Crimespree Magazine #56 Page 8
Because John Lescroart always has twisty, often complicated plots in his books, it’s sometimes hard to tell from reviews that his stories are, first and foremost, character studies. Everyone who shows up on his pages is richly drawn and fully realized, to a point where I found myself having conversations with them after I finished reading. (what? That’s normal, right?)
SOMEONE ELSE’S SKIN by Sarah Hilary
I never know quite what to expect when I open a first novel, and finding a good one, with a lead character I like and want to get to know better, is a real treat. SOMEONE ELSE’S SKIN is such a delight.
Detective Inspector Marnie Rome is tough, smart, and haunted. When she goes to interview a woman at a refuge in London, she happens on a more complex situation than she anticipated, and she never flinches as she confronts a complex web of heinous violence.
But let me be clear: The violence in SOMEONE ELSE’S SKIN is sometimes graphic, yes, but it is not gratuitous or facile. Like Marnie, this story does not flinch when addressing difficult subjects. I look forward to her next case.
WATCHING YOU by Michael Robotham
In the seventh entry in the Joe O’Loughlin series, Michael Robotham proves that great crime writers can indeed get better (and better).
WATCHING YOU opens with Marnie Logan, a young mom, feeling like she’s being—logically enough, given the book’s title—watched. Marnie’s in a tough spot because her husband has disappeared without a trace, and she’s trying to hold her life together, with Joe’s help. Joe is possessed of a deep and abiding sense of curiosity and desire to help people who need it, and when applied to Marnie, these lead to some dark places indeed. Who is watching Marnie—if anyone is at all—and why is at the core of the story, but this is much more than a traditional whodunit.
I read a lot of crime fiction, and as such, I’m not easily surprised. That’s fine—I don’t need to be in order to enjoy a book—but WATCHING YOU caught me completely unawares repeatedly. Robotham is a supremely skilled and confident storyteller, and WATCHING YOU is a joy to read.
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A Quick Five with Alex Grecian
By Jon Jordan
Issue 56
Jon: Alex, your latest novel, THE DEVIL’S WORKSHOP is pretty crazy and twisted and yet you seem pretty well adjusted. How does that work?
Alex: Maybe you just don’t know me well enough, Jon. Talk to me before my first cup of coffee some morning.
Jon: The plot of WORKSHOP is really fun, how did the idea come to you?
Alex: I’ve always wondered whether someone caught Jack the Ripper and just didn’t bothered to tell the rest of us. He did disappear suddenly. It took me three books to figure out who could’ve done it.
Jon: Three books in now, and I imagine you are working on the fourth, are you pretty comfortable with the voices of these characters in your head?
Alex: I am. I’m not crazy about having Saucy Jack’s voice in my head, but I’m getting used to him. (And, yeah, I’m working on the fourth book now. It’s called The Harvest Man.)
Jon: Did any special research go into the latest book?
Alex: I had to research a lot of secret societies. I wanted the Karstphanomen to behave like an actual secret society would have at the time. I do hope nobody’s monitoring my Google searches.
Jon: Given the nature of what you are writing I imagine you get interesting emails, any of them stick out as especially crazy or fun?
Alex: Actually, most of the people who write to me are very nice. I have polite readers. But I have had a handful of letters from people who want me to kill off Inspector Day’s wife, Claire. Not cool, you handful of people.
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Author Workspaces
By Robert Crais
Issue 56
One pic wouldn’t cover it, so strap up and dig it:
My office is shaped like an L, so we have three angles. Herewith, a brief tour:
Pic 1
Foreground: My MacBook Air and my feet. If you needed to be told this, please go to the end of the line.
My desk is directly across from me. I know it looks like a bunker wall, but it’s my desk, shot from the opposite corner where I am currently parked in a large brown chair. Note the clutter and mess. This happens as I get closer to finishing a book. In this case, THE PROMISE. Mail, magazines, research articles, and junk pile up on the desk and floor. I know, I know, I should be ashamed of myself. I’m not. Figuring out where to file these things or what to do with them is too distracting when I’m lost in a book, so I let the stuff pile up. This may be a character flaw. Note the black boards tacked with white slips leaning against the desk. This is THE PROMISE. Each slip describes a scene or chapter. Most are detailed and some contain dialog. I add, subtract, and rearrange their order as I develop the book. The complete novel filled four boards, but I’m nearing the finish so this is what’s left.
On the right side of the pic directly above the two stools, note the framed comic book cover, MS. DISTRICT ATTORNEY. No such comic existed. A radio drama called MR. DISTRICT ATTORNEY ran from ’39 to ’52, accompanied by a comic book of the same name. When my daughter became a Deputy District Attorney, I commissioned Eisner-nominated Batman illustrator, Jerry Bingham, to create a feminist version to celebrate her accomplishment and express my pride in her and all the women who fight the good fight on behalf of The People. Hence, MS. DISTRICT ATTORNEY.
Directly above MS. DISTRICT ATTORNEY is the Merry Marvel Marching Society No-prize I won for having a letter-of-comment published in the AMAZING SPIDER-MAN comic book. I was thirteen. Years later, Stan Lee inscribed and signed it for me.
Directly left of the No-prize is a photograph of me with my students at the Clarion Writers Workshop at UCSD in 2009. I teach there every two or three years, and this is the only workshop where I will teach. The Clarion workshop specializes in science fiction and fantasy. People seem confused when they learn this. They know me as a crime writer, but I began my career writing sf and am a graduate of the Clarion program. Besides, writing is writing.
Immediately left of the Clarion pic is an x-ray of my reconstructed ankle and foot, showing bone screws, pins, metal straps and other gross stuff. The ankle is fine. I hike three to five miles every morning before sunrise.
Directly above the x-ray is a big color pic of my friend Diane Friedman’s German shepherd, Dog. Yes, that’s her name. Dog, I mean, not Diane. Dog rides in the front seat exactly like Maggie (“a black-and-tan wall”). Dog looks exactly like Maggie. This is because Dog inspired Maggie. Maggie began here, folks.
All the way across to the left upper corner of the rear cork board (and slightly hidden behind the lamp) is the pic a certain Milwaukee publisher used as the cover of their special anniversary issue.
On the white wall to the left of the lamp is a page of original comic art by the great Steve Ditko, my all-time favorite comic book illustrator, who co-created Spider-Man. This page is from AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #29.
Pic 2
Looking to my left, note the door: Elvis Cole Detective Agency. I love it. You wouldn’t believe how difficult it was to find a qualified sign painter. The lettering was painted freehand.
Also, as if you missed it, note more clutter and stacks of books. The stacks at the far end of the room are foreign editions. Behind the stacks is a large glass view port. The view is blocked by two framed movie posters waiting to be hung. They will wait until I finish the book.
Bookshelves fill the wall on the left side of the pic.
Pic 3
The wall referred to above and the big brown chair in which I do much of my writing. Again, note the embarrassing clutter on desk. Picture my humiliation.
The bookcases contain books by me, research books, awards, personal mementos, collectibles, and a television. Note the vertical white column separating the bookcases. The lower black plaque is the Barry Award received for THE WATCHMAN. Above it is the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Private Eye Writers of America. Books by my f
riends and my personal library fill a lower level of the house.
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Girlie Confidential: A Brief History of Robert Harrison
By Frank De Blase
Issue 56
Publisher Robert Harrison: the guru of gossip, the sultan of sleaze, the titan of titter tattle, the king of innuendo. It could be said this man single-handedly created the American tabloid. With his magazine Confidential, Harrison proved to be a major threat to the Hollywood glitterati in the early to mid-1950s.
Harrison got the low down any way he could. He had a stable of snitches, insiders, dime-droppers, confidence men, and private dicks who trolled Hollywood’s underbelly looking to catch movie stars and celebs in salacious sojourns or illegal activity. Confidential outed homosexuals, hop heads, junkies, juice heads, white starlets cavorting with Negroes, society swells circling the drain, fallen femme fatales, washed up palookas, commies, and couples on the extra-marital stroll. Often these exposes were goosed for a bigger headline splash when reality came up short. Liberties with the truth were frequently taken.
Confidential was launched in December 1952 and by 1955 it reached circulation of five million copies—selling more than TV Guide, Life, Time, and The Saturday Evening Post. Harrison was raking in half a million dollars per issue and living the life. Back in New York where he maintained his offices, he was the man about town making the Gotham scene in his long white Cadillac and matching white alpaca coat with a blonde arm charm de jour in tow. Harrison was handsome and slick and always picked up the check.
However, the source of his good fortune had Hollywood panties in a bunch and in 1957 Tinsel town’s big wigs convinced the California Attorney General to charge Harrison with conspiracy to print libel. Over 100 Hollywood celebrities and movie stars were called as witnesses. But after a fifteen day deliberation, the jury was hung. Before a retrial could be set, Hollywood moguls and Harrison pow-wow’d and all charges were dropped providing Harrison backed off. Without the sizzle and dazzle of star-studded scandal, Confidential was essentially DOA and Harrison sold it off to publisher Hy Steirman in1958. The title would last as a much tamer shadow of its former self until 1978.
But before he took aim at America’s lust for gossip and scandal, Harrison addressed desire numero uno: girls, girls, girls. From 1941 to 1955 Harrison published a number of fantastic girlie magazine titles—Beauty Parade, Eyeful, Wink, Flirt, Titter, and Whisper—Tame by today’s standards, these magazines were salacious, bodacious, bawdy and naughty, with an undercurrent of fetish running throughout. There may be debate as to the subtle differences between these various publications, but for the most part the same kind of sexy girls, torrid fun, and taboo humor ran consistently in them all.
This was a time in the United States where the puritanical leanings of the white picket hoi-polloi still prevailed. Those in need of a little T&A had to rely on Tijuana bibles, illegal underground smut (of questionable quality), or nudist magazines with their focus on “health” and “lifestyle.” And then there were the camera magazines which went to great lengths to describe the technical aspects and artistic composition of a nude photo in an attempt to mask why the leerer was actually leering.
Not Harrison; he took his cue straight from burlesque with its beautiful girls and its overall irreverence and lampoon. No pretense; Robert Harrison produced girlie magazines, plain and simple.
Harrison was born in the Bronx in 1905 to Russian immigrant parents. He got his feet wet in the magazine game as a copy boy, working his way up to advertising sales. By 1941, Harrison was working for Martin Quigley who published Motion Picture Daily and Motion Picture Herald. It was after hours in the deserted Daily offices that Harrison began his cheesecake empire, pasting up the first copy of Beauty Parade. The magazine debuted in October 1941 and was printed sporadically until after the war when it—and all the titles that followed in its wake—went bi-monthly.
All Harrison’s girlie magazine covers featured the breathtaking illustrated pin-up work of artists like Earl Moran (who signed his earlier work for Harrison with only his middle name, Steffa), Billy Devorrs, and predominantly Peter Driben. Driben is probably most famous for his publicity artwork for the classic 1941 noir film, The Maltese Falcon starring Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, and Peter Lorre.
In the time between 1941 and 1955, Harrison published these great magazines. And American men ate them up at 25 cents a pop. These magazines were sexy and humorous. Harrison himself frequently appeared as the rube alongside the scantily clad models in some of the slapstick spreads. However, at the same time and in spite of the frivolity, these magazines had a serious fetish undertone. Many of the spreads featured models in shoes with six-inch heels or higher. There were corsets and girdles and a significant emphasis on long lovely legs (the only feminine feature that could be revealed at that time). Every title featured photo stories—essentially classic burlesque routines played out in print where a sexy doll in one sort of compromising caper or another, always got one over on the inept buffoon. But some also showed battling babes, dominant dames, damsels in distress, and an abundance of spanking (as a gag as well as for suggested corporal maintenance of the marriage). Cross-dressers and drag queens popped up here and there as well as travelogues to assorted sin city hotspots like New Orleans, Las Vegas, and Rio . Harrison even ran John Willey’s bondage cartoon serial Sweet Gwendolyn in Wink. And it was in the pages of Harrison’s magazines that the country got its first glimpse of pin-up legend Bettie Page after Harrison purchased some photos of Page from a photographer in Cass Carr’s camera club. Legendary lovelies like Dagmar, Tempest Storm, Carol Landis, and Lili St. Cyr graced these pages early on in their careers as well.
Advertising in these publications offered spicy photos (including multiple adds from pin-up king Irving Klaw), stag reels, lonely hearts clubs, get rich quick schemes, correspondence degrees for private detectives, bartenders, hypnotists, masseuses, and songwriters, cures for balding, shortness, lack of muscles, and hormone supplements to combat waning libidos.
Letters to the editor in the back of these magazines were particularly telling, showing Harrison’s true demographic. These letters often contained requests, entirely too specific to be taken as mere suggestions. Letters signed simply with initials followed by the sender’s city would request anything from scenarios to specific outfits to what expression they’d like to see on the model’s face.
For example; in the August 1949 issue of Eyeful a letter reads:
Dear Editor,
Have you ever tried putting the alluring girls who appear in your pages in full dresses (instead of scanties) and just give the reader a provocative glimpse of a low-cut dress or a lifted skirt for a brief glance? It seems to me that this is the height of beauty in girls—when they are secretly sharing their charms.
J.J.A., Toledo, Ohio
Or this one from the November 1948 issue of Wink:
Dear Editor,
I would like to see more of your beautiful girls wearing long black gloves and silk or nylon stockings—to heck with that fish net stuff.
How about a long-haired babe with black brassiere, black panties, no corset, silk stockings (not rolled) and long gloves? That’s my ideal! Your magazine is swell.
B.S., Chicago
By 1955, the girlie magazine scene was becoming saturated with titles and publishers pushing to see how much they could get away with. Competition was fierce and publishers needed to deliver more and more skin to win. Harrison was said to have found nudity offensive. Even still he had New York’s Society for the Suppression of Vice on his back along with the U.S Postal Service. Harrison’s magazines began to appear dated and antiquated next to this progressive new blood. His accountant spelled it out for him—the writing was on the wall; get out or face bankruptcy. Harrison 86’d all but one title, Whisper, and focused his attention on Confidential after seeing the country’s eyeballs glued to the Kefauver Hearings where Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver set his sights, first on the mob an
d its subsequent vices before moving on to juvenile delinquency and its root causes. Scandal trumped scantily clad gals.
But by 1958 Harrison was out of the big-time publishing game altogether. He tried his hand at one-off titles focusing on whatever scandal was hot at the time and also ran a much smaller publication, Inside News which he founded in 1963. Harrison essentially faded into obscurity living out his days under an assumed name in a Manhattan hotel. He died in 1978; the same year Confidential tanked.
All of Harrison’s titles are collectable and each can fetch upwards of $75 a copy depending on its condition. And though today where no taboo is too taboo and everything goes, any photographer, artist, model or magazine, that has just a hint, a glimmer of fun and fetish in what they do, needs to raise a glass to Robert Harrison, who despite living in the shadow of the sensationalism he created, was truly the granddaddy-o of the girlie mag.
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Yoga, Zen and the Art of Basketball
By Reed Farrel Coleman
Issue 56
“Taking this issue off to study yoga, Zen and the art of basketball”
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Mystery Town: Book Loving Friends (Part 3)
By Linda Brown
Issue 56
So…does anyone collect books anymore? Previously, I’ve asked this question of collectors, readers, and authors. What had originally started as a three part series has evolved into four parts. The blessing of knowing such interesting people in the crime fiction world lies in their responses to my questions. The curse lies in trying to keep to the word count of my column. In this issue are the responses of booksellers and publishers, somewhat precarious and constantly evolving positions these days.