The Story Behind the Story: “Bury Me Deep,” by Megan Abbott

(Editor’s note: This is the third installment of our “Story Behind the Story” series. Today we welcome New York City author Megan Abbott, who gives us the background to her new historical suspense novel, Bury Me Deep, which is based on a true, 1930s crime involving jealousy, abandonment, and homicide.)

On the evening of October 16, 1931, in Phoenix, Arizona, a pretty young doctor’s wife named Winnie Ruth Judd went to the apartment of her two closest female friends for dinner. An argument broke out, a gun was fired, and all three women were shot--Judd in her left hand, her two friends fatally. The 26-year-old Judd claimed self-defense. Prosecutors argued that she’d murdered in cold blood.

The story became one of the most notorious tabloid sensations of that decade, with Winnie Ruth Judd’s winsome face appearing on newspapers across the country under headlines branding her “The Blonde Butcher,” “The Velvet Tigress,” and, most famously, the “Trunk Murderess”--so named because both women’s bodies were found stuffed into trunks and abandoned at a Los Angeles railway station, one of the corpses cut into three pieces for easier packing.

But, of course, the story behind the “Trunk Murderess” sobriquet is so much more complicated than it appears, concealing far more than it reveals. Judd’s is a tale that lingers, that tantalizes. With so many decades behind us, free of the charged circumstances of the day, many elements seem clearer now, most clearly the ruinous handling of the crime scene (one example: blood samples were reportedly not taken for a month, after hundreds of people had traipsed through the “murder house,” being charged admission by the landlord). At the same time, however, the more veils we are able to tear away the more we realize that we will never have all the answers.

I can’t recall the first time I heard the name Winnie Ruth Judd. As a child, devouring true-crime books, I remember reading about her any number of times in accounts of “women who kill” through the ages. Somehow, over the years, I kept returning to the story. When I read journalist Jana Bommersbach’s excellent 1992 book, Trunk Murderess: Winnie Ruth Judd, it deepened the tale for me. Detailing the miscarriages of justice, the dubious confessions, and the old-boy network operating in Phoenix at that time, Bommersbach makes a stirring case to support Judd’s contention of self-defense and ultimately throws into question whether Judd (shown at left) fired any gun at all.

The more I read about this case, the more I came to see it as a tale of a lonely young woman whose isolation and naïveté rendered her vulnerable. A minister’s daughter from the Midwest, married to a physician more than twice her age, Judd found herself virtually abandoned in Phoenix after her husband’s morphine addiction sent him off to Mexico to find work. It’s no surprise that she was eager for friendship, which she found with a young nurse and her tuberculosis-stricken roommate--Agnes (“Anne”) LeRoi and Hedvig (“Sammy”) Samuelson--a pair of single gals who were living hand to mouth, assisted in part by the kindnesses of the town’s businessmen, particularly the dashing, politically well-connected J.J. “Happy Jack” Halloran. The inexperienced Judd fell hard for the wild--and very married--Jack, upsetting the delicate balance of power among the young women and, under circumstances that still remain unclear, leading to tragedy.

To me, the story came to seem one part James M. Cain, one part Edith Wharton, and one part Edgar Allan Poe. I knew I wanted to write a fictionalized version of the case, but I wasn’t sure how to go about doing it. The early 1930s era intimidated me. I’d never set anything quite that far in the past. For a while, I tried to move the whole story forward in time to the 1940s, or change the locale to Los Angeles, a more familiar setting.

But neither approach worked. In this case, specificity counted. The pivot the story marked, poised between a crushing hangover from the Jazz Age and the hard realities of the Great Depression, seemed critical. Phoenix at the time was a kind of dropping-off place for the TB-stricken, and the disease’s threat looms heavily over the story (Winnie Ruth Judd had also suffered from TB). Most of all, the fact that the slayings took place in the darkest days of the Depression was central to the story. All three women depended, both emotionally and economically, on keeping Jack Halloran “happy.”

I wanted to write a novel that would look at this “tiger women,” Judd, from another vantage point, free of the tabloid trappings--a novel that would place at its center the kind of woman so frequently portrayed as a femme fatale, as a party girl hoping to snag some sugar daddy, or as a vengeful mistress bringing ruin on her married lovers. I wanted to look at such a woman from the inside.

So I dug in, and immersed myself in all things 1930 through 1933, drowning especially in the glories of the riotous and seamy pre-Code Hollywood movies of that period, but also reading up on the culture of TB clinics at the time, Phoenix at this critical stage (half Western small town, half big-city-on-the-rise), and before long I was hooked. Traveling to Phoenix, I even got an eerie, and poignant, “insider’s tour” of the sites still standing, including the “murder house” (above), thanks to the Poisoned Pen bookstore’s Patrick Milliken, a true aficionado of the case.

While the novel that emerged, Bury Me Deep, obviously takes the Judd story as its inspiration, I wound up steering my heroine toward a different fate. Winnie Ruth Judd was incarcerated in a mental institution for nearly four decades and escaped multiple times before receiving a pardon in 1971. She died in Phoenix in 1998 at age 93. I’d always wondered what might have happened if she had eluded authorities and been able to put her formidable survival skills to the test. So my heroine, Marion Seeley, carves a distinct path for herself. I know it’s a cheat, but isn’t that, in part, what we hope stories will do? Give us the endings we want?

READ MORE: Author, screenwriter, and blogger Jedidiah Ayres offers a terrific new interview with Megan Abbott in Hard-boiled Wonderland. Read it now.

Take 10

• Anyone for a T.J. Hooker movie? The 1982-1986 TV police drama, which starred William Shatner, Adrian Zmed, Heather Locklear, and James Darren (the last two of whom joined the show in its second season), is frequently mocked by critics. But it enjoyed enough audience support that, after it was cancelled by ABC in 1985, CBS picked up Hooker for another year. And you can still watch episodes of that show on the Web video site Crackle. Now Variety reports that director Chuck Russell and series creator Rick Husky have plans to take T.J. Hooker to the big screen. Don’t expect a faithful adaptation of the series, however: Variety describes the film project as an “action comedy.” (Hat tip to Lee Goldberg.)

• As Ed Gorman informs us, Cal Branche has added significantly to his already packed John D. MacDonald Homepage. He’s also launched a new blog about all things MacDonald.

• Actor Robert Culp recalls the creation of I Spy.

• Do you remember those incidental appearances director Alfred Hitchcock used to make in his own movies? If you haven’t seen them all (and even if you have), check out Empire Magazine’s “film-by-film look at those uncredited cameos: the showy, the subtle, and the one where he sees off Ingrid Bergman’s champers.”

• Here’s something I definitely did not remember: that James Bond and the Beatles had an antagonistic relationship.

• More Beatles lore, from today’s edition of The Writer’s Almanac:

It was on this day in 1957 that John Lennon and Paul McCartney met at a church dance in Liverpool, England. John Lennon was almost 17, and Paul McCartney had just turned 15. Lennon had formed a band called The Quarrymen. They were all right, but not great, and they couldn’t play at bars because they were all underage. But they got a gig playing at St. Peter’s Church for the annual summer garden party, on a stage in a field behind the church, and then again that night in the dance hall at the church. Paul McCartney heard the band and thought they were pretty good--especially John Lennon. Paul went to school with one of the band members, who took him over to the band and introduced him while they were setting up for their second show. Paul said that he played guitar, and also that he knew how to tune one. No one in the band could tune their own guitars--they took them to a specialist--so they were impressed. Paul taught John how to tune, and he sang him a few recent rock songs, including a medley by Little Richard. And about a week later, John asked Paul to join the band.

• Short stories of no more than 25 words? I now know that they make up a genre called “hint fiction.” And that publisher W.W. Norton is planning an anthology of such brief yarns, some of which will be chosen through a public contest. Details here.

• Author Gail Bowen (The Brutal Heart) is the latest interviewee in Mystery Fanfare’s “Cool Canadian Crime” series. Read her exchange with David Cole here.

• English teacher and mystery writer Julia Buckley (Madeline Mann) talks about books and beagles in the new blog, Coffee with a Canine.

• Speaking of coffee, here’s good news for addicts like me.

Will One Be Called “An Early Frost”?

Two years after the death of British crime novelist R.D. Wingfield, who created the abrasive but popular series character Detective Inspector William Edward “Jack” Frost of Denton C.I.D., word arrives that Frost is planning a return:

Two ‘prequels’ set in the 1970s will chart Frost’s early career in a two-book deal commissioned by UK publisher Transworld from “James Henry,” the pen-name adopted by the writing partnership of James Gurbutt (himself an associate with Wingfield’s original publisher, Constable) and Henry Sutton, who teaches creative writing at the University of East Anglia.

The first of the Frost prequels is expected to be published in 2011. The last Frost novel, A Killing Frost, was published posthumously in 2008.

(Hat tip to Mike Ripley.)

Turmoil in the House

I just returned home from a July 4 weekend spent with my brother in Portland, Oregon, to find news about a surprise business development at Wisconsin-based publisher Bleak House Books:

Ben LeRoy and Alison Janssen announced today that they will leave their positions at Bleak House Books (a division of Big Earth Publishing) and begin a new venture, Tyrus Books.

LeRoy began publishing crime and literary fiction in 2001, with John Galligan’s Red Sky, Red Dragonfly. Titles bearing the Bleak House banner started in 2003, and to date, the company has published over fifty titles. In 2005, Bleak House Books was acquired by Big Earth Publishing, a “family of independent publishers.”

With LeRoy and Janssen at the helm, Bleak House Books titles have garnered much critical attention and praise, including seven starred reviews in trade publications, inclusion on several “Best of the Year” lists, and over a dozen nominations for prestigious awards in the mystery community. In 2008, three Bleak House titles were named finalists for the Edgar® Awards--a first for a small, independent press.

On its Web site, Tyrus says it expects to launch its first set of new titles in August. Three forthcoming books are already being advertised: Silver Lake, by Peter Gadol; Double Exposure, by Michael Lister; and Beyond the Dark and the Daylight, edited by Ed Gorman and Martin Greenberg.

Of the new venture, Janssen has been quoted as saying: “We’ll of course be sticking with what we know: tight, affecting, honest fiction dealing with crime and its repercussions. I’ll always be interested in stories of men and women making mistakes, and seeking redemption in some form or another. Our name is changing, but our commitment to quality storytelling remains the same.”

LeRoy (who, in 1995, co-founded what would become Bleak House) and Janssen (who joined Bleak House in 2003) have shepherded to print books by several well-recognized authors in the crime-fiction field, including Reed Farrel Coleman, Jennifer Jordan, Craig McDonald, and Anthony Neil Smith. This publishing pair seem to have worked very well together, earning plaudits from a number of their authors. And when LeRoy was nominated earlier this year for a Spinetingler Award in the Best Editor category, a post in the Bleak House blog remarked:

It says “Ben LeRoy of Bleak House” but really, anybody who knows a thing about this company knows that nothing gets done (or done well, at least) without the hard work and genius of Alison. She’s the one who works with the great Bleak House authors to polish the books, while Ben plays solitaire and goes golfing. A vote for one is a vote for both (but secretly a bigger vote for Alison).

More information about LeRoy and Janssen can be found here.

We look forward to receiving more news about the future plans of both Tyrus and Bleak House.

UPDATE: After receiving word of these departures, blogger-critic Sarah Weinman fired off a few questions to Ben LeRoy, among them being this one:

What happens to the Bleak House backlist--is it staying with Big Earth, or coming with you both?

The Bleak House backlist will stay with Big Earth. Titles will continue to be available for order from Big Earth/Bleak House. We’re very proud of those books and authors and have left them in good hands. BE/BH will continue to publish books, including Libby Fischer Hellmann’s Doubleback, Victoria Houston’s Dead Renegade, Mark Coggins’ The Big Wake-up, and Randall Peffer’s Seahawk Hunting.

Read all of Weinman’s short interview with LeRoy here.

A Long Line of Zen Men

“Thais have a saying about a frog living inside a coconut shell. The frog believes that the world inside the shell is the whole universe. In the private investigation business, Vincent Calvino had clients who were like the frog. What they saw from inside their shell blinded them, made them unable to solve a problem. So they hired Calvino. He knew the drill. Shells offered comfort and security. Leaving a shell could be a dangerous business. Calvino’s froglike clients paid him to venture into a larger existence and to find out and report on the wiring of relationships and places and events, how they were linked and fit together in networks.”
-- from The Risk of Infidelity Index, 2007

Christopher G. Moore and I bonded during this last spring’s Left Coast Crime convention in Hawaii, specifically over the subject of Lawrence Block’s 1994 Matt Scudder novel, A Long Line of Dead Men. Earlier that same day, I had enthused to another author, Barry Eisler, about this thing Block does in Long Line: he places detective Scudder and his friend, career criminal Mick Ballou, in the back room of a bar and just allows them to talk. And talk. Block writes a conversation that goes on for four or five chapters. Your average novelist couldn’t get away with that; it’s breaking all the standard rules of writing, but the results are absolutely riveting.

I recalled all of this in a conversation with Moore when we met during a panel discussion about politics in modern thrillers. We got along famously after that, and I convinced Moore to sit for a short interview with me the next day. I had arranged with LCC organizers to do a 15-minute thing called Talk Story, which allowed me to present something to the public during this convention on whatever subject I preferred. I decided to do an interview, since that’s so often part of the job of a blogger and Internet book critic. Hardly anybody showed up to watch me talk with Moore, but that was fine, since it allowed me to go longer than was planned and dig deeper. Fortunately, a filmmaker friend of Moore’s, Tito Haggardt (of Tito Productions), was on hand to capture our exchange on videotape.

Videotaped interviews are destined to become more important in the future, as the media move farther and farther away from traditional print presentations. They can also be extremely interesting. A live exchange is a spontaneous and living thing, allowing the viewer to see the interaction between interviewer and subject.

And the 56-year-old Moore is a delightful subject--a gentleman, soft-spoken and articulate, and passionate about the crime-fiction genre. A former law professor at Canada’s University of British Columbia, Moore first visited Thailand in the early 1980s to do some research for a book. He’s stayed there ever since, and has written almost 20 novels, 10 of them mysteries featuring ex-New York private eye Calvino. Moore understands that character is what comes first, what always must come first. His Vincent Calvino is a great character, a white man who flees America’s East Coast (I will not spoil things by telling you why) and lands in Thailand, where he gradually embraces Buddhism. That was one of the things we talked about in Hawaii: the peculiarity of his focusing not on a white Catholic, but on a white Buddhist.

In his novels, Moore writes about Bangkok as if it were one of the most famous cities of noir fiction. The nightlife there comes off as mysterious, dangerous, and exciting and the people in power are cast as no less corrupt than their counterparts might be in America. He makes Bangkok breathe and work as an important part of his cast. It’s akin to what George Pelecanos does with Washington, D.C., and what Don Winslow does with San Diego. Moore is a stylist much like the writers of the early to mid-20th century who kick-started the P.I. genre in America. He writes with the angry and sad voice of Ross Macdonald and the flow of and beauty of Raymond Chandler. Penning his books in the third-person, he uses allegory and symbolism to great effect. The Calvino series is distinctive and wonderful, not to be missed, and I’m pleased to see that it is finally becoming better known in the States.

I want to thank Tito Haggardt for capturing my one-on-one with Moore on video, and for making it possible for us to post that here in two parts. This technology for blogs is still developing, so please forgive us for taking so long to offer my interview in The Rap Sheet. I’m confident, at least, that you will enjoy the results.

One Dream Shattered

It sounds as if there will not be a Veronica Mars movie, after all.

Having It Just So

Editor and blogger Gerald So makes his debut in Beat to a Pulp with a new short story called “Artifacts.”

The Book You Have to Read: “The Criminal,” by Jim Thompson

(Editor’s note: This is the 55th installment of our Friday blog series highlighting great but forgotten books. Today’s choice comes from Nate Flexer, author of The Disassembled Man, an “unrelentingly dark” new psycho noir novel from New Pulp Press. Flexer is the pseudonym of New Pulp proprietor Jon Basoff.)

With sleazy cover art and over-the-top titles, Jim Thompson’s books often appeared indistinguishable from all the other cheap paperbacks being churned out in the 1950s by publishers such as Gold Medal and Lion Books. But Thompson, nicknamed the “Dimestore Dostoyevsky,” created some of the most poignant literature of the 20th century. Employing unreliable narrators, a wicked sense of humor, and surrealistic imagery, Thompson helped transform the derided pulp genre into art. His most well-regarded works--The Killer Inside Me (1952), Savage Night (1953), A Hell of a Woman (1954), and Pop. 1280 (1964)--all used the disconcerting technique of casting madmen to narrate his tales (filmmaker Stanley Kubrick called The Killer Inside Me “probably the most chilling and believable first-person story of a criminally warped mind I have ever encountered.”). But it was a little-known 1953 novel called The Criminal that perhaps best showed Thompson’s concern for the disintegration of our collective morality.

The Criminal centers around the heinous murder and rape of a teenage girl named Josie Eddleman. Almost immediately, suspicion surrounds Bob Talbert, a teenage neighbor of the victim and the last person to see her alive. But as the novel weaves towards its ambiguous ending, Bob’s guilt or innocence becomes largely irrelevant. No, the audience never does find out if Bob Talbert is guilty of rape or homicide--although he is certainly guilty of something. But then again, every character in this novel is guilty of something. In fact, despite its title, this book is more a study of the jury than the criminal, a study of collective guilt.

One of the more fascinating elements of Thompson’s writing was his constant experimentation with narration. Unlike most pulp novelists, Thompson eschewed a straightforward telling of his yarns, instead creating narrators who are extraordinary for their unreliability. While Thompson was a gifted storyteller, his major strength comes from his psychological portraits. Motives are rarely what they appear to be. Rare, too, is the character in a Thompson novel who has a moral center; rather, we see men and women who are overwhelmed by their own devious thoughts and uncontrolled passions. In The Criminal, Thompson provides not one, but nine different voices. Each of those voices has his/her own version of the truth, but we as readers soon find it apparent that none of those voices really provides the truth, that perhaps there is no single truth, at least not one without prejudice. It is important to note that Jim Thompson was heavily influenced by William Faulkner, and The Criminal certainly has echoes of Faulkner’s Southern Gothic masterpiece, As I Lay Dying (1930), both in terms of theme and narrative technique. And while perhaps The Criminal doesn’t match the narrative genius of As I Lay Dying, it comes mighty close. Thompson lacked Faulkner’s lyricism and uncanny sense of place, but he matched Faulkner in terms of dark humor and social understanding.

Before Thompson became a fiction writer, he was a journalist, and he shows a healthy amount of cynicism for the profession and how the media can create an alternative reality. The newspaper reporter in this novel, a man named Bill Willis, is able to manipulate the public into figuratively crucifying Bob before any evidence is actually presented. Because Bob is known as a sub-par student and all-around slacker, Willis is able to feast upon the public’s tendency to stereotype, and turn a truant into a murderer.

While The Criminal doesn’t contain the spectacular brutality of some of Thompson’s other works, there is a kind of weary resignation evident throughout its pages. Early in the book, Bob’s father says: “You just rock along, doing the things that you have to, and you get kind of startled sometimes when you stand off and look at yourself. You think, my God, that isn’t me. How did I ever get like that? But you go right ahead, startled or not, hating it or not, because you don’t actually have much to say about it. You’re not moving so much as you are being moved.” And later the D.A’s wife muses: “Isn’t it terrible? You’re just like you always were, the very same person, and suddenly that isn’t good enough anymore.”

Some readers may find the ending of The Criminal a bit disappointing, since there is no tidy resolution. However, that ambiguity is exactly what makes the novel powerful. As the story progresses, we can’t help but sympathize with this boy who has been charged with the crime. In fact, when we actually hear from Bob, he comes across as an upstanding young man and a sympathetic character. But Thompson was fascinated by the sociopaths and their ability to make people believe that they are something other than what they really are. For those of us who read The Killer Inside Me and Pop. 1280, we can’t help but wonder if Bob is, in fact, pulling the wool over our eyes.

In the end, the town and tabloids forget about Josie Eddleman, and Bob Talbert’s guilt or innocence becomes largely irrelevant. Ultimately, all that we are left with is a smörgåsbord of greed and betrayal, creating a Thompsonian view of a universe drenched with moral nihilism.

READ MORE: “The Book You Have to Read: The Grifters, by Jim Thompson,” by Chris Knopf (The Rap Sheet).

Up from Oblivion

I have recently been reading--and very much enjoying--Spanish author Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s new novel, The Angel’s Game. Like its best-selling predecessor, The Shadow of the Wind (2001), Angel’s welcomes readers into the protective recesses of Barcelona’s fictional Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a vast hidden library of obscure and underappreciated volumes that have been saved by readers who understood their worth. The concept reminds me somewhat of Patti Abbott’s “forgotten books” series. All of the participants in this now year-old Web project are guardians of neglected literature, hoping to prevent exceptional older works--many of them out of print--from disappearing out of human memory. I, for one, have found a good number of superior new reads because of this series. I hope others have as well.

Today brings a particularly rich abundance of books deserving of a second look. In addition to Nate Flexer’s write-up about The Criminal on this page, the crime-fiction volumes being touted include: Fires That Destroy, by Harry Whittington; Excellent Intentions, by Richard Hull; The Outside Man, by Richard North Patterson; The Chalk Pit Murder, by Edgar Lustgarten; Jass, by David Fulmer; The Defenders, by Edward S. Aarons (a tie-in with the 1960s TV series); Trace, by Warren Murphy; The Chinese Gold Murders, by Robert van Gulik; Pagoda, by James Atlee; and Detective Fiction (Cultural History of Literature), by Charles J. Rzepka.

Abbott features several more lost-book recommendations (among them, one about Benjamin M. Schutz’s Fistful of Empty) in her own blog, plus a list of all of this day’s participating blogs.

Bullet Points: Pre-Fourth of July Edition

• On the occasion of her second novel being published in Britain, Germany’s Andrea Maria Schenkel talks with Bob Cornwell of Tangled Web. Cornwell’s piece begins:

“Crime writers have to use considerable ingenuity to bring anything fresh to the genre,” wrote Natasha Cooper in her Times Literary Supplement review of The Murder Farm (Quercus, 2008). But, she declared, Andrea Maria Schenkel in her first-ever novel had pulled it off. Later David Peace, himself a formally inventive writer, would hint at the way in which Schenkel had “shown and redefined the possibilities and responsibilities of the genre”.

Now Schenkel has done it again. In her new book, the chilling Ice Cold (there is no other word) she re-imagines another real-life case, just as she did in The Murder Farm, this time of Johann Eichhorn, a serial sex killer executed in Nazi Germany in 1939. One by one, each book reached the top position in the German best-seller charts; each book was selected as the best crime novel of the year by the jury of mystery critics and literary scholars that award the Deutscher Krimi-Preis. The Murder Farm was also awarded the Friedrich Glauser Prize by Das Syndikat, the German crime-writer’s association. In Sweden, the book took precedence over both John le Carré and Peter Temple (amongst others) to win the 2008 Martin Beck Award, the Swedish Academy (of Detection)’s prize for the best translated novel.

• A new Miss Marple mystery series debuts this Sunday on PBS-TV.

• It’s been 18 years since the youth-oriented crime series 21 Jump Street disappeared from the FOX-TV schedule. But suddenly there’s talk of a big-screen version being produced, and news that Johnny Depp--who’s come a long way since he starred as undercover cop Tom Hanson on that show--wants a part in the flick.

• Another independent bookstore bites the dust. This time it’s Richmond, Virginia’s decade-old Creatures ’n Crooks, which specializes in mystery, science fiction, fantasy, and horror fiction. Read more here.

• For Karen Sisco lovers: the intro to that ill-treated ABC-TV series.

• The state of post-apartheid South African crime fiction.

• Still more classic book covers to love, from Robert Bloch, Charlie Wells, and Donald E. Westlake.

• TV Squad interviews Leverage’s Timothy Hutton.

• Shots’ L.J. Hurst speaks with James Zemboy, author of the new non-fiction book, The Detective Novels of Agatha Christie: A Reader’s Guide, which is described as being “perhaps the largest study of her work yet published.”

• If you have yet to discover the acclaimed work of Irish writer John Connolly (The Lovers), The Mystery Bookshelf offers a handy introduction to his novels.

• Hard Case Crime honcho Charles Ardai talks rather skeptically about the economics of publishing.

• And I’m posting this ... well, just because.

“The City Itself Was a Co-star”

I was hoping this would happen. Following up on yesterday’s sad news that actor Karl Malden died at age 97, the San Francisco Chronicle decided to look back at the role in which most Americans likely remember seeing Malden--that of “dedicated and compassionate” Detective Lieutenant Mike Stone in The Streets of San Francisco (1972-1977)--and how Streets portrayed the captivating city of its title.

Writer Ruthe Stein recalls that the series, “which premiered as a TV film of the same title in September 1972, ran for five seasons, with Michael Douglas playing Inspector Steve Keller through most of the show’s run.” She goes on to explain that

Unlike many current TV shows set in San Francisco, such as “Monk,” the series was actually filmed on location and it could be said that the city itself was a co-star. The series opened every week with quick-cut aerial shots of San Francisco, swooping over Civic Center, through Chinatown, over Fisherman’s Wharf, with the immediately identifiable percussive theme playing in the background. ...

Virtually the entire city was the back lot for “Streets of San Francisco,” but careful viewers will find a particular emphasis on Potrero Hill. In fact, one of the early episodes called “The House on Hyde Street,” featuring veteran actor Lew Ayres as a reclusive old man, wasn’t filmed anywhere near Hyde Street but on the corner of Pennsylvania and 18th streets.

The show’s producers were also fond of filming at Fisherman’s Wharf and at the Hall of Justice before the construction of the jail facilities. Once, while the series was shooting in Chinatown, a teenage boy was hit by a car. Mr. Malden immediately jumped in to assist, holding up traffic until an ambulance arrived. A gathering crowd thought it was a scene from the show.

Although “Streets” went off the air in 1977, NBC brought Mr. Malden back for a made-for-TV film in 1992 called “Back to the Streets of San Francisco.” Stone had been promoted and supervised two younger inspectors. By that time, Douglas had a healthy film career and did not participate in the film.

Meanwhile, I did some digging through my office today in search of the 1972 Fall Preview edition of TV Guide (with its all-too-brief synopsis of the debuting Streets), and happened across a cover story about Malden that Dick Lochte--who is now the Nero Award-winning author of Sleeping Dog (1986) and Croaked! (2007)--penned for the May 26, 1973, edition of TV Guide. The piece is good enough, and nostalgic enough, that I decided to embed the whole thing below. Simply click on the pages to increase them to readable size.

Fireworks of All Sorts

Speaking of this Independence Day, note that Janet Rudolph has posted a list of Fourth of July-related crime novels in Mystery Fanfare. Most of the titles give away the relationship between story and holiday (The Fourth of July Wake, by Harold Adams; Red, White, and Blue Murder, by Bill Crider; Star Spangled Murder, by Leslie Meier), but some take a little guidance to recognize as appropriate. Ann Parker’s Iron Ties? George Pelecanos’ King Suckerman? Tool & Die, by Sara Graves? Nice to know that we have options.

Taster Treats

Are you looking for a film to rent for this coming Independence Day weekend? You just might get a few (or far too many) ideas from pop-culture site IFC.com’s rundown of “The 50 Greatest Trailers of All Time.” Featured among the cinematic teasers are those for Anatomy of a Murder, The Manchurian Candidate, The Big Sleep, Charade, GoldenEye, 1996’s Mission: Impossible (the best of the three M:I flicks so far, released before we understood just how peculiar Tom Cruise is), and Psycho. Outside of the crime/mystery/thriller field, this list also gives us The Bishop’s Wife, A Night at the Opera (Yes! The Marx Brothers!), Pulp Fiction, Citizen Kane, and topping this list: 1979’s Alien.

Anybody want to suggest a few more favorite trailers?

(Hat tip to Bill Crider.)

RELATED: “Marlowe Goes to the Movies,” by J. Kingston
Pierce (The Rap Sheet).

Cool and the Gangsters

Director Michael Mann’s new historical gangster film, Public Enemies, debuts today in the States (though British moviegoers will have to wait until Friday to see it). But already, this picture starring Johnny Depp, Christian Bale, and Marion Cotillard has been hailed by Salon’s Stephanie Zacharek. In her review today, Zacharek writes:

“Public Enemies” is a folk song rendered in visual shards instead of notes, hopscotching through parts of the Midwest as it follows [John] Dillinger’s numerous bank robberies and evasions.

Over and over again, he slips through the clutches of the awestruck [Melvin] Purvis, leaving the venerable G-man stroking his extra-square jaw, which further stokes the rage and determination of FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover (played, with stylized hamminess, by Billy Crudup). Strict narrative clarity isn’t the picture’s strong suit: Time and again Mann--who co-wrote the script, along with Ronan Bennett and Ann Biderman, based on a book by Bryan Burrough--fails to introduce characters properly, allowing figures like Stephen Dorff’s Homer Van Meter, an associate of Dillinger’s, to drift on-screen so unceremoniously that we’re not always sure exactly who they are and what they’re doing there. ...

But what the picture lacks in clarity it makes up for in visual vitality. Words aren’t the strong suit of “Public Enemies”; instead, Mann lays out his vocabulary in the tilt of a fedora, or the easygoing manner in which Dillinger tucks a machine gun under his arm, or the way Marion Cotillard, as Dillinger’s lady love Billie Frechette, lounges in a bathtub, extending a glorious naked leg to caress its rim with her foot. The glamour quotient in “Public Enemies” is high, and in a landscape of contemporary movies in which “sophistication” is seemingly a dirty word, it’s a relief to see actors in period dress rather than outlandish Willy Wonka get-ups and superhero costumes.

Even the movie’s violence has a grown-up gloss: Mann doesn’t necessarily glorify Dillinger’s violence, but he is attuned to all the ways in which, in the movies, cruel acts can also have a brutal elegance.

You’ll find that full critique here.

READ MORE: “Review: Public Enemies,” by Jeffrey M. Anderson (Cinematical); “The Real John Dillinger,” by Elliott J. Gorn (Slate); “Famous Cases: John Dillinger” (U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation); “Dillinger (1973),” by Samuel Wilson (Mondo 70); and for the sake of comparison, here is the trailer for Dillinger.

Good-bye, Karl

After last week, with its multiple celebrity deaths, I was really hoping to take a breather from the obituary beat. But no such luck, apparently. The latest sad news:

Karl Malden, one of Hollywood’s strongest and most versatile supporting actors, who won an Oscar playing his Broadway-originated role as Mitch in “A Streetcar Named Desire,” died today. He was 97.

Malden starred in the 1970s TV series “The Streets of San Francisco” and was the longtime American Express traveler’s-check spokesman, warning travelers to not leave home without it. He died of natural causes at his home in Brentwood, said his daughter Mila Doerner.

According to the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), Malden’s final dramatic performance was in an episode of The West Wing back in 2000. (Video clip here.) But as TV Squad tells it, “His last appearance in general was a few weeks ago. AFI gave a Life Achievement Award to Michael Douglas, and Malden videotaped a congratulations for him. Douglas costarred in The Streets of San Francisco with Malden for several years. The show will air on TV Land July 19.”

Click here for much more from the Los Angeles Times. I’m still looking forward to The New York Times’ tribute to Malden, but meanwhile, its Arts Beat column covers this death in brief.

READ MORE: “The War on Celebrities Continues: Karl Malden Is Dead,” by Jaime J. Weinman (Something Old, Nothing New); “Karl Malden 1912-2009,” by Andrew O’Hehir (Salon); “A Character Actor of Intensified Normalness,” by A.O. Scott (The New York Times); “Karl Malden 1912-2009,” by Ruthe Stein (San Francisco Chronicle).

Striking Gold(blum)

I’ve been enjoying Jeff Goldblum’s recent introduction to the cast of Law & Order: Criminal Intent. Taking over from actor Chris Noth (who always looked as if he was one tattered fuse away from exploding, due to all of his internal frustrations), Goldblum alternates in the series lead with Vincent D’Onofrio, and partners with Julianne Nicholson. I was sorry when NBC cancelled Raines, the show in which Goldblum played a Los Angeles cop haunted by the victims of crimes he was investigating; and I appreciated the actor’s turn in the 1980 detective-comedy series Tenspeed and Brown Shoe (remember this opening?), even if I wasn’t a resolute fan of the program. So I was pleased to hear that Goldblum would be joining L&O: CI.

But Slate’s Nathan Heller (who shouldn’t be confused with the fictional gumshoe of that same name) insists this was a poor casting call. He writes:

We all know Goldblum is a quirky guy. But it’s rare that quirkiness is so starkly at odds with its surroundings. Law & Order has existed in one flavor or another for just short of 20 years; the recipe is as golden as a Wonka chocolate bar and basically unchanged since the ascendancy of Hammer pants. Our overcoated heroes beat the New York pavement in pursuit of heinous criminals, trawling from lavish townhouses to grim walk-ups and keeping countless coffee carts solvent along the way. Criminal Intent is the series’ most eccentric flavor, blending a high tolerance for idiosyncrasy (Vincent D’Onofrio’s Detective Robert Goren gets more fitful, obsessive, and shabby-looking with each season) with a low attention span for jurisprudence. But Goldblum exceeds even these allowances. The latest season doesn’t come across as Law & Order with Jeff Goldblum cast as a police dick. It comes across as an oblique, high-irony parody of Law & Order with Jeff Goldblum playing both the premise and the punch line.

Heller might not have been disappointed to hear the news that Goldblum had died on a New Zealand movie set, even though that turned out to be misinformation. But what about the rest of you? Do you think Jeff Golblum is a welcome or weird addition to L&O: CI?

Cruising the Blogosphere

• Sarah Weinman tells Stieg Larsson fans that they can stop holding their breaths for a fourth installment of Larsson’s “Millennium Trilogy,” following the publication in Britain later this year of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest. She writes that “the 200 or so pages of the fourth book in the series, left unfinished by Larsson’s death in 2004, won’t ever see the light of day ...”

• Here are a couple of TV main title sequences I thought I’d never see again: Banyon and The Bold Ones.

• Is the 1985-1988 ABC-TV series Spenser: For Hire ready for resurrection? Via Lee Goldberg’s blog comes news, from Spenser creator Robert B. Parker, that “we are in negotiation for a remake of the Spenser: For Hire series to be produced by Sony/Dreamworks, and shown on TNT. There is often a slip twixt cup and lip in Los Angeles, but so far things are promising.” Don’t count me among those enthused by this news. While I enjoyed the first year of Spenser, starring Robert Urich and Avery Brooks, I have grown tired of the books and, as a result, less enthusiastic about the character overall. There’s been too much emphasis over the years on all that manly “personal code” bullshit and insufficient attention given to developing fresh stories and--imagine this--letting Spenser and his cohorts age gracefully. To work, a new Spenser TV drama would have to start from scratch and undo some of the conventions Parker has built into his series. With the author significantly involved in the project, I doubt those big changes would be possible.

• My recent mention on this page of John Wayne’s 1974 crime thriller, McQ, started film and pop culture critic Vince Keenan thinking about other feature films shot in Seattle. Especially Harry in Your Pocket (1973). Read more here.

• Western writer Jack Martin (né Gary Dobbs) provides the latest short story at Beat to a Pulp. It’s called “The Devil’s Right Hand.”

• Speaking of updates: The Summer 2009 edition of Mysterical-E has just been posted, with contributions from Albert Tucher, Jeff Markowitz, Jim Winter, and B.J. Bourg, among others. The July edition of The Big Thrill, produced by the International Thriller Writers, has also gone up, offering myriad short book reviews and an interview with Jonathan Kellerman (True Detectives). And finally, you’ll find the new June issue of I Love a Mystery here, featuring reviews of Michael Stanley’s The Second Death of Goodluck Tinubu, Ian Pears’ Stone’s Fall, and other fresh crime fiction.

• Designer Michael Fusco talks about creating cover art for Pegasus Books’ latest editions of two Chester Himes novels--both of which are worth adding to your collection. Look here for the interview.

• For the person who just can’t get enough of Isaac Hayes’ Academy Award-winning Shaft theme.

• Robert Mitchum’s Night of the Hunter = noir gold.

• Per the I Am a Tie-In Writer blog: “Third annual presentation of the International Association of Media-Tie-in Writers (IAMTW) ‘Scribe’ Awards, honoring excellence in tie-in writing in such notable franchises as CSI, Criminal Minds, The X-Files, Star Trek, Stargate, Star Wars, and Dr. Who, will be held on Friday, July 24, 3-4:30 p.m. at Comic-Con in San Diego in Room 4.”

• On the subject of tie-in novels, this item comes from
Mystery Book News:

The Hollywood Reporter is reporting that ABC television will promote the second season of Castle by publishing a mystery novel “written” by the series lead, Richard Castle (played by Nathan Fillion).

Titled Heat Wave, the first chapter will be available on ABC.com on August 10th. Additional chapters will be posted weekly for 10 weeks. The real author of the book has not been identified.

• Nick Stone interviews fellow author Stav Sherez about his latest novel, The Black Monastery, the return of Dutch Detective Van Hijn, his three favorite cults, and ... uh, cheesecake recipes.

• It seems British hard-boiled writer Peter Cheyney’s Swedish publisher raided the files of paperback artist Robert McGinnis to produce its own covers of several of Cheyney’s FBI agent Lemmy Caution novels during the 1940s and ’50s. Of the four jackets featured at the link, the top three all carry McGinnis illustrations that originally appeared on other books.

• Scotland on Sunday catches up with former Man from U.N.C.L.E. co-star David McCallum to talk about his onetime fame playing Illya Kuryakin (the “blond Beatle”), his dwindling connection with Scotland, and his present work on the less-than-flashy American TV series NCIS. Read it all here.

• A reminder from the Writer’s Almanac: “It was on this day in 1731 that Ben Franklin founded the first circulating library, a forerunner to the now ubiquitous free public library. He started it as a way to help settle intellectual arguments among his group of Philadelphia friends, the Junto, a group of civic-minded individuals gathered together to discuss the important issues of their day.”

• And meet the inspiration for Amelia Peabody Emerson, Elizabeth Peters’ historical archaeologist-detective.

I’ve Been Gormanized!

Over the last couple of days, several people have sent their compliments on an interview author-editor Ed Gorman did with me for the Summer 2009 issue of Mystery Scene magazine. The public mails must be slow way out here in Seattle (blame it on all our recent sunshine--the local postal carriers just aren’t used to it), because my copy of that issue arrived only this afternoon.

As usual with Mystery Scene, there’s plenty of great reading to be found here. I want to draw your attention especially to Oline H. Cogdill’s interview with Tom Rob Smith, author of the much-praised historical thriller Child 44 and its new sequel, The Secret Speech; Cheryl Solimini’s profile of George Dawes Green, who wrote the Edgar Award-winning The Caveman’s Valentine (1994) as well as the forthcoming thriller, Ravens; Michael Mallory’s look back at the too-oft-forgotten work of Stuart Palmer, the creator of Hildegarde Withers, a “fictional schoolteacher turned sleuth who had a talent for tripping over bodies”; and Kevin Burton Smith’s wrap-up of five worthy American women private eyes who have sprung unto the scene since the “female P.I. boom of the ’80s and ’90s”--a selection that includes Diane Wei Liang’s Mei Wang, Mary Wilbon’s Cassandra Slick, and Libby Fischer Hellman’s Georgia Davis.

Then, of course, there’s that interview with yours truly.

I’m usually reluctant to blow my own horn. But Ed Gorman is a nice guy, a persistent promoter of this genre, and an unabashed admirer of The Rap Sheet. So when he requested an interview with me for Mystery Scene ... well, how could I say no? There was some editing done to the 3,000 words worth of responses I sent to Gorman, though not as much as I expected; and all of the best stuff made it to the printed page. I don’t want to inhibit Mystery Scene’s single-issue sales by posting the entirety of our exchange here. However, I think my response to one query might be interesting (with links added).

This would seem to be the true Golden Age of detective and crime fiction; so many fine writers. Would you agree?

Yes and no. While there are indeed many fine writers, bottom line oriented publishers aren’t always willing to pay those authors enough to keep them working. And not everyone can write a book a year. So publishers concentrate their resources on big-name wordsmiths who keep producing, even though they may be churning out the same sort of yarns over and over again. (Sadly, readers don’t always notice this betrayal.)

And while I’m thrilled to have so many reading options in crime fiction, I am disappointed with many of the myriad books hitting the shelves. Too many try to copy previously successful works, or they run a good theme to death. How many more books, for instance, can I be expected to read about serial killers? You would think that such murderers were running rife in the United States, when in fact they’re fairly unusual. And does every mystery story have to be about murder? There are other crimes of sufficiently absorbing magnitude, other ways to build up tension than having somebody new die every two or three chapters.

But then, editors and publishers would have to encourage such innovation. And I don’t think they do, at least not strongly enough.

I’ve found myself lately looking back at older works in this field, books by mid-20th-century writers who were searching for new veins of writing gold, trying to do something unlike what their fellows were up to at the time. Admittedly, there was a lot of trash, but I think no more trash being turned out then than what is being published now. And occasionally, I come across real gems, such as Stanley Ellin’s The Eighth Circle (1958) or Harold Q. Masur’s Bury Me Deep (1947) or Erle Stanley Gardner’s series about mismatched gumshoes Bertha Cool and Donald Lam. All of those--as well as the works of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Thomas D. Dewey, Ed McBain, and of course [Ross] Macdonald--provide the source material mined by today’s crime fictionists. But some of that older stuff still boasts an air of novelty, rather than the reek of repetition.

So, while I am happy to see crime fiction be so popular today, I fear that we’re not getting everything we could from this genre. The willingness of publishers and authors to emphasize profits and productivity over creativity may ultimately be the genre’s undoing. And maybe that’s a good thing, to let the genre burn itself out now and then lie fallow and recoup its innovation in preparation for some future renaissance.

Read the full piece in the Summer 2009 issue of Mystery Scene.

’Nuff Said

The funeral for Charlie’s Angels star Farrah Fawcett was held today. A bit more information is to be found here.

From the Artful to the Awful

This is hardly a new question, but it’s still a good one: If you could order up DVD sets of any old TV series that aren’t currently available in that format, what would you choose? My own selections would include Harry O, Hec Ramsey, Banyon, The Name of the Game, It Takes a Thief, City of Angels, Assignment: Vienna, Private Eye, and Search--none of which feature among PremiumHollywood.com’s alphabetized picks. Instead, we get AfterM*A*S*H, CPO Sharkey, Flying Blind, James at 15, Manimal, and When Things Were Rotten. A pretty rotten list altogether, though the site’s choices also include L.A. Law (why the hell isn’t that on DVD already?) and The Quest, both of which I’d be happy to sit down and watch again.

Click here to see--and ruthlessly judge--all of the site’s choices.

(Hat tip to TV Squad.)

READ MORE: “What’s On YOUR Wish List of TV Shows That Ought to Be Out on DVD?” by David Bianculli (TV Worth Watching).

LCC Does L.A.

Registration is now open for the 2010 Left Coast Crime conference, which will take place in Los Angeles from March 11 to 14. As “fan guest of honor” Janet Rudolph reminds us, “This will be the 20th Left Coast Crime Mystery Convention.”

Now with Twice the Punch

Don’t let the “Spring 2009” label fool you: the latest “double issue” of Spinetingler Magazine is all new and has just been posted. Actually, this appearance is part of a relaunch, turning Spinetingler into an element of BSCReview (BookSpotCentral). It also brings a masthead shift, with author Jack Getze being named as editor, while Sandra Ruttan assumes the title of “executive editor”--a change that is less significant than it seems. “Spinetingler is still Sandra’s baby,” Getze assures me in an e-mail note. “She’s the boss!”

Contents of this new edition can either be read online or downloaded in PDF format. They include new short stories from Anthony Rainone (“Fall to Pieces”), Fiona Kay Crawford (“Successful Surgeon”), and Graham Powell (“The Ins and Outs”); interviews with Russel D. McLean, Brian McGilloway, Phyllis Smallman, and Craig McDonald; and book reviews, as well as a tribute to Southwestern mystery novelist Tony Hillerman, who died last October.

Welcome back, Spinetingler. We’ve missed you.

Best of the Worst

This is a joyful annual task: announcing the winners of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. Inspired by English novelist and playwright Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, who is infamous for having come up with the much-ridiculed opening line, “It was a dark and stormy night,” this lighthearted competition invites writers and aspiring humorists to create the worst opening sentences for books that (thank goodness) will never be completed. The contest has been held ever since 1982 and is sponsored by the English Department at California’s San Jose State University. As newspaperman-blogger Dave Knadler once characterized it, the Bulwer-Lytton challenge is “a sobering reminder on the perils of handling dashes and subordinate clauses without parental supervision.” Well phrased, indeed.

Top honors this year go to David McKenzie, described as “a 55-year-old Quality Systems consultant and writer from Federal Way, Washington.” His groan-producing parody reads:

Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin’ off Nantucket Sound from the nor’east and the dogs are howlin’ for no earthly reason, you can hear the awful screams of the crew of the “Ellie May,” a sturdy whaler captained by John McTavish; for it was on just such a night when the rum was flowin’ and, Davey Jones be damned, big John brought his men on deck for the first of several screaming contests.

However, there are also winners in several individual categories. From the “Detective” division comes this bit of egregious overwriting, produced by Eric Rice of Sun Prairie, Wisconsin:

She walked into my office on legs as long as one of those long-legged birds that you see in Florida--the pink ones, not the white ones--except that she was standing on both of them, not just one of them, like those birds, the pink ones, and she wasn’t wearing pink, but I knew right away that she was trouble, which those birds usually aren’t.

Actually, though, I think I prefer the runner-up pick in that category, submitted by Los Angeles resident Tony Alfieri:

The dame sauntered silently into Rocco’s office, but she didn’t need to speak; the blood-soaked gown hugging her ample curves said it all: “I am a shipping heiress whose second husband was just murdered by Albanian assassins trying to blackmail me for my rare opal collection,” or maybe, “Do you know a good dry cleaner?”

And then there are several delightful “dishonorable mentions” (the best kind, in this competition), including this criminal misuse of clichés submitted by Lynn Lamousin of Baton Rouge, Louisiana:

Darnell knew he was getting hung out to dry when the D.A. made him come clean by airing other people’s dirty laundry; the plea deal was a new wrinkle and there were still issues to iron out, but he hoped it would all come out in the wash--otherwise he had folded like a cheap suit for nothing.

You’ll find all of this year’s winners and runners-up here.

“Three Heaven-sent Hell Raisers”

Funny. I was of prime-time TV-watching age when the Aaron Spelling series Charlie’s Angels debuted in 1976, but I have no memory of tie-in novels being published. Then again, I wasn’t a regular Angels watcher, and when I did take in an episode, I was probably too distracted by the generous displays of skin (they didn’t call this “Jiggle TV” for nothing) to wonder whether I could purchase books that would force me only to imagine what Kate Jackson, Farrah Fawcett, and Jaclyn Smith looked like while carrying out their undercover investigations for Los Angeles’ Charles Townsend Agency.

It wasn’t until after Fawcett’s death last Thursday that I happened across the cover of one of five Angels novels published between 1977 and 1978, and then went looking for the rest. These slender volumes were penned by “Max Franklin,” which was one of several pseudonyms employed by Richard Deming, a prolific writer of novels, short fiction, and stories for television. Deming/Franklin also composed novels based on episodes of Dragnet, Starsky & Hutch, The Mod Squad, and Vega$. The first four of his Charlie’s Angels books were adapted from Season One installments of the Wednesday night series, though the fifth and last one, Charlie’s Angels: Angels on Ice, was based on an episode from Season Two, after Fawcett had left the show and been replaced by the equally blond Cheryl Ladd.

These book covers offer nothing spectacular in the way of design. They’re simply decorated with photographs of the series’ three female investigators and catchy lines about “TV’s Troubletracking Trio” and the show’s “Three Curvaceous Crimestoppers.” But they are part of American TV crime-drama history--a history that seemed to become even more distant and gauzy last week.

Click on any of the covers for an enlargement.




READ MORE: “It’s All in the Game: TV P.I. Tie-ins” (The Thrilling Detective Web Site); “Spying, Anyone?” by Marty McKee
(Johnny LaRue’s Crane Shot).

Epitaph for a Spy Novelist

Had he not died all of 11 years ago, British espionage novelist Eric Ambler would today be celebrating his 100th birthday. As I explained on this date back in 2006:

The son of entertainers, Ambler studied engineering at London University and wrote plays, before embarking on a career composing novels. As noted in The Oxford Companion to Crime & Mystery Writing, “In the mid-1930s Ambler set out to redeem the then-lowest form of popular fiction, the thriller, by making it a vehicle for serious treatment of the European political situation, increasingly polarized between fascism and communism. ... In six novels between 1936 and 1940”--beginning with The Dark Frontier (1936) and concluding with 1939’s The Mask of Dimitrios (aka A Coffin for Dimitrios)--“Ambler revolutionized the thriller, bridging the gap between ‘popular’ and ‘serious,’ ‘entertainment’ and ‘literature.’”

Although he wrote two dozen books over his career, including Epitaph for a Spy (1938), Passage of Arms (1959), The Light of Day (1962), and Waiting for Orders (1991), some of which were turned into films, it’s usually Dimitrios that’s remembered as his greatest work--“one of the classics of spy fiction,” to quote Bruce F. Murphy from The Encyclopedia of Murder and Mystery.

I don’t really have anything to add to that short bio of the author. So let me instead direct you to some other pieces about Ambler that have appeared in The Rap Sheet and on other sites:

• “Pulp Valentine: Eric Ambler and the Invention of the Spy Novel,” by Stephen Metcalf (Slate)

• “Dangerous Games,” by Thomas Jones (The Guardian)

• “Beyond the Balkans--Eric Ambler and the British Espionage Novel, 1936-1940,” by Brett F. Woods (California Literary Review)

• “The Book You Have to Read: Journey into Fear, by Eric Ambler,” by Charles Cumming (The Rap Sheet)

• “The Book You Have to Read: A Coffin for Dimitrios, by Eric Ambler,” by Ali Karim (The Rap Sheet)

• “Why Eric Ambler’s A Coffin for Dimitrios Is a Masterpiece,” by Sarah Weinman (The Wall Street Journal)

• “Eric Ambler’s Obituary from The Guardian, 1998”
(The Marxism List)

“Sleight” Scores Sasher

In case you weren’t paying attention, what with all the news focus on the deaths of actress Farrah Fawcett and pop star Michael Jackson, the two-day Deadly Ink Convention was held this weekend in Parsippany, New Jersey. Lincoln Child was the guest of honor, with Jeff Cohen held forth as toastmaster.

Also during that conference came an announcement of this year’s recipient of the David G. Sasher Sr. Award for Best Mystery Novel. As attendee Jack Getze reports, Robin Hathaway walked away with that commendation for her third Dr. Jo Banks mystery, Sleight of Hand (Minotaur). Nominated as well for the Sasher were: Antiques to Die for, by Jane K. Cleland (Minotaur); Pushing Up Daisies, by Rosemary Harris (Minotaur); Death of a Cozy Writer, by G.M. Malliet (Midnight Ink); A River to Die for, by Radine Trees Nehring (St. Kitts Press); and Death Will Get You Sober, by Elizabeth Zelvin (Minotaur).

Rip, Rip, Hooray!

Someday I am really going to have to track down more of British author Mike Ripley’s Fitzroy Maclean Angel novels (including Angels Unaware), because I’ve come to appreciate his humor--which, I should say, is always amply on display in “Getting Away with Murder,” the monthly column he writes for Shots. In his July column, Ripley talks about Cambridge’s upcoming “Bodies in the Bookshop” event, author George Dawes Green’s Ravens, a new interview with the reclusive spy novelist Len Deighton in CADS: Crime and Detective Stories, and the publication of David Armstrong’s new Frank Cavanaugh/Jane Salt mystery, Written Out.

Read it all here.

Schwegel Owns Chicago Crime

My review of Chicagoan Theresa Schwegel’s tense new Sloane Pearson novel, Last Known Address, was posted today in the Chicago Tribune. The piece begins:

Chicago is the crime fiction capital of the world. Just ask any of the great writers (Sean Chercover, Barbara D’Amato, Michael Allen Dymmoch, Kevin Guilfoile, Libby Hellmann, Sara Paretsky, Marcus Sakey and others) who gather regularly at a blog called The Outfit.

Theresa Schwegel isn’t a member of The Outfit, but the author (who won an Edgar for her first book, “Officer Down”) appears to have put her unique vision of Chicago on virtually every page of “Last Known Address.” The mention of such sites as Wrigleyville, Ukrainian Village, Humboldt Park and Garfield Park transports us to their locations.

It’s the 2300 block of West Erie that gives the book its ironic title. It’s the address of a vacant building, one of several where a very nasty serial rapist has been attacking his victims and forcing them to fight--knowing, of course, that he’ll win.

When a real estate agent whom Detective Sloane Pearson knows is attacked by this violent predator, Sloane finds herself taking a case that threatens her plans to leave her longtime lover. Sloane is new to the Sex Crimes Division but no stranger to being treated like an incompetent blond by her hardened male co-workers.

Read the full story here.

The Book You Have to Read: “Trent’s Last Case,” by E.C. Bentley

(Editor’s note: This is the 54th installment of our Friday blog series highlighting great but forgotten books. Today’s selection comes from Stefanie Pintoff, the New York author of In the Shadow of Gotham, a historical mystery introducing early 20th-century police detective Simon Ziele. That book, the debut of a new series, won the first Minotaur Books/Mystery Writers of America First Crime Novel Competition. To learn more about Pintoff, click here.)

The book was written on a dare.

The author was a British newspaper reporter named E.C. Bentley, and when his friend G.K. Chesterton (of Father Brown fame) challenged him to write a story about a new kind of detective--an antithesis to Sherlock Holmes--he complied. Bentley wanted his sleuth to be a realistic character, not an idiosyncratic mix of mannerisms. His detective would not be an analytical master of deduction. On the contrary, he would be so fallible that he might actually get the crime’s solution wrong. As Bentley explained in his 1905 autobiography, Those Days,

It should be possible, I thought, to write a detective story in which the detective was recognizable as a human being and was not quite so much the ‘heavy sleuth.’ ... Why not show up the fallibility of the Holmesian method?

Bentley met Chesterson’s challenge, and the result was Trent’s Last Case, first published in 1913. The novel was wildly popular; in Britain, it sold out four editions in its first five months. In the United States, it was published as The Woman in Black and performed well. And over the years, both critics and mystery writers have offered generous praise of the book, with many even citing it as the first modern detective novel.

Here are the blurbs printed in the 1978 Perennial Library edition:

“One of the three best detective stories ever written.”--Agatha Christie

“The finest detective story of modern times.”--G.K. Chesterton

And in the same edition’s introduction, Dorothy L. Sayers wrote that Trent’s Last Case was “startlingly original ... when it first appeared. It shook the little world of the mystery novel like a revolution, and nothing was ever quite the same again. Every detective writer of today owes something, consciously or unconsciously, to its liberating and inspiring influence.”

Yet, for a book so highly praised, it is surprisingly under the contemporary mystery reader’s radar.

I read it myself in graduate school, because of its place in the history of the detective novel--and because it provided useful material for my dissertation on narrative form in the early detective novel.

But is the book still worth reading today for reasons other than its historical appeal? I believe it is.

Certainly Trent’s Last Case is far from a perfect crime novel. Modern readers may be unaccustomed to its flowery Edwardian language and slower pacing. In addition, the prejudices of Bentley’s era are present in the story: the racism, sexism, and anti-Semitism, in particular. Putting aside those historical markers, however, there’s much to enjoy and appreciate about the book--particularly in the character of “gentleman sleuth” Philip Trent and the plot’s triple twist of an ending.

After Sigsbee Manderson, a financial magnate, is found murdered on the grounds of his English country estate, Trent is called in to investigate. He is an artist who freelances as a newspaper reporter; in fact, he’s gained a reputation for publishing solutions to tough criminal cases that baffle the police. The Manderson murder case promises to be difficult: the victim was found shot through the eye with bruising on his wrists, indicating a struggle; his odd appearance suggests he dressed in haste, not even taking time to put in his dentures; and there are numerous suspects. They include his wife, Mabel (who was unhappy in her marriage), her uncle (who had quarreled with the victim), several servants, and a number of jealous business associates. As Trent puts it: “Here’s a man suddenly and violently killed, and nobody’s heart seems to be broken about it, to say the least.” Trent solves the case in three days--or so he believes. But he withholds the solution because of an unusual complication: he has fallen deeply in love with Mrs. Manderson, the dead man’s widow. Though his motivation for keeping the solution to himself is deeply personal--he wants only to protect Mabel--it leads to a fortunate result. Trent had gotten it wrong, and his “solution” would have doomed an innocent man to the hangman’s noose.

Yes, Trent is fallible. And yes, his weakness in falling in love with a prime suspect is a device that is later borrowed with great success by future crime novelists and filmmakers. But the protagonist’s appeal also lies in his unique gift of perception. In that, Trent is different from--but not wholly unrelated to--his antithesis, Sherlock Holmes. In explaining why his own analysis succeeds, Holmes tells Watson: “You see, but you do not observe.” Trent is an artist, and he observes his case with an artist’s perceptive eye. As he tells it, what’s needed to find out the truth is a “delicacy of perception”:

The law certainly does not shine when it comes to a case requiring much delicacy of perception. ... [W]hat would twelve red-faced realities in a jury-box have done to [young John] Marlowe? His story would, as he says, have been a great deal worse than no defence at all. It’s not as if there were a single piece of evidence in support of his tale.

This novel’s other strength is its clever plot, filled with enough twists to astonish and satisfy even today’s mystery fiction fans. Even as evidence builds that the victim himself played some role in his own demise, the final twist takes Trent (and likely the reader) by complete surprise. The real murderer confesses to Trent during the course of a celebratory dinner, secure in his belief that no legal consequences will follow. Based on the circumstances of the murder--and Trent’s own opinion of the killer--there is no question of involving forces of the law. Both Trent and the killer believe private justice has already been done.

Trent merely tells the man:

... I am cured. I will never touch a crime-mystery again. The Manderson affair shall be Philip Trent’s last case. ...” Trent’s smile suddenly returned. “I could have borne everything but that last revelation of the impotence of human reason. ... I have absolutely nothing left to say, except this: you have beaten me. I drink your health in a spirit of self-abasement. And you shall pay for the dinner.

With its unique detective figure and complex plot, Trent’s Last Case stands the test of time--and may even change the way existing fans of Golden Age classics view their favorite novels.

* * *

End note: Trent’s Last Case was not, in fact, his last case. E.C. Bentley eventually wrote more about Philip Trent, but not until 1936 when Trent’s Own Case was published, followed by Trent Intervenes in 1938. In the meantime, he penned and published several collections of clerihews (a type of short, comic biographical poem that he also invented).

READ MORE: The entire text of Trent’s Last Case can be found here.

Forgotten? Neglected? Neither Is Good

There’s a wide diversity of works being considered in today’s installment of the blogosphere-wide “forgotten books” series. In addition to Stefanie Pintoff’s recommendation on this page of Trent’s Last Case, those picks include: The Lodger, by Marie Belloc Lowndes; You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up, by Richard Hallas; Murderous Remedy, by Stella Shepherd; Road to Purgatory, by Max Allan Collins; Praying Mantis, by Hubert Montheilet; The Takers, by Jerry Ahern; and the Name of the Game tie-in, Los Angeles: A.D. 2017, by Philip Wylie (a book I didn’t even know existed before now, but that I must now search out). Patti Abbott hosts several additional recommendations in her own blog, plus a full rundown of today’s participating bloggers.

On a related note, it seems that Sally Owens, who works at the famous Mysterious Bookshop in New York City, has begun a series in the bookstore’s blog about “neglected authors.” She has addressed only two candidates so far--Lillian O’Donnell and E.X. Ferrars--but we’re looking forward to seeing more in the near future. (Hat tip to In Reference to Murder.)

Bullet Points: News and Nostalgia Edition

• My, how time flies. Johnny Depp’s new movie, Public Enemies, in which he plays notorious Depression-era bank robber John Diillinger, will debut next week. Now, I’ll always look back most fondly at Warren Oates’ portrayal of the same real-life character in Dillinger (1973), which found Ben Johnson playing FBI agent Melvin Purvis; but Depp sure looks good with that machine gun in his hand. And actor Christian Bale may not be Ben Johnson, but after seeing him in the Batman movies, I expect he can hold his own here. French beauty Marion Cotillard is just a wonderful bonus. Mystery Scene’s Oline H. Cogdill has more to say about Public Enemies here.

• On a related note, Elliott Gorn, who teaches history and American Civilization at Brown ­University and is the author of Dillinger’s Wild Ride: The Year That Made America’s Public Enemy ­Number One, picks what he thinks are the five best books about criminals for The Wall Street Journal. See all his choices here.

• Matt Beynon Rees, the author so far of three Palestine-based mysteries (including The Samaritan’s Secret), offers up his five favorite novels for a Dutch newspaper.

• John Douglas Marshall explains in The Daily Beast that American author Alan Furst (The Spies of Warsaw) “had it in mind to write a series of novels in a genre he was soon calling ‘historical espionage,’ literary works set in 1930s Europe amid the gathering thunderclouds of fascism and war. But he had no illusions that these novels would be his ticket to fortune or fame. ‘I was going to be the best failed novelist in Paris,’ Furst says. ‘That was certainly not the worst thing in the world that one could be.’” Read more of this story here.

• In a follow-up to yesterday’s obituary of actress Farrah Fawcett, I came across a terrific quote in the TV Confidential blog. Apparently, TV Guide asked Fawcett in 1977 to explain the success of Charlie’s Angels. “When the show was number three,” Fawcett quipped, “I thought it was our acting. When we got to be number one, I decided it could only be because none of us wears a bra.”

• Four more tributes to Fawcett: here, here, here, and here.

• Wow, I never thought I’d see the main title sequence from Jack Palance’s old TV detective series, Bronk, again--yet here it is.

• More forgotten things: The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. books.

• Due to my recent travels, I neglected to mention that David Cole’s series about “cool Canadian crime” has continued in Mystery Fanfare. Catch up with that series here.

• R.I.P., Kodachrome.

• Kevin Burton Smith apparently can’t say enough good things about Ray Banks’ latest novel, Beast of Burden. “[T]his is, hands down, one of the most affecting books I’ve read in a long time,” he writes in his blog.

• Megan Abbott is working on her first graphic novel?

• The eighth and final season of Monk doesn’t even begin on the USA Network until August 7, but star Tony Shalhoub is already getting nostalgic for that series about an obsessive-compulsive detective working the never-clean-enough streets of San Francisco.

He admits, “We all love to work, and we all love to have work, so to step away from something so strong and successful--of course there’s a risk involved.” Still, “I’ve spoken with the writers, and I think we’ve all agreed there’s only so much you can mine out of this character. Nobody wants to move into the area where it starts to feel stale or the quality starts to drop. Since everything does have to come to an end, we want it to happen in the right way, where we’re in control of it, not a situation where the plug gets pulled. I think it honors the audience this way.”

(Hat tip to Learning Curve.)

• There’s more Law & Order UK on the way.

• Clea Simon (Probable Claws) is the newest subject of January Magazine’s “Author Snapshot” series. Read more about her here.

• And Booked for Murder has launched a contest to find the “best Ross Macdonald imitations.” Blogger R.T. writes: “Anyone out there with a flair for hard-boiled tropes? I dare you to come up something as good as Macdonald’s description of a woman’s face or his description of the landscape (or maybe he was confusing the woman’s luscious landscape with the lovely view outside the glass wall).” More details here.

An Angel Gets Her Wings

This comes as no surprise, given all of the reports about her declining health over the last couple of years, but the news is sad nonetheless: Farrah Fawcett, the blond and bright-smiling, Texas-born model and actress who starred in the 1970s TV hit Charlie’s Angels, died today in Santa Monica, California, at age 62. She succumbed to anal cancer.

I was never a big fan of Aaron Spelling’s Angels series. But I did enjoy watching Fawcett--then credited as Farrah Fawcett-Majors, because of her marriage to The Six Million Dollar Man’s Lee Majors--on the mid-’70s David Janssen TV series Harry O (she played private eye Orwell’s bouncy next-door neighbor, Sue Ingham). And I remember appreciating her in the lead role in a 1989 teleflick called Margaret Bourke-White, about the famous 20th-century U.S. photographer. During the late ’70s and early ’80s, a poster of Fawcett wrapped up in a red bathing suit made her the No. 1 sex symbol in America, rivaled only by The Fall Guy’s Heather Thomas.

Even sadder than word about Fawcett’s passing this morning may be reports that she and her longtime love, actor Ryan O’Neal, who had planned to wed while she remained on her deathbed, weren’t able to follow through on that wish. “There just wasn’t time, and Farrah wasn’t in any condition to do it,” O’Neill is quoted in People magazine as saying.

In fond memory of Fawcett, here’s a video tribute to the actress in her best-remembered role, as Jill Munroe on Charlie’s Angels:



READ MORE: “What Was It About Farrah?” by Mary Elizabeth Williams (Salon); “Hollywood Pays Tribute to Farrah Fawcett,” by Mike Fleeman (People); “Farrah Fawcett Dies at 62; Actress Soared with, then Beyond, Charlie’s Angels,” by Valerie J. Nelson (Los Angeles Times); “Farrah Fawcett, Actress and Iconic Beauty, Dies at 62,” by Susan Stewart (The New York Times); “Good-bye Farrah,” by Sandra Stephens (You Call Yourself a Writer--Me Too); “Former Charlie’s Angel Farrah Fawcett Dies,” by Jesse Baker (NPR); “Farrah Fawcett (1947-2009),” by Edward Copeland (Edward Copeland on Film); “Why We Loved Farrah Fawcett,” by James Ledbetter (Slate); “Farrah Is Dead at 62,” by Marty McKee (Johnny LaRue’s Crane Shot); and video tributes to the actress can be found here, here, and here.

Brain Reign

There are already plenty of group blogs addressing crime-fiction-related topics, as Mystery Scene’s Oline H. Cogdill has noted recently (see here, here, and here). But now here’s another one: Criminal Minds, launched earlier this month, gathers together the talents of C.J. Lyons, Rebecca Cantrell, Kelli Stanley, Tim Maleeny, and others. Worth visiting.

On a Wing and a Scare

Do you remember The Caveman’s Valentine (1994), which earned its author, George Dawes Green, loads of rave reviews plus an Edgar Award for Best First Novel? After that, he wrote a murder-trial suspenser called The Juror--which, along with Caveman, is being reissued by Grand Central Publishing in spiffy trade-paperback format, to coincide with the hardcover release next month of Green’s latest novel, a terrific thriller called Ravens.

The ravens in this tale are two scary birds named Shaw McBride and Romeo Zderko. They had planned on pulling over from Interstate 95 in Georgia just long enough to put some air into the leaky tire of their car; but when a convenience-store clerk reveals that a winning ticket to the latest multimillion-dollar jackpot has just been sold, Shaw and Romeo change their plans and hatch a scheme. It seems the clerk made the mistake of giving away the winner’s home address, and Shaw and Romeo go there to take the family hostage.

Like Caveman and The Juror, Ravens is beautifully written. It has already moved high up on my list of the year’s best books.

“Get Carter”: A Re-examination

If English writer Derek Raymond exercises an influence in death that’s disproportionate to that which he achieved in life (and I believe he does), then his cinematic counterpoint is certainly director Mike Hodges’ 1971 production of Get Carter, based on the obscure novel Jack’s Return Home, by Ted Lewis.

This film, in fact, was lost to the British public for many years, only resurfacing when--much to Hodges’ chagrin--the magazine Loaded adopted it as the epitome of mid-1990s lads culture. It’s a reading of the film that is either entirely insensible or willfully incorrect. Because Get Carter is a purposefully sour vision of Britain at the dawn of the ’70s, providing as desolate a perspective on the country as post-punk would offer towards that decade’s conclusion.

The narrative itself concerns mobster Jack Carter (Michael Caine), a native of Newcastle, now living in London and working for a local “firm.” As the film opens, we see Carter pour himself a drink, clearly bored with the pornographic movie his bosses are watching. It’s an important beat; we see that Carter is a nowhere man. He’s not with these men, not really; but he’s not apart from them, either. As he sits back down, the camera voyeuristically slides over the supple curves of Anna (Britt Ekland) and we sense the implication: they’re conducting an affair. Momentarily distracted from his porn, Carter’s boss asks Jack not to return home, to let the police handle “it” (the supposed car-crash death of his elder brother, Frank), and we gather that these two are at cross-purposes.

It’s a strong scene, precisely because Hodges imparts so much information through so little effort; it feels naturalistic despite it’s density. As such, it sends a message to the audience: this is a film you either pay close attention to, or you’ll be left behind. And then we see Carter on board a train, bringing pain, both physical and personal, to everyone involved in the unfolding tragedy. The score, a key part of Get Carter’s artistic success, warrants a mention here. British jazz man Roy Budd brings a propulsive funk to the film that heightens the already intensifying sense of storm clouds gathering.

Carter’s return to Newcastle is ostensibly to attend his estranged brother’s funeral, although it’s not until we visit the family home that we realize this. In a grubby house, with chunks of wallpaper missing from the walls, we find the corpse of Frank Carter. It’s there that one of the core themes of the film is introduced: decline. This house had once been a comfortable abode, where Frank lived with his wife and Doreen (Petra Markham), his daughter. But nobody’s paid attention to the décor in years and, certainly, nobody lives there. Finding it hard to credit his sibling’s passing to accidental circumstances, Carter begins to question the people in his brother’s life: Frank’s daughter, his mistress, his workmates. This exercise, coupled with the fact that Jack Carter was reading a Raymond Chandler paperback novel on the train north, informs us that far from being classified as a gangster film, which it often is, Get Carter can be viewed as a British private eye movie. And, as is commonly true of works in that genre, Get Carter is less about the case and more about the nature of the man working it.

The gangster elements of this 38-year-old film are, in point of fact, fairly conventional: the London firm that employs Carter has interests in Newcastle, and there’s a war brewing between the Newcastle firms, both of which become increasingly nervous about Carter’s presence in their city and try to recruit him through both obvious and covert means. The question of whether brother Frank was involved with those local gangsters, and to what extent they were responsible for his death, is, of course, one of the things driving Carter. As a piece of narrative, this tale is not dissimilar from Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest (1929). Unlike Hammett’s novel, however, there are innocents in Get Carter’s world, and the film is careful to take note of when they’re injured--such as when Keith, a local barman who is slightly in awe of Carter, is left to take a beating meant for the visiting gangster. It’s this attitude towards violence, that you simply need to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, that really marries the worldviews of Ted Lewis and Derek Raymond and, therefore, positions this film as the cinematic equivalent of one of Raymond’s “black novels.”

Another key theme of the film is escape. This is brought to particular prominence when Carter interrogates Margaret (Dorothy White), his brother’s mistress, on the swing bridge. He explains to her that he’s only returned to this “crap house” to find out what became of his brother, and the viewer is forced to consider that this is a man who fled Newcastle for London only to become a lieutenant in a firm. But he might have taken the same dangerous path had he remained, and now he and Anna are planning to escape to South America: he’s a man who’s never stopped running. “We are what we are, like it or not,” Margaret says. If we didn’t recognize it before, we see it now: Carter has been quietly imploding for some time.

Such hints about Jack Carter unraveling are confirmed in the next major scene, during which we join him and a local gang boss’ “moll,” Glenda (Geraldine Moffat), as they make love under a coverless duvet, our eyes drawn to the mirror at the head of the bed in which their reflections can be seen, intentionally recalling the voyeurism of the pornographic movie running at the start of the film. When Glenda excuses herself from the bedroom, Carter gets up to turn on another projector. In a cinematic tour de force, the camera settles on Caine’s face and we are allowed to observe the action of that film he’s viewing both in the reaction of his features and the reflection of the mirror behind him. It’s another pornographic picture. Only this one, to the horror of the audience as well as Carter, does not feature some anonymous young woman; instead, it stars Doreen, his niece (who, it’s suggested, is actually his daughter). Having a personal connection to the subject matter, Carter can no longer marshal the professional detachment of the P.I. First he crumbles and then, with discernible effort, he exerts control.

As with all noir protagonists, Jack Carter is ultimately doomed. This is grimly and obviously played out across the last third of the film as the audience finds Carter, once an individual informed by his self-imposed control, being informed instead by his directed anger. The film ends with the now feral Carter, who had become a liability to the criminal institution he serves, being executed upon a beach. As nihilistic an ending as could be imagined.

Unlike the majority of crime cinema works, Get Carter isn’t a celebration of flawed masculinity or triumphant individualism. It’s an interrogation of lives at the margins of human society, margins populated by the increasingly desperate. (It’s significant that director Hodges has a background as a reporter for the old British investigative program World in Action.) The world of Get Carter is one where people simply prey upon one another and in so doing render whatever victories they may achieve pyrrhic.

* * *

Here’s the theatrical trailer to Get Carter, which has been hailed by film critics as the greatest British movie of all time:



And let us add a little bit of news, drawn from the Comments section of this post. The writer is Maxim Jakubowski, celebrated British editor and former bookstore owner:

You might all be interested to learn that Mike Hodges, who is a good friend, has recently written his first novel. “Watching the Wheels Come Off” is a noir comedy about a day in the life of [a] failed con man when everything goes from bad to worse. It has just appeared in France from Rivages and the English-language edition will appear in March of next year in the UK from my new list, Maximum Crime, from John Blake Publishing.

We’ll undoubtedly have more to say about this later.

Short Shrift

• Following up on recent posts here that addressed the infamous “four play meme challenge,” novelist Max Allan Collins today presents his own list of favorite movies, places he has lived, etc. His selections can be found on his Web site’s front page. By the way, I thought Collins’ rundown of “4 things you want to do before you die” was particularly entertaining:

Get an Edgar
Direct at least five more movies
Complete the Nathan Heller saga
Not die

• More following up: Last week, I wrote about the MyThemes.TV Web site, where you can listen to the theme songs from many old small-screen programs. Subsequently, I’ve discovered one piece of music that was noticeably missing from Mark Little’s expansive collection: the Isaac Hayes number that introduced ABC-TV’s The Men, a Thursday-night “wheel series” from 1972-1973 that featured three crime/espionage shows--Robert Conrad’s Assignment: Vienna, Laurence Luckinbill’s The Delphi Bureau, and Jigsaw, which starred the sadly underappreciated James Wainwright as a missing-persons investigator with the California State Police. Although I remember happily watching The Men when it was first broadcast, I couldn’t have whistled its main theme if you’d asked me to do so just two days ago. However, I stumbled across that number on a free-music site called Last.fm. Click here to listen for yourself. The four-minute work is obviously too long for it all to have been used under the ABC series’ credits, but it will take an expert more knowledgeable than I am to say with part made it onto the air.

• Could Daniel Craig’s James Bond be ready to tangle with an updated Ernst Stavro Blofeld? Permission to Kill weighs the rumors.

• Sam Peckinpah directed a Batman movie? If only it were true …

• And there are several new online interviews worth reading: Jedidiah Ayres talks with Todd Robinson, the creator-editor of ThugLit and the man behind the new short-story collection Sex, Thugs, and Rock & Roll. Lesa Holstine chats with Robert Fate, author of the Baby Shark series, which includes Baby Shark’s Jugglers at the Border, due out in September. (Curiously, there’s yet another exchange with Fate here.) Les Hurst takes on South African writer Deon Meyer (Blood Safari) for Shots. Introducing his latest blog, Coffee with a Canine, Marshal Zeringue of Campaign for the American Reader fame taps Chris Knopf (whose latest Sam Acquillo/Hamptons mystery, Hard Stop, recently reached bookstores) to write about his work … and his Wheaten terrier. And Rap Sheet contributor Declan Burke investigates John Connolly’s demons, while he talks with the Irish wordsmith about his latest thriller, The Lovers, and a young adult novel Connolly has planned that “involves Satanism and quantum physics.”

Twice Shy

Wow, I didn’t know I had so much power. ;) Novelist-editor Sandra Ruttan writes in her blog:

I think most authors who blog now live in fear of saying they like their new book cover, only to find it picked up on The Rap Sheet as a copycat cover.

For more about such duplicated cover designs, click here.

Ed’s Dead

I’m very sorry to hear this morning that Ed McMahon, who spent three memorable decades as Johnny Carson’s good-humored sidekick on The Tonight Show, has died in Los Angeles at age 86. Baltimore Sun TV critic David Zurewick writes:

With all the change in late-night TV theses days, it is hard to remember what a reliable, inviting and reassuring place McMahon and Carson made their faux couch and desk set seem like from 1962 to 1992--one of the longest and most successful runs in TV history. McMahon played a large role in that popularity with his deep voice, ready laugh and trademark “Heeeeeerrrrrreeee’s Johnny” nightly introduction.

While Carson was a perfectionist who made life difficult for those who worked with him, McMahon said in repeated interviews over the years that his job as sidekick was “the world’s greatest job.’”

“You can’t imagine hooking up with a guy like Carson,” McMahon said a 1993 AP interview. “There’s the old phrase, hook your wagon to a star. I hitched my wagon to a great star.”

Interestingly, McMahon’s demise comes close on the heels of the launch of Hiyoooo.com, billed as “the world’s first virtual sidekick.” When you need a pick-me-up, just go to that site, click on Ed’s smiling noggin, and let his full-throated call herald the significance of your every thought or utterance.

(Hat tip to TV Squad.)

READ MORE: “Heeeeyyyyyooooo!!!” by Ivan G. Shreve Jr. (Thrilling Days of Yesteryear); “Conan O’Brien and Tonight Pay Tribute to Ed McMahon” (The Huffington Post); “Ed McMahon: Sidekick on Tonight for 30 years famous for his cry of ‘Heeeeeere’s Johnny!’” by Michael Carlson (The Independent).

Reduce Your Carbon Footprint--or Else

My review of C.J. Box’s new novel, Below Zero (Putnam), has been posted on the Barnes & Noble Review page. Here’s how it begins:

Blue Heaven, Box’s last book, was a terrific standalone thriller about rogue L.A. cops retired to Idaho. Below Zero is a return to the Joe Pickett series, Box’s ongoing dissection of crime in Wyoming as seen through the eyes of a game warden whose favorite big game is human villains.

You’ll find my full critique here.

Happy Father’s Day

Appropriate to this occasion, Janet Rudolph has posted a list of Father’s Day-related mysteries for your reading pleasure. I’m almost ashamed to say that I have read none of those works. However, I can at least add another title to her list: John Calvin Batchelor’s 1994 political thriller, Father’s Day, which has to do with a U.S. president who temporarily relinquishes his office under the 25th Amendment to the Constitution, only to be blocked by his ruthless vice president when he tries to return to the Oval Office. It’s not the most relaxing weekend read, as I recall.

This being Father’s Day in many countries, I got to musing on the subject of dads as fictional detectives. There aren’t very many, as compared with the number of loner gumshoes and dysfunctional bachelor cops out there. The explanation for this may simply be that the demands of fatherhood can conflict too severely with the rigors of dogged detection. Tying one’s sleuth down to a wife and children limits the character’s ability to become intimately involved with femmes fatales, and it makes him consider something beyond his fervid pursuit of malefactors. He may not as willing as the socially unconnected investigator to compromise his life in order to resolve a case.

I started to make a list of detectives in crime fiction who are also fathers, or whose fathers are connected with their professional work. But in the course of it, I realized that most such characters come from television, rather than books.

As I recall from my recent reading of Rennie Airth’s third and latest John Madden novel, The Dead of Winter (an excellent work that’s due out in the States next month), his protagonist, a former Scotland Yard inspector, has reared two children with his wife since he was first introduced in River of Darkness (1999), yet he continues to involve himself in perilous investigations. Pre-World War II German Detective Inspector Nikolai Hoffner, who made his initial appearance in Jonathan Rabb’s Rosa (one of January Magazine’s favorite books of 2005), also has a couple of boys, both of whom are given intriguing larger roles in his second adventure, this year’s Shadow and Light. “Gumsandal” Gordianus the Finder, featured in Steven Saylor’s 10-book series of 1st century B.C. Roman whodunits, is responsible for one natural daughter and a couple of adopted sons. Novelist-snoop Ellery Queen--the brilliant but quirky creation of cousins Manfred B. Lee and Frederic Dannay--might have been a much less compelling character without his pater and sidekick, Inspector Richard Queen of the New York City Police Department. Private eye Tom Hickey, who made his debut in Ken Kuhlken’s The Big Adios (1991), has since relinquished his mystery-solving duties to his son, Clifford Hickey (The Do-Re-Mi, 2006). And let’s not forget that “salvage expert” Travis McGee discovered, at the end of his 21st adventure, John D. MacDonald’s The Lonely Silver Rain (1985), that he had a teenage daughter, Jean (the progeny of his long-ago love affair with Puss Killian in 1968’s Pale Gray for Guilt), about whom he’d known nothing. The supposition is that Jean Killian would have reappeared in MacDonald’s subsequent McGee novels, and had some impact on that troubleshooter’s development. But of course, there were no later McGee stories (despite rumors to the contrary).

If crime novels have given us few examples of father-offspring relationships, television has been rather less stingy. Consider, as an excellent example, The Rockford Files (1974-1980), in which Los Angeles P.I. Jim Rockford (James Garner) was alternately annoyed and assisted by his papa, retired truck driver Joseph “Rocky” Rockford (Noah Berry Jr.). Or Crazy Like a Fox (1984-1986), which found the wonderful actor Jack Warden playing a private dick who was a bit too prone to soliciting help from his less adventurous son, attorney Harrison Fox Jr. (John Rubenstein). We can’t forget, either, about Tenafly (1973-1974), the promising and too-short-lived NBC Wednesday Mystery Movie segment that starred James McEachin as an ex-cop turned corporate detective, who also happened to be a family man, with a much-forgiving wife and two young children, as I remember it. There was also The Feather and Father Gang (1977), in which Stefanie Powers played a successful lawyer, Toni “Feather” Danton, who solved crimes with the aid of her con-man parent, Harry Danton (Harold Gould). No doubt just as forgotten by now was Faraday and Company (1973-1974), another short-run NBC Wednesday Mystery Movie series. It found dancer-actor Dan Dailey portraying Frank Faraday, a 1940s shamus who, after he escaped from a quarter-century of unjustified incarceration in a South American prison, entered into a sleuthing partnership with the illegitimate son he never knew, Steve Faraday (James Naughton). In the third and final season of It Takes a Thief (1968-1970), another prominent dancer, Fred Astaire, joined the cast as Alistair Mundy, the equally light-fingered father of protagonist Alexander Mundy (Robert Wagner). E.G. Marshall and Robert Reed played father-son attorneys in the acclaimed 1961-1965 TV drama, The Defenders, while in the 1996-2001 police drama Nash Bridges, Don Johnson’s San Francisco police inspector lived with (and had to periodically protect) his retired longshoreman father, played by James Gammon.

I’m sure there are other examples of fathers figuring prominently in crime novels and TV series, but they escape me at the moment. Give me some help in the Comments section of this post.

What’s in a Name?

Having recently read and enjoyed UK author Robert Wilson’s The Ignorance of Blood, his fourth and evidently final modern crime novel featuring Spanish Inspector Jefe Javier Falcón (a series that began with The Blind Man of Seville, one of January Magazine’s favorite books of 2003), I confess to being ... well, a little jealous of blogger Julia Buckley’s new interview with the author. What a treat! I was particularly fond of this exchange:

I’m always interested in the naming of a detective, and yours, Inspector Jefe Javier Falcón, has the name of a bird of prey. In your latest novel you describe Falcón and his friend as “alive as hunting hawks.” Is a predator an apt metaphor for a homicide detective?

I chose the name because the intention of the books was to be all about ‘seeing’. That is: discovering the capacity to distinguish between the appearance and reality of both people and situations. The initial irony is that, of course, Falcón, and many of the other characters do not see things at all clearly. By the time he reaches the last book Falcón is as perceptive as he’ll ever be, and his friend, Yacoub, given his situation as a spy, perhaps even more so. A homicide detective is always trying to see the reality of things beyond the endless deception that is put before him. In Spanish the word for ‘falcon’ is in fact ‘halcón’, so the one audience that might miss the significance of this metaphor is the Spanish themselves.

You can read all of Buckley’s interview with Wilson here.

Pedals to the Metal

Since I just got through showcasing a memorable car chase scene from the John Wayne crime thriller McQ (1974), which was a follow-up to my previous post about Steve McQueen’s more famous chase sequence in Bullitt (1968), it’s only right that I revisit another chase scene, this one ... well, not quite so renowned. It comes from the 1971 TV film Once Upon a Dead Man, which was the pilot for the Rock Hudson-Susan Saint James mystery series McMillan & Wife. I can only assume that director-writer Leonard Stern had McQueen’s automotive acrobatics in mind when he conceived of this two-wheeled pursuit, also through the streets of San Francisco.

Bullet Points: Catching Up Edition

First of all, let me thank my colleague Linda L. Richards, who steered The Rap Sheet with impressive skill during my recent trip to Minneapolis. Second, there’s a little catching up to do, as far as recent developments are concerned. To wit:

• From the fine film blog, Cinematical: “How’s this for a shocking piece of news: Seventeen years after Kyle MacLachlan last appeared as Special Agent Dale Cooper in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, WENN reports that the actor wants to resurrect the legendary show on the Internet. The actor says: ‘I have a crazy idea to bring back Twin Peaks on the net as five-minute webisodes.’ Should this become a reality, it will be without David Lynch, whose ‘focus is more on transcendental meditation now.’”

• It’s interesting to see, on a list of the Top 50 TV Westerns of All Time (compiled by the Western Writers of America), at least three vintage series that can also be classified as crime fiction: Have Gun, Will Travel (#5), The Wild, Wild West (19), and the oft-overlooked 1972-1974 NBC Mystery Movie segment, Hec Ramsey (which, like Have Gun, starred Richard Boone). By the way, the top four places on the WWA’s roster are occupied by Gunsmoke, Maverick, Rawhide, and Bonanza. Deadwood placed 11th, but should’ve been higher.

• Here’s your Man from U.N.C.L.E. fix for the day.

• Over at Mysteries in Paradise, Kerrie Smith compares the recent nominees for a variety of high-profile crime-fiction awards. “Even if you are one that says you are not influenced by awards, and are often profoundly disappointed when you read the winner,” Smith writes, “it gives pause for thought when the same authors and titles crop up again and again doesn’t it?”

• The latest Beat to a Pulp short story: “YNot,” by Travis Erwin.

• I’m looking forward to seeing the film Whiteout, which debuts in September and stars the ever-lovely Kate Beckinsale as a deputy U.S. marshal investigating murder in Antarctica. My interest has been piqued further by the recently released trailer for that movie, which has been adapted from Greg Rucka’s 1998 comic-book series.

• Speaking of films, I am definitely adding this forgotten gem to my Netflix list: Hickey & Boggs (1972), which reunited I Spy stars Bill Cosby and Robert Culp in a plot about ill-fortuned gumshoes on the hunt for a missing girl. As author Duane Swierczynski remarks, “if you love your private eyes pushed to the point of oblivion, if you think the best crime films were made in the 1970s, and love a good neo-noir that plays out in broad daylight, I very much recommend tracking down Hickey & Boggs.”

• Amid rising tensions in Iran, following last week’s disputed re-election of the nation’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Tom Gabbay submits his third thriller, The Tehran Conviction, to the notorious Page 69 Test. The results are here.

• Funny. I had almost forgotten that espionage novelist Alan Furst (The Spies of Warsaw) once contributed football columns to Seattle Weekly, the “alternative newspaper” for which I also labored in a previous life. And I’m with Sarah Weinman in being puzzled as to why Furst prefers not to talk about his early novels. I liked both The Paris Drop (1980) and The Caribbean Account (1981).

• Over at Pulp Serenade, Cullen Gallagher assesses the “dark, brooding poetry” of David Goodis’ opening lines.

• “Readers should be warned that I am going to write a positive review of one of the most excoriated books in the thriller genre, and I should know since I have been among those excoriating it,” writes David L. Vineyard in Mystery*File. “That said, I think someone needs to point out why Sapper (Herman Cyril McNeile) and Bulldog Drummond have lingered so long in the public imagination and are still read today by some--myself included.” This is an excellent piece, well worth your reading.

• In a sprightly exchange for Pulp Pusher, Anthony Neil Smith and Victor Gischler “shoot the breeze ... about rural noir, tacos, and their literary heroes.” Quite the pair, indeed.

• Could Hawley Harvey Crippen, the American homeopathic physician found guilty of murdering his wife in London in 1910, have his name cleared 99 years later? The publicity would certainly be good for Martin Edwards, whose 2008 novel, Dancing for the Hangman, is finally due out in the States later this year from Five Star Press.

• Another thing I missed while I was away in the Midwest: Last week’s episode of the KSAV Web radio program TV Confidential featured a conversation with 82-year-old Emmy Award-nominated producer Everett Chambers, who worked on the original NBC series Columbo during four of its seven seasons (1971-1978). Fortunately, I--and you--can still listen to that exchange here.

• And among the books I saved from my father’s shelves after his death five years ago was a collection of the black-and-white, 1930s Secret Agent X-9 comic strips written by Dashiell Hammett and drawn by Alex Raymond. What I didn’t know, though, until reading about them in Christopher Mills’ Spy-fi Channel blog, was that two film serials were made from those strips. “The 1937 serial has Agent X-9 functioning pretty much as a standard movie G-Man, chasing after a ring of international jewel thieves ...,” Mills explains. “The 1945 serial, on the other hand, is a genuine espionage adventure. This one stars a young, up-and-coming Lloyd Bridges as Phil Corrigan, Secret Agent X-9. The charismatic and talented Bridges was a far better actor than most other serial heroes, and his nascent star quality really infuses the 13-chapter serial with energy. Unlike some other chapterplays of the era, you don’t get bored between fistfights and car chases.” Hmm. More DVDs to track down ...