The Mystery of Dana Wilson

(Editor’s note: Randal S. Brandt’s fine work has graced both this blog and Killer Covers before, in posts about the inspiration behind David Dodge’s To Catch a Thief, the 1961 Dodge novel Carambola, and paperback cover artist Robert Stanley. Today, he profiles an obscure American mystery writer named Dana Wilson. “I've uncovered a fascinating story,” he told me in pitching this piece. “Hint: after her second marriage she changed her last name to Broccoli.” “Fascinating” is definitely the adjective to describe the results of his digging.)

Before I tell you this story—a story about the literary mystery surrounding a crime novel with one of the strangest titles of all time and the genealogical research that led to its connection to the original James Bond girl—I must tell you a little bit about myself.

I’m a librarian at the University of California, Berkeley, where I am Head of Cataloging at the Bancroft Library, the university’s primary special collections and rare books library. As the flagship campus of the University of California system, Berkeley has a long tradition of collecting the literature of California and, since 2013, I have also served as the curator of the California Detective Fiction Collection. This means that I get a small budget to acquire titles of crime and mystery fiction that are set in California. A book that I acquired recently for the collection, with a decidedly odd title, made me take on a third role; I had to put on my fedora and play literary detective to solve the surprising mystery of its author, Dana Wilson.

Dana Wilson published exactly one crime novel. That book, Make with the Brains, Pierre, appeared in 1946 under the Julian Messner imprint. The story is narrated by Pierre Bernet, a French “film cutter” who emigrated to Hollywood to escape the Nazi occupation of France and has been unable to secure work for several years. Finding himself in the middle of a romantic triangle—Pierre is desperately in love with Eleanor, an aspiring young actress, but Eleanor is in love with Joe, who also loves Eleanor but is married and refuses to seek a divorce—Pierre gets involved in a blackmail plot that leads to murder.

Bill Pronzini reviewed the book in 1001 Midnights: The Aficionado’s Guide to Mystery and Detective Fiction and opined that, “despite having one of crime fiction’s worst and most misleading titles,” it is “neither a bad nor a whimsical nor a detective novel” but rather “a grim tale of psychological suspense reminiscent of the work of Cornell Woolrich in its incisive examination of a man destroyed by love, hate, and the dark side of his own soul.” He concluded by declaring the tale “a surprising accomplishment in its evocation of the Gallic character, the postwar Hollywood lifestyle, and the elements of human tragedy.” (Pronzini and Muller 1986, 855)

As I began working on the catalogue record for this novel (library cataloguing is essentially recording and describing a library’s holdings in order to provide access to readers and researchers), I kept coming back to a key question: Who is Dana Wilson?

The book itself, including the original dust jacket, was no help at all. There is no author’s biography, photograph, or blurb on this edition. I didn’t even know if Dana was a man or a woman (and apparently Pronzini didn’t either, as the 1001 Midnights entry is gender-neutral), or whether the name was real or a pseudonym. The Library of Congress, usually the authority on matters of book authorship, was no help whatsoever here. In its catalogue, the novel was entered under the simple heading of “Wilson, Dana,” which was linked to a composer and professor of music born in 1946. Nope, definitely not the author of this 1946 novel. The database contained entries for several other similarly named writers, but none were the one I was looking for. Disambiguating authors from one another and identifying them with the works that they produce is called, in library parlance, “authority control” and is a critical component of cataloguing, so I was determined to do something to distinguish Dana Wilson the mystery writer from the other Dana Wilsons. I turned next to another, usually reliable resource: Allen J. Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV bibliography. Alas, Hubin was no help either, as no additional biographical details were included there.

(Left) Dana Wilson in the 1940s.

“Dana Wilson” is a pretty generic name, and I thought that, without any other data points, I would have a hard time closing in on likely authors using genealogical resources available via the Ancestry database, which has provided me with a wealth of information for tracing authors’ identities. I was just about to give up hope of uncovering this mysterious writer’s identity when I looked through the book one more time and noticed that it contained a dedication, “To Stella, Michael, and Lewis.” Family members? Perhaps Stella was the author’s wife, and Michael and Lewis, his sons? Armed with this additional bit of potential information, I decided to give Ancestry a whirl.

One of the first results that came up was for the recently released 1950 U.S. Census. The record I found was for a Dana Wilson living in Los Angeles and working as a “screen treatments writer” in the movie industry, which seemed a likely occupation for the author of Make with the Brains, Pierre, given the inside-Hollywood angle of the novel. This Dana was female, aged 26, and listed in the census as “wife,” along with Lewis G. Wilson, as head of the household; the census also listed an 8-year-old son, Michael G. Wilson, and a mother-in-law, Stella Natol. I felt pretty confident that I’d found my Dana. What would be the odds of another family quartet with those names? The only thing that surprised me was Dana’s age. If she was 26 in 1950, that meant she would have been only 22 when her novel was published—and she was the mother of a young child at the time!

My second surprise came when I did another search in Ancestry, this time adding an approximate birth date of 1924 and her maiden name, Natol. I immediately landed on the 2004 death record of “Dana Dorothy Natol Broccoli.” The information there included that she was the widow of American film producer Albert R. Broccoli and the mother of Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli.

Wait. What?

As a longtime fan of the James Bond books and films, I immediately recognized the name Albert R. Broccoli. Broccoli and his partner Harry Saltzman were the producers behind the cinematic adaptations of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels. Now, my search took a completely different turn.

A Wikipedia page dedicated to Dana Broccoli revealed more information. It said that she was born Dana Natol in New York City on January 3, 1922 (making her the ripe old age of 24 when her novel was published), and met her first husband, Lewis Wilson, when they were both acting students at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts at Carnegie Hall. After Dana and Lewis divorced, she married Albert R. “Cubby” Broccoli in 1959. When Broccoli and Saltzman formed a holding company to control the licensing and rights to the Bond films, they named it Danjaq S.A., which is a combination of their wives’ first names (Dana Broccoli and Jacqueline Saltzman). After Cubby’s death in 1996, Dana became president of Danjaq and was instrumental in developing the musical theater version of another Ian Fleming work, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. She died at age 82 of cancer on February 29, 2004. Wikipedia also mentioned that Dana had written two novels, Scenario for Murder (1949) and Florinda (1977).

(Right) Scenario for Murder, 1949.

Hubin gives “Scenario for Murder” as the British title of Make with the Brains, Pierre, and the dust jacket of that edition does include an author photograph, depicting an attractive young woman, and a biographical sketch. So that solves the mystery of Dana Wilson.

Or, does it?

Further digging revealed that Dana Wilson Broccoli was a complex woman who led a fascinating life and had a lasting impact on one of the most iconic film series of all time.

It turns out that Dana was actually born Dorothy K. Natoli into an Italian-Irish family in Brooklyn (I haven’t been able to discover what the “K” stands for). Her parents were Giuseppe “Joseph” Natoli and Stella (White) Natoli. Her father was the son of Italian immigrants and a veteran of World War I. Shortly after Dana’s birth, the family name was shortened to Natol, but at the time of her marriage to Lewis Gilbert Wilson on June 7, 1941 (when she was 19 years old), she was still using Dorothy as her first name. The following year their son, Michael, was born in New York.

She likely changed her name to Dana after they moved to Los Angeles to pursue careers in Hollywood. Lewis was first to achieve some level of success. After a couple of bit parts in movies, including one in which he wasn’t even credited, he got his big break. In 1943, Columbia Pictures created the first live-action depiction of the DC Comics superhero Batman in a 15-part serial, and Lewis was cast in the titular role, giving him the distinction of being the first actor ever to portray the Caped Crusader. He then landed several other small parts in various films in 1943 and 1944, but his acting career was put on hold when he enlisted in the U.S. Army on June 27, 1944.

(Above) Douglas Croft and Lewis Wilson played Robin and Batman, respectively, in Columbia Pictures’ Batman film serial.

After Dana’s death, several obituaries reported that their long time apart during World War II had led to the failure of Lewis and Dana’s marriage. Later, during an interview, Dana confirmed that the separation was a turning point in their relationship: “Being separated with the war for five years just changed everything. And when my husband returned, we were two entirely different people. It was inevitable that we would divorce.” (Cork 2000)

However, the exact date of their divorce is unknown. In his autobiography Fragments, film director Andre de Toth, a longtime friend of the Broccolis, recalled meeting Dana “in Hollywood, years before she met Cubby,” remembering her as “a budding writer with a promising future, a single parent bringing up a son,” and noting that “in the forties [that] took guts.” (De Toth 1994, 460) However, aside from the fact that they appeared as a family in the 1950 census, there is evidence that their relationship continued at least into the early 1950s, and de Toth got either his timeline or Dana’s marital status wrong. Lewis remarried in 1956.

What is known is that it was during the war that Dana turned her hand to novel writing. Following the 1946 hardcover publication of Make with the Brains, Pierre, with its dedication to her mother, son, and husband, two cheap paperback editions appeared in 1948 and 1949, re-titled as Uneasy Virtue. Then, also in 1949, the British hardcover came out, this time re-titled as Scenario for Murder, with its dust jacket author blurb identifying her as a “wife, mother, actress and producer” living “in Hollywood with her actor-producer husband and small son.”

In 1950, Dana Wilson’s Hollywood acting career got started with a bit part in a film noir called Once a Thief starring Cesar Romero and June Havoc. Then, in 1951, Dana won her first (and only) lead role, as the Queen in Wild Women, opposite Lewis, who also had a lead role. If they were still married at the time, and if Lewis had anything to do with Dana taking that part, that truly awful film could very well have provided ample grounds for divorce.

(Left) Dana Wilson starred in 1951’s Wild Women.

Also, in 1951, both Dana and Lewis were cast in Trigger Tales, the half-hour pilot for a Western TV series that was not picked up. Dana had the supporting female role, in which she turned out to be the villain, but Lewis had a blink-and-you-miss-it appearance with barely a word of dialogue (although he did get to show off the stage-fighting skills he’d honed as Batman in a brief but rowdy dustup with the hero, Trigger Saunders). Then, Lewis got another big break when he was cast as a regular in the half-hour TV crime series Craig Kennedy, Criminologist. Although Donald Woods had the title role, Lewis, as newspaper reporter Walt Jameson, and Sydney Mason, playing New York City police Inspector J.J. Burke, shared nearly as much screen time. The series was short-lived, however, airing for one season (1952-1953) of 26 episodes. Dana guest-starred in one of the episodes near the end of the run.

Dana first met Albert R. “Cubby” Broccoli in December 1947. Struggling to earn a living in the movie business, Cubby decided to make some extra cash that year by trying his hand at selling Christmas trees on a street corner in the upscale L.A. suburb of Beverly Hills. In his posthumously published memoir, When the Snow Melts (1998), he described the “incredible, memorable coincidence” that occurred during his brief time in that job:

Early one evening, just before Christmas, a stunning-looking lady stopped at my lot to buy a tree. She had her small son with her. She had raven-black hair, large eyes and pale, delicate features. Having chosen a tree, she wondered where she could get a stand for it. I offered to make one for her, nailing a couple of crossed boards together and then pinning the tree to it. We wished each other ‘Happy Christmas’ and she walked away into the night. No reason for me to believe I’d ever see her again. To chic beauties of that class, when you’ve seen one Christmas tree salesman you’ve seen them all. But not in this particular scenario.

For that lady, my lovely Dana, and I were destined to meet again twelve years later. She remembers my selling her that tree on the corner of Wilshire and Doheny. I recall it even more vividly. There are some customers you just cannot forget. (Broccoli 1998, 84)

The pair re-encountered each other in 1958, at a New Year’s Eve party at the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas, and at least on Cubby’s end, it was love at second sight. Cubby was a widower, his wife Nedra having succumbed to cancer two years earlier, and a single father of two young children. He got Dana’s phone number before the night was out, but they did not get together again until a few months later, again by chance and this time in New York—they were both out with other dates. They made arrangements to meet once more back in Los Angeles, and after a five-week courtship, they were married on June 21, 1959. The wedding was in Las Vegas. Cary Grant was best man, and Dana’s 16-year-old son, Michael, who had spent the night before the wedding on the town with Cubby, was a hungover member of the wedding party. (Broccoli 1998, 140-41) With both her son and fiancé suffering the effects of the stag night, Dana had a chance at a very different future when Cary Grant came to tell her about the situation. “I did a film once,” he said, “where the best man ran off with the bride. How about it?” Dana laughed off the proposition. “As tempting as it may sound, I don’t think it’s going to happen this time.” (Cork 2000; Sellers 2019, 40)

(Right) “Cubby” Broccoli.

That Las Vegas ceremony was the start of a stunning second act for Dana Wilson. “I married Cubby,” she recalled, “and my life changed completely. I left my home in California. I left my country. I left my friends. I left everything that was familiar to me … But I followed Cubby [to London] and I trusted him, and I knew he was going to make everything all right.” (Cork 2000)

Dana immediately threw herself into her new role. She had always hoped to have a large family and insisted on formally adopting Cubby’s two children, Tony and Tina. On June 18, 1960, Dana gave birth to a daughter, Barbara Dana Broccoli, and, as Cubby wrote, “now [the] family was complete.” (Broccoli 1998, 147)

It was at about this time that Cubby met Harry Saltzman. Cubby had long wanted to film Fleming’s James Bond novels, but had never been able to secure the option. Saltzman had the option, which was about to expire, but could not convince anyone to finance him. Cubby had the connections in Hollywood to get the project off the ground and the pair entered into a partnership. They inked a deal with United Artists for $1 million on June 21, 1961 (Cubby and Dana’s second wedding anniversary), and the rest is movie history. (Broccoli 1998, 151-153)

Although Dana’s name never appears in the credits of any Bond film, she was an active behind-the-scenes partner to her husband and her fingerprints are all over the series:

• When Cubby and Harry were casting the lead role in Dr. No, they became interested in a young Scotsman with limited screen credits named Sean Connery. There are many versions of how Connery came to the producers’ attention, but it is generally accepted that the key to him getting the part lay with Dana Broccoli. (Pfeiffer and Lisa 1993, 14, 42, 55) Cubby thought he had terrific potential, but was unsure that he had the requisite sex appeal to play James Bond. So he asked Dana to take a look at the only footage he had available of Connery, the 1959 Disney film Darby O’Gill and the Little People. “Dana’s reaction,” Cubby recalled, “was immediate: ‘That’s our Bond!’” (Broccoli 1998, 165; Duncan 2015, 33) Dana confirmed this story: “I was just knocked out by [Connery]. I thought he was just incredible.” (Cork 2000; Field and Chowdhury 2015, 60)

• As a writer herself, Dana contributed to several scripts, making practical, informed, and helpful suggestions. As they struggled to put together a script for The Spy Who Loved Me (14 writers had tried and failed to come up with a coherent story), Cubby and Dana, themselves, “sat and talked for hours, with Dana scribbling ideas down on paper” and “rewrote the whole story.” When they presented their new screenplay to director Lewis Gilbert, he “said it was the first time a producer had come to him with a storyline that worked.” (Duncan 2015, 262) Barbara Broccoli later claimed that “all the major decisions [Cubby] made he discussed with her. It was a real partnership.” (Sellers 2019, 114; Cork 2000)

(Above) Maryam d'Abo, Timothy Dalton, Barbara Broccoli, Albert R. Broccoli, Dana Broccoli, and John Glen attend an event celebrating the release of the Bond film The Living Daylights (1987).

• Dana often functioned as an unofficial casting director. In For Your Eyes Only, she recommended Topol for his role and gave final approval on casting Julian Glover. (Field and Chowdhury 2015, 328-29) She “was absolutely convinced from the start that [Timothy Dalton] would make a first-class Bond” and pressed Cubby to cast him as Roger Moore’s successor; and she helped convince Dalton to accept the role. (Broccoli 1998, 280-81) Many of the actresses in the series remember that she was part of the casting process and had some influence in how the women were portrayed. (d’Abo and Cork 2003, 174)

• She provided unswerving support and expert advice to Cubby during his legal battles with Harry Saltzman. The breakup of the Broccoli-Saltzman partnership in 1975 was marked by accusations, lawsuits, and hard feelings. Michael Wilson, who had spent the previous two years at a prestigious Washington, D.C., law firm, came to London to help on the legal side, and Cubby credited Dana with giving him the strength to see it through: “But for Dana’s fantastic resources and devotion, I might have thrown in the towel. As it was, we took on the battle of a lifetime—and won.” (Broccoli 1998, 231)

• On December 5, 1976, Dana christened the 007 Stage at Pinewood Studios, which had been constructed specially for the filming of The Spy Who Loved Me, by breaking a bottle of champagne over the conning tower of the American submarine. (Owen and Burford 2000, 119)

• At the 1982 Oscars ceremony, the Academy bestowed its highest honor, the Irving G. Thalberg Award, on Cubby Broccoli. Roger Moore, who was in the middle of his long run portraying James Bond, was tasked with making the presentation. As Moore remembered, Cubby and Dana “were terrified that I would make light of the situation and say something silly.” Consequently, during rehearsals, “Dana sat right at the front of the auditorium to ensure I stuck to the script. I did indeed stick to the script, and Cubby accepted his award with great pride and modesty.” (Moore 2008, 244-45)

• Following Cubby’s death in 1996, Dana assumed the leadership of Danjaq and oversaw the transition of production duties to her children, Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli, who are still running the operation today.

Curiously, aside from that brief mention of the British title, Scenario for Murder, on Dana’s Wikipedia page, none of the sources that I uncovered refer in any way to Make with the Brains, Pierre. In 1977, Dana returned to fiction writing, penning Florinda, a historical novel set in 8th-century Spain, which was apparently inspired while scouting locations for the Bond series. Even the dust jacket copy of that book claims that it was her first novel. And, unlike Pierre, Florinda at least merits a mention in Cubby’s autobiography. Dana, herself, adapted the novel into a musical that had a modestly successful run in Los Angeles in 1995 and was revived as La Cava, which played in London’s West End in 2000-2001.

(Left) The 1977 novel Florinda, with cover art by Robert McGinnis.

Nothing in my previous experience in identifying crime writers and expanding on their biographies had prepared me for what I would find when I went looking for Dana Wilson, the author of an obscure 1940s Hollywood mystery novel. I found a young woman who carved out a career for herself in Hollywood, as both a writer and an actor, who turned her talents to psychological suspense fiction and made her way as a single mother. Then, in her stunning second act, she became one of the architects of the most famous and successful film franchise in history. Not only did Dana Natol Wilson Broccoli live twice, she was the original Bond girl.

SOURCES
Broccoli, Albert R., with Donald Zec. 1998. When the Snow Melts: The Autobiography of Cubby Broccoli. London: Boxtree.

Cork, John, dir. 2000. “Cubby Broccoli: The Man Behind Bond.” Diamonds Are Forever, Blu-ray Disc. Directed by Guy Hamilton. Beverly Hills, CA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, Inc., 2012.

d’Abo, Maryam, and John Cork. 2003. Bond Girls Are Forever: The Women of James Bond. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc.

De Toth, Andre. 1994. Fragments: Portraits from the Inside. London: Faber and Faber.

Field, Matthew, and Ajay Chowdhury. 2015. Some Kind of Hero, 007: The Remarkable Story of the James Bond Films. Gloucestershire: The History Press.

Duncan, Paul, ed. 2015. The James Bond Archives. Cologne: Taschen.

Moore, Roger, with Gareth Owen. 2008. My Word Is My Bond: A Memoir. New York: Collins.

Owen, Gareth, and Brian Burford. 2000. The Pinewood Story: The Authorised History of the World’s Most Famous Film Studio. London: Reynolds & Hearn Ltd.

Pfeiffer, Lee, and Philip Lisa. 1993. The Films of Sean Connery. New York: Carol Publishing Group.

Pronzini, Bill, and Marcia Muller. 1986. 1001 Midnights: The Aficionado’s Guide to Mystery and Detective Fiction. New York: Arbor House.

Sellers, Robert. 2019. When Harry Met Cubby: The Story of the James Bond Producers. Gloucestershire: The History Press.

STREAMING VIDEO
Batman
Release date: July 16, 1943
Trailer on YouTube: https://youtu.be/dyXp-8ZZkbg?si=HZ-hgukOpnDfgLMd (other trailers available)
Full film on Tubi: https://tubitv.com/movies/636895/batman>

Once a Thief (1950)
Release date: July 7, 1950
Full film on Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/once-a-thief

Wild Women, aka Bowanga, Bowanga: White Sirens of Africa (1951)
Release date: September 23, 1951
Clip on YouTube: https://youtu.be/hCdORg973bU?si=WEDvkkm4D6Hz-5Au (featuring Dana Wilson as the Queen and Lewis Wilson as the “strong white man”)
Full film on Plex: https://watch.plex.tv/movie/wild-women
Full film on Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/BowangaBowangaA.k.a.WildWomen

“Gun Blazers,” episode of Trigger Tales (1951)
Full film on YouTube: https://youtu.be/MPOJL-KfQv0?si=B-GGn40biOyDhzXo (fight scene starts at 13:45)

“The Golden Dagger,” S1, E24, Craig Kennedy, Criminologist (1952)
This episode is not available, but several others, all prominently featuring Lewis Wilson, can be found on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLY0ESviuN3DqTvOjrHh6uSE-OiE80_iy1

READ MORE: “Inside the Family Behind the James Bond Empire,” by Cari Beauchamp (Town & Country).

Bullet Points: Caffeine-Powered Edition

Since I woke up way too early on this cold Friday morning, and am already halfway through my second cup of coffee, I might as well dive into some recent crime-fiction-related news.

• During this year’s Black Orchid Banquet, held on December 4 in New York City, it was announced that Washington, D.C., author Stephen Spotswood has won the 2021 Nero Award for his 2020 novel, Fortune Favors the Dead. The Nero is presented annually by the fan organization The Wolfe Pack to “the best American mystery written in the tradition of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe stories.” (Last year’s recipient was David Baldacci.) That same festive event saw Alexis Stefanovich-Thomson being given the 2021 Black Orchid Novella Award for her story “The Man Who Went Down Under,” published in the July 2022 issue of Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. The Black Orchid is sponsored jointly by The Wolfe Pack and AHMM and honors the novella format popularized by Stout. Honorable mentions for the Black Orchid went to “Bad Apples,” by Kathleen Marple Kalb (writing as Nikki Knight); “The Inside Shake,” by Jason Koontz; “House of Tigers,” by William Burton McCormick; “The Mystery of the Missing Woman,” by Regina M. Sestak; and “Lovely As,” by Jacqueline Vick.

• The Bookseller reports that “Dettie Gould has won the Harvill Secker Bloody Scotland Crime Writing Award with her ‘deliciously dark thriller’ The Light and Shade of Ellen Swithin. Her story follows Swithin, who is a skilled actuary in an accounting firm, a dutiful daughter, and a latent serial killer.” It adds that “Gould will have her book published under the Harvill Secker imprint, in a publishing deal with an advance of £5,000. She will also appear on a panel at the Bloody Scotland festival and receive a guest pass for the weekend’s events. The Arvon Foundation, which sponsored the competition, has also offered the winner the chance to attend any one of its creative writing courses.” (Hat tip to In Reference to Murder.)

• Crime Time FM, an interview podcast hosted by Paul Burke in affiliation with the Web site Crime Time, has named its first Crime Novel of the Year: S.A. Cosby’s Razorblade Tears (Headline). Receiving runner-up honors is Dominic Nolan’s Vine Street (Headline). Also shortlisted for this inaugural commendation were The Village of Eight Graves, by Seichi Yokomizo (Pushkin Press); The Turnout, by Megan Abbott (Faber & Faber); The First Day of Spring, by Nancy Tucker (Hutchinson); and Future Perfect, by Felicia Yap (Wildfire).

• While I have online subscriptions to both The New York Times and The Washington Post, I don’t enjoy similarly unfettered access to Dublin’s Irish Times. So I have not been able to look through that broadsheet’s recent “Best Crime Fiction of 2021” list. However, author-playwright Declan Hughes, who put the piece together along with fellow Irish writer Declan Burke, sent George Easter of Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine his 10 choices, via e-mail. They are:

— Dream Girl, by Laura Lippman
— The Survivors, by Jane Harper
— Hidden Lies, by Rachel Ryan
— Blood Ties, by Brian McGilloway
— A Man Named Doll, by Jonathan Ames
— Vera Kelly Is Not a Mystery, by Rosalie Knecht
— Palace of the Drowned, by Christine Mangan
— The Plot, by Jean Hanff Korelitz
— A Slow Fire Burning, by Paula Hawkins
— 56 Days, by Catherine Ryan Howard

• English professor Carole E. Barrowman offers her own roll of favorite mysteries in Wisconsin’s Milwaukee Journal.

• Speaking of “best” books, CrimeReads this morning posted its selections of “The Best True Crime Books of 2021.” I’m pleased to see that its 10 picks include Dean Jobb’s The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream: The Hunt for a Victorian Era Serial Killer (Algonquin), a work I consumed in a captivated rush this last summer.

• Another CrimeReads piece worth noticing: Keith Roysdon’s tribute to the 1967-1975 TV detective drama Mannix, which starred Mike Connors. As Roysdon writes:

Sure, there have been cool P.I.s (Craig Stevens’ “Peter Gunn” with Henry Mancini’s theme music, full of smooth menace) and affably hot P.I.s (our boy Thomas Magnum) and cerebral consulting detectives (“Sherlock”) and the most charming, hard-luck P.I. on the California coast (“This is Jim Rockford, at the tone leave your name and message …”)

But as far as a play-it-straight-down-the-middle investigator who could take a blow to the head and come back swinging, nobody topped Mike Connors’ “Mannix.” And the show had a hell of a theme too, by Lalo Schifrin.

Roysdon’s full article can be found here. Click here if you’re interested in my own comments on that CBS-TV series.

• Television tidbits: Veronica Mars alumna Kristen Bell has a new psychological thriller coming to Netflix on January 28, The Woman in the Street, a trailer for which can be enjoyed in The Killing Times. And Deadline brings word that “Jo Nesbø’s Headhunters is returning to screens, this time as a TV series for Sweden’s C More and TV2 Norway starring Betrayed’s Axel Bøyum and Mr. Robot’s Martin Wallström. … Headhunters, which was made into a highly-rated Norwegian film 10 years ago … follows a headhunter lying and manipulating his way to success both in his career and in his love life. But one lie leads to another, and soon he is so entangled in his own stories that it becomes a danger to both himself and the people around him.”

• There have been far too many deaths among members of the crime-fiction community lately. The Gumshoe Site mentions one that I somehow missed: “Gordon McAlpine died on November 29. The former college writing teacher wrote his first novel, Joy in Mudville (Dutton, 1989), set in 1930s Chicago’s Wrigley Field. Woman with a Blue Pencil (Seventh Street Books, 2015) was nominated for the 2016 Edgar Award for best paperback. He used his pseudonym Owen Fitzstephen to write Hammett Unwritten (2013) and The Big Man’s Daughter (2020; both from Seven Street Books). The last two novels feature Dashiell Hammett and some people on whom Hammett modeled … the colorful characters in The Maltese Falcon. He was 62.”

• I’m tardy in bringing attention to a pair of posts focused on this year’s Iceland Noir festival (November 16-20), but I don’t want to just let them go unmentioned. Kristopher Zgorski’s report is in BOLO Books; Abby Endler’s recollections are in Crime by the Book.

• Randal S. Brandt, a friend of this blog and a librarian at the University of California Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, was profiled last month in the San Jose Mercury News because of his labors as curator of the Bancroft’s massive California Detective Fiction Collection. The story includes news that Mark Coggins, a Stanford University graduate and infrequent Rap Sheet contributor, added “a complete set of [Raymond] Chandler and [Dashiell] Hammett first editions” to the collection. Explains the News’ Chuck Barney: “Coggins, known for his August Riordan private eye novels, which are also in the Bancroft collection, had been acquiring the books since the early ’90s. He viewed himself as ‘sort of a custodian.’”

• Finally, yesterday’s episode of Terry Gross’ Fresh Air radio program focused on crime of a different sort—and a truly frightening scenario: the end of American democracy, engineered by Donald Trump’s Republican Party. “In a new article titled ‘Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun,’ published in The Atlantic,” she told listeners, “my guest, journalist Barton Gellman, warns January 6 was just practice. We face a serious risk that American democracy as we know it will come to an end in 2024. The attempt by Trump and other Republicans to overturn the results of the 2020 election failed. But Gellman reports that Republicans have been building an apparatus for election theft. They’ve studied Trump’s crusade to overturn the 2020 results. They’ve noted points of failure and have taken steps to avoid failure next time by working to change whose votes are counted, who oversees the election, who chooses the electors and what happens in the courts.” You can listen to the whole interview here. If you’re an Atlantic subscriber, you can read Gellman’s article here.

Heads-Up, David Dodge Fans!

The Seattle-based Book Club of Washington has invited Randal S. Brandt, a librarian at the University of California, Berkeley’s Bancroft Library and creator of the Web’s A David Dodge Companion, to address club members—electronically, of course—on Sunday, February 21. “They said I could pick any topic I wanted,” he told me recently, “so I’m going to develop a talk around the article I wrote on the origins of To Catch a Thief for The Rap Sheet.” You’ll find that excellent piece here.

The Book Club’s Web site says that Brandt’s “illustrated” Zoom presentation will cover Dodge’s life and career, as well as the real-life 1950 French Riviera jewel heist that inspired the author’s best-remembered novel. This event will be free and open to all. If you’d like to join the discussion, beginning at 2 p.m. PST, please RSVP here.

Brandt’s Honor on the Books

Congratulations to Randal S. Brandt, who has been given the Distinguished Librarian Award from the Librarians Association of the University of California’s Berkeley chapter. Brandt, you may recall, is a librarian at UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library and the curator of that institution’s California Detective Fiction Collection. He also happens to be the creator of the Web’s A David Dodge Companion and an occasional contributor to The Rap Sheet. (Among other things, he wrote our wonderful piece this last August about the real-life burglary that inspired David Dodge to write To Catch a Thief).

(Hat tip to Elizabeth Foxwell.)

READ MORE: “Shrouded in Mysteries: A Conversation with Randal S. Brandt,” by Grace Lemon (Choice).

A Quick Five

• Twenty months after he began posting his choices of the 106 “Greatest Crime Films of All Time,” in CrimeReads, New York City bookseller and editor Otto Penzler yesterday finally announced his No. 1 pick: The Third Man (1949), based on Graham Greene’s novella of that same name and starring Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, (Alida) Valli, and Trevor Howard. Of the picture, Penzler writes:

Graham Greene based the villainous Harry Lime on Kim Philby, the infamous British double agent. Greene had been a member of the British Secret Intelligence Service until 1944, when he abruptly resigned. It has been suggested that the reason for his resignation was that he suspected Philby of being a traitor and did not want to actively assist him. Greene, himself a communist sympathizer, did not report Philby, who continued his activities for some time after Greene’s resignation.

A trailer for The Third Man can be enjoyed here. Penzler’s full list of film favorites is available here.

• Can you tell a whole story in just half a dozen words? That’s the challenge being posed by the Rocky Mountain Chapter of Mystery Writers of America (RMMWA), which will open its fourth annual Six-Word Mystery Contest on Tuesday, September 15. A news release explains that “Six-word ‘whodunits’ can be entered in one or all five of the following categories: Hard-boiled or Noir; Cozy Mystery; Thriller Mystery; Police Procedural Mystery; and/or a mystery with Romance or Lust. The Six-Word Mystery Contest is open to all adults 18 and over. No residency requirements. … The contest entry fee is $6 for one entry (just $1 per word); or $10 to enter six-word mysteries in all five categories. The grand prize winner will receive $100 in cold, hard cash. Winners in all other categories will receive $25 gift certificates, and all winners and finalists will be featured in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, on our RMMWA website, and in our popular newsletter, Deadlines.” Last year’s the overall winner is Jeffrey Lockwood, an author and professor of natural sciences and humanities at the University of Wyoming, whose punchy submission read simply: 36D, 44 magnum, 20 to life.

• The crime-fiction social networking site Crimespace has shut down. Sydney, Australia, writer Daniel Hatadi, who founded that online community for crime-fiction enthusiasts back in 2007, recently sent out the following message:

As you may be aware, Ning.com, the company who provides the servers and service for Crimespace to run on, charges an annual fee. The fee is $USD 239.90 and based on the donations and my current financial situation I cannot afford to run Crimespace any longer.

I’ve been checking activity on Crimespace and it is extremely minimal these days, most likely due to the more popular social networks.

As such, I’ve decided to close Crimespace.

This was supposed to happen soon but it appears that it already has been deactivated from July 20th 2020. Please accept my apologies for this short notice.

For blogs, there is a function to duplicate posts to other blog services so if you have used this so far there will most likely not be much work for you to transition.

Thanks to everyone who has donated along the way, it’s much appreciated.

• San Francisco-area author Mark Coggins launched a podcast in the midst of the COVID-19 lockdown. Called Riordan’s Desk, after his series private eye, August Riordan, it began with him reading—chapter by chapter—his latest Riordan novel, The Dead Beat Scroll (2019). Last week, he concluded that 30-part presentation by sitting for an interview with Randal S. Brandt, curator of the California Detective Fiction Collection at the University of California, Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, who asked him questions about the podcast project and about his full Riordan series. Listen to their exchange here.

• Speaking of podcasts, Sunshine State journalist Craig Pittman is now co-hosting one called Welcome to Florida. He writes that “our latest episode features a discussion with Colette Bancroft of the new short-story collection Tampa Bay Noir, which features tales of shady people in sunny places from Michael Connelly, Lisa Unger, Ace Atkins, Lori Roy, and a host of others.” That episode can he heard here.

“The Easiest Eighty Thousand Words Ever Put Together”: The Story Behind the Story of David Dodge’s "To Catch a Thief"

(Editor’s note: It was 70 years ago today that an audacious burglary took place on France’s Côte d'Azur, inspiring author David Dodge to pen one of the best-known crime-caper novels of the 20th century. In the essay below, Randal S. Brandt, a librarian at the University of California, Berkeley’s Bancroft Library and creator of the Web’s A David Dodge Companion, recounts the circumstances of that robbery and the man responsible for its deft execution.)

Alfred Hitchcock’s romantic thriller To Catch a Thief was released by Paramount Pictures in August 1955. While generally acknowledged as being one of the lighter-weight films directed by the “Master of Suspense,” it contains many of the hallmarks for which Hitchcock is rightfully recognized: an innocent man falsely accused of crimes he did not commit; a cool blonde with mysterious motives; a setting shot through with glamour and romance; and a suspense-filled plot involving a race against time—in this case, an ex-jewel thief (played by Cary Grant) who has to catch a copycat pulling off a series of daring heists on the French Riviera in order to prove his own innocence and clear his name. As was common throughout Hitchcock’s career, this film was adapted from a previously published work.

To Catch a Thief, the 1952 novel upon which the screenplay was based, tells the story of John Robie, an American expatriate who is trying to live a quiet life in a villa, which he audaciously names Villa des Bijoux (Villa of the Jewels), in the South of France. Before World War II, Robie had put his acrobatic training to use as a jewel thief operating on the Côte d’Azur and was nicknamed Le Chat (The Cat) by the French press for his gravity-defying ability to soundlessly enter and exit hotel rooms and apartments of his wealthy victims. He worked alone and “was never known to employ violence or carry a weapon more dangerous than a glass cutter.” Eventually, he was arrested and sentenced to 20 years in a French prison. When the Germans occupied France during the war, they emptied the jails. Robie, along with his cellmates, went into the maquis, the French underground, and fought against the Germans. In exchange for their service to France, the ex-prisoners were extended an unofficial amnesty for their crimes—provided they stay out of trouble. Now a new thief is at work on the Riviera, using Robie’s exact methods, and the police are convinced that Le Chat is back in business. So, Robie determines to catch the thief himself.

The novel was written by American mystery writer David Dodge (1910-1974) while he was living with his wife, Elva, and pre-teen daughter, Kendal, in the South of France. Even before being given the Hitchcock treatment, it was destined to become Dodge’s most celebrated—and successful—book. In his 1962 travel memoir, The Rich Man’s Guide to the Riviera, Dodge referred to the inspiration for the story as a “stroke of luck that fell to earth on the Côte d’Azur,” and he said that once he had the story in his mind, it was “the easiest eighty thousand words ever put together. The book practically wrote itself.”

David Dodge arrived in France with his family in the spring of 1950, where they rented a house on a hill above Golfe-Juan, near Cannes. By agreeing to also act as groundskeeper and attempt to tame the neglected, overgrown garden, Dodge was able to install his family in a furnished villa with a view of the Mediterranean and employ an elderly, partially-deaf local woman named Germaine to cook and keep house. The Dodges’ modest villa was named Noël Fleuri and shared a garden wall with a much grander villa occupied by a “millionaire industrialist” that was the scene of frequent, glittering parties with glamorous guest lists. Shortly after their arrival, David and Elva enrolled Kendal in a girls’ boarding school at Cannes and left for Italy, where David had a freelance assignment for Holiday magazine. The very night they departed, the villa next door was struck by an acrobatic cat burglar while the guests were dining on the terrace. Dodge recounted the story in The Rich Man’s Guide to the Riviera:

Simultaneously with our departure, apparently to the hour and minute as far as anyone could determine, jewelry purporting to be worth a quarter of a million dollars left the wealthy industrialist’s home next door. The true value of the heist was never, as far as the record goes, accurately determined ... In all events a substantial haul of glittery valuables disappeared from the bedrooms of the industrialist’s wife and her guests the night we, the next-door neighbors, left unannounced for foreign parts. Entrance to the scene of the crime appeared to have been made by a muscular thief who had swarmed three floors up and down a drainpipe, or some such acrobatic exercise.

Inevitably, the mysterious American living next door, who vanished simultaneously with the jewels, became the prime suspect in the robbery. When questioned by the police, Germaine, who had a stubborn peasant’s natural dislike of the flics, did Dodge no favors when she refused to cooperate and answer questions about her employers, only adding to the substantial dossier of circumstantial evidence against him. As Dodge later noted, had he “been on hand to demonstrate the comic potentialities of a scenario calling for a middle-aged pear-shaped husband and father to shinny three floors up a drainpipe and back down again, the case against [him] would have collapsed in brays of appreciative French laughter.”

Eventually, when the police discovered that the Dodges had left a daughter behind in boarding school, the case did collapse. By the time David and Elva returned to Golfe-Juan, all the excitement had died down and Dodge was no longer on the “most wanted” list, because the actual thief was securely behind bars.

The crook, a good-looking young Italian porch-climber named Dario Sambucco doing business under the picaresque alias of Dante Spada, was by then in the can. He had pulled off several other successful acrobatic harvesting operations, but made the mistake of opening negotiations with a fence in Lyon who peached on him when they disagreed about a price for the stuff. On my own, I would never have thought of projecting myself into Dante’s rubber-soled shoes, or putting him in mine. We were simply not reconcilable people in reality. Aided, however, by the fertile fancy of others, I saw in the combination a fiction which was, for once, so much stranger than truth that it cried out to be immortalized between hard covers.

And thus were John Robie and the plot of To Catch a Thief born.

But who was Dante Spada?

There is very little consensus on the biographical details of Dario Sambucco’s life, other than that he was Italian. After his arrest in 1950, Sambucco first insisted to the police that his name was Mario Noiret and that he was an itinerant antiques dealer, traveling around the French countryside on a motorized bicycle looking for deals in second-hand furniture. When confronted with armfuls of evidence he was accused of stealing, along with the detention of his girlfriend, however, he confessed to the robberies and claimed that his name was Dante Spada and that he had been born in Padua, the son of a pastry maker, on January 10, 1927. The Paris newspaper Le Monde reported that those details had not been confirmed by Italian officials, and said police speculated that he might have been a militant fascist youth under Prime Minister Benito Mussolini, and that he was attempting to escape Italian justice by changing his name. Italian newspapers reported that the culprit was born on May 5, 1928; but the Journal de Monaco, in publicizing his sentencing in the Tribunal Criminel de Monaco in 1954, recorded that he was instead born May 3, 1929, in Codroipo, Italy, which is consistent with later references to his age and hometown.

(Left) The elusive Dante Spada

Dante Spada’s criminal career was documented locally in the pages of Nice-Matin, the daily regional French paper covering Nice and the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region (as Dodge noted, “The French press were crazy about him”), which emphasized his good looks by comparing him to French film star Jean Marais. In addition, the newspapers dubbed him Tarzan des campings (Tarzan of the Campgrounds) in reference to his acrobatic skills. His story was exported to the United States, where the press also clearly went “crazy” about him, picking up on his colorful nicknames and breathlessly reporting on the exploits of “Tarzan of the Côte d’Azur” or “Tarzan of the Riviera,” or sometimes even the “Phantom of the Riviera.”

Spada’s criminal escapades began in 1947 with a robbery in Milan, Italy, that he committed with an accomplice. In 1948 he hitchhiked to the South of France, where he was stopped at the border and had all of his money confiscated, but was allowed to continue. After a few clumsy robberies in Cannes, he was picked up by police and sentenced to two years in prison in Marseille. A model prisoner, Spada was released after eight months for good behavior. He then went briefly to Switzerland, where he burglarized an apartment house and netted about $2,000 worth of jewels.

Upon his return to France, his first purchase was a fake identity card in the name of Mario Noiret. He also acquired a motorbike, a camping license from the Touring Club of France, a nylon tent, and other outdoor gear. In order to keep out of sight of the police and others who might recognize him, he hid in the tourist camps outside towns and villages. Spada was reported to have enjoyed living out of doors, where he trained strenuously between jobs by swimming, running, and especially—given his career choice—climbing trees. The New York Daily News reported that “he could go up a tree trunk like a Polynesian after coconuts.” It was this arboreal ability that later led to those many “Tarzan” epithets. While living at Camp des Maurettes in April 1950, Dante met a beautiful young woman named Jeannette and fell madly in love. Jeannette’s last name was never recorded, but she was a divorcée with a 3-year old child, whose parents lived in Lyon. They became engaged and planned to marry the following September.

Nice-Matin reported on 14 separate suspected burglaries committed by Dante Spada on the Côte d’Azur and on the Côte Basque (Biarritz) during the spring and summer of 1950. The most celebrated theft, by far, took place on August 5, 1950, at the Villa Le Roc in Golfe-Juan during a party given by American hostess Rosita Winston who, with her husband, New York property magnate Norman K. Winston, was installed in the villa for the season. Sharing the garden wall with Le Roc was Noël Fleuri, where the Dodges were in residence. In addition to netting Spada a significant haul, the list of victims read like a veritable “who’s who” of the Riviera and included gossip columnist Elsa Maxwell and world-famous fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli. The New York Daily News gave a thrilling account of the heist:

There were two convenient telegraph poles. One of them got him over the railroad’s fence and down onto the tracks. He swarmed up the other in his rubber-soled shoes to the top of the villa’s wall. There he saw a window about five feet away. He jumped across the breach, caught himself and climbed to the roof.

He first entered the room of Mr. and Mrs. Rodman de Heeren … He opened a jewel box on the dressing table with his penknife. (He never carried any weapons or burglar tools.) Among the jewels he got there was a necklace with a diamond pendant at $25,000 to $50,000.

He moved on to [Schiaparelli’s] room where he took, among other things, the Great Bear [a custom piece designed for her by Cartier]. In Mrs. Winston’s room he found the safe locked and passed along, as he is not a cracksman. Next, the Gates’ room ...

Then he left the place the same way he had entered.

Finally casting aside their initial, misguided suspicion of David Dodge, the police turned their attention to Dante Spada, after finding a footprint on the top of a wall following a burglary a few nights later at the Villa Eldee, in Cannes. The Eldee job was one of the strangest—and most opportunistic—escapades on Spada’s rap sheet. In the wake of his successful heist at Le Roc, Spada took Jeannette to Cannes to see a film at Cinema Rex. When the power failed (apparently a common problem at the time), leaving the moviegoers sitting in the dark, Spada claimed he had a headache and needed some fresh air. He told Jeannette to stay in the theater, that he would be back shortly. He took a walk along the Croisette to the Villa Eldee, home of Louis Dreyfus, a former provincial senator, where a dinner party was in progress. He climbed a tree to gain access over the wall, and within minutes had lifted two million francs worth of jewelry. Half an hour later he was back at the movie with Jeannette.

(Above) The “Phantom of the Riviera” drew attention worldwide, thanks to newspaper stories like this one that appeared in the Minneapolis Sunday Tribune on August 24, 1952.

Up until this point, the police thought the robberies were inside jobs, but the footprint that Spada inadvertently left on the wall at Eldee on his way out suggested that they were dealing, rather, with a “mountain climber.” An inspector with the Cannes police, who had investigated Spada’s work in 1948, knew he had been released from the Marseille jail. A fence with whom Spada had been negotiating the sale of a bag of gems soon identified a picture of him as Mario Noiret, and the police quickly learned that an antiques dealer named Noiret frequented the camps. On August 25, 1950, he was taken into custody by the police outside of Nice.

Spada confessed to 12 burglaries in France and Switzerland, including the robbery at Villa Le Roc. He was motivated to confess when Jeannette was also arrested. It seems likely that she had no idea of his profession until she was picked up by the police. After his arrest, Spada revealed a romantic motive to his crimes: “I intended to reach the 100-million [franc] mark, then settle down as an honest man and marry the girl I love.”

The romance, though, was not destined to last. After initially pledging to stick with him, and reported as being pregnant, Jeannette disappears from Dante Spada’s story. She must have decided that a confessed thief was not the kind of man she wanted for herself or her child. Spada was finally prosecuted for his crimes in February 1953. During the trial, a newspaper in Melbourne, Australia, The Argus, gave an account of his methods:

A burglar climbed trees for two hours a day as rehearsal for a 100-million franc haul ... To get into the Villa Le Roc, at Golfe-Juan, on the Riviera—where Madame Schiaparelli was a guest—“Tarzan” Spada scaled a telephone pole, a wall, and the side of the villa. During the day, Spada acquired a sun tan. In the evening he dressed with care in a white evening suit, black glacé shoes—but with crepe soles. In his hip pocket he carried a chamois leather case with burglar kit and a pair of rubber gloves.

On February 27, 1953, Dante Spada was sentenced in Nice to eight years in prison.

His actual stay behind bars was short, however. After his conviction, Spada was extradited to Monaco to face additional charges for a job he had pulled in Monte Carlo on May 27, 1950. On August 15, 1953, he and another prisoner escaped by sawing through the bars of their cell and taking two pistols from the guards. As reported in the press, “French police now consider the move an ‘oversight.’ The Monaco prison is a small, four cell affair more noted for its hospitality than its security.” Spada then fled France for Italy. He was suspected of committing several burglaries in the ensuing months, including a high-profile heist of Hollywood movie mogul Jack Warner’s villa, Aujourd’hui, in Antibes on September 2, 1953. More likely, he was lying low in Italy at the time. He was finally re-arrested in Genoa on November 2, 1953.

This time the police made sure they not only got their man, but that they held onto him, too. In June 1954, Dante Spada—by now more commonly known by his real name, Dario Sambucco—was sentenced to 30 years by the Tribunal Criminel de Monaco. Shortly, thereafter, he was extradited to Milan to face charges stemming from his 1947 robberies. It was there, while recounting his life story to the newspapers, where word reached him that famed director Alfred Hitchcock was in the South of France making a film chronicling the exploits of an acrobatic cat burglar. On July 14, 1954, the Milanese newspaper Corriere della sera reported that Spada had instructed his attorneys to block production of To Catch a Thief. Dodge recounted this angle of the story:

Dante Spada was the first to scream. Until then he had been the epitome of good manners. Everybody liked him, even the cops and his victims, once they had got know him … [W]hile writing his memoirs for the newspapers, he learned that his life story had already been written up for him, and called for justice in the courts.

Nothing came of it. It wasn’t any more his life story than it was my own, in fact, a lot less so. I let him know, through a mutual connection in the Marseille underworld, that the copyright laws were on my side, not his, and that if he weren’t careful about what he put into his memoirs somebody might very well countersue for plagiarism.

Dodge’s claim to underworld connections is likely an exaggeration (his daughter, Kendal, later wrote that he was the most scrupulously honest man she had ever known). But the copyright laws were, indeed, on Dodge’s side. He recalled in a 1966 Holiday article, that Spada “dropped the complaint when his lawyers explained that a thief can’t copyright his methods of thievery.”

The Dante Spada story was not quite over yet, though. In 1955, he managed yet another jail break, this time from a prison in Naples. This freedom was likely short-lived, as he was suffering from severe arthritis and using a pair of crutches at the time. Somehow, he managed to simply hobble away from his guards during a medical treatment. A record of his recapture has not yet been located; but in 1972, newspapers detailed that he was ailing and that his widowed mother was campaigning to have his sentence commuted. “It’s not fair,” she reportedly said, “that murderers and rapists go free after a few years while my Dario, who just stole a few million in jewels, is dying in prison like a dog.”

(Above) Elva, David, and Kendal Dodge at the ceremony honoring David as a Chevalier de l’Ordre du Mérite Touristique.

The story of Dante Spada is remarkable for how widely it was spread around the world. Newspapers across North America and Europe thrilled their readers with accounts of his burglaries, captures, trials, and escapes. No doubt the fact that he chose Elsa Schiaparelli as one of his victims contributed to his widespread appeal. Schiaparelli, herself, added a bizarre twist to the story. When police were called to the Villa Le Roc following the August 1950 burglary, guests gave detailed reports of the items that were missing. Two weeks later, Schiaparelli was detained by plainclothes detectives at the airport as she was about to board a plane for Tunis, in North Africa. Some of the jewels she had reported stolen were found in her luggage; also there was $1,485 in U.S. dollars that she had failed to declare. In her 1954 autobiography, Shocking Life, Schiaparelli claimed she’d unexpectedly discovered two tiny clips that she had reported missing on her dressing table at the villa, and that she had informed the entire household of her find. The Winstons, however, urged her not to report it, as doing so would just bring the police back to the villa for more unwelcome attention. Schiaparelli was eventually released without being charged—although she had to pay a fine for the undeclared currency. Of course, the press again went “crazy,” with news of her embarrassing detention spreading like wildfire. Upon meeting with the local chief of police the next day, she was told that the detectives had been acting on a tip from someone at the villa. Did it really happen the way she described? Or was she trying to take advantage of the situation to scam her insurers? An unsolved mystery in the Dante Spada saga.

When an author has the right inspiration, the writing comes easily. From the robbery at Villa Le Roc on August 5, 1950, until the publication of To Catch a Thief on January 2, 1952, less than a year and a half had elapsed—the easiest 80,000 words, indeed. Dante Spada clearly was the right inspiration for David Dodge. “Le Chat … came out a kind of mixture of Cary Grant, Mister Universe, Dante Spada and the original suspect,” he explained. Despite the ease with which his story emerged, Dodge had only modest hopes for it. “It was, as it seemed, another potboiler that just might go as far as the paperback reprints. But Le Chat caught on …”

The novel, and its subsequent adaptation to the silver screen, was just the start of a lifelong love affair between Dodge and La Belle France. More novels with French settings and numerous articles for Holiday and other periodicals extolling the beauty and charm of the country followed, ultimately resulting in Dodge being appointed Chevalier de l’Ordre du Mérite Touristique for his contributions to French tourism. He was given a medal on a ribbon and a citation proclaiming him le plus grand agent americain de publicité de la Côte d’Azur. For most people, being accused of a crime you did not commit would be a horrific experience. For David Dodge, it was one of the luckiest things that ever happened to him.


Hitchcock’s cinematic version of To Catch a Thief debuted in Los Angeles on August 3, 1955—65 years ago this week.

* * *

David Dodge’s To Catch a Thief is available from Bruin Books. For more details about that novel’s adaptation by Alfred Hitchcock, check out Mr. Dodge, Mr. Hitchcock, and the French Riviera, by Jean Buchanan, available from Amazon as a Kindle Single or from Audible.

Just Trying to Keep Up

• Variety brings word that “PBS Masterpiece has boarded the remake of classic European detective series Van der Valk and will co-produce and air the show in the U.S. Masterpiece’s Rebecca Eaton will exec produce the project. It is the latest in a healthy line of U.K.-originated drama that Masterpiece has boarded since becoming the U.S. home for British-made hits such as Downton Abbey.” Production of this new Amsterdam-set series is said to be underway, with no firm release date as yet. The original Van der Valk, starring Barry Foster and based on a succession of novels by Nicholas Freeling, was broadcast (on and off) between 1972 and 1992. (Hat tip to Lee Goldberg.)

• Meanwhile, Mystery Fanfare reports that Lara Prescott’s debut novel, The Secrets We Kept, along with Adrian McKinty’s acclaimed The Chain are slated for Hollywood film adaptation.

• And Mystery Tribune says Swedish writer Camilla Läckberg (The Girl in the Woods) “has turned her attention into creating a new TV series titled Hammarvik, which can be characterized as a Nordic version of Desperate Housewives with a serial killer on the loose.”

• Not long after the posting of my latest CrimeReads piece, “Detecting During Disasters”—about mystery and detective novels set amid real-life catastrophes, including San Francisco’s 1906 earthquake and city-destroying fire—I received a note from Randal S. Brandt, a librarian with the University of California, Berkeley’s Bancroft Library. He told me of an article he’d written for a 2006 edition of the Bancroft’s newsletter, about novels featuring that trembler—everything from Sara Dean’s Travers: A Story of the San Francisco Earthquake (1908) and Shaken Down (1925), by Alice MacGowan and Perry Newberry, to Mignon G. Eberhart’s Casa Madrone (1980) and Dianne Day’s Fire and Fog (1996). Titled “The Big Shake,” Brandt’s feature is accessible in this PDF; simply scroll down to page 10.

• I’d never heard mystery-maker Ngaio Marsh speak—until now.

• Houston-born novelist Attica Locke has won the 2019 Texas Writer Award. Sponsored by the Texas Book Festival, this prize is given out annually to authors who have “significantly contributed to the state’s literary landscape.” Locke is, of course, known for penning such books as Bluebird, Bluebird (2017) and its new sequel, Heaven, My Home. She will be presented with her award during an October 26 ceremony in Texas’ state capitol in Austin. (Hat tip to The Gumshoe Site.)

• I’ll be sorry to miss this presentation. “If you’re going to Bouchercon [in Dallas, October 31-November 3],” writes B.V. Lawson in In Reference to Murder, “you won’t want to miss The Ghost Town Mortuary, a radio play by Anthony Boucher, performed by members of Mystery Writers of America NorCal, Friday, November 1, 11 a.m., at the Landmark Ballroom in the Hyatt Regency. Authors scheduled to participate include Laurie R. King, David Corbett, Kelli Stanley, Reece Hirsch, Randal S. Brandt, Dale Berry, Gigi Pandian, James L’Etoile, and Terry Shames.”

• Looking for a Christmas present for yours truly? This set of 20 Rockford Files trading cards would be a fun choice.

• England’s Daily Telegraph newspaper carries a story—reproduced by Chris Sullivan in his blog—about how actor Laurence Fox, late of Inspector Lewis and currently appearing in Victoria, has found solace in his music, after a divorce and the death of his best friend.

• Comfort TV blogger David Hofstede continues his series of posts about two-part television episodes—good and definitely not so good—with write-ups that mention several crime dramas, such as The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries, The Fugitive, and Charlie’s Angels.

• It’s always good to be reminded of ABC-TV’s classic gumshoe series, Peter Gunn, and its “jazz chanteuse,” played by Lola Albright.

• Finally, if you could use some financial assistance to attend next year’s Left Coast Crime convention in San Diego, California (March 12-15), you may be in luck. The LCC National Committee has drummed up funds for five scholarships to the event, plus expense money. More information and application procedures are available here.

Stanley Steams Ahead

Today in my Killer Covers blog, I launched what will be a heavily illustrated tribute to prolific paperback cover artist Robert C. Stanley (1918-1996). As I note in an introduction to that series, Stanley’s “realistic artistry graced more than 200 covers of paperback releases from Dell Books during the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s, giving that line an immediately familiar style.”

Killer Covers’ Stanley salute will continue through next Friday, April 6, with new postings every day. I kick things off with California librarian Randal S. Brandt’s introduction to this artist’s life and labors.

You should be able to keep track of the whole series here.

The Book You Have to Read: “Carambola,“ by David Dodge

(Editor’s note: This is the 125th entry in our ongoing blog series highlighting great but forgotten books. Today’s recommendation comes from Randal S. Brandt, a librarian at the University of California, Berkeley’s Bancroft Library. Brandt is also the creator of two critically lauded Web sites: Golden Gate Mysteries, an annotated bibliography of crime fiction set in the San Francisco Bay Area; and A David Dodge Companion, which chronicles the life and works of mystery/thriller writer David Dodge [1910-1974]. To learn more about Brandt and his interest in Dodge, click here).

Even for a largely forgotten author like David Dodge, his 12th novel, Carambola (1961), represents a new level of obscurity. Although it was published to positive reviews, it failed to capture the attention of contemporary readers.

At the start of the 1950s, David Dodge was on top of his game as a writer. In 1952, he struck literary gold with To Catch a Thief, his story of an American jewel thief living in quiet retirement in the South of France, who is drawn back into his old life when a copycat crook starts operating in the glittering playground of the rich and famous. That novel was optioned by Alfred Hitchcock before it was even published and, in 1955, the movie adaptation was released by Paramount Pictures featuring an all-star cast headed by Cary Grant and Grace Kelly, and with filming having taken place on location along the spectacular Côte d’Azur. Dodge’s next two novels, The Lights of Skaro and Angel’s Ransom, followed in 1954 and 1956, respectively, and shared with To Catch a Thief the key elements of expatriate Americans in exotic foreign locales.

Dodge’s next novel, however, was a distinct departure from his usual “blood and thunder” melodramas. Loo Loo’s Legacy (1960) is a comedic novel set in a boarding house in an unnamed East Coast city, featuring a large cast of eccentric characters. It was an utter failure. Dodge, who had been alternating his writing of thrillers with his work on a series of popular, humorous, anecdotal travel books, was encouraged by his publishers to employ that lighter tone and style in a novel. But then, when he took their advice, those publishers failed to put any effort into marketing the novel.

Discouraged by that experience, Dodge returned to more familiar storytelling territory with Carambola, a classic example of the “chase novel.”

The American hardcover appeared in April 1961 and was followed later that same year by an English hardcover version under the title High Corniche. But the paperback reprint publishers failed to take it up and, to this day, no paperback edition exists. As with Loo Loo’s Legacy, the publishers deserve no credit for boosting sales of Carambola. Its drab gray jacket art on the first edition certainly could not have aided readers in judging the book by its cover. And a British reprint edition that appeared in 1972 has one of the least appealing fronts in the history of thriller fiction: a profile photograph of a jaunty, grinning fellow with a bared chest, regrettable sideburns, and a comb-over. I know it was the 1970s, but come on. Really?

Dodge’s story begins on a beach in Cannes, France, when Andy Holland, an itinerant mining engineer, recognizes one of the contestants in a beauty contest even though he has never seen her before. The nearly 18-year-old American girl, who introduces herself as Mike (short for Micaela) Magill, is the spitting image of Holland’s ex-wife, Marsha, who had left him in the middle of a Peruvian jungle a little more than 18 years previously. As a novice engineer engaged in his first contract, he--as Marsha put it--chose a gravel bar over her. Realizing that the girl in the bikini must be his daughter, Holland soon tracks down Marsha herself. He then learns that Marsha’s husband, Harry Magill--the only father Micaela has ever known--is in hiding in Barcelona, where he is wanted on a charge of murder. It seems Magill had avenged his wife’s honor by shooting the man who’d raped her.

Holland also learns that an egotistical, but well-connected, Spanish marqués, Carlos de Vilasar, has committed himself to helping Magill. The price of his help, though, is Micaela’s hand in marriage. Marsha is torn between her own desperation over her husband’s fate and the prospect of giving her young daughter to a man who neither loves nor respects her, and who routinely risks his own life and the lives of others in the pursuit of reckless thrills. To keep his daughter from a disastrous marriage, Holland agrees to go to Barcelona and find some way to get Magill out of Spain.

Holland finds Magill hiding in a barrio with a fiercely loyal Catalan smuggler called Candelas. Originally planning to travel by fishing boat up the coast to France, this trio’s first escape route is thwarted by a ship captain’s greed and loose tongue. So, instead, they strike out overland through the tiny country of Andorra, high in the Pyrenees on the Spanish-French border. Andorra is a smuggler’s haven and Candelas has useful connections there, including a wealthy baron--a “master among contrabandists”--who lives in a 15th-century castle and offers them food and shelter. After leaving Andorra loaded down with packs of illegal goods--anyone not carrying contraband out of the country would immediately attract the suspicion of the authorities--they have to make a difficult night-time climb over a rugged mountain pass.


David and Elva Dodge in Princeton, N.J., 1956

As Holland, Magill, and Candelas attempt to reach safety in France, they are pursued from both sides of the border by the Spanish police, the French customs guards, and the Marqués de Vilasar who, angry at being outflanked by Holland, has put up a huge reward for their capture. The journey is complicated by Magill’s various physical limitations, as well as by Holland’s ambivalence about saving a man who stands between him and his chances at rekindling a relationship with Marsha and starting one with his newly discovered daughter. These feelings are pitted against Candelas’ threat that any harm that befalls Magill along the way will also be visited upon Holland--at Candelas’ hands.

Another impediment to the success of this novel may have been its strange, foreign-sounding title. Carambola is a Spanish word that has dual meanings. It is a billiards term referring to the impact of a cue ball against two other balls in succession. Candelas invokes this image when making his threat to Holland, and throughout the course of the novel, as alliances form and break among the three principal characters, that meaning is apt. However, the word can also mean “fluke,” “by lucky chance,” or “sheer luck,” and it is certainly sheer luck that Holland happens to be on the Cannes beach at the exact moment his daughter is there for him to recognize, thus providing the motive for his actions on Magill’s behalf. This latter meaning of carambola also takes on ironic significance, as Holland, who has spent much of his professional career in the Arab world, frequently muses on the Muslim concept of inshallah (“God willing”), which suggests that there is no such thing as luck or chance; everything has been predetermined and one must simply accept one’s fate.

(Left) Kendal Dodge in Cannes, circa 1956

When Carambola was originally published, David Dodge’s own daughter, Kendal, was a 21-year-old student at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, living away from her parents for the first time. From the time Kendal was 5 years old until her high school graduation, Dodge and his wife, Elva, had been traveling around the world, settling down for extended stays in Guatemala, Peru, and the South of France, where Dodge would gather local color for his international thrillers and practical advice for cost-conscious travelers (his The Poor Man’s Guide to Europe was a best-seller for much of the ’50s). After spending four years back in the United States, so that Kendal could attend high school, David and Elva began traveling again, but this time they left her behind in college. No doubt, they were feeling a bit insecure about their little girl growing up. With its theme of fathers being motivated by the desire to protect their daughters, it is no coincidence that Dodge dedicated Carambola to Kendal.