Independent Thinkers

OK, here’s the first reason to interrupt my hard-won week’s vacation: the announcement today of nominees for the 2013 Dilys Award. As you might recall, this commendation is given out annually by the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association (IMBA) to “the mystery title of the year which the member booksellers have most enjoyed selling.” The contenders are:

• Grandad, There’s a Head on the Beach, by Colin Cotterill (Minotaur)
• Broken Harbor, by Tana French (Viking)
• Mr. Churchill’s Secretary, by Susan Elia MacNeal (Bantam)
• The Expats, by Chris Pavone (Crown)
• Before the Poison, by Peter Robinson (Morrow)

A winner will be named during this year’s Left Coast Crime convention, to be held in Colorado Springs, Colorado, from March 21 to 24.

(Hat tip to Mystery Fanfare.)

Overdue Downtime

I don’t take many professional breaks; I’m a diligent and dedicated worker, even if my paychecks haven’t always reflected that fact. However, after the long business hours of the last couple of months, I am feeling in need of a brief vacation. So, unless something particularly noteworthy occurs, I shall take the next week off from The Rap Sheet. I’ll see you back here during the first full week of February.

Lusting After Loveys

Nominees for the 2013 Lovey Awards were announced today by Love Is Murder, the mystery-fiction conference set to take place from February 1 to 3 at the InterContinental Hotel in Rosemont, Illinois, just outside of Chicago. These commendations will be presented during the Saturday evening awards dinner/banquet.

Best First Novel:

• Courting Murder, by Bill Hopkins (Southeast Missouri State
University Press)

• Souljourner, by D. L. Marriott (CreateSpace)

• Perfidy, by Michele May (True Grit)

• In Her Shadow, by August McLaughlin (Dystel & Goderich)

Best Traditional/Amateur Sleuth:

• Where Did You Die, by Patricia K. Batta (Lillimar)

• The Trashy Gourmet, by David Ciambrone (L & L Dreamspell)

• A Small Hill to Die On, by Elizabeth Duncan (Minotaur)

• The Light Keeper’s Legacy, by Kathleen Ernst (Midnight Ink)

• Dabblers, by Kathryn Flatt (Write Words)*

• The Lost Artist, by Gail Lukasik (Five Star)

• Emma Winberry and the Evil Eye, by Helen Osterman
(Weaving Dreams)

• Murder in the Round, by Patricia Rockwell (Cozy Cat Press)

• Crosscurrents, by Powell Smily, with Susan Smily and Honora Finkelstein (El Amarna)

Best Thriller:

• Hitman: Damnation, by Raymond Benson (Del Rey)

• The Black Stiletto: Black & White, by Raymond Benson (Oceanview)

• The Ninth Day, by Jamie Freveletti (Harper)

• Company Orders, by David J. Walker (Allium Press)

Best Police Procedural:

• Portrait of Murder, by Rob Riley (Orange Hat)

• The Sons of Jude, by Brandt Dobson (Monarch)

Best Paranormal/Sci-fi:

• Last Wool and Testament, by Molly MacRae (Signet)†

• Walk-In, by Honora Finkelstein and Susan Smily (Dark Oak)

• When the Moon Is Gibbous and Waxing, by Angela Myers
(Etopia Press)

Best Historical:

• Archie Meets Nero Wolfe, by Robert Goldsborough
(Mysterious Press/Open Road)

• Death at Woods Hole, by Frances McNamara (Allium Press)

• The Bootlegger’s Nephew, by Sara Wisseman (Hilliard & Harris)

Best Suspense:

• A Bitter Veil, by Libby Fischer Hellman (Allium Press)

• Moonlight for Maggie, by Karen L. Syed (Echelon Press)

Best Series:

• Get Fluffy, by Sparkle Abbey (Bell Bridge)

• Thy Will Be Done, by Richard M. Davidson (RADMAR)

• The Janus Reprisal, by Jamie Freveletti (Grand Central)

• Killerfind, by Sharon Woods Hopkins (Deadly Writes)

• Trickster’s Point, by William Kent Krueger (Atria)

• The Watch, by Jerry Peterson (CreateSpace)

Best Short Story:

• “Harry’s Fall from Grace,” by Luisa Buehler (Amazon Digital)*

• “The Love Nest,” by Sharon I. Cook (from The Legend of Judgment Rock and Other Mystery Stories; Amazon Digital)*

• “Capital Partners,” by Libby Fischer Hellman (from Writes of Spring, edited by Gary Shulze and Pat Frovarp; Nodin Press)

• “Early’s Christmas,” by Jerry Peterson (from A James Early Christmas and Other Stories of the Season; CreateSpace)

• “The Case of the Extra Ingredient,” by Mary Welk (from Hot Crime, Cool Chicks: An Anthology; Amazon Digital)

The Lovey Awards, originally called the Reader’s Choice Awards, have been part of Love Is Murder since 2000. Winners are selected by conference attendees.

* From what I can tell, these are only available as e-books.

† Molly MacRae’s Last Wool and Testament was originally listed as a contender in the Best Traditional/Amateur Sleuth category. But, according to Love Is Murder organizer Juli Schatz, it was moved into the Paranormal/Sci-Fi category after the original notice of nominees was sent to the media.

Pierce’s Picks: “Dead Man’s Land”

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

Dead Man’s Land, by Robert Ryan (Simon & Schuster UK):
This novel was published in Great Britain at the beginning of the month; but as I live way out here in Seattle, and there’s no U.S. edition of Dead Man’s Land (in fact, author Robert Ryan doesn’t seem to have been published much in the States at all), I only recently received a copy of the book and found the chance to read it.

I am very glad I did.

As Ryan explains in a short essay for Crime Time, Dead Man’s Land was not originally his idea. His publisher was shopping around for “a work of fiction featuring a ‘detective in the trenches of World War I,’” and Ryan came up with a splendid solution: Why not send Dr. John H. Watson, of Sherlock Holmes fame, to the front lines in France, where he’d find himself involved in a homicide investigation? Of course, Watson would’ve been fairly old in 1914, when the action here takes place (in his early 60s, by most estimates). That, however, proved to be a surmountable problem. In Dead Man’s Land, we find Watson--who, after all, was a battlefield surgeon before becoming the chronicler of a crime-solver’s escapades--in Flanders Fields as a major with the Royal Army Medical Corps, and “an expert in the new techniques of blood transfusion.”

He becomes grudgingly accustomed to the quotidian deaths of thousands of soldiers, the persistent bomb barrages, the pressures that weigh heavily upon physicians and nurses under such circumstances, and the appalling atmosphere of the trenches (“black tar from lamp wicks, the constant cigarettes, not to mention the tang of rat piss and the sour smell of unwashed clothes”). Yet, when a sergeant suddenly perishes of an elusive ailment that turns his skin blue and his hands into claws, the horrific routines of war are upset. Blame is cast initially upon Watson’s blood transfusions; but when other, similar deaths are discovered, the old man’s sublimated sleuthing sensitivities are aroused, and his pursuit of a murderer with old grudges to exercise draws him into a deadly confrontation that must finally be settled in the worst possible place: the bleak no-man’s-land between the opposing armies.

Ryan’s portrayal of battlefield conditions is thorough and captivating, his cast of suspects sufficiently well drawn to have fooled me, and his capturing of Holmes’ associate faithful enough to have won the backing of Arthur Conan Doyle’s estate. The author has left himself room to write a sequel. I hope he will do just that.

Celebrating Web Wordsmiths

First of all, congratulations to Sergio Angelini, whose excellent blog, Tipping My Fedora, celebrates its second anniversary today. Sergio has done some fine work exploring mystery-fiction classics, both of the printed and film/television sort. As a consequence, Tipping My Fedora is a regular stop on my circuits through the Web.

I owe another thanks to Sergio, as well, for he’s just selected The Rap Sheet as one of the best blogs of 2012. I am certainly pleased to see that my humble efforts, and those of my occasional, talented contributors, are appreciated by readers.

This awards program was evidently started by the folks behind The Thought Palette, and has spread quickly. Here are the rules:

1. Select the blogs you think deserve the “Blog of the Year 2012” Award.
2. Write a blog post and tell us about the blogs you have chosen--there’s no minimum or maximum number of blogs required--and “present” them with their award.
3. Please include a link back to this page, “Blog of the Year 2012” award at The Thought Palette, and include these “rules” in your post.
4. Let the blogs you have chosen know that you have given them this award and share the “rules” with them.
5. You can now also join the Facebook group--click “like” on this page, “Blog of the Year 2012 Award” Facebook group, and then you can share your blog with an even wider audience.
6. As a winner of the award, please add a link back to the blog that presented you with the award--and then proudly display the award on your blog and sidebar.

I have periodically listed other crime-fiction-oriented “Weblogs” and bloggers meriting particular attention, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t mention them again. So here are those to which I present Blog of the Year 2012 honors:

• Beneath the Stains of Time (TomCat)

• Crime Fiction Lover

• Crime Time Preview (Robin Jarossi)

• Criminal Element

• Davy Crockett’s Almanack of Mystery, Adventure, and the Wild West (Evan Lewis)

• Detectives Beyond Borders (Peter Rozovsky)

• ‘Do You Write Under Your Own Name?’ (Martin Edwards)

• Existential Ennui (Nick Jones)

• Getting Away with Murder (Mike Ripley)

• In Reference to Murder (B.V. Lawson)

• In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel (“Puzzle Doctor”)

• Mrs. Peabody Investigates (Katharina Hall)

• The Passing Tramp (Curtis Evans)

• Past Offences (Rich Westwood)

• Pretty Sinister Books (John “J.F.” Norris)

• Pulp Curry (Andrew Nette)

• The Venetian Vase (Steven Powell)

• Up and Down These Mean Streets (Don Herron)

And of course, let me mention again Tipping My Fedora.

Yes, I know: these sorts of commendations have minimal value. But the more publicity I can offer to other high-quality blogs, the better. Writing one of these Web resources may seem easy, and it can be--initially. However, maintaining a thoughtful, informative blog over the long-run is damnably difficult. I know; I’ve been writing The Rap Sheet for more than six years already.

Congrats to all of my Blog of the Year nominees. Long may you thrive!

Wheels of Misfortune

In my Kirkus Reviews column today, I look back at Erle Stanley Gardner’s other great mystery-fiction series, that one starring the odd-couple detective duo of Bertha Cool and Donald Lam. Specifically, I recall 1941’s Spill the Jackpot, the series’ fourth installment, which finds the pair in Las Vegas, trying to track down a runaway fiancée and get to the bottom of a slot machine racket.

You will find that piece here.

Serial Errors: Reality and Myth in the Investigation of Serial Murders

(Editor’s note: This essay comes to The Rap Sheet from D.L. Johnstone, author of the best-selling 2012 crime thriller Chalk Valley, as well as the e-book Furies, released last month. Johnstone lives in the Toronto, Ontario, area with his wife, their four kids, and their half-dog/half-Sasquatch, Charlie.)

“He wondered for the hundred and first time if he had arrested the Chalk Valley killer, caught him dead to rights, and was losing him to the system.” -- from Chalk Valley

Novels about serial-murder investigations have been a staple subgenre of the thriller oeuvre for decades. Centuries, I suppose, if you include tales of Bluebeard and his ilk. In the traditional story arc, the heroic detective must sort through the clues to find the devious, unknown mastermind, solving whatever intricate puzzle the killer has set for him, against the backdrop of a ticking clock. It essentially ends when the killer is unmasked. Personally, I love these types of thrillers. I even wrote one (Furies). But that’s not how actual serial-murder investigations take place. Not even close. They’re a lot more complicated, they take far longer, they’re more political, more bureaucratic, and they are far more painful to those connected to the investigations.

When I was planning Chalk Valley, I decided I wanted to tell a different story than the usual serial-murder tale. I wanted to write one that explored the human drama of these investigations. There’s no mystery who the killer is in Chalk Valley. His name is revealed in the first sentence of the book, and by the end of the first chapter, it’s clear what Phil Lindsay is all about. It saves countless paper cuts from readers skipping to the end of the book for the Big Reveal. Chalk Valley is a cat-and-mouse portrayal of how a small-town cop forces his way through the system, bureaucracy, politics, and even the lead task force to stop Lindsay. And all the while the cop fears additional victims will be taken because he’s not doing more. That makes for a very different kind of thriller.

First myth: the murderers. Serial killers are not criminal masterminds. They’re deviant sociopaths who know how to work the system. They like to dominate others, degrade them, fill them with dread. The Three D’s. The successful ones who manage to evade capture for weeks, months, or even years are clearly bright enough, able to fool their victims and their families and friends, staying on the loose all the while. But they’re not Hannibal Lecters. Nor are they the wild-eyed nutbars you see pictures of in post offices. Those guys are pretty easy to spot--they’re the usual suspects. Serial killers are often just out there in the community. They may have families, 9-to-5 jobs, mortgages, car payments. And maybe a secret room in their man-cave. Frankly, that’s a far scarier proposition to most of us, thinking that such a killer could be living right next door.

Personal revelation moment: Scarborough, Ontario’s Paul Bernardo started out as the mysterious “Scarborough Rapist,” haunting the neighborhood in eastern Toronto where I grew up, terrorizing the citizens for a couple of years before he graduated to become a serial murderer with his creepy little wife, Karla Homolka, 100 miles down the road. People like them get off on not only their murders, but also on the impact those killings have on society. It gives them the opportunity to feel powerful, and to relive the crime over and over again with every news story. But Bernardo was no mastermind, he was just some vile deviant. He also went to my high school. I knew his sister. Hell, his family lived half a mile from where I did.

Second myth: the detectives. OK, this gets a little complicated. If the murders all take place in one big city, the investigation, while still dreadfully difficult and painful, is made somewhat simpler. The victim is taken from and murdered in a single jurisdiction, so the politics are relatively minimal. But that’s where serial killers can be fairly clever. They take advantage of the natural inefficiencies of two or more police agencies having to work together by snatching victims from one or more jurisdictions, killing them elsewhere, and then disposing of their bodies in yet another location. So the police not only have to figure out who the victim is, but who is in charge of the investigation. And if it’s members of a small police agency who are in the lead, they may not have the expertise to do things properly. It can take weeks, even months for cops to get their acts together. The associated politics can be quite brutal--bureaucracy amongst the police is as bad as any other government agency, with the added wrinkle that there are human lives at stake.

(Left) Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo

In Chalk Valley, which is set in the western Canadian province of British Columbia, the protagonist is a cop, Sergeant Dave Kreaver. He thinks he knows who the killer is. Unfortunately, Kreaver works outside the jurisdiction of the lead investigators and runs into major roadblocks when he tries to get his suspect considered. Similarly, in the Bernardo/Homolka serial murders, a street cop received a tip from a woman who said she’d been raped by Bernardo at a party. The cop followed up and found that Bernardo drove the same kind of car the killer had been seen driving. He had the right (wrong) kind of personality, arrogant and smug. He even matched the physical description investigators had of the killer. The cop worked up his tip--which was promptly ignored by the case’s Green Ribbon Task Force. The tip was then buried deep until an inquest pulled it out years later in the Campbell Inquiry’s exploration of the debacle.

Also a factor in these cases is the human cost to the investigators. They might put in 80-plus hours a week on the job, for months and months, with their supervisors, the media, the victims’ families, and even the general public questioning their every move. What kind of effect does that have on them and their families? Not a good one. On their health? Also, not recommended. But what choice do those investigators have? Plus they’re running up major overtime, which drains the city budget. If you don’t believe petty issues such as budgets affect major criminal probes, think again. Remember, police agencies are still at their core government bureaucracies--they just have badges and guns.

Third myth: the investigation itself. The cops in serial-killer cases aren’t just sorting through a few intriguing clues, like who killed Colonel Mustard with a nail-gun in the breakfast nook. They are inundated with leads. There may be tens of thousands of tips for them to sort through--a virtual mountain. And thousands of suspects to vet. They have to validate all of them--how could they not? How else would they know which ones are real or valuable? It’s like trying to find a specific needle in a stack of needles. And for any evidence they do want to pursue, the cops will likely need to get search warrants to make sure it holds up in court. They may need to check out DNA evidence. Unfortunately, that can take weeks, months, longer.

Are you getting the picture here?

And all of this needs to be balanced against the fear of tunnel vision. Consider the infamous case of Guy Paul Morin, a resident of Queensville, Ontario, who in 1984 was convicted of murdering his 9-year-old neighbor, Christine Jessop. The inquest found the lead detectives in that investigation had been so focused on Morin as the killer, they actually convinced Christine’s grieving family members to modify their statements as to when they had returned home on the afternoon the girl disappeared. This provided Morin with a sufficient time window within which he could have returned from work and abducted the girl. It led to Morin’s false conviction, overturned years later on DNA evidence after his life was destroyed. Christine’s real killer was never caught.

(Right) Author D.L. Johnstone

After I wrote Chalk Valley, I received questions from several readers who wanted to know if issues like this still take place. Haven’t we made huge strides in recent years? Haven’t we learned? Yes and no. Major Case Management, a state-of-the-art, turnkey process to help multiple police jurisdictions in Canada work together to solve serial crimes, rose from the ashes of the Bernardo inquest. I spent a lot of time with the MCM architects and ViCLAS (Violent Crime Linkage Analysis System) investigators when I researched this novel. The system still isn’t perfect, but everyone is trying to take the right steps. So that maybe, in time, these sort of obstacles will truly be a thing of the past.

Yet, let’s look at the 2010 case of disgraced Canadian Forces Colonel Russell Williams, who raped, tortured, and murdered two women over a two-month span, in addition to committing a chilling series of fetish break-ins around the rural Ontario neighborhood where he lived. While DNA testing was thankfully accelerated and led to his relatively prompt arrest, the Ontario government refuses to make public the dates Williams’ DNA samples were collected. Defending this action, the government has made the bizarre claim that revealing such information would be “an unjustified invasion of personal privacy.” An invasion of a convicted serial killer’s privacy, mind you. Bureaucracy reigns supreme--no one wants to look bad. Or expose themselves to negligence lawsuits, I imagine.

Have these improvements changed how investigators act as individuals? So many times, it comes down to one person doing the right thing. A cop meets someone she suspects might be a very bad person. She may not have the evidence, no one may want to listen to her, she may have a number of other responsibilities to attend to. What should she do? There’s a term in failure theory called the Organizational Bystander. It might be best defined using the following example: On January 28, 2010, a female police officer in Belleville, Ontario, noticed what turned out to be Russell Williams’ Pathfinder parked beside the home of 27-year-old Jessica Lloyd. It looked out of place. The officer, now suspicious, knocked on Lloyd’s door. No answer. Williams lurked in the shadows outside, waiting for the officer to leave. Which she did. Williams waited for Lloyd to return home, then abducted her, torturing her for several hours before murdering her. The officer made no note of the SUV’s license plate and did no computerized search. The OPP (Ontario Provincial Police) have no protocol requiring this, nor do they plan to implement one.

Organizational Bystanders are all too common. It’s so much easier to assume that either things aren’t really going all that wrong, or you can’t have an actual effect on the outcome of things. It’s so much easier just to stand by and watch, to not speak up, to let the adults do their thing. You don’t want to be admonished, treated as a troublemaker, a Chicken Little. It might affect your career advancement. It’s so much easier to take your chances, bite your tongue, and hope things don’t fail.

Those with the courage to take action when facing potential crises are all too rare. Or maybe not--when things go right, do we even notice?

* * *

Author’s note: All the examples I’ve given here are Canadian. My apologies to Canadian crime investigators everywhere--many of them are among the best in the world. I chose these examples simply because I know them well and spent time with investigators whose job it is to study and learn from them. These same issues exist in all nations, across all police jurisdictions.

Inauguration Day Linkfest

Much of this morning was spent watching President Barack Obama’s second inauguration (an event that’s been well-coupled on newspaper front pages with today’s U.S. holiday celebrating the legacy of civil-rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.). But I’ve also been digging up news of interest to crime-fiction readers. A few useful links:

• Lee Goldberg notes on Facebook that, despite his previous denials, prolific author/ghostwriter Donald Bain has “finally been ‘outed’ as Margaret Truman ... with the publication of [2012’s] Experiment in Murder.” Truman, the only child of former U.S. President Harry Truman, died back in 2008, but her series of Washington, D.C.-set mysteries has continued to expand ever since.

• Los Angeles Times TV critic Robert Lloyd notes the current proliferation of serial killers on the small screen, and voices concern about this trend: “I understand that terror has its uses and am not averse to a bit of frightful catharsis; too much decorum in our shared fantasies can be as unhealthful as too little. Nor do I believe that, in a general way, violence in entertainment makes violent people ... But it does create violence in the culture, in the social air we commonly breathe, and objections to it should not be dismissed merely because it can't be tied to a particular real-world act or because most of us are smart enough to tell the difference between fantasy and reality.”

• Jose Ignacio, author of the blog The Game’s Afoot, reminds us that Spain’s BCNegra crime-writing festival is scheduled to take place in beautiful Barcelona from February 4 to 9. “During the festival,” he adds, “the Carvalho Award will be handed to Swedish crime writer Maj Sjöwall who, alongside her husband, Per Wahlöö, penned The Story of a Crime: The Martin Beck series.”

• Here’s a book I’d like to add to my shelves.

• Robert Wilson, author of the new thriller Capital Punishment, writes in The Daily Telegraph about his new love for London as a crime-fiction locale. “... [O]ver the years, London to me has become increasingly exotic as its population has expanded, sucking in people from all over the world,” he remarks. “Being an outsider for many years helped me to look at London with fresh eyes.” His essay is here.

• In Pulp Curry, novelist Wallace Stroby selects “the best 5 crime films you’ve never seen.” (Actually, I’ve watched a couple of them.)

• It seems I’m not the only one who loved Peter May’s The Blackhouse. Kristopher (last name unknown) at BOLO Books has posted his own favorable review of that same novel.

• Let’s celebrate James Bond movie themes!

• Guns, Gams, and Gumshoes weighs the validity of recent articles suggesting that the private-eye “myth,” as a source of film storytelling, is well past its sell-by date.

• From Shotsmag Confidential: “The German writer, crime novelist and playwright Jakob Arjouni, has died from pancreatic cancer at the age of 48 years. He was at home in Berlin with his family. More information can be found here. His books were published by No Exit Press in the UK and a new Brother Kemal Kayankaya novel is due to be published this year. Mark Lawson’s tribute in The Guardian can be found here. His obituary in German can be found here.”

• Finally, the true-crime site Tickle the Wire revisits the life and career of Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, the handsome mob boss who did so much to create today’s Las Vegas “strip.”

The Book You Have to Read: “Bimini Run,” by E. Howard Hunt

(Editor’s note: This is the 121st installment of our ongoing Friday blog series highlighting great but forgotten books. Today’s piece comes from Steven Nester, the host of Poets of the Tabloid Murder, a weekly Internet radio show heard on the Public Radio Exchange [PRX]. Steve has written previously for this series about Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game, by William Kennedy, Cut Numbers, by Nick Tosches, and True Confessions, by John Gregory Dunne.)

E. Howard Hunt was a diehard CIA cold warrior and political operative perhaps best known for his failures. With ice water in his veins and patriotism in his heart, Hunt had a hand in the Bay of Pigs fiasco, was suspected of prior knowledge and complicity in President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, and most famously bungled the Watergate burglary, which brought down the presidency of Richard Nixon.

Few people, though, would suspect that Hunt also possessed a bit of poetry in his soul. Between toppling Banana Republics and playing hardball with the Russians, Hunt was the author of more than 40 adventure and espionage novels. One of his best-known works, Bimini Run (1949), combines action, concision, and an emotional dimension which in a scant 158 pages has the reader careening between characters and situations, and their entangling and final unwinding.

Leading man Hank Sturgis is a humble guy who’s seen a lot. A former football star, law student, and wounded World War II veteran, he’s now a drifting gambler struggling to stay solvent. When a bookie welshes on a bet, and then the nightclub where he works goes under, Sturgis is forced to sign on as first mate and man Friday to a pair of wealthy pleasure-seekers who’ve chartered a fishing boat for an extended expedition in the Caribbean. The husband, Clay Crawford, is a drunken bully who can’t seem to get over the insecurities that inheriting too much money have cursed him with. Leslie, his wife, was born poor; but she’s smart, ambitious, and beautiful. Captain Engstrom, master of the Velva, is in the book to clash with Crawford on various occasions and to pilot the boat so the other three can interact. Trouble begins when Crawford confuses catching big fish with virility and his wife begins to show an interest in Sturgis. Instead of dousing these fires with water, the players use alcohol.

Bimini Run possesses the decorating scheme of an Ernest Hemingway story--deep-sea fishing, too much alcohol, and a couple at odds over a husband’s machismo. The heart of the novel also has the familiar Hemingway themes of generational issues and the importance of maintaining a code of honor. Hunt has fashioned a story of youth dissatisfied with mainstream life after returning home from war; but instead of setting it in Paris, he placed it in the world of racetracks, gambling houses, and the idle rich. While hardly a reprise of The Sun Also Rises, in Bimini Run Sturgis, like Jake Barnes, lives by a code of honor that keeps him loveless, alone, and wary of intimacy. Hunt continues to crib from Hemingway with the theme of man vs. nature, as well. Crawford is on a quest to hook a manta ray fit for the record books. While Crawford is up to his eyeballs in booze, fistfights, and fishing, wife Leslie begins to look at Hank as more than just hired help.

Bimini Run is pure pulp entertainment, but Hunt deserves some credit for preventing Hank and Leslie from falling into the cliché of world-weary and star-crossed lovers. There’s no self-pity in Sturgis and how his life went from promising to slightly desperate. As for Leslie, she’s a girl who can look out for herself at the very least.

Sturgis had known poor girls with intelligence and rich girls who could barely read a comic strip. Leslie was something new--the once-poor and intelligent; the new-rich with brains. He found the combination disturbing.

It’s not that Sturgis doesn’t think he could handle a woman like Leslie; he’s onto her from the outset. He knows her motives might at the moment be pure, wanting him to rescue her from a brute of a husband, but they are not enduring. Sturgis “resents the admiration he had begun to feel for her,” because she’s calculating and doesn’t possess boilerplate scruples as he does, and therefore cannot be trusted. “He knew that she made her own rules and broke them when they grew too confining,” writes Hunt.

Leslie makes a play for Sturgis, but his independence and determination to make his own way obviate the temptation of a beautiful woman with money. He and Leslie come to terms in an exchange that shows the Brown University-educated Hunt had his head fully in the game of composing potboiler prose with wit and brevity.

“I offered myself to you and you took it as lightly as the morning mail.”

“I refused it because it came COD. It could be as sweet as paradise or as deadly as a box from the Borgias.”

Hunt pays homage to another writer, Raymond Chandler, paraphrasing one of Chandler’s classic lines and recycling it into the simile, “as easy to spot as a coral snake on a dice table.”

The climax of Bimini Run is an excellent consolidation of all the pieces of the plot, no matter how trivial. The ever-present guns, the constantly prowling sharks, the ill will of Leslie, the symbolic fish finally caught, and the animosity of Engstrom and Crawford as they fistfight while sharks begin a bloody feeding frenzy on the ray they have hauled to the boat. The two men fall into the water, and as Hank calls for Leslie, a crack shot, to help him kill the sharks before Engstrom and Crawford are torn to shreds, she does nothing. Man and fish merge as Sturgis observes that “there was nothing that looked human in the bloody pulp the waves pushed against the hull.”

One wonders what E. Howard Hunt would have done with his art if he’d spent more time writing rather than working in the shadows to keep America safe for democracy. The world most likely would’ve stayed the same without his efforts, but his writing, as professional and sound as it is, might’ve brought him a greatness that his career as a spy never came close to offering.

(The front and back covers of the 1952 Avon Books paperback edition of Bimini Run used to illustrate this post were borrowed from the collection of Bill Crider. Cover painting by George Erickson. Click on either cover for an enlargement.)

“It Is Physically Impossible to Look Cool in the Coffee Line Holding a Tablet”

In a fine essay for the NW Book Lovers Web site, Jonathan Evison, the author most recently of The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving, makes the case for print books over e-books.

Ned Kelly’s Final Ride

Two years ago, California detective novelist Raymond Chandler was reunited in the grave with his wife of three decades, the former Cissy Pascal. Now it’s Ned Kelly’s turn. This coming Sunday, the remains of that 19th-century Irish-Australian outlaw--after whom a coveted annual award for Aussie crime fiction is named--“will finally be laid to rest beside his mother in line with his final wishes at a plot not far from the site of his last stand,” reports the Philippines’ Manila Bulletin.

Kelly’s remains were thrown into a mass grave after his execution [in 1880 at Old Melbourne Gaol] and discovered during renovations to the jail in 1929 when they were reburied inside Pentridge Prison, save his skull, which remains missing.

Officially, their whereabouts had been a mystery until DNA testing in late 2011 on bones exhumed from the Pentridge site confirmed them to be Kelly’s.

Redevelopers of the now-defunct prison wanted to reinter Kelly’s remains at a museum or a memorial, but the Victoria state government ordered that they be returned to the family last year.

According to Joanne Griffiths, the great-granddaughter of Kelly’s sister Kate, the family would formally bid farewell to the outlaw at a Catholic service in the town of Wangaratta on Friday ahead of his burial in an unmarked grave.

“That’s what he would’ve wanted. That’s what he requested, and he wished to be buried in consecrated ground,” Griffiths told ABC radio.

You can read the remainder of the Bulletin’s report here.

(Hat tip to Bill Crider’s Pop Culture Magazine.)

Pierce’s Picks: “Capital Punishment”

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

Capital Punishment, by Robert Wilson (Orion UK):
Like so many other Rap Sheet readers, I suspect, I first encountered British author Wilson’s work in A Small Death in Lisbon, his extraordinary 1999 thriller about Nazi wartime shenanigans and slayngs in the Portuguese capital. That led me to investigate his previous four novels (beginning with 1994’s Instruments of Darkness), all starring a West African “fixer” named Bruce Medway. Then it was on to The Blind Man of Seville (a Spain-set mystery I included in January Magazine’s Best Books of 2003 feature) and its three sequels, which built around a troubled head of the Seville Police Department's homicide division, Inspector Jefe Javier Falcón--and inspired Sky Atlantic’s recent British TV drama, Falcón (see the trailer here). The Falcón books were quite popular. After four of them, however, Wilson “wanted to get away from the detective hero and the pure police procedural,” as he told the blog Crime Fiction Lover earlier this week. His solution was to pen Capital Punishment, the first installment in a new series featuring Charles Boxer, a British ex-homicide cop turned “freelance kidnap consultant.” In these pages, we find Boxer and his quondam inamorata, detective Mercy Danquah, hunting for Alyshia D’Cruz, the 25-year-old daughter of a crooked but influential Indian businessman, who has vanished in London after a night out on the town. I’m still reading Capital Punishment, so I can’t say how it all turns out. But I will tell you that the action shifts here from London to Lisbon to Mumbai, and sends Boxer up against religious zealots, assorted mobsters, and prospective terrorists. It doesn’t take Wilson’s protagonist long to realize that Alyshia’s abductors want something far better than money: they want power, and will stop at little to obtain it. American readers who don’t want to order the UK edition of Capital Punishment have only to wait until March for a U.S. release of this same book.

READ MORE: “London: Great Location to Set a Thriller,” by Robert Wilson (The Daily Telegraph).

Edgar Endorsements Everywhere

This morning brought the Mystery Writers of America’s announcement of its nominees for the 2013 Edgar Allan Poe Awards, which honor “the best in mystery fiction, non-fiction and television, published or produced in 2012.” The prizes will be presented during a banquet on May 2 at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in New York City.

Best Novel:

• The Lost Ones, by Ace Atkins (Putnam)

• The Gods of Gotham, by Lyndsay Faye (Putnam)

• Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn (Crown)

• Potboiler, by Jesse Kellerman (Putnam)

• Sunset, by Al Lamanda (Five Star)

• Live by Night, by Dennis Lehane (Morrow)

• All I Did Was Shoot My Man, by Walter Mosley (Riverhead)

Best First Novel by an American Author:
• The Map of Lost Memories, by Kim Fay (Ballantine)

• Don’t Ever Get Old, by Daniel Friedman (Minotaur/Thomas Dunne)

• Mr. Churchill’s Secretary, by Susan Elia MacNeal (Bantam)

• The Expats, by Chris Pavone (Crown)

• The 500, by Matthew Quirk (Reagan Arthur)

• Black Fridays, by Michael Sears (Putnam)

Best Paperback Original:
• Complication, by Isaac Adamson (Soft Skull Press)

• Whiplash River, by Lou Berney (Morrow)

• Bloodland, by Alan Glynn (Picador)

• Blessed Are the Dead, by Malla Nunn (Emily Bestler)

• The Last Policeman, by Ben H. Winters (Quirk)

Best Fact Crime:

• Midnight in Peking: How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China, by Paul French (Penguin)

• Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America, by Gilbert King (Harper)

• More Forensics and Fiction: Crime Writers’ Morbidly Curious Questions Expertly Answered, by D.P. Lyle (Medallion)

• Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies, by Ben Macintyre (Crown)

• The People Who Eat Darkness: The True Story of a Young Woman Who Vanished from the Streets of Tokyo--and the Evil that Swallowed Her Up, by Richard Lloyd Parry (Farrar Straus & Giroux)

Best Critical/Biographical:

• Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe: The Hard-boiled Detective Transformed, by John Paul Athanasourelis (McFarland & Company)

• Books to Die For: The World’s Greatest Mystery Writers on the World’s Greatest Mystery Novels, edited by John Connolly
and Declan Burke (Emily Bestler)

• The Scientific Sherlock Holmes: Cracking the Case with Science and Forensics, by James O’Brien (Oxford University Press)

• In Pursuit of Spenser: Mystery Writers on Robert B. Parker and the Creation of an American Hero, edited by Otto Penzler (Smart Pop)

Best Short Story:
• “Iphigenia in Aulis,” by Mike Carey (in An Apple for the Creature, edited by Charlaine Harris and Toni L. P. Kelner; Ace)

• “Hot Sugar Blues,” by Steve Liskow (in Mystery Writers of America Presents: Vengeance, edited by Lee Child; Mulholland)

• “The Void It Often Brings With It,” by Tom Piccirilli (Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine [EQMM], November 2012)

• “The Unremarkable Heart,” by Karin Slaughter (in Mystery Writers of America Presents: Vengeance)

• “Still Life No. 41,” by Teresa Solana (EQMM, March/April 2012)

Best Juvenile:
• Fake Mustache: Or, How Jodie O’Rodeo and Her Wonder Horse (and Some Nerdy Kid) Saved the U.S. Presidential Election from a Mad Genius Criminal Mastermind, by Tom Angleberger (Amulet)
• 13 Hangmen, by Art Corriveau (Amulet)
• The Quick Fix, by Jack D. Ferraiolo (Amulet)
• Spy School, by Stuart Gibbs (Simon & Schuster Books for
Young Readers)
• Three Times Lucky, by Sheila Turnage (Dial Books for Young Readers)

Best Young Adult:

• Emily’s Dress and Other Missing Things, by Kathryn Burak
(Roaring Brook Press)

• The Edge of Nowhere, by Elizabeth George (Viking)

• Crusher, by Niall Leonard (Delacorte BFYR)

• Amelia Anne Is Dead and Gone, by Kat Rosenfield (Dutton
Children’s Books)

• Code Name Verity, by Elizabeth Wein (Hyperion)

Best Television Episode Teleplay:
• “Pilot, ” Longmire, teleplay by Hunt Baldwin and John Coveny (A&E)

• “Child Predator,” Elementary, teleplay by Peter Blake (CBS)

• “Slaughterhouse,” Justified, teleplay by Fred Golan (Sony/FX)

• “A Scandal in Belgravia,” Sherlock, teleplay by Steven Moffat (BBC/Masterpiece)

“New Car Smell,” Homeland, teleplay by Meredith Stiehm (Showtime/Fox21)

Robert L. Fish Memorial Award:

“When They Are Done With Us, by Patricia Smith (in Staten Island Noir, edited by Patricia Smith; Akashic Books)

Grand Master:

Ken Follett and Margaret Maron

Raven Awards:

Oline Cogdill and Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore, San Diego and
Redondo Beach, California

Ellery Queen Award:

Johnny Temple, Akashic Books

The Simon & Schuster-Mary Higgins Clark Award:

(To be presented at the Mystery Writers of America’s Agents & Editors Party on Wednesday, May 1)

• Dead Scared, by S.J. Bolton (Minotaur)

• A City of Broken Glass, by Rebecca Cantrell (Forge)

• The Reckoning, by Jane Casey (Minotaur)

• The Other Woman, by Hank Phillippi Ryan (Forge)

• Sleepwalker, by Wendy Corsi Staub (Harper)

Congratulations to all of the nominees!

Click here to see this year’s full list of submissions in all of the Edgar Award categories.

READ MORE: “MWA Rewards Success,” by J. Kingston Pierce
(The Rap Sheet).

Back from the Dead

Well, rumors that the AMC-TV series The Killing--a lesser and previously cancelled American version of the popular Danish show Forbrydelsen--weren’t dead after all have been proved true. The Los Angeles Times reports today that the crime drama “has been resurrected for a third season by AMC and Fox Television Studios, bringing back its creator Veena Sud and original stars Mireille Enos and Joel Kinnaman.” An announcement from AMC’s president makes clear that this next season will focus once more on a single case, to be resolved (we hope) over the course of a dozen episodes.

E! Online mentions that “season three will begin production on Feb. 25 in Vancouver, Canada.” It’s not clear exactly when The Killing will return to the small screen, but there have already been clues as to the new story line. From ZAP2It:

A year after closing the Rosie Larsen case, Sarah Linden is no longer a detective. But when her ex-partner Stephen Holder’s search for a runaway girl leads him to discover a gruesome string of murders that connects to a previous murder investigation by Linden, she is drawn back into the life she thought she’d left behind.

(Hat tip to Omnimystery News.)

READ MORE: “The Danes Do Murder Differently,” by Mike Hale
(The New York Times).

The Story Behind the Story: “The Mannequin House,” by R.N. Morris

(Editor’s note: This 41st installment of The Rap Sheet’s “Story Behind the Story” series brings back into the spotlight British novelist R.N. “Roger” Morris, who has been interviewed on this page several times and has also contributed pieces to the blog. [Click here to find those posts.] Today, Morris supplies some background about his new historical mystery, The Mannequin House, which has already been released in Great Britain, and is scheduled for publication this spring in the United States.)

“Where do you get your ideas from?” is one of those questions that authors are supposed to get asked all the time. Actually, I can’t remember ever being asked it. That could mean one of two things. Either the source of my ideas is so obvious that the question is redundant. Or my ideas are such that people would rather not know where exactly they come from.

The Mannequin House (Creme de la Crime) is the second of my novels to feature the detective Silas Quinn, an inspector in the fictional “Special Crimes Department” of New Scotland Yard in 1914. Before starting my Silas Quinn series, I had written four novels featuring Porfiry Petrovich, the investigating magistrate from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. I suppose part of the motivation in creating Quinn was to show that I could write a book around a character of my own. In constructing that character, I wanted to play a little with some of the clichés of a fictional detective. So, yes, he is a detective with a troubled past, and a dark side, as well as being a brilliantly successful investigator. To some extent, I think he uses his police work as a kind of therapy. It just so happens that what makes him feel good and whole is giving in to an impulse to kill, or at least to shoot first and ask questions later. It’s a trait that led one critic (Mike Ripley) to describe him as “a sort of Edwardian Dirty Harry.” I’m not sure how accurate that description is, but it’s one that amuses me.

I have enjoyed embracing, and perhaps subverting, the archetype; I hope readers will enjoy the weird kinks that have emerged in Quinn.

The novel is set in 1914, before the outbreak of the First World War. All the horrors of the 20th century lie ahead, so it’s generally held to be an era of innocence, I think. This is an idea I challenge. It’s the Golden Age of detective fiction, but also a period when art movements such as dada and surrealism were starting to come through. A crucial phase in the development of psychoanalysis, too. And time of social upheaval, as well as political turmoil, in Britain and in Europe, with the war brewing and trouble in Ireland. A period of anxiety and stress, as I imagine it. All of which makes it an interesting time in which to set a book or two.

If I try to trace my fascination with the period, I find myself drawn to a painting called The Menaced Assassin, by René Magritte. Like a lot of teenage males of my generation, I was into surrealism, enough to possess a large art book on the movement. This was one of the paintings in the book. It depicted some bowler-hatted police officers lying in wait for the fictional master criminal Fantômas. I loved the mood of the painting, and the idea of Fantômas, and when the Pierre Souvestre and Marcell Allain novels were released in English by Picador in the 1980s I got hold of a few and read them. I even had a go at writing my own Fantômas novel, my first venture into literary fan-fiction, and in many ways an apprentice piece for my Porfiry Petrovich series. I was struck by the fact that Souvestre died in 1914, so the books they wrote together had a decided pre-war feel. My own Fantômas novel was written with the retrospective knowledge of what was to come, a sense of historical irony.

That Fantômas story of mine was never published, but I felt there was something in the dramatic potential of that specific period. Like most writers, I parked the idea in the back of my brain and let it cook.

Some years later, I was asked to write a screenplay based on G.K. Chesterton’s 1908 novel, The Man Who Was Thursday. Nothing came of the project (except for an unproduced screenplay sitting on my computer’s hard drive), but that strange, surreal book, together with the research I did around it, rekindled my interest in the period. With its themes of alienation and distrust, coupled with a dreamlike narrative, the book struck a chord with me and seemed strikingly modern.

So I had the idea of writing a series of crime novels set perpetually on the eve of the Great War, in which a series of increasingly outlandish crimes--occurring within an improbably condensed time frame--would be investigated. The crimes in the books would presage the terrible destruction to come. Silas Quinn emerged from that strange idea as a suitably peculiar detective.

Crime fiction has always struck me as a sub-genre of surrealism, perhaps because I came at it from a painting by Magritte. My new series takes me deeper into that territory. For inspiration, I turned again to G.K. Chesterton, this time immersing myself in his Father Brown stories, some of which are decidedly surreal (I’m thinking particularly of his story “The Secret Garden,” in which--SPOILER ALERT--a decapitated head from one body is found next to a headless corpse belonging to someone else). Inevitably. perhaps, I decided to incorporate a locked-room mystery, with bizarre elements.

I was also attracted to the idea of setting each novel within a different, defined milieu, which is a standard trope of detective series. You take your detective and plunge him into a world that is alien to him, which he then explores and reveals as he conducts his investigation. The first Quinn novel, Summon Up the Blood, dealt with the world of homosexual male prostitutes, or “renters.” This second novel is set in a fashionable department store.

The theme again feeds into my ideas about the surrealism of mystery and detective fiction. I had this notion of a department store where almost anything could be bought, where every desire could be satisfied in a consumerist dream. While I was researching the story, I read Whiteley’s Folly, Linda Stratmann’s biography of William Whiteley, the founder of Whiteley’s, a big department store in West London. I already had an idea of a character who would be the founder of my own fictional department store, who would be a womanizer and a tyrant. When I discovered that the real William Whiteley shared those attributes, I became intrigued. The fact that Whiteley was shot and killed in his own store by a man claiming to be his illegitimate son clinched it for me. History was trying to tell me something. I knew this was the setting I had to use, this was the story I had to write. All I needed to do was throw in a monkey in a fez.

By a strange coincidence, there have recently been two period dramas on UK television, both with department store settings: The Paradise on BBC and Mr. Selfridge on ITV. So maybe there is something in the air at the moment that makes early department stores especially appealing. I have a theory that it is linked to the approach of the centenary of the outbreak of World War 1, the moment when the world lost its innocence forever. The promise of wish fulfillment and gratification that a place like The House of Blackley (the fictional department store in my novel) seems to hold out could never truly be believed in again. And yet it is a promise we can’t quite give up on, one we keep nostalgically returning to.

In the Monday Mix

• Congratulations to Jen Forbus on the fifth anniversary of the launch of her crime-fiction-oriented blog, Jen’s Book Thoughts. To commemorate this occasion, Ohio resident Forbus is hosting a small giveaway contest. Entries must be submitted by January 31.

• I was sorry to read that British mystery writer Gwendoline Butler died on January 5 at age 90. Butler penned more than two dozen novels featuring Inspector John Coffin (beginning with 1958’s Receipt for Murder, in which the character was introduced playing second fiddle to another detective, Inspector Winter). She also concocted a series of women’s police procedurals under the pseudonym Jennie Melville. Butler won the Crime Writers’ Association’s Silver Dagger Award in 1973 for her novel A Coffin for Pandora.

• A belated note, too, about the demise, at age 98, of Jim Benét, “a former San Francisco Chronicle and KQED reporter who covered higher education in a tumultuous period in California” and produced two mystery novels, A Private Killing in 1949 and The Knife Behind You in 1950. His obituary in the Santa Rosa, California, Press Democrat mentions that Benét was investigated by the notorious House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) in 1970 and that he was a friend of Dashiell Hammett. A bit more info on Benét is available at the Golden Gate Mysteries Web site. (Hat tip to Peter Hegarty.)

• San Mateo, California, bookstore proprietor Ed Kaufman was included in The Rap Sheet’s list of crime-fiction notables who died in 2012. But author David Corbett has a few additional things to say about Kaufman in this post for Murderati.

• As Bill Crider notes in his blog, U.S. publisher Random House has commenced reissuing all of John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee detective novels in trade paperback and e-book versions. The first installment of that series, 1964’s The Deep Blue Good-by, can be purchased online here. Better yet, order this and the other MacDonald reprints from your nearest independent bookstore.

• Plan B, a new short-fiction magazine specializing in “all things mysterious, criminal, thrilling, and suspenseful,” is preparing to debut this coming March. Editor Darusha Wehm says, “we intend to post one story per week, available to read online for free. Quarterly e-book anthologies will be made available to purchase, as well as an annual e-book subscription.” She adds that “Plan B is currently running a fundraising campaign on IndieGoGo to support becoming a paying market for short mystery fiction. E-books, subscriptions, and other special rewards are available as part of the pre-sale IndieGoGo campaign.” Meanwhile, the mag is accepting submissions.

• Ah, to be in London this season, where the British Library is preparing to host a succession of mystery-fiction-oriented events.

• UK writer Karen Charlton, the author of two novels featuring 19th-century Northumberland Detective Stephen Lavender, is the subject of J. Sydney Jones’ latest interview in Scene of the Crime.

• And it has nothing to do with mysteries, but I was intrigued to read, in a recent interview with historian Doris Kearns Goodwin in The Christian Science Monitor, that her next book--her first since the justly acclaimed Team of Rivals--will look at “[President] Theodore Roosevelt’s ability to use the bully pulpit and [William Howard] Taft’s corresponding difficulty with it, even though they were such great friends and shared much of the ideology together. Until they split apart.” She added that “I’ve always been interested in the Progressive Era. Then when I read about [Roosevelt’s] friendship with Taft and knowing it had broken apart when they ran against each other in 1912, that became an angle. So it could be a different look at the era.” Goodwin’s book could go on sale as early as this coming fall.

An Octogenarian Aussie

I missed acknowledging, last Friday, the 83rd birthday of Australian-born actor Rod Taylor. In addition to starring in the 1960 science-fiction film The Time Machine and Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963), Taylor appeared with Dennis Cole in the 1971 historical action series Bearcats! and the 1983 spy drama series Masquerade.

Taylor also featured in Fate Is the Hunter (1964), Hotel (1967), Nobody Runs Forever (1968), and The Train Robbers (1973). He even did a turn as British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious asterds (2009).

However, many Rap Sheet readers may remember Taylor best for his performance as Travis McGee in Darker Than Amber, the 1970 cinematic adaptation of John D. MacDonald’s 1966 novel. As author Gar Anthony Haywood put it recently on Facebook, Taylor was the “best Travis McGee EVER.” If you’ve never seen the film, click here to watch its opening sequence as well as a late fight scene between Taylor and William Smith that apparently became much more violent than the director had expected.

Pierce’s Picks: “Ratlines”

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

Ratlines, by Stuart Neville (Soho Crime):
Coming off the success of three novels (beginning with The Ghosts of Belfast) set in his native Northern Ireland, Stuart Neville now transports readers south and back half a century to the Republic of Ireland, where homicide threatens to overshadow what could be one of the country’s proudest moments. It’s 1963, and American President John F. Kennedy is planning a visit to Ireland, his family’s ancestral home. But trouble is brewing. An aging German national has been found shot to death in a coastal guesthouse. It’s the third such slaying in a fortnight, all of the victims former Nazis who were granted asylum in Ireland after the end of World War II. Hoping to curtail this string of killings before it develops into a national or even international scandal, Minister of Justice Charles J. Haughey (“a politician with boundless ambition and the balls to back it up”) orders Lieutenant Albert Ryan of the Directorate of Intelligence to investigate. Quietly, of course, since Dublin officials don’t wish to draw excessive attention to their history of harboring ex-Nazis. Ryan’s known as a big, tough young cuss who actually volunteered to fight with the British Army, despite his hometown’s disgust with the Crown, and who has since kept a heel on the Irish Republican Army. He is also, though, a man with a conscience, and his conscience is disturbed by the notion of protecting war criminals. Especially Otto Skorzeny, an erstwhile SS colonel--“once called the most dangerous man in Europe”--who has set himself up as a “gentleman farmer” and minor celebrity in County Kildare. A legendary tactician, Skorzeny believes he can control Ryan, use him as a shield against whoever’s threatening Nazi “refugees” like himself, and as a shovel to unearth his enemies. To ensure the younger man’s cooperation, Skorzeny even tosses into his path a fetching redhead, whose job it is to report on Ryan’s thoughts and plans. However, as Ryan probes the case further, checking into allegations that a Jewish cabal is behind the recent slayings and attracting sometimes violent attention to his person, he discovers that Skorzeny is running a network that helps war criminals escape Europe. Can Ryan bring down this tale’s killers before they make good on their promise to remove Otto Skorzeny from among the living? Does he want to? Author Neville’s combination of smartly conceived characters, high-strung tension, and moral quandaries makes Ratlines a pell-mell-paced treat.

READ MORE: “Taoiseach, Nazi, Soldier, Spy,” by Declan Burke
(The Irish Times).

Chandler’s House Changes Hands

From U-T San Diego (the dumb name by which the former San Diego Union-Tribune is now known):

A La Jolla [California] home once owned by one of the most influential writers of the 20th century has been sold for $6 million, public records show.

The property, on Camino de la Costa near Avenida Cresta, at one point belonged to noted mystery writer Raymond Chandler, known mainly for creating the iconic private-eye character Philip Marlowe and his role as a Hollywood screenwriter.

He worked on the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock’s “Strangers on a Train” and co-wrote the movie “Double Indemnity.” The Chicago native lived in La Jolla during the latter part of his life, which ended in 1959.

You can read the whole piece here.

And author Mark Coggins posted a couple of older photographs of that house in his blog several years ago.

(Hat tip to Professor Barnhardt’s Journal.)

Bullet Points: Wet Wednesday Edition*

• To celebrate the release this month of his new non-fiction work, Ellery Queen: The Art of Detection, Francis M. Nevins recalls his introduction to the two “fractious” cousins who, under the Queen pseudonym, “reshaped the modern detective novel.”

• I’m very sorry to hear that Portland, Oregon’s Murder by the Book, on SE Hawthorne Boulevard, will close in April, after 30 years in business. A notice on the store’s Web site reads, in part:

As you know, these past few years have been difficult financially for many reasons, including the generally depressed economic climate, growth of e-books, and elevation in the price of print books. In addition, Barbara [Tom] and Carolyn [Lane] are ready to really retire.

So far we have not found others who want to take on the labor of love that an independent bookstore represents. We will be making a concerted effort to find some kind of successor in the next few weeks and months. (Of course, we would happily entertain discussions with you or anyone you know who would consider this a great opportunity!)

In the next few months, the store will operate normally--that is, with a wide selection of books and an unlimited amount of advice--so we would hope for your continued support.

Even though I am a frequent visitor to Portland (at least its west-of-the-river side), I’ve only been to Murder by the Book a few times. I’ll have to make a point of dropping in there sometime this spring.

• Happy 150th birthday to the London Underground, the oldest sections of which began operations on January 10, 1863. To commemorate this occasion, author Christopher Fowler has posted some Underground trivia, while Janet Rudolph has assembled a list of crime novels and short stories that take place on the Underground.

• Curiously, today also marks what would have been the 100th birthday of another frequent lurker in the shadows: Richard M. Nixon, the former Republican U.S. president who will forever be remembered by the unfortunate epithet “Tricky Dick,” and who resigned partway through his second term as a result of the Watergate scandal--an event that spawned a wealth of political thrillers. It should come as no surprise that, according to a piece in Politico, “2 in 3 Americans still disapprove of the job Nixon did as president, making him by far the most toxic president of the past 50 years.”

• And though I didn’t know Larry Storch was still alive, it turns out that this comic actor best known for his role in F Troop celebrated his 90th birthday on Tuesday. By the way, in addition to his sitcom efforts, Storch also appeared over the years in The Name of the Game, Tenafly, Mannix, and Police Story. Check here for more.

• From In Reference to Murder: “Author Thomas Pynchon is in talks with director Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights and There Will Be Blood) to bring Pynchon’s 2009 stoner private-eye novel, Inherent Vice, to the big screen.” You hear that? It’s time to roust ’60s-era gumshoe Larry “Doc” Sportello from his haze and get him prettied up for the cameras. The results of this project should be interesting.

• British author Chris Ewan subjects his new (in the States, at least) thriller, Safe House, to the challenge of Marshal Zeringue’s Page 69 Test. See the results here. Ewan is, of course, best known as the author of the “Good Thief’s Guide” series, including The Good Thief’s Guide to Vegas and, forthcoming, The Good Thief’s Guide to Berlin.

• Celebrating Chinatown one more time!

• In a piece for Kirkus Reviews, Sue Grafton looks back on her 30 years in the crime-fiction biz. Meanwhile, Jen Forbes critiques Kinsey and Me, Grafton’s new collection of stories about herself and her famous series P.I., Kinsey Millhone.

• Five modern female crime writers--Denise Mina, Jassy Mackenzie, Sara Gran, Donna Leon, and Nevada Barr are interviewed by The Christian Science Monitor’s Randy Dotinga.

• Mystery fictionist Ed Lacy, who died 45 years ago this week, is profiled at welcome length in Tablet. Concurrently, J.F. Norris of Pretty Sinister Books reviews Moment of Untruth, Lacy’s 1964 “sequel of sorts” to his well-regarded 1957 novel, Room to Swing.

• And Kevin Burton Smith delivers a keen defense of the 1947 film The Brasher Doubloon, based on Raymond Chandler’s novel The High Window (1942). In a piece in The Thrilling Detective Blog, Smith calls it “a clean, relatively straightforward screenplay ... that leans heavily on Chandler's penchant for wisecracks.” More on the source of this picture’s name is here, and you can read about some other big-screen productions based on Chandler’s stories here.

* Yes, it’s been raining in Seattle again. Remind me, why do I live in such a damp environment? I’m sure there’s a reason ...

Robinson Sheds Some Light on “Dark”

2013 begins my third year as a blogger-columnist for the Kirkus Reviews Web site. Together with this numerical change in the calendar come some conspicuous alterations in the site’s appearance. My Mysteries and Thrillers column, along with others focusing on different genres of fiction and categories of books, has undergone a redesign that I think gives it added snap and precision. The downside, unfortunately, is that hundreds of Facebook “likes” seem to have vanished ... though that’s still not as bad as what happened during a previous design revision, when dozens of reader comments were swallowed up into the electronic ether, never to be seen or read again.

In any event, my opening column of 2013, posted earlier today, is an interview with Peter Robinson, the 62-year-old, British-born Canadian author of Watching the Dark (Morrow). That police procedural--released this week in the States (and last summer in the UK)--is the 20th to feature Robinson’s popular series sleuth, Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks, along with Banks’ colleague and former lover, Annie Cabbot. The story finds the headstrong DCI investigating the unusual crossbow murder of a fellow inspector, Bill Quinn, who left behind some rather compromising photographs of himself with “a very beautiful, and very young, woman.” Whether the late copper’s demise is related to that sexual encounter, or maybe to a six-year-old case he had continued to pursue, involving the disappearance of a young British bridesmaid in the Estonian capital of Tallinn, will be up to Banks to determine. But his job won’t be made any easier by an officer from Professional Standards, who’s determined to dog Banks’ every step in order to resolve whether Quinn was guilty of corruption as well as concupiscence.

Click here to read my new Kirkus column about Robinson.

* * *

While putting that piece together, of course, I had to jettison large parts of my discussion with the author; they simply didn’t fit within the length restriction. Not being one to waste good material, I have posted the balance of our exchange below.

J. Kingston Pierce: When I last interviewed you, back in 1999, you were still considered an underappreciated Canadian crime writer. But that was before your 10th Banks novel, In a Dry Season, really took off. Am I correct in calling that your “breakout book”? And how have your career and audience reception changed over the last 13 years?

Peter Robinson: In a Dry Season was certainly a “breakout book” in many ways. It was nominated for several awards, even won a couple, and got my name better known in the UK and throughout mainland Europe. It was also very successful in the U.S., although I’m not sure it gave me the same sort of boost in Canada, as I was already better known there than in most other places. The biggest change of all really came in the UK. I was used to being practically ignored there for about 10 books, barely surviving with very limited print runs of the last few hardcovers, and no paperbacks at all for a while. Now my books regularly top the bestseller charts there.

JKP: Are there any negative aspects to producing a successful series?

PR: Only in that it becomes what people expect of you. I was extremely pleased with the fan reaction to Before the Poison because it was a risk, and most people said they loved it. There was still an undercurrent of “but I’m looking forward to the next Banks” in some responses, though! Still, it is also enormously flattering to think you’ve created a series character about whom people want to continue reading, especially when you see so many series fall by the wayside.

JKP: Do you ever want to toss in the idea of writing a series at all, and just compose standalones? Or maybe a different series?

PR: No, I can’t see dumping the series altogether, and I don’t think I would like to take on another series, but I would definitely like to write more standalones. I have always admired Ruth Rendell and envied her ability to switch from [Chief Inspector Reginald] Wexford to psychological thrillers, and to “Barbara Vine.” I’m not as prolific as she is, but I could see alternating Banks and standalones, or maybe two Banks then a one-off. Something like that.

JKP: Unlike some other series, your 20 books about Alan Banks have allowed the character to change and evolve in significant ways over the decades. He’s weathered the end of his marriage, the growth of his children, assorted ill-conceived relationships, and the retirements of several police colleagues. Do you think all of that has made him more human in the eyes of readers? And are you puzzled by writers less willing to let their characters evolve?

PR: I don’t think I would still be writing about Banks if I hadn’t set out quite early on to compose a series about a man who happened to work as a police detective, and about some of the things that happen to him in his work and in his life. I just had no idea it would run to more than 20 books!

I’m not really puzzled by writers who are less willing to let their characters evolve. After all, neither Sherlock Holmes nor Hercule Poirot changed that much. Sometimes a character exists simply to solve crimes in a particularly clever and eccentric way, and that is all that interests us about him or her. I think a lot of readers identify with Banks, and perhaps the things that happen in his private life, including his quiet moments with music and a glass of wine, do make him more human and make the cases he works on seem more real, or at least more believable. Also, as he ages, he encounters many of the same problems most of us do--children move away, friends die, one’s time seems to be running out more quickly, the specter of serious illness appears--and it tends to make him more introspective and philosophical, even melancholy.

JKP: When Banks’ younger colleague, Annie Cabbot, first appeared in In a Dry Season, I presumed that she was finally somebody in whose company he could be happy. Yet their relationship has been often troubled. Did you intend that from the start?

PR: I don’t even know what’s going to happen in the book I’m writing at the moment, let alone in future books. I think the Banks/Annie relationship has developed in interesting ways that I would never have guessed when I first put them together. They are still very close, and there’s still a strong attraction, but in many ways it is the job that keeps them apart. ... Banks needs to be kept on his toes, and Annie is particularly good at winding him up. It’s interesting to see her role change subtly as other female characters appear on the scene--such as [Detective Constable] Winsome [Jackman], Joanna Passero, and the new detective constable Gerry Masterson, who takes a more prominent role in the book I’m working on now. Annie becomes in some ways a public defender of her boss and his methods, but she still gives him a hard time when there’s no one else around to hear.

JKP: So let me ask this: You keep throwing new feminine enticements in Alan Banks’ path. In Watching the Dark, you introduce that woman you just mentioned, Inspector Joanna Passero, from Professional Standards. Can we expect to see more of her in the future?

PR: I wish I knew. I can see a role for Joanna, because I grew to like her as a character, and she may well become another cross for Banks to bear. She will move out of Professional Standards and into some other department with which Banks will have to deal on occasion. As far as romance goes, I have no idea. He might like the idea of unleashing the repressed passions of an icy Hitchcock blonde, but are there any to be unleashed, and could he do it? And how would Annie feel about it? Watch this space.

JKP: How old is Alan Banks now, and how many more years do you think he has as a series lead? Will you keep him going even after retirement, as Ian Rankin seems determined to do with John Rebus?

PR: Banks’ age is a tricky matter, because although there’s usually one book per year, the cases he works on may have taken place only months apart, so he hasn’t actually aged a whole year between books. This keeps him a few years younger than me and a few steps away from retirement. If he ever gets promoted to superintendent he could stay on until the age of 65, but I doubt if any of my readers would regard Banks as suitable material for promotion! But retiring Banks is not something I worry about too much. There are still a few books left to write about him, and I just hope I realize when I have come to the end. I doubt even then that I would retire him or kill him off. I’d probably have him promoted, against all odds, to chief constable, marry Annie, and live happily ever after. Then there would be nothing more to write about him--or nothing that anyone would want to read.

JKP: What still attracts you to the character of Alan Banks?

PR: In the face of everything he has seen and learned about the human condition, and in spite of everything that has happened to him, he still enjoys life, believes in people, and has a generally optimistic outlook. No matter how much life

and work throw at him, he always manages to get up, dust himself off, and carry on.

(Left) The DCI Banks pilot, based on the 2001 novel Aftermath.

JKP: Your novels have inspired a British ITV series, DCI Banks, which is debuting this month in America on PBS-TV stations. How do you feel about actor Stephen Tompkinson stepping into the lead role you’ve spent so many years in developing?

PR: I have tremendous respect for Stephen Tompkinson, and though he certainly didn’t match my idea of what Banks looks like, I think that he has developed the character wonderfully over the series so far. Many viewers may be disappointed that he doesn’t match their physical idea of Banks, either, but my advice is to give him a chance and approach the series with an open mind. No, it’s not the same as the books, but it is an entertaining TV cop show.

JKP: ITV hasn’t yet produced episodes of DCI Banks based on every one of your series installments. Have you been surprised at all by which books it has chosen to adapt?

PR: I have no idea why they choose the books they do. They’re the professionals, so far be it from me to tell them their business. We’ve have some discussions, and while they welcome my suggestions, they are obviously more aware of what will work and what won’t. I would like to see some of the more recent ones filmed--Friend of the Devil is the most recent [book transformed into a DCI Banks episode] so far--and I would also like to see an attempt at In a Dry Season, though I admit that would really be a challenge after the weather in Yorkshire last year. The other novel with a hook into the past which I think could work well is Piece of My Heart, but I doubt that we’d be able to get Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and The Who to sign up, though Pete Townshend is an affirmed Banks fan.

JKP: Of course, there might be opportunities to turn some of your standalone novels into TV or movie productions.

PR: I have never done an adaptation, and I’ve been told often enough that a writer would be a fool to adapt his own work, but I’d really like to have a go at Before the Poison. It presents all kinds of problems that I think would be interesting to try and solve, and could make a really good mini-series or something. I can even see Michelle Dockery, who plays Lady Mary in Downton Abbey, as Grace Fox!

JKP: Finally, you’re a British writer working in Canada, who rarely stages scenes in Canada. Yet there are many Canadian crime novelists--most of whom, unfortunately, are completely unknown to American readers. Why do think that is? Is it simply a matter of poor marketing, or are the tales Canadian crime novelists tell not the sort destined to appeal to U.S. crime-fiction fans?

PR: It’s probably a bit of both. Canadian publishers don’t do a great deal of out-of-Canada promotion, and Canadian writers rarely have separate U.S. deals. Also, I’m not sure that the majority of Americans are interested in reading about Canada, though the ones who are are quite passionate and knowledgeable about the place. A number of Canadian crime writers try to get over this lack of interest by setting their books in the U.S., so you probably think they’re American writers, anyway!

JKP: Can you recommend a few Canadian crime-fictionists whose work might be interesting to American readers?

PR: You may have heard of some of these, but crime fans should definitely try Giles Blunt, Louise Penny, Linwood Barclay, Maureen Jennings, John Lawrence Reynolds, and Gail Bowen. There are many more, and they will hate me for not mentioning their names, but if anyone is interested in Canadian crime fiction they can check out the Crime Writers of Canada Web site.

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In the video below, Peter Robinson looks back at how he went about developing his new Alan Banks novel, Watching the Dark.