A Right to Leftys

Since I couldn’t be in Phoenix, Arizona, for this week’s Left Coast Crime convention, I’ve tried to keep track of the doings there through other blogs. Getting Medieval’s wonderful Jeri Westerson has offered the most substantial coverage, with posts here, here, and here. Mystery Playground provided this recap of events, while Jungle Red Writers chimed in on this page. Lesa’s Book Critiques offered a collection of photographs from the event here, and Classic Mysteries’ Les Blatt wrote about the convention’s kickoff here.

Oh, and multiple sources are now reporting the winners of this year’s coveted Lefty Awards, though I happened to see them first in Jiro Kimura’s The Gumshoe Site. Because this is also Academy Awards night, let me present the Lefty recipients with the Oscars’ customary introduction, “And the winners are …”

Lefty for Best Humorous Mystery Novel: Lord of the Wings, by Donna Andrews (Minotaur)

Also nominated: Plantation Shudders, by Ellen Byron (Crooked Lane); February Fever, by Jess Lourey (Midnight Ink); Dying for a Donut, by Cindy Sample (Cindy Sample); and Crushed Velvet, by Diane Vallere (Berkley Prime Crime)

Lefty for Best Historical Mystery Novel (formerly the Bruce Alexander Memorial Historical Mystery Award, given to the best mystery novel covering events before 1960): Malice at the Palace, by Rhys Bowen (Berkley Prime Crime)

Also nominated: The Masque of a Murderer, by Susanna Calkins (Minotaur); The Chocolate Kiss-Off, by Heather Haven (Wives of Bath Press); The Secret Life of Anna Blanc, by Jennifer Kincheloe (Seventh Street); Dreaming Spies, by Laurie R. King (Bantam); and Mrs. Roosevelt’s Confidante, by Susan Elia MacNeal (Bantam)

Lefty for Best LCC Regional Mystery Novel (set in this year’s LCC geographic region, meaning the Mountain Time Zone and all time zones westward to Hawaii): The Accidental Alchemist,
by Gigi Pandian (Midnight Ink)

Also nominated: The Crossing, by Michael Connelly, (Little, Brown); Night Tremors, by Matt Coyle (Oceanview); The Promise, by Robert Crais, (Putnam); and Young Americans, by Josh Stallings (Heist)

Lefty for Best World Mystery Novel (set outside the LCC
geographic region): The Nature of the Beast,
by Louise Penny (Minotaur)

Also nominated: The Long and Faraway Gone, by Lou Berney (Morrow); Dragon Day, by Lisa Brackmann (Soho Crime); The Killing Kind, by Chris Holm (Mulholland); and Stone Cold Dead, by James W. Ziskin, (Seventh Street)

Congratulations to all of this year’s winners!

Of Boosts and Blunders

• The very prolific Robert J. Randisi—founder of the Private Eye Writers of America, co-founder of Mystery Scene magazine, and author of the Rat Pack Mystery series (When Somebody Kills You), among so many other books—has been announced as the recipient of this year’s John Seigenthaler Legends Award. That prize is given out by organizers of Tennessee’s annual Killer Nashville convention. A press release applauds Randisi for having “demonstrated the legitimacy of crime writers by showing that they were not sensationalists, but real writers addressing real problems.” Congratulations, Bob!

• As she has done for previous conferences, delightful “medieval noir” author Jeri Westerson (The Silence of Stones), is covering this week’s Left Coast Crime gathering in Phoenix, Arizona. You will find her first, picture-packed post here.

• Martin Edwards brings the unwelcome news that his fellow British crime novelist, Stuart Pawson, has passed away. Born in 1940, and a former mining electrical engineer, Pawson composed 13 books (including A Very Private Murder) starring Charlie Priest, “an art school graduate turned police detective in Yorkshire, England.” Edwards remembers him as “one of life’s nice guys, a quiet, kind man who also happened to be a terrific writer.” Pawson was diagnosed several years ago with Parkinson’s disease.

• As MovieFone puts it, the Fox-TV police procedural Bones—starring Emily Deschanel and David Boreanaz, and based on Kathy Reichs’ series of novels featuring forensic anthropologist Dr. Temperance Brennan—“was just renewed and canceled at the same time, with Fox announcing one last season, with a shortened run of 12 episodes.”

• Finally, my UK friends would probably call this a major cock-up. Time magazine recently listed English journalist-novelist Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966), noted author of Brideshead Revisited (1945), as the “97th most read female author in college classes.” The problem is, of course, that Waugh was a man. Made aware of its incredible literary ignorance (please excuse that editorializing), Time subsequently substituted French writer Marguerite Duras in the 97th spot.

The Story Behind the Story: “Remorseless,” by Will Patching

(Editor’s note: In this 63rd installment of The Rap Sheet’s “Story Behind the Story” series, we give the stage over to British author (but current Thailand resident) Will Patching, the author of The Hack and Remorseless, the latter of which was released as an audiobook at the end of last year. Below, Patching writes about the psychopathic protagonist in Remorseless and what he learned about psychopaths as a result of his work to create that character.)

Psychopaths. We are bombarded with fictional versions of them. They fascinate us, as exotic creatures, and hence they regularly feature in crime novels, Hollywood movies, and TV series. As a result, we understand implicitly who and what constitutes a psychopath. Right?

Hannibal Lecter, Dexter Morgan, and Norman Bates of Psycho fame all help us understand the heinous nature of the beast. Don’t they?

Well, actually, no they don’t. Out of the three fictional characters mentioned above, only Lecter, in The Silence of the Lambs (1991), could accurately be described as a psychopath in the clinical sense. Even then, Hollywood created a rather ridiculous scene in the 2001 sequel Hannibal, demonstrating behavior that would be highly unlikely for a genuine psychopath: he cuts off his own hand to escape, rather than that of his FBI nemesis Clarice Starling. In fact, this is not just unlikely, but bordering on the impossible for a clinical psychopath such as Thomas Harris’ brilliant creation, the man-eater, Hannibal Lecter.

It was this Hollywood treatment of psychopathic behaviors that led me to create Peter Leech, the villain in my most recent novel, Remorseless: A British Crime Thriller. My own research into psychopathy began soon after I had the misfortune to invite such a person into my life, stupidly and naïvely, even sharing my home with him. His constant manipulation of others, his repeated lying, the superficial charm combined with surreptitious backstabbing, all applied with a complete absence of conscience, were hallmarks I would only later come to recognize as characteristics of a psychopath.

“Living with a psychopath is like having an egg beater turned loose on your brain.” — Dr. Robert Hare, the creator of the definitive test for psychopathy, generally acknowledged as the worldwide expert, from his excellent textbook, Without Conscience

In reality, most psychopaths are like the guy I met. Normal. At least, outwardly. Alfred Hitchcock’s Bates is not a psychopath, but a psychotic individual. He’s crazy, hallucinating to such a degree that his dead mother’s character “takes over” his physical being.

At least Dexter is not crazy … just ridiculous. Entertaining too, but, according to Dr. Hare, Dexter’s portrayal of a psychopath with a conscience is an impossibility. Hollywood-style mythology strikes again.

Hollywood vs. Reality

The problem has to do with audience empathy, and the desire to create characters with at least one redeeming feature so that we are not completely repelled. Hannibal, so infatuated with Starling that he chops off his own hand. Dexter, a psychopath with an oxymoronic conscience. Sure, we are talking entertainment, not education, but for Remorseless I wanted to create something that reflected reality, as I believe people need to understand these creatures. So I set out to write a novel that did both—entertain and aid understanding.

To do that, I had to break the rules as they usually apply to novels—that is, if the author wants to get a publishing house interested in a potential best-seller. My villain, Leech, has no redeeming features: he is a clinical psychopath through and through. That makes him difficult for readers to empathize with, which is bad enough given the amount of time we spend with him, but I also deliberately delved deeply into the workings of his mind by making him a significant point-of-view character. Not only is he a truly nasty piece of work, a serial-killing convict with a brutal disposition and a violent temper, but we share a lot of time with him and, understandably, some readers find this disturbing. For others, it’s rather like being strapped into a roller-coaster, scared and horrified while experiencing a perfectly safe, yet thrilling ride.

A Guilty Conscience

The theme of the novel is guilt. In contrast to Leech—our criminal psychopath who cannot, by definition, experience remorse—we have our protagonist, Dr Colin Powers, a forensic psychiatrist suffering hideously from guilt for his role in the death of his wife. Doc’s ability to perform his job is endangered by his state of mind, with hallucinations threatening to overwhelm him. He finds himself on the parole board assessing Leech’s fitness for release, and that scene is central to the story, with our protagonist, burdened by an overabundance of guilt, as a clear counterpoint to our villain, who experiences none.

All the major characters in the novel demonstrate how guilt, or lack thereof, affects behavior, and for me, this was the most interesting aspect of the tale. A guilty conscience is uncomfortable for the average person, and the prospect alone is enough to moderate our behavior toward others. It acts as a brake on our selfishness, while our empathy for others’ suffering also helps prevent us from undertaking anti-social behaviors. If you have no conscience, you suffer no guilt, and if you have little empathy, you can be as anti-social as you want—overtly or surreptitiously, just as a true psychopath would be.

Remorseless was described by one reviewer (for Goodreads) as being part psychological suspense, part murder mystery, and part out-and-out thriller. The psychological aspect really appeals to me, but I also love a good detective yarn and always demand some thrills, so I suppose the mix of genres was inevitable.

Real-World Psychopaths

My fascination with psychopaths does not stop at writing about fictional characters. My Web site Psychopaths—Fact & Fiction is designed as a resource to help people understand the true nature and extent to which these individuals damage society. Although Peter Leech is a violent criminal, most psychopaths exist in plain sight, mingling with the rest of us “normal beings” who do suffer guilt. Hare estimates that as many as 1 percent of the general population have psychopathic traits to a clinically significant level. So, who are they, these myriad psychos?

(Right) Author Will Patching

Well, in the words of my fictional expert, Doc, “they often have qualities that allow them to succeed in our competitive corporate society. In spades.” Politicians, judges, policemen, doctors, bankers, chief executives, hedge-fund managers, etc. Some respectable people, often with stellar careers, are undoubtedly highly intelligent psychopaths, sufficiently socialized to mask their anti-social inclinations, while their lack of conscience enables their success. Ruthlessness and greed are traits prized by many organizations, and psychopaths are highly motivated by status and the trappings of wealth. Ken Lanning, a retired member of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit, calls such people “pillar of the community psychopaths.”

It is estimated that as many as a quarter of all violent criminals are actually clinically identifiable as psychopaths. Like my character Leech, they are clearly dangerous individuals whose paths you would not want to cross, and as such they fascinate us all, generating billions of words in books and many hours of big- and small-screen portrayals. The reality is, they are minor players in a much bigger game, and their misdeeds deflect us from the true peril, the socialized psychos who march us to unnecessary wars for profit, or poison our water supplies through incompetence and corruption, or knowingly crash the world economy, bringing misery to millions, in return for the comfort of a private jet.

This facet of their existence is tangentially explored in Remorseless and will feature to a much greater degree in that novel’s sequel, Mutilated, due to be published later this year.

Multiple Personality Disorder and Going Psycho!

During a three-month period toward the end of 2015, I spent some time as a psychopath.

Not a real one, of course, just my own creation: Leech. Remorseless has just been launched as an audiobook with yours truly as narrator. My approach to that project was not standard, as I tried to voice the characters as they sound in my head. Some audiophiles prefer a straightforward narration; others won’t enjoy this disturbing tale, littered with profanity and strewn with violence, so you have been warned!

I had a great deal of fun bringing more than 30 fictitious people to life, ranging from my seen-it-all-before detective to a down-beaten prostitute. The character I found most enjoyable as an alter-ego, rather worryingly, was my rendition of Leech. It seems I have some deep psychological affinity with my own imaginary psychopath—I spent a lot of time “in character,” wandering around my house, yelling obscenities at inanimate objects, threatening to kill all and sundry. My wife was, understandably, a little perturbed. She began to wonder whether I was not only suffering from multiple-personality disorder, but might be a little psycho myself.

I’ll leave you, dear reader, to decide on that conundrum.

Bullet Points: Starts and Finishes Edition

• There are five nominees for this year’s Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the Mystery/Thriller category:

-- The Long and Faraway Gone, by Lou Berney (Morrow)
-- The Sympathizer, by Viet Thanh Nguyen (Grove Press)
-- Bull Mountain, by Brian Panowich (Putnam)
-- The Whites, by Richard Price writing as Harry Brandt (Henry Holt)
-- The Cartel, by Don Winslow (Knopf)

The fact that all of these contenders are of the distinctly male persuasion has irritated critic Sarah Weinman, who remarked on her Facebook page that “it is the only one of the 10 categories that does not include a woman … [and] it is entirely unrepresentative of the genre as it stands now …” She added: “[I]t is part of the larger systemic problem of men, for reasons that always strike me as baffling and incomprehensible, shying away from reading books by women, and valuing novels by men as somehow ‘worthier,’ when of course that is patently untrue.” Click here to see the full rundown of Times Book Prize contestants. The winners will be declared during the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books on Saturday, April 9.

• Already announced is the recipient of this year’s Innovator’s Award, which will also be presented during the Festival: it’s thriller mega-seller James Patterson.

• This weekend will fill Phoenix, Arizona, with crime and mystery readers, as the 2016 Left Coast Crime convention opens there tomorrow and runs through Sunday morning. If you’d like to attend that event but still haven’t registered, you can do so here.

• The death last Friday of 89-year-old Harper Lee, best known for having written the 1960 novel To Kill a Mockingbird, was pretty much a shock, even though her health was known to be fragile. However, it also goaded Criminal Element’s Adam Wagner to compose this piece in which he makes the case that Lee “could have very well become an author of crime fiction.” Learn more about Lee’s “reclusive” life here.

• Close on the heels of Lee’s passing was the death of Umberto Eco, the Italian author-philosopher probably best known by Rap Sheet readers for having penned the 1980 historical whodunit The Name of the Rose. Now comes word, via The Bookseller, that the Italian release date for Eco’s “final book”—a collection of magazine essays titled Pape Satan Aleppe: Chronicles of a Liquid Society—has been moved up from May to this coming Friday, February 26. No word yet on when an English translation of this collection might become available.

• As a boy, I loved this movie! It was the first and only film I recall going to see at a drive-in theater with my parents and brother.

• I missed spotting this news item earlier: California author J. Sydney Jones has let it be known through his blog that last year’s The Third Place, his sixth historical Viennese Mystery (due out in paperback this coming June), will be “the final volume in the series. It feels a bit odd saying good-bye to that world,” writes Jones, “and to those characters who have become so real for me, and I hope, for you, as well.” He notes, however, that “I am still publishing other standalone titles,” including a suspenser called The Edit, which he promises will be published by Mysterious Press later this year.

• Gee, I thought I was conversant in all the various subgenres of crime and thriller fiction, but the label “cli-fi,” short for “climate fiction,” caught me off-guard. It came my way in relation to a May 2016 release called Cold Blood, Hot Sea (Torrey House Press), by marine ecologist Charlene D’Avanzo. An e-mail pitch says this novel “pits ocean scientists over big energy corporations in a thrilling addition to the new wave of cli-fi hitting the shelves.”

• This sounds like a fitting tribute: “[Britain’s] National Literacy Trust (NLT) and the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS) have launched an award in memory of Ruth Rendell for champions of literacy,” reports The Bookseller. “The prize is for an author or writer who has worked towards raising literacy levels in the UK, either through their writing and books or through their advocacy and championing of the cause of literacy. Schools, charities, libraries, booksellers and individuals can nominate candidates via the NLT website by the 31st May.”

• Classic Mysteries’ Les Blatt brings the “terrible news” that Boulder, Colorado-based independent publisher Rue Morgue Press “has gone out of business.” Adds Blatt: “Tom Schantz and his late wife, Enid, were pioneers in republishing some of the great—and often little-known—classic authors and their works, long before many of today’s smaller presses got into the business. RMP was responsible for republishing several of the finest John Dickson Carr mysteries, but they also specialized in other first-rate, if often obscure, mysteries. RMP introduced me to Dorothy Bowers, Glyn Carr, Clyde B. Clason, Gladys Mitchell, Craig Rice, Kelley Roos, Margaret Scherf and many more authors of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction and beyond. Each book had a brief, literate and entertaining introduction written by Tom and Enid which provided information about the author and his/her works. The Rue Morgue Press books remain centerpieces of my classic mystery collection. I’ll miss them.” Me, too.

• Beneath the Stains of Time writer TomCat explains that Rue Morgue’s “output was severely cut back after Enid Schantz passed away [in 2011] and completely stopped a year or two ago. Now the entire website has disappeared.” Meanwhile, the anonymous blogger at The Invisible Event delivers this “open love letter” to the publisher.

• And this sad news comes from In Reference to Murder:

Five Star is dropping its mystery line to focus on the Western and Frontier Fiction lines. Since 2000, the imprint has published exclusively first-edition books, many of which went on to earn starred reviews, Edgar Award and Anthony Award nominations, and land on bestseller lists. Apparently, Five Star will be honoring its already-signed contracts for books in the pipeline.

• Having enjoyed the first (2014) series of Happy Valley, the award-winning British TV crime drama starring Sarah Lancashire, I was pleased to see Criminal Element mention that Series 2, which is already being shown in the UK, will become available on Netflix in the States on March 16. Wikipedia says there are six episodes to come. That officially ranks as the happiest news so far today.

• Series 3 of Endeavour, the ITV period drama inspired by Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse novels, hasn’t even had an American showing yet, but a fourth series has already been commissioned.

• I was surprised to see the 2014 “stoner crime comedy” Inherent Vice on CinemaNerdz’s list of the “20 Best Detective Movies of All Time,” but the rest of them—especially the top five—were predictable.

• Two DVD releases to anticipate: May 24 will bring the debut of Lou Grant: The Complete First Season, finally introducing what I hope will be a whole new crowd of future fans to that frequently excellent 1977-1982 newspaper drama, starring Ed Asner as city editor of the fictional Los Angeles Tribune; and The Untouchables: The Compete Series is slated to go on sale May 10.

• Would you sign up for this ocean voyage?

• And don’t forget that voting is still open to anyone who would like to nominate authors for the British Crime Writers’ Association’s 2016 Dagger in the Library award. This commendation will be given “not for an individual book but for an author’s entire body of work.” Polls close on March 1, so get your ballots in now!

Image Conscious

2016 is more than a month and a half spent, but because this has been a remarkably busy time for me, I’m still wrapping up a couple of matters from last year. For instance, back in early January I posted The Rap Sheet’s roster of 20 nominees for Best Crime Fiction Cover of 2015, but only today can I finally announce the winners.

This is the eighth time we’ve asked our discriminating readers to choose which one, out of a group of mystery, crime, and thriller covers issued during a 12-month period, they found to be particularly eye-catching and handsome. (The first such survey was conducted back in 2007, but we skipped 2012 for reasons explained here.) In previous years the vote total has been somewhere between 1,000 and 1,500. But this time, things were rather different.

Generally, I set these polls up (through Polldaddy) with very few restrictions, allowing participants to select one or more book fronts on their first visit, and then perhaps come back on a later occasion to make their second thoughts known. I have not, in the past, prevented readers from voting more than once. I would like to believe that people are essentially honest, and that the stakes involved in this sort of informal canvassing in The Rap Sheet are not so important or life-changing that anyone would resort to ballot stuffing as a way to falsely drive up their numbers. Yet over the latest two-week survey period (and especially near its conclusion), there were occasions when the tallies for one or more books suddenly executed extraordinary jumps. And in the end, the vote total was an incredible 6,941—much higher than in previous years. I don’t believe that any book undeserving of acclaim wound up among the top five vote-getters, but this experience has made me reconsider my relaxed posture toward allowing people the opportunity to vote more than once.

With all of that said, let me now move on to our five winners. (Click on the covers below for enlargements.)

Having amassed a whopping 2,549 votes (or 36.75 percent of the total), this year’s first-place finisher is … Scratch the Surface (280 Steps), the opening installment in Illinois author Josh K. Stevens’ “pulp noir trilogy” about Deuce Walsh, “a former gangster trying to keep his past hidden in the middle of [the] nowhere Midwest.” (Stevens’ follow-up volumes are Delving Deeper, which reached booksellers last August, and To the Core, which is due out this coming April.) I wasn’t all that familiar with 280 Steps—an independent publisher headquartered in Oslo, Norway, of all places—and haven’t yet received any of its releases (which include both vintage and new works, by authors ranging from A.I. Bezzerides and Jonathan Ashley to Bill S. Ballinger and Eric Beetner). But I am definitely impressed with 280 Steps’ taste in cover illustrations.

As publisher Kjetil Hestvedt let me know in a recent e-mail note, Scratch the Surface’s front—with its minimalist, in-your-face illustration of a man (dare we guess it’s Walsh himself?) pointing a pistol toward what might be your right ear—represents the work of Risa Rodil, a young and “incredibly talented freelance designer who has designed most of our covers previously.” (She created all of the fronts for Stevens’ trilogy.) Separately, Rodil tells me she has a very collaborative association with 280 Steps. She says the imprint’s managers “provided me with a clear and specific direction of how they want[ed] the cover to look … My role [was] to translate their ideas visually. … For Scratch the Surface, after I submitted the initial design, they only asked for minor revisions … Such revisions included shadow and scale fixes for the face and the hand, and additional color scheme options.” The finished paperback boasts a sharp, distinctive façade that pops out from bookstore shelves cluttered with photographic covers, too many of which employ similar bland, stock imagery.

There’s nothing bland, though, about the photo front for the paperback release of Jamie Mason’s Monday’s Lie (Gallery), a novel about “a woman who digs into her unconventional past to confirm what she suspects: her husband isn’t what she thought he was.” A superior visual grabber to the earlier hardcover edition of Mason’s thriller, this reprint version—which took second place in The Rap Sheet’s cover contest (collecting 1,928 votes, or 27.78 percent of the total)—is credited to Lisa Litwack, the creative director at Gallery Books. Litwack’s work has earned her acclaim before. Her design for the 2015 edition of He Killed Them All: Robert Durst and My Quest for Justice, by Jeanine Pirro, found a spot among Bookish’s favorite covers of 2015. She was also responsible for the cover of 2012’s Romeo Spikes, by Joanne Reay, and paperback reprints of Stephen King novels that came out early in the last decade.

For Monday’s Lie, Lithwick delivers a front that elegantly communicates this yarn’s basic plot line. It shows a young woman with her hands held over her face, yet her physiognomy revealed clearly through those fingers. As if she can’t hide from what’s right there in front of her. Just as the protagonist in Mason’s novel, Dee Aldrich, can’t avoid acknowledging the obvious—that (as publicity materials put it) “her marriage is falling apart and she’s starting to believe that her husband has his eye on a new life … a life without her, one way or another.” This is Mason’s second novel, following 2013’s Three Graves Full, which was also brought to market by Gallery, and the covers for both have been quite haunting. I look forward to seeing whether the presentation of her next work can top that of Monday’s Lie.

Capturing third place in our competition is The Fury of Blacky Jaguar (One Eye Press), a novella by Angel Luis Colón, who has written for Web publications such as the Los Angeles Review of Books and the ambitious but late site, The Life Sentence. Colón is said to be finishing up a debut novel called Hell Chose Me, and he serves as an editor for the flash-fiction site Shotgun Honey.

In reply to an e-note I sent his way, Colón reports that the “design work [for Blacky Jaguar] was done by my publisher, Ron Earl Phillips. The guy’s amazing. Glad he’ll get some long-overdue credit.” Indeed, West Virginia resident Phillips—who also happens to be Shotgun Honey’s managing editor—deserves plenty of kudos for the powerful black, white, and red imagery fronting Colón’s paperback novella. The story inside is built around the eponymous Mr. Jaguar, an “ex-IRA hard man, devoted greaser, and overall hooligan,” who “is furious” because “someone’s made off with Polly, his 1959 Plymouth Fury, and there’s not much that can stop him from getting her back.” Phillip’s cover arrangement puts said Detroit gas-guzzler front and center, like a great bull with a chrome-plated grin, waiting impatiently to charge. Not a cover that’s easily ignored, and one that gathered 1,360 votes (or 19.59 percent) in this year’s match-up.

Our fourth-place champ is in sharp contrast with Blacky Jaguar. The front of True Grift, by Jack Bunker (Brash), is all about softness and grace, rather than strength and grittiness. Reviewing this debut offering from attorney-turned-author Bunker, Bookgasm called it “a comedic romp through a scam gone wrong. … J.T. Edwards, a bankrupt lawyer, meets Al Boyle, a greedy insurance adjuster, in the coffee shop of the golf course they both frequent in the land-locked ‘Inland Empire’ section of Southern California, several miles southeast of Los Angeles. After sharing their mutual financial and professional woes, the two devise a quick-cash personal injury scam.”

True Grift’s façade (which won 203 votes, or 2.92 percent of the total) nicely captures this tale’s comedic quality. You have the cartoonish bomb, with sputtering fuse and the book’s title, floating in the upper left-hand corner. You have the fedora-topped golfer photographed in the midst of his follow-through. And, of course, that linksman is standing in what appears initially to be a golf course bunker (aka “sand trap”—a nice allusion to the author’s moniker). But if you spread the cover out enough to appreciate its entirety, you recognize the bunker for what it actually is: the lumbar curve on a very beautiful, bikini-wrapped young woman. Praise for this composite artwork is owed generally to the New York-based design company Damonza, but specifically to a freelance designer who goes by the name Momir. By the way, Momir’s artistic skills have earned him more than a bit of attention over the last several years, especially from a blog called The Book Designer, which showcases a variety of his e-book fronts here.

Finally, taking home fifth-place honors in The Rap Sheet’s 2015 Best Crime Fiction Cover contest, is The Strings of Murder (Michael Joseph UK), the first novel by Mexico-born author Oscar De Muriel. Since De Muriel’s plot revolves around the locked-room murder of a violinist in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1888, it’s no surprise to find the virtuoso’s instrument incorporated into this work’s face. However, the art is considerably more complicated than that. Created by Roberlan Borges, a Brazilian graphic designer and illustrator with a fondness for vintage imagery, it combines classic-style typography with elements suggestive of both music and the unknown. “I wanted to give the cover several layers of images,” Borges has written, “like different nuances, and give the impression of a mystery being unfolded.” Layer atop all that embossed titles, and you get a book cover that, when held, delights your eyes as well as your fingertips.

The Strings of Murder bagged 151 votes, or 2.18 percent of all those cast. I’d have expected it to do even better, but as I said earlier, this wasn’t a typical surveying year. We will have to see how things go when we assemble our Best Crime Fiction Covers of 2016 nominees 10 months from now. Meanwhile, congratulations to all of this year’s winners! To find the complete survey results, click here.

Guilty Secrets

Although it was originally broadcast in Britain over three evenings—December 26-28, 2015—the new BBC One miniseries, And Then There Were None, is set to air on the American cable network Lifetime next month in only two segments. Those will be shown on Sunday, March 13, and Monday, March 14, beginning at 9 p.m. ET/PT each night.

This latest adaptation of Agatha Christie’s best-selling 1939 standalone thriller, about ill-fated strangers brought together on an island off the Devon coast, stars Douglas Booth, Charles Dance, Maeve Dermody, Sam Neill, Miranda Richardson, and Toby Stephens. The Daily Telegraph called it “a gripping confection featuring all the most reliable hallmarks of the brand,” while The Guardian quoted screenwriter Sarah Phelps describing the tale as “genuinely terrifying ... nobody is coming to save you ... no dapper Belgian detective, no twinkly-eyed and steely spinster is going to arrive and unravel it.”

Click here to watch a trailer for this miniseries, as well as the program’s ominous opening title sequence and the early scene showing the arrival on the island of Christie’s 10 secretive guests.

Not Your Typical Vicar

While I wait (with more than a modicum of trepidation) for the March 6 final episode of the British historical drama Downton Abbey, I see that Season 2 of Grantchester—the 1950s mystery series based on James Runcie’s still-growing collection of books—is set to debut on Sunday, March 27. According to the schedule for PBS-TV’s Masterpiece, six episodes of Grantchester will be aired through May 1. I’ve found this show, which stars James Norton as the Reverend Sidney Chambers and Robson Green as Detective Inspector Geordie Keating, to be quite entertaining, so I look forward to revisiting it throughout the spring. It won’t make up for the loss of Downton Abbey, but as the old song goes, “you can’t always get what you want.”

A UK trailer for Grantchester, Season 2, is embedded below.

Lee Dies, Atticus and Scout Live On

The first time I read Harper Lee’s 1960 novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, was back in high school. That tale of racism and courtroom drama was one of the assigned texts in a popular-literature course I took, together with Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, George Orwell’s 1984, and Jimmy Breslin’s The Gang that Couldn’t Shoot Straight. The next time I read Mockingbird was in 2010, when a 50th-anniversary hardcover edition of the book was released, and after Rap Sheet readers had chosen the yarn’s adult star, Atticus Finch, as “the best TV/movie criminal attorney in history.” I remember not appreciating the book the first time around, at least not until my classmates and I discussed it at length. The second time, it was pure pleasure.

When Lee’s original and quite different version of that classic story, Go Set a Watchman, was finally published last year, I bought and read it, because I’d so enjoyed the previous book. And though some people felt cheated by this immature work, I came away appreciating Watchman for the familiarity of its voice. At the time, though, I recall there was talk of Lee, in her 89th year, not being in good health. Therefore, today’s news of her demise seems unsurprising.

As The New York Times reports:

Harper Lee, whose first novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, about racial injustice in a small Alabama town, sold more than 40 million copies and became one of the most beloved and most taught works of fiction ever written by an American, died on Friday in Monroeville, Ala., where she lived. She was 89.

Hank Conner, a nephew of Ms. Lee’s, said that she died in her sleep at the Meadows, an assisted living facility.

The instant success of To Kill a Mockingbird, which was published in 1960 and won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction the next year, turned Ms. Lee into a literary celebrity, a role she found oppressive and never learned to accept.

“I never expected any sort of success with Mockingbird,” Ms. Lee told a radio interviewer in 1964. “I was hoping for a quick and merciful death at the hands of the reviewers, but, at the same time I sort of hoped someone would like it well enough to give me encouragement.”

National Public Radio’s Lynn Neary adds that

The book depicts the strivings of a small-town Alabama lawyer, Atticus Finch, on behalf of Tom Robinson, a black man charged with raping a white woman, and it casts the events through the lens of Finch’s precocious daughter, Scout. Despite its relative brevity, the book bears considerable weight, both in the gravity of its themes and the care with which it treats them.

Perhaps, then, it should be no surprise that Lee and her editor, Tay Hohoff, weren’t exactly expecting this book to fly off store shelves.

Hohoff “cautioned her that a book with racism at its center involving a rape trial was not a thing in 1960 to make people run to the bookstores for,” says Charles J. Shields, author of Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee. “She counselled her client and said, ‘If we sell 2,500 copies and break even, you should be proud.’”

You already know this twist: Turns out they were flat wrong.

It may have been the 1962 big-screen adaptation, starring Gregory Peck, that brought Lee’s (still sometimes controversial) novel much of its early renown, but it’s the story itself that has kept To Kill a Mockingbird popular. As the blog FiveThirtyEight notes, “In 2012, the Fordham Institute, an education policy think tank, surveyed 484 high school English teachers about which books they assigned. According to the group’s study, Mockingbird was taught by more ninth- and 10th-grade teachers—35 percent of them—than any other book of fiction listed. It also tops most works in other categories, including poetry and plays. Mockingbird beats the most-taught works of Mark Twain, Shakespeare or John Steinbeck. The only reading material that topped it was Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, which was taught by 38 percent of teachers in those grades.”

Lee’s death today is unlikely to change that triumphal record.

READ MORE: “Legendary Author Harper Lee Dies at Age 89,” by Nick Ostdick (Books Tell You Why); “Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird Is a Perfectly Built Novel, Despite Its Flaws,” by Todd VanDerWerff (Vox); “How Harper Lee Lost Her Voice,” by Sarah Weinman (The New Republic); “Harper Lee Tribute (1926-2016): From To Kill a Mockingbird to Go Set a Watchman” (Abebooks); “Obama on Harper Lee: ‘She Changed America for the Better,’” by Tierney Sneed (Talking Points Memo); “Godspeed Harper Lee,” by Terence Towles Canote (A Shroud of Thoughts).

On the Road Again

My Kirkus Reviews column this week looks at Scottish author Peter May’s latest U.S. release, Runaway (Quercus), an engrossing standalone yarn that, as I explain in the piece, “is partly crime fiction, partly a story of misspent and naïve youth, and partly a redemption tale.” Inspired by an episode from the author’s own past, Runaway tells about a party of five “teenage musicians from Glasgow, Scotland, who hie off impulsively to London in quest of pop stardom, only to have their adventure turn discouraging and deadly.” In a parallel narrative, the book also follows several of those same characters 50 years later, when—as older and less-impulsive men—they reunite to settle a bit of unfinished business in the British capital.

You can read my whole column here.

Bullet Points: Be My Valentine Edition

• Southern Louisiana’s Iberia Parish, which as every Rap Sheet reader surely knows is home to James Lee Burke’s fictional sheriff’s deputy, Dave Robicheaux, is preparing to host its first official Dave Robicheaux’s Hometown Literary Festival, April 8-10. “Various venues will celebrate literature and its impact on our parish’s culture with storytelling, workshops, theatrical vignettes, music, local cuisine, bourré lessons and a tournament, Dave Robicheaux tours and a 5K run,” says the festival’s Web page. More info and ticket purchases are available here. (Hat tip to Linda L. Richards.)

• I missed it by a couple of days, but actor Burt Reynolds’ 80th birthday was this last Friday, February 11. Over the years he has been featured in plenty of films with a criminal slant, including Fuzz (1972), Deliverance (1972), Shamus (1973), Sharky’s Machine (1981), Stick (1985), and Heat (1986). But no less important are his credits from small-screen crime dramas, everything from M Squad and Naked City to Perry Mason and The F.B.I. Reynolds also starred as Detective Lieutenant John Hawk (a full-blooded Iroquois) in the short-lived, 1966 series Hawk; as the eponymous Southern California homicide detective in Dan August (1970-1971, opening titles here); and as a Florida gumshoe who drove around in a 1960 Cadillac convertible in B.L. Stryker (1989-1990, opening titles here). In addition, notes The Spy Command, “in the very early 1970s, some (such as director Guy Hamilton) thought he could have been a good James Bond.”

• If you haven’t seen it, here’s the trailer for Season 2 of Bosch, the Los Angeles-based drama starring Titus Welliver as Michael Connelly’s fictional police detective, Harry Bosch. The series is scheduled to return to Amazon’s TV-streaming service on Friday, March 11.



• Speaking of trailers, here are two for The Night Manager, a six-part British-American miniseries based on John le Carré’s 1993 novel of the same name. According to Wikipedia, The Night Manager—which stars Tom Hiddleston, Olivia Colman, and Hugh Laurie—will debut on BBC One on February 21 and then on AMC in the States on April 19.

• This is interesting: Flavorwire explains that “Ashley Judd, who had a starring spot as a retired CIA agent in the canceled ABC series Missing, will return to TV for David Lynch’s Twin Peaks reboot. The surreal series is set to premiere on Showtime in 2017. Deadline reported the news, but does not indicate what role Judd will play in the show. Twin Peaks originally aired in 1990 and centered on the murder of high school student Laura Palmer.”

• Now for a bit of unfortunate news: ABC-TV’s Agent Carter, starring lovely actress Hayley Atwell as a clever, kick-ass American spy in the 1940s, has reportedly been cancelled due to its underwhelming Season 2 viewership stats. I’ve enjoyed this show a great deal, and will be sorry to see it disappear. At least all 10 episodes of the current season—which debuted on January 19—are expected to be broadcast through March 1. If you need to catch up with Agent Carter, click here to find the five Season 2 episodes that have been shown so far.

• Tim Dorsey, who pens crime-caper novels such as the new Coconut Cowboy, is the seventh and latest recipient of the John D. MacDonald Award for Excellence in Florida Fiction. He received his prize during an event on January 26. As this press release states, “Some past winners of the award include Elmore Leonard, James W. Hall, Randy Wayne White, and Stuart Kaminsky.” (Hat tip to Mystery Fanfare.)

• Seriously, a big-screen MacGyver movie?

• The guest line-up for the 2016 Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival (July 21-25 in Harrogate, England) has been announced. It includes not only Crime Writers’ Association Diamond Dagger winner Peter James and Gerald Seymour, but also Linwood Barclay, Jeffery Deaver, Martina Cole, and many others.

• Shotsmag Confidential highlights two opportunities to show your crime-fiction scholarship. Click here to find out about submitting chapters to a book about “domestic noir,” and here to learn how your knowledge of author Agatha Christie might come in handy.

• Saskatchewan lawyer/book critic Bill Selnes has recently focused his attention on UK novelist Philip Kerr and his acclaimed Bernie Gunther crime series, set around World War II. So far, he has reviewed Kerr’s first three Gunther novels—March Violets, The Pale Criminal, and A German Requiem—and looked at how the Gunther books treat the subject of the Jewish Holocaust in two posts, here and here.

• Not to brag or anything, but I have read all 14 of Stephen Greenleaf’s San Francisco-based John Marshall Tanner P.I. novels, from Grave Error (1979) to Ellipsis (2000). If you’ve missed out, note that Mysterious Press is offering 12 of those tales in e-book format. The only two missing seem to be 1994’s False Conception and 1997’s Past Tense, but the publisher also has for sale two of Greenleaf’s non-Tanner thrillers, The Ditto List (1985) and Impact (1989).

• I’ve long been a fan of Alistair MacLean’s thrillers, but I confess that, while I own a copy of Caravan to Vaccarès (1970), I haven’t yet read it. So Vintage Pop Fiction’s recent review of that novel is a good reminder of what I expect will be a pleasurable task ahead.

• David F. Walker’s new Shaft comic-book series, subtitled “Imitation of Life,” is winning plenty of favorable comments.

• I love this quote from author Douglas Adams, brought to my attention by The Passive Voice: “Wandering around the web is like living in a world in which every doorway is actually one of those science fiction devices which deposit you in a completely different part of the world when you walk through them. In fact, it isn’t like it, it is it.”

• While I know Rap Sheet contributor Mark Coggins best for having created the August Riordan private eye series (No Hard Feelings), he’s also a photographer, and he’s out now with a new book of his work in that field, titled The Space Between. As he explains, this is “a thoughtfully curated set of fifty street scenes from cities in France, Italy, Japan, and the U.S.” that “conveys the energy, communal bonds, and in some cases, inherent mystery and alienation of urban life.”

• A nice piece about Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon.

• David Morrell has a few things to say about fellow author John D. MacDonald, adding to the Sarasota Herald-Tribune’s series of pieces printed in the run-up to the July centennial of MacDonald’s birth.

• And since today is Valentine’s Day (tell me you didn’t forget, guys), click over to Mystery Fanfare for a rundown of crime novels that somehow feature this annual celebration of love.

Pierce’s Picks

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



Shaft’s Revenge, by David F. Walker (Dynamite Entertainment). The last year has been a red-letter time for fans of Ernest Tidyman’s 1970s New York City private eye, John Shaft. November brought the publication of Steve Aldous’ The World of Shaft, a comprehensive study of the character as he’s appeared in various media. And David F. Walker, who in late 2014 began delivering a new series of Shaft comic books (more recently collected as Shaft Volume 1: A Complicated Man), has now debuted a second series of adventures for that “cat who won’t cop out,” Shaft: Imitation of Life. Walker is also offering Shaft’s Revenge, the first new Shaft novel brought to market since Tidyman’s The Last Shaft in 1975. I haven’t yet received a copy of this 288-page work, but Walker—in an interview with Comic Vine—explains that its story “takes place shortly after Shaft’s Big Score [1972], which was the third book by Tidyman,” and that it finds the gumshoe being “hired by Knocks Persons, the godfather of Harlem, who appeared in the first novel [Shaft, 1970]. Knocks knows he is about to be killed, and he basically hires Shaft to find his killer. As he works the case, Shaft is caught up in the middle of a conflict between corrupt cops and the killer of Knocks.” Walker adds that this book gave him the chance to “explore some of what makes Shaft tick, including aspects of his youth. We learn stuff about Shaft in this book that has never been revealed before, stuff that even he didn’t know about, which serves as something of a second mystery within the story.”

Another familiar face turns up in The Sign of Fear (Simon & Schuster UK), Robert Ryan’s fourth outing for Sherlock Holmes’ aging but faithful companion, Doctor (or, more recently, Major) John H. Watson, following last year’s A Study in Murder. It’s now 1917, and London is under assault by German bombers, a barrage that seriously unnerves the local citizenry. Watson, already grieving after the loss of one friend, is struck again by news that another warfront ally has been lost during a torpedo attack on the English Channel. Then his concert-going comrade, Sir Gilbert Hastings, is snatched, along with four others, and a ransom demand follows, telling of the ghastly events destined to take place if those demands are not satisfied. Anxious for help, Watson accepts it from a most unlikely source: ruthless German spy Miss Pillbody, aka the “She Wolf.” Although their aims are ultimately different, their investigative efforts prove fruitful, exposing a dastardly, high-level plot. Ryan’s portrayal of Watson as compassionate, intelligent, and surprisingly brave for an old gent is most satisfying, and his careful suspense-building makes this series well worth the reading time.

Click here to see more of this season’s most-wanted books.

Listen to This

There are 29 categories of nominees for this year’s Audie Awards, given out by the Audio Publishers Association and celebrating “distinction in audiobooks and spoken word entertainment.” But only two are of obvious interest to Rap Sheet readers.

Mystery:
• All the Old Knives, by Olen Steinhauer,
narrated by Ari Fliakos and Juliana Francis Kelly (Macmillan Audio)
• Career of Evil, by Robert Galbraith,
narrated by Robert Glenister (Hachette Audio)
• Corrupted, by Lisa Scottoline,
narrated by Kate Burton (Macmillan Audio)
• Gun Street Girl, by Adrian McKinty,
narrated by Gerard Doyle (Blackstone Audio)
• Malice at the Palace, by Rhys Bowen,
narrated by Katherine Kellgren (Audible Studios)
• The Nature of the Beast, by Louise Penny,
narrated by Robert Bathurst (Macmillan Audio)

Thriller/Suspense:
• Blue Labyrinth, by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child,
narrated by Rene Auberjonois (Hachette Audio)
• The Patriot Threat, by Steve Berry,
narrated by Scott Brick (Macmillan Audio)
• The President’s Shadow, by Brad Meltzer,
narrated by Scott Brick (Hachette Audio)
• Season of Fear, by Brian Freeman,
narrated by Joe Barrett (Blackstone Audio)
• Signal, by Patrick Lee, narrated by Ari Fliakos (Macmillan Audio)

Winners will be announced during the Audies Gala on May 11, to be held at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago.

(Hat tip to Mystery Fanfare.)

Genre Bender

(Editor’s note: Over the last few years, Scottish author Peter May has become a favored concocter of fiction for at least several Rap Sheet contributors. We’ve interviewed him and hosted his essays about previous books. Today, we give space over to May once more, this time in order that he can remark on how his novel Runaway—which is being released this week in the States by publisher Quercus—like  other of his most recent works, stretches the boundaries of crime fiction.)

Police procedural, whodunit, hard-boiled, cozy, thriller—the list goes on. As “genres” go, the loose coverall of “crime” or “mystery” must be the most varied and all-encompassing there is. Is it really possible to push against the boundaries and extend the limits further?

We are now reading more non-English writers in translation, the swathe of Scandinavian authors, French writers like Pierre Lemaitre, or the Italian Roberto Costantini. And we are embracing the cultural differences they bring. The boundaries of the genre often vary from country to country.

The French definition of crime writing also includes the roman noir or “dark novel,” a fact that changed my life when I unwittingly banged up against London editors’ preconceived limits of what was “acceptable” as a crime book a few years ago.

The Blackhouse (2011) involved a policeman investigating a crime on the Isle of Lewis in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides. This remote archipelago was a place I knew very well, and I wanted to take readers to explore its unique culture and atmosphere. As I began to inhabit the being of a recently bereaved policeman returning to his birthplace with a lifetime of emotional baggage and regrets, his personal journey became even more important to me than the crime he was investigating. I believed his story was a strong one, and I felt sure readers would be engaged and moved by it. However, readers in Britain were not to get the chance to find out. The editors of all the London publishing houses turned the book down. They sent effusively complimentary rejection letters praising the quality of the writing and the strong atmosphere and characters, but they felt that they would have difficulty selling the book to their marketing departments and ultimately to readers.

I was devastated. I put the book away and was forced to pursue other ideas and stories. It wasn’t until a few years later that my French editor asked to read The Blackhouse. She loved it and bought world rights. When the book was translated and published in France it was declared a “masterpiece” by the French daily newspaper L’Humanité.

It went on to win several awards in France in the genre of crime writing as well as a major national literature award, the Prix Cezam Litteraire. And that’s the difference in France … there is no difference. The French don’t separate crime and mystery writing from “literature.” They believe a good book is a good book whether it belongs to a “genre” or not. They judge the book on the quality of its writing.

The Blackhouse went on to be published all over Europe, with editors falling over themselves to snap it up at the Frankfurt Book Fair, including a young publishing house in the UK that hadn’t been around when the book was first presented to those London editors. The managing editor at Quercus strongly believed in The Blackhouse and took it on without hesitation. Looking back, it was perhaps not such a difficult decision for him. Quercus was the publisher that had brought Stieg Larsson’s Millennium series to the English-speaking world. And in those years that followed the Larsson phenomenon all those Scandinavian authors, with their psychological stories set in cold northern climates, had actually expanded the boundaries of the crime genre for the British reading public. Now The Blackhouse was squeezing its way into the publishing world as a Scottish cousin in the subgenre of “Nordic Noir.”

Those editors who initially turned the book down need not have worried about readers’ reactions, The Blackhouse was selected for the UK’s Richard and Judy Book Club (like Oprah’s book club in the USA) and was voted the “best read” by readers. When The Blackhouse was eventually published in the USA, it won the Barry Award for best crime novel.

The Outer Hebrides, with its very low crime rate, was never destined to become a setting for a long-running series of crime books, but I was persuaded to follow The Blackhouse up with two more novels, creating what became known as the Lewis Trilogy. The Lewis Man (2012) and The Chessmen (2013) followed in the same style. Each book involves a crime and an investigation, but the main part of story concentrates on the history of the characters and their relationships.

More than two million copies of the Lewis Trilogy have been sold in the UK alone. I am inundated with requests to continue the stories and write more books involving Fin Macleod, but I spent many years as a young television scriptwriter, writing for soap operas and I won’t be returning to that!

I followed up the trilogy with the standalone Entry Island (2014). Pushing boundaries again, I suppose, this story is set half on the Magdalen Islands in Quebec, Canada, and half in 19th-century Outer Hebrides. It’s part crime story and part historical fiction, with a love story, too! That might sound like an odd mix, but Entry Island won the Deanston Scottish Crime Novel of the Year, UK ITV Crime Book Club Dagger for Best Read of the Year, and the French Revue 813 Award for Best Foreign Crime Book of the Year.

Runaway, the standalone which followed Entry Island, also ventures into untrodden territory. There is a crime and a mystery, but the story alternates between two time frames, 1965 and 2015. One story line follows a musical group of teenage boys who run away from home in Glasgow, Scotland, to the bright lights of London in the Swinging ’60s in search of fame and fortune. In parallel, the second story line follows three of them retracing the steps of their youthful journey now as infirm, elderly men on a quest to right a wrong from their past.

Am I stretching the limits of the mystery genre? I’m not setting out with that intent. I simply have stories to tell, and plotting and resolving a mystery is one of the most satisfying ways to do it. After all, nothing hooks a reader and engages his or her imagination faster than a mystery.

Perhaps there are purists who believe that there are formats and rules that should be adhered to, but I think that the crime and mystery genre is a broad enough church to accommodate us all.

Chesterton’s “Defense” of Detective Fiction

“There is, however, between a good detective story and a bad detective story as much, or, rather more, difference than there is between a good epic and a bad one. Not only is a detective story a perfectly legitimate form of art, but it has certain definite and real advantages as an agent of the public weal.”—G.K. Chesterton, the “father” of cleric-cum-sleuth Father Brown, defines the multiple values of detective fiction in this 1901 essay.

Bullet Points: First 2016 Edition — Finally!

This has been an extraordinarily busy time for me, which should explain why there have been fewer than normal postings in The Rap Sheet during the last month. Following the most recent holiday madness, I took on the task of helping to remodel two rooms in my house—both of which I’d passed on redoing when I first moved into this now 110-year-old Seattle residence back in the late 1990s. Tearing off wallpaper and removing baseboards, mudding and sanding walls, painting everything again, and then building new bookcases has caused a serious strain on my writing hours. I’m burning candles at more than their two ends. I apologize to readers for not being more active on The Rap Sheet and Killer Covers than I have been lately, but with any luck, this test of my construction skills should end soon. I hope ...

Meanwhile, let me pass along a passel of news items that should be of some interest to crime-fiction readers.

• With the centennial of author John D. MacDonald’s birth coming up in July (on July 24, to be exact) Florida’s Sarasota Herald-Tribune newspaper has initiated a series of remembrances it calls “John D. and Me.” Installment number one came from writer John Jakes, while Stephen King provided the initial follow-up. Other contributors have been Tim Dorsey, Jeffery Deaver, Don Bruns, and Heather Graham. Unless things go awry, you should be able to keep up with the series entries here.

• And if that isn’t enough …: Robert Fulford from Canada’s National Post looks at how MacDonald invented the subgenre of Florida crime fiction, and how it has grown and evolved since his death in 1986.

• This should be especially welcome news for fans of Erle Stanley Gardner’s clever, sometimes comical Bertha Cool and Donald Lam detective series, which he wrote under the pseudonym A.A. Fair. In December 2016, Hard Case Crime will publish an unexpected and forgotten 30th installment of that series, titled The Knife Slipped. “Lost for more than 75 years,” HCC explains on its Web site, “The Knife Slipped was meant to be the second book in the series but got shelved when Gardner’s publisher objected to (among other things) Bertha Cool’s tendency to ‘talk tough, swear, smoke cigarettes, and try to gyp people.’ But this tale of adultery and corruption, of double-crosses and triple identities—however shocking for 1939—shines today as a glorious present from the past, a return to the heyday of private eyes and shady dames, of powerful criminals, crooked cops, blazing dialogue, and delicious plot twists.” Oh, and the cover of this novel was painted by the legendary Robert McGinnis. I can’t wait to get my hands on The Knife Slipped!

• From In Reference to Murder: “Sherlock fans may be disappointed to hear that the fourth season of the show probably won’t air until sometime in 2017, according to PBS president Paula Kerger. Although the show will begin production early this year, the busy schedules of Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman add up to a delay in Sherlock’s timeline.” Well, darn it all!

• Oh no, say it isn’t so: The much-maligned 1990 ABC-TV series Cop Rock, a “musical police drama” co-created by Steven Bochco (of Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue), is finally due out in DVD format. Television Obscurities reports that the full series will be released by Shout! Factory this coming May 17. “The 3-disc set will include the 11 episodes plus new interviews with creator Steven Bochco, co-star Anne Bobby, and others,” the blog explains. “Shout! calls the release a ‘cause for both celebration and a long-overdue reappraisal of a series that has been called one of the most unusual programs of all time.’” Unusual isn’t the same thing as saying it was good.

• Editor Janet Rudolph will focus the next edition of her magazine, Mystery Readers Journal, on New York mysteries, and she’s now in the market for reviews (50-250 words), articles (250-1,000 words), and Author! Author! essays (500-1,500 words) to fill out the contents. If you’d like to make a submission, contact Rudolph at janet@mysteryreaders.org. The deadline for copy is February 20.

• Alcatraz Island in 1880, long before that hump in San Francisco Bay hosted one of America’s most notorious penitentiaries.

• To celebrate the half-century anniversary of their small-screen debut in 1966, The Monkees—“the greatest fake band ever assembled for a madcap TV show”—will release a new album, titled Good Times!, and engage in “a lengthy North American tour kicking off May 18 in Fort Myers, Florida,” reports Mashable.

• The Booksteve Channel has early publicity clips for The Monkees.

• The Thrill Begins, a blog presented under the auspices of the International Thriller Writers, spent all of this last week interviewing crime and mystery fiction critics, sometimes with humorous results. The reviewers being grilled were Peter Rozovsky of Detectives Beyond Borders, Kristopher Zgorski of BOLO Books, Katrina Niidas Holm of the late, great Life Sentence, Carole Barrowman from Wisconsin’s Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and Benoit Lievre of Dead End Follies.

• I was very sorry to hear about the passing, at age 73, of fiction anthologist and cinema historian Jon Tuska, who wrote—among many other works—1978’s The Detective in Hollywood: The Movie Careers of the Great Fictional Private Eyes and Their Creators, which I have long considered a must-have resource book. According to his obituary, Tuska breathed his last on Monday, January 18, “after a brief battle with cancer.” That note goes on to explain:

He graduated from Marquette University in Milwaukee in 1966. He was a renaissance man, known worldwide for his expertise on Western films and fiction. He wrote or edited over 30 books, consulted on television projects, taught and lectured, and between 1983 and 1991, he was associated with Oregon Public Broadcasting as the host of several classical music programs. In 1991, with his wife, Vicki Piekarski, he founded Golden West Literary Agency, which represented many of the authors of classic Western fiction.

A list of Tuska’s books can be found here.

I was fortunate to meet and interview Tuska in the early 1980s for a Portland, Oregon-based arts magazine called Stepping Out, and I’m sure I still have that particular issue someplace in my files, though I can’t seem to lay my hands on it right now. If and when I do locate that edition, though, I shall certainly post my interview with Tuska on this page. (Hat tip to Bill Crider’s Pop Culture Magazine.)

• The first part of David F. Walker’s new John Shaft comic-book series, Imitation of Life, is due out this week, and though I don’t see a print edition available yet, Amazon has the Kindle version for sale here. Steve Aldous, author of The World of Shaft, offers a sampling of the interior art here. He has also posted the covers from Part II and Part III of this story, along with this link to a new interview with Walker in Bleeding Cool.

• This is rather unexpected. It turns out that the book “Britons are most likely to have lied about reading” is … Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll. I’d have expected it to be Leo Tolstoy’s mammoth War and Peace, or Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, or maybe even David Foster Wallace’s self-indulgent but nonetheless oft-lauded Infinite Jest. But no. Britain’s Telegraph lists 20 works of fiction (more than that, if you count the Harry Potter series installments separately) that residents of Great Britain claim to have read, when in fact they have not. Of those, I’m pleased to say I have actually, truly digested all but a couple (including Fifty Shades of Gray—no thanks), and that while I haven’t read Alice’s Adventures myself, my mother did read it to me as a small boy.

• I, for one, would be interested to know how this list compares with an equivalent study of American reading accomplishments.

• Crime Watch blogger Craig Sisterson writes on Facebook that New Zealand novelist Paul Cleave—whose Five Minutes Alone won the 2015 Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Crime Novel—“has reportedly been made an Honorary Literary Fellow in the New Zealand Society of Authors Waitangi Day Honours (for those outside New Zealand, Waitangi Day is New Zealand's national day). Very well deserved, and great to see Paul get some recognition among the local literary world.”

• Author Max Allan Collins has recently been writing quite a bit in his blog about his repeatedly delayed heart surgery (fingers crossed for Collins’ swift recovery—whenever the procedure is done!), but in last week’s post he added this good news:

[M]y complete novel version of Road to Perdition the movie is due to be published along with reprints of Road to Purgatory and Road to Paradise. You may recall that my Perdition novelization was reduced to a pale shadow of itself back in the day—a 40,000-word condensation of the 70,000-word novel is what was foisted upon the public (it even made the New York Times best-seller list). As a great man once said, “Pfui.” But we appear to be on the verge of vindication.

In addition, new editions of Black Hats and Red Sky in Morning are in the works, to be published under my own name for the first time (R.I.P., Patrick Culhane).

All five of these books will be published by Brash Books, which is in part the brainchild of my buddy Lee Goldberg.

• From Crimespree Magazine comes news that “The Friends of the St. Paul Public Library [have] announced the nominees for the 28th annual Minnesota Book Awards.” The category of Genre Fiction contains four novels: The Devereaux Decision, by Steve McEllistrem (Calumet Editions); The Grave Soul, by Ellen Hart (Minotaur); He’s Either Dead or in St. Paul, by D.B. Moon (Three Waters); and Season of Fear, by Brian Freeman (Quercus). The winner in this and seven additional categories will be declared on April 16.

• It seems that distinguished essayist and poet T.S. Eliot was a fan of Golden Age detective stories, at one point describing Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone (1868) as “the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels.”

• Critic Mike Ripley’s “Getting Away with Murder” column for February contains observations on the annual Hodder and John Murray Crime Party, a new edition of James Crumley’s 1978 classic yarn, The Last Good Kiss (due out in April from UK publisher Black Swan), new releases by Robert Crais, Susan Moody, and others, and a Golden Age of Crime Weekend event scheduled as part of the Essex Book Festival (March 1-31). Read all of Ripley’s piece on the Shots Web site.

• No surprise here: Raymond Chandler’s 1953 novel, The Long Goodbye, is Benjamin Black’s favorite outing for Los Angeles private eye Philip Marlowe. “Chandler never wrote with such passionate conviction as he does in this long and darkly tormented work,” opines Black, the alter-ego behind which Irish author John Banville produces his own works of crime fiction—including The Black-Eyed Blonde (2014), a sort-of-sequel to The Long Goobye. “In the figure of the best-selling but self-hating author Roger Wade, we glimpse an exaggerated version of Chandler himself, who throughout his writing life chafed under the label of ‘mere’ thriller-writer.” You’ll find all of Black/Banville’s thoughts on this matter in The Independent.

• Here’s something I didn’t know before: Allen Dulles, the first civilian director of America’s Central Intelligence Agency, was a friend of Ian Fleming and a follower of his James Bond spy adventures.

• Nancie Clare is back with another year of novelist interviews for the Speaking of Mysteries podcast, beginning 2016 with Joe R. Lansdale, author of the new Hap and Leonard tale, Honky Tonk Samurai. Her other recent respondents include Denise Mina (Blood Salt Water), Joe Clifford (Lamentation), and Robert Crais (The Promise).

• S.W. Lauden talks with Rob Hart, author of the brand-new Portland-based Ash McKenna novel, City of Rose.

• You might recognize Joseph Goodrich as the editor of Blood Relations: The Selected Letters of Ellery Queen, 1947-1950 (2012), but he’s also a playwright. And his adaptation of Queen’s 1942 novel, Calamity Town, had its “world premiere” in Calgary, Alberta, at the end of last month. The Calgary Herald called it “an example of economical and polished crime fiction that is as theatrical as it is intriguing.” Goodrich tells me that he’s already “been commissioned to do a second Nero Wolfe play for Park Square Theater in St. Paul [Minnesota]. It goes up in June/July of 2017.”

• I never cease to be amazed by the lengths some businesses—both respectable and dubious—will go to in order to obtain free advertising. Among the worst abusers are folks who fake comments on blogs such as this one (comments often rife with typos or so mangled that it’s obvious they come from non-English speaking countries), and incorporate into them their Web site URLs. An example was this response to a piece I wrote about this year’s Agatha Award nominees: “I want to thank you for the superb post!! I surely liked every bit of it. I’ve bookmarked your internet site so I can take a appear at the latest articles you post later on.” At the end was a link to a “commode chair manufacturer.” Needless to say, I deleted that comment.