Bullet Points: Post-“Ho Ho Ho” Edition

Another Christmas come, another Christmas gone. Left behind are myriad wonderful gifts from family members and friends, including a package of delicious nonpareils, the DVD Mission: Impossible--The ’88 TV Season, Stephen King’s 11/22/63, and an out-of-print collection of New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell’s stories. I cut back on blogging in observance of the holiday, but am once more ensconced behind the mighty Rap Sheet desk, awaiting the new year. In the interim, let me highlight some crime-fiction bits of recent date.

• These last couple of days brought to the Web a Humphrey Bogart Blogathon hosted by the film fans at Forever Classics. Click here for a full list of the contributions, which include True Classics’ look back at John Huston’s adaption of The Maltese Falcon, Tales of the Easily Distracted’s write-up about The Big Sleep, In the Mood’s recollection of Bogie’s relationship with Lauren Bacall, and Friend of The Rap Sheet Ivan G. Shreve Jr.’s tribute to the 60th anniversary of The African Queen. There’s a good deal of excellent material here.

• Prolific novelist Stuart M. Kaminsky died in October 2009. However, the newly re-launched Mysterious Press has only now gotten around to releasing the majority of his Toby Peters gumshoe novels in inexpensive but handsome e-book form.

• Author Greg Rucka’s fine tribute to Kaminsky is here.

• Another welcome bit of news: Amazon Publishing’s Thomas & Mercer imprint will release 35 of Ed McBain’s famous 87th Precinct police procedurals in both trade paperback and e-book formats. The e-book versions are already available here, but the paperbacks won’t start showing up in bookstores till February 2012. In addition, Thomas & Mercer plans to publish a dozen titles in McBain’s series starring Florida attorney-detective Matthew Hope, beginning in the spring of next year. Lawrence Block, Nelson DeMille, Max Allan Collins, Aaron Elkins, and other crime novelists share their thoughts on McBain’s work and legacy here.

• Following up on its Thanksgiving crime stories, the housing-advocacy Web site FourStory has posted a couple of Christmas-themed tales for your enjoyment: “Third Santa on the Left,” by Gar Anthony Haywood,” and “Home for the Holidays,” by Mike Bullock.

• Happy birthday to Steve Lewis’ Mystery*File blog!

• Another old crime fictionist who’s new to me: Lord Ernest William Hamilton, who penned “at least two books that clearly fall with[in] the mystery genre: a thriller, The Perils of Josephine (1899), and a much later detective novel, published when Lord Ernest was seventy years old, The Four Tragedies of Memworth (1928).”

• It looks as if the year-end assessments have not yet petered out. In addition to the many blog posts I already compiled on this page, here are two new ones: Jen Forbes’ collection of revealing reads and rejects from 2011, and Netherlands blogger TomCat’s look back at his 35 favorite detective novels (not all of them published in 2011) that he most enjoyed reading during the last 12 months.

• Omnimystery News carries the trailer and poster promoting 21 Jump Street, a new film--premiering on March 16, 2012--based (kinda, sorta, lamely) on the 1987-1981 Stephen J. Cannell TV series that starred Johnny Depp, Holly Robinson, and others as “youthful-looking undercover police officers investigating crimes in high schools, colleges, and other teenage venues.”

• Meanwhile, The Huffington Post hosts the trailer for The Dark Knight Rises, the third (and apparently last) Batman film to star Christopher Nolan, and this time co-starring the purr-fectly proportioned Anne Hathaway as Catwoman.

• An article I composed for Mystery Scene about handsome contemporary crime-novel fronts, published in the magazine earlier this year, has now been posted on MS’ Web site.

• Flick Attack’s Ron Lott is surprisingly impressed with the 1938 film Nancy Drew--Detective. He writes: “The squeaky-clean, super-efficient mystery involves chasing a pigeon carrying a secret message; slapstick with a wrench; dressing Ned in drag, disguised as a nurse; and communicating via the cutting-edge technology of Morse code. Speaking of dated, the flick is filled with now-odd slang, like ‘Aw, stop disturbin’ the molecules!’ Even when presented in context, that made so sense to me, but like the rest of the hour-long adventure, I sure did enjoy it.” Hmm. Maybe I should give this a watch too.

• Los Angeles Times reviewer Kenneth Turan is much less captivated by film director David Fincher’s interpretation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the first of three best-selling thrillers by Stieg Larsson. (For a more favorable critique of that same movie, click over to Ali Karim’s recent posting in The Rap Sheet.)

• University of California, Berkeley librarian Randal S. Brandt writes in Mystery Fanfare about The Long Escape, David Dodge’s fifth mystery, which was recently reissued by Bruin Books. “This book holds a very special place for me,” explains Brandt. “Not only was it the first Dodge novel I ever read, but the story of the circumstances surrounding my discovery of it is one that I’m sure Dodge would have appreciated.” Find out more here.

• R.I.P., George Whitman and Russell Hoban.

• Here’s an unusual case of crime novelists working together: Rap Sheet contributor Mark Coggins provided the photograph for the end papers of Red Mist, Patricia Cornwell’s latest Kay Scarpetta thriller.

• And author James Gracie passes along news that “Bloomsbury Publishing are reissuing novels by forgotten Scottish writers in e-book form.” Among those novelists are Eric Linklater, Chaim Bermant, and Fitzroy Maclean.” Another Bloomsbury find, notes Gracie, “is crime writer Leo Horace Ognall (born in Canada, raised in Scotland). I’ve never heard of him, never mind read any of his works. He wrote under the pseudonyms Harry Carmichael and Hartley Howard.” It should be fun, rediscovering some of these dusty old works.

Picking Favorites

Prolific American mystery novelist Stuart M. Kaminsky died three weeks ago today. Ever since then, The Rap Sheet has been polling readers to see which of his three series protagonists they like best: 1930s Los Angeles private eye Toby Peters; modern Moscow Police Inspector Porfiry Rostnikov; unlicensed South Florida peeper Lew Fonesca; or Chicago police detective Abe Lieberman.

The results are now in. Out of 214 votes cast, the greatest number went to Rostnikov (66). Second place is held by Peters (60), with Fonesca (49) and Lieberman (39) bringing up the rear. For our money, though, all of these guys are winners.

Thanks to everyone for participating in this survey.

Details, Details

Four days after his death at age 75, the Chicago Tribune has finally published an obituary of mystery novelist Stuart M. Kaminsky. The author was born and lived in Chicago until moving to southern Florida in 1989, taught for many years at Northwest University, and set one of his crime series in the Windy City, so it wasn’t unreasonable to expect that this obituary might have appeared earlier. But at least the piece provides a bit of additional information about the circumstances of Kaminsky’s demise.

According to the Tribune, the author “died of complications from hepatitis and a recent stroke Friday, Oct. 9, in Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis ...” It adds that “He was an Army medic in the 1950s, when his family believes he got hepatitis C.”

By the way, if you were never fortunate enough to hear Kaminsky speak, YouTube features a video of the novelist talking about his background, his introduction to mystery fiction, and the occasional difficulties of writing “10 pages every day.”

UPDATE: More Stuart M. Kaminsky obits from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and The New York Times.

First Thoughts on Kaminsky’s Last Day

It is with shock that I just received the news about crime novelist Stuart M. Kaminsky passing away earlier today. Named in 2006 as a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America, and the author of four well-established detective series, the prolific Kaminsky just turned 75 years old last month. As far as I can tell, the cause of his death has not yet been reported.

Blogger-critic Sarah Weinman quotes a Facebook message that the author’s daughter, Tasha Kaminsky, released hours ago:

I’m posting with great sadness. My father passed away peacefully October 9, 2009. My mother, Enid Perll, and I, encourage you to donate to a charity of your choice in his name. He also strongly supported the United Negro College Fund, Hospice Care, Congregation Shaare Zedek (St. Louis, Mo.) and Congregation Temple Beth Shalom (Sarasota, Fla.). I will be checking his Facebook consistently for months to come and answering questions to the best of my ability. Thank you for your well wishes and prayers.

I had the opportunity in 2002 to interview Kaminsky for January Magazine. This followed many years of my reading and appreciating his crime fiction. My introduction to Kaminsky came in the early 1980s, when I picked up a paperback copy of his first period private-eye mystery, Bullet for a Star (1977). “A lighthearted twist on classic, hard-boiled American detective fiction,” I wrote in January, “Bullet introduced Toby Peters (né Pevsner), a disheveled, divorced and taco-loving former security officer with Warner Bros. Studio, who’d been fired in 1936 (after ‘breaking the arm of a Western star who had made the mistake of thinking he was as tough in person as he was on the screen’), and subsequently hung out his shingle as the most low-rent of private eyes. This job change, however, didn’t greatly alter his clientele. He’s continued to work for early 1940s celebrities, both Hollywood habitués and others.” Among his clients were leading man Errol Flynn, reclusive billionaire-aviator Howard Hughes, Dracula star Bela Lugosi, physicist Albert Einstein, and actress Bette Davis. Kaminsky penned 24 Peters books, the last of those being Now You See It (2004), in which he sought to prove magician Harry Blackstone innocent of murder.

In addition to his Peters novels, Kaminsky penned 15 novels starring Moscow Police Inspector Porfiry Rostnikov, “an honorable man in his 50s who, working within a system rife with corruption, has earned the distrust of his superiors and the KGB, because he doesn’t always follow procedures.” Rostnikov was introduced in Death of a Dissident (1981); his most recent outing came in People Who Walk in Darkness, which debuted only last year. A 16th Rostnikov novel, A Whisper to the Living, is due out in January 2010 from Forge Books.

From Kaminsky’s pen--or at least from his Macintosh computer--came two other series, as well. The first starred a world-weary former process server, Lew Fonesca, who, following his wife’s death, relocated to southern Florida from Chicago (where Kaminsky grew up, an avid fan of private-eye fictionist Thomas B. Dewey) to become “an unlicensed peeper.” The low-key Fonesca yarns began with Vengeance (1999) and ended--unless there’s another one of those books waiting for publication, too--with Bright Futures (2009). Kaminsky wrote another 10 novels about Abe Lieberman, a cantankerous but astute 60-something Chicago police detective, and his Irish Catholic partner, Bill Hanrahan--“the Rabbi and the Priest,” as they’re known out on the Windy City streets. Lieberman’s Folly (1990) was the first of those books to see the light of print; The Dead Don’t Lie (2007) was the most recently published.

Over the decades, Stuart Melvin Kaminsky also wrote a couple of books based on the 1970s TV series The Rockford Files, at least three tie-ins to the CBS-TV series CSI: New York, screenplays for movies and the TV series A Nero Wolfe Mystery, and biographies of film-world personalities such as Clint Eastwood and Don Siegel. “But he should be remembered just as much,” writes Weinman, “for what he gave back to the community as a whole and how he helped writers, from Sara Paretsky (who dedicated Indemnity Only, her first V.I. Warshawski novel, to him) to those he taught over the years and others who benefited from being selected by an anthology he edited--including On a Raven’s Wing, published at the beginning of this year, which celebrated Edgar Allan Poe’s bicentennial with new works by authors well-known and unknown tipping their hat to the old master.”

After living for many years in Chicago, and teaching at Northwestern University, Kaminsky moved to Sarasota, Florida, in 1989. I understand that only months ago, he and his wife relocated once more, this time to St. Louis, Missouri.

“A very warm, witty, wonderful guy, and a terrific writer” is how fellow author Max Allan Collins remembers Kaminsky. I shan’t disagree. Although I never actually met Kaminsky, I had many opportunities to communicate with him via letters and e-mail, not only in association with that long-ago January Magazine exchange, but also having to do with an earlier profile I did of Toby Peters for Stephen Smoke’s now-forgotten Mystery Magazine and requests for comments on a number of subjects (including “overlooked ... or underappreciated” crime novels). He was never less than generous with his time and expertise in this field.

I think I’ve read all but a small handful of Kaminsky’s novels. He was a confident, comfortable stylist with a taste for quirky and humorous, but never less than believable characters, people revealed by their responses to challenging circumstances. I looked forward to reading each new book born of Kaminsky’s imagination. I can now look forward only to re-reading them in his profound absence.

UPDATE: An obituary in Florida’s Sarasota Herald Tribune provides these details about Kaminsky’s declining health: “He and his wife, Enid Perll, had moved [to Missouri] last March to await a liver transplant to treat the hepatitis he contracted as an army medic in the late 1950s in France. He suffered a stroke just two days after their arrival in St. Louis, which made him ineligible for a transplant.” The paper adds that “Funeral services in St. Louis are pending; a memorial service will be held in Sarasota next year.”

READ MORE: “Stuart Kaminsky Has Passed Away,” by Lee
Goldberg (A Writer’s Life); “Stuart M. Kaminsky, 75, Dies,” by Peter Rozovsky (Detectives Beyond Borders); “Stuart Kaminsky, 1934-2009,” by Sara Paretsky (The Outfit); “Ray Browne and Stuart Kaminsky, R.I.P.,” by Francis M. Nevins (Mystery*File).

The Cop Who Came in from the Cold

It’s been almost six years since we last heard from Moscow Police Inspector Porfiry Rostnikov, the honorable, weight-lifting protagonist in Murder on the Trans-Siberian Express and 13 previous novels by Stuart M. Kaminsky. I was starting to think that Rostnikov, who scored Kaminsky his only Edgar Allan Poe Award (for 1987’s A Cold Red Sunshine), might have disappeared someplace into the corrupt law-enforcement system to which he has devoted his adult life.

But the author’s Web site now brings the news that there’s a 15th Rostnikov outing in the offing:

May 2008, the new Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov novel PEOPLE WHO WALK IN DARKNESS will be published in hardcover. For fans of Rostnikov, I am contracted for two new books in the series, the first of which is the above-mentioned PEOPLE WHO WALK IN DARKNESS. It is set in Siberia and deals with diamond mining, the ghost of a child and Rostnikov’s never-before-mentioned brother.

As far as hardcover publications go, Kaminsky’s site also carries word that the 10th Abe Lieberman/Bill Hanrahan Chicago novel, The Dead Don’t Lie, will be published in August of this year.