Mystery Scene: Thursday, November 30, 2023

A decade ago, British TV presenter Lucy Worsley examined her nation’s obsession with crime.

“Every murder tells a good story,” she said of the British docu-series A Very British Murder, which investigated the real crimes that influenced novelists such as Charles Dickens, Agatha Christie, and Graham Greene, and the filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock.

More recently, Worsley has become best known for a spate of programs with a regal hook, many with her name attached. It’s hardly surprising: The Oxford graduate is chief curator at Historic Royal Palaces, the independent charity responsible for maintaining such iconic sites as the Tower of London and Hampton Court Palace. Recent hosting credits include Lucy Worsley’s Royal Myths and Secrets, Lucy Worsley’s Royal Palace Secrets, and Lucy Worsley’s Royal Photo Album, to name but a few.

Ah, but she hasn’t forgotten her criminal past.

Agatha Christie: Lucy Worsley on the Mystery Queen (note the title’s regal reference!), debuts Sunday, December 3, 2023, with two subsequent episodes on December 10 and 17, on PBS, PBS.org, and the PBS App.

During a recent Zoom roundtable interview session, Worsley discussed the production and her Christie compulsion, giving a nod to a Christie trope when she quipped, “If our Zoom call were an Agatha Christie story, I’m telling you, the murderer would be one of us.”

The series builds on Worsley’s critically admired 2022 biography, Agatha Christie: An Elusive Woman, and she hopes it will further debunk misconceptions, including the forgivable impression that the mystery author was always gray-haired and of AARP status.

“She wasn’t like Miss Marple,” Worsley said, referencing Christie’s elderly spinster crime-solver. On the contrary, when Agatha Christie came to fame, explained Worsley, “physically, she was young, she was blonde, she was strong, she liked surfing and driving fast cars.”

The series weaves period and contemporary footage with interviews with various experts—including other Christie historians, mystery writers, and authorities on topics including the women of World War I, psychiatry in the 1920s, and archaeology, the latter a subject that would profoundly affect Christie’s life.

To illustrate parallels between events in Christie’s life and her writings, Worsley was filmed visiting significant locales, including an archaeological dig where Christie met the man who would become her second husband. Scenes of Worsley making her way through a Middle Eastern marketplace appear in black and white, grainy effects simulating vintage footage. There are also reenactments, as much a popular element of Worsley’s shows as her blonde bob, bright lipstick, and unmistakable narrative delivery (She has difficulty with the letter “r”).

Utilizing materials from Christie archives, Worsley gets to show viewers the first-ever detective story penned by Christie. It’s a kind of spoof, written for a hospital magazine when Christie was with the Voluntary Aid Detachment, working with injured World War I veterans. A harbinger of the signature story elements to come, the piece involves a murder, poison, and a close circle of suspects. For Worsley, discovery of the piece was “a super wow moment.”

There are additional revelations, most notably involving Christie’s headline-making 11-day disappearance in 1926. In the series, Worsley calls the subsequent search for the author “the biggest manhunt yet seen in Britain.” No less an authority than Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the great Sherlock Holmes and a noted believer in the supernatural, tried to aid the quest—by enlisting the help of a psychic.

For dramatic effect, Worsley visits the same rustic site where Christie’s automobile was found abandoned.

It was at a spa hotel, 230 miles north of where she was last seen, that Christie was finally found. She had checked in using the name of her cheating husband’s mistress.

Both in the series and during the interview session, Worsley expressed ire that many people at the time, and still today, considered the disappearance a publicity stunt to sell books.

Calling such speculation “deeply wrong and deeply unfair,” Worsley added, “She was ill,” carrying out her actions while in “a fugue state” not unlike the shellshock that afflicted veterans of World War I. Further, Worsley believes Christie sought help for memory loss following her breakdown. After consultations with the Royal College of Psychiatrists, Worsley and her team were able to pinpoint the treating psychiatrist. “And you won’t hear about him anywhere else because he’s a new discovery in our program.”

There’s even a photograph of the doctor, which Worsley proudly presents to the cameras. She cites one of the titles Christie wrote under a nom de plume—unknown to readers during most of her lifetime—as a thinly veiled account of what really happened.

In Grant’s Bread, written under the Christie pseudonym Mary Westmacott, a woman with an unfaithful husband loses her memory, and goes on to be aided by a doctor who sounds an awful lot like the same man who may have treated Christie. There are six Mary Westmacott books, and while none are mysteries, Worsley believes they are “vital for understanding the real Agatha,” revelatory in regard to Christie’s personal life. At the time the Westmacott books were written, the pseudonym shielded Christie from scrutiny. “Even as her books were getting more and more globally successful…,” Worsley explained, “she became ever sort of more meek and more humble and never let anybody into her process, if you like.”

Christie’s mysteries, on the other hand, were game changers for the genre. It was she who famously startled readers with a story told by an unreliable narrator (a work Worsley discusses in the series following a helpful spoiler alert). Christie also popularized “mysteries of the past”—aka historical mysteries (Murder in Mesopotamia). The ABC Murders is one of the earliest of the serial killer genre. The Mousetrap, which remains the longest running play in the world, illustrates the power of raiding from true crime; the show includes a segment on the horrific child abuse case that inspired the story.

The series doesn’t sidestep the controversy that some Christie materials are today deemed politically incorrect or insensitive. A segment discusses the book that was eventually retitled And Then There Were None (and, in the United States, Ten Little Indians).

Worsley is up-front about Christie’s disapproval of various screen adaptations of her work. As a “control freak,” said Worsley during the roundtable, “[Christie] didn’t like the idea of people taking and messing with her characters.” Pressed about specific depictions, Worsley said that Christie wouldn’t have given a thumbs-up to any actor portraying her characters. That includes David Suchet’s popular depiction of the famed detective on TV’s long-running series, Agatha Christie’s Poirot. No matter that it holds special meaning to Worsley. “I mean, this is how I came to Agatha Christie. I used to watch it on Sunday nights at my granny’s.”

Worsley also grew up in the shadow of Sherlock Holmes—“who I absolutely love.” Worsley’s next venture, Killing Sherlock, will examine the life of creator Conan Doyle, and “the kind of toxic relationship he had with his hero.”

For now, fans of both Worsley and the enigmatic Christie can enjoy the series dedicated to the writer whose first success, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, was published nearly 100 years ago. Worsley’s personal charm and exuberance, and her knowledge of the great Christie, makes for a production that’s every bit as satisfying as sitting down with a good mystery.

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Mystery Scene

Curious about the history of mysteries and the folks who write them? You could take a master’s class that spans months and costs serious bucks. Or, you could buy Martin Edwards’ latest genre compendium, and curl up with it on your sofa. But do so with care … the book weighs in at 2.6 pounds.

In The Life of Crime: Detecting the History of Mysteries and Their Creators (Collins Crime Club, November 2022, 724 pages, $32.99), Edwards gives the reader the full monty with his authoritative, eye-opening and entertaining opus. He is well-qualified to do so, as the archivist of the Crime Writers’ Association, president of the Detection Club, and author of titles including the hefty The Golden Age of Murder: The Mystery of the Writers Who Invented the Modern Detective Story (2015).

Comprised of 55 chapters with endnotes, the final 100 pages devoted to bibliography and indexes, The Life of Crime scrutinizes the genre through changing eras, subgenres, specific writers.

Citing novelist-critic Julian Symon’s 50-plus year-old Mortal Consequences: A History from the Detective Story to the Crime Novel as impetus for this project, Edwards utilizes what he calls “novelistic techniques” – accessible rather than scholarly writing – to chart the genre’s story. Chapters begin with a tantalizing anecdote, which leads to an examination of topic. Many names and claims to fame will resonate with genre enthusiasts. Just as many will surprise.

What was the first book about a manhunt? Long before John Buchan’s masterful The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) there was Things As They Are: The Adventures of Caleb Williams, written by William Godwin in … 1794. Oh, Godwin gave the genre another benchmark when he and his wife, the pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, produced daughter Mary, who would go on to pen Frankenstein. Readers of Ruth Rendell will be glad to hear that, as a fledgling journalist, she faked her attendance at an event she was assigned to cover. Writing the piece as if she’d been there, she was unaware the guest speaker had dropped dead at the gathering. Fired from her job, she decided to write a mystery. A chapter on genre rogues gives a nod to Arthur Conan Doyle’s brother-in-law, E.W. Hornung, creator of the debonair A.J. Raffles, cricketer by day, burglar by night.

Naturally, Doyle’s Great Detective gets his own chapter and other usual suspects – among them, Christie, Highsmith, Hammett, and Chandler – are also prominently featured.

But there are also accolades for the offbeat. Like the scientific mysteries of R. Austin Freeman, who personally tested his assorted theories. And how about Astrogen Kerby, aka Astro, the psychic and charlatan who solves crimes in the anonymously published 1912 short story collection The Master of Mysteries. A cipher within the book identified the author as Gelett Burgess who, per an endnote, is credited with originating the term, “blurb.” Yes, some of the book’s details are deliciously arcane.

Edwards doesn’t neglect the challenges of early female crime writers, some of whom felt it necessary to utilize male pseudonyms or gender-neutral monikers. Discussing genre diversity, Edwards charts the talents and turbulent personal life of Black writer Chester Himes, moving on to the impact wielded by the black-Jewish Walter Mosley, and his PI, Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins. The pros and cons of various Asian crime-fighters are also explored, and props given to the first gay detective.

I could go on and on … about the book’s coverage of Scandinavian crime, noir (and more noir), domestic suspense, psychological suspense, police procedurals, even my personal favorite, Ross Macdonald. But if I continued it would become a master’s class, and I’d have to charge tuition. Get this book instead. It’s an essential for mystery lovers.

**

Omitted from the massive Edwards tome, Stephen King merits his own spotlight in the gorgeously produced, oversize volume, Stephen King: A Complete Exploration of His Work, Life, and Influences (Epic Ink, September 2022, 240 pages, $30). Timed to the prodigious writer’s 75^th birthday, this celebratory critique is by Bev Vincent, who himself is pretty prodigious. Author of more than 120 short stories (published in Ellery Queen, Alfred Hitchcock, etc.), and previous King-related books, Vincent has been chronicling his idol for more than two decades, actually collaborating with King on several projects.

This book’s focus is on King’s writings, and includes anecdotes about particular works (King’s breakthrough novel, Carrie, began as a short story), as well as manuscript pages, correspondence to and from publishers, book cover art, and more. Interspersed are “sidebar” featurettes on film adaptations, King’s sports interests, collaborations, and so on. Fittingly, some of the book’s pages are “blood”-spattered.

Cynics may think it improbable, but Vincent manages to include appendixes of all of King’s writings (phew!) – and those myriad adaptations, right up to the latest streaming ventures.

This work will delight Stephen King’s fans while giving pop culture scholars – and adventurous newbies – plenty to process.

**

If historical true crime is your passion, reach for American Demon: Eliot Ness and the Hunt for America’s Jack the Ripper (Minotaur Books, September 2022, 352 pages, $29.99), in which Daniel Stashower details the life, career, and eventual downward spiral of the legendary G-Man, whose final years were tinged by regrets about the case he couldn’t solve.

It was as Cleveland’s Director of Public Safety in the 1930s, in the aftermath of helping to take down Chicago’s Al Capone, that Ness was tasked with finding a serial killer who became known by lurid monikers such as the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury and the Mad Torso Killer. To this day, the case remains unsolved.

Part biography, part true crime saga, this work utilizes reams of documents, including Ness’ own papers, and a cavalcade of newspaper clippings. It also builds on previous non-fiction books, including the 2020 entry by genre heavyweight Max Allan Collins and A. Brad Schwartz, and multiple volumes by James Jessen Badal (also an interview source), the Cleveland professor who has spent decades studying and writing about the homicides.

Stashower, a multiple Edgar award-winner, came away from this book still admiring Ness, even though the man wasn’t as stalwart as media depictions by the likes of Robert Stack and Kevin Costner. Still, in addressing the lawman’s failings, Stashower underscores the challenges he faced. With the torso killings, the era’s forensics tools were a serious impediment.

A skilled writer, Stashower delivers vivid, atmospheric depictions of the era and locales. There’s no downplaying the horrific nature of the crimes – even basic details are gruesome. At one point authorities put a severed head on display, in hopes of identifying a victim. No one was ever brought to justice and no conclusive evidence remains, still, Stashower has his suspicions (and they seem solid) about the evil doer. Devotees of true crime, especially the serial killer subgenre, will not be disappointed.

**

I’ll sign off with The First True Hitchcock: The Making of a Filmmaker by Henry K. Miller (University of California Press, January 2022, 233 pages, $26.95), which delves deep within the foggy mythos surrounding the 1927 silent movie, “The Lodger.”

Based on Marie Bellow Lowndes’ classic 1913 novel about a boarding house tenant, who may be Jack the Ripper, Hitchcock’s screen version launched an astounding career – indeed, a brand. Miller, a Sight and Sound critic and author of The Essential Raymond Durgnat (he was an esteemed British film critic), microscopically examines the 26-year-old director’s every filmmaking decision, including the choice of where to stage the first murder – which “marked the real beginning of a film career in which appearances deceive, identities divide, and authorities are undermined.”

Hitchcock’s relocation from Britain to America is ever-shadowed by The Lodger, which he long talked about remaking. Despite the assignment going to another filmmaker (for a 1944 version), Hitchcock was still trumpeting the possibility when he sat down for his famous interviews with French filmmaker-critic Francois Truffaut in 1972.

An academic work that could have used more chronological organization, this book nonetheless fills a gap within existing Hitchcockian studies. That alone makes it worthy of scrutiny. As does time spent in the company of the ever-compelling master of suspense.

##

There’s big trouble at the Executive Mansion. Treachery, deceit, infidelity, murder. And that’s just the short list.

Things aren’t much better down at the end of the National Mall, just two and a half miles away, at the Capitol Building.

And don’t even ask what’s happening at the Supreme Court.

It may be an election year, but all the slings and arrows from the warring candidates and their respective parties can’t compare to the ominous weaponry and sinister plots perpetrated in the fictional world of political thrillers.

With so much action currently emanating from White House and D.C. environs, it seems apt to explore fictional thrillers related to the presidency – and the capital that is the heartbeat of American democracy.

Like governments, political thrillers come in all forms. Some anticipate true history, others bank on it. Many reflect contemporary anxieties.

The genre has a cadre of leading authors whose names are as unmissable as the cover artwork of their books. The roster includes David Baldacci, Nelson DeMille, Vince Flynn, Brad Meltzer, Daniel Silva … Book dust jackets often depict the White House or the domed crown of the Capitol building, and are emblazoned with superlatives like “propulsive,” “nail-biting,” “blistering,” “explosive,” and “page-turning.”

Explaining the genre’s appeal, writer Matthew Quirk suggests, “People like to pull back the curtain on iconic institutions, and they like thrillers with high stakes. And it doesn’t get much more iconic or high stakes than 1600 Penn.” The author of half a dozen titles, including 2020’s Hour of the Assassin, about a former Secret Service agent on the run and a presidential candidate with a dark secret, Quirk stresses that well-drawn characters are necessary components for a reader’s “emotional investment.”

When the U.S. presidency is involved, he adds, the attraction is “the natural intrigue and fascination that comes with the most powerful job in the world.”

Quirk’s relevant job history includes having worked as a reporter in DC (he twice visited the White House), making him part of the constituency of journalists-turned-authors. Call it the genre press corps.

Still other contributors migrated to the field after genuine hands-on government work. These “insiders” – onetime spies, military members, politicians, staffers, and others – are known for bringing serious street cred to their novels.

Few authors can say, authoritatively, “I was in the Situation Room the night we bombed Libya.” For Karna Small Bodman it was one of many memorable experiences with the Reagan White House, where the former TV newscaster spent six years as deputy press secretary, then served as senior director of the National Security Council. During her tenure, Bodman had almost daily meetings with Reagan, and traveled on Air Force One for international trips that included arms control talks with the Soviets.

The author of five political thrillers boasting a female protagonist, Bodman reads a stack of newspapers daily, clipping articles that might be useful. (“The Wall Street Journal is my bible,” she declares.) The idea for one of her books evolved from a question she asked a high ranking military official: “What keeps you up at night?”

Her most recent book, 2018’s Trust But Verify, got its title from a political phrase popularized by – yes – Reagan.

**

You could stuff a ballot box with the names of all the politicos who have penned thrillers.

The list includes Newt Gingrich, Barbara Boxer, Gary Hart (under the pseudonym John Blackthorn), Marilyn Quayle (who teamed with her sister, Nancy T. Northcott). Not to omit Margaret Truman – daughter of President Harry S. Truman – who for many years “authored” her Capital Crimes novels. (A ghostwriter eventually came forward.)

John Ehrlichman, the former White House counsel who served time in federal prison for his role in the Watergate scandal, culled from real life for his entry, The Company, about a Nixon-like president’s downfall. Forty-six years after its 1976 publication, the book continues to track on “best of” lists.

Thrillers by William S. Cohen, former secretary of defense under President Bill Clinton, include a trilogy about a former national security adviser who dealt with the threat of an asteroid hurtling toward Earth in 2015’s Collision and 2018’s Final Strike.

Stacey Abrams, former minority leader of the House of Representatives, made headlines with the May 2021 publication of While Justice Sleeps, about a  beautiful Black Yale Law School graduate-turned-law clerk, who becomes legal guardian to an ailing Supreme Court justice. The story’s destructive Republican president would like to see that justice assassinated.

A former law clerk and Yale graduate herself, Abrams wrote the thriller almost a decade ago. It initially failed to sell, in part because of perceived disinterest in the Supreme Court. Known for her never-say-die spirit, Abrams – whose published works include eight romantic suspense novels, written under the pen name Selena Montgomery – resubmitted and sold the manuscript. Reviews were decidedly mixed, but initial sales made the book a best seller.

Later in 2021, Hillary Clinton and Louise Penny proved a winning ticket as co-authors of State of Terror, in which a secretary of state must prevent global nuclear warfare. Clinton and Penny first met in 2016, after Clinton lost the presidential race to Donald Trump. Outlining their book prior to the 2020 election, which saw Trump ousted by Joe Biden, they wrote the text during the pandemic.

State of Terror spent nine weeks on the best seller list of the New York Times, which called it a “romp,” noting “Political junkies will relish the veiled insults to real-life people.” Consider: a charismatic former president named Eric Dunn is known, among his advisers, as Eric the Dumb.

While there’s no word, yet, on whether Clinton and Penny will reteam for a sequel, Clinton’s husband has co-authored two thrillers with the prolific James Patterson. The Bill Clinton-Patterson teaming began with 2018’s The President is Missing.

That one didn’t give reviewers goosebumps, despite promises of insider details “that only a president can know.” “The CIA can relax,” wrote the Washington Post. “No felt-tip pens went dry redacting material for this manuscript. [The book] reveals as many secrets about the U.S. government as The Pink Panther reveals about the French government.”

Still, it was a best seller. Readers have long cast their ballots for plotlines about missing presidents.

**

“Red China is threatening to attack.

The hawks want to strike.

And then, suddenly

The President’s Plane is Missing!”

The print advertisements for this 1967 Cold War entry didn’t waste any time on the tarmac.

When a burdened president is headed to Palm Springs for rest and relaxation aboard Air Force One, his plane crashes in Arizona. But the president isn’t among the victims. Where is he? And is the vice president capable of sitting behind the desk of the Oval Office?

Author Robert J. Serling was a noted aviation writer who brought a “you are there” sensibility to the scenes aboard the presidential aircraft. The brother of Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling, Serling had collaborated on several of the iconic series’ famed episodes. He knew a thing or two about milking suspense. His novel subsequently became a popular TV movie.

**

The mania for MIA politicians dates back to the 1930s. When first published by “Anonymous,” The President Vanishes was promoted as “A story so startling its author dared not sign his name.”

The year was 1934. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was chief executive. The county was still recovering from the horrors of the First World War. But there were menacing signs overseas – specifically, in Germany. Thus the saga of a peace-loving commander-in-chief who is trying to keep the United States from being dragged into a European war promoted by industrialists and businessmen. Then, he disappears …

By the time the film version was released in 1935, Rex Stout, creator of Nero Wolfe, had been outed as the unknown author.

The President Vanishes created a genre boilerplate.

**

Then there’s the popular scenario about efforts to create a puppet presidency.

The classic example is the 1959 novel, “The Manchurian Candidate.” Richard Condon’s mix of satire and suspense follows a former Korean War POW whose Communist Chinese captors subject him to brainwashing, and program him to kill (using a post-hypnotic trigger). The story climaxes with the attempted assassination of a presidential candidate. The book was originally likened to science fiction by reviewers.

The 1962 film adaptation was hyped with come-ons such as, “You’ll swear there’s never been anything like it!” Directed by 60’s wunderkind John Frankenheimer, the movie starred Laurence Harvey, Frank Sinatra, Janet Leigh and, as one of filmdom’s most infamous mothers, Angela Lansbury. Though Lansbury was nominated for an Academy Award for her performance, the movie divided the critics.

But with the November 1963 assassination of JFK, both book and film took on a prophetic mystique.

Within a month, Richard Condon was guesting on the Today show, discussing similarities between his book and real life. (Condon revisited the JFK assassination in 1974 with his thriller Winter Kills.)

In fact, government agencies did chase a theory involving the possible brainwashing of Lee Harvey Oswald. They called it “the Manchurian Candidate syndrome.”

Fiction and reality had collided.

**

The JFK assassination and revelations that followed, including details about the President’s secretive personal life, were game-changers for the political thriller. Likewise Watergate, the fall of Richard Nixon, the Iran-Contra affair, the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal  … and the list goes on.

Already, the failure of the Cuban missile crisis had led to a spate of suspense titles examining Cold War threats, including Seven Days in May, about an attempted right-wing United States military coup. The 1962 book was co-authored by political columnist Fletcher Knebel (of the syndicated column “Potomac Fever”), who got his idea for the story after speaking to a hawkish Air Force general critical of the president’s handling of the Bay of Pigs. “Some thought he and others like him would have liked to overthrow the government,” Knebel recalled.

Seven Days in May was a best seller. The inevitable film version, released in 1964, starred Burt Lancaster, Fredric March, Kirk Douglas and Ava Gardner.

**

It was the death of JFK that sparked what crime editor-publisher Otto Penzler called, “Unequivocally the greatest espionage novel ever written by an American.” Its author, Charles McCarry, was a former CIA undercover agent – and a superlative storyteller.

Published in 1974, The Tears of Autumn proved startling for its plausible explanation of whodunit and why. (Spoiler Alert: It was the South Vietnamese, in retaliation for the assassination of their leader, President Ngo Dinh Diem. Kennedy and his advisers had played a role in the coup that led to Diem’s death, thereby resulting in the payback of JFK’s assassination.)

**

Depending on who you ask, the godfather of the political thriller is either Fletcher Knebel or Charles McCarry.

Knebel, who followed up Seven Days in May with at least another 10 novels, received renewed attention with the 2018 Vintage reprint of his yarn, Night of Camp David. About a mentally unbalanced president, it was first published in 1965, the same year that Congress passed the 25^th Amendment, which mandates  that the vice president shall succeed if a president cannot perform his or her duties. When Camp David was republished, some coverage posited if the topic – and situation – weren’t still timely.

Much of McCarry’s work continues to resonate. Especially Shelley’s Heart (1995), about a stolen election, and Lucky Bastard (1998), in which a curly-haired doughy-faced tomcatting president turns out to be a Soviet agent – and a rapist. The San Francisco Examiner labeled that one “a novelistic smear of President Clinton.”

McCarry could also be eerily prescient, as in 1979’s The Better Angels, which finds Arab terrorists hijacking planes for use as weapons. Critics of the day dubbed it “far-fetched.”

**

Similarly, reviewers deemed Tom Clancy’s Debt of Honor (1994) implausible, for a plot in which a vengeful Japanese national crashes a Boeing 747 into the Capitol. That perception changed on September 11, 2001. On that very evening’s broadcast of CNN’s America Under Attack, Clancy was an interviewee.

Clancy, who passed away in 2013, continues to be a superpower of the genre, with more than 17 bestsellers, film adaptations, and an ongoing franchise supporting his character, Jack “I’m just an analyst!” Ryan.

The presidency figures prominently in Clancy’s works – as when Ryan temporarily assumes the position when the chief executive and the rest of the powers-that-be are killed off, in the aforementioned Debt of Honor.

The author also has the distinction of being propelled to fame at least partly as a result of having a fan in the White House.

When President Ronald Reagan read Clancy’s debut novel, the 1984 techno-political thriller The Hunt for Red October, he famously called it, “my kind of yarn.”

So began Clancy’s rise.

No wonder he went on to write so passionately about power and politics.

As they say, truth is stranger than fiction – even when it’s beyond belief – or on the pages of a political thriller.

                                                          # # #

Hollywood Outtakes

Cuz we luv Yesteryear’s Hollywood, and cuz we’re an unapologetic cat lady, we thought we’d give a nod to the holiday by sharing a treat bag of celebs who dared to show their strong “felines” about Halloween. (Ouch!)

We start with screwball comedy film fave Carole Lombard – who did a whole series of snaps with this black beauty. Alas, Lombard was just 33 when she died in a 1942 plane crash while on a war bond tour. She was then Mrs. Clark Gable.

Nancy Carroll – all dolled up as a kitty cat – transitioned from silent to talkies and was especially busy in the Thirties. Heck, she was Oscar-nominated for 1930’s “The Devil’s Holiday.” This photo is from 1935. (P.S. She went on to do TV in the Fifties.)

Leila Hyams, with the art deco cat statuette, was a 1930s showbiz veteran. A child of vaudeville, she’ll forever be known for her daring work in the still-shocking 1932 film “Freaks.” We believe this photo was taken several years later.

The snap of the kitty-costumed Paulette Goddard is a publicity image for her 1939 horror-comedy (co-starring Bob Hope), “The Cat and the Canary.”

Also looking catty is Dusty Anderson, who appeared in small roles in the Forties – and was a hugely popular World War II pin-up. (She was often in the pages of Yank magazine.) She wound up marrying director Jean Negulesco, who was known for his work in CinemaScope.

Familiar to fans of Sixties-era TV for her role of Lily Munster in “The Munsters,” stunning Yvonne De Carlo had a successful career in crime and costume dramas of the Forties and Fifties. Her kitty pose atop the giant pumpkin is from 1946.

We’ll wrap it up with the ever-fabulous song and dance (and legs!) gal Ann Miller. An MGM favorite, Ann posed for this shot in 1949.

Enjoy the treats!

In the world of crime fiction, the name James M. Cain is as ubiquitous as the crisp pop-pop-pop of gunfire and the discovery of a dead body in the opening chapter of a crime novel.

Cain’s writings about rough-edged men, women who are craftier than they appear, and themes like adultery, blackmail and murder, made him the go-to guy for thirties-era fans of the un-put-downable quick-read. He also became known for hot-to-the-touch topics: at a time when few others would dare, Cain didn’t hesitate to write about incest and homosexuality.

But it isn’t easy to compile a dossier on James M. Cain. He defies encapsulation.

Not all of his fiction was crime-related. He didn’t even think of himself as a crime writer. As a journalist, he covered everything from politics to unions to … food. The latter was, in fact, a favorite topic. He wrote detailed articles on baking the perfect huckleberry pie and how to expertly carve a duck.

His own appetites were impressive.

During a luncheon interview a reporter made note of Cain’s order: two glasses of sherry, plates of oysters, a crab cake dinner, two beers, an extra crab cake, a slice of liederkranz cheese, and coffee.

He had a big appetite for the ladies, too. They reciprocated, though he was by no means a looker. “A big, shaggy fellow with graying hair,” is how a Hollywood journalist once described him.

As a subject, James M. Cain can overwhelm. The 1982 biography by Roy Hoopes, which enjoyed the author’s cooperation, is a doorstopper at 684 pages. There are myriad academic papers and essays scrutinizing Cain in conjunction with his settings, his love of the open road, his treatment of women (he’s either a misogynist or a feminist), the significance of food in his works, and on and on.

There are countless odes to his status as a tough-guy writer. David Madden, author of the recent The Voice of James M. Cain: A Biography (Lyons Press) – his fourth book about Cain – calls him “the 20-minute egg of the hard-boiled school,” an institution in which the Big Three are Cain, Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett.

Thanks to Hollywood, Cain also deserves serious props as a noir VIP.

Though his most famous work preceded noir’s emergence as a true genre, the 1940s film adaptations of his books Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice forever shine a spotlight on him. (Albeit with low-key lighting and shadows – those noir requisites.)

Cain used to gripe about Hollywood’s versions of his works, and the motion picture business in general. He knew about it first-hand, as a contract screenwriter. Years after leaving California, Cain once admitted, “Don’t get the idea that writing for movies is easy money. It ain’t. But I wanted the money.”

His move West proved prescient. Hollywood and Cain would be a potent combination.

**

Now, Cain wasn’t exactly chopped liver before he made the trek to Tinseltown.

The native of Annapolis, Maryland, was a son of privilege. His father was the president of Washington College, which Cain attended. His mother was an opera singer. In fact, James Mallahan Cain also wanted to become an opera singer–until his mother informed him he wasn’t good enough. (Theirs was a complicated relationship.)

Graduating from college at 17, he tried various jobs–including selling insurance and teaching high school–then became a newspaper reporter in Baltimore. Drafted into World War I, he was stationed in France, where he wrote for his division’s newspaper.

Coming home, he resumed his work as a reporter, but eventually moved to New York as a protégé of H.L. Mencken, contributing to the iconic writer-editor’s magazine, The American Mercury. Cain also worked for famed newspaperman Walter Lippmann, penning editorials for the New York World.

**

In a 1929 piece about “talking pictures,” Cain wrote, “If you’ve seen one crime movie, you’ve seen them all, and you haven’t seen very much at that.”

Still, like many literary giants of the day, including F. Scott Fitzgerald and Dorothy Parker, Cain allowed himself to be lured to Hollywood. Once he got there, and was assigned a cubicle at Paramount Pictures in the writers’ building, he discovered the studio knew nothing about his background. His first assignment: a rewrite of The Ten Commandments, which Cecil B. De Mille had produced and directed as a silent in 1923.

It was a car trip to a tourist attraction that triggered the short story that would become the basis for the first adaptation of a Cain work. Located in Thousand Oaks, California, the Goebels Lion Farm was run by a veteran animal trainer who leased his four-legged attractions to the movies.  Awed by the jungle cats, Cain authored The Baby in the Icebox, about a husband who sics a hungry tiger on his wife. It ran in the January 1933 issue of American Mercury.

The film version, called She Made Her Bed, was strictly ho-hum. One critic thought that the eight-month-old baby who co-starred – the son of leading man Dick Arlen – gave the best performance.

Then came Cain’s discovery that a woman he had seen working at a gas station had been accused of murdering her husband. That triggered an idea for a novel. And, what a novel! It was published in 1934. Cain was 42.

The Postman Always Rings Twice opens with one of the most oft-quoted lines in crime fiction: “They threw me off the hay truck around noon.”

Narrated by drifter Frank Chambers–a then-daring move, since the character would go on to commit murder–the book doesn’t waste any time. Chambers ambles into the Twin Oaks Tavern, a “roadside sandwich joint,” to get a meal. He spies Cora Papadakis, unhappy wife of the owner. She’s not traditionally beautiful, but, notes Chambers, “she had a sulky look to her, and her lips stuck out in a way that made me want to mash them in for her.”

When the lip-lock takes place–within the first dozen pages–she cries “Bite me! Bite me!”

Chambers complies. “I sunk my teeth into her lips so deep I could feel the blood spurt into my mouth. It was running down her neck when I carried her upstairs.”

And then they team to knock off the husband.

Phew!

Critics turned handstands. “The story is written like a streak of lightning. A hot adrenalin fluid shoots through its pages,” enthused one San Francisco reviewer, who wondered if the book would leave Dashiell Hammett green with envy.

The breathless coverage led to Postman’s purchase by MGM, for a then-startling $25,000. In breaking the news, a Hollywood columnist predicted the film would never be made, because the powerful Hays Office, overseeing the industry’s required self-censorship, had already deemed the book unfilmable due to its lurid storyline.

The prediction was accurate. Postman sat on the shelf at MGM for nearly 10 years. Meantime, Cain adapted it himself in 1936 as a Broadway play. To help finance the project, he wrote and sold another story of illicit love, murder, and betrayal, which ran in eight installments in Liberty Magazine: Double Indemnity.

It wasn’t until five years later that Double Indemnity was published as a novella. By this time, at least three films based on Cain’s writings had come and gone without fanfare and devoid of what his readers had come to expect from him. Wife, Husband and Friend, a 1939 romantic comedy, showcased Cain’s love of opera. When Tomorrow Comes, released the same year, reunited Irene Dunne and Charles Boyer (they’d starred in Love Affair) in what the Los Angeles Times called “a pensive and sacrificial love story.” The 1940 Money and the Woman had B-players in a tale of embezzlement.

**

When Double Indemnity first made the studio rounds it was expected to fetch a high price (akin to Postman’s) for the film rights. But the Hays office quashed any prospective deals, saying the project couldn’t be filmed because it was “a blueprint for murder.”

The plot mines the notorious real life 1920s-era Ruth Snyder-Judd Gray case. Lovers, they conspired to knock off her heavily-insured husband. The couple later turned on each other. Sentenced to death, both died in the electric chair.

In Cain’s take on the story, insurance adjuster Walter Huff meets sultry Los Angeles housewife Phyllis Nirdlinger, who seduces him into killing her husband. The death must look accidental, in order for her to receive the insurance pay-off. But, Huff’s mentor, claims manager Barton Keyes, suspects something is amiss.

When director Billy Wilder was putting together his film version for Paramount (after the Hays Office eased up on its concerns), Cain was under contract to another studio, and unavailable to adapt his own work. So Wilder brought in that other crime king, Raymond Chandler, to collaborate on the script. Wilder and Chandler didn’t get along, but their teaming resulted in a classic–a film that has long been celebrated as the first film noir.

Starring Fred MacMurray (playing against type), Barbara Stanwyck (in a severe blonde wig) and Edward G. Robinson as the tenacious investigator, the picture bucked the era’s standards by giving a blow-by-blow account of the commission of a crime.

It also broke with convention by opening with MacMurray’s character speaking into a Dictaphone, saying, “I have killed a man.” After letting the audience know right up front whodunit, the film flashes back for the why.

Nominated for seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Double Indemnity is the only adaptation of his work that earned Cain’s approval.

It was the first of a three-punch Cain combination.

**

Next came Mildred Pierce, Warner Bros.’ 1945 adaptation of Cain’s 1941 book about psychological battles between mother and daughter and the men in their lives.

Director Michael Curtiz (Casablanca) added a murder. The crime–and subsequent punishment–were a necessity; the era’s censors required villains, and villainesses, to face justice.

The noirish melodrama was another hit, with Joan Crawford winning a Best Actress Oscar in the title role. As her heinous daughter Veda, the memorable Ann Blyth earned a Best Supporting Actress nod.

**

In 1946 The Postman Always Rings Twice at last made it to the screen. There had already been a French version, 1939’s Le Dernier Tournant (aka The Last Turning) and the Italian Ossessione (aka Obsession), made in 1943. (Both were unauthorized.) And Albert Camus had cited the novel as inspiration for his existential work, The Stranger.

John Garfield, best known for playing antiheroes, and Lana Turner, best known for her curves, starred as the devious lovers. Affable Cecil Kellaway was cast as their unsuspecting victim.

The New York Times’ Bosley Crowther wrote that the picture gave its leads the best roles of their careers, adding, “The build-up of incident and character has the rhythm of a throttled-down machine, and the moments of cold, deliberate violence suddenly burst with accelerated force.”

Audiences loved it. Predictably, Cain didn’t.

**

The author left Hollywood in 1950, accompanied by his fourth wife, opera singer Florence Macbeth. (Cain had arrived in Hollywood with wife number two. After a divorce, he married veteran actress Aileen Pringle. That union lasted two years. Then he wed Macbeth.) The Cains moved to University Park, Maryland, where he worked on a Civil War opus.

Hollywood, meantime, butchered several of his novels – most notably Cain’s audacious

Serenade. Published in 1937, it was matter-of-fact with its murky saga of a tenor who’s lost his ability to sing, who meets and has an affair with a prostitute in Mexico. Regaining his voice, he returns with her to the United States–where she and his male lover vie for his affection. The 1956 film version, starring Mario Lanza, skipped the homosexuality.

**

Following the death of his spouse in 1966, Cain–who was childless–continued writing from the couple’s small, rundown house. He’d been forgotten by Hollywood and, it seemed, just about everyone else.

“It was kind of sad,” says biographer Madden, who stayed in contact with Cain over the years. “He didn’t complain, but you could tell he was lonely.”

Madden remembered the imprinted stationary Cain used: along with his phone number were the words, “Station to Station does it–I’m the only one here.”

In a 1969 Washington Post interview, Cain, then 76, confessed that his Hollywood days were drenched in drink. Neighbors had been looking in on him since his wife’s death. Their little dog was a frequent visitor. “Skippy is a barker. The postman never even rings once at Jim Cain’s,” wrote reporter John Carmody. “Jim Cain meets him out on the sidewalk.”

A year later came a surprising burst of attention–following the publication of Cain x 3, a collection of Postman, Mildred Pierce and Double Indemnity, and a rave from Ross Macdonald in the New York Times Book Review. “For 20 years they all forgot about me and now they’re calling up for interviews,” Cain commented wryly to the Baltimore Sun. Photographed holding the dog from next door, he talked about his knack for writing vernacular, his failings as a screenwriter (“I was no good [at it]”) and the uncertainties that beset every writer. Of his historical novel, Mignon, set during the Civil War, he said, “I worked harder on that than anything else I’ve done. It took me 10 years and nobody liked it. You never know.”

He died of a heart attack in 1977 at age 85, missing out on a 1980s Cain Hollywood revival that included an okay remake of Postman starring Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange, and a serious stinker, The Butterfly, with Pia Zadora. As an homage, the erotic thriller Body Heat liberally borrowed from Double Indemnity.

Today his writings continue to be adapted and remade. A 2011 Mildred Pierce mini-series for HBO starred Kate Winslet.

Cainesque works abound, from the films of the Coen Brothers to the writings of Laura Lippman, his influence remains white-hot. Did we mention that The Postman Always Rings Twice is included in the prestigious Modern Library’s listing of the top 100 Novels?

**

Cain’s final work, the long-lost novel The Cocktail Waitress, was published in 2012 following an investigative quest carried out by Charles Ardai, editor for the publishing imprint Hard Case Crime. Stephen King provided a blurb, calling it “A true rarity. A reader’s novel that is also a literary event.” In his review in the New York Times, Michael Connelly was more circumspect: “The book is not vintage Cain, but it is Cain nevertheless, and that makes it a worthwhile read.”

Told in the first person, The Cocktail Waitress finds its femme fatale protagonist coming to the grim realization that what she’s been aspiring for is within reach: “And then at last I began to realize how terrible a thing it was, the dream that you make come true.” It was a recurring Cain theme.

As Cain once put it, “I write of the wish that comes true, for some reason a terrifying concept, at least to my imagination … I think my stories have some quality of the opening of a forbidden box.”

Once Hollywood got inside those boxes, Cain’s legend was enshrined.

Interviewers often asked Cain what he thought about what Hollywood had done to his novels: “I tell them, they haven’t done anything to my book. It’s right up there, on the shelf.”

Like a plot twist straight out of … well, Cain, his relationship with Hollywood came to an ironic ending–symbolized by those long and inescapable shadows cast by the film versions of his most famous works.

                                                                                                ##

As the world grapples with the reality of the coronavirus pandemic there’s been considerable attention paid to fictional storylines. The now familiar roll call includes films like “Outbreak” (1995), starring Dustin Hoffman and an escaped monkey, and Steven Soderbergh’s “Contagion” (2011) and books by Dean Koontz, Stephen King and Michael Crichton (who had a day job as a doctor). But let’s not forget the granddaddy of the contemporary genre: the novel “Earth Abides.”

Published in 1949 – in the shadow of George Orwell’s masterwork “Nineteen Eighty-Four” – “Earth Abides” asked the unsettling question, “what if … ” in the devastating wake of a global killer virus.

Perhaps surprisingly, there had already been a spate of virus/plague-themed literary “what ifs” in the 1800s, including Mary Shelley’s “The Last Man” (1826) and Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” (1842). The early 20^th Century was marked by real life dramas – including the outbreak of bubonic plague in San Francisco (from 1900-1904) and the influenza pandemic of 1918. Then came the atrocities of two world wars – and Hiroshima. In the aftermath of the detonation of nuclear weaponry, anything seemed possible.

Within that context, “Earth Abides” could not be ignored. George R. Stewart, a U.C. Berkeley English professor, had already written a harrowing narrative account of the ill-fated Donner Party and two fictional works involving natural catastrophes. With “Earth Abides,” Stewart took a futuristic leap. The book’s title and theme come from the book of Ecclesiastes, 1: 4, “Men go and come, but earth abides.”

Published by Random House (the first edition will run you $499 on eBay, if you can find one!), the book followed the exploits of Isherwood “Ish” Williams, a young Berkeley grad student. Bitten by a rattlesnake while on a geological camping trip in the Sierras, he spends days in delirium in the wilderness. Returning home two weeks later, Ish is stunned to find empty streets and abandoned cars, and to discover that a viral pandemic has killed most of the world’s population. He survived because the snake venom proved to be an antitoxin.

Isherwood’s story is told in three parts: the immediate aftermath of the virus; his travels to discover who else might remain alive (the neon signs in a deserted San Francisco are still flashing – though in time,  technology will sputter and die); and, through his eyes as an old man, a tribal society with new taboos and superstitions.

If critics of the day didn’t do handstands, they recognized a powerful story. The Miami Herald cited the “masterful job of narration.” The Chicago Tribune called Stewart “a storyteller possessed of singular power and imagination.”

“Earth Abides” quickly became a best seller, and in 1951 received the International Fantasy Award – a precursor of the Hugo Award. Serialized in newspapers across the country by the Newspaper Enterprise Association (NEA) Service, it enjoyed multiple reprintings.

To this day there are myriad critical musings about the book, which manages to straddle topics as diverse as ecology (a prescient subject in 1949), archaeology (as a new civilization emerges), and even Biblical teachings, all while evading feel-good optimism for most of those whom the protagonist encounters.

An example: Milt owned a jewelry store in New York City; Ann was a salesgirl for a perfume shop. Coming together post-virus, they spend their days drinking warm martinis and listening to records on a hand-cranked player, choosing to live in the present, instead of thinking about the past – or what lies ahead. Driving through Manhattan’s desolate streets, Ish “doubted whether they could survive the winter, though they had piled broken furniture into the fireplace. Some accident would likely overtake them, or pneumonia might strike them down. They were like the highly bred spaniels and Pekinese who at the end of their leashes had once walked along the city streets. Milt and Ann, too, were city dwellers, and when the city died, they would hardly survive without it.” He has tears in his eyes as he heads toward the next destination.

**

Hollywood loved end of the world plotlines in the Fifties and raided from “Earth Abides,” though the book was never officially adapted for the big screen.

It did become the basis for a 1950 two-part drama for the CBS Radio program “Escape,” and jumping ahead, it was read over 10 segments (of 15 minutes each) for Canada’s CBC Radio program “Booktime” in 1983.

After reading “Earth Abides,” Jimi Hendrix became a sci-fi devotee. Stephen King has cited the book as inspiration for his hefty (1,000 pages!) 1978 post-apocalyptic saga “The Stand.” You’ll find nods to “Earth Abides” on TV shows (including Gene Roddenberry’s dystopian series “Earth: Final Conflict”). Video games, too.

It’s become a pervasive online presence, generating study guides, even Pinterest boards. Did we mention that you can buy it on Kindle?

George R. Stevens wrote more than 35 books. His obituary hailed him as an “educator, poet, novelist, onomastologist (expert on names), ecologist, geographer” and more. But it’s for his once-startling sci-fi entry that he is best remembered.

“Earth Abides” stands as an important genre entry – shaping the end of the world as we know it, fiction-wise. You could call it a viral sensation.

Quaint villages shadowed by secrets. A roster of eccentrics. Murders most bizarre. Not to mention all those teapots and taverns.

During its 20-plus years on TV, “Midsomer Murders” has quietly staked out its own territory – think of it as Agatha Christie with a dash of “Twin Peaks” – and in doing so, it has quietly become a genre classic. Circumventing casting changes and controversy, the popular British series has attracted viewers the world over – in some 200 countries to date.

Not bad for a contemporary crime drama about cops without guns. (Unlike US police officers, the majority of UK police do not carry them.)

Inspired by the Inspector Barnaby books by Caroline Graham, the series is set in fictional Midsomer County, where veteran Detective Chief Investigator John Barnaby – who took over when his cousin, Tom Barnaby, retired – probes mysterious deaths that occur in the county’s quirky, picturesque villages.

Of course, all is not what it seems within those villages. Which is why the media pokes fun about life in Midsomer. Per the British newspaper, The Telegraph, the county’s average life expectancy “can be compared unfavorably with Al Capone’s Chicago.”

Now in its 21^st season – a feat paralleled in this country only by the turgid and hectoring “Law and Order: Special Victims Unit” – the UK series is now streaming on BritBox and Acorn TV. The new season debuted in December while several older seasons continue to be available on local PBS stations. And of course, the many seasons (excluding the latest) are available on DVD.

Sabine Schreiner is co-author (with Joan Street) of “Midsomer Murders on Location” (Baker Street Studios Limited) and president of the Midsomer Murders Society, a fan group that hosts several annual events that draw attendees from as far away as the U.S. and Australia. When asked about the show’s appeal, Schreiner lists a number of factors. Early on, she says, it was the stars who enticed viewers – especially leading man John Nettles, who played DCI Tom Barnaby for 13 seasons (81 episodes). Neil Dudgeon now portrays DCI John Barnaby, Tom’s younger cousin.

Aiding and abetting the DCI is a series of young sidekicks. Nick Hendrix now carries the badge as DS Winter.

Notable guest stars are also an attraction. The “who’s who” has included former Disney star Hayley Mills, a pre-“Outlander” Sam Heughan, Oscar winner Olivia Colman, Henry “Superman” Cavill, Bond girl Honor Blackman and rock ‘n roller Suzi Quatro.

Schreiner also cites the classy production values: “Superb actors, scriptwriters, directors … sets it apart from other TV series, and goes a long way in explaining the show’s longevity,” she says.

Then there’s the notion that familiarity breeds comfort. Sue Turnbull, author of the book “The TV Crime Drama” (Edinburgh University Press), points out that viewers can settle down with “Midsomer” knowing full well that it will deliver “eccentric characters in twee settings, an unlikely murder, and a successful investigation.” As a Brit who has spent half her life in Australia – she is a professor of communications and media studies at the University of Wollongong – she adds, “the aesthetics of the form offer me a familiar security blanket.” It is, she says, “an idea of England that I find very nostalgic.”

Anthony Horowitz, the dizzyingly busy author-producer who helped originate the series, giving it its name and creating its bible, sees “Midsomer Murders” as an antidote to today’s uneasy headlines. “I think particularly now, with so many difficulties surrounding politics and the media, people look back very nostalgically on an England that consisted of smaller, quieter communities where everyone knew everyone and life was simpler.”

The investigators are based in the “county town” of Causton, home to Causton CID – that’s the Criminal Investigation Department, the Brits’ way of saying a police department. The quaintly named fictional villages of Midsomer County include Midsomer Newton, Aspern Tallow, Midsomer Mallow and Badger’s Drift – nods and winks to the mystery subgenre, the cozy. The population of Midsomer County goes through a lot of tea and coffee. Tea rooms are everywhere. And each village has its pub.

For non-UK viewers, some translation may be required. If someone’s got form they’ve got a record; if someone’s losing the plot they’re losing their mind. You don’t want to be called a fishwife, an odious sod or a toerag (ewww!). A toodle-pip! is a cheery send-off.

Storylines are rife with feuds (some dating back centuries), fights over money and property, and tangled relationships.

The delivery is old-fashioned in the sense that there’s no cursing or explicit sex or violence. There have only been snippets of nudity. Several times they involved young women posing for artists, though two episodes with Jason Hughes, as Detective Sergeant Ben Jones, got cheeky – showing his bare backside (once while he was singing in the shower).

Did we mention that the handsome young sergeants – who have always been single, and romantically available – come and go?

Meantime, and obliquely, “Midsomer” subverts the crime-drama genre.

When a film crew descends on Midsomer Magna, for a movie about the French Revolution (season 10’s “They Seek Him Here”), the unhappy producer bellows, “Not enough peasants … for future scenes you’ll need more crones and hags.” But, “Don’t make hard work of it … an area like this must be overrun with yokels and inbreds. Why don’t you try the local old-folks home? They’ll come cheap.” In a later scene a bus from the retirement home pulls into view. Ouch!

Over the years, the show has become famous for the increasingly bizarre ways in which it offs its victims.

An astronomer is bludgeoned with a meteorite. A cook drowns in a cauldron of soup. A butterfly collector is pinned to a wall. A dotty elderly woman dies when a tower of newspapers (the UK’s Daily Telegraph) topples over her. A man staked to a lawn by croquet wickets is killed by catapulted wine bottles. Then there was the woman who was crushed by a large wheel of cheese. (“Hard cheese?” asks the investigator.) One poor bloke was tied to a tree, covered in truffle sauce, and eaten by wild boars.

“It’s like you are in the woods and you find some beautiful log and turn it over and all the woodlice, spiders and beetles come running out from underneath,” is how star Neil Dudgeon once described the nastiness hidden in the shadows of the scenic settings.

Compared to the various suspects they come across, the investigators are rather ordinary. Which is by design.

Author Caroline Graham once said of Tom Barnaby: “[He] is a straight, happily married middle-of-the-road copper. He’s strong but he’s not intensely charismatic or eccentric in any way.”

Graham, who is now in her late eighties (and was unavailable for an interview) has a colorful CV that, briefly, goes like this:

She worked in a textile factory at age 14 (at three shillings a week), joined the Wrens (Women’s Royal Naval Service) at 17, later attended ballet school in France, followed by multiple odd jobs.

Married (and later divorced), with one son, she was in her late thirties when she heard a library talk by popular crime writer Christianna Brand. Brand was known for books including those featuring Inspector Cockrill of the Kent County Police.

As Graham has recalled, “[Brand] was superb and everything I thought a writer should be. She was wearing brocade, fur, a hat and had a cigarette in a long holder.” After hearing her, Graham wrote a story and sent it to her. An encouraging reply led to Graham’s decision to take a creative writing class. She went on to write radio plays and, during the late Seventies, episodes of the British TV soap opera, “Crossroads.”

Turning to books, she wrote a romance, then segued to horror. Teamed with her son, she wrote several children’s titles. But crime was what was popular. And so, she wrote “The Killings at Badger’s Drift,” the first title to feature DCI Tom Barnaby. Published in 1987 in the UK, it features plenty of traditional British touches – tea carts and the like. But it also has a skewed sensibility. It opens with an elderly spinster walking through the woods, in search of a rare white orchid. She chances upon something else, and winds up dead. A tangle of blackmail, incest and off-center characters follows.

When it was published in the US in 1988, Publisher’s Weekly called the book “uncommonly appealing … a real winner.”

Graham certainly was in esteemed company when the book was named to the Top 100 Crime Novels of All Time, per the UK Crime Writers’ Association (in 1990). The roll call included Josephine Tey’s “Daughter of Time,” Raymond Chandler’s “The Big Sleep,” Agatha Christie’s “And Then There Were None,” Dashiell Hammett’s “Red Harvest” and P.D. James’s “Innocent Blood.”

“Badger’s Drift” also won the Macavity Award for best first novel, was nominated in the same categories for the Anthony and Agatha awards, and was included in the 100 Favorite Mysteries of the 20^th Century, as selected by the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association.

In all, there are seven Chief Inspector Barnaby books. According to Graham’s agent, Anthony Goff, the books have sold in 20 languages in addition to the UK and US. (In the US, the first four titles are published by Felony & Mayhem Press; books five through seven are with Minotaur.) “That translation figure is very good for a crime series,” says Goff, “but the TV series has never had the effect on books sales in the UK (nor, I think, in the U.S.) that you might have expected. This is perhaps because the tone of the novels is quite dark whereas the TV is much cozier.” But, he adds, “[Caroline] was always quite philosophical about that, and never resentful.”

Ten years after its publication, “The Killings at Badger’s Drift” came to TV. The feature length program aired in the UK in March 1997, with Nettles starring. As the year’s top rated single program, it garnered nearly 14 million viewers.

It didn’t hurt that its star was well known to viewers. Nettles had spent a decade (1981-1991) playing unorthodox investigator Jim Bergerac, in the BBC-produced “Bergerac.” That character was an alcoholic and divorced father who romanced lots of ladies and logged in plenty of chases, both on foot and while behind the wheel of his classic Triumph Roadster.

In contrast, “Midsomer” found the younger Sgt. Troy (Daniel Casey) doing most of the running, while Barnaby stood by, working strictly by-the-book. When not quizzing suspects, he was happily at home with wife and daughter

It was producer Betty Willingale (a veteran script editor and script consultant) who first envisioned the possibilities of Graham’s work for the screen. And she wanted Nettles as Tom Barnaby. “It isn’t a role that goes deep into investigative techniques or forensic analysis … but he does present this very British approach to the role,” Willingale once said, adding, “And that approach is to look largely unperturbed and just carry on.”

“I liked that Barnaby was an ordinary man – and John Nettles played the husband/father perfectly,” says Anthony Horowitz, who wrote the script for “Badger’s Drift,” and four episodes for seasons one and two. They were all directed by the late Jeremy Silberston, whom Horowitz credits with creating “the style” for “Midsomer Murders.” Silberston did the same for “Foyle’s War,” the World War II-set detective series that Horowitz created and wrote. “He had an intuitive understanding of story and always delivered what was on the page – making it beautiful at the same time,” Horowitz adds.

(For more about the prolific Horowitz, author of more than 40 books, including the teen spy series, Alex Rider, and the Daniel Hawthorne mystery series, see the Summer issue #155 of Mystery Scene.)

When “Midsomer” debuted in the U.S. in 1998, Tom Barnaby’s “ordinary man” status was a selling point.

“It’s very refreshing to be in the company of a detective who has a happy marriage and is not dysfunctional,” said Delia Fine, who ushered the show into the country via her tenure at the A&E cable network. Speaking to the New York Times, Fine added, “I get these visions of an endless parade of aging, ex-alcoholic white men in rumpled trench coats, with egg on their ties, who are always in troubled marriages and have problems with authority.”

The late Fine (she passed away in 2016) was vice president of film, drama and performing arts for A&E when it aired its “Mysteries to Die For” programming umbrella that also included “Hercule Poirot,” “Sherlock Holmes” (the one with the late Jeremy Brett), “Inspector Morse,” and “Miss Marple.” Of the lineup, Fine said, “We have so little resolution in our daily lives … But with a mystery, everything’s tied up at the end. It’s one of the things that makes them so appealing,”

As with any series that’s survived over time there have been challenges that have led to changes. Most notably as a result of a 2011 controversy, when producer Brian True-May gave an interview to Radio Times in which he called the series “the last bastion of Englishness,” saying that the all-white cast – and lack of multiculturalism – was a reason for the show’s success.

The comments led to immediate repercussions. An apologetic statement was issued by ITV, the UK network that airs the show. The head of policy research for the country’s leading race equality think tank penned an opinion piece (for the Telegraph), asking for understanding of diversity experiences. And True-May was suspended from the show. (He later returned.)

Ever since, the ethnic minority population of Midsomer County has grown.

Meantime, there have been shifts in the approach to technology and science. Harkening back to the show’s origins, Horowitz admits, “I was very keen to keep the modern world out of the stories so that they would exist in some strange territory between golden age and the 21^st century.” For that reason, there were few pathologists and little forensic science. “Barnaby was on a level playing field with Poirot and Sherlock Holmes,” says Horowitz.

Not anymore. Computers and cell phones and forensics (and a shifting roll call of pathologists) are now a part of CID.

“Midsomer” mania extends beyond the screen. Befitting a show famed for its picturesque, albeit blood-spattered, settings, myriad tours of “Midsomer” location sites are offered.

In fact, the series is credited with boosting the economies of the areas where it films. Workshops are conducted for businesses looking to capitalize on what its organizers – tourism experts – call “the “Midsomer” effect.” (For instance, Lodden Brewery in Oxfordshire, which has appeared in the episodes “Night of the Stag” and “The Ghost of Causton Abbey,” brews a Night of the Stag beer, and conducts tours for “Midsomer” fans.)

Here’s how Brit Movie Tours touts its “Midsomer” outing: “You will visit fairy tale houses, ancient churches, cozy pubs, charming village greens, quaint stores and grand houses that feature prominently in the magical but rather deadly county of Midsomer.”

Like the country’s formidable queen, there’s a sense that “Midsomer” could reign forever. With tea and good manners, “Midsomer Murders” carries on. Toodle-pips and all.

The opening music is lush but ominous. As the movie credits roll, strains of carnival music break through, accompanying the camera as it moves in on a barker, doing his best to entice crowds outside a tent with a sign that reads GEEK.

GEEK? To modern audiences, a geek is someone with minor social skills – possibly combined with extra-ordinary intelligence. An eccentric. An oddball. A dweeb.

Back in the 1940s the term implied something else – something dark. And tragic. Something within this movie tent, where a striking looking man, wearing a white T-shirt and great physique, watches and waits. “This exhibit is being presented solely in the interest of education and science!” claims a handler, who points to an unseen figure below. “Is he the missing link? Is he man or beast?”

The man in the T-shirt – his name is Stanton Carlisle, and he’s a newcomer to the carnival biz – stands, appalled, among the gaping onlookers. When the (unseen) geek is tossed live chickens to eat, Carlisle walks away from the squawks of brutalized poultry, and the resulting gasps from the crowd. He goes on to say, incredulously, “I can’t understand how anybody could get so low.”

It’s a prophetic line that serves as a dirty welcome mat to “Nightmare Alley,” a weird, unsettling 1947 movie about an enigmatic grifter who uses the women he meets to con his way to the top.

The movie, and the eponymous 1946 book on which it’s based, have become known for a haunting mystique, spilling out over various incarnations.

There have been myriad critical analyses, a graphic novel adaptation, a musical stage production, and reports of planned film remakes – the latest of which involves Academy Award-winner Guillermo Del Toro. With its saga of deceit and lies and a central destructive character who appears irredeemable, it has also become a go-to attraction for mystery and crime enthusiasts.

Why? Give the geek some of the credit. Until “Nightmare Alley,” the general public wasn’t aware of the term, or the carny practice of exhibiting a man sunk to his lowest depths, a victim of alcohol abuse.

There is also the story’s grim trajectory, as Stan Carlisle goes from carnival mind reader to tuxedo-clad nightclub “mentalist,” with the help of a stolen “word code.” He’s poised to become the spiritual leader of his own church when karma closes in. At book and film’s end – Spoiler Alert – it’s Carlisle who is the geek.

The downbeat mood and fatalistic characters ushered the movie into the film noir canon, despite it not fitting the genre’s traditional model.

And then there is the head-spinning story of the book’s author. The rise and fall of William Lindsay Gresham is nowadays seen as a parallel to the story of his fictional charlatan, Stanton Carlisle. “It was a case of life reflecting art and art reflecting life,” says Alain Silver, a Los Angeles filmmaker and film historian-author who, with writing partner James Ursini, has written extensively about film noir. (Their latest work is “Film Noir Prototypes: Origins of the Movement,” for Applause Books.)

“He had this urge to expose the hidden side of things. He was in search of truth and enlightenment. But, deep in his heart, he knew he was never going to find it,” says Bret Wood, an Atlanta-based filmmaker who wrote the introduction to a 2013 collector’s edition of “Nightmare Alley” and edited a 2014 anthology of Gresham’s writings, both for Centipede Press.

Born in Baltimore, William Lindsay Gresham mostly grew up in New York, where he prowled the sideshows of Coney Island. He was 29 and serving with the army of the Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War, when he struck up a friendship with a medic who was an old carny man. He told Gresham about “the geek” – carnival slang for an act in which a man bites the heads off live chickens or other small animals. “Where do you get a geek?” Gresham asked. The answer: “You don’t get a geek. You make one.” With an assist from booze.

Gresham’s longtime interest in carnivals, and the geek, were the genesis of “Nightmare Alley.” Nothing else that he wrote, including a second novel and a spate of non-fiction articles, came close to its success or infamy.

Charles Schlessiger, now 85, was the agent who oversaw subsidiary rights for the author’s literary agency, Brandt and Brandt (now Brandt and Hochman). “I remember Bill as a nice guy who was kind of lighthearted. The last time I saw him, he said something funny to me. Don’t ask me what it was, it was too long ago. I do remember that the next thing I knew, I heard he’d committed suicide. And I just couldn’t figure that out.”

”Remember,” Schlessiger says, “The book is a classic in the truest sense. Think about it. Since 1946 it’s never been out of print.”

First published in September 1946 by Rinehart and Company (at a cover price of $2.50), “Nightmare Alley” had such sensational, sordid subject matter it was a guarantee to be noticed.

The pulpy storyline – with chapters named for the various tarot cards – is populated by a bevy of unusual characters: a fake mind reader, who believes in the power of the tarot, and her drunken husband; a sweet young thing who falls under Carlisle’s spell; a midway strongman; and a female psychologist who spots Carlisle for what he is (because it takes one to know one).  She’s put together a high society Chicago clientele, incredulous dupes for what she and Carlisle call “the spook racket,” the use of tricked-out spiritualism to contact loved ones in the hereafter. But Instead of leading to money and power, the gambit results in a dour finale – just as the tarot cards predicted.

And, of course, there is Carlisle. As he confesses to the psychologist Lilith, “I’m a hustler, God damn it … I’m on the make. Nothing matters in this damned lunatic asylum of a world but dough … When you get that you’re the boss … I’m going to milk it out of those chumps and take them for the gold in their teeth before I’m through.”

No wonder the Philadelphia Inquirer dubbed it a “fascinatingly evil novel” and said Carlisle “muscles himself into a sure niche of immortality in the anteroom, at least, of literature’s Hall of Infamy.” The Montgomery (Alabama) Advertiser warned, “Eyebrows will be raised higher than a cat’s back at this profoundly shocking and evil novel.” The headline in the Atlanta Constitution read, Beware Geeks Bearing Gifts. The review wrapped with, “… if you like your meat raw, it should be your dish.”

These headline grabbing reviews caught the attention of a man who would seem to be least likely interested – one of vaudeville’s most beloved comedians. George Jessel, the actor-humorist known as “the nation’s foremost toastmaster,” took the project to 20^th Century-Fox, where he had produced the frothy movie musicals “The Dolly Sisters” and “I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now?” He got studio chief Darryl Zanuck to buy the book’s rights for $50,000.

Enter one of Hollywood’s most dashing leading men, Tyrone Power. Known for his dark, swoon-worthy good looks and for playing smooth romantic leads – often in period costume, with sword in hand – Power was searching for an image change. He’d already taken a serious step with his most recent release, in which he starred as a World War I veteran in search of spiritual enlightenment, in Fox’s adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham’s “The Razor’s Edge.”

In an oft-quoted Fox publicity release for “Nightmare Alley” Power said, “Stan Carlisle fascinated me. He was such an unmitigated heel … Here was a chance to create a character different from any I had ever played before.” Flexing his movie star muscle, Power convinced Zanuck to hire his “Razor’s Edge” director, Edmund Goulding, to helm the picture. Jules Furthman (“To Have and Have Not,” “The Big Sleep”) came aboard as screenwriter. Gresham was reportedly a consultant (though what he did, exactly, has never been authoritatively recounted).

Joan Blondell, who possessed an earthy allure even at age 41, was cast as Zeena, the sham mind reader. Starlet Colleen Gray was chosen for the virginal carnival gal, Molly. Helen Walker, known for playing home wreckers, brought her chilly presence to the role of psychologist (and femme fatale) Lillith. (The movie Lillith spells her name with two “l’s.”) Rounding out the cast were veteran character actors Mike Mazurki, known for a string of thug-type roles, as Bruno the strongman; Ian Keith as Zeena’s boozy, doomed husband, Pete; and Taylor Homes as Ezra Grindle, a wealthy man who becomes one of Carlisle’s suckers.

Production took place in mid-1947. For authenticity, Fox hired an actual carnival. Its attractions spilled out over 10 acres of the studio’s backlot.

Three veteran carny men worked as consultants on “Nightmare Alley.” One of them, Ed Mundy, praised the movie’s sideshow performers while lamenting how changing times had impacted the business. Speaking to the Los Angeles Herald-Express, he said, “Today about the only top freaks are the sheep-headed boys, Eko and Iko.” (The wild-haired siblings were actually Albino African-Americans.) Added Mundy, at a time that pre-dated political correctness, “Improved health standards in the country are wiping out the monstrosities.”

As for the film’s beautiful people, Fox bragged about Power’s 28 (count ‘em) love scenes with his three leading ladies.

Still, Zanuck was worried. Studio memos of story conferences reveal his concern that the various screenplay outlines lacked “a sympathetic character to root for.” He also wanted the sexual content toned down, and a less hopeless ending.

Zanuck got what he wanted. In the book, Stan Carlisle is sexually involved with Zeena, Molly and Lillith. In the film he appears to be faithful to Molly – whom he’s forced to marry (presumably after having bedded her) – while involved in his shady dealings with Lillith. And unlike the book, which ends with Molly remarried, at film’s end she’s there to care for Stan.

**

When the movie opened that October some critics lobbed metaphorical tomatoes.

“The irritating deficiency about “Nightmare Alley” is its shocking lack of good taste,” opined the New York Times’ Bosley Crowther. The New York Daily News called it “too unpleasant to warrant a hearty endorsement.”

Most everyone, however, singled out Power’s take-no-prisoners performance. Comparing the star’s work in “The Razor’s Edge” to that of “Nightmare Alley,” the Los Angeles Times’s Philip K. Scheuer noted, “Power is much more convincing as a phony spiritualist than he was as the real thing.”

Nor were there complaints about production values. Not with cinematography by Lee Garmes, master of lighting, or the mournful music by Cyril Mockridge.

The trade publication Hollywood Reporter even called it “one of the finest pictures of the year,” and predicted an Academy Award nomination for Power. (It didn’t happen). Variety was cautious: “[The film] at times has the eerie effect of a horror film and occasionally approaches authentic tragedy … [but] one guess is as good as another as to what it will do at the box office.”

The industry seer got that right. Despite its A-ticket star and classy production, the movie’s box office sales wound up on the lower rung of the year’s Top 100 movies. Five years after the movie’s release, as Power exited Fox after a lengthy contract, he was asked to name his favorite film. He quickly cited “Nightmare Alley,” adding, “The studio did nothing to sell it and it wasn’t a success.”

**

Though “Nightmare Alley” was reissued theatrically in the early 1950s, to run as the second string title on double bills, it was its end-of-the-decade sale to television that insured its resurrection.

It first surfaced on TV in 1959. Per an early log line: “An ambitious but ruthless barker for a traveling carnival steals a wife and an act.” As the movie continued to air, in markets across the country, programmers – and the critics who worked for the papers that printed the log lines – reconsidered the film. The log lines became more enticing. As in, “Carnival man becomes obsessed with greed and turns himself into a mental monster” … “A carnival clairvoyant wreaks a terrible vengeance on himself” … “Strong drama about a carnival drifter who double crosses everybody on his way to success. One of Power’s best performances. Very good.”

Then there was the one that wrapped with, “This is one of the eeriest pictures of all time.”

That reputation continued to grow, with an assist from fans of offbeat cinema – which was becoming a kind of genre all its own. Bill Landis, a New Yorker who proudly prowled the theaters of then-scary Times Square, touted “Nightmare Alley” as a “sleaze” film in his self-published Eighties fanzine Sleazoid Express. As Landis told the Los Angeles Times, “I loved the attitude … that all people are sick, venal and greedy.” The movie got a listing in “The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film” (1983), which celebrated “the wildest movies ever made!!” And befitting its growing fandom, it was included in cult movie compendiums.

Thanks to 16-millimeter rentals, it also became a staple of screenings sponsored by film societies and college campuses.

That market ultimately died, replaced by the home viewing market made possible by the development of the video cassette. But there never was a VHS release of “Nightmare Alley,” due to a protracted lawsuit between the estate of producer George Jessel and Fox. This further fueled the want-to-see factor for the film.

“It was one of those films that people taped, if they got the chance. And then they passed around those tapes. And the movie got this mythic reputation,” says Bret Wood.

As bootleg video copies showed up for sale on eBay, the film’s only surviving star, Colleen Gray, graciously greeted fans at film festivals and fan gatherings. At retrospective houses the movie was sometimes co-billed with Tod Browning’s “Freaks,” the still-disconcerting 1932 film about human oddity sideshow performers. By this time “Nightmare Alley” was being promoted as film noir.

**

Hardboiled American crime fiction – the kind with tough guys, tougher dames, gunplay and shadowy streets (think Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe and Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade) – helped give rise to the noir genre. So did the gloomy tone of those works.

Those elements were plenty visible in 1947, when the marquees featured titles such as “Out of the Past,” “Body and Soul,” “Crossfire,” “Dark Passage,” “Kiss of Death” and “The Lady from Shanghai.” “Nightmare Alley” didn’t fit the mold – but it had fatalism to spare. It was also that rare movie experience that wasn’t easily forgotten.

“It’s not your typical crime-pulp piece. But it’s the spirit of film noir in a setting you don’t really associate with crime,” says Wood, adding, “Also, you can’t underestimate the power of the geek.”

“It’s kind of a fractured noir,” admits Silver. “The film examines transcendental philosophy and it’s got a somewhat redemptive ending. Instead of a crime setting we’ve got a carnival, which takes us, at least in the first half of the story, into a kind of secret society. Within it you have these outlandish characters, and within that context Stan appears to be normal. Only you find out he’s anything but.”

Prolific author/interviewer Tom Weaver, known for his more than three dozen books focusing on the science fiction/horror genres, finds elements of the latter in “Nightmare Alley.” “It’s such a unique picture to come out of 1940s Hollywood. It’s like it’s a pre-Code film made in 1947,” he said, referencing the Production Code, which brought censorship guidelines to films produced after the mid-1930s. Adds Weaver: “The film is so incredibly dark, so pessimistic. It’s even got a steak of meanness in its casting of Ian Keith as a drunk (as the husband of mind reader Joan Blondell), because he really was a drunk. Drinking ruined his career.”

**

“Nightmare Alley” was finally released on DVD in 2005, with commentary by Silver and Ursini.

The  story has since materialized in different mediums.

A stage musical, by playwright Jonathan Brielle, premiered in 2010 at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles. The two-act production, which included the musical numbers “Tough Cookies,” “The Code” and “Whatever It Takes,” was later performed Off-Broadway.

A graphic novel by the late underground comix artist Spain, aka Spain Rodriguez (aka Manuel Rodriguez) was published in 2003 by Fantagraphics Books. Time magazine loved it. “Not so much a yarn as a boiled leather strap … This is no ‘Hey! Rube!’ Go check it out.”

There’s also talk of a remake. Again.

Back in the late Seventies, it was music mogul Berry Gordy – legendary founder of the Motown label – who planned to direct a version starring Billy Dee Williams.

Currently, it’s Guillermo Del Toro – who won Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director for “The Shape of Water” – with a planned remake on the boards.

The book, meantime, is currently published by New York Review Books Classics, with an introduction by Nick Tosches, the novelist-biographer known for his philosophical riffs. It is also included in the prestigious Library of America collection, “Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s and 40s.”

**

As for Gresham: his personal story included a stint as a folksinger, suicide attempts (he once attempted to hang himself, but the hook broke), and much-written-about marriage to Joy Davidman, a poet whose writings also included feminist-leaning film reviews.

The pair had shared interests, including political activism (they both joined the Communist Party), spiritual growth (they tried various religions, including Dianetics, which gave rise to Scientology), and a love of cats. They were parents of two young sons. But they both struggled professionally.

Gresham, who wrote for the pulps and men’s magazines before hitting pay dirt with “Nightmare Alley,” would publish only one more novel, 1949’s tepidly received The Tower, set in a TB hospital. Then came “Midway Monsters,” a collection of his non-fiction writings, followed by a biography of Houdini. Oddly, his final book was about body building.

His personal life took a curious twist when Davidman met the British writer and theologian C.S. Lewis (“Chronicles of Narnia”). She subsequently divorced Gresham and married Lewis, an unlikely romance that was the basis of the 1993 film “Shadowlands,” starring Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger.

Gresham, meantime, married Davidman’s cousin, while continuing a spiritual search that sometimes veered into the occult.

He was 53 and suffering from cancer of the tongue in September 1962 when he checked into New York’s Hotel Dixie, where he’d written much of “Nightmare Alley.” Registered under one of his pseudonyms, he took an overdose of sleeping pills.

In the years since, many “Nightmare Alley” admirers have sought to understand Gresham, a man who once said, “Perhaps we are all freaks, doing the best we can with the handicaps we carry through the world.”

I’ve always enjoyed literature that transports me to locations around the world I’ve never visited. The mysterious moors of Daphne du Maurier’s intricate gothic suspense. A Thirties-era trip along the Orient Express with a certain Belgian detective. Laos, in the mid-Seventies, with an assist from Colin Cotterill’s Dr. Siri Paiboun, the country’s crime-solving national coroner.

But given the choice, I’ll often opt for a trip closer to home, the better to revisit a familiar setting, or even one of my own, personal stamping grounds.

In Southern California–where I’ve lived my entire life–realtors chant like a mantra the well-known phrase, “location, location, location,” while tempting would-be buyers with ocean views that will literally cost millions. To them, it’s all about the real estate value.

Interestingly, the film and TV industry has its own notions about location. To offset what’s known as runaway production, the California Film Commission offers cuts through red tape, and financial incentives, so that productions will shoot locally. A spate of Los Angeles’s signature sites–Griffith Observatory, Union Station, the Ennis House, the Formosa Café, among them–have received more close-ups than many a starlet. They’ve also shown up on plenty of pages of So Cal-set crime novels. My staycations.

For fictional sleuths, location can be as revealing as crime solving techniques, or the weapon of choice. Figure, Harry Bosch lives in a house in Los Angeles that sits on stilts on Woodrow Wilson Drive, off twisty, turny Mulholland–with views of canyons, mountains and the iconic Hollywood Sign. For Elvis Cole, home is a classic A-frame, cantilevered above Los Angeles’s Laurel Canyon. These are fitting sites for men whose actual lives seem ever on the edge. To those of us don’t dwell up high–maybe we don’t have the dough to do it; maybe we don’t want our cats to wind up coyote food–there’s a catharsis in reading about people who do, and asking ourselves, “what if … ”

Along with mountains and canyons, So Cal has its famous coastline, and beaches, and desert communities that range from oasis-like Palm Springs (nowadays touted as a mecca for modernism), to disquieting Death Valley (the hottest place on earth, and the driest in the nation). And we can’t forget now-hip Coachella, and its loud, rowdy music-lovers. And what about all those Indian casinos? Can you feel the plot thicken? On top of which there are cool bars and hangouts – and some of them are actually historic.

Rich in geographic diversity, So Cal also affords plenty of … characters. Hollywood helps, in that regard. But don’t think of all our residents as just another pretty face, and cosmetically-enhanced bod. The (many) crime novel protagonists who live and work in So Cal must deal with folks given to despair and heartbreak and dark doings–along with the usual Seismic activity– beneath the seemingly perfect surface.

Of course, the notion of the investigator who saunters down the streets of L.A. owes everything to Raymond Chandler, who famously described the city as “lost and beaten and full of emptiness.” Chandler’s hardboiled creation, Phillip Marlowe, prowled so many actual L.A. sites–bumping into assorted lowlifes and hubba-hubba dames–that you can take a virtual tour of his haunts via fan-created websites. You can also book an actual bus ride with other aficionados, or buy a fold-up map devoted solely to Chandler’s L.A.

When tourist-pals ask me to compile a “things to see and do” list I often include a Chandler site at Hollywood and Cahuenga, explaining that the historic six-story building used to be the tallest in the neighborhood. And that “Marlowe’s office was on the sixth floor.” That’s another draw of sun streaked noir: the genre can act as a guidebook.

Michael Connelly’s Bosch and Mickey Haller books deliver a nifty tour of So Cal, with settings ranging from Mariachi Plaza to the Hollywood Reservoir. L.A.’s iconic (but seldom operational) funicular railway, Angels Flight, even got to be a book title. (Okay, here and there Connelly takes artistic license–or, perhaps they’re just goofs. He put L.A.’s Central Library at an intersection where it isn’t.) The series even provides tips on where to dine: Bosch likes Du-Par’s and Philippe’s, and has been spotted at the Musso & Frank Grill, which happened to be a real life favorite of Chandler’s.

So Cal is known as a place where people reinvent themselves, where nothing is what it seems. Heck, the palm trees aren’t even native. Because truth is often stranger than fiction, writers love digging through archives to fictionalize true crime cases. That leads to evocative locations by way of the facts of the respective incidents. Walter Mosley’s Little Scarlet took us to South Central Los Angeles, and the Watt’s riots of 1965. In Rule of Capture, Ona Russell mined a myriad downtown L.A. and Hollywood locales, and even the celebrity-favored Tijuana getaway Agua Caliente, as she flashed back to 1928 and L.A.’s Julian Petroleum Corp. case, an early and notorious Ponzi scheme that defrauded 40,000 California investors.

L.A.’s most shocking and still-confounding case–the vicious 1947 murder of Elizabeth Short, nicknamed the Black Dahlia–was fictionalized by James Ellroy and, earlier, John Gregory Dunne. There have been film versions of both Ellroy’s The Black Dahlia and Dunne’s True Confessions. Should you want to raise a glass to Short’s memory, visit L.A.’s Biltmore Hotel–the last place Short was seen alive–where you can get a Black Dahlia cocktail. A wicked mix of vodka, Chambord black raspberry liqueur and Kahlua it’s served in the Gallery Bar and Cognac Room. Another great location.

South of L.A., by about forty miles, is Orange County. For a long time it was T. Jefferson Parker terrain. (He’s great at capturing those beach communities.) But others have discovered that there’s more to the area’s regional highlights than Disneyland. Jill Amadio has a series about an amateur sleuth that gets up close and cozy with Newport and Balboa Island (the latter disguised as Isabel Island); if you don’t know the town of Placentia, you will after reading Gayle Carline’s books about a former housecleaner turned investigator.

Go north of L.A., some ninety miles, to get to Santa Barbara. A fictionalized version of this gorgeous coastal community serves as the hometown of Kinsey Milhone. Only Sue Grafton calls it Santa Teresa, an homage to genre giant Ross Macdonald, who’d earlier written about Santa Barbara as the thinly-veiled Santa Teresa.

My love of familiar, richly expressive locations is interwoven with my love of Santa Barbara, which I visit often, to see family. It was there, many years ago–I wasn’t yet a teenager–that I bought a series of paperback novels at a used bookstore. At the time, I’d never heard of Macdonald, but I loved the titles … The Zebra-Striped Hearse, The Doomsters, The Chill … The covers were so lurid that I hid them from my mother. But, I couldn’t resist slumping down in the backseat of the car, to begin reading them during the drive back home.

It would be some time before I would come to understand Macdonald’s ambitious Freudian themes, and the internal struggles of his detective, Lew Archer, but I wasn’t tricked by Santa Teresa. Right off, I recognized the place as Santa Barbara. As we drove back home, along the coast, I alternately read and took in the views. I was reading about the very places we were driving past!

It was an exhilarating discovery.

I was hooked.

(photos: James L. Broeske)

As a child, Julie M. Rivett knew that her deceased grandfather was a famous writer. She knew he’d been a detective. She used to see copies of his novels on the bookshelves of her grandmother’s West Los Angeles home. At the time, she didn’t give it all that much thought.

“Later, I learned about the importance of those books, and about his background—the politics and the blacklist. But when you’re 10, you don’t know any of that.”

Rivett, who lives in Rossmoor, is the granddaughter of Dashiell Hammett, the author credited with inventing hard-boiled detective fiction. His novels include “The Maltese Falcon,” with that gritty gumshoe hero Sam Spade, and “The Thin Man,” which features two other indelible characters, Nick and Nora Charles, the glamorous, cocktail-swigging crime solvers.

When he died in 1961, at age 66, Hammett had a reputation as a hard-drinking ladies’ man who never regained his creative spark after his last novel was published in 1934. His 26-year bout with writer’s block was legendary. He was also an avowed leftist, who was caught in the crosshairs of the McCarthy era when he refused to answer questions about political associates. He served five months in federal prison. And he was part of a celebrity couple; he had a 30-year relationship with playwright and memoirist Lillian Hellman.

But most of all he was heralded as a crime writer who forever changed and legitimized the genre. He was a rarity in that he knew first-hand about sleuthing. He’d been an operative for Pinkerton, the national agency that gave rise to the term “private eye.” (Its logo was of an open eye, and the claim “We never sleep.”)

Rivett sometimes feels like a detective, too. The literary kind. Though she met her grandfather only once, in the spring of 1960 when she was 3 years old, she developed a posthumous relationship with the literary icon by way of exhaustive research. She studied his letters, manuscripts, and photographs, and scrutinized his books and their film adaptations. She’s able to rattle off characters, plots, and snappy lines of dialogue.

She became a Hammett authority so she could represent his legacy. For Rivett, it’s tough to separate the man from the writer. “His personality is inherent in his writing – which is logical, succinct, thoughtful. Even his inability to write for all those years was about his devotion to perfection.” She adds, “I’ve come to feel a great fondness and attachment to him.”

One of four Hammett grandchildren, the 59-year-old Rivett is the defacto spokesperson for the family and serves as a trustee of his literary estate. The trustees work with Hammett publishers and others, including filmmakers. (Johnny Depp was in serious talks regarding a “Thin Man” remake for a while.) Rivett is also an editor for collections of her grandfather’s work, such as the recent “The Hunter and Other Stories,” short fiction that was found in his archives and never before published. She curates Hammett exhibits and speaks about him around the country. “One of my jobs in talking about my grandfather is to humanize him … to get beyond that iconic image,” Rivett says.

She begins with his first name. It should be pronounced as Dah-sheel (rhymes with Neal), not Dash-el.

“Some people get very excited to meet a family member,” she says, adding, “But, you have to remember, it’s a borrowed fame.”

Before Rivett stepped into this public role, her mother, Hammett’s younger daughter Jo Hammett Marshall, of Cypress, served as family representative and chronicler. In a slender 2001 memoir, “Dashiell Hammett: A Daughter Remembers,” Marshall quotes from the letters exchanged between her mother, Josephine Dolan, and Hammett. These missives chart the love affair that began in 1920. Hammett was diagnosed with tuberculosis while serving as an Army ambulance corps driver during World War I and he became attracted to Dolan, a young nurse treating him.

When he was released from the hospital he moved to San Francisco, and they started corresponding. In one letter, Dolan advises him to eat healthy and to “take the cure”—a euphemism at the time for laying off the liquor.

Dolan eventually joined Hammett in San Francisco, where they married and had two daughters, Mary (who is now deceased) and little Josephine, who was known as Jo. By the time Jo was born, the Hammetts were living apart due to a reoccurrence of his TB. Weakened from the illness, Hammett had to give up detective work. To make money, he wrote advertising copy and book reviews. He also turned to fiction writing.

His stories started appearing in Black Mask in 1923, three years after the famous pulp magazine was launched. Hammett’s first book, the blood-spattered “Red Harvest,” initially appeared there, too, in four installments. The violent 1929 novel is narrated by an investigator known as the Continental Op, who returns in a second novel, and a series of short stories.

“The Maltese Falcon” debuted in Black Mask and was published in book form in 1930. It was an immediate hit and enormously influential. As Raymond Chandler—creator of sleuth Philip Marlowe—noted, Hammett took murder out of the drawing room and put it in the back alley, where it belonged.

Richard Layman, a Hammett biographer and editor who co-edits the Hammett collections with Rivett, says that genre-wise, “Hammett brought a new level of literary sensibility to mystery fiction…. characterized by tough dialogue and a tough-minded sensibility, and a concentration on lower classes … He was at the forefront of the early modernist writers.”

With his fifth and final novel, “The Thin Man,” Hammett did some social climbing. The book and the film version both came out in 1934 and garnered raves. Famed New Yorker critic Alexander Woollcott called the book—which featured a dapper-looking Hammett on the cover—“The best detective story yet written in America.”

The bickering, bantering Nick and Nora became the template for future romantic duo detectives. There were six “Thin Man” movies, a long-running radio show and a 1950s TV series.

Meantime, more than a decade after its publication, “The Maltese Falcon” took flight as a film for the third time, and that one proved to be the charm. The 1941 quest to find the priceless jeweled statuette of the black bird is a beloved classic. Considered the first film noir, it received three Academy Award nominations, including for best picture, and made a star of 41-year-old Humphrey Bogart.

Today, Hammett’s works are studied in universities, and revered by other writers. “He’s the man, in terms of the hard-boiled school,” says Gordon McAlpine, the Irvine-based author of the critically admired novel “Hammett Unwritten,” which finds Hammett in search of a treasured falcon statuette, in hopes that by finding it he will cure his writer’s block. There’s a roster of Hammett-esque fiction: Ace Atkins’ “Devil’s Garden”; Joe Gores’ “Spade and Archer” a “Maltese Falcon” prequel (authorized by the estate); the “Black Mask Boys” novels by Hammett biographer William F. Nolan, in which Hammett teams with those other famed crime writers, Raymond Chandler and Erle Stanley Gardner, to solve mysteries.

Hammett’s private life garnered almost as much publicity as his fiction, especially once his fame took him to Hollywood. When Hammett and Hellman met there in 1930, they were married to other people. She got a divorce. He got a “Mexican mail-order” divorce from Rivett’s grandmother. But Hellman and Hammett never tied the knot.

Their eyebrow-raising romance captured the public’s imagination, though, and they have been depicted numerous times in print and on-screen. The 1977 film, “Julia,” was based on one of Hellman’s memoirs (the veracity of which were debated) and cast Jane Fonda as Hellman and Jason Robards as a boozy Hammett, for which he won a best supporting actor Oscar.

Rivett can be defensive about some of the claims made about her family. Biographers have taken Hammett to task for his treatment of his wife and children during his decades-long relationship with Hellman. (Per one reviewer, “Hammett was a creep, the kind of guy Spade would have enjoyed kicking in the teeth.”) Rivett argues that he was a “Disneyland Dad,” one of those guys who puts in impressive but far from daily appearances. But he was “not a deserter,” she says.

Marshall writes in her memoir about staying overnight with her father at the Beverly Wilshire and at the glamorous Ambassador and Roosevelt hotels. She recalls his signature accessories, including a gold pen and silver cigarette cases. And his white cable-knit sweater.

Rivett has a few special memories from that single visit with her grandfather and Hellman on Martha’s Vineyard. She remembers him teaching her to feed the dog by carefully holding her hand flat, with a treat on it. “He and Lillian Hellman raised those big standard poodles”—Rivett always uses Hellman’s full name—“and I remember going up the stairs to the tower. It was this kind of round, empty room. And we made loud echo-y noises.”

After Hammett’s death, Hellman got control of his writings through a complicated series of maneuvers for a paltry $5,000. The acquisition came literally at the expense of his family; biographers and scholars have reported that Hellman grew wealthy off Hammett’s writings. “My mom would get a check at Christmastime for a couple of thousand dollars,” Rivett says. “It was a big deal to us, because she’d give each of us kids $125 as our portion of the gift. Lillian Hellman sent letters that said things like, ‘My attorneys tell me I shouldn’t do this, but, consider this a gift from your father.’ ”

Hellman refused to cooperate with a number of Hammett biographers, including Layman, who reached out to her while researching his 1981 book, “Shadow Man: Life of Dashiell Hammett.” But Layman gives her credit for overseeing the Hammett reprintings that led to his rediscovery. “There’s nothing so fragile as a dead author’s literary reputation. It can go away in a flicker. She kept it alive.” But, he adds, “she had a self-aggrandizing view of Hammett that she insisted upon. She knew it was distorted, but she held onto it with a death grip.”

Before she died in 1984, Hellman established a Hammett literary trust and named its administrators—none of whom had ties to the family.

During the 1990s—after the death of matriarch Josephine—rights to Hammett’s five novels were transferred to Marshall, the result of copyright extension law. Then Marshall and other family members sought to change the administrators of the trust. It was especially galling to Marshall that she had to get a stranger’s permission to publish a book of her father’s letters. (“Selected Letters of Dashiell Hammett: 1921-1960” finally came out in 2001.) There was a flurry of correspondence, some of it sent by Rivett’s brother, Los Angeles attorney Evan Marshall.

Rivett was a stay-at-home mom with two daughters, but as this was going on she went back to college. She planned to continue earlier studies in interior design but didn’t like the program, so she switched to American studies and communications studies at California State University, Long Beach, where she got her bachelor’s degree and then a master’s in communications. “By studying rhetoric, I learned about public speaking, and it all kind of came together, in terms of me working with the trust.” She took another significant step when she joined Layman in editing the collection of her grandfather’s letters and her mother’s memoir.

Today, the appointees to the Hammett literary trust are Rivett, her brother, and Layman, with Jo getting the final say so.

As the visible family representative, Rivett participates in literary events such as The Big Read, a program sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts, and local libraries. She’s often asked which one of his characters her grandfather most identified with. Her ready answer: “Sam Spade. He’s the most autobiographical. They both have a kind of pragmatic, existential outlook on life.”

She tries to get across a message that is in stark contrast with Hammett’s image. “He was brilliant, but imperfect. He had a family and a sense of humor. He loved children and dogs, and he liked working with his hands and hunting. He was a serious politician, and he was a drunk. In other words, he was a real person.”