashino (Minotaur)
• 1222, by Anne Holt (Scribner)
• Field Gray, by Philip Kerr (Putnam/Marion Wood)

Best First Novel by an American Author:
• Red on Red, by Edward Conlon (Spiegel & Grau)
• Last to Fold, by David Duffy (Thomas Dunne)
• All Cry Chaos, by Leonard Rosen (The Permanent Press)
• Bent Road, by Lori Roy (Dutton)
• Purgatory Chasm, by Steve Ulfelder (Minotaur/Thomas Dunne)

Best Paperback Original:
• The Company Man, by Robert Jackson Bennett (Orbit)
• The Faces of Angels, by Lucretia Grindle (Felony & Mayhem Press)
• The Dog Sox, by Russell Hill (Caravel Mystery Books)
• Death of the Mantis, by Michael Stanley (Harper)
• Vienna Twilight, by Frank Tallis (Random House)

Best Fact Crime:
• The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City and Sparked the Tabloid Wars, by Paul Collins (Crown)
• The Savage City: Race, Murder, and a Generation on the Edge,
by T.J. English (Morrow)
• Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President, by Candice Millard (Doubleday)
• Girl, Wanted: The Chase for Sarah Pender, by Steve Miller (Berkley)
• The Man in the Rockefeller Suit: The Astonishing Rise and Spectacular Fall of a Serial Imposter, by Mark Seal (Viking)

Best Critical/Biographical:
• The Tattooed Girl: The Enigma of Stieg Larsson and the Secrets Behind the Most Compelling Thrillers of Our Time, by Dan Burstein, Arne de Keijzer and John-Henri Holmberg (St. Martin’s Griffin)
• Agatha Christie: Murder in the Making, by John Curran (HarperCollins)
• On Conan Doyle: Or, the Whole Art of Storytelling, by Michael Dirda (Princeton University Press)
• Detecting Women: Gender and the Hollywood Detective Film, by Philippa Gates (SUNY Press)
• Scripting Hitchcock: Psycho, The Birds, and Marnie, by Walter Raubicheck and Walter Srebnick (University of Illinois Press)

Best Short Story:
• “Marley’s Revolution,” by John C. Boland (Alfred Hitchcock
Mystery Magazine)
• “Tomorrow’s Dead,” by David Dean (Ellery Queen Mystery
Magazine [EQMM])
• “The Adakian Eagle,” by Bradley Denton (from Down These Strange Streets, edited by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois; Ace Books)
• “Lord John and the Plague of Zombies,” by Diana Gabaldon (from Down These Strange Streets)
• “The Case of Death and Honey,” by Neil Gaiman (from A Study in Sherlock, edited by Laurie R. King and Leslie S. Klinger; Bantam)
• “The Man Who Took His Hat Off to the Driver of the Train,”
by Peter Turnbull (EQMM)

Best Juvenile:
• Horton Halfpott, by Tom Angleberger (Amulet)
• It Happened on a Train, by Mac Barnett (Simon & Schuster Books
for Young Readers)
• Vanished, by Sheela Chari (Disney Hyperion)
• Icefall, by Matthew J. Kirby (Scholastic Press)
• The Wizard of Dark Street, by Shawn Thomas Odyssey (Egmont USA)

Best Young Adult:
• Shelter, by Harlan Coben (Putnam Juvenile)
• The Name of the Star, by Maureen Johnson (Putnam Juvenile)
• The Silence of Murder, by Dandi Daley Mackall (Knopf Young Readers)
• The Girl Is Murder, by Kathryn Miller Haines (Roaring Creek Press)
• Kill You Last, by Todd Strasser (Egmont USA)

Best Play:
• Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Suicide Club, by Jeffrey Hatcher (Arizona Theatre Company, Phoenix, Arizona)
• The Game’s Afoot, by Ken Ludwig (Cleveland Playhouse,
Cleveland, Ohio)

Best Television Episode Teleplay:
• “Innocence,” Blue Bloods, teleplay by Siobhan Byrne O’Connor
(CBS Productions)
• “The Life Inside,” Justified, teleplay by Benjamin Cavell
(FX Productions and Sony Pictures Television)
• “Part 1,” Whitechapel, teleplay by Ben Court and Caroline Ip
(BBC America)
• “Pilot,” Homeland, teleplay by Alex Gansa, Howard Gordon and Gideon Raff (Showtime)
• “Mask,” Law & Order: SVU, teleplay by Speed Weed
(Wolf Films/Universal Media Studios)

Robert L. Fish Memorial Award:
“A Good Man of Business,” by David Ingram (EQMM)

Grand Master: Martha Grimes

Raven Awards:
M is for Mystery Bookstore, San Mateo, California
Molly Weston, Meritorious Mysteries

Ellery Queen Award:
Joe Meyers of the Connecticut Post/Hearst Media News Group

The Simon & Schuster-Mary Higgins Clark Award
(to be presented during the MWA’s Agents & Editors Party on Wednesday, April 25, 2012):
• Now You See Me, by S.J. Bolton (Minotaur)
• Come and Find Me, by Hallie Ephron (Morrow)
• Death on Tour, by Janice Hamrick (Minotaur)
• Learning to Swim, by Sara J. Henry (Crown)
• Murder Most Persuasive, by Tracy Kiely (Minotaur/Thomas Dunne)

Winners will be declared during the MWA’s 66th Gala Banquet, to be held on April 26 at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in New York City.

ADDENDUM: Rap Sheet/January Magazine contributor Anthony Rainone offers an interesting question: Why aren’t there any nominees for Best Motion Picture Screenplay this year?

Nevermore?

Baltimore’s annual “Poe Toaster” still hasn’t put in a showing.

READ MORE: “Edgar Allan Poe Fans Say ‘Nevermore’ to Vigil for Mystery Admirer,” by Dave Itzkoff (The New York Times).

Pierce’s Picks: A New Home

Five and a half years ago, when I proposed to January Magazine editor Linda L. Richards that I spin off The Rap Sheet--which I’d been writing as a mostly monthly newsletter for January subscribers--as a standalone blog, I promised that I would continue to write weekly crime-fiction book recommendations for the original site. Thus was born “Pierce’s Picks,” the brief, boxed book write-up that has appeared ever since at the top of January’s crime-fiction contents page. (An archive of the last year’s worth of such recommendations is located here.)

This morning, though, begins a new chapter in the life of “Pierce’s Picks.”

As the end of 2011 drew near, Linda told me that she would like to lighten her editorial load going forward, and asked whether I’d be willing to move my weekly book recommendation over to The Rap Sheet. Fair enough. So beginning today, you will find my “Picks” prominently displayed on this page, a new one each Monday, all recommending freshly published books--mostly fiction, but occasionally non-fiction works--of particular interest to crime, mystery, and thriller readers.

First up: Cold Comfort, by Quentin Bates (Soho Crime).

This sequel to last year’s Frozen Assets finds Sergeant “Gunna” Gunnhildur being promoted from her police posting in rural Iceland to Reykjavík’s Serious Crime Unit. She arrives in time to participate in a hunt for escaped convict Long Ommi, whose spree of violent retribution is terrorizing the Icelandic capital--a place still reeling from the ongoing worldwide financial crisis. Concurrently, she is tasked with solving the murder of a TV fitness guru. Powerful special interests and damaging secrets are soon swept into the case, testing Gunna’s determination to find truths, not just easy answers.

Praising Brevity

Last week Spinetingler Magazine announced it would inaugurate a new, possibly annual award competition, this one in the field of novella-writing. Today, that Webzine posts an online survey form on which you can choose your favorite story from among 10 nominees. Works published in 2011 by Ray Banks, Tom Piccirilli, Kio Stark, and Gerard Brennan are included among the contenders.

You have until the end of January to cast your vote here.

German Gems

Authors Peter Temple, Mechtild Borrmann, and Kate Atkinson are among the winners of this year’s Deutscher Krimi Preis (German Crime Novel Prize). For full results, look here.

Bullet Points: Snow Day Edition*

• Less than a week remains now in the submission process for 2012’s Debut Dagger competition, hosted by the British Crime Writers’ Association. The deadline is Saturday, January 21. As the CWA’s Web site explains, “The Debut Dagger is open to anyone who has not yet had a novel published commercially. ... Winning the Debut Dagger doesn’t guarantee you’ll get published. But it does mean your work will be seen by leading agents and top editors, who have signed up over two dozen winners and shortlisted Debut Dagger competitors.” Click here for more information about entering the contest.

• DC Comics is adapting Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo as a two-volume graphic novel, the first volume to be released in November 2012. As Omnimystery News reports, “The story is by Denise Mina and Leonardo Manco with art by Andrea Mutti.” But the real treat, I think, is the cover of that first graphic novel, featuring a powerful illustration by Lee Bermejo. Click on the image at left for a blowup. And clickety-clack here to see Bermejo’s original Tattoo art.

• “The Reichenbach Fall,” the third and final 90-minute episode in the second season of Sherlock, BBC-TV’s updated version of the famous Sherlock Holmes stories, will be broadcast this evening in Great Britain. This same sophomore season of Sherlock is set to show in the States as part of PBS-TV’s Masterpiece Mystery! series, beginning on May 6.

• Meanwhile, Tor.com’s Teresa Jusino takes a look back at the work of Sidney Paget, the Victorian artist who created our enduring images of Sherlock Holmes, Doctor John Watson, and so many other of Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictional players.

• Happy birthday to Muhammad Ali (born Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr.). The former American heavyweight boxing champ will turn 70 years old this coming Tuesday.

• GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich’s 30-minute film attacking Mitt Romney as a “corporate raider” and job killer was pretty damning of the one-term former Massachusetts governor. But a new ad put together by Romney’s latest (faux) rival, Stephen Colbert of Comedy Central, in the run-up to South Carolina’s January 21 Republican primary election, is certainly more clever. As the blog Boing Boing explains, it “points out that Mitt Romney says ‘corporations are people,’ but he also made his fortune as a raider buying up, gutting, and killing corporations. Conclusion: Mitt ‘the Ripper’ Romney is a serial killer.” Watch it here.

• Blogger-author Paul D. Brazill talks with Michael Haskins about the latter’s recent paperback thriller, Stairway to the Bottom.

• In his latest podcast interview, Jeff Rutherford chats with Peter Spiegelman, the author of Red Cat (2007) and Thick As Thieves, one of January Magazine’s favorite crime novels of 2011.

• Rick Mofina tells the Calgary Herald that his new novel, The Burning Edge, “was ‘inspired’ by [a] 1998 crime and other robberies he had covered” as a newspaper reporter.

• Unbelievable! First, The Killing--the AMC-TV crime drama adapted from a popular Danish police procedural--failed, after a strong start and 13 episodes, to reveal who was responsible for the teenager’s  murder at the very core of its plot, turning former fans irate at the prospect of having to sit through a second season of the show to finally learn the answer to that mystery. And now we hear that The Killing will return to AMC on April 1, but that the murderer still won’t be revealed until the Season 2 finale. Do network execs really believe many people are still going to be watching by then?

• Tonight brings the season conclusion of Leverage, TNT-TV’s series about a group of modern-day Robin Hoods led by Timothy Hutton. This episode, titled “The Last Dam Job,” will begin at 9 p.m. ET/PT.

• And one final TV note, courtesy of Omnimystery News: “A&E plans a prequel series to the classic Alfred Hitchcock thriller Psycho. An original scripted drama titled Bates Motel, the series would be centered on Norman Bates, and provide a back story into how he came to become the character we’ve all seen in the film.”

* Yes, that’s right: Seattleites are in the midst of the city’s first snowfall of 2012, with more of the white stuff expected over the next two days. Yippee!

Coming Up Short

Today marks the 65th anniversary of Los Angeles’ notorious “Black Dahlia murder.” The victim was an unemployed, 22-year-old woman from Massachusetts, Elizabeth Short, whose mutilated corpse was discovered on January 15, 1947, in a vacant lot on South Norton Avenue. Short had last been seen six days before in downtown’s elegant Biltmore Hotel. The murder--which has inspired a great deal of fiction over the decades, including the 1975 TV film Who Is the Black Dahlia?, James Ellroy’s novel The Black Dahlia (1987) and Max Allan Collins’ Angel in Black (2001)--was never solved.

You can find out more about the case here and here.

ALERT: At least for the time being, the teleflick Who Is the Black Dahlia?--which starred Efrem Zimbalist Jr. and Lucie Arnaz, the latter playing the ill-fated Ms. Short--can be viewed in its entirety here.

READ MORE: “The Black Dahlia Murder: The 65th Anniversary,”
by Craig McDonald.

Exit Lines

Reginald Hill (left) and critic-author Mike Ripley attending a mystery writers’ convention “somewhere in [our] happier--and much younger--days,” as Ripley explains.

(Editor’s note: This tribute to the late British novelist Reginald Hill comes from Karen G. Anderson, a Seattle-area resident who for many years wrote about crime fiction for January Magazine. At one time an Apple Inc. writer , Anderson has, for the last decade, “designed, written, and produced innovative online communications for business and consumer audiences.” She currently holds seats on the boards of the Clarion West Writers Workshop and Northwest Folklife.)

Crime-fiction writer Reginald Hill worked in a class by himself. He expanded on a niche created by Peter Dickinson for deeply literary, profoundly psychological, and quirkily creepy crime fiction. Hill, however, used all of those elements in the structure of a police-procedural series starring the unfailingly uncouth, cagey Superintendent Andy Dalziel (pronounced “Dah-ELL”) and his colleague, the perpetually worried Chief Inspector Peter Pasco.

That 24-book series unfolded over 39 years and was always contemporary. Someone who had only a passing interest in crime fiction could read the series and come away with a firm grounding in the social and political history of Great Britain, from the emergence of British feminism, through the Thatcher era, to terrorism and government surveillance technology, to the transformation of urban Britain into a multicultural society. (The series’ final installment, Midnight Fugue [2009], has the son of a Jamaican crime lord making a bid for a seat in Parliament.)

Enthusiastic fans of the crime fiction turned out by Hill’s contemporaries, such as Ian Rankin and Peter Robinson, often shy away from Hill’s own books because of the strong classics component that runs through them. I admit I wrestled with Arms and the Women (1999), based on the Iliad (and sub-titled “The Elliad,” after Pasco’s stridently feminist wife), terming it “dauntingly erudite.”

But while a reader lacking a classical education might struggle to catch the allusions (I’ve often wished for an annotated version), Hill wrote in clear, pungent prose and devised fast-paced plots that carried you right along. And he was an absolute master of dialogue.

He was also a master of characters. I confess I juggled the ambiguities and puzzles in many of his later books simply to find out what would happen to the astonishing Detective Sergeant Edgar Wield, a man as strikingly ugly as he was courageous and soulful.

And Hill contributed some of the creepiest bad guys to contemporary crime fiction--creepy because some of them turned out not to be bad guys at all ... maybe.

The last three books in the Dalziel/Pascoe series were all about death, illness, and the consequences of aging. Hill, who died this last Thursday at age 75 of cancer, was clearly playing with the ideas of lessening powers, and how society treats the ill and elderly. And how people remember the dead. Midnight Fugue sees the feisty Dalziel returning to work after near-death in a terrorist bombing and panicking when he realizes he’s headed off to the Monday-morning staff meeting ... on a Sunday.

Reginald Hill wrote genre books that did the genre proud. If you haven’t read them, and want to, a fine place to start is at the beginning, with A Clubbable Woman (1970), in which Dalziel despairs of ever turning Pascoe, an effete university graduate, into a hard-drinking, rugby-playing copper. It’s an easy read. You could also jump into the series (as I did) with On Beulah Height (1998), which shows Hill in stellar form. In that novel, the literary bits play second fiddle to a rip-roaring plot that makes the most of the colorful and complex secondary characters in this series. My own person favorite is Pictures of Perfection (1994), which focuses on Sergeant Wield. But if you have literary friends who turn up their noses at crime fiction, hand them the quotation-filled Dialogues of the Dead (2001) or Arms and the Women, and smile.

This is a series I read over and over again, the way I read the works of Australian author Arthur W. Upfield and the Maigret mysteries by Belgian-born fictionist Georges Simenon. I’m hoping there’s another book somewhere, perhaps to be published posthumously. I am not ready to say good-bye to Andy Dalziel.

READ MORE: “Reginald Hill Obituary,” by Mike Ripley (The Guardian); “In Memory of Reginald Hill (1936-2012)” (At the Scene of the Crime); “Tribute to Reginald Hill,” by Norman Price (Crime Scraps).

Hill Toppers

Following up on yesterday’s posting about the death of British novelist Reginald Hill, we asked his friend, critic-columnist Mike Ripley, to choose his five favorite books from among Hill’s extensive oeuvre. He replied with the following:

Under World (1988): Set in Yorkshire in the aftermath of the infamous miners’ strikes. I’m a Yorkshireman and the son of a miner, so I took this one personally. Reg got it spot-on, and his humane liberalism shines throughout.

A Pinch of Snuff (1978): The book that brought Reg national publicity because of the subject matter (snuff movies). As ingenious as always and in parts wickedly funny.

On Beulah Height (1998): Infuriatingly clever, close on a masterpiece. Even the title is a clue.

Urn Burial (1973): Writing as “Patrick Ruell,” this is Reg in Michael Innes mode: a fantastical story involving archaeology, mad scientists, and his beloved Cumbrian Fells. Written with zest and outrageous panache, as all his Ruell books were.

The Spy’s Wife (1980): Sadly overlooked in the Hill canon, but a heartfelt, romantic take on the female angle when a British spy is discovered (as they often are) to be a traitor.

“I could go on,” Ripley remarks at the end. That would be fine, except we’d really like to throw this open to The Rap Sheet’s well-read audience. What are the Reginald Hill novels you’ve most enjoyed over the last 40 years? Please make your selections in the Comments section at the bottom of this post.

Oh, Horrors!

It Couldn’t Happen Here ..., the new blog devoted to that horror TV series Kolchak: The Night Stalker, has dug up a 1975 article that crime novelist Stuart M. Kaminsky wrote for Cinefantastique about the Darren McGavin series and its protagonist, “the most unlikely heir to Dr. Van Helsing that one could imagine.”

“For the longest time this was the Kolchak writeup,” remarks blogger John Scoleri. You can read it for yourself here.

Reginald Hill Passes Away

This morning’s Guardian newspaper brings the avery sad news that British author Reginald Hill, who created the Yorkshire-based detective team of Andrew Dalziel and Peter Pascoe, died yesterday at age 75. As the paper’s Richard Lea notes:

Hill charted the ups and downs of his two contrasting sleuths in more than 20 novels published over four decades after his debut, A Clubbable Woman (1970), alongside a substantial body of other crime fiction and thrillers. He won the Crime Writers Association’s Golden Dagger in 1990 for Bones and Silence, and the Diamond Dagger for the series as a whole in 1995.

Writer Ian Rankin, who won the Diamond Dagger himself in 2005, paid tribute to Hill’s great good humour, the intelligence of his writing and the generous advice he gave to young authors.

“I didn’t read crime fiction until I was in my 20s,” Rankin said. “Hill was one of the first British writers I read. His plotting was elegant and his characters were larger than life--once you read about Andy Dalziel he’s never forgotten. I daresay there are shadings of him in my Inspector Rebus--they’re both bolshie and maverick and they don’t look after themselves.”

In a note sent our way this morning by Mike Ripley, a longtime UK books critic who writes the monthly “Getting Away with Murder” column for Shots, he explains:

I knew [Hill] had been ill and in and out of hospital for about eight months (with a brain tumour and breast cancer), but [he] didn’t want to make it too public, so relatively few people knew. ...

The eagle-eyed reader of my “Getting Away with Murder” column may have noticed occasional mentions of “Professor Charles Underhill”--a venerable academic who has devoted his life to finding and cataloguing all the jokes in Scandinavian crime fiction (!) Charles Underhill was one of Reg’s pen-names and it was Reg’s suggestion that this totally spurious character “only communicates in Old Norse these days.”

He had a wicked sense of humour and I will miss him, as he was a loyal friend and great supporter of young crime writers--as I was once.

Ripley adds that his own tribute to Hill will appear in The Guardian tomorrow morning, Saturday.

In addition to his Dalziel and Pascoe novels, which inspired a BBC-TV series (1996-2007), Hill penned five books about Joe Sixsmith, a black private investigator in the Bedfordshire town of Luton, and a series of thrillers published under the pseudonym Patrick Ruell.

Our condolences go out to Hill’s family.

READ MORE: “Reginald Hill, R.I.P.,” by Martin Edwards (‘Do You Write Under Your Own Name?’); “Reginald Hill” (The Telegraph); “Death of an Icon,” by Rhys Bowen (Rhys’s Pieces); “In Memoriam--Reginald Hill,” by Ayo Onatade (Shots); “Farewell, Reginald Hill,” by Barry Trott (Blogging for a Good Book).

The Story Behind the Story: “Favorite Sons,” by Robin Yocum

(Editor’s note: With this 29th entry in our “Story Behind the Story” series, we welcome to The Rap Sheet Robin Yocum, a former crime and investigative reporter who lives in Westerville, Ohio. He’s written two true-crime books as well as the novel Favorite Sons, which was published last year and named the 2011 Book of the Year for Mystery/Suspense by USA Book News. Below, he recalls how Favorite Sons was born.)

In the early 1980s I was the crime beat reporter for The Columbus Dispatch. I became interested in a case involving Johnny Spirko, who had been convicted of murdering Betty Jane Mottinger, the postmistress in Elgin, a speck of a town in northwestern Ohio, home to about 100 souls.

Spirko was no saint, and he had killed before, but I didn’t believe he was guilty of the Mottinger murder. Rather, he was convenient and easy to convict. I began working on a series of stories that I hoped would prove his innocence.* This involved a visit to Ohio’s Death Row, which was then housed at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville.

Following the interview, I took a tour of the Death Chamber, the focal point of which was “Old Thunderbolt,” the then nearly century-old electric chair that dominated the center of the room. (Yes, I sat in it.) Part of the tour included a visit to a small room connected to the Death Chamber. It was rectangular in shape and just big enough for a panel and three men to stand. On the panel were three buttons--red, green, and white, as I recall. On execution days, at the superintendent’s command, three guards would volunteer to push these buttons, only one of which delivered the lethal jolt.

The work was volunteer, but involved extra pay.

I wondered who would volunteer for such duty. When I sat down to write my novel, this singular act was at the center of the story. I pictured a book that would focus on the life of a prison guard, grizzled, perhaps an ex-cop whose temper had cost him his job on the force, who regularly volunteered for such duty. Perhaps he enjoyed his work. Perhaps he just did it for the extra money. I envisioned a friendship developing between the prison guard and one of the Death Row inmates. Over time, the guard slowly--grudgingly--begins to believe the inmate’s claims of innocence. I planned for the book to be titled The Button Man, which was also the prison guard’s nickname.

That is as far as I got before I starting putting words on paper.

My first step was to work out the crime--a murder--for which the Death Row inmate had been wrongfully convicted. I created the fictional Ohio River town of Crystalton, a thinly veiled version of my hometown, Brilliant, Ohio. I also created four central characters who would carry out that homicide, then remain silent while a local ne’er-do-well was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to die.

After four chapters, the crime was complete.

On a sunny June day in 1971, 15-year-old Hutch Van Buren, the book’s narrator, and three of his best friends are hiking the Appalachian foothills west of Crystalton in search for arrowheads, when they are confronted by Petey Sanchez.

Petey Sanchez was a troubled human being, a stewpot of mental, emotional and psychological problems manifested in the body of a wild-eyed seventeen-year-old, who cursed and made screeching bird noises as he rode around town on a lime-green spider bike with fluorescent pink streamers flying out from the handlebars.

When the confrontation was over, Petey Sanchez lay dead in the bushes, a crater in his head where Hutch’s pal Adrian Nash had struck him down with a granite Indian maul. The four boys then conspired to keep their deed a secret and protect Adrian, their friend and the star quarterback of the Crystalton High Royals.

But that is when my plan for the book went astray.

I liked the characters I had created--Hutch, Deak, Adrian, and Adrian’s brother, Pepper. I found a comfortable voice in the narrator, Hutch, and I very much wanted to see what would happen to the boys in the months and years following the crime.

Thus, my novel had to be turned around to meet the new parameters.

Writing the first half of the book was not difficult. I needed to get the boys through high school, while they struggled morally to maintain their grim secret, even after a local ne’er-do-well known as One-Eyed Jack is arrested and sent to prison for Petey’s slaying. The boys are able to justify their silence because Jack is such a despicable character.

The second half of the book, though, takes place 33 years after those four friends graduate from high school. What impact would the lingering secret have on their lives?

Hutch continues to narrate the second half of my novel. However, I couldn’t visualize him as a prison guard, and decided instead to make him a county prosecutor. (I will admit that there is a lot of Robin Yocum in Hutch Van Buren. So maybe I could not visualize me as a prison guard, and therefore did not take Hutch down that path.) I liked the irony of a man with a dark secret--covering up a murder--being a prosecutor with a reputation for sending men to Death Row. In fact, I resurrected the nickname “Button Man” for Hutch Van Buren, because prisoners believe he enjoys seeing the button on the lethal-injection device being pushed. (Ohio had given up the electric chair for lethal injection by the time Hutch becomes prosecutor.) I kept The Button Man as the working title of the book. But I eventually realized it had little meaning with the new scenario, so I changed it to Favorite Sons, which aptly describes this tale’s four main characters--all favorite sons of Crystalton, Ohio.

(Right) Author Robin Yocum

One of the first things I did before I started writing the second half of the book was to create the ending. I struggled with this for several weeks, developing a variety of possible conclusions until I found one I liked. Once I knew how the story would end, I felt comfortable enough to start writing. I know that many authors say they don’t know how a story ends until their characters tell them. That doesn’t work for me. I tried that approach once. I started writing a manuscript with no idea how it would end. It’s about 300,000 words and the damn characters refuse to tell me how it ends! Right now, they’re all at a cocktail party and I’m thinking of having a tanker truck full of napalm crash through the wall of the house. The End.

But, I digress.

With an ending in mind, I felt confident that I could draw a road map to get there. It’s just the way I write. I like things in neat packages.

Although I knew how the book would end, when I finally got there I was still able to throw in a little twist to surprise the reader. In the second half of the novel, Hutch is running for Ohio attorney general, when the wrongfully convicted man from his youth is released from prison. When he shows up in Hutch’s office, the prosecutor learns that his deep, dark secret wasn’t nearly as secret as he believed.

In the long run, changing the direction of this book made it easier to write. I was very comfortable with Hutch’s voice. My years on the crime beat provided much fodder for the story, but so did growing up in little Brilliant, Ohio. There is something about the gritty, industrial towns of eastern Ohio that draws in readers. While Crystalton is fictional, I kept the landscape of the rest of the Upper Ohio Valley. Much of the action takes place in Steubenville, and I included a mention of one of my favorite restaurants, Naples Spaghetti House, and of Steubenville’s favorite son--Dean Martin. Many characters are composites of childhood friends, as well as individuals I knew from the crime beat--criminals and cops alike.

Would I ever return to my original premise for this book? Maybe. However, it would be more likely that I’d write a sequel to Favorite Sons. I like Hutch and believe he could carry another book.

(Author photo by Mike Munden)

* My Columbus Dispatch series on wrongful convictions featured a lengthy story on Johnny Spirko and the bizarre set of circumstances that placed him on Ohio’s Death Row for the August 1982 murder of Betty Jane Mottinger. Other newspapers eventually covered the story, too. In 2008, after he had spent 24 years on Death Row, Spirko’s sentence was commuted to life in prison without chance of parole by then-Ohio Governor Ted Strickland. Spirko is currently a prisoner at the Toledo Correctional Institution.

Power of 10

Author Eddie Muller benefits from an impressive write-up today in the San Francisco Chronicle (a paper for which he once served as crime-fiction critic). The article’s principal hook is that the 10th annual version of Muller’s San Francisco Film Noir Festival--aka Noir City--is scheduled to begin on Friday, January 20, and run through Sunday, January 29. (Details of that event can be found here.)

But staff writer G. Allen Johnson also takes advantage of this occasion to explore Dashiell Hammett’s old apartment at 891 Post Street, in which the Pinkerton detective turned detective novelist wrote several of the books that made him famous, including The Maltese Falcon (1930). Johnson notes that this Post Street flat--which was declared a local literary landmark in 2005--served as the basis for private eye Sam Spade’s apartment in Falcon. He goes on to explain:

For years, the apartment was leased by Noir City festival announcer Bill Arney. When he left for a bigger place, local writer Robert Mailer Anderson took over and has painstakingly been re-doing the apartment exactly as it was when Hammett lived there, complete with vintage refrigerator and the apartment’s original bathtub and toilet.

Although Anderson and Muller are not exactly sure what to do with the place once restoration is complete (open it to the public? private tours? “Right now, it’s kind of like a boys’ club,” Muller chuckled), it’s coming in handy as the Noir City festival celebrates its 10th year. The festival’s poster was photographed here, with Muller and this year’s Miss Noir City, Helena Blanca Stoddard, and why not? Noir City began with an all-San Francisco program in 2003, and that festival’s opening and closing films also open and close this year’s festival: Dark Passage (on Jan. 20) and The Maltese Falcon (Jan. 29).

Click here to read more about those two classic movies. And below is the video teaser for this year’s film festival.*



* The Film Noir Festival’s Web site accompanies that video with the following explanation: “To commemorate its 10th anniversary, Noir City has returned to the source. This year’s poster was created in the San Francisco apartment where Dashiell Hammett, between 1927 [and] ’29, wrote Red Harvest, The Dain Curse, and The Maltese Falcon, laying the foundation for film noir. Ms. Noir City 2012, Helena Bianca Stoddard, portrays The Maltese Falcon’s duplicitous Brigid O’Shaughnessy, in a variation on a scene cut from all filmed versions of the book. When one of the ten $1,000 bills he’s been paid to locate the Black Bird goes missing, Sam Spade demands that Brigid undress to prove she’s hasn't stolen the money.”

READ MORE: “Up in Sam Spade’s Room,” by Thomas Burchfield.