2025 Dove Awardee: David Geherin.

The Detective/Mystery Caucus of the Popular Culture Assocation announced its latest Dove Awardee: David Geherin, professor emeritus of English at Eastern Michigan University, who is an Edgar nominee in the Best Critical/Biographical category this year for Organized Crime on Page and Screen. He received earlier Edgar nominations for The Crime World of Michael Connelly: A Study of His Works and Their Adaptations (2022), Scene of the Crime: The Importance of Place in Crime and Mystery Fiction (2008; also nominated for a Macavity Award), and The American Private Eye: The Image in Fiction (1985). His other books include Carl Hiaasen: Sunshine State Satirist (2019), Funny Thing About Murder: Modes of Humor in Crime Fiction and Films (2017), Small Towns in Recent American Crime Fiction (2015), and Elmore Leonard (1989).

The award, given to individuals who have contributed to the serious study of mystery, detective, and crime fiction, honors well-known mystery scholar George N. Dove. The chair of the Dove Award Committee is Rachel Schaffer (Montana State University Billings). Past recipients include Frankie Y. Bailey (University at Albany, SUNY), Martin Edwards, Barry Forshaw, Douglas G. Greene, P.D. James, Christine Jackson, H. R. F. Keating, Margaret Kinsman, Maureen Reddy (Rhode Island College), Janet Rudolph, J. K. Van Dover (Lincoln University), and yours truly.  

• David Geherin reads from Organized Crime on Page and Screen.

Lawsuit re Elmore Leonard's papers settled.

The Detroit News reported that a lawsuit regarding the sale of Elmore Leonard's papers to the University of South Carolina had been settled. Christine Leonard, Leonard's ex-wife, had sued alleging that Leonard's company, trust, and son had sold the archive in secret (stating that a stipulation in the divorce decree entitled her to a share of the proceeds).

Elmore Leonard speaks, 1984.

This interview with Elmore Leonard was part of the First Edition TV series on PBS station WNET cohosted by noted critic John Leonard (no relation) and Nancy Evans. In it, Elmore Leonard cites such diverse influences as Erich Maria Remarque, Ernest Hemingway, James M. Cain, and Mark Harris (Bang the Drum Slowly) and addresses his cross-genre works, his approach to dialogue, and the National Lampoon parody of his style.

Clues 33.1: Westlake, Leonard, Reichs, et al.

Clues 33.1 has been published; see below for abstracts. Contact McFarland for issue orders and subscriptions.

Update. The issue is now available on Nook and Kindle.

Introduction  JANICE M. ALLAN
Now You See Her—Now You Don’t: 
Household Spies in Aurora Floyd and Lady Audley’s Secret RACHEL SMILLIE (U Aberdeen) In Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s novels the female domestic servant enjoys a uniquely privileged position; she is granted admittance to the most intimate spaces of the home and given unfettered access to the family’s secrets. By focusing on the role of the female servant as household spy, this essay explores the control these women are able to exercise over their respective narratives.

“Something in a New Key”: Democratizing Poe’s Ratiocination in Psych and Elementary PATRICK KENT RUSSELL (U-Conn) Psych (2006–14) and Elementary (2013–) take steps to democratize Edgar Allan Poe’s ratiocination. Early seasons of Psych take a greater step by providing viewing audiences access to clues and lessons in what to observe. Seasons 1 and 2 of Elementary also show lessons, but as character development, rather than to redistribute necessary knowledge.

Far from Home and Near to Harm: Mazes, Rhizomes, and Illusory Domestic Spaces in Richard Stark’s Parker Novels GREGORY ALAN PHIPPS  This article considers the construction of Richard Stark’s Parker novels in relation to the symbolic models of the maze and the rhizome. These function in the Parker novels as frameworks that capture the structural forms of various spaces, social encounters, and modes of subjectivity.

Scarlet Fever: Communism, Crime, and Contagion in James Ellroy’s The Big Nowhere JOSHUA MEYER
 (U of Western Sydney) Throughout James Ellroy’s The Big Nowhere, the threat of communism and the institutional anxiety it engenders is played out through a series of symbolic associations among communism, crime, and contagion. Ellroy’s figuration of communism as a form of criminal contagion takes up underlying tensions involved with the discourse of typology that runs through the detective genre.

UM: Literary maps (including mystery authors).

T. S. Stribling
The Century, Oct. 1921

The Clark Library at the University of Michigan is featuring literary maps of the United States in an online exhibition, including the following:

• "Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles" (want to see where Philip Marlowe lives?)

• The Southern map includes Truman Capote, William Faulkner, Edgar Allan Poe, and T. S. Stribling

• The Michigan map includes Charlotte Armstrong, Loren Estleman, Steve Hamilton, and Elmore Leonard

• Links to interactive maps include Brooklyn, Detroit, Manhattan, and San Francisco

"Dutch" redux: Radio doc on Elmore Leonard.

The Trespassers, previously
unpublished by Elmore Leonard

On the KPFA radio program Bookwaves, Richard Wolinsky (known for various collaborations with mystery-science fiction author Richard A. Lupoff) hosts a documentary on Elmore Leonard that includes archival interviews. Two audio versions are available: a 36-min. edited version and a version as heard on KPFA.

Elmore Leonard on marketing his works.

After author Elmore Leonard died on August 20, the manuscript archivist at Indiana University's Lilly Library posted on the library blog about the small Leonard collection at the library, including an excerpt from a Leonard letter to his agent: "So what I'm going to do now is plot better stories. I'll show 'em."

Update. Here are some clips of Elmore Leonard from WNYC's Leonard Lopate Show.

TLS: Judith Flanders on authors of the first female detectives.

In the June 18 Times Literary Supplement, British novelist and journalist Judith Flanders discusses the first known female fictional detectives, particularly those pertaining to Experiences of a Lady Detective (aka Revelations of a Lady Detective, 1884; attributed to W. S. Hayward, but there is controversy about that); accounts based on the Constance Kent case (most recently the subject of Kate Summerscale's The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher); and a convincing unmasking of the pseudonymous Andrew Forrester Jr. (The Female Detective, ca. 1863). Unfortunately, Flanders's piece only appears to be available in the TLS print edition. Clues 25.1 (2006) and 26.3 (2008) featured articles that discussed Victorian female sleuths; the author of one, Dagni Bredesen of Eastern Illinois University, is working on scholarly editions of The Female Detective and Revelations of a Lady Detective.

Also of interest in the June 18th TLS: Michael Dirda's recollections as an assistant editor of the Washington Post Book World: "Elmore Leonard confessed that he was tired of being asked to review gritty crime novels, so I talked him into writing about the latest Anita Brookner" (16). Readers might also peruse Jonathan Barnes's June 23rd discussion (available online) of Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Creeping Man" (1923), in the context of a review for the 56-volume The Complete Works of Arthur Conan Doyle (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009).

Update: Bredesen's scholarly edition of The Female Detective and Revelations of a Lady Detective has been published under the title The First Female Detectives.

About the image: The Mutiny of the Thunder (1878) by W. S. Hayward, one of the authors discussed in Judith Flanders's June 18th TLS article.

Highsmith, Dibdin, Higgins, Leonard in British Library Sound Archive.

A quick browse through the British Library Sound Archive uncovered these audio nuggets (in Windows Media files; Mac users need a program such as Flip4Mac to listen to these):

• Michael Dibdin interviews Patricia Highsmith on the occasion of the publication of Ripley Under Water, Sept. 27, 1991. In the interview, Highsmith discusses Tom Ripley and Strangers on a Train. She also mentions that the German translation of Ripley Under Water sold 35,000 copies on the first day of release.

• George V. Higgins talks about his novel Penance for Jerry Kennedy, May 8, 1985.

• Elmore Leonard discusses his novel Maximum Bob, Sept. 18, 1991.

• Panel on the European crime novel, Nov. 28, 1992, with Michael Dibdin and Susan Moody (UK), Laura Grimaldi (Italy), and Fernando Martinez Lainez (Spain).

BBC Open Book: US gangster fiction.

Michael Carlson on BBC Radio 4's Open Book addresses a question on US gangster fiction in this podcast, recommending Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest, Raoul Whitfield, and Elmore Leonard, among other authors.

About the image: William Powell in Private Detective 62 (1933, dir. Michael Curtiz, from a story by Raoul Whitfield)

The Book Show: Elmore Leonard.

The Australian Broadcasting Co.'s Book Show talks to Elmore Leonard here.

Happy birthday, Elmore Leonard.

Elmore Leonard, whose many works include Mr. Majestyk, Maximum Bob, and Get Shorty, was born today in New Orleans in 1925. His latest novel is Up in Honey's Room.

It's often forgotten in the reviews of 3:10 to Yuma that the film (and its 1957 incarnation) are based on the 1953 Leonard short story "Three-Ten to Yuma." His sage "Ten Rules of Writing" will shortly be out in illustrated book form. (Rule 10: "Try to leave out the part that readers skip.")