The Rap Sheet

The Book You Have to Read: “The Staked Goat,” by Jeremiah Healy

2009-11-20T08:11:00.000-08:00

(Editor’s note: This is the 72nd installment of our ongoing Friday blog series highlighting great but forgotten books. Today’s selection comes from Chicago author Libby Fischer Hellmann. Her most recent novel is Doubleback, the second installment (after 2008’s Easy Innocence) in the private eye Georgia Davis series. Hellmann also edited Chicago Blues, a 2007 anthology of mystery stories. When not writing or editing fiction, she contributes to the group blog The Outfit.)

My entry into crime fiction was by way of thrillers. I gobbled up John le Carré, Robert Ludlum, Len Deighton, Ken Follett, and more (with the exception of Helen MacInnes, they were all men back then). In time, however, a steady diet of thrillers brought monotony: the world was on the precipice, the hero saved it, then walked off into the sunset. I remember complaining to my mother, who was and continues to be a prolific mystery reader. “Here,” she said, handing me a book. “Try this.” That book was The Staked Goat (1986), by Jeremiah Healy.

Although I didn’t know it then, I had wandered into a classic private-eye novel. In The Staked Goat Boston detective John Francis Cuddy tries to find out who murdered his old Vietnam buddy, Al Sachs. The police think Sachs’ death was the result of a ritualistic homosexual murder and want to close the case; Cuddy doesn’t buy it. His investigation takes him from Boston to Pittsburgh to the Pentagon, where he tangles with a subculture of the military whose black-market operations have flourished since the days of the Vietnam War. At the same time, Cuddy must deal with the aftermath of a previous case.

Unlike the novels I had been reading, there were no gut-wrenching pyrotechnics or impossible tasks to be accomplished in the nick of time. Instead, there was an absorbing story that dealt with real, human-scale issues. In fact, what attracted me most was the realization that crime fiction could be an excellent vehicle to explore social controversies without beating a reader over the head. Healy isn’t afraid to tackle a tough issue, one that--at the time--most would have liked to forget. He also explores society’s preconceptions about homosexuality, and, with unusual foresight for the era in which he was writing, shows how groundless they are.

But plot can only take a reader so far, and it was Healy’s characters who won me over. Al’s widow, her friends, the elderly black couple in Boston, even the antagonists--they’re all painted in shades of reality. There are no cardboard stereotypes here, no matter what race, gender, or sexual orientation--just people who laugh and cry and bleed. Everyone has a back story, and Healy sprinkles just enough of their histories into his pages to keep me reading. In that sense, the plot seems unhurried. Healy wants us to get to know these people before he reveals what will or won’t happen to them. And yet, events are carefully orchestrated. For example, one of the most touching scenes involves Cuddy taking a potential new love interest to the grave of his late wife, Beth. That’s interrupted with an explosive action scene. Perfect choreography.

The prose, crisp, lean, and muscular, takes us to the edge of terse. And while the author leaves much to his reader’s imagination, I never had questions about any character’s motivation. Healy really does show us how “less is more.”

It was Jerry Healy who started my journey into P.I. novels, police procedurals, even amateur sleuths. Over the next 10 years I read widely and eventually started writing myself. But, like a first lover, The Staked Goat has a special place in my heart. It’s a classic. Which is why you have to read this book.

READ MORE: “Jeremiah Healy’s Cuddy Edge,” by J. Kingston Pierce (January Magazine).

Rise of the Unread

2009-11-20T08:09:00.000-08:00

After you’ve had a chance to read Libby Fischer Hellmann’s recollections of The Staked Goat, by Jeremiah Healy, check out some of the other “forgotten books” being recommended around the Web today. Among the crime- and thriller-fiction titles: Dead at the Take-off, by Lester Dent; Danger Is My Line, by Stephen Marlowe; Decoys, by Richard Hoyt; The Girl on the Best Seller List, by Vin Packer; Victims, by B.M. Gill; The Velvet Touch, by Edward D. Hoch; The Schoolgirl Murder Case, by Colin Wilson; The Devil Rides Out, by Dennis Wheatley; The Curious Facts of My Execution, by Donald E. Westlake; A Garden of Vipers, by Jack Kerley; A Tasty Way to Die, by Janet Laurence; Box Nine, by Jack O’Connell; and the Jane Bond adventures by Mabel Maney.

Organizer Patti Abbott offers a full rundown of today’s participating writers in her own blog, plus several others lesser-known books worthy of reconsideration.

Reds, Germans, and Hollywood Lust

2009-11-20T06:45:00.000-08:00

It happens too often: a writer dies, and I’m reminded by the obituaries of books I meant to read but never did. Otto Friedrich’s City of Nets was a perfect example; I read all the reviews when that work came out in 1986, but it wasn’t until after Friedrich’s death in 1995 that I fell in love with his history of Hollywood in the 1940s.

The part that interested me most were the chapters about the German émigrés who settled in Los Angeles during and after World War II. Novelist and social critic Thomas Mann was the dean; his older brother Heinrich was less popular and returned to East Germany after the war. Other residents included Franz Werfel (Song of Bernadette) and his wife, Alma, who had been married to Gustav Mahler and never let anyone forget it; and that cynical smoker of cheap cigars, Bertold Brecht.

I can’t be certain, but I think that publisher-turned-novelist Joseph Kanon (who won an Edgar Award for his superb 1997 novel, Los Alamos, and whose equally excellent The Good German was turned into a film starring George Clooney) read those same chapters of City of Nets before starting to write his absolutely riveting and award-worthy new novel, Stardust (Atria).

Ben Collier, recently returned to the United States from service in Europe with the Signal Corps, travels to California in 1946 after his sister-in-law, Liesl, informs him that his B-movie director brother, Danny, has suffered a serious fall from a hotel window. Was it an accident or a suicide attempt? Ben arrives in time to witness his brother briefly emerge from a coma, but soon afterward Danny dies. While Liesl believes the suicide theory, Ben suspects that someone pushed Danny to his death, and he turns amateur detective in order to identify the culprit. Liesel and Ben soon begin a scorching affair, which is of course too good to last. Then Ben learns that his brother, formerly an active Communist, was playing a part in an anti-Communist crusade launched by a congressman against the American film industry.

Guest-starring a dazzling blend of real Tinsel Town players (Paulette Goddard, Jack Warner, agent Abe Lastfogel) and fictional creations (keep your eye on Bunny, the former child star who is now a top studio exec), Stardust deserves to be a featured attraction on everyone’s reading list.

Bondiversary!

2009-11-19T13:37:00.000-08:00

It was 10 years ago today that The World Is Not Enough--the 19th James Bond film and the last one of the 20th century--debuted in movie theaters. Although World is probably not counted among the series’ best pictures, The HMSS Weblog has a whole list of reasons why it was a significant installment.

My own two favorite things about The World Is Not Enough were the absolutely fantastic boat chase through London’s waterways (plus the onshore excitement that followed), and the “Bond girl” appearance by French actress Sophie Marceau (who--despite being a criminal sadist--was soooo much hotter here than Denise Richards).

Just for fun, I’ve embedded one of this movie’s trailers above. The line in it that makes me chuckle every time comes from Michael Kitchen: “His only goal is chaos.” Given the pyrotechnics in this and other Bond features, I can’t help wondering whether he’s describing Bond’s adversaries ... or Agent 007 himself.

READ MORE: “Dig That Gold,” by J. Kingston Pierce (The Rap Sheet).

“Hokey Smoke!”

2009-11-19T12:02:00.000-08:00

Happy 50th birthday, Rocket J. Squirrel and Bullwinkle J. Moose.

Jonesing Once More

2009-11-19T09:49:00.000-08:00

Barnaby Jones fans, take note. The Web site TV Shows on DVD announced yesterday that CBS DVD-Paramount will release the opening season of that 1973-1980 detective series to disc on February 16 of next year. The news prompted Ivan G. Shreve Jr. to recount the appeal of that Buddy Ebsen drama:

Contrary to people’s memories, Barnaby Jones was not a good-old-fashioned, folksy crime drama--no doubt considered so due to the participation of friendly Buddy Ebsen--but a fascinating study into the evil minds of some really twisted people.

The basic storyline of a Jones episode usually involved a nice, middle-class husband and wife who commit a depraved act in a temporary mindset of idiocy, and then commit blunder after blunder as the noose tightens around their necks. They’d race around like mad trying to cover up their crime ... and there’s ol’ Barnaby, everywhere they go, just being his folksy, avuncular self until he had the evidence he needed to convict the hapless pair and send them to the chair. It used to remind me of Tex Avery’s Droopy cartoons, where the wolf character would literally bust his ass running away from the Droopster (usually representing the law) only to find Droopy greeting him with his typical deadpan cheer: “Hi there.”

Shreve’s full piece can be found here.

Three Masterpieces Etched in Stone

2009-11-18T14:40:00.000-08:00

(Editor’s note: Boston lawyer, professor, and novelist George V. Higgins died a decade ago, at age 59, on November 6, 1999. Since then, many readers have forgotten his name, and others have failed to discover his novels at all. So we asked Brooklyn author Charlie Stella [Mafiya, Johnny Porno] for a little reminder of why Higgins’ literary contributions are still important. His response is posted below.)

Jackie Brown, at twenty-six, with no expression on his face, said that he could get some guns.

That’s the opening line to what many writers cite as the greatest crime novel ever penned, The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1972). Ten years after the author’s death, it is truly an honor for me to pay tribute to my writing hero, George V. Higgins. As a student in a small college in North Dakota trying to come to terms with the fact I had no clue what I was doing there other than playing football, I was blessed the day Dave Gresham opened the paperback copy of Eddie Coyle and read the first chapter aloud to our class.

I knew people who talked like that; I had lived around them all my life. But until that English class, all I had read were sports biographies and history books. The little Shakespeare I had been forced to read gave me headaches.

People didn’t talk like this:

“To be or not to be, that is the question.”

They talked like this:

“The day’s gonna come, it’s not here already. We’re gonna have to whack him out.”

One of the true masters of the crime-fiction genre, Higgins launched the reader in the moment through brilliant storytelling highlighted by what has become the standard by which dialogue is judged. That said, being distinguished as a master of crime writing was a bittersweet pill for Higgins to swallow. He took issue with being pigeonholed as such and claimed to have written novels that had crimes in them, not crime novels.

Lord knows he never became a household name; except for Eddie Coyle most modern-day crime readers can’t name even one of Higgins’ books.

That fact, above all else, is sad.

The two novels that followed, The Digger’s Game (1973) and Cogan’s Trade (1974), were a pair of masterpieces equally as good as Eddie Coyle and were appreciated by readers more inclined to dismiss what passed for usual crime fare (commercially successful formulaic stories about private investigators, journalists, lawyers, etc., who pursue bad guys). Higgins’ many fans knew better. Such stories were as far flung from reality as Harry Potter.

Higgins wrote the other type of novel--the type very true to life about people in bad places (or just plain bad people) whose actions were predicated on survival. The world of Higgins’ first three books was dark and desperate and many of the crimes committed in them might well have been found on police blotters in any big city. Eddie Coyle, the Digger, and Jackie Cogan lived in a world where subterfuge, violence, and death were as common as a morning cup of coffee. Thus, their stories were a slice of urban Americana as undeniable as Fenway Park.

While reviewers were generally kind to books two and three, there was always that nagging qualifier regarding the likability of the inhabitants of The Digger’s Game and Cogan’s Trade and/or Higgins’ treatment of women. Those reviews always bothered me on several levels, but the one about women I found most disconcerting. Higgins’ women may not have been world beaters, but they couldn’t have been portrayed more accurately (as they were perceived by the men in his first three novels). Eddie, the Digger, and Cogan lived in an underworld stone age where women were foils; the women of Higgins’ first three novels, for better or worse, belonged there.

While it isn’t easy to like most of the characters in those novels, we’re sympathetic to Eddie and the Digger and both the jamokes fresh out of the can in Cogan’s Trade. We all know people who can’t get out of their own way, some more likable than others, but those down on their luck tend to get an empathetic nod. In the world of Higgins, they are the ultimate underdogs trying to make it day to day in an ultimate underdog existence.

Whether it was to discuss the purchase of guns (Eddie Coyle), the proper attire when about to perform a robbery (The Digger’s Game), or if a particular connected card game should be the target of a heist (Cogan’s Trade), Higgins saw no need for obiter dicta when fleshing out characters; their “speak” told their story. The treacherous world of Eddie Coyle was laid out in what Life magazine termed: “Dialogue so authentic it spits.”

All three novels served as social documentary featuring urban Darwinism; an overview of how man survives an underworld as close to a modern state of nature as it gets. Higgins didn’t present the romanticized Mario Puzo version of wiseguys and their associates, but rather how bottom dwellers survive mean streets. He dissected cops and robbers alike; what they are and what they become. In Eddie Coyle, Higgins left no stone unturned in exposing the world of an ex-convict looking to reduce an upcoming sentence while balancing the books at home and keeping his connected bank robber friends supplied with the tools of their trade; a hellish existence that rarely offers hope.

Higgins solidified his reputation as a master of dialogue with The Digger’s Game. Digger is in his early 40s and has a nagging wife and four kids. He also has a priest brother who is street-smart enough to know when Digger calls, it can’t be good. Digger went to Vegas, had a few too many martinis at the blackjack table, and ran up a gambling tab on a junket that has put him behind the eight ball (a familiar place for him). His brother, near retirement and fed up with bailing Digger out, says Digger couldn’t “get five thousand dollars together in a bank vault with a rake.” How Digger is going to handle his debts is the stuff nightmares are made of. He robs an office and a Cadillac, and of course those small scores aren’t enough (his life’s story).

Cogan’s Trade features a couple of recently released desperadoes who rip off a connected card game. One is a dog thief and his discourse makes for some of the most interesting, hilarious, and offbeat dialogue I’ve ever read. The man behind the future score is another ex-con, but he’s also an inveterate gambler prone to leaving trails through his bookmaker. Jackie Cogan is the man hired to restore order in the Boston underworld, and everyone pays a price when he metes out justice.

I’ve been flattered with comparisons to George V. Higgins, but those have been more-than-kind reviews. Higgins did a lot more than mimic street talk. He conveyed the essence of a character in just a few exchanges of what passed for idle chatter; conversations for the sake of conversations that provided social, political, and moral backgrounds without six pages of exposition. The knockaround guys we meet in these three books are revealed to have some of the same concerns we all do, and thus provide snapshots of an American subculture not so unlike what passes for mainstream. While today we find that subculture clearly on the wane, Higgins left us with three masterpieces forever etched in stone.

So, who’s got it better’n us?

Talk, Talk

2009-11-18T14:17:00.000-08:00

There are at least two new interviews well worth reading today: Jedidiah Ayres’ discussion with Scottish novelist Allan Guthrie in Hard-boiled Wonderland; and Mary Troy’s chat (about Hawaii, basketball, and more) with Lono Waiwaiole in Make Mine Mystery.

The Business of Reading

2009-11-17T15:18:00.000-08:00

We hear much these days about business leaders focusing on the global economic downturn, but little about what they read for inspiration. So it was surprising to see BBC News’ report today on what books corporate heavyweights have readily at hand. As it turns out, James Smith, chairman of the Anglo-Dutch petroleum giant Shell UK, has been enjoying British thriller writer Roger Jon “R.J.” Ellory’s new book in the States, A Quiet Belief in Angels. Smith talks briefly about that novel here.

It will be interesting to see whether his recommendation has any impact on Ellory’s bookstore sales. Years ago, I remember, Shell was known for its slogan, “You Can Be Sure of Shell.” If enough readers believe they can also be sure of it’s current chairman’s reading tastes, that could be good for the West Midlands author.

By the way, Ellory just returned home to England after an extensive U.S. tour, promoting A Quiet Belief in Angels, which is published by Overlook Press. That followed the author’s attendance at Bouchercon 2009 in Indianapolis, during which he and I sucked back a few beers and talked about the present rich offerings in crime and thriller fiction. I’m so pleased that Ellory has stuck with the writing game, despite the struggles he has faced over the years. His determination seems to have paid off. Not only is Quiet Belief making believers of American readers, but his latest thriller, The Anniversary Man, is cementing his reputation among UK fans.

If you’re unfamiliar with R.J. Ellory’s work, check out this video in which he describes the plot and twists in A Quiet Belief in Angels:

The Grim Reaper Stays on Task

2009-11-17T13:11:00.000-08:00

Yesterday we reported on the death of Edward Woodward, star of The Equalizer. Now comes word of the passing this last Sunday of yet another actor, Dennis Cole, who was known for his work on at least two TV series of note to crime-fiction enthusiasts.

As blogger Ivan G. Shreve Jr. recalled in a post earlier today, the Detroit, Michigan-born Cole’s “best known television showcase was as the rookie Detective Jim Briggs on the ABC-TV crime drama Felony Squad, which had a respectable run from 1966 to 1969.” However, Cole also starred with Rod Taylor in the short-run, 1971 CBS western-detective series Bearcats! about two soldiers of fortune who roamed the American Southwest during the second decade of the 20th century, helping people in trouble. The program took its name from the automobile Taylor and Cole drove: a 1914 Stutz Bearcat.

Cole almost added a third series to his resume, but he was axed at the last minute. After starring in the May 1975 TV pilot film Barbary Coast--playing a slick but shady saloon owner in San Francisco’s pleasure quarter of the 1870s opposite William Shatner, whose role was that of a government agent and master of disguise--he was replaced before the show debuted in September 1975 in favor of Doug McClure. It wasn’t a smart switch; Cole had a bit of mysteriousness and danger about him as gambler-turned-businessman Cash Conover, while McClure substituted boyish exuberance that made the whole venture seem sillier than it should have been. (The show’s “family hour” scheduling didn’t help any, either.) Screenwriter Douglas Heyes created both Bearcats! and Barbary Coast.

As the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) notes, Cole appeared in the TV drama Bracken’s World and later guest-starred on such shows as The Streets of San Francisco, Police Story, The Fall Guy, Mike Hammer, and Murder, She Wrote. Prior to becoming an actor, he was employed as a male model. And Cole was married for three years to actress Jaclyn Smith, on whose series, Charlie’s Angels, he was also featured several times.

Lend an Ear

2009-11-17T12:49:00.000-08:00

The latest interviewee at Jeff Rutherford’s Reading and Writing Podcast site is David Morrell, author of The Shimmer.

Tough But Not Immortal

2009-11-16T08:19:00.001-08:00

There’s some very sad news coming out of Britain this morning. To quote from The Daily Mail’s lengthy obituary:

Veteran actor Edward Woodward, who was best known for his roles in The Wicker Man and The Equalizer, died today.

The 79-year-old had been suffering from various illnesses, including pneumonia, and passed away at the Royal Cornwall hospital in Truro, his agent said.

Janet Glass released a statement praising his ‘brave spirit and wonderful humour’.

It said: ‘Universally loved and admired through his unforgettable roles in classic productions such as Breaker Morant, The Wicker Man, Callan, The Equalizer and many more, he was equally fine and courageous in real life, never losing his brave spirit and wonderful humour throughout his illness. ...’

Although he started out as a Shakespearean actor, the success of Callan (the 1967-1972 series in which he played a professional killer employed by a mysterious British government intelligence service) helped to typecast him as a smooth but hard-nosed operator. The Equalizer sent him up that same alley. Again according to The Daily Mail, “one magazine poll voted him ‘the male TV star more women would like to cuddle than any other’, and he was labelled a sex symbol for his portrayal [in The Equalizer] of the ice cool, but charming ex-CIA agent Robert McCall--a vigilante who operates his own one-man security service.” Woodward exploited that image again in the short-lived, action-oriented UK crime drama CI5: The New Professionals (1999), playing the head of a fictional intelligence agency, with a team that included the lovely Lexa Doig.

More recently, Woodward had joined the cast of the long-running British soap opera EastEnders.

READ MORE: “Edward Woodward, 79: British Leading Man Personified ‘the Actor’s Life,’” by Adam Bernstein (The Washington Post); “What Do You Call a Man with Three Planks of Wood on His Head?” by Charlie Williams (The Charlie Williams Blog); “R.I.P., Edward Woodward,” by Tanner (Double O Section).

Bullet Points: Lazy Sunday Edition

2009-11-15T13:30:00.000-08:00

• Nathan Cain of Independent Crime has posted the trailer for the upcoming film The Killer Inside Me, based on Jim Thompson’s 1952 novel of the same name. It’s a depressing, violent taste of the finished picture (no such bad things should ever happen to the lovely Jessica Alba), but Cain notes that it all comes “straight from the novel”--no need to “tart up Thompson’s book with titillating and shocking detail.” This film is due out sometime in 2010.

• I’ve been thinking lately about Christmas presents, so Bookgasm’s round-up of sexy book covers--with its inclusion of the front from Miranda Forbes’ Seriously Sexy Stocking Filler (left)--inevitably caught my eye.

• With the 2009 holiday season fast approaching, I can guarantee that there will be lots of recommendations being made of appropriately themed crime novels. Blogger Les Blatt has already posted one list of Thanksgiving-related mysteries, and points me to an extensive compilation of Christmas crime stories prepared by the Cincinnati bookshop Grave Matters.

• Ohio writer Fred Snyder provides this week’s short-story offering at Beat to a Pulp. His provocatively titled tale is “Conjugal.”

• Derringer Awar-winning author and blogger Patti Abbott recounts the history of her successful “Friday forgotten books” series in a guest post at Meanderings and Muses.

• Happy birthday to actor Ed Asner. The star of Lou Grant and co-star of The Mary Tyler Moore Show turns 80 years old today.

• What are Ian Rankin’s six favorite books? Click here to find out.

• Rudy Giuliani doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

• Brat Packer Bret Easton Ellis (Less Than Zero, American Psycho) is going to pen an HBO-TV series based on Jason Starr’s 2007 novel, The Follower? Starr seems content with that idea, at least. Maybe better than content. As he told the e-zine Hard Feelings in August, “I think, with [Ellis’] themes, subject matter and style, he’s had a tremendous influence, not only on my writing, but on a whole generation of writers. I think we will look back and see he influenced his generation the way Hemingway and Stein influenced theirs.”

• UK author Craig Russell talks with Shots’ Ayo Onatade about both his detective Jan Fabel series (set in Hamburg, Germany) and Lennox, his latest novel, a private-eye adventure set in 1950s Glasgow. Their whole exchange is here.

• Is nothing new in Hollywood anymore? Now there’s talk of ABC-TV remaking Charlie’s Angels for the 21st century. Yawn ...

• Author Max Allan Collins says that he’s writing a graphic novel finale to his Perdition saga.

• And while I don’t remember Tales of the Gold Monkey all that well, I do recall that the ABC series (which starred Stephen Collins as a trouble-attracting pilot working the South Pacific trade routes in 1938) was rather fun, escapist fare. So it’s good to hear that the single-season show is bound for the DVD market next spring.

Noughties But Nice

2009-11-15T11:33:00.000-08:00

While, in all honesty, it seems a bit too early to name the books that have most defined the opening decade of the 21st century--the so-called noughties--Britain’s Daily Telegraph has taken a crack at doing just that. Its top five picks are J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father, Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. However, a number of crime, mystery, and thriller novels also qualify for this list, including: Sleepyhead, by Mark Billingham; The Fifth Woman, by Henning Mankell; The Ghost, by Robert Harris; The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, by Alexander McCall Smith; and of course The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson. You’ll find the Telegraph’s full rundown here.

(Hat tip to Campaign for the American Reader.)

Chan’s Front Man

2009-11-14T18:48:00.000-08:00

Just to be sure nobody misses seeing this, I’d like to point out my interview with designer-illustrator Chris Rahn in the Killer Covers blog. Rahn is responsible most recently for the noirish jacket art decorating Academy Chicago Publishers’ paperback reissues of Earl Derr Biggers’ six Charlie Chan mystery novels, the last two of which--Charlie Chan Carries On and Keeper of the Keys--just reached bookstores in October.

Here’s an excerpt from our exchange:

Q: How much did you know about Charlie Chan before you were asked to create cover art for these reissued Earl Derr Biggers’ novels? Had you the read any of the books prior to this assignment? Or had you watched the old Chan films?

A: I knew the name Charlie Chan, but not with much understanding of the story. When I got the Charlie Chan series I made it a point to quickly read the entire first two books to be sure the covers [I had in mind] would do them justice. I really wanted them to feel authentic.

Q: And what was your opinion of author Biggers’ characters and storytelling style?

A: I really enjoyed the books. I believe it was the first two that I read all the way through: The House Without a Key and The Chinese Parrot. I was amazed at how accessible and modern the stories and characters were, considering that they were written so long ago. It was also great to see an Asian man portrayed so early on in a capable and less stereotypical role, even if some of the writing would be considered insensitive by today’s standards.

Click here to read the entire interview.

From Bernie’s Wrist to Yours?

2009-11-14T15:30:00.000-08:00

There’s no real mystery here, but there is a crime connection: As Bloomberg News reports, the “prisoner watch” once worn by NASDAQ chairman and convicted Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff went up for auction today in New York City. “The name [of the watch] has nothing to do with Madoff’s current status as inmate No. 61727- 054 at Butner Federal Correctional Complex in North Carolina,” Bloomberg notes, before going on to explain that

The 18-carat gold chronograph, model 3525, gained its moniker because Rolex offered similar timepieces to prisoners of war in Germany during World War II, including those involved in “The Great Escape.” It is one of 27 Swiss-made watches that the U.S. Marshals Service plans to sell as it seeks to recover assets for Madoff’s victims. ...

Madoff’s watch collection included 17 Rolexes, seven Cartiers and timepieces from Patek Philippe, Audemars Piguet and Franck Muller, all of which are made by companies based in or near Geneva [Switzerland]. The prisoner watch is valued at $75,000 to $87,500, according to Gaston & Sheehan Auctioneers, which is running the sale at the Sheraton New York Hotel & Towers in Manhattan.

You’ll find the full story here.

UPDATE: Madoff’s Rolex finally sold at the auction for $65,000--$15,000 less than expected.

The Book You Have to Read: “Nightmare Alley,” by William Lindsay Gresham

2009-11-13T09:17:00.000-08:00

(Editor’s note: This is the 71st installment of our ongoing Friday blog series highlighting great but forgotten books. Today’s pick has been made by Kelli Stanley, a San Francisco author, film noir fan, and comic book buff. Her debut novel and first Roman Noir, Nox Dormienda [A Long Night for Sleeping], won the Bruce Alexander Memorial Mystery Award. Her second book, City of Dragons, is a private-eye tale set in 1940 San Francisco. It’s due out from Thomas Dunne/Minotaur Books in February 2010. When not penning novels or listening to old-time radio shows, Stanley composes a blog called Writing in the Dark.)

If noir is the stuff of nightmares--you know what I mean, the kind in which (according to the popular conference definition of the genre) you’re f&^#% from page one--then a one-off, nearly forgotten classic called Nightmare Alley is surely the biggest freak show of them all.

And I mean that literally. Nightmare Alley, written by William Lindsay Gresham, concerns itself with the twilight world of the carnival, the huckster, the super-slick salesman of the three shell con, all grifting a living--and sometimes better than a living--off the hopes, dreams, fears, and delusions of middle-class, corn-fed America.

Now, I’ve got this thing for carnivals. The black magic way they just appear on the edges--parking lots, small towns, aging strip malls--always, it seems, at twilight. The heady mixture of the barked come-on, the pitch, the rigged games, and the smells of hot dogs and popcorn and stale cotton candy. And the thrill rides ... screaming teens, no inhibitions. Secret assignations, stolen moments. Everything gone with the dawn.

My fascination with carnivals and their ephemeral, disturbing, chaotic, and ultimately transfiguring effect on mainstream society was one reason why I wanted to set a novel at San Francisco’s 1939/1940 world’s fair, the Golden Gate International Exposition. World’s fairs sport a midway--the one mounted on man-made Treasure Island, in San Francisco Bay, was called the Gayway, long before that tag would become an obvious pun. My short story “Children’s Day,” which will be published in the next International Thriller Writers’ anthology, First Thrills (due out in June 2010 from Tor), is a prequel to my forthcoming novel, City of Dragons, and is set on Treasure Island. And while the action in City of Dragons itself takes place during the off-season of that exposition, the Rice Bowl Party at the heart of that story is a three-day-and-night street carnival, complete with games of chance, the odors of sweat and peanuts, and a mind-reader named Madame Pengo--a small homage to Nightmare Alley.

Gresham’s book is sumptuous, rich, redolent, and literary. Fused with a classically tragic structure, the plot and characters roil and roll in your head, guests who will never leave. In some ways, it’s a bitter, cynical take on the Horatio Alger myth, a commentary on the Americans America left behind.

Stan Carlisle is a bright boy. He hooks up with a traveling carnival, and learns the tricks of the trade as a sideshow “mentalist”--how to read faces, how to memorize code, how to exploit his natural bent for theatricality. He uses whomever he has to in order to better his position. Stan possesses intelligence, ambition, good looks, and something more--a true talent for communicating with people, for persuading them. To know what the little lady would like and the ability to give it to her ... the power to charm the marshal into not closing down the fleabag flea circus he’s made his home:

“How’d you know I got a daughter?”

Stan rolled the silks into a ball and they vanished. His face was serious, the blue eyes grave. “I know many things, Marshal. I don’t know exactly how I know them, but there’s nothing supernatural about it, I am sure. My family was Scotch, and the Scotch are often gifted with powers that the old folks used to call ‘second sight.’”

The white head, with its coarse, red face, nodded involuntarily.

But Stan’s not satisfied with playing the sticks. He steps on a few people, causes trouble, exploits a woman named Zeena, and is torn between fascination and disgust at the spectacle of the alcoholic geek, the lowest of the low, the man who--for a bottle of cheap whiskey--will bite the heads off squirming live chickens and degrade himself to a subhuman status.

Eventually, Stan makes the big time, becoming a slick and successful spiritual advisor to the gullible, emotionally vulnerable and--of course--wealthy patrons who can make him the real bucks.

For a while, of course.

It would spoil the book to reveal any more. Gresham’s style sometimes veers from third-person to inner monologue, a feverishly close point of view that propels the drama:

Groping in the dark he found it, lying on its side there was still a drink in it oh Jesus I got to get out of here before they see this room ...

And “cards,” not chapters, divide the novel’s text, each section named for a tarot card and provided with a pertinent quote. Card I, for example, is The Fool: “who walks in motley, with his eyes closed, over a precipice at the end of the world.”

What makes Nightmare Alley even more of a nightmare is the temptation to see the author in these lines. Gresham was born in Baltimore in 1909, moved to New York, graduated from high school, and volunteered as a medic for the Loyalist forces in the Spanish Civil War in 1937. He came back in ’39 a damaged man and ravaged soul. Yet another personal point of interest for me, as Miranda Corbie--the protagonist of City of Dragons--volunteered as a nurse in that conflict in the same year, and later finds work as an escort.

For Gresham, the world was a downward spiral. He contracted tuberculosis and tried to commit suicide. He eventually married poet, radical communist, and former child prodigy Joy Davidman, and found work writing for the pulps. Gresham became an alcoholic and an abusive husband and father, which led Joy into a relationship to and marriage with English writer C.S. Lewis--a relationship later dramatized in the play and subsequent films, Shadowlands.

Nightmare Alley was published in 1946; Limbo Tower, Gresham’s only other novel--another noir, set in a TB ward--in ’49. He eventually penned a book about magician and escapologist Harry Houdini as well as a non-fiction look at the lives of carnies (Monster Midway, 1954), but years of hard living took their toll. He started to lose his sight, then developed cancer of the tongue. And finally, in 1952, he returned to the Dixie Hotel in Manhattan, where he’d written his first and greatest novel, Nightmare Alley ... and took an overdose of sleeping pills. He was 52.

In 1947, Nightmare Alley was fortunate enough to be made into one of the greatest of all film noirs. Starring a terrific Tyrone Power (if you don’t think he could act, you’re in for a surprise) and a strong supporting cast which included the lovely ingénue Colleen Gray, Joan Blondell, and noir stalwarts Mike Mazurki and Helen Walker, the movie is available on DVD. Rent it soon and often, or better yet buy a copy. With a crackling good script by Jules Furthman (The Shanghai Gesture, The Big Sleep), and atmospherically directed by Edmund Goulding (Grand Hotel, The Old Maid--we can only wish he’d been given more crime films), Nightmare Alley is a rare example of a movie almost as good as its source material.

Both the film and novel have been dark inspirations for my own work, and I appreciate The Rap Sheet for giving me the opportunity to share them with you! And I promise you this: You’ll never use the word “geek” without William Lindsay Gresham’s novel brushing through your mind ...

So step right up, ladies and gents, for only one thin dime, right this way--don’t crowd the ladies, children, make some room, make some room!--only one thin dime, and Zeena will tell your past--your present--your future ... in Nightmare Alley!

Revisited Reads

2009-11-13T09:16:00.000-08:00

It just wouldn’t seem like Friday anymore without “forgotten books” recommendations popping up all over the Web. Beyond Kelli Stanley’s tribute on this page to Nightmare Alley, by William Lindsay Gresham, today’s crime-fiction suggestions include: The Venetian Affair, by Helen MacInnes; Killers at Large, edited by Alfred Hitchcock; Sinful Woman, by James M. Cain; Fire, Burn, by John Dickson Carr; Trouble Is What I Do, by Rob Kantner; Woman at Risk, by Miles Tripp; The Case of the Dancing Sandwiches, by Fredric Brown; Die Dreaming, by Terence Faherty; and A Country Kind of Death, by Mary McMullen.

Patti Abbott, who launched this impressive series, has a few more reading choices in her own blog, plus a list of all of today’s participating writers.

Sector Sweep

2009-11-13T07:54:00.001-08:00

• A never-before-published Hercule Poirot story? Andrew F. Gulli, the managing editor of Strand Magazine, says the yarn will feature in his periodical’s upcoming 10th anniversary issue. He adds:

This is the first time in over a decade that something new has come from Agatha Christie and the first time in thirty-four years, since Poirot has made an appearance.

After Agatha Christie’s daughter Rosalind Hicks passed away in 2004, her home was left to the National Trust. While the home was being cleared out they found Agatha Christie’s notebooks. In one of the notebooks, “The Incident of the Dog’s Ball” was found, which is a Hercule Poirot story. [W]e decided to publish this because there is some interesting history behind the story; Christie later expanded the story into a novel called The Dumb Witness. To those who have read the novel, there are some similarities, but there are also several surprises which make it a great story in its own right in addition to providing a glimpse into the mind of Christie.

More here. (Hat tip to Janet Rudolph.)

• The blog Meridian Bridge has posted a very nice two-part interview with author, blogger, and determined lawn protector Bill Crider. Part I is here, Part II is here.

• Elizabeth Foxwell reminds us: “Lawyer-author George V. Higgins, best remembered for the gritty The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1972), was born today in Brockton, MA, in 1939. He died in 1999.”

• The DVD release of Southland’s first season episodes is due in January. That happens to be the same month in which TNT plans to begin running the series’ second season.

• More DVD news: The first-season episodes of Scarecrow and Mrs. King (1983-1987), which starred Kate Jackson as a divorced housewife impressed into the spy game by Bruce Boxleitner, will be released on March 9, 2010. Meanwhile, Season One of the Los Angeles cop series Hunter, with Fred Dryer and Stepfanie Kramer, is due in stores on January 19.

• Just in case you were wondering: “I don’t see anywhere in the Bible where it says you shouldn’t get breast implants,” disgraced former beauty queen Carrie Prejean tells Christianity Today.

• I’d like to offer my belated condolences to the family of short-story writer Dick Stodghill, who died last weekend in Ohio. The quondam newspaperman contributed over the years to Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, and Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, many of his yarns featuring 1930s Akron private eye Jack Eddy. (An example of such fiction can be enjoyed here.) Stodghill was 84 years old. UPDATE: More on Stodghill’s work can be found here.

• While impatiently awaiting the publication, by Crippen & Landru, of William Link’s book, The Columbo Collection (formerly known as The Columbo Stories), I stumbled today across a “fan fiction” site devoted to Los Angeles’ shabby but brilliant Lieutenant Columbo. Appropriately, it’s called Just One More Paragraph ...

• All I can say to this is, it’s about frickin’ time!

• G.M. Malliet, the author of Death and the Lit Chick, is interviewed by Sara Rosett in The Good Girls Kill for Money Club.

• Sue Grafton fans, take note.

• Don Bruns submits his latest novel, Stuff to Spy For, to Marshal Zeringue’s demanding Page 69 Test. The results are here. By the way, Bruns previously put his book through the Page 99 Test.

• It’s all choices, folks.

• Eighty-three-year-old actor Richard Anderson, who starred in The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman, co-starred for a time in Perry Mason, and appeared as a guest on series such as Ironside, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Hawaii Five-O, Columbo, and The Fall Guy, will be the next visitor to TV Confidential, the Web radio program hosted by Ed Robertson and Frankie Montiforte. The show will premiere this coming Monday, November 16, at 10 p.m. ET/7 p.m. PT on Shokus Internet Radio, with a rebroadcast on Tuesday, November 17, at 11 p.m. ET/8 p.m. PT on Share-a-Vision Radio, KSAV.org. Click here for more information.

Twice the Taibo

2009-11-13T06:25:00.000-08:00

Thanks to those smarties at Akashic Books, the wonderful Mexican writer Paco Ignacio Taibo II is receiving some major play. First off, he edited one of the company’s fine collections of short stories, Mexico City Noir, which offers new work by Eugenio Aguirre, Eduardo Antonia Parra, Bernardo Fernández Bef, Óscar de la Borbolla, Victor Luiz González, Myriam Laurini, Eduardo Monteverde, and others.

On top of that Akashic has released a new, expanded edition of The Uncomfortable Dead (2006), credited to both Taibo and Subcomandante Marcos. Says Publishers Weekly:

Mexican crime writer Taibo and a real-life spokesperson for the Zapatista movement, Subcomandante Marcos, provide alternating chapters for this postmodern comedic mystery about good, evil, and modern revolutionary politics. Elías Contreras, a detective for the Zapatista National Liberation Army (and Marcos’ creation), heads to Mexico City to investigate the case of a nefarious government-backed murderer named Morales. Taibo brings back one-eyed Mexico City detective Héctor Belascoaràn Shayne (Return to the Same City, etc. ), who becomes involved in the case when he learns of strange telephone messages about this same Morales. Taibo’s expertise ensures a smart, funny book, and Marcos brings a wry sense of humor. The authors mix mystery with metafiction: characters operate from beyond the grave or chat about the roles they play in the novel, and Marcos writes his fictional self into the story.

Taibo was born in Gijón, Spain, but he has lived in Mexico ever since 1958. He is now a professor of history at the Mexico City’s Metropolitan University.

Great stuff, especially the one-eyed detective ...

READ MORE: “FFB: Our Word Is Our Weapon,” by Kieran Shea
(Black Irish Blarney).

The Best TV Crime Drama Openers, #7

2009-11-11T12:14:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-11T11:31:00.002-08:00

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

2009-11-11T08:05:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-11T07:29:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-10T15:12:00.000-08:00

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.