The Short of It

 

The hubster and I were working a crossword puzzle, and one of the clues we couldn't get easily was a three-letter word for "gumshoe." After scratching our heads for awhile, we finally realized the answer was "tec," which in reality would be 'tec. This is one of those words (abbreviation, really) we had run across before, but couldn't remember the exact references.

After a little searching, I realized the abbreviation goes back quite a bit, to at least the time of George Bernard Shaw who used it in his 1916 play Pygmalion (later the musical My Fair Lady) at the beginning of the story when Henry Higgins is identifying everyone by their accent: "Whats the row? What she do? Where is he? A tec taking her down...He aint a tec. Hes a blooming busybody: thats what he is. I tell you, look at his boots."  Although from the context, it's clear they were referring to a police detective, not a P.I.

In a letter to Hamish Hamilton in 1949, Raymond Chandler wrote, "What a queer attitude the better minds have to mysteries. 'Oh, it's just a mystery, a thriller, a 'tec.' I read them in bed to put me to sleep. I read them when I am sick. I read them with I am too tired for serious reading.' The deprecation is so obvious, but does anyone ever reply, 'And what, my good sir, would you do if you were sick or tired or wakeful and there were no mysteries?' The very people who declare they read them rapidly and forget them at once declare in the same breath that they cannot exist without them. And they know God damned well that they could exist indefinitely without the more massive classics."

Another use came in the 1960s and 1970s, Detective Comics was abbreviated as 'TEC in letter columns and other places, but it's hard to find 'tec used much today.

Like Chandler's detective protagonists, "'tec" is usually used to refer to hard-boiled detectives mostly from that particular era. But still, I couldn't find the first use of that abbreviation for detective, nor when it really came into mainstream usage. Any takers for that little mystery?

Chasing Chandler

 

Today is the anniversary of Raymond Chandler's death, March 26, 1959, which brings up the fact that next year will be the 50th year since his passing — a tailor-made opportunity for a retrospective, and no doubt, there will be several.

I came across an article from the LA Times recently (actually written in December of last year), which makes me almost want to go to Los Angeles and take the "Chandler tour," as did the author, although it's now more an exercise in frustration and futility. Judith Freeman (The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved) set out to track down every place where Chandler had lived in L.A., in hopes ofdiscovering "how L.A. had changed, if the city of his fiction still existed, and how he had lived here."

Although there is no preserved Chandler home (like there is for Dickens in London and Balzac in France, among many other writers' homes around the world), Freeman realizes that

"The city itself is Chandlerland. You can drive through many neighborhoods and feel yourself moving through the landscapes of his stories. He captured this city — the wasted light of gas stations, the dark banked canyons, neon signs glaring across rain-slicked boulevards, windows glowing on hillsides, gray mornings with high fog, shadowed mansions, the drift of wind from the sea — he made it all his own."

Freeman goes on to point out that Chandler had a love-hate relationship with L.A., and up to the end of his life remained lonely and rootless. To write about a place," he said, "you have to love it or hate it or both, like a woman."

Of course, if you want the commercial experience, you can always try "Raymond Chandler's Bay City Bus Tour." Wonder if Chandler would be amused or appalled?

CSI: Now

 

Science Daily had a couple of recent posts about forensics and ballistics which were interesting. On the subject of ballistics, they reported the National Research Council has recommended a new national database containing images of ballistic markings from all new and imported guns sold in the U.S. should *not* be created at this time. Although proponents hoped such a database would help investigators link ballistics evidence to a firearm and the location where it was originally sold, the report says current limitations of ballistics don't justify the effort, since "the fundamental assumption underlying forensic firearms identification — that every gun leaves microscopic marks on bullets and cartridge cases that are unique to that weapon and remain the same over repeated firings — has not yet been fully demonstrated scientifically."

The report does recommend 15 improvements to the ATF's National Integrated Ballistic Information Network (NIBIN), an existing database that contains ballistic images from crime scenes and suspects' weapons, and also more research on a promising alternative to providing links between crime-scene evidence and the original weapon, called "Microstamping." This technique etches or engraves unique markings on gun parts, which in turn generate unique marks on spent cartridge cases and could even be applied to individual pieces of ammunition.

The other article was a little more hopeful. Titled "CSI Fact Catching Up With Fiction As Chemists Develop New Technology" (and actually referring to an article "Clues at the scene of the crime" scheduled for publication in the the March 24 issue of Chemical & Engineering News), it mentions a few new forensic tools. The first is a highly-sensitive method for identifying the specific dyes used to color fibers, a technique that hopefully will help distinguish between fibers that appear similar. Others include a handheld spectrometer for on-site detection of explosives and illegal drug residue, and a fluorescent dye allowing for a longer and more detailed analysis of bloodstains than conventional dyes.

Crime fiction writers take note — more fun forensics tools for your protagonists to play with.

An Eye for an Eye

 

Here's another possible forensic tool to use in a mystery story:  scientists can now determine when a person was born by looking into the eyes of the deceased. Researchers at the University of Copenhagen and Aarhus used radiocarbon dating method and special proteins in the lens of the eye to accomplish this feat. Although radiocarbon dating is usually used on organisms which have been dead for thousands of years, human technological warfare has made it possible for the researchers to do the same thing with present-day species, such as homo sapiens.

As the article above goes on to state:

"From the end of World War II and up until about 1960, the superpowers of the Cold War era, conducted nuclear tests, detonating bombs into the atmosphere. These detonations have affected the content of radioactive trace materials in the air and created what scientists refer to as the C-14 bomb pulse. From the first nuclear detonation and, until the ban on nuclear testing was evoked, the quantity of C-14 in the atmosphere doubled. Since 1960, it has only slowly decreased to natural levels.

This sudden curve has left an impression in the food chain and therefore also in the lens crystallins of the eyes, which have absorbed the increased carbon content through food stuffs. Since the crystallins remain unchanged once they have been created, they reflect the content of C-14 present in the atmosphere at the time of their creation. An event occurring shortly after birth. Using a large nuclear accelerator, physicists at Aarhus University can now determine the amount of C-14 in as little as one milligram of lens tissue and thereby calculate the year of birth."

Although the scientists involved in the project hope to use the technique for other applications, such as cancer research, mystery writers may beat them to it, as least as far as using the process to solve crimes.

Erin Go Bragh

 

In honor of St. Patrick's Day, I thought it would be fun to have a little blog parade of Irish-themed entries. Leading the way is Irish author Declan Burke over at Crime Always Pays, where he directs your attention to Irish crime writers "woefully neglected," as he says, in years gone by. Since Burke's blog is often centered around Irish crime fiction, you might want to stay awhile, grab a pint of Guinness, and check out his other postings, as well as his list of links to 100+ Irish Crime Writers.

Crime Scene NI (Northern Ireland) celebrates the date by interviewing Belfast native Sam Millar, author of three best-selling novels and his latest, Bloodstorm. As you an guess from the title of this blog, there's a lot more Irish fodder there for crime fiction fans to peruse. (With thanks to Peter Rozovsky over at Detectives Beyond Borders, who often writes about Irish crime fiction.)

On the Library Journal's blog, Wilda Williams profiles the Irish Book Awards. Drawn from a list voted on by over 300 Irish booksellers and librarians, the categories include the Hughes & Hughes Irish Novel of the Year, in which Ronan Bennet's historical thriller Zugwang was nominated, as well as Benjamin Black's second crime novel, The Silver Swan.

Kathy Harig, owner of the Mystery Loves Company bookstore in Baltimore (and its sister store in Oxford, Maryland), jumped the gun with a posting earlier in the month listing Irish mysteries and mystery writers.

The Euro Crime blog focuses primarily on UK crime fiction, but if you click on the "More European Countries" link under Crime in Translation, you'll find a lengthy bibliography with links for Ireland and Northern Ireland authors, including reviews by either Euro Crime or Reviewing the Evidence.

Sandy Mitchell included a select list of her favorite St. Patrick's Day Murder Mysteries on her Mystery Crime Fiction Blog. Two of them, by Lee Harris and Leslie Meier, even include the holiday in the title.

Sarah Weinman has a link from her blog, Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind, to her recent Dark Passages column in the Los Angeles Times about the state of P.I. fiction, where she mentions Declan Hughes' detective novels which, she says,

"truly embody the 'slow and steady' aspect of reinvention. His owes a literary debt less to Hammett and Chandler than to Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer books, family melodrama disguised as P.I. fiction. Hughes, a noted Irish playwright, writes about his hometown of Dublin, where corrosive secrets and generations of lies play out with melodramatic payoff. If anything, The Price of Blood, Hughes' third go-round with private eye Ed Loy -- tips its narrative hat to Sophocles and other purveyors of Greek tragedy."

Writer/editor Gerald So offers up one of his short stories with an appropriate theme for the day, as well as a review of the story "One Serving of Bad Luck" by Sean Chercover in the Killer Year anthology.

Another tribute to mystery short stories, the Criminal Brief blog, has James Lincoln Warren musing on the Blarney Stone ("to tip the Blarney," is figuratively used for telling a marvellous story, or falsity), which he weaves into an essay about the use of imagination in storytelling.

And finally, Terrie Farley Moran on Women of Mystery has a wonderful piece about the St. Patrick's Day Parade. Did you know the New York event is the oldest Saint Patrick’s Day Parade in the world, first held in 1762 when a group of Irish immigrants and Irish soldiers decided to march along lower Broadway on Saint Patrick’s Day?

She concludes with the traditional Irish toast meaning Good Health, which I'll also leave you with here -- Slàinte!

Space, the Final Frontier

 

This is a fair pictorial representation of the space shuttle launch I witnessed last Tuesday morning (with thanks to James N. Brown). Truly a sight to behold. It got me wondering about mystery and crime fiction novels which feature NASA or astronauts. I did a little digging, but wasn't able to uncover many examples. Obviously, science fiction is the way to go if you're really interested in fiction on space themes, but it seemed to me that the space program might provide decent fuel for mystery stories, as well.

Although the brilliant Stanislaw Lem is best known for his science fiction, he wrote a cross-genre book titled The Chain of Chance, which was written in the style of a detective novel. An ex-astronaut is hired to look into the death of a wealthy businessman, but neither detectives nor a sophisticated computer used for the investigation can crack the case. On a trail which reaches from Naples to Paris, the ex-astronaut barely escapes numerous seemingly random threats on his life, and begins to realize he may now be the target of a deadly conspiracy.

Tess Gerritsen published Gravity in 2004, part thriller and part horror novel in which six astronauts studying living creatures in space encounter an alien life form that wreaks havoc aboard the International Space Station.

Dana Stabenow penned Prepared for Rage, published in 2006, a thriller set at the Kennedy Space Center where terrorists are planning to disrupt the launch.

I *know* there have to be others out there, so if you are aware of other entries to add, pass them along. I might even be able to coax the nonfiction-loving hubster to chow down on some fiction books, if they relate to space. Suggested titles, anyone?

The Birthday Tapes

 

Today is the birthday of author Lawrence Sanders, born in Brooklyn on March 15, 1920, who should be an inspiration to aspiring writers if for nothing else than the fact that he had his first thriller published at the age of 50.  Kevin Burton Smith has a fun writeup of Sanders on his Thrilling Detective site:

"In his time, Lawrence Sanders ranked right up there in popularity with Stephen King, Danielle Steele and only a handful of other newsstand rack superstars, so much so that his name is more prominent on the covers of his books than their titles, and this has may have contributed to his not being taken very seriously among fans of this genre.

Too bad. Despite a reputation as the Robin Leach of the detective novel, perhaps best remembered now for his frothy, padded paperbacks of technology, sex and the peccadilloes of the rich and famous, Sanders wrote some damn entertaining, and even provocative and influential books in several crime genres, from capers to thrillers to police procedurals and yes, even private eyes.

A journalist for over twenty years, working for such publications as Mechanics Illustrated and Science and Mechanics, Sanders kept plugging away at writing fiction. A series of short stories featuring hardboiled insurance investigator  Wolf Lannihan appeared in the pages of the skin mag, Swank, in 1968-69, but his real break came with the publication of The Anderson Tapes in 1970, and the subsequent hit 1972 film.

The Anderson Tapes introduced New York cop Edward X. Delaney. It won the Edgar for Best First Mystery Novel from The Mystery Writers of America and spawned a hit movie, and began a long line of novels (at least thirty) that, for the most part, shot right up the bestseller lists.

In 1973, Delaney returned in The First Deadly Sin, which also eventually was filmed in 1980, with Frank Sinatra as Delaney. Sanders went on to write three more procedurals featuring Delaney in his "Sin" series.

In fact, Sanders was responsible for several series characters, most of them private investigators of some sort. Joshua is yet another of Lawrence Sanders' almost-private eyes, most of whom work for large corporations and whose dealings invariably involve looking into the various cracks in the facades of the rich and famous. A case could be made for Sanders being the Robin Leach of the detective novel. Check out the "Commandment series, with investigators Dora Conti, Samuel Todd, or Joshua Bigg, or the two Timothy Cone books. And if you're in the mood for something a bit breezier, you could try glib, easy-going Archie McNally, who makes the moneyed society of Palm Beach his stomping ground.

After Sanders' death in 1998, the question arose, half-jokingly, I think, as to whether Sanders, in fact, actually wrote the McNally books. The first McNally published post-humously, McNally's Dilemma (1999), has Sanders' name prominently displayed on the cover, but the copy right page reveals that someone named Vincent Lardo has been chosen by the family to continue the series. As one reader pointed out, "Lardo has either captured the style perfectly, or he wrote the earlier books, too."

And another reader of this site, Jim Roche, wrote to say "In fact, I believe Lawrence Sander's heir disputed the right of his publisher to continue to use his name when, in fact, the books were being written by Vincent Lardo.  However, the litigation failed and the publishers proceeded with publication."

All told, Sanders published over 40 novels, selling more than 58 million copies in the United States alone, and had two movies based on his novels, The Anderson Tapes (1971) and The First Deadly Sin (1980).

A Hair's Breadth

 

As was recently reported in Time Magazine and the Los Angeles Times, scientists have a new way of determining where a person has lived by analyzing a strand of human hair, a technique that could prove helpful in tracking down criminal suspects or unidentified murder victims.

It's based on chemical variations in drinking water from one geographic location to another, and how those chemicals can turn up in the hair of people who drank the water in those areas. Professors Thure Cerling and James Ehleringer at the University of Utah, co-founded Isoforensics, Inc. to use stable isotope analysis of forensic substances to find slight variations in chemical elements' various isotopes. "Hair is a good trap for all those things flowing through the blood system," says Ehleringer. Cerling added, "You are what you eat and drink, and that is recorded in your hair."

Their collection methods were a bit quirky, but effective. They took tap water samples from 600 U.S. cities and constructed a map of the regional differences, then verified the accuracy of their map by testing 200 hair samples collected from 65 small-town barber shops. But not all hair is created equally forensically, as the longer the hair, the greater the possiblity for information. Long hair can provide police with a 2-3 year history, whereas short hair may only reveal three to six months.

Hair analysis has already been used in one cold case by Todd Park in Salt Lake City. Chemical testing on a partial skull showed in the two years before the victim's death she moved about every two months, staying in the Northwest. Alhough the test could not be more specific than somewhere between eastern Washington and Oregon and western Wyoming, Detective Park said, "It's still a substantial area, but it narrows it way down for me." Cerling agrees, saying "This analysis can eliminate about 90% of the U.S. as a possibility" and that "The ability to exclude is just as powerful as the ability to include in forensic science."

M-I-C-K-E-Y

 

Today would have been the 90th birthday of the creator of Mike Hammer, if he'd managed to hang on just a little bit beyond his recent passing in July of 2006. But we won't hold that against him, because Mickey Spillane’s over two dozen books have sold more than 225 million copies worldwide, and, as he himself once said (with tongue firmly in cheek), “I'm the most translated writer in the world, behind Lenin, Tolstoy, Gorki and Jules Verne, and they're all dead.” Mike Hammer's fictional existence was born in 1947 when then-Army Air Corpsman and flight instructor Spillane published I, The Jury (written in 19 days, as the story goes), a novel based on a comic book character named Mike Danger who Spillane had created early in his career. It became an immediate bestseller, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Although Spillane’s novels went out of print, in 2001 the New American Library began reissuing  them. More recent offerings of his works include a reissue of I, the Jury by Impress in 2006  and Dead Street from Hard Case Crime, one of a handful of novels Spillane was working on at the  time of his death, prepared for publication by Hard Case veteran Max Allan Collins, and published in 2007.

He also wrote many short stories, a couple of children’s books, and other non-Spillane novels, such as a series featuring secret agent Tiger Mann, which was launched with Day of the Guns in  1964, although none of his other works reached the same level of success as Hammer.

Of the many dramatizations of Spillane’s novels, one of the most popular was the television series Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer which ran from 1984 to 1987 starring Stacy Keach, with 46  episodes, a Golden Globe nomination and several Edgar awards. In 1997-98, Stacy Keach reprised the role in a syndicated new series titled Mike Hammer Private Eye with 26 episodes (available in a complete DVD collection). Although a collection of the original series hasn't yet been released, in 2006 Sony Pictures did create a double-feature on DVD of two episodes, “More Than Murder” and “Murder Me, Murder You.”

Unfortunately, to the recollections of some folks (especially non-readers)—as was the case with  Orson Welles and his Gallo chablis TV ads—Spillane may be remembered most vividly for the Miller Lite beer commercials in which he appeared in the 1980s (even though Spillane was reported not to  have been a heavy drinker).

Spillane still makes many lists of “the most important crime fiction writers of all time,” as evidenced by this recent article from the British online newspaper Telegraph.

Stashower and Sherlock

Award-winning author Daniel Stashower was kind enough to drop by the local Sisters in Crime chapter and discuss his latest book, Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters, which he co-authored with fellow Doyle expert Jon Lellenberg and Charles Foley, Doyle's great-nephew. (I mentioned this book briefly back in November when Dianne Riehm had Stashower as a guest on her show). The book, which has been nominated for both Edgar and Agatha Awards this year, is a collection of previously-unpublished letters from the creator of Sherlock Holmes, beginning from the time Doyle was eight years old until 10 years before his death.

Stashower explained how difficult the process was, as Doyle was notoriously bad about dating his letters. The authors had 2,000 sheets of paper to work with (only 10% of which were dated), in no particular order, many of which had been separated from the other companion pages. Doyle's friend James Ryan even once prophetically told Doyle that his neglectfulness regarding dates would one day wreak havoc with his biographers.

One of the most fascinating aspects of working with these letters, according to Stashower, was how they allowed his warmth and personal voice to shine through, being at times hilariously funny, such as the letter he wrote to his mother after the birth of his daughter, an event he hadn't told her about in advance.

Most of the letters are to his mother Mary Doyle, to whom he was close and felt he owed a huge debt after she kept the family of seven children together throughout his father's alcoholism and institutionalization. Stashower recounted how three of Doyle's younger sisters took governess jobs to help put Doyle through medical school. As the oldest son, Doyle became in essence the man of the household, helping to support his mother and later his sisters, too, after recalling them from their posts once he had established himself in his practice.

Upon being asked whether Doyle was more the model for Sherlock Holmes or Dr. Watson, Stashower replied that it was probably a litte of both. Personality-wise, he was more Dr. Watson, and certainly his medical career was a key factor in developing that character. However, Doyle had his bouts of Holmsian issues, saying that "I suffer from my nerves sometimes more than people know." Although not a drug addict like Holmes, Doyle once experimented with a gelsemium and wrote up his experiences for medical journals, finally quitting altogether when he passed out and lost control of his bodily functions.

Stashower is not only an expert on Arthur Conan Doyle, but a novelist himself, and his lifelong fascination with magic (he's a card-carrying member of the Society for American Magicians) led him to write four books based on Harry Houdini as the protagonist or a central character. In his talk, Stashower touched on the relationship between Houdini and Doyle, the former a fierce skeptic, and the latter a proponent of spiritualism. Although they began as friends and Houdini would continue to respect Doyle's writing, they ended as antagonists due to their differences on the issue.

If you're going to the Malice Domestic conference in Arlington, Virginia in April, Stashower is going to be the Toastmaster for the banquet, so you'll get a chance to hear him in person then.