Bullet Points: Lots o’ Links Edition

• In The Rap Sheet’s last news wrap-up, I noted that Season 4 of Grantchester will premiere in the States this coming Sunday night, July 14, as part of PBS-TV’s Masterpiece Mystery! lineup. Now comes word, courtesy of The Killing Times, that ITV, the British network behind that cozyish historical crime series, has renewed Grantchester for yet another year. “The show’s fifth season,” says The Killing Times, “is set in 1957, the year Prime Minister Harold Macmillan told the British people that they had ‘never had it so good.’ For many of the residents of Grantchester, it really will feel like they’re in a delightful new Eden, but for all the talk of paradise on earth and faith-in-action, Geordie Keating (Robson Green) knows that trouble is never far away.”

• American film director Brian De Palma (Carrie, Scarface, The Untouchables, The Black Dahlia, etc.) will release his first novel—to be published by Hard Case Crime—in March 2020, according to Entertainment Weekly. Titled Are Snakes Necessary?, and co-authored with Susan Lehman, the book is said to be a “‘a blistering political satire’ that doubles as a female revenge thriller.” Hard Case provides this plot brief:

When the beautiful young videographer offered to join his campaign, Senator Lee Rogers should’ve known better. But saying no would have taken a stronger man than Rogers, with his ailing wife and his robust libido. Enter Barton Brock, the senator’s fixer. He’s already gotten rid of one troublesome young woman—how hard could this new one turn out to be? Pursued from Washington, D.C., to the streets of Paris, 18-year-old Fanny Cours knows her reputation and budding career are on the line. But what she doesn’t realize is that her life might be as well …

EW quotes Hard Case editor Charles Ardai as calling Are Snakes Necessary? “not just a great crime story, it’s a sharp, ruthless look at the state of affairs—both political and extramarital—in our turbulent modern era.” That certainly sounds promising.

• Margery Allingham’s renown lives on, thanks i part to a decision regarding the future of an annual short-story competition named after her. This note comes from Shotsmag Confidential: “The Margery Allingham Society has agreed with the [British] Crime Writers’ Association that the popular short mystery competition will run for at least another five years, until 2024. The Society, set up to honour and promote the writings of the great Golden Age author whose well-known hero is Albert Campion, works with the CWA to operate and fund the writing competition that opens for entries in the autumn on the CWA’s website and closes every February.” It was only this last May that the winner of the 2019 Margery Allingham Short Story Competition was announced: Ray Bazowski, for “A Perfect Murderer.”

• Blogger, genre historian, and author Curtis Evans seems more than moderately thrilled by news that Freeman Wills Crofts’ Golden Age mysteries starring Inspector French are the inspiration for a forthcoming TV series. “I have read the script of what is to be the first episode,” Evans explains in The Passing Tramp, “based on a Crofts novel which I write about extensively in my 2012 book about Crofts, John Street, and JJ Connington, and I am excited about the whole thing. Crofts readers will be able to tell just from this article that there are changes being made for the adaptation, changes which will be forthrightly aired here, but I think fans of the book will be pleased, as well as mystery fans more generally.” In a follow-up to that original post, Evans interviews Brendan Foley, the program’s writer.

• With Donald Trump’s outrageous and dangerous “nationwide immigration enforcement operation … targeting migrant families” apparently taking place this weekend—his latest ploy to gin up support among his radical base, no matter the damage it does to families as well as America’s reputation—it seems an appropriate time to point readers toward Oline H. Cogdill’s list of “mysteries that include immigrants in their solid plots.” Included among her choices are works by Ragnar Jónasson, Denise Hamilton, and Dennis Lehane.

• And while we’re on the subject of lists, check out Mystery Tribune’s picks of the “Top 10 Great Brazilian Crime Fiction Books.” Several of those works were composed by two authors well represented on my own bookshelves: Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza and Leighton Gage.

• Oh, and author John Galligan offers this CrimeReads piece identifying “8 Novels You Won’t Find in the Crime Section,” but that nonetheless belong there, given their subject matter. Yes, Jim Harrison’s Brown Dog (2013) is among them.

• HBO has chosen September 9 as the date on which its gritty George Pelecanos/David Simon-created drama series, The Deuce, will return for its third and final season. As Deadline explains, the show “chronicles the establishment of the porn industry in the decidedly pre-Disney Times Square of the early 1970s through legalization, the rise of HIV, the cocaine epidemic and the big business of the mid-1980s, with the changing real estate market about to bring the deadly party to a close.” James Franco and Maggie Gyllenhaal star.

• A premiere date has been set, too, for Stumptown, the ABC-TV detective series I wrote about not long ago. Based on graphic novels by Greg Rucka, this hour-long show stars Cobie Smulders (How I Met Your Mother, Friends from College) as Dex Parios, “a sharp-witted army veteran who becomes a private investigator in Portland, Oregon.” ABC will premiere Stumptown on September 25, at 10 p.m.

• Way to kick a dead man while he’s down! In its newest installment of a series revisiting Edgar Allan Poe Award winners from the past, Thomas Wickersham recalls The Rheingold Route, Arthur Maling’s 1979 “espionage novel without spies.” Wickersham remarks: “It is a pity when a book’s place in history is to languish all but forgotten besides its title on a list of awards. It is sadder still to revisit such a book and find that its place in obscurity is earned.” Maybe, though, as Wickersham himself suggests, The Rheingold Route “was a book of its time.” Back in ’79, Kirkus Reviews was much more generous to the novel, calling it “tautly plotted, distinctively populated, convincingly romantic—perfect material for a Hitchcock film or an all-in-one-sitting late-night read.” Author Maling passed away in 2013.

• The Staunch Prize, launched last year to salute thriller novels “in which no woman is beaten, stalked, sexually exploited, raped, or murdered,” has been criticized recently by authors objecting to organizers’ insinuations that their fiction may bias rape juries and trials. In the UK’s Guardian, prize-winning author Sarah Hilary (Never Be Broken) calls the Staunch Prize “not a prize so much as a gagging order,” and she goes on to say: “Violence against women takes many forms, perhaps the most insidious of which is censorship. We’re discouraged from going to the police in case we’re not believed, taught to expect resistance to our version of events, silenced by shame or fear. This prize reinforces all those negative messages, and ignores the very real good that crime fiction can do by reflecting the violent reality of many women’s lives.” Meanwhile, Edinburgh’s Kaite Walsh (The Unquiet Heart), who was herself raped as a younger woman, opines: “I can’t write about a world without rape because I don’t live in one. I won’t sanitise my writing in service of some fictional, feminist utopia. And while I indulge in fictional universes that let me escape, write the world the way I wish it was, my work lies in marrying my imagination with the ugly truth, challenging myself to explore the friction in the places where they collide. I wanted to write someone whose story didn’t end with rape, or even begin with it—but included it as just another bump in the road that has to be dealt with, worked through and lived with.”

• I wouldn’t normally bother with the right-wing “news” site Breitbart. But Gigi Garner, daughter of the late actor James Garner, recommended this Independence Day Breitbart tribute to her father, which touts his 1974-1980 NBC-TV series The Rockford Files as “the most American television show ever made.” Contributor John Nolte lays out a variety of reasons why he believes Garner’s private eye, Jim Rockford, was “TV’s great American,” including:

He’s a gentleman and chivalrous to the ladies—a real Neanderthal who opens car doors, lights cigarettes, steps into harm’s way to protect them, and yet still treats them as equals.

He’s a reluctant hero who keeps his virtues to a minimum “because they’re easier to keep track of.” In other words, he’s not a pompous virtue-signaler. …

Above all, Jim Rockford is first, last, and always his own man. His independence, his unwillingness to conform to anyone’s idea of how he should live his life, work his profession, or bow to authority is as American as it gets. He doesn’t tell anyone else how to live their life, and as long as you don’t cross that busybody line with him, there won’t be a problem.

Nolte goes out of his way to suggest that Rockford was one of those government-hating “real Americans” Sarah Palin was always spouting off about. I wonder if he realizes Garner was a self-described “‘bleeding-heart liberal,’ one of those card-carrying Democrats that Rush Limbaugh thinks is a communist. And I’m proud of it.”

• OK, a show of hands: Who remembers actor George Kennedy’s 1975-1976 CBS-TV series, The Blue Knight, based on Joseph Wambaugh’s 1973 novel of the same name? I just noticed that five of that program’s two-dozen episodes are available on YouTube. It’s best to watch them now, before they’re scrubbed from the site.

• Registration is already open for readers and writers hoping to attend the 2012 Left Coast Crime convention in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Guests of Honor that year will be novelists Mick Herron and Catriona McPherson. Don’t forget about LCC 2020, either, which is scheduled to be held in San Diego, California.

• In advance of the Veronica Mars TV revival series, which begins airing on July 26 on Hulu, the Web site Vox chooses the best and worst episodes from among the show’s original, 2004-2007 run; the 2014 film based on the program also joins the ranking. When you’re done reading through all of those, look back at Cameron Hughes’ 2008 piece about Veronica Mars, posted in The Rap Sheet.

• Finally, a belated (and posthumous) “happy birthday” to composer Earle Hagan, who “would have turned 100 years old on July 9,” as Variety notes. Among his many contributions to popular culture, Hagan gave us the themes for The Andy Griffith Show, I Spy, The Mod Squad, and The New Perry Mason.

Life from “Mars”

After just recently watching Kristen Bell (and Kelsey Grammer) in the Netflix comedy feature Like Father, my eyes were out for more news about the actress. And up crops this from Vox:

A Veronica Mars revival is in the works at Hulu, Entertainment Weekly reports. The deal hasn’t been finalized yet, but it’s apparently close.

None of the details have yet been confirmed, but EW is reporting that Kristen Bell, who starred in the show’s original run as the titular teen detective, will reprise the role despite her commitments to NBC’s The Good Place, which she stars in. That suggests that the Veronica Mars revival will be a limited-run series, perhaps along the lines of the Gilmore Girls Netflix revival, but at this point we don’t know for sure. According to TVLine, the revival would likely run for eight episodes. Series creator and showrunner Rob Thomas would also be on board.

For fans, the news comes as a mixed blessing. On the one hand: new Veronica Mars material! Hooray! On the other hand: A big part of the Veronica Mars appeal was that she was a hard-boiled neo-noir private eye who was also a teenage girl, and now that she’s no longer a teenager, the balance of the show will have to shift.

Plus, we’ve already had a glimpse of what a Veronica Mars revival with an adult Veronica might look like before, and the results were just okay.

You can read Cameron Pierce Hughes’ review of the original, UPN/CW series Veronica Mars by clicking here.

Bullet Points: Daffy and Dagger Edition

• Last Friday, Evan Lewis of the blog Davy Crockett’s Almanack of Mystery, Adventure, and the Wild West kicked-off a “nine-day extravaganza celebrating slick-tongued reporter Daffy Dill” of the fictional New York Chronicle, a character created in the 1930s by Richard Sale and popularized through the pages of Detective Fiction Weekly. So far, Lewis has posted “The Dancing Corpse,” a “never-reprinted adventure from the September 7, 1935, issue of Detective Fiction Weekly”; assembled a gallery of Dill magazine covers; and offered readers the Daffy adventures “A Dirge for Pagliaccio” and “A Slug for Cleopatra.” Coming up this Friday, Lewis promises, will be “an in-depth look at the life and times of Daffy Dill by Monte Herridge--an article that originally appeared in the 2013 Pulpfest magazine PEAPSTER. And to wrap things up, on Saturday the 29th we’ll have still another ‘new’ Daffy story, coming your way for the first time since 1937.” This extravaganza is certainly proving to be a lot of fun.

• The coming film adaptation of Veronica Mars had already earned one place in the history books, thanks to its record-breaking Kickstarter campaign (remember how it accumulated $2 million in financing in under 11 hours?). Now, reports Moviefone, the “movie will be the first to be simultaneously released by a major studio in theaters (270 theaters) and made available for purchase and to rent on the same day: March 14, 2014.”

• Meanwhile, watch for the long-awaited Man from U.N.C.L.E. movie to premiere on January 16, 2015. Unfortunately, this means it won’t be out in time to be part of the 50th anniversary celebration of U.N.C.L.E.’s September 22, 1964, NBC-TV debut.

• The British Crime Writers’ Association announced today that digital publisher Endeavour Press will be the new backer of its annual Historical Dagger for the best historical novel of the year. “Endeavour Press are proud to be sponsoring the CWA Historical Dagger,” says Richard Foreman, the company’s founder. “As both readers--and publishers--of crime fiction, Endeavour Press are keen to support the CWA, an association which continues to foster relationships between its authors and the growing readership for crime novels. Also, as someone who has spent the past decade promoting both history books and crime fiction, it also gives me great personal satisfaction to help reward authors for their hard work and talent, whether they be debut writers or more established names.” The winner of this year’s first CWA Endeavour Historical Dagger will be named on June 30.

• How’s this for a peculiar progression? Author J. Sydney Jones (The Keeper of Hands) recently e-mailed yours truly, J. Kingston Pierce, asking for information about how to contact Canadian novelist J. Robert Janes (whose new Jean-Louis St-Cyr/Hermann Kohler tale, Carnival, is due out in mid-May). The result is an excellent new interview with Janes in Jones’ Scene of the Crime blog.

• This comes from In Reference to Murder: “Thanks to Crime Fiction Lover for noting that Crime Story, a new festival for crime fiction lovers, is coming to Newcastle [England] at the University of Northumbria on May 31st. The organizers have added a fun twist: they’ve commissioned author Ann Cleeves to invent a fictional crime which will then be investigated by various experts including forensic scientists, police detectives, and legal eagles.”

• Won’t somebody please step up to help Linda Dewberry, the proprietor of Olympia, Washington's Whodunit? Books, who has put her mystery bookstore on the market?

• R.I.P., Maria von Trapp, who, the Moviefone blog notes, was “the last surviving member and second-eldest daughter of the musical family whose escape from Nazi-occupied Austria was the basis for The Sound of Music, has died. She was 99.” There’s more about von Trapp’s passing in Britain’s Daily Mail.

• In the Kill Zone blog, Mark Alpert reconsiders five “classic novels that offer useful lessons for thriller writers.” Good choices, all.

• Al Capone--in the flesh!

• Nancy O of The Crime Segments continues her reviewing of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe series with this piece about his 1949 novel, The Little Sister.

• Journalist and onetime cartoonist Keith Thomson, the author of 2011’s Twice a Spy and the brand-spanking-new thriller Seven Grams of Lead (Anchor), writes in Mystery Fanfare about his 2008 journey to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and his subsequent fantasy about having had an eavesdropping device planted in his left wrist during the course of that visit. Read the whole piece here.

• I love great unsolved mysteries.

• Flavorwire’s new list, “10 Times Oscar Got It (Unexpectedly) Right,” posted in advance of next Sunday’s Academy Award presentations, includes at least three winners near and dear to the hearts of crime-fiction fans: Gene Hackman’s “Best Actor” Oscar for The French Connection (1971); Robert Towne’s “Best Original Screenplan” win for Chinatown (1974); and Isaac Hayes’ “Best Original Song” prize for “Theme from Shaft” (1971).

• Saved from the Paper Drive seems to have a cache of old Have Gun, Will Travel comic books, and has been rolling them out in the blog one by one. Its latest sampling, “The Vigilantes,” comes from 1960. This link should take you to previous entries in the series.

• More from Michelle Monaghan on True Detective.

• Hmm. I must have missed seeing the recent news alert that Anthony Neil Smith, the author of Hogdoggin’, All the Young Warriors, and assorted other works of fiction, has confessed to being “Red Hammond”--the man behind XXX Shamus (Broken River), a “porno P.I.” novel that Jedediah Ayres applauds as “incendiary.”

• And as a balance against all the recent “you must read these books before you die” directories, Janet Potter offers some worthy suggestions in The Millions of what sorts of volumes really deserve your attention in the near future. Her best two bits of advice, I think: “You should read the book that you hear two booksellers arguing about at the registers while you’re browsing in a bookstore” and “You should read the book that you didn’t read when it was assigned in your high school English class. You’d probably like it better now anyway.”

Bullet Points: First 2014 Edition

Now that I’m finally past the feverish activities that surrounded Christmas, and have made peace with the weather woes that cancelled my long-planned-for holiday in beautiful Quebec City, Canada (gggrrrrr!), I can get back to the business of gathering and posting crime-fiction-related news bits. My, how quickly they accumulate …

• We’re now a week into 2014, but bloggers are still busy recapping their last 12 months of reading pleasures. Ayo Onatade gives a hearty thumbs-up to Lauren Beukes’ The Shining Girls, George Pelecanos’ The Double, Robert Crais’ Suspect, and other works in Shotsmag Confidential. Crimespree Magazine critics identify their favorite reads from 2013 here, while the pseudonymous Admiral Ironbombs at Battered, Tattered, Yellowed & Creased chooses his five top mystery/thriller books (all of them classics) in addition to the same number of science fiction/fantasy titles. Blogger-novelist Patti Abbott has announced her 10 favorite books of 2013, while Australia-based Reactions to Reading has gathered 14 crime-related tales of particular merit. And not incidentally, contributors to January Magazine--who listed their favorite crime-fiction works of 2013 in mid-December--have finally compiled their favorites in four additional categories. You’ll find editor Linda L. Richards’ introduction to the full feature, plus links to all of the posts, here.

• Oh, and Euro Crime has concluded its series focusing on “favorite discoveries” from the last year. All 10 posts are here.

• A new trailer for the big-screen version of Veronica Mars has been circulating lately, and it makes that Kickstarter-funded project look quite appealing. You can watch it here. (A previous version is here.) The Los Angeles Times explains the film’s plot thusly: “It’s been almost nine years since ‘Veronica Mars’ ended, and Veronica [Kristen Bell] is no longer in high school. But to give the characters a reason to congregate again once more, the film involves Veronica going back to her hometown of Neptune, Calif., for a high school reunion.” Veronica Mars, featuring an original screenplay by Rob Thomas and Dianne Ruggiero, is set to open in U.S. theaters on March 14.

• Rhian Davies (aka CrimeFicReader) brings news that The Detective’s Daughter (Head of Zeus), by Lesley Thomson, “has been voted eBook of the year following eBooks by Sainsbury’s month-long quest to reveal UK book-lovers’ top digital read for 2013.” (Sainsbury’s, for those of you who don’t happen to reside in Great Britain, is a large supermarket chain.) Thomson’s printed-book sequel, Ghost Girl, is due out in May.

• A big thanks to Sarah Weinman, who had some nice things to say about The Rap Sheet and yours truly in a recent post highlighting blogs that provide “good crime fiction recommendations.”

• The late Siân Busby’s A Commonplace Killing, which was among my favorite crime novels of 2013, is also one of the latest works chosen for W.H. Smith’s Richard & Judy Book Club. Find out more here.

• I love this vintage-style cover for William Boyd’s Solo.

• The organizers of Murder at the Beach, the 2014 Bouchercon to be held in Long Beach, California, are soliciting short stories for inclusion in that event’s anthology. Dana Cameron, a past winner of the Anthony, Agatha, and Macavity awards, has been convinced to edit that compilation. You can find submission details here.

• Oops! From The New York Times: “Chris Gossage, the lawyer whose indiscreet chatter led to the public unmasking of J.K. Rowling as the author of ‘The Cuckoo’s Calling’--the detective novel that she published under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith--has been fined £1,000 (about $1,645) by the Solicitors Regulation Authority for breaking the authority’s client confidentiality rules. Mr. Gossage, a partner at Russells Solicitors, also received a written rebuke.”

• And happy birthday, Sherlock Holmes!

Just a Few Things Worth Knowing

• Good on star Kristen Bell and show creator Rob Thomas for raising $2 million in less than a day though Kickstarter--money to finance the production of a feature-film follow-up to the 2004-2007 TV series Veronica Mars. That picture is expected to be released early in 2014. (UPDATE: Wired has more to say on this subject here.)

• In advance of the return of Foyle’s War, Acorn Media has re-released DVD versions of the first six seasons of that popular World War II-era mystery series. Also on sale is a collector’s edition of the entire series thus far, Foyle’s War: The Home Front Files. According to an Acorn press release, Foyle’s War, starring Michael Kitchen and Honeysuckle Weeks, will return to PBS-TV’s Masterpiece Mystery! this coming September with three new episodes. Hot diggity!

• Look for two newly released e-books by sometime Rap Sheet contributors: Gary Phillips’ The Essex Man: 10 Seconds to Death is an action-adventure novella introducing Luke Warfield (“part Shaft and part Batman sans the costume”) and boasting a fabulous cover by Carlos Valenzuela; while The Big O is the e-book reprint of Irish author Declan Burke’s first “screwball noir” novel.

• Phillips has more to say about black pulp fiction here.

• Kristopher Zgorski of BOLO Books recently interviewed Dana Cameron about her new Fangborn novel, Seven Kinds of Hell.

• For his blog, Woodcuttingfool, Los Angeles woodcut artist Loren Kantor has created a variety of original prints inspired by classic works of film noir. Among the more famous faces you’ll find on that site are those of Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Peter Lorre, Jack Palance, and Edward G. Robinson.

• A preliminary schedule for this year’s Malice Domestic conference in Bethesda, Maryland (May 3-5), has been released.

• And this was definitely one of my odder dreams.

Another Good Idea Quashed

Die-hard Veronica Mars fans who continue to hope for a big-screen follow-up to that 2004-2007 series will no doubt take heart from this TV Squad headline: “Kristen Bell Would Finance a ‘Veronica Mars’ Film ... If Warner Bros. Lets Her.” Unfortunately, as Omnimystery News notes, production company Warner Bros. “owns the rights and has no interest in making a film.” Sigh ...

Bullet Points: Oldies and Goodies Edition

• Don’t forget that this is the last day to enter The Rap Sheet’s contest to win a free copy of Jerry Stahl’s fourth and latest novel, Pain Killers. All you have to do is answer one simple question:

In which other of Stahl’s novels did ex-junkie turned codeine-popping detective Manny Rupert also appear?

If you need a clue, click here. Once you have the answer, send it in an e-mail note--along with your snail-mail address--to: jpwrites@wordcuts.org. And write “Pain Killers Contest” in the subject line. The deadline for entering is midnight tonight. One winner will be announced on Monday. Unfortunately, this contest is only open to U.S. residents.

• The first-season DVD set of Veronica Mars has recently received enthusiastic acclaim from not just one, but two sources. First, from Pajiba (which is forthrightly subtitled “Scathing Reviews for Bitchy People”). And second, from The Groovy Age of Horror. Writes Pajiba’s Daniel Carlson: “[I]t’s Season One that remains the sharpest crystallization of what ‘Veronica Mars’ promises: A show about a girl solving the mysteries and exploring the dangers of her own life, from the death of her best friend to the truth about her own family.”

• Pajiba’s Veronica Mars write-up, by the way, is just one of its critical looks back at “The Best 20 Seasons of the Past 20 Years” of American television. That series also includes: Murder One, Season One, Twin Peaks, Season One, The West Wing, Season Two, The Wire, Season Two, and Deadwood, Season One.

• Almost two years ago, author George Pelecanos chose to include Don Carpenter’s 1966 novel, Hard Rain Falling, in The Rap Sheet’s expansive rundown of overlooked, criminally forgotten, and underappreciated crime novels. He called it “a stunning, brutally honest entry in the social realist school of crime fiction.” Now, Pelecanos has written the introduction to a long-overdue new edition of Hard Rain Falling, coming from Random House in September. Good for him for reminding readers of this extraordinary novel. (Hat tip to Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind.)

• Uriah Robinson (aka Norman Price) reminds me of another older book worth rediscovering, The Polish Officer (1995), by Alan Furst.

• Judith Freeman, author of the biography The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved (more on that here), writes in today’s Los Angeles Times about meeting Chandler’s former secretary, Dorothy Fisher, who died in December 2008. You’ll find the Times piece here.

• Tom Bale (aka David Harrison) submits his latest novel, the cinematically told Skin and Bones, to Marshal Zeringue’s Page 69 Test. Click here for the results.

• For Pulp Pusher, Seth “Soul Man” Ferranti interviews gangbanger Terrell C. Wright, author of the new 2 Live and Die in L.A. and Home of the Body Bags (2005).

• And in case you haven’t noticed, novelist Alexandra Sokoloff (The Price) has been writing a terrifically thorough analysis of Roman Polanski’s 1974 private-eye film, Chinatown. “[T]here’s a good reason instructors love to talk about this movie--there’s just no film better to cover ALL the elements of filmic and dramatic structure with one single movie,” she explains. “I never watch it without seeing new things in it, and I always benefit from hearing what other people see in it.” If I have the parts in order, they are here, here, and here, with a character study of detective Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) here. It all makes me wants to watch Chinatown again--for what I think must be the 10th time.

The Best TV Crime Drama Openers, #22

Series Title: Veronica Mars | Years: 2004-2007, UPN/CW | Starring: Kristen Bell, Enrico Colantoni, Percy Daggs III, Jason Dohring, Francis Capra | Theme Music: The Dandy Warhols

Veronica Mars was special.

Don’t look at me like that, it was.

OK, I concede that it had a dumb concept. So dumb it shouldn’t have worked. All about a teenage girl, the daughter of a private detective, who goes about solving whatever problems her classmates have--like a missing mascot (that investigation actually brought to her by the school’s vice-principal) or figuring out who rigged the latest school election, and why.

It reeked of gimmick, and man, I hate gimmicks in my crime fiction.

But this series was special. Veronica Mars was about a high-school junior in the fictional, upscale San Diego suburb of Neptune Beach. Veronica (Bell) was one of the popular kids--not rich, but her dad was the local sheriff and that bought her a ticket into the It Crowd. It also helped her standing that she was dating Duncan Kane (Teddy Dunn), the son of Jake Kane, the richest man in Neptune Beach and CEO of an electronics empire.

And then Veronica’s best friend, Lily Kane (Amanda Seyfried), was murdered, and her life began spiraling downward. Her father lost his job as sheriff, after wrongly accusing Jake Kane of the crime. Duncan, in his grief, dumped her, and she was suddenly on her own--no friends, and no social position.

You see, Veronica Mars was Noir with a capital N.

There was no jazz or fancy car, though; her father, Keith Mars (Colantoni, formerly of Just Shoot Me!), a newly minted private eye, didn’t have an office bottle. In fact, Veronica and her dad were so poor, that their small apartment was the office and a good-paying job meant steak for dinner. Veronica was her father’s secretary, when she wasn’t helping out on the latest case--on an unofficial basis, of course, nothing dangerous, just computer work and the occasional snapping of pictures. But Veronica took after her dad and prowled the halls of her school, helping out both her peers and members of the faculty.

The show had a wonderful cast, in addition to its fetching blond star. Keith Mars was tough, but no Superman, and he was wryly humorous, with a fierce love for his daughter. The worst thing you could do was mess with her--if you did, you’d get a visit from him. The heart of this series lay in that bond between father and daughter. (Click here to watch an early scene indicative of their relationship.) After Veronica’s mother, Lianne, left them, they were all each other had.

Also important to the storytelling, however, was Veronica’s new best friend, Wallace Fennell (Daggs), a smart young man who found his place as a basketball player, but remained an outsider because he chose to pal around with Veronica. Given that he had a job in the high-school office, she often asked Wallace to look surreptitiously into files on her behalf. Like all great fictional detectives, Veronica had allies among the criminal element, too. Chief among those was Mexican Eli “Weevil” Navarro (Capra). Finally, the series’ breakout character was Logan Echolls (Dohring), son of abusive Aaron Echolls, a mega-movie star (played by ex-L.A. Law hunk Harry Hamlin). Logan was funny at times, but also a hell-raiser with a tangible disgust for The Establishment. He was dangerous to be around, but like everything in Veronica Mars, he had hidden depths, cracks in his armor that were put on display as the series evolved. Veronica Mars even had an antagonistic relationship with the sheriff who had replaced her father, because he ignored the fact that she had been date-raped, most likely by one of the sons of the many powerful people inhabiting Neptune Beach.

Oh, and did I mention that Veronica Mars could be downright hilarious? Like the great 2006 film Brick (which also placed a detective story within the world of teenagers), this too-short-lived series avoided emulating Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, but had a quick and intelligent wit about it.

Veronica: Look at you, all helpful.

Logan: Hey, your peskiness being unleashed on Conner brings me joy. Annoy, tiny blonde one, annoy like the wind!

There’s a plethora of memorable quotes and exchanges from this show that I could have used, so excellent was its dialogue.

In the same way that other places have been essential to detective series, whether in books or on the screen, so the town of Neptune Beach was a supporting player in Veronica Mars. It breathed corruption and bred class warfare. On one side, there were the rich “09ers” (so named for their ritzy zip code); on the other were the poor folk. The latter often worked for the former. It was amazing to me, being a native San Diegan, how closely this relationship mirrored that of my city’s actual prosperous districts. Since the show was filmed here, I often recognized where the action was taking place.

At the center of the first season’s story arc were the death of Lily Kane and the sexual abuse committed against young Veronica. They combined to make a real mystery that played fair with the watcher, and I knew a few fans who put the pieces together successfully as they were doled out by the series’ creator-writer, Rob Thomas. Veronica Mars didn’t cheat.

The second season was even better, one of its biggest plot elements being the tragic accident of a bus full of teenagers going off a cliff. The solution to that mystery was truly shocking.

The third season wasn’t quite so good. When the show moved to the new CW Television Network, some of its characters and complexities were softened, and there were a series of small mysteries that played over just a few weeks. It retained a lot of the same personality and heart, but it was often obvious that the network had told Thomas to make changes. The series finished on a high note, though, with a great noir ending. The heroes didn’t ride off into the sunset, happy and perky; instead, they rode off into cancellation with a multi-layered conclusion not unlike that of the film Chinatown.

The last thing I have to talk about is the opening title sequence.

Appropriate to its neo-noir atmospherics, the first thing you heard on Veronica Mars was the punk-rock sound of The Dandy Warhols blaring “We Used to Be Friends.” It’s an appropriate song for Veronica’s outsider world, and the fact that it is the work of a punk-rock band fit the personality of this show wonderfully. At least during the first two seasons (alterations were made in the third year, with the song running slower and not as loud), we cycled through shots of the cast with torn notebook paper and other school paraphernalia decorating the edges of the TV screen. A pencil scribbled an image on the paper that might best represent each character, such as handcuffs for former lawman Keith Mars. It was a vibrant and fast opening with a great theme song, deftly characterizing the depths of this show. The song just built and built until you didn’t know where it would go and as it ended, the last shot was of our girl Veronica glaring off into the distance, about to face off with whatever, or whoever, was foolish enough to challenge her next.

It could rightly be said that Veronica Mars was the punk-rock song of detective shows. Vibrant, no rules, no clichés or conforming to what others thought it should be.

As I said, Veronica Mars was special. Seek out the DVDs.

READ MORE: Mars Investigations: The (In)Complete Guide to Veronica Mars; “Eyes of Veronica Mars,” by Robert Abele (L.A. Weekly); “What Veronica Mars Could Have Been,” by Keith McDuffee (TV Squad).