In Reference to Murder

The Long Goodbye, 56 Years and Counting

I'm still in holiday mode, but wanted to point out that today (November 27) is the date on which Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye was published in 1953 by Hamish Hamilton. In honor of the occasion, Paul Davis and Today in Literature have tributes.

Detectives Don't Wear Seatbelts

In advance of the September release of the memoir Detectives Don't Wear Seatbelts: True Adventures of a Female P.I. by CiCi McNair, Hachette Books is offering readers of In Reference to Murder in the U.S. and Canada five free copies of the book. To enter, send an e-mail with your name and complete mailing address to bv@bvlawson.com with "Detectives Don't Wear Seatbelts" in the subject line, between now and midnight on August 31st. The five winners will be selected via random drawing and announced here the next day.

CiCi McNair fled a suffocating and emotionally-abusive childhood in Mississippi as soon as she could, taking a more traditional route at first with a Bachelor of Arts degree in American history. She used that degree to good effect researching the award-winning CBC documentary Connections, about organized crime in Canada. That led to news anchoring in Rome and a news broadcast stint on Vatican Radio.

But that wasn't enough for McNair. After years traveling around Europe, she returned to New York in 1994, divorced, broke and "camping out in a  borrowed apartment with an open suitcase under a dining room table."  She impulsively decided to become a private detective and started calling agencies in the Yellow Pages starting with "A" and working her way down the alphabet, before she was hired on April Fool's Day by a firm willing to give her a chance. Since then, she's worked for an ex-homicide detective in Mississippi with her 84-year-old mother riding shotgun in the surveillance car, joined a zany private eye firm in Hell's Kitchen fighting counterfeiters, and worked undercover with New York City law enforcement investigating the Born to Kill gang in Chinatown and the Middle Eastern underworld west of Broadway.

Since 2003 she's been head of the international firm Great Star Investigations, first in Miami and now in Philadelphia. Her firm handles cases including counterfeit pharmaceuticals, missing persons, stolen art recovery, and murder. McNair herself also works as a court-appointed investigator handling capital and non-capital cases. 

Detectives Don't Wear Seatbelts often reads like a first-person novel, and McNair has a flair for storytelling, as well as plenty of insights into her male-dominated field. Of her encounters with the Feebs (FBI), U.S. marshals, NYPD, Jersey cops, and others she encountered while working undercover in Chinatown, she says

"There were always ex-cops coming in and out of the office and others on the phone. The worst of them were racist, sexist, dishonest, and dumb. The best of them had a genuine urge or even a need to be protective of others. They were savvy and resourceful, and if there's anything I ever want to be called--it's that. Their brains turned me on. In every way. But I never did more than fantasize about making love to a detective. It would have been far too dangerous for my future. Detectives are skeptics, paranoid, and gossip like mad when they're not putting two and two together on their own. But it wasn't just fear of damaging my reputation. It would have made incest look like breaking a diet."

A Thrilling, Tony Trio

Harper Collins recently published the latest novels from James Grippando, Jane Stanton Hitchcock and Paulo Coehlo, and sent along some copies. At first, I thought I might feature them separately, but then I realized they have a common theme running not only among the three books but also the three authors.

Coehlo's book, The Winner Stands Alone, zeroes in on society's fascination with the world of fame, fortune, and celebrity, something Coehlo himself knows first-hand, as a theater director, actor and lyricist in his native Brazil. His novel takes place over a 24-hour period at the Cannes Film Festival, with the "superclass" of producers, actors, designers, and supermodels juxtaposed against aspiring starlets, has-been stars and jaded hangers-on. The story focuses on a successful, driven Russian entrepreneur who will go to the darkest lengths, even murder, to reclaim his ex-wife, but it's as much a indictment of the excesses and shaky moral ground of the Hollywood and celebrity lifestyle as it is a thriller. (That particular theme turns out to be a bit ironic, considering at the Cannes Film Festival in 2008, Harvey Weinstein bought the rights to Coelho's best-selling The Alchemist and will be producing it with a budget of $60 million.)

Author Jane Stanton Hitchcock is no stranger to fame and fortune, either, her mother being noted actress Joan Alexander and her father (adoptive stepfather) a wealthy Volkswagen executive, who entertained lavishly in New York and the Hamptons with the likes of George Plimpton, Neil Simon, and Leonard Bernstein. In Hitchcock's latest novel, Mortal Friends, the high society-connected Reven Lynch joins forces with a DC detective, playing an "ersatz Mata Hari" navigating embassy dinners and charity balls to help catch a killer, the "Beltway Basher," who might be closer to home than Reven realizes; the most likely suspect is Reven's businessman love interest. Eventually, her efforts cause her social world to unravel, put an old friendship to the test and unleash quite a bit of scandal as Reven discovers nothing in either high or low culture is what it appears to be.

Although novelist James Grippando didn't start out in such rarified circles as Hitchcock, his legal career drove him on the fast track to becoming a partner at Steel Hector and Davis, the Miami law firm at which former Attorney General Janet Reno began her career. His latest novel, Intent to Kill, centers around a fallen baseball star, Ryan James, who uses his skills as Boston's king of sports radio to outwit a dangerous caller and prove the hit-and-run which killed his wife was no accident. With help from the dedicated prosecutor on the case, James tries to unravel a cover-up that reaches back to the night of his wife's death and could end up involving one of New England's richest and most powerful families.

Power, greed and fame — the getting and the keeping — are certainly prime fodder for crime, and these three novels make good use of that construct. As philosopher Francis Bacon pointed out, “Fame is like a river, that beareth up things light and swollen, and drowns things weighty and solid," or, as Hitchcock's protagonist Reven Lynch says in Mortal Friends, "This being Washington, and Washington being the capital of ambition, there are a lot of killers around here, believe me. I imagined quite a few people in that audience would be capable of murder if they thought it would advance their careers, or keep them in power."

The Dynamics of Dillinger

The new film Public Enemies starring Johnny Depp as John Dillinger has brought the notorious bank robber back into the spotlight, spurring a mini-boom in Dillinger books, articles, and festivals. The Hotel Congress in Tucson, Arizona, where Dillinger was arrested in 1934 had a commemoration timed to coincide with the premiere of the movie, and in St. Paul, Minnesota, there's a Public Enemies Festival with author lectures, exhibits, and a reenactment of the trial of Dillinger’s girlfriend, Evelyn Frechette. You can even bid on Dillinger's derringer pistol, which is going up for auction on July 25 (although you'd better have about $45,000 on hand).

Although there have been many books on the life of the legendary Dillinger, there have been fewer on the gang members associated with him during his life, many of whom had even more colorful lives and committed more crimes that Dillinger himself. One such book is The Rise and Fall of the Dillinger Gang by Jeffery S. King (who also penned The Life and Death of Pretty Boy Floyd), which provides biographical information on nine of Dillinger's associates, their upbringing and how they drifted into -- or in some cases like Homer Van Meter -- actively sought out a life of crime. King delved into FBI files, court and prison records, and local newspapers to write this well-documented account of the supporting cast who supported Dillinger, most of whom would make fascinating biographical studies all their own.  As William Helmer comments on the back cover, "Dillinger didn't do it alone."

King includes some of the bizarre events from their escapades, such as Baby Face Nelson taking a perverse pleasure in Homer Van Meter's distress at the look of his face after Meter's plastic surgery, and firefighters helping Russell Lee Clark and Charley Makley during a fire at the Congress Hotel save their baggage which included a heavy fabric box where several machine guns were hidden. The book has several photos, some of morgue shots, and extensive bibliographical notes.

A companion book to Dillinger and the era of the gangster and outlaw era from 1920-1940 is The Complete Public Enemy Almanac by William Helmer and Rick Mattix. A valuable reference resource, the book has encyclopedic entries with outlaw bios and the FBI Gang Membership List, timelines of crime, interesting articles and sidebars such as info on the state of the police radio and bulletproofing and a listing of local and federal officers killed in the line of duty during the period, as well as what's billed as "the first comprehensive true-crime bibliography."

Both are good resources to have in your library if you're a fan of the gangster and outlaw era, or if you're researching or writing historical crime fiction set in that time period.