San Diego-area author Don Winslow has won this year’s Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the Mystery/Thriller category for his enthusiastically reviewed 17th novel, The Cartel (Knopf). That announcement was made earlier today during a ceremony at Bovard Auditorium on the University of Southern California campus.
The other books vying for that honor were The Long and Faraway Gone, by Lou Berney (Morrow); The Sympathizer, by Viet Thanh Nguyen (Grove Press); Bull Mountain, by Brian Panowich (Putnam); and The Whites, by Richard Price writing as Harry Brandt (Picador).
In addition, mega-best-selling thriller writer James Patterson is the recipient of this year’s Innovator’s Award.
Click here to see the winners and nominees in all 10 categories.
READ MORE: “Such a Nice Guy, Such Savage Books: Don Winslow and The Cartel,” by Ivy Pochoda (Los Angeles Times).
Saturday, April 09, 2016
Wednesday, April 06, 2016
Pierce’s Picks
A periodic alert for followers of crime and thriller fiction.
The byline on the cover of The Father (Quercus) reads “Anton Svensson,” but that’s only a collaborative pseudonym employed by screenwriter Stefan Thunberg (credited with contributions to the Swedish TV series Wallander as well as a succession of films based on Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö’s Martin Beck novels) and investigative journalist Anders Roslund. The latter, together with Börge Hellström, penned Box 21 and Three Seconds. But The Father—part one of a two-novel sequence called “Made in Sweden”—is really Thunberg’s story to tell, because it’s based on the history of his own bank-robbing family. The Father’s taught and tragic narrative alternates between the present-day, where we witness a trio of young criminal brothers—Leo, Felix, and Vincent—and their friend Jasper, plan and execute a string of increasingly daring heists; and flashbacks that spotlight the siblings’ wrathful and abusive father, Ivan, who imparted to them all of the hatred and brutality that had poisoned him during the Balkan civil wars. With their futures circumscribed by violence and a troubled Stockholm cop on their tails, the brothers must ultimately confront the parent who shaped (or misshaped) them.
Although I don’t usually choose non-fiction works as “Pierce’s Picks,” I’m going to make an exception in the case of The Midnight Assassin: Panic, Scandal, and the Hunt for America’s First Serial Killer (Henry Holt). Penned by Skip Hollandsworth, the executive editor of Texas Monthly magazine, this is the sometimes-shocking but still thoroughly engrossing tale of what he calls “one of the great American murder mysteries of the late 19th century, a blood-curdling whodunit ….” Beginning in December 1884, and continuing for the next year, Hollandsworth explains, one or more villains crisscrossed the booming Texas capital of Austin, “striking on moonlit nights, using axes, knives, and long steel rods to rip apart women from every race and class.” Because the initial victims—attacked in their beds, some managing to escape with only minor injuries—were black female servants who worked for some of the city’s wealthiest white families, this elusive “madman” came to be known as the Servant Girl Annihilator. The scant witnesses there were to the attacks offered conflicting testimony about the marauder’s racial identity, yet Austin’s conservative white businessmen convinced themselves that responsibility lay with one or more black men. Sadly, they handed the task of catching said killer(s) to men little experienced in detective work; and local politicians shied away from hiring additional policemen, fearing that they’d suffer the wrath of voters if they raised taxes in order to pay for such safeguards. (It was a far better idea, some said, to simply encourage white residents to shoot any and all black strangers they thought might be intruding on their property.) The result was that, despite numerous arrests, the killer was never apprehended or even identified. There has even been speculation that whoever was behind the Austin murder spree also committed the Jack the Ripper killings in London three years later. Anyone who read Steven Saylor’s standalone mystery from 2000, A Twist at the End (which imagined short-story writer O. Henry—who actually lived in Austin in 1885 under his real name, William Sydney Porter—uncovering the truth behind the slayer’s identity), will be familiar with the basics of the Servant Girl Annihilator legend. But Hollandsworth wraps that historical framework in an abundance of detailed, colorful information about Austin life and residents of the time that adds welcome human dimension to the criminal horrors.
Click here to see more of this season’s most-wanted books.
The byline on the cover of The Father (Quercus) reads “Anton Svensson,” but that’s only a collaborative pseudonym employed by screenwriter Stefan Thunberg (credited with contributions to the Swedish TV series Wallander as well as a succession of films based on Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö’s Martin Beck novels) and investigative journalist Anders Roslund. The latter, together with Börge Hellström, penned Box 21 and Three Seconds. But The Father—part one of a two-novel sequence called “Made in Sweden”—is really Thunberg’s story to tell, because it’s based on the history of his own bank-robbing family. The Father’s taught and tragic narrative alternates between the present-day, where we witness a trio of young criminal brothers—Leo, Felix, and Vincent—and their friend Jasper, plan and execute a string of increasingly daring heists; and flashbacks that spotlight the siblings’ wrathful and abusive father, Ivan, who imparted to them all of the hatred and brutality that had poisoned him during the Balkan civil wars. With their futures circumscribed by violence and a troubled Stockholm cop on their tails, the brothers must ultimately confront the parent who shaped (or misshaped) them.
Although I don’t usually choose non-fiction works as “Pierce’s Picks,” I’m going to make an exception in the case of The Midnight Assassin: Panic, Scandal, and the Hunt for America’s First Serial Killer (Henry Holt). Penned by Skip Hollandsworth, the executive editor of Texas Monthly magazine, this is the sometimes-shocking but still thoroughly engrossing tale of what he calls “one of the great American murder mysteries of the late 19th century, a blood-curdling whodunit ….” Beginning in December 1884, and continuing for the next year, Hollandsworth explains, one or more villains crisscrossed the booming Texas capital of Austin, “striking on moonlit nights, using axes, knives, and long steel rods to rip apart women from every race and class.” Because the initial victims—attacked in their beds, some managing to escape with only minor injuries—were black female servants who worked for some of the city’s wealthiest white families, this elusive “madman” came to be known as the Servant Girl Annihilator. The scant witnesses there were to the attacks offered conflicting testimony about the marauder’s racial identity, yet Austin’s conservative white businessmen convinced themselves that responsibility lay with one or more black men. Sadly, they handed the task of catching said killer(s) to men little experienced in detective work; and local politicians shied away from hiring additional policemen, fearing that they’d suffer the wrath of voters if they raised taxes in order to pay for such safeguards. (It was a far better idea, some said, to simply encourage white residents to shoot any and all black strangers they thought might be intruding on their property.) The result was that, despite numerous arrests, the killer was never apprehended or even identified. There has even been speculation that whoever was behind the Austin murder spree also committed the Jack the Ripper killings in London three years later. Anyone who read Steven Saylor’s standalone mystery from 2000, A Twist at the End (which imagined short-story writer O. Henry—who actually lived in Austin in 1885 under his real name, William Sydney Porter—uncovering the truth behind the slayer’s identity), will be familiar with the basics of the Servant Girl Annihilator legend. But Hollandsworth wraps that historical framework in an abundance of detailed, colorful information about Austin life and residents of the time that adds welcome human dimension to the criminal horrors.
Click here to see more of this season’s most-wanted books.
Tuesday, April 05, 2016
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.
• 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.
How’s This for Thrilling?
Today brings the announcement, by the International Thriller Writers (ITW), of its nominees for the 2016 Thriller Awards.
Best Hardcover Novel:
• The Fifth Gospel, by Ian Caldwell (Simon & Schuster)
• Playing with Fire, by Tess Gerritsen (Ballantine)
• The Girl on the Train, by Paula Hawkins (Riverhead)
• Inspector of the Dead, by David Morrell (Mulholland)
• Pretty Girls, by Karin Slaughter (Morrow)
Best First Novel:
• Little Black Lies, by Sandra Block (Grand Central)
• The Drowning Game, by L.S. Hawker (Witness Impulse)
• What She Knew, by Gilly Macmillan (Morrow)
• Bull Mountain, by Brian Panowich (Putnam)
• The Gates of Evangeline, by Hester Young (Putnam)
Best Paperback Original Novel:
• Day Zero, by Marc Cameron (Pinnacle)
• Against All Enemies, by John Gilstrap (Pinnacle)
• Name of the Devil, by Andrew Mayne (Bourbon Street)
• The Angel of Eden, by D.J. McIntosh (Penguin Canada)
• Pockets of Darkness, by Jean Rabe (WordFire Press)
Best Short Story:
• “Feeding the Crocodile,” by Reed Farrel Coleman (from Jewish Noir, edited by Kenneth Wishnia; PM Press)
• “Repressed,” Jeffery Deaver (from Killer Nashville Noir: Cold Blooded, edited by Clay Stafford; Diversion)
• “The Water Was Rising,” by Sharon Hunt (Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine [EQMM], August 2015)
• “El Cambalache,” by Terrence McCauley (ThugLit 17, edited by
Todd Robinson; ThugLit)
• “Gun Accident: An Investigation,” by Joyce Carol Oates
(EQMM, July 2015)
Best Young Adult Novel:
• Code of Honor, by Alan Gratz (Scholastic Press)
• The Forgetting, by Nicole Maggi (Sourcebooks Fire)
• Pretending to Be Erica, by Michelle Painchaud (Viking Books for
Young Readers)
• Half In Love with Death, by Emily Ross (Merit Press)
• The Dogs, by Allan Stratton (Sourcebooks Fire)
Best E-book Original Novel:
• Jack and Joe, by Diane Capri (AugustBooks)
• The Prisoner’s Gold, by Chris Kuzneski (Chris Kuzneski)
• Deadly Lullaby, by Robert McClure (Alibi)
• Ivory Ghosts, by Caitlin O’Connell (Alibi)
• Lie in Wait, by Eric Rickstad (Witness Impulse)
This year’s award winners will be declared during the ThrillerFest XI convention, to be held in New York City from July 5 to 9.
Best Hardcover Novel:
• The Fifth Gospel, by Ian Caldwell (Simon & Schuster)
• Playing with Fire, by Tess Gerritsen (Ballantine)
• The Girl on the Train, by Paula Hawkins (Riverhead)
• Inspector of the Dead, by David Morrell (Mulholland)
• Pretty Girls, by Karin Slaughter (Morrow)
Best First Novel:
• Little Black Lies, by Sandra Block (Grand Central)
• The Drowning Game, by L.S. Hawker (Witness Impulse)
• What She Knew, by Gilly Macmillan (Morrow)
• Bull Mountain, by Brian Panowich (Putnam)
• The Gates of Evangeline, by Hester Young (Putnam)
Best Paperback Original Novel:
• Day Zero, by Marc Cameron (Pinnacle)
• Against All Enemies, by John Gilstrap (Pinnacle)
• Name of the Devil, by Andrew Mayne (Bourbon Street)
• The Angel of Eden, by D.J. McIntosh (Penguin Canada)
• Pockets of Darkness, by Jean Rabe (WordFire Press)
Best Short Story:
• “Feeding the Crocodile,” by Reed Farrel Coleman (from Jewish Noir, edited by Kenneth Wishnia; PM Press)
• “Repressed,” Jeffery Deaver (from Killer Nashville Noir: Cold Blooded, edited by Clay Stafford; Diversion)
• “The Water Was Rising,” by Sharon Hunt (Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine [EQMM], August 2015)
• “El Cambalache,” by Terrence McCauley (ThugLit 17, edited by
Todd Robinson; ThugLit)
• “Gun Accident: An Investigation,” by Joyce Carol Oates
(EQMM, July 2015)
Best Young Adult Novel:
• Code of Honor, by Alan Gratz (Scholastic Press)
• The Forgetting, by Nicole Maggi (Sourcebooks Fire)
• Pretending to Be Erica, by Michelle Painchaud (Viking Books for
Young Readers)
• Half In Love with Death, by Emily Ross (Merit Press)
• The Dogs, by Allan Stratton (Sourcebooks Fire)
Best E-book Original Novel:
• Jack and Joe, by Diane Capri (AugustBooks)
• The Prisoner’s Gold, by Chris Kuzneski (Chris Kuzneski)
• Deadly Lullaby, by Robert McClure (Alibi)
• Ivory Ghosts, by Caitlin O’Connell (Alibi)
• Lie in Wait, by Eric Rickstad (Witness Impulse)
This year’s award winners will be declared during the ThrillerFest XI convention, to be held in New York City from July 5 to 9.
Monday, April 04, 2016
Bullet Points: Wide Net Edition
• Following on Ali Karim’s recent post about the second series run of Bosch—the crime drama based on Michael Connelly’s
award-winning police procedurals—comes news that the Amazon TV-streaming service has renewed Bosch for a third season. Connelly says that “We are going to adapt The Black Echo and elements of A Darkness More than Night this time around.” I look forward to seeing the results.
• New Zealand author Neil Cross, who I noted last week is in the running for a BAFTA (British Academy Television Craft Awards) commendation in the TV drama-writing category, has been tapped to adapt Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley and four later works featuring “dapper psychopath” Tom Ripley for television. “Landing Cross for the project is a coup,” says Variety, “as the scribe has been courted for TV in the U.S. following the success of Luther, the BBC drama starring Idris Elba.”
• Word is that the fourth season of BBC-TV’s Sherlock, starring Benedict Cumberbatch—preliminarily scheduled for broadcast in the UK in early 2017—“will be darker compared to the previous installments. Meanwhile, Martin Freeman, who plays the character of Doctor Watson, hinted that [Watson’s wife] Mary Morstan will
die in the upcoming season. [And] Thor star Tom Hiddleston has also been rumored to be the third brother of the Holmes family.” Wait, what was that? Third brother?
• We bid a sad farewell to Douglas Wilmer, the English actor who portrayed Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous “consulting detective” in a succession of Sherlock Holmes story adaptations made by BBC-TV between 1965 and 1968. Wilmer went on to appear in such films as Patton (1970), The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother (1975), Revenge of the Pink Panther (1978), and the 1983 James Bond adventure, Octopussy. As The Guardian’s obituary recalls, “In 2012, at the very end of his acting career, he made a special cameo appearance in an episode of BBC’s Sherlock as an irate old man at The Diogenes Club alongside Benedict Cumberbatch’s Holmes.” Wilmer passed away on March 31 “after a short bout of pneumonia.” He was 96 years old.
• It’s good to see that Criminal Element’s Leslie Gilbert Elman, who did such excellent work last year keeping track of Grantchester’s premiere season on PBS-TV, is back recapping the Season 2 installments. Her assessment of last night’s episode is here, and you’ll find all of her write-ups here. Grantchester, starring James Norton and Robson Green, resumed broadcasting under the Masterpiece series umbrella on March 27, and will show through Sunday, May 1.
• Someday I hope to be lucky enough to attend the annual Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival held in Harrogate, England. Not this year, though ... which is unfortunate, for In Reference to Murder brings news that the event, which will take place from July 21 to 24, now has its guest-star lineup. It “includes authors Peter James, Jeffery Deaver, Martina Cole, Neil Cross, Linwood Barclay, Tess Gerritsen, Val McDermid, and Gerald Seymour. Conference organizers encourage fans to ‘grab a pint of Yorkshire’s finest ale, and dip into an intoxicating mix of comedy, heated debate, and scintillating socializing’ at Agatha Christie’s old haunt, the luxurious Old Swan Hotel.”
• Meanwhile, this year’s lineup for Val McDermid’s much-watched Harrogate “New Blood” panel of fast-rising crime novelists has been announced. Its members will be Martin Holmen (Clinch), J.S. Law (Tenacity), Beth Lewis (The Wolf Road, and Abir Mukherjee (A Rising Man). That panel presentation is scheduled to take place at noon on Saturday, July 23, at the Old Swan Hotel.
• Rap Sheet contributor Gary Phillips is one busy guy, as he makes clear in this interview with fellow author S.W. Lauden.
• I’m starting to fear that the aggregator Web site CrimeSpot might be out of business. Founded in 2006 by Texan Graham Powell, it quickly became a popular resource, drawing together posts from a wide variety of blogs focused on crime, mystery, and thriller fiction. However, the last time CrimeSpot was updated was in December of last year. A few weeks ago, I sent Powell an e-note inquiring about his page’s future. “I haven’t had much time to work on it,” he told me, “and it really hasn’t been a high priority. You’re only the second person to ask me about it! But I guess I better get off my behind and get it straightened out.” We can only hope he does.
• A little visual entertainment: “18 Movie Poster Clichés That Prove Hollywood Has Run Out of Ideas.”
• From Mystery Fanfare: “Deadline reports that ... Sharp Objects, a drama series project starring Amy Adams [and based on Gillian Flynn's 2006 novel of the same name], has been picked up by HBO with an eight-episode straight-to-series first season order. Marti Noxon (UnReal) is show-runner for the project, with Jean-Marc Vallée (Wild) directing. Noxon wrote the pilot script and Flynn is set to write multiple episodes. The book was picked up five years ago by Jason Blum and Blumhouse Productions, long before Gone Girl was a hit movie.”
• Folks who read Philip Kerr’s new Bernie Gunther novel, The Other Side of Silence, might be particularly interested in watching this 1981 video showing “Kim Philby, Britain’s most notorious cold war traitor, [telling] an audience of East German spies after his defection that he was able to avoid being rumbled for so long because he had been ‘born into the British governing class.’ … Philby also describe[s] how he was able to walk out of secret service headquarters every night with his briefcase stuffed with secret documents and reports.”
• I don’t think I mentioned this before, but during the lead-up to his recent heart surgery, Max Allan Collins penned a blog post about having sold his original, 70,000-word movie tie-in novelization of Road to Perdition to publisher Brash Books. As most readers of The Rap Sheet know, the 2002 Tom Hanks/Paul Newman picture was based on Collins’
1998 graphic novel Road to Perdition. In his novelization, Collins explains, “I attempted to be true to the screenplay while weaving in material from the graphic novel as well as historical material about the real John Looney and his era. The DreamWorks licensing department put me through hell, making me cut anything—including dialogue!—that wasn’t directly from the script. They could not have cared less that I was the creator of this story and its characters. Even after they had accepted my 40,000-word debasement of my original novel, they kept cutting—if, in the film-editing process, director Sam Mendes dropped a scene or even a few lines of dialogue, they removed that from my novel as well. One chapter was reduced to a page and a half.” Collins says the Brash Books edition of Road to Perdition will be the full novelization, and that its release will be followed by new editions of the sequels Road to Purgatory (2004) and Road to Paradise (2005).
• I don’t always find the free time necessary to listen in on Les Blatt’s weekly “Classic Mysteries” podcast, but I am never disappointed when I do. His latest audio feature examines Charles Warren Adams’ The Notting Hill Mystery, published as a book in 1865 and “said to be the first real detective novel ever written.”
• Not long ago I mentioned that Sadie Trombetta had assembled a “listicle” for Criminal Element that showcased “13 of the Best Female Sleuths from Pop Culture.” Well, now she’s back with another 23 nominees, based on reader recommendations. I’m most pleased to see Laura Holt (from Remington Steele) and Liza Cody’s ex-cop-turned-private investigator, Anna Lee, make this latest cut.
• Like many people, I fear, I wasn’t aware that film and TV critic Edward Copeland (real name Scott Schuldt), who for most of a decade wrote and edited the blog Edward Copeland’s Tangents, died this last New Year’s Eve “after a long battle with Primary Progressive Multiple Sclerosis.” He was 46 years old. Schuldt’s colleague Ivan G. Shreve Jr. offers up these moving memories of the late writer.
• There doesn’t seem to be any word about this on either author Craig McDonald’s Web site or the Amazon sales site, but McDonald mentioned in a Facebook post yesterday that his final Hector Lassiter novel (the 10th, I believe) will be titled Three Chords & the Truth, and that it will include “a fleeting appearance” by country-and-western singer Merle Haggard. McDonald says Three Chords is “coming this autumn from Betimes Books.”
• If you don’t know this already, writer-filmmaker Peter Hanson has developed an interesting blog called Every ’70s Movie, which most recently focused on The Streets of San Francisco, the 1972 TV flick—based on Carolyn Weston’s novel Poor, Poor Ophelia—that led to the 1972-1977 ABC crime drama of the same name starring Karl Malden and Michael Douglas.
• Finally, there are two milestones worth observing. First, the fourth birthday of Deadline Detroit, the online news site founded in 2012 by my old friend Allan Lengel, who used to work for the The Washington Post and the Detroit News (as well as Monthly Detroit, which is where I met him), and Bill McGraw, another Detroit News alumnus. I’m very pleased to see the site growing and—despite some financial headaches—establishing itself as a valuable resource for Motor City residents seeking information about and insight into their struggling but important town. Second, last week brought the 40th birthday—wow!—of Seattle Weekly (formerly just The Weekly), founded in 1976 by David Brewster and Darrell Oldham. I joined the Weekly editorial staff in the mid-1980s, after first being hired to edit a sister publication, the Bainbridge Island-based Puget Sound Enetai, and stayed with it until the end of that decade. Unfortunately, the celebration of the Weekly’s history was pretty darn unimaginative—consisting of four essays looking back at the last four decades. But those of us who worked for the paper in its “alternative journalism” heyday (it’s now a shadow of its former self) remember it as a lively, civically involved, and sometimes provocative publication well deserving of the many awards it earned over the years.
• New Zealand author Neil Cross, who I noted last week is in the running for a BAFTA (British Academy Television Craft Awards) commendation in the TV drama-writing category, has been tapped to adapt Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley and four later works featuring “dapper psychopath” Tom Ripley for television. “Landing Cross for the project is a coup,” says Variety, “as the scribe has been courted for TV in the U.S. following the success of Luther, the BBC drama starring Idris Elba.”
• Word is that the fourth season of BBC-TV’s Sherlock, starring Benedict Cumberbatch—preliminarily scheduled for broadcast in the UK in early 2017—“will be darker compared to the previous installments. Meanwhile, Martin Freeman, who plays the character of Doctor Watson, hinted that [Watson’s wife] Mary Morstan will
die in the upcoming season. [And] Thor star Tom Hiddleston has also been rumored to be the third brother of the Holmes family.” Wait, what was that? Third brother?• We bid a sad farewell to Douglas Wilmer, the English actor who portrayed Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous “consulting detective” in a succession of Sherlock Holmes story adaptations made by BBC-TV between 1965 and 1968. Wilmer went on to appear in such films as Patton (1970), The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother (1975), Revenge of the Pink Panther (1978), and the 1983 James Bond adventure, Octopussy. As The Guardian’s obituary recalls, “In 2012, at the very end of his acting career, he made a special cameo appearance in an episode of BBC’s Sherlock as an irate old man at The Diogenes Club alongside Benedict Cumberbatch’s Holmes.” Wilmer passed away on March 31 “after a short bout of pneumonia.” He was 96 years old.
• It’s good to see that Criminal Element’s Leslie Gilbert Elman, who did such excellent work last year keeping track of Grantchester’s premiere season on PBS-TV, is back recapping the Season 2 installments. Her assessment of last night’s episode is here, and you’ll find all of her write-ups here. Grantchester, starring James Norton and Robson Green, resumed broadcasting under the Masterpiece series umbrella on March 27, and will show through Sunday, May 1.
• Someday I hope to be lucky enough to attend the annual Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival held in Harrogate, England. Not this year, though ... which is unfortunate, for In Reference to Murder brings news that the event, which will take place from July 21 to 24, now has its guest-star lineup. It “includes authors Peter James, Jeffery Deaver, Martina Cole, Neil Cross, Linwood Barclay, Tess Gerritsen, Val McDermid, and Gerald Seymour. Conference organizers encourage fans to ‘grab a pint of Yorkshire’s finest ale, and dip into an intoxicating mix of comedy, heated debate, and scintillating socializing’ at Agatha Christie’s old haunt, the luxurious Old Swan Hotel.”
• Meanwhile, this year’s lineup for Val McDermid’s much-watched Harrogate “New Blood” panel of fast-rising crime novelists has been announced. Its members will be Martin Holmen (Clinch), J.S. Law (Tenacity), Beth Lewis (The Wolf Road, and Abir Mukherjee (A Rising Man). That panel presentation is scheduled to take place at noon on Saturday, July 23, at the Old Swan Hotel.
• Rap Sheet contributor Gary Phillips is one busy guy, as he makes clear in this interview with fellow author S.W. Lauden.
• I’m starting to fear that the aggregator Web site CrimeSpot might be out of business. Founded in 2006 by Texan Graham Powell, it quickly became a popular resource, drawing together posts from a wide variety of blogs focused on crime, mystery, and thriller fiction. However, the last time CrimeSpot was updated was in December of last year. A few weeks ago, I sent Powell an e-note inquiring about his page’s future. “I haven’t had much time to work on it,” he told me, “and it really hasn’t been a high priority. You’re only the second person to ask me about it! But I guess I better get off my behind and get it straightened out.” We can only hope he does.
• A little visual entertainment: “18 Movie Poster Clichés That Prove Hollywood Has Run Out of Ideas.”
• From Mystery Fanfare: “Deadline reports that ... Sharp Objects, a drama series project starring Amy Adams [and based on Gillian Flynn's 2006 novel of the same name], has been picked up by HBO with an eight-episode straight-to-series first season order. Marti Noxon (UnReal) is show-runner for the project, with Jean-Marc Vallée (Wild) directing. Noxon wrote the pilot script and Flynn is set to write multiple episodes. The book was picked up five years ago by Jason Blum and Blumhouse Productions, long before Gone Girl was a hit movie.”
• Folks who read Philip Kerr’s new Bernie Gunther novel, The Other Side of Silence, might be particularly interested in watching this 1981 video showing “Kim Philby, Britain’s most notorious cold war traitor, [telling] an audience of East German spies after his defection that he was able to avoid being rumbled for so long because he had been ‘born into the British governing class.’ … Philby also describe[s] how he was able to walk out of secret service headquarters every night with his briefcase stuffed with secret documents and reports.”
• I don’t think I mentioned this before, but during the lead-up to his recent heart surgery, Max Allan Collins penned a blog post about having sold his original, 70,000-word movie tie-in novelization of Road to Perdition to publisher Brash Books. As most readers of The Rap Sheet know, the 2002 Tom Hanks/Paul Newman picture was based on Collins’
1998 graphic novel Road to Perdition. In his novelization, Collins explains, “I attempted to be true to the screenplay while weaving in material from the graphic novel as well as historical material about the real John Looney and his era. The DreamWorks licensing department put me through hell, making me cut anything—including dialogue!—that wasn’t directly from the script. They could not have cared less that I was the creator of this story and its characters. Even after they had accepted my 40,000-word debasement of my original novel, they kept cutting—if, in the film-editing process, director Sam Mendes dropped a scene or even a few lines of dialogue, they removed that from my novel as well. One chapter was reduced to a page and a half.” Collins says the Brash Books edition of Road to Perdition will be the full novelization, and that its release will be followed by new editions of the sequels Road to Purgatory (2004) and Road to Paradise (2005).• I don’t always find the free time necessary to listen in on Les Blatt’s weekly “Classic Mysteries” podcast, but I am never disappointed when I do. His latest audio feature examines Charles Warren Adams’ The Notting Hill Mystery, published as a book in 1865 and “said to be the first real detective novel ever written.”
• Not long ago I mentioned that Sadie Trombetta had assembled a “listicle” for Criminal Element that showcased “13 of the Best Female Sleuths from Pop Culture.” Well, now she’s back with another 23 nominees, based on reader recommendations. I’m most pleased to see Laura Holt (from Remington Steele) and Liza Cody’s ex-cop-turned-private investigator, Anna Lee, make this latest cut.
• Like many people, I fear, I wasn’t aware that film and TV critic Edward Copeland (real name Scott Schuldt), who for most of a decade wrote and edited the blog Edward Copeland’s Tangents, died this last New Year’s Eve “after a long battle with Primary Progressive Multiple Sclerosis.” He was 46 years old. Schuldt’s colleague Ivan G. Shreve Jr. offers up these moving memories of the late writer.
• There doesn’t seem to be any word about this on either author Craig McDonald’s Web site or the Amazon sales site, but McDonald mentioned in a Facebook post yesterday that his final Hector Lassiter novel (the 10th, I believe) will be titled Three Chords & the Truth, and that it will include “a fleeting appearance” by country-and-western singer Merle Haggard. McDonald says Three Chords is “coming this autumn from Betimes Books.”
• If you don’t know this already, writer-filmmaker Peter Hanson has developed an interesting blog called Every ’70s Movie, which most recently focused on The Streets of San Francisco, the 1972 TV flick—based on Carolyn Weston’s novel Poor, Poor Ophelia—that led to the 1972-1977 ABC crime drama of the same name starring Karl Malden and Michael Douglas.
• Finally, there are two milestones worth observing. First, the fourth birthday of Deadline Detroit, the online news site founded in 2012 by my old friend Allan Lengel, who used to work for the The Washington Post and the Detroit News (as well as Monthly Detroit, which is where I met him), and Bill McGraw, another Detroit News alumnus. I’m very pleased to see the site growing and—despite some financial headaches—establishing itself as a valuable resource for Motor City residents seeking information about and insight into their struggling but important town. Second, last week brought the 40th birthday—wow!—of Seattle Weekly (formerly just The Weekly), founded in 1976 by David Brewster and Darrell Oldham. I joined the Weekly editorial staff in the mid-1980s, after first being hired to edit a sister publication, the Bainbridge Island-based Puget Sound Enetai, and stayed with it until the end of that decade. Unfortunately, the celebration of the Weekly’s history was pretty darn unimaginative—consisting of four essays looking back at the last four decades. But those of us who worked for the paper in its “alternative journalism” heyday (it’s now a shadow of its former self) remember it as a lively, civically involved, and sometimes provocative publication well deserving of the many awards it earned over the years.
Thursday, March 31, 2016
“Bosch”: A Tale of Two Seasons
By Ali Karim
When the first season of a TV series receives the critical and commercial acclaim that Nic Pizzolatto’s True Detective and Michael Connelly’s Bosch garnered, then—to employ the title of a John Farris novel—All Heads Turn as the Hunt Goes By. Both of those police procedurals provoked such intense levels of adulation, that expectations ran very high for their sophomore seasons.
As things turned out, True Detective (an HBO-TV production) didn’t fare so well. Its second season was, without any question, a shambling mess. It offered style over substance—“all fur and no knickers,” to quote one wag. In fact, the show was disappointing enough to engender the creation of a short, amusing parody entitled Marty Watches Season 2. And the powers that be at Home Box Office felt compelled to comment about the series’ downturn in a Vanity Fair article, just to take some of the heat off Pizzolatto.
If you’re looking for someone to blame for the sharp drop off in quality between True Detective Season 1 and 2, HBO president Michael Lombardo would prefer you not attack the cast or creator Nic Pizzolatto. Instead, Lombardo falls on his own sword to highlight a key difference between True Detective’s shaky second season and Fargo’s rock-solid one. It’s all about the timing.(This was a far cry from Vanity Fair’s gushing feature published last year after the conclusion of that TV series’ inaugural season).
“Our biggest failures—and I don’t know if I would consider True Detective—but when we tell somebody to hit an air date as opposed to allowing the writing to find its own natural resting place, when it’s ready, when it’s baked—we’ve failed,” Lombardo told The Frame. ”And I think in this particular case, the first season of True Detective was something that Nic Pizzolatto had been thinking about, gestating, for a long period of time.”
In fact, Pizzolatto started work on True Detective Season 1 way back in July of 2010. He’s a rare kind of show-runner and insists on writing every episode himself. Three and a half years of work produced the stellar Matthew McConaughey/Woody Harrelson-led season, which also benefited from strong artistic input from director Cary Fukunaga. “I take the blame,” Lombardo says. “I became too much of a network executive at that point. We had huge success. ‘Gee, I’d love to repeat that next year.’” Pizzolatto, working without Fukunaga, only had 14 months after the end of Season 1 to conceive and execute the weaker second season of True Detective.
One thing I’ve found interesting about both True Detective and Bosch is how they’ve used their physical settings not simply as visual backdrops, but as independent characters of a sort. True Detective Season 1 found its footing in Pizzolatto’s native blue-collar Louisiana, but it moved to an allegedly corrupt California city for its sophomore run—a fact that might have provoked some concern among members of the Bosch team, who have done much to bring author Connelly’s Los Angeles-based tales to life through their program’s cinematography.
(Left) The official trailer for Bosch Season 2.
Another thing common to both procedurals is their striking use of music, especially in their opening title sequences. Composer T. Bone Burnett turned for the premiere season of True Detective to The Handsome Family’s “Far From Any Road,” which complemented what was to follow to great effect, but for its follow-up he switched to Leonard Cohen’s “Nevermind.” Since the two seasons were not linked in terms of their stories or characters, there was nothing wrong with also separating them musically. Bosch, by contrast, employs a continuing cast across its episodes, so it made sense to establish a consistent theme and title design. The song introducing this show is Caught a Ghost’s “Can’t Let Go.” It was a very apt choice, when you consider what motivates the series’ eponymous character, homicide detective Hieronymus “Harry” Bosch. According to Jesse Nolan, who wrote and produced the song (plus an accompanying video), “The song is basically about obsession. The idea for the song originated from feeling like I couldn’t free myself from some dark feelings I was wrestling with, and as is always the case, making music is always the only cure for such a condition.”
Like his creator, Harry Bosch (portrayed on the small screen by Titus Welliver of Deadwood and Big Apple fame) is a music aficionado, with a particular fondness for jazz. As Connelly explains in this short introduction to a recent documentary project he worked on to honor the memory of the late jazz saxophonist Frank Morgan, he conceived of Bosch from the outset as someone who “liked to listen to and draw inspiration from jazz. The character … had a particular affinity for the saxophone. Its mournful sound, like a human crying out in the night, was what he was drawn to. The detective saw the worst of humanity every day on the job. He found solace every night in the sound of the saxophone.” If you’ve watched much of Bosch at all, you’re aware of jazz’s dominance in its soundtrack.
So as the Amazon Prime premiere of Bosch Season 2 approached earlier this month, my excitement mounted. I’d been fortunate enough to attend the filming of one of the Season 1 episodes in Hollywood, just prior to the start of Bouchercon 2014 in Long Beach, California, together with my friends and colleagues Mike Stotter (the editor of Shots), UK author R.J. “Roger” Ellory, and Larry Gandle, a Florida oncologist and the assistant editor of Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine. Then, in the wake of last October’s Bouchercon in Raleigh, North Carolina, Connelly had invited me out to watch a filming from Season 2 of Bosch on location in Venice, just west of L.A.—a real treat, as I’m a longtime reader of the Bosch yarns and needed a serious break after working hard on Bouchercon programming.
But given my disappointment with the follow-up season of True Detective, I was apprehensive about the return of Bosch. Could it possibly live up to its earlier renown, or would it also let me down?
Well, after finally binge-watching all 10 episodes of the newest season in two five-hour sittings, I can tell you that the return of Bosch exceeded my expectations by a cube function. The one thought in my head as I took in the final credits was, “How the hell did they manage to create such a magnificent crime series?” This latest run of Bosch held my attention as if I were a drug addict long overdue for my fix. While watching the program, and recalling the hours I’d spent on location with its makers, I recognized how much of a labor of love Bosch was for all the people involved. Not only the major players, such as developer Eric Overmyer and Connelly himself, or executive producer Terrill Lee Lankford,
but for the technicians, actors, and co-writers as well. You can see their personal investment in every damn scene.(Right) Jeri Ryan as former stripper Veronica Allen.
Season 1 of this series wove together the story told in Connelly’s City of Bones (2002) with elements from The Concrete Blonde (1994) and Echo Park (2006). Season 2 similarly combines 1997’s Trunk Music with parts of The Drop (2011) and The Last Coyote (1995). Another thing that’s different this time around is my perception of Titus Welliver in the title role. Like many other viewers, I’m sure, I was quite perplexed by his casting as Harry Bosch, for he didn’t match up with my mental image of Connelly’s troubled police detective at all. This is not an uncommon problem when finding an actor or actress to take on the role of a beloved or renowned character; just remember the numerous catcalls when the short Tom Cruise was chosen to portray tall protagonist Jack Reacher. As far as Bosch goes, I was prepared for Welliver’s interpretation of the character this time around, and have come to agree with the show’s producers, that he’s the ideal person for that part. In fact, when I read Connelly’s The Crossing last year, I had trouble not visualizing Welliver whenever Bosch entered a scene. (The association was only cemented by the actor also voicing Bosch in a three-part mini-audiobook titled A Fine Mist of Blood, which is sponsored by Amazon and can be heard here.)
The new 10-episode arc of Bosch begins with the discovery of a dead Armenian porno-film producer in the Hollywood Hills, his ripening body folded none too neatly into the boot of his own Bentley (a plot facet straight out of Trunk Music). The story goes on from there to see Harry Bosch reinstated with the LAPD (after the events that closed out Season 1), and then assigned to investigate the producer’s murder. Meanwhile, there’s a political race heating up, which pits L.A.’s attention-seeking district attorney (the same guy who last year helped a serial killer escape police custody) against the city’s mayor, both of whom are courting Deputy Chief of Police Irvin Irving for his endorsement. And Irving’s son, George, who’s supposedly out of danger in the LAPD, goes undercover to track a rogue cabal of cops who’ve been committing crimes for money. Throw into this plotting mix a gun-running operation, Eastern European and Russian gangsters, a concealed cache of bearer bonds, and a federal investigation relating to the estate of the deceased porn-maker, and you wind up with one of the most captivating and hypnotic TV crime dramas of 2016. As James Wolcott of Vanity Fair puts it, Bosch’s latest season is “everything that True Detective Season 2 should have been had it not succumbed to sadistic, self-pitying, mood-mongering, garbage-barge bloat.”
While Welliver holds center stage in Bosch 2, the show offers some exceptional performances by supporting players as well. Lance Reddick (formerly of The Wire) commands attention as Deputy Chief Irving, who must face the consequences not only of his decisions as a cop but also as a father. Harry Bosch’s ex-wife and daughter, played respectively by Sarah Clarke and Madison Lintz, find themselves uncomfortably entangled in Bosch’s professional life and having to flee their Las Vegas home. The detective’s habitually dapper partner, Jerry Edgar (aka J. Edgar), played by Jamie Hector, must engage in some serious action here, and he remains a perfect foil for the more maverick-ish Bosch. Brent Sexton (ex-Justified) portrays a cop-turned-security guard who is just a little too helpful. And special mention should be made of Jeri Ryan’s outstanding turn as Veronica Allen, a not-as-sweet-as-she-looks retired stripper who was married to the recently deceased filmmaker. It’s quite a different side of Ryan than we witnessed back when she played the sleekly outfitted former Borg drone, Seven of Nine, on Star Trek: Voyager.
If you haven’t seen this new run of Bosch yet, let me suggest you follow my lead and binge-watch the show. The narrative is dense enough with character and plot developments that it only makes sense to take it all in quickly, in big gulps, so you can appreciate how Bosch’s dense tapestry knits together. But don’t tune into Season 2 unless you have already viewed last year’s run of Bosch. The two seasons interlock nicely, with some loose ends being tied up this time around, and the latest story arc doing much to answer questions surrounding the long-ago slaying of Harry Bosch’s mother and the roots of our hero’s obsessive personality.
WATCH MORE: If you would like to see some behind-the-scenes footage—filmed rather gonzo-style in Venice, California—that captures location shooting for episode seven of Bosch Season 2, click here, here, here, here, and here.
Shorts Time
Back at the beginning of this month, the Short Mystery Fiction Society announced its numerous nominees for the 2016 Derringer Awards. Today, the SMFS has declared the winners in four categories.
Best Flash Story (up to 1,000 words):
“Hero,” by Vy Kava (from Red Dawn: Best New England Crime Stories 2016, edited by Mark Ammons, Katherine Fast, Barbara Ross, and Leslie Wheeler; Level Best)
Best Short Story (1,001-4,000 words):
“Twilight Ladies,” by Meg Opperman (Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine [EQMM], March/April 2015)
Best Long Story (4,001-8,000 words):
“Dentonville,” by John M. Floyd (EQMM, November 2015)
Best Novelette (8,001-20,000 words):
“Driver,” by John M. Floyd (The Strand Magazine, February-May 2015)
In addition, the Society reports that “a committee of the SMFS Officers, Awards Coordinator, and two members-at-large awarded the Edward D. Hoch Memorial Golden Derringer (Lifetime Achievement) to: Michael Bracken.”
These winners will be honored during a special presentation at Bouchercon 2016, which is scheduled to be held in New Orleans, Louisiana, from September 15 to 18.
READ MORE: “Waco Writer Michael Bracken Honored for Lifetime of Mysteries,” by Carl Hoover (Waco Tribune-Herald).
Best Flash Story (up to 1,000 words):
“Hero,” by Vy Kava (from Red Dawn: Best New England Crime Stories 2016, edited by Mark Ammons, Katherine Fast, Barbara Ross, and Leslie Wheeler; Level Best)
Best Short Story (1,001-4,000 words):
“Twilight Ladies,” by Meg Opperman (Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine [EQMM], March/April 2015)
Best Long Story (4,001-8,000 words):
“Dentonville,” by John M. Floyd (EQMM, November 2015)
Best Novelette (8,001-20,000 words):
“Driver,” by John M. Floyd (The Strand Magazine, February-May 2015)
In addition, the Society reports that “a committee of the SMFS Officers, Awards Coordinator, and two members-at-large awarded the Edward D. Hoch Memorial Golden Derringer (Lifetime Achievement) to: Michael Bracken.”
These winners will be honored during a special presentation at Bouchercon 2016, which is scheduled to be held in New Orleans, Louisiana, from September 15 to 18.
READ MORE: “Waco Writer Michael Bracken Honored for Lifetime of Mysteries,” by Carl Hoover (Waco Tribune-Herald).
Leading Ladies
The Eighth Mrs. Bluebeard, by Hillary Waugh (Pan, 1961)
In the event that this fact has not yet fully registered with you, please note that today brings the final entry in Killer Covers’ two-week-long celebration of Women’s History Month. As I explained in my first post in the series, “I’ve decided that a special effort should be made to showcase book fronts that exhibit damsels in distress, sexy sweethearts, lascivious lasses, fearsome femmes fatales, and downright brash ‘dames.’ From now until April Fool’s Day, you can expect every day at Killer Covers to offer up a new distaff delight.” Catch up with the entire series by clicking here.
Ranging Far and Wide
… and he’s back: Mike Ripley has his new, April “Getting Away with Murder” column posted today in Shots. His topics this time include: the republication of Sir Basil Thomson’s classic Inspector Richardson novels; the recent Essex Book Festival’s celebration of Margery Allingham’s fiction; a one-day crime-fiction conference called Deal Noir, which will take place this Saturday in south-eastern England; and new works by Philip Kerr (The Other Side of Silence), Quentin Bates (Thin Ice), Michael Gregorio (Think Wolf), Ruth Dudley Edwards (The Seven), and others. Click here to find the full column.
Tuesday, March 29, 2016
Appointment on the Riviera
There aren’t many crime-fictionists (or authors, in general) whose books I grab up as soon as I spot them and immerse myself in immediately, but Philip Kerr is certainly among that select group. As I mentioned in a 2010 post I put together after first interviewing the Scottish novelist, his March Violets (1989), the book that introduced World War II-era Berlin homicide investigator Bernie Gunther, “was one of the earliest historical mysteries I remember reading.” And I’ve gladly followed the Gunther tales ever since—including his brand-new The Other Side of Silence (Marian Wood/Putnam).
Writing today on the Kirkus Reviews Web site, I explain that Silence begins with our cynical and despairing, Nazi-hating “hero”—now pushing 60 and working as the concierge at a lavish hotel on the French Riviera—trying to commit suicide. From there, the book takes off in a very different direction, combining elements of the traditional mystery story with the twisting gambits espionage fiction.
FOLLOW-UP: A reader asked me to name my five favorite Bernie Gunther novels (so far). Here they are, in order of their publication:
• March Violets (1989)
• A Quiet Flame (2008)
• If the Dead Rise Not (2009)
• Prague Fatale (2011)
• The Lady from Zagreb (2015)
There’s every possibility that The Other Side of Silence will wind up on my list of top 2016 crime-fiction releases. But I won’t make that decision until much later in the year.
Writing today on the Kirkus Reviews Web site, I explain that Silence begins with our cynical and despairing, Nazi-hating “hero”—now pushing 60 and working as the concierge at a lavish hotel on the French Riviera—trying to commit suicide. From there, the book takes off in a very different direction, combining elements of the traditional mystery story with the twisting gambits espionage fiction.
Resigned to the tedium of survival, Gunther heads back to the Grand Hôtel and resumes his concierge duties (consisting primarily of “making restaurant reservations, booking taxis and boats, coordinating porter service, shooing away prostitutes—which isn’t as easy as it sounds; these days only American women can afford to look like prostitutes—and giving directions to witless tourists who can’t read a map and don’t speak French”). However, he won’t be able to pick up his life where he left off. That’s due in part to the sudden appearance at Cap Ferrat of a figure from his past: Harold Heinz Hebel, who Gunther once knew better as mass-murdering Gestapo officer Harold Hennig. In addition, one of Gunther’s regular partners for evening games of bridge, a secretive Italian casino manager named Antimo Spinola, has been murdered, and Kerr’s man—sounding like Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon—insists “there’s an unwritten rule in bridge that when your partner gets killed you’re supposed to try and find out who did it.”You can enjoy the complete review here.
As if these challenges weren’t enough to keep Gunther’s mind off suicide, there’s also his search for a blackmailer targeting another local resident, W. Somerset Maugham.
FOLLOW-UP: A reader asked me to name my five favorite Bernie Gunther novels (so far). Here they are, in order of their publication:
• March Violets (1989)
• A Quiet Flame (2008)
• If the Dead Rise Not (2009)
• Prague Fatale (2011)
• The Lady from Zagreb (2015)
There’s every possibility that The Other Side of Silence will wind up on my list of top 2016 crime-fiction releases. But I won’t make that decision until much later in the year.
Monday, March 28, 2016
The Story Behind the Story: “Capitol Punishment,” by Andrew Welsh-Huggins
(Editor’s note: This 64th installment in The Rap Sheet’s “Story Behind the Story” series comes from Columbus, Ohio, resident Andrew Welsh-Huggins, a legal affairs reporter with the Associated Press and the creator of Andy Hayes, an Ohio gumshoe who has starred thus far in three novels: Fourth Down and Out [2014], Slow Burn [2015], and Capitol Punishment, the last of which is due out next month in both print and e-book versions. Welsh-Huggins writes below about the ingredients that went into crafting that latest mystery.)
If only I’d waited a few months.
I’ve had that feeling a lot lately, anticipating the publication of Capitol Punishment, my third mystery about Columbus, Ohio, private eye Andy Hayes. In his latest outing, Andy gets an up-close and deadly view of Ohio’s quadrennial starring role in presidential politics. Assigned to protect a hard-charging reporter covering a school-funding bill during an election year, Andy finds himself wondering how far a governor
with his eyes on the White House might go to keep certain truths from coming to light. It felt like a pretty good plot, if I do say so myself. Then this year’s real election got underway.
I guess the fictionalization of a sharp-tongued Ohio governor facing off against a potty-mouthed billionaire for the keys to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue will have to wait. In the meantime, I’m taking comfort from the current Keystone Cops campaign that my own tale isn’t that far-fetched. “I think there is only one thing in the world I can’t understand, and that is Ohio politics,” Teddy Roosevelt once said. Adopting this adage, it was easy to create characters a bit over the top: a pig-farming state Supreme Court justice with a dark secret; a bowtie-wearing chief of staff labeled the “Prince of Dorkness”; and a police detective who bears more than a little resemblance to Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry of War of 1812 fame. If only I’d thrown in a celebrated brain surgeon who equated universal health care to something worse than slavery. But no, there are limits to suspending one’s disbelief, even in fiction.
In some ways writing a mystery is like building a fire—small flames grow to a climactic blaze, which then diminishes into a denouement of coal and ashes. Achieving this sequence of events requires the proper location, kindling, and of course a spark to get things started. Composing a book with politics at its heart, I had all three in spades. Let’s start with location: Ohio, the best known of the bellwether states. As even casual political junkies know, no Republican has ever won the White House without taking the state, and only two Democrats have done so in more than a century (Franklin Roosevelt in 1944 and John F. Kennedy in 1960). Ohio plays kingmaker every four years—maybe “queen maker” this year—because of its purple state attributes: it’s a hodgepodge of cities, farms, and suburbs populated by liberals, moderates, and conservatives with every stripe of pro-union, anti-labor, and libertarian-leaning resident in-between. With eight presidents under its belt, the state is known for a gaze particular to politicians within its borders, what James Thurber dubbed the “Ohio Look”: “The dreamy, far-away expression of a man richly meditating on cheering audiences, landslides, and high office.”
Next, my kindling. For this I focused on two cohorts whose reputation couldn’t be much lower at the moment: politicians and reporters. We’re used to politicians as punching bags. But as a long-time journalist, I’m happy to report that my industry isn’t far behind: we now sit below lumberjacks and enlisted military personnel in rankings of the worst jobs, according to CareerCast’s annual list. Just a few rungs up the ladder, corrections officers and taxi drivers edged out photojournalists and broadcasters. (No word yet about Uber drivers.)
When it came to portraying politicians, in the form of state lawmakers and a governor, I tried to present individuals aiming to do good—in this case, pass a fictional school-funding bill—while engaging in questionable personal and political behavior. I had for my guide a comment attributed to 19th-century New York lawyer Gideon Tucker, an enlarged copy of which hangs in the Ohio Statehouse pressroom, to wit: “No man’s life, liberty or property are safe while the legislature is in session.” The observation was one of the first things I saw when I joined the press corps in1999 as an Associated Press newsman and was often on my mind during the year Capitol Punishment took shape. My fictional Statehouse bears a strong resemblance to the real thing, with a major exception: I put Democrats in charge of the Ohio Senate, which in reality they haven’t controlled for more than two decades. Although Republicans run everything in the Ohio Legislature these days, split governance isn’t that far-fetched: Democrats made up the House majority as recently as 2009. The partisan split I created through literary license
provided the tension that makes murder plausible. As one of my characters notes, “Nothing changes hands at the Statehouse without an IOU attached. Don’t ever forget that.”
(Right) Author Andrew Welsh-Huggins
The reporter that my investigator protects, Lee Hershey, is an amalgam of several people I’ve known over the years, and reflects both the old and new elements of journalism. Once a dyed-in-the-wool newspaperman, he now runs an online investigative journalism blog that doesn’t have a print product. Like me, he’s as apt to get his news from an app as an actual paper. In early drafts Hershey was an unlikable cynic, and it was thanks to my editor that I painted him with a more realistic brush: a professional skeptic with a patriotic streak who pursues the truth because he loves his state and wants politicians to do the right thing by it. (His womanizing is another matter, and suffice it to say that Hershey’s zipper problem isn’t based on any of my colleagues’ conduct—at least, not that I’m aware of.)
I was getting close to starting the fire. The only thing missing was the spark. Although the fictional legislation up for debate funds schools, the real fireworks involve charter schools, those publicly funded, privately run institutions adored by Republicans and despised by most Democrats. Here was one area where the truth didn’t need much embellishment. Outside of abortion and guns, almost no issue in Ohio has led to more political arguments than these schools, whether the topic is their academic performance, their impact on traditional public schools, or their use (and misuse) of taxpayer dollars. Voila: we have ignition.
Little did I know that, had I waited just a little bit longer, I could have borrowed liberally, so to speak, from even more combustible source material. All I had to do was turn on the presidential debates.
If only I’d waited a few months.
I’ve had that feeling a lot lately, anticipating the publication of Capitol Punishment, my third mystery about Columbus, Ohio, private eye Andy Hayes. In his latest outing, Andy gets an up-close and deadly view of Ohio’s quadrennial starring role in presidential politics. Assigned to protect a hard-charging reporter covering a school-funding bill during an election year, Andy finds himself wondering how far a governor
with his eyes on the White House might go to keep certain truths from coming to light. It felt like a pretty good plot, if I do say so myself. Then this year’s real election got underway.I guess the fictionalization of a sharp-tongued Ohio governor facing off against a potty-mouthed billionaire for the keys to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue will have to wait. In the meantime, I’m taking comfort from the current Keystone Cops campaign that my own tale isn’t that far-fetched. “I think there is only one thing in the world I can’t understand, and that is Ohio politics,” Teddy Roosevelt once said. Adopting this adage, it was easy to create characters a bit over the top: a pig-farming state Supreme Court justice with a dark secret; a bowtie-wearing chief of staff labeled the “Prince of Dorkness”; and a police detective who bears more than a little resemblance to Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry of War of 1812 fame. If only I’d thrown in a celebrated brain surgeon who equated universal health care to something worse than slavery. But no, there are limits to suspending one’s disbelief, even in fiction.
In some ways writing a mystery is like building a fire—small flames grow to a climactic blaze, which then diminishes into a denouement of coal and ashes. Achieving this sequence of events requires the proper location, kindling, and of course a spark to get things started. Composing a book with politics at its heart, I had all three in spades. Let’s start with location: Ohio, the best known of the bellwether states. As even casual political junkies know, no Republican has ever won the White House without taking the state, and only two Democrats have done so in more than a century (Franklin Roosevelt in 1944 and John F. Kennedy in 1960). Ohio plays kingmaker every four years—maybe “queen maker” this year—because of its purple state attributes: it’s a hodgepodge of cities, farms, and suburbs populated by liberals, moderates, and conservatives with every stripe of pro-union, anti-labor, and libertarian-leaning resident in-between. With eight presidents under its belt, the state is known for a gaze particular to politicians within its borders, what James Thurber dubbed the “Ohio Look”: “The dreamy, far-away expression of a man richly meditating on cheering audiences, landslides, and high office.”
Next, my kindling. For this I focused on two cohorts whose reputation couldn’t be much lower at the moment: politicians and reporters. We’re used to politicians as punching bags. But as a long-time journalist, I’m happy to report that my industry isn’t far behind: we now sit below lumberjacks and enlisted military personnel in rankings of the worst jobs, according to CareerCast’s annual list. Just a few rungs up the ladder, corrections officers and taxi drivers edged out photojournalists and broadcasters. (No word yet about Uber drivers.)
When it came to portraying politicians, in the form of state lawmakers and a governor, I tried to present individuals aiming to do good—in this case, pass a fictional school-funding bill—while engaging in questionable personal and political behavior. I had for my guide a comment attributed to 19th-century New York lawyer Gideon Tucker, an enlarged copy of which hangs in the Ohio Statehouse pressroom, to wit: “No man’s life, liberty or property are safe while the legislature is in session.” The observation was one of the first things I saw when I joined the press corps in1999 as an Associated Press newsman and was often on my mind during the year Capitol Punishment took shape. My fictional Statehouse bears a strong resemblance to the real thing, with a major exception: I put Democrats in charge of the Ohio Senate, which in reality they haven’t controlled for more than two decades. Although Republicans run everything in the Ohio Legislature these days, split governance isn’t that far-fetched: Democrats made up the House majority as recently as 2009. The partisan split I created through literary license
provided the tension that makes murder plausible. As one of my characters notes, “Nothing changes hands at the Statehouse without an IOU attached. Don’t ever forget that.”(Right) Author Andrew Welsh-Huggins
The reporter that my investigator protects, Lee Hershey, is an amalgam of several people I’ve known over the years, and reflects both the old and new elements of journalism. Once a dyed-in-the-wool newspaperman, he now runs an online investigative journalism blog that doesn’t have a print product. Like me, he’s as apt to get his news from an app as an actual paper. In early drafts Hershey was an unlikable cynic, and it was thanks to my editor that I painted him with a more realistic brush: a professional skeptic with a patriotic streak who pursues the truth because he loves his state and wants politicians to do the right thing by it. (His womanizing is another matter, and suffice it to say that Hershey’s zipper problem isn’t based on any of my colleagues’ conduct—at least, not that I’m aware of.)
I was getting close to starting the fire. The only thing missing was the spark. Although the fictional legislation up for debate funds schools, the real fireworks involve charter schools, those publicly funded, privately run institutions adored by Republicans and despised by most Democrats. Here was one area where the truth didn’t need much embellishment. Outside of abortion and guns, almost no issue in Ohio has led to more political arguments than these schools, whether the topic is their academic performance, their impact on traditional public schools, or their use (and misuse) of taxpayer dollars. Voila: we have ignition.
Little did I know that, had I waited just a little bit longer, I could have borrowed liberally, so to speak, from even more combustible source material. All I had to do was turn on the presidential debates.
Sunday, March 27, 2016
Short and Tweet
Just about a week ago, I received an e-mail note from a reader saying that The Rap Sheet’s Twitter account had suddenly been suspended, and asking, “what crimes did you commit” to provoke that? Having no idea of the answer, I contacted January Magazine editor Linda L. Richards, my friend who had generously sent up that account five years ago, to inquire as to what she might know about this peculiar turn of events. She pleaded ignorance as well, but said she had filed an appeal to end the suspension. Within a very short time, Twitter replied that “We have now unsuspended your account.”
Who knows what craziness happened here. Linda’s humorous conjecture is that Twitter acted pre-emptively out of fear that “anyone with ‘Rap Sheet’ in the name is going to be a badass.”
The good news is that The Rap Sheet’s Twitter page seems to be fully back in operation, though it is mysteriously missing about two weeks worth of automatic notices. Let’s hope everything goes along swimmingly from now on. You might note for the future that, in addition to that Rap Sheet Twitter page, I have another page of my own, found here, which covers the same material, as well as links to Killer Covers posts and subjects of more personal interest.
Happy Easter reading, everyone!
Who knows what craziness happened here. Linda’s humorous conjecture is that Twitter acted pre-emptively out of fear that “anyone with ‘Rap Sheet’ in the name is going to be a badass.”
The good news is that The Rap Sheet’s Twitter page seems to be fully back in operation, though it is mysteriously missing about two weeks worth of automatic notices. Let’s hope everything goes along swimmingly from now on. You might note for the future that, in addition to that Rap Sheet Twitter page, I have another page of my own, found here, which covers the same material, as well as links to Killer Covers posts and subjects of more personal interest.
Happy Easter reading, everyone!
Friday, March 25, 2016
The Book You Have to Read:
“The Black and the Red,” by Elliot Paul
(Editor’s note: This is the 135th installment in The Rap Sheet’s continuing series about great but forgotten books.)
By Steven Nester
I can hear the voice of detective and gourmand Homer Evans resounding in my head at this very moment. He possesses an upper class-sounding accent, with perfect phrasing and diction like that of George Plimpton, along with a touch of Dickens’ Mr. Pumblechook—pompous and imperious. By the conclusion of this book, however, readers might be begging for the verbose rancor of W.C. Fields just to lighten things up a bit.
Foregoing nitpicking, a holistic view is needed to capture from this work what it offers to discerning and tenacious readers.
The Black and the Red (1956) is the ninth mystery in Elliot Paul’s Homer Evans series and, like the other books, it’s a parody of epicurean sleuths in the Philo Vance and Nero Wolfe vein. While there is murder in this novel—two, actually—they are so inconsequential to the workings of the plot, and are given such little gravity, that they were probably tossed in merely so that the tale could be placed on the murder-mystery shelf.
The book’s title points readers in the direction of the roulette wheel, or perhaps the two columns on a balance sheet, but it also recalls the 1830 masterpiece The Red and the Black, by the great realist Stendahl. This bears the weight of a tremendous irony that won’t be lost on anyone familiar (if in name only) with the classic works, because The Black and the Red is, at its core, a fantasy and a diversion for readers of what author-screenwriter Terry Southern called “quality lit.”
Homer Evans is a superman-type of person who believes that being faster than a speeding bullet means you’re the most quick-witted person in any room. This, Homer Evans certainly is. He’s invincible, all-knowing, and all-seeing (“trying to lie to Mr. Evans was more futile than reaching for the moon or diving to grasp its reflection”). As a detective, he is always so many steps ahead of criminals and reality, that he seems gifted with ESP. Evans has the foresight to bug a criminal’s hideout even before a crime takes place, and is a cool-headed overachiever from whom pilots ask advice on how to safely land disabled planes. He speaks as if he’d memorized a dictionary and, in addition, likes to show off his learning, lading his much-used periodic sentences (and you thought Edmund Wilson was the master of this) with more interjections (“I beg of you,” “God forbid,” etc.) than you can wave a stick at.
The mystery in these pages is why an oilman and Las Vegas casino operator (can anyone say Howard Hughes?) has induced Jean Pierre Sabin, the renowned gastronome from Cannes, to quit the Riviera and work in Vegas during the gangster-rife 1950s. Everyone wants to know, and there are plenty of everyone packed into this book.
Mobsters, Hollywood Strip bigwigs, Vegas operators, artists, mannequins, Evans’ pistol-packing assistant Miriam Leonard, private detectives, and the pilot fish they all attract race through the pages with the speed and tumult of the actors in It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.
Gangsters talk like gangsters; cowboys talk like cowboys; and prudish epicures are as dimensional as the paper on which they were created.
(Right) Elliot Paul; photo by Schell.
Myriad subplots squeak round and round like rusty hamster wheels and Paul applies little grease; yet without them, this book would be lacking. As outlandish as the fictional situations are, everything fits, and here’s why: it’s the prose, not the story line, that serves as reason for picking this book up in the first place. The extravagant yet somehow confiding voice lulls readers into wishing they could hurl themselves straight into this yarn and stand at Evans’ side. The more the narrator and Evans reveal of facts, details, and honest, uncensored observations—no matter how purple and overstated they may be—the more it appears the narrator is revealing his true personality, sharing with the reader his innermost thoughts. One gets the sense of being on a great quest with a great man.
Readers of The Black and the Red will need to know a little something about the world of culture. They shouldn’t expect to watch James Joyce bench-press the entire canon of western literature; but at least they have to have been around the block enough times to chuckle knowingly when they encounter a scene in which two lovers enact “a duet which Fragonard would have painted in a Louis XVI boudoir.”
When the omniscient narrator over-reaches, he nearly falls out of the book onto the floor, as when Sabin “sighed like a weary gnu between feeding times.” Not every square inch of a work of art needs adornment, and an all-knowing narrator should perhaps have possessed the wisdom to leave this tidbit to the expertise of Marlin Perkins.
They sure don’t write ’em like this anymore. A fly in amber that at one point in time would’ve been called “clever,” this book’s appeal is the easy rapport it creates between a likeable know-it-all and a reader who might want a change from The New Yorker. It’s an artificial and perfect world (sans murder), wherein every mess of a jigsaw puzzle falls together at the snap of Evans’ fingers. Is this an example of good writing? Well, sure. But can it be bad writing as well? Well yes, inasmuch as it’s been written by an author who’s unrelentingly smitten with the sound of his own voice. The trick here is to take Nabokov’s observation, that satire is a lesson and parody is a game, turn off the critical thinking part of your brain, and enjoy the ride.
READ MORE: There’s a great deal more information about author Elliot Paul here; a Web site called The Lineup chose his 1939 novel, The Mysterious Mickey Finn, as one of “10 Forgotten Mystery Masterpieces”; and a blog called Interlude examines the use of musical references in the Homer Evans series.
By Steven Nester
I can hear the voice of detective and gourmand Homer Evans resounding in my head at this very moment. He possesses an upper class-sounding accent, with perfect phrasing and diction like that of George Plimpton, along with a touch of Dickens’ Mr. Pumblechook—pompous and imperious. By the conclusion of this book, however, readers might be begging for the verbose rancor of W.C. Fields just to lighten things up a bit.
Foregoing nitpicking, a holistic view is needed to capture from this work what it offers to discerning and tenacious readers.The Black and the Red (1956) is the ninth mystery in Elliot Paul’s Homer Evans series and, like the other books, it’s a parody of epicurean sleuths in the Philo Vance and Nero Wolfe vein. While there is murder in this novel—two, actually—they are so inconsequential to the workings of the plot, and are given such little gravity, that they were probably tossed in merely so that the tale could be placed on the murder-mystery shelf.
The book’s title points readers in the direction of the roulette wheel, or perhaps the two columns on a balance sheet, but it also recalls the 1830 masterpiece The Red and the Black, by the great realist Stendahl. This bears the weight of a tremendous irony that won’t be lost on anyone familiar (if in name only) with the classic works, because The Black and the Red is, at its core, a fantasy and a diversion for readers of what author-screenwriter Terry Southern called “quality lit.”
Homer Evans is a superman-type of person who believes that being faster than a speeding bullet means you’re the most quick-witted person in any room. This, Homer Evans certainly is. He’s invincible, all-knowing, and all-seeing (“trying to lie to Mr. Evans was more futile than reaching for the moon or diving to grasp its reflection”). As a detective, he is always so many steps ahead of criminals and reality, that he seems gifted with ESP. Evans has the foresight to bug a criminal’s hideout even before a crime takes place, and is a cool-headed overachiever from whom pilots ask advice on how to safely land disabled planes. He speaks as if he’d memorized a dictionary and, in addition, likes to show off his learning, lading his much-used periodic sentences (and you thought Edmund Wilson was the master of this) with more interjections (“I beg of you,” “God forbid,” etc.) than you can wave a stick at.
The mystery in these pages is why an oilman and Las Vegas casino operator (can anyone say Howard Hughes?) has induced Jean Pierre Sabin, the renowned gastronome from Cannes, to quit the Riviera and work in Vegas during the gangster-rife 1950s. Everyone wants to know, and there are plenty of everyone packed into this book.
Mobsters, Hollywood Strip bigwigs, Vegas operators, artists, mannequins, Evans’ pistol-packing assistant Miriam Leonard, private detectives, and the pilot fish they all attract race through the pages with the speed and tumult of the actors in It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.
Gangsters talk like gangsters; cowboys talk like cowboys; and prudish epicures are as dimensional as the paper on which they were created.(Right) Elliot Paul; photo by Schell.
Myriad subplots squeak round and round like rusty hamster wheels and Paul applies little grease; yet without them, this book would be lacking. As outlandish as the fictional situations are, everything fits, and here’s why: it’s the prose, not the story line, that serves as reason for picking this book up in the first place. The extravagant yet somehow confiding voice lulls readers into wishing they could hurl themselves straight into this yarn and stand at Evans’ side. The more the narrator and Evans reveal of facts, details, and honest, uncensored observations—no matter how purple and overstated they may be—the more it appears the narrator is revealing his true personality, sharing with the reader his innermost thoughts. One gets the sense of being on a great quest with a great man.
Readers of The Black and the Red will need to know a little something about the world of culture. They shouldn’t expect to watch James Joyce bench-press the entire canon of western literature; but at least they have to have been around the block enough times to chuckle knowingly when they encounter a scene in which two lovers enact “a duet which Fragonard would have painted in a Louis XVI boudoir.”
When the omniscient narrator over-reaches, he nearly falls out of the book onto the floor, as when Sabin “sighed like a weary gnu between feeding times.” Not every square inch of a work of art needs adornment, and an all-knowing narrator should perhaps have possessed the wisdom to leave this tidbit to the expertise of Marlin Perkins.
They sure don’t write ’em like this anymore. A fly in amber that at one point in time would’ve been called “clever,” this book’s appeal is the easy rapport it creates between a likeable know-it-all and a reader who might want a change from The New Yorker. It’s an artificial and perfect world (sans murder), wherein every mess of a jigsaw puzzle falls together at the snap of Evans’ fingers. Is this an example of good writing? Well, sure. But can it be bad writing as well? Well yes, inasmuch as it’s been written by an author who’s unrelentingly smitten with the sound of his own voice. The trick here is to take Nabokov’s observation, that satire is a lesson and parody is a game, turn off the critical thinking part of your brain, and enjoy the ride.
READ MORE: There’s a great deal more information about author Elliot Paul here; a Web site called The Lineup chose his 1939 novel, The Mysterious Mickey Finn, as one of “10 Forgotten Mystery Masterpieces”; and a blog called Interlude examines the use of musical references in the Homer Evans series.
Thursday, March 24, 2016
Hunting Down “The Manhunter”
After writing yesterday about the death of actor
Ken Howard, at age 71, I went looking for material in my files about his 1974-1975 CBS-TV crime drama, The Manhunter. I found two things that might be of interest to others. First, TV Guide’s 1974 Fall Preview write-up about that series, which found Howard playing Dave Barrett, an ex-Marine—recently returned from China—who was establishing himself during the Depression-era 1930s as a private eye-cum-bounty hunter.
(Introduced on that same page is Lucas Tanner, a single-season NBC program starring David Hartman as an athlete turned English teacher in my father's hometown of Webster Groves, Missouri.)
Next in this show-and-tell is a February 1974 column by Francis Murphy, who at the time served (quite ably, I should note) as TV critic for The [Portland] Oregonian. This piece was built around his interview with Howard, and focuses on the Manhunter pilot film.
Click on either of the images above for an enlargement.
(Introduced on that same page is Lucas Tanner, a single-season NBC program starring David Hartman as an athlete turned English teacher in my father's hometown of Webster Groves, Missouri.)
Next in this show-and-tell is a February 1974 column by Francis Murphy, who at the time served (quite ably, I should note) as TV critic for The [Portland] Oregonian. This piece was built around his interview with Howard, and focuses on the Manhunter pilot film.
Click on either of the images above for an enlargement.
More Newsy Tidbits for Your Delectation
• As The Spy Command reminds us, “Today, March 24, is the 100th anniversary of the birth of author Donald Hamilton, creator of Matt Helm.” More info about Helm and Hamilton can be found here.
• I mentioned yesterday that director Michael Mann is launching his own book-publishing imprint. What I hadn’t known until reading this item in the Crimespree Magazine blog is that “one of his first projects finds him teaming up with award-winning crime writer Don Winslow.” Jeremy Lynch goes on to explain that “Winslow will be crafting a novel based on the relationship between legendary organized crime bosses Tony Accord and Sam Giancana. And not surprisingly, plans are already underway to make a film out of it. Mann has, with The Story Factory’s Shane Salerno (Don’s co-writer on the screenplay for Savages), written a screenplay already. I would assume that Don will draw from the screenplay, but if a film is a made, a new draft will almost certainly be made to reflect where Don goes in the novel.”
• I always remember Oklahoma-born performer Larry Drake best for his regular part as Benny Stulwicz, a developmentally disabled office assistant on NBC-TV’s L.A. Law. However, blogger Terence Towles Canote makes clear that Drake, who died on March 17 at age 67, enjoyed a much more diverse and honored acting career. “Larry Drake was an extremely talented actor,” Canote writes in A Shroud of Thoughts. “When he was playing Benny on L.A. Law there were many in the general public who were convinced that he was actually developmentally challenged. His performance in the role was simply that convincing. What is more, he could play a wide variety of roles. Ruthless mobster Robert Durant in Darkman may be his second best known role and it is as far from the gentle Benny as one can get. Over the years Mr. Drake played everything from scientists to priests to rednecks to J. Edgar Hoover, and he did all of them well.”
• While any such list is suspect, Sadie Trombetta’s rundown of “13 of the Best Female Sleuths from Pop Culture” has much to commend it—including the fact that she includes Veronica Mars.
• So here’s an important question: What were the oddest-titled books published in 2015? Mashable has the answer.
• Speaking of titles … It isn’t often that the word “taffeta” figures into a novel’s name. So when I spotted this post about Marla Cooper’s brand-new Terror in Taffeta, I thought immediately of Ben Benson’s 1953 police procedural, Target in Taffeta.
• Andrew Nette has a fine piece in Pulp Curry about English screenwriter-director Mike Hodges’ “underappreciated 1972 film, Pulp,” which he calls “a delight for any fan of cheap pulp paperback fiction.” You will find Nette’s post here.
• Need reading material for Easter Sunday? Check this out.
• Rolling Stone has just endorsed Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton for president. Writes publisher Jann S. Wenner: “On the question of experience, the ability to enact progressive change, and the issue of who can win the general election and the presidency, the clear and urgent choice is Hillary Clinton.”
• Pay attention, James Bond film fans: For his blog, Illustrated 007, Peter Lorenz interviews Cindy Wirth, who modeled for the poster artwork promoting the 1983 film Never Say Never Again.
• Since I have always loved libraries, I was interested to check out BookRiot’s list of “47+ of Your Favorite Books About Libraries.” Among those mentioned are Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose and Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s The Shadow of the Wind, two favorites of mine.
• Meanwhile, the Detroit Public Library’s main branch figures into this post showcasing Motor City historical landmarks. Since I lived for a while in Detroit, Michigan, I’m always interested in stories about its past and present. At the link you will find photos and write-ups about 13 of the city’s surviving architectural wonders. I have visited most of them, but not all. Next time I’m in Detroit, I definitely have to pay a call on what remains of Michigan Building and Theater!
• I mentioned yesterday that director Michael Mann is launching his own book-publishing imprint. What I hadn’t known until reading this item in the Crimespree Magazine blog is that “one of his first projects finds him teaming up with award-winning crime writer Don Winslow.” Jeremy Lynch goes on to explain that “Winslow will be crafting a novel based on the relationship between legendary organized crime bosses Tony Accord and Sam Giancana. And not surprisingly, plans are already underway to make a film out of it. Mann has, with The Story Factory’s Shane Salerno (Don’s co-writer on the screenplay for Savages), written a screenplay already. I would assume that Don will draw from the screenplay, but if a film is a made, a new draft will almost certainly be made to reflect where Don goes in the novel.”
• I always remember Oklahoma-born performer Larry Drake best for his regular part as Benny Stulwicz, a developmentally disabled office assistant on NBC-TV’s L.A. Law. However, blogger Terence Towles Canote makes clear that Drake, who died on March 17 at age 67, enjoyed a much more diverse and honored acting career. “Larry Drake was an extremely talented actor,” Canote writes in A Shroud of Thoughts. “When he was playing Benny on L.A. Law there were many in the general public who were convinced that he was actually developmentally challenged. His performance in the role was simply that convincing. What is more, he could play a wide variety of roles. Ruthless mobster Robert Durant in Darkman may be his second best known role and it is as far from the gentle Benny as one can get. Over the years Mr. Drake played everything from scientists to priests to rednecks to J. Edgar Hoover, and he did all of them well.”
• While any such list is suspect, Sadie Trombetta’s rundown of “13 of the Best Female Sleuths from Pop Culture” has much to commend it—including the fact that she includes Veronica Mars.
• So here’s an important question: What were the oddest-titled books published in 2015? Mashable has the answer.
• Speaking of titles … It isn’t often that the word “taffeta” figures into a novel’s name. So when I spotted this post about Marla Cooper’s brand-new Terror in Taffeta, I thought immediately of Ben Benson’s 1953 police procedural, Target in Taffeta.
• Andrew Nette has a fine piece in Pulp Curry about English screenwriter-director Mike Hodges’ “underappreciated 1972 film, Pulp,” which he calls “a delight for any fan of cheap pulp paperback fiction.” You will find Nette’s post here.
• Need reading material for Easter Sunday? Check this out.
• Rolling Stone has just endorsed Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton for president. Writes publisher Jann S. Wenner: “On the question of experience, the ability to enact progressive change, and the issue of who can win the general election and the presidency, the clear and urgent choice is Hillary Clinton.”
• Pay attention, James Bond film fans: For his blog, Illustrated 007, Peter Lorenz interviews Cindy Wirth, who modeled for the poster artwork promoting the 1983 film Never Say Never Again.
• Since I have always loved libraries, I was interested to check out BookRiot’s list of “47+ of Your Favorite Books About Libraries.” Among those mentioned are Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose and Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s The Shadow of the Wind, two favorites of mine.
• Meanwhile, the Detroit Public Library’s main branch figures into this post showcasing Motor City historical landmarks. Since I lived for a while in Detroit, Michigan, I’m always interested in stories about its past and present. At the link you will find photos and write-ups about 13 of the city’s surviving architectural wonders. I have visited most of them, but not all. Next time I’m in Detroit, I definitely have to pay a call on what remains of Michigan Building and Theater!
Wednesday, March 23, 2016
Howard’s End
A 1974 CBS promo spot for The Manhunter.
I was never a big fan of The White Shadow, the 1978-1981 CBS-TV series with which star Ken Howard is still most closely associated. But I did enjoy an earlier, Quinn Martin production, The Manhunter (1974-1975; opening title sequence here), in which Howard played Dave Barrett, an Idaho-based private eye/bounty hunter determined to bring 1930s crooks and gangsters to justice. And I enjoyed his appearances on Crossing Jordan (2001-2007) as star Jill Hennessy’s father, a Boston ex-cop-turned-bar-owner. I have also long been intrigued with the fact that
Howard was briefly considered for the role of Stewart McMillan on McMillan & Wife. (That part ultimately went, of course, to Rock Hudson.)So I was saddened to learn that Howard died earlier today, at age 71. According to a story in Variety (which manages to misidentify that Hennessy show as Raising Jordan),
Howard earned an Emmy Award for his performance as Phelan Beale, the husband of Jessica Lange’s Big Edie, in HBO’s 2009 film “Grey Gardens,” which was inspired by Albert and David Maysles’ classic 1970s documentary.A full list of Howard’s screen credits can be found here.
Decades earlier, in 1970, he won a Tony Award as best supporting or featured actor (dramatic) for “Child’s Play,” in which he portrayed the gym coach at a Catholic boy’s school. …
Howard’s most significant recent film role came in Tony Gilroy’s 2007 thriller “Michael Clayton,” starring George Clooney as a fixer for a top law firm; Howard played the ruthless CEO of the corporation Clooney’s firm is representing in a multimillion-dollar class action lawsuit who employs the even more ruthless attorney played in the film by Tilda Swinton. In Clint Eastwood’s 2011 film “J. Edgar,” he played Attorney General Harlan F. Stone. In 2014’s “The Judge,” starring Robert Duvall as a crusty jurist on trial for murder, Howard played the judge presiding over the trial. In David O. Russell’s 2015 film “Joy,” starring Jennifer Lawrence, he played a mop company executive.
In addition to his work in front of the camera, the California native served for years as president of the actors union SAG-AFTRA (Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists). Howard’s cause of death has not yet been reported.
(Hat tip to Bill Crider’s Pop Culture Magazine.)
Of Films, Finales, and Farewells
I really need to spend some quality time putting together a longer “Bullet Points” post of news briefs. But for now, as I am in the midst of other projects, here are a few short items of interest.
• Lyndsay Faye’s brand-new book, Jane Steele, has been acquired by Chris Columbus’ 1492 Pictures with the intent of turning it into a big-screen picture. Deadline Hollywood explains: “Inspired by Charlotte Bronte’s classic Jane Eyre, Faye’s novel is a piece of historical fiction that tells the story of Jane Steele, a fresh and determined Victorian orphan, who—unlike her idol Jane Eyre—does not accept her lot in life without a fight. Fiercely intelligent and resourceful, Steele is forced to resort to extreme measures to make sure that life turns out the way she needs it to. The reimagining of Jane Eyre as a serial killer is a humdinger of a potential lead role for a major actress. No word yet on who’s adapting this one, but the world surely is fertile for a mischievous mind.”
• Until today, I had no idea that Isaac Asimov’s 1954 science fiction/detective novel, The Caves of Steel, was adapted for British television more than 50 years ago. Elizabeth Foxwell features a few “tantalizing (if low-budget) clips” in her blog.
• A trio of mystery and suspense novels are among the winners of this year’s Benjamin Franklin Awards, given out by the Independent Book Publishers Association. Those works are: The Fame Equation, by Lisa Wysocky (Cool Titles); The Lost Concerto, by Helaine Mario (Oceanview); and Method 15/33, by Shannon Kirk (Oceanview).
• From B.V. Lawson’s In Reference to Murder comes this intriguing tidbit: “Writer-director Michael Mann has made a deal to launch Michael Mann Books. The imprint will generate a series of novels with a stable of writers, with the properties to simultaneously be developed for film and television. Mann will look through his own long list of credits for ideas, placing high priority on a prequel novel dealing with the principal characters of Heat, Mann’s seminal crime thriller. The prequel novel will cover the formative years of homicide detective Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino), Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro), Chris Shihirles (Val Kilmer), McCauley’s accomplice Nate (Jon Voight), and other characters from the 1995 film.”
• One more from In Reference to Murder: “Amazon announced that Ripper Street will end after its fifth season, which recently began filming in Dublin. In the final season, Joseph Mawle (In the Heart of the Sea) rejoins the series as the feared Detective Inspector Jedediah Shine, intent on a mission of revenge after last being seen in the series two finale when Inspector Reid (Matthew Macfadyen) plotted with Drake (Jerome Flynn) to take Shine’s life.”
• New Zealand crime-fiction watcher Craig Sisterson notes on Facebook that Ngaio Marsh Award-winning Wellington author Neil Cross was recently nominated for a BAFTA (British Academy Television Craft Awards) commendation in the TV drama-writing category, thanks to his work on the acclaimed series Luther. Unfortunately, Cross’ competition in that category includes Peter Straughan, who scripted the historical miniseries Wolf Hall.
• In a Guardian story about the pseudonymous novelist Elena Ferrante (My Brilliant Friend, etc.), John Dugdale mentions “the semi-reclusive crime writer Josephine Tey [The Daughter of Time], who was only linked to her birth name (Elizabeth Mackintosh) posthumously. Friends who attended her funeral in 1952 thought they were mourning Gordon Daviot, another of her pseudonyms, and that was who the Times recorded as having been buried.” I’d never heard that before.
• Neither of these films has anything to do with crime fiction, but they still look like fun: Special Correspondents, a Netflix pic starring Ricky Gervais and Eric Bana, slated to begin streaming on April 29; and Love & Friendship, a big-screen adaptation of Jane Austen’s 1871 epistolary novel, Lady Susan, that stars the ever-captivating Kate Beckinsale and is set to debut in the States on May 13.
• Finally, a sad good-bye to Joe Santos, the Brooklyn-born actor whose most memorable TV role may have been that of beleaguered Los Angeles cop Dennis Becker in The Rockford Files. Small-screen watchers might also have spotted Santos in Barnaby Jones, The Streets of San Francisco, Lou Grant, Hill Street Blues, Magnum, P.I., and The Sopranos. (A full list of his performance credits is here.) Santos died of a heart attack on March 18. He was 84 years old.
• Lyndsay Faye’s brand-new book, Jane Steele, has been acquired by Chris Columbus’ 1492 Pictures with the intent of turning it into a big-screen picture. Deadline Hollywood explains: “Inspired by Charlotte Bronte’s classic Jane Eyre, Faye’s novel is a piece of historical fiction that tells the story of Jane Steele, a fresh and determined Victorian orphan, who—unlike her idol Jane Eyre—does not accept her lot in life without a fight. Fiercely intelligent and resourceful, Steele is forced to resort to extreme measures to make sure that life turns out the way she needs it to. The reimagining of Jane Eyre as a serial killer is a humdinger of a potential lead role for a major actress. No word yet on who’s adapting this one, but the world surely is fertile for a mischievous mind.”
• Until today, I had no idea that Isaac Asimov’s 1954 science fiction/detective novel, The Caves of Steel, was adapted for British television more than 50 years ago. Elizabeth Foxwell features a few “tantalizing (if low-budget) clips” in her blog.
• A trio of mystery and suspense novels are among the winners of this year’s Benjamin Franklin Awards, given out by the Independent Book Publishers Association. Those works are: The Fame Equation, by Lisa Wysocky (Cool Titles); The Lost Concerto, by Helaine Mario (Oceanview); and Method 15/33, by Shannon Kirk (Oceanview).
• From B.V. Lawson’s In Reference to Murder comes this intriguing tidbit: “Writer-director Michael Mann has made a deal to launch Michael Mann Books. The imprint will generate a series of novels with a stable of writers, with the properties to simultaneously be developed for film and television. Mann will look through his own long list of credits for ideas, placing high priority on a prequel novel dealing with the principal characters of Heat, Mann’s seminal crime thriller. The prequel novel will cover the formative years of homicide detective Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino), Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro), Chris Shihirles (Val Kilmer), McCauley’s accomplice Nate (Jon Voight), and other characters from the 1995 film.”
• One more from In Reference to Murder: “Amazon announced that Ripper Street will end after its fifth season, which recently began filming in Dublin. In the final season, Joseph Mawle (In the Heart of the Sea) rejoins the series as the feared Detective Inspector Jedediah Shine, intent on a mission of revenge after last being seen in the series two finale when Inspector Reid (Matthew Macfadyen) plotted with Drake (Jerome Flynn) to take Shine’s life.”
• New Zealand crime-fiction watcher Craig Sisterson notes on Facebook that Ngaio Marsh Award-winning Wellington author Neil Cross was recently nominated for a BAFTA (British Academy Television Craft Awards) commendation in the TV drama-writing category, thanks to his work on the acclaimed series Luther. Unfortunately, Cross’ competition in that category includes Peter Straughan, who scripted the historical miniseries Wolf Hall.
• In a Guardian story about the pseudonymous novelist Elena Ferrante (My Brilliant Friend, etc.), John Dugdale mentions “the semi-reclusive crime writer Josephine Tey [The Daughter of Time], who was only linked to her birth name (Elizabeth Mackintosh) posthumously. Friends who attended her funeral in 1952 thought they were mourning Gordon Daviot, another of her pseudonyms, and that was who the Times recorded as having been buried.” I’d never heard that before.
• Neither of these films has anything to do with crime fiction, but they still look like fun: Special Correspondents, a Netflix pic starring Ricky Gervais and Eric Bana, slated to begin streaming on April 29; and Love & Friendship, a big-screen adaptation of Jane Austen’s 1871 epistolary novel, Lady Susan, that stars the ever-captivating Kate Beckinsale and is set to debut in the States on May 13.
• Finally, a sad good-bye to Joe Santos, the Brooklyn-born actor whose most memorable TV role may have been that of beleaguered Los Angeles cop Dennis Becker in The Rockford Files. Small-screen watchers might also have spotted Santos in Barnaby Jones, The Streets of San Francisco, Lou Grant, Hill Street Blues, Magnum, P.I., and The Sopranos. (A full list of his performance credits is here.) Santos died of a heart attack on March 18. He was 84 years old.
Monday, March 21, 2016
The Talented Mr. Callan
Edward Woodward as David Callan.
By Ali Karim
I recently bumped into my old friend, the reviewer, raconteur, and Shots columnist Mike Ripley. Over glasses of gin, we got to talking about British Golden Age thrillers, a topic in which he is most well-versed. (You will, no doubt, recall that he moderated a CrimeFest panel on that very subject just a couple of years ago.)
In addition to his other responsibilities, Ripley works as a consultant for UK-based Ostara Publishing. So he was delighted to share with me the information that Ostara, under its Top Notch Thrillers imprint, has finally completed its republication of James Mitchell’s Callan series.
Callan, of course, was created as a one-off TV drama in 1967, written by Mitchell. The character of David Callan, a surly but vulnerable and ferociously downbeat professional hit man working for a very dirty section of British Intelligence, struck an instant chord with the viewing public. As portrayed by actor Edward Woodward (later to star in The Equalizer), Callan went on to feature in a four-season ITV series (1967-1972), plus a 1974 theatrical film and a 1981 TV reunion movie, some 40 short stories syndicated worldwide in newspapers, and five novels. The opening sequence from Callan is embedded below.
Top Notch editions of the Callan novels began to appear in 2013, and now the fourth and fifth volumes—Smear Job and Bonfire Night—are available in trade-paperback and e-book formats.
First published in 1975, Smear Job is the longest and most densely plotted of the Callan yarns, featuring all the characters Mitchell created for “The Section,” his fictional (one can only hope!) government agency dealing in surveillance, blackmail, and even the assassination of anyone deemed to be a threat to national security. Callan’s sidekick Lonely, the cowardly and often pungent professional burglar, plays a key role here, as do Spencer Purceval FitzMaurice and Toby Meres. Even Section chief “Colonel Hunter” finds himself “in the field” as the story moves along at Mitchell’s typically lightning pace, transporting readers from Sicily to the London ganglands, Las Vegas to Mexico, and Cold War West Germany to England’s deserted Suffolk coast.
Bonfire Night, the fifth and final entry in Mitchell’s series, was written more than 25 years later and published in 2002, the year of the author’s death. It has been out of print for the last 13 years and, with no previous paperback edition, rapidly became the most sought-after of the Callan yarns. The new Top Notch edition comes with a specially composed Introduction by the author’s son, Peter Mitchell,
that describes the extraordinary circumstances under which Bonfire Night was written.To quote series editor Ripley: “Since the Top Notch Thrillers imprint was established in 2009 to revive and republish great British thrillers, we have had many requests from readers to reissue Bonfire Night—the ‘lost Callan’—far more than for any other title, and we are now proud to so. After long consultation with the author’s son, Peter, I have kept editing to the bare minimum so that dedicated Callan fans can read this … coda to the Callan saga as the author intended. It is something of a ‘difficult’ book as Mitchell tried to merge a typically serpentine plot with major developments in the lives of his main characters. Callan is now rich, in danger of falling in love, and living in retirement in his own personal castle in Spain, and the new Hunter heading the Section is a woman. The seismic character change, though, is for Lonely, who has (thanks to a prison education course) become a computer genius and software millionaire!
“But if the world of Callan seems to have turned upside down, he still finds himself having to deal with old enemies (including a vicious ex-Stasi villain who tortured Callan in East Berlin back in the day) and treacherous former allies. But he does so with all the ruthless efficiency of the Callan of old.”
Other Callan titles by James Mitchell from Ostara Publishing are:
• A Magnum for Schneider, (aka A Red File for Callan, 1969)
• Russian Roulette (1973)
• Death and Bright Water (1974)
• Callan Uncovered and Callan Uncovered 2, featuring short stories as well as scripts
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