The ideal audience: cinephiles who’ve never read any of these stories before. But everyone will find something to treasure.
Indefatigable editor Penzler’s latest 61-scoop sundae is a treasure trove of short stories that were filmed, though most readers won’t care to sample more than a fraction of its contents.
Acknowledging that “most of the greatest mystery crime films were adapted from novels or were original screenplays,” Penzler (The Big Book of Female Detectives, 2018, etc.) introduces seven sections containing suspense stories, crime comedies, thrillers, horror stories, stories about criminals, fatal romances, and detective stories. A significant fraction of the volume’s 1,200 pages are devoted to the editor’s story-by-story introductions, but these short essays, which are filled with anecdotes, breezy evaluations, information about the production histories of the movies based on these stories, and the occasional spoiler, are often more interesting than the stories they introduce. As for the selections themselves, some (Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Five Orange Pips,” G.K. Chesterton’s “The Blue Cross,” Richard Connell’s “The Most Dangerous Game”) are anthology chestnuts fans will already know. Most of these, along with Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Six Napoleons” and Dashiell Hammett’s “The House in Turk Street,” are better than any of the film versions that provide the hook for their inclusion. Other stories changed beyond recognition in filming—Edgar Wallace’s “The Death Watch” and “The Ghost of John Holling,” Sapper’s “Thirteen Lead Soldiers,” Hammett’s “On the Make,” Barry Perowne’s “The Blind Spot,” Stuart Palmer’s “The Riddle of the Dangling Pearl,” Palmer and Craig Rice’s “Once Upon a Train,” Fredric Brown’s “Madman’s Holiday,” Ian Fleming’s “From A View to a Kill”—and will provide mostly bewilderment from readers familiar with their film versions. Only a handful—E.W. Hornung’s “Gentlemen and Players,” Agatha Christie’s “The Witness for the Prosecution,” W. Somerset Maugham’s “The Letter” and “The Traitor,” Daphne du Maurier’s “Don’t Look Now,” Irwin Shaw’s “Tip on a Dead Jockey,” and several of the eight noir tales by Cornell Woolrich, a welcome minianthology within this anthology—are memorable stories made into equally memorable films. The happiest discoveries for most readers will be the mostly forgotten stories that provided the basis for Broken Blossoms, Brother Orchid, Smart Blonde, The Killer Is Loose, Possessed, Gun Crazy, The Wild One, On the Waterfront, Bad Day at Black Rock, and (even before Robert Bloch’s novel) Psycho. Who knew?
The ideal audience: cinephiles who’ve never read any of these stories before. But everyone will find something to treasure.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-56388-4
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Eskens’ debut is a solid and thoughtful tale of a young man used to taking on burdens beyond his years—none more dangerous...
A struggling student’s English assignment turns into a mission to solve a 30-year-old murder.
Joe Talbert has had very few breaks in his 21 years. The son of a single and very alcoholic mother, he’s worked hard to save enough money to leave his home in Austin, Minnesota, for the University of Minnesota. Although he has to leave his autistic younger brother, Jeremy Naylor, to the dubious care of their mother, Joe is determined to beat the odds and get his degree. For an assignment in his English class, he decides to interview Carl Iverson, a man convicted of raping and killing a 14-year-old girl. Carl, who maintains his innocence, is dying of cancer and has been released to a nursing home to end his life in lonely but unrepentant pain. The more Joe learns about Carl—a Vietnam vet with two Purple Hearts and a Silver Cross—the more the young man questions the conviction. Joe’s plan to write a short biography and earn an easy A turns into something more. Even after his mother is arrested for drunk driving and guilt-trips Joe into ransacking his college fund to bail her out, he soldiers on with the project, though her irresponsibility forces him to take Jeremy into his care. But it’s his younger brother who cracks the code of the long-dead murder victim’s secret diary and an attractive neighbor, Lila Nash, who has her own agenda for helping Joe solve the mystery, whatever the risk.
Eskens’ debut is a solid and thoughtful tale of a young man used to taking on burdens beyond his years—none more dangerous than championing a bitter old man convicted of a horrific crime.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61614-998-7
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Seventh Street Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
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