Duck Snoop

In my new column for Kirkus Reviews, I appraise Max Byrd’s new historical thriller, The Paris Deadline, calling this rather twisted tale of treachery and technology “a sparkling and suspenseful caper adventure well-rooted in a lovingly re-animated Jazz Age Paris.” You can read the complete piece by clicking here.

Bullet Points: Prepping for Halloween Edition

The last week or so has been kind of a crazy time here at Rap Sheet headquarters. Too many responsibilities and too little time to concentrate fully on everything I wished to finish. So I let the blog languish a bit. Now, though, I’m back behind the editor’s desk and ready to bring your attention to some recent developments in the crime-fiction world. Prepare yourselves.

• In celebration of tomorrow being Halloween, editor-blogger Janet Rudolph has assembled a quite extensive list of related crime novels. Yvette Banek offers a compilation of “10 fabulous Halloween movies.” The blog Found in Mom’s Basement presents three of the weirdest Halloween postcards you’ll ever see. Flavorwire suggests some “terrifying new reads” for 2012, and recommends “12 horror sequels that don’t suck.” Richard L. Pangburn has posted his top-10 list of the “all-time most beautiful witches” (yes, he includes Elizabeth Montgomery). Terence Towles Canote has posted half a dozen of his favorite classic horror-movie trailers. Svengoolie, Crematia Mortem, and other eccentric late-night TV film hosts are being given rare recognition in the Classic TV Horror Host Blogathon. And J.F. Norris of Pretty Sinister Books has some “suggestions for this year’s Halloween mini-movie fest, one you can have in the privacy of your own home.” I have to admit, I haven’t seen any of Norris’ picks. Clearly, I don’t get out enough. Or don’t stay home enough with my DVD player.

• With America’s eastern seaboard still weathering heavy damage from Hurricane Sandy, Mystery Fanfare has put forward a selection of hurricane-related crime fiction. It includes John D. Macdonald’s Murder in the Wind, Tim Dorsey’s Hurricane Punch, Margaret Maron’s Storm Track, and James Lee Burke’s Tin Roof Blowdown.

• I’ve been looking forward to seeing the upcoming crime film Gangster Squad, if only for two reasons: (1) it’s about Los Angeles police detectives struggling to purge their city of organized mobsters during the 1940s and ’50s; and it features Sean Penn as well as the increasingly captivating Emma Stone.

However, real life seems to have interfered with the picture’s release. It was originally supposed to debut in early September, but was postponed in the aftermath of July’s mass shootings at a movie theater in Colorado. And as Omnimystery News reports, a movie house shootout between cops and crime boss Mickey Cohen’s henchmen has now been removed from the picture, as a result of the Colorado killings. The current Gangster Squad trailer is embedded on the right, but the original can still be viewed here. (The theater scene begins at the 2:00 mark.)

• Slaughter’s Hound, by Declan Burke--an Irish novelist and editor, as well as a sometime Rap Sheet contributor--is among the nominees for the 2012 Irish Book Awards. Also in the running: Vengeance, by Benjamin Black; Broken Harbour, by Tana French; The Istanbul Puzzle, by Laurence O’Bryan; Too Close for Comfort, by Niamh O’Connor; and Red Ribbons, by Louise Phillips. The winners are supposed to be announced on November 22.

• In his blog, The Passing Tramp, Curt Evans posts a pretty terrific tribute to Jacques Barzun, the historian and literary critic who died last week at age 104. Among other accomplishments, Barzun was the co-author (with Wendell Hertig Taylor) of what Evans calls a “magisterial critique of crime fiction,” 1971’s A Catalogue of Crime. There’s more about Barzun in Martin Edwards’ blog.

• The social reading site Goodreads has introduced its fourth annual Readers Choice Awards competition, with nominees in several categories--including mystery and thrillers. Click here to select among crime-fiction contenders that run the gamut from Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl and Robert Crais’ Taken to William Landay’s Defending Jacob. Winners will be announced on December 4.

• With the 23rd James Bond picture, Skyfall, having already premiered in Britain and being set to debut in the States on November 9, it’s understandable that the Web should be rather rife with associated content. The online magazine Pacific Standard ponders the question of whether Agent 007 is “the least interesting man in the world?” Esquire checks out the latest Bond duds and interviews a Bond stuntman. The HMSS Weblog picks up the story that screenwriter John Logan has been hired to put together the script for Bond 24. And Think Progress’ Alyssa Rosenberg gives a thumbs-up to talk of black actor Idris Elba (of Luther fame) being tapped as the next man to portray Ian Fleming’s superspy on the silver screen.

• Author Olen Steinhauer (The Tourist, The Nearest Exit) chooses four television series that he thinks are “the cream of the cream of the crop,” as far as a spy shows go. It should come as no surprise that The Avengers is one of them. Read his full post here.

• If performance of the Dow Jones industrial average is an accurate predictor of who will win America’s quadrennial presidential races--as it has so often been in the past--then President Obama should be planning for a second term. “The stock market has done better than average during his tenure,” The New York Times notes, “not to mention better than during either of the two terms of his predecessor. In the past, such a healthy stock market performance has usually been followed by a victory for the incumbent party.”

• Meanwhile, Washington Monthly offers a list of President Obama’s “top 50 accomplishments” during his first term. Pass that along to any right-wingers who claim the president has somehow “failed.”

• L.A.’s storied Magic Castle, long a nightclub and magicians’ clubhouse, will reportedly be the setting for “a feature film being developed by producer Ted Field and his company, Radar Pictures, at 20th Century Fox.” If all goes well, the club might be used in other future movies and TV series. All well and good, but let’s not forget that the Magic Castle was already prominent in one small-screen series, The Magician (1973-1974), serving as home to illusionist-cum-sleuth Anthony Blake (Bill Bixby) in the second half of that program’s run. It’s said to have been “the first time filming had been permitted inside” what was originally a private home.

• Here’s an odd fashion item from the 1970s.

• In part one of a fine feature for Press Play, critic Edward Copeland reminded me that the multiple-award-winning medical drama St. Elsewhere debuted on NBC-TV 30 years ago last Friday. I look forward to reading his second installment.

• This week’s new short story in Beat to a Pulp comes from North Carolina author Joseph D’Agnese. It’s titled “Back to the Boke.”

• Look in the blog Tipping My Fedora for a good overview of the six Perry Mason movies made by Warner Bros. between 1934 and 1937.

• Lee Goldberg, who’s penned 14 novels based on the 2002-2009 TV series Monk (including Mr. Monk Is a Mess) has announced that Monk writer-producer Hy Conrad will take over composing those books, following’s Goldberg’s late-December release, Mr. Monk Gets Even.

• Anybody who’s spent much time going through Washington, D.C.’s Daniel H. Burnham-designed Union Station (as I have) should appreciate these historical images of its grand interior public spaces.

• And MysteriousPress.com is preparing to release four “bibliomysteries from best-selling mystery authors” as e-books ($1.99 apiece) on November 12: The Scroll, by Anne Perry; Pronghorns of the Third Reich, by C.J. Box; Book of Virtue, by Ken Bruen; and An Acceptable Sacrifice, by Jeffery Deaver. A press release explains that these “short tales about deadly books all feature books as central plot devices.” For more suggestions of bibliomysteries, look here.

Oh, Brothers, Where Art Thou?

Here’s a very old TV show that’s new to me: The Brothers Brannagan, a syndicated American series that ran from September 1960 to July 1961, offering 39 black-and-white, half-hour episodes. I’d never heard of the show, until a reader brought my attention to it in relation to a recent post about the 1980s detective drama Simon & Simon.

I have since come across more than one reference on the Web to The Brothers Brannagan having inspired Simon & Simon. Both were about sibling sleuths, though Simon & Simon cast Rick and A.J. Simon as private eyes in San Diego, California, while The Brothers Brannagan imagined Mike and Bob Brannagan as gumshoes working out of the Mountain Shadows Resort Inn in Arizona’s Paradise Valley, near Phoenix. (The “low-budget” series was apparently filmed on location around the Grand Canyon State capital.) As The Thrilling Detective Web Site recalls, Bob Brannagan (played by Mark Roberts) “was the more serious, professional brother, Mike [Stephen Dunne] the poetry-quoting romantic, constantly in trouble with various women. As always, there was sibling rivalry to contend with. They lived together in a large luxury apartment, complete with a maid and a doorman. The rivalry between the brothers and (for the time) unusual setting weren’t enough, however, to compensate for weak scripts, and the show only lasted one season.”

The episodes found these brothers working cases involving theft, extortion, kidnapping, insurance fraud, body guarding, murder, and even the protection of a “French poodle with a rhinestone-studded collar.” William Schoell’s Great Old Movies blog suggests that “the best episode was ‘Damaged Dolls’ [December 31, 1960], a suspenseful story that had entertainers being blackmailed and/or murdered after receiving mutilated dolls in boxes.” Since they were handsome bachelors in their late 30s, early 40s, the Brannagans did their best to throw money around the Phoenix bar and nightclub scene, and woo the most comely young ladies they encountered there.

Novelist-blogger James Reasoner, who wrote about this show last year, pointed out that a tie-in novel--appropriately titled The Brothers Brannagan, and written by one Henry E. Helseth--was published by Signet in 1961, probably with the hope that this crime drama would last longer than it did. Instead, the show came and went quickly, and seems to have been pretty thoroughly forgotten in the succeeding five decades. I see that somebody is offering about a third of the episodes on DVD on the Web sales site eBay.com. I haven’t yet laid down my hard-earned cash for that set, though. And I may not. Scouring the few comments available on the Internet, it seems that the most memorable thing about The Brothers Brannagan was its “snappy” theme music (composed by Alexander Courage, who would go on to achieve something close to immortality by composing the original Star Trek theme). Courage’s tune figures into the opening title sequence, a version of which--taken from the November 19, 1960, episode “Her Brother's Keeper”--is embedded atop this post. (The opening apparently changed frequently, perhaps even per episode. Another example can be found here.)

Does anyone out there remember watching The Brothers Brannagan? And if so, do you think it’s worth my trying to track down the 39 existing episodes, or even the tie-in novel?

READ MORE: “A TV Series Review: The Brothers Brannagan (1960-61),” by Michael Shonk (Mystery*File).

Doubling Winslow’s Pleasure

For the second year in a row, author Don Winslow has captured the T. Jefferson Parker Award for Mystery from the Southern California Independent Booksellers Association. That announcement was made on October 20 during the annual Authors Feast & Trade Show, held aboard the Queen Mary in Long Beach, California.

Winslow’s win this time is for The Kings of Cool (Simon & Schuster), the prequel to Savages, which picked up the Parker prize last year. Also nominated for this 2012 commendation were Getaway, by Lisa Brackmann (Soho Press), and Taken, by Robert Crais (Putnam).

(Hat tip to The Gumshoe Site.)

Pierce’s Picks: “Dominion”

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

Dominion, by C.J. Sansom (Mantle UK):
Taking another detour from his Matthew Shardlake Tudor detective series--as he did with the melancholy Winter in Madrid (2008)--Sansom gives us a what-if spy adventure set in 1952. A dozen years have passed since Great Britain surrendered to the greater military might of Nazi Germany, though World War II continues to rage on in Russia. Britons are chafing under the authoritarian regulations imposed by their new government, and they’re worried by reports of atrocious acts taking place in their midst. However, Winston Churchill’s Resistance movement appears to be expanding, and it may have discovered a way to tip the balance of power in its favor. Much depends, though, on the daring efforts of a civil servant turned Resistance spy, David Fitzgerald, who has been assigned to help a scientist, trapped in a Birmingham mental hospital, flee the country. Fitzgerald soon finds himself hiding from capture, together with a group of other Resistance activists, in a London menaced by a hazardous air-pollution event, the notorious Great Smog of ’52. Meanwhile, Fitzgerald’s wife, Sarah, faces her own terrors, and one of the Gestapo’s most notorious manhunters is hot on both their heels. Sansom’s characters are given dimensions and detailed histories enough to make them credible, and in Dominion the author has cobbled together enough real events from 1950s Britain with his own imaginings to make readers believe, if only now and then, that the story presented in these pages could actually have happened. Fans of Len Deighton’s own alternative thriller, SS-GB (1978), may see similarities in Dominion, but they shouldn’t be disappointed with this new novel. No U.S. release of Dominion has been announced.

READ MORE: “C.J. Sansom on the Dangers of Nationalism”
(Mulholland Books).

More Treats Than Tricks

With Halloween due to be celebrated around the world next Wednesday, it’s high time to highlight a feature from SFX magazine’s Web site about the top 10 ghost tales of all time--as chosen by its readers. The list includes books, movies, and short stories.

Meanwhile, Open Road Media is offering 40 “scary reads” in e-book form for less than $3 apiece. Among the authors represented are Ira Levin, Robert McCammon, Lois Duncan, and Caroline R. Cooney.

READ MORE: “A Highbrow Halloween Reading List,” by Emily Temple (Flavorwire); “Frightfully Good,” by Les Blatt (Classic Mysteries).

Shore Leavings

Today, in our sister publication January Magazine, you will find Jim Napier’s critique of Beach Strip, the new crime novel by Canadian author John Lawrence Reynolds. Writes Napier:

Author Reynolds is a seasoned professional, and it shows. A former president of the Crime Writers of Canada, and a two-time winner of the Arthur Ellis Award for Best Novel, he has half a dozen crime novels under his belt. Beach Strip is an engrossing tale, with a strong sense of place and characters that are both believable and engaging. Nicely paced, with several twists and a story line that will hold the reader’s attention ...

Read the full critique here.

Book Him: The Best and Worst of Bond

With the 23rd James Bond film, Skyfall, debuting tomorrow in London, the blog Book Riot decided it was time to announce its favorites among Ian Fleming’s original Bond novels. In order. Live and Let Die (1954) and The Spy Who Loved Me (1962) rank at the bottom of that list, but I am not going to tell you which work comes in at No. 1.

Do you agree with the order in which these books have been listed? Share your thoughts in the Comments section of this post.

READ MORE: “Booze, Bonks, and Bodies” (The Economist).

The Book You Have to Read: “True Confessions,” by John Gregory Dunne

(Editor’s note: With this 120th installment of our ongoing Friday blog series highlighting great but forgotten books, we welcome back Steven Nester, the host of Poets of the Tabloid Murder, a weekly Internet radio show heard on the Public Radio Exchange [PRX]. He has written previously for The Rap Sheet about Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game, by William Kennedy, and Cut Numbers, by Nick Tosches.)

True Confessions reads like an epic poem written in the free-verse rhythm of voices resurrected from the golden age and golden land of noir, which of course would be post-World War II Los Angeles. Most novels in this overstuffed pigeonhole follow a gritty, one-dimensional formula, but True Confessions, written by John Gregory Dunne and published in 1977, is infused with fresh breath and a brogans-on-the-ground sense of reality.

In its pages, Dunne was able to create a world guided by chance and fate that holds together better than the stories of even the most accomplished liars, and with none of the fatuous coincidence and myopic plotting that would cause a lesser writer to scramble for spurious explanations further into the book.

Obviously a tribute to the genre, True Confessions is not obsequious, imitative, or slobbering. A nice long kiss on the mouth but with too much class for tongue, True Confessions says, “I love you,” without any meretricious groping. As a work of art it takes its place in a long literary tradition of crime novels where the only new ground broken is originality of voice and the adroitly and distinctively depicted confluence of character, motive, and circumstance.

Inspired by Los Angeles’ infamous 1947 Black Dahlia murder, the plot of True Confessions is fairly straightforward. The Spellacy brothers, Des the priest and Tom the cop, are on their own separate journeys to power and truth. But when the bisected body of Lois Fazenda, a hopeful Hollywood nobody, is found in a dingy L.A. neighborhood, a chain of events is set off that brings down just about everyone who ever laid eyes on her.

Des is a monsignor in the L.A. archdiocese and a comer. The Cardinal’s right-hand man, he’s being groomed for a bishopric and the keys to the archdiocese. A “combination lightning rod, hatchet man, and accountant,” Des is a street-smart priest who understands that “the calibration of sin was the essential element of his trade.” This comes in handy in the confessional, but it is indispensable in ministering to the wheeling-and-dealing ways of the archdiocese and how it operates behind the scenes, especially when it comes to sharpies with whom it sometimes reluctantly conducts business.

Brother Tom Spellacy is a homicide detective with an attitude problem, and it’s difficult to blame the guy. His children have joined religious orders and his wife has committed herself to a mental institution. He met his current girlfriend, Corinne, when a three-time loser named Turd Turner took her hostage and Tom had to rescue her. Nothing if not a stand-up guy, as a thank-you to Turd, Tom walked him to the gas chamber.

The archdiocese is in a hurry to sever itself from Jack Amsterdam, a crooked businessman and parishioner who greedily allows those two roles to mix. When Tom traces the trail of Fazenda, known to newspaper readers after her death as “The Virgin Tramp,” it leads to Amsterdam, archdiocese legal counsel Dan T. Campion and, unfortunately, brother Des. While none of them are even remotely involved in the murder, the crime is so toxic that the careers of anyone close to it are condemned.

Also in play is the career of Homicide Division Captain Fred Fuqua, who’s bucking for promotion to chief and is a constant irritation to Spellacy. Spellacy’s solving this high-profile crime would certainly help Fuqua’s aspirations, but so would playing ball with the lay Catholic hierarchy who happen to run the search committee. But Tom’s honesty (or his anger) is pathological. He welcomes the opportunity to associate Amsterdam, Campion, and his own sibling, Des, with the taint of the crime just to settle an old score--even though Des and Amsterdam were influential in helping Tom keep his job after the LAPD underwent an enormous graft scandal.

Less a breath of fresh air than an odious blast from the bowels of iniquity is Tom’s detective partner, Frank Crotty. The one character here with no pretense or illusions about the homicide-solving business, Crotty spends as much of the department’s time going through the motions of solving crimes as he does furthering his own business interests with shady partners. Ever on the lookout for opportunities, he buys his white linen suits from movie studio wardrobe departments after noir actor Sydney Greenstreet is finished wearing them in his roles, and sells the story of “The Virgin Tramp” to a film studio before the ink is even dry on the police reports.

In crime novels, information is everything: who knew what when, how it’s disseminated and then pieced together, and in True Confessions all this is done with brilliance. The flow of the narrative, at times garrulous, gossipy, inventive, deadpan and above all ironic, disperses information in a manner that allows Tom Spellacy to act on it and close the narrative net until it captures the truth--which in the nihilistic world of jaded police and clergymen doesn’t do anyone a bit of good.

True Confessions is a novel that even the least sensitive readers can feel vibrate in their hands. Not the leaden dirge of a hack mourning a genre, it’s the dynamic song of an artist taking the mundane and giving it life.

READ MORE: “The Book You Have to Read: The Other Girl, by Theodora Keogh,” by Steven Powell (The Rap Sheet).

Working the Web

• Later this morning, The Rap Sheet will post a new entry in the Web-wide “forgotten books” series. But this Friday has already brought many such recommendations. Herewith, some of the crime- and thriller-related works: The Deadly Truth, by Helen McCloy; Silent and the Dead, by George Harmon Coxe; A Caribbean Mystery, by Agatha Christie; Les Magiciennes, by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac; Raven Black, by Ann Cleeves; Veronica’s Room, by Ira Levin; A Time for Pirates, by Gavin Black; and The Janson Directive, by Robert Ludlum. Click here for a list of all of today’s participating bloggers.

• The recent 50th anniversary of the debut of the very first James Bond film, Dr. No, coupled with the imminent release of Skyfall, has certainly focused new attention on Agent 007. Not only the movies, but also the books. I recently put together a selection of Dr. No covers, but the blog Retronaut weighs in with its look at a wider assortment of Bond novel fronts from 1950 to 1975.

• And with only a few more days to go before Skyfall’s London premiere, another new trailer for the picture has surfaced.

• Wow! This is incredible. Ninety-five-year old Maryland resident Samuel J. Seymour, who witnessed John Wilkes Booth flee Ford’s Theatre after shooting President Abraham Lincoln in 1865, appears on the CBS-TV quiz show I’ve Got a Secret in 1956.

• There’s part of me that’s sorry to see the disappearance of Newsweek as a print publication. But really, that almost 80-year-old weekly news magazine seemed doomed ever since The Washington Post Company sold it in 2010, and it has recently been all over the map as far as maintaining an individual identity. Editor Tina Brown (formerly of The New Yorker) has announced that Newsweek will cease to be printed with the December 31, 2012, issue. After that, it will become an all-digital publication retitled Newsweek Global. The Huffington Post’s Howard Fineman, who worked for Newsweek from 1980 to 2010, ruminates on the mag’s electronic transition here.

• Master escapologist Harry Houdini performed in Seattle, Washington, 97 years ago this week. It’s only too bad that I was neither alive nor residing in this city at the time. I would most certainly have nabbed a ticket to one of his shows!

• After an eight-month search, Kate Griffin has been named as England’s “newest, hottest” crime-fiction writer. The 49-year-old resident of St. Albans, Hertfordshire, was chosen through a competition sponsored by the UK’s Stylist magazine and publisher Faber and Faber. Each contestant (364 of them!) produced up to 6,000 words of a new crime novel featuring a female protagonist. You can read an excerpt from Griffin’s yet-to-be-published book, Kitty Peck and the Music Hall Murders, here.

• Hungarian-American film director Frank Darabont, the creator of AMC-TV’s The Walking Dead, has reached an agreement with U.S. network TNT to produce an initial six episodes of a new period crime drama inspired by John Buntin’s 2009 non-fiction book, L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America's Most Seductive City. This series, “which focuses on the intense power struggle between the LAPD and the mob back in the 1940s and ’50s,” according to Flavorwire, will reunite Darabont with two Walking Dead stars, “Jon Bernthal (as its lead, an ex-Marine turned cop) and Jeffrey DeMunn (as the detective heading up the new mob squad). The ensemble cast also includes Heroes’ Milo Ventimiglia, playing a lawyer who has mob ties, and Justified’s Neal McDonough as Capt. William Parker of the LAPD, a man determined to fight the greed and corruption.” Hmm. It sounds like a show that’s right up my alley.

• Meanwhile, ABC-TV has another Los Angeles-set show in the works. Titled The Defectives, it will focus on “a female internal affairs investigator, who is tasked with rebuilding the LAPD’s special detective unit after she spearheads the probe into a corruption scandal that ultimately brings the department to its knees,” reports Omnimystery News. “She assembles a team of misfit cops, each of whom brings to the table a unique set of talents.”

• Sometime Rap Sheet contributor Seamus Scanlon has a new guest post in the blog Book Reviews by Elizabeth A. White about “how growing up in Galway, Ireland, set the tone for the noir perspective that infuses his recently released short-story collection, As Close As You’ll Ever Be (Cairn Press).”

• And who first satirized Arthur Conan Doyle’s popular Sherlock Holmes stories? Apparently it was Peter Pan author J.M. Barrie, whose 1891 story “My Evening with Sherlock” has been posted on Mystery Scene magazine’s Web site.

Picture This

Just to make us all a wee bit more jealous that he’s down at London’s Grosvenor House Hotel tonight, celebrating with the winners and nominees of three Dagger Awards and several Specsavers Crime Thriller Awards--while the rest of us are not--Rap Sheet correspondent Ali Karim sent along a few photographs from those festivities.


It’s a crowded awards ceremony, that’s for sure.


Literary agent Will Francis with his client, Ian Fleming Steel Dagger winner Charles Cumming.


Shotsmag Confidential blogger Ayo Onatade with novelist and Dagger Award nominee Megan Abbott.


Nattily attired Ali Karim with author Jo Nesbø.

Handing Out Dagger and Thriller Awards

Thanks to our on-the-spot correspondent, Ali Karim, we can now announce the winners of three prestigious commendations given out tonight by the British Crime Writers’ Association, along with the recipients of this year’s Specsavers Crime Thriller Awards. These prizes were dispensed during a glitzy ceremony at London’s Grosvenor House Hotel. Without any further ado, the winners are ...

The CWA Gold Dagger: The Rage, by Gene Kerrigan (Harvill Secker)

Also nominated: Vengeance in Mind, by N.J. Cooper (Simon & Schuster); The Flight, by M.R. Hall (Mantle); and Bereft, by Chris Womersley (Quercus)

The CWA John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger: A Land More Kind than Home, by Wiley Cash (Bantam)

Also nominated: Heart-Shaped Bruise, by Tanya Byrne (Headline); Good People, by Ewart Hutton (Blue Door); and What Dies in Summer, by Tom Wright (Canongate)

The CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger: A Foreign Country, by Charles Cumming (HarperCollins)

Also nominated: Dare Me, by Megan Abbott (Picador); The Fear Index, by Robert Harris (Hutchinson); and Reamde, by Neal Stephenson (Atlantic Books)

The Specsavers Bestseller Dagger (public vote): Kathy Reichs

Also nominated: Ann Cleeves, Anthony Horowitz, Stuart MacBride,
and Jo Nesbø

The Film Dagger: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Studio Canal)

Also nominated: Drive (Icon); The Dark Knight Rises (Warner Bros.); The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Sony); and The Guard (Optimum)

The TV Dagger: Sherlock: Series 2 (Hartswood Films/BBC1)

Also nominated: Appropriate Adult (ITV Studios/ITV1); Line of Duty (BBC/BBC2); Wallander (Left Bank Pictures, Yellow Bird/BBC1); and Whitechapel: Series 3 (Carnival/ITV1)

The International TV Dagger: The Bridge (Danmarks Radio,
Sveriges Television/BBC4)

Also nominated: 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); and The Killing II: Forbrydelsen (Arrow Films/BBC4)

The Best Actress Dagger: Claire Danes for Homeland (Teakwood Lane Productions, Showtime Productions, Cherry Pie Productions, Keshet Media Group, Fox 21/Channel 4)

Also nominated: Brenda Blethyn for Vera (ITV Studios/ITV1); Sofie Gråbøl for The Killing II (Arrow Films/BBC4); Sofia Helin for The Bridge (Danmarks Radio, Sveriges Television/BBC4); and Maxine Peake for Silk (BBC/BBC1)

The Best Actor Dagger: Benedict Cumberbatch for Sherlock (Hartswood Films/BBC1)

Also nominated: Kenneth Branagh for Wallander (Left Bank Pictures, Yellow Bird/BBC1); Steve Buscemi for Boardwalk Empire (HBO/Sky Atlantic); Damien Lewis for Homeland (Teakwood Lane Productions, Showtime Productions, Cherry Pie Productions, Keshet Media Group, Fox 21/Channel 4); and Dominic West for Appropriate Adult (ITV Studios/ITV1

The Best Supporting Actress Dagger: Kelly Macdonald for Boardwalk Empire (HBO/Sky Atlantic)

Also nominated: Frances Barber for Silk (BBC/BBC1); 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); and Una Stubbs for Sherlock (Hartswood Films/BBC1)

The Best Supporting Actor Dagger: Martin Freeman for Sherlock (Hartswood Films/BBC1)

Also nominated: 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); and Laurence Fox for Lewis (ITV Studios/ITV1)

Best Detective Duo (public vote): Lewis, DI Robbie Lewis and
DS James Hathaway

Also nominated: DCI Banks, with DCI Alan Banks and DS Annie Cabbot; Above Suspicion, with DC Anna Travis and DCS James Langton; Scott and Bailey, with DC Jane Scott and DC Rachel Bailey; Whitechapel, with DI Joseph Chandler and DS Ray Miles; and Vera, with DCI Vera Stanhope and DS Joe Ashworth

Anybody in the UK who was not on hand for this evening’s star-studded gala (which means most people), but would still like to see the show, can watch a video recap on ITV3 on October 23.

Pierce’s Picks: “Blood Lance”

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

Blood Lance, by Jeri Westerson (Minotaur):
I’ve found Westerson’s series of “medieval noir” novels to be quite a revelation. When I sat down with the first installment, Veil of Lies (2008), I figured it would be diverting enough as historical fiction, but nothing more. I was mistaken. California author Westerson has combined in these books not only sharply drawn portrayals of 14th-century London and the quotidian practices that make it appear so alien today, but also generous helpings of humor and cinematic derring-do. In the brand-new, fifth entry, Blood Lance, we find disgraced former knight-turned-“tracker” Crispin Guest making his way home on a moonlight October eve, when he suddenly sees a man--an armorer, it turns out--plummet to his death from the heights of London Bridge. A suicide? Crispin has his doubts, which are only exacerbated when he hears that the armorer may have been in possession of the Spear of Longinus, a weapon that allegedly pierced Christ’s side as he hung on the cross and is now supposed to bring its owner invincibility. With aid from his friend Geoffrey Chaucer (yes, that Geoffrey Chaucer), the sometimes too-trusting ex-knight goes hunting for the spear, trying in the meantime to avoid becoming involved in the many poisonous rivalries within King Richard’s court. I’ve come to enjoy Crispin’s regular swordplay and markedly dated exclamations (“God’s blood!”), as well as the political intrigues that author Westerson winds around him and his young apprentice, Jack Tucker. This series is just the thing for readers who crave a bit of chivalry with their sleuthing.

* * *

Also being released this week is Jimmy the Stick (Mysterious Press/Open Road), the first novel by film critic Michael Mayo. It’s set in 1932, the year that renowned aviator Charles Lindbergh’s infant son was snatched from his New Jersey home, and it stars a once-prominent gunman and bootlegger, Jimmy Quinn, who, after being injured by a bullet, has retired to the comparatively safe life of a Manhattan speakeasy owner. That retirement, though, is interrupted by Jimmy’s quondam crony Walter Spencer, who has married into money and gone legit, and now wants Jimmy to safeguard his family in Jersey from threats resembling those that’ve thrust the Lindberghs into the national news. Jimmy thinks guarding his friend’s attractive wife can’t be too onerous a task. But he didn’t anticipate that his own sordid past would finally catch up to him in the Garden State’s ’burbs.

Scouting the Blogosphere

• My friend and fellow critic Adam Woog passes along a line from Anthony Lane’s review of the movie Sinister in last week’s New Yorker magazine. Lane describes true crime as a “shapeless and often shameless genre which is to good crime fiction what pornography is to romance.” To which Woog remarks, “Amen, brother!”

• Author Max Allan Collins provides photographic evidence that he attended this month’s Bouchercon in Cleveland, Ohio.

• Blogger Jen Forbus offers her own particular memories of Bouchercon 2012, here and here.

• And for all those crime-fiction fans who didn’t make it to Cleveland, Peter Rozovsky notes that “VW Tapes is once again selling CDs and MP3s of Bouchercon panels.” At least you can listen to many of the author presentations and discussions.

• Sometime January Magazine contributor Jack Curtin reminds me that it was 50 years ago today that President John F. Kennedy was alerted to the fact that the Soviet Union had secretly delivered missiles to Cuba--the beginning of a 13-day international confrontation that history remembers as the Cuban Missile Crisis.

• One of the all-time-best music-video mash-ups.

• For anybody who hasn’t yet sampled Philip Kerr’s award-winning succession of historical thrillers featuring onetime Berlin police detective Bernie Gunther, Crime Fiction Lover’s David Prestidge provides a good overview of those books.

• And Randy Johnson proclaims that the 1947 motion picture The Brasher Doubloon--based loosely on Raymond Chandler’s The High Window (1942)--is “not a bad film, a tight little mystery” that “only suffers when compared to other Marlowe films, notably Bogart’s turn in The Big Sleep.” For a look at the range of movies made from Chandler’s books, simply click here.

Facts Behind the Fiction

I’ve done something a little different in my latest column for Kirkus Reviews. My topic today is crime-fiction reference books.

The three works I highlight are: Books to Die For: The World’s Greatest Mystery Writers on the World’s Greatest Mystery Novels, edited by John Connolly and Declan Burke (Atria/Emily Bestler); 100 American Crime Writers, edited by Steven Powell (Palgrave Macmillan); and Masters of the “Humdrum” Mystery: Cecil John Charles Street, Freeman Wills Crofts, Alfred Walter Stewart and the British Detective Novel, 1920-1961, edited by Curtis J. Evans.

You’ll find my comments about all of those works here.

The Story Behind the Story: “Killer in a Box,” by David Thayer

(Editor’s note: In this 38th contribution to The Rap Sheet’s “Story Behind the Story” series, we hear from author and sometime Rap Sheet contributor David Thayer, a native of Niagara Falls, New York, who now lives in the Seattle area. Thayer has published three e-book thrillers (with a fourth on the way), all featuring Manhattan police detective Armand DiPino. Below, he explains some of the background to the first entry in that series, Killer in a Box.)

For me the story of writing a novel is told by the first draft. I don’t use an outline, so I’ve learned to compensate by writing first drafts that become narrative outlines crammed with crazy scenes, discarded characters, vignettes, sidebars, and parts of future novels to be set aside. I took the original version of Killer in a Box to a writer’s conference where it was nominated for an award. That was fun, but four years later I was still rewriting, trying to find the sweet spot between what I thought I was doing and what was actually happening on the page.

The story is set at the time of the Euro conversion. I read an article in The New York Times about people with vast piles of legacy currency rushing to the meet the deadline. They had to bring their Deutschmarks, francs, lira, and pesetas to designated banks or the money would become worthless. I thought this idea would be a great setup for a crime novel, a powerful motivator for the villains.

The main character, Armand DiPino, is a young detective assigned to Midtown North in Manhattan. I chose the location because I used to live just south of Hell’s Kitchen. DiPino is a native Californian; his parents are professors who moved to New York City when he was in high school. Throughout the book DiPino tries to stay in touch with his family. His wife, Patti, died in a hit-and-run four years earlier. The void in his life cannot be filled by long hours at work.

Killer in a Box opens with a sustained gunfight between police and what appears to be a group of men in military garb. The NYPD responds by adopting an urban combat plan creating a grid of evacuated streets they call a box. Once the perimeter of the box is secure, the police send in a scout--in this case, DiPino. This shootout on the West Side leaves multiple cops dead and wounded. Richard Fast, a prominent lawyer, also dies in the melee, gunned down on Tenth Avenue next to his late-model Mercedes.

DiPino emerges as a hero credited with saving the life of a fellow officer while shooting dead a suspect in an alley.

The NYPD is wary of their new poster boy, however. DiPino doesn’t fit the mold; he’s tainted by his time in Patrol, suspected of being part of a corrupt ring of cops known as the 8-9 Pad, so called because street taxes were collected on the eighth and ninth days of the month. DiPino is assigned to the shootout investigating team, which is commanded by an inspector named Rinaldo Beladon. Beladon belongs to the Internal Affairs Bureau. He knew Patti. He cleaned up the 8-9 Pad. Now he’s interested in DiPino.

Killer in a Box could have been written in the first-person. Instead, I chose a tight third-person point of view that keeps the focus on DiPino. As he learns more about the shootout, and also more about the past, the reader is right there with him every step of the way. The death of Richard Fast leads DiPino to discover that Fast had represented officers indicted in the 8-9 Pad scandal, and to an Uzbek crime family that has millions of German Marks to exchange for the newly formed euro currency. Making that connection proves crucial for DiPino on a very personal level; it moves the story toward the crime within the crime, toward discovering Patti DiPino’s real history. Patti was a civilian employee of the police department, working as an assistant to a precinct commander who was indicted after her death. That’s what DiPino has believed--until he discovers that Internal Affairs had an undercover officer inside the 8-9 Pad.

As the plot lines merge between past and present DiPino throws the rules aside, provoking his bosses and the criminals who are growing more desperate as the conversion deadline looms. Tensions between DiPino and his partner, Mickey Reidel, reach an explosive level. Mickey is the senior detective, one of the elite First Grade in the Detective Bureau. Mickey made DiPino walk the box in the opening shootout scene. He withheld backup, and then led them into a confrontation with a mobster named Frankie Maggavero, a key figure in the currency heist--and a suspect in Fast’s murder. Mickey is crazy with jealousy, tied to Richard Fast’s widow, Ellen Houk. Ellen had a child with Mickey years earlier, a secret that could get him dismissed from the force.

Like most crime novels, Killer in a Box deals with lives in crisis. DiPino has to confront the truth about his marriage to Patti and his complicity in her death. What he discovers about her demise leads to the most knee-buckling scene in this novel. During a meeting at a cop bar called The Squire, a disgraced officer warns DiPino that he is being set up for a hit. Not by mobsters, but by his fellow police officers. Incredulous at first, DiPino follows the informant’s advice: “Don’t go out the back door when you leave. Use the front door.”

After exiting The Squire, DiPino circles the block. The rear entrance to the bar is staked out by two men--one of them a cop, the other a retired cop, Bill McCaffrey. Patti’s father. Shocked and angry, DiPino follows McCaffrey home to Far Rockaway to the same house where Patti grew up, the neighborhood they planned to live in after they had kids.

(Right) Author David Thayer

Her own father? For DiPino, discovering the truth is devastating, but he presses on, flushing out Patti’s killer through a series of bold moves that threaten to push him beyond the limits any police officer must respect.

Because this is the first book in a series, I wanted to set up the characters without diluting the story or loading up on back story. I’ve written four DiPino books now, and I think they can each stand alone if read out of order. That’s my intent: that each of the novels is complete with front story pushing the pace, rather than worrying about what’s happened in the previous books. In The Working Dead, the third book in the series (following Red Mountain), we leave New York for DiPino’s hometown of San Francisco; the as-yet-unpublished fourth book, Crazy People, is a prequel, in a sense, because it has DiPino working with Mickey Reidel again on a homicide case.

Writers know they have to make many decisions as they write, that there is a discipline that shapes and sometimes limits creativity. No two books are alike even if they include series characters; some go fast, some crawl, and none of mine have turned out the way I thought they would. Sometimes the characters really do take over and we experience our version of the runner’s high. At other times, the process is a slog. I guess the author’s trick is to not allow the reader to see those paragraphs that turned into blood-sucking leeches instead of smooth prose ...

That’s what rewrites are for.

(Author photograph by Brian Myers)

Sharing Fleming’s Secrets

In the run-up to the release of the new, 23rd James Bond film, Skyfall, London’s Sunday Times includes a magazine cover feature about 007’s creator, Ian Fleming, and the time he spent working at that newspaper’s foreign desk. You’ll find the whole piece online here. Times subscribers, however, will also receive the full-size interior illustration by Peter Lorenz, who runs the blog Illustrated 007.

By the way, today happens to mark the 85th birthday of Roger Moore, the actor who portrayed Britain’s most able espionage agent in seven movies during the 1970s and ’80s. Wherever you are in the world, be sure to raise a martini in Moore’s honor.

READ MORE: “Review: 60 Minutes’ James Bond Story,” by Bill Koenig (The HMSS Weblog).

Sampling the Sites

• Today’s Web-wide collection of “forgotten books” posts concentrates on works by renowned British novelist Agatha Christie. Among the books under investigation are Unfinished Portrait, The Hound of Death, The Clocks, Death in the Clouds, The Secret Adversary, and Hercule Poirot’s Christmas. In addition, Nick Jones spotlights three of artist Kenneth Farnhill’s classic Christie dust jackets. You’ll find a full list of this week’s “forgottens” posts here.

• Meanwhile, David Suchet--who’s portrayed brainy Belgian sleuth Hercule Poirot on ITV’s Agatha Christie’s Poirot ever since 1989--has announced that the next set of Poirot episodes will be his last.

• Oh, and one of the non-Christie novels being celebrated this fine Friday is The Eighth Circle, by Stanley Ellin, a work I previously championed in The Rap Sheet.

• During the 1971-1972 TV season, veteran performer Glenn Ford starred in the CBS crime drama/Western series Cade’s County, playing “the sheriff of the fictional Madrid County, a vast and sparsely populated desert area that was apparently located well inland in the American Southwest.” Character actor Edgar Buchanan (of Petticoat Junction fame) was featured as Ford’s chief deputy, and the program’s theme music was composed by Henry Mancini (better remembered, at least in the TV world, for creating the themes for The NBC Mystery Movie and Remington Steele). Yet Cade’s County failed to catch on with viewers, and it was cancelled the following fall, its Sunday night timeslot being given over to Mannix. I haven’t seen Cade’s County in four decades. However, I discovered today that its 10th episode, “A Gun for Billy” (originally broadcast on November 28, 1971), can now be watched, in five parts, on YouTube. Part I is here. As usual with YouTube videos, it’s best to jump on the opportunity to watch this right away, because it might vanish from the site soon.

• Speaking of vintage TV series, actors Adam Scott (Parks and Recreation) and Jon Hamm (Mad Men) teamed up to remake the main title sequence to Simon & Simon, the 1981-1989 detective show starring Gerald McRaney and Jameson Parker. I don’t know why they did this, but the result is described (with tongue firmly in cheek) as ”The Greatest Event in Television History.” You can watch that remade opening here. The original (and still better) version can be enjoyed here. And a trio of early Simon & Simon introductions is here.

• The blog Radiator Heaven looks back fondly at the 1971 teleflick The Night Stalker, which introduced Darren McGavin as reporter-cum-monster hunter Carl Kolchak, a role he would go on to reprise in another TV film and a short-lived ABC series.

• One more post about last week’s Bouchercon, this coming from Janet Hutchings, the editor of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.

• What non-James Bond film “had the biggest impact on 007”?

• And I have to admit, the big-screen film Hitchcock has sort of sneaked up on me. I knew it was coming out sometime before the end of 2012, but that always seemed soooo far off. The picture--based on Stephen Rebello’s 1990 non-fiction book, Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho--is scheduled for box office release on November 23. Omnimystery News has the trailer, which looks pretty damn good.

Wade, Karras Exit the Stage

The Gumshoe Site’s Jiro Kimura brings us the news that Robert Wade, one of the two authors who, from the 1940s to the 1970s, produced dozens of novels under the joint pseudonym Wade Miller, “died on September 30 at his home in San Carlos, California, after months of declining health.” Kimura explains further:

Wade and his high-school chum Bill Miller (1920-1961) wrote their first collaborative novel, Deadly Weapon (Farrar Straus, 1946), as “Wade Miller,” featuring Lt. Austin Clapp of the San Diego Police Department. Their second novel, Guilty Bystander (Farrar Straus, 1947), was the first novel that features San Diego private eye Max Thursday. The last Thursday novel was Shoot to Kill (Farrar Straus, 1951). Under the Wade Miller and Whit Masterson pseudonyms, they also wrote non-series novels such as All Through the Night (Dodd Mead, 1955), the basis of the 1956 movie A Cry in the Night starring Natalie Wood and Raymond Burr; and Badge of Evil (Dodd Mead, 1956), which was turned into the 1958 Orson Welles film Touch of Evil. After Miller died in 1961, Wade authored 11 standalones by himself using the Masterson pen-name and his own name until 1979. He started his book-reviewing column, “Spadework,” in 1977 and continued until 2011 for The San Diego Union-Tribune. He received the 1988 Eye Award for his lifetime achievement from the Private Eye Writers of America.

Wade was 92 years old at the time of his death.

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We also bid a fond farewell to Alex Karras, the Detroit Lions defensive tackle turned actor, who died this morning at age 77.

Over the course of his screen career, Karras appeared in the western-movie parody Blazing Saddles (1974) and Blake Edwards’ wonderful Victor, Victoria (1982), as well as McMillan & Wife, M*A*S*H, and the TV mini-series Centennial. During the 1980s, Karras starred with his wife, Susan Clark, in the small-screen sitcom Webster.

CNN-TV reports that Karras perished after “a battle with kidney disease, heart disease, dementia and stomach cancer.”

READ MORE: “Alex Karras: The Guardian Obituary,” by Michael Carlson (Irresistible Targets).

Pierce’s Picks: “The Blackhouse”

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

The Blackhouse, by Peter May (SilverOak):
Scottish-born author May has had a rather varied career. He started out in journalism, but switched to TV screenwriting after being asked to adapt his first novel, The Reporter (1978), as a 13-part BBC series called The Standard. In 1996 he quit television to resume his book-writing career, producing half a dozen mysteries set in China (beginning with 1999’s The Firemaker) before embarking on a second series, this one starring Enzo Macleod, a half-Italian, half-Scottish forensic scientist turned university biology professor with a particular skill for solving cold-case crimes. (2011’s Blowback is the latest installment in the Enzo series.) And just last year, UK publisher Quercus released its edition of The Blackhouse, the first book in a trilogy, which originally saw print in French translation back in 2009. The Blackhouse takes place on the Isle of Lewis, part of Scotland’s Outer Hebrides archipelago, and introduces us to Detective Sergeant Fin Macleod, who grew up on that island but now works with the Edinburgh police. Macleod has come to the Outer Hebrides to investigate a ghastly murder that resembles another committed in the Scottish capital. One might think Macleod, still reeling from the accidental death of his only child, could find some solace in these rocky environs, with old friends. However, his boyhood among the island’s hardened souls and fundamentalist churches was less than thoroughly happy, and numerous ghosts--along with plenty of other dangers--await him there. If you enjoy The Blackhouse, keep in mind that it has two sequels: The Lewis Man, which is already available in Britain; and The Chessmen, due out on the other side of the Atlantic in January 2013.

Bullet Points: Post-Bouchercon Edition

• Bouchercon 2012 ended on Sunday. Yet bloggers who were on hand for that event continue to post their impressions. J.F. Norris has filed his second report of Friday’s multiple panel discussions (the first part is here), along with Part I of his recollections of Saturday. Meanwhile, Peter Rozovsky recounts a bit of praise he received from an Illinois librarian and Sunday’s final doings. On top of those, Cleveland’s Channel 5 news features a short video on its Web site that includes interviews with authors Reed Farrel Coleman, Val McDermid, S.J. Rozan, and Thomas Kaufman.

• How can you not read this story? “The Spy Who Loved Men: She Was Churchill’s Favourite Spy, the Inspiration for Bond’s Love in Casino Royale, and Always Had a Knife Strapped to Her Thigh.”

• After a year-long delay, all six seasons of McMillan & Wife, starring Rock Hudson and Susan Saint James--an original part of The NBC Mystery Movie--will apparently be released by Millennium Media in a DVD box set on December 4. When an announcement of this set came in the fall of 2011, it was supposed to include 21 discs and cost $149.98. Now, though, it’s set to feature 24 discs and be priced at $169.99. Since I already own the first three of this series’ half-dozen years, which I think were the best ones (before the show was extended to two hours long, and before Saint James left McMillan in Hudson’s hands alone), I may not rush out immediately to buy the set, once it goes on sale. But that does not mean it won’t wind up someplace on my Christmas list this year.

• The pseudonymous TomCat tackles another of the initial Mystery Movie segments, Columbo, opining in Beneath the Stains of Time about a Season 8 episode of that program, the locked-room mystery “Columbo Goes to the Guillotine.”

• Wow, the Croatian publishing house Algoritam sure knows how to draw attention to its translations of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels. All of them feature models portraying “Bond girls.” The Croatian photographic cover for Diamond Are Forever can be found here, while the front from Casino Royale is here. Algoritam’s Web site shows all the books, though the image quality there isn’t outstanding.

• Still more 007 news: The 2006 film Casino Royale, which introduced Daniel Craig as James Bond and also starred the enthralling Eva Green as Vesper Lynd, was chosen in an international contest as the fan favorite among Bond movies.

• And when celebrating last week’s 50th anniversary of the release of Dr. No, the earliest big-screen James Bond film, I neglected to mention this rundown of Tipping My Fedora’s favorite 007 movies--including the oft-neglected GoldenEye (1995), in which Pierce Brosnan debuted as Ian Fleming’s suave superspy.

• For what will most likely be the best center-left case for President Obama’s re-election, check out The New Republic’s endorsement.

• Evan Lewis chooses his favorite Black Mask cover ever.

• Does anybody else remember the comic book Carter Brown Illustrated? Blogger Scott of The Nick Carter & Carter Brown Blog features the cover from one issue, but I don’t see any more other info about this publication online. Perhaps it was an Australian product.

• From The Guardian’s Books Blog: “What’s literature’s most frequently mentioned song? “Hey Jude,’ apparently--you can find it in 55 books, from Stephen King's Wolves of the Calla (‘The people are real. You ... Susannah ... Jake ... that guy Gasher who snatched Jake ... Overholser and the Slightmans. But the way stuff from my world keeps showing up over here, that’s not real. It’s not sensible or logical, either, but that’s not what I mean. It’s just not real. Why do people over here sing “Hey Jude”? I don’t know’) to Toni Morrison’s Paradise (“The Cadillac was unmolested but so hot the boy licked his fingers before and after he unscrewed the gas cap. And he was nice enough to start the engine for her and tell her to leave the doors open for a while before she got in. Mavis did not have to struggle to get him to accept money--Soane had been horrified--and he drove off accompanying “Hey Jude” on his radio’).”

• When Rudyard Kipling met Mark Twain.

• Clearly, Modern Family actress Sofia Vergara has more going for her than the, uh, er, most obvious assets. The Hollywood Reporter says she will executive produce a prospective TV series titled Killer Women, “a soapy procedural revolving around a female Texas Ranger.” The Reporter adds that “The hourlong project is based on the POL-KA Productiones’ Argentine series, Mueres Asesinas, which itself is based on the book trilogy of the same name by Marisa Grinstein.”

• Classic Film and TV Café offers an A-Z list of its favorite films noir.

• Nancy Oakes has posted a fine latter-day review Margaret Millar’s 1955 novel, The Beast in View. “Don’t let its age fool you,” she writes. “Beast in View is very dark, almost noirish in tone, and probes deeply into the human psyche, in many ways much more realistically than many modern offerings.”

• Basil Rathbone finds a spot among radio’s 100 “most essential people,” as chosen by The Great Detectives of Old Time Radio.

• In his blog, The Corpse Steps Out, author Jeffrey Marks posts a defense of S.S. Van Dine (aka Willard Huntington Wright), who created the detective character Philo Vance.

• Three weeks ago, I reported that Jedidiah Ayres had been relieved of his duties as Barnes & Noble’s Ransom Notes columnist. But now he’s suddenly back, interviewing Grand Jerkins about his latest novel, The Ninth Step. So what gives? “[I]t turns out,” Ayres tells me, “I’ll probably continue to contribute pieces on a much rarer basis (rather than the regular twice a week that I did before) which is fine with me.” Good to see you on the beat again, sir.

• And here’s a frightening thought, at least to me: the eventual disappearance of what used to be called “alternative weeklies,” or just “alt-weeklies.” As Will Doig writes in Salon, “For decades, alt-weeklies have been giving hell to incompetent mayors, evil developers, and lapdog city council members with the kind of righteous rage lots of us eventually outgrow. ‘It’s the best damn journalism in America outside of a monthly national magazine,’ says Fran Zankowski, president of the Association of Alternative Newsmedia (AAN).” However, the rise of giveaway newspapers, the encroachment of chain ownership, the creation of Craigslist, and the boom in blogs have all contributed to declining fortunes for alt-weeklies. I started out working in alt-weeklies, first for Willamette Week in Portland, Oregon, and later for Seattle Weekly. Both of those papers, as well as their brethren across the United States, helped educate readers about what was right and going wrong in their hometowns, and provided them with features about books, travel, entertainment, business--pretty much everything their bigger, daily competitors could offer, except the alt-weeklies often presented crisper, less dumbed-down writing than the daily papers, and weren’t afraid to cover edgier topics or leap into the middle of controversies. In recent years, however, many of these publications--including Seattle Weekly, unfortunately--have become timid shadows of their former selves, plumping their pages with soft “consumer stories” and leaving the field of investigative journalism to ... well, nobody. I hope alt-weeklies can find a new business model to ensure their futures, and become relevant again to a distinctive audience. At this point, though, I don’t have confidence of that happening on a wide scale.

Doin’ Bogie Proud

Humphrey Bogart fans should definitely take note of this. A press release recently found its way to my e-mailbox, telling me about a new Bogart film festival to be held down in Key Largo, Florida, from May 2 to 5, 2013. That release explained, in part:

The inaugural Humphrey Bogart Film Festival is to mark 65 years since the premiere of the Key Largo, starring Bogart and his wife Lauren Bacall, which was partially filmed on the island at the top of the Florida Keys archipelago.

Celebrating the life and films of the man the American Film Institute named “America’s greatest male screen legend,” the festival is the only event of its kind to ever be backed by the Bogart Estate, which is producing the event in partnership with the Key Largo Chamber of Commerce.

"We have long been looking for a natural home for a family-backed Bogie film fest, and we believe there is no better place than Key Largo," said Stephen Humphrey Bogart, son of the iconic performer.

“My father and mother starred in Key Largo and the actual boat from The African Queen is here in Key Largo,” Bogart said. “It just feels right to honor my father and his movies in this beautiful place, which has such an organic connection to his legacy.” ...

Highlights of the film festival include a rotating selection of the performer’s classic films and a group of movies focusing on the film noir genre. Also planned are a formal Bogart Ball, an outdoor screening of Casablanca, a display of Bogart memorabilia and canal cruises on the fully restored African Queen, which is docked at the Holiday Inn Key Largo, mile marker 100.

Check here for more event information.

READ MORE: “The Secret of Humphrey Bogart’s Distinctive Voice,” by Miss Cellania (Neatorama).

Shot in Cleveland

Not only was British correspondent Ali Karim on the spot at this year’s Bouchercon in Cleveland, Ohio, bringing us all the latest news about prize winners, but he had his trusty camera in hand to capture highlights from those festivities.

Following the presentation of the Anthony Awards earlier this evening, convention-goers have now settled into full-on social (and social drinking) mode, trying to make the most of their last hours together. There’s not a great deal on the schedule for Sunday morning, so most attendees will be leaving Cleveland early tomorrow, some promising to meet again at next year’s Bouchercon in Albany, New York.

Before the gathering breaks up, though, we want to share a few of the photographs Ali shot during his first three days in Ohio’s second largest city. Even if you weren’t on hand for Bouchercon 2012, you can still enjoy a vicarious thrill by scrolling down through these.

Click on any of the images for an enlargement.


Local police help welcome authors, critics, and others to their convention venue, downtown’s Cleveland Marriott Renaissance.


Ali’s traveling companion, Shots editor Mike Stotter (left), with this event’s toastmaster, Irish author John Connolly.


Attending authors (left to right) Tasha Alexander, Kelli Stanley, Martyn James Lewis, Andrew Grant, and Zoë Sharp.


Mike Stotter with novelist Sean Chercover.


Cleveland’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, where the opening ceremonies for Bouchercon 2012 were held.


Strand Magazine editor-publisher Andrew Gulli (left) alongside Peter James, chair of Britain’s Crime Writers’ Association and one of this year’s Barry Award winners.


Left to right: The ubiquitous Mr. Stotter with Australian author Michael Robotham and the UK’s Stephen Booth.


Stotter yet again (wow, he really does have a talent for standing in the way of camera lenses, doesn’t he), this time posed before the Nautica Queen, the dining cruise ship on which the 2012 Private Eye Writers of America (PWA) awards were handed out.


Former PWA presidents Max Allan Collins, Sara Paretsky, and Robert J. Randisi, the last of whom founded that organization back in 1981 and created the Shamus Award.


Our man Ali Karim with author Christa Faust.


Canadian wordsmiths Rick Mofina and Linwood Barclay flanking Ohio thriller writer Carla Buckley.


A flash storm brought heavy rain to Cleveland on Friday night, but the city was left to dry the next morning as convention-goers enjoyed their last full day there.

(All photos © 2012 Ali Karim)

READ MORE: “Bouchercon Day 3: The Wounded and the Clueless,” by Peter Rozovsky (Detectives Beyond Borders); “Cleveland Bouchercon Day 4,” by Jeri Westerson (Getting Medieval); “Bouchercon Cleveland--Fri., Oct 5 (Part One),” by J.F. Norris (Pretty Sinister Books); “Jungle Reds Rock at Cleveland Convention,” by Rhys Bowen (Jungle Red Writers); “Greetings from Cleveland,” by Marilyn Thiele (Hey, There’s a Dead Guy in the Living Room).