Steven Hill, the Seattle, Washington-born actor best remembered for playing New York County District Attorney Adam Schiff on NBC-TV’s Law & Order, and for his role as Daniel Briggs, the original team leader on CBS’ Mission: Impossible, passed away earlier today at age 94. The Los Angeles Times says,
“The cause of death was not immediately available, but his wife said he suffered from several ailments.”
Born Solomon Krakowsky, Hill was the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, his father being a furniture-store owner. After graduating from the University of Washington, and then working for a short time in the Chicago radio business, Hill moved to New York City to pursue an acting career. He found multiple opportunities on the Broadway theater circuit (at one point playing opposite Henry Fonda in a production of Mister Roberts), but by the late 1940s had begun taking TV roles. Over the years Hill appeared in everything from Suspense and Playhouse 90 to The Untouchables, Route 66, Naked City, The Fugitive, and Columbo. He also featured in big-screen films such as Legal Eagles (1986), Billy Bathgate (1991), and The Firm (1993).
You can learn more about Hill’s career from this obituary in The New York Times and this short remembrance in The Spy Command.
READ MORE: “Steven Hill Passes On,” by Terence Towles Canote
(A Shroud of Thoughts).
Showing posts with label Mission: Impossible. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mission: Impossible. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 23, 2016
Sunday, March 14, 2010
Graves Goes to His Grave
Click above to see the teasers and main title sequence from The Underground Man, originally shown on NBC-TV on May 6, 1974.
And to think, this Sunday had been going so well. Now this:
As Tom Nolan recalled in Ross Macdonald: A Biography (1999), Macdonald--whose real name was Kenneth Millar--watched some of the filming of that TV movie, which was also supposed to be the pilot for a prospective Archer series.
structural problem, and, even in cut-down form, there was too much material for the script-writer to handle.”
With all due respect, I must disagree with those naysayers. Having screened The Underground Man only recently, I think it is true to the spirit, if not always the details of Macdonald’s book. Yes, Graves’ Archer has a home among L.A.’s Venice canals, rather than an apartment out in West Los Angeles; and yes, it was probably a mistake to move the investigator’s place of business from an office on Sunset Boulevard to a bar. On the other hand, Graves did definitely look the part, and he had the combination of energy, empathy, and determination needed to fill the big gumshoes into which Macdonald had long fit his protagonist. This Paul Wendkos-directed teleflick benefited, too, from its impressive roster of guest stars: not only Dame Judith, but also Jack Klugman (two years before he appeared in Quincy, M.E.), Jim Hutton (more than a year before he began his star turn in the series Ellery Queen), Jo Ann Pflug, Vera Miles, and the then-captivating Kay Lenz as a woman in trouble (the sort of part in which she always excelled). Composer Marvin Hamlisch, who by then had put together scores for motion pictures such as The Way We Were and The Sting, gave The Underground Man a poignant, eminently hum-able score, and its main title sequence--embedded atop this post--looked for its typographical and image design to Bantam Books’ familiar 1970s line of Archer paperbacks (such as The Moving Target).
It’s a shame that NBC passed on the chance to turn The Underground Man into a series. Whatever Graves might have accomplished with that show would almost certainly have been superior to the performance of Brian Keith in Archer, a midseason replacement program for the same network (introduced in January 1975), in which Keith played Lew Archer with more tough-guy demeanor but far less magnetism. (“To all Lew Archer fans,” wrote the Times’ Cecil Smith, “I must regretfully report this ain’t him.”) During a period when the competition among TV sleuths (such as Jim Rockford and Harry Orwell) was considerable, Archer was too-basic private-eye fare. The series lasted a dismal six episodes.*
For readers who’ve never seen The Underground Man, but would like to do so, there are reasonably priced but unofficial DVD copies available on the Web, including from Modcinema.
coming season’s schedule--until CBS decided it would prefer to see Graves replace actor Steven Hill (later to star in Law & Order) as the team leader on Mission: Impossible.
Five years later, in 1973, Graves--fearing that Mission’s mission would soon be cancelled, and wanting another project to fall back on in that event--signed on to star in a second CBS pilot titled Call to Danger. According to one synopsis of the film, he portrayed “a federal agent who enlists ‘ordinary’ people to solve crimes. Headquartered in Washington, D.C. (where most of this film was shot), Graves selects his erstwhile agents by means of a computer.” In a piece for the Portland Oregonian (embedded at right--click to enlarge the images), radio and television columnist Francis Murphy wrote that Call to Danger “should be a strong contender for a regular CBS-TV series next fall.” Yet, although Mission: Impossible went off the air in March 1973, Call to Danger wasn’t called in to replace it. Graves was suddenly without a series commitment. He was therefore free to star in The Underground Man.
Not until 1988, with the revival of Mission: Impossible, did Peter Graves headline another TV series. And that show only lasted until early 1990.
* Just four months after the final episode of Archer was broadcast in March 1975, Paul Newman returned to the big screen in his second adaptation of a Ross Macdonald novel, The Drowning Pool, again starring as the renamed Lew Harper. Pool wasn’t as good as Harper, but it was still better than NBC’s Archer, much to the relief of faithful Macdonald readers like me.
READ MORE: “R.I.P., Peter Graves,” by Marty McKee (Johnny LaRue’s Crane Shot); “Peter Graves, ‘Mission Impossible’ Star, Dies at 83,” by Michael Pollak (The New York Times); “Peter Graves, R.I.P.,” by Randy Johnson (Not the Baseball Pitcher); “Peter Graves Dies at 83; Star of TV’s Mission Impossible,” by My-Thuan Tran (Los Angeles Times); “Peter Graves (1926-2010)” (Television Obscurities); “Classic Television Showbiz’s Night at the Drive-in: Killers from Space, starring Peter Graves (1954),” by Kliph Nesteroff (Classic Television Showbiz); “Peter Graves’ Unanswered Call to Danger” (The HMSS Weblog).
And to think, this Sunday had been going so well. Now this:
Actor Peter Graves was found dead Sunday at his home in Pacific Palisades, according to law enforcement sources. Graves, who starred in “Mission: Impossible,” “Airplane!” and Billy Wilder’s “Stalag 17”--apparently died of natural causes, the sources said.There seems no doubt that Graves, who was actually born Peter Aurness (the younger brother of Gunsmoke star James Arness) in 1926 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, will be most widely remembered for his role as Jim Phelps, the no-nonsense head of a contingent of secret U.S. government agents, on the long-running CBS-TV action-espionage series Mission: Impossible. But I remember him as well for playing Lew Archer, author Ross Macdonald’s compassionate Los Angeles private detective, in the 1974 NBC-TV flick The Underground Man, based on Macdonald’s 1971 novel of that same name. This was the second time Archer had been portrayed by a Hollywood actor (Paul Newman played Macdonald’s man--renamed Lew Harper--in the 1966 film Harper), but the first time he’d appeared in an original TV production.
Graves was 83, according to a biography on the Web site IMDB.com.
As Tom Nolan recalled in Ross Macdonald: A Biography (1999), Macdonald--whose real name was Kenneth Millar--watched some of the filming of that TV movie, which was also supposed to be the pilot for a prospective Archer series.
Millar approved of Graves (“a serious and very pleasant man”) as his detective; in fact, he told L.A. Times columnist Cecil Smith, he’d had a sort of premonition about the actor: “In thirty years of writing about Lew Archer, I never thought much about how he looked. Except that he was Californian, tanned, athletic. Then one night a few years ago, I saw Peter on Mission: Impossible and thought, ‘That’s Lew Archer; that’s the way he looks.’ It was really quiet eerie when I was told Peter was playing Lew, because I had nothing at all to do with the casting. Even stranger was the casting of Dame Judith [Anderson] as Mrs. Snow. All the way through the writing of the book, the image I had in mind for Mrs. Snow was Judith Anderson, who is a neighbor of ours in Santa Barbara [California]. It gives you the feeling of having had it all happen before.” Another thing Millar noted with surprise was how much he identified with his fictional character: whenever one of the actors in a scene addressed “Archer,” Millar looked up.Unlike his creator, other critics groused that the white-haired Graves had been miscast as Lewis A. Archer. Or they blamed this pilot’s failure to become a series on writer Douglas Heyes’ teleplay. Declaring the teleflick “lackluster and tedious,” Nolan notes that “The novel’s plot had been truncated and Archer’s persona fiddled with. This TV Archer lived in the past, watching reruns of forties movies, stocking his booze in a safe lined with a W.C. Fields poster, playing bland pseudo-jazz on his car’s eight-track. His ‘office’ was a café-bar run by a former cop; barkeep and Archer played a running trivia game with old songs, plays, and films. But the P.I. was with-it enough to swap slang with a seedy hippie: ‘Lay something new on me.’” Macdonald himself conceded sometime later that his novel, The Underground Man, “did present a
structural problem, and, even in cut-down form, there was too much material for the script-writer to handle.”With all due respect, I must disagree with those naysayers. Having screened The Underground Man only recently, I think it is true to the spirit, if not always the details of Macdonald’s book. Yes, Graves’ Archer has a home among L.A.’s Venice canals, rather than an apartment out in West Los Angeles; and yes, it was probably a mistake to move the investigator’s place of business from an office on Sunset Boulevard to a bar. On the other hand, Graves did definitely look the part, and he had the combination of energy, empathy, and determination needed to fill the big gumshoes into which Macdonald had long fit his protagonist. This Paul Wendkos-directed teleflick benefited, too, from its impressive roster of guest stars: not only Dame Judith, but also Jack Klugman (two years before he appeared in Quincy, M.E.), Jim Hutton (more than a year before he began his star turn in the series Ellery Queen), Jo Ann Pflug, Vera Miles, and the then-captivating Kay Lenz as a woman in trouble (the sort of part in which she always excelled). Composer Marvin Hamlisch, who by then had put together scores for motion pictures such as The Way We Were and The Sting, gave The Underground Man a poignant, eminently hum-able score, and its main title sequence--embedded atop this post--looked for its typographical and image design to Bantam Books’ familiar 1970s line of Archer paperbacks (such as The Moving Target).
It’s a shame that NBC passed on the chance to turn The Underground Man into a series. Whatever Graves might have accomplished with that show would almost certainly have been superior to the performance of Brian Keith in Archer, a midseason replacement program for the same network (introduced in January 1975), in which Keith played Lew Archer with more tough-guy demeanor but far less magnetism. (“To all Lew Archer fans,” wrote the Times’ Cecil Smith, “I must regretfully report this ain’t him.”) During a period when the competition among TV sleuths (such as Jim Rockford and Harry Orwell) was considerable, Archer was too-basic private-eye fare. The series lasted a dismal six episodes.*
For readers who’ve never seen The Underground Man, but would like to do so, there are reasonably priced but unofficial DVD copies available on the Web, including from Modcinema.
* * *
Graves, whose acting career began in earnest in the 1950s, won his first starring role in a TV series in the western Fury (1955–1960). He was later featured in the World War II-era crime drama, Court Martial (1966), playing Major Frank Whittaker of the Judge Advocate General’s (JAG) office. In 1968, Graves starred in Call to Danger, a CBS-TV adventure series pilot about “a secret government agency whose mission is to solve cases that stump other law enforcement offices.” The show looked to have a good shot at winning a slot in the 
coming season’s schedule--until CBS decided it would prefer to see Graves replace actor Steven Hill (later to star in Law & Order) as the team leader on Mission: Impossible.Five years later, in 1973, Graves--fearing that Mission’s mission would soon be cancelled, and wanting another project to fall back on in that event--signed on to star in a second CBS pilot titled Call to Danger. According to one synopsis of the film, he portrayed “a federal agent who enlists ‘ordinary’ people to solve crimes. Headquartered in Washington, D.C. (where most of this film was shot), Graves selects his erstwhile agents by means of a computer.” In a piece for the Portland Oregonian (embedded at right--click to enlarge the images), radio and television columnist Francis Murphy wrote that Call to Danger “should be a strong contender for a regular CBS-TV series next fall.” Yet, although Mission: Impossible went off the air in March 1973, Call to Danger wasn’t called in to replace it. Graves was suddenly without a series commitment. He was therefore free to star in The Underground Man.
Not until 1988, with the revival of Mission: Impossible, did Peter Graves headline another TV series. And that show only lasted until early 1990.
* Just four months after the final episode of Archer was broadcast in March 1975, Paul Newman returned to the big screen in his second adaptation of a Ross Macdonald novel, The Drowning Pool, again starring as the renamed Lew Harper. Pool wasn’t as good as Harper, but it was still better than NBC’s Archer, much to the relief of faithful Macdonald readers like me.
READ MORE: “R.I.P., Peter Graves,” by Marty McKee (Johnny LaRue’s Crane Shot); “Peter Graves, ‘Mission Impossible’ Star, Dies at 83,” by Michael Pollak (The New York Times); “Peter Graves, R.I.P.,” by Randy Johnson (Not the Baseball Pitcher); “Peter Graves Dies at 83; Star of TV’s Mission Impossible,” by My-Thuan Tran (Los Angeles Times); “Peter Graves (1926-2010)” (Television Obscurities); “Classic Television Showbiz’s Night at the Drive-in: Killers from Space, starring Peter Graves (1954),” by Kliph Nesteroff (Classic Television Showbiz); “Peter Graves’ Unanswered Call to Danger” (The HMSS Weblog).
Monday, October 19, 2009
An “Impossible” Decade
Double O Section has posted an excellent critique of Mission: Impossible--The Sixth Season, which was released on DVD earlier this year. “It’s the familiar that makes Mission: Impossible both compelling and sometimes infuriating at once,” writes blogger Tanner. “You wish they’d deviate from their formula a little more often, but then the formula itself is just so pleasant, like a favorite blanket. And despite the cast changes (I found myself missing [Leonard] Nimoy more than anyone else who had moved on in the past) and changes in villains, I still love Mission: Impossible, even as it enters its final downward spiral. If such a spiral is this much fun, then you’re doing something right, for sure.”
Saturday, August 16, 2008
Singer, Dancer, Spy
Funny how these things work, eh?
The recent news that the DVD set Mission: Impossible--The Fifth Season will reach stores in early October put me in mind of the lovely New York-born actress Lesley Ann Warren, who during that season (1970-1971) took on the series’ lead female role as Dana Lambert, replacing Barbara Bain’s Cinnamon Carter. Credited as “Lesley Warren,” she was only 24 years old at the time, and as Wikipedia reports, “was considered too inexperienced for the part.” Yet I remember Warren’s participation fondly, in a year when the series itself was undergoing some changes, its stories having more to do with combating organized crime in the States than tackling international intrigues. (The fifth season of Mission: Impossible was also when Sam Elliott joined the IMF team.)
The gaming Web site UGO has a Mission: Impossible tribute section, where it recalls that Warren
Warren made the rounds of celebrated crime dramas during the 1970s, guest starring on Columbo, Harry O, Jigsaw John, and other shows. But she is probably better recognized for several of her film roles. Warren, who originally trained as a ballet dancer and has developed an outstanding singing voice over the years, has put both to excellent use on the screen. Who could forget her remarkable, seductive performance in the 1984 Alan Rudolph film Choose Me, or her Oscar-nominated role as James Garner’s brassy, blond gangster’s moll in Victor, Victoria (1982), which included an eye-catching nightclub floor show in honor of Chicago, Illinois?
I, for one, have not forgotten. Happy birthday, Lesley Ann.
The recent news that the DVD set Mission: Impossible--The Fifth Season will reach stores in early October put me in mind of the lovely New York-born actress Lesley Ann Warren, who during that season (1970-1971) took on the series’ lead female role as Dana Lambert, replacing Barbara Bain’s Cinnamon Carter. Credited as “Lesley Warren,” she was only 24 years old at the time, and as Wikipedia reports, “was considered too inexperienced for the part.” Yet I remember Warren’s participation fondly, in a year when the series itself was undergoing some changes, its stories having more to do with combating organized crime in the States than tackling international intrigues. (The fifth season of Mission: Impossible was also when Sam Elliott joined the IMF team.)
The gaming Web site UGO has a Mission: Impossible tribute section, where it recalls that Warren
did a remarkable job of differentiating herself, most obviously by embracing the show’s penchant for disguises. Her transformation into an Asian woman in the 1970 episode “Butterfly” was astounding. While Lambert wasn’t the most versatile of the female operatives, she played the romance card very well. Of course, it also doesn't hurt that Warren was particularly outspoken about her character, publicly proclaiming that Lambert was a “now” person, meaning she was a well-versed member of the sexual revolution. Young, gorgeous and free-spirited? That’s just the way we like our spies.Anyway, all of this got me thinking about Warren, and caused me to look up her birthday. Which just happens to be today. Amazingly, she’ll be blowing out 62 candles on any cake set down before her this afternoon. I say “amazingly,” because even though I enjoy watching her now as Mary McCormack’s alcoholic mother on In Plain Sight (the first-season finale episode of which will be broadcast tomorrow night on the USA Network), I still think of Warren as a much younger woman. As Dana Lambert in Mission: Impossible. As Cathy Lange in the 1972 TV movie Assignment: Munich, which spawned the Robert Conrad series Assignment: Vienna. And as a convicted thief’s daughter in one episode of The Mod Squad.
Warren made the rounds of celebrated crime dramas during the 1970s, guest starring on Columbo, Harry O, Jigsaw John, and other shows. But she is probably better recognized for several of her film roles. Warren, who originally trained as a ballet dancer and has developed an outstanding singing voice over the years, has put both to excellent use on the screen. Who could forget her remarkable, seductive performance in the 1984 Alan Rudolph film Choose Me, or her Oscar-nominated role as James Garner’s brassy, blond gangster’s moll in Victor, Victoria (1982), which included an eye-catching nightclub floor show in honor of Chicago, Illinois?
I, for one, have not forgotten. Happy birthday, Lesley Ann.
Wednesday, July 02, 2008
Bullet Points: Back from the Past Edition
In case you haven’t noticed, my participation on this page has been a bit lighter than normal over these last two months. Thank goodness for The Rap Sheet’s other contributors, especially Ali Karim, Linda L. Richards, and June’s guest blogger, Patrick Lennon (Steel Witches), who all took up the slack. Meanwhile, I was off finishing work on a photographic history of San Francisco, which should be out sometime before Christmas (I think). Thanks to that project, I’ve been pretty much living in the past since January, and especially since I began my final push toward the finish line in late May. I barely had time enough to lift my nose from the computer screen, much less read as prodigiously as I would like, or keep up with current affairs. (Had the media not repeated its coverage of escalating gas prices, as well as John “100 Years War” McCain’s floundering campaign and bewildering inconsistencies, I might have been in the dark about all of that until now.) Fortunately, I have moved into the proofing stage on 
this book and haven’t yet begun composing its companion volume about Seattle. So I have time in between to catch up with friends, housework, and blogging.
A few crime-related things worth noting recently:
• The new Mystery Scene magazine just dropped through my mail slot. It offers plenty of distractions, including Kevin Burton Smith’s interview with 70-year-old writer Lawrence Block (Hit and Run); Jon L. Breen’s retrospective on the work of novelist (not politician) Thomas B. Dewey, who came up with one of the all-time best titles for a private eye novel, The Girl with the Sweet Plump Knees (1963); a catching-up piece on John R. Maxim (Bannerman’s Ghosts); and Ron Miller’s review of two UK series making their way back to America’s PBS-TV this month: Inspector Lewis and Foyle’s War. Oh, and elsewhere in the issue, novelist James O. Born interviews his “inspiration,” cop-turned-author Joseph Wambaugh. Great bathroom reading, to be sure.
• ThugLit is back, this time with added ... er, punch. Offerings from the June-July edition include short stories by Keith Gilman (“Pay to Pray”), L.V. Rautenbaumgrabner (“The Baby-Smooth Skin of the Bank Manager and His Mistress”), Kim Cushman (“Simeon”), and Andy Turner (“Food in Search of a Country Song”). The issue’s full contents can be found here.
• The latest issue of Genre Flash, focusing on new crime novels and true-crime books being released in Australia, has just been released. (Hat tip to Crime Down Under.)
• Guest blogger and second-novelist Michelle Gagnon (Bone Yard) writes in the BookBitchBlog about the unexpected value of e-book readers. “I quickly became hooked,” she explains. “I didn’t expect to--I’m one of those people who wax eloquent over the feel of a book in my hands, the whisper of pages turning, blah blah blah ... But with a few months of intensive travel facing me as I braced for my next book tour, I decided to download some books. I was only going to use it for travel, I was still in control. I swear, I could stop any time I wanted. After taking it on a vacation to Mexico, I was hooked. I read a book a day, and never had to deliberate over the weight in my suitcase, or whether or not I should shed paperbacks en route like some strange molting creature. What I discovered is that this format suited my reading habits perfectly.” Read her whole post here.
• Kerrie Smith, proprietress of the Mysteries in Paradise blog, is the latest host of that traveling extravaganza known as the Carnival of the Criminal Minds. She takes an unconventional approach, noting some of her favorite genre reads (from the last three years!), the longlist of nominees for the 2008 Ned Kelly Awards, and a rather short list of Australian crime-fiction-related blogs. The Carnival’s next stop: Damien Gray’s Crime Down Under at the start of August. (So, when did this progressive blog feature go from being a fortnightly offering to a monthly one?)
• Shamus Award nominee Daniel Judson (The Darkest Place, The Water’s Edge) is guest blogging this week at St. Martin’s Minotaur’s Moments in Crime site. You’ll find his contributions here.
• Timed to the release of his new thriller, Deadline, Simon Kernick is July’s Author of the Month in CrimeSquad. Over the course of a short interview, he talks about chairing the 2008 Harrogate Crime Writing Festival, the boost he received from British TV co-hosts Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan (who chose his last novel, Relentless, as one of their summer reads for 2007), and his “favorite plot twist of all time,” from Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (“To come up with a twist like that in 1926, when that kind of literary sleight of hand was still in its infancy, was sheer genius.”)
• Although Roger Ackroyd doesn’t appear on Brian Skupin’s list of “five of the best mind-blowers ever written,” he does feature another Agatha Christie tale. “What’s a mind-blower?” Skupin muses in his introduction. “You might think it’s a surprise ending, but not necessarily. With your typical surprise ending, if you know in advance it’s going to be a surprise, then you can usually figure out what the surprise is going to be. Although some of the 5 short stories below do have surprises, knowing that won’t help you. And a couple of them don’t exactly have a surprise ending so much as an upsetting of all your expectations,
leaving you flailing your arms with nothing to hold on to at the end.” You’ll find his five selections here.
• If ever there was a book jacket that screamed “summer reading pleasures,” it’s the one on the right. Too bad, then, that Linda Gerber’s Death by Bikini is a young adult novel.
• Actor Jeff Goldblum, who I so enjoyed in the too-short-lived NBC-TV series Raines, has reportedly been signed to replace Chris Noth on Law & Order: Criminal Intent. Adding to the eccentric appeal of Vincent D’Onofrio, Goldblum should make L&O: CI even more watchable, beginning in the fall.
• In other TV news: The Season 5 DVD set of Mission: Impossible--the year that both Sam Elliott and the lovely Lesley Ann Warren appeared on the show--is set to be released on October 7. A week later, stores should have in hand the initial season of Don Johnson’s series Nash Bridges. Meanwhile, Sharon Gless--former Cagney & Lacey star, and returning to small screens in next week’s season premiere of the USA Network’s spy spoof, Burn Notice--is interviewed by TV Squad.
• Since I’ve been writing about old San Francisco, it should come as no surprise that I was drawn to Anthony Flacco’s second novel, The Hidden Man, which happens to be set in that same city in 1915. Again featuring Randall Blackburn and his two adopted children (all introduced in 2007’s The Last Nightingale), the story this time is backdropped by San Francisco’s grandiose Panama-Pacific International Exposition. Flacco talks more about his tale in an interview with Poe’s Deadly Daughters. I found his explanation of why he’d given one of his characters Alzheimer’s disease to be of special interest. The full exchange can be found here.
• A (very) brief history of The Shadow, popularized by Walter Gibson in the 1930s and ’40s. (Hat tip to Bill Crider.)
• Author Jason Starr reports that his 2000 novel, Fake I.D.--previously published only in the UK--will be made available next year in Hard Case Crime paperback form.
• Finally, Salon movie critic Andrew O’Hehir admits he was “engrossed” by the French thriller Ne le dis à personne, adapted from Harlan Coben’s Tell No One (2001), and finally being released across the United States this month. Read his review here. And you can watch a brief trailer by clicking here.
this book and haven’t yet begun composing its companion volume about Seattle. So I have time in between to catch up with friends, housework, and blogging.A few crime-related things worth noting recently:
• The new Mystery Scene magazine just dropped through my mail slot. It offers plenty of distractions, including Kevin Burton Smith’s interview with 70-year-old writer Lawrence Block (Hit and Run); Jon L. Breen’s retrospective on the work of novelist (not politician) Thomas B. Dewey, who came up with one of the all-time best titles for a private eye novel, The Girl with the Sweet Plump Knees (1963); a catching-up piece on John R. Maxim (Bannerman’s Ghosts); and Ron Miller’s review of two UK series making their way back to America’s PBS-TV this month: Inspector Lewis and Foyle’s War. Oh, and elsewhere in the issue, novelist James O. Born interviews his “inspiration,” cop-turned-author Joseph Wambaugh. Great bathroom reading, to be sure.
• ThugLit is back, this time with added ... er, punch. Offerings from the June-July edition include short stories by Keith Gilman (“Pay to Pray”), L.V. Rautenbaumgrabner (“The Baby-Smooth Skin of the Bank Manager and His Mistress”), Kim Cushman (“Simeon”), and Andy Turner (“Food in Search of a Country Song”). The issue’s full contents can be found here.
• The latest issue of Genre Flash, focusing on new crime novels and true-crime books being released in Australia, has just been released. (Hat tip to Crime Down Under.)
• Guest blogger and second-novelist Michelle Gagnon (Bone Yard) writes in the BookBitchBlog about the unexpected value of e-book readers. “I quickly became hooked,” she explains. “I didn’t expect to--I’m one of those people who wax eloquent over the feel of a book in my hands, the whisper of pages turning, blah blah blah ... But with a few months of intensive travel facing me as I braced for my next book tour, I decided to download some books. I was only going to use it for travel, I was still in control. I swear, I could stop any time I wanted. After taking it on a vacation to Mexico, I was hooked. I read a book a day, and never had to deliberate over the weight in my suitcase, or whether or not I should shed paperbacks en route like some strange molting creature. What I discovered is that this format suited my reading habits perfectly.” Read her whole post here.
• Kerrie Smith, proprietress of the Mysteries in Paradise blog, is the latest host of that traveling extravaganza known as the Carnival of the Criminal Minds. She takes an unconventional approach, noting some of her favorite genre reads (from the last three years!), the longlist of nominees for the 2008 Ned Kelly Awards, and a rather short list of Australian crime-fiction-related blogs. The Carnival’s next stop: Damien Gray’s Crime Down Under at the start of August. (So, when did this progressive blog feature go from being a fortnightly offering to a monthly one?)
• Shamus Award nominee Daniel Judson (The Darkest Place, The Water’s Edge) is guest blogging this week at St. Martin’s Minotaur’s Moments in Crime site. You’ll find his contributions here.
• Timed to the release of his new thriller, Deadline, Simon Kernick is July’s Author of the Month in CrimeSquad. Over the course of a short interview, he talks about chairing the 2008 Harrogate Crime Writing Festival, the boost he received from British TV co-hosts Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan (who chose his last novel, Relentless, as one of their summer reads for 2007), and his “favorite plot twist of all time,” from Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (“To come up with a twist like that in 1926, when that kind of literary sleight of hand was still in its infancy, was sheer genius.”)
• Although Roger Ackroyd doesn’t appear on Brian Skupin’s list of “five of the best mind-blowers ever written,” he does feature another Agatha Christie tale. “What’s a mind-blower?” Skupin muses in his introduction. “You might think it’s a surprise ending, but not necessarily. With your typical surprise ending, if you know in advance it’s going to be a surprise, then you can usually figure out what the surprise is going to be. Although some of the 5 short stories below do have surprises, knowing that won’t help you. And a couple of them don’t exactly have a surprise ending so much as an upsetting of all your expectations,
leaving you flailing your arms with nothing to hold on to at the end.” You’ll find his five selections here.• If ever there was a book jacket that screamed “summer reading pleasures,” it’s the one on the right. Too bad, then, that Linda Gerber’s Death by Bikini is a young adult novel.
• Actor Jeff Goldblum, who I so enjoyed in the too-short-lived NBC-TV series Raines, has reportedly been signed to replace Chris Noth on Law & Order: Criminal Intent. Adding to the eccentric appeal of Vincent D’Onofrio, Goldblum should make L&O: CI even more watchable, beginning in the fall.
• In other TV news: The Season 5 DVD set of Mission: Impossible--the year that both Sam Elliott and the lovely Lesley Ann Warren appeared on the show--is set to be released on October 7. A week later, stores should have in hand the initial season of Don Johnson’s series Nash Bridges. Meanwhile, Sharon Gless--former Cagney & Lacey star, and returning to small screens in next week’s season premiere of the USA Network’s spy spoof, Burn Notice--is interviewed by TV Squad.
• Since I’ve been writing about old San Francisco, it should come as no surprise that I was drawn to Anthony Flacco’s second novel, The Hidden Man, which happens to be set in that same city in 1915. Again featuring Randall Blackburn and his two adopted children (all introduced in 2007’s The Last Nightingale), the story this time is backdropped by San Francisco’s grandiose Panama-Pacific International Exposition. Flacco talks more about his tale in an interview with Poe’s Deadly Daughters. I found his explanation of why he’d given one of his characters Alzheimer’s disease to be of special interest. The full exchange can be found here.
• A (very) brief history of The Shadow, popularized by Walter Gibson in the 1930s and ’40s. (Hat tip to Bill Crider.)
• Author Jason Starr reports that his 2000 novel, Fake I.D.--previously published only in the UK--will be made available next year in Hard Case Crime paperback form.
• Finally, Salon movie critic Andrew O’Hehir admits he was “engrossed” by the French thriller Ne le dis à personne, adapted from Harlan Coben’s Tell No One (2001), and finally being released across the United States this month. Read his review here. And you can watch a brief trailer by clicking here.
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