(Above) A word cloud generated from this post’s text.Today begins the historic third week of mass-seclusion here in Washington state, and I cannot say that I’m bored yet. If my work situation were more unstable, or if I lived alone, this downtime might be giving me fits. Instead, it has rewarded me with extra hours in which to write (notice how busy The Rap Sheet has been lately with posts), and some wonderfully quiet time for reading. Beyond the many DVD collections of vintage TV series I have at the ready, I’ve been sampling newer shows, among them Vienna Blood (which I found delightful), SS-GB (which I loved … until the bizarrely inconclusive final episode), Dublin Murders (which I gave up on watching halfway through, no longer interested in the redundantly troubled pair of protagonist cops), Star Trek: Picard (which got off to a rocky start but ended powerfully), and Jamestown (which stars a couple of actresses I’ve also appreciated in other productions: Sophie Rundle from Dickensian; and Niamh Walsh from The English Game).
If it hadn’t been so cold and damp in Seattle of late, I would probably have spent more time outside—maintaining the necessary social distance from my fellow humans, of course. As it is, I have managed to walk a few times around the local lake, and I’m seriously thinking (believe it or not) about doing some gardening, should predications hold true of warmer days ahead. I ought to have prepared my front and back yards better before winter clamped down, but was hampered last fall by the inconvenience of several broken bones.
For today, here are a few bits and bobs from the Web that are of likely interest to readers of crime, mystery, and thriller fiction.
• Oh no, it’s come to this! CrimeFest organizers Adrian Muller and Donna Moore have placed at the top of their Web page a note explaining that this year’s convention—originally slated to take place from June 4 to 7 in Bristol, England—has been cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, CrimeFest is in need of financial assistance. “Due to contractual obligations which have already been met,” they explain, “we need to raise emergency funds for the sole purpose of ensuring the continuity of CrimeFest, and next year’s convention, and finding new ways to connect writers and readers to the crime fiction we all love. Whatever you can spare, will make a big difference. And if it is not convenient to donate directly, sharing this plea further will assist us greatly.” Click here to make a contribution via the JustGiving crowd-funding platform. The goal is to bring in £35,000. At last check, £5,470 had been raised already.
• Headliners at this year’s CrimeFest were to have been Lynda La Plante, Laura Lippman, and Robert Goddard. Let’s hope they’re all available in 2021.• Big-selling American novelist James Patterson, who “has a long history of helping independent bookstores,” is stepping up again to support the cause. He is donating half a million bucks to help indie stores endangered by the novel coronavirus. “I can’t imagine anything more important right now, in terms of the book world, than helping indies survive,” he told the Los Angeles Times.
• Also on the disease front, Elizabeth Foxwell notes, in The Bunburyist, that a dinner ceremony during which new authors are to be inducted into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame has now been pushed back from June 2 to September 14. Among this year’s honorees is Brooklyn-born Anna Katharine Green (1846–1935), author of The Leavenworth Case (1878) and one of America’s first detective fictionists. The delayed ceremony will apparently be attended by Rebecca Crozier, Green’s great-great granddaughter.
• As an aid to all of us folks trapped at home with our fast-declining surplusages of toilet paper and run-amok coiffures, CrimeReads senior editor (and former bookseller) Molly Odintz has begun making recommendations to individual readers of what books they might tackle next. Her first advice-packed post is here, and she promises “an ongoing series.” If you’d like to know what additions the CrimeReads staff might suggest to you, shoot an e-mail request to crimereads@lithub.com. This undertaking follows the “Personalized Quarantine Book Recommendation” series already in progress at CrimeReads’ mother ship, Literary Hub.
• “To help us, and him, through the quarantine,” U.S. screenwriter/comic-book writer Damon Lindelof has begun composing an “exclusive, serialized” mystery story for venture capitalist Dave Pell’s blog, Next Draft. It’s titled “Something, Something, Something Murder,” and we’re told “chapters will update … periodically.”
• Oh, and John Connolly is now two chapters into posting a “Web-exclusive Charlie Parker novella,” “The Sisters Strange.”
• Most of us, when we think of Blake Edwards’ TV endeavors, immediately flash on Peter Gunn, his 1958-1961 private-eye drama starring Craig Stevens. A smaller percentage might recall that he also created the 1959-1960 adventure/drama Mr. Lucky. But I’m willing to wager that few people, save perhaps for those who were adults during the Kennedy administration, still remember Dante, the 1960-1961 NBC Monday-night series starring Howard Duff (the radio voice of Sam Spade) as William “Willie Dante,” an erstwhile gambler who now manages a downtown San Francisco nightclub called Dante’s Inferno. Edwards developed Dante as a recurring character—played originally by film star Dick Powell—on the 1950s CBS anthology series Four Star Playhouse. In the subsequent series Dante, says Wikipedia, Duff’s protagonist “claims to have put his past behind him,” but still keeps on his payroll longtime associates Stewart Styles (played by Alan Mowbray), serving as the club’s maître d’, and a thief-turned-bartender named Biff (Tom D’Andrea). “Every week,” wrote Michael Shonk in his 2013 Mystery*File overview of the series, “Willie would find himself caught in the middle of two or more opposing forces, usually the cops and bad guys. No one believed Willie was going straight, both the good guys and bad guys suspected him to be up to something.” What brought all of this to mind was a more recent Mystery*File post, in which editor Steve Lewis opined on the 22nd of 26 Dante episodes, “Dante in the Dark,” which guest-starred Marion Ross, the future Mrs. Cunningham on Happy Days. Sadly, that isn’t among the handful of episodes available on YouTube.
• Here’s an altogether remarkable resource for fans of vintage TV crime dramas: Uncle Earl’s Classic Television Channel. I can’t tell you who the heck Earl is, but he has amassed a trove of old-time films and small-screen delights. The site’s “Mystery, Detective and Crime Drama” features multiple episodes of series including 77 Sunset Strip, Burke’s Law, Checkmate, The New Adventures of Charlie Chan, Ellery Queen, The Fugitive, It Takes a Thief, Judd for the Defense, Richard Diamond, Private Eye, Switch, and Mike Connors’ short-lived Tightrope. Oh, expect to find Dante there, too.
• A newsletter received last week from the Web site Modcinema, which sells movies and made-for-TV flicks produced during the 1960s and ’70s, reminded me that U.S. television audiences were offered a Law and Order before the Law & Order we now recall best. I’m talking about the 1976 NBC pilot film adapted from former policewoman Dorothy Uhnak’s 1973 novel, Law and Order. As Lee Goldberg summarized it in Unsold Television Pilots: 1955-1989, that two-and-a-half-hour drama followed “three generations of an Irish American family of NYPD officers. The focal point of the envisioned series would be the Deputy Chief of Public Affairs [played by Darren McGavin], who is in constant conflict with his son [Art Hindle], a Vietnam veteran-turned-beat cop who opposes his father’s way of achieving law and order.” Also featured in the movie: Suzanne Pleshette, Keir Dullea, Jeanette Nolan, and Biff McGuire. It’s only too bad NBC didn’t turn this into a series. You can buy a copy of Law and Order here. At least for the nonce, it can also be enjoyed on YouTube.
• Looking for something else to watch during these low-activity times? Evan Lewis has posted the 1936 film Meet Nero Wolfe in his blog, Davy Crockett’s Almanack of Mystery, Adventure, and the Wild West. Based on Rex Stout’s 1934 novel, Fer-de-Lance, which introduced the characters of Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, this
movie stars Edward Arnold and Lionel Stander, with Rita Hayworth (then billed as Rita Cansino, and not even 20 years old yet) playing their client, Maria Maringola.• Here’s some good news for the many fans of that 2006-2007 UK science-fiction police procedural Life on Mars and its sequel, Ashes to Ashes: The Killing Times reports that co-creator Matthew Graham is talking up “a third and final installment of the story. Graham told fans that he’s expecting all the main stars—John Simm, Phillip Glenister and Keeley Hawes among them—for the installment, and sees it as ‘four or five episodes.’” Graham commented recently on Twitter: “We would never make another Mars unless we really had something to say and could push the envelope all over again. Finally we have something.”
• I had some misgivings about Defending Jacob, William Landay’s 2012 thriller about “the extremes to which parents might go out of love for their children.” But this hew trailer for the Apple TV+ miniseries set to premiere on April 24, reminds me how successfully Landay built up the tensions that course through his plot.
• Mike Ripley serves up his usual smörgåsbord of drollery, idiosyncratic recollections, and reading recommendations in Shots’ April “Getting Away with Murder” column. Covered are subjects ranging from Golden Age mystery writer Evadne Childe and Jacobean “revenge tragedies” to Dean Street Press’ republication of classic detective stories by Christopher Bush and forthcoming works by the likes of S.A. Cosby, Lindsey Davis, Camilla Lackberg, and Mai Jia (“who may be China’s John Le Carré”). Ripley’s column finishes with a comic sign-off appropriate for our disease-ridden present: “Stay safe, Stay Home, Stay Away from Me, The Ripster.”
• Meanwhile, Maxim Jakubowski delivers his latest “To the Max” column in Crime Time. His “Book of the Month” is Joe Ide’s Hi Five, followed by thoughtful comments on Malcolm Pryce’s The Corpse in the Garden of Perfect Brightness, Margarita Montimore’s The Rearranged Life of Oona Lockhart, and other works with shorter titles.
• It’s rather unnerving to go back and watch some of the TV programs that were popular during the mid-20th century, and see just how strange they often were. CrimeReads’ Olivia Rutigliano recently gathered together the plot descriptions from numerous Man from U.N.C.L.E episodes, and found they could be truly “bonkers.”
• Jerry House offers this primer on Paul W. Fairman, a largely forgotten author of both science-fiction and crime-fiction tales. One section that caught my eye: “Probably his best-known work was in Ellery Queen’s A Study in Terror [1966], in which Fairman anonymously wrote the crux of the novel centering on Sherlock Holmes and Jack Ripper, while ‘Ellery Queen’ wrote the framing device.”
• “J.J.,” the blogger at The Invisible Event, has just launched “a Golden Age Detection-focused podcast called In GAD We Trust. With so many people being at home,” he says, “and with so many of us seeking solace in books, I thought I’d take the opportunity to rustle up some GAD-based discussion with my fellow bloggers and enthusiasts, and record the results for your listening pleasure.” J.J.’s first guest is Kate Jackson, from Cross-Examining Crime, who talks about female sleuths. You can listen to their conversation here.
• Incidentally, I’ve added In GAD We Trust to The Rap Sheet’s right-hand-column selection of Crime/Mystery Podcasts.
• Speaking of podcasts, the new episode of Shedunnit is “all about Agatha Christie’s work as a hospital dispenser during both world wars, and how she applied what she learned there about poisons to her detective fiction,” says host Caroline Crampton. “My guest for this one was Dr Kathryn Harkup, science communicator, Agatha Christie fan, and author of A Is for Arsenic: The Poisons of Agatha Christie.”
• An intriguing item, “borrowed” from The Millions:
At JSTOR Daily, Erin Blakemore takes a look at a small publishing trend from the 1840s and 1850s that followed female murderers and gave middle-class women a brief escape from Victorian values. Literary scholar Dawn Keetley studied the “relatively unknown literary form” extensively. “It’s a genre with conventions of its own: a beautiful white heroine who murders her man, then embarks on a crime spree, ‘indulging in everything from sexual promiscuity, drinking, gambling, and dressing as a man to counterfeiting, robbery, infanticide, and serial murder.’ Dime novels weren’t a thing yet—the stories were printed in pamphlets and sold by traveling salesmen. Keetley thinks they were mainly read by middle-class women. Since the stories masqueraded as morality plays, they were seen as appropriate for women readers.”• Mystery Readers Journal is soliciting stories having to do with Italian mysteries for its next issue. The deadline is April 20. Submission specifics are available here.
• Although No Time to Die’s release has been delayed because of the coronavirus spread, director Cary Joji Fukunaga says work on that 25th James Bond movie is done, with no further changes expected. The Spy Command quotes Fukunaga as saying, “[W]e had to put our pencils down when we finished our post-production window, which was thankfully before COVID shut everything else down.”
• In this excerpt from the Slate podcast Thirst Aid Kit, Bim Adewunmi and Nichole Perkins explore “the potent trope of Unresolved Sexual Tension” as it was exemplified by the 1985-1989 comedy-cum-private investigator drama Moonlighting.
• New York book editor Gerald Howard asks, in this piece for Bookforum: “Do you find it as obvious as I do that Don DeLillo richly deserves to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature? And right away, as in this year?” Yeah, I can get behind that, as well!
• After reading reviews of two novels by Charles Williams in the blog Narrative Drive—this one of The Concrete Flamingo (aka All the Way, 1958), and this other one of The Sailcloth Shroud (1960)—it’s clear that I should be paying way more attention to his work than I have in the past.
Opines blogger Andrew Cartmel: “What a pleasure—discovering an outstanding crime novelist who looks destined to become a favourite of mine.”• The Rap Sheet’s last “Bullet Points” post included a brief mention of New York City’s famous Mysterious Bookshop confronting financial concerns amid the pandemic. Another week’s passage, however, seems to have brightened proprietor Otto Penzler’s outlook on matters somewhat. He writes in the shop’s current newsletter: “For those of you who responded to my letter last week by buying books and gift cards (and it was a surprisingly and gratifyingly large number), my heartfelt gratitude goes out to you at a magnitude that you cannot imagine. Here’s what you did: 1. My entire staff was paid in full until the end of the month; 2. Rent and all utilities are covered through the end of April; 3. Individuals from whom I bought books were paid in full; 4. February bills to major publishers were paid.” To help further, order books from The Mysterious Bookshop’s Web site, or purchase a gift card.
• Of course, it’s not solely independent bookstores in the Empire State that are suffering during our mutual hibernation period. Whichever indie you most frequently patronize (assuming there’s one left in your area at all) could surely use some of your money to keep things afloat during the short term. Buying books and especially purchasing gift cards can help. The point is, you want to make sure those retailers are still in business whenever we are able to patronize them again. We must all do our part.
• Here’s a list of Washington bookstores that continue to serve customers, through various means, while this COVID-19 crisis lasts. Search out similar lists in your own city or state. Books help us thrive; we need to make sure the shops selling them thrive in addition.
• Writing in Literary Hub, Lucy Kogler contends that because bookstores serve ideas and people, they are essential businesses—no matter what lawmakers or others might say.
• OK, I couldn’t resist finding out which fictional character I supposedly best resemble. I read about the Statistical “Which Character” Personality Quiz in Literary Hub. “To play,” explains senior editor Emily Temple, “you choose where you land on a series of spectra. The result is a ranked list of the fictional characters whose personalities most align with yours. It is weirdly accurate—and after taking the quiz, you can contribute to the research behind it by ranking the personalities of characters with whom you are familiar.” Click here to take the quiz. By the way, if you’re interested, the best match for me (78 percent!) was evidently dwarf Tyrion Lannister, from Game of Thrones. As Wikipedia observes, “Tyrion is intelligent, witty, well-read, and shares his father's skill for business and political maneuvering” Not far off the mark. Except for the dwarf part.
• Killer Covers’ salute to paperback artist Mitchell Hooks has been extended for a fortnight. Catch up with all of those posts here.
• Passover, the eight-day Jewish holiday commemorating the departure of Jews from slavery in Egypt more than 3,000 years ago, is slated to take place this year from April 8 to 16. Like most other recent events, Passover plans are likely to be cancelled. But you can still read mysteries with Passover connections.
• Molly Odintz makes a strong case here for why Passover is “by far the most noir of Jewish holidays.”
• New on The Thrilling Detective Web Site: Kevin Burton Smith’s catalogue of “The Best Anthologies of Original P.I. Stories.”
• Cara Black is interviewed in regard to her brand-new novel, the World War II-set standalone Three Hours in Paris (Soho Crime). Concurrently, Elle Marr (The Missing Sister) provides Criminal Element with a list of her five favorite Paris-set thrillers.
• In association with the release this week of Don Winslow’s new short-story collection, Broken (Morrow), U.S. federal prosecutor Bruce K. Riordan has assembled “a list of ten Winslow crime novels that you should read now. Read in sequence,” says Riordan, “they not only chart the author’s evolving vision of crime in America but also the potential for crime fiction to tell stories that capture the intricate webs of corruption, violence and deceit at the heart of the American Dream.”
• Lyndsay Faye conjectures why so many people seem to be turning to crime and mystery novels during our present quarantining.
• Finally, let me bid farewell to singer-songwriter Bill Withers, whose music filled the soundtrack of my youth, and who performed at the presidential inaugurations of both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. “The three-time Grammy Award winner, who withdrew from making music in the mid-1980s, died on Monday in Los Angeles,” according to the Associated Press. Two classic Withers songs are here.
