Bullet Points: No “Alternative Facts” Edition*

• Good news for David Fulmer fans! The Atlanta, Georgia, creator of the Shamus Award-winning Valentin St. Cyr/Storyville historical mystery series e-mailed me recently to say, “I just signed a contract for a new round of releases for the Storyville mysteries. The owner of Crescent City Books in New Orleans [Louisiana] is creating a new publishing imprint, and the first release will be a new edition of Chasing the Devil’s Tail in April, followed by the other four—Jass, Rampart Street, Lost River, and The Iron Angel—each month thereafter, followed by the in-progress Eclipse Alley, probably in October. Then the whole set for the holidays. Followed by the yet-untitled seventh—and last—installment in January 2018.” Fulmer adds: “The deal was, by the way, the handiwork of Michael Zell, a fine noir author out of [New Orleans].”

• More than 13 years after the demise of his creator, Manuel Vázquez Montalbán (shown at right), Spanish gumshoe and gourmand Pepe Carvalho “is to rise again to walk the mean streets of Barcelona at the fingertips of another renowned writer,” according to The Guardian. Responsibility for continuing Carvalho’s career has been passed to Catalan poet-novelist Carlos Zanón, who is said to be “working on a new novel set to appear next year.”

• Last week brought the debut of Writer Types, a podcast that focuses on crime and mystery fiction, hosted by Eric Beetner and S.W. Lauden. In Episode 1, you’ll hear “interviews with authors Megan Abbott, Lou Berney, and Steph Post; check in with Down & Out Books publisher Eric Campbell; hear about the best of 2016 and what to look forward to in 2017 from our reviewers, Kate Malmon and Dan Malmon; enjoy a live reading of the short story ‘Whoops’ by Nick Kolakowski, and have a little bookstore fun with S.G. Redling, Gary Phillips, and Jay Stringer.” The hosts hope to launch fresh episodes every month through the remainder of 2017, at least.

• Mystery Fanfare alerts us all to a new convention coming to star-spangled Las Vegas, Nevada: the Miss Fisher Con (May 4-7, 2017), celebrating Australian author Kerry Greenwood’s fictional aristocrat turned private eye. To register, click here.

• Congratulations to Tipping My Fedora for six blogging years.

• And I’m pleased to see that Only Detect has returned after a two-year-long hiatus. Blogger “Mike” says he aims at “posting something every week or so.”

• I should also mention that last Thursday brought the eighth anniversary of the launching of my other blog, Killer Covers. For the occasion, I posted “eight lovely book fronts … by artists whose identities seem to have been forgotten.”

• I once owned both of these Corgi cars, before my younger brother suddenly sold the entire collection of vintage automobiles we’d amassed during our childhood. Grrr!

• Since I’ve been rather lax lately in compiling these news wrap-up posts, I should probably mention—a tad belatedly—the death of American actor Dick Gautier, who passed away in an assisted living facility on January 13. He was 85 years old. Although Gautier is remembered best for his comedic work (he played humanoid robot agent Hymie on Get Smart and starred in the awful 1975 Robin Hood TV parody series, When Things Were Rotten), he also won guest roles on Banacek, The Rockford Files, Jimmy Stewart’s Hawkins, Raymond Burr’s Kingston: Confidential, The Eddie Capra Mysteries, Quincy, M.E., and a variety of other crime dramas. Steve Thompson shares more memories of Gautier in his Booksteve’s Library blog.

• Following his less-than-stellar appraisal of the new Ben Affleck film, Live by Night (based on Dennis Lehane’s 2012 novel of the same name), author Max Allan Collins reports in his blog: “I am working on a Quarry graphic novel, which Titan will publish in four issues and then collect. Don’t know the artist yet, though I approved several based on samples. It’s very, very hard. I have been away from this format for a while, and the story takes place partly in Vietnam in 1969 and then back in the America of 1972. Providing visual reference for the artist has been a dizzying, daunting task. A 22-page script runs to 60 pages with panel descriptions and links to reference photos. I doubt I will do many more such projects. Prose is far less taxing.”

• Meanwhile, Naomi Hirahara announced on her Facebook page recently that “the seventh and final book in the Edgar-winning Mas Arai mystery series,” tentatively titled Hiroshima Boy, should be published in March 2018 by Prospect Park Books. The plot has Hirahara’s protagonist, a Japanese atomic bomb survivor, “returning to Hiroshima in his old age, only to find himself embroiled in the mysterious death of a teenage boy.”

• Kristen Lepionka’s “driving tour of Midwestern mysteries.”

• Just what we needed—a CHiPS revival. Only dumber.

• And L.A. Law, too? At least writers Steven Bochco and Billy Finkelstein don’t look intent on turning the Emmy Award-winning 1980s legal drama into a lame comedy.

• Rap Sheet contributor Ali Karim previews Cast Iron, the sixth and concluding entry in Peter May’s France-set series featuring a half-Italian, half-Scottish former forensic scientist named Enzo Macleod. The novel went on sale this month in Britain, thanks to publisher Riverrun, but does not yet have an American release date, as far as I can tell. Read an excerpt from Cast Iron here.

• For the books-oriented Signature, Andrew Grant (False Friend) identifies “Five Must-Haves for a Great Detective in Fiction.”

• Keeping with the lists theme, check out Brian Boone’s “Five Great Novels That Will Probably Never Be Made Into Movies” (among them Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian); Crime Fiction Lover’s “10 of the Best Golden Age Crime Novels”; Lee Horsley’s choices of “five of the best missing-persons novels”; Bob Rivers’ picks, at the Strand Magazine Web site, of “The Top Ten Sherlock Holmes Films” (thank goodness he included 1971’s They Might Be Giants); Janie Chang’s choices (also from The Strand) of “The Top Eight Mysteries Set in China”; “Five Favorite Lawyers in Crime Fiction,” by Peter Manus (Fickle) for Crimespree Magazine; and, from Miriam C. Davis—author of the forthcoming non-fiction book The Axeman of New Orleans: The True Story—a rundown of the “Top Five Fictional Stories Inspired by [the] Real-Life Axeman of New Orleans.”

• Submissions are currently being accepted for the 2017 Shamus Awards, which will be given out by the Private Eye Writers of America next October, during Bouchercon in Toronto, Canada. The deadline for submissions is March 31.

• Really, Anton Chekhov wrote psychological suspense tales?

• From In Reference to Murder:

Four days after TNT’s drama Good Behavior ended its 10-episode first-season run, the show has been picked up for a fall 2017 second season. The series, based on a series of books by Blake Crouch, tells the story of Letty Raines (Michelle Dockery), a thief and con artist whose life is always one wrong turn or one bad decision from implosion. Fresh out of prison, Letty tries to stay afloat but gets sucked back into the criminal world when she overhears a hit man being hired to kill a man’s wife and decides to derail the job, with the help of her parole officer (Terry Kinney).

• The BookBub Blog’s list of “19 Anticipated Breakthrough Novels of 2017” features a small handful of crime and thriller yarns.

• A rather late entry in the “best crime-fiction reads of 2016” category: Irresistible Targets blogger Michael Carlson names several works he enjoyed, but says his “favorite crime novel of the year was Sara Gran’s Dope,” published in 2006.

• And in Hardboiled Wonderland, Jedidiah Ayres touts his “favorite crime flicks of 2016” as well as his “2016 honorable mentions.”

• Being less widely read than I should be in the plentiful works of John Dickson Carr (1906-1977), I appreciate this list by Puzzle Doctor, at In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, of his 10 favorite Carr novels. Sadly, I own none of the books mentioned.

• I do, however, have this 1956 Perry Mason novel, by Erle Stanley Gardner, and it sounds as if it’s one I should crack open soon.

• Wow, what a gorgeous time-travel tour down Route 66!

• A few interviews worth checking out: Ali Karim talks with Simon Kernick about the latter’s fresh UK thriller release, The Bone Field; MysteryPeople’s Meike Alana quizzes Terry Shames about her latest novel, An Unsettling Crime for Samuel Craddock; Ingrid Thoft chats with Crimespree Magazine about the new Duplicity; Scott Montgomery questions Tim Bryant about Old Mother Curridge; and Shotsmag Confidential’s Ayo Onatade chats up Ragnar Jónasson on the subject of his fourth Detective Ari Thor novel, Rupture.

• Finally, there’s a nice reminder, in Peter Hanson’s Every ’70s Movie blog, of the 1971 NBC-TV flick Ransom for a Dead Man, which guest-starred the abundantly talented Lee Grant and served as a second formal pilot for Peter Falk’s Columbo series. Grant went on two years later to star (with Lou Antonio) in another Richard Levinson/William Link television production, Partners in Crime, which was a pilot film reworked from their earlier Bette Davis/Doug McClure picture, The Judge and Jake Wyler.

* “With ‘Alternative Facts,’ Trump World Swimming in a Sea of Dishonesty,” by Steve Benen (The Maddow Blog).

The Story Behind the Story: “The Fall,” by David Fulmer

(Editor’s note: Rap Sheet readers probably recognize David Fulmer as the author of four historical mystery novels set in New Orleans and starring Creole detective Valentin St. Cyr, the most recently published of which was last year’s Lost River. But, forced by circumstances, he has also become a publisher, part of the Atlanta, Georgia-based venture Five Stones Press, which has just released Fulmer’s seventh novel, a contemporary standalone called The Fall. That book, according to press materials, “delves into the deepest bonds of friendship, all accompanied by a rock ’n’ roll beat. After Richard Zale receives news of the death of a childhood friend, he returns to their hometown to pay his respects. It isn’t long, however, before old frictions and a new puzzle emerge, drawing him deeper into the mystery of his friend’s demise.” In the essay below, Fulmer describes his sometimes awkward steps into the publishing market.)

The timing couldn’t have been worse.

Just as my contract with publisher Harcourt ended after six books, the company merged with Houghton Mifflin in 2007 and proceeded to drop me and several other writers with decent cred like so many dirty shirts. Never mind that my last two novels had sold the best since the first, and that The Blue Door had been nominated for the 2009 Shamus for Best Novel.

Hit the road, Jack.

On top of all this, the financial storm that was wrecking businesses around the world slammed the publishing industry as well. Advance dollars dried up and a bunch of authors were on the street. My agent soon found out that New York wasn’t much interested in a nominated, awarded, and well-reviewed author. I didn’t fit the current market agenda. We couldn’t get arrested. Not even the small presses would talk to me.

I wasn’t about to give up writing books. Call it pride; I wouldn’t let the bastards beat me. Also, I can’t do anything else very well. Mostly, though, I’d had plenty of experience being rebuffed when I was trying to get my first novel (2001’s Chasing the Devil’s Tail) published. The one that got nominated for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a Barry Award, and the Falcon Award and won the Shamus Award for Best First Novel. The same book that received excellent reviews from coast to coast. The one that everyone in New York had turned down flat. In other words, I had seen this movie before.

So I started thinking about angles. Self-publishing was an absolute down-and-out, drinking-muddy-water-and-sleeping-in-a-hollow-log last resort. I met with friends who knew different segments of the business and got their input. One was Dana Barrett, who started me thinking about alternative lean-and-green publishing models. She’d done some homework on the subject. Another big bright light came on when I sat down with Daren Wang, one of the partners in Georgia’s Decatur Book Festival, the driving force behind Verb.org, and now an organizer of Agnes and Eddie, a concert series at Agnes Scott College in Decatur that he puts together with Eddie Owen of the folk club Eddie’s Attic.

In Wang’s view, the publishing business was entering a phase similar to what the music business had gone through some years back, in which digital technologies and Internet marketing made it possible for talented artists who didn’t fit a musical mold or offer lowest-common-denominator sales potential for the Big Labels to do end runs and keep their careers alive. I understood that the book business is a different animal, but I saw the connection.

The true turning point came last spring, when I read a feature in The New Yorker on the plane ride back from taking my daughter to visit her grandparents. In that essay by Malcolm Gladwell, headlined “How David Beats Goliath” (gotta love that title), the author pointed out that Davids (i.e., the little guys) beat Goliaths (i.e., the big guys) not by trying to play the big guys’ game--an inevitably uneven competition--but by changing the game itself. Gladwell cited an underdog girls’ basketball team as a prime example, and gave some others as well. Over the days following my reading of that New Yorker piece, I saw similar examples everywhere I looked.

As the financial crisis lingered and I spoke to other publishing professionals, it became clear that the New York publishing model was facing a sea change. The industry was becoming increasingly top-heavy, or so those insiders reported, shifting more toward a business model that favored big-sellers. There would be no place left for a little feller like me. I had visions of fighting it out for scraps. My daughter, Italia, and I would end up living in a mobile home on the outskirts of Snellville, Georgia.

With all of this in mind, I still had no burning desire to become a publisher and produce my own books. I cheered myself by looking to musicians and actors who had taken control of their careers by moving into the production end. I also told myself that once we got this ship under sail, I would become an emeritus, leave the business to the grown-ups, and go back to my former life, which consisted of writing my books, teaching my classes, and raising my kid.

Thus mollified, I sat down over coffee and then adult beverages with Tara Coyt and Anna Foote, two friends who had business and marketing smarts. I explained that I wanted to sell shares in my next book. They thought about it and said, Go ahead. They would help. I told them I wanted to name the venture Five Stones Press. They got that, too. We scratched a business outline on a legal pad.

The next week, I sent a letter to a select group of people, explaining that shares in my new, seventh novel, The Fall, would be sold at $125 each. We would split the profits 50-50 between the venture and the shareholders. If there were profits. I made it clear that it was something of a crapshoot and I didn’t want any bad noise if it didn’t work out. In the same instant, I knew I would feel completely responsible for every penny.

I was deeply moved that those people got it, as well, and were ready to step up. Within a couple of weeks, we had enough revenue to get the motors running. My next book would be released under the banner of Five Stones Press.

Announcing this plan to the world was the easy part. There were missteps from the start. I had held out too long, waiting for a deal to come through from New York, so we were behind schedule from the beginning. The proof of my novel was rushed into production and went out to editors a bloody mess. I was embarrassed, and then gratified that a number of the reviewers didn’t hold that against us.

We did run into constant questions (and occasional accusations) about self-publishing. In the only definition of that phrase that I know, the author pays to have his or her book published. I didn’t go that route. There’s not a cent of my own money in this venture. I did put a ton of hard work into it, though.

We scrambled to get the cover and text right. We brought in Susan Archie, a Grammy Award-winning boxed-set artist to design the book jacket. We understood that we had no business mucking about with the sales end of the equation, and so hooked up with Small Press United, a book-distribution service for pocket-edition publishers.

Although I had spent 11 years in the media end of the motorsports business and still had some game, getting the word out was nonetheless a challenge. We ran into resistance in some mainstream quarters. While Publishers Weekly did a nice piece that got picked up all over the United States and in the UK, two of my hometown business editors made a point of ignoring us. This was not really a surprise, any more that the cold shoulder we got from some of our “friends” in the publishing business. On the other hand, there were enough people who came forward with words of encouragement, in spite of all our gaffes and stumbles.

We were late, but the pieces finally fell into place, though in a Rube Goldberg-like patchwork of moving parts. Now the official book release is upon us. We have no idea what to expect. Failure, success, or something in the middle.

We will go forward with a good dose of hope, though not too much. I’ve been in the book game too long for that.

The Book You Have to Read: “The Bloody Bokhara,” by William Campbell Gault

(Editor’s note: This is the 31st installment of our ongoing Friday blog series highlighting great but forgotten books. Today’s selection comes from Shamus Award-winning Atlanta novelist David Fulmer. The paperback edition of Fulmer’s 2008 standalone thriller, The Blue Door, will be released next month, as will be Lost River, the new fourth installment of his series featuring turn-of-the-last century New Orleans detective Valentin St. Cyr. The opening of Lost River can be read here.)

First a confession, offered without the need for bright lights, cigarette smoke, rude sneers, and the back of a meaty cop hand.

I wasn’t drawn to William Campbell Gault by way of a lurid pulp cover featuring a blowsy, busty, blond-haired dame in a curve-jutting posture. Before I got to girls, my post-adolescence was inhabited by dreams of cars: fast cars, sharp cars, and the boys and men who owned and drove them. So I discovered Gault and Henry Gregor Felsen at the same time.

Gault was a writer with definite tone. Whether he was dealing in hot cars or hot lead, his brand of grit came from the same shadows of post-World War II America. Playing in both fields, he displayed a deep sense for the dislocation in the shallows of those years. From Midwest dirt tracks on hot Sunday afternoons to a seedy Los Angeles saloon in the wee small hours, the man nailed loners doing brave and often thankless work.

He wrote two successful gumshoe series, one featuring a private eye by the name of Joe Puma and the other with Brock (“The Rock”) Callahan in its lead role.

I was more intrigued, though, with Gault’s one-offs, all of which were published in the 1950s. He came off the line with the sharply honed Don’t Cry for Me (1952), but it was his third, 1953’s The Bloody Bokhara, that really caught and held me fast. It’s a fascinating and complex little book, which showed Gault at his most prolific in terms of tone and voice.

What surprised me with the first page was how much this tale was unlike a traditional hard-boiled mystery. The narrative kicks off reading like nothing so much as a Bernard Malamud miniature, beginning with a richly drawn ethnic business scenario. The story has much to do with fine rugs. Two, in particular--a priceless Kashan and a Bokhara that bears a distinct bloodstain. Hence, this book’s title. The rugs, with their fantastically intricate and colorful weaves, make a nice analogy for the tale to follow.

The protagonist here, Levon (“Lee”) Kaprelian, is the mostly dutiful son of an Armenian rug merchant. He is thrust into the middle of a case of murder after a visit from a shady lady with an interest in his wares. In more ways that one.

Because this is hard-boiled fiction, it involves a femme fatale. Two, in fact. This first is rich and beautiful and in possession of both rugs, plus dozens more. She involves our hero in a scheme--all aboveboard, at least at first--to unload the goods on other rich women who might be susceptible to a young, handsome salesman’s attentions. The second woman is Kaprelian’s Armenian-American girlfriend, cast as a gypsy beauty and with a clear stake in his affections. There’s also a requisite body of someone who might or might not have deserved to be deprived of life.

The Bloody Bokhara is a tasty tale, and I don’t wish to spoil it for readers to come. I’m much more interested in Gault’s stylistic maneuvers anyway.

Although he provides a classic setup for a hard-boiled mystery, there is much here that deviates from the stereotype. Gault applies a laconic style when it comes to his male characters. You won’t find much in the way of snarling coppers or cleverer-than-thou wiseacres. No one is all that confident, except for the fakes. The women have agendas other than snaring a male. These folks are, in today’s parlance, conflicted.

I also remember being surprised and pleased that Gault doesn’t shy away from the sensual in his yarn. For such a B genre, he delivers some finely toned pillow talk between--are you ready?--non-married partners. It’s only odd because at the time this book was written, doors usually closed and that was the end of that. The reader was left to dream up his or her own scenario for what followed. It was a very mature and open-minded approach, and I liked it. A lot.

I never knew I would grow up to write historical mysteries, but I learned something from Gault about research. Whether it was the esoterica of Oriental rugs or the variations of late-1940s racing engines, the man had the details down cold. The ambiance makes all the difference.

Of course, no book is perfect and Gault committed some misdemeanors along his way. The most apparent being his repetitive use of a name when one character is addressing another, sometimes in such a forced way that I wonder what he or his editor was thinking. It’s strikingly odd quirk for such a disciplined craftsman. But that’s pretty much all the fault I find with The Bloody Bokhara.

Gault went from his well-wrought early volumes to working faster. It’s what happens when the contracts say so. He wrote hard-boiled crime for the grown-ups and baseball, basketball, and football for the high-school crowd, and auto racing for both markets. He maintained his sharp eye, his good feel for honest emotion, and flair for action.

But as entertained as I was by his later books, for my money, he never again hit the notes of the first three. I remain a fan, nonetheless.

One other caveat: I discovered after I had chosen this book and gone to retrieve an old copy that we share a literary agency--him, back when, and me, now. Who knew?

And who cannot be touched by Gault’s famous quote, “The best revenge is good writing”?

Indeed, he was the proof of it.

READ MORE: “William Campbell Gault; Weird Tales,” by Ed Gorman.