Bullet Points: Wednesday Supersize Edition

• There’s something odd about an article setting out to highlight crime novels “that don’t start with a dead girl.” Aren’t there thousands of such works? Well, apparently killing off young women at the beginning of books has become a trend recently, enough of one at least that Bustle’s Charlotte Ahlin wants to give readers some alternatives. “Look,” she makes clear right up front, “I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with a murder mystery that centers on a young, non-living lady. But every once in a while you might want to read a mystery novel that doesn’t star a grizzled male detective hunting down the killer of a super hot female corpse. Maybe, maybe even a thriller where the non-male lead makes it all the way to the end without getting killed or horrifically brutalized at all. I know it’s a lot to ask, but there are a few books out there that manage to be mysterious and gripping without killing a woman off in the first few pages.” Ahlin’s choices include novels by Brandi Reeds, Tara French, Sujata Massey, and Sheena Kamal. (Hat tip to Mystery Fanfare.)

• While writing recently about the death of actor Burt Reynolds, I happened across a YouTube clip from a 1976 NBC-TV pilot film titled A Matter of Wife … and Death. Remembering nothing about that project, I promptly reached for Lee Goldberg’s fat and essential reference book, Unsold Television Pilots: 1955-1989, and looked it up. Goldberg explains that the 90-minute flick was a follow-up to Reynolds’ 1973 big-screener Shamus, in which he played a pool hustler-turned-New York private investigator, Shamus McCoy. The pilot placed Rod Taylor in Reynolds’ shoes, and also starred Dick Butkus, Joe Santos (who’d appeared alongside Reynolds in Shamus, but is better known for his role on The Rockford Files), and a 24-year-old Lynda Carter. This plot briefing was found on the Web’s Complete Rod Taylor Site:

The show opens with the apparent murder of a [small-time P.I.] friend of Shamus’. Shamus has to deal with an assortment of underworld types as he uncovers a gambling scheme.

In the course of the story, his romancing of (a) Zelda (Lynda Carter—the future Wonder Woman) and (b) Carol (Anne Archer) is continually cut short when duty calls. Shamus also shows off his prowess at playing pool and making scrambled eggs. He also changes his shirt a lot.

A big difference between the Burt Reynolds movie and the Rod Taylor TV show is the location. “We’ve moved the locale from New York to Los Angeles, and we have more high comedy than low,” Rod said in an April 1975 interview. But then, here’s a similarity between the actor and his character: “Shamus is a guy who is gentle with women and tough with guys.”

I have no memory of ever sitting down to watch that Taylor pilot, but it’s apparently available on the Walmart Web site for $17.99. Does anyone have an opinion on whether it’s worth buying? Maybe YouTube’s clip—embedded below—will summon up a recollection or two.



• Speaking of failed pilot films, North Carolina’s Winston-Salem Journal notes, in a wrap-up of new DVD and Blue-ray sets, the release this month of Television’s Lost Classics, Volume 2: Rare Pilots (VCI Entertainment), a collection featuring four vintage, half-hour tryout flicks that never generated small-screen series. Among those is Cool and Lam, a 1958 production based on Erle Stanley Gardner’s novels starring mismatched Los Angeles gumshoes Bertha Cool and Donald Lam, which he published under the pseudonym A.A. Fair. Gardner himself explains, in the TV pilot’s short introductory message to would-be sponsors, that “the Cool and Lam books have been successful for many years” (beginning with 1939’s The Bigger They Come). Sadly, neither that fact nor the lighthearted performances of stars Billy Pearson and Benay Venuta was enough to convince CBS, the network for which this pilot was made—already the home of Gardner’s Perry Mason—that Cool and Lam deserved placement on its weekly broadcasting schedule. If you get a chance to watch Cool and Lam either on YouTube (where a version of marginal quality can be found) or on VCI Entertainment’s new discs (which promise a “high-definition restoration” of the film), it’s easy to imagine CBS execs grousing that the plot was simply too complex for its half-hour format.

• That Cool and Lam pilot, incidentally, appears to have been shot from a script based on Gardner’s much-superior 1940 novel Turn on the Heat, which was re-released by Hard Case Crime just last year.

• Oh, and before we deviate too far from the subject of Burt Reynolds, let me direct you to Vox’s picks of half a dozen performances that defined the late actor. And for your viewing pleasure, YouTube has available full episodes from Reynolds’ 1989-1990 private-eye series, B.L. Stryker. Episodes of his previous crime drama, 1966’s Hawk, can be found here—at least as of this writing.

• One more thing: Don’t miss reading Ace Atkins’ tribute to Reynolds, found on the Web site of the South-focused Garden & Gun.

• Considering how difficult these things are to maintain at an active level, I am always quite impressed when a blog survives for more than two or three years. So hats off to The Nick Carter & Carter Brown Blog, which last week celebrated its eighth anniversary.

• If it’s such a hard, unremunerative enterprise, why do mystery/crime-fiction bloggers go to all the effort? For Sisters in Crime’s bimonthly First Draft publication, Eona Calli asked that of four familiar figures in this field, including Classic Mysteries’ Les Blatt. (Although she never spoke with yours truly, Calli was kind enough to list The Rap Sheet among crime-fiction blogs worth checking out.)

• Why mystery-fiction readers make difficult jurors.

• A good books-related question, posed by Terena Bell of The Guardian: “Why does the U.S. change so many titles?” Bell points out that those renamed books are “disproportionately” mysteries, and that altering their titles is usually a marketing decision. She adds, however, that “sometimes publishers themselves don’t know” why a book has been given a new name. Bell continues:

For example, Hitler’s Scapegoat by Stephen Koch will be released ... in the US next year as Hitler’s Pawn. I asked their publicity manager why, but she wasn’t sure and said the editor didn’t know either. Ask the Brits, she suggested.

Then there’s The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, a Stuart Turton novel renamed The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle in the States because, apparently, Americans die more frequently. When asked about the change, US publisher Sourcebooks initially joked: “Our editorial team decided to supersize it.” We’re lucky [Agatha] Christie’s Three Act [Tragedy] wasn’t upgraded to 3¼ or—horror of horrors—Tragedy 3.0. After all, this is the country that slapped the title Little Women II on Louisa May Alcott’s Good Wives.

• Coincidentally, Matthew Bradford’s post last week, in Double O Section, about how Sony and Eleventh Hour Films will be bringing Anthony Horowitz’s teenage super-spy, Alex Rider, to the small screen, provides yet another example of a dumb book-title change.

• I always enjoy a good “listicle” piece, and here are three that caught my attention recently: For CrimeReads, author Stephanie Gayle picks seven of her favorite race-against-time thrillers; that same Web site features Steve Goble, author of The Bloody Black Flag and the new The Devil’s Wind, writing about seven “pirate novels that might appeal to lovers of crime fiction”; and The Guardian hosts Sarah Ward’s choices of the “top 10 trains in novels,” including those in Ian Fleming’s From Russia, with Love and Graham Greene’s Stamboul Train. (If you’d like more suggestions of train-based mysteries, track down a copy of the Summer 2017 issue of Mystery Scene, which offers bookseller Ann Whetstone’s piece on that very subject.)

• I mentioned a couple of weeks back that, in December, U.S. publisher Brash Books will begin re-releasing Ralph Dennis’ fondly remembered Hardman series of private-eye novels. In advance of that, you can also read a “long-lost short story” by Dennis titled “Wind Spirit,” available from Amazon for just 99 cents. “It’s not vintage pulp,” says Brash co-creator Lee Goldberg, “but it might be of interest to fans of Ralph’s work for what it may reveal about his own life at the time (the late ’60s). The parallels are striking.”

• Shotsmag Confidential reports that Belfast’s NOIRELAND International Crime Festival, launched back in October 2017, will become a spring gathering next year, with events set to take place in the Northern Ireland capital from March 8 to 10, 2019. “The festival programme,” explains blogger Ayo Onatade, “will be announced and the ticket office will open on 16 November 2018.”

• I recently made the tough decision to give up Esquire, after subscribing to the magazine for more than half of my lifetime. (I just didn’t feel I fit the slick’s demographic profile any longer.) So I’m still susceptible to a bit of Esquire nostalgia. Which drew me to this short piece by Samuel Wilson of the True Pulp Fiction blog, recalling that mag’s role—primarily between 1947 and 1952—as a venue for “pulp-esque genre fiction.” One thing I hadn’t known before was how important Esquire was in promoting Henry Kane’s swingin’ Manhattan private eye, Peter Chambers. As Wilson recalls, Chambers “made his debut in February 1947 [with ‘A Matter of Motive’] and remained an Esquire exclusive through the end of the decade.”

• Leave it to Jimmy Buffett to find fun in imminent disaster. As The Washington Post reported last week, in advance of Hurricane Florence’s brutal touchdown in the southeastern United States, the singer-songwriter finally got to live out his 2009 song lyric about “goin’ surfing in a hurricane.”

• New York author and music critic Jim Fusilli announced on Facebook last week that publisher Open Road Media will soon be reissuing his three well-regarded Terry Orr private-eye novels—at least in e-book format. Kindle editions of Closing Time (originally published in 2001), A Well-Known Secret (from 2002), and Tribeca Blues (2003) are all scheduled go on sale on October 9.

• The trailer for The Ballard of Buster Scruggs looks fantastic! That anthology-format Western film (more details here), directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, will begin streaming on Netflix on November 13.

• “Reading fiction from around the world can be key to understanding larger geopolitical questions,” opines Tobias Carroll. “Reading procedurals, which innately focus on questions of the law, societal norms, and questions of history, is especially edifying.”

• Some of the all-time-worst covers have been made for Kindle e-books. (Hell, there’s a whole Tumblr blog devoted to such design disasters.) But the front of Tom Leins’ Slug Bait (Dirty Books)—shown on the left—is powerful and ugly enough to draw attention from a dead man. It also seems appropriate for a violent story that reviewer David Nemeth says “is like immersing yourself in a vat of feces, vomit, and blood.”

• I don’t know who’s behind the pseudonym “dfordoom,” but he or she deserves my Big Thumbs-Up of the Week, based on this Cult TV Lounge post extolling the virtues of the 1975-1976 NBC-TV series Ellery Queen, which starred Jim Hutton as mystery writer/sleuth Ellery and David Wayne as his father, Inspector Richard Queen. I, too, remain a fan of that show (developed by Columbo creators Richard Levinson and William Link), as I slowly but surely make my way through the many Ellery Queen novels.

• This is excellent news! From The Hollywood Reporter:

Vincent D’Onofrio is headed to Epix.

The actor, who has been recurring on Netflix’s Marvel drama Daredevil, has booked a co-starring role on the premium cable network's forthcoming series Godfather of Harlem.

Picked up straight to series in April, Godfather of Harlem tells the true story of crime boss Bumpy Johnson (Forest Whitaker), who in the early 1960s returned after 10 years in prison to find the neighborhood he once ruled in shambles. With the streets controlled by the Italian mob, Bumpy takes on the Genovese crime family to regain control. During the brutal battle, he forms an alliance with radical preacher Malcolm X—catching his political rise in the crosshairs of social upheaval and a mob war that threatens to tear the city apart.

The project is described as a collision of the criminal underworld and the civil rights movement during one of the most tumultuous times in American history.

• From the blog Vintage Everyday: “The Story Behind the Iconic Farrah Fawcett Red Swimsuit Poster That Wound Up Plastered on Millions of Bedroom Walls.”

• “Stephen King knows crime,” explains Max Booth III. “He grew up mainlining pulp legends like Richard Stark and John D. MacDonald. He was a goddamn noir geek, if you want to know the truth. When MacDonald agreed to write the introduction for King’s debut collection, Night Shift, he nearly pissed himself.” Booth’s look at the broad diversity of King’s crime and mystery fiction is here.

• Julia Roberts has sure come a long way since her role in 1990’s Pretty Woman. In the upcoming Amazon Prime psychological drama Homecoming—based on a podcast of the same name created by Eli Horowitz and Micah Bloomberg—she plays Heidi Bergman, described by the Killing Times blog as “a caseworker at the Homecoming Transitional Support Center, a Geist Group facility helping soldiers transition back to civilian life. … Four years later, Heidi has started a new life, living with her mother (Sissy Spacek) and working as a small-town waitress, when a Department of Defense auditor (Shea Whigham) comes to her with questions about why she left the facility. Heidi begins to realize there’s a whole other story behind the story she’s been telling herself.” Homecoming will debut on November 2.

• The presence in American culture of Richard Boone’s 1957-1963 CBS-TV Western series, Have Gun–Will Travel, extended well beyond the small screen. Paul Bishop presents the evidence.

• I have launched a fun new series in my Killer Covers blog, looking at how vintage artists might differ substantially in what they emphasized when painting fronts for the same book. We’re only two installments into this series so far, found here and here.

• How to look like … Modesty Blaise!

• Those darn crime-fiction writers, they just keep on talking, don’t they! Here are some interviews that have turned up recently around the Web: Scott Von Doviak chats with MysteryPeople’s Scott Montgomery about his “one-of-a-kind” debut novel, Charlesgate Confidential; Paula Hawkins (The Girl on the Train) answers questions from The Guardian; NPR Weekend Edition Saturday host Scott Simon speaks with Sarah Weinman about her new non-fiction book, The Real Lolita; Nancie Clare’s latest podcast conversation is with Margaret Mizushima, the author of Burning Ridge, her fourth Timber Creek K-9 mystery; January Magazine’s Linda L. Richards goes one-on-one with Dietrich Kalteis (Poughkeepsie Shuffle); The New York Times manages a chinwag with the ever-elusive “Robert Galbraith” (J.K. Rowling), author of the new Cormoran Strike mystery, Lethal White; Saskatchewan lawyer/blogger Bill Selnes conducts a short exchange with Jayne “J.E.” Baynard, who penned When the Flood Falls; and Crimespree Magazine quizzes Warren C. Easley about Moving Targets, the sixth of his Oregon-set Cal Claxton mysteries.

• Author Scott Von Doviak is a resident of Austin, Texas, but his new novel, Charlesgate Confidential (Hard Case Crime), is set in Boston, Massachusetts. That makes him eligible to comment on “How George V. Higgins Invented the Boston Crime Novel,” as he does for CrimeReads; and about five writers—younger than either Higgins or Robert B. Parker—who are “taking Boston noir in exciting new directions,” his topic for the Strand Magazine blog.

• By the way, the story Von Doviak rolls out in Charlesgate Confidential was inspired by the mysterious and shocking theft, in March 1990, of 13 irreplaceable works of art from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. If you’d like to learn more about that “largest unsolved art heist in history,” note that The Boston Globe and public radio station WBUR-FM have just launched a podcast, “Last Seen,” which is re-examining and unearthing new details about the 28-year-old crime. You can listen to the episodes here.

• And for its next issue, Mystery Readers Journal is on the hunt for articles about “mysteries that take place in the Far East.” The deadline is October 10. For additional submission details, click here.

Movin’ Me Down the Highway

Earlier today, my predominately favorable review of Jim Fusilli’s new novel, Billboard Man (Thomas & Mercer), was posted on the Kirkus Reviews Web site. Click here to read the piece.

Prior to penning that critique, I conducted a brief e-mail interview with Fusilli, a New York City resident who, since 2008, has been The Wall Street Journal’s rock and pop music critic. I was curious about a few things having to do with Billboard Man and its 2012 predecessor, Road to Nowhere--both of which feature a traveling-man protagonist known as Sam Jellico (whose real name, revealed in Billboard Man, is Donald Harry Bliss)--and Fusilli was kind enough to answer my questions.

At the time, I didn’t know how much of our exchange might make it into the Kirkus article--and as it happens, not much did. So I’ve decided to offer the best portions of that interview below, covering Fusilli’s early fiction, his comeback novel, Narrows Gate, and what’s to be expected from future entries in his new series.

J. Kingston Pierce: Between 2001 and 2004, you published a quartet of novels featuring New York writer-turned-private eye Terry Orr, beginning with Closing Time and concluding with Hard, Hard City. But then you conceded in an interview that the P.I.-fiction field wasn’t necessarily the best place for your writing. What is it about the Sam Jellico/Donnie Bliss books that fits better with your desires and expectations as a novelist?

Jim Fusilli: I feel I outgrew the first-person narrative style that I used in the first four novels. Or at least I was eager to experiment with craft. I thought I’d put myself in a box and I wanted to do more. I was getting better simply because of the demands of having to do a novel a year. I was watching what Dennis Lehane, George Pelecanos, and Michael Connelly were doing, writers I had a chance to got to know a bit, and I saw they were writers who wrote crime stories, not “crime writers.” I wanted to reposition myself to be a writer first, regardless of genre and even if I loved genre-writing best of all.

Also, as you can imagine, I’m influenced deeply by musicians and the ones I admire the most always seem to want to stretch and to challenge themselves. I wanted to hold myself to the same standards I was demanding of musicians I was writing about for the Journal.

In the Sam series, the canvas is much broader: the entire U.S. vs. New York City. The stories are populated with people from a variety of backgrounds and geographic locations. Also, I’m using techniques that are popular in high-end TV these days, where I think we’re seeing great writing: fast-cutting from one plot point to another; many characters who contribute to advancing the arc of the story; threads that seem unrelated, yet come together slowly; and others.

JKP: What were your inspirations for this new series? If I had to venture a guess, I would say that you were an enthusiastic watcher of drifter-on-the-run-does-good TV shows in your youth--The Fugitive, Run for Your Life, etc.--and have made that genre your own here. But I could certainly be wrong. What’s the truth?

JF: You’re right. I mention contemporary TV often, but in some ways, Sam is like Richard Kimble in The Fugitive or Tod [Stiles] and Buz [Murdock] in Route 66, two series from the ’60s. He shows up in town and is drawn into mischief and misadventure. The new characters who appear in each book carry the story, to an extent, as they did in those shows. My books are populated with fully drawn “guest stars.”

JKP: There’s a good deal of subtle humor in Billboard Man. Was that intentional, or is it simply part of the way you compose fiction? And what value do you think humor has in crime and mystery tales?

JF: When I stopped writing novels in 2006, I set out to prove to myself, and maybe to the industry, that I could write in different styles and voices; that I was more versatile and maybe a bit more ambitious than I had shown. I wrote many, many short stories, many of which were published, and I found that using humor accelerated action and delineated characters. I know it sounds obvious, but if you can write funny, it’s fun.

In Narrows Gate, the novel that changed my career, there are characters who have varying means of expressing humor. That was a breakthrough for me--to be humorous in different ways as a means to create a hierarchy for the characters. I prize wit in people, so I prize in it characters too. My favorite characters are the witty ones. Also, there are several brief comedic bits in Narrows Gate that can work without context. I wanted to see if could write gags.

It’s the juxtaposition that makes it so valuable in creating a vivid reality in crime-fiction stories. Life is not an unending stretch of noir moments. Peculiar things happen, curious things, humorous things. Sometimes they happen a moment before terror begins. Why not exploit this? Give the reader a breather. And once they’re relaxed and laughing ...

JKP: What were your original expectations of--or concerns about--Sam Jellico, and how well do you think he’s developing in your books?

JF: Without giving too much away, I will say that I knew from the beginning that I wanted Sam to evolve. In Billboard Man, for example, he learns a hard lesson about the impropriety of his treatment of women. I hint at this in Road to Nowhere, but it’s explicit in Billboard Man. There’s a scene in Billboard Man in which he’s dressed down, and it’s what he deserved. He’s better for it, but it’s not easy to witness.

This required that I write vivid, multidimensional women characters. I was very conscious of that when I created [Billboard Man characters] Ginger, Cotillion, and Lola. They seem real to me in an almost tactile way. The men--Joe Blunt and Boone [Stillwell]--are archetypes, deliberately so.

JKP: Sam seems like such a controlled player. Do you really think he’s capable of carrying an extended series?

JF: Not as he is in Road to Nowhere. But if you think about his scenes with his late wife, Moira, that are revealed in flashback, you see the kind of man he was and might be again. As I said, in Billboard Man he grows. I think he’s someone worth caring about. He’s a tragic figure.

JKP: Are you currently at work on a sequel to Billboard Man? If so, can you say a little about that story’s plot?

JF: I always have the next book done by the time the current book is published. It’s my way. Again, it’s one of those things I learned from musicians. When something is done, move on. So the day after a manuscript is finished, I start something new, if only the research and sketching.

In Billboard Man, Sam is exposed. His real identity is revealed. The Wall Street powerbroker, Francis Cherry, wants him to come back to New York. In the next book, we find out why and whether he will. Also, there’s a character who appears in the first pages of Road to Nowhere, but who is never heard from for the remainder of that book or in Billboard Man. She’s a major player in the next book, so much so that she could carry the story by herself. There’s a small universe of recurring characters in the first two novels that contribute to the third book.

JKP: Perhaps the most interesting relationship in these yarns is that between Sam and his estranged college-student daughter. How do you imagine that relationship progressing?

JF: At the heart of this series is the question of whether Sam and his daughter, who he calls Pup, can be a family again--whether they can be repaired or repair each other. Another question: What role will Cherry play in bringing them together or forcing them to remain apart? I see the series as having two end points on the distant horizon: Will Sam seek to avenge his wife’s murder? And will he and Pup reunite?

JKP: In the crime/mystery/thriller fiction field--both modern and historical--whose work do you most enjoy reading these days?

JF: If you don’t mind, I prefer not to answer that question. I’ve made many friends in the worlds of mystery, crime, and thrillers--it is the most welcoming community, as you know. I always feel I’m slighting someone when I start mentioning writers I enjoy. I will say that when I was studying how to develop characters that emerged organically from setting, I read Daniel Woodrell and Kent Haruf with the same intensity as I read Willa Cather and other great American authors. I don’t know if Haruf is considered a genre writer, but everyone should read him.

JKP: Finally, didn’t you tell me not long ago that you’d like to write a sequel to Narrows Gate? What’s the status of that book?

JF: I’ve been asked to write a sequel to it, yes. It’s been a challenge. I wrote Narrows Gate as if it were the last novel I’d ever write--I had no idea that it would be published, never mind be successful. Everything I wanted to say about the subject is in that book: the Italian-American experience; the demythologizing of The Godfather myth; the value of loyalty and the meaning of friendship; how we derive our sense of identity; and the price we pay in our struggle to succeed.

But as I worked on early drafts, I was pleased to rediscover several characters, particularly Benno and Bell, who are vivid and compelling, at least to me. There’s a suggestion in Narrows Gate of where they can go--and where they can fail. I’ve developed a few new characters who are staring to feel real. Also, Narrows Gate ended in 1946, which is at the precipice of a fascinating period in American history. I think I’ll be all right. I’ve got about 600 pages that are an awful mess, but there’s a story in there.

Our Man on the Aisle

Most of us know Jim Fusilli as the creator of the marvelous New York-based Terry Orr private-eye series and as a contributor to several recent anthologies.

But as it happens, Fusilli is also the rock music critic for The Wall Street Journal, and as Sarah Weinman pointed out, his review of the Led Zeppelin reunion concert in Greenwich, England, appeared online beyond the reach of the Journal’s firewall (although a story in The New York Times suggested that new owner Rupert Murdoch may dismantle the damned barrier soon).

I had occasion to talk with Jim during Bouchercon 2005 not about mysteries, but about his musical assignments for the Journal. I remember commending him on the piece he wrote about Brian Wilson’s long-awaited (and even longer-rumored) Smile album, and the concert Wilson performed in London in 2004. Jim’s eyes lit up as he told me about that sublime evening. As it turns out, I was in London at the same time, and had I known this show was going down, I’d have willingly inflicted some serious credit-card damage in an attempt to round up enough cash to enrich some scalper.

Here’s a marvelous piece of Jim Fusilli’s music writing. Let’s hope that someday all of his Wall Street Journal pieces will be collected in an anthology.

(Hat tip to Sarah Weinman.)