Don’t let the title scare you. These aren’t comic book stories. They’re crime stories, most of them with a dark edge, and the superhero characters will surprise you with their variety. James Reasoner’s story, for example, is set during the American Revolution. You didn’t know there were superheroes then? Now’s the time to find out all about it. This is a surprising and entertaining anthology.

As a South Floridian, I am no stranger to hurricanes. And I know no matter how prepared one is, one is never completely prepared.

So my heart goes out to those affected by Hurricane Sandy’s devastating visit to the Northeast, effects of that continue to impact
lives.

Author Chris Grabenstein found inspiration in the Jersey Shore for his about Iraqi War veteran John Ceepak turned police detective.

Grabenstein set his novels in the Jersey Shore town of Sea Haven, a fictional combination of the very real towns of Seaside Heights and Beach Haven, both of which were slammed by Sandy. The roller coaster that inspired his novel Mad Mouse is now under water following Sandy’s visit.

Now Grabenstein wants to do his part to help Hurricane Sandy relief efforts.

During December, Grabenstein will donate all the money from the Kindle and Nook sales of four of his Ceepak novels: Tilt A Whirl, Mad Mouse, Whack a Mole and Ring Toss.

Grabenstein also will donate all the proceeds from his two self-published ebooks, The Explorers’ Gate and The Christmas Tree (Kindle story only).

The money will be donated to the Community Food Bank of New Jersey.

The unsung heroes of our society are the ordinary women with neither style nor beauty who take up the slack every single day...

I wrote the final draft of Dark Lie in Chile, South America, with bronchitis. My husband took me there to visit his native country, but I spent the vacation mostly sitting up in bed writing Dark Lie on my laptop computer, coughing, and cocooned in my alpaca fleece hoodie because Chile was chilly. Uniformly. And for some inexplicable Chilean reason it was necessary for the windows always to be wide open so that it was cold indoors and out.

While I did not appreciate this local custom at the time, it might have been a fortunate circumstance that I was sick, because I was writing about a chronically ill protagonist. Dorrie White, the middle-aged woman who becomes the unlikely hero of Dark Lie, has a severe case of lupus.

To add another fortunate circumstance, one of my husband’s Chileno relatives happens to be married to a gringa like me, and she has lupus. It was from the Chilean connection and years of friendship with her that I had learned about lupus, and appreciated why its name is derived from the Latin word for wolf. Lupus ravages. I saw for myself its unpredictable flare-ups and fatigue, its red, rough skin rash, the effects of the steroids used to treat it, and the many ways in which it manages to lower a woman’s self-esteem and mess up her life.

In Dark Lie, Dorrie’s marriage remains childless because of her lupus, and she yearns for the baby she gave up for adoption when she was a teenager. She locates this child, Juliet, only to see a predatory male abduct her and drive away with her. And then Dorrie takes action.

For a long time now (ever since my stint as a mom and housewife), I have been convinced that the most frequent unsung heroes of our society are the ordinary women with neither style nor beauty who take up the slack every single day, doing what needs to be done no matter what it costs them. Dorrie is one of these. Her immediate, instinctive reaction to rescue Juliet leads her deeper and deeper into the dangerous shadows of her own past, exposing the lies that have sickened her own psyche.

My bronchitis eventually went away, of course. No big deal. But being held captive by sickness in a cold, foreign land seemed to give me some extra depth of insight. I realized that Dorrie’s lupus, while a practical problem, is also symbolic of predation in Dark Lie and in our lives. Everywhere women go they are stalked by a wolf pack of domestic violence, rape, abduction, even murder. Dorrie White confronts the same wolves that eat at many women, and that comprise part of our society’s “dark lie.”

Dark Lie by Nancy Springer, NAL, November 2012, $14.00

This article first appeared in Mystery Scene Holiday Issue #127.

Those of us who work for Mystery Scene feel we are part of a family united not by blood but by common interests.

We also are united by Kate Stine and Brian Skupin, Mystery Scene’s publisher and co-publisher who also are married.

Ever since I joined the Mystery Scene team, I have felt that Kate and Brian go out of their way to make us all feel incredibly welcomed.

When Kate and Brian were the Fan Guests of Honor during the 2011 Bouchercon in St. Louis, they elected not to have the usual one-on-one interview. Instead, they had several of their contributors participate on a panel with them.

So I want all our readers to know that Kate is the subject of the latest Sisters in Crime interview. Kate is interviewed by Hank Phillippi Ryan, an Emmy Award-winning journalist and a fine mystery writer. By the way, I interviewed Hank for the Fall 2012 issue (No. 126).

Here’s the link to the interview:

http://sisters-in-crime-sinc.blogspot.com/2012/12/interview-with-publisher-kate-stine-of.html

The real curiosity about the movie Jack Reacher is not about the plot or or the action; it’s about the star.

Can Tom Cruise, not known for his height or his brawn, slip into the shoes of Jack Reacher, described in Lee Child’s novels as 6' 5" tall with a 50-inch chest, and weighing between 210 and 250 pounds?

Well. . .Cruise may play Jack Reacher, but he is no Jack Reacher.

And it is not because physically Cruise doesn’t resemble the Reacher described in the novels.

Granted, movies have a history of those rather short of stature playing bigger than life heroes. Alan Ladd, at 5 feet-6 inches, is about the same height as Cruise, but no one sat higher in the saddle than he did in Shane. (Ladd’s height has been reported to be anywhere from 5-5 to 5-9 with 5-6 being the most accepted.)

It’s not the lack of height that shortens the appeal of Cruise as Reacher.

It’s Cruise himself, and the script.

His personal oddities aside, I generally like Cruise as an actor. He has proven himself to be a decent action hero as Ethan Hunt in the Mission Impossible series and as a man caught up in situations beyond his control in The Firm and A Few Good Men. As a romantic lead, he’s had me at hello in Jerry Maguire and Top Gun. He’s even shown he has a sense of humor and can riff off his image in Tropic Thunder and Rock of Ages. And we sometimes forget that Cruise can be a really good actor as witnessed in The Color of Money and Born on the Fourth of July.

His performance isn’t bad and often is entertaining, but he should not be in this role.

But, Cruise brings nothing new to the role, no nuance, no reason to make those unfamiliar with Child’s novels understand why they are like the crack cocaine of mystery fiction. He is simply Tom Cruise delivering the kind of performance that has worked time and again for him.

Entertaining? Yes? Nuanced? No.

Cruise is playing dress up; he is saying the right things and trying to act like the hero. But it is difficult to buy him as Reacher, even in the scene where he is shirtless.

It’s as if Ethan Hunt from the MI franchise went undercover as Jack Reacher. Any moment he will take off his mask to reveal he is. . . Tom Cruise!

It would have been better to cast an unknown as Jack Reacher, an actor who could make us believe in this character and who would find himself in a star-making role.

But Cruise brings in the big bucks. And that is what counts.

But Jack Reacher ’s shortfall isn’t totally Cruise’s fault.

Spread some of the blame to writer and director Christopher McQuarrie (The Usual Suspects, The Tourist).

On the page, Child’s drifter-hero mixes the thriller with an old-fashioned western. With his military police background, Reacher knows how to clean up a town, and when to leave. True, there is a formula to the books but it is a formula that is invisible and works every time.

On the screen, that formula overwhelms nearly every scene. Jack Reacher isn’t a bad thriller film, but it’s one we’ve seen way too many times and the predictability blares too loudly.

If you have seen any of the Die Hards, the Bournes or any James Bond films, then you have seen Jack Reacher .

We’ve seen the car chases, the action clichés and we’ve heard the dialogue before, too, though snatches of it are quite clever. And I do want to give mad props to one car chase that doesn't appear to use any computer graphics.

Jack Reacher is based on Child’s 2005 novel One Shot, the ninth in his series.

Evidence points to James Barr, a former military sniper, in the shooting of five people. Reacher has different ideas. Taking a job as an investigator for the accused man’s defense attorney, Reacher comes up against a hired killer and a Russian called “the Zec.”

British actress Rosamund Pike plays the defense attorney and director Werner Herzog gives a turn as a Russian mobster. Both have done better work, as has Robert Duvall who plays the cantankerous owner of a gun range. Look for Lee Child playing a silent desk sergeant.

There are many differences between the novel One Shot and Jack Reacher , none of which add or detract from the story. In the novel, the action takes place in Indiana. The movie moves the action to Pittsburgh; Barr’s sister and a TV reporter who help Reacher are missing.

Jack Reacher features a lot of violence, shootings and fighting. I wish someone could explain to me how this was rated PG-13 and the comedy This Is 40 is rated R (for sexual content, crude humor, pervasive language and some drug material.)

Will Jack Reacher interest new readers to Child’s novels? I hope so. Because then those who are unfamiliar with the novels would know what the fuss over Reacher is really all about.

Jack Reacher is rated PG-13: Violence, some drug material and language. Running time 2 hours, 10 minutes.

Photos: Tom Cruise as Jack Reacher, top two photos. Cruise with Lee Child and Rosamund Pike. Cruise with Robert Duvall. Photos from Paramount Pictures

No matter how I try, no profile can encompass every snippet of an interview.

And I certainly tried to include every quote in the profile of Michael Connelly, which is the cover article in the current issue of Mystery Scene.

But some things just have to hit the cutting room floor.

Several people offered quotes about Connelly’s well-respected reputation.

Here’s what McKenna Jordan, owner of Murder by the Book in Houston, said:

“In my experience, the vast majority of authors within the mystery community are terrific people: smart, funny, self-deprecating, and truly appreciative of the support of an independent bookseller,” she said.

“Michael Connelly embodies these qualities and more. He is a true gentleman, one whom we are always honored to host, and one whose books are consistently among the best of the year.”

And Connelly, whose latest novel is The Black Box, told me that he prefers to write novels rather than scripts. But Connelly is again “deviating” from his plans by writing a script based on his short story "The Safe Man," a ghost tale that was published anonymously in The Secret Society of Demolition Writers in 2005. The Safe Man is now being sold as ebook and audio book under his name.

“It’s not what I normally write, but I thought it would be a cool writing challenge to do a script based on it. It’s a very visual story.”

Reading's pleasure is solitary, but it is also infinite. There is very little in life that gives us so much and asks so little...

It seems to me that I have always been in the midst of reading a book. I can’t remember a time when it was otherwise, although there is a distinct possibility that I wasn’t doing any reading in the crib. But from my earliest memories of being a child, I was surrounded by books, and books and libraries loom large in my personal legend. I became a writer largely because I loved reading. Reading, I found myself swept up in other worlds and in the lives of people whose largeness of experience lived within me long after the covers of the book were closed. Reading, I developed a desire to do the same thing that was going on on the page. But by this I mean that what I wanted to do was write. For what was on the page constituted words, and it was the words themselves that created in my mind the images of Anne Shirley, of Laura Ingalls, of Nancy Drew, of the Boxcar Children, and on and on.

When I was growing up in the 1950s, there were few distractions to lure a child away from books, but I didn’t cling to books because they were the only relief I had from boredom. Indeed, in the neighborhood in which I lived, there were children aplenty so there was very little boredom. We played like demons, returning home only when the “five o’clock whistle” blew at the packing plant in Mountain View, California, down by the railroad tracks but with enough velocity that it could be heard all over town. Our play was filled with games of imagination that always began with one of the children offering the magic words, “Let’s say…” and completing the sentence with something like “we live on the prairie and over there under the plum tree will be our sod house” or “I’m the mother and you’re the father” or “I’m the teacher and you’re the bad kids.” We also played hide-and-seek and kick-the-can and mother-may-I and tag. But when darkness fell or when rain visited the Santa Clara valley, we had books. Or perhaps I should say more specifically, I had books.

I cannot imagine a life in which there are no books. Nor can I imagine a life in which books are merely a second, third, fourth, or fifth choice of entertainment. When I finish one book, I pick up another and to me there never exists the anxiety of "What will I do next?" or "What will I do alone?" or "What will I do while I wait?" I have a stack of to-be-read books that will give me pleasure for at least a decade, and whenever I enter our local bookstore, I buy another and add it to the stack.

I have my favorites, of course. I have read To Kill a Mockingbird at least ten times, and Possession by A.S. Byatt will probably always reign as my choice of best novel ever written although In the Lake of the Woods by Tim O'Brien takes a close second to that. I have discovered writers whose work has taken my breath away—who can do otherwise but celebrate the discovery of Tana French, for example?—and I have lived in the descriptive elegance of people who have been writing for years.

As a novelist myself now, I am thrilled when someone tells me they walked down the King’s Road in London to look at the exact house at the corner of Cheyne Row and Lordship Place where my character Simon St. James lives, and I am delighted when I learn that someone else went to a location in one of my novels because I made it so real that they “just had to see it.” For these are things that I myself have done as a reader, eager to experience in part what a writer whom I will never meet has so lovingly crafted on the page.

I celebrate reading, probably more than anything. Its pleasure is solitary, but it is also infinite. There is very little in life that gives us so much and asks so little of us: just to find a chair, to open the pages, and to fall into the embrace of story.

This "Writers on Reading" essay was originally published in "At the Scene" eNews January 2013 as a first-look exclusive to our enewsletter subscribers. For more special content available first to our enewsletter subscribers, sign up here.

Although he enjoyed a long and successful career culminating in a popular TV series based on his thoughtful Superintendent Wycliffe novels, W.J. Burley has attracted surprisingly little critical attention. Here are some reasons to seek out his work.

Photo courtesy of the W.J. Burley website and ©Alan Burley.

W.J. Burley is best known for the novels featuring Chief Superintendent Wycliffe, which form the most notable detective series ever to have been set in Burley’s beautiful native county, Cornwall. Yet when he died in 2002, Burley’s passing was scarcely noticed in the crime fiction world, a mystery in itself.

The solution to the puzzle lies in Burley’s private nature. He was for many years a member of the Crime Writers’ Association, but he never involved himself in its activities and seems to have spent little time socialising with fellow mystery novelists. He seldom sought personal publicity after turning to fiction, relatively late: he was 52 when his first novel, A Taste of Power, was published in 1966.

The book received relatively scant attention, but it launched a career that was to last for three and a half decades. Throughout that time, Burley’s main preoccupation was to develop his craft. Almost alone amongst major British crime writers, he modeled his style on that of Georges Simenon, whose work he much admired. His books, like Simenon’s, were short and crisply written, but unlike the Belgian master, he did not write full-time until retiring from his career as a teacher.

Intensely self-critical, Burley confessed in Twentieth Century Crime and Mystery Writers that he had “never felt very happy with my books—they seemed rather too derivative, following too closely an established pattern.” By that time, Wycliffe was already well-established, but Burley resolved “to break new ground.” He said of Charles and Elizabeth, a Gothic novel of suspense published in 1979: “For the first time I feel that I have written a book which offers something a little different.” Yet despite his efforts to break away from the constraints of formula, he kept returning to Wycliffe, and as the series progressed it displayed an increasing assurance of style. Happily, Burley’s reputation is likely to benefit from the creation of a new and impressive website by a Cornwall-based enthusiast, Mario de Pace. So this is perhaps an opportune moment to take another look at his career.

William John Burley (known as John) was born in the pretty port of Falmouth in 1914. Married with two sons, he worked as an engineer before seizing the opportunity to change direction and study zoology as a mature student at Oxford University. At Oxford, he attended Balliol College, best known to mystery lovers as the alma mater of Lord Peter Wimsey. (Balliol has produced close to 40 writers of crime fiction over the years.) Afterwards, Burley taught biology at Newquay School.

Like many teachers, he was meticulous in his habits. When he bought a book for his personal library, he not only wrote his name inside it, but also recorded the date of acquisition. Such attention to detail is an excellent qualification for an author of tightly plotted traditional mysteries. Burley went further by compiling “plot books” with plans for his stories. These make fascinating reading and extracts can be seen on the website, which also contains informative material about Burley’s unfinished work—he remained a committed writer up to the very end of his life.

Burley began with books about an amateur detective before deciding to concentrate on the unfolding career of a professional policeman. A Taste of Power involved poison pen letters in a school setting and introduced Henry Pym. Henry is a zoologist with a keen interest in murder and a convenient friendship with senior police officer, Detective Superintendent Judd.

Pym reappears in Death in Willow Pattern (1969), a high-spirited example of the traditional detective novel that, shorn of a few modern touches, might have been published 30 years earlier. Pym is invited, along with his glamorous secretary Susan, to spend Christmas at Peel Place, a Cornish mansion steeped in dark legends. His host, Sir Francis Leigh, wants his advice on the disposal of antiquarian books and manuscripts, but it soon emerges that Sir Francis may have an ulterior motive for asking Pym to stay. A couple of local girls have gone missing and there are hints that Sir Francis may have inherited the esoteric sexual tastes of a notorious ancestor.

“Crime isn’t a chess problem,” Pym tells Susan. “There can be no dependence on mathematical logic as a tool for unravelling the workings of the human mind.” This is hardly the credo of a disciple of Sherlock Holmes, and Burley seems to have realised that the classic whodunit form was unlikely to give him the scope he needed to explore criminal psychology. So Henry was abandoned—the hint at the end of the book is that he will marry Susan—and Wycliffe, who had made his bow in Three-Toed Pussy (1968), moved on to centre stage in To Kill a Cat (1970).

Burley explained in 1991 that he wanted Wycliffe “to be diligent but compassionate, earnest but with a wry sense of humour, and sufficiently idiosyncratic to be interesting.” He also said, “My next five books exploited the Wycliffe character and three of them, Guilt-Edged, Wycliffe and the Pea-Green Boat, and Wycliffe and the Schoolgirls, adopted a more psychological approach. This trend culminated in The Schoolmaster, a non-Wycliffe crime story which tells how a sensitive, introspective schoolmaster with a load of guilt finds his way to some sort of salvation.”

One senses that Burley, like so many crime writers, was torn between concentrating on his series and venturing into other territories. For him, the Wycliffe books were not a mere refuge from more testing challenges; he was keen to lift his series above the formulaic. Yet from time to time he succumbed to the urge to try something different. In 1978, he even tried his hand at a different genre. The Sixth Day is a little-known science fiction novel (which is unlikely to become better known unless someone reprints it—the price of the first and only edition are prohibitive to all but the most passionate fan) and he did not repeat the experiment. After The House of Care (1980), which treats the tangled relationships of the Care family in another Cornwall-based Gothic mystery, he seems to have decided to stick to Wycliffe.

This decision was finally vindicated when he was over 80 and HTV, on the strength of a successful pilot show, decided to produce a series about Wycliffe, with the detective played by an excellent, edgy actor, Jack Shepherd. The glamorous Cornish locations may well have attracted the television moguls even more than the mystery puzzles, but the results were consistently watchable and attracted high viewer ratings. Burley preferred the original scripts based on his characters to those adapted from his own novels: “The breakdown in structure involved with adaptation seemed to lose much of the point of the books.”

Burley summed up his work thus:

Most of my books are set in the far southwest, and they are concerned with the tensions which arise within small groups of people who live or work together in close proximity—the family in a country house; the partners in a family business; the people living in a village street or town square. My criminals are never professionals but ordinary people who feel driven by repressed emotions of fear, hatred or jealousy to commit crimes which in other circumstances they would find unthinkable. In my more recent books I have used actual locations in Cornwall and Devon, confusing the topography slightly in order to avoid the risk of seeming to represent actual people.

The rural settings suit Burley’s low-key style and offer further confirmation of Sherlock Holmes’ belief, expressed in “The Copper Beeches,” that “the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.” By focusing on a region he knew intimately, Burley evoked atmosphere with an insider’s sure touch.

In Burley’s books, the policeman’s lot is far from glamorous. Wycliffe is much given to introspection, especially as a tough case draws to a conclusion. Take, for instance, this passage from the final page of Wycliffe and the Schoolgirls (1976):

Wycliffe went up to his office and stood by the window in the darkness. He was trying to come to terms with himself. Why had he subjected [the culprit] to an interrogation which served no recognised professional end? Out of curiosity? If that meant that he needed to understand. Surely that was more important than knowing about the electrostatic detection of footprints or the latest methods of recording and analysing the statistics of crime.

It is this need to understand the psychological make-up of murderers that drives his detective work. The mood as he solves a mystery is not triumphalist but melancholy, verging on the anticlimactic, and occasionally judgmental. At the end of Wycliffe and the Winsor Blue (1987), he reflects that the killer’s need for a scapegoat “excluded every other consideration. That to me is wickedness. There is no other word.” In the final pages of Wycliffe and the Four Jacks (1985), “the atmosphere in the Incident Room was lethargic, deflated, the process of winding down had started.” Brooding, Wycliffe says to his attractive sidekick Lucy Lane, “That’s what this case has been about—people who have never grown up.” In Wycliffe and the Dunes Mystery (1993) the scene is domestic but equally downbeat:

The Wycliffes were in their living room. Outside the light was fading, the curtains were undrawn and in the garden shapes and shadows merged in the melancholy twilight. It suited Wycliffe’s mood. As often before when an investigation culminated in an arrest, he was experiencing a feeling of anticlimax, even of futility.

Downbeat, yes, but not depressing. Thoughtful seems to me to be the right word to describe Charles Wycliffe and the books about him. For readers prepared to have their own thoughts provoked, there is much in the novels to relish.

Inevitably, Burley’s bleak yet clear-eyed perspective of human nature does not always make for comfortable, light entertainment. Wycliffe is nothing like Marlowe, Wimsey, or even Inspector Morse. He is a pragmatist first and foremost—and all the more credible a human being for it. We are told in Wycliffe and the Cycle of Death (1990) that the detective “believed the criminal law should aim at damage limitation rather than at some abstraction called justice.”

The plots of Burley’s books are competently constructed, but for him the exploration of criminal motivation is much more important than the weaving of an ingenious puzzle. Although he does not go in for fireworks—he is scarcely as witty as Reginald Hill, and his stories lack the bizarre originality of Ruth Rendell—his economical style makes for vivid characterisation, a lively pace, and contributes to a rapid and enjoyable read.

And then, perhaps above all, there is the romantic peninsula of Cornwall, evoked lovingly but without resorting to sentimentality or purple prose. Forget the travel brochures. If you seek a vivid portrayal of this varied and fascinating English county, with its old tin mines and its sandy beaches, you can do no better than reach for the books of W.J. Burley.

A SELECTED W.J. BURLEY READING LIST

The Superintendent Charles Wycliffe Novels
Three-Toed Pussy, 1968
To Kill a Cat, 1970
Guilt Edged, 1971
Death in a Salubrious Place, 1973
Death in Stanley Street, 1975
Wycliffe and the Pea-Green Boat, 1975
Wycliffe and the Schoolgirls, 1976
Wycliffe and the Scapegoat, 1978
Wycliffe in Paul’s Court, 1980
Wycliffe’s Wild Goose Chase, 1982
Wycliffe and the Beales, 1983
Wycliffe and the Four Jacks, 1985
Wycliffe and the Quiet Virgin, 1986
Wycliffe and the Winsor Blue, 1987
Wycliffe and the Tangled Web, 1988
Wycliffe and the Cycle of Death, 1990
Wycliffe and the Dead Flautist, 1991
Wycliffe and the Last Rites, 1992
Wycliffe and the Dunes Mystery, 1994
Wycliffe and the House of Fear, 1995
Wycliffe and the Redhead, 1997
Wycliffe and the Guild of Nine, 2000

This article first appeared in Mystery Scene Winter Issue #93.