This season holds particular significance for followers of fictional detective Sherlock Holmes. It was 125 years ago, in 1887, that Holmes and his chronicler, Doctor John Watson, made their first appearances in A Study in Scarlet,
a novel published in the paperback magazine Beeton’s Christmas Annual. That yarn had previously been called A Tangled Skein and featured sleuth Sherrinford Holmes, who shared rooms at 221B Upper Baker Street in London with a character called Ormond
Sacker. However, author Arthur Conan Doyle, at the time a physician with
a not terribly successful practice in Portsmouth, England, changed all of those
names prior to publication. Thank goodness.
Conan Doyle was paid a remarkably modest £25 for his work, which appeared again a year later in book form, complete with illustrations by the author’s father. Favorably reviewed by the prominent newspapers in Scotland, A Study in Scarlet would be followed by three more Holmes novels and 56 short stories, and help make Conan Doyle one of the world’s best-selling crime novelists.
If you’ve never read A Study in Scarlet ... first of all, shame on you! But if you would like to at least hear it being read, an audio recording of the book is available on YouTube. Click here for Chapter One.
READ MORE: “Sherlock at 125,” by Les Blatt (Classic Mysteries).
• It was 70 years ago today that the now-famous film Casablanca premiered at New York City’s elegant Hollywood Theater “to coincide with the Allied invasion of North Africa and the capture of Casablanca.” During that 10-week showing
audiences were first introduced to nightclub proprietor Rick Blaine
(Humphrey Bogart), his ex-lover Ilsa Lund (Ingrid Bergman), her Resistance
leader husband, Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid), and club pianist Sam (Dooley
Wilson), who made the song “As Time Goes By” a classic. The film didn’t go into general release, however, until January 23, 1943. Casablanca wasn’t a huge hit to begin with, but it made Bogart a romantic leading man and it has weathered well among young lovers. Click here, here, and here
to read more about this 70th anniversary.
• Because I was away for Thanksgiving, I missed last week’s news that Broken Harbour, by Tana French, won the 2012 Irish Book Award in the Crime Novel category. Also contending for that honor were Slaughter’s Hound, by Declan Burke; Vengeance, by Benjamin Black; The Istanbul Puzzle, by Laurence O’Bryan; Too Close for Comfort, by Niamh O’Connor; and Red Ribbons, by Louise Phillips.
• Speaking of commendations, Uriah Robinson (aka Norman Price) of Crime Scraps Review alerts us that author Åsa Larsson’s Till offer åt Molok has won the Swedish Crime Academy’s 2012 award for Best Swedish Crime Novel. Meanwhile, Peter Robinson’s Before the Poison captured
the Academy’s Best Foreign Crime Novel prize.
We’re approaching the 125th anniversary of Sherlock Holmes’ introduction to the reading world. His first adventure, in A Study in Scarlet, was serialized in Beeton’s Christmas Annual in late 1887. Gregory McNamee commemorates this occasion with a short piece for the Kirkus Reviews Web site. It begins:
It was an inspired but utterly accidental moment when Arthur Conan Doyle, a Scottish doctor struggling to establish himself both as a physician and as a writer in late Victorian London, drew upon the habits of an irascible medical school mentor to concoct a character that he pegged as a “consulting detective,” an utterly newfangled job description.
Like millions of other people, you probably missed the memo, but today happens to be Global James Bond Day. It was 50 years ago, on October 5, 1962, that the film Dr. No--the first big-screen Bond movie, and the earliest of Sean Connery’s seven Agent 007 pictures--commenced showing at the London Pavilion. That thriller went on to debut in other theaters around England over the next several days, before finally reaching American movie houses in May 1963.
Although it has nothing to do with crime and mystery fiction, I want to draw your attention to a quite wonderful, two-part feature in January Magazine about the longtime New Yorker magazine writer and author Joseph Mitchell (1908-1996). It commemorates 20 years since his omnibus work, Up in the Old Hotel, was first released.
The piece was put together by Matthew Fleagle. Now a technical writer for a small software company in Seattle, Washington, Fleagle began his career with an interest in journalism. I hired him on as an intern at the old Washington Magazine, and then watched his talents grow as he took on assignments for Eastsideweek, Northwest Health, and assorted other local periodicals. He’s been away from journalism for some while--he says that the Mitchell feature is “the first article I’ve written specifically for publication in a dozen years.”--but his writing and reporting skills seem not to have suffered tremendously as a result. I’m proud to have done what I could to encourage him to compose this piece about Mitchell and help get it posted. I hope to encourage more of his contributions to January in the future.
Anyway, check out both installments of Fleagle’s piece. Part I is located here, while Part II can be found here.
It was 120 years ago today, on August 4, 1892, that Lizzie Borden, a 32-year-old resident of Fall River, Massachusetts, allegedly took up a hatchet and with it murdered her banker father and her stepmother in their home at 92 Second Street. The ensuing police investigation and court trial attracted media attention from around the country, and most people seemed sure that Lizzie had done the ugly deed. However, she was acquitted on June 20, 1893, after her jury had deliberated for a mere hour and a half.
Lizzie Borden subsequently moved (with her older sister, Emma, from whom she eventually became estranged) to another house in Fall River, this one on more fashionable French Street. Following gallbladder surgery, Lizzie died on June 1, 1927. She was 66 years old.
Today, the house where Andrew Borden and his second wife, Abby, met their bloody ends operates as a bed and breakfast as well as a museum. The story of their long-ago homicides has been the inspiration for many novels (among them 1984’s Lizzie, by Evan Hunter [aka Ed McBain], and 1989’s Miss Lizzie, by Walter Satterthwait) as well as television dramatizations (including the haunting 1975 film The Legend of Lizzie Borden, which starred former Bewitched actress Elizabeth Montgomery--who was reportedly related to Lizzie--and can be viewed in its 90-minute entirety here). But those events of August 1892 may be best remembered as a result of a familiar skipping-rope rhyme of now-forgotten origin:
Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her mother forty whacks.
When she saw what she had done
She gave her father forty-one.
The likelihood of the Borden murders ever being moved from the “active” into the “solved” files ranks right up there with the chances of someone finally unmasking notorious Jack the Ripper. But that’s OK. Some mysteries are best left as just that: mysteries.
• If you live around Harrogate, England, you have the opportunity to enter a contest sponsored in part by the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival, which is to be held this year at the Old Swan Hotel, July 19-21. If I understand this challenge correctly, the goal is to compose “crime stories [of] no more than 300 words” long that can be featured in local buses. Entry details are here.
• Suddenly, G.K. Chesteron’s parish priest-cum-sleuth seems to be everywhere. Penguin’s handsome new 768-page volume, The Complete Father Brown Stories, is due out at the end of next month. And Mark Williams, who played Arthur Weasley in the “Harry Potter” films--has reportedly been cast as Chesterton’s protagonist in a 10-episode BBC-TV drama set to air in early 2013.
• By the way, Omnimystery News mentioned in its item about Weasley’s hiring that “A pilot for a U.S. crime drama, Sanctuary of Fear with Barnard Hughes as Father Brown living in Manhattan, aired in 1979 but was not developed further.” While I don’t remember watching that pilot, YouTube hosts its introductory segment, which I am embedding on the left. Guest starring Kay Lenz and Fred Gwynne, it couldn’t have been all bad. Does anyone out there remember seeing that teleflick?
• The online mag Obit featuresa good background piece on Patricia Highsmith’s career and her tendency toward “violent thoughts.”
• Writers Gary Phillips and Tony Chavira are combining their respective Webcomics--Bicycle Cop Dave and Brand & Reese, both of which were published on the Los Angeles housing/development Web site FourStory.org--in a single volume,titled Beat L.A., which they hope to produce through the crowd-funding site Kickstar. You can learn more about their project, and help contribute, here.
• The Web site ForeWord Reviews has announced the winners of its 2011 ForeWord Book of the Year Awards in dozens of categories, including Mystery and Thriller/Suspense. In addition, the Editor’s Choice Prize for fiction was given to a murder mystery, All Cry Chaos, by Leonard Rosen (The Permanent Press).
• Author J. Sydney Jones presents, in his blog, an excellent interview with British writer Michael Jecks, the author of 31 books in his Knights Templar series and a “master of the medieval murder mystery,” to quote Jones. You will find their exchange here.
• Another thing I recall fondly: CBS newsman Christopher Glenn’s Saturday morning “In the News” segments, which were geared toward young people and broadcast from 1971 to 1986. In case you didn’t know, Glenn died in 2006 at age 68.
• Mark your calendars, folks:This year’s Poisoned Pen Conference, organized by Arizona’s Poisoned Pen Bookstore, will take place at Phoenix’s historic Biltmore Hotel on Friday, July 13. Guests scheduled to participate include Joseph Kanon, Timothy Hallinan, Alex Kava, Jesse Kellerman, Martin Limon, and Dana Stabenow. The price to attend is just $20. More information is available here.
• I’m tardy too in sending out best birthday wishes to Lindsay Wagner, who not only starred in The Bionic Woman (perhaps not her finest moment, all things considered), but put in twoappearances on The Rockford Files. Wagner turned 63 years old last Friday.
• Robert Mitchum, Richard Dreyfuss, Shirley MacLaine, and Jimmy Stewart (partly because of his 1973-1974 CBS-TV mystery series Hawkins) are all featured on Flavorwire’s rundown of “10 Movie Stars Who Bombed on TV.” Speaking of Stewart, if you pay close attention to Flavorwire’s clip from his 1971-1972 sitcom, you’ll spot actress Kate Jackson--beautiful and bare-midriffed in her early 20s (pre-The Rookies, pre-Charlie’s Angels)--guesting as a college student in a fix.
• I, for one, had forgotten that Michelle Pfeiffer starred in the very short-lived, 1980 police drama B.A.D. CATS. “An obvious ripoff of Starsky & Hutch (and executive-produced for the same network by Starsky’s Aaron Spelling), B.A.D. CATS pitted the two male detectives--one blond and one brunette, natch--of the Burglary Auto Detail, Commercial Auto Thefts squad (!) against various hijackers, terrorists, dope fiends, and auto thieves,” writes Marty McKee. “Because Nick and Ocee happen to be former race car drivers, their method of busting crime involves endangering innocent civilians and destroying lots of private property.”
• Even the British are struck by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s reputation for mendacity. “Granted, presidential candidates are no strangers to disingenuous or overstated claims; it's pretty much endemic to the business,” observes The Guardian’s Michael Cohen. “But Romney is doing something very different and far more pernicious. Quite simply, the United States has never been witness to a presidential candidate, in modern American history, who lies as frequently, as flagrantly and as brazenly as Mitt Romney.”
• It will be good to see 1940s comic-book industry troubleshooter Jack Starr return in Seduction of the Innocent, by Max Allan Collins, due out from Hard Case Crime in September.
• Michael Connelly, Robert Dugoni, and David Ellis are the nominees for the 2012 Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction.
• And I really do have to rent the DVD set of Burke’s Law sometime. That cop series, originally broadcast on ABC-TV from 1963 to 1965, seems to have lots of fans, but I’ve only seen a few episodes.
It was 40 years ago today that operatives linked to Republican President Richard Nixon’s re-election campaign broke into Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C., looking for material that could be used to damage then presidential candidate Senator George McGovern (D-South Dakota) and his fellow Dems. Police arrested five men for the crime. Those five, and others, were subsequently tried on charges of conspiracy, burglary, and violation of federal wiretapping laws. The Watergate break-in, and the White House cover-up that followed, led to Nixon--who was facing impeachment and removal from office--becoming the only U.S. president ever to resign.
This coming Sunday, May 27, will mark the 75th anniversary of the opening of San Francisco’s magnificent Golden Gate Bridge. To commemorate this occasion, The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley has put together a guided Web tour of that heavily traveled span as displayed on the covers of mystery, crime, and detective novels. There are book jackets dating back to 1940, though most of them are of much more recent vintage.
Being a longtime supporter of and frequent visitor to San Francisco, I wish I could say that I’ve read all of the books Brandt has collected for this Web tour. I haven’t ... but that only means I have a pleasant challenge ahead of me before the 80th anniversary ...
It was 20 years ago tonight that comedian Johnny Carson, then 66 years old, left NBC-TV’s The Tonight Show after 30 years as its congenial host. Can it really have been that long?
It’s not crime fiction related, but I have a new article posted on the Kirkus Reviews Web site, looking at some of my favorite books about the now century-old sinking of the British luxury liner Titanic--a tragedy that cost more than 1,500 people their lives.
It was 130 years ago today that American outlaw Jesse James was shot in the back in St. Joseph, Missouri, by a member of his own gang, Robert Ford. James was only 34 years old. Ford later tried to exploit his obvious act of homicide, posing for photographs and staging re-enactments of James’ death, but with limited success. Ford was himself murdered 10 years later.
As the fine blog Television Obscurities notes, it was 50 years ago today that astronaut John Glenn’s spacecraft, Friendship 7, blasted off from Cape Canaveral in Florida as part of the United States’ Project Mercury. That launch resulted in the first successful attempt by NASA to put an astronaut in orbit.
At least 60 million viewers were glued to their television set, according to Broadcasting. Some 135 million would watch at least some of the network coverage that day. The three networks spent at least $3 million on the mission, a figure that included the costs incurred by a number of delays. The expensive delays forced ABC to withdraw from broadcasting “A Tour of the White House with Mrs. John F. Kennedy” earlier in the month. The coverage began three hours prior to lift-off, at 6:30 a.m., and continued for 11.5 hours. Both CBS and NBC also pre-empted portions of their evening schedule to air specials on Glenn’s flight: CBS aired a half-hour special from 9:30-10 p.m., while NBC’s special ran from 10 [to] 11 p.m.
Television Obscurities’ post includes “footage of the countdown and launch of Friendship 7, with commentary by Walter Cronkite ...”
By the way, John Glenn--who went on from being an astronaut to become a popular Democratic U.S. senator from Ohio (1974-1999)--will celebrate his 91st birthday in July. However, network TV news programs will probably pay closer attention to him today.
Amazing as this seems, my Killer Covers blog--which focuses mostly on paperback cover illustrations--turns three years old today. To celebrate, I’m “showcasing three covers by three different illustrators I discovered during the last 12 months: Britain’s Sam Peffer (aka ‘Peff’) and American artists Lu Kimmel and Tom Miller.”
Today marks the 65th anniversary of Los Angeles’ notorious “Black Dahlia murder.” The victim was an unemployed, 22-year-old woman from Massachusetts, Elizabeth Short, whose mutilated corpse was discovered on January 15, 1947, in a vacant lot on South Norton Avenue. Short had last been seen six days before in downtown’s elegant Biltmore Hotel. The murder--which has inspired a great deal of fiction over the decades, including the 1975 TV film Who Is the Black Dahlia?, James Ellroy’s novel The Black Dahlia (1987) and Max Allan Collins’ Angel in Black(2001)--was never solved.
You can find out more about the case here and here.
ALERT: At least for the time being, the teleflick Who Is the Black Dahlia?--which starred Efrem Zimbalist Jr. and Lucie Arnaz, the latter playing the ill-fated Ms. Short--can be viewed in its entirety here.
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In the Beginning ...
Before The Rap Sheet was a blog, it was a monthly newsletter in January Magazine. To find all the old editions of that newsletter, just click here.
featured sleuth Sherrinford Holmes, who shared rooms at 221B Upper Baker Street in London with a character called Ormond
Sacker. However, author Arthur Conan Doyle, at the time a physician with
a not terribly successful practice in Portsmouth, England, changed all of those
names prior to publication. Thank goodness.
