I can pretty much guarantee that you’re not the only one looking at this latest installment in The Rap Sheet’s “PaperBack” series and wondering, How in the heck did a science-fiction novel manage to worm its way into this mix? I thought the “PaperBack” choices were all from the crime, mystery, and thriller shelves.
The change of pace is provoked by a couple of unfortunate anniversaries occurring this week. First, it was exactly one year ago today—on December 3, 2017—that Texas mystery writer and longtime blogger Bill Crider posted the front and back covers from Raymond F. Jones’ 1977 novel, The River and the Dream (which, I just noticed, he misspelled The River and the Dread). That was the concluding installment in Crider’s own “PaperBack” series, which he’d debuted in his blog back in 2010—and which The Rap Sheet picked up, in his honor, just before the author’s death in February 2018.
I had thought originally to highlight a different book front here today, from the only Jones work I know is in my possession: his 1965 TV tie-in novel, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (Whitman). As a boy, I was a huge fan of the 1964-1968 Irwin Allen series on which Jones based that adventure yarn, and have managed to hold onto my copy of the book ever since. However, after digging through the boxes in my basement to find said “authorized edition”—shown on the left (click for an enlargement)—I discovered it was a hardcover book, not a paperback. So I have substituted Renegades of Time, instead.
This week’s second sad occasion falls on Wednesday, December 5, which will mark one year since Crider—then 76 years old and suffering from a very aggressive prostate cancer—announced he was giving up blogging after an impressive decade-and-a-half-long run. He wrote:
Things could change, but I suspect this will be my final post on the blog. I met with some doctors at M.D. Anderson [Cancer Center] today, and they suggested that I enter hospice care. A few weeks, a few months is about all I have left. The blog has been a tremendous source of pleasure to me over the years, and I’ve made a lot of friends here. My only regret is that I have several unreviewed books, including Lawrence Block’s fine new anthology, Alive in Shape and Color, and Max Allan Collins’ latest collaboration with Mickey Spillane, The Last Stand, which is a collection of two novellas, “A Bullet for Satisfaction,” an early Spillane manuscript with an interesting history, and “The Last Stand,” the last thing that Spillane completed. It saddens me to think of all the great books by many writers that I’ll never read. But I’ve had a great life, and my readers have been a big part of it. Much love to you all.
Bill Crider passed away quietly a little over two months later. And there’s probably not a day that has gone by since, when I didn’t read something about a brand-new novel, or hear about a news event involving crocodiles, Nicolas Cage, or the passing of another celebrity, and think, I wonder how Bill would’ve treated that in his blog.
Anyone who’s read Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon (and who among us hasn’t?) knows about John’s Grill in downtown San Francisco. Located on the edge of the Tenderloin neighborhood, just north of Market Street and convenient to a BART Station and the Powell Street cable-car tracks, that wood-paneled and photograph-filled eatery was founded in 1908, just two years after the city’s ruinous earthquake and fire. According to its Web site, John’s Grill “was the first downtown restaurant to open after the quake.” Hammett used to eat there in the 1920s, when he was working for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency in the nearby John Flood Building, and he went on to immortalize the joint in his only Sam Spade novel.
In any case, Bay Area newspaper reporter Peter Hegarty—a Rap Sheet reader—just sent me the following news release about tomorrow’s 110th anniversary party for John’s Grill, suggesting that others might find it interesting, as well:
San Francisco — The 110th Birthday of Historic John’s Grill will be celebrated beginning at 12:00 noon, Thursday, November 29th, with Dashiell Hammett’s granddaughter Julie Rivett and over 200 friends and patrons of John’s Grill. Celebrity watchers will not be disappointed.
Historic John's Grill was one of the first restaurants to rebuild out of the rubble and ashes of San Francisco’s Great 1906 Earthquake & Fire and is the 27th “Literary Landmark” in the United States. Just off Union Square, John’s Grill was made famous internationally by Dashiell Hammett’s 1927 “Maltese Falcon” mystery novel (later a classic Humphrey Bogart movie): “Sam Spade went to John’s Grill, asked the waiter to hurry his order of chops, baked potato, sliced tomatoes and was smoking a cigarette with his coffee when …” was written by Hammett, who ate at John’s while working next door in the Flood Building as a Pinkerton agent. Detectives, politicians, reporters, and celebrities have been coming to John’s Grill for the past century. Their pictures adorn the walls above their tables and you never know whom you might see at John’s Grill. Be sure to visit the Grill’s Hammett museum located on the third floor and see the 150-pound lead-filled bronze statue of the famous Maltese Falcon.
WHO: Fifty-Piece Washington High School Marching Eagles, San Francisco Mayor London Breed Former San Francisco Mayors [Willie] Brown and [Frank] Jordan, Dashiell Hammett's granddaughter Julie Rivett, John’s Grill owner John Konstin and family; 200 well-known San Franciscans, Politicians, Politicos, Newsies, detectives and Maltese Falcon fans.
John’s Grill is one of my customary stops whenever I’m visiting San Francisco. Unfortunately, I won’t be there tomorrow to help celebrate its latest anniversary, but I shall be sure to tip a glass in honor of its continuing existence and the novel that made it famous.
Ceremonies were held today in Paris to observe Armistice Day. Led by French President Emmanuel Macron—whose speech made clear to world leaders (this time including Donald Trump, who evidently mustered the strength he lacked yesterday to brave a little rain) that they “must find new ways to build peace together in the face of dangerous, rising populism and ‘selfish’ nationalism”—the event specifically commemorated 100 years since the end of World War I.
In the United States, November 11 is Veterans Day, an annual holiday designed to honor everybody who has served with the American military (not just those who died in combat—they’re specifically recognized on Memorial Day in May). Janet Rudolph has taken advantage of this occasion to post, in Mystery Fanfare, a rundown of general war-related mysteries, plus links to lists elsewhere of crime novels set around World War I or those that at least feature protagonists who are military vets. Click here to find her piece.
As my maternal grandfather told me when I was a boy, he was only 14 or 15 years old and living in Canada when World War I broke out in Europe in 1914. Yet he had several older brothers who quickly volunteered to join the British Army, and my grandfather wanted to go with them. So he lied about his age, and was sent to the front lines in France. Amazingly, he didn’t die, though he did have some scares (one of them involving a rat that sneaked up on his trench from no-man’s-land one night, and that he almost shot, thinking it was a German soldier). And he was seriously injured by a bomb blast that left shrapnel in one of his legs. The field medics wanted to amputate that limb and send him home, but my grandfather told them he’d rather die than lose his leg. For the rest of his long life, he suffered with the pain of metal bits working their way out of his flesh.
Eventually, he did return to Canada—as did all of his brothers. I seem to remember him saying that their German-born mother cried for days, after her sons were safely home. Though I could be wrong about that. Sadly, my grandfather is no longer around to set me straight.
I thought of my grandfather often as I wrote my piece about post-World War I mysteries, which appears today in CrimeReads—just two days before the centennial, on Sunday, November 11, of that war’s conclusion. He was an enthusiastic reader; in fact, it was partly the prevalence of books in his home that led me to become a book lover. (My mother was an equal influence on me in that regard.) Whether he would have appreciated any of the novels featured in my piece, I can’t say. Perhaps not, for in one way or another, their stories all focus on loss—the loss of friends, the loss of one’s moral or mental bearings, the loss of confidence that the world remains a safe place.
I, of course, came to these crime and mystery novels without my grandfather’s baggage—and was glad of the opportunity to dive into the tales about which I write today. My focus is on nine crime, mystery, and spy novels that take place shortly after the end of the fighting in Europe. Works by Robert Goddard, Alex Beer, Charles Todd, and Christopher Huang are among those under consideration. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it’s a start for readers interested in how fictional detectives—and others—were affected by those four years of fighting, and how their lives and careers changed afterward.
Again, click here to find my post-World War I mystery picks.
Front page of the New York Daily News, October 31, 1938.
It was 80 years ago tonight, on October 30, 1938, that actor Orson Welles “vaulted into stardom by narrating”—for The Mercury Theatre on the Air—“his famous radio presentation of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds,” recalls the blog Pulp International. “In adapting the [1898] novel, which concerns an invasion by malevolent Martians bent on the total destruction of humanity, Welles decided to use fictional news bulletins to describe the action. These were presented without commercial breaks, leaving listeners to decide whether the familiar-sounding news flashes were truthful. Since a radio show had never used the news flash for dramatic purposes, many people were confused. The public reaction was described at the time as a panic ...”
It has been estimated that of the 6 million people who heard the original broadcast, more than 1.5 million believed it to be true and more
than a million others were genuinely terrified, and contemporary accounts tell of police stations swamped with calls. Within a month there were more than
12,000 newspaper articles on the broadcast and its impact, and as far away as Germany, Adolf Hitler is said to have cited it as “evidence of the decadence
and corrupt condition of democracy.” Many listeners sued the network for mental anguish, claims that were all denied save one for a pair of size-nine black
shoes, by a man from Massachusetts who complained he’d had to spend what he’d saved for new shoes to escape the invading Martians. Welles insisted that that
claim be reimbursed.
Welles and the Mercury Theatre were censured, but the broadcast secured Welles an instant, notorious fame. In 1988, Grover’s Mills, New Jersey, celebrated its hour of fame by installing a Martian Landing Site monument near Grover’s Mill Pond, not far from the remains of a water tower shot to pieces by its frightened residents 50 years before.
So give yourself a little pre-Halloween scare by listening to that dramatic old broadcast, embedded above. The Mercury Theatre on the Air Web site also offers it and other episodes for free downloading here. To watch Welles talk about the fallout from his radio program, click here. And if you’d like to learn still more about that controversial show, grab a copy of A. Brad Schwartz’s Broadcast Hysteria: Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds and the Art of Fake News (2015).
POSTSCRIPT: You will find a selection of book fronts from H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds by clicking over to Killer Covers.
Congratulations to The Spy Command, which today turns 10 years old. I know how much work goes into keeping a blog active and interesting for even a few years, so a decade’s work is nothing to sneeze at.
As managing editor Bill Koenig recalls, The Spy Command was inaugurated in 2008 as The HMSS Weblog, an offshoot of the James Bond-obsessed Webzine Her Majesty’s Secret Servant (founded in 1997). By the next year, Koenig was the blog’s primary contributor, and in 2014, Her Majesty’s Secret Servant folded up shop. The blog was rechristened The Spy Command in February 2015. It remains one of the best online sources of information about Agent 007, though Koenig also writes occasionally about The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Hawaii Five-O, two TV shows in which he’s particularly interested.
If you aren’t already a loyal follower of The Spy Command, it’s definitely time you became one.
• Mystery Fanfare brings the unhappy news that Aunt Agatha’s Mystery Bookshop in Ann Arbor, Michigan—which won the 2014 Raven Award from the Mystery Writers of America for “outstanding achievement in the mystery field outside the realm of creative writing”—will shut its doors for good this coming August, after 26 years in business. Owners Robin and Jamie Agnew say they’ve scheduled a closing event for Sunday, August 26, with guest author William Kent Krueger, “and we hope you’ll join us for a final gather round the communal mysterious
hearth.”
• If you were too busy yesterday with chocolate bunnies and secreted Easter eggs to have noticed that the Thrilling Detective Web Site celebrated its 20th anniversary, there’s plenty of time now to check out editor Kevin Burton Smith’s commemorative additions to the site.
• The latest “Getting Away with Murder,” Mike Ripley’s monthly column for Shots, contains notes about Philip Kerr’s recent and untimely demise, Stella Duffy’s success in completing a previously unfinished last novel by Ngaio Marsh, and new fiction releases from the likes of Lindsey Davis, Peter Morfoot, and Andrew Taylor.
• Speaking of Philip Kerr, CrimeReads has posted a rather excellent piece by associate editor Molly Odintz remarking on the literary impact and lasting value of Kerr’s Bernie Gunther series.
• I see the third issue of Down & Out: The Magazine is now available in print and e-book versions. Its contents include new short fiction by Barry Lancet, Art Taylor, Patricia Abbott, and Peter Sellers; “a discussion and a story by one of the hard-boiled school’s originators, Raoul Whitfield”; and the latest edition of my “Placed in Evidence” column, focused on the private-eye novels of Stanley Ellin.
• Congratulations to Spanish writer José Ignacio Escribano on the ninth birthday of his blog, A Crime Is Afoot.
• The Web site Inside Hook was not familiar to me until this afternoon. Yet it contains an intriguing interview with Jim Heimann about Los Angeles’ “seedy underbelly.” L.A. native Heimann, of course, is the author of Dark City: The Real Los Angeles Noir (Taschen America), a volume filled with photographs of places that have “provided inspiration for journalists, pulp fiction scribes, and filmland script writers in their creation of the noir genre.” (Hat tip to Elizabeth Foxwell’s blog, The Bunburyist.)
• And while this isn’t about crime fiction, it’s worth mentioning nonetheless. Today marks 50 years since the big-screen debut of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the landmark science-fiction adventure written by motion-picture director Stanley Kubrick and noted SF author Arthur C. Clarke (whose 1951 short story “The Sentinel” helped inspire the movie). 2001 premiered on April 2, 1968, at the Uptown Theater in Washington, D.C., and then opened to wider U.S. distribution the next day. One of the most beautiful and memorable aspects of that film was its musical score, employing a variety of classical works, among them Richard Strauss’ “Also sprach Zarathustra,” which served as the main title theme. (Click here to relive the drama of that opening number.) What people forget, especially half a century on, is that Kubrick had commissioned Hollywood composer Alex North to create an original soundtrack for his film. But as Wikipedia notes, Kubrick decided during his post-production work to toss that score “in favor of the now-familiar classical pieces he had earlier chosen as ‘guide pieces’ for the soundtrack.” Wikipedia adds that “North did not know of the abandonment of the score until after he saw the film’s premiere screening.” One can’t help wondering whether 2001: A Space Odyssey might be remembered differently had Kubrick stuck with North’s musical score, the beginning of which—including an alternative main title theme—can be heard here. Additional selections from North’s 2001 score can be sampled here. UPDATE: You can read more about this movie’s 50th anniversary by clicking here.
Today marks two decades since the launch of one of the Web’s most valuable and interesting resources for crime-fiction lovers: Kevin Burton Smith’s Thrilling Detective Web Site.
As the Canadian-born Smith—once a resident of Montreal, Quebec, now living in the sun-seared environs of Southern California—recalled in a blog post late last year, he uploaded “a tentative few pages” of the prospective site in November 1997. Encouraged by favorable responses from friends, he “scrambled to make it more presentable, and I officially released the site to the big bad world on April 1, 1998, trying (and inevitably failing) to keep up with the ever-expanding world of private-eye fiction—past, present and future.” Ever since, the Thrilling Detective Web Site has grown and grown still more. “Let me tell you, it’s been one wild ride,” Smith writes. “A time-consuming monster that gobbles up every bit of time it can. And I’ve loved it.”
The results of Smith’s efforts are obvious and deserving of honors. Where else but in the electronic depths of his site can you find so much information about fictional private investigators, those born in books and magazines, as well as others conceived for television, film, and radio presentation? I, for one, cannot skim Smith’s lists of P.I.s without succumbing to curiosity about some now-obscure character or another (Torchy Blane? Ken Corning? Cotton Moon?). Of course, he’s got the better-known figures covered, too, folks such as Lew Archer, Philip Marlowe, Kinsey Millhone, Joe Mannix, Sam Spade, Jacob Asch, Sharon McCone, Milo Milodragovitch, and Thomas Banacek. Not
a week goes by nowadays that I don’t find myself looking up—and linking to—something in the Thrilling Detective Web Site. It has often occurred to me that, were both Wikipedia and Smith’s site to disappear, half of the exterior links in The Rap Sheet might go dead.
Smith has promised to roll out a special 20th-anniversary edition of the Thrilling Detective Web Site sometime today, and I’ll be looking forward to reading what it offers (and probably commenting more on it later). In the meantime, though, let me just wish the site a happy birthday. If you aren’t already addicted to the Thrilling Detective Web Site, you’re likely to be after investigating it further.
I might well have forgotten all about this, had it not been for the blog Spy Vibe, which mentioned earlier this morning that
Ian Fleming's sixth James Bond novel, Dr. No, was published on this day in 1958. With elements such as the villain’s steel-pincer hands, a flame-throwing tractor/dragon, a killer centipede, death traps, tests of pain, and a climactic fight with a giant cephalopod, Dr. No is perhaps one [of] the most Pulp-styled adventures in the series.
If you are in the mood for a bit of celebrating, click here to see Killer Covers’ delightful selection of Dr. No book covers produced over the decades. And click here to watch the trailer for the 1962 Sean Connery version of Dr. No—the first big-screen outing for Agent 007.
Additionally, Spy Vibe notes that “Ian Fleming Publications celebrates the novel’s release today in a 60th-anniversary post of excerpts from period reviews and Fleming’s text from the novel.
It was 50 years ago tonight that Lieutenant Columbo, as portrayed by Peter Falk,
first appeared on American television screens. As Radio Times’ David Brown reminds us, February 20, 1968, brought the premiere of an NBC made-for-TV-movie titled Prescription: Murder, an elegantly twisted mystery starring Falk, Gene Barry, Katherine Justice, and Nina Foch. Written by William Link and Richard Levinson, the story found a rumpled but shrewd Los Angeles police detective facing off against a wealthy and devious psychiatrist, Dr. Ray Flemming (Barry), who has murdered his wife, Carol (Foch), in order to preserve a relationship with his younger mistress, actress Joan Hudson (Justice), and seeks to conceal his role in that homicide.
Peter Falk and Gene Barry in 1968’s Prescription: Murder
The Classic Film and TV Café recalls how viewers were introduced to the character Falk would eventually portray, on and off, for more than 30 years:
Considering that Columbo would eventually become a TV icon, it's somewhat surprising that he doesn’t make his entrance until 32 minutes into Prescription: Murder. He introduces himself to Gene Barry’s murderer as simply: “Lieutenant Columbo, police.” Thus, it’s up to Barry to carry the film’s opening scenes and he’s quite persuasive as the intelligent, egotistical Flemming. His simple, yet ingenious, murder plot relies on an axiom employed by Agatha Christie in her classic Hercule Poirot novel Lord Edgware Dies. Flemming explains it to his accomplice: “People see what they expect to see.”
It takes Flemming most of the film to realize that he has underestimated his dogged pursuer.
In the best scene, the two men discuss the murder in theoretical terms—though each knows exactly what happened. Flemming even offers a psychoanalysis of Columbo’s tactic of masking his intelligence. At its best, Prescription: Murder is a two-character play—and I mean that as a compliment. William Windom, Nina Foch, and Katherine Justice are fine in supporting roles, but the crux of the film is the cat-and-mouse game between Columbo and Flemming.
Prescription: Murder wasn’t technically a pilot for Columbo, but as William Link recalls in the first of the two video clips found here, it was such a popular telefilm that NBC immediately wanted to turn it into a series, with 22 episodes a year. Falk balked at such a commitment, however, and as a result the idea went dormant. A few years later, Link and Levinson were asked to write the story for a second Columbo telefilm, which became Ransom for a Dead Man (1971), co-starring Lee Grant as “a brilliant lawyer who supposedly commits the perfect crime.” (Watch the opening from that flick here.) Like its predecessor, Ransom was a viewer-ratings winner, and the proposal to make Columbo a regular small-screen offering was revived—only this time the vision was to make it just one component of a rotating, or “wheel,” series of 90-minute dramas titled the NBC Mystery Movie. (Dennis Weaver’s McCloud and McMillan & Wife, starring Rock Hudson and Susan Saint James, were slated to become the other elements of that weekly rotation.) Being asked under this plan to shoot fewer episodes—only six or seven a year—Falk finally acquiesced.
(Above) TV Guide’s 1968 “Close-Up” on Prescription: Murder.
The rest, as that hoary cliché goes, is history. Columbo debuted beneath the NBC Mystery Movie umbrella on September 15, 1971, with an episode titled “Murder by the Book,” featuring Jack Cassidy as a renowned whodunit author bent on offing his writing partner, played by Martin Milner. Columbo would continue its run as part of the NBC Mystery Movie (later the NBC Sunday Mystery Movie) until the spring of 1978, and then be revived in a succession of two-hour films on a rival American TV network, ABC, broadcast from 1989 to 2003.
Even 15 years after the airing of the final Columbo movie, Columbo Likes the Nightlife, the character Levinson and Link created, and that Falk inhabited so convincingly, hasn’t lost his appeal. There are currently whole Web sites devoted to that single-monikered L.A. cop (check out The Columbophile and The Ultimate Columbo Site!), as well as a couple of podcasts (Just One More Thing and The Columbo Podcast—which addresses Prescription: Murderhere) and at least two Twitter pages tied to those podcasts, Lieutenant Columbo and Just One More Thing. William Link’s The Columbo Collection (Crippen & Landru, 2010), comprising a dozen original short stories starring you-know-who, remains in print. DVD sets of both the original NBC series and the subsequent ABC films can be easily purchased. Episodes of Columbo continue to be shown on MeTV network and the Hallmark Movie Channel. And there’s even talk of a ColumboCon taking place in Falk’s old hometown of Ossining, New York, this coming July.
Why does the public’s fondness for Columbo persist? Radio Times’ Brown suggests seven reasons, my favorite two being that the series indulged in “class war” (“Not only does Columbo always get his man [or woman], he’s also a street-smart expert when it comes to reducing smug sophisticates to gibbering wrecks.”) and that it offered an entertaining succession of “false exits.” Of the latter, Brown writes:
And so we reach possibly the most famous aspect to Columbo: his “just one more thing” catchphrase, used to befuddle an antagonist just when they think a meeting is at an end. As Columbo makes to leave, out comes one of his seemingly inconsequential queries that end up putting the murderer further in the mire.
Here is a man who doesn’t need to brandish a firearm (Columbo notably hated guns) or screech his car tyres—the dogged Lieutenant pulls the bad guys apart question by question. Who needs an action scene set-piece when you have Columbo wrapping up his dogged interrogations in fake apologies?
So let’s share a toast to Lieutenant Columbo and Peter Falk, and also to William Link, who celebrated his 84th birthday this last December. (His childhood friend and screenwriting collaborator, Richard Levinson, died back in 1987.) While other crime solvers have flickered onto our TV sets, only to soon disappear and be forgotten, Columbo has achieved durable greatness. We can only hope his sly investigative talents will still be appreciated another half a century from now.
Please forgive the recent paucity of fresh posts on this page, but I’ve been busy finishing up a couple of large projects over the last two weeks, one of which I was particularly pleased to have tackled. (More about that soon.) Having now put both of those endeavors behind me, I can return to my collection of crime fiction-related links around the Web. Here are a few of the things I’ve turned up lately.
• The site ComingSoon.net reports that Willem Dafoe has been tapped to co-star, opposite Edward Norton, in Motherless Brooklyn, a forthcoming big-screen adaptation of Jonathan Lethem’s 1999 novel of that same name. Norton has apparently written the script already, and will be one of the picture’s producers. For anyone who hasn’t read Lethem’s Brooklyn-set yarn, here’s Wikipedia’s plot synopsis: “Lethem’s protagonist, Lionel Essrog, has Tourette syndrome, a
disorder marked by involuntary tics. Essrog works, along with Tony, Danny and Gilbert, who call themselves the Minna Men, for Frank Minna—a small-time
neighborhood owner of a ‘seedy and makeshift’ detective agency—who is stabbed to death.” Motherless Brooklyn won both the 1999 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction and the 2000 Gold Dagger from the British Crime Writers’ Association.
• Series 5 of Endeavour began showing last weekend in Great Britain. In the first of six new episodes (two more than previous seasons offered), “It’s 1st April 1968, and Morse [played by Shaun Evans] is now a Detective Sergeant and lodging with [DS Jim] Strange [Sean Rigby], though his position in the reorganised nick is hardly secure,” explains the UK TV blog Killing Times. “He’s investigating a handbag snatching, but there’s more skullduggery going on, including the auction of a Faberge egg, that old cliché of caper movies, and a shooting in a taxi. … Joan Thursday (Sarah Vickers) is back in town, her dalliance in exotic Leamington evidently having come to a sticky end, but there seems no prospect of her resuming any relationship with Morse, or indeed her dad, Fred [Roger Allam].” The blog Morse, Lewis, and Endeavour provides further hints at what to expect from this excellent program in the weeks to come, and in a separate post, says that Endeavour showrunner Russell Lewis is planning some sort of on-screen tribute to Colin Dexter, who created Inspector Morse and passed away last year. Watch the Season 5 video trailer below.
• I have not so far come across any reliable news as to when Endeavour Series 5 will reach American television screens, but if history can be our guide, it should begin broadcasting as part of PBS-TV’s Masterpiece Mystery! lineup in late summer of this year.
• In the wake of sexual-misconduct allegations leveled against Kevin Spacey, who played its pitiless central character, politician Frank Underwood, the Netflix drama series House of Cardshas
made some casting changes. According to The New York Times, Spacey is out, while Diane Lane and Greg Kinnear will join returning star Robin Wright for the show’s sixth and final season. Shooting of House of Cards’ concluding episodes commenced in late January.
More than a decade after the release of the feature film adaptation of Dennis Lehane’s best-selling novel, Gone Baby Gone, Fox has ordered a pilot for a TV series adapting the story of working-class Boston detectives investigating a young girl’s kidnapping. Written by Black Sails creator Robert Levine, the pilot will be a one-hour drama following private detectives Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro, who are “armed with their wits, their street knowledge and an undeniable chemistry” as they attempt to tackle cases that the law can’t in the working-class Boston borough of Dorchester. Levine and Lehane are both set to executive produce the pilot, which is aiming for Fox’s 2018-2019 TV season.
• The same source brings word that CBS-TV has greenlighted a small-screen version of L.A. Confidential, “a new take on the James Ellroy detective novel that inspired the Oscar-winning 1997 film.” As we reported last September, author Jordan Harper (She Rides Shotgun) will be responsible for writing the pilot’s script.
• This comes from Tor.com: “The first full-length trailer for the second season of Jessica Jones has the hard-drinking superpowered detective taking on an incredibly personal case: her own, delving into the car accident that killed her, and the shadowy people who brought her back to life. The powers, it turns out, were a side effect.” Jessica Jones will return to Netflix on Thursday, March 8.
• OK, just one more bit of movie news: Cinelou Films has grabbed up the cinematic rights to Jar of Hearts, a thriller novel set for release by Minotaur Books in June, and written by Jennifer Hillier, a quondam Seattleite now residing in Toronto, Canada. Amazon’s brief on the plot line of Hillier’s tale says, “This is [the] story of three best friends: one who was murdered, one who went to prison, and one who’s been searching for the truth all these years.” I have not yet received a copy of Hillier’s book, but it sounds promising.
• Tampa Bay Times journalist Craig Pittman, who last year wrote about Elmore Leonard’s LaBrava for The Rap Sheet, has a fun piece in Slate speculating that the parents on television’s The Brady Bunch “murdered each other’s spouses and married each other. And that’s the way they all became the Brady Bunch.”
• Editor Janet Rudolph has let it be known that the latest edition of Mystery Readers Journal—the second in a row to focus on “Big City Cops”—is now available for purchase, either in a hard-copy version or as a downloadable PDF. If you missed the previous magazine, you can order it and other back issues by clicking here.
• A belated happy birthday to Ida Lupino. As Terence Towles Canote observed in his blog, this last Sunday, Febrary 4, marked the 100th year since Lupino’s delivery in London, England. “It seems likely that most people know Ida Lupino only as a beautiful and talented actress from the Golden Age of Hollywood,” Canote writes. “Classic movie buffs know otherwise. We know that she was not only a talented actress, but a talented director as well. Over the years she directed several films and several hours worth of television. As only the second woman to join the Directors Guild of America (Dorothy Arzner was the first), Ida Lupino was a true pioneer.” She died in 1995, aged 77.
• And happy 20th anniversary to the James Bond-obsessed site MI6. Looking back over its history, the editors write: “The future of the 007 franchise was more certain 20 years ago than it [is] today, although nobody knew back then what would be in store with [Pierce] Brosnan’s unceremoniously leaving the franchise, MGM’s bankruptcy and repeated financial troubles, Daniel Craig’s controversial casting, and the ‘new normal’ of longer breaks between films. Whatever lies in store as we approach the fifth—and probably final—Daniel Craig outing, MI6 will be here to cover it.”
• The entertainment Web site WhatCulture.comlists
10 things it expects from the coming, 25th 007 flick—“essential signifiers that James Bond, in all its glory, has truly returned.”
• The Gumshoe Site reports the sad news that Kansas-born, Southern California-reared author Gaylord Dold
“died after complications from the flu and was found on January 29 at his mother’s home in Fort Scott, Kansas.” The blog goes on to explain:
The former lawyer wrote the Mitch Roberts private eye series starting with Hot Summer, Cold Murder (Avon, 1987). Modeled on Robert Mitchum, Dold’s favorite actor, Roberts gumshoes around in 1950s Wichita, Kansas, Dold’s hometown, in the first six paperback original books … then he turns international in A Penny for the Old Guy (St. Martin’s, 1991) and three following hardcover novels, sleuthing around Europe till Samedi’s Knapsack (Minotaur, 2001). He also wrote standalone crime novels (such as The Last Man in Berlin; Sourcebooks, 2003; retitled Storm 33; Kindle, 2014), a memoir (Jack’s Boy; Kindle, 2014), two travel guides ([including]The Rough Guide to the Bahamas; Rough Guides, 2007), [and] two Jack Kilgore novels ([including] The Nickel Jolt, Premier Digital, 2013; Kilgore being ex-Marine Intelligence agent). He was 70.
• In Mystery*File, Francis M. Nevins notes the passing, this last October, of Donald A. Yates, an authority on Spanish and Latin American literature (he helped, for instance, to bring the works of Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges to U.S. audiences). Yates translated crime stories for Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and edited Latin Blood (1972), “an anthology of mystery tales from Central and South America, which includes three stories by Borges.” In addition, Yates was a Sherlock Holmes enthusiast and a fan
of locked-room mysteries, and he penned “several detective short stories” of his own over the years. He was 87 years old when he died at his home in Deer
Park, California.
• No sooner had I finally listened to all of Nancie Clare’s Speaking of Mysteries podcasts, than three new episodes appeared. Her latest author interviewees: Karen Cleveland (Need to Know), Jody Gehrman (Watch Me), and Adam Walker Phillips (The Perpetual Summer).
• Another thing I haven’t been keeping up with: Crime Friction, the rookie podcast hosted by Jay Stringer and the delightful Chantelle
Aimée Osman. Episode 4 is just out, featuring Gary Phillips talking about Culprits: The Heist Was Just the Beginning (Polis), a new serial anthology he co-edited with Richard J. Brewer.
• It’s been a while now since we had an update on Bill Crider’s health, supplied by family members through his Facebook page. As you will remember, the 76-year-old Alvin, Texas, author-blogger, suffering from prostate cancer, is undergoing hospice care. The last I remember reading, Bill was weak but resting
peacefully. Meanwhile, his three beloved cats—rescued from a drainage ditch near his home in 2016, and known ever since as the VBKs (Very Bad Kittens)—have gone to live with his goddaughter, Liz Romig Hatlestad, at her home in the central Texas town of Brownwood. They also now have their own Facebook fan page! And to commemorate Bill’s writing career, fellow blogger Evan Lewis has been posting photos of Bill and Judy Crider from their appearances at multiple Bouchercons over the years.
• Speaking of the honorable Mr. Crider, Spinetingler Magazine’s Brian Lindenmuth recently launched a new blog, Palomino Mugging, that he calls “a spiritual successor to Bill Crider’s blog, Bill Crider’s Pop Culture Magazine. Bill’s blog was like a personalized RSS feed of interesting things, interspersed with reviews and other writings. That’s the approach I plan to take.” There isn’t much new crime-fiction content on Lindenmuth’s site yet; most of the posts so far appear to have been picked up from Lindenmuth’s older Web offerings. But as a longtime reader of Crider’s blog, I look forward to seeing how successfully Lindenmuth’s efforts will measure up.
• I have often thought how wonderful it would be to spend more time in Great Britain, which seems to be regularly rife with crime-fiction events. Just look at this list, put together by the Crime Writers’ Association (CWA), of writing festivals and workshops being offered “across the pond” over the next couple of months.
• Also from the CWA comes a reminder that its annual Margery Allingham Short Story Competition is accepting submissions from both published and unpublished wordsmiths. The deadline is midnight on February 28. The CWA explains that “There’s a limit of 3,500 words and a fairly open brief—your mystery story needs to fit Margery Allingham’s definition of a mystery: ‘The Mystery remains box-shaped, at once a prison and a refuge. Its four walls are, roughly, a Crime, a Mystery, an Enquiry and a Conclusion with an Element of Satisfaction in it.’ It costs £12 to enter and the winner walks away with £500, a selection of Margery Allingham books and two passes for international crime writing convention CrimeFest in 2019.” This year’s winner will be announced during CrimeFest 2018 (May 17-20).
• An Indian media site called Scroll carries Jai Arjun Singh’s intriguing account of baffling disappearances (of people, footprints, weapons, cars, etc.) in need of investigating in classic mystery fiction.
• Prolific crime-novelist John Lutzrecalls for the SleuthSayers blog how and why he created Thomas Laker, the secret agent hero of a brand-new series being introduced this month with The Honorable Traitors (Pinnacle). Compounding my interest in that post is Jan Grape’s introduction, in which she says she first met Lutz at the Baltimore Bouchercon convention in 2008. As it happens, that was also the only time I remember encountering the author. It was during a late evening, and I’d gone down to the convention hotel bar for a nightcap and some conversation. After receiving my drink, I looked across the well-lit, too-shiny room and saw Lutz and his wife, Barbara, seated at a small round table in the far corner. They were chatting amiably, not inviting company. But, being fairly new to the conventioneering game and—after years spent as a reporter—comfortable with approaching strangers (even famous ones), I sidled over to their table, apologized for the interruption, and then went into an overlong appreciation of Lutz’s Fred Carver private-eye series. The author seemed very humble in the face of my adulation, but let a small smile ride his lips the whole time. After I was done prattling, he thanked me for reading his novels, and I retreated to my own table. The Lutzes left soon afterward. In retrospect, it was a small moment, but it reminded me of how much I appreciated Lutz’s work. Within the next six months, I had re-read most of the Carver yarns. It just goes to show what impact meeting an author can have on a true fan.
• For the ninth year in a row, government information librarian/author Robert Lopresti has chosen his favorite crime-fiction short stories of the year, this time for 2017. “The big winners,” Lopresti explains, “were Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, tied with five stories each. Akashic Press and Mystery Weekly Magazine each scored two. … Six of the stories are funny (says me); four have fantasy elements. Only one is a historical. I think one could be described as fair play.” You will find his 18 top choices in the blog SleuthSayers.
• Late last month brought word that author and screenwriter Bridget Lawless was launching the Staunch Book Prize, to be given to the best thriller novel “in which no
woman is beaten, stalked, sexually exploited, raped, or murdered.” She explains on her competition’s Web site that “As violence against women in fiction reaches a ridiculous high, the Staunch Book Prize invites thriller writers to keep us on the edge of our seats without resorting to the same old clichés—particularly female characters who are sexually assaulted (however ‘necessary to the plot’), or done away with (however ingeniously).” Lawless’ contest, which offers £2,000 in prize money, will be open to “stories across the thriller genre—crime, psychological, comedy, and mysteries—and to traditionally published, self-published, and not-yet-published works.” Submissions will be accepted from February 22 through July 15, with an announcement of the winning entry scheduled for November 25, “coinciding with the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women.” While many readers have cheered Lawless’ move, there have been objections—including from Britain’s Sophie Hannah, who wrote in The Guardian:
The prize clearly has good intentions, and wishes to take an important stand against violence towards women. The problem is that it’s not
the violence that’s on the receiving end of that stand; it’s writers and readers.
Brutality is not the same thing as writing about brutality. After suffering a trauma, some people find it consoling and empowering to read, or write, about fictional characters who have survived similar experiences. If we can’t stop human beings from viciously harming one another, we need to be able to write stories in which that harm is subjected to psychological and moral scrutiny, and punished. On some occasions, perhaps the fictional perpetrator will go unpunished, if the author is writing about the failure of the legal system to deliver justice. There is no life-changing experience that we should be discouraged from writing and reading about.
The Staunch prize could instead have been created to honour the novel that most powerfully or sensitively tackles the problem of violence against women and girls. Reading the eligibility criteria, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the prize actively sets out to discourage crime fiction, even of the highest quality, that tackles violence against women head-on.
• Nominees for this year’s RT Reviewers’ Choice Awards have been proclaimed in a range of categories. Click here to see the mystery fiction and romantic suspense works vying for honors. Winners will be named during a May 27 ceremony in Reno, Nevada.
• It’s time to suit up again for SleuthFest, which is set to be held in Boca Raton, Florida, from March 1 to 4. Mystery Fanfare shares the details on special guests, registration, and more.
• I, for one, have never seen “The Deep End,” a 1964 episode of Kraft Suspense Theatre that Elizabeth Foxwell features in The Bunburyist. She says the show, which finds Clu Gulager starring in a private dick role, was “likely” adapted from John D. MacDonald’s 1963 standalone novel, The Drowner.
• George C. Chesbro devotees, please take note. A decade after his
death in 2008, Open Road Media has made available e-book versions of 23 of that author’s mystery and private-eye novels. They include most of his books headlined by dwarf criminologist/gumshoe Robert Frederickson, aka “Mongo the Magnificent.”
• Congratulations are owed to a couple of new columnists at different publications: Craig Sisterson, who has launchedCrimespree Magazine’s
new “Māwake Crime Review,” “featuring some great crime writers and crime novels from beyond the borders of North America and
Europe”; and Dean Jobb, the author of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine’s new “Stranger Than Fiction” column, about true-crime books.
• The aforementioned Mr. Sisterson has also created a Facebook page for Rotorua Noir, which he says is “New Zealand’s first-ever crime-writing festival,” and is set to take place in the North Island city of Rotorua from January 27 to 27, 2019. “We have already secured a great venue, and four amazing international Guests of Honour, who will be joining an array of crime writers on a terrific programme of writer workshops, author panels, and other cool events.”
• Although this
critique of Sarah Trott’s non-fiction work, War Noir: Raymond Chandler and the Hard-Boiled Detective as Veteran in American Fiction (University Press of Mississippi), could have benefited from more careful proofreading, it leads me to believe I would enjoy the book. Trott’s thesis is that Chandler’s service with the Canadian Expeditionary Force during World War I influenced “his prose style and can chiefly be identified in his most famous character, private investigator [Philip] Marlowe; namely in the way he thinks, talks and acts.” It’s just a shame Trott’s volume is so expensive, $65, making most readers think twice before purchasing.
• We are still a week away from Valentine’s Day, but Mystery Fanfare has reposted its extensive list of Valentine’s Day mysteries, only a handful of which I can honestly claim to have read.
• And here’s a series I never thought I would see again: The Lazarus Man, a
1996 TNT-TV Western/mystery that starred Robert Urich (Spenser: For Hire) as an amnesiac who escaped a premature grave in Texas in the mid-1860s, then wandered about the West trying to figure out who he was and why he was plagued by recollections of being attacked by a man in a derby hat. The show was actually renewed for a second season, but was subsequently cancelled after news broke that Urich had been diagnosed with the rare cancer synovial cell sarcoma. (He would die in 2002.) Twenty episodes were shown, but two never unaired. Now, the Web site TV Shows on DVD informs me that The Lazarus Man—The Complete Series will be released on February 13 by the Warner Archive Collection. That site says the DVD set will comprise five discs, but is vague on whether it will contain those never-broadcast last two eps. The Turner Classic Movies site, though, says all 22 episodes will be included in the set. Amazon lists the retail price of The Lazarus Man—The Complete Series as $47.99.
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onto my copy of the book ever since. However, after digging through the boxes in my basement to find said “authorized edition”—shown on the left (click for an enlargement)—I discovered it was a hardcover book, not a paperback. So I have substituted Renegades of Time, instead.
