Worthy of Notice

Having just finished work on another piece for CrimeReads, I have time to highlight a few genre-related stories I’ve seen lately.

• There’s big news from U.S. publisher Soho Crime. In a press release, it declares it’ll release a brand-new novel by James Sallis this coming October: Sarah Jane, about “a good cop with a complicated past,” whose “life takes an unexpected turn when she is named the de facto sheriff of a rural town, investigating the mysterious disappearance of the sheriff whose shoes she’s filling—and the even more mysterious realities of the life he was hiding from his own colleagues and closest friends.” No less exciting is word that, beginning this fall, Soho will reissue Sallis’ six novels starring Lew Griffin, a sometime private eye in New Orleans with a particular interest in locating lost children. The first of those short books, The Long-Legged Fly (1992), should reach stores in mid-September, with the last, Ghost of a Flea, going on sale in early December.

• London’s Goldsboro Books has announced its 2019 longlist of nominees for the Glass Bell Award, given “annually to an outstanding work of contemporary fiction, rewarding quality storytelling in any genre.” The dozen contenders include several plucked from the crime/mystery shelf: Our House, by Louise Candlish; Memo from Turner, by Tim Willocks; The Puppet Show, by M.W. Craven; The Poison Bed, by Elizabeth Fremantle; Snap, by Belinda Bauer; and The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle. Shelf Awareness says, “The shortlist, judged by Goldsboro Books founder and managing director David Headley and his team, will be announced on August 1, and the winner named September 16.”

• This comes from the Los Angeles Times:

Publisher Harper Collins will release a novel by filmmaker Michael Mann featuring the characters from his iconic 1995 film “Heat” next year, the director revealed on Twitter.

The novel, which has been in the works for years, is being co-written with Reed Farrel Coleman, the crime author best known for his series of novels featuring Moe Prager, an ex-police officer turned private eye.

“Heat,” written and directed by Mann, gained critical acclaim upon its release and remains one of the best-known films of the 1990s. The movie follows a Los Angeles police detective, played by Al Pacino, on the trail of a crew of robbers led by a longtime thief, played by Robert De Niro.

The Times goes on to explain that “Mann first indicated his interest in writing a novel inspired by ‘Heat’ in 2016, when Harper Collins announced that the director would be getting his own imprint with the publisher. Deadline reported that the planned novel would be a prequel, covering ‘the formative years of homicide detective Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino), Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro), Chris Shiherlis (Val Kilmer), McCauley’s accomplice Nate (Jon Voight), and other characters ...’” No title or release date has yet been set for Mann’s novel.

• In Reference to Murder reports that “The Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association has scheduled a July 21 walking tour of areas in South Berkeley, California, that are associated with mystery/sci fi author, editor, and critic Anthony Boucher (aka William Anthony Parker White). The walk will be guided by Randal Brandt, a librarian who curates the California Detective Fiction Collection at the University of Southern California at Berkeley’s Bancroft Library. The tour will also cover sites associated with Boucher’s fellow mystery writer Mary Collins, the California Writer’s Club, pioneering film critic Pauline Kael, and others.” If only I lived in the Bay Area …

• I have to admire Tom Simon’s ambition. Not only does he write the excellent Paperback Warrior blog, focused on 1950s-1990s soft-cover novels, but this week he launched a companion podcast. In the premiere episode, he and a colleague “discuss the goldmine of paperback treasure, the famed Chamblin’s Book Mine in Jacksonville, Florida, as well as two novels—Sins of the Fathers, by Lawrence Block, and Penetrator #14, by Chet Cunningham.” When I finally get around to adding a list of podcasts to The Rap Sheet’s already lengthy blogroll, I’ll definitely have to include this new one.

• With Season 4 of Grantchester set to debut this coming Sunday night, July 14, as part of PBS-TV’s Masterpiece Mystery! lineup, The Killing Times has posted a list of what it contends are “the most dangerous villages in British crime drama.” Grantchester, of course, makes the cut, as do Kembleford (Father Brown), Carsley (Agatha Raisin), and St. Mary Mead (Miss Marple).

• By the way, if you’ve forgotten, this season of Grantchester will be star James Norton’s last. His “charismatic, jazz-loving clergyman Sidney Chambers” will be eased out during the coming half-dozen episodes to make way for the Reverend Will Davenport, played by Tom Brittney. Click here to watch the official series trailer.

• Speaking of Masterpiece Mystery!, I was sorry to bid adieu last Sunday to Series 6 of Endeavour, the Inspector Morse prequel starring Shaun Evans and Roger Allam. This season comprised only four episodes—two fewer than last year. And as Chris Sullivan points out in his excellent Morse Universe blog, scenes were either eliminated or truncated in the U.S. broadcasts of those latest eps. Here are the links to Sullivan’s posts featuring the material cut from individual Season 6 installments of the series: “Pylon” (see here and here), “Apollo,” “Confection,” and “Degüello.” I have to say, “Degüello” would have been even more satisfying than it already was had the scene Sullivan embeds last in his post—showing Fred Thursday and Reginald Bright talking about how they met their wives—remained intact.

• Omnivoracious: The Amazon Book Review blog chooses what it claims are the five “best mysteries and thrillers of 2019 so far.” Interestingly, I’ve read only one of them. So far.

• I can’t tell you how many times I’ve spoken with people impressed by their own collections of electronic books on one device or another. But the Microsoft Store’s recent decision to close its books department—in the process “disappearing every single e-book from every one of its customers” —should cause them to consider the transient nature of such libraries. NPR has more on the story.

• Finally, keep in mind that Dead Good, the British crime-fiction Web site, is still asking for assistance in choosing the winners of its 2019 Reader Awards. Click here to take part in this competition. Polls will remain open through Wednesday, July 17, with winners set to be announced on Friday, July 19, at the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate, England.

Congratulations, Reed Farrel Coleman!

From the Web site Deadline Hollywood comes this news:

After a long manhunt that involved months of interviews with substantial authors, Michael Mann has found his co-writer for the prequel novel to Mann’s landmark [1995] crime film Heat. Writing with Mann will be Reed Farrel Coleman, the four-time Edgar Award-nominated author who is up for the award tonight for his 2016 novel Where It Hurts, part of mystery series that revolves around the retired Suffolk County cop Gus Murphy. Coleman will collaborate with Mann to tell an origin story involving the characters that populated the Al Pacino-Robert De Niro-led ensemble drama that Mann scripted, directed, and produced. The novel will be published next year under the Michael Mann imprint at William Morrow/HarperCollins.

(Hat tip to Linda L. Richards)

Of Films, Finales, and Farewells

I really need to spend some quality time putting together a longer “Bullet Points” post of news briefs. But for now, as I am in the midst of other projects, here are a few short items of interest.

• Lyndsay Faye’s brand-new book, Jane Steele, has been acquired by Chris Columbus’ 1492 Pictures with the intent of turning it into a big-screen picture. Deadline Hollywood explains: “Inspired by Charlotte Bronte’s classic Jane Eyre, Faye’s novel is a piece of historical fiction that tells the story of Jane Steele, a fresh and determined Victorian orphan, who—unlike her idol Jane Eyre—does not accept her lot in life without a fight. Fiercely intelligent and resourceful, Steele is forced to resort to extreme measures to make sure that life turns out the way she needs it to. The reimagining of Jane Eyre as a serial killer is a humdinger of a potential lead role for a major actress. No word yet on who’s adapting this one, but the world surely is fertile for a mischievous mind.”

• Until today, I had no idea that Isaac Asimov’s 1954 science fiction/detective novel, The Caves of Steel, was adapted for British television more than 50 years ago. Elizabeth Foxwell features a few “tantalizing (if low-budget) clips” in her blog.

• A trio of mystery and suspense novels are among the winners of this year’s Benjamin Franklin Awards, given out by the Independent Book Publishers Association. Those works are: The Fame Equation, by Lisa Wysocky (Cool Titles); The Lost Concerto, by Helaine Mario (Oceanview); and Method 15/33, by Shannon Kirk (Oceanview).

• From B.V. Lawson’s In Reference to Murder comes this intriguing tidbit: “Writer-director Michael Mann has made a deal to launch Michael Mann Books. The imprint will generate a series of novels with a stable of writers, with the properties to simultaneously be developed for film and television. Mann will look through his own long list of credits for ideas, placing high priority on a prequel novel dealing with the principal characters of Heat, Mann’s seminal crime thriller. The prequel novel will cover the formative years of homicide detective Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino), Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro), Chris Shihirles (Val Kilmer), McCauley’s accomplice Nate (Jon Voight), and other characters from the 1995 film.”

• One more from In Reference to Murder: “Amazon announced that Ripper Street will end after its fifth season, which recently began filming in Dublin. In the final season, Joseph Mawle (In the Heart of the Sea) rejoins the series as the feared Detective Inspector Jedediah Shine, intent on a mission of revenge after last being seen in the series two finale when Inspector Reid (Matthew Macfadyen) plotted with Drake (Jerome Flynn) to take Shine’s life.”

• New Zealand crime-fiction watcher Craig Sisterson notes on Facebook that Ngaio Marsh Award-winning Wellington author Neil Cross was recently nominated for a BAFTA (British Academy Television Craft Awards) commendation in the TV drama-writing category, thanks to his work on the acclaimed series Luther. Unfortunately, Cross’ competition in that category includes Peter Straughan, who scripted the historical miniseries Wolf Hall.

• In a Guardian story about the pseudonymous novelist Elena Ferrante (My Brilliant Friend, etc.), John Dugdale mentions “the semi-reclusive crime writer Josephine Tey [The Daughter of Time], who was only linked to her birth name (Elizabeth Mackintosh) posthumously. Friends who attended her funeral in 1952 thought they were mourning Gordon Daviot, another of her pseudonyms, and that was who the Times recorded as having been buried.” I’d never heard that before.

• Neither of these films has anything to do with crime fiction, but they still look like fun: Special Correspondents, a Netflix pic starring Ricky Gervais and Eric Bana, slated to begin streaming on April 29; and Love & Friendship, a big-screen adaptation of Jane Austen’s 1871 epistolary novel, Lady Susan, that stars the ever-captivating Kate Beckinsale and is set to debut in the States on May 13.

• Finally, a sad good-bye to Joe Santos, the Brooklyn-born actor whose most memorable TV role may have been that of beleaguered Los Angeles cop Dennis Becker in The Rockford Files. Small-screen watchers might also have spotted Santos in Barnaby Jones, The Streets of San Francisco, Lou Grant, Hill Street Blues, Magnum, P.I., and The Sopranos. (A full list of his performance credits is here.) Santos died of a heart attack on March 18. He was 84 years old.

The Best TV Crime Drama Openers, #7

Series Title: Crime Story | Years: 1986-1988, NBC | Starring: Dennis Farina, Anthony Denison, Bill Smitrovich, Steve Ryan, Paul Butler, Bill Campbell, Stephen Lang, John Santucci | Theme Music: Del Shannon

In the mid-1980s, with two successful years behind him as the executive producer of ratings winner Miami Vice, screenwriter and director Michael Mann decided that his next TV series would take him from the pastel hues, string bikinis, and glass cliffs of Florida’s largest city back to the place of his birth: Chicago, Illinois. On September 18, 1986, NBC debuted Crime Story, his underworld saga that substituted a grim, malevolent verisimilitude for Vice’s stylishness and more distant violence, and wound up being touted by Time magazine as one of the decade’s best small-screen treats.

The series’ two-hour pilot movie, which like the rest of the early episodes was set in 1963, established this program’s tone and pace. As The New York Times’ John J. O’Connor wrote after seeing it:

During a robbery in progress at a flashy Chicago club, a customer is killed by a vicious thug, who then starts taking hostages. Rushing to the scene, a police lieutenant, Mike Torello, warns the murderer that if anyone else is hurt, “I’m gonna kill whoever you love most--your mother, your father, your dog.”

Then comes the inevitable highway chase, complete with a thumping rock score, during which one of [the] screaming hostages, a gorgeous blonde, is shoved through the bullet-shattered back window to hang onto the trunk of the speeding car. Finally, trapping his quarry in a quiet residential neighborhood, Torello puts a bullet through the killer’s head as two children in pajamas watch silently from a nearby window. It is a bit like Steven Spielberg gone gory. And we haven’t even got to the opening credits yet.

To play the lead in Crime Story, Mann and the show’s creators, Miami Vice veteran (and ex-Windy City cop) Chuck Adamson and former Wall Street international investment banker Gustave Reininger, enlisted a relative newcomer to Hollywood, Dennis Farina. With a dark mustache broad enough to sweep streets and a pockmarked face that looked like it had been reclaimed from the scrap heap at Mount Rushmore, Farina made a most convincing Mike Torello--and why not, since he had actually served 18 years with Chicago’s police force before moving into film consulting and then acting. There was impatience, cynicism, and perpetual disgust in Farina’s heavy-lidded gaze. Viewers had little trouble accepting him as the head of the Chicago Police Department’s Major Crime Unit (MCU), “an elite cop squad that goes after big scores and high-ticket crooks,” to quote from TV Guide’s 1986 Fall Preview edition write-up on the series. Other notable MCU members included Torello’s second-in-command, Sergeant Danny Krychek (played with volcanic authority by Bill Smitrovich) and cigar-chomping Detective Walter Clemmons (Paul Butler), who kept his thoughts--and his guns--close to his chest.

With a story arc that followed Torello and his ever-underpaid law-enforcement colleagues from America’s Rust Belt to its spit-shined buckle at Las Vegas, Crime Story reveled in period details. The automobiles sported whitewalls, bat-wing tail-fins, and front grilles as broad as shark grins. Furnishings bore sleek lines and often exaggerated, futuristic configurations. The cops seemed to have been issued fedoras and baggy overcoats along with their badges, and white socks peeked out beneath their black shoes, while the crooks--the climbers and the jamokes both--favored pricey sharkskin suits and hair slicked back with Brylcreem. The women either dressed demurely, like June Cleaver, or--if they were riding the high times with some punk--like exaggerations of whatever Vogue had most recently declared chic. It was an era when boys pitched pennies on street corners, gasoline cost a whopping 25 cents per gallon, and cigarette smoking was still considered stylish. Into the neon-lit nights, hi-fi players carried the rhythms of Sam Cooke’s “Twistin’ the Night Away” and Johnny Mathis’ “Chances Are.”

The art department for this show was frequently compelled to run newspaper advertisements in search of just the right atmosphere-producing accouterments, but the extra effort (while expensive) paid off in terms of transporting viewers backward through the decades. If it didn’t “slavishly re-create the early ’60s ...,” Dick Fiddy, a TV historian and consultant to the British Film Institute, told The Daily Telegraph in 2004, “it always had a tang of authenticity.” The fact that Crime Story was filmed in Chicago, at least until the action moved west partway through Season One, also gave it gritty credibility.

The series’ plots turned primarily on three characters, as the Times’ O’Connor explained: “Torello ..., the tough cop who can be as sadistic as the criminals he stalks; Ray Luca (Anthony Denison), the young and completely amoral mobster on the rise; and David Abrams (Stephen Lang), a liberal lawyer who, through his own criminal father, is keenly aware of all the justice that money can buy.”

Most of Crime Story’s tension was born from the rivalry between Torello and the pompadour-topped Luca, a good-versus-evil relationship that claimed victims on both sides, physically as well as emotionally. Torello’s dick-swinging pursuit of the flashier but equally hot-tempered thug-on-the-rise consumed him entirely, and was a contributing factor in the failure of this cop’s “beauty and the best” marriage. Torello’s brainy wife, Julie (Darlanne Fluegel), whose role early in the series was to tease out his post-Neanderthal humanness, remarked to him in the pilot that “They haven’t invented the hard time we can’t handle.” Yet she eventually grew tired of playing second-fiddle to Torello’s 24-hour job and putting up with his growing detachment and jealousy. Complaining that she wanted “attention and affection,” she first had an affair on him, and then abandoned Torello entirely, leaving our hero to become, I think, a less-dimensional figure, a blunt instrument to be wielded against the wiseguys of the world.

Meanwhile, Lang’s bespectacled courtroom advocate played a more nuanced and evolving part in this crime drama. For all of his self-doubts about what he was doing, whether he was really making a difference in terms of upholding the law and helping people, David Abrams was in many respects a reflection of Torello’s conscience--at least in the beginning, before he, like the lieutenant, was changed by the very corruption he’d sworn to overcome. Abrams also helped to illuminate some of the social and justice issues that confronted Americans during the 1960s. For instance, in one particularly good first-season episode, “Abrams for the Defense,” the lawyer defends a poor black apartment dweller on trial for assaulting his Polish slumlord. The case looks like a loser from the opening gate, but Abrams is too idealistic to bow to the odds against him; instead, he goes about the business of gathering evidence to demonstrate how the living conditions his client and that man’s family have had to endure provoked his aggression. And over the course of it, Abrams becomes enamored of an African-American investigative journalist, portrayed by former blaxploitation actress Pam Grier (later the star of Quentin Tarantino’s 1997 film, Jackie Brown). In those days, inter-racial relationships were frowned upon--often by both sides--and even Abrams isn’t blind to his violating cultural taboos in the name of love.

Mann told reporters that the concept of Crime Story had been influenced by scripts he’d worked on for Police Story, an acclaimed 1973-1978 NBC anthology drama created by cop-turned-novelist Joseph Wambaugh. He wanted his new series to contain long story- and character-development arcs, rather than depend on standalone episodes, and he predicted it would have a five-year lifespan. According to the movie blog Radiator Heaven:

Mann said that the first season of the show would go from Chicago in 1963 to Las Vegas in 1980 where the characters would have “very different occupations, in a different city and in a different time.” He said, “It’s a serial in the sense that we have continuing stories, and in that sense the show is one big novel.” Mann and Reininger’s inspiration for the 1963-1980 arc came from their mutual admiration of the epic 15+ hour film, Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980), by German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Mann said, “The pace of our story is like the speed of light compared to that, but that’s the idea--if you put it all together at the end you’ve got one hell of a 22-hour movie.”

Things didn’t go quite as Mann had planned. Yes, Torello and company made it to Vegas, becoming federal agents--shades of The Untouchables!--still in hot pursuit of Ray Luca, who’d been sent by godfather Manny Wisebord (Joseph Wiseman) to establish mob operations in the casino capital. But all of that transpired with unbelievable speed--the series never did move forward through the 1970s, but instead remained in the “hip” ’60s. And yes, Crime Story offered some outstanding episodes, including the aforementioned “Abrams for the Defense” and a cliffhanger ending to Season One, in which Luca and his loyal but dimwitted henchman, Pauli Taglia (John Santucci), tried to escape by driving across Nevada’s Yucca Flats--just as an atomic bomb was being tested! (The story goes that the producers didn’t think this series would be renewed, so wanted it to go out with a bang.) However, Season Two was rather a disappointment, despite interesting twists such as the launching of a high-profile investigation into American organized crime (modeled on Estes Kefauver’s 1950 hearings, but with Kevin Spacey playing a more John F. Kennedy-like U.S. senator).

Thanks in part to Mann’s clout, Crime Story drew scores of distinguished guest performers, among them David Caruso (who did an excellent turn in the pilot as a mob boss wannabe), Julia Roberts (in her first TV appearance), Ving Rhames, Laura San Giacomo, Stanley Tucci, and even jazz trumpeter Miles Davis.

It also boasted one of television’s coolest opening sequences. Singer Del Shannon provided the theme song--a reworking of his 1961 hit, “Runaway”--while the visuals leaned toward period imagery. The original version, shown below, combined historical film footage from Chicago (cops on motorcycles, airplanes landing at Midway

Airport, commercial neon, etc.) with cuts of the flashing lights and chrome embellishments on vintage gas guzzlers.

After Crime Story’s action moved out west, its main title sequence--embedded at the top of this post--shed what had been dark and moody elements in favor of bursting, effervescent neon from the Las Vegas Strip, combined with appreciative sweeps over gambling tables. Mike Torello and his squad were literally outshone by all the flash and dazzle of Sin City at its glamorous height. (It may be no coincidence that this second opening sequence for Crime Story is reminiscent of the main titles to Robert Urich’s first private eye drama, Vega$, which Michael Mann created.)

Despite these and other strengths, Crime Story failed to live up to NBC’s inflated expectations. As Radiator Heaven recalls:

When the show debuted on September 18, 1986, following Miami Vice, the two-hour pilot had a 20.1 national Nielsen rating and a 32 percent audience share. The ratings dipped when it was counter-programmed against ABC’s Moonlighting. By October, the show dropped below a 22 Nielsen share, where a series is deemed a “failure.” Despite low ratings, Crime Story was picked up by NBC to finish the 1986-87 season. This prompted the network to move the show to Friday nights after Miami Vice on December 5, 1986, where its ratings improved but it still lost to Falcon Crest. NBC temporarily pulled Crime Story off the schedule on March 13, 1987. In order to get more people to watch, Farina and other cast members promoted the show in five U.S. cities.

It was a noble effort, to be sure--enough to win the show a second season. But the optimism didn’t last. The final episode of Crime Story--another cliffhanger, in which most of the regular cast appeared to have been killed when their plane crashed into the Atlantic Ocean--was broadcast on May 10, 1988.

So, was that the end of Mike Torello, Ray Luca, and the rest? Viewers will never know. Executive producer Mann went on to make one more TV series, the police procedural Robbery Homicide Division (2002-2003), but was also responsible for such films as Heat (1995), Miami Vice (2006), and this year’s Public Enemies. Dennis Farina continued doing television, starring in the short-lived comedy-detective series Buddy Faro and then a not-half-bad sitcom called In-Laws before joining the cast of Law & Order for a two-year stint. Shaking off the psychotic killer-rapist mantle he’d worn as Luca, Anthony Denison portrayed an undercover agent in Wiseguy and now plays a cop on Kyra Sedgwick’s TNT-TV crime drama, The Closer. Stephen Lang is currently the co-artistic director of the Actor’s Studio in New York City, and can be seen in the new comedy film, The Men Who Stare at Goats.

Despite periodic calls for a full-length theatrical film that would answer the questions left dangling after Crime Story signed off for the last time 21 years ago, no such production appears to be in the offing. We’re left to watch, and rewatch, the DVD releases of Season One and Season Two and wonder, What happened next?

READ MORE: “What a Crime (Story)!,” by Robert Lewis
(Criminal Element).

Cool and the Gangsters

Director Michael Mann’s new historical gangster film, Public Enemies, debuts today in the States (though British moviegoers will have to wait until Friday to see it). But already, this picture starring Johnny Depp, Christian Bale, and Marion Cotillard has been hailed by Salon’s Stephanie Zacharek. In her review today, Zacharek writes:

“Public Enemies” is a folk song rendered in visual shards instead of notes, hopscotching through parts of the Midwest as it follows [John] Dillinger’s numerous bank robberies and evasions.

Over and over again, he slips through the clutches of the awestruck [Melvin] Purvis, leaving the venerable G-man stroking his extra-square jaw, which further stokes the rage and determination of FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover (played, with stylized hamminess, by Billy Crudup). Strict narrative clarity isn’t the picture’s strong suit: Time and again Mann--who co-wrote the script, along with Ronan Bennett and Ann Biderman, based on a book by Bryan Burrough--fails to introduce characters properly, allowing figures like Stephen Dorff’s Homer Van Meter, an associate of Dillinger’s, to drift on-screen so unceremoniously that we’re not always sure exactly who they are and what they’re doing there. ...

But what the picture lacks in clarity it makes up for in visual vitality. Words aren’t the strong suit of “Public Enemies”; instead, Mann lays out his vocabulary in the tilt of a fedora, or the easygoing manner in which Dillinger tucks a machine gun under his arm, or the way Marion Cotillard, as Dillinger’s lady love Billie Frechette, lounges in a bathtub, extending a glorious naked leg to caress its rim with her foot. The glamour quotient in “Public Enemies” is high, and in a landscape of contemporary movies in which “sophistication” is seemingly a dirty word, it’s a relief to see actors in period dress rather than outlandish Willy Wonka get-ups and superhero costumes.

Even the movie’s violence has a grown-up gloss: Mann doesn’t necessarily glorify Dillinger’s violence, but he is attuned to all the ways in which, in the movies, cruel acts can also have a brutal elegance.

You’ll find that full critique here.

READ MORE: “Review: Public Enemies,” by Jeffrey M. Anderson (Cinematical); “The Real John Dillinger,” by Elliott J. Gorn (Slate); “Famous Cases: John Dillinger” (U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation); “Dillinger (1973),” by Samuel Wilson (Mondo 70); and for the sake of comparison, here is the trailer for Dillinger.

Of Radio, Rate Hikes, and Reel Life

• Today would have been screenwriter-director-actor Orson Welles’ 92nd birthday (he died in 1985, though it really doesn’t seem like it could have been that long ago). To commemorate this occasion, Elizabeth Foxwell will feature two of Welles’ radio performances on tomorrow’s installment of It’s a Mystery, a production of WEBR radio in Fairfax, Virginia. One of those segments (from 1937) will star Welles--who’s pictured at left--in the role of Lamont Cranston, aka “The Shadow,” while the other (originally aired in 1952) will have him playing con artist Harry Lime (who he’d originally portrayed in the 1949 film The Third Man). It’s a Mystery is set to be Webcast at 11 a.m. ET. Click here to listen in on the show.

• In preparation for the centenary of Daphne du Maurier’s birth, on May 13, British gothic fictionist Patrick McGrath writes in The Guardian about how much he appreciates the ways in which du Maurier addressed “the dark side” in her short stories.

• Deadly Pleasures editor George Easter brings this news about the next book from Edward Wright, whose third novel, Red Sky Lament, last year won the Ellis Peters Historical Crime Award. According to Easter, Wright has a new standalone mystery-thriller, Damnation Falls, due out from Orion in the UK come September.

Plot: Randall Wilkes, his big-city journalism career in ruins, has returned after twenty years to Pilgrim’s Rest, the Tennessee hill town where he grew up. He has taken on a lucrative but low-prestige writing job for Sonny McMahan, a former governor and Randall’s boyhood friend, whose own career is under a shadow and who needs a ghost-written autobiography to ease his way back into politics. Faye McMahan, Sonny’s mother, is addled with age, imagining that her dead husband is alive and worrying that her son might be in danger. Amid a violent autumn storm, Randall finds Faye hideously murdered, hanged by the neck from a bridge over the town landmark called Damnation Falls. Within days, another person connected to the McMahan clan is murdered in an even more grisly fashion. And the bones of a third, long-buried murder victim--a young woman--have emerged from the earth.

No word on a U.S. publication date yet.

• Miami Vice’s Michael Mann and Leonardo DiCaprio are apparently teaming up again (they previously worked together on The Aviator) for a period film based around a Hollywood murder investigation. Cinematical reports that “The film will take place in the 1930s on the MGM lot and will apparently feature cameos from people like Judy Garland and Bugsy Siegel (people playing them, anyway). The plot will likely follow the detective as he is hired by the studio to clean up a scandal involving a starlet who may or may not have murdered her husband. The only other part of the script that has been revealed is that there will be a major shootout that takes place in the Trocadero nightclub on Sunset Boulevard. Despite the fact that no studio is yet confirmed (New Line has been revealed to have bid, but too low), the film will start shooting in February.”

• I, for one, am considerably more optimistic and intrigued by this Mann-DiCaprio match-up than I am by Mel Gibson’s recent proposal to shoot a sequel to the 1994 film Maverick. While I greatly enjoyed and even own a DVD copy of that movie, which was of course based on the 1950s James Garner TV series Maverick; and while Garner has allegedly expressed interest in reprising his role as “Pappy” Beau Maverick in the sequel, Gibson has proved himself in recent years to be a religious nuthead and anti-Semite. As a result, I’ve avoided his films of recent date. However, if Garner--a proud liberal--can stomach Gibson as Bret Maverick once more, then I guess I can, too.

• Soon there will be no one other than me left to interview Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon, author of the new more-or-less crime novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (as well as the 2004 Sherlock Holmes homage The Final Solution). The Sydney Morning Herald’s takes a crack at him here; The New York Times visits with Chabon in Sitka, Alaska, here; and National Public Radio’s Terry Gross talks with the novelist about his story’s premise and his writing process here. Meanwhile, Salon contributor Sarah Goldstein asks Chabon the obvious question:

The book is set in Sitka, Alaska, which you have made the temporary home to Yiddish-speaking Jews, in a world where Israel doesn’t exist. Why make it a detective story on top of all that?

I wanted to find a way, narratively, to range as freely as I could across the whole of this place and every level of this society. I just kind of felt it as an intuitive leap that a detective, a policeman with a badge, would be able to go everywhere, see everything. He would be informed, he would understand how the world operates--the written and the unwritten rules.

Some moment around the time that I was conceiving of this book I reread Isaac Babel’s short stories and I just felt like there was a stylistic link there between Babel and [Raymond] Chandler. Isaac Babel was a hard-boiled writer; he was tough and deliberately so. He almost wore his hardness as a badge of honor in a way that I felt like I recognized also from Chandler and [Dashiell] Hammett. And he was writing around the same time as Hammett and Hemingway; it just didn’t feel like a totally ridiculous comparison to make.

I was also reading a lot of Ross Macdonald while I was writing this and I noticed not only did he have short chapters but he would sometimes break a scene right in the middle into two chapters, right on a line of dialogue.

All of Salon’s conversation can be found here.

• And speaking of Chabon, The New York Times Magazine’s today published the concluding, 15th installment of his serial novella, Gentlemen of the Road, a swashbuckling historical adventure. If you haven’t been keeping up, Chapter 1 is located here. The author answers a few questions about this novella here. Next week, Scottish crime writer Ian Rankin debuts in the Times Magazine’s Funny Pages with Doors Open, a supposedly “light” thriller (not starring Inspector John Rebus) that revolves around “an audacious art heist.” Chapters of this serial will appear in the Times for 14 weeks. A hardcover edition of Doors Open is already slated for publication by the UK’s Orion in the fall of 2008.

• Why weren’t there comic books like this one, back when I was still a kid? I would likely have become a crime-fiction fan much sooner than I did.

• Donald E. Westlake talks with Scott Butki in what we’re promised is only the first section of a two-part interview having to do with Westlake’s latest novel, What’s So Funny? Read their exchange here.

• Bill Crider wrote about mystery-western crossovers a few years back in January Magazine. Now, author Chap O’Keefe offers still more about this convergence of genres at the Black Horse Westerns site. (Hat tip to Grumpy Old Bookman.)

• Finally, Mystery Scene co-publishers Kate Stine and Brian Skupin have blitzed the crime-fiction blogosphere with a plea for help in nixing a proposed U.S. postal rate hike that they say “unfairly targets small magazines to the considerable advantage of larger ones. It’s going to put a number of magazines out of business and cause considerable hardships for many others.” More information about this rate hike, which is evidently being pushed by media giant Time Warner, can be found here. And a petition to kill this rate-hike proposal is available here. I’ve already signed. How about you?