In Reference to Murder

Media Murder for Monday

MOVIES

Omnimystery reports that John Lee Hancock (Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, The Blind Side) will direct his own adaptation of John Grisham's 1997 legal thriller The Partner for New Regency. This is the author's eighth book to make it to the big screen.

Guy Ritchie has reportedly signed on to direct a third Sherlock Holmes movie, again starring Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law, although Ritchie says he wants to base the next installment in Hollywood.

TV

Pilot Season continues: NBC has ordered the pilot Chicago Fire, a fire-department action drama co-written by crime novelists Derek Haas (the "Silver Bear" thrillers) and Michael Brandt, who have together written a number film and television screenplays including 3:10 to Yuma, Wanted and The Double.

CBS has ordered Golden Boy, about one cop's rise from officer to detective to Police Commissioner, to be written and produced by Nicholas Wootton (NYPD Blue, Law & Order, Prison Break).

Also from CBS comes Quean, a drama pilot centering on an edgy, punk-rock girl who uses her hacker skills to help an Oakland-based detective solve crimes. Sound familiar? The first, but possibly not the last, show to try and copy The Girl with the Dragoon Tattoo's success.

CBS picked up an untitled 1960s-era project about famed rodeo cowboy turned Las Vegas sheriff Ralph Lamb (to be executive-produced and written by Nicholas Pileggi and Greg Walker).

Applebaum is a potential CBS drama about a former public defender who avoids the mommy blues by becoming a private investigator. The pilot is based on the Mommy Track Mysteries book series by Ayelet Waldman, and will be directed and executive-produced by filmmaker Christopher Columbus.

CSI veteran Carol Mendelsohn has received a pilot order from CBS for Widow Detective, a police detective who has seen three different partners killed in the line of duty and becomes involved in the families they have left behind.

PODCASTS/RADIO

Author Walter Mosley spoke with NPR's Talk of the Nation about his latest novel, All I Did Was Shoot My Man, the third featuring private investigator Leonid McGill. Mosley also announced he's writing another Easy Rawlins, Little Green, to be published in 2013.

NPR's "Fresh Air" program featured host Terry Gross chatting with Paul Barrett, the author of Glock: The Rise of America's Gun. Barrett says, "Police departments were amazed when they took their officers out to the range and found out not only could they learn to use the Glock pretty quickly, but the Glock also made them more accurate as marksmen."

THEATER

Former American Idol contender Constantine Maroulis has signed on to play the dual title roles in the Broadway revival of Jekyll & Hyde, scheduled to open in New York in spring 2013 after a 25-week national tour that starts October 2 of this year in San Diego.

The Repertory Theatre of St. Louis is staging A Steady Rain, by playwright Keith Huff. The play is about two beat cops who both aspire to make detective but are running up against a quota system and their own failure to follow police procedures.

The Washington Stage Theatre in LaPorte, Indiana has adapted Sleeping with Anemone, by author Kate Collins, who writes the "Flower Shop Mysteries." The troupe is small, but kudos to them for performing four original works each year.

Night of a Million Books

Are you familiar with World Book Night? Despite its name, it began in only the UK and Ireland last year, when volunteers—armed with 25 specially-printed book titles from Jane Austen and Charles Dickens to Iain M. Banks and Cormac McCarthy—fanned out across the region and gave away one million free copies. The event included what was billed as "the biggest single literary event in the world ever, " with readings and performances at London's Trafalgar Square.

The celebration was so successful, it spawned a second year in the UK in 2012 and events in Germany and the U.S. You can help with the U.S. World Book giveaway by signing up to be a volunteer by February 1st, and then, if you're chosen, giving away 20 books to people in your community on April 23. The organizers need 50,000 volunteers and only require that you be a U.S. citizen, at least 16 years old and are able to articulate where, to whom and why you want to give books away.

There were some critics of the endeavor last year, concerned the freebies would damage commercial book sales. However, the goal is not to preach to the converted, as it were, but to find non-readers or light readers and help spread a passion for reading to others in your city. As the U.S. World Book Night site states, most of the "publishing, bookstore, library, author, printing, and paper community is behind this effort with donated services and time."

If you'd like to know which books were selected for the U.S. giveaway, check out the list. For more information on registering as a volunteer, the World Book Night site has details. 

 

Friday's "Forgotten" Books - The Grey Flannel Shroud

Henry Slesar (1927-2002) was an American author, playwright, and copywriter, and I think it's say to say he was prolific. Around 1955, he started to write short stories while working as a copywriter and eventually created 500 stories for magazines like Playboy, Imaginative Tales, and Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. The latter was particularly appropriate, becasue Slesar went on to become a frequent contributor to the popular Alfred Hitchcock Presents TV series. He also served as head writer for CBS Daytime's The Edge of Night, for which he won an Emmy in 1974, and penned scripts for The Twilight Zone, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and Batman.

It wasn't until 1959 that he tried his hand at a novel, The Grey Flannel Shroud, an effort that turned out to be as successful as his many other endeavors, receiving the Edgar Award for Best First Novel in 1960. Slesar was an experienced ad man, credited with being the brains behind McGraw-Hill's extremely popular "The Man in the Chair" advertising campaign, as well as coining the phrase "coffee break." Thus it's no surprise that advertising is at the heart of the plot in The Grey Flannel Shroud.

In the novel, Dave Robbins is a a handsome young account manager at a small Madison Avenue agency who is put in charge of the prestigious Burke Baby Food account. He'd only gotten the job due to a colleague's heart attack and now he finds himself fending off the unwelcome attentions of an influential client and the scorn of the head of the Burke empire. Things take a turn for the bizzare when people connected to the Burke Baby account begin to die in strange ways. Dave soon worries he's next, a suspicion given weight by a near-fatal push off a train platform and poisoned medication.

Aided by a reporter friend/drinking buddy and Dave's clever and gutsy girlfriend, Janey Hagerty, an art director at the agency, Dave tries to navigate his complicated love life and the promising Burke account career-booster, while trying to figure out why the boss's confidential files include an unexplained and large payment to the mysterious "A.G." And why being put in charge of the Burke account may end up being the very last thing he ever does.

The Grey Flannel Shroud isn't heavy on the sleuthing, but if you're a fan of Mad Men, you'll see a lot of the essence of that era in the advertising world in this novel. There's plenty of character development and also whimsy--such as the chapter headings, all of which are taken from famous advertising campaigns.

Mystery Melange

The CBC radio program Day 6 is sponsoring "The Elmore Leonard Rule-Breaking Contest," in which they want you to submit a sentence that breaks as many of Leonard's famous Rules for Writing as possible. Winners will have their rule-breaking sentences featured on the Day 6 website and published in The National Post, plus they'll receive three Elmore Leonard books courtesy of HarperCollins. (Hat tip to Shots Mag.)

Here's another interesting contest (brought to my attention by Crimespree Mag), the "Queen of Crime" sweeptstakes. Acorn Media is offering a Grand Prize package with a trip for two to London and Paris; a visit to the set of a Poirot or Marple production; a tour of Greenway, Christie’s holiday home; tickets to see The Mousetrap, the world’s longest-running play; one-day rail trip to Paris on the Orient Express; and a DVD library of Agatha Christie programs. You can enter once per day through April 30th.

Amazon.com, along with Penguin Group and CreateSpace, announced the third annual Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award, the international competition seeking the next popular novel. For the first time, the competition will award two grand prizes: one for General Fiction and one for Young Adult Fiction. The contest will also now be open to novels that have previously been self-published. Each winner will receive a publishing contract with Penguin, which includes a $15,000 advance. Manuscript submissions will be accepted through February 5 or when 5,000 entries have been received in each category, whichever is earlier.

As part of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference, you can attend an evening of "The Wrong Kind of Reading" on Thursday, March 1st from 8-10 p.m. This free event features a reading from seven "literary pulp" writers: Pinckney Benedict, Kyle Minor, Robin Becker, Anthony Neil Smith, John Weagly, Nikki Dolson, and David James Keaton, all affiliated to some extent with the ezine Plots with Guns.

If you're a budding writer or just want to perfect your craft, the Left Coast Crime 2012 Workshop for Writers is ready to help. Scheduled for Thursday, March 29, from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the  Sheraton Grand Hotel in Sacramento, there will be two sessions: one with Jennifer Sawyer Fisher – former editor at Kensington, Penguin, Morrow/Avon and HarperCollins, to such luminaries as Lawrence Block and Lisa Jackson, who will teach a session on self-editing; the other with Alexandra Sokoloff - current author, former screenwriter, teaching a session on using screenwriting techniques to enhance your novel-writing. Also, if you're registered for the Left Coast Crime Conference, you have until Friday, January 27 to submit your award nominations.

For those of you who are members on the Grand Dame of mystery newsgroups, the DorothyL discussion and idea list for the lovers of the mystery genre, you can order DorothyL merchandise, with proceeds to benefit the charity to Stitches from the Heart. This is the 20th Anniversary of the founding of Dorothy L by a group meeting of the Association of Research Libraries.

In cooperation with the New Mexico Book Coop, Wordharvest is creating the Tony Hillerman Award for Best Fiction as part of the expanded New Mexico/Arizona Book Awards. The prize will be given to the book that judges deem to be the best work of fiction submitted in the contest's various categories. The competition is open to any author living in New Mexico or Arizona, and to authors from elsewhere who write about these states. Guidelines will be posted on the Wordharvest site on Jan. 27 and entries will be open from that date until July 1, 2012.

Media Murder for Monday

MOVIES

Director Lawrence Kasdan is teaming with author Harlan Coben for a film adaptation of Coben's latest thriller, Stay Close, reports Deadline. The novel, due in bookstores March 20, deals with a past crime returning to "devastate the lives of a photojournalist, a suburban mother with a hidden past, and a homicide detective obsessed with a series of unsolved disappearances."

George Clooney is looking to co-write, produce and star in an adaptation of the true-crime book 2009’s Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History by Robert M. Edsel and Bret Witter. The book and film concern a group of museum curators and art scholars who donned uniforms to rescue thousands of art treasures as the Allies liberated Europe during World War II. (Hat tip to Art Info, which included the groan-inducing title: "Raiders of the Lost Art?")

Some Sundance news related to the annual festival: Filmmaker Chris Columbus' 1492 Pictures is partnering with ro*co productions to adapt documentary films into narrative dramas. For their first project, they've chosen to adapt Yoav Potash's documentary Crime After Crime, about two young attorneys trying to free a woman sentenced to life behind bars for her role in the murder of a man who abused her. Rodrigo Cortes also premiered his film Red Lights, a supernatural thriller that follows two investigators (Cillian Murphy, Sigourney Weaver) of alleged supernatural phenomena who appear to meet their match in a blind healer named Simon Silver (Robert De Niro).

TV

Great news for fans of the BBC series Sherlock Holmes, set in contemporary London and starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman: it's returning for a third season. Apparently CBS has decided to try and capitalize on the show's popularity by creating their own modern-day Holmes series, although this setting will be modern-day New York. This isn't stopping the BBC from threatening a lawsuit if the CBS show shares too many similarities with their series.

FX has chosen not to buy the pilot for the Powers TV series, based on the comic book with police homicide detectives Christian Walker and Deena Pilgrim (Jason Patrick and Lucy Punch), who specialize in cases involving "powers," or superpowered individuals. FX is leaving the door open for the future, but will require a substantial rewrite.

CBS has ordered a pilot for Jerry Bruckheimer's potential Trooper series about a "sensible mother" who becomes a New York state trooper.

Former Law & Order: Criminal Intent actor Courtney B. Vance is joining ABC's crime drama Revenge, playing a high-powered defense attorney who will end up representing the not-yet-revealed prime suspect at the center of the show.

Warehouse 13—Syfy's paranormal series about two Secret Service working in a top-secret storage facility that houses every strange artifact and mysterious relic collected by the U.S. government—will see an expanded season next year, from 13 to 20 episodes.

Daniel Sunjata (Rescue Me) has joined the cast of the Jeff Eastin pilot from Fox TV studios, which follows four agents from varying law enforcement agencies (DEA, FBI, LAPD) who live together undercover in a "ganglord's mansion-turned-safe house" in Southern California.

THEATER

Kamala Sankaram's Miranda is described as a "steampunk murder-mystery chamber opera" that depicts the trial of three suspects accused of murdering young Miranda Wright. It's being produced at HERE Arts Center in New York. The plot has the trial broadcast on a reality TV show in an alternate history and features a small chamber ensemble whose musicians also serve as the cast, while the audience participates as the jury.

IMBA Bestsellers for December

Here are the top selling crime fiction book titles for December from Independent Mystery Bookseller Association (IMBA) member store Mysterious Galaxy:

Hardcovers:

1. The Drop by Michael Connelly
2. The House Of Silk by Anthony Horowitz
3. ‘V’ Is For Vengeance by Sue Grafton
4. Murder Season by Robert Ellis
5. Family Legacy by Jack O’Halloran
6. Explosive Eighteen by Janet Evanovich
7. Red Mist by Patricia Cornwell
8. Death Comes To Pemberly by P.D. James
9. The Boy In The Suitcase by Lene Kaaberbøl & Agnete Friis
10. The Litigators by John Grisham

Paperbacks:

1. Trashy Chic by Cathy Lubenski
2. Dead Bolt by Juliet Blackwell
3. The Night And The Music by Lawrence Block
4. Double Booked For Death by Ali Brandon
5. Narrows Gate by Jim Fusilli
6. A Study In Sherlock ed. by King & Klinger
7. The Last Word by Ellery Adams
8. Resuscitation by D.M. Annechino
9. Though Not Dead by Dana Stabenow
10. In The Shadow Of Sherlock Holmes ed. by Klinger

A Back Alley Goes Dark

Sad, but understandable, news today from the editor of Back Alley Webzine, Richard Helms. He sent this note out to the crime fiction community:

 

This decision has been a long time coming, but I've decided to shut down The Back Alley Webzine.

We've had a great almost-five-year run.

Well, four of the five years were great. 2011 didn't really exist.

After the deaths of my mother and stepfather, within five weeks of each other in 2010, I sort of lost motivation to do a lot of things, and The Back Alley was one of them. 2011 was an amazing year for me personally, with four major award nominations and one win, but all the hoopla distracted me from the editing and publishing duties that might have kept The Back Alley alive.

I was very proud of what we were able to accomplish in just four short years:

Five Derringer Award nominations. Two were for me, and one each went to John Weagly, Debbi Mack, and Chris F. Holm. Two of these nominations resulted in wins (Paper Walls/Glass Houses, written under my pseudonym Eric Shane; and In The Shadows of Wrigley Field, by John Weagly).

A Spinetingler Award nomination for Claude Lalumi??re (She Watches Him Swim)

An Anthony Award nomination for Simon Wood (The Frame Maker)

And, among my proudest achievements, The Back Alley Webzine became the very first all-electronic publication to be accepted by Mystery Writers of America as an Approved Publisher (Periodical/Webzine).

Along the way, we published stories by winners of the Edgar, Anthony, Agatha, Shamus, and Derringer Awards. Authors who graced our electronic pages included O'Neil De Noux, Ross Macdonald protege Fred Zackel, Wayne D. Dundee, Simon Wood, Stephen D. Rogers, Angela Zeman, Patricia Abbott, Jack Bludis, Tim Wohlforth, Keith Gilman, Jochem Vandersteen, Nick Andreychuk, Anita Page, Keith Gilman, John Lau, and G. Miki Hayden, among others.

While I was proud to showcase acclaimed authors, one of the greatest pleasures came from uncovering new and emerging talents. In each issue, I tried to feature at least one story by an author who either had never had a paid publishing credit, or was at the very beginning of what I hoped would be a jet-propelled ride up the writing ladder.

I plan to keep the website up for at least a few more months, and eventually I will migrate all the archived issues over to my personal website, so that they will continue to be accessible for readers looking for a toot of the good ol' hard stuff.

As a side note, I really would prefer to see the webzine keep going, even though I just don't have the time anymore to make that happen. If anyone out there would like to take up the reins and drive the second generation of The Back Alley Webzine, I will happily sell the domain name and rights to produce the 'zine. How about twenty bucks and bottle of Patron Anejo tequila?

Thanks to all the readers for a great run. Onward and upward!

Richard Helms
2011 ITW Thriller Award Winner

Friday's Forgotten Books - She Shall Have Murder

Delano Ames (1906-1987) was born in Ohio to a newspaperman father. In 1929 Ames married Maysie Grieg, who later became a highly successful author of lighthearted romances, and the duo settled in Greenwich Village where Ames published his first novel, a philosophical look at the Greek gods entitled A Double Bed on Olympus. When the couple divorced, Ames moved to England where he remarried and worked for British intelligence during the second World War.

After the war, according to his tongue-in-cheek autobiography, he "translated an erudite history of keyboard instruments from the French, and believes that at least 100 copies were sold." Fortunately, his later efforts were more successful, beginning with in 1948 with She Shall Have Murder, the first in what was to become a 12-book series featuring the British husband-and-wife sleuthing team of Jane and Dagobert Brown. Ames produced a Brown book every year until 1959 when he moved to Spain and switched to writing a four-book
series featuring Juan Llorca of the Spanish Civil Guard.

She Shall Have Murder, made into a movie on British television in 1950, introduces Jane Hamish, a pretty young executive in the law firm Daniel Playfair and Son, and Dagobert Brown, Jane's lover and a researcher/writer who is so absorbed in the thriller he and Jane are concocting around the law firm's staff, that he is astonished when the wrong victim dies. Said victim is Mrs. Robjohn, the least favorite client of the firm, thanks to her frequent calls, letters and visits and unwavering paranoid belief that the mysterious "they" are out to get her.

She Shall Have Murder was labeled as "Detection with Wit" when first published in 1948, an apt description of the characters of Jane, always the common-sense, down-to-earth narrator, and her other half Dagobert, whose eccentricities and passing fads often leave Jane alternatively delighted and driven to despair ("Dagobert is my hero, but he persistently refuses to behave like one.") One of Dagobert's primary pursuits is amateur sleuthing that he puts to good use as he resorts to bluffs, disguises, charm and insightful detection in his efforts to prove Mrs. Robjohn was murdered.

Jane makes a delightful narrator, as in this bit about her thoughts on her potential novel-writing career at the start of the story:

"On the other hand, thrillers have nowadays become an accepted art-forom; bishops and minor poets read practically nothing else, and the New Statesman reviews them....The beginning of a book is always the tricky part. It should arrest. A shot should ring out in the night, or if you prefer, a rod should cough or a Roscoe belch forth destruction. Personally, I like to meeet my corpse on page one, and I like him (or her) to be very dead."

In Peter Walker's foreword to the Black Dagger edition of She Shall Have Murder, he notes that the novel is a time capsule of post-World War II life, with utility clothing, conscription, rationing, listening to the wireless, putting lavender in the clothes closet, feeding gas meters with shillings and girls who resemble Rita Hayworth. But the writing sparkles over 60 years later and is far from dated in its ability to entertain.

Mystery Melange

Nancy Martin, Tom Straw, Clare Toohey and Lois Winston will take part in the panel "The Funny Side of Crime," sponsored by Mystery Writers of America/New York Chapter at the Mid-Manhattan Library tomorrow, January 19th at 6:30pm.

If you happen to be in Berkeley, California on January 26th, don't miss an opportunity to hear author Val McDermid at the Mystery Readers International NorCal Literary Salon. Space is limited, so you'll need to RSVP for directions by making a comment on Janet Rudolph's blog, Mystery Fanfare.

Curious about the state of e-Books in 2011? Over at TeleRead, Piotr Kowalczyk has an extensive report complete with highlights, tables and charts.

There's still time to register for Sleuthfest, the mystery writers conference March 1 to 4 in Orlando. Special guests this year are Jeffery Deaver, Chris Grabenstein and Charlaine Harris. Plus, do I have to mention the warm weather and a couple of theme parks you might have heard of where you can take the kids?

There's also still time to apply for two scholarships of up to $500 each awarded in the McCloy-MWA Scholarship Program to unpublished authors. The samples of mystery writing to submit can be three chapters of a novel or nonfiction, or three short stories or essays, or a full-length script. There's no entry fee or membership requirement, and applicants also get feedback from a judge. All applications must be postmarked by February 29, 2012.

Murder Must Advertise is a newsgroup for mystery authors to discuss advertising, publicity and marketing related to their books. It's free to join, and there are many benefits to membership including the chance to get some great ideas from your fellow authors. Also, coordinator Jeffrey Marks is putting together an anthology of short stories related to the ad/publicity/marketing theme, and he's looking for submissions. You can subscribe to the newsgroup on this page, and if you're interested in the anthology, contact Jeff via the e-mail listed here.

Meanwhile, Sandra Seamans' excellent blog My Little Corner has more short-story anthologies with open calls for submissions.

Have you decided to bite the bullet and purchase an e-Reader or tablet? Make sure it's not made out of clay first.

Re-arranging the Furniture

I  hope you'll pardon the little advance spring-cleaning of the blog. I've been wanting to change the color scheme for some time to make it a little easier on the eyes, which I hope I've accomplished. At any rate, everything else is the same—the content, links, archived posts, features—the only changes are a little bit of a blog facelift.

Also I wanted to point out that I'll be adding a new regular feature on the blog this year, something I call "Author R&R," (Reference and Research) in which crime fiction authors stop by to talk about how they undertake researching their books or whether too much research can be death to a mystery novel. Already lined up are Betty Webb, Carola Dunn, Hilary Davidson, Susan Wittig Albert, Jane Cleland, Tina Whittle, Jake Needham, Carolyn G. Hart and William Ryan, with more to come.

Hope you'll continue to drop by and check out the latest news, books, authors, and features!