Carnival of the Criminal Minds, No. 28

Wouldn’t you know it, that I’d pick the shortest day of the year on which to compose my second entry in Barbara Fister’s fine Carnival of the Criminal Minds series? It’s been like this for me during the entirety of 2008--too much to do, too little time in which to complete everything. I look forward to a slightly more settled 2009, hoping that isn’t merely wishful thinking on my part. But meanwhile, the Carnival has moved on from Fister’s excellent Scandinavian Crime Fiction blog to encamp on this page, with its voluminous tents, everything-on-a-stick repasts, and giant pooper-scooper for the pachyderm leavings. It’s been a while since my first stab at hosting this Carnival, back in October of last year. But with my traditional mascot, smiling Tillie, firmly in my thoughts, I shall endeavor to justify being given this second chance at rounding up the best of the crime-fiction-oriented Web. Come one, come all, folks. The show’s about to begin.

• Thriller writer Eric Ambler seems to have been much on the minds of Rap Sheet contributors lately. Two entries in our “forgotten books” series have championed Ambler works: A Coffin for Dimitrios (1939) and Journey Into Fear (1940). So I couldn’t help but notice an entry in Karen Meek’s Euro Crime blog about plans to reprint some of Ambler’s best-known novels. Quoting from BookBrunch:

Simon Winder, Publishing Director at Penguin Press, has bought five “remarkable and prescient” Eric Ambler thrillers, to be republished as Penguin Modern Classics in May 2009 for Ambler’s centenary. The titles are Journey Into Fear, introduction by Norman Stone, Epitaph for a Spy, introduction by James Fenton, The Mask of Dimitrios, introduction by Mark Mazower, Cause for Alarm, introduction by John Preston, and Uncommon Danger, which is introduced by Thomas Jones.

• Speaking of Meek, she’s compiling a series about Christmas crime novels--just the thing to keep you warm (and on the edge of your seat) during this chilly season.

• Which isn’t to say that we must always read with a sense of seasonal appropriateness in mind--though we often do just that, explains The Guardian’s Molly Flatt.

• If you are, indeed, of a mind to read mysteries based around this festive season of the year, Mystery Readers Journal editor Janet Rudolph has compiled her own, quite extensive rundowns of Christmas mysteries and Chanukah mysteries.

• Who knew that the late pinup girl, Bettie Page, had anything in common with Ellery Queen? Independent Crime’s Nathan Cain did.

• Now, this is a book cover that just screams out “Buy me!”

• Bookgasm finds much to praise in the fifth and latest issue of Out of the Gutter. “If nothing else ...,” writes critic Rod Lott, “it holds true to its ‘degenerate literature’ label, offering story after story that dares to go even further than you thought anyone today had the balls to do. What other magazine prints fiction with titles like ‘Just Look at What the Bitch Made You Do’?” You can read the whole review here.

• Since when did “cozies” become “senior sleuth novels”? I don’t remember receiving that memo. In any event, author Jean Henry Mead contends at the Rule of Three site that the market for novels that are “less violent, devoid of graphic sex and [in which] the language usually lacks the F-word” is growing as Baby Boomers go gray. Not surprisingly, her own first novel features an elderly sleuth.

• In creating his famous literary creation, James Bond, was author Ian Fleming inspired by the real-life story of a Serbian-born, World War II double agent by the name of Dusko Popov? The blog Permission to Kill suggests that the answer is “yes.”

• Double O Section, a blog specializing in espionage fiction, has posted a handy guide for the spy story fans on your gift list. The most unexpected suggestion: “Varese Sarabande’s recent single-disc release of Dave Grusin music from The Girl from U.N.C.L.E.”

• Author and former Rap Sheet guest blogger Jeri Westerson (Veil of Lies) has posted her own holiday gift list--this time containing only books--in her distinctive Weblog, Getting Medieval.

• After some trials and errors and short-timers, the British e-zine Shots has finally tapped Nick Stone--whose latest novel, The King of Swords, is brand-new in the States--as its latest film critic.

• While we’re on the subject of movies, Bish’s Beat, written by Los Angeles cop and novelist Paul Bishop, reminds me that the San Francisco Film Noir Festival will return to the historic Castro Theatre on January 23. “The theme of this year’s festival is Newspaper Noir, with many of the films set in the world of newspapers, or, in some cases, publishing or radio,” according to Bishop. The festival schedule runs through February 1. Tickets can be purchased here. Sigh. If only I loved in San Francisco ...

• From movies to DVD news: The complete collection of Robbie Coltrane’s dark crime series, Cracker, is due out from Acorn Media on March 10. Meanwhile, Thrilling Days of Yesteryear blogger Ivan G. Shreve Jr. has word that “Paramount/CBS DVD is apparently committed to releasing the remaining seasons (four, five and six) of Have Gun--Will Travel on DVD to fans ... they’re just not certain about when they’ll get around to doing it.” And if anybody’s stuck on what to jam into my Christmas stocking this year, this certainly wouldn’t be a bad idea.

• John’s Grill, located on Ellis Street off Union Square in San Francisco, and famously mentioned in The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett (who “worked next door in the Flood Building in the 1920s”), is celebrating its 100th year in business this month. As the San Francisco Chronicle recalls,

John’s Grill has weathered at least four owners, the death of its namesake--the story is that he was struck and killed by a cable car in 1908--a 1983 fire that closed the restaurant for about nine months, and the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.

Throughout, it has remained at the same site, unlike some of the city’s oldest restaurants. And it’s just coincidence that John Konstin--the current owner after his father, Gus, bought John’s Grill more than 30 years ago--happens to be named John.

Anyone passing by John’s Grill, be sure to give it a big thumbs-up from The Rap Sheet.

• Reports The New York Times: “Julius Fast, who won the first Edgar Award given by the Mystery Writers of America and went on to publish popular books on body language, the Beatles and human relationships, died on Tuesday in Kingston, N.Y. He was 89.”

• Beat to a Pulp, the fiction Web site that debuted last week, is up with a second tough tale, “Hard Bite,” this one coming from an author who signs herself “Anonymous-9.”

• I often find the most unusual bits of crime-fiction history at The Bunburyist, written by Elizabeth Foxwell, managing editor of Clues: A Journal of Detection, touted as “the only U.S. scholarly journal on mystery/detective fiction.” Last week, for instance, brought this fascinating tidbit:

Her image as the scheming Brigid O’Shaughnessy in John Huston’s version of The Maltese Falcon is indelibly burned into our consciousness, but the Neglected Books blog discusses in fascinating detail Astor’s The Incredible Charlie Carewe (1960), which features a Ted Bundyesque prototype, and some of her other novels.

Click here to read the full post about Astor, author.

• I’m already missing William Shatner’s goofy antics on Boston Legal, the David E. Kelly series that earlier this month ended its four-year run on ABC-TV. What I hadn’t known until this week, though, was that Shatner appeared in a previous legal drama in 1965, called For the People. (I bet he didn’t do any sleepovers on that one, though.) This information comes from Marty McKee, a copywriter and critic who writes a thoroughly entertaining blog called Johnny LaRue’s Crane Shot ... which is also where I was reminded of another offbeat legal series, called Rosetti and Ryan, starring Tony Roberts and Squire Fridell. Drat! Yet one more show to wait for in DVD release.

• Congratulations are due author and Rap Sheet poster Declan Burke, who writes that he’s working on a new book project:

The idea is for a book of essays, interviews and conversations about various aspects of Irish crime fiction, each chapter being written by an Irish crime writer. The names already confirmed include--although this may be subject to change--Colin Bateman, Gerard Brennan, Ken Bruen, Paul Charles, John Connolly, Ruth Dudley Edwards, Reed Farrel Coleman, Alan Glynn, Declan Hughes, Arlene Hunt, Gene Kerrigan, Brian McGilloway, Adrian McKinty and Neville Thompson. Messers, sorry, Messrs McKinty and Brennan are also on board as editors. Some of the writers’ chapters have yet to be confirmed, but the proposed material that has been is, in my entirely biased opinion, seriously interesting stuff.

Anyway, the good news is that the project has been given the green light by the Arts Council with regard to commissioning funding, which means that we can afford to pay the writers a token gesture, at least. That means we’re over the second hurdle, and there’s only about 198 left to clear.

To read more about this, click here.

• Have you heard about the graveside memorial service next month for Philadelphia noir writer David Goodis? Author Duane Swierczynski has the scoop in his Secret Dead Blog.

• The Nation features a wonderful retrospective on the novels of Derek Raymond, most familiar for his Factory series of (more or less) police procedurals.

• From Mike Stotter’s Shotsmag Confidential blog: “Craig Russell, author of the Jan Fabel detective series for Hutchinson, has joined Quercus for a concurrent series set in Glasgow in the 1950s. The series will star Lennox, a private detective whose clients are not always on the right side of the law. Jane Wood and Ron Beard bought UK and Canadian rights in three novels, starting with Lennox in 2009, through Carole Blake of Blake Friedmann. Wood said: ‘At Quercus we’re all fans of the Fabel novels and we couldn’t be happier that Craig Russell has joined us. The Lennox books are very different in tone and confirm Craig’s amazing range and skill as a crime writer.’”

• Dennis Lehane (A Given Day) has been signed to edit a new short-story anthology, Boston Noir, for Akashic Books. That’s quite a coup on Akashic’s part.

• According to The Writer’s Almanac, “On this day in 1913, the world’s first crossword puzzle appeared in a special Christmas issue of the New York World.”

• If you think I’m writing this item primarily so I can illustrate it with the naked Jennifer Aniston cover of GQ ... well, you wouldn’t be entirely wrong. However, there is a quote in that same January 2009 issue of the magazine from author Stephen King that I thought worth repeating. Asked how he stays so productive, King explains:

I go to the same place to write almost every day. I don’t bring a cell phone. I don’t take an iPod. My mind is thrown on its own resources. I make a little deal with myself. I say, just get five pages out. Five pages, and that’s it. You’re done. Of course I’ll get to give pages and always want to write a little bit more, but without that quota, I’d have a hard time even starting. It used to be that I would work on something new in the daytime and then I would rewrite and work on something new at night, but those were the days when I drank a lot. There was a lot of liquid energy and Bolivian marching powder.

• Tim Maleeny, author of the new novel Greasing the Piñata, talks with blogger Julia Buckley about Mannix, sleuth protagonist Cape Weathers, and his move into standalone crime fiction. The results can be found here.

• If you can be thankful of nothing else this year, at least be glad that yours is not among the best mugshots of 2008.

• And what the hell is Rosemary Harris talking about, when she states that nobody drinks eggnog at Christmastime anymore? I’m sucking one down even as I write this!

That’s all for now, folks. The Carnival of the Criminal Minds is moving to the southern hemisphere in a couple of weeks, where it will be hosted at Australian Kerrie Smith’s Mysteries in Paradise blog. We trust that all the elephants and tigers will make the trip safely.

Carnival of the Criminal Minds, No. 2

Strangely, when author and librarian Barbara Fister first asked me if The Rap Sheet would like to participate in a rotating blog carnival for crime-fiction sites, the first image that sprang to mind wasn’t of Ferris wheels or roller coasters or rambunctious children covered in cotton candy, but of Tillie (seen at right), a “fun face” painted in the 1950s on the side of the Palace Amusements building, an indoor amusement park in Asbury Park, New Jersey. (Although that structure no longer exists--it was demolished in 2004--the mural was removed for incorporation into a future building on the site.) Tillie was a tribute, of sorts, to George Cornelius Tilyou, the founder of Coney Island’s famous Steeplechase Park (1897-1964). He employed a similar grinning mug as the symbol of his trends-setting entertainment venue, which was renowned both for its half-mile mechanized horse race and, later, for its parachute jump, a fortunate transplant from the 1939 New York World’s Fair.

Showman Tilyou conceived of his park as a place where everyone--young and old, male and female, wealthy and otherwise underprivileged--could find curiosities and distractions of varying degrees. A smörgasbord of delights. That’s not unlike what this Carnival of the Criminal Minds is designed to provide. So, while introducing our second entry in the series (Karen Chisholm hosted the previous carnival post at her Australian and New Zealand Crime Fiction Web site), let me also introduce our mascot for the installments that will appear in The Rap Sheet: Tillie.

Come one, come all. The show is about to begin.

• John Kenyon is an Iowa business writer who keeps up a pretty active blog, Things I’d Rather Be Doing, that deals alternately with crime fiction and music. Yesterday, he posted one of his “Monday Morning Interviews” with Richard Lange, author of the recent short-story collection Dead Boys. Lange seems to me like one of those writers, similar to Daniel Woodrell, who is arguably but not definitely a crime novelist. Yet the blurbs on Dead Boys come from such genre heavyweights as Michael Connelly and George Pelecanos. During his exchange with Kenyon, Lange talks about his challenging cast of characters (“sensitive men trying to cope with the chaos that surrounds and permeates them”), the open-ended nature of his tales (“One of my intentions with these stories was to see how little actual plot I could get away with”), and his fondness for Los Angeles as a setting. You can read the whole interview here.

• Following up on his recent sexiest crime writer poll, Daniel Hatadi, an Australian author and creator of the social networking site Crimespace, is now surveying his readership on the subject of favorite crime-fiction subgenres. “It’s not exactly scientific,” Hatadi concedes, “but don’t fret too much over your answer. Rather than racking your brains over your all-time favorite, I’d like it if y’all went for the subgenre you’re enjoying the most right now ...” Make your choice known on Crimespace’s front page. At last check, suspense fiction was in the lead, with 24 percent of the vote, followed by police procedurals (17 percent) and hard-boiled fiction (14 percent).

• As we noted earlier this month, something of a rivalry has broken out between Baltimore, Maryland, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, over which deserves custody of 19th-century novelist Edgar Allan Poe. Bill Crider, the Texas author of the Sheriff Dan Rhodes series and a diligent blogger, points me to a fresh piece in The Philadelphia Inquirer that recounts how this sudden feud came about and polls readers on whether they think Poe really ought to be exhumed from his Charm City grave and moved north to Philly.

• Over its year-and-a-half existence, I’ve become a regular reader of Bruce Grossman’s column, “Bullets, Broads, Blackmail & Bombs,” at Bookgasm. In order to compose that weekly feature, he has to read through some of the best and worst of mid-20th-century crime and thriller fiction, looking for novels he can fit around themes. This week’s column tackles a trio of works--The Ambushers, The Menacers, and The Interlopers--by the late Donald Hamilton. All star his classic government operative and assassin, Matt Helm, who Grossman calls “a much cooler character” than James Bond. “As much as Bond was a cold thug, Helm was even more brutal in his treatment ...” That’s apparently a selling point from Grossman’s perspective.

• While we’re on the subject of older titles, check out Finnish writer Juri Nummelin’s recent look back at the literary labors of Frank Castle, the author of an obscure paperback, The Sowers of the Doom (or Tuhon kylväjät, in Finnish) that Nummelin says is an one of “several examples of American paperbacks having been published only in Europe or even only in Scandinavia” during the 1950s and ’60s. (Update: A bit more information about Castle is now available at Steve Lewis’ Mystery*File blog.)

• Karen Meek does a pretty amazing job at Euro Crime of keeping up with new books, author events, and awards pertaining to European mystery/thriller writers. Her associated Euro Crime blog reports this week that Ariana Franklin’s Mistress of the Art of Death has won the Best Historical Crime Novel 2007 award at the Gothenburgh Book Fair, and that the BBC’s Radio 4 is broadcasting a dramatization of Stef Penney’s Costa Book Award-winning novel, The Tenderness of Wolves. That series began on Monday and will continue through Friday, October 26. Even if you’re not in the UK, you can hear the series here. Individual episodes are available on the Web for seven days after broadcast.

• Somehow I missed the news that John’s Grill, a historic eatery on San Francisco’s Ellis Street, which for years had showcased “a signed reproduction of the Maltese Falcon--one used for publicity stills for the movie,” had found a replacement bird. As the San Francisco Chronicle reported last week, the original, which was stolen by unidentified thieves last February, never found its way back home, despite a $25,000 reward. So, says the paper, “restaurateur John Konstin commissioned the sculptors at the nearby Academy of Art San Francisco to make him a new one.”

• Novelist-blogger Mark Coggins was the one who finally tipped me off about that handsome new Falcon. Also in Coggins’ blog, called Riordan’s Desk, after the protagonist in his novels (the latest being Runoff, due out next month), he provides links to a multi-part audio interview he did with Dashiell Hammett expert and author Joe Gores. Part I of their exchange can be accessed here, while Part II is available here. I haven’t been able to listen to the whole interview yet, but Coggins provides a table of contents for each installment. I’m only hoping that at some point he asked Gores about the Maltese Falcon prequel he is supposed to be writing.

• The Rap Sheet was fortunate last April to have British writer Roger “R.N.” Morris, author of A Gentle Axe, as a guest blogger. He has since continued as a very infrequent contributor. Now, the pseudonymous Crimeficreader, from It’s a Crime! (or a Mystery ...), brings the welcome news that Morris has a sequel to Axe, called A Vengeful Longing, due out in the United Kingdom come February 2008. Like its predecessor, Longing will feature St. Petersburg investigator Porfiry Petrovich (from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s classic novel Crime and Punishment) as its protagonist. Summing up the plot, Crimeficreader writes that “It concerns death by poison, for more than one victim--a nasty way to die and a difficult one to investigate.” Read more of her report here.

• In case you happened to miss it (as I did), Heartsick author Chelsea Cain blogged all last week for the Portland, Oregon-based Powell’s Books site. It must’ve been quite an experience; as she noted in her inaugural post, “I am writing this from my sick bed, which is the fulfillment of a childhood dream of mine.”

• Over at Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind, the ever-vigilant Sarah Weinman picks up on news about Henning Mankell (Kennedy’s Brain) using his author’s spoils to help African residents:

Swedish crime fiction writer Henning Mankell has donated 15 million kronor ($2.3 million) for the construction of homes for orphaned children in Mozambique.

The author of the popular [Kurt] Wallander series of crime novels has long divided his time between Stockholm and Maputo. He said he viewed it as a privilege to divert some of his wealth to a new SOS Children’s Village in his second home.

“What the hell should I do with all this money?” he wondered in a statement.

If only everyone with deep pockets was so generous ...

• News for lovers of TV series on DVD: Season two of the 1967-1975 Raymond Burr police procedural series Ironside is due in stores this week, along with the complete series of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, by Aaron Sorkin. (OK, so the latter wasn’t actually a crime show; it still appealed to intelligent viewers, a group among whom we all belong, right?) And though fans of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (1964-1968) must wait until November 27 to pick up the handsomely packagedm briefcase-full of that series’ collected episodes, distributor Time-Life is already releasing a few short clips from the show, just to get potential buyers salivating. You can watch those clips--and see the finished case for this 41-disc set--here.

• B.V. Lawson of In Reference to Murder introduces us to “a literary version of Netflix called Book Swim. For a monthly fee,” she explains, “they’ll send you books to read, which you send back at your leisure.” While Lawson writes that “This sounds like a godsend for readers, ... especially shut-ins and busy families,” she raises the specter of Book Swim potentially hurting already declining book sales, but then reassures authors and booksellers that, well, maybe the threat isn’t so dire. “After all, there are still an estimated 117,378 libraries in the U.S. alone, and their existence hasn’t caused a decline in the publishing world. Authors can also take heart that if a Book Swim renter likes a book, they can go ahead and buy it for keeps.” Read more here.

• Novelist Richard Helms, who also edits The Back Alley, reports via e-mail that he “should have the second issue up within a couple of weeks. ... I had expected to have the second issue done by the first of October, but there were so many submissions that it took a while to make decisions.” Meanwhile, a bit of good news for his contributors: “[W]e have raised our pay-per-story to $25 to comply with [the Mystery Writers of America’s] requirements for Qualified Publisher. We were turned down this year for inclusion, since the ’zine was new, but they did suggest that we apply again next year. To the best of my knowledge, we are the only webzine devoted to hard-boiled and noir shorts that currently pays the MWA minimum.”

• Tardiness seems to run in the Webzine family. Our friend Kevin Burton Smith from The Thrilling Detective Web Site admits that he, too, has “hit a speed bump.” He explains in his blog that “The new issue, what I’d optimistically thought would be a late summer/early fall/back-to-school issue, is now a month and a half late.”

• During its brief, six-month existence, the Irish-fiction-centric blog Crime Always Pays, steered by novelist Declan Burke (The Big O), has done a bang-up job of publicizing authors from the Auld Sod. Just over the last couple of days, hat blog has banged the drum for Ingrid Black (The Judas Heart), delivered a complimentary critique of Andrew Nugent’s Second Burial, and proposed a list of 20 Irish crime novels deserving of more attention in the country’s largest daily newspaper, the Irish Independent. American readers who are less than familiar with the genre offerings spilling forth from Ireland’s wordsmiths would do well to check periodically to see what new reading riches Burke has unearthed.

• Speaking of fiction from beyond the familiar shores of England and the United States, Glenn Harper of the International Noir Fiction blog investigates a trio of books written by the late Spanish writer Manuel Vázquez Montalbán and featuring his middle-aged gastronome series detective, Pepe Carvalho. Harper’s critique can be found here.

• Paperback publisher Hard Case Crime recently told its newsletter subscribers about the company’s latest acquisition: No House Limit, by Steve Fisher. “No House Limit is a story of Las Vegas,” the newsletter explains, “where a man’s future can turn on a roll of the dice. It’s by the legendary pulp author of I Wake Up Screaming, who was nominated for an Academy Award for the screenplay of Destination Tokyo and also wrote the scripts for films such as Raymond Chandler’s Lady in the Lake, Humphrey Bogart’s Dead Reckoning and Tokyo Joe, and the last film in the Thin Man series. Fisher was a real talent and this particular book is tense, suspenseful, heartbreaking, and full of local color that only a Vegas insider would know. (In a touching afterword, Fisher’s son reveals how his father came by his intimate knowledge of the Strip.)”

• There are two months yet to go before the 85th anniversary of Dashiell Hammett’s landmark first appearance in Black Mask magazine. (His story “The Road Home,” published under the nom de plume Peter Collinson, was featured in the mag’s December 1922 issue.) But already, Hammett enthusiasts are coming forth with trivia related to the creator of Sam Spade and the Continental Op. At Ed Gorman’s blog, Fred Blosser notes comparisons between crude Izzard (mentioned in Hammett’s 1924 short story, “Nightmare Town”) and the Virginia town of Hopewell, to which Hammett likened it. Read more here.

By the way, if anyone out there has a good-quality, good-sized electronic image of the cover from the December 1922 edition of Black Mask that they’re willing to share, please drop me a line here.

• And finally, from J.D. Rhoades, blogger and the author most recently of Safe and Sound, comes what may well be the perfect Christmas or Hanukkah present for crime writers and readers. Sorry, no hints. Click here to find out more.

That concludes our three-ring acts for now. I’ll see what other surprises I can round up the next time this Carnival of Criminal Minds becomes my responsibility. In the meantime, the next stop for the carnival will be Julia Buckley’s blog, Mysterious Musings. If all goes as planned, she should be raising her tents and getting the thrill rides ready for presentation at the start of November.

For fun, Fister has mapped out where the bloggers participating in this carnival rotation are located. The results are here.