Bullet Points: Making the Best of It Edition

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Easter mysteries to relish over the coming holiday.

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

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

• This item comes from In Reference to Murder:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mystery Fiction’s Record Keeper

I first knew him as the silent co-editor of The New Black Mask, the mid-1980s revival of the famous American Black Mask pulp magazine that flourished during the 1920s and ’30s. I say silent because when my story “There’s No Such Thing As Private Eyes” was published in NBM #4, all my correspondence was carried on with his editing partner, Richard Layman.

Later, as I began collecting first editions of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler novels, Bruce Taylor--then owner of the San Francisco Mystery Bookstore--pointed me to the bibles for collectors of Hammett and Chandler: the descriptive bibliographies edited by this man.

As I delved deeper into the world of hard-boiled fiction, I discovered more volumes on writers such as Chandler and Ross MacDonald edited by him, including the fascinating Chandler Before Marlowe.

And then, in my late 30s, when I finally read the novel the Modern Library determined to be the second best in the English language--The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald--I found his preface and notes accompanying the authorized text. I went on to read a great more of and about Fitzgerald, discovering that this man had written one of the standard biographies of Fitzgerald, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, and had edited the Cambridge Edition of The Love of the Last Tycoon, undoing many of the good-intentioned but misguided changes of Edmund Wilson and restoring the text to a form that better approximated Fitzgerald’s intentions.

The man I’m talking about is Matthew J. Bruccoli, who he died at his home in Columbia, South Carolina, on Wednesday of glioma, a tumor of the brain stem. He was 76. Bruccoli (pronounced BROOK-uhly) will be remembered for many things. To quote the New York Times obit:

In addition to his voluminous work on Fitzgerald and Hemingway, he wrote biographies of John O’Hara, James Gould Cozzens and Ross Macdonald, compiled descriptive bibliographies of several authors and edited the letters and notebooks of many others, including Vladimir Nabokov, whose literature courses he took at Cornell.

But the mystery fiction world--and in particular the hard-boiled mystery fiction world--has lost a great friend and scholar.

READ MORE: “The Great Bruccoli,” by Rachel Donadio (Paper Cuts/The New York Times).

In Layman’s Terms

Over the course of an eight-part series that ran in The Rap Sheet from November of last year to earlier this month, I offered a sort of guided tour to the short run of The New Black Mask, the mid-1980s revival of the famous American Black Mask pulp magazine that flourished in the 1920s and ’30s.

I thought the perfect bookend to that tour would be an interview with New Black Mask (NBM) co-editor Richard Layman, and he was kind enough to oblige.

Layman has written six books about Dashiell Hammett, including Literary Masterpieces: The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett: A Descriptive Bibliography, and Shadow Man: The Life of Dashiell Hammett. In addition, two of his editing assignments--for Selected Letters of Dashiell Hammett, 1921-1960 and Discovering The Maltese Falcon and Sam Spade--have been nominated for Edgar Awards by the Mystery Writers of America. And in 2005, he commemorated the 75th anniversary of The Maltese Falcon’s publication with a speech about Hammett and his best-known novel at the Library of Congress.

He is vice president of South Carolina-based Bruccoli Clark Layman Inc., which produces reference works in literary and social history, including the Dictionary of Literary Biography.

Layman was born and reared in Louisville, Kentucky, where he co-owns the popular seafood restaurant Leander’s on Oak. He earned a B.A. and an M.A. from the University of Louisville, and a Ph.D. from the University of South Carolina. He currently lives in Columbia, South Carolina.

Mark Coggins: How did the concept for New Black Mask originate?

Richard Layman: The idea for a magazine of crime stories in paperback format originated with William Jovanovich. Bruccoli Clark, as our company was called then, had an imprint with Harcourt Brace Jovanovich [HBJ]. Mr. Jovanovich approached Matthew Bruccoli with the idea, and Matt asked me to co-edit the series with him.

MC: What sort of stories were you looking to publish originally? Did you change the editorial guidelines at all during the course of the eight NBM issues? And were the guidelines for the succeeding publication, A Matter of Crime (AMOC), different?

RL: The editorial rationale was to publish quality stories about crime that were not bound by genre restrictions, and that rationale remained consistent. Thus, we published some writers not normally associated with mystery fiction.

MC: Were most submissions agented or over the transom? Did you request submissions from particular authors?

RL: Almost all of our stories came over the transom. In some cases we went after particular writers, normally for the featured story in a issue, but rarely otherwise. After the first issue, we received about 25 unsolicited stories a day.

MC: Were there any writers who you wanted to publish but weren’t able to entice into submitting work?

RL: Sure, but we were satisfied with what we got.

MC: In addition to you and Matthew J. Bruccoli, I understand Martha C. Lawrence [later the author of the Dr. Elizabeth Chase series] was also on the editorial staff. What was her role? Were there other editors involved in the publication?

RL: I don’t know anything about Martha C. Lawrence except what is posted on her Web site. She had no editorial role in either NBM or AMOC. Matt and I were the sole editors. Each of us read each story that came in and rated it “good,” “maybe,” or “reject.” Two goods meant an acceptance; two rejects, or one maybe and a reject, meant a reject. Two maybes meant the story got reread.

MC: Who was responsible for the interviews in each issue? Were the interviews conducted face-to-face? How were the interviewed authors to deal with personally?

RL: Generally, Matt and I alternated interviews. Most of the interviews were conducted by phone, and I cannot recall an interview subject who was not easy to talk to. One of the most brusque was John D. MacDonald, which I did just before he left on the long ocean cruise during which he died. I thought it was the last interview done with him, but I have been corrected by one of his fans.

MC: How did you become aware of and gain the rights to the “rarities” you published from Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Jim Thompson?

RL: Matt collects Chandler; I collect Hammett; and we are both Thompson fans. We went to the agents for permission to publish works we knew existed.

MC: There are some great stories from James Ellroy in the issues. Although he had been published previously, he had yet to release the groundbreaking “L.A. Quartet.” Did you have a sense when you were working with him that he was on the edge of superstardom?

RL: When we began NBM, we went to friends in the business to ask for help. Otto Penzler was publishing Ellroy then and recommended him highly. He sent us James’ first story, which we liked and published. Otto assured us that James had a bright future, and he was right.

MC: You published several stories from first-time writers. Was that intentional or did it just happen?

RL: We believed that a market was needed for quality stories about crime. It was particularly gratifying to get good work from then-unrecognized writers, such as Mark Coggins, for example.

MC: Several writers, myself included, launched series characters from the stories they first published in NBM. Did you anticipate that NBM would be the launching point for careers, in the same way the original Black Mask was?

RL: That was certainly our hope. We didn’t find this generation’s Hammett or Chandler, but we will stand by the books.

MC: One must ask: Do you have a favorite story among all that were published in NBM?

RL: James Lee Snyder’s “Shopping Cart Howard” is a story I remember after 22 years. [Robert] Sampson’s “Rain in Pinton County” won an Edgar. But “favorite” is a difficult concept to apply here. We were proud to have published a lot of those stories.

MC: What were the circumstances surrounding the decision to morph the publication into A Matter of Crime?

RL: A litigious character emerged, who claimed rights to the old Black Mask. As I understood it, that claim got reduced to his claiming rights to the name and the type design of the masthead. In any event, HBJ bowed to the threat of a restraint order, paid him off, changed the name to A Matter of Crime, and altered the format to rack-size paperback

MC: What was the most enjoyable aspect of publishing NBM? And conversely, the least enjoyable?

RL: The most enjoyable aspect, obviously, was finding good stories. That pleasure was enhanced by the contrast with the least enjoyable aspect, which was making our way through real junk. There were stories by writers without a flicker of talent, and there were stories so twisted that I, at least, wondered if we should notify the authorities.

MC: If you were to do it all over again, what, if anything, would you do differently?

RL: Neither Matt nor I have the time or inclination now to read 25 stories a day in search of a gem. I would engage a pre-vetter to weed out the stories that don’t merit consideration. I think marketing would have to be reconsidered. Can a series designed to be sold in bookstores be effectively marketed? Maybe not without some subscription support. An alternate publication plan would have to be designed.

MC: Any other facets of the NBM experience that you think our readers would enjoy hearing about?

RL: One of the great pleasures of NBM was the people we met along the way. I should mention George Greenfield, the respected British literary agent and author of Scribblers for Bread. He was a friend of Matt’s, one of the people we contacted at the beginning. George allowed Matt to look through his entire file of unpublished crime stories and was instrumental in introducing a British flavor to NBM. There was the attorney at MGM who allowed me into their files, where I found the Hammett Thin Man original stories that MGM allowed us to publish. There was Otto Penzler.

That is three among many.

(To read all of Mark Coggins’ excellent series about The New Black Mask magazine, click here.)

Back to Black, Part VIII

(Editor’s note: This is the final installment of author Mark Coggins’ appreciative look back at The New Black Mask magazine; previous entries can be found here. Although Mark is finished with this series, we’re not finished with him. He’s agreed to join The Rap Sheet’s “Usual Suspects” stable of contributors. We look forward to more astute entries from him in the near future.)

* * *

1987 was the year the eighth and final issue of The New Black Mask (NBM) made its appearance in print. It is a strong close, including as it does a number of stories from both well-established and rising stars of the mystery genre.

From the well-established category, Travis McGee creator John. D. MacDonald grabs the cover with his story “Night Ride.” It’s the tale of a middle-aged salesman who leaves a late-night poker game drunk and a thousand bucks down, and manages to dig himself even deeper on the ride home when he hits a homeless man. He gambles further when he attempts to cover up that accident.

I once took a creative-writing class during which the instructor passed out two Xeroxed excerpts from published novels, with the authors’ names and the titles obscured. I happened to be able to identify both: one was a scene from Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985) and the other was a chapter from a Travis McGee novel. The instructor had us read the selections and then led us in a discussion their individual merits, revealing at the end that he considered the first to be one of the best examples of published fiction (McCarthy’s Meridian) and the second to be one of the worst (MacDonald’s McGee novel).

I like MacDonald and think the instructor did him an injustice. Certainly MacDonald acquits himself well with “Ride.” It provides the story’s protagonist with a strong characterization, making his actions in the final third of this tale feel entirely consistent with what we learn about him in the preceding two thirds. There’s one curious failure of “continuity,” however, in the NBM cover illustration associated with MacDonald’s story. The plot of “Ride” turns on the fact that one headlight of the salesman’s car is busted during the accident, yet both are shown blazing on the front of this issue.

James Ellroy, who in 1987 can be said to have been on the verge of superstardom, provides the second story in this edition, and his second piece for NBM overall, a barn-burner called “Dial Axminster 6-400.” As with the yarn he provided for the fifth issue, it features a character from The Black Dahlia: Lee Blanchard, the “fire” half of the “fire and ice” Black Dahlia detective team of Blanchard and Bucky Bleichert. In “Axminster 6-400,” Blanchard and his hot-rod-loving partner find that an assignment to transport an Okie prisoner from the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department turns from a chance to misappropriate the prisoner’s 1936 Auburn Speedster into a series of deadly high-speed chases and gun battles involving the prisoner’s accomplices, Ventura County deputies, and the feds. The highlight here is the thrill-ride on a Rube Goldberg hot-rod that Blanchard’s partner calls “Li’l Assdragger.”

Veteran writer John Lutz bats next with his story “Flotsam and Jetsam.” In it, private eye Alo “Nudge” Nudger helps the owner of the Dunker Delite doughnut shop, located below his office, determine why former crewman from his old U.S. Navy ship keep winding up in the gutter with their heads bashed in. Nudge has to get past ingestible doughnuts, fumigating cigars, and flying ashtrays, but he ultimately gets his man.

The fourth story here is contributed by first-time author Martin J. Miller Jr. Miller has experience in private investigations and he puts it to good use in “Telex,” a sort of “P.I. procedural” yarn about bank fraud, featuring a four-person private eye firm called Quad Investigations. The fraud in question involves the theft by computer of nearly $6 million from a large Los Angeles bank. Quad discovers the identity of the person responsible--the former head of “data processing” (now, there’s a 1980s term for you)--but determines that he’s covered his tracks too well to bring charges. Instead, they contrive to get the money back from his Cayman Islands account in the same way that he stole it. The story concludes as more of an Ocean’s Eleven-type caper.

One thing I’ve always admired about Chicago writer Sara Paretsky is how she has her female P.I., V.I. Warshawski, hang tough in realistic hard-boiled plots. Unfortunately, V.I.’s role in “Skin Deep”--the next story in NBM No. 8--is a bit more soft-boiled and Agatha Christie-ish than what we’ve come to expect from Paretsky (who by 1987 had only four novels under her belt, all of them Warshawski books). This tale involves the poisoning of a spa client through a toxic agent mixed into the skin cream applied to his face, and the resolution of the mystery has V.I. drawing (upon) her Italian language skills rather than the gat in her purse.

Another master--make that Grand Master--of P.I. fiction holds the “super hit six” position: Bill Pronzini. Although Pronzini is best known for his Nameless Detective series, “Stacked Deck,” his story in this edition of NBM, reminded me more of a Parker yarn by Richard Stark (aka Donald E. Westlake). It features a Parker-like character named Deighan, who pulls off the strong-arm heist of a high-stakes poker game in Tahoe. The wrinkle in this well-written yarn is that Deighan’s true motives are not obvious and very unlikely to be shared by Parker.

William Doxey, a University of West Georgia English professor who retired after 35 years in the saddle, is up next with his story “Family Business.” In “Business,” all P.I. Jack Bleekman wants to do is get his house painted before the next rainstorm, but Kimberly, an attractive 19-year-old with $500, convinces him that he has enough time to tell her parents to stop looking for her. It seems she’s found a well-paying job as a dancer and is happy to be living in Atlanta and not a small town in Tennessee. Funny thing--when Bleekman visits the parents at a nearby Travelodge, it turns out that the girl who gave him the money wasn’t their daughter after all. He teams up with the bruiser of a father, finds the real Kimberly, and gets his house painted to boot.

As you might guess from its title, the following tale by Sol Newman, “’Ead All About It,” employs (more than) a bit of patois. Although Mark Twain pulled it off nicely in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, I’ve never been a big fan of patois, and it made “’Ead All About It” a bit hard for me to parse. Set in New York in the early 1900s, “’Ead” tells the story of a pair of star-crossed lovers, Julius and Rosala, and Julius’ older brother Finkie, who “could fix anything: ballgames, prizefights, horse races, tennis even.” When Finkie tries to involve the lovers in one of his scams as a way to fund their honeymoon, physician Julius slips his harness, Rosala proves less than faithful, and newspaper headlines result.

Edward D. Hoch, who also had a story in the fourth NBM, delivers “Spy for Sale” as the ninth story in this last issue. “Spy” seems to be a rather atypical tale for Hoch, featuring as it does non-series characters and dealing with high technology, specifically picture-taking satellite technology. When civilian photo analyst Frasier gets an offer he can’t refuse to pass on photos of the Mediterranean and Persian Gulf regions to his firm’s “outside sales” guy, Jack Sergeant, and he finds that Miss Raymond, the office administrative assistant, is more than willing to hop into the sack with him, it seems like he’s got it made. But then the U.S. Defense Department starts making inquiries about inappropriate use of the technology, Sergeant gets greedy, and Miss Raymond shows she has a surprise or two up the sleeve of her negligee.

“Looking for Lauren,” by Joseph Lisowski, is next in the line-up. The guy who’s doing the looking here is a bookkeeper and wanna-be P.I. by the name of Wilcox. Pushing 60, Wilcox is overweight and he lives only for eating and his daily trip to the post office, where he hopes someday someone will respond to his classified ad for discreet inquiries. He just about has a heart attack when someone does: Sarah Wright, who is missing her sister Lauren with whom she lives. Wilcox swings into action, eating cheeseburgers at the local college snack bar, ribs at the Blue River Rib Company, steak and eggs at a Waffle House, cream puffs at the Dunkin’ Donuts, and spaghetti at Joe’s Inn--all while breaking wind and occasionally throwing up into the tank (not the bowl) of the toilet at the morgue. When Lauren ends up dead and Wilcox actually discovers who killed her (perhaps because he boned up on investigative techniques by reading Ross Macdonald’s The Zebra-Striped Hearse at the library), he’s as surprised as anyone. The only problem is dealing with the consequences. It’s an amusing ride with a quirky parody of the prototypical P.I. Lisowski went on to publish Looking for Lauren as a novel in 1998. (It’s apparently being reissued by Eternal Press later this year.)

Although second-time offender Peter Lovesey has the 11th story in NBM No. 8, I was surprised to realize that his name isn’t on the front or the back cover. The story is “Murder in Store” and it has to do with the death of a department store Santa, which is reported to the store clerk protagonist by one of his young customers with the following line of dialogue: “I think Santa’s snuffed it, miss.” The “miss” in question is Pauline Fothergill, and with the help of the young customer, she fingers the murderer in relatively short order.

The penultimate tale here is penned by another repeat performer, Carolyn Banks, whose previous New Black Mask story appeared in Issue 6. Titled, “Shhh, Shhh, It’s Christmas,” Ms. Banks explains in the introduction that she intends the story as an “experiment in voice.” When the female narrator learns that the couple next door is getting a divorce and that her husband has been having an affair with the other man’s wife, will the reader be fooled by the homey and matter-of-fact voice? As Ms. Banks asks, “Is it really true that it ain’t what you say; it’s how you say it?”

Credit for the last story in this issue, and the last story ever to be published under The New Black Mask banner, goes to Robert Sampson, who also had an (Edgar Award-winning) story in NBM No. 5. This one is titled “To Florida” and it involves a character, Jerry Teller, who only Jim Thompson could love. Teller decides it’s time to visit the Sunshine State after a run-in with his landlord, who comes calling for the rent. All the landlord gets is dead, and Teller takes off with his wallet, his car, and the apartment’s window-mounted air conditioner, hauling his vapid girlfriend along for the ride. When he drops the air conditioner in the lap of a used-appliance dealer who refuses to buy it, it becomes clear that Teller is more likely going to hell than Florida.

Thus ends my guided tour of The New Black Mask. A close reading of the copyright page in the eighth issue gives a hint of the reason for this magazine’s imminent discontinuance. A notice, missing from the seven prior issues, appears near the bottom of that page: “The title and design ‘Black Mask’ is used in accordance with an arrangement with Keith Deutsch.”

NBM co-editor Richard Layman told me later that copyright issues and the fact that the larger trade paperback format was not popular with bookstores were the two primary reasons the editors stopped producing The New Black Mask. But they weren’t quite finished. They morphed the publication into A Matter of Crime and switched to mass-market paperback format. The transition also seemed to signal a shift from hard-boiled to more traditional mysteries, but the publication only survived for four issues.

Farewell, New Black Mask. We hardly knew ye.

Back to Black, Part VII

(Previous installments of author Mark Coggins’ look back at The New Black Mask magazine can be found here.)

In 1986, Ed McBain celebrated the 30th anniversary of the publication of his first 87th Precinct novel, was elected a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America, and captured the cover spot in the seventh issue of The New Black Mask (NBM) with an excerpt from his 39th 87th Precinct book, Poison. The excerpt is a chapter titled “Honesty,” and it describes an interview that police detective Hal Willis has with Marilyn Hollis, an attractive, flirty murder suspect who offers him a drink and ends up getting more information from him than he from her.

In the interview that accompanies this excerpt, McBain (aka Evan Hunter, aka Salvatore Lombino) talks about how he got started with the famous police-procedural series: “Erle Stanley Gardner ... was getting old, and Pocket Books was looking for a replacement, to be blunt about it, and [the editor] asked me if I had any ideas for a series character.” The interview ends on a somewhat bitter note, especially in light of McBain’s death in 2005. When asked about any involvement in the (then popular) Hill Street Blues TV program, he responds, “No, they did not come to me. It continues to amaze me that anyone developing a police series, a series with a conglomerate hero in a mythical city, had never heard of the 87th Precinct. My only consolation is that Hill Street Blues will be off the air one day, and I’ll still be here writing my novels.”

The next story in NBM No. 7, “Busman’s Holiday,” by Josh Pachter, is quite a treat--as much for the story as for the back story behind it. Pachter is primarily known as a short-story writer and “Busman” is a story that sneaks up on you. It head-fakes you into thinking it is a rather mundane recounting of a businessman’s two-week vacation, and then ends up being something quite different. The back story is also a surprise. Apparently, the piece Pachter originally sold to the editors was a parody of McBain’s 87th Precinct novels, but the publisher decided at the last minute that parodies were not appropriate for NBM. The editors bought “Busman” instead, and as Pachter exalts, “I somehow got billed above Joyce Carol Oates and Tony Hillerman on the back cover of this book. Eat your heart out, Oatesy! And bite me, Hillermeister!”

Speaking of “Oatesy,” what follows “Busman” is a Joyce Carol Oates piece with the ponderous title of “Little Moses/The Society for the Reclamation and Restoration of ‘E. Auguste Napoleon Bonaparte.’” Excerpted from her 1998 novel, My Heart Laid Bare, which the introduction says is “planned for publication in 1988 or 1980,” “Little Moses” gives us two well-written episodes in the scam-ridden career of con man Abraham Licht and his adopted black son, Elisha. In the first, Licht travels the rural backroads of early 20th-century America selling and reselling Elisha into slavery for $600 cash. In the second, Licht concocts a scheme to peddle shares in a legal defense fund for the recovery of the inheritance of Emanuel Auguste Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon I’s last-born (illegitimate) child. After raising more than $1 million dollars by convincing American “heirs” of Emanuel Auguste that they will receive a slice of the nearly $200-million inheritance that is moldering in the vaults of the Bank of Paris, Licht deems it wise to shut down the scheme before anyone tumbles to his fraud, with a clever stunt that plays upon the “heirs’” racism and fears of mixed blood in their own ancestry.

The Hillermeister, as Josh Pachter calls him, is next. (But note that he declined to use that sobriquet when he signed my copy of NBM No. 7, shown at right, preferring a simple Tony Hillerman.) His story, “Chee’s Witch,” involves the younger of his two series characters, Navajo Tribal policeman Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee. In “Witch,” Chee butts heads with a Caucasian FBI agent sent to pick up a witness under protection for a car-theft investigation. Chee decides that what the agent doesn’t know may hurt that agent as well as the federal government’s case, but won’t bother Chee or the people on the reservation who’ve been reporting incidents of witchcraft.

The fifth story in this edition of NBM is “The Blue Book of Crime,” by Jerome Charyn, author of 37 books, including three memoirs about growing up in New York City and several detective novels. In a way, this story combines elements of both the memoirs and the detective novels, concerning as it does the friendship of two boys growing up in New York who are caught with goods stolen from a department store--even though they’ve made a point to study the “Blue Book” (a primer put out by the FBI) in order to allude capture. It’s a clever coming-of-age tale about betrayal, karma, and frustrated dreams--with a generous bit of nostalgia for the golden age of Hollywood thrown in.

Peter Heyrman follows with a noirish yarn called “One for the Money.” Written in an no-nonsense style, “Money” features tantalizing femme fatale Deborah Usher, who hires Key West, Florida, charter boat skipper Mark Kane for a trip that involves more than fishing for marlin. (Can you say “cocaine,” children?) Kane finds out what it’s like to have his hands full when his first mate comes down with an appendicitis, the boat runs into a squall line with 30-knot winds and high seas, and Ms. Usher’s “representative” on the trip breaks free from the chair he’s been tied down in and goes after Kane with a sap.

“The Death of the Tenth Man” comes next in this issue’s lineup, and it is Steve Oren’s first publication. The title refers to the minyan (a quorum of 10 Jewish males over the age of 13) that must be present to perform a Kaddish--a public prayer that is often used as a memorial for the dead. In “Tenth Man,” the Kaddish is being performed for the father of Mike, the narrator, and getting a minyan together proves especially difficult when one of the chosen males is found dead in the basement of the synagogue with a knife through his heart. Because of the advanced age of the other people present, and the fact that Mike is a Vietnam veteran, suspicion quickly falls on him in this creative variant of a traditional locked-room mystery.

Irish writer Maurade Glennon serves up “Murder, though it has no tongue …” in the following story, which reminded me a bit of the Stephen King novel Misery. The protagonist, Jay Simpson, wakes up in a Mexican hospital, paralyzed and mute from a stroke with his wife whispering in his ear, “I’m going to kill you.” She’s as good as her word, feeding Simpson doctored blood-pressure medicine to induce a second stroke. Simpson’s only hope is to find a way to alert his doctor before her fiendish plan succeeds.

Isak Romun (aka Gordon Bennett), who also had a story in the third NBM, bats ninth with “Capriccio.” Told once again from the point of view of newspaperman Oscar Monahan, this yarn deals with the hurt feelings and murderous impulses that can surface when the work of a temperamental artist is changed by another--in this case the work of a composer as altered by a conductor. Although Romun says that the “story resulted from the author’s thoughts, while attending a concert, about the different performances of the same composition,” you can’t help but wonder if Romun was really inspired by the actions of an editor.

Clark Dimond, who seems to have contributed as much or more to the field of music as to mystery, provides the penultimate story in the issue, “You Can’t Fire Me for Doing My Job.” While “extremism in the defense of liberty” may not be a vice, “You Can’t Fire Me” proves that extremism in the defense of copper tubing on a construction site may just qualify.

The final author in this issue, Ron Goulart, has a background as a historian of pulp fiction and hard-boiled detective characters. He puts that knowledge to good use with a tongue-in-check send-up of a quintessential pulp plot, wherein the main character suffers amnesia and his unremembered past comes back to haunt him. In “Hollywood Detective,” the main character in question is a writer who wakes up with no memory and a copy of an obscure detective novel in his pocket. Because of his admiration for the author, he is inspired to try his hand at writing private-eye fiction himself. He succeeds in grand style, but is always haunted by the desire to find and meet the person responsible for the book in his pocket. It’s a fun story, and in a weird way, it reminded me of William Hjortsberg’s Falling Angel, due to the narrator’s lack of self-knowledge.

(To be continued)

Back to Black, Part VI

(Previous installments of author Mark Coggins’ look back at The New Black Mask magazine can be found here.)

In the sixth issue of The New Black Mask (NBM), published in 1986, Dashiell Hammett takes the cover again with the second installment of his original treatment for the 1936 movie After the Thin Man. But before Hammett steps onto center stage, Belgian writer Georges Simenon has a short interview and a story titled “The Man Behind the Looking Glass.” Best known for his Inspector Jules Maigret books, Simenon wrote in French and says in the interview that he aims for as simple a style as possible with “a minimum of adjectives and adverbs, a minimum of abstract words which have a different resonance for each reader.” Likewise, he asks that his translators “safeguard his simplicity,” but adds that sometimes that’s difficult, “as for instance in Italian.”

“The Man Behind the Looking Glass” was written in 1943, but was published in English for the first time in NBM No. 6. The title refers to a character named Emile, who is the actual brains behind the well-regarded Agency O, putatively run by the much more famous detective Joseph Torrence, former inspector of Paris’ Criminal Division. From his post “behind the looking glass,” Emile pulls all the strings in investigations, while the stodgy, phlegmatic Torrence provides a respectable public face to the world. Like Sherlock Holmes in the short story “A Scandal in Bohemia,” Emile matches wits here with a female adversary possessed of skills equal to or better than his own, and achieves only a partial victory.

Following “Looking Glass” is the second half of “After the Thin Man.” Hammett continues to put Nick and Nora Charles through their paces, once more employing the wry humor he used to good effect in the first part of this tale. When Nora complains that a police detective failed to chase after a suspect whom she had pointed out, the detective says to Nick, “[I]t sounded kind of screwy to me at first ... I didn’t know she was your wife then.” Deadpans Nick, “You can never tell where you’re going to find one of my wives.”

Later, Nick and Nora visit a crime scene, only to find police Lieutenant Abrams’ men killing time doing a crossword puzzle at the kitchen table. As they make their way through the apartment house, Hammett’s wedded snoops discover a rug upstairs that Nick wants rolled up for mysterious, not-yet-explained reasons. Abrams calls down to his men to do the heavy lifting:

“Hey, Francis--you and that other cutie who was trying to find a three-letter word for ape, come up here.”

Nora, in a hoarse whisper, asks, “What is it, Nick?”

Nick. “Do I know? Men are dying all around and you ask me riddles.”

In a famous essay on the mystery story, Raymond Chandler wrote that Hammett “gave murder back to the kind of people who do it for a reason, not just to provide a corpse.” My only complaint about “After the Thin Man” is that the author cedes this yarn to the people who commit it “with handwrought dueling pistols, curare and tropical fish” for improbable reasons. In fact, Hammett’s ending was changed in the movie version of the story to make it more plausible, although the guilty party remained the same: a character played by (a then young) Jimmy Stewart.

Jeffry Scott--a pseudonym employed by (white) British writer Shaun Usher--does an impressive job of putting across an adventure told from the point of view of an urban African American in the story that follows Hammett’s, “A Friend to the Limit.” Norm, the narrator, is the “friend to the limit” who pulls a white father and son’s chestnuts out of the fire when they blunder into the inner-city murder of a prostitute.

The next author in this issue’s line-up is R.D. Brown, who in addition to teaching English for 25 years at Western Washington University--where there is a memorial scholarship named after him--also wrote mystery stories. One of his novels, Hazzard, was nominated for a Best Paperback Original Edgar in 1987. His New Black Mask story, “Frisbee in the Middle,” gives us a private eye named Frisbee and his gal Friday, Glendora (“prettier than a red pickup”), who match wits with a mobster and a bodyguard capable of removing knobs from the office doors of private eyes. Frisbee does most of the legwork, while Glendora contributes the brain work and thus the day is saved.

The next tale here is a short, edgy one by Austin, Texas, writer Carolyn Banks called “Mean to My Father.” Told from the perspective of a young girl, it explains why, after the girl’s best friend is stabbed 13 times, she is no longer quite so nice to her sire.

Dennis Lynds (aka Michael Collins), who also had a story in the second NBM, gets the “super hit six” spot with his yarn “Killer’s Mind.” “Mind” is an interesting mix of the traditional puzzle story with a noirish spiral of deceit and betrayal à la Double Indemnity. The person at the center of it all? A young, attractive, success-hungry femme fatale, natch. Two successful architects vie for her affections, but neither she nor her suitors get quite the just desserts the reader expects at the outset of this escapade.

The final story in this (relatively slim) issue of NBM is by mystery man Harold Walls. We are told in the introduction to “It Was a Hard Fall” that Walls is a pseudonym for a writer who describes himself as a “dyspeptic misanthrope with no real desire to reveal my identity or my motive in writing fiction to the world at large.” I’ve not been able to find any other references to Walls, so apparently he wasn’t merely paying lip service to his misanthropic inclinations.

“Hard Fall” is the story of Marblehead Dexter Simpkins, an inner-city black man who was “six-feet-four of prime fullbacking scholarship meat” before he got caught one night, after he left high school, in the company of the under-aged daughter of a prominent white businessman. By the third page of this yarn, Marblehead gets his ass put “in the can for two to ten on a charge of rape statutorily”--and that is only the beginning of problems that multiply fact-ta-torially.

(To be continued)

Back to Black, Part V

(Previous installments of author Mark Coggins’ look back at The New Black Mask magazine can be found here.)

The fifth issue of The New Black Mask came out in 1986, but features a previously unpublished cover story that was written more than 50 years before: Dashiell Hammett’s original treatment for the 1936 movie After the Thin Man. More on this great Hammett “rarity” in a moment, but coming before “After the Thin Man” in the issue is an interview and story by William Haggard, a now-deceased British spy/thriller writer.

Haggard’s interview has as much to do with what Wikipedia charitably calls his “idiosyncratic points of view” on politics, international relations, and England’s place in the world as it does with his writing. Someone less generous might call those opinions jingoistic or possibly even xenophobic. Sample quotes are in order. On who’s who in the world, Haggard says: “I much prefer Turks to Greeks. I don’t like Greeks ... So far as the Indian martial races are concerned, I have great admiration for them ... But apart from them, the rest of India is a four-letter word ... [The Swiss and French are] infinitely bribable. The French are merely a nuisance. They’ve never forgiven the Anglo-Saxons for saving them. I don’t like Germans, but I greatly admire them.” And when asked about Britain’s class system, the author remarks: “[I] uphold it strongly, but I’m not a snob. I know which class I was born to.”

Haggard’s story is titled “Timeo Danaos,” the first part of the Latin expression timeo Danaos et dona ferentes, which translates as, “I fear the Greeks even when they bring gifts.” Set in Cyprus around the time of the 1974 Turkish invasion, it’s the tale of a Dutch woman married to an upper-class Englishman, who gets into trouble with the Greek authorities on the island. The husband finally rides in to save her, executing an unlikely stratagem, and Haggard has the opportunity to run down the Greeks a bit more. In commentary after the story, he takes a parting shot. “At the first sign of real trouble,” Haggard pronounces, “Greece will let both Britain and the United States down, as I privately fear that France will too.”

If you’re getting the sense that I was surprised Haggard and his story were included in this issue, you’re right. But the real treasure in NBM No. 5 is the first installment of Hammett’s “After the Thin Man.” It continues the adventures of the characters Nick and Nora Charles, who Hammett introduced in his 1933 novel The Thin Man. But getting Hammett to produce this film treatment was evidently not an easy undertaking. To quote from NBM’s introduction to the story:

After the success of the movie The Thin Man in 1934, a wire was sent from the Culver City office of MGM to the New York office requesting that Hammett be hired to write a sequel ... Hammett arrived in Culver City on October 29, 1934, rented a six-bedroom penthouse at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, and proceeded to astonish Hollywood regulars with his profligacy ... He drank the nights away in the company of a variety of female partners and then complained about being harassed by starlets ... [A]t the end of his ten-week contract, he had only a thirty-four page plot summary to show.

For a description of what Hammett could be like on one of his benders, read this blog entry of mine, describing a Hollywood incident that recently came to light in Charis Wilson’s book Through Another Lens: My Years with Edward Weston.

Although Hammett was a slow and unreliable worker, studio executives liked what they saw in the plot summary. They hired him to flesh out the story to 115 pages of typescript, and then Hammett friends Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich translated it into screenplay format.

In the first part of the story, published in NBM No. 5, Nick and Nora return from New York City to San Francisco to find a welcome-home New Year’s Eve party in progress at their house. That party is interrupted, however, when the body of the former gardener for Nora’s family is found on their doorstep. The discovery of that corpse and the later disappearance of the husband of Nora’s cousin, Selma, conspire to pull Nick into another investigation. The stakes are raised even higher when the husband is shot to death by a person or persons unknown and Selma is found holding a gun.

Although this isn’t Hammett’s traditional hard-boiled fare, I enjoyed the piece quite a bit, particularly the deadpan humor he sprinkles in. For example, when a police detective named Abrams asks Nick why he didn’t tell Selma and her family about the gardener’s death, Nick replies, “This is my wife’s family. They’d think I did it.” And when Nick and Nora leave the family home, Nick asks Harold, the chauffeur, “Where’s a good place to get the stink of respectability out of our noses?” Harold reels off the names of several joints, ending with the statement, “None of them three ain’t apt to be cluttered up with schoolteachers.”

The tale that follows “After the Thin Man” is a highly inventive one by an author with whom I was not previously acquainted. The piece is call “Action at Vicksburg,” and its author is Irvin Faust. I may not be alone in my unfamiliarity with Faust. Herb Gold, in his 1985 New York Times review of Faust’s book The Year of the Hot Jock and Other Stories, poses the question, “Why are other urban wits famous and why is Irvin Faust not?” His answer is that Faust tends to go his own way, and after reading “Action” I can understand what Gold means.

The yarn’s narrator is a Japanese tourist who observes a drug deal gone bad at Grant’s Tomb, in Manhattan’s Morningside Heights neighborhood, while he’s snapping photographs and engaging in an internal narrative that makes mistaken assumptions from afar about the motivations and the conversation between buyer and seller. These assumptions stem from an incompletely digested study of American history and culture--particularly black culture--and tend to be hilarious. For example, this is what Mr. Ito, the tourist, says to one of the men at the end of the story to distract him from firing another bullet into the man who lies wounded by a tree: “Well, twirl my turban, man alive, can this be Mister Five by Five.”

A Time magazine reviewer said of Faust’s characters, “[They] are consumed by a world of mass-produced trivia and popular mythology ... They generate authentic obsessions about the inauthentic.” That just about nails Mr. Ito.

The next story in this edition of The New Black Mask is a fun one called “Shopping Cart Howard,” by first-time author James Lee Snyder. I can’t find any references to other publications by Snyder, so this may have been his one and only. Like other NBM fiction, “Shopping Cart” features a private eye, but the story is told from the perspective of the individual that gumshoe has been hired to find: Howard, a homeless person in New Orleans. Snyder provides a great characterization of Howard and has a little fun with the conventions of P.I. tales, all at the same time.

“Rain in Pinton County,” by Robert Sampson, follows and it is the first and only New Black Mask work to win an Edgar Award--the 1987 one for short fiction, to be specific. Although he has published a number of other short stories, Sampson is perhaps best known for writing Yesterday’s Faces, a five-volume study of pulp magazines. In “Rain,” Sampson gives us the tale of Ed Ralston, “Special Assistant to the Sheriff” of Pinton County, and his quest to avenge the death of his sister. It’s a noirish yarn with a slam-bang ending that plants a heavy, ironic thumb on the scales of justice.

British author George Sims, who also had a story in the first NBM, comes next in the line-up with a very well-written story called “Family Butcher,” involving a well-respected butcher in a picture-postcard village in England’s Hambleden Valley, who discovers that his younger wife is cheating on him. His solution to his predicament suggests a second, sardonic meaning to the title of the story and also proves the wisdom of the aphorism “look before you leap.”

The penultimate tale in this issue is one from a heavy hitter--James Ellroy--featuring a character he made famous in a book that was still “in progress” in 1986: The Black Dahlia. The character is Lee Blanchard, the “fire” half of the “fire and ice” Black Dahlia detective team of Blanchard and Bleichert. The story is set in Los Angeles in 1945, right after World War II ends, and is titled “High Darktown,” which is a reference to an upper-middle-class black neighborhood in L.A. In “Darktown,” Blanchard has to track down a paroled convict named Wallace Simpkins, who had earlier “voodoo-hexed” Blanchard, after he (Blanchard) sent him to prison for “clouting markets and juke joints on West Adams.” The chase takes Blanchard into the aforementioned neighborhood, where he’s in for an appointment with fists, .45s, a tommy-gun, and a shiv.

Chet Williamson contributes the final story in NBM No. 5, “Some Jobs Are Simple.” I think he actually should have titled it “Inside Job,” but you’ll have to read the story to understand why. It’s the shifty, hard-hitting tale of a young wife who cooks up a scheme to get a little extra money by staging a jewelry robbery in her own house. However, things don’t end exactly the way she sketches them out to the “Joe” she hires to do the job.

(To be continued)

Back to Black, Part IV

(Previous installments of author Mark Coggins’ look back at The New Black Mask magazine can be found here.)

In the fourth issue of The New Black Mask, Detroit detective novelist Loren D. Estleman, who also had a story in the first NBM, makes a return appearance, this time to nab the cover with his original Amos Walker story, “Blond and Blue.” That issue was published in 1986, but in correspondence years later, Estleman told me he was never very happy with the artist’s portrayal of Walker (the gentlemen in the illustration with his coat pulled down around his shoulders), feeling that his protagonist came off looking more like game-show host (and The Snoop Sisters co-star) Bert Convy than a tough-guy private investigator. Judging by this Convy photo, at least, he could well have a point.

“Blond and Blue” tells the story of a kidnapped boy who ends up being a pawn in a battle between his estranged parents, the feds, and the mob. Walker (who by 1986 had appeared in only six novels, most recently Every Brilliant Eye) is in fine form, eschewing his Smith & Wesson for a well-aimed Oldsmobile in the final showdown scene. (This scan of the “Blond and Blue” title page shows the signature and inscription Estleman provided me when I wrote to request them back in 1999.)

In the Estleman interview accompanying this tale, he talks about submitting his first short fiction to Argosy magazine when he was just 15, and compares the art of short-story writing with making love in an elevator! Regarding the basics of fiction-writing, Estleman said: “You have to know where you’re going from the beginning. You have to nail your character down in a couple of lines and move on from there.” And when asked about his reading of other authors’ work, he remarked: “I read a great deal, and I make it a practice not to read writers who do not themselves read. We read for the same reason a baseball player looks at a videotape of another player in action. Certainly a pitcher does it to see how his opponent works and to see if he can better it.”

Following Estleman’s yarn in NBM No. 4 comes “The Sins of the Fathers,” by returning author George V. Higgins. Higgins once again says it all with dialogue, conveying a character sketch of a corrupt, blackmailing police lieutenant in the course of one long conversation between two of his underlings at a shooting range. Higgins bookends his opening line--“I am telling you right now ... that you would not believe, that no sane person would believe, what I go through with this guy”--with the perfect line at the close, and nicely motivates it with what comes in between.

Prolific veteran Edward D. Hoch spins the next yarn, “The Other Eye,” which offers one of the relatively rare appearances of his California private eye, Al Darlan. I say relatively rare, because Hoch has written more than 900 short stories, and Darlan, although he was featured in a story from the March/April 2007 issue of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, does not show up nearly as often as do his other series characters, Nick Velvet and Captain Leopold. In “The Other Eye” Darlan lets an eager would-be investigator buy his way into his one-man firm, but soon has cause to regret it.

Not many people can say, “Goddamn [James] Ellroy ... he’s always calling me up. He wants to be friends; I don’t need friends,” and mean it, but apparently the author who follows next in this lineup, Joseph L. Koenig, can--and did. As Sarah Weinman once explained, Koenig is something of a cipher: he wrote true-crime articles for 15 years prior to the publication of his story “The Scoop” in NBM, then went on to write four crime novels--scoring an Edgar Award nomination and a movie-option deal in the process--before simply disappearing. In “The Scoop,” he describes how one newsman learns that pressing his First Amendment rights to the limit can be hazardous to a person’s health.

I’m going to skip over the fifth story in this issue for a moment and proceed to the sixth, instead: “Pincushion,” by David A. Bowman. In some ways, Bowman is as much a cipher as Koenig. The introduction to this story says that “Pincushion” was his first publication, but I can find no other fiction credited to a David Bowman with the middle initial “A.” What I was able to find is a New York writer without the middle initial, who has published two novels, a biography of the Talking Heads, and several stories in Salon (including one about “the real-life tragedy that haunted Ross Macdonald”). If anyone can tell me if these are one and the same person, or has contact information for New Yorker Bowman, I’d appreciate hearing from you.

I’m particularly interested in finding Bowman, because “Pincushion” is my favorite story in this issue of The New Black Mask. It’s a warped, nourish tale of private eye Foy Laneer’s quest to determine whether his client’s husband is “doing the thing” with an exotic dancer whose act involves impaling herself with needles. If you were to throw David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, some random Twilight Zone episodes, and Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men into a blender and hit purée, you might come up with something that approximates “Pincushion.”

“Psychodrama,” by Mike Handley, is the next-to-last story in the magazine. Handley has other short fiction to his credit, and in “Psychodrama” he provides the fictionalized account of a real-life Oakland, California, holdup that occurred in August 1983.

Capping off this edition is the fourth and concluding installment of Jim Thompson’s The Rip-Off. Our hero, Britt Rainstar, has his hands full dodging the fists, bodies, switchblades, and balustrades that are thrown at him in a climatic, penultimate scene; but in the closing act, he’s back to his old tricks with the ladies.

* * *

Now let’s return to that short story I skipped over previously, the fifth one you come to, when flipping through this particular issue. It’s called “There’s No Such Thing as Private Eyes,” and represents my first appearance in print. The tale also introduces my series character, San Francisco private eye August Riordan.

In “Eyes,” August has a different last name (Hammond) and lives in another city (Phoenix, Arizona). But he still drives the same 1968 Galaxie 500, and he is still the same “smart-ass with a foolish heart,” as described in the jacket text for my newest book, Runoff.

I composed “There’s No Such Thing as Private Eyes” in the late ’70s for a creative-writing class at Stanford University taught by Ron Hansen (The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Hitler’s Niece). This was shortly after I’d learned about Raymond Chandler and his distinctive writing style in another class, that one taught by Tobias Wolff (This Boy’s Life). I was all of 19 years old when I typed out the original draft on my Smith-Corona portable, and although the story went through a number of revisions, at the direction of both Hansen and NBM co-editor Richard Layman, it must be acknowledged--particularly when it comes to the plot and character motivations--that it still reads like a 19-year-old wrote it.

All that said--and if an author may be forgiven for commenting on his own work--in rereading “Eyes” again for this post, I did find that it contained a few “Chandlerisms,” or instances of the traditional private-eye voice that made smile. Here’s a sampling:

• From the story’s opening: “Delbert Evans was cheap: cheap with his time, cheap with his money. Cheap with everything. It didn’t do you any good to tell him, though, because he liked being that way.”

• Describing the love interest: “She wore a cream pantsuit over a figure that would make an accountant snap all his pencils.”

• August checks the back of his head after being knocked out: “[I] found a matted patch of bloody hair on a bump big enough to convince me that my head was reproducing by fission.”

• Calling on the maid of a suspect: “The Roman Empire rose and fell in the time it took someone to answer the door ... She smiled at me and tilted her hips at an insolent angle. She looked about as hard to get as the time of day.”

• Prowling a hallway to the chief suspect’s apartment: “I ... stepped out into a hallway that was as quiet as a sneak thief in the duchess’s bedroom.”

• After getting clobbered over the head yet again: “Points of light blazed like welding sparks in front of my eyes. The floor reached up to grab me.”

• And perhaps the best (and shortest) sentence I have ever written: “Things happened,” as the prelude to a description of the story’s big gun battle.

I am an inveterate pack rat. So I still have the original manuscript with Hansen’s comments, as well as a copy of the version I submitted to Layman, which contains his handwritten editorial remarks. I also have much of the correspondence between Layman, myself, and various representatives of the publisher. For the social historian interested in the process of writing and selling a short story to a major publisher in the mid-1980s, here is a little tour.

This is the last page of the original manuscript with Hansen’s summary recommendations (click on the image to enlarge it). He is very generous with his praise and you can see that he is encouraging me to submit the story for publication, though he’s concerned that the theme of the piece--that private eyes, as written about during the early and mid-20th century by Dashiell Hammett and Chandler, could not exist in today’s world--is not fully explored. I confess I couldn’t bring myself to make August recognize that he was a complete anachronism, because I was too much in love with the Hammett-Chandler world. August does quit doing private investigations at the end of “Eyes,” but reverses that decision in time to appear in his next adventure, The Immortal Game, which also began life as a short story that I submitted to The New Black Mask. Unfortunately--or fortunately, depending on how you view it--NBM ceased operations before it could publish Game; and after letting the story languish in a drawer for a number of years, I pulled it out to expand into novel form. By then, August had become a bit less anachronistic, a bit more mature--and a bit more self-aware.

Here is the letter I received from Layman after sending my story “over the transom” to the editors. Some years later, I learned that author Martha C. Lawrence (Ashes of Aries) also served on the editorial staff (see this interview), but I never corresponded with her, only with Layman. As you might expect, I was thrilled to bits to receive the acceptance. Check out the amount I was paid for the story: $750. More than 20 years later, that is still considered a generous amount for a short story. And some wonder why short fiction is dying ...

This is page 30 from the “enclosed marked typescript” mentioned in Layman’s letter. I agreed with 99 percent of the changes he wanted, and when I did call him to discuss the work, it was a fairly efficient conversation. On this page, the sentence he marked as “too strained” originally read, “The gun barked in my hand and three pills found found [sic] their way into his gut.” During the call, Layman told me that he didn’t like the use of the word “pills” because that was too reminiscent of Hammett and 1930s detective fiction argot. He also thought “barked” was hackneyed and that it was unnecessary to say “in my hand.” We agreed to replace “pills” with “slugs,” and I suggested “jolted” as a substitute for “barked.” I noted those changes down while we talked.

On this second page of the contract I eventually signed for the story, you’ll see the representative for the publisher is none other than Peter Jovanovich of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Some time after “There’s No Such Thing as Private Eyes” was accepted and the contract executed, I received another call from Richard Layman, telling me that I had been selected to have my photo on the back cover (only five of the authors in any one issue were selected). Again, I was thrilled and perhaps more than a little dumbstruck. I asked Layman what sort of photo he needed. His laconic response was straight out of the P.I. tradition, “Preferably one with your clothes on.”

(To be continued)