A Rainy City of Dark Desires

Earlier this morning, my 14th article for CrimeReads appeared in that excellent online publication. Its topic—Seattle, Washington, as a setting for crime and thriller fiction—is one that I have been thinking about for quite a while, but tackling it required that I first read or re-read a variety of novels in my possession.

All of the ingredients necessary to make Seattle a fertile environment for tales of homicide, turmoil, and detection seem to exist in this Pacific Northwest city: a history boasting “criminality of all sorts and severities”; an ethnically, culturally, and financially diverse population; an economy powered by both modern, rising enterprises (Microsoft, Amazon, and other high-tech trailblazers) and long-established businesses (Boeing, Starbucks, Nordstrom, etc.); and of course, oft-inclement weather that lends a noirish aspect to any story’s backdrop, with local rain and cloud shadow supplying cover to malefactors.

That Seattle hasn’t yet become synonymous with crime fiction in the same way that, say, New York City, L.A., and San Francisco have certainly isn’t for wont of trying. Indeed, there have been many fine Seattle-set novels in this genre produced over the last 80 years—10 of which I highlight today in CrimeReads, by authors including Stuart Brock, Bernadette Pajer, G.M. Ford, and K.K. Beck.

* * *

While assembling my piece, I couldn’t help but think about how several famous contributors to this field of fiction once had experience with Seattle, yet failed to employ the city in their work.

In 1920, for instance, Dashiell Hammett sought hospital treatment for tuberculosis in Tacoma (just 33 miles south of Seattle), and while there stumbled across the inspiration for the famous “Flitcraft Parable” that his gumshoe Sam Spade recites in The Maltese Falcon (1930). Hammett likely found time during his weeks-long stay, or perhaps amid his previous travels up the West Coast as a Pinkerton detective, to see Seattle’s sights. But they must not have impressed him greatly, for the town didn’t star in his later stories. Raymond Chandler, too, knew this so-called Emerald City. He stayed here with friends awhile in 1932, after being dismissed from his oil company job in Los Angeles for alcoholism and absenteeism. Once again, though, Chandler’s fiction reflected no significant interest in this locale.

Alan Furst also resided in these parts for a spell, though the historical espionage yarns he’s now turning out (A Hero of France, Under Occupation) take place primarily in Europe. Likewise, British-born author Michael Dibdin made his home here from the 1990s through the mid-2000s, but wrote primarily about an Italian police commissioner named Aurelio Zen. And as far as I know, thriller author Robert Ferrigno still resides in Kirkland, a historic burg on the east side of Lake Washington, but prefers to place his mayhem-packed stories as far away from this place—and his family—as he can. The sole exception, I believe, is his 2013 novel, The Girl Who Cried Wolf.

If any or all of these writers had done more to integrate the Northwest’s largest metropolis into their storytelling, there’s no question that Seattle would be recognized more widely as an ideal milieu for crime fiction. But would their books have been better than those that already exist? It’s impossible to know.

Where Investigation Meets Ruination

My 12th and latest piece for CrimeReads was posted earlier this morning. It’s a survey of crime and detective novels set amid real-life catastrophes—both natural and man-made. As I explain:

Disasters are already rampant in human history, and thanks to escalating terrorism, recurrent mass shootings, and myriad threats posed by global warming—wildfires, rising sea levels, extreme weather, pandemics, etc.—the world seems unlikely to become safer or more secure at any time soon. This may actually be good news for storytellers, including those working the crime and thriller side of the tracks, who can continue to capitalize on reader attraction to nightmarish events.

Most of the large-scale hardships this genre serves up are dramatic fabrications, or are rooted only partially in reality. Yet a number of books … have combined bona fide historical tragedies with invented misdeeds and mysteries, the disasters often complicating the detection.

Among the history-making calamities featured in the dozen books under review are the 14th century’s Black Plague, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, and Hurricane Katrina. Click here to read the full piece.

The Robust Rise of the “Regionals”

Today marks my long-overdue return to CrimeReads, after a few months of being distracted by other editorial projects and helping to open a new Seattle bookshop. My subject under consideration this time is the forgotten rise of regional American detective fiction during the 1970s and ’80s. As I recall in the piece:

That’s when a restless new generation of detective-fictionists decided the field—grown stale after a mid-century deluge of male-oriented works formulated around cynical peepers, amorous female clients, and epidemic gunplay—needed a serious shaking-up in order to maintain relevance and readership. One result of that effort was a broader, updated perspective on what sorts of offenses could and should be addressed in these books: not just larceny, abductions, and choreographed slayings anymore, but also environmental injustices, endemic racism, human trafficking, right-wing extremism, domestic abuse, and child-custody disputes. Another way the genre diversified was by expanding its storytelling stage beyond familiar urban hubs, to rediscover the value of literary regionalism.

Included among the people responsible for that era’s crime-fiction expansion were authors ranging from Robert B. Parker and Tony Hillerman to K.C. Constantine, James Crumley, Karen Kijewski, Jonathan Valin, Richard Hoyt, Linda Barnes, and William J. Reynolds.

Again, click here to find that whole CrimeReads piece.

Ross Macdonald: An Ongoing Investigation

I don’t often return to a subject after an interval of 20 years, but that’s exactly what I am doing today. Back in April 1999, I assembled—for January Magazine—a diverse collection of articles focused on renowned California detective fictionist Ross Macdonald and his original Lew Archer private eye novel, The Moving Target, which was then celebrating its 50th year in print. Kevin Burton Smith, Gary Phillips, and Frederick Zackel all contributed personal essays to the project; Swedish crime-fiction enthusiast Karl-Erik Lindkvist chose his three favorite Archer stories; I wrote about my single, long-ago meeting with Macdonald (whose real name was Kenneth Millar); and I also interviewed Los Angeles-area journalist and critic Tom Nolan, author of the then freshly published work, Ross Macdonald: A Biography.

Weeks ago, I received the go-ahead from my editor at CrimeReads to write a couple more Macdonald tribute pieces, this time tied in with The Moving Target’s official 70th anniversary on April 11, 2019. One thing I planned to do was assemble a gallery of best and worst covers from the novel’s history; that piece went up online yesterday, right on schedule. In addition, I wanted to interview Nolan once more. He and I have stayed in e-mail touch over the last two decades, and I talked at length with him again (this time for Kirkus Reviews and The Rap Sheet) in 2015, the centennial year of Macdonald’s birth.

In 1999, Tom Nolan had produced only the one book about P.I. Archer’s creator. However, as I explain in this piece posted earlier today in CrimeReads, since that time he

has furthered his Macdonald scholarship by, first, collecting three of the author’s previously unpublished pieces of short fiction in Strangers in Town (2001), and then compiling, in 2007’s The Archer Files, all of the Archer short stories (plus fragments—like this one—of unfinished yarns). With Suzanne Marrs, Nolan edited Meanwhile There Are Letters (2015), which gathered together hundreds of revealing missives Macdonald exchanged with Pulitzer Prize-winning Mississippi author Eudora Welty between 1970 and 1982. And most recently, Nolan edited the Library of America’s three-volume set of Archer mysteries, 11 novels in total.

Although I initially worried that on this third go-round I wouldn’t have any more worthwhile questions to pitch Nolan’s way, as I started thinking about Macdonald and his books and all that Nolan has written about both over the last two decades, I found there was no shortage of things about which I remained curious. During the course of our e-mail exchange, we talked about the endurance of Macdonald’s legacy; the troubles he faced as a boy and as a father, and how those fed his fiction; his sometimes “quarrelsome marriage” to fellow mystery writer Margaret Millar; his mysterious middle-age suicide attempt; his most influential books, and a great deal besides.

Click here to real all about it.

Targeting Archer at Readers

As I note in my latest piece for CrimeReads, today marks 70 years since the release of Ross Macdonald’s first Lew Archer private-eye novel, The Moving Target. To commemorate this anniversary, I have gathered together—and commented on—25 of the best and worst front covers that book has carried over its history. Those include the original, 1949 Alfred A. Knopf edition; two British publications that renamed Archer “Lew Arless”; Mitchell Hooks’ 1970s reworking of the series fronts; a couple of Italian giallo versions; and a Czech translation suggesting that the plot is a mash-up of the old TV shows Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer and WKRP in Cincinnati.

I also offer this reminder of the tale’s multiple qualities:

All these decades later, The Moving Target still impresses with its vivid prose and carefully rendered characters, plus its plotting mix of greed, broken trust, and festering disillusionments. While it’s tougher and more cinematic than some of Macdonald’s 17 subsequent Archer novels, Target hints at what will become more obvious as the series progresses: the author’s interest in the psychological roots of criminal behavior.

The story finds L.A. private investigator Archer, a 35-year-old ex-cop with a sardonic streak (“Most of my work is divorce. I’m a jackal, you see”), being hired by the dysfunctional family of Ralph Sampson, an oil millionaire from “Santa Teresa” (a fictionalized Santa Barbara). It seems the alcoholic Sampson has vanished. His younger, paraplegic second wife figures he’s off on a bender, rather than having been kidnapped. But Albert Graves, a former district attorney and onetime Archer colleague, asks that she hire the P.I. to at least locate the man. It’s a task more easily assigned than accomplished, leading the shamus into a circle of suspects that include Sampson’s beguiling but drifting daughter, Miranda; Alan Taggert, the tycoon’s pretty-boy pilot and the elder Graves’ rival for Miranda’s affections; a sun-worshipping holy man, Claude, to whom Sampson gave a mountain retreat; as well as a downwardly mobile actress with an astrology bent, a forgotten piano player, low-IQ bruisers, and even human traffickers.

Again, click here to observe how different artists and photographers have introduced The Moving Target to readers.

The “Pop Culture Rembrandt” of Paperbacks

You may have noticed over the years what a big fan I am of American artist and paperback illustrator Robert McGinnis. In 2014, I not only celebrated his career with a month-long exposition of his book fronts in Killer Covers, but I interviewed Art Scott, his co-author on the exquisite book, The Art of Robert E. McGinnis (Titan), for both The Rap Sheet and Kirkus Reviews. Two years later, I posted an additional, smaller selection of his work in celebration of his 90th birthday.

Well, McGinnis’ 93rd birthday is fast approaching—on Sunday, February 3—and I decided to compose one additional encomium to his six decades of work. As I write today in CrimeReads,

The case could well be made that McGinnis, along with contemporary commercial illustrators such as Mitchell Hooks, Ron Lesser, Robert Maguire, and Harry Bennett, was instrumental in raising the profile (and sales) of crime and detective fiction during the latter half of the 20th century. “His work was highly influential, both in the sense that a lot of other painters of paperback covers tried to imitate the McGinnis ‘look’ and in the sense that his beautiful covers got a lot of readers to pick up books they might not otherwise have tried,” explains Ardai. “I know my father bought Brett Halliday’s Mike Shayne novels at least as much for the covers as for the stories inside, and I’d much rather look at a Carter Brown cover than read a Carter Brown novel any day.”

McGinnis has deployed his genius widely over the years. He’s crafted fronts not only for works of crime and spy fiction, but also for historical and Gothic romance novels. He has contributed to slick magazines and developed iconic posters for such Hollywood flicks as Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Barbarella, The Odd Couple, Cotton Comes to Harlem, and Sean Connery’s 1967 James Bond movie, You Only Live Twice. And he’s exercised “pure self-expression” through an assortment of gallery pieces, primarily portraits of women, rural landscapes, and Old West scenery. His colleagues at the Society of Illustrators recognized McGinnis’ expertise and prolificacy in 1993, when they elected him to the Illustrators’ Hall of Fame, an honor first bestowed on Norman Rockwell in 1958.

Yet this “pop culture Rembrandt” (as he was dubbed by a magazine serving his current hometown of Greenwich, Connecticut) got his start in the book-cover biz illustrating crime novels. And more than half a century later, he’s still influencing that field.

I have never met McGinnis, and I probably never will. But I own stacks of the paperback books he’s graced with his artistry over the years, and I try to snap up any I don’t already possess, whenever I see them. He’s a master of his art, and it gives me great pleasure to pay tribute to his efforts in CrimeReads. Click here to learn more.

READ MORE: “Happy Birthday, Robert McGinnis!” by J. Kingston
Pierce (Killer Covers).

Puzzling Out Mysteries

Back in early December of last year, I submitted to CrimeReads an assigned piece about Dell Books’ Murder Ink/Scene of the Crime series from the 1980s. Thanks to the subsequent holiday hoopla, however, it’s only today that the piece has finally been posted.

What, you don’t remember Dell’s series? It consisted of mystery-fiction paperback reprints, and was launched in the fall of 1980. As I explain in my piece, the project was steered by a pair of then-well-known bookstore proprietors: “Carol Brener, who owned the landmark Murder Ink bookshop, established in 1972 on New York City’s Upper West Side, and Ruth Windfeldt, the proprietor of Scene of the Crime, another popular haunt for mystery-fiction enthusiasts, opened in 1975 in the Sherman Oaks neighborhood of Los Angeles. Each of those women was asked to pick half a dozen titles every year—all of which had previously appeared in hardcover—that they believed deserved reprinting.”

Although the line lasted only a few years, it drew considerable attention with the quality of its cozy-ish selections, which included Sheila Radley’s Death in the Morning, A.A. Milne’s The Red House Mystery, Mignon Warner’s The Tarot Murders, and Robert Barnard’s Death on the High C’s. But the books were also recognized for their distinctive, uniform design. “[T]he fronts of these works were principally white,” I write, “with single jigsaw puzzle pieces positioned below the author’s byline and the book’s title. The gimmick was that those oddly configured fragments fit into fuller illustrations on the backsides of the books (though they were usually enlarged for easier readability). So you had to flip each volume over not only to read the plot précis, but to appreciate the complete artwork.”

My shelves still contain a few dozen of the Murder Ink/Scene of the Crime titles, and while researching this piece, I managed to speak with several people who were involved on the editorial and art side of the project. Again, you’ll find my full CrimeReads piece here.

CrimeReads’ Critical Judgment

The editors and contributors at CrimeReads weigh in today with their choices of favorite mystery, crime, and thriller novels published in 2018 (plus a handful of non-fiction works about crime). There are 62 books mentioned in all—one of which is Philip Kerr’s penultimate Bernie Gunther historical thriller, Greeks Bearing Gifts, about which I was asked to comment. There are plenty of excellent reading choices here, if you’re still looking for holiday presents for book lovers.

You can enjoy the full CrimeReads feature here.

Inkslingers Turned Investigators

This CrimeReads piece has sure been a long time in coming. Way back in April, I dropped the following note onto my Facebook page:

I’m trying to develop a list of mystery/crime/thriller novels that feature journalists and reporters (especially newspaper reporters) as the protagonists/crime solvers. Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

That request elicited dozens of responses. So many, in fact, that I resolved to confine myself to writing only about books offering newspaper reporter protagonists. I also had a variety of other assignments standing in the way of my compiling novels along this theme, including last week’s dive into post-World War I mysteries. And in the meantime, other CrimeReads contributors brought forth related stories, including J.G. Heatherton’s selection of novels featuring investigative reporters, and Steven Cooper’s essay about “why investigative reporters become mystery writers.” All of this accounts for the rather lengthy lag time between the birth of my “brilliant” idea and my actually composing the piece I had in mind.

Only this morning has my work, “A Brief History of Reporters in Crime Fiction,” finally been posted in CrimeReads. It features 10 crime and mystery novels starring print journalists, together with one that imagines a newspaper photographer in the sleuthing role. My picks were published as far back as 1939 and as recently as September. Among the authors represented are Martin Edwards, William P. McGivern, Julia Dahl, Les Whitten, and Pete Hamill. Although I settled on reading and then writing about 11 books, and mentioning 19 others at the end of the piece, I culled those from a much longer list of options available. In addition to the suggestions received on Facebook, two online sources helped me get a handle on the scope of the field: The Thrilling Detective Web Site and Stop, You’re Killing Me! With all of this assistance, I tallied up books I hoped to write about, but later had to cut my choices way back in order to finish my research before the year 2030. So many books had to go unexamined—for now, at least:

• David Mamet’s Chicago (2018)
• Liam McIlvanney’s Where the Dead Men
Go (2013)
• Val McDermid’s Report for Murder (1987)
• Marc Olden’s Kill the Reporter (1978)
• Lawrence Meyer’s False Front (1979)
• Simon Wood’s Paying the Piper (2007)
• Jim Kelly’s The Water Clock (2003)
• Steven Brewer’s End Run (2000)
• Allen Eskens’ The Shadows We Hide (2018)
• James Howard’s Die on Easy Street (1957)
• Sarah Ruttan’s Suspicious Circumstances (2007)
• Rick Mofina’s If Angels Fall (2000)
• Mary Daheim’s The Alpine Advocate (1992)
• Vince Kohler’s Rainy North Woods (1990)
• Jason Pinter’s Stolen (2008)
• Mark Arsenault’s Spiked (2003)
• Warren Adler’s The Henderson Equation (1976)
• Robert Olen Butler’s Paris in the Dark (2018)
• Martyn Waites’ Mary’s Prayer (1997)
• Mark Sanderson’s Snow Hill (2010)
• Thomas Enger’s Cursed (2017)

A full study of this subject would probably be book-length. But I am pleased with what I was able to accomplish in a much shorter space, for CrimeReads. Click here to read the full article.

READ MORE: “The Disappearing Newsroom,” by Wallace Stroby (CrimeReads).

Battling Crime in the Wake of War

As my maternal grandfather told me when I was a boy, he was only 14 or 15 years old and living in Canada when World War I broke out in Europe in 1914. Yet he had several older brothers who quickly volunteered to join the British Army, and my grandfather wanted to go with them. So he lied about his age, and was sent to the front lines in France. Amazingly, he didn’t die, though he did have some scares (one of them involving a rat that sneaked up on his trench from no-man’s-land one night, and that he almost shot, thinking it was a German soldier). And he was seriously injured by a bomb blast that left shrapnel in one of his legs. The field medics wanted to amputate that limb and send him home, but my grandfather told them he’d rather die than lose his leg. For the rest of his long life, he suffered with the pain of metal bits working their way out of his flesh.

Eventually, he did return to Canada—as did all of his brothers. I seem to remember him saying that their German-born mother cried for days, after her sons were safely home. Though I could be wrong about that. Sadly, my grandfather is no longer around to set me straight.

I thought of my grandfather often as I wrote my piece about post-World War I mysteries, which appears today in CrimeReads—just two days before the centennial, on Sunday, November 11, of that war’s conclusion. He was an enthusiastic reader; in fact, it was partly the prevalence of books in his home that led me to become a book lover. (My mother was an equal influence on me in that regard.) Whether he would have appreciated any of the novels featured in my piece, I can’t say. Perhaps not, for in one way or another, their stories all focus on loss—the loss of friends, the loss of one’s moral or mental bearings, the loss of confidence that the world remains a safe place.

I, of course, came to these crime and mystery novels without my grandfather’s baggage—and was glad of the opportunity to dive into the tales about which I write today. My focus is on nine crime, mystery, and spy novels that take place shortly after the end of the fighting in Europe. Works by Robert Goddard, Alex Beer, Charles Todd, and Christopher Huang are among those under consideration. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it’s a start for readers interested in how fictional detectives—and others—were affected by those four years of fighting, and how their lives and careers changed afterward.

Again, click here to find my post-World War I mystery picks.

READ MORE: “Words of War: History and Mystery Meet in Battlefield Trenches,” by J. Kingston Pierce (Kirkus Reviews); “Interview with WWI Historical Novelists,” by Elise Cooper (Crimespree Magazine); “At War with the War,” by Xavier Lechard (At the Villa Rose); “Raymond Chandler on the Western Front, 1918,” by Bethany Reynard (First World War Centenary).

Putting Murder on the Map

This morning has brought the posting of my fourth CrimeReads submission, an enthusiastic look back at Dell Books’ distinctive early 20th-century line of paperbacks. As I explain in the piece,

Ever since the 1930s and the advent of the “paperback revolution” in English-language books, publishers have sought to make their creations not merely inexpensive, but distinctive. One of the notable successes in that regard was also one of the earliest. For about a decade, beginning in 1943, American publishing house Dell—which had started out in 1921 producing pulp fiction magazines, and in 1942 followed rival Pocket Books into the mass-marketing of compact, cut-rate, and sporadically abridged softcover reprints—launched a numbered line of works branded with stylistically recognizable cover paintings and backed by detailed diagrams of where events in each story took place. Those “mapback” editions were popular at the time, and over the decades have become collectible. …

Mapbacks were published across a gamut of genres (each identified by a variant of the company’s keyhole colophon). At least half of them, though, were mystery, detective, or suspense novels, both of the traditional sort (by Agatha Christie, Mignon G. Eberhart, John Dickson Carr, and others) and those concocted by harder-edged scribblers (Dashiell Hammett, Erle Stanley Gardner, Margaret Millar, Brett Halliday, etc.). The focus of those books’ back-cover diagrams varied widely, but they can roughly be broken down according to three progressively widening perspectives.

Over the last decade or so, I have collected a number of these mapback editions—in various conditions of use—and was pleased to break them all out again for close appraisal while working on that CrimeReads story. The bad news was, I had room enough in my feature to include only 13 such paperback fronts. That’s 13 out of some 600 mapbacks Dell produced! Cutting down my selections was no easy enterprise, as you can imagine, since I had so many excellent specimens from which to choose. In the end, I winnowed my choices down to 28 covers I thought best represented Dell’s line, but then I had to trim away 15 of those to reach the magic baker’s dozen. Not being one to waste valuable research, and confident that Rap Sheet readers would enjoy seeing more mapbacks, I’ve installed those excess 15 images in my Killer Covers blog. Enjoy!

The Improbable Afterlife of Philip Marlowe

In connection with both the release last week of The Annotated Big Sleep (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard) and this week’s debut of Lawrence Osborne’s Philip Marlowe novel, Only to Sleep (Hogarth), the Web site CrimeReads has been making the most of Raymond Chandler and his famous fictional private eye. All of the pieces are worth checking out if, like me, you’re a Chandler fan.

“The World of Raymond Chandler and The Big Sleep” is an adaptation of the introduction to The Annotated Big Sleep, by Owen Hill, Pamela Jackson, and Anthony Dean Rizzuto. In “How to Write Like Chandler Without Becoming a Cliché,” Hill offers some “tips for aspiring crime writers enthralled by the [crime-fiction] classics.” And if you’re curious to see how The Big Sleep has been artistically presented by publishers around the world since its initial appearance in 1939, take a scroll through this gallery of 25 mostly paperback book covers.

Since this week brought the 130th anniversary of Chandler’s birth (he took his first breaths in Chicago on July 23, 1888), CrimeReads continues it celebration with a piece I contributed, titled “The Many Faces of Philip Marlowe.” It’s an examination of eight books, all published since Chandler’s demise back in 1959, that feature Marlowe or the author himself, but—like Osborne’s Only to Sleep—were penned by wordsmiths other than Chandler. It was great fun visiting or revisiting those works in order to write about them.

READ MORE: “The Big Seep,” by Megan Abbott (Slate); “Marlowe Never Sleeps,” by Clay and Susan Griffith (Tor.com); “Sleep Covers Worth Waking Up For,” by J. Kingston Pierce (Killer Covers); “The Man Who Would Be Marlowe,” by J. Kingston Pierce (The Rap Sheet).

Peril to the Chief

Today marks the official publication date of The President Is Missing, by Bill Clinton and James Patterson (Little, Brown). The first thriller ever penned by a onetime American president, this novel boasts all the hallmarks of a best-seller. It likely also represents the fulfillment of a dream for Clinton, a longtime fan of crime, mystery, and thriller fiction whose support of their writing has boosted the sales of books by Walter Mosley, Linda Fairstein, Daniel Silva, and others. With Patterson’s assistance, this former leader of the free world enters the pantheon of authors he has so much admired.

Details of the book’s story line and characters have been kept mostly under wraps. But Publishers Weekly recently gave this plot synopsis:

President Jonathan Lincoln Duncan is under fire from the [U.S.] House Select Committee for allegedly ordering a team of Special Forces and CIA operatives to Algeria to thwart an attempt on the life of Turkish-born terrorist Suliman Cindoruk, leader of the Sons of Jihad. Hostile committee members repeatedly ask him questions about the raid that he refuses to answer. But Duncan’s concerns about the outcome of congressional hearings into his actions are secondary to his fears that a computer virus is about to be activated that would completely cripple the United States. In order to avert that calamity, Duncan leaves the White House and his protective detail behind and attempts to gain the confidence of the shadowy figures who revealed the existence of the threat. The authors keep the suspense high as Duncan dodges bullets from a master assassin, deals with his deteriorating health from a blood clotting disorder, and strives to unmask a traitor among his inner circle of advisers.

My guess is that Clinton had a blast playing novelist. But he’s not the first to imagine a U.S. president in peril. Not by a long shot. As I explain in a new piece for CrimeReads, The President Is Missing “joins an already packed sub-genre of political suspense novels featuring current presidents, future presidents, or their wives as the victims, perpetrators, or solvers of crimes.” Included are works by David Baldacci, Richard North Patterson, Francine Mathews, and Watergate co-conspirator John Ehrlichman.

You’ll find that CrimeReads article right here.

READ MORE: “Bill Clinton and James Patterson Team Up to Imagine a True Fantasy: Sane Politics,” by Janet Maslin (The New York Times); “Bill Clinton and James Patterson Open Up About Their Unlikely Collaboration,” by Jeff Bercovivi (The National); “Bill Clinton and James Patterson’s Concussive Collaboration,” by Anthony Lane (The New Yorker); “Bill Clinton and James Patterson Have Written a Thriller. It’s Good,” by Nicolle Wallace (The New York Times); “Bill Clinton and James Patterson Are Co-authors—But Who Did the Writing?” by James O’Sullivan (The Guardian).

I’ve Got You Covered

Today marks my debut on the still-new Web site CrimeReads, where I write about what any regular Rap Sheet reader knows is one of my favorite subjects: mid- to late-20th-century paperback artists.

CrimeReads senior editor Dwyer Murphy made contact with me in late November of last year. He let me know that this offshoot of the more established books site, Literary Hub, would be launching in the spring, and asked whether I’d be interested in contributing to its development. I was flattered. And it was so good to speak on the phone with an editor who seemed to know a great deal about crime fiction (as opposed to others who only hope the writers know their stuff), that I promptly agreed to drum up some story ideas for CrimeReads. Today’s piece, “12 Cover Artists Every Vintage Crime Lover Should Know,” is my first effort on the site’s behalf, but certainly not my last. I am already working on another article, which (fingers crossed!) should appear in early June.

If you haven’t already discovered the quite ambitious CrimeReads, consider this your opportunity to do so now.

Welcoming the Competition

Today brings the launch of CrimeReads, a new subsection of the Web site Literary Hub that hopes to “showcase[e] the best writing from the worlds of crime, mystery, and thrillers.” Describing plans for this new resource, editors Dwyer Murphy and Molly Odintz write:

We’ll bring you stories that represent the vast scope of crime literature today—writing that gives full weight to ideas, that revels in a sense of place, that embraces differing viewpoints, all coexisting under the same big umbrella. Today, day one for CrimeReads, you can read Laura Lippman’s celebration of James M. Cain’s transgressive noir, an essay on spy fiction and the black American experience, a personal story about a life of activism and writing mysteries, and a conversation with the godfather of legal thrillers, Scott Turow. Over the coming days, you’ll find articles about fugitive enclaves under attack from the CIA, the rise of paramilitary narcos in Colombia, a new monthly column from “The Crime Lady” Sarah Weinman, exclusive fiction from Jo Nesbø, Lars Kepler, Donna Leon, and many others. You’ll see more noir stills, and pulp covers than you can shake a stick at, and hopefully you’ll read something worth obsessing over.

Every time a new crime fiction-oriented site like this makes its debut, I feel a small pang of regret that The Rap Sheet hasn’t the monetary wherewithal or staff to become much bigger or more influential than it already is. Then again, it’s exhausting to run a larger editorial operation, as I know from having edited magazines and newspapers. Maybe The Rap Sheet is just the right size for me nowadays.