Don’t Go Away, There’s More!

A few additions to yesterday’s wrap-up of crime-fiction news.

• January Magazine editor Linda L. Richards interviews Sam Wiebe, the author of Cut You Down, which stars Vancouver, Canada-based Dave Wakeland, an ex-cop turned private eye.

• Meanwhile, CrimeReads talks with George Pelecanos about his new Washington, D.C.-based novel, The Man Who Came Uptown. Contributor Lily Meyer explains:

I’m not a neutral reader of George Pelecanos. How could I be, when his newest novel, The Man Who Came Uptown, is set ten blocks from my apartment? Its characters eat at my favorite Sichuan restaurant and drink at the bar where my boyfriend plays darts. The hero, Michael Hudson, orders Elmore Leonard novels from Upshur Street Books, where I used to work. I’m delighted by seeing my city on paper, of course. But I’m implicated, too. The Man Who Came Uptown wrestles with gentrification on every page, and as both a reader and a Washingtonian, so do I.

Notice that I didn’t say The Man Who Came Uptown was a novel about gentrification. I could have. I could also say it’s about the corrupting pursuit of money, or about how difficult it is to live according to your ideals—a struggle shared by Michael Hudson and his foil, a private investigator named Phil Ornazian. But at its core, The Man Who Came Uptown is a novel about reading. It’s an absolute love letter to books. Michael Hudson becomes an avid reader in the D.C. Jail, thanks to a prison librarian named Anna, and much of the novel is devoted to the characters and authors they love.

• The Hollywood Reporter brings word that Universal TV and Adam Levine, a singer and judge/coach on The Voice, have together “optioned the rights to the Thorn series of novels by James W. Hall, which will be developed for television. There are 14 books in the series, which began with Under Cover of Daylight in 1987. The series follows Thorn, a fishing guide in the Florida Keys with a dark past.” Writers and actors for the project have yet to be announced.

• I forgot to mention that Craig Sisterson has posted the second edition of his Māwake Crime Review on the Crimespree Magazine site. Its purpose is to introduce readers to “great crime writers and crime novels from beyond the borders of North America and Europe.” This sophomore column includes an interview with Michael Sears and Stanley Trollip, who—under the joint nom de plume Michael Stanley—write the Botswana-based Detective Kubu series.

• And Evan Lewis tracks down the 10th issue of a Green Hornet comic book, from 1942. It features a Mickey Spillane-scripted feature about “gun-slinging private detective” Mike Lancer, who Lewis says was the “first incarnation” of Mike Hammer. That was four years before Spillane tried to launch another Hammer precursor, Mike Danger.