Kaufman Just Wants to Have Fun

(Editor’s note: British correspondent Ali Karim has been somewhat absent from this page for the last couple of months, busy with his day-job responsibilities. But he recently submitted the interview with author Thomas Kaufman that appears below. Welcome back, Ali.)


Rap Sheet editor J. Kingston Pierce (left) and Thomas Kaufman attend the Shamus Awards ceremony in St. Louis, 2011.

I’ve been following the work of Thomas Kaufman ever since the publication of his first novel, Drink the Tea, which introduced laconic Washington, D.C., private eye Willis Gidney and won the 2008 Private Eye Writers of America/St. Martin’s Press competition for Best First P.I. Novel. Kaufman’s follow-up, Steal the Show (2011), was even more engaging. There is compassion and dry wit in the oft-troubled world of Willis Gidney, which makes Kaufman’s stories a pleasure to read.

In synopsizing the plot of Drink the Tea, Kaufman’s publisher, Minotaur Books, described Gidney thusly:

Willis Gidney is a born liar and rip-off artist, an expert at the scam. Growing up without parents or a home, by age twelve he is a successful young man, running his own small empire, until he meets Shadrack Davies. That’s Captain Shadrack Davies, of the D.C. Police. Davies wants to reform Gidney and becomes his foster father. Though he tries not to, Gidney learns a small amount of ethics from Shad--just enough to bother a kid from the streets for the rest of his life.

Now Gidney is a P.I., walking those same streets. So it’s no surprise that when his closest friend, jazz saxophonist Steps Jackson, asks Gidney to find his missing daughter, Gidney is compelled to say yes--even though she’s been missing for twenty-five years. He finds a woman who may be the girl’s mother--and within hours she turns up dead. The police accuse Gidney of the murder and throw him in jail.

Maybe Gidney should quit while he’s behind. But when his investigation puts him up against a ruthless multinational corporation, a two-faced congressman, and a young woman desperate to conceal her past, Gidney has no time left for second thoughts. In fact, he may have no time left at all.

In an overcrowded genre, Kaufman’s gumshoe is a most refreshing and watchable player. But what also makes this series enjoyable is the author’s cinematic storytelling style. He comes by that style honestly: for years Kaufman has been laboring behind the lens of a movie camera, primarily as a director of photography but occasionally as a director/cameraman. His many credits include work on Discovery Channel productions, Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, and the very popular NBC-TV series The West Wing.

I’ve met Kaufman at Bouchercons over the years, including the 2011 event in St. Louis and again at last year’s Bouchercon in Cleveland, and have learned a number of interesting things about this now 57-year-old novelist, filmmaker, and musician (in his spare time, he plays upright bass and bass guitar). During the 2012 Shamus Awards banquet, however, we took the opportunity to chat at greater length about his life in film, the influences on his prose-writing, the genesis of Willis Gidney, and much more. Then recently, I asked him some extra questions, including about his brand-new e-book, Erased and Other Stories. The results of those exchanges are posted below.

Ali Karim: Tell me, what compels you to write?

Thomas Kaufman: This whole writing thing, it’s like a sickness. I blame it on the airline industry. Working as a cinematographer, I travel a lot. If the airlines hadn’t kept me waiting endlessly in terminals, or sitting on the tarmac, or wasting hour upon hour in soul-sucking tedious travel, I might never had reached the frustration level necessary to say, screw this, I have to use this time somehow. I got a laptop and started writing Drink the Tea.

AK: Do you come from a family of readers?

TK: Yes, and quite a few writers too. My aunt Carole wrote opening monologues for Steve Allen on The Tonight Show before turning to non-fiction books. My uncle Ted wrote several non-fiction books as well. My brother Pete has a novel out, and will soon have a true-crime book about identity theft during the Yukon gold rush. And my niece Miriam has a book of poetry. A number of librarians in the family as well.

AK: During your early education, what were the books and authors that influenced you most, steering you toward the writing world?

TK: I read a lot of science fiction growing up--starting with Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, graduating to [Arthur C.] Clarke and [Isaac] Asimov, then Harlan Ellison, Fred Pohl, Cyril Kornbluth, Alfred Bester. Around 16, I read Dickens, Thackery, Thomas Wolfe, Ken Kesey, and Somerset Maugham. At 18, I was given a copy of Farewell, My Lovely, and that’s when the penny dropped. I decided that somehow, some way, I was going to write a P.I. novel.

AK: Do you read widely in the P.I. genre, and what do you see as pivotal novels featuring private eyes?

TK: I read all of [Raymond] Chandler and [Dashiell] Hammett, of course: they’re the Louis Armstrong and Sidney Bechet of American detective fiction. Then there was Cornell Woolrich, Horace McCoy, Frederick Brown, Chester Himes, Ross Thomas, Charles Willeford, Donald E. Westlake, and Lawrence Block. Plus lots of others I’m not naming, of course.

AK: Americans usually consider P.I. fiction a U.S. creation. But credit must certainly be given to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, as well. Are you a fan of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson?

TK: You have to credit Conan Doyle for creating what is arguably the most memorable character in detective fiction. As to origins, Holmes came about 40 years after Edgar Allan Poe wrote the first private-detective story, but you don’t see Robert Downey Jr. playing [C.] Auguste Dupin, do you?

AK: Given your interest in cinematography, what do you make of the various big- and small-screen incarnations of Holmes and Watson, from Basil Rathbone to Benedict Cumberbatch?

TK: The current BBC series with Cumberbatch and [Martin] Freeman is great fun. The director, Paul McGuigan, seems to have taken a page from the Guy Ritchie playbook, in terms of the way the programs are directed. It has a modern feel, and that’s fitting because the show makes Holmes and Watson modern characters.

The tools of cinematography have changed a lot since Basil Rathbone first appeared as Holmes. Still, the aesthetics have changed very little. It’s all about story. The cinematographer’s job--like the director’s, the editor’s, and the sound recordist’s--is to help tell that story. If you compare the relatively static camera of those early Holmes films with the moving, variable frame-rate work in the most recent Holmes movies and TV shows, you see a world of difference. You can’t deny the commercial success of the newer Holmes films, but there’s something about Rathbone as Holmes that’s compelling.

AK: From whence did your interest in cinematography spring?

TK: Well, in addition to a family of writers and musicians, we also have photographers. My mother, Joanne, was a graduate of the Eastman School, and taught aerial photography to the Army Air Force during World War II. My cousin Jordan Klein won an Academy Award in technical achievement for designing underwater camera housings (he shot the underwater sequences for [1954’s] Creature from the Black Lagoon). My uncle and brother were still photographers. So it felt natural at an early age to fool around with still cameras. At age 10 I had built a darkroom and thought that was the bomb, until I discovered an old 8mm motion-picture camera in our attic, and taught myself how to shoot with it. No idea what I was doing, of course. I just knew I was having fun.

AK: That eventually led you to study film production at the University of Southern California. Can you tell us a little about that experience, and were you also writing fiction during your student years?

TK: I was writing all through high school, and wrote my first novel at age 22. I loved being 22, and thought I had written something perfect. I couldn’t understand why no publishers wanted it. When I read it now, I see that it’s not fit to line a birdcage. As to living in L.A., it was like a six-year out-of-body experience, apart from the traffic jams.

AK: Tell us a little about some of the film productions you have been involved in. And I see that you have some awards on your mantelpiece.

TK: I’ve been very lucky, in that I’ve worked with great documentary directors--Charles Guggenheim, Barbara Kopple, Michael Moore, and Mark Jonathan Harris, to name a few. Just as I’ve tried to learn from the writers I admire, I’ve also tried to learn from the directors.

Sometimes people tell me how hard my job is, that as director of photography, I’m in the hot seat. But it’s nothing compared to being the director. In a way, being a director is like being the author--whether a project succeeds or fails is on you.

When I moved to Washington, D.C., I found out about Gallaudet University, the world’s only university that serves the deaf and hard of hearing. They also have education from pre-school through high school. When I visited their pre-school, I grew fascinated with how quickly children learned sign language, and decided to make See What I’m Saying, which won an Emmy Award. I’ve also worked on three Academy Award-nominated feature documentaries. One of them, Promises to Keep, is about homelessness, and informed my writing Drink the Tea.

AK: A personal favorite among the productions in your canon is 2010’s chilling look at the legacy of the Cold War arms race, Countdown to Zero. Can you tell us about working on that project?

TK: Lucy Jane Walker directed Countdown, and she had some great ideas about how to shoot the film. Basically, she wanted a similar look to The Bourne Identity. I think I achieved some success there, but for budget reasons they had to scale back, and I wound up shooting far less of the film than I would’ve liked. Working with Lucy was great fun, and we filmed what I believe is the last interview with [former U.S. Secretary of Defense] Robert McNamara. He gave an impassioned plea for the world to eliminate all nuclear weapons. It’s a great film, and a worthy topic. [Editor’s note: At least for the time being, you can watch all of Countdown to Zero on YouTube.]

AK: You’ve labored on these documentaries, but have you ever wanted to film a piece of fiction? Working behind the camera can be akin to creating your own view of a situation, as a novelist tells a story.

TK: Ali, I knew you’d get to that eventually! First, I have shot fiction. I won the Gordon Parks Award for my work on an adaptation of Cinderella called Ashpet (1990]. I’ve also been a camera operator on The West Wing, and shot behind the scenes for The Wire, 24, and [the TV miniseries] John Adams. As to writing, there’re many parallels between filming a scene and writing a scene in a novel. For instance, where does the camera go? It’s a basic question, relating to point of view. Is the camera looking up at a character, making the character seem powerful and important? Or is the camera looking down, making that character seem weak, powerless? Is the camera moving or static? Does the camera use a wide-angle lens to emphasize the spaces between people, or a telephoto lens that seems to stack people close together?

When you write a scene, you have to consider point of view, and where your audience/reader is in relation to the characters. After so many years behind the viewfinder, I tend to visualize the scenes I’m writing. Where are my actors? How do they move? What’s the staging?

You want to see some great staging, check out the opening of Sullivan’s Travels [1941], by Preston Sturges. Early in the film, there a three-minute continuous take with three actors in a small space that’s incredibly dynamic. It’s visual, yet so subtle. Imagine getting that into a book!

AK: You have carried out a good deal of research with cops during your documentary filming. Could you share some of your experiences?

TK: I got to be friends with a producer who was doing crime shows for a cable channel, and he asked me to direct and shoot a number of episodes. I had a blast. The policemen and -women I met were natural storytellers, and they had great stories to tell. I’m still in touch with four of five of them.

One of the stories I did involved a guy who killed his girlfriend, burned her remains in a 55-gallon drum over three days, then emptied the remains into a nearby stream. He still had to dispose of the drum, so he drove it to a construction site and left it there, among all the other drums. The problem? At dawn, the foreman noticed that all of his drums were green, but someone had left a blue one. You see, in the dark, the colors looked much the same. So the foreman called the cops, who found bone fragments. A forensic anthropologist was able to tell from the fragments that the victim was a Caucasian woman, early 20s, between 5-foot-4 and 5-foot-8, and weighed about 120 pounds. Given time, I think the forensics guy could’ve told the cops how much change she had in her pocket when she died. Anyway, the cops were able to locate the victim’s boyfriend ...

Here’s the thing, though--after the boyfriend gets rid of the 55-gallon drum, he goes to a bar, gets pissed, and tells the victim’s brother-in-law what he did. He confesses everything! The brother-in-law tips off the cops, who arrest this scumbag.

Now, do you think the confession made it into the show? Guess again. As the producer explained it to me, for the show to work, all the criminals had to appear to be geniuses, so that the cops looked even smarter when they caught the bad guys. This helped me realize that “reality TV” isn’t real, and it’s often barely TV. I think Donald Westlake had fun satirizing it in Get Real, the last Dortmunder novel.


Author Kaufman reads from his novel Steal the Show at Washington, D.C.’s renowned Politics and Prose Bookstore. You can watch all of his presentation, beginning here.

AK: You share a similar background with Lee Child, who worked in TV film production before becoming a novelist. Do you think that both of you share that cinematic sense of perspective in your storytelling?

TK: What’s funny is we both worked for Granada Television, though Lee worked full-time as a director in the UK, while I shot only the occasional job in the U.S. Lee’s books are cinematic, I really enjoy them.

When I write a scene, I tend to see it happen. That’s the result of years behind the camera viewfinder, watching life unfold. So I visualize where the actors are, how they move, what the lighting is like, but I’m aware of the other senses, too. Unlike film, a book can involve all the senses. Does a place have a unique smell, taste, or touch? George Orwell excelled at combining all the senses to bring his world to life in the reader’s mind. In Nineteen Eighty-Four [1949], Orwell gives the reader an all-too-real look at what the future may bring.

The other thing is, I keep yelling “Cut!” when I finish writing a scene. This really upsets the people at Starbucks.

AK: Did you have one of those wonderful “eureka moments” when you consciously applied yourself to writing fiction?

TK: More like a “get off your ass” moment. After [composing] that first novel [at 22], I knew I wanted to write another, and wanted it to be a private-eye novel. But I put it off, concentrating on film work. When my first child was born, I realized the clock was ticking. So I started writing on a more regular basis.

Most of Drink the Tea was written in airplanes or hotel rooms, while I was traveling on shoots. I still write outside my home, but now find I don’t have to be on an airplane to get a chapter done. So long as I sit in a cramped position, drink coffee, and eat little bags of peanuts, I can pile up the chapters.

AK: Other than that first, youthful novel, do you have a drawer with other early work, all gathering piles of dust? And did those efforts prove to be learning experiences?

TK: That first book taught me what not to do, and showed me what I didn’t know. I’m a better writer because I wrote it.

As a teenager I took a week-long workshop with jazz pianist George Shearing and his group. I had lessons in the morning with his bass player, Andy Simpkins, who was terrific. And in the afternoon we all got together, Shearing would hear us play and talk with us. Driving to the first day of the workshop, I thought I was God’s gift to jazz. By the end of the week, I realized I knew nothing at all.

So on the very last day, Shearing sensed that some of us were feeling pretty down. He said, don’t worry, if you feel that you know nothing it means you’ve learned something this week. The thing to watch out for is the feeling that you know it all, that you’ve got it all under control--that’s when you’ll stagnate as an artist. I think that’s true for writers as well as musicians.

AK: Two years before it actually appeared in print, Drink the Tea won the Private Eye Writers of America/St. Martin’s Press contest for Best First P.I. Novel. Tell us about that experience and also about what Robert J. Randisi and the PWA [he founded] mean to you, since you seem to have a fascination with the private-eye genre.

TK: Each year St. Martin’s has four different competitions for different mystery genres. For the P.I. genre, it works with the PWA. I applied and was instructed to send my book to Robert Randisi as my judge. I thought I was screwed. I mean, Randisi knows the P.I. genre better than anyone. Drink the Tea is not a conventional P.I. story. So I figured there was no way I could win the competition. In fact, when I sent the manuscript to him, I distinctly remember thinking I was throwing away $6 in postage. It was a shock to learn I’d won. I still think some ghastly mistake was made, though I’d never admit that publicly. This is all off the record, right?

AK: Tell us a little about you series lead, Willis Gidney. Where did he spring from? And why use Washington, D.C., as the stories’ backdrop?

TK: Let’s answer your question with a question: Are you troubled by unsightly back story? Do you wish those troubling details could all be erased?

That’s what I thought when I was creating Willis Gidney. Why bother with back story? Just invent a guy who doesn’t have one. So Willis Gidney is a product of an author’s laziness. I decided to make his early life forgotten. Since I’d worked on Promises to Keep, I thought it’d be a good idea for Willis to have grown up homeless. Traumatic childhood, memory gone. Problem solved, right?

Wrong. It turned out I had quite a bit of research to do, relating not only to homelessness, but also D.C.’s juvenile justice system. Of course, this was a good thing in the long run, but lots of heavy lifting. Hey, I got into this racket for the easy money and loose women. Still waiting for both, I’m afraid.

AK: I hear that George Pelecanos, another writer who uses the U.S. capital as a backdrop, enjoys your work.

TK: George has said nice things about what I’m doing. He’s one of the best writers in America, in my humble opinion. He’s also a neighbor, and over the years he’s offered solid suggestions and insights about what I’m writing. George’s D.C. is different from mine, but that’s because we’re different people. I love his work, and reading his descriptions of D.C. is like reading great reportage. The only other writer I've read who is as insightful about D.C. is Edward P. Jones (check out his Lost in the City).

AK: Recently, Scottish author Ian Rankin, when he was being interviewed by the BBC about the return of protagonist John Rebus [in Standing in Another Man’s Grave], said that he might not get on with Rebus if he actually met the man. Might that same thing be true if you encountered Willis Gidney in a bar?

TK: Willis has got some issues, but it would be hard not to like the guy. I often think of him as a nephew who doesn’t take advice terribly well. But I think we’d get along. We’re a lot alike. In fact, if I were taller, younger, better looking, and had faster reflexes, we could be twins.

AK: Are you a detailed plotter, or do you allow your imagination to take you on a journey traversing the high-wire?

TK: I talk to writers about this from time to time. The bottom line is, whether you outline or do it on the fly, you’re going to spend time staring at a blank page. I think outlines are terrific, I just suck at writing them.

The P.I. story is primarily an American invention, and so is jazz. So it feels right to forgo an outline and riff my way through a book. I once heard jazz bassist Rufus Reid talk about playing a song. He said that once you learned the melody and knew the chord structure, the song becomes a playground. The melody and chords are like the rules of the playground, so once you know them, you can have lots of fun. I think the same is true of a mystery, or of any genre, for that matter. Writers just want to have fun.

AK: There’s a lot of pathos in Gidney’s back story and also in his investigations, and in both Drink the Tea and its follow-up, Steal the Show, you pepper the narrative with social commentary, which adds a dimension to the tale. Would you care to comment?

TK: The great thing about the P.I. novel is how adaptable it is, how much you can do with it. It can be funny, dark, a thriller, a whodunit, a puzzle piece--whatever you want it to be, provided you know the rules of the playground, right? This includes social commentary, and who better to talk to the reader about disparities than the private eye? He crosses all boundaries--social, economic, political, and in Willis’ case, ethical. Plus, D.C. is a great town to write about, because it’s the home of the federal government, which controls the purse strings for what’s really a small Southern town, where people work and live and pay taxes. So the conflict is built in.

AK: Was it hard to follow up Drink the Tea, which was a remarkable tale of the dark side of family dynamics, with Steal the Show?

TK: I began a story arc that covers three books, starting with Drink the Tea. My P.I. finds an abandoned child and the smart thing is to turn her over to D.C. juvenile services, but he can’t bring himself to do it, since he barely survived D.C.’s system himself. In Steal the Show he’s trying to do right by this kid, and it leads to unforeseen complications in his life. I thought it was a good story, and I liked Willis getting antagonized from all sides. The next [still-untitled] Gidney book continues this particular arc, and the reader gets deeper into Gidney’s character.

I think family conflicts spring up like mushrooms in a forest. Steal the Show had it’s genesis in a story a friend told me about a father, a son, and a third man, who became partners selling an electronic device. They became successful, and the father and the other man squeezed the son out of this business. The son had signed a non-compete clause, and he used that time [away from work] to redesign the device so he could compete with his father and run him out of business, which he eventually did. I thought that was an interesting family dynamic, and used it in Steal the Show.

AK: Did you plan that Drink the Tea would lead to a series?

TK: It wasn’t until I finished Tea that I realized how much I had come to know Gidney, and how much I liked him. I knew I wanted to write more about him. One of the things people tell me is that they love spending time with Gidney, and that to me is a fine compliment.

AK: Did the film backdrop for Steal the Show come from your own experiences in that industry? And do you believe in the old adage, “write what you know”?

TK: It’s certainly easier to write what you know, but it’s also important to write about what most people don’t know. When we read, we like to feel we’re getting an inside look at something, so I did that with Steal the Show. I’d done quite a lot of work at the National Institute for Standards and Technology [NIST], and was fascinated by cryptology and the digital revolution’s impact on it. Plus, it was fun to use people I’ve known from the film business as characters in the book.

AK: I enjoy the wit in your Gidney novels, as I think dark tales with striated morality often need a bit of humor to keep their narratives from becoming too gloomy. But tell us your own views on the deployment of humor in fiction.

TK: It’s tricky, because humor can undermine you if you’re trying to generate suspense. So I wind up cutting a lot of funny stuff in successive drafts, because I think it’s misplaced. Willis uses humor as a coping mechanism, so it’s OK in a tense situation, to an extent. But when he or someone he loves is threatened, it’s no time for jokes.

That said, I love humor mixed in with dark tales, and some people can do it perfectly--Donald Westlake and Carl Hiassen, to name two.

AK: One thing I really enjoy about the Willis Gidney novels is that they contain a sense of awareness of the problems weaker members of society face amid the randomness of life. I’m assuming that you must be of the liberal political persuasion. So what were your thoughts about last year’s U.S. elections?

TK: Ali, I’m not sure one needs to be a liberal to write about other people’s problems, but yeah, I am a liberal. A few years ago I had lunch with Lee Child and a dozen of his fans at Bouchercon, and I told him how appreciative I was for his anti-war views in Nothing to Lose [2008]. History will judge whether the U.S. invasion of Iraq accomplished anything worthwhile, but in the short run I can’t see that it did.

As to our election in 2012, I was petrified. In the summer of that year, I thought [Republican] Mitt Romney might actually become the next president. So I went out and canvassed door-to-door, I drove people to the polls (and wrote a short story about that, “Four More Years”), and I worked a phone bank--in short, I became the thing I hate, an odious pustule who calls you up while you're resting in the evening to ask impertinent questions, like who you’re going to vote for! But I was frantic, I knew I had to do this. If Romney won and I did nothing to help stop him, I’d hate myself for the next four years.

AK: So where are you with your follow-up to Steal the Show? And what has Gidney been up to since we last read about him?

TK: Gidney’s a lazy sod, I can tell you. I have to do all of the heavy lifting. He did form a jazz band, the Willis Gidney Quintet. It’s a skilled group of musicians, if you don’t count the bass player. We’re playing in clubs around D.C. and it’s great fun, even though Willis has yet to show up for a single rehearsal or gig.

Still, Gidney has condescended to appear in two of the short stories in my new collection, Erased and Other Stories. ... In addition to Gidney, I also have two stories that relate to the Holocaust. Years ago I shot a TV [special] with Walter Cronkite, Holocaust: In Memory of Millions, and interviewed people who survived the Nazi death camps. They told stories I’ll never forget. One of them was the basis for “Erased.”

Readers tell me they love Gidney, so I’m hard at work on the third novel about him, his girlfriend Lilly, and the bizarre Washington, D.C., scene that surrounds them. This new book goes deeper into both of their characters, and I hope readers will like it.

AK: Finally, can you tell us about some of the books you’ve read and been excited about recently?

TK: Lately? I’ve been reading Reed Farrel Coleman, Steve Hamilton, John Lutz, Allison Leotta, Laura Lippman, Daniel Stashower; and re-reading Ross Thomas, Donald Westlake, and Lawrence Block.

AK: Thanks for your time, Tom. And you’re much better-looking in person than in your pictures.

TK: You’re very perceptive.

Secrets and Spies

Flavorwire recently asked Max Allan Collins--whose penultimate completion of a “substantial” Mickey Spillane novel, the espionage-tinged Complex 90, is now on bookstore shelves--to name his 10 favorite Cold War-era spy novels. The results of that exercise won’t surprise many people (though it is fairly unusual to see Peter O’Donnell’s The Impossible Virgin mentioned). But for anyone who hasn’t yet enjoyed these books, this might be a good reminder to check them out. Collins’ list is here.

Short Notices

• This could be pretty interesting: Among the “scripted development projects” for American TV network TNT announced this week is a series based on Ross Macdonald’s string of Lew Archer private-eye novels. Less hopeful is a “re-imagining” of Peter Gunn, Blake Edwards’ iconic 1958-1961 series starring Craig Stevens. Really, does anyone believe that the original Gunn can be outdone?

• And this in indisputably good news: The Michael Kitchen-led historical mystery series Foyle’s War will return to PBS-TV’s Masterpiece Mystery! this coming September. Three new episodes, all of which are set in the post-World War II years of 1946-47 (and have already been broadcast in the UK), will be shown.

• Organizers of the 2013 Tony Hillerman Writers Conference, scheduled to take place in Santa Fe, New Mexico, from November 7 to 9, put out the word this week that the faculty for this year’s event will feature authors Margaret Coel, Craig Johnson, and David Morrell, along with Kirk Ellis, Emmy-award winning writer of the HBO mini-series John Adams, James McGrath Morris, the recipient of two New Mexico Book Awards, and Hillerman’s author daughter, Anne.

• The next James Bond film won’t be out until 2015. At least.

• Among the latest “Top Notch Thriller” releases from Ostara Publishing is Tightrope, Antony Melville-Ross’ 1981 novel set in Britain and the United States. For added interest, sometime Rap Sheet contributor and Top Notch editor Mike Ripley notes that Melville-Ross had “a pretty thrilling family history (originally American) back to Moby Dick via Pancho Villa and a possible inspiration for Indiana Jones. I couldn’t make this up!”

• Ace Atkins’ second Spenser novel, Robert B. Parker’s Wonderland, was only just published by Putnam, but already there’s word that Boston’s best-fed gumshoe will make an encore appearance this year in Silent Night, a holiday-theme work apparently left unfinished at the time of Parker’s death in early 2010. The book was completed by Helen Brann, Parker’s longtime literary agent. It’s due out in late October.

• Stephen King’s latest novel, Joyland, is being readied for paperback release by Hard Case Crime in early June. But “special limited editions” of the book, including one featuring “nine gorgeous illustrations from master artist Robert McGinnis and a map of the Joyland amusement park,” are also being made available. Presumably at a steeper price than the regular $12.95 edition.

• A few months back I wrote on this page about the failed 1972 TV pilot film A Very Missing Person, which sought to bring author Stuart Palmer’s “meddlesome old battleaxe” of an amateur sleuth, Hildegarde Withers, to small-screen audiences. Now comes word that publisher Mysterious Press/Open Road Media is releasing e-book versions of 17 Palmer novels, including such Withers outings as The Penguin Pool Murder (1931), Murder on Wheels (1932), and 1969’s Hildegarde Withers Makes the Scene (from which A Very Missing Person was derived). Blogger Les Blatt, who has reviewed nine of Palmer’s novels within the last few years, describes the Withers books as “well-plotted and told with some nice humorous touches.” If you’d like to check out Open Road’s Palmer re-releases, click here.

• The Mystery Writers of America announced the winners of its 2013 Edgar Awards earlier this month. But now I see that it’s made videos of the individual prize presentations available on YouTube.

In Tune with Vintage Vienna

Images from Vienna, 1900, with music by Johann Strauss II.

In case you haven’t noticed it yet, the first part of my recent interview with historical novelist J. Sydney Jones was posted this morning on the Kirkus Reviews Web site. This is of course timed to correspond with the release of Jones’ fourth and latest Karl Werthen “Viennese Mystery,” The Keeper of Hands (Severn House), the plot of which its publisher describes this way:

Vienna, 1901. With the police seemingly indifferent to the murder of a 19-year-old prostitute known as Mitzi, brothel-keeper Frau Mutzenbacher turns to lawyer Karl Werthen to find out what happened and bring her killer to justice. Yet the more he discovers about the mysterious Mitzi, with her secret past and impressive roster of clients, the more questions Werthen’s investigation throws up.

At the same time, Werthen undertakes a second commission: to find out who viciously assaulted playwright Arthur Schnitzler. Schnitzler believes his latest controversial play might have been the motive for the attack--but is there more to it than that?

As he navigates the highs and lows of Viennese society in dogged pursuit of the truth, Werthen finds himself drawn into a conspiracy of espionage and affairs of state.

That’s a pretty simplistic breakdown of what is actually a rather complicated and propulsive yarn involving important officials with secrets to hide, competing espionage agencies, and a killer practiced in the diabolical art of shutting people up for good. Viennese lawyer/private eye Werthen, last seen in The Silence (2012), tackles all of the questions and dangers involved here with the assistance of his increasingly resourceful spouse, Berthe Meisner, and real-life criminologist Doktor Hanns Gross. Jones’ careful pacing, attention to historical detail, and self-assured prose make The Keeper of Hands--like the previous entries in this series--well worth the time it takes to read.

As is so often the case with my author interviews for Kirkus, I gleaned considerably more material from Syd Jones than I had any hope of fitting into today’s column. The 64-year-old author--who grew up in a “little beach town” on the Oregon coast but now resides in the Santa Cruz, California, area with his wife and young son, Evan--responded at satisfying length to my numerous questions about his past, his writing career, and his reading preferences. Rather than file away what I couldn’t fit into Kirkus, never to be seen by the reading public, I am posting the greater part of our exchange below.

J. Kingston Pierce: When and why did you first visit Vienna, and what were your earliest impressions of that city?

J. Sydney Jones: I initially went to Vienna as a junior in college in 1968. I had planned on attending the University of Stirling in Scotland as an occasional student. But those were the years of the Vietnam War and the draft and student deferments; my draft board did not go along with the non-graduating status I would have in Scotland, so I looked around for a school abroad that did not have a language requirement. I’d studied German at university, but had no real desire to go to school full time in that language. A junior-year-abroad program in Vienna fit the bill--and it turned out to be a terrific fit all around, quite by accident. Some of my best friends are from those days. That year in Vienna changed my life.

JKP: For how many years did you later live in Vienna?

JSJ: I went back to Vienna following graduation, newly married, and stayed there on and off throughout the 1970s and most of the ’80s. This was the high point of the Cold War and a good time to be in the spy center of Vienna and also a good time to be away from the U.S., if the fashions say anything of the times. I had already determined as a student to become a writer; Vienna became my Paris, my school of life.

JKP: One of your previous, non-fiction books, Hitler in Vienna, 1907-1913: Clues to the Future (2002), looked at Austrian-born Adolf Hitler’s experiences in the imperial capital. What did you learn about Hitler and Vienna by focusing your research this way?

JSJ: Hitler in Vienna was indeed a labor of love. It took five years of research and writing. I had initially intended the book to be a popular narrative history of Vienna 1900 and its amazing renaissance: think Freud, Mahler, Schoenberg, Klimt, Schiele, Loos, Otto Wagner, Wittgenstein--the list goes on and on of those who helped to shape the modern sensibility. At that time (mid-1970s), New York publishers were most definitely not interested in Vienna 1900; now it has become a cottage industry. Publishers were, however, interested in Hitler, so I paired the two--“a tale of genius versus malignancy” as a melodramatic blurb. Hitler scratched out a living of sorts in those years painting pictures that would be sold to frame shops. It was the frame that was of interest, not the picture, much like you might buy a small frame today with a photo already in it just for advertisement sake. Hitler worked mostly for Jewish frame dealers when he wasn’t living rough on the streets, a failed wannabe artist who was gaga for opera, especially the works of Wagner.

I used the eyes of an outsider to research that book and it was ultimately published in German first. The Hitler angle took my rose-colored glasses off vis-à-vis Vienna: not all schlagobers and waltzes. Anti-Semitism was a deep and ugly vein in the landscape of Central Europe, and Vienna was no exception. An early pre-Nazi National Socialist Party had its start in turn-of-the-century Austria.

JKP: The shorthand version of your biography is that you produced several non-fiction books about Vienna, and then began writing your current series of Viennese Mysteries. But in fact, you penned two standalone historical thrillers before delivering your first Viennese Mystery, The Empty Mirror (2009). What were those novels about, and how did they prepare you to compose the Karl Werthen novels?

JSJ: I wrote two thrillers for NAL back in the early 1990s. The first, Time of the Wolf, is available now as a Kindle (with a wonderful cover by the talented Peter Ratcliffe). It should have been titled In Death’s Time, as it came from a dream I had about this person--obviously a police inspector--coming down an immense flight of marble stairs and thinking to himself: “Only one more death in death’s time. Who will care?” The novel has a Gorky Park sort of feel to it, featuring a Viennese police inspector in 1942 who uncovers documents proving that the Final Solution is being carried out. He resolves to get the secret out to the Allies, but his mission is compromised and soon the SD, German security services, is on his tail. Publishers Weekly called this novel an “exciting intellectual game of cat and mouse ... [that] offers driving tension from beginning to end.” The book is a bit edgy vis-à-vis sex and violence. It remains one of my favorites.

The other thriller, The Hero Game, is set in Ireland during World War II. Its premise is that the Nazis mount a secret mission to Ireland to foment a second uprising, which will distract the Brits just at the time of a planned German invasion of Old Blighty. It also has my biggest howler--I have the Irish leader, a good Catholic, attending mass in a Protestant church. Those thrillers were my education in pacing and writing action scenes, both of which have come in handy in the Werthen books. They are also powerfully character-driven for thrillers.

JKP: What is it about the setting of Vienna in the diapered days of the 20th century that so attracts you as a novelist?

JSJ: I have to admit, it took me a good half-minute to figure out “diapered days”--nice.

I love the time, simple as that. I feel at home in that time. I have since first encountering it as a student. There is terrific resonance with our own times, there are fascinating personalities with quirks and dark sides. Lovely material. Plus, Vienna, when I first went there, was not so far removed from those times: the buildings, the feel of the society. All from another age.

JKP: And what can you accomplish as a novelist writing about Vienna in the late 18900s, early 1900s that would not be possible to do as the author of non-fiction works?

JSJ: It’s funny: I thought that writing this material as fiction would free me up from the obsessive constraints of getting every little historical nuance right. Wrong. I use actual historical characters in each book of the series, and I continue to feel an obligation to getting things right about them in the fictional format, as well. In Requiem in Vienna [2010], for example, featuring the composer Gustav Mahler, I had the appropriate volume of excellent Henry-Louis de la Grange Mahler bio (Vienna: The Years of Change) ever at my side to double-check for Mahler’s daily movements. It’s the same for all the books. If I have a real character speak, I want to know that this is a good facsimile of what they actually talked about.

I only every wanted to be a fiction author; I started with non-fiction as I figured that would be the easiest way to break into print. From travel articles to travel books to narrative non-fiction and then, voila, I could make the leap to fiction. It sort of worked that way, but it is not necessarily a recipe for success. But what the hell, I was young and definitely not a MFA grad--I had to figure these things out for myself. So there is no great moral purpose in my choosing to use this rich Vienna material in a fictional format rather than non-fiction. I am simply being selfish--this is the kind of book I want to write. Werthen and company are just plain fun.

JKP: Do you spend a lot of effort trying to immerse yourself in 1900-1901 Vienna while you’re writing the Werthen books? If so, what do you do to get yourself in the right mind space to recapture life in Vienna during that period?

JSJ: Actually, the Werthen books are planned to cover the era from 1898 to 1915. I am still in 1901 with the fifth book, the same year as The Keeper of Hands. But the books are planned to progress year by year, the characters aging with a sell-buy date. And yes, there is a great deal of immersion in the times. Besides reading tons of history for each book, and focusing on the particular real-life person from the time, I also do a daily bit of time travel via photos and newspapers. Bless the Internet. Time was, if you wanted to do any real research on Vienna 1900, you had to be in Vienna and go to the National Library and request actual newspapers one by one or visit their photo archive and present credentials to show that you deserved a look-see. Now that library has put such information online. I can browse several newspapers for the very day I am writing about over a century ago, see what was in the news, the weather, the social gossip. I can stroll down the street I am writing about in Vienna via the online photo archive. It is a wonderful resource.

Apropos this resource, one of my recurring minor characters in the series is Karl Kraus, of whom I lovingly referred to in one interview as “the intellectual pit bull of Vienna.” Kraus was a cultural critic, grammar policeman, and word maven of Vienna 1900. A frail-looking man, Kraus beavered away for over three decades, single-handedly publishing his magazine, Die Fackel (The Torch). In this journal he took on the hypocrisies of the day, stood up to the rich and the powerful when need be, fought crime and societal stupidity, and generally pissed off everybody. The ultimate aphorist, Kraus termed Vienna 1900 a “laboratory for world destruction.” And guess what, the entirety of his publication can also be found online.

JKP: How realistic is Werthen’s role as a lawyer/private investigator? Have you read about other people in Vienna at the time who engaged in comparable endeavors?

JSJ: Werthen is spun out of whole cloth, though a few months ago I did run across an obscure reference to a private investigator at the time working on Praterstrasse. I could find no further information, however. Werthen and his wife, Berthe, are at the heart of the books, and I do not want their creation to be limited by any real-life forebears.

JKP: Your new novel, The Keeper of Hands, follows a rather complicated plot course. It starts out as a whodunit, with a murdered young brothel employee, but soon expands into a work of intrigue about rival European intelligence agencies and the criminal consequences of seeking to cover up indiscretions among “important” people. What led you to concoct this tale, and how do you think it represents growth in your series?

JSJ: Actually, most of the books in the series follow this arc from mystery to thriller; from whodunit to stop-them-from-doing-it. The first in the series, The Empty Mirror, sets up this format: it begins with the death of an art model and the trail ultimately leads to the Hofburg [Palace] and the secrets involving the deaths of an archduke and an empress. Keeper is this format on steroids. I very much wanted to deal with the espionage agencies of the times and also to create a vile antagonist. I love vile antagonists. Herr Schmidt from Keeper will be making reappearances.

(Right) J. Sydney Jones

JKP: The plots of each of your Viennese Mysteries start with a cultural luminary or two from the city’s colorful past--future philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein in The Silence, for instance, and composer Gustav Mahler in Requiem in Vienna, and authors Arthur Schnitzler and Bertha von Suttner in The Keeper of Hands. One real-life figure keeps coming back, though: Hanns Gross, the so-called father of criminology. How has Gross found a regular role in your series, when other authentic characters have not? Is it simply because he has an expertise in criminal analysis, or is there something else he contributes to your storytelling?

JSJ: Gross is one of the team, not merely an incidental player. ... He is ... instrumental in finding a sort of informal justice, as in The Silence. Gross’ ongoing role is part of the reason why the series is called the “Viennese Mysteries” and not the Werthen series. Besides, my private inquiries agent’s name is a strange one: Americans are going to be pronouncing it”wurthan” when it is actually “vairtun.”

JKP: Are there other authors currently penning mystery or thriller fiction who you think do a particularly good job of capturing their chosen historical time periods?

JSJ: Where do I start? Philip Kerr nails Germany before and after WWII. Jacqueline Winspear ditto for post-WWI England. Alan Furst, especially in his first novels, transports you to Central Europe and the Balkans in the 1930s. You want Shanghai and the People’s Republic of China in transformation during 1990s? Read Qiu Xiaolong. This list could go on with a number of excellent writers.

JKP: Is it true that, beyond composing your Viennese Mysteries, you’re also working on some new standalone thrillers? What can you tell us about those? And will we be seeing any of them in the near future?

JSJ: Glad you asked. My novel Ruin Value will be out this October from Mysterious Press/Open Road. It’s a suspense thriller set in Nuremberg just before and during the War Crimes Trials. It features an ex-OSS agent whose job it is to track down a serial killer (they were called multiple murderers at the time) in that city of ruins. He enlists a German, a former Kripo (criminal police) agent in the hunt. And there is also a well-connected American journalist who is out after the scoop of her life. I am very excited about this, working with [editor] Otto Penzler and with the excellent folks at Open Road. This is, to my mind, exactly what the e-book business needs--a house with proven editorial oversight and professional packaging and marketing.

JKP: In what ways do you still need to grow as a writer?

JSJ: I must confess to a very non-professional desire: at this stage of my career I am much more concerned about improving my backhand than I am my writing hand. Which is not to say that I do not still try to grow with each book--I think Keeper is the best of the series thus far--but such growth is on the macro scale, not the micro. I do not consciously atomize the writing process while I am at it. Some of that comes, of course, with revision. But when I sit down to work in the morning it’s all about the story and the characters and giving them room to live.

JKP: You’ve previously cited the works of Gerald Seymour and John le Carré as being particularly strong in their quality of dialogue. Is that the part of writing fiction you find most difficult?

JSJ: Let's put it this way: I think my sense of plotting and character development are my strong suits.

JKP: Whose books are you reading right now?

JSJ: On the non-fiction side is Daniel M. Vyleta’s Crime, Jews and News: Vienna 1895-1914; a re-reading of Edward Crankshaw’s superb The Fall of the House of Habsburg; and Maria Hornor Lansdale’s Vienna and the Viennese, a book published in 1902 and full of delicious slice-of-life apercus about Vienna 1900. For fiction there is William Boyd’s Ordinary Thunderstorms (Boyd is my favorite contemporary author: his Any Human Heart is at the top of all my lists--that guy can write) and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s These Happy Golden Years, which I am reading with my son at bedtime. I had never read the Wilder books before and I must confess to [their being] a guilty pleasure. Among all the other joys of having a child at my time of life is discovering all those books one should have read as a youth and did not.

JKP: Finally, when you first visited Vienna back in the late ’60s, you were intending to establish a career as an attorney, not as a wordsmith. Are you glad now that you gave up those aspirations to practice law, and became a man of letters instead?

JSJ: I have only partially given up those dreams. Remember that Werthen is a lawyer, the protagonist of my [never-published] mainstream Irish novel, Yanks in the Glen, was a lawyer, and, as you will discover, the protagonist of Ruin Value studied the law.

Pierce’s Picks: “Little Green”

A weekly alert for followers of crime, mystery, and thriller fiction.

Little Green, by Walter Mosley (Doubleday):
At the conclusion of Mosley’s 10th Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins novel, Blonde Faith (2007), we found his Los Angeles private eye drunk, depressed at the loss of his longtime girlfriend, Bonnie Shay, and wheeling his automobile over a cliff on the Pacific Coast Highway north of Malibu, California. “The back of my car hit something hard,” Easy told readers, “a boulder no doubt. Something clenched down on my left foot and pain lanced up my leg. I ignored this, though, realizing that in a few seconds, I’d be dead.” It was hardly unreasonable to think that Mosley had thereby delivered his final Rawlins outing.

Six years later, though, Easy is back, if not in great condition--the plummet from that precipice had thrown him free, but it took most of a day for his old buddy, the ever-armed-and-dangerous Raymond “Mouse” Alexander, to locate him and get him medical attention. After spending two months in bed in a semi-coma, the detective finally reawakens to the world of 1967 ... only to have Mouse ask that he take on a new assignment: locating Evander “Little Green” Noon, a man of 19 or 20 (“but he’s immature for his age”) who disappeared after calling his mother to tell her that he’d met some girl on the Sunset Strip.

A lesser, perhaps smarter man might have said no way, that he needed considerably more bed rest before tackling anything so difficult. But Easy has never been one to fail a friend, and so, bucked up by a “voodoo elixir” supplied by “Southern witch” Mama Jo, he sets off in a bright red 1965 Plymouth Barracuda to bring Evander home--and in the meantime, protect the young man from folks who would rather he ceased breathing immediately. All of this, despite risks to his own life. (“It’s always been my opinion,” Easy tells us at one point, “that if a man’s going to be a fool he should go all the way.”) As the case unfolds, Rawlins will rub elbows (and more intimate body parts) with free-spirited hippie chicks, run afoul of gun-wielding thugs, do his best to hide a small fortune in tainted cash, and try to figure out why Evander’s mother hates Mouse so, despite the lengths Mouse is willing to go to rescue her oldest child. There’s a secondary plot here, too, which has Easy helping another longtime pal, Jackson Blue, squeeze out from under a blackmail threat.

Walter Mosley may have taken a half-dozen-year break from his man Easy, but in the course of it he lost none of his sure footing with this series. Little Green ranks as one of the finest Rawlins novels to date, and that’s no small compliment. These pages are filled with the author’s typically incisive characterizations and careful attention to historical detail. (You can almost smell the patchouli oil and pot smoke so beloved by America’s sexually liberated generation.) While this tale is certainly a mystery, challenging “research and delivery” man Rawlins to sort out why Evander vanished and remains in danger, it also boasts strong social commentary. Easy is always sensitive to the unfairness and insults any black resident of the United States experienced during the mid-20th-century; yet he senses things might be changing a little, that in the age of Martin Luther King Jr. and the African-American civil-rights movement, blacks may see more acceptance and evenhandedness in their future. For a guy who recently died, such revelations can be powerful incentives to go on living.

* * *

Also worth looking for at your local bookshop: Robert B. Parker’s Wonderland (Putnam), the second of Ace Atkins’ remarkably successful efforts--following last year’s Lullaby--to extend Parker’s best-selling Spenser series. This time out, the Boston P.I. and his sometime sidekick, Zebulon “Z” Sixkill, rush to the aid of gym owner Henry Cimoli, who faces mounting pressure and threats from a commercial developer intent on purchasing his condominium at Revere Beach, once the site of an oceanfront amusement park and dog-racing track. ... Complex 90 (Titan), by Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins, in which take-no-shit shamus Mike Hammer (last spotted in 2012’s Lady, Go Die!) precipitates an international incident by, first, traveling with a conservative politician on a fact-finding mission to the Soviet capital, Moscow, and then being arrested for murder. ... Steve Ulfelder’s Shotgun Lullaby (Minotaur), which finds his redemption-craving series protagonist, Conway Sax, trying to help a recovering substance abuser named Gus Biletnikov stay sober--and also stay alive, amid what look like pretty clear threats to the life of Gus, someone who reminds Sax a bit too much of his estranged son. ... And Original Skin (Blue Rider Press), David Mark’s second novel featuring Yorkshire Detective Sergeant Aector McAvoy. The Scottish-born McAvoy--previously seen in The Dark Winter--and his fellow members of the Serious and Organized Crime Unit start by probing the apparent suicide of a “swinger,” only to have that lead them to the trail of a killer linked to the local erotic sex scene and powerful politicians who would think nothing of breaking a too-curious copper.

READ MORE: “Call It Noir If You Want to: Talking to Walter Mosley About His New Book, Little Green,” by Jeannette Cooperman (St. Louis magazine); “Resisting Little Boxes: The Soul of Walter Mosley,” by Amy Goldschlager (Kirkus Reviews); “America’s Blackest Jewish Writer,” by Harold Heft (Tablet).

Invitation to “Trouble”

Several years ago on this page, I reviewed the 1946 novel The Double Take, written by Roy Huggins. He, of course, would go on to become a popular TV series creator and producer, responsible for such shows as 77 Sunset Strip, The Rockford Files, and City of Angels. And The Double Take would have an extended life of its own, becoming the source material for episodes of several of Huggins’ shows.

Apparently the earliest adaptation of that novel, though, was as the 1948 big-screen picture I Love Trouble, starring Franchot Tone--an American actor, despite his name--as Los Angeles private eye Stuart Bailey (the same character Huggins later employed in 77 Sunset Strip). Huggins composed the script for Columbia Pictures, an effort that introduced him into the Hollywood movie industry.

In his review for the Web site Film Noir, Tony D’Ambra writes:

This is one helluva movie. A gem that sparkles like the eyes of the hot dames that swagger, pout, smolder, and snap their high heels across the screen. A joyous L.A. romp in Marlowe territory which has it all. ...

There are laughs and smooth-as-nylons repartee, but the melodrama is hard-hitting and typically noir: guys get slapped hard, drugged, and slugged from behind. In one scene the face of a murder victim under a Malibu pier is highlighted by torch-light at night. A particularly impressive scene is where a guy is under the threat of a gun, which is shown from the holder’s viewpoint, as it moves with the frightened target as he staggers backward and across the screen in a small room.

At the time I wrote about The Double Take, I’d not had the opportunity to see I Love Trouble. A print of it has been shown at noir-oriented film festivals, and it has undoubtedly appeared at some point on late-night television. But it isn’t available on DVD.

So I was delighted to find all 94 minutes of I Love Trouble on YouTube yesterday. It is an imperfect print, too dark in places, and the story might seem confusing at first; however, I think old-movie fans will get a kick out this early effort from a man who would become an important figure in the evolution of small-screen P.I. dramas.

Click here to watch the whole thing.

When Lightning Strikes

(Editor’s note: The following essay/film critique comes from Thomas Kaufman, an award-winning motion-picture director and cameraman from Maryland, who also pens the Willis Gidney private-eye series [Drink the Tea, Steal the Show]. His e-book, Erased and Other Stories, has just been published by Antenna Books.)

Few movies are as great as 1944’s Double Indemnity. And few people drove Raymond Chandler as crazy as director Billy Wilder. It wasn’t just Wilder’s mannerisms, his walking stick, his constant pacing while they collaborated on the script for Double Indemnity. It was also the constant stream of phone calls--Wilder chatting up young women, and scoring with them at night. How it must have galled Chandler, 18 years Wilder’s senior, to see this young man with broken English score with such a lot of babes.

Chandler apparently considered Wilder a good character. In his 1949 Philip Marlowe novel, The Little Sister, Chandler writes about a Hollywood agent with most of Wilder’s mannerisms intact. Take that, Billy!

To me, Double Indemnity is interesting because Wilder and Chandler turned a good book into a great screenplay.

American journalist and author James M. Cain broke new ground with his novels Mildred Pierce (1941), The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), and Double Indemnity (1943). Even his lesser-known works, such as Career in C Major and Other Stories (1943), are worth reading. But like many books by the pulp writers of his time, Cain’s are often better in conception than in execution.

So how did co-writers Wilder and Chandler improve Double Indemnity? For one thing, the two enlarged the part of Barton Keyes, played on screen by Edward G. Robinson. In Cain’s novel, Keyes is a minor character, but in the movie Keyes is the third part of a love triangle between Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) and insurance salesman Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray). I think Wilder and Chandler gave Robinson the best speech in the film, as he berates the front office owner of their insurance company for knowing nothing about the business.

For another, the narrative of the book is a straight chronology of events. In the film version, there’s a narrative frame, consisting of Walter’s confession to murder. This frame not only gives us all the expositional material we need, it also gives the whole story its tone--we know things are not going to work out for Walter Neff.

Then there’s the dialogue. Nobody wrote it better than Wilder and Chandler. Despite their differences, they clearly enjoyed the use of language. Take this scene as an example:



Listen to the rhythm of the dialogue, how MacMurray and Stanwyck spar with each other, and the great subtext that brings a certain heat to their interaction.

Subsequent movies such as Body Heat (1981) and China Moon (1994) owe debts to Double Indemnity, but I'm hard pressed to think of a modern motion-picture that has the wit and suspense of this classic. How about you? Have you seen a recent film that can stand shoulder to shoulder with Double Indemnity?

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Click here to see the Double Indemnity trailer and Raymond Chandler’s brief, oft-overlooked cameo appearance in that movie.

READ MORE: “8 Great Noir Films that Revolve Around Life
Insurance,” by Hannah Peterson (Noir Nation: International Crime Fiction); “Billy Wilder and Double Indemnity,” by Thomas Kaufman (Spinetingler Magazine).

What’s So Trivial About Matt Helm?

Since response to this request was rather scant the first time around, I’m going to repost it in hopes of drawing more suggestions:

I was recently asked to come up with 20 trivia questions focused around Donald Hamilton’s long-running series of Matt Helm espionage thrillers. These stumpers can pertain not only to the more than two dozen Helm novels, but also to the films and short-lived TV series Hamilton’s character inspired. I’m supposed to submit my queries in early May.

It occurs to me that some Rap Sheet readers might find it fun to contribute their own posers to this mix. I’ll gladly entertain any and all suggestions. Please drop me a line--soon--at jpwrites@wordcuts.org. I ask only that whatever Helm-related questions you submit also include the answers, as well as info about where those answers can be found (either online or in the individual books).

I hope a few more Rap Sheet readers will be able to contribute.

’Tis the Season for Back Patting

The last week has been a significant one, at least so far as crime-fiction-related commendations go. Lists of nominees were announced for the 2013 Dagger in the Library Award, the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award, and of course the 2013 Anthony Awards. Meanwhile, we were let in on the winners of this year’s Edgar Allan Poe Awards and Agatha Awards.

However, there are still more contenders for additional honors. Let’s start here with the shortlists of nominees for four prizes to be handed out on Saturday, June 1, at a “gala dinner” during this month’s CrimeFest (May 30-June 2) in Bristol, England:

The Audible Sounds of Crime Award (“recognizes the best crime audiobook published in both print and audio in 2012”):

• The Black Box, by Michael Connelly; read by Michael McConnohie (Orion Audio)
• The Racketeer, by John Grisham; read by J.D. Jackson
(Hodder & Stoughton)
• The Lewis Man, by Peter May; read by Peter Forbes (Quercus)
• Phantom, by Jo Nesbø; read by Sean Barrett (Random House/Isis)
• Standing in Another Man’s Grave, by Ian Rankin; read by James MacPherson (Orion Audio)

The Goldsboro Last Laugh Award (“for the best humorous crime
novel of 2012”):

• The Prisoner of Brenda, by Colin Bateman (Headline)
• The Corpse on the Court, by Simon Brett (Severn House)
• Slaughter’s Hound, by Declan Burke (Liberties Press)
• Killing the Emperors, by Ruth Dudley Edwards (Allison &; Busby)
• Bryant & May and the Invisible Code, by Christopher Fowler (Doubleday)
• The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats, by Hesh Kestin (Mulholland)

The eDunnit Award (“for the best crime fiction e-book published in 2012 in both hardcopy and in electronic format”):

• The Age of Doubt, by Andrea Camilleri (Mantle)
• Killing the Emperors, by Ruth Dudley Edwards (Allison &; Busby)
• Bryant & May and the Invisible Code, by Christopher Fowler (Transworld)
• Dominion, by C.J. Sansom (Mantle)

The H.R.F. Keating Award (“for the best biography or critical book related to crime fiction e-book published between 2008 and 2012”):

• Books to Die For: The World’s Greatest Mystery Writers on the World’s Greatest Mystery Novels, edited by John Connolly and Declan Burke (Hodder & Stoughton, 2012)
• Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks, by John Curran
(HarperCollins, 2009)
• British Crime Writing: An Encyclopaedia, edited by Barry Forshaw (Greenwood World Publishing, 2008)
• Invisible Ink, by Christopher Fowler (Strange Attractor, 2012)
• Following the Detectives: Real Location in Crime Fiction, edited by Maxim Jakubowski (New Holland Publishers, 2010)
• Talking About Detective Fiction, by P.D. James (The Bodleian
Library, 2009)

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Next, we have the 2013 winners of the Spinetingler Awards, presented annually by Spinetingler Magazine. Readers were asked to vote for the favorite nominees online. Here are this year’s fortunate recipients, with the full lists of contenders available under the category links:

• Best Novel -- New Voice: Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn (Crown)
• Best Novel -- Rising Star/Legend: The Cold Cold Ground, by Adrian McKinty (Seventh Street)
• Best Novella/Short Novel: A Woman and a Knife, by Matthew C. Funk (from Uncle B’s Drive-in Fiction, edited by Elisha Murphy; CreateSpace)
• Best Anthology/Short Story Collection: Roachkiller & Other Stories, by R. Navaez (Beyond the Page)
• Best Short Story on the Web: “The Tractor Thief’s Jacket,” by Gita M. Smith (MudJob, September 2012)
• Best Cover: 18 Days, by Allen Miles (Byker e-book)

* * *

Finally, the online edition of the American Library Association’s Booklist magazine has posted its rundown of “The Year’s Best Crime Novels: 2013.” If it seems, well, a tad early to be broadcasting such a thing, that’s because the calendar employed for this compilation doesn’t jibe with the one you or I usually use; as author Bill Ott explains, these picks “draw from crime fiction reviewed in Booklist since the last Mystery Showcase issue (in this case, from May 1, 2012, through April 15, 2013).” Among Booklist’s top 10 choices are The Andalucian Friend, by Alexander Soderberg, Ghostman, by Roger Hobbs, and Shatter the Bones, by Stuart MacBride, while its selection of the “best crime fiction debuts” includes The Beggar’s Opera, by Peggy Blair, A Good Death, by Christopher R. Cox, and The Thing About Thugs, by Tabish Khair. Again, you’ll find the full lists here.

(Hat tip to Randal Brandt.)

Now on to the Anthonys

This year’s Bouchercon convention isn’t schedule to take place in Albany, New York, until the weekend of September 19-22. However, this morning brings news of the nominees for five Anthony Awards to be handed out during that event. They are as follows:

Best Novel:
• Dare Me, by Megan Abbott (Reagan Arthur)
• The Trinity Game, by Sean Chercover (Thomas & Mercer)
• Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn (Crown)
• The Beautiful Mystery, by Louise Penny (Minotaur)
• The Other Woman, by Hank Phillippi Ryan (Forge)

Best First Novel:
• Don’t Ever Get Old, by Daniel Friedman (Minotaur/Thomas Dunne)
• The Professionals, by Owen Laukkanen (Putnam)
• The Expats, by Chris Pavone (Crown)
• The 500, by Matthew Quirk (Reagan Arthur)
• Black Fridays, by Michael Sears (Putnam)

Best Paperback Original:
• Whiplash River, by Lou Berney (Morrow)
• Murder for Choir, by Joelle Charbonneau (Berkley Prime Crime)
• And She Was, by Alison Gaylin (Harper)
• Blessed Are the Dead, by Malla Nunn (Emily Bestler)
• Big Maria, by Johnny Shaw (Thomas & Mercer)

Best Short Story:
• “Mischief in Mesopotamia,” by Dana Cameron (Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, November 2012)
• “Kept in the Dark,” by Shelia Connolly (in Best New England Crime Stories 2013: Blood Moon, edited by Mark Ammons, Katherine Fast, Barbara Ross, and Leslie Wheeler; Level Best)
• “The Lord Is My Shamus,” by Barb Goffman (in Chesapeake Crimes: This Job Is Murder, edited by Donna Andrews, Barb Goffman, and Marcia Talley; Wildside Press)
• “Peaches,” by Todd Robinson (Grift, Spring 2012)
• “The Unremarkable Heart,” by Karin Slaughter (in Mystery Writers of America Presents: Vengeance, edited by Lee Child; Mulholland)

Best Critical Non-fiction Work:
• Books to Die For: The World’s Greatest Mystery Writers on the World’s Greatest Mystery Novels, edited by John Connolly and Declan Burke (Atria/Emily Bestler)
• Blood Relations: The Selected Letters of Ellery Queen, 1947-1950, edited by Joseph Goodrich (Perfect Crime)
• More Forensics and Fiction: Crime Writers Morbidly Curious Questions Expertly Answered, by D.P. Lyle (Medallion Press)
• The Grand Tour: Around the World with the Queen of Mystery Agatha Christie, edited by Mathew Prichard (Harper)
• In Pursuit of Spenser: Mystery Writers on Robert B. Parker and the Creation of an American Hero, edited by Otto Penzler (Smart Pop)

Congratulations to all of the authors and works in contention!