B.V. Lawson's Blog, page 37
January 12, 2024
Friday's "Forgotten Books" - The Long Shadow
[image error]Celia Fremlin (1914-2009) was born in Kingsbury, England, the daughter of a doctor and the sister of nuclear physicist John H. Fremlin. She studied classics at Somerville College, Oxford, but after her mother died in 1931, she was expected to look after her father. Instead of being content to just stay at home, she took jobs in domestic service, which was unusual for a middle-class woman at that time. She said it was to "observe the peculiarities of the class structure of our society," and those experiences later found their way into her later writing.
Much later, in her sixties, she began to take long walks at night by herself all over the back streets of London, partly for research and partly to prove a point. Her conclusion was that to make the dark streets lose their terror, "We don’t need more policemen on the beat. We need more grandmothers." Those experiences were compiled into a TV program about challenging people’s fears of urban streets at night and many observations also wound up in her books.
Her life may have seemed like domestic bliss on the surface, but it was filled with its share of tragedy that would be at home in any crime novel: Not only did she lose her mother at age 17, but her youngest daughter committed suicide, as did Fremlin's husband rather than live a disabled life after a heart attack. She also outlived her second husband and her other two children, and went slowly blind in her later years, spending her last days in a nursing home, which was a bit ironic, considering she became an advocate for euthanasia late in life. [image error]
Fremlin's first mystery novel was The Hours Before Dawn from 1958 which won the Edgar Award for Best Novel and established her style of mystery/horror set mostly around the lives of married women in the 1950s. Some feel that The Long Shadow was an equally fine work, and H.R.F. Keating even included it in his 1987 listing of the 100 best crime and mystery books. It's the story of the Imogen Barnicott, third wife of a celebrated, cruel and egocentric professor, who, despite her unhappy marriage, had never plotted her husband's murder—yet after his supposedly accidental death, she receives a mysterious phone call accusing her of that very thing. Add to that strange happenings like new messages left lying around in his handwriting, work on an unfinished manuscript of his that continues to be written, and shadowy figures seen in the house, and Imogen not only begins to doubt her husband is dead at all, she begins to believe she just might take his place.
Celia Fremlin used to say that she wrote the sort of book she wanted to read, in which a mysterious threat hangs over someone and escalates chapter by chapter; or as, H.R.F. Keating recalled her saying, "to put a plot that is exciting or terrifying against a background that is domestic, very ordinary, humdrum." She used this to great effect in The Long Shadow and others, slowly building an atmosphere of suspense and terror out of the excruciatingly mundane, using the contrasts as a literary canvas like Dali and his surrealistic art.
Her character observations managed to be cutting and yet have a touch of dark humor, as well, as this passage from Imogen's experience at a party a well-wishing friend had encouraged her to attend:
Worst of all, perhaps, was the apparently unending procession of people who, incredibly, still hadn't heard, and had to be clobbered with the news in the first moment of meeting. Had to have the smiles slashed from their faces, the cheery words of greeting rammed back down their gullets as if by a gratuitous blow across the mouth. There they would be, waving from across the road, calling "Hi!" from their garden gates, phoning by chance from Los Angeles, from Aberdeen, from Beckenham...One and all to have their friendly overtures slammed into silence, their kindly voices choked with shock. One after another, day after day, over and over again: sometimes Imogen felt like the Black Death stalking the earth, destroying everything in her path.
Fremlin's books are filled with astute perceptions that no doubt bear the imprint of her first-hand research into human behavior, as Imogen's stepson Robin advises her about taking on boarders:
I'd choose Depressions rather than Anxiety States...From the point of view of a landlady, Depressions are good because they lie in bed until midday and don't eat breakfast. Whereas Anxiety States want grapefruit—All Bran—the lot."
In addition to her 20 novels and nonfiction books, the last dating from 1994, she wrote short stories, poetry and articles and was a member of the Crime Writers Association for many years. The Long Shadow, The Hours Before Dawn, and her other fiction certainly deserves a closer look. Faber & Faber released a reprint edition in 2018, in addition to a few of her other works.
January 11, 2024
Mystery Melange
Mystery Writers of America announced the 2024 Grand Masters and Ellery Queen Award recipient. The board chose Katherine Hall Page and R.L. Stine as the 2024 Grand Masters, an award that represents the pinnacle of achievement in mystery writing, and Michaela Hamilton of Kensington Publishing will receive the Ellery Queen Award, which honors "outstanding writing teams and outstanding people in the mystery-publishing industry." They will accept their awards at the 78th Annual Edgar Awards Ceremony, which will be held May 1, 2024, at the Marriott Marquis Times Square in New York City.
Alex Segura has won the Strand Magazine Critics Award for Best Novel for Secret Identity. The other finalists include Anywhere You Run by Wanda M. Morris; Back to the Garden by Laurie R. King; Desert Star by Michael Connelly; Her Last Affair by John Searles; and A World of Curiosities by Louise Penny. Stacy Willingham won the Best Debut award for A Flicker in the Dark, edging out Jackal by Erin E. Adams, Before You Knew My Name by Jacqueline Bublitz, Don’t Know Tough by Eli Cranor, and Shutter by Ramona Emerson. It was also previously announced that Lee Child and James Lee Burke would be honored with Lifetime Achievement awards.
Alexander McCall Smith has been knighted for his service to literature, academia and charity. The Scottish writer, who was once a professor of medical law at the University of Edinburgh, is best known for the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, although he's published more than 120 books, radio plays, operas, children’s books, and collections of poetry. McCall Smith noted, "There are others who deserve it more than I do, of course. Will it make any difference? I still have books to write. Perhaps it will put a spring in my step. We shall see. I’m very grateful to the powers that be." McCall Smith’s newest novel, The Perfect Passion Company, is released next month and is more in the romance vein.
And in more Scottish crime new, Noir at the Bar Edinburgh returns to The Canons Gait pub on January 25th. Although the full lineup hasn't been released just yet, Andrew James Greig will be there discussing his latest novel, The Girl in the Loch. Previous participants have included Jackie M. Baldwin, Ana Collins, Guy Hale, Mark Leggatt, Liza North, Cailean Steed, and Mary Turner Thompson.
Plus, Granite Noir, Aberdeen’s crime writing Festival, returns for its eighth year from February 20-25 with a mix of returning and new features. In addition to panels, interviews, workshops, readings, film screenings, and plays (including one titled "CSI – Crime Scene Improvisation"), David Suchet—whose iconic portrayal of Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot is a fan favorite—will make two appearances offering audiences the chance to meet the actor behind the detective. There's also an exhibit on "Gunpowder, Tattoos and Transportation: Aberdeen’s Inked Convicts," which explores how nineteenth century European criminologists tried to establish a connection between tattoos and the criminal underclass. New for 2024, Granite Noir has also teamed up with the Press and Journal and Evening Express to launch a new short story competition, with a submission deadline of January 28.
Mystery Readers Journal has a call for articles on "Mysteries set in Southern California." They're seeking articles (500-1,000 words), reviews (50-250 words), and author essays (500-1,000 words), which you should treat "as if you're chatting with friends and other writers in the bar or cafe (or on zoom) about your work and the Southern California setting in your mysteries." The deadline is January 19, 2024. Send to: Janet Rudolph, Editor.
The Popular Culture Network will host a virtual symposium exploring the criminal in popular culture on May 2-3, including celebrated detectives, true crime podcasts, police procedurals, the fashion of crime and deviancy, spy, war, political and corporate crimes in film, sport cheats, pickpockets and con artists, glamorous lawyers, innocent victims, and grumpy Judges. Organizers have put out a call for papers on related topics such as "You know my methods, Watson – The methodological gap between fictional and real detectives"; and "It is the brain, the little grey cells on which one must rely. One must seek the truth within - not without. Conceptualising crime fighting." The deadline for submissions is February 29, 2024.
There's also a call for papers on FX Channel Original TV Series for an edited collection in a similar vein to The Essential HBO Reader. The scholarly edited collection will critically analyze FX’s history and its import to prime-time television and platform streaming with chapters on its most critically noteworthy series, such as crime dramas The Americans; Justified; American Crime Story; and Fargo. Abstracts of 300 -500 words identifying your chosen series accompanied by a short third person author bio (100 words max) should be sent to david.pierson@maine.edu as a Word document by March 10, 2024. Final chapters should be 6000-8000 words including references.
The Rap Sheet reported some sad news: John F. "Jack" O’Connell, who gained public attention as the author of crime novels set in the worn-out, fictional New England city of Quinsigamond, died on January 1. According to his obituary, he passed away after an undisclosed brief illness at the age of 64. He was known as a noir-suspense novelist, publishing five books, beginning with Box Nine for which Mysterious Press awarded him winner of The Mysterious Press Discovery Contest for best first novel in 1992. His later novels included Wireless, (1993) and The Skin Palace (1996). O’Connell was a finalist for a Shirley Jackson Award in 2008, for his final book, The Resurrectionist, and that same work won him France’s Prix Mystère de la critique in 2010.
This year marks the bicentennial of the birth of the Victorian writer, Wilkie Collins, best known for his mystery novels, The Woman in White and The Moonstone. If you're new to the author's work, The Guardian looked at some good places to begin. Meanwhile, The Telegraph (paywall) had their own retrospective on why every writer in the genre is indebted to Collins’s instinct for plotting and psychological complexity. And the CBC also profiled the author, whom they call "A true detective of the human mind."
Each year, new literary works previously under copyright fall under the public domain depending upon the various convoluted laws that vary from country to country and even within jurisdictions. As Elizabeth Foxwell points out, there are several mysteries that entered the public domain and are on the online Project Gutenberg including works such as As a Thief in the Night by R. Austin Freeman (a Dr. Thorndyke mystery); Behind That Curtain by Earl Derr Biggers (a Charlie Chan mystery); and The Velvet Hand: New Madame Storey Mysteries by Hulbert Footner, among others.
If you're a fan of both crime fiction and stamp collecting, Kate Jackson, aka Armchair Reviewer over at the Cross Examining Crime blog featured a look at "The World of Sherlock Holmes Stamps," although she also takes note of stamps issued to commemorate Georges Simenon’s Inspector Maigret, G. K. Chesterton, and even a Columbo stamp starring Peter Falk.
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January 8, 2024
Media Murder for Monday
[image error]It's the start of a new week and that means it's time for a brand-new roundup of crime drama news:
THE BIG SCREEN/MOVIES
Roadside Attractions and Vertical have acquired U.S. rights to Firebrand, an historical thriller starring Alicia Vikander (Ex Machina) and Jude Law (The Talented Mr. Ripley) that premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. The film is directed by Karim Aïnouz (Invisible Life) and slated for an exclusive theatrical release on June 21, 2024. Based on the bestselling historical novel, Queen’s Gambit by Elizabeth Fremantle, the film follows legendary Queen of England, Catherine Parr (Vikander), and her quest to survive the perilous last months in the life of her ailing and abusive husband, Henry VIII (Law). Eddie Marsan (21 Grams), Sam Riley (Control), Simon Russell Beale (The Death of Stalin) and Erin Doherty (The Crown) co-star.
Freestyle Digital Media has acquired North American rights to Julia Verdin’s feature, Maya, which will begin its limited theatrical release on Jan. 21, 2024 with a screening at the Chandler International Film Festival in Arizona, followed by a Q&A presented by anti-trafficking organization Cece’s Hope Center. The movie follows Maya (Isabella Feliciana), who "is raised in a household stricken by her father’s abandonment and her mother’s (Patricia Velasquez) ensuing alcoholism. She seeks an escape from her mother’s abusive boyfriend by confiding in a man she meets online, who convinces her to run away. Unbeknownst to Maya, she has been lured into a child trafficking scheme where her confidant quickly becomes her pimp, along with an older captive, Kayla (Rumer Willis). While Maya fights to understand the difference between love and manipulation, her mother must fight through her addiction to bring her daughter home."
Bridgerton standout, Simone Ashley, will star in This Tempting Madness, a new indie directed by Jennifer E. Montgomery from her script written with husband Andrew M. Davis. Inspired by a true story, This Tempting Madness is a psychological thriller about a young woman (Ashley) who awakens from a coma grievously injured, with her memory fractured, and her husband arrested. But as she puts together the pieces of her past, she starts to question her own actions — and her perception of reality.
TELEVISION/SMALL SCREEN
CBS has handed a straight-to-series order to Watson, from writer Craig Sweeny (Elementary) for the 2024-25 broadcast season. Morris Chestnut is set to play the title role and executive produce the medical drama inspired by the characters from Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes mysteries. Watson is described as a medical show with a strong investigative spine, featuring a modern version of one of history’s greatest detectives as he turns his attention from solving crimes to solving medical mysteries. The series lives in a universe where Holmes has been killed off, something Conan Doyle reportedly intended to do with The Final Problem. In Watson, a year after the death of his friend and partner Sherlock Holmes at the hands of Moriarty, Dr. John Watson (Chestnut) resumes his medical career as the head of a clinic dedicated to treating rare disorders. Watson’s old life isn’t done with him, though—Moriarty and Watson are set to write their own chapter of a story that has fascinated audiences for more than a century.
Gibbs is returning to the NCIS universe as the lead of a new CBS drama, which serves as a prequel to the long-running procedural. The network has given a straight-to-series order to NCIS: Origins, about young Leroy Jethro Gibbs, for the 2024-25 broadcast season. The project comes from the two actors who have portrayed Gibbs on NCIS, Mark Harmon and his son Sean Harmon, veteran NCIS writers-producers, Gina Lucita Monreal and David J. North, as well as CBS Studios, which is behind the NCIS franchise. Narrated by Mark Harmon, NCIS: Origins begins in 1991, years prior to the events of NCIS. In the new series, Gibbs starts his career as a newly minted special agent at the fledgling NCIS Camp Pendleton office where he forges his place on a gritty, ragtag team led by NCIS legend Mike Franks. (On the mothership series, Franks has been a recurring character played by Muse Watson who helped Gibbs when he needed a sounding board on hard cases.)
Apple TV+ greenlit a fifth season of Slow Horses, which stars Gary Oldman in the adaptation of Mick Herron’s novels. The fifth outing of Slow Horses will be adapted from Herron’s Spook Street. Everyone is suspicious when resident tech nerd Roddy Ho (Christopher Chung) has a glamorous new girlfriend, but when increasingly bizarre events occur across the city, it falls to the Slow Horses to work out how everything is connected. The ensemble cast includes Oldman, who plays central character Jackson Lamb, along with Academy Award-nominee Kristin Scott Thomas and fellow nominee Jonathan Pryce, Jack Lowden, Saskia Reeves, Rosalind Eleazar, Samuel West, Sophie Okonedo, Aimee-Ffion Edwards, and Kadiff Kirwan.
Fabien Frankel (House of the Dragon) and Alison Oliver (Saltburn) have been cast in key roles in an upcoming HBO crime drama series from Mare of Easttown creator Brad Ingelsby. Starring Mark Ruffalo, the Untitled Brad Ingelsby Task Force Project is set in the working class suburbs outside of Philadelphia where an FBI agent (Ruffalo) heads a Task Force to put an end to a string of drug-house robberies. Frankel will play Anthony, an integral member of the task force. Oliver will portray Lizzie, an under-performing state police officer who is added to the team.
Principal photography has begun in Iceland on the six-part, English-language drama, The Darkness, based on the best-selling thriller series by Ragnar Jónasson. The Darkness, a joint project of CBS Studios and Stampede Ventures, follows Detective Inspector Hulda Hermannsdóttir (Lena Olin) as she investigates a shocking murder case whilst coming to terms with her own personal traumas. Facing early retirement and forced to take on a new partner, she is determined to find the killer, even if it means putting her own life in danger. Recently added to the cast are Jack Bannon, Douglas Henshall, and Björn Hlynur Haraldsson.
PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO/AUDIO
The BBC's In Our Time podcast host Melvyn Bragg and guests discussed Edgar Allan Poe, famous for his Gothic tales of horror, madness, and the dark interiors of the mind, such as "The Fall of the House of Usher" and "The Tell-Tale Heart." As well as tapping at our deepest fears in poems such as "The Raven," Poe pioneered detective fiction with his character C. Auguste Dupin in The Murders in the Rue Morgue. After his early death, a rival rushed out a biography to try to destroy Poe's reputation, but he has only become more famous over the years as a cultural icon as well as an author.
On Crime Time FM, Maxim Jakubowski, publisher, editor, bookseller, writer, and critic, chats with Paul Burke about his new novel, Just a Girl with a Gun.
The latest episode of the Crime Cafe featured Debbi Mack's interview with Kim Hays, a a dual citizen of the US and Switzerland, who is author of the Polizei Bern Series, featuring detectives Giuliana Linder and Renzo Donatelli.
On the Writer's Detective Bureau, Detective Adam Richardson answered questions about California’s Alcoholic Beverage Control agency; who investigates murders involving the military; and the surprising limitation on Tribal Police law enforcement powers.
The latest podcast episode from Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine whisked listeners off to Paris for an adventure filled with fine food and wine, paired with a side of revenge, in "City of Light" by Josh Pachter, one of EQMM's most prolific contributors and translators.
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January 5, 2024
Friday's "Forgotten" Books - First Cases
[image error]Before they were stars, everyone's favorite literary private eyes had to start somewhere. Many jumped to life fully-formed in novels, but others began their lives in short stories. Robert Randisi, a lifelong champion of P.I. fiction and founder of the Private Eye Writers of America (PWA) in addition to being an author himself, put together a collection of First Cases: First Appearances of Classic Private Eyes in 1996. Fortunately, that volume was successful enough that Randisi was able to compile three additional collections, the last in 2002.
The 1996 volume (and the one that started it all) includes stories in which now-beloved protagonists first saw the light of day, such as Bill Pronzini’s Nameless Detective in "It’s a Lousy World," first published in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine in 1968; Joe Gores's Dan Kearny and company in "File #1: The Mayfield Case," printed in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in 1968 (a banner year, it seems); Linda Barnes's Carlotta Carlyle in "Lucky Penny," published in New Black Mask in 1986; and Robert Randisi's own ex-boxer Miles Jacoby in "The Steinway Collection," first published in Mystery Monthly in 1977.
Other entries are the first short story appearances of detectives who had already made a splash in a novel, such as Lawrence Block's Matthew Scudder in "Out of the Window," Sara Paretsky' V.I. Warshawski in "The Takamoku Joseki," and Max Allan Collins's Nathan Heller in "The Strawberry Teardrop," all three of which were published just barely one year after each character’s debut novel.
Most of these authors and their detectives went on to win major awards, including several Shamus nods—awards Randisi initiated as part of the PWA. In this book and the following volumes, the stories and characters include hard-boiled and soft-boiled, covering a range of settings (Block's Manhattan, Jeremiah Healy's Boston, Gores's San Francisco), but the most interesting aspect, as Randisi says, "It's interesting to go back and read an early story about a series character. In some cases the character you meet is very different from the character as he or she appears in later stories." In some cases, these include a switch of POVs from third to first, or major life changes as with Block's pre-AA Scudder who still drinks bourbon with his coffee.
These collections should be both inspiration and caveat to contemporary writers of crime fiction short stories. If you're fortunate enough to produce a long-lived private eye series after having auditioned the character first in the short format, you might just wind up in a future Randisi anthology. So make it good and make it count.
January 4, 2024
Mystery Melange
The Best Private Eye Stories of the Year, a new annual anthology celebrating the best private eye short stories published each year, will be released by Level Short, an imprint of Level Best Books, beginning in 2025. The inaugural edition will honor the best PI stories published in English in 2024. Series editor Michael Bracken welcomes Matt Coyle as guest editor for the first volume and notes that Kevin Burton Smith will contribute "The Year in Review," an essay looking at the year’s significant events in private eye fiction.
The several bloggers who banded together to create a poll for readers to vote on the best reprint nominations of the year have named a winner. Kate Jackson, aka Armchair Reviewer over at Cross Examining Crime announced the results culled from a variety of writing styles from the mysteries, most of which were originally published in the 1930s and 1940s. This year's overall winner was He Who Whispers (1946) by John Dickson Carr (British Library Crime Classics), the first time that author has topped this particular list.
Elizabeth Foxwell's Bunburyist blog alerts us to a talk titled "Mutual Friends: The Adventures of Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins," in association with the current exhibition at the Charles Dickens Museum that runs until Feb 25, 2024, and looks at the personal and professional relationship of these two Victorian authors. The UK's University of Buckingham will also host the conference "Collins and Dickens—Dickens and Collins" on June 20–21, 2024, to celebrate the bicentennial of Collins's birth and examine Dickens' role as mentor to Collins and Collins's influence on Dickens, including co-projects such as The Frozen Deep, and theatrical and film productions of their works.
If you are in the Northern Virginia area, join mystery writers Dana King, Rick Pullen, Austin Camacho, and Mark Bergin for an author discussion titled "Writing Cops, P.I.s and Reporters for Fun and Profit," moderated by Jeffrey James Higgins, on similarities and differences in writing police procedurals, journalistic heroes, and private eyes. The event will take place on Sunday, January 28, at 1 pm at Elaine’s in Alexandria, Virginia.
In all of the "best of" lists that come out around this time of year, crime fiction collections and anthologies are often overlooked. But the CrimeReads editors tried to correct that oversight and made their selections for the best crime anthologies released in 2023, featuring "dark indigenous fiction, true crime reckonings, weird westerns, and more."
Seems like we hardly got this year started before we begin looking to next year. Left Coast Crime announced the Special Guests for Left Coast Crime 2025: Guests of Honor are Manuel Ramos and Sara Paretsky, Fan Guest of Honor is Grace Koshida, and Toastmaster will be John Copenhaver. Registration is also now open for the event, which will be held in Denver, Colorado, March 13-16, 2025.
From Martin Edwards comes : Geoff Bradley announced that the latest issue, #92, of his irregular magazine of comment and criticism about crime and detective fiction, will be the last. As Edwards notes, it's a shame that CADS won't reach its century, but Bradley has produced the magazine for 38 years, "an astonishing length of time, and he deserves the thanks of all mystery fans - in particular those with a taste for the Golden Age - for his hard work and the quality of the material he has consistently assembled. It's a wonderful achievement."
The "world’s largest Dickens festival" recently took place in the seemingly unlikely setting of the Netherlands, specifically, Deventer, in the eastern province of Overijssel. Despite no known historical connection with the author, 950 volunteers filled the streets of the ancient Bergkwartier, performing street theatre and selling hot punch and Victorian treats. There were strict rules for actors and traders: no trainers, modern watches or mobile phones. The estimated 125,000 visitors included Ebenezer Scrooge, Tiny Tim, Queen Victoria, Miss Havisham, beggars, thieves and, for the first time, Dickens himself.
The Australian Broadcasting Company took a stab at defining what is outback noir and why so much crime fiction set in regional Australia.
In the Q&A roundup, novelist Laury A. Egan chatted with Lisa Haselton about her new psychological suspense title, The Psychologist’s Shadow; Clea Simon, author of cozy mysteries and psychological suspense, applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, To Conjure a Killer; the Crime Time blog spoke with New Zealand author Kirsten McDougall about her new satirical dystopian cli-fi thriller, She's a Killer; and the American Booksellers Association interviewed Alex Michaelides, whose book The Fury, about a gorgeous, private island in Greece that becomes the site of a terrible murder, is the ABA top pick for the January 2024 Indie Next List.
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December 25, 2023
December 22, 2023
Friday's "Forgotten" Books - Red Christmas
Most people know him as creator of the now-classic Yorkshire detective duo Andrew Dalziel and Peter Pascoe and for his Crime Writers' Association Cartier Diamond Dagger for Lifetime Achievement. But author Reginald Hill (1936-2012) was also known as Patrick Ruell, publishing eight novels under that pen name beginning with The Castle of the Demon in 1971. Whereas most of his books, including the Dalziel and Pascoe series, are police procedurals or P.I. novels, the Patrick Ruell stories are what Mike Ripley of Shots Ezine calls "slightly surreal and very funny thrillers."
In 1972's Red Christmas, a group of strangers are on a Christmas Eve trip for a Dickensian weekend at Dingley Dell. They have seemingly nothing in common: Jules and Suzie Leclerc, a French couple; Arabella Allen, a 23-year-old English lass; and Stephen Swinburne, a "young many of great beauty." They're ensconced in the Dingley Dell manor along with other guests, including a German couple dubbed "Herr Bear" and "Frau Cow" and an American party-crasher, Robert E. Lee Sawyer, all under the watchful eye of the hosts, Wardle and Boswell.
But the festivities soon take a less cheery turn when one of the servants has an accident near a quarry on the property and is taken to the hospital. Arabella soon learns that behind the facade of good-will-toward-men hides conspiracy and intrigue when she learns she's being spied upon. Things take an even nastier turn when she stumbles upon the dead body of the servant who was supposedly recuperating in the hospital. Then the grinning face of yet another corpse is seen buried beneath the ice in a skating pond just as a blizzard is blowing in — and their only means of communication with the outside world, a radio, is sabotaged. As Arabella delves deeper, aided by her growing reliance upon Boswell, who is at the center of the mystery, she finds herself in the thick of an international spy ring, with double-cross and murder all part of the game.
I rather like Robert Barnard's foreword to the Black Dagger reissue from 1995, where he says "The action is fast and furious, the characterisation light but deft, the climax thrilling and satisfying. It is, no doubt about it, a heady brew, such as might have been served at the original Dingley Dell, and just as the Christmas season. Take emergency rations and a bottle of your favorite tipple, retreat to your study and lock out the family, then settle down to a rollicking good read. With a bit of luck it will last you the whole of Christmas Day."
The omniscient head-hopping is a bit dizzying at times, but it serves its purpose of keeping you unsteady and wondering just who is telling the truth and who is not. It's an anti-Christmas romp, so to speak, although there's plenty of spiked punch and red and green in the form of blood and forests and even a Christmas tree used as a diversion. If you get your fill of overly-sweet desserts and watch It's a Wonderful Life too many times, then Red Christmas might just be the antidote.
December 20, 2023
Mystery Melange, Christmas Edition
Several bloggers banded together to create a poll for readers to vote on the best reprint nominations of the year. The Kate Jackson, aka Armchair Reviewer over at Cross Examining Crime has posted the poll which includes the 23 nominations, 3 of which were randomly selected from the nominations put forward by blog readers. The list reflects a variety of writing styles from the mysteries, most of which were originally published in the 1930s and 1940s. Three authors managed to get two books into the poll: John Dickson Carr, Erle Stanley Gardner (one under the pen name of A. A. Fair). and Clifford Witting. You can add your vote now for up to 3 titles.
Janet Rudolph has been busy updating her ever-growing list of Christmas mysteries over at her Mystery Fanfare blog. In fact, the list is so long, it's broken down into alphabetical chunks, starting with Authors A-E; followed by Authors F-L; and finally, Authors M-Z. She's even compiled a roster of Christmas mystery novellas and short story anthologies and has a Winter Solstice list, to boot.
This is one holiday tradition we simply must start in the United States. It's time once again for Jolabokaflod, which roughly translates from Icelandic as "Christmas book flood." In this decades-old tradition, friends and loved ones in Iceland give each other a book on the night before Christmas and then spend the rest of the night curled up with that book, ideally with a cup of hot cocoa (or something stronger). But that's to be expected, I suppose from a literary country: the island nation has the most authors per capita in the world and publishes the most books per capita in the world (with five titles published for every 1,000 Icelanders). Some have even called reading a "national sport" in the country, as over half the population finishes eight or more titles a year. Even Katrin Jakobsdottir, the country’s current prime minister, literally published a crime fiction novel while in office.
"Reindeer noir" is the name given for the Finnish crime sub-genre influenced by Santa’s home town. As reported in The Guardian, books, films, and plays set in Lapland often have a "hint of dark humour" where the landscape is a looming presence.
A little bit south of Finland and Iceland, Atlas Obscura zooms in on "How Christmas Murder Mysteries Became a U.K. Holiday Tradition," with tales in which Santa has a very low survival rate.
Writing for The New York Times, Isabella Kwai says to forget Halloween and bring ghost stories back to Christmas, adding that "If your idea of festive joy is being haunted by past memories or driven insane by mysterious specters, have we got the tradition for you."
To further darken your Yuletide spirit, if you happen to be in New York tonight, head on over to Oakland's historic Grand Lake Theatre for NOIR CITY XMAS. The Film Noir Foundation is presenting in 35mm Cover Up, a 1949 noir film recently restored by UCLA Film & Television Archive, starring William Bendix, Dennis O'Keefe, and Barbara Britton. Starting off the evening is a book signing by Eddie Muller with three of his latest works: Kid Noir: Kitty Feral and the Case of the Marshmallow Monkey; Eddie Muller's NOIR BAR: Cocktails Inspired by the World of Film Noir; and Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir.
Most Christmas movies are more in the family-friendly vein, and a former church in Ohio houses what's believed to be the world's largest privately owned collection of Christmas movie memorabilia.
The murder mystery puzzle book, Murdle, has topped the UK Christmas bestseller chart. GT Karber’s book of challenges beat out Richard Osman’s mystery novel, The Last Devil to Die, as well as Guinness World Records to notch the top spot. Murdle is based on the daily puzzle website Karber developed in 2021, and across the book’s 100 challenges, readers must use codes and maps to decipher who the killers are. It has sold more than 200,000 copies since its publication in June.
The UK's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) has released what has become an annual Christmas Codebreaking Challenge. Although it's aimed at young people and designed to test skills such as codebreaking, math, and analysis, adults might have some fun with it, too.
The authors at Mystery Lovers Kitchen are celebrating the season with a host of recipes and reads. You can check out a Gluten-Free Jelly Donuts recipe by Libby Klein; Cleo Coyle's Eggnog Shorbread Cookies; Apricot Pinwheels by Leslie Budewitz; Stained Glass Window Cookies via Peg Cochran; Pumpkin Chiffon Pie from Ellen Byron; and Rack of Lamb by Maya Corrigan.
The Mysteryrat's Maze Podcast has two holiday offerings. The first is the initial chapter of "Peppermint Barked" by Leslie Budewitz, a Christmas mystery read by actor Ariel Linn. The other features the Christmas mystery short story, "Santa's Helper," by John M. Floyd, read by Ren Burley.
In the Q&A roundup, Catriona McPherson, author of Dandy Gilver historical detective stories, the Last Ditch mysteries, set in California, and a strand of contemporary standalone novels, took the Page 69 Test for her novel, Hop Scot; and Lisa Haselton chatted with Tony Brenna about his new thriller, Honey Trap.
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December 18, 2023
Media Murder for Monday
[image error]It's the start of a new week and that means it's time for a brand-new roundup of crime drama news:
THE BIG SCREEN/MOVIES
After a bidding war, 20th Studios has bought the Kevin McMullin short story, "BOMB," an action thriller with franchise potential, and brought Ridley Scott on board to direct. The short story is a template for an action thriller in the vein of Dog Day Afternoon and Speed. Frankie Ippolito is a hostage negotiator called into duty the night before his wedding in London. A man who has parked himself in a construction site in Piccadilly Circus is standing on a newly uncovered, unexploded bomb from WWII. He tells local law enforcement he will only speak with Frankie, and this sets off a chain of events in which Frankie is drawn into an overnight struggle to stop the bomber with whom he has a past.
Netflix has acquired an untitled Ryan Reynolds-led heist dramedy that was the focus of yet another bidding frenzy. The project uses an international setting and is said to have "great parts for an ensemble in the spirit of an Oceans Eleven." Shawn Levy will helm the film, with Dana Fox (Lost City) set to write the script.
Filming has begun in London on the action thriller, Bad Day At The Office, starring John Hannah (The Mummy), Radha Mitchell (Silent Hill), and Tamer Hassan (Layer Cake). The film opens with Karl Davis (Hannah) waking in a wrecked hotel room with no memory of what’s happened, where he is, or even who he is. When he discovers a dead body in the bathtub, and two police officers soon knock at his door, it sets into motion a terrifying and explosive series of events that force Karl and hotel maid Molly on a blind descent into a deceptive world of confusion and conspiracy and at the same time with a price on his head and half the city in murderous pursuit. Karl will need to draw on his forgotten skill sets if he has any hope of survival as he and Molly endeavor to unravel the mystery that took his memories.
Production has also launched in New Jersey on One Stupid Thing, a suspense/drama directed by Linda Yellen, and written by Yellen and Michael Leeds. The film stars Corey Fogelmanis, Jack Wright, Sky Katz, Shelby Simmons, and Alfredo Narciso. Three high school friends (Wright, Fogelmanis, and Simmons) share a deeply bonded friendship, until one winter night on a Nantucket rooftop, a harmless game takes a fatal turn, and the course of their lives changes forever. For nearly a year, they keep what they did a secret until the following winter break when they meet a girl (Katz) with her own dark past who helps them uncover what really happened that night – and who is behind it.
Shelley Hennig (Teen Wolf), Shiloh Fernandez (Evil Dead), and Tyrese Gibson (Fast & the Furious) are leading the thriller, Fluxx, which has recently wrapped filming in the U.S. The psychological thriller charts the story of a Hollywood actress who is intent on finding her famous missing husband, despite the fact that she cannot willingly leave her Malibu home. Co-written by Keyaunte Mayfield and Brendan Gabriel Murphy, the film's cast also includes Henry Ian Cusick (Lost), Charlotte McKinney (Baywatch), Jeff Perkins (Echo Boomers), Lance Paul (Never and Again), Michael A. Milligan (Outer Banks) and Tanner Beard (We Summon the Darkness).
TELEVISION/SMALL SCREEN
Netflix has confirmed it picked up a new adaptation of the Patricia Highsmith classic character, Tom Ripley, from Academy Award–winning screenwriter-filmmaker Steven Zaillian (Schindler’s List, The Irishman). The streaming service also released some first-look imagery, featuring Sherlock actor Andrew Scott in the lead role. The eight-episode series, which is called Ripley, also stars Johnny Flynn and Dakota Fanning. It doesn't currently have a release date but Netflix says it will stream in 2024.
Alexander Skarsgård will star and executive produce a new ten-episode TV adaptation of the sci-fi crime series, Murderbot, for Apple TV+ from creators and directors Chris and Paul Weitz. Based on Martha Wells’s Hugo and Nebula Award-winning book series, "The Murderbot Diaries," the TV series will center on a self-hacking security android who is horrified by human emotion yet drawn to its vulnerable "clients." The official logline is as follows: "Murderbot must hide its free will and complete a dangerous assignment when all it really wants is to be left alone to watch futuristic soap operas and figure out its place in the universe."
Mad Men star, Jon Hamm, will lead the Apple TV+ drama series, Your Friends and Neighbors. Hamm stars as Coop, a recently divorced hedge fund manager who, after being fired, resorts to stealing from the wealthy residents in his tony upstate New York suburb in order to keep his family’s lifestyle afloat. These petty crimes begin to reinvigorate him until he breaks into the wrong house at the wrong time. Warrior creator Jonathan Tropper developed the series and will serve as showrunner.
CBS is looking to turn another successful drama into a franchise by introducing a new character in an episode from Fire Country's upcoming second season. Casting is currently underway for the role, a female sheriff, which is an episodic guest star with an option to become a series regular. Sources caution that this is not a formal backdoor pilot order, and CBS could go different routes with the new character if the episode is well received, spinning off the character into her own series or adding the actress to the cast of the Fire Country mothership.
Peacock has ordered Fight Night: The Million Dollar Heist starring Kevin Hart as a limited drama series. The story is based on the infamous armed robbery that happened the night of Muhammad Ali’s historic 1970 comeback fight. Set in Atlanta, the series follows the heavyweight fight and criminal underground heist that introduced the world to the city dubbed "the Black Mecca” and the cop and the hustler at the center of it all.
Fox has picked up the psychological crime drama, Murder in a Small Town, starring Rossif Sutherland (The Handmaid’s Tale) and Kristin Kreuk (Smallville), for the 2024-25 season. Based on the Edgar Award-winning, nine-book "Karl Alberg" series by the late Canadian author L.R. Wright, Murder in a Small Town follows the title character (Sutherland), who moves to a quiet coastal town to soothe a psyche that has been battered by big-city police work. But this gentle paradise has more than its share of secrets, and Karl will need to call upon all the skills that made him a world-class detective in solving the murders that, even in this seemingly idyllic setting, continue to wash up on his shore. Kreuk stars as Cassandra, a local librarian who becomes Alberg’s muse, foil, and romantic interest.
PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO/AUDIO
The latest episode of the Crime Cafe featured Debbi Mack's interview with crime writer, S.J. Rozan, author of the Bill Smith and Lydia Chin Mysteries and recipient of the Edgar, Anthony, Shamus, Nero, and Macavity Awards as well as the Japanese Maltese Falcon Award and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Private Eye Writers of America.
The Axe Files podcast host, David Axelrod, spoke with author Sara Paretsky who said it was her summer in Chicago volunteering during the civil rights movement in 1966 that marked the "defining experience" on her life. Sara joined David to talk about her family history, the recent rise in antisemitism, using her writing to give voice to the marginalized, the creation of V.I. Warshawski, and Sara’s work on abortion and women’s rights.
Criminal Mischief with Dr. D.P. Lyle discussed "Humor in Crime Fiction."
Terry Hayes chatted with Paul Burke on Crime Time FM about The Year of the Locust; off-Earth mining; epic adventure tales; the limits in fiction; screenwriting; and whether there'll be a Pilgrim II.
Read or Dead hosts Katie McLain Horner and Kendra Winchester discussed their favorite books of 2023.
The Pick Your Poison podcast discussed a substance called the disease of kings, the toxic plant used to treat it, and the prehistoric animal that also suffered from this disease.
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December 15, 2023
Mystery Melange
I apologize for the slight delay with this week's Mystery Melange, but we're dealing with a bit of family Covid right now. But without further ado:
The Crime Fiction Lover blog announced the winners of the third annual Crime Fiction Lover Awards, culled from shortlists nominated by readers, who also voted for the winners. Within each of the six categories, the team also selected an Editor’s Choice Award and this year added a lifetime achievement award, the "Life of Crime Award," which was bestowed upon James Ellroy. The Book of the Year was The Last Remains by Elly Griffiths. Book of the Year Editor’s Choice: Strange Sally Diamond by Liz Nugent. Best Debut Winner: You’d Look Better as a Ghost by Joanna Wallace. Best Debut Editor’s Choice: City Under One Roof by Iris Yamashita. Best in Translation Winner: Thirty Days of Darkness by Jenny Lund Madsen, translated by Megan E Turney. Best in Translation Editor’s Choice: The Sins of our Fathers by Åsa Larsson, translated by Frank Perry. Best Indie Novel Winner: Scratching the Flint by Vern Smith. Best Indie Novel Editor’s Choice: The Associate by Victoria Goldman. Best Crime Show Winner: Only Murders in the Building S3. Best Crime Show Editor’s Choice: Happy Valley S3. Best Crime Author Winner: Michael Connelly. Best Crime Author Editor’s Choice: Mick Herron.
After two separate rounds of voting, the Goodreads Choice Awards announced the winners for 2023 in various categories. The Mystery & Thriller category winner was The Housemaid’s Secret by Freida McFadden, which collected 86,468 votes. You can see the full list of Mystery & Thriller nominees via the above link and winners in all the other categories here.
If you're an unpublished crime fiction author, you have one day left to submit a manuscript to the 2024 Minotaur Books/Mystery Writers of America First Crime Novel Competition, sponsored by Minotaur Books and Mystery Writers of America (MWA). Entrants should complete an online entry form and upload an electronic file of your manuscript by 11:59pm EST on December 15, 2023. The winner will receive an offer from Minotaur Books for publication and an advance against future royalties of $10,000.
Harrogate International Festivals has announced that international bestselling novelist, Ruth Ware, in 2024, when the world’s largest and most prestigious celebration of crime fiction, the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival, returns with a world class line-up of authors and special guests. The acclaimed crime writer will follow in the footsteps of such stellar predessors as Ian Rankin, Val McDermid, Elly Griffiths, Denise Mina, Lee Child, and Vaseem Khan.
A literary magazine is printing a previously unpublished work by the novelist Raymond Chandler, and it's not a hard-boiled detective story. Strand Magazine announced that its latest issue will include a poem by Chandler written around 1955 that shows the "softer, sensitive side" of the writer known for his pulp fiction hits such as The Big Sleep. Andrew Gulli, managing editor of Strand, explained, "He wrote the poem after his wife had passed away and this poem also serves as a love letter to her," noting it was the first time Chandler wrote a poem as an adult. Chandler's wife, Cissy, died in 1954, after which the author grew depressed and attempted suicide one year later.
Chanukah (aka Hanukah or Hanukkah) began December 7 and continues through December 15. Over at Mystery Fanfare, Janet Rudolph has updated her lists of Chanukah-themed crime fiction titles.
Did you ever wonder where the word "shamus" comes from?
In the Q&A roundup, Jacqueline Seewald spoke with Kathleen Marple Kalb, an award-winning weekend anchor at New York’s 1010 WINS Radio, who also pens novels including The Stuff of Murder and the upcoming Ella Shane mystery, A Fatal Reception; Publishers Weekly spoke with Laurie R. King and how the latest entry in her Mary Russell series mines new corners of Sherlockian lore and offers glimpses into the author’s own life; and Catherine Ryan Hyde took the Page 69 Test for her new novel, A Different Kind of Gone, in which the truth behind a teenage girl’s disappearance becomes something to conceal "in a gripping novel about justice, lies, and impossible choices."
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