Bullet Points: Indie Bookstore Day Edition

What a busy week it has been, between my posting a two-part interview with distinguished Ross Macdonald biographer Tom Nolan (see here and here), Wednesday’s Edgar Awards presentation, news about this year’s two Spotted Owl Award winners, and my work on a couple of interesting Killer Covers entries (here and here). I’m hoping to reward myself with a quiet Saturday in my backyard, just appreciating all the new planting I’ve had to do recently. But I must first mention a few pertinent news bits.

• Yes, today is Independent Bookstore Day in the United States. That means everyone who reads this post, and has such a shop within walking or driving distance, should immediately go there and invest in some promising reading material. (Sadly, not everyone has easy access to such businesses, though I have two such stores nearby--one that sells only new books, the other dispensing only used ones.) As somebody who worked, part-time, in an indie bookstore for many years, I can tell you how important it is that everybody supports these enterprises. Amazon.com can be a very convenient way to buy many things, but it’s also a neighborhood killer, wiping out independent small businesses of all sorts, and thereby depleting the character and vitality of urban residential districts. Big stores such as Barnes & Noble are less predatory, but they’re usually located in shopping malls, and again do nothing to support neighborhoods. If we want any independent businesses, including bookstores, to thrive, we have to shop there ourselves. Have I made that point clear enough yet?

• Jeremiah Healy ended his own life last August at age 66, leaving behind--among other things--more than a dozen novels featuring Boston private eye John Francis Cuddy. Now the organizers of Mystery Writers Key West Fest have announced the creation of the Jeremiah Healy Mystery Writing Award, aka “The Jerry,” which will salute “the author’s legacy as a beloved and influential mentor credited with helping and advising many aspiring writers. Candidates wishing to compete for the Jeremiah Healy Mystery Writing Award are invited to submit the first three pages of a finished, unpublished manuscript no later than June 30, 2015. Finalists will be notified August 1, and will have until August 10 to submit full manuscripts.” All entries should be e-mailed to JerryAward@comcast.net as Word attachments. Healy’s fiancée, mystery novelist Sandra Balzo, will serve as the head of the judging committee for this prize. The winner of the inaugural Jerry will be named during this year’s second annual Mystery Writers Key West Fest, to be held from August 14 to 16 in Key West, Florida.

• The Jerry isn’t the only new prize being readied for crime and mystery authors. Blogger Crime Thriller Girl says, “The fabulous team behind Dead Good Books have created six new crime-writing awards which will be presented in Harrogate this July at the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival.” My favorite among those commendations: The Reichenbach Falls Award for Most Epic Ending.

• Incidentally, the Dead Good folks need readers to nominate their most beloved authors and books for these prizes. Do so here.

• What is the world’s favorite Agatha Christie novel? That’s a challenging question, given that she penned 66 book-length detective or mystery tales over the course of a career that spanned more than five decades. Yet Christie’s estate is holding an online public vote to select just one “favorite” from among a shortlist of 25 options, including Murder on the Orient Express, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, And Then There Were None, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, and The Secret Adversary. Go here to cast your ballot. The winner will be declared in September, which also marks the 125th anniversary of Christie’s birth in Devonshire, England.

• Following last month’s crowning of the first winner in its regular short-story contest called “The M.O.” (S.W. Lauden’s “Fix Me” took the honors), the blog Criminal Element has announced the theme for its second such contest: “Wishful Thinking.” Editors explain that “The theme can be interpreted widely, in whatever style, tone, subgenre, targeted age range, and/or era the writer chooses.” Submissions of 1,000 to 1,500 words will be accepted from Friday, May 15, through Friday, May 29, with a shortlist of leading contenders to be broadcast on June 12. Click here for further instructions on how to enter.

• In the wake of his recently aborted retirement, British critic Mike Ripley is back with yet another installment of “Getting Away with Murder,” his monthly Shots column. The contents this time include: news that Ripley is “devoting [himself] to a study of thrillers written in the 1930s, to see how they dealt with the rise of fascism and how they portrayed Nazi Germany in the pre-war years”; word that Derek Marlowe’s 1966 spy thriller, A Dandy in Aspic, is back in print after almost four decades; the coming release (at least in the UK) of another collection of James Mitchell’s short stories featuring “reluctant professional killer” David Callan; and fresh works by Adrian Magson, Minette Walters, Don Winslow, and Louise Welsh.

• In an interview with Lisa Levy, editor of the new crime-fiction Web site, The Life Sentence, Hard Case Crime honcho Charles Ardai talks about bringing Thieves Fall Out, Gore Vidal’s 1953 thriller, back into print. He also answers Levy’s question about whether there’s “anyone’s lost manuscript you dream of publishing.”

Yes--the one I haven’t found yet! I’m always on the hunt for the next great discovery. There are a few I’ve found but haven’t been able to publish: Alan Furst’s first novel [Your Day in the Barrel, 1976], which was nominated for the Edgar Award, but is not the sort of thing he’s writing these days, so he doesn’t want it brought back into print; one of Martin Cruz Smith’s early pseudonymous novels. But the next truly big discovery is always just over the horizon, waiting to be unearthed. I never tire of the search. Hell, when [J.D.] Salinger died, I called his agent and asked, “Were any of those books in the vault crime novels, by any chance?”

• Congratulations to UK author Stephen Booth, whose first Ben Cooper-Diane Fry police procedural, Black Dog, was released to readers 15 years ago this week.

• As Jake Hinkson notes, “May 6th, 2015, will mark the 100th birthday of the late Orson Welles.” To commemorate this occasion, Hinkson is writing a series of posts for Criminal Element about actor-director Welles’ “greatest cinematic accomplishments.” He started with “the ill-fated The Other Side of the Wind,” moved on to Citizen Kane, and has now added The Stranger to his film analyses. More to come.

• Really, do we need a Roots remake?

• Michael Shonk revisits Mrs. Columbo (1979) for Mystery*File. “Perhaps the most infamous TV mystery series ever made,” he opines, “was Mrs. Columbo. The story behind Mrs. Columbo and Kate Loves a Mystery is an epic farce of clueless decisions, confusion among the involved, and the ineptness of a troubled TV network that could not stop shooting itself in the foot.” Thankfully, most of us have forgotten about this series, which Columbo co-creator William Link calls a “one-year disaster,” and star Kate Mulgrew went on to restore her reputation with Star Trek: Voyager.

• Now, this is interesting news. “Author Megan Abbott is developing an MTV series based on her book The Fever,” reports Entertainment Weekly, “working with Sarah Jessica Parker’s Pretty Matches Productions, and producer Karen Rosenfelt (who worked on The Book Thief, The Devil Wears Prada, and Twilight). Abbott will also write the pilot episode.” Congratulations, Megan!

• Isn’t this jumping the gun a bit? It’s only May, but already Crime Fiction Lover has picked “the five best crime comics of 2015.”

• Behind the scenes at the James Bond auditions, 1967.

• The British Crime Writers’ Association has announced its longlist of as-yet-unpublished contenders for the 2015 Debut Dagger Award:

-- Kate Evans, The Art of the Imperfect
-- Nigel Robbins, The Pure Drop
-- Kate Simants, Lock Me In
-- Mirandi Riwoe, The Mystery of Heloise Chancey
-- Chris Blackford, Nick Off
-- Mark Furness, Five Blind Eyes
-- Greg Keen, Last of the Soho Legends
-- Jill Sawyer, The Ice Coffin
-- Winnie M. Lee, Dark Chapter
-- Samantha Bacchus, Portrayal
-- Colleen Tully Steel, Darke House

A shortlist should come on May 15, with the winner to be named on May 30 during the CWA Dagger Awards dinner.

• The sophomore season of True Detective won’t debut until June 21, but that popular cable-TV crime drama is already receiving plenty of publicity. Here’s a rather surprising tidbit from The Wall Street Journal: “One of the biggest reasons fans went crazy for HBO’s True Detective last year was the thrill of hunting down obscure cultural Easter eggs tucked into the show, from Friedrich Nietzsche’s ‘flat circle’ to the evil Yellow King. Don’t expect a similar experience this time around, though. There won’t be any references or homages in the series’ second season, according to an emphatic statement from creator and writer Nic Pizzolatto.”

• I wasn’t in the right mood when I tried to read Susanna Clarke’s 2004 alternative history novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, so it was far from the most satisfying experience. But this first trailer for BBC-TV’s seven-part adaptation of the novel--set to air this month in Britain, and “this summer” (no specific dates yet) in the States--makes me think I’d be happier watching the story on screen.

• Jim Napier concludes his review, in January Magazine, of Philip Kerr’s new, 10th Bernie Gunther historical thriller with these promising words: “The Lady from Zagreb is, hands down, the best thing I’ve read for many months--if not longer.”

• If I owned a smart phone (my Star Trek-inspired flip phone being about as dumb but faultless as they come), I’d certainly consider buying one of these bookish cases for it.

• Here’s a forgotten writer for you: Ianthe Jerrold.

• I mentioned in my short post last spring about Denzel Washington’s The Equalizer (a film based oh-so-loosely on Edward Woodward’s 1980s TV series of the same name) that a sequel was already being discussed. The blog Double O Section now confirms that such a picture is in the works. “While Sony announced the sequel at [late April’s] Cinemacon,” writes Matthew Bradford, “little else is known at this time, including a release date, additional cast involvement, or whether Antoine Fuqua will return to direct.” Fuqua, of course, was behind the camera for Equalizer No. 1.

• And did you know that May 2 is World Naked Gardening Day? My neighbors will be relieved to learn I don’t honor this tradition.

Healy “Was Always the Welcoming Force”

I was a bit surprised, but pleased, to find that The Boston Globe’s just-published remembrance of 66-year-old author Jeremiah Healy--who took his own life on August 14--includes several quotes he gave me during an interview I conducted with him more than a decade ago for January Magazine:

John Francis Cuddy, the Hub-based hero of his 13-book mystery series, “is a man who keeps his promises, but isn’t afraid to use violence to do so,” Mr. Healy said in an April 2000 interview with January magazine. He added, however, that “the reason why I’ve been blessed with so many female readers is that Cuddy isn’t sexist. He’s also honorable in his dealings with the women in the books.”

The piece, by Globe staffer Bryan Marquard, goes on to say that “Within the community of crime writers, Mr. Healy was as loved for the time he invested as a mentor to aspiring writers as he was respected for his 18 novels and dozens of short stories.” It adds, “As a teacher [at the New England School of Law], he modeled himself after Charles Kingsfield, the Harvard Law professor portrayed by John Houseman in the film ‘The Paper Chase.’ Mr. Healy addressed students formally, by honorific and last name, and insisted they stand while answering questions.” And Marquard explains that

In a blunt, informative essay posted on his website, Mr. Healy wrote about being treated for prostate cancer a decade ago and apparently planned to write about depression, too. A week ago, [his fiancée, fellow author Sandra] Balzo was going through papers on his desk and discovered a note on a legal pad: “JH memoir on depression: Can’t see the sun even in June. A lifetime of fighting--and beating--depression.”

“Sadly, Jerry didn’t beat it,” she said by e-mail Sunday evening. “But he sure as hell did fight it.”

Click here to read the Globe’s entire report.

READ MORE: “Jeremiah Healy, Who Created Boston Private Eye, Dies at 66,” by William Yardley (The New York Times).

Jeremiah Healy Passes Away

I’ve had my head down over the last couple of days, trying to finish work on my latest column for Kirkus Reviews. Which may explain why I missed the tragic news that Jeremiah Healy--author of the Boston-based John Francis Cuddy private-eye series--committed suicide yesterday in Pompano Beach, Florida. He was only 66 years old. A post in Bill Crider’s blog says that “depression exacerbated by alcohol” contributed to Healy’s action.

Born in New Jersey on May 15, 1948, Healy was a graduate of Rutgers College and Harvard Law School, and had been a military police lieutenant, a trial attorney, and later a professor at the New England School of Law for 18 years. He’d served as the chair for the Shamus Awards, president of the Private Eye Writers of America, and president of the International Association of Crime Writers. During his writing career, he turned out at least 18 novels and dozens of short stories. His second Cuddy outing, The Staked Goat (1986), won the Shamus. Under the pseudonym Terry Devane, he also penned novels about Boston lawyer Mairead O’Clare.

I had the chance to interview Healy for January Magazine back in 2000, but saw him at more than one Bouchercon over the years. The last time, I believe, was during the 2011 convention in St. Louis. He always struck me as a smart guy, and very much a fighter. He’d already survived a bout with prostate cancer.

His fiancée, author Sandra Balzo, sent out the following message:

My heart breaks to send you all this news, especially by e-mail. As you may know, Jerry has battled chronic severe depression for years, mostly controlled by medication, but exacerbated by alcohol. Last night he took his own life. Jerry was the smartest, kindest man I’ve ever met, and I thought we’d continue to grow old together. His demons had other plans. Please keep Jerry in your heart, as you all were in his.

I offer my best wishes to his family.

FOLLOW-UP I: Not surprisingly, other writers who knew Healy have taken to social media to express their sorrow this loss. The following two notes came through Facebook.

From Reed Farrel Coleman:
“I am very saddened to learn of the suicide of my colleague Jerry Healy. Jerry was what we in my family would call a real character. He had his foibles and eccentricities, as do we all--writers more than most--but he was a good man, a caring man. It’s people like Jerry who make being part of the mystery-writing community a special thing. It’s safe to say, there won’t be another like him.”

From Brendan DuBois:
“I’m shocked and stunned beyond belief on the news that my old friend Jerry Healy has taken his own life. Fuck. He warmly introduced me to MWA when I first joined, encouraged my own writing, helped me get my first agent, and blurbed my first novel. A quiet joke between us was that he claimed he had the body of a 19-year-old paratrooper, a description I used in one of my later novels about a law professor. We sometimes would share a meal and companionship in Boston. He was a great presence at New England MWA meetings and B’cons, and could be found rounding up people to go bar-hopping or just to hang out at the bar. He always welcomed newcomers, to make them feel at home, and his output was magnificent, being a multi-Shamus Award winner. He was a true light in this field, and my Lord, he will be missed.

“An MP and law professor, he often joked he was to the right of Atilla the Hun, but you’d never know it from his warm demeanor.

“Prayers and wishes for Sandy and his family. I can’t remember feeling this sick and gobsmacked in ages.”

From Richard Helms:
“I am so shocked and saddened to learn that Shamus Award-winning author, and my friend, Jerry Healy has taken his life.”

“I first met Jerry at Sleuthfest in 2002. He attended a presentation I did on forensic profiling, and afterward he stayed and talked with me for almost an hour. I was in awe. Jerry was already a 10-time PWA Shamus Award nominee in 2002, and had won several of them, and he took time out of his conference to talk with a guy who only had two books on the shelves.

“Two years later, he agreed to provide a cover blurb for my novel Grass Sandal. A year later, he helped engineer my introduction to Bob Parker, and helped me get a cover blurb from The Master for my novel Cordite Wine. I caught up with him at Bouchercon in 2006, after Cordite Wine had garnered my third Shamus nomination, and I bought him a couple of rounds to thank him for helping out a young(ish) author who really didn’t have the street cred to merit it. He gladly accepted the drinks, but also said that if I really wanted to thank him I should ‘pay it forward’--that is, help the next author who came along asking ME for help.

“Since then, I’ve made it my policy to help any author who contacts me for whatever answers I can offer, cover blurbs for new novels, and any other assistance. When I won the Thriller Award in 2011, I told this story in my acceptance speech, and reiterated--as Jerry had taught me--that as authors, at whatever level of success we have achieved, we have the privilege and the obligation to help others up the ladder.

“Just two years ago, at Killer Nashville, we spent two or three hours in the hotel bar tossing back cold ones and talking about a little bit of everything. The next day I moderated a panel with Jerry and his partner Sandy Balzo. As always, Jerry stole the show, and he did it masterfully. I had no idea at the time that it was the last time I’d see him.

“Jerry was a very important and influential person in my early days writing and publishing mysteries, and I can honestly say that he will be dearly missed. I think I’ll mark his passing by going back and re-reading one of his excellent John Francis Cuddy novels.

“Safe travels, my friend.”

FOLLOW-UP II: And this comes from Sandy Balzo …

“I posted Monday about Robin Williams’ loss, saying, ‘Severe depression is about as far from “the blues,” as Ebola is from a cold,’ based on seeing Jerry battle through a bad bout in May and June. You can’t just ‘cheer up,’ or ‘see somebody’ or ‘take something’ and instantly make it better. Even the right drug, when you finally find it, takes days or weeks to work. Plain and simple, I said, depression kills. Little did I know that three days later it would claim my love.

“I plan to have the memorial at Jerry’s beloved Lauderdale Tennis Club [in] mid-November when the snowbirds are back in South Florida. You know how Jerry always loved a crowd.

“I’ll post the exact date and time here, as well as on the memory page: http://serenityfuneralhomeandcremation.com/book-of-memories/1929690/Healy-Jeremiah/index.php

“In the meantime, please know that I appreciate every single post, even if I don’t respond directly. We are blessed in our friends. Jerry would have been so pleased.”

READ MORE: “Farewell, Jeremiah Healy,” by Ali Karim (Shotsmag Confidential); “Interview with Jeremiah Healy,” by Jon Jordan; “The Popularity of Legal Thrillers,” by Jeremiah Healy (Mystery Fanfare).

The Book You Have to Read: “The Staked Goat,” by Jeremiah Healy

(Editor’s note: This is the 72nd installment of our ongoing Friday blog series highlighting great but forgotten books. Today’s selection comes from Chicago author Libby Fischer Hellmann. Her most recent novel is Doubleback, the second installment [after 2008’s Easy Innocence] in the private eye Georgia Davis series. Hellmann also edited Chicago Blues, a 2007 anthology of mystery stories. When not writing or editing fiction, she contributes to the group blog The Outfit.)

My entry into crime fiction was by way of thrillers. I gobbled up John le Carré, Robert Ludlum, Len Deighton, Ken Follett, and more (with the exception of Helen MacInnes, they were all men back then). In time, however, a steady diet of thrillers brought monotony: the world was on the precipice, the hero saved it, then walked off into the sunset. I remember complaining to my mother, who was and continues to be a prolific mystery reader. “Here,” she said, handing me a book. “Try this.” That book was The Staked Goat (1986), by Jeremiah Healy.

Although I didn’t know it then, I had wandered into a classic private-eye novel. In The Staked Goat Boston detective John Francis Cuddy tries to find out who murdered his old Vietnam buddy, Al Sachs. The police think Sachs’ death was the result of a ritualistic homosexual murder and want to close the case; Cuddy doesn’t buy it. His investigation takes him from Boston to Pittsburgh to the Pentagon, where he tangles with a subculture of the military whose black-market operations have flourished since the days of the Vietnam War. At the same time, Cuddy must deal with the aftermath of a previous case.

Unlike the novels I had been reading, there were no gut-wrenching pyrotechnics or impossible tasks to be accomplished in the nick of time. Instead, there was an absorbing story that dealt with real, human-scale issues. In fact, what attracted me most was the realization that crime fiction could be an excellent vehicle to explore social controversies without beating a reader over the head. Healy isn’t afraid to tackle a tough issue, one that--at the time--most would have liked to forget. He also explores society’s preconceptions about homosexuality, and, with unusual foresight for the era in which he was writing, shows how groundless they are.

But plot can only take a reader so far, and it was Healy’s characters who won me over. Al’s widow, her friends, the elderly black couple in Boston, even the antagonists--they’re all painted in shades of reality. There are no cardboard stereotypes here, no matter what race, gender, or sexual orientation--just people who laugh and cry and bleed. Everyone has a back story, and Healy sprinkles just enough of their histories into his pages to keep me reading. In that sense, the plot seems unhurried. Healy wants us to get to know these people before he reveals what will or won’t happen to them. And yet, events are carefully orchestrated. For example, one of the most touching scenes involves Cuddy taking a potential new love interest to the grave of his late wife, Beth. That’s interrupted with an explosive action scene. Perfect choreography.

The prose, crisp, lean, and muscular, takes us to the edge of terse. And while the author leaves much to his reader’s imagination, I never had questions about any character’s motivation. Healy really does show us how “less is more.”

It was Jerry Healy who started my journey into P.I. novels, police procedurals, even amateur sleuths. Over the next 10 years I read widely and eventually started writing myself. But, like a first lover, The Staked Goat has a special place in my heart. It’s a classic. Which is why you have to read this book.

READ MORE: “Jeremiah Healy’s Cuddy Edge,” by J. Kingston Pierce (January Magazine).

A Soul to Tell

Sons of Spade blogger Jochem van der Steen this week has the chance to address just three questions to veteran crime novelist Jeremiah Healy. Fortunately, one of those queries was about the status of fictional Boston private eye John Francis Cuddy, who’s still mixing it up in magazine-published short stories, but hasn’t been seen in a novel since Spiral (1999).

The 59-year-old author begins his response by lamenting that “the taste of the American public has changed. Thrillers have eclipsed private-eye novels and classic mysteries, UNLESS a substantial promotional budget is provided for those latter kinds of book.” But then he leaks the following:

The GOOD news on the Cuddy front is that a long-time friend and executive producer of television series (Martial Law, The Nero Wolfe Mysteries, Dick Van Dyke’s Diagnosis: Murder) is “pitching” Cuddy as a television series. We would probably update Cuddy as a Military Police veteran from the Persian Gulf conflict rather than the Vietnam War, and we would likely replace Cuddy’s visits to his wife at her gravesite by having an actress play the dead wife, whom only Cuddy can see (think Mike Hammer meets The Sixth Sense).

Hmm. I like the notion that Cuddy could be coming to the small screen someday. We’ve been without decent private-eye series for far too long. But the widower sleuth’s customary visits to his late wife Beth’s grave, and how he even followed the advice she supposedly gave him during those drop-bys, became a peculiar attraction of the books. And part of what made those visits so interesting was that we never saw Beth, who had perished even before the first Cuddy novel, Blunt Darts (1984), began. We simply had to take it on faith that our hero could see her, or could at least sense her in some way. To give Beth a physical presence, no matter how ghostly, would be to detract from the commitment a reader, or maybe someday a viewer, has to make in believing that Cuddy isn’t merely crazy when he goes out to seek his wife’s counsel. The device of employing incorporeal characters whom nobody but the protagonist and TV audience can see worked OK in last year’s Jeff Goldblum series, Raines, and it was of course a staple of the late-1960s British series Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased). But it’s unfortunate that TV audiences must always see to believe. Then again, if people had better imaginations, television might not be so popular.

Something New Under the Gun?

Tidbits of interesting news can be found in Ed Gorman’s “Pro-File” interview with Jeremiah Healy, author of the John Francis Cuddy P.I. series. When asked what he’s working on now, Healy answers: “A stand-alone thriller involving the stalking and implosion of a major Boston law firm. I’m also collaborating with a couple of executive producers in Hollywood on a potential police-procedural series based on, believe it or not, an aspect of investigation NOT yet tapped by the current franchise programs.”