Always an Ace in My Book

I have been a follower of Ace Atkins’ fiction from White Shadow forward, and including his 10 Spenser novels. So I was pleased to read this news item from In Reference to Murder:

Author Ace Atkins will receive the 2026 Harper Lee Award, organizers of the Monroeville Literary Festival have announced. The elite club of previous winners includes E.O. Wilson, Winston Groom, Rick Bragg, and Fannie Flagg. According to festival organizers, the award “recognizes the lifetime achievement of a writer either born in Alabama or strongly connected to the state.” A former Auburn Tiger and sports and crime reporter, Atkins published his first crime novel, Crossroad Blues, in 1998. He’s since published several novels in the Nick Travers and Sheriff Quinn Colson series, as well as standalone titles and a series of ‘Spenser’ novels, continuing the franchise launched by the late Robert B. Parker. The festival and award presentation will take place Feb. 26-28, 2026.

Atkins’ next novel, “a rollicking comedic thriller” titled Everybody Wants to Rule the World, is due out from William Morrow in December.

Atkins Splits Up with Spenser

January 18, 2022, will bring the release of Robert B. Parker’s Bye Bye Baby (Putnam), the 50th book starring Spenser, the wisecracking Boston private eye introduced in 1973’s The Godwulf Manuscript. It will also apparently mark the end of Ace Atkins’ responsibility for continuing that series since the death of its creator, Robert B. Parker, in 2010. Atkins broadcast the news on Twitter earlier today:

Yep, it’s true. I’m retiring as Spenser: For Hire after “Bye Bye Baby” is out next month. After ten books, it was high time to return to some major projects I want to tackle. I appreciate the support all these years. Raising a donut and beer to you all!

This announcement brought forth a deluge of compliments, with readers saying how much they’ve appreciated Atkins’ stewardship and reinvigoration of Parker’s series, which began with the 2012 publication of Robert B. Parker’s Lullaby. “Ace, I say this with the utmost sincerity,” wrote one. “You did RBP proud. You kept Spenser, Hawk, Susan, and Pearl alive for us. You did it with integrity and love for the characters, and it shows in every word you wrote.”

Amid all such applause, the 51-year-old Mississippi author made clear that, while he was happy for the opportunity to concoct 10 further Spenser adventures, he’s looking forward to again producing fictional yarns of his own unique devising (“the story queue is backed up for miles”). Atkins is developing more entries in his series about Mississippi sheriff Quinn Colson (The Heathens), and added, “I’m working on an amazing project now. More details soon. But another true crime novel.” As I recall, the last “true crime novel” he penned was 2010’s Infamous, which Wikipedia explains was “based on the 1933 Charles Urschel kidnapping and subsequent misadventures of the gangster couple George ‘Machine Gun’ and Kathryn Kelly.”

I don’t see word yet of who might take over the composing of Spenser novels. But considering the financial success of Parker’s series, it’s unlikely to go without a continuation writer for long.

FOLLOW-UP: Well, thanks goodness for Lee Goldberg, who—in a comment attached to this post—put me onto news about the future of not just one, but two Robert B. Parker protagonists. As Publishers Weekly reports, sportswriter and novelist Mike Lupica, who has already penned a couple of books featuring small-town police chief Jesse Stone, in addition to three headlined by gumshoe Sunny Randall, will “be taking over the Spenser series from Ace Atkins.” Meanwhile, the magazine says, author Alison Gaylin (The Collective) “will write a new installment in Parker’s Sunny Randall series; in doing so, she will become the first woman to take over a Parker series.”

Bullet Points: Still Hanging in There Edition

• The Strand Magazine is out today with its list of nominees for the 2020 Strand Critics Awards. The contenders are as follows:

Best Mystery Novel:
— Big Sky, by Kate Atkinson (Little, Brown)
— The Lost Man, by Jane Harper (Flatiron)
— The Sentence Is Death, by Anthony Horowitz (Harper)
— Lady in the Lake, by Laura Lippman (Morrow)
— Heaven, My Home, by Attica Locke (Mulholland)
— The Border, by Don Winslow (Morrow)

Best Debut Novel:
— Scrublands, by Chris Hammer (Atria)
— Miracle Creek, by Angie Kim (Sarah Crichton)
— One Night Gone, by Tara Laskowski (Graydon House)
— The Silent Patient, by Alex Michaelides (Celadon)
— Three-Fifths, by John Vercher (Agora)

In addition, authors Walter Mosley and Tess Gerritsen will receive Lifetime Achievement Awards, and Bronwen Hruska of Soho Press will be given the Publisher of the Year Award. Other winners will be announced during a virtual event come September 4.

• Earlier this week, the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers announced the winners of its 2020 Scribe Awards, in seven categories. The only one focused on crime fiction appears to be “Original Novel—General.” And the winner there is Robert B. Parker’s The Bitterest Pill, by Reed Farrel Coleman (Putnam). Competing for that same honor were Murder, My Love, by Max Allan Collins (Titan), and Murder, She Wrote: A Time for Murder, by Jon Land (Berkley).

• While we’re on the subject of literary prizes, let me also acknowledge the recipients of the 2019 Shirley Jackson Awards, which celebrate “outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic.” There were six categories of contenders, but it’s among the rivals for Best Novel that we find the most works of crime fiction. The Book of X, by Sarah Rose Etter (Two Dollar Radio), captured that title, beating out five other books: Curious Toys, by Elizabeth Hand (Little, Brown); Goodnight Stranger, by Miciah Bay Gault (Park Row); Ninth House, by Leigh Bardugo (Flatiron); Nothing to See Here, by Kevin Wilson (Ecco); and Tinfoil Butterfly, by Rachel Eve Moulton (MCD x FSG Originals).

• A third Life on Mars series is a go! First, of course, came the 2006-2007 UK science-fiction police procedural Life on Mars, followed by its sequel, Ashes to Ashes. Now we can look forward to the “third and final installment of the story,” titled Lazarus. The Killing Times says Mars co-creator Matthew Graham plans a four- or five-episode run, and assures fans that all of the principal series stars—“John Simm, Phillip Glenister, and Keeley Hawes among them”—will be returning for Lazarus.

• Also from The Killing Times comes the welcome word that “Clerkenwell Films has picked up the rights to acclaimed Irish writer Catherine Ryan Howard’s third novel, Rewind.

It tells the story of Andrew, the manager of Shanamore Holiday Cottages, who watches his only guest via a hidden camera in her room. One night the unthinkable happens: a shadowy figure emerges onscreen, kills her and destroys the camera. But who is the murderer? How did they know about the camera? And how will Andrew live with himself?

Natalie wishes she’d stayed at home as soon as she arrives in the wintry isolation of Shanamore. There’s something creepy about the manager. She wants to leave, but she can’t—not until she’s found what she’s looking for.

• Brian Busby, who blogs at The Dusty Bookcase, draws my attention to the under-reported demise of Canadian mystery writer Edward O. Phillips on May 30. He writes: “Ted—as he was known—may not be well-known south of the border, though he was published in the United States. In Canada, his debut, Sunday's Child (1981), was nominated for the First Novel Award. His 1986 novel, Buried on Sunday, won the Arthur Ellis Award.” Wikipedia says the author “was best known for his mystery novel series featuring gay detective Geoffrey Chadwick.” An obituary in The Montreal Gazette notes that Phillips, a lifelong Quebec resident, died “of complications from COVID-19.” He was 88 years old. The Globe and Mail offers its own Phillips obit here.

• Variety reports that Ace Atkins’ novels starring Quinn Colson, “a former Army Ranger who returns to his home in rural northeast Mississippi,” and becomes a sheriff, are being adapted into an HBO-TV drama. There are 10 Colson yarns, beginning with 2011’s The Ranger and including the latest entry, The Revelators (Putnam).

• Meanwhile, Oline H. Cogdill interviews Atkins for the Mystery Scene magazine blog. “The plan was to have 10 questions for 10 years of Quinn,” she explains. “Instead, we got a bit carried away.”

• Author Sheila Kohler puts forth the proposition, in the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine blog, that Miguel de Cervantes’ 17th-century yarn, Don Quixote, was the first real crime novel.

• After scouring Ian Fleming’s novels for clues of every sort, William Boyd—who wrote the 2013 James Bond continuation novel, Solo—believes he’s found where British agent 007 lived in London. And it’s not far from the street where another spy-fiction celebrity, John le Carré’s George Smiley, had his own comfortable digs.

• For CrimeReads, Christina Schwarz offers a photo tour of sites familiar from the two years that Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were on the run from law-enforcement officials in the 1930s.

• I remember sitting through the 1990 film Dick Tracy, based on Chester Gould’s comic-strip character and starring Warren Beatty, Al Pacino, and Madonna. The experience was tedious, the script “lousy” (to quote Max Allan Collins, who penned the movie tie-in novel), and the character’s no better than two-dimensional. Early expectations of Dick Tracy generating a movie franchise quickly fell by the wayside. But as Den of Geek reports, there were ideas for what a sequel might be, even if no script was developed. Dick Tracy screenwriter Jack Epps Jr. tells Den’s Mike Cecchini that the follow-up “would have seen a roughly ten-year jump in time, featured an older Junior [the police detective’s adopted son], and put Tracy in the midst of World War II.

“The sequel [would have been] something around munitions and war secrets,” Epps says “I probably would have gone to factories, because I was always amazed at how America turned into this armament industry. We had no weapons manufacturers before the war began, and by the end, we were a juggernaut, turning out planes in two, three days and things like that.”

To be clear, there were no plans to put Warren Beatty in uniform and send Tracy overseas to join the war effort on the frontlines. Dick Tracy 2 would have been strictly a domestic wartime affair.

• Bloggers Dru Ann Love, of Dru’s Book Musings, and BOLO Books’ Kristopher Zgorski have teamed up for a new YouTube venture, BOLO*MUSINGS. It’s been an opportunity, thus far, for them to chat about recent and upcoming crime/mystery novels. The second installment, posted this week, finds the pair discussing a dozen of their favorite works from the first half of 2020.

• Do you remember Vengeance Unlimited, the 1998 ABC-TV crime drama starring Michael Madsen? As Wikipedia recalls, Madsen played Mr. Chapel, “a mysterious stranger keen on serving justice to those who had been ignored by the law. To achieve those ends, Mr. Chapel made use of promised favors from former clients. People in trouble were usually contacted by Chapel with an envelope on their front doorstep containing newspaper clippings related to previous clients, along with the phone number 555-0132. When Mr. Chapel took a case, his demand was simple: either pay a fee of one million dollars, or promise to do a favor at some time in the future—whatever, whenever, wherever and for however long he needed you—then your debt would be paid in full. In the series pilot, it was clear that Mr. Chapel had been doing this for some time, as he called in a number of favors to help his current client.” Only 16 episodes of Vengeance Unlimited were broadcast, and recently a YouTube channel called Pop Zone posted them all. There’s no telling how long they’ll be available, though, before a copyright complaint provokes their disappearance.

Spenser 2.0

This week, I devote my Kirkus Reviews column to an assessment of Robert B. Parker’s Lullaby--the first installment in Ace Atkins’ new series of Spenser novels--and In Pursuit of Spenser: Mystery Writers on Robert B. Parker and the Creation of an American Hero, a collection of essays about Parker’s work and life, edited by Otto Penzler.

Of Lullaby, I write in part:

... Atkins spends so much time trying to capture the wit and melody of Parker’s prose, that it can be hard to spot his peculiar fingerprints on Lullaby. Some of Atkins’ contributions may be perceived only by veteran readers of Spenser’s adventures, as they’re subtle allusions to the gumshoe’s original outings. At one point, for instance, Spenser recalls watching Fourth of July fireworks with Brenda Loring, a “nubile secretary” he dated before falling for Susan Silverman (“I wondered what ever became of her…”). Elsewhere he considers working on a long-neglected chunk of wood that he probably last took his carving knife to in Parker’s first couple of books. And Spenser has started to drink Amstel Light beer again, once a staple of his diet.

What’s also distinctive about Lullaby, though, is a seemingly renewed sense of interest in Boston as a setting.

You can look up--and, I hope, enjoy--my whole Kirkus piece here.

Hired for Spenser

This morning brings my latest contribution to the Kirkus Reviews Web site, its subject being Sixkill, the 39th--and last--novel Robert B. Parker finished writing before he died in January of last year at age 77. You’ll find my thoughts on the book and its author here.

* * *

While working on that Kirkus article, I had the chance to interview Mississippi author Ace Atkins, who has been hired by publisher Putnam to compose new entries in Parker’s renowned series featuring Boston gumshoe Spenser. Because Kirkus blog posts are limited in length, I wasn’t able to include most of my exchange with Atkins. Rather than let the excess go to waste, I’m featuring it below.

Since the announcement that he’ll take over Parker’s series, I haven’t seen Atkins quizzed about either what he hopes to do with Spenser in the future or what affect this new responsibility will have on his existing career as a novelist. (After all, Atkins is just starting a new series of his own with the release next month of The Ranger [Putnam], which introduces Army Ranger Quinn Colson.) So I hope this material will be enlightening to Rap Sheet readers.


Author Atkins samples the winter delights in Parker territory, Boston. (Photo by Carrefour, Ltd. Used with permission.)

J. Kingston Pierce: Did you ever meet Robert B. Parker?

Ace Atkins: I never met Bob, but we corresponded. He thought it was pretty great that we shared the nickname Ace. He’d been called Ace Parker by his close friends. The nickname was after the Pro Hall of Fame football player Ace Parker, who, in a strange twist, was a friend of my father’s.

I had been a big fan of his work since I was a teenager. Spenser turned me on to [Dashiell] Hammett, [Raymond] Chandler, and [Ross] Macdonald. Parker and those writers helped me form the backbone of my career and find my voice as a writer.

JKP: Did you have to audition to become the new author of the Spenser series, maybe by submitting a sample story of some sort?

AA: Yep, I became aware of the search for a new Spenser author last fall, and turned in 50 pages in October. I was already into my sequel to The Ranger, but felt very strongly about trying my hand.

JKP: What made you the right guy to take over the Spenser series?

AA: More than any other writer, except perhaps Elmore Leonard, Bob shaped my style and taste in storytelling. I learned a lot from him and use much of his technique in everything I do. We also have a very similar worldview and an appreciation for sports, beer, food, and dogs. I also draw a lot into my work from my love of Westerns. You can see a lot of that influence in the Spenser novels.

I also think there is a certain musical quality to his novels--much like Chandler. My earlier writing was shaped by turning music into prose. Bob wrote Spenser like classic jazz.

JKP: Are you picking up the Spenser series right where Parker left off in Sixkill, or are you planning your books to be prequels, transporting Spenser back to his younger days?

AA: I would love to write about some cases in the Spenser files from long ago. But it was very important to everyone involved that Spenser remains a very contemporary character right now. Much of the fun of Spenser is his reaction to pop culture in America. Reading the entire series, you get such a pulse on trends that Bob thought were pretty silly at the time.

JKP: I’ve heard that you are just wrapping up work on your first Spenser novel. Does it have a title?

AA: The novel is done. I’m sending it to Bob’s longtime editor at Putnam this week. Spenser #40 has a title, but not an official title yet. Although, I hope it’s kept. I think Bob would’ve liked it, as it comes from a jazz standard.

JKP: Finally, what does this new assignment mean as far as your writing non-Spenser books? While penning the Spenser series, will you have time and energy enough to keep up a separate writing career?

AA: Very good question! I was half into the next Ranger novel when Spenser knocked on my door. I will be finishing up that novel this summer and fall and will have two novels on bookstore shelves in 2012. For the immediate future, I look forward to rotating between Boston and the Deep South for my Quinn Colson stories. For someone who was born in the South but raised in many northern cities, this just seems ideal.

READ MORE: “Let’s Talk Ranger” (Official Site of Ace Atkins).

Hand-off Play

I’m not surprised by this news from Publishers Weekly:

In a deal cut by Robert B. Parker’s estate, Penguin’s Putnam imprint will continue to publish two of the author’s most popular series--Spenser and Jesse Stone--under the authorship of writers Michael Brandman and Ace Atkins. The Spenser series debuted in 1974 and is made up of 39 novels; the Jesse Stone series began in 1997 and [comprises] nine novels.

Brandman produced (and wrote the screenplays) for the TV movies based on Parker’s small-town Massachusetts detective, Jesse Stone, that appeared on CBS and starred Tom Selleck in the title role. The first Jesse Stone novel Brandman will release is Robert B. Parker’s Killing the Blues, which is scheduled for September 13, 2011. Atkins, a tested crime author at Putnam with books like White Shadow and Infamous to his credit, will release the first new Parker-branded Spenser novel in Spring 2012. Parker’s longtime editor, Chris Pepe, will be overseeing both projects.

Parker, who wrote over 60 novels, died in January 2010.

While I don’t know Michael Brandman, I am familiar with the work of Ace Atkins (who was interviewed by Megan Abbott for this page in association with his 2009 novel, Devil’s Garden).

From a business perspective, I can certainly understand Penguin wanting to continue the Stone and Spenser series indefinitely--they’ve become cash cows: many readers buy new installments every year simply because they’ve gotten in the habit. But Spenser, especially, has had a long enough run. And though I’m sure Atkins can do a serviceable job concocting new tales about that Boston gumshoe, his girlfriend, Susan Silverman, and the ever-ominous Hawk, I’ll be surprised to see him make any substantial shifts in the series’ all-too-familiar format. (Fans would likely cry “foul” if he thought of killing off Ms. Silverman, for instance.) So one has to ask: Why can’t we just be happy with Parker’s legacy as it is, and not try to artificially extend it?

In the meantime, I’m still looking forward to seeing Parker’s last real Spenser novel, Sixkill, which is due out from Putnam on May 3.

(Hat tip to Omnimystery News.)

READ MORE: “Spenser, Continued,” by Bill Crider (Bill Crider’s Pop Culture Magazine).

The Book You Have to Read: “The Drowner,” by John D. MacDonald

(Editor’s note: This is the 78th installment of our ongoing Friday blog series highlighting great but forgotten books. Today’s pick comes from Mississippi novelist Ace Atkins. He’s the creator of the Nick Travers series [Crossroads Blues, etc.] and the author of Devil’s Garden [2009], which found Pinkerton detective and future writer Dashiell Hammett investigating the infamous 1921 Fatty Arbuckle scandal. Atkins’ next crime thriller, Infamous, is due out this coming April.)

Had John D. MacDonald been less prolific, perhaps he’d be better known today. The author, best remembered for his iconic “salvage expert,” Travis McGee, was a manic genius, producing more than 70 novels in his lifetime, from noir to sordid love tales to science fiction. He even wrote the novelization of the 1963 Judy Garland movie I Could Go on Singing. But it was at writing crime stories where he excelled, leaving an amazing backlist of classic crime fiction.

Maybe it’s easier for publishers to package and promote a small canon of work by Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler, or even the 18 Lew Archer novels by Ross Macdonald, than to wrestle with the backlist of someone like John D. MacDonald.

A decade ago, Random House made a poor effort to repackage the Travis McGee series for modern readers. The editions included an outstanding foreword by Carl Hiaasen, wrapped in terrible, uninspired jackets. Had John D. not been known for his fascinating, sexy, and sometimes lurid covers, it wouldn’t have been such a sin. One of the highlights of being a teenager was discovering old John D. paperbacks with impossibly curvy women in small bikinis.

Many titles outside of the McGee series--most notably Where’s Janice Gantry?, A Bullet for Cinderella, and Dead Low Tide--are terrific novels that have unfortunately not been in print since their original run in the 1950s and ’60s.

One of his best is The Drowner, published as a paperback original by Fawcett in 1963. The novel has everything that became a hallmark of a MacDonald story--high social commentary mixed in with kinky sex, wild immorality, and the victims cast aside in the wake.

This story takes place in central Florida, the setting of most of MacDonald’s work, making the Sunshine State look far more deviant and dark than any of the happy images spread by local chamber of commerce men. MacDonald’s landscape includes forgotten cracker towns, roadside motels, and endless orange groves waiting for the developers’ bulldozers. Even the steady drip and hum of overworked air conditioners add a sense of despair.

The novel’s private investigator, Paul Stanial, is hired to look into a suspicious suicide by the victim’s sister. Soon, we’re into a small-town society of swinger’s parties, where a blackout summons the pairing off of new sexual partners, crooked business deals, and most importantly, the disappearance of a hidden stash of money that is lost with the girl.

The Drowner is classic, distilled MacDonald populated with many recognizable stock characters: the world-weary investigator with a moral compass, a woman used up by a male-dominated world, a sluggish doof of a playboy with his pants around his ankles and his hand on a bottle, a Florida native as rugged and stalwart as a cypress, and a femme fatale who possesses freakish physical powers. (That same sort of female killer, as sexy as she is strong, has appeared in several MacDonald books.)

Like the victim, pretty much all of the characters in this novel are drowning in some form or another: Barbara Larrimore is drowning in grief over her sister’s death and from a recent cheap motel affair. Kelsey Hanson is drowning from the swingers’ parties and booze. And Sam Kimber, the roughneck Floridian, is up to his neck in tax trouble with the government.

Stanial (one of the few licensed private eyes in MacDonald’s tales) comes to the central Florida town drenched in disgust for what south Florida has become: “The biggest hedonistic complex in the known world. One big nosy sunny cauldron of busy butts and ripe red mouths, rare steaks and guitars, skinny-dipping and party games, twisters and gin, kicks and tits, laughter and brass horns, oiled brown backs and tall teased hair. Wade in, guys. Welcome to the most concentrated, gut-wrenching loneliness ever devised by man.”

MacDonald mastered this kind of camera eye turned upon the sleaziness of the ’60s scene, more complex than Los Angeles during Chandler’s day. All the Travis McGee books were pretty much big, fat morality plays, pulling no punches on the violence and anguish left in the wake of a good time.

As Stanial’s investigation drains the lake, he exposes each level of depravity caused by too much sex, or in one case, not enough of it. He exposes Florida for what it is now and was becoming at his time--a tidal pool and social experiment for the rest of the country.

The Drowner packed a hell of a wallop when it hit paperback racks at 40 cents a copy. Like most of MacDonald’s work, it’s long overdue to return. And MacDonald has every right to sit on the shelf besides Hammett, Chandler, David Goodis, and the rest of the pulp masters who wrote terrific lit for pennies per word.

No one should be forgotten for leaving such a legacy.

READ MORE: “Who Is Travis McGee?” by Dr. Gonzo (To Be or Not to Be ...); “Interview with John D. MacDonald,” by Ed Gorman (Mystery*File).

Devil’s Workshop

Ace Atkins at the Arcade Restaurant in Memphis, Tennessee. (Photograph by Jay Nolan)

Author Ace Atkins’ back story is the stuff of one of those sprawling, robust American novels of the mid-20th-century by Norman Mailer, James T. Farrell, John Steinbeck, or James Jones. He’s the college football star who made the cover of Sports Illustrated and then turned into a muckraking, Pulitzer Prize-nominated reporter, penning blues-drenched mysteries on the side, before settling deep in the heart of Faulknerania, teaching journalism at Ole Miss while publishing a pair of dazzling crime novels--White Shadow (2006) and Wicked City (2008)--that tangle fiction and fact.

His latest book, Devil’s Garden (due out from Putnam in early April), deepens Atkins’ fascination with the cunning and often cruel ways that American scoundrels high and low, overworld and underworld, manipulate power. The real-life case at the center of his tale: the infamous 1921 Fatty Arbuckle scandal. The agreed-upon facts are still few. World-famous and much-loved screen comic Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle threw a wild party in a suite at San Francisco’s St. Francis Hotel on September 5, 1921, Labor Day weekend. One of the guests, 20-something model-actress Virginia Rappe, fell ill and died shortly afterward from peritonitis brought on by a ruptured bladder. Days later, as the story took on momentum and newspaper headlines shrieked, Arbuckle was indicted for manslaughter. Newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst reportedly bragged later that this Jazz Age criminal case sold more papers than the sinking of the Lusitania.

It is a vast, complicated, and tragic story, and one of the many achievements of Atkins’ new novel is that it feels both kaleidoscopic and intimate, beckoning us to eavesdrop on the backroom machinations among the biggest powerbrokers of the 1920s and the down-and-dirty connivings of a merry band of hucksters and thieves who circle around the movie star’s downfall, looking for any angle to cash in.

And who does Atkins--now 38 and living on a Mississippi farm--offer us as our most reliable guide through this heady brew? A smart young Pinkerton detective named ... Dashiell Hammett.

Megan Abbott: Did you have any hesitations about including Hammett as a character?

Ace Atkins: When I first thought about this project, I knew Hammett was a terrific component of the story. I just could not believe someone had not written about all these 20th-century icons--Hammett, Arbuckle, and Hearst--within a story about the trial. To me it seemed like a great E.L. Doctorow book. But when I got about halfway into the novel, I feared the book would be perceived--by those just looking superficially--as a gimmick, one of those quickie mysteries with a famous figure at the helm. But, what the hell? I mean, Hammett is a great character before he became that icon. Sam Hammett was interesting to me because of what I knew about his life at the time. So I had to get over those fears and just write the damn book.

MA: Did you set any rules for yourself about how faithful to his biography you would be?

AA: I wanted and hoped to be absolutely faithful to Sam Hammett, 1921. I did not want to write Sam Spade, Nick Charles, or The Continental Op. I wanted to write about a young man with a low-paying detective job, who was trying to make sense of a pregnant wife he barely knew and the tidal surge of political and cultural events of the period. I believe it’s an accurate reflection of Hammett’s frustration and boiling ambition at the time. I believe he was just forming a worldview that would eventually make such a huge impact in his literature.

MA: You must have done tremendous research into the Arbuckle case. Was it hard to find what you needed to?

AA: The great thing about this case that made it easier than my other two novels--White Shadow and Wicked City--was that it was a well-known story that happened in a major city. San Francisco records were well archived and easily found through a lot of letter-writing and a little detective work. The autopsy results on Virginia Rappe [shown on the left] and the inquest into her death were the first documents I found. But the newspapers of the period really provided the color, details, and drama that I needed to write a novel. The facts of the case--or lack of facts--is pretty basic. I really wanted to know about the conflict between the Vigilant Committee and Arbuckle, the little quips from Milton U’Ren, the prosecutor in the case, and the entire circus of the trial. That’s what made Devil’s Garden come together.

MA: Your novel features an intriguing epigraph from Hammett about the Arbuckle case: “The Arbuckle case was the funniest case I ever worked on. In trying to convict him, everyone framed everybody else.” Is that the sum of what Hammett said publicly about the case, or did he actually say more?

AA: Hammett was notoriously cryptic. In the foreword to [the 1966 short-story collection] The Big Knockover, Lillian Hellman writes about Hammett’s quirks. She recalled trying to pull biographical details from him such as: “Tell me more about the girl in San Francisco. The silly one who lived across the hall in Pine Street.”

“She lived across the hall in Pine Street and was silly,”
Hammett said.

When Hellman inquired more, Hammett would say, “Finish your
drink and go to sleep.”

I do believe I understand Hammett and his worldview at the time. I know where and how he lived and even more about his wife, [onetime nurse Josephine “Jose” Dolan], through a friend of mine who was the only person to ever interview her. I perhaps got to understand Hammett by understanding his complicated relationship with her.

MA: You can tell us: What do you think happened to Virginia Rappe in that hotel room?

AA: It’s in the book. I’m sure of it. So I don’t want to say too much.

But since Virginia Rappe died, Roscoe Arbuckle has been portrayed as either a beast or an angel. He wasn’t either. I know he was very drunk and probably very horny on that Labor Day. But I don’t think either one of those things killed Virginia Rappe.

MA: You have a fascinating dual portrait of William Randolph Hearst and [his paramour] Marion Davies in this novel. How much of that comes from your research and what is your own invention?

AA: As the novel started to come together, it was quickly known to me that Devil’s Garden was really a love story. And if you pick apart each thread--not my invention, but really the truth of the different characters--you’ll see different types of love. I think Hammett felt obligation and duty to a woman he got pregnant. I think Minta Durfee’s love for her ex-husband, Roscoe [seen at right], was really the most pure. And of course you have Hearst with his obsession with Marion Davies. There is a mountain of fact and background for his relationship with Davies. The Svengali thing was pretty easy. During the Arbuckle trial, the only thing that knocked Roscoe off the front page of the Hearst paper was the opening of Marion Davies’ Enchantment at the Grenada Theater. The opening gained a bigger headline than the world war. I guess I would say scenes were created from a lot of research.

She really was a gorgeous woman and it was hard to blame the guy.

MA: The cast of grifters and con artists you unfurl is like Hammett crossed with Damon Runyon. You introduce the case’s infamous star witness, Virginia Rappe’s friend Maude Delmont, dining on bourbon and ice cream. But some of your other characters are less well-known, even to aficionados of the case. For instance, your character Daisy Simpkins, “federal dry agent.” Is she your invention, or does she have a real-life counterpart?

AA: You really can’t beat bourbon and ice cream. It’s a
wonderful combination.

And I’m glad you asked about Daisy Simpkins. I know most people will believe she’s invented. Look, she’s named “Daisy,” with all the Jazz Era connotations from Fitzgerald, and [she’s] a shotgun-toting federal agent just after women were given the right to vote. But Daisy was absolutely real. She had great coverage in the San Francisco Examiner in 1921 with headlines like “Girl Agent Leads Raid.” She was apparently tough as nails and such a ballsy figure in San Francisco at that time. I never saw a picture of her, and I don’t know anything about her private life. (Her relationship with Hammett was invented. But I know he would’ve loved her.) But she’s one of those wonderful characters lost to time that I wanted readers to know about.

MA: Devil’s Garden is coming out less than two months after Joe Gores’ prequel to The Maltese Falcon, Spade & Archer, was released. Have you had a chance to read Gores’ novel yet?

AA: I have not. But I have a copy and plan to read it while on tour for Devil’s Garden. I’ve been working on a new novel for the past year and feared Gores would transport me right back to 1920s San Francisco and Hammett, and that I’d never return. I’m looking forward to it.

MA: What’s one of your favorite recent reads, crime novels aside?

AA: Without doubt, it would be ... Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game [1978], by William Kennedy. I’m very embarrassed to say this was my first read of the novel, which stacks up to anything in 20th-century literature. Kennedy is a powerhouse of a talent telling a hell of a story. It’s the best novel I’ve read since discovering The Paperboy, by Pete Dexter, 10 years ago.

MA: There has been much discussion at mystery conventions of late about this issue: How do you think the publishing world handles so-called noir?

AA: I think my main qualification for any novel is sincerity. I sense many writers turning to noir because they know it sells. Some will say they are slumming and most don’t know a damn thing about the art form. If the writer doesn’t know noir from mystery from thriller from a crime novel, then they really should study up. I’ve seen a handful of so-called noirs be released that are so riddled with plot devices and clichés that they’d be laughed at by anyone with a passing knowledge of crime fiction.

To me, the crime novel or the noir is a great American art form. But lately it does seem to be a buzzword and a marketing hook, a safe haven for those with literary aspirations. Most publishers really don’t have a clue what really makes noir, and as we know, it’s much, much more than a crime.

MA: If you could have any author, living or dead, write you into their novels, as you have done with Hammett, who would you pick?

AA: I would have to say Danielle Steel. I know the character of Ace Atkins would get lucky with some really rich broad and get a plane ticket to Paris.

MA: So, what’s next for you?

AA: I’m finishing up a novel for 2010 set during the Great Depression and centering on the kidnapping of Oklahoma oilman Charles Urschel. The kidnapping was pulled off by the infamous “Machine Gun” Kelly, who was raised nearby to me, in Memphis. But the main attraction for telling this story was writing about his wife, Kathryn, who made Lady Macbeth look soft. It’s a crime novel and a road book, but really, at its core, somewhat of a comedy. I don’t really know if it’s noir. It has noir elements in it. But really, the only true noir I believe I’ve written would be White Shadow set in 1950s Tampa. I guess you could call Devil’s Garden a pre-noir.