Thrilling Crime

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Oct 14, 2010 in Film, Guest Posts

Image Entertainment’s 14-disc set of all sixty-seven black-and-white, one-hour episodes of the NBC series Thriller (1960–62) officially hit the streets on August 31.

Why should you care?

Because Thriller provided several of the best telefilms-noir nobody has ever seen. Existing in the shadow of Alfred Hitchcock—who actively sought to undermine what he rightly saw as competition with Alfred Hitchcock Presents—and hobbled by its own bifurcated structure (crime shows one week and supernatural horror the next, with little rhyme or reason), Thriller became the redheaded stepchild of a subgenre to which no one could put a definitive label. History rendered the verdict that while some of the out-and-out “horror” episodes were among the best television had to offer (“The Grim Reaper,” “The Cheaters,” and the immortal “Pigeons from Hell,” for example), Thriller’s crime episodes were thin beer indeed when compared to the stuff coming from the Master of Suspense (or, at least, under his imprimatur). Worse, they paled next to Thriller’s own forays into the ghostly and horrific.

And so they were largely forgotten. When Thriller popped up in syndication, most aficionados videotaped the horror episodes and didn’t bother with most of the crime shows . . . which is a shame, since many of them sprang from stories by the likes of Robert Bloch or Cornell Woolrich. The stinkers quickly outweighed the noteworthy nonsupernatural episodes in public memory, with the result that Thriller’s crime episodes all got tarred with the same brush: Forget ’em. Watch the scary ones instead.
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Missed us on BlogTalkRadio?

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Oct 13, 2010 in Mulholland News

Want to learn more about the origins of the imprint? What we’re excited about for Spring 2011? Our opinions on the future of the suspense genre? Online Marketing secrets? Of course you do. Listen to our BlogTalkRadio interview. Click play below or visit the Hachette Book Group Features Channel on BlogTalkRadio.

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This Land is Noir Land

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Oct 13, 2010 in Books, Guest Posts, Mulholland Authors

The Devil's HighwayI’ve always wanted to drive cross-country. Would have done it in college, except for two small things: (a) no car, and (b) no money.

But now that I own a motor vehicle (granted, a minivan) and have a little more folding green, I decided to take my family on a cross-country drive this past summer. We spent twelve days trekking from Philly to the Pacific Ocean, stopping at whatever caught our eye.

Of course, being a crime writer, my eye usually goes to dark places.

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the allergy pills took hold . . . and I came to the realization that the U.S.A.—the whole dang thing—was an extremely noir country. Everywhere you look, there’s something to remind you of that French word for “black” that Otto Penzler thinks we all use incorrectly.

Don’t believe me? Here are only a few of our trip highlights: Continue reading ›

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The True Believer

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Oct 12, 2010 in Books, Mulholland Authors

Every writer needs a true believer on his team. I am a literary agent, and I am a true believer. I am a creative partner and a business partner to a group of talented, ambitious, and hardworking authors. I’m a good editor, I know a lot of people who can publish your book or buy your rights, and I can negotiate a sweet contract with them. But my real job is just to believe.

Publishing is a creative business. Everyone who works in this industry is semi-crazy with the belief that we are working on something that is going to make a mark, become something special, maybe even invent an entire subgenre. I believe in the endless possibility of a good creative idea. That’s why I hate rejecting submissions. I sometimes sit on them when I should just say no, because I believe they can be fixed. I am sick with this belief; I can see the potential in almost everything. Yet in my heart I know they can’t all be saved.

But here’s how it goes when it’s good: One day a writer tells me about an idea. I tell her it rocks, because it does. A few months and a few drafts later, it is an 85,000-word novel under contract with a publisher. With an on-sale date at bookstores and a very pretty cover. Soon after that, it’s a signed first edition or downloading to your iPad in fifteen seconds and your friends are talking about it. The next year, it’s winning a big award and we’re all drunk with the celebration. Then I have cool-looking copies of the book in Polish and Chinese translations sitting on my office bookshelves, and the guy I first pitched the film rights to is on the telephone with me seriously talking about Nicolas Cage playing the lead in the film adaptation. This kind of stuff happens because we all believe.

My belief disrupts my family life. Last week, Duane Swierczynski delivered the first draft of his new novel Fun and Games. It seems like we just pitched this as a story idea not fifteen minutes ago. It is so damned good that I blew off the Friday night movie my wife and I rented to watch together just so I could finish reading it. Sadly, my wife understands. She wants to read it, too.

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Sinking the Titanic

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Oct 11, 2010 in Books, Guest Posts, Mulholland Authors, Mulholland News, Writing

Man with Tommy GunBest interview question I’ve ever been asked: What’s the worst thing your parents think you’ve done? Not actually done, but that they think you’ve done.

My answer: Heroin.

I love doing research. It’s like cheating, but with permission.

Here are some of the things I have done in the name of Research: learned to ride a motorcycle; became a certified EMT for both New York State and Monterey County, California; had my sneakers stick to the floor in a peep-show booth back when Times Square was not a place where you took the kids; drunk tea with nuns; crawled through the Portland Shanghai Tunnels; watched a domme flog her sub in an S&M club while he hung on a St. Andrew’s Cross; visited the Oregon State Police Crime Lab; learned to play guitar from a former member of Everclear; learned how to field-strip an M1911; gone on countless ride-alongs in countless cities; fired an HK MP5 on single, three-round, and full-auto; fired a Tommy Gun (only full-auto); fired many other types of firearms; hung out with junkies; hung out with methheads; hung out with rock bands; argued politics with a Political Officer at the State Department; gotten bronchitis standing in Lancashire fields taking reference photographs; been politely asked to leave the premises of Vauxhall Cross; run a day-long “scavenger hunt” through New York City and the boroughs (had to see if the route was possible, and to get the timing down); gotten sick-drunk with men who wouldn’t talk to me sober; been attacked by rats; trespassed; eavesdropped; learned the best way to burn someone alive; used a Starbucks bathroom seat-cover dispenser for a dead drop; been laughed at, mocked, threatened, and ignored.

Some of the things I’ve done.

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Jess Walter and Thomas Mullen on Character, Crime, Class, and the Whole Genre Thing

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Oct 08, 2010 in Books, Mulholland Authors

Jess Walter writes about cops and feds, hapless realtors and laid-off journalists, poets and hit men. The protagonists of his three most recent novels are a mob informer living under Witness Protection and obsessed with his new voter registration card (Citizen Vince, winner of the Edgar Award), an NYPD survivor of 9/11 with a memory problem who gets mixed up in a shadowy intelligence organization (The Zero, nominated for the National Book Award), and a struggling journalist-poet who starts dealing pot to save his mortgage (The Financial Lives of the Poets, which was showered with acclaim last fall and was just issued in paperback).

I’ve never met Jess, but we’ve traded a few e-mails over the years, starting with the day I finished reading The Zero and was compelled to send him an electronic high-five immediately. Since his work seems to straddle the nefarious and hard-to-place (and some would say nonexistent) border between literary fiction and crime fiction, suspense and humor, genre and non-, he seemed an appropriate person to interview for Mulholland’s new website.

Following is a not terribly linear series of Qs and As we emailed each other over the past week, while he took a break from the publicity for The Financial Lives of the Poets’ paperback release and I procrastinated on writing a final chapter of my new manuscript.

THOMAS MULLEN: It seems to me that over the last few years the news has been full of stories about intelligence and espionage and new kinds of crime—CIA agents “rendering” and/or torturing people, journalists being prosecuted for their stories, the new “industries” around legalized pot in some states, etc. (Some of which are issues your last two books touch upon.) Are there times when you think, damn, there are so many amazing stories happening in the real world, how can fiction possibly keep up? Or do you think, wow, what a great time to be a novelist, especially one with a penchant for writing about cops and criminals?

JESS WALTER: I don’t imagine the gap between fiction and the real world is any larger than it ever was; how could you write a novel that kept up with events during, say, World War II? Fiction has always been the worst way to break news. That’s why, for me, character is a more rewarding and reliable starting point for a novelist. Real, organic-seeming characters can illuminate any event—whether it’s timely, the way I’ve worked recently, or steeped in history, like your novels. I like what Emerson said: “Fiction reveals the truth that reality obscures.”

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Bernie Madoff: Noir Icon?

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Oct 07, 2010 in Guest Posts

Bernie Madoff was in the news again recently—or at least his bankruptcy case was. It seems the trustee and some of Madoff’s victims are fighting over legal fees—surprise, surprise. It was a small story, and just the latest chapter in a long saga, but it had me thinking again about Madoff, and about the largest Ponzi scheme in history. Which, given that I write crime fiction, often with Wall Street backdrops, is probably inevitable. After all, the case is a playground of crime fiction motifs, and rich in inspiration.

In the event you somehow missed it, here’s the story in a nutshell: Bernie Madoff rose from modest beginnings in Queens, New York, to become what my grandfather would’ve called a big macher on Wall Street—a big deal. He amassed huge wealth and influence as chief executive of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities, the firm he founded in 1960. His company was a major market-maker in stocks, and the technology he helped develop was instrumental in the creation of the NASDAQ. The firm eventually came to employ Madoff’s wife, brother, sons, and other relatives, and Bernie himself became an elder statesman in the financial services industry, serving on the boards of major industry groups and as chairman of the NASD.

In the late 1970s, Bernie added a new line of business to his company: an investment-management division, with affluent individuals as its client base. By 2001, this division had grown into one of the largest hedge funds in the world, with investors that included universities, hospitals, charitable organizations, bold-faced names in sports and entertainment, as well as banks and other hedge funds. It was this part of his business that Madoff was discussing in December 2008 when he confessed to his sons: “It’s all just one big lie…basically a giant Ponzi scheme.” And so it was: Madoff had for years been fabricating client statements so that they showed steadily growing investment account balances. If ever clients wanted to liquidate their holdings, they were paid with money from other investors. The rest of the cash apparently went to finance Bernie’s lavish lifestyle.

Madoff’s sons went to the FBI and Madoff was arrested, and the messy aftermath began. Personal fortunes—many large, but some quite modest—were wiped out. There were an unknown number of stress-induced heart attacks and strokes among Madoff investors and at least two suicides (a retired British soldier whose family fortune had evaporated and a French money manager who’d lost over $1 billion of his own and his clients’money). Several charities—also Madoff investors—closed their doors for good, and anti-Semites the world over gleefully trotted out the usual slanders about Jews and money.

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The Meat of Children

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Oct 06, 2010 in Guest Posts, Mulholland Authors

Favela Rocinha Rio de JaneiroAnd then those strange people flew those big planes into those big buildings.

You remember that, yes?

There was a vogue born in the aftermath, a fashion for declaring the death of things. As if actual deaths in the thousands were insufficient to the popular appetite for such things. Irony, particularly in the literary mode, was accounted an early casualty.

A rumor of demise that proved to be somewhat exaggerated.

This recollection occurred not in light of the recent anniversary, but was spurred a few days after when the Census Bureau reported an increase in the number of Americans and residents of the U.S.A. living below the poverty line.

A quick glance at the lead deposited this ratio in my brain: 1 in 7 American residents are now living in poverty.

The poverty line has been rather notoriously jammed against an invisible obstruction for several decades. Weighted by the burden of a fifty-year-old instrument of calculation, it has snagged on a flange of economics. Were the flange filed smooth and the weight cut away, the line would likely elevate until a vast, and not entirely unaware-of-their-circumstances, population found themselves under the thin shade of its protection.

Still, it is plenty high enough at present to overtop those 1 in 7 residents.

GunkidSpeaking of putting a bullet in the head of irony, 1 in 5 U.S. resident children are currently living below that line.

You can’t, as the comedians are wont to say, make this shit up.

Facts, in these situation, kick the shit out of fiction every fucking time.

The present moment is born of the past. The future moment is born also of the past, and the now.

1 in 5 children born from the past into present poverty. How the fuck did that happen?

Ultimate causality is a fool’s quest. It’s the arrow that never reaches its target because you halve, again and again, the distance it must cover to reach the bull’s-eye. A tail that no worm can consume without eating first its own head.

Why bother?

Is the poverty of children connected to job loss connected to economic collapse connected to heedless profiteering connected to wartime economies connected to overseas invasions connected to fireballs billowing from holes rent into the sides of skyscrapers by passenger jets?

Heat and pressure so intense it vaporized flesh and bone.

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Michael Connelly Drives Mulholland: EXCLUSIVE Video

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Oct 05, 2010 in Books

Today is the publication date of Michael Connelly’s new novel The Reversal, which we of course devoured the minute we got our hands on it. Michael Connelly is an amazing writer and chronicler of Los Angeles.

Below is a video, exclusive to MulhollandBooks.com of Michael Connelly driving on Mulholland Drive, talking about The Reversal and the role that that the road plays in the book. (Please note that this video does contain a bit of information about the end of The Reversal. If you don’t want to know anything before you’ve read the book, you might want to wait to watch the video until after you’re done. Which, let’s be honest, you should be soon because it’s so good.)

This video is from The Reversal enhanced eBook, which is available for the iBook application and the iPad Kindle application. The enhanced eBook includes many more videos like this one created exclusively for the eBook, as well as interactive maps of Los Angeles featuring locations from The Reversal, commentary by Michael Connelly, author Q&A, timelines of major events in the lives of Harry Bosch and Mickey Haller and much more.

Download from the iBook store.
Download from the Kindle store.

Want to show your love for Michael Connelly?  Check in to The Reversal on entertainment social network GetGlue via the web or GetGlue’s app and share on Twitter and/or Facebook to earn Michael Connelly-related stickers. Collect a variety of 7 or more GetGlue stickers, and GetGlue will mail crack-n-peel versions of the stickers to you to display proudly.

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King Pleasure

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Oct 04, 2010 in Books, Comic Books

more super rainI work in midtown, an area of Manhattan that isn’t often accused of having an excess of personality. Good restaurants within a few blocks’ radius are hard to come by. Chains dominate in all endeavors. But whenever I need to pop out at lunch for a few minutes of sweet escape from the nonconventional bookshelves, I’m glad the office is within easy walking distance of at least one New York underground staple: Midtown Comics.

Like Jonathan Santlofer, Brad Meltzer, and Max Allan Collins—like a whole lot of other crime and suspense addicts out there, I suspect—I, too, initially cut my teeth on the monthlies. It somehow became a tradition in my family that, after my father took me into town to get a haircut, we’d drop by the local independently owned comic store and I’d get to pick out one issue to add to my small but growing collection.

For me, it was less Batman or horror rags—I was a Marvel kid to start, mainly thanks to The Amazing Spider-Man around the time the villains Venom and Carnage were created.venom vs carnage

Whether or not all of my selections were age-appropriate is up for debate—I was young enough to still enjoy being read aloud to on occasion. During the recitation of a particularly climactic issue of X-Men, in which Magneto uses his power to forcefully expel all of Wolverine’s adamantium from his body—essentially gutting him like a fish—my father was horrified enough to refuse to continue right in the middle of a text box.

From then on, I kept my reading mostly to myself.

Like any self-respecting comic store, Midtown Comics has a section devoted to back issues many times deeper than the new offerings. This was my destination—not for one of the Marvel giants that initially drew my eye, but for something a little more obscure: Malibu Comics’ Solitaire #1. An origin story that has stuck with me to this day, of special note because it’s more than just derring-do, babes and bad guys. It’s a crime story. Continue reading ›

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