Going for the Silver

Just when you thought an end had finally come to announcements involving contenders for assorted annual crime, mystery, and thriller fiction prizes … here comes another one. With only a few days yet to go before the start of this year’s Killer Nashville conference (to be held August 18-21 in Nashville, Tennessee), organizers of that event have disseminated their list of contenders for the 2016 Silver Falchion Awards. There are 20 categories of finalists for these commendations—too many to list here. But below are the first two.

Best Fiction Adult Book:
• Hard Latitudes, by Baron R. Birtcher (Permanent Press)
• The Raping of Ava Desantis, by Mylo Carbia (Rockefeller)
• The Wild Inside, by Christine Carbo (Atria)
• Trust No One, by Paul Cleave (Atria)
• Go Down Hard, by Craig Faustus Buck (Brash)
• As Night Falls, by Jenny Milchman (Ballantine)
• One Tenth of the Law, by Ray Peden (Williams Printing)
• The Dead Key, by D.M. Pulley (Thomas & Mercer)
• The Ripper Gene, by Michael Ransom (Forge)
• Done in One, by Jan Thomas and Grant Jerkins (Thomas Dunne)
• Prince of the Blue Castles, by Timothy Vincent (W&B)

Best Fiction First Novel:
• One Murder More, by Kris Calvin (Inkshares)
• The Wild Inside, by Christine Carbo (Atria)
• The Mind of God, by Bevan Frank (Elm Park)
• The Ripper Gene, by Michael Ransom (Forge)

Again, you can find the complete list of prize nominees here. The winners in each category will be declared during an awards banquet this coming Saturday, August 20.

Elevating E-books

Three e-books have been identified as finalists for the inaugural Mysterious Press Award. As explained by a news release, this prize “was established as a contest for a mystery novel to be published as Best E-Book Original by MysteriousPress.com and distributed in the United States and Canada by Open Road Integrated Media and published world-wide.” Here’s the trio of contenders:

• Alibi, by Lee Goodman (represented by Janet Reid)
• The Downside, by Mike Cooper (represented by Janet Reid)
• Bright Like Blood, by Leigh C. Rourks (represented by
Larry Kirshbaum)

Otto Penzler, who serves as the president and CEO of MysteriousPress.com, is quoted in that same release as saying: “As electronic publishing has become a significant element of the publishing world, we decided to recognize an outstanding work of mystery fiction by offering a substantial advance and a great opportunity for world-wide recognition. We had an extraordinary array of outstanding crime novels submitted for the contest and will be thrilled to publish whichever one is chosen as the winner.”

The victorious entry will score its author $25,000, an advance against future royalties. And the announcement of a winner will be made during the 2016 Frankfurt Book Fair (October 19-23).

Copycat Covers: In the Hood

A new entry in our series about remarkably look-alike book fronts.



Yours Until Death, by Gunnar Staalesen (Arcadia, 2011);
and The Son, by Jo Nesbø (Knopf, 2014).

The Scandi Man Can

I’ve been curious to learn more about the work of Norwegian detective novelist Gunnar Staalesen ever since reading this piece in Crime Fiction Lover, in which noted UK critic Barry Forshaw identified his “top 10 Nordic classics”—one of which is Staalesen’s The Consorts of Death (released in an English-language translation in 2009). Only recently, I was sent a copy of Where Roses Never Die (Orenda), the 19th installment in Staalesen’s series featuring Varg Veum, a committed, compassionate private eye on the order of Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer. You can read my critique of that novel today on the Kirkus Reviews Web site.

When Bad Is Good

This is far from the first time I’ve written on this page about the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, which asks contestants to submit the worst (i.e., funniest and most outlandish) opening sentences from never-to-be-finished books. Yet the task never ceases to raise a smile on my face. As Neatorama explains, “The annual contest is named for Victorian novelist Edward George Earle Bulwer-Lytton, who once began a book with the phrase ‘It was a dark and stormy night …’ and cemented those words as a writing cliché.” 2016 marks the 34th year for this bad-writing challenge, sponsored by the English Department at California’s San Jose State University.

Fifty-five-year-old Tallahassee, Florida, building contractor William “Barry” Brockett has been declared the overall winner of this year’s competition. His submission bears a distinctly hard-boiled air:

Even from the hall, the overpowering stench told me the dingy caramel glow in his office would be from a ten-thousand-cigarette layer of nicotine baked on a naked bulb hanging from a frayed wire in the center of a likely cracked and water-stained ceiling, but I was broke, he was cheap, and I had to find her.

The winner in the Crime/Detective category is Charles Caldwell of Leesville, Louisiana, who sent in this entry:

She walked toward me with her high heels clacking like an out-of-balance ceiling fan set on low, smiling as though about to spit pus from a dental abscess, and I knew right away that she was going to leave me feeling like I had used a wood rasp to cure my hemorrhoids.

But I am also rather fond of Akron, Ohio, resident Andrew Caruso’s “Dishonorable Mention” recipient in that same category:

As he gazed at Ming’s lifeless body draped over the sushi bar, chopsticks protruding from his back, Det. Herc Lue Perrot came to the sobering realization that tonight, there had been a murder at the Orient Express.

And I got an especially big chuckle out of the winner in the Purple Prose category, which comes from Rachel Nirenberg of Toronto, Canada:

She was like my ex-girlfriend Ashley, who'd stolen my car, broken my heart, murdered my father, robbed a bank, and set off a pipe bomb in Central Park—tall.

Click here to enjoy all of this year’s winners and runners-up.

Revue of Reviewers, 8-10-16

Critiquing some of the most interesting recent crime, mystery, and thriller releases. Click on the individual covers to read more.

Well, Lookee Here!

I’ve recently made three new additions to The Rap Sheet’s YouTube page—all of them the main title sequences from TV crime series.

Click here to see the opening from Private Eyes, a recently debuted Canadian comedy-drama starring Jason Priestley as Matt Shade, a former hockey player, and Cindy Sampson as feisty Angie Everett, who go into business together as Toronto private investigators. Or look here for the intro from K-Ville, an under-appreciated 2007-2008 FOX-TV crime drama led by Anthony Anderson and Cole Hauser as cops working the recently Hurricane Katrina-flooded streets of New Orleans. And go over here to watch the main titles from the 1974 ABC-TV series Chopper One, which featured Jim McMullan and Dirk Benedict as members of a California police helicopter team.

Multiple Millars

I’ve been experiencing Internet problems all day long, which seem to be associated with my service provider, rather than with my own computer or its connection. I have had online access only sporadically. Having now found a window onto the Web, let me toss up here a couple of things. First of all, this note from In Reference to Murder:

New imprint Syndicate Books is publishing the complete works of MWA [Mystery Writers of America] Grandmaster Margaret Millar, with a special offer for readers: you can pre-order the series and receive each book one month before its on-sale date. Order now and receive one book every two months, or order at any point later and receive all released volumes and then the rest as they publish.

This looks like a wonderful, seven-volume paperback set, featuring all 26 of Millar’s novels, plus her 1968 memoir, The Birds and the Beasts Were There. The price: an apparently discounted $99.99.

Copycat Covers: Shadow Play

A new entry in our series about remarkably look-alike book fronts.



The Final Page of Baker Street: The Exploits of Mr. Sherlock Holmes, Dr. John H. Watson, and Master Raymond Chandler, by Daniel D. Victor (MX Publishing, 2014); and Masters of the “Humdrum” Mystery: Cecil John Charles Street, Freeman Wills Crofts, Alfred Walter Stewart, and the British Detective Novel, 1920-1961, by Curtis Evans (McFarland, 2012).

Make Your Reservations Now

Private Eye Writers of America founder Robert J. Randisi has let me know that tickets are now on sale for this year’s PWA Shamus Awards Banquet, which is to be held on September 16, during Bouchercon in New Orleans. The banquet will begin at 6:30 p.m. at the Pere Marquette Hotel in the French Quarter (817 Common Street) and last until 9 p.m. Tickets are priced at $60 per person. For more information, contact Randisi at RRandisi@aol.com.

Should you require a reminder of which books and authors are in contention for the various Shamus Awards this year, simply click here.

If memory serves, this will be my fifth Shamus Awards Banquet, following last year’s event in Raleigh, North Carolina. They’re always welcoming and often humorous affairs, and provide close contact with some of the most notable crime-fiction authors. Last year, for instance, I was seated one table away from Lawrence Block, and Steve Hamilton was right behind me. Great company, indeed.

Double-Dipping for Davids

As was the case last year, when the competition for the Deadly Ink Mystery Conference’s David Award ended in a tie (with Jeff Markowitz’s Death and White Diamonds and Steven Rigolosi’s The Outsmarting of Criminals sharing the honors), the 2016 David goes to a pair of novels: Big Shoes, by Jack Getze (Down & Out), and Forgiving Mariela Camacho, by A.J. Sidransky (Berwick Court). The winners were announced earlier this evening in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

Also in the running for the 2016 David Award were Ornaments of Death, by Jane K. Cleland (Minotaur); What You See, by Hank Phillippi Ryan (Forge); and Pretty Girls, by Karin Slaughter (Morrow).

The annual David Award is named after David G. Sasher Sr., a New Jersey resident who passed away back in 2006 at age 66, after working on the Deadly Ink convention.

And the Links Keep Coming

I don’t usually compile posts filled with crime-fiction-related links in such close succession, but since yesterday’s lengthy wrap-up, I have run across enough of what I think are interesting items around the Web that they justify this follow-up. So here goes …

• Mike Ripley’s August “Getting Away with Murder” column for Shots includes notes about the recent Heffers of Cambridge crime-fiction summer party, classic works by Fergus Hume and Anna K. Green, Ostara Publishing’s reprints of Frank McAuliffe novels, and forthcoming books from Rod Reynolds, Ray Celestin, Steven Price, Paul Doherty, and numerous others. Oh, and Ripley brings the most welcome news, that The Callan File, by Robert Fairclough and Mike Kenwood—“the long-awaited definitive guide” to the 1967-1972 UK TV series Callan, starring Edward Woodward—will become available in September courtesy of Quoit Media.

• Having mentioned Ray Celestin, I should also note that his excellent first novel, The Axeman’s Jazz (published last year in the States as simply The Axeman), “has been optioned for television by independent film production company See-Saw Films,” according to The Bookseller. Celestin’s sequel, Dead Man’s Blues (Mantle), is scheduled for release in Great Britain on August 11. So far, though, I don’t see any U.S. publication date for that second book.

• In other TV production news, Deadline Hollywood reports that L.A. Law co-creator Steven Bochco has finally agreed to try rebooting that 1986-1994 NBC-TV series for FOX. Bochco says he “probably will have a script ready in October, in time for next pilot season.”

• Actor Richard Boone is better remembered for his lead roles in the television series Have Gun—Will Travel and Hec Ramsey. But in 1972 he starred with Michael Dunn (who had played Dr. Miguelito Loveless in The Wild Wild West) and Barbara Bain (from Mission: Impossible) in an ABC-TV movie titled Goodnight, My Love. Set in 1946 Los Angeles, that drama found Boone and Dunn playing gumshoe partners Frank Hogan and Arthur Boyle, and Bain filling the elegant heels of a femme fatale. The Thrilling Detective Web Site describes the picture as “a well-done little private-eye flick …, not quite the Maltese Falcon spoof it claims, but still great fun,” while author (and former president of the Private Eye Writers of America) Dick Lochte includes Hogan and Boyle on his list of the top 20 TV private eyes. Chuck Rothman’s recent post in Great but Forgotten praises Goodnight, My Love’s dialogue as having “just the right amount of cynicism and the same worldview as [Raymond] Chandler,” and its cast as “perfect.” I didn’t see the teleflick when it was originally broadcast, but I did catch up with it years later. I recall it as being slow-paced at times, but still amusing and rife with period color. Watch Goodnight, My Love for yourself, beginning here. Below, I’ve posted the film’s opening segment.



• With the 2016 Summer Olympics having kicked off yesterday in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, it’s worth revisiting this list of Olympics-related crime novels from Janet Rudolph’s Mystery Fanfare blog.

• Meanwhile, Bouchercon 2016 is gearing up for its September 15-18 run in New Orleans. So Jon Jordan, the co-editor of Crimespree Magazine, decided to ask a bunch of authors and critics who’ve attended Bouchercons in the past why they “love” this annual gathering of crime, mystery, and thriller fiction enthusiasts.

• Since Bouchercon attendees will be asked to select the winner of this year’s Macavity Award for short fiction, it was a good idea to posts links to spots on the Web where people can read that the nominated yarns in advance of the conference’s start.

• As part of the Third Annual British Invaders Blogathon, orchestrated by Terence Towles Canote of A Shroud of Thoughts, a new-to-me blog called The Flapper Dame extols the virtues of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1935 film, The 39 Steps.

• Why reading might make you carsick …

• … but can also help you live longer!

• Blogger Kate Jackson asked some of her fellow Golden Age of Crime enthusiasts to respond to the question of which classic author they most wish could have “written one more book.” The answers range from Dorothy L Sayers and Clayton Rawson to Ianthe Jerrold and Hugh Wheeler. Strangely, nobody suggested Raymond Chandler, who would have been my No. 1 choice. Dashiell Hammett, Rex Stout, Ellery Queen, and James M. Cain go equally unmentioned.

• Although he’s disappointed in some production values, Steve Aldous, author of The World of Shaft, is pleased to see Ernest Tidyman’s John Shaft stories being reissued by Dynamite Entertainment. The recent republication of Shaft, he observes, is “the first time the novel [which introduced Tidyman’s series] has been available in a new print [version] in the U.S. since the 1970s.”

• Back in 2000, author Tom Nolan reviewed Hugh Merrill’s The Red Hot Typewriter: The Life and Times of John D. MacDonald for January Magazine, declaring that an “interesting, dimensional, and focused portrait of [MacDonald] fails to emerge” from its pages. Fortunately, Steve Scott, who writes the MacDonald-obsessed blog The Trap of Solid Gold, says that a new version of that biography, from Stark House Press, “represents a significant improvement over Merrill’s original work, with additional material added and many of the author’s original errors corrected. I know this because I was involved with the editing of the new edition and made many of the corrections myself, in addition to editing and amending the book’s bibliography. I came late to the project but, thanks to the miracle of this age of computers, was able to get my contributions included just under the wire. This will be a book that everyone interested in the life and works of John D MacDonald should own.” Hmm. That means I’ll have to pair a copy of this Stark House edition with the original one I already own. So much for efforts to clear some space on my crime-fiction shelves …

• Mike Nevins writes about Georges Simenon’s early novels.

• Here’s a preview of the cover of The Day I Died, Lori Rader-Day’s third novel, following Little Pretty Things. It’s due out next April.

• “You cannot help liking [Ian] Fleming,” reads a 1969 diary entry by actor Richard Burton, who was once considered for the film role of British spy James Bond. “He is so obviously enjoying the creation of his extroverted, Hemingway-esque, sadistic, sexually-maniacal boy-scout that in the end he becomes likable.”

Bullet Points: Frenzied Friday Edition

• This weekend promises to bring the annual Deadly Ink Mystery Conference to New Brunswick, New Jersey. The August 5-7 event will feature Reed Farrel Coleman as guest of honor, and Hilary Davidson as toastmaster. Blogger Les Blatt explains that “events [are scheduled] from Friday through the middle of the day Sunday. Friday night, after opening ceremonies, there’s a ‘Deadly Desserts’ party—always a highlight of the conference. Saturday and Sunday, there are entertaining and informative panels with mystery authors and fans talking about a variety of mystery-related topics. There’s a buffet lunch on Saturday; Saturday night, there’s an awards banquet, and on Sunday there’s a brunch. Mystery readers do eat well.” During that Saturday banquet he mentions, the 2016 David Award will be handed out to one of five deserving authors.

• The publication late last week of the panel/events schedule for next month’s Bouchercon in New Orleans, Louisiana (September 15-18) has provoked crime-fiction bloggers to begin announcing what they intend to do during the conference. Peter Rozovsky of Detectives Beyond Borders, for instance, reports that he’ll moderate an early Thursday panel discussion focusing on “Lesser Known Writers of the Pulp and Paperback Original Eras” (which will include Patti Abbott among its speakers), while Kristopher Zgorski of BOLO Books says he’ll host a Wednesday evening “wine/lemoncello event to thank all the authors and fans who [have] supported BOLO Books during its early years.” In that same post, Zgorski cites a variety of panel presentations and other events that he’s “most excited about.”

• R.I.P., Jack Davis. The Georgia-born cartoonist, who became famous for his movie-poster art (It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, The Bank Shot, The Long Goodbye, etc.) and his easily recognizable caricatures in Mad magazine (illustrations that made my father a fan), died on July 27 at age 91. The Spy Command has information about Davis’ comical salutes to TV spy shows here.

• TV and film actor David Huddleston has passed away in Santa Fe, New Mexico, according to Deadline Hollywood. Most of his obituaries mention Huddleston’s roles in The Big Lebowski, Blazing Saddles, and the 1975 film adaptation of Alistair MacLean’s Breakheart Pass, as well as his appearances on small-screen series such as Petrocelli, The West Wing, Gilmore Girls, The Wonder Years, and Murder, She Wrote. But I recall him best from the 1973-1974 NBC Wednesday Mystery Movie series Tenafly, on which he played Lieutenant Sam Church opposite James McEachin’s happily married private eye, Harry Tenafly. Huddleston died on August 2, six weeks short of his 86th birthday.

• Good-bye, too, to Clue/Cluedo’s Mrs. White.

• Thanks to a closed fan group on Facebook called The Busted Flush, I now know that NBC-TV was seriously planning in 1971 to produce a “World Premiere Movie” based on John D. MacDonald’s 1965 Travis McGee novel, A Deadly Shade of Gold. The site links to this piece from the Chicago Tribune, which explains how NBC imagined its film spawning a TV series, but MacDonald wasn’t so optimistic. He’s quoted in the Tribune article complaining about cheapskate Hollywood types who refuse to spend enough money to get high-quality scripts. Needless to say, the teleflick A Deadly Shade of Gold was never made. To date, only two films based on MacDonald’s McGee yarns have been produced: the 1970 Rod Taylor picture Darker Than Amber (which you can watch in its entirety on YouTube), and a 1973 small-screen movie/pilot starring Sam Elliott, titled simply Travis McGee, based on MacDonald’s The Empty Copper Sea (1978). Plans to adapt the first McGee novel, 1964’s The Deep Blue Good-by, into a big-screen picture starring Christian Bale were delayed at the very least as a result of a knee injury Bale sustained last year.

• Yes, I too was surprised to learn that His Bloody Project, an “ingenious” psychological crime thriller by Scottish writer Graeme Macrae Burnet, was among the 13 novels shortlisted for this year’s Man Booker Prize. Good luck, Mr. Burnet!

• From In Reference to Murder: “The Detection Club will publish in November a new collection of short stories, Motives for Murder, to celebrate the 80th birthday of one of the Club’s most distinguished members, Peter Lovesey. The book will be published in Britain as a paperback original by Little, Brown and in the U.S. (with a limited hardback edition as well) by Crippen & Landru. Each of the nineteen stories and one sonnet was written specially for the book, with each prefaced by a few words from the author about Peter’s contribution to the genre. Contributors include Ann Cleeves, Andrew Taylor, Len Tyler, Michael Ridpath, [and] Liza Cody.” A foreword to this volume was penned by “the legendary Len Deighton.”

• Happy fifth anniversary to Crime Fiction Lover!

• Steve Thompson of Booksteve’s Library reminds us that July 30 marked half a century since the release of Batman, the big-screen picture based on the 1966-1968 ABC-TV series of that same name starring Adam West and Burt Ward. I well remember seeing that campy feature in a drive-in theater as a small boy, my parents having wheeled my brother and me out for an evening of POW!, WHAM!, and ZOWIE! Click here to watch a trailer for the movie. National Public Radio’s Monkey See blog has more to say more about this anniversary.

• The Spy Command gets all nostalgic about 2015 as “The Year of the Spy,” a designation greatly bolstered by the release last August of Guy Ritchie’s underappreciated film, The Man from U.N.C.L.E.

• August 3 marked singer Tony Bennett’s 90th birthday! When I was a kid, and my parents played Bennett’s music on the stereo, I thought it was so corny. But something about being an adult has made everything he sings much more charming. Hard to believe that my parents were right about his music all along …

• The Hollywood Reporter brings the news that Benedict Cumberbatch of the BBC One series Sherlock “will star in and produce a film adaptation of Rogue Male, the 1939 survivalist thriller by Geoffrey Household” about “a hunter who attempts to assassinate a dictator but is caught, tortured, and left for dead.”

• Editor-author Vince Keenan offers this postmortem of Seattle, Washington’s recent Noir City film festival (July 22-28). “After a hiatus of almost two and a half years …,” he writes, “the return engagement on Capitol Hill was a success, with solid crowds every night for a week. The theme this go-round was Film Noir from A to B: double-bills that moved chronologically through the 1940s, pairing prestige pictures with shorter, grittier productions to re-create the movie-going experience of the era.”

• A couple of good recent lists from The Strand Magazine’s Web site: Author Anne Frasier selected what she claims are the “Top 10 Investigators with Dark Pasts,” while writer-editor Maxim Jakubowski picks “10 Overlooked Modern Crime Novels,” one of which is 1993’s Tony and Susan, by Austin Wright—a novel about which he commented at greater length in The Rap Sheet a few years back.

• Speaking of lists (and don’t we often do so?), Book Riot’s rundown of “100 Must-Read New York City Novels” includes Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn, Caleb Carr’s The Alienist, Lyndsay Faye’s The Gods of Gotham, and more than a few other mystery novels.

• More than 15 recognizable women mystery writers are set to participate in the third annual Ladies of Intrigue event, which will take place on Sunday, October 2, in Huntington Beach, California. Leading the list of speakers will be Agatha Award winner Carolyn Hart and Robin Burcell, the co-author—with Clive Cussler—of Pirate and the author of The Last Good Place, a 2015 work continuing the Al Krug/Casey Kellog police procedural series created by Carolyn Weston. Also set to take part are Lisa Brackmann, Kate Carlisle, Earlene Fowler, Naomi Hirahara, and others. Registration info is available here.

• Cable-TV network Cinemax has set Friday, September 9, as the debut date for Quarry, its new TV series based on Max Allan Collins’ novels about a peripatetic hit man. The eight-episode first season stars Logan Marshall-Green, Jodi Balfour, and Peter Mullan.

• Meanwhile, the espionage drama Berlin Station, created by spy novelist Olen Steinhauer, is being readied for an October 16 launch. Double O Section offers a trailer for the 10-episode opening season.

• Finally, a handful of interviews worthy of your attention: Crimespree Magazine’s Elise Cooper talks with Linda Castillo about the latter’s new novel, Among the Wicked; Amy Gentry chats with Kirkus Reviews’ Rachel Sugar about Good as Gone; Polish fictionist Zygmunt Miloszewski answers questions from Crime Fiction Lover about Rage; and Scott Montgomery from the Austin, Texas, bookshop MysteryPeople, grills Megan Abbott (You Will Know Me), Bill Loehfelm (Let the Devil Out), and Alison Gaylin (What Remains of Me).

Revue of Reviewers, 8-3-16

Critiquing some of the most interesting recent crime, mystery, and thriller releases. Click on the individual covers to read more.

Long Road to the Big Easy

Well, now I’ve gone and done it: registered to attend Bouchercon 2016 in New Orleans. For months, I had been thinking I might take a pass on the convention this year. But then again, it is taking place in one of my favorite cities in the world, where I can dine on some of the best beignets, gumbo, and hushpuppies around. And there will be a number of authors attending who I’d very much like to see, including Robert Wilson, Martin Edwards, Patti Abbott, Megan Abbott, James Sallis, Steve Hamilton, Kelli Stanley, Max Allan Collins and Barbara Collins, Art Taylor, Lori Rader-Day, and J. Robert Janes. And I did find a screamin’ deal on a hotel in the city’s Arts/Warehouse District. And the next few Bouchercons will be held in places I find less interesting (Toronto, Dallas, St. Petersburg), so I can always skip those instead.

All of which led me to finally plunk down my $185 and sign up. I won’t be participating in any panel discussions, by my own choice (I lack anything approaching public-speaking skills), but I shall be attending as many convention events as I can … when I am not out and about in the French Quarter or elsewhere in New Orleans, soaking up the atmosphere and downing the local cuisine.

It should be fun! I hope to see a few Rap Sheet readers there.

Crider’s Care Continues Apace

To follow up on what I wrote last Thursday about author Bill Crider’s health problems, here’s an update he posted today in his blog:

I’m still here. I saw my doctor at the [University of Texas] M.D. Anderson [Cancer Center], and she’s still very optimistic. There have been some complications, but she wasn’t as concerned about them as I am. I’ve had the first in a series of shots, and I’ll be starting chemo in about a month or a month and a half. My daughter, Angela, has been here through all of this, and I couldn’t have made it without her. She’ll be going back to California soon, and I’ll have to see how I can make it on my own for a while. If things don’t go well, my son or my sister can come. I think I’ll be fine, though. I hope to ease back into blogging later in the week. We’ll see how it goes.

Sadly, when I asked him whether he’d be attending next month’s Bouchercon in New Orleans, as previously planned, Bill responded, “I’d hoped to, but it’s highly doubtful.”

Angels Rise Again?

Seriously, there’s another Charlie’s Angels reboot on the way? In Reference to Murder’s B.V. Lawson reports that “Sony has lined up Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Auburn to pen the latest incarnation of the Charlie’s Angels franchise, to be directed by Elizabeth Banks. It might seem an odd choice to tackle a franchise that began as a TV showcase for bikini-clad detectives in the 1970s, but the move is strategic on the part of Sony and Banks, who are seeking rich, fully developed characters and not just pretty faces plugged into action, or as Hollywood Reporter put it, ‘less ass, more class.’”

McFetridge Sows Crime Among His Roots

If I’m correct, the first time I met Toronto, Ontario-based crime-fictionist John McFetridge was during the 2008 Bouchercon in Baltimore, when we gathered together with way too many other people in an auditorium to see editor-bookseller Otto Penzler interview writer Dennis Lehane on stage. As it happens, I had packed along for that trip a copy of McFetridge’s third novel, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, but hadn’t read much of it by the time I met its author, so I hoped he wouldn’t ask my opinion of the work. (Which he did not.)

I didn’t return to his fiction until 2014, when the first of his Eddie Dougherty mysteries, Black Rock, saw print. With its unusual setting of 1970s Montreal, Quebec, and its stripped-down, dialogue-heavy style, the novel struck me as something rather special. I wrote in a spring books wrap-up for Kirkus Reviews that McFetridge was “still looking for a ‘breakout book,’” and added hopefully: “With its well-etched family drama and dynamic historical background Black Rock might finally be the one.”

Whether a breakout work or not, Black Rock got me interested in McFetridge’s storytelling in a way that his handful of previous novels had not. I was quick to snap up his second Dougherty yarn, A Little More Free, when it came out in 2015, and asked his publisher to send me a copy of this year’s third series installment, One or the Other, long in advance of its August 9 release date. My hope was to conduct an e-mail interview with McFetridge, which I managed to complete just recently.

The results of our exchange are posted today in two parts. The first segment, focused around One or the Other, fills my new Kirkus column. Part II can be found below. It covers McFetridge’s educational and reading history, his interest in filmmaking, his early Toronto-backdropped novels, parallels between his own life and the Dougherty yarns, and why he chose Montreal—the city of his birth almost 57 years ago (his next birthday is in November)—as his setting for fiction.

J. Kingston Pierce: I’ve read that you attended high schools in Quebec, New Brunswick, and Ontario. What made you such a peripatetic teenager? Was it the result, perhaps, of one of your parents having to move around for work?

John McFetridge: Both my parents worked for the phone company. My father was an installer and my mother was a clerk, so we didn’t move for work. But when I was a teenager in the early 1970s my father had a couple of heart attacks and open-heart surgery. (I used some of those experiences in A Little More Free.) In those days that meant some long hospital stays, and I was the youngest of three kids and the only one still at home (and maybe not the best-behaved kid in the world), so I was sent to live with various relatives while all that worked itself out.

JKP: Are your parents still around?

JM: My father passed away in 1985 but my mom is living in New Brunswick. She had a pretty severe stroke a few years ago.


Author John McFetridge (photo by Jimmy McFetridge)

JKP: Have you been a big reader your whole life? And were you always interested in crime fiction, or is that a more recent interest?

JM: I was not a big reader in high school. I did read a little, but I wasn’t a good student. I was about 10 years old when my older brother [Bobby] joined the RCMP [Royal Canadian Mounted Police], so I was interested in the cop’s life, so to speak. And when I was in high school I did read Joseph Wambaugh’s The Onion Field and The New Centurions and a book called Walking the Beat, by Gene Radano, which stuck with me so I looked it up a little while ago. One of my favorite books that I read in high school was The Super Summer of Jamie McBride [by Christopher S. Wren and Jack Shepherd]. It wasn’t until I was in my 20s that I started to read a lot more.

JKP: How is it that you started out at Quebec’s Concordia University wanting to study economics, but wound up—nine years later—with an English Literature degree? What changed in between? And one can’t help but ask, did it really take you nine years to get through college? Was that because you were working at the same time?

JM: Yes, I was working at the same time. Concordia University in Montreal started out, in the 1920s, as Sir George Williams College, a night school attached to the YMCA. It became Concordia in 1974, but for quite a while it still had a lot of evening classes that made it easy to do a part-time degree. After high school I had gone out west and worked, and then returned to Montreal, and I figured I needed to get some kind of career. I had met a couple of movie producers who were raising money through stock brokers (some of this will be in the next Dougherty book), so I thought I could become a broker and I enrolled in economics. I was wrong.

JKP: Early on, you wanted to be a filmmaker. How and why did you make the transition into penning novels?

JM: As I said, I wasn’t a big reader in high school, and when I was working blue-collar jobs everyone I knew saw movies but not many read novels. So, I thought to get to the audience that was like me, I needed to do it with movies. And I was intimidated by the idea of writing a novel. But when I started taking creative-writing classes and trying to write short stories, I started to realize that [novel writing] was the best way to be able to say everything you want to say. There’s really nothing like a novel to tell a story. And to understand other people. I realized a while ago, for instance, that the best insight I had into my mother and her life was through the stories of Alice Munro; they really gave us a way to talk to each other.

JKP: You went to college back in Montreal, but you now live in Toronto. When did you move to the Ontario capital? Was it before or after attending the Canadian Film Centre there in the early 2000s?

JM: It was before. When my wife and I were married in 1990, she was living in Hamilton, just outside Toronto, and I was in Montreal and we had to decide where to live. I was ready for a change of scenery, I think.

JKP: The first book you saw published was Below the Line, a 2002 short-story collection about filmmaking in Toronto, which you co-authored with Scott Albert. But did you try writing other books before that? Are there as-yet-unpublished John McFetridge novels gathering dust in a drawer somewhere?

JM: Yes, there are a few in the drawer. I haven’t looked at them in a long time, but the Eddie Dougherty series is getting into the 1980s and I wrote a private-eye novel in Montreal in the mid-80s, so I may get it out of the drawer and see if there’s anything I can scavenge.

JKP: Save for that first book, your subsequent ones have been novels published in Canada by small, Toronto-based ECW Press. Did you try selling your work to larger houses? How did you wind up with ECW, and can I assume that’s been a good relationship?

JM: It’s been a very good relationship. I’ve had three different editors at ECW and each one has been excellent and has helped me in different ways. I did have a couple of contracts with American publishers, but the timing was bad. My first two novels, Dirty Sweet and Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, were bought by Harcourt, but it merged with Houghton Miflin just as they were being published, and my novels got lost in the shuffle (they did print a paperback of Dirty Sweet and a hardcover of Everybody Knows with, I think, terrific covers, but I don’t think they ever made it to stores). Then my next two books, Swap and Tumblin’ Dice, were picked up by St. Martin’s, but my editor left just before publication and those books disappeared, too. There is an American version of Swap called Let It Ride [2010] that I see sometimes, but it’s pretty rare.

And I’m very comfortable with ECW. I’m an old guy and I think of indie presses like indie record labels or indie movies. I’m glad I had the experience with Harcourt and St. Martin’s, but I’m very happy to be with ECW.

JKP: Have you given up on selling your books to the big U.S. publishers?

JM: I don’t really know a lot about the business end of things, so if a deal came along I’d certainly look at it, but it isn’t something I’m pursuing.

JKP: You wrote four novels in your so-called Toronto Series. For readers who haven’t yet discovered those books, could you please summarize what you intended to achieve with them?

JM: Toronto is a steadily growing, ever-changing place, and I was really just trying to get to know it myself. Within Canada, Toronto is the city everyone loves to hate because it’s the biggest, and the joke is it thinks of itself as the center of the universe. But within Toronto, of course, not many people really feel a part of the center. A little more than half the population of Toronto was born somewhere else, some in another part of Canada like me, but most in another country.

And I felt then that one of the best ways to see characters in many different and diverse neighborhoods was to follow cops and criminals around. I still feel that way. Criminals, especially in organized crime and drug dealers, often move between richer and poorer neighborhoods and cops go anywhere they’re called.

JKP: Yet, just four books into the Toronto Series, you gave it up. Were you personally ready for a change, or was this something suggested by an agent or publisher?

JM: I was ready for a change. After I wrote Black Rock, Jack David [the co-founder, with Robert Lecker, of] ECW asked if I could write another Eddie Dougherty novel, which was not something I was thinking about doing, but I’m very glad he asked. Then he asked if I would be able to link the series, and I thought I would. There are some characters in the Toronto Series who, like me, moved from Montreal to Toronto, and now I’m very excited about seeing some of those people earlier in their lives [in the Dougherty novels].

JKP: So Black Rock finally moved your attention back to Montreal. You’d been born across the St. Lawrence River, in what was at that time a separate city, Greenfield Park (since merged with Longueuil). Was it useful to have put some distance between you and the Montreal area by the time you started penning the Dougherty mysteries?

JM: Yes, I think it was. And also a little distance [from] my younger self. There’s not much that’s autobiographical in the Toronto Series (except I was arrested, along with everyone else on my shift, as a night-shift cleaner in a department store), but Eddie’s parents live in the house I grew up in and Eddie’s younger brother, Tommy, is exactly my age and going to the high school I went to.

JKP: What is it about Dougherty that made him seek a life in law enforcement?

JM: He didn’t start out looking at it as a life in law enforcement. It started out as not being at another desk in another classroom or at a desk in an office. Like a lot of cops of his age, Dougherty played sports and gave the referee a hard time, but understood that without the refs there wouldn’t be much of a game, and that’s how he saw the cops. As he gets more experience on the job, though, he starts to really appreciate that most of the interaction he has with people is when they are in a time of crisis—maybe minor, like a fender-bender, and maybe major, [as] when a loved one has been killed—and he starts to realize that he has a chance to make a positive difference in these moments.

JKP: You integrate a great deal of history into the Eddie Dougherty books. Has it helped that you lived through the 1970s, so you remember at least the highlights of that era? And when it gets down to re-creating Montreal street scenes, or now-defunct businesses, are you drawing on memory to some degree?

JM: Yes, I’m drawing on a lot of memories. Which is fun now, to reminisce like that, it helps to balance some of the unpleasant things that I research for the books, like the murders of young women or the [1972] nightclub fire.

JKP: Is your historical research mostly a matter of reading old newspapers and other publications?

JM: I do read a lot of old newspapers. And magazines. I try to interview people as much as I can, too. I wish my father was still alive, he spent his whole life in Montreal and a lot of it driving around in a phone company van with ladders on the top going to every neighborhood in the city. Driving with him was an adventure with a running commentary.

JKP: Even after you seemed to become comfortable as a novelist, you went back in 2010 to compose an episode of the Canadian TV crime drama The Bridge. Do you still harbor aspirations as a screenwriter?

JM: Yes, I interviewed for another TV show gig a couple of weeks ago. I still like TV and the big audience reach it has. Plus, writers’ rooms are usually catered and the food is really good.

JKP: Finally, what sort of books do you read these days? Do you read a lot of crime fiction, and if so, who are the writers you prefer?

JM: I just finished Stephen King’s Bill Hodges crime-fiction trilogy and enjoyed it a lot. I do like to read crime fiction and I wouldn’t want to give it up. I really liked Sam Wiebe’s Invisible Dead, a terrific private-eye novel set in Vancouver [British Columbia]. Also I’m reading the Women Crime Writers collection that Sarah Weinman edited and discovering some great writers I hadn’t read.

Also, I read a lot of non-fiction for research, but also for pleasure. Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class, by Jefferson Cowie, is a very good book about the ’70s, and now I’ve started reading about the ’80s. Some of it I’m looking forward to, but some of it I never wanted to think about again.

Losing Lewis

This Sunday evening will introduce PBS Masterpiece Mystery! viewers to the start of the eighth and final season of Inspector Lewis, the popular British-made TV detective drama starring Kevin Whately and Laurence Fox. That first episode, “One for Sorrow,” will be one of three new stories to be shown on successive Sundays.

Inspired by Colin Dexter’s now classic novels about Oxford police detective Endeavour Morse, and a sequel to the earlier Inspector Morse, Inspector Lewis follows the late Morse’s former sergeant, Robert “Robbie” Lewis, as he teams up with a younger cop, Detective Sergeant James Hathaway, to solve new crimes on Morse’s old turf. If you haven’t been keeping up with this usually excellent series, you can find write-ups about past installments on the Criminal Element blog.

Click here to watch previews of all Season 8 episodes.

Copycat Covers: Face to Face

A new entry in our series about remarkably look-alike book fronts.



The Final Seven, by Erica Spindler (Doubleshot Press, 2016); and Fifteen Minutes to Live, by Phoef Sutton (Brash Books, 2015).

(Hat tip to Lee Goldberg.)