It has been estimated that of the 6 million people who heard the original broadcast, more than 1.5 million believed it to be true and more than a million others were genuinely terrified, and contemporary accounts tell of police stations swamped with calls. Within a month there were more than 12,000 newspaper articles on the broadcast and its impact, and as far away as Germany, Adolf Hitler is said to have cited it as “evidence of the decadence and corrupt condition of democracy.” Many listeners sued the network for mental anguish, claims that were all denied save one for a pair of size-nine black shoes, by a man from Massachusetts who complained he’d had to spend what he’d saved for new shoes to escape the invading Martians. Welles insisted that that claim be reimbursed.
Welles and the Mercury Theatre were censured, but the broadcast secured Welles an instant, notorious fame. In 1988, Grover’s Mills, New Jersey, celebrated its hour of fame by installing a Martian Landing Site monument near Grover’s Mill Pond, not far from the remains of a water tower shot to pieces by its frightened residents 50 years before.
cop drama NYPD Blue is currently in the works:
Another classic series is coming back to television without rebooting its entire universe—in fact, it’s killing off a major character. NYPD Blue is getting a revival, but the premise revolves around the death of original series protagonist [Sergeant] Andy Sipowicz (played by Dennis Franz). The new show would be based on Theo Sipowicz, who followed in his father’s footsteps and pursued law enforcement. His goal is to earn his shield as a detective and investigate crime out of his dad’s old 15th precinct, including using his NYPD resources to investigate his dad’s murder.Sadly, original series co-creator Steven Bochco won’t be around to help with this revival. He died earlier this year at age 74.
I’ve just learned the sad news that author Tom Kakonis has passed away. I first met Tom at the 1994 Bouchercon in Seattle. I was a big fan of his work and was delighted when he invited me to sit and chat with him … and I was thrilled when he later blurbed my book My Gun Has Bullets. It meant a lot to me that a writer I admired as much as Tom would endorse my work.There doesn’t seem to be a great deal of biographical information on the Web about Thomas E. Kakonis (who also published as “Adam Barrow”), but this is his Amazon background blurb:
Two decades later, when author Joel Goldman and I launched Brash Books, I called Tom about publishing his out-of-print backlist. Not only did he say yes, but he surprised me by offering us an unpublished manuscript that had been sitting in his drawer for years. His dark-comic thriller Treasure Coast was the first original novel that we released, so as long as Brash Books is in business, he will be an integral part of who we are as publishers, what we stand for, and what we aspire to achieve.
Tom was a great writer who didn’t get the recognition or wide readership that he deserved. I wish I’d been able to change that. Do yourself a favor and read Michigan Roll, his first and most acclaimed novel. I guarantee you’ll be hooked by this man’s talent and humor. He was a hell of a storyteller.
Tom Kakonis was born in California, squarely at the onset of the Depression, the offspring of a nomadic Greek immigrant and a South Dakota farm girl of Anglo-Saxon descent gone west on the single great adventure of her life. He has worked variously as a railroad section laborer, lifeguard, pool hall and beach idler, army officer, technical writer, and professor at several colleges in the Midwest. He published six crime novels before retiring for over a decade, then resumed fiction writing with the novel Treasure Coast. Currently he makes his home in Grand Rapids, Michigan.An interview with Kakonis, published at the time Treasure Coast originally saw print, can be found here. And a “Behind the Story” piece on that novel is available here.
Anne Catherick is the “Woman in White.” She is sickly and as pale as her preferred wardrobe. Catherick is also very much afraid she will be forcibly returned to the Bedlam-like asylum she has just escaped from. Fortunately, dashing painter and art teacher Walter Hartright helps her elude her pursuers. Subsequently, he is struck by her resemblance to one of his new students, Laura Fairlie.The story is quite a bit more complicated than that, as I recall, even though it’s been decades since I last read Collins’ 1859 “sensation novel” on which this small-screen production is based. There’s plenty of legal intrigue and suspense—enough so, that even someone like me, who has watched previous televised versions (one from 1966, the other from 1997) will want to tune in for this new adaptation.
Of course, Hartright falls for the pretty Fairlie rather than her plainer but more resourceful and independent half-sister, Marian Halcombe. Unfortunately, Fairlie was promised in marriage by her father to the financially strapped Sir Percival Glyde, Baronet, who is determined to complete the wedding bargain so he can take control of the orphaned heiress’s fortune (a princely twenty-thousand pounds).
This is where the skullduggery really comes into play. It quickly becomes apparent Glyde does not have her best interests at heart. He also has good reason to permanently silence the fugitive Catherick, because she and her estranged mother are the only ones who know his scandalous secret. Not even Glyde’s sinister co-conspirator, Count Fosco, knows what the cash-poor Baronet is so desperate to keep hidden, but the Sicilian exile has his own shadowy history to worry about.
books by Umberto Eco, Stuart M. Kaminsky, Caleb Carr, Susanna Gregory, Charles Todd, Edward Marston, Rennie Airth, J. Sydney Jones, and Walter Mosley soon followed.
(1951) and Ken Follett’s Eye of the Needle (1978). But again, as you say, they didn’t carry the label.
his Raj-set series—and there are American writers equally skilled in the genre, as you know.
I bet I’m not the first to do so.
and spy fiction, the field of historical mysteries seems better balanced between male and female authors. How is this genre richer as a result of women contributing to it?
BF: Everything! Every country. Every era, from Chandler and Christie through to James Lee Burke and Sara Paretsky. Every genre, every language, film, TV—making sure I don’t repeat elements from my earlier books. It’s to be published (if I finish it—and I will) sometime in 2019.
As some of you may have heard, Midnight Ink will be shutting its doors after the Spring/Summer 2019 season. That means a few of us, notably [editors] Nicole [Nugent], Sandy [Sullivan], and myself, will be looking for new employment.Although Bischoff—who’d previously owned a mystery bookstore—joined Midnight Ink during the fall of 2009, the company had been launched four years earlier, in February 2005, as the first fiction imprint of Llewellyn Worldwide, a New Age publisher headquartered in a suburb of St. Paul, Minnesota. Over the course of the last 13 years, it has released both “medium-boiled” and “soft-boiled” mysteries, police procedurals, private-eye tales, historical cozies, works of suspense, and assorted other works. Among its myriad authors are Jess Lourey, Brendan DuBois, G.M. Malliet, Steve Hockensmith, Catriona McPherson, E.J. Copperman and Jeff Cohen, Sue Ann Jaffarian, Kellye Garrett, Keith Raffel, J.D. Allen, Gwen Florio, Leonard Goldberg, Patricia Smiley, and Bill Cameron. A catalogue of Midnight Ink’s forthcoming—and final—titles can be found here.
I want to take this opportunity to thank all my authors and agents for their hard work over the last nine years. I count so many of you as my friends and I sincerely hope this isn’t the end of my publishing career in crime fiction. You are my extended family and I appreciate all the connections and friendships over the last nine years.
I’m still in a little bit of shock. I didn’t know this was coming. I’m sure there will be much activity and a lot of questions in the near future. I will answer as best I can.
collections and is the poetry editor at Guernica Magazine. In her note to me, explaining how she came to be interested in Charlotte Armstrong’s 12th novel—the subject of her essay below—Wright explained, “I bought A Dram of Poison because the protagonist is a poetry professor, and I thought it might be fun to see if I recognized myself at all.”)
convincing Gibson of this possibility, while any observant reader can see that the crash was indeed an accident. Moreover, Rosie is in love with her husband, marriage of convenience be damned.She started her writing career after World War Two with short stories for women’s magazines. She wrote her first novel, Imperial Highness (Museum Press; U.S. title: Rebel Princess, Crowell), in 1953. After that she produced nearly a book a year, and in 1967 she switched from historical romances to spy thrillers, including The Tamarind Seed (Hutchinson, 1971), which was turned into the 1974 movie starring Julie Andrews and Omar Sharif. She created her series character, Davina Graham, a British spy during the Cold War, who appeared in four novels starting with The Defector (Hutchinson, 1980) and ending with The Company of Saints (Hutchinson, 1983 ...).Editor Kimura says Anthony “died peacefully on September 25 at her home in Essex, England.”
he now covers TV-related subjects for The Onion’s entertainment Web site, A.V. Club. He has penned three previous non-fiction books (including 2012’s If You Like The Terminator ..., but Charlesgate Confidential—about which he provides some background below—is his first published novel.)
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