A weekly alert for followers of crime, mystery, and thriller fiction.
In Bitter Chill, by Sarah Ward (Faber and Faber UK), involves the apparent suicide, in England’s Peak District, of elderly Yvonne Jenkins, whose only daughter, Sophie, perished during a still-unsolved kidnapping back in 1978. As a pair of police detectives investigate, they connect
Jenkins’ demise to that snatching as well as to the more recent strangling of a retired teacher who’d once known both Sophie and Rachel Jones, the latter of whom was also abducted but managed to escape. Might Rachel, now a genealogist, provide the clues needed to solve these crimes--even if she has no memory of the long-ago kidnappings to which they appear so firmly linked? Little Pretty Things, by Lori Rader-Day (Seventh Street), introduces Juliet Townsend, who in high school dreamed of becoming a track star, but 10 years on is cleaning rooms in a shabby Indiana motel. Imagine her surprise when Maddy Bell, her onetime athletic rival, checks in to that same lodging, looking prosperous and wanting to share a drink with Juliet. Something is quite wrong here, but Juliet doesn’t inquire until it is too late: Maddy is found dead and the cops figure Juliet was involved. To save herself, Juliet sifts through her past and memories of Maddy, hoping to identify a killer in the present.
Click here to see more of this season’s most-wanted books.
During a dinner ceremony this evening at the Hotel Russell in London, the British Crime Writers’ Association (CWA) presented seven of its coveted annual Dagger Awards. Recipients were as follows:
The International Dagger:Camille, by Pierre Lemaitre, translated by Frank Wynne (Quercus)
Also nominated: Falling Freely, As If in a Dream, by Leif G.W. Persson, translated by Paul Norlen (Transworld); Cobra, by Deon Meyer, translated by (Hodder & Stoughton); Arab Jazz, by Karim Miské, translated by Sam Gordon (MacLehose); The Invisible Guardian, by Dolores Redondo, translated by Isabelle Kaufeler (HarperCollins); and Into a Raging Blaze, by Andreas Norman, translated by Ian Giles (Quercus)
The Short Story Dagger: “Apocrypha,” by Richard Lange (from Sweet Nothing: Stories, by Richard Lange; Mulholland Press)
Also nominated: “Red Eye,” by Michael Connelly and Dennis Lehane (from Face Off, edited by David Baldacci; Sphere); “The Hunter,” by Dashiell Hammett (from The Hunter and Other Stories; No Exit Press); “Sweet
Nothing,” by Richard Lange (from Sweet Nothing); “Juror 8,” by Stuart Neville (from OxCrimes; Profile); and “The Dead Their Eyes Implore Us,” by George Pelecanos (from OxCrimes)
The Non-fiction Dagger:In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile, by Dan Davies (Quercus)
Also nominated: A Kim Jong-Il Production, by Paul Fischer (Penguin); Ghettoside: Investigating a Homicide Epidemic, by Jill Leovy (Bodley Head); Gun Baby Gun: A Bloody Journey into the World of the Gun, by Iain Overton (Canongate); One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway, by Ǻsne Seierstad (Virago); and Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, by Bryan Stevenson (Scribe)
The Endeavour Historical Dagger:The Seeker, by
S.G. MacLean (Quercus)
Also nominated: Havana Sleeping, by Martin Davies (Hodder & Stoughton); Lamentation, by C. J. Sansom (Mantle); The Man from Berlin, by Luke McCallin (No Exit Press); The Silent Boy, by Andrew Taylor (HarperCollins); and The Taxidermist’s Daughter, by Kate Mosse (Orion)
The Debut Dagger:Last of the Soho Legends, by Greg Keen
Also nominated: Dark Chapter, by Winnie M. Li; The Ice Coffin, by Jill Sawyer; The Pure Drop, by Nigel Robbins; Lock Me In, by Kate Simants
The winners of another three Daggers--the Gold Dagger, the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger, and the John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger--will be announced this coming fall.
Well, I’ve done it again, folks. So pleased was I with last week’s expansion of Killer Covers' summertime book-fronts gallery, that I decided to update another post from around that same time.
In May 2009, I cobbled together an assortment of “suburban sin fiction” covers from the mid-20th century, including works such as Adultery in Suburbia, Sexurbia County, Split-Level Love, and Shopping Center Sex. In the years since, however, I’ve found many more examples of that genre, and have now added to my gallery--boosting the number of paperbacks on display from 16 to a whopping 76.
There’s nothing like a good obituary, and this one in The New York Times honoring British-born actor Patrick
Macnee begins thusly:
Patrick Macnee, who wielded a lethal umbrella and sharp repartee as the dapper secret agent John Steed on the 1960s television series “The Avengers,” died on
Thursday at his home in Rancho Mirage, Calif. He was 93.
His son, Rupert, confirmed his death.
Mr. Macnee faced off against an assortment of evildoers, armed with understated wit and a traditionalist British fashion sense that made him look less like a spy in the Bond mold than “a junior cabinet minister,” as he
once put it, although his tightly rolled umbrella concealed a sword and other crime-fighting gadgets, and his bowler hat, lined with a steel plate, could stop bullets and, when thrown, fell an opponent.
He was paired with a comely female sidekick, initially Honor Blackman (who left the series to play Pussy Galore in the James Bond film “Goldfinger”) but most famously Diana Rigg, stylish in a leather cat suit and every bit his equal in the wit and hand-to-hand-combat departments.
In many scenes he was content to observe, an eyebrow cocked, as Emma--whom he always referred to as Mrs. Peel--unleashed her martial arts expertise on a hapless foe. He would often summon her to action with the words “Mrs. Peel, we’re needed.” Steed carried no gun. Aplomb and sang-froid were his weapons. In one episode, his back to the wall and facing a firing squad, he was asked if he had a last request. “Would you cancel my milk?” he said.
This Associated Press obit observes that John Steed “appeared in all but two episodes [of The Avengers], accompanied by a string of beautiful women who were his sidekicks.” It goes on:
“We were in our own mad, crazy world,” Macnee told the Wichita Eagle in 2003 when “The New Avengers” [1976-1977] was being issued on DVD. “We were the TV Beatles. We even filmed in the same studio.”
But while he made his name internationally playing a smart, debonair British secret agent, Macnee was never a fan of the James Bond movies.
“I think their stories aren’t that realistic,” he told Salt Lake City’s Deseret News in 1999. “I think the sadism in them is horrifying. ... On the other hand, the books--the James Bond books--were fascinating.”
Macnee eventually appeared in one of the Bond films himself: 1985’s A View to a Kill, starring Roger Moore, in which he portrayed a Bond ally, Sir Godfrey Tibbett, who was ultimately murdered by the evil “superwoman,” May Day (Grace Jones). Macnee had also featured opposite Moore seven years before that, playing Doctor John H. Watson in the under-rated 1976 teleflick Sherlock
Holmes in New York. Wikipedia notes that Macnee
filled the role of Watson “twice [more] with Christopher Lee, first in Incident at Victoria Falls (1991) and then in Sherlock Holmes and the Leading Lady (1992). He played Holmes in another TV film, The Hound of London (1993). He is thus one of only a very small number of actors to have portrayed both Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson on screen.”
The fact is, while many people remember Macnee best as the quintessential English gentleman spy and leading man in The Avengers, he was more often included in films and on television in standalone appearances or as a secondary
character. “Macnee was the kind of actor you looked for as a guest star in other series,” writes It’s About TV’s Mitchell Hadley, “and when you ran across the name you made sure to watch the episode, even if you weren’t a fan of the show itself. He was a ship’s captain in Columbo and a man who thought he was Sherlock Holmes in Magnum, P.I., and lent his voice to the Cylon leader in the original Battlestar Galactica (as well as doing the voice-over to the opening credits). Whether playing the hero or the villain, he was a wonderful presence on screen, one that forced you to watch him.”
Macnee’s résumé included roles on Alias Smith and Jones, Diagnosis: Murder, Family Law, Hart to Hart, Murder, She Wrote, and Frasier. He did a turn as an unusually versatile travel agent in Robert Urich’s 1982-1983 TV series, Gavilin, and featured in Dennis Weaver’s 1989 one-off McCloudsequel, The Return of Sam McCloud. In addition, Macnee--who’d begun training as
a stage performer before joining the Royal Navy during World War II--can be seen in motion pictures such as Scrooge(1951), The Sea Wolves(1980), and This Is Spinal Tap(1984).
For all of the wonderful words being said about Patrick Macnee in the wake of his demise, two of the most interesting things I learned about him are these: he was “expelled from Eton College for running a sports book and selling pornography,” to again quote The New York Times; and as The Telegraphexplains, “he became an active member of a nudist colony in the mid-1970s.” As his one-time New Avengers co-star, Joanna Lumley, quipped: “He was the best-dressed man on television and a nudist in real life.”
It’s such ironic gems that make reading obituaries worthwhile.
To honor this week’s official start of the season, I have updated and more than tripled the size of a gallery in my Killer Covers blog showcasing vintage summer-related paperback book fronts. Among the artists represented are Robert McGinnis, Ernest Chiriacka, Paul Rader, Harry Bennett, and Charles Copeland. Click here to learn more.
(Editor’s note: This is the fourth recent piece by Rap Sheet contributor Anthony Rainone, who has been reflecting on real crimes and how they relate to fictional characters facing similar circumstances. You can enjoy all of Anthony’s previous posts here.)
On June 6, 2015, prisoners Richard Matt, 48, and David Sweat, 35, broke out of the Clinton Correctional Facility, a maximum-security state prison located in Dannemora, New York. At the same time as that
getaway set off a massive
manhunt that continues today, it caused various news media to compare the incident, if only fleetingly, to the 1994 film The Shawshank Redemption, which starred Tim Robbins as Andy Dufresne and Morgan Freedman as Ellis Boyd “Red” Redding.
There are some similarities, to be sure. Matt and Sweat placed dummies in their beds, dug through brick, made their way along interior corridors, cut through pipes with power tools, and emerged outside the prison walls through a manhole cover. Andy Dufresne did not use power tools to escape from Maine’s (fictional) Shawshank State Penitentiary, though he did employ a small ball-peen hammer to break through his wall and dig down to the sewer pipes which also served as his means of escape through the bowels of the prison. Of course, Red Redding walked out of prison a free man, but broke his parole to meet up with Dufresne in Mexico--a locale to which some people thought Matt and Sweat would also head.
Yet the manhole cover escape immediately brought to mind another favorite film, the 1998 caper tale, Out of Sight, starring George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez. Based on the 1996 Elmore Leonard novel of the same name, that picture at one point finds convicted bank robber Jack Foley (played by Clooney) emerging from beneath a manhole cover only to find himself staring down the barrel of a gun held by U.S. Marshall Karen Sisco (Lopez). The similarity extends further in that Matt and Sweat expected to see a woman when they exited their own manhole: accomplice and 51-year-old civilian prison tailor employee Joyce Mitchell.
Parallels end there, though one could technically extend them a bit further, since prisoner Matt seemed to have a sexual relationship with Mitchell, while Clooney’s Foley enjoyed a romantic attraction to Sisco. Clearly, Foley’s was the more admirable liaison, since Mitchell seemed to be merely a pawn in the Dannemora escape plans.
The recent New York fleeing also brings to mind another of my favorite prison-breakout movies: Escape from Alcatraz. Based on true events, that 1979 film starred Clint Eastwood as convicted armed robber Frank Morris and Patrick McGoohan as the sinister Warden. In 1962, the multiple-offending Morris used a sort-of power tool to undo bolts on a shaft vent; he’d rigged the thing from a fan motor and a drill bit. And let’s not forget the dummy head that Morris left
on his prison bed.
Ruining the continuity thread, Morris did not go underground or utilize pipes in his daring flight. Instead, he crossed the roof of Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary together with his accomplices, climbed down a wall, climbed over a fence, and used a makeshift raft assembled from raincoats to cross surrounding San Francisco Bay. Morris and his cohorts, the brothers Clarence and John Anglin, were never found and--though they’d be very old men
by now--might still be at large. Most presumed they died crossing the frigid waters fraught with strong currents. But many believe Frank Morris eventually made his way to Mexico--the desired flee-to location for Matt and Sweat as
well.
Maybe Morris, Dufresne, and Redding all enjoyed drinks with umbrellas on the beach. I could live with that.
Life imitates art/imitates life doesn’t fully apply to the case of Richard Matt and David Sweat, of course. There’s a serious departure. Shawshank’s Dufresne was wrongly convicted of murdering his wife and her lover. Out of Sight’s Jack Foley was a gentleman bank robber with charm and morals--he was not a violent man. Frank Morris was a convicted armed robber, certainly a serious matter, but Eastwood managed to make his character sympathetic and gruffly likable, if not entirely innocent.
Matt and Sweat, on the other hand, are cold-blooded killers. There is nothing romantic or likable about these men, one of whom murdered a deputy, while the other killed and dismembered his victim. Unlike Dufresne or Morris, the recent escapees in New York state deserve to be apprehended and serve out their life sentences. Their story does not merit a happy cinematic ending.
A weekly alert for followers of crime, mystery, and thriller fiction.
Stealing People, by Robert Wilson (Orion UK), brings the return of London kidnap consultant Charles Boxer (Capital Punishment, You Will Never Find Me), this time challenged by a case involving the children of six billionaires, all abducted within a span of just 32
hours. The well-organized group responsible for these acts demands no ransom, but does want £25 million per hostage to cover “expenses.” As Boxer and his ex, London police detective Mercy Danquah, go at the investigation from different angles, they’re competing with intelligence agencies concerned about the kidnappings because the parents that have been targeted have connections to some very powerful characters. The Cartel, by Don Winslow (Knopf)--a sequel to The Power of the Dog (2005)--transports us back into the company of Art Keller, a now-retired Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent, who re-enters the deadly hubbub of Mexico’s drug-peddling conflicts following news that his old antagonist, Adán Barrera, leader of the Sinaloan cartel El Federación, has broken out of prison and is intent on re-establishing himself as a criminal kingpin. Keith Rawson writes in Lit Reactor that “if this was a just world, The Cartel would be Winslow’s true breakout novel and it would place all of Winslow’s future novels at the top of [the] New York Times bestseller list.”
Click here to see more of this season’s most-wanted books.
There was a time, from the late 1950s through the ’70s, when private-eye dramas were all the rage on television. Now it’s hard to find any such programs. We’ve been told for a long while that gumshoes are a dying breed in published fiction as well, that--as I write in my new Kirkus Reviews column--“In our era of smartphones and Google searches, mass shootings and invasive electronic surveillance, the resolute P.I. plodding through a case, dissecting myriad motives and doubting the truthfulness of everyone he or she encounters, simply does not excite readers any longer.”
Yet there are still plenty of hard-working and intriguing freelance investigators stalking the streets of our most crime-besieged cities. (Just ask the Private Eye Writers of America, presenter of the annual Shamus Awards.) On the Kirkus Web site today, I highlight five recently published novels that do a commendable job of keeping private detectives relevant--whether they operate in modern times or historical ones. You’ll find that piece here.
Astounding as this is to believe, it was 40 years ago today that Steven Spielberg’s summer blockbuster, Jaws, premiered on U.S. movie screens. The film’s script, about a giant man-eating shark that menaces a seaside vacation town in New England, was based on Peter Benchley’s 1974 novel of the same name and turned out to be a mammoth box-office success. Wikipedia recalls that “Jaws opened with a $7 million weekend and recouped its production costs in two weeks. In just 78 days, it overtook The Godfather as the highest-grossing film at the North American box office ...”
While that entire beachside horror film is pretty frickin’ memorable, even people who haven’t seen the picture are probably familiar with the poster used to publicize it--a poster that gave rise to myriad thematic imitations. The artwork, inspired by the Benchley novel’s first scene and showing a young skinny-dipping woman being attacked by a great white shark, was created originally for the 1975 Bantam paperback edition of Jaws. It was painted by Roger Kastel (born 1931), a White Plains, New York, native who’d been turning out magazine and paperback book-cover illustrations since the ’60s, and would go on from the Jaws commission to create the movie artwork for the first Star Wars film sequel, The Empire Strikes Back (1980).
Unfortunately, those Hollywood projects have pretty much eclipsed Kastel’s other artistic efforts. A bit of searching around the Web, though, brings up a number of book and periodical fronts by this artist that merit attention. So as we commemorate this 40th anniversary of Jaws’ release, let us also remember the man behind its iconic poster. Below I’ve embedded Kastel’s original illustration for the 1967 Banner edition of The Tease, by Gil Brewer; several of his façades for paperback novels by Frank Kane, H.G. Wells, John Steinbeck, Franz Kafka, and others; and finally, a quartet of adventure magazine fronts that demonstrate, if nothing else, Kastel’s eye for the female form.
Click on any of these images to open an enlargement.
Blogger and editor Janet Rudolph today announced the contenders for the 2015 Macavity Awards. Nominees are selected and voted on “by members of Mystery Readers International, subscribers to Mystery Readers Journal, and friends and supporters of MRI.”
Best Mystery Novel: •The Lewis Man, by Peter May (Quercus) •The Last Death of Jack Harbin, by Terry Shames (Seventh Street) •The Killer Next Door, by Alex Marwood (Penguin) •The Day She Died, by Catriona McPherson (Midnight Ink) •The Missing Place,
by Sophie Littlefield (Gallery) •The Long Way Home,
by Louise Penny (Minotaur)
Best First Mystery Novel: •Invisible City,
by Julia Dahl (Minotaur) •The Black Hour,
by Lori Rader-Day (Seventh Street) •Someone Else’s Skin,
by Sarah Hilary (Penguin) •Dear Daughter, by Elizabeth Little (Viking) •Blessed Are the Dead, by Kristi Belcamino (Witness Impulse) •Dry Bones in the Valley, by Tom Bouman (Norton)
Best Mystery-Related Non-fiction: •Writes of Passage: Adventures on the Writer’s Journey, edited by Hank Phillippi Ryan (Henery Press) •The Figure of the Detective: A Literary History and Analysis, by Charles Brownson (McFarland) •Poe-Land: The Hallowed Haunts of Edgar Allan Poe, by J.W. Ocker (Countryman) •400 Things Cops Know: Street Smart Lessons from a Veteran Patrolman, by Adam Plantinga (Quill Driver)
Best Mystery Short Story: • “Honeymoon Sweet,” by Craig Faustus Buck (from Murder at the Beach: The Bouchercon Anthology 2014, edited by Dana Cameron; Down & Out) • “The Shadow Knows,” by Barb Goffman (from Chesapeake Crimes: Homicidal Holidays, edited by Donna Andrews, Barb Goffman, and Marcia Talley; Wildside) • “Howling at the Moon,” by Paul D. Marks (Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine [EQMM], November 2014) • “The Proxy,” by Travis Richardson (ThugLit #13,
September/October 2014) • “The Odds Are Against Us,” by Art Taylor (EQMM, November 2014)
Sue Feder Memorial Award for Best Historical Mystery: •Queen of Hearts, by Rhys Bowen (Berkley Prime Crime) •Present Darkness, by Malla Nunn (Atria) •A Deadly Measure of Brimstone, by Catriona McPherson (Minotaur) •An Officer and a Spy, by Robert Harris (Knopf) •Hunting Shadows, by Charles Todd (Morrow) •Things Half in Shadow, by Alan Finn (Gallery)
Winners will be declared during Bouchercon 46, to be held in Raleigh, North Carolina, from October 8 to 11.
(By the way, the Macavity Awards take their name from the “mystery cat” in the 1939 collection of whimsical poetry, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. The author of that collection was, of course, T.S. Eliot--about whom I wrote earlier today in regard to his five rules of “detective conduct” in fiction. How’s that for an odd coincidence?)
Way back in 2006, I posted on this page author S.S. Van Dine’s “Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories,” which had originally been featured in American Magazine in 1928. I hadn’t realized until today, though, that essayist-playwright--a great fan of mystery and crime fiction, I hear--concocted his own five rules of “detective conduct” a year before Van Dine’s appeared. Curtis J. Evans provides this brief version of those “rules” in his blog, The Passing Tramp.
1. The story must not rely upon elaborate and incredible disguises. ... Disguises must be only occasional and incidental.
2. The character and motives of the criminal should be normal. In the ideal detective story we should feel that we have a sporting chance to solve the mystery ourselves; if the criminal is highly abnormal, an irrational element is introduced which offends us.
3. The story must not rely upon either occult phenomena, or, what comes to the same thing, upon mysterious and preposterous discoveries made by lonely scientists.
4. Elaborate and bizarre machinery is an irrelevance. ... Writers who delight in treasures hid in strange places, cyphers and codes, runes and rituals, should not be encouraged.
5. The detective should be highly intelligent, but not superhuman. We should be able to follow his inferences and almost, but not quite, make them with him.
Hey, I want to hear more about those “mysterious and preposterous discoveries made by lonely scientists.” Were those once regular occurrences in the genre?
A weekly alert for followers of crime, mystery, and thriller fiction.
The Convictions of John Delahunt, by Andrew Hughes (Pegasus), sweeps readers confidently--and on the wings of some elegant prose--into the poverty-encumbered world of 1840s Dublin, where a young paid informant for the British government awaits hanging for the brutal murder of a small boy. Based on historical events, Hughes’ debut novel finds former Trinity College student John Delahunt reflecting in his prison cell on his clandestine activities, the romance he’d enjoyed with the sister of a rebellious friend, and the ways in which he betrayed others ... and was in turn betrayed. Charlie Martz and Other Stories (Morrow) finds Elmore Leonard--who died in 2013--back in bookstores with a collection of 15 short tales from his early career, most of them previously unpublished. As Edward A. Grainger notes in Criminal Element, the offerings here range from Westerns (such as “Charlie Martz” and “First Western Siesta in Paloverde”) to criminal yarns (including “One, Horizontal,” about “an older brother looking for revenge for his younger sibling who had been maimed by a mobster and wisely isn’t looking for retribution himself”).
Click here to see more of this season’s most-wanted books.
Earlier today I posted the news about this year’s shortlisted nominees for three Dagger Awards, to be given out by the Crime Writers’ Association. But I didn’t realize, until reading Karen Meek’s Euro Crime blog, that another prize announcement had been made. Here, then, are the finalists for the 2015 Theakstons Crime Novel of the Year:
•The Facts of Life and Death, by Belinda Bauer (Black Swan) •The Axeman’s Jazz, by Ray Celestin (Mantle) •The Outcast Dead, by Elly Griffiths (Quercus) •Someone Else’s Skin, by Sarah Hilary (Headline) •The Devil in the Marshalsea, by Antonia Hodgson
(Hodder & Stoughton) •Entry Island, by Peter May (Quercus)
In addition, Sara Paretsky will be given the Outstanding Contribution to Crime Fiction Award. Past winners of that commendation include Denise Mina, Lee Child, Val McDermid, and Mark Billingham.
The British Crime Writers’ Association (CWA) announced, in May, the longlist of nominees in five of its 2015 Dagger Awards categories. Today it offers up four additional sets of contenders for CWA prizes.
CWA Goldsboro Gold Dagger: •The Shut Eye, by Belinda Bauer (Bantam Press) •The Rules of Wolfe, by James Carlos Blake (No Exit Press) •The Silkworm, by Robert Galbraith (Sphere) •Missing, by Sam Hawken (Serpent’s Tail) •Mr. Mercedes, by Stephen King (Hodder & Stoughton) •Pleasantville, by Attica Locke (Serpent’s Tail) •The Bone Seeker, by M.J. McGrath (Mantle) •The Serpentine Road, by Paul Mendelson (Constable) •Life or Death, by Michael Robotham (Sphere) •The Kind Worth Killing, by Peter Swanson (Faber and Faber)
CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger: •No Safe House, by Linwood Barclay (Orion) •The Defence, by Steve Cavanagh (Orion) •The Stranger, by Harlan Coben (Orion) •Missing, by Sam Hawken (Serpent’s Tail) •The Girl on the Train, by Paula Hawkins (Doubleday) •Nobody Walks, by Mick Herron (Soho Crime) •The White Van, by Patrick Hoffman (Grove Press) •The Final Minute, by Simon Kernick (Century) •Runner, by Patrick Lee (Michael Joseph) •The Night the Rich Men Burned, by Malcolm MacKay (Mantle) •Cop Town, by Karin Slaughter (Century) •The Kind Worth Killing, by Peter Swanson (Faber and Faber) •Heartman, by M.P. Wright (Black & White)
CWA John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger: •The Abrupt Physics of Dying, by Paul E. Hardisty (Orenda) •Dear Daughter, by Elizabeth Little (Harvill Secker) •Dry Bones in the Valley, by Tom Bouman (Faber and Faber) •Everything I Never Told You, by Celeste Ng (Little, Brown) •Fourth of July Creek, by Smith Henderson (Heinemann) •The Girl in the Red Coat, by Kate Hamer (Faber and Faber) •The Killing of Bobbi Lomax, by Cal Moriarty (Faber and Faber) •The Well, by Catherine Chanter (Canongate) •You, by Caroline Kepnes (Simon & Schuster)
Shortlists of the competitors in all of these Dagger categories should be declared on June 30, with the final winners to be announced in September during an awards ceremony in central London.
The Dead Good Reader Awards. You’ve never heard of them? That’s probably because their creation was only announced this last April by the crime fiction-oriented UK Web site Dead Good. There are six prizes in total, each “celebrat[ing] a unique element in crime writing” and in some cases a specific author who has gained renown in the genre. Winners are to be selected through online polling as well as by a vote among attendees at the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate, England, July 16-19.
The Dead Good Recommends Award for Most Recommended Book: •The Girl on the Train, by Paula Hawkins (Transworld) •I Am Pilgrim, by Terry Hayes (Transworld) •The Defence, by Steve Cavanagh (Orion) •I Let You Go, by Clare Mackintosh (Sphere) •The Lie, by C.L. Taylor (Avon) •No Other Darkness, by Sarah Hilary (Headline)
The Lee Child Award for Best Loner or Detective: • Cormoran Strike, created by Robert Galbraith (Little, Brown) • John Rebus, created by Ian Rankin (Orion) • Harry Hole, created by Jo Nesbø (Vintage) • Lacey Flint, created by Sharon Bolton (Transworld) • David Raker, created by Tim Weaver (Michael Joseph) • Vera Stanhope, created by Ann Cleeves (Pan Macmillan)
The Val McDermid Award for Fiendish Forensics: •Bones Are Forever, by Kathy Reichs (Cornerstone) •Die Again, by Tess Gerritsen (Transworld) •The Ghost Fields, by Elly Griffiths (Quercus) •Flesh and Blood, by Patricia Cornwell (Harper) •Rubbernecker, by Belinda Bauer (Transworld) •Time of Death, by Mark Billingham (Sphere)
The Reichenbach Falls Award for Most Epic Ending: •The Defence, by Steve Cavanagh (Orion) •The Girl on the Train, by Paula Hawkins (Transworld) •The Nightmare Place, by Steve Mosby (Orion) •I Let You Go, by Clare Mackintosh (Sphere) •Personal, by Lee Child (Transworld) •The Skeleton Road, by Val McDermid (Sphere)
The Dr. Lecter Award for Scariest Villain: •The Shining Girls, by Lauren Beukes (Harper) •Into the Darkest Corner, by Elizabeth Haynes (Myriad) •An Evil Mind, by Chris Carter (Simon & Schuster) •The Stand, by Stephen King (Hodder)
• You Are Dead, by Peter James (Macmillan) •The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson (Quercus)
The Patricia Highsmith Award for Most Exotic Location: • Amsterdam, The Girl Who Wouldn’t Die, by Marnie Riches (Maze) • Bardsey Island, The Bones Beneath, by Mark Billingham (Sphere) • Boston, The Kind Worth Killing, by Peter Swanson (Faber) • Greece, The Long Fall, by Julia Crouch (Headline) • Nepal, The Lie, by C.L. Taylor (Avon) • Oslo, Police, by Jo Nesbø (Vintage)
To vote for all your favorites among this bunch, use these links:
The biggest vote-getters will be declared during a special event at the Crime Writing Festival on Friday, July 17.
FOLLOW-UP: There were a couple of questions I thought hadn’t been answered by press releases about these Dead Good Reader Awards. The first was, “What is the last date on which readers can vote for their favorite books in this competition?” Rhiannon Griffiths, a content assistant at Penguin Random House in the UK, got back to me via e-mail this morning, explaining that “The deadline for votes is 18th July, as visitors to Harrogate crime writing festival will have the opportunity to vote in person.” Second question: “Are the Dead Good Reader Awards supposed to be presented annually? If so, are some of the specific prizes likely to change … because I cannot imagine you would get a wholly new crop of nominees every year if you ask readers for the ‘Scariest Villain’ or the ‘Most Epic Ending.’” Again, Ms. Griffiths responds: “We’re hoping to run the Dead Good Reader Awards annually but some of the categories will change” Now we know.
Ontario illustrator and instructor Leif Peng, who put together the Today’s Inspiration blog, before moving his efforts over to Facebook, recently launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise $21,680 in order to produce a new hardcover book celebrating the art of Will Davies, “Canada’s premier illustrator of the Mad Men era.” So far, $16,428 has been pledged by 166 backers. There are only 18 days left in the campaign. If you can pitch in a few bucks, please do so here.
In advance of the Deadly Ink Mystery Conference, which is set to take place in New Brunswick, New Jersey, from August 7 to 9, organizers have released the list of nominees for the 2015 David Award. Convention attendees will choose the recipient of this prize for the best mystery novel of last year. Here are the contenders:
•Blood Rubies, by Jane Cleland (Minotaur) •The Question of the Missing Head, by E.J. Copperman and
Jeff Cohen (Midnight Ink) •Circle of Influence, by Annette Dashofy (Henery Press) •Death and White Diamonds, by Jeff Markowitz (Intrigue) •The Roar of the Crowd, by Janice MacDonald (Ravenstone) •The Outsmarting of Criminals, by Steven Rigolosi (Ransom Note)
The David Award is named in memory of David G. Sasher Sr. Unfortunately, the Deadly Ink Web site doesn’t remind us who Sasher was; that seems like something worth explaining, don’t you think?
FOLLOW-UP: Gerald So, editor of the crime-fiction poetry blog The 5-2, wrote to me late last week, saying he’d “found some information about David G. Sasher” that might be of interest. According to a 2010 post on the news Web site NorthJersey.com, “The David [Award] is given in memory of Jefferson Township [New Jersey] resident David G. Sasher, Sr. who passed away in November 2006. He had worked hard on Deadly Ink 2006, helping with mailings and manning the registration desk.” Furthermore, this bare-bones obituary says Sasher was born in October 1940 and died at age 66. Thank you, Gerald, for your assistance in this matter.
• What a treat! Los Angeles resident and Ross Macdonald biographer Tom Nolan is currently composing a series of posts about that renowned detective novelist for the Library of America site. You’ll find the first couple here and here. They’re well worth reading.
• I mentioned in my interview with Nolan back in April, that The Archer
Files, his 2007 compilation of Macdonald’s previously unpublished Lew Archer short stories and story fragments, would be reissued in paperback by Vintage Crime/Black Lizard in July. But there wasn’t cover art available for
the book at that time. Now there is. Personally, I prefer artist Jeff Wong’s original front for this collection (which was based on Mitchell Hooks’ illustration for the 1955 Bantam paperback, The Name Is Archer), but clearly, Vintage wanted its edition of The Archer Files to look like its previous Macdonald reprints.
• Rap Sheet reader Peter Hegarty passes along this story from The Irish Times, explaining that former U2 manager Paul McGuinness has been working for the past year with director Neil Jordan and Irish wordsmith John Banville, aka Benjamin Black (The Black-Eyed Blonde, Holy Orders), on a pay-TV crime drama called Riviera. “It’s about a sort-of French, sort-of Italian business family,” McGuinness explains. “This large, seemingly legitimate family business empire conceals a criminal enterprise. That’s the basis of the story.” He hopes to see Riviera make it to the airwaves by the fall of 2016.
• A reminder to authors: The deadline to register, if you wish to be considered for a panel at Bouchercon 2015 in Raleigh, is June 15!
• According
to Double O Section, “Sundance Channel has started aggressively advertising for Deutschland 83, their Cold War miniseries event that will mark the first ever German-language program broadcast on American television …” The blog provides a rather humorous video trailer, and you can learn more about the show on the Sundance Web site. Deutschland 83 is scheduled to debut next Wednesday, June 17.
• Lisa Levy, editor of the new crime fiction-oriented Web site, The Life Sentence, is profiled briefly by author Alex Segura in his newsletter, Stuff & Nonsense.
• Speaking of The Life Sentence, it features a new piece about the Black Gat line of paperback noir works rolling out from Stark House Press. That imprint has already brought three books to market: A Haven for the Damned, by Harry Whittington; Stranger at Home, by Leigh Brackett; and Eddie’s World, by Charlie Stella. When asked what future titles to expect, publisher Greg Shepard says, “I don’t want to give much away at this point, but authors I’m considering or have contracted at this point cover an interesting range of old and new: Malcolm Braly, Vin Packer, Orrie Hitt, who we’ve already published in the trade line; and writers like Helen Nielsen, Don Tracy, Gary Phillips, and John Flagg, who would be first-time authors to the list.”
• “Can Reading Make You Happier?” asks The New Yorker. There’s no doubt of where I stand on that question--a resounding YES!!!
• Director Guy Richie has released, via Instagram, “what he described as the final poster for The Man from U.N.C.L.E. movie and said a new trailer debuts June 11.” That news comes from The Spy Command, which notes that “The movie, with Henry Cavill as Napoleon Solo and Armie Hammer as Illya Kuryakin, is scheduled to debut Aug. 14.” A new, second trailer for Ritchie’s U.N.C.L.E. is here.
• In case you have not yet noticed (and hey, why the hell haven’t you?), I put together a rather extensive gallery of paperback fronts for my other blog, Killer Covers, all of which employ the word “wanton” in their titles or, alternatively, use it in their cover teasers. One additional entry along the same theme is found here.
• I don’t envy the judges of this year’s Davitt Awards, sponsored by Sisters in Crime Australia. There are a record 96 books vying for only six prizes, all of which are intended to honor the best in Down Under crime writing by women. A list of finalists is to be announced in late July, with the 2015 winners to be declared on August 29.
• After “months in the making,” says Sarah Weinman, her good-sized profile of 87-year-old American “Queen of Suspense” Mary Higgins Clark has finally been published in The Guardian. One of the things that stands out in the piece is Clark’s contrary insistence on delivering amiable, reliable female protagonists in her fiction. “Unlikable heroines are in vogue,” notes Weinman, “and the success of books like Gone Girl, The Girl on the Train, and Luckiest Girl Alive
ensures it will stay that way for some time. Clark’s overtly likable heroines, a standard from which she hasn’t deviated ... in four decades and never will, seem strangely subversive as a result.”
The Bloody Scotland conference announced the lineup for its fourth annual event this September. Highlights will include an all-woman panel of writers tackling the topic, “Killer Women--Deadlier Than the Male?”; a celebration of the 125th anniversary of Agatha Christie’s birth, with talks by research chemist Dr. Kathryn Harkup (whose book A Is for Arsenic looks at Christie’s obsession with poison), and Icelandic author Ragnar Jónasson, who’s translated 14 of Christie’s books; writers and comics will join forces to improvise the plot of a crime novel on stage; and the event culminates with the Bloody Scotland Crime Book of the Year awards dinner. The conference also announced it’s giving away free tickets to the unemployed.
• Nancie Clare has been busy of late, posting a number of new Speaking of Mysteries podcasts for your delectation. Her interviewees include Robert Rotstein (The Bomb Maker’s Son), Stephen Hunter (I, Ripper), Sharon Bolton (Little Black Lies), and Attica Locke (Pleasantville). Check out all of her author conversations right here.
• Cuban/Spanish novelist Leonardo Padura, whose books include a quartet of crime novels
featuring Lieutenant Mario Conde (Havana Black), has won Spain’s Princess of Asturias Award for Literature. In The Game’s Afoot, blogger Jose Ignacio Escribano quotes the prize jury’s president, Dario Villanueva Prieto, as saying: “The vast work of Leonardo Padura, which crosses all genres of prose, highlights a resource which characterizes his literary work and that is the interest in listening to people’s voices and lost stories from others.”
• Meanwhile, Spy Vibe reportsthat
a new Blu-ray edition of Deadlier Than the Male has gone on sale in Britain. “If you are curious to explore slightly less mainstream 1960s spy movies and/or Eurospy, this is definitely in the top-five and not to be missed.” Hmm. I’m not altogether sure that I have seen Deadlier Than the Male (a trailer for which is embedded below). Maybe a viewing is in order.
• But don’t vampires live forever? Apparently, only the “real” ones do. The Guardianbrings the sad news that “Sir Christopher Lee, known as the master of horror, has died at the age of 93 after being hospitalized for respiratory problems and heart failure.” In addition to his horror-flick roles, Lee also played the villainous Scramanga in the 1974 Bond picture, The Man with the Golden Gun. More here.
• For The Strand Magazine, Joseph Finder (The Fixer) picks his 10 favorite heist novels, among them Donald E. Westlake’s The
Hot Rock, Steve Hamilton’s The Lock Artist, Michael Crichton’s The Great Train Robbery, and Gerald Browne’s 19 Purchase Street.
• HBO-TV is really trying to whet our appetites for the second season of True Detective. It’s released two new video teasers for the show, which is scheduled to return on June 21. “Although terse--one of the teasers (titled ‘Stand’) contains no
dialogue at all--some insight about the new characters can be gleaned,” avers Flavorwire.
• Author Henry Miller’s “11
Commandments of Writing and Daily Routine” include one morsel of advice that I always try (and sometimes struggle) to bear in mind: “Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards.”
• Speaking of guides to authors’ works, folks interested in exploring Henning Mankell’s acclaimed Kurt Wallander series--either in books or on screen--would do well to check out this piece in Crime Lover.
• The British Library has decided to bring back into printThe Incredible Crime, a 1931 novel by Lois Austen-Leigh, the granddaughter of Jane Austen’s nephew. “[Austen-Leigh] seems to have completely slipped out of memory--even experts in the field haven’t heard of her,” says Robert Davies of the British Library. “But she wrote four crime novels. This first one has an academic setting in a Cambridge college, and is very well done. It’s a witty take on academic life in Cambridge.”
• J.K. Rowling’s third detective novel written under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith will be titled Career of Evil. It’s set for release in the UK in late October. I don’t find any U.S. publication date yet.
• Did you know author Lynda La Plante, who created the long-running TV police-procedural series Prime Suspect, has a
new novel due out in the UK on September 24 starring the same protagonist? It’s titled simply Tennison (Simon & Schuster), and serves as a prequel to the small-screen drama. “In 1972 Jane Tennison, aged 22, leaves the Metropolitan Police Training Academy to be placed on probationary exercise in Hackney where criminality thrives,” reads the book’s plot description. “We witness her struggle to cope in a male-dominated, chauvinistic environment, learning fast to deal with shocking situations with no help or
sympathy from her superiors. Then comes her involvement in her first murder case.” Again, no U.S. release date for this work has been publicized.
• La Plante, by the way, is scheduled to be “among the big names at this year’s Hay Festival Kells in County Meath,” reports Crime Fiction Ireland. That festival will run from June 25 to 28.
• In Noah’s Archives, Scott Ratner delivers a lengthy and fascinating piece about the myth of “fair play” in Golden Age mystery fiction.
• And I’m well aware of James Franciscus’ 1971-1972 ABC-TV series Longstreet, which cast him as a blind insurance investigator in New Orleans. But I didn’t know until this week that he’d previously held the same sort of position in CBS’s The Investigators (1961). According to this fine piece by Michael Shonk, in Mystery*File, “The Investigators told the story of a major investigation firm that worked for various insurance companies around the country (or maybe the world). Investigators, Inc. was run by Russ Andrews [Franciscus] and Steve Banks [James Philbrook] and located in New York. … The Investigators is worth remembering for the work of director Joseph H. Lewis and giving TV its first female licensed P.I., Maggie Peters [played by Mary Murphy]. However it, as [well as] many other action and crime dramas during the 1961-62 season, was doomed by the changing times.” Only 13 episodes of this Thursday night program were aired.
The New York City-based Nero Wolfe/Archie Goodwin fan organization, The Wolfe Pack, has announced the list of finalists for its 2015 Nero Award. This prize is presented annually “for the best American mystery written in the tradition of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe stories.” The shortlisted contenders are:
• Herbie’s Game, by Timothy Hallinan (Soho Press) •The Detective & the Pipe Girl, by Michael Craven (HarperCollins) •First Light, by Al Lamanda (Five Star) •The Detective, by James Patrick Hunt (Cengage Gale) •Peter Pan Must Die, by John Verdon (Crown)
The winning work and author will be announced in early December, during the Black Orchid Banquet, to be held in Manhattan.
Last year’s Nero Award recipient was David Morrell, who won it for his first Thomas De Quincey historical mystery, Murder as a Fine Art.
Newly minted novelist Patricia “Patti” Abbott has a nice short essay posted this morning in Bill Crider’s Pop Culture Magazine, which explains in part: “I wasn’t raised to have high aspirations. I was raised to find a steady job with good benefits, to raise a family, to be a good citizen. I think that is why it took me so many years--nearly 50--to have any confidence that I could be what I secretly always wanted to be--a writer. I would still not identify myself as one--except to you.”
Her modesty is endearing, but quite unnecessary. Over the last decade and a half, Abbott has published more than 150 short stories and won awards for her efforts. She’s become a familiar blogging voice, spearheading the Web-wide “Friday forgotten books” series of posts from her own site, Pattinase. And now this 67-year-old resident of Huntington Woods, Michigan, the mother of novelist Megan Abbott (The Fever), is debuting her own first novel, a domestic suspense yarn titled Concrete Angel (Polis). The fact that it wasn’t until her two children left home that Patti Abbott finally went back to finish her college degree and launched her career as a crime-fictionist takes nothing away from the fact that she accomplished her goal: she has a novel in print, and it’s a damn good work to boot. That’s a confidence raiser, if ever there was one.
In my Kirkus Reviews column today, I remark briefly on the plot of Concrete Angel, which is set in the area around Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (where Abbott herself grew up), noting that it “introduces readers to Evelyn ‘Eve’ Moran, a narcissistic, melodramatic and hyper-acquisitive woman who, as this story opens, shoots her latest boyfriend to death after trying to filch cash from his wallet, and then persuades her 12-year-old daughter, Christine, to say she pulled the trigger, instead, that she was protecting her mother from attack.
Did I mention Eve is also highly self-protective? In any case, Christine goes along with this seat-of-pants scheme because … well, she doesn’t want to lose her single remaining parent, and after years of listening
to Eve lie her way out of one tight spot or another, the girl has become more than a bit adept at spinning prevarications of her own. She’s also practiced at excusing, if not denying, her mother’s casual kleptomania, which propels Eve from one Philadelphia-area store to the next, snatching merchandise merely for the sake of having it, not because she needs it or can’t afford it. This remorseless larceny eventually leads to run-ins with the law, lands Eve in a pricy sanitarium, destroys her marriage to Christine’s father and results in her renting a profusion of storage units for her “junk.”
Through all of these turns, young Christine hangs in there as her mother’s confidante and co-conspirator, even though she’s also served up occasionally as Eve Moran’s scapegoat. However, the responsibilities and deceptions eventually become too much to bear, leading Christine, as she matures, to think “killing her [mother] might be the easiest thing,” just to put an end to the nightmare that Eve has created for both of them.
Abbott does an exceptional job of building Eve Moran’s twisted character and showing how her behavior corrupts the lives of everyone around her, especially that of her less-attractive only daughter. She also makes fine work of re-creating 1960s and ’70s Philadelphia, as well as the public attitudes of that period toward psychiatric illness and treatment. The author takes what might, in the hands of some less-talented writer, have become an unrelentingly grim and distressing story, and turns it into a textured, ever-magnetic mix of humor and heartbreak. One that makes me more than a little curious to read her next novel.
I spent some time recently interviewing Patti Abbott via e-mail. Parts of our exchange make up today’s Kirkus Reviews column, but there was plenty left over, including Abbott’s recollections of her sometimes troubled Philadelphia childhood, her transition from poet to fiction writer, her story about first being published, her memories of the struggle it took to get even one novel into print, and her satisfaction in having introduced many blog readers to vintage mystery and thriller fiction they might never have discovered on their own. All of that material is embedded below for your enjoyment.
J. Kingston Pierce: You were born Patricia Arlene Nase?
Patricia Abbott: On the birth certificate Nase was spelled as “Nasi,” but it had to be corrected
when I married. I am not sure why no one fixed it before then. The error may have come because the name Nase is pretty unusual. It was changed at least six times over the years that my brother traced it back. I think the original spelling might have been “Nehs.” The family came from the German section of Alsace-Lorraine. The town of Sellersville, Pennsylvania, is filled with Nases but it is hard to find them anywhere else. More than you wanted to know I am sure.
Author Patti Abbott, photographed by Ewa Golebiowska.
JKP: You grew up in Philadelphia during the 1950s and ’60s. Where in that city did you live? What
was Philly like in those days, and how significantly has it changed?
PA: I lived in a section to the north known as West Oak Lane then, but now it seems to have been folded in with Mount Airy. It was a middle to lower middle-class neighborhood. My block was made up of mostly large Catholic families. Mine was Lutheran. These were tiny houses, but
some had four or five children crammed in.
But across the alley in the back of my house, everyone was Jewish. I was the girl who lit the Shabbat lamps and ovens. My school was 90 percent Jewish. (All of the Catholic kids went to parochial school.) As a child, I rarely left my neighborhood except when we went shopping downtown. I had very little sense of living in a large city. I was quite free to roam my neighborhood, though. My life centered around the church to a large degree. I think of my childhood as more similar to someone who lived in a small town than someone who lived in a city. We took very little advantage of the art museum or any cultural institutions. Most of that was due to my father’s long work hours and small paycheck. And my parents were not adventurous.
My old block, 7600 Gilbert Street, has a Facebook page and it is all African American today. It looks very similar. There wasn’t a tree on that block when I lived there and there still don't seem to be many. Downtown Philly seems vibrant to me today when compared to Detroit, but less so than in the ’60s. It shares many of the same issues as Detroit (my current home): too much poverty, poor schools, deteriorating housing. But since I get [to Philadelphia] only as a tourist now, I probably don’t know enough about issues to comment.
JKP: What were your parents like? Were they big readers, or did you acquire your interest in
reading from others?
PA: My father was the third youngest of 19 children and became an office manager for car dealers. My mother, a secretary, was an only child. His father was a cigar maker. Hers, an architect. To my knowledge, my father never read a book after high school. He read the sports page and that was about it. He worked 12 hours a day, six
days a week, so there was little time for reading, although I doubt he would have read anyway. My mother read more but not a lot. If she read, it was Ellery Queen mysteries or light romance. My maternal grandparents were bigger readers, but still mostly [of] those condensed books they collected in the ’50s. My grandmother read a lot of movie-star biographies.
But I couldn’t wait to learn how to read so I could go the bookmobile that cruised my neighborhood and take out the five books allowed. And when they built a library, I went every Friday after school, returning the books for five more the next week. The children’s librarian, Mrs. Robinson, the only African-American woman I knew, would hold books aside she thought I would like. And I read the most prosaic books on the shelves. I never once tried science fiction or fantasy. It had to be about girls, and girls as much like me as possible. My favorite series was the Betsy-Tacy series by Maud Hart Lovelace. And the “Shoes” books by Noel Streatfeild (Ballet Shoes, Circus Shoes, etc.) and All-of-a-Kind Family [1951], by Sydney Taylor. So I acquired my interest from others. I just can’t tell you what others.
JKP: Where did you go to school, and were you a “serious student”?
PA: I went to Samuel Pennypacker Elementary School, Leeds Jr. High School, Germantown High School for a year, and then Philadelphia Montgomery Christian High School, which my parents could ill afford. But I was beginning to get into trouble. I was hanging out on corners, smoking, running around with some bad types. I had a boyfriend who stole cars for a while. Another who dropped out of school. So [my parents] scraped together their money and sent me to a school [Philadelphia Montgomery] that straightened me out pretty quickly. I went from a C student (I had been an A student in elementary school) to the National Honor Society in one year. Academically it was great, but it was a fundamentalist Christian school, and although my parents went to church, it was a traditional church, not this. In my junior year I campaigned for Barry Goldwater with friends from school and Lyndon Johnson with my friends from the ’hood. Still, I was old enough not to be completely swayed by the school’s politics.
But then I made a mistake and went to a Christian college [Gordon College in Wenham, Massachusetts]. That lasted one semester and I did not go back to college for 20 years, despite marrying a man with a Ph.D. in the meantime. I studied history and anthropology went I returned in the late ’80s [this time to Wayne State University in Detroit]. On my return, I was very serious indeed. I was tired of explaining why, although my husband was a professor, I was uneducated. I graduated with a 4.0, not because I was particularly smart but because I was particularly driven. I loved college in my 40s.
JKP: How did you meet your husband to be, Philip Abbott, and when did you marry? Am I correct
that you have two children together?
PA: I met Phil the summer after I graduated from high school. His father had a store in a town where I had a summer job (New Hope, Pennsylvania). We married the next year (1967). I was 19 and he 22, and just starting grad school. My son, Josh, was born in 1970 and is a prosecutor in Macomb County [Michigan]. And Megan was born the next year and writes novels.
JKP: Is it true that your mother remarked to you, just as you and your new husband were leaving after your wedding reception, “I give it six months”? That seems a bit cynical, doesn’t it?
PA: Wow! How did that get out? She actually murmured it to my grandmother, but I overheard. This comment referred to my fickleness as a teenager. And also to my age. And also to our brief courtship. But [my mother] was wrong and admitted it many times over the years. She became Phil’s biggest fan.
JKP: Am I correct that your husband is a professor of political thought, American political culture, and presidential studies at Wayne State? How long has he been there?
PA: Phil has been at Wayne State University since 1970. He came there at age 25 and stayed. With the Vietnam War going strong and his draft number being low (5), he had to attend school full-time and was done just as he turned 26 and could no longer be drafted. Amazing how much that war determined what our life would be.
JKP: Did you move to Detroit after marriage, or were you already there for some reason?
PA: We moved to Detroit three years after we got married. WSU was Phil’s first job offer. Well, not really his first, but the first one that seemed feasible. He had lived in D.C. for four years and wasn’t anxious to teach in a small town, and the other offers were in small towns.
JKP: When your children were young, did you work away from home?
PA: No, I was a stay-at-home mom mostly until high school. We were active in Little League, Girl Scouts, were room parents, on the PTO [Parent Teacher Organization] boards. I made quilts and read books. Lots of
books. My mother had been a working mother and I thought that was one of the reasons I got into trouble. Well, at least partially. Part of the truth was, I didn’t know what to do with myself without a degree. So I finally started taking classes and that seemed like enough, until college for the kids began to loom in front of us and more money seemed like a good idea. Then I got a job at WSU, where I wrote catalogue copy, newsletters, flyers, and course descriptions, and worked on placing our Ph.D. [recipients].
(Right) Megan, Patti, and Philip Abbott.
JKP: Your daughter, of course, is novelist Megan Abbott. Her success as a fiction writer seemed to coincide with your rise as an author of short stories. So was it you who influenced her to try penning fiction, or was it the other way around?
PA: When I started writing stories, Megan was working on her Ph.D. and had expressed no desire (to us) to write fiction. Although as a child she wrote and illustrated her own stories constantly. And I mean constantly. When I remember her as a kid, it is sitting in front of a movie like Red Dust or Little Caesar, a sketch pad in hand. I don’t think either of us was influenced by the other. In many ways, my husband is more of an influence on her in terms of her intellectual interests. They can talk about Freud, the Cold War, Hannah Arendt, and Kim Philby forever. That’s why I fully expected her to be a college professor, but it wasn’t quite the right fit.
JKP: Had you been trying to write fiction for a long time before you were actually published? What was your first story to see print, and when/where did that piece appear?
PA: My first story was published in 1998 in a little journal called The Bonfire Review. It was a story about two friends who find some salacious photographs among the remains of a deceased friend. Both of them swear they won’t show anyone the photos, but of course they do. It was a humorous story--or at least it was to me.
The journal was elegant, hand-bound with a hard cover, and the editors held a reading and I went to Ann Arbor [Michigan] and read a part of the story in a neat little pub there. So I sort of thought I would be doing a lot of that, but of course, that live reading was the exception. I was able to get most stories published by aiming fairly low. I never tried to get into The New Yorker. But more and more over time, traditional literary journals were saying, “this is crime fiction.” So I began to make the switch.
JKP: It seems you’ve been making rather hesitant steps toward becoming a novelist for several years now. You published an e-book of unconnected short stories, Monkey Justice (2011). Then you released Home Invasion (2013), with stories taking place over a 40-year span, mostly about members of the same family and folks whose lives intersected with theirs. Finally we get Concrete Angel. Did this progression reflect your working up the courage to write longer pieces of fiction?
PA: I tried writing a novel before I did these collections. I almost had an agent. But no one liked the central character very much. No one was willing to take her on. So I tempered an unlikable character with a likable one in Concrete Angel. I guess unlikable characters will always interest me more than nice ones. If I wrote detective fiction I might create a likable protagonist, but it doesn’t seem to work for me in suspense. If that is what this is.
JKP: You have said before that your influences as a short-story writer include Andre Dubus, Alice Munro, Raymond Carver, Bobbie Ann Mason, Eudora Welty, Jean Thompson, William Trevor, John Cheever, Amy Hempl, John Updike, and Lorrie Moore. Who, then, are your influences as a novelist?
PA: Anne Tyler, Richard Bausch, Russell Banks, Margaret Millar, Patricia Highsmith, John Irving, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Daphne DuMaurier, Shirley Jackson, Carson McCullers, Stewart O’Nan, Joe R. Lansdale, Nicholas Freeling, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, Ruth Rendell, Ross
Macdonald. I could go on for days.
JKP: When author Richard Godwin interviewed you in 2011, you said you had two unpublished novels. “The first one,” you said, “was based on a short story called ‘Raising the Dead.’ It is the story of a photographer who hasn’t achieved the success she’d hoped for and how she goes about achieving that elusive goal. It takes place in Detroit and deals with the current situation here--the poverty, the animosity between black and white, the
failure of a once-great city.” The second novel you mentioned--“about a Philadelphia woman who steals, grifts, hoards, and eventually kills”--was obviously Concrete Angel. How is it that Concrete Angel made it into print, while the other book, which you’ve titled Shot in Detroit, has not?
PA: Well, the other one, after some revision, will come out next summer. [Its protagonist] was the unlikable woman who I hope I have honed a bit. Taken off some of the rough edges but not too many. Made her story a fuller one than that agent finally rejected.
Martina McBride sings her 2002 hit, “Concrete Angel.”
JKP: So where does the title Concrete Angel come from? Are you suggesting that Christine, Eve Moran’s daughter, provides a rock for her mother, or did you have something more complicated in mind?
PA: Originally the title was Eve’s Daughter. But the first press that took it, Exhibit A (before they folded), thought that was too bland. So I chose Concrete Angel, which is the title of a song by Martina McBride about an abused child. Also one of my favorite novels is The Stone Angel, by Margaret Laurence (Canadian). So nothing complicated at all.
JKP: Was part of the reason that Concrete Angel was slow to be picked up by a publisher because it’s not strictly a crime novel, but also not obviously a literary novel?
PA: No publisher saw it before Exhibit A Books. I didn’t send it to that many agents--maybe 15. So without an agent I didn’t see how I would interest a publisher. I had lost confidence after coming close and missing with Shot in Detroit. If [author] Sandra Scoppettone
hadn’t read it and said you have to try harder with this, it would probably exist only on my hard drive. So I started trying harder.
When I heard that writer Bryon Quertermous had become an acquisitions editor for Exhibit A (then part of Angry Robot), I e-mailed him and asked him if he’d like to take a look. He liked [the book] and made an offer to publish. When Exhibit A closed its doors, Bryon suggested I try Polis (where his book Murder Boy had found a home).
I do think Concrete Angel falls between the two genres somewhat. And the other one does, too. But I see them both as crime novels, because it is the driving engine to me. Eve [Moran] steals and kills to get what she wants. [Shot in Detroit’s] Violet Hart throws herself into some treacherous water to get the photos she needs for an exhibit. When people want something badly, they either get their 4.0 or commit a crime.
JKP:Concrete Angel might fit most comfortably into the amorphous sub-genre of “domestic suspense.” Did you intend your work to be domestic suspense?
PA: That is how I see it. I am not sure if the term existed before Sarah Weinman’s collection, or if it did, it was not well known as a sub-genre. But if you look at the stories written by Margaret Millar, Charlotte Armstrong, and Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, I think that term describes their work well. The Blank Wall [1947] by Holding is a perfect example.
JKP: I know you’re a fan of at least one author whose work also often fits under that label, Margaret Millar (The Iron Gates). But are you a big fan of domestic suspense fiction? Or will you become one now?
PA: I wonder if Mignon Eberhart would count. And what about Celia Fremlin? Is there any man who writes it? I would say Linwood
Barclay’s novels are a sort of domestic suspense. Maybe Harlan Coben, too. Also, outside the genre, Russell Banks’ novels, especially Continental Drift and Affliction, are very much about families in crisis. Same with Richard Bausch.
JKP: What do you still need to learn in order to really be “a novelist”?
PA: I think my biggest failing is my reliance on flying by the seat of my pants too much, which I was able to get away with in a story. With a novel, you can get into trouble, write yourself into too many corners, without more of an outline. I would hope to have one next time.
JKP: In the course of Concrete Angel, Eve becomes more and more obviously a hoarder, someone whose happiness and self-definition/self-worth are defined at least in part by the accumulation of stuff, no matter how valueless. Did you do a great deal of research about the psychology of hoarding, or do you know people with such inclinations?
PA: Both. I knew a hoarder who could not even throw away a used Band-Aid. This hoarder had an office next to mine and after a while was forced to meet with people outside of his office. I heard rustling in there off and on, and finally called the custodial staff and they carted everything out one weekend (with a family member standing by). In every other way, this person seemed normal. Of course, within a year the office was the same again.
But I also read several books on mental illness [in the] mid-20th century. Especially Women and Madness, by Phyllis Chesler. The way women were treated in the middle of the 20th century was shocking to say the least. I also did some research online and via some of the reality shows that expose these ill people for entertainment.
JKP: Some of the most interesting and comical elements of your new book revolve around Eve’s psychiatric treatments. Every new analyst or therapist she is sent to seems to have a different idea of how to treat (or mistreat) her. Can I assume your opinions of 20th-century psychiatry are mixed, at best, and probably negative?
PA: Again I would recommend Women and Madness, which documents the evolution in treatment. As various drugs came on the market, it became more about finding the right drug than finding what the problem was. And
now the average psychiatrist is just there to write prescriptions.
I must also confess to knowing a woman during that period (mid-’70s) who was incarcerated--the only word for it--in Norristown State Mental Hospital in Pennsylvania. What led to her commitment was having an affair with a fellow teacher. For some reason, he was thought to be OK. I saw him not long ago--now in his 80, his wife on his arm.
JKP: This yarn takes place in Philadelphia in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s. Did you find returning to the city as you once knew it enjoyable? Were you able to work some of your fonder recollections into the novel?
PA: A lot of the book is set in Bucks and Montgomery counties. In the mid-60s, I spent a lot of time there. Doylestown seemed so provincial to me then. So too, Hatboro. I loved writing about Eve going downtown to shop. I remember downtown Philly so fondly. I was crushed in the ’70s and ’80s, when one after another, those elegant
stores all closed. I also enjoyed re-creating life in a Philadelphia townhouse--the fact that to get to the back of the house, you had to go all the way around the block. How you lived elbow-to-elbow most of the time. How little went unnoticed in 750 square feet.
JKP:Concrete Angel depends more on understatement and character building than it does on cinematic action. Yet you begin your story with an action sequence: Eve’s murder of a boyfriend who has discovered her taking money from his wallet. Was that simply to draw readers in immediately, or was it the quickest way to define the dysfunctional association between Eve and her daughter, Christine?
PA: Just yesterday I read a review from [The New York Times’] Janet Maslin in which she said no self-respecting writer would start a novel with a murder now. Nobody told me that. I started there because I wanted to establish right from the start that this woman was someone who would do anything to protect herself. And very little to protect her child. I toyed with the idea of another murder--perhaps Mickey [DiSantis, Eve’s second husband]--but she really only had one murder in her. She was a lot of bad things but not really a murderer.
JKP: As much as I enjoyed Concrete Angel, I was a bit distressed to see your new novel filled with so many typos and missing or incorrect bits of punctuation. We’ve all been conditioned to accept some such errors these days, even in books from major publishers. But was there something about Polis Books’ publishing process that prevented these errors from being caught?
PA: Polis went over it several times and I went over it repeatedly, so I am sorry we have missed so much. I will have to pass this observation along. After a time, a writer just doesn’t see the mistakes, I am afraid. Especially one with old eyes.
JKP: One of the things that many readers know about you is that you’re active in the blogging world. When and why did you first test the waters there?
PA: I started my blog [Pattinase] in 2006. I really liked the idea of communicating with other readers and writers. The Rap Sheet was one of the first blogs I had read as a wannabe crime-fiction writer, and I saw it had many links. My hope was to be linked there. And then CrimeSpot came along and made blogging so much more rewarding.
JKP: Have those rewards changed for you over time? And do you see yourself continuing to blog, even as a successful novelist?
PA: I blog less than I used to. Because so much of my blog is based on my coming up with new topics, I am running out of steam. And Facebook has taken a lot of that steam out of blogs. You can communicate with people very easily there. And in great numbers.
JKP: Seven years ago, in the spring of 2008, you made the suggestion that bloggers interested in crime fiction begin writing periodically about “books we love but might have forgotten over the years.” That idea has since grown into a regular, Web-wide series of “Friday forgotten books” (FFB) posts. Are you surprised that the series is still going strong?
PA: I expected it to last a few months--especially with The Rap Sheet doing a similar series. But when [author-blogger] Bill Crider did a second review the second week and then a third and fourth, I began to think there was a pent-up desire for such a thing. A lot of the reviewers had participated in a newsletter where books were reviewed. That newsletter was coming to an end and I think FFB took its place. I am very surprised that Bill Crider, for instance, has written a book review every Friday for seven years. And there are others not far behind him. I can’t let them down, and passing it on seems too sad.
JKP: Do you have at least anecdotal evidence that these forgotten books posts have encouraged readers to expand their knowledge of vintage crime, mystery, and thriller fiction? How often do you try to track down an old book because of something that’s been written in this series?
PA: I have tracked down quite a few over the years. When I came into this crime-fiction blogging world I didn’t know about a lot of the writers that these reviewers read. I read a lot of best-seller-type crime fiction, but not people like Elisabeth Sanxay Holding or Don Carpenter or Derek Raymond. There was this whole other world of crime fiction that I never heard about. These were the writers on spinner racks in 1960s drugstores. The truly forgotten writers.
And the other participants often mention that they found a book someone else recommended in some obscure place or other. I think it means a lot to a small group of people and, hopefully, some writers that deserve to be remembered are. Just putting a name on the Internet may have some value. I hope so.
JKP: Finally, let me ask which current authors you most enjoy reading. And do you restrict yourself primarily to crime and mystery fiction?
PA: I read crime and mainstream fiction about equally. I really hate favoring one current crime-fiction
writer over another, but in the mainstream arena I like Stewart O’Nan, Ann Patchett, Richard Yates, Barbara Kingsolver. I am reading [Ted Lewis’] Get Carter right now and recently enjoyed The Boys in the Boat, by Daniel James Brown. Set in Seattle, Jeff. Have you read it?
JKP: Not yet, Patti. But my stepmother-in-law gave me a copy for my birthday, and it’s not far down now from the top of my to-be-read pile. Maybe it’s time to move it up higher yet.
Send Us News:
The Rap Sheet is always on the lookout for information about new and soon-forthcoming books, special author projects, and distinctive crime-fiction-related Web sites. Shoot us an e-mail note here.
Check out our selection of more than 200 works of mystery, crime, and thriller fiction scheduled to become available in the United States between now and the beginning of June. Click here.
The Rap Sheet has now been around long enough that some older posts may include links to stories or Web sites that no longer exist. If you encounter such broken links, try searching for the original material via the Wayback Machine, an invaluable archive of digital content.
Also, we’d be very grateful if you could let us know where those inoperable links can be found. We’ll update them as soon as possible.
If You Can, Please Help The Rap Sheet to Survive and Thrive
Your Vigilance Is Welcome
Those of us responsible for The Rap Sheet try to get everything right, and we work to keep our Web links up to date. But we’re not perfect. So, if you spot any errors (typographical or otherwise) in this blog, or discover links or embedded videos that aren’t functioning properly, please let us know via e-mail.
The Rap Sheet Faithful
Disclosure Notice
The Rap Sheet accepts books sent free of charge from publishers, publicists, and authors. Those works may inspire comments on this page. However, in no case is there any promise given that a book will be the subject of an endorsement or review, either positive or negative.
Back in the fall of 1971, NBC-TV introduced its most successful “wheel series,” the NBC Mystery Movie. Look for our anniversary posts here.
Videos Disclaimer
From time to time, The Rap Sheet features short video clips. Use of these is for historical and entertainment purposes only, and is not meant to establish ownership of such materials. Rights to those clips stay with their owners/creators.
The One Book Project
In honor of The Rap Sheet’s first birthday, we invited more than 100 crime writers, book critics, and bloggers from all over the English-speaking world to choose the one crime/mystery/thriller novel that they thought had been “most unjustly overlooked, criminally forgotten, or underappreciated over the years.” Their choices can be found here.
In the Beginning ...
Before The Rap Sheet was a blog, it was a monthly newsletter in January Magazine. To find all the old editions of that newsletter, just click here.
