PaperBack: “The Disappearance of Penny”

Part of a series honoring the late author and blogger Bill Crider.



The Disappearance of Penny, by Robert J. Randisi (Charter, 1980). Randisi noted in an interview with Shots that this was his “first mystery novel.” It was also his only novel featuring New York Racing Commission investigator Henry Po, though Po appeared later in three short stories. Cover illustration by Mitchell Hooks.

Back in Tune

Robert J. Randisi made his name as a crime novelist partly because of his books featuring private eyes such as Miles Jacoby and Nick Delvecchio, and partly because of his founding, in 1981, of the Private Eye Writers of America. But lately he’s spent much of his time plotting historical mysteries (such as It Was a Very Bad Year and the forthcoming You Make Me Feel So Dead) around the 1960s “Rat Pack.”

So it’s noteworthy to see Randisi finally returning to the world of gumshoe fiction. His next novel, The Honky Tonk Big Hoss Boogie (to be published in August by Perfect Crime), will introduce Nashville session musician and P.I. Auggie Velez. You can see the cover and read the plot description here.

The Story Behind the Story: “I’m a Fool to Kill You,” by Robert J. Randisi

(Editor’s note: For this latest entry in The Rap Sheet’s “Story Behind the Story” series, we welcome back veteran and prolific crime novelist Robert J. Randisi, who Booklist says “may be the last of the pulp writers.” Randisi is most recently the author of the Rat Pack Mysteries, including his brand-new one, I’m a Fool to Kill You, about which he writes below.)

Practically a lifelong Rat Pack fan, my favorite member has flip-flopped over the years. In my teens I started buying Sammy Davis Jr. albums (and enjoyed his 1969 TV movie, The Pigeon, in which he played a private eye), and was taken with Frank Sinatra films (Tony Rome, The Detective, Von Ryan’s Express, etc.) and Dean Martin westerns (Five Card Stud, Rough Night in Jericho). I never liked Dean Martin’s Matt Helm movies, but his long-running TV variety series finally earned him the title of my overall favorite. That show really struck me as the closest we ever came to seeing the genuine Dino.

I finally decided that Sammy was the greatest entertainer who ever lived. Frank was ... well, Frank. Joey Bishop--never my favorite of the bunch--was nevertheless the hub of the wheel and the arranger of the stage act that made the Rat Pack famous as a group. I didn’t like Peter Lawford, and that probably shows in the way I have used him in my Rat Pack series of mysteries. No apologies. They are my books. But Dino--well, more people than just me have pronounced him the coolest Rat Pack member ever.

In 2005, after writing a series of police procedurals built around Joe Keough, a New York City homicide detective transplanted to St. Louis, Missouri, I decided I wanted to do something different. I have long had the habit of watching the 1960 Rat Pack film, Ocean’s 11, whenever it’s on (and now own my own copy). So watching it again one day, I got the idea of building a book--and then a series--around the making of that picture. This would enable me to use my favorite entertainers in a novel, set in my favorite town (Las Vegas), and at least part of my research would come from the simple fact that I had lived through the 1960s. However, I didn’t want to use one of the Pack as my protagonist. I needed more freedom to have my main character do whatever I wanted him to, so I created former Brooklynite Eddie G (Gianelli), a Sands Casino pit boss who becomes the “go-to guy” for the Rat Pack in Sin City. As it turned out, Ocean’s 11 found its place at the core of the first and second entries in this series, Everybody Kills Somebody Sometime (2006) and Luck Be a Lady, Don’t Die (2007).

Writing these books is the most fun I’ve ever had in my career. I use song titles as the roots of the book titles, and not only use Frank, Dino, Sammy, Joey, and Peter as players, but bring in other famous entertainers from that period, too--some of whom are considered “extended” Rat Packers--for cameo appearances. I’ve tried to be as factual as I can with the time period and the story settings. If I say that Frank, or Dino, or Sammy was in Vegas, or at Lake Tahoe, at the time, then they were there. If I say Sammy liked guns, he did. If I say Dino was friends with Marilyn Monroe, then he was. And if I say the love of Frank’s life was actress Ava Gardner, well, that’s true too.

As I worked on the first two books I found myself looking forward to the time when I’d be able to bring Marilyn into the series (book #4: You're Nobody ’Til Somebody Kills You, 2009) and, finally, my dream goddess, Ava Gardner (the newly released book #5: I’m a Fool to Kill You, published by Severn House).

Coming up with the title of this Ava novel, set in 1963, was easy. Frank wrote the lyrics to the song “I’m a Fool to Love You” specifically for Ava. It just needed one word changed, and it worked.

The plot is almost factual. Ava was worried at this point in her life about growing old, about her career. She was living in Spain, drinking and carousing, and had just come off making a film with Charlton Heston--55 Days at Peking--during which Heston did say that her behavior was “the worst I’ve ever seen from a colleague.” And Ava did fly to Vegas to see Frank, and became upset when she saw that his ex-wife, the former Nancy Barbato, and their children were there. The rest is pure fiction, but my depiction of Ava (shown on the left)--which critic Vince Keenan describes as “earthy, seductive, foul-mouthed, and fearful of aging”--was as realistic as I could make it.

The basic plot of I’m a Fool to Kill You is this: Ava suffers a blackout, and then wakes up in a hotel bed beside the body of a low-level gangster. At Frank’s request, Eddie G and his buddy from Brooklyn, Jerry Epstein, take on the task of proving Ava didn’t kill anybody, no matter how it may look.

As usual there are plenty of cameos in these pages--from one-liners to full scenes--this time by Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme, Johnny Carson, George C. Scott, as well as mob boss and famous Frank buddy Sam “Momo” Giancana. Frank and Dino represent the Rat Pack here, with Sammy appearing in only one scene (set in Chicago, because Sammy was in Chicago at the time). We get a brief encounter with Joey, and there’s no Peter at all (for by this point, Peter was on the outs with Frank).

Ava Gardner was, in my opinion, one of the most beautiful women in Hollywood. My buddy, Eddie G, obviously feels the same way, and is completely entranced when he meets her. Neither of us understands why, in the 1953 film Mogambo--which starred Clark Gable, Gardner, and Grace Kelly--the Gable character would even have looked at Grace Kelly, when Ava’s “Honey Bear” was around.

I’m a Fool to Kill You is the first Rat Pack book with my new publisher, Severn House, and it features a big change in the cover art after four books with St. Martin’s Press. Severn had put me on a six-month schedule, so the next book--Fly Me to the Morgue--will be out in the UK in March, and in the United States in July. I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoyed writing them.

* * *

AND THERE’S A CONTEST, TOO: To celebrate the publication of I’m a Fool to Kill You, author Randisi has generously consented to give two free copies of his new novel away to always-deserving Rap Sheet readers. If you would like a shot at winning one of those, all you have to do is e-mail your name and snail-mail address (no P.O. boxes) to jpwrites@wordcuts.org. And please be sure to write “Rat Pack Mystery Contest” in the subject line. Entries will be accepted between now and midnight next Monday, January 31. Winners will be chosen at random, and their names will be listed on this page the following day.

Sorry, but this contest is open only to U.S. residents.

READ MORE: “Last of the Pulp Writers,” by Jedidiah Ayres (Ransom Notes: The B&N Mystery Blog).

Roping in a Heavyweight

As Kieran Shea explains, this week’s short-story contribution to Beat to a Pulp comes from Private Eye Writers of America founder Robert J. Randisi. It’s called “Shut Up and Kill Me,” and is apparently BTAP’s final offering of 2009. By the way, Shea himself wrote last week’s BTAP tale, “Charlie and Stevie Do a Repo.”

Eye on Bouchercon: Robert J. Randisi

Robert J. Randisi, founder of the Private Eye Writers of America, talks about a major surprise he got during this year’s Shamus Awards presentation, courtesy of Max Allan Collins.

The Fantastic Fours

My suggestion yesterday that crime-fiction bloggers take up “the four play meme challenge” has already produced some interesting responses. So far, I’ve spotted posts by Patti Abbott, Scott D. Parker, Cullen Gallagher, Bill Crider, James Reasoner, David Cranmer, Randy Johnson, Donna Moore, Rhian Davies, George Kelley, and Uriah Robinson. I also just received a list from crime-fictionist, western novelist, and founder of the Private Eye Writers of America Robert J. Randisi (right), whose most recent books, of many, are You’re Nobody ’Til Somebody Kills You (a Rat Pack Mystery) and Dial Emmy for Murder (a Soap Opera Mystery), written with Eileen Davidson. I am posting Randisi’s responses below.

4 movies you would watch over and over again:

• Harper
• Chinatown
• Eddie and the Cruisers
• Jaws

4 places you have lived:

• Brooklyn (born there)
• Florida
• St. Louis, Missouri
• Clarksville, Missouri

4 TV shows you love to watch:

• Harry O
• Secret Agent
• Stargate: SG1
• Burn Notice

4 places you have been on vacation:

• Deadwood, North Dakota
• Las Vegas, Nevada
• New Orleans, Louisiana
• Sanibel, Florida

4 of your favorite foods:

• Pizza
• Chinese
• Pasta
• Fried Chicken

4 Web sites you visit daily (there are none, but if I had to pick ...):

• The Rap Sheet
• Ed Gorman Blog
• Bill Crider’s Pop Culture Magazine
• Brisnet

4 places you would rather be right now:

• Las Vegas
• Tuscany
• New Orleans
• Sedona, Arizona

4 things you want to do before you die:

• Go to the Kentucky Derby
• Go to the Breeder’s Cup
• Tour Europe
• Sing with an orchestra on stage

4 books you wish you could read again for the first time:

• Replay, by Ken Grimwood
• Dune, by Frank Herbert
• The Moving Target, by Ross Macdonald
• Death of a Citizen, by Donald Hamilton

Tag 4 people you think will respond:

• Ed Gorman
• Bill Crider
• Paul Bishop
• Max Allan Collins

UPDATE: This “four play” meme continues to rumble through the blogosphere. Corey Wilde has posted his own list in The Drowning Machine. Ed Gorman has his say on these matters here, while Todd Mason presents his picks in the Sweet Freedom blog. Weighing in elsewhere are Keith Rawson, Patrick Shawn Bagley, and the mysterious Iasa. Oh, and Peter Rozovsky decided to modify the categories to fit his idiosyncratic tastes (you radical you!). We’ll keep watch on the spread of this meme over the next few days.

I Smell a Rat (Pack)

Here’s an interesting tidbit of news, offered by prolific author Robert J. Randisi on his fellow writer, Ed Gorman’s blog:

I’ve sold film right[s] to my first Rat Pack book, Everybody Kills Somebody Sometime, to Sandy Hackett, the late Buddy Hackett’s son. I will be writing the screenplay. Plans are to begin filming [in] January 2010. Sandy Hackett will star as Sands Casino pit boss Eddie G., who in the story is asked by Frank Sinatra to help find out who is sending Dean Martin threatening notes, while they are filming Ocean’s 11 in 1960 Las Vegas. All of the Rat Pack members appear in the book, as well as other historical characters like Sands boss Jack Entratter, George Raft and Angie Dickinson.

This book was followed last year by Luck Be a Lady, Don’t Die, and in December Hey There (You With the Gun in Your Hand) will be published. All the books come from St. Martin’s Press, and I’m presently working on the fourth, You’re Nobody Til Somebody Kills You.

Cool, daddy-o, cool.

The Book You Have to Read: “The Falling Man,” by Mark Sadler

(Editor’s note: This is the 14th installment of our ongoing Friday blog series highlighting great but forgotten books. Today’s selection comes from the ultra-prolific Robert J. Randisi. Founder of the Private Eye Writers of America, creator of the Shamus Award, and [with Ed Gorman] co-founder of Mystery Scene magazine, Randisi is the author of three “Rat Pack Mysteries,” the latest of which--Hey There [You With the Gun in Your Hand]--is due out in early December.)

In 1967, at the ripe old age of 16, I discovered Michael Collins and his one-armed private detective, Dan Fortune, when I bought and read Act of Fear. The book won a Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award for Best First Novel, and I not only found a favorite author but--years later--one of my best friends.

Three years after Act of Fear came out, I read a book called The Falling Man, by “Mark Sadler,” only to find out that Sadler was a pseudonym of St. Louis-born, New York-reared author Dennis Lynds.

In 1970 the third Dan Fortune novel was also published. Night of the Toads followed The Brass Rainbow (1969). I was firmly and forever a “Michael Collins” fan, reading all 17 novels in that series over the years. But I discovered Mark Sadler and his P.I., Paul Shaw, before I found out that Sadler-was-Collins-was-Lynds. (Max Allan Collins once told me a similar story about himself, that he had books on his shelves by Donald E. Westlake, Richard Stark, and Tucker Coe before he found out that they were one and the same.) Also, Dennis and I did not become friends until the late ’70s, when I started a correspondence with him. Later, we shared lunches and dinners and favorite beers with each other.

So when I discuss The Falling Man as a forgotten book you should read, it has nothing to do with the friendship factor.

Dennis Lynds--as “Michael Collins,” as “Mark Sadler,” and also as “William Arden” (the name under which he wrote the Kane Jackson novels)--was, along with Bill Pronzini, the linchpin that took us from Ross Macdonald to Robert B. Parker and the resurgence of the P.I. novel. See, they were still turning out P.I. novels when P.I.s were not cool, and virtually kept the genre alive until others could discover how well a story could be told through the eyes of a private eye.

And protagonist Paul Shaw is not a Dan Fortune carbon copy. Shaw is the opposite of Fortune as The Falling Man starts. He has money, status, and a beautiful and successful actress wife. He has it all, until the evening he comes back from a trip, stops by the offices of Thayer, Shaw and Delaney--Security and Investigations, and accidentally pushes an intruder out a window during a struggle--an intruder who turns out to be a young man with no criminal record.

Far from a whodunit, this book then becomes a whydunit as Shaw tries to find out why the kid “made” him kill him.

Early in the novel, Shaw waxes eloquently on a variation of the “when somebody kills your partner” speech made by Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon:

When you kill a man you want to know his name. I learned that as I sat there with Baxter. You want to know who he was and why you had to kill him. It was something I learned then and there. I wanted to know who he had been, and what reason he had for making me kill him.

Shaw, living in an entirely different tax bracket, nevertheless shares a code with Dan Fortune. He walks the same streets, only his suit and his shoes are of better quality. Both are cerebral men, though, who turn to action when it is warranted. Both have a conscience and a social awareness.

This post is not, strictly speaking, about a book that should be read, but a short-run series that should be enjoyed. There were six books in that series, listed here for your convenience:

• The Falling Man (1970)
• Here to Die (1971)
• Mirror Image (1972)
• Circle of Fire (1973)
• Touch of Death (1981)
• Deadly Innocents (1986)

Dennis Lynds wrote under the names Michael Collins, Mark Sadler, John Crow, Carl Dekker, and others. He gained the most fame with his Dan Fortune books, but the Paul Shaw novels hold their own against any of the limited series in this genre, most notably the “Mitch Tobin” books penned by Tucker Coe (aka Donald E. Westlake). The Coe books have been reprinted several times, but the Paul Shaw books have yet to be.

Point Blank Press is planning to reprint most of the late Lynds’ work, including all the Dan Fortune novels and selected installments of his other series, including those featuring Paul Shaw. It’s going to start with a mammoth Dennis Lynds Reader, which will contain the entire John Crowe Buena Costa County novel Bloodwater (1974), the Michael Collins short novel Resurrection, the Dennis Lynds short novel Talking to the World (1995), and a selection of Michael Collins and Dennis Lynds short stories. This is important, I think, because Dennis passed away in 2005 and he is not a writer who should be forgotten.

I’m hoping that Dennis Lynds’ work will be so well received that Point Blank--or some other publisher--will eventually reprint the Paul Shaw series in its entirety. For now, though, copies of The Falling Man are available online, in hardcover and in both paperback editions (Zebra, 1970; Manor Books, 1973).

Next week’s forgotten book will be chosen by Max Allan Collins, two-time Shamus Award winner for his Nate Heller detective series. Collins is also the creator of Ms. Tree, and the author of Road to Perdition (1998) and the more recent Black Hats (as Patrick Culhane). He has worked in so many different media--comics, film, short stories, novels, as well as music--that he is the very definition of a renaissance man.

The Betting’s in His Favor

It seems to be something of a Robert J. Randisi day here at The Rap Sheet desk. This morning, I received a copy of The Picasso Flop, the premiere installment of a high-stakes poker-based mystery series, which Randisi is writing with former child star Vincent Van Patten (Apple’s Way), who now hosts the Travel Channel’s World Poker Tour series. Then just now, I came across a note from Randisi at Ed Gorman’s blog. He reports that his own first “Rat Pack Mystery” was “reviewed well enough” that St. Martin’s Minotaur has asked for two more entries in the entertaining series. “That’s four, counting the one I just delivered,” Randisi explains. “The first two are Everybody Kills Somebody Sometime and Luck Be a Lady, Don’t Die. The third will be Hey There, You With the Gun in Your Hand.”

If Randisi sounds pumped, there’s ample reason. “I published my first book with SMP in 1984,” he tells Gorman, “[and] have been on a book every other year schedule with them. This is the first time they’ve ever given me a two-book contract. Go figure.”

Roping in Randisi

The ubiquitous Ed Gorman, who conducted “Pro-File” interviews for the late, much-lamented Mystery*File, seems to be continuing that series on his new blog. His introductory exchange is with Robert J. Randisi, who says that he’s delivered his sequel to his first “Rat Pack Mystery,” the delightful Everybody Kills Somebody Sometime; that he’s working on a follow-up to his first “Texas Hold ’em Mystery,” The Picasso Flop (scheduled for publication in February, and co-authored with “poker analyst-actor-former tennis star Vince Van Patten”); and that the greatest pleasure of a writing career is ... well, I’m not going to tell you that last one, because it’s the funniest part of the interview. Go read the whole thing here.

Dead at the Sands

A new exchange at the Chatterific site between novelist Robert J. Randisi (Eye in the Ring, Arch Angels, etc.) and a trio of interviewers, including moderator Gerald So, reveals that Randisi is preparing to debut a new mystery series featuring Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., and other members of the notorious 1950s-1960s “Rat Pack” of American entertainers. He explains that the first entry, Everybody Kills Somebody Sometime (due out in late October from St. Martin’s Minotaur), is “set in Vegas during 1960, when the Rat Pack was shooting Ocean’s 11 ... Dean Martin is threatened, hence the title.” Randisi has also contracted to write a sequel, Luck Be a Lady, Don’t Die, which will focus on crooner Sinatra. If the series prospers, the third installment “would be a Sammy Davis book.” Although Dean, Frank, and Sammy will appear in all of these novels, “along with other real people,” Randisi points out that the main character will actually be “a fictional pit boss named Eddie G.” Cool, man.