The Robust Rise of the “Regionals”

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

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

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

Again, click here to find that whole CrimeReads piece.

Bullet Points: Broad Scope Edition

• Sad news, indeed. The Bookseller reports that Marcel Berlins, the French-born lawyer and law professor who reviewed crime fiction for The Times of London for 37 years, died on July 31 from a brain hemorrhage. He was 77 years old. “Berlins started his career at the Times as a legal correspondent in 1971,” The Bookseller explains. “During his decade covering law, Berlins also wrote his first books, including Caught in the Act with Geoffrey Wansell (Penguin, 1974), a study of young offenders. His weekly legal column later moved to the Guardian.” The Rap Sheet’s Ali Karim says Berlins’ book critiques were “always insightful. … He was one of the greatest London critics, providing such elegance in his literary commentary.” And fellow critic Barry Forshaw offered this encomium in Crime Time:

I don’t have to talk here about Marcel being the doyen of British crime fiction critics (though he was French), writing for The Times for many years—all the many obits will talk about that. What I will miss most was a friend of many years: wry, alert to all the arts and always immensely knowledgeable. … I’ll also miss those phone calls when we’d both received proof copies from a publisher—he’d usually discover new talents ahead of me, and was the perfect early warning system: ‘Have you read X?’, he’d enthuse. ‘He/she is terrific!’ (‘Terrific’ was a favourite Marcel adjective.)

But finally, I can’t avoid saying what everyone who knew
him will say—however much of a cliché it is. The most distinguished of writers on crime fiction will be missed. Much missed, both for his personality and his championing of so many crime writers.

The City University of London, where Berlins had once been a Media Law lecturer, has posted this additional tribute.

• Also gone is Australian-born composer Barrington Pheloung, who, observes London’s Classic FM Web site, was “best known for his dark, hypnotic music for Inspector Morse, for which he was nominated for Best Original Television Music at the 1992 British Academy Television Awards. He also composed the themes for the sequel Lewis, and the prequel Endeavour.” (Listen to the Morse theme here.) The BBC recalls that Pheloung was “born in Manly, New South Wales, in 1954, … started playing the guitar at the age of five and moved to London in his teens to study at the Royal College of Music.” He was just 65 years old when he passed away yesterday in Australia.

• I missed mentioning earlier this week that the Australian Crime Writers Association has promulgated its longlists of contenders for three different 2019 Ned Kelly Awards. Vying in the Best Fiction category are The Rip, by Mark Brandi; Kill Shot, by Garry Disher; Gone by Midnight, by Candice Fox; The Spotted Dog, by Kerry Greenwood; Scrublands, by Chris Hammer; The Lost Man, by Jane Harper; The Other Wife, by Michael Robotham; Preservation, by Jock Serong; Under Your Wings, by Tiffany Tsao; and Live and Let Fry, by Sue Williams. Click here to see all three of the longlists.

• Meanwhile, London’s Goldsboro Books has announced its shortlist of nominees for the 2019 Glass Bell Award, which honors “compelling storytelling with brilliant characterisation and a distinct voice that is confidently written and assuredly realized”:

— Snap, by Belinda Bauer (Transworld)
— Our House, by Louise Candlish (Simon & Schuster)
— The Puppet Show, by M.W. Craven (Little, Brown)
— Vox, by Christina Dalcher (HQ)
— Swan Song, by Kelleigh Greenberg- Jephcott (Cornerstone)
— The Tattooist of Auschwitz, by Heather Morris (Bonnier Zaffre)

The winner is to be declared on September 16. He or she will receive “£2,000 and a beautiful, handmade, engraved glass bell.”

• In Reference to Murder brings word of the finalists for the 2019 Library of Virginia Literary Awards. They include James A. McLaughlin’s Bearskin, “which also won the Edgar Award for Best Debut Novel.”

• And let’s not forget the 2019 Amazon Publishing Readers’ Awards, which are designed to celebrate “the crime and thriller genre and in a UK festival first, recognize excellence in film and television as well as books.” Among the many finalists are novels by Philip Kerr, Manda Scott, Anthony Horowitz, Louise Candlish, and Laura Shepherd-Robinson. The victor in each of nine categories will be proclaimed on September 26, during London’s Capital Crime Festival.

• Happy 200th birthday today to author Herman Melville, who—thanks to works such as Typee and Moby Dick—became a literary giant of the 19th century, yet “died in obscurity” at age 72.

• The New York Times has more on Melville here.

• Dan Moldea, a Washington, D.C.-based investigative journalist “specializing in organized-crime and political-corruption investigations,” has his own theories about what happened to American labor union leader Jimmy Hoffa 44 years ago this week, and he shares them with the news Web site Deadline Detroit.

• “The body of John Dillinger, the notorious 1930s bank robber from Central Indiana, will be exhumed from his Crown Hill Cemetery burial site in Indianapolis as part of an upcoming History Channel documentary.” The Indianapolis Star has that story.

• Episode 4 of the Paperback Warrior Podcast examines the brand-new Stark House Press release, The Best of Manhunt, and also considers the influence of the TV series The Man from U.N.C.L.E. on spy fiction of its time. Listen to the whole show here.

• Blogger B.V. Lawson mentions this development:

Jeffery Katzenberg and Meg Whitman’s Quibi short-form streaming service has picked up Skinny Dip, a comedy series based on Carl Hiaasen’s 2004 satirical novel. The project had been set up as a drama pilot at the CW in the 2018 cycle but did not move forward there. The series is described as a darkly comedic odyssey of revenge where a jilted woman miraculously survives a night in the open ocean after her husband suddenly flings her overboard on their anniversary cruise. Plucked to safety serendipitously by a retired cop, the two team up to gaslight her husband.

• Someday I want to visit Buenos Aires, which I’ve heard is a beautiful, European-styled city. For right now, though, the closest I can come to there is Paul French’s piece in CrimeReads exploring a range of mystery and thriller fiction set in the Argentinean capital.

• Max Allan Collins notes in his blog that he and co-author A. Brad Schwartz are hard at work on The Untouchable and the Butcher, a second non-fiction book about 20th-century law-enforcement agent Eliot Ness. The pair previously penned Scarface and the Untouchable: Al Capone, Eliot Ness, and the Battle for Chicago (2018).

• Finally, New Mexico’s Albuquerque Journal reports that Santa Fe author James McGrath Morris, “who has written books about newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer, authors Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos and African-American journalist Ethel Payne,” is currently conducting research for a new biography of Tony Hillerman. Hillerman, who died back in 2008, was of course the creator of the “popular mystery novel series featuring Navajo tribal policemen Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee.” (Hat tip to The Bunburyist.)

The Last of Tony Hillerman

Celebrated New Mexico-based crime novelist Tony Hillerman passed away on Sunday afternoon. As the Associated Press reports:

Tony Hillerman, author of the acclaimed Navajo Tribal Police mystery novels and creator of two of the unlikeliest of literary heroes--Navajo police officers Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee--died Sunday of pulmonary failure. He was 83.

Hillerman’s daughter, Anne Hillerman, said her father’s health had been declining in the last couple years and that he was at Presbyterian Hospital in Albuquerque when he died at about 3 p.m.

More details can be found here.

In her own remembrance of Hillerman’s fiction and influence, New York Times crime-fiction critic Marilyn Stasio recalls:

Mr. Hillerman’s evocative novels, which describe people struggling to maintain ancient traditions in the modern world, touched millions of readers, who made them best sellers. But although the themes of his books were not overtly political, he wrote with a purpose, he often said, and that purpose was to instill in his readers a respect for Indian culture. The plots of his stories, while steeped in contemporary crime and its consequences, were invariably instructive about ancient tribal beliefs and customs, from purification rituals for a soldier returned from a foreign war to incest taboos for a proper clan marriage.

“It’s always troubled me that the American people are so ignorant of these rich Indian cultures,” Mr. Hillerman once told Publishers Weekly. “I think it’s important to show that aspects of ancient Indian ways are still very much alive and are highly germane even to our ways.”

Mr. Hillerman was not the first mystery writer to set a story on Indian land or to introduce a full-blooded Native American detective to crime literature. In 1946 the grand prize in the first short-story competition of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine went to Manly Wade Wellman for the first of two stories he wrote with an Indian protagonist.

But beginning with “The Blessing Way” in 1970 the 18 novels Mr. Hillerman set on Southwest Indian reservations featuring Lieut. Joe Leaphorn and Sgt. Jim Chee of the Navajo Tribal Police, brought a new dimension to the character of the traditional genre hero.

The Albuquerque Journal, meanwhile, offers somewhat more of a glimpse into the author’s life and lasting impact:

“He grew up humbly, and that’s always who he was,” his daughter Anne Hillerman said. “Despite all the honors and recognition he got, he always stayed the same guy.”

Tony Hillerman called New Mexico home for more than 50 years, but his roots go back to Sacred Heart, Okla., where he was born to a family of farmers in 1925.

He fought in World War II, receiving a Silver Star, Bronze Star and Purple Heart. After the war, a reporter read letters Hillerman had sent to his mother. She saw talent and told him to pursue journalism.

“He belongs to a generation that is about to disappear over the edge of history,” said a New York Times review about his memoirs, “Seldom Disappointed,” calling them “laced with humor and worldly wisdom.”

Hillerman could always tell a good story, his daughter said.

“He really loved a good conversation, and he was a good listener. He was a natural storyteller,” she said. “When my brothers and sisters were growing up, he would tell bedtime stories, and we would always be the heroes of the stories.”

After the war, Hillerman studied journalism at the University of Oklahoma and received his degree in 1948.

He worked at newspapers in Texas before moving to Santa Fe to work for the United Press International, a news-wire service. He later became the editor of the Santa Fe New Mexican. Hillerman moved to Albuquerque to teach at the University of New Mexico in the early 1960s.

“He was really an outstanding person. ... He was a real asset to the university and a great source of information. He was not only an outstanding writer but a great teacher and mentor,” said John Perovich, a former UNM president who worked with Hillerman when both were in the university’s administration.

Teaching, just like writing, was always his passion, Perovich said.

“I don’t know any journalism student that didn’t think the world of Tony,” he said. “And of course, he trained many of New Mexico’s newspaper people.”

(Sorry, the full Journal story is accessible only to newspaper subscribers or through a trial offer.)

More personal reflections on the life and times of Tony Hillerman can be found here, here, and here. Lists of Hillerman’s fiction and non-fiction books can be found here and here.

The writer’s death comes less than two weeks before The Hillerman Conference, scheduled to take place this year at the Hyatt Regency in Albuquerque, New Mexico, November 5-9.

(Contributions to this post from Linda L. Richards.)

READ MORE: “Tony Hillerman Is Dead,” by Carolyn Kellogg (Los Angeles Times); “In Memorium: Tony Hillerman” (Prairie Sun Rising); “In Appreciation of Tony Hillerman,” by Marjorie Kehe (Christian Science Monitor); “Thanks for Everything, Tony,” by Kate Flora (Writers Plot); “Man of Enchantment,” by Mary Lynn Reed (The Lipstick Chronicles); “Mystery Novels, with a Southwestern Flair,” by Lynn Neary (National Public Radio); “A 1001 Midnights Review: Tony Hillerman--Dance Hall of the Dead,” by Marcia Muller (Mystery*File).

Who Are We to Argue?

From B.V. Larson’s In Reference to Murder: “The Western Writers of America announced yesterday they are giving Tony Hillerman their Owen Wister Award for lifetime contribution to Western literature. President Cotton Smith said, ‘Tony Hillerman is truly a national treasure, bringing all of us wonderful stories of the modern West while giving us memorable glimpses of the distinctive ways of the Navajo Nation.’” Read more here.

It’s Hillerman Country

Musing in Smithsonian magazine on his hometown of Los Ranchos de Albuquerque, New Mexico, Tony Hillerman (The Shape Shifter) writes:

While we declare our independence--and have our own city hall, firetrucks, mayor and council, and post reduced speed limits on city streets that pass through our village--mapmakers, the U.S. Postal Service and political and commercial agencies all see us as Albuquerqueans. In the census we are just 5,000 of a half-million citizens who make it New Mexico’s major metropolis. Officially urbanites, we drive downtown enjoying the perfume of new-mown alfalfa and the sight of grazing horses. And our nocturnal quiet is punctuated only by occasional yips and honks in the bosque--the honks from the geese whose sleep has been disturbed by the coyotes stalking them.

The map of Los Ranchos on the wall in our little city hall shows a crazily shaped place. It runs along the east bank of the Rio Grande, 7,000 yards long (north to south) and much narrower east to west, varying from as little as a short block in some places to perhaps 3,000 yards at its widest. When I asked a former mayor of Los Ranchos for a brief description, he offered this summary: “Four square miles with 5,000 cranky people five miles from downtown Albuquerque.”

You’ll find Hillerman’s whole essay here.

Just Don’t Call It the “Tony”

There’s nothing quite like having a literary prize named after you. Just ask Tony Hillerman, the 81-year-old author of the Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee mysteries. The Tony Hillerman Writers Conference and St. Martin’s Press have gotten together to sponsor the 2007 Hillerman Mystery Competition, the intent of which is to find the best “first mystery novel set in the Southwest [and] written by a previously unpublished mystery author. The winning novel will be published by Thomas Dunne Books,” according to Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind.

For more information and contest guidelines, click here.