Got You Covered!

We’ve already seen which books The Rap Sheet chose as their top picks for 2014, now come have a peek at the contenders (and final winner) of the top crime fiction covers. This is always a terrific field!

The final blow-by-blow is here.

Top Crime Fiction of 2014

What were the top works of crime fiction in 2014? At The Rap Sheet, six top critics opine. And here’s a hint: expect to be at least a bit surprised!

Best Crime Covers

Over at our sister publication, The Rap Sheet, editor J. Kingston Pierce has revised a Rap Sheet tradition. Readers there are looking over and voting on the best crime fiction covers of the year. As Pierce says:

You will find 15 fronts from crime, mystery, and thriller works published last year. All of them, I think, are special in their own ways, whether it’s because of their typographical excellence, their bold imagery, or the manner in which they suggest the intensity of drama to be enjoyed between their covers. 

Take a look through the spectacular selection of covers and cast your vote for your favorite.

Massive Elmore Leonard Tribute

We knew all along that the passing of Elmore Leonard earlier this week would create a sad stir at our sister publication, the crime fiction-focused Rap Sheet. A tribute to Leonard began rolling out yesterday and readers should keep their eyes peeled for subsequent installments: it’s clearly going to be a Rap Sheet classic.

Editor J. Kingston Pierce responds to the sad news in his typical style: partly personal, partly deeply factual and partly shepherding responses from a phalanx of grief-stricken authors who share their sense of loss upon losing a writer who was a hero to many of his kind. Robert Ferrigno, Kelli Stanley, Ace Atkins, Gary Phillips, R.J. Ellory, Bill Crider, Libby Fischer Hellmann and Jason Starr are among those who add their voices to The Rap Sheet’s tribute.

The first part of The Rap Sheet’s massive tribute to Elmore Leonard is here. Part II has now been posted here.

Laidlaw’s Father on the Record

Seventy-six-year-old Irish crime novelist William McIvanney, the so-called Godfather of Tartan Noir, was recently interviewed for The Rap Sheet by Australian-born Scottish author Tony Black. The results of their discussion can be found today in our sister blog.

Here’s how Black sets up the piece:

A good friend of mine recently described McIlvanney as “like meeting a statue that’s come to life,” and that does kind of sum up the reverence with which he’s treated in his home country. But crime writers didn’t always attract such rapturous plaudits.

When McIlvanney wrote Laidlaw, back in the late 1970s, Scotland was not well-known for its crime fiction -- something he was to change singlehandedly. McIlvanney’s curmudgeonly cop, Glasgow Detective Inspector Jack Laidlaw, provided the imprimatur for the Scottish best-sellers lists, and our longest-running television drama, Taggart, is a very heavy homage to the work.

You’ll find the complete post here.

Pierce’s Picks and Sad News

If you’re looking for Pierce’s Picks, from now on, you’ll find it on the nearby Rap Sheet, edited by Pierce himself.

While you’re at The Rap Sheet, you’ll see some very sad news: Reginald Hill, creator of the Yorkshire-based detective team of Andrew Dalziel and Peter Pascoe, died last Thursday at age 75.

In a lovely tribute, Karen Anderson writes:

The last three books in the Dalziel/Pascoe series were all about death, illness, and the consequences of aging. Hill, who died this last Thursday at age 75 of cancer, was clearly playing with the ideas of lessening powers, and how society treats the ill and elderly. And how people remember the dead. Midnight Fugue sees the feisty Dalziel returning to work after near-death in a terrorist bombing and panicking when he realizes he’s headed off to the Monday-morning staff meeting ... on a Sunday.

You can see Anderson’s piece here.

Pierce’s Pick: Agent 6 by Tom Rob Smith

This week, J. Kingston Pierce chooses Agent 6 by Tom Rob Smith:

Former Moscow secret policeman Leo Demidov’s wife and two daughters travel to New York City in 1950 as part of a “peace tour,” only to be implicated in the killing of an African-American singer. Afterwards, Demidov -- denied the chance to investigate officially -- launches a years-long, international quest for truth ... and revenge.

Looking for previous Pierce’s Picks? Twelve months of them are here. And though the Pierce’s Pick archive will remain on January Magazine, going forward, you’ll find the weekly Pierce’s Pick on January’s sister publication, the crime fiction-focused Rap Sheet.

Crime is Covered

Near the end of each year, our sister publication, the crime fiction-focused Rap Sheet, looks back at the top covers of the year and gets its readers involved in choosing the very best one. Editor J. Kingston Pierce says:

Come the end of every year, it’s now a tradition here at The Rap Sheet to look back over the preceding 12 months and choose our favorite crime novel fronts. We commenced this custom way back in 2007, and have no interest in discontinuing it. Especially not when there ample excellent candidates from which to select.

You can see the top covers and vote for your favorite here.

NBC’s “Mystery Movie” Turns 40

Fans of a certain type of television drama might be astonished to read that, this month, the NBC Mystery Movie series turns 40. Over the coming weeks, The Rap Sheet will take an affectionate glance back at the various series produced under the Mystery Movie banner. Its first installment looks at the show that started it all, featuring “rumpled, stogie-chomping, and unassuming Lieutenant Columbo of the Los Angeles Police Department [who] matches wits with prominent, devious, and generally prosperous murderers.”

As The Rap Sheet recalls of Columbo’s creators:

Their plan was to hire Bing Crosby as Columbo, but the aging crooner-actor kindly passed on the role. Subsequently, a younger performer from New York named Peter Falk contacted Levinson and Link, saying, “I’ll kill to play that cop,” and he quickly won them over with his offbeat sense of humor and Everyman persona.

Read more here, but also keep your eyes trained on The Rap Sheet over the next few weeks. There is, after all, a lot more where that came from.

Pierce’s Pick: Murder in the Minster by Susanna Gregory

This week, our man Pierce chooses Cambridge academic Susanna Gregory’s latest novel to feature 14th century teach-investigator Matthew Bartholomew.

In Murder in the Minster, Pierce writes, Bartholomew “travels from the college of Michaelhouse, in Cambridge, to help claim a much-needed legacy from the Archbishop of York. But trouble brews: York is threatened by greed and the French, several of the Archbishop’s executors have died and proof of Michaelhouse’s bequest has vanished.”

Looking for previous Pierce’s Picks? They’re here. Want to hear more from Pierce? He’s most often found at The Rap Sheet, and that’s here.

Pierce’s Pick: The End of Everything by Megan Abbott

J. Kingston Pierce follows Rap Sheet contributor, Megan Abbott, out of mystery and into thriller in this week’s Pierce’s Pick: The End of Everything.

“Suburban adolescents Lizzie Hood and Evie Verver lived amid innocence and the promise of glamour,” writes Pierce. “After Evie is apparently kidnapped, though, Lizzie is left to deal with -- and sometimes delight in -- the fallout. But as she manipulates the investigation, Evie starts to question whether she really knew her best friend at all.”

You can see previous Pierce’s Picks here. You can hear more from Pierce at The Rap Sheet.

Pierce’s Pick: A Fear of Dark Water by Craig Russell

J. Kingston Pierce returns to the United Kingdom for this week’s Pierce’s Pick.

Craig Russell’s A Fear of Dark Water gets the nod this week. “As an environmental summit begins in Hamburg, Germany,” writes Pierce, “a storm brings in flood waters -- and a headless corpse. Cop Jan Fabel figures it’s another victim of a serial killer who stalks victims through social-networking sites. But the case is soon complicated by a doomsday cult and an exploration of cyberspace’s dark side.”

You can see previous Pierce’s Picks here. You can hear more from Pierce at The Rap Sheet.

Pierce’s Picks

Regular readers know that, every week, January Magazine features a crime fiction pick from Rap Sheet editor and January senior editor J. Kingston Pierce. Pierce’s Pick this week will be of interest to an even wider than usual audience as it highlights Kiss Her Goodbye by Max Allan Collins and the late Mickey Spillane.

The novel, lovingly completed by Collins and featuring Spillane’s best-known characters, will especially appeal to readers who loved Spillane’s inimitable voice.

Collins, an acclaimed and celebrated author in his own right, manages the very finest of homage: in Kiss Her Goodbye, you feel like you’re once again reading the work of an old friend, one you feared you wouldn’t encounter again.

“Working from an unfinished novel by the late Spillane,” Kirkus said, “Collins provides the franchise’s trademark winking salacity, self-congratulatory vigilantism and sadistic violence, topped off with a climax that combines the final scenes of two of Mike’s most celebrated cases.”

In his Pick, Pierce lets us know what’s going on. “Returning to Manhattan from Florida in the 1970s, P.I. Mike Hammer finds his world out of joint. His partner, Velda Sterling, has disappeared and his old police mentor has supposedly committed suicide. But Hammer, doubting the suicide explanation, opens up a case that leads to drug racketeers and a stock of Nazi diamonds.”

This is crime fiction from an era most of us would not want to go back to, but for a short visit? Bring it on!

And while we’re on the topic of The Rap Sheet, yesterday Pierce pointed out to readers that it has been five years since that worthy blog was spun off on its own. Says Pierce:

It hardly seems possible, but today marks five years since The Rap Sheet was launched as a blog separate from its great mother ship, January Magazine. Little did I know then what would come of this project. I didn’t ever expect it to last as long as it has, or to gain the popularity it now enjoys. But I’ve been pleased by it all. And I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to the many contributors who have added their voices to The Rap Sheet since 2006.

Congratulations to us and to The Rap Sheet! It’s been a fantastic journey for all of us.

Matthew McConaughey and a Car

With The Lincoln Lawyer, the film based on Michael Connelly’s award-winning 2005 novel of the same name, opening at a big screen near you tomorrow, reviews are appearing from various sources. Not the least of these is the one over at our sister publication, The Rap Sheet, where discussion of work of Michael Connelly in its various forms is nothing new.

Today Rap Sheet contributor Brandon M. Leonard weighs in on the film version of Connelly’s book. Though there are places where he spots weakness in the movie, overall he likes it well enough to recommend a few hours in the dark:

Ladies and gentlemen, Eddie lives.

After years spent in the B-movie wilderness, Michael Paré, the star of Eddie and the Cruisers (1983) makes a triumphant return as Detective Kurlen in The Lincoln Lawyer, the big-screen adaptation of Michael Connelly’s 2005 Edgar-nominated novel, scheduled for release tomorrow. While he’s no longer the James Dean-throwback that he once was, he’s not a bloated monstrosity à la Mickey Rourke either, and he brings a gruff effectiveness to his role. One of the many pleasant surprises in this new film was seeing Paré use the same low-key, tough-guy charisma on Ryan Phillippe and Matthew McConaughey that he once used to face Willem Dafoe in 1984’s Streets of Fire (also known as the best movie ever made--take that, The Rules of the Game!).

”Pleasant surprise” is an excellent way to describe The Lincoln Lawyer, starring McConaughey as Connelly’s series criminal defense attorney, Michael “Mick” Haller (changed from “Mickey” in the original novel). After an excellent opening credits sequence by Jeff McEvoy, set to Bobby “Blue” Bland’s soul classic, “Ain’t No Love (In the Heart of the City),” the film wastes little time throwing us into the life of Mickey Haller and the case that will fuel the plot. While the original novel takes a few chapters to establish Haller and his world, in the movie it’s developed alongside the case of Louis Roulet (Ryan Phillipe), a rich young man accused of attempting to murder a prostitute. This new balance might give fans of the novel whiplash, but screenwriter John Romano balances plot and character with a comfortable ease.

The piece in its entirety includes much insight and many asides and it’s here.

Happy Belated to Killer Covers!

For various crazy reasons, we completely missed wishing a happy second birthday to J. Kingston Pierce’s Killer Covers blog. Pierce, who is editor of The Rap Sheet and senior editor here at January, has a passion for terrific cover art, as almost anyone who reads either January or The Rap Sheet already knows. Like so many of the projects Pierce has involved himself with, Killer Covers began from a place of passion. As Pierce says:

It was all my own damn fault, of course: I was interested in discovering and writing more about the authors and artists whose work I displayed. I didn’t want to simply compose extended captions about each book face, or put up the book covers without any explanation, the way several other blogs already do.

Killer Covers has evolved into an exploration and celebration of great crime fiction covers. Congratulations, Pierce! And thanks for creating this terrific resource. Killer Covers’ birthday post is here.

Sam and Dash Remembered

I’m just under the wire -- on the West Coast, anyway -- in reminding readers that 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.”

That’s all from The Rap Sheet’s wonderful tribute to Hammett, which can be found here.

Best Crime Fiction Covers 2010

Can you judge a book by its cover? Popular opinion says no, no, no! Even so, it’s pretty hard not to, especially when there’s so much terrific book art around.

Because Rap Sheet editor J. Kingston Pierce cares enough about cover art to discuss it on January Magazine’s sister publication fairly often, he’s made it an annual practice to collect the best of what he finds and then allow readers to vote for their own favorites:

Ever since 2007, those of us at The Rap Sheet have closed out each year with a look back at some of what we considered to be the finest crime novel covers of the previous twelvemonth. It’s our small way of acknowledging the often-unheralded graphic designers who, though they don’t write the books we read, nonetheless play a vital role in encouraging us to pick up those works in the first place.

Honestly? We’d do something similar for January if only we could find the energy! Meanwhile, this year’s crop of great crime novel covers went live on The Rap Sheet this morning. You can peek at them and then let your preferences be known here.

007 to Go Digital

These days, the discussions are not so much is if electronic books are going to take root and take hold. On a book-by-book basis, it’s really just a matter of when. Case in point, even good old 007, who some might expect to be moldering away somewhere by now, is getting a digital makeover:

Amid all the talk about e-book publishing taking over from paper, and with some authors having turned evangelical on this topic, I was interested to see that Ian Fleming Publications has finally decided to publish the James Bond catalogue in electronic form, even bypassing the Penguin Group, the novels’ longtime English-language publisher.

Ali Karim has the whole story today on The Rap Sheet.

He Left His Heart in San Francisco

Just returned from Bouchercon 2010 in San Francisco, January senior editor J. Kingston Pierce raps up his journey on The Rap Sheet, with a lengthy narrative that includes mention of lots of January and Rap Sheet friends and contributors, with photos!

... it was a thrill to be in San Francisco last week among myriad friends and acquaintances. Most of my life at the moment seems to be spent in relative isolation, as I’m parked behind a computer, batting out magazine articles, books, and blog posts. But for the four days of Bouchercon 2010, I didn’t write a single damn word. Instead, I basked in the company of other obsessive readers, pleasant folk such as Janet Rudolph (the editor of Mystery Readers Journal), George Easter (of Deadly Pleasures renown), Rap Sheet contributor Kevin Burton Smith (who’s also the editor of The Thrilling Detective Web Site), “cultural anthropologist” and noir film guru Eddie Muller (whose excellent essay about San Francisco’s contributions to crime fiction appeared in the Bouchercon program), and authors Kelli Stanley (City of Dragons), Gary Phillips (Freedom’s Fight, The Underbelly), and Mark Coggins (The Big Wake-Up).

The Rap Sheet Bouchercon round-up is here.

Philip Kerr at The Rap Sheet

Today at The Rap Sheet, J. Kingston Pierce offers up an in-depth interview with Scottish crime fictionist, Philip Kerr (If the Dead Rise Not, A Quiet Flame).

Pierce opens with this charming story, but wastes no time in getting down to business:

No matter how many authors I interview in my life, I may never escape the jitters I feel whenever I start talking with somebody whose writing I admire. That anxiety hit me hard last October, during a trans-Atlantic telephone call with critic and Rap Sheet correspondent Ali Karim in London. He’d just informed me that Scottish novelist Philip Kerr, author of the Bernie Gunther crime series, had been named the 2009 recipient of the prestigious Ellis Peters Historical Award, given to him that night during a special reception in the British capital. In response, I casually told Karim that, if he happened to see Kerr amid the crowd of champagne-swilling celebrants, he should pass along my congratulations. “Well,” Karim said excitedly, “why don’t you tell him yourself?” And with that, my correspondent walked over to Philip Kerr -- and handed him his cell phone.

The interview is in-depth and available in full right here.