Diamonds Are a Con Man’s Best Friend

I first came across the Great Diamond Hoax of 1872 many years ago, when I was writing a non-fiction book titled San Francisco, You’re History! The gist of the story goes like this: In the early 1870s, a pair of prospecting cousins from Kentucky worked out an audacious scheme, built upon wild rumors of previously undiscovered diamond deposits in the American West, that proved to be more successful than anyone involved could have predicted.

Not until the late fall of 1872—a century and a half ago this year—was that confidence game spectacularly debunked. And by then, a galaxy of notables, among them an eminent newspaper editor, an erstwhile Union Army commander and presidential candidate, and the nation’s foremost jeweler, had fallen prey to the scheme. Meanwhile, the flimflammers had made off with hundreds of thousands of dollars (or more than $10 million in today’s currency)!

When, a few months ago, I drew up a list of additional stories I could write for CrimeReads, I included among them the Great Diamond Hoax—the first time I’d proposed a true historical crime piece for the Web site. My editor responded quickly, and enthusiastically. “My God,” he wrote, “this story sounds right up my alley. I can’t wait to read it.” And so I then had to hunker down and do the research necessary to present that tale in authoritative and dramatic fashion.

The results can be enjoyed today in CrimeReads.

While investigating the history of this scam, I discovered it had inspired at least two episodes of the old syndicated western TV series Death Valley Days. One of those was titled “A Killing in Diamonds,” and was broadcast in October 1955. The other, “The Great Diamond Mines,” featuring future Love Boat captain Gavin MacLeod, was shown in February 1968. You can watch both at the links provided.

It’s hard to believe how canny—or gullible—some people can be.

All the Crime in Half the Time

I returned home this afternoon from a short, out-of-Seattle fishing excursion with my nephew, only to discover 411 new junk-mail messages needing to be removed from my e-maibox … and my latest CrimeReads piece having been posted for public consumption.

My subject on this occasion is half-hour American TV crime dramas. Although such offerings long ago fell out of favor—overwhelmed by the spread of hour-long series—there were myriad 30-minute shows available from the 1950s through the early ’70s. As I write:

Billboard brought word in May 1948 that “the first half-hour mystery series,” NBC-TV’s Barney Blake, Police Reporter—centered on an indomitable newspaperman (played by Gene O’Donnell) and his trusty secretary, who together interview suspects and solve crimes—had recently flashed onto American television sets. The magazine then proceeded to excoriate that live-action drama for employing “just about every cliché in the whodunit book.” Barney Blake hung on for 13 weeks before being axed.

By the fall of 1959, the U.S. television landscape had changed markedly. Westerns continued to ride high on the nighttime schedule, but as Time magazine explained in an October cover story, that season also dished up a whopping “62 shows (network and syndicated) devoted to some variation of Cops & Robbers”—the majority of them lasting 30 minutes and headlined by fictional private eyes. There were so many such programs, Time quipped, that “as the evenings pass, one Eye blurs inevitably into another, a TV trouble that even an honest repairman cannot cure.”

Do you remember Peter Gunn or Staccato? How about Martin Kane, Private Eye or Honey West? And it wasn’t only gumshoe dramas shooting up the mid-20th-century airwaves. Divertissements also came in the form of abbreviated police procedurals, such as The Naked City, M Squad, and Decoy, in addition to amateur or part-time detective mysteries, among them The Adventures of Ellery Queen, Mr. and Mrs. North, Man with a Camera, and T.H.E. Cat.

Chances are, the majority of people reading this post weren’t around to take in those programs when they originally aired on network television or in syndication. (I was not either.) However, episodes of vintage half-hour series can still be found and enjoyed on YouTube, or can be purchased in DVD sets. I say they can be “enjoyed,” because over the months I spent sampling early, mostly black-and-white whodunits and cop shows on behalf of CrimeReads, I found myself far from bored. Yes, a few of the programs now seem hopelessly dated; yet many hold up reasonably well after half a century or more of gathering dust and being forgotten.

So recognize my latest CrimeReads piece as a curated guide to the lost world of classic, condensed TV crime and mystery dramas. And on some evening when you’re stumped for what to watch next, ditch the supposedly must-see shows of today in favor of a streaming installment of Peter Gunn or Decoy or Mr. Lucky, or a YouTube-borne episode of Dante or N.Y.P.D. or Markham. You just might find that half-hour stories can be as entertaining as their 60-minute cousins.

Begin your boob-tube investigations right here.

Evidence of Patterns

Giant hands often appeared on covers during the height of the paperback boom. The example above comes from The Case of the Fiery Fingers, by Erle Stanley Gardner (Great Pan, 1959); illustration by Sam “Peff” Peffer.

I’m back on the subject of vintage paperback book covers in what is, amazingly, my 20th piece for CrimeReads, posted this morning. It seemed time to showcase some of the recurring artistic motifs seen during the mid-20th century. As I explain in my introduction,

Commercial artists were called upon to toil at speed, and usually for rock-bottom remunerations, to meet that era’s escalating demand for paperback-cover illustrations. The most talented of the bunch produced work that’s still cherished by collectors. Yet the pace they maintained in order to make ends meet, coupled with pressures to chase aesthetic trends thought to be especially saleable, led to recognizable—and occasionally eccentric—themes cropping up in their artwork. In the same way that aerial photographs of snow-shrouded forests, central figures captured from behind, and sinister children’s playgrounds have all become clichés on the jackets of modern crime, mystery, and thriller novels, so too were images of women exposing themselves to men, corpses in bathtubs, and damsels reclined—and plainly deceased—on bedsheets overly recurrent fixtures of mid-1900s paperback fronts.

Those, however, weren’t the only motifs once pervasive in this genre. Let us venture now into the deeper, dustier recesses of crime fiction’s past, where oversized pates loomed behind every shoulder, bodies had a nasty habit of tumbling from the sky, malicious mitts demanded the spotlight, and shapely shanks got all the attention they deserved.

You will find—and, I hope, enjoy—the full piece here.

Janssen’s Gumshoe Never Found His Footing

About a year ago, my editor at CrimeReads asked me whether I’d like to write for the site about television as well as books and authors. This was shortly after CrimeReads had published a piece on The Rockford Files by Nathan Ward (The Lost Detective: Becoming Dashiell Hammett), which had received a great deal of attention.

I had to mull over the invitation for a spell. Had the same question been addressed to me before Ward’s article appeared, I would surely have suggested writing about Rockford, which has always been a favorite on mine. Instead, I pitched him on a piece about TV “wheel series,” which once ushered many mystery and crime dramas onto the small screen (among them Columbo, Banacek, and The Name of the Game). After that, and having lost out on the opportunity to remark on Jim Rockford’s escapades, I proposed revisiting the next best private eye series of the 1970s, David Janssen’s Harry O.

(Left) Promotional illustration by Ted CoConis.

My editor was immediately intrigued. “I’ve never seen it,” he wrote back, “but if you say it’s next after Rockford, I’m sold.” That was all the impetus I needed to start filling my leisure-time TV-viewing schedule with Harry O episodes—all 44 of them, plus two pilot films. You can already imagine the negotiations I had to go through with my wife in order to rewatch the entire run of a largely forgotten detective program from more than four decades ago. (There were many hours of rom-coms and quaint periods dramas I had to screen in exchange.) But it was all worth it in the end, for it led to my 19th (and probably longest) CrimeReads story, which was posted earlier today.

As I explain in that remembrance, Harry O almost didn’t make it to the boob tube. And even after it did, it faced budget woes (which led eventually to the series’ action being relocated from San Diego to Los Angeles) and continual efforts by hand-wringing network execs to make it “a different sort of detective show with no differences at all.” Janssen was outstanding in the role of wounded cop-turned-shamus Harry Orwell, his performances overcoming some uneven and disappointing scripts; and the late Season 1 addition of Anthony Zerbe to the cast, playing a Santa Monica police lieutenant, imparted a bit more humor to the show and gave Janssen’s gumshoe a fit foil. Unfortunately, those changes weren’t enough, and Harry O—Janssen’s fourth and last series—vanished from the air after just two years.

If anything, binging this series on CrimeReads’ behalf left me fonder of it than I had been before. As I write in my piece, “It says a lot, don’t you think, that although I only recently rewatched Harry O in its entirety, I’m nearly ready to start all over again?”

Just don’t let my wife know that yet.

* * *

In the interview embedded below, likely dating back to early 1975 and filmed for KBAK-TV in Bakersfield, California, David Janssen talks about his history of portraying law-enforcement figures, the concept behind Harry O, and his popularity in Turkey—plus an “interesting” experience he had while visiting that country in June 1974 (click here to learn more, beginning at the bottom of page 26).



READ MORE: “The Origins of Harry O,” by Steve Aldous; “Here’s What Happened to Actor David Janssen Before, During and After Starring in The Fugitive,” by Ed Gross (Closer Weekly).

Gardner’s Forgotten Courtroom Series

Pretty much everyone is familiar with Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason novels (if only through their translation to television), and more readers are coming to know his Bertha Cool/Donald Lam private-eye yarns (thanks to Hard Case Crime having republished several of those in recent years). But Gardner also created other protagonists, for use in both books and short stories, including Terry Clane, Gramps Wiggins, Ed Jenkins, “Speed” Dash—and Douglas Selby.

Douglas Who, you ask? I was equally in the dark until a few years ago, when, after delighting in many of Mason’s early adventures, I took a flier on Gardner’s nine novels featuring Selby, the freshly elected district attorney in fictional Madison County, California. I started with the first, 1937’s The D.A. Calls It Murder—and couldn’t stop. So taken was I with Selby and his eccentric supporting cast, that I tracked down and devoured the whole series.

Today, in CrimeReads, I recount the history of Selby’s creation (it came at a time when Gardner was seriously considering killing off his Los Angeles defense attorney, Mason!) and look individually at the novels in which he appears. I’m very proud of the piece (a version of which appeared originally in Down & Out: The Magazine), and hope you will find some enjoyment in it as well.

Click here to investigate the whole story.

The Bygone Delights of Cast Listings

Am I the only one who loves the “Cast of Characters” pages that so often introduced paperback crime novels during the mid-20th century? Probably not, but they definitely rank nowadays among the ugly stepchildren of publishing. With rare exceptions, such prefatory pages don’t appear in new books; even Hard Case Crime—normally a supporter of all things old-fashioned—excised from its November re-release of Erle Stanley Gardner’s Shills Can’t Cash Chips the roll call of players that had appeared in that book’s 1970 Pocket edition.

Too bad, because those one- or two-page lists of dramatis personae were often witty, filled with wordplay, and delightfully provocative. As I explain in a piece posted this morning in CrimeReads,

“Cast of Characters” pages date back at least to the 19th century and such densely populated yarns as Charles Dickens’ Bleak House (1853), which limned one of literature’s early eccentric sleuths thus: “Mr. Inspector Bucket, a sagacious, indefatigable detective officer.” Yet they enjoyed a particular and particularly creative later flowering during the mid-20th-century American paperback boom. It became de rigueur back then for crime-fiction publishers such as Pocket, Dell, Ace, and Permabooks to open their releases with rosters of this sort. (Those might disappear from subsequent versions, however, which is why I mention the publication year of each vintage edition cited here.) Some lists included not only provocative or revealing personality details, but also the page numbers on which the players were set to enter the plot line. The choicest examples were pawky and piquant in comparable measure; they were intended to bring a smile to the reader’s face and perhaps even mine a chuckle from his or her throat.

I have collected many examples of “Cast of Characters” write-ups, which you can enjoy by clicking here.

The Eyes of Ellin

Today brings the posting of my 16th article for CrimeReads, its subject being Brooklyn-born crime-fictionist Stanley Ellin (1916-1986). Ellin may best be remembered nowadays for having written short stories such as the much-anthologized “The Specialty of the House” (1948) and “The Blessington Method” (1956), both of which won him Edgar Allan Poe Awards. But as I explain in CrimeReads,

it wasn’t solely in that field he excelled. Over the course of his 40-year career, he produced more than a dozen novels. They ranged from his 1948 revenge tale, Dreadful Summit, to 1972’s Mirror, Mirror on the Wall (a work about sex, macho self-hatred, and violence that British author H.R.F. Keating included in his 1987 list of the 100 best crime and mystery books), to 1985’s Very Old Money, focusing on out-of-work schoolteachers who join the servant staff of an affluent family that can’t seem to dust the skeletons from its closets.

In addition, Ellin concocted four gumshoe narratives, each impressive in its own way, and at least the first two of them meriting mention among the last century’s most distinctive such works.

The piece goes on to talk separately about each of those private-eye outings: The Eighth Circle (1958, which won Ellin the 1959 Edgar Award for Best Novel), The Bind (aka The Man from Nowhere, 1970), Star Light, Star Bright (1979), and The Dark Fantastic (1983), the latter two of which featured the same protagonist.

If you’re thinking that this article sounds rather familiar, it’s because it was published originally in the March 2018 issue of Down & Out: The Magazine, in somewhat different form. So pleased was I with the finished product, that I encouraged my editor at CrimeReads to reprint the story after D&O’s rights to its publication lapsed. I hope you’ll read and enjoy this examination of Ellin’s work, too.

Click here to find the full story.

The Many Styles of “Styles”

October marks 100 years since the original publication of Agatha Christie’s The Mysterious Affair at Styles, the intricate whodunit that introduced the famous, fastidious fictional Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. It wasn’t the first novel Christie wrote—that was, instead, a comedy of manners tale, set in Egypt and titled Snow Upon the Desert—but it was her first book to actually see print.

To commemorate this month’s anniversary, I put together, for CrimeReads, a diverse collection of 25 covers from Styles, published over the last century. Many of those come from English-language editions, but others originated in Sweden, France, Israel, and elsewhere. I couldn’t have reasonably remarked on all of the options available (there were simply too many), but I believe this sampling represents some of the best and worst examples of Styles fronts.

Of the novel’s plot, I explain in CrimeReads:

Styles was an early and influential contribution to what’s now called the Golden Age of detective fiction, a period that stretched arguably from the 1920s through the 1940s. The book tosses us into the company of Captain Arthur Hastings, a soldier who’s been invalided home from World War I’s Western Front and has accepted an invitation to spend part of his sick leave at Styles Court, the Essex country estate of his boyhood acquaintance John Cavendish. However, his peace there is soon upset by the slaying of Cavendish’s elderly, widowed, and wealthy stepmother, Emily Inglethorp—an incident that awakened the household near the close of a summer night. Afterward, Hastings seeks help with the investigation from Hercule Poirot, a retired but once illustrious Belgian police detective Hastings had met before the war, and who has recently been living as a refugee in a cottage near Styles.

In short order, Poirot confirms his suspicions that the deceased was done in by strychnine, “one of the most deadly poisons known to mankind,” though precisely how she was dosed with that bitter neurotoxin is unknown. As is the identity of her killer. The suspects, however, are plentiful, among them John Cavendish and his younger brother, Lawrence, whose claim on their stepmother’s fortune is in doubt; Emily’s most recent and significantly more junior husband, Alfred Inglethorp, described as “a rotten little bounder”; Evelyn Howard, the late grandame’s hired companion, who exhibits singular animus toward Alfred; Mary Cavendish, whose love for husband John has suffered severely amid his dalliances and her own drab flirtations; and Cynthia Murdoch, Emily’s protégée, who happens to work in a dispensary. It’s up to Poirot, with aid from Hastings and Scotland Yard Inspector James Japp, to weigh motives and opportunities and finally suss out who among the Styles Court habitués was responsible for Mrs. Inglethorp’s premature dispatching.

The Mysterious Affair at Styles’ popularity is now so great, and the book’s prominence in Christie’s oeuvre so significant, that it’s hard to believe that as many as half a dozen publishers rejected that yarn before it finally reached the public in October 1920.

When you get a chance, enjoy that CrimeReads piece here.

READ MORE: “Strychnine at the Savoy: Was Agatha Christie’s Mysterious Affair at Styles Inspired by an Indian Murder?” by Arup K. Chatterjee (The Conversation); “True Crime Parallels to the Mysteries of Agatha Christie (2020) by Anne Powers,” by Kate Jackson (Cross-Examining Crime).

Take a Ride on the Mystery “Wheels”

(Above) An early TV industry ad for The Name of the Game.

If there’s one thing I have learned over my decades as a reporter and author, it’s that some stories we write primarily for money. Some stories we write primarily for love. My contribution today to CrimeReads falls solidly in the latter category.

The subject is TV “wheel series.” You know, those rotating weekly dramas—usually crime dramas—that used to offer multiple shows or alternating protagonists under a single, umbrella title. The Name of the Game. The Bold Ones. The NBC Mystery Movie. Those are certainly the best-remembered of the bunch, though they are far from the only examples. I initially happened across this category of entertainment as a boy, when one of the original Big Three TV networks broadcast Saturday-afternoon repeats of The Name of the Game, a stylish (and, I have learned since, quite expensive for its time) program about magazine journalists seeking to unearth truths in a world too comfortable with deceit. Later, I became a huge fan of the Mystery Movies (two batches of them, on Sunday and Wednesday nights), even though my childhood bedtime required that I clandestinely listen to at least part of those shows—Columbo, McMillan & Wife, Banacek, The Snoop Sisters, etc.—on my father’s TV-band radio.

Over the last couple of decades, I’ve managed to feed my nostalgia for those and other “wheels” by purchasing DVD sets of the classic series, though many still remain frustratingly unobtainable. (Will I ever be able to see Assignment: Vienna or Tenafly again?) I have also taken opportunities to revisit the shows here in The Rap Sheet. But not until recently did I devote myself to investigating and recording the rather complicated history of those rotating dramas.

The results of that research are found today in CrimeReads.

I know I’m not alone in my enduring fondness for wheel series. The Rap Sheet’s YouTube page featuring the NBC Mystery Movie opening is, for instance, filled with wistful recollections of folks who once enjoyed its offerings. (“I can remember sitting on my grandfather’s lap watching this show. It was his favorite. Sadly both are now gone,” one viewer recalls.) I hope that others who were once charmed by these small-screen rotations, as well as others who missed out on this programming format altogether, will take a few moments to revisit the heyday of those shows today. Click here to travel back in time.

A Rainy City of Dark Desires

Earlier this morning, my 14th article for CrimeReads appeared in that excellent online publication. Its topic—Seattle, Washington, as a setting for crime and thriller fiction—is one that I have been thinking about for quite a while, but tackling it required that I first read or re-read a variety of novels in my possession.

All of the ingredients necessary to make Seattle a fertile environment for tales of homicide, turmoil, and detection seem to exist in this Pacific Northwest city: a history boasting “criminality of all sorts and severities”; an ethnically, culturally, and financially diverse population; an economy powered by both modern, rising enterprises (Microsoft, Amazon, and other high-tech trailblazers) and long-established businesses (Boeing, Starbucks, Nordstrom, etc.); and of course, oft-inclement weather that lends a noirish aspect to any story’s backdrop, with local rain and cloud shadow supplying cover to malefactors.

That Seattle hasn’t yet become synonymous with crime fiction in the same way that, say, New York City, L.A., and San Francisco have certainly isn’t for wont of trying. Indeed, there have been many fine Seattle-set novels in this genre produced over the last 80 years—10 of which I highlight today in CrimeReads, by authors including Stuart Brock, Bernadette Pajer, G.M. Ford, and K.K. Beck.

* * *

While assembling my piece, I couldn’t help but think about how several famous contributors to this field of fiction once had experience with Seattle, yet failed to employ the city in their work.

In 1920, for instance, Dashiell Hammett sought hospital treatment for tuberculosis in Tacoma (just 33 miles south of Seattle), and while there stumbled across the inspiration for the famous “Flitcraft Parable” that his gumshoe Sam Spade recites in The Maltese Falcon (1930). Hammett likely found time during his weeks-long stay, or perhaps amid his previous travels up the West Coast as a Pinkerton detective, to see Seattle’s sights. But they must not have impressed him greatly, for the town didn’t star in his later stories. Raymond Chandler, too, knew this so-called Emerald City. He stayed here with friends awhile in 1932, after being dismissed from his oil company job in Los Angeles for alcoholism and absenteeism. Once again, though, Chandler’s fiction reflected no significant interest in this locale.

Alan Furst also resided in these parts for a spell, though the historical espionage yarns he’s now turning out (A Hero of France, Under Occupation) take place primarily in Europe. Likewise, British-born author Michael Dibdin made his home here from the 1990s through the mid-2000s, but wrote primarily about an Italian police commissioner named Aurelio Zen. And as far as I know, thriller author Robert Ferrigno still resides in Kirkland, a historic burg on the east side of Lake Washington, but prefers to place his mayhem-packed stories as far away from this place—and his family—as he can. The sole exception, I believe, is his 2013 novel, The Girl Who Cried Wolf.

If any or all of these writers had done more to integrate the Northwest’s largest metropolis into their storytelling, there’s no question that Seattle would be recognized more widely as an ideal milieu for crime fiction. But would their books have been better than those that already exist? It’s impossible to know.

READ MORE: “What Makes Seattle Such a Good Setting for Thrillers?” by Burt Weissbourd (CrimeReads).

Where Investigation Meets Ruination

My 12th and latest piece for CrimeReads was posted earlier this morning. It’s a survey of crime and detective novels set amid real-life catastrophes—both natural and man-made. As I explain:

Disasters are already rampant in human history, and thanks to escalating terrorism, recurrent mass shootings, and myriad threats posed by global warming—wildfires, rising sea levels, extreme weather, pandemics, etc.—the world seems unlikely to become safer or more secure at any time soon. This may actually be good news for storytellers, including those working the crime and thriller side of the tracks, who can continue to capitalize on reader attraction to nightmarish events.

Most of the large-scale hardships this genre serves up are dramatic fabrications, or are rooted only partially in reality. Yet a number of books … have combined bona fide historical tragedies with invented misdeeds and mysteries, the disasters often complicating the detection.

Among the history-making calamities featured in the dozen books under review are the 14th century’s Black Plague, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, and Hurricane Katrina. Click here to read the full piece.

The Robust Rise of the “Regionals”

Today marks my long-overdue return to CrimeReads, after a few months of being distracted by other editorial projects and helping to open a new Seattle bookshop. My subject under consideration this time is the forgotten rise of regional American detective fiction during the 1970s and ’80s. As I recall in the piece:

That’s when a restless new generation of detective-fictionists decided the field—grown stale after a mid-century deluge of male-oriented works formulated around cynical peepers, amorous female clients, and epidemic gunplay—needed a serious shaking-up in order to maintain relevance and readership. One result of that effort was a broader, updated perspective on what sorts of offenses could and should be addressed in these books: not just larceny, abductions, and choreographed slayings anymore, but also environmental injustices, endemic racism, human trafficking, right-wing extremism, domestic abuse, and child-custody disputes. Another way the genre diversified was by expanding its storytelling stage beyond familiar urban hubs, to rediscover the value of literary regionalism.

Included among the people responsible for that era’s crime-fiction expansion were authors ranging from Robert B. Parker and Tony Hillerman to K.C. Constantine, James Crumley, Karen Kijewski, Jonathan Valin, Richard Hoyt, Linda Barnes, and William J. Reynolds.

Again, click here to find that whole CrimeReads piece.

Ross Macdonald: An Ongoing Investigation

I don’t often return to a subject after an interval of 20 years, but that’s exactly what I am doing today. Back in April 1999, I assembled—for January Magazine—a diverse collection of articles focused on renowned California detective fictionist Ross Macdonald and his original Lew Archer private eye novel, The Moving Target, which was then celebrating its 50th year in print. Kevin Burton Smith, Gary Phillips, and Frederick Zackel all contributed personal essays to the project; Swedish crime-fiction enthusiast Karl-Erik Lindkvist chose his three favorite Archer stories; I wrote about my single, long-ago meeting with Macdonald (whose real name was Kenneth Millar); and I also interviewed Los Angeles-area journalist and critic Tom Nolan, author of the then freshly published work, Ross Macdonald: A Biography.

Weeks ago, I received the go-ahead from my editor at CrimeReads to write a couple more Macdonald tribute pieces, this time tied in with The Moving Target’s official 70th anniversary on April 11, 2019. One thing I planned to do was assemble a gallery of best and worst covers from the novel’s history; that piece went up online yesterday, right on schedule. In addition, I wanted to interview Nolan once more. He and I have stayed in e-mail touch over the last two decades, and I talked at length with him again (this time for Kirkus Reviews and The Rap Sheet) in 2015, the centennial year of Macdonald’s birth.

In 1999, Tom Nolan had produced only the one book about P.I. Archer’s creator. However, as I explain in this piece posted earlier today in CrimeReads, since that time he

has furthered his Macdonald scholarship by, first, collecting three of the author’s previously unpublished pieces of short fiction in Strangers in Town (2001), and then compiling, in 2007’s The Archer Files, all of the Archer short stories (plus fragments—like this one—of unfinished yarns). With Suzanne Marrs, Nolan edited Meanwhile There Are Letters (2015), which gathered together hundreds of revealing missives Macdonald exchanged with Pulitzer Prize-winning Mississippi author Eudora Welty between 1970 and 1982. And most recently, Nolan edited the Library of America’s three-volume set of Archer mysteries, 11 novels in total.

Although I initially worried that on this third go-round I wouldn’t have any more worthwhile questions to pitch Nolan’s way, as I started thinking about Macdonald and his books and all that Nolan has written about both over the last two decades, I found there was no shortage of things about which I remained curious. During the course of our e-mail exchange, we talked about the endurance of Macdonald’s legacy; the troubles he faced as a boy and as a father, and how those fed his fiction; his sometimes “quarrelsome marriage” to fellow mystery writer Margaret Millar; his mysterious middle-age suicide attempt; his most influential books, and a great deal besides.

Click here to real all about it.

Targeting Archer at Readers

As I note in my latest piece for CrimeReads, today marks 70 years since the release of Ross Macdonald’s first Lew Archer private-eye novel, The Moving Target. To commemorate this anniversary, I have gathered together—and commented on—25 of the best and worst front covers that book has carried over its history. Those include the original, 1949 Alfred A. Knopf edition; two British publications that renamed Archer “Lew Arless”; Mitchell Hooks’ 1970s reworking of the series fronts; a couple of Italian giallo versions; and a Czech translation suggesting that the plot is a mash-up of the old TV shows Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer and WKRP in Cincinnati.

I also offer this reminder of the tale’s multiple qualities:

All these decades later, The Moving Target still impresses with its vivid prose and carefully rendered characters, plus its plotting mix of greed, broken trust, and festering disillusionments. While it’s tougher and more cinematic than some of Macdonald’s 17 subsequent Archer novels, Target hints at what will become more obvious as the series progresses: the author’s interest in the psychological roots of criminal behavior.

The story finds L.A. private investigator Archer, a 35-year-old ex-cop with a sardonic streak (“Most of my work is divorce. I’m a jackal, you see”), being hired by the dysfunctional family of Ralph Sampson, an oil millionaire from “Santa Teresa” (a fictionalized Santa Barbara). It seems the alcoholic Sampson has vanished. His younger, paraplegic second wife figures he’s off on a bender, rather than having been kidnapped. But Albert Graves, a former district attorney and onetime Archer colleague, asks that she hire the P.I. to at least locate the man. It’s a task more easily assigned than accomplished, leading the shamus into a circle of suspects that include Sampson’s beguiling but drifting daughter, Miranda; Alan Taggert, the tycoon’s pretty-boy pilot and the elder Graves’ rival for Miranda’s affections; a sun-worshipping holy man, Claude, to whom Sampson gave a mountain retreat; as well as a downwardly mobile actress with an astrology bent, a forgotten piano player, low-IQ bruisers, and even human traffickers.

Again, click here to observe how different artists and photographers have introduced The Moving Target to readers.

The “Pop Culture Rembrandt” of Paperbacks

You may have noticed over the years what a big fan I am of American artist and paperback illustrator Robert McGinnis. In 2014, I not only celebrated his career with a month-long exposition of his book fronts in Killer Covers, but I interviewed Art Scott, his co-author on the exquisite book, The Art of Robert E. McGinnis (Titan), for both The Rap Sheet and Kirkus Reviews. Two years later, I posted an additional, smaller selection of his work in celebration of his 90th birthday.

Well, McGinnis’ 93rd birthday is fast approaching—on Sunday, February 3—and I decided to compose one additional encomium to his six decades of work. As I write today in CrimeReads,

The case could well be made that McGinnis, along with contemporary commercial illustrators such as Mitchell Hooks, Ron Lesser, Robert Maguire, and Harry Bennett, was instrumental in raising the profile (and sales) of crime and detective fiction during the latter half of the 20th century. “His work was highly influential, both in the sense that a lot of other painters of paperback covers tried to imitate the McGinnis ‘look’ and in the sense that his beautiful covers got a lot of readers to pick up books they might not otherwise have tried,” explains Ardai. “I know my father bought Brett Halliday’s Mike Shayne novels at least as much for the covers as for the stories inside, and I’d much rather look at a Carter Brown cover than read a Carter Brown novel any day.”

McGinnis has deployed his genius widely over the years. He’s crafted fronts not only for works of crime and spy fiction, but also for historical and Gothic romance novels. He has contributed to slick magazines and developed iconic posters for such Hollywood flicks as Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Barbarella, The Odd Couple, Cotton Comes to Harlem, and Sean Connery’s 1967 James Bond movie, You Only Live Twice. And he’s exercised “pure self-expression” through an assortment of gallery pieces, primarily portraits of women, rural landscapes, and Old West scenery. His colleagues at the Society of Illustrators recognized McGinnis’ expertise and prolificacy in 1993, when they elected him to the Illustrators’ Hall of Fame, an honor first bestowed on Norman Rockwell in 1958.

Yet this “pop culture Rembrandt” (as he was dubbed by a magazine serving his current hometown of Greenwich, Connecticut) got his start in the book-cover biz illustrating crime novels. And more than half a century later, he’s still influencing that field.

I have never met McGinnis, and I probably never will. But I own stacks of the paperback books he’s graced with his artistry over the years, and I try to snap up any I don’t already possess, whenever I see them. He’s a master of his art, and it gives me great pleasure to pay tribute to his efforts in CrimeReads. Click here to learn more.

READ MORE: “Happy Birthday, Robert McGinnis!” by J. Kingston
Pierce (Killer Covers).

Puzzling Out Mysteries

Back in early December of last year, I submitted to CrimeReads an assigned piece about Dell Books’ Murder Ink/Scene of the Crime series from the 1980s. Thanks to the subsequent holiday hoopla, however, it’s only today that the piece has finally been posted.

What, you don’t remember Dell’s series? It consisted of mystery-fiction paperback reprints, and was launched in the fall of 1980. As I explain in my piece, the project was steered by a pair of then-well-known bookstore proprietors: “Carol Brener, who owned the landmark Murder Ink bookshop, established in 1972 on New York City’s Upper West Side, and Ruth Windfeldt, the proprietor of Scene of the Crime, another popular haunt for mystery-fiction enthusiasts, opened in 1975 in the Sherman Oaks neighborhood of Los Angeles. Each of those women was asked to pick half a dozen titles every year—all of which had previously appeared in hardcover—that they believed deserved reprinting.”

Although the line lasted only a few years, it drew considerable attention with the quality of its cozy-ish selections, which included Sheila Radley’s Death in the Morning, A.A. Milne’s The Red House Mystery, Mignon Warner’s The Tarot Murders, and Robert Barnard’s Death on the High C’s. But the books were also recognized for their distinctive, uniform design. “[T]he fronts of these works were principally white,” I write, “with single jigsaw puzzle pieces positioned below the author’s byline and the book’s title. The gimmick was that those oddly configured fragments fit into fuller illustrations on the backsides of the books (though they were usually enlarged for easier readability). So you had to flip each volume over not only to read the plot précis, but to appreciate the complete artwork.”

My shelves still contain a few dozen of the Murder Ink/Scene of the Crime titles, and while researching this piece, I managed to speak with several people who were involved on the editorial and art side of the project. Again, you’ll find my full CrimeReads piece here.

CrimeReads’ Critical Judgment

The editors and contributors at CrimeReads weigh in today with their choices of favorite mystery, crime, and thriller novels published in 2018 (plus a handful of non-fiction works about crime). There are 62 books mentioned in all—one of which is Philip Kerr’s penultimate Bernie Gunther historical thriller, Greeks Bearing Gifts, about which I was asked to comment. There are plenty of excellent reading choices here, if you’re still looking for holiday presents for book lovers.

You can enjoy the full CrimeReads feature here.

Inkslingers Turned Investigators

This CrimeReads piece has sure been a long time in coming. Way back in April, I dropped the following note onto my Facebook page:

I’m trying to develop a list of mystery/crime/thriller novels that feature journalists and reporters (especially newspaper reporters) as the protagonists/crime solvers. Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

That request elicited dozens of responses. So many, in fact, that I resolved to confine myself to writing only about books offering newspaper reporter protagonists. I also had a variety of other assignments standing in the way of my compiling novels along this theme, including last week’s dive into post-World War I mysteries. And in the meantime, other CrimeReads contributors brought forth related stories, including J.G. Heatherton’s selection of novels featuring investigative reporters, and Steven Cooper’s essay about “why investigative reporters become mystery writers.” All of this accounts for the rather lengthy lag time between the birth of my “brilliant” idea and my actually composing the piece I had in mind.

Only this morning has my work, “A Brief History of Reporters in Crime Fiction,” finally been posted in CrimeReads. It features 10 crime and mystery novels starring print journalists, together with one that imagines a newspaper photographer in the sleuthing role. My picks were published as far back as 1939 and as recently as September. Among the authors represented are Martin Edwards, William P. McGivern, Julia Dahl, Les Whitten, and Pete Hamill. Although I settled on reading and then writing about 11 books, and mentioning 19 others at the end of the piece, I culled those from a much longer list of options available. In addition to the suggestions received on Facebook, two online sources helped me get a handle on the scope of the field: The Thrilling Detective Web Site and Stop, You’re Killing Me! With all of this assistance, I tallied up books I hoped to write about, but later had to cut my choices way back in order to finish my research before the year 2030. So many books had to go unexamined—for now, at least:

• David Mamet’s Chicago (2018)
• Liam McIlvanney’s Where the Dead Men
Go (2013)
• Val McDermid’s Report for Murder (1987)
• Marc Olden’s Kill the Reporter (1978)
• Lawrence Meyer’s False Front (1979)
• Simon Wood’s Paying the Piper (2007)
• Jim Kelly’s The Water Clock (2003)
• Steven Brewer’s End Run (2000)
• Allen Eskens’ The Shadows We Hide (2018)
• James Howard’s Die on Easy Street (1957)
• Sarah Ruttan’s Suspicious Circumstances (2007)
• Rick Mofina’s If Angels Fall (2000)
• Mary Daheim’s The Alpine Advocate (1992)
• Vince Kohler’s Rainy North Woods (1990)
• Jason Pinter’s Stolen (2008)
• Mark Arsenault’s Spiked (2003)
• Warren Adler’s The Henderson Equation (1976)
• Robert Olen Butler’s Paris in the Dark (2018)
• Martyn Waites’ Mary’s Prayer (1997)
• Mark Sanderson’s Snow Hill (2010)
• Thomas Enger’s Cursed (2017)

A full study of this subject would probably be book-length. But I am pleased with what I was able to accomplish in a much shorter space, for CrimeReads. Click here to read the full article.

READ MORE: “The Disappearing Newsroom,” by Wallace Stroby (CrimeReads).

Battling Crime in the Wake of War

As my maternal grandfather told me when I was a boy, he was only 14 or 15 years old and living in Canada when World War I broke out in Europe in 1914. Yet he had several older brothers who quickly volunteered to join the British Army, and my grandfather wanted to go with them. So he lied about his age, and was sent to the front lines in France. Amazingly, he didn’t die, though he did have some scares (one of them involving a rat that sneaked up on his trench from no-man’s-land one night, and that he almost shot, thinking it was a German soldier). And he was seriously injured by a bomb blast that left shrapnel in one of his legs. The field medics wanted to amputate that limb and send him home, but my grandfather told them he’d rather die than lose his leg. For the rest of his long life, he suffered with the pain of metal bits working their way out of his flesh.

Eventually, he did return to Canada—as did all of his brothers. I seem to remember him saying that their German-born mother cried for days, after her sons were safely home. Though I could be wrong about that. Sadly, my grandfather is no longer around to set me straight.

I thought of my grandfather often as I wrote my piece about post-World War I mysteries, which appears today in CrimeReads—just two days before the centennial, on Sunday, November 11, of that war’s conclusion. He was an enthusiastic reader; in fact, it was partly the prevalence of books in his home that led me to become a book lover. (My mother was an equal influence on me in that regard.) Whether he would have appreciated any of the novels featured in my piece, I can’t say. Perhaps not, for in one way or another, their stories all focus on loss—the loss of friends, the loss of one’s moral or mental bearings, the loss of confidence that the world remains a safe place.

I, of course, came to these crime and mystery novels without my grandfather’s baggage—and was glad of the opportunity to dive into the tales about which I write today. My focus is on nine crime, mystery, and spy novels that take place shortly after the end of the fighting in Europe. Works by Robert Goddard, Alex Beer, Charles Todd, and Christopher Huang are among those under consideration. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it’s a start for readers interested in how fictional detectives—and others—were affected by those four years of fighting, and how their lives and careers changed afterward.

Again, click here to find my post-World War I mystery picks.

READ MORE: “Words of War: History and Mystery Meet in Battlefield Trenches,” by J. Kingston Pierce (Kirkus Reviews); “Interview with WWI Historical Novelists,” by Elise Cooper (Crimespree Magazine); “At War with the War,” by Xavier Lechard (At the Villa Rose); “Raymond Chandler on the Western Front, 1918,” by Bethany Reynard (First World War Centenary).

Putting Murder on the Map

This morning has brought the posting of my fourth CrimeReads submission, an enthusiastic look back at Dell Books’ distinctive early 20th-century line of paperbacks. As I explain in the piece,

Ever since the 1930s and the advent of the “paperback revolution” in English-language books, publishers have sought to make their creations not merely inexpensive, but distinctive. One of the notable successes in that regard was also one of the earliest. For about a decade, beginning in 1943, American publishing house Dell—which had started out in 1921 producing pulp fiction magazines, and in 1942 followed rival Pocket Books into the mass-marketing of compact, cut-rate, and sporadically abridged softcover reprints—launched a numbered line of works branded with stylistically recognizable cover paintings and backed by detailed diagrams of where events in each story took place. Those “mapback” editions were popular at the time, and over the decades have become collectible. …

Mapbacks were published across a gamut of genres (each identified by a variant of the company’s keyhole colophon). At least half of them, though, were mystery, detective, or suspense novels, both of the traditional sort (by Agatha Christie, Mignon G. Eberhart, John Dickson Carr, and others) and those concocted by harder-edged scribblers (Dashiell Hammett, Erle Stanley Gardner, Margaret Millar, Brett Halliday, etc.). The focus of those books’ back-cover diagrams varied widely, but they can roughly be broken down according to three progressively widening perspectives.

Over the last decade or so, I have collected a number of these mapback editions—in various conditions of use—and was pleased to break them all out again for close appraisal while working on that CrimeReads story. The bad news was, I had room enough in my feature to include only 13 such paperback fronts. That’s 13 out of some 600 mapbacks Dell produced! Cutting down my selections was no easy enterprise, as you can imagine, since I had so many excellent specimens from which to choose. In the end, I winnowed my choices down to 28 covers I thought best represented Dell’s line, but then I had to trim away 15 of those to reach the magic baker’s dozen. Not being one to waste valuable research, and confident that Rap Sheet readers would enjoy seeing more mapbacks, I’ve installed those excess 15 images in my Killer Covers blog. Enjoy!