Bullet Points: Another Hump Day Edition

• I missed spotting this news about the 2013 Florida Book Awards. It seems Randy Wayne White won the Gold prize in the General Fiction category for his second Hannah Smith mystery, Deceived (Putnam); while in the Popular Fiction category, Brad Meltzer picked up the Silver prize for The Fifth Assassin (Grand Central Publishing), his second Beecher White thriller, and the Bronze went to Alex Kava for her latest Maggie O’Dell mystery, Stranded (Doubleday).

• A hardy congratulations is due Patti Abbott, whose novel Concrete Angel has been purchased by Exhibit A Books and is scheduled for publication in February 2015.

• I didn’t know until just yesterday that Los Angeles Police Department veteran-turned-author Paul Bishop has begun penning a column about crime fiction for a Web site called Venture Galleries, but his latest installment--looking back at August Derleth’s Sherlockian pastiche, Solar Pons--certainly convinces me to check on his contributions more regularly now. You’ll find Bishop’s piece here.

• Really, John Travolta as the next James Bond?

• Editor Janet Rudolph is looking for additional essays about Canada-themed crime fiction to publish in the spring 2014 edition of Mystery Readers Journal. She’s also in need of more personal “Author! Author!” articles for that same issue. The deadline is March 15. E-mail Rudolph here for more information.

• An interesting prospect for any wannabe crime-fictionists living in the Lone Star State: “The Sisters in Crime, Heart of Texas Chapter here in Austin is offering a fun opportunity for aspiring mystery authors. The Barbara Burnett Smith Aspiring Writers Event (BBSAWE) is calling for all unpublished, aspiring writers of thrillers, true crime, noir or any mystery genre, for young or old readers, to submit the first 500 words of their mystery manuscript along with a brief synopsis. All who submit will be paired with a published author mentor for one-on-one sessions and recognition at the BBSAWE in May of each year. The submission deadline is March 31, 2014.” Learn more here.

• One of the most intriguing turns, at least for me, in the saga of Western outlaws Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (Harry Longabaugh) has always been their 1901 stopover--together with the mysterious Etta Place--in New York City on the way to what they hoped would be quieter lives in Argentina. Last night’s episode of the PBS-TV series American Experience dealt well with that interlude, as well as so much else about their exciting, unlikely story.

• Did you know that Halle Berry is set to star in a CBS-TV mystery/science fiction series titled Extant, due to premiere this coming July? As The Futon Critic explains, the show will be about “a female astronaut trying to reconnect with her family after returning from a year in outer space. Her mystifying experiences in space lead to events that will ultimately change the course of human history.”

• The Crime Segments’ Nancy O. is reviewing her way through Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe novels. She’s now up to The Lady in the Lake. You should be able to find her preceding posts here.

• Happy 205th birthday to Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln, both of whom were born on February 12, 1809.

• I’ve never read Always Leave ’Em Dying, Richard S. Prather’s 1954 Shell Scott private-eye novel, but this fabulous quote from the book--included in a post by Detectives Without Borders’ Peter Rozovsky--makes me want to find a copy sometime very soon: “ … she’d just turned twenty-one, but had obviously signaled for the turn a long time ago. … she wore a V-necked white blouse as if she were the gal who’d invented cleavage.”

• Ed Gorman wrote more about Prather’s fiction here.

• This note comes from B.V. Lawson’s In Reference to Murder: “Italian novelist Andrea Camilleri was awarded the prestigious Pepe Carvalho prize for lifetime work at the BCNegra noir literary festival in Barcelona last week. Previous winners include Michael Connelly, P.D. James, and Henning Mankell.”

• Good for President Obama, who today signed an “executive order raising the contracting standards for workers on federal contracts.”

• Why does this not surprise me one bit? According to a new study by Central Connecticut State University president John Miller, my current hometown of Seattle is the second most literate city in the United States. The No. 1 position belongs to Washington, D.C., which probably benefits from its large contingent of highly educated people laboring away in government offices there. (Which isn’t to say that everybody in D.C. is all that bright--especially not those who are ideologically driven to tank the nation’s economy.) Minneapolis, Atlanta, and Pittsburgh round out the roster’s top five, while Boston holds eighth place, San Francisco is in 10th, and Portland, Oregon, ranks No. 11. Of the 77 cities included in this study, Bakersfield, California, came out at the very bottom; Corpus Christi, Texas, and Stockton, California, didn’t fare much better.

• It was on this date in 1940 that “Superman took flight on radio,” recalls the blog Down These Mean Streets. “Premiering in his own serial adventure just two years after his comic debut, the Man of Steel thrilled radio audiences for over a decade.”

• This just makes me happy!

• Another assessment of James Bond’s drink of choice.

• With the character of Sherlock Holmes having entered the public domain--thanks to a judicial ruling last year--will the future hold a series of increasingly bizarre/ridiculous pastiches? I mean, how many Holmes vs. vampires thrillers do we need?

• Is there anyone less likely than Stuart MacBride--“one of Scotland’s darkest, most blood-curdling authors”--to write a children’s book?

• I’ve always loved Mad’s Spy vs. Spy cartoons.

• The oddball but nonetheless brilliant 1974-1975 ABC-TV crime/horror drama Kolchak: The Night Stalker, starring Darren McGavin, has periodically been a subject of comment on this page. But now Phil Dyess-Nugent applauds its spooky strengths in the A.V. Club blog. His post, by the way, includes a link to the full 1972 teleflick that started it all, The Night Stalker, “a Richard Matheson-penned adaptation of [Jeff Rice’s] unpublished novel The Kolchak Papers.”

• Maybe it’s time to re-read John Ball’s In the Heat of the Night.

• I’m sorry to say that I have been to only half a dozen of what Business Insider declares are “18 Book Stores Every Book Lover Must Visit at Least Once.” Then again, I hope to enjoy many healthy years in my future to remedy this deficiency.

• Just in time for Valentine’s Day: Word that DNA deposited on somebody’s cheek through kissing can become criminal evidence.

• Yay! A new release of Orson Welles’ classic Touch of Evil.

• R.I.P., Sid Caesar, who died today at age 91.

• And congratulations to Governor Jay Inslee of Washington, who has declared a moratorium on state executions. “Equal justice under the law is the state’s primary responsibility,” Inslee says. “And in death penalty cases, I’m not convinced equal justice is served. The use of the death penalty in this state is unequally applied, sometimes dependent on the budget of the county where the crime occurred.”

Ear to the Ground

• This morning’s e-mail brought the following news from Linda Pendleton, wife of the late author Don Pendleton:

I want to announce the publication of Richard S. Prather’s final Shell Scott private eye novel, The Death Gods, October 10, 2011, in Kindle, and [it] will be in print at Amazon in about two weeks. I also plan to have it via Smashwords soon.

Happy-go-lucky, Los Angeles private eye Shell Scott bulldozes his way through thugs, often with light-hearted humor, and with a beauty or two along the way, in this final novel of the long-running Shell Scott series by Richard S. Prather. More than 40 million copies of Richard S. Prather's hard-boiled Shell Scott mysteries have been sold in the U.S., with millions more world-wide since Shell Scott first appeared in 1950. Richard S. Prather (1921-2007) received the Private Eye Writers of America Lifetime Achievement Award in 1986.

Previous entries in the Shell Scott series are listed here.

• The second season of Sherlock, BBC One’s updated version of Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman, is finally slated to reach Americans as part of PBS-TV’s Masterpiece Mystery! series, beginning on May 6 of next year. Three episodes will be shown.

• What’s the difference between “mysteries” and “thrillers”? Author and publisher Jim Huang tries to make some distinctions.

• Still more Icelandic crime novels are on their way to translation.

• Kathleen George extols the virtues of tension-filled conversations between killers and their anticipated victims in crime fiction.

• NBC has extended the seasons of Harry’s Law and Prime Suspect.

• Here’s a cool e-book short-story collection for you.

• For the Mulholland Books site, Kate Atkinson interviews fellow author Denise Mina (The End of the Wasp Season).

• And the movie Web site Flick Attack has now reviewed all six of the classic Thin Man films, starring William Powell and Myrna Loy. It makes me want to see those pictures again, even the lesser ones.

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).

Always Leave ’Em Wanting

During the 1950s, Richard S. Prather was America’s second-most-successful private eye fictionist, just behind Mickey Spillane. His Hollywood gumshoe, the buzz-cut and surprisingly sanguine Sheldon “Shell” Scott, “appeared in a long string of over three dozen Fawcett/Gold Medal PBOs [paperbacks only], collections and countless short stories, and even lent his name to Shell Scott Mystery Magazine,” recalls Kevin Burton Smith at The Thrilling Detective Web Site. Yet Prather, who is now 85 years old, and whose last new novel, Shellshock, was published back in 1987 (a year after he received the Mystery Writers of America’s Lifetime Achievement Award), isn’t well remembered by most of today’s crime-fiction enthusiasts. Hard Case Crime’s recent re-release of his 1952 standalone, The Peddler (boasting cover art by Robert McGinnis, who also supplied the illustrations for many of Prather’s early paperbacks), is likely to send some younger readers into library back corners in search of his other works, or maybe off to E-Reads, which has made a number of the Shell Scott novels available again through electronic and print publication. However, a generation reared on CSI, Monk, and Veronica Mars may find Prather’s tales a bit dated and skimpy on forensic details.

Fortunately, for those curious to know more about Scott and his creator, Linda Pendleton, the widow of pulp novelist Don Pendleton, has posted a fresh and satisfyingly long interview with Prather at her husband’s official site. The subject matter of their exchange ranges all over the map, from Prather’s childhood and writing “rules,” to his thoughts on supportive spouses and “channeled wisdom,” to his as-yet-unpublished, 1,000-page Shell Scott manuscript, The Death Gods. But the section I most enjoyed reading was his response to what is a classic reader question to authors: In what ways is your protagonist like you, and in what ways is he not? Prather answers:

I created Shell Scott as essentially a light-hearted, optimistic, happy-go-lucky fellow, and from the beginning I wanted my books--even though they’re mystery novels about murder and crimes and troubles and crooks--to reflect that upbeat attitude, to focus more on the “mystery” than the “murder,” more on the approaching light than the gathering darkness. There’s always enough misery in the world, and I didn’t want to add more to it.

So, OK, sure, to a degree Shell Scott is “me, operating from the same worldview,” but only to a degree. Certainly I’ve given Shell qualities like integrity, self-reliance, courage, love of truth and justice, that I consider admirable in him--or anyone else--along with a few flaws and foibles to make him seem more human, like us ordinary people. But he isn’t “ordinary,” and isn’t supposed to be. For an obvious example, he’s a lot bigger and stronger and braver than I am. But we authors know (or should know) that our Heroes or Heroines are ten feet tall and invincible, even if we’re not. Because we want (or should want) to write about extraordinary people living extraordinary lives, and thus give our readers relief for a while from what are often Thoreau’s “lives of quiet desperation” punctuated by shopping at the supermarket and paying the monthly bills. We’re avenues of temporary escape for them, just as other authors (especially if they lift our spirits instead of depressing them) are respite for us fellow scribblers.

So, yes, I’d like to say that Shell Scott’s virtues, his good humor and honesty and ingenuity and optimism, and his belief that all women are Goddesses, are positive qualities that he inherited in part from his creator. But we can’t stop there, can we? If we authors profess that our admirable Heroes reflect much of what we ourselves are, we have to be consistent and also admit that the most villainous characters we’ve invented must reflect much of the darkness and “evil” that’s somewhere within ourselves. So the negative qualities of my numerous bad guys (and gals)--their crookedness, dishonesty, greed, cruelty, nastiness and so on ad infinitum--must have come from somewhere within me, and my experiences of many lifetimes, or I wouldn’t have been able to pass them on to my fictional progeny. After all, I created those villains too, didn’t I?

You can--and should--read the entire interview here.

(Hat tip to Mystery*File’s Steve Lewis.)