Even the Toy Department Isn’t Safe!

While doing some research for a Rap Sheet piece I hope to have finished next week, I stumbled across a Christmas-related episode of Man Against Crime, the 1949-1956 TV series starring Ralph Bellamy (and later Frank Lovejoy) as tough New York private eye Mike Barnett. The episode, titled “Petite Larceny” and embedded above, was originally broadcast by NBC on December 20, 1953, and as The Classic TV Archive explains, it finds Barnett “uncover[ing] a pair of criminals disguising themselves as father and daughter, trying to steal the valuable ‘Star of Bethlehem’ diamond necklace.” If, like me, you’ve never before seen Man Against Crime (syndicated as Follow That Man), take a bit of time to enjoy this half-hour show.

These Are a Few of My Favorite Reads

What do you know, it’s not even the 1st of December yet, and I have already selected my 10 favorite crime, mystery, and thriller novels published in 2012. I won’t tell you here which works made the cut, but my Kirkus Reviews column today is devoted to it.

Click here to read more. And please feel free to add your own suggestions of the year’s best crime fiction in the Comments section at the end of that column.

* * *

I should note, too, that while 10 is a neat and conventional number for this sort of accounting, it’s also a highly restrictive one. Over the last 12 months, I have enjoyed many times more works in this genre than 10, published for the first time on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Some of those I didn’t include in my Kirkus count also deserve particular attention for the quality of their prose or storytelling. So below I offer up 25 “honorable mentions” for 2012, listed alphabetically rather than in order of preference:

• Archie Meets Nero Wolfe, by Robert Goldsborough
(The Mysterious Press/Open Road)
• Bellringer, by J. Robert Janes (The Mysterious Press/Open Road)
• Blood Lance, by Jeri Westerson (Minotaur)
• The Boy in the Snow, by M.J. McGrath (Viking)
• City of Saints, by Andrew Hunt (Minotaur)
• Dare Me, by Megan Abbott (Reagan Arthur)
• Dead and Buried, by Stephen Booth (Sphere UK)
• Death on the Pont Noir, by Adrian Magson (Allison & Busby)
• Detroit Breakdown, by D.E. Johnson (Minotaur)
• The Devil’s Cave, by Martin Walker (Quercus UK)
• Die a Stranger, by Steve Hamilton (Minotaur)
• The Double Game, by Dan Fesperman (Knopf)
• House of the Hunted, by Mark Mills (Random House)
• Kings of Midnight, by Wallace Stroby (Minotaur)
• Lake Country, by Sean Doolittle (Bantam)
• Lehrter Station, by David Downing (Soho Crime)
• Live by Night, by Dennis Lehane (Morrow)
• Mission to Paris, by Alan Furst (Random House)
• Murder Mile, by Tony Black (Preface Publishing UK)
• The Professionals, by Owen Laukkanen (Putnam)
• Robert B. Parker’s Lullaby, by Ace Atkins (Putnam)
• Standing in Another Man’s Grave, by Ian Rankin (Orion UK)
• Target Lancer, by Max Allan Collins (Forge)
• The Twenty-Year Death, by Ariel S. Winter (Hard Case Crime)
• Trust Your Eyes, by Linwood Barclay (NAL)

I don’t think you will go wrong giving any of these novels as holiday presents, or just purchasing them for your own reading pleasure.

Pierce’s Picks: “Target Lancer”

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

Target Lancer, by Max Allan Collins (Forge):
Forty-nine years ago this month, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated during a motorcade ride through the streets of Dallas, Texas. It was only the fourth time a U.S. chief executive had been murdered (following the deaths of Abraham Lincoln, James A. Garfield, and William McKinley), and though a government commission contended that ex-Marine Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone in killing Kennedy, questions still linger--more than enough to keep authors working on books about the assassination for years to come.

In Target Lancer, his 14th novel featuring Nate Heller--the intriguingly ubiquitous Chicago gumshoe who has previously “solved” the slayings of Bugsy Siegel, Amelia Earhart, Marilyn Monroe, and others--Max Allan Collins writes that he had originally intended to dispatch his protagonist “to Dallas shortly after the shooting and put him in the midst of everything. But it didn’t feel real, or right, and the massive nature of the evidence that needed presenting overwhelmed me.” Instead, his story takes place earlier in November 1963--in the Windy City, rather than Dallas. It was there, according to historical records on which Collins has built this new novel, that another attempt on JFK’s life was prepared.

Heller gets involved in this fast-rolling plot by way of a press agent friend, Tom Ellison, who does public-relations work for the Teamsters Union and asks our hero to watch his back as he makes a questionable money drop in a Chicago strip joint. While in that club, Heller is surprised to encounter a small-time hustler he’s known for years, Jake Rubinstein (now calling himself Jack Ruby), as well as “a nebbishy guy in his early twenties” named Oswald. The meeting doesn’t set off any alarm bells, though, until Ellison turns up dead in a hotel room, supposedly slain while cheating on his wife. Suddenly, everyone from Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa to mobster Johnny Roselli and U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, the president’s brother, wants an audience with Nate Heller. The AG--whose relationship with Collins’ aging private eye has hit a few bumps in the past--even recruits Haller to help the Secret Service investigate local threats against the 35th president, whose schedule will soon find him in an open car, parading through Chicago. But can Heller put together enough clues to what looks like a malevolent conspiracy to save JFK--code name “Lancer”--from being exterminated?

Author Collins is a master at integrating facts with his fiction, engineering encounters between Heller and myriad famous figures--including burlesque dancer Sally Rand, who he first got cozy with in True Crime (1984) and with whom, in Targer Lancer, he seriously discusses the possibility of marriage. Collins’ re-creation of early ’60s Chicago is convincing and detailed (sometimes a bit too detailed, as when he describes clothing styles), and his observations about politics and racism during the Kennedy era make this whole literary cocktail of sex, violence, and organized crime seem like something closer to history than mystery. The novelist has already finished a follow-up to Target Lancer called Ask Not, which he says will deal with “the dead witnesses in the wake” of the Kennedy assassination.

You Must Remember This

• It was 70 years ago today that the now-famous film Casablanca premiered at New York City’s elegant Hollywood Theater “to coincide with the Allied invasion of North Africa and the capture of Casablanca.” During that 10-week showing audiences were first introduced to nightclub proprietor Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart), his ex-lover Ilsa Lund (Ingrid Bergman), her Resistance leader husband, Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid), and club pianist Sam (Dooley Wilson), who made the song “As Time Goes By” a classic. The film didn’t go into general release, however, until January 23, 1943. Casablanca wasn’t a huge hit to begin with, but it made Bogart a romantic leading man and it has weathered well among young lovers. Click here, here, and here to read more about this 70th anniversary.

• Actress Noomi Rapace, of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo fame, guest stars in The Rolling Stones’ new “Doom and Gloom” music video.

• Because I was away for Thanksgiving, I missed last week’s news that Broken Harbour, by Tana French, won the 2012 Irish Book Award in the Crime Novel category. Also contending for that honor were Slaughter’s Hound, by Declan Burke; Vengeance, by Benjamin Black; The Istanbul Puzzle, by Laurence O’Bryan; Too Close for Comfort, by Niamh O’Connor; and Red Ribbons, by Louise Phillips.

• Speaking of commendations, Uriah Robinson (aka Norman Price) of Crime Scraps Review alerts us that author Åsa Larsson’s Till offer åt Molok has won the Swedish Crime Academy’s 2012 award for Best Swedish Crime Novel. Meanwhile, Peter Robinson’s Before the Poison captured the Academy’s Best Foreign Crime Novel prize.

• Happy 60th anniversary to The Mousetrap.

• And here’s just the thing for writers in search of a next line.

Hagman Made His Shot Count

It’s only natural that obituaries of American TV and film actor Larry Hagman, who died on Friday at age 81, should recall him best for only two roles: those of astronaut Major Tony Nelson in the sitcom I Dream of Jeannie (1965-1970) and of oil magnate J.R. Ewing in Dallas (1978-1991). Those are certainly the two programs that best broadcast his name, image, and talents.

But Texas-born Hagman, the oldest child of renowned actress-singer Mary Martin, also guest-starred during the 1960s and ’70s on a variety of small-screen crime and detective series. As blogger Terence Towles Canote notes in A Shroud of Thoughts, Hagman appeared on The Defenders, Dan August, The Name of the Game, Police Woman, McCloud, Harry O, Ellery Queen, McCoy, Barnaby Jones, The Streets of San Francisco, The Rockford Files, and McMillan & Wife. In 1974 he starred with Louis Gossett Jr. in Sidekicks, the unpicked-up pilot for a CBS-TV Western series based on the 1971 theatrical film Skin Game, in which Gossett had starred opposite James Garner. A year later, Hagman teamed with Brock Peters to do The Detective: Bull in a China Shop, a cop drama made for NBC, but so thoroughly forgotten now that it isn’t even listed in the Internet Movie Database (IMDb). And in 1976, he took the lead in another teleflick, a comedy-mystery titled The Return of the World’s Greatest Detective, playing a Los Angeles motorcycle cop named Sherman Holmes who, after suffering a bad fall, wakes up thinking he’s actually Sherlock Holmes.

The New York Times’ obit says the actor died from “complications of cancer” and that he “had been in Dallas filming an episode of the TNT cable channel’s reboot of [Dallas] ...” Given how much Hagman seemed to relish portraying the villainous (and once famously shot) J.R., it seems only fitting that he should have gone this way.

READ MORE: “Larry Hagman: A Video Retrospective of Jeannie, Dallas, BVDs,” by Scott Sandell (Los Angeles Times); “The Hat Squad: Remembering Larry Hagman,” by Tony O’B (Inner Toob).

Happy Thanksgiving, Everyone!

And we send our wishes for a happy birthday to The Man from U.N.C.L.E.’s Robert Vaughn, who turns 80 years old today!

Bullet Points: Pre-Holiday Edition

• Today marks 10 years since the premiere of Die Another Day, the 20th James Bond picture and the last of four to star Pierce Brosnan as Ian Fleming’s Agent 007. The HMSS Weblog reminds me that “Die Another Day contained numerous references to the 007 series, including a sequence where Brosnan-Bond and Q (John Cleese) are in a storage area of gadgets, including the Thunderball jet pack. Q gives Bond a watch with a laser beam (Bond’s 20th watch, we’re told). Halle Berry as Jinx, a U.S. operative, made an entrance in a bikini, modeled after Ursula Andress’s first appearance in Dr. No.” Although it received some mixed reviews, The HMSS Weblog

notes that Die Another Day was a financial hit, “with almost $432 million in worldwide ticket sales, a 19 percent jump from 1999’s The World Is Not Enough.”

• Most Rap Sheet readers have probably never read the stories of Oklahoma-born detective novelist (George) Todd Downing (1902-1974), who composed a series of books--set mostly in Mexico--about a U.S. customs inspector named Hugh Rennert. However, Curt Evans knows that fictionist’s work very well indeed. Evans is the author of Masters of the “Humdrum” Mystery (which I wrote about recently in Kirkus Reviews), and he has a book devoted to Downing’s tales, Clues and Corpses, due for publication in December. What’s more, he penned an introduction for reprints of six Downing novels released this month by Coachwhip Publications. I confess to having never read any of Downing’s books, but with all of this attention being lavished upon him, maybe I’d better try a couple.

• Another reprint worth finding, this one in e-book form: Unfaithful Wives, by Orrie Hitt, originally published in 1956.

• Roberta Alexander’s review of The Bones and the Book, a historical mystery by Jane Isenberg, was posted this morning in January Magazine. You can read it here.

• So much for widespread rumors that Christopher Fowler’s series about Arthur Bryant and John May of the Peculiar Crimes Unit had reached its end after 10 installments. As Fowler reports in his blog, “Bryant & May have been given the go-ahead in the U.S. for a further two novels! ... First up will be Bryant & May and the Bleeding Heart, in which the decrepit detectives investigate the case of a man found dead in a cemetery. I’ll rephrase that. A man thought dead, then found alive, then dead because--hell, you’ll just have to wait and see how Bryant & May deal with what appears to be the return of Resurrectionists in London graveyards.”

• I haven’t really heard much about the 2013 heist film Now You See Me. Its been described as a thriller about an elite FBI squad “pitted in a game of cat and mouse against ‘The Four Horsemen,’ a super-team of the world’s greatest illusionists, who pull off a series of daring heists against corrupt business leaders during their performances, showering the stolen profits on their audiences while staying one step ahead of the law.” But the trailer--spotlighted in Omnimystery News--does a good job of getting me interested in that big-screen flick, which stars Jesse Eisenberg and Mark Ruffalo.

• Author Sophie Littlefield (A Bad Day for Mercy) is the featured interviewee on the 90th episode of Jeff Rutherford’s Reading & Writing podcast. Listen to their exchange here.

• A sad end to what was once a technological icon.

• “The 40 Most Gruesome Deaths in Literature.” Now, there’s a headline you cannot slide by without at least giving a quick look at the piece beneath. Among the mortal endings included in this Shortlist.com compilation are several from crime, mystery, and thriller works, among them Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest and Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

• Here’s a short video from the recent Bouchercon in Cleveland, showing Max Allan Collins receiving The Hammer for his Nate Heller private-eye series. The Hammer--named in honor of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer--is given out by the Private Eye Writers of America. Click here to learn more about Collins and this prize.

• And if all goes as planned, tomorrow will bring the concluding entry in Win Scott Eckert’s series of blog posts featuring 11 covers from paperback editions of Honey West novels. Today’s photographic front from Honey on Her Tail is rather disappointing in relation to those that have come before. But we’ll see what Eckert can come up with for Wednesday. You should find his whole series of posts here.

Yorke Passes Away

Shotsmag Confidential’s Ayo Onatade brings us the sad news today that English crime novelist Margaret Yorke has died. According to another report, in Mystery Fanfare, she passed away on Saturday at age 88.

Yorke (whose real name was Margaret Beda Nicholson) was born on January 30, 1924, in Compton, Surrey, but spent her growing-up years in Dublin, Ireland. She finally moved back to England in 1937. Twenty years later, she saw her first novel published, Summer Flight. She went on to produce more than 40 other novels, five of which starred her Oxford Don sleuth, Dr. Patrick Grant. All of the Grant tales--including the first, 1970’s Dead in the Morning--were reissued in paperback by House of Stratus earlier this year.

Britain’s Crime Writers’ Association (CWA) had Yorke as its chairman in 1979 and 1980, and she won not only Sweden’s Martin Beck Award in 1982 but also the CWA’s Cartier Diamond Dagger Award in 1999.

I don’t yet see any official obituaries of Yorke, or any mention of her cause of death. But I shall update this item as more news comes in.

READ MORE: “Margaret Yorke, R.I.P.,” by Martin Edwards (‘Do You Write Under Your Own Name?’).

Pierce’s Picks: “Archie Meets Nero Wolfe”

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

Archie Meets Nero Wolfe, by Robert Goldsborough
(The Mysterious Press/Open Road):
Several years ago, when I re-read Rex Stout’s first Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin novel, Fer-de-Lance (1934), I was rather surprised at its paucity of back-story. I’d somehow forgotten that the more than 40 novels and dozens of novellas Stout penned about his rotund and eccentric, yet brilliant armchair detective and Wolfe’s more dynamic legman/sidekick, Goodwin, supplied little in the way of history for either character. Readers were told much about the everyday rituals at Wolfe’s West 35th Street brownstone and Archie’s endeavors to charm women (particularly female suspects), but considerably less of an intimate nature about Stout’s odd couple. In Archie Meets Nero Wolfe, though, Robert Goldsborough--who concocted seven Wolfe novels in the 1980s and ’90s, beginning with Murder in E Minor (1986), before moving on to unrelated literary endeavors--tries to change that a wee bit, imagining how Goodwin might have earned his memorable place in Wolfe’s retinue. Set during the waning years of America’s Prohibition era (1920-1933), Goldsborough’s tale finds the then 19-year-old, Ohio-born Archie having decamped to Gotham with hopes of expanding his realm of experience, only to wind up working as a night watchman--a job during which he shoots a couple of burglars. Promptly dismissed for being “trigger happy,” he wangles a better position with a moderately successful (and seemingly honest) private investigator by the name of Del Bascom. It’s when Bascom is recruited to help solve the kidnapping of young Tommie Williamson that Goodwin meets Wolfe. Burke Williamson, Tommie’s dad and a wealthy hotel owner, has hired Wolfe to figure out who snatched his boy from the family home, and get him back pronto, no matter the cost. As you might well guess, Archie proves more than able in resolving this mystery, impressing Nero Wolfe with both his memory and his moxie. The rest, as they say, is history. This concept could have come off as egregiously gimmicky, but Goldsborough--capturing something akin to Stout’s voice and storytelling energy--delivers a whodunit that satisfies above and beyond its place as a Wolfe prequel. Having enjoyed this novel, I now hope to go back and read Goldsborough’s earlier Wolfe/Goodwin pastiches, which have been released in e-book format.

* * *

With Thanksgiving coming next Thursday, and several other professional assignments drawing heavily on my time, I’ve decided to take a week off from writing “Pierce’s Picks.” So let me leave you with mentions of a few other new crime-fiction works to investigate while I am busy elsewhere: Road to Nowhere (Thomas & Mercer), by Jim Fusilli, about a drifter whose life takes an unexpected and violent twist after he plays Good Samaritan to a young woman; Crashed (Soho Crime), by Timothy Hallinan, which introduces burglar-turned-gumshoe Junior Bender in a story having to do with sabotage on a porn-film set and the downward-spiralling career of a once-beloved child star; and A Death in the Small Hours (Minotaur), the sixth of Charles Finch’s mysteries featuring Victorian politician and amateur sleuth Sir Charles Lenox, who in these pages finds his relaxation in a country village upset by a succession of odd vandalisms that may indicate a substantially more sinister plan in the works.

Polar Opposites No Longer

British crime reporter-turned-author David Mark took a stab yesterday at sussing out the differences between American and British crime fiction for The Huffington Post.

Mark points out, first, that the lines have blurred considerably in recent years and the “best of British crime writers can do brash, ultra-violent and cool as well as anyone. The Scandinavians are producing noir so hard-boiled that you can use it to bend horseshoes.” But, he notes, this wasn’t always the case:

The American and British schools used to be poles apart. Both were entertaining, but in markedly different ways. In British novels, a crime was an aberration. It was something that upset the balance of things, and tended to happen to bad people. It involved complicated poisons, ingenious alibis and an uncanny number of twins. It happened in stately homes in pretty rural villages and tended to be solved by a middle-class outsider who could figure everything out while doing a crossword and making scones.

In American novels, crime was a part of life. People were crooked, decent folk could get a hole blown in their guts as easily as somebody rotten to the core, and the kind of hero who put the pieces together usually had a taste for whisky, a soft spot for the ladies, and a never-ending supply of witty rejoinders.

“These days,” Mark points out, “the differences are far fewer.”

British crime writing has moved away from cozy fireside tales and locked-room mysteries. They’re brutal. They’re hard. They’re set in the real world and there are no black and whites. The hero and the villain both recognise something of themselves in the other, and good people die in horrible ways.

There has been a change in America too. Sometimes, only one or two people will die in a novel, rather than the dozen or so disposable characters that seemed to be consistently bumped off in days gone by.

Mark’s debut novel, The Dark Winter, is newly out from Blue Rider Press. Publishers Weekly liked the book well enough to give it a starred review, part of which reads: “British crime reporter Mark’s outstanding first novel, a suspenseful whodunit, introduces Det. Sgt. Aector McAvoy ... Readers will want to see more of the complicated McAvoy, who well deserves a sophisticated and disturbing plot.”

This recommendation comes as no surprise, actually. It sounds like Mark has done his homework.

The Huffington Post piece is here.

Hot Under the Collars

For Criminal Element, short-story writer Terrie Farley Moran has initiated a survey of clergymen as amateur sleuths. You can learn more on the subject at the Web site Clerical Detectives.

READ MORE: “Give Us This Day, Our Daily Sleuth: Clerical Sleuths, Part 2,” by Kerry Hammond (Criminal Element).

Fishing All the Ponds

• It’s only mid-November, but already we’re starting to see lists of the Best Crime/Mystery/Thriller Novels of 2012. The editors at bookseller Amazon this week posted their top 10 picks:

1. Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn
2. Sweet Tooth, by Ian McEwan
3. Live by Night, by Dennis Lehane
4. Phantom, by Jo Nesbø
5. Defending Jacob, by William Landay
6. Broken Harbor, by Tana French
7. Creole Belle, by James Lee Burke
8. May We Be Forgiven, by A.M. Homes
9. Afterwards, by Rosamund Lupton
10. The Thief, by Fuminori Nakamura

(Hat tip to Crime Watch.)

I can’t say that I agree with all of those choices, but that’s my prerogative as a critic and enthusiastic reader in the genre. I evidently have different tastes than the folks at Amazon. I’m currently preparing my own catalogues of “favorites,” one set to appear in my Kirkus Reviews column of November 27, with additional titles to be featured in January Magazine not long after that.

• With just a week left before Thanksgiving, you might want to give some thought to finding a holiday-appropriate crime-fiction read. Here’s Janet Rudolph’s list of Thanksgiving mysteries from 2011. And click here to see some additional selections from B.V. Lawson of the blog In Reference to Murder.

• I heard some time ago that Netflix was planning to launch a new adaptation of Michael Dobbs’ 1989 political thriller, House of Cards. But I’d forgotten just how soon it was set to appear on TV screens. As Omnimystery News reports, this Americanized version--starring Kevin Spacey as Congressman Francis Underwood and Robin Wright as his wife, Claire--will be available

“only for Netflix streaming subscribers on February 1st, 2013.” (The trailer is embedded on the left.) With Spacey acting as one of the project’s developers and executive producers (together with David Fincher, who brought us both the U.S. version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and 2007’s Zodiac), the results are likely to be worth watching. But I have to say, I don’t want this second adaptation--set on Capitol Hill, rather than in the Houses of Parliament--to supplant my memories of the original, 1990 BBC-TV version, with starred Ian Richardson as Francis Urquhart, the British Conservative Party’s ambitious, calculating, and thoroughly amoral chief whip. Richardson, a Tony Award-winning founding member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, brought the ideal balance of arrogance and odiousness to the part of Francis Urquhart (brilliantly nicknamed “F.U.”). In fact, so popular was his House of Cards on both sides of the Atlantic, that it spawned two sequels. If you have not already watched Richardson’s mini-series, you ought to do so before tuning in Spacey’s remake. You’ll find the original show’s distinctive opening here.

• The blog Tipping My Fedora has reviewed one of my favorites among Ross Macdonald’s 18 private-eye Lew Archer novels, The Zebra-Striped Hearse, first published in 1962.

• Following his previous collection of paperback spy-novel fronts (check them out here), Andrew Nette of Pulp Curry today features a second set of covers, these from stories set in Asia.

• The four-part Sky Atlantic TV drama Falcón, based on the first two of Robert Wilson’s exceptional novels about Seville-based Inspector Jefe Javier Falcón and starring Marton Csokas, began showing tonight in Britain. I hope that it will eventually become available to American television watchers like me. But in the meantime, I’m left to appreciate this minute-long trailer for the series.

• I’ve long been a fan of this movie opening.

• Congratulations to Terence Towles Canote on his 2,000th post in A Shroud of Thoughts. He has been working on that movie- and TV-oriented blog ever since 2004.

• Jeremy Lynch of Crimespree Magazine writes that the U.S. TV network The CW “is looking to develop Thomas Perry’s Jane Whitefield for a series. Jane, who has appeared in seven novels, is a Native American guide who helps people in danger disappear.” Perry’s most recent Whitefield adventure is Poison Flower, which saw print earlier this year, but he has a new, non-series suspenser, The Boyfriend, due out from The Mysterious Press in March 2013.

• Law & Order fans, take note: Overthinkingit.com has put together a database of 20 years worth of L&O episodes, including the legal outcomes of each show. What a daunting project that must have been ... Also worth checking out, by the way, is Chris Zimmer’s blog, All Things Law and Order.

• NoirCon 2012 took place last week in Philadelphia, but Cullen Gallagher is still posting about it in Pulp Serenade. You’ll find a video excerpt from Robert Olen Butler’s keynote address here. And you can watch Lawrence Block accept the David Loeb Goodis Award here.

• Meanwhile, blogger Jen Forbus offers a nice wrap-up of Muskego, Wisconsin’s Murder and Mayhem convention, which took place on Saturday, November 10. She’s also posted an almost-complete video of the interview she did there with Robert Crais.

• Jim Napier reviews Lehrter Station, the latest installment in David Downing’s World War II espionage series, for January Magazine.

• Well, that’s frustrating. In a list of the “Top 10 Most-Read Books in the World,” there’s only one crime or thriller work ... and it’s Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code.

• In an interview that appeared originally in The Browser, Keith Jeffery, author of The Secret History of MI6: 1909-1949, talks about the origins of Ian Fleming’s renowned Agent 007 and five books that influenced his own writing.

• And here’s something that every James Bond lover will love.

Hot Crimes in Cold Climes

Earlier this afternoon, a good chunk of my recent interview with M.J. McGrath, the British author of the new thriller The Boy in the Snow (Viking), was posted on the Kirkus Reviews Web site.

You can read that here.

Being brief as it is, that piece focuses primarily on McGrath’s latest book, the sequel to her highly praised debut novel, White Heat (which I named in January Magazine as one of my favorite books of 2011). While the earlier story took place in the frigid, far-north Canadian terrirory of Nunavut and on Ellesmere Island--the home of McGrath’s protagonist, Edie Kiglatuk, a half-white, half-Inuit teacher and sometime guide in her 30s--Boy moves the action west to Alaska. Together with her friend, Sergeant Derek Palliser, Edie has traveled to the so-called Last Frontier in support of her ex-husband, who is participating in the annual Iditarod dog sled race. Of course, troubles follows Edie: she discovers the frozen body of a child, left on the edge of a forest outside Anchorage under ceremonial circumstances. Unsatisfied with the efforts of local cops to get to the bottom of this sad mystery, the remarkably gutsy Edie decides to do some digging herself. It isn’t long before she’s mixing it up with members of a reportedly dangerous Russian religious sect as well as sex traffickers, and involving herself in a bizarre scheme that’s linked to the current Alaska gubernatorial campaign.

As is frequently true of the author interviews I conduct on Kirkus’ behalf, there was way more material available from my e-mail discussion with M.J. “Melanie” McGrath than I could have hoped to squeeze into my column. So I’m posting the remainder below.

J. Kingston Pierce: You worked early on in the book-publishing field, before becoming a full-time writer in your late 20s. Why did that evolution take so long?

M.J. McGrath: You can’t really write a book until you know who you are and what you have to say. Like most people, I spent my early 20s exploring that stuff. It’s possible that for me the process was accelerated after the very early death of my father. [It] kind of focuses the mind.

JKP: When did your father pass away? What age was he at the time, and how old were you?

MM: My dad died when I was 26 and he was in his late 50s. His father was an alcoholic and the family grew up pretty poor. Dad worked very, very hard to escape the circumstances of his early life and I often think it was this, coupled with the unhappiness of his childhood, which led to his early death. So I’ve spent almost the whole of my adult life without a father, and even now, I miss him.

A sister of mine once consulted a clairvoyant who told her that my dad said I was driving too fast. I did used to drive too fast, so who knows. Whatever, that clairvoyant certainly made me into a better driver.

Losing a parent early really changes you, or it changed me. I suddenly felt on the frontline of mortality. It was me next in line. So I’ve lived almost my whole adult life very aware of my own mortality in a way that many people don’t. That’s partly what drew me to crime fiction. I know what it’s like to feel: “You’re next.”

Author M.J. “Melanie” McGrath (photo © Patricia Grey)

JKP: You've taken on some journalistic assignments over the years, many of them been built around travel writing. How did you move into that field, and are you still writing about travel?

MM: I’ve never thought of myself as a travel writer, but I love to write about place and its connection to identity. In each of the different settings I’ve lived--from Las Vegas, Nevada, to Bonn, Germany, Leon, Nicaragua, and London, England--I’ve been a slightly different person, and this really intrigues me.

Would Edie Kiglatuk be the same woman if she lived in Tokyo? No, of course not! Though she’d still eat a lot of raw fish.

I can’t imagine writing about a place unless I’d been there. For The Boy in the Snow I traveled across Alaska. Turns out it’s pretty big.

JKP: How long did you spend in the 49th state, and did you have any unusual or revealing experiences that you can share here?

MM: I spent a spring and part of a summer traveling alone in Alaska, staying with local people. It’s a wonderful, fabulous place but also quite strange. The usual rules don’t apply. The whole state was just getting out of [Sarah] Palin fever. There was a bit of a Palin backlash going on. I got chatting to one of Palin’s aunts one time. She said, “I don’t know why some people don’t like Sarah. She’s such a sweet girl.” Sarah Palin’s many things but “a sweet girl” wouldn’t be at the top of my list.

I spent quite a lot of time hiking out on my own. I remember one time just outside Anchorage, I came across a bear safety notice. There was different advice for grizzlies and black bears which, as I remember, said that neither grizzlies nor black bears often attack humans, but that once they launch an attack, grizzlies can sometimes be persuaded to stop but black bears, never. The sign said, “If a black bear attacks you, fight for your life.” I was on my own, I didn’t have a gun or bear spray. Of course, an hour or so into the hike, I saw something black and furry moving through the trees making an odd coughing sound, and I remember stopping and thinking, OK, so now I might have to follow the advice board and fight for my life. I wasn’t even scared so much as really, really angry. Murderously so. I guess that was the adrenaline. I remember feeling really pissed off at the advice, at how general it was. Fight for your life. Sure, but how exactly?

In any case, lucky me, I never had to put it to the test. The creature--I never got a clear look--lumbered off. But I’ve used that feeling I had--that initial recognition of being in a life-or-death situation--in my work.

JKP: Prior to writing your first novel, you penned three non-fiction books, the best-known of which is The Long Exile (2006), about Canada’s forced relocation, in 1953, of three dozen Inuit natives from their traditional home on Hudson Bay to Ellesmere Island. I understand it was your effort on that book that inspired White Heat. But what provoked your transition from composing non-fiction to writing fiction? Was this something you’d wanted to do for a long time?

MM: I see myself as a storyteller. Some of the stories I tell are true, some are made up, though even in the ones that are made up there is usually some factual element. The Boy in the Snow deals with sex trafficking and political corruption in Alaska, and it’s true to say that Alaskan politics have been notoriously corrupt and that Anchorage has one of the highest rates of sexual crime per capita in the USA.

JKP: I guess that doesn’t surprise me. During my very first visit to the city of Anchorage, back in the late 1990s--in fact, during the cab ride in from the airport--I was offered the services of a prostitute. It definitely left an impression on me! But let me ask: Had you ever tried writing fiction before White Heat?

MM: For a long time I was very interested in hybrid forms like memoir and that’s what kept me busy. My fiction still has some factual basis in that it deals with real places and real issues. Crime is growing exponentially in parts of the Arctic. In Arctic Canada, for example, homicide is seven times the national average. So my work is partly a reflection of reality.

JKP: After studying the Inuit culture all this time, do you think you have a good grasp on the breadth of its nuances? Or are there things that you’ll simply never understand?

MM: I’m still trying to work out my own culture!

I don’t think there’s anything in Inuit culture I don’t understand, but that doesn’t mean it’s not very different in some ways from my own. Inuit have evolved to live in small bands or communities who depend completely on one another for their survival. The Inuit verb “to love” also means “to care for.” So Inuit tend to be great sharers. And they don’t often outwardly express anger or indeed any strong emotion because, not so long ago, to have done so would have been threatening to their survival. It’s also quite taboo to talk about the dead. For these reasons, there tend to be a lot of secrets in Inuit communities as well as long-held but unexpressed grudges. In that, they’re not so different from goldfish bowl communities anywhere, but it tends to be more extreme in Inuit culture.

JKP: What elements of yourself--your history, your attitudes, your behavior--have gone into the character of Edie Kiglatuk?

MM: Edie is partly a sort of fantasy version of me, the me I might be if nobody was noticing or likely to tell me off. That element of being scared shitless but going ahead anyway, for example--there’s definitely something of that in me. I think that losing a parent early focuses the mind and maybe makes you more likely to say yes to experiences, even if they’re ones that fill you with foreboding or fear.

JKP: One of the things that originally made Edie interesting was that she had such difficulties with her family and alcohol. Yet she seems to be in better control of both in this new book. Can we expect to follow a more put-together Edie from here on out, or will we see more of her weaknesses crop up in future stories?

MM: Edie is no more or less flawed than the rest of us. Like all of us, Edie’s struggles with her demons are more successful at some points in her life than at others.

JKP: White Heat succeeded in part because it was set in such an alien environment. However, for The Boy in the Snow, you leave the barrens of Ellesmere Island in favor of setting your story among the more recognizable cities and tamer frontier culture of Alaska. Why did you make this switch?

MM: I’d like to think that White Heat succeeded not simply because it was set in an alien environment, but because the characters are people readers find easy to engage with and the story gripped them.

JKP: Again, though, why--so early in your series--did you choose to leave Nunavat and write instead about Alaska? Was it simply because you wanted to write about the Iditarod, or because you thought it important to expand Edie’s character by showing how she would operate amongst a larger population of qalunaat (white men)?

MM: It was just a story I wanted to tell. In many ways the Arctic region defies national boundaries. Many people living in the Arctic, particularly indigenous people, think of themselves first and foremost as inhabitants of the Great North ... rather than as Americans, Canadians or whatever.

JKP: Will future Edie tales return to Nunavat?

MM: The story I’m writing now, the third in the Edie Kiglatuk series, is set back in Nunavut, but the fourth won’t necessary be.

JKP: Finally, I have to ask this: You mention in the biographical section of your Web site that early in your career, you had to write an essay “on whether I could prove I wasn’t a bat.” How, pray tell, does one go about proving such a thing?

MM: As I’ve matured I’ve decided that it’s OK to live with the uncertainty. I guess I could weigh up the evidence. On the one hand my eyesight isn’t so good. On the other hand my prose style is probably a bit more sophisticated than the average bat’s.

It’s All Dutch to Me

Roger “R.J.” Ellory, the well-known British author and regret-ridden sock puppet perpetrator, posted earlier today on Facebook about having been nominated for one of this year’s Crimezone Thriller Awards, given out by the Dutch magazine Crimezone. But it turns out that the nominees’ names were actually announced in late September. I just failed to see the news, as did others, including Janet Rudolph of the blog Mystery Fanfare.

Rudolph has since posted the list of nominees, which includes a number of familiar names, among them not only Ellory, but also Linwood Barclay, Lee Child, Gillian Flynn, Nicci French, Jussi Adler-Olsen, Emily St. John Mandel, and Deon Meyer. Yes, the book titles are given in Dutch, but many of them are easily deciphered.

What little I can discern from the Crimezone Web site, using online translating software, it appears that what’s on offer here is the longlist of contenders, and there will soon be a shorter inventory of finalists from which winners will ultimately be selected. I don’t see a date indicated of when those winners will be declared.

If anybody knows more about these awards, please share.

Time of the Wolfeans

Reservations are currently being accepted for the 35th annual Black Orchid Banquet, sponsored by the Nero Wolfe Literary Society. It is to be held on Saturday, December 1, at New York City’s fine Arno Ristorante (141 West 38th Street) and will include the presentation of this year’s Nero Award (click here for the list of contenders).

The banquet is the centerpiece of a weekend’s worth of events (November 30-December 2) designed to attract crime-fiction fans--particularly the followers of detectives Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin--to Manhattan. You’ll find more information about all of the festivities, plus a registration form, here.

Bullet Points: Veterans Day Edition

OK, I admit it: I was too busy preparing for and then celebrating last week’s U.S. national elections (with umpteen hours spent watching TV news programs) to do much of anything else in my spare hours. As a consequence, I let The Rap Sheet go quiet for a few days. But to borrow a call to action that President Obama often employed on the campaign trail (and which he, in turn, borrowed from a supporter in South Carolina in 2008), I’m feeling pretty “fired up” and “ready to go” again. So let’s start with some news tidbits worth sharing.

• After all of the pre-release publicity, it’s hardly surprising that the new, 23rd James Bond film, Skyfall, should have “sold $87.8 million in tickets in the U.S. and Canada this weekend, breaking the previous 007 record of $67.5 million for 2008’s Quantum of Solace.” Those stats are courtesy of The HMSS Weblog, but there’s much more being said of the movie around the far corners of the Internet. There are a couple of assessments of the picture in Salon, to be found here and here. Author Christopher G. Moore muses here on Bond’s latest body count, while Karen Slaughter contends that Agent 007’s enemies continue to make him fascinating. Flavorwire’s Jason Bailey lists what he thinks are the 10 best and worst Bond movie themes of all time. (Rest assured, both Shirley Bassey’s “Goldfinger” and Paul McCartney & Wings’ “Live and Let Live” made the cut.) The New Yorker weighs in with highlights from a 1962 interview between one of its writers, Geoffrey Hellman, and Bond creator Ian Fleming. (Only the magazine’s subscribers can access the full electronically archived piece.) Philadelphia Weekly offers some “unusual tidbits” of information about the Bond tales. And Britain’s Daily Mail looks back at 50 years worth of Bond babes.

• Although you may not have noticed, the Open Road Blog has been running a weeklong series of posts about “great detectives,” linked to the e-book re-release of Otto Penzler’s 1979 work, The Great Detectives: The World’s Most Celebrated Sleuths Unmasked by Their Authors. Installments of this series focus on female detectives, crime-fighting duos, cozy-mystery protagonists, inspectors with quirks, and more. You should be able to access all of the posts here.

• NoirCon 2012 began on Thursday in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and concluded earlier today. Among the highlights of that event were a couple of prize presentations: Veteran novelist Lawrence Block won the David Goodis Award, while editor, author, and bookseller Otto Penzler received the Jay and Deen Kogan Award for Literary Excellence. To read more about NoirCon, click here, here, here, here, here, and here.

• Once-famous buggies of the boob tube.

• Travel back with me now to the 1974 pilot episode of James Garner’s The Rockford Files, available in its entirety on YouTube. At least for the time being. It co-stars the entrancing Lindsey Wagner (in her pre-Bionic Woman days) and Robert Donley as Rockford’s father, a role that went to Noah Berry when the series was picked up by NBC. To me, this remains one of the best American TV pilots ever made.

• You can add this DVD set to my Christmas list: Hawkins: The Complete TV Movie Collection. For those of you who don’t remember, in 1973 CBS-TV convinced actor Jimmy Stewart to star in a series called Hawkins, in which he played an often folksy but renowned criminal defense attorney from West Virginia, who took on high-profile murder cases around the country. The plan was to place Hawkins in a rotation with Shaft, the small-screen adaptation of Richard Roundtree’s big-screen films. The two would alternate in a 90-minute slot on Tuesday nights. Sadly, only the pilot and seven other episodes of Hawkins were produced, before the series was cancelled. Several years ago, I purchased a couple of the eps of Hawkins on VHS tape, but was convinced I would never see the whole show again. Boy, was I wrong! Following its release last year of Shaft: The TV Movie Collection, Warner Archive is now preparing to market all eight of the Hawkins mini-films in a four-disc, MOD (manufacture on demand) set priced at $39.95. According to the Web site TV Shows on DVD, “It will initially be available only from [Warner] ... , strictly to USA customers. Later on, however, this will also be for sale from Amazon’s CreateSpace MOD program, where international customers will be able to buy it, too.” You’ll find the cover image and ordering info here.

• Hot stuff! Today kicks off 11 straight days of Honey West book covers on author-editor Win Scott Eckert’s blog. The first front posted for your entertainment is from the 1957 Pyramid Books edition of This Girl for Hire, with artwork by Harry Schaare.

• This week’s new short story in Beat to a Pulp is titled “Loose Ends.” The author is Garnett Elliott from Tucson, Arizona.

• While we’re waiting to hear whether the American adaptation of The Killing will be revived by Netflix, the third and final season of the original Danish version of that show (aka Forbrydelsen) will begin its 10-episode run in Britain, with English subtitles, next Saturday, November 17, at 9 p.m. BBC4 provides this plot synopsis:

Denmark is the midst of a fiercely contested election race, set against the backdrop of the financial crisis. With 10 days to go to the election, Detective Chief Inspector Sarah Lund prepares to celebrate her 25th year in the police and looks forward to the prospect of a new job in the force. But her relative peace is shattered when unidentified body parts are found at Copenhagen dock only hours before a scheduled visit by the Prime Minister.

(Hat tip to It’s a Crime! [Or a Mystery].)

• Robin Jarossi offers more on The Killing, Series 3, here.

• Also worth watching, if--unlike yours truly--you happen to be living in the UK: Falcón, a four-part TV drama based on the first two of Robert Wilson’s excellent novels about Spain-based Inspector Jefe Javier Falcón, The Blind Man of Seville and The Silent and the Damned. As EuroCrime reports, Falcón will begin this coming Thursday, November 15, at 10 p.m. on Sky Atlantic. Residents of Britain and Ireland can watch a trailer here.

• For his (?) 300th post, the blogger known by the pseudonym The Puzzle Doctor (hereafter referred to as “PZ”), at In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, has posted a list of the top five novels by British author and historian Paul C. Doherty. Since Doherty has been extraordinarily prolific over the decades, and since I have not read as widely in his oeuvre as has PZ, I shall refrain from making a judgment on these selections. But I am happy to see that the choices are spread across Doherty’s several series. You can check out PZ’s picks here.

• Sex sells ... coffins?

• Well-respected Scottish author Val McDermid makes some predictions, for the blog Crime Fiction Lover, of which new(ish) mystery and thriller novelists she thinks are destined for greatness. I’m sorry to say that I have read work by only one of the people she names. I had better remedy that shortly ...

• Following up on his last gallery of cheesy espionage/action paperback covers, Retrospace’s “Boogie Pilgrim” is offering another collection, this one featuring works by John Creasey, Helen MacInnes, and Rod Gray (the creator of Eve Drum, “The Lady from L.U.S.T.”). Monsieur Pilgrim’s latest cover compilation is here.

• A nicer array of spy-novel fronts can be found in Pulp Curry.

• TV-obsessed Mystery*File contributor Michael Shonk has filed what might be his last post for a while about the underappreciated 1974-1976 ABC-TV series Harry O, which starred David Janssen as a cop turned private eye in San Diego (later Los Angeles). There are actually five parts to Shonk’s series: “Harry O: ‘Gertrude,’” “Harry O in San Diego,” “Harry O--Season 1, Part 2,” “Harry O--Season 2, Part 1,” and “Harry O--Season 2, Part 2 (1976).” Whether you harbor positive memories of Janssen’s cancelled-too-soon series, or want to learn more about it, these posts are worth reading.

• I had the welcome opportunity, a couple of years back, to interview Philip Kerr, British author of the award-winning Bernie Gunther crime series. Now I see that novelist-blogger J. Sydney Jones has put his own questions to Kerr, with interesting results.

• The British Crime Writers’ Association has opened its 2013 competition for the Debut Dagger Award. The deadline for submitting 3,000-word entries is February 2.

• And what could be more appropriate today than Janet Rudolph’s post about Veterans Day-related mystery fiction?

Just When You Thought It Was Gone ...

Good grief, why won’t AMC-TV’s The Killing--a disappointing American version of the popular Danish program Forbrydelsen--just go away? The show was officially cancelled last summer. Now, though, there are reports that AMC is conspiring with Netflix to develop a third season of The Killing, possibly for initial release through Netflix’s on-demand streaming media service.

Series stars Mireille Enos and Joel Kinnaman are evidently already under contract to participate in a third season, so there’s no problem there. But how many people would give this resurrected drama another chance, after being so often let down by its storytelling?

Certainly not the folks at Omnimystery News.

In a recent post, they declared that showrunner Veena Sud’s further involvement in The Killing would be a deal-breaker. “The only way we’d return,” they insisted, “is if she publicly apologized for the way she handled the first two seasons of the series and then promised to create a positive viewer experience for the third season. Since that’s not likely to happen, we simply don’t have the time and energy to commit to being deceived again by her, and thus we’ll likely give the third season--if it comes to be--a pass.”

I regretfully agree.

“Dr. Watson, Mr. Sherlock Holmes”

We’re approaching the 125th anniversary of Sherlock Holmes’ introduction to the reading world. His first adventure, in A Study in Scarlet, was serialized in Beeton’s Christmas Annual in late 1887. Gregory McNamee commemorates this occasion with a short piece for the Kirkus Reviews Web site. It begins:

It was an inspired but utterly accidental moment when Arthur Conan Doyle, a Scottish doctor struggling to establish himself both as a physician and as a writer in late Victorian London, drew upon the habits of an irascible medical school mentor to concoct a character that he pegged as a “consulting detective,” an utterly newfangled job description.

You can enjoy the full article here.

Pierce’s Picks: “Standing in Another Man’s Grave”

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

Standing in Another Man’s Grave, by Ian Rankin (Orion UK):
Scottish author Ian Rankin sent his long-running and persistently rebellious Edinburgh copper, Detective Inspector John Rebus, off into an unwelcome retirement in Exit Music (2007). Or at least, that’s what his many fans thought. But suddenly, Rebus back. He’s a civilian consultant, hired to look into the very cold cases of five young women who disappeared over a decade-long period. Nobody on the force who’s worked with Rebus before much looks forward to assisting him in his latest pursuit of odd hunches, including his younger ex-partner, Siobhan Clarke, whose career might be endangered by Rebus’ antics. Rebus’ familiar nemesis, mob boss Big Ger Cafferty, shows up in these pages to nettle and threaten the retired detective. So, too, does internal affairs investigator Malcolm Fox, about whom Rankin has already penned two post-Rebus novels, The Complaints and The Impossible Dead. Fox is hoping, it seems, to protect Siobhan from her old associate, a man he deems “the loosest of canons.” Yet the scenes in which Fox and Rebus appear together--damning each other the whole time--are some of the most entertaining, and they suggest just how much those two characters are flip sides of the same coin. Scottish politics and the country’s current independence movement figure into this novel’s story line, and as Rebus wheels about the countryside in his familiar Saab--a vehicle nearly as geriatric and wounded as the retired sleuth himself--the author muses pleasantly on Scotland’s past and present. The plot here isn’t as complicated as you’ll find in some of this author’s previous works, but its mounting drama, character explorations, and humor make Standing in Another Man’s Grave well worth the reading time. Although Rankin’s book is new this week in Britain, it won’t be released in the States until January 2013.

Don’t Forget to Vote!

By this point, few people need reminding that tomorrow, November 6, is Election Day in the United States. Billions of dollars have been spent, advertising on behalf of Democratic and Republican candidates around the country--including $1 billion on the presidential race alone. And TV news and opinion programs have been crowded for months with pundits and partisans of all sorts, trying to analyze who’s ahead in the races and what the fallout of projected wins might be. Despite efforts by Republican officeholders in Ohio and Florida, as well as by right-wing tea party activists, to hold down early voting efforts (which favor Democrats), voters seem highly engaged in this election, and the Pew Research Center is expecting a “big turnout.”

Yet there are still people who don’t think it’s important to vote. They may be frustrated that their views aren’t represented by the candidates, or they don’t care to be part of the political process and don’t see the issues at stake as important to their lives.

Since this isn’t a politics-oriented blog, I won’t go on about the specifics of what is at stake in this election. (If you’d like to read more on that, click here.) The bottom line is that your vote decides your future, in concrete ways, as well as the futures of your community and your nation. It is not a right to waste. If you haven’t already cast a ballot, please remember to do so tomorrow.

The Story Behind the Story: “Hell City,” by Allen Shadow

(Editor’s note: In this 39th installment of The Rap Sheet’s “Story Behind the Story” series, we welcome Allen Shadow (aka Allen Kovler), a New York poet, songwriter, blogger, and now author of the e-book Hell City, which Kirkus Reviews called “an entertaining mystery that borrows from the best in mystery and noir, while adding a heavy dose of modern paranoia.” Below, Shadow fills us in on some of his new novel’s history.)

It happened one night. The idea for my novel, Hell City, that is. But as we know, Rome wasn’t built in a single day. So, for the full back story to this novel--one in which the city of New York qualifies as a central character--I’ll have to ask you to join me in the proverbial time machine.

Let’s go back to the era when this author was 5 years old, standing on a rooftop in West Harlem, marveling at the hard dark and light of the Meatpacking District while on a trip to my father’s bookkeeping office--trucks with half cows, men with blood-smeared aprons, crows wheeling under the vaulted girders of the West Side Highway viaduct. Then came the poems, during my college days and beyond. Poems that refracted the chiaroscuro of the city’s façades, the dolor of her teeming but lonely streets. Poems that found their way into many a small-press magazine, into chapbooks. Poems that caused Library Journal to cite my work for its “startling imagery.”

Along the way, I worked in the city’s warehouses, drove her cabs, wrote for her newspapers, and sang in her nightclubs. Her underbelly was my beat, forging a gritty, cinematic prose style.

Then, a decade ago, I put out my first rock album, King Kong Serenade. The record was a paean to the city, with songs about the ghosts of Broadway, of Times Square, of Coney Island, songs with lines like “This is Hopper’s town, Edward Hopper’s town.”

New York was a character, if you will, in that album, and she’s a character once again in Hell City. This novel’s protagonist--a former NYPD homicide dick turned counter-terrorism commander--and his colorful crew patrol a shadowy world of clues that takes them through the city’s grittiest precincts, as all the while Gotham’s great façades loom in the background: old pier houses, factories, hotels--again, the city’s dark side.

Now I can flash forward to that night, the single evening the idea for Hell City presented itself. I can’t reveal the precise circumstances, since they would spoil this thriller’s ending, but I can say the plot surrounds another major terrorist attack on New York City. The action in the novel feels like it’s ripped from today’s news pages. Yes, Osama bin Laden is dead. Yes, al-Qaida is on the run. And, yes, the Middle East and Africa are in turmoil. But, al-Qaida and its many affiliates are metastasizing, reforming new alliances, and fomenting new plots. The question is, can one of these new-generation jihadi groups pull off another “big one” in New York? As the subtitle of Hell City suggests, “Al-Qaida isn’t dead yet. New York may be.”

This time, Americans play an integral role in the new generation of al-Qaida, or Qaida 2.0 as it is called. The American jihadists are inspired by Internet imams who have taken on rock-star personae. Prior to starting this novel, I had paid much attention to such real-life figures as the late Anwar al-Awlaki, who had influenced a number of Americans to commit lone-wolf acts, homegrown terrorists like Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan, who shot and killed 13 people at Fort Hood, and the Christmas Day bomber and his attempt on an airliner over Detroit, both in 2009. There was the Times Square bomber months later. It seemed like there was a new American-led plot every few weeks: Jihad Jane, a Colorado cell with a plot for New York’s subways--the list went on, and it still does.

I realized that the constant drumbeat of high alerts was having a “boy who cried wolf” affect on the American public. The typical subway rider couldn’t keep up with it all. He was becoming inured to the threats and had also decided that al-Qaida was decimated post-bin Laden, that all they could manage was the lone-wolf attack, that they couldn’t pull off another big one like 9/11. So, he went to sleep on the whole thing.

Well, that attitude sounded fairly familiar to me. It reminded me of our original encounter with al-Qaida, the first attack on the World Trade Center, in 1993. I’m sure there are young adults today who don’t know there even was a “first” attack. I thought about how that botched attempt to bring down one of the towers in ’93 left us with the impression that al-Qaida was the terrorist “gang that couldn’t shoot straight.” To the guy on the subway, it was like, “You #%@! kidding me, a blind cleric from Jersey City? What’s this, the Three Stooges?” So he went to sleep on them, as most of us did. Then--boom, bam, boom--three airliners in three places: 9/11. If that wasn’t a wake-up call on the capabilities and the long-term tenacity of al-Qaida, I don’t know what is.

So one night the scenario that Qaida 2.0 just might be able to pull off another “big one” in New York was born. And so began Hell City, a novel with a vigilante hero, Jack Oldham, who tracks the newest generation of American-born jihadists through the darkest precincts of New York. And while the city’s dark side is in evidence, this novel’s picaresque characters provide for a darkly comic, if terrifying tale. And, perhaps my favorite character, the city of New York, is in play in all her glory.

Meet the Prez

With only four days left now before Election Day--and with more than a few American voters ready to have the whole thing over already--Janet Rudolph today posts a list of presidential crime fiction. Among the titles mentioned are: The Manchurian Candidate, by Richard Condon; Sleeping Dogs, by Ed Gorman; The Kidnapping of the President, by Charles Templeton; Madam President, by Anne Holt; and Mr. President, Private Eye, edited by Martin Greenberg and Francis M. Nevins.

You’ll find the full rundown of options here.

Pierce’s Picks: “City of Saints”

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

City of Saints, by Andrew Hunt (Minotaur):
In late February 1930, the corpse of 32-year-old Dorothy Dexter Moormeister was discovered on a road near the western edge of Salt Lake City, Utah. She’d been run over repeatedly by a car, which left most of her bones crushed. Local police investigated. They questioned her much older husband, Dr. Frank Moormeister, a prosperous physician with a less public sideline: performing abortions for local prostitutes. They also quizzed a man who’d purportedly encouraged Dorothy to divorce her hubby and swindle him in the process, and followed up on bizarre rumors of the deceased’s philanderings, one of which implicated a Persian prince. Ultimately, though, the murder of this socialite was declared “unsolved.”

In City of Saints, Andrew Hunt--who was born in Salt Lake City but now teaches history in Ontario, Canada--uses the Moormeister homicide as the basis for a dramatic and elaborate mystery that, prior to its publication, won the 2011 Tony Hillerman Prize. In these pages we’re introduced to Salt Lake County Deputy Art Oveson, a 29-year-old husband and father, and the youngest member of a family of Mormon lawmen. He and his more rough-mannered partner, Roscoe Lund, are summoned on a chilly winter’s night to investigate the slaying of Helen Kent Pfalzgraf, the youthful and eye-catching wife of a wealthy, well-respected doctor, who has been run over repeatedly by somebody behind the wheel of her own Cadillac.

Oveson’s boss, Sheriff Fred Cannon--currently engaged in a “dirty” race to retain his job--wants this case wrapped up posthaste. He also wants Oveson to act as his “spy,” keeping an eye out for any mischief among the other Mormon deputies (one of them named Romney!) that might put Cannon in a bad light at voting time. But as Oveson and Lund pursue leads, they find no easy answers in Helen Pfalzgraf’s killing. Is there a connection, for instance, between her demise and the hit-and-run death of Dr. Pfalzgraf’s first wife more than two decades before? Could this latest tragedy be linked to the murder of an abortionist against whom Dr. Pfalzgraf had campaigned? And what truth might there be to talk of Mrs. Pfalzgraf having been engaged in extramarital affairs with a Hollywood star and a foreign prince she’d met during a European excursion?

Oveson can appear naïve at times, causing himself trouble. As this mystery unfolds, however, he shows that he’s smarter than many observers expect, and prepared to do whatever needs doing to ensure that something looking vaguely like justice is achieved in the end.

Historian Hunt expertly re-creates Depression-era Salt Lake City, without larding on excessive detail, and does an equally astute job of building a credible relationship between seeming opposites Oveson and Lund. The Utah capital isn’t a common setting for crime fiction (Robert Irvine’s old Moroni Traveler series may represent its best-known previous use), but if the Stetson-wearing Art Oveson and his creator can find new cases there as engaging as this first one, it might well be worth repeated literary visits in the future.

* * *

Also worth looking up this week: Return of the Thin Man (Mysterious Press), edited by Richard Layman and Julie M. Rivett. It contains the screen stories for two Nick and Nora Charles mysteries that Dashiell Hammett concocted at Hollywood’s behest during the 1930s. Hammett’s only Nick and Nora novel, The Thin Man, had been published in 1934 and was quickly adapted by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) for the silver screen. Its handsome profits led MGM to ask for more material featuring those same bibulous crime-solvers. After considerable fuss (and more than a little imbibing of his own), Hammett finally produced After the Thin Man, which inspired a 1936 film of the same name, and Another Thin Man, the basis for the 1939 follow-up. His After the Thin Man treatment was previously published during the 1980s in The New Black Mask magazine, appearing in two parts--in issues five and six. However, the novella Another Thin Man might be offered here for public consumption for the first time. Although these stories show the same sort of humor and plotting skills Hammett brought to his original Thin Man novel, they were written specifically for film adaptation, so lack the familiar descriptive and binding material of most printed fiction. Still, they are excellent artifacts that should delight the author’s myriad fans.