It was fifty years ago today, on October 27, 1966, that the Halloween special It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown debuted on CBS. It was actually the third of the Peanuts specials to air, after A Charlie Brown Christmas in 1965 and Charlie Brown’s All-Stars earlier in 1966. Alongside A Charlie Brown Christmas it would arguably become the most popular of the Peanuts television specials. …You can read all of Canote’s note here. And if you can’t find time to watch It’s a Great Pumpkin this year (it is scheduled for broadcast again tomorrow night, October 28, at 8 p.m. ET/PT on ABC-TV), you can always watch the full, half-hour episode on YouTube.
It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown would not only be historic as the first time in the Peanuts TV specials in which the Great Pumpkin was referenced. It was also historic as the first TV special that portrayed Snoopy’s recurring fantasy of fighting the Red Baron, a running joke that had been introduced only a little over a year before the special aired (on October 10, 1965).
Showing posts with label Anniversaries 2016. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Anniversaries 2016. Show all posts
Thursday, October 27, 2016
Back to the Pumpkin Patch
Here’s an anniversary worth celebrating—with costumes, candy, and carved jack-’o-lanterns. As blogger Terence Towles Canote reminds us,
Thursday, September 08, 2016
Five Years, 50 Years—Mission Accomplished
I know this is supposed to be a crime-fiction blog, but I can’t resist mentioning that tonight marks 50 years since the debut of the NBC-TV series Star Trek. Terence Towles Canote has a nice in-depth post up about this anniversary, which notes that
I think creator Gene Roddenberry’s vision for Star Trek has been greatly enhanced and deepened by some of the people who took over the franchise after his death in 1991, particularly executive producer Rick Berman. Yet Roddenberry gave television watchers the blueprint, and even half a century later, his “Wagon Train to the stars” is as durable and promising and hopeful as ever.
Live long and prosper, my fellow Star Trek fans!
READ MORE: “To Boldly Imagine: Star Trek’s Half Century,” by Andrew Liptak (Kirkus Reviews); “Star Trek’s Still as Relevant on the 50th Anniversary,” by Dave Marinaccio (Bookgasm); “The Mission to Restore the Original Starship Enterprise,” by Jackie Mansky (Smithsonian); “Star Trek at 50: The Theme Song Has Lyrics. No, Really,” by Chris Barton (Los Angeles Times).
Since September 8, 1966, Star Trek has become the stuff of television legends. It was the low-rated science-fiction show saved by its fans from cancellation that became a phenomenon in syndicated reruns. While there is some truth to the legend (in its initial network run Star Trek’s ratings were always moderate to low), there is much about the legend that simply isn’t true. Indeed, even while in its first run there were signs that Star Trek was on its way to becoming a phenomenon.Comic-book writer Christopher Mills offers his own thoughts on the show, in Atomic Pulp, explaining that the original, 1966-1969 Trek “inspired and informed the person I became.
I learned the value of reason and logic from an alien with pointed ears and a Satanic visage. I learned the nobility of humanity and compassion toward all life, regardless of shape, color or form, from an anachronistic Southern medic. And, most importantly, I learned about the worth of boldness, courage, and tempered wisdom from a charming leader with a confident swagger sporting a gold tunic. [Captain James T.] Kirk was a fighter, a diplomat, a philosopher—and a libidinous wolf—but in my eyes, he was the best of us as a species. He wasn’t perfect—and to his credit, usually admitted his flaws and acknowledged his mistakes—but he was also a man of intelligence and action, who sought out brave new worlds and always had his eye on the future.My own experience with Star Trek didn’t begin until the early 1970s, when I was old enough and aware enough to appreciate television. To my mother’s regret and my father’s everlasting bewilderment, I became a Trek fan for life as a result of watching reruns of that series’ original 79 episodes about a multi-cultural crew of explorers who raced across the galaxy in a sleek starship, bringing help to humans and aliens in need, and taking with them a message of hope and love and peace. (It didn’t hurt, either, that there was the occasional Orion dancing girl to catch a young boy’s eye!) I have since seen all of the Star Trek spinoffs and every Trek movie save the most recent one. I even went with my niece one year to a Trek convention, during which I had the pleasure of listening to William Shatner recount his hilarious experience in traveling to Seattle for that event.
I think creator Gene Roddenberry’s vision for Star Trek has been greatly enhanced and deepened by some of the people who took over the franchise after his death in 1991, particularly executive producer Rick Berman. Yet Roddenberry gave television watchers the blueprint, and even half a century later, his “Wagon Train to the stars” is as durable and promising and hopeful as ever.
Live long and prosper, my fellow Star Trek fans!
READ MORE: “To Boldly Imagine: Star Trek’s Half Century,” by Andrew Liptak (Kirkus Reviews); “Star Trek’s Still as Relevant on the 50th Anniversary,” by Dave Marinaccio (Bookgasm); “The Mission to Restore the Original Starship Enterprise,” by Jackie Mansky (Smithsonian); “Star Trek at 50: The Theme Song Has Lyrics. No, Really,” by Chris Barton (Los Angeles Times).
Friday, August 05, 2016
Bullet Points: Frenzied Friday Edition
• This weekend promises to bring the annual Deadly Ink Mystery Conference to New Brunswick, New Jersey. The August 5-7 event will feature Reed Farrel Coleman as guest of honor, and Hilary Davidson as toastmaster. Blogger Les Blatt explains that “events [are scheduled] from Friday through the middle of the day Sunday. Friday night, after opening ceremonies, there’s a ‘Deadly Desserts’
party—always a highlight of the conference. Saturday and Sunday, there are entertaining and informative panels with mystery authors and fans talking about a variety of mystery-related topics. There’s a buffet lunch on Saturday;
Saturday night, there’s an awards banquet, and on Sunday there’s a brunch. Mystery readers do eat well.” During that Saturday banquet he mentions, the 2016 David Award will be handed out to one of five deserving authors.
• The publication late last week of the panel/events schedule for next month’s Bouchercon in New Orleans, Louisiana (September 15-18) has provoked crime-fiction bloggers to begin announcing what they intend to do during the conference. Peter Rozovsky of Detectives Beyond Borders, for instance, reports that he’ll moderate an early Thursday panel discussion focusing on “Lesser Known Writers of the Pulp and Paperback Original Eras” (which will include Patti Abbott among its speakers), while Kristopher Zgorski of BOLO Books says he’ll host a Wednesday evening “wine/lemoncello event to thank all the authors and fans who [have] supported BOLO Books during its early years.” In that same post, Zgorski cites a variety of panel presentations and other events that he’s “most excited about.”
• R.I.P., Jack Davis. The Georgia-born cartoonist, who became famous for his movie-poster art (It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, The Bank Shot,
The Long Goodbye, etc.) and his easily recognizable caricatures in Mad magazine (illustrations that made my father a fan), died on July 27 at age 91. The Spy Command has information about Davis’ comical salutes to TV spy shows here.
• TV and film actor David Huddleston has passed away in Santa Fe, New Mexico, according to Deadline Hollywood. Most of his obituaries mention Huddleston’s roles in The Big Lebowski, Blazing Saddles, and the 1975 film adaptation of Alistair MacLean’s Breakheart Pass, as well as his appearances on small-screen series such as Petrocelli, The West Wing, Gilmore Girls, The Wonder Years, and Murder, She Wrote. But I recall him best from the 1973-1974 NBC Wednesday Mystery Movie series Tenafly, on which he played Lieutenant Sam Church opposite James McEachin’s happily married private eye, Harry Tenafly. Huddleston died on August 2, six weeks short of his 86th birthday.
• Good-bye, too, to Clue/Cluedo’s Mrs. White.
• Thanks to a closed fan group on Facebook called The Busted Flush, I now know that NBC-TV was seriously planning in 1971 to produce a “World Premiere Movie” based on John D. MacDonald’s 1965 Travis McGee novel, A Deadly Shade of Gold. The site links to this piece from the Chicago Tribune, which explains how NBC imagined its film spawning a TV series, but MacDonald wasn’t so optimistic. He’s quoted in the Tribune article complaining about cheapskate Hollywood types who refuse to spend enough money to get high-quality scripts. Needless to say, the teleflick A Deadly Shade of Gold was never made. To date, only two films based on MacDonald’s McGee yarns have been produced: the 1970 Rod Taylor picture Darker Than Amber (which you can watch in its entirety on YouTube), and a 1973 small-screen movie/pilot starring Sam Elliott, titled simply Travis McGee, based on MacDonald’s The Empty Copper Sea (1978). Plans to adapt the first McGee novel, 1964’s The Deep Blue Good-by, into a big-screen picture starring Christian Bale were delayed at the very least as a result of a knee injury Bale sustained last year.
• Yes, I too was surprised to learn that His Bloody Project, an “ingenious” psychological crime thriller by Scottish writer Graeme Macrae Burnet, was among the 13 novels shortlisted for this year’s Man Booker Prize. Good luck, Mr. Burnet!
• From In Reference to Murder: “The Detection Club will publish in November a new collection of short stories, Motives for Murder, to celebrate the 80th birthday of one of the Club’s most distinguished members, Peter Lovesey. The book will be published in Britain as a paperback original by Little, Brown and in the U.S. (with a limited hardback edition as well) by Crippen & Landru. Each of the nineteen stories and one sonnet was written specially for the book, with each prefaced by a few words from the author about Peter’s contribution to the genre. Contributors include Ann Cleeves, Andrew Taylor, Len Tyler, Michael Ridpath, [and] Liza Cody.” A foreword to this volume was penned by “the legendary Len Deighton.”
• Happy fifth anniversary to Crime Fiction Lover!
• Steve Thompson of Booksteve’s Library reminds us that July 30 marked half a century since the release of Batman, the big-screen picture based on the 1966-1968 ABC-TV series of that same name starring Adam West and Burt Ward. I well remember seeing that campy feature in a drive-in theater as a small boy, my parents having wheeled my brother and me out for an evening of POW!, WHAM!, and ZOWIE! Click here to watch a trailer for the movie. National Public Radio’s Monkey See blog has more to say more about this anniversary.
• The Spy Command gets all nostalgic about 2015 as “The Year of the Spy,” a designation greatly bolstered by the release last August of Guy Ritchie’s underappreciated film, The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
• August 3 marked singer Tony Bennett’s 90th birthday! When I was a kid, and my parents played Bennett’s music on the stereo, I thought it was so corny. But something about being an adult has made everything he sings much more charming. Hard to believe that my parents were right about his music all along …
• The Hollywood Reporter brings the news that Benedict Cumberbatch of the BBC One series Sherlock “will star in and produce a film adaptation of Rogue Male, the 1939 survivalist thriller by Geoffrey Household” about “a hunter who attempts to assassinate a dictator but is caught, tortured, and left for dead.”
• Editor-author Vince Keenan offers this postmortem of Seattle, Washington’s recent Noir City film festival (July 22-28). “After a hiatus of almost two and a half years …,” he writes, “the return engagement on Capitol Hill was a success, with solid crowds every night for a week. The theme this go-round was Film Noir from A to B: double-bills that moved chronologically through the 1940s, pairing prestige pictures with shorter, grittier productions to re-create the movie-going experience of the era.”
• A couple of good recent lists from The Strand Magazine’s Web site: Author Anne Frasier selected what she claims are the “Top 10 Investigators with Dark Pasts,” while writer-editor Maxim Jakubowski picks “10 Overlooked Modern Crime Novels,” one of which is 1993’s Tony and Susan, by Austin Wright—a novel about which he commented at greater length in The Rap Sheet a few years back.
• Speaking of lists (and don’t we often do so?), Book Riot’s rundown of “100 Must-Read New York City Novels” includes Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn, Caleb Carr’s The Alienist, Lyndsay Faye’s The Gods of Gotham, and more than a few other mystery novels.
• More than 15 recognizable women mystery writers are set to participate in the third annual Ladies of Intrigue event, which will take place on Sunday, October 2, in Huntington Beach, California. Leading the list of speakers will be Agatha Award winner Carolyn Hart and Robin Burcell, the co-author—with Clive Cussler—of Pirate and the author of The Last Good Place, a 2015 work continuing the Al Krug/Casey Kellog police procedural series created by Carolyn Weston. Also set to take part are Lisa Brackmann, Kate Carlisle, Earlene Fowler, Naomi Hirahara, and others. Registration info is available here.
• Cable-TV network Cinemax has set Friday, September 9, as the debut date for Quarry, its new TV series based on Max Allan Collins’ novels about a peripatetic hit man. The eight-episode first season stars Logan Marshall-Green, Jodi Balfour, and Peter Mullan.
• Meanwhile, the espionage drama Berlin Station, created by spy novelist Olen Steinhauer, is being readied for an October 16 launch. Double O Section offers a trailer for the 10-episode opening season.
• Finally, a handful of interviews worthy of your attention: Crimespree Magazine’s Elise Cooper talks with Linda Castillo about the latter’s new novel, Among the Wicked; Amy Gentry chats with Kirkus Reviews’ Rachel Sugar about Good as Gone; Polish fictionist Zygmunt Miloszewski answers questions from Crime Fiction Lover about Rage; and Scott Montgomery from the Austin, Texas, bookshop MysteryPeople, grills Megan Abbott (You Will Know Me), Bill Loehfelm (Let the Devil Out), and Alison Gaylin (What Remains of Me).
• The publication late last week of the panel/events schedule for next month’s Bouchercon in New Orleans, Louisiana (September 15-18) has provoked crime-fiction bloggers to begin announcing what they intend to do during the conference. Peter Rozovsky of Detectives Beyond Borders, for instance, reports that he’ll moderate an early Thursday panel discussion focusing on “Lesser Known Writers of the Pulp and Paperback Original Eras” (which will include Patti Abbott among its speakers), while Kristopher Zgorski of BOLO Books says he’ll host a Wednesday evening “wine/lemoncello event to thank all the authors and fans who [have] supported BOLO Books during its early years.” In that same post, Zgorski cites a variety of panel presentations and other events that he’s “most excited about.”
• R.I.P., Jack Davis. The Georgia-born cartoonist, who became famous for his movie-poster art (It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, The Bank Shot,
The Long Goodbye, etc.) and his easily recognizable caricatures in Mad magazine (illustrations that made my father a fan), died on July 27 at age 91. The Spy Command has information about Davis’ comical salutes to TV spy shows here.• TV and film actor David Huddleston has passed away in Santa Fe, New Mexico, according to Deadline Hollywood. Most of his obituaries mention Huddleston’s roles in The Big Lebowski, Blazing Saddles, and the 1975 film adaptation of Alistair MacLean’s Breakheart Pass, as well as his appearances on small-screen series such as Petrocelli, The West Wing, Gilmore Girls, The Wonder Years, and Murder, She Wrote. But I recall him best from the 1973-1974 NBC Wednesday Mystery Movie series Tenafly, on which he played Lieutenant Sam Church opposite James McEachin’s happily married private eye, Harry Tenafly. Huddleston died on August 2, six weeks short of his 86th birthday.
• Good-bye, too, to Clue/Cluedo’s Mrs. White.
• Thanks to a closed fan group on Facebook called The Busted Flush, I now know that NBC-TV was seriously planning in 1971 to produce a “World Premiere Movie” based on John D. MacDonald’s 1965 Travis McGee novel, A Deadly Shade of Gold. The site links to this piece from the Chicago Tribune, which explains how NBC imagined its film spawning a TV series, but MacDonald wasn’t so optimistic. He’s quoted in the Tribune article complaining about cheapskate Hollywood types who refuse to spend enough money to get high-quality scripts. Needless to say, the teleflick A Deadly Shade of Gold was never made. To date, only two films based on MacDonald’s McGee yarns have been produced: the 1970 Rod Taylor picture Darker Than Amber (which you can watch in its entirety on YouTube), and a 1973 small-screen movie/pilot starring Sam Elliott, titled simply Travis McGee, based on MacDonald’s The Empty Copper Sea (1978). Plans to adapt the first McGee novel, 1964’s The Deep Blue Good-by, into a big-screen picture starring Christian Bale were delayed at the very least as a result of a knee injury Bale sustained last year.
• Yes, I too was surprised to learn that His Bloody Project, an “ingenious” psychological crime thriller by Scottish writer Graeme Macrae Burnet, was among the 13 novels shortlisted for this year’s Man Booker Prize. Good luck, Mr. Burnet!
• From In Reference to Murder: “The Detection Club will publish in November a new collection of short stories, Motives for Murder, to celebrate the 80th birthday of one of the Club’s most distinguished members, Peter Lovesey. The book will be published in Britain as a paperback original by Little, Brown and in the U.S. (with a limited hardback edition as well) by Crippen & Landru. Each of the nineteen stories and one sonnet was written specially for the book, with each prefaced by a few words from the author about Peter’s contribution to the genre. Contributors include Ann Cleeves, Andrew Taylor, Len Tyler, Michael Ridpath, [and] Liza Cody.” A foreword to this volume was penned by “the legendary Len Deighton.”
• Happy fifth anniversary to Crime Fiction Lover!
• Steve Thompson of Booksteve’s Library reminds us that July 30 marked half a century since the release of Batman, the big-screen picture based on the 1966-1968 ABC-TV series of that same name starring Adam West and Burt Ward. I well remember seeing that campy feature in a drive-in theater as a small boy, my parents having wheeled my brother and me out for an evening of POW!, WHAM!, and ZOWIE! Click here to watch a trailer for the movie. National Public Radio’s Monkey See blog has more to say more about this anniversary.
• The Spy Command gets all nostalgic about 2015 as “The Year of the Spy,” a designation greatly bolstered by the release last August of Guy Ritchie’s underappreciated film, The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
• August 3 marked singer Tony Bennett’s 90th birthday! When I was a kid, and my parents played Bennett’s music on the stereo, I thought it was so corny. But something about being an adult has made everything he sings much more charming. Hard to believe that my parents were right about his music all along …
• The Hollywood Reporter brings the news that Benedict Cumberbatch of the BBC One series Sherlock “will star in and produce a film adaptation of Rogue Male, the 1939 survivalist thriller by Geoffrey Household” about “a hunter who attempts to assassinate a dictator but is caught, tortured, and left for dead.”
• Editor-author Vince Keenan offers this postmortem of Seattle, Washington’s recent Noir City film festival (July 22-28). “After a hiatus of almost two and a half years …,” he writes, “the return engagement on Capitol Hill was a success, with solid crowds every night for a week. The theme this go-round was Film Noir from A to B: double-bills that moved chronologically through the 1940s, pairing prestige pictures with shorter, grittier productions to re-create the movie-going experience of the era.”
• A couple of good recent lists from The Strand Magazine’s Web site: Author Anne Frasier selected what she claims are the “Top 10 Investigators with Dark Pasts,” while writer-editor Maxim Jakubowski picks “10 Overlooked Modern Crime Novels,” one of which is 1993’s Tony and Susan, by Austin Wright—a novel about which he commented at greater length in The Rap Sheet a few years back.
• Speaking of lists (and don’t we often do so?), Book Riot’s rundown of “100 Must-Read New York City Novels” includes Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn, Caleb Carr’s The Alienist, Lyndsay Faye’s The Gods of Gotham, and more than a few other mystery novels.
• More than 15 recognizable women mystery writers are set to participate in the third annual Ladies of Intrigue event, which will take place on Sunday, October 2, in Huntington Beach, California. Leading the list of speakers will be Agatha Award winner Carolyn Hart and Robin Burcell, the co-author—with Clive Cussler—of Pirate and the author of The Last Good Place, a 2015 work continuing the Al Krug/Casey Kellog police procedural series created by Carolyn Weston. Also set to take part are Lisa Brackmann, Kate Carlisle, Earlene Fowler, Naomi Hirahara, and others. Registration info is available here.
• Cable-TV network Cinemax has set Friday, September 9, as the debut date for Quarry, its new TV series based on Max Allan Collins’ novels about a peripatetic hit man. The eight-episode first season stars Logan Marshall-Green, Jodi Balfour, and Peter Mullan.
• Meanwhile, the espionage drama Berlin Station, created by spy novelist Olen Steinhauer, is being readied for an October 16 launch. Double O Section offers a trailer for the 10-episode opening season.
• Finally, a handful of interviews worthy of your attention: Crimespree Magazine’s Elise Cooper talks with Linda Castillo about the latter’s new novel, Among the Wicked; Amy Gentry chats with Kirkus Reviews’ Rachel Sugar about Good as Gone; Polish fictionist Zygmunt Miloszewski answers questions from Crime Fiction Lover about Rage; and Scott Montgomery from the Austin, Texas, bookshop MysteryPeople, grills Megan Abbott (You Will Know Me), Bill Loehfelm (Let the Devil Out), and Alison Gaylin (What Remains of Me).
Sunday, July 10, 2016
100 Years of Travis McGee’s “Father”
Should this have escaped your radar somehow, listen up: July 24 will mark the passage of a full century since John D. MacDonald—the Florida author Stephen King once called “the great entertainer of our age, and a mesmerizing storyteller”—was born in Pennsylvania.
By way of celebrating, our sister blog Killer Covers has just begun two weeks of posting the fronts from assorted MacDonald works. In addition to editions of his famous Travis McGee novels, you can expect to see the façades from a number of his standalone tales of crime, suspense, and science fiction. Today’s opening post looks back at MacDonald’s first published novel, 1950’s The Brass Cupcake.
Bookmark this link to follow the series as it develops.
Sunday, May 22, 2016
The Rap Sheet: 10 Years in the Making
I’ve wanted to be a book critic for a very long while. The first review I ever wrote was for The Oregonian, the daily newspaper in my hometown of Portland, Oregon. My eighth-grade teacher, Jeanne Leeson, had a program in place that allowed her more promising students to publish reviews in that broadsheet, and she asked me to critique a new book about U.S. Senator Mike Mansfield (D-Montana) and his efforts to limit the deployment of anti-ballistic missile (ABM) systems in the United States and the Soviet Union. (A rather complicated topic, though I don’t remember feeling out of my depth.) From there, it was some years before I took on another reviewing assignment, this time for my college paper. Protests had erupted on campus after the administration foolishly invited a South African government official to address the student body (this was during South Africa’s racial-segregation era, after all), and one of my contributions to the coverage looked at James McClure’s crime novels starring white Afrikaan Lieutenant Tromp Kramer of the Murder and Robbery Squad and his Zulu assistant, Sergeant Mickey Zondi.
After college, during my stint with Portland’s “alternative weekly,” Willamette Week, I composed a great number of crime- and mystery-fiction reviews for the paper’s entertainment section, Fresh Weekly, and took advantage of what I now see were incredibly lucky opportunities to interview authors in this genre. (It was during that period, for instance, that I traveled—on my own dime—to interview Ross Macdonald in Santa Barbara, California, Arthur Lyons in Palm Springs, and Bill Pronzini in Petaluma; plus Robert B. Parker in Boston and George C. Chesbro in New York.) Although I was interested as well, back then, in science fiction (particularly work by Larry Niven, who I also went to chat with in Tarzana, California), my passion for stories marked by a crime or mystery bent soon dominated my pleasure-reading hours. It was just the beginning of a long education in the field that has carried me through the rest of my life so far.
When Linda L. Richards invited me, in 1997, to begin contributing to her online review/author interview site, January Magazine, I was thrilled. It gave me a soapbox from which to comment regularly on crime fiction (though my first review for January was actually of Larry McMurtry’s Comanche Moon). Within a couple of years my contributions to the publication increased, when I launched what was originally an e-mail newsletter about the genre called The Rap Sheet. I took responsibility, too, for building up January’s crime-fiction department, which in 2005 won the Gumshoe Award, presented by David J. Montgomery’s then-substantial Mystery Ink Web site.
Around the same time I received that commendation, I concluded that The Rap Sheet needed to be something more than a newsletter, and that I needed to have more design control over the product if it was ever to fulfill what I imagined was its potential. Coincidentally, in 2005, my technophobic copy-editor colleague and longtime friend, Charles Smyth, asked me to help him figure out how to use the Blogger software. He wanted to create his own blog (then still a new idea—imagine!), but didn’t know how. In the course of assisting Charlie, I realized that blogging could be the way of the future for The Rap Sheet. It would allow me to update the information
 |
| J. Kingston Pierce |
So on May 22, 2006—10 years ago today—after several weeks of experimenting with the Blogger software, trying to adapt elements of the Rap Sheet newsletter design to a blog format, I finally began publishing on this page. The site has grown tremendously since then, recording its 500th post by November 2006, and its 1,000th post by April 2007; registering half a million page views by March 2009, and a cool million two years later; attracting a small but enthusiastic lineup of guest contributors; winning a Spinetingler Award in 2009; and in 2008 being nominated for an Anthony Award for Best Web Site/Blog—the first of two times that commendation was dangled in front of me, the second occasion being in 2011. (Sadly, in neither case did I actually take the Anthony home, and now the Best Web Site/Blog category seems to have been eliminated from the competition.) Oh, and when I checked this morning, Blogger’s statistics-keeping software told me that almost 6,400 posts have gone up in The Rap Sheet, and the site has exceeded 3.8 million page views. Not bad for a little “Weblog” that rose out of my enthusiasm for crime fiction of all sorts and wasn’t intended to be much more than a hobby.
Over the last 10 years, I have sought to make The Rap Sheet something I’d want to read, even if I weren’t responsible for its production. Because I have spent my entire professional career as a writer and editor, somebody more interested in finely crafted and thoughtful prose than in brief and pithy reportage, I have pretty much ignored the advice dispensed by “experts” who claim that people are too busy in the 21st century to read anything online that’s longer than 500 words, or that forces them occasionally to refer to a dictionary. I want to create here a spirited, lasting, non-academic resource for readers interested in gleaning more than a shallow understanding of this genre’s depth and breadth. The fact that many of our articles have won considerable attention suggests we’re on the right track. The following 10 posts have been, by far, the most popular:
1. NBC’s “Mystery Movie” Turns 40: “Banacek” (December 7, 2011)
2. The Return of Lisbeth Salander (January 2, 2009)
3. Distinction by Design: Best Crime Covers, 2015 (January 7, 2016)
4. Say Good-bye to Kolchak’s “Father” (July 27, 2015)
5. But Really, Sally McMillan Is Ageless (August 14, 2006)
6. “Money,” Shot (December 4, 2007)
7. NBC’s “Mystery Movie” Turns 40: “McMillan & Wife”
(November 10, 2011)
8. Happy Birthday, Doctor Watson? (March 31, 2009)
9. The Book You Have to Read: “Tapping the Source,” by Kem Nunn (March 15, 2013)
10. Quinn’s Border Blues (October 15, 2013)
(I won’t clue you in here to what these posts entail, but will instead let you explore and enjoy them for yourself.)
It’s also interesting to see who’s paying attention to this blog. As might be expected, the overwhelming majority of readers hail from the United States, where I also live, with the United Kingdom holding second place. After that, the countries most often clicking over to The Rap Sheet rank in this order: Germany, Canada, France, Russia, Ukraine, The Netherlands, Poland, and Australia.
When I first took up this venture, I was editing and contributing to a wide variety of publications, all of which kept me busy and intellectually stimulated. Nowadays, I spend far too many hours working by myself, and my outlets for journalism and other writing have been severely reduced in number. I’d expected by this stage of my life to have moved confidently from writing non-fiction to penning novels. But my labors in that direction have proven … well, frustrating at best. Alternatively, I imagined The Rap Sheet might become a well-paying enterprise, perhaps an adjunct to some book-publisher’s Web site, but that hasn’t come to pass, either.
Producing The Rap Sheet has gone from being a sideline to being a central occupational endeavor, perhaps a legacy of sorts. And while there are often moments when I feel the blog doesn’t quite measure up to my (admittedly unrealistic) ambitions for it, I have drawn tremendous energy from some of the supportive notes I’ve received during these last 10 years. One reader, for instance, wrote to say, “The Rap Sheet is, in my opinion, by far the best of the best in the mystery-fiction blogging field.” Another remarked: “After reading your latest Rap Sheet, I wanted to convey how much I appreciate all your efforts in producing that blog. Due to circumstances beyond my control, I am stuck in southeast Georgia. The Rap Sheet is a true highlight for me. When I lived in Berkeley and in New York City, I was active as a fan in the crime-fiction scenes there. To say The Rap Sheet ‘keeps me in touch’ only scratches the surface of how it functions for me. Thanks again for your efforts!” No less heartening are compliments I have received on occasion from writers whose work I’ve edited over the years, either at January or The Rap Sheet. Read one: “You have made me a better writer, my friend.” And in a post highlighting blogs that provide “good crime-fiction recommendations,” critic/anthologist Sarah Weinman described The Rap Sheet as “one of the oldest [such sites] ... and still one of the best—plus editor J. Kingston Pierce was the first person to seriously edit my reviews, for which I am forever grateful).”
I can’t tell you what I shall be doing in another 10 years, or whether The Rap Sheet will still be around to celebrate its 20th anniversary. But I can say that this last decade has brought unexpected treats and memorable successes to yours truly. It’s through The Rap Sheet that I won my column-writing gig for Kirkus Reviews, and it is because of this modest blog (and my work with January Magazine) that I established some of my most prized friendships, including those with Ali Karim and Linda Richards. If I had to give it all up tomorrow, I’d be more heartbroken than I might’ve expected back in 2006, but I would also be extremely proud of what has been created here.
Thank you, everyone, for following along on this adventure.
SEE MORE: Killer Covers joins this anniversary celebration with its own “Rap Party” countdown of vintage paperback fronts.
Monday, April 04, 2016
Bullet Points: Wide Net Edition
• Following on Ali Karim’s recent post about the second series run of Bosch—the crime drama based on Michael Connelly’s
award-winning police procedurals—comes news that the Amazon TV-streaming service has renewed Bosch for a third season. Connelly says that “We are going to adapt The Black Echo and elements of A Darkness More than Night this time around.” I look forward to seeing the results.
• New Zealand author Neil Cross, who I noted last week is in the running for a BAFTA (British Academy Television Craft Awards) commendation in the TV drama-writing category, has been tapped to adapt Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley and four later works featuring “dapper psychopath” Tom Ripley for television. “Landing Cross for the project is a coup,” says Variety, “as the scribe has been courted for TV in the U.S. following the success of Luther, the BBC drama starring Idris Elba.”
• Word is that the fourth season of BBC-TV’s Sherlock, starring Benedict Cumberbatch—preliminarily scheduled for broadcast in the UK in early 2017—“will be darker compared to the previous installments. Meanwhile, Martin Freeman, who plays the character of Doctor Watson, hinted that [Watson’s wife] Mary Morstan will
die in the upcoming season. [And] Thor star Tom Hiddleston has also been rumored to be the third brother of the Holmes family.” Wait, what was that? Third brother?
• We bid a sad farewell to Douglas Wilmer, the English actor who portrayed Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous “consulting detective” in a succession of Sherlock Holmes story adaptations made by BBC-TV between 1965 and 1968. Wilmer went on to appear in such films as Patton (1970), The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother (1975), Revenge of the Pink Panther (1978), and the 1983 James Bond adventure, Octopussy. As The Guardian’s obituary recalls, “In 2012, at the very end of his acting career, he made a special cameo appearance in an episode of BBC’s Sherlock as an irate old man at The Diogenes Club alongside Benedict Cumberbatch’s Holmes.” Wilmer passed away on March 31 “after a short bout of pneumonia.” He was 96 years old.
• It’s good to see that Criminal Element’s Leslie Gilbert Elman, who did such excellent work last year keeping track of Grantchester’s premiere season on PBS-TV, is back recapping the Season 2 installments. Her assessment of last night’s episode is here, and you’ll find all of her write-ups here. Grantchester, starring James Norton and Robson Green, resumed broadcasting under the Masterpiece series umbrella on March 27, and will show through Sunday, May 1.
• Someday I hope to be lucky enough to attend the annual Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival held in Harrogate, England. Not this year, though ... which is unfortunate, for In Reference to Murder brings news that the event, which will take place from July 21 to 24, now has its guest-star lineup. It “includes authors Peter James, Jeffery Deaver, Martina Cole, Neil Cross, Linwood Barclay, Tess Gerritsen, Val McDermid, and Gerald Seymour. Conference organizers encourage fans to ‘grab a pint of Yorkshire’s finest ale, and dip into an intoxicating mix of comedy, heated debate, and scintillating socializing’ at Agatha Christie’s old haunt, the luxurious Old Swan Hotel.”
• Meanwhile, this year’s lineup for Val McDermid’s much-watched Harrogate “New Blood” panel of fast-rising crime novelists has been announced. Its members will be Martin Holmen (Clinch), J.S. Law (Tenacity), Beth Lewis (The Wolf Road, and Abir Mukherjee (A Rising Man). That panel presentation is scheduled to take place at noon on Saturday, July 23, at the Old Swan Hotel.
• Rap Sheet contributor Gary Phillips is one busy guy, as he makes clear in this interview with fellow author S.W. Lauden.
• I’m starting to fear that the aggregator Web site CrimeSpot might be out of business. Founded in 2006 by Texan Graham Powell, it quickly became a popular resource, drawing together posts from a wide variety of blogs focused on crime, mystery, and thriller fiction. However, the last time CrimeSpot was updated was in December of last year. A few weeks ago, I sent Powell an e-note inquiring about his page’s future. “I haven’t had much time to work on it,” he told me, “and it really hasn’t been a high priority. You’re only the second person to ask me about it! But I guess I better get off my behind and get it straightened out.” We can only hope he does.
• A little visual entertainment: “18 Movie Poster Clichés That Prove Hollywood Has Run Out of Ideas.”
• From Mystery Fanfare: “Deadline reports that ... Sharp Objects, a drama series project starring Amy Adams [and based on Gillian Flynn's 2006 novel of the same name], has been picked up by HBO with an eight-episode straight-to-series first season order. Marti Noxon (UnReal) is show-runner for the project, with Jean-Marc Vallée (Wild) directing. Noxon wrote the pilot script and Flynn is set to write multiple episodes. The book was picked up five years ago by Jason Blum and Blumhouse Productions, long before Gone Girl was a hit movie.”
• Folks who read Philip Kerr’s new Bernie Gunther novel, The Other Side of Silence, might be particularly interested in watching this 1981 video showing “Kim Philby, Britain’s most notorious cold war traitor, [telling] an audience of East German spies after his defection that he was able to avoid being rumbled for so long because he had been ‘born into the British governing class.’ … Philby also describe[s] how he was able to walk out of secret service headquarters every night with his briefcase stuffed with secret documents and reports.”
• I don’t think I mentioned this before, but during the lead-up to his recent heart surgery, Max Allan Collins penned a blog post about having sold his original, 70,000-word movie tie-in novelization of Road to Perdition to publisher Brash Books. As most readers of The Rap Sheet know, the 2002 Tom Hanks/Paul Newman picture was based on Collins’
1998 graphic novel Road to Perdition. In his novelization, Collins explains, “I attempted to be true to the screenplay while weaving in material from the graphic novel as well as historical material about the real John Looney and his era. The DreamWorks licensing department put me through hell, making me cut anything—including dialogue!—that wasn’t directly from the script. They could not have cared less that I was the creator of this story and its characters. Even after they had accepted my 40,000-word debasement of my original novel, they kept cutting—if, in the film-editing process, director Sam Mendes dropped a scene or even a few lines of dialogue, they removed that from my novel as well. One chapter was reduced to a page and a half.” Collins says the Brash Books edition of Road to Perdition will be the full novelization, and that its release will be followed by new editions of the sequels Road to Purgatory (2004) and Road to Paradise (2005).
• I don’t always find the free time necessary to listen in on Les Blatt’s weekly “Classic Mysteries” podcast, but I am never disappointed when I do. His latest audio feature examines Charles Warren Adams’ The Notting Hill Mystery, published as a book in 1865 and “said to be the first real detective novel ever written.”
• Not long ago I mentioned that Sadie Trombetta had assembled a “listicle” for Criminal Element that showcased “13 of the Best Female Sleuths from Pop Culture.” Well, now she’s back with another 23 nominees, based on reader recommendations. I’m most pleased to see Laura Holt (from Remington Steele) and Liza Cody’s ex-cop-turned-private investigator, Anna Lee, make this latest cut.
• Like many people, I fear, I wasn’t aware that film and TV critic Edward Copeland (real name Scott Schuldt), who for most of a decade wrote and edited the blog Edward Copeland’s Tangents, died this last New Year’s Eve “after a long battle with Primary Progressive Multiple Sclerosis.” He was 46 years old. Schuldt’s colleague Ivan G. Shreve Jr. offers up these moving memories of the late writer.
• There doesn’t seem to be any word about this on either author Craig McDonald’s Web site or the Amazon sales site, but McDonald mentioned in a Facebook post yesterday that his final Hector Lassiter novel (the 10th, I believe) will be titled Three Chords & the Truth, and that it will include “a fleeting appearance” by country-and-western singer Merle Haggard. McDonald says Three Chords is “coming this autumn from Betimes Books.”
• If you don’t know this already, writer-filmmaker Peter Hanson has developed an interesting blog called Every ’70s Movie, which most recently focused on The Streets of San Francisco, the 1972 TV flick—based on Carolyn Weston’s novel Poor, Poor Ophelia—that led to the 1972-1977 ABC crime drama of the same name starring Karl Malden and Michael Douglas.
• Finally, there are two milestones worth observing. First, the fourth birthday of Deadline Detroit, the online news site founded in 2012 by my old friend Allan Lengel, who used to work for the The Washington Post and the Detroit News (as well as Monthly Detroit, which is where I met him), and Bill McGraw, another Detroit News alumnus. I’m very pleased to see the site growing and—despite some financial headaches—establishing itself as a valuable resource for Motor City residents seeking information about and insight into their struggling but important town. Second, last week brought the 40th birthday—wow!—of Seattle Weekly (formerly just The Weekly), founded in 1976 by David Brewster and Darrell Oldham. I joined the Weekly editorial staff in the mid-1980s, after first being hired to edit a sister publication, the Bainbridge Island-based Puget Sound Enetai, and stayed with it until the end of that decade. Unfortunately, the celebration of the Weekly’s history was pretty darn unimaginative—consisting of four essays looking back at the last four decades. But those of us who worked for the paper in its “alternative journalism” heyday (it’s now a shadow of its former self) remember it as a lively, civically involved, and sometimes provocative publication well deserving of the many awards it earned over the years.
• New Zealand author Neil Cross, who I noted last week is in the running for a BAFTA (British Academy Television Craft Awards) commendation in the TV drama-writing category, has been tapped to adapt Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley and four later works featuring “dapper psychopath” Tom Ripley for television. “Landing Cross for the project is a coup,” says Variety, “as the scribe has been courted for TV in the U.S. following the success of Luther, the BBC drama starring Idris Elba.”
• Word is that the fourth season of BBC-TV’s Sherlock, starring Benedict Cumberbatch—preliminarily scheduled for broadcast in the UK in early 2017—“will be darker compared to the previous installments. Meanwhile, Martin Freeman, who plays the character of Doctor Watson, hinted that [Watson’s wife] Mary Morstan will
die in the upcoming season. [And] Thor star Tom Hiddleston has also been rumored to be the third brother of the Holmes family.” Wait, what was that? Third brother?• We bid a sad farewell to Douglas Wilmer, the English actor who portrayed Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous “consulting detective” in a succession of Sherlock Holmes story adaptations made by BBC-TV between 1965 and 1968. Wilmer went on to appear in such films as Patton (1970), The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother (1975), Revenge of the Pink Panther (1978), and the 1983 James Bond adventure, Octopussy. As The Guardian’s obituary recalls, “In 2012, at the very end of his acting career, he made a special cameo appearance in an episode of BBC’s Sherlock as an irate old man at The Diogenes Club alongside Benedict Cumberbatch’s Holmes.” Wilmer passed away on March 31 “after a short bout of pneumonia.” He was 96 years old.
• It’s good to see that Criminal Element’s Leslie Gilbert Elman, who did such excellent work last year keeping track of Grantchester’s premiere season on PBS-TV, is back recapping the Season 2 installments. Her assessment of last night’s episode is here, and you’ll find all of her write-ups here. Grantchester, starring James Norton and Robson Green, resumed broadcasting under the Masterpiece series umbrella on March 27, and will show through Sunday, May 1.
• Someday I hope to be lucky enough to attend the annual Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival held in Harrogate, England. Not this year, though ... which is unfortunate, for In Reference to Murder brings news that the event, which will take place from July 21 to 24, now has its guest-star lineup. It “includes authors Peter James, Jeffery Deaver, Martina Cole, Neil Cross, Linwood Barclay, Tess Gerritsen, Val McDermid, and Gerald Seymour. Conference organizers encourage fans to ‘grab a pint of Yorkshire’s finest ale, and dip into an intoxicating mix of comedy, heated debate, and scintillating socializing’ at Agatha Christie’s old haunt, the luxurious Old Swan Hotel.”
• Meanwhile, this year’s lineup for Val McDermid’s much-watched Harrogate “New Blood” panel of fast-rising crime novelists has been announced. Its members will be Martin Holmen (Clinch), J.S. Law (Tenacity), Beth Lewis (The Wolf Road, and Abir Mukherjee (A Rising Man). That panel presentation is scheduled to take place at noon on Saturday, July 23, at the Old Swan Hotel.
• Rap Sheet contributor Gary Phillips is one busy guy, as he makes clear in this interview with fellow author S.W. Lauden.
• I’m starting to fear that the aggregator Web site CrimeSpot might be out of business. Founded in 2006 by Texan Graham Powell, it quickly became a popular resource, drawing together posts from a wide variety of blogs focused on crime, mystery, and thriller fiction. However, the last time CrimeSpot was updated was in December of last year. A few weeks ago, I sent Powell an e-note inquiring about his page’s future. “I haven’t had much time to work on it,” he told me, “and it really hasn’t been a high priority. You’re only the second person to ask me about it! But I guess I better get off my behind and get it straightened out.” We can only hope he does.
• A little visual entertainment: “18 Movie Poster Clichés That Prove Hollywood Has Run Out of Ideas.”
• From Mystery Fanfare: “Deadline reports that ... Sharp Objects, a drama series project starring Amy Adams [and based on Gillian Flynn's 2006 novel of the same name], has been picked up by HBO with an eight-episode straight-to-series first season order. Marti Noxon (UnReal) is show-runner for the project, with Jean-Marc Vallée (Wild) directing. Noxon wrote the pilot script and Flynn is set to write multiple episodes. The book was picked up five years ago by Jason Blum and Blumhouse Productions, long before Gone Girl was a hit movie.”
• Folks who read Philip Kerr’s new Bernie Gunther novel, The Other Side of Silence, might be particularly interested in watching this 1981 video showing “Kim Philby, Britain’s most notorious cold war traitor, [telling] an audience of East German spies after his defection that he was able to avoid being rumbled for so long because he had been ‘born into the British governing class.’ … Philby also describe[s] how he was able to walk out of secret service headquarters every night with his briefcase stuffed with secret documents and reports.”
• I don’t think I mentioned this before, but during the lead-up to his recent heart surgery, Max Allan Collins penned a blog post about having sold his original, 70,000-word movie tie-in novelization of Road to Perdition to publisher Brash Books. As most readers of The Rap Sheet know, the 2002 Tom Hanks/Paul Newman picture was based on Collins’
1998 graphic novel Road to Perdition. In his novelization, Collins explains, “I attempted to be true to the screenplay while weaving in material from the graphic novel as well as historical material about the real John Looney and his era. The DreamWorks licensing department put me through hell, making me cut anything—including dialogue!—that wasn’t directly from the script. They could not have cared less that I was the creator of this story and its characters. Even after they had accepted my 40,000-word debasement of my original novel, they kept cutting—if, in the film-editing process, director Sam Mendes dropped a scene or even a few lines of dialogue, they removed that from my novel as well. One chapter was reduced to a page and a half.” Collins says the Brash Books edition of Road to Perdition will be the full novelization, and that its release will be followed by new editions of the sequels Road to Purgatory (2004) and Road to Paradise (2005).• I don’t always find the free time necessary to listen in on Les Blatt’s weekly “Classic Mysteries” podcast, but I am never disappointed when I do. His latest audio feature examines Charles Warren Adams’ The Notting Hill Mystery, published as a book in 1865 and “said to be the first real detective novel ever written.”
• Not long ago I mentioned that Sadie Trombetta had assembled a “listicle” for Criminal Element that showcased “13 of the Best Female Sleuths from Pop Culture.” Well, now she’s back with another 23 nominees, based on reader recommendations. I’m most pleased to see Laura Holt (from Remington Steele) and Liza Cody’s ex-cop-turned-private investigator, Anna Lee, make this latest cut.
• Like many people, I fear, I wasn’t aware that film and TV critic Edward Copeland (real name Scott Schuldt), who for most of a decade wrote and edited the blog Edward Copeland’s Tangents, died this last New Year’s Eve “after a long battle with Primary Progressive Multiple Sclerosis.” He was 46 years old. Schuldt’s colleague Ivan G. Shreve Jr. offers up these moving memories of the late writer.
• There doesn’t seem to be any word about this on either author Craig McDonald’s Web site or the Amazon sales site, but McDonald mentioned in a Facebook post yesterday that his final Hector Lassiter novel (the 10th, I believe) will be titled Three Chords & the Truth, and that it will include “a fleeting appearance” by country-and-western singer Merle Haggard. McDonald says Three Chords is “coming this autumn from Betimes Books.”
• If you don’t know this already, writer-filmmaker Peter Hanson has developed an interesting blog called Every ’70s Movie, which most recently focused on The Streets of San Francisco, the 1972 TV flick—based on Carolyn Weston’s novel Poor, Poor Ophelia—that led to the 1972-1977 ABC crime drama of the same name starring Karl Malden and Michael Douglas.
• Finally, there are two milestones worth observing. First, the fourth birthday of Deadline Detroit, the online news site founded in 2012 by my old friend Allan Lengel, who used to work for the The Washington Post and the Detroit News (as well as Monthly Detroit, which is where I met him), and Bill McGraw, another Detroit News alumnus. I’m very pleased to see the site growing and—despite some financial headaches—establishing itself as a valuable resource for Motor City residents seeking information about and insight into their struggling but important town. Second, last week brought the 40th birthday—wow!—of Seattle Weekly (formerly just The Weekly), founded in 1976 by David Brewster and Darrell Oldham. I joined the Weekly editorial staff in the mid-1980s, after first being hired to edit a sister publication, the Bainbridge Island-based Puget Sound Enetai, and stayed with it until the end of that decade. Unfortunately, the celebration of the Weekly’s history was pretty darn unimaginative—consisting of four essays looking back at the last four decades. But those of us who worked for the paper in its “alternative journalism” heyday (it’s now a shadow of its former self) remember it as a lively, civically involved, and sometimes provocative publication well deserving of the many awards it earned over the years.
Tuesday, March 15, 2016
I’m Talking the Fifth
It was five years ago this month that I debuted as the lead crime-fiction blogger for Kirkus Reviews. Not long before that, Molly Brown, then the publication’s Web and features editor, had called me up out of the blue to offer me the job, based on favorable recommendations she’d received from other sources. It seemed like an excellent opportunity, especially since working for Kirkus 
meant, in theory, that I could cut back on other freelancing obligations; so I didn’t take long before saying “yes.”
Some aspects of the job Brown described were never realized. For instance, she told me, as she did other bloggers Kirkus hired back then to cover different genres of fiction, that I’d be expected to do my own posting to the Web site, and would need to contribute several pieces each week of varying lengths—all written in a “conversational,” “consumer-friendly” style. She also mentioned how advertising dollars brought in by these new blogs would be shared among the writers, and how we’d be paid for our work at a generous per-word rate. In the end, a flat per-column fee was negotiated (quite below what I’d earned previously), and there was no more talk of ad-generated bonuses. Rather than posting frequently, I was restricted to a single column per week, and subsequently to fortnightly contributions.
Despite all of that, the Kirkus gig has been a generally satisfying one. I have the leeway to write about whatever subjects I wish, just so long as they relate in some manner to crime, mystery, and thriller works available in U.S. bookstores. Although I’ve gone through several editors (with the most recent one—and one of my favorites—Chelsea Langford, leaving the company just last Friday), they have all been accommodating and respectful, if rather quiet. I am pretty much left alone to do my work, which demonstrates trust in my abilities but also leaves me feeling distant from the business of publishing, a business I have loved for so long. Then again, as my beloved maternal grandfather used to say, “it could be worse.”
To celebrate this fifth anniversary, my new Kirkus column is devoted to what I think are alternately amusing and revealing top-five lists representing my experience with this genre. They range from “5 Crime and Mystery Novelists Best Represented on My Shelves” and “5 Classic Authors Whose Work I Should Have Read, But Have Not” to “5 Mysteries I Wish I’d Written.” I’d be very pleased if others among the Rap Sheet audience were to submit their own picks in those same categories, either in the Comments section at the end of my Kirkus piece, or as a comment at the end of this particular post.
2016 is turning out to be a big anniversary year for me. January brought the fifth birthday of my book-design blog, Killer Covers. Now we’re commemorating my half-decade association with Kirkus Reviews. And The Rap Sheet’s 10th anniversary is coming right up in mid-May. It’s a good thing I like champagne toasts!
READ MORE: “Take Fives,” by J. Kingston Pierce (Killer Covers).
meant, in theory, that I could cut back on other freelancing obligations; so I didn’t take long before saying “yes.”Some aspects of the job Brown described were never realized. For instance, she told me, as she did other bloggers Kirkus hired back then to cover different genres of fiction, that I’d be expected to do my own posting to the Web site, and would need to contribute several pieces each week of varying lengths—all written in a “conversational,” “consumer-friendly” style. She also mentioned how advertising dollars brought in by these new blogs would be shared among the writers, and how we’d be paid for our work at a generous per-word rate. In the end, a flat per-column fee was negotiated (quite below what I’d earned previously), and there was no more talk of ad-generated bonuses. Rather than posting frequently, I was restricted to a single column per week, and subsequently to fortnightly contributions.
Despite all of that, the Kirkus gig has been a generally satisfying one. I have the leeway to write about whatever subjects I wish, just so long as they relate in some manner to crime, mystery, and thriller works available in U.S. bookstores. Although I’ve gone through several editors (with the most recent one—and one of my favorites—Chelsea Langford, leaving the company just last Friday), they have all been accommodating and respectful, if rather quiet. I am pretty much left alone to do my work, which demonstrates trust in my abilities but also leaves me feeling distant from the business of publishing, a business I have loved for so long. Then again, as my beloved maternal grandfather used to say, “it could be worse.”
To celebrate this fifth anniversary, my new Kirkus column is devoted to what I think are alternately amusing and revealing top-five lists representing my experience with this genre. They range from “5 Crime and Mystery Novelists Best Represented on My Shelves” and “5 Classic Authors Whose Work I Should Have Read, But Have Not” to “5 Mysteries I Wish I’d Written.” I’d be very pleased if others among the Rap Sheet audience were to submit their own picks in those same categories, either in the Comments section at the end of my Kirkus piece, or as a comment at the end of this particular post.
2016 is turning out to be a big anniversary year for me. January brought the fifth birthday of my book-design blog, Killer Covers. Now we’re commemorating my half-decade association with Kirkus Reviews. And The Rap Sheet’s 10th anniversary is coming right up in mid-May. It’s a good thing I like champagne toasts!
READ MORE: “Take Fives,” by J. Kingston Pierce (Killer Covers).
Friday, January 08, 2016
Following in Gumshoe’s Path
Whoever you are and wherever you live, if you write or edit a blog about crime, mystery, or thriller fiction—or even if you merely read such blogs occasionally—I suggest that you take a moment to thank The Gumshoe Site and its editor, Jiro Kimura, for their trailblazing efforts. It was 20 years ago today, on January 8, 1996, that Kimura, a Japanese crime-fiction critic and author, 
launched The Gumshoe Site, one of the earliest Web resources devoted exclusively to this genre.
“I thought it would be fun to write about mystery books and writers I like in English,” Kimura told me in 2011 when I interviewed him in association with his blog’s 15th anniversary. “I didn’t think about what the future would bring. It has been said that launching a Web site is not difficult, but keeping it up-to-date is, and I have realized in a hard way that it is right.”
The Gumshoe Site has outlasted many other similar resources, including The Mysterious Homepage, Kate Derie’s ClueLass, and The Mystery Reader. Over the last five years alone, a variety of promising rival blogs have appeared, only to vanish as their writer-editors realize the high level of commitment (or sheer insanity) necessary to maintain and grow a site that’s both entertaining and informative. Yet Kimura, now 66 years old, just keeps rolling out news about book prizes and author demises, without obvious signs of slowing down.
With The Rap Sheet’s 10th anniversary coming up only months from now, I can only admire Kimura’s two-decades-long commitment to building The Gumshoe Site. All bloggers in this field owe him a debt of gratitude for his pioneering work.
launched The Gumshoe Site, one of the earliest Web resources devoted exclusively to this genre.“I thought it would be fun to write about mystery books and writers I like in English,” Kimura told me in 2011 when I interviewed him in association with his blog’s 15th anniversary. “I didn’t think about what the future would bring. It has been said that launching a Web site is not difficult, but keeping it up-to-date is, and I have realized in a hard way that it is right.”
The Gumshoe Site has outlasted many other similar resources, including The Mysterious Homepage, Kate Derie’s ClueLass, and The Mystery Reader. Over the last five years alone, a variety of promising rival blogs have appeared, only to vanish as their writer-editors realize the high level of commitment (or sheer insanity) necessary to maintain and grow a site that’s both entertaining and informative. Yet Kimura, now 66 years old, just keeps rolling out news about book prizes and author demises, without obvious signs of slowing down.
With The Rap Sheet’s 10th anniversary coming up only months from now, I can only admire Kimura’s two-decades-long commitment to building The Gumshoe Site. All bloggers in this field owe him a debt of gratitude for his pioneering work.
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