Nice Work by Nasty Woman

By Linda L. Richards
In some ways, Nasty Woman Press was born almost the moment Donald Trump was elected as the U.S. president back in 2016. Award-winning author Kelli Stanley knew something had to be done. But what could one writer—a fiction writer, at that—do in the face of all that she sensed was about to come? Stanley allowed the moment to galvanize her, and she started putting together a crew.

The organization that resulted from all of that galvanizing is a registered non-profit called the Creative Resistance. Members are authors, readers, attorneys, librarians, editors, literary agents, artists, entertainers, publishers, performers, and others. “People who value creativity and imagination. People who value education, the environment, human rights, and a saner, more compassionate world,” says the organization’s Web site. Their imprint takes its name from an insult Trump directed at his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, during a 2016 presidential debate (“such a nasty woman”).

The first book-length publication from this resistance-driven organization drops this week, and it couldn’t come at a better time. Shattering Glass is intended to be the first in a series of anthologies, and if this one is a taste, we have some great reading ahead of us.

The book collects essays, interviews, articles, and short fiction on the stated theme—the empowerment of women—but it really is so much more. A sharp and beautifully rendered window into this cultural moment, crafted by passion and a deep need to try and right, or at least articulate, something that has gone terribly wrong.

And this is just the crew we want to have sharing stellar thoughts not only about but also around this moment in history. Contributors include Heather Graham, Valerie Plame (yes, that Valerie Plame), Sandi Ault, Eric Beetner, Cara Black, Rhys Bowen, former U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer, Hallie Ephron, Rachael Howzell Hall, Charlaine Harris, Libby Fischer Hellmann, Toni L.P. Kelner, Catriona McPherson, S.J. Rozan, Clea Simon, Alexandra Sokoloff, Kelli Stanley, Kate Thornton, Jacqueline Winspear, and several others. Profits from the sale of this collection will go to Planned Parenthood.

It’s a stunning lineup of authors writing to us from their hearts at an incredible moment in time. Run, don’t walk.

Favorite Crime Fiction of 2017, Part III: Linda L. Richards

Linda L. Richards is a journalist, photographer, and the author of 15 books, including three series of novels featuring strong female protagonists. She is the former publisher of Self-Counsel Press and the founder and publisher of award-winning January Magazine. Richards is currently based in Vancouver, Canada, but you can find her wherever her laptop decides to rest for awhile.

• Every Breath You Take, by Mary Higgins Clark and
Alafair Burke (Simon & Schuster):
While on the surface of things, this fourth entry in the Higgins Clarke/Burke partnership might seem like an outlier in a best-of-the-year round-up, I just can’t help but love these books that much. Their Under Suspicion series is high-end candy for suspense lovers. Or maybe top-of-the-line caviar. The good stuff, anyway. In Every Breath You Take, Higgins Clark and Burke have us again spending time with TV producer Laurie Moran as she goes about solving another cold case. This time it’s the Met Gala Murder, and the goal is to discover who shoved wealthy widow Virginia Wakeling to her death from atop Manhattan’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Although Wakeling’s much-younger boyfriend seems like a ready-made guilty party, as Laurie begins to probe the crime, she discovers that the victim’s super-rich family has a lot to hide … and they might even prove dangerous to Laurie herself, if provoked. Higgins Clark and Burke are both master plotters in their own rights. But get them together? This is the kind of novel for which the term “unputdownable” was created. The only thing I don’t like: the authors are going to make me wait a while for the next entry in their series.

• Invisible Dead, by Sam Wiebe (Quercus):
Sam Wiebe is one of the few writers I would read no matter the topic or genre or day of the week. Margaret Atwood is another. Stephen King. Salman Rushdie. A mixed bag, certainly, but good company, any way you figure it. This young author’s second novel (after 2014’s Last of the Independents) is a stunning accomplishment. Wiebe here grabs at a whole bunch of the tropes of crime fiction and turns them around, pulling them masterfully beyond the cliché. Dave Wakeland is an ex-cop turned private eye. In Invisible Dead he’s hired by a terminally ill woman to find her adopted daughter, who vanished a decade earlier. Like Sheena Kamal’s debut yarn, highlighted below, Wiebe’s tale deals at its core with the disappearance and loss of indigenous Canadian women from Vancouver, British Columbia’s Downtown East Side, and the horror and travesty of the fact that not more has been made of their loss. Both books are brilliant, though in starkly different ways. Wiebe navigates crime fiction’s mean streets in a manner that absolutely honors the heritage of his subgenre, yet pushes it towards sharp new directions. Ever wanted to find the perfect P.I. novel? This is it.

• The Lost Ones (aka Eyes Like Mine), by Sheena Kamal (Morrow):
The thing I like least about Sheena Kamal’s debut work is that it was published under different titles in North America and in the UK. This may confuse readers who are trying to figure out which of her books they’ve already picked up. Relax: until sometime in mid-2018, there is only one. Like Sam Wiebe’s Invisible Dead, the action in these pages focuses around an indigenous Canadian woman gone missing from Vancouver’s Downtown East Side. And while, on the surface of things, that would seem to make them very similar books, they just could not be more different. Both are magnificent in their own right. A lot of the tension and, in fact, the success of The Lost Ones comes to us through Nora, Kamal’s damaged and world-weary narrator. In reviews, this story has often been compared to Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo—and not without reason. There is an equivalent darkness and edge to the two novels, and thanks to the British Columbia backdrop of The Lost Ones, even some shared feeling of spiritual and emotional overcast. There is an unexpected virtuosity in Kamal’s pen. This is the first installment in a promised trilogy, and though the story concludes solidly, The Lost Ones leaves us, quite appropriately, wanting more.

• Montreal Noir, edited by John McFetridge and
Jacques Filippi (Akashic):
Montreal, Quebec, isn’t like other places. It’s a holdout from old Europe, nestled in a traditionally largely Anglo country. That juxtaposition hasn’t always been entirely comfortable. Montreal is not like the rest of Canada, that’s what I’m saying. Culturally, physically, and emotionally, Montreal is not like any other place at all. The totality of its differences play a part in the melting-pot soup that is Montreal Noir. This diverse collection of short fiction, like the city itself, is not always easy or even. It’s not always comfortable. The 15 stories gathered here were written originally in English and French, the latter having been translated for this latest volume in Akashic Books’ Noir series. The writers contributing to this work will mostly be unfamiliar to readers outside (and possibly even within) Canada: Samuel Archibald, Michel Basilières, Arjun Basu, Tess Fragoulis, Peter Kirby, Robert Pobi, Patrick Senécal, Geneviève Lefebvre, Ian Truman, Johanne Seymour, Howard Shrier, Martin Michaud, Melissa Yi, Catherine McKenzie, and Brad Smith. In their introduction, editors McFetridge and Filippi say that “Today, the city has its own language: Franglais (or Frenglish). Maybe the first word spoken in that language was noir …” Appropriate, then, to have it said here in so many ways. For me, this was an eye-opening collection, showing off parts of my country that I didn’t know existed, in ways that I won’t easily forget.

• The Seagull, by Ann Cleeves (Minotaur):
During a recent interview, bestselling author Ann Cleeves told me that The Seagull is her most personal book to date. That’s because it is set in the English seaside town where she has lived for many years. But it also may be because Cleeves’ best-known and best-loved creation, Vera Stanhope, is dealing here with a case that has deeply personal roots, leading back to Detective Inspector Stanhope’s very own late father and some of his cronies. There is something of a British Columbo about Vera Stanhope. She has a sort of bumbling energy, is the furthest thing one can imagine from a fashion plate, and occasionally seems to solve crimes despite herself. Even so, Vera is no fool and there is no element of comedy—except as it is naturally found in life—about either her or the action in The Seagull. The fictional nightclub that gives this book its title looms over the story, even though it was destroyed many years before the book’s present day. It was a luxury establishment, run by the son of a Scottish mobster, and the illegal goings-on that took place there were always suspected though never proven. The themes in this story are the family ties that bind and how old secrets can eat through the heart of a community. This is Cleeves’ eighth outing for Vera Stanhope, in a book series that has received a great deal of attention, not only because of the excellent BBC-TV production based on it, but also because of Shetland, which is based on Cleeves’ newer series featuring Inspector Jimmy Perez. In both series the writing—and also the television!—is top-notch. Anne Cleeves has always been a fantastic writer. It’s good to see her getting the attention she deserves.

Noir Doesn’t Come Much Darker

By Linda L. Richards
I once heard his fellow Canadian author Owen Laukannen describe Dietrich Kalteis’ writing as being like “jazz on the page.” If you want to boil Kalteis’ work down very tightly, for me descriptions just don’t get any better than that.

Kalteis’ voice is taut, tight, and if it were any more noir, it would be too dark to see. With all of that, there is a graceful muscularity to his writing. And a sparseness that reminds one of jazz, as well.

Zero Avenue (ECW Press) is Kalteis’ fifth novel, and it is confident and mature. No uneven beats here, at all. Publishers Weekly said in its review that “if a literary prize existed for depicting the most offensive club lavatories, [Zero Avenue] would win it hands down.” And while that’s pretty much true, there is so much more here than that. Kalteis’ highest ninja skill is that he can make the reader feel deeply with a simple shrug of his super-cool shoulder. The aforementioned bathroom scene is a good example. It is vivid and classically, achingly noir, and he accomplishes it in just a few bold strokes:

A lone bulb hung from the center of the room, a dead fluorescent tube horizontal over the sink, two toilets, only one with an enclosed stall, a urinal and a plugged-up sink, soapy brown scum floating in it. Toilet paper unfurled like crime scene tape across the floor. Graffiti all over—the voice of the people.

Another example of this seemingly effortless intensity can be found in what may be the best-drawn chase scene I’ve ever read. In it, Frankie, a young punk musician running drugs to raise enough money to cut her debut EP, thinks she’s picked up a tail in the middle of doing a delivery. Her battered Karmann Ghia is running on fumes, and the rubber on its tires is so low, a gas-station attendant feels it necessary to point out the potential danger. She’s stoned and paranoid; and between evading the tail and checking in with the mad-dog gangster who is her handler, and finally (spoiler alert) making her delivery, there is enough tension here that it can be difficult to read. With all of this against her, you just know it can’t turn out well.

Passing the Italian joint, Paesano’s, the place Marty wanted to take her to dinner, night she clocked the blonde. Everything slow-cooked and homemade, mozzarella and olives shipped from the old country. Espresso done right. Cannoli to die for.

Bopping to “Fan Club” now, she licked somebody else’s tongue around her mouth, her nerves still shot. Frankie thinking she could use a chunk of bhang. Her eye on the rearview, keeping watch for the four-by-four, Serpico with the shades and beanie.

Past Pender, she stomped the brakes, some kid in a ball cap on backwards dashed from behind a parked Buick, dashing across the lane, a paper bag in his hand. She yelled at him, sounding like somebody’s mother, the kid flipping her the bird, Frankie flipping it back.

Frankie has put together a little band called Waves of Nausea, which is playing low-level gigs in 1979 Vancouver, British Columbia, near the birth of the punk rock movement. Johnny Falco runs Falco’s Nest, the fictional club just down the street from the non-fictional Smilin’ Buddha, where a lot of significant punk acts got their start. Falco is sweet on Frankie from the beginning, and wondering if she’d ever entertain the thought of going out with a mug like him, especially since we open on her at the beginning of an uncomfortable relationship with local gangster Marty Sayles.

Among other things, Marty is involved with an ingenious pot-growing operation that has seen his goons seeding pot in farmers’ fields hidden in rows of corn. After harvest, the pot is processed in an old barn Marty owns on a property he picked up along Zero Avenue.

I grew up in the area described, so I came to this novel knowing that Zero Avenue is the street that runs on the northern side of the U.S./Canada border for, well, a long ways. But the part of it I knew, and the part described in this book, runs from South Surrey all the way to Abbotsford and probably beyond: just a double ditch and a country road—no fence or guards or anything but the occasional patrol run separating two big countries that have a lot of inhabitants who like drugs of various descriptions. Obviously, a recipe for drug-related high jinks, in reality and now in fiction. While this local knowledge possibly added to my enjoyment of the book, one could come to Zero Avenue without it, as Kalteis does a good job of making the reader feel not only the where but the when.

With sex, drugs, and rock-’n-roll on the menu, crime is not far off. This rich combination pushes Zero Avenue along at a graceful burn. The book is tight and rich and as hard to pin down as smoke. If you love noir, you’ll love Zero Avenue. Simply as good as it gets.

READ MORE: “Zero Avenue: Dietrich Pulls a Fast One,” by Kevin Burton Smith (The Thrilling Detective Blog).

The Story Behind the Story: “Death Was in the Blood,” by Linda L. Richards

(Editor’s note: This 43rd entry in our “Story Behind the Story” series comes from Linda L. Richards, an author and resident of British Columbia, Canada, who also serves as the editor of January Magazine and contributes frequently to The Rap Sheet. In the essay below, she writes about Death Was in the Blood, her new, third novel in a succession of historical mysteries set in Los Angeles. It follows 2008’s Death Was the Other Woman and 2009’s Death Was in the Picture.)

I don’t remember participating in the creation of Kitty Pangborn.

I’ve talked about this before.

I was in a period of reading a great deal of classic noir fiction. More than my share. And amid all the drinking and testosterone-informed shenanigans, I began to see her there, at the edge of things. A voice of sense and sanity (a feminine one, of course) in a rough-edged world peopled by men who’d seen too much and had paid too high a cost in a war years past--one they still carried around with them, emblazoned on their souls.

Men like that, they’re good men, but broken sometimes. It can be as true now as it was then. We’re luckier now, at least some of the time. We have words for things; acronyms even. And we know that post-traumatic stress syndrome can do funny things to a soldier’s mind and heart. But during the first half of the 20th century? They didn’t have words for such problems back then. “He’s busted up inside,” someone might say. Or, “You mean that Theroux boy? He ain’t been right since he came back. There’s nothin’ wrong with him, you understand. But he ain’t been right at all.”

These men--these big-hearted yet shadowy and broken men--loom large in the work of some of my favorite wordsmiths. Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade (The Maltese Falcon, et al.) is racing from demons, I’m sure of it. We don’t really know that. Hammett never says, but one can imagine that Sam Spade’s story was influenced at least in part by Hammett’s own. Hammett had enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1918 and served in the Motor Ambulance Corps until he contracted Spanish Flu and then later tuberculosis. Hammett lost his health to the military, and it seems entirely possible he lost more than that. And certainly, the detectives he later wrote about were broken in ways the author never clearly defined, but that we could sense, all the same. Lost boys, in a way. Lost in distant lands and never to find their way back, even when they made it all the way home.

So during all of this noir reading, I began to see that it was not possible for the lost boys peopling that field of fiction to actually be accomplishing what they seemed to be accomplishing. The drinking they were managing all on their own. The occasional womanizing, sure, they were doing all right with that. But, as people, it often seemed they were so shattered, it was unlikely they could keep businesses together. Yet there it was, in tale after tale: their name on the door. Phones ringing. Clients more or less standing in line.

When they were out of the office, though--drinking, or womanizing, or even out on a case--who was looking after things then? And who was keeping it all together, just running the day-to-day business?

I don’t even remembering what wild and crazy hat I pulled Katherine “Kitty” Pangborn out of. The name, I mean. And the girl, as well. Suddenly, she was just standing there, tidy threadbare office suit, sensible shoes, and all. I know she was somewhat inspired by Spade’s capable secretary, Effie Perrine. Effie, whom you had the feeling was young and even lovely, yet whose sister-like relationship with Sam was refreshingly free of that often-all-too-tiresome frisson that can muddy up the clearest noir waters.

Although the latest Kitty Pangborn novel, Death Was in the Blood, stands alone (as all my series books have done) and doesn’t rely on readers having enjoyed the books in sequence, I think it is a darker read than those that have gone before. Kitty herself is in a darker place. No longer just happy to have found a way to keep a roof over her head during America’s Great Depression, she’s thinking about her life and about what might have been, and discovering she’s not entirely happy with the result. For me, that’s one of the things that defines Death Was in the Blood most sharply. Meeting the beautiful and privileged client Flora Woodruff, an aristocratic young woman about Kitty’s own age, forces Kitty to examine her own life and the odd turns it’s taken since her father’s suicide led her to find a job working with Los Angeles private eye Dexter J. Theroux.

* * *

A lot of the action in Death Was in the Blood takes place against preparations for the 1932 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, California. That was, in many ways, a ground-breaking Olympics. It took place at the height of the Depression and a number of countries pulled out because they simply couldn’t afford to send their teams on such a big trip. Less than half the number of participants of the 1928 Olympics in Amsterdam competed in L.A. in 1932.

That competition in Los Angeles marked the first time in history that an Olympic village was built to house the athletes. It was apparently really fantastic, with dining halls and entertainment centers and even a screening room where the athletes could watch moving pictures of their performances from the day. (And nobody had iPhones, so it was a pretty big deal.) Movie stars would drop by every night and give impromptu shows (so L.A.!), but it was all for the men. The women athletes were housed in a hotel on Wilshire Boulevard and got left out of all the fun--though, in fairness, it should be said that 1,206 men competed, compared with only 126 women.

So all of this is known absolutely: we have first-hand accounts, we have photos and even film. What we don’t know exactly is where this village was, because it was dismantled right after the Olympics concluded and, near as anyone can tell, beyond one structure that ended up--and still stands--at the police academy in Elysian Park, the rest of that trailblazing 1932 Olympic village is gone without a trace.

(Left) Author Linda L. Richards

There is agreement that the village was located in the Baldwin Hills, but it might have been in the Blair Hills, an area that’s now actually part of Culver City. Or it might have been near Crenshaw and Vernon in the View Park area and, according to the Baldwin Hills Park Web site, “One account places the village in the Crenshaw or Angeles Mesa district, in the hills to the west of Crenshaw Boulevard south of Vernon Avenue. The roads Olympiad Drive and Athenian Way in this area commemorate its history.”

From that same source:

The village comprised between 500 and more than 600 two-room dwellings and included post and telegraph offices, an amphitheater, a hospital, a fire department, and a bank. The village was built on between 250 and 331 acres that was loaned by the heirs of the estate of Lucky Baldwin. The buildings were removed after the games.

This account is pretty consistent with what I found in other sources: references to developer and stock market speculator Elias Jackson “Lucky” Baldwin, who died in 1909 but whose fortune--by the early 1930s--was still largely intact. Mentions of the Olympic village being constructed at great cost during the Depression, then mysteriously disappearing right after the games.

But there are enough things not mentioned, or merely hinted at, that if you’re of a certain disposition, your mind fills in the blanks. The construction of a whole village during the Depression--one that needed to look good, yet not be required to stand the test of any significant amount of time? That would have been a plum contract. A multi-million-dollar contract, even in the dollars of the day. One worth killing over? Well, just wait and see.

The Story Behind the Story: “The Indigo Factor,” by Linda L. Richards

(Editor’s note: This 34th entry in our “Story Behind the Story” series comes from Linda L. Richards, author of the stockbroker Madeline Carter mystery series and two novels (Death Was the Other Woman and Death Was in the Picture) starring Kitty Pangborn, the resourceful “girl Friday” to Los Angeles private eye Dexter Theroux. A resident of British Columbia, Canada, Richards is also the editor of January Magazine, an award-winning book review and author interview site. After releasing a couple of short stories for e-readers--Hitting Back and Dearborn 9-1-1--Richards this week debuts her first original e-novel, The Indigo Factor, which she describes as “Fringe meets The Sixth Sense” and “a taut and muscular thriller that takes readers behind the scenes at the CIA, deep inside a doomsday cult and beyond.” Below, she recalls how she came to write this novel and release it in electronic format, rather than print.)

Write the book that’s in your heart. It’s what I have always told people: readers, students, people who read my blog, basically anyone who will listen.

Write the book that’s in your heart.

And that’s what I’ve always done.

And then there was The Indigo Factor. A few years ago, I started hearing about indigo children, youngsters who--though they may have been diagnosed with learning disabilities--are thought to be endowed with special, perhaps supernatural traits. In my life, I’m always waiting for threes. And hearing about indigo children came to me in threes and I knew I had to act.

I have a difficult time now remembering exactly where the story that would become The Indigo Factor came from, or how the people who inhabit it grew. After a while, see, they were so much a part of me that their origins were lost in the mist of all of that. It seems to me that I blinked my eyes one day, and they were just there: Olivia, peaceful of mien but of a tortured military background; little Faun with her questionable heritage and her unnameable gifts; Royce, just doing his job, because what else is there for him to do?; and Jamison--conflicted, beautiful and, in the end, supremely compromised.

So the story began, as the stories I tell always do, with a distant thought and a feeling. That is, when I began the journey, I didn't know where it would all end or what impossible lengths it would put me through. Every aspect of the novel I researched led more deeply into another, more impossible place. And so what started as a story involving indigo children ended up looking at so much more: cults, physic hot spots, remote viewing, black helicopters. More. So much more, my heart and head swam with the story that was unfolding under my fingers. And still--still--I wrote.

When it was done, I knew it was done. I knew, also, that I could write a sequel: could see the place that this story would go. I sent the book to my agent, who fell in love with it instantly. “Linda,” she said, “you’ve written a bunch of terrific books, but this? This is the best by far.” The Indigo Children, she said, would be my breakthrough book. How could it not be? That was how good she thought it was.

Of course she tried selling it right away. Lots of editors wanted to see it, too. The very best at every house. After a while, reports started coming back. Editors loved The Indigo Factor. I have a file of beautiful notes. Editors loved the story. They loved the characters. They loved the writing. What they didn’t love: where would it fit? I understand. Sure I do. It’s a thriller, at its core. But there are vestiges of the paranormal about it, even though it is not a paranormal book. Editors of paranormal lines felt it was not paranormal enough. Straight-up thriller and mystery editors thought it danced too closely to that edge.

We came very close a couple of times with significant publishers. But for some it was too Canadian. For others, not Canadian enough. And no matter where readers fell on the Canadian thing, we’d be back to the issues of paranormal and not. Suffice it to say this was not a formulaic book and it was difficult to know exactly where it would fit.

I’ve written several novels that were critically acclaimed, and I’ve built a readership for my work, but my numbers were not--are not--significant enough for editors to take a risk. Certainly not for a book that is too Canadian and not Canadian enough, and is not completely paranormal but has too much of the paranormal about it. A book that was not an easy fit.

See, I had set out convinced that the last thing the world needed was the story of yet another damaged cop or another hard-done-by reporter. It seemed to me there were enough of those available already. Maybe more than enough. I didn’t follow a formula. I told the story that was in my heart. What was it? Mystery? Thriller? Art? I didn’t care. I don’t care now. It was a story tinged--touched?--by all the mystery we have in our world. I wanted readers to wonder, when they’d finished it, what was real and what was not. More than one reader told me afterwards that she spent time with Google siphoning the real from the not-so-much. That’s a journey I’m proud of, as well: the one that moves you from your seat.

Several editors suggested that if I made The Indigo Factor into something else--a little more of this, a little less of that--they could find it a comfortable place on their lists. More than once I sat down with the manuscript thinking I would begin that journey of taking what it appeared had become a square peg and stuffing it into a round hole. But it just stuck in my craw.

I loved these characters. I still do. And I love this story. And I’m lucky: authors in other eras would have had to either shove the book into a deep drawer to hope someone stumbled across it when they were dead and had more clout ... or take the trip at altering what they’d written in passion and turning it into something the gatekeepers would accept. For better or for worse, I didn’t have to do those things and have instead opted to have it be my first original novel to debut in electronic formats. A book, also, completely unlike anything I’ve written before. Darker, I think. More violent. And with a reality that shifts so quickly, I hope you don’t ever stay steady on your feet.

Bullet Points: The Carnaval Edition

While the annual Carnaval celebration roars into being in Brazil, complete with its body-painted queen, the rest of us--pasty-white and in no shape to go parading about thoroughfares in our all-togethers--must content ourselves with watching the 81st annual Academy Awards presentation. And maybe ordering in a pizza. And nosing around the blogosphere for crime-fiction news. To wit:

• Bill Crider brings us the sad news that novelist John Alfred “Jack” Webb (no, not the same Jack Webb who brought us Dragnet) has died at age 92. During the 1950s and ’60s, Webb wrote mysteries featuring the crime-solving pair of Father Joseph Shanley and Sammy Golden. The former was a Catholic priest in Southern California, the latter a Jewish detective-sergeant working with what was apparently the Los Angeles Police Department’s Homicide Division. Among Webb’s titles: The Big Sin (1952), The Damned Lovely (1954), The Brass Halo (1957), and One for My Dame (1961).

• Notice of another death in the crime-fiction community comes from Jiro Kimura’s The Gumshoe Site. He reports that Charles “Chuck” Crayne, “one of the founders of Bouchercon and a co-chairman (with Bruce Pelz) of the first Bouchercon, which was held during Memorial Day weekend in 1970 at the Royal Inn in Santa Monica, California,” died on February 16 of cardiac arrest in Willits, California. Crayne was 71 years old.

• Oline H. Cogdill, who for many years has written about crime and mystery fiction for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, today begins penning twice-weekly posts for the Mystery Scene magazine blog. “As I do for the Sun-Sentinel, I’ll be writing about a variety of subjects, mystery fiction, for sure, but also movies, DVDs, publishing trends, etc.,” she told subscribers to the listserv DorothyL. “The plan is to update the Mystery Scene blog each Sunday and Wednesday, though I may add a bonus or two when the mood strikes.” This is good news indeed, since that particular blog has been updated with disappointing infrequency since its inception in the summer of 2007. Even sadder has been the moribund state of the magazine’s companion blog, Brian Skupin’s Bookflings, which hasn’t offered new material since June 17 of last year.

• How can you not read a story that’s headlined “James Patterson: Evil Genius?” Picking up on a news item, blogger and fictionist Declan Burke reports that “Best-selling crime author James Patterson will release a new kind of novel next month--one that’s been collaboratively written with the crowd. Called Airborne, the upcoming novel will feature 30 chapters, each written by a different author except the first and last--those will be written by Patterson himself. With the release of this book, it appears the Web 2.0 movement of collaborative writing is about to hit the mainstream.” Is this good news? It’s hard to know, really ...

• As somebody with a longtime fondness for the works of author Alistair MacLean, once one of the world’s biggest-selling thriller writers, I am delighted to see Gravetapping’s Ben Boulden having collected five trailers for films made from MacLean’s books: The Guns of Navarone, Ice Station Zebra, Where Eagles Dare, Breakheart Pass, and Bear Island. Watch these in between Oscar-night shots of Marisa Tomei, Frank Langella, Anne Hathaway, and Josh Brolin.

• Speaking of the Oscars, celebrity Joan Rivers and her co-author, Los Angeles mystery author Jerilyn Farmer (The Flaming Luau of Death), imagine those glitzy goings-on with more crime than camaraderie in Murder at the Academy Awards.

• Devil on Two Sticks. How is that not the perfect book title?

• Linda L. Richards imagines the casting choices for a movie version of her first Kitty Pangborn mystery, Death Was the Other Woman (2008). Although I might prefer How I Met Your Mother’s Alyson Hannigan in the redheaded Kitty role, I can definitely see Russell Crowe as the besotted but still able Los Angeles private eye, Dexter J. Theroux. Now, would somebody just please make this film?

• British blogger-critic Uriah Robinson (aka Norman Price) has been posting a multi-part interview with Hawaii resident Rebecca Cantrell, author of the historical crime novel A Trace of Smoke, which is due out from Forge Books in May. Cantrell answers Robinson’s questions about her book, which is set in Berlin in 1931, here, here, and here, with more of their exchange to come. Fine stuff. UPDATE: The fourth and final installment of Robinson’s discussion with Cantrell can be read here.

• Crimespree editors and Bouchercon organizers Jon and Ruth Jordan win star treatment in the Chicago Tribune.

• The Irish Times investigates the explosion in crime fiction turned out by its homeland’s resident novelists. “There was a time when Irish writers of the criminal persuasion were rarer than root canal work on a hen,” writes Arminta Wallace. “Over the past decade, however, Irish crime fiction has emerged as a self-assured genre whose practitioners are not just selling well at home, but are also gaining recognition on the murderously competitive international crime scene.” The full story can be found here.

• After his splendid post last week about the U.S. TV shows that debuted in the fall of 1971, Saskatchewan writer Brent McKee follows up with another post that addresses questions readers have raised, and even features a bonus double-shot of theme music from Henry Mancini. Personally, I’m looking forward to McKee’s future comments about the 1972-1973 TV season, which he says will include “some rather interesting thoughts on Hec Ramsey.”

• Thinking of Hec Ramsey brings back memories of other NBC Sunday Mystery Movie segments, including Dennis Weaver’s McCloud.

• And though it took longer to write than I had expected, I’m rather pleased with my latest post at the Killer Covers blog. It covers the work of Frank Kane, an alcohol-industry promoter and the creator of New York City private eye Johnny Liddell (Grave Danger, 1954). Check it out when you find a bit of free time.