A Look Back At Mel Brooks and Buck Henry's Groundbreaking Spy Comedy TV Series, 'Get Smart'

When I was a teenager back in the 1960s, I was a huge fan of the James Bond films, TV’s Secret Agent and other spy thrillers.  

I also loved Get Smart, the Mel Brooks and Buck Henry TV spy comedy series. 

Olivia Rutigliano at Crimereads.com offers a look back at the funny and clever series.       

In the first few moments of the black-and-white pilot episode of Get Smart, the camera hangs over an audience in a concert hall—Symphony Hall, the narrator tells us, in Washington D.C. Somewhere in the city is the headquarters for a secret counter-espionage organization known as “CONTROL.” And as the camera moves around the audience, capturing the group in evening dress watching in rapt silence as the orchestra plays, the narrator informs us, that somewhere in the audience “is one of CONTROL’s top employees, a man who lives a life of danger and intrigue, a man who has been carefully trained never to disclose the fact that he is a secret agent.” 

At that very moment, in the middle of the concert hall, a phone rings. It’s a loud, jangly telephone ring, the kind from a mid-century rotary phone, and it echoes throughout the venue. 

Watching this scene in the twenty-first century, it might not seem so jarring; how often have we sat inside crowded theaters and had our viewing experiences disturbed by the loud ringing of a phone? But this episode is from 1965, and so when the phone goes off in the middle of the theater, the patrons look around incredulously. A man stands up and hastily exists the theater and when he does, the ringing travels with him, out into the hall. 

Ducking into a supply closet, he takes off his right shoe and removes the bottom, revealing a tiny, compact phone receiver with built-in rotary dial along the sole. “This is Smart,” he says into the shoe (which it is, but then he elaborates): “Maxwell Smart… Agent 86.” He learns from his boss that the evil organization KAOS is up to a nefarious plan, and so promises to get right down to headquarters. 

Of course, this will take a moment, because in the course of answering his shoe-phone, he has unwittingly locked himself in the closet. 

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

Get Wise to Get Smart ‹ CrimeReads

You can also watch a Get Smart clip about “the Cone of silence” from the first episode via the below link:

Get Smart - Cone of Silence (from episode 1) - YouTube

When Edgar Allan Poe Invented The Detective Story, He Changed The Literary World Forever

Today, on Edgar Allan Poe's birthday, Olivia Rutigliano offers a piece on Poe and the first detective story at CrimeReads.com. 

Even though literature had, for centuries, brimmed with clever problem-solvers, from tricksters to reformed thieves to wise men to police prefects, Edgar Allan Poe’s detective story, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” still awed the literary world when it appeared in 1841. 

A gruesome double-murder has taken place in a home along the Rue Morgue (a fictional street in Paris). Several witnesses heard several voices, but no one can agree on what language one of the speakers may have been using. Several clues linger about, each more baffling than the next. The police are stumped. But C. Auguste Dupin, a chevalier and rare book aficionado, solves the mystery at home after reading the details in the paper, becoming literature’s first bona fide detective character and starting a genre revolution. He would appear again in two more stories, “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt,” published from 1842-1943, and “The Purloined Letter” in 1844. 

As literary critic A. E. Murch writes, the detective story is one where its “primary interest lies in the methodical discovery, by rational means, of the exact circumstances of a mysterious event or series of events.” Critic Peter Thoms elaborates on this, defining the detective story as “chronicling a search for explanation and solution, such fiction typically unfolds as a kind of puzzle or game, a place of play and pleasure for both detective and reader.” 

The well-heeled Dupin in an armchair detective, who solves puzzles because he can, using a process called “ratiocination,” in which Dupin basically thinks outside of the box. (And it’s a good thing he does, or no one will solve these crimes; the murderer in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” turns out to be an orangutan. It might be safe to say no one else would conclude that.) He narrates his discoveries to his good, book-collector friend (who is an anonymous and often awed first-person narrator). 

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

 When Poe Invented the Detective Story, he Changed the Literary World Forever ‹ CrimeReads 

Theodore Roosevelt And The Frontier Lawman: Long Before Heading To The White House, Teddy Roosevelt Hung Out With The Wildest Badge-Wearers Of The Old West.

Erin Lindsey at CrimeReads.com offers a piece on Teddy Roosevelt and his friendship with frontier lawmen. 

Lawman. 

The word calls a specific image to mind. Rugged features, weathered skin, bushy moustache. He’s got a hat on his head, a gun at his waist, and a tin badge on his chest, and he’s a one-man embodiment of the American Old West.

In an era populated with colorful characters—the gunfighter and the gambler, the outlaw and the prospector—no one loomed larger than the lawman. Some of the most notorious figures of the day, including Wild Bill Hickock, Wyatt Earp, and Bat Masterson, wore a badge. Not that this stopped them from pursuing other endeavors, not all of them strictly legal. Lawmen of the Old West were gunslingers, gamblers, prospectors, prize fighters, buffalo hunters, and even outlaws. Small wonder they so captured the imagination of the American public—and of her 26th President, Theodore Roosevelt. 

TR was himself a lawman, having served as deputy sheriff of Billings County, Dakota Territory in 1885-1886, and as police commissioner of New York City ten years later. He had a deep and abiding respect for the law and those who upheld it, and maintained lifelong friendships with a number of famous frontier lawmen. He even appointed several of them to positions in federal law enforcement—prompting the press of the era to refer to them collectively as “the White House Gunfighters.” 

I first became acquainted with this fascinating facet of Rooseveltian history while doing research for The Silver Shooter, a Wild West mystery featuring Theodore Roosevelt as a character. One of my favorite television shows of all time was HBO’s Deadwood, so imagine my delight upon discovering that one of TR’s closest confederates from his Dakota days was Seth Bullock, onetime Sheriff of Deadwood. 

According to TR’s autobiography, their first meeting was less than cordial, with Bullock inquiring after a horse thief Roosevelt had arrested “with a little of the air of one sportsman when another has shot a quail that either might have claimed—‘My bird, I believe?’” TR seems to have smoothed it over, however, and Bullock became one of his “staunchest, most valued” friends. The legendary lawman even presided over a posse of 50 Dakota cowpunchers as part of TR’s inaugural parade in 1905, an event described with breathless delight by the newspapers of the day. 

Interestingly, Bullock wasn’t officially considered one of the White House Gunfighters, perhaps because his reputation was too squeaky-clean. The same could not be said of ‘official’ members Pat Garrett (famous for gunning down Billy the Kid) or Ben Daniels, a former assistant marshal of Dodge City whose stint as a lawman ended when he was tried and acquitted for a murder he almost certainly committed. When TR appointed these men to federal positions—Garrett as Collector of Customs in El Paso (1901) and Daniels as US Marshal of Arizona Territory (1902), the outcry was swift and furious. In the case of Daniels, he was forced to resign barely a month after accepting the post (though he was reappointed three years later). 

The most famous of Roosevelt’s White House Gunfighters was William Barclay “Bat” Masterson, former Sheriff of Dodge City and acquaintance of many of the era’s most famous figures, including Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, and Buffalo Bill Cody. 

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

https://crimereads.com/theodore-roosevelt-and-the-frontier-lawman/ 

Richard Sorge And Agent Sonya: A Legendary Spy's Unusual Recruitment In 1930S Shanghai

I’m currently reading Ben Macintrye’s Agent Sonya: Moscow's Most Daring Wartime Spy. 

One of the most interesting historical characters in his book on espionage history is Richard Sorge (seen in the above photo).

CrimeReads.com offers an excerpt from Agent Sonya about Richard Sorge.

Ian Fleming once described Richard Sorge as “the most formidable spy in history.” Despite being German and communist, and approaching middle age, in 1930 Sorge bore a distinct resemblance to the fictional James Bond, not least for his looks, appetite for alcohol, and prodigious, almost pathological, womanizing. Even Sorge’s sworn enemies acknowledged his skill and courage. After China, Sorge would move on to Tokyo, where he spied, undetected, for nine years, penetrating the innermost secrets of the Japanese and German High Commands and alerting Moscow to the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. When he met Ursula, Sorge was just setting out on his espionage career in the Far East, a journey that would lead, eventually, to a place in the small pantheon of spies who have changed the course of history.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:    

 https://crimereads.com/a-legendary-spys-unusual-recruitment-in-1930s-shanghai/

Another interesting book on Richard Sorge is Gordon V. Prange's Target Tokyo: The Story of the Sorge Spy Ring.

The 2020 Edgar Award Winners: The Year's Best In Mystery And Crime Writing From The Mystery Writers Of America

Crimereads.com offers the Mystery Writers of America’s announcement of this year’s Edgar Awards.

This year marks the 74th anniversary of the Mystery Writers of America’s gala celebrating the Edgar Awards—one of the crime fiction world’s highest honors. 

Under normal circumstances, the mystery community would be convening for a black-tie affair at a midtown Manhattan hotel, but this year—with a deadly pandemic still spreading and countries around the world on lockdown—the event has gone virtual. The winners have been announced on social media, and we’re following all the action here. Let’s take the day to celebrate these authors—and the weeks and months ahead to read their work.

Here are your 2020 Edgar Award winners. 

You can read the rest of the announcement and see the list of the Edgar Award winners via the below link:  

https://crimereads.com/announcing-the-2020-edgar-award-winners/ 

Retired Navy SEAL Jack Carr On The Hunter, The Hunted, and “The Most Dangerous Game"

CrimeReads.com offers a piece by Jack Carr, a retired Navy SEAL and author of The Terminal List, True Believer and Savage Son, on hunting, war and the classic short story, The Most Dangerous Game.

I was, and remain, a student of war and of the hunt. Experiences in combat and in the backcountry helped shape me into the citizen, husband, father and writer I am today. The one has made me better at the other. I suspect it has always been this way. It is the feelings and emotions from those most primal of endeavors that form the foundation of Savage Son. 

I was first introduced to Richard Connell’s masterpiece, “The Most Dangerous Game,” in junior high school. Connell, a veteran of World War I, published his most celebrated short story in Collier’s Weekly in 1924. Upon that initial reading, I was determined to one day write a modern thriller that paid tribute to this classic tale, exploring the dynamic between hunter and hunted.  

Providing for and defending my family and country are hardwired into my DNA. Perhaps that is why “The Most Dangerous Game” resonated with me at such an early age, or maybe those primal impulses are in all of us, which is why Richard Connell’s narrative continues to endure almost a century after it was first published.

Fast-forward thirty years. As I prepared to leave the SEAL Teams, I laid out all my ideas for what was to become my first novel, The Terminal List. The plot for Savage Son was among several of the storylines I was contemplating as I decided how to introduce the world to James Reece. 

For that first outing, I knew my protagonist was not yet ready for what I had in store. I needed to develop him through a journey, first of revenge and then of redemption, before I could explore the dark side of man through the medium of the modern political thriller. Is James Reece a warrior, a hunter, a killer? Perhaps all three?

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link: 

https://crimereads.com/the-hunter-the-hunted-and-the-most-dangerous-game/ 

You can also read Richard Connell’s The Most Dangerous Game via the below link: 

https://americanliterature.com/author/richard-connell/short-story/the-most-dangerous-game

And you can read my Counterterrorism magazine Q&A with Jack Carr via the below link:  

www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2019/05/my-q-with-jack-carr-retired-navy-seal.html 

Elmore Leonard In Florida

Craig Pittman offers a good piece at CrimeReads on the late, great crime novelist Elmore Leonard in Florida. 


“Now they were in Florida postcardland, surf and sunny sky, lush tropical greenery. Stick took it all in, watched it get better and better….worlds away from a bleached house in Norman on an oil lease, or a flat on the west side of Detroit.” 

Stick, 1983

When he died, the papers called him “The Dickens of Detroit.” Dutch always hated that nickname. “What if I came from Buffalo?” he’d ask his researcher, Gregg Sutter. “Would I be the Bard of Buffalo?”

So no, he wasn’t Dickens. He wasn’t the Bard either. He was just Dutch, a guy who started off writing Westerns and then moved into crime stories and hit the bigtime and got his picture on the cover of Newsweek and sold a lot of his stories to Hollywood. 

Some of his crime books were set in and around his hometown of Detroit, but a lot of them weren’t. They were set in Florida, a place Dutch knew quite well. He had absorbed the humid atmosphere and sketchy cons first-hand. As a result he created some of his most iconic characters in books that were set in, or started off in, Florida including U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens, the main character in the acclaimed TV show Justified,

So while the late, great Elmore “Dutch” Leonard would decline the nickname of “the Dickens of Detroit,” maybe he’d be okay with another title: “Part-Time Florida Man.” 

“It was his Florida books, you could say, where he really made his bones,” Sutter told me.

… “I think the idea of the Florida landscape got his juices flowing,” Sutter told me. “It’s the land of psychics and strippers.”

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

https://crimereads.com/elmore-leonard-florida-man/

You can also read my Crime Beat column on Elmore Leonard via the below link:

 www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2009/05/return-to-elmoreland-elmore-leonards.html 

Raymond Chandler Wanted Cary Grant to Play Philip Marlowe

Olivia Rutigliano offers a piece at CrimeReads.com on the late, great crime novelist Raymond Chandler wanting actor Cary Grant to portray his iconic private eye character Philip Marlowe.

Humphrey Bogart will go down in history as the actor most associated with the detective character Phillip Marlowe, but he wasn’t the first actor to play him, and he wasn’t author Raymond Chandler’s first preference.

In 1944, the washed-up musical star Dick Powell played the sleuth in the first film adaptation of a Chandler novel Farewell, My Lovely (retitled to Murder, My Sweet, lest it seem like another musical). The movie relaunched Powell’s career, and Chandler was not disappointed with the casting decision. Powell bought an air of refinement that Chandler had initially envisioned for his P.I. But actually, he said later, the actor he most wanted to play his detective was Cary Grant.

What a movie that would have been. But anyway.

“I like people with manners, grace, some social intuition, an education slightly above the Reader’s Digest fan,” he mentioned in a letter to his colleague, the writer George Harmon Coxe. When writing to movie producer John Houseman, he stressed that Marlowe was an “honorable man” above all, and this quality needed to shine through.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link: 

https://crimereads.com/raymond-chandler-wanted-cary-grant-to-play-philip-marlowe/

Note: Think of Cary Grant portraying Marlowe as he portrayed a tough guy gambler in Mr. Lucky (seen in the top and above photos), as I noted in my Crime Beat column on Raymond Chandler.

You can read my Crime Beat column on Raymond Chandler via the below link:  

www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2009/11/on-raymond-chandlers-influence-on-crime.html

The Art Of Writing About Organized Crime And The Rise And Fall Of The New York Mafia: Talking Mafia History In A Former Mafia Stronghold

Nancy Bilyeau at CrimeReads.com offers a piece on a talk given by organized crime authors Nicholas Pileggi and Anthony M. DeStefano.

Pileggi is author of Wiseguy, which was made into the great Martin Scorsese crime film Goodfellas, as well as Casino, which Martin Scorsese also made into an outstanding film.

DeStefano is the author of Gotti's Boys and The Last Godfather.

You can read the piece via the below link:

https://crimereads.com/the-art-of-writing-about-organized-crime-and-the-rise-and-fall-of-the-new-york-mafia/

You can also read my Washington Times review of Gotti's Boys via the below link:

www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2019/08/my-washington-times-review-of-gottis.html

Did 'Hill Street Blues' Rip Off Ed McBain's 87th Precinct Series? A Tragicomic Tale Of Stolen Set-Ups, Threatened Lawsuits, Bruised Egos, Stalled Adaptations, And Besieged Productions

I began to read and enjoy Ed McBain's 87th Precinct crime novels when I was a teenager in the 1960s. I also read and enjoyed his other crime novels, such as A Matter of Conviction. Ed McBain's  novel about New York street gangs was made into one of my favorite films from the 1960s, The Young Savages, which starred Burt Lancaster and Telly Salvalas. 

(Ed McBain is seen in the above photo).

I also read his literary novels, such as The Blackboard Jungle, written under his name Evan Hunter, which he legally changed from his name at birth, Salvatore Lombino. He died in 2005.

Paul Abbott at CrimeReads.com offers a piece on Ed McBain’s belief that the TV series Hill Street Blues ripped off his 87^th Precinct series.    

Nothing, as they say, comes from nothing; largely authors and creators are quick to acknowledge, if not the direct influences on their work, then at least the traditions from which their output has emerged. Evan Hunter was proud of his work, boastful about it on occasion, but as Ed McBain he was happy to acknowledge the debt the 87th Precinct series paid to such things as the radio version of Dragnet, for example. 

The 87th Precinct books, and in particular the stories from the first two decades of the near fifty-year lifespan of the series, helped to shape the notion of what a police procedural series could be. What McBain did most successfully was demonstrate that much of policing was based on luck as well as and that all the tedious day-to-day matters that the job entailed couldn’t be avoided. In fact, he reveled in them, reproducing forms, reports, autopsy findings and laws as photostats in the books. Had this detailed quasi-fictional procedural nature been the only unique feature of the books, then they may not have become as successful as they did, but McBain’s coup de grace was to portray his cops as interesting and unique individuals struggling with not only their lives and relationships at work, but often at home as well. It is ironic that even with this winning formula, the 87th Precinct series was never effectively adapted for the screen, or at least not to McBain’s liking. Even worse, when police procedural shows really hit big in the early eighties, it was with a television show set in an unnamed city, starring an Italian-American cop as lead character, and focused on day-to-day procedure balanced against the relationships and lives of the cops in the squadroom. This was Hill Street Blues, still one of the best thought-of and most loved of all police television shows. Evan Hunter was livid.

“No of course they didn’t consult me,” the author told The Guardian newspaper in 1990, “if you come in to steal my jewels, you don’t say ‘May I come in tonight through the window please?’” Hunter’s first response to the appearance of this new show was to put a call in to his lawyer. He was told he had a case, but it would probably cost at least $500,000 dollars to fight it. He couldn’t afford to take the legal risk and instead took the opportunity to make his feelings known in interviews, and even out of the mouths of his characters in the 87th Precinct stories themselves. 

In his contemporaneous novel from 1984, Lightning, McBain dedicates three pages to venting his spleen. Everyone’s favorite bigot, Fat Ollie Weeks, is livid that an episode of Hill Street Blues has featured a character called Charlie Weeks, himself an out-an-out racist. Ollie goes on to outline all the similarities between the 87th Squad and Hill Street Blues and explains that he considered suing the TV company but that it’d, “prolly cost me a fortune.” It’s a fascinating insight into the author’s mindset as characters in a book, based in a fictional city, discuss fictional portrayals of cops in a fictional city. The layers of reality become quite blurry.

Hunter’s first response to the appearance of this new show was to put a call in to his lawyer. He was told he had a case, but it would probably cost at least $500,000 dollars to fight it.

Evan Hunter’s fury at Furillo and his Hill Street Friends might have been more tempered had he not himself been engaged in writing a new 87th Precinct television pilot himself at the time. “I knew we were dead in the water,” he told Bill Slocum in the New York Times. Furthermore, had any of the other attempts to bring the 87th Precinct to screens, large or small, been successful, then maybe Hunter would have looked the other way. As it was, even by 1981 there had been a string of attempts at rendering the 87th Precinct tales on screen but none of them had satisfied their creator.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

https://crimereads.com/did-hill-street-blues-rip-off-ed-mcbains-87th-precinct-series/  

Stephen Hunter, Author Of The Former Marine Sniper Bob Lee Swagger Thriller Series, On 6 Rules For Writing Realistic, Meaningful Gunfights

I’m reading Stephen Hunter’s latest Bob Lee Swagger thriller, Game of Snipers, and I plan to review the book in the Washington Times.

Swagger is a former Marine sniper is in his early 70s, but as a gun consultant for the FBI, the old Vietnam veteran stills gets into a lot of action. 

Guns are the trademark of Stephen Hunter (seen in the above photo). As a knowledgeable gun owner and shooter, he writes about guns with professional accuracy. He gets guns – and he gets it right. 

As a military-trained gun owner and shooter, I often cringe and curse novels, movies and TV shows that make silly mistakes about guns, such as someone with a snubnosed revolver shooting up from the ground and hitting someone with a sniper rifle on a third-story roof.

Crimereads.com offers a piece that Stephen Hunter wrote for his publisher, G. P. Putnam’s Sons on gunfights.  

Gunfights are chaos events. They make no sense, can never make sense. They are over in seconds. The men who fight them do so guided only by instincts that may or may not reflect training and experience. What happens—no matter how unlikely—happens, without recourse to do-overs, odds and the utter whimsey of luck. There are no rules. Nothing is clear, no one is heroic, self-urination is quite common (never shown in the movies). And they are incredibly loud, even though nobody’s hearing is working. Heartbeats go supersonic, blood chemicals mingle beyond any cocktail maker’s wildest imagination, no coherent thought forms in any brain, and luck is better than smarts, cover is more important than concealment, ammo is more important than heroism and too often the good die young.

I have pretty much spent my professional life trying to capture these moments in prose. Ask me why and watch my face go blank: no explanations beyond the fact that such happenings fire off lots of brain electricity, electricity is energy, energy is work, and work is–well, whatever it will be, from glory and dough to failure, ignominy and self-laceration.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

https://crimereads.com/6-rules-for-writing-realistic-meaningful-gunfights/ 

 You can also read my Washington Times review of The Third Bullet via the below link:

www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2013/03/my-washington-times-review-of-stephen.html

And you can read my Philadelphia Inquirer review of I, Sniper, below: 

Raymond Chandler: The Art Of Beginning A Crime Story

Dwyer Murphy at CrimeReads.com offers a piece on the late, great Raymond Chandler and his masterful opening paragraphs.

There are times in life when you need a good opener. Maybe you’re caught in a rut and need the charge of a new world, new characters, something that carries with it the quiet thrill of possibility. Maybe you’re looking for inspiration yourself. All writers, aspiring and established, have a few special works they return to time and again, those books and stories that seem to act like jumper cables for their own work—read a few paragraphs, a chapter or two, and you’re back on the road. Whatever your reason or need, you’d be hard pressed to find an author equal to Raymond Chandler in jolting a story alive. If Elmore Leonard was the king of the opening line, Chandler made a case for himself as the master of the opening paragraph. Whether he’s describing the weather, the face of a building, a street corner, or the glint in a doorman’s eye, Chandler brought the scene instantly to life and gave you an immediate and overwhelming feeling that you were in a real place, encountering real people caught up in the little dramas and tragedies that define all our lives.

One-hundred and thirty one years ago today, Chandler was born in Chicago, Illinois. In honor of that auspicious entrance and the many more he would pass down to the annals of literature, we’ve collected here (and ranked, because some are first among peers) our ten favorite openers from Chandler’s novels and short stories.

Read them all, get drawn in all over again, and above all, let yourself be inspired.

“It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid-October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my power-blu suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.    

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

https://crimereads.com/raymond-chandler-the-art-of-beginning-a-crime-story/

You can also read my Crime Beat column on Raymond Chandler via the below link:

www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2009/11/on-raymond-chandlers-influence-on-crime.html

And you can read my Washington Times review of The Annotated Big Sleep via the below link:

www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2018/09/my-washington-times-review-of-annotated.html 

John Douglas On His Life's Work: Talking With Killers

Lisa Levy at CrimeReads.com offers an interview with John Douglas, a former FBI profiler, author of Mindhunter, and his current book, The Killer Across the Table.

John Douglas is the OG of criminal profilers. As the lead profiler at the FBI, and now as a consultant, he has helped apprehend some of the worst serial killers and predators in history. As a young agent, he hit upon the idea to do extensive interviews with the worst society had to offer: the evolution of this program is traced in Douglas’s book Mindhunter, which was made into a Netflix series last year. To further his investigation into why criminals do what they do, he’s interviewed the most horrifying murderers in recent history: Jeffrey Dahmer, Son of Sam, Ted Bundy, the Green River killer, BTK—the list is depressingly long.

His new book, The Killer Across the Table, talks about some of the lesser known (but still frightening) criminals Douglas has interviewed, as well as describing some of his techniques for getting people to open up—one of the topics we discussed below, along with how his work affected his health, what profilers do to help police, and the advent of forensic evidence.

You can read the interview via the below link:

https://crimereads.com/john-douglas-on-his-lifes-work-talking-with-killers/ 

The Long Strange History Of Novelists Who Became Spies: The Overlapping Worlds Of Espionage And Fiction

In writing about his new spy thriller, The Moroccan Girl, at CrimeReads.com, via St. Martin’s Press, Charles Cumming (seen in the below photo) looks back at the famous novelists who became spies or were spies before they became novelists. 

In my new novel, The Moroccan Girl, a successful writer of spy thrillers becomes an agent for MI6. Kit Carradine is in his mid-30s. He lives alone in London, forever putting off the moment when he has to sit at his desk and write the required 1000 words per day which will allow him to meet the deadline on his latest book. Restless and easily distracted, Carradine is struggling to come to terms with what he calls the “Groundhog Day routine” of the writer’s life. In short, he’s a bit bored.

Then, a miracle. While en route to an afternoon screening of a film in Notting Hill (another instance of Carradine avoiding his desk), our hero is buttonholed by a mysterious man named Robert Mantis who claims to be a fan of his novels. The two men later meet for lunch, where Mantis reveals not only that he is an intelligence officer, but also that MI6 want to recruit Carradine as a support agent. Before he has time to ask himself whether or not he is doing the right thing, Carradine is on a plane to Casablanca operating as a bone fide British spy.

Could such a thing happen in real life? Does MI6 use writers in this capacity—or can I be accused of writing a 350-page wish-fulfilment fantasy? The answer is: of course! MI6 has a well-documented history of recruiting novelists to its cause.

Take Frederick Forsyth, for example. In his 2016 memoir, The Outsider, the author of The Day of the Jackal revealed that he had worked as a support agent for MI6 for more than two decades. On one occasion during the Cold War, Forsyth agreed to have sensitive documents hidden in the paneling of his car, which he then drove across the border into Communist East Germany. At an agreed time, Forsyth met a contact in the men’s lavatory of a prestigious Dresden museum and passed the documents to him from one locked cubicle to another.

… Forsyth was by no means the first famous writer to work for British intelligence. During World War One, MI6 recruited W. Somerset Maugham as an asset in Switzerland. While supposedly working on a new play, Maugham was in fact spying for king and country. The celebrated novelist and dramatist later produced Ashenden, a collection of semi-autobiographical short stories inspired by his experiences. Winston Churchill was said to be so incensed at Maugham’s breach of the Official Secrets Act that he demanded several of the stories be destroyed to prevent publication.

Already well-established as a writer, Graham Greene also did his bit, working for MI6 in Sierra Leone during World War Two. Greene’s Head of Station was none other than Kim Philby who, of course, was secretly working for the Soviet NKVD at the time. Greene later gave his MI6 code number—592000—to a character in Our Man in Havana, that devastating satire of espionage. He also parlayed his experience of the secret world into two of the finest spy novels of the 20th century: The Quiet American (1955) and The Human Factor (1978).

Why should novelists be sought after by intelligence services? Well, as Mantis tells Carradine in The Moroccan Girl: “Writers on research trips provide perfect cover for clandestine work…The inquisitive novelist always has a watertight excuse for poking his nose around. Any unusual or suspicious activity can be justified as part of the artistic process.” Put it another way: as an author visiting Moscow or Tehran, I can write things down, take photographs, meet politicians and business leaders – all under the legitimate guise of researching a thriller.

It works the other way around, too. The most famous spy-turned-author is undoubtedly John le Carré, who worked for both MI5 and MI6 while writing his first three books. The global success of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold allowed him to retire from the secret world and to devote himself full time to writing.

And then there is Ian Fleming, whose experiences in naval intelligence during World War II led to the creation of the most famous spy of them all—James Bond. Fleming was also partly responsible for one of the most ingenious intelligence coups of the war: Operation Mincemeat, in which false Top-Secret papers were planted on a corpse with the intention of misleading Nazi command.

… Already a world-famous writer at the outbreak of war, Ernest Hemingway was keen to be of service to his country. A recent biographer alleges that ‘Papa’ set up a counterintelligence bureau in Havana on behalf of the FBI and offered his 38-foot yacht, Pilar, for use as a scouting vessel to search for German U-Boats. Perhaps Red Sparrow author Jason Matthews, himself a former CIA officer, could confirm or deny this story?

The Moroccan Girl was inspired by these real-life examples of novelists turning to espionage—and vice-versa. Fans of Eric Ambler might also recognize my homage to The Mask of Dimitrios, in which a celebrated mystery writer, Charles Latimer, is drawn into a real-life crime story by Colonel Haki of the Turkish Secret Police. The Moroccan Girl may tackle the era of Trump and Putin, but it is a deliberately old-fashioned spy novel about an ordinary man who finds himself in extraordinary circumstances: An Ambler specialty.

You can read the entire piece via the below link:

https://crimereads.com/the-long-strange-history-of-novelists-who-became-spies/  

Note: The top photo is of W. Somerset Maugham. Below are photos of Frederick Forsyth, Ian Fleming, Graham Greene, Ernest Hemingway, John le Carre and Eric Ambler. Also included is William F. Buckley Jr, not mentioned in the piece, but he served briefly in the CIA and later wrote a series of spy thrillers.

Mickey Spillane Turns 100: Max Allan Collins On Sex, Violence, And Mike Hammer

As I noted in my Crime Beat column on the late crime writer, Mickey Spillane's I, the Jury was one of the first crime thrillers I read as a boy. I thought it was terrific.

The novel was tough, violent and sexy. I loved the book's wild ending. I thought it was a cool book.

I went on to read better crime novels and thrillers, like the works of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Ian Fleming, Eric Ambler and others, but I remember fondly Spillane's I, the Jury like one remembers his first girlfriend.

I love Spillane's "fuck you" attitude regarding critics. Despite the terrible reviews he received during his life, he sold millions of copies of his books. He wrote unabashedly for money and he said his books were the chewing gum of American literature.

CrimeReads.com offers a piece by Max Allan Collins, himself a crime writer, and a friend to the late Mickey Spillane. He has completed many of Spillane’s unfinished works, included the newly published, The Last Stand.

In July of 2006, at the age of 88, the last major mystery writer of the twentieth century left the building. Only a handful of writers in the genre—Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler among them—achieved such superstar status.

Spillane’s position, however, is unique—reviled by many mainstream critics, despised and envied by a number of his contemporaries in the very field he revitalized, the creator of Mike Hammer had an impact not just on mystery and suspense fiction but popular culture in general.

The success of the paperback reprint editions of his startlingly violent and sexy novels—tens of millions of copies sold—jumpstarted the explosion of so-called “paperback originals,” for the next quarter-century the home of countless Spillane imitators, and his redefinition of the action hero as a tough guy who mercilessly executed villains and slept with beautiful, willing women remains influential (Sin City is Frank Miller’s homage).

When Spillane published I, the Jury in 1947, he introduced in Mike Hammer one of the most famous of all fictional private eyes, and one unlike any P.I. readers had met before. Hammer swears vengeance over the corpse of an army buddy who lost an arm in the Pacific, saving the detective’s life. No matter who the villain turns out to be, Hammer will not just find him, but kill him—even if it’s a her.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

https://crimereads.com/mickey-spillane-turns-100/

You can also read my Crime Beat column on Mickey Spillane via the below link:

www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2015/03/my-crime-beat-column-look-back-at-crime.html 

Trained To Protect Foreign Dignitaries, Hunt Fugitives, And Write Tom Clancy Novels: How A US Marshal Inherited An Iconic Spy Fiction Series

CrimeReads.com offers a piece by thriller writer Marc Cameron (seen in the above photo) that looks back on his youth and former career as a police officer and a U.S. Marshall as he continues writing about Tom Clancy’s character Jack Ryan in Oath of Office.

A few years ago, at my thirtieth high school reunion, my wife and I sat beside a friend of mine named Merri—a girl on whom I had a massive crush my freshman year.

“You know what I remember about Marc?” Merri said to my wife in her honeyed Texas accent.

I braced myself.

“He always wanted to be a spy…”

Merri could have made a worse revelation. My wife already knew I was odd in college, so the fact that I was odd in high school was not news.

I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t reading, writing, or imagining adventure stories. My aunt sent me a box of Hardy Boys mysteries when I was eight, and I burned through those by the time I hit the fourth grade. By middle school, there was usually a Fleming or Forsyth on my nightstand—along with assorted notebooks filled with my attempts to write stories of my own. The Hunt for Red October came out about the time I joined the police department, and I quickly added Tom Clancy to my reading pile.

As a would-be writer, I read with a pencil, noting story structure and interesting turns of phrase. Plot ideas inspired by other books and my own work escapades filled countless legal pads. I felt certain that the fistfights, foot chases, and high-speed pursuits I was involved with would somehow, someday, end up in a novel.

When I was a green detective, a savvy Texas Ranger helping me with my first homicide investigation told me to write down everything I observed, even stuff that didn’t seem important at the time. It was excellent advice for a detective—and a writer. I chased bad guys during work hours and banged away on my Smith Corona typewriter during my off time. I’d piled up a sizable stack of rejection letters by the time I left the PD for a position as a deputy US marshal. Tom Clancy’s The Cardinal of the Kremlin had just come out in paperback and I took a copy with me for my four-month stay at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center near Brunswick, Georgia.

… I’ve always had a vivid imagination, but I never imagined that I’d someday have the opportunity to carry on writing Tom Clancy’s iconic characters. One of the plots of last year’s Power and Empire let me explore what John Clark might do if faced with similar circumstances to those in Without Remorse.

In The Cardinal of the Kremlin, Clancy (seen in the below photo) wove plenty of interesting technical information into the story, but Cardinal is at its core, a book about spies, the case officers who handle them, and the counter intelligence operatives who hunt them. My aim was to give Oath of Office that same flavor.

Over the years since high school, I was fortunate to have a job that let me drive fast, carry a gun, and fight a bad guy or two—experiences that were invaluable to my writing. Despite my dreams from back when I had that crush on Merri, I never did get to be spy. But, thanks to this new job writing about Jack Ryan, John Clark, Mary Pat Foley, and countless other Clancy characters, I get to come up with stories for some of the best.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

https://crimereads.com/trained-to-protect-foreign-dignitaries-hunt-fugitives-and-write-tom-clancy-novels/