Whew!

Back from a week away, visiting family and friends, I’m still trying to catch up with everything that happened during my mini-vacation. It’s usually the case that Thanksgiving week is slower than molasses in the Yukon. But there was a lot going on over the last seven days to miss, and more matters of note since.

• Marcus Sakey’s first novel, The Blade Itself, made Esquire magazine’s list of the “Year’s 5 Best Reads.” Writes contributor T. Jefferson Parker:

This book landed on my desk uninvited. With it was a letter from the book’s editor saying that he had never published a better debut crime novel. I looked at the stack of manuscripts sent to me for quotes. There were spiderwebs on them. I decided to read one page. Just one. Three hundred pages later I put it down. It’s smart, sad, relentless, and believable. It has style and attitude. I love Sakey’s Chicago. I love the way his characters fight the riptides of place and time that carry them so far from their good intentions. They remind me of people I’ve known.

• Speaking of “best of the year” lists, we neglected to mention that San Francisco Chronicle crime-fiction critic Eddie Muller has published his list of 10 faves from 2007. They include Christine Falls, by the pseudonymous Benjamin Black; Queenpin, by The Rap Sheet’s own Megan Abbott; In the Woods, by Tana French; and one novel that caught me completely off-guard: De Niro’s Gate, by Beirut-born author Rawi Hage. You’ll find all of Muller’s picks here.

• I was getting tired of my old computer wallpaper (tulips--yeah, I know, weak) so I was happy to find a pair of old paperback book-cover collages assembled by Bookgasm’s Bruce Grossman. One combines the fronts from works by Ellery Queen, Richard S. Prather, Mickey Spillane, and others. The second--which is the image I chose for my own screen--concentrates on Brett Halliday’s Mike Shayne novels, all of which were illustrated by the talented Robert McGinnis. You’ll find both desktop alternatives at The Big Adios.

• Barry Forshaw, author of The Rough Guide to Crime Fiction, provides the London Times with his list of “six American noir masters.” No real shockers here, although lumping David Goodis and Jim Thompson together with Ross Macdonald and Donald E. Westlake isn’t always done. (I wonder what distinction Forshaw makes between “noir” and “hard-boiled” fiction.) Meanwhile, Allan Guthrie (Hard Man) offers up his own “idiosyncratic” list of 200 noir novels, published between 1929 and 1997. Find Guthrie’s rundown here.

• How did I miss the memo about HarperCollins reissuing (in mass-market paperback size) Lawrence Block’s eight novels featuring sleepless spy Evan Tanner? Luckily, Bookgasm has been keeping up with the roll-outs. See here and here.

• While I was out of town, pseudonymous blogger CrimeFicReader continued collecting recommendations from noteworthy British and Irish crime writers of books that really ought to be placed in “the crime aficionado’s stocking” this Christmas. Since we last checked in, she’s added picks from Chris Ewan, Declan Burke, John Baker, Bernard Knight, Margaret Murphy, Steve Mosby, Brian McGilloway, Donna Moore, and our friend R.N. “Roger” Morris.

• Sad news comes from Jiro Kimura of The Gumshoe Site: Peter Haining, a onetime reporter in Britain who went on to edit anthologies of fantasy, horror, and mystery fiction, died from a heart attack on November 19. He was only 67 years old. Kimura notes that Haining “wrote a number of books about Dr. Who, Sherlock Holmes, James Bond, Hercule Poirot, Jules Maigret and pulps” (a list of his numerous works can be found here). But I remember Haining best for a wonderful overview of this genre’s development called The Classic Era of Crime Fiction. Shortly after the publication of that book in 2002, I remarked in The Rap Sheet:

Finally, let me tout a handsome new volume of cultural history, The Classic Era of Crime Fiction (Chicago Review Press). Written by Peter Haining, it traces the evolution of the modern mystery story from the 19th century through the 1950s, covering Sherlock Holmes and Britain’s “yellow-back” thrillers, as well as America’s Black Mask period and the rise of more literary yarns.

Like last year’s excellent The History of Mystery, by Max Allan Collins, Haining’s book shows both an appreciation for and an infectious curiosity about this genre’s colorful development. Even people who consider themselves well read in crime fiction are likely to discover authors they’ve never heard of--such as Peter Cheyney, whose hard-boiled novels featuring British private eye Lemmy Caution (including This Man Is Dangerous, 1936) were precursors to Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer books. And who remembers the exploits of professor-sleuth Craig Kennedy, “the American Sherlock Holmes,” who appeared in more than two dozen novels (such as The Exploits of Elaine, 1915) written by Arthur B. Reeve? In addition to excavating the roots of detective fiction, Haining devotes an intriguing--what else?--chapter to the maturation of the spy story, from James Fenimore Cooper’s The Spy (1821), starring Revolutionary War agent Harvey Birch, all the way through John Buchan’s renowned The Thirty-nine Steps (1913), Herman McNeile’s Bulldog Drummond series (including The Female of the Species, 1928), Eric Ambler’s espionage classics (such as The Mask of Dimitrios, 1939) and, of course, the best-selling titles by Ian Fleming and John le Carré.

As good as its text is, though, The Classic Era of Crime Fiction probably wouldn’t attract nearly so much attention were it not for its abundant original magazine and book jacket illustrations, from the startling (the cover of George Manville’s 1899 A Crimson Crime shows a frilly-hatted woman shooting a man in the head) to the suggestive (Bevis Winter’s Redheads Are Poison, 1948, is fronted by a long-legged beauty in a dress so sheer that one’s imagination hasn’t far to leap).

Mr. Haining will definitely be missed.

UPDATE: UK novelist Martin Edwards has posted a short tribute to Haining in his blog, ‘Do You Write Under Your Own Name?’ You can find his contribution here.

• If you need an escape from the chill and psychological blues this winter, New York magazine recommends picking up a spy novel set in some distant corner of the planet. Among its 10 selections: The Midnight Choir, by Gene Kerrigan (Dublin, Ireland); Salamander Cotton, by Richard Kunzmann (South Africa); and Hidden Moon, by James Church (Pyongyang, North Korea). Read the whole list here.

• Novelist Richard Helms is back with the second edition of his crime-fiction Webzine, The Back Alley. Included this time are stories by Bryon Quertermous, Megan Powell, and Keith Gilman. There’s also a good chunk of Frank Norris’ “classic noir” tale, McTeague, which Helms promises will “be continued in the next issue.” Look for the full Back Alley contents here.

• Here’s an odd development. Reports the Associated Press:

Deployed on high-stakes missions across the globe and surrounded by glamorous admirers, James Bond should be the perfect recruitment tool for Britain’s intelligence agencies.

But the icon gives a disorted impression of MI6’s work and may be hampering its drive to hire more minorities, Muslims and women, the service’s chief recruiter said in an interview Monday with British Broadcasting Corp. radio.

Read the full story here.

• We’re very late to the party on this one, we know ... but writer-editor Anthony Neil Smith reports that the once-popular Webzine Plots With Guns, which posted its “final issue” at the end of 2004, “will go back online in the new year, as soon as I get enough good stories to fill an issue.” Smith adds:

I’ll be doing quarterly issues. The pay will be ... well, it’ll be me buying you your drink of choice the next time I happen to see you. The standards will be higher than ever, and I’ll be pickier than ever. Looking for hard-boiled, noir and transgressive crime fiction. Every story has to have a gun in it somehow, some way (doesn’t have to play a big role. Just needs to be there). No pastiche. It’s got to feel right to find a home in PWG. ...

In 2008, we’re starting over with Issue #1. Send me your best (e-mail only). You know how to get in touch. And I promise you this won’t be a Ross Perot thing (he’s running, he’s not, he’s running again, he’s not). This time, I’m sticking around for the long haul.

It’ll be good to have Plots With Guns back in the game. We’ll let you know when the first new issue is posted.

• And British writer Mark Billingham (Death Message) is Angie Johnson-Schmit’s latest victim ... er, interviewee on the In for Questioning podcast. “In this episode,” she says, “Mark talks about his Tom Thorne police procedurals, his upcoming stand-alone novel, In The Dark, and the foreword he wrote for the fab anthology, Expletive Deleted. He also joins in the debate about genre vs. literary novels and how much sex/violence/cussin’ is too much. Find out what's on Mark’s iPod, the perks of mentioning favorite restaurants in your novels and what celebrities are reading his books.” Click here to listen in.

First Mailer, Now This

From the Associated Press:

Best-selling writer Ira Levin, whose genre-hopping novels such as the horror classic “Rosemary’s Baby” and the Nazi thriller “The Boys from Brazil” provided meaty movie roles for Mia Farrow and Laurence Olivier, has died of a heart attack, his agent said Tuesday.
The 78-year-old Levin, who also wrote for television and Broadway during his long career, passed away in his Manhattan apartment on Monday, agent Phyllis Westberg said.

The AP quotes Newsweek writer Peter S. Prescott as saying that Levin’s novels were “[u]tterly without nutritive value and probably fattening, yet there’s no way to stop once you’ve started.” I remember experiencing that same compulsion with The Boys from Brazil, which I read as a teenager--in one long sitting.

(Hat tip to Sarah Weinman.)

READ MORE: “Ira Levin, Author of Hit Mystery Play Deathtrap, Dies at 78,” by Robert Simonson (Playbill); “Ira Levin Gone?” by Ruth Jordan (Central Crime Zone); “Rosemary’s Daddy,” by Kevin Guilfoile (Chicago Tribune); “Grand Eulogies Today--But Who Will Read Them Tomorrow?” by Sarah Weinman (The Guardian).

Blink and He’s Gone

I hate writing obituaries, with their reminders of our own mortality. Yet this weekend I’ve already felt compelled to pen parting words about a historian-journalist colleague of mine here in Seattle. And now I have to turn to the business of observing the passage of Marc Behm, a New Jersey-born novelist who spent much of his life in France. The fact that Behm actually died this past July doesn’t make this easier to write.

Like UK author, critic, editor, and bookshop proprietor Maxim Jakubowski, who, in his most recent column for The Guardian, brought Behm’s demise to my attention, I hadn’t heard anything about the author’s fate. Not a single word, until then. Which is altogether remarkable, when you consider all the things that Behm accomplished in his 82 years. As Jakubowski explains:

Behm was born in 1925 in Trenton, New Jersey, and served with the U.S. army in Europe during the Second World War. Following a decade of small parts as an actor on the stage and U.S. television, he initially made a name for himself as a screenwriter, penning the short story “Charade,” later expanded into a full-blown screenplay in collaboration with his friend Peter Stone. The film that resulted, directed by Stanley Donen and starring Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn, is widely acknowledged as a classic.

Two years later, he boarded the Beatles bandwagon and wrote the screenplay for Help! for Richard Lester and moved full-time to Europe. His later screenwriting assignments were of a journeyman nature, with lucrative but artistically frustrating work including Trunk to Cairo, The 13 Chairs, an Edith Piaf biopic and sundry Charles Bronson and Sylvia Kristel vehicles. The screenwriting paid the bills as he shared his time between Paris and the Brittany coast, but it’s his second life as a writer that should ensure he is not forgotten.

Behm’s first published novel, 1977’s The Queen of the Night (“a curiously baroque and deliberately over-the-top romance set in Nazi Germany”), caused little stir. But his next effort, The Eye of the Beholder (1980), about a private eye who happens into the role of witness to a murder, only to then become obsessed with the beautiful killer, was heralded by The New York Times’ Newgate Callendar (Harold C. Schonberg) as “[o]ne of the most remarkable combinations of a private-eye novel and psychological suspense story, with an entirely new slant, that has ever been published ...”

I picked up a first edition of Eye soon after I graduated from college, and was enthralled. Much later, when that book--after having spent some years out of print--was being reissued, I offered a plot synopsis in the old newsletter version of The Rap Sheet:

Like Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op, Behm’s detective hero is unnamed. We know him only as The Eye, a neurotic and lonely sort who spends most of his time doing crossword puzzles and pretending that his long-lost daughter will again find a place at his side. Now enter Joanna Eris. She’s lonely, too, only for quite different reasons: Every time she gets married, her husband winds up dead. The Eye is hired by the wealthy parents of Joanna’s latest groom, and when he, too, is bumped off on their wedding night, The Eye’s curiosity is piqued. He doesn’t turn the bride in for this homicide, but instead follows her as she changes her identity and remarries. Again, the connubial bliss is broken by bloodshed, and Joanna leaves to become yet another woman, with yet another name and destination. Eventually, The Eye becomes Joanna’s guardian (though she isn’t aware of it), protecting her from the law and from herself. His efforts to stop her exterminations, however, are usually unsuccessful--and that may be exactly the way he wants it.

I concluded by noting that “Like his creations [in Eye], Behm is a manipulator. His writing style carries you off into a crazy world, and you don’t recognize its effect on you until the end.” Callendar added: “It’s an eerie, unusual book and can be read several ways. Basically, it is a parable of man’s quest for the unattainable. It is also a haunting love story of unfulfilled desire. It quietly tapers off into a kind of poetry. And it is beautifully written.” When asked to characterize the novel himself, Behm said, “It’s the story of God in disguise as a Private Eye, searching for his daughter: a quest for grace.”

Unfortunately, critical enthusiasm for The Eye of the Beholder was not broadly shared by Americans in 1980. While Behm became extremely popular in Paris, his works disappeared from U.S. bookstores--and not in a good way. It wasn’t until 1999, when Eye was turned into a big-budget Hollywood film by Australian director Stephan Elliott, starring Ewan McGregor (miscast in the lead) and the divine Ashley Judd, that many people outside of France finally read the book from which it was adapted. By then, recalls Jakubowski, “Marc had retired from screenwriting and his writing became something of a hobby. He would complete another five novels, all initially published only in France apart from Afraid to Death, picked up by No Exit Press in the UK. This latter is a fascinating mirror image to Eye of the Beholder, in which the male character becomes the prey of a female stalker cum angel of death, yet again a striking tale of obsession unbound and a disturbing psychological chiller.”

Most of Behm’s novels (and at least one collection of his short stories) continue to be unavailable in his native language. And both Eye and Queen of the Night appear to have fallen out of print in the States (though they’re available from online used-books sellers, including AbeBooks and Powell’s). It’s a shame, I realize, to discover a terrific novelist only after he or she has passed on. But if you haven’t yet read Marc Behm’s work, you could offer him no better tribute than to find and enjoy his books now.

READ MORE: “Marc Behm,” by Christopher Hawtree (The Guardian).

Still Catching Up

• Nicolas Cage will star in a film remake of the 1980-1988 TV detective series Magnum, P.I.? That’s the latest rumor, following on previous gossip that pretty boy Ben Affleck would play Ferrari-driving Hawaiian gumshoe Thomas Magnum, a role originally taken by Tom Selleck. According to TV Squad, the 43-year-old Cage is “considering the role”--which is a long way off from his actually accepting the part, or the movie actually being made. We won’t hold our breaths.

• Is there anything Duane Swierczynski doesn’t do? Weekly newspaper editor, novelist, and now comic-book writer? He explains in his Secret Dead Blog that “This November, I’ll be making my Marvel Comics debut with a one-shot issue of Moon Knight called “Date Night.”

• Following on the release of his new novel, Anarchy and Old Dogs, the fourth installment of his series featuring 73-year-old Laotian national coroner Dr. Siri Paiboun, British-born author Colin Cotterill tells Salt Lake City, Utah’s Deseret Morning News that he writes about septuagenarian characters in his novels “because they’re being wasted.” And for would-be mystery authors, he relates the basics of his writing process: “To start another book, he goes to an isolated bungalow south of Bangkok, ‘a place where I won’t be disturbed, where I pretend I don’t speak English, and I just write for 13 hours a day.” Hmm. Maybe that isn’t really so helpful to the rest of us.

• UK writer John Baker (White Skin Man) has recently been filling his blog with guest-posts from novelists, each one telling “What phases are involved in the creation” of their own work. What caught our eye in particular, though, was a contribution from Robert Wilson, the Gold Dagger-winning author of A Small Death in Lisbon (1999) and the Javier Falcón series (The Hidden Assassins, 2006). In it, Wilson offers somewhat more useful advice to struggling writers than Cotterill does. Writes Wilson:

When it comes to writing a text what I am trying to do is to move everything forward at the same time. That is plot, setting and character have to evolve together, not one after the other. This is especially important at the beginning of a book where you are trying to draw a reader into your world. The writer must give them as little excuse (or time) to slip away as possible. If a reader feels they are putting in too much time on stormy weather, baroque architecture or rocky escarpments their mind can wander. If you go into dense characterization or, worse, heavy back story, you will hear the thunder of readers hooves moving off to new pastures. I reckon you have a maximum of ten pages in which to position your central character in his/her life with friends, family and relationships, in an atmospheric setting with a plot up and running. You can (partially) fail on the first two counts but you must not fail with plot.

Read all of what Wilson has to say here.

• George W. Bush picking a fight with spy novelist Graham Greene? The Huffington Post’s Chris Kelly says it’s not a good idea.

• Interviewed by Texas’ Austin American-Statesman, thriller writer Olen Steinhauer explains that he’d “originally planned to include himself as a character in [his new novel,] ‘Victory Square,’ which started out as a 1,000-page Joycean epic called ‘Falling Sickness.’ His editor made it clear this wasn’t going to work--Barnes & Noble wouldn’t stock a big brick of a book by a midlist author--so Steinhauer stopped at the 400-page mark and reined it in. (An autobiographical element remains, though: Early in the book, the Militia detective Gavra Noukas travels to America on the trail of a defector and visits Clover Hill High School in Virginia--which is Steinhauer’s alma mater.)” Later in this newspaper piece, Steinhauer tells what we can expect next from his pen: he has “sent his agent the first draft of a contemporary CIA thriller that he hopes will be his commercial breakthrough. ‘I’m thinking trilogy,’ he says.” You’ll find the whole piece here.

• And we almost missed noting the recent death of Max Hodge, a Hollywood screenwriter with a long history of working on TV crime-fiction series. The Internet Movie Database has him down as a contributor to such classics as Mission: Impossible, Cannon, Ironside, Barbary Coast, and Police Woman, as well as The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. (on which he also served as producer), The Wild Wild West, Alias Smith and Jones, and The Waltons. In addition, notes TV Squad, Hodge in the 1960s was “a writer for Batman and created the Mr. Freeze character.” That last credit alone should’ve made him famous. He died in Woodland Hills, California, on August 17. Hodge was 91 years old.

You Only Live Once

Following word last week about the passing of R.D. Wingfield, creator of the Jack Frost mysteries, we have still more sad news to impart: John Gardner, the English spy novelist who revived the James Bond series in the 1980s, died last Friday, August 3, of suspected heart failure. He was 80 years old.

Born in a mining village in Northumberland, Gardner attended St. John’s College, Cambridge, before volunteering to fight in World War II. After returning home, he followed his Anglican clergyman father’s example and was ordained, serving as a priest for seven years before he realized that the work wasn’t for him. Following brief dalliances then with careers as a Marine commando and a magician, Gardner commenced his life as a fiction writer in 1964 with the publication of The Liquidator, the first of his eight books featuring a rather comical British secret agent named Boysie Oakes. (The series continued through Killer for a Song, 1976.) Most people reading this, however, will likely remember Gardner best for his Bond contributions.

Following the demise of Bond creator Ian Fleming in 1964, fellow British writer Kingsley Amis, who’d previously composed a critical work on Agent 007, The James Bond Dossier (1965), penned a new Bond novel titled Colonel Sun (1968), using the nom de plume Robert Markham. The Bond torch was then passed to Gardner, who revived Fleming’s man in License Renewed (1981). Gardner went on to contribute 16 books to the canon (including two movie novelizations), the last of which was Cold (or Cold Fall, as it appeared in the States), published back in 1996. Later, the Bond mantle was passed to Raymond Benson. And more recently, as we’ve reported here, Brit Sebastian Faulks has written a new Bond adventure, Devil May Care, which is set to be published on May 28, 2008, the 100th anniversary of Fleming’s birth.

Britain’s Independent newspaper recalls a bit more of Gardner’s history in its obituary:

John Gardner, author of more than 50 thrillers, including 14 James Bond books, was a workaholic and recovered alcoholic who even in his 81st year was still writing at all hours. He worked every day--even a little on Christmas Day. “I work because I am scared stiff of losing the ability to put words together,” he said. “Touch wood, it’s never happened, but I have nightmares that it might.”

His fictional characters included the cowardly secret agent Boysie Oakes (introduced in The Liquidator in 1964, the first of a series of books Gardner described as “born in the hope of being an amusing counter-irritant to the excesses of the many imitators of 007”) and Big Herbie Kruger (who first appeared in The Nostradamus Traitor in 1979). He also expanded and developed Arthur Conan Doyle’s Moriarty in The Return of Moriarty, 1974; The Revenge of Moriarty, 1975; and a third volume, provisionally titled The Redemption of Moriarty, which he had just completed before his death.

Gardner took over the Bond books in 1981 after being approached by the literary copyright owners, Glidrose. (Kingsley Amis had written just one Bond book after Ian Fleming’s death in 1964.) “What I wanted to do,” he said, “was take the character and bring Fleming’s Bond into the Eighties as the same man but with all he would have learned had he lived through the Sixties and Seventies.” The first new Bond was Licence Renewed (1981) in which M reminds Bond that the 00 section has been abolished; however, M retains Bond as a troubleshooter, telling him “You’ll always be 007 to me.” Other titles included Nobody Lives Forever (1986), Win, Lose, or Die (1989) and, the one Gardner considered his best, The Man from Barbarossa (1991).

Gardner was ambivalent about Bond, regarding the character as “one- dimensional”, and was at first reluctant to write about a character he had not devised himself. He said: “I’m used to putting a lot more flesh on my characters. And of course with Bond I can’t. It wouldn’t be in keeping with the way Fleming depicted him.” However, he refused to “dumb down” Bond. “What the Americans wanted,” he said, “was: ‘Bond goes to see M, flirts with Moneypenny, goes off, Bond loses the baddy, baddy gets Bond’ and then ‘Bond triumphs’. And I thought, ‘erm, no’”. But he enjoyed the trappings, including a Bentley (his second) and a silver Saab 900 Turbo, which his version of Bond switched to later.

Gardner died just weeks before the UK publication of his latest novel, a World War II-era story titled No Human Enemy, the fifth entry in a saga starring Detective Sergeant Suzie Mountford. And it will be interesting to see what becomes of that “just completed” Moriarty novel. But I can’t help thinking back as well to his first book--his only non-fiction book--called Spin the Bottle (1964). There’s a longstanding link between British writers and gin, and both Gardner and Fleming were partial to consuming that quintessential aperitif. In Spin the Bottle, Gardner, a self-confessed alcoholic, chronicled the agonies he once went through with his habit of two bottles of gin a day. “If I were still a magician,” he once said, “I’d be playing the northern clubs and I’d be down-at-heel, seedy and a chronic alcoholic.” Fortunately, he found a finer fortune in writing.

To learn more about John Gardner’s fascinating literary life, read this report at the James Bond fan site MI6 and this recollection at Mystery*File. Gardner’s official Web site can be found here.

A Late Frost

British critic and author Mike Ripley sends some very sad news our way: Rodney D. Wingfield, the former oil company salesman who created the series character Detective Inspector William Edward “Jack” Frost of Denton C.I.D., “died at his home in Essex, England, last night. Rodney was 79 and had been fighting cancer very privately for some years.” Ripley continues:

An established writer of radio plays, Rodney developed his radio character, Inspector Jack Frost, into the novel Frost at Christmas during the 1970s, though it took almost 12 years to find a publisher. Four more novels and a hugely popular TV series, starring Sir David Jason, followed.

Shortly before his final illness, Rodney, who wrote as R.D. Wingfield, completed the sixth in the series, Killing Frost, which will be published posthumously in the UK in the spring of 2008.

We offer our condolences to Wingfield’s family.

READ MORE: “A Tribute to R.D. Wingfield,” by Stuart
MacBride (Halfhead).

Say Good-night, David

First it was Kurt Vonnegut. Now, within the same month, another writer who had a strong influence on my choice of career, David Halberstam--author of The Powers That Be, The Best and the Brightest, and assorted other books--has died. Killed in a car crash yesterday south of San Francisco, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist was only 73 years old. The New York Times, for which he once covered the Vietnam War, has a fine remembrance here. Salon offers a trio of print interviews with the author here, while National Public Radio archives eight interviews with Halberstam on subjects ranging from the war on Iraq to baseball. Listen to those here.

READ MORE: “David Halberstam on Today’s American Press,” by Glenn Greenwald (Salon); “A Small Tribute to David Halberstam” (Material Witness); “NY Times Had to Scramble for Halberstam Obit,” by Joe Strupp (Editor & Publisher); “David Halberstam (1934-2007),” by Jack Shafer (Salon).

The Name’s Nelson. Barry Nelson.

“He is the answer to the trivia question: Who was the first actor to play James Bond?” writes the Associated Press’ Greg Risling in an obituary for veteran U.S. actor Barry Nelson, who died last Friday, April 7, at age 89. “Before Sean Connery was tapped to play the British agent on the big screen in 1962’s ‘Dr. No,’ Nelson played Bond in a one-hour TV adaptation of ‘Casino Royale’ in 1954.” To date, Nelson is the only American to have played Ian Fleming’s renowned Agent 007 on the big or small screens.

The AP recaps a bit of Nelson’s history as a performer:

After graduating from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1941, Nelson was spotted by a talent scout and signed to MGM. He appeared in a number of films for the studio in 1942, including “Shadow of the Thin Man,” “Johnny Eager” and “Dr. Kildare’s Victory.” He also landed the leading role in “A Yank on the Burma Road,” playing a cab driver who decides to lead a convoy of trucks for the Chinese government.

Nelson entered the Army during World War II and went on the road with other actors performing the wartime play “Winged Victory,” which was later made into a movie starring Red Buttons, George Reeves and Nelson.

After the war, Nelson starred in a string of movies, including “Undercover Maisie,” “Time to Kill” and “Tenth Avenue Angel.” ...

Nelson switched to the stage during the 1960s and 1970s, appearing on Broadway in “Seascape,” “Mary, Mary” and “Cactus Flower.” He earned a Tony nomination in 1978 for his role in “The Act,” which also starred Liza Minnelli.

According to Wikipedia, the rendering of Fleming’s 1953 novel, Casino Royale, in which Nelson starred was featured as part the CBS suspense/mystery anthology series Climax! “Reportedly this was considered a pilot for a possible James Bond television series,” the online encyclopedia explains, “though it’s not known if Nelson intended to continue playing the character. Nelson played James Bond as an American named ‘Jimmy Bond’; the program also featured Peter Lorre as the primary villain. Originally broadcast live, the production was believed lost to time until a kinescope emerged in the 1980s. It was subsequently released to home video, and is currently available on DVD as a bonus feature with the 1967 film adaptation of the novel,” which starred Peter Sellers and David Niven.

Over his lengthy career, Nelson also guested on such TV crime series as The Name of the Game, Longstreet, Cannon, Magnum P.I., Murder, She Wrote, and the considerably less memorable David Cassidy--Man Undercover. He is survived by his second wife, the former Nansilee (Nansi) Hoy, whom he married in 1992.

READ MORE: “Climax!--‘Casino Royale’” (TV Obscurities); “Behold the Original Bond Babe,” by J. Kingston Pierce (The Rap Sheet).

So It Goes

I was saddened to hear that renowned satirical author Kurt Vonnegut Jr. died yesterday in New York at age 84, of brain injuries suffered as a result of a fall several weeks ago. The Indianapolis, Indiana-born writer was just 29 years old when his first novel, Player Piano, was published in 1952. He went on to pen 13 others, including the semiautobiographical Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), Breakfast of Champions (1973, in which the author himself appeared), Jailbird (1979, the first of his novels I read and enjoyed), and his final work of fiction, Timequake (1997).

The New York Times’ Dinitia Smith eulogizes today that

Vonnegut wrote plays, essays and short fiction. But it was his novels that became classics of the American counterculture, making him a literary idol, particularly to students in the 1960s and ’70s. Dog-eared paperback copies of his books could be found in the back pockets of blue jeans and in dorm rooms on campuses throughout the United States.

Like Mark Twain, Vonnegut used humor to tackle the basic questions of human existence: Why are we in this world? Is there a presiding figure to make sense of all this, a god who in the end, despite making people suffer, wishes them well?

He also shared with Twain a profound pessimism. “Mark Twain,” Vonnegut wrote in his 1991 book, “Fates Worse Than Death: An Autobiographical Collage,” “finally stopped laughing at his own agony and that of those around him. He denounced life on this planet as a crock. He died.”

Politics had always been a significant interest of Vonnegut’s, and had informed much of his fiction. But in recent years, he turned increasingly to remarking on the often disastrous situation in which the United States and the world find themselves. He was especially critical of George W. Bush’s White House, opining in the politically progressive magazine In These Times that “our leaders are punch-drunk chimpanzees,” and remarking, in a 2006 interview with Rolling Stone, “Honestly, I wish Nixon were president. Bush is so ignorant.” Considering Vonnegut’s contempt for the Watergate scandal’s chief architect and most tragic figure (he once described Republican Richard M. Nixon as the “first president to hate American people and all they stand for”), such criticism is biting, indeed.

Much of this man’s philosophy about politics and life can be better understood by reading his most recent book, A Man Without a Country (2005), portions of which were originally published in In These Times. An index to Vonnegut’s stories in that magazine can also be found here.

Vonnegut wasn’t a crime novelist (though Bill Crider notes that his 1961 novel, Mother Night, was published by Gold Medal, a paperback house that brought many crime fictionists into the limelight), but the strength and imagination of his work promoted the public’s enjoyment of fiction, in general. And for that we all owe him a giant debt of gratitude.

Kilgore Trout weeps.

* * *

The media are (justifiably) filled today with Kurt Vonnegut encomia, including the Los Angeles Times, Salon (here and here), Time, The Huffington Post (here, here, and here), Esquire, and what was once his hometown newspaper, The Indianapolis Star. As well, a number of crime writers and writers about crime-mystery fiction have been sounding off today on Mr. Vonnegut’s passing, including James R. Winter, Patrick Shawn Bagley, M.J. Rose, Victor Gischler, and Steve Lewis. If you’re still craving more, Salon offers up a five-minute audio clip of Vonnegut reading from Slaughterhouse-Five. Click here to listen. And Rolling Stone has archived a 1998 essay by Vonnegut in which he “ruminates on the American Dream and the fate of the planet in the dawn of the twenty-first century.” You can read that here. Finally, the author’s Web site today features what may be the most heartfelt good-bye of all, in the form of a simple illustration, presumably by Vonnegut himself. See it while you can.

Dibdin’s Short Finish

The sad news coming out of Seattle, Washington, today is that Michael Dibdin, the 60-year-old author of an award-winning series starring Venetian detective Aurelio Zen (Back to Bologna), died there last Friday, March 30, after what Britain’s Telegraph says was “a short illness.”

Generous in both length and tone, the Telegraph’s obituary of Dibdin, who was born in Wolverhampton, England, in March 1947, but has lived in the United States since the early ’90s, is the best one I’ve spotted yet. As that piece explains:

Dibdin combined a flair for complex plotting and biting characterisation with a mastery of satire and the surreal.

In all he produced 16 novels, 11 of them featuring Zen, and his work was translated into 18 languages. With popular success came critical acclaim: “During the Nineties,” noted the legal commentator Marcel Berlins, “no writer of crime fiction attracted as much praise, and gave as much enjoyment, as Michael Dibdin.”

His trademark was the multi-layered literary whodunnit, couched in prose that his contemporary Val McDermid described as “limpid and extraordinary”; another admirer concluded that Dibdin remained “one of an elite cadre of crime fiction writers for whom literary critics break out all of their favourite adjectives”.

Dibdin deliberately tapped into British middle-class fantasies in the Aurelio Zen series. The appeal of the books lay partly in his decision to set each one in a different part of Italy (starting in the beautiful medieval city of Perugia), but also in the character of Zen himself: Dibdin invented him as an outsider, coming to Perugia as a stranger, much as Didbin himself had done when he arrived to teach English at the university there in the late 1970s.

Aurelio Zen’s initials offered a clue to his creator’s methods and motives; in the course of the series, Dibdin pieced together an A to Z of contemporary Italy, a composite of finely-drawn observations about the country and its people. The picture he painted, however, was no rose-tinted idyll: his tenth Zen mystery, Back to Bologna (2005), opened with a football club tycoon slumped dead over the wheel of his Audi, a bullet in his brain and a Parmesan cheese knife rammed through his chest.

Dibdin was an outsized figure with outsized traits and appetites; he had a fondness for fine food and drink, and liked to sport a Panama hat (“he embraces excess”, one observer wrote). Although in person he was private and shy, his books were larded with sex and violence--“two of the things we can do,” Dibdin noted, “which were not possible for earlier generations [of writers], so there’s an understandable tendency to want to take it to the max”.

Although his plots were convoluted (“as tangled as a dish of spag bol,” as one reviewer put it), Dibdin was a thoughtful exponent of crime fiction with a literary cast, specialising in unsympathetic heroes (someone noted that Aurelio Zen is not a man with whom one would want to be marooned in a gondola), and he took an academic interest in the history of the genre.

As for politics, Dibdin was careful not to taint his narratives with an identifiable ideology, but he believed that a wider political lens was not only essential to telling criminal tales but also unavoidable. He admired Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, both of whom were Left-leaning and disturbed by the corruption and abuses they saw in the society they wrote about. Like them, Dibdin shunned an overt political agenda in his books. “They exposed problems,” Dibdin said of them, “they didn’t propose solutions.”

The Telegraph piece goes on to quote Dibdin on the reason he devoted his novel-writing career to crime fiction: “The mainstream has lost its way. Crime fiction is an objective, realistic genre because it’s about the real world, real bodies really being killed by somebody. And this involves the investigator in trying to understand the society that the person lived in.”

Dibdin’s first published novel, a Sherlock Holmes pastiche, was The Last Sherlock Holmes Story (1978). It was followed 10 years later by Ratking, the first of his Commissario Zen crime novels, which won the Macallan Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger Award. “Other books in this series,” The Telegraph notes, “include two of his best titles, Cabal (1992), which was awarded the French Grand Prix du Roman Policier, and Dead Lagoon (1994). Cosi Fan Tutti (1996), a brutal exposé of Italian organised crime and a brilliantly funny pastiche of Mozart and Da Ponte’s opera buffa, was followed by A Long Finish (1998) and Blood Rain (1999), in which Zen faced death at the hands of the Sicilian Mafia.” In addition to his Italian series, Dibdin wrote standalones such as Dark Spectre (1995), which was set in an American town traumatized by an apparently random set of killings, and Thanksgiving (2000), about a journalist fixated on the recent death of his wife.

Back to Bologna was Dibdin’s most recent title, but he has an 11th (and probably last) Zen novel, End Games, due out in the UK in July and in the States in November.

I had the opportunity to talk with Michael Dibdin only once, shortly after the publication in 1997 of The Vintage Book of Classic Crime, a rather curious literary sampler he’d edited. He was by then living in rainy Seattle, after meeting (at a 1993 writers’ conference in Spain) and then marrying local mystery author Kathrine Beck (aka K.K. Beck). I found Dibdin to be a bit gruff at first, delivering clipped responses that he evidently believed would be quite sufficient for an interviewer with no more than passing interest in crime fiction. After we’d spent a good while talking about his work and the genre at a coffee shop in Seattle’s historic Pioneer Square district, though, he realized that I was no general assignment reporter, but instead had a longtime interest in the very variety of story to which he had devoted himself. We then carried on for another hour or so, exchanging the names of favorite recent books and talking about some of the acknowledged giants and lesser-known stars of this genre, many of whose work figured into his Vintage collection. We promised to get together again someday, but never did.

My January Magazine colleague Linda L. Richards had a similar experience when she sat down to interview him in 1999. In the resulting article, she wrote:

In person Michael Dibdin’s warmth is not immediately apparent. There is, at first, almost a shyness to our exchange: perhaps a caution. This is the slightly self-protective, intensely private Dibdin who--when he married Seattle writer and single mom Kathrine Beck ...--acquired the house next door to hers in order to have a peaceful nest where he could spin his yarns.Dibdin does warm, though. He has the sort of passion for his work and his genre that doesn’t allow distance in discussion that he finds interesting. Before long, his self-protection is abandoned and his eyes sparkle with interest and intelligence as he discusses his work and his passions.

Regrettably, such encounters are now no longer possible.

Blogger-mystery maven Sarah Weinman remarks that Dibdin’s demise is a “huge blow to the crime fiction world and to literature at large.” I’m sure that much more will be expressed about Dibdin’s loss in days to come. He demonstrated crime fiction’s potential for making sense of the world, at the same as it entertains. Can literature expect to do any more than that?

READ MORE: “Michael Dibdin: RIP,” by Lindesay Irvine (The Guardian); “Remembering Michael Dibdin,” by Maxim Jakubowski (BBC Radio 4).

Donald Hamilton Dies

After a day spent away from my office, what do I find upon my return? An e-note relating the sad news that Swedish-born novelist Donald Hamilton, creator of government operative and assassin Matt Helm, has died. And not just recently, but more than four months ago.. In that note, Hard Case Crime publisher Charles Ardai--who last year reprinted Hamilton’s 1964 standalone, Night Walker--wrote:

Don was 90 years old. Though his name may be little remembered today, in the 1960s and 70s he was well known as the best-selling author of the “Matt Helm” novels, a series of well-written and popular stories about a ruthless agent of the U.S. government who fought evil in the Cold War world (and eventually--briefly--the post-Cold War world). Helm starred in 27 novels between 1960’s DEATH OF A CITIZEN and 1993’s THE DAMAGERS; he was also featured in several movies starring Dean Martin, as well as a short-lived TV series starring Anthony Franciosa that reimagined the character as a private eye. More recently, DreamWorks optioned the rights to all the Helm novels for feature film development. A final Matt Helm novel exists but has never been published.

Don also wrote a dozen non-Helm novels, including several popular Westerns (including THE BIG COUNTRY, which became the Gregory Peck movie, and SMOKY VALLEY, which was filmed as “The Violent Men” starring Glenn Ford). And he wrote several outstanding noir crime novels, including one--NIGHT WALKER--which we’re proud to have reprinted last year in the Hard Case Crime series.

In the last decade of his life, Don moved back to Sweden, where he’d been born, and lived there with his son, Gordon. He died peacefully, in his sleep, this past November. Gordon kept the fact of his death private until today, when he confirmed it in a phone conversation with me.

We’ve lost a number of giants of the mystery field over the past few years--Mickey Spillane, Ed McBain, and Richard S. Prather, among others--and Donald Hamilton is very much of that caliber. He sold more than 20 million books during his lifetime. But unlike Spillane, McBain and Prather, all of whom were widely remembered at the time of their death, Don’s passing has sadly gone unremarked.

Well, back in November, true. But since news of Hamilton’s demise broke earlier today, tributes have been rolling in from Bill Crider, Duane Swierczynski, and others. All justified for a wordsmith who author-critic John Fraser, writing at the Mystery*File site, called “one of the three best American thriller writers, the other two being Dashiell Hammett and Ross Thomas.”

I’m only sorry that I come to this post ill armed, having read very few of Donald Hamilton’s novels over the years. Like Steve Lewis over at Mystery*File, my experience with Hamilton’s work was initially through the four Helm films in which Dean Martin starred back in the late 1960s. At a time when James Bond (Sean Connery) was dominating the field of movie spies, the folks at the helm of the Helm flicks thought that they needed to parody the genre in order to draw a crowd. Bad move. Equally regrettable was the decision, in the mid-’70s, to cast leading man Tony Franciosa (formerly of The Name of the Game and Search) as Matt Helm in a weekly ABC-TV series, but then reimagine the character as a Los Angeles private eye, solving textbook cases that at least took him outside of the country on occasion. All I really remember about that show was that it boasted a pretty cool theme, and that Franciosa’s agent-turned-gumshoe always seemed to be surrounded by comely females (one of whom was guest star Lynda Carter). The series lasted only 13 episodes.

Maybe I should use the excuse of Hamilton’s death to explore more of his simply titled Helm yarns (The Ravagers, The Retaliators, The Frighteners, etc.). Or perhaps a couple of those Westerns Ardai mentioned in his note. Any suggestions of where to start?

READ MORE: “Travis McGee and Matt Helm,” by Doug Bassett (Mystery*File); “Thriller Writers #1: Donald Hamilton,” by John Fraser (Mystery*File); “The Death of Matt Helm,” by Frank Sennett (Booklist); “Iwan Morelius on Donald Hamilton”(Mystery*File); “Murderers’ Row--Donald Hamilton” (Bill Crider’s Pop Culture Magazine); “Date with Darkness--Donald Hamilton,” by James Reasoner (Rough Edges).

“Avengers” Star Passes

Actor Gareth Hunt, who starred in The New Avengers (1976-1977) with Patrick Macnee and Joanna Lumley, died of pancreatic cancer on Tuesday. He was 65 years old and, according to his agent, died at home in England. “He fought the disease with great courage and through his strength of character and his wonderful sense of humour, he continued to work right up until the end of 2006,” the agent says.

Hunt was born Alan Leonard Hunt on February 7, 1943, a nephew of the well-known British actress Martita Hunt (1900-1969).

Although Hunt’s role as Mike Gambit on The New Avengers is the one he is most strongly identified with, he was a working actor throughout his life, with many screen, stage, and TV roles to his credit. In the years just prior to those he spent playing Gambit, he was very strongly identified as Frederick Norton, the character he portrayed on the long-running British drama Upstairs, Downstairs.

And look for Hunt later this year in writer-director Brendan Foley’s The Riddle. (Which actually sounds like a pretty rockin’ movie. Here’s what the IMDb says about it: “A journalist investigates a series of murders that follows the discovery of an unpublished novel by Charles Dickens in the cellar of an old Thames-side pub. Gradually, he becomes obsessed with unraveling a century-old murder in the pages of the manuscript. Only when he has done so, with the help of a mysterious beach-combing tramp who stalks the Thames foreshore, is he able to solve the modern murders.”)

The BBC has a lovely remembrance of Gareth Hunt here.

Another Giant Falls

It was just a month ago that I touted an online interview with 85-year-old Richard S. Prather, who was best known for having created Hollywood gumshoe Shell Scott, introduced in the 1950 novel Case of the Vanishing Beauty. And now comes the sad news that Prather has passed away at his home in Sedona, Arizona. I have to admit that I wasn’t a huge Shell Scott fan, though I did buy a first edition of Kill Me Tomorrow (1969) during the Left Coast Crime convention held two weekends ago in Seattle. However, the death of any author who was as influential in this genre as Prather (The Thrilling Detective Web Site notes that Scott was “the second most commercially successful private eye of the fifties [over forty million books sold].”) is deserving of recognition and regret.

Although Prather hadn’t seen a new book of his published since Shellshock (1987), Hard Case Crime last year reissued his 1952 standalone, The Peddler (which originally appeared under his pseudonym “Douglas Ring”), and interviewer Linda Pendleton, the widow of pulp novelist Don Pendleton, noted in her recent interview with Prather that the author was sitting on an as-yet-unpublished, 1,000-page Shell Scott manuscript, The Death Gods. Between widespread rediscovery of The Peddler and E-Reads’ efforts to make the Shell Scott novels available again through electronic and print means, it seemed as if there was a Prather revival in the offing. But today’s news means that any rebirth of this novelist’s renown will be posthumous. Too late for him to enjoy.

I don’t feel qualified to eulogize over this author; but longtime writer-editor Ed Gorman has the creds necessary to do so. Therefore, I’ll defer to his judgment, quoting with permission from something he wrote earlier today on his blog:

Richard S. Prather’s death has special meaning for people my age who grew up reading paperback originals. Even kids who hated reading read Prather because he was just so damned much fun. His creation, Shell Scott, was as iconic in his way as all the hard-boiled private eyes he spoofed. Was there an L.A. lass that Shell didn’t get to eventually?

He was a better writer than he generally got credit for, every once in a while he’d slip in a Scott that was darker than the general run and he’d surprise you with how skillfully he could turn from parody to realism. ...

I talked with him several times on the phone and the conversation always got around to him leaving Gold Medal for Pocket Books and a lot more money. Or what promised to be a lot more money. Pocket could never figure out how to sell him. Remember that ridiculous male model with the ridiculous spray-painted white hair? Contrast that with the great GM illustration of a grinning Shell. Acrimony ensued. Prather sued Pocket, and his career, for all practical purposes, was over. Michael Seidman brought him back for a few Tor books, and damned good ones they were, but time had passed for the Prather approach to crime fiction.

So long, Richard. And good night, Shell.

Because illustrator Robert McGinnis drew the covers for so many of his novels over the decades (including the latest Peddler front), there might be no other more fitting tribute to Richard S. Prather’s memory than to look back at some of the old Shell Scott paperbacks, a gallery of which can be found here. For a good Prather bibliography, with covers and brief plot descriptions, refer to this page. And for those of you who’ve never read a detective Scott story, you can start tonight with “The Bloodshot Eye,” an original Prather tale published in the June 1966 issue of Shell Scott Mystery Magazine. You can download it from here.

Sheesh! First it was Mickey Spillane. Now Richard S. Prather is gone. Life’s just not fair ...

READ MORE: “Obituary: Richard S. Prather (1921-2007),” by Steve Lewis (Mystery*File); “Richard S. Prather, R.I.P.,” by James Reasoner (Rough Edges); “Dead Man’s Walk,” by James Reasoner (Rough Edges); “Richard S. Prather, R.I.P.,” by Bill Crider (Bill Crider’s Pop Culture Magazine); “Classic Lines,” by Lee Goldberg (A Writer’s Life).

Even One Book Counts

Novelist and trained concert pianist Fred Mustard Stewart, best known for writing historical sagas such as Ellis Island (1983) and The Naked Savages (1999)--but who also penned a crime-related novel called The Mephisto Waltz (1969)--died last Wednesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 74 years old. Stewart’s obituary in The New York Times can be found here.

“I Couldn’t Possibly Comment”

I’m not sure how I missed this news, but it is very sad, indeed. Ian Richardson, the British actor who’s probably best known for his starring role as a conniving, backstabbing, and thoroughly corrupt politician in BBC-TV’s popular 1990 series House of Cards, died last Friday in London at age 72. His agent says he had not previously been ill, and passed away quietly in his sleep.

According to Wikipedia, Richardson was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, was a founding member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, was nominated for a Tony Award for playing Professor Henry Higgins in a 1976 revival of My Fair Lady, and first gained attention in the United States through a series of televised Dijon mustard commercials. He was apparently the gentleman in the Rolls-Royce who leaned out to ask others, “Pardon me, would you have any Grey Poupon?”

However, it was Richardson’s role as Francis Urquhart, the polished but thoroughly Machiavellian chief whip for Britain’s Conservative Party, that brought him the greatest recognition on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. The success of House of Cards, based on a 1989 political thriller of the same name by Michael Dobbs, led to two sequels, To Play the King (1993) and The Final Cut (1995), in both of which Urquart served as the UK’s prime minister. In addition to his sinister suavity, Urquart was most familiar for the line he regularly delivered when he wanted to signal his agreement with a statement made to him but could not do so on the record: “You might say that, I couldn’t possibly comment.” (That phrase has apparently become common among British politicians since.)

Following his performances in the House of Cards trilogy, Richardson became intimately associated with quite another part, that of Doctor Joseph Bell, a 19th-century medical school mentor of Arthur Conan Doyle, whom he portrayed in a series of BBC dramas called Murder Rooms: The Dark Beginnings of Sherlock Holmes, based on books by British screenwriter and novelist David Pirie. Richardson won a Sherlock Award in 1991 for his portrayal of Bell, who in Pirie’s novels (the most recent of which is 2004’s The Dark Water) acts as a Holmesian investigator, with Doyle taking up a second-fiddle status not unlike that of Doctor John H. Watson.

Earlier in his career, Richardson appeared in the TV miniseries Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1979), Ike (1979), and The Woman in White (1982). He also played Soviet spy Anthony Blunt in TV’s Blunt (1985) and had a role in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985). In addition, Richardson was featured in some films that, well, didn’t quite seem up to his usual standards, such as B*A*P*S (1997), 102 Dalmatians (2000), and The Booze Cruise II: The Treasure Hunt, a 2005 teleflick.

In 1989, Richardson was made a Commander of the British Empire (CBE) by Queen Elizabeth II.

The London Times yesterday carried a brief obituary of the actor, in which it said that “To meet, Richardson was articulate, outgoing, even effusive. But behind that was a fastidious and somewhat private Scot. The contrast fed into his acting a powerful tension. Alongside this was always a vein of glinting irony and, if needed, a wonderful ability to make audiences laugh--without which, [Laurence] Olivier once said, no actor can effectively play tragedy.”

If I don’t answer the phone or e-mail tonight, you’ll know that I am too busy watching House of Cards again, this time in tribute to a great actor gone.

READ MORE: “The Night Ian Richardson Died in My Arms,” by Leslie Middlehurst (The Daily Mail).

Nothing Lasts Forever

It’s funny what you can learn about a famous person only after he or she dies. Take, for instance, writer Sidney Sheldon, who passed away this afternoon, at age 89, of complications from pneumonia.

My only knowledge of Sheldon until today was that he’d produced a series of thrillers, all of them fronted by slinky, reclining young women clad in provocative attire. (This is a good example.) However, he also wrote Broadway musicals and the Shirley Temple-Cary Grant film, The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer (1947), the latter of which won him an Academy Award. And he claimed to have penned “almost every single episode” of The Patty Duke Show (1963-1966). He went on to create an even better-remembered TV series, I Dream of Jeannie (1965-1970). In addition, Sheldon created and then wrote episodes of Hart to Hart (1979-1984). It wasn’t until age 50 that he turned to composing novels, soon becoming a bestseller, with several of his books being adapted for screens large and small (including Bloodline, Master of the Game, and Memories of Midnight). Oh, and did I mention that his very first novel, The Naked Face (1970), won him an Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America?

Sheldon packed a lot of successes into 89 years. Would that we could all be so productive.

READ MORE: “Sidney Sheldon, 89; Master of Flashy, Trashy Bestsellers,” by Bettijane Levine and Valerie J. Nelson (Los Angeles Times); “Obituary: Sidney Sheldon (1917-2007),” by Steve Lewis (Mystery*File).