A Fast Five

• Vaseem Khan, award-winning author of both the Baby Ganesh Detective Agency novels and the Malabar House series, has been elected as the new chair of the British Crime Writers’ Association. He succeeds editor, writer, and critic Maxim Jakubowski in that post. As The Guardian notes, Khan is “the first person of colour to take the role in the organisation’s 70-year history.” It adds that “Jakubowski will formally hand over the Creasey Bell—named in honour of the CWA founder [John Creasey]—to Khan at the annual Dagger awards on 6 July. The bell has been passed on from chair to chair for 70 years.”

• The 69th and latest edition of Strand Magazine contains a previously unpublished short story by James M. Cain (1892-1977). Titled “Blackmail,” and for decades cached at the Library of Congress, it “tells of a blind Korean War veteran known as Johnsie; Pat, the former comrade who now employs him; and Myra, a woman from the past with some hard-boiled ideas about money, and love …,” according to the Associated Press. “The themes in ‘Blackmail’ of betrayal, violence, rough sexuality—and blackmail—echo such Cain classics as Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice.” The Strand remarks: “In just over 3,000 words, Cain offers up all the noir elements we’ve come to expect from him, complete with gritty dialogue and a cunning antagonist, but puts in an unexpected twist that turns the tale on its head, offering a surprisingly nuanced take on these supposedly hard characters.” Order a copy of the issue here.

• We must say farewell to George Maharis, the American actor/singer perhaps best remembered for playing peripatetic Buz Murdock in the first three seasons of the television series Route 66. He died on May 24 at 94 years of age. In the decades following Route 66, Maharis appeared in films such as The Satan Bug (1965) and The Desperadoes (1969); starred as a San Francisco private eye in the 1969 ABC-TV pilot The Monk (written by Blake Edwards); and—alongside Ralph Bellamy and Yvette Mimieux—headlined the 1970-1971 ABC crime drama The Most Deadly Game. He also found roles on shows such as Cade’s County, Mission: Impossible, Police Story, Shaft, McMillan & Wife, Ellery Queen, Switch, and Murder, She Wrote. Something I didn’t know until reading The New York Times’ obituary of this performer: Maharis was gay, and was arrested twice during the less-enlightened 1960s and ’70s for “cruising in men’s bathrooms.”

• Although I will be attending the 2023 Bouchercon in San Diego (August 30-September 3), the price of this banquet is a wee bit steep for my budget. According to a message from convention organizers, “The Wolfe Pack is planning a dinner in a local restaurant near the event, Friday, September 1, at 6:30 p.m. Over the course of the evening, celebrate Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe stories by singing pastiches; completing hilarious quizzes about the opus; and toasting Mr. Stout, Mr. Wolfe, Archie, Fritz, and ‘Other.’ Very limited seating, so register now. $175 per person.” Click here for more information.

• And this is an unlikely employment opportunity. “M16 spooks are looking for James Bond-loving cabbies to drive cars, minibuses and lorries for the secret service,” reports Britain’s Daily Mail. “The intelligence service is searching for chauffeurs to drive around the capital for £33,029 a year.” The paper goes on to explain: “The day-to-day job will be varied, with drivers picking up staff members in varying authority as well as passengers.” It adds that “experience of driving large vans, minibuses or lorries is vital for you to be successful in this role.” What sensitive materials might those oversized vehicles be transporting? Get your application in now to find out!

Bullet Points: Barbie and Bangor Edition

• Among the six shortlisted nominees for this year’s Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-fiction are two books familiar to true-crime fans: Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee, by Casey Cep; and The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper, by Hallie Rubenhold. The winner will be announced on November 19. Victory brings £50,000 in prize money.

• Mystery Fanfare’s Janet Rudolph spreads the sad news that nurse, artist, and author Bette Golden Lamb has died. “Bette and [her husband] J.J. Lamb,” recalls Rudolph, “have written novels that include a female serial killer who thinks she’s on a noble mission to save barren women from a life of despair (Sisters in Silence) and the Gina Mazzio RN medical thriller “Bone” series (Bone Dry, Sin & Bone, Bone Pit, Bone of Contention, Bone Dust, Bone Crack, Bone Slice, Bone Point). … Bette’s most recent novel, The Russian Girl, was based on a true story of a woman who escapes from a high-security nursing home during the hottest day of the year. Her delirium reveals a harrowing story of a young immigrant Russian girl forced to come to America in the early 1900s. Her turbulent life is filled with upheaval, lost love, and activism in a crushing, brutal 20th-century journey.”

• Farewell, too, to prolific actor Jerry Fogel, who may be best remembered for having co-starred in the sitcom The Mothers-In-Law and in the later drama The White Shadow. Terence Towles Canote notes, in A Shroud of Thoughts, that Fogel died this last Monday, October 21. He was 83 years old and “had been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in 2008.” In addition to the aforementioned two series, Fogel won roles in The Bold Ones, The New Perry Mason, Police Story, Barnaby Jones, Ellery Queen, and Lou Grant.

• A story from earlier this week, about Mattel teaming up with National Geographic magazine to produce “Photojournalist Barbie,” put me in mind of Bouchercon 2019, which will commence in Dallas, Texas, on Halloween. So what’s the link? A distinctive but quite peculiar version of America’s favorite female doll, “Bouchercon Barbie” (below), that I chanced across recently. That unique plaything was evidently auctioned off 16 years ago to benefit the French Red Cross. A photo cutline identified it as “part of the Barbie Jewelry 2003 Collection,” and described it this way: “A water nymph with a serpent necklace of white gold set with diamonds and sparkling emerald eyes, a black gold serpent bracelet set with emerald and diamond eyes. The entire assembly required 250 hours of work in the Place Vendome Workshop.” Has anyone else heard of this? And the 2003 Bouchercon convention was held in Las Vegas; what did that have to do with the French Red Cross?

• Max Allan Collins reports that his next collaboration with the now very late Mickey Spillane, Masquerade for Murder—Collins’ 12th Mike Hammer novel—will be published next March. “This is the second Hammer I’ve written from a Spillane synopsis,” Collins explains, “with only two scraps of Mickey’s prose to work into the book (including the opening, however). That’s an intimidating prospect, but I think it came out well. The novel takes place in the late ’80s and is a follow-up (not a sequel) to Mickey’s The Killing Man. Like the preceding Spillane/Collins Hammer novel, Murder, My Love, the synopsis may have been written by Mickey as a proposed TV episode for the Stacy Keach series. This means I had fleshing out to do, and I hope I’ve done Mike and the Mick justice.”

• From In Reference to Murder comes this item:

In a New York Times profile, author John le Carré revealed that his sons’ production company, The Ink Factory, is plotting an epic new TV series about his most famous character, spymaster George Smiley. The Ink Factory now plans to do new television adaptations of all the novels featuring Cold War spy George Smiley—this time in chronological order. Le Carré says that his sons are interested in casting the British actor Jared Harris (Chernobyl, The Man from U.N.C.L.E.). Harris was originally cast in Tomas Alfredson’s 2011 le Carré adaptation, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, as MI6 chief Percy Alleline, but had to drop out due to scheduling conflicts with Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, in which he played Professor Moriarty.

• I, for one, have fond memories of NBC-TV’s Ghost Story. For more about that short-lived, Sebastian Cabot-hosted series, click here.

• The Library of Congress blog carried a story this week about how James M. Cain’s most famous crime novel, The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), started out with the “limp noodle” title, Bar-B-Q.

• Was Michael Crichton “the Arthur Conan Doyle of the 20th Century”? Brian Hoey endeavors to make that case for Books Tell You Why.

• Members of Britain’s Detection Club have conspired to produce Howdunit, a book “about the art and craft of crime writing,” slated for publication by HarperCollins next June. Martin Edwards explains: “The contributors will include almost all the current members of the Detection Club, including Ian Rankin, Val McDermid, Ann Cleeves, Mick Herron, James Runcie, Peter James, Sophie Hannah, Peter Robinson, Felix Francis, Elly Griffiths, Peter Lovesey, Mark Billingham, and Len Deighton, to whom the book is dedicated—given that this year, Len celebrates 50 years as an enthusiastic member of the Club. They will offer a marvellous range of insights into the writing life, including personal reminiscences, practical tips for aspiring writers, and an insight into the realities of being a writer—there are terrific pieces, for instance, about ‘imposter syndrome’ and ‘improvisation techniques’ as well as thoughts on social media, writing for radio, and the experience of having your work adapted for TV and film. … The book will also include shorter pieces by a number of illustrious Detection Club members of the past, from G.K. Chesterton onwards.”

• Thanks to a bit of rezoning, Stephen King’s Victorian mansion in Bangor, Maine, has been cleared to become an archive of the author’s work, with an adjacent writers’ retreat. Rolling Stone magazine quotes King on Facebook as saying: “We are in the very beginning of planning the writers’ retreat at the house next door, providing housing for up to five writers in residence at a time. … We are one to two years away from an operating retreat. The archives formerly held at the University of Maine will be accessible for restricted visits by appointment only. There will not be a museum and nothing will be open to the public, but the archives will be available to researchers and scholars.”

• Is crime fiction really “Melbourne’s biggest export”?

• A few interesting stories from CrimeReads: Paul French examines Berlin as a mystery-fiction setting; Michael Gonzales showcases a little-known crime novel by Richard Wright, of Native Son fame; Neil Nyren offers a primer on Dorothy L. Sayers’ work; and as the full scope of Donald Trump’s impeachment-inspiring Ukraine scandal becomes clearer, Noah Berlatsky compares it to Richard Nixon’s equally notorious Watergate scandal, so well examined in All the President’s Men (1974), by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.

• For the vintage illustration lover on your Christmas list: Eva: Men’s Adventure Supermodel, edited by Robert Deis and Wyatt Doyle. It’s described as “a lushly illustrated book that showcases the unique career of the blonde Swedish model and actress Eva Lynd, … well known to fans of men’s adventure magazines (MAMs) as the model for scores of [mid-20th0century] MAM cover paintings and interior illustrations.” Ron Fortier adds, in a review, that “What is captivating here is Ms. Lynd actually narrates the book in her own words as she recalls many of her experiences vividly with charm and melancholy. It truly was a simpler time in many ways and she describes it with an honest sincerity that infuses the volume with a special, elegant grace.”

• “George Lazenby, the one-time film James Bond, is returning to the espionage genre,” writes Spy Command blogger Bill Koenig. “Lazenby stars as Dr. Jason Love in an audio adaptation of author James Leasor’s [1964 novel] Passport to Oblivion.”

• Finally, a few author interviews worth checking out: Jake Hinkston talks with Criminal Element about his new novel, Dry County; Thomas Pluck questions Joyce Carol Oates on the matter of the latter’s new anthology, Cutting Edge: New Stories of Mystery and Crime by Women Writers (Akashic); MysteryPeople converses with Mark Coggins (The Dead Beat Scroll), Martin Limón (G.I. Confidential), and L.A. Chandlar (The Pearl Dagger); The Big Thrill quizzes Robert J. Randisi about The Headstone Detective Agency; and Lori Rader-Day goes one-on-one with Elizabeth Hand, the author of Curious Toys.

Worth Mentioning

• Ian Rankin is quoted by The Star, in Sheffield, England, as joking that he was nervous in the run-up to this month’s UK release of In a House of Lies (Orion), his 22nd John Rebus novel. “When it’s published,” he told the newspaper, “suddenly you get a flood of people who’ve read it and of course now, thanks to social media, they can immediately let you know what they think.” In a House of Lies is due out in late December in the States, from Little, Brown.

• With her new standalone suspense novel, The Witch Elm (Viking), set to appear in bookstores early next week, Dublin fictionist Tana French talks with New York magazine’s pop-culture Web site, Vulture, about “how to write a red herring.”

• Yikes! John D. Macdonald’s 1960 novel The End of the Night is “cited as one of his finest stand-alone novels,” and I have never even read it. Obviously, that situation must be remedied.

• Having watched the trailer for The Cry, a four-part British/Australian crime drama starring Jenna Coleman (Victoria), I’m now very much looking forward to seeing the full program. Unfortunately, that might take awhile. Although The Cry—based on Helen FitzGerald’s 2013 novel of that same name—has already premiered in the UK, and is slated for showing Down Under sometime later this year, there’s still no firm date for its broadcast in the United States, as far as I can tell.

• Such a bookstore sign is especially relevant right now.

• Sadly, this probably won’t be the last we’ll see of such reprehensible characters in fiction. In its report on how Bath, England, resident Georgia Fancett “has picked up a £20,000 publishing contract with Century for her ‘hard-hitting’ police procedural, The Fifth Girl,” The Bookseller adds that Fancett’s story pairs “a gay detective, [Detective Inspector] Alice Warnes,” with “a lazy, Trump-loving bigot” of a police partner. It seems Donald Trump will only reinforce the worldwide cliché of the “ugly American.”

• Author and educator Sean Carswell writes in the Los Angeles Review of Books about how the early 20th-century West Virginia “coal mine wars” inspired James M. Cain to embark on a career penning crime fiction. (Hat tip to Mystery Fanfare.)

• James Bond and Aston Martins belong together.

• For the CrimeReads Web site, Sherry Thomas—author of the Charlotte Holmes series (The Hollow of Fear)—picks seven mystery tales and TV shows that she says “imbue their Sherlock Holmes reinterpretations with far greater emotional resonance” than Arthur Conan Doyle’s original stories ever offered.

• And more author interviews worth exploring: MysteryPeople talks with George Pelecanos (The Man Who Came Uptown); Tom Leins quizzes Hector Duarte Jr. about his new short-story collection, Desperate Times Call; The Killing Times chats with Robert Olen Butler about Paris in the Dark, his fourth novel starring early 20th-century newspaper correspondent Christopher Marlowe “Kit” Cobb; and Rick Ollerman, my editor at Down & Out: The Magazine, answers six questions about the publication in Jim Harrington’s blog.

But Tell Us What You Really Think, Ray

“I hope the day will come when I don’t have to ride around on [Dashiell] Hammett and James Cain, like an organ grinder’s monkey. Hammett is all right. I give him everything. There were a lot of things he could not do, but what he did he did superbly. But James [M.] Cain--faugh! Everything he touches smells like a billygoat. He is every kind of writer I detest, a faux naif, a Proust in greasy overalls, a dirty little boy with a piece of chalk and a board fence and nobody looking. Such people are the offal of literature, not because they write about dirty things but because they do it in a dirty way.”

-- Raymond Chandler to his publisher, 1943

Cain Goes to the Cinema

In an excellent essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books, author Steve Erickson looks back at James M. Cain, his novel The Postman Always Rings Twice, and Hollywood’s response to both.

Hard Case Finds Lost James M. Cain Novel

The final unpublished novel by the author of Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce, and The Postman Always Rings Twice has found its way to light and will be published by Hard Case Crime in the autumn of 2012.

According to a press release from Hard Case, James M. Cain was working on revisions to The Cocktail Waitress close to the time of his death in 1977. Author Max Allan Collins (Bye Bye, Baby, Road to Perdition) first told Hard Case Crime editor and co-founder Charles Ardai about the book nine years ago. Ardai spent the time since first tracking down the original manuscript, then arranging for the rights to publish the book.

“Together with Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler,” says Ardai, “James M. Cain is universally considered one of the three greatest writers of noir crime fiction who ever lived, and for fans of the genre, The Cocktail Waitress is the Holy Grail. It’s like finding a lost manuscript by Hemingway or a lost score by Gershwin--that’s how big a deal this is.”

From the press release:

Combining themes from Mildred Pierce and The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Cocktail Waitress tells the story of a beautiful young widow, Joan Medford, whose husband died under suspicious circumstances. Desperate to make ends meet after his death, she takes a job as a waitress in a cocktail lounge, where he meets two new men: a handsome young schemer she falls in love with, and a wealthy older man she marries.

“Why am I taping this?” Joan narrates. “It’s in the hope of getting it printed to clear my name of the charges made against me…of being a femme fatale who knew ways of killing a husband so slick they couldn’t be proved. Unfortunately, they cannot be disproved either… All I know to do is to tell it and tell it all, including some things no woman would willingly tell …”

The book will be published in hardcover and electronic editions in 2012, with a paperback edition available the following year. Fans of The Rap Sheet will be waiting for the icing: Like all of this outfit’s novels, Hard Case Crime will commission a new cover illustration in classic pulp style.

Our biggest complaint? It’s just too long to wait!

READ MORE: “James M. Cain Discusses The Cocktail Waitress,” by Cullen Gallagher (Pulp Serenade); “How Charles Ardai Picked Up a Cocktail Waitress,” by Duane Swierczynski (Secret Dead Blog); “Discovering James M. Cain--Again: Guest Post by Andrew McAleer” (Mystery Fanfare).

Cain Was More Than Able

Thanks to Bill Crider for reminding me that today marks novelist/journalist James M. Cain’s 114th birthday. And I’m sure Cain would be celebrating, had he not already died an alcoholic at age 85, in 1977. Certainly best remembered as the author of The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), Double Indemnity (1936), and Mildred Pierce (1941), Cain was born in Maryland, aspired early to become a singer like his mother, worked in journalism with both H.L. Mencken and Walter Lippmann, and moved to Hollywood to write movie scripts but wound up penning cinematic novels, instead.

Most of Cain’s success as an author came between the early Depression years of the ’30s and the end of the Second World War. His hard-boiled yarns were usually set in California (though one of his personal favorites, The Butterfly [1947], involves incest and murder in the West Virginia coalfields). They often revolved around men who fell in love with femmes fatales, only to get mixed up in criminal acts and eventually have their paramours betray them. Raymond Chandler, a Cain contemporary, was not overly fond of having his work compared to that other novelist’s (despite the fact that he helped Billy Wilder adapt Double Indemnity for the silver screen). In a 1942 letter to the wife of his publisher, Alfred K. Knopf, Chandler grumbled:

... I hope the day will come when I won’t have to ride around on [Dashiell] Hammett and James Cain, like an organ grinder’s monkey. Hammett is all right. I give him everything. There were a lot of things he could not do, but what he did he did superbly. But James Cain--faugh! Everything he touches smells like a billygoat. He is every kind of writer I detest, a faux naïf, a Proust in greasy overalls, a dirty little boy with a piece of chalk and a board fence and nobody looking. Such people are the offal of literature, not because they write about dirty things, but because they do it in a dirty way. Nothing hard and clean and cold and ventilated. A brothel with a smell of cheap scent in the front parlor and a bucket of slops at the back door. Do I, for God’s sake, sound like that?

Others, however, have been more generous to Cain. In his 1997 study of mystery fiction, Guilty Parties, Ian Ousby writes that Cain “is usually put first on the list of those American writers whose crime novels, without adopting the conventions of the hard-boiled school, breathe a distinctly hard-boiled atmosphere.” And The Oxford Companion to Crime & Mystery Writing (1999) opines that

Compared with the voices and narration of private-eye novelists with whom he was often compared, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, the diction of Cain’s narrators has the pure simplicity of Horace McCoy and of the more literary [Ernest] Hemingway; his plots were more unified and tighter. Cain agreed with the observation that his best work was “pure”--conceived and executed to produce an experience for the reader, rather than to illustrate a moral or to lay out any other thematic trappings. The purity and the staccato, metallic style of The Postman Always Rings Twice so affected Albert Camus that, in a revised version, he adapted it to the first-person narration of The Stranger (1942).

Due to the fact that several of his early novels were turned into movies, Cain achieved a renown that probably wouldn’t have come his way otherwise. Yet his later turnout, primarily of tales with historical settings and paltry few of the trappings that would’ve earned them “hard-boiled” classification, were not nearly so well-received. Regardless, in 1970 James M. Cain was named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America.

* * *

During the Monday, July 3, broadcast of her WEBR radio program, “It’s a Mystery,” host Elizabeth Foxwell will commemorate Cain’s birthday by presenting a radio production of Double Indemnity starring Burt Lancaster. The radio drama can be heard here.

Mommie Damndest

When James M. Cain is mentioned nowadays, it’s usually in association with his first novel, 1934’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, which has been filmed three times, most recently in 1981 (with Jessica Lange and Jack Nicholson). As hard as a “six-minute egg” (to quote The New York Times), fatalistic in its viewpoint and unusually open in its treatment of sex and violence, Postman was banned as obscene in Boston and Canada, but won Cain the admiration of American critic Edmund Wilson, who labeled the novelist the “poet of the tabloid murder.” (Raymond Chandler wasn’t nearly so admiring; he dismissed Cain as “a Proust in greasy overalls.”) Cain went on to publish more than a dozen subsequent novels, many with historical settings, and put his stamp on the field of film noir, before he died at age 85 in 1977. However, explains novelist Laura Lippman, “the conventional wisdom is that he never equaled his debut novel, The Postman Always Rings Twice.”

But Lippman insists that conventional wisdom is wrong. Writing in Slate, the Baltimore author (whose ninth private eye Tess Monaghan novel, No Good Deeds, should hit bookstores late next month) instead applauds Mildred Pierce, Cain’s somewhat less-celebrated 1941 novel of greed, ambition, and betrayal, as “my favorite Cain work ... the unicorn of crime fiction, a noir novel with no murder and very little crime.”

Lippman observes: “With this book’s subversively skeptical view of maternal love, Cain proved that noir could be set in the most domestic, middle-class locales. He also showed that a man can write beautifully from a woman’s point of view.” She goes on to decry the sanitized 1941 film version of Mildred Pierce, for which star Joan Crawford won an Academy Award, because it eliminated the adultery from Cain’s grim yarn and substituted murder--considered somehow more acceptable to film audiences. The movie also changed the novel’s “cleverer” ending. And Lippman concludes with an anecdote sure to send Cain fans running to their bookshelves for confirmation:

Cain, who didn’t believe in advances, sold Mildred Pierce, his fourth novel, for $5,000, a significant sum at the time. To celebrate the sale, [biographer Roy] Hoopes writes, Cain bought a snowball maker, like the one he remembered from his boyhood. The snowballs weren’t much good, but the machine made divine mint juleps. This is an apt metaphor for Mildred Pierce, a book that delivers much more of a wicked kick than expected, especially if you’ve been raised on the saccharine pieties of the film.

Read Lippman’s full essay here.