And Now It’s the Hammett

Only hours after we finally heard who won the inaugural set of Spinetingler Awards, we’ve received the list of nominees for the 2008 Hammett Prize, given annually by the North American Branch of the International Association of Crime Writers to “a work of literary excellence in the field of crime writing by a U.S. or Canadian author.” The contenders are:

• The Outlander, by Gil Adamson (House of Anansi Press)
• The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, by Michael Chabon (HarperCollins)
• End Games, by Michael Dibdin (Pantheon)
• Dahlia’s Gone, by Katie Estill (St. Martin’s Press)
• Stalin’s Ghost, by Martin Cruz Smith (Simon & Schuster)

A winner is to be announced during the Bloody Words conference to be held in Toronto, Canada, from June 6 to 8.

(Hat tip to Sarah Weinman.)

From Russia with Death

Books preceded by hype usually put me off. And many, if not most, heavily promoted debut works never live up to their public relations budgets. But 2008 is shaping up to be an exceptional year for crime-fiction introductions. First, we had Stieg Larsson’s stunning The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Quercus). Now we have Child 44, by Tom Rob Smith, which I originally heard about only in hushed rumors, spread during last year’s London Book Fair. After the excitement of speaking with Dean Koontz via Margaret Atwood’s LongPen device, though, Smith’s novel slipped my mind.

Then came a post from British literary agent Simon Trewin. He explained that the troubled literary agency PFD, which has lately been in the news almost as much as its authors, had signed the promising Smith to its stable:

PFD fielded a large team in the International Rights Centre with Tom Rob Smith’s thriller CHILD 44 scooping the pool as the hottest book of the fair with a large number of deals being done worldwide. Ridley Scott snapped up the film rights 48 hours before the fair began and PFD’s new Adult Foreign Rights Director, Jessica Craig, and Tom Rob Smith’s literary agent, James Gill, were soon besieged by publishers keen to read and bid for this exceptional debut.

Still, I remained skeptical, if for no other reason than that the previously unknown Smith is a couple of years shy of his 30th birthday. It took a conversation with Lee Child (Bad Luck and Trouble) to make me more optimistic. Child had provided a complimentary blurb for Smith’s first novel (“An amazing debut--rich, different, fully formed, mature ... and thrilling.”), and his enthusiasm for this forthcoming work was infectious.

Well, having now read Child 44, I’m willing to say--oh so subtly--that it is a brilliant debut novel that had me clutching it with both hands as if my life depended on reading it in a single night. (How’s that for subtlety?) What makes this book so bewitching? First of all, its backdrop: the Soviet Union during Joseph Stalin’s cruel 20th-century regime, during which the Russian people were enslaved by poverty and paranoia. This is a most interesting canvas against which to pitch the fictional hunt for a child-murdering serial slayer, because the Soviet state refuses to credit the existence of any such crime amid its Communist nirvana. Secondly, we can’t forget the characters in this tale, especially Leo Demidov, a respected secret policeman, and his wife, Raisa, who find themselves on the wrong end of state politics when the case of a murdered child turns to obsession. They discover that a death on a railway track was not the accident that local authorities concluded. Nor is it an isolated case, for a trail of child murder snakes along the USSR’s railway system, showing the work of a seriously deranged mind, or minds. Finally, Child 44 is remarkable for how Smith portrays the cruelty of the instruments of the state oppressing its people with the threat of the Gulag, and contrasts all of that against the compassion and strength of the human spirit.

In this story loosely based on the case of prolific Russian serial killer Andrei Chikatilo, “the Red Ripper,” we find Leo and Raisa exiled from their privileged home in Moscow to the freezing hinterlands. After an operation to capture a Soviet veterinary surgeon (and suspected spy) goes terribly wrong, Leo finds himself under scrutiny from his superiors, due in large measure to professional jealously on the part of a subordinate, the banally evil Vasili Ilyich Nikitin. The brutality of this book is shocking, but it’s placed into context of the terrible extremes of the Stalinist era. Concealed in the darkness, Smith shows a warmth and insight into the good within people who struggle against tyranny.

Child 44 feels very well researched, but the level of detail is not thrown in your face; rather, it’s painted subtly into the plot, enriching the narrative and giving fresh dimension to the hunt for a serial murderer. At some times this yarn is harrowing, at other times terrifying. And on occasion, it brings you to tears. I was concerned that the ambition of the book’s first half might not be sustained in the second half, but my concerns were for naught. The tension and terror of Child 44 is striated evenly throughout the narrative, all the way till the chilling and satisfying dénouement. This debut work might be looked at as part Martin Cruz Smith, part Thomas Harris, part Robert Harris, with a smattering of George Orwell thrown in. I really do not want to reveal anymore, for fear of spoiling one of this year’s greatest literary treats.

In a piece about Ridley Scott optioning Child 44 for the big screen, Variety reports that Tom Rob Smith’s first novel will not be his last:

Set in Stalinist Russia, [the] storyline revolves around an officer in the secret police who is framed by a colleague for treason. On the run with his emotionally estranged wife, he stumbles upon a series of child killings and launches his own rogue investigation, even though it means risking his own capture.

Scott Free president Michael Costigan and senior VP of production Michael Ellenberg brought in the project. At Fox 2000, Carla Hacken helped drive the deal.

Smith, a Cambridge graduate, has written for several British television shows, including “Doctors” and “Dream Team.” He also penned the story for Cambodia’s first-ever soap opera for the BBC World Service Trust.

Considering that author Smith is British, I’m pleased to see that Child 44 will be published on this side of the Atlantic (by Simon & Schuster) in March, more than a month before it goes on sale in the States (where it’s being published by Grand Central). It will be a nail-biting wait for the Americans, because this debut is one beautifully wild ride. For once, believe the hype.

(Author photo courtesy of C.J. Bauer/Simon & Schuster UK)

A Faustian Bargain

The eminently provocative Christa Faust--the first woman to be featured in Hard Case Crime’s roll-out of pulpy paperbacks (her Money Shot recently reached bookstores)--goes one-on-one with Damien Seaman in an interview for Noir Originals. In it, she talks about the dearth of female noir authors, the exploitation of women for sex, her life as a peepshow girl, and the film trailer she put together to promote Money Shot.

You’ll find their whole exchange here.

Tingle All the Way

This is shaping up to be a big day for author, editor, and blogger Sandra Ruttan. Her new and very diverse network site, At Central Booking, debuts today. As does the Winter 2008 issue of Spinetingler Magazine, which she somehow finds time to manage (although this new issue has been guest-edited by Jack Getze.)

In addition to all of that, Ruttan has today announced the winners of the inaugural Spinetingler Awards. The envelopes, please ...

Best Novel: Legend: What the Dead Know, by Laura Lippman

Also nominated: Cross, by Ken Bruen; Priest, by Ken Bruen; The Tin Roof Blowdown, by James Lee Burke; The Naming of the Dead, by Ian Rankin; and Dust Devils, by James Reasoner

Best Novel: Rising Star: The Cleanup, by Sean Doolittle

Also nominated: The Shotgun Rule, by Charlie Huston; The Ragtime Kid, by Larry Karp; A Perfect Grave, by Rick Mofina; A Thousand Bones, by P.J. Parrish; and Concrete Maze, by Steven Torres

Best Novel: New Voice: Hard Man, by Allan Guthrie

Also nominated: Queenpin, by Megan Abbott; The Big O, by Declan Burke; The 50/50 Killer, by Steve Mosby; Safe and Sound, by J.D. Rhoades; and The Blonde, by Duane Swierczynski

Best Publisher: Bitter Lemon Press

Also nominated: Europa Editions; Hard Case Crime; Poisoned Pen Press; and Text Publishing

Best Cover: Hard Man, by Allan Guthrie (design by Vaughn Andrews; photo from Corbis)

Also nominated: Kill Now, Pay Later, by Robert Terrall (cover painted by Robert McGinnis); The Vengeful Virgin, by Gil Brewer (cover painted by Greg Manchess); Blackmailer, by George Axelrod (cover painted by Glen Orbik); Mr. Clarinet, by Nick Stone (designed by Emily Cavett Taff)

Best Editor: Stacia Decker, Harcourt

Also nominated: Charles Ardai, Hard Case Crime; Alison Janssen, Bleak House; Barbara Peters, Poisoned Pen Press; and Dave Thompson, Busted Flush

Special Services to the Industry: Daniel Hatadi of Crimespace

Also nominated: Ali Karim of Shots and The Rap Sheet; Graham Powell of CrimeSpot; J. Kingston Pierce of The Rap Sheet; Maddy Van Hertburger of 4MA; and Sarah Weinman from Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind

Best Short Story on the Web: “Seven Days of Rain,” by Chris F. Holm (Demolition)

Also nominated: “The Leap,” by Charles Ardai (Hardluck Stories); “Breaking in the New Guy,” by Stephen Blackmoore (Demolition); “Amphetamine Logic,” by Nathan Cain (ThugLit); “The Switch,” by Lyman Feero (ThugLit); “Shared Losses,” by Gerri Leen (Shred of Evidence); “The Living Dead,” by Amra Pajalic (Spinetingler); and “Convivum,” by Kelli Stanley (Hardluck Stories)

“I Never Wanted to Repeat Myself”

We’d previously missed this news. But Mystery*File’s Steve Lewis today draws our attention to a London Times obituary of Philip Freund, an American anthropologist and author who, while certainly best known for penning “a comprehensive, multivolume history of world theatre,” also wrote at least three books that qualify as crime/mystery fiction. Born in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, he was 99 years old.

“A consummate generalist, and one incapable of remaining idle,” the Times observes, “he was not averse to the odd bread-and-butter writing gig in addition to his scholarly and literary efforts.” That “bread-and-butter writing” apparently included The Beholder: Seven Tales for Sebastian Romm (1961), The Devious Ways (1962), and The Spymaster (1965).

Freund died on December 20, 2007, “fully productive up to the last few weeks of [his] life.”

A Life on the Line

I’m intrigued by novels featuring scientists and the dark edges of the medical profession, having enjoyed the works of real-life medics Michael Crichton, Michael Palmer, Tess Gerritsen, and James Rollins, as well the exploits of a certain Dr. Hannibal Lecter. (I guess my own scientific background, coupled with the influence of my retired psychiatrist father, casts a long shadow.) So I was intrigued to receive this week an interesting debut novel from C.J. Lyons titled Lifelines.

I first met Lyons when she was the chairperson of the International Thriller Writers’ inaugural, 2006 ThrillerFest conference in Phoenix, Arizona. She was a great organizer in addition to being a big reader of mystery and thriller fiction. She told me (between rushing from one event to the next) that she was scribbling a piece of fiction in her free time, so I asked her to keep me posted about her own writing.

When I saw Lyons again last summer, during ThrillerFest in New York City, and shared a drink with her and Kristy Montee (one half of the pseudonymous writing duo “P.J. Parrish”), she was excited to tell me about her novel, Lifelines, which had been purchased by Berkley. More recently, Lyons asked me to provide some notes on reading mystery fiction from a reviewer’s perspective, as she was teaching a creative-writing class.

But weren’t we talking about my receiving a review copy of Lifelines? Yes, of course. That book arrived here this week, together with a press release from Berkley that gives a synopsis of Lyons’ tale:

Growing up in L.A., tough-as-nails ER doc Lydia Fiore thought she’d seen everything. When she arrives in Pittsburgh, eager for her first shift as a newly fledged attending physician, she realizes how wrong she is.

During her first days at work, Lydia finds herself embroiled in the murder of a gay-rights activist, targeted by a right-wing militia, stalked by an unknown assailant, and racing to stop a plot to ignite a race riot.

At first Lydia yearns for the mean streets of L.A., but, with the help of her new colleagues and hunky paramedic Trey Garrison, she overcomes her doubts and embraces her new life at Angels of Mercy’s ER.

Written by a physician who has worked in some of the country’s busiest ER’s, C.J. Lyons’ medical suspense series gives readers a taste of life on the edge, reminding them that everyone needs a hero, even doctors and nurses working to save lives.

I could see right away that Lyons’ debut was not a conventional doctors and nurses mystery. So I asked her to tell me how a physician finally found herself in print, and what we might expect from her debut work. Her e-mailed response:

When Berkley asked me to create a new series for them, something edgy and different, medical suspense told through the point of view of the women who worked in an urban trauma center, I was excited by the challenge.

I started by setting Lifelines during the most dangerous day of the year, July 1st. Why is July 1st the most dangerous day of the year? Well, here in the U.S., that’s the day the brand-new interns start work in hospitals, the ink on their medical school diplomas still wet. That also gave me my premise. What if a new doctor working her first day at a new hospital lost the “wrong” patient and couldn’t explain why he died? Then I added a twist. What if a doctor saved the wrong patient and by doing so was targeted by a killer?

Drawing upon my 17 years of practicing medicine as a pediatric emergency room physician and community pediatrician to create Lifelines’ main characters was easy. Trying to create a realistic set of “bad guys” for them to deal with was a lot more difficult.

You see, in real life, most of the villains aren’t highly intelligent, cunning serial killers who spend all their time obsessing over how to torment the police, which obscure red herrings to lay, or how to manipulate victims into walking into their devious traps. No, the killers, rapists, and abusers I’ve dealt were nothing like fictional killers. Instead, they really are “ordinary”--people you’d pass on the street and think nothing of. A few of the more heinous who I’ve had the pleasure to testify against, although unfortunately after children had been harmed or died, were even pillars of the community and leaders of their churches.

So what did these people have in common? What traits could I draw upon for my fictional criminals? The one thing I noted over and over in my dealings with gangbangers, drug addicts, child molesters, physical abusers, sexual predators, and killers (including one who could be labeled a serial killer) was an overwhelming need for self-gratification. These people had all gone [and] built a universe that revolved around them and their needs. When the real world intruded and denied them anything--the right brand of beer when they got home from work, a baby daring to cry and disturb Monday night wrestling, a girl who flaunted her sexuality by walking past but not responding to their crude jeers--they were prepared to respond with violence to get what they wanted.

No exulted codes of honor like Hannibal Lecter (my own favorite “bad guy”), no elaborate, twisted fantasies that consumed them, no intricate meticulously thought-out plans. Merely: I want it, I want it now, and I’m going to get it.

Other people serve as objects, means to achieving their desires. Malignant narcissism. Hard for a writer to find much that a reader could engage with in that kind of character. Hard to make such juvenile thought processes compelling.

But I was determined to make Lifelines as realistic as possible--yet, still keep it entertaining. So I focused on how hard it is to tell the good guys from the bad. How we all are driven by similar motives: family, love, security. And how easy it can be for any of those motives--and any of us--to drift into the realm of obsession. To become that monster who acts for instant self-gratification and sees others as objects to use and abuse.

And how terrifying it is that they look just like the rest of us. But, since I’m building a world where no one is immune to danger, maybe that’s a good thing …

Lifelines isn’t due out until March 4, but an excerpt is already available here. If you like your mysteries flavored with an authentic medical flavor, this book just might be the prescription for you.

Literary Police Blotter

Who says literary sneakiness can’t have a big payout?

In a brazen attempt to attract students to the pleasures of reading by associating classic literature with acts of senseless violence, a professor at a well-known liberal-arts college ran the following log in the pages of the campus newspaper. The local bookstore noted a sudden spike in sales of The Iliad.

The full story is in The Chronicle of Higher Education and it’s here.

(Hat tip to Barbara Fister.)

The End of Her Own Story

Former First Daughter and mystery-fiction author Margaret Truman (aka Margaret Truman Daniel) died earlier today at the age of 83. Her 23rd “Capital Crimes” novel, Murder on K Street, was just released last October. From Reuters:

Daniel, a long-time New York resident, died in a care facility in Chicago from complications from an infection contracted recently, said library director Michael Devine.

After living for decades in the same New York apartment, she moved to Chicago to be closer to the eldest of her four sons, Clifton, Devine said in a telephone interview from the Independence, Missouri, library.

Margaret Truman did not let being the president’s daughter keep her from pursuing first a singing career and then one as a mystery writer that took off after her father’s death in 1972.

It was her singing and his fatherly protection that ignited President [Harry S.] Truman’s well-known temper, leading him to write one of the most famous presidential letters in history.

After Washington Post music critic Paul Hume panned one of her vocal recitals--“Miss Truman cannot sing very well”--Truman responded from the White House that the review was “poppycock” and the critic was a “frustrated old man” who was “off the beam.”

“Some day I hope to meet you,” the president wrote Hume, ignoring the fact the critic had called his daughter “extremely attractive.” “When that happens you’ll need a new nose, a lot of beefsteak for black eyes, and perhaps a supporter below!”

More of the Reuters obit can be found here. The Associated Press has its own take here. And The Washington Post, despite having miscounted the number of her mystery novels Truman saw published during her lifetime, has much to contribute to her story here.

POSTSCRIPT: Coincidentally, today also brings notice of the death of another presidential offspring, Theodora Keogh. The granddaughter of President Theodore Roosevelt (her father was TR’s son Archibald), she gained renown as the author of nine pulpish novels, one of which was The Other Girl (1962), which fictionalized the bizarre 1947 murder of Elizabeth Short, aka the “Black Dahlia.” January Magazine has more on her story here.

The 300

It’s said that more than 300 writers, editors, and bloggers are participating today in Patry Francis Blog Day, supporting the author of The Liar’s Diary (just released in paperback) as she battles cancer. Since she’s unable to go on tour to promote her novel, the crime-fiction community is banding together in this way to help out.

The campaign was organized by fellow writer Laura Benedict (Isabella Moon) and features both a book trailer for The Liar’s Diary and an audio clip from Francis’ story. More on this potentially powerful promotions project can be found here, here, and here.

We wish Ms. Patry well in her difficult struggle.

Welcome to “The Age of Dreaming”

One of the great pleasures of reading is discovering a stunning writer totally unknown to you. It’s very much like the romantic experience: your first thought is “Where has this person been all my life?”

Nina. I’ve just met a writer named Nina. Nina Revoyr. Akashic Books, that wonderful class act run by rock musician Johnny Temple, has sent me a copy of a novel by her called The Age of Dreaming (due out in April). Not only is it a tremendously intriguing book about a fascinating period--the 1910s and ’20s, the golden age of silent movies--but it’s also a superb work of publishing art: French covers (the fold-over sort that provide instant, unloseable bookmarks), an evocative cover photo, and all the trimmings.

Revoyr’s Jun Nakayama was a Japanese actor who became a movie star in Hollywood. He might remind you of Sessue Hayakawa, who appeared as the terrifying prison camp commander in David Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai. Into this mix, Revoyr ladles recognizable chunks from a genuine Hollywood mystery--the murder of a famous director which, although it was never officially solved, was thought to be the work of the mad mother of a very young and emotionally fragile Southern actress.

Jun starts his story in 1964, 42 years after the murder and his abrupt retirement from the film world. Thanks to wise investments, he now lives in comfort in Los Angeles, thinking only occasionally about the past. But when a journalist and budding screenwriter calls to ask for an interview, Jun is set off on a truly amazing voyage of self-discovery. Driving his vintage Packard through neighborhoods now unimaginably changed to him, he contacts old associates from the period. A strong undercurrent of racial prejudice runs through this book: a scene in which Jun takes some Japanese associates to a golf driving range in Westwood, only to discover that a new rule bars “Orientals and Negroes” from playing there, could break your heart.

Revoyr, who is half Japanese herself (her mother was Japanese, her father Polish-American) seems to get it all right. She also is a master of her art who has been compared by advance readers to Kazuo Ishiguro (author of Remains of the Day) and Vladimir Nabokov. Enter her dream world. You won’t regret it.

At Fame’s Edge

“Marcus Sakey,” writes blogger John Kenyon in his interview today with the author of The Blade Itself and At the City’s Edge, “has quickly established himself as a writer willing to entertain and enlighten at the same time. There are plenty of writers out there who can create a masterful plot peopled by two-dimensional characters who fill roles. Sakey isn’t one of them. Sure, his tales are gripping, but these are fully realized 3-D people here, and the situations they encounter do more than raise the hairs on the back of your neck. If you’re paying attention, they raise your consciousness, too.” Kenyon goes on to ask the author about dealing with political and socio-economic issues, the transfer of books to film, and his decision--maybe not the right one--to fictionalize the neighborhood at the heart of his second novel.

Read the full interview here.

Making the Rounds

• More than a week after his death, The Washington Post finally publishes an obituary of Benjamin M. Schutz, the 58-year-old forensic and clinical psychologist and three-time Shamus Award-winning creator of Washington, D.C, private eye Leo Haggerty (Embrace the Wolf, 1985). The saddest line in that whole short piece: “‘If my dad could have had enough commercial success to transfer to writing private eye fiction full time, he would have,’ said a son, Dr. Jakob C.L. Schutz of St. Louis.” Read the full obituary here.

• Rest easy, my friends. Thanks to a lead from Clayton Moore, book critic and blogger, I now know the potential of my becoming a cannibal, were I ever trapped in a blizzard. Click on the image at right to find out what hunger might provoke you to do. (Who thinks up these crazy quizzes, anyway?)

• We’re so accustomed to hearing about authors Ross Macdonald and John D. MacDonald, but Martin Edwards reminds us of another, more overlooked Macdonald: Philip MacDonald. Writing in his blog, novelist Edwards (Waterloo Sunset) remarks of Macdonald, “I’d rate him as one of the most interesting crime novelists to emerge from the Golden Age. Even though many of his books have flaws of one kind or another, he had the gift of creating fascinating situations that keep you turning the pages.” Macdonald is probably best known for The List of Adrian Messenger (1959), from which a 1963 George C. Scott film was made. Enlighten yourself on the work of this classic British novelist by going here.

• New York writer Jim Fusilli tells Sons of Spade blogger Jochem van der Steen that his series private eye, Terry Orr, last seen in Hard, Hard City (2004), might not ever return to print. “I enjoyed doing the four Terry Orr novels, but I’m not certain that the P.I. field is the best place for my writing,” Fusilli explains. Read more here.

• Don’t forget that this coming Thursday is the deadline for submissions to Crimespace’s 2008 short-story competition. For details, click here.

• While I was off working on other things (instead of keeping obsessive track of every development in the crime-fiction blogosphere), In for Questioning interviewer Angie Johnson-Schmit sat down to talk with authors Zoë Sharp (Second Shot) and Brett Battles (The Cleaner).

• Declan Burke remarks on the oddity of three novels by Irish writers--Ken Bruen, Benjamin Black (aka John Banville), and Tana French--featuring in this year’s Edgar Award nominations and wonders, “why aren’t these writers as popular in Ireland as they are in the U.S.?” His thoughts on the matter can be found here.

• Who was the first female detective in literature? Blogger John Adcock thinks he has the answer at Yesterday’s Papers.

• And am I the last person to hear about the forthcoming eighth annual Forensic Science and Law Conference, this year’s theme being “Where Fact Meets Fiction”? It is scheduled to take place during the first week of April at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania’s Duquesne University and will feature authors Linda Fairstein and Robert Tanenbaum as guest speakers. More details are here.

Feel the Love

It’s less than three weeks now before that holiday of heartfelt proportions, Valentine’s Day. And in the spirit of the occasion, Patti Abbott and Aldo Calcagno are inviting published as well as merely aspiring mystery writers to post short stories about love and crime on the Web. The length should be 750 words or fewer, and all entries ought to go up on Valentine’s Day, Thursday, February 14.

Even if you don’t have your own blog or Web site, you can still enter this affair. Calcagno has generously offered to post participating stories in Powder Burn Flash, his noir fiction blog. Both he and Abbott will catalogue links to the entries at their respective sites.

If you’d like to contribute to this outpouring of love (and hate, and jealousy, and ... well, crimes of passion have numerous causes), drop an e-mail note to Abbott at aa2579@wayne.edu, just letting her know the title of your story and where it will appear. Or tell Calcagno (at powderburnflash@sbcglobal.net) that you’ll be sending him a submission to the competition.

And Poe It Goes

Philadelphia lit-blogger Edward Pettit, who helped incite a war of verbiage last year over whether Philly or Baltimore has the better claim to Edgar Allan Poe’s corpse, announces that he’s launching a year-long American Poe exploration. A visit to his Web site, The Bibliothecary, finds the following message:

Come on by Monday, January 28, for the kick-off of the Ed and Edgar blog. I’ll be travelling throughout the year to all sites related to Poe and interviewing all sorts of Poe fanatics. I’ll also be spreading the Philly Poe gospel everywhere I go. The fun started in Baltimore on Poe’s birthday and will take me to Richmond, New York, Boston, West Point, back to Baltimore and finishing in October in Philadelphia for Poe’s death anniversary and his honorary holiday, Halloween.

I’ll also be speaking at various venues, which I’ll let you know about as they happen. (First up is the Manayunk Arts Center in Philly on Sun Feb 3.)

So come on by Monday and read all about my trip to Baltimore last weekend. Yes, I saw the Poe Toaster. But did I convert him to my cause? You’ll have to come back to find out.

And the first 10 readers to leave a comment on Monday’s first Ed and Edgar post will receive a Philly Poe souvenir (which I will mail to the winners free of charge).

Pettit’s new blog will be found here.

Idiocy of the Week

What sort of a blue-nosed, puritanical nation is the United States when an inoffensive episode of partial (and quite beautiful) nudity becomes such a big deal? From the Associated Press:

The Federal Communications Commission has proposed a $1.4 million fine against 52 ABC Television Network stations over a 2003 broadcast of cop drama NYPD Blue.

The fine is for a scene where a boy surprises a woman as she prepares to take a shower. The scene depicted “multiple, close-up views” of the woman’s “nude buttocks” according to an agency order issued late Friday.

We should consider ourselves lucky, folks. It could’ve been Dennis Franz’s ass instead of Charlotte Ross’ ...

If you’re curious, here’s the clip under indictment. Watch it before the right-wing obscenity police descend upon YouTube.

The Born Ultimatum

I have enjoyed the company of Florida lawman and crime writer James O. Born over the last few years, both through his novels and during a personal encounter with him at ThrillerFest 2006 in Phoenix.

At the time of ThrillerFest, I’d just read his second novel, Shock Wave, which featured his alter ego, Bill Tasker, working with the FBI and ATF to track down a missing Stinger missile. I enjoyed the level of realism and humor in that tale. For the ThrillerFest conference, Born had brought a selection of weapons, and he proceeded to demonstrate how he and his colleagues at the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) are trained in the use of pistols, shotguns, and nightsticks. He gave a scary demonstration with fellow crime-writer Shane Gericke of how to shoot to disable a perpetrator (not much like what you see on television or in the movies). After the demonstration, I introduced Born to my friend Damien Thompson, a British journalist with the Telegraph newspaper, who’d traveled with me to cover the Arizona conference. I listened and sucked back a number of beers while Born was grilled by Thompson about his work both as a novelist and a lawman.

Naturally, one of the topics of conversation was the level of realism in Born’s work. After returning home to Britain, I noticed that my fellow Rap Sheet contributor, Anthony Rainone, had asked a similar question in an interview for January Magazine:

Give me a specific example of something from your actual law-enforcement experiences that you spliced in one of your books.
In Shock Wave, there are a number of scenes, and one comes to mind the most. Years ago, I was on a surveillance of a guy that escaped. Five guys had tunneled out of a prison in Florida ... [They] went into the chapel and came up on the other side of the fence. They disappeared. Largest manhunt in history at that time. We literally beat the bushes, and after a couple of weeks, we captured three and one was killed. Still, one guy is out there. The FDLE is told to find this guy. He’s in prison for murder. He almost killed a guy on the way out. So, we’re doing everything possible to find him. We had a lead that he was possibly going to show up [at a particular apartment] in Miami. We go down there. Two of us, were on it, partners on the SWAT team. We grab the assignment because it’s overtime--it’s Sunday. Big money. So, I’m sitting there [on the stakeout]. I have an MP-5 machine gun on my lap--[because] he’s one of the most wanted guys in the country. I have a newspaper over [the machine gun], and I’m actually reading the paper. I’m sitting in an empty parking lot on a Sunday morning. Three younger Latin guys come up and rap on my window. I roll it down and ask them what they want. “Nothing. You want something?” they say. So I tell them to buzz off. They rap on the window harder. I roll down the window again--and it was almost exactly like the [scene in Shock Wave]. The guy says, “In this neighborhood, you either want something, or you got something.” They knew or had already figured out I was a cop, but they didn’t know why I was there. “You either want something, or got something.” I said, “Oh, I got this submachine gun.” And I pulled it out. How often are you confronted, where you actually have a submachine gun? And they stepped back so quick that one guy tripped on the curb and goes down. And they ran. Now, is that the official, proper way to do things? No. But it shut them up, sent them on their way, and we were able to complete our mission. So that stuff I put in there. And there were several situations where we had to question members of the [Ku Klux] Klan, or whatever groups the Klan has become. And what those guys say to me, I put in my books. I could’ve picked any group, but I chose the Klan guys because I know what morons they are. Every time someone talks in my books, I can picture [from real life] what they are saying and what they are doing. And I try to put in that detail, so that when you are reading, you can get the [actual] feel of [the characters].

I bumped into Born again last summer at ThrillerFest in New York City, and asked him to sign my copy of his fourth novel, Field of Fire. It was a departure for this author. After a trio of books featuring Tasker, it seems he’d decided to focus instead on an ATF agent named Alex Duarte. Born was going all federal on me!

And now he’s coming back with a second Duarte novel, Burn Zone, due out next month. An e-mail note from Born’s publishers gives me some information about what to expect from this latest book:

It was supposed to be a low-level bust for ATF agent Alex Duarte, with the hope that he could work it up the ladder to someone important. He just didn’t know how important. In New Orleans to check out a mysterious Panamanian named Ortiz, who likes to trade guns illegally and import marijuana by the truckload, Duarte suddenly finds himself in the middle of something bigger than he has ever known. Because guns and drugs are bad enough--but there are other things that are much, much worse.

A shadowy colonel who is not what he seems … a white supremacist intent on becoming “the man who changed America” … an attractive FBI agent with a lot of pull and a lot of secrets … Duarte knows he’s in deep with these characters. He just hopes it’s not over his head.

For those of you who already love James O. Born’s work, look for Burn Zone on Valentine’s Day. The author is embarking on a U.S. book tour to publicize his work; details are here. And if you haven’t had a chance to read this author’s fiction yet, Chapter 1 of Burn Zone is available right here. Just don’t count on being able to read that first chapter alone, without plunking down for the full book.

A Strike, a Story

It appears we’re making significant strides toward to the publication of Dennis Lehane’s next novel. I just received the following e-mail note from New Jersey author Jack Getze:

I’m in St. Pete Beach, FL, taking a writing class from Dennis Lehane at Eckerd College. Yesterday, he showed us the cover of his new book which he said just arrived. A Given Day, he called it, a “historical novel about the 1919 Boston police strike.” Said he’d been interested in that strike since he was a kid. He said [the novel] was due to be published in September.

Sign me up for a copy.

“One Man Will Fight the Wrong Around You”

A Barnaby Jones novel, written by Buddy Ebsen with Darlene Quinn and offered by a print-on-demand vanity press? Lee Goldberg investigates here.

Cut to the Chase

Because I’ve been writing feverishly lately on a non-fiction book about San Francisco history, and because the 1968 Steve McQueen thriller Bullitt was shot on location in that beautiful city, I decided it was incumbent upon me to watch the film again. Solely for the purposes of research, of course.

It had been a few years--quite a few, maybe 10--since I last screened Bullitt, but the picture has lost none of its hard-boiled allure. Based on the 1963 novel Mute Witness, by Edgar Award winner Robert L. Fish, it finds McQueen playing a world-weary but tough police lieutenant named Frank Bullitt, who’s asked by an ambitious U.S. senator (Robert Vaughn in another fine role) to protect a key witness in an organized-crime trial. Naturally, things go seriously awry, the witness is murdered, and an angry Bullitt goes after the folks who did in his charge.

In Fish’s original novel, which I’ve never had the chance to read, Bullitt was known as Lieutenant Clancy, and there was no car-chase sequence. However, that nine-minute, 42-second high-speed pursuit is one of the most memorable parts of Bullitt, and certainly one of the best car chases in film history. No matter that it has “some strange inconsistencies,” as the San Francisco Chronicle pointed out a few years back. (“The bad guys’ Charger lost six hubcaps and couldn’t hit the broad side of a gas station during the explosive finale. The chase route looks as if it were designed by Siegfried and Roy, with cars disappearing and reappearing at random points in the city.”). Every time I see the determined look on McQueen’s face, as he begins chasing up and down the hilly streets of San Francisco, the tires of his 1968 GT V8 Ford Mustang smoking as he closes on the black Dodge Charger containing his quarry, I know that I’m in for one hell of a wild ride. And glad to go.

Buckle your seat belts and take that ride for yourself in this adrenaline-pumping clip from Bullitt.



READ MORE: “Bullitt: Sounds of the ’60s,” by Peter Rozovsky (Detectives Beyond Borders); “Bullitt Locations in San Francisco: April 1968, July 2002,” by Ray Smith.

Who Are We to Argue?

From B.V. Larson’s In Reference to Murder: “The Western Writers of America announced yesterday they are giving Tony Hillerman their Owen Wister Award for lifetime contribution to Western literature. President Cotton Smith said, ‘Tony Hillerman is truly a national treasure, bringing all of us wonderful stories of the modern West while giving us memorable glimpses of the distinctive ways of the Navajo Nation.’” Read more here.

A Clamor Over “Solace”

We’ve been referring to the next James Bond film simply as Bond 22. But it seems we can now use a real name for that picture, scheduled for release in November. It’s Quantum of Solace. Yep, you read that right, even if you haven’t a clue why anyone would choose such a bizarre title for an action movie.

Evidently, the name was revealed this morning at Pinewood Studios near London, where the 22nd entry in the Bond franchise--again starring Daniel Craig as Agent 007--is being filmed. Reuters reports that Quantum “sees the super spy out for revenge on a mission that takes him to Austria, Italy and South America.”

According to the synopsis, Bond girl Camille, played by Ukrainian-born Olga Kurylenko, leads the secret agent to Dominic Greene, member of a mysterious organization and a ruthless businessman, seeking to control huge natural resources.

Greene is played by Frenchman Mathieu Amalric, who starred in the Oscar-nominated “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.”

The plot follows on directly from “Casino Royale,” as Bond aims to uncover the truth about Vesper [Lynd], the beauty who betrayed him, and discovers that she had been blackmailed.

“James Bond is after revenge, and Camille is after revenge and they have slightly different goals, but in the end they are going to have to collaborate,” Kurylenko told reporters.

CommanderBond.net has an ITV News clip that offers a few more details about this film.

If you’re wondering where that clunky title comes from ... well, it’s writer Ian Fleming’s fault. “Quantum of Solace” is the name of one of the five short stories contained in his 1960 collection, For Your Eyes Only. And it’s far from the first of those abbreviated tales to be have its moniker stolen by Hollywood. As Wikipedia explains,

The title story of the collection lent its name to the 12th official James Bond film in the EON Productions series, For Your Eyes Only. Released in 1981, it was the fifth film to star Roger Moore as the British Secret Service agent, Commander James Bond. The film used elements and characters from the short stories “For Your Eyes Only” and “Risico” from this collection. “From a View to a Kill” lent its title to the 14th Bond film, A View to a Kill (1985). Plot elements from “The Hildebrand Rarity” were incorporated in the 16th Bond film, Licence to Kill (1989).

And now comes Quantum of Solace, which bears scant resemblance to the story from which its title was filched. That original tale was not even a spy story, but had to do with a wife’s infidelity in Bermuda, and Commander Bond wasn’t a major character in it.

Despite its honest provenance, not everyone is thrilled with the name of this forthcoming Bond film. As critic David J. Montgomery put it earlier this morning, “I think that is quite possibly the worst title I have ever heard. They should just call it ‘New James Bond Movie.’ That’s all anyone cares about anyway.”

READ MORE: “Bond and His Quantum of Solace (or Not),” by Karen Meek (Euro Crime Blog); “James Bond Book News,” by Karen Meek (Euro Crime Blog).

“This Is the Way the World Ends”

Wow! The video promo for Martyn Waites’ new Joe Donovan thriller, White Riot, may just set the standard for how these things ought to be done. It looks like a movie trailer. Extraordinary production values. Would that every author (or publisher) could afford such quality. Click here.

See It Now

One of the strengths of the Internet, but--from a blogger’s perspective--also one of its myriad frustrations, is its changeability. Things appear in the electronic ether, only to have vanished by the time you go looking for them again. As a reference tool, then, the Web couldn’t be less reliable. Blogs such as The Rap Sheet take a chance, when linking to Wikipedia or authors’ personal pages or any other site, that those pages will still be in existence when readers go to look them over for themselves.

This problem now crops up in relation to Graeme Flanagan’s exceptional site collecting and honoring the work of paperback cover artist Robert McGinnis. Bill Crider posts a note this morning that he received from Flanagan, regarding the site’s future:

I regret to say that I have been asked to remove my Robert McGinnis website from the Internet because of claims that the site contains direct links to live porn sites. I am unaware of any such links and no-one has contacted me to say that they have encountered any problems of this nature.

However, as I would never, either intentionally or otherwise, do anything to upset Mr. McGinnis or any other member of his family, I will remove the website 14 days from now, unless this claim can be clearly demonstrated to be false and is accepted as such by the complainant.

The full note can be found here.

Flanagan’s McGinnis resources are phenomenal in their scope, and have been very useful to us here on many occasions. We’re sorry to see the site disappear, if indeed it does. Sorrier still that the cause for its demise should be some dubious claim of pornographic connections. Never once have we been directed to a porn site through Flanagan’s pages, nor would we ever expect to be. His subject, McGinnis, is an illustrator of remarkable talent, with a particular skill for rendering beautiful women in seductive or revealing poses on book jackets. But that’s art, not porn--even if some flush-faced prigs can’t begin to recognize the difference.

We dearly hope that Flanagan can resolve this dispute without shutting down his site. In the meantime, go there now to look over the wealth of Robert McGinnis book covers he has collected. You’ll be doing yourself a favor.

The Ideas Just Keep Getting Dumber

Part of the reason why the crime-fiction genre, like any other literary field, is inconsistent in its quality these days is that everybody thinks he or she can write a novel. That dubious notion is now being taken to its illogical extreme in a British TV series called Murder Most Famous, which will feature one of the dancing professionals from the UK’s Strictly Come Dancing (a precursor to America’s Dancing with the Stars). As Digital Spy reports:

Brendan Cole is to star in a new reality show which teaches celebrities to become crime writers.

The Strictly Come Dancing regular will join former Sun editor Kelvin McKenzie and four other stars in BBC Two’s Murder Most Famous.

The group will be given writing tasks while being taught how to solve crimes with help from psychologists and police.

Best-selling author Minette Walters has signed up to be a mentor on the show and will have the power to oust a celebrity at the end of each day.

The winner will pen their own crime novel to be published by PanMacmillan on next year’s World Book Day.

Cole also appeared on ITV1’s Love Island in 2006.

Murder Most Famous will air on BBC Two over five afternoons in March.

(Hat tip to Karen Meek’s Euro Crime Blog.)

“At First, I’d Find Any Excuse Not to Write”

Garry Disher, the 57-year-old Australian author (of Chain of Evidence, Death Deal, etc.) who has been receiving a good deal of attention over at Glenn Harper’s International Noir Fiction blog, is profiled this week in The Sydney Morning Herald. It seems that 2008 marks Disher’s 20th year as a full-time writer. The Herald’s profile, which can be found here, is something of a primer for anyone else thinking to take the plunge into authorhood.

King's Kindle Adventure

I was amused to discover that bibliophile and Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Stephen King’s first try at using Amazon’s new Kindle reading device involved the enthusiastic digestion of a mystery novel by Robert Goddard. In his latest regular Entertainment Weekly column, King writes:

What did I do during the holidays? Read a good book, of course. It was called In Pale Battalions, by Robert Goddard. Goddard’s British, and his tales of suspense and mystery have recently been reissued in America. I’d never read him. Now I’m glad I did. Set mostly during World War I (but with a leisurely framework that allows the story to stretch comfortably all the way to 1968), In Pale Battalions is a story of sex, secrets, and murder--all the good stuff, in other words. What makes it especially riveting is the malevolent demon-woman at the novel’s center: Olivia Powerstock’s greatest talent is making those around her suffer. And Goddard is clever, giving the reader not just one solution to what happened at drafty ole Meongate Manor, but three--each fuller and more satisfying than the last.

A book to remember, in other words, but one I’ll remember another way: as the first book I read on my new Kindle.

Most of you will already know what that is, but for those of you who have been living in a barn, your Uncle Stevie will now elucidate. It’s a gadget available from Amazon.com. The advance publicity says it looks like a paperback book, but it really doesn’t. It’s a panel of white plastic with a screen in the middle and one of those annoying teeny-tiny keyboards most suited to the fingers of Keebler elves. Full disclosure: I have not yet used the teeny-tiny keyboard, and really see no need for it. Keyboards are for writing. The Kindle is for reading.

A mention by King in the press can transform a writer’s career, so perhaps Goddard will now become as well recognized in the United States as he already is in the UK. If so, he’d be following in the path of Californian Meg Gardiner. In November 2006, when King came to the UK to promote Lisey’s Story, he picked up a book by Gardiner and read it on his journey home, as he later recounted on the Web. That mention had a huge effect on Gardiner’s sales and even (finally) won her a publishing deal in her native America. As a press release at the time explained:

King praised Gardiner on his website in December and interest in her work, particularly among bloggers, has been growing ever since. He then wrote extensively about Gardiner again in his Entertainment Weekly column published on February 9 where he said he was “staggered” that she was not published in the U.S. “I mean, this woman is as good as Michael Connelly and far better than Janet Evanovich,” wrote King, who advises readers to start with China Lake [2002]--Gardiner’s first book in her Evan Delaney series.

Speaking of King, he returns to form this month with the novel Duma Key, which I reviewed in January Magazine earlier this week.

In Layman’s Terms

Over the course of an eight-part series that ran in The Rap Sheet from November of last year to earlier this month, I offered a sort of guided tour to the short run of The New Black Mask, the mid-1980s revival of the famous American Black Mask pulp magazine that flourished in the 1920s and ’30s.

I thought the perfect bookend to that tour would be an interview with New Black Mask (NBM) co-editor Richard Layman, and he was kind enough to oblige.

Layman has written six books about Dashiell Hammett, including Literary Masterpieces: The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett: A Descriptive Bibliography, and Shadow Man: The Life of Dashiell Hammett. In addition, two of his editing assignments--for Selected Letters of Dashiell Hammett, 1921-1960 and Discovering The Maltese Falcon and Sam Spade--have been nominated for Edgar Awards by the Mystery Writers of America. And in 2005, he commemorated the 75th anniversary of The Maltese Falcon’s publication with a speech about Hammett and his best-known novel at the Library of Congress.

He is vice president of South Carolina-based Bruccoli Clark Layman Inc., which produces reference works in literary and social history, including the Dictionary of Literary Biography.

Layman was born and reared in Louisville, Kentucky, where he co-owns the popular seafood restaurant Leander’s on Oak. He earned a B.A. and an M.A. from the University of Louisville, and a Ph.D. from the University of South Carolina. He currently lives in Columbia, South Carolina.

Mark Coggins: How did the concept for New Black Mask originate?

Richard Layman: The idea for a magazine of crime stories in paperback format originated with William Jovanovich. Bruccoli Clark, as our company was called then, had an imprint with Harcourt Brace Jovanovich [HBJ]. Mr. Jovanovich approached Matthew Bruccoli with the idea, and Matt asked me to co-edit the series with him.

MC: What sort of stories were you looking to publish originally? Did you change the editorial guidelines at all during the course of the eight NBM issues? And were the guidelines for the succeeding publication, A Matter of Crime (AMOC), different?

RL: The editorial rationale was to publish quality stories about crime that were not bound by genre restrictions, and that rationale remained consistent. Thus, we published some writers not normally associated with mystery fiction.

MC: Were most submissions agented or over the transom? Did you request submissions from particular authors?

RL: Almost all of our stories came over the transom. In some cases we went after particular writers, normally for the featured story in a issue, but rarely otherwise. After the first issue, we received about 25 unsolicited stories a day.

MC: Were there any writers who you wanted to publish but weren’t able to entice into submitting work?

RL: Sure, but we were satisfied with what we got.

MC: In addition to you and Matthew J. Bruccoli, I understand Martha C. Lawrence [later the author of the Dr. Elizabeth Chase series] was also on the editorial staff. What was her role? Were there other editors involved in the publication?

RL: I don’t know anything about Martha C. Lawrence except what is posted on her Web site. She had no editorial role in either NBM or AMOC. Matt and I were the sole editors. Each of us read each story that came in and rated it “good,” “maybe,” or “reject.” Two goods meant an acceptance; two rejects, or one maybe and a reject, meant a reject. Two maybes meant the story got reread.

MC: Who was responsible for the interviews in each issue? Were the interviews conducted face-to-face? How were the interviewed authors to deal with personally?

RL: Generally, Matt and I alternated interviews. Most of the interviews were conducted by phone, and I cannot recall an interview subject who was not easy to talk to. One of the most brusque was John D. MacDonald, which I did just before he left on the long ocean cruise during which he died. I thought it was the last interview done with him, but I have been corrected by one of his fans.

MC: How did you become aware of and gain the rights to the “rarities” you published from Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Jim Thompson?

RL: Matt collects Chandler; I collect Hammett; and we are both Thompson fans. We went to the agents for permission to publish works we knew existed.

MC: There are some great stories from James Ellroy in the issues. Although he had been published previously, he had yet to release the groundbreaking “L.A. Quartet.” Did you have a sense when you were working with him that he was on the edge of superstardom?

RL: When we began NBM, we went to friends in the business to ask for help. Otto Penzler was publishing Ellroy then and recommended him highly. He sent us James’ first story, which we liked and published. Otto assured us that James had a bright future, and he was right.

MC: You published several stories from first-time writers. Was that intentional or did it just happen?

RL: We believed that a market was needed for quality stories about crime. It was particularly gratifying to get good work from then-unrecognized writers, such as Mark Coggins, for example.

MC: Several writers, myself included, launched series characters from the stories they first published in NBM. Did you anticipate that NBM would be the launching point for careers, in the same way the original Black Mask was?

RL: That was certainly our hope. We didn’t find this generation’s Hammett or Chandler, but we will stand by the books.

MC: One must ask: Do you have a favorite story among all that were published in NBM?

RL: James Lee Snyder’s “Shopping Cart Howard” is a story I remember after 22 years. [Robert] Sampson’s “Rain in Pinton County” won an Edgar. But “favorite” is a difficult concept to apply here. We were proud to have published a lot of those stories.

MC: What were the circumstances surrounding the decision to morph the publication into A Matter of Crime?

RL: A litigious character emerged, who claimed rights to the old Black Mask. As I understood it, that claim got reduced to his claiming rights to the name and the type design of the masthead. In any event, HBJ bowed to the threat of a restraint order, paid him off, changed the name to A Matter of Crime, and altered the format to rack-size paperback

MC: What was the most enjoyable aspect of publishing NBM? And conversely, the least enjoyable?

RL: The most enjoyable aspect, obviously, was finding good stories. That pleasure was enhanced by the contrast with the least enjoyable aspect, which was making our way through real junk. There were stories by writers without a flicker of talent, and there were stories so twisted that I, at least, wondered if we should notify the authorities.

MC: If you were to do it all over again, what, if anything, would you do differently?

RL: Neither Matt nor I have the time or inclination now to read 25 stories a day in search of a gem. I would engage a pre-vetter to weed out the stories that don’t merit consideration. I think marketing would have to be reconsidered. Can a series designed to be sold in bookstores be effectively marketed? Maybe not without some subscription support. An alternate publication plan would have to be designed.

MC: Any other facets of the NBM experience that you think our readers would enjoy hearing about?

RL: One of the great pleasures of NBM was the people we met along the way. I should mention George Greenfield, the respected British literary agent and author of Scribblers for Bread. He was a friend of Matt’s, one of the people we contacted at the beginning. George allowed Matt to look through his entire file of unpublished crime stories and was instrumental in introducing a British flavor to NBM. There was the attorney at MGM who allowed me into their files, where I found the Hammett Thin Man original stories that MGM allowed us to publish. There was Otto Penzler.

That is three among many.

(To read all of Mark Coggins’ excellent series about The New Black Mask magazine, click here.)

“Death Never Rains But It Pours”

More on last week’s death of Edward D. Hoch, this time from Francis M. “Mike” Nevins and posted at the Mystery*File site:

Ed Hoch’s death was the sort we wish for ourselves and those we care about, instant, without pain. He got up and went to take a shower and his wife heard a thump from the bathroom and he was already gone, apparently a massive heart attack.

He would have been 78 next month. His ambition was to write 1,000 short stories but he died something like 50 short of that goal.

Read all of Nevins’ piece here. And do read it, as it’s quite exceptional. It is coupled, too, with a tribute from Nevins to “the first love of my life,” a woman known here only as “Lucy,” who apparently influenced his 1975 novel, Publish and Perish.

History in a Hurry

Atlanta, Georgia, novelist David Fulmer--author of the new Philadelphia-set novel The Blue Door, but still best known for his series featuring early 20th-century New Orleans sleuth Valentin St. Cyr--submits to an interview with the Sons of Spade blog. In the course of it, he explains something important about his historical research methods:

I do research for every book. First of all, I read all the books on a time and place. I also do something different. I go to the libraries and read old newspapers. I’m not looking for anything in particular, just soaking up the news from the street. I find this helps me with the content and pace of speech from the day. So I can use that in dialogue. The books are for the big historical picture, the newspapers bring me down to the ground where average people are living.

The full exchange can be found here.

Doomed from the Start

Damn! Another book I don’t have time to read, and don’t even own (yet), but will have to get around to sometime.

The Short and Shorter of It

Gerald So was kind enough to remind us that nominations will soon open for the 2008 Derringer Awards, honoring excellence in short crime fiction. Submissions can be of four specific lengths, from 1,000 words to 17,500, and must be made between February 2 and conclude on March 16. For more information, click here.

A Master of the Medium

(Editor’s note: Most of us never had a chance to meet Edward D. Hoch, the prolific short-story writer who passed away this week. But Al Navis did. A bookseller for more than a quarter-century, he managed two Bouchercon conventions in Toronto, Canada--one in 1992, the other in 2004. It was thanks to his Bouchercon involvement that Navis encountered, and later befriended, Hoch (shown at right). Following the author’s death, Navis wrote a personalized obituary of Hoch for the Canadian Booksellers Association newsletter, which will be published on Tuesday. In advance, he has given The Rap Sheet a chance to post that same obit. We appreciate his generosity and hope that readers not familiar with Hoch and his work will discover in this piece an author worthy of further, if now posthumous, investigation.)

* * *

I first met Edward D. Hoch (pronounced “hoke”), who passed away on Thursday, January 17 (the day after my 56th birthday, to those of you who forgot), at the age of 77, at the Bouchercon World Mystery Convention in Philadelphia in 1989.

At the time, he was just another name on a long list of “attending authors,” and after a bit of sleuthing, I was able to find a couple (of the five) novels he had written as well as a few of the Mystery Writers of America (MWA) collections of short stories that he had edited. So naturally I brought them along with me to sell, or if I couldn’t sell them, at least I would get them signed.

On the second day of the convention, Ed Hoch and his darling wife, Pat, came though the book dealers’ room and by my tables. I had never met him and indeed had never so much as heard of him, but after about 30 seconds of conversation, it felt as if we had known each other forever.

When he saw that I was from Toronto (he was from Rochester, New York), he immediately began extolling the virtues of my hometown (for those of you outside of Toronto, some people do like us). I instantly liked him as he signed the few copies of his books that I had brought. He was gracious, friendly and above all, classy. Even though I had never met him before, and hadn’t even heard his name before I saw it in the “authors” list of the convention, I felt that I had indeed made a friend.

The following year, Bouchercon was in London, and in 1991 it was in Pasadena, California, followed by the first Bouchercon that I was to host and chair, in Toronto in 1992. Over those years, I came to know Ed and Pat Hoch. After talking with colleagues, it seemed that Ed was the master of the mystery short story and that he’d had a story published in every issue of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine since 1973! At the time, that was a record of more than 20 years. Well, the string continued until his passing ... an unbelievable 34 years of continuous publication.

Now, some literary types may pooh-pooh the short story, saying that it’s for those who either can’t write a novel or who haven’t enough imagination for one. Well, when Ed was asked, “why the short story?,” he responded:

The ideas came quickly, as they still do, and I enjoyed the exhilaration of finishing a story in a couple of weeks rather than waiting several months before concluding a novel. As many others have observed over the decades, the short story was the first and perhaps most successful medium of the detective story. For Poe and Doyle and Chesterton it was the only medium, even when Doyle tried to stretch out a few of his stories to something approaching novel length.

It takes a special ability to tell a story in 3,000 words, without all the bumph and padding that so many modern novels have today, and Ed Hoch was a master of that medium. I say “master,” because the Mystery Writers of America have a little thing called the Grand Master Award, which is given to an individual who not only has a considerable backlist of work, but whose work has been of a consistently high standard. Hoch won the Grand Master in 2001.

Some of the other past recipients? Agatha Christie, Rex Stout, Ellery Queen, Erle Stanley Gardner, John Dickson Carr, Georges Simenon, James M. Cain, and John D. MacDonald. Too long ago for you, I hear you say? OK, then how about Stephen King, Stuart M. Kaminsky, Marcia Muller, Joseph Wambaugh, Robert B. Parker, Mary Higgins Clark, P.D. James, Ruth Rendell, Dick Francis, and this year’s recipient, Sue Grafton. Is that a bit more current? In between were authors such as Lawrence Block, Elmore Leonard, Tony Hillerman, Phyllis Whitney (who is still alive at the age of 104!), John le Carré, Daphne du Maurier, Graham Greene, and Eric Ambler. And I’ve missed tons of others.

The other thing about Ed Hoch was his undying generosity to younger writers. He was always willing to give ideas, read stories, and critique passages, and he had a very close bond with the Crime Writers of Canada (CWC), as he and Pat attended practically every Arthur Ellis Awards Banquet for the past 20 years.

While everybody who knew him had an “Ed Story,” mine is closely tied to the Ellis Awards. For a few years in the 1990s, the executive director of the CWC was a delightful and eccentric librarian, author, and book collector named David Skene-Melvin. It seemed that David and his dear late wife, Ann, were members of the Arts and Letters Club in downtown Toronto. So he was able to get a decent price for the annual banquet and awards presentation.

Well, we’d had the past two years’ dinners in that club’s Great Hall--a medieval room containing huge high-vaulted ceilings with massive exposed wooden beams, and complete with shields bearing the coats of arms of English heraldry--largely without incident. Then came what has come to be known as the “Duck Dinner.” Anyone who attended this will remember it. I was seated across from Ed and Pat Hoch when our entrées were served. I gazed down at a desiccated, dried-out excuse for a duck breast, entirely lacking the necessary meat that duck is famous for. This piece could have been excavated by Howard Carter from the tomb of Egyptian Pharaoh Tutankhamen. It had indeed been mummified.

As everyone was looking down at this crunchy piece of fowl, I looked over at Ed and said, “This is the first time I’ve ever had a dinner where the entrée was older than the wine.”

He and Pat began laughing, and Ed retorted, “Thereby damning both in but a single sentence.”

That was Ed Hoch. Funny and quick as lightning, but generous to give others a little bit of the spotlight. He was also a “must-have” on panels at mystery conventions, partly because he’d been writing since 1955, but mostly because he was so damn funny!

While most of you have never had any association with Ed Hoch--even now he’s just a name to you--I urge all of you to go to your local newsstand and pick up a copy of the latest Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and read Ed’s story. I guarantee that he’ll surprise and please you.

As for the thousands of people whom Ed has helped, befriended, touched and met, we’re all the lesser now, as we won’t have that smiling, cherubic face to hug anymore.

Farewell, old friend.

READ MORE: “Edward D. Hoch, Writer of Over 900 Mystery Stories, Is Dead at 77,” by Margalit Fox (The New York Times).