The Best TV Crime Drama Openers, #7

Series Title: Crime Story | Years: 1986-1988, NBC | Starring: Dennis Farina, Anthony Denison, Bill Smitrovich, Steve Ryan, Paul Butler, Bill Campbell, Stephen Lang, John Santucci |
Theme Music: Del Shannon

In the mid-1980s, with two successful years behind him as the executive producer of ratings winner Miami Vice, screenwriter and director Michael Mann decided that his next TV series would take him from the pastel hues, string bikinis, and glass cliffs of Florida’s largest city back to the place of his birth: Chicago, Illinois. On September 18, 1986, NBC debuted Crime Story, his underworld saga that substituted a grim, malevolent verisimilitude for Vice’s stylishness and more distant violence, and wound up being touted by Time magazine as one of the decade’s best small-screen treats.

The series’ two-hour pilot movie, which like the rest of the early episodes was set in 1963, established this program’s tone and pace. As The New York Times’ John J. O’Connor wrote after seeing it:

During a robbery in progress at a flashy Chicago club, a customer is killed by a vicious thug, who then starts taking hostages. Rushing to the scene, a police lieutenant, Mike Torello, warns the murderer that if anyone else is hurt, “I’m gonna kill whoever you love most--your mother, your father, your dog.”

Then comes the inevitable highway chase, complete with a thumping rock score, during which one of [the] screaming hostages, a gorgeous blonde, is shoved through the bullet-shattered back window to hang onto the trunk of the speeding car. Finally, trapping his quarry in a quiet residential neighborhood, Torello puts a bullet through the killer’s head as two children in pajamas watch silently from a nearby window. It is a bit like Steven Spielberg gone gory. And we haven’t even got to the opening credits yet.

To play the lead in Crime Story, Mann and the show’s creators, Miami Vice veteran (and ex-Windy City cop) Chuck Adamson and former Wall Street international investment banker Gustave Reininger, enlisted a relative newcomer to Hollywood, Dennis Farina. With a dark mustache broad enough to sweep streets and a pockmarked face that looked like it had been reclaimed from the scrap heap at Mount Rushmore, Farina made a most convincing Mike Torello--and why not, since he had actually served 18 years with Chicago’s police force before moving into film consulting and then acting. There was impatience, cynicism, and perpetual disgust in Farina’s heavy-lidded gaze. Viewers had little trouble accepting him as the head of the Chicago Police Department’s Major Crime Unit (MCU), “an elite cop squad that goes after big scores and high-ticket crooks,” to quote from TV Guide’s 1986 Fall Preview edition write-up on the series. Other notable MCU members included Torello’s second-in-command, Sergeant Danny Krychek (played with volcanic authority by Bill Smitrovich) and cigar-chomping Detective Walter Clemmons (Paul Butler), who kept his thoughts--and his guns--close to his chest.

With a story arc that followed Torello and his ever-underpaid law-enforcement colleagues from America’s Rust Belt to its spit-shined buckle at Las Vegas, Crime Story reveled in period details. The automobiles sported whitewalls, bat-wing tail-fins, and front grilles as broad as shark grins. Furnishings bore sleek lines and often exaggerated, futuristic configurations. The cops seemed to have been issued fedoras and baggy overcoats along with their badges, and white socks peeked out beneath their black shoes, while the crooks--the climbers and the jamokes both--favored pricey sharkskin suits and hair slicked back with Brylcreem. The women either dressed demurely, like June Cleaver, or--if they were riding the high times with some punk--like exaggerations of whatever Vogue had most recently declared chic. It was an era when boys pitched pennies on street corners, gasoline cost a whopping 25 cents per gallon, and cigarette smoking was still considered stylish. Into the neon-lit nights, hi-fi players carried the rhythms of Sam Cooke’s “Twistin’ the Night Away” and Johnny Mathis’ “Chances Are.”

The art department for this show was frequently compelled to run newspaper advertisements in search of just the right atmosphere-producing accouterments, but the extra effort (while expensive) paid off in terms of transporting viewers backward through the decades. If it didn’t “slavishly re-create the early ’60s ...,” Dick Fiddy, a TV historian and consultant to the British Film Institute, told The Daily Telegraph in 2004, “it always had a tang of authenticity.” The fact that Crime Story was filmed in Chicago, at least until the action moved west partway through Season One, also gave it gritty credibility.

The series’ plots turned primarily on three characters, as the Times’ O’Connor explained: “Torello ..., the tough cop who can be as sadistic as the criminals he stalks; Ray Luca (Anthony Denison), the young and completely amoral mobster on the rise; and David Abrams (Stephen Lang), a liberal lawyer who, through his own criminal father, is keenly aware of all the justice that money can buy.”

Most of Crime Story’s tension was born from the rivalry between Torello and the pompadour-topped Luca, a good-versus-evil relationship that claimed victims on both sides, physically as well as emotionally. Torello’s dick-swinging pursuit of the flashier but equally hot-tempered thug-on-the-rise consumed him entirely, and was a contributing factor in the failure of this cop’s “beauty and the best” marriage. Torello’s brainy wife, Julie (Darlanne Fluegel), whose role early in the series was to tease out his post-Neanderthal humanness, remarked to him in the pilot that “They haven’t invented the hard time we can’t handle.” Yet she eventually grew tired of playing second-fiddle to Torello’s 24-hour job and putting up with his growing detachment and jealousy. Complaining that she wanted “attention and affection,” she first had an affair on him, and then abandoned Torello entirely, leaving our hero to become, I think, a less-dimensional figure, a blunt instrument to be wielded against the wiseguys of the world.

Meanwhile, Lang’s bespectacled courtroom advocate played a more nuanced and evolving part in this crime drama. For all of his self-doubts about what he was doing, whether he was really making a difference in terms of upholding the law and helping people, David Abrams was in many respects a reflection of Torello’s conscience--at least in the beginning, before he, like the lieutenant, was changed by the very corruption he’d sworn to overcome. Abrams also helped to illuminate some of the social and justice issues that confronted Americans during the 1960s. For instance, in one particularly good first-season episode, “Abrams for the Defense,” the lawyer defends a poor black apartment dweller on trial for assaulting his Polish slumlord. The case looks like a loser from the opening gate, but Abrams is too idealistic to bow to the odds against him; instead, he goes about the business of gathering evidence to demonstrate how the living conditions his client and that man’s family have had to endure provoked his aggression. And over the course of it, Abrams becomes enamored of an African-American investigative journalist, portrayed by former blaxploitation actress Pam Grier (later the star of Quentin Tarantino’s 1997 film, Jackie Brown). In those days, inter-racial relationships were frowned upon--often by both sides--and even Abrams isn’t blind to his violating cultural taboos in the name of love.

Mann told reporters that the concept of Crime Story had been influenced by scripts he’d worked on for Police Story, an acclaimed 1973-1978 NBC anthology drama created by cop-turned-novelist Joseph Wambaugh. He wanted his new series to contain long story- and character-development arcs, rather than depend on standalone episodes, and he predicted it would have a five-year lifespan. According to the movie blog Radiator Heaven:

Mann said that the first season of the show would go from Chicago in 1963 to Las Vegas in 1980 where the characters would have “very different occupations, in a different city and in a different time.” He said, “It’s a serial in the sense that we have continuing stories, and in that sense the show is one big novel.” Mann and Reininger’s inspiration for the 1963-1980 arc came from their mutual admiration of the epic 15+ hour film, Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980), by German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Mann said, “The pace of our story is like the speed of light compared to that, but that’s the idea--if you put it all together at the end you’ve got one hell of a 22-hour movie.”

Things didn’t go quite as Mann had planned. Yes, Torello and company made it to Vegas, becoming federal agents--shades of The Untouchables!--still in hot pursuit of Ray Luca, who’d been sent by godfather Manny Wisebord (Joseph Wiseman) to establish mob operations in the casino capital. But all of that transpired with unbelievable speed--the series never did move forward through the 1970s, but instead remained in the “hip” ’60s. And yes, Crime Story offered some outstanding episodes, including the aforementioned “Abrams for the Defense” and a cliffhanger ending to Season One, in which Luca and his loyal but dimwitted henchman, Pauli Taglia (John Santucci), tried to escape by driving across Nevada’s Yucca Flats--just as an atomic bomb was being tested! (The story goes that the producers didn’t think this series would be renewed, so wanted it to go out with a bang.) However, Season Two was rather a disappointment, despite interesting twists such as the launching of a high-profile investigation into American organized crime (modeled on Estes Kefauver’s 1950 hearings, but with Kevin Spacey playing a more John F. Kennedy-like U.S. senator).

Thanks in part to Mann’s clout, Crime Story drew scores of distinguished guest performers, among them David Caruso (who did an excellent turn in the pilot as a mob boss wannabe), Julia Roberts (in her first TV appearance), Ving Rhames, Laura San Giacomo, Stanley Tucci, and even jazz trumpeter Miles Davis.

It also boasted one of television’s coolest opening sequences. Singer Del Shannon provided the theme song--a reworking of his 1961 hit, “Runaway”--while the visuals leaned heavily toward period imagery. The original version combined historical film footage from Chicago (cops on motorcycles, airplanes landing at Midway Airport, commercial neon, etc.) with cuts of the flashing lights and chrome embellishments on vintage gas guzzlers.



After Crime Story’s action moved out west, its main title sequence--embedded at the top of this post--shed what had been dark and moody elements in favor of bursting, effervescent neon from the Las Vegas Strip, combined with appreciative sweeps over gambling tables. Mike Torello and his squad were literally outshone by all the flash and dazzle of Sin City at its glamorous height. (It may be no coincidence that this second opening sequence for Crime Story is reminiscent of the main titles to Robert Urich’s first private eye drama, Vega$, which Michael Mann created.)

Despite these and other strengths, Crime Story failed to live up to NBC’s inflated expectations. As Radiator Heaven recalls:

When the show debuted on September 18, 1986, following Miami Vice, the two-hour pilot had a 20.1 national Nielsen rating and a 32 percent audience share. The ratings dipped when it was counter-programmed against ABC’s Moonlighting. By October, the show dropped below a 22 Nielsen share, where a series is deemed a “failure.” Despite low ratings, Crime Story was picked up by NBC to finish the 1986-87 season. This prompted the network to move the show to Friday nights after Miami Vice on December 5, 1986, where its ratings improved but it still lost to Falcon Crest. NBC temporarily pulled Crime Story off the schedule on March 13, 1987. In order to get more people to watch, Farina and other cast members promoted the show in five U.S. cities.

It was a noble effort, to be sure--enough to win the show a second season. But the optimism didn’t last. The final episode of Crime Story--another cliffhanger, in which most of the regular cast appeared to have been killed when their plane crashed into the Atlantic Ocean--was broadcast on May 10, 1988.

So, was that the end of Mike Torello, Ray Luca, and the rest? Viewers will never know. Executive producer Mann went on to make one more TV series, the police procedural Robbery Homicide Division (2002-2003), but was also responsible for such films as Heat (1995), Miami Vice (2006), and this year’s Public Enemies. Dennis Farina continued doing television, starring in the short-lived comedy-detective series Buddy Faro and then a not-half-bad sitcom called In-Laws before joining the cast of Law & Order for a two-year stint. Shaking off the psychotic killer-rapist mantle he’d worn as Luca, Anthony Denison portrayed an undercover agent in Wiseguy and now plays a cop on Kyra Sedgwick’s TNT-TV crime drama, The Closer. Stephen Lang is currently the co-artistic director of the Actor’s Studio in New York City, and can be seen in the new comedy film, The Men Who Stare at Goats.

Despite periodic calls for a full-length theatrical film that would answer the questions left dangling after Crime Story signed off for the last time 21 years ago, no such production appears to be in the offing. We’re left to watch, and rewatch, the DVD releases of Season One and Season Two and wonder, What happened next?

Double Your Pleasure

Timed to the publication of their first collaborative novel, the historical thriller One Too Many Blows to the Head, authors J.B. (Jennifer) Kohl and Eric Beetner submit to an interview with blogger Cullen Gallagher of Pulp Serenade. In my opinion, one of the most interesting aspects of their exchange is Beetner’s answer to a question about what it’s like to write with a partner:

My favorite part of One Too Many Blows to the Head was getting to write a novel and at the same time read one. With each new chapter that came in I got to get pulled deeper into the story and have it stay fresh for the entire writing process. Sometimes it is easy to get too inside a book when you’re working on it all alone. This allowed us (well, me anyway) to keep a critical eye and respond to the new chapters as a reader first and a writer second. I felt good about sending chapters to Jennifer and having her react the same way. We had a broad outline but things would change and the specifics were all new to each of us every time we would
open an e-mail.

Now I understand why Ken Bruen, Reed Farrel Coleman, and Jason Starr have been writing fiction together in recent years.

You can read all of Pulp Serenade’s interview with Kohl and Beetner here. And the same blog has posted the excellent video trailer for One Too Many Blows to the Head.

From the Battlefield to Books

It’s Veterans Day here in the United States. If you’re looking for some appropriate reading material, Janet Rudolph has a round-up of themed mysteries here.

Meanwhile, Toby O’Brien keeps up a Veterans Day tradition at Inner Toob by focusing on a TV character who served in the military. His subject this time: the immortal Lieutenant Columbo.

The Art of Mystery

Where was I back in 1997, when this wonderful two-part, Masterpiece Theatre production was broadcast on PBS-TV? Asleep, or out of the country? Clearly, I was not paying attention. But thanks to a reminder from Drew Lebby, I just rented Painted Lady from Netflix.

The mini-series was written (by Allan Cubitt) for English actress Helen Mirren after the success of her initial Prime Suspect series. And Mirren is riveting in a role for which you might not have thought to cast her. She plays Maggie Sheridan, a former rock star, who, at age 50, has been reduced by drink and drugs to living rough on the streets of New York City.

Maggie is rescued by a childhood friend, who takes her to his father’s estate in Ireland. There, all hell breaks loose, involving art theft, murder, and one of the scariest screen heavies I’ve seen in a long time, played brilliantly by John Kavanagh. There’s also some lovely glamour and romance as Maggie takes on the identity of a rich Polish countess and becomes involved with an Italian count (Franco Nero).

Really, who could ask for anything more?

Taking It All In

I somehow failed to notice that Mike Ripley had posted a brand-new “Getting Away with Murder” column in Shots. (And this oversight is not merely because M. Ripley is in arrears as regards my monthly promotional checks). So, although belatedly, let us review some of the subjects he’s covering this month: Gillian Flynn’s The Dark Places (“a totally hypnotic story”); Philip Kerr winning the Ellis Peters Historical Award for If the Dead Rise Not; Russell James’ “magisterial” Great British Fictional Villains; and Mark Sanderson’s forthcoming historical thriller, Snow Hill.

To read all that’s on offer, click here.

The Anderson Tapes

My work often puts me in contact with literary agents, and I enjoy hearing their insights into the current state of publishing and future fiction releases. Among the top UK representatives working in the crime fiction and thriller genre are Jane Gregory; Ed Victor, who represents Robert Littell; Judith Murdoch, who looks after Tony Black; Broo Doherty, who takes care of Paul Johnston; Carole Blake, whose clientèle includes Peter James; and Jonny Geller, the agent for Michael Marshall and Tom Rob Smith. But I have interacted with one author rep more than any other, and that’s the legendary Darley Anderson, probably because he represents many of my favorite writers: Lee Child, John Connolly, Chris Mooney, and of course Martina Cole.

So it was delightful to spend a little talking with Anderson during last week’s launch party for Martina Cole’s new Hard Girls, held at London’s Cavendish Square. The affair was predictably manic, and since Cole’s books have engendered more and more interest among television and film folk, many of those sort mingled with (and at points threatened to swamp) the book-oriented guests. To escape the hubbub, I found a quiet corridor in which to have an unusually detailed chat with agent Anderson. (In the photo above, Darley Anderson is the handsome devil on the right, with yours truly.)

Since it was Anderson who “discovered” Cole, we naturally discussed the U.S. release earlier this year of Close, which represented her overdue launch into the American market. This isn’t a particularly good time for U.S. publishing, but Cole’s work has apparently been selling well, perhaps due to the popularity of The Sopranos, which tapped a similar blue-collar criminal vein. Anderson remarked on Cole’s willingness to credit everyone else for her success--her publisher, her editor, her agent--but deny herself acclaim for an engaging no-frills, down-to-earth writing style that attracts readers worldwide. Maybe a favorable U.S. reception will change her tune.

Anderson and I went on to talk about Lee Child. He noted that Child’s U.S. publisher is asking for two new Jack Reacher novels in 2010, and Transworld in the UK will introduce both 61 Hours and an as-yet-unnamed book later next year. I reminded him of the wonderful party he and the author hosted in London a few years back to celebrate Child’s first decade as a published writer. And I shared with Anderson an anecdote relative to that event. Two months after the celebration, my wife and I rented the Woody Allen thriller Matchpoint on DVD. With the kids in bed, we were well into our second bottle of Chardonnay, totally absorbed in Allen’s Highsmith-esque thriller about the dangers of infidelity, when I suddenly coughed up a mouthful of wine and pointed excitedly at the TV screen. The picture showed a couple having a steamy session in a Westminster penthouse. “I was there,” I shouted, much to the bewilderment of my wife. Why, her eyes asked suspiciously, had I been anywhere near a place where married people engaged in illicit engagements? “No,” I said quickly, “I don’t mean I had an affair there. That apartment was where Lee Child and Darley Anderson hosted the ‘Jack Reacher Decade in Publishing’ party--in Westminster Tower, overlooking the Thames.” She tutted me. “You and your books,” my wife said with a sigh.

Moving from Child to John Connolly, I reminded Anderson that the latter has also now reached the end of his first decade as a published novelist. And Connolly’s work certainly shows the benefits of that experience. His latest private eye Charlie Parker novel, The Lovers, will likely wind up as one of my favorite books of 2009. Anderson agreed with that assessment, adding that he was sure Irishman Connolly had talent when he picked the first Parker book, Every Dead Thing (1999), out of his slush pile.

I made it a point to congratulate Anderson on supporting Connolly’s ventures into literary territory beyond the popular Parker series, including The Gates, his recently published young adult novel. And I went on to explain that during my attendance at the Indianapolis Bouchercon in October, editor George Easter of Deadly Pleasures had announced that he was scheduling The Gates as the subject of his magazine’s next “Reviewed to Death” feature. All of DP’s critics will be asked to read Connolly’s book and comment on it, giving readers a huge cross-section of opinions.

Anderson voiced curiosity at how I can read so many books each year. I’m passionate about crime fiction, I answered, but then admitted I can now only finish a small proportion of the novels I start reading. Unless they really “hit the spot,” they’re abandoned soon after I crack their spines. My free time is simply too tight to spend hours with fiction that doesn’t captivate me by page 60 (although that isn’t an altogether reliable gauge--an exception was the aforementioned Every Dead Thing, which I almost gave up on, due to the unrelenting grimness of the opening section, but stuck with and liked by its end). I told Anderson that I wind up reviewing only the novels I complete. A very small number of those am I really enthusiastic about, and willing to champion--works such as Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Tom Rob Smith’s Child 44, and Nick Stone’s Mr. Clarinet.

“That’s what I love about you,” Anderson said, laughing. “Your enthusiasm is so bloody infectious.”

It was happy with this opportunity to speak at length with Darley Anderson. But our time together ended when Martin Nield from Headline, Cole’s publisher, arrived with the author herself in tow. We proceeded to raise our glasses to Cole’s success at booting Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol from the top of the UK bestseller charts. If anyone could do it, the author of Hard Girls--something of a hard girl herself--was up to the task.

Maybe Crime Does Pay

You’ll have to forgive us if we don’t reproduce the entire longlist for the 2009 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the commendation referred to as the “world’s most valuable annual literary prize for a single work of fiction published in English.” It’s a very long list, indeed.

Nominations have come from 163 libraries in 123 cities and 43 countries worldwide. The authors of the longlisted books, announced by the Lord Mayor of Dublin last week, hope to win the €100,000 award--but, as any bookmaker worth his salt will tell you, the odds aren’t that good for any singlee title: the longlist comprises 156 novels representing authors from 46 countries.

Of the longlisted works, some are likely to resonate more strongly with Rap Sheet readers than others. Here are a few: The Black Tower, by Louis Bayard; Blood Trail, by C.J. Box; The Given Day, by Dennis Lehane; Arctic Chill, by Arnaldur Indridason; Child 44, by Tom Rob Smith; This Night’s Foul Work, by Fred Vargas; Lush Life, by Richard Price; Blackstrap Hawco, by Kenneth J. Harvey; Diablerie, by Walter Mosley; and The Enchantress of Florence, by Salman Rushdie.

The complete longlist is here.

From Page to Stage

Publishers love authors with innovative promotional ideas. And every author these days is working up some better means of getting the word out about his or her new book. Hard Case Crime editor Charles Ardai just sent me a note about one such scheme put forth by Jonny Porkpie, the self-proclaimed Burlesque Mayor of New York City:

The author of our December title (no, not A.C. Doyle--the other one) is a full-time burlesque performer and producer, and he’s debuting a new live stage show called “Lurid Pulp” at [New York’s] Bleecker Street Theatre to coincide with the publication of his Hard Case Crime novel, The Corpse Wore Pasties. (The book comes out on 11/24; the show will run for the two Saturday nights on either side, 11/21 and 11/28.)

It’s all very meta: The book’s a roman à clef set in the world of burlesque, starring a character also named Jonny Porkpie and filled with other characters based on real-life performers. The show, in turn, stars those very performers, and it tells the story of how Jonny Porkpie winds up murdered after the performers get wind of how they’ve been portrayed in his book. It’s part stage show (readers will get to see all the burlesque numbers described in the book performed live on stage) and part interactive whodunit (audience members will get to interact with the cast), and for people who don’t mind seeing half-dressed dames running around (including the book’s two gorgeous cover models), I think it’ll
be loads of fun.

For more information, click here.

Bullet Points: Fall Feast Edition

• Shots magazine columnist and author Mike Ripley has undertaken an intriguing new venture with Britain’s Ostara Publishing, a print-on-demand house. He says that he’ll act as the editor of a line of reprinted “British thrillers from my youth.” The initial four titles are being made available this month: Snake Water, by Alan Williams; A Clear Road to Archangel, by Geoffrey Rose; The Terrible Door, by George Sims; and Night of Glass, by Philip Purser. “The combined age of our three still-living authors is, I think, 234,” Ripley remarks in an e-note, “but they are very happy to see their books back in print, as is the widow of the late George Sims.”

• Howard Duff does another fine turn as radio’s Sam Spade in “The Battles of the Belvedere Caper,” now available for your listening pleasure at Davy Crockett’s Almanack. I also owe a tip of the hat to Almanack honcho Evan Lewis, who this weekend touts The Rap Sheet with particular cleverness: “And when you’re done listening, please pay a visit to The Rap Sheet, the blog that helps you get ahead socially and on the job (and also cures dandruff). Sam swears it’s the next best thing to Wildroot Cream-Oil.”

• By the way, I only realized today that these Sam Spade radio adventures aren’t available at Davy Crockett’s Almanack permanently. So either listen to them right away, or refer to the Internet Archive for shows you’ve missed.

• Steve Bissette celebrates the James Bond promotional illustrations created during the 1960s by artist Frank McCarthy. Click here. (Hat tip to Spy Vibe.)

• And may the best femme fatale win: Twenty-nine-year-old Eva Green, who made herself more than memorable in the 2006 James Bond film, Casino Royale, has taken it all off for the latest edition of the British “style bible” Tatler. The image of her perched naked on a table in front of a mirror is the more-or-less re-creation of a famous 1973 shot of Charlotte Rampling (Farewell, My Lovely, Sherlock Holmes in New York) taken by Helmut Newton. Compare the photographs, er, back to back here.

• Actor Philip Glenister, who played crude, chauvinistic, and altogether colorful Detective Chief Inspector Gene Hunt on BBC-TV’s Life on Mars, and reprises that role on the show’s sequel, Ashes to Ashes, shares memories of his portrayal with NPR’s Scott Simon. Delightfully listenable.

• It looks as if NUM3RS’ number is up.

• “The death of a crime fiction writer with as many books as James Pattinson produced should not go unnoted,” writes Mystery*File’s Steve Lewis in his brief notice about Pattinson’s passing on October 18. Jiro Kimura of The Gumshoe Site provides a synopsis of the novelist’s career: “He was a prolific British writer of more than 100 books of thrillers and sea novels, starting with The Mystery of the Gregory Kotovsky (Harrap, 1958; U.S. title: The Silent Voyage) and ending with The Unknown (Hale, 2008). Only [a] few of his novels have been published in the U.S., and he had a couple of series characters: Sam Grant (in Search Warrant; Hale, 1973) and Harvey Landon (in Contact Mur. Delgado; Harrap, 1959). He was 94.”

• Northern California writer Sophie Littlefield (A Bad Day for Sorry) provides this week’s short story in Beat to a Pulp. Her fine contribution is called “Mortification.”

• This year’s recipient of the Black Orchid Novella Award won’t even be announced until early next month, during the annual Black Orchid Banquet in New York City. Already, though, the Rex Stout fan organization, The Wolfe Pack, has let it be known that May 31, 2010, will be the deadline for submissions to its fourth annual contest. Entries can range from 15,000 to 20,000 words in length. The winner receives $1,000 and publication of his or her story in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. For more entry details, click here.

• A hearty congratulations to Ivan G. Shreve Jr. of Thrilling Days of Yesteryear on his blog’s third anniversary. Please keep up the excellent work, Ivan.

• The latest interviewee at Jeff Rutherford’s Reading and Writing Podcast site is Meg Gardiner, author of The Memory Collector.

• Canada’s capital city will be the center of crime next Saturday, November 14, as the Ottawa Public Library (120 Metcalfe Street) hosts the Capital Crime Writers’ 20th anniversary author and fan festival. The panels, workshops, readings, and signings will run from 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. More information here.

• Good for Representative Joseph Cao (R-Louisiana). Despite last night’s historic success in the U.S. House, health-care reform legislation still has a long way to go before it’s approved by Congress and signed into law by President Obama. But Cao’s demonstration of courage and rare cooperation from the “Party of No” is a sign that it’s not just Democrats who see the importance of providing all Americans with quality, affordable health care.

• A preview of Maxim Jakubowski’s new maXcrime line.

• During this last May’s CrimeFest in Bristol, England, some of the critics from Euro Crime had the chance to interview Don Bartlett, “perhaps best known to crime fiction readers as the translator of Jo Nesbø’s and K.O. Dahl’s books, from the Norwegian to English.” The three-part results of their conversation can now be found in the Euro Crime blog, here, here, and here.

• Much to his own amazement, it seems, Bookgasm crime-fiction columnist Bruce Grossman dives into three “Vintage Collection” titles from publisher Harlequin--and comes away disappointed. At least those books boast terrific covers.

• More classic Patricia Highsmith book jackets. But no nude author art to go with them this time.

• Scottish novelist Tony Black talks about his standout Gus Dury series (Gutted) with The Inverness Courier.

• Huffington Post columnist and author Jason Pinter consults blogger-critic Sarah Weinman, Mystery Scene editor Kate Stine, South Florida Sun-Sentinel mystery fiction columnist Oline H. Cogdill, and others on the state of the crime novel. My favorite part of the discussion is probably Cogdill’s response to the question, “Do you feel like publishers are taking the same care to grow authors as they did 10, 15, 20 years ago, or is there more of a ‘swing for the fences’ mentality?” Cogdill replies:

Absolutely not. Publishers and even agents do not have the time anymore for the care and feeding of an author. Would F. Scott Fitzgerald have become Fitzgerald without the nurturing of Maxwell Perkins? Bennett Cerf had a talent in building and maintaining relations with authors such as William Faulkner, John O’Hara, James Michener. Because of him, Random House supported them and they supported Random House. Does that relationship exist anymore? Today, writers have to bring their “A” game the minute they turn in their manuscript.

• F.G. Cottam (The Magdalena Curse) has been selected as Crime Squad’s author of the month.

• Congratulations to one of my favorite National Public Radio hosts, Liane Hansen, on the 20th anniversary of Weekend Edition Sunday.

• And watch tonight for the second and concluding installment of A Place of Execution, the excellent ITV adaptation of Val McDermid’s 2000 standalone novel, which will be broadcast on PBS-TV. It begins at 9 p.m. on Masterpiece Classic.

I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere

There’s a Sherlock Holmes fest going on this weekend at The Tainted Archive, where author-actor Gary Dobbs presents interviews, features, stories, and reviews.

Some of the highlights thus far: a rundown of unlikely Holmes portrayers; Evan Lewis’ critique of Sherlock Holmes, Jr., starring Buster Keaton; a review of the 1944 Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce film, The Scarlet Claw; Hard Case Crime editor Charles Ardai on The Valley of Fear as hard-boiled detective fiction; the full text of “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” (1892); a review of The Mammoth Book of New Sherlock Holmes Adventures, edited by Mike Ashley; a peek at the forthcoming film, Sherlock Holmes; and the entire Holmes canon reviewed in several parts (look for Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI, and Part VII).

Dobbs promises that more posts are yet come. Stay tuned.

Buy a Book, Save a Shop

Let’s face it: bookstores have had a pretty rough ride this year. Between the (cheerfully monikered) economic meltdown (cue scary music now), the rising tide of electronic books and the hardcover price wars that took place earlier this autumn, there must have been at least a few days in 2009 when some booksellers just didn’t want to get out of bed.

All of this leads us to the Publishers Weekly-sponsored National Bookstore Day, the idea being that bookstores will be front and center today, November 7. Says PW:

Event organizers are hoping promotions tied to the day will attract local and national media coverage--and, in turn, draw new customers into bookstores. “The number of stores already signed up meets our rosiest hopes for this first year. Many of the stores celebrating National Bookstore Day are recognized nationally as leaders, so we’re gratified that this idea has been endorsed by these savvy booksellers,” said Ron Shank, PW group publisher. Among the offerings that bookstores are planning are author signings, children’s activities, discounts, extended hours, free refreshments, marathon “read-aloud” events, raffles and writing contests.

Although this idea is certainly laudable, as National Bookstore Day kicks off, it doesn’t seem to possess the same sort of traction achieved earlier this year by American thriller author Joseph Finder’s grassroots “Buy Indie Day.”

Even so, every conscious step taken moves us in the right direction. The message is one to cherish and remember: books are important. So are the people who buy, make, and sell them. The place books have in our lives is of value: it’s meaningful to us. And if we take all of this as read, it behooves us to do everything in our collective power to keep independent bookstores not only in business but thriving. And how do we do that? We try to raise awareness. We raise readers. We spread the word.

And then we shop.

Pros with Pens

Two soon-to-be-published novels by fine crime writers recently arrived in my mailbox, and were very much enjoyed:

The Morning Show Murders, by Al Roker and Dick Lochte (Delacorte; November). Network television can be murder, as Today show weather guy Roker knows. Just ask his hero, Billy Blessing, famous for his smile, charm, and ability to survive the shark tank that is high-stakes morning broadcasting. While Roker may have personally enriched the terrain where this tale takes place, a lot of the book’s smarts obviously come from Lochte, a longtime crime-fiction reviewer for the Los Angeles Times and the Nero Award-winning author of mysteries such as Blue Bayou, Croaked!, Laughing Dog, Sleeping Dog, and The Neon Smile.

The Traitor in Us All, by Robert S. Levinson (Five Star; February). Says Jeffery Deaver about best-selling author Levinson’s latest: “Absolutely top-notch ... a delicious blend of the best in thriller writing.” No surprise here: Levinson has been stirring up delicious blends for many years. His series starring a Hollywood movie and music couple, Neil Gulliver and Stevie Marriner, reflects the author’s earlier career as an ace publicist. Such previous works as Hot Paint, The Elvis and Marilyn Affair, The James Dean Affair, and The John Lennon Affair are wonderfully bitchy reads.

The Book You Have to Read: “The First Deadly Sin,” by Lawrence Sanders

(Editor’s note: This is the 70th installment of our ongoing Friday blog series highlighting great but forgotten books. Today’s must-read choice comes from L.J. Sellers, an award-winning journalist, editor, novelist, and occasional standup comic based in Eugene, Oregon. She writes the Detective Wade Jackson mystery series. Two of those novels are already in print--The Sex Club and Secrets to Die For--and two more are in the works. Thrilled to Death will be released in 2010, along with a standalone thriller, The Baby Thief.)

The First Deadly Sin (1973), by Lawrence Sanders, is why I love police procedurals. It’s probably why I write them. I read the story my first year in college on a break between terms. Sanders’ characterizations of the cop, the killer, the conspirator, and the victims blew me away. His characters were so unlike anyone I had ever known or read about. The details were so intimate that I completely lost my sense of self at times while I was reading. It was one of the first and only books in which that happened for me.

The novel was called “shocking and boldly original” when it first came out. It was labeled a “psychosexual thriller,” and some reviewers say it set the standard for all the psychological thrillers to follow. After five months on the New York Times Bestseller List, The First Deadly Sin was still at number five. Eventually, it was made into a movie that most people agree was badly casted and not worthy of the novel.

Sanders’ writing in this first book (in what would become a series) is precisely crafted, beautifully detailed, intellectual, and leisurely, unlike many of today’s mysteries and thrillers (including my own) that rush along to a tumultuous ending. If your only exposure to Lawrence Sanders’ work is the Archy McNally series, which he developed late in his career, put that out of your mind. Because this novel--and the other Deadly Sin/Edward X. Delaney stories--is so different from that series, it’s almost as if they had different authors.

The First Deadly Sin is not a traditional mystery. The reader knows the killer, Daniel Blank, from the beginning. This tale’s suspense is built in the pitting of one man against another, good against evil. You turn the pages quickly, eager to know even more about each man, what he will do next, and who will triumph in the long run.

Although Daniel Blank is evil, he is not sadistic. He doesn’t want his victims to suffer, and he’s disturbed when one of them lies in the hospital for days before he dies. In fact, Blank loves his victims for the joy they give him (“he felt that sense of heightened intimacy, of entering into another, merging, so far beyond love that there was no comparison”). Blank is a fascinating study of a killer who is intelligent and compassionate, meticulous in the details of how he lives, sexually adventurous, and ultimately twisted. Naming him “Blank” is a clever mischaracterization, for the slayer in these pages is anything but a blank slate.

Sanders does equal justice to New York Police Captain Edward X. Delaney (previously introduced in 1969’s Edgar Award-winning novel The Anderson Tapes. His characterization is so perfect, that for me, Delaney will always be the ultimate homicide investigator. His tenacity, intelligence, compassion, and humanity set the bar for all subsequent investigators to reach. Sanders wrote The First Deadly Sin in an era before it was common to give detectives and FBI agents serious character flaws, and Delaney has none, save an occasional smart-ass comment.

He’s also more than just a great investigator. He’s a family man, who tenderly cares for his sick wife, Barbara, and a dedicated detective who takes on a case while on leave of absence. In addition, Captain Delaney is the first male investigator I encountered--back in the ’70s--who truly respected women. At one point, Sanders writes:

He wished with all his heart he could discuss this with Barbara, as he had discussed every important decision in his career. He needed her sharp, practical, aggressive, female intelligence to probe motives, choices, possibilities, safeguards. He tried, he strained to put himself in her place, to think as she might think and to decide as she might decide.

There were so many things I admired about the protagonist that I’m a little ashamed to confess that whenever I visualize Delaney, I see him standing at the kitchen sink, eating a sandwich made of rare roast beef, red onion, beefsteak tomato, and garlic-spiced mayonnaise. He stood at the sink, because his creations were often messy and he was a man on the move.

Yet Delaney’s investigation is not perfect. Daniel Blank kills three men, including a police officer, before the investigator discovers his identity. Even then, Delaney does not have the evidence to prove anything. So he taunts the killer, first by coercing the widow of one of Blank’s victims to call him, then by contacting Blank directly. The psychological tension in the final pages is nerve-racking.

This novel is not for everyone, but readers who enjoy great writing, carefully developed characters, and a story that slowly, steadily pulls them in deeper and deeper should read, or re-read, The First Deadly Sin. I also recommend the story to writers as a model for some of the best characterization they’ll ever encounter.

Not So Forgotten Anymore

After you have enjoyed L.J. Sellers’ critique on this page of The First Deadly Sin, by Lawrence Sanders, look up a few of the other “forgotten books” being touted around the blogosphere. Among today’s crime-fiction choices: Six Deadly Dames, by Frederick Nebel; We All Killed Grandma, by Fredric Brown; Murder at the Villa Rose, by A.E.W. Mason; Blackstone’s Fancy, by Richard Falkirk; Have Gat--Will Travel, by Richard S. Prather; A Death for a Dancer, by E.X. Giroux; One Lonely Night, by Mickey Spillane; Diamond Head, by Charles Knief; and Who Goes Hang? by Stanley Hyland.

Click on over to Patti Abbott’s blog for several more choices from the dusty back stacks, including David Goodis’ Black Friday. She also provides a full list of today’s participating writers.

Let the Accolades Begin!

Here comes the annual onslaught of year-end “best books” lists, beginning with Publishers Weekly. There’s plenty of controversy surrounding the fact that none of the titles on PW’s top-10 rundown was written by a woman. But what’s lost in all of that is the fact that so many choices in the Fiction and Mystery categories are crime fiction: Michael Connelly’s The Scarecrow, Thomas H. Cook’s The Fate of Katherine Carr, Gillian Flynn’s Dark Places, George Dawes Green’s Ravens, Reggie Nadelson’s Londongrad, Craig Johnson’s The Dark Horse, and more.

Meanwhile, one book from the crime-fiction/thriller field--Stieg Larsson’s The Girl Who Played with Fire--finds a place on Amazon.com’s top-10 choices. But a number of others have made it onto the site’s rundown of 100 favorites from 2009, including The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, by Alan Bradley; The Defector, by Daniel Silva; Blood’s a Rover, by James Ellroy; Nobody Move, by Denis Johnson; and Inherent Vice, by Thomas Pynchon.

Get It--or Else

This past April, Atlantic Monthly Press released a frightening and unusual thriller called Ultimatum, by a British physician writing under the pseudonym Matthew Glass.

My son, who operates a non-profit company called CALCEF (California Clean Energy Fund), read a review of Ultimatum in The Economist, and because of its subject matter bought an Advance Review Copy from AbeBooks. He was immediately gripped--as was I when I began to read the same novel on my new Kindle.

This book is set in 2032, when a new Democratic president is elected after years of unemployment, growing public anger, and failed environmental promises by a Republican who sounds very much like George W. Bush. Shortly after his election, the Democrat is summoned by the outgoing president to a private meeting. There he receives the news that greenhouse gas emissions have begun to increase at an alarming rate. The Republican chief executive and his aides have tried to open secret negotiations with China, the world’s worst polluter of the atmosphere, but the Chinese government wants to wait on those until the new president finally takes office.

To put it simply, Ultimatum is an amazing piece of work, a
political thriller that is unusually full of both believable politics and genuine storytelling thrills.

So why in the world has this book received so little notice since its original publication? There have been no reviews in either The New York Times or the Los Angeles Times, and Ultimatum’s sales ranking on Amazon is lower than a Philly fan’s spirits.

Do yourself a favor and find a copy of this most worthy thriller. It’s available in a Kindle version, a few copies can be found at BookFinder, and a paperback edition is due out in February. Now you know why it’s worth reading.

Driven to Choose

Hard to believe, isn’t it. TV.com has put together a list called “Our 10 Favorite TV Cars.” Selections include Starsky and Hutch’s Gran Torino, The A-Team’s “badass” GMC van (can a van ever reasonably be called “badass”?), The Green Hornet’s Chrysler Crown Imperial, and Batman’s winged Lincoln Futura concept car ... but there’s no mention whatsoever of the gold Pontiac Firebird in which James Garner screamed around Los Angeles on The Rockford Files.

How much credibility can a list like this have, if it doesn’t include private eye Rockford’s signature wheels?

“It Feels Like Forever”

Congratulations to Double O Section on its third “blogiversary.”

All the Nudes Fit to Print

At the conclusion of a interesting post about various smartly designed editions of Patricia Highsmith’s five Tom Ripley novels, the Caustic Cover Critic blog notes: “Highsmith, by the way, is the only serious writer I can think of who had the dubious honour of getting a nude photo of herself put on the cover of her biography (and not by her choice, given that she was dead several years before it was published) ...” He includes that shot in his post.

The Story Behind the Story: “The Big Wake-Up,” by Mark Coggins

(Editor’s note: The last time most Americans heard much about Argentina, it was in relation to South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford’s fiction about hiking the Appalachian Trail, when in fact he was visiting a mistress in Buenos Aires. But even that Republican’s scandalous adventures weren’t as dramatic as the plot of The Big Wake-Up, Mark Coggins’ fifth novel, due out in bookstores this week. The novel’s synopsis reads this way: “When San Francisco private August Riordan engages in a flirtation with a beautiful university student from Buenos Aires, he witnesses her death in a tragic shooting and is drawn into the mad hunt for [former Argentine first lady Eva Perón’s] remains. He needs all of his wits, his network of friends and associates, and an unexpected legacy from the dead father he has never known to help him survive the deadly intrigue between powerful Argentine movers and shakers, ex-military men, and a mysterious woman named Isis who is an expert in ancient techniques of mummification.” Below, Coggins tells us about his new novel’s inspiration.)

The genesis of The Big Wake-Up came from a tour I took of Buenos Aires’ famous La Recoleta Cemetery on Christmas morning in December 2007. My wife and I decided to spend the holidays in Argentina, and we had arrived the evening before. That morning I was eager to get out the door and into the capital city to do things, but I had been warned that there was in fact very little to do on a Christmas day in Buenos Aires.

All government offices, museums, and most restaurants were closed. The one tourist attraction that remained open was La Recoleta. And quite an attraction it is--assuming you can get past the fact that it’s populated with dead people. An immense place covering more than 13 acres, the cemetery is laid out like a city with paved walks subdividing blocks and blocks of house-like mausoleums, statues, and monuments, some of which date from the 1800s. If the architecture isn’t enough of a draw by itself, there are the residents. La Recoleta is the final resting place for innumerable Argentine presidents, scientists, military leaders, and captains of industry. It is also home to Maria Eva Duarte de Perón: Evita, to those of you who’ve seen the play or the movie. (Left: The Duarte tomb.)

My guide that morning was Robert Wright. He’s a tour guide, guidebook researcher, and writer in Europe for travel authority Rick Steves, and at that time was making his home in Buenos Aires. Wright has a special interest in La Recoleta and has spent considerable time and energy documenting it for his blog and the comprehensive map he has made of the burial grounds.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from his tour, but I found it an intriguing mix of Argentine history, politics, art, and architecture. It was from Wright that I first heard the story of Evita Perón’s incredible “afterlife” following an early death from cervical cancer in 1952. I learned how her body was specially preserved like those of Vladimir Lenin or Mao Zedong; how it fell into the hands of the military dictatorship that overthrew her husband, Juan Perón; and how the military leaders decided to bury her under a false name in Milan, Italy, to avoid having her grave become a shrine and a rallying point for government opposition.

I also visited the last resting place of one of those leaders: Pedro Eugenio Aramburu. In 1970, he was kidnapped and executed by a Peronist guerrilla group seeking the return of Perón to power--and the return of Evita’s body (right) to Argentina. Aramburu was buried in La Recoleta, but the same Peronist group pried open his crypt and seized his corpse, holding it hostage until Evita’s body came home to a secured underground vault in Recoleta, just a couple hundred yards from his desecrated grave. When Aramburu’s remains were finally released, authorities thought it prudent to pour concrete over his coffin before closing the lid to the crypt to ensure that he was never disturbed again. I saw the hardened concrete oozing from the seams.

Returning to the United States in the new year, I decided that the story of Evita’s afterlife would provide an excellent foundation for my next novel, so I abandoned plans to write about the (fictional) discovery and theft of an unknown Jack Kerouac manuscript (The Dead Beat Scroll). I found a book called Santa Evita, by Tomás Eloy Martínez, that provided more bizarre details about the efforts of the military to hide her body, such as the fact that there were duplicates made of it to mislead the Peronist groups searching for it, that strange misfortunes seemed to befall the men guarding her before she was buried in Italy, and that some of her guards may have engaged in necrophilia.

In spite of all the research into the specifics of Evita’s afterlife in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, I set The Big Wake-Up in present-day San Francisco. I didn’t attempt a fictional dramatization of historical events. What I did attempt to do was answer the following question: What if Evita was actually buried in the Bay Area (and the body in La Recoleta is a duplicate)?

That scenario--and the implications of it for groups in modern Argentina--is what my private eye protagonist, August Riordan, and his sidekick, Chris Duckworth, struggle to come to grips with. And although I’ve eschewed re-creation of past events, as you can see from the excellent cover artist Owen Smith did for The Big Wake-Up, I’m not above duplicating a little old-fashioned grave robbery.

Bullet Points: Post-Spooks Edition

Halloween turned out to be a lot more exciting at my house than I’d expected. We welcomed at least 45 trick-or-treaters, which is about twice as many as we usually see. (Maybe it was the double pumpkins and Christmas lights that drew those crowds.) Fortunately, I had plenty of sweets on hand--enough to give everybody generous helpings (which led one tyke in superhero garb to bellow out to his compatriots on the street, “This guy’s giving away handfuls of candy!”). During the height of the night’s frenzy, I saw robots and vampires and the occasional ballerina, but it was the pretty long-legged blond teenager, maybe 19 years old and dressed in a skimpy outfit not dissimilar from the one topping this post, who really made me glad to have gone all-out for the occasion.

Now, though, it’s time to return to the “real world” of crime fiction. A few developments worth mentioning:

• As the free-TV Web site Hulu prepares to begin charging its customers (perhaps as early as next year), another similar site--AOL’s SlashControl--enters the market. SlashControl’s offerings are pretty skimpy right now (unless you’ve been dying to gander at old episodes of Scarecrow and Mrs. King, Spenser: For Hire, or CHiPs), but maybe with some expansion it can make up for the loss of Hulu. And I do mean loss. I have enjoyed revisiting such Hulu-hosted programs as Peacemakers, The Fall Guy, Deadline, Charlie’s Angels, Hill Street Blues, It Takes a Thief, K-Ville, Raines, Moonlighting, L.A. Dragnet, Miami Vice, Simon & Simon, The Rockford Files, and Lou Grant. But would I pay to keep it up? Not a chance. I may be watching lots of Hulu before January 1.

• National Public Radio’s Glen Weldon examines the current boomlet in crime-centered comic books for adults.

• Fans of the 1965-1966 British TV show The Baron, which was based on stories by John Creasey and starred Steve Forrest as “an antiques dealer and undercover agent working in an informal capacity for the head of the fictional British Diplomatic Intelligence,” will be glad to hear that the complete series has been released on DVD.

• I was sorry to hear about the recent death of UK thriller writer Lionel Davidson. Although not well known on this side of the Atlantic, he won three Gold Dagger Awards from the British Crime Writers’ Association, the first of those for his 1960 novel, The Night of Wenceslas. There’s more on Davidson and his career here and here.

• Bill Crider directs my attention to a new site called iPulp Fiction. There you can purchase short fiction by well-known writers at very minimal cost online. The multiplicity of genres covered is pretty impressive already, with more tales to come.

• I didn’t even know there were words to the theme song for Kojak, Telly Savalas’ 1973-1978 TV series, much less that Sammy Davis Jr. could have been persuaded to sing them.

• Brian Lindenmuth is right when he says that artist Aly Fell ought to get more work from publishers of pulpish paperbacks. Wow!

• I don’t know about you, but I’ve certainly been enjoying the chance to listen to classic Sam Spade radio adventures, courtesy of Evan Lewis at Davy Crockett’s Almanack. The latest installment is called “The Vaphio Cup Caper.”

• This 1960s TV commercial makes the game Twister look all innocent. I guess it wasn’t really meant to be played in the nude ...

• Sarah Weinman brings the news that Don Winslow, the California author of last year’s “surf noir” novel, The Dawn Patrol, has been tapped to write the prequel to Trevanian’s 1979 thriller, Shibumi.

• Frankly, I’d be overjoyed simply to watch Chuck actress Yvonne Strahovski unscrew a can of peanut butter. But she gives us considerably more in this video clip from TV Squad, talking about her surprise that Chuck was renewed and filling us in a bit on where the comedy-spy series is headed in its coming third season.

• Two new crime novels have been put through the Page 69 Test at Campaign for the American Reader: Derek Nikitas’ The Long Division and Charles Kipps’ Hell’s Kitchen Homicide.

• There’s a nice, if short, profile of novelist Philip Kerr in The Scotsman. Kerr, who just picked up the British Crime Writers’ Association’s Ellis Peters Historical Award for his 2009 Bernie Gunther novel, If the Dead Rise Not, tells the paper: “This is my best book, to be honest. Some of them have been better than others. The CWA is the first crime-writing award I have won in this country. I’ve been at it for 19 years.”

• Ali Karim has collected all of the video trailers for the forthcoming Martin Scorcese film adaptation of Dennis Lehane’s creepy 2003 novel, Shutter Island. He has also posted a few other videos of Lehane speaking. See them all here.

• And I don’t think I mentioned this before, but that the Fall 2009 issue of Mysterical-E has been posted. The contents include short stories by Stephen D. Rogers, Dave Siddall, and Dee Stuart; Gerald So’s look at recent animated crime films; and Byron McAllister’s advice on avoiding dated-ness in fiction.

Some Thoughts on Today’s Voting ...

... if you’re in the mood for a politics fix.

The Plundering Po8

(Editor’s note: I usually reserve my writing about history for one of my other blogs, Limbo. But today marks an anniversary that is potentially as interesting to readers with a taste for crime as it would be to students of western Americana. It was 126 years ago that the California highwayman known as Black Bart [left] stopped his last stagecoach, intent on robbing it. I recalled that incident in my 1995 book, San Francisco, You’re History! For those of you not conversant in the legend and curious truth about this masked man, I offer my entire essay--with small additions--below.)

This legend begins at a desolate spot between what was then known as Punta Arenas and Duncan’s Mills on the Russian River, just north of San Francisco. It was there, on August 3, 1877, that a lone highwayman wearing a long, soiled white linen duster and a flour sack over his head, with slits cut out for his eyes, stepped boldly in front of a stagecoach, pointed a 12-gauge shotgun at the driver, and forced him to halt. With the horses still sweating and the stage’s dust settling in whorls about them all, the bandit gave the four-word instruction that would become infamous in Northern California over the next six years of his criminal career: “Throw down the box.”

It was a “deep and hollow” voice, as the coach driver later explained, the sort of voice that brooks no disobedience. But the shotgun was even more commanding. Without hesitation, the stage man tossed over the pine-and-iron strong box he was carrying for Wells, Fargo & Company, and he was relieved when the bandit, with peculiar politeness, told him to ride on. The masked man made no attempt to rob either the driver or his passengers.

The box was later found--empty. The mysterious brigand had escaped with $300 in coins and a check for $305.52, drawn on the Grangers’ Bank of San Francisco. But he had left something behind--a splenetic rhyme, penned on the back of a waybill, each sentence scribed meticulously in a slightly different manner, as if to confound handwriting analysis:

I’ve labored long and hard for bread--
For honor and for riches--
But on my corns too long you’ve tred,
You fine-haired sons of bitches.

The quatrain was signed “Black Bart, the Po8.”

Most people who heard about this crime must have gotten a hoot out of Bart’s clean getaway and his pretensions toward “Po8try.” Wells, Fargo, however, was anything but amused. Company managers put their offices up and down California on the lookout for this robber-poet, but their description of him could have fit thousands of men. The Grangers’ Bank check was never cashed. And Bart let his trail cool for almost a year before he reappeared.

* * *

This time he struck high in the Sierras, leveling his shotgun at the driver of a stage headed through the Feather River Valley, from Quincy to Oroville. Again, he told the driver to surrender his strong box, only this time Bart’s take was better--$379 in currency, a diamond ring allegedly worth another $200, and a $25 silver watch. He also absconded with a U.S. Mail bag, but the contents of that have never been delineated.

Bart’s doggerel on this occasion seemed more confident than confrontational:

Here I lay me down to sleep
To wait the comming morrow,
Perhaps success, perhaps defeat,
and everlasting sorrow.
Let come what will I’ll try it on,
My condition can’t be worse;
And if there’s money in that box
’Tis munny in my purse!

California Governor William Irwin posted a $300 reward for Bart’s “capture and conviction.” Wells, Fargo added $300, and postal authorities threw in another $200. The price on his head only led Bart to take more chances, not fewer. He held up three more stages over the next week, all of them northwest of San Francisco. But contrary to legend, never again did he leave a calling card of verse, as if he was either suffering writer’s block or worried that his literary pretensions might offer some clue to his identity.

Bart’s modus operandi rarely changed. He made the 28 stagecoach assaults of his career in wide-open territory, near the crest of steep grades, where horses would be winded and slower than normal. He always had his loose coat and his flour sack mask, but there’s some dispute as to whether he also wore a derby on top of the sack or underneath it to make him appear taller. His rifle was in evidence but never fired. (It was later learned that he never even loaded the gun.) He always cut the mail sacks with a “T,” and he used an old ax to open the strong boxes, then left the ax behind.

Many of his victims described him as a gentleman. As the story goes, a frightened woman once tossed Bart her purse after he had ordered her stage driver to “throw down the box!” He kindly returned it to her, insisting that all he wanted was the Wells, Fargo strong box and the U.S. Mail bag. Such yarns made Black Bart a darling of the San Francisco press and, later, fine grist for penny-novel writers.

Although his crimes were committed far away from civilization, Bart never rode a horse, but instead walked with a blanket roll and camped out when necessary. Yet he covered a lot of ground, in three separate districts of Northern California: north of San Francisco, in Shasta County, and to the north of Sacramento. Even Wells, Fargo was impressed by his stamina, describing their masked adversary as a “thorough mountaineer.”

* * *

Ending this highwayman’s career would be difficult, but James B. Hume, chief investigator for Wells, Fargo, was determined to carry out the task. His first big break came in finding some people who thought they’d seen or even dined with a man who might be Black Bart. They’d encountered him walking cross-country in the general vicinity of Bart’s crimes. One said the stranger had graying brown hair, with patches of baldness at the temples, two missing front teeth, a mustache, and slender hands that showed no evidence of hard work. They all remarked upon his gentility and added that, surely, such a well-mannered soul could not be a bandit. Could he?

Hume’s second break came after what would prove to be Black Bart’s last holdup, on November 3, 1883.

In the predawn of that fateful morning, Reason E. McConnell, a driver for the Nevada Stage Company, left the town of Sonora, en route west to Milton. Along the way, he stopped first at Tuttletown, where he picked up 228 ounces of gold amalgam from the Patterson Mine and locked them into his strong box, which already contained $550 in gold coin and about 3.25 ounces of raw gold dust. Then McConnell made a second stop, for breakfast, at Reynolds Ferry, where he took on a passenger--a 19-year-old named Jimmy Rolleri, who wanted to do a little small-game hunting down the stagecoach road.

McConnell was happy to have the company. But Jimmy wasn’t seeing any animals, so when the stage had to go up one particularly steep hill, the teenager grabbed his repeating rifle and said he would rather walk around it, maybe flush some dinner out of the brush.

The driver, then, was alone at the top of the hill when Black Bart confronted him from behind a shotgun’s double barrels.

Bart, concealed as always beneath his flour sack, sensed immediately that things were wrong. First, he’d watched the stage coming and knew there had been two men, not one on board. Second, there was no strong box to be seen.

McConnell lied about Jimmy. He said the boy had gone off in search of stray cattle. Bart wasn’t satisfied with the answer, but had no time to ponder its implications. He had made friends with men at the Patterson Mine, knew there was gold to be had on board this stage, and if it wasn’t up top, then it must be secreted inside. So he ordered McConnell down from his perch and told him to unhitch the horses and lead them over the hill.

While McConnell was doing this, listening all the while to the sounds of Bart ransacking the stage for gold, he spotted Jimmy Rolleri coming around the hill with his rifle. McConnell couldn’t believe his luck! He immediately signaled Jimmy over, and together they crept back up the knoll.

Bart was just backing out of the stagecoach with the hidden booty when the sound of three shots exploded over the countryside. Bart sprinted for the brush, clutching his loot but dropping a bundle of papers. By the time the driver and his sidekick could hustle down the hill, the robber-poet had skedaddled. But there was fresh blood on the papers. Black Bart’s blood.

There was more, too. Bart had dropped his derby and failed to pick up some belongings that he’d sequestered behind a nearby rock--bags of crackers and sugar, a pair of field glasses, a couple of flour sacks, three dirty linen cuffs, a razor, and a knotted handkerchief filled with buckshot. Without too much trouble, the Calaveras County sheriff located the woman who had sold Bart his provisions, along with two other men who had seen a stranger matching the highwayman’s physical description. But the clue that broke the Black Bart case was a laundry mark on that abandoned handkerchief--F.X.O.7.

* * *

It took a week of searching through San Francisco’s 91 laundries before detective Hume’s special agent on the Black Bart robberies, Harry N. Morse, turned up an owner to correspond with that mark: C.E. Bolton, a resident of the Webb House, at 37 Second Street, Room 40. And that wasn’t all the luck Morse could claim. As he was talking with the owner of the laundry where Bart had taken his linens, who should walk by but the man himself.

At 54 years of age, Bart stood 5 feet 8 inches tall, bore his 160 pounds of weight in an arrow-straight posture, and had a light complexion. His deep-sunk eyes were bright blue. He sported a broad white mustache and an “imperial” (a pointed beard growing beneath his lower lip). He had small feet--size 6. Photographs show him looking very much like his pursuer, the dogged James B. Hume.

Morse later told reporters that his initial impressions of the unmasked outlaw were of a man “elegantly dressed, carrying a little cane. He wore a natty little derby hat, a diamond pin, a large diamond ring on his little finger, and a heavy gold watch and chain. ... One would have taken him for a gentleman who had made a fortune and was enjoying it.”

That was exactly the case, of course, although Bolton--whose real name was Charles E. Boles, according to a Bible found in his room--denied initially that his gains had been ill-gotten. (“Do you take me for a stage robber?” he said in mock amazement. “I never harmed anybody in all my life, and this is the first time that my character has ever been called into question.”) He claimed to be the proud owner of a mine on the California-Nevada border. Not until he was identified by people he had encountered during the planning of his final crime did the bandit admit that he’d stopped and robbed the Sonora-Milton stage. And even then, it was only because he surmised that with one confession he might escape sentencing for many others. The judge proved him right on that account: Bart-Boles was given just six years in San Quentin Prison for a crime spree that should’ve kept him imprisoned until his death.

* * *

Reporters slowly filled in the details of Charles Boles’ life. He had been born in Norfolk County, England, in 1829, but at 2 years old had moved with his family to Alexandria township, Jefferson County, in upstate New York. He had served with the 116th Regiment of the Illinois Infantry during the Civil War, either as a captain or a sergeant--the facts grew fuzzier each time they were given. When asked what sort of education he’d received, Boles dismissed thoughts of schools or grades and answered simply “Liberal!” in a proud manner that was characteristic of him. Coming west first to Montana (where he’d failed as a miner) and then to California, he had evidently left behind a family in the Midwest, including a wife, Mary, who for years before his arrest had thought her husband dead. After learning of his Black Bart incarceration, though, she began corresponding with him from her home in Hannibal, Missouri.

But there were still many questions remaining by the time Bart-Boles was released, after serving only four years and two months of his sentence. So it was no surprise that he was mobbed by ink-spotted newspaper reporters on January 21, 1888, as a prison boat ferrying him south from Marin County finally landed at San Francisco. Had prison life hurt him? they wanted to know. No, Bart said, he felt very well, although he was becoming a bit deaf and now required reading glasses. Did he intend to rob stages again? Bart shook his head almost violently and turned to go. One final question, said a newsie: Had he any more verses up his sleeve? At this, Bart seemed to perk up, to regain a bit of the self-confidence that prison had tried to sap from him. “Young man,” the old highwayman replied archly, “didn’t you hear me say I would commit no more crimes?”

At final report, the man who’d once been Black Bart was heading south from California’s Bay Area. He got as far as Visalia, where he stayed for a short while at a hotel, leaving behind a valise that contained some containers of food, a couple of neckties, and a pair of cuffs bearing the laundry mark F.X.O.7. He was last spotted on February 28, 1888. After that, the Po8 disappeared forever.

READ MORE: “Legend and Lore,” by Isaac Levinson (Bohemian.com).

Seeing the Light

Coloradan Tom Piccirilli has submitted to being interviewed by Hard-boiled Wonderland’s Jedidiah Ayres. Perhaps the most interesting part of their exchange comes when blogger Ayres asks the author whether he faced any “unforeseen challenges” in writing for a blind protagonist in his new novel, Shadow Season. Answered Piccirilli: “I’ve been wearing glasses since I was 10, and the older I get the thicker they get. So at its heart, Shadow Season is about my own fear of blindness. Again, I did a smattering of research but, and this might sound a little Afterschool Special-ish, I wrote most of the novel with my eyes shut. Sounds goofball, I know, but imagining having to deal with certain issues in the dark really started to spook and frustrate me.” The complete interview is here.

The “Thief” in Your Machine

For me anyway, this is no less good news than that TNT has picked up the cancelled NBC series Southland. According to the Web site TV Shows on DVD, “the classic Robert Wagner series It Takes a Thief, which ran on ABC for three seasons (from 1968 [to] 1970), is finally come to DVD. ... Right now the DVD is just gossip, officially, but it comes from a source that has always proven to be right on the money.” Let’s hope that holds true this time, too.

I missed seeing It Takes a Thief during its original run, but watched it with great relish (and sometimes behind my mother’s back) when it was broadcast on weekend afternoons later in the 1970s. Had a genie given me three wishes back then, I almost certainly would’ve spent one of them turning myself into Wagner’s suave thief, Alexander Mundy.

(Hat tip to Spy-fi Channel.)

Cops on the Move

Excellent news for fans of the Los Angeles-based police drama Southland, which was suddenly canceled last month by NBC-TV. From Jeremy Lynch at Crimespree Cinema:

It is official: TNT has picked up Southland. After weeks of speculation, the cabler has purchased the 13-episode second season of the canceled NBC crime drama. ...

“This is a great win for fans of Southland and a perfect opportunity to introduce the series to new viewers,” said Steve Koonin, president of Turner Entertainment Networks. “It’s also another outstanding example of how TNT has established itself as the go-to place for the best dramas on television.”

Lynch’s whole piece is here. Meanwhile, Pop Crunch reports that TNT will begin broadcasting Southland in January 2010. Plans are to “re-air the series’ original seven episodes plus the six new hours that NBC ordered but chose not to air.” Watch for it on Tuesday nights at 10 p.m., opposite NBC’s beleaguered Jay Leno Show.

It seems all those viewer pleas to save Southland really worked.

Monsters from My Boyhood

Grave Doings

“Vampires are after me,” announces Dracula star Bela Lugosi in “One Night Near Hangtown,” the latest short-story offering at Beat to a Pulp, written by James Reasoner.

READ MORE: “My Bela Lugosi Story,” by Patti Abbott (Pattinase).

Boo!

If you’re in the mood this Halloween for some frightful reading, there are plenty of stories from which to choose. Book Sense offers its top 10 list of Halloween books. Brad Leithauser, editor of The Norton Book of Ghost Stories, made up a list for The Wall Street Journal of his five favorite ghost tales. Britain’s Guardian newspaper has a fang-tastic rundown of the top 10 vampire tales, while London Times reviewer offers her own selection of six vampiric yarns. And Mystery Readers Journal editor Janet Rudolph has her own choices of Halloween-appropriate reading matter. More suggestions are available from MyShelf.com, the Springfield (Massachusetts) City Library, Classic Mysteries, and Suite 101.

Perhaps the scariest thing of all, though, is the idiocy being propagated this Halloween by people such as those at Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network, who wrote in a blog post yesterday: “During this period demons are assigned against those who participate in the rituals and festivities. These demons are automatically drawn to the fetishes that open doors for them to come into the lives of human beings. For example, most of the candy sold during this season has been dedicated and prayed over by witches.” Who is being tricked here, I ask you.

(Hat tip to Campaign for the American Reader.)

The Book You Have to Read: “The Dolly Dolly Spy,” by Adam Diment

(Editor’s note: This is the 69th installment of our ongoing Friday blog series highlighting great but forgotten books. Today’s must-read choice comes from the pseudonymous British journalist-turned-author Tom Cain. Cain has so far produced three well-received thrillers: The Accident Man [2007], No Survivors [2008, published in the UK as The Survivor], and this year’s Assassin. His original and controversial, three-part short story, “Bloodsport,” appeared in The Rap Sheet in August.)

Four years ago, or so, when I was really struggling with the first 30,000 words of what would become The Accident Man (and I do mean struggling: it took two years to come up with anything even vaguely suitable to show to publishers), my long-suffering agent, Julian Alexander, suggested I should read some books by a British writer called Adam Diment. They’d been written back in the mid- to late-1960s and they featured a posh, dope-smoking, babe-shagging, terminally fashionable young spy called Philip McAlpine. Julian thought I’d enjoy them and maybe get some inspiration, too. I said I’d check them out.

That was easier said than done. After he published his first book, The Dolly Dolly Spy, in 1967, Diment was very briefly very hot. The London Sunday Times told its readers that “Adam Diment is 23; his hero, Philip McAlpine, is based on himself. That is to say he’s tall, good-looking, with a taste for fast cars, planes, girls, and pot.”

The following year, like the Beatles, Diment hit the hippy trail to India where he studied at an ashram. By 1971 he was living in Rome. After that: nothing. But I am getting ahead of myself ...

Desperate for something, anything to get me out of my unproductive rut, I trawled the Internet for Diment’s books. And the first thing I discovered was that he gave great title. The Dolly Dolly Spy was followed by The Bang Bang Birds (1968), The Great Spy Race (1968), and Think Inc. (1971). Something about those names took me right back to the London of my childhood, and the covers were more outrageous and evocative still. The Dolly Dolly Spy’s jacket is, like Philip McAlpine himself, a neat combination of James Bond (blood, bullet holes, and a blonde in a bikini) and the counterculture (a block of hash resin, a razor blade, and two smoked joints). But the cover of The Bang Bang Birds (shown at left) is entirely original. It features a chorus-line of machine-gun-toting girls, naked except for knee-length boots, drawn as a psychedelic cartoon.

This was real time-capsule stuff, a perfect evocation of the look and attitudes of its era, and I loved it. Within a week I’d bought hardback first editions of all four of Diment’s books. When they arrived, I discovered to my delight that the writing matched the packaging. Diment is the lost boy-genius of British thriller writing.

The first thing that’s great is the attitude. Diment was educated at Lansing, a private boarding school in West Sussex, right on the south coast of England, where he must have been an almost exact contemporary of the lyricist Sir Tim Rice. So, like the Old Etonian Ian Fleming, he writes in a slick, slangy style that never quite disguises the classical education--Diment would have studied Latin from the ages of 8 to 15--that lies behind it. And, like Fleming, Diment is cloaked with that confidence, tipping over into arrogance that marks the English public schoolboy.

He writes in the first-person and his character of McAlpine is not afraid to say precisely, caustically, and often very wittily what he thinks of anything or anyone he encounters. But right from the start of The Dolly Dolly Spy--written, remember, by a 23-year-old first-timer--there are passages that suggest Diment had the makings of a seriously good novelist. Here McAlpine is, for example, describing his on-and-off girlfriend Veronica Lom:

Her experience, which includes a large number of love affairs, modelling jobs, minor television appearances, two abortions and a wide range of kinky and interesting episodes, hangs around her like a halo. There, you would say on seeing her, is a girl who has seen life. Paddington pot parties, a hundred odd secretarial jobs like her present one--which end because her boss starts to twitch his fingers a bit--a film part which curled up and died on the cutting room floor. Following the flotsam of the jet set across Europe: Paris, Cannes, St Tropez, Venice, Sardinia, Baden Baden, Paris, Rome and back to Paris. The modern, cuffed airport waiting rooms. Dull flights, indigestible high altitude food and the grimy bodies of travel.

That paragraph is 124 words long. And it tells me precisely who this girl is. McAlpine’s MI6 boss, Rupert Quine, is an even finer character. He’s snide, vicious, utterly camp, and quite willing to resort to blackmail to make McAlpine do what he wants. When McAlpine first meets him, the diminutive, gnomic Quine is wearing a light green suit: “the impression he gave was of a dandified mouling stoat.” Quine looks McAlpine up and down and says, “Well, it’s nice to see you after reading so much. Your picky doesn’t do you justice, luv.” Then he produces some drugs, found in McAlpine’s flat, and explains that if McAlpine doesn’t accept the assignment he is about to be offered, he will be sent to jail for drug-dealing. Along the way, he calls McAlpine, “lovey,” “sweetie,” and “honeychile.”

Rupert Quine is really not at all like M.

And that, for me is the really fascinating thing about Diment’s work. His stories are thoroughly Bond-esque: his first assignment is to go undercover as a pilot in an airborne smuggling operation run by former members of the Waffen-SS. But everything else about him reminds one why Ian Fleming’s death in 1964 was--from the point of view of his literary reputation and Bond’s survival as a global icon--so astonishingly well timed.

Bond is a man of the ’50s, whose attitudes can be traced back to Fleming’s days as a fashionable young man in pre-World War II, 1930s London. Had he kept writing into the mid-’60s, Fleming would have been utterly overtaken: Agent 007 would have been clueless in the world of the Beatles and the Stones, miniskirts, Flower Power and demonstrations against the Vietnam War. Adam Diment, however, was utterly in his element and his four books are to Bond what Sgt. Pepper was to The Sound of Music: a signal of something clearly rooted in the past that is, at the same time, utterly new.

Or to put it another way, Diment’s man McAlpine is Austin Powers, but for real ... and played by a cool, handsome, upper-class Englishman, not some irritating little tit from Ontario.

Once More to the Fore

In addition to author Tom Cain’s endorsement on this page of The Dolly Dolly Spy, by Adam Diment, today’s blog-wide crop of “forgotten books” deserving of renewed attention includes the following crime-fiction-related works: The Killing, by Lionel White; Fallen into the Pit, by Ellis Peters; The Whispering Master, by Frank Gruber; First Blood, by David Morrell; Mr. Calder and Mr. Behrens, by Michael Gilbert; Hot Cargo, by Orrie Hitt; Bird Dog, by Philip Reed; The Man Who Killed Himself, by Julian Symons; The Anastasia Syndrome and Other Stories, by Mary Higgins Clark; and Whodunit? Houdini? edited by Otto Penzler. There’s a pick ideal for this Halloween Eve, too: The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson.

Look to Patti Abbott’s blog for more prime choices from the back stacks, plus a full accounting of today’s participating writers.

The Martians Have Landed!

It was on this date back in 1938 that actor-writer Orson Welles “vaulted into stardom by narrating his famous radio presentation of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds,” notes the blog Pulp International. “In adapting the [1898] novel, which concerns an invasion by malevolent Martians bent on the total destruction of humanity, Welles decided to use fictional news bulletins to describe the action. These were presented without commercial breaks, leaving listeners to decide whether the familiar sounding news flashes were truthful. Since a radio show had never used the news flash for dramatic purposes, many people were confused. The public reaction was described at the time as a panic ...”

Put a little pre-Halloween scare into yourself by listening to that dramatic, 71-year-old broadcast. The Mercury Theater on the Air Web site has it ready for free downloading here, along with other radio episodes.

READ MORE: War of the Worlds Invasion: The Historical Perspective; “2003 War of the Worlds Radio Documentary” and “Book Review: Waging the War of the Worlds,” by Feliks Banel (I Still Love Radio).

Picking Favorites

Prolific American mystery novelist Stuart M. Kaminsky died three weeks ago today. Ever since then, The Rap Sheet has been polling readers to see which of his three series protagonists they like best: 1930s Los Angeles private eye Toby Peters; modern Moscow Police Inspector Porfiry Rostnikov; unlicensed South Florida peeper Lew Fonesca; or Chicago police detective Abe Lieberman.

The results are now in. Out of 214 votes cast, the greatest number went to Rostnikov (66). Second place is held by Peters (60), with Fonesca (49) and Lieberman (39) bringing up the rear. For our money, though, all of these guys are winners.

Thanks to everyone for participating in this survey.

NBC Turns to Magic for Help

Being a big fan of the 1973-1974 TV series, The Magician, which starred Bill Bixby as a wealthy, mystery-solving illusionist, I was struck by this report from Variety:

NBC is conjuring a drama series revolving around a crime-solving magician.

Untitled project hails from Universal Media Studios, scribe Dan Fesman (“NCIS”), producer David Percelay and helmer Jon Amiel (“Entrapment”). Fesman is writing and will exec produce with Percelay and Amiel, who will direct if the project is picked up to pilot.

The concept centers on a master magician whose career is in ruins after he develops stage fright and agoraphobia; an elite law enforcement agency recruits him to take an unusual approach to cracking tough cases.

“It won’t be as much of a whodunit as a ‘how the hell do we catch him,’” Amiel told Daily Variety. Percelay approached Amiel with his one-line description of the project, which felt “totally in my wheelhouse,” Amiel said. The two developed it together and then scouted for a writer.

The “stage fright and agoraphobia” character traits make me think NBC is hoping to be brought something more like Tony Shaloub’s Monk than Bixby’s long-ago, more earnest show (or even the slightly more tongue-in-cheek 1986 Hal Linden/Harry Morgan series, Blacke’s Magic). But it might behoove NBC, which could really use a couple of hits right now, to look toward its own past for inspiration. “Why Doesn’t NBC Just Remake The Magician?” asks TV Squad’s Bob Sassone. An excellent question, indeed.

Kerr Wins the Ellis Peters Award

After failing to capture last year’s Ellis Peters Historical Award, given out by the British Crime Writers’ Association, Scottish wordsmith Philip Kerr has received that commendation for his 2009 Bernie Gunther novel, If the Dead Rise Not (Quercus).

Also nominated for this year’s award: The Dead of Winter, by Rennie Airth (Macmillan); The Redemption of Alexander Seaton, by Shona MacLean (Quercus); The Information Officer, by Mark Mills (HarperCollins); The Interrogator, by Andrew Williams (John Murray); and An Empty Death, by Laura Wilson (Orion).

Calling in from the London reception at which Kerr’s win was announced, Rap Sheet contributor Ali Karim noted that the author gave “a lovely thank-you speech,” which he claimed had been gathering dust ever since last year, when he’d first hoped to deliver it. In the course of his address, Kerr noted that Ellis Peters (née Edith Pargeter), after whom the CWA’s annual historical prize is named, had produced dozens of novels before she became a best-seller; he is apparently looking for similar late-career fame.

To my mind, at least, Kerr is well deserving of this reward. I’ve been reading his Gunther novels ever since 1989, when I picked up the first entry in that series, March Violets, and found myself transported into the darkness of pre-World War II Berlin. The author turned out two more Gunther books in close succession--The Pale Criminal (1990) and A German Requiem (1991)--but then went off to compose standalone works for more than a decade, before returning to the troubled, dangerous, and sexually active life of his first protagonist in The One from the Other (2006). Last year’s A Quiet Flame, which dispatched cop-turned-private eye-turned-fugitive Gunther to Buenos Aires, Argentina, in pursuit of an ex-Nazi killer, was one of my favorite books of 2008. And If the Dead Rise Not is more than likely to feature on my favorites list for 2009.

So, while all of this year’s Ellis Peters nominees are deserving of congratulations, I am especially pleased to hear that the prize has finally landed in Kerr’s hands.

In other news from tonight’s event, Karim tells me that Janet Laurence, the present chair of the Ellis Peters Award judging panel, has decided to step down from that post. And two new judges--critics Jake Kerridge of The Daily Telegraph and Barry Forshaw--will be added to the panel next year.

Have You Voted Yet?

If you have not already made your opinion known in our latest poll, which asks that you name your favorite among the late Stuart M. Kaminsky’s four fictional series sleuths, then you’d better do so right away. Tomorrow morning (Friday) is the cutoff time, when I’ll announce which character won.

So go directly to the silver-tinted box in the upper right-hand corner of this page, and let your voice be heard.

Brief Encounter

One of my favorite memories from this year’s Crime Writers’ Association Dagger Awards presentation (now sponsored by Specsavers, Cactus TV, and ITV3) was catching up with best-selling Scottish author Ian Rankin prior to the festivities. While I was waiting in the Grosvenor House’s Red Bar, Rankin arrived and spotted me seated behind one of my signature gin-and-tonics (my first of the night, actually, and at the Red Bar’s prices, there was little fear of my putting away many more). Rankin’s interruption was welcome. I hadn’t seen him for a while, and as every Rap Sheet reader knows, he has a new work of fiction out in Britain--The Complaints, his opening entry in a post-John Rebus series.

Like the majority of Rankin’s work, The Complaints is set in his hometown of Edinburgh. In relation to that book, P.D. James wrote recently in The Guardian:

Rankin is predominantly a crime novelist of realism. He eschews even the convenient convention that a detective does not age and may talk of retiring but seldom does. Each book is set unambiguously in place and time. In The Complaints we are given precise dates at which the narrative moves forward. The story is told chiefly in dialogue which is terse and realistic. We meet [Inspector] Malcolm Fox on Friday 6 February 2009, and part company on Tuesday 24 February. We travel with him through the sinister underground of the city and the haunts of the rich and powerful, knowing the pubs, the offices, the hotels he enters, what he eats when he is alone, where he does his shopping and the food he buys. And always human lives are seen against the thread of history.

Rankin is a master at what, for me, is one of the important aspects of a crime novel: the integration of setting, plot, characters and a theme which, for Rankin, is the moral dimension never far from his writing. Here it is unambiguously stated on the cover of The Complaints: who decides right from wrong? Fox is so fully realised and interesting a character, his job in “the complaints” so fraught with fascinating possibilities, that we can surely hope to meet him again. And somewhere in Edinburgh is John Rebus, retired, but for Ian Rankin readers very much alive.

I congratulated Rankin on his induction--destined to take place that night--into ITV3’s Crime Writers “Hall of Fame.” But being the modest sort, he immediately changed the subject and inquired whether I was in the running for some kind of award myself (after having been nominated repeatedly for an Anthony Award for Special Service, only to be denied the prize). Alas, I was not. So I turned the subject around once more and passed along regards from Jon and Ruth Jordan of Crimespree Magazine, who I’d only just left at Bouchercon in Indianapolis. There is a very strong bond between Rankin and the Jordans, because it was the Scotsman who introduced Ruth to Jon Jordan, at the 1999 Bouchercon in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. (“Crikey, that was years ago,” Ian said when I recalled this fortuitous encounter.) And he was pleased to learn that the Jordans had just won their third Anthony Award for services to the genre.

It wasn’t long before we were sharing memories of all sorts. When I mentioned that I was attending this evening’s awards presentation as a guest of the organizers of Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate, England, Rankin reminded me that he was one of the guests of honor at the very first Harrogate event back in 2003. (His fireside chat during that conference with novelist Peter Robinson still resides pleasantly in my memory.) And we agreed that it was largely because of the 2003 festival--and, in particular, Ann Cleeves’ championing of a special track of panel discussions about Scandinavian crime fiction--that works from Sweden, Iceland, and elsewhere have come to widespread notice in Britain.

2003 was a signal year in other respects. It was at the 2003 Bouchercon in Las Vegas, Nevada, that Jon Jordan whispered to me over breakfast one morning, “Hey, Ali, we’re thinking of starting a magazine ...” (Crimespree debuted in the summer of 2004.) It was during the same convention that I introduced Gayle Lynds to David Morrell, and the seeds of the International Thriller Writers organization were planted.

“Life was simpler then,” I mused, before acquainting Rankin with my present hectic schedule. He mentioned, in turn, that he’s about to embark on a lengthy tour of India, China, and Southeast Asia--travel destined to consume many of what might otherwise be valuable fiction-creating hours. “When do you get time to write?” I asked him. Rankin gave me an anxious smile, then remarked, “Ali, it’s getting harder and harder to get the momentum with all the travel, and of course I need the sights and smells of Edinburgh” [for inspiration]. He mentioned, though, that he’d just penned a piece for the Sunday Observer. Apparently, Rankin’s hometown won the No. 1 position--again--in a survey asking Observer readers to name their favorite UK city. Who better than Rankin to decipher the enduring appeal of the Scottish capital? In the article, Rankin tries to explain his city’s attractions by citing one of its lesser-known destinations, the Oxford Bar on Young Street:

This isn’t a random starting point. I discovered it as a young writer. I’d invented a character called Detective Inspector John Rebus, and he needed a place to hang out. The Oxford Bar is central (Young Street is a two-minute walk from Princes Street), yet hidden. It is small, but contains the widest possible cross-section of Edinburgh life.

As I walk in, there are a few nods of greeting (nothing too effusive). Kirsty behind the bar has guessed that I’ll want a pint of Deuchars India Pale Ale. Edinburgh at one time had more than 40 breweries--the Scottish Parliament sits on the remains of one of them. These days, though, there is just the one. It’s called the Caledonian Brewery, and that’s where my IPA was made--about two miles from here as the crow flies.

The “Ox” is run by Harry Cullen. Harry used to sing in a folk group (though he won’t thank me for publicising the fact), and has a fund of stories of his own. In fact, everyone I have ever met in the Oxford Bar has a story to tell. I ask Harry today if any Rebus fans have been in. He rolls his eyes.

“Two of them took photos--without buying a drink!” He then asks me if I’m having another. I shake my head.

“Things to do,” I say by way of apology.

“That’s my profits shot,” he mutters, polishing a glass.

With a shrug and a wave, I head out, crossing nearby Charlotte Square (home to the First Minister) and emerging on a rain-soaked Queensferry Street. The shops soon disappear as I approach Randolph Cliff. I cross the road and head down Bells Brae, turning right at a signpost announcing that Leith is two-and-three-quarter miles away. This path, deserted apart from the odd dog-walker and jogger, runs along the
Water of Leith.

Robert Louis Stevenson once called Edinburgh a “precipitous city”, and he was absolutely right. Whether you’re peering down on to Princes Street Gardens from the castle, or craning your neck to look up from the Cowgate at George IV Bridge above, you sense that Edinburgh contains an intensity of heights and depths.

(For a longer version of that feature story, get your hands on the November issue of Lonely Planet Magazine.)

Our drinks done, our stories swapped, it was time to move on to our respective commitments. He had a Hall of Fame award to receive, and I had a table to find, from which I could watch that prize handed his way. We said our good-byes, and then he was gone--our meeting another memory to catalogue, without complaints.

Triple Play

• This coming Thursday will bring word about who has won the latest Ellis Peters Historical Award. But blogger Uriah Robinson (aka Norman Price) has already handicapped the field.

• I very much enjoyed NBC-TV’s political drama, The West Wing, during its seven-year run. But I am not convinced that an American version of House of Cards, the 1990 BBC series based on Michael Dobbs’ novel of the same name and starring Ian Richardson as a nefarious Parliament climber, will either satisfy my jonesing for West Wing-like political fiction on the tube or live up to the excellence of the original. But we will see. (Hat tip to Crimespree Cinema.)

• And there’s a new flash-fiction contest being put together by the proven team of Patti Abbott, Aldo Calcagno, and Gerald So. “What I would like to propose,” writes Abbott, “is a 750-800-word story that is set, or at least partially set, in a Wal-Mart Store.” The possibilities may be as numerous as shopping aisles. Tales are supposed to be readied for posting on November 30.

A New Den for Wolfe

How curious. Despite dire warnings that the once very popular Internet domain Yahoo GeoCities would go dark for good yesterday, all of the crime-fiction-oriented Web sites mentioned in my previous posting appear still to be in operation.

In the meantime, however, Winnifred Louis, the creator of Merely a Genius ..., a site devoted to author Rex Stout and his fictional detectives, Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, is moving her material over to the Web site of The Wolfe Pack, a New York-based Stout fan organization. Already updated are a page devoted to the A&E Nero Wolfe TV Series and the Nero Wolfe Reading List. Still to come: “Updates to Book Synopses on the covers page for each book, including Winnifred’s great selection of a priceless quotation per story”; “More Pastiche References”; and “Wolfe Whistle References.” All valuable resources.

Again the Wolfe Pack site can be found here.

Welcome to Marlowe’s World

OK, so I was a bit snarky about Raymond Chandler recently. But it’s time to forgive and forget ... and give our attention instead to the publication of an oversize new paperback book called Daylight Noir: Raymond Chandler’s Imagined City (Charta). Inside its covers are photographs by Catherine Corman, the daughter of filmmaker Roger Corman and the editor of Joseph Cornell’s Dreams (2007).

Corman has taken excellent black-and-white shots of many of those menacing, memorable Los Angeles locations described by Chandler in his novels. From Lido Pier to the iconic Hollywood sign, from MGM Studios to Musso and Frank’s Grill, from Union Station to Bullocks Wilshire, these locales were integral to the L.A. of Chandler’s rich imagination. They also conjure a world that has not yet entirely vanished. Of Chandler’s fascination with his adopted hometown, author-critic Clive James once remarked: “[W]hen he said that it had as much personality as a paper cup, he was saying what he liked about it.” The creator of private eye Philip Marlowe was especially attracted to L.A.’s Hopperesque loneliness, all the “anonymous multitudes whose solitude fills the city,” to quote from Corman’s introduction.

Corman’s images, paired with quotes from Chandler’s novels, give us what Jonathan Lethem, in his preface, calls “a supremely evocative catalogue of haunted places ... these streets and buildings we have erected in order to give order to our solitudes.”

Prizes and Surprises

• Debra Ginsberg has won the 2009 T. Jefferson Parker Mystery Award for her novel The Grift. This commendation is given out annually by the Southern California Independent Booksellers Association (SCIBA). To see a full list of nominees in the Mystery category, click here. If you’re looking for a rundown of all the SCIBA winners for 2009, click here.

• It looks as if the third set of Columbo telefilms (1991-1992) on DVD is working its way to stores, though there’s no release date yet.

• Meanwhile, Crippen & Landru’s compilation of new Columbo short tales seems to be sloooowly moving toward publication. What was originally titled The Columbo Stories, featuring 14 new cases for Los Angeles’ scruffiest but smartest police lieutenant--all penned by William Link, co-creator of the 1970s Peter Falk series--is now being promoted as The Columbo Collection, and is said to be in the “proofs” stage. Is Crippen & Landru trying to build up anticipation for this book, in the same way that producers of the TV series built up suspense around just how Lieutenant Columbo would catch his man ... or woman? Not a bad idea.

• Sad news from The Gumshoe Site: “Ray Browne died on October 22 at his home in Bowling Green, Ohio. He was a professor at Bowling Green State University, who was credited with coining the phrase ‘popular culture’ and establishing the first academic department of popular culture in the U.S. at Bowling Green in 1973. He and his wife, Pat Browne, launched several publications devoted to popular culture, such as Clues: A Journal of Detection. When Clues started with the Spring/Summer 1980 issue, it was published semi-annually by Bowling Green Popular Press and edited by Pat Browne, with academic articles on mystery fiction and writers by academic professors including Ray Browne. (Now Clues is published by McFarland & Co. and edited by Elizabeth Foxwell.) He was 87.”

• Actor Benjamin Bratt, who played New York Detective Rey Curtis on TV’s Law & Order from 1994 to 1999, is set to return to that series--but only briefly. And another member of the L&O alumni, Angie Harmon, who portrayed Abbie Carmichael of the District Attorney’s Office for three years, has been cast as Boston homicide detective Jane Rizzoli in a possible series based on Tess Gerritsen’s novels. Let’s hope it’s better than her last TV venture, in the short-lived Women’s Murder Club.

• Boston novelist George V. Higgins, who died 10 years ago next month, is honored in a report by Beantown’s WBUR-FM radio.

• There’s more talk that the recently cancelled NBC-TV series Southland may be headed to TNT--and soon.

• New at Beat to a Pulp: “Hunter’s Moon,” by Charles Gramlich.

• And in this week leading up to All Hallows’ Eve, blogger Craig Clarke of Somebody Dies is posting a series of “reviews ... of Halloween-related stories: five books, one movie, and one novelty that can only be called ‘other.’” Look for the whole series here.

Service Permanently Unavailable

As wonderful a resource as the Internet can be at times, the thing I dislike most about it is its impermanence. Web sites shut down, YouTube videos are prone to disappear, blogs go out of business, and suddenly all those links the rest of us created to interesting, valuable, or entertaining information don’t work anymore. The carnage will be wholesale today, as GeoCities, “once the Internet’s third most visited domain,” shuts down.

Not many GeoCities sites feature on The Rap Sheet’s lengthy blogroll. But there are certainly some there that we’ve come to respect, among them The Nick Carter Page, Pulp and Adventure Heroes of the Pre-War Years, Shamus: A Tribute to Philip Marlowe, and the Rex Stout appreciation page Merely a Genius ... It’s sad to see these sites suddenly vanish from our radar. I hope they all find other domain homes in the near future, and that their authors will contact The Rap Sheet with their new URLs. (My e-mail address is available in the All Points Bulletin blurb at the top of this page.)

For the moment at least, all of these sites appear still to be operating. Visit them while you can.