9/24/1986 A Rose gets Named

September 24, 1986.  Italian literary critic Umberto Eco made quite a sensation with his first novel, the medieval mystery The Name of the Rose.  On this date the movie came out, starring Sean Connery as the brilliant Brother William of Baskerville (one of many perfect names... I recall the blind librarian Jorge of Burgos).

Many thought the book would be impossible to film but it turned out quite well and was nominated for an Edgar.

My favorite bit of dialog, between Brother William and Dr. Watson - I mean Adso (Christian Slater).

     –Oh dear.
     –Why oh dear?
     –You ARE in love.
     –Is that bad?
     –For a monk, it does present certain problems.

9/10/1989 The icy clutches of Aaron Elkins

September 10, 1989.  On this day the action begins in Aaron Elkins' sixth novel about anthropologist and bone expert Gideon Oliver.  Icy Clutches involves three scientific researchers who died in an avalanche in the  1960s. Now their remains are coming out of the glacier, but there is something very odd about them...

Elkins once said that all the brilliant discoveries Oliver makes in his book have been made by other physical anthropologists.  Elkins just makes them all occur to our hero, and gives them a criminal twist.  Did I make that sound easy?  If it was then everybody would be writing books like this.  And they don't.

Gideon Oliver, that most engaging forensic anthropologist, solves a lulu here....Aaron Elkins is witty, and oh so clever with that final twist."
- New York Daily News

8/20/87 Sherlock opens his last case

August 20, 1987,  Sherlock's Last Case opened on Broadway on this date.  It was Charles Marowitz's take on Conan Doyle.  From the Playbill summary: Dr. Watson gives us the truth about Arthur Conan Doyle's legendary detective Sherlock Holmes — he is a self-absorbed, egotistical tyrant in private, even as he is tested once again to solve the case of "the perfect murder."

Whatever you think of that it gave the world a chance to see Frank Langella as the Master.  It ran for 124 performances.

8/14/198? Sleeping Dogs awake

August 14, 198?.  On August 14th in an unspecified year an American who calls himself Michael Shaeffer meets a beautiful aristocratic woman in London.  Schaeffer is actually the Butcher's Boy, the Mafia's favorite hit man until a mobster tried to cheat him  That made our hero cranky and that made the cheater dead.  

The Butcher's Boy gets spotted in London and he decides he needs to go back to the States to teach a refresher course to those thugs who think they need to kill him.  All he has to do is stay out of the way of the mob, the cops, the FBI, and the Justice Department.  Piece of cake...

Sleeping Dogs is the second of (so far) three novels by Thomas Perry about the terrifyingly efficient Butcher's Boy.  They are worth reading, and in order.

7/25/1980 Dressed to Kill

July 25, 1980.  On this date in 1980 director Brian DePalma released his most Hitchcockian flick, Dressed To Kill.  A woman has an adulterous fling that turns into murder, and a call girl is the only witness.  And the next victim? 

Michael Caine, Angie Dickinson, and Nancy Allen starred.

5/31/1985 Here's Fletch

May 31, 1985.  On this day the movie Fletch was released, based on the great novel by Gregory MacDonald.  Michael Ritchie directed from a script by Andrew Bergman.  Chevy Chase played a rough approximation of I.M. Fletcher.

It was a very popular movie (nominated for an Edgar no less), and I hated it.  This was largely because they gummed up a very clever plot by going for dumb cliches.  (I believe there was a rule in the 1980s that every businessman in a movie had to be a secret drug lord.)  Not the worst movie made from a good book, but definitely on my list thereof.

4/30/1982 A is for Alibi

April 30, 1982. This date saw the publication of  A is for Alibi, by Sue GraftonIn it she invented Kinsey Milhone, was one of the first female private eyes to make an impression.

One of the unique things about the series is that they have stayed in the 1980s, progressing a few months in each book.  By the time Z is for Zero arrives Kinsey may have a cell phone.  It is rare for a series to turn into historical fiction.

MWA named her a Grand Master in 2009.  I won't list all the other awards.  I will say Grafton is one of my favorite writers of P.I. short stories.

4/13/1980 Sergeant Cribb meets PBS

April 13, 1980.  This day saw the premiere of Cribb on Mystery on PBS.  The British series was based on Peter Lovesey's brilliant novels about a Victorian copper.  Alan Dobie played the shrewd detective who could never get promoted because he came from the wrong social class.

 I saw them a year later and it used to drive me crazy because at the same time I could watch NBC's disastrous attempt to bring Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe to the screen in the person of William Conrad.  Why could the British do so well what Hollywood couldn't do at all?

The only bad thing about the series was that Peter Lovesey used up all his ideas for future Victorian stories on episodes of the show.  He never wrote another Cribb novel.

3/19/1987 Inspector Rebus arrives

March 19, 1987.  Ian Rankin wrote Knots and Crosses, published on this date, while a postgraduate student at the University of Edinburgh.  It was the first novel to feature John Rebus (who happened to live just across the street from Rankin.  Amazing coincidence.)  Rankin claimed he was amazed to discover that he had written a crime novel, a genre with which he was unfamiliar.  He seems to have warmed up to the field. Rebus #20 will be published soon.

3/5/1982 Evil Under the Sun exposed

March 5, 1982.  This day saw the premiere of Evil Under the Sun, the second of six movies in which Peter Ustinov played Agatha Christie's master sleuth Hercule Poirot.  The cast included Maggie Smith, Diana Rigg, Sarah Miles, James Mason, and Roddy McDowall.  Anthony Shaffer was nominated for an Edgar for the screenplay.

Poirot: "Really to count, a woman must have either goodness or brains."

Dame Agatha had at least one of the above.

3/4/1982 Police Squad!

March 4, 1982.  Sad but true fact about television: you can't assume the people watching it are actually watching it.  Maybe they are knitting, or reading, or doing God knows what, and just using their ears to follow what's going on on the tube.  That may have been what doomed Police Squad!, one of the funniest shows that ever lasted a mere six episodes.

It was full of scenes in which the main cops, Leslie Nielsen and Alan North, would be gravely discussing the crime investigation while utterly bizarre things went on around them.  For example, in one episode they were chatting in an elevator in the police station.  A woman in a bathing suit gets in on one floor and, at the next she dived out, straight into a swimming pool which happened to be just outside the elevator.  Neither of the cops found this particularly noteworthy.  And the half-asleep viewers missed it too.

Each episode began with a Special Guest Star being murdered, never to be mentioned again in the story.

Fortunately the producers, same folks who created Airplane!, recycled the idea as the Naked Gun movie series.  And in theatres, people were watching.

2/25/1981 EQMM is forty

February 25, 1981.  The issue of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine with this cover date celebrated the fortieth anniversary of that great institution.  It featured stories by Ruth Rendell, Simon Brett, Michael Gilbert, James Holding, and (of course) Edward D. Hoch, among others.

2/20/1989 Gideon Oliver on TV

February 20, 1989.  ABC's Mystery Movie series had some great shows: Columbo and Kojak, for example.  Gideon Oliver, which premiered on this day, was none of them.

It was based, loosely, on Aaron Elkins' series of books about a physical anthropologist, i.e. the skeleton detective.  But TV's Oliver (played by a wasted Lou Gossett, Jr.) was more of a general anthropologist, dealing with cults and tongs.  The result was not good.

Here is part of what reviewer Richard Meyers said in The Armchair Detective:

"I can imagine Aaron [Elkins] visiting Hollywood, nudging his lovely wife Charlotte, and going, 'Isn't that Gideon Oliver's femur over there?  Isn't that his sternum?'
"Gideon Oliver  is dead.  Long live Gideon Oliver."

1/16/1981 Nero Wolfe comes to NBC

January 16, 1981.  This date saw the premiere of Nero Wolfe on NBC, starring William Conrad and Lee Horsley.  As a major fan of Rex Stout's great detective I will restrain myself and merely  say that it was worse than bubonic plague.

1/8/1989 LIttle Gray Cells Come to TV.

January 8, 1989.  This date saw the premiere on ITV of Agatha Christie's Poirot, one of the most popular and long-running filmed versions of Dame Agatha's fiction  David Suchet starred as the wily Belgian detective and by 2013 he had filmed essentially everything Christie had written about him.  The series was nominated for countless awards and won several, including an Edgar for best TV episode..

10/13/1989 Crimes and Misdemeanors revealed

October 13, 1989.  Woody Allen is not generally thought of as a director of crime movies, but there are Take The Money and Run, Manhattan Murder Mystery, and Small Time Crooks, among others.  And there is Crimes and Misdemeanors, released on this day.

Allen and Martin Landau star as two men in bad marriages, at least one of whom is considering murder as a solution.

The movie was nominated for three Oscars, and the Edgar.

2/15/1980 That Sinking Feeling rises

February 15, 1980.  Today saw the release of a strange, but very funny caper movie.  That Sinking Feeling is set in Glasgow, Scotland.  There's a recession and four young men are desperately unemployed.  Their plan is to commit one big crime that will set them up for life.   And so they plan to rob ... a warehouse full of kitchen sinks.

Come to think of it, maybe these guys would be unemployable even in a good economy.

This was supposedly the most low-budget feature film in British history, and it shows.  But it is hilarious.  

2/12/198? Ice forms

February 12, 198?.  On this date the plot of Ice begins.  Ice was the 36th book in Ed McBain's excellent 87th Precinct series, police procedurals set in a nameless city that resembled but wasn't quite New York.

As with most of his one-word titles (a subset that included Bread, Calypso, Ghosts, Heat, etc.) "Ice" has several meanings in the book.  There is the weather, a drug, jewelry, and a reference to a theatre custom.

The New Yorker called it " a real stunner."

2/2/1980 Early Autumn arrives in February

February 2, 1980.  This day saw the publication of Early Autumn,  Robert B. Parker's seventh novel about Boston private eye Spenser.  In the series it is most notable for introducing the character Paul Giacoman, a teenager Spenser is hired to protect.  Paul appears in several more books, essentially as a surrogate son for our hero.  Parker won the Maltese Falcon Award in Japan for the book.

1/28/1981 The Absence of Emily is noticed.

January 28, 1981.  The issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine bearing this date had Jack Ritchie's phizzog on the cover and one of his best stories inside.  "The Absence of Emily" was narrated by a man whose second wife has disappeared.  His sister-in-law is keenly aware of that - and of the suspicious death of his first wife.  But things are much more complicated -and funnier -- than it seems.

The story brought Ritchie a well-deserved Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America and was later made into a short film.

Milwaukee's Ritchie was one of the greatest authors of humorous short mysteries.  Another of his tales, "The Green Heart," became the movie A New Leaf, and later, a Broadway musical.  He died a year after winning his Edgar.