Let He Who Is Without an Agent Cast the First Actor

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?

Hello, world -- here comes Esme

"Tattoo" Nails It

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

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?

[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

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

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

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!

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...