THE KNOWLEDGEABLE BLOGGER

2010-04-07T14:49:00.000-07:00

Let He Who Is Without an Agent Cast the First Actor

2010-03-22T09:52:00.000-07:00

I wrote last week about the subtitled Swedish film version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which just opened in New York. As sure as there’s a Scott Rudin in heaven, somebody is already casting the Hollywood version of this picture. But who could possibly be as good as Nooni Rapace was in the role of Lisbeth Salander? Or as fine as Michael Nyquist was at playing her supporter and lover, the journalist Mikael Blomkvist? Or as excellent as the great Swedish actor Sven-Bertil Taub, who portrays Heinrich Vanger, the man who gets this whole story rolling?

Well, here’s your chance to choose your favorite actors for the American version of Dragon Tattoo. Click the Comments tab at the end of this post to tell us who should star. How about Beyonce as Salander, Jeff Bridges as Blomkvist, and Kris Kristofferson as Vanger?

2010-03-20T12:46:00.001-07:00

Hello, world -- here comes Esme

"Tattoo" Nails It

2010-03-19T11:20:00.000-07:00

Through methods too devious to mention, I just saw the subtitled Swedish version of THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, the first of the late Steig Larsson's Millenium Trilogy.

In a word, terrific. Perfect casting from start to finish, especially the scary, gorgeous Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace). Michael Nyqvist as the crusading journalist Michael Blomkist is also excellent, as are all the ghosts and villains.

No spoilers here: It should be available from Netflix any day now. See it. You'll love it.

Cozies Uber Alles

2010-01-22T15:31:00.000-08:00

I've been accused of not spending enough time on so-called "cozies" -- gentler mysteries more gris than noir. Mea culpa. (Remember her?) Here are two recent excellent examples:

SCARY STUFF, by Sharon Fiffer (Minotaur Books)

It's called The Reviewer's Curse, and it has happened to me several times. A critic goes nuts about a first novel -- and the writer either slides into a steep decline or falls off the page entirely. So when I said about Sharon Fiffer's 2001 debut mystery, Killer Stuff, "This one's a keeper," I had all digits crossed.

Fortunately, the Curse was out to lunch. Six books later, Fiffer's Jane Wheel -- collector of weird old stuff and crime solver of surprising skills -- is better than ever. Best of all, her writing mixes great humor and unique insights with a powerful narrative engine.

Early in Scary Stuff, Fiffer reminds us that "Jane collected Bakelite, buttons, sewing tools, measuring tapes, yardsticks, cigar boxes, flower frogs, anything with letters and numbers..." When her shrewd, stamp-collecting niece asks her aunt why he doesn't go in for stamps or coins, Jane says, "I never collect anything that I actually might make money on... I only accept poor stuff, old throwaways and castoffs."

One of the most intriguing features of Fiffer's Wheel books is the way she gives Jane an instantly- believable background. Jane and her younger brother, Michael, were raised in Kankakee, IL., where their parents, Don and Nellie, own and run a bar and grill called the EZ Way Inn. Jane got as far from home as Evanston, but Michael made it all the way to Los Angeles. Finding a box of Michael's old baseball cards at his California home, Jane remembers Nellie threatening to throw them away, and is baffled. "Every mother threw away her son's baseball cards. It was the rule...," she thinks.

It is this visit to her brother, her first in two years, that plunges Jane into the mystery part of her book. Michael tells her that on three occasions, someone has accused him of fraud on EBay -- only to realize later that it wasn't him. Then, back in Kankakee, one of Don and Nellie's close friends is attacked. Jane and her detecting partner, a former cop called Oh, work hard to tie everything up in a package that is definitely a keeper.

DOUBLEBACK, by Libby Fischer Hellmann (Bleak House)

Not at all a cozy, Hellman's new book is one tough cookie. When I think of Libby Fischer Hellmann, her two excellent series come to mind: the longer one about video producer and single mother Ellie Foreman, and the newer one about ex-Chicago cop turned private investigator Georgia Davis. (Hellmann also edited and contributed to Chicago Blues, a wonderful collection of stories about the city and its musical heritage, which should be on everyone's shelf.)

Now Hellmann has combined her two chief characters into one strong and moving novel. Other writers have done this before: Michael Connelly merged his LAPD veteran Harry Bosch with his fascinating Mickey Haller, a lawyer who does business from his Lincoln Town Car. But with Doubleback, Hellmann proves she can stand up to peer pressure.

When she gets a call from her best friend, Susan, asking for her help in finding a missing eight-year-old girl, Ellie's first reaction is stay out of it. "Over the past several years," she tells us, "I've had several encounters with the dark side of human nature. I don't look for it, and don't much like it. I prefer a boring, normal life. But then Rachel is my daughter, Jake Foreman is my father, and Luke Sutton is my boyfriend. Normal is not an option."

She decides to pass the problem to Davis -- a tough, competent private eye she has worked with before. "Foreman was the kind of woman who seemed to attract trouble; it was a small miracle she was still alive," Georgia says when Ellie calls. The case appears to be a lose-lose situation: the girl's mother, Chris, has been warned not to tell the police, and she was just involved in a nasty divorce case and is worried about losing custody. "Being a good PI meant knowing when to take on a case and when to hand it off," Davis says. "This one practically screamed 'hands off' "

The little girl is returned safely three days later. But the plot darkens and thickens when Chris, the IT manager at a large Chicago bank, may have misappropriated three million dollars. Not convinced that his daughter is safe, Molly's father hires PI Georgia Davis to follow the money.

Hellmann has done such a good job of bringing her dual principals to vivid life that you believe every word of it.

IS THIS THE BEST THRILLER OF 2009?

2010-01-16T18:20:00.000-08:00

[THIS ONE'S FOR YOU, RUTH]

THE HIDDEN MAN, by David Ellis (Putnam; $25.95)

If you've just been the prosecutor who hung Rod Blagojevich out to dry, what do you do for an encore? If you're David Ellis, you write your best legal thriller yet – creating a new series hero who should be around for a long time.

Jason Kolarich, a Chicago criminal defense lawyer easing the pain of a personal tragedy by taking on no-brainer cases and drinking himself into a stupor most nights, has come down in the world. A college football star, he was smart enough to land a good job with one of Chicago's most prestigious firms after serving as a county prosecutor. Fame and fortune shined down after he second-chaired the defense of a sitting state senator charged by the Feds with extortion and taking bribes, and helped get him off.

Then came his tragedy, which tore him apart. “I'd been back on my feet for six months, and I'd gotten some good results for some clients,” he tells us. Kolarich's nightmare – which so quickly and naturally becomes the reader's that you'll be amazed and frightened in equal measures – begins when a man calling himself Smith (“From the moment my assistant Marie showed him in, he felt wrong... His hand was moist when I shook it, and he didn't make eye contact”) offers him a very large retainer to defend Sammy Cutler, Jason's closest boyhood friend, whom he hasn't seen in 20 years – on a murder charge. Cutler's baby sister, Audrey, was stolen from her bed when Sammy was seven. Now, he has been accused of killing the sexual predator who everybody believes was the child's abductor, and wants his old friend Jason to get him off. The case “would require dedication, consistency, and full work days,” Kolarich says – knowing that the price of screwing it up would be his old friend spending his life in jail.

It gets even more harrowing when Jason begins to get threats of violence from Smith and his employer, known only as “Carlo” – chiefly against his younger brother, Pete, the only surviving member of the Kolarich clan whom Jason loves. When Pete is charged with selling guns and a large amount of cocaine, he insists to his brother that he was set up.

Kolarich believes him, but now has to work his mind and body through some dangerous moments. Again, Ellis lays it all out in cool, understated pages that grab you by the throat. And the ending will knock your socks off.

Did I mention that he also writes about trials and all things legal with the same expertise he's been guilty of for six books?

Parker Handles Heavy Iron

2010-01-02T14:41:00.000-08:00

In L.A. Outlaws, T. Jefferson Parker introduced Los Angeles County sheriff's deputy Charlie Hood, sent up to the Antelope Valley after some bad behavior. In The Renegades, Hood was wrapped up in a major case of police corruption. Now, in the absolutely riveting Iron River, Hood is working with the ATFE (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives) along the Mexican border, trying to slow the flow of illegal weapons into the U.S.

Few writers of any kind can match Parker's rare combination of dead-on characterization, narrative excitement and the kind of cool, poetic prose that grabs your attention and won't let go. In L.A. Outlaws, Hood tangled with (in all aspects of that phrase) a female bank robber who called herself Allison Murrietta, after a famous bandit who was an ancestor. She also taught school as Suzanne Jones.

Early in Iron River, Hood is searching through some sales records of a recently de-licensed Arizona gun dealer and comes across a listing for "a .40-caliber derringer for Allison Murrietta of Norwalk, California.

"Hood looked away and took a deep breath and let it out and looked back at the record. Allison Murrieta/Suzanne Jones. Take your pick. He recognized her bold handwriting. It conjured her voice and the shape of her face and the feel of her body and the taste of her breath. She had been shot with that derringer in her hand, not quite ready to use it against a boy. It was ivory-handled and beautifully tooled. Now it was Hood's gun, bequeathed wordlessly to Hood by Allison's son.

"Hood held the form and looked at her signature and in spite of everything he felt at this moment, he smiled."

A similar note is sounded near the book's end, as Hood watches through field glasses what appears to be very large gun deal going down, run by Allison's son. "In this young descendant of Joaquin Murietta, Hood saw outlaws dead and outlaws not yet born, and he also saw Suzanne, and even glimpsed something dark and tempting that he had long ago banished from himself..."

As I've said before, Parker is arguably the best Southern California crime writer now working, and his Charlie Hood is a fascinating creation. You can find Parker's treasure lode at Amazon.

Gorman Vs. The 1960s

2010-01-01T16:16:00.000-08:00

He'll probably be pissed at me for saying it, but Ed Gorman is the tooth fairy of the mystery world -- dispensing not only wisdom but actual paying jobs. We have never met, but one day I got an e-mail from Ed. He had read a piece about Fredric Brown's The Fabulous Clipjoint which I'd written for the Chicago Tribune, and asked if I'd like to write the introduction to a new edition of Brown's Madball for a series he was putting together. A nice fee was mentioned. Madball was one of the first mysteries I ever read, and I would have written the introduction for nothing -- but I didn't tell Gorman that.

Aside from his kindness, Gorman is one of the best writers of mysteries of recent memory. His Sam McCain series, about a lawyer in Black Water Falls, Iowa in the 1960s, earned these glowing comments from Booklist: "...Sam McCain is cut from the same cloth as Lawrence Block's Matt Scudder and Bill Pronzini's "Nameless"-- series heroes who change as time passes. The sweet, nonviolent, naive young man we met in the series debut (The Day the Music Died, 1999) is now comfortable pistol-whipping a witness..."

Gorman also edits, along with Martin H. Greenberg, the annual Best Crime and Mystery Stories of the Year -- the most recent titled Between the Dark and the Daylight.

Now for the best part: his latest Sam McCain outing, TICKET TO RIDE, just published by Pegasus, is one terrific read. It's set in 1965, and the basically conservative townsfolk plan on burning Beatle, Rolling Stone and Bob Dylan records in front of a local church on Labor Day. And the first young soldier from Black River Falls returns home from a strange place called Viet Nam, in a coffin.

Ticket to Ride is a fascinating look at the war from both sides of smalltown America. Sam is very active in the anti-war movement, and when a rich and powerful warmonger is killed in a fistfight with a young radical, Sam is the only lawyer in town to have the guts and heart to take his case.

If you've missed any of the McCain series, you can rectify that by going to Gorman's page at Amazon.com.

Caputo Comes Across

2009-12-31T14:10:00.000-08:00

CROSSERS, by Philip Caputo

Early in Philip Caputo's complex and elegant new novel, we first meet Ben Erskine. It is 1903, and Ben -- "a boy just past the threshold of adolescence, tall for his age, as lean as one of the ocotillo wands that fence the yard" -- becomes the book's first crosser, riding his pinto Maggie across the border from his uncle's home in Arizona's San Rafael Valley to Nogales on a routine errand with a surprisingly violent ending. "The thunderstorm rolls on, passing to the west, while the sky overhead is clear. Nothing much has changed except Ben Erskine"

We have come to expect original history-based books from Caputo: His Vietnam memoir, A Rumor of War, is, as John Gregory Dunne wrote, "a dangerous and even subversive book, the first to insist — and the insistence is all the more powerful because it is implicit — that the reader ask himself these questions: How would I have acted? To what lengths would I have gone to survive?" And Acts of Faith, his novel set in the Sudan, also won high praise.

Crossers is in the same league, full of characters and events which start separately in various forms and in both past and present tense and which slowly begin to coalesce. After the loss of his wife on 9/11, Gil Castle leaves New York for his family's Arizona ranch, San Ignacio, overlooking the Mexican border. Gil's discovery of a Mexican illegal, left for dead after a border-crossing deal gone awry, soon merges the world of cattle and horses and operatic landscapes with the world of drug lords and coyotes and murder.

Caputo says that he at first intended to write two separate novels -- one past and one present. But then "I decided to fuse the two. At first, the historical story was going to be part one, the contemporary story was going to be part two; but that seemed too linear, too mechanical and schematic. It also violated the spirit of the book--I wanted to show that the past is never dead, that it constantly affects the present..."

Good choice. Great book.

Way To Go, Moynahan!

2009-12-27T12:45:00.000-08:00

One of the best jobs I ever had was editing a London men's magazine called TOWN in the 1960s. It was in the Esquire tradition, was published by Clive Labovitch and Michael Heseltine (who later went on to become Deputy Prime Minister under Margaret Thatcher), and had a staff of talented if occasionally eccentric journalists, one of whom, Jane Wilson, wrote up a storm, the first of her many bonfires, and became my wife of 41 years.

Also on the editorial staff was a fearless reporter named Brian Moynahan, who went to such dangerous places as Vietnam and Cambodia in search of stories, and later moved from Town to the London Sunday Times (pre-Murdoch) and other prestigious journals.

I lost track of Brian when I returned to America, and always wondered how (and what) he was doing. Now comes word of what sounds like a tremendous success -- a new book called JUNGLE SOLDIER about Freddy Spencer Chapman, one of Britain's many World War II heroes. In 1941, Chapman was dispatched to Singapore to train British guerrillas for the coming war with Japan. Setting out from Kuala Lumpur in January, 1942 on a mission to sabotage Japanese supply lines, he became a veritable one-man army. The Japanese deployed 2,000 men to search for what they believed was a squad of 200 Australian guerrillas. Following Japan's invasion of Malaya and the fall of Singapore in February 1942, Chapman found himself stranded. Under these most desperate of circumstances, the man dubbed the "the jungle Lawrence" by Field Marshal Wavell showed his bloody-minded talent for survival. Relentlessly hunted by the Japanese army, he was afflicted by typhus, scabies, pneumonia, blackwater fever, cerebral malaria, dengue fever and ulcers before finally being rescued and evacuated to Ceylon on 13 May 1945. Chapman returned to Malaya by parachute in August to take the Japanese surrender at Penang.

The British reviews of Jungle Soldier have been ectastic. "Crisp, compelling biography... Moynahan has done a terrific job of turning Chapman's life into an elegant narrative. The adventures and achievements are so remarkable that his factual biography reads at times like a Victorian novel, where the central character suffers disaster after disaster ... perhaps this book will help win final recognition for a truly extraordinary man," said the Sunday Times. "Captures the amazing wartime exploits of Freddy Spencer Chapman," raved the Daily Express. "An extraordinary life ... For over three years in the Second World War, he blew up trains, bridges and enemy soldiers in the jungles of Malaya all the while studying birdlife and collecting seeds to send back to Kew Gardens ... Quite why Chapman hasn't found Lawrence of Arabia's fame is anyone's guess," wrote The Guardian. "Brian Moynahan's gripping book gives a fascinating insight into Chapman's upbringing," wrote the Daily Telegraph. And the Daily Mail summed it up: "This story of endurance in the fetid heat of the Malayan jungle is surely one of the most awe-inspiring of the whole war - a courageous and utterly English hero, a man whose extraordinary bravery and tenacity were an inspiration to all who observed him. Only now, with the publication of this biography, will Freddy Spencer Chapman win the recognition his memory deserves."

No American publication of Jungle Soldier appears to be under way, but perhaps those glowing reviews will move an enterprising company into action. Meanwhile, you can get a copy of the British edition (published by Quercus, the folks who discovered Steig Larsson) through Amazon.com. And best wishes to you, Brian...

New Life For Jack Liffey

2009-12-22T12:53:00.000-08:00

John Shannon is probably the most under-rated and unread writer of crime fiction in California. I've talked about him here before, and have mentioned that his publisher had unceremoniously dumped him, even though his last book for them -- PALOS VERDES BLUE -- was one of his best Jack Liffey outings.

Today, I got the following e-mail from John, and I'm delighted to reprint it here:

Jack Liffey Migrates To a New Publisher!

"Poor Jack, I wish he'd settle down. First he starts out at John Brown Books, then Berkley Prime Crime, then Carroll & Graf, then Pegasus--and now, the British/ American publisher Severn House. With whom Jack now has a two-book deal.

"There was a word for this in Malawi English when I taught in the Peace Corps. When someone was restless or changed domicile a lot, he was called 'movious.' Poor movious Jack. So let's all rush out and buy the next one -- an independent mystery bookstore or Amazon may be your best bet -- and maybe Jack will stay put for a while.

"And just to ice the cake, the next novel, ON THE NICKEL (Jack Liffey No. 12), actually deals with homelessness: At the outset, laid-off aerospace worker Jack Liffey finds himself temporarily mute and wheelchair-bound, and his 18-year-old daughter Maeve tries to cheer him up by taking the first steps of a new case for him, to find the missing son of his old friend, Mike Lewis.

"Unintentionally, Maeve embroils her father in a simmering fight on L.A.'s Skid Row (known locally as The Nickel because Fifth Street bisects the area.) The fight is between the homeless who desperately cling to the only shelter they know and developers trying to upgrade the single-room-occupancy hotels into pricey lofts for urban gentrifiers.

"Bully-boys for the developers toss Jack and his wheelchair into the hellish night streets of the Nickel. Some of the night denizens steal what they can -- his chair, his wallet and watch and shoes, while others end up helping him out.

"Eventually a chance encounter with an old girlfriend from the first Jack Liffey Novel -- The Concrete River -- helps restores his speech and legs. Jack can now repay those who helped him, and everyone is driven to an embattled flophouse: Jack, his current girlfriend, a Latina cop, Maeve, the missing boy and a small group of determined down-and-out Yiddish workers. The bully-boys' scheme to frighten them away touches off a conflagration that drives them all up to the rooftop for a touch-and-go rescue, as flames eat up through the tarpaper."

Personally, I can't wait for the first review copies of ON THE NICKEL to appear from Severn House. The publisher has also signed up another great mystery writer, Gar Anthony Haywood. Good on you, mates.

Another Tough and Tasty Cookie From Ira Berkowitz

2009-12-13T14:33:00.000-08:00

Those of us whose mystery tastes were bred and buttered by Dashiell Hammett, Mickey Spillane, John D. McDonald, Lawrence Block and Ross Macdonald will be pleased to hear that Ira Berkowitz, their legitimate child, has a fine new Jackson Steeg book out, a handsome trade paperback called SINNERS' BALL. After surviving, in Old Flame, a bomb blast at a saloon called Feeney's (imagine Matt Scudder's favorite hangouts rolled into one), Steeg, an ex-NYPD homicide cop who has been pensioned off because of a problem with Johnny Walker Black Label and a missing lung, can still find the strength to battle bad guys, even if he has to sit down and breathe hard afterwards.

Jake's biggest problem is his brother, Dave, an amoral mobster who lost a hand in the blast, brought on by his kidnapping of the son of a ruthless Israeli gangster trying to muscle in on his terrority. Now Dave is in even more trouble: When a warehouse he owns goes up in flames and kills three squatters and two fire fighters, an additional six bodies, sexually mutilated and placed in packing crates, turn up in the basement. Dave is an easy target for an indictment, and when Steeg tries to locate the real culprit, he steps on the wrong toes and finds himself ducking bullets.

Berkowitz is the best thing to happen to tough American crime fiction
since Jim Fusilli (A Well-Known Secret; Closing Time), who seems to be writing for younger audiences these days. So if a blast from the past is what you crave to get you through the holidays, Sinners' Ball is your noir of the year.

All the News That Fits

2009-12-10T13:22:00.000-08:00

Newspapers may be in deep trouble, but good crime novels about them seem to be on a roll. New York Times vet John Darnton's Black and White and Dead All Over told us about the bitchy, nasty things that go on at a New York paper of record. In The Scarecrow, Michael Connelly showed what happens when a top Los Angeles Times writer is given the sack -- and is then asked to train his successor.

Following in that same quality vein is the just published FACES OF THE GONE, a debut mystery by New Jersey's own Brad Parks, who knows the turf as well as Harlen Coben. His Carter Ross is an investigative reporter for the (fictional) Newark Eagle-Examiner. When four bodies, each with a single bullet wound in the back of the head, are found stacked like cordwood in a weed-choked vacant lot, Ross learns that the four victims -- an exotic dancer, a drug dealer, a hustler and a mama’s boy -- came from different parts of the city and didn’t seem to know one another.

How Carter turns from investigative reporter to crime-solver makes for a lively, intelligent read. And for people like me who spent lots of years in lots of newsrooms, it's the perfect cure for the news today that Editor & Publisher, where I used to scan the classifieds and imagine myself working in exotic places like Seattle or Singapore, is folding after 130 years...

Brits Don't Surf

2009-12-07T14:52:00.000-08:00

Sarah Weinman broke the news in October that one of my favorite writers, Don Winslow, is taking on the mantle of the late and much-admired thriller writer known as Trevanian, author of The Eiger Sanction and Shibumi. But at that time, she reported, "Winslow's own publishing status in the US is in a bit of limbo, as The Gentlemen's Hour - the even-better sequel to the amazing The Dawn Patrol - was published in the UK, but there's no US publication date in sight."

That changed last month, when Weinman wrote, "Winslow not only is writing as Trevanian for Grand Central, but his own work will have a new publisher, namely Simon and Schuster... According to Publishers Marketplace, The Gentlemen's Hour won't be published until July 2011, which is a hell of a long way away - but that's because the house has elected to publish Winslow's standalone novel Savages, described as 'a gritty, humorous, and drug-fueled ransom thriller set amidst the Baja Cartel in Laguna Beach, CA.'"

2011 was indeed too long to wait, so I girded my wallet and bought (through Amazon.UK) a copy of The Gentlemen's Hour. Wonderful stuff, and as Weinman said it was even better than the gorgeous The Dawn Patrol. Even if the closest you've ever come to a surfboard is watching a Gidget flick, there's enough action, suspense, sex, love, humor and wisdom in it to get you down to your nearest point break at top speed.

Sadness, too, as surfing San Diego private eye Boone Daniels -- broke, as usual -- takes on a case for a top law firm that has been hired to defend a nasty punk kid charged with killing a local surfing hero. Boone knows he'll be courting outrage from the rest of the Dawn Patrol, a mixed group -- a Japanese cop, a giant Samoan, a lothario lifeguard -- who would rather surf than eat, and who have their own strict moral code. As his closest friendships begin to fray, and he digs deeper into the murkier side of surfing culture, drug czars and corrupt builders and politicians rise out of the Pacific like creatures from a very black lagoon.

The book arrived on Friday. I finished it the next day, pausing only to rest my eyes. I think you'll have the same reaction...

Mother Of Mercy, Is This The End of The Peculiar Crimes Unit?

2009-12-05T18:04:00.000-08:00

Bryant & May On the Loose, the seventh book in the series, could be the last book Christopher Fowler ever writes about Scotland Yard's weirdest and most endearing fictional duo.

With the special police unit shut down, mostly because of budget cuts, Detective Arthur Bryant is feeling withdrawn and depressed while his partner, John May, is considering PI work. May is the more affable of the two, while the socially inept Bryant takes every opportunity to anger his bosses at the Yard. When a former team member stumbles on a beheaded corpse in London's King's Cross neighborhood, May uses the discovery to gain the Unit a brief new lease on life. He persuades the higher-ups that unsolved gang crimes in the area could threaten the economic benefit anticipated from the 2012 Olympics. Given one week to solve the case, without any official sanction or access to police resources, May pulls Bryant out of his doldrums and reassembles the unit. To May's dismay, his colleague is more interested in reports that a man wearing a stag's head has been seen in the area.

In last year's The Victoria Vanishes, my favorite in this underappreciated series, Bryant watches a famous pub disappear in the course of chasing a serial killer who preys on middle-age women in the city’s most popular watering holes. B&M discover a connection between the victims, but the most critical clues, it turns out, are embedded in the histories of the saloons (including the long-gone Victoria Cross, where Bryant swears he saw one of the victims just moments before her death).

Fowler has written a total of 15 novels, including the highly-lauded Full Dark House, and if anyone can keep these two grand geezers alive, it's him. Let's all keep our fingers crossed...

My Best of 2009 List

2009-12-03T10:11:00.000-08:00

Jim Mustich of BN.com asked me to pick them, and this is running right now:

Stardust
Joseph Kanon

Kanon's latest is as good as anything he's done, including the Edgar-winning Los Alamos. It's about a young man, Ben Collier, son of a famous German director, just returned to the U.S. in 1946 from service in the Signal Corps in Europe, who travels to California after his sister-in-law tells him that his director brother, Danny, has suffered a serious fall from a hotel window. Was it an accident or a suicide attempt? When Danny dies, Ben suspects that someone pushed Danny out the window and turns amateur detective to identify the culprit. Toss in the Hollywood German Colony and a part Danny was playing in an anticommunist crusade a congressman is launching against the film industry, and you've got one of the year's best.

Breathing Water
Timothy Hallinan

I used to think that John Burdett's terrific books (Bangkok 8, Bangkok Tattoo, Bangkok Haunts) about Royal Thai police detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep, the only practicing Buddhist on the police force, were all I needed to know about the darker, sadder side of that popular tourist site. Then I began to read Hallinan's books about American travel writer Poke Rafferty, who lives in Bangkok with his Thai wife, Rose, and their adopted daughter who calls herself Miaow. Last year's The Fourth Watcher was his best yet – but his new one, Breathing Water, tops it.

The Ghosts of Belfast
Stuart Neville

Just when you thought the invasion of excellent Irish crime writers -- a group nicknamed Gaelic Noir -- had ended, along comes Stuart Neville with his first novel. Its central character, Gerry Fegan, is a former IRA "hard man," a killer in Northern Ireland, now reduced by the coming of peace to a shambling drunk, haunted by the ghosts of 12 victims who follow him everywhere. The only way that Fegan can kill off his ghosts is by tracking down his IRA superiors who ordered their deaths. This he does with violent precision, one by one, until he is alone again. Along the way, Neville condenses the fear and hate that troubled Ireland for so long, at the same time creating a memorable character with ease and a cool, deceptively straightfoward writing style.

Starvation Lake
Bryan Gruley

Gruley is the Chicago bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal, but don't expect any business secrets in his smashing debut thriller. Gruley has either played or is obsessed with the lower depths of amateur hockey; is as familiar with the backwaters of Michigan as he is with his computer keyboard; and knows how to drag you kicking and screaming into a story so gripping that you'll probably devour it in one gulp -- like the heavenly sounding egg pie served at Audrey's Diner. "Cheddar cheese and scrambled eggs bubbled up through a golden cocoon of Italian bread ... Steam billowed from the sausage, bacon, potatoes, green peppers, mushrooms and onions baked inside..."

Bury Me Deep
Megan Abbott

Nobody combines historical fact with bravura fiction the way Megan Abbott does. In The Song Is You, she took the real story of a young Hollywood starlet who really existed: Jean Spangler, a sexy-longlegs who disappeared one night and was never seen again. The papers called her Daughter of Black Dahlia, connecting Spangler to another notorious disappearance. The true parts of Bury Me Deep are based on another case that filled the tabloids in 1931, when a young Hollywood woman named Winnie Ruth Judd -- labeled Trunk Murderess, Tiger Woman, and Blonde Butcher -- gave herself up, saying that sexual jealousy had caused her to kill two of her female friends and dismember their bodies, after which she packed them into two trunks and shipped them to Phoenix.

Runners-up, in no particular order:

Palos Verdes Blue, by John Shannon
The Hidden Man, by David Ellis
Damnation Falls, by Edward Wright
Last Known Address, by Theresa Schwegel
Await Your Reply, by Dan Chaon
The Financial Lives Of The Poets, by Jess Walter
The Girl Who Played With Fire, by Steig Larsson
Roanoke, by Margaret Lawrence
Bruno, Chief Of Police, by Martin Walker
Below Zero, by C.J. Box
Dark Dreams, by Michael Genelin
Risk, by Colin Harrison
The Silent Hour, by Michael Koryta
Spade & Archer, by Joe Gores

Let the Suicides Assemble...

2009-11-28T15:25:00.000-08:00

Not at a table down at Maury's but a fine pizza place called Dino's in Burbank, where on Tues., Dec. 1st, the Suicide Club (from a Robert Louis Stevenson story), a group of crime writers who used to meet at the Farmers Market in Los Angeles, will gather together for some holiday cheer.

Robert S. Levinson (left) is hosting the affair at his son's restaurant. His latest book, which I've already mentioned, is the excellent standalone, The Traitor in Us All.

Among the others in attendance will be Dick Lochte, (left)

author of such classics as Sleeping Dog and the just-published The Morning Show Murders, which he wrote with some NBC weather guy.

The normally elusive Tom Nolan (left) has also agreed to attend. He reviews mysteries for the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and other journals. Nolan also wrote my favorite biography of recent years, Ross MacDonald.

What can I say about Gary Phillips that hasn't been said before -- mostly by him? Creator of the fine Ivan Monk series about a black detective who also runs a donut shop and which reminds me of the best of
Chester Himes, Gary is the most versatile a writer I know -- everything from comic books to political thrillers. His latest titles include Freedom's Flight and The Jook.

John Shannon is the heart and soul of the Suicide Club, a writer who fights the changing book market and comes out swinging. His work includes The Cracked Earth and his latest, Palos Verdes Blue.

Last but certainly not least is Kevin Burton Smith, editor of the fine online journal Thrilling Detective and one of the few writers and critics whose knowledge of the genre occasionally equals even mine. He's a Canadian, which probably explains his fascination with American crime.

And we'll be saving a chair for the much-missed Bruce Cook. Here's what January Magazine wrote when he died in 2003:

Bruce Cook, better known to fans of historical mysteries as "Bruce Alexander," author of the Sir John Fielding series, died in Los Angeles on November 9, 2003, after suffering a stroke. He was 71 years old. A former journalist and editor, Cook published his first genuine crime novel in 1988. However, it was his subsequent series about Fielding, the real-life 18th-century magistrate who created London's original police force, the Bow Street Runners, that brought him the greatest acclaim. "[T]he series," opines Mike Ashley in The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Modern Crime Fiction, "is a strong evocation of this important period when not just the police force came into existence but new laws ushered in the dawn of criminal justice." The Price of Murder, Cook/Alexander's 10th adventure for Fielding and his young protégé, Jeremy Proctor, was published only months before the author's passing.

Let the Good Stuff Roll

2009-11-25T14:17:00.000-08:00

2009, that great year for crime fiction, isn't over yet. Here's one that would make a perfect stocking stuffer -- if people still do that in the age of Kindle.

Gaelic Noir lives, with help from a fine female practitioner. "Campbell shows a light and conciliatory touch... She is excellent on the symptomatic one-upmanship of academia... she clearly has a talent for direct and uncompromising character portrayal," says the Irish Times. "Written in glistening prose... a major talent," agrees the Irish Independent. Jay Hamilton lives a comfortable life in London as a psychoanalyst, but the darker recesses of his own psyche would not stand up to close examination. His brother, a genius professor of mathematical linguistics at UCLA, was killed and Jay was the first on the scene. When Jay uses his clients' case studies as material for his fiction writing, the fallout threatens to cause his past to unravel.

And here two more goodies due out in the months ahead:

Ex-FBI agent Steve Vail is more than happy to leave the Bureau behind, but they aren't through with him yet. A group called the Rubaco Pentad is killing human targets one by one unless the FBI can give them buckets of cash, with the amount and the body count escalating each time the agency doesn’t pay up. The Feds are stumped. Some signs point to a corrupt agent while others lead to completely dead ends. Vail has built a reputation for being able to find anybody anywhere. Now, with no official ties, he's the perfect choice for the sort of under-the-radar investigation they need. But as Vail well knows, going after people who use killing as a bargaining chip is asking for the worst kind of trouble.

Anyone who enjoys C.J. Box and Nevada Barr should relish this one. Set in the wilds of Maine, it's an explosive tale of an estranged son thrust into the hunt for a murderous fugitive -- his own father. Game warden Mike Bowditch returns home one evening to find an alarming voice from the past on his answering machine: his father Jack, a hard drinking womanizer who makes his living illegally poaching game. An even more frightening call comes the next morning from the police: They are searching for the man who killed a beloved local cop the night before—and his father is their prime suspect. Jack has escaped from police custody, and only Mike believes that his tormented father might not be guilty.

It almost makes me sad that my two-year stint as a judge on the crime panel for the Los Angeles Times Book Awards is nearing its end..

Wider Than a Mile

2009-11-22T14:14:00.000-08:00

Mystery and music fight for space in my life, and music is gaining. I was fortunate enough to be sent an early copy (by Nicolas Latimer at Knopf, one of the best book publicists and enthusiasts in the business) of The Complete Lyrics of Johnny Mercer.

And the icing on my cake was Johnny Mercer: The Dream’s on Me , co-produced by Clint Eastwood, written and directed by Bruce Ricker, and featuring interviews with Tony Bennett, Julie Andrews, Blake Edwards, John Williams and others, which ran on Turner Classic Movies last Friday, on what would have Mercer’s 100th birthday. (He died in 1976.)

His lyrics set the highest standards in the American songbook. Collaborating with Hoagy Carmichael, Harry Warren, Harold Arlen and Jerome Kern, among many others, he set unforgettable words to some of the most memorable melodies in popular music, including “You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby,” “Fools Rush In,” “I Remember You,” “That Old Black Magic,” “Laura,” “Come Rain or Come Shine,” “Midnight Sun,” “Satin Doll,” "Moon River" and “One for My Baby (and One More for the Road).”

Some may think that Eastwood produced this marvelous program for TCM to give his daughter Alison a chance to sing on camera. But she's actually very good, seems to understand the lyrics perfectly, and gives a moving, nuanced performance.

I've been singing Mercer songs ever since, looking up lyrics on the invaluable Lyricsmania site. The details of the Eastwood biog (and other Mercer music) are at TCM's site

Men's Misadventure

2009-11-21T15:09:00.000-08:00

Those of you who are old enough to remember MEN'S ADVENTURE, my sad attempt to write a serial novel based on my own early years at Argosy Magazine for Jeff Pierce at The Rap Sheet, might be interested in the real story, just published by Kent State Press, All Man!, written by David M. Earle and beautifully produced in color in China.

Argosy gets several mentions, mostly about my boss and gin rummy partner managing editor Milt Machlin's phone interviews with Hemingway, which he turned into a paperback book called The Private Hell of Hemingway after Papa ate his shotgun in 1961.

I remember one of those New York/Havana conversations, which Milt invited me to listen in on while he taped it. Unfortunately, the recorder got only Machlin's questions and not Hem's responses. I was quickly drafted to help reconstruct the Hemingway half.

Any road, here's the publisher's description of All Man!

During the 1950s, Hemingway was in two plane crashes, won a Nobel Prize, published a best-selling novel, and had five movies released based on his work. He had always been a public figure, but during these years his fame rose to that of celebrity. Splashed on the pages of men's magazines were articles titled "Hemingway, Rogue Male," "Hemingway: America's No 1 He-Man," "Hemingway: War, Women, Wine, and Words," and "Hemingway: King of the Vulgar Words and Seduction." These articles appeared not in the mainstream men's magazines like Esquire, Field & Stream, and Playboy, but in the pulp men's adventure magazines of Vagabond, Rogue, Modern Man, Male, Bachelor, Sir Knight!, and Gent. Kitschy, extreme, and often misogynistic, these magazines capture the hyper-masculinity of the postwar decade. And Hemingway was portrayed as a role model in all of them. Using these overlooked and sensational magazines, David M. Earle explores the popular image of Ernest Hemingway in order to consider the dynamics of both literary celebrity and midcentury masculinity. Profusely illustrated with magazine covers, article blurbs, and advertisements in full color, All Man! considers the role that visuality played in the construction of Hemingway's reputation, as well as conveys a lurid and largely overlooked genre of popular publishing. More than just a contribution to Hemingway studies, All Man! is an important addition to scholarship in the modernist era in American literature, gender studies, popular culture, and the history of publishing.

Reds, Germans and Hollywood Lust

2009-11-19T13:42:00.000-08:00

It happens too often: a writer dies, and I'm reminded by the obits 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 it came out in 1986, but it wasn't until after his death in 1995 that I fell in love with this history of Hollywood in the 1940s.

The part that interested me most were the chapters about the German emigres who settled in Los Angeles during and after World War II. Thomas Mann was the dean; his 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 Joseph Kanon, publisher-turned-novelist (he won an Edgar for his superb Los Alamos, and his The Good German, equally excellent, became a film starring George Clooney) read those same chapters of City of Nets before starting to write his absolutely riveting and award-worthy STARDUST.

Ben Collier, recently returned to the U.S. from service in the Signal Corps in Europe, 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 someone pushed Danny out the window, and turns amateur detective to identify the culprit. Liesel and Ben begin a scorching affair, too good to last. Then Ben learns that his brother, formerly an active Communist, was playing a part in an anticommunist crusade which a congressman is launching against the film industry.

Stuffed with a dazzling blend of real people (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 is a splendid read.

Watch this, Bernie Madoff

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

No real mystery here, but there is a crime connection: As Bloomberg News reports, Bernard Madoff’s Rolex “Prisoner of War" watch will be auctioned today in New York. "The name has nothing to do with Madoff’s current status as inmate No. 61727- 054 at Butner Federal Correctional Complex in North Carolina.

"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. 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.

"The sale will do little to ease the anger in Geneva, where clients of financial institutions, including Union Bancaire Privee, Banque Benedict Hentsch & Cie. and Notz, Stucki & Cie., lost about $7 billion on Madoff investments.

“'It won’t change anything,' said André Polony, owner of the Piguet jewelry and watch store in Nyon, 17 miles northeast of Geneva, which sells Swiss brands, including Chopard, Baume & Mercier and Oris. 'It’s not like the money will make its way back to Switzerland.'"

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. 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.

The Rolex POW up for sale, as watch historian Alan Downing says, was one of several sent by the company to men incarcerated in Prisoner of War camps like Stalag Luft III (located at Sagan, 100 miles southeast of Berlin, at present Poland). "This camp is probably the most famous of all Prisoner of War Camps, due to it being the scene of the Great Escape of March 1944 and the subsequent making of the 1962 film of the same name."

=================

UPDATE

Madoff's Rolex sold for $65,000 — $15,000 less than expected.

Great Book

2009-11-13T10:32:00.000-08:00

.. and not a bad review, if I do say myself. Here's my take on Stuart Neville's certain-to-be-on-everyone's-Top-Ten-list, THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST, which ran yesterday on BN.com.

Just when you thought the invasion of excellent Irish crime writers -- a group nicknamed Celtic Noir -- had ended, along comes Stuart Neville with his first novel. Its central character, Gerry Fegan, is a former IRA "hard man," a killer in Northern Ireland, now reduced by the coming of peace to a shambling drunk, haunted by the ghosts of 12 victims who follow him everywhere. In a Belfast bar, "Fegan looked at each of his companions in turn. Of the five soldiers, three were Brits and two were Ulster Defence Regiment. Another of the followers was a cop, his Royal Ulster Constabulary uniform neat and stiff, and two more were Loyalists, both Ulster Freedom Fighters. The remaining four were civilians who had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. He remembered doing all of them, but it was the civilians whose memories screamed the loudest... They'd been with him since his last weeks in the Maze prison, seven years ago... He told one of the prison psychologists about it. Dr. Brady said it was guilt..." The only way that Fegan can kill off his ghosts is by tracking down his IRA superiors who ordered their deaths. This he does with violent precision, one by one, until he is alone again. Along the way, Neville condenses the fear and hate that troubled Ireland for so long, at the same time creating a memorable character with ease and a cool, deceptively straightfoward writing style.

A Double Dose of Taibo II

2009-11-12T16:09:00.000-08:00

Thanks to the smarties at Akashic, the wonderful Mexican writer
Paco Taibo II is getting some major play. He is the editor of one of the company's fine collections of stories, Mexico City Noir which offers brand new tales by Eugenio Aguirre, Eduardo Antonia Parra, Bernardo Fernández Bef, Óscar de la Borbolla, Rolo Díez, Victor Luiz González, F.G. Haghenbeck, Juan Hernández Luna, Myriam Laurini, Eduardo Monteverde, Julia Rodríguez and Taibo II himself.

And then there's a new, expanded edition of The Uncomfortable Dead
by Taibo and Subcomandante Marcos. Says PW, "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's 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 Belascoarán 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 II was born in Gijón, Spain, and has lived in Mexico since 1958. He is a professor of history at the Metropolitan University of Mexico City.

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

A Great Film You Might Have Missed

2009-11-10T13:53:00.000-08:00

Where was I in 1997, when this wonderful two-parter ran on PBS? Asleep, or out of the country? Any road, thanks to a reminder from Drew Lebby, I just got Painted Lady from Netflix.

It was written (by Allan Cubitt) for Helen Mirren after her Jane Tennison Prime Suspect series. And Mirren is riveting in a role which you might not have imagined her at first. She plays Maggie Sheridan, a former rock star now, at 50, reduced by drink and drugs to living rough on the streets of New York.

Maggie is rescued by a childhood friend, who takes her to his father's estate in Ireland. There, all hell breaks loose -- 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 glamor and romance as Maggie takes on the identity of a rich Polish countess and gets involved with an Italian count, a fine job by Franco Nero.

Who could ask for anything more?

The Cover That Sums Up My Life

2009-11-09T14:36:00.000-08:00

The Pros Keep On Writing Good Prose

2009-11-06T15:00:00.000-08:00

Two upcoming books by fine crime writers Bob Levinson and Dick Lochte have just arrived and were much enjoyed.

THE TRAITOR IN US ALL, by Robert S. Levinson

Says Jeffrey 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 books starring a Hollwood movie and music couple, Neil Gulliver and Stevie Marriner. reflect Levinson's earlier career as an ace publicist: such titles as Hot Paint, The Elvis and Marilyn Affair, The James Dean Affair and The John Lennon Affair are wonderfully bitchy reads.

THE MORNING SHOW MURDERS, by Lochte and some NBC weather guy named Al Roker.

Network TV can be murder, as 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 TV. And while Roker may have enriched the terrain, a lot of the book's smarts obviously come from Lochte -- a longtime crime reviewer for the Los Angeles Times whose mysteries include Blue Bayou, Croaked! Laughing Dog, Sleeping Dog, and The Neon Smile.

The Case of the Missing Thriller

2009-11-05T17:00:00.000-08:00

This past April, Atlantic Monthly Press published a frightening and unusual thriller -- ULTIMATUM, by a British physician writing under the pseudonym Matthew Glass.

My son, who runs 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 ABE. He was immediately gripped -- as was I when I began to read it on my new Kindle.

The 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 very much like George W. Bush. Shortly after his election, the Democrat is summoned by the outgoing president to a private meeting. There he gets the news that greenhouse gas emissions have begun to increase at an alarming rate. The Republican president and his aides have tried to open secret negotiations with China, the world's worst polluters of the atmosphere, but the Chinese government decides to wait until the new president takes office.

Ultimatum, in short, is an amazing piece of work -- a political thriller that is unusually full of both believable politics and genuine thrills.

Now comes the real mystery. Ultimatum was published in April, to very little notice -- no reviews in either the New York or Los Angeles Times. Its sales rank on Amazon is lower than a Philly fan's spirits.

Why is virtually nobody buying or reading this most worthy thriller? It's available on Kindle, a few copies can be found at Book Finder, and a paperback version is due out in February, 2010.

Now you know.

Chandler: The Photographs

2009-10-25T15:00:00.000-07:00

Okay, I was a bit snarky about Raymond Chandler recently. But a new book called Daylight Noir: Raymond Chandler's Imagined City certainly deserves attention. It's a collection of photographs by Catherine Corman (editor of Joseph Cornell's Dreams), an oversize paperback just published by Charta.

Corman has taken excellent black and white photographs of all those ominous, forbidding Los Angeles locations described by Chandler in his novels. From Malibu Pier to the Hollywood Sign, from Union Station to the Beverly Hills Hotel, from MGM Studios to Musso and Frank's Grill, these locales form the geography of Chandler's imagination, and conjure a world not yet entirely vanished. Clive James wrote of Chandler's fascination with Los Angeles that "when he said that it had as much personality as a paper cup, he was saying what he liked about it." But Chandler was also drawn to the Hopperesque loneliness of the city, to that sense of isolate existences that never merge. In these photographs, Corman has given us, as Jonathan Lethem writes in his preface, "a supremely evocative catalogue of haunted places... these streets and buildings we have erected in order to give order to our solitudes."

The Eaglet Has Landed

2009-10-24T22:35:00.001-07:00

My fourth grandchild, Esme Leonore Adler, was born tonight. Welcome to the world, Esme. Need any books?

ARCs 'R' Us Is Up!

2009-10-23T15:24:00.000-07:00

Don't forget to check my new blog. Save some dough and get to read stuff early!

Chandler comments

2009-10-21T10:57:00.000-07:00

From The Rap Sheet. Thanks, Jeff

Anonymous said...

Chandler may have been a racist, I don’t know. But how anyone could suspect so based on what you cite here is beyond me. Chandler was writing realistically. What do you suppose a real-life character like Moose would say on Central Ave. in the 1940’s? “Golly gee, there sure are a lot of African-Americans around here.” ?? You think maybe Chandler should have rewritten Nulty’s dialogue so that it would be more politically correct?

I abhor racism. I’m just not ready to label someone as such based on a few lines from one of their novels. Perhaps many other mystery writers of the period wished they had Chandler’s courage to put real words into the mouths of their characters.

Also, as much as I love him, Bogart was miscast as Marlowe. He was perfect as Sam Spade, but to play Marlowe you need an undertone of innocence/ naiveté. Powell had it. Mitchum and Garner, too. Bogart was far too cynical.

9:00 AM

Blogger Chris said...

Those elements (and a couple others, like the dusky-lipped alcoholic Marlowe questions with a bottle of hooch) definitely made me squirm a bit reading FML, but for the life of me, I couldn't tease out whether the bias was Marlowe's, or Chandler's, or whether Chandler was merely trying to tell it plain. If I recall, not all black characters in the book are treated with disrespect -- but then, one could claim that's the old, "I'm not racist -- I have black friends!" move, so take it with a grain of salt.

I do think you've rushed to conclusions a bit, but there's no doubt that the book contains some thorny racial issues. Of course, Hammett's THE MALTESE FALCON portrayed Joel Cairo in a less-than-flattering light as well, so your assertion that Hammett's work was absent racial bias might be painting with a broad brush.

What I find interesting is the head-on way in which Chandler presented race in FML, particularly when race didn't play nearly as large a role as any of his other works. Whether that was because of a flare-up of personal bias, or a purposeful intent to take on issues of race, I couldn't say.

10:17 AM

Blogger dick adler said...

What Anonymous omits to mention is the language used by Nulty and the Chronicle newshawk.

10:38 AM
Anonymous said...

This is something i think about often when reading my old favorites. However, i once read that Chandler was criticized by his writer peers for being pro-Latino (and it seems they were saying he wasn't racist enough for their liking). I think the racism is readily apparent in James Cain, but in Chandler's work, I don't see it. An author isn't necessarily racist if he is capturing racist thoughts/belief of the area he is writing about. Los Angeles was and still is a very racist place. None of the hard boiled writers truly capture that though because it's not their world, they just walk into it sometimes.

10:49 AM

Music to my ears

2009-10-20T19:02:00.000-07:00

Proving that I'm not just (or not even) a Mystery Boy, here's a musical review which just ran on BN.com.

Sing along...

Raymond Chandler: Racist or Realist?

2009-10-19T11:17:00.000-07:00

This started when I began watching Bored to Death
on HBO, where the hero, a mystery novelist who becomes a private eye when he can't finish his second book, is influenced by Raymond Chandler's 1940 Farewell, My Lovely.

I realized that I hadn't read the book for a long time, so I dug up a copy -- and quickly noticed that it contained lots of material which hinted that Chandler was either a racist or that Los Angeles had changed a lot since 1940.

"Smokes in here, huh?" says Moose Malloy, just out of prison and looking for his girl, Velma, who used to work in the place called Florian's. "A dinge... I just thrown him out... You say this here is a dinge joint?" A minute later, when a black bouncer tries to throw him out, Malloy says angrily under his breath, "Shinebox..." And a white cop called Nulty complains, "Shines. Another shine killing. That's what I rate after eighteen years in this man's police department... One time there was five smokes carved Harlem sunsets on each other down on East Eighty-four... I go down and outside the house a guy that works on the Chronicle, a newshawk, is coming off the porch and getting into his car. He makes a face, and says, 'Aw, hell, shines,' and gets in his heap and goes away. Don't even go in the house."

That was 1940. Four years later came a film called, for reasons best known to its producers, Murder, My Sweet, directed by Edward Dmytryk, with a screenplay by John Paxton. Dick Powell played Philip Marlowe, Mike Mazurki was Moose Malloy, Claire Trevor was Velma. If there was a black face or mention, I must have missed it.

Things stayed quiet on the Farewell front until 1975, when director Dick Richards and writer David Zelag Goodman went back to the original title, with Robert Mitchum as Marlowe, Jack O'Halloran as Moose Malloy, Charlotte Rampling as Velma, John Ireland as Nulty and Harry Dean Stanton as a grifting cop.

This was more like it: Mitchum was a better Marlowe than Powell (although Bogart still did him best), and Ireland was a much more believable cop. Much of the black background had been restored, but the language had a different edge -- irony had entered the picture. (Netflix doesn't have Farewell, My Lovely in its files, but you can watch it on your computer or TV set from Amazon for $9.99.)

So what does all this add up to? As my in-house historian reminds me, America in 1940 was a racist country -- not allowing blacks to serve with whites at the start of World War II. But not many other mystery writers of the period (Dashiell Hammett, for example) used anti-black imagery and language as seriously as Chandler did in Farewell.

Did Chandler mean the book to be satire, in the tradition of Mark Twain? I don't think so. He was a British schoolboy who still held beliefs of England Uber Alles and looked upon other races as suspect. (As Harry Andrews said to Ossie Davis in Sidney Lumet's The Hill set during WWII, "You different-colored bastard!") Chandler wrote from his experience, and his experience was apparently not well integrated.

Another Great Book

2009-10-18T11:22:00.000-07:00

Sarah Weinman got it right, as Miss Smartypants almost always does:

Carolyn Wall: Sweeping Up Glass

What a gorgeous, moving, heartbreaking book, and it might be hard to believe that it's Wall's debut novel, but it is. Olivia Harker is tough but very much a woman, struggling to raise her baby grandson, care for a mother who never much loved her, come to grips with how little love she has had at all. But a series of events force her to realize that she does, in fact, have a measure of control over calamities and doesn't have to stave them off. But will she take that stand? Here lies the power of Wall's prose, making the reader care desperately about Olivia's fate.

I heartily concur. And so will you.

A Case of Digital Rape -- Not as much fun as it sounds

2009-10-16T17:00:00.000-07:00

Warning: Scam Artists at Work

From Jeff Pierce at The Rap Sheet:
I received a rather distressed message this afternoon from critic Dick Adler, informing me that his electronic mail account has been compromised. Or as he put it ...

I’ve been digitally raped. And I believe it has happened to other Facebook users. Somebody has stolen my e-mail address and is using it to contact my list with a story about me being mugged in the UK and asking them to send $$$ to an
Edinburgh address.

Is this the start of a mystery, or what?

I was among those who received this e-note yesterday, ostensibly from Adler himself:

Hello

How are you doing?, I hope all is well with you and family. It is me Dick Adler and I am sending this email direct from United Kingdom. I’m writing this to you in a hurry but I want to say I’m really sorry I didn't inform you about my traveling to United Kingdom, I am here for a Seminar. It was something urgent which I did not even inform anyone about the trip. But I just got myself in serious mess now. I am stranded here in United Kingdom, I was robbed on my arrival and everything I have was stolen from me including my Luggage, Mobile Phone, Diary, and my wallet which contains all my Money and my Bank Cards, I am left alone with the cloth I am putting on and my passport, Although I have filed the case at the nearest police station.

Meanwhile I need to clear my Bills and get out of this place, I will be glad if you can assist me with a soft loan urgently with the sum of $1,800 USD to sort-out my hotel bills and get myself back home. I will appreciate whatever you can afford and I promise to pay you back as soon as I return, Please don't ignore my message because I really need your help urgently and you are the hope I am having presently and I assured you that I will pay back on my arrival home.

I will be glad if you can help me out as no amount is too small for my present situation, You will help me to send the money through Western Union with this details below.

Name: Dick Adler
Address: 4 Porteous pend
City: Edinburgh
Zip code: EH1 2HP
State: Scotland
Country: United Kingdom
Test Question: Thank
Answer: You

Kindly help me to make the transfer as soon as you receive this email and you should get back to me with the 10 Digit Money Transfer Control Number, exact Amount sent with details used in sending it. I still have my passport to prove my identity at Western union here when receiving the money, and I will email you with the return flight details immediately I receive the money.

Your reply will be appreciated.

Thanks so much
Dick Adler

The Britishisms in this message (“sort-out” and “diary,” instead of appointment calendar) should have been tip-offs that it wasn’t being sent by American Adler. So should the poor-quality English.

I hope nobody was taken in by this confidence game. Adler assures me that he’s fine and nowhere in the vicinity of London.

Vanity, Vanity, all is Vanity

2009-10-14T17:39:00.000-07:00

Nothing mysterious about this item, just great fun: A test from Vanity Fair.

The idea is to see what famous people you most think and behave like. Oddly enough, my own list starts with Karl Rove! But Martin Scorcese is a close second