Bullet Points: Caffeine-Powered Edition

Since I woke up way too early on this cold Friday morning, and am already halfway through my second cup of coffee, I might as well dive into some recent crime-fiction-related news.

• During this year’s Black Orchid Banquet, held on December 4 in New York City, it was announced that Washington, D.C., author Stephen Spotswood has won the 2021 Nero Award for his 2020 novel, Fortune Favors the Dead. The Nero is presented annually by the fan organization The Wolfe Pack to “the best American mystery written in the tradition of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe stories.” (Last year’s recipient was David Baldacci.) That same festive event saw Alexis Stefanovich-Thomson being given the 2021 Black Orchid Novella Award for her story “The Man Who Went Down Under,” published in the July 2022 issue of Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. The Black Orchid is sponsored jointly by The Wolfe Pack and AHMM and honors the novella format popularized by Stout. Honorable mentions for the Black Orchid went to “Bad Apples,” by Kathleen Marple Kalb (writing as Nikki Knight); “The Inside Shake,” by Jason Koontz; “House of Tigers,” by William Burton McCormick; “The Mystery of the Missing Woman,” by Regina M. Sestak; and “Lovely As,” by Jacqueline Vick.

• The Bookseller reports that “Dettie Gould has won the Harvill Secker Bloody Scotland Crime Writing Award with her ‘deliciously dark thriller’ The Light and Shade of Ellen Swithin. Her story follows Swithin, who is a skilled actuary in an accounting firm, a dutiful daughter, and a latent serial killer.” It adds that “Gould will have her book published under the Harvill Secker imprint, in a publishing deal with an advance of £5,000. She will also appear on a panel at the Bloody Scotland festival and receive a guest pass for the weekend’s events. The Arvon Foundation, which sponsored the competition, has also offered the winner the chance to attend any one of its creative writing courses.” (Hat tip to In Reference to Murder.)

• Crime Time FM, an interview podcast hosted by Paul Burke in affiliation with the Web site Crime Time, has named its first Crime Novel of the Year: S.A. Cosby’s Razorblade Tears (Headline). Receiving runner-up honors is Dominic Nolan’s Vine Street (Headline). Also shortlisted for this inaugural commendation were The Village of Eight Graves, by Seichi Yokomizo (Pushkin Press); The Turnout, by Megan Abbott (Faber & Faber); The First Day of Spring, by Nancy Tucker (Hutchinson); and Future Perfect, by Felicia Yap (Wildfire).

• While I have online subscriptions to both The New York Times and The Washington Post, I don’t enjoy similarly unfettered access to Dublin’s Irish Times. So I have not been able to look through that broadsheet’s recent “Best Crime Fiction of 2021” list. However, author-playwright Declan Hughes, who put the piece together along with fellow Irish writer Declan Burke, sent George Easter of Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine his 10 choices, via e-mail. They are:

— Dream Girl, by Laura Lippman
— The Survivors, by Jane Harper
— Hidden Lies, by Rachel Ryan
— Blood Ties, by Brian McGilloway
— A Man Named Doll, by Jonathan Ames
— Vera Kelly Is Not a Mystery, by Rosalie Knecht
— Palace of the Drowned, by Christine Mangan
— The Plot, by Jean Hanff Korelitz
— A Slow Fire Burning, by Paula Hawkins
— 56 Days, by Catherine Ryan Howard

• English professor Carole E. Barrowman offers her own roll of favorite mysteries in Wisconsin’s Milwaukee Journal.

• Speaking of “best” books, CrimeReads this morning posted its selections of “The Best True Crime Books of 2021.” I’m pleased to see that its 10 picks include Dean Jobb’s The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream: The Hunt for a Victorian Era Serial Killer (Algonquin), a work I consumed in a captivated rush this last summer.

• Another CrimeReads piece worth noticing: Keith Roysdon’s tribute to the 1967-1975 TV detective drama Mannix, which starred Mike Connors. As Roysdon writes:

Sure, there have been cool P.I.s (Craig Stevens’ “Peter Gunn” with Henry Mancini’s theme music, full of smooth menace) and affably hot P.I.s (our boy Thomas Magnum) and cerebral consulting detectives (“Sherlock”) and the most charming, hard-luck P.I. on the California coast (“This is Jim Rockford, at the tone leave your name and message …”)

But as far as a play-it-straight-down-the-middle investigator who could take a blow to the head and come back swinging, nobody topped Mike Connors’ “Mannix.” And the show had a hell of a theme too, by Lalo Schifrin.

Roysdon’s full article can be found here. Click here if you’re interested in my own comments on that CBS-TV series.

• Television tidbits: Veronica Mars alumna Kristen Bell has a new psychological thriller coming to Netflix on January 28, The Woman in the Street, a trailer for which can be enjoyed in The Killing Times. And Deadline brings word that “Jo Nesbø’s Headhunters is returning to screens, this time as a TV series for Sweden’s C More and TV2 Norway starring Betrayed’s Axel Bøyum and Mr. Robot’s Martin Wallström. … Headhunters, which was made into a highly-rated Norwegian film 10 years ago … follows a headhunter lying and manipulating his way to success both in his career and in his love life. But one lie leads to another, and soon he is so entangled in his own stories that it becomes a danger to both himself and the people around him.”

• There have been far too many deaths among members of the crime-fiction community lately. The Gumshoe Site mentions one that I somehow missed: “Gordon McAlpine died on November 29. The former college writing teacher wrote his first novel, Joy in Mudville (Dutton, 1989), set in 1930s Chicago’s Wrigley Field. Woman with a Blue Pencil (Seventh Street Books, 2015) was nominated for the 2016 Edgar Award for best paperback. He used his pseudonym Owen Fitzstephen to write Hammett Unwritten (2013) and The Big Man’s Daughter (2020; both from Seven Street Books). The last two novels feature Dashiell Hammett and some people on whom Hammett modeled … the colorful characters in The Maltese Falcon. He was 62.”

• I’m tardy in bringing attention to a pair of posts focused on this year’s Iceland Noir festival (November 16-20), but I don’t want to just let them go unmentioned. Kristopher Zgorski’s report is in BOLO Books; Abby Endler’s recollections are in Crime by the Book.

• Randal S. Brandt, a friend of this blog and a librarian at the University of California Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, was profiled last month in the San Jose Mercury News because of his labors as curator of the Bancroft’s massive California Detective Fiction Collection. The story includes news that Mark Coggins, a Stanford University graduate and infrequent Rap Sheet contributor, added “a complete set of [Raymond] Chandler and [Dashiell] Hammett first editions” to the collection. Explains the News’ Chuck Barney: “Coggins, known for his August Riordan private eye novels, which are also in the Bancroft collection, had been acquiring the books since the early ’90s. He viewed himself as ‘sort of a custodian.’”

• Finally, yesterday’s episode of Terry Gross’ Fresh Air radio program focused on crime of a different sort—and a truly frightening scenario: the end of American democracy, engineered by Donald Trump’s Republican Party. “In a new article titled ‘Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun,’ published in The Atlantic,” she told listeners, “my guest, journalist Barton Gellman, warns January 6 was just practice. We face a serious risk that American democracy as we know it will come to an end in 2024. The attempt by Trump and other Republicans to overturn the results of the 2020 election failed. But Gellman reports that Republicans have been building an apparatus for election theft. They’ve studied Trump’s crusade to overturn the 2020 results. They’ve noted points of failure and have taken steps to avoid failure next time by working to change whose votes are counted, who oversees the election, who chooses the electors and what happens in the courts.” You can listen to the whole interview here. If you’re an Atlantic subscriber, you can read Gellman’s article here.

Blood Will Tell

In January Magazine today, Kevin Burton Smith--creator/editor of The Thrilling Detective Web Site and an infrequent contributor to The Rap Sheet--interviews Irish playwright and theatrical director Declan Hughes, author of the new private-eye novel The Color of Blood. Their lengthy exchange ranges all over the map, from Hughes’ respect for cartoonist Charles M. Schulz and the critical reception of his fiction on both sides of the Atlantic, to the author’s wide-ranging tastes in music, the rising scale of Dublin’s criminality, and his concern for series protagonist Ed Loy’s health.

But one of my favorite parts of this interview comes when Smith asks Hughes about his debts to notable crime novelists of the past--Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Ross Macdonald. We join their discussion, already in progress:

Q: What about Macdonald?

A: I think it’s Ross Macdonald I’m most influenced by. If Hammett took murder out of the rose garden and put it back in the alley where it belongs, Macdonald told you about the kid who’d been dumped in the alley, found out that he was from a family with more than a little loot, and then took you into their house to leaf through the family album and trace the deep history that led to that kid’s death. That “family gothic” spoke to me, because Irish society is still pretty tribal, and because, despite the impression Irish people give that we’re open and friendly and candid, there’s a lot we don’t want to tell you. A lot of skeletons in our closets. As it says in [my first novel] The Wrong Kind of Blood, “Whatever you say, say nothing.”

So reading Ross Macdonald years ago, I always thought that that aspect of the P.I. story would certainly work well in Dublin.

I just had to wait a little longer for the other stuff--the gold-rush town [Dublin] with opportunities for all, especially gangs of organized criminals--to come about.

Q: But Ireland’s always had its share of crime. What’s changed?

A: The scale. More people with more money equals more drugs, equals more money to be made in supplying them, equals more turf wars, etc. And second/third generation criminals, high on their own supply. Mental bastards. The stakes weren’t that high 20 years ago.

You can read the entirety of their discussion here.

A New Irish Tradition?

So, the latest issue of Mystery News (June/July 2006) came sailing through my mail slot today. Dominating the paper’s front page is an interview with Jacqueline Winspear (Pardonable Lies), while inside, there’s a lengthy profile of Wyoming novelist Craig Johnson (The Cold Dish, Death Without Company), a look back at the mid-20th-century works of Thomas Kyd (aka Alfred B. Harbage), and, best of all--at least to my way of thinking--an interview with Irish playwright-turned-novelist Declan Hughes. Hughes’ debut novel, The Wrong Kind of Blood, ranks as one of the 2006 books that I least anticipated but most enjoyed. It’s the tale of an Irish-born private eye in Los Angeles, Ed Loy, who heads back to the ol’ sod to attend his mother’s funeral, but winds up looking for the missing husband of a former lover, longing for answers to his father’s disappearance, and bumping elbows with Dublin criminals petty and prosperous. Although it owes a few rather obvious debts to Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald, and strains a bit here and there to maintain its hard edge, The Wrong Kind of Blood stands out because of its protagonist’s mordant approach to life, its sharp dialogue, and ... well, the fact that it’s Irish. While there are myriad English crime stories, and a growing number of Scottish ones, Ireland hasn’t produced such an abundance within this genre. Hughes explains why, in his exchange with Mystery News’ Stephen Miller:

Well, first of all there is no “traditional” type of mystery in Ireland; the UK has its own tradition, but Ireland (a separate country in so many respects) has no great history or tradition of crime writing; it’s only in the last ten years or so that the genre has begun to take root. The kind of English mystery within a settled society where everyone knows his place and the solution to the murder restores order always sat uneasily in an Ireland that was making itself up as it went along. In terms of the kind of noir or hard-boiled P.I. novel I want to write, it’s been among other things a question of waiting until the conditions were right. There’s been an economic boom the last ten years in Ireland, leading to a lot of money being made very quickly, often with no questions asked. There has always in Ireland been the “family gothic” aspect--secrets being kept, skeletons in every family closet--the motto for years was “whatever you say, say nothing”--but in recent years these secrets have begun to be unearthed, whether they relate to clerical sex abuse, widespread planning corruption or the simple incarceration of an inconvenient family member in a mental hospital. The time seemed ripe for a detective who could be an outsider--having been away for twenty years, Ed Loy finds much of what is new in Ireland astonishing and disturbing--but also an insider--through his upbringing, he is connected to a wide range of people, from lawyers and police to petty criminals and gangsters. Loy--literally, a spade or a shovel--is there to dig up the truth, uncover the secrets and lies that Ireland has lived by.

Unfortunately, Miller’s interview with Hughes isn’t available online. But it’s worth the $4.50 single-copy price to buy this latest Mystery News and read the thing through.