“America’s First Celebrity”

Today marks the 176th anniversary of Samuel Clemens’ birth in Florida, Missouri. Before he died in 1910, Clemens would become known far and wide by a much different pen name, Mark Twain.

READ MORE: “Mark Twain Gets Birthday Tribute from Google,”
by Alison Flood (The Guardian).

“It’s a Grabber”

You didn’t really think I would forget it was 45 years ago today that Murderers’ Row, the second of four films starring Dean Martin as Donald Hamilton’s U.S. government counter-agent, Matt Helm, debuted in U.S. movie theaters, did you? Below you’ll find the trailer for that 1966 film, plus stills from Murderers’ Row, backdropped by composer Lalo Schifrin’s wonderful music for the film.





To learn more about Dean Martin’s parody-ish Matt Helm pictures (which are not to be confused with the 1975-1976 Tony Franciosa TV series, Matt Helm), I refer you to Matthew R. Bradley’s article at CinemaRetro, “Mr. Helm Goes to Hollywood.”

Shots Heard ’Round the World

It was also on this date, 48 years ago, that U.S. President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, by Lee Harvey Oswald. Or at least, that’s what most people believe.

The Devil Only Knows

Think of The Exorcist, and you’re likely to recall images of a young Linda Blair’s head turning completely around, or perhaps two priests being pelted with vomit, or maybe even a bed levitating a few feet off the floor. Of course, those indelible images belong to the award-winning film released in 1973 and starring Ellyn Burstyn, Linda Blair, Max Von Sydow, and Lee J. Cobb. Yet, before the film started raising the neck hairs of the viewing public, there was William Peter Blatty’s novel--a book that’s just now celebrating its 40th birthday with a special anniversary edition.

The Exorcist initially came together under desperate circumstances. In a hand-out distributed by his publisher, Blatty states that

In January 1968, I rented a cabin in Lake Tahoe to start writing a novel about demonic possession that I’d been thinking about for many years. I’d been driven to it, actually. ... My breaking point came ... when at the Van Nuys, California, unemployment office I spotted my movie agent in a line three down from mine.

After several false starts, the author finally went back “home” to

a clapboard raccoon-surrounded guest house in the hills of Encino owned by a former Hungarian opera star who had purchased the property from the luminous film actress Angela Lansbury, and where I finally overcame the block ... Almost a year later, I completed a first draft of the novel. At the request of my editors ... I did make two quick changes ... but because of a dire financial circumstance, I had not another day to devote to the manuscript ... I left my novel to find its fate.

And what a glorious fate it found. After it was published in 1971, The Exorcist spent 57 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, including 17 consecutive weeks in the No. 1 position.

Even four decades later, the novel still retains its raw power to scare the bejesus out of readers. Sure, there are the familiar images such as those mentioned above, but there are other frightening moments in the tome that director William Friedkin did not incorporate into his film, such as when the possessed child, Regan MacNeil, contorts her body to look like a spider and silently stalks her nanny. This reader got serious goose bumps while going through that section. Whether or not you believe evil walks this earth, you will give in to the horrors contained in these pages. And if you are reading this book at night, you’ll want to turn on all the lights.

Beatty beat his writer’s block 40 years ago by correctly realizing that his novel should open in northern Iraq. It’s there that we first meet Father Lankester Merrin, an old Jesuit priest on the site of an archeological dig. A relic depicting the demon Pazuzu is uncovered from amongst the ruins.

It was a green stone head of the demon Pazuzu, personification of the southwest wind. Its dominion was sickness and disease. The head was pierced. The amulet’s owner had worn it as a shield. “Evil against evil,” breathed the curator.

Merrin is filled with a sense of foreboding as he walks around the dig site one last time, “his heart encased in the icy conviction that soon he would be hunted by an ancient enemy whose face he had never seen. But he knew his name.”

We quickly shift to the tony Washington, D.C., suburb of Georgetown. Film star and mother Chris MacNeil is living there temporarily while she’s shooting her latest role. At first, her 12-year-old daughter, Regan, is the epitome of a happy child living in privileged circumstances. The house is large and comfortable, there is a household staff catering to the mother and daughter’s needs, and at night there are parties with powerful and accomplished guests. It all seems golden. Then, shortly after Regan discovers a Ouija board in the basement of the house, her bed starts shaking one night and she has to go sleep with her mother. Things only go downhill from here.

Both the novel and the film (Blatty penned the screenplay too and won an Oscar for his efforts) do a brilliant job of building an aura of increasing dread, though the new anniversary edition of the book--revised, polished, and slightly added to by Blatty--provides a greater foundation for what is afflicting Regan. The author offers ample religious and psychological background, so that the reader can do some of the detective work in deciding for him- or herself if Regan is indeed possessed by a demon, or undergoing some type of psychotic breakdown.

(Right) The original Exorcist cover

After the anguished Chris MacNeil watches her daughter develop skin lesions and start speaking in strange voices, and sees Regan's bed levitate while MacNeil tries to hold it down, she seeks medical help. Unable to resolve Regan’s symptoms either physically or mentally, a psychiatrist finally suggests that MacNeil try an exorcism--but only in order to trick Regan into believing she’s been “cured.”

MacNeil turns to a Jesuit priest and psychiatrist, Father Damien Karras--a man suffering from both the death of his neglected mother and a doubting faith that results in his reassignment within the church. In the anniversary edition of The Exorcist, Blatty has provided an additional scene introducing the tortured priest. Leaving his mother alone in Brooklyn years earlier, the athletic Karras had earned a medical degree in addition to taking religious vows. But his continued neglect of his mother weighs heavily upon him, and after she is briefly hospitalized, she dies. Karras begins to lose his faith. Into this picture steps Chris MacNeil. She has seen Karras around the Georgetown campus where she is filming. She’s intrigued by his boxer physique and brooding manner. When she asks him to perform an exorcism on Regan, though, he initially resists.

“And how do you go about getting an exorcism?”

There was a pause while Karras stared.

“Beg pardon?” he said at last.

“If a person’s possessed by some kind of a demon, how do you go about getting an exorcism?”

Karras looked off, took a breath, then looked back to her. “Oh, well, first you’d have to put him in a time machine and get him back to the sixteenth century.”

Puzzled, Chris frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Well, it just doesn’t happen anymore.”

“Oh, really? Since when?”

“Since when? Since we learned about mental illness and schizophrenia and split personality; all those things that they taught me at Harvard.”

In the middle of the maelstrom surrounding Regan, there is also a bona-fide murder investigation. When Burke Dennings, the director shooting Chris MacNeil’s flick, is killed, homicide detective Lieutenant William Kinderman picks up the case. Dennings’ body was discovered at the bottom of the stairs outside MacNeil’s home, and Kinderman at first suspects MacNeil’s servant, Karl, of the crime. Parallel to the murder, someone has been desecrating statues at a local church, and through recovered evidence, Kinderman links it to the MacNeil household. Near the end of this book, Kinderman comes to the astonishing conclusion that Regan could be behind Dennings’ death. Kinderman is a great crime-fiction character. He presents a befuddled front, but his engines are really at full-throttle. Only Karras catches onto his shtick.

Eventually, Karras puts aside his analytical evaluation of Regan and goes to his bishop to ask permission to perform an exorcism. The priest understands that this is perhaps his last chance to do good in the world. The bishop has other ideas, however, and he calls in Father Merrin, who has more experience in such matters. When Karras offers to give the elderly priest background information on Regan’s affliction, Merrin cuts him off. He has no doubt who he is dealing with: the demon Pazuzu. It is the showdown that Merrin foresaw back in Iraq. And for his part, Pazuzu has been waiting for Merrin.

Suddenly, Chris flinched at a sound from above, at the voice of the demon. Booming and yet muffled, croaking, like an amplified premature burial, it called out “Meriiiiinnnnnn!” And then the massive and shiveringly hollow jolt of a single sledgehammer blow against the bedroom wall.

The exorcism itself encompasses only a small portion of the last part of this novel, but it is packed with tension: a room so cold the priests’ breath can be seen, objects levitating and flying around, Regan emitting strange animal sounds, and the priests physically wearing down under the assault. Before he arrived at the MacNeil house, Father Merrin knew he would not survive the exorcism. But the ending includes a shocking twist that the reader never sees coming.

Long before the glut of vampire books arrived on the scene with their themes of the undead, William Peter Blatty brought us the realm of everlasting evil colliding with modern culture. With its mix of psychology and religion against the backdrop of film, The Exorcist is a fascinating draw. Moreover, it assures us that things going bump in the night are truly horrific. Father Karras is never certain until the end whether he is truly dealing with a demonic possession. No such dubious claims can be made against the novel, though. The Exorcist was a bestseller 40 years ago and it hasn’t lost an ounce of its power to entertain and enthrall readers. I suspect the publisher will be issuing anniversary editions for many decades to come.

READ MORE: “After 40 Years, Grisly Exorcist Book Gets a Rewrite” (National Public Radio); “20 Facts About The Exorcist on Its 40th Birthday,” by Jennifer M. Wood (Mental Floss).

Take Me with You, Mr. Fogg!

It was 55 years ago today that the movie Around the World in 80 Days, based on French novelist Jules Verne’s 1873 novel of the same name, and produced by Michael Todd, premiered at the (now long-gone) Rivoli Theater in New York City.

“I Won’t Play the Sap for You”

In addition to today being the 50th anniversary of The Dick Van Dyke Show’s debut, it’s the 70th anniversary of the date on which the best-known movie adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s novel, The Maltese Falcon (1930), had its New York City premiere. That version, of course, starred Humphrey Bogart and Mary Astor, and was directed by John Huston. It’s not only an incredibly popular picture, but has been named one of the greatest films of all time.

Rather than go on at length about the attractions of 1941’s The Maltese Falcon, I shall simply embed a brief clip from that motion picture. Below, Bogie, portraying San Francisco private eye Sam Spade, confronts his alternately seductive and scheming client, Ruth Wonderly/Brigid O’Shaughnessy (Astor), about her role in the shooting death of his business partner, Miles Archer. It’s a powerful scene, based closely on the book’s denouement, that loses none of its impact with repeat viewings.



Thank you, Mr. Hammett, for penning The Maltese Falcon, one of my favorite private-eye novels. And thank you, Mr. Bogart and Mr. Huston, for bringing that story so vividly to the big screen.

READ MORE: “The Maltese Falcon,” by Tim Dirks (AMC Filmsite); “Ten of the Best Fat Men in Literature,” by John Mullan (The Guardian).

“Oh, Rob ...”

I know it has nothing to do with crime fiction, but I just want to point readers to our friend Ivan G. Shreve Jr.’s Dick Van Dyke Show blogathon. The groundbreaking CBS-TV comedy series that he and so many others are celebrating debuted 50 years ago tonight and ran until June 1966. Shreve is cataloguing all the blogathon contributions here.

Missing Mona

As is known to all dozen people who, like me, keep track of such minutiae, it was exactly 100 years ago today that Leonardo da Vinci’s most famous 16th-century portrait, the Mona Lisa, vanished from its home in Paris’ Musée du Louvre. As Wikipedia explains,

The painting’s increasing fame was further emphasized when it was stolen on 21 August 1911. The next day, Louis Béroud, a painter, walked into the Louvre and went to the Salon Carré where the Mona Lisa had been on display for five years. However, where the Mona Lisa should have stood, he found four iron pegs. Béroud contacted the section head of the guards, who thought the painting was being photographed for marketing purposes. A few hours later, Béroud checked back with the section head of the museum, and it was confirmed that the Mona Lisa was not with the photographers. The Louvre was closed for an entire week to aid in investigation of the theft.

French poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who had once called for the Louvre to be “burnt down,” came under suspicion; he was arrested and put in jail. Apollinaire tried to implicate his friend Pablo Picasso, who was also brought in for questioning, but both were later exonerated.

At the time, the painting was believed to be lost forever, and it was two years before the real thief was discovered. Louvre employee Vincenzo Peruggia had stolen it by entering the building during regular hours, hiding in a broom closet and walking out with it hidden under his coat after the museum had closed. Peruggia was an Italian patriot who believed Leonardo’s painting should be returned to Italy for display in an Italian museum. Peruggia may have also been motivated by a friend who sold copies of the painting, which would skyrocket in value after the theft of the original. After having kept the painting in his apartment for two years, Peruggia grew impatient and was finally caught when he attempted to sell it to the directors of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence; it was exhibited all over Italy and returned to the Louvre in 1913. Peruggia was hailed for his patriotism in Italy and only served six months in jail for the crime.

An excellent recounting of this theft can be found in The Crimes of Paris: A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection, by Dorothy Hoobler and Thomas Hoobler (2010). But Nashville, Tennessee, screenwriter and playwright Carson Morton has also used employed the case in a new mystery novel, Stealing Mona Lisa (Minotaur). He doesn’t stick completely to the facts, but uses them as the basis for a remarkably engaging and at times romantic yarn that offers a more complex story behind the Mona Lisa’s disappearance. (He’s even managed to incorporate Paris’ Great Flood of 1910 in his plot, though it required some jiggering with the timeline.)

I recently read Stealing Mona Lisa, and was very impressed. Although it spins off many an imaginary thread, the book certainly captures the spirit of that century-old pilferage. And Morton plumps up his tale with a fictional cast of eccentric and generally well-wrought secondary players. Entertaining, entrancing, and a times humorous, Stealing Mona Lisa is an ideal diversion for these waning days of summer.

Birds of a Feather Plot Together

This is a big year for fans of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon. At least for fans of the movies adapted from that best-selling 1930 detective yarn. Two of those films celebrate notable anniversaries in 2011.

Over a decade-long period in the early 20th century, three black-and-white motion pictures were released, all based on Hammett’s only novel about San Francisco private eye Sam Spade: The Maltese Falcon (1931), Satan Met a Lady (1936), and the best-known of this lot, the John Huston-directed Humphrey Bogart film, The Maltese Falcon (1941). On the Spade page of his excellent Thrilling Detective Web Site, Kevin Burton Smith supplies this background:

The first attempt, starring Ricardo Cortez as Sam Spade, was a solid, if unspectacular film. Cortez played Spade as a smirking womanizer, too smug to possibly be taken seriously. But the women in it were well cast, and easy on the eyes. The film was flawed by an anti-climactic jailhouse ending that merely reinforced the notion of Spade as something of a shit. ... But there was a lot I liked about this version. I liked the guy who played [Miles] Archer--his being much older than [his wife] Iva made sense. And I did like the fact Spade at least appeared to have a sex drive (which made him even more credible as a shit to Iva than Bogart was). I thought the women on the whole were more believable (and a whole lot sexier) and the exposition a lot clearer (even if some of the book was MIA). But what struck me the most was how much Huston’s version followed this one. The identical camera angles, the set-ups, the framing of shots--even the way the lines were read are often exactly the same. And the 1941 cast looks like it was chosen for its resemblance to the 1931 originals. It’s like they filmed the rehearsal and ten years later Huston tidied up the rough edges. ...

The second version, Satan Met a Lady ..., seemed “incapable of deciding whether to be a screwball comedy or a murder mystery.” Many changes were made to the original plot, the characters, even the title. None were for the better.

Sam Spade is now Ted Shane, the Fat Man is now the Fat Lady, Bette Davis is lackluster as Miss Wonderly [renamed Valerie Purvis], and the Black Bird is now a ram’s horn. Generally considered poorly acted, forced and dull. Intended, perhaps, as a spoof, but of what? Warren William as Spade had possibly the biggest head in Hollywood, but so what? At the end of the film, having finally grabbed the bejeweled horn, he gives it a tentative toot. “Honey, it blows,” he informs Miss Wonderly. I know how he feels.

The third time was the charm. The Maltese Falcon, released in 1941 by Warner Bros., written and directed by John Huston, and starring Humphrey Bogart as Spade was an amazing, powerful piece of work. Okay, Bogey didn’t match the description of Spade in the book. He was too small and too dark, but can anyone ever picture anyone else ever playing Spade? In fact, Bogart was so good as Spade, that his later appearance as Chandler’s Philip Marlowe never seemed right to me. Add a memorable cast of colorful characters (with Mary Astor as Brigid O’Shaugnessy, Lee Patrick as Effie Perine, Sydney Greenstreet as Caspar Gutman, Peter Lorre as Joel Cairo and Elisha Cook Jr. as Wilmer Cook) and a taut moody screenplay that was essentially the novel itself, and you’ve got the making of the archetypal private-eye film. Decades later, filmmakers are still trying to crawl out from its shadow.

The film proved to be such a success that Sam Spade started showing up all over. Three short stories written by Hammett and published back in the early thirties (all pretty weak, compared to The Maltese Falcon), were collected and published in book form.

There was even a plan to do a sequel with Bogart and the rest, but it never came to fruition.

The first Maltese Falcon film debuted in theaters on June 13, 1931--80 years ago last month. Bogart’s version was released on October 3, 1941, which means its 70th anniversary is coming up in just three months. To celebrate these occasions, we are embedding below their respective dramatizations of one of the most familiar scenes from Hammett’s novel, the one in which Spade negotiates with the mysterious criminal, Gutman, for a “fall guy,” somebody to take the blame for a couple of murders. Roy Del Ruth, who directed the 1931 flick, and John Huston handled this episode quite differently, though as you’ll see below, much of the tone and success of the scene depends on the actors involved.

From 1931’s The Maltese Falcon:



From 1941’s The Maltese Falcon:



Without question, Bogart took command of this scene in a way that Cortez, as Spade, never did. And actor Greenstreet, playing Gutman, is more credible and far less of a ham than was Dudley Digges in the same role. If you have a chance, watch these two films back to back (and throw in Satan Met a Lady, if you’re a Bette Davis enthusiast). But note that there are good reasons why the 1941 version is considered a classic, and its decade-older predecessor isn’t seen much nowadays.

Has It Really Been That Long?

It was two years ago today that onetime Charlie’s Angels co-star Farrah Fawcett died as a result of anal cancer at age 62.

A Word-of-Mouth Sensation

Today marks 40 years since the release of Frederick Forsyth’s best-selling thriller, The Day of the Jackal. British author Charles Cumming offers background on that novel in The Guardian, while Ali Karim spotlights this anniversary in the blog Shotsmag Confidential.

Fame Was in the Cards

Another worthy reminder, this one coming from The Sly Oyster: It was on this date in 1953 that Ian Fleming’s very first James Bond spy novel, Casino Royale (aka You Asked for It) was published in Britain.

Splitting a Nation

This isn’t a history blog, so I won’t address the issue at length. But I would be remiss were I not to at least note that today marks the 150th anniversary of the outbreak of America’s bloody Civil War. The Philadelphia Inquirer offers a succinct remembrance of this occasion. Meanwhile, both Steve Benen of The Washington Monthly and MyDD’s Charles Lemos wonder at a new CNN poll showing that issues related to that long-ago conflict “still divide the public.”

Shaft Is Back!

Over at the Kirkus Reviews site today you’ll find my anniversary tribute to the crime novel and movie Shaft. That column begins:

Forty years ago, America got Shafted. No, this isn’t going to be some wild-eyed rant about Big Business corruption or political malfeasance. It’s about Shaft, John Shaft. Can you dig it? It was in 1971 that the U.S. paperback edition of Ernest Tidyman’s Shaft and the big-screen adaptation of that novel both debuted, firmly establishing a cool, black, kick-ass private eye in literary territory dominated by cynical white gumshoes.

Click here to read more.

The Kirkus piece features the trailer and opening scene from the original Shaft film starring Richard Roundtree. But for extra fun, below I’ve embedded the trailers associated with the later two Shaft movies, Shaft’s Big Score (1972) and Shaft in Africa (1973).

All you cats just sit back and let the nostalgia roll over you!

Rounding Third

Congratulations to Ohioan Jen Forbus, whose crime-fiction blog, Jen’s Book Thoughts, turns three years old today.

Long Gone, Long Remembered

It was 50 years ago today, on January 10, 1961, that American detective-story writer Dashiell Hammett--who’d invented enduring characters such as The Continental Op and Sam Spade, and in the course of it, changed the character of detective fiction itself--perished of lung cancer at New York City’s Lenox Hill Hospital. He was only 66 years old, but had contracted tuberculosis during World War I and then damaged his health still further by persistently over-consuming alcohol and cigarettes. As The New York Times recalled in its obit the next day:

Mr. Hammett won his fame as an author in the late Nineteen Twenties and Thirties. He put his name to a series of detective novels whose characters were, by modest estimate, at one remove from stuffy, formal sleuths who moved through the mystery fiction of the day, disdaining evil. Before him paragons had trapped scoundrels in the dark lair of their own duplicity.

Mr. Hammett brought the form a step closer to reality. His detectives were tough or urbane or both, but they were by no means inaccessible to the common temptations of man. They were drawn in part from the writer’s eight years of experience as a Pinkerton agent.

A less formal, more heartfelt encomium to Hammett appeared on the Times’ editorial page two days after his passing. It began with a reference to Charles Poore, an author and one of the newspaper’s regular book reviewers:

Charles Poore remarked that one of the most uncomfortable trips he ever took was an ocean voyage on which he had read a defective copy of a Dashiell Hammett novel. The last few pages were missing.

This is about the best that can be said for a writer, although many another more resounding statement might be made about Dashiell Hammett. His prose was clean and entirely unique. His characters were as sharply and economically defined as any in American fiction. His stories were as consistent as mathematics and as intricate as psychology. His gift of invention never tempted him beyond the limits of credibility. The Latin scholar responded to the classic precision of his language and the comic strip reader to the excitement of his plots.

Dashiell Hammett died the other day, and it is this sad news that leads us to make a prediction: Years from now his stories will be in print.

Hammett was born on a tobacco farm in southern Maryland on May 27, 1894. He later moved with his family to Baltimore, where in 1915, he answered a want-ad that led him to the local headquarters of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency and into a short career as a sleuth. To commemorate Hammett’s connection with Maryland’s largest burg, Patrick Maynard, a runner and regular blogger for The Baltimore Sun’s Web site, recently mapped out a 10-mile-long course past “some of the Baltimore sites related to [the] famous mystery author ...,” and wrote in the paper’s Exercists blog about following that route. Among the landmarks he passed were the Continental Building (now One Calvert Plaza), where Hammett applied for employment with the “Pinks”; “the location of the now-gone Rennert Hotel, which stood on Saratoga Street and acted as the headquarters for Hammett’s political boss in The Glass Key”; and the “former Pratt Library Branch at Hollins and Calhoun streets, where Hammett allegedly vowed to read every book.”

You’ll find Maynard’s enjoyable piece here.

Also in association with this anniversary, Don Herron--a San Francisco writer and raconteur, who’s led walking tours of Hammett-related sites in that city ever since 1977--has launched “a new incarnation” of his Web site, Up and Down the Mean Streets. Herron is a font of Hammett knowledge and esoterica, in addition to being a hell of a nice guy. When I took an abbreviated version of his downtown San Francisco tour during last fall’s Bouchercon, I found myself scribbling down information in my notebook that I didn’t already know about Sam Spade’s “father”--and there was a lot of it. I expect Up and Down the Mean Streets will develop into a welcome resource about both Hammett and the Northern California city with which he’s deservedly associated.

Finally, today might be a good day to visit (or revisit) January Magazine’s tribute to Dashiell Hammett, posted in 2005 to honor the 75th anniversary of the release of The Maltese Falcon.

* * *

Meanwhile, today also marks 30 years since the death of Richard Boone. The Los Angeles-born actor starred in more than 50 films, but is undoubtedly best known for playing Paladin, a slick-dressing, San Francisco-based gunfighter and troubleshooter, in the TV series Have Gun--Will Travel (1957-1963). Boone died of throat cancer on this date in 1981, at 63 years of age.

A descendent of frontiersman Daniel Boone, and a cousin to singer-actor Pat Boone, Richard Boone got into acting after World War II, first debuting on Broadway and then appearing in the 1950 film Halls of Montezuma. In the mid-1950s, he starred in an NBC-TV medical drama called Medic, for which he received an Emmy Award nomination. However, it was his next series, Have Gun--Will Travel, that made him a national celebrity. After the cancellation of that show, Boone and his family moved to Honolulu, Hawaii. According to Wikipedia,

While living Oahu, Boone helped persuade Leonard Freeman to film Hawaii Five-O exclusively in Hawaii. Prior to that, Freeman had planned to do “establishing” location shots in Hawaii, but to do most production in Southern California. Boone and others convinced Freeman that the islands could offer all necessary support for a major TV series and would provide an authenticity otherwise unobtainable. Freeman, impressed by Boone’s love of Hawaii, offered him the role of Steve McGarrett; however, Boone turned it down, and the role went to Jack Lord, who shared Boone’s enthusiasm, which Freeman considered vital. Coincidentally, Jack Lord had appeared with Boone in the first episode of Have Gun--Will Travel, entitled “The Three Bells to Perdido.”

Boone went on to star in an anthology series, The Richard Boone Show (1963-1964), but it wasn’t until he took center stage in Hec Ramsey, part of the NBC Sunday Mystery Movie rotation, that he found himself a small-screen star again. In Hec Ramsey (1972-1974), produced by Dragnet’s Jack

Webb, Boone played an aging, once-infamous quick-to-draw lawman who, in 1901, had finally settled down as the deputy sheriff in an ambitious Oklahoma railroad town. His evolving interest in forensic science set him apart from his colleagues, and made the show distinctive among western dramas. I was a big Hec Ramsey fan myself, and was sorry when a contract dispute between Boone and Universal Studios led to its demise. (A teaser for one of the episodes, “The Mystery of Chalk Hill,” is embedded on the left.)

In 1970, Boone had moved to Florida, where for a time he wrote a newspaper column called “It Seems to Me” for the St. Augustine Record. His final role was playing Commodore Matthew Perry in The Bushido Blade (1981). Boone died in St. Augustine, but his cremated ashes were later scattered in the Pacific Ocean off Hawaii.

READ MORE: “When Lillian Met Dashiell,” by Bill Peschel.

Still Standing

The Gumshoe Site’s Jiro Kimura. (Photo used with permission.)

Japanese crime-fiction critic and writer Jiro Kimura launched The Gumshoe Site 15 years ago today, before there were many other Web pages devoted to analyzing or championing crime, mystery, and thriller fiction. Heck, in 1996 the term “blog” hadn’t even been invented yet, but that’s exactly what Kimura had created: a blog in which he could impart information about new and intriguing books, genre awards, and the passings of prominent authors in this literary field. That he’s still maintaining his site a decade and a half later, and that--despite its lack of bells and whistles and distracting Twitter feeds--it remains a must-watch Web resource is something of a marvel.

I’ve only had one brief opportunity, I believe, to speak in person with The Gumshoe Site’s creator (during Bouchercon 2008 in Baltimore). But as this 15th anniversary approached, I e-mailed several questions to Kimura, who’s now 61 years old, living in Takarazuka, Japan, and translating mystery fiction from English into Japanese for a living. He was kind enough to recall for me the history of his site, his meetings with some of the genre’s late stars, and his own efforts at crime-fiction writing.

J. Kingston Pierce: When you launched The Gumshoe Site, blogging about books wasn’t as broadly done as it is today. What were your hopes for the site back then? And did you ever imagine that you’d still be updating it a decade and a half later?

Jiro Kimura: In 1996, there were very few mystery-oriented Web sites, such as The Mysterious Homepage and Kate Derie’s ClueLass. I thought it would be fun to write about mystery books and writers I like in English. I didn’t think about what the future would bring. It has been said that launching a Web site is not difficult, but keeping it up-to-date is, and I have realized in a hard way that it is right.

JKP: What’s been the best thing about writing The Gumshoe Site?

Kimura: When I go to some mystery gatherings, several attendants I don’t know recognize me as the Webmaster of The Gumshoe Site, and tell nice things about it.

JKP: Have you been surprised by the remarkable growth, over the last few years, in the number of blogs that also cover crime fiction? And do you read many of those?

Kimura: Honestly, I am not really surprised at the number of too many mystery-oriented blogs around. It is a trend in cyberspace, now that we have the Twitter site and its imitators. I read The Rap Sheet, Sarah Weinman’s Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind, In Reference to Murder, and Janet Rudolph’s Mystery Fanfare, to name a few. Since I mainly use a 10-year-old Mac computer, I don’t (or couldn’t) read heavy blogs.

JKP: I’m often impressed by The Gumshoe Site’s ability to broadcast news about the genre before other blogs have that same information. This is evident both in obituaries associated with crime fiction, and with news of awards presentations. Have you built up a lot of contacts in the field over time, people who feed you such news?

Kimura: I have a couple of friendly contacts who send me info, but I usually go [looking] for news, which is very time-consuming, as you may be well aware.

JKP: Between writing The Gumshoe Site and translating English-language crime fiction into Japanese for 20 years, you’ve had access to many authors. What are your favorite memories of meeting or communicating with crime novelists?

Kimura: I lived in New York in the 1970s, and at many mystery events I met a lot of mystery writers whose fiction I had read. Especially, I was extremely thankful that now-deceased writers (Ed Hoch, Donald Westlake, Stanley Ellin, Henry Slesar, Robert Parker, Thomas Chastain, and Dennis Lynds) invited me to their homes when I asked [to do] interviews.

JKP: There was a time when you were contributing reviews and other pieces to such publications as Hayakawa’s Mystery Magazine and Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Are you still writing about crime fiction for print periodicals?

Kimura: Sometimes I am asked to write some articles on mystery fiction for Hayakawa’s Mystery Magazine. I also write severe reviews for The Maltese Falcon Flyer, a hard-boiled/private eye fiction fanzine (the newsletter of The Maltese Falcon Society Japan, actually).

JKP: For a while, at least, you were penning crime fiction of your own, stories in English that starred New York City private eye Joe Venice, and others in Japanese starring Sachinosuke Terada. Are you still writing and publishing short stories of your own?

Kimura: Recently I have resumed writing short stories featuring Joe Venice, as well as other stories under secret pseudonyms.

JKP: Over the last 15 years, have there been great changes both in the way English-language crime fiction is accepted and read in Japan, and the availability of Japanese crime fiction? Is the genre more popular there than it was in the mid-1990s?

Kimura: English-language mystery fiction is selling less these days than in the mid-1990s, while Japanese mystery fiction is accepted more than before in the States and in the UK.

JKP: You told me recently that you “have been thinking of folding” your site for some while; that you might be “burned out” on the idea of writing it. There are plenty of people, I know, though, who’d miss The Gumshoe Site if it suddenly disappeared. How serious are you about folding your page?

Kimura: On every New Year’s Day, I think about folding my Web site, but somebody I don’t know sends me an e-mail asking me not to fold it. There are many other good Web sites with a lot of useful news. I am getting old and my eyesight is getting worse and I want to change the course of my life. That’s how serious I am. Surely today’s young bloggers and Webmasters will feel the same way in the future.

JKP: Finally, can you list the five crime novelists whose work you admire most, and any specific books by them that you’d recommend?

Kimura: Yes, these writers are all dead, so that nobody gets offended.
• The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiell Hammett
• The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler
• The Hunter, by Richard Stark
• Freak, by Michael Collins
• The Velvet Touch, by Edward D. Hoch

“The Greatest Television Show of All Time”?

Dang it! I missed mentioning this anniversary yesterday. As Shroud of Thoughts’ Mercurie recalls,

It was fifty years ago tonight, on 7 January 1961, that the greatest television show of all time (in my humble opinion) debuted. The Avengers was an espionage series which centred upon a top professional (John Steed, played by Patrick Macnee) and a talented amateur (his partner of the moment) who protected the United Kingdom (and often the world) from various threats. Alongside Danger Man, The Avengers was one of the shows which precipitated a spy craze in the United Kingdom, preceding the release of Dr. No by a year and ten months. It would also prove phenomenally successful, running nine years--longer than any spy drama on British or American television. Worldwide it could possibly be the most famous spy drama of all time.

You’ll find the full and fine piece here.

READ MORE: “The Avengers Novel Covers,” by Randy Johnson
(Not the Baseball Pitcher).