A Busy Life, a Tranquil Passing

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I have learned that Canadian novelist J. Robert Janes, the much-admired author of World War II-era mysteries starring Chief Inspector Jean-Louis St-Cyr of France’s Sûreté and Detektiv Inspektor Hermann Kohler of the Nazi Gestapo, died this morning at his home in southern Ontario. He was 86 years old.

His wife, Gracia, kindly sent me an e-mail message explaining that her husband of 65 years had “passed away … peacefully after a 2-year struggle with [congenital heart failure] and cancer.”

I first encountered the work of Joseph Robert “Bob” Janes, a Toronto-born former field geologist and petroleum engineer, in the late 1990s or early aughts. It was at a time when Philip Kerr, whose Bernie Gunther novels I’d so relished, had backed away from that series (only temporarily, as it turned out), and I was looking for more crime fiction set in Europe during the tumultuous early 1940s. I believe I began with his fourth St Cyr/Kohler book, Salamander (1994), but then moved on to Janes’ more recent entries in the series, Madrigal (1999), Beekeeper (2001), and Flykiller (2002).

A full decade went by before Janes’ 13th St Cyr/Kohler novel, Bellringer, saw print. I was so excited by the author’s return to work on that series, I tracked him down through his publisher for an online interview. The results appeared partly in Kirkus Reviews and partly in The Rap Sheet. This led to a periodic correspondence that culminated in our first and (sadly) only face-to-face meeting, at the 2014 Bouchercon convention in Long Beach, California.

After not hearing from Janes for some while, I wrote him a year ago to check on his status. He reported that he’d been confined to a wheelchair and had “totally retired” from penning fiction, though he remained an avid reader, “and that kind of keeps me going.” Given all I knew, Gracia’s report of her husband’s demise—three months shy of his 87th birthday, on May 23—didn’t surprise me, but I was touched by her mention that Janes had “very much appreciated your [Rap Sheet] write up last year, and kept it with him even in the hospital.”

I consider myself blessed to have met and exchanged missives with this quiet, kind, and generous author I so admired, and am glad also that I still have three or four of Bob Janes’ novels I haven’t yet cracked open. I’d been hoping for more, of course, but the fact that such an abundance—including 16 St Cyr/Kohler yarns—already exists is testament to the welcoming breadth of modern crime fiction. I hope that many new readers will discover Janes’ work in the future with the same joy and enthusiasm I have long experienced.

Bullet Points: From All Corners Edition

(Above) J. Robert Janes signs his books at Bouchercon 2014.

• Canadian novelist J. Robert Janes has long ranked among my favorite historical crime-fictionists. His 16-volume, World War II-set series starring Jean-Louis St-Cyr, a chief inspector with the French Sûreté, and his unlikely investigative partner, Detektiv Inspektor Hermann Kohler of the Nazi Gestapo, began with 1992’s Mayhem (aka Mirage) and continued through 2015’s Clandestine. Naturally, I have devoured the whole lot, plus Jones standalones such as The Hunting Ground (2013) and The Sleeper (2015). I had the delightful opportunity a decade ago to interview Janes for Kirkus Reviews and The Rap Sheet, and I finally met him at the 2014 Bouchercon convention in Long Beach, California. Back then, he said he was busy composing more novels, and in fact his old Web site proclaimed that a 17th St-Cyr/Kohler novel, Timeweaver, “now awaits a final read. The 18th St-Cyr and Kohler may well conclude the series, but that remains to be seen.” So whatever happened to those promised installments? I recently e-mailed Janes—who lives near Toronto, Ontario, and will turn 86 years old on May 23—to see how he’s doing. His response:

At my age now I’m lucky to be able to manage 18 blocks with my push chair. There are fortunately two little book kiosks en route, so I am able to get a few books now and then, and that kind of keeps me going. As to writing anything more, that’s really hard work and I’m totally retired, and reading the work of others finally, after all these years! You see, when I was writing I didn’t read other fiction because one can pick things up so easily and not even know they’ve done so. Therefore, I was just being careful. As for anybody at my age, my medical conditions are a real damper to doing a lot, and I’m very content just to go for my walks, read fiction books by others, and settle down with a cup of tea.

Janes’ wife of 64 years, Gracia, subsequently sent me an e-mail message, explaining that her husband’s health is fragile, that he suffers from “cancer and congenital heart failure.” She added, “He has retired knowing that he has published 34 books in four different genres (i.e., geology texts for elementary through university levels, children’s fiction, thrillers, and the 16-book St Cyr and Kohler series, and three other co-published books). All the words he has ever written are housed in over 140 boxes in the McMaster University Archives,” in Hamilton, Ontario. As to the existence of that 17th St-Cyr/Kohler novel? Well, Gracia says, “Timeweaver presents a puzzle”—and perhaps one that her husband cannot help solve. “Bob has a reluctance to talk about his books,” she confides, “as it saddens him that he is no longer able to write,” after more than three decades spent behind a keyboard, pounding out stories. She suggests the manuscript may be in the McMaster archives, “but not catalogued yet.” She continues to look. I’ll provide any updates Gracia shoots my way.

• Whenever a writer publishes a list purporting to name the “best” of anything, he or she becomes an immediate target of criticism. So it’s no surprise that this recent selection of “the 30 greatest literary detectives of all time,” by ShortList’s Marc Chacksfield, has attracted detractors. Among the sleuths included in Chacksfield’s tally: Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Philip Marlowe, Inspector Morse, Lew Archer, and Father Brown. Single-appearance players such as William of Baskerville (from Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose), Inspector Bucket (from Charles Dickens’ Bleak House), and Smilla Qaaviqaaq Jaspersen (the star of Peter Høeg’s Smilla’s Sense of Snow) also scored spots on the list, which has predictably stirred questions about why figures such as Ellery Queen, Lord Peter Wimsey, Miss Maud Silver, and—for goodness sakes!—Nero Wolfe didn’t make the cut.

• The Sisters in Crime organization has launched its new Pride Award for Emerging LGBTQIA+ Crime Writers. As Oline H. Cogdill explains in the Mystery Scene blog, “A $2,000 grant will be awarded to an up-and-coming writer who identifies as part of the LGBTQIA+ community. … Candidates must apply by March 15, 2021. The winner will be announced in April, 2021.” Registration information is available here.

• With the 80th anniversary of the release of director John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon coming in October 2021, David Walsh, arts editor of the World Socialist Web Site, has posted this excellent assessment of the movie’s history and importance, its messages, and how its development fit into Huston’s filmmaking evolution.

• The Guardian’s Guy Lodge takes advantage of 2021 being the 100th anniversary of author Patricia Highsmith’s birth by highlighting the best film adaptations of her work. He reminds us, too, that “A glossy new Ben Affleck-starring film of her novel Deep Water, the first film from Adrian Lyne in 19 years, is scheduled for August, while a TV version of Ripley, starring Andrew Scott as her most adaptable character, is in the pipeline.”

• Like so many other literary festivals, Granite Noir is moving online this year. According to Shotsmag Confidential, Aberdeen, Scotland’s fifth annual celebration of homegrown and international crime writing will be streamed on the Aberdeen Performing Arts site from Friday, February 19, through Sunday the 21st. Ian Rankin, Camilla Läckberg, Stuart MacBride, Peter May, Jo Nesbø, Attica Locke, and David Baldacci are among the writers scheduled to participate. Click here to find a PDF containing the full roster of events.

• Then on Saturday, March 20, Hull Noir will return as a day-long festival based in the English port city of Kingston upon Hull. This year’s guests includes Mark Billingham, Laura Shepherd-Robinson, “Alex North” (aka Steve Mosby), and Hull-born Ian McGuire. The event will recognize, as well, this year’s “50th anniversary of the British crime [film] classic, Get Carter—adapted from Ted Lewis’s seminal crime novel Jack’s Return Home. For Lewis, who studied at Hull Art School in the late 1950s and whose novels reference the city and its hinterland, the towns on the south bank of the Humber, and the bleak Lincolnshire coast, 2021 is also the 50th anniversary of his novel Plender, this year’s festival read.” As Shotsmag Confidential notes, “There’ll be no charge for tickets, which will be available from Sunday 21 February along with the full festival lineup. Follow the Hull Noir Facebook and Twitter (@hullnoir) for all the most up to date information.”

• Here’s something I didn’t know: James Hong is a phenomenally prolific American actor, born to Hong Kongese parents, whose performance credits include roles in everything from Richard Diamond, Private Eye and Hawaii Five-O to Kung Fu, The Rockford Files, Switch, and the 1974 film Chinatown. He is also, according to blogger Lou Armagno, “the last living actor to portray a son (or daughter) of the fictional detective [Charlie Chan] in either a television series or film.” Hong was cast as “Number One Son” Barry Chan in the 1957-1958 TV drama The New Adventures of Charlie Chan, starring J. Carrol Naish. Hong will welcome his 92nd birthday this coming February 22nd.

• After applauding Robert McGinnis’ 93rd birthday two years ago in this longish piece for CrimeReads, I somehow managed to forget the artist’s 95th birthday this last Thursday, February 3. Fortunately, Deuce Richardson stepped up with a proper tribute in the DMR Books blog. After acknowledging McGinnis as “a national treasure,” Richardson reminds us that “He’s painted iconic characters ranging from James Bond to Barbarella to Captain America. He’s done covers for authors such as Rafael Sabatini, Neil Gaiman, John Jakes, Gardner F. Fox, Donald Westlake and Ian Fleming … and he’s still at it.” The DMR piece comes with a dozen beautiful examples of McGinnis’ work.



• By the way, whilst prowling around the Web early last week, I stumbled across a fake book front for Twilight Gal, created in imitation of one of McGinnis’ most famous covers, from the 1960 Dell paperback edition of Kill Now, Pay Later, by Robert Kyle. The artist here identifies him- or herself only as “astoralexander,” but explains that Twilight Gal re-imagines the video game The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess “as a hard-boiled crime novel.” Both McGinnis’ cover and astroalexander’s respectful knock-off are above.

• My wife and I are currently in the midst of watching the first five episodes of Netflix’s French mystery thriller, Lupin. So I was interested to read, in B.V. Lawson’s In Reference to Murder, that the show “is returning to Netflix for its second half of season one this summer. The series has become a surprising hit for the streamer, with 70M households projected to watch since its launch on January 8, making it easily Netflix’s biggest French original. The project is a contemporary adaptation of the novels penned by French writer Maurice Leblanc and stars Omar Sy as Assane Diop, who uses the world-famous gentleman thief and master of disguise, Arsène Lupin, as his inspiration as he tries to get revenge on those responsible for his father’s death.”

• While we’re on the subject of Netflix, let me point you to this piece in The Killing Times, containing the first trailer for Behind Her Eyes, a six-part TV adaptation of Sarah Pinborough’s 2017 novel of that same name. The KT’s Paul Hirons says this program “stars Eve Hewson, Simona Brown, Tom Bateman and Robert Aramayo, and tells the story of a single mother, whose world is thrown off kilter when she begins an affair with her new boss David and matters take an even stranger turn when she’s drawn into an unlikely friendship with his wife Adele. What starts as an unconventional love triangle soon becomes a dark, psychological tale of suspense and twisted revelations, as Louise finds herself caught in a dangerous web of secrets where nothing and no-one is what they seem.” Behind Her Eyes drops on February 17.

• Another promising trailer is that of Bloodlands, a BBC One mini-series starring “James Nesbitt as a Northern Irish detective on the hunt for a serial killer known as Goliath ...,” explains Radio Times. “In the 40-second trailer we meet detective Tom Brannick (Nesbitt) as he picks up a 20-year-old investigation into [the] ‘possible assassin’ they called Goliath and reveals to his team that the killer at large murdered his wife.” There doesn’t appear to be a set premiere date yet for Bloodlands; Radio Times says to expect it “later in the year.”

• John Porter reports in The Verge that delays in releasing No Time to Die, the 25th James Bond film (currently slated to reach theaters on October 8) are “causing problems for its marketing deals, with advertisers concerned that the film may end up featuring outdated product placements.” He says “the movie could face reshoots to hide its outdated products, and … some scenes may be ‘carefully edited.’”

• So that’s what happened to Steve Hamilton. The last book published under his sole moniker, An Honorable Assassin (his third Nick Mason thriller), saw print in 2019. But next month, he will return as the co-author, with Janet Evanovich, of The Bounty, book seven in a series about FBI agent Kate O’Hare and con man Nicholas Fox, originally co-written with Lee Goldberg. The Real Book Spy tells more.

• Max Allan Collins revealed in a recent interview by Publishers Weekly that, with 2022 marking the 75th anniversary of private eye Mike Hammer’s debut, in I, the Jury, “I’ll be doing a biography of [Spillane] with James Traylor for Otto Penzler at Mysterious Press.” It was just two years ago that Collins commemorated the author’s 100th birthday with a blitz of special publications.

• After having picked up Jeff Vorzimmer’s The Best of Manhunt (2019) and last year’s The Best of Manhunt 2, you can bet I’m looking forward to the March 26 release of The Manhunt Companion, also from Stark House Press and co-edited by Peter Enfantino. In his blog Rough Edges, James Reasoner writes: “This book contains a history of the magazine, indexes of authors and stories that Manhunt published, plus reviews of every story from every issue. I’m not sure anything like this has ever been attempted before, let alone pulled off in such great style.” Click here to learn more about Manhunt (1952-1967).

• Washington Post book critic Ron Charles includes this smile-inducing tidbit in his latest newsletter:

After two weeks in office, Vice President Kamala Harris has already improved the economy of some yearbook owners. Used and rare bookseller AbeBooks reports that a set of three Howard University yearbooks—1984, 1985 and 1986—recently sold for $1,500. Those volumes include pictures of Harris, who graduated from the historically black university in D.C. in 1986. A photo of Howard’s Economics Society shows sophomore Harris with her fellow students and sponsor Joseph Houchins, who was once a member of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Federal Council of Negro Affairs.

• George Easter, the editor of Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine, has posted two pieces recently that are of likely interest to Rap Sheet readers. The first collects 39 vintage paperback fronts, each of which features one or more things we don’t see around much anymore. The challenge is to identify each of those anachronisms. The answers are all available at the post’s end.

• In this second piece, Easter showcases a splendid variety of “girl with a gun”-themed covers—one of which featured in Killer Covers’ not-long-ago-concluded 12th-anniversary celebration.

• Did you know that you can watch the entire run of Columbia Pictures’ 1943 Batman serial on YouTube? The 15 installments, starring Lewis Wilson, Douglas Croft, and J. Carrol Naish, begin here with a chapter titled “The Electric Brain.”

• Gothic-style lettering makes a comeback amid our modern plague.

• Mystery & Suspense finally gets around to reviewing The Devil and the Dark Water, by British wordsmith Stuart Turton—one of my favorite mysteries of 2020—and pronounces it “clever and fun. Addictively page-turning. And so very, very entertaining.”

• I don’t relish penning obituaries, yet it seems I must do so regularly. Hal Holbrook, for instance, cannot leave this world without fit acclamation. The Ohio-born theater, film, and TV performer died on January 23 at age 95. Although many younger people know him—if only vaguely—as the guy who won a Tony Award for his stage portrayal of Mark Twain, Holbrook began his movie career in 1966, being cast in Sidney Lumet's The Group. He went on to portray then-unidentified Watergate scandal source “Deep Throat” in All the President’s Men (1976) and appeared in other movies such as Wall Street (1987), The Firm (1993), and Lincoln (2012). On the small screen, Holbrook won parts in the series Coronet Blue, The F.B.I., The Name of the Game, Designing Women (featuring his wife, Dixie Carter), Evening Shade, and The West Wing, and in teleflicks on the order That Certain Summer (1972, written by Richard Levinson and William Link) and Pueblo (1973). He starred in The Senator, a much-lauded but sadly short-lived and sometimes-controversial, 1970-1971 NBC “wheel series” drama—part of the Bold Ones rotation—playing Hays Stowe, a progressive and highly principled member of the U.S. Senate. Holbrook later led the cast of three Perry Mason TV movies (following Raymond Burr’s death in 1993), filling the boots of William “Wild Bill” McKenzie, a hotshot attorney and Utah rancher. One of my fondest memories of this actor had him playing a solely vocal part, his craggy voice narrating the 1997 Ken Burns TV documentary, Lewis & Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery. The New York Times says Holbrook died at his home in Beverly Hills, California; he was buried at a cemetery in Tennessee, alongside Dixie Carter, who met her own end a decade ago, in 2010.

• Last August, I mentioned on this page that Paul Green, a self-described “biographer specializing in film and television history,” had let it be known he was entering hospice care. The author of books about Roy Huggins, Pete Duel, Jeffrey Hunter, and others, Green told me in an e-mail message, “I suffer from stage 4 prostate cancer that has spread to my bones. I have been under treatment for three years.” Now Ed Robertson, host of the radio talk show TV Confidential, brings the sad news that Green passed away on Sunday, January 17, at age 65. “He was a gifted artist, a skilled biographer, and a good friend,” Robertson wrote on Facebook. “Paul and I last spoke about two months ago, at which time he informed me of his prognosis. He was in good spirits, all things considered, and we had a nice visit. It is hard for me to pick a favorite among his books. We met because of his biography of Pete Duel, did a couple of programs about his book on The Virginian, and had memorable conversations about his biographies of Jennifer Jones, Jeffrey Hunter, and Roy Huggins. He brought all of those figures to life and gave us each an understanding of who they were as people. Rest in peace, Paul … and thank you.”

• Finally, we must say good-bye to television producer and screenwriter Cy Chermak, who apparently perished from natural causes on January 29 in Hawaii. Born in Bayonne, New Jersey, in 1929 as Seymour Albert Chermak, he went on to develop scripts for Beverly Garland’s Decoy, Cheyenne, the 1977 TV movie Murder at the World Series, and Star Trek: The Next Generation. Additionally, he produced such shows as Ironside, Amy Prentiss, Kolchak: The Night Stalker, Barbary Coast, and CHiPS. Chermak was 91.

• Speaking of obits, I tried to do justice to 81-year-old author John Lutz, who breathed his last on January 9. But his friend Francis M. Nevins does a far superior job of recounting Lutz’s illustrious career in this new Mystery*File piece. He also offers this poignant closing:

The last time I saw [Lutz] was in March 2020, shortly before COVID-19 dominated the world. He said nothing, needed a walker to get around, had lost a lot of weight, but he could still function. That soon changed. He deteriorated over the rest of last year and died a little more than a week into this one.

The only other writers with whom I had such a close and rich relationship were Fred Dannay and Ed Hoch, both of them now long dead. Is it any wonder that as the years pass I feel empty and alone more and more often?

• You may not be aware of this, but frequent Rap Sheet contributor also hosts Poets of the Tabloid Murder, a mystery-fiction author interview show heard on the Public Radio Exchange (PRX). That show was off the air for awhile, but it returned to production last August. Since then, Nester has interviewed such authors as J. Todd Scott (Lost River), T. Jefferson Parker (Then She Vanished), S..A. Cosby (Blacktop Wasteland), and most recently, Nick Petrie (The Breaker). I’ve added a link to the index of Nester’s broadcasts to the “Crime/Mystery Podcasts” list in this blog’s right-hand column.

• Promoting his new spy novel, The Mercenary—not to be confused this “orgy of death” Cold War thriller—Paul Vidich submits to an interview with Mystery Tribune, and contributes a piece to CrimeReads about the role imposters play in our literary tradition.

​• Four other CrimeReads posts to read: Vince Keenan’s look back at the never-produced Orson Welles picture The Smiler with a Knife, based on a novel by Nicholas Blake and casting Lucille Ball as its female lead; an interview with David Brawn, the publishing director for the Collins Crime Club, which recently reissued The Conjure-Man Dies, a 1932 work described as “the first detective novel by an African-American author”; Michael Kaufman’s analysis of where police procedurals stand in the age of Black Lives Matter and the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump-backing domestic terrorists; and editor in chief Dwyer Murphy’s eulogy for John D. MacDonald’s Point Crisp home in Sarasota, Florida, razed to make room for the sort of “enormous mansions that JDM railed against.”

• And we’ve heard much about small-business closings over these trying last 12 months. However, the British Web site inews.co.uk reports that independent bookshops in the UK have “managed not only to withstand the myriad difficulties thrown at them by the COVID-19 pandemic … but actually increased their numbers.”

(J. Robert Janes photo © 2014 by Ali Karim.)

Pierce’s Picks

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



The Sleeper (Mysterious Press/Open Road) finds Canadian J. Robert Janes taking another of his infrequent breaks from composing the Jean-Louis St-Cyr/Hermann Kohler series of historical mysteries (Clandestine) in order to present this story of David Douglas Ashby, an American with a potentially deadly secret. Following his military service in World War I, Ashby wed Christina von Hoffman, the well-proportioned, yet manipulative offspring of a German general, and with her fathered a child, Karen. As Adolf Hitler consolidated his power in Berlin and became ever more bellicose, though, Ashby--fearing for his daughter’s safety--essentially kidnapped the girl from her mother and fled with her to England. Ashby is now a popular teacher at a country boarding school, the headmaster of which is an old army comrade whose life he once saved, and whose wife has fallen more than a little in love with Ashby. Meanwhile, Karen has been placed covertly in the care of Hilary Bowker-Brown, a surprisingly resourceful young woman who lives on the Cornwall coast and dreams of writing novels. Impatient with Ashby’s determination to keep Karen from her, Christina pushes the German intelligence services to find and recover the child. This task may require the awakening of a “sleeper,” an agent in Britain who has remained quiet and under the radar for a long while, in anticipation of just such an assignment as this one. Concealed motives and rivalries between spy agencies help keep readers off-guard through most of this yarn.

Skeleton Blues, by Paul Johnston (Severn House UK), brings the swift return of maverick, near-future Edinburgh investigator Quint Dalrymple, who we last saw in Heads or Hearts, released just this last summer in the States. It’s 2034 here, and the various city-states that once comprised Scotland are holding a public referendum to decide whether to restore their union. That’s a touchy enough matter by itself, and is destined to be made even more difficult following the murder of a tourist in Edinburgh. Called in once more by the Council of City Guardians to help, Quint and his partner, Davie Oliphant, go looking for a prime suspect who is nowhere to be found, while the threat of violence hangs heavy over the former Scottish capital--social unrest that might be playing into the hands of nefarious parties. The U.S. debut of Skeleton Blues is expected in March 2016.

Click here to see more of this season’s most-wanted books.

Bullet Points: Daffy and Dagger Edition

• Last Friday, Evan Lewis of the blog Davy Crockett’s Almanack of Mystery, Adventure, and the Wild West kicked-off a “nine-day extravaganza celebrating slick-tongued reporter Daffy Dill” of the fictional New York Chronicle, a character created in the 1930s by Richard Sale and popularized through the pages of Detective Fiction Weekly. So far, Lewis has posted “The Dancing Corpse,” a “never-reprinted adventure from the September 7, 1935, issue of Detective Fiction Weekly”; assembled a gallery of Dill magazine covers; and offered readers the Daffy adventures “A Dirge for Pagliaccio” and “A Slug for Cleopatra.” Coming up this Friday, Lewis promises, will be “an in-depth look at the life and times of Daffy Dill by Monte Herridge--an article that originally appeared in the 2013 Pulpfest magazine PEAPSTER. And to wrap things up, on Saturday the 29th we’ll have still another ‘new’ Daffy story, coming your way for the first time since 1937.” This extravaganza is certainly proving to be a lot of fun.

• The coming film adaptation of Veronica Mars had already earned one place in the history books, thanks to its record-breaking Kickstarter campaign (remember how it accumulated $2 million in financing in under 11 hours?). Now, reports Moviefone, the “movie will be the first to be simultaneously released by a major studio in theaters (270 theaters) and made available for purchase and to rent on the same day: March 14, 2014.”

• Meanwhile, watch for the long-awaited Man from U.N.C.L.E. movie to premiere on January 16, 2015. Unfortunately, this means it won’t be out in time to be part of the 50th anniversary celebration of U.N.C.L.E.’s September 22, 1964, NBC-TV debut.

• The British Crime Writers’ Association announced today that digital publisher Endeavour Press will be the new backer of its annual Historical Dagger for the best historical novel of the year. “Endeavour Press are proud to be sponsoring the CWA Historical Dagger,” says Richard Foreman, the company’s founder. “As both readers--and publishers--of crime fiction, Endeavour Press are keen to support the CWA, an association which continues to foster relationships between its authors and the growing readership for crime novels. Also, as someone who has spent the past decade promoting both history books and crime fiction, it also gives me great personal satisfaction to help reward authors for their hard work and talent, whether they be debut writers or more established names.” The winner of this year’s first CWA Endeavour Historical Dagger will be named on June 30.

• How’s this for a peculiar progression? Author J. Sydney Jones (The Keeper of Hands) recently e-mailed yours truly, J. Kingston Pierce, asking for information about how to contact Canadian novelist J. Robert Janes (whose new Jean-Louis St-Cyr/Hermann Kohler tale, Carnival, is due out in mid-May). The result is an excellent new interview with Janes in Jones’ Scene of the Crime blog.

• This comes from In Reference to Murder: “Thanks to Crime Fiction Lover for noting that Crime Story, a new festival for crime fiction lovers, is coming to Newcastle [England] at the University of Northumbria on May 31st. The organizers have added a fun twist: they’ve commissioned author Ann Cleeves to invent a fictional crime which will then be investigated by various experts including forensic scientists, police detectives, and legal eagles.”

• Won’t somebody please step up to help Linda Dewberry, the proprietor of Olympia, Washington's Whodunit? Books, who has put her mystery bookstore on the market?

• R.I.P., Maria von Trapp, who, the Moviefone blog notes, was “the last surviving member and second-eldest daughter of the musical family whose escape from Nazi-occupied Austria was the basis for The Sound of Music, has died. She was 99.” There’s more about von Trapp’s passing in Britain’s Daily Mail.

• In the Kill Zone blog, Mark Alpert reconsiders five “classic novels that offer useful lessons for thriller writers.” Good choices, all.

• Al Capone--in the flesh!

• Nancy O of The Crime Segments continues her reviewing of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe series with this piece about his 1949 novel, The Little Sister.

• Journalist and onetime cartoonist Keith Thomson, the author of 2011’s Twice a Spy and the brand-spanking-new thriller Seven Grams of Lead (Anchor), writes in Mystery Fanfare about his 2008 journey to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and his subsequent fantasy about having had an eavesdropping device planted in his left wrist during the course of that visit. Read the whole piece here.

• I love great unsolved mysteries.

• Flavorwire’s new list, “10 Times Oscar Got It (Unexpectedly) Right,” posted in advance of next Sunday’s Academy Award presentations, includes at least three winners near and dear to the hearts of crime-fiction fans: Gene Hackman’s “Best Actor” Oscar for The French Connection (1971); Robert Towne’s “Best Original Screenplan” win for Chinatown (1974); and Isaac Hayes’ “Best Original Song” prize for “Theme from Shaft” (1971).

• Saved from the Paper Drive seems to have a cache of old Have Gun, Will Travel comic books, and has been rolling them out in the blog one by one. Its latest sampling, “The Vigilantes,” comes from 1960. This link should take you to previous entries in the series.

• More from Michelle Monaghan on True Detective.

• Hmm. I must have missed seeing the recent news alert that Anthony Neil Smith, the author of Hogdoggin’, All the Young Warriors, and assorted other works of fiction, has confessed to being “Red Hammond”--the man behind XXX Shamus (Broken River), a “porno P.I.” novel that Jedediah Ayres applauds as “incendiary.”

• And as a balance against all the recent “you must read these books before you die” directories, Janet Potter offers some worthy suggestions in The Millions of what sorts of volumes really deserve your attention in the near future. Her best two bits of advice, I think: “You should read the book that you hear two booksellers arguing about at the registers while you’re browsing in a bookstore” and “You should read the book that you didn’t read when it was assigned in your high school English class. You’d probably like it better now anyway.”

Pierce’s Picks: “A Conspiracy of Faith”

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

A Conspiracy of Faith, by Jussi Adler-Olsen (Dutton):
What more tantalizing inspiration could there be for a criminal investigation than a message written in blood and secreted in a bottle? Unfortunately, that cast-off communication was discovered years ago and hundreds of miles away from Denmark, where it was dropped into the sea, and its lettering has faded badly since. In fact, the only really legible word is the first one: “Help.” But that’s enough to get Detective Carl Mørck and his eccentric colleagues from the Copenhagen Police Department’s cold-case division, Department Q, involved. Is this cry for rescue authentic, and if so, who sent it--and are they still alive? Once deciphered, the note suggests that children were kidnapped, and yet there were no reports of missing youngsters filed at the time and in the location it specifies. Further complicating matters, when Mørck & Co. finally determine who at least one of the absent youths must be, his parents stonewall the police rather than help them. Can Mørck and his two more energetic associates, Hafez el-Assad and Rose Knudsen, track down the first kidnap victims before their abductor snatches the next couple of children he’s targeted? Danish author Adler-Olsen’s first English-translated Department Q novel, The Keeper of Lost Causes (2001), earned him considerable attention, in part because enthusiastic readers of the late Stieg Larsson’s “Millennium Trilogy” were hungry for more Nordic crime fiction. Keeper’s sequel, The Absent One (2012), kept interest in Department Q high, and no doubt Conspiracy (which will be released in the UK in July as Redemption) will attract a comparably wide audience. Although these books can be frustratingly thin on nuance, as far as the development of some characters (particularly the “bad guys”) goes, their detection components are strong and their pacing is dramatic.

* * *

Also new and worth finding a copy of this week is Tapestry (Mysterious Press/Open Road), Canadian author J. Robert Janes’ 14th novel featuring Chief Inspector Jean-Louis St-Cyr of the French Sûreté and his partner, German Detektiv Inspektor Hermann Kohler. Their latest adventure, set in Paris during an early 1943 blackout, finds them investigating a burglarized stamp collector’s shop, the brutal murder of a young man found naked, black-market dealings in improperly confiscated goods, and the rape of a woman--the spouse of a prisoner of war--whose nighttime attack may trace to her alleged willingness to accept other, Nazi companionship in her husband’s absence. The concluding pages of this work suggest Janes may actually have penned Tapestry prior to Bellringer, which was published last year; however, you needn’t read that earlier novel to enjoy this new one. ... And British shoppers should be on the lookout for The Dying Hours (Little, Brown), Mark Billingham’s 11th outing for Detective Inspector Tom Thorne. Here we find the oft-reprimanded and lately demoted Thorne seeing something more sinister than suicide behind the recent deaths of elderly Londoners. Naturally, none of his police colleagues take Thorne’s warnings of a serial slayer seriously, so he sets out on his own to find a killer who has nothing to lose. Billingham’s yarns are dark and frequently bleak, but they’re also pretty darn gripping. The Dying Hours is due out in the States in early August.

The Story Behind the Story: “The Hunting Ground,” by J. Robert Janes

(Editor’s note: This 42nd entry in The Rap Sheet’s “Story Behind the Story” series reintroduces us to Canadian author J. Robert Janes, who I was so privileged to interview last year. In the essay below, he writes about The Hunting Ground [Mysterious Press/Open Road], his new standalone thriller set during the German occupation of France during World War II.)

A year ago last January I had to undergo a very serious operation on my right eye and was told to keep my head down for at least 10 days. I managed 14, but what does someone who’s used to working every day of the week but Sundays do for all that time?

Out came the clipboard and the manuscript--there was, in retrospect, never any question of what I would work on during my convalescence. You see, The Hunting Ground has been with me ever since 1990, and has been through at least six or seven revisions during those years. It’s the book I first worked on after my thriller The Alice Factor was finally set to be published in 1991. Which was before I started writing Mayhem (1992), the opening number in my Jean-Louis St-Cyr/Hermann Kohler mystery series.

Head down, pencil in hand--for I always compose my stories in longhand and have for the past 43 years of full-time writing--I started in. And yes, I always use one of those rechargeable pencils: HB 0.5mm leads and no others. That first day, I worked for 12 hours straight and totally forgot myself.

Immediately, it all came back, all those doors that had opened in my imagination, opening again and again into Occupied France during the Second World War. Those 14 recovery days eventually stretched into six months of work on The Hunting Ground. And certainly, when I retyped the manuscript later on, I could have used both eyes, had they been working in sync and in focus. However, the operation was a terrific success and I am extremely lucky to have come through it so well.

In The Hunting Ground, Lily de St Germain (née Hollis) is a wife and mother who, in 1938 and living in what she has come to call a “château” on the edge of Fontainebleau Forest to the southeast of Paris, feels increasingly that she must take her children and leave before the threat of war reaches her doorstep. A chance meeting in Paris during the first exodus in September 1939 brings a man named Thomas Carrington into her life. He keeps coming back, but initially it’s not because of his interest in Lily, it’s because of something her son has found hidden--hidden by his papa, Lily’s unfaithful husband, for friends who are no friends of hers. Only when Tommy takes Lily and the children to England, does she discover that he’s an insurance investigator who works for a very old, well-established firm in London that underwrites the underwriters. But, of course, Lily’s husband steals their children back and she has to return to that “château.”

Always I am drawn into the story I’m telling and that, in itself, can be a very powerful thing. And of course, once done, one has to stand back and look at it all from a distance. Sure, some things you might not see even then, simply because you’ve been so close to the work for such a long time. But Lily, as the first-person narrator of this yarn, had--and still has--a lot of meaning for me because, in essence, she spoke of what was happening to so many others. Lots and lots of people just like her hoped never to be drawn into such a war or made victims of that war’s violence, and yet they were. Lily comes to see and live with the very changes war visits upon her, a mother with two children.

She also introduced me to the German occupation of France (1940-1944) and allowed me to open door after door into what is a truly remarkable period of history. And certainly, when I was working again on this novel last year, with a far greater understanding of the history than I had back in 1990, I could have included and dealt with other aspects I’ve come to understand since then. But I didn’t; I wanted the story to be as close as possible to the way I’d written it originally.

Becoming an active résistante, Lily goes on to work with Tommy and others in the search for and recovery of stolen works of art. However, she’s ultimately arrested and sent to the German concentration camps at Birkenau and then Bergen-Belsen, where the past and those recollections of Tommy and the others are all that really keep her going. Always, though, she blames herself for what happened. Finally freed in 1945, her recovery is uncertain. From a clinic in Zurich, Switzerland, she begins sending little black pasteboard coffins to her husband and his friends, and also to one other person, all of whom think her dead and themselves released from any responsibility for what has happened. Telephone calls follow in which Lily tells each of those people that, while they may have been cleared by the Résistance, she’s coming home and they are to meet her at the “château.” But time, which for her, in the concentration camps, has been spent entirely in a memory-packed past, increasingly confronts her with the present, until both are one and the same. To achieve her ends, she’ll have to employ all of the survival skills she learned from the Résistance, as her husband--together with his friends, a Sûreté detective inspector, Gaetan Dupuis, and a former SS Obersturmführer, Ernst Johann Schiller--pursue her in what was once the hunting ground of kings: namely, Fontainebleau Forest.

I still vividly recall that after my first attempt at writing this historical and psychological thriller, I set my pencil aside and asked myself, “Hey, what about a good Sûreté officer in all of this Occupation? Of course, he’d need a German overseer, since everything else did in those days. I’d call him Hermann Kohler but make him only a detective inspector, since Jean-Louis St-Cyr, his French counterpart, was a chief inspector.”

The notion of writing a series attracted me. I knew, though, that if I were to tackle it properly, I had to keep on delivering new installments to bookstores. As a result, I set aside The Hunting Ground and concentrated on the wartime investigative adventures of St-Cyr and Kohler. Yet still, I found myself coming back repeatedly to the tense tale of Lily de St-Germain. Finally, I had that eye operation and those six months of concentrated work on the novel, and it all led to the publication this week of The Hunting Ground--23 years after I started writing the novel.

It’s only the first of two new books with my name on them. Tapestry, the 14th installment in my St-Cyr and Kohler series (following last year’s Bellringer), is due out from Mysterious Press/Open Road on June 4. And The Alice Factor is set to be released as an e-book, also from Mysterious Press/Open Road, on June 5.

So in a sense, for me as well as for Lily, the past has become the present.

Solving Crimes in the Shadow of War

Author Janes in his neighbors’ yard. (Photo by Charles Bellamy)

It was Philip Kerr who drove me into the literary embrace of his fellow author, J. Robert Janes. I’d begun reading Kerr’s wonderful series about World War II-era Berlin detective Bernie Gunther not long after he introduced the character in March Violets (1989), and had been appreciating where that series was headed. But then, suddenly ... well, the Scottish wordsmith stopped producing new Gunther tales, following the publication of A German Requiem (1991).

Hungry for more crime fiction of a similarly sinister, complex sort, I soon stumbled across Janes’ Salamander (1994), the story of a disastrously successful arsonist at large in Lyon, France, in late 1942. This turned out to be the fourth of Janes’ historical thrillers to feature a most improbable pair of middle-aged investigators operating throughout German-occupied France during the early 1940s: a widowed, pipe-smoking chief inspector of the French Sûreté, Jean-Louis St-Cyr, and his Bavarian partner, Detektiv Inspektor Hermann Kohler of the Nazi Gestapo (described early on as “a giant of a man with the heart and mind of a small-time hustler”). Amazingly, those onetime enemies had not only been getting along since their first adventure in Mayhem (aka Mirage), published in 1992, but had become a rather crack team of crime solvers--often to the disgruntlement of their Gestapo superiors in Paris, who see them as far too independent. While war storms across the face of Europe, it’s up to St-Cyr and Kohler to solve the more everyday but nonetheless disturbing crimes--the assaults, the thefts, the occasional cross-bow killings. Misdeeds outside the scope of state-sanctioned battle.

Like Kerr’s work, Janes’ fiction benefited from critical approval. The Wall Street Journal called the St-Cyr/Kohler series “engrossing.” Publishers Weekly said it “convincingly documents the wartime background of Nazi-occupied France.” The New York Times’ Marilyn Stasio applauded Kaleidoscope (1993) for being “thick with dramatic incident, and the stark scenes of a country trying to survive a hard winter under siege have a palpable horror.” And in 2002, Janes’ 12th book in the series, Flykiller, received a nomination for the Dashiell Hammett Award, a prize given out annually by the North American Branch of the International Association of Crime Writers.

But then, just as Kerr’s Bernie Gunther had vanished in 1991 (only to reappear 15 years later in The One from the Other), so St-Cyr and Kohler abruptly dropped off the publishing stage in 2002. I feared Janes had finally given up writing.

In March of this year, however, I came across a new note on his Web site reading:

In December 2011, I signed two contracts with The Mysterious Press in New York. They will publish the complete St-Cyr and Kohler series, all 12 of them, in e-book form and print-on-demand ... They will also publish a new mystery, the 13th in the series, Bellringer, so please watch for these.

I posted a mention of that deal in The Rap Sheet, and soon afterward received an e-note from the author himself, thanking me. In reply, I told Janes how pleased I was to learn that his two savvy wartime sleuths would be staging a comeback. I also suggested that I interview him about Bellringer and his future plans for the series.

Since then, I have had the opportunity to ask the novelist a great deal more about his background. He was born Joseph Robert Janes in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, on May 23, 1935, and grew up with his two brothers on Keewatin Avenue, the home of “middle- to lower-class [residents] and some really very poor folks.” He’s been married for 54 years to the former Gracia Lind, part of whose family, he says, “goes way back in Newfoundland history.” Together they have four children--two girls, two boys--and six grandchildren, scattered as far west as Saskatchewan. Janes and his wife currently live in the southern Ontario town of Niagara-on-the-Lake.

I’ve also been lucky enough to read Bellringer, which is set to be officially released by Otto Penzler’s Mysterious Press early next week (both in a print edition and as an e-book). The novel transports readers into the dark, fearful, sometimes paranoid confinement of two former luxury hotels in Vittel, a town in northeastern France. Those resorts have been jointly converted into a bleak internment camp, now housing 1,678 British women who didn’t escape the country before Adolf Hitler’s military occupied it in 1940, as well as 991 American women “who failed to leave when the Führer thought to declare war on America on 11 December, 1941.” (In addition, there are some Senegalese men being held at the camp, who will become a focus of suspicion as this story marches along.) As Bellringer commences, St-Cyr and Kohler have been summoned by the camp’s kommandant to probe the death of an American woman, found stabbed through the heart with a U.S. Army pitchfork, her pockets filled with hard-to-find goodies that might have been used to bribe guards. This leads to a broader investigation involving the alleged elevator-shaft suicide of another woman, the filching of goods from among inmates’ meager possessions, missing capsules of a potentially dangerous herb, a suspicious monk, broken and duplicitous love affairs, séances, spies, and the 23-year-old mystery surrounding a husband’s passing.

As is common of Janes’ yarns, Bellringer is thick with three-dimensional characters and loose ends enough to prevent readers from solving the mystery too soon. The camp’s oppressive, desperate atmosphere suffuses every chapter. Describing the women in one of the hotels, the author writes:

Out in the foyer, some carried handbags that had never left them since they’d been taken into custody in December 1940; others had sewn purses and tied these around their waists as in the Middle Ages. Most wore the signs of underfeeding, the lack of minerals and vitamins, the skin dried and cracked, the joints sore. All were cold and often yawning or coughing up their lungs, and halitosis, with or without their fags, depending entirely on fortune.

One eventually becomes consumed by this story, so captivated by the sadness and scheming of its players, it’s easy to forget that the action here takes place over just a couple of days, rather than a week or more. The author’s style of presenting and examining evidence in the course of dialogue, rather than through simpler narration, might test the patience of some readers, but the results are certainly rewarding. Bellringer is a banquet of plots and counterplots, deceptions and unexpected motivations. If you’re looking for a quick snack of a tale, look elsewhere.

(Left) My introduction to Janes’ historical thrillers: 1994’s Salamander.

Not long after turning the last page on Bellringer, I sent the now 77-year-old author a series of questions about his personal and professional history, which he was kind enough to answer. Some of those responses were included in my latest column for Kirkus Reviews, but the greater number are featured below.

J. Kingston Pierce: Could you tell us something about your parents?

J. Robert Janes: To describe in a nutshell my parents, is to attempt the impossible. Both were exceedingly complex. My father, a former reporter for The Northern Miner and the Toronto Star, was Canada’s first public relations man. His Public Relations Services Ltd., at 33 Scott Street behind the King Edward Hotel, commanded a great deal of his time. He also employed one of his brothers, my uncle George, and kept my grandparents and Geordie in the upper half of a duplex across the street from our house that he rented for them. What that did, of course, was bring me close to my grandmother, who was a lovely, lovely person, and many’s the time I, alone, would slip over there to have afternoon tea with her. My grandfather loved my mother’s bread and would sit on our front steps and eat the better part of a loaf, straight from the oven.

Mother was a very fine artist who knew all of Canada’s Group of Seven and many other artists. [She was] a remarkable cook. Friends often came to supper, [with] my brothers and I helping in the kitchen and always being seated around the dining room table too, and I’d give a fortune if I could re-create just one of those dinner parties. Good artists, and I mean really, really good ones, don’t just argue--they fight for what they believe in. Hence the talk would ebb and flow and sometimes erupt like a rocket, sending one or more off in a huff or tears with weeks of silence to follow; yet all would be forgiven and peace restored. Of course, there was gossip and lots of laughter. Some of them were painters, or worked in chalks, others were sculptresses or weavers, one was a potter of note, and we lived in the midst of it all, for Mother used that dining room as her studio--except for when she had one in the old Summerhill cottage where A.Y. Jackson had his studio. I still have a watercolor sketch of myself at age 3 that Arthur Lismer did at mother’s urging (unsigned unfortunately!).

Among my earliest memories is one of being bundled up at the age of 2 or 3 and shoved out the side door to play by myself in the back garden. Mother was busy “painting.” The snow was granular and I knelt at what would’ve been the edge of one of our flowerbeds under the big apple tree, and I used my imagination. That snow became mountains in which were hidden heaps of silver and gold, and I found within myself both the friend we all need and the driving force of my later writing.

JKP: Was your family a bookish one?

JRJ: My father was the only one of his family to go to university and he added a master’s degree in economics to his B.A. Mother, because her father insisted, obtained her B.A. first before attending the Ontario College of Art and then heading off to Paris. Had she been cut loose from family responsibilities, I’m certain she would have made a significant mark at a time when women artists were patently being ignored. Certainly, there were books in our house, lots and lots of them, and my parents read, as did my two brothers and myself. Mother, of course, was a huge fan of mysteries, and when I began to write them I lived in absolute trepidation, for I knew she could find fault in any author’s work if she felt the need, but would also praise them. I still have a novel upstairs that she handed to me. Inside it, she had written, “Bob, one of the most entertaining and humourous books I have ever read.” The title is The Monte Cristo Cover-Up, by Mario Simmel, translated from the German by James Cleugh. I enjoyed it immensely ...

(Right) Janes’ mother used books such as this one to interest him in mysteries.

I knew how to read at a very early age and loved the books of Thornton W. Burgess and others. By the age of 4 or 5, I was writing and illustrating my own animal adventures and would sit patiently at my little desk in front of one of the windows in the bedroom I shared with my older brother, myself totally absorbed in the story I was setting down. Later, by age 6 or 7, I would head out at 5:00 a.m. and go for a walk in the park, for our yard backed onto Sherwood Park. Fields, hills, forest, ravine, and river were all there and the dawn coming up. It’s by far the best of times to see birds and foxes and other things, and never was there ever any concern about my safety. Never. My imagination just took off and was constantly strengthened.

JKP: I’ve read that you were originally a petroleum engineer and field geologist. Where did you earn your academic degrees?

JRJ: I have a B.A.Sc in Mining Engineering from the University of Toronto, 1958; an Ontario College of Education high-school teacher’s certificate; an M.Eng. in Geology, U of T, 1967; and the first year of a doctorate in Pleistocene Geology on a Queen’s University, Brock University program that was set up uniquely for myself. My undergraduate thesis won an award from the Petroleum and Natural Gas Division of the Canadian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy. In my third summer at U of T, I worked for Mobil Oil in Alberta, and went back there when I graduated. Hence the petroleum engineer, but prior to this I had worked as a geologist and also had taken a year out to work at the Ontario Research Foundation as a lab technician for Lyman Chapman, who mapped Ontario’s Pleistocene deposits among other things and was a remarkable scientist. Basically, I was easy in the field as a geologist on my own or working, as with Mobil Oil and the Research Foundation. I “dug” what I was doing.

JKP: When did you start teaching high-school geology, geography, and mathematics? And where did you teach?

JRJ: Gracia was very unhappy in the west, in Alberta, so we and our [oldest daughter] Anne packed it in and came back to Toronto, me to the Ontario Research Foundation as a research engineer, minerals beneficiation. I guess I’ve worked on practically every will-o’-the-wisp ore prospect possible, and when I finally left, my boss, as had the one at Mobil Oil, begged me to stay. But I thought I’d try high-school teaching, and when I took the summer course, who should be there but a few of my classmates in geology and mining. From 1964 to 1966 I taught for the North York Board of Education, at William Lyon Mackenzie High School, grade 11 geology and geography, grade 12 and 9 math. I loved teaching and the kids and can honestly say it’s the toughest, hardest job ever. I never sat down, was always on the move, for the way to teach and keep kids interested is to keep them guessing, and you do this by constantly bringing in new ways of doing things and by always moving about the room amongst them.

JKP: And at what point did you begin teaching geology at Ontario’s Brock University, and for how long did you engage in that?

JRJ: When I went back to U of T to do my master’s degree under Dr. Tuzo Wilson of Plate Tectonics fame, I taught one summer at Brock University (1966-1967) and then came back for full-time. My students were adults bettering their degrees or getting them, and also technical people from industry. I taught first-year Physical Geology, third-year Glacial and Pleistocene Geology, and fourth-year Geology of Canada. In 1969 I developed and conducted the first and only cross-country university course in the Geology of Canada, taking a group from St. Catharines, Ontario, west to Long Beach on Vancouver Island. Two of the students and myself brought along our families, so that at the end of each day in the field, there would be baseball, a swim, or a campfire gathering. It was a unique way of teaching and an adventure for all of us, but also one tough, tough job, since I had to plan out everything ahead and be ready with all the details at each outcrop of note, right the way up through the geological time scale.

(Left) University of Toronto

JKP: When did you realize that you wanted to be a writer?

JRJ: Consciously, I never planned to become a full-time writer. When I did my undergraduate thesis there weren’t any courses in petroleum geology and related areas at U of T, and I would go up to the Imperial Oil Library on St. Clair Avenue in Toronto. There I had everything I needed and spent many, many hours digging for material, selecting what I’d need, and all the rest of what one calls “research” for a thesis on the treatment of water for use in the secondary recovery of oil--for fracked formations. It has to be far, far purer than even our tap water, so there’s a definite science to it.

The librarians could not have been kinder. In contrast, the head of the Mining Department bordered on rage at my selecting a non-mining topic and something they patently knew absolutely nothing about. As a result, he gave me a miserable C, which should have taught me something, I guess, but maybe I became a writer because of what I went through at that library. I just really, really liked what I was doing and still remember it fondly.

In any case, a writer is like my garden, or like any novel, for that matter: she/he is a work in progress. If she/he isn’t, then they’d better get with it.

JKP: On your Web site, you say that you “turned to full-time writing in June 1970.” How worried were you about succeeding as a writer?

JRJ: My turning to full-time writing in 1970 was, in retrospect, a huge leap of faith and of course it’s the reason I have such a small “pension.” I’d written a few travel articles and other things, and the travel editor of [Manitoba’s] Winnipeg Free Press had been immensely kind. I also had a contract for some film strips and a couple of textbooks, so I simply closed the door on the paychecks and began to “work” for myself. My father, bless him, must have been alarmed but he never said anything, nor did my mother. They knew, I think, that I was “different.” Gracia and I had four young children and when we moved from Toronto to St. Catharines (to work at Brock University) we bought an old farmhouse, half an acre and one heck of an old barn. My “work” room was tiny and located downstairs next to the living room and the kids when they came home from school.

Did I have financial worries? Yes! Did I ever worry about succeeding? Not really. After all, I did have contracts to start off with. But what one doesn’t do, and should, is to worry about the publishers not doing as they have agreed, and their going bankrupt at the worst of times--just when a new book has come out!

I grew up in the Great Depression, and Mother sure taught us a lot. At that old farmhouse, Gracia and I had a 22-cubic-foot freezer, and I grew a lot of our own food and packed that freezer every fall. I always felt I had saved at least $1,800, maybe $2,000 a year on that alone. I also canned peaches, plums, pears, you name it, and had 100 feet of red currants, so jams and jellies, wine even, were a part of it all.

JKP: And you started out writing non-fiction?

JRJ: Basically, I began by writing textbooks, film strips, slide sets, and such in geology because they were desperately needed at the time and there was nothing available in the schools. I also took virtually all the photos that were used to illustrate my textbooks.

Rocks, Minerals and Fossils, for grades 7 and 8, was a hands-on text which gave the kids the nitty-gritty but did so in a unique and very rich way by using photos and experiments I designed and conducted first before writing them down. Earth Science, for grades 9 and 10, continued the study, again in the same hands-on way with further experiments and such. Geology and the New Global Tectonics was a senior-level text for grades 12 and 13, but was also used in first-year university courses.

JKP: So what first made you interested in writing fiction?

JRJ: When that last text came out, I got a call from Canada’s finest airphoto expert, Dr. Jack Mollard, P.Eng., of Regina. Jack wanted me to help him with Airphoto Interpretation and the Canadian Landscape and I did, and we became good friends. I’d also written and done the photographs for The Great Canadian Outback, a [book about the] geology and scenery of Canada.

But when I was done co-authoring the airphoto book, I decided that I would not write any more non-fiction. I began a novel, and realized six months later, that I had lost a lot of time and would have to catch up, so have stuck to fiction ever since. But I still have one non-fiction book I want to do, and that is on past climate, the Ice Ages, and current climatic change. There is so much the general public simply don’t have a handle on and should, and I’m someone who could write such a complex thing but make it easily readable for the average person. Few others have written texts and such for each level and also taught at least several of those levels, and I still love the study of the Pleistocene Epoch for it offers so many answers to why we’re here and how we came to be the way we are. That book, however, is at least a two- or three-year project.

JKP: As I understand it, your first novels were mysteries for children. I believe The Odd-Lot Boys and the Tree-Fort War came out in 1976 and was followed by four more such stories for the younger set. Why did you start out penning children’s fiction?

JRJ: I started writing for the preteen-to-13 age group. Having children of my own, it seemed natural, but there were other influences, primarily the need to protect the unique farmlands of the Niagara Peninsula, something Gracia has worked at ever since. The Odd-Lot Boys and the Tree-Fort War came about by my seeing the need for wild places in the standard subdivision, places where kids could be themselves and do the things they need to, like building and having a tree fort. I’d seen a real-estate sign on a vacant lot and beyond it the remains of a tree fort. The title came to me, and I wrote it.

JKP: What did you find most gratifying about composing those children’s mysteries? And did they have a common thread?

JRJ: Theft of Gold [1980], my second for kids, came about via two things. First, Toronto’s subway and the boots and shoes people wore. How distinctive they all were. Then, too, when I’d been an undergraduate at U of T there had been a robbery--samples of gold ore [had gone missing]: dust, flakes, and nuggets from the Klondike and Cariboo, among other samples. Me, I knew all about such things and was certain I knew who had done it--ease of access, etc. So I had that background and wrote it.

These were followed by Danger on the River [1982], which preceded the environmental stories long before they came into vogue, but dealt with such a topic. I had walked the riverbank I used [as a setting], my kids had played there, and we’d all seen what was happening, so I wrote it with that message in the hope that readers would do the same as my protagonists, Rolly and the gang, did. Spies for Dinner [1985] followed. We had had a cottage on Gloucester Pool and the Severn River, and I knew that area like the back of my hand. Murder in the Market [1985] is largely set in Toronto’s St. Lawrence Market, which I loved as a kid and still visit every time I go to the city.

Those [last] three books were a series, so Rolly, Jim, Katie, and Alice carry on through them. But after [publisher] Clarke Irwin went bankrupt, and Collins of Canada ceased publishing children’s books, I set the series aside. Which doesn’t mean I’ve stopped writing for kids and young adults. Good heavens, no. I still do.

JKP: Your first adult novel, I believe, was The Toy Shop, published in 1981. It’s been identified as the earliest of four “Richard Hagen novels.” I have to confess, I’ve never read any of those so-called Hagen books. Could you tell us something about them?

JRJ: The Toy Shop. Picture this: no money, Christmastime, four kids, and a contest--the Seal Book $50,000 prize. Late in November, Gracia and I went to Niagara-on-the-Lake to try and find something for the kids, and when we got to the Toy Shop (it no longer exists as such) it was dusk and the streetlights had come on. I told her to let me go on ahead, and as I did so, that story came at me like a ton of bricks. In 35 days and nights, including five hours on that Christmas Day, I wrote that psychological thriller. It didn’t win the prize, but I was one of only three who were called in by the editor. Stupidly, I used the call-in to get my first agent, and the editor who had called me in, promptly tossed me out.

The Toy Shop is a standalone, as are The Watcher (in the Dunes) [1982], The Hiding Place [1984], and The Third Story [1983]. All are set in the Niagara area. Each of these mystery-thrillers has a female protagonist. ...

The “Hagen books” are a misnomer; somebody took it upon themselves to label them that way, but Richard Hagen doesn’t appear in any of these. He’s the protagonist in [1991’s] The Alice Factor ... a thriller about diamonds in World War II. It’s set in the Third Reich, 1937, to begin, and in Belgium, Britain, and elsewhere, for Hagen was a salesman of diamonds. Published in hardcover, it was the last novel its publisher did, so my Alice never got any push but my own. As a geologist I had worked with diamonds and knew people in the business, so that helped a lot. The novel was a standalone, though it could, I guess, have been made into a trilogy ...

JKP: In 1992, your first St.-Cyr and Kohler novel, Mayhem, appeared. Please tell us about your inspiration for that book. Had you been thinking for a long while about writing Mayhem? And did you see it as the opening installment of a series?

JRJ: My editor with Alice felt it was too long and would cost the publisher he was with too much. He advised that I cut [out a large] French section, and I did only because I had to (but I then used that section to write the thriller I’ve been currently working on). In it there’s a really bad Sûreté, and when I got to the end of that manuscript I can still recall setting my pencil aside and asking myself, “Hey, what about a good Sûreté in all of this mess? He would need a German overseer, since everything else did in those days, but I’d make Jean-Louis a chief inspector, and Hermann Kohler, not an Oberdetektiv but simply a detective inspector. Hence Kohler sometimes refers to Louis as “chief.”

I grew up hating the Germans, and when I came to write Mayhem, the first in that series, I honestly didn’t know how I could possibly do it. But Hermann, bless him, ran away with the story right away and I’ve had to cut him back ever since. As a result, it was a huge lesson for me, and I no longer hate Germans. Indeed, why would I?

I didn’t envisage a series at first, but when I’d finished Mayhem I knew, as a writer will, that I really had something, and immediately started in on Carousel [1992]. By the time Constable took them on, I’d written those two. Kaleidoscope [1993] then went straight from myself to the typesetter.

JKP: Were you already quite familiar with France at the time? Have you visited there many times over the years, as you’ve put these novels together?

JRJ: I knew I had to drive myself to get that series established, and fortunately in Miles Huddleston at Constable I had the perfect editor. I’d send Miles a manuscript and would get back a note perhaps saying, “Bob, what do you think about ...” Usually it was length [that was the problem], and I’d go at it and in about three weeks he’d have it back and I’d be working on the next one. I never bothered to send any of those later books to my agent. Miles and I simply handled everything, but I did leave the agent to take care of the contracts.

I was, since The Alice Factor, and have become extremely more familiar with German-occupied France, but must state that many of the places I write about no longer exist. Whole areas have been flattened and built over. Even some of the street names have changed!

I’ve always viewed this series as like the trajectory of an artillery shell. Both Kohler and Jean-Louis were in World War I, and enemies, so the analogy is apt. What I’ve done so far, and it has probably taken more titles than it should, is to do the crest of that trajectory which sits around the time of the [Nazi] defeat at Stalingrad on February 3, 1943. What I intend to do now, is to write the flank-stories on either side, ending up, of course, with my two honest cops--for they are honest--up against the post: St-Cyr for working with the enemy (against common crime in an age of officially sanctioned crime on a horrendous scale) and Kohler for being of that enemy (having, with Louis, crossed so many criminals).

JKP: It’s interesting that you imagined St-Cyr and Kohler as both good men, in their respective ways. Some readers have objected to that characterization, have they not?

JRJ: Aside from having a German overseer, one has to keep in mind that if you were a detective in Germany in 1933-1934, you were automatically in the Gestapo. Hence Kohler is one of those, and we have the situation of a good Frenchman having to work with--you guessed it--a good Gestapo.

Some have been upset with me over this. One young woman used to nail me at every Bouchercon she attended, and she certainly wouldn’t listen, but had never read any of the books to find out what the heck I was really up to.

This also applies to French people who think I must be pointing out the worst, but again haven’t read any of the books. As for Kohler and for St-Cyr, no one need be offended by either, and as for the Holocaust and all ... why, I’ve written hugely about it, so they surely should be able to see what side I’m on and Kohler too, and Jean-Louis as well.

JKP: Between them, St-Cyr and Kohler have pissed off so many German authorities, I’m surprised they’re allowed to continue their investigations. How do they avoid being chastised and pulled from the field for insubordination? Are they simply too good at their jobs?

JRJ: They are on the run always ... It’s a part of their uniqueness and I wouldn’t want to give it up for anything. It brings them closer and closer, welding them into a single unit that cares not only about the outcome, but increasingly about each other. Remember, too, that they are outcasts, lonely in their fight against common crime.

Sometimes, as in Bellringer, the answers to their very survival come from others, but this in itself comes in part from the very way the two men have treated those others.

JKP: Which of your sleuths do you think is changing more as a result of their working relationship, St-Cyr or Kohler?

JRJ: These are two very different men who have been thrown together by time and circumstance. As a result, both derive things from the other. Kohler tends to be a womanizer and to use his Gestapo clout when needed but, please, this last is far, far different from the accepted usual. Jean-Louis sees the background better--he’s French--but encourages the “clout” when needed and uses Sûreté muscle if required.

But primarily what the two do is to allow me to switch action from one to the other to build pace and story, bringing them together every now and then to go over things and illustrate their different ways of drawing conclusions. Both are, however, very “with it,” in a crime sense, with lots of past experience that comes up every now and then. But Kohler has one failing St-Cyr worries about: Because of what he’s been through, Hermann can’t stand the sight of corpses any more. The younger the victim, the worse his reaction, so Jean-Louis has to protect him and hide that fact from the Gestapo, the SS, the Wehrmacht higher ups, and the Gestapistes français--even the big shots of the black market. It’s a constant worry. And, please, there’s lots and lots of humor in their association. There has to be.

JKP: After Flykiller saw print in 2002, you lost your publisher and seemed to disappear. I understand that your agent had also been sick for a long time, so probably wasn’t working as ably as you would’ve hoped. What’s finally made it possible for you to return to the St-Cyr/Kohler series with Bellringer?

JRJ: Yes, after a good 22 years with that one agency, I found myself on my own again. But remember, please, that this was the way I started out and that I’d done a lot of books without ever having an agent.

What did I do? I grabbed the phone early last December and called The Mysterious Press. They knew of my books and we agreed on doing e-books of the first 12 St-Cyr and Kohlers, and a print-on-demand and e-book of the new one, the 13th, Bellringer. As a result--and let me just set this down here--Gracia and I had a lovely Christmas. My two guys were back in business!

JKP: Bellringer takes place during the winter of 1943, in a couple of French hotels that now serve as an internment camp for women. What sorts of research did you have to do to compose this book?

JRJ: Gradually I have come to a process with each new mystery in the series. I begin with about three or four months of “digging,” and in Bellringer’s case, some of it was not very nice at all. When I came to the writing, I decided, since I’d covered enough of such things in the previous two manuscripts, I would set those things aside and concentrate primarily on the two hotels and their internees, and am glad I did. There were others in the camp, and other hotels nearby, and these are touched on a little and form a part of the novel, but the focus is on those two groups of women.

I also, having been at Madison, Wisconsin’s Bouchercon [in 2006], did some of the “research” there, which I enjoyed immensely, and was able to use with one of the characters, but it also gave me lines of thought on the others. In addition, as a geologist, I’d been to the granite quarries at Barre, Vermont, and could use those as background [for another of my characters].

JKP: What do you think would’ve been the hardest thing about being one of those women, trapped in an internment camp in France?

JRJ: The injustice, the suspension of normally useful lives, loss of loved ones, loneliness even in such a crowd, the never knowing how long it would last or what, really, was happening elsewhere, ... the utter boredom, lack of food, heat, warmth, privacy--all a huge amount of what we normally take for granted. Dealing with the Occupation, as I do, it continually amazes me how much we have and how little attention we pay to those everyday things until they’re taken from us.


One of two hotels where the action takes place in Bellringer.

JKP: By the way, were there similar facilities for men at the time?

JRJ: There were internment camps for British nationals, separate ones for lots of others, but these were not close to Vittel. As to their exact locations, I have those, of course, but they are buried in the heaps and heaps of reference notes that face me every day and also surround me ... so please don’t ask me to start digging!

JKP: Part of Bellringer’s plot has to do with mediums or fortune tellers, people who say they can contact one’s dead relatives or discern the future from shaking baskets of trinkets. What’s your own experience with such spiritualism and fortune telling, if any?

JRJ: When folks die, I say they have stepped off the planet. When someone close does, I go out into my garden and touch the living for them. Regarding mediums and such, I have only the experience of what is in Bellringer. Granted, I had to learn it all and tried my best to do so. But it was fun and I loved working with it, and it was as natural to the story and the times as was everything else.

JKP: You were born in 1935, so were still pretty young during World War II. What do you remember of it? And did something happen back then that made you want to return to the era in fiction?

JRJ: I was 4 years old when World War II started, but our street became totally involved in it and not just in scrap metal and newspaper drives. The two boys across the street were in the army, one up the street in the navy, others in the air force. Leonard Allman--with whom I sat on his back porch while he, on leave, had a beer his mother didn’t know of, and I had a Coke--died when his Lancaster bomber was shot down over Germany. I still recall how he made me swear never to tell his mom about that beer.

I also grew up with the Belgian refugee to whom The Alice Factor was dedicated. Willi Wunsch and his sister, Arlette, lay on the backseat floor of their old car and were machine-gunned as their father drove it onto the ship [bound for North America]. Willi couldn’t speak any English, and myself little French, but we became fast friends until the war ended and they went back to Belgium. We did meet later on when he came back for a visit, but by then I had four children and he was employed with the U.N., I think, so our lives had become vastly different. I’d love to see him again, though, and still have the pastel portrait my mother drew of him.

JKP: During the decade-long hiatus between the release of Flykiller and the appearance now of Bellringer, you wrote two additional, still-unpublished St-Cyr/Kohler books, Carnival and Tapestry. But didn’t you also work on other projects?

JRJ: It was after those [two World War II thrillers] that I went back to my historical fiction for young adults and worked on a novel that is set in 1611 and deals with the man who was perhaps the greatest pirate of all time. It’s set in England, on the North Atlantic, in the New-Found-Land, and the Azores, and I would like, as always, to get right back to it. I also wrote a historical mystery for young people, which I call The House By the Water. It has wonderful character studies and I love it--I have to. Then, too, I wrote another mystery for children, one that can be read to the very young, while those a little older can cut their teeth on it. This one I call Borgford, the Housemouse Detective and the Case of the Missing Things. Borgford’s a Norwegian who jumped his ship when it passed through [Ontario’s] Welland Canal.

I worked on some other things too, and am still at them. Lots. Hey, that’s what I do, isn’t it?

JKP: Most of your World War II novels are now out of print. Mysterious Press (via Open Road Media) is bringing them all back as e-books, but are there plans to reissue them as printed works as well?

JRJ: At present, I don’t think so, but I would certainly wish it.

JKP: Do you have a favorite book in the St-Cyr/Kohler series?

JRJ: I can’t have favorites beyond the one I’m writing, but if I were to be judged, Tapestry would rank highly, as would Beekeeper [2001] and Stonekiller [1995], and certainly I still maintain that Flykiller is a major work. It took a huge amount of time, nearly two years. There was just a colossal amount to deal with. [The French town of] Vichy, at the time of the Occupation, was never easy, and I could go back there and write another [book] and another, and still not cover everything.

JKP: Finally, how would you most like be remembered?

JRJ: My archive is at the Mills Memorial Library of McMaster University [in Hamilton, Ontario], who have done an outstanding job of looking after things. But as for myself, let me state the following: Simply that my books will speak for me. Basically, I’m unassuming, quite quiet, love my garden, my daily routine, my walks up the river, my coffee, my making notes for the day’s section to come, all such things. I’m not a cymbal-banger. Rather, rightly or wrongly, I tend to leave it up to the books and wish all others nothing but the very best.

READ MORE: “J. Robert Janes and His Paris,” by Alex
Waterhouse-Hayward; “France on Berlin Time,” by J. Robert Janes (Mystery Readers Journal).