• Although it might be easy to overlook, today is Independent Bookstore Day. In previous years, this occasion has brought out tens of thousands of readers, all willing to race between independent book retailers in record time. (You can read my recaps of some such mad dashes here, here, and here.) But, due to the continuing—and continually devastating—COVID-19 pandemic (180,000 people dead in the United States, and Trump still won’t develop a national plan for dealing with this crisis!), the 2020 celebration was first postponed from April 25 to today, August 29, and has since turned into a primarily virtual celebration. However, as B.V. Lawson of In Reference to Murder reminds us, there are limited in-store events around the United States. And even if it’s unsafe to visit two dozen or so shops today, you can still patronize one or two, picking up fresh reading material and supporting these immensely valuable businesses, many of which have seen significant drops in sales this year. Or go online to order. Click
here to find a list of participating retailers; search for your local stores by zip code.
• While we’re on the subject of indies, Portland, Oregon’s wonderful Powell’s Books (which has also been hit hard by the pandemic) has announced that it will no longer sell its wares via Amazon. “For too long,” says owner Emily Powell, “we have watched the detrimental impact of Amazon’s business on our communities and the independent bookselling world. We understand that in many communities, Amazon—and big box retail chains—have become the only option. And yet when it comes to our local community and the community of independent bookstores around the U.S., we must take a stand. The vitality of our neighbors and neighborhoods depends on the ability of local businesses to thrive. We will not participate in undermining that vitality.” Of course, you can still purchase new and used works from the Powell’s Web site.
• In Reference to Murder alerts us as well to the coming “virtual Bloody Scotland writing festival on September 18, available with free registration. Features include a panel on Pitching Your Story; Jeffery Deaver—My Life in Crime; The Fun Lovin’ Crime Writers—Behind the Scenes; and The McIlvanney Prize and Debut Prize announcement. Organizers also recently announced that the entire Bloody Scotland crime fest (running September 17-30) will be available for free online, including events with special guests Lee Child and Ian Rankin.”
• George Roy Hill’s 1973 con-man film, The Sting, placed 12th in Otto Penzler’s recent assessment of “The Greatest Crime Films of All Time.” But CrimeReads staff writer Olivia Rutigliano gives that Oscar-winning Paul Newman/Robert Redford vehicle star treatment in this new piece, which applauds its storyline as “a perfect crystal of a premise—clean and neat despite the multitude of facets that it will turn over as it rolls along.” She adds:
In my opinion, The Sting’s particular kind of endless narrative-unfurling has never been topped by another movie—but The Sting is also fascinating for how many layers of performance it dons, as it progresses. The movie is often discussed in terms of its flawless headlining, a pairing between Newman and Redford that is even more fun and fulfilling than its counterpart in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (which, despite the joys of its big-time good-guy-burglaries, scenic chase scenes, and bicycle riding interludes, is bound to a historical accuracy that can’t provide the triumphant ending we crave for our heroes). Indeed, for us, the audience, much of the massive appeal of The Sting is specifically dependent on the performative
togetherness of Newman and Redford—the presentation that they’re two halves of a friendly, repeatable routine. They are one of Hollywood’s greatest duos, greatest double-acts.
All of which reminds me that during last year’s Independent Bookstore Day, I found the paperback movie tie-in treatment of The Sting, written by Robert Weverka. It’s still sitting in a pile on my desk. Might it at last be time to crack that baby open?
• I read Elmore Leonard’sUnknown Man #89 (1977) back in college, which was more than a few coon’s ages ago. So it’s good to have my memory of the tale refreshed by this
review in Mystery Tribune. Author Nev March says the book “gets more than passing grades—it reveals the quandary of a ‘regular guy,’ a sometime
scamp, coming to terms with what he can and cannot stomach in the world around him. It lays bare the arguments that an alcoholic wields to persuade himself,
with honesty that can only come from the pain of experience. Although lesser known than Leonard’s bestsellers Raylan, Tishomingo Blues, Be Cool, Get
Shorty, and Rum Punch, the novel Unknown Man #89 is a tale of action, deduction, and soul-searching choices.”
• Finally, I have some sad news to impart: Sixty-five-year-old author Paul Green—who has penned biographies of Roy Huggins, Pete Duel, and Jeffrey Hunter, and has also produced books about “weird
detectives” and television’s The Virginian—confided recently on Facebook that he has entered hospice care. He tells me, “I suffer from stage 4 prostate cancer that has spread to my bones. I have been under treatment for three years.” According to a biographical note on Amazon, Green “began his professional career as an artist for World Distributors, DC and Marvel UK, Egmont and Whitman on such titles as Doctor Who, Star Trek, Alias Smith and Jones, Masters of the Universe, Scooby-Doo, Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and Spider-Man.” Born in Lincoln, England, he currently resides in Rustburg, Virginia. A kind, hopeful thought or two for Paul would not go amiss.
If you were hoping to attend next year’s Left Coast Crime convention, this is going to put a kink in your plans. From Mystery Fanfare:
Due to the uncertainty of holding large gatherings in the spring of 2021, the Left Coast Crime 2021 convention in Albuquerque, New Mexico, has been rescheduled for April 7–10, 2022—same place, same week in April, just a year later.
The Left Coast Crime national committee is making this decision now because we cannot count on having favorable government policies and the hotel’s ability to provide necessary services by next spring, as well as the willingness of our Left Coast Crime community to travel with confidence. We’ve been in continual conversations with hotel personnel and sought assurances from the State of New Mexico, but no one can say when conventions can resume, even in 2021.
Registration for Left Coast Crime 2022 is currently open.
Although next year’s gathering won’t happen, LCC organizers say the 2021 Lefty Awards will still go ahead, with the results to be announced online. “Registrants for the Left Coast Crime Conventions in San Diego and Albuquerque will be able to nominate three titles in each category,” according to Mystery Fanfare. “Nomination forms will be e-mailed to all eligible LCC registrants by January 1, 2021. The Lefty Award categories are: Best Mystery Novel, Best Debut Mystery Novel, Best Humorous Mystery Novel, Best Historical Mystery Novel (the Bruce Alexander Memorial).” More info on these prizes is available here.
The Australian Crime Writers Association (ACWA) has announced its shortlists of nominees for the 2020 Ned Kelly Awards, aka the “Neddies,” which take their name from that country’s most notorious bushranger. A news release says, “This year, for the first time, the Ned Kelly Awards also include a category for Best International Crime Fiction published in Australia, adding to the regular categories of Best Crime Fiction, Best Debut Crime Fiction and Best True Crime.”
Best Crime Fiction: •Death of a Typographer, by Nick Gadd (Australian Scholarly Publishing) •The Strangers We Know, by Pip Drysdale (Simon & Schuster) •The Scholar, by Dervla McTiernan (Harlequin) •The Wife and the Widow, by Christian White (Affirm Press) •Rivers of Salt, by Dave Warner (Fremantle Press) •True West, by David Whish-Wilson (Fremantle Press)
Best Debut Crime Fiction:
•Present Tense, by Natalie Conyer (Clan Destine Press) •Eight Lives, by Susan Hurley (Affirm Press) •Where the Truth Lies, by Karina Kilmore (Simon & Schuster) •The Nancys, by R.W.R. McDonald (Allen & Unwin) •Six Minutes, by Petronella McGovern (Allen & Unwin) •Lapse, by Sarah Thornton (Text)
Best True Crime:
•Bowraville, by Dan Box (Penguin Random House) •Dead Man Walking: The Murky World of Michael McGurk and Ron Medich, by Kate McClymont (Penguin Random House) •Shark Arm, by Phillip Rooper and Kevin Meagher (Allen & Unwin) •Snakes and Ladders, by Angela Williams (Affirm Press)
Best International Crime Fiction:
•Cruel Acts, by Jane Casey (HarperCollins) •The Night Fire, by Michael Connelly (Allen & Unwin) •The Chain, by Adrian McKinty (Hachette) •The Last Widow, by Karin Slaughter (HarperCollins)
The ACWA news release about these prizes does not specify when this year’s winners will be declared, but we’ll keep you posted.
• Twenty months after he began posting his choices of the 106 “Greatest Crime Films of All Time,” in CrimeReads, New York City bookseller and editor Otto Penzler yesterday finally announced his No. 1 pick: The Third Man (1949), based on Graham Greene’s novella of that same name and starring Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, (Alida) Valli, and Trevor Howard. Of the picture, Penzler writes:
Graham Greene based the villainous Harry Lime on Kim Philby, the infamous British double agent. Greene had been a member of the British Secret Intelligence Service until 1944, when he abruptly resigned. It has been suggested that the reason for his resignation was that he suspected Philby of being a traitor and did not want to actively assist him. Greene, himself a communist sympathizer, did not report Philby, who continued his activities for some time after Greene’s resignation.
A trailer for The Third Man can be enjoyed here. Penzler’s full list of film favorites is available here.
• Can you tell a whole story in just half a dozen words? That’s the challenge being posed by the Rocky Mountain Chapter of Mystery Writers of America (RMMWA), which will open its fourth annual Six-Word Mystery Contest on Tuesday, September 15. A news release explains that “Six-word ‘whodunits’ can be entered in one or all five of the following categories: Hard-boiled or Noir; Cozy Mystery; Thriller Mystery; Police Procedural Mystery; and/or a mystery with Romance or Lust. The Six-Word Mystery Contest is open to all adults 18 and over. No residency requirements. … The contest entry fee is $6 for one entry (just $1 per word); or $10 to enter six-word mysteries in all five categories. The grand prize winner will receive $100 in cold, hard cash. Winners in all other categories will receive $25 gift certificates, and all winners and finalists will be featured in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, on our RMMWA website, and in our popular newsletter, Deadlines.” Last year’s the overall winner is Jeffrey Lockwood, an author and professor of natural sciences and humanities at the University of Wyoming, whose punchy submission read simply: 36D, 44 magnum, 20 to life.
• The crime-fiction social networking site Crimespace has shut down. Sydney, Australia, writer Daniel Hatadi, who founded that online community for crime-fiction enthusiasts back in 2007, recently sent out the following message:
As you may be aware, Ning.com, the company who provides the servers and service for Crimespace to run on, charges an annual fee. The fee is
$USD 239.90 and based on the donations and my current financial situation I cannot afford to run Crimespace any longer.
I’ve been checking activity on Crimespace and it is extremely minimal these days, most likely due to the more popular social networks.
As such, I’ve decided to close Crimespace.
This was supposed to happen soon but it appears that it already has been deactivated from July 20th 2020. Please accept my apologies for this short notice.
For blogs, there is a function to duplicate posts to other blog services so if you have used this so far there will most likely not be much work for you to transition.
Thanks to everyone who has donated along the way, it’s much appreciated.
• San Francisco-area author Mark Coggins launched a podcast in the midst of the COVID-19 lockdown. Called Riordan’s Desk, after his series private eye, August Riordan, it began with him reading—chapter by chapter—his latest Riordan novel, The Dead Beat Scroll (2019). Last week, he concluded that 30-part presentation by sitting for an interview with Randal S. Brandt, curator of the California Detective Fiction Collection at the University of California, Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, who asked him questions about the podcast project and about his full Riordan series. Listen to their exchange here.
• Speaking of podcasts, Sunshine State journalist Craig Pittman is now co-hosting one called Welcome to Florida. He writes that “our latest episode features a discussion with Colette Bancroft of the new short-story collection Tampa Bay Noir, which features tales of shady people in sunny places from Michael Connelly, Lisa Unger, Ace Atkins, Lori Roy, and a host of others.” That episode can he heard here.
Just about a month ago, we brought you the list of finalists for the 2020 Silver Falchion Awards. Tonight we can tell you the winners in two categories of special interest to Rap Sheet readers.
Best Mystery Novel: Lovely Digits, by Jeanine Englert (Soul Mate)
Also nominated: A Dream of Death, by Connie Berry (Crooked Lane); The White Heron, by Carl and Jane Bock (Whiz Bang); The Mammoth Murders, by Iris Chacon (Independently published); Blood Moon Rising, by Richard Conrath (Gulf Shore Press); Fake, by John DeDakis (Strategic Media); The Marsh Mallows, by Henry Hack (Dog Ear); Murder at the Candlelight Vigil, by Karen McCarthy (McCarthy Mystery); Murder
Creek, by Jane Suen (Jane Suen); and The Deadliest Thief, by June Trop (Black Opal)
Best Thriller: Hyperion’s Fracture, by Thomas Kelso (Jolly Robin Press)
Also nominated: Red Specter, by Brian Andrews and Jeffrey Wilson (Thomas & Mercer); All Hollow, by Simeon Courtie (Simantics); Deadly Obsession, by Shirley B. Garrett (Independently published); The Gryphon Heist, by James R. Hannibal (Revell); Low Country Blood, by Sue Hinkin (Literary Wanderlust); Rise, by Leslie McCauley (Independently published); The Secret Child, by Caroline Mitchell (Thomas & Mercer); The Silent Victim, by Dana Perry (Bookouture); and Downhill Fast, by Dana J. Summers (Independently published)
Crime and mystery novels also took home the trophies in three additional Silver Falchion divisions:
Readers’ Choice 2020: A Sip Before Dying, by Gemma Halliday (Independently published)
Best “Attending: Author 2020: Below the Fold, by R.G. Belsky (Oceanview)
Book of the Year 2020 Queen’s Gambit, by Bradley Harper (Seventh Street). Harper’s novel scored the prize for Best Suspense, as well.
The announcement of 2020 Silver Falchion recipients was supposed to have been made during this year’s Killer Nashville conference in Tennessee. But since that event was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the register of winners was broadcast online.
(Editor’s note: This is the 165th installment in The Rap Sheet’s continuing series about great but forgotten books.)
By Steven Nester
It wouldn’t be a stretch to mistake private eye Payton Sherwood for a doormat in some Raymond Chandler novel, at least as we observe him at the beginning of
Russell Atwood’s neo-noir, East of A (1999). Having returned to New York City after losing a child-custody suit upstate, Sherwood is nearly destitute,
totally debt-ridden, and pining for a lost love. When he attempts to rescue a damsel in distress in his East Village neighborhood, her attackers give him a thorough beating. To add insult to injury, the elfin victim steals his Rolex before escaping into the night.
Lucky for readers that Sherwood’s sense of humor wasn’t taken as well. With few prospects and feeling like “a million bucks. In small, crumpled bills,” he decides to hire himself to recover that wristwatch—and perhaps also his dignity. One would think he’d had enough (even getting tossed in front of a speeding subway train later on can’t dissuade him), but like a dedicated P.I. with time on his hands and an insistent curiosity, Sherwood wants to find out
what it is the young street girl has taken that three burly thugs so violently wish to retrieve. Sherwood returns to the crime scene the next day, and the payback begins immediately.
A telephone pager found in the gutter reveals a trove of information. The resourceful Sherwood discovers it belongs to Gloria “Glo” Manlow, a homeless, 16-year-old runaway, whom Sherwood learns is alleged to have stolen a small fortune in designer dope from a nightclub promoter. In the meantime, the chase is on as Sherwood works his way through names and telephone numbers, hoping to find her.
As the gumshoe begins his investigation, he lures two colorfully dressed club kids named Seth and Droopy into the daylight with the promise of a duffel belonging to Glo. Sherwood pumps the self-absorbed duo for information, and through them begins to make contact with promoters, activists, artists, hipsters, the homeless and others on the skids—all the extreme individuals who give Manhattan’s East Village, and this book, its color and edgy bonhomie.
Sherwood finally catches up to the elusive Glo. She turns out to be a world-weary Holly Golightly with spiky hair, tons of attitude and a selfish nonchalance, whose “nothings turn out to be other people’s somethings”—as is made clear by the escalating body count among people she knows, the fresh corpses
including those of her abusive ex-boyfriend and a disgruntled former employee of a downtown rave club called the Hellhole. “Big as the city is,” Seth
presciently opines at one point, “its strands converge like a spider’s web,” and the Hellhole is the place where the spider lives in this tale.
The goons who assaulted Glo are bouncers at the club, and Seth and Droopy are part of that establishment’s louche scenery and drugs-fueled vibrancy. The place is owned by a promoter named Ellis Dee, and it’s apparently his dope that was taken. The only problem is that Glo firmly denies committing the theft, and no one but Sherwood is willing to buy her story. Sherwood soon learns that when the going gets tough, even the tough get their butts kicked, as when he and Glo watch both one of her friends and one of her attackers being pushed from a window several stories too high for their health.
It’s not necessary for Sherwood to subject himself to the threat of such violence. After he gets his watch back (albeit broken), he has no further stake in this case. In addition, his self-indulgent curiosity is careening him towards poverty. Repeated entreaties from his former boss to provide security at an upcoming wedding fall on deaf ears, revealing that Sherwood’s idea of distracting busy-work is quite busy indeed. He has no interest, either, in easily available but tedious divorce-related investigations. Instead, Sherwood continues to pursue Glo’s case, gladly willing to “walk barefoot in murder”—which he encounters up to the very last page of this book.
It’s mostly the bad guys who perish in East of A. But it takes the death of an innocent—a squatter and recovering junky named Jimmy, who makes his home in a vacant lot where he tends a vegetable garden—to finally provide the pieces essential to solving this yarn’s puzzles. East of A (which led to a 2009 sequel, Atwood’s Losers Live Longer), is a noir with a cheerful yet world-weary tone and an arty renegade zeitgeist (it takes place in New York’s East Village, after all). Don’t let those elements fool you, though: Into Jimmy’s garden paradise may slither serpents, freighting the plot circumstances with universal meaning, which a skillful writer (Atwood was once a managing editor of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine) can hide in plain sight.
However, neither of those previous renderings of Christie’s knotty yarn—which finds brilliant Belgian sleuth Poirot investigating the slaying of a young heiress aboard a cruise ship as it sails through Egypt upon the Nile River—was as “steamy” as Branaugh’s film promises to be. As Literary Hub observes of the “top drawer teaser” for this picture: it is positively studded with sexy, smoldering, and possibly sinister stars in period garb.” Judge for yourself here.
This is the second time Branaugh will portray a prodigiously mustachioed Poirot. Three years ago he directed and starred in 20th Century Fox’s Murder on the Orient Express.
Congratulations to Nancie Clare, the Southern California-based host of that splendid podcast Speaking of Mysteries, who this week posted her 200th and 201st interviews. Clare’s latest subjects: Denise Mina, author of the brand-new thriller, The Less Dead; and Robert Pobi, who talks about his second Dr. Lucas Page yarn, Under Pressure.
Clare and her partner in this podcast project, Leslie S. Klinger, launched their first episode back in April 2014. It’s been quite a run!
Part of a series honoring the late author and blogger Bill Crider.
The Rat Began to Gnaw the Rope, by C.W. Grafton (Dell, 1947). Published originally in 1943—but recently reissued by Poisoned Pen Press—this was the first of four novels penned by Grafton, the father of better-known mystery writer Sue Grafton. It’s a spirited little whodunit tinged with humor, starring Gilmore “Gil” Henry, a “pudgy,” self-deprecating young attorney of short stature and scant attractiveness to women, who practices in fictional Calhoun County, Kentucky, south of Louisville. A second Henry yarn, The Rope Began to Hang the Butcher, was released in 1944. Dell’s 1947 soft-cover edition of Rat was part of its famous “mapback” series, with cover art by Gerald Gregg and a rear-side scene-of-the-crime illustration by Ruth Belew.
As a fellow fan of TV crime series, I greeted each new Shonk story as an opportunity to learn more about the genre, and invariably to discover fresh details about even shows that I thought I knew well.
Unfortunately, those days are gone. Steve Lewis, Shonk’s editor at Mystery*File, announced this week that the columnist has died:
I have some bad news to report. Those of you who have been readers of this blog for a long time will recognize Michael’s name for sure. He
started out by leaving comments on posts he found interesting and ended up being one of this blog’s most frequent reviewers.
I have been informed by a close friend of his that he passed away on July 17, 2020. He suffered from a variety of serious ailments, including bad vision, extreme diabetes, and heart disease. He was 65 years old.
As I said before, I never had the chance to meet or talk in person with Michael Shonk. Over the years, though, as I wrote about classic TV crime, mystery, and espionage dramas for The Rap Sheet, he’d occasionally drop me an e-mail note or add a comment to a post here and there. I always found him to be kind and generous in his communications. After I remarked, in a 2012 post, that I had never seen a full episode of Darren McGavin’s 1968-1969 NBC-TV series, The Outsider, he sent me a DVD containing multiple episodes, which I greatly enjoyed watching.
I occasionally thought about interviewing Shonk, but never got around to it. Which is sad, because we shared an appreciation for the NBC Mystery Movie as well as for 1970s P.I. series, and my asking him questions about those subjects and so many others would surely have provided us all with entertainment and enlightenment. As he demonstrated in this Mystery*File post about a Season 1 installment of Mike Conners’ Mannix, Shonk enjoyed discussing with other TV
enthusiasts the highs and lows of that medium.
Although he’s now passed away—and at a relatively early age, too—Shonk’s work for Mystery*File remains available (though a few YouTube videos he offered have disappeared). Should you have some leisure time coming in the near future, you could spend it in less valuable ways than to revisit his decade’s worth of posts.
By Jim Napier
Canadian private investigator Sam Jones has had a difficult life, and recently it’s only gotten worse. A 42-year-old veteran of the war in Iraq, Sam had lost an arm in that conflict. Returned from the fighting and now a civilian again, he is in a Toronto coffee bar trying to come to terms with what he just saw, and what he just did. Noticing spots of blood on his sleeve, he goes to the washroom to get rid of them. The blood isn’t his, but he knows police will soon be searching for him, and wanting an explanation for the two dead people—one a mere boy—who are lying in the basement of a house Sam vacated not long ago.
As we learn in Mike Knowles’ latest novel, Running from the Dead (ECW Press), Sam is bothered as well by thoughts of what he will tell the dead boy’s mother. Six years earlier he’d set out to find that youngster, hoping to bring him back to her alive. Today, though, he realizes he’s failed. That, more than anything else, concerns him greatly.
While he is scrubbing the blood from his shirt, Sam notices a bit of graffiti containing a cryptic message near a hinge on the bathroom door: I know you are, but what am I? A belligerent challenge, or a cry for help? Sheena, a 20-something tattooed barista with an attitude, is tending the coffee bar counter. She is unable to help Sam identify the author of those words, so the task falls to him. Remorseful over the fact that he failed to find the boy alive and restore him to his mother, Sam is driven to try at least to identify the obviously troubled graffiti writer and maybe lend that person some help.
Thus begins the odyssey of a good man caught up in an evil world. Before it ends, Sam will enlist the improbable aid of an aging ex-bank robber as he navigates the dark streets of Toronto, where vulnerable young women are easy prey for men who cannot see beyond their own twisted lives; and he’ll do his best to remain on the run from cops wanting to question him about those bodies in the basement.
As if all that weren’t enough weight upon his already burdened shoulders, while Sam grapples with a distressed young woman who might not want
to be found—and might not want to be helped—he’s also anxious about his looming meeting with the dead boy’s mother. And he’s having to care for his own 80-year-old father, who is in a residential care home, unable to speak following a stroke.
Running from the Dead is the layered and nuanced eighth novel by Hamilton, Ontario, writer Knowles. It is a highly charged tale, marked by crackling dialogue and leavened only by brooding narration and a deft use of metaphor, as in this passage, which finds Sam comparing his race to evade the police with the behavior of sharks:
Sharks needed to remain in a constant state of motion in order to breathe. It didn’t matter how much water was around—if the shark stopped swimming it would suffocate in the middle of the ocean … [F]or the same reason he was driving across the city on a Monday—it kept him from stopping. If he stopped, if he lost momentum, it would mean confronting the inevitable, and ... Jones had a week before the inevitable became unavoidable. Seven days—his
own Shark Week—unless he stopped moving.
There are also moments of dark humor scattered about this yarn, as when Sam is asked how he happened to lose his arm and he replies, “I didn’t lose it. I know exactly where it is.”
Readers in search of an uncompromising chronicle of our troubled times, exquisitely told, will find much to admire in Knowles’ new book, and will, I suspect, be drawn afterward to his earlier writing.
Highly recommended.
* * *
Since 2005 Jim Napier’s book reviews and author interviews have appeared in several Canadian newspapers and on various crime-fiction and literary Web sites, including his own award-winning review site, Deadly Diversions. His debut crime novel, Legacy, was published in the spring of 2017, and its sequel, Ridley’s War, is scheduled for release in the late summer of 2020. He can be reached at jnapier@deadlydiversions.com
As I noted in early June, one of the casualties of the Minneapolis protests that followed George Floyd’s police-assisted killing in that city was Uncle Edgar’s Mystery Bookstore. The commercial shopfront in which that establishment had operated for four decades, alongside its sister enterprise, the slightly older Uncle Hugo’s Science Fiction Bookstore, was burned to the ground by rioting vandals (not protesters) in the early morning hours of Saturday, May 30. Owner Don Blyly couldn’t say at the time whether he would reopen his much-loved conjoined shops, but a GoFundMe campaign was launched soon afterward to raise funds needed to make that possible. (At last check, $166,762 had been promised toward a $500,000 goal.)
Now Blyly is facing another recovery hurdle, this one of the distinctly bureaucratic sort. Today’s Minneapolis Star Tribune explains:
In Minneapolis, on a desolate lot where Don Blyly’s bookstore stood before being destroyed in the May riots, two men finish their cigarettes and then walk through a dangerous landscape filled with slippery debris and sharp objects. The city won’t let Blyly haul away his wreckage without a permit, and he can’t get a contractor to tell him how much it will cost to rebuild the store until that happens.
In [neighboring] St. Paul, where Jim Stage’s pharmacy burned down during the same disturbances, crews have already removed the bricks and scorched timbers. A steel fence keeps out trespassers. Stage expects construction of his new Lloyd’s Pharmacy to begin later this month.
The main reason for the different recoveries is simple: Minneapolis requires owners to prepay the second half of their 2020 property taxes in order to obtain a demolition permit. St. Paul does not.
“Minneapolis has not been particularly friendly toward business for some time,” said Blyly, who prepaid $8,847 in taxes last week but still hasn’t received his demolition permit. “They say they want to be helpful, but they certainly have not been.”
City officials say their hands are tied, pointing to a state law that prohibits the removal of any structures or standing timber until all of the taxes assessed against the building have been fully paid. ...
Local business owners are appalled by the finger-pointing, noting that nearly 100 properties in Minneapolis were destroyed or severely damaged in the riots ... The vast majority of those properties are either still standing or have been turned into ugly and often dangerous piles of rubble. Owners say the lack of progress is discouraging reinvestment and sending customers to other parts of the metro.
You can read the complete Star Tribune piece here.
Being a fan, myself, of time-travel mysteries, I was intrigued to discover that California author Julie McElwain (Shadows in Time) had collected some of her favorite such yarns for CrimeReads. Included among her half-dozen picks are Dean Koontz’s Lightning, Lauren Beukes’ The Shining Girls, and Stephen King’s 11/22/63.
Curiously absent from her recommendations, though, are Karl Alexander’s Time After Time (1979), in which 19th-century science-fictionist H.G. Wells travels to late-20th-century San Francisco in hot pursuit of Jack the Ripper, and Jack Finney’s Time and Again (1970), wherein an advertising artist leaps back to 1882 New York City on the trail of a much-damaged letter penned that very year.
• Renowned movie and TV composer Billy Goldenberg—who died on Monday, August 3, at age 84—was the son of two musicians and took his first breaths in Brooklyn, New York, in 1936. He began his Hollywood career directing music for TV programs such as Hullabaloo and 1968’s Elvis: The Comeback Special. As Varietyrecalls, “In late 1968, Goldenberg became assistant to Universal TV music director Stanley Wilson, who assigned him scores for series [such] as Ironside, It Takes a Thief and The Name of the Game. He met [director Steven] Spielberg on Name of the Game and later did the director’s television work, including Night Gallery, Duel and three installments of Amazing Stories in the 1980s.” Goldbenberg wrote the music for 1971’s Ransom for a Dead Man, the teleflick that served as the actual pilot for Columbo, and went on to create the
music for “Murder by the Book,” that series’ first regular episode. Among his other crime-drama credits are the themes for Harry O, Banacek, Kojak, and Delvecchio. When asked about Goldenberg’s contributions to the TV mystery field, Gary Gerani, a screenwriter and film historian now working on a documentary about the composer, offered these comments:
Billy Goldenberg certainly didn’t invent crime and mystery TV music. But what he brought to the genre was a perverse, transcendent elegance, something missed even by immortal composers like Bernard Herrmann and Jerry Goldsmith. Having followed his career from the very beginning, I think it’s
significant that Broadway-based Goldenberg began his TV-film work with supernatural music (Fear No Evil, Ritual of Evil, Night Gallery). This led his aural ideas and arrangements in a darkly surreal direction … ”romantic mysticism” he called it. It was just a short walk from the demonic investigations of Dr. David Sorell (Louis Jourdan) to the insanely upper-class, full of themselves, larger-than-life villains facing Columbo. And in all of this … beauty. Elegance. Class. Billy was able to find an elegant “inner life" even in the bald-headed, lollipop-slurping countenance of Telly Savalas, his Kojak theme finding something eternal in the man and his city.
What will Mr. Goldenberg be remembered for? The Spielberg collaborations, of course; before John Williams, Goldenberg was Spielberg’s go-to composer, with Duel a very high-profile title on Billy’s résumé. And his Bartok-inspired supernatural music clearly defined the TV-movie flavors of the ’70s. But Columbo, beloved by fans all over the world, is probably the pop-culture property he’s most identified with. [His] Ransom for a Dead Man score was essentially the next step from his more cosmic television movies. This score influenced the “elegant beauty” style of music used in most detective TV shows produced by
Dean Hargrove later in the decade, and beyond; even Murder, She Wrote’s harpsichord owes something to what Billy brought to the genre with Ransom. His approach captures the off-center personality of the Columbo episodes themselves far better than Henry Mancini’s [NBC] Mystery Movie theme, which is loads of fun, but clearly doesn’t belong in the same provocative, “perverted melodious” universe as Goldenberg’s creations. So yes, it’s fair to say that Billy Goldenberg’s compositions defined the signature sound of the 1970s mystery movie, and much of what followed in its wake.
Goldenberg collected almost two dozen Emmy nominations during his lengthy career, winning for such small-screen gems as Queen of the Stardust Ballroom (1975) and for miniseries including The Lives of Benjamin Franklin (1974) and King (1978). The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) carries an extensive list of his work.
(Above) The opening scene from Ransom for a Dead Man—with music by Billy Goldenberg—finds a lawyer (played by Lee Grant) assembling a ransom note for her husband (actor Harlan Warde), editing a tape recording to prove that he was indeed snatched, and finally shooting him in their living room.
• Also lost last week: journalist and author Pete Hamill. A longtime, much-admired New York City newspaperman, Hamill also published in The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Playboy, and Esquire. (A variety of his pieces can be read here, with one of his best-known Esquire features available at this link.) On top of all those credits, he penned close to a dozen novels, recalls Jiro Kimura of The Gumshoe Site, “including A Killing for Christ (Little, Brown, 1968), his first novel which was a thriller about a plot to assassinate the Pope in Rome.” Hamill produced, as well, a quartet of action-packed thrillers starring Gotham freelance reporter Sam Briscoe, beginning with 1978’s Dirty Laundry (about which I wrote in CrimeReads) and running through 2011’s Tabloid City. Kimura goes on to note that Hamill’s “mystery short stories include ‘The Men in Black Raincoats,’ first published in the December 1977 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and ‘The Book Signing’ (first published in Brooklyn Noir; Akashic, 2004), which was an Edgar nominee. His teleplays include Laguna Heat (1987, based on the novel by T. Jefferson Parker) and Split Images (1992, based on the novel by Elmore Leonard).” Click here to enjoy New York magazine’s fine tribute to Hamill, who passed away from heart and kidney failure on August 5. He was 85 years of age.
• Like so many other crime-fiction gatherings, Belfast, Ireland’s NOIRELAND International Crime Fiction Festival has had its ups and downs this year. A one-day event had been planned for March 28, only to be postponed until October due to the novel coronavirus. And now … “Sadly, it seems we were a little optimistic!” writes festival manager Angela McMahon. “The risk to public health from COVID-19 is still significant and unlikely to change for some time. As the well-being of our audiences, our authors and our many wonderful volunteers is paramount, we have concluded that in the circumstances we cannot go ahead with NOIRELAND this year.” She promises that tickets will be refunded over the next couple of weeks.
• Also cancelled was this year’s Pulpfest. Nonetheless, organizers announced that the winner of that planned convention’s 2020 Munsey Award is Mike Ashley, “the author or co-author of numerous works related to the pulps, science fiction, and fantasy. … Ashley has also edited many anthologies and single-author collections, often drawing work
from the pulps. He is currently part of a team compiling an index to the most important British popular fiction magazines published between 1880 and 1950,
including all the British pulps.” In 2003, Ashley’s Mammoth Encyclopedia of Modern Crime Fiction captured the Edgar Award for Best Critical/Biographical Work.
• Plans are quite different for another annual get-together, the Crime Fiction Weekend at St. Hilda’s College, University of Oxford. The two-day conference (August 14-15) will take place entirely online. As publicity committee member Jean Harker says in an e-mail note, “This year’s theme is ‘All Our Yesterdays: Historical Crime Fiction’ … and speakers include Andrew Taylor, Mick Herron, Andrew Wilson, Elly Griffiths, Anna Mazzola, etc.” She adds that “St. Hilda’s alumna and Honorary Fellow Val McDermid will preside over some of the proceedings. There will also be a tribute to Dame Agatha Christie as we celebrate the centenary of the publication of The Mysterious Affair at Styles—and a solve-it-yourself Whodunnit playlet written by Andrew Taylor and acted by a cast of crime writers.” Click here to find the full program. Proceedings are supposed to be recorded and made available to ticket-holders for a month. The ticket price is £30, with a discount available to students. You can register here.
• As the coronavirus lockdown continues, you may be curious to know how retired Edinburgh Detective Inspector John Rebus (soon to return in A Song for the Dark Times) is managing the isolation. His creator, Ian Rankin, answers that question in this delightful scripted video short starring Emmy Award-winning Scottish actor Brian Cox. It imagines Rebus coping with the absence of pubs, the need for exercise, the ubiquity of Zoom communications, and much more. (Hat tip to Randal S. Brandt)
• I’m just in the midst of reading Sam Wasson’s The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood (Flatiron), and here comes news that Ben Affleck is spearheading a film based on that character-rich tale about the making of Chinatown (1974). The Hollywood Reportersays he’ll pen the script and direct the picture, and co-produce with Lorne Michaels, “who initially nabbed the rights to the book.” Let’s hope for the best from this project.
• In other story-to-screen news, The Killing Times brings word that Megan Abbott’s next novel, The Turnout—to be published in the summer of 2021—is already scheduled for television treatment. It says the story “is set in the hothouse world of a ballet school led by the Durant sisters, Dara and Marie, and Dara’s husband Charlie. Their connection is intense, forged by a glamorous but troubled family history. But after they hire Derek, a charismatic, possibly shady contractor to renovate the studio, Marie throws herself into an intense affair with him that threatens their tight bonds and brings forward family secrets until an act of violence overturns everything.”
• Meanwhile, it’s been reported that actress Elisabeth Moss (The West Wing, The Handmaid’s Tale) “will be developing Araminta Hall’s forthcoming Imperfect Women as one of the first projects of her new production company, Love & Squalor Pictures.” Publishers Weeklycalls
that novel a “heart-wrenching psychological thriller.”
• Netflix has chosen September 3 as the debut date for Young Wallander, its six-episode series inspired by Henning Mankell’s tales of Swedish police inspector Kurt Wallander.
• Here’s a show I didn’t expect: HBO’s The Undoing, a psychological drama starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant. Varietyexplains,
The six-episode series follows Grace Fraser (Kidman), a successful therapist who discovers that her husband Jonathan (Grant) may be wrapped up in the death of another woman. She must unravel a chain of mysteries to reclaim her family’s life. The limited series, based on Jean Hanff Korelitz’s [2014] novel You Should Have Known, is written and executive produced by David E. Kelley. Susanne Bier, Per Saari, Bruna Papandrea, Stephen Garrett, Celia Costas and Kidman also executive produce. Bier also directs.
The Undoing is slated to start its run on October 25.
• And Netflix is offering images from its adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 Gothic novel, Rebecca, which was already so well filmed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1940. Netflix’s interpretation will premiere on October 21. As Deadline explains, “Lily James and Armie Hammer lead the cast this time out, playing the aristocratic widower Maxim de Winter (Laurence Olivier in Hitchcock’s version) and his new wife (previously Joan Fontaine), with Kristin Scott Thomas as Mrs Danvers.”
• August brings what would have beenEarl Derr Biggers’ 136th birthday, were the creator of Charlie Chan still around to enjoy such festivities. (He perished in 1933, aged 48.) To celebrate, Lou Armagno, who blogs at The Postman on Holiday, has compiled a “musical montage” of compositions and musicians associated with
Biggers’ Chinese-American detective, the majority of which relate to the 44 vintage Chan films. Among the many things I hadn’t know before: David Raksin, who created music for the 1941’s Dead Men Tell, starring Sidney Toler as Chan, would three years later compose the eerily beautiful score for that film noir classic, Laura.
• Laura seems to be burning bright in the zeitgeist lately. Otto Penzler placed that 1944 Gene Tierney/Dana Andrews picture at Number 6 in his CrimeReads countdown of “The Greatest Crime Films of All Time.” And in Loren D. Estleman’s new, sixth Valentino mystery, Indigo (Forge), his imperfect film detective is presented with the original Laura Hunt portrait painted for that movie.
• Regarding Penzler’s picks, he’s identified his top two—Chinatown (1974) and The Maltese Falcon (1941)—but we’re still waiting to see which motion picture he thinks belongs at the top of the heap.
• In a new interview with Hollywood Soapbox, Hard Case Crime editor Charles Ardai talks about his company’s initial inspiration, forthcoming works by Ray Bradbury and Max Allan Collins, and the importance of original cover artwork for HCC titles.
• Speaking of Hard Case, Entertainment Weekly has revealed the Paul Mann-painted cover of Later, Stephen King’s third contribution to that paperback line (following 2005’s The Colorado Kid and 2013’s top-selling Joyland). Due out in March 2021, Later is described by Ardai as “a beautiful story about growing up and facing your demons—whether they’re metaphorical or (as sometimes happens when you’re in a
Stephen King novel) the real thing. It’s terrifying, tender, heartbreaking and honest, and we’re so excited to bring it to readers.”
• When it comes to crime- and mystery-fiction blogs, patience is sometimes rewarded. In July 2018, Brooklyn writer, critic, and musician Cullen Gallagher put up what appeared to be the final contribution to his fine site, Pulp Serenade: an interview with author Paul D. Brazill. Given Gallagher’s previous posting prolificacy, though, I hesitated to delete Pulp Serenade from The Rap Sheet’s blogroll—and now my restraint has been vindicated. Almost a full two years after Gallagher seemed to disappear, he suddenly returned in mid-June with a flood of posts, some of them reprints but others new (such as his reviews of S.A. Cosby’s Blacktop Wasteland and Lawrence Block’s Dead Girl Blues). I don’t know how long his renewed commitment to Pulp Serenade will last, but let’s hope it will not flag any time soon.
• So what’s happened to Reviewing the Evidence? Created in 2001 by Barbara Franchi, it has more recently been managed by Yvonne Klein. However, the
last time that site saw an update was back in January of this year. I hope the pandemic has not spelled an end to RTE. I recently sent an e-mail inquiry to
Klein, but have not yet received a response. If anybody out there knows about the site’s future, I hope they’ll reveal it in the Comments section at
the end of this post.
Independent publisher Canelo is launching a new crime fiction imprint, Canelo Crime, and has promoted Louise Cullen as publishing director to oversee the list. The
imprint will launch with a selection of eight titles, including novels by Rachel Lynch and Nick Louth, due for release on September 24. Cullen is now actively seeking new novels with “bestseller potential” for inclusion in the imprint in 2021 and beyond, with a target of 15–18 new releases next year.
• If you’ve ever wondered what it would like to be in the company of prolific Texas author James Reasoner, click over to this YouTube interview he did with Paul Bishop of Wolfpack Publishing and fellow writer Robert Vaughan. By the way, Reasoner just declared that he’s finished work on his 386th novel. I suddenly feel very lazy …
• Let me recommend one other story in CrimeReads: Andrew Cartmel’s look back at the “lost classics” of 20th-century hard-boiled author Charles Williams.
• I’m not much for audiobooks, since I can generally read a work faster myself than somebody else can read it to me. However, I have enjoyed listening to Phoebe Judge’s presentations at Phoebe Reads a Mystery, a podcast I first heard about from blogger Dave Knadler. Since the novel coronavirus struck, she’s been recording
chapter-by-chapter deliveries of classic works, some of the most recent being Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Anna Katharine Green’s The Leavenworth Case, Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Links, and Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone. While I still shy away from audio versions of new novels, I find that I quite enjoy revisiting books I have already read, transported into another time and place by Judge’s soothing voice.
This season’s flurry of crime-fiction awards news continues, as organizers of New Zealand’s annual Ngaio Marsh Awards announce their finalists for two separate 2020 prizes:
Best Novel: •Whatever It Takes, by Paul Cleave (Upstart Press) •Girl from the Tree House, by Gudrun Frerichs (Self-published) •Auē, by Becky Manawatu (Mākaro Press) •The Nancys, by R.W.R. McDonald (Allen & Unwin) •In the Clearing, by J.P. Pomare (Hachette New Zealand) •The Wild Card, by Renée (Cuba Press)
Best First Novel: •Tugga’s Mob, by Stephen Johnson (Clan Destine Press) •Auē, by Becky Manawatu (Mākaro Press) •The Nancys, by R.W.R. McDonald (Allen & Unwin) •Into the Void, by Christina O’Reilly (Self-published e-book)
A news release says, “This year’s finalists are a fascinating group of Kiwi storytellers who’ve collectively won or been shortlisted for accolades in New Zealand and overseas, including the Prime Minister’s Awards for Literary Achievement, the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction, the Australian Book Industry Awards, the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, the Saint-Maur Crime Novel of the Year in France, and the Edgar Awards and Barry Awards in the United States.
“‘Our international judging panels have been dealing with a range of rāhui and lockdown situations this year but have thoroughly enjoyed reading the range and quality of stories offered by our Kiwi authors,’ says [founder and judging convenor Craig] Sisterson. ‘There were differing favourites, tough decisions, and some great reads our judges loved that didn’t become finalists. A decade on from our inaugural Ngaio Marsh Awards, our local genre is certainly in great health.’”
The longlist of contenders for Best Novel can be found here.
Winners of this year’s Ngaio Marsh Awards are to be declared during the WORD Christchurch Spring Festival, October 29-November 1. Congratulations to all of the nominees!
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