Pretty much everyone is familiar with Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason novels (if only through their translation to television), and more readers are coming to know his Bertha Cool/Donald Lam private-eye yarns (thanks to Hard Case Crime having republished several of those in recent years). But Gardner also created other protagonists, for use in both books and short stories, including Terry Clane, Gramps Wiggins, Ed Jenkins, “Speed” Dash—and Douglas Selby.
Douglas Who, you ask? I was equally in the dark until a few years ago, when, after delighting in many of Mason’s early adventures, I took a flier on Gardner’s nine novels featuring Selby, the freshly elected district attorney in fictional Madison County, California. I started with the first, 1937’s The D.A. Calls It Murder—and couldn’t stop. So taken was I with Selby and his eccentric supporting cast, that I tracked down and devoured the whole series.
Today, in CrimeReads, I recount the history of Selby’s creation (it came at a time when Gardner was seriously considering killing off his Los Angeles defense attorney, Mason!) and look individually at the novels in which he appears. I’m very proud of the piece (a version of which appeared originally in Down & Out: The Magazine), and hope you will find some enjoyment in it as well.
Click here to investigate the whole story.
Showing posts with label Erle Stanley Gardner. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Erle Stanley Gardner. Show all posts
Friday, July 02, 2021
Friday, September 04, 2020
PaperBack: “The Case of the Sulky Girl”
Part of a series honoring the late author and blogger Bill Crider.
The Case of the Silky Girl, by Erle Stanley Gardner (Pocket, 1962). Cover illustration by Robert McGinnis.
The Case of the Silky Girl, by Erle Stanley Gardner (Pocket, 1962). Cover illustration by Robert McGinnis.
Thursday, August 16, 2018
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:
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:
• 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).
• 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.• 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
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?
• 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).
Saturday, July 28, 2018
PaperBack:
“The Case of the Sun Bather’s Diary”
Part of a series honoring the late author and blogger Bill Crider.
The Case of the Sun Bather’s Diary, by Erle Stanley Gardner (Pocket, 1962). This is the 47th book in Gardner’s best-selling series starring Los Angeles defense attorney Perry Mason. Cover illustration by Robert McGinnis.
The Case of the Sun Bather’s Diary, by Erle Stanley Gardner (Pocket, 1962). This is the 47th book in Gardner’s best-selling series starring Los Angeles defense attorney Perry Mason. Cover illustration by Robert McGinnis.
Monday, July 09, 2018
How Money Changed Mason
I, for one, had never read this sort of background information before. It comes from a Francis M. Nevins piece, in Mystery*File, about Erle Stanley Gardner’s incipient, Hammett-esque crime fiction:
The earliest published stories of Erle Stanley Gardner, dating back to the middle 1920s, were written in a style that might best be described as non-existent. Around the end of the decade he began to be heavily influenced in terms both of style and story substance by Dashiell Hammett, and he remained more or less in Hammett’s shadow during the first few years he was writing novels including the earliest cases of Perry Mason, which began to appear in 1933.You can read all of Nevins’ fine piece here.
Mason as portrayed in the first nine novels about him could almost be a Hammett character: a tiger in the social Darwinian jungle, totally self-reliant, asking no favors, despising the weaklings who want society to care for them. Then a sea-change came over the character. The Saturday Evening Post offered Gardner a ton of money for permission to serialize the Mason novels before their book publication, but part of the deal was that the character had to be toned down to conform to the magazine’s “family values” ideology.
Money talked. Mason from then on became a much tamer character, still skating on the thin edge of the law but always as advocate for a client we knew was innocent, so that we readers could delight in his legal tricks without the moral qualms we might experience if we thought the client might be guilty.
Wednesday, November 30, 2016
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.
• 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.
Monday, February 08, 2016
Bullet Points: First 2016 Edition — Finally!
This has been an extraordinarily busy time for me, which should explain why there have been fewer than normal postings in The Rap Sheet during the last month. Following the most recent holiday madness, I took on the task of helping to remodel two rooms in my house—both of which I’d passed on redoing when I first moved into this now 110-year-old Seattle residence back in the late 1990s. Tearing off wallpaper and removing baseboards, mudding and sanding walls, painting everything again, and then building new bookcases has caused a serious strain on my writing hours. I’m burning candles at more than their two ends. I apologize to readers for not being more active on The Rap Sheet and Killer Covers than I have been lately, but with any luck, this test of my construction skills should end soon. I hope ...
Meanwhile, let me pass along a passel of news items that should be of some interest to crime-fiction readers.
• With the centennial of author John D. MacDonald’s birth coming up in July (on July 24, to be exact) Florida’s Sarasota Herald-Tribune newspaper has initiated a series of remembrances it calls “John D. and Me.” Installment number one came from writer John Jakes, while Stephen King provided the initial follow-up. Other contributors have been Tim Dorsey, Jeffery Deaver, Don Bruns, and Heather Graham.
Unless things go awry, you should be able to keep up with the series entries here.
• And if that isn’t enough …: Robert Fulford from Canada’s National Post looks at how MacDonald invented the subgenre of Florida crime fiction, and how it has grown and evolved since his death in 1986.
• This should be especially welcome news for fans of Erle Stanley Gardner’s clever, sometimes comical Bertha Cool and Donald Lam detective series, which he wrote under the pseudonym A.A. Fair. In December 2016, Hard Case Crime will publish an unexpected and forgotten 30th installment of that series, titled The Knife Slipped. “Lost for more than 75 years,” HCC explains on its Web site, “The Knife Slipped was meant to be the second book in the series but got shelved when Gardner’s publisher objected to (among other things) Bertha Cool’s tendency to ‘talk tough, swear, smoke cigarettes, and try to gyp people.’ But this tale of adultery and corruption, of double-crosses and triple identities—however shocking for 1939—shines today as a glorious present from the past, a return to the heyday of private eyes and shady dames, of powerful criminals, crooked cops, blazing dialogue, and delicious plot twists.” Oh, and the cover of this novel was painted by the legendary Robert McGinnis. I can’t wait to get my hands on The Knife Slipped!
• From In Reference to Murder: “Sherlock fans may be disappointed to hear that the fourth season of the show probably won’t air until sometime in 2017, according to PBS president Paula Kerger. Although the show will begin production early this year, the busy schedules of Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman add up to a delay in Sherlock’s timeline.” Well, darn it all!
• Oh no, say it isn’t so: The much-maligned 1990 ABC-TV series Cop Rock, a “musical police drama” co-created by Steven Bochco (of Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue), is finally due out in DVD format. Television Obscurities reports that the full series will be released by Shout! Factory this coming May 17. “The 3-disc set will include the 11 episodes plus new interviews with creator Steven Bochco, co-star Anne Bobby, and others,” the blog explains. “Shout! calls the release a ‘cause for both celebration and a long-overdue reappraisal of a series that has been called one of the most unusual programs of all time.’” Unusual isn’t the same thing as saying it was good.
• Editor Janet Rudolph will focus the next edition of her magazine, Mystery Readers Journal, on New York mysteries, and she’s now in the market for reviews (50-250 words), articles (250-1,000 words), and Author! Author! essays (500-1,500 words) to fill out the contents. If you’d like to make a submission, contact Rudolph at janet@mysteryreaders.org. The deadline for copy is February 20.
• Alcatraz Island in 1880, long before that hump in San Francisco Bay hosted one of America’s most notorious penitentiaries.
• To celebrate the half-century anniversary of their small-screen debut in 1966, The Monkees—“the greatest fake band ever assembled for a madcap TV show”—will release a new album, titled Good Times!, and engage in “a lengthy North American tour kicking off May 18 in Fort Myers, Florida,” reports Mashable.
• The Booksteve Channel has early publicity clips for The Monkees.
• The Thrill Begins, a blog presented under the auspices of the International Thriller Writers, spent all of this last week interviewing crime and mystery fiction critics, sometimes with humorous results. The reviewers being grilled were Peter Rozovsky of Detectives Beyond Borders, Kristopher Zgorski of BOLO Books, Katrina Niidas Holm of the late, great Life Sentence, Carole Barrowman from Wisconsin’s Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and Benoit Lievre of Dead End Follies.
• I was very sorry to hear about the passing, at age 73, of fiction anthologist and cinema historian Jon Tuska, who wrote—among many other works—1978’s The Detective in Hollywood: The Movie Careers of the Great Fictional Private Eyes and Their Creators, which I have long considered a must-have resource book. According to his obituary, Tuska breathed his last on Monday, January 18, “after a brief battle with cancer.” That note goes on to explain:
I was fortunate to meet and interview Tuska in the early 1980s for a Portland, Oregon-based arts magazine called Stepping Out, and I’m sure I still have that particular issue someplace in my files, though I can’t seem to lay my hands on it right now. If and when I do locate that edition, though, I shall certainly post my interview with Tuska on this page. (Hat tip to Bill Crider’s Pop Culture Magazine.)
• The first part of David F. Walker’s new John Shaft comic-book series, Imitation of Life, is due out this week, and though I don’t see a print edition available yet, Amazon has the Kindle version for sale here. Steve Aldous, author of The World of Shaft, offers a sampling of the interior art here. He
has also posted the covers from Part II and Part III of this story, along with this link to a new interview with Walker in Bleeding Cool.
• This is rather unexpected. It turns out that the book “Britons are most likely to have lied about reading” is … Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll. I’d have expected it to be Leo Tolstoy’s mammoth War and Peace, or Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, or maybe even David Foster Wallace’s self-indulgent but nonetheless oft-lauded Infinite Jest. But no. Britain’s Telegraph lists 20 works of fiction (more than that, if you count the Harry Potter series installments separately) that residents of Great Britain claim to have read, when in fact they have not. Of those, I’m pleased to say I have actually, truly digested all but a couple (including Fifty Shades of Gray—no thanks), and that while I haven’t read Alice’s Adventures myself, my mother did read it to me as a small boy.
• I, for one, would be interested to know how this list compares with an equivalent study of American reading accomplishments.
• Crime Watch blogger Craig Sisterson writes on Facebook that New Zealand novelist Paul Cleave—whose Five Minutes Alone won the 2015 Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Crime Novel—“has reportedly been made an Honorary Literary Fellow in the New Zealand Society of Authors Waitangi Day Honours (for those outside New Zealand, Waitangi Day is New Zealand's national day). Very well deserved, and great to see Paul get some recognition among the local literary world.”
• Author Max Allan Collins has recently been writing quite a bit in his blog about his repeatedly delayed heart surgery (fingers crossed for Collins’ swift recovery—whenever the procedure is done!), but in last week’s post he added this good news:
• It seems that distinguished essayist and poet T.S. Eliot was a fan of Golden Age detective stories, at one point describing Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone (1868) as “the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels.”
• Critic Mike Ripley’s “Getting Away with Murder” column for February contains observations on the annual Hodder and John Murray Crime Party, a new edition of James Crumley’s 1978 classic yarn, The Last Good Kiss (due out in April from UK publisher Black Swan), new releases by Robert Crais, Susan Moody, and others, and a Golden Age of Crime Weekend event scheduled as part of the Essex Book Festival (March 1-31). Read all of Ripley’s piece on the Shots Web site.
• No surprise here: Raymond Chandler’s 1953 novel, The Long Goodbye, is Benjamin Black’s favorite outing for Los Angeles private eye Philip Marlowe. “Chandler never wrote with such passionate conviction as he does in this long and darkly tormented work,” opines Black, the alter-ego behind which Irish author John Banville produces his own works of crime fiction—including The Black-Eyed Blonde (2014), a sort-of-sequel to The Long Goobye. “In the figure of the best-selling but self-hating author Roger Wade, we glimpse an exaggerated version of Chandler himself, who throughout his writing life chafed under the label of ‘mere’ thriller-writer.” You’ll find all of Black/Banville’s thoughts on this matter in The Independent.
• Here’s something I didn’t know before: Allen Dulles, the first civilian director of America’s Central Intelligence Agency, was a friend of Ian Fleming and a follower of his James Bond spy adventures.
• Nancie Clare is back with another year of novelist interviews for the Speaking of Mysteries podcast, beginning 2016 with Joe R. Lansdale, author of the new Hap and Leonard tale, Honky Tonk Samurai. Her other recent respondents include Denise Mina (Blood Salt Water), Joe Clifford (Lamentation), and Robert Crais (The Promise).
• S.W. Lauden talks with Rob Hart, author of the brand-new Portland-based Ash McKenna novel, City of Rose.
• You might recognize Joseph Goodrich as the editor of Blood Relations: The Selected Letters of Ellery Queen, 1947-1950 (2012), but he’s also a playwright. And his adaptation of Queen’s 1942 novel, Calamity Town, had its “world premiere” in Calgary, Alberta, at the end of last month. The Calgary Herald called it “an example of economical and polished crime fiction that is as theatrical as it is intriguing.” Goodrich tells me that he’s already “been commissioned to do a second Nero Wolfe play for Park Square Theater in St. Paul [Minnesota]. It goes up in June/July of 2017.”
• I never cease to be amazed by the lengths some businesses—both respectable and dubious—will go to in order to obtain free advertising. Among the worst abusers are folks who fake comments on blogs such as this one (comments often rife with typos or so mangled that it’s obvious they come from non-English speaking countries), and incorporate into them their Web site URLs. An example was this response to a piece I wrote about this year’s Agatha Award nominees: “I want to thank you for the superb post!! I surely liked every bit of it. I’ve bookmarked your internet site so I can take a appear at the latest articles you post later on.” At the end was a link to a “commode chair manufacturer.” Needless to say, I deleted that comment.
Meanwhile, let me pass along a passel of news items that should be of some interest to crime-fiction readers.
• With the centennial of author John D. MacDonald’s birth coming up in July (on July 24, to be exact) Florida’s Sarasota Herald-Tribune newspaper has initiated a series of remembrances it calls “John D. and Me.” Installment number one came from writer John Jakes, while Stephen King provided the initial follow-up. Other contributors have been Tim Dorsey, Jeffery Deaver, Don Bruns, and Heather Graham.
• And if that isn’t enough …: Robert Fulford from Canada’s National Post looks at how MacDonald invented the subgenre of Florida crime fiction, and how it has grown and evolved since his death in 1986.
• This should be especially welcome news for fans of Erle Stanley Gardner’s clever, sometimes comical Bertha Cool and Donald Lam detective series, which he wrote under the pseudonym A.A. Fair. In December 2016, Hard Case Crime will publish an unexpected and forgotten 30th installment of that series, titled The Knife Slipped. “Lost for more than 75 years,” HCC explains on its Web site, “The Knife Slipped was meant to be the second book in the series but got shelved when Gardner’s publisher objected to (among other things) Bertha Cool’s tendency to ‘talk tough, swear, smoke cigarettes, and try to gyp people.’ But this tale of adultery and corruption, of double-crosses and triple identities—however shocking for 1939—shines today as a glorious present from the past, a return to the heyday of private eyes and shady dames, of powerful criminals, crooked cops, blazing dialogue, and delicious plot twists.” Oh, and the cover of this novel was painted by the legendary Robert McGinnis. I can’t wait to get my hands on The Knife Slipped!
• From In Reference to Murder: “Sherlock fans may be disappointed to hear that the fourth season of the show probably won’t air until sometime in 2017, according to PBS president Paula Kerger. Although the show will begin production early this year, the busy schedules of Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman add up to a delay in Sherlock’s timeline.” Well, darn it all!
• Oh no, say it isn’t so: The much-maligned 1990 ABC-TV series Cop Rock, a “musical police drama” co-created by Steven Bochco (of Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue), is finally due out in DVD format. Television Obscurities reports that the full series will be released by Shout! Factory this coming May 17. “The 3-disc set will include the 11 episodes plus new interviews with creator Steven Bochco, co-star Anne Bobby, and others,” the blog explains. “Shout! calls the release a ‘cause for both celebration and a long-overdue reappraisal of a series that has been called one of the most unusual programs of all time.’” Unusual isn’t the same thing as saying it was good.
• Editor Janet Rudolph will focus the next edition of her magazine, Mystery Readers Journal, on New York mysteries, and she’s now in the market for reviews (50-250 words), articles (250-1,000 words), and Author! Author! essays (500-1,500 words) to fill out the contents. If you’d like to make a submission, contact Rudolph at janet@mysteryreaders.org. The deadline for copy is February 20.
• Alcatraz Island in 1880, long before that hump in San Francisco Bay hosted one of America’s most notorious penitentiaries.
• To celebrate the half-century anniversary of their small-screen debut in 1966, The Monkees—“the greatest fake band ever assembled for a madcap TV show”—will release a new album, titled Good Times!, and engage in “a lengthy North American tour kicking off May 18 in Fort Myers, Florida,” reports Mashable.
• The Booksteve Channel has early publicity clips for The Monkees.
• The Thrill Begins, a blog presented under the auspices of the International Thriller Writers, spent all of this last week interviewing crime and mystery fiction critics, sometimes with humorous results. The reviewers being grilled were Peter Rozovsky of Detectives Beyond Borders, Kristopher Zgorski of BOLO Books, Katrina Niidas Holm of the late, great Life Sentence, Carole Barrowman from Wisconsin’s Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and Benoit Lievre of Dead End Follies.
• I was very sorry to hear about the passing, at age 73, of fiction anthologist and cinema historian Jon Tuska, who wrote—among many other works—1978’s The Detective in Hollywood: The Movie Careers of the Great Fictional Private Eyes and Their Creators, which I have long considered a must-have resource book. According to his obituary, Tuska breathed his last on Monday, January 18, “after a brief battle with cancer.” That note goes on to explain:
He graduated from Marquette University in Milwaukee in 1966. He was a renaissance man, known worldwide for his expertise on Western films and fiction. He wrote or edited over 30 books, consulted on television projects, taught and lectured, and between 1983 and 1991, he was associated with Oregon Public Broadcasting as the host of several classical music programs. In 1991, with his wife, Vicki Piekarski, he founded Golden West Literary Agency, which represented many of the authors of classic Western fiction.A list of Tuska’s books can be found here.
I was fortunate to meet and interview Tuska in the early 1980s for a Portland, Oregon-based arts magazine called Stepping Out, and I’m sure I still have that particular issue someplace in my files, though I can’t seem to lay my hands on it right now. If and when I do locate that edition, though, I shall certainly post my interview with Tuska on this page. (Hat tip to Bill Crider’s Pop Culture Magazine.)
• The first part of David F. Walker’s new John Shaft comic-book series, Imitation of Life, is due out this week, and though I don’t see a print edition available yet, Amazon has the Kindle version for sale here. Steve Aldous, author of The World of Shaft, offers a sampling of the interior art here. He
• This is rather unexpected. It turns out that the book “Britons are most likely to have lied about reading” is … Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll. I’d have expected it to be Leo Tolstoy’s mammoth War and Peace, or Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, or maybe even David Foster Wallace’s self-indulgent but nonetheless oft-lauded Infinite Jest. But no. Britain’s Telegraph lists 20 works of fiction (more than that, if you count the Harry Potter series installments separately) that residents of Great Britain claim to have read, when in fact they have not. Of those, I’m pleased to say I have actually, truly digested all but a couple (including Fifty Shades of Gray—no thanks), and that while I haven’t read Alice’s Adventures myself, my mother did read it to me as a small boy.
• I, for one, would be interested to know how this list compares with an equivalent study of American reading accomplishments.
• Crime Watch blogger Craig Sisterson writes on Facebook that New Zealand novelist Paul Cleave—whose Five Minutes Alone won the 2015 Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Crime Novel—“has reportedly been made an Honorary Literary Fellow in the New Zealand Society of Authors Waitangi Day Honours (for those outside New Zealand, Waitangi Day is New Zealand's national day). Very well deserved, and great to see Paul get some recognition among the local literary world.”
• Author Max Allan Collins has recently been writing quite a bit in his blog about his repeatedly delayed heart surgery (fingers crossed for Collins’ swift recovery—whenever the procedure is done!), but in last week’s post he added this good news:
[M]y complete novel version of Road to Perdition the movie is due to be published along with reprints of Road to Purgatory and Road to Paradise. You may recall that my Perdition novelization was reduced to a pale shadow of itself back in the day—a 40,000-word condensation of the 70,000-word novel is what was foisted upon the public (it even made the New York Times best-seller list). As a great man once said, “Pfui.” But we appear to be on the verge of vindication.• From Crimespree Magazine comes news that “The Friends of the St. Paul Public Library [have] announced the nominees for the 28th annual Minnesota Book Awards.” The category of Genre Fiction contains four novels: The Devereaux Decision, by Steve McEllistrem (Calumet Editions); The Grave Soul, by Ellen Hart (Minotaur); He’s Either Dead or in St. Paul, by D.B. Moon (Three Waters); and Season of Fear, by Brian Freeman (Quercus). The winner in this and seven additional categories will be declared on April 16.
In addition, new editions of Black Hats and Red Sky in Morning are in the works, to be published under my own name for the first time (R.I.P., Patrick Culhane).
All five of these books will be published by Brash Books, which is in part the brainchild of my buddy Lee Goldberg.
• It seems that distinguished essayist and poet T.S. Eliot was a fan of Golden Age detective stories, at one point describing Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone (1868) as “the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels.”
• Critic Mike Ripley’s “Getting Away with Murder” column for February contains observations on the annual Hodder and John Murray Crime Party, a new edition of James Crumley’s 1978 classic yarn, The Last Good Kiss (due out in April from UK publisher Black Swan), new releases by Robert Crais, Susan Moody, and others, and a Golden Age of Crime Weekend event scheduled as part of the Essex Book Festival (March 1-31). Read all of Ripley’s piece on the Shots Web site.
• No surprise here: Raymond Chandler’s 1953 novel, The Long Goodbye, is Benjamin Black’s favorite outing for Los Angeles private eye Philip Marlowe. “Chandler never wrote with such passionate conviction as he does in this long and darkly tormented work,” opines Black, the alter-ego behind which Irish author John Banville produces his own works of crime fiction—including The Black-Eyed Blonde (2014), a sort-of-sequel to The Long Goobye. “In the figure of the best-selling but self-hating author Roger Wade, we glimpse an exaggerated version of Chandler himself, who throughout his writing life chafed under the label of ‘mere’ thriller-writer.” You’ll find all of Black/Banville’s thoughts on this matter in The Independent.
• Here’s something I didn’t know before: Allen Dulles, the first civilian director of America’s Central Intelligence Agency, was a friend of Ian Fleming and a follower of his James Bond spy adventures.
• Nancie Clare is back with another year of novelist interviews for the Speaking of Mysteries podcast, beginning 2016 with Joe R. Lansdale, author of the new Hap and Leonard tale, Honky Tonk Samurai. Her other recent respondents include Denise Mina (Blood Salt Water), Joe Clifford (Lamentation), and Robert Crais (The Promise).
• S.W. Lauden talks with Rob Hart, author of the brand-new Portland-based Ash McKenna novel, City of Rose.
• You might recognize Joseph Goodrich as the editor of Blood Relations: The Selected Letters of Ellery Queen, 1947-1950 (2012), but he’s also a playwright. And his adaptation of Queen’s 1942 novel, Calamity Town, had its “world premiere” in Calgary, Alberta, at the end of last month. The Calgary Herald called it “an example of economical and polished crime fiction that is as theatrical as it is intriguing.” Goodrich tells me that he’s already “been commissioned to do a second Nero Wolfe play for Park Square Theater in St. Paul [Minnesota]. It goes up in June/July of 2017.”
• I never cease to be amazed by the lengths some businesses—both respectable and dubious—will go to in order to obtain free advertising. Among the worst abusers are folks who fake comments on blogs such as this one (comments often rife with typos or so mangled that it’s obvious they come from non-English speaking countries), and incorporate into them their Web site URLs. An example was this response to a piece I wrote about this year’s Agatha Award nominees: “I want to thank you for the superb post!! I surely liked every bit of it. I’ve bookmarked your internet site so I can take a appear at the latest articles you post later on.” At the end was a link to a “commode chair manufacturer.” Needless to say, I deleted that comment.
Tuesday, March 31, 2015
Mason to the Rescue
I appreciate Gardner’s complex plotting and propulsive storytelling style, so I often dip into those boxes of his work for my reading material. This practice proved recently to be a damn smart one. I had boarded a train bound south from Seattle to Portland, Oregon, with three books in my bags. The first two were new or forthcoming novels, about which I thought to write for either The Rap Sheet or Kirkus Reviews. The third was Gardner’s 1941 Mason outing, The Case of the Haunted Husband. It was a four-hour train ride, so I settled down initially with one of the new works, figuring to polish off at least most of it before arriving in the Beaver State. However, after reading 100 pages, I’d had quite enough, and turned to the second new novel … which was a product of the same publishing imprint … and which I also decided wasn’t worth my time. (I won’t say what the imprint was, but may have to be more wary of it in the future.)
Finally, I picked up The Case of the Haunted Husband. And the next thing I knew, I’d reached my destination, oblivious to the miles passed and cozily wrapped in the world of attorney Mason, his ever-protective secretary, Della Street, and their private-eye colleague, Paul Drake. The Case of the Haunted Husband, Gardner’s 18th Mason novel, was one I hadn’t read before, and I enjoyed it immensely--enough so, that I made it the focus of my new Kirkus Reviews column.
By the way, this is the latest entry in my all-too-occasional “rediscovered reads” series for Kirkus.
Sunday, March 01, 2015
Introducing Perry Mason
A good reminder, from Today in Mystery History:
March 1, 1933. On this date The Case of the Velvet Claws was published. Erle Stanley Gardner had been writing stories and novellas at an amazing rate, mostly for Black Mask Magazine, trying to earn enough money to drop being a lawyer and go full-time as an author. It took another lawyer to help him out: the fictional but wildly successful Perry Mason, who premiered in this book. 75 novels and a hit TV show followed.READ MORE: “The Best TV Crime Drama Openers, #9: Perry Mason,” by J. Kingston Pierce (The Rap Sheet).
Monday, June 10, 2013
No Question About It, That’s a Punchy Name
Look at what I just found on the Amazon U.S. Web site: a sales page for The Black-Eyed Blonde, Irish author John Banville’s long-promised novel featuring Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe. According to that page, Banville’s book--which will appear under his Benjamin Black pseudonym--is due out from publisher Henry Holt on March 4, 2014. It was originally slated for release sometime later this year.
As Tom Williams, author of last year’s Chandler biography, A Mysterious Something in the Light, notes in his blog, there’s a history to the name of this new Marlowe outing:
The title was one of several potential pulp titles listed in Chandler’s notebooks. It has been used before, as the title of an authorised short story by Benjamin M. Schutz in Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe: A Centennial Celebration, and, perhaps more interestingly, by Erle Stanley Gardner as the title for one of his Perry Mason stories. Since Gardner and Chandler were great friends it is possible that the Chandler suggested the title to Gardner. There is no mention of it in the correspondence I have read, but Ray and [his wife] Cissy were occasional visitors to the Gardner ranch and perhaps, over a coffee or a whisky, the title was mentioned. We will never know, of course. Gardner’s book is long out of print so it seems, for now at least, Chandler will be associated with the title once again.Hmm. I own a paperback copy of Gardner’s The Case of the Black-Eyed Blonde (1944). Maybe I ought to read that before tackling Banville/Black’s forthcoming tale.
Tuesday, January 22, 2013
Wheels of Misfortune
In my Kirkus Reviews column today, I look back at Erle Stanley Gardner’s other great mystery-fiction series, that one starring the odd-couple detective duo of Bertha Cool and Donald Lam. Specifically, I recall 1941’s Spill the Jackpot, the series’ fourth installment, which finds the pair in Las Vegas, trying to track down a runaway fiancée and get to the bottom of a slot machine racket.
You will find that piece here.
You will find that piece here.
Monday, June 06, 2011
There Can Be Value in Criticism
While finishing work on a good-sized encyclopedia entry about Perry Mason creator Erle Stanley Gardner, I came across a story about his initial efforts as an author that I thought was fun and might encourage today’s young writers to keep plucking away at their work.
It seems that in the early 1920s, Gardner decided he wanted to do more than be a defense attorney all his adult life. So he set about trying to break into the pulp-fiction-writing market. He recognized right off the bat, however, that he was no natural-born author. “It was like I was trying to sign my name with my left hand,” Gardner later recalled. “I knew what I wanted to do, but for the life of me I couldn’t do it.” To protect his reputation, he submitted his stories to editors under a pseudonym, Charles M. Green.
As time went on, Gardner managed to peddle a couple of jokes to a newspaper, then sold a humorous skit involving a Frenchman and a hotel detective. But the first major work he saw published was a novelette called “The Shrieking Skeleton,” which he sent in 1923 to what was then a three-year-old pulp-fiction magazine called Black Mask. Its editors were distinctly unimpressed. In fact, they thought Gardner’s story was so bad, they forwarded it to the periodical’s too-serious circulation director as a gag, suggesting he plan a major promotional campaign around it. Predictably incensed, the circulation man responded with a note highlighting the narrative’s failings and begging for its rejection.
The editors subsequently returned Gardner’s manuscript with a refusal notice, but accidentally included the circulation director’s detailed criticism--which inspired the would-be wordsmith to rewrite his tale and resubmit it. Black Mask bought “The Shrieking Skeleton” the second time around, launching Gardner’s literary career.
It seems that in the early 1920s, Gardner decided he wanted to do more than be a defense attorney all his adult life. So he set about trying to break into the pulp-fiction-writing market. He recognized right off the bat, however, that he was no natural-born author. “It was like I was trying to sign my name with my left hand,” Gardner later recalled. “I knew what I wanted to do, but for the life of me I couldn’t do it.” To protect his reputation, he submitted his stories to editors under a pseudonym, Charles M. Green.
As time went on, Gardner managed to peddle a couple of jokes to a newspaper, then sold a humorous skit involving a Frenchman and a hotel detective. But the first major work he saw published was a novelette called “The Shrieking Skeleton,” which he sent in 1923 to what was then a three-year-old pulp-fiction magazine called Black Mask. Its editors were distinctly unimpressed. In fact, they thought Gardner’s story was so bad, they forwarded it to the periodical’s too-serious circulation director as a gag, suggesting he plan a major promotional campaign around it. Predictably incensed, the circulation man responded with a note highlighting the narrative’s failings and begging for its rejection.
The editors subsequently returned Gardner’s manuscript with a refusal notice, but accidentally included the circulation director’s detailed criticism--which inspired the would-be wordsmith to rewrite his tale and resubmit it. Black Mask bought “The Shrieking Skeleton” the second time around, launching Gardner’s literary career.
Sunday, June 13, 2010
A Dapper, Ingenious Chap
Thirty years ago, The Dial Press issued The Adventures of Lester Leith, an Ellery Queen-edited, hardcover collection of Erle Stanley Gardner’s delightful tales featuring Leith, the audacious “Robin Hood of detectives” who “robbed crooks ‘of their ill-gotten spoils’ and gave the proceeds to deserving charities--less ‘20 percent for costs of collection.’” It’s been a while since I thumbed through those Leith adventures. But Evan Lewis’ posting today of “The Crimson Mask,” a Lester Leith novelette from 1931, got me to pick up that Dial Press edition again--which, by the way, didn’t include “The Crimson Mask” among its five tales.
Thursday, March 11, 2010
The Case of the Avid Author
Most of the time, Erle Stanley Gardner seems like a figure out of the distant past. It’s easy to forget that, although the creator of defense attorney Perry Mason, private eyes Bertha Cool and Donald Lam, and District Attorney Douglas Selby was born way back in 1889, he died only 40 years ago today, at age 80.
Growing up, I didn’t appreciate Gardner’s literary contributions. I thought of him only as the man behind the TV series Perry Mason, which--while I enjoyed both Raymond Burr in the title role and some of that show’s dramatic courtroom scenes--always seemed too consistently formatted. It has only been over the last few years that I’ve come to recognize Gardner as the author of some highly imaginative, and usually complexly plotted, novels. He wasn’t a poetic author, and he sometimes rushed to wrap up his tales. But he was definitely a prolific writer, turning out 80 Mason novels and dozens of other books beyond those. I’ve only read a fraction of this former California lawyer’s oeuvre, but enough to know now that when I pick up a Gardner novel, I am guaranteed a consuming and imaginative adventure.
Maybe this 40th anniversary of his death should be another excuse for me to indiscriminately pluck a title from my shelf of Gardner books. I could certainly choose my reading matter less wisely.
Growing up, I didn’t appreciate Gardner’s literary contributions. I thought of him only as the man behind the TV series Perry Mason, which--while I enjoyed both Raymond Burr in the title role and some of that show’s dramatic courtroom scenes--always seemed too consistently formatted. It has only been over the last few years that I’ve come to recognize Gardner as the author of some highly imaginative, and usually complexly plotted, novels. He wasn’t a poetic author, and he sometimes rushed to wrap up his tales. But he was definitely a prolific writer, turning out 80 Mason novels and dozens of other books beyond those. I’ve only read a fraction of this former California lawyer’s oeuvre, but enough to know now that when I pick up a Gardner novel, I am guaranteed a consuming and imaginative adventure.
Maybe this 40th anniversary of his death should be another excuse for me to indiscriminately pluck a title from my shelf of Gardner books. I could certainly choose my reading matter less wisely.
Friday, July 17, 2009
Happy Birthday, Erle
As The Writer’s Almanac reminds us, it was 120 years ago today that Erle Stanley Gardner took his first experimental breath in Malden, Massachusetts. As a boy, he moved west with his family to California, taught himself to be a lawyer, and eventually abandoned that profession in favor of writing crime and mystery fiction.
Restless and prolific, and willing to work under a variety of pseudonyms, Gardner penned more than 80 novels about a skillful Los Angeles attorney named Perry Mason, 29 others featuring private eyes Bertha Cool and Donald Lam (beginning with The Bigger They Come in 1939), and myriad short stories starring lesser-known protagonists such as “gentleman thief” Lester Leith and “Phantom Crook” Ed Jenkins. He died in 1970, but is still recognized as one of the best-selling American authors of all time. And the 1957-1966 Perry Mason TV series, based on his characters, has evidently influenced generations of young people to become lawyers. Sonia Sotomayor, President Barack Obama’s first nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court, spoke during her confirmation hearings this week about watching Perry Mason “all of the time” as a little girl.
READ MORE: “Perry Mason Never Dies,” by Stephen Bowie (The Classic TV History Blog).
Restless and prolific, and willing to work under a variety of pseudonyms, Gardner penned more than 80 novels about a skillful Los Angeles attorney named Perry Mason, 29 others featuring private eyes Bertha Cool and Donald Lam (beginning with The Bigger They Come in 1939), and myriad short stories starring lesser-known protagonists such as “gentleman thief” Lester Leith and “Phantom Crook” Ed Jenkins. He died in 1970, but is still recognized as one of the best-selling American authors of all time. And the 1957-1966 Perry Mason TV series, based on his characters, has evidently influenced generations of young people to become lawyers. Sonia Sotomayor, President Barack Obama’s first nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court, spoke during her confirmation hearings this week about watching Perry Mason “all of the time” as a little girl.
READ MORE: “Perry Mason Never Dies,” by Stephen Bowie (The Classic TV History Blog).
Monday, February 09, 2009
Putting Up a Good Front
I hope I’m not establishing a trend here, but I have chosen to participate in my second meme of 2009. The first one required that I post 16 random facts about myself. This time, I am tagging onto a meme that started at a Web site called Weekly Geeks. The assignment is to 
“pick a book--any book, really--and search out multiple book cover images for that book. They could span a decade or two (or more) ... Or they could span several countries. Which cover is your favorite? Which one is your least favorite? Which one best ‘captures’ what the book is about?”
One of the half dozen or so works I’m currently reading is Turn on the Heat, the second installment of the classic Bertha Cool and Donald Lam detective series, created by novelist Erle Stanley Gardner under the pseudonym “A.A. Fair.” That series began with The Bigger They Come in 1939 and continued until 1970, when the 29th Cool and Lam novel, All Grass Isn’t Green, was published.
Turn on the Heat originally went on sale in January 1940. It finds obese private eye Bertha Cool and her “half-pint runt” of an operative, former attorney Donald Lam, being hired by a mysterious “Mr. Smith” to track down Amelia Lintig, the wife of an eye, ear, nose, and throat specialist who disappeared from the small town of Oakville, California, 21 years before. That disappearance followed a marital scandal involving Dr. James Lintig’s young nurse; neither Mrs. Lintig nor her unfaithful hubby has been spotted since. However, when Lam visits Oakville, he discovers that--by apparent coincidence--Amelia Lintig has also just dropped into town for the unexpected purpose of dismissing her long-ago divorce case, leaving her still married to James Lintig. Before Lam can get a handle on all of this, Amelia Lintig vanishes again, he’s given a thorough beating by parties unrecognized, he falls for and gains the assistance of an Oakview reporter, and a link is sought between the Lintigs’ troubled past and a political campaign in the present--a race that could be seriously jeopardized by revelations about extramarital dalliances of yore. As with most of Gardner/Fair’s Cool and Lam stories, clients are deceptive, Lam cleverly manipulates suspects toward a satisfying resolution of the case, and Mrs. Cool begrudgingly goes along with her op’s illegal connivances, because she knows there’s a guarantee of financial reward in the long run.
Searching carefully through the Web, I was able to come up with six different covers that have featured on Turn on the Heat over the years. The first two come from the 1940s; the rest were published at various times in the 1960s and ’70s:
Honestly, none of these jackets does a perfect job of representing Gardner/Fair’s tale, though the second one in the top row--showing a naked woman being strangled with a cord--was at least inspired by an event in this novel. The first jacket, with what looks like a vintage blow torch, signals the escalating tensions of Turn on the Heat, but the other fronts seem intended to draw the eyes of male book buyers, rather than capture anything about the plot on offer in this work. The two jackets on the bottom are particularly worthless--examples of what book designers of the “make love, not war” era thought was cool, but having only scant connection to Turn on the Heat. Those covers could have been featured on any number of ’60s detective novels, and worked just as well--or just as poorly--as they do on this one.
As far as I can tell, there hasn’t been another American edition of Turn on the Heat since the last one shown here (bottom right), which came out from Dell Publishing in 1972.
If you would like to see what other bloggers have been doing with this “judge a book by its cover” meme, click here.
One of the half dozen or so works I’m currently reading is Turn on the Heat, the second installment of the classic Bertha Cool and Donald Lam detective series, created by novelist Erle Stanley Gardner under the pseudonym “A.A. Fair.” That series began with The Bigger They Come in 1939 and continued until 1970, when the 29th Cool and Lam novel, All Grass Isn’t Green, was published.
Turn on the Heat originally went on sale in January 1940. It finds obese private eye Bertha Cool and her “half-pint runt” of an operative, former attorney Donald Lam, being hired by a mysterious “Mr. Smith” to track down Amelia Lintig, the wife of an eye, ear, nose, and throat specialist who disappeared from the small town of Oakville, California, 21 years before. That disappearance followed a marital scandal involving Dr. James Lintig’s young nurse; neither Mrs. Lintig nor her unfaithful hubby has been spotted since. However, when Lam visits Oakville, he discovers that--by apparent coincidence--Amelia Lintig has also just dropped into town for the unexpected purpose of dismissing her long-ago divorce case, leaving her still married to James Lintig. Before Lam can get a handle on all of this, Amelia Lintig vanishes again, he’s given a thorough beating by parties unrecognized, he falls for and gains the assistance of an Oakview reporter, and a link is sought between the Lintigs’ troubled past and a political campaign in the present--a race that could be seriously jeopardized by revelations about extramarital dalliances of yore. As with most of Gardner/Fair’s Cool and Lam stories, clients are deceptive, Lam cleverly manipulates suspects toward a satisfying resolution of the case, and Mrs. Cool begrudgingly goes along with her op’s illegal connivances, because she knows there’s a guarantee of financial reward in the long run.
Searching carefully through the Web, I was able to come up with six different covers that have featured on Turn on the Heat over the years. The first two come from the 1940s; the rest were published at various times in the 1960s and ’70s:
Honestly, none of these jackets does a perfect job of representing Gardner/Fair’s tale, though the second one in the top row--showing a naked woman being strangled with a cord--was at least inspired by an event in this novel. The first jacket, with what looks like a vintage blow torch, signals the escalating tensions of Turn on the Heat, but the other fronts seem intended to draw the eyes of male book buyers, rather than capture anything about the plot on offer in this work. The two jackets on the bottom are particularly worthless--examples of what book designers of the “make love, not war” era thought was cool, but having only scant connection to Turn on the Heat. Those covers could have been featured on any number of ’60s detective novels, and worked just as well--or just as poorly--as they do on this one.
As far as I can tell, there hasn’t been another American edition of Turn on the Heat since the last one shown here (bottom right), which came out from Dell Publishing in 1972.
If you would like to see what other bloggers have been doing with this “judge a book by its cover” meme, click here.
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Only the Perry Best
It was this last summer, when I spent some time researching a Rap Sheet post about what would have been the 118th birthday of mystery writer Erle Stanley Gardner, that I became aware of how modern author James Reasoner has been slowly but consistently reviewing Gardner’s classic Perry Mason novels in his blog, Rough Edges. As somebody who has read only a handful of the Mason novels (though I must have seen every episode of the 1957-1966 TV series by now), his diagnosis of this once-popular series has been fascinating.
Today, for instance, Reasoner looks back at The Case of the Daring Decoy, published in 1957, which he opines was “still a good period in the Perry Mason series, if not as consistently excellent as the more hard-boiled Thirties and Forties. By this time many of the books opened not with Mason, as the earlier ones do, but with the person who will turn out to be the client later on.” (Well, we now know where the format of the Raymond Burr TV series comes from, don’t we?) To compose previous posts, Reasoner read or re-read The Case of the Sun Bather’s Diary (1955), The Case of the Sleepwalker’s Niece (1936), The Case of the Silent Partner (1940), and The Case of the Velvet Claws, which was the first Mason outing, released in 1933.
Keep ’em coming, Jim.
Today, for instance, Reasoner looks back at The Case of the Daring Decoy, published in 1957, which he opines was “still a good period in the Perry Mason series, if not as consistently excellent as the more hard-boiled Thirties and Forties. By this time many of the books opened not with Mason, as the earlier ones do, but with the person who will turn out to be the client later on.” (Well, we now know where the format of the Raymond Burr TV series comes from, don’t we?) To compose previous posts, Reasoner read or re-read The Case of the Sun Bather’s Diary (1955), The Case of the Sleepwalker’s Niece (1936), The Case of the Silent Partner (1940), and The Case of the Velvet Claws, which was the first Mason outing, released in 1933.
Keep ’em coming, Jim.
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
The Defense Never Rests
When attorney-turned-author Erle Stanley Gardner’s first 1933 novel, The Case of the Velvet Claws, rolled off the printing press, its jacket featured a rather confident endorsement of its protagonist, penned by Thayer Hobson, then president of Gardner’s publishing company, William Morrow: “Perry Mason--criminal lawyer. Remember that name. You’ll meet him again.” Indeed, over the next 37 years, Los Angeles lawyer Mason would appear 
in 82 novels as well as short stories, comic strips, a highly successful daily radio serial, and an Emmy Award-winning 1957-1966 TV series that brought Gardner’s passionate defense counsel worldwide acclaim and made a star of its tough-jawed lead, Raymond Burr.
Gardner, who took his first gasping breath in Massachusetts but moved west with his family when he was just 10 years old, was born on this date back in 1889. For most of his life, he would identify himself as a Californian. After just a month’s stint in 1909 at Indiana’s Valparaiso University School of Law (he was suspended for boxing in the dormitory), Gardner returned to California and taught himself to be an attorney. In 1911, he passed the state bar exam and soon joined a firm in Oxnard, north of L.A. Easily bored with the routines of practicing law (he was excited only by trial work), Gardner moonlighted between cases as a hard-boiled writer, contributing stories to Black Mask and other “pulp magazines” of the 1920s and ’30s, and creating dozens of characters. As Kevin Burton Smith explains at his Thrilling Detective Web Site,
The noted English crime novelist H.R.F. Keating, who included Mason’s second adventure, The Case of the Sulky Girl (1933), in his perforce discriminating volume, Crime & Mystery: The 100 Best Books (1987), has opined that Gardner wasn’t a great stylist, but he made one crucial decision about the Mason tales: that the reader should always be able to outguess his protagonist. The trick was to see Mason add credibility and concreteness to conjecture.
“Usually in the beginning of a story,” explains the Web literary database Books & Writers, “a client enters Mason’s office: ‘A man came into the room who radiated restlessness. He was a thin man, with a very pointed nose and large ears. He walked with nervous, jerky steps. He was in his late twenties or early thirties.’ (from The Case of the Sulky Girl) Mason of course gets more attention in the story--he ‘gave the impression of bigness; not the bigness of fat, but the bigness of strength. He was broad-shouldered and rugged-faced, and his eyes were steady and patient. Frequently those eyes changed expression, but the face never changed its expression of rugged patience.’” Nonetheless, Mason wasn’t a two-fisted bulldog, like so many of the heroes of early hard-boiled fiction. “The character I am trying to create for him,” Gardner told his publisher, “is that of a fighter who is possessed of infinite patience.”
Transferring Perry Mason from printed page to silver screen was a lightning-fast process. Just a year after The Case of the Velvet Claws reached bookstores, the first Mason picture--The Case of the Howling Dog--started showing in theaters. Five more movies would be made over the next four years, most of them starring Warren William (who’d previously played S.S. Van Dine’s detective, Philo Vance.) But it wasn’t until the Eisenhower era that Perry made it to the small screen. Interestingly, Raymond Burr was not the original choice to play Gardner’s investigating-attorney: versatile film actor Fred MacMurray was offered the job first, but turned it down. (He’d later take top billing in My Three Sons). The Canadian-born Burr, who had starred with Jimmy Stewart in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) and the 1956 U.S. adaptation of that Japanese monster classic, Godzilla, was allowed to audition for the Mason part--but only if he also read for the role of L.A. district attorney Hamilton Burger. According to Wikipedia, “Erle Stanley Gardner happened to be sitting in on the auditions that day and excitedly shouted, ‘That’s Perry Mason’ upon seeing Burr. Gardner later made a cameo as a judge in the last episode of the original series.”
Burr would go on to film almost all of the 271 episodes that were made over nine years, with the exception of several that had to be shot while he was recovering from surgery in 1963. (Bette Davis and Hugh O’Brian were brought in to pitch-hit for him.) A 1973 revival of the show, The New Perry Mason, starring actor Monte Markham as the legendary trial attorney, debuted to great fanfare, but was canceled 15 episodes and numerous catcalls later. Then, nearly two decades after the original show went off the air, and following the run of his second successful series, Ironside (1967-1975), Burr--now sporting more weight and a full beard--returned
to the courtroom to shoot 26 Mason teleflicks, beginning with 1985’s Perry Mason Returns. His death in 1993 obviously ended his involvement, but a quartet of “Perry Mason Mystery Movies,” with other actors “subbing” for Perry, were broadcast over the next couple of years.
In other words, the on-screen Mason outlasted his creator by almost a quarter of a century. Erle Stanley Gardner died of cancer in 1970 at his home in Temecula, California, southeast of Los Angeles, and his cremated remains were apparently scattered across “his beloved Baja Peninsula,” Mexico. The posthumously published Case of the Postponed Murder (1973) was Gardner’s final Perry Mason outing, although a pair of new books featuring the character, The Case of the Burning Bequest and The Case of Too Many Murders, were penned by Thomas Chastain and published in 1990.
Nowadays, there are probably few people in the English-speaking world who don’t recognize the name “Perry Mason.” There is no more famous defense attorney in fiction. It seems likely, as publisher Hobson promised so long ago, that we will “meet him again” in some other incarnation, some other time. And yet, in one respect Gardner failed to accomplish the job he’d set out to do. A remarkable Web site called The Perry Mason TV Show Book, put together by Brian Kelleher and Diana Merrill, recalls that the California novelist “always believed that lawyers in general were treated unfairly.
READ MORE: “Erle Stanley Gardner Update,” by Bill Crider (Bill Crider’s Pop Culture Magazine); “Review: The Case of the Terrified Typist,” by Steve Lewis (Mystery*File); “Review: The Case of the Sun Bather’s Diary,” by James Reasoner (Rough Edges).
Gardner, who took his first gasping breath in Massachusetts but moved west with his family when he was just 10 years old, was born on this date back in 1889. For most of his life, he would identify himself as a Californian. After just a month’s stint in 1909 at Indiana’s Valparaiso University School of Law (he was suspended for boxing in the dormitory), Gardner returned to California and taught himself to be an attorney. In 1911, he passed the state bar exam and soon joined a firm in Oxnard, north of L.A. Easily bored with the routines of practicing law (he was excited only by trial work), Gardner moonlighted between cases as a hard-boiled writer, contributing stories to Black Mask and other “pulp magazines” of the 1920s and ’30s, and creating dozens of characters. As Kevin Burton Smith explains at his Thrilling Detective Web Site,
In his pulp days, Gardner was notorious for killing off the final heavies with the last bullet in the hero’s gun, which led to some editors teasing him about how all his good guys seemed to be such bad shots. Gardner’s alleged explanation? “At three cents a word, every time I say ‘Bang’ in the story I get three cents. If you think I’m going to finish the gun battle while my hero still has fifteen cents worth of unexploded ammunition in his gun, you’re nuts.”Perry Mason never made an appearance in the pages of Black Mask, but a rather similar Gardner-created attorney did: Ken Corning, who, according to Thrilling Detective, was “a slick, crusading lawyer ... who fought against injustice in a corrupt city.” While followers of Gardner’s early stories thought he might be remembered best for his creation, under the pseudonym “A.A. Fair,” of a private eye duo, Bertha Cool and Donald Lam (who star in the 2004 Hard Case Crime reissue, Top of the Heap), it was Mason who captured the reading public’s attention and held it mostly strongly. It didn’t take long before Gardner gave up legal practice in favor of novel-writing.
The noted English crime novelist H.R.F. Keating, who included Mason’s second adventure, The Case of the Sulky Girl (1933), in his perforce discriminating volume, Crime & Mystery: The 100 Best Books (1987), has opined that Gardner wasn’t a great stylist, but he made one crucial decision about the Mason tales: that the reader should always be able to outguess his protagonist. The trick was to see Mason add credibility and concreteness to conjecture.
“Usually in the beginning of a story,” explains the Web literary database Books & Writers, “a client enters Mason’s office: ‘A man came into the room who radiated restlessness. He was a thin man, with a very pointed nose and large ears. He walked with nervous, jerky steps. He was in his late twenties or early thirties.’ (from The Case of the Sulky Girl) Mason of course gets more attention in the story--he ‘gave the impression of bigness; not the bigness of fat, but the bigness of strength. He was broad-shouldered and rugged-faced, and his eyes were steady and patient. Frequently those eyes changed expression, but the face never changed its expression of rugged patience.’” Nonetheless, Mason wasn’t a two-fisted bulldog, like so many of the heroes of early hard-boiled fiction. “The character I am trying to create for him,” Gardner told his publisher, “is that of a fighter who is possessed of infinite patience.”
Transferring Perry Mason from printed page to silver screen was a lightning-fast process. Just a year after The Case of the Velvet Claws reached bookstores, the first Mason picture--The Case of the Howling Dog--started showing in theaters. Five more movies would be made over the next four years, most of them starring Warren William (who’d previously played S.S. Van Dine’s detective, Philo Vance.) But it wasn’t until the Eisenhower era that Perry made it to the small screen. Interestingly, Raymond Burr was not the original choice to play Gardner’s investigating-attorney: versatile film actor Fred MacMurray was offered the job first, but turned it down. (He’d later take top billing in My Three Sons). The Canadian-born Burr, who had starred with Jimmy Stewart in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) and the 1956 U.S. adaptation of that Japanese monster classic, Godzilla, was allowed to audition for the Mason part--but only if he also read for the role of L.A. district attorney Hamilton Burger. According to Wikipedia, “Erle Stanley Gardner happened to be sitting in on the auditions that day and excitedly shouted, ‘That’s Perry Mason’ upon seeing Burr. Gardner later made a cameo as a judge in the last episode of the original series.”
Burr would go on to film almost all of the 271 episodes that were made over nine years, with the exception of several that had to be shot while he was recovering from surgery in 1963. (Bette Davis and Hugh O’Brian were brought in to pitch-hit for him.) A 1973 revival of the show, The New Perry Mason, starring actor Monte Markham as the legendary trial attorney, debuted to great fanfare, but was canceled 15 episodes and numerous catcalls later. Then, nearly two decades after the original show went off the air, and following the run of his second successful series, Ironside (1967-1975), Burr--now sporting more weight and a full beard--returned
In other words, the on-screen Mason outlasted his creator by almost a quarter of a century. Erle Stanley Gardner died of cancer in 1970 at his home in Temecula, California, southeast of Los Angeles, and his cremated remains were apparently scattered across “his beloved Baja Peninsula,” Mexico. The posthumously published Case of the Postponed Murder (1973) was Gardner’s final Perry Mason outing, although a pair of new books featuring the character, The Case of the Burning Bequest and The Case of Too Many Murders, were penned by Thomas Chastain and published in 1990.
Nowadays, there are probably few people in the English-speaking world who don’t recognize the name “Perry Mason.” There is no more famous defense attorney in fiction. It seems likely, as publisher Hobson promised so long ago, that we will “meet him again” in some other incarnation, some other time. And yet, in one respect Gardner failed to accomplish the job he’d set out to do. A remarkable Web site called The Perry Mason TV Show Book, put together by Brian Kelleher and Diana Merrill, recalls that the California novelist “always believed that lawyers in general were treated unfairly.
In an article in TV Guide dealing with the state of television, he wrote that there were “two classes of persons who automatically enjoy poor public relations: the attorney at law and the mother in law.” In many ways, the Perry Mason character let the lawyers, at least, fight back. “Perry Mason represents a member of the legal profession who is fighting for human rights and liberties,” he wrote in the same article. “I am hoping that people who see him [on TV] will learn to appreciate the importance of the law and the necessity for fearless, intelligent lawyers who are, above all, primarily loyal to their clients.”Mason himself has earned the public’s respect. But more than 70 years after Gardner’s man tackled his first case, lawyers--along with politicians, reporters, and in some quarters, Catholic priests--continue to be looked upon with suspicion. Reforming his profession’s reputation may be one rare case Perry Mason can’t win.
READ MORE: “Erle Stanley Gardner Update,” by Bill Crider (Bill Crider’s Pop Culture Magazine); “Review: The Case of the Terrified Typist,” by Steve Lewis (Mystery*File); “Review: The Case of the Sun Bather’s Diary,” by James Reasoner (Rough Edges).
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
Confronting Frontal Nudity
Regular readers of The Rap Sheet know my fondness for vintage paperback fronts, especially those that Independent Crime’s Nathan Cain might define as “book cover porn.” I find the squeamishness of modern U.S. readers toward provocative novel jackets 
ludicrous, especially when they’re hit through every other medium by sexy imagery (see this new ad campaign for PETA, as an example), and when they appear more ready to take up arms against bared body parts on the nation’s bookshelves than they are violence in their crime and thriller fiction. I also applaud the willingness of publishers such as Hard Case Crime to bring back the sort of suggestive illustrations (see here and here) that were, interestingly, familiar to pre-Sexual Revolution Americans of the 1940s and ’50s, but are now deemed too risqué. Aren’t we all grown-ups here?
So Steve Steinbock’s post yesterday at Vorpal Blade Online about vintage Dell paperback covers struck me as amusing. Among the many fine examples he showcases of works by Ellery Queen, George Harmon Coxe, John Dickson Carr, and others are two versions of Fools Die on Friday, a Bertha Cool/Donald Lam mystery, originally published in 1947 and credited to “A.A. Fair,” one of the numerous pseudonyms employed by Perry Mason creator Erle Stanley Gardner. It seems that this novel bore two rather dissimilar paperback covers during its early years, one of which (shown on the left above) was distinctly racier than the other. When that original version (Dell #542) was republished (as Dell #1542), the redhead who’d previously been zipping up her skirt and displaying a handsome cleavage was now merely adjusting a shirtcuff. According to Bookscans, a paperback history site,
(Hat tip to Bill Crider.)
So Steve Steinbock’s post yesterday at Vorpal Blade Online about vintage Dell paperback covers struck me as amusing. Among the many fine examples he showcases of works by Ellery Queen, George Harmon Coxe, John Dickson Carr, and others are two versions of Fools Die on Friday, a Bertha Cool/Donald Lam mystery, originally published in 1947 and credited to “A.A. Fair,” one of the numerous pseudonyms employed by Perry Mason creator Erle Stanley Gardner. It seems that this novel bore two rather dissimilar paperback covers during its early years, one of which (shown on the left above) was distinctly racier than the other. When that original version (Dell #542) was republished (as Dell #1542), the redhead who’d previously been zipping up her skirt and displaying a handsome cleavage was now merely adjusting a shirtcuff. According to Bookscans, a paperback history site,
This is the only Dell cover illustration ever to be altered. The first was published in 1951, the later printing appeared in 1953. Robert Stanley remembers painting over the old illustration, but claims that he was never told the reason, or who the request came from. William Lyles, the Dell bibliographer, believes the change was ordered by either [William] Morrow (the hardcover publisher) or by Erle Stanley Gardner ...I guess American Puritanism comes and goes. Thanks to today’s condemnatory, hyper-religious posturing of U.S. conservatives and the dimwitted complacency of everybody else, it seems, the country is enduring another of its prudish periods. Fortunately, those old paperbacks aren’t yet being burned on the White House lawn, and I live with confidence that these priggish times, too, will pass.
The model in the illustration was obviously one of Stanley’s favorites. She graces the covers of literally dozens of vintage paperbacks. You guessed it ... she’s his wife, Rhoda.
So what happened between 1951 and 1953 that might have prompted such a change? Plenty. In 1952, Congress convened the House of Representatives Select Committee on Current Pornographic Materials. They wound up “suggesting” that a list of 60 paperback titles be banned by communities throughout the country, including works by Erskine Caldwell, John Steinbeck and Irving Shulman, to name only a few. ... Of particular interest to the Committee was the “pornographic” nature of modern book covers. Oddly, the Book Jacket Designers Guild (yes, they had a union, too) agreed with them. They saw no reason to make jacket illustrations overly provocative, especially if the work itself was not particularly sexual in nature.
This book [Fools Die on Friday] was NOT on anybody’s “bad” list, but somebody obviously thought the original cover illustration had crossed the line between good taste and indecency. And so Stanley was told to change the scene. The cover art is actually very true to the story. You will notice the copywriters also changed the dialog at the top of the scene. While they’re both close, neither of the quotes listed on the covers is taken verbatim from the text.
(In the book, Donald Lam, who unwittingly has a knack for attracting ALL women, has stashed a key witness in his apartment. Sgt. Sellers is on his way to search the place. She’s taking a bath when Lam gets there, just ahead of him. He--ever the honorable hero--turns his back as she gets dressed. Hey, whaddya expect in the early 50’s? That’s as risqué as it was allowed to get!)
(Hat tip to Bill Crider.)
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