Public Hearings

Comedian Billy Crystal got all of the headline play when the winners of this year’s Audie Awards were announced, noting his capture of the 2014 Audio Book of the Year prize for the single-voice narration of Still Foolin’ ’Em: Where I’ve Been, Where I’m Going, and Where the Hell Are My Keys?, his 2013 memoir. But there were many other Audie recipients as well, including these that Mystery Fanfare tagged as of particular interest to crime- and mystery-fiction fans:

Fiction: Doctor Sleep, by Stephen King; read by Will Patton (Simon & Schuster Audio)

Classic: The Complete Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; read by Simon Vance (Brilliance Audio)

Short Stories/Collections: Sherlock Holmes in America, edited by Martin H. Greenberg, Jon L. Lellenberg, and Daniel Stashower; read by Graham Malcolm (Audible)

Mystery: Unleashed, by David Rosenfelt; read by Grover Gardner (Listen & Live Audio)

Thriller/Suspense: The Hit, by David Baldacci; read by Ron McLarty and Orlagh Cassidy (Hachette Audio)

You’ll find a list of all the award winners here.

Now Debuting on Facebook

For a while now, readers have been asking me when I was going to create a Facebook page for The Rap Sheet. I’ve resisted taking on that task, partly because I didn’t want such a page to simply lead people back over to every new post in this blog … and also because I have had a personal Facebook page for more than two years now, and know exactly how much of a time-suck FB can be. Furthermore, I didn’t want a Facebook page to undermine the value of The Rap Sheet, with its longer, more thoughtful posts.

But today I decided, what the heck, I’ll give it a shot.

So all you Facebook fans can now click here to reach The Rap Sheet’s page. We will see how things develop. My intention is to use that page as a place to highlight crime-fiction-related news, look back at wonderful old paperback covers (some that I am not already writing about in my other blog, Killer Covers), point out the availability of interesting vintage crime/mystery TV series on YouTube and elsewhere, and maybe direct new readers of The Rap Sheet to some older stories they might have missed in the blog.

Feel free to “like” The Rap Sheet’s Facebook page if you find its content informative or merely entertaining.

In the Shadow of the Ripper

Last week brought the much-publicized release of The Devil’s Workshop (Putnam), the third of Midwestern author Alex Grecian’s Murder Squad novels, all set in London, England, shortly after Jack the Ripper’s bloody reign of terror in 1888. The first installment, 2012’s The Yard, introduced us to Grecian’s principal cast: former country cop Walter Day, now an inspector with London’s Metropolitan Police Force (aka Scotland Yard); able but eccentric, trouble-attracting Constable (later Sergeant) Nevil Hammersmith; and Dr. Bernard Kingsley, a forward-thinking pathologist often aided by his daughter, Fiona. It was followed out of the gates by The Black Country (2013), in which Day and Hammersmith hie off to the British Midlands to investigate the disappearances of family members from a coal-mining village.

Now, in The Devil’s Workshop, Grecian circles back to the notorious Ripper case, delivering a dark-hued tale about Saucy Jack’s apparent resurrection. As I explain in my column for Kirkus Reviews, posted just this morning,

The story begins in 1890 with a railway “accident” that liberates several imprisoned murderers, one of whom goes on to discover a long-forgotten labyrinth of underground streets where Jack, far from dead, has instead been secreted away and tortured by vigilantes with lofty moral ideals. As Day and company pursue the fugitives, Jack--unpredictable, mesmerizing, alternately sympathetic and sadistic--engineers his return to the unsuspecting world of the living. It’s a comeback that could spell disaster for Day’s very pregnant wife, Claire.

Click here to read the entirety of that column, which focuses around my recent interview with Alex Grecian.

Although I was able to shoehorn 1,068 words of my exchange with the author into that Kirkus piece, our actual interview ran almost four times that long. Not being inclined to throw away valuable editorial material, and thinking that our whole discussion would be informative--especially to readers already familiar with Grecian’s work--I’ve decided to embed the balance of our talk below. Here we cover subjects ranging from Grecian’s advertising background and work on graphic novels to his fondness for Jacques Futrelle’s mysteries, the real-life inspirations for some of his Murder Squad characters, and his decision to expand the series into original e-books.

J. Kingston Pierce: Did you grow up among enthusiastic readers?

Alex Grecian: My father is a playwright and the first part of my childhood was spent surrounded by bookcases and literary clutter. Reading was always treated as an important part of life and I never questioned the value of books.

JKP: How early on did you entertain the notion of writing fiction?

AG: As far back as I can recall, I was writing short stories and bad poetry and little stapled-together comic books. I planned out an epic science-fiction story that I thought I’d write as a trilogy of novels. But it wasn’t until I was 12 years old that I actually started thinking of writing as a possible career for myself. Before that it was just something I did, a hobby.

JKP: Like a number of today’s crime novelists (including Philip Kerr and Ed Gorman), you have a background in advertising. Where did you work in that capacity and for how long, and what were your responsibilities in advertising?

AG: I was headhunted by a small agency (about 15 employees) to help brainstorm fresh campaign concepts for their clients. That was the best part of the job, but when I wasn’t in the conference room brainstorming I was initially doing illustrative work, storyboards and basic graphic design. From there I branched out into copywriting and then directing TV and radio spots. After about three years I left to be a stay-at-home parent for my son, and I decided to use the break to try to launch a career as a full-time fiction writer.

JKP: What convinced you to finally give up advertising?

AG: I’d always wanted to pursue fiction writing, but I knew it would be an uphill battle to actually make a living at it. It’s very hard to reach that point and I don’t multitask well, so my day jobs always got in the way. Worrying about my son’s future inspired me to stop letting other things get in the way of my dream. I want him to be happy and successful when he grows up and I didn’t feel like I was setting much of an example for him.

JKP: Prior to composing The Yard, you penned Proof, a graphic-novel series starring a Bigfoot special agent, John Prufrock. When and how did you land that gig? And what did writing graphic fiction teach you about composing classic-style novels such as The Yard?

AG: The first story I ever got paid to write was a graphic novel called Seven Sons [2006]. It was much easier to get a graphic novel published than it was to interest anyone in a prose novel. The artist on that book, Riley Rossmo, and I enjoyed working together and we decided to try our hand at creating something a bit more long-form, an open-ended series. I created Proof as a sasquatch who had been discovered by the Lewis and Clark expedition and raised by humans. For me, a creature that didn’t belong anywhere and had to constantly rethink his sense of identity seemed like rich fodder for lots of stories. Image Comics was publishing most of the graphic novels we enjoyed reading, the stuff that wasn’t just superheroes, so we sent the Proof concept to them and they loved it. Really, it was all pretty simple. Our first choice for publisher signed on and supported the book over the course of its four-year run. But writing it didn’t really have much to do with writing prose. The two media force you to flex different writing muscles. The format of a graphic-novel script is rigid and restrictive. You’re forced to be very disciplined and to pare a story down to its bare bones. Prose allows me much more freedom.

JKP: Is it true that one of your Proof works inspired The Yard?

AG: The fourth volume of Proof has the subtitle “Julia.” Since my character John Prufrock had been alive for 200 years, I decided to explore his past a bit. I’d always wanted to tell the true story of Julia Pastrana. She was a real person, a talented, vivacious woman [of the 19th century] who was completely covered with hair from head to foot. She was displayed as a carnival freak and ended up being cruelly used by her husband and promoter. I was able to fictionalize her story and fold it into the Proof series by having John Prufrock travel with her in Victorian-era England. There’s a character in “Julia” named Detective Inspector Augustus McKraken. I did a lot of research to try to make the investigative aspect of that character seem authentic and I eventually realized that I couldn’t do anything with most of that research. So I made plans for a spin-off series of graphic novels starring DI McKraken. My agent advised me to write it as a prose novel instead, so I removed the more bizarre, vaguely supernatural aspects of the concept, swapped out McKraken for [Walter] Day, and gave it a shot. It turned out to be very good advice.

(Left) Author Alex Grecian, photographed by Christy Grecian

JKP: Have you now given up on graphic novels, at least for the time being?

AG: Nope. I recently helped found a graphic-novel anthology called Bad Karma. I’m working on a second volume of that and I’m just about to announce a new series that I’m writing on my own. I have too many story and character ideas to ever be able to write them all in my lifetime. Some notions seem to me to be better suited for novels or short stories, and some seem like they’d work better in a visual medium. I don’t want to bite off more than I can chew, but if there’s time to do both, why not go for it?

JKP: I seem to remember reading someplace that you were a youthful devotee of Jacques Futrelle’s early 20th-century “The Thinking Machine” tales. Did that represent your initial discovery of mystery and crime fiction?

AG: The Thinking Machine may have been my first encounter with a fictional detective, but I’m honestly not sure. At roughly the same time I was also reading Sherlock Holmes stories and Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew books and Encyclopedia Brown collections. But Professor Augustus S.F.X. Van Dusen (who later inspired the first name of my Victorian-era detective in Proof) was different than all those other characters. He was even drier and more coldly logical than Holmes or Nero Wolfe. I had a somewhat tumultuous and unpleasant childhood, and reading about an adult who didn’t suffer from an abundance of emotions was comforting. I was also fascinated by the fact that Futrelle had gone down with the Titanic [in 1912]. That added to his mystique. I must have reread “The Problem of Cell 13” dozens of times while hiding out in my basement.

JKP: Is it still true that, despite setting your now three Murder Squad novels in England, you’ve never actually visited that country?

AG: I spent a month in London while I was writing The Black Country. It was invaluable to be able to soak up the flavor of the place. Even so, modern London isn’t Victorian London, so plenty of research is still called for. I plan to go back for a longer stretch of time as soon as I finish this next book.

JKP: The Yard opens in 1889, shortly after the Jack the Ripper slayings, at a time when the London citizenry had lost faith and trust in its police force, since the Ripper was never caught, or even publicly identified. How strong was that public antipathy toward the police?

AG: The public was really quite angry and distrustful. It’s that attitude that inspired me to write The Yard. It puts the police in such a strange position and it’s so much better to write about people under duress. But time heals most wounds and the police used their failures as inspiration to do better. Scotland Yard improved their game and instituted new procedures that fairly quickly, by the standards of bureaucratic evolution, turned them into the premier police force in the world.

JKP: Was there a real Murder Squad of the sort you write about in your novels? And is it known for breaking any famous cases?

AG: There’s still a Murder Squad, although they don’t call themselves that anymore. I think they refer to themselves as Major Investigation Teams now. They’re pretty good at what they do, so I’d imagine they’ve broken all sorts of cases in the last century. They’ve more than earned back the public’s trust and respect.

JKP: Am I correct in my understanding that your protagonist, Detective Inspector Walter Day, is loosely based on real-life Scotland Yard Inspector Walter Dew, who was largely responsible for nabbing alleged wife-slayer Hawley Harvey Crippen?

AG: That’s right. Walter Dew was the first internationally famous policeman. I changed his name to Walter Day for these novels because I didn’t want to be tied down to his actual history. (And it’s a good thing I did, since I’ve written horrible things about the poor guy.) But he was very much my inspiration for The Yard.

JKP: Day’s pathologist associate in your books, Dr. Bernard Kingsley, also has a historical counterpart, correct?

AG: Kingsley’s based on Dr. Bernard Spilsbury, who was by all accounts an amazing forensic detective. He put into practice most of the basic procedures that police forces all around the world still use today. But he was apparently a very sad person, very dry and humorless. He eventually committed suicide. That didn’t fit into my plans for him, so I changed his name (and some aspects of his personality), giving me more freedom to let the character forge his own destiny over the course of this series.

JKP: In The Yard, you did such a brilliant job of setting your characters and imagined crimes amid the exotic hurly-burly of Victorian London. But then, in its first sequel, The Black Country, you moved most of the story’s action to the relatively quieter British Midlands, and I thought it floundered a bit as a result. Why did you choose to shift your action outside of London so soon in the series?

AG: I wanted to challenge myself. I didn’t want to accidentally fall into using a formula. And I wanted to throw Day and Hammersmith together in a high-stress situation where they had to rely on each other. I wanted them to be in unfamiliar territory with nobody else to turn to. Their friendship and their sense of trust in each other had to be earned and the seeds for that trust had to be explicitly shown, rather than just talked about. I also wanted to try my hand at a Wicker Man sort of story, playing with the basic tropes of a traditional cozy. I didn’t realize that for many readers London had essentially become a character and an integral part of the books. I’m sorry it wasn’t your cup of tea, but I think I accomplished what I set out to do with The Black Country, and I think you may find you like it more when it’s eventually viewed as a part of the whole series.

JKP: What sorts of research sources have you employed in order to bring historical verisimilitude to your Murder Squad series?

AG: Lots of books, including Donald Rumbelow’s excellent book (I also took his Ripper tour in London and talked to him) and Jack the Ripper: Letters from Hell, by Stewart P. Evans and Keith Skinner. Many others. And I haunted Ripperologist message boards. Years ago I’d planned to write a more conventional Ripper book of my own, but Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell covered the bases I liked best in From Hell. So I abandoned that, but eventually came back to the idea and approached it from a completely different angle.

JKP: Among the real-life Ripper suspects, do you have a favorite?

AG: Nope. I suspected [Sir William] Gull for a long time. But, really, we’ll never know who the Ripper was. There won’t ever be new evidence that’s completely reliable. It’s meant to be a mystery. So, no, I don’t pay much attention to any of the theories about who really committed those murders.

JKP: Although your Day novels can be serious and pretty violent at times, you always manage to leaven them with humor--often involving Nevil Hammersmith’s antics. How important do you think humor is in crime and mystery fiction?

AG: Very. Without some humor, a crime story can become unrelentingly grim. One of the themes that always runs through my books is the suddenness and brutality of violence. I don’t believe that violence should be glossed over or celebrated. One violent act can end or ruin a promising life and it can come out of nowhere. But that’s a bit depressing and hard to absorb, so a little bit of whimsy or oddness can help bring the reader back to even ground and smooth out the pace.

JKP: I have to say that Claire Day, the inspector’s wife, seems like the character in these books who has the most trouble earning the readers’ attention. But maybe that’s because she isn’t involved directly in crime-solving. How do you see her role?

AG: Claire’s unjustly maligned, I think. She ended the first book pregnant and was barely squeezed into the second book. There was really no way to responsibly involve her in crime-solving, although I’m sure she would have preferred that. I was actually kind of offended by some of the early notices [for The Devil’s Workshop] that characterize Claire as whiny. She’s having a baby. There’s some discomfort involved. I don’t think she’s whiny at all; I think she’s honest and brave and she’s usually in a situation she doesn’t much like. But she forges ahead anyway. Just like my male characters.

JKP: I was interested in the fact that, between the publication of The Black Country and that of The Devil’s Workshop, you released The Blue Girl, a short story--packaged as an e-book--that focuses on another member of the Murder Squad, Constable Colin Pringle. What were your intentions with that story, and how does it help readers to better understand the larger world of Walter Day and company?

AG: I intended for Blue Girl to be a free e-book, to hopefully bring new readers into the Murder Squad series. I wanted to experiment with a first-person narrative and a more traditional detective story. I also missed writing Constable Pringle and wanted a way to build his character and give a different perspective on the workings of Scotland Yard than I do in the regular books. There will be more Pringle stories. I’ve almost finished a second one called The Scarlet Box.

JKP: Can you imagine having lived in London during the Victorian era? What would have been the pluses and minuses of such a life?

AG: I’m fond of taking showers and refrigerating leftover pizza, so I’m perfectly happy to live in the present. But it would be much easier to make a living and get away with murder in that era when there were no fingerprints on file, no DNA testing, no computers and cell phones. I don’t have a criminal bone in my body, but for many of my characters it’s a paradise.

JKP: Are you content right now to continue writing the Murder Squad novels, or do you have more extensive plans as an author?

AG: I’m going to keep writing the Murder Squad novels as long as Putnam wants to publish them and people want to read them. I would like to eventually begin releasing a second book each year, something non-Murder Squad related, but I have no plans to abandon Walter and Nevil anytime soon.

JKP: Do you read many other works in the crime/mystery/thriller field? If so, which authors or books have you particularly relished?

AG: Most of the books I read in my own field are older, classics of the genre. I’m more likely to re-read Patricia Highsmith than to discover someone new. But I do keep up with a few authors. Michael Connelly, Walter Mosley, George Pelecanos, Joe Lansdale, Lawrence Block, a handful of others. I used to snap up every new Elmore Leonard book as soon as they hit the bookstores. And I really kind of loved [J.K.] Rowling’s mystery novel last year. I’m most interested in authors who surprise me. I don’t just want to be shocked when the identity of the murderer is revealed. I want to spend time with characters I like and I want things pulled together in interesting ways by the end, not necessarily in a tidy happy bow.

JKP: Finally, if you could lay claim to having penned any book that does not already carry your byline, what would it be?

AG: Hmm. A wealth of titles just popped into my head. Books so good I wish I’d written them: The Road, The Quiet American, The Talented Mr. Ripley, The Man in My Basement, The Accidental Tourist, Cat’s Cradle, To Kill a Mockingbird … But on second thought, if I’d written any of those books I wouldn’t be able to enjoy them. So, no. I’ll stick with claiming credit for my own books. Meanwhile, I’ll re-read the books I wish I’d written and simply be happy that they exist.

READ MORE: “Alex Grecian: 5 Books Everyone Should Read Before They Die” (The Big Issue).

Pining for “Detective” Details

There have been more than a few rumors floating around the Web about what we’ll see in the second season of HBO-TV’s acclaimed True Detective series, including one--lately revealed as false--that had Zero Dark Thirty star Jessica Chastain being offered a lead role in those sophomore-year episodes.

Today, though, Variety finally offers up a modicum of verifiable information, straight from the mouth of creator Nic Pizzolatto:

In a recent interview with public radio program “To the Best of Our Knowledge,” Pizzolatto revealed that in the new season’s current form, “we’re working with three leads. It takes place in California--not Los Angeles, but some of the much lesser known venues of California--and we’re going to try to capture a certain psychosphere ambiance of the place, much like we did in season one.”

He added, “The characters are all new, but I’m deeply in love with each of them. We’ve got the entire series broken out with a couple of scripts, and we’ll probably start casting in earnest in the coming months.”

The show’s anthology format means that season two will be entirely self-contained and distinct from its freshman year, with no plans for season one stars Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson to return--something that differentiates the series from FX’s “American Horror Story,” which recycles actors from past seasons in new roles.

You can read that whole Variety article here.

READ MORE: “What Beer Will Replace Lone Star in True Detective Season 2?” by Aaron Goldfarb (Esquire).

Who’re You Gonna Call?

It seems to bear scant resemblance to Edward Woodward’s The Equalizer, the well-remembered 1985-1989 CBS-TV series that inspired it. Yet based on the trailer embedded above, Denzel Washington’s new big-screen picture, The Equalizer--due to premiere in theaters this coming September--certainly has much to commend it. As The Huffington Post explains, the plot finds Washington playing Robert McCall, “a man with ‘possible military training,’ who takes on the Russian mob because of an innocent girl he barely knows. As Washington says of the book he is reading in the trailer, ‘It is about a guy who is a knight in shining armor, except he lives in a world where knights don’t exist anymore.’ As per usual, he is really good at killing people, but with this character he likes to time himself when in combat.” There’s already talk of a sequel being made.

Bullet Points: Eighth Anniversary Edition

Believe it or not, I forgot about The Rap Sheet’s anniversary last week. This blog marked the end of its eighth year in business on Thursday, May 22. In previous years, I’ve made a big production of these milestones. But I was too involved over the last several days in putting together my piece about eight decades having passed since Bonnie and Clyde were killed, as well as a column to be posted in Kirkus Reviews this coming Tuesday. The Rap Sheet’s anniversary … well, it simply slipped my mind. But I ought not let the occasion pass without at least thanking everybody who reads and comments on this blog, and especially those people who have been kind enough to pitch a few dollars into the pot now and then to keep it going. It’s astounding to think that I launched The Rap Sheet way back in May 2006, and have since benefited from contributions by such talented folks as Linda L. Richards, Ali Karim, and the other “Usual Suspects” to enhance its Web presence.

Now on with this weekend’s edition of quick newsy hits:

• Crime-fiction blogs come and go, but some of them go … and then come back eventually! Two examples: Cullen Gallagher’s Pulp Serenade, which went dormant in December 2012, only to suddenly kick back into gear (while I wasn’t paying attention) in late April; and Zachary Klein’s Just Sayin’, which the author put on hiatus last December, but which he promises to reinvigorate tomorrow. Welcome back, guys!

• Memorial Day mysteries for your holiday reading pleasure.

• I was honored a few months ago to be asked to contribute to the seventh issue of Black Scat Review, a publication edited by “Norman Conquest,” better known as Derek Pell. Since the theme of the issue was going to be “Lit Noir,” I decided to compose an essay about how I first became interested in crime fiction, and how that curiosity provoked my subsequent obsession with vintage detective yarns (and their often-beautiful covers). The “Lit Noir” issue, finally released late last week, also includes work by Kelli Stanley, John Nickle, Michael Hemmingson, and Michelle Gray. You can purchase a copy of Black Scat Review for yourself here, in either print or digital formats.

• Speaking of Conquest/Pell, he’s celebrating this holiday weekend on his Facebook page with what he describes as “a marathon (some might say orgy) of posted excerpts from my unpublished manuscript Missing Mysteries: A Pictorial History of Nonexistent Mysteries (1840-2013). [It’s] a 200-paged monster, featuring rare cover art and descriptions, and covering nearly 100 little-known subgenres.” If you’re not a “friend” of the author, you can still check out Missing Mysteries here.

• In a fun piece for Criminal Element, Edward A. Grainger (aka David Cranmer) offers a list of 10 fictional modern cowboys endowed with grit, including Raylan Givens from Justified, Walt Longmire from Longmire, and Sam McCloud from McCloud.

• That same blog hosts Jake Hinkson’s list of books that should be of particular interest to fledgling film noir geeks.

• Fears that Edgar Allan Poe’s old home, long an attraction in Baltimore, Maryland--and a National Landmark--would not reopen came to naught yesterday, when the residence welcomed back visitors.

• Really, another Bonnie and Clyde film? My recent focus on that pair of Depression-era outlaws led me to this story from The Wrap, which says that “Game of Thrones star Emilia Clarke and X-Men actor Nicholas Hoult will play [the bank-robbing duo] … in [director] Michael Sucsy’s Go Down Together,” a picture adapted from Jeff Guinn’s thoroughly engrossing 2009 non-fiction book of the same name. Who knows how this latest cinematic interpretation of the Bonnie Parker-Clyde Barrow adventure will turn out (and whether it will ever be released), but I’m not encouraged by production notes saying that “Bonnie Parker was a prostitute before joining up with and eventually going down in a hail of bullets with Barrow.” Guinn’s contention that Bonnie may have offered sex for pay prior to her criminal escapades has been strongly denied by her niece, and is only mentioned in passing in Guinn’s book. That the filmmakers emphasize this allegation makes me think the production Sucsy has in mind will be no less sensationalized and distorted than its predecessors. Too bad.

• More promising entertainment might be had from The Escape Artist, a British drama/thriller starring David Tennant and scheduled to be broadcast on PBS-TV’s Masterpiece, beginning on Sunday, June 15. Although it showed in the UK as a three-part miniseries, Masterpiece is offering The Escape Artist in two parts. Find out more about this program and watch a preview in Mystery Fanfare.

• Anybody want to buy Dracula’s bathroom-less castle?

• Being a longtime fan of South African novelist James McClure, creator of the Apartheid-era Tromp Kramer-Mickey Zondi series, I was happy to read in Peter Rozovsky’s Detectives Without Borders that “a collection of McClure’s short stories and scripts,” titled God It Was Fun, is now available. Unfortunately, I only see an e-book version of this work, which isn’t going to cut it with someone like me, who hasn’t successfully read an e-book yet. I’m strictly a print-edition guy.

• Max Allan Collins (King of the Weeds) had a delightful piece in The Huffington Post last week about long-running fictional sleuths who have, or have not, been allowed to age. Read the essay here.

• It’s hard to keep up anymore with all of the Internet blogathons either underway or in the works. But this one caught my attention: a June 2-5 celebration of the many classic small-screen series now broadcast on MeTV. Among the focuses of planned posts are Peter Gunn, The Saint, Columbo, and Adam-12. You’ll find the schedule here.

• I’m not convinced Dashiell Hammett would have approved: In this February 28, 1958, episode of the Peter Lawford-Phyllis Kirk series, The Thin Man, the married detectives meet Robby the Robot.

• If you’ve ever thought about spiffing up your bookcases with some handsomely produced editions of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot novels, this new four-volume set published by The Folio Society might be just what you need.

• Has it really been 20 years since the release of Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction? The Dissolve commemorates this occasion with a look back at “five great shots” from that influential film.

• Wow, this is quite a treat: The blog Where Danger Lives has put together a colorful gallery of “50 Extraordinary Noir and Crime Posters from Republic Pictures!”

• How sad it is to hear that Leslie Thomas, the British author who came to fame with his 1966 comic novel, The Virgin Soldiers, died earlier this month at age 83. My first experience with Thomas’ fiction came courtesy of the 1976 Dell paperback release of Dangerous Davies: The Last Detective. As The Gumshoe Site recalls, that novel “was turned into the 1981 TV movie of the same name starring Bernard Cribbins as the CID officer in the London borough of Willesden, with Thomas and director Val Guest co-writing the script. Also, The Last Detective became [a] TV series starring Peter Davison, with 17 episodes broadcast from 2003 [to] 2007.”

• Are women hooked on violent crime fiction? According to The Guardian’s Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett, the answer is “yes.” She writes: “Friends can spend hours online, reading about serial killers. I myself became fascinated by the Black Dahlia case in the 1940s, after reading a reference to it in a crime novel. The female author Jessie Keane says that consuming crime fiction allows women to examine violence ‘in a safe way.’ In other words, we are attempting to address our fears.”

• Two interviews worth reading: Anthony Neil Smith, the author most recently of XXX Shamus (published under the pseudonym Red Hammond), talks with Crimespree Magazine, while Reed Farrel Coleman (The Hollow Girl) fields a few questions from MysteryPeople.

• And if you’ve tired of crime and thriller novels backdropped by such familiar locales as New York City, London, and Scandinavia, take a gander at Crime Fiction Lover’s list of “The 10 Most Unexpected Crime Fiction Settings.” American Samoa, anyone?

Glamorized Bumblers, Dead in Seconds

Early on the morning of May 23, 1934--80 years ago today--a stolen Cordoba gray, four-door Ford V-8 left the town of Gibsland, in northern Louisiana, and headed south. The car’s two passengers--both well-publicized outlaws, the man having recently turned 25 years old, the woman only 23--were speeding to a rendezvous with a criminal accomplice. They were already late. But on a rural road in Bienville Parish, off Highway 154, they spotted their gang member’s father, his old truck apparently disabled on the side of the rutted dirt lane. They stopped to lend assistance.

And that’s the moment when all hell broke loose.

One of six lawmen who’d been waiting at that point on the road to ambush the car suddenly leaped to his feet and began firing his rifle into the sedan. He wasn’t supposed to have done that. As the story goes, the man in charge of the posse, a former Texas Ranger named Frank Hamer, was going to call out for the couple in the car to surrender. Once the firing commenced, though, there was no turning back. One of the first bullets killed the driver, passing through the Ford’s windshield and carving a vicious path through the young wheelman’s head. He died instantly, and as he did so, his foot slipped off the clutch, letting the Ford roll forward toward a ditch at the side of the road. The slender, petite woman in the passenger seat screamed, “a high shrill wail that haunted the men about to kill her for the rest of their lives.” Although there was talk later on that those two outlaws had fired at the posse, and they’d fired back in self-defense, the fact was that the several guns the couple had packed along with them were laid out on the Ford’s backseat, because there wasn’t enough room in front to keep them handy.

In short order, 150 or more bullets were blasted at the car, some ricocheting off, others getting trapped in the Ford’s metal body, but enough whizzing through the doors and windows to murder both occupants several times over. Hamer himself fired a barrage of bullets through the passenger-side window, making sure that the young strawberry blonde--already slumped down in her seat, covered with blood--wouldn’t be leaving the scene alive.

That cacophonous ambuscade lasted only about 16 seconds, but it concluded Hamer’s 102-day pursuit of the outlaw pair--and put a violent stop to the notorious two-year criminal careers of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker. Those misguided lovers from the wrong side of the tracks in Dallas, Texas, weren’t the brightest, most crafty crooks roaming Depression-era America; in fact, they could fairly be called ardent bumblers. They remained at large and alive as long as they did, mostly because communications were pretty poor in the 1930s, and law-enforcement agencies didn’t do well at sharing information. Yet in that era when the news media and FBI were hot on the trails of more skilled malfactors, such as John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, and Pretty Boy Floyd, Barrow and Parker received a lot more publicity for their hold-ups of banks, gas stations, and country stores (as well as for crimes they didn’t commit) than they might have had they been operating in isolation.

(Left) Bonnie Parker in full “moll” mode.

In his fascinating 2009 book, Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde, Jeff Guinn recalls how distorted public impressions of the couple became:

Thanks to newsreels at movie theaters and photos transmitted to newspapers through the recent magic of wire services, most Americans believed they knew exactly what Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker looked like. The young couple loved to strike dramatic poses for the cameras that they carried along with their guns, and some of these pictures had fallen into the hands of lawmen who made them available to the media. So the nation became familiar with nattily dressed Clyde brandishing a menacing Browning Automatic Rifle, and with Bonnie assuming unladylike postures on the bumpers of stolen cars. The most famous photo showed Bonnie with a cigar dangling from the corner of her mouth, a particularly eye-catching image in a time when most respectable women would discreetly puff cigarettes in private. Thanks to the media, Clyde and Bonnie had quickly come to be considered the epitome of scandalous glamour. But in person Clyde was short and scrawny, and Bonnie’s looks were ordinary. They were both crippled, Clyde from cutting off two of his own toes in prison and Bonnie as the result of a car wreck nine months earlier in which her right leg was burned so badly that bone was visible in several places. She hopped now rather than walked. Clyde often had to carry her. They had little in common with the glittering images of themselves that mesmerized the public.

Despite the fact that many Americans of the time romanticized the crimes and screeching-tire escapes performed by Barrow and Parker--portraying them as “Romeo and Juliet in a getaway car”--the pair weren’t innocents; they were complicit in a few deaths along the way, and their robberies didn’t just hurt people who could afford such troubles. Over the last eight decades, their adventures have been seriously mythologized by Hollywood; while Arthur Penn’s 1967 big-screen picture, Bonnie and Clyde (starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway) and last year’s TV miniseries Bonnie & Clyde (previewed here) offer compelling stories, they shouldn’t be considered truthful re-tellings of events. Clyde and Bonnie were just two young people looking for better lives at a time when a broken U.S. economy respected nobody who wasn’t well-to-do. These two didn’t have to die in the violent, cinematic way they did, on that lonely back road in Bienville Parish, filled with hot lead. However, they also didn’t expect to perish in any other way than that. Just days before the ambush, Bonnie told the cousin of an acquaintance to “never go crooked,” adding “it’s for the love of a man than I’m gonna have to die … I don’t know when, but I know it can’t be long.”

Today, the town of Gibsland (pop. 979) will hold its annual Bonnie and Clyde festival, complete with live entertainment, a jambalaya feed, and a lookalike competition to find matches for Bonnie, Clyde, and the posse members who assassinated them. Meanwhile, there’s likely to be more attention than usual around the so-called Bonnie and Clyde Death Car, the Ford V-8 in which that pair met their end, and which is currently on display at Whiskey Pete’s Hotel & Casino in Primm, Nevada--bullet holes and all. If you aren’t planning to be in either of those towns this afternoon, at least you can check out the video below, a simplistic but not overly sensationalized account of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker’s two-year criminal run, originally presented in 2009 as part of Britain’s Timewatch documentary series.



READ MORE: “Legacy of Dallas-based Bank Robbers Bonnie and Clyde Lives On,” by Tristan Hallman (The Dallas Morning News); “Bonnie and Clyde Gunned Down 80 Years Ago Today,” by Adam Duvernay (Shreveport Times); “Bonnie & Clyde Met Violent Death 80 Years Ago,” by Paul Prost (The Saratogian); “Bonnie and Clyde--13 Things You May Not Know About America’s Most Infamous Outlaw Couple” (Vintage Everyday); “10 Things You May Not Know About Bonnie and Clyde,” by Christopher Klein (History.com).

Burning Drama

I don’t usually do anything during Memorial Day weekend except work, and maybe steal a bit of time to read on my front porch. But I was actually invited to a barbecue this Saturday (will wonders never cease?) ... which caused me to notice that Janet Rudolph has posted a rundown of barbecue-related crime fiction in Mystery Fanfare. If you need reading matter to occupy your mind while burgers and chicken parts cook ponderously over the grill, try the deliciously titled Finger Lickin’ Dead, by Riley Adams, or perhaps Elaine Viets’ Death on a Platter, or Lucy Burdette’s Topped Chef. Come and get ’em!

Piling On with the Anthonys

Close on the heels of announcements regarding the 2014 CrimeFest award winners, the first batch of Dagger Award shortlists (courtesy of Britain’s Crime Writers’ Association), and the longlists of nominees for the 2014 Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award comes today’s alert about contenders for the 2014 Anthony Awards. The Anthonys will be presented during the 45th annual Bouchercon World Mystery Convention to be held in Long Beach, California, in November. There are contenders in eight categories.

Best Novel:
• Suspect, by Robert Crais (Putnam)
• A Cold and Lonely Place, by Sara J. Henry (Crown)
• Ordinary Grace, by William Kent Krueger (Atria)
• The Wrong Girl, by Hank Phillippi Ryan (Forge)
• Through the Evil Days, by Julia Spencer-Fleming (Minotaur)

Best First Novel:
• Yesterday’s Echo, by Matt Coyle (Oceanview)
• Ghostman, by Roger Hobbs (Knopf)
• Rage Against the Dying, by Becky Masterman (Minotaur)
• Reconstructing Amelia, by Kimberly McCreight (HarperCollins)
• The Hard Bounce, by Todd Robinson (Tyrus)

Best Paperback Original Novel:
• The Big Reap, by Chris F. Holm (Angry Robot)
• Purgatory Key, by Darrell James (Midnight Ink)
• Joyland, by Stephen King (Hard Case Crime)
• The Wicked Girls, by Alex Marwood (Penguin)
• As She Left It, by Catriona McPherson (Midnight Ink)

Best Short Story:
• “Dead End,” by Craig Faustus Buck (Untreed Reads)
• “The Caxton Private Lending Library & Book Depository,” by John Connolly (The Mysterious Press)
• “Annie and the Grateful Dead,” by Denise Dietz (from The Sound and the Furry, edited by Denise Dietz and Lillian Stewart Carl; Amazon Digital)
• “Incident on the 405,” by Travis Richardson (from The Malfeasance Occasional: Girl Trouble, edited by Clare Toohey; St. Martin’s Press)
• “The Care and Feeding of Houseplants,” by Art Taylor (Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, March/April 2013)

Best Critical or Non-Fiction Work:
• Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes, by Maria Konnikova (Viking)
• The Secret Rescue: An Untold Story of American Nurses and Medics Behind Nazi Lines, by Cate Lineberry (Little, Brown)
• All the Wild Children, by Josh Stallings (Snubnose Press)
• The Hour of Peril: The Secret Plot to Murder Lincoln Before the Civil War, by Daniel Stashower (Minotaur)
• Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives, edited by Sarah Weinman (Penguin)

Best Children’s or Young Adult Novel:
• The Testing, by Joelle Charbonneau (Houghton Mifflin)
• Escape Theory, by Margaux Froley (Soho Teen)
• Escape from Mr. Lemoncello’s Library, by Chris Grabenstein (Random House)
• Dancer, Daughter, Traitor, Spy, by Elizabeth Kiem (Soho Teen)
• The Code Busters Club: Mystery of the Pirate’s Treasure, by Penny Warner (Edgmont USA)

Best Television Episode Teleplay (First Aired in 2013):
• The Blacklist, “Pilot,” teleplay by Jon Bokenkamp (Davis Entertainment, NBC)
• The Fall, “Dark Descent,” teleplay by Allan Cubitt (Netflix Original)
• Breaking Bad, “Felina,” teleplay by Vince Gilligan (AMC)
• The Following, “Pilot,” teleplay by Kevin Williamson (Fox/Warner Bros. Television)
• Justified, “Hole in the Wall,” teleplay by Graham Yost (Fox/Warner Bros. Television)

Best Audiobook:
• Crescendo, by Deborah J, Ledford, read by Christina Cox (Audible)
• The Cuckoo’s Calling, by Robert Galbraith, read by Robert Glenister (Hachette)
• Man in the Empty Suit, by Sean Ferrell, read by Mauro Hantman (AudioGO)
• Death and the Lit Chick, by G.M. Malliet, read by Davina Porter (Dreamscape)
• Hour of the Rat, by Lisa Brackmann, read by Tracy Sallows (Audible)

Congratulations to all of the contenders!

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

Scene of the CrimeFest

If you include, as you probably should, the 2006 Left Coast Crime convention--which also took place in Bristol, England--as part of its history, then this weekend’s CrimeFest was the event’s ninth year. Through all that time, these gatherings have been organized by Adrian Muller and Myles Allfrey, and have been held at the four-star Bristol Marriott Royal Hotel. Ali Karim, The Rap Sheet’s tireless British correspondent, has long sung the praises of this convention, and his opinions on this weekend’s conference echo those he’s delivered in years past. He calls CrimeFest “excellent, just the right size,” held in a “fantastic hotel” in a town with hundreds of restaurants within a five-minute walk, for all budgets.” And he extols the fact that “no one [there] takes themselves too seriously.” Maybe it’s all the gin Ali imbibed during his three-plus days in southwest England, or the fact that he had the opportunity to hang around with some of the world’s most respected crime novelists, but he says he left Bristol on Sunday feeling “energized and with such warm thoughts. He adds that he’s “rarely laughed so much” as he did at CrimeFest.

Fortunately for those of us who weren’t able to attend the 2014 CrimeFest, Ali took a profusion of photographs there and uploaded them to his Facebook page. With his permission, I’ve culled more than a dozen of my favorites and posted them below.

Click on any of these photographs to open an enlargement.


Author Maureen Jennings with critic-novelist Peter Guttridge, snooping out fresh reads in the CrimeFest Book Room.


Severn House editor Kate Lyall Grant is the rose caught between two thorns--author James Oswald and Shots editor Michael Stotter.


Novelist Stephen Booth concentrates on his signing at CrimeFest.


The charming Ruth Dudley Edwards inks some bookplates.


Martin Walker ventured over from France for this convention.


CrimeFest Bristol co-chairs Myles Alfry and Adrian Muller enjoy a bite to eat during a short break from the convention.


Mick Herron, who won the 2013 Gold Dagger Award for Dead Lions, devotes a bit of downtime to signing books.


Ali Karim and critic-author Mike Ripley certainly seem to be enjoying themselves at the Severn House party.


Shots contributor Ayo Onatade and Sophia Isabelle Karim (Ali’s daughter) arrive for the CrimeFest “gala dinner.”


Julia Jones (left) of the Margery Allingham Society presents Martin Edwards with the inaugural CWA Margery Allingham Prize.


2014 Diamond Dagger Award recipient Simon Brett served ably as after-dinner speaker and CrimeFest toastmaster.


What better way to finish off an evening than in the Bristol Marriott Royal Hotel bar, where laughter echoes as if in a cave?


Fellow authors and longtime friends Robert Wilson and Paul Johnston sample some of the bar’s liquid treats.


Martin Edwards looks on while fellow author Kate Ellis signs bookplates for her fans.


Kevin Wignall’s Sunday morning interview with Icelandic novelist Yrsa Sigurðardóttir drew a standing-room-only crowd.


It’s time to say farewell, until next year’s CrimeFest. Left to right: Mason Cross, Sophia Isabelle Karim, Shots editor Michael Stotter, Kevin Wignall, and James Oswald.

(All photos © 2014 Ali Karim)

READ MORE: “CrimeFest--and a Magic Moment,” by Martin Edwards (‘Do You Write Under Your Own Name?’); “Thrillers at CrimeFest 2014,” by Ali Karim (Shotsmag Confidential); “CrimeFest 2014: Saturday’s Panels,” by Sarah Ward (Crimepieces); “Confessions from CrimeFest,” Parts One, Two, and Three (Crime Thriller Girl).

Prizes and Surprises in Bristol

Thanks to our British correspondent, Ali Karim, who’s on the scene at this year’s CrimeFest convention in Bristol, England, we have the winners of several commendations handed out during a ceremony there this evening. I’m particularly pleased to see one of my favorite crime novels from last year, Derek B. Miller’s Norwegian by Night, honored twice. Below are all of the prize recipients.

Petrona Award (for Best Scandinavian Crime Novel of the Year): Linda, As in the Linda Murder, by Leif G.W. Persson, translated by Neil Smith (Doubleday)

Also nominated: Closed for Winter, by Jørn Lier Horst, translated by Anne Bruce (Sandstone Press); Strange Shores, by Arnaldur Indriðason, translated by Victoria Cribb (Harvill Secker); The Weeping Girl, by Håkan Nesser, translated by Laurie Thompson (Mantle); Someone to Watch Over Me, by Yrsa Sigurðardóttir, translated by Philip Roughton (Hodder & Stoughton); and Light in a Dark House, by Jan Costin Wagner, translated by Anthea Bell
(Harvill Secker)

eDunnit Award (honoring “the best crime fiction ebook first published in both hardcopy and in electronic format in the British Isles in 2013”): Norwegian by Night, by Derek B. Miller (Faber and Faber)

Also nominated: The Beauty of Murder, by A.K. Benedict (Orion); Sandrine, by Thomas H. Cook (Head of Zeus); Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway, by Sara Gran (Faber and Faber); Under a Silent Moon, by Elizabeth Haynes (Sphere); Cross and Burn, by Val McDermid (Sphere); The Red Road, by Denise Mina (Orion); Sign of the Cross, by Thomas Mogford (Bloomsbury); and The Double, by George Pelecanos (Orion)

Goldsboro Last Laugh Award (honoring “the best humorous crime novel first published in the British Isles in 2013”): Norwegian by Night, by Derek B. Miller (Faber and Faber)

Also nominated: Fire and Brimstone, by Colin Bateman (Headline); Speaking from Among the Bones, by Alan Bradley (Orion); The Axe Factor, by Colin Cotterill (Quercus); Calamitous Chinese Killing, by Shamini Flint (Little, Brown); Bad Monkey, by Carl Hiaasen (Little, Brown); A Little Murder, by Suzette A. Hill (Allison & Busby); and The Sound of One Hand Killing, by Teresa Solona (Bitter Lemon Press)

Audible Sounds of Crime Award
(honoring “the best unabridged crime audiobook first published in the UK in 2013 in both printed and audio formats, and available for download from Audible UK”): The Cuckoo’s Calling, by Robert Galbraith, read by Robert Glenister (Hachette Audio)

Also nominated: Broken Homes, by Ben Aaronovitch, read by Kobna Holdbrook-Smith (Orion Audio); A Delicate Truth, by John le Carré, read by John le Carré (Penguin); Dead Man’s Time, by Peter James, read by Daniel Weyman (Macmillan Audio); The Chessmen, by Peter May, read by Peter Forbes (Quercus); and Natural Causes, by James Oswald, read by Ian Hanmore (Penguin)

Congratulations to all the winners and other nominees!

A New York Lover, Lost

It’s sad to hear, from a post in Janet Rudolph’s Mystery Fanfare, that New York City writer Martin Meyers died earlier this week at age 79. As one of his friends, Connecticut blogger Joe Meyers, recalls,

After a long and varied career as an actor, Marty started out as a writer in the 1970s with a series of Mickey Spillane-style novels about a detective named Patrick Hardy--the author was the first to admit, years later, that the books were bluntly pre-feminist and un-PC--but under the influence of [his wife] Annette he began writing a series of historical novels about the earlier days of the city he adored (and knew more about than almost anyone I know).

Those books, of course, grew into the well-regarded “Dutchman” series, which the couple published under the pseudonym “Maan Meyers,” and which was set in 17th-, 18th-, and 19th-century New York. The first installment was 1992’s The Dutchman, while the last was 2008’s The Organ Grinder. As Joe Meyers writes, “The ‘Dutchman’ books span centuries but always have a present-tense excitement that make them read like contemporary stories. They also eschew cheap sentiment--Marty and Annette make sure that we realize that ‘the good old days’ were not so great.”

The biographical section of Martin and Annette Meyers’ Web site adds a few notes to our understanding of Martin’s career:

Marty's short story, “The Girl, the Body, and the Kitchen Sink,” signaling the return of Patrick Hardy, was published in the Signet anthology, The Private Eyes (1998). His erotic noir short story, “Pickup,” appears in the 2002 anthology, Flesh & Blood, Dark Desires, Mysterious Press/Warner. … “Mr. Quincy’s Different Drummer” was published in Argosy Magazine’s May/June 2004 issue, and “Snake Rag” was published in the anthology Murder ... And All That Jazz, in 2004, by Signet.

We send our condolences to Mr. Meyers’ family at this difficult time.

Readying the Launch of Daggers

Bristol is buzzing this weekend as mystery writers, editors, critics, and readers descend upon that city in southwest England to take part in CrimeFest. This annual convention began on Thursday, but last night brought its first headline event: the announcement of shortlisted nominees for a variety of awards to be presented by the British Crime Writers’ Association. The winners of these commendations will be announced on Monday, June 30, during the CWA Dagger Awards dinner.

The CWA Endeavour Historical Dagger:
• Devil in the Marshalsea, by Antonia Hodgson (Hodder & Stoughton)
• The Late Scholar, by Jill Paton Walsh (Hodder & Stoughton)
• Treachery, by S.J. Parris (HarperCollins)
• The City of Strangers, by Michael Russell (Avon)
• Kitty Peck and the Music Hall Murders, by Kate Griffin
(Faber & Faber)
• Theft of Life, by Imogen Robertson (Headline Review)
• The Dead Can Wait, by Robert Ryan (Simon & Schuster)

The CWA Non-Fiction Dagger:
• Did She Kill Him, by Kate Colquhoun (Little, Brown)
• Life After Death, by Damien Echols (Atlantic)
• Undercover, by Rob Evans & Paul Lewis (Faber & Faber/Guardian)
• The Girl, by Samantha Geimer (Simon & Schuster)
• Manson, by Jeff Guinn (Simon & Schuster)
• The Seige, by Adrian Levy & Cathy Scott-Clark (Viking)

The CWA International Dagger:
• Strange Shores, by Arnaldur Indridason; translated by Victoria Crib (Harvill Secker)
• Irène, by Pierre Lemaître; translated by Frank Wynne (Quercus/MacLehose)
• The Siege, by Arturo Perez-Reverte; translated by Frank Wynne (Weidenfeld)
• Forty Days Without Shadow, by Oliver Tru; translated by Louise Rogers LaLaurie (Little, Brown)
• Plan D, by Simon Urba; translated by Katy Derbyshire (Harvilll Secker)
• Dog Will Have His Day, by Fred Vargas; translated by Siân Reynolds (Harvill Secker)

The CWA Short Story Dagger:
• “Judge Surra,” by Andrea Camilleri (from Judges, by Andrea Camiller, Carlo Lucarelli, and Giancarlo De Cataldo; MacLehose Press)
• “Reconciliation,” by Jeffery Deaver (from Trouble in Mind, by Jeffery Deaver; Hodder & Stoughton)
• “In Our Darkened House,” by Inger Frimansson (from A Darker Shade: 17 Swedish Stories of Murder, Mystery, and Suspense, edited by John-Henri Holmberg; Head of Zeus)
• “Fedora,” by John Harvey (from Deadly Pleasures, edited by Martin Edwards; Severn House)
• “Night Nurse,” by Cath Staincliffe (from Deadly Pleasures)

The CWA Debut Dagger:
• The Long Oblivion, by Tim Baker
• A Convenient Ignorance, by Michael Baker
• Under the Hanging Tree, by Barb Ettridge
• The Father, by Tom Keenan
• Motherland, by Garry Abson
• The Allegory of Art and Science, by Graham Brack
• Convict, by Barb Ettridge
• The Dog of Erbill, by Peter Hayes
• Burnt, by Kristina Stanley
• Deviant Acts, by John J.White
• Seeds of a Demon, by Anastasia Tyler
• Colours, by Tim Emery
• The Movement, by Jody Sabral

In addition, Martin Edwards, the author of such novels as The Frozen Shroud (2013) and Dancing for the Hangman (2008), was honored with the inaugural CWA Margery Allingham Prize.

Still to come at CrimeFest: the proclamations of which authors and works will receive the 2014 Petrona Award and three other commendations.

(Hat tip to Shotsmag Confidential.)

READ MORE: “Friday’s Panels,” by Sarah Ward (Crimepieces).

Bullet Points: Prizes, Poirot, and Porizkova

Sorry for the scarcity of “Bullet Points” wrap-ups lately, but thanks to a recent Firefox redesign, the Bookmarks feature of my Web browser has become more difficult to use. Bookmarks now appear in a sidebar, rather than a drop-down menu, and I can’t easily open several of them at a time (using the highlighting feature) the way I used to do. Therefore, assembling these wrap-ups is a bit harder. Bear with me.

Today's edition of quick hits:

• People sure do seem to love lists, so critics are more than willing to deliver them. But trying to assemble a rundown of “The 20 Best Crime Novels of All Time”--as Britain’s Daily Telegraph did recently--is a no-win proposition. There’s too much room for argument. Featured on the Telegraph’s roster are: Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White, Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train, and James Ellroy’s L.A. Confidential. But Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood also finds a place there, and it’s not really a novel. Neither is Kate Summerscale’s The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher. And why not include there Ross Macdonald’s The Chill, Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, Sara Paretsky’s Indemnity Only, Ellery Queen’s Calamity Town, or … well, you see where I’m going. I have commented before on the difficulty of compiling these lists, and Crime Watch’s Craig Sisterson has a few thoughts to share on the Telegraph list, specifically.

• The 2014 edition of CrimeFest began yesterday in Bristol, England. Tomorrow night, Saturday, we’ll learn which books and authors have won prizes at that event. Stay tuned.

• Meanwhile, Ayo Onatade has put together this report from CrimeFest, Day 2.

• The fall schedule for PBS’ Masterpiece series features not only an adaptation of P.D. James’ 2001 novel, Death Comes to Pemberley, but also a seventh season of Inspector Lewis (yay!), three new episodes of Miss Marple, and a couple of follow-ups to the political thriller Page Eight, starring Bill Nighy as MI5 spy Johnny Worricker. Learn more here.

• For Criminal Element, Jake Hinkson has put together what he calls “a nice beginner’s guide to some of the critical/historical literature that’s sprung up around crime fiction over the years. This isn’t a comprehensive list, just a nice jumping-off place for fans of the hard-boiled stuff.” Not surprisingly, I have most of these books on my shelves already. You will find all of Hinkson’s choices here.

• “Are they the best TV couple of all time?” asks The Guardian’s Darragh McManus in this tribute to the ABC-TV private-eye spoof series Moonlighting. “From the mid to the late 1980s, the world looked on in delight as Cybill Shepherd and Bruce Willis fought, made up, fought some more, had amusingly rambling conversations, and then fell in love, sort of, while solving mysteries along the way.” In the mood for more Moonlighting nostalgia? Check out this site devoted to the show.

• Since when did “spox” become an acceptable abbreviation for “spokesperson”? Really, do modern-day news gatherers not have enough time to spell out whole English words?

• And the next time I receive press materials promoting a book that’s described as a “fiction novel,” I’m just going to scream!

• Not long ago I finished reading Robert B. Parker’s Cheap Shot (Putnam), the third of Ace Atkins’ efforts to extend the late Mr. Parker’s popular Spenser series. What’s most remarkable about Atkins’ contributions is how much they focus on Spenser’s investigative procedures. Parker’s later entries in this series downplayed the often time-consuming and frustrating steps a private eye would have to go through in trying to solve a case, and highlighted instead Spenser’s macho run-ins with tough guys/mobsters and the lovable quirkiness of his core players. I’m partial to Atkins’ approach, because it brings at least a modicum of realism to this series (which has never been very realistic). But mine may be a minority viewpoint. I wish that either of the two most recent online interviews with Atkins that I’ve spotted had included a question about this change in storytelling approach, but they don’t. Still, they’re worth reading. The first appears on the MysteryPeople site, while the other can be found in Jim Wilsky’s new blog, The Write Answers.

• MysteryPeople has also posted this short Q&A with Philip Kerr about his new (in the States, anyway) standalone thriller, Prayer.

• Speaking of interviews … Having recently published a lengthy exchange with Max Allan Collins about King of the Weeds (Titan), his latest posthumous collaboration with Mickey Spillane on a previously unfinished Mike Hammer novel, I was interested to read Collins’ comments--in his own blog--about the difficulties he faced in getting that sixth “new” Hammer tale to market. Read more here.

• Curtis Evans has had a good deal to say of late about U.S. writer Cornell Woolrich (1903-1968), whom he calls “one of the great twentieth-century masters of the crime short story (and the king of the crime novelette).” He writes here about the first volume in Centipede Press’ new series of Woolrich story collections, and here about “the legend of Cornell Woolrich, dark as his darkest fiction.”

• The UK release earlier this spring of John Connolly’s 12th Charlie Parker outing, The Wolf in Winter (Hodder & Stoughton), has prompted Crime Fiction Lover to recap “Parker’s bloodstained past,” tracing the books all the way back to Every Dead Thing (1999). Unfortunately, The Wolf in Winter isn’t due out in the States till late October.

• If you happen to be in Ireland this coming Monday evening, May 19, don’t miss dropping ’round to see our friend Declan Burke (Crime Always Pays) moderate a conversation between his fellow crime novelists Brian McGilloway, Sinead Crowley, and Arne Dahl--part of the Dublin Writers’ Festival. Details here.

• If you don’t know already, the new, authorized Hercule Poirot novel penned by British poet-novelist Sophie Hannah will be titled The Monogram Murders. It’s due out in U.S. bookstores from Morrow in early September; HarperCollins is publishing the UK edition, to be released at the same time. Learn more from Hannah about the project in this short YouTube video.

• In what we’re told is Part I of a who-knows-how-many-postings series about “Mystery TV Theme Songs,” the blog Mystery Playground looks back at the opening sequences from Charlie’s Angels, The Rockford Files, and Simon & Simon. More, please!

• It seems I’ve spent a lot of time recently cruising through the depths of YouTube, looking for episodes of older crime dramas. And in the course of that, I happened across the video below--a December 2010 episode of the BBC-TV documentary series Timeshift, “investigat[ing] the success of Scandinavian crime fiction and why it exerts such a powerful hold on our imagination.” Enjoy!



• Timeshift later did a study of Italian noir fiction, viewable here.

• During the 1980s, I was a thoroughly devoted fan of Czech-born model Paulina Porizkova, who appeared on a number of Sports Illustrated covers (including this one) and now ranks as No. 10 on SA’s list of the “50 Greatest Swimsuit Models.” (I’d have ranked her higher!) Porizkova also did a few turns in films and TV shows, including her co-starring role in the 1989 romantic comedy Her Alibi, in which she played a murder suspect who’s caught the eye of a mystery novelist, Phil Blackwood (Tom Selleck). I remember going to a screening of Her Alibi, shortly after it was released, but hadn’t seen it since. So imagine my surprise at discovering the full 90-minute picture available on YouTube. It is not a must-catch film; in fact, Porizkova’s performance earned her a Golden Raspberry nomination for Worst Actress (though she ultimately lost out to Heather Locklear in The Return of Swamp Thing). However, Porizkova--then in her mid-20s--is well worth watching, if only for her captivating smile.

• The cinema blog The Dissolve reports that a Blu-ray set of the fascinatingly weird ABC-TV drama series Twin Peaks--containing “not just the entire run of the show and [the 1992 prequel film] Fire Walk With Me, but also 90 minutes of material that was cut from the movie”--will be released on July 29. “This is great news for two reasons,” remarks Dissolve staff writer Noel Murray. “For one, all of the previous Twin Peaks VHS and DVD collections have been lacking in one way or another, missing the pilot movie and/or the prequel, and frequently beset with technical snafus and subpar presentation. So even if the Blu-ray set just contained nice-looking transfers of every Twin Peaks episode plus the movies, it’d be welcome. But the Fire Walk With Me outtakes … elevate The Entire Mystery to event status.” You can order Twin Peaks: The Entire Mystery here.

• Just when you think CBS-TV’s CSI (Crime Scene Investigation) franchise might finally be petering out, along yet omes another spinoff. CSI: Cyber, starring ex-Medium lead Patricia Arquette as the head of the Cyber Crime Division at Quantico, Virginia, will debut as a mid-season replacement series in January 2015.

• Even most readers of The Rap Sheet--and you are obviously a knowledgeable bunch--probably don’t remember Henry Kuttner (1915-1958), but he was a California-born author of fantasy, horror, and crime fiction. Among Kuttner’s numerous protagonists was the smart and compassionate Michael Gray, a psychoanalyst and amateur sleuth in San Francisco. Gray starred in a quartet of novels: The Murder of Ann Avery (1956); The Murder of Eleanor Pope (1956); Murder of a Mistress (1957); and Murder of a Wife (1958). Haffner Press is currently planning to release a 712-page omnibus edition of those four works, The Michael Gray Mysteries, in late July. It might be worth checking out. (Hat tip to Ed Gorman.)

• The latest edition of Crime Review features, among other things, a brief interview with Sara Paretsky (Critical Mass).

• Ah, I do love San Francisco …

• Having just written for Kirkus Reviews about Loren D. Estleman’s new Western/detective novel, Ragtime Cowboys--which features Old West sometime lawman Wyatt Earp in a secondary role--I couldn’t help but notice this piece in Criminal Element about the various big-screen portrayals of Earp over the years.

• The Big Click is back with a new edition. It features an essay by Barry Graham (“Scary Decorations: The Comfort of Bad Things”) and a short story, “Gorge,” by Heather L. Nelson. And as of May 20, it will add Gary Phillips’ brief tale, “Tobin and Gagarin,” set amid San Francisco’s 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.

• Patti Abbott’s “forgotten books” spotlight today shines on crime fiction published during the 1950s, including worthy works by Michael Avallone, Holly Roth, Gil Brewer, Charity Blackstock, Harry Whittington, and Wade Miller. Catch the links here.

• Winners of the 2013 Bram Stoker Awards were announced at the World Horror Convention in Portland, Oregon.

• And Omnimystery News has brought us the winners of this year’s Independent Publisher Book Awards (the IPPYs). These prizes will be handed out in New York City on May 28, the evening before the BookExpo America convention begins. Oddly, I don’t think I have ever heard of the crime and thriller works being honored.

• Who remembers Judd, for the Defense?

• Finally, I’m not sure why (perhaps I missed seeing his introduction to all of this), but San Franciscan Ronald Tierney--author of the Deets Shanahan P.I. novels--has recently been posting a succession of “Observations” in his blog, Life, Death and Fog. Each of those looks back at what I guess is a year from his life (he was born in 1944), recalling noteworthy events, book publications, and automobile debuts. You should be able to access the whole series by clicking here.