I never have trouble remembering Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s birthday, for it coincides with the anniversary of my founding The Rap Sheet (a subject about which I shall have more to say anon). Had that physician turned author not died in July 1930, he’d be celebrating his 154th birthday today, having been born in 1859.
On this occasion, let me direct you to a fairly good biography of Conan Doyle here, a video
of the author talking about his life and career (which I’ve posted before
on this page, but which many readers probably have not seen), and David Abrams’ review of the 2007 bookArthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters, by Jon Lellenberg, Daniel Stashower, and Charles Foley. Oh, and if you didn’t see it before, here
is James McCreet’s Rap Sheet piece looking back at some of the more preposterous deductions made in the Sherlock Holmes stories.
A weekly alert for followers of crime, mystery, and thriller fiction.
The Black Country, by Alex Grecian (Putnam):
I was fond enough of Midwestern novelist Alex Grecian’s premiere
Murder Squad tale, The Yard, that I chose it as one of the top crime novels of 2012. Naturally, my expectations of its sequel were high. Although The Black Countrylacks some of the attractions of its predecessor, it still secures Grecian standing as somebody whose work is well worth following.
This sophomore outing for Inspector Walter Day of Scotland Yard’s Murder Squad opens in the spring of 1890. Day and his rather eccentric associate, Sergeant Nevil Hammersmith, have been dispatched to the beleaguered coal-mining village of Blackhampton, in the British Midlands, from which three members of the Price family have gone missing. Concerns about their fate have only been heightened by a child’s recent discovery--in a tree’s upper branches, of all places--of an eyeball. As if these factors didn’t make the case weird enough, a seeming plague has struck the town, the foundations of houses and other buildings there have been undermined by aged mine shafts, and a gruesomely disfigured stranger appears to be lurking in the vicinity. Being a superstitious lot, Blackhampton residents take these turns with some equanimity; but Day and Hammersmith want answers and aren’t willing to leave
villagers with any secrets unexcavated. As the village is slowly swallowed by the
earth, Hammersmith is struck down by the advancing plague and a long-festering
vengeance threatens to trim Blackhampton’s population still further.
The Yard made excellent use of its London backdrop and the displeasure Victorian-era Londonders exhibited toward Scotland Yard, which had failed to protect them from Jack the Ripper, the city’s deadly scourge of 1888. The rural setting of The Black Country proves less captivating (and reminds me overmuch of Charles Todd’s better-known Inspector Ian Rutledge novels). And though Day’s colleague, progressive pathologist Dr. Bernard Kingsley, eventually rolls into Blackhampton to aid in sorting out the mysteries at hand (together with his dim but endearing assistant, Henry Mayhew), the absence of other Scotland Yarders and the police-procedural atmosphere they helped impart to The Yard is keenly felt in these pages. I hope that by their third adventure, Grecian’s gang of colorful historical crime-solvers will have found their way back among the belching smokestacks and ribald underworld corners of the British capital.
* * *
New in stores as well is Reed Farrel Coleman’s Onion Street (Tyrus), which winds back the clock for series protagonist Moe Prager. We see him here in 1967, when he was still a college student, feeling lost in his own life and struggling to figure out who beat his girlfriend and left her to die in Brooklyn. ... Meanwhile, the celebrated Charles McCarry offers us The Shanghai Factor (The Mysterious Press), about an American spy in Shanghai, whose recent, heated affair with a young woman may leave him vulnerable as he tries to discern the secrets of China’s seemingly impregnable new intelligence agency.
• I’ve tried to remain optimistic about the reboot of the 1960s series Ironside, which
NBC-TV has finally added to its fall 2013 schedule. However, a new video preview has raised my doubts. I’m particularly disappointed in the idea that “tough, sexy but acerbic”--and wheelchair-bound--former chief of detectives Robert Ironside (played here by Blair Underwood) has been moved to New York City, rather than keeping him and his crew in San Francisco, where the original Raymond Burr series was set. Watch the trailer for yourself here.
• In the aftermath of the poorly received 1998 movie version
of The Avengers, I haven’t heard of any other serious efforts to adapt that durable, 1961-1969 British TV spy series for the big screen. However, if someone
does decide to take on such an endeavor at any time soon, I hope he or she will
consider a recommendation--spread recently on Facebook--to hire English starlet
Jenna-Louise Coleman
into the role of Emma Peel. The 27-year-old actress, currently appearing as
Clara Oswald in Doctor Who, has demonstrated the requisite sass and style for the part (created by Diana Rigg), and she sure knows how to wear a black leather catsuit.
• And Black Scat Books, the small press started by California artist/author Derek Pell (of Missing Mysteries fame), has just released a paperback collection called Nickle Noir: The Art of John Nickle. Even if you’re not familiar with Nickle’s name, you may well know his artwork: he created the covers for Black Lizard’s line of Martin Beck novels, for instance. Nickle Noir contains the illustrator’s “best cover art and illustrations produced over the past 25 years,” including “moody crime scenes for novels by the likes of Ross MacDonald, James Swain, [Maj] Sjöwall and [Per] Wahlöö, and many others.” Examples of work from the book can be enjoyed here.
• This could be pretty interesting: Among the “scripted development
projects” for American TV network TNT announced this week is a series based on Ross Macdonald’s
string of Lew Archer private-eye novels. Less hopeful is a “re-imagining” of Peter
Gunn, Blake Edwards’ iconic 1958-1961 series starring Craig Stevens.
Really, does anyone believe that the original Gunn can be outdone?
• And this in indisputably good news: The Michael Kitchen-led historical mystery series Foyle’s War will return to PBS-TV’s Masterpiece Mystery!this coming September. Three new episodes, all of which are set in the post-World War II years of 1946-47 (and have already been broadcast in the UK), will be shown.
• Organizers of the 2013 Tony Hillerman Writers Conference, scheduled to take place in Santa Fe, New Mexico, from November 7 to 9, put out the word this week that the faculty for this year’s event will feature authors Margaret Coel, Craig Johnson, and David Morrell, along with Kirk Ellis, Emmy-award winning writer of the HBO mini-series John Adams, James McGrath Morris, the recipient of two New Mexico Book Awards, and Hillerman’s author daughter, Anne.
• Among the latest “Top Notch Thriller” releases from Ostara Publishing is Tightrope,
Antony Melville-Ross’ 1981 novel set in Britain and the United States. For added interest, sometime Rap Sheet contributor and Top Notch editor Mike Ripley notes that
Melville-Ross had “a pretty thrilling family history (originally American) back
to Moby Dick via Pancho Villa and a possible inspiration for Indiana Jones. I
couldn’t make this up!”
• Ace Atkins’ second Spenser novel, Robert B. Parker’s Wonderland, was only just published by Putnam, but already there’s word that Boston’s best-fed gumshoe will make an encore appearance this year in Silent Night, a holiday-theme work apparently left
unfinished at the time of Parker’s death in early 2010. The book was completed by Helen Brann, Parker’s longtime literary agent. It’s due out in late October.
• Stephen King’s latest novel, Joyland, is being readied for paperback release by Hard Case
Crime in early June. But “special limited editions” of the book, including one
featuring “nine gorgeous illustrations from master artist Robert McGinnis and a
map of the Joyland amusement park,” are also being made available. Presumably at a steeper price than the regular $12.95 edition.
• A few months back I wrote on this page about the failed 1972 TV pilot film A Very Missing Person, which sought to bring author Stuart Palmer’s “meddlesome old battleaxe” of an amateur sleuth, Hildegarde
Withers, to small-screen audiences. Now comes word that publisher
Mysterious Press/Open Road Media is releasing e-book versions of 17 Palmer
novels, including such Withers outings as The Penguin Pool Murder (1931), Murder on Wheels (1932), and 1969’s Hildegarde Withers Makes the Scene
(from which A Very Missing Person was derived). Blogger Les Blatt, who has reviewed nine of Palmer’s novels within the last few years,
describes
the Withers books as “well-plotted and told with some nice humorous touches.” If you’d like to check out Open Road’s Palmer re-releases, click here.
Images from Vienna, 1900, with music by Johann Strauss II.
In case you haven’t noticed it yet, the first part of my
recent interview with historical novelist J. Sydney Jones was posted this morning on the Kirkus Reviews Web site. This is of course timed to correspond with the release of Jones’ fourth and latest Karl Werthen “Viennese Mystery,” The Keeper of Hands (Severn House), the plot of which
its publisher describes this way:
Vienna, 1901. With the police seemingly indifferent to the
murder of a 19-year-old prostitute known as Mitzi, brothel-keeper Frau
Mutzenbacher turns to lawyer Karl Werthen to find out what happened and bring
her killer to justice. Yet the more he discovers about the mysterious Mitzi,
with her secret past and impressive roster of clients, the more questions
Werthen’s investigation throws up.
At the same time, Werthen undertakes a second commission: to find out who
viciously assaulted playwright Arthur Schnitzler. Schnitzler believes his
latest controversial play might have been the motive for the attack--but is
there more to it than that?
As he navigates the highs and lows of Viennese society in dogged pursuit of the
truth, Werthen finds himself drawn into a conspiracy of espionage and affairs
of state.
That’s a pretty simplistic breakdown of what is actually a rather complicated and propulsive yarn involving important officials with secrets to hide, competing espionage agencies, and a killer practiced in the diabolical art of shutting people up for good. Viennese lawyer/private eye Werthen, last seen in The Silence (2012), tackles all of the questions and dangers involved here with the assistance of his increasingly resourceful spouse, Berthe Meisner, and real-life criminologist Doktor Hanns Gross. Jones’ careful pacing, attention to historical detail, and self-assured prose make The Keeper of Hands--like the previous entries in this series--well worth the time it takes to read.
As is so often the case with my author interviews for Kirkus, I gleaned considerably more material from Syd Jones than I had any hope of fitting into today’s column. The 64-year-old author--who grew up in a “little beach town” on the Oregon coast but now resides in the Santa Cruz, California, area with his wife and young son,
Evan--responded at satisfying length to my numerous questions about his past, his
writing career, and his reading preferences. Rather than file away what I
couldn’t fit into Kirkus, never to be seen by the reading public, I am posting the greater part of our exchange below.
J. Kingston Pierce: When and why did you first visit Vienna, and what were your earliest impressions of that city?
J. Sydney Jones: I initially went to Vienna as a junior in college in 1968. I had planned on attending the University of Stirling in Scotland as an occasional student. But those were the years of the Vietnam War and the draft and student deferments; my draft board did not go along with the non-graduating status I would have in Scotland, so I looked around for a school abroad that did not have a language requirement. I’d studied German at university, but had no real desire to go to school full time in that language. A junior-year-abroad program in Vienna fit the bill--and it turned out to be a terrific fit all around, quite by accident. Some of my best
friends are from those days. That year in Vienna changed my life.
JKP: For how many years did you later live in Vienna?
JSJ: I went back to Vienna following graduation, newly married, and stayed there on and off throughout the 1970s and most of the ’80s. This was the high point of the Cold War and a good time to be in the spy center of Vienna and also a good time to be away from the U.S., if the fashions say anything of the times. I had already determined as a student to become a writer; Vienna became my Paris, my school
of life.
JKP: One of your previous, non-fiction books, Hitler in Vienna, 1907-1913: Clues to the Future
(2002), looked at Austrian-born Adolf Hitler’s experiences in the imperial capital. What did you learn about Hitler and Vienna by focusing your research this way?
JSJ:Hitler in Vienna was indeed a labor of
love. It took five years of research and writing. I had initially intended the
book to be a popular narrative history of Vienna 1900 and its amazing
renaissance: think Freud, Mahler, Schoenberg, Klimt, Schiele, Loos, Otto
Wagner, Wittgenstein--the list goes on and on of those who helped to shape the
modern sensibility. At that time (mid-1970s), New York publishers were most
definitely not interested in Vienna 1900; now it has become a cottage industry.
Publishers were, however, interested in Hitler, so I paired the two--“a tale of
genius versus malignancy” as a melodramatic blurb. Hitler scratched out a
living of sorts in those years painting pictures that would be sold to frame
shops. It was the frame that was of interest, not the picture, much like you
might buy a small frame today with a photo already in it just for advertisement
sake. Hitler worked mostly for Jewish frame dealers when he wasn’t living rough
on the streets, a failed wannabe artist who was gaga for opera, especially the
works of Wagner.
I used the eyes of an outsider to research that book and it was ultimately published in German first. The Hitler angle took my rose-colored glasses off vis-à-vis Vienna: not all schlagobers and waltzes. Anti-Semitism was a deep and ugly vein in the landscape of Central Europe, and Vienna was no exception. An early pre-Nazi National Socialist Party had its start in turn-of-the-century Austria.
JKP: The shorthand version of your biography is that you produced several non-fiction books about Vienna, and then began writing your current series of Viennese Mysteries. But in fact, you penned two standalone historical thrillers before delivering your first Viennese Mystery, The Empty Mirror(2009). What were those novels about, and how did they prepare you to compose the Karl Werthen novels?
JSJ: I wrote two thrillers for NAL back in the early 1990s. The first, Time of the Wolf, is available now as a Kindle (with a wonderful cover by the talented Peter Ratcliffe). It should have been titled In Death’s Time, as it came from a dream I had about this person--obviously a police inspector--coming down an immense flight of marble stairs and thinking to himself: “Only one more death in death’s time. Who will care?” The novel has a Gorky Park sort of feel to it, featuring a Viennese police inspector in 1942 who uncovers documents proving that the Final Solution is being carried out. He resolves to get the secret out to the Allies, but his mission is compromised and soon the SD, German security services, is on his tail. Publishers Weekly called this novel an “exciting intellectual game of cat and mouse ... [that] offers driving tension from beginning to end.” The book is a bit edgy vis-à-vis sex and violence. It remains one of my favorites.
The other thriller, The Hero Game, is set in Ireland during World War II. Its premise is that the Nazis mount a secret mission to Ireland to foment a second uprising, which will distract the Brits just at the time of a planned
German invasion of Old Blighty. It also has my biggest howler--I have the Irish
leader, a good Catholic, attending mass in a Protestant church. Those thrillers
were my education in pacing and writing action scenes, both of which have come
in handy in the Werthen books. They are also powerfully character-driven for
thrillers.
JKP: What is it about the setting of Vienna in the diapered days of the 20th century that so attracts you as a novelist?
JSJ: I have to admit, it took me a good half-minute to figure out “diapered days”--nice.
I love the time, simple as that. I feel at home in that
time. I have since first encountering it as a student. There is terrific
resonance with our own times, there are fascinating personalities with quirks
and dark sides. Lovely material. Plus, Vienna, when I first went there, was not
so far removed from those times: the buildings, the feel of the society. All
from another age.
JKP: And what can you accomplish as a novelist writing about Vienna in the late 18900s, early 1900s that would not be possible to do as the author of non-fiction works?
JSJ: It’s funny: I thought that writing this material as fiction would free me up from the obsessive constraints of getting every little historical nuance right. Wrong. I use actual historical characters in each book of the series, and I continue to feel an obligation to getting things right about them in the fictional format, as well. In Requiem in Vienna[2010], for example, featuring the composer Gustav Mahler, I had the appropriate volume of excellent Henry-Louis de la Grange Mahler bio (Vienna: The Years of Change) ever at my side to double-check for
Mahler’s daily movements. It’s the same for all the books. If I have a real
character speak, I want to know that this is a good facsimile of what they
actually talked about.
I only every wanted to be a fiction author; I started with
non-fiction as I figured that would be the easiest way to break into print.
From travel articles to travel books to narrative non-fiction and then, voila, I could make the leap to fiction. It sort of worked that way, but it is not necessarily a recipe for success. But what the hell, I was young and definitely not a MFA grad--I had to figure these things out for myself. So there is no great moral purpose in my choosing to use this rich Vienna material in a fictional format rather than non-fiction. I am simply being selfish--this is the kind of book I want to write. Werthen and company are just plain fun.
JKP: Do you spend a lot of effort trying to immerse yourself in 1900-1901 Vienna while you’re writing the Werthen books? If so, what do you do to get yourself in the right mind space to recapture life in Vienna during that period?
JSJ: Actually, the Werthen books are planned to cover the era from 1898 to 1915. I am still in 1901 with the fifth book, the same year as The
Keeper of Hands. But the books are planned to progress year by year, the
characters aging with a sell-buy date. And yes, there is a great deal of
immersion in the times. Besides reading tons of history for each book, and
focusing on the particular real-life person from the time, I also do a daily
bit of time travel via photos and newspapers. Bless the Internet. Time was, if
you wanted to do any real research on Vienna 1900, you had to be in Vienna and
go to the National
Library and request actual newspapers one by one or visit their photo
archive and present credentials to show that you deserved a look-see. Now that
library has put such information online. I can browse several newspapers for
the very day I am writing about over a century ago, see what was in the news,
the weather, the social gossip. I can stroll down the street I am writing about
in Vienna via the online photo archive. It is a wonderful resource.
Apropos this resource, one of my recurring minor characters
in the series is Karl Kraus,
of whom I lovingly referred to in one interview as “the intellectual pit bull
of Vienna.” Kraus was a cultural critic, grammar policeman, and word maven of
Vienna 1900. A frail-looking man, Kraus beavered away for over three decades,
single-handedly publishing his magazine, Die Fackel (The Torch). In this journal he took on the hypocrisies of the day, stood up to the rich and the powerful when need be, fought crime and societal stupidity, and generally pissed off everybody. The ultimate aphorist, Kraus termed Vienna 1900 a “laboratory for
world destruction.” And guess what, the entirety of his publication can also be found online.
JKP: How realistic is Werthen’s role as a lawyer/private investigator? Have you read about other people in Vienna at the time who engaged in comparable endeavors?
JSJ: Werthen is spun out of whole cloth, though a few months ago I did run across an obscure reference to a private investigator at the time working on Praterstrasse. I could find no further information, however. Werthen and his wife, Berthe, are at the heart of the books, and I do not want their creation to be limited by any real-life forebears.
JKP: Your new novel, The Keeper of Hands, follows a
rather complicated plot course. It starts out as a whodunit, with a murdered
young brothel employee, but soon expands into a work of intrigue about rival
European intelligence agencies and the criminal consequences of seeking to
cover up indiscretions among “important” people. What led you to concoct this
tale, and how do you think it represents growth in your series?
JSJ: Actually, most of the books in the series follow this arc from mystery to thriller; from whodunit to stop-them-from-doing-it. The first in the series, The Empty Mirror, sets up this format:
it begins with the death of an art model and the trail ultimately leads to the Hofburg [Palace] and the
secrets involving the deaths of an archduke and an empress. Keeper is this format on steroids. I very much wanted to deal with the espionage agencies of the times and also to create a vile antagonist. I love vile antagonists. Herr Schmidt from Keeper will be making reappearances.
(Right) J. Sydney Jones
JKP: The plots of each of your Viennese Mysteries start with a cultural luminary or two from the city’s colorful past--future philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein in The Silence, for instance, and composer Gustav Mahler in Requiem in Vienna, and authors Arthur Schnitzler and Bertha von Suttner in The Keeper of Hands. One real-life figure keeps coming back, though: Hanns Gross, the so-called
father of criminology. How has Gross found a regular role in your series, when
other authentic characters have not? Is it simply because he has an expertise
in criminal analysis, or is there something else he contributes to your
storytelling?
JSJ: Gross is one of the team, not merely an incidental player. ... He is ... instrumental in finding a sort of informal justice, as in The
Silence. Gross’ ongoing role is part of the reason why the series is called
the “Viennese Mysteries” and not the Werthen series. Besides, my private
inquiries agent’s name is a strange one: Americans are going to be pronouncing
it”wurthan” when it is actually “vairtun.”
JKP: Are there other authors currently penning mystery or thriller fiction who you think do a particularly good job of capturing their chosen historical time periods?
JSJ: Where do I start? Philip Kerr nails Germany before and after WWII. Jacqueline Winspear ditto for post-WWI England. Alan Furst, especially in his first novels, transports you to Central Europe and the Balkans in the 1930s. You want Shanghai and the People’s Republic of China in transformation during 1990s? Read Qiu Xiaolong. This list could go on with a number of excellent writers.
JKP: Is it true that, beyond composing your Viennese Mysteries, you’re also working on some new standalone thrillers? What can you tell us about those? And will we be seeing any of them in the near future?
JSJ: Glad you asked. My novel Ruin Value will be
out this October from Mysterious Press/Open Road. It’s a suspense thriller set
in Nuremberg just before and during the War Crimes Trials. It
features an ex-OSS agent whose job it is to track down a serial killer (they
were called multiple murderers at the time) in that city of ruins. He enlists a
German, a former Kripo (criminal police) agent in the hunt. And there is also a
well-connected American journalist who is out after the scoop of her life. I am
very excited about this, working with [editor] Otto Penzler and with the
excellent folks at Open Road. This is, to my mind, exactly what the e-book
business needs--a house with proven editorial oversight and professional
packaging and marketing.
JKP: In what ways do you still need to grow as a writer?
JSJ: I must confess to a very non-professional desire: at this stage of my career I am much more concerned about improving my backhand than I am my writing hand. Which is not to say that I do not still try to grow with each book--I think Keeper is the best of the series thus
far--but such growth is on the macro scale, not the micro. I do not consciously
atomize the writing process while I am at it. Some of that comes, of course,
with revision. But when I sit down to work in the morning it’s all about the
story and the characters and giving them room to live.
JKP: You’ve previously
cited the works of Gerald Seymour and John le Carré as being particularly
strong in their quality of dialogue. Is that the part of writing fiction you
find most difficult?
JSJ: Let's put it this way: I think my sense of plotting and character development are my strong suits.
JKP: Whose books are you reading right now?
JSJ: On the non-fiction side is Daniel M. Vyleta’s Crime, Jews and News: Vienna 1895-1914; a re-reading of Edward Crankshaw’s superb The Fall of the House of Habsburg; and Maria Hornor Lansdale’s Vienna and the
Viennese, a book published in 1902 and full of delicious slice-of-life
apercus about Vienna 1900. For fiction there is William Boyd’s Ordinary Thunderstorms (Boyd is my favorite contemporary author: his Any
Human Heart is at the top of all my lists--that guy can write) and Laura
Ingalls Wilder’s These Happy Golden Years, which I am reading with my son at bedtime. I had never read the Wilder books before and I must confess to [their being] a guilty pleasure. Among all the other joys of having a child at my time of life is discovering all those books one should have read as a youth and did not.
JKP: Finally, when you first visited Vienna back in the late ’60s, you were intending to establish a career as an attorney, not as a wordsmith. Are you glad now that you gave up those aspirations to practice law, and became a man of letters instead?
JSJ: I have only partially given up those dreams. Remember that Werthen is a lawyer, the protagonist of my [never-published] mainstream Irish novel, Yanks
in the Glen, was a lawyer, and, as you will discover, the protagonist of Ruin Value studied the law.
