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:

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.

Bullet Points: Age of Anxiety Edition

• Nominees for the 2020 British Book Awards—aka The Nibbies—were announced earlier today, in 24 categories. There’s no guarantee that this year’s presentations (administered as usual by The Bookseller) will go ahead, amid the worsening COVID-19 pandemic; they’ve already been postponed until June 29, in London. But we can hope for the best. Below are the half-dozen novels shortlisted for Crime & Thriller Book of the Year.

— My Sister, the Serial Killer, by Oyinkan Braithwaite (Atlantic)
— The Hunting Party, by Lucy Foley (HarperCollins)
— How the Dead Speak, by Val McDermid (Little, Brown)
— The Silent Patient, by Alex Michaelides (Orion)
— Impostor, by L.J. Ross
(Dark Skies)
— Blue Moon, by Lee Child (Bantam Press)

Click here to see all of this year’s shortlisted nominees for the Nibbies.

• Swedish author David Lagercrantz (right), who penned three additional Girl with the Dragon Tattoo sequels after that series’ creator, Stieg Larsson, died in 2004 (the most recent of Lagercrantz’s entries being The Girl Who Lived Twice), has a crime-fiction trilogy of his own devising due out soon from the UK’s MacLehose Press. “Described as ‘a modern Sherlock Holmes saga,’ the Rekke trilogy features a young police officer, raised in a rough neighbourhood, and an older professor specialised in psychopathy and interrogational techniques,” explains The Bookseller. The first novel is expected to appear in bookshops by August or September of 2021, with Alfred A. Knopf having picked up the U.S. rights to that yarn.

• Sisters in Crime is accepting applications for its seventh annual Eleanor Taylor Bland Crime Fiction Writers of Color Award, with a $2,000 grant up for grabs. This prize of course honors African-American author Bland, the creator of a series starring Illinois police detective Marti MacAlister (Dead Time, Suddenly a Stranger), who died in 2010. Those wishing to apply for the 2020 award must do so by June 8. The winner is supposed to be announced by July 15. Previous recipients include Jessica Martinez (2019), Mia Manansala (2018), Jessica Ellis Laine (2017), and Stephane Dunn (2016).

• When I mentioned last weekend that the Murder and Mayhem in Chicago conference, planned for Saturday, March 21, had been cancelled, I wasn’t aware that it was being moved online. Sign in here ahead of time in order to watch the events, which begin tomorrow at 9 a.m. CDT and run through 4 p.m.

• Senior Editor Molly Odintz asserts, in CrimeReads, that mystery and thriller novels provide ideal escapes from our present worries:

Why are crime books so soothing? Or for that matter, why is genre fiction, or even fiction in general, a place of solace in times of need?

Fiction in general, and much narrative nonfiction, is immersive, and perhaps that is part of the answer. Genre fiction, with its need to pay attention to both the contents of the book and how those contents measure up to genre conventions, seems particularly good at distracting busy minds. I tend to judge the success of fiction by the following measure: does it require enough concentration, or grip my attention so fully, that I don’t start thinking about doing my laundry?

Maybe right now, we can all enjoy reading whatever books grip our attention so fully that we don’t have to think about anything outside the closed world of storytelling, for at least the few hours that it takes to read that story.

• Other recent CrimeReads offerings of note: Rebecca Rego Barry remarks on how mystery author and rare book collector Carolyn Wells “helped to create the ‘biblio-mystery’ genre”; Suzanne Redfearn lists “six current novels in which architecture plays an important role”; in this piece Stephanie Wrobel “breaks down the nine types of twist endings and the books that executed them best”; and in an interview with Harlan Coben, the author insists that the original Planet of the Apes movie provides “the best twist ending in history.”

• Tor.com brings word that this country’s “biggest publishing trade event and conference, Book Expo America and its associated convention BookCon, have officially been postponed until this summer because of the ongoing coronavirus outbreak … BEA will take place between July 22nd and 24th, while BookCon will shift to July 25th and 26th at New York City’s Javits Center. This is currently the same weekend that San Diego Comic Con is scheduled to take place, leaving an open question as to what conference publishers and authors will prioritize. (If SDCC isn’t delayed, in any case.)”

• In the meantime, the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, previously slated to take place from April 18 to 19 at the University of Southern California campus in L.A., has been postponed until the weekend of October 3-4. Additionally, according to a press alert, the Book Prizes ceremony—planned for April 17, and including five contenders in the Mystery/Thriller category—“will not be held this year. Book Prizes honorees and winners will be acknowledged through an announcement which remains scheduled for April 17.”

• Robert E. Howard Days, a pulp-fiction celebration that takes its name from the prolific creator of Conan the Barbarian, had been set to draw visitors to Howard’s birthplace of Cross Plains, Texas, in June. But it, too, has been cancelled due to the coronavirus crisis.



• Another unfortunate turn: Manhattan’s famous Mysterious Bookshop is shuttered “for the foreseeable future,” as the State of New York decrees “that all nonessential businesses must close their doors until an end to this pandemic is in sight.”

• Is this the right time to begin composing a COVID-19-inspired novel? Essayist Sloane Crosley suggests not. “From an artistic standpoint,” she writes in The New York Times, “it’s best to let tragedy cool before gulping it down and spitting it back into everyone’s faces. After all, Don Quixote was published about a century into the Spanish Inquisition. Art should be given a metaphorical berth as wide as the literal one we’re giving one another.”

• I hadn’t heard before that Marilyn Stasio, who has penned the Times Book Review’s must-read crime-fiction column ever since 1988, had suffered an accident. But the Review’s latest newsletter includes this note: “And for the many readers who have been writing and asking about our cherished crime columnist, you will be glad to know that the hardened New York City taxi that tried to mow her down found its match in Marilyn. She has fully recovered from the accident and is back to her biweekly habit of reviewing.” Well, thank goodness!

• R.I.P., Stuart Whitman. Born in San Francisco, California, in February 1928, the productive and versatile actor—who featured in such films as The Comancheros (1961), The Mark (1961, for which he received an Oscar nomination), and Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines (1965)—died from skin cancer this last Monday at age 92. In addition to his big-screen credits, Whitman appeared in more than a dozen episodes of the 1955-1959 TV series Highway Patrol, starred in the 1967-1968 TV western Cimarron Strip, and led the 1971 Irwin Allen-produced TV pilot City Beneath the Sea. Also decorating his résumé were guest-starring parts on Night Gallery, The Streets of San Francisco, Hec Ramsey, Police Story, Ellery Queen, Harry O, and Simon and Simon. Terence Towles Canote offers a fairly thorough record of Whitman’s career in his blog, A Shroud of Thoughts.

• Another actor gone from this world: Lyle Waggoner. He may be best remembered for his roles on The Carol Burnett Show and Wonder Woman, but Waggoner also guest-starred on such small-screen crime dramas as Charlie’s Angels, Hardcastle and McCormick, The New Mike Hammer, and Murder, She Wrote. He perished on March 17 at age 84, his cause of death being an unspecified form of cancer.

• In Reference to Murder's B.V. Lawson reports that “The International Book Publishers Association [has] announced the finalists for the annual Ben Franklin Award, celebrating excellence in book editorial and design. The Mystery & Thriller category shortlist [comprises] Bleed Through: Alex Greco, ADA Series Book 2, by Roger Canaff (Brooklyn Writers Press); The Last Getaway, by Clay Savage (Ocean Park Press); and A Veil Removed: A Henrietta and Inspector Howard Novel, by Michelle Cox (She Writes Press).”

• One of the books I’ve acquired to stave off cabin fever amid our present mass-seclusion is the 30th-anniversary edition of Mark Dawidziak’s The Columbo Phile: A Casebook, a long-out-of-print and wonderfully deep dive into Peter Falk’s Columbo, which premiered as part of the NBC Mystery Movie series back in 1971. That purchase, in turn, reminded me to check up a favorite blog coincidentally also called The Columbophile, where I discovered two fresh posts of interest. First, this critical assessment of “the very best” Columbo elements from the ’70s. (Yes, 1977’s “The Bye-Bye Sky High IQ Murder Case” wins a mention.) And second, this compilation of what the blog’s anonymous author contends are the series’ lowest points from that same era (the greatest derision being heaped upon 1976’s “Last Salute to the Commodore”). I’ve been thinking a lot about Columbo over the last week, as it figures into a writing assignment I have taken on, and preparation for that project will require my rewatching a variety of episodes, so these resources should help refine my choices.

• By the way, if you’re at all curious about Dawidziak and his book, don’t miss The Columbophile’s 2019 interview with him.

• And speaking of literary interviews, peruse this exchange between Spy Command managing editor Bill Koenig and Mark A. Altman, the co-author (with Edward Gross) of Nobody Does It Better: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of James Bond. It includes Altman’s succinct analysis of what impact the delayed release of No Time to Die might have on that 25th 007 film:

I was really disappointed when No Time to Die was pushed to Thanksgiving, but obviously in retrospect it was a very smart and necessary decision. I’m really hoping that it is a fitting capper to the [Daniel] Craig era and takes its cues from Casino Royale, not to mention On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, and doesn’t double down on the family drama of Spectre.

But I always go into every 007 movie hoping it’ll be the best one ever and sometimes I [am] more disappointed than others. I actually think the release date might help the film as it could play all through the holidays. It’s not unlike when Force Awakens got bumped from summer and ended up being a huge hit for Christmas and changed the whole release pattern for Star Wars films, with Solo proving a notable outlier.

• Following its limited release this month in U.S. theaters, the Australian film Miss Fisher and the Crypt of Tears—based on the 2012-2015 TV series Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries, and starring Essie Davis as a glamorous private eye in late 1920s Melbourne—will begin streaming in the States on Monday, March 23, via the Acorn TV platform. Its premiere in Great Britain, on Alibi, is scheduled for Friday, April 10. Click here to watch a trailer for this picture.

• Author Lee Goldberg alerts me to the fact that a five-disc DVD set of Matt Helm, containing all 13 episodes of that 1975-1976 Tony Franciosa TV series, can now be purchased in a version from France. However, he explains, those 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.” Thus far, no official Region 1 release of Matt Helm (viewable in the United States and Canada) is yet available.

• Over time, I have amassed a collection of DVDs from the Web site Modcinema, which sells movies and made-for-TV flicks produced during the 1960s and ’70s. I’m usually familiar with the small-screen offerings, either because I watched them once upon a time, or because I’ve read about them in Goldberg’s fat volume, Unsold Television Pilots: 1955-1989. But this one escaped my notice: 1978’s No Prince for My Cinderella, starring Robert Reed as David McKay, a psychologist “who specializes in finding teen runaways.” Of McKay, the site says:

He’s firm when he needs to be but adds just the right
dose of humor to lighten things up. One case has him chasing down a scrappy Scott Baio as a confused kid who forms a bond of respect with Reed. The main story has a troubled teenage girl (Terri Nunn, future singer of [the band] Berlin) who suffers from split personality. To make matters worse her alter ego is a hardened prostitute.

The film goes back and forth between Reed’s efforts to find Nunn and her sleazy descent from innocent street hooker to high-class call girl. Nunn (who was only 17 when she made this) gives a surprisingly solid performance as she snaps back and forth, from one personality to the other.

Hmm. “Mike Brady” as a gumshoe? I think I’ll pass.

• Caroline Crampton, host of the podcast Shedunnit, has posted a new episode, “Happily Ever After.” As she explains in her latest newsletter, her topic this time “is something that I've been wanting to do for ages: I’m a big fan of the Peter Wimsey/Harriet Vane romance in Dorothy L. Sayers’ books, and it was a real pleasure to consider that in detail. I also read the four Jill Paton Walsh ‘continuation’ novels to see how that relationship develops in different hands, and … against my expectations I mostly enjoyed them. My favourite was the WWII one A Presumption of Death, in case you were wondering.”

• While we’re on the subject of podcasts, I have failed to mention Nancie Clare’s most recent Speaking of Mysteries guests: Jason Pinter (Hide Away), Hilary Davidson (Don’t Look Down), Susan Elia MacNeal (The King’s Justice), and Heather Chavez (No Bad Deed). I think I might have drawn your attention already to her conversations with Lee Goldberg (Lost Hills) and Alan Furst (Under Occupation), but just in case I forgot to do so, you now have the necessary links.

• Did you know that there’s a blog called JJ Gittes Investigations, focusing on “the films of private investigator Jake Gittes” (Chinatown, The Two Jakes)? Yeah, neither did I—until yesterday, when I found that the site’s unidentified author had posted a favorable review of Sam Wasson’s February-released non-fiction book, The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood (Flatiron), another work I look toward for entertainment during my coronavirus sheltering. “While much of the ground has been covered before,” this blog observes, “The Big Goodbye reveals so much more about the creation of Chinatown, in such rich detail and depth, that sometimes you feel as if you’re really there. However, this is not a run-of-the-mill account of the making of the film; rather, it is an elaborate, careful illustration of Wasson’s thesis that Chinatown was a product of multiple personalities and events which converged to produce a perfect storm that is not only a cinematic masterpiece, but also the high water mark of Hollywood artistry before its decline into the ‘cinema of sensation,’ which began with 1970s disaster movies, such as The Towering Inferno, Airport and Earthquake.”

• Finally, here’s some good advice from Sergeant Phil Esterhaus to get you through these frightening days of disease.

Stay safe, everyone. We’ll get through this together.

Bullet Points: Media Medley Edition

• Argentina-born pianist and composer Lalo Schifrin, who has scored such films as Cool Hand Luke, Bullitt, and Dirty Harry, and created the theme music for TV productions including Mission: Impossible, Petrocelli, and Mannix, was honored this last weekend with a Governors Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. In addition to the 86-year-old Schifrin, two other recognizable Hollywood figures received Governors Awards: 93-year-old actress Cicely Tyson and Marvin Levy, a longtime public relations exec who was once a member of the AMPAS board of governors. You can watch Schifrin accept his award on YouTube.

• The Classic Film and TV Café calls producer-writer Stirling Silliphant “the poet laureate of 1960s television” in this tribute looking back at his scripts for the 1960-1964 CBS series Route 66. “Silliphant, who co-created the series with producer Herbert B. Leonard, wrote an incredible 73 of the 116 episodes over the show’s four-year run,” observes the blogger known as Rick29. “In terms of entertainment value, the plots were consistently above-average, but it’s Silliphant's dialogue that gave Route 66 its unique voice. As David Mamet would do later, Silliphant embellished his characters with dialogue that would never pass for natural—but which conveyed a singular poetry all its own.” In addition to Route 66, Silliphant (shown on the left) is remembered for his work on the TV programs Naked City and Longstreet, and his screenplays for such pictures as In the Heat of the Night (1967) and Marlowe (1969), which starred James Garner as Raymond Chandler’s justly famous Los Angeles private eye, Philip Marlowe.

• While we’re on the subject of bygone boob-tube shows, check out Michael Shonk’s new Mystery*File post about Gavilan, a 1982-1983 NBC series that featured Robert Urich (later of Spenser: For Hire fame) as a former intelligence operative who has gone to work for an oceanographic research organization called the Dewitt Institute, but keeps trying to help people—especially attractive young females—in trouble. Shonk opines:

The series had its good moments, but it also had many of the flaws of 1980s television. The plots were better than average but had to really stretch to connect to the Institute. In “By the Sword” the brilliant beautiful woman was a scientist working on a project to study the krill as a food source, but the plot was about an ancient samurai sword she stole from the Yakuza to regain her family honor.

The stories were entertaining but mindless, predictable and too willing to sacrifice story and character for a joke or twist. In “By the Sword,” the female scientist is trained in the martial arts and had done something her entire family had not done in over a hundred years, got her family’s ancient honored Japanese sword back from the Yakuza. So in the final confrontation for the sword it is Gavilan—as she watched—who sword fights to the death for the sword and her family honor. Of course, Gavilan out duels the unbeatable Master Samurai.

Shonk’s piece includes two episodes of Gavilan found on YouTube. A few of my own thoughts on this show can be found here.

• NBC-TV has reportedly made a script commitment for The Bone Collector, a series based both on Jeffery Deaver’s 1997 psychological thriller of the same name and on the 1990 Denzel Washington movie already adapted from that novel. According to Deadline Hollywood, NBC’s project “hails from writers V.J. Boyd and Mark Bianculli (S.W.A.T.), Universal Television and Sony Pictures Television … Written by Boyd and Bianculli, The Bone Collector follows Lincoln Rhyme, a retired genius forensic criminologist left paralyzed after an accident on the job. When a harrowing case brings him back to the force, Rhyme partners up with an ambitious young detective, Amelia Sachs, to take down some of the most dangerous criminals in the U.S.” There’s no information yet on who might star in this series, but plenty of speculation on what it could draw from Deaver’s 14 existing Rhyme novels, the latest of which is 2017’s The Cutting Edge.

• The Killing Times says that America’s Audience Network has renewed the Stephen King-inspired, David E. Kelley-developed crime drama, Mr. Mercedes, for a third season.

• I’m not surprised by news that Netflix’s Tony Danza/Josh Groban “dramedy,” The Good Cop, hasn’t been picked up for a second season. While I really wanted to like the series—in part because its creator-showrunner was Monk mastermind Andy Breckman—it came off as way too cute too much of the time, with an excess of thin plots and ridiculous turns. I did, however, like Danza’s portrayal of a disgraced ex-New York City policeman as part con man, part reluctant troubleshooter; and dancer-actress Monica Barbaro consistently brightened up the screen playing Grogan’s ballsier partner, Cora Vasquez. I’ve only seen half of the 10 episodes of The Good Cop, but their performances will keep me watching through to the end.

• I’d heard about this before, and was convinced that I’d mentioned it here, but evidently I was wrong. Anyway, Mystery Tribune notes that Christopher Huang’s debut novel, A Gentleman’s Murder—which featured in my recent CrimeReads piece about nine post-World War I mysteries—has been optioned for TV adaptation.

• Deadline Hollywood brings word that Tom Shepherd, who scripted Robert Downey Jr.’s forthcoming The Voyage of Doctor Dolittle, has been signed to pen Matt Helm, based on Donald Hamilton’s long-running series of spy thrillers. Bradley Cooper will star in this Paramount project, with George Clooney, Grant Heslov, Alex Kurtzman, and Roberto Orci all serving as executive producers.



• Continuing The Rap Sheet’s series on “copycat covers,” book fronts that employ artwork previously displayed on other titles, we offer—above—the façades of Blow Out the Candles and Say Goodbye (Lamplighter Suspense), Linda S. Glaz’s 2017 novel, and 2016’s Stealing People (Europa Editions), the third entry in Robert Wilson’s series starring kidnap consultant Charlie Boxer.

• A new book suggests that Arthur Conan Doyle based the character of Professor James Moriarty, sleuth Sherlock Holmes’ principal nemesis, on a brilliant 19th-century professor of mathematics named George Boole. “A thorough comparison between Conan Doyle’s fictional Moriarty and the real Boole,” writes The Irish Times, “reveals numerous persuasive similarities. Both characters held chairs at small provincial universities; both won appointments on the basis of outstanding early work; both had interests in astronomy; the two were of similar appearance—an illustration of Moriarty in Conan Doyle’s work bears a striking resemblance to a photograph of Boole and may well have been based on it. The major discrepancy between Boole and Moriarty is that Boole was a man of high morals and excellent character, a social reformer, religious thinker and family man.” While Moriarty … well, as Conan Doyle put it in The Valley of Fear, he was “the greatest schemer of all time, the organizer of every devilry …”

• Murder & Mayhem picks “11 must-read mysteries set in Los Angeles,” and I’m relieved to discover that I’ve read all but one: Dorothy B. Hughes’ The Expendable Man (1963).

• To his excellent John D. MacDonald blog, The Trap of Solid Gold, Steve Scott has recently added two worth-reading vintage profiles of Travis McGee’s creator—one from Florida’s Tampa Bay Times, dated April 26, 1981; and the other from a 1978 edition of the Canadian news magazine Maclean’s (you’ll find that second piece here).

• Authors are generally quite reticent to reveal which books they prefer among those they have written, so it’s interesting to see Max Allan Collins identify his two favorite entries in his rapidly expanding series about the hit man known as Quarry.

• Which reminds me, I wasn’t aware before reading this piece in The Guardian, that Agatha Christie’s 1967 novel, Endless Night, was her favorite. Sam Jordison says more about that standalone here.

• A weekend spent organizing my late in-laws' long-forgotten boxes of books turned up some surprising and welcome literary gems.

• I am, of course, an enthusiastic follower of the Web site Pulp Covers, with its ever-growing abundance of classic book and magazine fronts. And one of the reasons for my interest is that the site’s unidentified editor frequently posts links to full issues of periodicals such as Dime Mystery Magazine, Detective Book Magazine, Manhunt, and New Detective. Those issues are easily downloaded and can be wonderfully entertaining.

• So much has already been said about the demise, late last week, of 87-year-old novelist and screenwriter William Goldman, that I fear I have nothing to add. Obituaries in The New York Times and in the British Guardian covered the highlights of his career: his scripting of movies such as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President’s Men, Maverick, and Paul Newman’s Harper; his penning of novels that included Marathon Man, The Princess Bride, and Magic; and his late-life success with a memoir titled Adventures in the Screen Trade. CrimeReads adds to those encomia a collection of notable Goldman quotes. My own first experience with Goldman was way back in high school, when I was introduced to Magic … which put me off of ventriloquist’s dummies for the remainder of my mortal life. I’ve often watched Goldman’s motion pictures, with Harper—based on Ross Macdonald’s 1949 private-eye novel, The Moving Target—and Butch Cassidy being my favorites. I never met the man, but the power and precision of his prose, and the pleasure I’ve derived from listening to his dialogue and reading his stories made me care about him nonetheless. Really, a storyteller could hope for nothing better than that.

• The Gumshoe Site reminds us that William Goldman’s first mystery novel was No Way to Treat a Lady. In another blog, Tipping My Fedora, Sergio Angelini recalls that that book was “originally published in 1964 under the pseudonym ‘Harry Longbaugh,’ the real name of the outlaw ‘The Sundance Kid.’ Written in just 10 days, this brief novel is 160 pages long and broken down into 53 chapters and is an exciting, blackly comic work reminiscent of the best of the Ed McBain thrillers of the time.” Adam Groves of The Bedlam Files adds that No Way to Treat a Lady “lacks the slickness and polish of [Goldman’s] later novels, with much slapdash prose and an uncertain grasp of tone (it’s difficult to discern if all the comedic elements were meant to be funny). Yet the wit, verve and imagination that characterize Goldman’s best work are very much evident in this suspenseful and macabre novel that predates everything from Dexter to Natural Born Killers in its furiously inventive account of the fortunes of a mass murderer.” Concludes Groves: “I say it’s one of William Goldman’s finest books.”

• By the way, No Way to Treat a Lady was made into a 1968 film starring Rod Steiger, Lee Remick, and George Segal. As I’ve never read Goldman’s original book, or seen the movie, I guess I have some serious catching up to do.

• Want to learn more about classic New Zealand mystery writer Ngaio Marsh? CrimeReads’ Neil Nyren provides a bit of background as well as recommendations of four works from her oeuvre.

• Here’s something I didn’t know before: Wisconsin-born, Japanese-American crime novelist Milton K Ozaki (1913-1989)—who often wrote under the moniker Robert O Saber—was not only “a newspaperman, an artist, and the operator of a beauty parlor” (per Bill Crider), but also something of a con man, according to Paperback Warrior.

• In The Spy Command, Bill Koenig traces the complicated roots of the 1964-1968 NBC-TV spy series The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and its connections to James Bond creator Ian Fleming. This is a continuing series, but you can find Part I here, with Part II here.

• The New York Times’ Alexandra Alter recently caught up with Megan Abbott, whose commitments both as an author and as the executive producer of a TV pilot film based on her 2012 novel, Dare Me, must leave her little time for relaxation.

• Leo W. Banks has claimed another prize for his 2017 debut novel, Double Wide. His publisher’s Web site says Banks “just received the 2018 Best Mystery Novel award from the New Mexico Book Co-op, announced at a gala awards banquet in Albuquerque on November 16th. Along with this latest honor, Double Wide also has received two Western Writers of America 2018 Spur Awards and [the] Best Crime Novel of the Year Award by True West magazine.”

• Finally, I’ve spent several years now trying to procure copies of the four episodes made of Faraday and Company, a 1973-1974 detective series that starred Dan Dailey and James Naughton, and was part of the NBC Wednesday Mystery Movie line-up. Then, just today, I happened across a Web site called DVD Planet Store, which offers the full run of Faraday for $16. The trouble is, after reading negative online reviews of this Pakistan-based enterprise, I fear I might never receive the DVDs I sought to purchase. Has anybody else tried to buy from DVD Planet Store? What were your experiences with it?

More Newsy Tidbits for Your Delectation

• As The Spy Command reminds us, “Today, March 24, is the 100th anniversary of the birth of author Donald Hamilton, creator of Matt Helm.” More info about Helm and Hamilton can be found here.

• I mentioned yesterday that director Michael Mann is launching his own book-publishing imprint. What I hadn’t known until reading this item in the Crimespree Magazine blog is that “one of his first projects finds him teaming up with award-winning crime writer Don Winslow.” Jeremy Lynch goes on to explain that “Winslow will be crafting a novel based on the relationship between legendary organized crime bosses Tony Accord and Sam Giancana. And not surprisingly, plans are already underway to make a film out of it. Mann has, with The Story Factory’s Shane Salerno (Don’s co-writer on the screenplay for Savages), written a screenplay already. I would assume that Don will draw from the screenplay, but if a film is a made, a new draft will almost certainly be made to reflect where Don goes in the novel.”

• I always remember Oklahoma-born performer Larry Drake best for his regular part as Benny Stulwicz, a developmentally disabled office assistant on NBC-TV’s L.A. Law. However, blogger Terence Towles Canote makes clear that Drake, who died on March 17 at age 67, enjoyed a much more diverse and honored acting career. “Larry Drake was an extremely talented actor,” Canote writes in A Shroud of Thoughts. “When he was playing Benny on L.A. Law there were many in the general public who were convinced that he was actually developmentally challenged. His performance in the role was simply that convincing. What is more, he could play a wide variety of roles. Ruthless mobster Robert Durant in Darkman may be his second best known role and it is as far from the gentle Benny as one can get. Over the years Mr. Drake played everything from scientists to priests to rednecks to J. Edgar Hoover, and he did all of them well.”

• While any such list is suspect, Sadie Trombetta’s rundown of “13 of the Best Female Sleuths from Pop Culture” has much to commend it—including the fact that she includes Veronica Mars.

• So here’s an important question: What were the oddest-titled books published in 2015? Mashable has the answer.

• Speaking of titles … It isn’t often that the word “taffeta” figures into a novel’s name. So when I spotted this post about Marla Cooper’s brand-new Terror in Taffeta, I thought immediately of Ben Benson’s 1953 police procedural, Target in Taffeta.

• Andrew Nette has a fine piece in Pulp Curry about English screenwriter-director Mike Hodges’ “underappreciated 1972 film, Pulp,” which he calls “a delight for any fan of cheap pulp paperback fiction.” You will find Nette’s post here.

• Need reading material for Easter Sunday? Check this out.

• Rolling Stone has just endorsed Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton for president. Writes publisher Jann S. Wenner: “On the question of experience, the ability to enact progressive change, and the issue of who can win the general election and the presidency, the clear and urgent choice is Hillary Clinton.”

• Pay attention, James Bond film fans: For his blog, Illustrated 007, Peter Lorenz interviews Cindy Wirth, who modeled for the poster artwork promoting the 1983 film Never Say Never Again.

• Since I have always loved libraries, I was interested to check out BookRiot’s list of “47+ of Your Favorite Books About Libraries.” Among those mentioned are Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose and Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s The Shadow of the Wind, two favorites of mine.

• Meanwhile, the Detroit Public Library’s main branch figures into this post showcasing Motor City historical landmarks. Since I lived for a while in Detroit, Michigan, I’m always interested in stories about its past and present. At the link you will find photos and write-ups about 13 of the city’s surviving architectural wonders. I have visited most of them, but not all. Next time I’m in Detroit, I definitely have to pay a call on what remains of Michigan Building and Theater!

Matt Helm Fans, Take Note!

I was recently asked to come up with 20 trivia questions focused around Donald Hamilton’s long-running series of Matt Helm espionage thrillers. These stumpers can pertain not only to the more than two dozen Helm novels, but also to the films and short-lived TV series Hamilton’s character inspired. I’m supposed to submit my queries in early May.

It occurs to me that some Rap Sheet readers might find it fun to contribute their own posers to this mix. I’ll gladly entertain any and all suggestions. Please drop me a line--soon--at jpwrites@wordcuts.org. I ask only that whatever Helm-related questions you submit also include the answers, as well as info about where those answers can be found (either online or in the individual books).

So, who’s going to be the first reader to take on this challenge?

Taking in the Sites

• Blogger-author Evan Lewis today reports that Doug Allyn (who’s already carried home more of these coveted commendations over the years than anybody else) has won Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine’s 2012 Readers Award. Here’s how the voting broke down:

1. “Wood-Smoke Boys,” by Doug Allyn (March/April 2012)
2. “Mariel,” by David Dean (December)
3. “Champawat,” by Lia Matera (September/October)
4. “Skyler Hobbs and the Garden Gnome Bandit,” by Evan Lewis (September/October)
5. “Dial Country Code 91 + M for Murder,” by Stewart Brown (December)
6. “Death of a Drama Queen,” by Doug Allyn (September/October)
7. “So Near Any Time Always,” by Joyce Carol Oates (March/April)
8. “Black Pearls,” by Clark Howard (May)
9. “One Angry Julius Katz and Eleven Befuddled Jurors,” by Dave Zeltserman (June)
10. “Golden Chance,” by S.J. Rozan (December)

• It was about a year ago, I think, that my cable-TV provider dropped BBC America from its one-step-up-from-basic package. As a consequence, I lost Law & Order: UK and other programs I’d enjoyed watching regularly. Just this last weekend, though, I discovered that I once more have access to the channel ... which meant that I could finally see Ripper Street, the new crime series set in London’s notorious East End in

1889, shortly after Jack the Ripper’s murderous rampage there. Well, as you might expect, I spent a good few chunk of Saturday and Sunday catching up with Ripper Street via On Demand--and enjoyed every minute of that experience. What a splendidly atmospheric, character-rich, and smartly written show this is, with special credits due Adam Rothenberg, playing Homer Jackson, an American police surgeon with an elusive past, and Jerome Flynn, who appears as laconic but hammer-fisted Detective Sergeant Bennet Drake. If you haven’t partaken of this series, you owe it to yourself to watch. The eighth and final episode of the season is scheduled for broadcast in the States this coming Saturday at 9 p.m. (see the preview on the left), but Ripper Street has already been renewed for 2014. Once I’ve made it through the episodes from this series, I’ll be on to another BBC America crime drama, Copper, set in New York’s notorious Five Points neighborhood in the mid-1860s, which I’ve heard is also a must-see. Thank goodness, BBC America is back!

• Lend an ear, folks! At least for the time being, you can listen to Mark Billingham’s Rule Book of Crime, a three-hour production of BBC Radio’s 4 Extra. During the show, this author best known for his Tom Thorne crime novels (The Demands) “detects his favourite radio sleuthing stars--Sherlock Holmes, Miss Marple, Raymond Chandler, Henning Mankell, and P.D. James.” Billingham has long experience as a stand-up comedian, so you can expect this program to be very entertaining. (Hat tip to Ali Karim.)

• The March edition of Mike Ripley’s “Getting Away with Murder” column was posted in Shots today. It features notes about upcoming crime-fiction commendations, London’s “Murder in the Library” exhibition, new novels by Andrew Taylor, Tom Harper, and Paul Thomas, and the only rude photo I’ve ever seen of Louise Penny.

• The HMSS Weblog looks back a full half-century to the time when author Ian Fleming had to choose between committing himself to making movies from his James Bond novels, or participating in the TV spy drama The Man from U.N.C.L.E.

• You can’t revisit The Maltese Falcon too often.

• Thank you to Steve Powell of The Venetian Vase for choosing The Rap Sheet as one of 2012’s best blogs.

• Well, it’s about damn time! China Beach, the habitually exceptional, 1988-1991 Vietnam War-era drama starring Dana Delaney, is finally due out in a 25-anniversary collector’s edition next month. It won’t be cheap; all 61 episode are being retailed for $199.95. But China Beach was an amazing show. If you have somehow forgotten it, refresh your memory by watching the Season 1 opening here.

• Do you have fond memories of Dean Martin’s Matt Helm spy films (based loosely on Donald Hamilton’s Helm novels)? If so, then a new e-book called Booze, Bullets & Broads: The Story of Matt Helm, Superspy of the Mad Men Era might be well worth your investigating.

• The fourth Kindle edition of ThugLit is now available.

• Organizers of PulpFest 2013 are soliciting nominations for their annual Munsey Award, which recognizes “the efforts of those who work to keep the pulps alive for this and future generations.” The PulpFest Web site adds that “All members of the pulp community, whether they plan to attend PulpFest 2013 or not, are welcome to nominate a deserving person for this year’s award.” Any ideas? The deadline for nominations is April 30.

• Can this really be? Today marks the 60th birthday of Los Angeles-born actress Kay Lenz, whose face was once very familiar on screens large and small. One of her childhood roles was on The Andy Griffith Show, but Lenz went on to appear in Ironside, Owen Marshall: Counselor at Law, McCloud, Nakia, Petrocelli, Hill Street Blues, Moonlighting, and numerous other TV series. She played a disturbed woman in the 1974 Peter Graves TV pilot, The Underground Man, and was cast as a mystified witness to a shooting in the 1979 Father Brown series pilot, Sanctuary of Fear. She also portrayed a withdrawn college student in the 1978 TV creepshow, The Initiation of Sarah. Lenz won an Emmy Award for her guest spot in “After It Happened,” an installment of the 1988-1991 NBC drama Midnight Caller. I probably remember her best, though, as a captivating, “free-spirited teenage runaway” in Clint Eastwood’s 1973 romantic film, Breezy, which also starred William Holden. (Watch the trailer here.) Happy birthday, Ms. Lenz!

Return of Matt Helm

Some good news for Matt Helm fans:

Titan Books announced today that beginning in 2013, they will reissue the original Matt Helm spy thrillers written by Donald Hamilton, starring the famed counter-agent whose career included 27 novels spanning more than three decades, four films, and a network television series.

The Titan site has a bit more information on this deal. I’ll be interested to see how the publisher packages these novels. Will it use the original paperback art? That’s probably too much to hope for ...

READ MORE: “Breaking News! Donald Hamilton’s Matt Helm Spy Series Returns to Print in 2013, from Titan Books!,” by Nick Jones (Existential Ennui).

“It’s a Grabber”

You didn’t really think I would forget it was 45 years ago today that Murderers’ Row, the second of four films starring Dean Martin as Donald Hamilton’s U.S. government counter-agent, Matt Helm, debuted in U.S. movie theaters, did you? Below you’ll find the trailer for that 1966 film, plus stills from Murderers’ Row, backdropped by composer Lalo Schifrin’s wonderful music for the film.





To learn more about Dean Martin’s parody-ish Matt Helm pictures (which are not to be confused with the 1975-1976 Tony Franciosa TV series, Matt Helm), I refer you to Matthew R. Bradley’s article at CinemaRetro, “Mr. Helm Goes to Hollywood.”

The Book You Have to Read: “Death of a Citizen,” by Donald Hamilton

(Editor’s note: This is the 39th installment of our Friday blog series highlighting great but forgotten books. Today’s selection comes from Rob Kantner, the creator of fictional Detroit private eye Ben Perkins (Concrete Hero, Final Fling), who has a brand-new Perkins short story, “Sticky Fingers,” available at his Web site.)

Matt Helm, the hero of what ended up being a 27-volume series, starts out in Donald Hamilton’s Death of a Citizen (1960) as a self-described peaceful, law-abiding citizen. By book’s end--token ambivalence notwithstanding--he is, as prefigured by the title (so much for suspense), born again as the professional assassin he’d been during World War II, a decade and a half earlier. Helm’s path along that arc starts with the reappearance of Tina, a code-named colleague from his bad old days. Sensuous, ruthless, and (spoiler alert) not entirely trustworthy, Tina triggers a series of violent events that draw Helm back into the realm of the government murder bureau still run by his wartime boss, “Mac.”

And this return to warlike ways is by no means an unwilling one on Helm’s part. Although toward the novel’s conclusion he pulls a brief and token 180, his progression is pretty much a straight line from citizen to killer as his skill, and appetite, for lethality emerges. Perhaps this notion expects more depth than the genre’s playbook calls for, but one has to wonder.

If being a killing machine is Helm’s true nature (and it would seem to be: “Killing’s my line” is what he says near the end), why did he leave that work at the end of the war to marry the deceived and unaware Beth? He claims to love her, and describes her in warm detail. Then he proceeds to bump uglies with Tina, within mere pages of her appearance. Helm’s three children, equipped with names and genders and not much else, are mentioned, but never actually appear on the page. One senses that they’re referred to only because Hamilton needed one of them to be conspicuously handy for his tale’s final act.

To give Hamilton credit, he seems to have been conscious of Helm’s readiness--not to say eagerness--to be drawn into Tina’s thicket of murderous intrigue. “It seems to me,” an observer tells Helm, “you lent yourself to this scheme without much thought. I can’t quite understand how a reputable citizen, with a wife and three small children, could allow himself to be persuaded.” Helm never responds.

Death of a Citizen, then, turns out to be, roughly, 10 percent citizen and 90 percent death.

But perfunctory though the “citizen” component is, the death part still, nearly 50 years later, rocks pretty well.

Bedazzled by Tina and bedeviled by surveillance teams, Helm leaves his Santa Fe, New Mexico, home and, supposedly seeking material for a new book, bangs around several Southwestern states, the features of which get described in lavish and very enjoyable detail. This type of thing is, clearly, Hamilton’s comfort zone.

Even more comfortable is Hamilton, via Helm, as a critic of people, places, and institutions large and small. (This tendency toward editorial comment grew more pronounced--another term for it is “shrill”--as the series went on.) He makes damn sure we know what Helm likes and appreciates: machinery, weapons, wide-open spaces, strong and silent types, sturdy vehicles that will go anywhere. You can also count on Helm to point out what he dislikes, including Californians, jukeboxes, Texans, women in pants, and Washington, D.C. And the violent encounters--terse, direct, well staged--seem to be the area where Hamilton is most comfortable.

Hamilton is not so comfortable, however, with the subtleties of characterization. Shades of gray get checked at the door. Everybody falls into three neat groups: good guys, bad guys (including femmes fatales), and the clueless.

Granted: subtle characterization is not what we read these types of thrillers for. Certainly it was not what I was after as a reader, when, at the age of 14 or so, I started out with Matt Helm. Year after year I gobbled up the books. Then, along about No. 13, I finally fell off the Helm wagon. Other, more engaging, series had come along, and the Helm novels had gotten fatter, the storylines less engrossing, the situations repetitive.

But Death of a Citizen has none of those problems. It’s brisk and well paced and lean, clocking in at a trim 60,000 words or so (despite the lamentable tendency of characters to speechify in paragraph-length chunks). It offers occasional moments of deadpan humor (though later books had more of those). If it offers no white-knuckle suspense--you always know that Matt’s going to survive and prevail--at least the question of how things are going to work out is engaging enough.

Moreover, I was struck anew, re-reading the book after all these years, by the brusque amorality of the so-called good guys. At one point Helm says, directly, “I don’t have much of a conscience.” Consistently he lives up to that conviction--or, depending on your point of view, down to it.

In this, Hamilton seems, I think, to have been swimming against the tide. This was 1960, the tail end an era in which America thought of itself as the country of good guys who won The Good War with virtually bloodless, honorable, John Wayne-style heroism.

Yet Tina, describing the methodology of Mac’s Second World War assassination squad (and, ironically, anticipating our era of “pre-emptive war”), says: “Police, FBI ... cannot convict and execute a man for murder until he has murdered someone. Or a woman. We do not have this trouble. ... We execute the murderers before they commit their crimes.”

And Helm, in no way chivalrous, consistently and almost gleefully condemning the very concept of a fair fight, commits murder, mayhem, and even torture with gruesome abandon.

Donald Hamilton died in 2006 at age 90. According to Wikipedia, his final Matt Helm book, The Dominators, has never been published. That’s a shame. While I have little interest in re-reading other books in the Helm series--there continue to be way, way too many other new works and authors to explore--re-reading Death of a Citizen made me wonder how Matt Helm might have ended up.

READ MORE: “The Best TV Crime Drama Openers, #23: Matt Helm,” by J. Kingston Pierce (The Rap Sheet); “Death of a Citizen,” by Marty McKee (Johnny LaRue’s Crane Shot); “Helm for the Holidays #1: Death of a Citizen,” by Armstrong Sabian (Mister 8); “Understanding Adobe,” by Ed Crocker (The New Mexican).