B.V. Lawson's Blog, page 235

Media Murder for Monday

MOVIES

Millennium Films has acquired the rights to Eliza Graves, a Joseph Gangemi screenplay based on the Edgar Allan Poe short story "The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether." The thriller will be directed by Brad Anderson (The Machinist) and centers on a new doctor who arrives to apprentice at a mental institution where he falls in love with a patient under stange circumstances.

The Tom Hanks-produced JFK feature film Parkland has signed Paul Giamatti, Billy Bob Thornton, and Jacki Weaver in leading roles. The film revolves around the chaotic events aat Parkland Hospital in Dallas the day President Kennedy was assassinated.

Bryan Callen has been cast in the Universal Pictures project Ride Along, playing Miggs, a wily and somewhat sketchy undercover cop. He joins fellow cast members Ice Cube (as another tough undercover officer), Kevin Hart (playing Cube's future brother-in-law), John Leguizamo and Laurence Fishburne. The studio has set a January 17, 2014 release date for the film.

There's been a change at the helm of William Goldman's film adaptation of his 1985 crime thriller Heat, set to star Jason Statham. It was originally going to be Brian de Palma, but Simon West (Con Air, The General's Daughter) will now serve as director.

Collider has a new trailer for the documentary West of Memphis, about the investigation behind the "West Memphis Three" trio of innocent men who were wrongly convicted of murdering three young boys in Arkansas in 1993.

TV

Crimespree has a trailer for the upcoming third season of Luther, starring. Idris Elba. The airs in the States on BBC America.

Chloe Sevigny and James D'Arcy have signed on to star in A&E's crime drama Those Who Kill. Sevigny will play a detective who possesses a deep understanding of the serial killers she hunts, and D'Arcy will play a forensic profiler and Sevigny's partner. Glen Morgan (X Files) wrote the script for the pilot, which is based on the Danish series Den Som Dræber.

ABC has ordered a pilot titled Coup , with some heavy-hitters attached: Mad Men co-executive producer Chris Black wrote the project, and feature director Martin Campbell (Casino Royale) will serve as executive produce and director. Coup centers on a young American man whose wife is taken hostage in an overseas coup, and who must join forces with a dangerous mercenary to get her back.

ABC also bought Black Friday, a drama written by screenwriter Ken Nolan (Black Hawk Down). The thriller centers on a man who finds himself in the center of a perilous event where he is responsible for the safety of others and works to uncover the conspiracy behind it all.

Mike Colteri is joining the Fox midseason serial killer thriller The Following in the recurring role of FBI bureaucrat Nick Donovan. The series revolves around a deranged serial killer and the retired FBI profiler Ryan Hardy (Kevin Bacon) who is hunting him down.

Dark Knight actress Monique Gabriela Curnen has signed on for a recurring role in The Mentalist as an agent who works in the gang division of the CBI, alongside a police tactical team.

Shooting has begun on a TV movie based on Quebec crime writer Louise Penny's debut novel Still Life. Nathaniel Parker, who plays Inspector Thomas Lynley in the long-running British crime series The Inspector Lynley Mysteries, is starring as Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec.

The Discovery reality show Mythbusters is planning a Breaking Bad-centric episode with appearances by Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul. Among the gruesome myths to be tested: an event from the show's first season, in which Paul’s Jesse Pinkman used hydrofluoric to dissolve a body in a bathtub instead of using a plastic container.

USA cancelled both Fairly Legal and Common Law but has renewed Burn Notice for a 13-episode seventh-season. Meanwhile, USA announced the return dates for Suits, White Collar and Necessary Roughness in January 2013.

PODCASTS/RADIO/VIDEO

Elizabeth Foxwell notes that BBC Radio 4 is airing a new series, "Foreign Bodies: An Investigation into European Detectives", that looks at mystery fiction in an international context.

Patricia Cornwell joined MSNBC's Morning Joe to talk about her latest novel, The Bone Bed.

Friday's "Forgotten" Books - Aristotle Detective

Margaret Anne Doody (born 1939) is a professor of literature at the University of Notre Dame, helping to found the PhD in Literature program there. Her interest in history spurred her to write a historical mystery in 1978, at a time when historical mysteries weren't nearly as popular as they are now. The book was titled Aristotle Detective, and became the first in a series of eight books set at the time of Greek philosopher Aristotle in 32 B.C. Athens.

As the book opens, Athens is unhappy under the rule of the Macedonian Alexander the Great, now fighting he King of Persia for control of the East. In the middle of the unrest, the eminent citizen Boutades is brutally murdered by a bow and arrow. Suspicion falls on young Philemon, an exile formerly guilty of manslaughter. By Athenian law, his nearest male relative, 23-year-old Stephanos, must conduct Philemon's defence.

Out of desperation, Stephanos turns to his former mentor, Aristotle, who turns detective and soon has Stephanos disguising himself as a vegetable-seller to investigate undercover in harbor-towns. Together their investigations culminate in a gripping trial where Stephanos has to muster all the powers of rhetoric and oratory Aristotle has taught him to clear his family's name of the bloody murder.

Doody said in an interview with Shots Magazine that the idea came to her after reading Aristotle's Rhetoric and thinking "how Aristotle was so un-illusioned about human behaviour." She decided that somebody should write a detective story in which Aristotle was the Sherlock Holmes. In her novel, Aristotle is to Holmes what Stephanos is to Watson, although a more apt description for Aristotle during the first part of the book would be Nero Wolfe, since he does his detective from his armchair.

Doody's details are well researched, with technical terms limited to bare essentials, and she manages to inject some dry wit and a playful tone that helps offset the somewhat predictable plot. As Colin Dexter says in a Foreword to the 1996 reissue, "the author wears her scholarship lightly, and the authenticity of the settings—the dirt, smell, noise, throng, of Piraeus, for example—is eminently enjoyable in its own right."

Doody didn't publish the second book in the series, Aristotle and the Poetic Justice, until 2002, 24 years after the first book due to a sequence of events involving a change in agents, editors and publishers (an all-too-familiar story for a lot of authors). The most recent installment, Aristotle and the Egyptian Murders, was published in 2010.

Media Murder for Monday

MOVIES

The Bond film franchise movie #23, Skyfall, has yet to debut in theaters in the U.S. (it debuted to record box office overseas this weekend), but Bond #24 and #25 are reportedly already being written by John Logan (Hugo, Gladiator, Aviator) as a two-movie arc. Production on 24 may start this time next year to accommodate a fall 2014 release; it's possible the two films will also be shot back-to-back.

Michael Pitt (Boardwalk Empire) joins Tony-winner Nina Arianda to star in the crime thriller Rob The Mob, scripted by Jonathan Fernandez. Based on a true story, the film follows a couple who target and rob some of New York's biggest mobsters.

Mirimax and Fathom events are joining forces to bring two of Quentin Tarantino's two biggest films to theaters for one night only for each. "Tarantino XX: Reservoir Dogs 20th Anniversary Event" will be simulcast Tuesday, December 4, and "Tarantino XX: Pulp Fiction Event" will follow two days later, with evening shows and some matinees in select markets. (Hat tip to Crimespree.)

Omnimystery News has a new trailer for the thriller Broken City, featuring an ex-cop Billy Taggart (Mark Wahlberg) seeking redemption and revenge after being double-crossed and then framed by its most powerful figure, the mayor (Russell Crowe). The film opens in theaters January 18th, 2013.

TV

Mira Sorvino has been chosen to star in TNT's pilot Trooper, produced by Jerry Bruckheimer. Sorvino will play a recently divorced and unconventional female state trooper whose trooper partner is a widowed father with a by-the-book approach to policing.

Rebecca Romijn has signed on to co-star with Jon Tenney in the TNT pilot King And Maxwell, from CBS TV Studios and Shane Brennan (NCIS). The characters and show are adapted from novels by David Baldacci and follow Sean King (Tenney) and Michelle Maxwell (Romijn), an atypical pair of private investigators.

The young British actress Hayley Atwell will play a policewoman who becomes obsessed with tracking down the killer of a 15-year-old girl in ITV’s just-commissioned Life Of Crime. The series will follow Atwell's character in three parts over three decades.

The pilot for a TV series based on the Beverly Hills Cop films continues to go forward. Eddie Murphy will reprise his role as Axel Foley, and Brandon T Jackson is in talks to play Axel's son Aaron Foley, a Beverly Hills police officer attempting to establish himself in the shadow of his legendary father, who is now the chief of police in Detroit.

Law & Order producer Barry Schindel is helping spearhead a new legal drama for USA. Titled Shadow Counsel, the series would follow a former Army lawyer recruited reluctantly by the FBI as a “secret” lawyer who operates off the record to circumvent existing roadblocks in classified cases.

Fresh off its recent Emmy, Golden Globe, ITV and BAFTA awards, Showtime's Homeland series was rather predictably renewed for a third season.

CBS gave full-season orders to their freshmen shows Vegas and Sherlock, while the CW's new series, featuring Stephen Amell as the crime-fighter superhero Arrow, has also been given a full season order.

USA gave the go-ahead to an unscripted docu-drama series, Partners in Crime. The show will focus on defense attorneys Mario Gallucci and Big Lou Gelormino as they take on infamous criminal cases and "are like brothers behind the courtroom scene, complete with bickering and family meals featuring spaghetti and buffalo meatballs."

PODCASTS/VIDEO

John Grisham appeared on the Colbert Report, talking about his rivalry with Stephen King, his days as a starving lawyer, and his latest book, The Racketeer.

From EuroCrime: A new daily series about European Crime Writing has started on BBC Radio 4 and the Martin Beck Killings, starring Steven Mackintosh, will begin on the 27th, all available for download.

THEATER

Baltimore's Center Stage is presenting The Completely Fictional—Utterly True—Final Strange Tale of Edgar Allan Poe through November 25. Written by Stephen Thorne and directed by Curt Columbus, the play touches on the morbid life and mysterious final days of Edgar Allen Poe, played by actor Bruce Nelson.

Dangerous Lady, a stage adaptation of one of Martina Cole's bestselling crime thrillers, is currently playing at the Theatre Royal Stratford East in London, and the Guardian has a review.

After a long battle to secure the stage rights to the 1942 story "Rear Window" by Cornell Woolrich (made into Alfred Hitchcock's classic film), it appears that a Broadway adaptation is finally on track. Director Jay Russell and producer Charlie Lyons are on board, along with with Homeland actor Tim Guinee.

GAMES/COMICS

From Omnimystery News: The first "Sherlock Holmes" game for the Nintendo 3DS was released this week in the UK and Nordic countries.

During at panel at the recent Comic Con in New York, it was announced that "2000 AD" editor Matt Smith will be writing a " Judge Dredd: Year One " miniseries for IDW Publishing, and writer John Wagner, who created Judge Dredd along with artist Carlos Ezquerra, will return as the writer of the "Judge Dredd" series in 2013. Dredd is an American law enforcement officer in a violent city of the future where uniformed Judges combine
the powers of police, judge, jury and executioner.

Halloween Mystery Melange

Janet Rudolph's Mystery Fanfare blog has a nice long list of mystery novels (and a few short stories) with a Halloween theme.


Elizabeth Foxwell, editor of Clues: A Journal of Detection, notes that just in time for Halloween, Clues 30.2 has been published—a theme issue on paranormal mysteries guest edited by Agatha and Macavity nominee A. B. Emrys.

What better way to celebrate Halloween than snuggling down with a dim light (candlelight would be pretty awesome) and some Edgar Allan Poe stories? GalleyCat very helpfully posted links to free Poe eBooks from Project Gutenberg.

Are you stuck trying to think of a perfectly horrorific word to use? Dictionary.com compiled "Seven Spooky Words for Halloween."


Audible has released a new audio short story from author Neil Gaiman titled "Click-Clack the Rattlebag." Audible will donate $1 per download through Halloween to the literary charities DonorsChoose.org and Booktrust.

Here's a chance for you to win 10 horror movies on DVD. Simply snap photos of your TV or movie-inspired costumes, either from this year or excellent ones from years past, and e-mail them to katey@cinemablend.com before midnight on Friday, November 2, to be entered in a drawing.



What can you do with a giant pumpkin? Ray Villafane of Villafane Studios took one 1,800-pound pumpkin and created a ghoulish (zombish?) masterpiece for the New York Botanical Garden's Haunted Pumpkin Garden. The Mirror newspaper online has several other amazing pumpkin masterpieces.

BookRiot compiled its own gallery of Bookish Pumpkins (part one and part two), from Winnie the Pooh to Harry Potter.

Lucy Burdette, one of the authors who make up the Mystery Lovers' Kitchen blog, has an easy-peazy recipe for a Pumpkin Cornmeal Halloween Cake (that can be gluten-free if you use GF flour). Bonus points to Lucy for wearing the Kermit costume...

Over at the Criminal Element, Deborah Lacy offers up drink recipes to go along with some favorite crime dramas on TV (The Castletini) and mystery authors and books (Poirot Pumpkin Coffee).


Don't forget man's best friend, with these 25 Crazy Pet Costumes for Halloween.

Here are 10 classic short Halloween cartoons you can watch online, from Disney’s 1929 Skeleton Dance to The Duxorcist starring Daffy Duck.

Bibliomysteries

I received an interesting e-mail from Nina Lassam at Open Road Media, which is a publishing partner with Mysterious Press for eBooks. Together, they're releasing new bibliomystery eBooks from best selling mystery authors Anne Perry, Ken Bruen, C.J. Box, and Jeffery Deaver on November 12th. What is a Bibliomystery, you may ask? It's a book featuring books, manuscripts, libraries or publishing houses as a major theme that can appear in all the various subgenres: hard-boiled private-eye stories (such as Raymond Chandler's classic The Big Sleep), cozy mysteries (including those of Charlotte MacLeod's librarian sleuth) and the mainstream detective novel (such as Booked to Die by John Dunning).

The upcoming titles include



The Scroll by Anne Perry: An ancient book draws a bookseller into a chilling mystery.
Pronghorns of the Third Reich by C.J. Box: A hidden library holds a mystery that stretches back to Nazi Germany.
Book of Virtue by Ken Bruen: A son¹s only inheritance is a leather-bound book, which causes his life to spin out of control.
An Acceptable Sacrifice by Jeffery Deaver: A cartel leader's weakness is antique books ­ which federal agents use to attack where it matters most.


Look for more bibliomystery eBook titles in the coming months.

Friday's Forgotten Books - Let's Talk of Graves, Worms and Epitaphs

Robert Furneaux Jordan (1905–1978) was an English architect, architectural critic for The Observer, taught as Hoffmann-Wood Professor of Architecture in the University of Leeds and was a visiting Professor of Architecture at Syracuse University in the U.S. If you conduct a bibliographical search under his given name, you'll find he penned the nonfiction reference books A Concise History Of Western Architecture and Victorian Architecture, among others.

In 1945, Jordan published a detective novel under the pen name Robert Player, and eventually wrote four more standalone mystery novels over the next 32 years. In the Foreword to the Black Dagger edition of Player's novel Let's Talk of Graves, of Worms and Epitaphs, author and past Crime Writers Assocation Chairman Robert Richardson noted that Player's name rarely appears in standard works about the genre, but "there is an inescapable feeling that, had he devoted himself to writing, he would be recognized as, if not a master, then certainly a gifted and entertaining talent. Literate and ingenious, his books have originality and a capacity to attract."

The novel opens with the line, "It is not every man whose father was both a pope and a murderer." The pope in question is Barnabas Barbellion, a distinguished Anglican clergyman who converted to Catholocism and later became Pope Paschal the Fourth. But years prior, Barbellion was married with two children and also having an affair with Philippa, the wife of his neighbor, Harold Gatsby. When Gatsby is poisoned to death at a croquet party, Philippa is accused of the murder a sensational trial ensues, but no one dares to connect the case with the fact that Barbellion's ailing wife had also died suddenly, except for the narrator, Barbellion's son Augustine Xavier.

The title of the novel is taken from Shakespeare's play Richard II about the British king whose greed, thirst for greater power and disdain for both friends and subjects prove to be his undoing. Despite the darkness of that tragedy, Player's novel is actually rather wickedly funny satire, chock-full of intricate details and tricky plotting and character development that culminates in a twist ending. The density of the writing can bog a bit at times, and it's not the type of book that makes for a quick read, but if you're a fan of historical mysteries and religious lampoonery, Player's novel may be to your taste.

Mystery Melange

Carousel book sculpture by Cara Barer.

Twitter is hosting a Twitter Fiction Festival in November and is inviting "authors and creative storytellers around the world to push the bounds of what’s possible with Twitter content." The proposal must fit into the time window of the five day festival—but that means that a project could run for the length of the festival, or just for an hour.

The Booksellers Association's IndieBound is adding a consumer website of "inspired recommendations" for readers from independent booksellers. The goal is to have booksellers submit book recommendations for titles they have loved, hidden gems, mid-list classics, or simply books selling well, to build up an "antidote to algorithm-based, chart-led, celebrity-endorsed book recommendations."

Actor Johnny Depp is partnering with Harper Collins to start a new literary imprint called Infinitum Nihil. It will publish titles reflecting Mr. Depp's eclectic tastes and interests, although only two have been mentioned thus far, a new work about Bob Dylan by the historian Douglas Brinkley and an unpublished novel by the folk singer Woody Guthrie.

A new study from the Pew Research Center about the reading habits of young people contained a few surprises: more than eight in ten Americans between the ages of 16 and 29 read a book in the past year; a majority of Americans from the ages of 16 through 29 still frequent libraries; and readers under 30 who read electronically were more likely to read books on a cellphone or a computer than a dedicated eReader.

Here's an intriguing idea from Houston: a roaming bookmobile library that "facilitates serendipitous discoveries in many different locations." The founders, librarians, Kelly Allen and Chris Grawl, call it the Billy Pilgrim Traveling Library (BPTL) and envision it as both a free range bookmobile (operating on a rent-barter-donate system) and a bookmobile-for-hire to public libraries, museums, schools, and local businesses.

Coming up this weekend are four different literary festivals ranging from Texas to Canada. The QuebeCrime Festival features special guests Laura Lippman, Mark Billingham and Linwood Barclay; Magna cum Murder in Muncie, Indiana, welcomes Guest of Honor S.J. Rozan and Banquet Speaker Eric G. Wilson; the Boston Book Festival, which is light on crime fiction but does include Dennis Lehane and Hank Phillippi Ryan, among many other authors of interest; and the Texas Book Festival in Austin will feature close to 300 authors, including Michael Ennis, Jasper Fforde, Amelia Gray, Janice Hamrick, Stephen Saylor, Roland Smith, Ellis Weiner and Reavis Z. Wortham.

Want to win a trip to France? Omnimystery News brought to my attention that publisher Le French Book is offering just that as part of a promotion for a new line of translated French crime novels, including The 7th Woman, winner of the 2007 Prix du Quai des Orfèvres for best unpublished crime novel manuscript. But hurry - you have to enter by October 29th.

Writing Crime Fiction

For all you authors, newbies and wannabes, there are some new (and recent) reference books on the craft of writing crime fiction that may be of interest.


The 12 award-winning thriller writers who constitute Top Suspense have banded together to share everything they know about their craft in the book Writing Crime Fiction. Joel Goldman has advice and tips on "going indie"; Vicki Hendricks offers secrets to sizzling sex scenes; Stephen Gallagher and Ed Gorman write on what it takes to start and finish that first novel; Hollywood veterans Lee Goldberg and Paul Levine give insights into how to turn your crime thriller into a TV series or movie; Libby Hellmann and Max Allan Collins describe how to ratchet up your book's suspense; Dave Zeltserman discusses noir fiction, while Naomi Hirahara discusses the perfect amateur sleuth; Harry Shannon writes about paranormal thrillers; and the prolific Bill Crider will tell you the secrets to writing more than a hundred thrillers.


Edited by Michelle Spring and Laurie R. King, the Arvon Book of Crime and Thriller Writing comes out of a series of professional writing courses by published writers and gathers the advice into a practical handbook. The book features fascinating insights from twenty-six top crime-writing guests including Lee Child, P.D James, and Ian Rankin and is a detailed, practical guide to writing every kind of crime story, from classic whodunits to fast-paced thrillers. The book's objective is to bring together some of the lessons and insights that the authors and contributors have learned over their careers, to help the readers to free their creative minds, while also studying the solid technique behind writing in this genre. It's divided into three sections: Part 1 – Essays on critical issues in the genre; Part 2: Guest Writers – 25 contributors offering advice and tips; Part 3: How To Write Crime.


Journalist and fiction writer Craig McDonald collected and edited Rogue Males: Conversations & Confrontations. The collection features "no-holds-barred" interviews with 16 authors who have shaped and defined narrative fiction and songwriting, including Elmore Leonard and James Crumley (in one of his last interviews); premier stylists James Sallis and Daniel Woodrell; noir kingpins James Ellroy and Ken Bruen, and top thriller writers Lee Child and Randy Wayne White. Stephen J. Cannell and Max Allan Collins hold forth on the intersection of crime novels and the silver screen while Andrew Vachss, Pete Dexter, Craig Holden, Alistair MacLeod, Tom Russell and Kinky Friedman round-out the collection on the craft of writing.

Media Murder for Monday

MOVIES

It's been almost 30 years since the television series Mike Hammer, based on the novels by Mickey Spillane and starring Stacy Keach as the iconic private eye. Now, Warner Bros. has acquired the feature film rights to the "Mike Hammer" novels, although details are sketchy on the concept for any potential movies. (With thanks to Omnimystery News for the tip.)

Filming will soon start on Ombra Films' project, Mindscape, scripted by Guy Holmes and directed by Jorge Dorado, with a cast that includes Mark Strong, Taissa Farmiga and Brian Cox. The plot follows a man with the ability to enter people’s memories who tries to determine if a 16-year-old girl is a psychopath, a victim of trauma, or both.

Universal Pictures continues to pursue its remake of the gangster film Scarface, hiring Paul Attanasio to rewrite the movie from the original draft by David Ayer. The plan is to reimagine Scarface in a contemporary setting, rather than have it be a remake or a sequel.

The first film based on James Patterson's fictional detective Alex Cross, with Tyler Perry as the famous Washington D.C. crimefighter/psychologist, opened just this past Friday (to mixed reviews), but a sequel is apparently already in the works.

Universal Pictures and producer Scott Stuber have optioned the Derek Haas spy thriller novel The Right Hand. The book is focused on Austin Clay, a spy whose work is so covert that the government won’t even admit he exists, sent to track down a missing American operative in Russia.

Blackout, an action thriller based on a script by Sidney King, is closer to becoming a movie project. The plot centers on a cop transporting a mysterious and dangerous criminal across town when a city-wide blackout plunges them into darkness and chaos.

TV

The CWA handed out the winners for its film/TV Dagger Awards last Thursday. The Film Dagger went to Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, while the The TV Dagger was given to Sherlock: Series 2. Other awards included The International TV Dagger to The Bridge; The Best Actress Dagger to Claire Danes for Homeland; The Best Actor Dagger to Benedict Cumberbatch for Sherlock; The Best Supporting Actress Dagger to Kelly Macdonald for Boardwalk Empire; The Best Supporting Actor Dagger to Martin Freeman for Sherlock. Also, the Best Detective Duo chosen by public vote was awarded to Lewis' DI Robbie Lewis and DS James Hathaway. (Hat tip The Rap Sheet.)

BBC America renewed its historical police procedural series Copper for a second season. The series, which centers on an Irish immigrant cop (played by Tom Weston-Jones) in 1864 New York, premiered in August with 1.1 million total viewers, the largest audience ever for a BBC America series debut.

CBS ordered two crime drama pilots, a project set in New Orleans titled The Big Easy, and Darkness Falls, a police procedural of sorts, in which an FBI psychologist and a homicide specialist "journey into small communities around the country to solve the darkest, most twisted single murders."

ABC bought American rights to the Dutch series Sea Of Fire, which will be adapted by Steve Maeda (The X-Files) and produced by Sony Pictures TV. The original series centered on three teenage girls who star in a pornographic film, a decision that "tears their families apart and leads to a disappearance, a murder and host of other secrets boiling under the surface."

Crime Time Preview summarizes upcoming crime dramas to be broadcast on BBC and ITV in the UK, some of which will show up in U.S. markets later in the year (e.g. Sherlock with Benedict Cumberbatch and John Freeman).

PODCASTS

Patricia Cornwell joined CBS's This Morning to promote her new novel, The Bone Bed, and noted that she was "the pop culture mother of CSI."

Friday's "Forgotten" Books - A Time for Pirates

Oswald Wynd (1913-1998) was born in Japan, the son of a Baptist missionary from Scotland. Wynd's family moved to the U.S. in the 1930s, where Wynd attended High School in Atlantic City, then later back to Scotland. Wynd's studies at Edinburgh University were interrupted by the outbreak of the Second World War, and in 1941 Wynd's unit in Malaysia was attacked and Wynd imprisoned in Hokkaido mines.

Upon the end of the War and Wynd's liberation as a POW, he returned to the U.S. and on a whim decided to enter a "first novel" contest  by publisher Doubleday in 1947. The novel, Black Fountains, about a young American-educated Japanese caught up in the war, won first prize. Another novel, The Ginger Tree, was turned into a television series by the BBC, with NHK, Japan and WGBH Boston.

But it was under the pen name of Gavin Black that Wynd wrote his thrillers, fifteen in all, most featuring Paul Harris, a young man with a Scottish background making a living as an unconventional businessman in Asian countries like Singapore and Malaysia. The first, Suddenly At Singapore, was published in 1960, and the last, Night Run From Java, in 1979. A Time For Pirates lies right in the middle of the series.

Set in Kuala Lumpur, A Time for Pirates finds Paul Harris rescuing damsel in distress Jean Hyde from a rioting mob. Unfortunately for Harris, the beautiful blonde damsel is the wife of a geologist looking for oil on behalf of a Chinese company Min Kow Lin, and Harris has been fighting to save Malaysia from Communism. He decides to delve into the oil business to try and find out why Min Kow Lin is disguising its oil exploration as prospecting for less valuable minerals and why it's buying a rubber plantation.

With the assistance of his "humor challenged" Sikh bookeeper Bahadur, Harris investigates whether the nasty business he's stumbled onto is really a Communist plot or a capitalist scheme to deny poor Malaysians the rights and profits from the oil. After two kidnap attempts, a near-fatal fight with a Manchu thug, and an arson attack that burns down his house, Harris begins to suspect that the man who wants him dead isn't an outsider, but a friend.

The Independent said of Black that he wrote "superior and literate thrillers - school of Stevenson and Buchan - which were at the same time witty and clever, and moved at a by no means gentlemanly pace." The intriguing characters and details of the exotic setting of newly-independent but unstable Malaysia and the clashes between the native population, Communists and Western enterpreneurs are well drawn and the writing is descriptive, as in this one passage:

It was a long time since I had walked up my drive. The gradient is steep, an asphalt razor cut on a slope packed with jungle hardwoods...snakes which reach my antiseptic woods are there isn't a stagnant pool anywhere in which mosquitoes can breed. Sometimes monkeys come on excursions from the adjacent public gardens to try out the long drops from high branches, but they never seem to stay long, as though the surrounding intense hygiene is too much for them. I wish they would set up a colony near me; I like them, they are a continuing and salutary rebuke to our pretensions.

Black Dagger Crime reprinted A Time for Pirates in 1971, and a Fontana First Thus edition came out in May 1973, but they're hard to find. However, Langtail Press Limited, with a mission to bring back crime and mystery novels that have been out of print or unavailable, made new print and eBook versions of Black's novel in December 2010.