Dastardly Deeds

Performing Autopsies on Great Bodies of Crime Fiction.

Talking To The Dead

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Lily Dale town entrance at night. A 10 buck fee to enter is required.
Some of the religious leaders in stone at Camp Chesterfield, IN

Bored with 24 hour news, politics, and Perry Mason re-runs, I tripped over the laughably named The Learning Channel, and fell into an episode of Long Island Medium. I had seen snippets of the show before, but hadn’t concentrated all that hard at what was transpiring. Apparently a woman who has a typical Longk I-link accent and brassy personality, speaks to dead people. And this is a reality TV show because. . .? Mediumship and Spiritualism seems to have been having a major rebirth, pardon the pun, the last 15 years or so. 9/11, 2 wars, and economic depression  are the perfect ingredients for those who claim to have entrance into the afterlife. The grief stricken, frightened, confused, seek answers and some find themselves making an appointment with a psychic, medium, spiritualist with the idea that they have them.

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Composition For Four Hands–Best 100 Mysteries of All Time

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Composition  for Four Hands—Hilda Lawrence–1947-OOP

“They wheeled her chair to the big bay window in her bedroom. She’d been fed and bathed. She’d had what they called her forty winks.  They said it was such a beautiful afternoon and wasn’t she lucky to have such a nice window? Then they left her.”

This is the ominous beginning to a story that builds in suspense. Unusual, that it’s not told in the first person, considering the main character is completely paralyzed. I would have probably gone with Nora Manson telling the story from her personal point of view, of her terror in the unknown and the fact that she was being targeted by someone in her own home, someone wanted to kill her.

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Songs For The Missing

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One of our ferrets disappeared. One minute he was in the Queens apartment, the next I couldn’t locate him when putting the ferrets back in their cage at night. I’d not made them go into the cage for a couple of days, so I didn’t know when he actually went missing. The entire apartment was ferret proofed, meaning, all areas of danger were closed up, no holes in walls, or in back of the stove or refrigerator. At first, I had no misgivings–ferrets sleep deeply in burrowing spaces–so my husband and I started our routine of checking all the typical spots–in clothes left lying around, under the bed sheets, below the chairs or sofa, and in closets, although they usually weren’t open. When these didn’t pan out and after we had checked and rechecked, we then took the entire place apart, becoming more and more alarmed when he didn’t turn up. By around 4 in the morning, we realized he just wasn’t there.

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The Big Sleep–Best 100 Mysteries of All Time

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The Big Sleep—Dashiell Hammett–1939–in print

I admit, the film is one of my all time favorites. I will watch it each and every time it plays on Turner Classic Movies. Happily, Mr. Turner didn’t colorize this film–or if he did, they don’t bother ruining our viewing pleasure by showing that version. I can enter at the middle, and become glued to the set, or even at the very end, when there’s just a few more moves to be made, and I’ll still opt to watch it rather than some first run program. I love it for the very reason some critics hate it–the convoluted plot. So layered, that even Chandler was hard put to explain whodunit for one of the murders in the book and on screen. I love the actors, naturally–I mean, how could one not love Bogart and Bacall–and wow–the sister to Bacall’s character, Martha Vickers, steals the show–which is why they went back and added more scenes for Bacall to shine in. Character actors galore, and an early Dorothy Malone add up to the perfect mystery film. And lest I forget, the biblio aspect of the story is just the scotch in old man Sternwood’s glass, he can’t drink.

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Interview with Sara J. Henry-Author of Learning To Swim

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“If I’d blinked, I would have missed it. But I didn’t, and I saw something fall from the rear deck of the opposite ferry: a small, wide-eyed human face, in one tiny frozen moment, as it plummeted toward the water.”

From the publishers: When she witnesses a small child tumbling from a ferry into Lake Champlain, Troy Chance dives in without thinking. Harrowing moments later, she bobs to the surface, pulling a terrified little boy with her. As the ferry disappears into the distance, she begins a bone-chilling swim nearly a mile to shore towing a tiny passenger.
Surprisingly, he speaks only French. He’ll acknowledge that his name is Paul; otherwise, he’s resolutely mute.
Troy assumes that Paul’s frantic parents will be in touch with the police or the press. But what follows is a shocking and deafening silence. And Troy, a freelance writer, finds herself as fiercely determined to protect Paul as she is to find out what happened to him.  She’ll need skill and courage to survive and protect her charge and herself.
Sara J. Henry’s powerful and compelling Learning to Swim will move and disturb readers right up to its shattering conclusion.

Winner of the 2012 Agatha Award for best first novel and the 2012 Mary Higgins Clark Award; nominated for the Barry, Macavity, and Anthony awards. The sequel, A COLD AND LONELY PLACE, will be out Feb. 5, 2013.

I had the privilege of sending Ms. Henry some questions regarding her writing, and the publishing industry in general. I was quite happy with the detailed and thoughtful responses she wrote. Here it is:

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Laura. Best 100 Mysteries of All Time

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Laura—Vera Caspary–1943 (it ran as a serial in a magazine in 1942 before being published as a novel)–used paperback

I recently read another Vera Caspary title, Bedelia, and the only similarity to Laura is the author. Bedelia is a nice character study of a beguiling black widow, whose latest husband finally catches on. It holds neither the suspense or surprise that Laura does. Since a great deal of the impact of the novel, Laura, is intertwined with the plot–I’ll need to give a general *Spoiler Alert” for the entire article! That’s assuming you are one of the few people who never heard of or saw the classic film starring Gene Tierney and Dana Andrews, nor saw the billion rip-offs on episodic television.

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Partners & Crime Booksellers Closing

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Another independent bookstore is ending its run. Partners & Crime follows many other mystery indies that have closed over the last 20 or so years in New York City. Starting with the two Foul Play bookstores, one in the Village, the other on the Upper East Side in 1994, and over a decade later by the first mystery bookstore established in the US, Murder Ink (it had expanded to two stores before the expansion closed in the late 90s.) Black Orchid, closed a few years ago, and now Partners & Crime. The only specialized mystery bookstore left in the city will be Mysterious Bookshop, which moved downtown after the brownstone it was located in was sold. Partners & Crime was in business for 18 years, not a bad run at all. The reason it was able to stay open as long as it did–the original partners all had day jobs as well as part ownership. The digital world has been taking over, and in some ways this doesn’t seem like a bad thing, to one of the owners. The idea that books will now be on the same playing field as music and movies pleases her. Nonetheless, it is sad for those of us who love wandering through the aisles, perusing titles and authors, making selections from what we physically handle rather than reading inane reviews online and choosing that way. Having a live intelligent person who can point out what they have recently read and liked beats amazon’s ridiculous reviews any day.

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Vietnam Echos in The Mercy Killers By Lisa Reardon

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Lisa Reardon is on my Best 100 Mysteries of All Time list for her first book Billy Dead. If  I’d read The Mercy Killers before I finalized the list, she may have had two entries. The Mercy Killers is not an easy read, and yet, it compels and rivets the reader with little action other than the characters living their lives, as dysfunctional as they are. The toughness comes from the unrelenting negativity surrounding the crowd at McGurk’s Taproom in Ypsilanti, MI.  The book starts with what feels like a forced addition–forced by an editor or publisher to encapsulate the plot before the story even begins, to give the reader a broad idea of what lies ahead–trouble. And war.

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