The Oldfangled Author in Residence

Eons ago I worked for a slick periodical called Monthly Detroit (later Detroit Monthly), which—until it vanished as a standalone publication in the mid-1990s—covered Michigan’s Motor City as if it were a grittier San Francisco, making everything look just a bit more stable and stylish than it really was. Since then, that same burg has sprouted a substitute features mag called Hour Detroit, which recently visited with 71-year-old local area author Loren D. Estleman.

I’ve had the chance on at least one occasion to interview Estleman, who has become a prolific writer since his first crime novel, Motor City Blue, appeared in 1980. Yet, as Hour Detroit’s Jenn McKee explains, he remains wedded to his fiction-producing ways of old:

Long ago, Estleman, the Whitmore Lake-based author of more than 90 books, rejected the shift to email, and he’s never once been online. He does have a computer, an “antediluvian” model pieced together from spare parts, on which he polishes his final manuscripts; his wife, the writer Deborah Morgan, forwards them to his publisher.

While the publishing industry has undergone seismic shifts during his nearly 50-year writing career, Estleman still drafts his manuscripts—detective novels, mysteries, and historical Westerns—on a 1960 Olympia manual typewriter. He uses a 1923 Underwood for correspondence …

Estleman is a consistently engaging writer, and I never fail to pick up his Detroit-set Amos Walker gumshoe tales (mostly recently City Walls) or his lighter adventures of Los Angeles “film detective” Valentino (star of the imminently released Vamp). So the chance Hour Detroit gave me to visit his off-the-beaten-path abode, filled with “more than 50 manual typewriters, 3,000 films on VHS and DVD, shelves upon shelves of old books, hidden baseboard drawers (that house his original manuscripts), [and] a secret bookcase passageway,” was one I just could not pass up. If you’re an Estleman fan, or especially if you’re not one yet, check out McKee’s profile of the man.

Bullet Points: Pandemic (Yikes!) Edition

• I mentioned here in January that American network CBS-TV was developing a crime-drama series around Clarice Starling, the FBI agent first introduced in Thomas Harris’ best-selling 1988 novel, The Silence of the Lambs. At the time, there was no star slated to fill the title role in Clarice, but Deadline reported recently that 32-year-old Australian actress Rebecca Breeds (Pretty Little Liars, The Originals) has been hired for the job. Deadline notes that Breeds (right) “is taking on the role that earned Jodie Foster an Oscar for the 1991 movie adaptation directed by Jonathan Demme. In 2001’s Hannibal, based on Harris’ 1999 novel, which was set 10 years after Silence of the Lambs, Clarice was played by Julianne Moore. (Hat tip to January Magazine.)

• The finalists for this year’s Lambda Literary Awards—aka the “Lammys”—have been announced in 24 categories. These annual prizes, now in their 32nd year, are sponsored by Lambda Literary, “the nation’s oldest and largest literary arts organization advancing LGBTQ literature.” Below are the contenders for best lesbian and gay mystery.

Lesbian Mystery:
— The Blood Runs Cold, by Catherine Maiorisi (Bella)
— Galileo, by Ann McMan (Bywater)
— The Hound of Justice, by Claire O’Dell (Harper Voyager)
— The Mirror of Muraro, by Amelia Ellis (Newton Pryce Ingram)
— Twisted at the Root, by Ellen Hart (Minotaur)

Gay Mystery:
— Carved in Bone, by Michael Nava (Persigo Press)
— ChoirMaster, by Michael Craft (Questover Press)
— Death Takes a Bow, by David S. Pederson (Bold Strokes)
— The Fourth Courier, by Timothy Jay Smith (Arcade)
— The Nowhere, by Chris Gill (PRNTD)
— The Quaker, by Liam McIlvanney (World Noir)
— Rewind, by Marshall Thornton (Kenmore)
— Royal Street Reveillon, by Greg Herren (Bold Strokes)

Winners are to be announced during a ceremony held in New York City on Monday, June 8. (Hat tip to Mystery Fanfare.)

• In Reference to Murder reminds us that 2020 brings at least two notable crime-fiction anniversaries: “it’s been sixty years since the [release of the] 1960 Alfred Hitchcock psychological horror film, Psycho, which was based on the Wisconsin killer and graveyard robber, Ed Gein; and it’s also the 50th anniversary of Tony Hillerman’s The Blessing Way, the first book to introduce Navajo police officer Joe Leaphorn.” According to The New Mexican, Hillerman’s novel debuted on March 11, 1970. Psycho saw its premiere on June 16, 1960, at New York City’s DeMille Theatre (aka Columbia Theatre).

• Max Allan Collins’ long-awaited 17th Nathan Heller novel, Do No Harm, was released this week by Forge. Concurrently, Collins recalled in his blog some of the difficulties he’d had fitting his fictional Chicago private eye into the real-life case involving Ohio doctor Sam Sheppard and the July 1954 murder of Sheppard’s first wife, Marilyn—a crime that may have helped inspire David Janssen’s 1963-1967 TV series The Fugitive, and that Collins says “has fascinated me since 1961.” An excerpt from Do No Harm can be found here.

• Did Scottish violinist and mystery author William Crawford Honeyman (1845–1919) provide inspiration to Arthur Conan Doyle in his creation of “consulting detective” Sherlock Holmes?

• Regrettably, I must acknowledge the recent deaths of three people familiar to the mystery-fiction community. First, Barbara Neely, author of the four-novel Blanche White series (Blanche on the Lam, etc.), “which had at its center a nomadic amateur detective and domestic worker who uses the invisibility inherent to her job as an advantage in pursuit of the truth,” as the Associated Press explains. Just three months ago, Neely was named by the Mystery Writers of America as the winner of its 2020 Grand Master Award. She passed away on March 2, at age 78, as a result of a heart ailment. (CrimeReads provides a fine tribute to Neely’s work here.) Second, former trial attorney Laura Caldwell, who, recalls the Chicago Tribune, penned “a trilogy of mysteries (Red Hot Lies, Red Blooded Murder and Red White & Dead) in 2009, all featuring a Chicago-based attorney/private investigator named Izzy McNeil …” Caldwell was only 52 years old when she died of breast cancer on March 1. Finally, we said good-bye on March 8 to Swedish-born actor Max von Sydow. Although he was closely associated with films by director Ingmar Bergman, and made his U.S. movie debut in 1965’s much-criticized The Greatest Story Ever Told, von Sydow also portrayed villains in Three Days of the Condor (1975) and the 1983 James Bond flick, Never Say Never Again. He even did a turn in a 1985 Kojak TV picture, Kojak: The Belarus File, starring Telly Savalas. Von Sydow perished just one month shy of his 91st birthday.

• Shortly after I posted this obituary of author Clive Cussler, Neil Nyren, the former editor-in-chief of G.P. Putnam’s Sons and now editor-at-large for CrimeReads, let me know that Publishers Weekly would soon “be running a piece by me … about being Clive’s editor.” That fine, fond remembrance can finally be relished here.

• For anyone who didn’t know this already:

Humphrey Bogart will go down in history as the actor most associated with the detective character Phillip Marlowe, but he wasn’t the first actor to play him, and he wasn’t author Raymond Chandler’s first preference.

In 1944, the washed-up musical star Dick Powell played the sleuth in the first film adaptation of a Chandler novel, Farewell, My Lovely (retitled to Murder, My Sweet, lest it seem like another musical). The movie relaunched Powell’s career, and Chandler was not disappointed with the casting decision. Powell bought an air of refinement that Chandler had initially envisioned for his P.I. But actually, he said later, the actor he most wanted to play his detective was Cary Grant.

• Deadline reports that “Showtime has found its missing President. Ann Dowd (The Handmaid’s Tale) has been cast in the key role opposite David Oyelowo in The President Is Missing, Showtime’s drama pilot based on the novel by President Bill Clinton and James Patterson from Christopher McQuarrie and Anthony Peckham. In The President Is Missing pilot, a powerless and politically aimless vice president (Oyelowo) unexpectedly becomes president halfway into his administration’s first term when President Jillian Stroud (Dowd) goes missing, despite his every wish to the contrary. He walks right into a secret, world-threatening crisis, both inside and outside the White House. Attacked by friends and enemies alike, with scandal and conspiracy swirling around him, he is confronted with a terrible choice: keep his head down, toe the party line and survive, or act on his stubborn, late-developing conscience and take a stand.”

• Short-story writer Chris McGinley makes the case that Charles Brockden Brown’s forgotten Edgar Huntly, or Memoirs of a Sleepwalker (1798) was “the first true rural noir in American letters.”

• I know Lee Goldberg primarily as a prolific author (Fake Truth) and as the co-founder of Brash Books. But not long ago, he also launched Cutting Edge, an imprint he says was “created for stuff that doesn’t fit into Brash … mostly vintage crime and thrillers from the late ’50s and early ’60s, some non-fiction, some literary fiction, and some westerns.” Among the yarns already available from Cutting Edge are e-book versions of Sterling Noel’s I See Red (1955), Geoffrey Wagner’s Season of Assassins (1961), and The House on Q Street (1959), by “Robert Dietrich,” aka E. Howard Hunt, plus paperback reprints of all four of James Howard’s novels starring “itinerant newspaper man” Steve Ashe. I have read only one of those four, 1957’s Die on Easy Street, but can finally now get my hands on the remainder: I’ll Get You Yet (1954), I Like It Tough (1955), and Blow Out My Torch (1956). Such a treat! To learn more about each of these titles, and more, and to see what’s coming soon from Cutting Edge, refer to the imprint’s Web site or its Facebook page.

• If you’re like me, you are hoping soon to enjoy a fifth entry in David Hewson’s dramatic series starring Amsterdam police detective Pieter Vos and his country-reared colleague, Laura Bakker (The House of Dolls, Little Sister, etc.). Unfortunately, no such book yet seems on the horizon. UK author Hewson has, however, just made available for downloading a Vos short story titled “Bad Apple.”

• CrimeReads posted a fascinating piece earlier this week about “poison pen letter crimes” of the early 20th century, by Curtis Evans (Murder in the Closet). While you’re visiting that online periodical—which celebrated its second birthday on March 7—be sure to also take a gander at Paul French’s appraisal of crime fiction based in Saigon, Vietnam, Katie Orphan’s survey of the Los Angeles locales used in James M. Cain’s novels, and Tessa Wegert’s essay, “How Do You Write a Mystery When Every Plot Is Taken?” A trio of slightly older articles worth tracking down, too: Laura James’ “brief history of beauty as a surprisingly effective legal defense”; Ashawnta Jackson’s analysis of “how Isaac Hayes' soundtrack to Shaft ushered in an era of iconic Blaxploitation cinema”; and L. Wayne Hicks’ look back at the writing career of C.W. Grafton, father of author Sue Grafton.

• One of the books I’m looking forward to reading this season is Loren D. Estleman’s Indigo, his fifth novel about L.A. “film detective” Valentino. In advance of that work’s May 26 release, publisher Forge has posted the initial four chapters online. Hurrah!

• San Francisco-area novelist Mark Coggins’ latest August Riordan private eye novel, The Dead Beat Scroll, was published last September. Since, he contributed this photo feature to Mystery Tribune, showcasing some of the Fog City sites figuring into that yarn.

• In his blog, Men’s Pulp Mags, Robert Deis offers a quite favorable critique of a 2019 book to which I contributed, Sticking It to the Man: Revolution and Counterculture in Pulp and Popular Fiction, 1950 to 1980, edited by Andrew Nette and Iain McIntyre. Deis opines, in part: “Sticking It to the Man is not your typical book about vintage paperbacks. It’s one that combines insightful paperback reviews with heavily-researched cultural and political history, pop culture history, and author profiles and interviews. And, it includes contributions written by more than 20 knowledgeable academics and other experts Nette and McIntyre recruited for the project.” Find out more here.

• Meanwhile, a reviewer for the literary mag NB lists my essay, “Black Is Beautiful,” as one of his favorite pieces in Sticking It to the Man.

• Mystery Fanfare alerts us to a special offer being made by the organizers of Bouchercon 2021, to be held in New Orleans, Louisiana: The first 200 registrants will pay only $175 to participate, while other attendees will be charged $195. At last check, the 200 threshold had not yet been reached. It’s your lucky day!

• In a recent interview, Spy Vibe’s Jason Whiton spoke with Ian Dickerson, author of A Saint I Ain’t: The Biography of Leslie Charteris. Of course, Charteris was “the creator of Simon Templar, a modern-day Robin Hood who was better known as The Saint.”

• For Britain’s Guardian newspaper, Peter Swanson (Eight Perfect Murders) addresses the ever-important question, “what can novels teach us about getting away with murder?”

• Speaking of “Getting Away with Murder,” that’s the name of the column UK reviewer/raconteur Mike Ripley composes each month for Shots. His March edition includes remarks about the annual Penguin Books crime party, Icelander Snorri Sturluson’s King Harald’s Saga (“which was [possibly] first published in 1230),” and new or forthcoming works by Kathryn Harkup (Death by Shakespeare), Peter Morfoot (Knock ’Em Dead), Stephanie Wrobel (The Recovery of Rose Gold, aka Darling Rose Gold), and Jim Kelly (Night Raids).

• And as you negotiate the COVID-19 pandemic, revisit this piece I wrote last year about crime novels set amid disasters.

The Robust Rise of the “Regionals”

Today marks my long-overdue return to CrimeReads, after a few months of being distracted by other editorial projects and helping to open a new Seattle bookshop. My subject under consideration this time is the forgotten rise of regional American detective fiction during the 1970s and ’80s. As I recall in the piece:

That’s when a restless new generation of detective-fictionists decided the field—grown stale after a mid-century deluge of male-oriented works formulated around cynical peepers, amorous female clients, and epidemic gunplay—needed a serious shaking-up in order to maintain relevance and readership. One result of that effort was a broader, updated perspective on what sorts of offenses could and should be addressed in these books: not just larceny, abductions, and choreographed slayings anymore, but also environmental injustices, endemic racism, human trafficking, right-wing extremism, domestic abuse, and child-custody disputes. Another way the genre diversified was by expanding its storytelling stage beyond familiar urban hubs, to rediscover the value of literary regionalism.

Included among the people responsible for that era’s crime-fiction expansion were authors ranging from Robert B. Parker and Tony Hillerman to K.C. Constantine, James Crumley, Karen Kijewski, Jonathan Valin, Richard Hoyt, Linda Barnes, and William J. Reynolds.

Again, click here to find that whole CrimeReads piece.

PaperBack: “Whiskey River”

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



Whiskey River, by Loren D. Estleman (Bantam Crime Line, 1991), the opening entry in his seven-book Detroit Crime Series.
Cover illustration by Larry Lurin.

When Bad Typos Happen to Good People

I take what some people might characterize as inordinate delight in discovering typographical errors on book covers. (No doubt a consequence of my years as a magazine and newspaper editor.) So it was with a hearty laugh that I encountered one such typo on the rear side of an advance reader’s copy of Loren D. Estleman’s forthcoming short-story collection, Nearly Nero: The Adventures of Claudius Lyon, the Man Who Would Be Wolfe (Tyrus).

As anyone familiar with Rex Stout’s longest-practicing protagonist, Nero Wolfe, knows, that oversize but percipient New York City armchair sleuth was fond not only of fine comestibles and beer, but also of orchids. Wikipedia quotes Stout biographer John J. McAleer as explaining that “Wolfe spends four hours a day with his orchids. Clients must accommodate themselves to this schedule.” While the crime-solver could often be irritable, he derived great pleasure from raising and breeding orchids, and giving them away.

When it came time to pen the promo copy for the reverse of Nearly Nero, though, its writer must have been either tired or imbibing too heavily of beer himself. Its first paragraph begins as follows:

From 1934 until his death in 1975, Rex Stout entertained the world with the exploits of Nero Wolfe, the eccentric, organ-breeding detective genius, as related by Archie Goodwin, the irreverent legman.

You can see a scan of that back cover by clicking here.

As talented as he was, I doubt that Wolfe ever engaged in medical experimentation. Presumably, then, the good folks at Tyrus Books will notice and correct this back-cover blunder long before Estleman’s book reaches print in May. But for now, I am keeping it on my desk to glance at whenever I need a chuckle to get me through the day.

Pierce’s Picks: “The Confessions of Al Capone”

A weekly alert for followers of crime, mystery, and thriller fiction.

The Confessions of Al Capone, by Loren D. Estleman (Forge):
One can’t help but admire Loren D. Estleman’s authorial versatility. For the last 33 years--beginning with 1980’s Motor City Blue--he’s been writing up the adventures of unreconstructed Detroit gumshoe Amos Walker (last seen in Burning Midnight). But the now 60-year-old writer has also turned out smaller successions of books about hit man Peter Macklin, Old West marshal Page Murdock, and “film detective” Valentino (Alive!), and he’s concocted historical novels around real-life figures such as “hanging judges” Isaac Parker (The Branch and the Scaffold) and Roy Bean (Roy & Lillie: A Love Story). The Confessions of Al Capone adds to this last category of his storytelling.

Set in 1944, this new yarn introduces Peter Vasco, an FBI “drone” who’s typically “assigned to proofread non-classified instructions to Special Agents in Charge and the odd innocuous press release for errors of spelling and grammar.” One day, though, Vasco is summoned to Director J. Edgar Hoover’s office. He fears that Hoover is going to dismiss him for some incidental slip-up; instead, the director wants young Vasco--posing as a Catholic priest--to infiltrate the guarded inner circle around mob boss Al Capone, who has recently been released after a seven-year prison stint (part of it spent at Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay) brought on by his 1931 conviction on federal charges of tax evasion. Capone has returned to his estate in Palm Beach, Florida; however, he’s suffering from syphilis, only irregularly lucid, and prone to spontaneous rants. It’s up to Vasco to gain the declining gangster’s trust and elicit from him as much information as he can about Capone’s confederates before “Scarface” kicks the bucket (which he will do in 1947 at age 48).

Running more than 400 pages in length, this is a big book for Estleman, and one that displays his narrative-writing skills and comprehension of U.S. criminal history most effectively. Its chapters shift back and forth between third-person action and the first-person recollections of Capone himself. Along the way, Estleman provides readers with sharp portrayals of the mobster’s underappreciated wife, Mae, top Capone henchman Frank Nitti, and other members of the so-called Chicago Outfit. One gets the impression that Estleman invested more than mere time in this novel, that he had a genuine connection with the era and people about which he writes. As he told an interviewer recently, his biggest challenge was in capturing Capone’s voice. That, he said, “was the very kernel of the idea of what I wanted to do. ... [Capone] had a fascinating cadence of speech. He loved to tell a story; he loved to talk about himself; he loved publicity. ... I wanted that version of Capone to come through.” It’s only one critic’s opinion, of course, but from what I’ve read of this book so far, I think he succeeded in that task, and more.

* * *

Also new and worth tracking down is The Rules of Wolfe (Mysterious Press), by James Carlos Blake. It rolls out the increasingly tense tale of Eddie Gato Wolfe, a too-impulsive member of a Texas gun-running family, who signs on to work security for a Sonoran drug cartel--only to fall hard for a cinnamon-skinned beauty he should never have touched, and with whom he soon flees, pursued by a pack of killers. A great chase thriller. ... And Brits should look for The Resistance Man (Quercus UK), the sixth entry in Martin Walker’s heralded series about small-town French police chief Bruno Courrèges. Here we find the food-and-wine-loving Bruno investigating a cache of old bank notes and dealing with burglaries, one of which concludes in murder.

Pierce’s Picks: “Alive!”

A weekly alert for followers of crime, mystery, and thriller fiction.

Alive!, by Loren D. Estleman (Forge):
Michigan resident Loren D. Estleman is certainly best known for having produced 22 novels--thus far, anyway--about Detroit gumshoe Amos Walker (Burning Midnight, 2012). Prolific writer that he is, he has also penned a succession of tales focusing on hit man Peter Macklin and a seven-book series of thrillers rooted in the Motor City’s criminal history. Oh, and of course he’s concocted a generous number of Westerns. And standalones too, such as the forthcoming The Confessions of Al Capone.

In the late 1990s, Estleman introduced yet another protagonist, a young Los Angeles “film detective” by the name of Valentino--no relation to the silent-film performer of that same name--who serves as an archivist for UCLA’s Film Preservation Department and lives in a historic but rundown movie theater that he is slowly (and expensively) restoring. Valentino, whose initial investigations were related in short stories published by Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, specializes in digging up valuable vintage films, but along the way he becomes involved in mysteries of a more violent variety. For instance, Alive! (his third book-length romp, after 2009’s Alone) finds him being contacted by an alcoholic old friend, who is murdered shortly after Valentino refuses to get involved with him again. Regretful, Valentino sets off to figure out who terminated his former pal’s life, and why. That leads him to what may be notorious, long-lost film footage of Dracula portrayer Bela Lugosi auditioning for the starring role in the 1931 horror-movie classic, Frankenstein (a part that eventually went to Boris Karloff). As it turns out, though, Valentino isn’t alone in wanting to get his mitts on that missing screen test; others are equally interested--and considerably more ready to kill to acquire the reels.

Estleman is a veteran film enthusiast, so he brings an abundance of knowledge about Hollywood history and trivia to this sometimes humorous series. Readers who enjoyed the late Stuart M. Kaminsky’s collection of Tinseltown mysteries featuring Toby Peters, or who reveled in Jonathan Gash’s stories about antiques “divvie” Lovejoy, should find much to like in these Valentino yarns.

* * *

Also new and worth looking over is Murder by the Book (Sphere), the 18th installment in Susanna Gregory’s popular series about 14th-century English physician-sleuth Matthew Bartholomew. In these pages we find tempers flaring at the colleges of the University of Cambridge over plans to create a democratizing Common Library. After a corpse is discovered in the library’s garden, and then more murders take place in the adjacent town (supposedly committed by smugglers), it falls to Bartholomew to end the bloodshed and restore peaceful co-existence between Cambridge and its growing institutions of learning. ... The plot of Gregory Gibson’s caperish debut novel, The Old Turk’s Load (Mysterious Press), builds around a $5 million shipment of high-grade heroin that vanishes amid Newark, New Jersey’s 1967 riots. Between these covers you’ll find an entertaining cast of eccentrics that includes a crime boss in rather desperate need of anger management, a Manhattan developer of dubious honesty, and a private eye who’s much in the market for some redemption. In addition to delivering a memorable final showdown, Gibson makes excellent use of his tale’s quirky historical setting. ... Finally, in Criminal Enterprise (Putnam), Owen Laukkanen brings back his justice-seeking duo, Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension investigator Kirk Stevens and FBI agent Carla Windermere, who were last seen in The Professionals. Here, the pair seek to bring down Carter Tomlin, a formerly successful executive who, after being laid off as a consequence of the Bush recession, turns to robbing banks in order to keep up his living standards. As he did in The Professionals, Laukkanen executes this work of suspense largely from the viewpoint of the “bad guy,” in this case Tomlin, stirring readers to sympathize with his plight. He’s less successful at making Stevens and Windermere compelling.

Pierce’s Picks: “Burning Midnight”

A weekly alert for followers of crime, mystery, and thriller fiction.

Burning Midnight, by Loren D. Estleman (Forge):
Detroit-area author Estleman is one my “old reliables”--novelists who almost never disappoint. I started reading his fiction way back in 1980, when his first Amos Walker private-eye novel, Motor City Blue, saw print, and I’ve kept up with his work (more or less) ever since. He’s penned a number of novels exploring Detroit’s colorful history, as well as many Westerns, but I have been most diligent in reading the Walker yarns. Estleman’s man isn’t the trendiest investigator on the block--he’d be more comfortable partnering with Nate Heller than Nick Heller--but he’s certainly reliable. So he’s the guy Inspector John Alderdyce of the Detroit Police Homicide Division turns to when he needs help, even though the two men don’t always get along. It seems Alderdyce’s son’s 16-year-old brother-in-law, Ernesto Pasada, has joined one of the city’s Mexicantown gangs, the Maldados, and the inspector wants Walker to get him out. Fast. The traditionally rancorous relationship between the Maldados and a rival gang is turning ugly, and Ernesto risks becoming a gang-war casualty. But as Walker inserts himself into the midst of those brewing hostilities, he discovers that something much bigger and more dangerous than a turf battle is in the offing. Estleman’s humor and sarcasm, and his appreciation for beleaguered Detroit help make Burning Midnight an especially satisfying read.

An excerpt from Burning Midnight is available here.

* * *

There are several other crime and mystery novels being released this week that also deserve attention: The Skeleton Box, by Bryan Gruley (Touchstone); An Unmarked Grave, by Charles Todd (Morrow); Midwinter Blood, by Mons Kallentoft (Emily Bester/Atria); and The Seven Wonders, by Steven Saylor (Minotaur).

Back to Black, Part IV

(Previous installments of author Mark Coggins’ look back at The New Black Mask magazine can be found here.)

In the fourth issue of The New Black Mask, Detroit detective novelist Loren D. Estleman, who also had a story in the first NBM, makes a return appearance, this time to nab the cover with his original Amos Walker story, “Blond and Blue.” That issue was published in 1986, but in correspondence years later, Estleman told me he was never very happy with the artist’s portrayal of Walker (the gentlemen in the illustration with his coat pulled down around his shoulders), feeling that his protagonist came off looking more like game-show host (and The Snoop Sisters co-star) Bert Convy than a tough-guy private investigator. Judging by this Convy photo, at least, he could well have a point.

“Blond and Blue” tells the story of a kidnapped boy who ends up being a pawn in a battle between his estranged parents, the feds, and the mob. Walker (who by 1986 had appeared in only six novels, most recently Every Brilliant Eye) is in fine form, eschewing his Smith & Wesson for a well-aimed Oldsmobile in the final showdown scene. (This scan of the “Blond and Blue” title page shows the signature and inscription Estleman provided me when I wrote to request them back in 1999.)

In the Estleman interview accompanying this tale, he talks about submitting his first short fiction to Argosy magazine when he was just 15, and compares the art of short-story writing with making love in an elevator! Regarding the basics of fiction-writing, Estleman said: “You have to know where you’re going from the beginning. You have to nail your character down in a couple of lines and move on from there.” And when asked about his reading of other authors’ work, he remarked: “I read a great deal, and I make it a practice not to read writers who do not themselves read. We read for the same reason a baseball player looks at a videotape of another player in action. Certainly a pitcher does it to see how his opponent works and to see if he can better it.”

Following Estleman’s yarn in NBM No. 4 comes “The Sins of the Fathers,” by returning author George V. Higgins. Higgins once again says it all with dialogue, conveying a character sketch of a corrupt, blackmailing police lieutenant in the course of one long conversation between two of his underlings at a shooting range. Higgins bookends his opening line--“I am telling you right now ... that you would not believe, that no sane person would believe, what I go through with this guy”--with the perfect line at the close, and nicely motivates it with what comes in between.

Prolific veteran Edward D. Hoch spins the next yarn, “The Other Eye,” which offers one of the relatively rare appearances of his California private eye, Al Darlan. I say relatively rare, because Hoch has written more than 900 short stories, and Darlan, although he was featured in a story from the March/April 2007 issue of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, does not show up nearly as often as do his other series characters, Nick Velvet and Captain Leopold. In “The Other Eye” Darlan lets an eager would-be investigator buy his way into his one-man firm, but soon has cause to regret it.

Not many people can say, “Goddamn [James] Ellroy ... he’s always calling me up. He wants to be friends; I don’t need friends,” and mean it, but apparently the author who follows next in this lineup, Joseph L. Koenig, can--and did. As Sarah Weinman once explained, Koenig is something of a cipher: he wrote true-crime articles for 15 years prior to the publication of his story “The Scoop” in NBM, then went on to write four crime novels--scoring an Edgar Award nomination and a movie-option deal in the process--before simply disappearing. In “The Scoop,” he describes how one newsman learns that pressing his First Amendment rights to the limit can be hazardous to a person’s health.

I’m going to skip over the fifth story in this issue for a moment and proceed to the sixth, instead: “Pincushion,” by David A. Bowman. In some ways, Bowman is as much a cipher as Koenig. The introduction to this story says that “Pincushion” was his first publication, but I can find no other fiction credited to a David Bowman with the middle initial “A.” What I was able to find is a New York writer without the middle initial, who has published two novels, a biography of the Talking Heads, and several stories in Salon (including one about “the real-life tragedy that haunted Ross Macdonald”). If anyone can tell me if these are one and the same person, or has contact information for New Yorker Bowman, I’d appreciate hearing from you.

I’m particularly interested in finding Bowman, because “Pincushion” is my favorite story in this issue of The New Black Mask. It’s a warped, nourish tale of private eye Foy Laneer’s quest to determine whether his client’s husband is “doing the thing” with an exotic dancer whose act involves impaling herself with needles. If you were to throw David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, some random Twilight Zone episodes, and Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men into a blender and hit purée, you might come up with something that approximates “Pincushion.”

“Psychodrama,” by Mike Handley, is the next-to-last story in the magazine. Handley has other short fiction to his credit, and in “Psychodrama” he provides the fictionalized account of a real-life Oakland, California, holdup that occurred in August 1983.

Capping off this edition is the fourth and concluding installment of Jim Thompson’s The Rip-Off. Our hero, Britt Rainstar, has his hands full dodging the fists, bodies, switchblades, and balustrades that are thrown at him in a climatic, penultimate scene; but in the closing act, he’s back to his old tricks with the ladies.

* * *

Now let’s return to that short story I skipped over previously, the fifth one you come to, when flipping through this particular issue. It’s called “There’s No Such Thing as Private Eyes,” and represents my first appearance in print. The tale also introduces my series character, San Francisco private eye August Riordan.

In “Eyes,” August has a different last name (Hammond) and lives in another city (Phoenix, Arizona). But he still drives the same 1968 Galaxie 500, and he is still the same “smart-ass with a foolish heart,” as described in the jacket text for my newest book, Runoff.

I composed “There’s No Such Thing as Private Eyes” in the late ’70s for a creative-writing class at Stanford University taught by Ron Hansen (The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Hitler’s Niece). This was shortly after I’d learned about Raymond Chandler and his distinctive writing style in another class, that one taught by Tobias Wolff (This Boy’s Life). I was all of 19 years old when I typed out the original draft on my Smith-Corona portable, and although the story went through a number of revisions, at the direction of both Hansen and NBM co-editor Richard Layman, it must be acknowledged--particularly when it comes to the plot and character motivations--that it still reads like a 19-year-old wrote it.

All that said--and if an author may be forgiven for commenting on his own work--in rereading “Eyes” again for this post, I did find that it contained a few “Chandlerisms,” or instances of the traditional private-eye voice that made smile. Here’s a sampling:

• From the story’s opening: “Delbert Evans was cheap: cheap with his time, cheap with his money. Cheap with everything. It didn’t do you any good to tell him, though, because he liked being that way.”

• Describing the love interest: “She wore a cream pantsuit over a figure that would make an accountant snap all his pencils.”

• August checks the back of his head after being knocked out: “[I] found a matted patch of bloody hair on a bump big enough to convince me that my head was reproducing by fission.”

• Calling on the maid of a suspect: “The Roman Empire rose and fell in the time it took someone to answer the door ... She smiled at me and tilted her hips at an insolent angle. She looked about as hard to get as the time of day.”

• Prowling a hallway to the chief suspect’s apartment: “I ... stepped out into a hallway that was as quiet as a sneak thief in the duchess’s bedroom.”

• After getting clobbered over the head yet again: “Points of light blazed like welding sparks in front of my eyes. The floor reached up to grab me.”

• And perhaps the best (and shortest) sentence I have ever written: “Things happened,” as the prelude to a description of the story’s big gun battle.

I am an inveterate pack rat. So I still have the original manuscript with Hansen’s comments, as well as a copy of the version I submitted to Layman, which contains his handwritten editorial remarks. I also have much of the correspondence between Layman, myself, and various representatives of the publisher. For the social historian interested in the process of writing and selling a short story to a major publisher in the mid-1980s, here is a little tour.

This is the last page of the original manuscript with Hansen’s summary recommendations (click on the image to enlarge it). He is very generous with his praise and you can see that he is encouraging me to submit the story for publication, though he’s concerned that the theme of the piece--that private eyes, as written about during the early and mid-20th century by Dashiell Hammett and Chandler, could not exist in today’s world--is not fully explored. I confess I couldn’t bring myself to make August recognize that he was a complete anachronism, because I was too much in love with the Hammett-Chandler world. August does quit doing private investigations at the end of “Eyes,” but reverses that decision in time to appear in his next adventure, The Immortal Game, which also began life as a short story that I submitted to The New Black Mask. Unfortunately--or fortunately, depending on how you view it--NBM ceased operations before it could publish Game; and after letting the story languish in a drawer for a number of years, I pulled it out to expand into novel form. By then, August had become a bit less anachronistic, a bit more mature--and a bit more self-aware.

Here is the letter I received from Layman after sending my story “over the transom” to the editors. Some years later, I learned that author Martha C. Lawrence (Ashes of Aries) also served on the editorial staff (see this interview), but I never corresponded with her, only with Layman. As you might expect, I was thrilled to bits to receive the acceptance. Check out the amount I was paid for the story: $750. More than 20 years later, that is still considered a generous amount for a short story. And some wonder why short fiction is dying ...

This is page 30 from the “enclosed marked typescript” mentioned in Layman’s letter. I agreed with 99 percent of the changes he wanted, and when I did call him to discuss the work, it was a fairly efficient conversation. On this page, the sentence he marked as “too strained” originally read, “The gun barked in my hand and three pills found found [sic] their way into his gut.” During the call, Layman told me that he didn’t like the use of the word “pills” because that was too reminiscent of Hammett and 1930s detective fiction argot. He also thought “barked” was hackneyed and that it was unnecessary to say “in my hand.” We agreed to replace “pills” with “slugs,” and I suggested “jolted” as a substitute for “barked.” I noted those changes down while we talked.

On this second page of the contract I eventually signed for the story, you’ll see the representative for the publisher is none other than Peter Jovanovich of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Some time after “There’s No Such Thing as Private Eyes” was accepted and the contract executed, I received another call from Richard Layman, telling me that I had been selected to have my photo on the back cover (only five of the authors in any one issue were selected). Again, I was thrilled and perhaps more than a little dumbstruck. I asked Layman what sort of photo he needed. His laconic response was straight out of the P.I. tradition, “Preferably one with your clothes on.”

(To be continued)