The 2015 Edgar Allan Poe Awards, sponsored by the Mystery Writers of America, were handed out this evening during a banquet in New York City. Below are the winners, courtesy of Mystery Fanfare.
Best Novel: Mr. Mercedes, by Stephen King (Scribner)
Also nominated: This Dark Road to Mercy, by Wiley Cash (Morrow); Wolf, by Mo Hayder (Atlantic Monthly Press); The Final Silence, by Stuart Neville (Soho Press); Saints of the Shadow Bible, by Ian Rankin (Little, Brown), and Coptown, by Karin Slaughter (Ballantine)
Best First Novel by an American Author: Dry Bones in the Valley, by Tom Bouman (Norton)
Also nominated: Invisible City, by Julia Dahl (Minotaur); The Life We Bury, by Allen Eskens (Seventh Street); Bad Country, by C.B. McKenzie (Minotaur/Thomas Dunne); Shovel Ready, by Adam Sternbergh (Crown); and Murder at the Brightwell, by Ashley Weaver (Minotaur/Thomas Dunne)
Best Paperback Original: The Secret History of Las Vegas, by Chris Albani (Penguin)
Also nominated: Stay With Me, by Alison Gaylin (Morrow); The Barkeep, by William Lashner (Thomas & Mercer); The Day She Died, by Catriona McPherson (Midnight Ink); The Gone Dead Train, by Lisa Turner (Morrow); and World of Trouble, by Ben H. Winters (Quirk)
Best Fact Crime: Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood, by William Mann (Harper)
Also nominated: Kitty Genovese: The Murder, the Bystanders, the Crime that Changed America, by Kevin Cook (Norton); The Savage Harvest: A Tale of Cannibals, Colonialism, and Michael Rockefeller’s Tragic Quest for Primitive Art, by Carl Hoffman (Morrow); The Other Side, by Lacy M. Johnson (Tin House); and The Mad Sculptor: The Maniac, the Model, and the Murder that Shook the Nation, by Harold Schechter (New Harvest)
Best Critical/Biographical: Poe-Land: The Hallowed Haunts of Edgar Allan Poe, by J.W. Ocker (Countryman Press)
Also nominated: The Figure of the Detective: A Literary History and Analysis, by Charles Brownson (McFarland & Company); James Ellroy: A Companion to the Mystery Fiction, by Jim Mancall (McFarland &
Company); Kiss the Blood Off My Hands: Classic Film Noir, by Robert Miklitsch (University of Illinois Press); and Judges & Justice & Lawyers & Law: Exploring the Legal Dimensions of Fiction and Film, by
Francis M. Nevins (Perfect Crime)
Best Short Story: “What Do You Do?,” by Gillian Flynn (from Rogues, edited by George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois; Ballantine)
Also nominated: “The Snow Angel,” by Doug Allyn (Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine [EQMM], January 2014); “200 Feet,” by John Floyd (The Strand Magazine, February-May 2014); “Red Eye,” by Dennis Lehane vs. Michael Connelly (from FaceOff, edited by David Baldacci; Simon & Schuster), and “Teddy,” by Brian Tobin (EQMM, May 2014)
Best Juvenile: Greenglass House, by Kate Milford (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Books for Young Readers)
Also nominated: Absolutely Truly, by Heather Vogel Frederick (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers); Space Case, by Stuart Gibbs (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers); Nick and Tesla’s Super-Cyborg Gadget Glove, by “Science Bob” Pflugfelder and Steve Hockensmith Quirk); Saving Kabul Corner, by N.H. Senzai (Paula Wiseman); and Eddie Red, Undercover: Mystery on Museum Mile, by Marcia Wells (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Books for Young Readers)
Best Young Adult: The Art of Secrets, by James Klise (Algonquin
Young Readers)
Also nominated: The Doubt Factory, by Paolo Bacigalupi (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers); Nearly Gone, by Elle Cosimano (Penguin Young Readers Group/Kathy Dawson); Fake ID, by Lamar Giles (HarperCollins Children’s Books/Amistad); and The Prince of Venice Beach, by Blake Nelson (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers)
Best Television Episode Teleplay: “Episode 1,” Happy Valley, teleplay by Sally Wainwright (Netflix)
Also nominated: “The Empty Hearse,” Sherlock, teleplay by Mark Gatiss (Hartswood Films/Masterpiece); “Unfinished Business,” Blue Bloods, teleplay by Siobhan Byrne O’Connor (CBS); “Dream Baby Dream,” The
Killing, teleplay by Sean Whitesell (Netflix); and “Episode 6,” The Game, teleplay by Toby Whithouse
(BBC America)
The Simon & Schuster/Mary Higgins Clark Award: The Stranger You Know, by Jane Casey (Minotaur)
Also nominated: A Dark and Twisted Tide, by Sharon Bolton (Minotaur); Invisible City, by Julia Dahl (Minotaur); Summer of the Dead, by Julia Keller (Minotaur); and The Black Hour, by Lori Rader-Day (Seventh Street)
Robert L. Fish Memorial Award:
“Getaway Girl,” by Zoë Z. Dean (EQMM)
Grand Master: Lois Duncan and James Ellroy
Raven Awards:
Ruth and Jon Jordan, Crimespree Magazine
Kathryn Kennison, Magna Cum Murder
Ellery Queen Award:
Charles Ardai, editor/founder, Hard Case Crime
In addition, the mother and son who write as “Charles Todd” have received the inaugural Edgar Distinguished Service Award, which will apparently now be named in the Todds’ honor. And the winner of this year’s St. Martin’s Minotaur/Mystery Writers of America First Crime Novel Competition is John Keyse-Walker.
Congratulations to all of the contenders!
READ MORE: “Best in Mysteries: The 2015 Edgar Award Winners,” by Sara Nelson (Omnivoracious); “2015’s Edgar Awards: Mystery’s Faithful Gather,” by Leslie Gilbert Elman (Criminal Element).
Just the Facts
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Wednesday, April 29, 2015
Choice Cuts
The Gumshoe Site reports that Michigan writer Doug Allyn is the first-place winner in the 2015 Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine Readers Choice Award contest for his story “The Snow Angel,” which appeared in EQMM’s January 2014 issue. “The Snow Angel” previously won the 2015 Derringer Award for Best Novelette.
Second-place honors in EQMM’s reader vote-determined competition went to “Blood Red Roses,” by Marilyn Todd (September/October 2014), while Miriam Grace Monfredo captured third place with “The Tavern Keeper’s Daughter” (December 2014).
These results evidently feature in the mag’s May 2015 edition.
Second-place honors in EQMM’s reader vote-determined competition went to “Blood Red Roses,” by Marilyn Todd (September/October 2014), while Miriam Grace Monfredo captured third place with “The Tavern Keeper’s Daughter” (December 2014).
These results evidently feature in the mag’s May 2015 edition.
Tuesday, April 28, 2015
On the Case with Tom Nolan
What does it say about 20th-century crime novelist Ross Macdonald that he finally--as of this week--has a Library of America volume dedicated to his early work? “That he’s taking his rightful place amongst the acknowledged masters of American literature,” says Tom Nolan, the Los Angeles writer and Wall Street Journal books critic who gave us Ross Macdonald: A Biography (1999), certainly the best-yet study of this author’s life and literary endeavors. As Nolan told me during a recent interview--the first part of which was posted today on the Kirkus Reviews Web site--his new Ross Macdonald: Four Novels of the 1950s comprises some of the most “beautifully written” books Macdonald (whose real name was
Kenneth Millar) produced
during the post-World War II era: The Way Some People Die (1951), The Barbarous Coast (1956), The Doomsters (1958), and The Galton Case (1959). It also features several “other writings” that illuminate the author’s work on those novels, recount his discovery of detective fiction, and tell of his deliberate efforts to enlarge the genre’s scope.
Even for somebody as familiar with Macdonald’s work as I am (the first crime novel I remember consuming was 1949’s The Moving Target, which introduced his series protagonist, L.A. private eye Lew Archer, and I’ve since enjoyed reading and re-reading the entirety of Macdonald’s oeuvre), holding the brand-new, 900-plus-page Library of America collection in my hands is a treat. Macdonald wasn’t only a terrific crime novelist; he was a terrific novelist who used fictional illegalities as his entry into telling stories--sometimes braided with Freudian issues and Greek tragedy--about families in trouble. As author-playwright Gordon Dahlquist opined in HiLobrow:
That capacity for compassion, Archer’s willingness to excavate the tumbledown remains of a family’s history (and in so many of Macdonald’s later novels, the roots of contemporary misfortunes are traceable to injustices and failures in the past) was one thing that drew me, as it did so many other readers, to Lew Archer’s adventures. After managing--through some miracle that could only have been available to an individual as young and callow as I was at the time--to arrange an interview with Millar/Macdonald in 1980, what I wanted to do most as I sat with him in the dimly lit study of his Santa Barbara, California, home was ask him for a deep analysis of his sleuth-cum-shrink, and inquire where Archer’s path might lead him in the future. Unfortunately, by that point Macdonald was already enduring
the effects of the Alzheimer’s disease that would kill him (in July 1983), and he couldn’t always remember the nuances of his fiction.
(Left) Editor Tom Nolan, photographed by Hal Boucher
Much later, in 1999, when I first had the opportunity to interview Tom Nolan, about his Macdonald biography, I asked him how much his subject’s troubled past had influenced his choice of a career writing about troubled people. “Oh, enormously,” said Nolan. “I think that initially he read certain kinds of books--not just fiction, but non-fiction, psychology, philosophy--to some extent, because he was trying to find ways to deal with life and with his problems. As far as fiction, I'm sure that [Charles] Dickens and that sort of fiction appealed to him because he could identify with the travails of Oliver Twist, and I think authors like [Edgar Allan] Poe and [Nathaniel] Hawthorne, people who probed the psychology of good and evil, or good and bad choices, appealed to him because he was wrestling with these things himself. Eventually, he tried to take the detective story and make it more interesting psychologically, able to explore some of these things that he was very interested in.”
More than a decade and a half has passed since then. But when I learned that the Library of America planned to issue a selection of Ross Macdonald’s early Archer cases--to help celebrate this year’s centennial of the author’s birth (he came into the world in Los Gatos, California, on December 13, 1915)--and that Nolan had served as its editor, I knew I had to interview him again. I also wanted to ask Nolan, though, about his work on a second volume, Meanwhile There Are Letters: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and Ross Macdonald, which Arcade Publishing will debut in July. Co-edited with Eudora Welty biographer Suzanne Marrs, it draws on an abundance of letters--more than 300 of them!--exchanged during the 1970s and early ’80s between Macdonald and Mississippi Pulitzer Prize winner Welty (The Optimist’s Daughter). “Though separated by background, geography, genre, and his marriage,” explains the back-jacket copy on my bound galley of this book, “the two authors shared their lives in witty, tender, and profoundly romantic letters, each drawing on the other for inspiration, comfort, and strength.”
And Nolan’s centennial-year offerings don’t stop there. He’s also awaiting this summer’s paperback release of an expanded version of The Archer Files, his 2007 collection of Macdonald’s previously unpublished Archer short stories and story fragments.
I took the opportunity recently to quiz Nolan, via e-mail, about his various Macdonald projects. A significant chunk of our exchange can be found in my new Kirkus column. But I also asked him more about his personal history with Macdonald’s fiction, his continuing research into that author’s career, Macdonald’s often uneasy association with Chandler, and the “forgotten” suspense fiction penned by Macdonald’s wife. What didn’t fit in Kirkus is posted below.
J. Kingston Pierce: I understand you started reading crime and mystery fiction when you were a boy, just 8 or 9 years old. What provoked such an early interest in the genre?
Tom Nolan: I was 9 when a school chum told me about the Sherlock Holmes stories, which his father had bought him in the complete edition with introduction by Christopher Morley; my friend said this book was terrific. My dad was kind enough to buy me the same anthology, from the Pickwick Bookshop on Hollywood Boulevard. I loved the Holmes canon, too. At the Hollywood library on Ivar [Avenue], I looked for more detective stories. There were lots. 100 Years’ Entertainment: The Great Detective Stories, 1841-1941, the Modern Library Giant collection edited by Ellery Queen, proved a useful historical guide. Soon I was compiling and memorizing lists of fictional detectives and their creators (as, I suppose, some kids memorized batting averages): Remember Martin Hewitt, Investigator? Max Carrados, the Blind Detective? The Great Merlini?
Then Nero Wolfe, Ellery Queen, Hercule Poirot, Perry Mason, and on and on.
(Right) Pickwick Books in Los Angeles, circa 1965
Also, in the late 1950s, daytime TV was full of old movies, many of them mystery and crime stories adapted from books by prose-writers ranging from Conan Doyle to Cornell Woolrich. The greatest detective movies, I discovered, were taken from novels: The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiell Hammett. The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler. I read those books, too--and they were as good or better than the movies.
There were many detective and police series on prime-time television: Dragnet, Border Patrol, Racket Squad, Perry Mason. They claimed a degree of authenticity.
Newspapers were full of crime news. L.A. had five newspapers then, with morning, afternoon, and evening editions. All were sensationalistic, with lots of black-headlined crime stories--some set in one’s own neighborhood.
The fiction I read began to merge in my imagination with life around me. “Colorful” mobster Mickey Cohen was a local “celebrity” and acted the part, hanging out with stars on the Sunset Strip, always good for a quote. His henchman Johnny Stompanato was stabbed to death in movie star Lana Turner’s house; her courtroom testimony was carried live on L.A.’s Channel 5.
There seemed a synthesis between life and art, fact and fiction, in the town I grew up in. I was 10 when I first went to lunch at Musso-Franks restaurant on Hollywood Boulevard. (I ordered filet mignon, bread and butter, and a glass of milk.) Musso’s, “the oldest restaurant in Hollywood,” turned up in detective (and other) books I read, including Raymond Chandler’s and Ross Macdonald’s. Philip Marlowe, Chandler’s private eye, had an office on Ivar (or sometimes Cahuenga) and used the same library I did. Chandler and William Faulkner (whose mystery short-stories were collected in Knight’s Gambit) had been patrons at Pickwick’s, the bookstore I spent whole Saturdays in.
After a while, I began to feel I was halfway living in an L.A. novel.
JKP: You’ve told me before that the first Macdonald novel you read, when you were 11, was The Barbarous Coast (1956), his sixth Lew Archer tale, and that you experienced an “eerie personal moment” in the course of enjoying that book. Can you explain further?
TN: In Chapter 7 of the book, Archer seeks information from Anton, a French-Canadian dance teacher in a stucco building in West Hollywood.
I was French-Canadian by birth and as a younger youngster had taken tap lessons in a stucco-fronted studio in West Hollywood.
Archer asks Anton why he didn’t give more assistance to Archer’s client, a Canadian husband come to Southern California in search of his missing wife (an ex-pupil of Anton’s); the instructor answers: “ … my father was a streetcar conductor in Montreal. Why should I help an Anglo from Toronto?”
My father, before our family moved in ’53 to Southern California, drove a streetcar in Montreal.
I stopped, stunned. If I’d known [Jorge Luis] Borges’ work then, I might have felt like a Borges figure: a fellow reading a story and realizing he himself is one of its characters. At the very least,
I decided, this Ross Macdonald had somehow done his homework.
JKP: Were you a consistent reader of Macdonald’s work ever after, or were there other novelists in this genre to whom you gravitated more strongly?
TN: There were and are other writers I have and do admire greatly: Chandler, Hammett, [George] Pelecanos, [Michael] Connelly, [Denise] Mina, [Tana] French. But I always returned, and still do, to Macdonald: no one else affects me so deeply and on so many artistic and emotional levels.
JKP: What’s been Macdonald’s lasting impact on detective fiction?
TN: “Incalculable” is the word that springs to my tongue. All the household-name mystery writers since the 1970s in a sense owe their careers to his crossover onto mainstream-fiction bestseller lists; he paved the way for Robert B. Parker, Sue Grafton, Tony Hillerman, and dozens of others. And he set an artistic standard that many authors still aspire to.
James Ellroy dedicated a book to his memory.
Ross Macdonald was one of the favorite authors of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, whose Martin Beck police novels revolutionized--you could almost say invented--Swedish crime fiction, leading directly to the work of Henning Mankell, Stieg Larsson, and dozens of contemporary Scandinavian writers, all of whom share Macdonald’s Ibsenesque vision of a world where everyone is in some sense culpable; there’s always enough guilt to go around.
Macdonald personally mentored by mail a Canadian teenager named Linwood Barclay, who’s now an internationally successful thriller writer.
Recently Donna Leon, who lives in Venice and writes a best-selling series about an Italian police detective, said her favorite mystery writer is Ross Macdonald: “Macdonald’s prose is wonderful, his sentences are sometimes serpentine, sometimes as balanced as anything Alexander Pope wrote.”
Ross Macdonald’s works were translated into many languages, including Japanese and Russian. His influence was global, and it continues--along with his own works--into the 21st century.
JKP: Since the publication of your Ross Macdonald biography, you’ve obviously been busy as The Wall Street Journal’s crime-fiction reviewer, plus you penned a biography of clarinetist/band leader Artie Shaw [Three Chords for Beauty’s Sake] that was released in 2010. But you keep circling back again to Macdonald, compiling three previously unpublished mysteries in Strangers in Town (2001), collecting the author’s short fiction in The Archer Files (2007), and this year producing two new books about Lew Archer’s creator. Are you surprised to still be researching Macdonald’s life after all this time?
TN: I think it’s accurate to say that every post-biography Macdonald work I’ve been associated with has been something I’ve wanted (and been trying) to do since 1999. But it takes a long time, for a number of reasons, to bring a book from conception to publication. Yet the results always seem (to me) worth whatever the wait. I am grateful to be able to help bring more Macdonald material to readers.
JKP: Are you constantly following clues to material you’ve heard might exist, or is much of the Ross Macdonald stuff you find nowadays brought to you by other literary researchers who think you might be interested in new finds?
TN: To tell you the truth, Jeff, I expect other researchers would most likely keep such finds to themselves! But new acquisitions come into Macdonald’s archive [at the University of California-Irvine]
from time to time, and that reminds me: I must go over there soon and see what’s up.
JKP: What other archives of his work have you plumbed over the last 16 years?
TN: Macdonald’s considerable correspondence with [publisher] Alfred A. Knopf and his staff is in the Knopf archive at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. His decades of letters to the Harold Ober Agency are in the Ober Archives at Princeton University. There are letters from Macdonald to the critic and author Anthony Boucher at the Lilly Library of Indiana University. And Macdonald’s letters to Eudora Welty (and hers to him) are housed at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History.
JKP: When I first interviewed you, in 1999, I asked about the existence of a last, unpublished Lew Archer novel that Macdonald had contracted to write for Knopf in 1979, before he was overcome by Alzheimer’s. You said you’d found fragments of work that you thought he might have eventually combined, including some that he could have employed to link Archer’s early life with his own, revealing that Archer had originally come from Canada. Have you located any further clues as to what Macdonald’s final Archer novel might have offered?
TN: As he wrote Eudora Welty, he was drawn back to memories of two early teenage years spent in Winnipeg, with an aunt and uncle who left lifelong impressions on him. He wrote some pages and made notes for a work set in that city circa 1929. He also told Welty he was intrigued by the notion of a book that would mix fact and fiction, memory and invention, in interlacing and overlapping fashion: a writer exploring his own past through made-up stories derived from it.
JKP: Macdonald saw seven of his Lew Archer novels published during the 1950s, four of which you feature in this new Library of America (LOA) Macdonald omnibus. Of those, is there one you think represents the best of the author’s literary talents?
TN: Each is great in its way. But The Galton Case is the first novel of his mature period, I feel; the first to deploy fully his characteristic themes and wonderful poetic style. He saw this novel at the time as a fulcrum upon which his future work could turn.
JKP: Macdonald penned 18 Archer novels. Do you have other favorites that didn’t fit within the period constraints of this new volume?
TN: Lots. The Chill, The Zebra-Striped Hearse, Sleeping Beauty, The Underground Man, The Far Side of the Dollar--to name but five.
JKP: And this LOA collection represents only one of four decades during which Macdonald was producing fiction. Can we expect follow-up collections from you,
or haven’t you brought that up with the LOA folks yet?
TN: I think it’s safe to say there’ll likely be at least one more Macdonald LOA volume, drawing from the final 10 years or so of his work. In fact, I now have permission to say there’ll be two more volumes!
JKP: In addition to the four novels, your LOA collection offers five “other writings” by Macdonald. Among those is a wonderful letter he penned to publisher Knopf that explains how his work differs from that of Raymond Chandler, Mickey Spillane, and other contemporaries. How did you choose the short works featured here?
TN: His 1952 letter to Alfred Knopf was written in response to Pocket Books’ complaint that Macdonald’s upcoming standalone, Meet Me at the Morgue, didn’t reflect the black-and-white, good-versus-evil world the paperback house expected then from such a book; they suggested Knopf have someone rewrite Macdonald’s novel to bring it more into the expected formulaic line. In Macdonald’s impassioned response, he defends his right to his own aesthetic integrity and moral vision. I’m sure he felt he was fighting for his artistic life.
The 1965 essay “The Writer As Detective Hero,” written for Show magazine, was published three years after Raymond Chandler’s 1949 letter to critic James Sandoe saw print; this was the letter in which Chandler found sneering fault with Macdonald’s first Lew Archer novel, The Moving Target, a book Sandoe had liked and made the mistake of praising to Chandler. Macdonald felt the need to defend himself against Chandler’s now-public attack. In this essay, he contrasts his morally complex and stylistically nuanced approach to crime fiction with the arguably more simplistic view of Chandler and his imitators.
“Preface to Archer in Hollywood” (a 1967 Knopf three-decker omnibus) is included in part for its references to The Way Some People Die and The Barbarous Coast.
“Writing The Galton Case” is an informative piece about another of the books in the Library’s Macdonald quartet.
And “Down These Streets a Mean Man Must Go” is the rewritten-for-publication version of a 1973 talk Macdonald gave in Chicago to a gathering of the Popular Culture Association. It contains moving autobiographical revelations concerning Macdonald’s adolescent discovery, in Kitchener, Ontario, of Dashiell Hammett’s fiction, which started him on the long, detour-filled path to becoming a detective novelist himself.
JKP: I was sorry to see how seriously Macdonald had fallen out with Chandler, whose work once inspired his own. In that letter to Knopf, he contends Chandler just doesn’t have it in him to advance the detective story farther than he has by that point--a year before Chandler published The Long Goodbye.
TN: Although the exuberant prose and compelling L.A. panorama of Raymond Chandler’s first two books exhilarated Macdonald in the early 1940s and liberated his own nascent creativity, he became disenchanted (as did his wife, Margaret Millar) by the limitations of Chandler’s approach.
Chandler wrote great individual scenes but often paid scant attention to plot. Macdonald saw plot “as a vehicle of meaning. … The surprise with which a detective novel concludes should set up tragic vibrations which run backward through the entire structure.”
Chandler’s conception of his narrator-protagonist was antithetical to Macdonald, who stated, “I could never write of Archer [as Chandler had of Philip Marlowe]:
‘He is the hero, he is everything.’ It is true that [Archer’s] actions carry the story … But he is not [its] emotional center.”
On a personal level, Macdonald was upset by things Chandler had done circa 1949 and ’50 that he interpreted as Chandler trying to spoil Macdonald’s chances in the marketplace: mocking The Moving Target to James Sandoe, knocking The Drowning Pool to colleague James Fox (head of the Southern California chapter of the Mystery Writers of America), putting down Macdonald in comments to an influential Midwestern bookseller. Macdonald felt Chandler had tried to smother his career in its cradle, so to speak; and while he later took pains to give Chandler his artistic due in print, Macdonald in private could never condone what he felt had been Chandler’s personal maliciousness towards him.
JKP: Let’s talk briefly about your second major Macdonald book coming out this year, Meanwhile There Are Letters. By what mechanics did you and your co-editor, Suzanne Marrs, put this book together?
TN: By telephone, e-mail, and the U.S. Postal Service. I transcribed Ken’s half of the correspondence, from photocopies of his handwritten originals. Suzanne transcribed Miss Welty’s half. We collaborated with ease and pleasure on the introduction and the narrative text woven around the letters.
JKP: What new information can we glean about Macdonald and Welty by reading through this correspondence they once thought private?
TN: What you’ll see is a relationship developing from professional admiration and collegial respect through intense personal friendship into love. As Alfred Uhry, the author of Driving Miss Daisy (and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Tony Award, and the Oscar) says, if I may quote: “These exquisite letters chart the growth of a deep and abiding friendship. And, astoundingly, they become a love story that will break your heart.”
JKP: What were the most valuable or satisfying things these authors derived from their epistolary relationship?
TN: Someone to whom they could express personal thoughts and feelings in ways impossible or uncomfortable or inappropriate with other correspondents. Someone with profound interest in their feelings and perceptions, who took joy in their existence. Someone who cherished them.
JKP: In addition to 2015 marking a century since Kenneth Millar was born, it’s also the 100th anniversary of Margaret Millar’s birth in Ontario, Canada. You compiled a collection of her mystery short stories (The Couple Next Door, 2005) and wrote an intro to Stark House Press’ 2006 pairing of two of her classic novels, An Air That Kills and Do Evil in Return. So let me ask: Although her stories of
psychological suspense have won critical acclaim, she has been all but forgotten by most readers. Why has Ross Macdonald’s work remained in print, while hers has not?
TN: For the same reasons they stayed only sporadically in print during her lifetime.
Except for her first and last few books, she did not write series characters, whose adventures tend to attract a larger and more faithful readership (and a more regular publishing schedule). Once it was clear that Margaret Millar’s forte was the unique standalone thriller, her husband resigned himself to continuing his Lew Archer novels, which served him better in the long run. “Maggie” (as she liked to be called) suffered severe writer’s block in the 1970s and prematurely “retired” for six years, which interrupted her career momentum to say the least.
But the posthumous neglect of this excellent author will soon end. Soho Crime’s Syndicate Books has announced its imminent reissue, in uniform print and e-book editions, of all the books of Margaret Millar (including her non-fiction work, The Birds and the Beasts Were There).
JKP: I understand that in July publisher Vintage/Black Lizard will be bringing out an expanded version of your 2007 collection of Macdonald’s short fiction, The Archer Files. What additional material can we expect to find in this new edition?
TN: The added material in this expanded edition of The Archer Files includes a couple of chapters from the fragmentary Winnipeg-based manuscript referred to above, a discarded last chapter from the 1965 novel The Far Side of the Dollar [“We Went on from There”], and two more beginnings of unfinished stories similar to the 11 “case notes” in the original Archer Files. These items--some of which have appeared before, in different limited-edition contexts--are held in Macdonald’s archive at UC Irvine, which is where I came upon them.
JKP: With all of the books you have out now about Macdonald, are there still pieces of his work that you’re holding back, waiting to use at some date in the not-too-distant future? In other words, will there be more Macdonald books rolling out of your computer?
TN: As gratifying as it is for me to be thought a sort of custodian of my favorite writer’s oeuvre, let me hasten to say I am not his literary gatekeeper. Ross Macdonald’s trustee and his agent make the decisions regarding what parts of his work are to be published or republished. Other writers and editors may be at work on their own Ross Macdonald projects.
As for me: In the past 16 years, I’ve written a number of occasional pieces about Macdonald’s fiction--all drawing on material not in my Macdonald biography--which I’d love to see collected in a book.
LISTEN UP: In the 49th episode of their podcast, Speaking of Mysteries, Nancie Clare and Leslie S. Klinger speak with Tom Nolan about his new Library of America Macdonald collection. Click here to enjoy their conversation.
READ MORE: “Can’t Wait for True Detective 2? Dive Into Ross Macdonald’s California Noir Masterpieces,” by Scott TImberg (Salon).

Even for somebody as familiar with Macdonald’s work as I am (the first crime novel I remember consuming was 1949’s The Moving Target, which introduced his series protagonist, L.A. private eye Lew Archer, and I’ve since enjoyed reading and re-reading the entirety of Macdonald’s oeuvre), holding the brand-new, 900-plus-page Library of America collection in my hands is a treat. Macdonald wasn’t only a terrific crime novelist; he was a terrific novelist who used fictional illegalities as his entry into telling stories--sometimes braided with Freudian issues and Greek tragedy--about families in trouble. As author-playwright Gordon Dahlquist opined in HiLobrow:
Simply in terms of the hard-boiled mystery, the books are audaciously accomplished. Macdonald’s intricate plots are like Sophocles by way of a boa constrictor. His subtle reconfiguration of the detective character tips the Archer books toward social portrait and social critique without the burden of any particular axe being ground. Archer isn’t an avatar of tough virtue for the reader’s vicarious thrill. He may be a catalyst within the stories, but most profoundly and more simply he’s a witness. If [Raymond] Chandler’s novels are about [gumshoe Philip] Marlowe, then Macdonald’s--despite Archer’s fuller realization--are about California. But most remarkable is the compassion with which these unsparing tales are unwound. The compassion is never soft, but feels truthful without being cruel.Macdonald made Archer a sharp observer of the social condition, a questioner who unpeeled layers of familial strife, jealousy, and disappointment even as he sought answers to whatever obvious mystery lay at the heart of his current yarn. The author, having endured ample woes himself (both as a youngster and as the father of a “wild” daughter, Linda, who killed a 13-year-old boy in a car wreck and later disappeared from college for more than a week) and undergone psychoanalysis as a result, could--through Archer--empathize with his hardship-plagued characters. Not all imaginary shamuses on the clock during the first three quarters of the 20th century demonstrated such understanding. National Public Radio’s Maureen Corrigan, recalling the opening of The Doomsters--in which “a troubled young man bangs at Lew Archer’s door in the wee hours of the morning”--suggests that “Sam Spade would have rolled over in bed and ignored the knock; Philip Marlowe would have been out walking the L.A. streets in the rain; later on, Mickey Spillane would have just shot that annoying predawn visitor. But Lew Archer is as much a social worker, a counselor, a father confessor as he is a private eye. Macdonald gave us a detective with psychological depth; a gumshoe capable of throwing around words like ‘gestalt.’”
That capacity for compassion, Archer’s willingness to excavate the tumbledown remains of a family’s history (and in so many of Macdonald’s later novels, the roots of contemporary misfortunes are traceable to injustices and failures in the past) was one thing that drew me, as it did so many other readers, to Lew Archer’s adventures. After managing--through some miracle that could only have been available to an individual as young and callow as I was at the time--to arrange an interview with Millar/Macdonald in 1980, what I wanted to do most as I sat with him in the dimly lit study of his Santa Barbara, California, home was ask him for a deep analysis of his sleuth-cum-shrink, and inquire where Archer’s path might lead him in the future. Unfortunately, by that point Macdonald was already enduring

(Left) Editor Tom Nolan, photographed by Hal Boucher
Much later, in 1999, when I first had the opportunity to interview Tom Nolan, about his Macdonald biography, I asked him how much his subject’s troubled past had influenced his choice of a career writing about troubled people. “Oh, enormously,” said Nolan. “I think that initially he read certain kinds of books--not just fiction, but non-fiction, psychology, philosophy--to some extent, because he was trying to find ways to deal with life and with his problems. As far as fiction, I'm sure that [Charles] Dickens and that sort of fiction appealed to him because he could identify with the travails of Oliver Twist, and I think authors like [Edgar Allan] Poe and [Nathaniel] Hawthorne, people who probed the psychology of good and evil, or good and bad choices, appealed to him because he was wrestling with these things himself. Eventually, he tried to take the detective story and make it more interesting psychologically, able to explore some of these things that he was very interested in.”
More than a decade and a half has passed since then. But when I learned that the Library of America planned to issue a selection of Ross Macdonald’s early Archer cases--to help celebrate this year’s centennial of the author’s birth (he came into the world in Los Gatos, California, on December 13, 1915)--and that Nolan had served as its editor, I knew I had to interview him again. I also wanted to ask Nolan, though, about his work on a second volume, Meanwhile There Are Letters: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and Ross Macdonald, which Arcade Publishing will debut in July. Co-edited with Eudora Welty biographer Suzanne Marrs, it draws on an abundance of letters--more than 300 of them!--exchanged during the 1970s and early ’80s between Macdonald and Mississippi Pulitzer Prize winner Welty (The Optimist’s Daughter). “Though separated by background, geography, genre, and his marriage,” explains the back-jacket copy on my bound galley of this book, “the two authors shared their lives in witty, tender, and profoundly romantic letters, each drawing on the other for inspiration, comfort, and strength.”
And Nolan’s centennial-year offerings don’t stop there. He’s also awaiting this summer’s paperback release of an expanded version of The Archer Files, his 2007 collection of Macdonald’s previously unpublished Archer short stories and story fragments.
I took the opportunity recently to quiz Nolan, via e-mail, about his various Macdonald projects. A significant chunk of our exchange can be found in my new Kirkus column. But I also asked him more about his personal history with Macdonald’s fiction, his continuing research into that author’s career, Macdonald’s often uneasy association with Chandler, and the “forgotten” suspense fiction penned by Macdonald’s wife. What didn’t fit in Kirkus is posted below.
J. Kingston Pierce: I understand you started reading crime and mystery fiction when you were a boy, just 8 or 9 years old. What provoked such an early interest in the genre?
Tom Nolan: I was 9 when a school chum told me about the Sherlock Holmes stories, which his father had bought him in the complete edition with introduction by Christopher Morley; my friend said this book was terrific. My dad was kind enough to buy me the same anthology, from the Pickwick Bookshop on Hollywood Boulevard. I loved the Holmes canon, too. At the Hollywood library on Ivar [Avenue], I looked for more detective stories. There were lots. 100 Years’ Entertainment: The Great Detective Stories, 1841-1941, the Modern Library Giant collection edited by Ellery Queen, proved a useful historical guide. Soon I was compiling and memorizing lists of fictional detectives and their creators (as, I suppose, some kids memorized batting averages): Remember Martin Hewitt, Investigator? Max Carrados, the Blind Detective? The Great Merlini?

(Right) Pickwick Books in Los Angeles, circa 1965
Also, in the late 1950s, daytime TV was full of old movies, many of them mystery and crime stories adapted from books by prose-writers ranging from Conan Doyle to Cornell Woolrich. The greatest detective movies, I discovered, were taken from novels: The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiell Hammett. The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler. I read those books, too--and they were as good or better than the movies.
There were many detective and police series on prime-time television: Dragnet, Border Patrol, Racket Squad, Perry Mason. They claimed a degree of authenticity.
Newspapers were full of crime news. L.A. had five newspapers then, with morning, afternoon, and evening editions. All were sensationalistic, with lots of black-headlined crime stories--some set in one’s own neighborhood.
The fiction I read began to merge in my imagination with life around me. “Colorful” mobster Mickey Cohen was a local “celebrity” and acted the part, hanging out with stars on the Sunset Strip, always good for a quote. His henchman Johnny Stompanato was stabbed to death in movie star Lana Turner’s house; her courtroom testimony was carried live on L.A.’s Channel 5.
There seemed a synthesis between life and art, fact and fiction, in the town I grew up in. I was 10 when I first went to lunch at Musso-Franks restaurant on Hollywood Boulevard. (I ordered filet mignon, bread and butter, and a glass of milk.) Musso’s, “the oldest restaurant in Hollywood,” turned up in detective (and other) books I read, including Raymond Chandler’s and Ross Macdonald’s. Philip Marlowe, Chandler’s private eye, had an office on Ivar (or sometimes Cahuenga) and used the same library I did. Chandler and William Faulkner (whose mystery short-stories were collected in Knight’s Gambit) had been patrons at Pickwick’s, the bookstore I spent whole Saturdays in.
After a while, I began to feel I was halfway living in an L.A. novel.
JKP: You’ve told me before that the first Macdonald novel you read, when you were 11, was The Barbarous Coast (1956), his sixth Lew Archer tale, and that you experienced an “eerie personal moment” in the course of enjoying that book. Can you explain further?
TN: In Chapter 7 of the book, Archer seeks information from Anton, a French-Canadian dance teacher in a stucco building in West Hollywood.
I was French-Canadian by birth and as a younger youngster had taken tap lessons in a stucco-fronted studio in West Hollywood.
Archer asks Anton why he didn’t give more assistance to Archer’s client, a Canadian husband come to Southern California in search of his missing wife (an ex-pupil of Anton’s); the instructor answers: “ … my father was a streetcar conductor in Montreal. Why should I help an Anglo from Toronto?”
My father, before our family moved in ’53 to Southern California, drove a streetcar in Montreal.
I stopped, stunned. If I’d known [Jorge Luis] Borges’ work then, I might have felt like a Borges figure: a fellow reading a story and realizing he himself is one of its characters. At the very least,

JKP: Were you a consistent reader of Macdonald’s work ever after, or were there other novelists in this genre to whom you gravitated more strongly?
TN: There were and are other writers I have and do admire greatly: Chandler, Hammett, [George] Pelecanos, [Michael] Connelly, [Denise] Mina, [Tana] French. But I always returned, and still do, to Macdonald: no one else affects me so deeply and on so many artistic and emotional levels.
JKP: What’s been Macdonald’s lasting impact on detective fiction?
TN: “Incalculable” is the word that springs to my tongue. All the household-name mystery writers since the 1970s in a sense owe their careers to his crossover onto mainstream-fiction bestseller lists; he paved the way for Robert B. Parker, Sue Grafton, Tony Hillerman, and dozens of others. And he set an artistic standard that many authors still aspire to.
James Ellroy dedicated a book to his memory.
Ross Macdonald was one of the favorite authors of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, whose Martin Beck police novels revolutionized--you could almost say invented--Swedish crime fiction, leading directly to the work of Henning Mankell, Stieg Larsson, and dozens of contemporary Scandinavian writers, all of whom share Macdonald’s Ibsenesque vision of a world where everyone is in some sense culpable; there’s always enough guilt to go around.
Macdonald personally mentored by mail a Canadian teenager named Linwood Barclay, who’s now an internationally successful thriller writer.
Recently Donna Leon, who lives in Venice and writes a best-selling series about an Italian police detective, said her favorite mystery writer is Ross Macdonald: “Macdonald’s prose is wonderful, his sentences are sometimes serpentine, sometimes as balanced as anything Alexander Pope wrote.”
Ross Macdonald’s works were translated into many languages, including Japanese and Russian. His influence was global, and it continues--along with his own works--into the 21st century.
JKP: Since the publication of your Ross Macdonald biography, you’ve obviously been busy as The Wall Street Journal’s crime-fiction reviewer, plus you penned a biography of clarinetist/band leader Artie Shaw [Three Chords for Beauty’s Sake] that was released in 2010. But you keep circling back again to Macdonald, compiling three previously unpublished mysteries in Strangers in Town (2001), collecting the author’s short fiction in The Archer Files (2007), and this year producing two new books about Lew Archer’s creator. Are you surprised to still be researching Macdonald’s life after all this time?
TN: I think it’s accurate to say that every post-biography Macdonald work I’ve been associated with has been something I’ve wanted (and been trying) to do since 1999. But it takes a long time, for a number of reasons, to bring a book from conception to publication. Yet the results always seem (to me) worth whatever the wait. I am grateful to be able to help bring more Macdonald material to readers.
JKP: Are you constantly following clues to material you’ve heard might exist, or is much of the Ross Macdonald stuff you find nowadays brought to you by other literary researchers who think you might be interested in new finds?
TN: To tell you the truth, Jeff, I expect other researchers would most likely keep such finds to themselves! But new acquisitions come into Macdonald’s archive [at the University of California-Irvine]

JKP: What other archives of his work have you plumbed over the last 16 years?
TN: Macdonald’s considerable correspondence with [publisher] Alfred A. Knopf and his staff is in the Knopf archive at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. His decades of letters to the Harold Ober Agency are in the Ober Archives at Princeton University. There are letters from Macdonald to the critic and author Anthony Boucher at the Lilly Library of Indiana University. And Macdonald’s letters to Eudora Welty (and hers to him) are housed at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History.
JKP: When I first interviewed you, in 1999, I asked about the existence of a last, unpublished Lew Archer novel that Macdonald had contracted to write for Knopf in 1979, before he was overcome by Alzheimer’s. You said you’d found fragments of work that you thought he might have eventually combined, including some that he could have employed to link Archer’s early life with his own, revealing that Archer had originally come from Canada. Have you located any further clues as to what Macdonald’s final Archer novel might have offered?
TN: As he wrote Eudora Welty, he was drawn back to memories of two early teenage years spent in Winnipeg, with an aunt and uncle who left lifelong impressions on him. He wrote some pages and made notes for a work set in that city circa 1929. He also told Welty he was intrigued by the notion of a book that would mix fact and fiction, memory and invention, in interlacing and overlapping fashion: a writer exploring his own past through made-up stories derived from it.
JKP: Macdonald saw seven of his Lew Archer novels published during the 1950s, four of which you feature in this new Library of America (LOA) Macdonald omnibus. Of those, is there one you think represents the best of the author’s literary talents?
TN: Each is great in its way. But The Galton Case is the first novel of his mature period, I feel; the first to deploy fully his characteristic themes and wonderful poetic style. He saw this novel at the time as a fulcrum upon which his future work could turn.
JKP: Macdonald penned 18 Archer novels. Do you have other favorites that didn’t fit within the period constraints of this new volume?
TN: Lots. The Chill, The Zebra-Striped Hearse, Sleeping Beauty, The Underground Man, The Far Side of the Dollar--to name but five.
JKP: And this LOA collection represents only one of four decades during which Macdonald was producing fiction. Can we expect follow-up collections from you,

TN: I think it’s safe to say there’ll likely be at least one more Macdonald LOA volume, drawing from the final 10 years or so of his work. In fact, I now have permission to say there’ll be two more volumes!
JKP: In addition to the four novels, your LOA collection offers five “other writings” by Macdonald. Among those is a wonderful letter he penned to publisher Knopf that explains how his work differs from that of Raymond Chandler, Mickey Spillane, and other contemporaries. How did you choose the short works featured here?
TN: His 1952 letter to Alfred Knopf was written in response to Pocket Books’ complaint that Macdonald’s upcoming standalone, Meet Me at the Morgue, didn’t reflect the black-and-white, good-versus-evil world the paperback house expected then from such a book; they suggested Knopf have someone rewrite Macdonald’s novel to bring it more into the expected formulaic line. In Macdonald’s impassioned response, he defends his right to his own aesthetic integrity and moral vision. I’m sure he felt he was fighting for his artistic life.
The 1965 essay “The Writer As Detective Hero,” written for Show magazine, was published three years after Raymond Chandler’s 1949 letter to critic James Sandoe saw print; this was the letter in which Chandler found sneering fault with Macdonald’s first Lew Archer novel, The Moving Target, a book Sandoe had liked and made the mistake of praising to Chandler. Macdonald felt the need to defend himself against Chandler’s now-public attack. In this essay, he contrasts his morally complex and stylistically nuanced approach to crime fiction with the arguably more simplistic view of Chandler and his imitators.
“Preface to Archer in Hollywood” (a 1967 Knopf three-decker omnibus) is included in part for its references to The Way Some People Die and The Barbarous Coast.
“Writing The Galton Case” is an informative piece about another of the books in the Library’s Macdonald quartet.
And “Down These Streets a Mean Man Must Go” is the rewritten-for-publication version of a 1973 talk Macdonald gave in Chicago to a gathering of the Popular Culture Association. It contains moving autobiographical revelations concerning Macdonald’s adolescent discovery, in Kitchener, Ontario, of Dashiell Hammett’s fiction, which started him on the long, detour-filled path to becoming a detective novelist himself.
JKP: I was sorry to see how seriously Macdonald had fallen out with Chandler, whose work once inspired his own. In that letter to Knopf, he contends Chandler just doesn’t have it in him to advance the detective story farther than he has by that point--a year before Chandler published The Long Goodbye.
TN: Although the exuberant prose and compelling L.A. panorama of Raymond Chandler’s first two books exhilarated Macdonald in the early 1940s and liberated his own nascent creativity, he became disenchanted (as did his wife, Margaret Millar) by the limitations of Chandler’s approach.
Chandler wrote great individual scenes but often paid scant attention to plot. Macdonald saw plot “as a vehicle of meaning. … The surprise with which a detective novel concludes should set up tragic vibrations which run backward through the entire structure.”
Chandler’s conception of his narrator-protagonist was antithetical to Macdonald, who stated, “I could never write of Archer [as Chandler had of Philip Marlowe]:

On a personal level, Macdonald was upset by things Chandler had done circa 1949 and ’50 that he interpreted as Chandler trying to spoil Macdonald’s chances in the marketplace: mocking The Moving Target to James Sandoe, knocking The Drowning Pool to colleague James Fox (head of the Southern California chapter of the Mystery Writers of America), putting down Macdonald in comments to an influential Midwestern bookseller. Macdonald felt Chandler had tried to smother his career in its cradle, so to speak; and while he later took pains to give Chandler his artistic due in print, Macdonald in private could never condone what he felt had been Chandler’s personal maliciousness towards him.
JKP: Let’s talk briefly about your second major Macdonald book coming out this year, Meanwhile There Are Letters. By what mechanics did you and your co-editor, Suzanne Marrs, put this book together?
TN: By telephone, e-mail, and the U.S. Postal Service. I transcribed Ken’s half of the correspondence, from photocopies of his handwritten originals. Suzanne transcribed Miss Welty’s half. We collaborated with ease and pleasure on the introduction and the narrative text woven around the letters.
JKP: What new information can we glean about Macdonald and Welty by reading through this correspondence they once thought private?
TN: What you’ll see is a relationship developing from professional admiration and collegial respect through intense personal friendship into love. As Alfred Uhry, the author of Driving Miss Daisy (and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Tony Award, and the Oscar) says, if I may quote: “These exquisite letters chart the growth of a deep and abiding friendship. And, astoundingly, they become a love story that will break your heart.”
JKP: What were the most valuable or satisfying things these authors derived from their epistolary relationship?
TN: Someone to whom they could express personal thoughts and feelings in ways impossible or uncomfortable or inappropriate with other correspondents. Someone with profound interest in their feelings and perceptions, who took joy in their existence. Someone who cherished them.
JKP: In addition to 2015 marking a century since Kenneth Millar was born, it’s also the 100th anniversary of Margaret Millar’s birth in Ontario, Canada. You compiled a collection of her mystery short stories (The Couple Next Door, 2005) and wrote an intro to Stark House Press’ 2006 pairing of two of her classic novels, An Air That Kills and Do Evil in Return. So let me ask: Although her stories of

TN: For the same reasons they stayed only sporadically in print during her lifetime.
Except for her first and last few books, she did not write series characters, whose adventures tend to attract a larger and more faithful readership (and a more regular publishing schedule). Once it was clear that Margaret Millar’s forte was the unique standalone thriller, her husband resigned himself to continuing his Lew Archer novels, which served him better in the long run. “Maggie” (as she liked to be called) suffered severe writer’s block in the 1970s and prematurely “retired” for six years, which interrupted her career momentum to say the least.
But the posthumous neglect of this excellent author will soon end. Soho Crime’s Syndicate Books has announced its imminent reissue, in uniform print and e-book editions, of all the books of Margaret Millar (including her non-fiction work, The Birds and the Beasts Were There).
JKP: I understand that in July publisher Vintage/Black Lizard will be bringing out an expanded version of your 2007 collection of Macdonald’s short fiction, The Archer Files. What additional material can we expect to find in this new edition?
TN: The added material in this expanded edition of The Archer Files includes a couple of chapters from the fragmentary Winnipeg-based manuscript referred to above, a discarded last chapter from the 1965 novel The Far Side of the Dollar [“We Went on from There”], and two more beginnings of unfinished stories similar to the 11 “case notes” in the original Archer Files. These items--some of which have appeared before, in different limited-edition contexts--are held in Macdonald’s archive at UC Irvine, which is where I came upon them.
JKP: With all of the books you have out now about Macdonald, are there still pieces of his work that you’re holding back, waiting to use at some date in the not-too-distant future? In other words, will there be more Macdonald books rolling out of your computer?
TN: As gratifying as it is for me to be thought a sort of custodian of my favorite writer’s oeuvre, let me hasten to say I am not his literary gatekeeper. Ross Macdonald’s trustee and his agent make the decisions regarding what parts of his work are to be published or republished. Other writers and editors may be at work on their own Ross Macdonald projects.
As for me: In the past 16 years, I’ve written a number of occasional pieces about Macdonald’s fiction--all drawing on material not in my Macdonald biography--which I’d love to see collected in a book.
LISTEN UP: In the 49th episode of their podcast, Speaking of Mysteries, Nancie Clare and Leslie S. Klinger speak with Tom Nolan about his new Library of America Macdonald collection. Click here to enjoy their conversation.
READ MORE: “Can’t Wait for True Detective 2? Dive Into Ross Macdonald’s California Noir Masterpieces,” by Scott TImberg (Salon).
It’s Double Owls This Year
Authors Chelsea Cain and Johnny Shaw are the joint winners of this year’s Spotted Owl Award. This commendation is presented by the Portland, Oregon-based Friends of Mystery group to celebrate mystery novels by authors living in the Pacific Northwest (Alaska, British Columbia, Canada, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington).
Cain receives her prize specifically for One Kick (Simon & Schuster), published last year, while it’s Shaw’s Plaster City (Thomas & Mercere) that earned him the same honor.
There were nine runners-up for the 2015 Spotted Owl were: Crooked River, by Valerie Geary (Morrow); Cold Storage, Alaska, by John Straley (Soho Crime); Identity, by Ingrid Thoft (Putnam); The Ascendant, by Drew Chapman (Simon & Schuster); Chump Change, by G.M. Ford (Thomas & Mercer); My Sister’s Grave, by Robert Dugoni (Thomas & Mercer); Dead Float, by Warren Easley (Poisoned Pen Press); House Reckoning, by Mike Lawson (Atlantic Monthly Press); and Street Justice, by Kris Nelscott (WMG).
Congratulations to all of the contenders.
(Hat tip to Mystery Fanfare.)
Cain receives her prize specifically for One Kick (Simon & Schuster), published last year, while it’s Shaw’s Plaster City (Thomas & Mercere) that earned him the same honor.
There were nine runners-up for the 2015 Spotted Owl were: Crooked River, by Valerie Geary (Morrow); Cold Storage, Alaska, by John Straley (Soho Crime); Identity, by Ingrid Thoft (Putnam); The Ascendant, by Drew Chapman (Simon & Schuster); Chump Change, by G.M. Ford (Thomas & Mercer); My Sister’s Grave, by Robert Dugoni (Thomas & Mercer); Dead Float, by Warren Easley (Poisoned Pen Press); House Reckoning, by Mike Lawson (Atlantic Monthly Press); and Street Justice, by Kris Nelscott (WMG).
Congratulations to all of the contenders.
(Hat tip to Mystery Fanfare.)
Saturday, April 25, 2015
Bouchercon Procrastinators, Repent!
The deadline for sending in your ballots is only five days away.
Anyone who attended Bouchercon 2014 in Long Beach, or who has registered for Bouchercon 2015 in Raleigh, North Carolina, should have received--via e-mail--a personal link to an online ballot, inviting you to nominate books and stories in six Anthony Awards categories. If you’re eligible to vote, but have not received your ballot, promptly e-mail B.G. Ritts with your name and the information of whether you were at Long Beach or have registered for the Raleigh convention.
These ballots must be returned electronically by this coming Thursday, April 30. The top five candidates in each category will be announced after May 1, and the Anthonys are to be presented during a ceremony in Raleigh on Saturday, October 10.
Anyone who attended Bouchercon 2014 in Long Beach, or who has registered for Bouchercon 2015 in Raleigh, North Carolina, should have received--via e-mail--a personal link to an online ballot, inviting you to nominate books and stories in six Anthony Awards categories. If you’re eligible to vote, but have not received your ballot, promptly e-mail B.G. Ritts with your name and the information of whether you were at Long Beach or have registered for the Raleigh convention.
These ballots must be returned electronically by this coming Thursday, April 30. The top five candidates in each category will be announced after May 1, and the Anthonys are to be presented during a ceremony in Raleigh on Saturday, October 10.
Friday, April 24, 2015
The Story Behind the Story:
“The Word,” by Hubert Crouch
(Editor’s note: This 57th entry in our “Story Behind the Story” series introduces to The Rap Sheet Hubert Crouch, a veteran trial lawyer practicing in Dallas, Texas. He’s the author now of two legal thrillers, the latest being The Word, which was released earlier this month--in print and e-book versions--by Serpentine Books.)
Having been a trial lawyer for a number of years, I’ve handled cases that are a testament to the old adage that “fact is stranger than fiction.” A macabre grave robbery was the impetus for one of the more bizarre cases I handled, and served as the inspiration for my first novel, Cried for No One (2013). Critics and readers alike said they loved that book and wanted to see more of its
hard-charging
trial lawyer, Jace Forman, his resourceful paralegal, Darrin McKenzie, savvy police detective Jackie McLaughlin, and up-and-coming journalist Leah Rosen. Gratified, I began writing the sequel.
While I had always planned on penning a trilogy of novels featuring these characters, I had not decided on a central theme for the second book. It was during the course of teaching Free Speech and the First Amendment to undergraduates at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, that the theme finally began to form. One of the cases we examined in class was Snyder v. Phelps. The Snyder case addressed the question of whether a religious group had the First Amendment right to protest at the funerals of fallen soldiers. The United States Supreme Court held that it did. The Court’s decision was hotly debated in my class: Did the Court correctly balance the right of a family burying a loved one with the right of a religious sect to voice its views?
With the Snyder case in mind, I thought back on a wedding I had attended several years prior. During the ceremony the presiding minister emphasized the importance of the bride being submissive to her husband. He based his lesson on Ephesians 5:22-24 (ESV): “Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also should wives submit in everything to their husbands.”
That message troubled me. Why should a woman be submissive to her husband? Shouldn’t husband and wife be equal partners in the commitment they are solemnly undertaking? Does scripture mandate unquestioning obedience from the wife even if she genuinely believes her husband is morally or legally wrong?
The passage raised an even more fundamental issue for me. Don’t we have the obligation to read and carefully consider what we profess to believe? So, with study guides in hand, I did something I had never done before–I read the Bible from beginning to end. And what a rewarding, enlightening and, at times, confusing journey it was! In considering the differing interpretations that have been given to identical verses by scholars, rabbis, priests, and ministers over time, I often wondered whether anyone had the “true” answers as to what certain passages in the Bible actually meant. No doubt, many have professed with unwavering conviction to know the true--and only--meanings. But do they really? These musings spawned one of the central figures in my second Jace Forman novel--a self-assured, narcissistic “prophet” who leads his followers on a misdirected, pain-inflicting odyssey.
The importance of this central theme has recently been graphically spotlighted by current events--most recently, the atrocities committed by ISIS and the senseless murders of political satirists in Paris. How could any so-called religious belief require the beheading of human beings? What religious justification could there be for the gruesome executions of unarmed journalists/cartoonists?
The perversion of religion is nothing new. It has occurred time after time, century after century--charismatic, power-hungry individuals preaching intolerant, judgmental doctrines that fit their purposes. Their messages all have a common commandment: follow my rules and teachings lest you be doomed to eternal damnation or, more immediately, lose your head (literally). Unquestioning obedience to another’s agenda--whether it be a movement,
a religion, or a person can lead down a dangerous path with dire consequences--a path I explore in my new, second book, The Word.
(Left) Author Hubert Crouch
Intertwined with religion and freedom of speech, women’s rights are a central focus of The Word. My interest in women’s rights was piqued in the late 1960s and early ’70s as I watched demonstrations staged by Gloria Steinem and others. At the time, it was more abstract than personal. But that changed in my last year of law school. One of my close friends and study partners graduated number one in our class and yet received a cold shoulder from premier law firms when applying for employment. Why? There could only be one answer--my friend was a woman. Rather than accept this inequity, she and several of my other female classmates filed suit, and a settlement was reached with the firms in question, opening the doors of opportunity for countless female law students who graduated in the years after. I’ve dedicated The Word to their courage and convictions.
So, what’s The Word about? Self-proclaimed prophet Ezekiel Shaw and his fanatical followers travel the country staging protests at the funerals of fallen soldiers. But when they disrupt the funeral of Second Lieutenant Lauren Hanson, a West Point graduate killed by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan, they find themselves being relentlessly pursued through the courts by Fort Worth trial attorney Jace Forman, who is determined to put an end to their crazed crusade, no matter the cost.
Kirkus Reviews remarks that “the pages all but turn themselves as each scene builds on the next,” and calls the novel “a topical, lively legal thriller.” Meanwhile, the book review Web site Readers’ Choice warned readers, “Be ready for a wild ride! … Corruption, greed, and danger criss-cross with the pursuit of honesty and truth for a page-turning, action packed story. ... The writing is high caliber and the story is engaging and realistic, with memorable characters. Top notch.”
I wanted to write a novel that was exciting as well as provocative. Based upon these early reviews, it seems I’ve accomplished that goal.
Having been a trial lawyer for a number of years, I’ve handled cases that are a testament to the old adage that “fact is stranger than fiction.” A macabre grave robbery was the impetus for one of the more bizarre cases I handled, and served as the inspiration for my first novel, Cried for No One (2013). Critics and readers alike said they loved that book and wanted to see more of its

While I had always planned on penning a trilogy of novels featuring these characters, I had not decided on a central theme for the second book. It was during the course of teaching Free Speech and the First Amendment to undergraduates at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, that the theme finally began to form. One of the cases we examined in class was Snyder v. Phelps. The Snyder case addressed the question of whether a religious group had the First Amendment right to protest at the funerals of fallen soldiers. The United States Supreme Court held that it did. The Court’s decision was hotly debated in my class: Did the Court correctly balance the right of a family burying a loved one with the right of a religious sect to voice its views?
With the Snyder case in mind, I thought back on a wedding I had attended several years prior. During the ceremony the presiding minister emphasized the importance of the bride being submissive to her husband. He based his lesson on Ephesians 5:22-24 (ESV): “Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also should wives submit in everything to their husbands.”
That message troubled me. Why should a woman be submissive to her husband? Shouldn’t husband and wife be equal partners in the commitment they are solemnly undertaking? Does scripture mandate unquestioning obedience from the wife even if she genuinely believes her husband is morally or legally wrong?
The passage raised an even more fundamental issue for me. Don’t we have the obligation to read and carefully consider what we profess to believe? So, with study guides in hand, I did something I had never done before–I read the Bible from beginning to end. And what a rewarding, enlightening and, at times, confusing journey it was! In considering the differing interpretations that have been given to identical verses by scholars, rabbis, priests, and ministers over time, I often wondered whether anyone had the “true” answers as to what certain passages in the Bible actually meant. No doubt, many have professed with unwavering conviction to know the true--and only--meanings. But do they really? These musings spawned one of the central figures in my second Jace Forman novel--a self-assured, narcissistic “prophet” who leads his followers on a misdirected, pain-inflicting odyssey.
The importance of this central theme has recently been graphically spotlighted by current events--most recently, the atrocities committed by ISIS and the senseless murders of political satirists in Paris. How could any so-called religious belief require the beheading of human beings? What religious justification could there be for the gruesome executions of unarmed journalists/cartoonists?
The perversion of religion is nothing new. It has occurred time after time, century after century--charismatic, power-hungry individuals preaching intolerant, judgmental doctrines that fit their purposes. Their messages all have a common commandment: follow my rules and teachings lest you be doomed to eternal damnation or, more immediately, lose your head (literally). Unquestioning obedience to another’s agenda--whether it be a movement,

(Left) Author Hubert Crouch
Intertwined with religion and freedom of speech, women’s rights are a central focus of The Word. My interest in women’s rights was piqued in the late 1960s and early ’70s as I watched demonstrations staged by Gloria Steinem and others. At the time, it was more abstract than personal. But that changed in my last year of law school. One of my close friends and study partners graduated number one in our class and yet received a cold shoulder from premier law firms when applying for employment. Why? There could only be one answer--my friend was a woman. Rather than accept this inequity, she and several of my other female classmates filed suit, and a settlement was reached with the firms in question, opening the doors of opportunity for countless female law students who graduated in the years after. I’ve dedicated The Word to their courage and convictions.
So, what’s The Word about? Self-proclaimed prophet Ezekiel Shaw and his fanatical followers travel the country staging protests at the funerals of fallen soldiers. But when they disrupt the funeral of Second Lieutenant Lauren Hanson, a West Point graduate killed by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan, they find themselves being relentlessly pursued through the courts by Fort Worth trial attorney Jace Forman, who is determined to put an end to their crazed crusade, no matter the cost.
Kirkus Reviews remarks that “the pages all but turn themselves as each scene builds on the next,” and calls the novel “a topical, lively legal thriller.” Meanwhile, the book review Web site Readers’ Choice warned readers, “Be ready for a wild ride! … Corruption, greed, and danger criss-cross with the pursuit of honesty and truth for a page-turning, action packed story. ... The writing is high caliber and the story is engaging and realistic, with memorable characters. Top notch.”
I wanted to write a novel that was exciting as well as provocative. Based upon these early reviews, it seems I’ve accomplished that goal.
Championing Canadian Crime
Crime Writers of Canada has announced its shortlist of nominees for the 2015 Arthur Ellis Awards. These prizes highlight “excellence in Canadian crime writing.” Winners will be announced on May 28 during a “gala” affair at the Arts and Letters Club in Toronto.
Best Novel:
• Cold Mourning, by Brenda Chapman (Dundurn Press)
• None So Blind, by Barbara Fradkin (Dundurn Press)
• Plague, by C.C. Humphreys (Doubleday Canada)
• No Known Grave, by Maureen Jennings (McClelland
& Stewart)
• Killing Pilgrim, by Alen Mattich (House of Anansi)
Best First Novel:
Best First Novel:
• A Quiet Kill, by Janet Brons (Touchwood)
• Siege of Bitterns, by Steve Burrows (Dundurn Press)
• Windigo Fire, by M.H. Callway (Seraphim)
• No Worst, There Is None, by Eve McBride (Dundurn
Press)
• Last of the Independents, by Sam Wiebe (Dundurn
Press)
Best Novella:
Best Novella:
• The Boom Room, by Rick Blechta (Orca)
• Juba Good, by Vicki Delany (Orca)
• The Dragon Head of Hong Kong, by Ian Hamilton (House
of Anansi)
• A Knock on the Door, by Jas. R. Petrin (Alfred
Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, April 2014)
Best Short Story:
Best Short Story:
• “Stone
Mattress,” by Margaret Atwood (from Stone Mattress: Nine Stories, by Margaret
Atwood; McClelland & Stewart)
• “Hook,
Line and Sinker,” by Melodie Campbell (NorthWord)
• “Therapy,”
by Peter Clement (Belgrave House)
• “First
Impressions,” by Madona Skaff (from The Whole She-Bang 2: 24 Stories by Sisters
in Crime Canada, edited by Janet Costello; Toronto Sisters in Crime)
• “Writers
Block,” by Kevin P. Thornton (from World Enough and Crime, edited by Donna
Carrick; Carrick Publishing)
Best Book in French:
Best Book in French:
• Jack: Une enquête de Joseph Laflamme, by Hervé
Gagnon (Expression noir/Groupe librex)
• Bondrée, by Andrée Michaud (Editions Québec
Amérique)
• Meurtre à l’hôtel Despréaux, by Maryse Rouy (Édition
Druide)
• Repentirs, by Richard Ste Marie (Alire)
Best Juvenile/Young Adult Book:
Best Juvenile/Young Adult Book:
• Face-Off, by Michael Betcherman (Penguin Canada)
• Dead Man’s Switch, by Sigmund Brouwer (Harvest
House)
• The Voice Inside My Head, by S.J. Laidlaw (Tundra)
• About That Night, by Norah McClintock (Orca)
• The Bodies We Wear, by Jeyn Roberts (Knopf Books
for Young Readers)
Best Non-fiction Book:
Best Non-fiction Book:
• Being Uncle Charlie, by Bob Deasy, with Mark Ebner
(Penguin Random House)
• The Massey Murder, by Charlotte Gray (HarperCollins)
• Innocence on Trial: The Framing of Ivan Henry, by Joan
McEwen (Heritage House)
• Life Real Loud: John Lefebvre, Neteller, and the
Revolution in Online Gambling, by Bill Reynolds (ECW Press)
• Extreme Mean, by Paula Todd (McClelland &
Stewart)
Unhanged Arthur (for best unpublished first crime novel):
Unhanged Arthur (for best unpublished first crime novel):
• Rum Luck, by Ryan Aldred
• Full Curl, by Dave Butler
• Full Curl, by Dave Butler
• Crisis Point, by Dwayne Clayden
• Afghan Redemption, by Bill Prentice
• Strange Things Done, by Elle Wild
In addition, Sylvia McConnell has been given the 2015
Derrick Murdoch Award, with this explanation: “In 1998, Sylvia McConnell began
RendezVous Crime, a publishing house with the mandate to publish crime novels written
by Canadians set in Canada. Over the next thirteen years she published 80 works
of crime fiction, many of which were nominated for or won prestigious awards.
For her belief in the value of Canadians telling Canadian stories, for her
encouragement of new Canadian authors, and for her recognition of talent with
staying power, she was given the Derrick Murdoch Award.”
And Crime Writers of Canada is creating a new Lou Allin
Memorial Award, named in honor of Canadian mystery writer Allin, who died
last July at age 69. “Lou was a board member of CWC, a co-chair of the 2011
Bloody Words Conference, an award-winning writer, and a mentor to many. This
award is particularly fitting, as she was the winner of the first Arthur Ellis
Novella Award.”
* * *
Last but not least, I somehow missed seeing the recent
news about this year’s two winners of the Pinckley Prize for Achievement in
Crime Fiction. Nevada Barr, known for her novels about crimes in U.S. national
parks, has won the first Pinckley for her body of work, while Adrianne Harun has picked
up the second for her 2014 debut novel, A Man Came Out of a Door
in the Mountain (Penguin).
(Hat tip to The
Gumshoe Site.)
Wednesday, April 22, 2015
Bullet Points: Break from Earth Day Edition
I don’t usually post crime-fiction news wrap-ups in such quick succession, but since last Friday’s batch of “Bullet Points,” there seem to have been quite a number of developments worth mentioning in some manner, no matter how briefly.
• Yesterday seemed to be full of notices about a new online resource called The Life Sentence, which promises to become “the destination sophisticated crime fiction/noir fans go to for reviews and stimulating criticism.” Lisa Levy, formerly the noir and mystery editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books, is this new site’s editor in chief, while the editor’s seat is held by Faith Black Ross, previously an editor with the Berkley Publishing Group. The contents thus far range from an interview with Laura Lippman and an overview of Thomas Perry’s thrillers to a critique of Ted Lewis’ 1980 “masterwork,” GBH, and a piece about “falafal noir” (aka Middle Eastern crime writing). The site’s editorial board is packed with important names, including those of Megan Abbott, Jonathan Lethem, Sarah Weinman, Art Taylor, and Michael Koryta, so Levy & Co. have clearly set The Life Sentence up to be A Big Deal. To keep an eye on its development, subscribe to its newsletter, The Verdict. I’ve added The Life Sentence to The Rap Sheet’s blogroll, and will be checking back for new contents.
• In February, I mentioned on this page that I’d been asked by a Wall Street Journal writer about my interest in collecting the main title sequences for older TV crime dramas--the basis for The Rap Sheet’s YouTube page. At the time I told him there were a few such introductions I had still not found, including one for the 1973-1974 NBC cop drama Chase, starring Mitchell Ryan. Well, thanks to author Lee Goldberg, who shares my obsession with these classic small-screen openings, I’ve finally added the Chase intro to my collection:
• Cable-TV network HBO is still a month away from the second-season debut of True Detective (mark your calendars for Sunday, June 21!), but it recently made a teaser video available and today released three (slightly) animated posters promoting TD’s return.
• The Bookseller reports that two new TV dramas based on UK author Mark Billingham’s crime fiction are in the works at the BBC: “The first series will be based on Billingham’s 2008 novel, In the Dark (Sphere), and the second is based on his new novel being published this Thursday (23rd April), Time of Death (Little, Brown). BBC Drama North is adapting both books. Filming will begin early next year and both series will launch in autumn 2016. No casting details have been revealed yet.”
• From In Reference to Murder: “Author Jeanne Matthews takes note of a mystery author who may soon receive canonization by The Catholic Church. The process is underway of deciding whether to bestow sainthood on G.K. Chesterton, who, among other ecclesiastical works, created the Father Brown mystery series. It doesn’t hurt that Pope Francis is apparently a long-time fan of the author’s novels.”
• Max Allan Collins is the focus of this delightful new video entry in Amazon’s Kindle Most Wanted series. The prolific Iowa author talks about his love of comics, his years of writing the Dick Tracy comic strip, his “legacy work” on the Nathan Heller private-eye series, the comic mystery novels he composes with his wife, the U.S. government-focused thrillers he’s writing for Thomas & Mercer, and much more.
• While we’re on the subject of Max Allan Collins (and don’t we often seem to be?), note that publisher Hard Case Crime today announced that, with the new Cinemax TV series Quarry, based on his hit-man series of novels, currently in production in New Orleans, it “will publish brand new editions of Collins’ five original Quarry novels--the first editions to appear in stores in almost 30 years. The five books--Quarry, Quarry’s List, Quarry’s Deal, Quarry’s Cut, and Quarry’s Vote--will all feature cover paintings by legendary illustrator Robert McGinnis.” Those new editions are due out in October.
• Crime Fiction Lover recommends 10 Latin American crime novelists whose work we all ought to try, including Claudia Piñeiro, Ernesto Mallo (check), Juan Gabriel Vasquez, and Leonardo Padura (check).
• The Minnesota Book Award doesn’t have a crime-fiction category, but it does honor a Best Genre Fiction winner. And last weekend that prize went to Julie Klassen for The Secret of Pembrooke Park.
• Emma Myers has a thoughtful piece in The Dissolve that looks at Humphrey Bogart’s posthumous film roles and portrayals. “Overindulging in noir conventions,” she concludes, “the post-Bogart comedies merely set out to remind viewers of a world that was once filled with dames and bourbon, quixotic ideals, and perpetually wet pavement. This world no longer exists, and perhaps it never really did. No man will ever really be a Humphrey Bogart character. But while we can’t help but move relentlessly forward, all we want to do is look back and have him play it again.”
• Scottish author Malcolm Mackay, the author of three much-heralded thrillers--his Glasgow Trilogy--is Nancie Clare’s latest guest on her Speaking of Mysteries podcast.
• I already featured one trailer for the forthcoming film Mr. Holmes on this page, but Mystery Fanfare now brings us a second. I must say, I’m looking forward to Ian McKellan’s turn as an aged Holmes, in a story based on Mitch Cullin’s 2005 novel, A Slight Trick of the Mind.
• Bad news from The Gumshoe Site. “Charlene Weir (rhymes with cheer) died on April 4 in El Cerrito, California. The former nurse started writing after being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Before winning the St. Martin’s Malice Domestic contest for The Winter Widow (St. Martin, 1992), introducing Susan Wren, police chief in Hampstead, Kansas, she contributed several stories for Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. The seventh Wren novel, Edge of Midnight (St. Martin’s, 2007), is her most recent book. She was 77.” Mystery Fanfare offers more.
• Fans of Lovejoy, the classic BBC-TV comedy-drama based on Jonathan Gash’s novels and starring Ian McShane (later to do such a fine turn in Deadwood), will want to watch for the complete series release coming from Acorn Media on June 16.
• And this is weird news. According to the Los Angeles Times, 84-year-old Seattle-area true-crime writer Ann Rule “is in poor health and ‘on oxygen at all times,’” and her two sons, Michael and Andrew Rule, “have been charged with theft and forgery after authorities say they stole more than $100,000 from their mother … Prosecutors have set an April 30 arraignment date for the Rule brothers, who have been released on their own recognizance.” More here.
• Yesterday seemed to be full of notices about a new online resource called The Life Sentence, which promises to become “the destination sophisticated crime fiction/noir fans go to for reviews and stimulating criticism.” Lisa Levy, formerly the noir and mystery editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books, is this new site’s editor in chief, while the editor’s seat is held by Faith Black Ross, previously an editor with the Berkley Publishing Group. The contents thus far range from an interview with Laura Lippman and an overview of Thomas Perry’s thrillers to a critique of Ted Lewis’ 1980 “masterwork,” GBH, and a piece about “falafal noir” (aka Middle Eastern crime writing). The site’s editorial board is packed with important names, including those of Megan Abbott, Jonathan Lethem, Sarah Weinman, Art Taylor, and Michael Koryta, so Levy & Co. have clearly set The Life Sentence up to be A Big Deal. To keep an eye on its development, subscribe to its newsletter, The Verdict. I’ve added The Life Sentence to The Rap Sheet’s blogroll, and will be checking back for new contents.
• In February, I mentioned on this page that I’d been asked by a Wall Street Journal writer about my interest in collecting the main title sequences for older TV crime dramas--the basis for The Rap Sheet’s YouTube page. At the time I told him there were a few such introductions I had still not found, including one for the 1973-1974 NBC cop drama Chase, starring Mitchell Ryan. Well, thanks to author Lee Goldberg, who shares my obsession with these classic small-screen openings, I’ve finally added the Chase intro to my collection:
• Cable-TV network HBO is still a month away from the second-season debut of True Detective (mark your calendars for Sunday, June 21!), but it recently made a teaser video available and today released three (slightly) animated posters promoting TD’s return.
• The Bookseller reports that two new TV dramas based on UK author Mark Billingham’s crime fiction are in the works at the BBC: “The first series will be based on Billingham’s 2008 novel, In the Dark (Sphere), and the second is based on his new novel being published this Thursday (23rd April), Time of Death (Little, Brown). BBC Drama North is adapting both books. Filming will begin early next year and both series will launch in autumn 2016. No casting details have been revealed yet.”
• From In Reference to Murder: “Author Jeanne Matthews takes note of a mystery author who may soon receive canonization by The Catholic Church. The process is underway of deciding whether to bestow sainthood on G.K. Chesterton, who, among other ecclesiastical works, created the Father Brown mystery series. It doesn’t hurt that Pope Francis is apparently a long-time fan of the author’s novels.”
• Max Allan Collins is the focus of this delightful new video entry in Amazon’s Kindle Most Wanted series. The prolific Iowa author talks about his love of comics, his years of writing the Dick Tracy comic strip, his “legacy work” on the Nathan Heller private-eye series, the comic mystery novels he composes with his wife, the U.S. government-focused thrillers he’s writing for Thomas & Mercer, and much more.
• While we’re on the subject of Max Allan Collins (and don’t we often seem to be?), note that publisher Hard Case Crime today announced that, with the new Cinemax TV series Quarry, based on his hit-man series of novels, currently in production in New Orleans, it “will publish brand new editions of Collins’ five original Quarry novels--the first editions to appear in stores in almost 30 years. The five books--Quarry, Quarry’s List, Quarry’s Deal, Quarry’s Cut, and Quarry’s Vote--will all feature cover paintings by legendary illustrator Robert McGinnis.” Those new editions are due out in October.
• Crime Fiction Lover recommends 10 Latin American crime novelists whose work we all ought to try, including Claudia Piñeiro, Ernesto Mallo (check), Juan Gabriel Vasquez, and Leonardo Padura (check).
• The Minnesota Book Award doesn’t have a crime-fiction category, but it does honor a Best Genre Fiction winner. And last weekend that prize went to Julie Klassen for The Secret of Pembrooke Park.
• Emma Myers has a thoughtful piece in The Dissolve that looks at Humphrey Bogart’s posthumous film roles and portrayals. “Overindulging in noir conventions,” she concludes, “the post-Bogart comedies merely set out to remind viewers of a world that was once filled with dames and bourbon, quixotic ideals, and perpetually wet pavement. This world no longer exists, and perhaps it never really did. No man will ever really be a Humphrey Bogart character. But while we can’t help but move relentlessly forward, all we want to do is look back and have him play it again.”
• Scottish author Malcolm Mackay, the author of three much-heralded thrillers--his Glasgow Trilogy--is Nancie Clare’s latest guest on her Speaking of Mysteries podcast.
• I already featured one trailer for the forthcoming film Mr. Holmes on this page, but Mystery Fanfare now brings us a second. I must say, I’m looking forward to Ian McKellan’s turn as an aged Holmes, in a story based on Mitch Cullin’s 2005 novel, A Slight Trick of the Mind.
• Bad news from The Gumshoe Site. “Charlene Weir (rhymes with cheer) died on April 4 in El Cerrito, California. The former nurse started writing after being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Before winning the St. Martin’s Malice Domestic contest for The Winter Widow (St. Martin, 1992), introducing Susan Wren, police chief in Hampstead, Kansas, she contributed several stories for Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. The seventh Wren novel, Edge of Midnight (St. Martin’s, 2007), is her most recent book. She was 77.” Mystery Fanfare offers more.
• Fans of Lovejoy, the classic BBC-TV comedy-drama based on Jonathan Gash’s novels and starring Ian McShane (later to do such a fine turn in Deadwood), will want to watch for the complete series release coming from Acorn Media on June 16.
• And this is weird news. According to the Los Angeles Times, 84-year-old Seattle-area true-crime writer Ann Rule “is in poor health and ‘on oxygen at all times,’” and her two sons, Michael and Andrew Rule, “have been charged with theft and forgery after authorities say they stole more than $100,000 from their mother … Prosecutors have set an April 30 arraignment date for the Rule brothers, who have been released on their own recognizance.” More here.
Britain, Canada Announce Prize Rivals
Thanks to Janet Rudolph’s Mystery Fanfare, we now have the shortlists of nominees for four annual awards to be handed out on Saturday, May 16, as part of this year’s CrimeFest convention in Bristol, England.
The Audible Sounds of Crime Award
(for the best unabridged crime audiobook first published in the UK in 2014 in both printed and audio formats):
(for the best unabridged crime audiobook first published in the UK in 2014 in both printed and audio formats):
• Foxglove Summer, by Ben Aaronovitch; read by Kobna
Holdbrook-Smith (Orion)
• Personal, by Lee Child; read by Jeff Harding
(Penguin)
• The Silkworm, by Robert Galbraith (aka J.K.
Rowling); read by Robert Glenister (Little, Brown)
• Moriarty,
by Anthony Horowitz; read by Derek Jacobi and Julian Rhind-Tutt (Orion)
• Want You Dead, by Peter James; read by Daniel
Weyman (Macmillan)
• Mr. Mercedes, by Stephen King; read by Will Patton
(Hodder & Stoughton)
(Hodder & Stoughton)
• The Hangman’s Song, by James Oswald; read by Ian
Hanmore (Penguin)
E-Dunnit Award
(for the best crime fiction e-book first published in both hardcopy and in electronic format in the British Isles in 2014):
E-Dunnit Award
(for the best crime fiction e-book first published in both hardcopy and in electronic format in the British Isles in 2014):
• No Safe House, by Linwood Barclay (Orion)
• The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons, by Lawrence
Block (Orion)
• A Colder War, by Charles Cumming (HarperCollins)
• Dark Tides, by Chris Ewan (Faber & Faber)
• Natchez Burning, by Greg Illes (HarperCollins)
• Hollow Mountain, by Thomas Mogford (Bloomsbury)
• Tomorrow and Tomorrow, by Thomas Sweterlitsch
(Headline)
• The Silent Boy, by Andrew Taylor (HarperCollins)
The Goldsboro Last Laugh Award
(for the best humorous crime novel first published in the British Isles in 2014):
(for the best humorous crime novel first published in the British Isles in 2014):
• The Burglar Who Counted the Spoons, by Lawrence
Block (Orion)
• Crime Always Pays, by Declan Burke (Severn House)
• Bryant & May: The Bleeding Heart, by
Christopher Fowler (Bantam)
• Kill Your Boss, by Shane Kuhn (Little, Brown)
• The Accident, by Chris Pavone (Faber & Faber)
• Crooked Herring, by L.C. Tyler (Allison &
Busby)
The H.R.F. Keating Award
(for the best biographical or critical book related to crime fiction first published in the British Isles between 2013 and 2014):
(for the best biographical or critical book related to crime fiction first published in the British Isles between 2013 and 2014):
• Dime Novels and the Roots of American Detective
Fiction, by Pamela Bedore (Palgrave)
• Late Victorian Crime Fiction in the Shadows of
Sherlock, by Clare Clarke (Palgrave)
• Nordic Noir, by Barry Forshaw (Pocket Essentials)
• Euro Noir, by Barry Forshaw (No Exit Press)
• Crime Scene: Britain & Ireland, by John Martin (Five
Leaves)
• A Very British Murder, by Lucy Worsley (BBC Books)
* * *
Meanwhile, we also have the five contenders for this year’s Bony Blithe Award for Best Canadian Light Mystery. They are:
• The Corpse with the Platinum Hair, by Cathy Ace
(Touchwood)
• Many Unpleasant Returns, by Judith Alguire
(Signature)
• Seeing the Light, by E.C. Bell (Tyche)
• Night of the Living Thread, by Janet Bolin (Berkley
Prime Crime)
• The Resurrection of Mary Mabel McTavish, by Allan Stratton
(Dundurn Press)
(Dundurn Press)
A winner will be announced on May 29 during the Bony Blithe
Bash at The Hot House Restaurant in Toronto, Ontario.
Saturday, April 18, 2015
“Dry Bones” Kills in L.A.
Pennsylvania author Tom Bouman has been awarded the 2015 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the Mystery/Thriller category for his novel, Dry Bones in the Valley (Norton). His was one of several commendations handed out this evening during the Times Festival of Books, held on the University of Southern California campus.
This year’s other Mystery/Thriller nominees were: The Painter, by Peter Heller (Knopf); After I’m Gone, by Laura Lippman (Morrow); Sins of Our Fathers, by Shawn Lawrence Otto (Milkweed); and The Girl with a Clock for a Heart, by Peter Swanson (Morrow).
You’ll find the complete list of tonight’s prize winners here.
READ: MORE: “L.A. Times Festival of Books 2015,” by Jeri Westerson (Getting Medieval).
This year’s other Mystery/Thriller nominees were: The Painter, by Peter Heller (Knopf); After I’m Gone, by Laura Lippman (Morrow); Sins of Our Fathers, by Shawn Lawrence Otto (Milkweed); and The Girl with a Clock for a Heart, by Peter Swanson (Morrow).
You’ll find the complete list of tonight’s prize winners here.
READ: MORE: “L.A. Times Festival of Books 2015,” by Jeri Westerson (Getting Medieval).
Friday, April 17, 2015
Bullet Points: Something for Everyone Edition
• Every Secret Thing, the film based on Laura Lippman’s 2004 standalone novel of that same name, debuted at last year’s Tribeca Film Festival and is being prepared for a nationwide release on May 15. But until today, I hadn’t spotted a trailer for this picture starring Elizabeth Banks, Dakota Fanning, and Diane Lane. Click here to see the preview in Janet Rudolph’s Mystery Fanfare blog.
• The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books begins tomorrow on the University of Southern California campus and continues through Sunday. If I lived in L.A., I’d be present for all the festivities, especially since they’re free to the public. But at least I can report on the 2015 Times Book Prize competition, the winners of which will be announced on Saturday night. Here are the five contestants in the Mystery/Thriller category; a list of all the nominees is here.
• Earlier this week I was paging through The Seattle Times, when I happened onto this front-page story about Roy Price, the 47-year-old vice president of Amazon Studios, which you’ll know is behind the Michael Connelly-created crime drama Bosch (covered here and here). What most interested me, though, was this sentence: “His grandfather, Roy Huggins, was a legendary television writer who created such classic series as Maverick, The Fugitive, and The Rockford Files.” Holy crap! I’ve long been a fan of Huggins’ work, both his television projects and his early endeavors as a novelist. I didn’t know I was living in the same city--Seattle--where his grandson can often be found laboring over a desk. I might have to come up with some way to interview Price in the very near future …
• I need the first volume mentioned in this Bookgasm review!
• Bouchercon organizers announced on their Facebook page that they’ve chosen a “brand-new logo for Bouchercon National! Each year--including 2015 in Raleigh--will still have
their own logo, but this one will cover the organization as a whole.” I’ve embedded that new artwork on the left.
• As somebody who was very fond of British author Paul Johnston’s series of near-future-set thrillers starring Edinburgh senior cop-turned-private eye Quintilian Dalrymple (last seen in 2001’s The House of Dust), it’s pretty exciting to know the author is returning with a new, sixth installment of that series, Head or Hearts, out this month in the UK from Severn House and due in U.S. stores come July. Euro Crime has posted a synopsis of the new yarn.
• By the way, if you haven’t read Ali Karim’s 2003 interview with Paul Johnston, in which they talk about the Quint books, do so now.
• I never owned a Pet Rock, but I do remember when those low-commitment companions first rolled onto the market in the mid-1970s. So I was saddened to hear that Gary Dahl, the creator of the Pet Rock fad (which Newsweek called “one of the most ridiculously successful marketing schemes ever”) died recently at age 78.
• Over in the Killer Covers blog, we have posted a look back at the “sexpionage” novels of Ted Mark, published mostly during the 1960s and ’70s, as well as the latest entry in our still-new “Friday Finds” series, which highlights “context-free covers we love.” Today’s pick: The Flesh and Mr. Rawlie (1963).
• Back in February, I mentioned that the blog Criminal Element was launching a regular short-story competition called “The M.O.” The initial deadline for tales was March 6 and the theme for all submissions was “Long Gone.” Readers of Criminal Element were asked to vote for their favorite entries. Today the blog has posted the winner of its first “M.O.” contest, “Fix Me,” by Los Angeles “writer and drummer” S.W. Lauden. According to its schedule, Criminal Element will announce its next short-story contest--with a new theme--on May 1.
• Honey West star Anne Francis melted hearts looking like this.
• MSNBC-TV host Rachel Maddow did an excellent interview last night with Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada), during which they talked about Reid’s long political history, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s “historic candidacy” for president of the United States in 2016, and the current Republican leadership in Congress (“I think they’ve been absolute failures”). You can now watch it all here.
• These are some of the most spectacular aerial shots ever! They come from a Web site called AirPano, where you can find still more breathtaking photos. Copy them to your computer now!
• California author J. Sydney Jones has made an excellent reputation for himself over the last half-dozen years penning mystery novels set in early 20th-century Vienna. However his new release, Basic Law (Severn House)--the first entry in a trilogy--is a more contemporary thriller featuring “expat American journalist Sam Kramer.” To better acquaint readers with Kramer, he’s just posted “Body Blows,” a short story featuring the same protagonist.
• Author Declan Burke recently introduced me to a new blog called Crime Fiction Ireland, which he says “pretty much does exactly what it says on the tin. Edited by Lucy Dalton, the blog covers crime and mystery fiction of all hues, TV and film, provides author profiles and a ‘What’s On’ slot, and also offers a Short Fiction selection.” I’ve added Crime Fiction Ireland to The Rap Sheet’s selection of links.
• I haven’t yet seen any notices about PBS-TV’s Masterpiece Mystery! umbrella series picking up the concluding three-episode season of Foyle’s War, the wonderful Michael Kitchen/Honeysuckle Weeks period drama from British broadcaster ITV that debuted in 2002. That last season began showing in the UK back in January, and is available to people who subscribe to the online viewing service Acorn Media. (You’ll find all Foyle’s War episodes here.) National Public Radio’s John Powers posted a fine wrap-up of Foyle’s final run here, and you can purchase a DVD set of the series’ last three eps here. But for Americans like me who prefer to watch Kitchen’s show on Masterpiece for free, all of this just adds up to a painful reminder of what we’re missing. C’mon, PBS, step up and add this one last Foyle’s War run to your summer 2015 schedule!
• Here’s one reason why you can’t trust amateur online reviews.
• Finally, my old friend Matthew, who has spent years talking up Sinbad and Me, the 1966 adventure/mystery novel for children by Kin Platt (author of the Max Roper detective series), reports that the book is back in print this month after being commercially unavailable for decades. Sinbad and Me captured the 1967 Edgar Award for Best Juvenile Mystery Fiction. The new edition is available from Amazon in both hardcover and paperback, but Matthew--who shares my adoration for books--asked me to “encourage your readers to order from their local independent bookseller.” I can’t but endorse that suggestion. Amazon, for all the purchasing advantages it offers, has proved to be a killer of small neighborhood stores, whether they sell books or other goods. I provide links from The Rap Sheet to Amazon pages, but that’s simply for the convenience of my readers. I always try to buy from independent bookstores. And you should too.
• The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books begins tomorrow on the University of Southern California campus and continues through Sunday. If I lived in L.A., I’d be present for all the festivities, especially since they’re free to the public. But at least I can report on the 2015 Times Book Prize competition, the winners of which will be announced on Saturday night. Here are the five contestants in the Mystery/Thriller category; a list of all the nominees is here.
• Earlier this week I was paging through The Seattle Times, when I happened onto this front-page story about Roy Price, the 47-year-old vice president of Amazon Studios, which you’ll know is behind the Michael Connelly-created crime drama Bosch (covered here and here). What most interested me, though, was this sentence: “His grandfather, Roy Huggins, was a legendary television writer who created such classic series as Maverick, The Fugitive, and The Rockford Files.” Holy crap! I’ve long been a fan of Huggins’ work, both his television projects and his early endeavors as a novelist. I didn’t know I was living in the same city--Seattle--where his grandson can often be found laboring over a desk. I might have to come up with some way to interview Price in the very near future …
• I need the first volume mentioned in this Bookgasm review!
• Bouchercon organizers announced on their Facebook page that they’ve chosen a “brand-new logo for Bouchercon National! Each year--including 2015 in Raleigh--will still have

• As somebody who was very fond of British author Paul Johnston’s series of near-future-set thrillers starring Edinburgh senior cop-turned-private eye Quintilian Dalrymple (last seen in 2001’s The House of Dust), it’s pretty exciting to know the author is returning with a new, sixth installment of that series, Head or Hearts, out this month in the UK from Severn House and due in U.S. stores come July. Euro Crime has posted a synopsis of the new yarn.
• By the way, if you haven’t read Ali Karim’s 2003 interview with Paul Johnston, in which they talk about the Quint books, do so now.
• I never owned a Pet Rock, but I do remember when those low-commitment companions first rolled onto the market in the mid-1970s. So I was saddened to hear that Gary Dahl, the creator of the Pet Rock fad (which Newsweek called “one of the most ridiculously successful marketing schemes ever”) died recently at age 78.
• Over in the Killer Covers blog, we have posted a look back at the “sexpionage” novels of Ted Mark, published mostly during the 1960s and ’70s, as well as the latest entry in our still-new “Friday Finds” series, which highlights “context-free covers we love.” Today’s pick: The Flesh and Mr. Rawlie (1963).
• Back in February, I mentioned that the blog Criminal Element was launching a regular short-story competition called “The M.O.” The initial deadline for tales was March 6 and the theme for all submissions was “Long Gone.” Readers of Criminal Element were asked to vote for their favorite entries. Today the blog has posted the winner of its first “M.O.” contest, “Fix Me,” by Los Angeles “writer and drummer” S.W. Lauden. According to its schedule, Criminal Element will announce its next short-story contest--with a new theme--on May 1.
• Honey West star Anne Francis melted hearts looking like this.
• MSNBC-TV host Rachel Maddow did an excellent interview last night with Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada), during which they talked about Reid’s long political history, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s “historic candidacy” for president of the United States in 2016, and the current Republican leadership in Congress (“I think they’ve been absolute failures”). You can now watch it all here.
• These are some of the most spectacular aerial shots ever! They come from a Web site called AirPano, where you can find still more breathtaking photos. Copy them to your computer now!
• California author J. Sydney Jones has made an excellent reputation for himself over the last half-dozen years penning mystery novels set in early 20th-century Vienna. However his new release, Basic Law (Severn House)--the first entry in a trilogy--is a more contemporary thriller featuring “expat American journalist Sam Kramer.” To better acquaint readers with Kramer, he’s just posted “Body Blows,” a short story featuring the same protagonist.
• Author Declan Burke recently introduced me to a new blog called Crime Fiction Ireland, which he says “pretty much does exactly what it says on the tin. Edited by Lucy Dalton, the blog covers crime and mystery fiction of all hues, TV and film, provides author profiles and a ‘What’s On’ slot, and also offers a Short Fiction selection.” I’ve added Crime Fiction Ireland to The Rap Sheet’s selection of links.
• I haven’t yet seen any notices about PBS-TV’s Masterpiece Mystery! umbrella series picking up the concluding three-episode season of Foyle’s War, the wonderful Michael Kitchen/Honeysuckle Weeks period drama from British broadcaster ITV that debuted in 2002. That last season began showing in the UK back in January, and is available to people who subscribe to the online viewing service Acorn Media. (You’ll find all Foyle’s War episodes here.) National Public Radio’s John Powers posted a fine wrap-up of Foyle’s final run here, and you can purchase a DVD set of the series’ last three eps here. But for Americans like me who prefer to watch Kitchen’s show on Masterpiece for free, all of this just adds up to a painful reminder of what we’re missing. C’mon, PBS, step up and add this one last Foyle’s War run to your summer 2015 schedule!
• Here’s one reason why you can’t trust amateur online reviews.
• Finally, my old friend Matthew, who has spent years talking up Sinbad and Me, the 1966 adventure/mystery novel for children by Kin Platt (author of the Max Roper detective series), reports that the book is back in print this month after being commercially unavailable for decades. Sinbad and Me captured the 1967 Edgar Award for Best Juvenile Mystery Fiction. The new edition is available from Amazon in both hardcover and paperback, but Matthew--who shares my adoration for books--asked me to “encourage your readers to order from their local independent bookseller.” I can’t but endorse that suggestion. Amazon, for all the purchasing advantages it offers, has proved to be a killer of small neighborhood stores, whether they sell books or other goods. I provide links from The Rap Sheet to Amazon pages, but that’s simply for the convenience of my readers. I always try to buy from independent bookstores. And you should too.
Wednesday, April 15, 2015
An Artistic Star Fades Out
Rudy Nappi, a New York-born illustrator renowned for his pulpish paperback fronts of the mid- to late-20th century, died last month in his early 90s. I’ve posted a piece--complete with examples of Nappi’s work and links to many more--in the Killer Covers blog.
Tuesday, April 14, 2015
Brady’s Path from Newsie to Novelist
Irish former newspaper editor Conor Brady’s story of getting his first novel into print is pretty much guaranteed to stir jealousy among other writers who’ve spent long years arduously toiling over their manuscripts, fighting uncooperative scenes down to the mat and polishing their prose to a blinding sheen before they could convince an editor to so much as notice their work--and not promptly reject it.
“I really put it together over a period of, I suppose, two or three years, maybe,” Brady told the Irish online magazine Writing.ie. “I didn’t sit down at nine o’clock every morning and say, ‘I’m going to do this now until lunchtime,’ or something. What I did was, I did it weekends, take your laptop on an airplane with you, do a bit on holidays. And before I knew it, I had a story and I had a plot and I had characters. And I didn’t quite know what to do with them.” A friend pointed him at Dublin publisher New Island, which quickly agreed to take on Brady’s yarn, and then after several months of reshaping and editing the work (“because it was a first draft, and rather scrappy and rather untidy in many ways”), it was finally fed into the pipeline for release. That novel, a densely composed and captivating mystery set in 1887 Dublin, titled A June of Ordinary Murders--the first installment in a new series starring Detective Sergeant Joseph Swallow of the Dublin Metropolitan Police (DMP)--reached bookstores in Ireland back in 2012. But only now is it set to be published in America by Minotaur Books.
Brady had an advantage on most first-time novelists: he’d spent a decade and a half as editor of The Irish Times in Dublin, and was well known for his knowledge of Ireland’s policing history. Nonetheless, A June of Ordinary Murders ultimately had to win over readers and critics alike, as it seems to have done. Declan Burke, writing in Brady’s old broadsheet, opined that this author “weaves a police procedural that does full justice to the complex nature of the social, political, and criminal labyrinth that was Dublin in the summer of 1887. He paints a vivid picture of the city as it bakes beneath the unrelenting sun, employing Joe Swallow’s sharp eye and the character’s ambitions as an amateur painter to deftly sketch both its landmarks and its less salubrious corners.” Kirkus Reviews adds, “Brady’s powerful first mystery novel is evocative of the period. The many aspects of life in 19th-century Dublin are cleverly woven through a baffling mystery.”
With today’s posting of my latest column for Kirkus, I add my voice to this mix. Here’s my brief sketch of Ordinary Murders’ opening:
J. Kingston Pierce: Where were you born?
Conor Brady: In Dublin, in 1949. But that was a technicality. My parents were living in Tullamore, a county town in the Irish midlands. It’s famous as the home of Tullamore Dew, the mellow whiskey beloved of Joe Swallow. My mother wasn’t a young mum. She was 43. I had two older sisters, but they had left home by the time I was born. So it was decided she should go to the National Maternity Hospital in the capital
to see me into the world. My father was the superintendent of police in the midlands area.
(Left) Author Conor Brady. Photo by Bryan Meade.
JKP: And what were your growing-up years like? What are your fondest and most horrifying memories of boyhood?
CB: Contrary to many Irish childhood memories, mine are the happiest. I grew up secure in a loving home. My memories are of warm summer days with my friends at the town swimming pool, of walking country fields with my Irish Terrier, “Rusty,” and of playing golf with my mother, Amy.
My most horrifying memory is the death of my father when I was 13. He had had a number of small strokes, but I never thought he would die. I remember the screaming of my mother in the garden that night when her friend, our local doctor, came to tell her that her beloved husband was gone.
JKP: So how did you wind up in journalism?
CB: After my father’s death I went to boarding school at Roscrea College [in County Tipperary]. It was run by the monks of the Cistercian order, or Trappists. It was a very positive experience and I was very happy there. It’s still operating with 180 students. It’s set in beautiful farmland and there are still 15 monks in the community. There was a student newspaper in the school and I got involved and I loved the buzz of it all. Later at University College Dublin, I got involved with the student newspaper, Campus UCD News, and was editor in my second year. These were exciting times for student journalism. We’re talking the 1960s with student power on the move in the U.S., in Europe, and even in Ireland.
JKP: Am I correct that you later went on to spend more than a decade and a half as editor of The Irish Times?
CB: I did 16 years as editor and a previous 14 years in a variety of roles, from reporter on the streets of Belfast, to covering the war in Rhodesia, to night editor, to features editor, to deputy editor. I was exposed to every aspect of newspaper journalism, plus a couple of stints on radio and TV.
JKP: Before you went to the Times, what sorts of other post-college journalism jobs did you hold?
CB: I did four years at The Irish Times after graduating from college. Then I left to edit the Garda Review, the monthly magazine of the Irish police. I went from there to RTÉ, Ireland’s national broadcaster, where I worked on a prime-time news program as a reporter/presenter. Then I edited a broadsheet Sunday newspaper, the Sunday Tribune.
JKP: What would you say now was your principal accomplishment as editor of The Irish Times?
CB: Undoubtedly, our support for the peace process in Northern Ireland. We committed the paper to the search for a solution that would eschew violence. Some Irish media were very skeptical of the peace process to the point of hostility. I put the weight of The Irish Times behind the peacemakers. I’ll always be glad I did.
JKP: It sounds as if your later years at the Times were fraught with financial problems and staff layoffs. Were those the cause of your departure from the paper, or were there additional factors involved?
CB: Not really. I had stayed longer than I intended anyway. I had already told my senior staff that my editorship was coming to an end. And I stayed to see a restructuring in place that involved quite a few voluntary redundancies and so on. I thought it best that I should do those things, leaving my successor as editor to make a fresh, clean start. The problem was top-fold. The organization had become rather bloated, and not just the editorial departments.
Too many time-servers and too much feather-bedding. Then the mini-recession of post-9/11 struck and revenues dropped.
JKP: Had you been thinking about becoming a fiction writer before you left the newspaper, or did you only decide upon that future after you were out of work?
CB: I didn’t start writing the Joe Swallow stories until I was perhaps 10, 12 years out of The Irish Times. I did a few things in the interim, including two years as a visiting professor at John Jay College [of Criminal Justice], City University of New York. But the challenge of creative writing was always there, lurking under the surface of a dull, stilted newsman’s prose.
JKP: So tell me: What was the hardest thing about transitioning from writing non-fiction to penning fiction?
CB: That’s a really penetrating question. News journalists are conditioned to being factual, detailed, and detached. Or at least they should be. Creative writing requires quite different impulses and talents. And I found that the former skills-set militated against the latter. I had tried to put too much detail in and I found that I simply had to pull most of it out again in order to achieve the free-flowing narrative one needs for a novel.
JKP: It sounds, though, as if your research talents came in handy.
CB: Researching this period of Irish history and Irish society is relatively easy. This was the new era of the newspaper industry, with big circulation numbers. Reporters covered everything from the police courts to society weddings. So the raw material is all there in the newspaper archives.
JKP: What was it that made you choose 1887 as your time-frame for A June of Ordinary Murders? Were you attracted primarily by Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee?
CB: The Jubilee became the focus for extraordinary political tension in Ireland. Those loyal to Britain wanted to celebrate, while those who believed in Irish nationalism opposed any acknowledgment of Victoria's long reign. She had sat on the throne while the Great Famine ravaged the country. A million died and two million were driven out by hunger to America, Britain, Australia, and elsewhere.
Detective Joe Swallow’s usual haunt: Dublin Castle’s Lower Yard, as it appeared in the late 19th century.
JKP: While conducting your research for Ordinary Murders, what was the most unusual thing you learned about life in Dublin or Ireland during the 1880s?
CB: Probably the extent to which alcohol played a part in the lives of working people. There were very few comforts other than drink, so when anybody had a few shillings to spare they generally invested in the oblivion of alcohol.
JKP: You make it sound in your book as if the Dublin Metropolitan Police force was rampant with divisions between the Catholic Irish officers and their Protestant English superiors. I kept expecting there to be more fireworks as a result of those differences. But was 1887 still too early for such disparities to become a problem?
CB: The tensions were there. But as in any disciplined force they were generally kept in check. The rank-and-file Catholic members did feel themselves cut off from the higher ranks. John Mallon, Swallow’s boss, was a real-life character. He was the exception that proved the rule. The son of a Catholic farmer from County Armagh, he went on to head the detective
division—G Division—and attained the rank of assistant commissioner.
JKP: You published a book in 2000 titled Guardians of the Peace, a history of Irish policing from the 1920s onward. How did law enforcement in Ireland change from Swallow’s time to the Jazz Age?
CB: The changes were significant at one level, but minimal at another. Regime change is often accompanied by changes in visible, outward symbols of authority such as policing arrangements. So the government of the new Irish state in 1922 decided to disband the old Royal Irish Constabulary [RIC] and replace it with a new force, the Garda Síochána or “Guardians of the Peace.” It operated as an unarmed force. Dublin’s separate police force, the Dublin Metropolitan Police, continued until 1925 but was then amalgamated with the Garda. Outwardly, this was all new. But it was essentially the same administrative model as before, with a police chief appointed by government and accountable to central authority. This was quite different to the system in Britain where police forces were locally accountable.
JKP: What’s this I hear about your grandfather having been a copper? Is that how your interest in the history of Irish policing began?
CB: My grandfather, William Brady, was in the RIC. But he died 35 years before I was born, so I know very little about him. His record shows he was a fairly typical “ranker.” A Catholic, his family operated a small public house in Cavan. He achieved no promotion, no distinctions, and no reprimands.
My father had a more successful police career. He had been a teacher of English and French before the 1919-1921 War of Independence. He took neither side in the civil war that followed, so he was well placed for a senior rank when the new state established its own police. He was appointed a superintendent at 24 years of age.
JKP: Let’s talk a little about Sergeant Swallow. He’s a rather extraordinary figure, a 42-year-old Catholic man with an unfortunate fondness for drink, whose family has operated a public house in County Kildare for generations. Yet he chose to make a living keeping the peace in Dublin. Why did you settle on him as your ideal protagonist?
CB: Like most fictional characters, I suspect, Swallow is an amalgam of various individuals a writer will have encountered. He is a conflicted man, both personally and politically. I think he would have been fairly typical of his generation and class. He has become a policeman by default, having drunk his way out of medical school. But paradoxically, it turns out, he’s quite good at sleuthing.
JKP: He’s also carrying on a relationship with a younger public-house proprietress named Maria Walsh, despite the DMP frowning on such relationships. How do you see Maria Walsh’s role in this story?
CB: Again, I think Maria would be fairly typical of women of her generation and class. Most women had no career options. They could marry or become a nun. Most clerical or secretarial work was still done by men. The licensed trade was one of the few areas in which a woman could make a business career. So Maria is quite a strong character, if a little dull and unexciting. She’s a grounded woman and a realist. Her role, among other things, is to keep Swallow grounded too.
JKP: There’s a great deal of early forensic science employed in Ordinary Murders, thanks to your inclusion of the character Dr. Henry Lafeyre, the Dublin medical examiner. Can I presume that you did considerable research into the subject before you sat down to write your first novel? And was that research conducted in books or among modern experts in the field?
CB: I went no further than the definitive Manual of Forensic Jurisprudence, by Professor A.S. [Alfred Swaine] Taylor of Edinburgh (1893 edition). Taylor has it all. The symptoms of poisoning, drowning, asphyxiation, etc. Henry Lafeyre has, of course, studied under Taylor at Edinburgh.
JKP: Although it’s comfortably rolled into your story, you offer a considerable amount of Irish history and culture in this novel--much of which would not be familiar to the majority of American readers. Did you have to do some editing of your novel after Minotaur Books bought it, to make it easier for readers in the States to understand?
CB: No, happily not. I guess the editors at Minotaur took the view that if readers were going to go through this story they’d simply have to make an effort to take
in the historical context. And it’s not that complicated, really. Moreover, I think a great many Americans would have a basic understanding of the historic difficulties in the relation between Ireland and Britain.
JKP: A June of Ordinary Murders was originally published in Ireland back in 2012. A year later saw the release of a sequel, The Eloquence of the Dead. I am delighted to hear that Eloquence will also be released in the States, probably in early 2016. Can you tell us something about the story you offer in that second Swallow yarn?
CB: The second story opens with the murder of a pawnbroker in his shop at Lamb Alley, near Dublin Castle. When Swallow investigates he uncovers a massive fraud on Her Majesty’s exchequer, organized around the purchase scheme through which tenant farmers are buying out their holdings from the big landlords. The story brings him to London where he gets an attractive job offer from Scotland Yard. And a possible rival to Maria comes on the scene.
The third story, A Hunt in Winter, brings us into 1888, which was the year that Jack the Ripper did his bloody work in the east end of London. Also in that year, a commission of inquiry in London examined alleged links between the great Irish parliamentary leader, [Charles Stewart] Parnell, and political violence. The two themes intertwine in what I think is a good yarn.
JKP: When you’re not writing crime and mystery fiction, which other authors in the genre do you enjoy reading?
CB: My favorite is the Brother Cadfael series, set in the 13th century in the Benedictine Abbey of Shrewsbury, in England. The author, Ellis Peters, is now deceased. She wrote, I think, some 20 stories about Cadfael. He’s a monk of Shrewsbury but also a man of action, having been a crusader who has known military action.
JKP: Are you surprised by the rapid and fairly recent growth of Irish crime fiction as a subgenre?
CB: Not really. The Irish are an imaginative people. And many celebrated Irish writers have touched on criminal themes in the past. Some of what’s coming out is really good. But some is also merely imitative and predictable.
JKP: If you could have written any book--fiction or non-fiction--that doesn’t currently carry your byline, what would it have been?
CB: I’d like to have written The Day of the Jackal [1971], by Frederick Forsyth. It's the perfect thriller, pacy, tightly written, and wonderfully evocative of the atmosphere of France in the troubled 1950s and 1960s. Besides, I’d also be very rich!
JKP: Finally, since you are a newspaper veteran, let me ask you this: We now live in an era of marked newspaper decline, perhaps also a period of decline for journalism in general. What do you think the costs are to society of such declines, and do you see the news media finding firmer roles for themselves in the near future?
CB: I’ve been very pessimistic for traditional news media, watching the collapse of the various business models that sustained them. But I’m starting to be a little more hopeful now. I think good journalism is reasserting itself. There’s an absolute torrent of drivel and posturing on the Internet, but I think people are starting to be a lot more discerning.
READ MORE: “A June of Ordinary Murders: New Excerpt”
(Criminal Element).

Brady had an advantage on most first-time novelists: he’d spent a decade and a half as editor of The Irish Times in Dublin, and was well known for his knowledge of Ireland’s policing history. Nonetheless, A June of Ordinary Murders ultimately had to win over readers and critics alike, as it seems to have done. Declan Burke, writing in Brady’s old broadsheet, opined that this author “weaves a police procedural that does full justice to the complex nature of the social, political, and criminal labyrinth that was Dublin in the summer of 1887. He paints a vivid picture of the city as it bakes beneath the unrelenting sun, employing Joe Swallow’s sharp eye and the character’s ambitions as an amateur painter to deftly sketch both its landmarks and its less salubrious corners.” Kirkus Reviews adds, “Brady’s powerful first mystery novel is evocative of the period. The many aspects of life in 19th-century Dublin are cleverly woven through a baffling mystery.”
With today’s posting of my latest column for Kirkus, I add my voice to this mix. Here’s my brief sketch of Ordinary Murders’ opening:
… Brady summons members of the Dublin Metropolitan Police (DMP) to Phoenix Park, an expansive walled reserve west of the town center, to look into a discovery of two corpses. The deceased appear to be a slightly built man wearing attire of “indifferent quality,” and a boy “perhaps 8 or 9 years old.” Neither victim bears any sort of identification, but both have been shot, and the elder casualty’s face is horribly mutilated, which will make it still more difficult to put a name to him. This isn’t exactly a favorable beginning for a murder inquiry, but Det. Sgt. Joseph Swallow--who, at 42, has already spent more than two decades with the city’s constabulary--figures he can get a decent launch on things with help from Dr. Henry Lafeyre, Dublin’s forensic examiner and a former medical officer who served with a mounted police unit in South Africa. (Lafeyre calls himself “a copper with a stethoscope.”)After consuming A June of Ordinary Murders at a rather breakneck pace, I contacted Conor Brady’s publisher and requested an interview with him. Some of the author’s thoughtful responses to my e-mailed questions managed to find homes in today’s Kirkus column, but, sadly, most didn’t fit. So I am presenting our complete exchange below, which covers Brady’s journalism career, his family’s law-enforcement connections, his research into Dublin’s Victorian era, and what challenges he next has in store for Joe Swallow.
J. Kingston Pierce: Where were you born?
Conor Brady: In Dublin, in 1949. But that was a technicality. My parents were living in Tullamore, a county town in the Irish midlands. It’s famous as the home of Tullamore Dew, the mellow whiskey beloved of Joe Swallow. My mother wasn’t a young mum. She was 43. I had two older sisters, but they had left home by the time I was born. So it was decided she should go to the National Maternity Hospital in the capital

(Left) Author Conor Brady. Photo by Bryan Meade.
JKP: And what were your growing-up years like? What are your fondest and most horrifying memories of boyhood?
CB: Contrary to many Irish childhood memories, mine are the happiest. I grew up secure in a loving home. My memories are of warm summer days with my friends at the town swimming pool, of walking country fields with my Irish Terrier, “Rusty,” and of playing golf with my mother, Amy.
My most horrifying memory is the death of my father when I was 13. He had had a number of small strokes, but I never thought he would die. I remember the screaming of my mother in the garden that night when her friend, our local doctor, came to tell her that her beloved husband was gone.
JKP: So how did you wind up in journalism?
CB: After my father’s death I went to boarding school at Roscrea College [in County Tipperary]. It was run by the monks of the Cistercian order, or Trappists. It was a very positive experience and I was very happy there. It’s still operating with 180 students. It’s set in beautiful farmland and there are still 15 monks in the community. There was a student newspaper in the school and I got involved and I loved the buzz of it all. Later at University College Dublin, I got involved with the student newspaper, Campus UCD News, and was editor in my second year. These were exciting times for student journalism. We’re talking the 1960s with student power on the move in the U.S., in Europe, and even in Ireland.
JKP: Am I correct that you later went on to spend more than a decade and a half as editor of The Irish Times?
CB: I did 16 years as editor and a previous 14 years in a variety of roles, from reporter on the streets of Belfast, to covering the war in Rhodesia, to night editor, to features editor, to deputy editor. I was exposed to every aspect of newspaper journalism, plus a couple of stints on radio and TV.
JKP: Before you went to the Times, what sorts of other post-college journalism jobs did you hold?
CB: I did four years at The Irish Times after graduating from college. Then I left to edit the Garda Review, the monthly magazine of the Irish police. I went from there to RTÉ, Ireland’s national broadcaster, where I worked on a prime-time news program as a reporter/presenter. Then I edited a broadsheet Sunday newspaper, the Sunday Tribune.
JKP: What would you say now was your principal accomplishment as editor of The Irish Times?
CB: Undoubtedly, our support for the peace process in Northern Ireland. We committed the paper to the search for a solution that would eschew violence. Some Irish media were very skeptical of the peace process to the point of hostility. I put the weight of The Irish Times behind the peacemakers. I’ll always be glad I did.
JKP: It sounds as if your later years at the Times were fraught with financial problems and staff layoffs. Were those the cause of your departure from the paper, or were there additional factors involved?
CB: Not really. I had stayed longer than I intended anyway. I had already told my senior staff that my editorship was coming to an end. And I stayed to see a restructuring in place that involved quite a few voluntary redundancies and so on. I thought it best that I should do those things, leaving my successor as editor to make a fresh, clean start. The problem was top-fold. The organization had become rather bloated, and not just the editorial departments.

JKP: Had you been thinking about becoming a fiction writer before you left the newspaper, or did you only decide upon that future after you were out of work?
CB: I didn’t start writing the Joe Swallow stories until I was perhaps 10, 12 years out of The Irish Times. I did a few things in the interim, including two years as a visiting professor at John Jay College [of Criminal Justice], City University of New York. But the challenge of creative writing was always there, lurking under the surface of a dull, stilted newsman’s prose.
JKP: So tell me: What was the hardest thing about transitioning from writing non-fiction to penning fiction?
CB: That’s a really penetrating question. News journalists are conditioned to being factual, detailed, and detached. Or at least they should be. Creative writing requires quite different impulses and talents. And I found that the former skills-set militated against the latter. I had tried to put too much detail in and I found that I simply had to pull most of it out again in order to achieve the free-flowing narrative one needs for a novel.
JKP: It sounds, though, as if your research talents came in handy.
CB: Researching this period of Irish history and Irish society is relatively easy. This was the new era of the newspaper industry, with big circulation numbers. Reporters covered everything from the police courts to society weddings. So the raw material is all there in the newspaper archives.
JKP: What was it that made you choose 1887 as your time-frame for A June of Ordinary Murders? Were you attracted primarily by Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee?
CB: The Jubilee became the focus for extraordinary political tension in Ireland. Those loyal to Britain wanted to celebrate, while those who believed in Irish nationalism opposed any acknowledgment of Victoria's long reign. She had sat on the throne while the Great Famine ravaged the country. A million died and two million were driven out by hunger to America, Britain, Australia, and elsewhere.

JKP: While conducting your research for Ordinary Murders, what was the most unusual thing you learned about life in Dublin or Ireland during the 1880s?
CB: Probably the extent to which alcohol played a part in the lives of working people. There were very few comforts other than drink, so when anybody had a few shillings to spare they generally invested in the oblivion of alcohol.
JKP: You make it sound in your book as if the Dublin Metropolitan Police force was rampant with divisions between the Catholic Irish officers and their Protestant English superiors. I kept expecting there to be more fireworks as a result of those differences. But was 1887 still too early for such disparities to become a problem?
CB: The tensions were there. But as in any disciplined force they were generally kept in check. The rank-and-file Catholic members did feel themselves cut off from the higher ranks. John Mallon, Swallow’s boss, was a real-life character. He was the exception that proved the rule. The son of a Catholic farmer from County Armagh, he went on to head the detective

JKP: You published a book in 2000 titled Guardians of the Peace, a history of Irish policing from the 1920s onward. How did law enforcement in Ireland change from Swallow’s time to the Jazz Age?
CB: The changes were significant at one level, but minimal at another. Regime change is often accompanied by changes in visible, outward symbols of authority such as policing arrangements. So the government of the new Irish state in 1922 decided to disband the old Royal Irish Constabulary [RIC] and replace it with a new force, the Garda Síochána or “Guardians of the Peace.” It operated as an unarmed force. Dublin’s separate police force, the Dublin Metropolitan Police, continued until 1925 but was then amalgamated with the Garda. Outwardly, this was all new. But it was essentially the same administrative model as before, with a police chief appointed by government and accountable to central authority. This was quite different to the system in Britain where police forces were locally accountable.
JKP: What’s this I hear about your grandfather having been a copper? Is that how your interest in the history of Irish policing began?
CB: My grandfather, William Brady, was in the RIC. But he died 35 years before I was born, so I know very little about him. His record shows he was a fairly typical “ranker.” A Catholic, his family operated a small public house in Cavan. He achieved no promotion, no distinctions, and no reprimands.
My father had a more successful police career. He had been a teacher of English and French before the 1919-1921 War of Independence. He took neither side in the civil war that followed, so he was well placed for a senior rank when the new state established its own police. He was appointed a superintendent at 24 years of age.
JKP: Let’s talk a little about Sergeant Swallow. He’s a rather extraordinary figure, a 42-year-old Catholic man with an unfortunate fondness for drink, whose family has operated a public house in County Kildare for generations. Yet he chose to make a living keeping the peace in Dublin. Why did you settle on him as your ideal protagonist?
CB: Like most fictional characters, I suspect, Swallow is an amalgam of various individuals a writer will have encountered. He is a conflicted man, both personally and politically. I think he would have been fairly typical of his generation and class. He has become a policeman by default, having drunk his way out of medical school. But paradoxically, it turns out, he’s quite good at sleuthing.
JKP: He’s also carrying on a relationship with a younger public-house proprietress named Maria Walsh, despite the DMP frowning on such relationships. How do you see Maria Walsh’s role in this story?
CB: Again, I think Maria would be fairly typical of women of her generation and class. Most women had no career options. They could marry or become a nun. Most clerical or secretarial work was still done by men. The licensed trade was one of the few areas in which a woman could make a business career. So Maria is quite a strong character, if a little dull and unexciting. She’s a grounded woman and a realist. Her role, among other things, is to keep Swallow grounded too.
JKP: There’s a great deal of early forensic science employed in Ordinary Murders, thanks to your inclusion of the character Dr. Henry Lafeyre, the Dublin medical examiner. Can I presume that you did considerable research into the subject before you sat down to write your first novel? And was that research conducted in books or among modern experts in the field?
CB: I went no further than the definitive Manual of Forensic Jurisprudence, by Professor A.S. [Alfred Swaine] Taylor of Edinburgh (1893 edition). Taylor has it all. The symptoms of poisoning, drowning, asphyxiation, etc. Henry Lafeyre has, of course, studied under Taylor at Edinburgh.
JKP: Although it’s comfortably rolled into your story, you offer a considerable amount of Irish history and culture in this novel--much of which would not be familiar to the majority of American readers. Did you have to do some editing of your novel after Minotaur Books bought it, to make it easier for readers in the States to understand?
CB: No, happily not. I guess the editors at Minotaur took the view that if readers were going to go through this story they’d simply have to make an effort to take

JKP: A June of Ordinary Murders was originally published in Ireland back in 2012. A year later saw the release of a sequel, The Eloquence of the Dead. I am delighted to hear that Eloquence will also be released in the States, probably in early 2016. Can you tell us something about the story you offer in that second Swallow yarn?
CB: The second story opens with the murder of a pawnbroker in his shop at Lamb Alley, near Dublin Castle. When Swallow investigates he uncovers a massive fraud on Her Majesty’s exchequer, organized around the purchase scheme through which tenant farmers are buying out their holdings from the big landlords. The story brings him to London where he gets an attractive job offer from Scotland Yard. And a possible rival to Maria comes on the scene.
The third story, A Hunt in Winter, brings us into 1888, which was the year that Jack the Ripper did his bloody work in the east end of London. Also in that year, a commission of inquiry in London examined alleged links between the great Irish parliamentary leader, [Charles Stewart] Parnell, and political violence. The two themes intertwine in what I think is a good yarn.
JKP: When you’re not writing crime and mystery fiction, which other authors in the genre do you enjoy reading?
CB: My favorite is the Brother Cadfael series, set in the 13th century in the Benedictine Abbey of Shrewsbury, in England. The author, Ellis Peters, is now deceased. She wrote, I think, some 20 stories about Cadfael. He’s a monk of Shrewsbury but also a man of action, having been a crusader who has known military action.
JKP: Are you surprised by the rapid and fairly recent growth of Irish crime fiction as a subgenre?
CB: Not really. The Irish are an imaginative people. And many celebrated Irish writers have touched on criminal themes in the past. Some of what’s coming out is really good. But some is also merely imitative and predictable.
JKP: If you could have written any book--fiction or non-fiction--that doesn’t currently carry your byline, what would it have been?
CB: I’d like to have written The Day of the Jackal [1971], by Frederick Forsyth. It's the perfect thriller, pacy, tightly written, and wonderfully evocative of the atmosphere of France in the troubled 1950s and 1960s. Besides, I’d also be very rich!
JKP: Finally, since you are a newspaper veteran, let me ask you this: We now live in an era of marked newspaper decline, perhaps also a period of decline for journalism in general. What do you think the costs are to society of such declines, and do you see the news media finding firmer roles for themselves in the near future?
CB: I’ve been very pessimistic for traditional news media, watching the collapse of the various business models that sustained them. But I’m starting to be a little more hopeful now. I think good journalism is reasserting itself. There’s an absolute torrent of drivel and posturing on the Internet, but I think people are starting to be a lot more discerning.
READ MORE: “A June of Ordinary Murders: New Excerpt”
(Criminal Element).