Odds and Ends

• Although it might be easy to overlook, today is Independent Bookstore Day. In previous years, this occasion has brought out tens of thousands of readers, all willing to race between independent book retailers in record time. (You can read my recaps of some such mad dashes here, here, and here.) But, due to the continuing—and continually devastating—COVID-19 pandemic (180,000 people dead in the United States, and Trump still won’t develop a national plan for dealing with this crisis!), the 2020 celebration was first postponed from April 25 to today, August 29, and has since turned into a primarily virtual celebration. However, as B.V. Lawson of In Reference to Murder reminds us, there are limited in-store events around the United States. And even if it’s unsafe to visit two dozen or so shops today, you can still patronize one or two, picking up fresh reading material and supporting these immensely valuable businesses, many of which have seen significant drops in sales this year. Or go online to order. Click here to find a list of participating retailers; search for your local stores by zip code.

• While we’re on the subject of indies, Portland, Oregon’s wonderful Powell’s Books (which has also been hit hard by the pandemic) has announced that it will no longer sell its wares via Amazon. “For too long,” says owner Emily Powell, “we have watched the detrimental impact of Amazon’s business on our communities and the independent bookselling world. We understand that in many communities, Amazon—and big box retail chains—have become the only option. And yet when it comes to our local community and the community of independent bookstores around the U.S., we must take a stand. The vitality of our neighbors and neighborhoods depends on the ability of local businesses to thrive. We will not participate in undermining that vitality.” Of course, you can still purchase new and used works from the Powell’s Web site.

• In Reference to Murder alerts us as well to the coming “virtual Bloody Scotland writing festival on September 18, available with free registration. Features include a panel on Pitching Your Story; Jeffery Deaver—My Life in Crime; The Fun Lovin’ Crime Writers—Behind the Scenes; and The McIlvanney Prize and Debut Prize announcement. Organizers also recently announced that the entire Bloody Scotland crime fest (running September 17-30) will be available for free online, including events with special guests Lee Child and Ian Rankin.”

• George Roy Hill’s 1973 con-man film, The Sting, placed 12th in Otto Penzler’s recent assessment of “The Greatest Crime Films of All Time.” But CrimeReads staff writer Olivia Rutigliano gives that Oscar-winning Paul Newman/Robert Redford vehicle star treatment in this new piece, which applauds its storyline as “a perfect crystal of a premise—clean and neat despite the multitude of facets that it will turn over as it rolls along.” She adds:

In my opinion, The Sting’s particular kind of endless narrative-unfurling has never been topped by another movie—but The Sting is also fascinating for how many layers of performance it dons, as it progresses. The movie is often discussed in terms of its flawless headlining, a pairing between Newman and Redford that is even more fun and fulfilling than its counterpart in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (which, despite the joys of its big-time good-guy-burglaries, scenic chase scenes, and bicycle riding interludes, is bound to a historical accuracy that can’t provide the triumphant ending we crave for our heroes). Indeed, for us, the audience, much of the massive appeal of The Sting is specifically dependent on the performative togetherness of Newman and Redford—the presentation that they’re two halves of a friendly, repeatable routine. They are one of Hollywood’s greatest duos, greatest double-acts.

All of which reminds me that during last year’s Independent Bookstore Day, I found the paperback movie tie-in treatment of The Sting, written by Robert Weverka. It’s still sitting in a pile on my desk. Might it at last be time to crack that baby open?

• I read Elmore Leonard’s Unknown Man #89 (1977) back in college, which was more than a few coon’s ages ago. So it’s good to have my memory of the tale refreshed by this review in Mystery Tribune. Author Nev March says the book “gets more than passing grades—it reveals the quandary of a ‘regular guy,’ a sometime scamp, coming to terms with what he can and cannot stomach in the world around him. It lays bare the arguments that an alcoholic wields to persuade himself, with honesty that can only come from the pain of experience. Although lesser known than Leonard’s bestsellers Raylan, Tishomingo Blues, Be Cool, Get Shorty, and Rum Punch, the novel Unknown Man #89 is a tale of action, deduction, and soul-searching choices.”

• Finally, I have some sad news to impart: Sixty-five-year-old author Paul Green—who has penned biographies of Roy Huggins, Pete Duel, and Jeffrey Hunter, and has also produced books about “weird detectives” and television’s The Virginian—confided recently on Facebook that he has entered hospice care. He tells me, “I suffer from stage 4 prostate cancer that has spread to my bones. I have been under treatment for three years.” According to a biographical note on Amazon, Green “began his professional career as an artist for World Distributors, DC and Marvel UK, Egmont and Whitman on such titles as Doctor Who, Star Trek, Alias Smith and Jones, Masters of the Universe, Scooby-Doo, Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and Spider-Man.” Born in Lincoln, England, he currently resides in Rustburg, Virginia. A kind, hopeful thought or two for Paul would not go amiss.

Bullet Points: Making the Best of It Edition

• London’s Goldsboro Books has announced its longlist of a dozen contenders for the 2020 Glass Bell Award, a prize meant to celebrate “the best storytelling across contemporary fiction.” About half of the books—identified below with asterisks—are obviously or at least arguably drawn from the crime/mystery side.

— Imaginary Friend, by Stephen Chbosky (Orion)
— Darkdawn, by Jay Kristoff (HarperVoyager)
— The Starless Sea, by Erin Morgenstern (Harvill Secker)
— The Lost Ones, by Anita Frank (HQ)
— My Sister, the Serial Killer, by Oyinkan Braithwaite (Atlantic)*
— The Farm, by Joanne Ramos (Bloomsbury)
— Girl, Woman, Other, by Bernardine Evaristo (Hamish Hamilton)
— The Second Sleep, by Robert Harris (Cornerstone)*
— Blood & Sugar, by Laura Shepherd-Robinson (Mantle)*
— Daisy Jones and the Six, by Taylor Jenkins Reid (Cornerstone)
— Nothing Important Happened Today, by Will Carver (Orenda)*
— The Silent Patient, by Alex Michaelides (Orion Books)*

A shortlist of six Glass Bell finalists is expected to be released on May 11, with the winner to be named on July 2.

• In advance of Bosch’s return to Amazon Prime next Friday, April 17, Crime Fiction Lover briefly recaps the last five seasons of that Michael Connelly-supervised police-procedural series.



• This apparently coincidental cover similarity (see above) is sure to create confusion when it comes to ordering books. In the Dark, by Loreth Anne White, was released last December by Montlake Romance. Somewhere in the Dark, by R.J. Jacobs, is set to debut in August, from Crooked Lane. (Hat tip to Linda L. Richards.)

• It had to happen: ThrillerFest XV, which had been arranged for July 7-11 in New York City, has been cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. An e-mail notice from executive director Kimberley Howe says, “We will be providing full refunds to everyone, and you will receive those funds in approximately two weeks, as soon as Cvent (our registration provider) can process our request.” But all is not lost. “To help you avoid ThrillerFest withdrawal,” says Howe, “we will be offering, in July, a virtual conference that you can enjoy from the safety of your own home. This event will include PitchFest, ConsultFest, Master Class, the Debut Author Breakfast, the Thriller Awards Presentation, and other special ThrillerFest presentations. Current registrants will have first dibs to register for these events before others are welcomed to join in the fun (if there’s still space). Details and your chance to sign up will follow soon.”

• As he explains it, about three weeks ago Scottish novelist Peter May (The Blackhouse, A Silent Death) was asked by someone on Twitter whether he had any interest in composing a story set against today’s novel coronavirus scare. At which point May realized, “I had already done just that.” It seems that about a decade and a half ago, at a time when he despaired of his career future, May penned Lockdown, a thriller that imagined a global pandemic of bird flu. Unfortunately, the book was rejected by publishers as “unrealistic” and “unimaginable in present-day London.” May’s outlook on publishing was soon after buoyed by the release (originally in France) of The Blackhouse, and he shelved Lockdown, not expecting it ever to reach readers. Until now. With the novel coronavirus making grim news worldwide, British publisher Quercus is rushing Lockdown into print. It will go on sale in the UK on April 30; its U.S. premiere will be August 18.

• A different book with the same title is coming from publisher Polis in mid-June. Edited by Nick Kolakowski and Steve Weddle, Lockdown: Stories of Terror, Crime, and Hope During a Pandemic is an anthology of short stories that LitReactor says take place “against the background of a nationalized lockdown in response to a (fictional) virus, which mutates rapidly as it jumps from person to person. Cities are under martial law. The skies are clear as all planes are grounded. Some people panic, while some go to heroic lengths to save those they love—and others use the chaos as an opportunity to engage in purest evil. From New York City to the Mexican border, from the Deep South to the misty shores of Seattle, their characters are fighting for survival against incredible odds.” Proceeds from the sale of this collection are supposed to go to BINC, the Book Industry Charitable Foundation, a non-profit enterprise “that assists booksellers in need.”

• Which brings us to this good news: The U.S. branch of Sisters in Crime has accelerated its support program for bookstores. The organization usually awards $500 every month to a deserving shop “to use for promotion, marketing, or hosting book-signing events.” But, it has announced, “in response to the current pandemic, we will be drawing the winners for the rest of 2020—nine winners—on April 16, 2020. We want to get these prizes out while the need is great. The deadline for entry is April 15. All other entry criteria remain the same.” Entry details are available here.

• Meanwhile, author Laurie R. King is holding an unusual auction. The person who contributes the most money will win the opportunity to name a character in King’s 2021 novel (to be set in Transylvania in 1925). Proceeds from this auction go to the Second Harvest Food Bank of Santa Cruz County, California, which King says “is stepping up [during the current pandemic] with drive-by food giveaways serving hundreds of families at a time—families whose breadwinners pick our fruit, clean our rooms, pack our home deliveries, care for our sick.” You have until Wednesday, April 15, to make an auction bid and become eligible for these naming rights. If you simply want to donate to the food bank, you can do so at that same link.

• In case you’re feeling too happy of late, Zach Vasquez suggests you read “The 12 Darkest Endings in the History of Noir Fiction.”

• Easter mysteries to relish over the coming holiday.

• Need some film fun this weekend? Empire of Deception author Dean Jobb picks “10 of the Greatest Con Artist Movies of All Time.”

• Actor James Drury, who died this last Monday at age 85, may be best-remembered for starring in the 1962-1971 NBC-TV western series The Virginian. (Not bad for somebody who was actually born in New York City—nowhere in spitting distance of America’s frontier reaches.) However, he also played Captain Spike Ryerson in the short-lived 1974 ABC drama Firehouse, featured in three episodes of Walker, Texas Ranger, and guest-starred on everything from Bourbon Street Beat, Michael Shayne, and Perry Mason to It Takes a Thief, Ironside, and The Fall Guy. Drury’s lengthy catalogue of credits is here.

• This item comes from In Reference to Murder:

A beloved TV character is coming back: NBC gave a 13-episode series order to a new crime drama series starring Christopher Meloni, reprising his Law & Order: SVU role as Elliot Stabler. The SVU spinoff drama will revolve around the NYPD organized crime unit led by Stabler. Like Law & Order: SVU, headlined by Mariska Hargitay as Olivia Benson, the new drama is set in New York, allowing for potential seamless crossovers with SVU and for Benson-Stabler reunions.

• I’m very sorry to hear that Mort Drucker, the Brooklyn-born cartoonist and caricaturist whose work became so familiar over his five decades of contributing to Mad magazine, died on Wednesday at 91 years of age. Drucker, who “specialized in parodies of movies and television shows” (including The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Perry Mason, Magnum, P.I., and the James Bond flicks), was one of my father’s favorite artists, along with Jack Davis and politics lampooner Pat Oliphant, so there were always a lot of Mads around my boyhood home. “Mr. Drucker’s facility was best expressed in multi-caricature crowd scenes,” opines J. Hoberman in The New York Times. “His parody of the 1986 Woody Allen film, Hannah and Her Sisters, opened with a panel depicting a Thanksgiving dinner that, in addition to most of the movie’s ensemble cast, included caricatures of Mr. Allen’s first wife, Louise Lasser; the film critics Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel; Mayor Ed Koch of New York; and Mad’s mascot, Alfred E. Neuman. His drawing for a 1970 Time magazine cover, ‘Battle for the Senate,’ now in the National Portrait Gallery, featured a pileup of 15 individually characterized political figures, including President Richard M. Nixon and Vice President Spiro T. Agnew. Mad’s takeoff on the MGM retrospective feature That’s Entertainment, published in 1975, required Mr. Drucker to caricature more than two dozen stars.” (Drucker applied the same aesthetic to his poster art for the 1971 Mafia comedy film, The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight.) Let’s give the final word here to Saturday Evening Post art critic David Apatoff, who recalls in his blog: “Drucker was such a humble, gentle soul, I could never quite figure out where he found the drive and ambition to create his hundreds of beautiful stories, decade after decade. The opposite of competitive, he was as generous and open-minded an artist as I’ve ever known. Yet he maintained the excruciatingly high standards to stay up late night after night crafting marvelous drawings, working out likenesses for his caricatures and populating his pictures with details and humor that reflected his abundance of spirit.”

• Scott D. Parker’s obituary of Drucker, in Diversions of the Groovy Kind, features the cartoonist’s parody of the 1972 disaster pic The Poseidon Adventure, retitled “The Poopsidedown Adventure.”

• For its part, Spy Write recalls Drucker’s satirical twist on the 1966 picture The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.

• There’s a new crime-fiction podcast worth sampling: Tartan Noir. As the program’s Web site explains, this hour-long offering will spotlight Scottish crime-fiction writing, and will be hosted “by author and broadcaster Theresa Talbot, who’s joined each week by a special guest (fellow authors, journalists or celebrity fans).” Val McDermid lent her voice and knowledge to the first episode, while on the second, Talbot spoke with Liam McIlvanney.

• Here’s one other podcast recommendation, courtesy of Dave Knadler. In his blog, Dave’s Fiction Warehouse, he extols the “lovely, measured tones” of Phoebe Judge’s voice as she reads classic mysteries. Judge has hosted the podcast Criminal for several years; but since the onset of today’s pandemic, she’s also been reading—chapter by chapter—such famous works as The Mysterious Affair at Styles, by Agatha Christie, and The Hound of the Baskervilles, by Arthur Conan Doyle. You can listen in at Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Let’s hope Judge continues these readings past the time when all of us can resume something approaching our normal lives.

• Way back in 2008, author Mark Coggins contributed a multi-part series to The Rap Sheet about The New Black Mask magazine, a short-lived 1980s revival of the publication that had helped launch the careers of so many well-known crime-fictionists. In Coggins’ assessment of the final, 1987 edition of NBM, he talked about John D. MacDonald, who was that issue’s feature focus and who was interviewed briefly in its pages. What wasn’t included with his article, however, was the full text of Macdonald’s “brusque” exchange with co-editor Richard Layman. But now, Tennessee banker-turned-writer Steve Scott has posted that interview in his MacDonald-oriented blog, The Trap of Solid Gold, for all of us to appreciate.

• Ace Atkins’ next (ninth) novel starring one-named Boston P.I. Spenser will be Robert B. Parker’s Someone to Watch Over Me, scheduled for release (from Putnam) in November.

• Illinois writer Thomas McNulty is behind the book-review blog Dispatches from the Last Outlaw, but it turns out he also has a YouTube channel, McNulty’s Book Corral, on which he talks about reading matters. Some of the episodes have focused on westerns and science fiction, but here he enthuses over Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer novels (and Max Allan Collins’ continuation of that series). And here he focuses on “man-bait paperbacks,” soap-operaish works with romantic themes and “saucy” covers, marketed toward male readers. McNulty must have an outstanding collection of vintage softcovers.

• Elmore Leonard seems to be a popular subject this week, as Craig Pittman celebrates that author’s strong Florida connections in CrimeReads, and Don Winslow writes in Deadline about how he “almost made a movie with Elmore Leonard.”

• Winslow also talks with Thomas Pluck, for Criminal Element, about his fresh-off-the-vine short-story collection, Broken.

• Two more worthy exchanges: Nancie Clare’s chat with Cara Black (Three Hours in Paris) for her podcast, Speaking of Mysteries; and the delightful Hilary Davidson’s conversation with Frank Zafiro about her sixth novel, Don’t Look Down, for Wrong Place, Write Crime.

• If you haven’t been reading the Māwake Crime Review, a Crimespree Magazine feature that regularly showcases “great crime writers and crime novels from beyond the borders of North America and Europe,” you should start. In the latest installment, New Zealand critic-blogger Craig Sisterson turns his gaze upon Japanese contributions to this genre. Part of the column is devoted to an interview with Soji Shimada, author of The Tokyo Zodiac Murders and Murder in the Crooked House.

• I have heard several times over the years that film, TV, and stage performer Tony Franciosa—who starred in The Name of the Game, Search, and Matt Helm—was not popular among some of the people with whom he worked. Author and screenwriter Lee Goldberg recently shared this anecdote on Facebook, confirming such talk:

Tony Franciosa was reportedly a very difficult actor to work with. During the production of Matt Helm, he punched a director. Things got so bad, that Franciosa was written out of the 13th and final episode of the show. The producers must have loathed him because, in that final episode, they covered Franciosa’s face in the main titles with credits! Below are the credits as they appear in the first 12 episodes … and how they appeared in the final one. I’m amazed they got away with it!

• By the way, Goldberg has good news concerning a complete, five-disc French DVD set of Matt Helm episodes. In a March 20 “Bullet Points” post, he cautioned that the discs (with their English soundtrack, but French subtitles) “are unplayable on U.S. DVD players … unless you have a multi-standard DVD player (which I do) or software that allows you to watch it on your computer’s DVD drive.” However, he wrote me earlier this week to say that, in fact, those Matt Helm discs (which he must have ordered for himself) “will play on any DVD player … The picture and sound are great.”

• Columbus, Ohio, isn’t often thought of as a hotbed of fiction, when it’s even thought of at all. However, in his introduction to the new anthology Columbus Noir (Akashic), Andrew Welsh-Huggins—an editor and reporter for the Associated Press, and an occasional contributor to The Rap Sheet—points out why the 14th largest city in the United States offers all of the ingredients necessary to make it “ripe for the attention of crime fiction writers.” Read it all here.

• Terry Zobek takes a deep dive into all the corners of Lawrence Block’s writing career in his new release, A Trawl Among the Shelves: Lawrence Block Bibliography, 1958-2020.

• Spanish blogger José Ignacio Escribano continues to post intriguing mini-biographies of mystery writers in A Crime Is Afoot. Recent subjects include the well-remembered Leo Bruce, Julian Symons, and Anthony Boucher as well as less tip-of-the-tongue talents such as Anthony Wynne, A.E.W. Mason, and Ronald A. Knox.

• With April being National Poetry Month, Gerald So has organized a 30-day celebration of crime-related verse in The Five-Two.

• And a couple of weeks back, CrimeReads posted a critic’s list of 14 “long-ass books”—all crime, mystery, and thriller novels, of course—that might help us while away these mass-isolation times. Now Literary Hub’s Emily Temple takes that same idea and expands upon it, delivering an inventory of what she says are “The 50 Best Contemporary Novels Over 500 Pages.” I’m pleased to see that her choices include Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See, Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke, Don DeLillo’s Underworld, and Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove (a novel I chose as one of the 20th century’s best works). Several of her picks overlap those in CrimeReads (among them Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, and Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries), but she also promotes two other crime-oriented tales: Ian Pears’ An Instance of the Fingerpost and Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games.

Bullet Points: Pre-Book Lovers Day Edition

• In late July, the British Crime Writers’ Association (CWA) announced its shortlists of nominees for the 2019 Dagger Awards, in nine categories. Now comes news that the CWA is adding a 10th category to that set of annual prizes: the Dagger for Best Crime and Mystery Publisher of the Year. Shotsmag Confidential says that “Publishers and specific imprints are being nominated by a representative group of leading book reviewers, booksellers, festival organizers, bloggers, literary agents and journalists,” and a shortlist of contenders for this new Dagger will be made known “later this summer.” The winners of all the 2019 Dagger Awards are supposed to be declared during a special ceremony, in London, on October 24.

• British author and critic Mike Ripley has now posted two different tributes to Marcel Berlins, the French-born lawyer and law professor who reviewed crime fiction for The Times of London for 37 years, before dying on July 31 at age 77. The first of those can be found in The Guardian, and covers all the highlights of Berlins’ long career; the second, more personal remembrance was posted in Shots.

• While we’re on the subject of passings, let me mention that Chris Sullivan, who writes the blog Morse, Lewis and Endeavour, states on his Facebook page that Barrington Pheloung—best known to Rap Sheet readers for composing the hypnotic theme for the TV series Inspector Morse and its spin-offs—died (also on July 31) from influenza. “Death from influenza at Barrington’s age,” remarks Sullivan, “normally means there was some underlying health problems.” No specific cause of death had previously been released.

• Well, I have finally done it: added a “Crime/Mystery Podcasts” subsection to The Rap Sheet’s already extensive blogroll. You will find it by scrolling down past the “General Crime Fiction” section in the right-hand column. For the time being, there are only 19 podcasts listed there—those that were recommended by readers. But I’m willing to add more, as the field grows and additional podcast discoveries are made. I hope you like this addition to the page.

• The fifth and final episode of Grantchester, Season 4, will air in the States this coming Sunday evening as part of PBS-TV’s Masterpiece Mystery! series. (Don’t panic: the program has already been renewed for a fifth season.) I’ve watched that cozyish historical mystery drama ever since it debuted on this side of the Atlantic back in January 2015, and have enjoyed it for the most part. Enough so, in fact, that I recently picked up The Road to Grantchester (Bloomsbury), author James Runcie’s prequel novel to the show inspired by his six previous mysteries. I wrote a short review of said work for the newsletter distributed by Madison Books, a Seattle neighborhood bookshop with which I am associated, and am embedding it below:

The Road to Grantchester
By James Runcie
Now, during PBS-TV’s latest run of the British mystery series Grantchester, is an ideal time to dive into this prequel novel, which recalls the circuitous path protagonist Sidney Chambers took from being a Cambridge classics student to becoming an Anglican vicar-cum-sleuth. As World War II consumes Europe, Chambers and his irrepressible friend Robert Kendall join the Scots Guards and are sent to the Italian front, where their ability to maintain optimism amid unrelenting carnage is sorely tested. Crucial to Chambers’ efforts is “Rev Nev” Finnie, an Episcopal chaplain with whom he engages in philosophical discussions—talks that prepare him for Kendall’s subsequent battlefield death and his own return home. Back in England, Chambers finds himself guilt-ridden for having survived, and at a loss to deal with Kendall’s coquettish younger sister, Amanda. Others expect Chambers to become a teacher or diplomat, but his search for peace leads him instead into the priesthood. There’s little crime-solving here, but author Runcie excels at evoking the climate of warfare, and his investigations of the human mind and heart will feel familiar to any Grantchester fan.

• Happy 10th anniversary to The View from the Blue House!

• Happy 100th birthday (belatedly) to Jerusalem-born actor Nehemiah Persoff, whose face was once ubiquitous in U.S. films and TV shows—everything from The Untouchables and The Twilight Zone to The Name of the Game, The Mod Squad, McMillan & Wife, Columbo, and even Star Trek: The Next Generation. According to Wikipedia, Persoff experienced health problems in the 1980s and “retired from acting in 1999” to devote his full time to painting. “He currently lives with his wife, Thia, in Cambria, California.

• And though this also comes late, I want to acknowledge the 75th anniversary of the release of Double Indemnity (1944), co-written by director Billy Wilder and author Raymond Chandler. “That great movie …,” explains blogger George Kelley, “ignited a series of noir movies in the post-World War II era. The screenplay was based on James M. Cain’s 1943 novel of the same name (which originally appeared as an eight-part serial in Liberty magazine, starting with the February 1936 issue). Fred MacMurray portrays an insurance salesman who fails for the Wrong Woman. Crafty Barbara Stanwyck plays a provocative housewife who wishes her husband were dead (and that she had the insurance money, too). Savvy Edward G. Robinson plays an insurance claims adjuster whose job is to investigate suspicious claims.” With a cast like that, how can a movie go wrong?

• National Public Radio celebrates Double Indemnity, too.

• Can’t get enough of Steely Dan—both the classic rock band and new stories influenced by its song catalogue? Then you’re definitely in luck: Brian Thornton, the Seattle-based editor of Die Behind the Wheel: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Music of Steely Dan (Down & Out) has let it be known on Facebook that a sequel is being readied for late October publication. Also to be published by Down & Out, under the title A Beast Without a Name: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Music of Steely Dan, this second volume will feature contributions by a “Merry Band of Dan Enthusiast[s]” including Steve Brewer, Bill Cameron (writing as W.H. Cameron), Reed Farrel Coleman, Naomi Hirahara, Richie Narvaez, Kat Richardson, Peter Spiegelman, Jim Thomsen, and Thomas Hottle (writing as Jim Winter).

• Short-story writer Carol Westron considers the sport of fishing as it was portrayed in Golden Age Detective Fiction.

• LaBrava is among my favorite Elmore Leonard novels (a preference shared by author-screenwriter Nora Ephron), so it was good to see Christi Daugherty revisit that 1984 yarn recently as part of Criminal Element’s series on works that, over the last 65 years, have won the Edgar Award for Best Novel. “Among the books that did not win the year LaBrava was given the Edgar,” Daugherty observes, “were John le Carré’s The Little Drummer Girl and Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose, both of which are considered classics now. Both are books I’ve read and loved. In fact, to be perfectly honest, I came into this review with a bit of a chip on my shoulder, expecting to find LaBrava somehow inferior. How could this dingy little tale of a sociopath planning to set up a fading film star be better than those giants of twentieth-century fiction? Reading this book changed my mind.”

• Curtis Evans (Murder in the Closet) offers an excellent piece, in CrimeReads, about “The Rise and Fall and Restoration of Anna Katharine Green’s The Leavenworth Case.”

• While you’re browsing CrimeReads, don’t miss Derek Milman’s essay on “How North by Northwest Changed Cinema Forever.”

• This comes from In Reference to Murder:

The cast has been set for Agatha Christie Limited’s The Pale Horse, the latest TV adaptation from Dame Agatha for the BBC. The Pale Horse centers on Mark Easterbrook (Rufus Sewell) as he tries to uncover the mystery of a list of names found in the shoe of a dead woman. His investigation leads him to the peculiar village of Much Deeping and also to The Pale Horse, the home of a trio of rumored witches. Word has it that the witches can do away with wealthy relatives by means of the dark arts, but as the mount up, Easterbrook is certain there has to be a rational explanation.

• Meanwhile, blogger Jerry House draws my attention to a 1982 adaptation of that same 1961 mystery novel by Christie, produced as part of the CBS Radio Mystery Theater series (1974-1982). As House explains, this 45-minute version “features the talents of Earl Hammond and Mandel Kramer, with Elspeth Eric and Marianne Sanders, and was introduced by Tammy Grimes. ‘The Pale Horse’ was produced and directed by Himan Brown. The script by Roy Winsor veered from Christie’s original novel. Winsor was an established radio soap-opera writer before he went on to create some of television’s most well-known soaps: Search for Tomorrow, Love of Life, and The Secret Storm. He also co-created Another Life and was the head writer for Somerset. Winsor also wrote three mystery novels and received an Edgar Award for The Corpse That Walked in 1975.” You can listen to this radio version of “The Pale Horse” either on YouTube or on the CBS Radio Mystery Theater Web site.

• Someday I hope to find time enough to listen to all 1,399 episodes of the CBS Radio Mystery Theater. Like any radio or TV series, it wasn’t perfect, but I remember being mesmerized by many of those old episodes. I used to listen to them at night after going to bed, my earplug firmly planted into whichever ear wasn’t most easily seen, should my mother decide to double-check that I was actually asleep. Host E.G. Marshall (formerly of The Defenders and The Bold Ones) was an ideal—and appropriately spooky—host for most of the program’s run, and the episodes attracted a wide variety of talent, many performers having blossomed during the so-called Golden Age of Radio (the 1920s through the 1940s). Thankfully, all of those episodes are still available today—for free!—through the aforementioned CBS Radio Mystery Theater Web site. Too bad I’m no longer young enough to stay awake into the wee hours of the night, listening.

• Quinta Jurecic, the managing editor of Lawfare, suggests in The New York Times that people read the Mueller Report as a detective story. It “may turn out to be more of a film noir than anything else,” she writes. “The detective successfully uncovers the plot, only to discover that the society around him is too rotten to do anything about it. For all the missing pieces in this story, the issue is less whether it can be told and more whether anyone cares to listen.”

• Author interviews worth your time: Fresh Air host Terry Gross speaks with Laura Lippman about her impressive new Baltimore-set novel, Lady in the Lake; Hallie Ephron (Careful What You Wish For) is Nancie Clare’s latest guest on Speaking of Mysteries; John Parker chats with John Connolly (A Game of Ghosts) for Shotsmag Confidential; and MysteryPeople has a few questions for S.J. Rozan (Paper Son).

• Finally, it’s true: tomorrow is National Book Lovers Day here in the States. But really, every day is Book Lovers Day for yours truly.

Bullet Points: Pre-Cinco de Mayo Edition

Sorry for the recent paucity of posts on this page, and for failing to respond in anything like a timely fashion to e-mail messages, but I’ve been quite busy over the last couple of weeks, helping to open a new independent bookshop in Seattle’s Madison Park neighborhood. I hope that my schedule will settle down soon. In the meantime, though, let me take this opportunity to highlight an assortment of crime fiction-related stories appearing elsewhere on the Web.

• I don’t customarily publish news releases, but this item from the organizers of Bouchercon 2019—which is to be held in Dallas, Texas, from October 31 to November 33—seems worth passing along:

We are concentrating on the history of our first fifty years. If you have and are willing to donate historical programs, bags, buttons, pictures, Anthony Awards, mementos, or other articles for display, please contact Carol Puckett, Bouchercon 2019 Chair and a member of the Bouchercon National History Committee at BCon2019@gmail.com. Note that we are hoping to include some of these articles in an archive that we are planning to establish to continue to honor the history of Bouchercon.

• Among the recipients of this year’s Best of Illinois History Awards, presented late last week by the Illinois State Historical Society, was the non-fiction book Scarface and the Untouchable: Al Capone, Eliot Ness, and the Battle for Chicago, by Max Allan Collins and A. Brad Schwartz (Morrow, 2018). The ISHS credits that book with providing “a new look at an old story. An engaging, well-researched, and informative dual biography of Al Capone and Eliot Ness that may be the best book of this genre to come along in this century. Collins and Schwartz tell a story all Illinoisans know in fragments but few know in its entirety. It is the story of the coming of age of Capone when the most disrespected law of the land—Prohibition—is enacted, told in tandem with the story of Ness, an introspective, timid lawman with a passion for justice. For those who grew up with the Hollywood myths of gangster films, and The Untouchables TV series, this will be the book you remember ...”

• While we’re on the subject of author accolades, yesterday brought word of which books and writers have been nominated for the 2018 Shirley Jackson Awards, honoring “exceptional work in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and dark fantasy.” There are six categories of contenders, so I’m not going to list them all. But here are the rivals for this year’s Best Novel commendation:

— Everything Under, by Daisy Johnson (Jonathan Cape)
— In the Night Wood, by Dale Bailey (John Joseph Adams/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
— Little Eve, by Catriona Ward (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
— Social Creature, by Tara Isabella Burton (Double Day/Raven)
— We Sold Our Souls, by Grady Hendrix (Quirk)

Winners of these awards (for books published in 2018) will be declared on Sunday, July 14, during Readercon 30, set to take place in Quincy, Massachusetts, July 11-14.

• Finally, among the half-dozen shortlisted nominees for this year’s Pushkin House Russian Book Prize is a non-fiction release likely to have drawn the attention of Rap Sheet readers: Ben Macintyre’s dramatic Cold War-era tale, The Spy and the Traitor (Viking).

• It’s hard to believe it is time again for the annual running of the Kentucky Derby. In association with that, Mystery Fanfare’s Janet Rudolph has updated her list of Derby-related mystery fiction.

• How’s this for a bit of irony? People magazine reports that the next role for actress Felicity Huffman, recently implicated in the nationwide college admissions cheating scandal, will find her playing a prosecutor. She’ll portray Manhattan assistant district attorney (and later author) Linda Fairstein in Ava DuVernay’s When They See Us, a Netflix production that People says will focus on the notorious 1989 Central Park Five scandal. (It was the legacy of that brutal rape case, you may recall, which led to the Mystery Writers of America withdrawing Fairstein’s Grand Master Award earlier this year.)

• Comfort TV’s David Hofstede has chosen what he declares are “The 100 Most Memorable Songs Introduced by Classic TV.” There aren’t many crime fiction-related tunes listed, but he does include a “melancholy country ballad” from Charlie’s Angels titled “Trippin’ To the Mornin’” as well as the theme from Moonlighting. Part I of Hofsede’s list can be found here, while Part II is here.

• St. Louis’ Riverfront Times reports on a project by Winnipeg, Canada-based filmmaker Guy Maddin to re-interpret Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 psychological thriller, Vertigo, “not through dialogue or specific actions but through purely visual associations. Drawing heavily on ’70s crime shows, including The Streets of San Francisco and McMillan & Wife, Maddin creates connections to Vertigo by reusing a particular camera angle, a detail in the set decoration or even just the rhythm of an edited sequence. Nearly every aspect of the film—the watered-down colors and sledgehammer editing of TV drama and the sudden, unexpected appearances (and just as sudden disappearances) of Karl Malden, Claude Akins, Meg Ryan and dozens of other familiar faces—flaunts its discontinuity and challenges the viewer to find meaning in the clutter. Yet somehow the themes and spirit of Vertigo creep through, almost eerily.” Until this week, I had never heard of Maddin’s hour-long film, titled The Green Fog, but it apparently debuted at the San Francisco International Film Festival back in 2017. I can only hope to see it sometime. A brief trailer is embedded below.



• In his latest “Getting Away with Murder” column for Shots, Mike Ripley writes about a trio of new novels produced by journalists (including Tom Bradby’s Secret Service), Cuban writer Leonardo Padura’s new Mario Conde story (Grab a Snake by the Tail), a highly irregular book-promotion item (“One has to wonder what sort of idiot promotes his novel by sending out review copies accompanied by a real knife …”), the pending debut of a previously undiscovered Desmond Bagley yarn, and a great deal more.

• And since we’re at the start of a new month, let me remind everyone to take a peek at The Rap Sheet’s wrap-up of fresh spring books, which includes more than 115 tales coming out—on both sides of the Atlantic—between now and June 1.

• For The Writer, thriller scribes Paul Doiron and Lee Child ponder how best to develop “realistic female characters that offer way more than sex appeal.” While this may have seemed like a good idea to Writer editors, the piece has been met with a considerable derogatory blowback. Critic Sarah Weinman complained that it was “presented as if they are saving thrillers from needless chest-thumping,” while others suggested—not unreasonably—that if the magazine wanted to know how to create strong women characters, perhaps it should have asked female authors instead of male ones.

• I already mentioned here the demise, on April 15, of 91-year-old New York author-playwright Warren Adler (The War of the Roses, American Quartet). But now comes blogger-critic Michael Carlson with his own obituary of Adler, prepared for Britain’s Guardian.

• I didn’t know, until reading this piece in Shotsmag Confidential, that Swedish writer David Lagercrantz’s third addition to Stieg Larsson’s Dragon Tattoo series, The Girl Who Lived Twice (due out in August), will also be his last.

• Although I’m not a big podcast follower, I do enjoy the Today I Found Out series, available on YouTube. This last Monday’s installment, for instance, found fast-yakking host Simon Whistler introducing the curious to “10 Detectives More Interesting than Sherlock Holmes,” among his picks being “cowboy detective” Charles Siringo and female Pinkerton operative Kate Warne.

• A trio of CrimeReads stories I have enjoyed recently: Craig Pittman’s profile of Donald J. Sobol, the creator of that literary “‘Sherlock in sneakers,’ boy detective Leroy ‘Encyclopedia’ Brown”; Lisa Levy’s examination of “the hipster mystery, or hipstery”; and Curtis Evans’ look back at poet, essayist, and literary critic T.S. Eliot, “the man who rescued Wilkie Collins from obscurity.”

• And I owe a hearty toast to Dwyer Murphy, the managing editor of CrimeReads, who chose my recent piece about the covers of Ross Macdonald’s The Moving Target as one of the site’s “favorite stories of April.” He writes: “It’s hard to think of a crime author who influenced the aesthetic of modern detective fiction more than Ross Macdonald, so it seems appropriate to undertake a visual history on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of Lew Archer’s first appearance, in The Moving Target. J. Kingston Pierce, expert on all things crime, but especially crime fiction covers, takes on the project in this fantastic survey of Macdonald’s first Archer novel, offering up an engaging mixture of history and critique as he tells the story of one of the century’s most important crime novels, cover-by-cover.”

• The Nick Carter & Carter Brown Blog is currently in the midst of posting a selection of Robert McGinnis paperback covers. Because it can. Because they’re that good.

• The Stiletto Gumshoe applauds the paperback cover artistry of “Cecil Calvert Beall (1892-1970), better known as C.C. Beall.” Among the familiar examples of Beall’s work is his “darkly gorgeous painting” for the 1950 edition of Bruno Fischer’s House of Flesh.”

• Vulture argues that even at age 60 (it was first released in April 1959), Richard Condon’s The Manchurian Candidate remains timely.

• Last month I noted, in my Killer Covers blog, that Britain’s Piccadilly Publishing was reissuing the vintage series of Larry Kent novels in e-book form. It began with just five titles from among the hundreds originally published. But this week, Piccadilly co-founder David Whitehead (aka Ben Bridges) announced on Facebook that an additional five (Go-Go for Broke, Call for a Corpse, Crimson Lady, Terror Below, and The Weirdos) have been scheduled for release by the end of May, all with their original cover art. What’s more, Whitehead says he hopes that paperback versions of these tales will soon become available as well.

• Lee Goldberg has compiled the list of musical numbers he listened to while composing his latest novel, Killer Thriller. These same TV and movie themes could be used as a soundtrack to accompany your reading of that book. But if you’re like me, you might find it difficult to concentrate on the page while listening to, say, Richard Markowitz’s galloping theme for The Wild Wild West.

• I don’t think I had ever before seen a list of which Sherlock Holmes stories were Arthur Conan Doyle’s favorites, but here’s one.

• This trailer for the film Anna, “Luc Besson's latest neo-Eurospy spectacle,” slated to premiere on June 21, has me wanting to view the picture in its action-packed entirety.

• In response to a question about the future of his Ethan Gage historical adventure series, 67-year-old Washington newspaperman-turned-author William Dietrich explained recently on Facebook:

I’m flattered to periodically get inquiries about the next Ethan Gage novel, but I need to update my status (in 2019) to explain that no more books in that series are currently planned.

That wasn’t my original intention. I’d hoped to continue the series through the entire period [of] the Napoleonic Wars, but HarperCollins made a business decision to stop its support because of gradually eroding sales. I followed up with one self-published Ethan, The Trojan Icon, which readers enjoyed. However, I found self-publishing of this and two other books (the young adult novel The Murder of Adam and Eve and the non-fiction Napoleon's Rules) limiting because of the difficulty of getting publicity or shelf display.

So, as I entered my late 60s, I decided to retire! This doesn’t mean I’ve stopped writing—I have several projects that might become completed books someday—but I’m not “working” at being an author as I once was. While my 22 books are well short of the hundreds some authors have turned out (Issac Asimov comes to mind), it’s about 22 more than I expected back when I was starting. The journey has been thrilling.

I still hope to someday have screen adaptations of some of my works, and continue to ponder the peripatetic Ethan Gage. I never say never.

But I’m also enjoying more time in a lovely corner of the world (the San Juan Islands of Washington state) and time to read, write, and travel—especially after a couple health scares. I’m delighted that fans are still reading and I hope new readers will keep discovering Ethan and the other adventures I’ve so enjoyed writing. Happy exploring!

• In a rather wonderful piece for Criminal Element, Susanna Calkins revisits Chicago’s peculiar “Canary Murder” case of 1929.

• From Elizabeth Foxwell’s The Bunburyist: “The Detroit News reported that a lawsuit regarding the sale of Elmore Leonard’s papers to the University of South Carolina had been settled. Christine Leonard, Leonard’s ex-wife, had sued alleging that Leonard’s company, trust, and son had sold the archive in secret (stating that a stipulation in the divorce decree entitled her to a share of the proceeds).”

• Last but not least, since I mentioned Cinco de Mayo in this post’s headline, it’s only right and proper that I should point you to a catalogue of mysteries related to Sunday’s holiday.

Bullet Points: Post-Getaway Edition

So I have finally returned to Rap Sheet headquarters after an almost two-weeks-long train journey through western Canada, mostly touring Banff National Park and Jasper National Park on the British Columbia/Alberta border. The relaxation time was much needed; I didn’t touch a computer or cell phone the whole time I was away, and only read a newspaper twice. I’m feeling rested and ready to gather my latest assortment of crime fiction-related news items.

• Five years after Elmore Leonard passed away, his son Peter is set to reinvigorate one of Leonard’s best-recalled series characters, Raylan Givens, in Raylan Goes to Detroit, which is due out next month from Rare Bird Books. Here’s the plot synopsis offered by Amazon:

After an altercation with his superiors in Harlan County, Kentucky, Deputy U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens is offered two choices. He can either retire or finish his career on the fugitive task force in the crime-ridden precincts of Detroit.

Acting on a tip, Raylan and his new partner, Deputy Marshal Bobby Torres, arrest Jose Rindo, a destructive and violent criminal. Rindo is also being pursued by the FBI, who arrive shortly after he is in custody. Raylan bumps heads with a beautiful FBI agent named Nora Sanchez, who wants Rindo for the murder of a one of their own.

When Rindo escapes from the county jail and is arrested in Ohio, Raylan and FBI Special Agent Sanchez drive south to pick up the fugitive and bring him back to stand trial. Later, when Rindo escapes again, Raylan and Nora―still at odds―are reunited and follow the elusive fugitive’s trail across Arizona to El Centro, California, and into Mexico, where they have no jurisdiction or authority. How are they going to bring Rindo, a Mexican citizen, across the border without anyone knowing?

• While I was away on vacation, I received word from publisher Eric Campbell that the fourth edition of Down & Out: The Magazine is now ready for purchase. Featured among the contents of this issue: a new Inspector Kubu short story from the writing team of Michael Stanley; a vintage yarn by Frederick C. Davis; new fiction by Arthur Klepchukov, Lissa Marie Redmond, and Brian Silverman; and my latest “Placed in Evidence” column, which surveys the extensive field of Jack the Ripper novels—just in time for the 130th anniversary of that murderous fiend’s rampage through London.

• By the way, I just noticed that Kevin R. Tipple has reviewed the first two issues of Down & Out: The Magazine in his blog, Kevin’s Corner. Look here for his Issue 1 assessment, and here to see what he said about Issue 2. I am pleased to learn that he’s enjoying my “Placed in Evidence” contributions.

• This week’s release, by William Morrow, of Scarface and the Untouchable: Al Capone, Eliot Ness, and the Battle for Chicago has brought with it a spate of associated Web postings by co-authors Max Allan Collins and A. Brad Schwartz. In CrimeReads, for instance, the pair look back at Capone’s fondness for self-publicity, while on the Strand Magazine’s Web site they compile “10 Surprising Facts About Al Capone and Eliot Ness.” The authors fielded questions today from Reddit users. And in a piece for History News Network they try to make sense of Donald Trump’s bizarre effort to compare Capone with his indicted former campaign manager, Paul Manafort.

• Who will play Perry Mason now? Deadline Hollywood reports that Robert Downey Jr., who’d long hoped to portray Erle Stanley Gardner’s highly successful criminal defense attorney on screen, doesn’t have time enough in his schedule to star in an HBO-TV series that “reimagines” the protagonist. Deadline Hollywood adds, though, that “Robert and Susan Downey, who developed the project, remain executive producers along with Joe Horaceck. Team Downey originally had a Perry Mason feature reboot set up at Warner Bros. six years ago with Downey Jr. attached to star.” Also stepping aside from this project is Nic Pizzolatto, who had been on board to write the Mason series, but is now devoting himself to Season 3 of HBO’s True Detective.

• Nancie Clare’s most recent guest on her Speaking of Mysteries podcast is the frequently funny Chicago novelist Lori Rader-Day, who has much to say about her new novel, Under a Dark Sky.

• Happy 16th birthday to the Literary Saloon blog.

• Canada’s Globe and Mail carries a good profile of Linwood Barclay, emphasizing his interest in scripting films and TV shows.

• I missed this news during my holiday travels. Fortunately, B.V. Lawson picked it up in her blog, In Reference to Murder:

Sisters in Crime Australia announced the winners of this year’s Davitt Awards at the annual awards dinner this past weekend. Best Adult Crime Novel was won by And Fire Came Down by Emma Viskic; the Readers’ Choice winner was Force of Nature by Jane Harper; Best Debut, The Dark Lake by Sarah Bailey; Best Non-fiction Book, Whiteley on Trial by Gabriella Coslovich; Best Young Adult, Ballad for a Mad Girl by Vikki Wakefield; and Best Children’s Novel, The Turnkey by Allison Rushby. The awards are named after Ellen Davitt, author of Australia’s first mystery novel, Force and Fraud (1865), and as of 2018, are sponsored by Swinburne University of Technology.

• Meanwhile, Mystery Fanfare has posted the list of finalists for the 2018 Silver Fanchion Awards, to be dispensed during the Killer Nashville conference in Tennessee (August 23-26). The categories of contenders include Best Mystery, Best Thriller, and Best Suspense.

• The Detroit Free Press bids a fond farewell to Aunt Agatha’s. After 26 years in business, that popular Ann Arbor, Michigan, bookshop will close its doors for the last time on August 31.

• In mid-July, editor and scholar Steven Powell wrote in The Rap Sheet about his latest book, The Big Somewhere: Essays on James Ellroy’s Noir World (Bloomsbury Academic). More recently, he excerpted the opening chapter from that work in his blog, The Venetian Vase. As he explains, it “examine[s] the influence of Raymond Chandler’s writing on Ellroy’s work.”

• Speaking of Chandler—and following on from my July 26 piece for CrimeReads about how other authors have “revived and reinterpreted” his series private eye, Philip Marlowe—note that Open Letters Review features a thoughtful critique of what it calls “one of the summer’s least likely and most fascinating volumes”: The Annotated Big Sleep, edited by Owen Hill, Pamela Jackson, and Anthony Dean Rizzuto (Vintage Crime). Kevin Burton Smith supplies his own generally favorable comments about that notes-heavy version of the first Marlowe novel in The Thrilling Detective Web Site, together with some unexpectedly laudatory remarks about Only to Sleep, Lawrence Osborne’s new tale imagining Marlowe as an older gent investigating an insurance scam in 1980s Mexico. Smith’s bottom line: “what works best in this book is all the ways it’s not Chandler, but merely Chandleresque.” I couldn’t agree more.

• A books and culture site I’d never heard of before, called Signature, has posted a worthwhile rundown of what it claims are the “100 Best Thrillers of All Time.”

• Not to be outdone as a cultural arbiter, National Public Radio has compiled a list of its “100 Favorite Horror Stories.”

• Oh, and cable-TV provider AMC has slated November as the broadcast month for its mini-series adaptation (co-produced with the BBC) of John le Carré’s Little Drummer Girl.

• Finally, the Columbophile recently asked its readers to choose their favorite episodes of Peter Falk’s 1971-1978 NBC Mystery Movie series, Columbo. Not surprisingly, the top 10 list resulting from that poll includes 1974’s “Exercise in Fatality” (guest starring Robert Conrad) and “Negative Reaction” (with Dick Van Dyke), along with 1973’s “A Stitch in Crime” (featuring Leonard Nimoy) and “Any Old Port in a Storm” (also from 1973, with Donald Pleasance as the murderer). It’s a shock, however, to not see on this roster any eps guest starring multiple offenders Robert Culp (who appeared in three installments) or Patrick McGoohan (who featured in four).

The Book You Have to Read: “LaBrava,” by Elmore Leonard

(Editor’s note: This 152nd entry in The Rap Sheet’s continuing series about great but forgotten books welcomes Craig Pittman to our league of contributors for the first time. A native of Pensacola, Florida, Pittman is an award-winning journalist who covers environmental issues for the Tampa Bay Times. His non-fiction books include Manatee Insanity: Inside the War Over Florida’s Most Famous Endangered Species [2010], The Scent of Scandal: Greed, Betrayal, and the World’s Most Beautiful Orchid [2012], and Oh, Florida!: How America’s Weirdest State Influences the Rest of the Country [Picador], which was released in paperback earlier this month.)

Elmore “Dutch” Leonard, prolific author of thrillers, Westerns, and screenplays, hailed from Detroit, Michigan, and set quite a few of his novels there. But Leonard also had a strong connection to another state—Florida. He began visiting the Sunshine State in the 1950s and lived part-time in Palm Beach County.

“I bought my mom a four-unit motel in Pompano Beach,” he once told Rolling Stone. “She lives in one unit, rents out the others. Visiting her, I found Miami a great locale. The high crime rate, the contrast in people—rich retirees, Cubans, boat-lifters—all kinds of good things are going on there for me.”

Leonard got to know Florida’s geography, its weather, and its many oddball characters pretty well, and he used that knowledge in some of his best work.

His Florida books include Pronto and Riding the Rap, the two novels that first introduced the character of Raylan Givens, the deputy U.S. marshal featured on the TV show Justified. His novel Out of Sight, later made into a Steven Soderbergh film, begins in Florida and ends in Detroit. Rum Punch was set in Florida, too, but Quentin Tarantino moved the action to Los Angeles when he turned it into the movie Jackie Brown.

But I think Leonard’s finest Florida-set novel is one that never made it to a theater, although a love of movies seeps from every page. I’m talking about LaBrava, which was published back in 1983 and won an Edgar Award in 1984.

I first read this book 20 years ago after reading a bunch of other Elmore Leonard works, and that time it didn't do much for me. All of his unusual characters and dialogue-driven storytelling had begun to blur together. However, I read LaBrava again recently while poring over a collection of novels about Florida and revised my opinion dramatically upward. This book really stands out amid the other Leonard thrillers, both for its themes and its sense of history.

The title character is Joe LaBrava, a guy in his late 30s who put in time at the IRS and the Secret Service. It sounds glamorous, but it wasn’t. The low point of his Secret Service career was serving as part of Bess Truman’s protective detail in Independence, Missouri.

LaBrava’s Secret Service experience helped train him to read people and catch details about their faces. He enjoyed hunting counterfeiters out of the Miami field office, shooting surveillance photos. Now, he’s decided that what he really wants to do is be a photographer. In seedy Miami Beach he finds a plethora of things to shoot.

LaBrava becomes friends with the old ex-bookie who owns the ancient hotel where he lives. Maurice Zola can see LaBrava’s talent. He knows talent, because Zola shot photos all over Florida in the 1930s for the Farm Security Administration.

“He’s got the eye,” Zola tells a gallery owner about LaBrava. “He’s got an instinct for it, and he’s not afraid to walk up and take the shot.” Then Zola goes off on a tangent about the 1935 Labor Day hurricane that obliterated the Overseas Railroad in the Florida Keys, and how shooting that disaster was his break as a photographer.

Throughout this book, Zola pops up repeatedly, offering rambling recollections of his life. Through him, Leonard sprinkles in references to various events in Florida history that helped make the state a magnet for outsiders, such as LaBrava, who are trying to catch a break.

Parts of the book comes across as a love letter to the Art Deco shabbiness that was early 1980s Miami Beach, before Miami Vice turned it into a neon-lit star. Here’s LaBrava looking out a window, feeling the history of the place:

What he saw from the window was timeless, a Florida post card. The strip of park across the street. The palm trees in place, the sea grape. The low wall you could sit on made of coral rock and gray cement. And the beach. What a beach. A desert full of people resting, it was so wide. People out there with blankets and umbrellas. People in the green part of the ocean, before it turned deep blue. People so small they could be from any time. Turn the view around. Sit on the coral wall and look this way at the hotels on Ocean Drive and see back into the thirties.

One night, Zola asks LaBrava to help him retrieve a woman who’s been brought in drunk to a Palm Beach County crisis center. She turns out to be Jean Shaw, a 50-ish faded star of classic noir films. LaBrava saw one of her movies when he was 12 and was instantly smitten. Now he feels protective toward her. He’s so protective, in fact, that he tangles with a security guard named Richard Nobles, “the kind of guy—LaBrava knew by sight, smell, and instinct—who hung around bars and arm-wrestled.” Nobles is after Shaw too. LaBrava takes away Nobles’ gun, sits on him and sticks the gun in Nobles’ mouth. Nobles vows revenge.

One thing I didn’t like about this book on first reading was Nobles, because he’s a Florida native, like me. There’s a similar character filling the villain role in Leonard’s novel Maximum Bob, a “Florida Man” type before we ever knew that term—a big dumb guy who thinks he’s got the world licked. (The one in Maximum Bob is part of a family of Florida lowlifes, the Crowes, who show up in several Leonard novels.)

As I was re-reading LaBrava, though, I realized Nobles is no mere redneck stereotype. His character provides Leonard with an artful way to slip in some more Florida history. We learn about Nobles’ role in a well-known DEA bust that took down a major smuggling ring in the apparently sleepy fishing village of Steinhatchee—another signal from Leonard that nothing in Florida is what it appears to be.

Leonard fills in his canvas with such off-kilter characters as Franny Kaufman, a frizzy-haired cosmetics saleswoman; Johnbull Obasanjo, a sarcastic Nigerian cab driver; and Paco Boza, who travels around in a wheelchair he stole “because he didn’t like to walk and because he thought it was cool, a way for people to identify him.”

Soon LaBrava is drawn into an extortion scheme involving Shaw, Nobles, and Cundo Rey, a Cuban killer who arrived with the Mariel boatlift and likes performing as a male stripper as a sideline. Eventually, LaBrava realizes Shaw is so caught up in her noir past, she’s confused it with her present reality. LaBrava’s ability as a photographer to see the truth about people eventually helps him pierce the cloud of artifice and nostalgia so he can unravel the scheme. When the time comes, he is definitely ready to take the shot.

In the end some of the right people get punished and some don’t, and I think that was the other thing that bothered me about this book the first time. But now it doesn’t, and I think it’s because that’s what happens in real life, especially in Florida.

A postscript: LaBrava almost became a movie—a Martin Scorsese picture, in fact. According to a 2013 story at New York magazine’s Vulture site, Dustin Hoffman wanted to star as the title character, and held a series of meetings with Leonard and movie execs—meetings that Leonard found more and more frustrating. That film was never made, but Leonard used the experience as fodder for his 1990 novel, Get Shorty, which of course did become a movie. Hoffman reportedly asked Leonard if Danny DeVito’s egotistical actor character was really based on him. “Come on, Dustin,” Leonard said. “You think you’re the only short actor in Hollywood?”