Treacherous: Grifters, Ruffians and Killers by Gary Phillips isn’t a book you’d want to give to your best friend who loves cozies, as the subtitle indicates. In fact Maureen Corrigan said on NPR that some of these stories “would make Nancy Drew faint facedown into her cucumber tea sandwiches.” I didn’t know that Ms. Drew was into cucumber tea. Or maybe I’m reading the sentence wrong. At any rate, this is a collection full of the real hardboiled thing.

I’m particularly fond of “Disco Zombies,” and not just because of the title. Those of you of a suspicious nature might think I like it because one of the characters happens to be a sword-wielding tough guy named “Crider,” but I’m much too big a person to plug a story for that reason. Okay, I’m not, but the story’s a lot of fun no matter what the characters’ names are. And speaking of names, there’s “The Kim Novak Effect,” which you’ll have to read for yourself if you want to find out just what the effect is. Though you might have a good idea already.

Kate Carlisle’s One Book in the Grave finds series heroine Brooklyn Wainwright once again caught up in a perilous situation precipitated by her remarkably dangerous profession of bookbinding. When a rare edition of Beauty and the Beast surfaces, Brooklyn—along with her hot boyfriend, security expert Derek Stone, and the mysterious bad-boy Gabriel, who always seems to turn up when necessary—confronts past traumas and resolves them favorably. You will need to read the book yourself to see how a friend, long presumed to be dead, is resurrected and the evils leading to his need to fake death are vanquished. As always, Carlisle provides fascinating forays into the intricacies of bookbinding.

James Bond continues to live.

Long after his creator Ian Fleming's death, through Sean Connery, Roger Moore, et al, up to Daniel Craig, James Bond is still with us. No villain who wants to rule the world has been able to get rid of super spy 007. Even Q's gadgets haven't killed him.

And he continues to live on the page as well as on the screen.

William Boyd, the author of Restless, A Good Man in Africa, and Any Human Heart, is the third author who has been tapped by the Ian Fleming estate to continue the James Bond adventures.

Sebastian Faulks and Jeffrey Deaver were the first two authors to bring their vision of James Bond to the novels.

Boyd said he was a lifelong fan of the man with the license to kill, having been introduced to James Bond by his father. His
favorite in the series is From Russia with Love, he said.

According to newspaper and website reports, Boyd said he plans to set the novel in 1969, returning to ""classic Bond."" Boyd's 007 novel is slated to be published in the fall of 2013, which will be 60 years after the publication of the first Bond novel, Casino Royale.

Fleming died in 1964 shortly after the early Bond films brought his character to worldwide fame. He wrote 14 Bond novels and short story collections and penned the children's classic Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

Boyd's novel is slated to be published in Britain by Jonathan Cape, which is Ian Fleming's original publisher and an imprint of Vintage Publishing, and simultaneously by HarperCollins Publishers in the US and Canada.

Celebrating Nero Wolfe and 75 Years of detective brilliance.

Carl Mueller illustration for "Bitter End" by Rex Stout in The American Magazine (November, 1940)

The bestsellers of 1934 included James Hilton’s Goodbye Mr. Chips, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lamb in His Bosom by Caroline Miller, and all 1,224 pages of Hervey Allen’s Anthony Adverse, which Hollywood adapted into a sprawling epic starring Fredric March. But the most notable title of that year may well have been a $2 Farrar & Rinehart hardcover featuring a dust jacket adorned with a pink orchid and the silhouette of a fat man. Rex Stout was 47 years old when he wrote that book titled Fer-de-Lance. He could not have known that 48 Wolfe books were to follow, or that by the time of his death in 1975 his works would be translated into 22 languages and have sold more than 45 million copies. At the 2000 Bouchercon, Stout was nominated as Best Mystery Writer of the Century, along with Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Agatha Christie.

Three-quarters of a century after its release, Fer-de-Lance continues to delight readers. In just a few hundred pages, Stout brilliantly melds traditional English whodunits with hardboiled American gumshoes by personifying each in the form of a character, Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, arguably the most memorable detective team after Holmes and Watson. Eccentric genius Wolfe deduces in the style of Sayers and Christie, while his streetwise assistant Archie is a private eye in the tradition of Hammett and Chandler.

According to Otto Penzler, proprietor of New York City’s Mysterious Bookshop and publisher of the Harcourt imprint Otto Penzler Books, Stout “remains to this day the only significant writer who was able to blend perfectly the hardboiled and the softboiled.”

Wolfe, for the uninitiated, is a corpulent aesthete living in a four-story brownstone on Manhattan’s West 35th Street. He indulges in reading, drinking beer, eating haute cuisine (courtesy of his live-in four star cook, Fritz), and cultivating a collection of several thousand orchids (tended to by his full time orchidacean, Theodore). Wolfe’s intellect is staggering, as are his sedentary habits. Because he’s loath to leave the brownstone, he depends on Archie (who has a photographic memory) to gather facts and corral suspects. Along with doing the legwork, Ohio-born Archie shrewdly narrates the stories, does the bookkeeping and drinks copious amounts of milk.

Although Wolfe is a champion of the truth, he makes it clear that he works for money to support his sybaritic lifestyle. Usually Archie has to needle Wolfe into dropping his reading and taking a case. “He doesn’t solve crimes for altruistic reasons; he expects to be paid, and well, because he has a particular skill others do not have,” says Will Thomas, author of the Cyrus Barker and Thomas Llewelyn mysteries and a longtime fan of the Wolfe canon. “He is no amateur, like Lord Peter Wimsey or Miss Marple. Stout has combined the old-fashioned knight errant with the modern businessman who embodied success in post-war America.”

In that sense, Wolfe resembled his creator. In a 1946 interview published in Writers and Writing, Stout quipped, “While I could afford to, I played with words. When I could no longer afford that I wrote for money.” There were other similarities, as Stout’s own mental gifts and idiosyncratic life paved the way for his singular literary creations.

Rex Todhunter Stout was born in Noblesville, Indiana, in 1886, the sixth of nine children in a family of Quaker heritage. He grew up in Kansas, learned to read before age two, and was a four-state spelling bee champion at 11. By that time he’d also read his father’s thousand-volume classical library. He breezed through high school, but was an indifferent collegian.

In 1905 he enlisted in the Navy and spent two years aboard President Theodore Roosevelt’s yacht, the Mayflower, where he made a killing playing cards with ranking officers. After buying his discharge, he studied law for a couple of months and then worked a series of odd jobs, including stints as a bookkeeper, tugboat worker, and tobacco store clerk. In a 1969 interview for Holiday, he stated, “I never had any adventures, but I had a lot of episodes. It was not only good preparation for a writer, but also for life.”

In his 20s and 30s, Stout eventually began to focus on writing, selling short stories and churning out a handful of serialized novels. During that period, he and his brother devised an educational savings program that was marketed to schools. It became an enormous success, and brought Stout the financial freedom to concentrate on literary fiction. In 1929, now living in New York, he wrote How Like a God, a psychological novel about a man obsessed with a seductress whom he murders. Over the next few years, he published four more novels in a similar psychological vein. All received good to mixed reviews, but did not sell well (and are rarely read today).

To make matters worse, Stout lost his fortune when the market crashed. By 1933, he had a family to support—his wife Pola was pregnant and bills needed to be paid. Realizing that his skills lay in storytelling, not “serious” literature, he decided to turn to the more lucrative world of detective stories, a genre he’d enjoyed as a reader. A day after Pola and their baby daughter Barbara returned home from the hospital, Stout began writing Fer-de-Lance. In it, Wolfe manages to link the murders of a poor Italian immigrant and a distinguished college president without setting one foot outside his home. Although it is the first Wolfe story, the characters and tone emerge virtually fully formed. Wolfe’s daily routines are casually revealed: breakfast at eight, two hours with his orchids from nine to 11, office hours from 11 until lunch, then more office hours till four, after which he returns to the plant rooms for two more hours. In an introduction to a 1992 reissue of the book, Loren D. Estleman wrote, “So many references are made to earlier adventures in such an offhand, familiar way by narrator Archie, and his abrasive relationship with his eccentric employer fits them so much like a beloved and well-worn suit of clothes, that the newcomer may be excused the assumption that he has encountered the canon in mid-stride.”

The American Magazine purchased serial rights to Fer-de-Lance and published it under the title Point of Death on October 24, 1934. Two days later, the book was released to favorable reviews, and a series was born. Stout delivered his second Wolfe novel, The League of Frightened Men, the following year. As with this and every other Wolfe story, his first draft—written in longhand—was his last. Remarkably, he finished each story in about five weeks. The rest of his time was spent in private and political pursuits at his beloved New York country home, High Meadows, which he had designed.

More books followed in quick succession as Stout’s popularity grew with readers, critics and fellow writers. Stout briefly flirted with two other sleuths—1937’s The Hand in the Glove introduced female detective “Dol” Bonner, while Double for Death (1939) featured Westchester County detective Tecumseh Fox—but these had little impact. During World War II, he wrote US propaganda materials as chairman of the War Writers’ Board. From the end of the war and onward, Stout only composed Wolfe novels and short stories. He achieved incredible consistency—the works were set in the year they were written, but the routines in the brownstone remained invariable. Taken as a whole, he was able to explore human nature in all its complexity, without sacrificing narrative or character.

Several of the story lines were memorable, such as And Be a Villain, the first of three books that pitted Wolfe against criminal mastermind Arnold Zeck. Nonetheless, the plots have always been somewhat beside the point. The real draw is the interplay between Wolfe and Archie, and the aura of the brownstone. “Rex Stout usually doesn’t make a pretense of playing fair with the reader in the Christie sense,” says Ira Matetsky, the leader (or “werowance”) of The Nero Wolfe Society, a group of aficionados affectionately known as The Wolfe Pack. “He is perfectly capable, in a 200-page novel, of having Saul Panzer fly in from Peru on page 193 with missing information. You can argue about the plot. It’s the characters, the dialog, the humor, the ritual, the sense of family that pulls us all in.”

Fellow Wolfe Pack member and author Jane Cleland concurs: “I still feel like I’m friends with the characters,” she says. “I adore them. Wolfe and Archie fit together like ying and yang.”

Cleland usually tucks in a Wolfe homage or two in each of her Josie Prescott antique mysteries. She’s part of a who’s who of writers who have admired Stout’s work—Isaac Asimov, John Lescroart, Lawrence Block, James M. Cain, Donald E. Westlake, Walter Mosley, Stuart Kaminsky, and Susan Conant are among several others. Will Thomas considers his detecting duo of Barker and Llewelyn to be his own tribute to Wolfe and Archie. “I feel that Stout’s influence is widespread among American mystery writers,” Thomas says. “We study him the way an English major studies Shakespeare or Eliot.” And if the creation of Wolfe and Archie weren’t enough, writers have another reason to be grateful to Stout. Long a champion of liberal issues, he was a member of the Author’s League, twice served as president of the Author’s Guild and worked toward securing reprint royalties for writers. He fervently lobbied Congress for copyright reform and was in attendance when President Eisenhower signed the Universal Copyright Convention into law in 1954.

News of Stout’s death in 1975 made the front page of The New York Times. His final novel, A Family Affair, written in his late 80s, had appeared a month before. But Nero Wolfe lives on. In 1977, Boston College English professor John McAleer renewed interest in the author with his exhaustive Rex Stout: A Biography. From the late 1980s to mid-1990s, Robert Goldsborough continued the Wolfe saga with seven novels; the first, Murder in E Minor, initially was written as a gift to his mother, a Stout devotee. In 2000, A&E debuted a television adaptation of Stout’s novels starring Maury Chaykin and Timothy Hutton—as Wolfe and Archie, respectively—which ran for two seasons. (This wasn’t the sleuth’s first TV appearance; NBC ran 12 episodes of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe in 1981, with William Conrad in the title role. Additionally, there have been Italian and Russian adaptations.)

Right: Maury Chaykin and Timothy Hutton as Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, respectively, in the A&E series A Nero Wolfe Mystery

Bantam has reissued many of Stout’s mysteries in paperback, although unfortunately others currently remain out of print. Nonetheless, he continues to inspire passionate fans. They know that Wolfe sleeps in yellow pajamas, can tell you about Archie’s preferences in guns and are able to sketch a diagram of the brownstone’s floor plans from memory. Some of the most fervent enthusiasts are members of the The Wolfe Pack. Organized in the 1970s, today the group boasts more than 400 members; central among its activities is the annual Black Orchid Banquet and the presentation of the Nero Wolfe and Black Orchid Novella Awards. (In honor of the 75th anniversary of Fer-de-Lance, the Wolfe Pack will celebrate with a special banquet on the final night of the 2009 Bouchercon, complete with a full menu taken from Too Many Cooks.)

“The fans are devoted fans, they’re not casual fans,” says Otto Penzler, who himself was a founding member of the Wolfe Pack. “I’ve been in business over 30 years now and everybody likes Rex Stout. Young, old, men, women, people who like cozies, people who like hardboiled stuff—everybody. The brownstone is like 22 Baker Street. It’s just like coming home.”

Before his death, Stout told his biographer McAleer that he hoped Wolfe and Archie would live forever. As the countless readers who have joyfully taken that literary journey to West 35th Street can attest, they do.

“Archie called his employer a genius,” says Will Thomas. “The same could be said of his creator.”

Annabelle Mortensen is a librarian and freelance writer living in Chicago.

This article first appeared in Mystery Scene Fall Issue #111.

Voices. I hear ’em. All the time. All the best private eyes have ’em. Crack open a book, read a few pages, and you can pretty much nail down who’s speaking. No, really. Is there any fan of the genre who could ever mistake Mike Hammer for Lew Archer, or V.I. Warshawski for Stephanie Plum?

Kathleen Turner as V.I. Warshawski in the 1991 Jeff Kanew film

Sure, the prevalence of first-person narration in the shamus game is part of it, but it’s more than that. It’s about attitude and tone and pacing and outlook.

Raymond Chandler, who brought one of the most singular and influential voices to the genre (and arguably to American literature itself), called it style, and he may have had something there.

“The most durable thing in writing is style,” he once wrote, “and style is the most valuable investment a writer can make with his time.”

Right from the start, Black Mask Boys seemed to understand that. The Continental Op and Race Williams had their own voices, and only the most tin eared reader would have had difficulty telling them apart.

Carroll John Daly’s Williams was a man of action, to be sure, but he wasn’t exactly a deep thinker, something of which he seemed inordinately proud. “Sometimes...one hunk of lead is worth all the thought in the world,” was pretty much his credo, whereas Hammett’s Continental Op tended to be a little more philosophical, and icily pragmatic. He’d shoot you if he had to, but only if he had to. “I’m a detective because I like the work.... And liking the work makes you want to do it as well as you can. Otherwise there’d be no sense to it. I don’t know anything else, don’t enjoy anything else...”

And yet, the Op voice is very different from that of Hammett’s other great gumshoe. Sam Spade is the Op with a snarl and a full set of teeth, capable of the same chilly practicality, perhaps, but also more vulnerable to temptation. He may toss off a breezy compliment to his long-suffering secretary Effie (“You’re a damn good man, sister”) but he’s no fan of wasted words. “The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter,” he snaps at one point. But it’s in his closing, straightoutta-Hamlet near-soliloquy that his heart is laid bare. He carefully argues the case for turning Brigid in to the law, and then makes the counter-argument. “Now on the other side we’ve got what? All we’ve got is the fact that maybe you love me and maybe I love you.... But suppose I do? What of it? Maybe next month I won’t.... Then what? Then I’ll think I played the sap. And if I did it and got sent over then I’d be sure I was the sap,” Spade argues, mostly to himself, before summing it up with a frosty “I won’t play the sap for you,” arguably the greatest kiss-off in the genre.

Now that’s a voice.

And there are so many more:

The fatherly tone of Lew Archer, forever ready to hear confessions, doomed like some mythic Greek figure to trying to understand the past.

The curmudgeonly gloom and weathered-but-sunshiny hedonism of Travis McGee.

Amos Walker’s broad-shouldered, wisecracking spit at the once-shiny chrome of Motown.

The primal roar of Mike Hammer, a hunter loosed on the streets of Manhattan, out for justice and blood.

The giddy romanticism and swaggering self-confidence of Spenser, tempered by a Groucho-worthy smart-ass defiance that’s ready to put the boot to any show of affectation, snootiness or pretense.

The bristly earnestness and closely guarded heart of V.I. Warshawski.

The high-flying slang-slinging gobbledegook of Robert Leslie Bellem’s Dan Turner.

The smirky nudge nudge wink wink of Shell Scott and “Where are my clothes?” naïveté of Honey West offer a whole different take on sexuality from the last call frankness of Jill Edmonson’s Toronto PI Sasha Jackson or the unapologetic let’s-get-it-on pulpy raunchiness of Christa Faust’s new “dyke dick,” Butch Fatale.

The “just folks” Everyman decency—even in the midst of some outlandish scam—of Jim Rockford.

The fatalistic pessimism and survivor’s guilt of Philip Kerr’s Nazi-era Berlin dick Bernie Gunther as he tries to crawl from the shadow of a world gone mad.

The “been there” conversational and confessional vibe of Lawrence Block’s Matt Scudder after-hours storytelling.

The glacial efficiency and warrior’s fierceness of Thomas Perry’s Jane Whitefield, as she escorts her charges “out of the world” to safer ground.

The “Have you heard the news?” worried man blues and stubborn defiance of John Shannon’s Jack Liffey. The pub-crawling world-weariness and poet’s broken soul of Ken Bruen’s Jack Taylor. The “Me, Tarzan” confidence in his own abilities of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher. All as individual as fingerprints.

And so it goes. One of my favorite reads last year was The Cut by George Pelecanos, which introduced Lucas Spero, a 29-year-old Iraq War vet who’s come home to Washington and has more or less stumbled into his present occupation of unlicensed private investigator. As he explains it, “When I came back from the Middle East, I did a little security work. Limo companies, driving celebrities and dignitaries, like that. I also silent-bounced at a couple of clubs. One night at the bar I met a woman whose boyfriend... was a bully; he’d fucked her over.... I agreed to try and get her stuff back.... Her jewelry was worth a lot of money, and my take was substantial. I thought, I can get used to this.”

The plot? No new ground broken there, perhaps, but you’ve gotta love that voice. Sure, at times the tidal wave of twentysomething pop culture references may seem forced (Pelecanos is my age), but there’s no doubt he’s really tapped into something fresh here.

And it bodes well for the future.

Because as long as there are new voices to be heard in detective fiction, voices with something to say about our lives and how we live them, we’ll keep listening.

This article first appeared in Mystery Scene Spring Issue #124.

Mollie Cox Bryan sets Scrapbook of Secrets in rural Shenandoah Valley, Virginia. All is not well in Cumberland Creek. This becomes clear immediately, as the book opens with a mysterious, seemingly senseless knife attack upon a harmless elderly woman, whose daughter owns a dance studio and is a member of a local scrapbooking circle. The crafters are perplexed by a puzzle of their own: the sudden, entirely unanticipated suicide of a young housewife who had recently joined their scrapbooking group. In addition, the crafters are bewildered by the fact that the woman's effects were discarded immediately, placed by the curbside for trash pickup.

Plagued by the incongruous death, the crafters set out to investigate, led by ex-investigative reporter Annie Chamovitz, a young mother recently transplanted from more cosmopolitan Bethesda, Maryland. Annie employs her investigative skills to turn up a number of truly astonishing facts that I won't divulge, lest I spoil the pleasures of the novel plot. Scrapbook of Secrets is a font of ingenuity, providing not only superb entertainment but also a surprisingly successful exploration of marital issues. I'm very much looking forward to the next book in this promising series.

The author (1940-2009) was an outstanding mystery writer, but this memoir, first published in 1993, concerns his hunting and fishing experiences and his relationship with his father, outdoors writer H.G. "Tap" Tapply. The main text includes some discussion of writing advice he got from his father, and some of this memorial edition's new material concerns his collaborations with friend and fellow mystery writer Philip Craig. Copious family photos appear throughout. Son Mike Tapply and widow Vicki Stiefel (herself a mystery novelist) provide introductory remembrances.