Bullet Points: One Heck of Giant Edition

• Chris Sullivan, who writes the fine blog Morse, Lewis and Endeavour, confirms that the popular ITV-TV series Endeavour, starring Shaun Evans and Roger Allam, “will end as predicted, at 33 episodes.” Endeavour is, of course, a prequel to the long-running small-screen drama Inspector Morse, both of them based on characters created by Colin Dexter. “It is no surprise to those who believed that Russell Lewis, the creator and writer of all the Endeavour episodes, would not go beyond the number of episodes that the original Morse series and the Lewis series stopped at,” Sullivan remarks. This means there will be eight seasons of Endeavour altogether, with the final one comprising only three episodes. That’s the same number of installments found in Series 7, which was already broadcast in Great Britain this last February, but will debut in the States on PBS-TV’s Masterpiece Mystery! come Sunday, August 9. Here’s a trailer for the new season.

• If you want a jump on that August debut, and aren’t  squeamish about plot spoilers, check out The Killing Times’ reviews of those Series 7 installments: Episode 1, Episode 2, and Episode 3.

• Since I last took note, The Columbophile has rolled out three more posts in its series identifying “The 100 Greatest Columbo Scenes of the 1970s.” Part 6 is here and includes a great clip from the Season 3 episode “Double Exposure,” in which Peter Falk’s Lieutenant Columbo rattles his prime suspect (played by Robert Culp) during his golf game. Part 7 features a scene from the Season 2 installment “Requiem for a Falling Star” in which renowned American costume designer Edith Head has a cameo role. And in Part 8, look for guest murderer Patrick McGoohan to offer Columbo some cigar etiquette in the Season 4 episode “By Dawn's Early Light.” (By the way, McGoohan scored an Emmy Award for that performance.”) The Columbophile’s unnamed author has so far covered 80 of his or her 100 choices. The penultimate post in this project is slated to appear tomorrow.

• When I read that 82-year-old New Mexico author Rudolfo Anaya died on June 28 at his home in Albuquerque, I didn’t immediately recognize any link with crime fiction. After all, I associated him with mainstream fiction, especially his best-selling 1972 novel, Bless Me, Ultima, and also with his children’s stories. It was The Gumshoe Site’s Jiro Kimura who reminded me that, in addition to Anaya being “regarded as one of the founders of contemporary Chicano literature,” he had penned a quartet of mysteries starring a Mexican-American high school teacher turned private eye, Sonny Baca. Three of those novels were published in the 1990s, beginning with Zia Summer (1995). The fourth, Jemez Spring, didn’t appear until 2005.

• It’s been almost half a dozen years since novelist P.D. James passed away at age 94. If you need an introduction to her oeuvre or a reminder of her significant contributions to the genre, click onto this terrific piece from Neil Nyren, in CrimeReads.

• Really, “emoticons” date back to 1881?

• This is good news: Vienna Blood, the BBC-TV drama based on Frank Tallis’ Max Lieberman historical mysteries, and set in early 20th-century Vienna, has been renewed. “Three feature-length episodes have been ordered for the show’s second run,” says The Killing Times, “and BBC Two will once again serve as the UK broadcaster.” The show’s return is expected in Britain in 2021. There’s no word yet on when Americans might enjoy these fresh Vienna Blood stories.

• A six-episode ITV-TV adaptation A Spy Among Friends, Ben McIntyre’s 2014 non-fiction book about the Cambridge spy ring, will bring together an assortment of stars and writers with “some serious spy experience on their résumé,” according to Double O Section. That blog’s Matthew Bradford writes that “Damian Lewis (Our Kind of Traitor) will reunite with his Homeland producer Alexander Cary (the Taken TV show) to star as [Nicholas] Elliott. Dominic West (The Hour, Johnny English Reborn) will play [Kim] Philby, who has been portrayed in the past by Toby Stephens, Tom Hollander, Anthony Bate, and Billy Cruddup.” The show is scheduled for broadcast in fall of 2021.

• Our favorite genre is offering succor to many Brits forced inside by COVID-19. “Britain’s readers have been emerging from lockdown to restock their bookshelves, with book sales—and particularly crime novels—booming in the three weeks since booksellers were allowed to open their doors,” reports Alison Flood of The Guardian.

The print market continued its healthy run since England’s bookshops reopened on 15 June, with 3.8m books sold in the last week, for £32.6m, up from 3.1m (making £26.9m) at the same time last year. This is a 15% increase in value on last week and 21% year-on-year.

Sales in the last three weeks are up 19% on the same period in 2019, according to book sales monitor Nielsen, with almost 11m titles worth £94m sold over the period. Readers have been pouncing on stories of murder and revenge, with nearly 120,000 more crime and thriller books bought in the last two weeks of June, when compared to the same point last year.

• Just as the COVID-19 crisis was beginning, back in March, blogger Evan Lewis brought us a four-part BBC Radio adaptation of Hammett’s early Secret Agent X-9 yarns. (If you missed those, click here, here, here, and here to listen.) Last weekend he followed up by posting the four-hour, 13-episode, action-packed entirety of a 1945 film serial starring future Sea Hunt hunk Lloyd Bridges as Phil Corrigan/X-9. When you have enough free time, tune it in here.

• Chicago Tribune film critic Gene Siskel really didn’t like the 1995 James Bond film GoldenEye, the first in the series to star ex-Remington Steele lead Pierce Brosnan. “I think he isn’t an interesting Bond,” said Siskel. “I like [Sean] Connery and everybody else has been nothing compared to Connery. Frankly, Roger Moore has a more commanding physical performance than this guy. I thought this was an average picture. … I can’t recommend this picture at all.”



• Incidentally, GoldenEye premiered 25 years ago this coming November. Do you think it might be time for a rewatch?

• Why crime fiction might be the perfect genre for our coronavirus times: “Through crime fiction,” explains author Sulari Gentill (A Dangerous Language), “we have faced all manner of peril, defended the unjustly accused, protected intended victims. We have been selfless and fearless, we have been seekers of truth and justice, someone’s last hope. We have trained for crisis.”

• It was a couple of weeks ago that I announced my tally of favorite U.S. crime novels published during the first half of 2020. Last weekend, librarian-turned-blogger Lesa Holstine issued a comparable list of her own. Holstine’s picks extend beyond mystery fiction, but she does include Tracy Clark's What You Don't See, Paul D. Marks’ The Blues Don’t Care, and Katharine Schellman’s The Body in the Garden.

• This item comes from In Reference to Murder:

Killer Nashville is the latest event to announce it’s canceling for 2020 due to the pandemic, … the new travel bans and the recent upsurge of cases in Tennessee. They’re going to postpone Killer Nashville 2020 and roll everyone’s registrations forward to KN 2021 (August 19-22, 2021). Founder Clay Stafford added that “It was a hard choice, but the safety and well-being of our friends is our most important consideration. These are tough and uncharted times.” This year’s special guests were to be Lisa Black, J.T. Ellison, and Walter Mosley.

• Other conventions are seeking ways to carry on. Mystery in the Midlands, for instance, has scheduled a live Webinar for Saturday, July 25, that will include appearances by Charlaine Harris, Jeffery Deaver, Tara Laskowski, Art Taylor, and Dana Cameron. Register here.

• If you didn’t catch it already, here’s my Killer Covers gallery of artist James Bama’s splendid paperback fronts showcasing “teenagers either causing trouble or trying to find their own way in a confusing new world of sex, drugs, and yes, rock ’n’ roll.”

• As you’re probably already aware, Max Allan Collins and A. Brad Schwartz have co-authored a new criminal history, Eliot Ness and the Mad Butcher: Hunting America’s Deadliest Unidentified Serial Killer at the Dawn of Modern Criminology (Morrow), due out in August. (It’s a follow-up to their 2018 collaboration, Scarface and the Untouchable: Al Capone, Eliot Ness, and the Battle for Chicago.) What you may not know, is that Collins has also signed with Las Vegas-based Wolfpack Publishing to reissue his four Eliot Ness historical thrillers, beginning with a new omnibus edition released earlier this month. In his blog, Collins explains that this relationship with Wolfpack—a “hybrid” house that “place[s] primary importance on e-books and secondary importance on real books, which are Print-on-Demand”—will give him the chance to resurrect backlist titles, publish new short-story collections, and add to existing or discontinued series. “I can do a Jack and Maggie Starr or a Mallory or a ‘disaster’ or a Perdition prequel or a Black Hats sequel or even—should the current publishers stop doing them—new Spillane titles. Wolfpack is interested in whatever I might want to do. This feels incredibly liberating.”

• I have enjoyed the blog Paperback Warrior almost since the day it debuted seven years ago this week. And one of its most engaging ingredients is the much-newer Paperback Warrior Podcast, focusing on vintage adventure and crime novels as well as the authors behind those works. A couple of recent entries have been particular standouts: Episode 50, which looks back in part at Thomas B. Dewey’s life and writing career; and Episode 51, addressing the work of “CIA operative, Watergate burglar, and vintage genre fiction author [E.] Howard Hunt.” You can catch up with all of the podcasts here.

• Speaking of Hunt, I see that a couple of the novels he wrote pseudonymously (as “Robert Dietrich”) about “two-fisted, hard-drinking CPA detective, Steve Bentley,” are available again in print, thanks to Lee Goldberg’s new imprint, Cutting Edge Books. The House on Q Street, originally released in 1959, can be purchased here, while The Calypso Caper (1961) is newly obtainable right here. Cutting Edge is offering additional Dietrich works in e-book format only. For more info, click here.

• I somehow missed the welcome news that Steeger Books is reissuing—in both softcover and e-book formats—the 1952-1973 Milo March series, starring “a high-flying, globetrotting investigator for Intercontinental Insurance.” “Written by Green Lama creator Kendell Foster Crossen under the [M.E.] Chaber pen name, the Milo March thrillers are fondly recalled by paperback collectors for the spectacular Robert McGinnis paintings on the covers of the 1970s series,” explains the publisher. “These remastered, uniform editions include the original texts, restored by Kendra Crossen Burroughs, her father’s literary executor and the series editor. New bonus articles, interviews, and rare images are featured in most of the volumes.” Steeger is already selling six March titles, with 17 more to come by the end of this year—“including the final, unpublished March novel,” Death to the Brides.

• Mick Finlay, Glasgow-born author of the new mystery Arrowood and the Thames Corpses, reconsiders the 2007 book Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters and pronounces it “a real treat for Sherlock Holmes fans. The letters were written to Doyle’s family, publishers and others, but most of them are to his ‘Mam,’ who he was very close to all his life. He describes her as a wonderful storyteller, and attributes his own gifts to her influence, while his gift for dramatic effect came from his father, an artist whose alcoholism led to lengthy stays in sanitoria and asylums in the latter part of his life. As well as some fascinating insights into Conan Doyle’s personal life and politics, they also provide some background to the development of the Sherlock Holmes stories.” Finlay’s full essay can be enjoyed at this link.

• An unusually nice photo cover for a crime-fiction mag.

• British actor Peter Cushing, said to have been “a huge fan of Sherlock Holmes,” starred in the 1959 big-screen production The Hound of the Baskervilles. He later returned to sleuthing in a 1968 run of the BBC-TV series Sherlock Holmes. (See the show’s opening titles here.) Cushing apparently played Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous consulting detective in 15 installments of that hour-long series, taking over from Douglas Wilmer. However, only six were known to have survived, the remainder said to have been wiped “to allow tape stock to be re-used.” Now, though, The Killing Times brings word that at least some clips from those missing episodes have been found, thanks to “an intense search” by Yorkshire Post reporter Tony Earnshaw.

• Because I’ve long been a fan of the 1971-1977 NBC Mystery Movie series McMillan & Wife, starring Rock Hudson and Susan Saint James, I must draw your attention to Steve Lewis’ generally complimentary review, in Mystery*File, of that show’s first regular installment, “Murder by the Barrel.” The full-episode video is included.

• This is curious: Midnight Atlanta, the third book in U.S. author Thomas Mullen’s outstanding series about mid-20th-century Georgia police officers Lucius Boggs, Tommy Smith, and Denny Rakestraw, is already available in the UK, from Little, Brown. However, there’s no American edition of the novel. Both of Mullen’s previous series entries appeared in the States (from 37 Ink, an Atria Books imprint) months before the were released in Britain. Why is Midnight Atlanta the exception? So far, I see no word on the Web about when Mullen’s new novel might reach U.S. bookshops.

• Bloomberg Businessweek has studied the murderers in Agatha Christie’s mysteries, and charted the age, sex, profession, relationship to the victim, and homicidal methods used by each of them. The bottom line: “In Agatha Christie’s novels, murder and financial fraud are often intertwined. The murderers are more likely to be men, are partial to poison, and frequently commit the crime as part of a scam such as winning an inheritance.” See all of the results here.

• I’ve never read Joel Townsley Rogers’ The Red Right Hand. But with Penzler Publishers having recently brought that acclaimed 1945 novel back into print as part of its American Mystery Classics line, I have another chance to do so. Joe R. Lansdale’s introduction to this edition leaves me further intrigued. As he observes: “At times, while reading Rogers’s peculiar book, I felt as if I were seeing the world through a dark and grease-smeared window pane that would frequently turn clear and light up in spewing colors like a firework display on the Fourth of July. At the same time there was the sensation of something damp and dark creeping up behind me, a cold chill on the back of my neck. Clues and odd impressions pile up like plague victims, and from time to time the answer to the riddle seems close at hand, as if you could reach out and grasp it. Then the answer that seemed so clear wriggles from your grasp like an electric eel and slithers into darkness.”

• Has it been a while since you last consulted The Rap Sheet’s inventory of Summer 2020 crime-fiction releases? Then you might want to revisit it, as I have made many additions over the last month.


• There’s nothing secret about my fondness for Olivia Rutigliano’s contributions to CrimeReads. I favor her work partly because so much of it glances back at the history of this genre, in all media. Case in point: her recent piece about the jailing of Dashiell Hammett, after the quondam Pinkerton agent and private-eye novelist ran afoul of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York in 1951. Another Rutigliano piece that won my immediate attention remarked on “the endless symbolism of Jaws, which owes its dark soul to Moby Dick.” (The 45th anniversary of that movie’s release was June 20.) Her spoiler-filled essay begins:

I watch Jaws every year on the Fourth of July, in view of its timelessness as well as its seasonality. Jaws is specifically set during Independence Day. It also generally invented the ‘summer blockbuster,’ a detail which makes its 1975 premiere on midsummer’s eve seem quite significant, in hindsight. Like the shark that arrives off the coast of Amity Island in the film’s famous opening scene, Jaws arrived unassumingly at the start of the season and caused a frenzy that would ripple out far past Labor Day. It became one of our greatest filmmaking touchstones: a marvelously intellectual monster movie, an arbiter of cinematic summer, a technical origin story for the boy-genius director who would become Steven Spielberg. It is also a touch prescient. It is one of those eerie films that, to me, feels a little sibylline, a little otherworldly. It seems to sit at the nexus of everything—the past, the future, high art, popular entertainment, mythology, history—as a film whose deliverance certainly revolutionized filmmaking and scared everyone from going in the ocean, but also stands as a vessel for the summoning of mankind for reflection and atonement.

• New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis offers her own take on the initial impact and enduring legacy of Jaws here.

• Could a motion picture based on Luther, the popular BBC psychological crime drama starring Idris Elba, finally be in the offing? While speaking with Deadline about his new Sky-TV comedy, In the Long Run, Elba said: “I’ve made it very clear that I’d like to see Luther come back as a film. And I can tell you this, that we are this close to making a film of Luther.” Of course, as Deadline notes, this is “not the first time Elba has talked about the BBC Studios show heading to the big screen. He told [the British newspaper] Metro in 2018 that Luther writer Neil Cross has been ‘beavering away’ on a feature script.” Will such talk ever amount to something?

• Vulture talks with writers, directors, and others about the challenges of presenting TV cop dramas in the post-George Floyd era.

• How might school history textbooks of the future summarize and try to make sense of this crazy year, 2020? Historian James West Davidson speculates on that subject in The Atlantic.

• Real people have spent the months-long COVID-19 lockdown in different ways, not all of them worth reporting or free of embarrassment. But what about some of our favorite crime-fiction protagonists? What have they been up to amid this health crisis? Scott Montgomery, of Bookpeople, in Austin, Texas, asked Joe R. Lansdale, Laura Lippman, Mark Pryor, Craig Johnson, and Megan Abbott to imagine their creations’ self-quarantine escapades.

• From Elizabeth Foxwell’s The Bunburyist: “The In GAD We Trust podcast chats with short-story sleuth Tony Medawar, who has uncovered unknown or neglected works by authors such as Christianna Brand, John Dickson Carr, Agatha Christie, Anthony Berkeley Cox, Edmund Crispin, Ngaio Marsh, and Dorothy L. Sayers. Medawar talks about his favorite mystery finds and other discoveries he has made. A new volume in Medawar’s Bodies from the Library series will be out in October in the United States.”

• A few other writer exchanges worth finding: For his Author Interviews blog, Marshal Zeringue talks with J. Todd Scott (Lost River) and Chris Nickson (The Molten City); Speaking of Mysteries podcast host Nancie Clare quizzes Cathi Stoler (Bar None) and Michael Elias (You Can Go Home Now); Jeff Rutherford pitches questions at T.R. Ragan (Don’t Make a Sound) for his Reading and Writing Podcast; and Do Some Damage’s Steve Weddle chats with Jay Stringer about the latter’s new book, Marah Chase and the Fountain of Youth.

• In another episode of Open Book on Location, authors Lee Goldberg, Nicholas Meyer, and Leslie S. Klinger got together virtually to talk about their writing processes, movie/TV tie-in novels, their respective reading histories, Hollywood, and more.

• I forgot to mention this before, but The Nick Carter & Carter Brown Blog spent the month of May saluting—with book covers—the prolific work of Alan Geoffrey Yates, who wrote under the Carter Brown pseudonym. Those fronts can all be seen here.

• At the Villa Rose’s Xavier Lechard muses on Golden Age investigators who occasionally took justice into their own hands.

• Finally, Flashbak offers a sometimes-shocking selection of vintage crime-scene images, taken by the Los Angeles Police Department and barely saved from destruction. “In 2014,” the site explains, “Los Angeles-based photographer Merrick Morton (a onetime LAPD reserve officer) spotted a derelict stash of LAPD crime photos dating from the 1920s to 1970s. The cellulose nitrate-based film and negatives were decomposed and deemed as fire hazard. … Now spruced up, the macabre collection includes photographs of crimes, many of them violent. … There’s an unusual photo of Maila Nurmi dressed as Vampira, pictures of comedian Lenny Bruce’s overdose in March of 1966 and images of the Manson Family arriving at their arraignment in 1970.” That post is definitely not safe for work.

PaperBack: “Angel Eyes”

Part of a series honoring the late author and blogger Bill Crider.



Angel Eyes, by “Robert Dietrich,” aka E. Howard Hunt (Dell, 1961). Not to be confused with this new novel of the same title, Hunt’s Angel Eyes was the sixth of 10 hard-boiled tales, all penned by that CIA officer and future Watergate co-conspirator, and all featuring Steve Bentley, a gun-toting accountant (and later tax attorney) in Washington, D.C. Cover art by Robert McGinnis.

PaperBack: “End of a Stripper”

Part of a series honoring the late author and blogger Bill Crider.



End of a Stripper, by “Robert Dietrich,” aka E. Howard Hunt (Dell, 1960). This was the second entry in future Watergate conspirator Hunt’s series of thrillers starring Washington, D.C.-based CPA-cum-private eye Steve Bentley. Cover illustration by Freeman Elliott.

The Book You Have to Read: “Where Murder Waits,” by E. Howard Hunt

(Editor’s note: This is the 151st installment in The Rap Sheet’s continuing series about great but forgotten books.)

By Steven Nester
As Richard Nixon’s presidency unraveled in 1973 and Watergate burglar/thriller writer E. Howard Hunt faced a stretch in federal prison, the marketing department of Fawcett Gold Medal Books thought to squeeze every penny it could from this notorious novelist’s oeuvre by reissuing Where Murder Waits, this time under his real name. First published in 1965, and attributed to the pseudonymous Gordon Davis, Where Murder Waits is a bitter rebuke to 1961’s failed Bay of Pigs invasion, which Hunt had had a role in planning while employed by the CIA. Although he tells no tales out of school and only reiterates some familiar gripes about the debacle, Hunt does describe the complications endured by dispossessed foreign nationals plotting a return to their Cuban homeland. With Fidel Castro’s regime firmly ensconced in Havana, however, the only intrigue that occurs is between members of the exile community who wish to unseat him.

Patrick Conroy is a man with a past. Born Patricio Conroy in Cuba, wounded and imprisoned after the failed expedition that landed at the Bay of Pigs on the island nation’s southern coast, Conroy is now a lawyer living under the radar in Miami, Florida. Battle injuries resulted in “a contained grace to Conroy’s movements that inspired desire in women and confidence in men”; and while he’s content, makes a “sturdy martini,” and enjoys a fulfilling bachelor love life, there seems to be something lacking in his existence.

Conroy’s reputation is known to former contrarrevolucionarios, and though he no longer has an active interest in taking up arms against Castro, he’s approached by an organization of displaced patriots—the Exile Committee—wishing him to take on a task. It seems money raised by the group for an insurrection has vanished from a Panamanian bank, along with the group’s treasurer. Conroy is asked to recover the cash, but he demurs. The next knock on his door is delivered by an FBI agent, who talks to Conroy about his possible Neutrality Act violations, which could result in his disbarment and a revocation of his U.S. citizenship. Conroy is incensed by the threats that agent has made against his liberty, something he figures he earned in combat. He observes that fewer exiles are willing to step into the breach, and is disheartened to see the zeal of counterrevolution diminish among members of the exile community. To many of them, Cuba is simply the place their parents once lived, and Conroy sees the “younger generation maturing in an alien land and accepting exile as a fact of existence.” Feeling the anger of exiles who are harassed for their patriotism and grit, Conroy finally accepts the mission to track down that lost money.

The Cuban Revolution (1953-1959) turned various South and Central American capitals into settings resembling Casablanca during World War II, and as Conroy travels between Florida, Panama, and Brazil, he must tread lightly and mind his manners. Any insurgent group operating in a foreign country is suspected of trying to bring revolution or unwanted attention to that region, and from the time he boards an airplane for Panama, Conroy is under surveillance not only by foreign agencies, but also by the CIA. In addition, someone close to the bank theft is attempting to thwart Conroy, starting with an attempt on his life in Miami. Since it’s obvious that the theft was an inside job, Conroy’s mission becomes tricky when every insider who had access to the Exile Committee’s money is murdered.

A visit to the Panamanian bank where that dough had been deposited leads nowhere. However, a break that will resound through the remainder of this novel comes when Conroy discovers Javier Ruiz tossing his hotel room. A legendary anti-Castro guerilla, better known as El Machete, Javier was believed to have died during the failed Bay of Pigs assault, but instead spent time in prison, just like Conroy. Javier says he was tipped off that Conroy had located the misplaced funds and was about to abscond with them to Cuba; he planned to stop Conroy. Javier’s anti-Castro credentials are bombproof, and Conroy sure could use his help—as he could that of Javier’s comely sister, Lola, whose husband did die at the Bay of Pigs—to complete his mission. Yet the siblings’ arrival on the scene seems all too convenient, and Conroy resolves to keep a close eye on the pair.

As he investigates, Conroy learns that the last man to hold the money he seeks exchanged it for a diamond, which was easier to transport than cash. When the gem dealer subsequently turns up dead, and the rock goes missing, Conroy must accept, dolefully, that even heroic Cuban freedom fighters are not immune from avarice. In fact, it’s Javier who has the diamond, and he intends to keep it as recompense for his betrayal and imprisonment in Cuba so many years ago. Further, he wants his sister, Lola, to flee with him to freedom. She refuses her brother’s entries, though, for she and Conroy have fallen in love. There is a bloody standoff between the trio, but justice is done—more thoroughly than might have been possible in real life, and this is the key to the complexity of E. Howard Hunt.

Say what you’d like about Hunt, but there’s no denying he was a man of some accomplishment. Biographical accounts suggest he lived out a quasi-James Bond fantasy, as he allowed many of his fictional characters to do. But among the tuxedos and tailored clothing was plenty of dirty laundry. For instance, Hunt devised a plot to overthrow the government of Guatemala in 1954, which resulted in countless deaths. He had a hand, too, in other clandestine and disreputable operations around the globe before the Bay of Pigs drove his espionage career into a ditch. When the chance to work for the Nixon White House came along, this suave spy became a “plumber,” and the rest is infamy.

In Where Murder Waits, Patrick Conroy is given the opportunity to assist—in a small way—a noble cause, and he succeeds. Through the character of Conroy, Hunt showed the world his espionage super-self (an image far superior to what he was becoming: a bungling intelligence has-been), and therein lies the fragile beauty of make-believe. Reality doesn’t always allow people to be viewed in the best possible light; mistakes are made, victories go unrecognized, aspirations are often not realized. Through fiction, though, writers can imagine themselves as better than they are. Hunt was a rather prolific novelist, and he tended to cast his protagonists—and by reflection, himself—in the glow of patriotism, glamour, and triumph. It might have been a bitter pill for him to swallow knowing that, thanks to the Watergate scandal, history was much more likely to remember him (ignominiously) for his involvement in what Nixon’s press secretary, Ron Ziegler, called a “third-rate burglary.”

READ MORE: “The Book You Have to Read: Bimini Run, by E. Howard Hunt,” by Steven Nester (The Rap Sheet).

The Book You Have to Read: “Bimini Run,” by E. Howard Hunt

(Editor’s note: This is the 121st installment of our ongoing Friday blog series highlighting great but forgotten books. Today’s piece comes from Steven Nester, the host of Poets of the Tabloid Murder, a weekly Internet radio show heard on the Public Radio Exchange [PRX]. Steve has written previously for this series about Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game, by William Kennedy, Cut Numbers, by Nick Tosches, and True Confessions, by John Gregory Dunne.)

E. Howard Hunt was a diehard CIA cold warrior and political operative perhaps best known for his failures. With ice water in his veins and patriotism in his heart, Hunt had a hand in the Bay of Pigs fiasco, was suspected of prior knowledge and complicity in President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, and most famously bungled the Watergate burglary, which brought down the presidency of Richard Nixon.

Few people, though, would suspect that Hunt also possessed a bit of poetry in his soul. Between toppling Banana Republics and playing hardball with the Russians, Hunt was the author of more than 40 adventure and espionage novels. One of his best-known works, Bimini Run (1949), combines action, concision, and an emotional dimension which in a scant 158 pages has the reader careening between characters and situations, and their entangling and final unwinding.

Leading man Hank Sturgis is a humble guy who’s seen a lot. A former football star, law student, and wounded World War II veteran, he’s now a drifting gambler struggling to stay solvent. When a bookie welshes on a bet, and then the nightclub where he works goes under, Sturgis is forced to sign on as first mate and man Friday to a pair of wealthy pleasure-seekers who’ve chartered a fishing boat for an extended expedition in the Caribbean. The husband, Clay Crawford, is a drunken bully who can’t seem to get over the insecurities that inheriting too much money have cursed him with. Leslie, his wife, was born poor; but she’s smart, ambitious, and beautiful. Captain Engstrom, master of the Velva, is in the book to clash with Crawford on various occasions and to pilot the boat so the other three can interact. Trouble begins when Crawford confuses catching big fish with virility and his wife begins to show an interest in Sturgis. Instead of dousing these fires with water, the players use alcohol.

Bimini Run possesses the decorating scheme of an Ernest Hemingway story--deep-sea fishing, too much alcohol, and a couple at odds over a husband’s machismo. The heart of the novel also has the familiar Hemingway themes of generational issues and the importance of maintaining a code of honor. Hunt has fashioned a story of youth dissatisfied with mainstream life after returning home from war; but instead of setting it in Paris, he placed it in the world of racetracks, gambling houses, and the idle rich. While hardly a reprise of The Sun Also Rises, in Bimini Run Sturgis, like Jake Barnes, lives by a code of honor that keeps him loveless, alone, and wary of intimacy. Hunt continues to crib from Hemingway with the theme of man vs. nature, as well. Crawford is on a quest to hook a manta ray fit for the record books. While Crawford is up to his eyeballs in booze, fistfights, and fishing, wife Leslie begins to look at Hank as more than just hired help.

Bimini Run is pure pulp entertainment, but Hunt deserves some credit for preventing Hank and Leslie from falling into the cliché of world-weary and star-crossed lovers. There’s no self-pity in Sturgis and how his life went from promising to slightly desperate. As for Leslie, she’s a girl who can look out for herself at the very least.

Sturgis had known poor girls with intelligence and rich girls who could barely read a comic strip. Leslie was something new--the once-poor and intelligent; the new-rich with brains. He found the combination disturbing.

It’s not that Sturgis doesn’t think he could handle a woman like Leslie; he’s onto her from the outset. He knows her motives might at the moment be pure, wanting him to rescue her from a brute of a husband, but they are not enduring. Sturgis “resents the admiration he had begun to feel for her,” because she’s calculating and doesn’t possess boilerplate scruples as he does, and therefore cannot be trusted. “He knew that she made her own rules and broke them when they grew too confining,” writes Hunt.

Leslie makes a play for Sturgis, but his independence and determination to make his own way obviate the temptation of a beautiful woman with money. He and Leslie come to terms in an exchange that shows the Brown University-educated Hunt had his head fully in the game of composing potboiler prose with wit and brevity.

“I offered myself to you and you took it as lightly as the morning mail.”

“I refused it because it came COD. It could be as sweet as paradise or as deadly as a box from the Borgias.”

Hunt pays homage to another writer, Raymond Chandler, paraphrasing one of Chandler’s classic lines and recycling it into the simile, “as easy to spot as a coral snake on a dice table.”

The climax of Bimini Run is an excellent consolidation of all the pieces of the plot, no matter how trivial. The ever-present guns, the constantly prowling sharks, the ill will of Leslie, the symbolic fish finally caught, and the animosity of Engstrom and Crawford as they fistfight while sharks begin a bloody feeding frenzy on the ray they have hauled to the boat. The two men fall into the water, and as Hank calls for Leslie, a crack shot, to help him kill the sharks before Engstrom and Crawford are torn to shreds, she does nothing. Man and fish merge as Sturgis observes that “there was nothing that looked human in the bloody pulp the waves pushed against the hull.”

One wonders what E. Howard Hunt would have done with his art if he’d spent more time writing rather than working in the shadows to keep America safe for democracy. The world most likely would’ve stayed the same without his efforts, but his writing, as professional and sound as it is, might’ve brought him a greatness that his career as a spy never came close to offering.

(The front and back covers of the 1952 Avon Books paperback edition of Bimini Run used to illustrate this post were borrowed from the collection of Bill Crider. Cover painting by George Erickson. Click on either cover for an enlargement.)

Hunt at the Edge of Memory

It’s been just over two years since Watergate burglar and spy novelist E. Howard Hunt died at age 88. But only now has author-blogger Bill Crider resurrected a couple of pieces about Hunt from the old Paperback Quarterly. Clickety-clack here to read an interview with Hunt, and here to read Crider’s essay about his fiction from the same 1979 issue of PQ. Crider also offers up--here and here--a few of the wonderful covers from Hunt’s early novels.

Of Politics and Plagiarism

The death earlier this week of 88-year-old Watergate burglar and spy novelist E. Howard Hunt continues to generate headlines as well as less prominent insights.

Former Washington Post investigative reporter Carl Bernstein sat for an online chat at the Post Web site on Wednesday, answering readers’ questions about everything from Hunt’s theory that George H.W. Bush and Lyndon Johnson were complicit in President John F. Kennedy’s 1963 assassination (“I would judge it preposterous and not worth further examination”) to the “lying and mendacity” practiced by the current White House occupant (“As a [Republican] bumper-sticker of the day proclaimed, ‘Nobody died at Watergate.’ If only we could say that about the era of George W. Bush ...”) to Hunt’s “distinguished” pre-Watergate career (“He had a certain erudition, he could write [spy novels] he liked to see himself in a heroic, Cold War tradition ... but his accomplishments were meager ...”). Especially for people who aren’t old enough to have lived through the nightmare of Watergate, it’s interesting to hear what Bernstein has to say about Hunt’s role in that scandal.

Also intriguing is a post that author Mark Coggins (Candy from Strangers) put up on his blog yesterday. It recalls how Hunt “once corresponded” with Raymond Chandler. Explains Coggins:

In 1952, Chandler wrote a two page letter in response to--of all things--charges from Hunt of ethical violations of “self-plagiarism.” Hunt had written to complain that several of Chandler’s 1930s Black Mask short stories, anthologized in the 1952 collection The Simple Art of Murder, had been the cannibalized to provide the plot lines for his first four novels.

Coggins goes on to quote the full text of Chandler’s response, as lifted from editor Frank MacShane’s Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler (1981). While it seems remarkable that the creator of Philip Marlowe should have bothered to respond to any such accusations from a then-unknown such as Hunt, what makes Chandler’s missive worth reading is the bitterness he shows toward other fictionists who would imitate him:

I have a further remark. As you may know, writers like Dashiell Hammett and myself have been widely and ruthlessly imitated, so closely as to amount to a moral plagiarism, even though the law does not recognize anything but the substantial taking of a plot. I have had stories taken scene by scene and just lightly changed here and there. I have had lines of dialogue taken intact, bits of description also word for word. I have no recourse. The law doesn’t call it plagiarism. Against this background you must pardon me if I find it just a little ludicrous that you should object to my using what is mine in the way that seems to me most suitable and most convenient. If my early stories had been published in a magazine of prestige and significance, the situation would have been rather different, and I would have been much more reluctant to do what you complain of. But as it is, I wish I had carried the process much further and used more of my old novelettes as material instead of republishing them with all their crudities, some of which crudities I know find almost unbearable.

Read all of Coggins’ post here.

READ MORE: “His Name Was Conspiracy,” by John Nadler (Contemporary Nomad); “Bill Pronzini on the Early E. Howard Hunt,” by Steve Lewis (Mystery*File); “Paperback 79: Stranger in Town/Howard Hunt,” by Rex Parker (Pop Sensation).

Uncovering Hunt’s Past

Although most news accounts of former Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt’s death yesterday failed to mention much about his having been a spy novelist, bloggers Steve Lewis and Bill Crider are endeavoring to make up for that slight. Lewis’ Mystery*File has a lengthy rundown of Hunt’s fiction, written both under his own name and under a variety of pseudonyms (including Robert Dietrich). Meanwhile, Crider--whose impressive collection of pulp paperbacks must be threatening the integrity of his home’s foundation by now--has posted cover scans of the Hunt books at his fingertips. I’m particularly fond of the fronts from End of a Stripper (1960) and Curtains for a Lover (1962), both of which, Lewis points out, starred “two-fisted, hard-drinking CPA detective, Steve Bentley, a former agent for the Treasury, but whose nose for trouble led him into the exact same situations as any two-fisted, hard-drinking private eye would find himself in.”

READ MORE: “Paperback Warrior Primer—Howard Hunt” (Paperback Warrior); “Ex-Spy Crafted Watergate, Other Schemes,” by Patricia Sullivan (The Washington Post); “E. Howard Hunt,” by Ed Gorman; “A PQ Interview with E. Howard Hunt” (Bill Crider’s Pop Culture Magazine); “E. Howard Hunt’s The Towers of Silence,” by dfordoom (Vintage Pop Fictions).

Of Stars, Send-ups, and Spies

First of all, let me thank Megan Abbott, author of the noirish new historical thriller, The Song Is You, for her generous contributions to The Rap Sheet over the last seven days. Her perspective on writing, film, and period atmospherics were much appreciated--not just by those of us at The Rap Sheet, but by readers, who flocked here in rather extraordinary numbers last week, just to see what Megan had to say. And I’m quite pleased to repeat her news from yesterday, that--after a brief but necessary hiatus to promote The Song Is You--she will be joining this blog as a regular contributor.

Second, having finally escaped from other responsibilities for the time being, I can report a variety of other news related to this genre:

• Is this the face of Philip Marlowe, the hard-drinking and cynical, yet philosophical Los Angeles private eye introduced in Raymond Chandler’s 1939 novel, The Big Sleep? Hollywood apparently thinks so. Drawing from an interview with film producer Marc Abraham, which appeared earlier this week in Louisville, Kentucky’s Courier-Journal newspaper, Cinematical confirms rumors that 43-year-old English actor Clive Owen will play Marlowe in a feature-length film based “on one of Raymond Chandler’s detective stories,” though Abraham “didn’t specify which story would be adapted ...” Now, I haven’t been big on the prospects of bringing Chandler’s soiled knight back to television, especially if he’s to be “modernized” and played again by Elliot Gould. But Owen, despite his being a Brit, might have the grit, depth, and faint charm necessary to step into the scuffed shoes of L.A.’s most famous fictional detective. True he isn’t James Garner, who I think did the best job of portraying Chandler’s P.I. (in 1969’s Marlowe); nor is he David Strathairn, who one reader of Cinematical suggested for the part (and who I agree would be an excellent choice). However, Owen has at least shown his chops in a couple of previous sleuthing roles, as Detective Chief Inspector Ross Tanner in the UK psychological thriller Second Sight (1999), and as author Mark Timlin’s doped-up South London gumshoe in the 1996 series Sharman. And he’s won plaudits for his role as an anti-hero in Children of Men, the recent film adaptation of P.D. James’ 1992 novel of the same name. My fingers are crossed that he can bring new and appeal life to the iconic Marlowe.

• As part of his Monday series of author interviews, John Kenyon reaches out to Spokane, Washington, novelist Jess Walter--sometime crime novelist and author of the National Book Award finalist The Zero--to talk about how Walter’s journalism background informs his fiction, his feelings about the term “literary crime fiction,” and having Richard Russo pen the screenplay of his 2005 novel, Citizen Vince. Their exchange at Kenyon’s Things I’d Rather Be Doing blog can be found here.

• A year after Comedy Central star Stephen Colbert delivered a brilliant knee-capping to George W. Bush during the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner, the event’s organizers have decided to invite the much-less-controversial comedian and impersonator, Rich Little (“basically a Republican, whose jokes are reminiscent of Ronald Reagan’s, though without the edge,” as he says of himself) to their dinner this April, instead. With Bush’s public-approval ratings having once more tumbled below 30 percent, and with at least two-thirds of Americans opposed to the prez’s planned escalation of the Iraq conflict, it seems that Washington, D.C., journalists (who should have more backbone than this) are concerned about piling on to Bush’s woes. Nonetheless, “truthiness,” the Colbert-popularized term defined as “the quality of stating concepts one wishes or believes to be true, rather than the facts,” lives on at the fiction e-zine Hardluck Stories. Explaining to would-be contributors his theme for a future “special issue,” editor Dave Zeltserman writes:

What I’m looking for are the same typically brilliant noir stories that Hardluck routinely publishes, but stories that are somehow inspired by the Colbert Report show, possibly even by the concept of “truthiness.” These could be stories featuring a Colbert-type character or inspired by an episode of Colbert Report or capture the essence of what Colbert is doing or whatever else your imagination can concoct as long as Colbert, his show or “truthiness” is a key element of the story. ...

So is this is a ploy on my part to have Hardluck mentioned to millions of viewers of the Colbert Report, or am I trying to pay tribute to a national icon in a manner most befitting him--with stories of despair, crime and degradation? I think the answer is obvious.

• Michael Caine is writing “a contemporary thriller about terrorism”? Shotsmag Confidential’s Mike Stotter has the lowdown.

• Novelist-critic Mike Ripley is back with his latest “Getting Away with Murder” column in Shots, and this time he’s writing about novelist Martyn Waites’ sideline as “a practising thespian,” mystery-writer muses, Walter Mosley’s move into penning sexually explicit fiction, and the resurrection of early 20th-century crime-fictionist Raoul Whitfield in Walter Satterthwait’s newest novel, the beautifully packaged Dead Horse.

• I reported recently that the prolific Max Allan Collins and illustrator Terry Beatty are collaborating on a Hard Case Crime novel called Deadly Beloved, featuring their comic-book detective, “Ms. Tree.” But that seems not to be this pair’s only project for the year. The Berkley Publishing Group’s summer 2007 catalogue includes word about a collaboration called A Killing in Comics, due out in May and starring a former striptease artist, now in charge of her late hubby’s newspaper syndicate (distributor of the Wonder Guy superhero comic strip), who has to “find a killer among cartoonists, wives, mistresses, and minions of a different sort of ‘syndicate’--suspects with motives that are anything but heroic.”

• Finally, Bill Crider’s blog brings news that E. Howard Hunt, who along with G. Gordon Liddy engineered the first break-in at Washington, D.C.’s Watergate complex in 1972--a crime that lead in part to President Richard M. Nixon’s notorious Watergate scandal--died earlier today at age 88. What’s the crime-fiction relevancy here? It’s that Hunt was a CIA operative turned spy novelist before he became a Republican White House “plumber.” Among his books: East of Farewell (1942), Limit of Darkness (1944), The Violent Ones (1950), The Berlin Ending (1973), and Evil Time (1992). According to the “who’s who”-like Web site, NNDB,

... Hunt was a proficient writer of spy and hard-boiled genre novels, drawing on his knowledge of CIA operations and techniques. None of his books were particularly popular until Watergate gave his name an added mystique, and several of his earlier titles were republished to fairly brisk sales. In a review, Publishers Weekly once described Hunt’s fiction as “violent, sexist and xenophobic.” He wrote more than 30 novels under his own name, thirteen as Robert Dietrich, ten as David St. John, four as Gordon Davis, and three each as John Baxter and P.S. Donoghue.

Several of his novels featured a fictional protagonist named Peter Ward, who seems to be Howard Hunt. Ward and Hunt both attended Brown University, both became polished Washington socialites, and Ward frequently traveled to overseas nations where Hunt had been stationed. Another series of Hunt novels centered on Steve Bentley, an accountant who is repeatedly drawn into foreign intrigue. In response to a long litany of negative notices about his books, Hunt once said that too many reviewers had “chosen to criticize my life rather than professionally appraise my work.”

Intriguingly, Hunt claimed that he was the real-life inspiration for the character of “Jim Phelps” in the TV series Mission: Impossible.