Just over a year ago, I posted on this page a list of what I thought were the best English-language crime-fiction blogs and Web sites. I did this in response to a bogus assessment along the same lines, perpetrated by a newsfeed aggregator site that had been asking writers to purchase subscriptions to its services in exchange for their sites being listed among its “top 50” blogs for readers of crime, mystery, and thriller fiction. I thought people interested in this genre deserved a more honest rundown of what was found online.
The response to my efforts was overwhelmingly favorable. And it started me thinking that perhaps an annual, or not quite so regular, appraisal of the “best” crime fiction-oriented blogs and Web sites was needed. While there are abundant awards given out every year to novels, short stories, and non-fiction books springing from this genre, only during occasional Bouchercons is there a prize presented for quality in online content—and then, the judging falls to readers with generally narrow scopes of experience in this field, rather than to professional critics evaluating a broader range of sites.
My judgment in this matter is obviously biased. I’ve been writing The Rap Sheet now for more than a dozen years, and I know what I like and don’t like in this arena. I also understand how difficult it is to develop and maintain an active, thoughtful crime-fiction blog, so I look at other such projects through the lens of someone with high expectations as well as a hard-earned knowledge of what can be accomplished when blogging is an unpaid sideline, rather than a full-time occupation.
The Rap Sheet’s 2017 catalogue of the best crime-fiction blogs and Web sites featured 66 electronic publications. This year’s inventory runs to 95 sites. (New entries have been marked with asterisks.) The greater number isn’t because I’ve loosened my standards; it’s simply that I have decided more of these Web projects deserve recognition, and readers of this genre deserve as much help in finding information online as they can get. A few of the blogs I included among last year’s listings have since shut down or gone dormant, including Past Offences, Tipping My Fedora, and of course, Bill Crider’s Pop Culture Magazine, which became inactive shortly before Crider passed away in February 2018. However, I have added a wide variety of sites both large (such as CrimeReads) and small, covering new as well as classic books.
What I emphasized last year still applies: These are my personal choices. I wouldn’t be surprised if other writers and reviewers differ slightly in their opinions of the “best” crime-fiction blogs and Web sites. If I have failed to note any Web resources that you think are also deserving of mention, please feel free to tell everyone about them in the Comments section at the end of this post.
• The Killing Times reports that French actress Eva Green (Casino Royale, Penny Dreadful) has been signed to star in a British television adaptation of Eleanor Catton’s Man Booker Prize-winning novel, The Luminaries (2013). “The period tale of adventure and mystery is set on the Wild West Coast of New Zealand’s South Island in the boom years of the 1860s gold rush,” the blog explains. “It’s billed as an epic story of love, murder and revenge, as men and women traveled across the world to make their fortunes.” Variety notes that Green will be appearing in this six-part BBC Two production opposite Eve Hewson (The Knick) and Marton Csokas (Into the Badlands). The Luminaries is set to start filming in November of this year.
• Catherine Turnbull has posted a fine retrospective, in
Crime Fiction Lover, on the 2018 Bloody Scotland International Crime Writing Festival, which took place from September 21 to 23.
• If you caught my article in CrimeReads about original Philip Marlowe private-eye stories published since Raymond Chandler’s death in March 1959, you know that I was hesitant to read Lawrence Osborne’s recent Marlowe outing, Only to Sleep, but wound up with a generally favorable opinion of the work. So I was also interested to read the author’s new essay in The New York Times Book Review about how he came to write that novel and how his own experiences as a reporter in Mexico informed his fiction.
• “Burt Reynolds made his share of dogs, which he’d be the first to admit, but in 1981 he released Sharky’s Machine, a rock-solid cop noir about dirty money and easy virtue,” writes SleuthSayers’ David Edgerley Gates. He goes on to call Sharky’s Machine “Burt Reynolds' high-water mark” as a director. Hmm. I guess it’s about time I watched that film, which somehow passed me by.
• Author and former journalism professorRichard Hoyt wrote me recently to announce that he’s trying to crowd-fund the publication of a topical work of black humor called Pussy
Bomb: The Rude Truth About President Ronald Strangedick. He describes this outlandish but “hip” standalone yarn as “an expanded, rewritten and
updated version” of his 1984 Jim Quint novel, Cool Runnings, which “dealt with the awkward reality that a battlefield or ‘suitcase’ nuke weighing from 10 to 20 pounds—large enough to evaporate Manhattan—can be smuggled in the hold of a cargo ship, in a sailboat, or in the bed of a Ford pickup.” Hoyt also said Pussy Bomb “satirizes the thriller genre, the national security apparatus, and Donald Trump.” Reading the synopsis—available here—is likely to make your head spin, what with its converging plots about North Korea’s efforts to spread nuclear destruction, a humiliated jihadist seeking revenge, and a CIA agent who’s struggling to keep U.S. President Strangedick, “a paranoid narcissist, from going totally off the rails.” You can read the first 50 pages of Pussy Bombon Hoyt’s Facebook page. He’s set a deadline of Sunday, October 21, to sell 500 “pre-orders.”
• Happy 50th anniversary to the original Hawaii Five-O! The Spy Command reminds us that that “cop show with a spy twist” first aired on CBS-TV on September 20, 1968.
Not content with solving murders in Titan Comics and Hard Case Crime’s graphic novels, period detective Minky Woodcock is making the leap
to the stage with this week’s opening of a new play based on her first appearance, just as Titan announces details of her upcoming second case.
Created by author, artist and playwright Cynthia von Buhler, Minky—a private detective and rabbit lover in the 1920s—made her debut in the four-issue series The Girl Who Handcuffed Houdini in 2017; the critically acclaimed series, which also won praise from Neil Gaiman, was released in a hardcover collected edition last month.
Now, it’s become a live-action stage play written and directed by von Buhler, opening at Theater 80 in New York City on Wednesday and running through Nov. 10. Really, “stage play” doesn’t begin to describe the show, which takes place over three floors of the theater, with audience members choosing whether to be spiritualists, pragmatists or Houdini’s guests as the action unfolds, with their choice changing what they watch throughout the night.
The next Minky Woodcock comic-books series, Minky Woodcock: They Die Fast on Broadway, is set to go on sale in 2019.
• Reed Farrel Coleman, writing about the connections between alcohol and crime fiction: “When I’m asked about the drinking habits of Chandler, Hammett, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, or whomever, I say that it’s about emotional access. My theory—and it is just that, a theory—is that these men used alcohol in two ways: to either ease the process of accessing their emotions or to self-medicate after the experience. Is there any validity to it? Probably some, but maybe not. What makes sense isn’t always so. It sounds good at speaking engagements and the audiences like it.”
• I always enjoyed Vincent Price’s introductions to the PBS-TV series Mystery!, which he delivered from 1981 to 1989. So I was pleased to find this example online. In it, he not only prepares viewers for Part 3 of Praying Mantis, starring Jonathan Pryce and Cherie Lunghi, but also ponders the definition of what constitutes a “mystery.”
• I’ve never met Bill Cosby, but like so many other people, I am familiar with him from his many television appearances (mostly, for me, in I Spy and The Cosby Mysteries), his co-starring role in 1972’s Hickey & Boggs, and his comedy albums (especially 1973’s Fat Albert). So when I heard on Tuesday that the now 81-year-old performer had been sentenced to three to 10 years in prison for sexual assault, I had a hard time wrapping my mind around the news. Cosby has a long history of sexual assault charges, and I don’t disagree that the evidence required his sentencing; but it was jarring to reconcile his criminality with my appreciation of his acting and my memories of laughing at his comic routines. I wasn’t the only one with such mixed feelings, as I learned by reading this piece in the Los Angeles Times by deputy television editor Greg Braxton.
• Bruce K. Riordan, a federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, chooses his 12 favorite police procedurals from among the myriad such movies and TV shows produced over the last half century. And yes, he includes both Bullitt
(1968) and the initial season of True Detective.
• Finally, a few more author interviews deserving of your attention: Martin Edwards talks with Steven Powell of The Venetian Vase about his new historical crime novel, Gallows Court; for Jeff Rutherford’s Reading and Writing Podcast, Ace Atkins answers questions having to do with his latest Quinn Colson novel, The Sinners; Ivy Pochada (Wonder Valley) is the guest on the third episode of the Killing Times Podcast; The Christian Science Monitorchats with Ovidia Yu on the subject of her latest Singapore-set cozy, The Frangipani Tree Mystery; and Crime Watch’s Craig Sisterson quizzes Simone Buchholz, the German author of Mexikoring and Blue Night.
• Somehow it escaped my notice that California author Don Winslow was in the midst of penning a trilogy of books, one that began with 2005’s The Power of the Dog, continued into 2015’s The Cartel, and is now set to conclude with The Border, due for publication by William Morrow in February 2019. As Entertainment Weeklyreported earlier today, The Border “continu[es] the saga about international law enforcement, merciless drug traffickers, the press trying to cover the carnage, and the everyday people trapped in the crossfire. It’s the culmination of decades of research and writing, but The Border also brings us to the present day—exploring real-life corruption in Washington, D.C., the opioid epidemic sweeping the U.S., a new generation of brutal narcos, and how Wall Street and real estate moguls have helped launder untold amounts of blood money.” I guess I know one book I'll be reading in five months.
• Benet Brandreth, the rhetoric coach to the Royal Shakespeare Company and the author of The Spy of Venice (Pegasus), suggests in this piece for CrimeReads that renowned playwright William Shakespeare may not simply have been “a man of words but also of action, and dangerous action at that.” Elizabethan England was no place for the faint of heart, it seems.
• Meanwhile, in Criminal Element, writer Ryan Gattis (Safe) selects “The 5 Best L.A. Crime Novels,” choices that include Nina Revoyr’s Southland and Ross Macdonald’s The Underground Man.
• Classic Film & TV Café’s new list of “Seven Things to Know About Robert Goulet” mentions that in 1966, that singer-actor starred in the World War II-era espionage drama Blue Light, “play[ing] a double agent posing as an American journalist [David March] in Nazi Germany. French actress Christine Carère portrayed another spy, the only person who knows about Goulet’s true identity. The series lasted just seventeen episodes.” A few of those TV eps were scripted by the program’s creator, director-screenwriter Larry Cohen, who’d previously created the Chuck Connors Western Branded and would go on to give viewers Coronet Blue, The Invaders, and the NBC Wednesday Mystery Movie series Cool Million. Wikipedia notes that following Blue Light’s axing, “its first four episodes, which told a continuous story of David March’s efforts targeting a German super-weapon facility at Grossmuchen, Germany, were edited together to create a movie. Entitled I Deal in Danger, it was released theatrically in the United States in December 1966 and in other countries in 1967 and 1968.” I’m not old enough to have watched Blue Light when it first ran, and I remember little about it. But I was able to track down the show’s main title sequence, as well as its second episode, “Target: David March,” which—at least for the time being—can be enjoyed on YouTube.
• AbeBooks’ newly posted compilation of “10 Novels Set in Bookstores” features a couple of works plucked from the crime/mystery shelves: Mikkel Birkegaard’s The Library of Shadows and John Dunning’s Booked to Die. Whoever put that list together, though, neglected to also mention Matthew Sullivan’s Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore and Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s The Shadow of the Wind. If we extend our parameters beyond novels, to short stories, then we can also include editor Otto Penzler’s Bibliomysteries: Stories of Crime in the World of Books and Bookstores, as well as its equally chunky sequel, this year’s Bibliomysteries: Volume Two: Stories of Crime in the World of Books and Bookstores.
Good news just in for crime fiction lovers: reading makes you smarter. That’s the conclusion of Global English Editing [an editing and proofreading service based in Southern California], which has checked all the relevant facts to support the theory and put them together into a fascinating infographic …
The majority of readers seem to find crime fiction to be therapeutic. The genre provides not only excitement and an escape from the regular world, but a sense of comfort in knowing that although troubling things may be happening in the book, you are safe on the couch in your pyjamas.
• In a Rap Sheet post just last week, I noted that Esquire magazine was important in getting Henry Kane’s Peter Chambers private-eye series off the ground. I quoted a source as saying that Chambers “made his debut in February 1947 [with ‘A Matter of Motive’] and remained an Esquire exclusive through the end of the decade.” Since then, I have located a scan online of how “A Matter of Motive” appeared in that issue of the mag. (Sorry, but you must be an Esquire subscriber to leaf through the whole story.) I also discovered—and can’t believe I didn’t know this before—that “man-about-Manhattan” Chambers was the star of a short-lived, 1954 radio drama series. Cast as Kane’s “private richard” in Crime and Peter Chambers was Dane Clark, who would later star on television in Justice (1954-1956), Bold Venture (1959), and as Lieutenant Arthur Tragg in The New Perry Mason (1973-1974). If you’re interested, you can listen to 21 installments of Crime and Peter Chambers by clicking here.
• In Reference to Murder spreads the word that Apple’s soon-to-debut, G-rated TV-streaming service “has given an eight-episode straight-to-series order to Defending Jacob, headlined and executive produced by Chris Evans. Created and written by Mark Bomback (Planet of the Apes trilogy) and based on William Landay’s bestselling [2012] novel, the project tells the story of a father dealing with the accusation that his son is a 14-year-old murderer.”
• My radar also somehow failed to catchThe Dame Was Trouble, a collection of short crime stories by Canadian women authors, edited by Sarah L. Johnson, Halli Lilburne, and Cat McDonald, and released in July by Coffin Hop Press. Author-blogger C.S. O’Cinneide opines in She Kills Lit that each of the book’s contributions takes the “dame” archetype “out for a different spin. There are nasty dames, ingénue dames, ghost dames and double-agent dames. Gay dames, trans dames, and dames of colour. Dames who are detectives and cops, but also sex workers and hard-done-by diner owners. Dames out to even the score, to find love or money, or maybe just to find a little peace in a patriarchal world. Most of the time, some unsuspecting man dies who deserves it. No offense to the guys, but given the prolific trope of defenseless female victims, this is a refreshing change. One can only watch so many episodes of Law & Order: SVU without tiring of seductively arranged female bodies outlined in chalk.”
• This reminds me that it’s nearing time for me to think about building on my “12 Dames of Christmas” set of vintage paperback fronts in my other blog, Killer Covers.
• Did Nobel Prize-winning 20th-century author Isaac Bashevis Singer find literary inspiration in the obscure Yiddish pulp exploits of “Max Spitzkopf, the King of Detectives, the Viennese Sherlock Holmes,” a fictional sleuth created by Yoyne (Jonas) Kreppel? Apparently so. (Hat tip to Elizabeth Foxwell of The Bunburyist.)
• And here’s another batch of interviews worth checking out: Caroline and Charles Todd talk with Crimespree Magazine about their latest Bess Crawford mystery, A Forgotten Place; English author Mark Dawson discusses his new novel, Sleepers, with Crime Fiction Lover; and the MysteryPeople blog features a trio of conversations, with Sarah Gran (The Infinite Blacktop), Tom Siegel (The Astronaut’s Son), and Edwin Hill (Little Comfort).
It’s an understatement to say that Hank Stuever, TV critic for The Washington Post, isn’t impressed with the rebooted Magnum P.I. series set to debut tonight on CBS. As he writes,
Despite the calibrated charm of your star, Jay Hernandez (who casually assumes Tom Selleck’s defining role, knowing full well that a hint of a stubbly goatee is no match for the ’stache), your pilot episode is an uninspired slop of cornball action and opening misfires. You are strewn with too many characters (that original sense of camaraderie now gives off a smarmy whiff of the bromantic) and preoccupied with checking off a long to-do list. Things are made worse by Hernandez’s ceaseless voice-over narration, which fails to explain much.
You are not good at the thing you’re trying to be, New Magnum, and instead of resurrecting a feeling, you’ve run right over it with that bright red Ferrari. Instead of declaring a creative or timely purpose (like your network friend and fellow exhumee, “Murphy Brown”), you are merely a piece of content placed between commercials. Your existence is cold and cynical, Magnum, predicated on the previous success of reboots such as “Hawaii Five-O” and “MacGyver.”
Well, that’s too bad. I wasn’t a big watcher of Tom Selleck’s original Magnum, P.I. (1980-1988), but I was at least willing to give Hernandez’s new version of the show a shot, if only because I like on-screen car chases every now and then, and I was amused by the notion of proper Englishman Jonathan Higgins III (John Hillerman) being re-imagined as ass-kicking former MI6 agent Juliet Higgins (played by Perdita Weeks, oh so recognizably the younger sister of Foyle’s War co-star Honeysuckle Weeks). However, the Magnum trailer—posted here—definitely has that too-cute, action-above-all-else vibe I dislike so much in the current Hawaii Five-O incarnation.
It seems that at the same time as it lost the comma from its title, this new Magnum P.I. also lost its heart and any purpose for its existence other than to make CBS lots and lots of money. Will America’s broadcast TV networks ever stop trying to breathe new life into once-popular shows, and instead come up with a few new ideas? No wonder people are turning to streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime for more of their small-screen entertainment.
In addition to the news, reported here yesterday, of the winners in two other recent literary competitions, mention should be made of the fact that Chicago author Jake Hinkson’s 2015 novel, No Tomorrow (New Pulp Press), has been chosen to receive the 2018 Grand Prix de Littérature Policière. That French award, established in 1948 by novelist-critic Maurice-Bernard Endrebe, is given out annually to a pair of crime novels published in France during the previous year—one French and the other foreign. No Tomorrow has captured the foreign book honor, while Marion Brunet has claimed the French prize for her 2018 novel, L'été circulaire (The Circle of Summer).
The list of other contenders for both Grand Prix de Littérature Policière prizes this year can be found here. Among Hinkson’s foreign-author rivals for the commendation were Eva Dolan (from Britain), Jørn Lier Horst (Norway), and Fernando Aramburu (Spain).
After noting this latest international win in his blog, The Night Editor (he’d previously picked up the 2016 Prix Mystère de la Critique), Hinkson wrote: “It’s a remarkable honor, and one that I’m going to bask in for a while. If you need me, I’ll be chugging a cheap Bordeaux and singing ‘La Marseillaise.’”
Because I was away from my office all of yesterday, it’s only this morning that I am finally able to post the news that Liam McIlvanney, an academic in New Zealand and the son of legendary Scottish crime writer William McIlvanney (Laidlaw), has won the Scottish award named in honor of his late father. It was announced during Friday’s opening reception at the Bloody Scotland International Crime Writing Festival in Stirling, that the younger McIlvanney’s most recent novel, a serial-killer yarn titled The Quaker (HarperCollins), was chosen to receive the 2018 McIlvanney Prize for crime book of the year.
Also vying for this year’s McIlvanney Prize were Follow the Dead, by Lin Anderson (Macmillan); Places in the Darkness, by Chris Brookmyre (Little, Brown); and The Man Between, by Charles Cumming (HarperCollins). Congratulations to them, as well as McIlvanney.
Previous recipients of the McIlvanney Prize are Denise Mina (for The Long Drop in 2017), Chris Brookmyre (for Black Widow in 2016), Craig Russell (for The Ghosts of Altona in 2015), Peter May (for Entry Island in 2014), Malcolm Mackay (for How a Gunman Says Goodbye in 2013), and Charles Cumming (for A Foreign Country in 2012).
* * *
Meanwhile, Mystery Fanfare reports, “Abir Mukherjee has won the 2018 Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize (£15,000) with his second novel, A Necessary Evil (Vintage). The historical crime tale, set in India in 1920, sees Captain Wyndham and Sergeant Banerjee of the Calcutta Police Force investigate the assassination of a Maharajah's son.”
(Editor’s note: This is the 157th installment in The Rap Sheet’s continuing series about great but forgotten books. It comes from New York resident Gray Basnight. After a youthful dalliance with acting, he’s spent almost three decades in the broadcast news business as a writer, editor, producer, and reporter. He’s also the author of three novels: The Cop with the Pink Pistol (2012), a modern-day New York detective mystery; Shadows in the Fire (2015), a Civil War-era yarn about two young slaves living just on the edge of freedom as Richmond, Virginia, falls in April 1865; andFlight of the Fox, a run-for-your-life thriller released in July by Down & Out Books.)
Sometimes the most overlooked and criminally forgotten mystery novels hide in plain sight. That’s the case with They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? by Horace McCoy. Very few people today will recognize the author’s name. Yet his most popular title is widely known, primarily by baby boomers, because of the 1969 film starring Jane Fonda and Michael Sarrazin. Therein lies a problem typical to our era. We know the movie and we know the story, but we do not know the novel or the novelist.
This wonderfully hard-boiled and metaphoric narrative was originally published in 1935. It depicts two young Hollywood hopefuls, Robert Syverten and Gloria Beatty, struggling against double-downed odds. Not only do they hope to break into the film industry, but they’re trying to do it during the Great Depression. Broke in both means and spirit, these two opt to play the odds at another game: a weeks-long dance marathon wherein the winning couple—make that the surviving couple—is promised a thousand dollars. In today’s economy, that 1935 sum equals as much as one-hundred-thousand dollars in buying power.
From there, the set-up may be obvious even to those who have neither read McCoy’s novel nor seen the movie. The couple struggles mightily, only to ultimately lose everything, including, for Gloria, the will to continue living. The marathon, of course, is a dark allegory of life itself, where the game so frequently seems rigged and there are no true winners. Even those who establish the contest rules are caught in their own craven cycle of marathon defeat. To subtly emphasize its fatalistic pace, the story takes place on a pier with the constant roll of the Pacific Ocean in the background. It’s the same effect Matthew Arnold immortalized in his great poem “Dover Beach”:
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back …
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Maybe McCoy loved Arnold’s poem, because that’s his bare-bones narrative in a nutshell. As one of the greatest noir mysteries ever penned, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? also explores the “eternal note of sadness” that wounds all humanity. At fewer than 40,000 words in length, the story is so spartan that it’s a writer’s lesson in brevity. As such, it’s spiritually related to two other classics of the genre: The Postman Always Rings Twice, by James
M. Cain (published in 1934), and The Day of the Locust, by Nathanael West (1939). Both of those have been adapted for film as well, yet unlike Horses, they tend to retain greater prestige as standalone novels.
McCoy’s vivid writing nears perfection of the hard-boiled, Chandleresque style that he and other writers of their era followed and eventually helped to evolve:
HOURS ELAPSED …….. 752
Couples Remaining …….. 26
The derby races were killing them off. Fifty-odd couples had been eliminated in two weeks. Gloria and I had come close to the finish once or
twice, but by the skin of our teeth we managed to hang on. After we changed our technique we had no more trouble: we stopped trying to win, not caring where we finished so long as it wasn’t last.
We had got a sponsor too: Jonathan Beer, Non-Fattening.
Near the end, when Robert and Gloria have opted out of the “dance,” the reader can feel the story readying to earn its title:
We sat down on a bench that was wet with spray. Up towards the end of the pier several men were fishing over the railing. The night was black;
there was no moon, no stars. An irregular line of white foam marked the shore.
“This air is fine,” I said.
Gloria said nothing, staring into the distance. Far down the shore on a point there were lights.
“That’s Malibu,” I said. “Where all the movie stars live.”
Then there’s McCoy’s cutting-edge experimentation. As someone once said, there are no laws for writing a novel. Horace McCoy not only knew that, but he lived it in writing this manuscript. The plotting of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?turns formulaic tradition inside out before sending it to the future where the reader lives. The beginning is the ultimate ending. Though penultimate, the actual ending becomes the reader’s denouement.
Try to figure that out. Although convoluted, it’s simple and works beautifully. And if that’s not enough writerly iconoclasm for you, consider the chapter titles. Each heading tenders a retelling of the basic plot, while constituting a standalone subplot. And it does so in a font of increasing size half-a-century before Microsoft offered each consumer a home-based printing press via Microsoft Word:
THE PRISONER WILL STAND
… IT IS
THE JUDGEMENT
AND SENTENCE
OF THIS COURT…
… THAT FOR THE CRIME OF MURDER IN THE FIRST DEGREE …
… MAY GOD HAVE MERCY ON YOUR SOUL…
While we’re on the subject of formulaic rebellion, there’s that title:
They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?
I mean, it has punctuation! Two pieces of punctuation, to be exact. Name another title of any novel from any age by any author with both a
comma and a question mark. (Betcha can’t.)
Then, after all that, this terrifically inventive crime writer blows off tradition once more with his last line of dialogue. No spoiler alert is necessary as McCoy took care of that from the title page. Robert speaks his final words for the reader when a police officer asks him why he killed her:
“They shoot horses, don’t they?” I said.
The good news for readers looking to discover McCoy’s debut novel is that They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?remains in print, as do many of his other, even lesser-known works. One reason for that, aside from the success of the 1969 film, may be that readers in France discovered Horses in 1948, embracing its metaphoric value for transcending the genre of crime noir and exploring, as it does,
philosophy noir (aka existentialism). Novelist and feminist writer Simone de Beauvoir even crowned Horses America’s “first existential novel.” Coming from the life partner of Jean-Paul Sartre, that’s quite a recommendation. Too bad it’s never been used as a cover blurb for McCoy’s minor masterpiece. Perhaps the time has come to do so.
Today begins the inaugural Inkshares Mystery & Thriller Contest, sponsored by the Oakland, California-based “publishing and literary rights-management
platform” Inkshares. The goal, I’m told, is to find “at least three novelists for publishing and rights
representation.” People like Christopher Huang, the Singapore-born Montreal architect-author whose debut novel with Inkshares, A Gentleman’s Murder—released this last July—was reviewed favorably by Publishers Weekly and has already been acquired for TV series development.
As the company makes clear on its Web site, Inkshares is hunting for both mysteries and thrillers. “The mystery may take place in 1920s London, modern-day Missouri, or on a future Martian colony,” it explains. “What matters is that we need—desperately—to know what happened. The thriller could follow attorneys, spies, physicians, politicians, or absolute nobodies. It could take place entirely in a small town, or across metropolises on five continents and reaching the highest corridors of power.”
The rules for entering this competition, and the distinctive criteria by which books will be judged, are available here. Entries will be accepted between now and 11:59 p.m. PST on November 21, 2018.
• The Spy Command reports that the as-yet-untitled 25th James Bond movie has “found its replacement director and will be pushed back to early 2020 … The new director is Cary Joji Fukunaga, who replaces Danny Boyle who departed the project last month. Filming now is scheduled to start March 4, 2019, according to the announcement. The previous start date was Dec. 3.” FOLLOW-UP:Variety writer Brent Lang says it’s a “risky bet” to give “true auteur” Cary Joji Fukunaga directing responsibilities on the next Bond picture.
• Los Angeles writer Ryan Gattis (Safe) has an interesting new piece out this week in CrimeReads about what he calls the “gang procedural. A story that focuses almost exclusively on gang- or mafia-related criminals trying to solve a crime themselves—without the aid of the state.” This concept brings to mind Day of the Moon (1983), an underappreciated novel by Bill Pronzini and Jeffrey Wallmann (writing jointly as “William Jeffrey”) that uses as its private eye-like protagonist a guy in San Francisco named Flagg, who works as a troubleshooter for the mob, investigating thefts, hijacking, and other offenses against that widespread criminal organization.
• For The Paris Review, teacher-turned-private investigator Anne Diebel examines Dashiell Hammett’s unusual and unlikely path toward a fiction-writing career.
• Two different authors supply background to their latest novels: For Shotsmag Confidential, American storyteller Andrew Gross explains what led him to write The Last Brother (published in the States as Button Man). And in The Guardian, the UK’s Dominick Donald talks about incorporating the real-life serial killer John Christie and London’s Great Smog of 1952 into his debut thriller, Breathe.
• Sad but true: I just discovered that Edward Biddulph has decided to “call it a day with James Bond Memes,” the blog he’s been writing for eight years. However, he assures us that “James Bond Memes will stay on the air, and so all my articles will remain available to read.”
• Finally, In Reference to Murder brings news that “The city of Wallingford in the UK may be getting its own Agatha Christie statue. The Queen of Crime lived in town, and the Wallingford Museum sponsors an annual Agatha Christie festival in the author's honor. Now, the same artist who created a memorial to Agatha Christie in London (a memorial in the form of a large bronze book, featuring the crime writer’s face) is being asked to complete a similar tribute in Wallingford which will likely take the form of the author seated on a bench reading a
book.”
I hate it (as I’m sure you do) when I am reading happily through a novel, only to stumble across what should have been an easily avoidable historical error. That happened to me two times this morning with Anthony Horowitz’s Forever and a Day, his generally excellent second James Bond adventure (after 2015’s Trigger Mortis).
On page 214, Horowitz refers to the Marie Celeste. He obviously intended to write Mary Celeste, the name of an American merchant brigantine that was found mysteriously adrift and abandoned off the coast of Portugal in 1872; the Marie Celeste was a fictionalized version of that vessel, featured in Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1884 short story, “J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement.” Three pages later, Horowitz has a character say, “As a matter of fact, I actually knew President Woodrow Wilson when he brought in the Neutrality Acts back in the thirties …” Well, as a matter of fact, Wilson—though he did, in 1914, declare that the United States would remain neutral as World War I erupted in Europe—died in 1921. It was President Franklin D. Roosevelt who was in office when, in the 1930s, Congress passed the Neutrality Acts (prior to America’s entry into World War II).
Just so you know, I was reading the British version of Forever and a Day (released in May). Let’s see if the copy editors at Harper, Horowitz’s American publisher, will correct these mistakes before the book appears on U.S. shelves in November. I’m skeptical, as Harper’s advance readers’ edition of the novel simply repeats the errors.
• There’s something odd about an article setting out to highlight crime
novels “that don’t start with a dead girl.” Aren’t there thousands of such works? Well, apparently killing off young women at the beginning of books has become a trend recently, enough of one at least that Bustle’s Charlotte Ahlin wants to give readers some alternatives. “Look,” she makes clear right up front, “I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with a murder mystery that centers on a young, non-living lady. But every once in a while you might want to read a mystery novel that doesn’t star a grizzled male detective hunting down the killer of a super hot female corpse. Maybe, maybe even a thriller where the non-male lead makes it all the way to the end without getting killed or horrifically brutalized at all. I know it’s a lot to ask, but there are a few books out there that manage to be mysterious and gripping without killing a woman off in the first few pages.” Ahlin’s choices include novels by Brandi Reeds, Tara French, Sujata Massey, and Sheena Kamal. (Hat tip to Mystery Fanfare.)
• While writing recently about the death of actor Burt Reynolds, I happened across a YouTube clip from a 1976 NBC-TV pilot film titled A Matter of Wife … and Death. Remembering nothing about that project, I promptly reached for Lee Goldberg’s fat and essential reference book, Unsold Television Pilots: 1955-1989, and looked it up. Goldberg explains that the 90-minute flick was a follow-up to Reynolds’ 1973 big-screener Shamus, in which he played a pool hustler-turned-New York private investigator, Shamus McCoy. The pilot placed Rod Taylor in Reynolds’ shoes, and also starred Dick
Butkus, Joe Santos (who’d appeared alongside Reynolds in Shamus, but is better known for his role on The Rockford Files), and a 24-year-old
Lynda Carter. This plot briefing was found on the Web’s Complete Rod Taylor Site:
The show opens with the apparent murder of a [small-time P.I.] friend of Shamus’. Shamus has to deal with an assortment of underworld types as he uncovers a gambling scheme.
In the course of the story, his romancing of (a) Zelda (Lynda Carter—the future Wonder Woman) and (b) Carol (Anne Archer) is continually cut short when duty calls. Shamus also shows off his prowess at
playing pool and making scrambled eggs. He also changes his shirt a lot.
A big difference between the Burt Reynolds movie and the Rod Taylor TV show is the location. “We’ve moved the locale from New York to Los Angeles, and we have more high comedy than low,” Rod said in an April 1975 interview. But then, here’s a similarity between the actor and his character: “Shamus is a guy who is gentle with women and tough with guys.”
I have no memory of ever sitting down to watch that Taylor pilot, but it’s apparently available on the Walmart Web site for $17.99. Does anyone have an opinion on whether it’s worth buying? Maybe YouTube’s clip—embedded below—will summon up a recollection or two.
• Speaking of failed pilot films, North Carolina’s Winston-Salem Journalnotes, in a wrap-up of new DVD and Blue-ray sets, the release this month of Television’s Lost Classics, Volume 2: Rare Pilots (VCI Entertainment), a collection featuring four vintage, half-hour tryout flicks that never generated small-screen series. Among those is Cool and Lam, a 1958 production based on Erle Stanley Gardner’s novels starring mismatched Los Angeles gumshoes Bertha Cool and Donald Lam, which he published under the pseudonym A.A. Fair. Gardner himself explains, in the TV pilot’s short introductory message to would-be sponsors, that “the Cool and Lam books have been successful for many years” (beginning with 1939’s The Bigger They Come). Sadly, neither that fact nor the lighthearted performances of stars Billy Pearson and Benay Venuta was enough to convince CBS, the network for which this pilot was made—already the home of Gardner’s Perry Mason—that Cool and Lam deserved placement on its weekly broadcasting schedule. If you get a chance to watch Cool and Lam either on YouTube (where a version of marginal quality can be found) or on VCI Entertainment’s new discs (which promise a “high-definition restoration” of the film), it’s easy to imagine CBS execs grousing that the plot was simply too complex for its half-hour format.
• That Cool and Lam pilot, incidentally, appears to have been shot from a script based on Gardner’s much-superior 1940 novel Turn on the Heat, which was re-released by Hard Case Crime just last year.
• Oh, and before we deviate too far from the subject of Burt Reynolds, let me direct you to Vox’s picks of half a dozen performances that defined the late actor. And for your viewing pleasure, YouTube has available full episodes from Reynolds’ 1989-1990 private-eye series, B.L. Stryker. Episodes of his previous crime drama, 1966’s Hawk, can be found here—at least as of this writing.
• One more thing: Don’t miss reading Ace Atkins’ tribute to Reynolds, found on the Web site of the South-focused Garden & Gun.
• Considering how difficult these things are to maintain at an active level, I am always quite impressed when a blog survives for more than two or three years. So hats off to The Nick Carter & Carter Brown Blog, which last week celebrated its eighth anniversary.
• If it’s such a hard, unremunerative enterprise, why do mystery/crime-fiction bloggers go to all the effort? For Sisters in Crime’s bimonthly First Draft publication, Eona Calli asked that of four familiar figures in this field, including Classic Mysteries’ Les Blatt. (Although she never spoke with yours truly, Calli was kind enough to list The Rap Sheet among crime-fiction blogs worth checking out.)
• A good books-related question, posed by Terena Bell of The Guardian: “Why does the U.S. change so many titles?” Bell points out that those renamed books are “disproportionately” mysteries, and that altering their titles is usually a marketing decision. She adds, however, that “sometimes publishers themselves don’t know” why a book has been given a new name. Bell continues:
For example, Hitler’s Scapegoat by Stephen Koch will be released ... in the US next year as Hitler’s Pawn. I asked their publicity manager why, but she wasn’t sure and said the editor didn’t know either. Ask the Brits, she suggested.
Then there’s The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, a Stuart Turton novel renamed The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle in the States because, apparently, Americans die more frequently. When asked about the change, US publisher Sourcebooks initially joked: “Our editorial team decided to supersize it.” We’re lucky [Agatha] Christie’s Three Act [Tragedy] wasn’t upgraded to 3¼ or—horror of horrors—Tragedy 3.0. After all, this is the country that slapped the title Little Women II on Louisa May Alcott’s Good Wives.
• Coincidentally, Matthew Bradford’s post last week, in Double O Section, about how Sony and Eleventh Hour Films will be bringing Anthony Horowitz’s teenage super-spy, Alex Rider, to the small screen, provides yet another example of a dumb book-title change.
• I always enjoy a good “listicle” piece, and here are three that caught my attention recently: For CrimeReads, author Stephanie Gayle picks seven of her favorite race-against-time thrillers; that same Web site features Steve Goble, author of The Bloody Black Flag and the new The Devil’s Wind, writing about seven “pirate novels that might appeal to lovers of crime fiction”; and The Guardian hosts Sarah Ward’s choices of the “top 10 trains in novels,” including those in Ian Fleming’s From Russia, with Love and Graham Greene’s Stamboul Train. (If you’d like more suggestions of train-based mysteries, track down a copy of the Summer 2017 issue of Mystery Scene, which offers bookseller Ann Whetstone’s piece on that very subject.)
• I mentioned a couple of weeks back that, in December, U.S. publisher Brash Books will begin re-releasing Ralph Dennis’ fondly remembered Hardman series of private-eye novels. In advance of that, you can also read a “long-lost short story” by Dennis titled “Wind Spirit,” available from Amazon for just 99 cents. “It’s not vintage pulp,” says Brash co-creator Lee Goldberg, “but it might be of interest to fans of Ralph’s work for what it may reveal about his own life at the time (the late ’60s). The parallels are striking.”
• Shotsmag Confidential reports that Belfast’s NOIRELAND International Crime Festival, launched back in October 2017, will become a spring gathering next year, with events set to take place in the Northern Ireland capital from March 8 to 10, 2019. “The festival programme,” explains blogger Ayo Onatade, “will be announced and the ticket office will open on 16 November 2018.”
• I recently made the tough decision to give up Esquire, after subscribing to the magazine for more than half of my lifetime. (I just didn’t feel I fit the slick’s demographic profile any longer.) So I’m still susceptible to a bit of Esquire nostalgia. Which drew me to this short piece by Samuel Wilson of the True Pulp Fiction blog, recalling that mag’s role—primarily between 1947 and 1952—as a venue for “pulp-esque genre fiction.” One thing I hadn’t known before was how important Esquire was in promoting Henry Kane’s swingin’ Manhattan private eye, Peter Chambers. As Wilson recalls, Chambers “made his debut in February 1947 [with ‘A Matter of Motive’] and remained an Esquire exclusive through the end of the decade.”
• Leave it to Jimmy Buffett to find fun in imminent disaster. As The Washington Postreported last week, in advance of Hurricane Florence’s brutal touchdown in the southeastern United States, the singer-songwriter finally got to live out his 2009 song lyric about “goin’ surfing in a hurricane.”
• New York author and music critic Jim Fusilli announced on Facebook last week that publisher Open Road Media will soon be reissuing his three well-regarded Terry Orr private-eye novels—at least in e-book format. Kindle editions of Closing Time (originally published in 2001), A Well-Known Secret (from 2002), and Tribeca Blues (2003) are all scheduled go on sale on October 9.
• The trailer for The Ballard of Buster Scruggs looks fantastic! That anthology-format Western film (more details here), directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, will begin streaming on Netflix on November 13.
• “Reading fiction from around the world can be key to understanding larger geopolitical questions,” opines Tobias Carroll. “Reading procedurals, which innately focus on questions of the law, societal norms, and questions of history, is especially edifying.”
• Some of the all-time-worst covers have been made for Kindle e-books. (Hell, there’s a whole Tumblr blog devoted to such design disasters.) But the front of Tom Leins’ Slug Bait (Dirty Books)—shown on the left—is powerful and ugly enough to draw attention from a dead man. It also seems appropriate for a violent story that reviewer David Nemeth says “is like immersing yourself in a vat of feces, vomit, and blood.”
• I don’t know who’s behind the pseudonym “dfordoom,” but he or she deserves my Big Thumbs-Up of the Week, based on this Cult TV Lounge post extolling the virtues of the 1975-1976 NBC-TV series Ellery Queen, which starred Jim Hutton as mystery writer/sleuth Ellery and David Wayne as his father, Inspector Richard Queen. I, too, remain a fan of that show (developed by Columbo creators Richard Levinson and William Link), as I slowly but surely make my way through the many Ellery Queen novels.
The actor, who has been recurring on Netflix’s Marvel drama Daredevil, has booked a co-starring role on the premium cable network's forthcoming series Godfather of Harlem.
Picked up straight to series in April, Godfather of Harlem tells the true story of crime boss Bumpy Johnson (Forest Whitaker), who in the early 1960s returned after 10 years in prison to find the neighborhood he once ruled in shambles. With the streets controlled by the Italian mob, Bumpy takes on the Genovese crime family to regain control. During the brutal battle, he forms an alliance with radical preacher Malcolm X—catching his political rise in the crosshairs of social upheaval and a mob war that threatens to tear the city apart.
The project is described as a collision of the criminal underworld and the civil rights movement during one of the most tumultuous times in American history.
• From the blog Vintage Everyday: “The Story Behind the Iconic Farrah Fawcett Red Swimsuit Poster That Wound Up Plastered on Millions of Bedroom Walls.”
• “Stephen King knows crime,” explains Max Booth III. “He grew up mainlining pulp legends like Richard Stark and John D. MacDonald. He was a goddamn noir geek, if you want to know the truth. When MacDonald agreed to write the introduction for King’s debut collection, Night Shift, he nearly pissed himself.” Booth’s look at the broad
diversity of King’s crime and mystery fiction is here.
• Julia Roberts has sure come a long way since her role in 1990’s Pretty Woman. In the upcoming Amazon Prime psychological drama Homecoming—based on a podcast of the same name created by Eli Horowitz and Micah Bloomberg—she plays Heidi Bergman, described by the Killing Times blog as “a caseworker at the Homecoming Transitional Support Center, a Geist Group facility helping soldiers transition back to civilian life. … Four years later, Heidi has started a new life, living with her mother (Sissy Spacek) and working as a small-town waitress, when a Department of Defense auditor (Shea Whigham) comes to her with questions about why she left the facility. Heidi begins to realize there’s a whole other story behind the story she’s been telling herself.” Homecoming will debut on November 2.
• The presence in American culture of Richard Boone’s 1957-1963 CBS-TV Western series, Have Gun–Will Travel, extended well beyond the small screen. Paul Bishop presents the evidence.
• I have launched a fun new series in my Killer Covers blog, looking at how vintage artists might differ substantially in what they emphasized when painting fronts for the same book. We’re only two installments into this series so far, found here and here.
• Author Scott Von Doviak is a resident of Austin, Texas, but his new novel, Charlesgate Confidential (Hard Case Crime), is set in Boston, Massachusetts. That makes him eligible to comment on “How George V. Higgins Invented the Boston Crime Novel,” as he does for CrimeReads; and about five writers—younger than either Higgins or Robert B. Parker—who are “taking
Boston noir in exciting new directions,” his topic for the Strand Magazine blog.
• By the way, the story Von Doviak rolls out in Charlesgate Confidential was inspired by the mysterious and shocking theft, in March 1990, of 13 irreplaceable works of art from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. If you’d like to learn more about that “largest unsolved art heist in history,” note that The Boston Globe and public radio station WBUR-FM have just launched a podcast, “Last Seen,” which is re-examining and unearthing new details about the 28-year-old crime. You can listen to the episodes here.
• And for its next issue, Mystery Readers Journal is on the hunt for articles about “mysteries that take place in the Far East.” The deadline is October 10. For additional submission details, click
here.
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someone with high expectations as well as a hard-earned knowledge of what can be accomplished when blogging is an unpaid sideline, rather than a full-time occupation.
