• Today brings the official release of Lawrence Block’s The Autobiography of Matthew Scudder (LB Productions), plus an interview with the author, whose 85th birthday just happens to be June 24. Kevin Burton Smith, editor of The Thrilling Detective Web Site, had an opportunity recently to question Block via e-mail, and he combines the results of their exchange with incisive observations about the book itself—and its unlikely existence. Read all about it here.
• Several of PBS-TV’s most-loved Masterpiece Mystery! programs are slated to reappear on U.S. television screens over the next four months. Season 8 of the British historical detective drama Grantchester, starring Tom Brittney and Robson Green, will make its debut on Sunday, July 9. Season 5 of Unforgotten, the cold-case-focused puzzler featuring Sanjeev Bhaskar and this year introducing Sinéad Keenan in the role of Detective Chief Inspector Jessica “Jessie” James, will premiere on Sunday, September 3. On that same date, watch for the Season 3 start of Van der Valk, the Amsterdam-set crime drama starring Marc Warren and Maimie McCoy, and inspired by the novels of Nicolas Freeling. Finally, the sophomore series of Annika—the Scottish mystery featuring Nicola Walker (formerly of Unforgotten) as the head of a Glasgow-based marine homicide unit—is scheduled to begin airing on Sunday, October 15. Click here to see a brief promotional video covering all of these shows.
• This year’s Shirley Jackson Award nominees have been announced. Named for the author of The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, among other works, these prizes recognize “outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic.” There are six categories of contenders, the following works vying for Best Novel:
— Beulah, by Christi Nogle (Cemetery Gates)
— The Dead Friends Society, by Paul Gandersman and Peter Hall (Encyclopocalypse)
— The Devil Takes You Home, by Gabino Iglesias (Mulholland)
— Jackal, by Erin E. Adams (Bantam)
— Unwieldy Creatures, by Addie Tsai (Jaded Ibis Press)
— Where I End, by Sophie White (Tramp Press)
The five remaining divisions of nominees can be found here. Winners are to be declared on Saturday, July 15, at Readercon 32, the Conference on Imaginative Literature, in Quincy, Massachusetts.
• I love cats, but don’t usually gravitate toward mysteries in which they play significant roles. Kate Jackson, the blogger at Cross-Examining Crime, is of quite another mind altogether. Here she lists her 10 favorite crime novels featuring felines, by authors as renowned as Erle Stanley Gardner, Dolores Hitchins, and Stuart Palmer.
• Martin Edwards offers a few comments about (and photos from) last weekend’s Shetland Noir Festival in Lerwick, Scotland.
• Back in late March, CrimeReads’ Olivia Rutigliano enumerated “The 19 Scruffiest Detectives in Crime Film and TV.” Now she’s balanced that out with a rundown of “The 19 Most Polished Detectives in Crime Film and TV.” Andre Braugher’s Frank Pembleton (Homicide), Bertie Carvel’s Adam Dalgliesh (Dalgliesh), Gene Barry’s Amos Burke (Burke’s Law), and both Pierce Brosnan’s Remington Steele and Stephanie Zimbalist’s Laura Holt (Remington Steele) made the cut.
• It seems made-for-TV movies are once more having a moment, thanks to the proliferation of streaming channels. In my younger years, I loved many such one-off wonders, especially those imbued with considerable suspense (The Night Stalker and Duel, for instance), those with a crime or espionage angle (House on Greenapple Road, Assignment: Munich), others focused on natural disasters (The Day After, Hurricane), and those that served as series pilots (Genesis II, Smile, Jenny, You’re Dead). But teleflicks had pretty much fallen out of favor by the 1990s. Now, however, writes Randee Dawn of the Los Angeles Times, “the explosion of content on streamers (along with changes in the theatrical system during and post-pandemic) is causing filmmakers to rethink what a movie made for television can be.”
Showing posts with label Lawrence Block. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lawrence Block. Show all posts
Saturday, June 24, 2023
Friday, June 02, 2023
Block from the Beginning
Consider this an early birthday present to Lawrence Block, the prolific New York crime fictionist and Mystery Writers of America Grand Master who will turn an amazing 85 years old on June 24. Robert Deis, an expert on the art of vintage men’s adventure magazines, and Wyatt Doyle, the self-proclaimed “ringmaster” at publisher New Texture—who together produce the Men's Adventure Library line—recently released two editions of their latest entry in that series: The Naked and the Deadly: Lawrence Block in Men's Adventure Magazines.
Block started his writing career in the 1950s, when he was an editorial associate with the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, charged with reading and generally rejecting paid submissions by folks angling for entry into the publishing world. He got his feet wet by penning fiction and very lightly researched non-fiction (mostly under pseudonyms such as Sheldon Lord) to be placed in male-oriented periodicals on the order of Real Men, All Man, and For Men Only, earning “a cent a word, sometimes a cent and a half,” as he explains in this book’s introduction. Many of those stories, he recalls, “I wrote of my own initiative,” but other times “an editor would call the office with an assignment. He needed 2,500 words to fill a hole in an issue [of a magazine] that was about to go to press, say, or he had a terrific idea and needed someone to write it up. A shipwreck, or a disaster, or a Very Bad Man—generally something it would never occur to me to write, but more often than not an occasion to which I was prepared to rise.”
(Left) The expanded, full-color hardcover edition of The Naked and the Deadly, with bonus content. (Right) The slimmed-down, black-and-white paperback version, which the editors say honors “Block’s many successes in that format.”
The softcover edition The Naked and the Deadly contains a dozen dusty Block tales, printed in men’s adventure magazines (MAMs) between 1958 and 1968. “Some of the stories included,” says the blog Paperback Warrior, “will be familiar to long-time Blockheads. ‘Great Istanbul Land Grab’ and ‘Bring on the Girls’ are extracts from existing Block novels”—The Thief Who Couldn’t Sleep and The Scoreless Thai, respectively—“starring his sleepless adventurer Evan Tanner. There are also three novellas starring his private detective Ed London previously reprinted in Block’s [2008] collection, One Night Stands and Lost Weekends.” Paperback Warrior questions the fact that the initial story on offer here, “Queen of the Clipper Ships,” is included, given that the author asserts he didn’t compose it. But editor Doyle tells me “Clipper Ships” has been previously credited to Block, thanks to its original “Sheldon Lord” byline, and was used at the author’s request:
By the way, if you are a real Lawrence Block enthusiast, there are 200 copies available of a signed and numbered edition of the expanded hardcover. Pick up one of those here while supplies last.
I can only agree with Paperback Warrior’s assessment that “overall, this collection from a mystery grandmaster is an easy recommendation. If you’re on the fence, take the plunge.”
READ MORE: “The Naked and the Deadly—Lawrence Block,” by James Reasoner (Rough Edges); “The Naked and the Deadly: Lawrence Block in Men’s Adventure Magazines,” by dfordoom (Vintage Pop Fictions).
SEE MORE: Paperback Parade editor Gary Lovisi examines The Naked and the Deadly in this YouTube video.
Block started his writing career in the 1950s, when he was an editorial associate with the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, charged with reading and generally rejecting paid submissions by folks angling for entry into the publishing world. He got his feet wet by penning fiction and very lightly researched non-fiction (mostly under pseudonyms such as Sheldon Lord) to be placed in male-oriented periodicals on the order of Real Men, All Man, and For Men Only, earning “a cent a word, sometimes a cent and a half,” as he explains in this book’s introduction. Many of those stories, he recalls, “I wrote of my own initiative,” but other times “an editor would call the office with an assignment. He needed 2,500 words to fill a hole in an issue [of a magazine] that was about to go to press, say, or he had a terrific idea and needed someone to write it up. A shipwreck, or a disaster, or a Very Bad Man—generally something it would never occur to me to write, but more often than not an occasion to which I was prepared to rise.”
(Left) The expanded, full-color hardcover edition of The Naked and the Deadly, with bonus content. (Right) The slimmed-down, black-and-white paperback version, which the editors say honors “Block’s many successes in that format.”
The softcover edition The Naked and the Deadly contains a dozen dusty Block tales, printed in men’s adventure magazines (MAMs) between 1958 and 1968. “Some of the stories included,” says the blog Paperback Warrior, “will be familiar to long-time Blockheads. ‘Great Istanbul Land Grab’ and ‘Bring on the Girls’ are extracts from existing Block novels”—The Thief Who Couldn’t Sleep and The Scoreless Thai, respectively—“starring his sleepless adventurer Evan Tanner. There are also three novellas starring his private detective Ed London previously reprinted in Block’s [2008] collection, One Night Stands and Lost Weekends.” Paperback Warrior questions the fact that the initial story on offer here, “Queen of the Clipper Ships,” is included, given that the author asserts he didn’t compose it. But editor Doyle tells me “Clipper Ships” has been previously credited to Block, thanks to its original “Sheldon Lord” byline, and was used at the author’s request:
When [Block] told us the story wasn't his, naturally we said we’d take it out. But he said nope, he wanted it in. So we proposed it as a special bonus for the deluxe hardcover alone, but he insisted it be included in all editions. And then of course in his intro, he says, I didn’t write it, but since it’s been attributed to me all this time, it’s mine now. This kind of playfulness has been a component of nearly every conversation with LB while working on the book, so we like that this bit of it carried over into the book for readers to share in. And of course almost all of the supplementary info in the expanded hardcover’s editorial comments illustrates where various bits and bobs were borrowed, swiped, repurposed, and reused, in the grand MAM tradition.As regards that aforereferenced hardcover version of this collection, it features an additional 60 pages of material, including magazine covers and interior spreads; context regarding the oft-salacious slant of MAMs; Block’s history of employing noms de plume; and “an entire 8,000-word story exclusive to the hardcover edition.” Said bonus yarn, “Erotic Life of the ‘Fly Me’ Stewardesses,” is an excerpt from Sex and the Stewardess (1972), “one of far too many purportedly factual books I wrote as John Warren Wells,” Block remarks. Yes, the hardcover edition is priced at $39.95—a full $23 more than the paperback—but it’s handsome and well worth the extra expense.
Though the decision to Include “Clipper Ships” was Block’s, in the end it’s become one more way the book endeavors to immerse the reader in the MAM experience.
By the way, if you are a real Lawrence Block enthusiast, there are 200 copies available of a signed and numbered edition of the expanded hardcover. Pick up one of those here while supplies last.
I can only agree with Paperback Warrior’s assessment that “overall, this collection from a mystery grandmaster is an easy recommendation. If you’re on the fence, take the plunge.”
READ MORE: “The Naked and the Deadly—Lawrence Block,” by James Reasoner (Rough Edges); “The Naked and the Deadly: Lawrence Block in Men’s Adventure Magazines,” by dfordoom (Vintage Pop Fictions).
SEE MORE: Paperback Parade editor Gary Lovisi examines The Naked and the Deadly in this YouTube video.
Friday, April 10, 2020
Bullet Points: Making the Best of It Edition
• London’s Goldsboro Books has announced
its longlist of a dozen contenders for the 2020 Glass Bell Award, a prize meant to celebrate “the best storytelling across contemporary fiction.” About half of the books—identified below with asterisks—are obviously or at least arguably drawn from the crime/mystery side.
— Imaginary Friend, by Stephen Chbosky (Orion)
— Darkdawn, by Jay Kristoff (HarperVoyager)
— The Starless Sea, by Erin Morgenstern (Harvill Secker)
— The Lost Ones, by Anita Frank (HQ)
— My Sister, the Serial Killer, by Oyinkan Braithwaite (Atlantic)*
— The Farm, by Joanne Ramos (Bloomsbury)
— Girl, Woman, Other, by Bernardine Evaristo (Hamish Hamilton)
— The Second Sleep, by Robert Harris (Cornerstone)*
— Blood & Sugar, by Laura Shepherd-Robinson (Mantle)*
— Daisy Jones and the Six, by Taylor Jenkins Reid (Cornerstone)
— Nothing Important Happened Today, by Will Carver (Orenda)*
— The Silent Patient, by Alex Michaelides (Orion Books)*
A shortlist of six Glass Bell finalists is expected to be released on May 11, with the winner to be named on July 2.
• In advance of Bosch’s return to Amazon Prime next Friday, April 17, Crime Fiction Lover briefly recaps the last five seasons of that Michael Connelly-supervised police-procedural series.
• This apparently coincidental cover similarity (see above) is sure to create confusion when it comes to ordering books. In the Dark, by Loreth Anne White, was released last December by Montlake Romance. Somewhere in the Dark, by R.J. Jacobs, is set to debut in August, from Crooked Lane. (Hat tip to Linda L. Richards.)
• It had to happen: ThrillerFest XV, which had been arranged for July 7-11 in New York City, has been cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. An e-mail notice from executive director Kimberley Howe says, “We will be providing full refunds to everyone, and you will receive those funds in approximately two weeks, as soon as Cvent (our registration provider) can process our request.” But all is not lost. “To help you avoid ThrillerFest withdrawal,” says Howe, “we will be offering, in July, a virtual conference that you can enjoy from the safety of your own home. This event will include PitchFest, ConsultFest, Master Class, the Debut Author Breakfast, the Thriller Awards Presentation, and other special ThrillerFest presentations. Current registrants will have first dibs to register for these events before others are welcomed to join in the fun (if there’s still space). Details and your chance to sign up will follow soon.”
• As he explains it, about three weeks ago Scottish novelist Peter May (The Blackhouse, A Silent Death) was asked by someone on Twitter whether he had any interest in composing a story set against today’s novel coronavirus scare. At which point May realized, “I had already done just that.” It seems that about a decade and a half ago, at a time when he despaired of his career future, May penned Lockdown, a thriller that imagined a global pandemic of bird flu. Unfortunately, the book was rejected by publishers as “unrealistic” and “unimaginable in present-day London.” May’s outlook on publishing was soon after buoyed by the release (originally in France) of The Blackhouse, and he shelved Lockdown, not expecting it ever to reach readers. Until now. With the novel coronavirus making grim news worldwide, British publisher Quercus is rushing Lockdown into print. It will go on sale in the UK on April 30; its U.S. premiere will be August 18.
• A different book with the same title is coming from publisher Polis in mid-June. Edited by Nick Kolakowski and Steve Weddle, Lockdown: Stories of Terror, Crime, and Hope During a Pandemic is an anthology of short stories that LitReactor says take place “against the background of a nationalized lockdown in response to a (fictional) virus, which mutates rapidly as it jumps from person to person. Cities are under martial law. The skies are clear as all planes are grounded. Some people panic, while some go to heroic lengths to save those they love—and others use the chaos as an opportunity to engage in purest evil. From New York City to the Mexican border, from the Deep South to the misty shores of Seattle, their characters are fighting for survival against incredible odds.” Proceeds from the sale of this collection are supposed to go to BINC, the Book Industry Charitable Foundation, a non-profit enterprise “that assists booksellers in need.”
• Which brings us to this good news: The U.S. branch of Sisters in Crime has accelerated its support program for bookstores. The organization usually awards $500 every month to a deserving shop “to use for promotion, marketing, or hosting book-signing events.” But, it has announced, “in response to the current pandemic, we will be drawing the winners for the rest of 2020—nine winners—on April 16, 2020. We want to get these prizes out while the need is great. The deadline for entry is April 15. All other entry criteria remain the same.” Entry details are available here.
• Meanwhile, author Laurie R. King is holding an unusual auction. The person who contributes the most money will win the opportunity to name a character in King’s 2021 novel (to be set in Transylvania in 1925). Proceeds from this auction go to the Second Harvest Food Bank of Santa Cruz County, California, which King says “is stepping up [during the current pandemic] with drive-by food giveaways serving hundreds of families at a time—families whose breadwinners pick our fruit, clean our rooms, pack our home deliveries, care for our sick.” You have until Wednesday, April 15, to make an auction bid and become eligible for these naming rights. If you simply want to donate to the food bank, you can do so at that same link.
• In case you’re feeling too happy of late, Zach Vasquez suggests you read “The 12 Darkest Endings in the History of Noir Fiction.”
• Easter mysteries to relish over the coming holiday.
• Need some film fun this weekend? Empire of Deception author Dean Jobb picks “10 of the Greatest Con Artist Movies of All Time.”
• Actor James Drury, who died this last Monday at age 85, may be best-remembered for starring in the 1962-1971 NBC-TV western series The Virginian. (Not bad for somebody who was actually born in New York City—nowhere in spitting distance of America’s frontier reaches.) However, he also played Captain Spike Ryerson in the short-lived 1974 ABC drama Firehouse, featured in three episodes of Walker, Texas Ranger, and guest-starred on everything from Bourbon Street Beat, Michael Shayne, and Perry Mason to It Takes a Thief, Ironside, and The Fall Guy. Drury’s lengthy catalogue of credits is here.
• This item comes from In Reference to Murder:
Gene Siskel; Mayor Ed Koch of New York; and Mad’s mascot, Alfred E. Neuman. His drawing for a 1970 Time magazine cover, ‘Battle for the Senate,’ now in the National Portrait Gallery, featured a pileup of 15 individually characterized political figures, including President Richard M. Nixon and Vice President Spiro T. Agnew. Mad’s takeoff on the MGM retrospective feature That’s Entertainment, published in 1975, required Mr. Drucker to caricature more than two dozen stars.” (Drucker applied the same aesthetic to his poster art for the 1971 Mafia comedy film, The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight.) Let’s give the final word here to Saturday Evening Post art critic David Apatoff, who recalls in his blog: “Drucker was such a humble, gentle soul, I could never quite figure out where he found the drive and ambition to create his hundreds of beautiful stories, decade after decade. The opposite of competitive, he was as generous and open-minded an artist as I’ve ever known. Yet he maintained the excruciatingly high standards to stay up late night after night crafting marvelous drawings, working out likenesses for his caricatures and populating his pictures with details and humor that reflected his abundance of spirit.”
• Scott D. Parker’s obituary of Drucker, in Diversions of the Groovy Kind, features the cartoonist’s parody of the 1972 disaster pic The Poseidon Adventure, retitled “The Poopsidedown Adventure.”
• For its part, Spy Write recalls Drucker’s satirical twist on the 1966 picture The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.
• There’s a new crime-fiction podcast worth sampling: Tartan Noir. As the program’s Web site explains, this hour-long offering will spotlight Scottish crime-fiction writing, and will be hosted “by author and broadcaster Theresa Talbot, who’s joined each week by a special guest (fellow authors, journalists or celebrity fans).” Val McDermid lent her voice and knowledge to the first episode, while on the second, Talbot spoke with Liam McIlvanney.
• Here’s one other podcast recommendation, courtesy of Dave Knadler. In his blog, Dave’s Fiction Warehouse, he extols the “lovely, measured tones” of Phoebe Judge’s voice as she reads classic mysteries. Judge has hosted the podcast Criminal for several years; but since the onset of today’s pandemic, she’s also been reading—chapter by chapter—such famous works as The Mysterious Affair at Styles, by Agatha Christie, and The Hound of the Baskervilles, by Arthur Conan Doyle. You can listen in at Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Let’s hope Judge continues these readings past the time when all of us can resume something approaching our normal lives.
• Way back in 2008, author Mark Coggins contributed a multi-part series to The Rap Sheet about The New Black Mask magazine, a short-lived 1980s revival of the publication that had helped launch the careers of so many well-known crime-fictionists. In Coggins’ assessment of the final, 1987 edition of NBM, he talked about John D. MacDonald, who was that issue’s feature focus and who was interviewed briefly in its pages. What wasn’t included with his article, however, was the full text of Macdonald’s “brusque” exchange with co-editor Richard Layman. But now, Tennessee banker-turned-writer Steve Scott has posted that interview in his MacDonald-oriented blog, The Trap of Solid Gold, for all of us to appreciate.
• Ace Atkins’ next (ninth) novel starring one-named Boston P.I. Spenser will be Robert B. Parker’s Someone to Watch Over Me, scheduled for release (from Putnam) in November.
• Illinois writer Thomas McNulty is behind the book-review blog Dispatches from the Last Outlaw, but it turns out he also has a YouTube channel, McNulty’s Book Corral, on which he talks about reading matters. Some of the episodes have focused on westerns and science fiction, but here he enthuses over Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer novels (and Max Allan Collins’ continuation of that series). And here he focuses on “man-bait paperbacks,” soap-operaish works with romantic themes and “saucy” covers, marketed toward male readers. McNulty must have an outstanding collection of vintage softcovers.
• Elmore Leonard seems to be a popular subject this week, as Craig Pittman celebrates that author’s strong Florida connections in CrimeReads, and Don Winslow writes in Deadline about how he “almost made a movie with Elmore Leonard.”
• Winslow also talks with Thomas Pluck, for Criminal Element, about his fresh-off-the-vine short-story collection, Broken.
• Two more worthy exchanges: Nancie Clare’s chat with Cara Black (Three Hours in Paris) for her podcast, Speaking of Mysteries; and the delightful Hilary Davidson’s conversation with Frank Zafiro about her sixth novel, Don’t Look Down, for Wrong Place, Write Crime.
• If you haven’t been reading the Māwake Crime Review, a Crimespree Magazine feature that regularly showcases “great crime writers and crime novels from beyond the borders of North America and Europe,” you should start. In the latest installment, New Zealand critic-blogger Craig Sisterson turns his gaze upon Japanese contributions to this genre. Part of the column is devoted to an interview with Soji Shimada, author of The Tokyo Zodiac Murders and Murder in the Crooked House.
• I have heard several times over the years that film, TV, and stage performer Tony Franciosa—who starred in The Name of the Game, Search, and Matt Helm—was not popular among some of the people with whom he worked. Author and screenwriter Lee Goldberg recently shared this anecdote on Facebook, confirming such talk:
• By the way, Goldberg has good news concerning a complete, five-disc French DVD set of Matt Helm episodes. In a March 20 “Bullet Points” post, he cautioned that the discs (with their English soundtrack, but French subtitles) “are unplayable on U.S. DVD players … unless you have a multi-standard DVD player (which I do) or software that allows you to watch it on your computer’s DVD drive.” However, he wrote me earlier this week to say that, in fact, those Matt Helm discs (which he must have ordered for himself) “will play on any DVD player … The picture and sound are great.”
• Columbus, Ohio, isn’t often thought of as a hotbed of fiction, when it’s even thought of at all. However, in his introduction to the new anthology Columbus Noir (Akashic), Andrew Welsh-Huggins—an editor and reporter for the Associated Press, and an occasional contributor to The Rap Sheet—points out why the 14th largest city in the United States offers all of the ingredients necessary to make it “ripe for the attention of crime fiction writers.” Read it all here.
• Terry Zobek takes a deep dive into all the corners of Lawrence Block’s writing career in his new release, A Trawl Among the Shelves: Lawrence Block Bibliography, 1958-2020.
• Spanish blogger José Ignacio Escribano continues to post intriguing mini-biographies of mystery writers in A Crime Is Afoot. Recent subjects include the well-remembered Leo Bruce, Julian Symons, and Anthony Boucher as well as less tip-of-the-tongue talents such as Anthony Wynne, A.E.W. Mason, and Ronald A. Knox.
• With April being National Poetry Month, Gerald So has organized a 30-day celebration of crime-related verse in The Five-Two.
• And a couple of weeks back, CrimeReads posted a critic’s list of 14 “long-ass books”—all crime, mystery, and thriller novels, of course—that might help us while away these mass-isolation times. Now Literary Hub’s Emily Temple takes that same idea and expands upon it, delivering an inventory of what she says are “The 50 Best Contemporary Novels Over 500 Pages.” I’m pleased to see that her choices include Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See, Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke, Don DeLillo’s Underworld, and Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove (a novel I chose as one of the 20th century’s best works). Several of her picks overlap those in CrimeReads (among them Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, and Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries), but she also promotes two other crime-oriented tales: Ian Pears’ An Instance of the Fingerpost and Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games.
— Imaginary Friend, by Stephen Chbosky (Orion)
— Darkdawn, by Jay Kristoff (HarperVoyager)
— The Starless Sea, by Erin Morgenstern (Harvill Secker)
— The Lost Ones, by Anita Frank (HQ)
— My Sister, the Serial Killer, by Oyinkan Braithwaite (Atlantic)*
— The Farm, by Joanne Ramos (Bloomsbury)
— Girl, Woman, Other, by Bernardine Evaristo (Hamish Hamilton)
— The Second Sleep, by Robert Harris (Cornerstone)*
— Blood & Sugar, by Laura Shepherd-Robinson (Mantle)*
— Daisy Jones and the Six, by Taylor Jenkins Reid (Cornerstone)
— Nothing Important Happened Today, by Will Carver (Orenda)*
— The Silent Patient, by Alex Michaelides (Orion Books)*
A shortlist of six Glass Bell finalists is expected to be released on May 11, with the winner to be named on July 2.
• In advance of Bosch’s return to Amazon Prime next Friday, April 17, Crime Fiction Lover briefly recaps the last five seasons of that Michael Connelly-supervised police-procedural series.
• This apparently coincidental cover similarity (see above) is sure to create confusion when it comes to ordering books. In the Dark, by Loreth Anne White, was released last December by Montlake Romance. Somewhere in the Dark, by R.J. Jacobs, is set to debut in August, from Crooked Lane. (Hat tip to Linda L. Richards.)
• It had to happen: ThrillerFest XV, which had been arranged for July 7-11 in New York City, has been cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. An e-mail notice from executive director Kimberley Howe says, “We will be providing full refunds to everyone, and you will receive those funds in approximately two weeks, as soon as Cvent (our registration provider) can process our request.” But all is not lost. “To help you avoid ThrillerFest withdrawal,” says Howe, “we will be offering, in July, a virtual conference that you can enjoy from the safety of your own home. This event will include PitchFest, ConsultFest, Master Class, the Debut Author Breakfast, the Thriller Awards Presentation, and other special ThrillerFest presentations. Current registrants will have first dibs to register for these events before others are welcomed to join in the fun (if there’s still space). Details and your chance to sign up will follow soon.”
• As he explains it, about three weeks ago Scottish novelist Peter May (The Blackhouse, A Silent Death) was asked by someone on Twitter whether he had any interest in composing a story set against today’s novel coronavirus scare. At which point May realized, “I had already done just that.” It seems that about a decade and a half ago, at a time when he despaired of his career future, May penned Lockdown, a thriller that imagined a global pandemic of bird flu. Unfortunately, the book was rejected by publishers as “unrealistic” and “unimaginable in present-day London.” May’s outlook on publishing was soon after buoyed by the release (originally in France) of The Blackhouse, and he shelved Lockdown, not expecting it ever to reach readers. Until now. With the novel coronavirus making grim news worldwide, British publisher Quercus is rushing Lockdown into print. It will go on sale in the UK on April 30; its U.S. premiere will be August 18.
• A different book with the same title is coming from publisher Polis in mid-June. Edited by Nick Kolakowski and Steve Weddle, Lockdown: Stories of Terror, Crime, and Hope During a Pandemic is an anthology of short stories that LitReactor says take place “against the background of a nationalized lockdown in response to a (fictional) virus, which mutates rapidly as it jumps from person to person. Cities are under martial law. The skies are clear as all planes are grounded. Some people panic, while some go to heroic lengths to save those they love—and others use the chaos as an opportunity to engage in purest evil. From New York City to the Mexican border, from the Deep South to the misty shores of Seattle, their characters are fighting for survival against incredible odds.” Proceeds from the sale of this collection are supposed to go to BINC, the Book Industry Charitable Foundation, a non-profit enterprise “that assists booksellers in need.”
• Which brings us to this good news: The U.S. branch of Sisters in Crime has accelerated its support program for bookstores. The organization usually awards $500 every month to a deserving shop “to use for promotion, marketing, or hosting book-signing events.” But, it has announced, “in response to the current pandemic, we will be drawing the winners for the rest of 2020—nine winners—on April 16, 2020. We want to get these prizes out while the need is great. The deadline for entry is April 15. All other entry criteria remain the same.” Entry details are available here.
• Meanwhile, author Laurie R. King is holding an unusual auction. The person who contributes the most money will win the opportunity to name a character in King’s 2021 novel (to be set in Transylvania in 1925). Proceeds from this auction go to the Second Harvest Food Bank of Santa Cruz County, California, which King says “is stepping up [during the current pandemic] with drive-by food giveaways serving hundreds of families at a time—families whose breadwinners pick our fruit, clean our rooms, pack our home deliveries, care for our sick.” You have until Wednesday, April 15, to make an auction bid and become eligible for these naming rights. If you simply want to donate to the food bank, you can do so at that same link.
• In case you’re feeling too happy of late, Zach Vasquez suggests you read “The 12 Darkest Endings in the History of Noir Fiction.”
• Easter mysteries to relish over the coming holiday.
• Need some film fun this weekend? Empire of Deception author Dean Jobb picks “10 of the Greatest Con Artist Movies of All Time.”
• Actor James Drury, who died this last Monday at age 85, may be best-remembered for starring in the 1962-1971 NBC-TV western series The Virginian. (Not bad for somebody who was actually born in New York City—nowhere in spitting distance of America’s frontier reaches.) However, he also played Captain Spike Ryerson in the short-lived 1974 ABC drama Firehouse, featured in three episodes of Walker, Texas Ranger, and guest-starred on everything from Bourbon Street Beat, Michael Shayne, and Perry Mason to It Takes a Thief, Ironside, and The Fall Guy. Drury’s lengthy catalogue of credits is here.
• This item comes from In Reference to Murder:
A beloved TV character is coming back: NBC gave a 13-episode series order to a new crime drama series starring Christopher Meloni, reprising his Law & Order: SVU role as Elliot Stabler. The SVU spinoff drama will revolve around the NYPD organized crime unit led by Stabler. Like Law & Order: SVU, headlined by Mariska Hargitay as Olivia Benson, the new drama is set in New York, allowing for potential seamless crossovers with SVU and for Benson-Stabler reunions.• I’m very sorry to hear that Mort Drucker, the Brooklyn-born cartoonist and caricaturist whose work became so familiar over his five decades of contributing to Mad magazine, died on Wednesday at 91 years of age. Drucker, who “specialized in parodies of movies and television shows” (including The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Perry Mason, Magnum, P.I., and the James Bond flicks), was one of my father’s favorite artists, along with Jack Davis and politics lampooner Pat Oliphant, so there were always a lot of Mads around my boyhood home. “Mr. Drucker’s facility was best expressed in multi-caricature crowd scenes,” opines J. Hoberman in The New York Times. “His parody of the 1986 Woody Allen film, Hannah and Her Sisters, opened with a panel depicting a Thanksgiving dinner that, in addition to most of the movie’s ensemble cast, included caricatures of Mr. Allen’s first wife, Louise Lasser; the film critics Roger Ebert and
Gene Siskel; Mayor Ed Koch of New York; and Mad’s mascot, Alfred E. Neuman. His drawing for a 1970 Time magazine cover, ‘Battle for the Senate,’ now in the National Portrait Gallery, featured a pileup of 15 individually characterized political figures, including President Richard M. Nixon and Vice President Spiro T. Agnew. Mad’s takeoff on the MGM retrospective feature That’s Entertainment, published in 1975, required Mr. Drucker to caricature more than two dozen stars.” (Drucker applied the same aesthetic to his poster art for the 1971 Mafia comedy film, The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight.) Let’s give the final word here to Saturday Evening Post art critic David Apatoff, who recalls in his blog: “Drucker was such a humble, gentle soul, I could never quite figure out where he found the drive and ambition to create his hundreds of beautiful stories, decade after decade. The opposite of competitive, he was as generous and open-minded an artist as I’ve ever known. Yet he maintained the excruciatingly high standards to stay up late night after night crafting marvelous drawings, working out likenesses for his caricatures and populating his pictures with details and humor that reflected his abundance of spirit.”• Scott D. Parker’s obituary of Drucker, in Diversions of the Groovy Kind, features the cartoonist’s parody of the 1972 disaster pic The Poseidon Adventure, retitled “The Poopsidedown Adventure.”
• For its part, Spy Write recalls Drucker’s satirical twist on the 1966 picture The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.
• There’s a new crime-fiction podcast worth sampling: Tartan Noir. As the program’s Web site explains, this hour-long offering will spotlight Scottish crime-fiction writing, and will be hosted “by author and broadcaster Theresa Talbot, who’s joined each week by a special guest (fellow authors, journalists or celebrity fans).” Val McDermid lent her voice and knowledge to the first episode, while on the second, Talbot spoke with Liam McIlvanney.
• Here’s one other podcast recommendation, courtesy of Dave Knadler. In his blog, Dave’s Fiction Warehouse, he extols the “lovely, measured tones” of Phoebe Judge’s voice as she reads classic mysteries. Judge has hosted the podcast Criminal for several years; but since the onset of today’s pandemic, she’s also been reading—chapter by chapter—such famous works as The Mysterious Affair at Styles, by Agatha Christie, and The Hound of the Baskervilles, by Arthur Conan Doyle. You can listen in at Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Let’s hope Judge continues these readings past the time when all of us can resume something approaching our normal lives.
• Way back in 2008, author Mark Coggins contributed a multi-part series to The Rap Sheet about The New Black Mask magazine, a short-lived 1980s revival of the publication that had helped launch the careers of so many well-known crime-fictionists. In Coggins’ assessment of the final, 1987 edition of NBM, he talked about John D. MacDonald, who was that issue’s feature focus and who was interviewed briefly in its pages. What wasn’t included with his article, however, was the full text of Macdonald’s “brusque” exchange with co-editor Richard Layman. But now, Tennessee banker-turned-writer Steve Scott has posted that interview in his MacDonald-oriented blog, The Trap of Solid Gold, for all of us to appreciate.
• Ace Atkins’ next (ninth) novel starring one-named Boston P.I. Spenser will be Robert B. Parker’s Someone to Watch Over Me, scheduled for release (from Putnam) in November.
• Illinois writer Thomas McNulty is behind the book-review blog Dispatches from the Last Outlaw, but it turns out he also has a YouTube channel, McNulty’s Book Corral, on which he talks about reading matters. Some of the episodes have focused on westerns and science fiction, but here he enthuses over Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer novels (and Max Allan Collins’ continuation of that series). And here he focuses on “man-bait paperbacks,” soap-operaish works with romantic themes and “saucy” covers, marketed toward male readers. McNulty must have an outstanding collection of vintage softcovers.
• Elmore Leonard seems to be a popular subject this week, as Craig Pittman celebrates that author’s strong Florida connections in CrimeReads, and Don Winslow writes in Deadline about how he “almost made a movie with Elmore Leonard.”
• Winslow also talks with Thomas Pluck, for Criminal Element, about his fresh-off-the-vine short-story collection, Broken.
• Two more worthy exchanges: Nancie Clare’s chat with Cara Black (Three Hours in Paris) for her podcast, Speaking of Mysteries; and the delightful Hilary Davidson’s conversation with Frank Zafiro about her sixth novel, Don’t Look Down, for Wrong Place, Write Crime.
• If you haven’t been reading the Māwake Crime Review, a Crimespree Magazine feature that regularly showcases “great crime writers and crime novels from beyond the borders of North America and Europe,” you should start. In the latest installment, New Zealand critic-blogger Craig Sisterson turns his gaze upon Japanese contributions to this genre. Part of the column is devoted to an interview with Soji Shimada, author of The Tokyo Zodiac Murders and Murder in the Crooked House.
• I have heard several times over the years that film, TV, and stage performer Tony Franciosa—who starred in The Name of the Game, Search, and Matt Helm—was not popular among some of the people with whom he worked. Author and screenwriter Lee Goldberg recently shared this anecdote on Facebook, confirming such talk:
Tony Franciosa was reportedly a very difficult actor to work with. During the production of Matt Helm, he punched a director. Things got so bad, that Franciosa was written out of the 13th and final episode of the show. The producers must have loathed him because, in that final episode, they covered Franciosa’s face in the main titles with credits! Below are the credits as they appear in the first 12 episodes … and how they appeared in the final one. I’m amazed they got away with it!
• By the way, Goldberg has good news concerning a complete, five-disc French DVD set of Matt Helm episodes. In a March 20 “Bullet Points” post, he cautioned that the discs (with their English soundtrack, but French subtitles) “are unplayable on U.S. DVD players … unless you have a multi-standard DVD player (which I do) or software that allows you to watch it on your computer’s DVD drive.” However, he wrote me earlier this week to say that, in fact, those Matt Helm discs (which he must have ordered for himself) “will play on any DVD player … The picture and sound are great.”
• Columbus, Ohio, isn’t often thought of as a hotbed of fiction, when it’s even thought of at all. However, in his introduction to the new anthology Columbus Noir (Akashic), Andrew Welsh-Huggins—an editor and reporter for the Associated Press, and an occasional contributor to The Rap Sheet—points out why the 14th largest city in the United States offers all of the ingredients necessary to make it “ripe for the attention of crime fiction writers.” Read it all here.
• Terry Zobek takes a deep dive into all the corners of Lawrence Block’s writing career in his new release, A Trawl Among the Shelves: Lawrence Block Bibliography, 1958-2020.
• Spanish blogger José Ignacio Escribano continues to post intriguing mini-biographies of mystery writers in A Crime Is Afoot. Recent subjects include the well-remembered Leo Bruce, Julian Symons, and Anthony Boucher as well as less tip-of-the-tongue talents such as Anthony Wynne, A.E.W. Mason, and Ronald A. Knox.
• With April being National Poetry Month, Gerald So has organized a 30-day celebration of crime-related verse in The Five-Two.
• And a couple of weeks back, CrimeReads posted a critic’s list of 14 “long-ass books”—all crime, mystery, and thriller novels, of course—that might help us while away these mass-isolation times. Now Literary Hub’s Emily Temple takes that same idea and expands upon it, delivering an inventory of what she says are “The 50 Best Contemporary Novels Over 500 Pages.” I’m pleased to see that her choices include Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See, Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke, Don DeLillo’s Underworld, and Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove (a novel I chose as one of the 20th century’s best works). Several of her picks overlap those in CrimeReads (among them Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, and Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries), but she also promotes two other crime-oriented tales: Ian Pears’ An Instance of the Fingerpost and Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games.
Tuesday, October 08, 2019
And I Can’t Fail to Mention …
• Criminal Element’s continuing series focusing on works that, over the last 65 years, have won the prestigious Edgar Award for Best Novel, last Friday showcased Margaret Maron’s The Bootlegger’s Daughter, which captured that prize way back in 1993. In a departure from the norm, on that same day Hector DeJean, the associate director of publicity at Minotaur Books, posted a fine essay in Criminal Element about Michael Connelly’s The Black Echo, which won the 1993 Edgar for Best First Novel and launched the fictional career of Los Angeles homicide detective Hieronymus “Harry” Bosch. Reflecting on that novel and its many sequels, DeJean wrote:
• Congratulations to The Spy Command, which today celebrates its 11th birthday! Managing editor Bill Koenig’s espionage fiction-oriented blog debuted in 2008 as The HMSS Weblog, but was renamed in 2015, following the failure of its partner Web site, Her Majesty’s Secret Servant. It remains a superior source of news about James Bond projects as well as other crime and cloak-and-dagger works.
• As we move ever closer to New Year’s Day, 2020, these sorts of features are bound to multiply. The Killing Times recently began enumerating what it says have been “the top 20 crime dramas of the decade.” So far, it has rolled out only the first half of its choices—in two parts, here and here—but I presume the balance of that Web site’s selections will soon follow. Watch for updates here.
• The Australia-based Columbophile blog typically celebrates the legacy of Peter Falk’s long-running NBC-TV series, Columbo. But not long ago, its unnamed editor put together a list of “the 10 least-satisfying Columbo ‘gotchas’ of the ’70s.” As he explains: “A Columbo without a magnificent ‘gotcha’ is like a porcupine without quills; a snake without fangs; a cat without claws. In short, it lacks a certain clout. Granted, not every episode can have a rousing finale in the mould of ‘Suitable for Framing’ [1971] or ‘Candidate for Crime’ [1973], but the strength of the gotcha plays a big part in our overall enjoyment of the episode.” Indeed, most of the 10 episodes The Columbophile cites for their disappointing denouements are also among those I remember least well, though I am fond of one: 1973’s “Requiem for a Falling Star,” which features Anne Baxter as a fading actress and includes a cameo by eminent costume designer Edith Head.
• Two CrimeReads pieces worth investigating: Sarah Weinman recalls how, during the summer of 1947, U.S. mystery novelist Mary Roberts Rinehart narrowly escaped being murdered by her longtime chef; and Crawford Smith, the author of this year’s Jackrabbit (Sweet Weasel Words), writes here about persist rumors that John Dillinger—“America’s first celebrity criminal”—escaped being gunned down outside a Chicago theater in 1934, and how such talk has resulted in efforts to disinter Dillinger’s remains from an Indiana cemetery.
• I’ve long been a fan of Ellery Queen, the 1975-1976 series developed for NBC-TV by Richard Levinson and William Link, and starring Jim Hutton. So I was pleased to learn recently that the anonymous blogger “dfordoom” has been slowly reviewing that show’s episodes for Cult TV Lounge. He tackles three of them here, and another trio here. To read his overview of the show, click here.
• Having been a Star Trek enthusiast since childhood, I am naturally thrilled by the prospect of a new series that will bring Patrick Stewart back to the role of Jean-Luc Picard, which he created for Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994). A new trailer for Star Trek: Picard, released during this month’s New York Comic Con, carries the same adventurous, hopeful spirit that has always drawn me to the Star Trek universe. And the moment in that trailer when Picard revisits his old Enterprise shipmates William Riker and Deanna Troi … well, it brought cheerful tears to my eyes. Although I resisted subscribing to the CBS All Access streaming service in order to watch Star Trek: Discovery (I instead purchased Season 1 on DVD), Star Trek: Picard—slated to debut there on January 23, 2020—may finally compel me to take that step.
• While we’re on the subject of Star Trek (and yes, I’ll get back to matters of crime fiction anon), my fellow fans should check out Trek on the Tube, the YouTube channel created by a Trekkie named Sean and covering what seems like an ever-growing assortment of Star Trek projects. Sean has set up a Patreon page, too, to solicit funds to keep his efforts on track. It seems a worthwhile cause.
• Also deserving of consideration, I think, is a solicitation from “Norman Conquest,” aka Derek Pell, who has published my work in his literary magazine, Black Scat Review. He has established an Indiegogo crowd-funding page in hopes of raising money enough to keep his enterprises afloat. This “Fund-o-Rama,” as he calls it, will continue through Halloween. Please send him treats, not tricks.
• New author interviews of note: Speaking of Mysteries host Nancie Clare fires questions at both Deborah Crombie (A Bitter Feast) and “Nicci French” (aka Nicci Gerrard and Sean French), whose latest thriller is The Lying Room; and blogger Lesa Holstine chats with Dana Ridenour about her new novel, Below the Radar.
• Finally, some essay-writing fun for students: The Bunburyist’s Elizabeth Foxwell reports that the Beacon Society, a “scion society” of that well-known Sherlock Holmes fan group, the Baker Street Irregulars, “is sponsoring an essay contest for U.S. and Canadian students in 4th to 12th grades that focuses on the Sherlock Holmes stories ‘The Adventure of the Red-Headed League,’ ‘The Adventure of the Copper Beeches,’ and ‘The Greek Interpreter.’ There are cash prizes for first to third place. The submission deadline is February 1, 2020.” Click here to find more entry details.
Adjustments have been made to Bosch over the years, as the character and his city have evolved. For one thing, he no longer sports a mustache, that once-standard identifying trait of all veteran cops. His past has been filled in a little more, and on the TV series his military service has been updated to the Gulf War. Connelly has tackled such topics as the Los Angeles Riots and the police department opening up to LGBTQ officers in later books. But what may work so well about Bosch is that he basically fits the mold; he’s a close cousin of several other thick-skinned knights-errant policemen, one brought to fuller life and given a deeper relationship with his city.• Lawrence Block is already teasing his February release, The Burglar in Short Order (Subterranean), which he describes as “a complete collection” of short-form appearances by his series thief, Bernie Rhodenbarr. He says “its fifteen chapters include four short stories, three extracts from novels, five op-ed columns, and an essay—well, some would call it a rant—about Bernie’s experiences in Hollywood.” The Amazon page for this book adds that “you’ll find every published story, article, and standalone excerpt Bernie has ever appeared in—plus two new, unpublished pieces: an introduction discussing the character’s colorful origins and an afterword in which the author, contemplating retirement, comes face to face with his own creation.”
• Congratulations to The Spy Command, which today celebrates its 11th birthday! Managing editor Bill Koenig’s espionage fiction-oriented blog debuted in 2008 as The HMSS Weblog, but was renamed in 2015, following the failure of its partner Web site, Her Majesty’s Secret Servant. It remains a superior source of news about James Bond projects as well as other crime and cloak-and-dagger works.
• As we move ever closer to New Year’s Day, 2020, these sorts of features are bound to multiply. The Killing Times recently began enumerating what it says have been “the top 20 crime dramas of the decade.” So far, it has rolled out only the first half of its choices—in two parts, here and here—but I presume the balance of that Web site’s selections will soon follow. Watch for updates here.
• The Australia-based Columbophile blog typically celebrates the legacy of Peter Falk’s long-running NBC-TV series, Columbo. But not long ago, its unnamed editor put together a list of “the 10 least-satisfying Columbo ‘gotchas’ of the ’70s.” As he explains: “A Columbo without a magnificent ‘gotcha’ is like a porcupine without quills; a snake without fangs; a cat without claws. In short, it lacks a certain clout. Granted, not every episode can have a rousing finale in the mould of ‘Suitable for Framing’ [1971] or ‘Candidate for Crime’ [1973], but the strength of the gotcha plays a big part in our overall enjoyment of the episode.” Indeed, most of the 10 episodes The Columbophile cites for their disappointing denouements are also among those I remember least well, though I am fond of one: 1973’s “Requiem for a Falling Star,” which features Anne Baxter as a fading actress and includes a cameo by eminent costume designer Edith Head.
• Two CrimeReads pieces worth investigating: Sarah Weinman recalls how, during the summer of 1947, U.S. mystery novelist Mary Roberts Rinehart narrowly escaped being murdered by her longtime chef; and Crawford Smith, the author of this year’s Jackrabbit (Sweet Weasel Words), writes here about persist rumors that John Dillinger—“America’s first celebrity criminal”—escaped being gunned down outside a Chicago theater in 1934, and how such talk has resulted in efforts to disinter Dillinger’s remains from an Indiana cemetery.
• I’ve long been a fan of Ellery Queen, the 1975-1976 series developed for NBC-TV by Richard Levinson and William Link, and starring Jim Hutton. So I was pleased to learn recently that the anonymous blogger “dfordoom” has been slowly reviewing that show’s episodes for Cult TV Lounge. He tackles three of them here, and another trio here. To read his overview of the show, click here.
• Having been a Star Trek enthusiast since childhood, I am naturally thrilled by the prospect of a new series that will bring Patrick Stewart back to the role of Jean-Luc Picard, which he created for Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994). A new trailer for Star Trek: Picard, released during this month’s New York Comic Con, carries the same adventurous, hopeful spirit that has always drawn me to the Star Trek universe. And the moment in that trailer when Picard revisits his old Enterprise shipmates William Riker and Deanna Troi … well, it brought cheerful tears to my eyes. Although I resisted subscribing to the CBS All Access streaming service in order to watch Star Trek: Discovery (I instead purchased Season 1 on DVD), Star Trek: Picard—slated to debut there on January 23, 2020—may finally compel me to take that step.
• While we’re on the subject of Star Trek (and yes, I’ll get back to matters of crime fiction anon), my fellow fans should check out Trek on the Tube, the YouTube channel created by a Trekkie named Sean and covering what seems like an ever-growing assortment of Star Trek projects. Sean has set up a Patreon page, too, to solicit funds to keep his efforts on track. It seems a worthwhile cause.
• Also deserving of consideration, I think, is a solicitation from “Norman Conquest,” aka Derek Pell, who has published my work in his literary magazine, Black Scat Review. He has established an Indiegogo crowd-funding page in hopes of raising money enough to keep his enterprises afloat. This “Fund-o-Rama,” as he calls it, will continue through Halloween. Please send him treats, not tricks.
• New author interviews of note: Speaking of Mysteries host Nancie Clare fires questions at both Deborah Crombie (A Bitter Feast) and “Nicci French” (aka Nicci Gerrard and Sean French), whose latest thriller is The Lying Room; and blogger Lesa Holstine chats with Dana Ridenour about her new novel, Below the Radar.
• Finally, some essay-writing fun for students: The Bunburyist’s Elizabeth Foxwell reports that the Beacon Society, a “scion society” of that well-known Sherlock Holmes fan group, the Baker Street Irregulars, “is sponsoring an essay contest for U.S. and Canadian students in 4th to 12th grades that focuses on the Sherlock Holmes stories ‘The Adventure of the Red-Headed League,’ ‘The Adventure of the Copper Beeches,’ and ‘The Greek Interpreter.’ There are cash prizes for first to third place. The submission deadline is February 1, 2020.” Click here to find more entry details.
Tuesday, July 10, 2018
Scudder’s Retirement Isn’t Working
Here’s a surprise for Lawrence Block fans: His beloved recovering alcoholic detective, Matthew Scudder, will be returning to the streets of Manhattan in A Time to Scatter Stones, a novella due out from Subterranean Press in January 2019.
This won’t be Scudder’s first resurrection in fiction. Remember, we thought he was gone after the Shamus Award-winning novel Eight Million Ways to Die (1982), only to see him return four years later in an equally powerful, sixth series installment, When the Sacred Ginmill Closes. And now comes this note from Block’s blog: “Just between us, I never expected to write more about Matt Scudder after A Drop of the Hard Stuff [2011]. I surprised myself once, with a final short story (“One Last Night at Grogan’s”), which closed out The Night and the Music [2011], and in a way that certainly suggested there’d be no more. And, really, how could there be? Matt’s the same age I am [80], and just as he’s way too old to leap tall buildings in a single bound, so am I a little old myself to be hunched over a keyboard, trying to coax cogent thoughts out of what remains of my mind.”
Despite all of that, we can look forward to seeing more of Scudder in about six and a half months. Subterranean Press gives this plot synopsis of A Time to Scatter Stones:
This won’t be Scudder’s first resurrection in fiction. Remember, we thought he was gone after the Shamus Award-winning novel Eight Million Ways to Die (1982), only to see him return four years later in an equally powerful, sixth series installment, When the Sacred Ginmill Closes. And now comes this note from Block’s blog: “Just between us, I never expected to write more about Matt Scudder after A Drop of the Hard Stuff [2011]. I surprised myself once, with a final short story (“One Last Night at Grogan’s”), which closed out The Night and the Music [2011], and in a way that certainly suggested there’d be no more. And, really, how could there be? Matt’s the same age I am [80], and just as he’s way too old to leap tall buildings in a single bound, so am I a little old myself to be hunched over a keyboard, trying to coax cogent thoughts out of what remains of my mind.”
Despite all of that, we can look forward to seeing more of Scudder in about six and a half months. Subterranean Press gives this plot synopsis of A Time to Scatter Stones:
Well past retirement age and feeling his years—but still staying sober one day at a time—Matthew Scudder learns that alcoholics aren’t the only ones who count the days since their last slip. Matt’s longtime partner, Elaine, tells him of a group of former sex workers who do something similar, helping each other stay out of the life. But when one young woman describes an abusive client who’s refusing to let her quit, Elaine encourages her to get help of a different sort. The sort only Scudder can deliver.I don’t see a listing on Amazon for this novella. However, the Subterranean Web site allows you to “pre-order” a copy of A Time to Scatter Stones in either a $45 signed-and-numbered limited edition, or a regular $25 hardcover edition.
A Time to Scatter Stones offers not just a gripping crime story but also a richly drawn portrait of Block’s most famous character as he grapples with his own mortality while proving to the younger generation that he’s still got what it takes. For Scudder’s millions of fans around the world (including the many who met the character through Liam Neeson’s portrayal in the film version of A Walk Among the Tombstones), A Time to Scatter Stones is ... a valedictory appearance that will remind readers why Scudder is simply the best there is.
Wednesday, June 25, 2014
“You Want to Know What Happens Next”
While searching earlier today through my many boxes of vintage magazines (others might be less generous and call them “old”), looking for something completely unrelated, I happened across the July/August 1993 issue of American Heritage. I could have saved this particular edition for Donald L. Miller’s fine piece about Chicago’s 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, or perhaps for John Steele Gordon’s essay recalling America’s historical debates over free-trade practices. But my suspicion is that I actually held onto this copy of AH because of its cover story by author Lawrence Block. Titled “My Life in Crime,” it recounts Block’s childhood introduction to works of mystery and thriller fiction, tries to separate “cozies” from “hard-boiled” stories, and has nice things to say about Bouchercon, which was then one of the few opportunities mystery writers and readers had to congregate.
In addition to all of that, though, Block offers a rundown of his 16 favorite American crime-fictionists … well, really his 16 favorite dead crime-fictionists, every one of them a man. (If given the same assignment today, I suspect he might throw at least a few women’s names into the mix. There are so many more being published nowadays.) The usual suspects are all included, from Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Chester Himes to the two Macs: Ross Macdonald and John D. MacDonald. In addition to those, I’m pleased to see that he features Stanley Ellin (whose 1958 novel, The Eighth Circle, I so enjoy), Ellery Queen (whose many whodunits have, sadly, fewer followers in 2014 than they once did), and Cornell Woolrich (with whom many younger readers are completely unfamiliar). Mentioned as well is Jack Ritchie, who penned primarily short stories--and is the only person on this list who is all but a stranger to me. (I’ll have to remedy that hole in my education soon.)
Because I think Block’s survey of the genre is still worth reading, if only to remind you of authors you have not sampled in a while (Erle Stanley Gardner? Charles Willeford?), I am embedding it below.
Right-click on the pages below to bring up enlargements.
In addition to all of that, though, Block offers a rundown of his 16 favorite American crime-fictionists … well, really his 16 favorite dead crime-fictionists, every one of them a man. (If given the same assignment today, I suspect he might throw at least a few women’s names into the mix. There are so many more being published nowadays.) The usual suspects are all included, from Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Chester Himes to the two Macs: Ross Macdonald and John D. MacDonald. In addition to those, I’m pleased to see that he features Stanley Ellin (whose 1958 novel, The Eighth Circle, I so enjoy), Ellery Queen (whose many whodunits have, sadly, fewer followers in 2014 than they once did), and Cornell Woolrich (with whom many younger readers are completely unfamiliar). Mentioned as well is Jack Ritchie, who penned primarily short stories--and is the only person on this list who is all but a stranger to me. (I’ll have to remedy that hole in my education soon.)
Because I think Block’s survey of the genre is still worth reading, if only to remind you of authors you have not sampled in a while (Erle Stanley Gardner? Charles Willeford?), I am embedding it below.
Right-click on the pages below to bring up enlargements.
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
Thursday, December 02, 2010
Hard Case’s Hardcover Helpings
Mass-market paperback imprint Hard Case Crime has provided plenty of news headlines over the past several months, after its longstanding association with Dorchester Publishing collapsed, and editor Charles Ardai signed a new distribution deal with UK-based Titan Publishing. Yesterday there were still more developments, this time involving the Hard Case line’s re-launching next September with a new hardcover work by Lawrence Block:
I put these questions to editor Ardai, who responded earlier today:
Meanwhile, Ardai has announced that the sixth volume in his Gabriel Hunt adventure series, written by Raymond Benson and titled Hunt Through Napoleon’s Web--which had originally been slated for release last month--will now come out sometime in 2011. However, it will appear in trade-size paperback, rather than the series’ original mass-market size.
Titled Getting Off: A Novel of Sex and Violence, the book tells the story of a beautiful and self-confident young woman who sets herself a mission and carries it out with ruthless single-mindedness--to track down and murder every man she’s ever slept with. (And it’s not a small number, especially since she finds herself sleeping with a few more along the way.) The character is one of Block’s most memorable, the first new series character he’s introduced since J.P Keller in Hit Man a dozen years ago. Like Keller, she first appeared in a short story Block found himself writing, and after she’d stuck around for a second tale and then a third, he realized he had a novel-length story to tell about her. Thus was Getting Off born.After seeing a couple of bloggers describe Getting Off as Hard Case’s first hardcover release, I started to wonder how this jibed with a previous and much-heralded announcement, from this last August, about HC resurrecting “a pair of early Lawrence Block novels,” 69 Barrow Street and Strange Embrace, as a double volume--also in hardcover--for publisher Subterranean Press. That announcement said those two Blocks in one would see print during “the first half of 2011.” Wouldn’t that timing make the double volume, rather than Getting Off, HC’s first hardcover release? Or has the Subterranean book been postponed?
I put these questions to editor Ardai, who responded earlier today:
No, the Subterranean book is definitely still coming--we’re all very excited about that one--but [Subterranean] generously agreed to push it back from mid-2011 to the start of 2012, to give Getting Off a window in which it can take the spotlight as the debut title of our re-launch. Better, we all agreed, to have one Block hardcover in 2011 and then another in 2012 than to crowd the two together back-to-back in one season.So I guess that clears up that.
Incidentally, the Subterranean double wouldn’t strictly speaking have been Hard Case Crime’s first hardcover release--Subterranean previously published a hardcover edition of my own Fifty-to-One, and Otto Penzler brought out a small hardcover edition of Donald Westlake’s Memory. It would have been the first Hard Case Crime book that we’d have published initially in hardcover, but it might have been a little funny to describe it as a “hardcover original” given that the two books it contains are both reprints, and specifically reprints of books that came out as paperback originals back in the sixties. Getting Off, on the other hand, is clearly a hardcover original in every sense. So it makes sense for it to take that spot.
None of which matters from a reader’s point of view, of course. All readers will care about is that they’ve got two great Lawrence Block books to look forward to! (Three, really, since one’s a double.)
Regarding schedule, we’ll be putting out two books in September (Getting Off and one other we haven’t announced yet) and two more in October (Quarry’s Ex [by Max Allan Collins] and Choke Hold [by Christa Faust]). No further delay for those two.
And after the four books in 2011? We’re currently planning to do four more in 2012 (and then four more the year after), but we haven’t decided yet whether that means one per quarter or two at a time twice a year, or what. We’ll be talking with Titan about those questions over the coming months.
It’s also possible we might wind up doing more than 4/year--we’ll see. But I do want to keep it down from the punishing 12-13 books/year I was doing at the end with Dorchester. That schedule--a new book every 4 weeks!--is physically exhausting for me and would make it hard for me to work on all the other projects I’ve got underway, such as the TV series Haven and some books of my own I’ve been putting off writing. It’s the curse of being a one-man operation! You can’t do absolutely everything, however much you might want to. But I love Hard Case Crime, and I’m very happy that we’ve found a pace that enables me to keep it going while also working on a few other things.
Meanwhile, Ardai has announced that the sixth volume in his Gabriel Hunt adventure series, written by Raymond Benson and titled Hunt Through Napoleon’s Web--which had originally been slated for release last month--will now come out sometime in 2011. However, it will appear in trade-size paperback, rather than the series’ original mass-market size.
Wednesday, July 02, 2008
Bullet Points: Back from the Past Edition
In case you haven’t noticed, my participation on this page has been a bit lighter than normal over these last two months. Thank goodness for The Rap Sheet’s other contributors, especially Ali Karim, Linda L. Richards, and June’s guest blogger, Patrick Lennon (Steel Witches), who all took up the slack. Meanwhile, I was off finishing work on a photographic history of San Francisco, which should be out sometime before Christmas (I think). Thanks to that project, I’ve been pretty much living in the past since January, and especially since I began my final push toward the finish line in late May. I barely had time enough to lift my nose from the computer screen, much less read as prodigiously as I would like, or keep up with current affairs. (Had the media not repeated its coverage of escalating gas prices, as well as John “100 Years War” McCain’s floundering campaign and bewildering inconsistencies, I might have been in the dark about all of that until now.) Fortunately, I have moved into the proofing stage on 
this book and haven’t yet begun composing its companion volume about Seattle. So I have time in between to catch up with friends, housework, and blogging.
A few crime-related things worth noting recently:
• The new Mystery Scene magazine just dropped through my mail slot. It offers plenty of distractions, including Kevin Burton Smith’s interview with 70-year-old writer Lawrence Block (Hit and Run); Jon L. Breen’s retrospective on the work of novelist (not politician) Thomas B. Dewey, who came up with one of the all-time best titles for a private eye novel, The Girl with the Sweet Plump Knees (1963); a catching-up piece on John R. Maxim (Bannerman’s Ghosts); and Ron Miller’s review of two UK series making their way back to America’s PBS-TV this month: Inspector Lewis and Foyle’s War. Oh, and elsewhere in the issue, novelist James O. Born interviews his “inspiration,” cop-turned-author Joseph Wambaugh. Great bathroom reading, to be sure.
• ThugLit is back, this time with added ... er, punch. Offerings from the June-July edition include short stories by Keith Gilman (“Pay to Pray”), L.V. Rautenbaumgrabner (“The Baby-Smooth Skin of the Bank Manager and His Mistress”), Kim Cushman (“Simeon”), and Andy Turner (“Food in Search of a Country Song”). The issue’s full contents can be found here.
• The latest issue of Genre Flash, focusing on new crime novels and true-crime books being released in Australia, has just been released. (Hat tip to Crime Down Under.)
• Guest blogger and second-novelist Michelle Gagnon (Bone Yard) writes in the BookBitchBlog about the unexpected value of e-book readers. “I quickly became hooked,” she explains. “I didn’t expect to--I’m one of those people who wax eloquent over the feel of a book in my hands, the whisper of pages turning, blah blah blah ... But with a few months of intensive travel facing me as I braced for my next book tour, I decided to download some books. I was only going to use it for travel, I was still in control. I swear, I could stop any time I wanted. After taking it on a vacation to Mexico, I was hooked. I read a book a day, and never had to deliberate over the weight in my suitcase, or whether or not I should shed paperbacks en route like some strange molting creature. What I discovered is that this format suited my reading habits perfectly.” Read her whole post here.
• Kerrie Smith, proprietress of the Mysteries in Paradise blog, is the latest host of that traveling extravaganza known as the Carnival of the Criminal Minds. She takes an unconventional approach, noting some of her favorite genre reads (from the last three years!), the longlist of nominees for the 2008 Ned Kelly Awards, and a rather short list of Australian crime-fiction-related blogs. The Carnival’s next stop: Damien Gray’s Crime Down Under at the start of August. (So, when did this progressive blog feature go from being a fortnightly offering to a monthly one?)
• Shamus Award nominee Daniel Judson (The Darkest Place, The Water’s Edge) is guest blogging this week at St. Martin’s Minotaur’s Moments in Crime site. You’ll find his contributions here.
• Timed to the release of his new thriller, Deadline, Simon Kernick is July’s Author of the Month in CrimeSquad. Over the course of a short interview, he talks about chairing the 2008 Harrogate Crime Writing Festival, the boost he received from British TV co-hosts Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan (who chose his last novel, Relentless, as one of their summer reads for 2007), and his “favorite plot twist of all time,” from Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (“To come up with a twist like that in 1926, when that kind of literary sleight of hand was still in its infancy, was sheer genius.”)
• Although Roger Ackroyd doesn’t appear on Brian Skupin’s list of “five of the best mind-blowers ever written,” he does feature another Agatha Christie tale. “What’s a mind-blower?” Skupin muses in his introduction. “You might think it’s a surprise ending, but not necessarily. With your typical surprise ending, if you know in advance it’s going to be a surprise, then you can usually figure out what the surprise is going to be. Although some of the 5 short stories below do have surprises, knowing that won’t help you. And a couple of them don’t exactly have a surprise ending so much as an upsetting of all your expectations,
leaving you flailing your arms with nothing to hold on to at the end.” You’ll find his five selections here.
• If ever there was a book jacket that screamed “summer reading pleasures,” it’s the one on the right. Too bad, then, that Linda Gerber’s Death by Bikini is a young adult novel.
• Actor Jeff Goldblum, who I so enjoyed in the too-short-lived NBC-TV series Raines, has reportedly been signed to replace Chris Noth on Law & Order: Criminal Intent. Adding to the eccentric appeal of Vincent D’Onofrio, Goldblum should make L&O: CI even more watchable, beginning in the fall.
• In other TV news: The Season 5 DVD set of Mission: Impossible--the year that both Sam Elliott and the lovely Lesley Ann Warren appeared on the show--is set to be released on October 7. A week later, stores should have in hand the initial season of Don Johnson’s series Nash Bridges. Meanwhile, Sharon Gless--former Cagney & Lacey star, and returning to small screens in next week’s season premiere of the USA Network’s spy spoof, Burn Notice--is interviewed by TV Squad.
• Since I’ve been writing about old San Francisco, it should come as no surprise that I was drawn to Anthony Flacco’s second novel, The Hidden Man, which happens to be set in that same city in 1915. Again featuring Randall Blackburn and his two adopted children (all introduced in 2007’s The Last Nightingale), the story this time is backdropped by San Francisco’s grandiose Panama-Pacific International Exposition. Flacco talks more about his tale in an interview with Poe’s Deadly Daughters. I found his explanation of why he’d given one of his characters Alzheimer’s disease to be of special interest. The full exchange can be found here.
• A (very) brief history of The Shadow, popularized by Walter Gibson in the 1930s and ’40s. (Hat tip to Bill Crider.)
• Author Jason Starr reports that his 2000 novel, Fake I.D.--previously published only in the UK--will be made available next year in Hard Case Crime paperback form.
• Finally, Salon movie critic Andrew O’Hehir admits he was “engrossed” by the French thriller Ne le dis à personne, adapted from Harlan Coben’s Tell No One (2001), and finally being released across the United States this month. Read his review here. And you can watch a brief trailer by clicking here.
this book and haven’t yet begun composing its companion volume about Seattle. So I have time in between to catch up with friends, housework, and blogging.A few crime-related things worth noting recently:
• The new Mystery Scene magazine just dropped through my mail slot. It offers plenty of distractions, including Kevin Burton Smith’s interview with 70-year-old writer Lawrence Block (Hit and Run); Jon L. Breen’s retrospective on the work of novelist (not politician) Thomas B. Dewey, who came up with one of the all-time best titles for a private eye novel, The Girl with the Sweet Plump Knees (1963); a catching-up piece on John R. Maxim (Bannerman’s Ghosts); and Ron Miller’s review of two UK series making their way back to America’s PBS-TV this month: Inspector Lewis and Foyle’s War. Oh, and elsewhere in the issue, novelist James O. Born interviews his “inspiration,” cop-turned-author Joseph Wambaugh. Great bathroom reading, to be sure.
• ThugLit is back, this time with added ... er, punch. Offerings from the June-July edition include short stories by Keith Gilman (“Pay to Pray”), L.V. Rautenbaumgrabner (“The Baby-Smooth Skin of the Bank Manager and His Mistress”), Kim Cushman (“Simeon”), and Andy Turner (“Food in Search of a Country Song”). The issue’s full contents can be found here.
• The latest issue of Genre Flash, focusing on new crime novels and true-crime books being released in Australia, has just been released. (Hat tip to Crime Down Under.)
• Guest blogger and second-novelist Michelle Gagnon (Bone Yard) writes in the BookBitchBlog about the unexpected value of e-book readers. “I quickly became hooked,” she explains. “I didn’t expect to--I’m one of those people who wax eloquent over the feel of a book in my hands, the whisper of pages turning, blah blah blah ... But with a few months of intensive travel facing me as I braced for my next book tour, I decided to download some books. I was only going to use it for travel, I was still in control. I swear, I could stop any time I wanted. After taking it on a vacation to Mexico, I was hooked. I read a book a day, and never had to deliberate over the weight in my suitcase, or whether or not I should shed paperbacks en route like some strange molting creature. What I discovered is that this format suited my reading habits perfectly.” Read her whole post here.
• Kerrie Smith, proprietress of the Mysteries in Paradise blog, is the latest host of that traveling extravaganza known as the Carnival of the Criminal Minds. She takes an unconventional approach, noting some of her favorite genre reads (from the last three years!), the longlist of nominees for the 2008 Ned Kelly Awards, and a rather short list of Australian crime-fiction-related blogs. The Carnival’s next stop: Damien Gray’s Crime Down Under at the start of August. (So, when did this progressive blog feature go from being a fortnightly offering to a monthly one?)
• Shamus Award nominee Daniel Judson (The Darkest Place, The Water’s Edge) is guest blogging this week at St. Martin’s Minotaur’s Moments in Crime site. You’ll find his contributions here.
• Timed to the release of his new thriller, Deadline, Simon Kernick is July’s Author of the Month in CrimeSquad. Over the course of a short interview, he talks about chairing the 2008 Harrogate Crime Writing Festival, the boost he received from British TV co-hosts Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan (who chose his last novel, Relentless, as one of their summer reads for 2007), and his “favorite plot twist of all time,” from Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (“To come up with a twist like that in 1926, when that kind of literary sleight of hand was still in its infancy, was sheer genius.”)
• Although Roger Ackroyd doesn’t appear on Brian Skupin’s list of “five of the best mind-blowers ever written,” he does feature another Agatha Christie tale. “What’s a mind-blower?” Skupin muses in his introduction. “You might think it’s a surprise ending, but not necessarily. With your typical surprise ending, if you know in advance it’s going to be a surprise, then you can usually figure out what the surprise is going to be. Although some of the 5 short stories below do have surprises, knowing that won’t help you. And a couple of them don’t exactly have a surprise ending so much as an upsetting of all your expectations,
leaving you flailing your arms with nothing to hold on to at the end.” You’ll find his five selections here.• If ever there was a book jacket that screamed “summer reading pleasures,” it’s the one on the right. Too bad, then, that Linda Gerber’s Death by Bikini is a young adult novel.
• Actor Jeff Goldblum, who I so enjoyed in the too-short-lived NBC-TV series Raines, has reportedly been signed to replace Chris Noth on Law & Order: Criminal Intent. Adding to the eccentric appeal of Vincent D’Onofrio, Goldblum should make L&O: CI even more watchable, beginning in the fall.
• In other TV news: The Season 5 DVD set of Mission: Impossible--the year that both Sam Elliott and the lovely Lesley Ann Warren appeared on the show--is set to be released on October 7. A week later, stores should have in hand the initial season of Don Johnson’s series Nash Bridges. Meanwhile, Sharon Gless--former Cagney & Lacey star, and returning to small screens in next week’s season premiere of the USA Network’s spy spoof, Burn Notice--is interviewed by TV Squad.
• Since I’ve been writing about old San Francisco, it should come as no surprise that I was drawn to Anthony Flacco’s second novel, The Hidden Man, which happens to be set in that same city in 1915. Again featuring Randall Blackburn and his two adopted children (all introduced in 2007’s The Last Nightingale), the story this time is backdropped by San Francisco’s grandiose Panama-Pacific International Exposition. Flacco talks more about his tale in an interview with Poe’s Deadly Daughters. I found his explanation of why he’d given one of his characters Alzheimer’s disease to be of special interest. The full exchange can be found here.
• A (very) brief history of The Shadow, popularized by Walter Gibson in the 1930s and ’40s. (Hat tip to Bill Crider.)
• Author Jason Starr reports that his 2000 novel, Fake I.D.--previously published only in the UK--will be made available next year in Hard Case Crime paperback form.
• Finally, Salon movie critic Andrew O’Hehir admits he was “engrossed” by the French thriller Ne le dis à personne, adapted from Harlan Coben’s Tell No One (2001), and finally being released across the United States this month. Read his review here. And you can watch a brief trailer by clicking here.
Monday, February 12, 2007
Blasts from the Past
In a new interview at Things I’d Rather Be Doing, the great Lawrence Block talks with John Kenyon about his long-out-of-print books (at least one more of which, A Diet Of Treacle, is still due from Hard Case Crime), his screenplay for the upcoming Wong Kar-wai film My Blueberry Nights, and the possibility that he’ll ever bring his various series characters together in one novel. Read the interview here.
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