Seattle Losing a Major Attraction

Sadly, it appears that Seattle Mystery Bookshop, which has been a must-visit fixture in my hometown’s historic Pioneer Square district for the last 27 years, will be closing at the end of its business day on Saturday, September 30. Owner J.B. Dickey, who purchased the store from founder Bill Farley near the end of Bill Clinton’s presidency, blames a variety of factors—including giant book outlets that discounted their wares, the sale of cheaper e-books, the demise of first-edition-collector culture, and the Great Recession’s hurtful impact on Seattle’s downtown—for this sad turn. In a short piece posted on the shop’s Web site this morning, Dickey writes:

I’ve worked here almost since the day it was open for business. At first, I was here just one day a week, so that Bill could have a day off—which he used to do bookkeeping at home. I remember [the Farleys’] long dining room table, which was covered with pile after pile of paperwork. I don’t know where they ate dinner. Slowly, this place absorbed my life until my brain looked like Bill’s dining room table. In ’98, when he felt like stepping back from ownership, Bill offered to sell it to me but, happily, he kept working with us all. It has been a great honor to own the Seattle Mystery Bookshop since 1999. Sadly, that is now going to come to an end. …

At one time, when this shop was young, there were at least three dozen independent mystery bookshops around the globe. NYC had four. DC had three. Now there are but a handful. It isn’t just us. I am dead certain that none of those that closed wanted to, but, in the end, there was no choice.

We’re all heartbroken to close the shop. I personally feel as if I have failed Bill. But we all fought hard to keep it going for years, but the sharp bottom line is people have not been buying enough books from us to keep it working for a long time. Time to say goodbye.

I want to thank all of those loyal customers who have been regulars over the years. It’s been a gas.

What happens next? It’s a mystery.

It’s difficult to imagine my going to Pioneer Square without stopping by the Seattle Mystery Bookshop on Cherry Street. I can’t tell you how many of the volumes decorating the walls of my home and office were purchased at that small store, but there would be significant holes on my shelves had it not been for Bill Farley, J.B. Dickey, and their wonderful, knowledgeable crew. It was also at the Mystery Bookshop that I had the great pleasure just last year of meeting and talking with one of my all-time-favorite authors, Philip Kerr.

I always used to feel proud that Seattle could support a crime- and mystery-fiction retailer, when other major U.S. cities could not. I will soon lose those bragging rights. Don’t be surprised if you see me paying a call or two on the Seattle Mystery Bookshop before the end of this month. There’s still room on my shelves that needs filling.

In Seattle, Use It or Lose It

There’s still no word on the future of the Seattle Mystery Bookshop, a 27-year fixture in Seattle’s downtown historic district. It was announced in early August that the store, which has been struggling financially for a while, was for sale. Since then, the stock has been reduced, and employees have ceased accepting used books in exchange for credit. Additionally, patrons were told they must redeem any outstanding credit slips and gift certificates by the end of this month—which just happens to be tomorrow, August 31.

Because folks get busy and tend to forget deadlines like that, I figured a friendly reminder in The Rap Sheet wouldn’t hurt one bit.

Of Spies, Sales, and Speculations

Today’s quick hits from around the crime-fiction world.

• The August edition of Mike Ripley’s “Getting Away with Murder” column for Shots includes brief mentions of London’s “Summer of Spies” promotion, HarperCollins UK’s decision to reissue Desmond Bagley’s adventure thrillers, an “absolutely magnificent” John le Carré book cover, Mattias Boström’s thorough study of Sherlock Holmes’ rise “from fictional creation to media megastar,” and new novels by Will Dean, Brooke Magnanti, Karen Ellis, and others.

• Worrisome news from In Reference to Murder:

[T]he Seattle Mystery Bookshop is up for sale. Founded by Bill Farley 27 years ago, the shop has hosted a veritable who's who of crime-fiction authors through the years for talks and signings. The store sells both new and used books within the genre, from noir to cozy, espionage, classics, [and] historical, and also specializes in hard-to-find, collectible, and signed first editions and Northwest mysteries.

Current owner J.B. Dickey hastened to add that the store isn't closing … yet. But they already had to resort to a GoFundMe drive which brought in enough funds to pay off overdue bills and sock away enough to last through this past winter. As Dickey noted, “It bought us a year—but barely, and that has taken its toll. While we could do another such fundraiser, that’s not a viable way to continue in business.”

My fingers are crossed that Seattle Mystery Bookshop will find a buyer able to steady that store’s financial outlook for the long term.

• If you remember CBS-TV’s Q.E.D., you may be among the few people who do. As explained by Wikipedia, it was “a 1982 adventure television series set in Edwardian England, starring Sam Waterston as Professor Quentin Everett Deverill. The Professor was a scientific detective in the mold of Sherlock Holmes, and the series had a smattering of what would later be called steampunk [devices]. In the show, the lead character was known primarily by his initials, Q.E.D; the reference here is that Q.E.D. usually stands for quod erat demonstrandum, a statement signaling the end of a proof.” I barely recall this show, and I’m not sure I ever watched it when it was originally broadcast. But suddenly, I have a second chance. Somebody signing himself “Howard Carson” has posted all six of the hour-long Q.E.D. episodes on YouTube. Enjoy them while you can!

• Oops! Britain’s Daily Mirror newspaper is enduring a public thrashing over its allegedly “fabricated story” (cited recently in The Rap Sheet) about the next, 25th James Bond motion picture being set in Croatia and based on U.S. author Raymond Benson’s 2001 Bond continuation novel, Never Dream of Dying. “What has yet to be uncovered in this tale,” writes the Bond blog MI6, “is the original source of the false rumour. Most likely, someone e-mailed the Mirror’s showbiz tip line with the claims of having inside information.”

• In a piece for The Paris Review, Megan Abbott remarks on In a Lonely Place, Dorothy B. Hughes’ 1947 genre-bending noir novel, which is set to be reissued by publisher NYRB Classics on August 15.

• Meanwhile, New York journalist-turned-fictionist Julia Dahl (Conviction) writes in the Columbia Journalism Review about her years as a freelancer for the tabloid New York Post—an experience that, as she has written elsewhere, “changed my life in more ways than I could have ever imagined.” Click here to read her recollections in CJR.

• For the list fanatics among us: Kirkus Reviews’ rundown of the “10 Most Overlooked Books of This Summer” includes Riley Sager’s Final Girls and Bill Loehfelm’s The Devil’s Muse. Among the Chicago Review of Books’ “12 Books You Should Definitely Read This August” are Ryan Gattis’ Safe, Christopher Swann’s Shadow of the Lions, and Augustus Rose’s The Readymade Thief. For the Strand Magazine blog, British Columbia author Sam Wiebe names his “Top 10 Vancouver Crime Novels.” And U.S. novelist Warren Adler delivers to Crime Fiction Lover a selection of his “Top 5 British [TV] Crime Shows.”

• Finally, congratulations are due The Spy Command and its managing editor, Bill Koenig, for reaching their first million pageviews. Koenig’s spy fiction-oriented blog debuted in 2008 as The HMSS Weblog, but was renamed in 2015, following the failure of its associated Web site, Her Majesty’s Secret Servant.

Let Me Be Brief

• My best experience thus far in April? Finally meeting Scottish author Philip Kerr, who I have interviewed twice via e-mail (see here and here), but have never talked with in person. Until today, that is, when he visited my hometown of Seattle to sign copies of his new Bernie Gunther novel, The Other Side of Silence, at the Seattle Mystery Bookshop. Before he began inking title pages, Kerr talked with a small group of devoted readers (mostly men, if that means anything) about how he researches and composes his award-winning World War II-era series. In the course of it, Kerr—dressed in jeans and a dark sport jacket, with a long blue scarf wrapped around his neck and a cup of Starbucks coffee at hand—mentioned that if he had the opportunity to meet just one Nazi leader, he’d like it to be Joseph Goebbels, who in addition to being Adolf Hitler’s propaganda minister was also a published novelist; that the plot of his next Gunther yarn, Prussian Blue, includes a murder at Berghof, Hitler’s residence in the Bavarian Alps; that he doesn’t maintain a detailed chronology of his protagonist’s history, believing the wise-cracking Gunther should be allowed some inconsistencies and prevarications in the stories he tells other people about his life; and that HBO-TV is considering launching a series based on his Gunther adventures. I’ve read every one of Kerr’s 11 Gunther books, so was more than a bit pleased to walk away from today’s bookstore encounter carrying a hardcover copy of The Other Side of Silence, signed to me from “Phil Kerr” and including the mischevious message, “Bernie says hi.”

• This is a most promising development, indeed: The Hollywood Reporter states that “The upcoming HBO drama [The Deuce] from David Simon has tapped novelists Megan Abbott and Lisa Lutz as new writers on the series. They’ll join current writers George Pelecanos, Richard Price, and Simon, who together penned the pilot. The project, which was given a series order in January, stars Maggie Gyllenhaal and James Franco and is in pre-production in New York. It follows the story of the legalization and subsequent rise of the porn industry in New York’s Times Square from the early 1970s through the mid-1980s, exploring the rough-and-tumble world that existed there until the rise of HIV, the violence of the cocaine epidemic, and the renewed real-estate market all ended the bawdy turbulence.”

• A post in Mystery Fanfare about forthcoming offerings from the British U.S. streaming service Acorn TV mentions that Season 9 of Murdoch Mysteries—the Canadian series based on Maureen Jennings’ novels about Victorian-era Toronto police detective William Murdoch—includes an episode in which former Star Trek captain William Shatner plays humorist Mark Twain. In the video below, Murdoch Mysteries lead Yannick Bisson explains that Shatner’s guest spot came about as a result of a series of Twitter communications.



• Delicious Foods, James Hannaham’s 2015 Gothic crime novel, has won the 2016 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.

• Glenn Harper, who usually writes the International Noir Fiction blog, has a good piece in the Los Angeles Review of Books about Lene Kaaberbøl and Agnete Friis’ tetralogy of thrillers featuring Danish nurse Nina Borg (The Considerate Killer).

• Someday I hope there will be crime and mystery tales included among the nominees for the Sarah Awards for audio fiction.

• And yesterday I noted that author Craig McDonald said, in a Facebook post, that his next Hector Lassiter novel will be titled Three Chords & the Truth. McDonald subsequently sent me a link to this interview he did with Steve Powell of The Venetian Vase, in which the handsome cover from that new book is featured.

Strengthening Bookstore Futures

This is excellent news! Once Upon a Crime, the well-respected independent mystery-fiction bookstore in Minneapolis, Minnesota, has “found a buyer,” as current owners Pat Frovarp and Gary Shulze announced in a press release posted by Crimespree Magazine today. Their note goes on to explain:

Hard to believe, but here we are. After 7 months of backs and forths with potential buyers, Once Upon a Crime is about to have new owners. We’re both excited and saddened by this news. We’ll miss the store, authors, and especially customers as we hand over the care and feeding of Once Upon a Crime on April 1 (we’re not fooling) to a new and enthusiastic generation. This date is—coincidentally—the 29th anniversary of the store’s founding in 1987. Why not hold out until the 30th anniversary next year, you may ask. Good question. Short answer is “because it’s time.” Running an independent bookstore is hard, ceaseless work. We don’t sit at the desk and read books until the next customer shows up. But Dennis Abraham, Megan King–Abraham, along with their daughter Devin are perfectly suited to take over. You’re going to love them.

Don’t start thinking that you’ll never see us again. We plan to stay on for a while in an advisory capacity. There’s a lot of ropes to learn. And Devin, who will primarily manage daily operations, has already demonstrated that she’s a fast learner.

Dennis Abraham and Meg King-Abraham are avid mystery readers. The Abrahams moved to Minneapolis in 2014. Once Upon a Crime was recommended to them by friends. When they read that we were considering selling, Dennis and Meg became interested in becoming small-business owners because of their love of books. Dennis is an Operations Manager at Medtronic. Meg teaches elementary technology in St. Paul. Devin Abraham, their daughter, will be the primary staff. She is a voracious reader and a graduate of the University of Wisconsin.

Thank you for your past and future support of
Once Upon a Crime.

Meanwhile, there are favorable tidings from the Seattle Mystery Bookshop, which in January put out word that it was trying to raise $50,000 through a GoFundMe campaign, one that would help overcome its recent financial woes and “build back to our former glory.” A message on that GoFundMe page now declares that the goal has been reached—and exceeded. Checking this morning, the tally sits at $52,052, with further donations still being accepted.

This Bookstore Needs Your Help

Uh-oh. I feared that all might not be well at the Seattle Mystery Bookshop when, in September 2014, it moved back into its previous, smaller digs in the city’s Pioneer Square historical district. Now comes this note, titled “Save Seattle Mystery Bookshop”:

You know us, we’re old friends. We’re Seattle Mystery Bookshop, a specialty store dedicated to the art of the mystery novel. We’re also quite fond of thrillers, suspense, espionage, traditional cozies, culinary, pet and even urban fantasy mysteries. If there’s a crime, we’re interested! You, of course, are our dedicated and loyal friends, whom we adore. And we have a request.

Over the last 25 years, we’ve introduced new authors to you, brought in big names to meet with adoring fans, reviewed countless books, and provided personalized and non-algorithmic service (and sometimes even cookies!) to our beloved friends.

And we want to continue on doing all those things. We love our shop and our books and our customers and our authors!

However, this digital age—and that pesky recession—hit us kind of hard. We need your help to build back to our former glory.

We want to be able to carry all the obscure books that you’ve come to treasure. We want to be the meeting place for both new and upcoming authors as well as old friends and big names to visit with fans and friends.

We’ve set up a GoFundMe account, and our target goal is $50,000. That’s an awful lot of money, we know, but if you can pitch in even a little, it’ll help a whole lot!

Our plan is to use your donations to make sure the rent is completely paid off, all our suppliers are happy, and to restore missing titles and depleted series to our shelves. Some books are hard to find, but we’re up to the task--with your help!

Our aim to is get to a stable financial footing so that we can continue to be the place where you can reliably find the books you want, as well as a resource to answer the questions you have. Should we massively exceed our goals, we’d love to look into establishing our own publishing house. Or maybe even (*gasp*) move the shop to a more accessible location!

We’ve got some nifty rewards to thank you for your gifts. We’ll put those in a second blog post, but we wanted to let you know what we’re up to, and how you can help.

Basically, we want to be here for you, and this is our way of getting our feet back under us.

Those “nifty” thank-you gifts—available to anyone contributing between $1 and $5,000--are revealed here. The money goes to a very good cause. The Seattle Mystery Bookshop, which last summer celebrated its first quarter-century in business (not long before the death of its founder, Bill Farley), is a popular stop for touring crime, mystery, and thriller authors. In addition to its well-packed shelves of new releases, the store boasts an abundance of classic and out-of-print works. It was there, for instance, that I finally found the 15 entries I’d been missing in Erle Stanley Gardner’s series of Bertha Cool and Donald Lam mysteries. Whenever I’m in the Pioneer Square area (which is, sadly, less often now that I don’t work in downtown Seattle), I make a point of stopping by the bookshop, if only to browse and see what other rare or curious finds might be available.

Again, click here to reach the bookshop’s GoFundMe page.

READ MORE: “6 Meccas for Mystery Lovers” (The Lineup).

Bullet Points: Pre-Festive Fourth Edition

With Seattle’s 10-day weather forecast promising temperatures in the high 80s and low 90s (holy cow!), and with my best friend from college due to drop in on me within days for an extended vacation, I have decided to take next week off. I won’t be completely absent from the blogging world; I have a new “Pierce’s Picks” post scheduled to go up on Tuesday, and a few fresh things will appear in my book-design blog, Killer Covers. Plus, I will not be out of computer touch, so I shall try to keep an eye open for any earthshaking developments in the crime-fiction sphere. But for the most part, next week should be pretty quiet here. Let me catch up, then, with a few short news bits.

• Bill Farley, who founded the excellent Seattle Mystery Bookshop, passed away on June 28 at age 83. He was always a kind and helpful presence in that little store on Cherry Street in Seattle’s Pioneer Square district, and I--along with so many others who posted their condolences on Facebook--will miss his reading suggestions. A photo-heavy post in the Seattle Mystery Bookshop’s blog explains:

Bill and [his wife] B Jo Farley moved to Seattle [from Philadelphia] at the end of 1989 with the aim of opening their own specialty mystery bookshop. In the summer of 1990, they opened the Seattle Mystery Bookshop with the intention that it be a place where readers could meet authors, authors could be exposed to readers, questions could be asked and information given, where the casual reader and the serious collector could all find something of interest. As Bill put it, “For mystery lovers who know what they want and for those who haven’t a clue!”

Bill was a serious bookman but was armed with a lively sense of humor and a raucous laugh.

Farley ostensibly retired way back in 1999, selling the store to manager J.B. Dickey, but he continued to make frequent visits to those book-lined digs. Click here to read a fun joint interview with Farley and Dickey from 2006.

• Sadly, Bill was not around on July 1 to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Seattle Mystery Bookshop’s opening.

• Another demise worth noting: Blogger Jerry House reports that crime and mystery novelist Charles Runyon kicked the bucket on June 8 at age 87. In addition to penning such books as Color Him Dead (1963), The Prettiest Girl I Ever Killed (1965), and To Kill a Dead Man (1976), Runyon also published a trio of works under the “Ellery Queen” house name and produced “sex romps” as “Mark West.” Several years ago, Mystery*File published an Ed Gorman interview with Runyon, together with bibliographical information. In 2007, Stark House Press released a “three-fer” collection of Gold Medal novels that included The Prettiest Girl I Ever Killed; it remains in print. ADDENDUM: The Gumshoe Site has more information to share, explaining that Runyon “was once rumored to die in 1987, but it turned to be just a rumor. … His first fiction sales was ‘First Man in a Satellite,’ printed in the December 1958 of Super-Science Fiction. … He contributed mystery short stories for Manhunt, Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. His first mystery novel was The Anatomy of Violence (Ace, 1960; not 1963) and he published 13 [more] mystery novels … Power Kill (Gold Medal, 1972) was nominated for an Edgar in the paperback category.”

• Oh, and Jack Carter died on June 24. Yes, the Brooklyn-born 89-year-old was primarily a comedian of long and distinguished standing. But he also guest-starred on a number of TV crime dramas, including The Name of the Game, Mannix, McCloud, McMillan & Wife, Hawaii Five-O, Police Story, Ellery Queen, The Rockford Files, Kingston: Confidential, Switch, and … well, I could go on with this list for some while. Better that you should refer to Carter’s Internet Movie Database (IMDb) credits page here.

• Mike Ripley returns with the July edition of his Shots column, the justly popular “Getting Away with Murder.” His topics this time include: London’s Crime in the Court party, hosted last month by Goldsboro Books; a possible new TV series pairing Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini; the re-release of two “classic” works by Ianthe Jerrold; and new fiction by the likes of Brian Panowich, Peter Lovesey, Nicci French, and Bonnie MacBird.

• Tom Nolan, Los Angeles editor of the new Library of America omnibus, Ross Macdonald: Four Novels of the 1950s, continues his excellent series about Macdonald for that publisher’s blog, writing here about the often-troubled literary and personal relationship between Macdonald and his author wife, Margaret Millar.

• The Sydney Morning Herald offers a nice piece about Blockbuster! Fergus Hume & The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, by Lucy Sussex. That book looks back at author Hume’s 1886 thriller, The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, set in then-booming Melbourne, Australia, with hopes of “understanding of how a low-key provincial novel written by a frustrated playwright as a way of promoting himself to theatre producers could be so commercially successful.”

• Coincidentally, I noticed the other day that a 2012 TV adaptation of Hume’s yarn is available on YouTube. Watch it while you can!

• I also found on YouTube a quartet of TV mystery movies scripted by Columbo co-creators Richard Levinson and William Link (the latter of whom I was fortunate enough to interview in 2010). Again, there’s no telling how long these videos will remain on the site, but at least for the time being you can watch Murder by Natural Causes (1979, starring Hal Holbrook and Katharine Ross), Rehearsal for Murder (1982, starring Robert Preston, Lynne Redgrave, and Patrick Macnee), The Guardian (1984, with Martin Sheen and Louis Gossett Jr.), and Guilty Conscience (1985, starring Anthony Hopkins and Blythe Danner).

• Gravetapping blogger Ben Boulden is on the prowl for facts about author Ron Faust (Nowhere to Run, Split Image, The Long Count, etc.), which he hopes to use in establishing a “permanent page” in his blog dedicated to the memory of that “best writer you have never heard of,” who died in 2011. Boulden says, “I’m looking for information about Mr. Faust and his work: first-hand stories, interviews, articles, etc. The information will be used to develop a better understanding of both the man and his work. If you have memories, knowledge of his biography, bibliography, or know of any magazine and newspaper articles featuring Mr. Faust I would love to hear them. Please send an e-mail to zulu1611@yahoo.com.”

• The quarterly, indie-publishing-focused mag, Foreword Reviews, has announced the recipients of its 2014 INDIEFAB Book of the Year Awards, including winners in the Thriller & Suspense category.

• Seriously? Director Michael Bay wants to remake The Birds, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 thriller film based on a Daphne du Maurier short story? Why bother, when the original picture is so incredible? I swear, somebody with new ideas is desperately needed in Hollywood!

• Steven Nester’s review of Delicious Foods, by James Hannaham, was posted earlier today in the newly redesigned January Magazine. “This finely crafted book,” Nester writes, “updates the often lugubrious [crime fiction] genre with satire, social commentary, and such personal and cultural detail that it gives the antiquated gloom-and-doom clichés a real run for their money.”

• Here’s a present for fans of James Garner’s 1974-1980 private-eye series, The Rockford Files: 74 of the usually funny messages left on Rockford’s answering machine. Download them all!

• Now that Hal Holbrook’s often-powerful 1970-1971 series, The Senator--which showed on NBC-TV as one of the rotating elements of The Bold Ones--has been released in a DVD set by Shout! Factory, get ready to see an equally short-run Bold Ones series, The Protectors, brought to market in mid-September. Explains the TV Shows on DVD site: “The Protectors stars Leslie Nielsen as Sam Danforth, the deputy chief of police in a volatile California city. He is a conservative law-and-order type who is brought in from Cleveland to try to keep the lid on, but often is at odds with the city’s idealistic, liberal black D.A., William Washburn played by Hari Rhodes.” Might all this mean that we can expect to welcome the last remaining Bold Ones components--The New Doctors (with E.G. Marshall, David Hartman, and John Saxon) and The Lawyers (with Burl Ives, Joseph Campanella, and James Farentino)--to store racks sometime soon?

• Here’s a nicely matched set of posts: Irish author Ken Bruen, creator of the Jack Taylor crime series (Green Hell), offers Publishers Weekly readers his “highly personal” list of the “10 Best Noir Novels,” while Eric Beetner (Rumrunners) chooses “10 of the Best Noir Novels of the 21st Century” for Criminal Element. There are several books in each rundown that I have not yet read.

• A very belated congratulations to Martin Edwards, who has been chosen to follow author Simon Brett as the next president of The Detection Club, a prominent organization for mystery writers founded in 1930. Brett has been president since 2000, but is expected to retire in November, after which Edwards will take over. Most ably, I am sure.

• Works by Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Leigh Brackett, and Patricia Highsmith all find places on Mashable’s idiosyncratic tally of “10 Influential Pulp Novels That Are Criminally Good.”

• Mental Floss has gathered together “15 Fateful Facts About Gilligan’s Island” including this one: “THE MILLIONAIRE’S WIFE REALLY WAS A MILLIONAIRE. Natalie Schafer, who played Mrs. Lovey Howell--and allegedly only accepted the invitation to play Mrs. Howell because it meant a free trip to Hawaii to film the pilot--was a real-life millionaire. During her marriage to actor Louis Calhern, the couple had invested heavily in Beverly Hills real estate at a time when a house on Rodeo Drive could be purchased for $50,000.”

• The island nation of Malta, located in the Mediterranean Sea just south of Italy, has already enjoyed some fame in crime-fiction circles as the setting for Mark Mills’ “triumphantly old-fashioned,” 2010 novel The Information Officer. But apparently that’s not good enough for Maltese travel promoters, who recently wooed “three hugely popular thriller writers, in what must rank as one of the most unusual and canny tourist initiatives ever.” According to The Guardian, Chris Kuzneski, Boyd Morrison, and Graham Brown “came to Malta at the invitation of the Malta Tourism Authority, which is now hoping that they will return home and help promote the Maltese islands in the as-yet-untapped U.S. market by using the archipelago as a backdrop in their new thrillers.” There’s more on this story here.

• And because Saturday is the Fourth of July, check out Janet Rudolph’s list of Independence Day-related mysteries? She has everything on there from Meg Chittenden’s Dead on the Fourth of July to Carolyn Hart’s Yankee Doodle Dead and Bill Crider’s Red, White, and Blue Murder. Who knows, you might want to have something new to read between fireworks explosions.

Small But Bountiful

• Jen Forbus’ “World’s Favorite Detective Tournament” has entered its second stage. She initially asked for nominations of fictional sleuths. From those, she has tallied up the 64 most popular, a list that includes Lew Archer, Philip Marlowe, Harry Bosch, V.I. Warshawski, Sherlock Holmes, Kinsey Milhone, Spenser, Bernie Gunther, and Guido Brunetti. As Forbus explains it, this tournament will consist of weekly contests, with readers asked to choose their favorites, until the list is boiled down to a winner. Voting is set to begin tomorrow. If you’d like to participate, click here.

• Connecticut author Chris Knopf has a few casting suggestions for any producer daring enough to turn his latest novel, Short Squeeze, into a film. Read more.

• Naomi Johnson of The Drowning Machine gives well-deserved props today to my local independent bookstore specializing in crime fiction, the Seattle Mystery Bookshop.

• A great DVD packaging idea.

• Speaking of DVDs, next week will bring the first season release of Matt Houston, the 1982-1985 ABC-TV series that starred Lee Horsley as a Texas oil man, living in Los Angeles, who conducts private investigations on the side. A totally unbelievable concept, but Horsley managed to make the most of it. And Buddy Ebsen joined the cast in Houston’s final season, playing a former CIA operative.

• Married writing partners Mary Reed and Eric Mayer, who write the John the Eunuch mystery series (the latest entry in which is Eight for Eternity), deliver a poetic explanation of their fiction-composition process in the Mystery Fanfare blog.

• Thanks to British critic Mike Ripley and Ostara Publishing, more great old thrillers are being brought back into print.

• And actor Michael Imperioli, last seen in the unjustly abbreviated U.S. version of Life on Mars, has reportedly signed up to star in a TV series called 187 Detroit, which TV Squad calls “kind of The Office meets NYPD Blue in Michigan.” Imperioli is slated to play Fitch, “the hot-tempered, veteran detective who boasts an impeccable record for closing cases and catching killers.” Hmm. Is it just me, or does that character not sound so very different from Imperioli’s role as the arrogant, politically incorrect New York police detective, Ray Carling, in Life on Mars?

Mystery Book Seller Becomes Mystery Sleuth

In today’s issue of Publisher’s Weekly online, writer Kevin Howell reports on how Seattle Mystery Bookshop owner J.B. Dickey delivered sweet payback after being duped in a scam. Following a phone order he took for The Shortcut: 20 Stories to Get You from Here to There (Author Identity Press), Dickey discovered that the name of the potential buyer, and the credit card number given, were both false. He was stuck with two non-returnable copies of the vanity-published book. Not one to take it lying down, Dickey put a warning out on the Mystery Booksellers Association listserv saying, “I hate like hell committing my buffoonery to the world-at-large, but if it stops someone else from making my mistake, good.”

It did more than that, however. Turns out that other booksellers in “several different states” had been stuck with the identical book. Amateur sleuthing further discovered that the same phony name was used in each instance: Michael Evers. As it happens, Michael Evers is “the name of the main character in a suspense novel called The Palace of Wisdom: A Rock And Roll Fable” (Publish America), by Kevin A. Fabiano. Furthermore, Fabiano also authored and contributed a story to the aforementioned Shortcut. Do you see where this is going? While many vanity presses serve their authors fairly well, it seems that Author Identity has had complaints lodged against it--so many, that it prompted Victoria Strauss to write about the dubious publisher on her blogsite, At Last! Writer Beware Blogs!

The above scenario has shadows deeper than a hidden alley in a noir novel. Let the buyer--and writer--beware. The moral of this tale? Dickey spells it loud and clear: “Anyone being contacted about ordering this book should *69 the call ... and let them know we're onto them.” Another moral to be gleened: Don’t pick on the folks who read crime fiction. It’'ll get ugly. Fast.

You can read the whole PW article here.

READ MORE: “More on Author Identity,” by Victoria Strauss (At Last! Writer Beware Blogs!)