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It’s finally spring and we’re clearing out all the skeletons and, more importantly, books from the Criminal Element Prize Vault! Bring on the thrills, bring on the mystery! 

You can enter for a chance to win a whole box full of books by David Mark, Julia Keller, Charles Cumming, Daniel Stashower and Bill Loehfelm. 

[Find out about the books...]

I tend to get on kicks. I ran through Homeland Season 1 in three days and then moved on. I became obsessed with baseball for a summer and then moved on (mostly). I spent one summer in high school reading every Ian Fleming and Doc Savage book ever. And then I moved on. I saved all of John le Carré’s novels until this last winter. And then I read them all back to back. And I’ve moved on. Now I’m reading every book I can find on the history of Special Operations throughout history. And I’m sure I’ll move on.

A few months ago, I was asked the question that is probably most often asked of authors: What are your influences? And for a minute I was stumped. I love every genre, not just crime. In fact crime is such a broad genre that it’s kind of impossible not to like. I love spies and espionage. And espionage, by its very nature is crime. Crime that is sanctioned by the state, but still criminal, depending on what side you’re on. 

But when I though back I realized that there was a summer in 1988 right before I got to high school that I stumbled upon some reprints of the old Dick Tracy comic strips. They’d been repackaged into regular sized comic books and were being released as issues. Black and white comics? Ugh. What I was used to was full-color superhero comics and Doc Savage up to that point so these rough dark gritty comics were something else all together.

[Turn the page and learn...]

If you like your mysteries with a generous heaping of intrigue, action and great acting, plus a side of sci-fi, BBC America’s Orphan Black is a tasty dish, indeed. The fantastic drama begins when scrappy streetwise orphan Sarah Manning happens to witness the suicide of a woman who looks identical to herself and decides to step into her life to make a little cash. But she soon discovers that the dead woman wasn’t just a long-lost twin…but one of a series of clones.  And someone is trying to kill them.

The series just aired its seventh (of ten) episodes last Saturday, and each installment just keeps getting better and better. In case you missed Christopher Morgan’s introductory post, here’s a handful of reasons to catch up with the show and tune in:

[You can count on this show...]

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to work for a horror film? Not just any horror film with monsters and the like, but one of those good old-fashioned ’70s grindhouse films, like the original Last House on the Left?

That is exactly the kind of experience that the above trailer for Berberian Sound Studio looks to be. It even has some of the music and sound effects down perfectly. Here’s the official synopsis:

In the 1970s, a British sound technician is brought to Italy to work on the sound effects for a gruesome horror film. His nightmarish task slowly takes over his psyche, driving him to confront his own past. Berberian Sound Studio is many things: an anti-horror film, a stylistic tour de force, and a dream of cinema. As such, it offers a kind of pleasure that is rare in films, while recreating in a highly original way the pleasures of Italian horror cinema.

It looks right up my alley, what about you? Just remember, it’s only a movie.

Smarty Bones by Carolyn Haines is lucky number thirteen in the Sarah Booth Delaney humorous private eye series (available May 21, 2013).

 It wasn’t long ago that I was telling you how much I enjoyed reading the raucously entertaining Bonefire of the Vanities, the twelfth book in the Sarah Booth Delaney series written by Carolyn Haines. I will admit it can give the reader pause when a book is so much fun to read but is number twelve of a series. Will number thirteen prove to be unlucky or will the author move the story and characters along uproariously and at warp speed? But hey, this is Carolyn Haines and Sarah Booth Delaney we’re talking about. And don’t forget Sarah Booth’s best friend and partner in her private investigation business, Tinkie Bellcase Richmond. Not to mention Jitty, the resident Civil War-era ghost who lives at Sarah Booth’s ancestral home, Dalia House.

Fascinating as these ladies may be, I couldn’t imagine that the author would add the Lady in Red to the mix. While on a book tour, Carolyn Haines came across the Lady in Red, a corpse that was approximately one hundred years old when it was found buried in a Mississippi cemetery in 1969. The lady’s body had been preserved in alcohol and the rumors about her past were filled with mystery and legend. What better jumping off point for a paranormal, southern mystery?

[Mysterious women and others...]

As a kid I, along with most of the rest of the country, watched the made-for-TV movie Born Innocent. If you don’t know that film, it’s a 1974 title that stars Linda Blair as a once “normal” teenage girl who, mostly due to her parents’ cruel indifference, goes down a path that leads to the hell of life inside a girls’ reform school. At that time I wasn’t familiar with the concept of camp entertainment, or that there were whole subgenres within that realm that had to do with babes behind bars and reform school girls. Born Innocent was just the big TV movie that everybody was talking about that week, and it starred that girl who’d been in The Exorcist, and I wanted to see it.

The movie devastated me. The tale of a likable kid who was emotionally abandoned by her parents and left to fend for herself, with no place or person to turn to for ultimate security, left me shaken. It was so desolate. It made me realize that things like having parents who cared about you, and protection from bullies, were gifts, not to be taken for granted. I hugged my mom extra hard before going to bed after watching the movie.

[It was no Roller Boogie...]

HBO recently announced it was picking up a 7-part series called Criminal Justice starring James Gandolfini as an “ambulance-chasing New York City attorney who gets in over his head when he takes on the case of a Pakistani accused of murdering a girl on the Upper West Side,” according to Deadline.com.

The series is based very loosely on a 2008 BBC series of the same name that starred Ben Whishaw as the accused murderer. It will be written by Richard Price, who prefers to call himself a novelist (Clockers and Freedomland, among others), but who’s written some major screenplays (The Color of Money and Ransom, among others) and a bunch of episodes of The Wire—which entitles him to call himself whatever he pleases. Steven Zaillian is the director.

No word on broadcast plans yet, but we think we’ll pencil this one in on our watch list. How about you?

In April 1945, the end of World War II was finally in sight. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, recently elected to an unprecedented fourth term as president, was at his Warm Springs, Georgia, retreat, sitting for a painting. He reminded the artist that she only had 15 more minutes to work, then complained of a sudden, blinding headache, lost consciousness, and died.

Quite frankly, even someone as suspicious as I would have bought that story, hook, line, and sinker. Roosevelt had been in bad health for years, after a bout with polio left him dependent upon crutches or a wheelchair. The doctors, seeing no real need for an autopsy, decided that it must have been a cerebral hemorrhage.

And so, FDR was buried and Harry S Truman became president.

[Nothing suspicious about that... or is there?]

The Private Eye is an experiment.

From a creative standpoint, the setting is daring, a strange new future in which all technologies have advanced except for communication and images.

From a distribution standpoint, it’s unprecedented. Writer Brian K. Vaughan and artist Marcos Martin placed the 32-page Issue 1 of The Private Eye up at their site, Panel Syndicate, where it can be downloaded on a “name your price” payment system. The 27-page Issue 2 was released May 7, 2013. The plan is for a 10-issue “old-school maxiseries.”

[Try it and buy it...]

Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him Horatio; a fellow of infinite jest…

In William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the role of Yorick the court jester is little more than a cameo (you couldn’t properly call it a “walk-on”); a nonspeaking role that wouldn’t even qualify you for membership in Actors’ Equity. Yet plenty of people have wanted to play him, even though “poor Yorick” is nothing more than a skull that Hamlet holds and muses upon in Act V, Scene 1.

After all, Yorick is a role you could play…forever.

[I always dreamed of a life in the theater…]

Cuts Through Bone by Alaric Hunt is a contemporary PI novel in the classic PI novel style (available May 14, 2013).

Alaric Hunt’s Cuts Through Bone is a PI mystery with the style and tone of classic PI mysteries, which is probably why it won the 2012 Private Eye Writers of America award for Best First Private Eye Novel.

Hunt’s private investigator is Clayton Guthrie—a man short in stature and heavy on observation. He knows how to talk to snitches and how to break down a case, skills he’s trying to teach his protégé, Rachel Vasquez.

Vasquez, on the other hand, is having a hard time dealing with the tediousness that is real detective work. She considers quitting after a particularly rough morning when in walks one Mr. H.P. Whitridge with a young woman named Michelle Tompkins and the case to end all cases: the Barbie doll murders.

[Oh, you beautiful doll...]

•  Be warned! If you're using social media platform Snapchat, because the photos you send with it are promised to “self-destruct” after a time limit you specify, know that your embarrassing selfies are not safe! According to this Forbes article by Kashmir Hill, an IT forensics firm pulled dozens of supposed-to-be deleted photos from phones. It was frightningly easy...
 
• A heroine from French comics has been turned into a live-action movie by director Luc Besson, and it's got magic, mummies, and a pterodactyl! The Extraordinary Adventures of Adele Sec-Blanc features an intrepid novelist in 1911 Paris. It'll be available on DVD in August, but we must say it looks delightful!

• Also coming in late August is the third in the Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy (aka the Blood and Ice Cream trilogy) begun with Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. All were directed by Edgar Wright, who shares writing credits with Simon Pegg, who co-stars with Nick Frost. In The World's End, five friends reunite for an epic pub crawl and become humankind's only hope for survival. Bonus Martin Freeman!

In Shotgun Lullaby by Steve Ulfelder, Conway Sax must  help a recovering substance abuser who reminds him a little too much of his estranged son (available May 14, 2013).

The third Conway Sax novel by Steve Ulfelder opens with Conway beating down a guy over a lemon car sold to a new Barnburner, one Gus Biletnikov. In other words, Conway’s still acting as a half-assed investigator-slash-enforcer for the special group of AA members he credits with saving his life. And he’s still doing it with his perfect blend of heart, gruff, and bullheaded luck.

A long time ago, after more tries than you could count, I finally put together some sobriety. A couple of months, my longest dry stretch since I was fourteen.

It was awful. I didn’t know what I was doing. My knuckles were white, my teeth were ground to nubs, my nightmares lasted all day.

It was slipping away, and I knew it. I was feeling shame already over the next backslide. Had a feeling it would be the last one, the one that carried me all the way down.

[When you reach bottom there’s nowhere to go but up...]

They say you can’t judge a book by its cover, well with Kate Bufton that is certainly true! She sees books as much more than a mere storage area for words and ideas, but as the starting point for some incredible pieces of artwork.

Based in Warrington, in the North West of England, Kate says her creative side was nurtured by her teachers at school and college. “It was only at university when I started to realise that art and craft are so closely linked, yet so far apart. I consider myself both an artisan and a crafts maker,” she notes.

Kate creates amazing shapes and designs by manipulating old and unwanted books through a variety of cuts and folds. “I love manipulating the pages of the book and transforming the books from a carrier of text to an object of art,” she explains. “The pages take on a whole new and innovative life, forcing the books to be open and the pages to be displayed for all to see.”

[Her life is an open book...]

For years, absinthe was considered far more dangerous than most liquors. In fact, it was banned in both the United States and the EU for nearly a century due to its alleged hallucinogenic qualities. But in fact, it appears that the absinthe itself—the distilled spirit of wormwood—was not responsible for the problems faced by early drinkers. No, the blame would fall to adulterants in either the cheaper forms of the drink or in the mixers.

Today, absinthe can still be dangerous. Especially when mixed with stupidity. Or fire. Or both. A lesson a Russian bartender and patron learned to their combined shock and horror.

The Healer by Antti Tuomainen is a novel of dystopian, futuristic Nordic noir (available May 14, 2013).

Tapani Lehtinen’s wife, Johanna is missing. She’s a reporter and routinely goes out on assignment for days at a time, but always checks in with her husband, and it’s been twenty-four hours since he’s heard from her. After visiting her editor and expressing his concerns, the editor reluctantly tells him that she’s been working on a story about The Healer, a killer who’s been targeting families of high powered men involved in the seeming destruction of the environment, thus being part of the cause of the deteriorating climate of Helsinki and the surrounding areas. The editor is dubious that something bad has happened to Johanna, but seems to soften a bit when Tapani explains the nature of their relationship.

[The heat is on in Helsinki...]

Escapism is one of the appeals of the fantasy genre. It’s a chance to visit a world where impossible things like magic and monsters are real, and to go on epic quests to save the world. It can be just as fun and interesting though to see those elements bump up against real world events such as crime and murder. Generally you only see that collision in fantasy tales set in the modern worlds like Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files series. There are a number of authors, though, who have combined the elements of crime and noir with stories set in mythical or ancient realms.

[Crime and Fantasy were made for each other!]

Double Whammy by Gretchen Archer is the first Davis Way Crime Caper novel, a humorous mystery set in Biloxi, Mississippi (available May 14, 2013).

Davis Way is divorced from her ex-ex-husband (so, yes, twice divorced from the same guy), unemployed because her father fired her, not getting along with her mother—which is par for the course, and frustrated. It doesn’t look like things can get much worse. After all, how many restraining orders can one girl face? 

Things start to look up when she finds a job at the Bellissimo, a casino in Biloxi, Mississippi. The grand hotel offers a chance to start over, with a large paycheck and posh surroundings. After a gazillion interviews, Davis is hired to work undercover security, catching safe-cracking thieves and protecting the casino’s hard-earned gains. However, nothing in the Bellissimo is as straightforward or simple as it seems.

First off, the man who seems to be ripping off the Bellissimo’s biggest slot-game—the Double Whammy—is Davis’s ex-ex-husband.

[So nice she divorced him twice...]

At times, Britain’s chief export would seem to be well-crafted television shows in the suspense line. From across the pond, we’ve been given Prime Suspect, Public Enemies, Waking the Dead, and the recent Sherlock. Additionally, we have the mysteries of Inspectors Lewis, Lynley, and Luther (and even some inspectors whose names don’t start with L.)

In the midst of this British Invasion, one series that has perhaps fallen under the radar—despite its excellent writing, impressive acting, and intelligent approach—is the anthology series Accused. Created by Edgar Award-winning writer Jimmy McGovern, it ran two seasons from 2010 to 2012 on BBC for a total of ten hour-long episodes. The series won the International Emmy Award for Best Drama. The fact that it was short-lived (though not for lack of acclaim) makes for an easily consumable packet of probable causes.

[There’s always a story behind the story...]