by Gorman, Ed
Short Stories
Single-author short story collections, though less plentiful than in some recent years, included excellent work. Donald Thomas’s Sherlock Holmes and the King’s Evil (Pegasus) is another triumph for the supreme master of Baker Street pastiche. John C. Boland writes for digests, not pulps, but we won’t hold that against 30 Years in the Pulps (Outskirts). Two mainstream bestsellers had new collections, John Grisham’s first, Ford County: Stories (Doubleday), and Joyce Carol Oates’s umpty-umpth, Dear Husband (Ecco). Sleuths known mostly for book-length cases included the title character in Ralph McInerny’s The Wisdom of Father Dowling (Five Star), Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse in A Touch of Dead (Ace), and Gar Anthony Haywood’s Aaron Gunner in Lyrics for the Blues (A.S.A.P.). A Rumpole Christmas (Viking) is presumably the final collection about John Mortimer’s beloved Old Bailey hack. Most of Peter Robinson’s The Price of Love and Other Stories (William Morrow) concerned Yorkshire cop Alan Banks, but there were non-series stories as well. Of some criminous interest were the mixed collections Visions (Mythos) by Richard A. Lupoff; F. Paul Wilson’s Aftershock & Others: 19 Oddities (Forge); and Lewis Shiner’s Collected Stories (Subterranean).
Crippen & Landru published James Powell’s A Pocketful of Noses: Stories of One Ganelon or Another and Robert Silverberg and Randall Garrett’s A Little Intelligence and Other Stories (writing as Robert Randall), while extending its Lost Classics series with Victor Canning’s The Minerva Club, the Department of Patterns, and Others and collecting some vintage 1940s radio scripts in Anthony Boucher and Denis Green’s The Casebook of Gregory Hood. Also celebrating the past, The Strange Adventures of Mr. Andrew Hawthorn and Other Stories (Penguin Classics) gathered the short stories of John Buchan, with an introduction by Giles Foden, while L. Ron Hubbard’s WindGone-Mad (Galaxy) combined a novella with two short stories by the pulp-magazine master.
Original multi-author theme-oriented anthologies continue to be plentiful. The title of Two of the Deadliest (Harper), edited by Elizabeth George, referred to lust and greed. The team of Martin H. Greenberg, Jon L. Lellenberg, and Daniel Stashower edited Sherlock Holmes in America (Skyhorse). The annual Mystery Writers of America anthology, The Prosecution Rests (Little, Brown), edited by Linda Fairstein, centered on the justice system. Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons, a radio sleuth remembered by a few of us old-timers, turned up in two quite different new stories, one in It’s That Time Again, Volume 4 (BearManor), edited by Jim Harmon, composed of mysteries in the worlds of old radio shows, and the other in Sex, Lies and Private Eyes (Moonstone), edited by Joe Gentile and Richard Dean Starr, mostly new stories about sleuths famous from print, radio, TV, and comics.
The second anthology of the International Thriller Writers was Thriller 2 (MIRA), edited by Clive Cussler. The Crime Writers Association’s Criminal Tendencies (Crème de la Crime/Dufour), edited by Lynne Patrick, combined originals and reprints and benefitted breast cancer research. The five historical specialists known as The Medieval Murderers produced their fifth story collection (or is it group novel?), King Arthur’s Bones (Simon and Schuster UK/Trafalgar Square).
Of course, there were more additions to Akashic Press’s ongoing noir series: Phoenix Noir, edited by Patrick Millikin; Delhi Noir, edited by Hirsh Sawhney; and Seattle Noir, edited by Curt Colbert. Also on the dark side were Sex, Thugs, and Rock & Roll (Kensington), edited by Todd Robinson of Thuglit.com, and Uncage Me (Bleak House), edited by Jen Jordan.
It was a stronger than average year for reprint anthologies. The precursor to the present volume, Between the Dark and the Daylight and 27 More of the Best Crime and Mystery Stories of the Year (Tyrus), edited by Ed Gorman and Martin H. Greenberg, and The Best American Mystery Stories 2009 (Houghton Mifflin), from guest editor Jeffery Deaver and series editor Otto Penzler, agreed on only two stories, N.J. Ayres’s “Rust” and Michael Connelly’s “Father’s Day.” As has often been the case, Joyce Carol Oates made both volumes with different stories, “The First Husband” for Gorman/Greenberg, “Dear Husband” for Penzler/Deaver. Kristine Kathryn Rusch completed a similar double with “Patriotic Gestures” for G/G and “G-Men” for P/D. G/G included the Edgar winner, T. Jefferson Parker’s “Skinhead Central,” and three of the other nominees: Sean Chercover’s “A Sleep Not Unlike Death,” Dominique Mainard’s “La Vie En Rose,” and David Edgerley Gates’s “Skin and Bones.”
Another project of prolific anthologist Penzler was the massive The Vampire Archives (Vintage/Black Lizard). Michael Sims edited The Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime (Penguin). Peter Washington edited the no-frills Detective Stories (Everyman’s Pocket Classics/ Knopf). Maxim Jakubowski gathered contemporary tales from around the globe in The Mammoth Book of Best British Mysteries (Running Press). A Sherlockian anthology of note, often leaning toward the supernatural, was The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Night Shade), edited by John Joseph Adams. Technically a reprint anthology but offering stories new to English-language readers was Sherlock Holmes in Russia (Hale/Trafalgar), edited and translated by Alex Auswaks.
Reference Books and Secondary Sources
It was another strong year for books about mystery and detective fiction.
Given its author’s prominence and the quality of its writing and critical acumen, the book of the year in the field was undoubtedly P.D. James’s Talking About Detective Fiction (Knopf). Other good Edgar nominees in the biographical/critical category were Lisa Rogak’s Haunted Heart: The Life and Times of Stephen King (Dunne/St. Martin’s) and The Lineup: The World’s Greatest Crime Writers Tell the Inside Story of Their Greatest Detectives (Little, Brown), edited by Otto Penzler. Two nominees not seen by me were The Stephen King Illustrated Companion (Fall River) by Bev Vincent, and The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith (St. Martin’s) by Joan Schenkar.
An important albeit expensive essay collection, groundbreaking as an English-language source, was French Crime Fiction (University of Wales Press), edited by Claire Gorrara. Craig McDonald’s Rogue Males: Conversations & Confrontations About the Writing Life (Bleak House) is a good addition to the interview shelf, while Kate Macdonald’s John Buchan: A Companion to the Mystery Fiction (McFarland) is an unusually fine singleauthor reference, encompassing much more than the subtitle suggests. Though more about race walking than mystery fiction, Lawrence Block’s Step by Step: A Pedestrian Memoir (William Morrow) is an excellent autobiographical piece by one of the greatest living writers of crime fiction.
For certain icons, the market always has room for another secondary source. Hilary Macaskill’s lavish coffee-table book Agatha Christie at Home (Frances Lincoln), is a nice addition to the buckling shelf, but less fresh ground was dug in Richard Hack’s Duchess of Death: The Unauthorized Biography of Agatha Christie (Phoenix). Enjoyable but inessential was Catherine Corman’s photographic collection Daylight Noir: Raymond Chandler’s Imagined City (Charta). Devotees of Arthur Conan Doyle’s most famous creation welcomed the second edition of Christopher Redmond’s useful and wide-ranging reference Sherlock Holmes Handbook (Dundurn).
Among the more specialized items were James E. Keirans’ John Dickson Carr in Paperback: An English Language Bibliography (CADS), Bradley Mengel’s Serial Vigilantes of Paperback Fiction: An Encyclopedia from Able Team to Z-Comm (McFarland); John C. Fredriksen’s Honey West (BearManor), concentrating on the TV show rather than the books; Murder 101: Essays on the Teaching of Detective Fiction (McFarland), edited by Edward J. Reilly; and my most gratefully received 2009 reference source, Ken Wlaschin’s Silent Mystery and Detective Movies: A Comprehensive Filmography (McFarland).
A Sense of History
Mystery fiction continues to honor its past, mostly through the efforts of small publishers, but sometimes in a questionable way. William MacHarg (1872–1951) and Edwin Balmer (1883–1959) hold a special place in detective fiction history as the authors of the 1910 collection The Achievements of Luther Trant, credited with introducing concepts of psyc
hology to fictional crime detection. On his own, MacHarg created the police stories collected in The Affairs of O’Malley (1940), while Balmer co-wrote with Philip Wylie the science-fiction classic When Worlds Collide (1933). MacHarg and Balmer also collaborated on a 1917 mystery novel, The Indian Drum, set on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. In 1996, Donald A. Johnston rewrote their novel, which was published under the title The Echoes of L’Arbre Croche with a credit to MacHarg and Balmer on the verso of the title page. In an interview with The Northern Michigan Journal, the author justified his rewrite thus: “The book had been out of print for generations and both [my copy and a friend’s copy] were falling apart. The acid content of the paper of The Indian Drum is such that I expect by the turn of the century, there will be no copies left. Reading it, I just found too many words missing.” In 2009, University of Michigan Press published a new edition of Johnston’s rewrite, this time with the small-print credit to the original authors promoted to the title page.
The novel is presumably in the public domain, and there may be no legal impediment to the publication of a lightly rewritten (and not improved) version. But MacHarg and Balmer deserve honor and respect for their work, not an attempt to have it erased from literary history. If The Indian Drum is worth reprinting for its view of the Upper Peninsula, why not a new edition of the original novel, with annotations and a scholarly introduction, rather than an inept rewrite that robs the original authors of their proper credit?
More conventional reprints included Gil Brewer’s 1952 paperback original Flight to Darkness (New Pulp Press), H.F. Heard’s pioneering 1941 Sherlockian pastiche A Taste of Honey (Blue Dolphin), and the first three in a new series of Holmes revivals from Titan Books, Daniel Stashower’s The Ectoplasmic Man (1985) and two by David Stuart Davies.
Rue Morgue Press continued its admirable revival program of mostly traditional mysteries, including Eilis Dillon’s Death at Crane’s Court (1953), the first American edition of Gladys Mitchell’s athletics-themed 1930 novel The Longer Bodies, and additional titles by Catherine Aird, Delano Ames, Manning Coles, and Michael Gilbert. On the more hardboiled side, Stark House offered two novels to a volume by Benjamin Appel (Sweet Money Girl and Life and Death of a Tough Guy) and W.R. Burnett (It’s Always Four O’Clock and Iron Man), plus a Harry Whittington threesome comprised of To Find Cora, Like Mink Like Murder, and Body and Passion.
Hard Case Crime continued its proclivity for publishing stunts with a new edition of Arthur Conan Doyle’s final Sherlock Holmes novel The Valley of Fear, with misleading packaging in parody of 1950s paperback practice, and a reprint of Robert B. Parker’s Passport to Peril (1951). (This is Robert Bogardus Parker, not the late creator of Spenser.) Hard Case also repackaged Donald E. Westlake’s Edgar-nominated 1960 debut The Mercenaries as The Cutie and presented first editions of novels not published in their authors’ lifetime: Lester Dent’s Honey in His Mouth and Roger Zelazny’s The Dead Man’s Brother.
Ramble House continued to revive out-of-print mysteries, some by American masters like Ed Gorman, others by British writers never before published in the U.S., like Rupert Penny. Among the offerings from Surinam Turtle Press, Richard A. Lupoff’s Ramble House subsidiary, was Mack Reynolds’s 1951 first novel, the science fictional mystery The Case of the Little Green Men.
At the Movies
In last year’s volume, I called 2008 “a weaker than average year for motion pictures generally” though “the crop of crime films was terrific.” Well, 2009 was even worse and dragged down the crime crop as well. However, if there had been a Best Motion Picture Edgar for 2009, the committee could have given it to a potential classic, though it played not the multiplexes but the art houses specializing in independent and foreign-language films: Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon, a superb whodunit set in small town Germany in the years before World War I. Another excellent foreign-language film was the very explicitly violent but riveting French prison drama Un prophète, directed by Jacques Audiard, who wrote the script with Thomas Bidegain from an original screenplay by Abdel Raouf Dafri and Nicolas Peufaillit.
American films most likely to have filled out the non-existent nominations were Michael Keaton’s directorial debut, the low-key hitman drama The Merry Gentleman, scripted by Ron Lazzeretti, and Tony Gilroy’s story of corporate espionage Duplicity. Other criminous features of at least passing interest included Wes Anderson’s animated big-caper Fantastic Mr. Fox, written with Noah Baumbach from Roald Dahl’s book; the Nicolas Cage vehicle The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call — New Orleans, directed by Werner Herzog from William Finkelstein’s script and based on a 1992 film written by Victor Argo, Paul Calderon, Abel Ferrara, and Zoe Lund; Lucrecia Martel’s French-language psychological thriller The Headless Woman; Michael Mann’s Dillinger biography Public Enemies, adapted with Ronan Bennett and Ann Biderman from Bryan Burrough’s book Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34; and the remake of The Taking of Pelham 123, directed by Tony Scott from Brian Helgeland’s screenplay, based on John Godey’s novel.
No, I haven’t forgotten the controversial Sherlock Holmes, directed by Guy Ritchie with Robert Downey Jr. in the title role, though I’d like to.
Award Winners
Awards tied to publishers’ contests, those limited to a geographical region smaller than a country, those awarded for works in languages other than English (with the exception of the Crime Writers of Canada’s nod to their French compatriots), and those confined to works from a single periodical have been omitted. All were awarded in 2009 for material published in 2008. Gratitude is again extended to all the websites that keep track of these things, with a special nod to Jiro Kimura’s Gumshoe Site.
Edgar Allan Poe Awards (Mystery Writers of America)
Best novel: C.J. Box, Blue Heaven (St. Martin’s Minotaur)
Best first novel by an American author: Francie Lin, The Foreigner (Picador)
Best original paperback: Meg Gardiner, China Lake (NAL/Obsidian)
Best fact crime book: Howard Blum, American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood, and the Crime of the Century (Crown)
Best critical/biographical work: Harry Lee Poe, Edgar Allan Poe: An Illustrated Companion to His Tell-Tale Stories (Metro)
Best short story: T. Jefferson Parker, “Skinhead Central” (The Blue Religion, Little, Brown)
Best young adult mystery: John Green, Paper Towns (Dutton)
Best juvenile mystery: Tony Abbott, The Postcard (Little, Brown)
Best play: Ifa Bayeza, The Ballad of Emmett Till (Goodman Theatre, Chicago)
Best television episode teleplay: Patrick Harbinson, “Prayer of the Bone” (Wire in the Blood, BBC America)
Best motion picture screenplay: Martin McDonagh, In Bruges (Focus Features)
Grand Master: James Lee Burke and Sue Grafton
Robert L. Fish award (best first story): Joseph Guglielmelli, “Buckner’s Error” (Queens Noir, Akashic)
Raven: Edgar Allan Poe Society (Baltimore, Maryland) and Poe House (Baltimore, Maryland)
Mary Higgins Clark Award: Bill Floyd, The Killer’s Wife (St. Martin’s Minotaur)
Agatha Awards (Malice Domestic Mystery Convention)
Best novel: Louise Penny, The Cruelest Month (Minotaur)
Best first novel: G. M. Malliet, Death of a Cozy Writer (Midnight Ink)
Best short story: Dana Cameron, “The Night Things Changed” (Wolfsbane and Mistletoe, Penguin)
Best nonfiction: Kathy Lynn Emerson, How to Write Killer Historical Mysteries (Perseverance)
Best Children’s/Young Adult: Chris Grabenstein, The Crossroads (Random House)
Lifetime Achievement Award: Anne Perry
Poirot Award: Kate Stine and Brian Skupin, publishers of Mystery Scene
Dagger Awards (Crime Writers’ Association, Great Britain)
Gold Dagger: William Brodrick, A Whispered Name (Little, Brown)
International Dagger: Fred Vargas, The Chalk Circle Man (Harvill Sec
ker)
Ian Fleming Steel Dagger: John Hart, The Last Child (John Murray)
Best short story: Sean Chercover, “One Serving of Bad Luck” (Killer Year, MIRA)
John Creasey New Blood Dagger: Johan Theorin, Echoes From the Dead (Doubleday)
Film Dagger: Gran Torino (Warner Bros.)
TV Dagger: Red Riding (Channel 4 Films; Channel 4)
International TV Dagger: The Wire (HBO; BBC Two)
Best Actress Dagger: Juliet Stevenson for Place of Execution (Coastal Productions; ITV1)
