Steven Nester is the longtime host ofPoets of the Tabloid Murder, a weekly Internet radio program heard on the Public Radio Exchange (PRX). In addition, he is a New York-based freelance writer whose work has appeared in The Rap Sheet, January Magazine, Shotgun Honey, Yellow Mama, Mystery Scene, and Firsts Magazine.
Shake Bouchon, a onetime wheelman for the Armenian mob in Los Angeles, is at it again, and this third (perhaps last?) installment in Lou Berney’s franchise is a doozy. Shake’s former boss and gorgeous ex-lover, Alexandra “Lexy” Ilandryan—who is now a capo di capo herself—has been kidnapped while enjoying a solo vacation to Cambodia. Shake is blissfully ignorant of this turn until he’s suddenly dragooned from his sedentary life by a mob enforcer, the Freudianly skewed Dikran, who demands his help in rescuing Lexy.
Meanwhile, in the jungles of Cambodia, Lexy is being held captive by a couple of knuckleheads, Ramos and French, who are waiting for their own gangster leader to appear and cut a deal for her release. This happens to be Bjorn, a Cambodian who speaks “flawless hipster American” and who really should’ve been a better planner; Bjorn has no idea who he’s grabbed or the consequences that might follow. Considering what readers learn about Bjorn’s lineage later in this story, he is in the wrong business.
It doesn’t take long for the whole abduction scheme to begin unraveling. Shake’s wife (and erstwhile adversary), Gina, arrives in Cambodia, along with Lexy’s second in command, who circles the circumstances like a shark and spots an opportunity to replace her as number one. Oh, and add to those plot twists an expatriate hippy girl named Mitch, and Ouch, a Cambodian godfather with CIA connections. If the success of this overseas free-for-all doesn’t convince author Berney to keep Shake alive for readers, then nothing will.
It’s the long, hot summer of 1965 in Los Angeles, and Harry Ingram is in it up to his neck. This Black crime photographer and part-time process server happens upon a traffic stop in the city’s racially charged Watts neighborhood that quickly turns fatal. Cops beat the motorist, and when a young Black activist confronts them, he’s shot dead—and Harry documents the entire scene. The police then proceed to pound on Harry and take away his camera, a Korean War-era Speed Graphic. But while he recuperates in a hospital bed, his lover, Anita Claire, finds that camera, and the photos he snapped with it are published, putting Harry squarely in the unwelcome sights of the LAPD.
Once released back onto the street, Harry achieves plenty of notoriety and exposure (a bad thing for a man whose avocation is playing gumshoe), but that doesn’t stop him. An invitation to find the missing partner of a local businesswoman takes Harry on an odyssey through the underbelly of Los Angeles, where it comes as no surprise that even the police are corrupt—and they aren’t the only ones.
As this story progresses, Phillips adds complication upon complication. He eventually has Harry walking a fine line between crime and retribution, after he discovers that Anita, who also happens to be an associate of L.A. mayor Tom Bradley, has a sideline as a Robin Hood-like bank robber, assisted by her interracial parents.
Phillips, probably best known for creating private eye Ivan Monk (Violent Spring), recounts actual events—racial tensions and violence—that are a tragic part of this country’s history, and still haunt us today. However, a significant appeal of this novel and its predecessor, 2022’s One-Shot Harry, comes from how the author re-creates the past, dusting off a Los Angeles that no longer exists. Mid-20th-century demands for racial equality are brought more to the fore in this second Ingram novel, and it will be interesting to see in future installments of this series how Phillips’ intrepid lensman makes it past the age of Motown and Stax, and documents the country’s social/cultural evolution into the era of Superfly and Shaft.
Novelist and screenwriter Scott Phillips has concocted The Devil Raises His Own with a touch of film director Robert Altman’s historical irreverence, choice of ensemble cast and meandering plot line, giving readers not just a slice of life, but a slab of life looked at from many angles. “The good old days,” Phillips tells us, is bunk.
It’s the year 1916, and Hollywood is just in its formative stages. After being found innocent of murdering her abusive husband back in Wichita, Kansas, Flavia Purcell flees to Los Angeles, where her grandfather Bill Odgen (the main character from Cottonwood, Phillips’ 2004 novel) now owns a photography studio. There she learns the business, but this being Hollywood—where dreams die and reality sets in hard and fast—Flavia and Bill soon find themselves in the nascent pornography business. (A warning for readers: this book features sex, but when it does [people must make a living somehow], it’s not even close to the full-frontal nuts-and-bolts, lascivious variety that’s so prevalent today.) As the city endures a succession of murders, Bill and his resourceful granddaughter find themselves mixed up in events as complicated and ominous as any found in old black-and-white pictures.
While The Devil Raises His Own is classified as “noir,” that’s true only in the way Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays (a very dark take on the same town) is noir: the people in its pages make choices, sometimes bad ones, and must live with the consequences, dealing with what life has arbitrarily dished out. Vaudevillian losers of high birth; a washed-up actor getting a second chance as a child star’s punching bag; cinematic performers on the way up and on the way down—they all find roles here. Phillips offers a cross-section of pre-World War I America through his focus on early Hollywood, for it was there to which so many people with big dreams went to see them thrive … or die.
As wildfires consume Southern California’s long, flat Central Valley, and war erupts among the area’s white-trash dope purveyors, Luke Crosswhite—heir-apparent to the throne of the criminal Combine gang—returns to the fold. Unsure whether to prepare to be groomed for the crown (the king, his father, has been incarcerated for a slaying Luke witnessed, yet he still calls the shots), Luke needs time to sort things out. Meanwhile, prospects are looking up for the gang’s crank-dealing business—that is until the vicious Aryan Steel gang rolls in. Its leaders demand not only a 10-percent payoff from the Combine for doing business in the neighborhood, but want Luke’s family’s gang to purchase their product, as well. The Combine’s de facto boss, Luke’s uncle Del, nixes any such deal, which is understood clearly as throwing down the gauntlet.
Amid all of this, young lovers Pretty Baby and Callie (the latter being an old friend to Luke) hope to escape the Combine’s hold over them at last. Their scheme involves ripping off an associate in a drug deal, and then handing him over to police. Unfortunately, that associate owes money to Aryan Steel honcho Beast Daniels. An all-out war ensues and the death toll mounts. As an initiated gang member, Luke must obey orders even though his future holds much brighter—or in the world of gangbangers, much darker—promise. When Del orders him to kill Callie in retribution for her actions, Luke realizes that the gang’s motto, Blood Is Love, cannot be taken lightly. Traveling to visit his father in prison, Luke is left to wonder, Just who is the last king of California?
Like Harper’s 2023 thriller, Everybody Knows, The Last King of California (published originally in Great Britain two years ago) is a most discomfiting tale of the American West.
Last but not least, one work from the non-fiction shelves ...
Speaking of the American West, that expansive region has provided so many things: tall tales, legends, and more than a few rich myths. But its 19th- and early 20th-century history also contains a goodly number of real men and woman who lived large in spirit, bravery, and what might be called spunk. Buffalo Bill Cody, Bat Masterson, Wyatt Earp, Belle Starr—they all made their marks on the growing country. This list wouldn’t be complete, though, without Charlie Siringo, a cowboy, bounty hunter, sleuth, and eventual silent-movie extra who has often been overlooked by writers and filmmakers focused mostly on the Old West’s lawless particulars. Nathan Ward (previously the author of The Lost Detective: Becoming Dashiell Hammett) seeks to correct that slight with this non-fiction work—first published in late 2023, but released in paperback last fall—that supplies a deeply researched account of Siringo’s adventures and accomplishments.
Born in Texas in 1855 to an Irish mother and an Italian father, Siringo participated in his first cattle drive at age 12. He went on to survive a fusillade of beer glasses flung in a Dodge City saloon by the aforementioned Sheriff Masterson; chase after cattle rustled by Billy the Kid; witness Chicago’s deadly Haymarket massacre of 1886; and join the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, for which he investigated mining corruption and pursued outlaws, among them Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. He also penned a variety of books, including A Texas Cow Boy: Or, Fifteen Years on the Hurricane Deck of a Spanish Pony (1885), which readers ate up—and which helped mold the public’s image of the leathery range rider. After leaving the Pinkertons in the early 1900s. he engaged in a lengthy dispute with that agency, claiming it had sabotaged the publication of his cowboy memoirs.
Without a doubt, Charlie Siringo was an American original, and Ward does him justice here. Son of the Old West gives a generous accounting of this cowboy-detective’s long life (he died in 1928, just short of his 74th birthday), at the same time providing a history of the West from the post-Civil War era through the age of steam to the wonderment of the motion-picture industry.
Other 2024 Favorites:The Queen City Detective Agency, by Snowdon Wright (Morrow); and The Arizona Triangle, by “Sydney Graves,” aka Kate Christianen (Harper Paperbacks).
Just when it seemed we’d finally run out of “best crime fiction of the year” lists (other than those still waiting to be posted in The Rap Sheet), here comes a new slew of interesting picks. Noteworthy among those are two more sets of “bests” from Crime Fiction Lover contributors—Mike Parker and Vicki Weisfeld; the selections of Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine editor George Easter and his colleague Hank Wagner; and the Toronto Star’s Steven W. Beattie.
In addition, reviewer Kevin R. Tipple surprises us with his 10 favorites of 2024 (including Harry Hunsicker’s The Life and Death of Rose Doucette and Terry Shames’ The Troubling Death of Maddy Benson). Prolific writer James Reasoner offers a dozen new and older books he particularly relished amid the 167 (!) he read this year. Reading Reality’s Marlene Harris chooses her 20 faves, fewer than half of which can be classified as mystery or crime fiction. Equally mixed are choices by blogger Michael Popple, of The Unseen Library. And Steven Barge’s year-end assessment, in In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, features several titles (Oskar Jensen’s Helle and Death and Adam Oyebanji’s Two Times Murder, for instance) that I would like to add to my own reading stack soon. He also gives special praise to Martin Edwards’ latest Rachel Savernake yarn, Hemlock Bay.
Finally, Kate Jackson shares the results of the 2024 Reprint of the Year awards competition. (Novelists Ruth Fenisong, Seishi Yokomizo, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Ellery Queen, and Christianna Brand all come in for some level of acclaim). And we don’t want to miss mentioning Brian Lindenmuth’s picks of “Best Crime Comics of 2024.”
Jim Thomsen is a writer and editor living in the pocket-edition community of Kingston, Washington. He edited A Killing Rain, an anthology of crime stories set in the greater Seattle area, which was published earlier this year by Down & Out Books in conjunction with the Left Coast Crime convention held in nearby Bellevue.
I’ll be honest: I read less new crime fiction (or, at least, books marketed as such) in 2024, and liked less of what I read than in any year previous. I get a sense that genre writers are struggling to speak coherently to the current moment, and have largely retreated to safe corners of it to observe and comment on our divided classes. That said, there were some works in this vein well worth celebrating.
Holly may not be the best crime novel of 2024 (it was, after all, first published in late 2023), but it’s up there near the top, and it’s certainly the most fun one I read, by far. The killers—a pair of octogenarian, semi-retired professors—are an absolute hoot, full of themselves and their out-there ideas on how to prolong their lives at the expense of others. And Holly Gibney, King’s neurasthenic, neurodivergent sleuth from the Mr. Mercedes trilogy (among other stories), is the perfect person to connect the dots between the marginalized missing victims in this tale and that nutjob couple. Her methodical detective work is laid out in painstaking slow-burn detail; King doesn’t skimp on the step-by-step. As is always expected with this author, his secondary characters are extraordinarily well-developed. Holly’s pages turn but don’t fly; there’s much to linger over in every passage, even as you can’t wait to find out what comes next.
This second novel (after 2020’s The Searcher) to be centered on Cal Hooper, a retired Chicago cop relocated to the eccentric Irish village of Ardnakelty, where he is forever navigating the town’s arcane protocols and suspicious locals, is a patiently plotted masterpiece. Just when Cal thinks he’s finally settled in, with teenage pal Theresa “Trey” Reddy and semi-girlfriend Lena in his everyday orbit, he’s pushed out of his comfort zone once more when Trey’s charming-loser father, Johnny Reddy, breezes into town promising riches too rich for the not-rich locals to ignore. He’s caught between those who know Johnny is full of shit and others who choose to look past that because he’s “one of them.” And Cal, for all his virtues, is not. French’s prose burns long and on even low heat, like an underground peat fire; and though you may think nothing much is happening on occasion, you can’t look away because you and the author both know better.
In this standalone novel from the author of the standout Cash Blackbear series (Murder on the Red River, Girl Gone Missing, etc.), Rendon shows she’s basically the genre-fied incarnation of Louise Erdrich, depicting Native American reservation life with chilling authenticity. Here, Quill, wife and mother, steps in when women from Minnesota’s Red Pine Reservation go missing amid an uptick in the number of white-male pipeline workers housed in the surrounding area. Quill is as reluctant a sleuth as they come, feeling called to action in the face of chilling complacency from local law enforcement. But when one of her best friends appears to fall into the clutches of sex traffickers, Quill goes into Full Metal Mama Bear mode. The thriller elements in Rendon’s tale are satisfyingly urgent; the cultural study of a place white people will never fully understand is first-rate.
As Marcie Rendon knows reservation life in Minnesota and North Dakota, so Eli Cranor
knows rural Arkansas, and its cultural and economic forces that constantly collide from within and without. Brutal conditions experienced by the undocumented workers at a chicken processing plant in a trailer-park town push one man to his breaking point, leading to the kidnapping of the plant manager’s 6-month-old boy, the ransom demanded being tens of thousands of dollars in overtime pay. And the only people who seem to have their heads on straight here—the abducted child’s mother and a female line worker married to the kidnapper—find a cracked sort of common cause when the men in their lives prove to be useless. This yarn’s deeper themes never lose their impact in the face of nonstop action, which is tougher to pull off than it seems. Cranor, in his third novel, finally sees his gifts take flight in full feather.
As sleek as it is dark, Wayne’s story of clashing classes and cultures unfolds in old-monied coastal Long Island, where a struggling law-school graduate turned tennis instructor, Conor O’Toole, leans into his looks to bed both a mother and her daughter. His desperate efforts to keep one from finding out about the other lead to murder and an equally desperate and seemingly endless attempt to cover it up. The thriller elements in this novel are strong, but what stands out most is the cluelessness of the elite, who never have to worry about where their next meal—or mansion—is coming from.
Other 2024 Favorites:The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2024, edited by S.A. Cosby (Mariner); Buried Lies, by Steven Tingle (Crooked Lane); Blond Hair, Blue Eyes, by Chris Kelsey (Black Rose Writing); Ordinary Bear, by C.B. Bernard (Blackstone); and American Spirits, by Russell Banks (Knopf).
With 2024 quickly fading in the rearview mirror, and the new year almost upon us, there are fewer “best books of the year” lists still to be mentioned. But don’t overlook author Eric Beetner’s picks in the blog Criminal Minds, which include Henry Wise’s Holy City, Laura McHugh’s Safe and Sound, and two new Old West mysteries by Steve Hockensmith, Hired Guns and No Hallowed Ground.
Meanwhile, former Mystery Scene reviewer Ben Boulden touts Thomas Perry’s Hero and Joyce Carol Oates’ Flint Creek: Stories of Mystery and Suspense, as well as other new releases from the last dozen months. And TomKat, over at Beneath the Stains of Time, both recaps his favorite and least favorite crime-fiction reprints from 2024, and looks ahead to classic works set for reissuing in 2025.
Be aware, too, that The Rap Sheet will post another entry in its “Favorite Crime Fiction of 2024” series—this one from Jim Thomsen—later this afternoon. Keep a weather eye out for it!
Kevin Burton Smith is the Montreal, Quebec-born founder and editor of that essential resource, The Thrilling Detective Web Site, as well as the Web Monkey for The Private Eye Writers of America and a contributor to Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine. A lost Canadian, he’s currently hiding out in Southern California’s High Desert with his wife, mystery author D.L. Browne (aka Diana Killian and Josh Lanyon), and waiting for the end of the world.
It sounds like the set-up for a bad joke: three stand-up comics walk into a bar in Canada …
But it’s no joke—it’s a scene played out several times in comedian Brett Butt’s dead-serious thriller, Huge.
One of the comedians is Dale, a cash-strapped but seasoned pro who knows how to leave ’em laughing. Not a superstar, maybe, but he knows how to play the game, serving as emcee and closing headliner on a low-key, low-budget tour of nowhere Canadian prairie towns (Brass Hole! Wire Beach! Horsewater!), working its way to big-city Winnipeg, Manitoba, a prime spot (really!) on the North American comedy circuit. Joining Dale is Rynn, a feisty young Irish comedienne with a possible TV show deal in the works. She’s the opener. And the third comic, occupying the middle slot, is Hobie Huge, an over-sized Canadian desperate to make it as a comedian. He’s local, and so he’s using his customized van to drive them from gig to gig.
Only catch? Hobie’s a frickin’ psychopath—a stone-cold, homicidal nutjob with absolutely zero impulse control and a hair-trigger temper. So what starts out as a fascinating behind-the-scenes peek at the world of stand-up comedy ends up being infinitely darker as Hobie slowly loses it, and Dale and Rynn realize—too late—just how far out on the crazy train their co-star really is.
The lovably schlubby Canadian author, Butt, is probably best known in the United States for Corner Gas, a long-running, still-streaming Canadian sitcom, and No Clue, a 2014 film comedy in which a mild-mannered, middle-aged Vancouver, British Columbia, novelty salesman (played by Butt) poses as a hard-boiled private investigator, hoping to impress a woman. But Huge is something else again—a disturbing, twitchy, and surprisingly effective nail-biter that draws you in … before it yanks the rug right out from under you.
By this point, a kick-ass graphic novel by Brubaker (words) and Phillips (art) is no surprise—it’s pretty much an annual event. But Where the Body Was, which marks a break from their regular (and much harder-boiled) Criminal and Reckless series, is something else again—a clever and engaging standalone that borders on cozy; a crime story featuring a group of characters who all live in the same sleepy 1980s American suburban neighborhood, told through a bunch of overlapping viewpoints.
It’s almost quaint: tree-lined streets, well-tended (mostly) lawns, tranquil cul-de-sacs, a tree house, a slew of seemingly comfy bungalows, an old boarding house and, as presented in the helpful “Cast of Characters” list (a nod to vintage Dell Mapbacks), a closed circle of suspects. Those include a couple of ne’er-do-well “wild” kids, a loner with a badge and a rich fantasy life, a horny housewife, a workaholic psychiatrist, a homeless Vietnam vet, a precocious 11-year old fangirl who has appointed herself the local superhero, and an outsider private eye hunting for a runaway girl. And of course a murder that rocks this little world.
It’s all depicted with a nuanced and empathetic hand by Phillips, and as the viewpoint slides back and forth between multiple players and timeframes, the tale feels as cozy as a cup of Earl Grey, poured by Dame Agatha herself. At first, anyway, because Brubaker and Phillips can’t help but slide in a deliciously dark if-not-quite-noir sucker punch at the end. As the various pieces slowly come together, they click into place in a fashion that, frankly, knocked me for a loop.
I generally hate serial-killer novels. Too often they’re simply workarounds for lightweights who want to skip over the tough job of creating credible villains. But Swierczynski does the heavy lifting here, because he’s after much bigger game. This ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco—he ain’t foolin’ around.
Sure, there’s the obligatory hunt for a serial killer, but that's just the corkboard for this author to pin a whole lot of things to, including:
— A multiple murderer known as the “California Bear,” who vanished four decades ago but is now coming out of retirement.
— An upcoming true-crime documentary by some scruple-free filmmakers about that slayer coming out of retirement.
— Cato Hightower, a crooked former cop who smells money, and isn’t beyond a little extortion to get what he wants.
— Jack Queen, a recently released ex-convict and single parent who’s trying to do right by his 15-year-old daughter.
— Jeanie Hightower, Cato’s beleaguered wife, a genealogist unwillingly dragged into her husband’s schemes.
— A slew of California Bear online fans and true-crime podcasters, plus a handful of real-life wannabes and copycats gumming up the works.
— The Girl Detective (aka Matilda), Jack Queen’s aforementioned daughter, a brainiac problem solver, confined to a hospital bed with a bad case of leukemia. And the prognosis is not good.
Along the way, Southern California writer Swierczynski takes savage pokes at a true-crime industry that cashes in on other people’s tragedies, a health care system run for profit, a legal system’s sometimes shaky notions of justice, and the million ways we can be torn apart, while shining a defiant light on the fragile, yet enduring ties that somehow—against all odds—bind us together.
Yeah, the plot slips and slides all over the place, its short, punchy chapters leaping from viewpoint to viewpoint, the head-whipping twists held together only by this author’s always muscular storytelling chops. But what it all adds up to is arguably Swierczynski’s best novel yet—a multilevel triumph that burns red hot, with an ending guaranteed to put the boot to even the most hardened of hearts. (And for those of us fortunate enough to know Duane Swierczynski, that ending is even more devastating.)
There are all kinds of tough guys (and gals), and the Shamus Game has had more than its fair share of both, starting back in the pulps when bullet wounds, knife wounds, the ever-popular KOs, and every other sort of bodily misfortune could be miraculously cured by a shot of hooch from the office bottle, a Lucky or two, a good night’s rest, and maybe a therapeutic roll in the hay.
And in some ways that hasn’t changed much. Bruen’s latest entry in the Jack Taylor series carries on the tradition in grand old fashion. The private eye’s first instinct, after awaking in a Galway, Ireland, hospital from an almost two-year-long coma (thus conveniently skipping the entire pandemic), is to reach for a drink.
And who could blame him?
Alas, that restorative slug is offered by Rafferty, a poetry-spouting stranger who, it’s soon revealed, has been Jack’s only regular visitor. Allegedly an ex-Marine (among other things), he’s the guy who saved Jack from the brutal attack that had landed him in the hospital.
But upon release, it’s a whole new, more violent Galway that greets Jack (Masks! Reduced hours in the bars! Someone setting fire to homeless people at night!). He’s approached by a woman who wants him to find the man who’s been attacking nuns with a hammer. Reluctant at first (Jack’s no fan of the Catholic Church), he eventually relents, and so, wearing his all-weather Garda coat and armed with his beloved hurley, he sets out to do what must be done.
Simple enough, maybe, but fans of these books know that Bruen, one of the most distinctive stylists in crime fiction, only makes it look simple—the Taylor series contains multitudes. Loyal, steadfast, and as Irish as a pint of the black, Jack’s also an angry, bitter alcoholic and drug abuser, broken, battered, tattered, and scarred inside and out, and prone to violence—and not even much of a detective at times. “Cases get solved around me,” he admits, “very rarely did I actually find the solution.”
But try turning away. Somehow, despite numerous betrayals and failures, Jack perseveres. And really, how can anyone turn their back on a man who is so damned that even the nuns, he tells us, were “no longer praying for” him?
In this standalone Perry yarn, the man behind the critically acclaimed Jane Whitfield series gives us another strong, resourceful female. But Justine Poole isn’t a “guide,” shepherding people into new lives under new identities.
Nope, Justine—we eventually find out—has already done that. To herself. Not that it matters—it’s her present life, as a personal security agent on the payroll of a high-priced and well-regarded Los Angeles firm, that lands her in trouble.
She's young, ambitious, attractive, quick on her feet, and very good at her job, protecting wealthy, high-profile Hollywood celebrities, attending lavish galas, and hobnobbing with Tinseltown’s rich and famous. So when she gets a call from her hands-on boss, who suspects a couple he’s been guarding—an elderly television producer and his wife—are possibly the targets of a home invasion, she doesn’t hesitate. She rushes to the couple’s swanky Beverly Hills home, and confronts five armed robbers lying in wait, who open fire. Her training kicks in, and she kills two of them, reluctantly becoming the “hero” of the title.
But that acclaim doesn’t last. Her brief moment of local celebrity does not go down well with the fragile ego of Mr. Conger, the man behind the robbery; a self-styled criminal mastermind who takes umbrage at a lone “girl” who not only took out two of his lackeys, but more importantly, blew his scheme to smithereens. Gee, what will all the other criminal masterminds think?
So he dispatches Leo Sealy, a coldly efficient assassin with a few ego problems of his own, to take out Justine and, he hopes, restore the chronically insecure Conger's reputation. Should be a snap, Leo figures, especially with the easily manipulated local media more than eager to dish on the new “hero” and her current whereabouts. Thus begins a dangerous game of cat-and-mouse, as the young bodyguard finds herself trying to stay out of the sights (literally) of a much more experienced and deadly foe.
I said cat-and-mouse, but maybe I should have said roadrunner-and-coyote. It turns out that Justine Poole is unexpectedly resourceful, clever, and … lucky. A few coincidences click into place, a few missteps occur, and the increasingly frustrated Leo winds up badly rattled, making him even more dangerous.
This is a fine romp, a blood-flecked cartoon of deadly intentions and random chaos, tinged with black humor.
All rock stars die in plane crashes of one kind or another. Sex. Drugs. Actual plane crashes. Take your pick. Someone (Lennon?) said that.
For former rock musician Martin Wade, it was definitely drugs (mostly heroin) that ended not his life, but at least his gig as front man for the French Letters, a 1990s punk band that had a brief slam dance with success. Well, the drugs and the subsequent disappearance of Wade’s wife, Cecilia, for which the LAPD has long suspected (and still suspects) Martin was responsible. As he tells it, “they didn’t know if she was dead or alive, but they saw a junkie ex-rock star aching for a fix and a blackout where a woman should be.”
That was almost two decades ago, though, and somehow Martin was eventually cleared. He survived, cleaned up his act, earned his P.I. ticket, and moved to Perrine, a small town in upstate New York, where he “learned how to run searches and what to look for.” Revisiting his wife’s fate, he finally came to the conclusion that “there was no trace of the woman [he] had once planned to spend [his] life with.”
Yet it’s that years-past tragedy that adds a strong touch of compelling melancholy to this story by Shamus and Black Orchid award winner Cudmore. Martin continues to rebuild his life, attend AA meetings, and live quietly and alone, working simple cases out of his shabby office over a vape shop, playing piano by himself in his living room. Not drinking. Not doing drugs. And keeping his head down.
Of course, one of the big hooks for a geek like me is the never-quite-gone music that is still a huge part of the middle-aged Martin's life, with songs and bands being name-dropped like confetti all over the place. His former bandmates have been mentioned casually in previous Wade stories Cudmore has contributed to Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, and other periodicals. But in this long-awaited novel-length debut (its title nicked from a Steely Dan song), one of them is finally dragged into the spotlight.
Janie Carlock, a promising young classical musician, shows up one day at Martin’s office and asks his new assistant, the heavily tattooed, 30-something Valerie Jacks, for an appointment. Janie wants Martin to speak to her estranged, drug addict father, who has lately been stalking her, trying to push his way into her life. As it transpires, that father is Ron Carlock, Martin’s old friend and a guitarist from the French Letters, who is still struggling with pills and booze. When Martin finally hooks up with Ron, the reunion isn’t a happy one. And their association doesn’t improve after Janie’s corpse is fished out of a river only days later.
The cops quickly write this drowning off as an accident, but Martin, Valerie, and Janie's heart-broken father don’t buy it. Martin reluctantly starts to nose around, unaware that Valerie, eager to prove her investigative chops and do more than manage their office, is conducting her own parallel investigation. Martin, we learn, isn’t the only sleuth here with a dark past, and Valerie has more than enough confidences of her own to confront.
As Cudmore’s story unfolds, and the side-by-side investigations crisscross in an uneasy tango (at one point, Valerie confesses that she doesn’t mind Martin when he “wasn’t being an asshole”), façades fall away and both secrets and hard, unpleasant truths are brought to the fore. Addiction, family ties, obsession, greed, resentment, mental illness, jealousy, and denial swirl around as Martin and Valerie swap the first-person narrative chores from chapter to chapter. When the solution of this moody, noir-tinged weeper comes, it cuts deep.
But not as deep as the concealed histories of our two gumshoes.
Wrenching. But you can dance to it.
Other 2024 Favorites:Murder at La Villette, by Cara Black (Soho Crime); Cream of the Crop: Best Mystery and Suspense Stories of Bill Pronzini, by Bill Pronzini (Stark House); Kingpin, by Mike Lawson (Atlantic Monthly Press); The Murder of Mr. Ma, by S.J. Rozan and John Shen Yen Nee (Soho Crime); and Buster, by George Pelicanos (Akashic).
December hasn’t exactly worked out the way I had planned. My hope was to have all of The Rap Sheet’s “favorite crime fiction of 2024” lists, from our various contributors, edited and posted by this point in the month, and be well along in completing my catalogue of early 2025 releases. None of that has happened. Through an unfortunate collision of personal and professional responsibilities (and a wee bit of laziness on my part), I am only now ready to begin delivering our critics’ collections of “favorites.”
The first of those posts—from the always-reliable Kevin Burton Smith—will appear later today, with more to follow through the end of this year, and probably into the first chill week of January.
You will note, sadly, two fewer voices in the mix this time around. Canadian correspondent and novelist Jim Napier, who had shared his annual choices with us for many years, passed away in December 2023. And this last summer, journalist, author, and West Ham United Football Club aficionado Fraser Massey died from cancer. I did not know Fraser well, but he provided The Rap Sheet with a variety of excellent articles, including three installments in our annual “favorites” series, dating back to 2021 (see here, here, and here).
Here’s a short biographical note I wrote about Fraser for The Rap Sheet’s “Contributors” page:
Fraser Massey is a freelance journalist based in London, England. A former columnist for the Radio Times, Now, and Real People, he is also a regular contributor to The Times. His short story “Have a Cigar” appears in Coming Through in Waves: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Songs of Pink Floyd (2021), the latest entry in Gutter Books’ Rock Anthology series. An early draft of his yet-to-be published neo-noir thriller, Whitechapel Messiah, was shortlisted in the New Voices category at the inaugural Capital Crime Festival Awards in 2019.
Two thousand twenty-four has been a sad year for me in many respects. I lost an old and very good friend a few months ago, at age 80, and Fraser was only one of the people I knew from the crime-fiction community who went to their graves during these last dozen months. With the political situation in the United States likely to turn dark, mean, and perhaps violent in the near future, I find myself longing for the power to turn back time—even slightly. Putting up this blog’s latest “favorites” posts—late as they are—gives me the chance to think back on 2024, and to remember how many wonderful diversions fiction gave us from the turmoil and tragedies all around.
(Above) The movie trailer for Blue Christmas. Charles Dickens could have had no inkling, when he penned his 1843 novella, A Christmas Carol, how durable or popular that tale about the grumpy skinflint Ebenezer Scrooge and a quartet of invasive night spirits would prove to be. The English novelist and journalist published myriad other yuletide yarns during his career, as well as further ghost stories. Yet most are long-forgotten, and not one of the others has been as oft-adapted for the theater, radio, and television as has Carol—or provided such rich inspiration for derivative fiction.
Case in point: “A Wreath for Marley,” which Iowa author Max Allan Collins concocted during a professional low point, in 1992, and first saw published four years later. “Marley” melded A Christmas Carol with Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon into a story—set in Chicago in 1942—that introduced Richard Stone, a dick of a private dick who, as Kevin Burton Smith remarks in The Thrilling Detective Web Site, “needed a little ghostly comeuppance and a spectral visitation or three.” Smith goes on to explain the tale’s set-up: “It’s Christmas Eve, and Stone is tying one on at his office Christmas party, celebrating his dodging of the draft thanks to a well-placed bribe, much to the disapproval of his secretary/girlfriend, Katie Crockett, whose brother is fighting overseas in the Pacific Theatre, while his squeaky-clean young op Joey is none too happy about all the divorce cases he’s been stuck with. Stone is also marking the one-year anniversary of the murder of his partner, Jake Marley—a murder he couldn’t even be bothered trying to solve.”
You pretty much know where this holiday fantasy is headed. But Collins’ elaborations on Dickens’ Victorian plot line—especially his casting substitutions of John Dillinger and Elvis Presley for two of the original yarn’s phantoms—lend “Marley” both intrigue and humor. “I am not by inclination a short-story writer,” Collins wrote in his blog a couple of months ago, “but as soon as I’d finished it, I knew ‘Marley’ was special.” So special, in fact, that he thought his novella could succeed as a movie. Unfortunately, other projects got in the way, and it was only last year that he finally began work on what he calls a “not-at-all lavishly budgeted” big-screen version of the story, retitled Blue Christmas. That one-hour, 19-minute feature saw its theatrical debut last spring, and is now available in both Blu-ray and DVD formats. (Alternatively, you can watch it online here.)
Although the picture isn’t quite so polished as many modern Hollywood blockbusters (reviewers have likened it to “a community theater production”), it has won its share of critical plaudits. The Aisle Seat, for instance, writes that it “outperforms its low budget with an effective script,” while Overly Honest Reviews says that Blue Christmas “offers a potent mix of suspense, humor, and nostalgia, promising to engage viewers with its compelling tale of personal redemption and the enduring power of the holiday spirit.”
‘Tis the season for films such as Blue Christmas, but that project is certainly not the only one on which the prolific Collins has been working lately. He also has a second film in the works, a final collaborative installment in Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer series due out just three months from now, a sequel to Hammett’s The Maltese Falconrecently completed, and True Noir: The Assassination of Anton Cermak—a multi-part audio drama adapted from True Detective (1983), his Shamus Award-winning first novel starring Chicago gumshoe Nathan Heller—set to drop its initial three episodes this coming Friday.
I took the opportunity earlier this month to ask Collins about all of these subjects. The results of our exchange are below.
J. Kingston Pierce: You’ve said before that the 1996 novella “A Wreath for Marley,” from which your film Blue Christmas is adapted, is “probably my favorite piece of fiction I ever wrote.” You’ve written a lot of fiction. Why does this yarn stand out so?
Max Allan Collins: That was probably an overstatement on my part—“A Wreath for Marley” is my favorite short fiction I’ve written. I am not known as a short-story specialist, and in fact I’m not even the best short-story writer in my house—that would be my wife, Barb. I’m a novelist by nature, and it took me a while to sell “Marley,” because Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, for example, liked it but found it too long for their purposes. Probably the most prominent place where it’s appeared is in Otto Penzler’s Big Book of Christmas Mysteries. And of course it’s in my collection Blue Christmas and Other Holiday Homicides [2001].
JKP: I hear that A Christmas Carol is your favorite Charles Dickens story, at least in part because you so enjoy the 1951 Alastair Sim movie version, Scrooge. Had you long considered ways to re-conceive that story with a crime-fiction angle?
MAC: No, it was something that occurred to me at a specific time, an idea I knew was special and pursued it immediately.
I have told this story frequently, but it’s necessary to tell it again. In early December (or maybe late November) 1992, I was fired from writing the Dick Tracy comic strip by the new editor at the Tribune Syndicate. He and I agreed on only one thing: that we hated each other. The day I received word of my firing (after a very successful run on that strip) I heard from my agent that my current Nate Heller contract had been cancelled by Bantam. This was right after a Heller novel, Stolen Away, won the Best Novel Shamus Award, so to say I was blindsided is an understatement.
I went into a brief period of not writing (not writer’s block exactly, but the lack of a project to drive me) and was understandably at a low ebb. On Christmas Eve 1992, after everybody but me was tucked in their wee little beds, I wrote “A Wreath for Marley” in a fever pitch. In one sitting, I wrote the entire 50-page novella. And after that my juices were flowing again. I started doing short stories for Ed Gorman and Marty Greenberg, who were doing theme anthologies that my wife was contributing to, and Michaela Hamilton at Dutton picked Nate Heller up. Heller is now at his fifth publisher, Hard Case Crime, a bit of a Christmas miracle of itself in this market.
I should add that the Alastair Sim Scrooge and Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon represented two narratives I loved, and somehow something in my brain saw the way their core concepts could be combined.
JKP: Did you ever consider making “Marley” a Nate Heller story, rather than enlisting a new Chicago P.I., Richard Stone? There are definite similarities between those two protagonists. But was there something Stone brought to the plot that Heller didn’t have going for him?
MAC: Heller was never an option. Richard Stone is more of a stinker than Nate, and the novella needed a third-person approach, not the Heller first-person one. And Heller is always fact-based, and “Marley” was a hard-boiled fantasy. Also, the protagonist needed a rural, very homespun Americana-type background, which Stone had rejected.
JKP: Wasn’t it long ago that you first wrote the screenplay version of Blue Christmas? When was that, exactly, and what made you think the tale would satisfy a film audience?
MAC: When we did my first movie, Mommy, in 1994—which brought [actress] Patty McCormack back to her Bad Seed persona, but as an adult—it was part of my seeking a replacement in my working career for Dick Tracy. I loved The Bad Seed, both the [1954] William March novel and Patty’s film, and thought an adult variation on that kind of character would have appeal in a psychological, blackly comic thriller.
When our effort did well—we had a respectable indie budget (at the time) of half a million bucks—and we became a chain-wide Blockbuster buy and a prime-time movie on Lifetime, I knew we could move forward with another project. That was originally to be Blue Christmas—the script was written, locations were scouted, and preliminary casting was underway. But there was demand for a Mommy sequel, and that was fine with me—I had a notion of how to do a sequel that was its own thing, not a rehash. It didn’t do as well—Lifetime turned it down, though Blockbuster again bought it chain-wide—and some financial malfeasance on my producer’s end stalled my indie movie-making badly.
We did a few more projects on criminally low budgets—Eliot Ness: An Untouchable Life, Real Time: Siege at Lucas Street Market—and I made a couple of documentaries, and sort of moved on, occasionally managing to sell a screenplay (The Expert, The Last Lullaby).
I still thought Blue Christmas (as I titled the film project from “Marley”) would be a natural with audiences, combining a Christmas theme with a noir mystery, and tried a couple of times to get it done as a movie or as a stage play. But nothing came of it.
JKP: So you stuck that screenplay away in a drawer, only to more recently pull it out and finally turn it into a film. What motivated you at this stage in your life to venture back into movie-making?
MAC: A couple of years ago I was approached to do a radio-style Dick Tracy play as a fundraiser for the local arts center. I said no, that ship had long since sailed; but I offered them Encore for Murder, a [Mike Hammer] radio-style play I’d written for Stacy Keach to do as an audio presentation. I was invited to co-direct, and attended the first rehearsal expecting Amateur Night at Dixie but finding some really strong local talent. I took Barb along to the second rehearsal, to see if I was imagining things, and she said, “No, they’re very good.” I asked Gary Sandy, who had played Mike Hammer in two [stage] presentations of Encore for Murder (one in Kentucky, another in Florida) if he’d consider coming to Muscatine, Iowa, to help us out. I expected him to say no, but he generously said he’d love to do it. Gary, famously the star of WKRP in Cincinnati, had been in my movie Mommy’s Day.
Gary did a fantastic job, and as a last-minute thing we shot a dress rehearsal and the one performance, then edited it into a bonus feature for a re-do/updating of my Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillanedocumentary on Blu-ray. The video company decided also to release the radio play as a separate DVD. Suddenly I was making indie movies again.
The editing for Encore was done at the local community college, where I saw their Black Box theater and thought, “This is a lot like a movie soundstage.” And just sort of automatically the notion of doing Blue Christmas in a one-set format came to mind. Previous versions, with bigger budgets in mind, would have followed the detective to various Chicago locations. The new version would stay at the office where, after a night of heavy office-party drinking, the detective falls asleep and the Christmas Carol-like dreams/visions ensue.
JKP: You had hoped for more money to make Blue Christmas, including support from Greenlight Iowa. That didn’t happen. You decided to go ahead and make do with a “micro-budget,” instead. What concessions were you forced to swallow in order to produce this picture?
MAC: We were going to bring Gary Sandy back in to play Marley. We’d have had more overtly period-specific costumes and better props and, not a small thing, my producer, d.p. [director of photography], and myself would have got paid. We would have shot more second-unit footage—hallways of the office building, etc., and perhaps used two (adjacent) sets, the office and Stone’s apartment. Ultimately I like the way it works on the one office set—where all the visions play out.
JKP: I recently decided to re-read “A Wreath for Marley,” and was surprised at just how closely the film follows that novella’s plot and dialogue. One major change, though, was that Stone’s first spirit guide in the original story was the colorful American bank robber John Dillinger, while in the film it’s another bandit, Bonnie Parker, who—with her partner, Clyde Barrow—was gunned down by law enforcement in the same year as Dillinger, 1934. Why the switch?
MAC: Re-reading the screenplay as originally written, I felt we needed another strong female role. And I think Bonnie and Clyde may be more famous now than Dillinger. A real consideration was the possibility of landing Alisabeth Von Presley to play Bonnie. Alisabeth is sort of a Midwest superstar—she was on American Idol and American Songwriting Contest, and is a fabulous performer. I wrote it with her in mind and, with the help of my lead actor, Rob Merritt (like Alisabeth a Cedar Rapids resident), got her to agree to play the role. She won a Best Actress award for it from the Iowa Motion Picture Association.
JKP: What’s been the reception like so far of Blue Christmas?
MAC: We’ve had the opportunity to screen it at a few actual theaters, though it was designed for streaming and physical media, and audiences took to it warmly. Of course we had hometown advantage on the court. The reviews have taken an interesting turn. We’ve had mostly very good reviews and several raves, but the couple of bad ones were really bad. Hey, it’s an $8,000-dollar micro-budget movie on mostly a single set. The cast is led by a couple of pros, Rob and Alisabeth, but the rest are from Quad Cities dinner theater and the same local talent used on Encore. If you meet our little movie on its own terms—as a bittersweet noir fantasy—you’ll have a good time. If you are expecting Wicked, you’ll be disappointed.
JKP: You have written that your work on Blue Christmas inspired you to try your hand at making a second holiday-themed film, Death by Fruitcake. This one brings to life the main characters from the Trash ’n’ Treasures mystery series you’ve been working on with your wife for the last two decades (all the titles of which begin with Antiques), and publishing under the joint nom de plume Barbara Allan. What’s the status of Fruitcake? Will it be available by next Christmas?
MAC: My wife, Barb, is a key element in my moviemaking, but she swore Blue Christmas would be her last film project. So I kind of tricked her back into it by doing an Antiques movie with our characters Brandy and Vivian Borne (we’re at 19 entries in the series). Over the last 10 years or so, several top TV showrunners have taken the property out for a possible series, and we’ve come very close but not caught the gold ring. We decided to show how effective and fun the Trash ’n’ Treasures mysteries could be on screen.
I’m proud of Blue Christmas, but there’s no question Death by Fruitcake is a step up. We have Alisabeth back (as Brandy) and Quad Cities broadcasting legend Paula Sands is Vivian. Paula had just retired from Channel 6 and was available (she also appears in Mommy’s Day) for a new kind of project. Both of them are terrific. Our Stone, Rob Merritt, plays recurring character Chief of Police Tony Cassato. And we have a bigger budget this time—a whopping $24,000. We did a two-night premiere at the local multi-plex and packed the house both nights. We haven’t taken it out to market yet, but it should easily be out there for Christmas 2025.
JKP: What did you learn from Blue Christmas that was helpful in putting together another modestly budgeted film, Death by Fruitcake?
MAC: Frankly, I wanted (and got) even more control. The six-day shoot of Blue Christmas found me leaving things to the director of photography while I focused on performance and story, just so we could make time. We had two weeks and some second-unit days on Fruitcake, and I was much more in auteur mode.
JKP: Do you think Death by Fruitcake might earn you more attention from hardened crime-fiction enthusiasts who believe the Trash ’n’ Treasures books are just too cozyish for their tastes?
MAC: I hope so. It’s a funny movie, with a share of dark comedy, that may introduce new audience members to the Antiques novels, which are after all on some level a spoof of the cozy genre and on another a two-detective approach not entirely unlike Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe.
JKP: While I have your attention, let me ask about a couple of other works you have in the hopper, the first being Baby, It’s Murder, which is due out this coming March from Titan Books. After penning 14 previous Mike Hammer novels, finished by you from material Mickey Spillane left behind when he died in 2006, this is to be Hammer’s last novel-length outing. Why end the series here?
MAC: Titan and I were at the point where I would have to start writing strictly original Hammer novels. The object had always been to complete the unfinished projects from Mickey’s files. The first eight or so were from substantial manuscripts. By the end I was using synopses he had jotted down. If there’s a movie or something, I’d consider putting Mike back out there. But for now, our goal of completing what Mickey left behind has been met.
Baby, It’s Murder has some special poignancy and is a good stopping place. Wait till you read the last line!
JKP: This is going to be a short novel (just 192 pages long, according to Amazon), but it must have been a very significant one to you. What have you learned about either Spillane’s storytelling methods or Mike Hammer’s character that you didn’t know before you started trying to bring the last of Mickey’s fiction to the reading public?
MAC: There’s enough Spillane in my native style to just ramp it up a little on these novels. I am strictly a Hammett/Chandler/Spillane boy—no other private-eye writers have influenced me a whit. I concentrate on the Hammer character, getting him right, and let the books write themselves. I do think there’s more humor in my Hammer, or if not more, then a slightly different style of humor—less Howard Hawks in tone. And I allow Mike to show a tad more humanity than Mickey did, although my take is probably just as tough—I think it’s scarier when a guy with a certain sensitivity does something really violent and vengeful.
JKP: What do you think you’ve added to our understanding of Hammer that we didn’t know by the time Black Alley—the final Hammer novel Spillane wrote by himself—reached print in 1996?
MAC: Mickey was struggling with Velda toward the end. He wanted Mike and Velda to be full partners, including sexually, but his conservative religious beliefs sort of hamstrung him. He would find excuses for them not having sex, and started denying that they’d ever had sex, though that was the pay-off of The Snake. So I made it clear that Velda and Mike were full partners. There’s a lot more full-blooded Velda in my collaborations with Mickey. Maybe that comes from writing the Ms. Tree comics character for a decade and a half.
JKP: In addition, you finally gave Velda a last name, Sterling.
MAC: That was Mickey’s last name for Velda, never revealed till I became involved. In the movie of The Girl Hunters, an “S” bracelet is shown. And, by the way, the last name of Patty McCormack’s Mommy character, in those films, is Sterling.
JKP: Although you won’t be writing any more Hammer novels, do you think the character might figure into future short stories?
MAC: Possibly, though there’s one major Hammer project left to do—a science-fiction-oriented one that needs to be set apart from the canon somewhat. Mickey called it Time Cycle, but I’m hoping to call it Mickey Spillane’s The Time Machine.
JKP: Now let’s talk about The Return of the Maltese Falcon, your sequel to Dashiell Hammett’s famous 1929 detective novel. How long have you been thinking about writing this book?
MAC: Oh, I have been thinking about doing it for maybe 15 years. Keeping an eye on the public domain clock. [Falcon is one of “thousands of copyrighted works from 1929 (that) will enter the U.S. public domain” beginning in 2025.]
JKP: What do you say when people dismiss the need for such a sequel?
MAC: Well, it isn’t necessary. But a surprising number of readers, and fans of the John Huston-directed movie, would have liked another ending. Even Bogart (who apparently came up with it) added a different last line. I think a good case can be made that Hammett’s ending is perfect, though. That doesn’t stop me from wanting more Sam Spade.
It’s disappointing to me, but not surprising, that some Hammett fans resent this project. Don Herron, whose The Dashiell Hammett Tour guidebook was a major reference for my novel, has made it clear in his Internet column that he won’t be reading the novel. He actually made fun of the idea. I was only half-way through writing Return and I already had a bad review!
JKP: Before we move on, just what was the different last line Humphrey Bogart proposed for The Maltese Falcon?
MAC: Technically, it’s “huh?” Spoken by the cop, Sergeant [Tom] Polhaus. But before “huh,” Bogart says, “The, uh … stuff that dreams are made of.” Hammett’s tag, an additional scene, has [his secretary] Effine Perine disenchanted with him and [his late partner’s wife] Iva Archer lurking to step in.
JKP: So can you tell us a little something about the plot of Return? Do you pick up right on the heels of Hammett’s tale, or is this a story set later in the Depression? And other than Sam Spade, which characters from the original book are you bringing back?
MAC: It takes place in December 1928, within two weeks of the end of the action in The Maltese Falcon. Most of the characters I use are either in the original novel (Brigid O’Shaughnessy, Joel Cairo) or are characters referred to in the original but who were never on stage (General Kemidov, Dixie Monahan). Rhea Gutman, who is in the original but was left out of the Huston film, is a major player. The idea was to work as much as possible within the confines of the Hammett novel—to make that the world.
JKP: In addition to The Maltese Falcon, Hammett penned three Sam Spade short stories. Now that you’ve made his San Francisco gumshoe your own, can you see using Spade again in your future short fiction?
MAC: Not short fiction necessarily, but possibly—if Return is well-received—another Spade novel or two. You make a necessary point: Hammett used, perhaps conceived, Spade as a series character. He was on that path when he stopped writing. Spade was of course [the star of] a very successful radio series, if a rather spoofy one, that Hammett licensed.
JKP: As if you didn’t have your fingers in enough pies already, you have also been working on a major Nate Heller project this past year.
MAC: Yes, a 10-part immersive, full-cast audio drama based on the first Heller novel, True Detective. Because of the HBO show, we couldn’t use the book’s title, so we decided upon True Noir. I’ve adapted [my story] myself, into a 400-page script. The episodes are each a bit over half an hour. Robert Meyer Burnett, who is a major YouTube presence but also a film and TV director, is directing and editing the production. Rob has been great to work with—having me sit in on all the recording sessions and offer my input, which is not usual director behavior. Our cast is unbelievably stellar—David Straithairn (as Frank Nitti), Vincent Pastore, Katee Sackhoff, Bill Smitrovich, William Sadler, Jeffrey Combs, Adam Arkin, and that’s just scratching the surface. Our casting director, Christine Sheaks, and Rob Burnett came up with the cast, though I also got my friends Bill Mumy and Patton Oswalt to participate. Nate Heller is played by Michael Rosenbaum, of Smallville fame, and he nails the character. Just great.
This is a dream come true for me, essentially a movie without pictures that really brings my vision to life. The initial three episodes will be “dropped,” as they say, very soon, followed by weekly, podcast-style distribution of the other seven episodes. Stay tuned.
You can now purchase True Noirhere. JKP:True Noir reminds me of an old-time radio drama, with sound effects and everything. Are you a fan of radio mystery series?
MAC: I am a fan of old radio, though Barb and I lean more toward Fibber McGee and Molly and The Great Gildersleeve. Of the non-comedies, we like Dragnet. In my ways, including subject matter, True Noir is a big advancement over the traditional old-time radio dramas, which have their charm but can sound hokey to a contemporary audience. True Noir has first-rate sound effects and a wonderful, complete score.
JKP: What happened to Todd Stashwick (Star Trek: Picard, 12 Monkeys, The Riches). Wasn't he slated to voice Nate Heller in your forthcoming audio production?
MAC: Todd was hired to do the proof-of-concept mini-episode, with an eye on him doing True Noir. He did a fine job but we had some scheduling and creative issues we couldn't get past. We looked at some very big names for Nate Heller, and finally just auditioned a few people. Michael Rosenbaum knocked it out of the park—the moment Rob Burnett and I first heard Michael, we knew we had our man.
JKP: If True Noir is a hit, would you then adapt other Heller novels? I remember you’d actually thought initially to adapt Stolen Away first.
MAC: Yes, we’d do more, although we hope it leads to a long-form streaming TV series. We’re discussing The Million-Dollar Wound [first published back in 1986] at the present.
JKP: So what’s next on your writing plate?
MAC: Barb is working on her draft of Antiques Round-up. She’s almost done, so I’ll be starting that the first of January (or thereabouts).
JKP: Finally, I can’t leave off without inquiring about your health, as you often write about that in your blog--and it’ts affects your production as a fiction writer. How are you doing?
MAC: I am doing fine. The recurring joke around here is, “I’m in great health for somebody with this much wrong with him.” Doing a full two-week shoot on Death by Fruitcake was a sort of test to see what I can still pull off. The biggest problem for me, and anyone my age writing the kind of things I do, is the shrinking markets. My editors, even my publishers, are heading into well-deserved retirements. But I don’t know what to do with myself but write.
While I struggle to assemble The Rap Sheet’s 2024 collection of “favorite crime fiction” posts, other publications and Web sites are declaring their own best-of-the-year recommendations.
Just two weeks after announcing the winners of its annual awards, Crime Fiction Lover is starting to roll out its critics’ comments on what new books from this genre they liked over the last dozen months. Seemingly ubiquitous UK reviewer Paul Burke (who already contributed to Crime Time’s recent discussion on the subject of “bests”) has narrowed his preferences to five titles only:
•The Bells of Westminster, by Leonora Nattrass (Viper) •The Last Days of Johnny Nunn, by Nick Triplow (No Exit Press) •Bay of Thieves, by Megan Davis (Zaffre) •The Silent Killer, by Trevor Wood (Quercus) •Murder Under the Midnight Sun, by Stella Blómkvist (Corylus)
Burke also hosts, on his Crime Time PM podcast, a panel of a distinguished writers (Trevor Wood, Sam Holland, Antony Johnstone, Jo Furniss, Rob Parker, and Michael Wood) addressing this hot topic. They go further to mention releases they are looking forward to reading in 2025. (Yay, two more to come by Vaseem Khan!)
Among the diverse works (not all of them published this year) mentioned as favorites by Aunt Agatha’s reviewer Vicki Kondelik are What Time the Sexton’s Spade Doth Rust, by Alan Bradley, and To Slip the Bonds of Earth, by Amanda Flower. Jeremy Black’s top picks of 2024 include Simon Mason’s The Case of the Lonely Accountant, Martin Edwards’ Hemlock Bay, and Janice Hallett’s The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels. Among others, Bookreporter toutsThe Stars Turned Inside Out, by Nova Jacobs, and The Last One at the Wedding, by Jason Rekulak, while National Public Radio critic Maureen Corrigan gives thumbs up to Francis Spufford’s Cahokia Jazz, Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake, and Liz Moore’s The God of the Woods.
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In honor of The Rap Sheet’s first birthday, we invited more than 100 crime writers, book critics, and bloggers from all over the English-speaking world to choose the one crime/mystery/thriller novel that they thought had been “most unjustly overlooked, criminally forgotten, or underappreciated over the years.” Their choices can be found here.
In the Beginning ...
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a solo vacation to Cambodia. Shake is blissfully ignorant of this turn until he’s suddenly dragooned from his sedentary life by a mob enforcer, the Freudianly skewed Dikran, who demands his help in rescuing Lexy.
camera, a Korean War-era Speed Graphic. But while he recuperates in a hospital bed, his lover, Anita Claire, finds that camera, and the photos he snapped with it are published, putting Harry squarely in the unwelcome sights of the LAPD.
Bill Odgen (the main character from Cottonwood, Phillips’ 2004 novel) now owns a photography studio. There she learns the business, but this being Hollywood—where dreams die and reality sets in hard and fast—Flavia and Bill soon find themselves in the nascent pornography business. (A warning for readers: this book features sex, but when it does [people must make a living somehow], it’s not even close to the full-frontal nuts-and-bolts, lascivious variety that’s so prevalent today.) As the city endures a succession of murders, Bill and his resourceful granddaughter find themselves mixed up in events as complicated and ominous as any found in old black-and-white pictures.
purchase their product, as well. The Combine’s de facto boss, Luke’s uncle Del, nixes any such deal, which is understood clearly as throwing down the gauntlet.
• Son of the Old West: The Odyssey of Charlie Siringo: Cowboy, Detective, Writer of the Wild Frontier, by Nathan Ward (Grove Press):
