But Wait, There’s More!

A few things I forgot to mention in yesterday’s news wrap-up.

• The New York Times reports that British author Paula Hawkins, who won an impressive following with her first psychological thriller, The Girl on the Train, has a follow-up novel due out on both sides of the Atlantic this coming May. Titled Into the Water and being prepared for U.S. release by Riverhead Books, this new tale will focus (according to the Times) on “two women, a single mother and a teenage girl, [who] are found dead at the bottom of a river in a small town in northern England, just weeks apart. An investigation into the mysterious deaths reveals that the women had a complicated and intertwined history.”

• Happy birthday to author John Dickson Carr! Had that Pennsylvania-born creator of detectives Gideon Fell and Sir Henry Merrivale not died in 1977, at age 70, he would today be celebrating the 110th anniversary of his first breath. Even though he’s not around to appreciate it, there are many veteran Carr readers still singing his praises—with good reason: he was, among others things, a major contributor to the field of “locked-room mysteries.” If you’d like to refresh your memory about all things Carr, see this piece about his status as a “forgotten author”; this tribute by his granddaughter; this site dealing specifically with his locked-room yarns; this fine collection of Carr-related posts from The Invisible Event; and this new review of his 1935 Merrivale mystery, The Unicorn Murders, which he penned under his familiar pseudonym, Carter Dickson.

• Ben Affleck’s Live by Night, a crime film based on Dennis Lehane’s 2012 novel of that same name, and due for wide theatrical distribution in early January, is now represented by a new and better trailer, which you can watch at Criminal Element. As that blog explains, Live by Night is set during America’s Prohibition era of the 1920s and finds Affleck playing “the ambitious Joe Coughlin, the son of the Boston Police Superintendent, who turns his back on his strict upbringing for the spoils of being an outlaw—setting him on a path of revenge, ambition, romance, and betrayal that finds him in the seedy rum-running underworld of Tampa.” What’s not to like?

• I bought this 1930s mystery some time ago, but haven’t read it yet. Perhaps a chilly winter offers the perfect opportunity.

• In an interview with Black Gate, Charles Ardai, the editor at Hard Case Crime, talks about getting his hands on the soon-to-be-released 30th installment in Erle Stanley Gardner’s Bertha Lam/Donald Cool detective series, The Knife Slipped, and how he’d like to bring additional Gardner works to market in the future. “I’m a big fan,” Ardai declares, “and would be delighted to do more.” I can’t wait!

• During a conversation with fellow author Mark Rubinstein, David Morrell answers a number of questions about the 19th-century development Britain’s extensive railway system, drug use among fictional sleuths, and other subjects related to his new novel, Ruler of the Night, the third and final installment in his trilogy featuring essayist and notorious opium addict Thomas De Quincey.

• Finally, The Spy Command’s Bill Koenig writes about Caribe, a mostly forgotten, 1975 Quinn Martin-produced ABC-TV series starring Stacy Keach as Lieutenant Ben Logan, the head of a Miami-based law-enforcement unit dealing with crime all over the Caribbean basin. As Koenig notes, the lead in this 13-episode drama had been intended for Robert Wagner; but Keach wound up getting the part, instead. Fortunately, Keach recovered from the Caribe debacle, starring a decade later in Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer on CBS.

Bullet Points: St. Paddy’s Week Edition

• To hardly anyone’s surprise, Amazon has renewed the TV crime drama Bosch for a second season. That show is based on Michael Connelly’s popular novels featuring Los Angeles police detective Harry Bosch. You’ll find The Rap Sheet’s recent coverage of Bosch here.

• In the latest installment of her fine newsletter, The Crime Lady (now available online, not just to e-mail subscribers, it seems), critic Sarah Weinman relates a very uncomfortable moment during last weekend’s Left Coast Crime convention in Portland. UPDATE: Gar Anthony Haywood has since apologized for what he calls his “boneheaded, sexually-offensive joke.”

• As you might expect, I already own all six seasons of James Garner’s renowned private-eye series, The Rockford Files, on DVD, and have managed over the years to find most of the subsequent teleflicks on YouTube. But word has finally come down that Universal Studios Home Entertainment will release The Rockford Files: The Complete Series--a 34-disc anthology including 120 episodes and all eight TV films--on May 26. Retail cost: $149.98. On that very same day, says TV Shows on DVD, Universal will put on sale a DVD set of the last four Rockford movies, those that weren’t featured in The Rockford Files: Movie Collection--Volume 1, which hit shelves back in 2009. The Rockford Files: Movie Collection--Volume 2 will reportedly retail for $26.98. If you’ve been waiting for the right moment to add Rockford to your DVD-viewing diet, now might be the perfect time.

• Also worth watching for is the release, on June 16, of The Bold Ones: The Senator. Starring Hal Holbrook, that 1970-1971 NBC-TV political drama was one of several series rotating under the umbrella title The Bold Ones. Only nine episodes (plus a pilot film) of The Senator were made, yet it won five Emmys, including one for Holbrook himself. TV Shows on DVD offers this program synopsis:

In this gripping drama, Senator Hays Stowe [Holbrook] … works tirelessly to serve his constituents, and the American people as a whole. Exploring the issues facing our nation, The Senator received praise for its intelligent portrayal of the challenges and responsibilities inherent in one of the most sacred duties imaginable.

Co-starring Sharon Acker and Michael Tolan, and featuring guest appearances by Randolph Mantooth and Burgess Meredith, The Bold Ones: The Senator is a fascinating look back at the ideals held within our political system and a program whose themes still resonate today.

The Bold Ones: The Senator--The Complete Series will be a three-disc offering produced by Timeless Media Group, a division of Shout! Factory. It will set you back $29.93.

• Have you ever seen Harry Houdini’s 1926 death certificate?

• Might President Barack Obama and his family be planning to buy the beachfront estate on the Hawaiian island of Oahu that once served as “Robin’s Nest,” home to private eye Thomas Magnum (Tom Selleck) in the 1980-1988 CBS-TV series Magnum, P.I.? The president clearly loves Hawaii, where he was born in 1961 (nutty “birther” theories aside) and where the First Family has often vacationed since Obama’s election to the White House in 2008. But so far, this is just a rumor and there’s no official confirmation that Obama will take up residence in Magnum’s old digs after he leaves office in early 2017.

• We already knew that Christian Bale was slated to star as Florida “salvage consultant”-cum-private eye Travis McGee in a film adaptation of John D. Macdonald’s 1964 novel, The Deep Blue Good-by, and that Rosamund Pike would play the female lead in that picture. Now, though, I hear Game of Thrones star Peter Dinklage has been cast as McGee’s brainier-than-thou sidekick, Meyer, in this story that sends McGee “on the trail of stolen sapphires, which leads to a sadistic torturer.” Meanwhile, the lovely 20-year-old actress Nicola Peltz (Transformers: Age of Extinction) “will play a woman who acts older than she is, knows more about the sapphires than she lets on, hires McGee to find them, and ends up on the wrong side of the torturer.” This big-screener is currently scheduled for a 2016 debut. Oh, and did I mention that author Dennis Lehane is working on its screenplay?

• Lehane, whose new novel, World Gone By, has just seen print, is certainly a busy guy these days. As fellow author Craig Mcdonald writes: “Word on the street is Dennis Lehane is mounting a TV series about [former Untouchables investigator Eliot] Ness that will presumably come closer to the real and ‘touchable’ Ness than previous incarnations ever contemplated.” Ohio’s Cleveland Plain Dealer explains that Lehane is putting together a program “based on Douglas Perry’s 2014 biography, Eliot Ness: The Rise and Fall of an American Hero. The series will focus on the crime-fighter’s post-Untouchables years [in Cleveland] as public safety director, mayoral candidate, society swell, and alcoholic. Don’t get too excited, though,” remarks the newspaper’s book editor, Joanna Connors.  “As Lehane cautioned last week, in a phone interview, the show still has many steps to take before you add it to your DVR lineup.”

• And before we leave the subject of John D. MacDonald, here’s a link to a post Peter Quinones wrote about the women appearing in the first four Travis McGee novels.

• The new James Bond film poster is downright uninspiring.

• Stephen King’s novel Joyland has already won a good deal of publicity, including critic Ali Karim’s choice of it, in January Magazine, as one of the best crime novels of 2013. However, paperback publisher Hard Case Crime--which previously also issued a hardcover limited edition of Joyland, with new frontal art by Robert McGinnis--has still more plans for King’s popular book. HCC announced yesterday that it will release an illustrated edition of Joyland in September 2015.

The acclaimed coming-of-age story set in a possibly haunted small-town amusement park spent more than 25 weeks on the New York Times Best-Seller List in paperback and e-book format. Aside from certain extremely limited editions for collectors, however, no hardcover edition of the book has ever been published. The new edition will feature a brand-new cover painting by popular Hard Case Crime artist Glen Orbik, whose other covers for the series include books by Gore Vidal and Michael Crichton; a map of the Joyland amusement park illustrated in the classic “mapback” style by Susan Hunt Yule; and more than twenty interior illustrations by acclaimed artists Robert McGinnis, Mark Summers, and Pat Kinsella.

• Was Arthur Conan Doyle the victim of a police conspiracy?

• Paula Hawkins, author of the much talked-about novel The Girl on the Train, dropped a few hints to Entertainment Weekly about her next project: “It’s a similar genre [as that of Train] and it’s also going to be narrated by women, but a very different book. I haven’t really talked about this much because it’s quite a difficult thing to explain. Because it sounds weird. It’s got quite a gothic feel to it. It’s not about witch-hunting, I can tell you this. However, I wanted there to be something about women being accused of witchcraft. That didn’t happen much in the south of England. Mostly that happened in Scotland and the north. That part of England really lends itself to a dark and gothic and brooding novel, so it worked out. I’m not at the point where I’ve got an elevator pitch, as you can tell! But I’m working on it and I think that [the novel] will be out next year.”

• Since I recently interviewed novelist David Morrell for Kirkus Reviews (with part of our e-mail exchange spilling over into The Rap Sheet), my radar is still quite sensitive to stories about his work. So it was to be expected that I’d catch mention on Facebook of a forthcoming collector’s edition of First Blood, his 1972 debut novel and the story that introduced resourceful Vietnam War veteran John Rambo. On his Facebook author page, Morrell writes that Gauntlet Press will issue “a numbered edition of 500 signed copies and a lettered edition of 52 signed copies. The lettered edition includes everything that’s in the numbered edition, but it also has additional items: manuscript pages, research photographs, and 1972 publicity materials.” Gauntlet’s own site adds that, along with Borderlands Press, it “will publish special editions of the entire Rambo trilogy over the next three years.” Something to look forward to, indeed.

• So, as it turns out, I’ve been loading toilet paper the wrong my whole life. Inventor Seth Wheeler apparently had specific ideas about this when he applied for his patent in 1891.

• I’d pretty much forgotten the one-season TV spinoff, Law & Order: Los Angeles. But then Mystery*File reminded me of its passing.

• This is a most promising development: Publisher Altus Press has announced the premiere of its new line, The Argosy Library series, which will resurrect fiction originally featured in Argosy magazine (one of my grandfather’s favorite publications) or its sister periodicals, The All-Story, Flynn’s Detective Fiction Weekly, and others. Ten books at a time are set to be brought to market (in hardcover, paperback, and e-book versions), with the initial batch coming in May. As the press release for this venture phrases it, “The Argosy Library expects to showcase the varied mix of genres that made Argosy one of the most popular pulps of all time, and Series 1 does just that by showcasing adventure, mystery, Western, science fiction, fantasy, and crime stories by … authors such as Lester Dent, W. Wirt, Otis Adelbert Kline, W.C. Tuttle, George F. Worts, and Theodore Roscoe …” Click here to find the covers and write-ups about each volume.

• With his first book, On the Road With Del and Louise: A Novel in Stories, coming out this fall from Henery Press, Virginia author Art Taylor explores the “novel in stories” concept in this piece for the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine blog.

• Who remembers Robert Loggia’s T.H.E. Cat?

• After revisiting the 1974-1975 ABC-TV crime drama Get Christie Love! during last month’s Classic Detective TV Blogathon (see his post here), Hal Horn of The Horn Section has apparently decided to stay on the GCL beat at least a while longer. Go here to read his review of the November 13, 1974, episode, “Downbeat for a Dead Man.” Personally, I’d be happy to see him write about all 24 regular episodes of that Teresa Graves series, though since there’s been no DVD release of the show, I suspect they’re hard to locate.

• Director Guy Ritchie’s big-screen version of The Man from U.N.C.L.E.--set to premiere this coming August--has evidently fiddled a bit with the back story of American secret agent Napoleon Solo (portrayed in the original 1960s TV series by Robert Vaughn). The Spy Command has that story.

• I’m intrigued to read that Portland, Oregon, author Evan Lewis has resurrected Dashiell Hammett’s The Continental Op for a story--the first in a new series--being published in the May 2015 edition of Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. More here.

• Finally, it seems Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman, who play Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson, respectively, in the BBC One TV series Sherlock, will--by some strange alchemy of storytelling--be sent back to Victorian England (Holmes’ traditional milieu) for a holiday special “likely set to air next Christmas.”

Riding High with David Morrell

Although I am “mature” enough to remember when Sylvester Stallone’s first Rambo action picture splashed onto U.S. movie screens in 1982, it wasn’t until two decades later that I finally understood those films had been spawned from a 1972 work titled First Blood, by Canadian-American novelist David Morrell. Credit for this realization lies largely with my fine friend Ali Karim, a Rap Sheet contributor and big Morrell enthusiast, who in 2003 conducted what is still one of the most thorough interviews with the author, published by the e-zine Shots.

And only last fall, during Bouchercon 2014 in Long Beach, California, did I finally have the opportunity to meet (and actually dine with) Morrell. More recently, I decided to fire some questions off to him--via e-mail--about his new historical thriller, Inspector of the Dead (Mulholland). Many of Morrell’s responses can be found in my latest Kirkus Reviews column. Those that couldn’t fit there are posted below.

Morrell, you might already know, was born in 1943 in the Canadian city of Kitchener, Ontario (which also happens to have been where the man who would grow up to be private-eye novelist Ross Macdonald spent a good chunk of his boyhood). After receiving his B.A. at St. Jerome’s University in Ontario, Morrell moved to the United States in the mid-1960s and studied American literature at Pennsylvania State University, eventually receiving his M.A. and Ph.D. Morrell began working as a professor with the University of Iowa English department in 1970, and two years later his debut novel, First Blood, was published. Described on Morrell’s Web site as “a ground-breaking novel about a returned Vietnam veteran suffering from post-trauma stress disorder who comes into conflict with a small-town police chief and fights his own version of the Vietnam War,” First Blood was followed in fairly quick succession by such books as Testament (1975), The Totem (1979), and Brotherhood of the Rose (1984). The last of those was adapted into a two-part television movie of the same name, broadcast in 1989, and followed by a pair of sequels.

Morrell left teaching in 1986 and has since produced 20 additional novels (not only crime thrillers, but works in the horror and Western genres as well), plus a collection of short stories (1999’s Black Evening). He’s also racked up enough literary prizes to make a sturdy shelf sag, including the Nero and Macavity awards, multiple Bram Stoker Awards (from the Horror Writers Association), an Inkpot Award (bestowed by the Comic-Con International convention in San Diego, California), and, in 2009, the ThrillerMaster Award, presented for lifetime achievement by the International Thriller Writers.

My chief purpose in interviewing Morrell recently was to talk about Inspector of the Dead and its no-less-captivating predecessor, Murder as a Fine Art (2013), both of which find UK essayist and notorious drug addict Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859)--best known for penning Confessions of an English Opium-Eater--serving in the role of detective, with his youngest daughter, the resourceful and self-confident Emily, acting as his sidekick. However, I also asked him about his interest in the classic Martin Milner/George Maharis TV series Route 66, his often difficult childhood, the use of violence in his fiction, and a supposedly growing resurgence of interest in the eccentric De Quincey. I suggest you first check out my new Kirkus Reviews column, which highlights a variety of Inspector of the Dead’s essential plot elements, and then come back here to read the remainder of our lengthy e-mail exchange.

J. Kingston Pierce: Let’s start out with a simple question. Is it true that you’re 71 years old, with your next birthday on April 24?

David Morrell: It is. My debut novel, First Blood, was released in 1972. This is my 43rd year as a published author, an eternity if we consider that many careers end after 15 or 20 years. I think one reason I’m still being read is that I did my best to evolve. With each decade I tried to find new ways of writing action and suspense. My recent Victorian mystery/thrillers are a good example. Who could have predicted them?

(Left) David Morrell and his books. Photo by Jennifer Esperanza.

JKP: Is it also correct that you became a writer because of the early 1960s TV series Route 66? What was it about that program’s scripting that so affected you?

DM: My life was changed at 8:30 p.m. on the first Friday of October in 1960 when Route 66 premiered: two young men in a sports car traveling across the country in search of themselves. I was 17, and the scripts by Oscar-winner Stirling Silliphant (a fascinating mix of action and ideas) spoke to me so powerfully that I wrote him a letter, saying that I wanted to do what he did. He wrote back with the advice to write, write, write, and write. I never looked back. Route 66 was about moving ahead and searching, an attitude that really stuck with me.

JKP: You had a very difficult childhood. Your father, a Royal Air Force (RAF) bombardier, was shot down over France during World War II, and your mother first put you in an orphanage, then later sent you to live on a Mennonite farm. Your mother finally remarried and took you back, but your stepfather wasn’t a fan of children. How did those trying times prepare you for a life composing novels?

DM: I found out recently that my father was actually a Royal Navy pilot (not a bombardier). His task was to fly over German military facilities that were targeted by Navy cannons and to report where the shells were landing so that the ships could improve the trajectory of their barrage. I’m told that he was shot down during D-Day operations. Before that he was in Ontario, Canada, training Canadian pilots for the war. That’s where he met my mother. With the orphanage and the distant, sometimes violent stepfather, I had a troubled youth. My mother and stepfather argued so much that, as a child, I was so afraid I slept under my bed. That’s when I started telling stories to myself in which I was a hero, saving people. In a way, I was programmed to write thrillers.

JKP: The scope of research you must have done in order to produce Murder as a Fine Art and then Inspector of the Dead had to be extensive. It’s always a risk, after an author has done such considerable research for a book, that he will feel the need to share too much of that knowledge in his story. Do you find yourself prone to such over-explanation?

DM: My goal was to try to make readers believe that they are truly on those harrowing, fogbound streets [of London]. So I kept reminding myself that every detail had to serve the story and move it along. But because Murder as a Fine Art and Inspector of the Dead are imitation Victorian novels, I had an advantage--the omniscient viewpoint. Typical of many Victorian authors, [Charles] Dickens allowed his narrator to explain things, almost as a historian. Note the opening of Bleak House in which the narrator descends through London’s smog and finds the law courts at the center of it. Dickens basically explains the British legal system before the story begins. I find this to be refreshing, a technique so out of fashion these days that it’s brand new. The omniscient narrator gave me the opportunity to explain aspects of Victorian culture, burial practices for example, that I couldn’t have done any other way.

JKP: You’ve occasionally been criticized for inserting too much violence into your novels. In Murder as a Fine Art, you even cautioned readers in the introduction that some people might find the bloodshed, particularly in Chapter 1, “shocking.” Inspector has its own savage elements, though they’re somewhat less nightmarish. Are you sensitive to criticism about violence in your fiction? And what kind of balance do you try to strike between being honest to your story, letting violent acts speak when they must, and understanding that violence may sometimes turn off readers?

DM: Murder as a Fine Art uses many details from the first media-sensation murders in English history …, the 1811 Ratcliffe Highway slayings in London. Those murders--two sets of them, only a few days apart--were so ghastly that they literally paralyzed all of England. I call them the first media-sensation murders because they happened after improved roads and the speedy mail-coach system allowed the news to travel everywhere in England within two days. My main character, Thomas De Quincey, wrote in detail about those killings in the third installment of his famous “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts.” The point of the novel is that someone uses his step-by-step essay (the start of the modern true-crime genre) as an instruction manual. So I needed to be specific about the murders. It’s strong stuff. That’s why I put a disclaimer in the foreword, advising readers to be prepared for the first chapter, but that it was necessary for me to be specific.

In terms of violence in my work generally, I don’t include it unless it’s essential to the story. In my debut novel, First Blood, for example, you could say that I was dealing with “war as hell,” so sometimes the details are necessarily strong in order to show their effect on Rambo. In contrast, the movie (which I like) is more like “war is heck.”

JKP: After reading Inspector of the Dead, I find myself amazed by Queen Victoria’s willingness to appear regularly in public, even though men kept trying to assassinate her on the streets of London. Do you think her courageous, or perhaps willfully naïve?

DM: Victoria’s immediate forebears, George IV and William IV, were seldom seen in public. They mostly stayed in their country houses and lived excessively with their mistresses. When she was a child, Victoria was trained by her mother and her mother’s “advisor,” a man named [John] Conroy, to appear in public often and play up to the crowd. So … I’m not sure we can say she was courageous (although seven men did try to kill her). Mostly I see her as doing what she’d been indoctrinated to believe an effective monarch should do.

JKP: Thomas De Quincey seems rarely to sleep in your stories, for fear that his opium nightmares will plague him. Is that true, that he remained awake as many hours as possible? And what part did all that sleeplessness play in shaping his personality?

DM: Opium affected De Quincey as a stimulant. It wasn’t unusual for him to stay awake for 24 hours at a stretch, and to be writing all that time, dropping manuscript pages everywhere. But when he did sleep, he suffered opium nightmares that led him to conclude that the human mind has “caverns and abysses, layer upon layer,” where there are secret chambers in which alien natures can hide, undiscovered. These dreams caused him to write about the subconscious, a concept that he invented 70 years before Freud.

JKP: How do you see Emily De Quincey’s role in these novels? Is she principally the tether that keeps her father grounded, prevents him from bewildering his police associates with philosophizing above their comprehension, and translates his more obscure musings? Or does she serve a less obvious part in your fiction?

DM: Yep, she’s the tether. The books depend on her.

JKP: Much is known about Thomas De Quincey, but I believe relatively little is known of Emily. Do we even know what she looked like?

DM: [There’s] a wonderful painting that one of De Quincey’s daughters commissioned in 1855. The daughter was going to India to be married, and she wanted an image of her father and her two sisters. That painting survives. I often look at it as I write about these historical figures. Emily looks beautiful and, for me, spellbinding.


This 1855 painting by James Archer (part of the collection of The Wordsworth Trust) shows Thomas De Quincey with his daughters Emily and Margaret and granddaughter Eva Craig.

JKP: So is the young woman on the cover of Inspector of the Dead supposed to be Emily? I can’t imagine who else it might be, but I don’t recall a scene in the tale that would have inspired such an image.

DM: The image on the cover--a young woman walking across a bridge with a mysterious figure ahead of her--doesn’t depict anything in Inspector of the Dead. My Mulholland Books editor and I had several conversations about the image, which looks wonderfully atmospheric. We finally decided to pretend that it was Emily in a part of the book that wasn’t written.

JKP: More than a few book critics have compared the investigative partnership of De Quincey and Emily to that of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John H. Watson. Is it that simple?

DM: For certain, Emily’s function isn’t simple. With her bloomer skirt, her independent attitude, and her suspicion about authority, she’s an anachronism, and that’s important because the contrast shows how few rights and how little freedom Victorian women had.

JKP: You’ve suggested before that we’re in the midst of a De Quincey renaissance. What factors convince you of that?

DM: One of my research assets is Robert Morrison, an English professor at Queens University in Ontario, Canada. Years ago, I too was a professor, so I wrote to him as one professor to another, asking for advice. I sent him the manuscript for Murder as a Fine Art to find out if he thought I had been true to De Quincey. When he gave me his imprimatur, we became Internet friends. The two of us are on a mission to make De Quincey part of the pantheon of 1800s English authors. Robert has been receiving reports about an increasing number of university courses that feature De Quincey. For a long while, TDQ (as Robert and I call him) didn’t receive his proper credit--because of the suspicion that an opium addict couldn’t have been a major author. But that overlooks the obvious. He was the first person to write about drug addiction, vividly, in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. I mentioned that he invented the modern true-crime genre in the third installment of “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts.” He invented what he called “psychological” literary criticism in his groundbreaking essay, “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth.” At a time when Wordsworth’s poetry was ridiculed, De Quincey championed it to everyone he met and was a major factor in Wordsworth’s being accepted as major poet. And then there’s De Quincey’s psychoanalytic writing. This guy was a big deal and deserves to be treated as such. Robert and I are spreading the word. The other major De Quincey expert, Grevel Lindop, has also been a big help to me.

JKP: How have you changed as an author since you published First Blood back in 1972? And what do you know about the business of fiction-writing now that you wish you’d known then?

DM: Every book is a new adventure. I finish one novel and decide that I finally understand what’s involved, but then I start a new one, and I realize that I have to learn how to write a book all over again.

JKP: You’ve said that you are currently at work on your third De Quincey novel, and you have “always thought of this as a trilogy.” Does that mean readers absolutely cannot expect a fourth installment … or that you’d be open to considering a fourth book, if you’re happy with how the first three are received?

DM: There’s always the chance there could be a fourth De Quincey novel. But at the moment, I’m focused on completing my original intention of a trilogy, and I can’t see beyond it. I never imagined that I’d write a short-story prequel about De Quincey (The Opium-Eater), which is sort of outside the trilogy, so it just goes to show that anything’s possible.

JKP: Finally, the Wikipedia page about you contains a particularly odd résumé item. It says that you’re a graduate of the G. Gordon Liddy Academy of Corporate Security. When did you take on that instruction, and what did the course work entail? Does this mean you actually had some contact with Liddy, the notorious Watergate burglar?

DM: In 1986, Gordon allowed his name to be used for an Academy of Corporate Security. The course lasted three weeks--days, nights, and weekends. It was taught by instructors who were retired from the DEA, FBI, CIA, etc. The course was designed for professionals in the security field, but I was allowed to attend (President Reagan’s son Ron was also allowed to attend). I spent a lot of time with Gordon, who mostly talked about opera and his family. The course was very intense. From the sessions with a professional undercover operative, I got the details for Assumed Identity [1993]. Another instructor, a retired U.S. marshal who’d been part of the team that protected John Hinckley Jr. after he shot President Reagan, gave me the research that I needed to write The Fifth Profession [1990], The Protector [2003], and some other protective-agent novels. Over the years, I’ve [had] numerous similar kinds of training from people who basically put me through what CIA operatives learn at the so-called Farm in Virginia.

I’m a Method-actor sort of novelist. I love learning what I write about. For one of my novels, [2009’s] The Shimmer (which is about the mysterious Marfa Lights in West Texas), I even became a private pilot. Of course, this hands-on approach is impossible for the Victorian period. Most of the De Quincey-era buildings are gone. But where possible, I did prepare some photo essays about the physical parts of the Victorian world that remain and that I wrote about in the novels. Here’s a link to one of them: “Eerie Lord Palmerston’s House.”

* * *

If you’d like to watch the first episode of Route 66, “Black November,” which Morrell credits with changing his life, click here.

Orchids Blooming Everywhere

During its Black Orchid Banquet, held last evening in New York City, the Nero Wolfe/Archie Goodwin fan organization, The Wolfe Pack, announced that the winner of its 2014 Nero Award is Murder as a Fine Art, by David Morrell (Mulholland). This commendation is given out annually “for the best American mystery written in the tradition of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe stories.”

Morrell’s historical thriller beat out four other novels to capture this year’s Nero: Ask Not, by Max Allan Collins (Forge); Three Can Keep a Secret, by Archer Mayor (Minotaur); A Study in Revenge, by Kieran Shields (Crown); and A Question of Honor, by Charles Todd (Morrow).

Also in the course of Saturday night’s Manhattan banquet, the Black Orchid Novella Award was presented to K.G. McAbee for “Dyed to Death.” The Black Orchid is sponsored jointly by The Wolfe Pack and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine.

(Hat tip to Mystery Fanfare.)

Lend an Ear

The latest interviewee at Jeff Rutherford’s Reading and Writing Podcast site is David Morrell, author of The Shimmer.

An Agent Out of Place

I don’t know what it is, I don’t know why it should be, but I’m a total sap for the holidays. I love the food. I love the shopping. Much to my partner’s chagrin, I love the goofy music, the tired old movies, the TV shows that only get dusted off once every 12 months and sent out at us in a massive airwave for a couple of weeks late in the year.

And I love the holiday traditions I’ve built for myself over the decades. One of them involves books and reading. Every year--right around this very moment--publishers release a few select titles totally targeted to only make sense during the holidays. Some of them will become holiday classics, destined to get hauled out year after year, just like the aforementioned goofy TV shows and tired old movies. And some of them will disappear almost without a trace before we even finish picking tinsel out of the rug.

To be perfectly honest, I’m not yet sure on which side of this classic divide thrillermeister David Morrell’s brand-new The Spy Who Came for Christmas (Vanguard) will come down. On the one hand, this is the dude who gifted Rambo to the world. On the other, the Christmas market is a fickle one. I mean, seriously: whatever even happened to Tickle Me Elmo? Think about it.

Little more than novella length, in many ways The Spy Who Came for Christmas is more charming than regular readers of Morrell’s books might expect. This is surprising in a tale that in no way will shortchange those looking for the thrills Morrell always delivers.

Morrell’s story here centers around Kagan, a spy who has long been in deep cover and who now wants out--only his handlers won’t let him go. More: Kagan has in his care a child whose fate might have the power to change the world. The Spy Who Came for Christmas is stuffed full of metaphors. There are some wise men-ish types; and a young mother and her son have been victimized and need Kagan’s help. Possibly other things, as well, but Morrell’s pacing is such that the story flows by very quickly. Metaphor or no, we are reminded that this is one of the top thriller writers of his generation.

That said, I’ll have to revisit the question: contemporary classic, yes or no? And so maybe now I’ll venture out with a cautious “yes,” if only because I suspect it will take multiple readings to pull all of the nuances out of this slender and seemingly simple book. I’ll plan on doing that over a series of years. And maybe that is the place where classics are born. There, of course, and with heart.

Pay Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain

I am currently writing a section of a book for McFarland Press about one of my literary heroes. So who is this wordsmith idol of mine? He is a tremendous author of horror, crime, and thriller fiction, as well as short stories and screenplays, that many younger readers will not recognize. But if I were to mention the names Alfred Hitchcock, Anthony Perkins, and Janet Leigh, or perhaps hum a few bars of the score, or pull back a shower curtain really fast, or finally whisper the film title, Psycho, some of the more observant among you might recall who actually penned the novel from which this classic picture was adapted: Robert Bloch. But for most casual moviegoers or readers, Bloch’s name would mean very little. This makes me sad.

Yet as we all know, sometimes a creation grows to eclipse its creator. That’s been the case, too, for Rambo. On this eve of the British release of the fourth Rambo picture, the casual filmgoer probably doesn’t know who created the iconic figure of John James Rambo. I do, though, because the 1972 novel that introduced that troubled Vietnam vet and Green Beret, First Blood, struck hard at my youthful imagination. It left an impression that is as fresh today as it ever was. But because actor Sylvester Stallone has made the Rambo character convincingly his own, the source material from which Rambo is drawn and the modest English professor who created him, David Morrell, are now largely in the shadows.

One of the reasons I attended my first U.S. mystery convention in 2003 was to meet the man who’d penned First Blood. I was, quite frankly, appalled that only half a dozen people turned up to listen to this man speak at a panel entitled “Rogue Males.” In my mind, I kept shouting, Don’t you know who this man is? He’s David Morrell! I pinched myself when, after the panel, he agreed to have a drink with me, and from then on, I have counted Morrell as a friend. I bump into him each year in the United States or England, and on each occasion he’s been very generous with his time. He even forgave me for falling asleep (due to jet lag) at a film presentation he gave during last summer’s ThrillerFest on the classic TV series Route 66.

Another person who is hidden in the shadows is Morrell’s daughter Sarie, a book publicist who supplies me with new works and information about many of her clients (including her writer-father). Public relations folk are often given a hard time, but believe me, a good one such as Sarie Morrell is a treasure. With tomorrow’s release of Rambo IV in the UK, and publisher Headline’s reissue of First Blood on this side of the pond, I asked Sarie if she could get me some background information on the character of John Rambo and ask David Morrell what his thoughts were more than 35 years after he penned that debut novel of his. She sent me a superb press release and some informative supplementary material.

Armed with all of that, plus my own knowledge of Morrell’s work and my conversations with this author, I produced an article for Mike Stotter, my editor at the British e-zine Shots. If you want to learn more about how large a shadow John Rambo casts over his creator, and the source of Rambo’s name, click over to “David Morrell Is Back.” But hey, did he ever really leave?

Time for a Bigger Trophy Case

Best-selling thriller writer David Morrell, creator of the fictional Vietnam War veteran John James Rambo and father of the modern action novel, was the astonished recipient recently of the legendary Inkpot Award, given to him during the Comic-Con International convention, held in San Diego, California. The annual four-day event is dedicated to creating awareness of, and appreciation for, comics and related popular art forms. More than 125,000 people attended this year’s sold-out gathering.

A co-founder of the International Thriller Writers organization, Morrell has written more than two dozen books, including First Blood (1972), which launched the fictional powerhouse Rambo (portrayed in a series of films by Sylvester Stallone). His blockbuster novel The Brotherhood of the Rose (1984) was developed into a popular NBC-TV mini-series that was broadcast after the Super Bowl game in 1989. He is a three-time recipient of the prestigious Bram Stoker Award, given to him most recently for his 2005 novel, Creepers. Morrell’s new six-part comic book series, Captain America: The Chosen, is set to debut from Marvel Comics in September 2007.

The Inkpot Award was presented to Morrell by fellow novelist and former Dick Tracy writer Max Allan Collins during a “Spotlight Interview” session. “During the interview, a Comic-Con representative came into the room,” Morrell recalls, “when Max stopped the interview, gave me a big smile and a wink, and said, ‘You’re going to like this!’ It was an utter surprise, as well as an exceptional honor.”

Since 1974, Comic-Con International has bestowed the Inkpot Award in recognition of outstanding contributions having been made to the fields of comic books, comic strips, animation, science fiction, and other popular culture fields. Past recipients include Collins, Ray Bradbury, George Lucas, Frank Miller, Steven Spielberg, Harlan Ellison, Matt Groening, Gahan Wilson, Clive Barker, Neil Gaiman, Francis Ford Coppola, Mickey Spillane, Rod Serling, and others.

For a huge comics fan like me, it’s a real pleasure to see one of my favorite thriller novelists be given this commendation.

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Also making a splash during Comic-Con: the teaser poster for Whiteout, the Kate Beckinsale film being made from Greg Rucka’s 1998 graphic novel of the same name. Whiteout rolls out in 2008. More from from Crimespree Cinema.

Morrell’s Mushrooming Fame

I was thinking this week about multi-talented American novelist David Morrell (Creepers), after a contact of mine e-mailed me with the news that pre-production on Rambo 4: In the Serpent’s Eye is well underway. The film is slated for release early in 2008.

Information about this production is closely guarded; however, I can report a little bit about the plot. It seems that Vietnam War veteran John James Rambo has been living with his family in relative peace for the past 15 years, but remains in the employ of the U.S. military. Work pressures finally force him to move his family to the American outback. There, the former Green Beret and his family are attacked by white supremacists, and Rambo has to risk life and limb to rescue his 10-year-old daughter, who is being held hostage.

Rambo 4 has had a carousel of writers and directors associated with it, but it appears that Sylvester Stallone may well be directing the movie (as well as starring in it). And for those of you who are unaware of the link between Rambo and author Morrell ... well, click here. Earlier this year, UK publisher Headline released, as part of its classics series, a special anniversary edition of First Blood (1972), the debut novel by Canadian-born literature professor Morrell, in which John Rambo was first introduced.

I was also pleased this week to receive, from Headline, the cover art for Scavenger, Morrell’s follow-up to his claustrophobic real-time thriller, Creepers (2005). Scavenger is due to be released in March 2007, and it’s one of the books I am most anticipating reading in the near future, as I happily shortlisted Creepers among January Magazine’s favorite books of 2005. It’s also a novel in which I appeared--quite without my volunteering. As The Rap Sheet noted earlier this week, novelists have the tendency to incorporate real living people into their stories. This happened to me in Creepers, where a certain Ali Karim has a problem with his credit card while checking into the Paragon Hotel. Morrell penned an interesting article about the work he did on Creepers, so while you’re waiting for Scavenger to appear on bookstore shelves, why not point your browser here. Morrell is tight-lipped about his forthcoming book and will only say that Scavenger is “a desperate high-tech scavenger hunt for a hundred-year-old time capsule.”

I’ve spent many years in the company of books by David Morrell (with whom I am shown above). During my late teenage years I read his horror fiction and was traumatised by his novel The Totem as well as Testament. Later, I tore through his espionage thrillers, finishing most of them within in a day or two, and as I grew older, I read his mature work and marveled at his way of weaving action into a thought-provoking plot. With their duplicitous characters and enemies legion and murderous, his books, for me, retained a sense of purpose and perspective. No matter how grim the circumstances, there is always purpose in the world of David Morrell.

A few years ago, during Bouchercon 2003 in Las Vegas, I had the chance to interview this author at length. He talked modestly about his work, and I found out that he’d survived a troubled and traumatic childhood (which he detailed in the introduction to his second collection of short stories, Nightscape). Later, he and his wife, Donna, faced a personal tragedy with dignity and grace, which is outlined in his book Fireflies: A Father’s Tale of Love and Loss. In fact, much of Morrell’s work has a melancholic edge. As he told me:

“To paraphrase Graham Greene, ‘an unhappy childhood is a gold mine for a novelist.’ My father was an RAF bombardier who was shot down over France during WWII. He had met my mother when he was sent to Canada to train airmen there. When I was very young, no one bothered to explain why I didn’t have a father. I couldn’t understand why my friends had men in their homes, while I did not. Then my mother, unable to hold a job and take care of me simultaneously, put me in an orphanage. Later, she put me on a Mennonite farm. Eventually she remarried, but my stepfather didn’t like children or staying at home. There were countless arguments that left me terrified about my safety. I used to put a pillow under my covers to make it look as if I was in bed. Then I crawled UNDER the bed and slept there. My major themes come from that time: sons searching for fathers; fear; the need for control of one’s emotions; the perception that the world is a hostile environment. We lived in small apartments over bars, where the drunks fought in the alleys. On one occasion, there were shots. Not a pleasant time.”

With a complex body of work that spans more than 30 years and traverses the Horror, Espionage, and Thriller genres, Morrell is something of a giant in the literary world. His books have picked up a number of awards, including the 2003 Thriller Award, presented to The Protector during the Love Is Murder Conference in Chicago. In 2005, he won the Bram Stoker Award in a tie with Charlee Jacob (Dread in the Beast). His efforts, in cooperation with Gayle Lynds, Lee Child, M.J. Rose, and others, to establish the International Thriller Writers (ITW) were all-important. Like fellow scribe Stephen King, Morrell helped others in the field by publishing his take on the writing process, Lessons from a Lifetime of Writing, which, together with King’s On Writing, may be one of the two most significant books about that creative enterprise. (Morrell also penned an interesting essay for Crimespree Magazine about grappling with what constitutes a “thriller.” Download that essay as a PDF here).

On the subject of David Morrell’s novels, Michael Connelly once said: “If you’re reading Morrell, you’re sitting on the edge of your seat.” With the author now claiming more than 22 million copies of his books in print, it means there sure are a lot of people sitting uncomfortably around the globe.