Omnimystery News this morning brings word of last night’s recipients of the 2012 Ned Kelly Awards, given out by the Crime Writers’ Association of Australia during a ceremony held in conjunction with the Melbourne Writers Festival. Here are the winners, along with the shortlisted works that did not take home the prizes. The longlists of this year’s nominees can be found here.
Best Novel: Pig Boy, by J.C. Burke (Random House)
Also nominated: The Life, by Malcolm Knox (Allen & Unwin), and Chelsea Mansions, by Barry Maitland (Allen & Unwin)
Best First Novel: The Cartographer, by Peter Twohig (HarperCollins)
Also nominated: When We Have Wings, by Claire Corbett (Allen & Unwin), and The Courier’s New Bicycle, by Kim Westwood (HarperCollins)
Best True Crime: Sins of the Father, by Eamonn Duff (Allen & Unwin)
Also nominated: Cold Case Files, by Liz Porter (Pan Macmillan), and Call Me Cruel, by Michael Duffy (Allen & Unwin)
S.D. Harvey Short Story Award: “Summer of the 17th Poll,”
by A.J. Clifford
Also nominated: “Frame Seventeen,” by Miranda Gott, and “Seventeen Days to Freedom,” by Mark O’Flynn
Finally, Gabrielle Lord was given a Lifetime Achievement Award.
Wednesday, August 29, 2012
Tuesday, August 28, 2012
Traditional Tales Only, Please
The Wolfe Pack, a New York City-based organization devoted to Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe tales, is soliciting contenders for its seventh annual Black Orchid Novella Award. According to a press release,
Entries are supposed to run 15,000 to 20,000 words in length, and have to be postmarked by no later than May 31, 2013. The winner will announced during The Wolfe Pack’s Annual Black Orchid Banquet in New York City, which is to be held on December 7, 2013.
Click here for more entry details.
We are looking for original works of fiction in the tradition of the ratiocinative detective, as exemplified by Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe. Your entry must:Whoever wins this contest will receive $1,000 and have his or her story published in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine.
• Emphasize the deductive skills of the sleuth
• Contain no overt sex or violence
• Not include characters from the original series
Entries are supposed to run 15,000 to 20,000 words in length, and have to be postmarked by no later than May 31, 2013. The winner will announced during The Wolfe Pack’s Annual Black Orchid Banquet in New York City, which is to be held on December 7, 2013.
Click here for more entry details.
Driven to Attraction
That’s funny: The rundown of the “five coolest cars on classic TV,” cooked up by Rick29 over at the Classic Film and TV Café blog, doesn’t include any vehicles from what I usually think of as crime dramas. However, his “Honorable Mentions” list features four: the 1975 Ford Gran Torino from Starsky & Hutch; the 1978 Ferrari 308 GTS from Magnum, P.I.; the 1974 Pontiac Firebird Esprit from The Rockford Files; and Emma Peel’s Lotus Elan from The Avengers.
Mystery in Music City
Janet Rudolph today brings word of the various award winners from this last weekend’s Killer Nashville conference:
2012 Claymore Award Winner: “Again,” by Jonathan Stone
2nd Place: “A Twist of Hate,” by V.R. Barkowski
3rd Place — tie: “Wicked Schemes,” by Carol Baier, and “The Law of the Splintered Paddle,” by Mark Troy
2012 Silver Falchion Award: “Lowcountry Bribe,” by C. Hope Clark
Crime Scene Detective Award: Lee Masterson
SEMWA Magnolia Award: Chester D. Campbell
Previous recipients of these commendations can be found here.
2012 Claymore Award Winner: “Again,” by Jonathan Stone
2nd Place: “A Twist of Hate,” by V.R. Barkowski
3rd Place — tie: “Wicked Schemes,” by Carol Baier, and “The Law of the Splintered Paddle,” by Mark Troy
2012 Silver Falchion Award: “Lowcountry Bribe,” by C. Hope Clark
Crime Scene Detective Award: Lee Masterson
SEMWA Magnolia Award: Chester D. Campbell
Previous recipients of these commendations can be found here.
Friday, August 24, 2012
The Story Behind the Story: “The Devil’s Road
to Kathmandu,” by Tom Vater
(Editor’s note: This 36th entry in our “Story Behind the Story” series comes from Tom Vater, a journalist and author who operates principally in South and Southeast Asia. His stories have appeared in such publications as The Times of London, The Guardian, The Far Eastern Economic Review, 
Discovery, Marie Claire, The Asian Wall Street Journal, and Penthouse. He’s currently The Daily Telegraph’s Bangkok expert. Vater is the author most recently of a non-fiction book, Sacred Skin: Thailand’s Spirit Tattoos. Below, though, he looks back on the roots of an earlier work, which--after being unavailable for some while--can now be enjoyed as an e-book.)
My first novel, The Devil’s Road to Kathmandu, recently received a second lease on life. First published to favorable reviews by Dragon’s Mouth/Orchid Press, a very short-lived Hong Kong-based imprint, in 2006, The Devil’s Road has now been reissued as a Kindle e-book with up-and-coming crime-fiction publisher Crime Wave Press, also based in Hong Kong.
The Devil’s Road to Kathmandu was and is a long work. In 1976, four friends--Dan, Fred, Tim, and Thierry--drive a bus along the hippie trail from London, England, to Kathmandu. En route in Pakistan, a drug deal goes badly wrong, yet the boys escape with their lives and the narcotics. Thousands of kilometers, numerous acid trips, accidents, nightclubs, and a pair of beautiful Siamese twins later, as they finally reach the counter-culture capital of the world, Kathmandu, Fred disappears with the drug money.
A quarter-century later, after receiving mysterious e-mail messages inviting them to pick up their share of the money, Dan, Tim, and Thierry go back to Kathmandu. The Nepalese capital is not the blissful mountain backwater they remember. Soon a trail of kidnapping and murder leads across the Roof of the World. With the help of Dan’s backpacking son, a tattooed lady, and a Buddhist angel, the aging hippies try to solve a 25-year-old mystery that leads them amongst Himalayan peaks for a dramatic showdown with their past.
I first started thinking about writing a novel/thriller about the overland hippie trail between London and Kathmandu in the late 1990s, when I did the journey myself, albeit in the opposite direction. In 1998, with barely an inkling that I would soon be a writer making a living from my craft, I set off from Kathmandu in Nepal, traveled through India, Pakistan, Iran, and finally Turkey, where I ran out of money and used the last few dollars I had to fly to Switzerland to work in a factory.
In Pakistan I met a drug dealer, in the now notorious Swat Valley, who would later become the template for Harun Rashid, one of the drug dealers in The Devil’s Road. In Peshawar, a hotbed of smuggling and then one of the centers of Taliban activity, I met a Mr. Khan, who ran a tourist hotel in which numerous junkies, most of them Japanese, were lying in a dormitory, consuming and clocking time.
Back in Europe, I attended a party at which four old friends, all of them significantly older than me, celebrated an odd reunion--they had driven a bus from the UK to Nepal in the mid-’70s, had lost track of each other, and finally met up again. It was the spark that I needed for my story. But the characters in my novel were not based on those men. At the time I was just starting out to write fiction and made a living from travel journalism. I adopted friends, acquaintances, lovers, and enemies and combined them to come up with the exotic individuals who populate my story.
I did not get into writing the text properly until 2001. Then living in London, but already with many thousands of miles of travel in Asia under my belt, I composed the first draft in an old tower block council flat just as the planes slammed into the World Trade Center in New York City. But by that time, the story was already standing and I chose to ignore 9/11 in the context of my tale, some of which was of course set in 2001, though it did provide constant--and in a perverse way, welcome--distraction from the writing process.
I was very close friends with a tattooed lady at the time, which provided significant inspiration for a long tattoo episode in Kathmandu. I also remember very much enjoying the writing of a long nightclub scene. The Grey Parrot, as I called it, was the funkiest place in Esfahan, Iran, prior to the Islamic revolution and it was a truly wild place. The club, with its allusions to drugs and sex, was more than a figment of my imagination; I knew someone who had spent considerable time in 1970s Iran, and who conveyed to me stories of Tehran’s eclectic nightlife. The true template, though, was a club in Luxor, Egypt, I hung out in during the mid-’90s, which had similar music and a clientele like the eccentrics described in my novel. I passed through Iran in 1998, during the football world cup. The United States played its eternal foe, and I ended up playing a match against Iranian security forces in Esfahan. This formed part of my impressions of the city, and the story can still be read on my blog today.
I think William Burroughs once wrote that writers are like people who sail ships, and the less experience they have, the closer they should stay to the shore. I took this advice to heart, so almost everything in The Devil’s Road to Kathmandu is in some way based on an experience that I had, or that a close acquaintance of mine had. I needed to be able to relate to everything I was writing about, directly. I needed to be able to feel the very fibers of my narrative to make the story ring true. As unlikely as this tale of high adventure may seem today, I lived it more than my next novel, The Cambodian Book of the Dead (now available as an e-book, but with a paperback release due in October), which is far more of a classic genre enterprise.
To me, The Devil’s Road to Kathmandu is a part of my life in the same way a relative I occasionally bump into might be. The second, new edition is actually quite different from the original version. Given the opportunity to republish, I cut a lot of flab (about 3,000 words worth), straightened out the style a little, and lost a sub-level narrative that appeared stilted and awkward. A meaner and leaner tale of derring-do and high crime (and that’s a pun folks, as the protagonists in the 1970s segments are completely stoned almost all of the time) has emerged, a more focused text with more entertainment and less writer’s ego. It’s been an incredible and long journey on The Devil’s Road from those early thoughts about writing a novel based on my experiences in the ’90s to its current reissue.
Discovery, Marie Claire, The Asian Wall Street Journal, and Penthouse. He’s currently The Daily Telegraph’s Bangkok expert. Vater is the author most recently of a non-fiction book, Sacred Skin: Thailand’s Spirit Tattoos. Below, though, he looks back on the roots of an earlier work, which--after being unavailable for some while--can now be enjoyed as an e-book.)My first novel, The Devil’s Road to Kathmandu, recently received a second lease on life. First published to favorable reviews by Dragon’s Mouth/Orchid Press, a very short-lived Hong Kong-based imprint, in 2006, The Devil’s Road has now been reissued as a Kindle e-book with up-and-coming crime-fiction publisher Crime Wave Press, also based in Hong Kong.
The Devil’s Road to Kathmandu was and is a long work. In 1976, four friends--Dan, Fred, Tim, and Thierry--drive a bus along the hippie trail from London, England, to Kathmandu. En route in Pakistan, a drug deal goes badly wrong, yet the boys escape with their lives and the narcotics. Thousands of kilometers, numerous acid trips, accidents, nightclubs, and a pair of beautiful Siamese twins later, as they finally reach the counter-culture capital of the world, Kathmandu, Fred disappears with the drug money.
A quarter-century later, after receiving mysterious e-mail messages inviting them to pick up their share of the money, Dan, Tim, and Thierry go back to Kathmandu. The Nepalese capital is not the blissful mountain backwater they remember. Soon a trail of kidnapping and murder leads across the Roof of the World. With the help of Dan’s backpacking son, a tattooed lady, and a Buddhist angel, the aging hippies try to solve a 25-year-old mystery that leads them amongst Himalayan peaks for a dramatic showdown with their past.
I first started thinking about writing a novel/thriller about the overland hippie trail between London and Kathmandu in the late 1990s, when I did the journey myself, albeit in the opposite direction. In 1998, with barely an inkling that I would soon be a writer making a living from my craft, I set off from Kathmandu in Nepal, traveled through India, Pakistan, Iran, and finally Turkey, where I ran out of money and used the last few dollars I had to fly to Switzerland to work in a factory.
In Pakistan I met a drug dealer, in the now notorious Swat Valley, who would later become the template for Harun Rashid, one of the drug dealers in The Devil’s Road. In Peshawar, a hotbed of smuggling and then one of the centers of Taliban activity, I met a Mr. Khan, who ran a tourist hotel in which numerous junkies, most of them Japanese, were lying in a dormitory, consuming and clocking time.
Back in Europe, I attended a party at which four old friends, all of them significantly older than me, celebrated an odd reunion--they had driven a bus from the UK to Nepal in the mid-’70s, had lost track of each other, and finally met up again. It was the spark that I needed for my story. But the characters in my novel were not based on those men. At the time I was just starting out to write fiction and made a living from travel journalism. I adopted friends, acquaintances, lovers, and enemies and combined them to come up with the exotic individuals who populate my story.
I did not get into writing the text properly until 2001. Then living in London, but already with many thousands of miles of travel in Asia under my belt, I composed the first draft in an old tower block council flat just as the planes slammed into the World Trade Center in New York City. But by that time, the story was already standing and I chose to ignore 9/11 in the context of my tale, some of which was of course set in 2001, though it did provide constant--and in a perverse way, welcome--distraction from the writing process.
I was very close friends with a tattooed lady at the time, which provided significant inspiration for a long tattoo episode in Kathmandu. I also remember very much enjoying the writing of a long nightclub scene. The Grey Parrot, as I called it, was the funkiest place in Esfahan, Iran, prior to the Islamic revolution and it was a truly wild place. The club, with its allusions to drugs and sex, was more than a figment of my imagination; I knew someone who had spent considerable time in 1970s Iran, and who conveyed to me stories of Tehran’s eclectic nightlife. The true template, though, was a club in Luxor, Egypt, I hung out in during the mid-’90s, which had similar music and a clientele like the eccentrics described in my novel. I passed through Iran in 1998, during the football world cup. The United States played its eternal foe, and I ended up playing a match against Iranian security forces in Esfahan. This formed part of my impressions of the city, and the story can still be read on my blog today.
I think William Burroughs once wrote that writers are like people who sail ships, and the less experience they have, the closer they should stay to the shore. I took this advice to heart, so almost everything in The Devil’s Road to Kathmandu is in some way based on an experience that I had, or that a close acquaintance of mine had. I needed to be able to relate to everything I was writing about, directly. I needed to be able to feel the very fibers of my narrative to make the story ring true. As unlikely as this tale of high adventure may seem today, I lived it more than my next novel, The Cambodian Book of the Dead (now available as an e-book, but with a paperback release due in October), which is far more of a classic genre enterprise.
To me, The Devil’s Road to Kathmandu is a part of my life in the same way a relative I occasionally bump into might be. The second, new edition is actually quite different from the original version. Given the opportunity to republish, I cut a lot of flab (about 3,000 words worth), straightened out the style a little, and lost a sub-level narrative that appeared stilted and awkward. A meaner and leaner tale of derring-do and high crime (and that’s a pun folks, as the protagonists in the 1970s segments are completely stoned almost all of the time) has emerged, a more focused text with more entertainment and less writer’s ego. It’s been an incredible and long journey on The Devil’s Road from those early thoughts about writing a novel based on my experiences in the ’90s to its current reissue.
Big Names, Small Crowd
Registration is now open for the Northern California Crime Writing Conference, to take place in San Francisco on Saturday, September 22.
As Janet Rudolph explains in her Mystery Fanfare blog, this daylong event--running from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.--will be “broken into two segments: The Craft of Writing and The Business of Writing. In addition to our guests of honor [Rhys Bowen and Sheldon Siegel], participating authors include David Corbett, Cara Black, Keith Raffel, Camille Minichino, Priscilla Royal, Reece Hirsch, Lisa Brackman, J.J. and Bette Lamb, Robin Burcell, Michelle Gagnon, Julianne Balmain, Simon Wood, and Catriona McPherson.”
Participation will be limited to just 75 people, so if you wish to attend, sign up by September 15 to guarantee a seat. Registration and programming details are available here.
As Janet Rudolph explains in her Mystery Fanfare blog, this daylong event--running from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.--will be “broken into two segments: The Craft of Writing and The Business of Writing. In addition to our guests of honor [Rhys Bowen and Sheldon Siegel], participating authors include David Corbett, Cara Black, Keith Raffel, Camille Minichino, Priscilla Royal, Reece Hirsch, Lisa Brackman, J.J. and Bette Lamb, Robin Burcell, Michelle Gagnon, Julianne Balmain, Simon Wood, and Catriona McPherson.”
Participation will be limited to just 75 people, so if you wish to attend, sign up by September 15 to guarantee a seat. Registration and programming details are available here.
You Must Read These
In association with the release of Books to Die For: The World’s Greatest Mystery Writers on the World’s Greatest Mystery Novels, edited by John Connolly and Declan Burke (due out later this month in the UK, but not until October in the States), busy Shotsmag Confidential contributor Ayo Onatade asked “a number of well-known bloggers and reviewers” covering the crime-fiction beat to submit short write-ups about mystery and thriller works they think other people really ought to be reading.
I’m not sure how many posts are scheduled in this series, but already Onatade has rolled out five good ones: Barry Forshaw on The Ministry of Fear, by Graham Greene; Peter Rosovsky on Roses, Roses, by Bill James; Sander Verheijen on Wicker, by Kevin Guilfoile; Ali Karim on The Silence of the Lambs, by Thomas Harris; and my own humble submission about The Eighth Circle, by Stanley Ellin.
Future entries should appear here.
I’m not sure how many posts are scheduled in this series, but already Onatade has rolled out five good ones: Barry Forshaw on The Ministry of Fear, by Graham Greene; Peter Rosovsky on Roses, Roses, by Bill James; Sander Verheijen on Wicker, by Kevin Guilfoile; Ali Karim on The Silence of the Lambs, by Thomas Harris; and my own humble submission about The Eighth Circle, by Stanley Ellin.
Future entries should appear here.
The Gift of Gags
Here’s something I didn’t know, and I suspect most Rap Sheet readers are equally in the dark. According to The Gumshoe Site, the late comedienne Phyllis Diller not only “wrote four best-selling funny books, including Housekeeping Hints and The Joys of Aging and How to Avoid Them,” but also “8 short stories for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, whose [June] 1990 issue featured her on its cover.”
Thursday, August 23, 2012
Counting Up the Crime-Fiction Kudos
The British Crime Writers’ Association (CWA) has announced its lists of finalists for three prestigious annual commendations, along with the names of contenders for a number of Specsavers Crime Thriller Awards. All of the winners are to be declared on October 18 at London’s Grosvenor House Hotel (with a video presentation of that ceremony to be shown on the UK’s ITV3 on October 23).
The CWA Gold Dagger:
• Vengeance in Mind, by N.J. Cooper (Simon & Schuster)
• The Flight, by M.R. Hall (Mantle)
• The Rage, by Gene Kerrigan (Harvill Secker)
• Bereft, by Chris Womersley (Quercus)
The CWA John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger:
• Heart-Shaped Bruise, by Tanya Byrne (Headline)
• Land More Kind than Home, by Wiley Cash (Bantam)
• Good People, by Ewart Hutton (Blue Door)
• What Dies in Summer, by Tom Wright (Canongate)
The CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger:
• Dare Me, by Megan Abbott (Picador)
• A Foreign Country, by Charles Cumming (HarperCollins)
• The Fear Index, by Robert Harris (Hutchinson)
• Reamde, by Neal Stephenson (Atlantic Books)
The Specsavers Bestseller Dagger (public vote):
• Ann Cleeves
• Anthony Horowitz
• Stuart MacBride
• Jo Nesbø
• Kathy Reichs
According to a press release, “This award honors the success of authors throughout their careers, and is chosen by the reading public. Readers can check out the official Web site at www.crimethrillerawards.com and register their vote for the favorite best-selling author online. The winner will be presented with the Bestseller Dagger at the awards ceremony on the 18 October, after all the votes are counted on 12 October.”
The Film Dagger:
• Drive (Icon)
• The Dark Knight Rises (Warner Bros)
• The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Sony)
• The Guard (Optimum)
• Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Studio Canal)
The TV Dagger:
• Appropriate Adult (ITV Studios/ITV1)
• Line of Duty (BBC/BBC2)
• Sherlock: Series 2 (Hartswood Films/BBC1)
• Wallander (Left Bank Pictures, Yellow Bird/BBC1)
• Whitechapel: Series 3 (Carnival/ITV1)
The International TV Dagger:
• Boardwalk Empire: Season 2 (HBO/Sky Atlantic)
• Dexter: Season 6 (Showtime Networks, John Goldwyn Productions, The Colleton Company, Clyde Phillips Productions/FX)
• Homeland (Teakwood Lane Productions, Showtime Productions, Cherry Pie Productions, Keshet Media Group, Fox 21/Channel 4)
• The Bridge (Danmarks Radio, Sveriges Television/BBC4)
• The Killing II: Forbrydelsen (Arrow Films/BBC4)
The Best Actress Dagger:
• Brenda Blethyn for Vera (ITV Studios/ITV1)
• Claire Danes for Homeland (Teakwood Lane Productions, Showtime Productions, Cherry Pie Productions, Keshet Media Group, Fox 21/Channel 4)
• Sofie Gråbøl for The Killing II (Arrow Films/BBC4)
• Sofia Helin for The Bridge (Danmarks Radio, Sveriges Television/BBC4)
• Maxine Peake for Silk (BBC/BBC1)
The Best Actor Dagger:
• Kenneth Branagh for Wallander (Left Bank Pictures,Yellow Bird/BBC1)
• Steve Buscemi for Boardwalk Empire (HBO/Sky Atlantic)
• Benedict Cumberbatch for Sherlock (Hartswood Films/BBC1)
• Damien Lewis for Homeland (Teakwood Lane Productions, Showtime Productions, Cherry Pie Productions, Keshet Media Group, Fox 21/Channel 4)
• Dominic West for Appropriate Adult (ITV Studios/ITV1
The Best Supporting Actress Dagger:
• Frances Barber for Silk (BBC/BBC1)
• Kelly Macdonald for Boardwalk Empire (HBO/Sky Atlantic)
• Archie Panjabi for The Good Wife (Scott Free Productions, King Size Productions, Small Wishes, CBS Productions/More 4)
• Sarah Smart for Wallander (Left Bank Pictures, Yellow Bird/BBC1)
• Una Stubbs for Sherlock (Hartswood Films/BBC1)
The Best Supporting Actor Dagger:
• Alun Armstrong for Garrow’s Law (Shed Media/BBC1)
• Alan Cumming for The Good Wife (Scott Free Productions, King Size Productions, Small Wishes, CBS Productions/More 4)
• Phil Davis for Silk and Whitechapel (Silk: BBC/BBC1; Whitechapel: Carnival/ITV1)
• Laurence Fox for Lewis (ITV Studios/ITV1)
• Martin Freeman for Sherlock (Hartswood Films/BBC1)
Best Detective Duo (public vote):
The British public can recognize their favorite TV detective duo through a telephone vote, beginning on September 7.
• DCI Banks
DCI Alan Banks and DS Annie Cabbot -– call 090 16 16 14 01
• Above Suspicion
DC Anna Travis and DCS James Langton –- call 090 16 16 14 02
• Scott and Bailey
DC Jane Scott and DC Rachel Bailey –- call 090 16 16 14 03
• Lewis
DI Robbie Lewis and DS James Hathaway –- call 090 16 16 14 04
• Whitechapel
DI Joseph Chandler and DS Ray Miles –- call 090 16 16 14 05
• Vera
DCI Vera Stanhope and DS Joe Ashworth –- call 090 16 16 14 06
(Hat tip to It’s a Crime! [Or a Mystery ...])
The CWA Gold Dagger:
• Vengeance in Mind, by N.J. Cooper (Simon & Schuster)
• The Flight, by M.R. Hall (Mantle)
• The Rage, by Gene Kerrigan (Harvill Secker)
• Bereft, by Chris Womersley (Quercus)
The CWA John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger:
• Heart-Shaped Bruise, by Tanya Byrne (Headline)
• Land More Kind than Home, by Wiley Cash (Bantam)
• Good People, by Ewart Hutton (Blue Door)
• What Dies in Summer, by Tom Wright (Canongate)
The CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger:
• Dare Me, by Megan Abbott (Picador)
• A Foreign Country, by Charles Cumming (HarperCollins)
• The Fear Index, by Robert Harris (Hutchinson)
• Reamde, by Neal Stephenson (Atlantic Books)
The Specsavers Bestseller Dagger (public vote):
• Ann Cleeves
• Anthony Horowitz
• Stuart MacBride
• Jo Nesbø
• Kathy Reichs
According to a press release, “This award honors the success of authors throughout their careers, and is chosen by the reading public. Readers can check out the official Web site at www.crimethrillerawards.com and register their vote for the favorite best-selling author online. The winner will be presented with the Bestseller Dagger at the awards ceremony on the 18 October, after all the votes are counted on 12 October.”
The Film Dagger:
• Drive (Icon)
• The Dark Knight Rises (Warner Bros)
• The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Sony)
• The Guard (Optimum)
• Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Studio Canal)
The TV Dagger:
• Appropriate Adult (ITV Studios/ITV1)
• Line of Duty (BBC/BBC2)
• Sherlock: Series 2 (Hartswood Films/BBC1)
• Wallander (Left Bank Pictures, Yellow Bird/BBC1)
• Whitechapel: Series 3 (Carnival/ITV1)
The International TV Dagger:
• Boardwalk Empire: Season 2 (HBO/Sky Atlantic)
• Dexter: Season 6 (Showtime Networks, John Goldwyn Productions, The Colleton Company, Clyde Phillips Productions/FX)
• Homeland (Teakwood Lane Productions, Showtime Productions, Cherry Pie Productions, Keshet Media Group, Fox 21/Channel 4)
• The Bridge (Danmarks Radio, Sveriges Television/BBC4)
• The Killing II: Forbrydelsen (Arrow Films/BBC4)
The Best Actress Dagger:
• Brenda Blethyn for Vera (ITV Studios/ITV1)
• Claire Danes for Homeland (Teakwood Lane Productions, Showtime Productions, Cherry Pie Productions, Keshet Media Group, Fox 21/Channel 4)
• Sofie Gråbøl for The Killing II (Arrow Films/BBC4)
• Sofia Helin for The Bridge (Danmarks Radio, Sveriges Television/BBC4)
• Maxine Peake for Silk (BBC/BBC1)
The Best Actor Dagger:
• Kenneth Branagh for Wallander (Left Bank Pictures,Yellow Bird/BBC1)
• Steve Buscemi for Boardwalk Empire (HBO/Sky Atlantic)
• Benedict Cumberbatch for Sherlock (Hartswood Films/BBC1)
• Damien Lewis for Homeland (Teakwood Lane Productions, Showtime Productions, Cherry Pie Productions, Keshet Media Group, Fox 21/Channel 4)
• Dominic West for Appropriate Adult (ITV Studios/ITV1
The Best Supporting Actress Dagger:
• Frances Barber for Silk (BBC/BBC1)
• Kelly Macdonald for Boardwalk Empire (HBO/Sky Atlantic)
• Archie Panjabi for The Good Wife (Scott Free Productions, King Size Productions, Small Wishes, CBS Productions/More 4)
• Sarah Smart for Wallander (Left Bank Pictures, Yellow Bird/BBC1)
• Una Stubbs for Sherlock (Hartswood Films/BBC1)
The Best Supporting Actor Dagger:
• Alun Armstrong for Garrow’s Law (Shed Media/BBC1)
• Alan Cumming for The Good Wife (Scott Free Productions, King Size Productions, Small Wishes, CBS Productions/More 4)
• Phil Davis for Silk and Whitechapel (Silk: BBC/BBC1; Whitechapel: Carnival/ITV1)
• Laurence Fox for Lewis (ITV Studios/ITV1)
• Martin Freeman for Sherlock (Hartswood Films/BBC1)
Best Detective Duo (public vote):
The British public can recognize their favorite TV detective duo through a telephone vote, beginning on September 7.
• DCI Banks
DCI Alan Banks and DS Annie Cabbot -– call 090 16 16 14 01
• Above Suspicion
DC Anna Travis and DCS James Langton –- call 090 16 16 14 02
• Scott and Bailey
DC Jane Scott and DC Rachel Bailey –- call 090 16 16 14 03
• Lewis
DI Robbie Lewis and DS James Hathaway –- call 090 16 16 14 04
• Whitechapel
DI Joseph Chandler and DS Ray Miles –- call 090 16 16 14 05
• Vera
DCI Vera Stanhope and DS Joe Ashworth –- call 090 16 16 14 06
(Hat tip to It’s a Crime! [Or a Mystery ...])
Wednesday, August 22, 2012
Of Routines, Rivalries, and Risks
The conjurer himself ... casts his spell not with the starry lure of titillation nor, in the manner of many noir masters, a scene of such keen violence that we are stunned into submission. No, no. [He] does it with language. And not in the form of well-chosen words, the music of a fine sentence, the harmony of a paragraph crafted to draw you close to the book’s beating heart. No. The thing [he] does to words is the stuff of dark alchemy.Megan Abbott: the conjurer herself. Although she wrote the preceding in her foreword to the 2012 re-release of Daniel Woodrell’s Tomato Red, the description applies equally well to her and the “dark alchemy” she performs in her new novel, Dare Me (Reagan Arthur).
Dare Me is the tale of a Machiavellian struggle for power within a high-school cheerleading squad. And if cheerleading seems like an unlikely milieu for practitioners of Niccolò Machiavelli’s brand of cunning and duplicity, listen to how a sampling of the many enthusiastic reviewers have characterized this book. The Wall Street Journal said it “turns the frothy world of high-school cheerleading into something truly menacing”; The New York Times calls it “unsentimental ... [It] reveals something very true about the consuming, sometimes ugly, nature of female friendships”; and to quote Entertainment Weekly, “It feels groundbreaking when Abbott takes noir conventions--loss of innocence, paranoia, the manipulative sexuality of newly independent women--and suggests that they’re rooted in high school, deep in the hearts of all-American girls.”
And critics aren’t the only ones taking an interest in the book. Publishers Weekly announced this week that Fox 2000 Pictures has optioned Dare Me for producer Karen Rosenfelt, who boasts The Devil Wears Prada and the Twilight series among her credits. Abbott will adapt the book to screen herself.
As I suggested by quoting Abbott’s Tomato Red preface at the outset of this post, I think a great deal of the power and appeal of Dare Me comes from the language and voice of the novel’s teenage narrator, Addy Hanlon. I recently sat down with Abbott to talk about that, as well as a range of other topics, including her inspirations for the tale and her literary influences.
Mark Coggins: Give us some insight into the choices you made for telling this story: in the present tense, narrated in the first person by a sort of Nick Carraway-like character who (at least initially) doesn’t seem to have a direct stake in the central conflict.
Megan Abbott: I’ve always been interested in the lieutenant/second in command figure--whether it’s a war movie, a gangster tale, a Shakespeare play. What is their stake? Do they hold their own ambitions? What is it like being the always-beta girl? Also, since most of us are not “alphas,” it seemed like a useful perch from which to tell the story. I had, however, initially intended her to be more of a fly-on-the-wall narrator. But, like Lizzie in The End of Everything, she just kept inserting herself.
MC: “Cheer,” a short story you wrote prior to Dare Me, has some similar characters and themes, but is actually quite different. What were your goals for the novel versus the short story?
MA: That story was meant to be a nasty little slice of noir, but I couldn’t picture living with those characters for the duration of the book. I have to love all my characters in a novel, and so they all transformed. I always think of that line from the movie The Rules of the Game: “The awful thing about life is this: everyone
has their reasons.” And as the novel unfurled for me, I found the heart of all the characters. I felt for all of them, even when they did bad things.MC: I read an interview you did for your previous book, The End of Everything, in which you said that part of the idea behind writing Dare Me was to set Shakespeare’s Richard III in the world of high-school cheerleaders. I can see the power struggle for leadership of the cheerleading squad being like Richard’s struggle for the throne, but I’m not sure I could say which character in Dare Me would be Richard, especially by the end. In your mind, is there a Richard, or are all of the central characters tainted or corrupted in some way by the struggle?
MA: Originally, I suspect I had a clearer match-up in mind, but it fell apart quickly. Mostly, I wanted to absorb the atmosphere of the play, the feeling of drive, desperation, treachery. And the way Richard, despite his bad behavior, draws us in. He is our guide, our vantage point and we are his confidantes, so as much as his actions alarm us, we find ourselves linked to him.
MC: When I went to high school, cheerleaders were more like “cheerlebrities,” to borrow a term used by Addy. They were all about looking good and rallying support for the school’s (male) athletes at high-school games and matches. The cheerleaders in Dare Me, on the other hand, pretty much view the high-school games as a venue for their performances. They don’t talk or think about the athletes on the school teams, and are not even concerned whether the team wins or loses. Why is it so different for them?
MA: This is, foremost, a change in cheerleading in the last 20 years. It’s now a competitive sport (even if can’t quite garner that particular designation) that girls train from a young age to take part in. Shaping their bodies, taking tumbling and gymnastics classes, going to cheer camp. Their focus is tournaments, beating other squads. In many ways, it would be like expecting gymnasts to rally for football players. But our long-burnished image of the cheerleader as the peppy rally girl for her team persists. I recently wrote a piece about this--I think it’s hard for us to let that [image] go. There’s a nostalgia for it. For the America that originated it.
MC: Having characterized the cheerleaders of my generation as cheerlebrities, as I did, I will also mention that the head cheerleader, homecoming queen, and girl voted most-respected in our class later joined the Marines. It strikes me that there is something almost martial about the squad in Dare Me. Coach Colette French could be viewed as a drill sergeant come to whip her recruits into shape, and the girls’ performances the “battle” they do against other schools’ squads. There’s also the requirement to have each other’s backs in the stunts they perform, like soldiers have to protect their buddies. Is that taking things too far?
MA: Not too far at all. The book sprang from a sense that these girls were, in many ways, like hardcore Marines, bad-ass warriors. Squads, after all, are martial by nature. And the book was framed around these captain and lieutenant characters. It quickly spilled over into the language the girls use (which is only a slight exaggeration, if that, of the language in use among the more serious squads I observed). I found myself riffing on famous military speeches (MacArthur, Patton) for Coach. It was a huge influence on the way I wrote the book. And one of its pleasures writing it; I really got to explore the power of military rhetoric.
MC: I made the mistake of installing the Facebook Messenger application on my cell phone, and during the early morning hours of my birthday not long ago, was subjected to an almost constant barrage of notification buzzes and beeps as friends waking up around the world left birthday wishes on my wall. I was too sleepy/lazy to get up and shut the phone off, but for the first time I realized how connected I had become to other people via my phone. It also made me think about how much worse it must be for today’s teenagers, given the volume of texts and phone calls they are constantly exchanging. Can you talk about the electronic “connectedness” of the characters in Dare Me and how it informs the plot?
MA: It felt to me that texts, Facebook, and Twitter are the contemporary equivalent of notes passed in class in my day. Except in my day, your reputation could be ruined by the end of the day, as the note passed from hand to hand, period after period. Today, it only takes an instant. It struck me as very powerful, both intimate and treacherous.
Also in my teen years, you could, as long as you didn’t pick up the family phone, leave the terrors and heartache of the school day behind when you got home. Now, that’s very hard. Your experience with your birthday wishes--that’s the part I mean. I feel that in my life too. My phone has become this virtual appendage, a live thing buzzing in my hand. All of this felt like exciting tools for suspense.
MC: For a 50-something male, reading Dare Me is probably as close as I will ever get to experiencing life as a teenage girl. A lot of that comes from the verisimilitude of Addy’s voice, and the language you choose to narrate the story. Her interior dialogue feels a lot like a fever
dream at points--so body conscious, so tied to real time, with little emotional distancing. Is that an effect you consciously sought?MA: I’m so glad it reads that way. I can’t say I sought it out consciously. It seemed to come once I found her voice, which took a while. At first, she was a far more tentative and distant narrator. It was on the advice of my first reader, Dan Conaway, that I gave her more breathing room, more room to feel things. As soon as he said that I knew she wanted something. Once I knew that, she become very strong in my head and grew to surprise me.
MC: Without giving away any key plot points, can you say which character you have the most empathy for, and why? Do you expect the reader will share that empathy?
MA: Beth [Cassidy, the “alpha” girl on the squad]. I had an idea about her when the book began and it changed dramatically. She is the putative troublemaker here, but I grew to love her. Her bruised and dented heart. The more I fell for her, the more space I gave her, the more I granted her. I definitely get that she can come across as a “mean girl,” or as a villain (she behaves very badly in the book), but I don’t see her that way myself. She’s my girl.
MC: In past interviews, you’ve expressed admiration for the writing of Raymond Chandler. To your credit, your admiration hasn’t assumed the form of forced mimicry. If you think he’s had any direct influence on you, how would you characterize it?
MA: I think he will always be my biggest influence in terms of style. The way, to him, mood mattered above all. Sights, scents, colors, pressures in the air, the way sound can travel. The way it can feel like everything around you is part of you, part of your own longing or fear or trepidation. That if you can strike a mood, it’s far more than a mood. It’s a world you’ve given your reader.
MC: In your non-fiction study of hard-boiled fiction, The Street Was Mine, you point out that Dashiell Hammett’s protagonists, as opposed to Chandler’s and James M. Cain’s, are less introspective and more self-contained. Does that make them less interesting to you? Are you less influenced by Hammett’s writing as a result?
MA: Boy, I don’t remember writing that (ha!), but it feels true. I am a Hammett lover, but I do have a weakness for damaged, unreliable narrators whose neurosis can’t help but peek through. Hammett’s are harder nuts to crack. He feels more removed from his protagonists. Which is one of the gifts of his books. They are less constricted by [point of view], for one thing. And that distance makes the books whip-smart, so incisive. But Chandler and Cain can’t help but love their protagonists/narrators and that leads to a certain messiness I love. They identify with them and want to protect them, which makes their books much crazier than Hammett’s (and not as jewel-perfect) but so open-hearted.
MC: Can you give us any details about your next novel?
MA: It’s called The Fever and it’s about a mysterious outbreak in a small town.
MC: And will you confirm for Rap Sheet readers that the red-lipsticked lips on the cover of Dare Me are yours?
MA: As someone who has admitted a predilection for unreliable narrators, I can wholeheartedly say: Of course.
Mark Coggins’ latest memoir, Prom Night and Other Man-made Disasters, also involves dark tales of high-school cheerleaders, but the only thing harmed in the making of them was his ego.
(Author photo by Drew Reilly)
Short Subjects
• I was very sorry to hear about the deaths over the last week of comedienne Phyllis Diller (who was a staple of my childhood TV watching), William Windom (of Murder, She Wrote and My World and Welcome to It fame, but also the best thing about the Star Trek episode “The Doomsday Machine”), and musician Scott McKenzie, whose late-1960s song “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)” is one of my all-time favorite odes to the American West Coast’s most wonderful metropolis.
• Lawrence Block’s fine tribute to Mickey Spillane has now been posted on the Mystery Scene magazine Web site.
• Another piece worth reading: Screenwriter John Geraci’s look back at Ross Macdonald’s exceptional Lew Archer series.
• Although it has nothing to do with crime fiction, I do love New York City singer-songwriter Taylor Ferrera’s musical effort to explain the right wing’s incoherent separation of “legitimate rape” from any other kind. You can watch that here.
• Registration is now open for the next California Crime Writers Conference, set to take place at The Hilton Pasadena from June 22 to 23, 2013. Co-chair and author Jeri Westerson says, “We’re excited about how the program is shaping up. We have two international bestselling authors as keynote speakers. Sue Grafton on Saturday and Elizabeth George on Sunday. ... We have also tapped some high-profile agents, as well as bestselling authors, editors, academics and forensics experts to teach an array of workshops on the business and craft of writing. A limited number of manuscript critiques are available, so snap them up before they disappear.” Learn more here.
• And wouldn’t this house in Ocklawaha, Florida, make the perfect vacation retreat for lovers of criminal history?
• Lawrence Block’s fine tribute to Mickey Spillane has now been posted on the Mystery Scene magazine Web site.
• Another piece worth reading: Screenwriter John Geraci’s look back at Ross Macdonald’s exceptional Lew Archer series.
• Although it has nothing to do with crime fiction, I do love New York City singer-songwriter Taylor Ferrera’s musical effort to explain the right wing’s incoherent separation of “legitimate rape” from any other kind. You can watch that here.
• Registration is now open for the next California Crime Writers Conference, set to take place at The Hilton Pasadena from June 22 to 23, 2013. Co-chair and author Jeri Westerson says, “We’re excited about how the program is shaping up. We have two international bestselling authors as keynote speakers. Sue Grafton on Saturday and Elizabeth George on Sunday. ... We have also tapped some high-profile agents, as well as bestselling authors, editors, academics and forensics experts to teach an array of workshops on the business and craft of writing. A limited number of manuscript critiques are available, so snap them up before they disappear.” Learn more here.
• And wouldn’t this house in Ocklawaha, Florida, make the perfect vacation retreat for lovers of criminal history?
From the Dark Side
Author and publisher Otto Penzler offers a handy guide to five identifying characteristics of “hard-boiled crime fiction.” In case you were, like, confused about that term ...
Another Shot of Paladin, Anyone?
Really? This is what Hollywood thinks Americans are craving most, what bored viewers really need, what they can’t possibly live without? A new version of Richard Boone’s Western-detective series Have Gun--Will Travel? Really? This item comes from Deadline Hollywood:
The subhead on Patrick Goldstein’s last Los Angeles Times column this week was right on the money: “Sequels, remakes, reboots. What Hollywood needs is an original thought.”
CBS has put in development Have Gun--Will Travel, a reboot of the 1957 CBS Western drama, to be penned by writer/director/playwright David Mamet. Mamet is set to direct the potential pilot, which will be produced by CBS TV Studios. He is executive producing with agent-turned-producer Elliott Webb.Listen, I enjoyed Boone’s Have Gun--Will Travel, just as I liked his NBC Mystery Movie series, Hec Ramsey, in the 1970s. But am I desperate to see a revised version of it, when the original is easily available in DVD format? No, not any more than I was dying to see resurrections of Charlie’s Angels, or The Rockford Files, or Kojak.
Have Gun--Will Travel, whose title plays on a line commonly used in personal ads, aired on CBS from 1957 through 1963 and also spawned a successful radio version. Its producers included Frank Pierson, and one of its main writers was Gene Roddenberry who would go on to create Star Trek. Created by Sam Rolfe and Herb Meadow, Have Gun starred Richard Boone as Paladin, a top-notch gunfighter who preferred to settle problems without violence but stood his ground when provoked.
The subhead on Patrick Goldstein’s last Los Angeles Times column this week was right on the money: “Sequels, remakes, reboots. What Hollywood needs is an original thought.”
Tuesday, August 21, 2012
Pierce’s Picks: “Red Jacket”
A weekly alert for followers of crime, mystery, and thriller fiction.
Red Jacket, by Joseph Heywood (Lyons Press):
This novel wasn’t supposed to become available until early September, but it seems to have slipped into the public realm ahead of schedule. Heywood is of course the author of eight novels (most recently Force of Blood) starring Grady Service,
a former Marine and conservation officer working the backwoods of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. In Red Jacket he introduces a second protagonist, Lute Bapcat, a former cowhand and ex-beaver trapper who, in 1913, after serving with Theodore Roosevelt’s legendary Rough Riders in the Spanish-American War, becomes--thanks partly to Roosevelt’s backing--one of Michigan’s first civil-service game wardens, assigned to the rugged but industrialized Keweenaw Peninsula. This book (based on historical events) finds Bapcat in the middle of an extremely volatile labor strike targeting local copper-mining companies. Mine owners are doing their damndest to make life hard for the strikers, hoping in the process to break their influential union. Bapcat’s in a tough position himself, trying not to (obviously) take sides in the dispute, while endeavoring to maintain order on his patch and deal with the irate miners--many of whom didn’t speak English. But it’s clear that increasing violence in on the horizon. Heywood exhibits an obvious love for the Upper Peninsula environment, as well as an appreciation of historical detail.
Red Jacket, by Joseph Heywood (Lyons Press):
This novel wasn’t supposed to become available until early September, but it seems to have slipped into the public realm ahead of schedule. Heywood is of course the author of eight novels (most recently Force of Blood) starring Grady Service,
a former Marine and conservation officer working the backwoods of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. In Red Jacket he introduces a second protagonist, Lute Bapcat, a former cowhand and ex-beaver trapper who, in 1913, after serving with Theodore Roosevelt’s legendary Rough Riders in the Spanish-American War, becomes--thanks partly to Roosevelt’s backing--one of Michigan’s first civil-service game wardens, assigned to the rugged but industrialized Keweenaw Peninsula. This book (based on historical events) finds Bapcat in the middle of an extremely volatile labor strike targeting local copper-mining companies. Mine owners are doing their damndest to make life hard for the strikers, hoping in the process to break their influential union. Bapcat’s in a tough position himself, trying not to (obviously) take sides in the dispute, while endeavoring to maintain order on his patch and deal with the irate miners--many of whom didn’t speak English. But it’s clear that increasing violence in on the horizon. Heywood exhibits an obvious love for the Upper Peninsula environment, as well as an appreciation of historical detail.* * *
Also worth watching for this week: The Double Game, by Dan Fesperman (Knopf), in which a once upwardly mobile journalist, Bill Gage, pursues the elusive truth behind three-decades-old rumors that a quondam CIA operative and current best-selling novelist was a double agent during the Cold War; and Pines, by Blake Crouch (Thomas & Mercer), a suspenseful yarn about a federal agent who fears for his sanity after surviving a bad car accident near what seems to be a quiet town--and then has even greater cause to worry, after discovering the despoiled corpse of a fellow agent who’d recently gone missing.
“As Tough as He Was Tender”
Max Allan Collins, who has been finishing a number of Mickey Spillane’s novels since that latter author’s death in 2006, has posted a fond farewell to Biff Elliot--“the first actor to portray Mike Hammer in the movies” (in 1953’s I, the Jury, to be exact)--who passed away on August 15 at age 89. Writes Collins:
I count Biff as one of the best Hammers, and obviously a pioneering one. He left an indelible stamp on the role, though, at the time, some (even Mickey himself) expressed disappointment. Biff himself stated that his approach was to make a human being out of Spillane’s comic strip-style character, and I feel he succeeded.You can read the entirety of Collins’ post here. Then click here to watch the trailer for I, the Jury.
You’d Better Find Shelf Space
I know it’s only the third week of August, but I am already well into reading crime novels scheduled for release this fall and winter.
On the Kirkus Reviews Web site today, I list 10 of those forthcoming mysteries and thrillers--by people such as Linwood Barclay and Barbara Vine, and from both sides of the Atlantic--that I particularly recommend you explore over the next four months.
Click here to read more.
On the Kirkus Reviews Web site today, I list 10 of those forthcoming mysteries and thrillers--by people such as Linwood Barclay and Barbara Vine, and from both sides of the Atlantic--that I particularly recommend you explore over the next four months.
Click here to read more.
Sizzle and High Stakes
The 1981 trailer for Body Heat
(Editor’s note: The following essay comes to us from author Kathleen George, the author of Simple--a novel set to be released today by Minotaur Books--and the editor of Pittsburgh Noir [Akashic]. A previous novel of hers, 2009’s The Odds, was an Edgar Award finalist. George teaches theatre and writing at the University of Pittsburgh. This marks her first appearance in The Rap Sheet.)
A few weeks ago, I happened upon 1981’s Body Heat already well in progress on television. I was bouncing around, exercising, when I realized I could no longer count repetitions. Even though I had seen it before, the movie demanded my full attention. I decided later to order it and watch the full film properly.
Critics have called Body Heat neo-noir; it stands up very well to the great noir films that came before it.
I think what I’m most in awe of is the sexiness of the movie. Many X-rated films later, nothing competes with the sizzle of this one. Strangers, danger, illicitness, beautiful bodies, booze, and heat,
heat, heat. I watched it, wanting to write something like it--the physicality is so palpable. It was a great film to watch during this very hot, record-breaking summer.Body Heat may be Lawrence Kasdan’s directorial debut, but it reads like the masterwork of a seasoned director. Glistening faces. Sweat. Clothes that stick to the body. Sweat. Necks moist. Ties unbuttoned. Necklines plunging. Clothing (no tank tops) crying for air; anything will do, another button undone, a skirt that swishes. Cool drinks--glasses with ice cubes--pressed to the forehead. Wind chimes that signal more hot air on the way in. Cigarettes. People at the edge, self-destructive.
Actress Kathleen Turner has the beginnings of a whiskey voice. Her Matty Walker drinks and smokes a lot, as do other characters. They give off an “I don’t care anymore” message, flirting with death. They are hungry for relief, any sort.
William Hurt’s character, Ned Racine, is a fool and a slacker. We’re not only told he’s poor, but we see the cheesy clothes, the worn bottoms of his shoes. At first Matty Walker seems too beautiful to be within his reach, but he tries for her anyway, willing to play the fool. He’s used to a small hot room; he moves around wonderingly in her grand mansion. I love the detail of his worn shoes.
The sound of this world is not television, radio. Instead it’s the motors of cars, the clink of ice cubes, occasional telephones, the voices of two people in the throes of lust, and when we don’t get those sounds, we get a wonderful jazz score. Other voices in this movie seem wrong, intrusive. Matty Walker (“relentless,” “keeps coming,” “will do whatever has to be done”) destroys Ned Racine as he realizes what is happening to him, but the others (Ted Danson, J.A. Preston, Richard Crenna) make the real world seem harsh, coarse, and uninteresting. We get to obsess along with these two main characters; everybody else, the real world, comes off as unwelcome.
Great job, Lawrence Kasdan. To think this film was made in cold temperatures with spray-on sweat!
Friday, August 17, 2012
Vying for the Parker
Among the nominees for this year’s SCIBA (Southern California Independent Booksellers Association) Book Awards are six novels in the mystery category, all vying for the 2012 T. Jefferson Parker Book Award. Those contenders are:
• Getaway, by Lisa Brackmann (Soho Press)
• Kings of Cool, by Don Winslow (Simon & Schuster)
• Taken, by Robert Crais (Putnam)
Hmm. Do we see some consistency here?
Don Winslow won this same commendation last year for Savages, and Robert Crais won it in 2010 for his second Joe Pike novel, The First Rule. Could Lisa Brackmann win this year, if only to share the wealth? We will see. The winner of this and other SCIBA awards will be announced during the Authors Feast & Trade Show, to be held on October 20 in Long Beach, California.
• Getaway, by Lisa Brackmann (Soho Press)
• Kings of Cool, by Don Winslow (Simon & Schuster)
• Taken, by Robert Crais (Putnam)
Hmm. Do we see some consistency here?
Don Winslow won this same commendation last year for Savages, and Robert Crais won it in 2010 for his second Joe Pike novel, The First Rule. Could Lisa Brackmann win this year, if only to share the wealth? We will see. The winner of this and other SCIBA awards will be announced during the Authors Feast & Trade Show, to be held on October 20 in Long Beach, California.
Thursday, August 16, 2012
So Bad They’re Good
Since, in previous years, I have faithfully announced the winners of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, I feel it necessary to inflict still more examples of bad writing on you this time around.
The English Department at San Jose State University sponsors this annual competition, which seeks to identify the opening sentence to “the worst of all possible novels.” There are a number of categories of victors, including those in fantasy, children’s literature, historical fiction, and western. Plus, there’s a top prize, which goes this year to Cathy Bryant of Manchester, England, for the following entry:
This contest, which has been held ever since 1982, is of course named after English novelist and playwright Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, who’s infamous for having concocted that oft-mocked opening phrase, “It was a dark and stormy night.”
The English Department at San Jose State University sponsors this annual competition, which seeks to identify the opening sentence to “the worst of all possible novels.” There are a number of categories of victors, including those in fantasy, children’s literature, historical fiction, and western. Plus, there’s a top prize, which goes this year to Cathy Bryant of Manchester, England, for the following entry:
As he told her that he loved her she gazed into his eyes, wondering, as she noted the infestation of eyelash mites, the tiny deodicids burrowing into his follicles to eat the greasy sebum therein, each female laying up to 25 eggs in a single follicle, causing inflammation, whether the eyes are truly the windows of the soul; and, if so, his soul needed regrouting.But if you find that groan-worthy, check out this winner in the crime category, submitted by Sue Fondrie of Appleton, Wisconsin:
She slinked through my door wearing a dress that looked like it had been painted on ... not with good paint, like Behr or Sherwin-Williams, but with that watered-down stuff that bubbles up right away if you don’t prime the surface before you slap it on, and--just like that cheap paint--the dress needed two more coats to cover her.Perhaps my favorite among the crime-fiction candidates, though, comes from Carl Stich of Mariemont, Ohio, who receives a Dishonorable Mention for this opener:
Inspector Murphy stood up when he saw me, then looked down at the lifeless body, crumpled like a forlorn Snicker’s candy wrapper, and after a knowing glance at Detective Wilson pointed to the darkening crimson pool spreading from the stiff’s shattered noggin, and said, “You settle it, Gibson; does that puddle look more like a duck or a cow?”Click here to read all the winning entries as well as their close rivals.
This contest, which has been held ever since 1982, is of course named after English novelist and playwright Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, who’s infamous for having concocted that oft-mocked opening phrase, “It was a dark and stormy night.”
The Matchless Mitchell
Although it has nothing to do with crime and mystery fiction, I want to draw your attention to a quite wonderful, two-part feature in January Magazine about the longtime New Yorker magazine writer and author Joseph Mitchell (1908-1996). It commemorates 20 years since his omnibus work, Up in the Old Hotel, was first released.
The piece was put together by Matthew Fleagle. Now a technical writer for a small software company in Seattle, Washington, Fleagle began his career with an interest in journalism. I hired him on as an intern at the old Washington Magazine, and then watched his talents grow as he took on assignments for Eastsideweek, Northwest Health, and assorted other local periodicals. He’s been away from journalism for some while--he says that the Mitchell feature is “the first article I’ve written specifically for publication in a dozen years.”--but his writing and reporting skills seem not to have suffered tremendously as a result. I’m proud to have done what I could to encourage him to compose this piece about Mitchell and help get it posted. I hope to encourage more of his contributions to January in the future.
Anyway, check out both installments of Fleagle’s piece. Part I is located here, while Part II can be found here.
The piece was put together by Matthew Fleagle. Now a technical writer for a small software company in Seattle, Washington, Fleagle began his career with an interest in journalism. I hired him on as an intern at the old Washington Magazine, and then watched his talents grow as he took on assignments for Eastsideweek, Northwest Health, and assorted other local periodicals. He’s been away from journalism for some while--he says that the Mitchell feature is “the first article I’ve written specifically for publication in a dozen years.”--but his writing and reporting skills seem not to have suffered tremendously as a result. I’m proud to have done what I could to encourage him to compose this piece about Mitchell and help get it posted. I hope to encourage more of his contributions to January in the future.
Anyway, check out both installments of Fleagle’s piece. Part I is located here, while Part II can be found here.
Tuesday, August 14, 2012
Speaking of Raymond Chandler
Critics are calling UK author Tom Williams’ debut study of Raymond Chandler, Raymond Chandler: A Mysterious Something in the Light, a definitive work. The London Times hailed Williams as the “best biographer” of one of America’s foremost detective novelists, and described his book as “packed, insightful, entertaining.” A follow-up review in The Sunday Times said, “Outstanding ... thanks to his biography Chandler himself is a less mysterious something than he was.” And perhaps responding to the impulse to question the requirement of yet 
another biography of the hard-boiled pioneer (there have been four if you include The Long Embrace, Judith Freeman’s 2008 contemplation on the relationship between Chandler and his wife, Cissy), The Scotsman called Williams’ book “precise, kindly and necessary.”
Williams and I became acquainted while he was doing research and ran across my essay about The Long Goodbye. I’ve been eagerly tracking his progress since then, and I purchased the Aurum Press edition of the biography from the Amazon UK Web site immediately upon publication. Williams is currently shopping his work to U.S. publishers as well, and hopes to release an edition on this side of the Atlantic in the near future.
Having now read A Mysterious Something (that subhead coming from a line near the end of Chandler’s first novel, 1939’s The Big Sleep), I agree with the British critics: this biography is the best all-round portrayal of the troubled California writer. I especially appreciate how Williams has clarified and demystified many things, particularly during the period of Chandler’s life before he started writing crime fiction, but also after Cissy died in 1954.
Williams generously agreed to my request to do an interview for The Rap Sheet. Below are his answers to questions covering everything from his research finds, to what makes Chandler and his series protagonist, private eye Philip Marlowe, particularly appealing to UK readers, to his opinion about the news that Irish novelist John Banville (who composes noir novels under the name “Benjamin Black”) will be penning a new Marlowe story.
Mark Coggins: What first drew you to Raymond Chandler and the idea of writing his biography?
Tom Williams: I think Chandler is endlessly fascinating. I mean the books themselves are some of the best in the canon and his use of language is stunning. But he also lived a compelling life. Brought up in Chicago, then London; failing to make it as a poet in Bloomsbury; coming to L.A. in 1913 just as it was beginning to morph into a city; fighting in World War I; living and working in the heart of L.A. as an oil executive, witnessing the city’s corruption firsthand ... and all this before he wrote his novels. His was a life of drama, of love and loss too. He could almost have been the subject of a novel himself, and it’s been a real privilege to spend time with his papers.
MC: I know you spent a great many hours in Los Angeles and elsewhere doing research and conducting interviews. Did you uncover any new material or previously unknown facts about Chandler during the course of your work? If so, how did they influence your portrayal of him?
TW: Yes I did find quite a bit of new material over the course of my research. I was lucky to find some new letters dating back to 1932 in the UCLA library. It meant that I could add a lot of detail about what happened after Chandler was sacked from Dabney’s [the oil company for which he worked in the 1920s and early ’30s] and explore how he came to write the stories he did. There were also new letters from the end of his life, which helped me understand his last years and how he interacted with the women around him. But there was also material in the archives that I thought deserved to be mentioned: the poetry, for example. Though the early stuff was very poor indeed, the lines he
wrote for Cissy in the early ’20s and, indeed, throughout his life, showed a different side to Chandler and I’ve tried to incorporate this throughout the book.
(Left) Cissy Chandler
MC: Chandler’s wife, the former Cissy Pascal, was 18 years older than him. Some authors have suggested that he didn’t know her true age at the time of their marriage in February 1924. Do you think that’s right? Can we assume that he eventually knew?
TW: I’m not sure we’ll ever really know one way or the other. He knocked 10 years off her age when he filled out her death certificate. Perhaps this suggests he didn’t know. Or perhaps it was a noble choice, which would be in character of course. My feeling, for what it is worth, is that he didn’t know how old she was when they married and that, had he known, it wouldn’t have mattered at all.
MC: Before finally turning to crime fiction in the 1930s, Chandler spent a lot of time as an executive in the oil industry. From what I understand of the man--and what I understand of corporate life--he didn’t seem like the sort who would thrive in that environment. Was he a good businessman?
TW: I think he might have been. He certainly thought he was. But, either way, he seems to have enjoyed what he did. Throughout his life Chandler was an assiduous filer of things. I wonder if the corporate life actually suited him, though he may have resented his taking pleasure in the work. That said, some of his pleasure derived from the people he worked with and, after he was sacked, they seem to have disappeared. It’s not clear if that was a result of bad behavior or just that they no longer had anything in common. He tried to do some tax work in the early ’30s but preferred writing by a long chalk, possibly because [tax work] was dull and boring in comparison, and possibly because he no longer got to work with friends.
MC: When you look at the “topology” of Chandler’s life before he began writing seriously, there are a lot of unusual features that stand out: being born in the U.S., but reared in the UK after his parents divorced; British public school education; moving back to the States as a young man; seeing action in the First World War; marrying a much older woman; losing his job due to drinking and womanizing, and all the rest. Do you think any of these experiences were critical in forging his abilities as a writer? For example, could he have been as successful if he stayed in Britain or married a different woman?
TW: To a certain extent we’ll never know, but I think it’s fair to say that without the unique combination of experiences, Chandler would not have written the books he did write. Perhaps, had he worked as a civil servant in London he would have produced a Georgian novel. But hundreds did and very few lasted. Chandler needed to become a modern to write his fiction and L.A. pushed him to change. His love for Cissy was undoubtedly a motivation too. Another woman may not have tolerated his drinking, his occasional dalliances, and he could have easily become something other than a writer in 1932. Then again, Chandler had a drive to write, a compulsion that predated L.A. and Cissy, so perhaps he would have written something, though I suspect it would not have been crime fiction.
MC: Other biographers have suggested that Chandler stopped drinking completely for periods of time. You report that he reduced consumption of alcohol during those periods, rather than quitting outright. How did you reach that view?
TW: Oh, from Chandler’s letters. I found a cache in UCLA dating from 1932, and he is quite open about drinking through the period after his sacking [from Dabney’s], and later letters follow this theme.
MC: The Chandlers’ restlessness--their habit of moving frequently--has been emphasized by other biographers. Do you think too much has been made of it?
Is it reflective of some facet of Chandler’s or Cissy’s personality?
(Right) Author Tom Williams
TW: Yes and no. The reason they moved so much was because they liked to spend summers in the mountains--where the air was cooler--and winters in the sun. This may have been to do with Cissy’s lungs, though that is a supposition. In the 1930s they alternated like this every six months pretty much. They continued this pattern into the early ’40s, but settled more once Chandler was working in Hollywood.
MC: Which of Chandler’s novels do you think is the best, and why?
TW: Ha--it depends when you ask me! That’s like asking who is your favorite [James] Bond or what is your favorite Shakespeare play. I think if The Rap Sheet exiled me to a desert island with only one, I’d take Farewell, My Lovely [1940]. I think that is Chandler at his very, very best. But please don’t exile me, not yet anyway.
MC: You surprised me a bit by saying that you felt The Big Sleep was better than The Maltese Falcon (1930). I think a lot of Chandler fans would concede that Falcon is an excellent novel, and even if Chandler’s oeuvre is better than Hammett’s, Falcon might beat Sleep. Can you give us some insight into your thinking?
TW: Perhaps this is controversial but I don’t think Sam Spade has the depth of Marlowe. He is an alien--he looks like Satan after all, and how many can identify with that?--and so I don’t think the reader connects with him in the same way as they do with Marlowe. Or at least I didn’t. But I am sure plenty would disagree.
MC: Jean Fracasse, a woman Chandler hired as a personal secretary near the end of his life, is not portrayed well by other biographers. In particular, Chandler’s first biographer, Frank MacShane, makes it clear that he thought she was a gold-digger who hastened the author’s demise. You seem to have a more balanced view. How would you characterize their relationship?
TW: It’s an interesting one. I think Jean Fracasse’s motives will always remain opaque for the simple reason that we can’t ask her. Any younger, attractive woman involving herself with a wealthy older man is going to come under suspicion but that doesn’t necessarily mean they deserve it.
To be blunt, I don’t know what motivated Jean Fracasse any more than Frank McShane or Tom Hiney [Chandler’s second biographer] did, and so I tried to be balanced in my view, using the evidence I found to construct the events of the late ’50s. I think one thing is sure, though, Ray valued her contribution: he dedicated Playback [1958] to “Jean and Helga.” [Helga Greene was his literary agent.]
MC: Arguably, the reception for Chandler’s work has always been stronger in the UK than in the U.S., and now that your book has been published, two of the four Chandler biographers have come from Britain. What is it about Chandler that makes him particularly appealing to the UK audience?
TW: I think Marlowe is a strangely European hero. His willingness to take on the rich and powerful tied neatly with some British unease about American influence after the war. Marlowe’s mantle was taken up by Bond (a hero who made Britain feel powerful, even when British power was fading). We Brits like that. We’ve always love an underdog and Marlowe is the ultimate underdog.
MC: What surprised you most about Chandler during your research?
TW: Without doubt, the richness and variety of the letters. Chandler was one the great letter writers and the more time I spent with his missives the more I was in awe.
MC: Now, 53 years after his death, do you think Chandler would be satisfied with his literary legacy?
TW: I do wonder about that. But I also wonder, were we to ask him somehow, whether he would point us to the penultimate paragraph of The Big Sleep. [See image below.]
The final spread of the first edition of The Big Sleep. Click on this photograph for an enlargement.
MC: Could Chandler have written a “straight” literary novel?
TW: I think he wanted to. At one point, he started a third-person novel, with hardly any murder in it and without Marlowe at all. He couldn’t get it to work and set about rewriting it. That novel became The Long Goodbye. Had he not tried to keep writing a great book, he would never have achieved everything that he did. In the end I’m not sure it matters whether his books are straight or not. They’re damn fine books and that is that.
MC: How do you feel about John Banville being commissioned to compose a new Philip Marlowe tale?
TW: I’m cautiously optimistic. You can read more about my views in the blog post I did for The Guardian.
MC: Finally, what question would you ask Chandler if you could?
TW: Who killed [chauffeur] Owen Taylor, really?
READ MORE: “Raymond Chandler, Gritty Enchanter,” by Michael Dirda (The Times Literary Supplement).
another biography of the hard-boiled pioneer (there have been four if you include The Long Embrace, Judith Freeman’s 2008 contemplation on the relationship between Chandler and his wife, Cissy), The Scotsman called Williams’ book “precise, kindly and necessary.”Williams and I became acquainted while he was doing research and ran across my essay about The Long Goodbye. I’ve been eagerly tracking his progress since then, and I purchased the Aurum Press edition of the biography from the Amazon UK Web site immediately upon publication. Williams is currently shopping his work to U.S. publishers as well, and hopes to release an edition on this side of the Atlantic in the near future.
Having now read A Mysterious Something (that subhead coming from a line near the end of Chandler’s first novel, 1939’s The Big Sleep), I agree with the British critics: this biography is the best all-round portrayal of the troubled California writer. I especially appreciate how Williams has clarified and demystified many things, particularly during the period of Chandler’s life before he started writing crime fiction, but also after Cissy died in 1954.
Williams generously agreed to my request to do an interview for The Rap Sheet. Below are his answers to questions covering everything from his research finds, to what makes Chandler and his series protagonist, private eye Philip Marlowe, particularly appealing to UK readers, to his opinion about the news that Irish novelist John Banville (who composes noir novels under the name “Benjamin Black”) will be penning a new Marlowe story.
Mark Coggins: What first drew you to Raymond Chandler and the idea of writing his biography?
Tom Williams: I think Chandler is endlessly fascinating. I mean the books themselves are some of the best in the canon and his use of language is stunning. But he also lived a compelling life. Brought up in Chicago, then London; failing to make it as a poet in Bloomsbury; coming to L.A. in 1913 just as it was beginning to morph into a city; fighting in World War I; living and working in the heart of L.A. as an oil executive, witnessing the city’s corruption firsthand ... and all this before he wrote his novels. His was a life of drama, of love and loss too. He could almost have been the subject of a novel himself, and it’s been a real privilege to spend time with his papers.
MC: I know you spent a great many hours in Los Angeles and elsewhere doing research and conducting interviews. Did you uncover any new material or previously unknown facts about Chandler during the course of your work? If so, how did they influence your portrayal of him?
TW: Yes I did find quite a bit of new material over the course of my research. I was lucky to find some new letters dating back to 1932 in the UCLA library. It meant that I could add a lot of detail about what happened after Chandler was sacked from Dabney’s [the oil company for which he worked in the 1920s and early ’30s] and explore how he came to write the stories he did. There were also new letters from the end of his life, which helped me understand his last years and how he interacted with the women around him. But there was also material in the archives that I thought deserved to be mentioned: the poetry, for example. Though the early stuff was very poor indeed, the lines he
wrote for Cissy in the early ’20s and, indeed, throughout his life, showed a different side to Chandler and I’ve tried to incorporate this throughout the book.(Left) Cissy Chandler
MC: Chandler’s wife, the former Cissy Pascal, was 18 years older than him. Some authors have suggested that he didn’t know her true age at the time of their marriage in February 1924. Do you think that’s right? Can we assume that he eventually knew?
TW: I’m not sure we’ll ever really know one way or the other. He knocked 10 years off her age when he filled out her death certificate. Perhaps this suggests he didn’t know. Or perhaps it was a noble choice, which would be in character of course. My feeling, for what it is worth, is that he didn’t know how old she was when they married and that, had he known, it wouldn’t have mattered at all.
MC: Before finally turning to crime fiction in the 1930s, Chandler spent a lot of time as an executive in the oil industry. From what I understand of the man--and what I understand of corporate life--he didn’t seem like the sort who would thrive in that environment. Was he a good businessman?
TW: I think he might have been. He certainly thought he was. But, either way, he seems to have enjoyed what he did. Throughout his life Chandler was an assiduous filer of things. I wonder if the corporate life actually suited him, though he may have resented his taking pleasure in the work. That said, some of his pleasure derived from the people he worked with and, after he was sacked, they seem to have disappeared. It’s not clear if that was a result of bad behavior or just that they no longer had anything in common. He tried to do some tax work in the early ’30s but preferred writing by a long chalk, possibly because [tax work] was dull and boring in comparison, and possibly because he no longer got to work with friends.
MC: When you look at the “topology” of Chandler’s life before he began writing seriously, there are a lot of unusual features that stand out: being born in the U.S., but reared in the UK after his parents divorced; British public school education; moving back to the States as a young man; seeing action in the First World War; marrying a much older woman; losing his job due to drinking and womanizing, and all the rest. Do you think any of these experiences were critical in forging his abilities as a writer? For example, could he have been as successful if he stayed in Britain or married a different woman?
TW: To a certain extent we’ll never know, but I think it’s fair to say that without the unique combination of experiences, Chandler would not have written the books he did write. Perhaps, had he worked as a civil servant in London he would have produced a Georgian novel. But hundreds did and very few lasted. Chandler needed to become a modern to write his fiction and L.A. pushed him to change. His love for Cissy was undoubtedly a motivation too. Another woman may not have tolerated his drinking, his occasional dalliances, and he could have easily become something other than a writer in 1932. Then again, Chandler had a drive to write, a compulsion that predated L.A. and Cissy, so perhaps he would have written something, though I suspect it would not have been crime fiction.
MC: Other biographers have suggested that Chandler stopped drinking completely for periods of time. You report that he reduced consumption of alcohol during those periods, rather than quitting outright. How did you reach that view?
TW: Oh, from Chandler’s letters. I found a cache in UCLA dating from 1932, and he is quite open about drinking through the period after his sacking [from Dabney’s], and later letters follow this theme.
MC: The Chandlers’ restlessness--their habit of moving frequently--has been emphasized by other biographers. Do you think too much has been made of it?
Is it reflective of some facet of Chandler’s or Cissy’s personality?(Right) Author Tom Williams
TW: Yes and no. The reason they moved so much was because they liked to spend summers in the mountains--where the air was cooler--and winters in the sun. This may have been to do with Cissy’s lungs, though that is a supposition. In the 1930s they alternated like this every six months pretty much. They continued this pattern into the early ’40s, but settled more once Chandler was working in Hollywood.
MC: Which of Chandler’s novels do you think is the best, and why?
TW: Ha--it depends when you ask me! That’s like asking who is your favorite [James] Bond or what is your favorite Shakespeare play. I think if The Rap Sheet exiled me to a desert island with only one, I’d take Farewell, My Lovely [1940]. I think that is Chandler at his very, very best. But please don’t exile me, not yet anyway.
MC: You surprised me a bit by saying that you felt The Big Sleep was better than The Maltese Falcon (1930). I think a lot of Chandler fans would concede that Falcon is an excellent novel, and even if Chandler’s oeuvre is better than Hammett’s, Falcon might beat Sleep. Can you give us some insight into your thinking?
TW: Perhaps this is controversial but I don’t think Sam Spade has the depth of Marlowe. He is an alien--he looks like Satan after all, and how many can identify with that?--and so I don’t think the reader connects with him in the same way as they do with Marlowe. Or at least I didn’t. But I am sure plenty would disagree.
MC: Jean Fracasse, a woman Chandler hired as a personal secretary near the end of his life, is not portrayed well by other biographers. In particular, Chandler’s first biographer, Frank MacShane, makes it clear that he thought she was a gold-digger who hastened the author’s demise. You seem to have a more balanced view. How would you characterize their relationship?
TW: It’s an interesting one. I think Jean Fracasse’s motives will always remain opaque for the simple reason that we can’t ask her. Any younger, attractive woman involving herself with a wealthy older man is going to come under suspicion but that doesn’t necessarily mean they deserve it.
To be blunt, I don’t know what motivated Jean Fracasse any more than Frank McShane or Tom Hiney [Chandler’s second biographer] did, and so I tried to be balanced in my view, using the evidence I found to construct the events of the late ’50s. I think one thing is sure, though, Ray valued her contribution: he dedicated Playback [1958] to “Jean and Helga.” [Helga Greene was his literary agent.]
MC: Arguably, the reception for Chandler’s work has always been stronger in the UK than in the U.S., and now that your book has been published, two of the four Chandler biographers have come from Britain. What is it about Chandler that makes him particularly appealing to the UK audience?
TW: I think Marlowe is a strangely European hero. His willingness to take on the rich and powerful tied neatly with some British unease about American influence after the war. Marlowe’s mantle was taken up by Bond (a hero who made Britain feel powerful, even when British power was fading). We Brits like that. We’ve always love an underdog and Marlowe is the ultimate underdog.
MC: What surprised you most about Chandler during your research?
TW: Without doubt, the richness and variety of the letters. Chandler was one the great letter writers and the more time I spent with his missives the more I was in awe.
MC: Now, 53 years after his death, do you think Chandler would be satisfied with his literary legacy?
TW: I do wonder about that. But I also wonder, were we to ask him somehow, whether he would point us to the penultimate paragraph of The Big Sleep. [See image below.]
The final spread of the first edition of The Big Sleep. Click on this photograph for an enlargement.
MC: Could Chandler have written a “straight” literary novel?
TW: I think he wanted to. At one point, he started a third-person novel, with hardly any murder in it and without Marlowe at all. He couldn’t get it to work and set about rewriting it. That novel became The Long Goodbye. Had he not tried to keep writing a great book, he would never have achieved everything that he did. In the end I’m not sure it matters whether his books are straight or not. They’re damn fine books and that is that.
MC: How do you feel about John Banville being commissioned to compose a new Philip Marlowe tale?
TW: I’m cautiously optimistic. You can read more about my views in the blog post I did for The Guardian.
MC: Finally, what question would you ask Chandler if you could?
TW: Who killed [chauffeur] Owen Taylor, really?
READ MORE: “Raymond Chandler, Gritty Enchanter,” by Michael Dirda (The Times Literary Supplement).
Gee, Are We Supposed to be Shocked?
Thriller writer James Patterson “remains the highest-earning author,” according to Forbes. “The magazine estimates that Patterson made $94 million last year, with nearly all of that revenue coming from book sales and relatively little from TV and film royalties,” reads a piece in The Baltimore Sun’s Read Street blog. “Patterson published 14 new titles in 2011, Forbes said. Patterson maintains his prodigious output because he works as a writer/editor, often teaming with others who bang out thrillers under his direction.”
“Ooh-ooh-ooooh!”
This is an unwelcome surprise: As the Los Angeles Times reports, “Ron Palillo, an actor whose signature role was Arnold Horshack in the 1970s TV sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter, died Tuesday. He was 63.”
Monday, August 13, 2012
Pierce’s Picks: “And When She Was Good”
A weekly alert for followers of crime, mystery, and thriller fiction.
And When She Was Good, by Laura Lippman (Morrow):
Edgar Award winner Lippman continues to stretch herself with this high-stakes yarn featuring Heloise Lewis, a seemingly upstanding young suburbanite who actually operates a profitable call-girl service. Following a traumatic childhood, red-headed
Heloise (introduced in “Scratch a Woman,” from Lippman’s 2008 short-story collection, Hardly Knew Her) has carved out a steady, if secrets-filled existence for herself in Maryland, with a son, Scott, in middle-school and what the Internal Revenue Service has been led to believe is a successful lobbying practice with several female employees. All of that hard-won order and compartmentalization is threatened, however, after another “suburban madam” is found dead (a possible suicide) and Heloise receives word that Scott’s father, Val Deluca--who also happens to be her former pimp, and doesn’t know that he has a child or that Heloise helped send him to prison for murder--may soon be free again. Even the other men she’s come to depend on most might not be able to protect Heloise Lewis from the consequences of choices she made long ago. Partly an arm’s-length dip into the world of sex workers but mostly an intense character study, And When She Was Good succeeds on both levels.
Be on the lookout as well for Shake Off, by Mischa Hiller (Mulholland), a thriller focused around Michel Khoury, a Palestinian-born intelligence operative who’s committed to bringing a peaceful end to the Middle East conflict that caused the tragic loss of his own family. As the habitually careful Khoury develops a relationship with his young London housemate, the intriguing Helen, he unwittingly places her in a state of jeopardy that will soon cause them both to flee to Germany and Scotland for the sake not only of their love, but their lives.
And When She Was Good, by Laura Lippman (Morrow):
Edgar Award winner Lippman continues to stretch herself with this high-stakes yarn featuring Heloise Lewis, a seemingly upstanding young suburbanite who actually operates a profitable call-girl service. Following a traumatic childhood, red-headed
Heloise (introduced in “Scratch a Woman,” from Lippman’s 2008 short-story collection, Hardly Knew Her) has carved out a steady, if secrets-filled existence for herself in Maryland, with a son, Scott, in middle-school and what the Internal Revenue Service has been led to believe is a successful lobbying practice with several female employees. All of that hard-won order and compartmentalization is threatened, however, after another “suburban madam” is found dead (a possible suicide) and Heloise receives word that Scott’s father, Val Deluca--who also happens to be her former pimp, and doesn’t know that he has a child or that Heloise helped send him to prison for murder--may soon be free again. Even the other men she’s come to depend on most might not be able to protect Heloise Lewis from the consequences of choices she made long ago. Partly an arm’s-length dip into the world of sex workers but mostly an intense character study, And When She Was Good succeeds on both levels.* * *
Also new in bookstores this week--at least in Britain--is Watching the Dark, by Peter Robinson (Hodder & Stoughton). This 20th installment in his Alan Banks series finds the detective chief inspector probing the crossbow death of a police colleague, who apparently left behind a number of rather compromising photographs. The DCI won’t pronounce a fellow cop guilty without ample convincing evidence, but he’s having a hard time collecting any, what with a fellow inspector dogging his every step to ensure against corruption. How might all of this present-day mess relate to an English girl who disappeared in the Baltics half a dozen years ago? (Watching the Dark isn’t scheduled to debut in the States until January 2013.)Be on the lookout as well for Shake Off, by Mischa Hiller (Mulholland), a thriller focused around Michel Khoury, a Palestinian-born intelligence operative who’s committed to bringing a peaceful end to the Middle East conflict that caused the tragic loss of his own family. As the habitually careful Khoury develops a relationship with his young London housemate, the intriguing Helen, he unwittingly places her in a state of jeopardy that will soon cause them both to flee to Germany and Scotland for the sake not only of their love, but their lives.
Plug for the Thug
Todd Robinson reports on Facebook that ThugLit, the Webzine of crime fiction he edited for many years, before putting it on hiatus two years ago, will return with a new issue on September 1. He says it will feature “new fiction from Hilary Davidson, Jordan Harper, Matthew C. Funk, Jason Duke, Court Merrigan, Terrence McCauley, Johnny Shaw, and Mike Wilkerson.” File this under “good news.”
Out With It: Another Side of P.I. Fiction
For Criminal Element, Liz Strange offers a brief overview of gay detective fiction, mentioning some of the better-known contributors to that subgenre--Joseph Hansen and Mark Richard Zubro, for instance--but leaving out many more.
If you’d like a somewhat fuller look at this field of stories, check out Lori L. Lake’s piece from the November/December 2005 issue of Crimespree Magazine. Lake’s companion essay about lesbian detective fiction can be found here.
Still more information on the subject is available from Judith A. Markowitz’s 2004 book, The Gay Detective Novel: Lesbian and Gay Main Characters and Themes in Mystery Fiction. Chapter 1 of Markowitz’s work can be read here.
If you’d like a somewhat fuller look at this field of stories, check out Lori L. Lake’s piece from the November/December 2005 issue of Crimespree Magazine. Lake’s companion essay about lesbian detective fiction can be found here.
Still more information on the subject is available from Judith A. Markowitz’s 2004 book, The Gay Detective Novel: Lesbian and Gay Main Characters and Themes in Mystery Fiction. Chapter 1 of Markowitz’s work can be read here.
Friday, August 10, 2012
Scottish Shortlist
Half a dozen novels are finalists for the inaugural Bloody Scotland Scottish Crime Book of the Year Award. They are:
• A Foreign Country, by Charles Cumming (Harper Collins)
• Dead Men and Broken Hearts, by Craig Russell (Quercus)
• Gods and Beasts, by Denise Mina (Orion)
• The Lewis Man, by Peter May (Quercus)
• Prague Fatale, by Philip Kerr (Quercus)
• Redemption, by Will Jordan (Random House)
The winner of this prize, which “seeks to recognize and reward excellence in Scottish crime writing,” is supposed to be announced on Sunday, September 16, during the Bloody Scotland convention. The winner will received a trophy and a £3,000 check.
(Hat tip to Shotsmag Confidential.)
• A Foreign Country, by Charles Cumming (Harper Collins)
• Dead Men and Broken Hearts, by Craig Russell (Quercus)
• Gods and Beasts, by Denise Mina (Orion)
• The Lewis Man, by Peter May (Quercus)
• Prague Fatale, by Philip Kerr (Quercus)
• Redemption, by Will Jordan (Random House)
The winner of this prize, which “seeks to recognize and reward excellence in Scottish crime writing,” is supposed to be announced on Sunday, September 16, during the Bloody Scotland convention. The winner will received a trophy and a £3,000 check.
(Hat tip to Shotsmag Confidential.)
Thursday, August 09, 2012
The Textual Body;
Or, The Birth of Criminal Forensics
(Editor’s note: Pseudonymous British author James McCreet has published three historical crime novels in book form, all featuring crime solvers Albert Newsome and George Williamson--the most recent of those being The Thieves’ Labyrinth [Macmillan], which January Magazine named as one of its favorite mystery novels of 2011, and 
which I mentioned in Kirkus Reviews as one of the top UK crime-fiction works of last year. His fourth book in that series, The Masked Adversary, was released as an e-book in July. McCreet explains that “The Masked Adversary revolves around the discovery in Victorian London of two bodies that are not entirely human. To solve the crimes, the detectives must become acquainted with the relatively new science of forensics and the pseudo-sciences of pathognomy and physiognomy. The novel takes us on a bizarre journey of masking and likeness, of waxworks, effigies and taxidermy--all of the ways in which a man might hide or fake his identity. Only by discovering the real criminals behind the masks of untruth will the cases be solved.” In the essay below, McCreet acquaints us with some of the peculiar and less-than-scientific methods 19th-century sleuths employed to “get their man.”)
Today, we all know more about pathology and criminal forensics than the greatest medical experts of the 19th century did in their day. CSI and modern crime fiction have educated all of us in the finer points of profiling, DNA, MO, blood-drop study, and trace analysis. We have an intensely scientific appreciation of investigation.
The first detectives, however, had no such useful knowledge. They were totally in the dark.
Before forensics, police work was little more than a cat-and-mouse game. A crime was committed, the criminal would vanish, and the detectives would have to search an entire city in hopes of catching their prey. It didn’t help that the police were often bound by rules and regulations, while the thieves and killers were obviously not. (For example, many crimes in Victorian London were timed to coincide with the period when police shifts relieved each other.)
Eugène François Vidocq changed all of that. In the early 19th century, this notorious criminal and adventurer became--by a remarkable series of events--the head of the Parisian Secret Police (the Sûreté). His motto was that “the cat cannot catch the mouse if he is wearing gloves,” and so he changed the rules of detection. Forget the regulations--he
would wear disguises and infiltrate the criminal gangs, learning their ways and becoming their friend. The crooks were often amazed when he pulled off the false nose and denounced them.
(Left) Eugène François Vidocq
More importantly, Vidocq’s first-hand experience with lawbreakers allowed him to create a nomenclature or classification system for many different kinds of criminals, identifying their slang, their clothing, their behavior, and the areas they worked in. He saw it as the same kind of thing that naturalists were doing with animals or flowers. For the first time, criminals might be observed and known before they committed a crime. Vidocq would often be waiting for them as they prepared to strike. It was not forensics as we recognize it today, but it was the beginning of a criminal science.
Around that same time, medical men were making the first steps in scientific forensics. In France and Germany, doctors were trying to determine a system of discerning how long a body had been dead. “Body farms” were kept to study decomposition and books were written attempting to clarify and classify the signs. Such variables as temperature, age, illness, the season, or the kind of coffin in which a body had been stored were taken into account to solve this great mystery. Often, the crime of infanticide was the stimulus and the focus of these studies, because so many people would discard newborn children out of shame or poverty.
As the cities of Europe grew ever larger, the need to identify bodies grew more important. With such huge populations, everyone was anonymous and the discovery of a severed limb or a head was an utter mystery. It was a time of intense study and marked the emergence of forensic medicine as a distinct specialty required by the police. A book from 1824 defined the forensics as “the physical grounds on which we may conclude that the human frame has sustained injury--whether fatal to life or not.”
Medical men would conduct experiments on pieces of flesh to test and record the effects of different weapons. They would apply their knowledge of human anatomy to stray pieces of body pulled from the River Thames or dug from fresh graves. And in all of this work, their knowledge would be increased with the collaboration of the police, who always had a steady stream of victims.
Perhaps the first and greatest of the London forensic examiners was Dr. Thomas Bond, the official surgeon of Scotland Yard’s Division A (to which the Detective Force belonged). He was a lecturer in forensic medicine at Westminster Hospital in the 1880s and was often called upon to identify lethal herbs found inside a corpse’s stomach or to attend to (still living) victims of street crime and study their wounds for evidence. On one occasion, Bond was presented with a coffin containing a body chopped into 10 distinct pieces. He discerned that the victim had been a woman of
20-25 years of age, about 5 feet tall, and with a bullet in her brain. She had first been shot (the bullet had flattened on impact), then hacked to pieces postmortem with an axe.
(Right) Dr. Thomas Bond
In 1888, Bond worked on the Thames Torso Murders case. Excavations for a new police station on Westminster Embankment had revealed a woman’s torso with all limbs missing, and he managed to link the body to an arm found in the adjacent river earlier that week. But 1888 was a busy year for Bond and he was soon given the case that would change the history of both crime and forensics: Jack the Ripper.
Dr. Bond worked in an unusual way on the Ripper case. Rather than examine the corpses himself, he studied the postmortem notes and photographs (the first ever of a serious crime) and tried to draw conclusions about the murderer. Just as a modern crime-fiction lover looks for clues in a story’s text, so Bond sought to reconstruct the narrative from the material he had, “re-writing” the crimes for the police. Most importantly, he used a clear, logical system to tell the story of the killers.
For example, he looked at the position of a body, the estimated time of death, the direction of attack, and the area of the city in which it was found to suggest what kind of criminal might have struck. What kind of clothing might the person have worn at that time, in that weather, in that part of town? What job might they do if they were free at that hour? What associates might they have?
He also paid close attention to the injuries. The direction of attack, the choice of weapons, and the location of wounds would denote whether the injuries had been intended to subdue, to kill quickly, or to torture. This in turn would reveal if the killer was frenzied, calculated, prepared, or spontaneous. In fact, Bond concluded that “Jack” was a sexual sadist.
Sadly, Dr. Thomas Bond might have been a victim of all the horrible things he saw. In 1901, he jumped to his death from his bedroom window after a prolonged period of insomnia. What was keeping him awake? And did he ever find peace?
The late 19th century also saw the birth of a number of pseudo-sciences that were utilized in the name of forensics. These all come under the general term of “anthropometry”--the measurement of man--and followed on from Vidocq’s reasoning that a criminal might be known before he ever committed a crime. Phrenology was an early one, created by Franz Joseph Gall and positing 27 distinct “brain organs” that affected the shape of the skull.
From these bumps, it was thought that a man’s propensity to affection, or friendship, or violence might be revealed.
(Left) Author James McCreet
For those who thought phrenology too vague, two other pseudo-sciences were created--physiognomy and pathognomy--by which a man’s entire character might be known, even if he tried to disguise his appearance. This was taken so seriously at the end of the 19th century, that recruits to London’s Metropolitan Police were examined by a physiognomist and accepted or rejected based on the shapes of their ears, nose, or shoulders. For the difference between the two studies, here is an excerpt from my new novel, The Masked Adversary:
The history of forensics is in many ways the history of crime fiction: the desire to know and to solve, the recognition of clues, the reconstruction of story out of chaos. The body is the text and we try to find ways of making it reveal its narrative postmortem. In the end, there may be many stories, but only one truth.
which I mentioned in Kirkus Reviews as one of the top UK crime-fiction works of last year. His fourth book in that series, The Masked Adversary, was released as an e-book in July. McCreet explains that “The Masked Adversary revolves around the discovery in Victorian London of two bodies that are not entirely human. To solve the crimes, the detectives must become acquainted with the relatively new science of forensics and the pseudo-sciences of pathognomy and physiognomy. The novel takes us on a bizarre journey of masking and likeness, of waxworks, effigies and taxidermy--all of the ways in which a man might hide or fake his identity. Only by discovering the real criminals behind the masks of untruth will the cases be solved.” In the essay below, McCreet acquaints us with some of the peculiar and less-than-scientific methods 19th-century sleuths employed to “get their man.”)Today, we all know more about pathology and criminal forensics than the greatest medical experts of the 19th century did in their day. CSI and modern crime fiction have educated all of us in the finer points of profiling, DNA, MO, blood-drop study, and trace analysis. We have an intensely scientific appreciation of investigation.
The first detectives, however, had no such useful knowledge. They were totally in the dark.
Before forensics, police work was little more than a cat-and-mouse game. A crime was committed, the criminal would vanish, and the detectives would have to search an entire city in hopes of catching their prey. It didn’t help that the police were often bound by rules and regulations, while the thieves and killers were obviously not. (For example, many crimes in Victorian London were timed to coincide with the period when police shifts relieved each other.)
Eugène François Vidocq changed all of that. In the early 19th century, this notorious criminal and adventurer became--by a remarkable series of events--the head of the Parisian Secret Police (the Sûreté). His motto was that “the cat cannot catch the mouse if he is wearing gloves,” and so he changed the rules of detection. Forget the regulations--he
would wear disguises and infiltrate the criminal gangs, learning their ways and becoming their friend. The crooks were often amazed when he pulled off the false nose and denounced them.(Left) Eugène François Vidocq
More importantly, Vidocq’s first-hand experience with lawbreakers allowed him to create a nomenclature or classification system for many different kinds of criminals, identifying their slang, their clothing, their behavior, and the areas they worked in. He saw it as the same kind of thing that naturalists were doing with animals or flowers. For the first time, criminals might be observed and known before they committed a crime. Vidocq would often be waiting for them as they prepared to strike. It was not forensics as we recognize it today, but it was the beginning of a criminal science.
Around that same time, medical men were making the first steps in scientific forensics. In France and Germany, doctors were trying to determine a system of discerning how long a body had been dead. “Body farms” were kept to study decomposition and books were written attempting to clarify and classify the signs. Such variables as temperature, age, illness, the season, or the kind of coffin in which a body had been stored were taken into account to solve this great mystery. Often, the crime of infanticide was the stimulus and the focus of these studies, because so many people would discard newborn children out of shame or poverty.
As the cities of Europe grew ever larger, the need to identify bodies grew more important. With such huge populations, everyone was anonymous and the discovery of a severed limb or a head was an utter mystery. It was a time of intense study and marked the emergence of forensic medicine as a distinct specialty required by the police. A book from 1824 defined the forensics as “the physical grounds on which we may conclude that the human frame has sustained injury--whether fatal to life or not.”
Medical men would conduct experiments on pieces of flesh to test and record the effects of different weapons. They would apply their knowledge of human anatomy to stray pieces of body pulled from the River Thames or dug from fresh graves. And in all of this work, their knowledge would be increased with the collaboration of the police, who always had a steady stream of victims.
Perhaps the first and greatest of the London forensic examiners was Dr. Thomas Bond, the official surgeon of Scotland Yard’s Division A (to which the Detective Force belonged). He was a lecturer in forensic medicine at Westminster Hospital in the 1880s and was often called upon to identify lethal herbs found inside a corpse’s stomach or to attend to (still living) victims of street crime and study their wounds for evidence. On one occasion, Bond was presented with a coffin containing a body chopped into 10 distinct pieces. He discerned that the victim had been a woman of
20-25 years of age, about 5 feet tall, and with a bullet in her brain. She had first been shot (the bullet had flattened on impact), then hacked to pieces postmortem with an axe.(Right) Dr. Thomas Bond
In 1888, Bond worked on the Thames Torso Murders case. Excavations for a new police station on Westminster Embankment had revealed a woman’s torso with all limbs missing, and he managed to link the body to an arm found in the adjacent river earlier that week. But 1888 was a busy year for Bond and he was soon given the case that would change the history of both crime and forensics: Jack the Ripper.
Dr. Bond worked in an unusual way on the Ripper case. Rather than examine the corpses himself, he studied the postmortem notes and photographs (the first ever of a serious crime) and tried to draw conclusions about the murderer. Just as a modern crime-fiction lover looks for clues in a story’s text, so Bond sought to reconstruct the narrative from the material he had, “re-writing” the crimes for the police. Most importantly, he used a clear, logical system to tell the story of the killers.
For example, he looked at the position of a body, the estimated time of death, the direction of attack, and the area of the city in which it was found to suggest what kind of criminal might have struck. What kind of clothing might the person have worn at that time, in that weather, in that part of town? What job might they do if they were free at that hour? What associates might they have?
He also paid close attention to the injuries. The direction of attack, the choice of weapons, and the location of wounds would denote whether the injuries had been intended to subdue, to kill quickly, or to torture. This in turn would reveal if the killer was frenzied, calculated, prepared, or spontaneous. In fact, Bond concluded that “Jack” was a sexual sadist.
Sadly, Dr. Thomas Bond might have been a victim of all the horrible things he saw. In 1901, he jumped to his death from his bedroom window after a prolonged period of insomnia. What was keeping him awake? And did he ever find peace?
The late 19th century also saw the birth of a number of pseudo-sciences that were utilized in the name of forensics. These all come under the general term of “anthropometry”--the measurement of man--and followed on from Vidocq’s reasoning that a criminal might be known before he ever committed a crime. Phrenology was an early one, created by Franz Joseph Gall and positing 27 distinct “brain organs” that affected the shape of the skull.
From these bumps, it was thought that a man’s propensity to affection, or friendship, or violence might be revealed.(Left) Author James McCreet
For those who thought phrenology too vague, two other pseudo-sciences were created--physiognomy and pathognomy--by which a man’s entire character might be known, even if he tried to disguise his appearance. This was taken so seriously at the end of the 19th century, that recruits to London’s Metropolitan Police were examined by a physiognomist and accepted or rejected based on the shapes of their ears, nose, or shoulders. For the difference between the two studies, here is an excerpt from my new novel, The Masked Adversary:
Physiognomy is the study of the body’s organic constitution: its shape and relative dimensions. There is a finite number of possible body shapes, just as there are a series of known individual features to the nose or fingers. Critically, all of these elements are necessarily connected within a single organic type so that a tall, thin man will not have a broad fat nose--unless, of course, he is of African descent. Phrenology, it need hardly be stated, also falls within the same discipline. Pathognomy, on the other hand, is the study rather of gesture and motion: the organic character manifested as a physical language, if you like. Thus, a thoughtful man gestures with grace, while the imbecile is spasmodic in gesticulation. Any skilled practitioner of the one discipline must master the other, since one’s actions derive directly from the character as apples issue only from an apple tree.It should be clear that there was very little science and less justice in these disciplines. A man with a low forehead and thick, dark hair might be marked as a murderer, when in fact he was a judge. The next (il)logical step of such studies was the system created by the Frenchman Alphonse Bertillon, who proposed exact measurements of known criminals to scientifically record their identities and prevent their re-offending. It was a system that implicitly sought to categorize criminal “types” and was thankfully soon rendered extinct by the science of fingerprinting and the wider use of photography. However, it still laid the foundations for the measurements Adolf Hitler’s Nazis made of “racial types” in the early 20th century.
The history of forensics is in many ways the history of crime fiction: the desire to know and to solve, the recognition of clues, the reconstruction of story out of chaos. The body is the text and we try to find ways of making it reveal its narrative postmortem. In the end, there may be many stories, but only one truth.
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