A Basketful of Oddments

• In late August, Rap Sheet contributor Steven Nester wrote a review of the “forgotten” 1999 neo-noir novel East of A, Russell Atwood’s first of two mysteries starring New York City private eye Payton Sherwood. (Its sequel was 2009’s Losers Live Longer.) Then just last week, I received an e-note from Atwood himself, saying, “I have a new novel out, not a Payton Sherwood mystery but a haunted house novel with a difference.” Titled Apartment Five Is Alive, the book was released in late September. Atwood adds: “Currently, I am a bookshop owner in my hometown of Westfield, Massachusetts, and I wrote this novel specifically to save my bookstore from closing, so I hope you can see your way to promoting it.” His business, it turns out, is Blue Umbrella Books, in downtown Westfield, and as this story for Western Mass News makes clear, it has been hurt partly by “a combination of online book sales, Audibles, and digital books.” This year’s COVID-19 pandemic has done further damage to Blue Umbrella’s prospects. Atwood created a GoFundMe page last December, but he’s apparently not yet achieved his funding goal of $10,000. With Halloween on the horizon, it’s certainly the right time to think about buying a haunted house tale. If your purchase can also improve the chances that an independent bookstore can keep its lights on, so much the better. To learn more about Apartment Five Is Alive, visit its Amazon page. Then scroll down to a video of Atwood reading his new novel’s opening chapter.

• Despite it being only late October, Publishers Weekly is already out with its “best books of 2020” list. Included are a dozen picks from the mystery/thriller stacks, among them Rachel Howzell Hall’s And Now She’s Gone, Matthew Carr’s Black Sun Rising, Stuart Turton’s The Devil and the Dark Water, Karen Dionne’s The Wicked Sister, and David Heska Wanbli Weiden’s Winter Counts.

• From In Reference to Murder: The finalists for the An Post Irish Book Awards were announced this week. Readers and fans will be able to vote online for their favorites through November 16, with the category winners to be announced in a virtual awards ceremony on November 25th. Those vying for Best Crime Fiction [are] The Nothing Man by Catherine Ryan Howard; The Cutting Place by Jane Casey; Our Little Cruelties by Liz Nugent; After the Silence by Louise O'Neill; The Guest List by Lucy Foley; and Fifty Fifty by Steve Cavanagh.” Click here to choose your favorite from among those.

• Deadline reports that The Son, Norwegian writer Jo Nesbø’s 2014 standalone vengeance thriller, The Son, is being adapted as a TV series for HBO. Jake Gyllenhaal (The Sisters Brothers, Velvet Buzzsaw) has been signed to star in the production.

• Meanwhile, actor Bertie Carvel (Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell) will take the lead in a six-episode UK TV series based on P.D. James’ stories about UK police detective Adam Dalgliesh. The Killing Times says this show “starts in 1970s England and follows Dalgliesh’s career to present day as he solves unusual murders and reveals buried secrets. Each murder mystery will offer its own unique setting and extraordinary cast. The six episodes will comprise three two-part stories, all of which are based on three of the Dalgiesh novels. The novels being adapted for the first season are Shroud for a Nightingale, The Black Tower, and A Taste for Death.” This new Dalgliesh (not to be confused with previous ITV adaptations starring Roy Marsden and Martin Shaw) is expected to air sometime in 2021.

• And this is more ammunition for critics who say there are no new ideas on television these days. Blogger B.V. Lawson says that “NBC has put in development Always Wright, a drama from For Life executive producer Sonay Hoffman and Sony Pictures TV. Written by Hoffman, Always Wright is set in Los Angeles and revolves around a young, wealthy, and jet-setting African-American couple who solve mysteries, run their own successful empires, and are completely head-over-heels in love with each other.” That sounds suspiciously similar to the premise of that 1979-1984 ABC series Hart to Hart?

• What a cock-up! Last week, the small bookshop where I help out had to send back its copies of John Grisham’s latest novel, A Time for Mercy. Shelf Awareness explains why:

At least some copies of A Time for Mercy by John Grisham contain printing errors so extensive that Doubleday has recalled copies and is replacing them. The book’s pub date was last Tuesday, October 13.

The publisher commented: “Doubleday has discovered some defective copies in the first printing of John Grisham’s A Time for Mercy. We are currently working with our accounts to replace inventory, and have already begun shipping out corrected copies."

One bookseller who is receiving replacement copies tomorrow described the printing errors as including “pages in the wrong order and some repeated with chapter numbers following themselves.” The books were printed in the U.S.

• Finally, we bid a sad good-bye to English novelist Jill Paton Walsh, who died on October 18. Walsh was likely best known to Rap Sheet readers for having completed Dorothy L. Sayers’ previously unfinished Lord Peter Wimsey/Harriet Vane murder mystery, Thrones, Dominations (1998), and then going on to pen three Wimsey continuation novels, including The Last Scholar, which was shortlisted for the Crime Writers’ Association’s Endeavour Historical Dagger award in 2014. Walsh, who also wrote children’s books, was 83 years old. Martin Edwards offers a fond remembrance of her here.

The Book You Have to Read: “East of A,” by Russell Atwood

(Editor’s note: This is the 165th installment in The Rap Sheet’s continuing series about great but forgotten books.)

By Steven Nester
It wouldn’t be a stretch to mistake private eye Payton Sherwood for a doormat in some Raymond Chandler novel, at least as we observe him at the beginning of Russell Atwood’s neo-noir, East of A (1999). Having returned to New York City after losing a child-custody suit upstate, Sherwood is nearly destitute, totally debt-ridden, and pining for a lost love. When he attempts to rescue a damsel in distress in his East Village neighborhood, her attackers give him a thorough beating. To add insult to injury, the elfin victim steals his Rolex before escaping into the night.

Lucky for readers that Sherwood’s sense of humor wasn’t taken as well. With few prospects and feeling like “a million bucks. In small, crumpled bills,” he decides to hire himself to recover that wristwatch—and perhaps also his dignity. One would think he’d had enough (even getting tossed in front of a speeding subway train later on can’t dissuade him), but like a dedicated P.I. with time on his hands and an insistent curiosity, Sherwood wants to find out what it is the young street girl has taken that three burly thugs so violently wish to retrieve. Sherwood returns to the crime scene the next day, and the payback begins immediately.

A telephone pager found in the gutter reveals a trove of information. The resourceful Sherwood discovers it belongs to Gloria “Glo” Manlow, a homeless, 16-year-old runaway, whom Sherwood learns is alleged to have stolen a small fortune in designer dope from a nightclub promoter. In the meantime, the chase is on as Sherwood works his way through names and telephone numbers, hoping to find her.

As the gumshoe begins his investigation, he lures two colorfully dressed club kids named Seth and Droopy into the daylight with the promise of a duffel belonging to Glo. Sherwood pumps the self-absorbed duo for information, and through them begins to make contact with promoters, activists, artists, hipsters, the homeless and others on the skids—all the extreme individuals who give Manhattan’s East Village, and this book, its color and edgy bonhomie.

Sherwood finally catches up to the elusive Glo. She turns out to be a world-weary Holly Golightly with spiky hair, tons of attitude and a selfish nonchalance, whose “nothings turn out to be other people’s somethings”—as is made clear by the escalating body count among people she knows, the fresh corpses including those of her abusive ex-boyfriend and a disgruntled former employee of a downtown rave club called the Hellhole. “Big as the city is,” Seth presciently opines at one point, “its strands converge like a spider’s web,” and the Hellhole is the place where the spider lives in this tale.

The goons who assaulted Glo are bouncers at the club, and Seth and Droopy are part of that establishment’s louche scenery and drugs-fueled vibrancy. The place is owned by a promoter named Ellis Dee, and it’s apparently his dope that was taken. The only problem is that Glo firmly denies committing the theft, and no one but Sherwood is willing to buy her story. Sherwood soon learns that when the going gets tough, even the tough get their butts kicked, as when he and Glo watch both one of her friends and one of her attackers being pushed from a window several stories too high for their health.

It’s not necessary for Sherwood to subject himself to the threat of such violence. After he gets his watch back (albeit broken), he has no further stake in this case. In addition, his self-indulgent curiosity is careening him towards poverty. Repeated entreaties from his former boss to provide security at an upcoming wedding fall on deaf ears, revealing that Sherwood’s idea of distracting busy-work is quite busy indeed. He has no interest, either, in easily available but tedious divorce-related investigations. Instead, Sherwood continues to pursue Glo’s case, gladly willing to “walk barefoot in murder”—which he encounters up to the very last page of this book.

It’s mostly the bad guys who perish in East of A. But it takes the death of an innocent—a squatter and recovering junky named Jimmy, who makes his home in a vacant lot where he tends a vegetable garden—to finally provide the pieces essential to solving this yarn’s puzzles. East of A (which led to a 2009 sequel, Atwood’s Losers Live Longer), is a noir with a cheerful yet world-weary tone and an arty renegade zeitgeist (it takes place in New York’s East Village, after all). Don’t let those elements fool you, though: Into Jimmy’s garden paradise may slither serpents, freighting the plot circumstances with universal meaning, which a skillful writer (Atwood was once a managing editor of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine) can hide in plain sight.

The Book You Have to Read: “Freak,” by Michael Collins

(Editor’s note: This is the 68th installment of our ongoing Friday blog series highlighting great but forgotten books. Making today’s selection is Russell Atwood, a former managing editor of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and the author of two novels featuring New York City private eye Payton Sherwood: East of A (1999) and Losers Live Longer, the latter of which was released just recently by Hard Case Crime and features a fabulous cover by Robert McGinnis.)

The best part of this assignment was that I got to re-read one of my favorite novels of all time. And I don’t just mean “mystery” novels--though Freak is that, full of straightforward detective work, intriguing clues, and several corpses--but one of my favorite novels, period. I had a distinct memory of reading this book for this first time and being blown away by its ending. It completely changed my ideas of what a mystery novel could accomplish, because its final twist has nothing to do with crime and criminals, but instead the way we live our lives in the modern world.

Often, when re-exploring a novel that has had an impact on us years ago, we find the experience a bit of a letdown, perhaps because we’ve already assimilated the knowledge it provided and so it’s not quite as relevant the second time around. I half-expected, half-feared, this would be the case with 1983’s Freak. But no way: all the original thrills were in perfect working order and on top of that, new hidden treasures were discovered. Possibly this is because I’m now closer to the age of the narrator and main protagonist, Dan Fortune, so that what he’s thinking and feeling is no longer an abstract concept, but vital news from the front.

A few words about private eye Dan Fortune then. He began his life as Dan Fortunowski. His policeman father deserted his wife when Dan was still a young boy, leaving her to raise their son alone. As a result, Dan grew up a juvenile delinquent, committing petty crimes, which eventually would’ve developed into bigger, more serious crimes if not for a life-defining moment: he lost his left arm in an accident at age 17, while he and some of his friends were looting the hold of a docked freighter. The experience changed Dan forever, as illustrated by this quote from Freak:

[A] one-armed man learns patience, does most things in two steps not one. It’s made me an unhurried man, careful if not always cautious. With two arms I’d be running all the time, but I don’t have two arms so I walk.

Or I sit and think.

Dan decided to go straight. He served briefly as a merchant marine, but eventually returned to his old stomping grounds of New York City and his old neighborhood, Chelsea. There he set himself up as a private investigator in his own one-man agency, a profession he went on to practice for more than three decades, even after he moved his operation to Southern California.

I don’t know precisely how the author--whose real name was Dennis Lynds (“Michael Collins” was just one of many pseudonyms he employed over his career)--came up with this protagonist, but I do know that Fortune has partial origins in an earlier character Lynds created, a man called Slot Machine Kelly. Kelly began as a pastiche of the hard-boiled private eye, his biggest connection to Fortune being that each had only one arm. But from that broader character developed a very specific person.

Dan Fortune feels real. This is due in large part to his handicap. But while the single arm may have been a gimmick with Slot Machine, it makes Fortune more human, closer to being one of us. He is tough, but also vulnerable. And when he feels fear, we know it isn’t out of cowardice, but because he’s a realist, aware of practical matters. Hell, Fortune’s only got one arm, so he doesn’t even consider taking on two guys at once without some kind of edge in his favor. It serves to heighten all the perils he--and we, the readers--face. But at the same time, the handicap doesn’t define him. His debilitating accident happened so far in the past that he’s almost unconscious of the loss. Only when Fortune meets a new client or interrogates a witness face-to-face for the first time does he become aware of other people’s reactions to his empty sleeve. At times throughout Lynds’ long-running series, Fortune even uses his handicap to his advantage, styling the “story” about how he lost his limb to get the maximum response from whoever he’s questioning. (For instance, if he is seeking information from a war vet, he’ll let the man assume that he lost his arm in combat.) Essentially, Dan Fortune takes a minus and turns it into a plus, a tool of his profession.

The handicap also forces Lynds’ protagonist to rely more on his brains and compassion than on brute strength. “[M]uscles are a lost hope for a one-armed man anyway,” he says. “For any man, really. There is always someone bigger, stronger, faster, or meaner. That’s why weapons were invented.”

Now back to the meat of this novel. One of the biggest mysteries in Freak is the title itself. Why is the book called Freak? It is not set amid a carnival sideshow or a crazy art community; instead, the case involves the president of a computer software firm hiring Dan Fortune to find his missing son and the son’s new bride, who cleaned out their bank accounts and sold the house the father gave them as a wedding present, and then left the small upscale New Jersey town they had settled in. And gone where? That’s the job: just locate the son, nothing else! But Fortune is more intrigued by why the couple has run off, and the only clue to this seems to be a memo pad on which the missing wife had written over and over again the single word: freak. It’s not until the final chapter that this mystery--and the book’s title--is explained, and it hits you like a kick in the stomach. As twists go, it is not what most readers of detective novels will be prepared for, not what we’ve come to expect from a work of mystery fiction. It is a climax that resonates back through the entire book.

One of the hidden treasures I discovered upon my recent re-reading of Freak is the following story, which Dan relates during pillow-talk with his lady friend:

“I knew a man who played in a regular poker game and lost most of the time. Not much, but a little almost every time. He began to feel like a fool playing regularly and losing most of the time. He wondered if he was a pigeon, a sucker. He talked of quitting. But he loved the game, enjoyed it almost more than anything. Then he found an answer. He decided that he simply didn’t take the game as seriously as two of the players. He wasn’t as disciplined as a third. That meant he would always be the fourth best player in the game no matter how well he played. He would always be, over the year, among the losers, if the smallest loser. When he worked that out he was happy. It gave him the justification he needed to lose and still go on playing. He knew why he lost, he knew the truth, therefore he wasn’t a sucker. As long as he knew, understood, it didn’t matter if he won or lost.”

I can’t help but wonder if Dennis Lynds was talking about himself--although, by all accounts, he was an excellent poker player--because here I am recommending what I consider to be his greatest novel, yet you’ll have to seek out a copy of this out-of-print book in order to discover whether I’m just blowing smoke. I believe Lynds acknowledged what he, as a writer and as a human being, was facing--obscurity--and yet he still played on.

I only had one chance to meet author Lynds, who died in 2005. I was fortunate enough to share a book-signing table with him at a Bouchercon, and so I got to tell him how much the Dan Fortune series meant to me. At that time he inscribed a copy of his novel Chasing Eights (1990) with the words, “To Russell, Welcome to the game.” In light of the above passage, those words now strike me as slightly ominous. But they also make me feel hopeful and a little proud that he saw in me a kindred spirit: another loser who nonetheless still enjoys playing the game.

READ MORE: “Michael Collins: A Score’s Worth of P.I. Dan Fortune,” by Ed Lynskey (Mystery*File).

Charles in Charge

This week brings the official release of Russell Atwood’s new novel, Losers Live Longer, the second installment of his series featuring New York City private eye Payton Sherwood--and his first book to be published by Hard Case Crime (HCC). Here’s the back-cover description of Atwood’s plot:

The death of legendary private eye George Rowell looked like an accident--but searching for the truth behind it will put down-and-out East Village detective Payton Sherwood on the corpse-littered trail of a runaway investment scam artist, a drug-addicted reality TV star--and the bewitching beauty whose appearance set it all in motion ...

Atwood’s story is brimming with eccentric Manhattan color and the traditional pleasures of a private-eye yarn (lust, lack of trust, and leads gone bust). But what’s also interesting about this book is its horizontally oriented cover, boasting an illustration by that famous paperback artist Robert McGinnis. As Hard Case editor Charles Ardai (shown above) explains, “Horizontal covers were never really popular. They’re a quirky aberration, and are unlikely ever to catch on. But I happen to like them.” I was curious to know more about the front of Losers Live Longer. So I prevailed upon Ardai’s generosity to interview him on the subjects of paperback design, how he works with cover artists old and new, the origins of his popular paperback imprint, how idiosyncratic American tastes affect its jackets, and the future of both HCC and its newer sister line, The Adventures of Gabriel Hunt. You can enjoy the results of our discussion today in The Rap Sheet’s spin-off blog, Killer Covers.