Kanon’s Stardust is Pierce's Pick

One of the weekly features of January Magazine’s crime-fiction page is “Pierce’s Picks.” Every Monday, J. Kingston Pierce selects a just-published book that goes on to headline January’s crime-fiction section for the next seven days.

His selection for this week is Stardust by Joseph Kanon, while for the week of September 21st, he chose The Brutal Telling by Louise Penny.

If you have not been keeping track of what Pierce has been Picking (just try to say that five times fast), you haven’t missed the boat: 52 weeks of Pierce’s Picks are archived here. Meanwhile, if your hankering for crime fiction goes deeper still, Pierce is also the editor of January Magazine’s sister publication, The Rap Sheet, where the you can find the very best of crime fiction coverage.

Carver Goes for Blood

Beginning today, our sister publication, The Rap Sheet, will begin posting -- in three parts, over three successive days -- a never-before-seen short story called “Bloodsport.” It’s the work of Tom Cain, the pseudonymous British journalist turned author who has won praise for his thrillers, including the new UK release, Assassin.

Like those novels, “Bloodsport” stars the shadowy Samuel Carver. Cain describes the plot of this first-ever Carver short story this way:

Samuel Carver is an angry man. The protagonist of The Accident Man, The Survivor, and Assassin, whose specialty is creating deniable assassination by means of unattributable “accidents,” has just discovered that one of his former brother officers in the SBS (Special Boat Service) has been killed in Afghanistan. The man died very horribly and painfully in the hands of the Taliban, lost for want of the helicopter that should have airlifted him to safety.

Suddenly, a situation that has long been a matter of principled outrage to Carver has become very personal. So he reacts in the way that he knows best. He decides to make a bad thing happen to what he believes is a bad person; the person he holds responsible for the death of his friend and many other fine soldiers, the prime minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

In the tradition of Rogue Male and The Day of the Jackal, Carver stalks his prey. In this case he does not choose the boulevards of Paris as his hunting ground, nor the hills and forests of Germany. Instead he goes to the hills of northern England, where the prime minister is taking his summer holiday.

Click here to read the opening installment of “Bloodsport,” along with Cain’s disclaimer. And click here to enjoy Ali Karim’s interview with the author, which includes some background on “Bloodsport.”

Happy Birthday to the Original Batman

Today is the anniversary of the publication of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. At The Rap Sheet, J. Kingston Pierce does a typically stylish job of remembering:

It was on this date, back in 1897, that the horror novel Dracula first saw publication. It was written, of course, by Bram Stoker, the business manager at London’s famed Lyceum Theatre and the personal assistant to actor Henry Irving, who apparently served as the model for Stoker’s nocturnal Transylvanian count. In that epistolary novel, explains The Writer’s Almanac, Stoker “added several chilling details to the age-old vampire tale: that the undead show no reflection in a mirror, that they shun garlic, and that they can be killed only by a stake through the heart.”

Happy Birthday, Baby!

It was three years ago last week that we sent The Rap Sheet out onto the blogosphere on its own steam. And, wow: baby done good! As Rap Sheet editor J. Kingston Pierce noted on Friday:

It was in May 2006 that we took a chance and cut The Rap Sheet loose from its great mothership, January Magazine. We’ve been trying to fly on our own ever since, with varying degrees of success. It’s amazing to me, that not only have we racked up more than 2,800 posts on this page, but The Rap Sheet has exceeded 500,000 page views. Neither of those things seemed possible three springs ago.

The Rap Sheet started as a crime fiction-focused column here on January Magazine back in early 1999. (Which, when I think about it, actually makes this The Rap Sheet’s 10th anniversary!)

From the beginning, The Rap Sheet was fueled largely by Pierce’s knowledge and passion and while I happily lap up the occasional Rap Sheet kudo and while I do on occasion contribute to The Rap Sheet, there’s really never been any confusion about whose energy has created that amazing and tightly focused publication.

In a relatively short time, The Rap Sheet has covered a lot of ground and racked up an impressive list of accomplishments:

Over the last twelvemonth, The Rap Sheet has introduced or significantly expanded several signature features, including our series about the “25 Best TV Crime Drama Openers,” our rundown of unjustly forgotten “Books You Have to Read,” our authors’ essays on how and why they wrote their latest novels (“The Story Behind the Story”), and our seemingly never-ending exposure of copycat book covers. We’ve welcomed a number of guest bloggers into the fold, among them Gary Phillips, Patrick Lennon, Declan Burke, and Jason Starr, all of whom have since become irregular contributors. We have put together interviews with Reed Farrel Coleman, Chelsea Cain, Max Allan Collins, Craig McDonald, Martin Edwards, Giancarlo De Cataldo, Ace Atkins, Dennis Lehane, Tess Gerritsen, Andrew Taylor, Jeremy Duns, and so many others. We’ve begun holding contests to win free copies of new crime novels, and even hosted a competition whereby readers could win three free passes to CrimeFest, held earlier this month in Bristol, England. And not long ago, I debuted a companion blog, Killer Covers, that focuses on classic book jacket art.

Obviously, if you love crime fiction and you’ve not been making The Rap Sheet a regular stop, you’re clearly missing out.

Congratulations Pierce and team on three richly entertaining years!

Harlan Coben Isn’t Lost at All

At The Rap Sheet today, January Magazine contributing editor Ali Karim talks to rising star Harlan Coben.

For all of his fame, author Harlan Coben is remarkably low on hubris and pretentiousness. As a result, I’ve always enjoyed his company. He was particularly charming with my family during the 2007 Harrogate Crime Writing Festival, and in the process turned my son, Alexander, into a huge fan of his series featuring sports agent and troubleshooter Myron Bolitar. That series began with Deal Breaker in 1995 and this year added a ninth installment, Long Lost, which sends Bolitar and his horny sidekick, billionaire and martial artist Windsor “Win” Horne Lockwood III, into the center of a global conspiracy.

Although Coben cut his teeth on suburban crime fiction set in and around New York City and New Jersey, where he was born in 1962, in Long Lost he proves to be adept at working on a much broader canvas.

Karim and Coben’s exchange is here.

The Man of Many Faces

Who was American author Robert Terrall, really? Under his own name and a variety of pseudonyms -- most memorably “Robert Kyle” and “John Gonzales” -- he wrote somewhere around 53 novels, including some humor-suffused numbers starring Manhattan gumshoe Ben Gates (Kill Now, Pay Later). But he also penned at least 29 books about another fictional private eye, Mike Shayne, using the “house name” Brett Halliday. After Terrall died in late March of this year at 94 years age, The Rap Sheet set out to discover more about this author described by novelist Ed Gorman as one of the “really fine craftsman” of the mid-20th-century paperback revolution.

In an interview with Terrall’s son, San Francisco journalist Ben Terrall, January Magazine’s sister publication learns what became of the author after he ceased publishing in 1986, how he got into the novel-writing game in the first place, how he felt about his respective fictional series, and what sort of father he was to his four children.

At one point in the exchange, Ben Terrall is asked about how his father looked at his literary trade:

Q: In 1979, your dad was interviewed by The New York Times. He was quoted as saying that he wasn’t enamored of the crime-fiction genre, but “it was a way of starting writing.” Why did he think that was the place to begin? And did he eventually develop a stronger interest in the genre, or did he always write mysteries just for the money?

A: Dad tried to make it writing “serious” novels, starting with his World War II book The Steps of the Quarry. But that novel took four years [to write] and didn’t go anywhere. So, as he had to support a family, he started writing more commercial stuff. He had already written They Deal in Death (which I love) in 1943 and A Killer Is Loose Among Us ... (a favorite of Charles Ardai’s), so he knew he was capable of producing that kind of stuff.

After the market for short stories in magazines dried up, he was writing whatever he could make a living at. The choice then was pretty much mysteries or westerns. He viewed them as entertainment, something that he could write relatively quickly so he could make time to write other, more serious novels. That didn’t work out as well as he hoped.

I wouldn’t presume to say I know how Dad felt about the genre, but I think it’s safe to say he was a complicated guy and had mixed feelings about the trade. He read a lot of world literature in translation, and went though at least two dense books a week. Dad could be a bit of a snob about what was and what wasn’t great writing, which sometimes drove me crazy when I was an angry young man (a very brief phase, I can assure you).

He could be dismissive about other writers in the field, though he told me Charles Williams [Talk of the Town, Dead Calm, etc.] was one of his favorite mystery/crime writers, and I can see why now. Williams was a great plotter and storyteller, and no hack as a writer. With Dad very much on my mind, I’m reading Williams now and loving his stuff.

You can read the full Rap Sheet interview here.

The Book You Have to Read

Over the last year, our sister publication, the award-winning crime fiction-dedicated Rap Sheet, has been compiling a list of the Books You Have to Read. That weekly feature had a birthday today. Editor J. Kingston Pierce says, “As hard as this is for me to believe, it was a year ago that The Rap Sheet inaugurated its ‘Books You Have to Read’ series.” As Pierce points out, “Rap Sheet contributors and a more substantial number of published authors have produced 51 posts about must-read crime novels, many of those no longer in print.”

The list is wicked impressive, including contributions from authors Stephen Booth, Gary Phillips, Jason Starr, Simon Wood, Linwood Barclay, Cara Black, Max Allan Collins, Louise Ure and 42 others about books both well-known and obscure. You can find the complete list here.

Thoughts on Books and Tea Parties

In his usual stylish fashion, J. Kingston Pierce at The Rap Sheet socks it to ‘em with a trenchant post on death, taxes and book covers:

I’ve been waiting for months to post this book jacket. And I could hardly have picked a better day than this: April 15, aka Tax Day in the United States. While political right-wingers and FOX News talking heads, upset at President Barack Obama’s campaign to repair the sour U.S. economy left behind by his predecessor, gather in ragtag “Tea Parties” at various points around the country to protest progressive taxation, government spending, the supposedly detrimental ideas students are taught in college (as if ignorance were really bliss), and the general fact that one of their own isn’t in charge anymore, everybody else will be filing their tax forms or feeling smug that they already completed that annual deed weeks ago.

The title of this book comes, of course, from a saying attributed to U.S. Founding Father Benjamin Franklin: “In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” However, Franklin makes no appearance in the novel.

Pierce’s full post is predictably engaging and it’s here.

Do you just love that cover to death? There’s more where that came from. Pierce has been collecting them at his Killer Covers blog. Along with -- you guess it -- still more trenchant observations. Kill Covers is a must stop because, as the blog tells us, “it’s what’s upfront that counts.”

Marlowe at the Movies

The incomparable Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep, The Long Goodbye) died 50 years ago today. To celebrate the great novelist’s memory, J. Kingston Pierce at The Rap Sheet has put together a really special tribute:

In commemoration of this being the 50th anniversary of the death of oil company exec-turned-crime novelist Raymond Chandler, I’ve put together a collection of trailers from the various 20th-century film adaptations of his private eye Philip Marlowe novels.

After some experience penning screenplays for Hollywood, Chandler came to despise the movie-making business; yet producers were willing to pay big bucks for Chandler’s stories, and he was no less willing to take their checks and cash them. Under those terms, most of the seven Marlowe books were brought to the silver screen, several of them more than once, though the results weren’t always sympathetic to their source material.

That article -- with trailers -- is here.

A Honey of an Opening

The story that goes with that amazing bit of video is at The Rap Sheet today. J. Kingston Pierce continues his series of the best of television crime drama openers with an intimate look at a classic heroine of the page and the small screen, Forrest and Gloria Fickling’s deliciously dangerous Honey West.

Replete with humor and plenty of risqué innuendos, the novels made Honey out as “the nerviest, curviest P.I. in Los Angeles -- or anywhere else for that matter,” to repeat one description. She was also an important precursor to some of today’s best-known distaff dicks, including V.I. Warshawski and Kinsey Millhone. “Of course, these days nobody would dare call her a feminist icon,” wrote Kevin Burton Smith in a 2004 profile of Gloria Fickling for Mystery Scene magazine, “but in her time she was a rarity -- an independent woman calling her own shots. She may have been prone to frequent ‘wardrobe malfunctions,’ but she was out there knocking on doors, taking down names, and answering to nobody but herself.”

Pierce’s story on Honey West is here.

Rockford at 80

Anyone who has spent much time on our sister site, the wonderful Rap Sheet crime fiction blog, knows that the Sheet’s editor, J. Kingston Pierce is a serious fan of the 1970s television drama, The Rockford Files. Serious.

Today Pierce writes a charming birthday tribute to Rockford Files star James Garner, 80, as well as M*A*S*H and City of Angels star Wayne Rogers, 75.

We have a couple of birthdays to celebrate today, both from the TV crime-drama category. The first and most significant, of course, is the 80th birthday of Rockford Files star James Garner, an actor who may never have given a bad performance. I’ve not only been watching the DVDs of Rockford lately, but have managed to acquire an almost complete collection of Bret Maverick, the NBC series (and revival of the 1950s TV western Maverick) that he went on to do after leaving Rockford. What a treat.

Pierce’s dual birthday tribute can be found here.

Royalty Visits The Rap Sheet

Today, all day, bestselling novelist Laurie R. King is guest-blogging over at The Rap Sheet. King is the author of the new historical thriller Touchstone, reviewed here at January just a few days ago.

In an introduction to King’s blogging visit, Rap Sheet editor J. Kingston Pierce writes:

King’s first novel, the Edgar Award-winning A Grave Talent (1993), introduced crime-fiction readers to Kate Martinelli, the lesbian San Francisco homicide inspector who has since headlined four more books, the latest of those being 2006’s The Art of Detection. King may be better known, however, for her series featuring Mary Russell, the resourceful younger woman and scholar who, in The Beekeeper’s Apprentice (1994), met an aging Sherlock Holmes in Sussex in the early 20th century, learned his methods, and eventually married him -- at least in King’s fiction.

On top of those popular series installments, the 55-year-old King has penned a handful of standalone novels, including A Darker Place (1999) and Keeping Watch (2003). Of her latest, Touchstone (which came out just before the new year began, but carries a 2008 publication date), critic Dick Adler wrote in January Magazine:

Everything Laurie R. King writes is first-class, from her modern, totally feminist and often surprisingly touching Kate Martinelli mysteries to her Mary Russell thrillers, which manage to carry on with (and improve upon) Arthur Conan Doyle’s tales of Sherlock Holmes and give the Great Detective a new life. King’s new novel, Touchstone, is one of the best books of any kind published in 2007 -- a terrific combination and culmination of her work so far.

King’s first Rap Sheet post is here.

What to Read This Fall

It’s a whole new book-publishing season. Do you know yet what you’re going to read this fall? If not, you’ll find plenty of help in choosing. Critical Mass, the blog of the National Book Critics Circle Board of Directors, has recently begun asking its members for their suggestions of which books consumers ought to be sticking their noses into this season. Recommendations so far include The Shock Doctrine, by Naomi Klein (Metropolitan Books); Exit Ghost, by Philip Roth (Houghton Mifflin); Run, by Ann Patchett (HarperCollins); Bridge of Sighs, by Richard Russo (Knopf); The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible, by A.J. Jacobs (Simon & Schuster); and The Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Díaz (Riverhead). A collection of those recommendations can be found here.

If what you’re looking for is more crime fiction in your life, though, check out The Rap Sheet’s autumn reads list, which includes Exit Music, by Ian Rankin (Orion UK); Damnation Falls, by Edward Wright (Orion UK); and Blonde Faith, by Walter Mosley (Little, Brown USA).

One of a Kind

Tomorrow, May 22, will mark not only the birthdays of novelist Arthur Conan Doyle and comic-book creator Hergé, but also the first birthday of The Rap Sheet, January Magazine’s sister blog, a popular resource for crime-fiction fans. To celebrate, we’ve asked more than 100 novelists, critics and book bloggers--running the gamut from Michael Connelly, Laura Lippman, Ian Rankin, Michael Marshall, Rhys Bowen, Peter Temple and Zoë Sharp, to Lee Child, Gary Phillips, Sarah Weinman, Barry Eisler, Sara Paretsky and Declan Hughes--to answer one question: What one crime, mystery or thriller novel do you think has been most unjustly overlooked, criminally forgotten or underappreciated over the years?

Most of the works selected are familiar; others are out of print, but apparently worth tracking down. The Rap Sheet will be rolling out these nominations over the rest of this week.

The only downside to this birthday project is that it may cause you to add a lot more books to your to-be-read pile.

Read the first installment of The Rap Sheet’s commemorative “one book project” here.