Bullet Points: Veterans Day Edition

OK, I admit it: I was too busy preparing for and then celebrating last week’s U.S. national elections (with umpteen hours spent watching TV news programs) to do much of anything else in my spare hours. As a consequence, I let The Rap Sheet go quiet for a few days. But to borrow a call to action that President Obama often employed on the campaign trail (and which he, in turn, borrowed from a supporter in South Carolina in 2008), I’m feeling pretty “fired up” and “ready to go” again. So let’s start with some news tidbits worth sharing.

• After all of the pre-release publicity, it’s hardly surprising that the new, 23rd James Bond film, Skyfall, should have “sold $87.8 million in tickets in the U.S. and Canada this weekend, breaking the previous 007 record of $67.5 million for 2008’s Quantum of Solace.” Those stats are courtesy of The HMSS Weblog, but there’s much more being said of the movie around the far corners of the Internet. There are a couple of assessments of the picture in Salon, to be found here and here. Author Christopher G. Moore muses here on Bond’s latest body count, while Karen Slaughter contends that Agent 007’s enemies continue to make him fascinating. Flavorwire’s Jason Bailey lists what he thinks are the 10 best and worst Bond movie themes of all time. (Rest assured, both Shirley Bassey’s “Goldfinger” and Paul McCartney & Wings’ “Live and Let Live” made the cut.) The New Yorker weighs in with highlights from a 1962 interview between one of its writers, Geoffrey Hellman, and Bond creator Ian Fleming. (Only the magazine’s subscribers can access the full electronically archived piece.) Philadelphia Weekly offers some “unusual tidbits” of information about the Bond tales. And Britain’s Daily Mail looks back at 50 years worth of Bond babes.

• Although you may not have noticed, the Open Road Blog has been running a weeklong series of posts about “great detectives,” linked to the e-book re-release of Otto Penzler’s 1979 work, The Great Detectives: The World’s Most Celebrated Sleuths Unmasked by Their Authors. Installments of this series focus on female detectives, crime-fighting duos, cozy-mystery protagonists, inspectors with quirks, and more. You should be able to access all of the posts here.

• NoirCon 2012 began on Thursday in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and concluded earlier today. Among the highlights of that event were a couple of prize presentations: Veteran novelist Lawrence Block won the David Goodis Award, while editor, author, and bookseller Otto Penzler received the Jay and Deen Kogan Award for Literary Excellence. To read more about NoirCon, click here, here, here, here, here, and here.

• Once-famous buggies of the boob tube.

• Travel back with me now to the 1974 pilot episode of James Garner’s The Rockford Files, available in its entirety on YouTube. At least for the time being. It co-stars the entrancing Lindsey Wagner (in her pre-Bionic Woman days) and Robert Donley as Rockford’s father, a role that went to Noah Berry when the series was picked up by NBC. To me, this remains one of the best American TV pilots ever made.

• You can add this DVD set to my Christmas list: Hawkins: The Complete TV Movie Collection. For those of you who don’t remember, in 1973 CBS-TV convinced actor Jimmy Stewart to star in a series called Hawkins, in which he played an often folksy but renowned criminal defense attorney from West Virginia, who took on high-profile murder cases around the country. The plan was to place Hawkins in a rotation with Shaft, the small-screen adaptation of Richard Roundtree’s big-screen films. The two would alternate in a 90-minute slot on Tuesday nights. Sadly, only the pilot and seven other episodes of Hawkins were produced, before the series was cancelled. Several years ago, I purchased a couple of the eps of Hawkins on VHS tape, but was convinced I would never see the whole show again. Boy, was I wrong! Following its release last year of Shaft: The TV Movie Collection, Warner Archive is now preparing to market all eight of the Hawkins mini-films in a four-disc, MOD (manufacture on demand) set priced at $39.95. According to the Web site TV Shows on DVD, “It will initially be available only from [Warner] ... , strictly to USA customers. Later on, however, this will also be for sale from Amazon’s CreateSpace MOD program, where international customers will be able to buy it, too.” You’ll find the cover image and ordering info here.

• Hot stuff! Today kicks off 11 straight days of Honey West book covers on author-editor Win Scott Eckert’s blog. The first front posted for your entertainment is from the 1957 Pyramid Books edition of This Girl for Hire, with artwork by Harry Schaare.

• This week’s new short story in Beat to a Pulp is titled “Loose Ends.” The author is Garnett Elliott from Tucson, Arizona.

• While we’re waiting to hear whether the American adaptation of The Killing will be revived by Netflix, the third and final season of the original Danish version of that show (aka Forbrydelsen) will begin its 10-episode run in Britain, with English subtitles, next Saturday, November 17, at 9 p.m. BBC4 provides this plot synopsis:

Denmark is the midst of a fiercely contested election race, set against the backdrop of the financial crisis. With 10 days to go to the election, Detective Chief Inspector Sarah Lund prepares to celebrate her 25th year in the police and looks forward to the prospect of a new job in the force. But her relative peace is shattered when unidentified body parts are found at Copenhagen dock only hours before a scheduled visit by the Prime Minister.

(Hat tip to It’s a Crime! [Or a Mystery].)

• Robin Jarossi offers more on The Killing, Series 3, here.

• Also worth watching, if--unlike yours truly--you happen to be living in the UK: Falcón, a four-part TV drama based on the first two of Robert Wilson’s excellent novels about Spain-based Inspector Jefe Javier Falcón, The Blind Man of Seville and The Silent and the Damned. As EuroCrime reports, Falcón will begin this coming Thursday, November 15, at 10 p.m. on Sky Atlantic. Residents of Britain and Ireland can watch a trailer here.

• For his (?) 300th post, the blogger known by the pseudonym The Puzzle Doctor (hereafter referred to as “PZ”), at In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, has posted a list of the top five novels by British author and historian Paul C. Doherty. Since Doherty has been extraordinarily prolific over the decades, and since I have not read as widely in his oeuvre as has PZ, I shall refrain from making a judgment on these selections. But I am happy to see that the choices are spread across Doherty’s several series. You can check out PZ’s picks here.

• Sex sells ... coffins?

• Well-respected Scottish author Val McDermid makes some predictions, for the blog Crime Fiction Lover, of which new(ish) mystery and thriller novelists she thinks are destined for greatness. I’m sorry to say that I have read work by only one of the people she names. I had better remedy that shortly ...

• Following up on his last gallery of cheesy espionage/action paperback covers, Retrospace’s “Boogie Pilgrim” is offering another collection, this one featuring works by John Creasey, Helen MacInnes, and Rod Gray (the creator of Eve Drum, “The Lady from L.U.S.T.”). Monsieur Pilgrim’s latest cover compilation is here.

• A nicer array of spy-novel fronts can be found in Pulp Curry.

• TV-obsessed Mystery*File contributor Michael Shonk has filed what might be his last post for a while about the underappreciated 1974-1976 ABC-TV series Harry O, which starred David Janssen as a cop turned private eye in San Diego (later Los Angeles). There are actually five parts to Shonk’s series: “Harry O: ‘Gertrude,’” “Harry O in San Diego,” “Harry O--Season 1, Part 2,” “Harry O--Season 2, Part 1,” and “Harry O--Season 2, Part 2 (1976).” Whether you harbor positive memories of Janssen’s cancelled-too-soon series, or want to learn more about it, these posts are worth reading.

• I had the welcome opportunity, a couple of years back, to interview Philip Kerr, British author of the award-winning Bernie Gunther crime series. Now I see that novelist-blogger J. Sydney Jones has put his own questions to Kerr, with interesting results.

• The British Crime Writers’ Association has opened its 2013 competition for the Debut Dagger Award. The deadline for submitting 3,000-word entries is February 2.

• And what could be more appropriate today than Janet Rudolph’s post about Veterans Day-related mystery fiction?

“Perfect Defense, Billy Jim”

Several years ago I wrote in The Rap Sheet about the 1973-1974 CBS-TV mystery series Hawkins. For those of you who weren’t around to watch it during its original run, that show starred cinema legend Jimmy Stewart as Billy Jim Hawkins, a deceptively astute country lawyer who hailed from West Virginia, but took on high-profile, typically sordid homicide cases all over the United States, usually with investigative assistance from his less-than-suave cousin, R.J. Hawkins (Strother Martin). The show rotated in a 90-minute, Tuesday-night slot with Richard Roundtree’s Shaft.

I have favorable memories of Hawkins, though I haven’t been able to watch it in years (sadly, the show’s pilot film and seven regular episodes haven’t yet been released on DVD). Only today did I stumble across a short clip from the series’ first Tuesday-night installment, “Murder in Movieland” (broadcast on October 2, 1973). According to The New York Times’ synopsis, in that episode “Hawkins arrives in Hollywood to defend the husband of a movie star on a murder charge. The suspect has confessed--to clubbing another man to death, but not to the crime at hand.” Written by Hawkins co-creator David Karp, “Murder in Movieland” guest-starred Sheree North, Cameron Mitchell, and Kenneth Mars.

The clip I found today on YouTube, and have embedded below, gives you a sense of the show’s storytelling tone, as well as a preview of how comfortable Stewart seemed in his lead role. Hawkins’ hummable theme music was composed by Jerry Goldsmith, who also created the scores for Chinatown, L.A. Confidential, and five Star Trek films.

Let’s hope Hawkins someday enjoys a commercial DVD release.

“The Law’s Kinda a Funny Critter”

Now, I reckon I’m not the only person around these parts who remembers fondly the 1973-1974 CBS-TV series Hawkins, starring the legendary Jimmy Stewart as slow-moving but quick-thinking West Virginia criminal attorney Billy Jim Hawkins. It was the aging film actor’s second foray into television, following The Jimmy Stewart Show (1971-1972), a cute comedy in which he had played a grandfather and an anthropology professor at a small-town university, beset by family challenges. And Hawkins was well-received, even though it was quite short-lived.

Billy Jim Hawkins was introduced in a teleflick called Hawkins on Murder in March 1973, but the series itself, created by David Karp and Robert Hamner, debuted on October 2, 1973. It was one of two 90-minute crime dramas rotating in a New CBS Tuesday Night Movies slot (the other show being Shaft, which had Richard Roundtree reprising his popular film role as New York City P.I. John Shaft). Stewart’s pin-striped attorney played it folksy. As Richard Meyers explained in TV Detectives (1981), “Billy Jim would ‘Um,’ and ‘Wall ... wall,’ his way through conversations until his clients felt he could not defend a saint in a paternity suit.” Yet, with help from a multiplicity of kinfolk he roped into helping him investigate his cases--most notably cousin R.J. Hawkins (Strother Martin), who served well as Billy Jim’s comic foil--Stewart’s character proved himself to be as savvy and shrewd as Perry Mason. The New York Times called it “the best role [Stewart] has had in years”--good enough, in fact, that it earned him a Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Dramatic TV Series.

But, Meyers notes in his book, “[a]s writers loved to put rumpled Columbo into opulent surroundings, so they loved to put down-home Hawkins in seamy surroundings. After getting an heiress off for triple murder in the TV movie, the series’ debut was ‘Murder in Movieland’ and it had Hawkins tangling with bisexual hustlers, homosexuality, raped teen-agers, and dirty tricks. It’s likely that viewers were not ready for or interested in these subjects. Hawkins’ case was rested after seven episodes.” Far too soon, if you ask me.

I’d always assumed that Hawkins’ failure was due chiefly to anemic ratings. It was one of several highly promoted crime dramas that didn’t make it that year, the others including Griff, The New Perry Mason, The Magician, Chase, Tenafly, Toma, and Roundtree’s Shaft.

However, a recently published biography, Jimmy Stewart: The Truth Behind the Legend (Barricade Books), by Michael Munn, suggests that the actor’s age--he turned 65 years old in 1973--and infirmities might have helped hasten the program’s demise. The following excerpt comes from pages 293 and 294 of Munn’s book:

‘I liked that series of films,’ Jim said about Hawkins. ‘I did them because I’d always wanted to play a lawyer since doing Anatomy of a Murder. I was a defense lawyer, and I liked the way my character played the game trial lawyers play. When the facts were against him, he argued the law. And when the law was against him, he argued the facts. And when both the facts and the law were against him, he banged his hands on the table.’

His scene-stealing co-star from Shenandoah and Fool’s Parade, Strother Martin, was his regular co-star in Hawkins. Jim had no objections about Martin, feeling that he ‘might well need someone to help carry the load ... as I’m not getting any younger’. He also stipulated, ‘I don’t care too much what Strother does ... just don’t let him carry a piece of string.’

Making Hawkins proved too grueling for Jim: ‘I made eight of those films for television ... in just two years ... but in the end I had to give it up. It was all too hectic for me. I’d been in films that were made in a hurry, but they were never shot as fast as they do with television. I just couldn’t keep up. I had so many lines to learn and not much time to learn them, and when you’re not a young man anymore, you don’t remember lines as easy as you used to. One time, I said, “I can’t do this. I can’t remember my lines.” The director said, “You know, Jim, it’s okay for you to use cue cards. A lot of actors do.” I said, “But I can’t see the cue cards.”’

Stewart’s commitment to the series might also have taken a hit as a result of events in his off-screen life. As Munn writes: “[D]uring production on one of the Hawkins films, John Ford died.” Ford was one of the motion-picture directors with whom Stewart had most often worked, on screen gems such as The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) and Cheyenne Autumn (1964), and one he most admired. “Jim attended the funeral and went back to work. But he was uncharacteristically bad tempered, and after getting into a rage about something trivial, he suddenly stopped and asked, ‘What am I doing?’ Said [his wife] Gloria, ‘He felt lost. All his friends were dying. He often said to me, “I’m losing all my old friends, and I’m not making any new ones.”’ ...”

Stewart did, though, make new fans. Hawkins brought him recognition among a younger generation of Americans who didn’t know him for his western films, or his Alfred Hitchcock collaborations, or even It’s a Wonderful Life. I have to count myself among that contingent. It is only too bad that Billy Jim had to disappear so soon, as Stewart lived for another 23 years after Hawkins went off the air. He could’ve spent at least several more of those years whippin’ the pants off over-confident West Virginia district attorneys and tricking murderers into giving themselves away on the stand. Aw shucks.