Bullet Points: Daffy and Dagger Edition

• Last Friday, Evan Lewis of the blog Davy Crockett’s Almanack of Mystery, Adventure, and the Wild West kicked-off a “nine-day extravaganza celebrating slick-tongued reporter Daffy Dill” of the fictional New York Chronicle, a character created in the 1930s by Richard Sale and popularized through the pages of Detective Fiction Weekly. So far, Lewis has posted “The Dancing Corpse,” a “never-reprinted adventure from the September 7, 1935, issue of Detective Fiction Weekly”; assembled a gallery of Dill magazine covers; and offered readers the Daffy adventures “A Dirge for Pagliaccio” and “A Slug for Cleopatra.” Coming up this Friday, Lewis promises, will be “an in-depth look at the life and times of Daffy Dill by Monte Herridge--an article that originally appeared in the 2013 Pulpfest magazine PEAPSTER. And to wrap things up, on Saturday the 29th we’ll have still another ‘new’ Daffy story, coming your way for the first time since 1937.” This extravaganza is certainly proving to be a lot of fun.

• The coming film adaptation of Veronica Mars had already earned one place in the history books, thanks to its record-breaking Kickstarter campaign (remember how it accumulated $2 million in financing in under 11 hours?). Now, reports Moviefone, the “movie will be the first to be simultaneously released by a major studio in theaters (270 theaters) and made available for purchase and to rent on the same day: March 14, 2014.”

• Meanwhile, watch for the long-awaited Man from U.N.C.L.E. movie to premiere on January 16, 2015. Unfortunately, this means it won’t be out in time to be part of the 50th anniversary celebration of U.N.C.L.E.’s September 22, 1964, NBC-TV debut.

• The British Crime Writers’ Association announced today that digital publisher Endeavour Press will be the new backer of its annual Historical Dagger for the best historical novel of the year. “Endeavour Press are proud to be sponsoring the CWA Historical Dagger,” says Richard Foreman, the company’s founder. “As both readers--and publishers--of crime fiction, Endeavour Press are keen to support the CWA, an association which continues to foster relationships between its authors and the growing readership for crime novels. Also, as someone who has spent the past decade promoting both history books and crime fiction, it also gives me great personal satisfaction to help reward authors for their hard work and talent, whether they be debut writers or more established names.” The winner of this year’s first CWA Endeavour Historical Dagger will be named on June 30.

• How’s this for a peculiar progression? Author J. Sydney Jones (The Keeper of Hands) recently e-mailed yours truly, J. Kingston Pierce, asking for information about how to contact Canadian novelist J. Robert Janes (whose new Jean-Louis St-Cyr/Hermann Kohler tale, Carnival, is due out in mid-May). The result is an excellent new interview with Janes in Jones’ Scene of the Crime blog.

• This comes from In Reference to Murder: “Thanks to Crime Fiction Lover for noting that Crime Story, a new festival for crime fiction lovers, is coming to Newcastle [England] at the University of Northumbria on May 31st. The organizers have added a fun twist: they’ve commissioned author Ann Cleeves to invent a fictional crime which will then be investigated by various experts including forensic scientists, police detectives, and legal eagles.”

• Won’t somebody please step up to help Linda Dewberry, the proprietor of Olympia, Washington's Whodunit? Books, who has put her mystery bookstore on the market?

• R.I.P., Maria von Trapp, who, the Moviefone blog notes, was “the last surviving member and second-eldest daughter of the musical family whose escape from Nazi-occupied Austria was the basis for The Sound of Music, has died. She was 99.” There’s more about von Trapp’s passing in Britain’s Daily Mail.

• In the Kill Zone blog, Mark Alpert reconsiders five “classic novels that offer useful lessons for thriller writers.” Good choices, all.

• Al Capone--in the flesh!

• Nancy O of The Crime Segments continues her reviewing of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe series with this piece about his 1949 novel, The Little Sister.

• Journalist and onetime cartoonist Keith Thomson, the author of 2011’s Twice a Spy and the brand-spanking-new thriller Seven Grams of Lead (Anchor), writes in Mystery Fanfare about his 2008 journey to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and his subsequent fantasy about having had an eavesdropping device planted in his left wrist during the course of that visit. Read the whole piece here.

• I love great unsolved mysteries.

• Flavorwire’s new list, “10 Times Oscar Got It (Unexpectedly) Right,” posted in advance of next Sunday’s Academy Award presentations, includes at least three winners near and dear to the hearts of crime-fiction fans: Gene Hackman’s “Best Actor” Oscar for The French Connection (1971); Robert Towne’s “Best Original Screenplan” win for Chinatown (1974); and Isaac Hayes’ “Best Original Song” prize for “Theme from Shaft” (1971).

• Saved from the Paper Drive seems to have a cache of old Have Gun, Will Travel comic books, and has been rolling them out in the blog one by one. Its latest sampling, “The Vigilantes,” comes from 1960. This link should take you to previous entries in the series.

• More from Michelle Monaghan on True Detective.

• Hmm. I must have missed seeing the recent news alert that Anthony Neil Smith, the author of Hogdoggin’, All the Young Warriors, and assorted other works of fiction, has confessed to being “Red Hammond”--the man behind XXX Shamus (Broken River), a “porno P.I.” novel that Jedediah Ayres applauds as “incendiary.”

• And as a balance against all the recent “you must read these books before you die” directories, Janet Potter offers some worthy suggestions in The Millions of what sorts of volumes really deserve your attention in the near future. Her best two bits of advice, I think: “You should read the book that you hear two booksellers arguing about at the registers while you’re browsing in a bookstore” and “You should read the book that you didn’t read when it was assigned in your high school English class. You’d probably like it better now anyway.”

The Story Behind the Story: “Hogdoggin’,” by Anthony Neil Smith

(Editor’s note: This is the fourth installment of our “Story Behind the Story” series. Today we welcome Anthony Neil Smith, editor of the Webzine Plots With Guns and author of the new novel Hogdoggin’ [Bleak House Books]. The sequel to Yellow Medicine, one of January Magazine’s favorite books of 2008, Hogdoggin’ is a violent yarn about motorcycles, murder, and cold-blooded revenge. How could one hope for a better storytelling mix? Smith also blogs at Crimedog One.)

Let’s back this up a minute.

In the summer of 2005, I moved to rural southwest Minnesota, which felt more like Iowa and South Dakota, with their vast prairies and corn and bean fields, than this “Land of a Thousand Lakes” I kept hearing about. I rented a house on the river in Yellow Medicine County from a colleague at the university where I worked. A couple of months later I sold my second novel, The Drummer, to indie publisher Two Dollar Radio. And a few days after that, Hurricane Katrina hit the Mississippi and Louisiana Gulf Coast, where I had been born and reared and where my family still lived.

My parents and sisters had fled Slidell, right across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans, for my grandmother’s house on the eastern edge of Mississippi’s Gulf Coast, which looked like it would avoid the strike. They were wrong. Two feet of water got into their house--and nearly half the city’s other homes--and the storm surge wiped out almost all the residences on the beach. They lost power. They were hungry. Their cars were flooded. And all I could do was listen to their horror stories … when I could connect with them at all. In fact, it took my uncle and grandmother nearly 12 hours to make what was usually a two-and-a-half hour drive between her house and Baton Rouge, because the only way to get gasoline was to drive four hours north to Jackson and then wait in line for two or three hours. I finally got back in touch with them while I was in Chicago for Bouchercon a week later.

When I said I was coming down to help, they said, “You’d just end up as hungry and miserable as we are. Stay put.”

So I did. Until Christmas.

What I finally saw in New Orleans and along the coast over those few weeks of my visit was reminiscent of a post-apocalyptic video game. Burned-out houses. Abandoned neighborhoods. Cars and boats heaped together as if made of paper. An entire community of fishing cabins along Lake Pontchartrain erased as if they were never there. My parents had finally come back to Slidell after several months to find that their neighborhood had been flooded--nearly seven feet of standing water in their home, everything on the first floor completely wrecked and unsalvageable. By choosing to return when they did, my folks had to agree to get tetanus shots and wear surgical masks. A truck carrying food came by occasionally, and that’s when they found out who was still in the neighborhood. They had to sleep lightly, on guard for looters.

Still, they were determined to make the house livable again, and they even refused one of the infamous FEMA trailers. Good thing, too, because those became a crutch for many people in that neighborhood who were either too shell-shocked or unable to move as quickly as my folks did. On my visits over the next several years, those trailers remained parked on front lawns, becoming people’s main residences while the homes behind them rotted away.

As cold as it may sound, I knew pretty quickly that I would never want to live on the Gulf Coast again. Not so much for the fear of hurricanes--I’d been through several as a child, and we persevered every time--but rather the sense that so many people in my hometown and in New Orleans had just given up. Their spirits were broken. Sure, on the surface it’s great to think that New Orleans will return to her former glory and status, and that the Gulf Coast’s best days are ahead of it. But with so much abandoned wreckage still polluting the scenery four years later, that might not be the case--although I wouldn’t be disappointed if I were proven wrong.

Following my initial post-Katrina trip to Mississippi, I returned to my little river home and began to write Yellow Medicine, about a disgraced and dirty cop from the Gulf Coast, Billy Lafitte, who took advantage of the chaos and need in Katrina’s wake and got popped for it. After he was bounced from the force, Lafitte’s ex-wife took pity and had her brother hire Billy as a deputy in Yellow Medicine County, all the way up in Minnesota. Lafitte moved into a little river home and immediately went back to his old ways, turning the lucrative backwoods methamphetamine economy into his private savings account.

One thing I realized while writing the book was that even though the Mississippi and Minnesota accents were very different, rural was rural. I began to break through the surface and get a feel for how people here viewed family, the land, their town, and other aspects of rural life. We had more in common than we had differences.

Unfortunately, one of those aspects of rural life is the same thing I noticed along the Gulf Coast in the years following Katrina: the slow death of the small-town existence. Although Minnesota hadn’t been swamped by a hurricane, I had a sense of decay and abandonment as I traveled around this area and discovered many small towns on the way to somewhere else. The emptiness hits immediately, like hunger, and just from a look around the town square you can tell there used to be more people here. The local bar, the gas station, the co-op and grain elevator, they all look … done. As bad as a meth addict’s teeth. Old before their time, just waiting for it all to be over. I’m sure the locals would argue with me about this, but my response would be, “Then do something. Make it look the way you think it really is.”

People in the town where I live and work really treasure it. So I wonder why the Christmas decorations strung along the light poles each year are in such lousy shape--dirty, torn, and with some of the lights not even working. Is that pride? I’m told over and over again by residents that this is one of the best places to live. OK, so what’s with all the empty downtown buildings, their signs left to molder even after a sprucing-up of the sidewalks and roads? A strange contradiction, it seems to me. Why is it that the same buildings that were for sale or rent along the main drag when I arrived four years ago are still sitting empty, waiting for someone to do something?

But guess what? There’s not much to be done about it. Just hunker down and wait it out.

So if Yellow Medicine was about the exile experience and the clash with one’s new surroundings, then Hogdoggin’ is about realizing you can never go home again.

* * *

I began Hogdoggin’ before we’d even sold Yellow Medicine. While I wasn’t usually a “series guy” in the stuff I’d written to that point, Billy Lafitte drew me back as I was driving through a small Minnesota/South Dakota border town, rusty and fading, and saw that the “Welcome to ...” sign was surrounded by gnomes. Your everyday garden gnomes, welcoming you to town. For some reason that brought up the contrasting image of Lafitte riding through town on a tricked-out chopper, his return to Minnesota after being out on the run. But that left me with two questions: 1) Why was he back, and 2) where had he been?

The motorcycle answered the first question for me, and it made sense. Out on the road, alone, being hounded by the law, of course Lafitte would turn to a place where his talents could be useful while also giving him shelter. So he joins a new family, Steel God’s splinter motorcycle club--more like a cult out in the wilderness--as an enforcer. But he doesn’t quite fit in. Although he was a bad cop, he had still been a cop, and the line between right and wrong was visible even if Billy had skipped back and forth across it willy-nilly. Now that line is so far behind him, he can’t see it over his shoulder.

In order to get him back, it takes a distress call from his family--his ex-wife and the kids he abandoned in Mississippi. Behind that call, though, is really rogue FBI agent Franklin Rome, beaten to a pulp by Billy at the end of Yellow Medicine, who threatened Billy’s ex if she didn’t cooperate. Rome knows his prey. Knows Lafitte can’t resist a chance to feel normal and right again. It barely takes a second thought for the man to hop on his hog and roar back into town, planning a trip to the Deep South.

He doesn’t get very far. Though not for lack of trying.

But let’s leave it at that for now.

To tell the truth, after one Minnesota winter, the Southern Guy in me wanted to make a break for warmer climes, too. I applied and interviewed for a job in Arkansas. Didn’t get it, but that was OK. By then I’d fallen in love with a Minnesota woman who began to show me what I was missing across the state. We took road trips. We went camping at several different state parks. We toured Minneapolis and she showed me the shortcuts through traffic, plus all the nooks, crannies, and neighborhoods that put Minneapolis on top of my list of cool big cities. We eventually got married in Itasca State Park, where the Mississippi River begins, and it had been a long trip, beginning at the mouth all those years ago and winding my way to the source. I wasn’t so eager to leave anymore. I was beginning to love the place.

Now, I can’t say that Billy Lafitte ever came to love his place in the world, but he did learn to accept it. He’d observed enough of southwest Minnesota and South Dakota to understand that he belonged here. Me? Well, I came to realize that I was a former Southerner, only going back to visit family and friends for short stints. And I was OK with that.

Still, the wanderlust hasn’t left me. Of course, my wife and I are part of our community. The reason we can criticize it is because we care. We’re invested here. We want to see the potential for this town that everyone else tells us is right in front of our noses. Really, we’re rooting for this place. But you’ll find us planning lots of little adventures up to the lake country, Duluth (my idea of heaven, really), the Twin Cities, Sioux Falls, Fargo, Omaha, and wherever else we can drive off to for a while. We pass through so many small towns along the way, wishing we’d seen them at their peaks. Wishing we didn’t have to witness the decline. Crossing our fingers for some miracle but also reading the lay of the land.

After all, I am a noir writer. I’m sure I’ll squeeze plenty more dark and twisted stories out of this landscape.

Strong Medicine

There is noir, and then there’s NOIR. For five years, NOIR in caps and italics was defined by Plots With Guns (PWG), the in-your-face, over-the-top Webzine started by three college kids from Mississippi--Anthony Neil Smith, Victor Gischler, and Hunter Hayes. They graduated. Hayes moved on, soon replaced by a bad-ass named Trevor Maviano, and eventually, Gischler stepped aside as well, leaving Smith in sole charge.

During the long, strange trip that was PWG’s original incarnation, many names now familiar to Rap Sheet readers first appeared on Smith’s dark, smoke-filled Web pages: Charlie Stella and Ray Banks, Sean Doolittle and Jennifer Jordan. PWG inspired a host of other dark corners on the ’Net, too, including David Zeltserman’s Hardluck Stories and Todd Robinson’s ThugLit, as well as print mags such as Murdaland and Out of the Gutter.

And then one day, the music stopped. PWG shut down. Maviano disappeared. Gischler and Smith went on to bigger and better things.

For Neil Smith, bigger and better meant his Point Blank debut in 2005 with the novel Psychosomatic. Psychosomatic was PWG amped up a notch with, as Smith puts it, a sort of Grindhouse origin, featuring an armless and legless woman who is as dangerous as they come.

He followed that up with a violent homage to hair metal music, the Two-Dollar Radio release The Drummer (2006). That book was made all the more poignant as it was written just before Hurricane Katrina ravaged its New Orleans setting.

But now Smith is back, and so is Plots With Guns. In the intervening years, the now 35-year-old Smith has moved to Minnesota and moved up to a bigger publisher, Bleak House Books out of Madison, Wisconsin. This summer, he returns with his first Bleak House effort, Yellow Medicine. The usual references to the Gulf Coast and the dark side of American life are there, along with Smith’s apparent new musical obsession, psychobilly. What’s psychobilly? A clinical breakdown is here, but it sounds like the mutant offspring of punk, rockabilly, and an overdose of pulp horror and science fiction. Just the sort of strangeness that Smith’s readers appreciate.

Bleak House says this about his new novel, set in rural Minnesota:

Deputy Billy Lafitte is not unfamiliar with the law--he just prefers to enforce it, rather than abide by it. But his rule-bending and bribe-taking have gotten him kicked off the force in Gulfport, Mississippi, and he’s been given a second chance--in the desolate, Siberian wastelands of rural Minnesota.

I checked in with Neil Smith as he and Victor Gischler (Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse) were in the midst of a barn-storming tour of the South to promote their latest efforts. We talked about his relocation from the South to the Midwest, his music preferences, why he resurrected PWG, and what he’s working on next.

Jim Winter: Yellow Medicine is your third novel and first with Bleak House. How were the people there to work with?

Anthony Neil Smith: Bleak House is what you want in a publisher, especially if you’re on the fringes of genre or taking risks. Their enthusiasm is infectious, and they’re a gang that looks at the book first and foremost. They want to help you find the readers that will like that sort of book rather than watering it down for the masses or just letting it die. So in that sense, you always feel like the writing comes first, and I’m grateful they thought my dirty little book was worth their time.

JW: Did you have the story in mind before moving from Mississippi to Minnesota? Or did it come to you after you moved there?

ANS: I didn’t plan on writing about Minnesota quite yet. Had no idea how long I would be here (but it’s three years now), but now I’ve been bumped up to director of the Creative Writing Program [at Southwest Minnesota State University], and I bought a house, and I married a Minnesota girl, so ...

Anyway, when I first moved here, I rented a place a lot like Billy’s in the novel. It was always damp, mold growing on everything, and then there was an infestation of bugs. This was in Yellow Medicine County, about a half-hour from work. And it just seemed a good title. It had some weird appeal to it. So what I had hoped to do was write a “fast and dirty” cop novel. But it turned into more than that. I think The Shield was a big influence, but I also am a big fan of the “exile in America” idea--take a disgraced cop from Mississippi and drop him in Minnesota and see what happens. Kind of the way I felt a little, as well. And I wanted to play up the ugliness, too, in addition to the weird beauty of the prairie. They go hand in hand.

So there would’ve been no Yellow Medicine or Billy Lafitte without those experiences I had during my first few months in Minnesota. And then I made the rest of that shit up.

JW: Even though this novel is set in the upper Midwest, you manage to give the Gulf Coast a lot of attention.

ANS: It’s the place I know best. It was home for nearly all my life. And, again, the exile idea is fascinating. Starting over somewhere new, trying to escape whatever haunts you (and failing, usually). My folks live right outside New Orleans, and in fact, my mom is a painter in Jackson Square. The rest of my family is scattered along the Coast. They took a hit in Katrina, [it] flooded their houses (nearly eight feet of standing water in my parents’ home), ruined all their stuff, and they decided to rebuild, start again, right there. This happened about two months after I had moved to Minnesota. And I wasn’t able to get back down there until nearly Christmas. It’s changed a lot, some places getting back to normal, and others seeming to sink farther and farther.

But I miss the beach, the waves. I get a chance to go a couple of times a year, but I wonder if the psychology of the place, which used to be wired in my head, has changed so much that it’s harder for me to connect anymore. I do think I have one or two more books set down South in me, though. To at least try to reconnect.

JW: We can’t forget the psychobilly. Is that your regular music these days, or is it just what fits with the story?

ANS: You know, it felt right for the story. But I wouldn’t throw it in if I didn’t like quite a bit of it. I think there could probably be more psychobilly in it. There are about five or six psychobilly bands I really like, and they’re all more in the “billy” mode than the “psycho” (or at least not the metal-leaning ones), like HorrorPops, The Cramps, Horton Heat, Southern Culture on the Skids (yeah, they seem on the psy-billy tip), and The Chop Tops. But I listen to a lot of alt-country, old ’80s hair metal, the occasional techno song, and whatever the hell else sounds good at the moment.

JW: Plots With Guns has returned. What brought that about?

ANS: Well ... competition? I saw Out of the Gutter and Murdaland, and I thought, Wow, they nailed the attitude I’d always talked about at PWG. A number of crime mags just don’t seem to have any real individual identity to them, no editorial angle that connects issue after issue, but these two were really laying it bare--the cover art, the stories chosen, the marketing. They seem like mirror-images, one evil and the other evil-er. Both are print mags, and I knew I couldn’t pull off a print mag without a lot of money (ahem, *cough*, any underwriters out there?). Online, though ... I thought about how I could make PWG work online again now that I could fit it into my life after a handful of years of getting my own work out there, getting a job, settling down. And it’s easier to get online now; [there’s] less time formatting like I used to [do]. So we’re quarterly, we don’t pay, but we try to find the best damned fiction we can (that has a gun in it). Not really “mystery” fiction, but just the best stories of people being bad to each other and the consequences thereafter.

JW: Any chance of another PWG anthology?

ANS: Ha. Ha ha. You know ... when a good publisher comes to us and is really excited about doing it, then maybe. But I’m not chasing them down. Kudos to ThugLit (another awesome attitude-filled ’zine) for finding someone to back them (well deserved), and to Akashic [Books] for making their noir series work. But I think it’s a big undertaking. Dennis McMillan [Publications] did a fine job on the PWG anthology, and it’s an amazing collection. But instead of doing PWG reprints, I’d prefer that a publisher let us do the occasional themed volume full of new stories. We do have a few ideas for that from a plan that fell through a few years ago, so if any eager publishers want to drop me a line ...

JW: I liked The Drummer for its nostalgia towards the hair metal era.

ANS: It’s the stuff that turned me on to playing guitar, and it was what led me to find the type of person I was. I mean, junior high, stumbling around, a comic-book geek (still love comics) and a Dungeons & Dragons dork (but no longer a D&D or RPG fan, nooooo); but then I heard Eddie Van Halen and said, “Oh, yeah, I like that sound.” So I grew out my hair for a handful of years and thought I was going to start a band (but we could never find a drummer!). Years later, it just stuck with me, this idea of writing a book about a band like that, one where the love of the music was real, not ironic or mocking.

JW: Psychosomatic, on the other hand, had this strange WTF vibe, especially with a legless, armless central character.

ANS: I call it my “noir cartoon.” The limbless lady was due to a martini-soaked Victor Gischler scribbling the first line on a cocktail napkin and handing it to me in a bar, saying “There’s the first line of your next story.” And so it was. I published three stories centered in this same “world,” two in [the late] Blue Murder magazine, before realizing “This can be a novel.” So I ran with it.

JW: What are you working on now?

ANS: I already turned in the next Bleak House book, called Hogdoggin’. It’s a sort of sequel (but not [the roots of] a series) to Yellow Medicine, but a very different type of book even though it features the same characters.

I’ve got the next two or three things in my head, building steam, and I’m working on a weird Mississippi Southern Gothic type of thing, I think, involving Pentecostal preachers and evil teenage cults, and something else I’ll keep under my hat. It started kind of Grindhouse style, but I’m not sure where it’ll go, really. It’s a different kind of animal than the others, but still all me.

LISTEN UP: Anthony Neil Smith Interview, by Angie Johnson-Schmit (In for Questioning).