Falchion Fanfare

Just about a month ago, we brought you the list of finalists for the 2020 Silver Falchion Awards. Tonight we can tell you the winners in two categories of special interest to Rap Sheet readers.

Best Mystery Novel:
Lovely Digits, by Jeanine Englert (Soul Mate)

Also nominated: A Dream of Death, by Connie Berry (Crooked Lane); The White Heron, by Carl and Jane Bock (Whiz Bang); The Mammoth Murders, by Iris Chacon (Independently published); Blood Moon Rising, by Richard Conrath (Gulf Shore Press); Fake, by John DeDakis (Strategic Media); The Marsh Mallows, by Henry Hack (Dog Ear); Murder at the Candlelight Vigil, by Karen McCarthy (McCarthy Mystery); Murder Creek, by Jane Suen (Jane Suen); and The Deadliest Thief, by June Trop (Black Opal)

Best Thriller:
Hyperion’s Fracture, by Thomas Kelso (Jolly Robin Press)

Also nominated: Red Specter, by Brian Andrews and Jeffrey Wilson (Thomas & Mercer); All Hollow, by Simeon Courtie (Simantics); Deadly Obsession, by Shirley B. Garrett (Independently published); The Gryphon Heist, by James R. Hannibal (Revell); Low Country Blood, by Sue Hinkin (Literary Wanderlust); Rise, by Leslie McCauley (Independently published); The Secret Child, by Caroline Mitchell (Thomas & Mercer); The Silent Victim, by Dana Perry (Bookouture); and Downhill Fast, by Dana J. Summers (Independently published)

Crime and mystery novels also took home the trophies in three additional Silver Falchion divisions:

Readers’ Choice 2020:
A Sip Before Dying, by Gemma Halliday (Independently published)

Best “Attending: Author 2020:
Below the Fold, by R.G. Belsky (Oceanview)

Book of the Year 2020
Queen’s Gambit, by Bradley Harper (Seventh Street). Harper’s novel scored the prize for Best Suspense, as well.

The announcement of 2020 Silver Falchion recipients was supposed to have been made during this year’s Killer Nashville conference in Tennessee. But since that event was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the register of winners was broadcast online.

(Hat tip to Mystery Fanfare.)

The Book You Have to Read: “East of A,” by Russell Atwood

(Editor’s note: This is the 165th installment in The Rap Sheet’s continuing series about great but forgotten books.)

By Steven Nester
It wouldn’t be a stretch to mistake private eye Payton Sherwood for a doormat in some Raymond Chandler novel, at least as we observe him at the beginning of Russell Atwood’s neo-noir, East of A (1999). Having returned to New York City after losing a child-custody suit upstate, Sherwood is nearly destitute, totally debt-ridden, and pining for a lost love. When he attempts to rescue a damsel in distress in his East Village neighborhood, her attackers give him a thorough beating. To add insult to injury, the elfin victim steals his Rolex before escaping into the night.

Lucky for readers that Sherwood’s sense of humor wasn’t taken as well. With few prospects and feeling like “a million bucks. In small, crumpled bills,” he decides to hire himself to recover that wristwatch—and perhaps also his dignity. One would think he’d had enough (even getting tossed in front of a speeding subway train later on can’t dissuade him), but like a dedicated P.I. with time on his hands and an insistent curiosity, Sherwood wants to find out what it is the young street girl has taken that three burly thugs so violently wish to retrieve. Sherwood returns to the crime scene the next day, and the payback begins immediately.

A telephone pager found in the gutter reveals a trove of information. The resourceful Sherwood discovers it belongs to Gloria “Glo” Manlow, a homeless, 16-year-old runaway, whom Sherwood learns is alleged to have stolen a small fortune in designer dope from a nightclub promoter. In the meantime, the chase is on as Sherwood works his way through names and telephone numbers, hoping to find her.

As the gumshoe begins his investigation, he lures two colorfully dressed club kids named Seth and Droopy into the daylight with the promise of a duffel belonging to Glo. Sherwood pumps the self-absorbed duo for information, and through them begins to make contact with promoters, activists, artists, hipsters, the homeless and others on the skids—all the extreme individuals who give Manhattan’s East Village, and this book, its color and edgy bonhomie.

Sherwood finally catches up to the elusive Glo. She turns out to be a world-weary Holly Golightly with spiky hair, tons of attitude and a selfish nonchalance, whose “nothings turn out to be other people’s somethings”—as is made clear by the escalating body count among people she knows, the fresh corpses including those of her abusive ex-boyfriend and a disgruntled former employee of a downtown rave club called the Hellhole. “Big as the city is,” Seth presciently opines at one point, “its strands converge like a spider’s web,” and the Hellhole is the place where the spider lives in this tale.

The goons who assaulted Glo are bouncers at the club, and Seth and Droopy are part of that establishment’s louche scenery and drugs-fueled vibrancy. The place is owned by a promoter named Ellis Dee, and it’s apparently his dope that was taken. The only problem is that Glo firmly denies committing the theft, and no one but Sherwood is willing to buy her story. Sherwood soon learns that when the going gets tough, even the tough get their butts kicked, as when he and Glo watch both one of her friends and one of her attackers being pushed from a window several stories too high for their health.

It’s not necessary for Sherwood to subject himself to the threat of such violence. After he gets his watch back (albeit broken), he has no further stake in this case. In addition, his self-indulgent curiosity is careening him towards poverty. Repeated entreaties from his former boss to provide security at an upcoming wedding fall on deaf ears, revealing that Sherwood’s idea of distracting busy-work is quite busy indeed. He has no interest, either, in easily available but tedious divorce-related investigations. Instead, Sherwood continues to pursue Glo’s case, gladly willing to “walk barefoot in murder”—which he encounters up to the very last page of this book.

It’s mostly the bad guys who perish in East of A. But it takes the death of an innocent—a squatter and recovering junky named Jimmy, who makes his home in a vacant lot where he tends a vegetable garden—to finally provide the pieces essential to solving this yarn’s puzzles. East of A (which led to a 2009 sequel, Atwood’s Losers Live Longer), is a noir with a cheerful yet world-weary tone and an arty renegade zeitgeist (it takes place in New York’s East Village, after all). Don’t let those elements fool you, though: Into Jimmy’s garden paradise may slither serpents, freighting the plot circumstances with universal meaning, which a skillful writer (Atwood was once a managing editor of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine) can hide in plain sight.

Revue of Reviewers, 8-19-20

Critiquing some of the most interesting recent crime, mystery, and thriller releases. Click on the individual covers to read more.

No Holiday for Hercule

In anticipation of the October 23 release of Death on the Nile, Kenneth Branagh’s adaptation of Agatha Christie’s 1937 novel of the same title, I recently re-watched David Suchet’s fine version of that Hercule Poirot mystery, shown in 2004 as an episode of the ITV series Agatha Christie’s Poirot. I also hope sometime soon to watch the 1978 big-screen version of Death on the Nile, starring Peter Ustinov.

However, neither of those previous renderings of Christie’s knotty yarn—which finds brilliant Belgian sleuth Poirot investigating the slaying of a young heiress aboard a cruise ship as it sails through Egypt upon the Nile River—was as “steamy” as Branaugh’s film promises to be. As Literary Hub observes of the “top drawer teaser” for this picture: it is positively studded with sexy, smoldering, and possibly sinister stars in period garb.” Judge for yourself here.

This is the second time Branaugh will portray a prodigiously mustachioed Poirot. Three years ago he directed and starred in 20th Century Fox’s Murder on the Orient Express.

The Queen of Questioning

Congratulations to Nancie Clare, the Southern California-based host of that splendid podcast Speaking of Mysteries, who this week posted her 200th and 201st interviews. Clare’s latest subjects: Denise Mina, author of the brand-new thriller, The Less Dead; and Robert Pobi, who talks about his second Dr. Lucas Page yarn, Under Pressure.

Clare and her partner in this podcast project, Leslie S. Klinger, launched their first episode back in April 2014. It’s been quite a run!

PaperBack: “The Rat Began to Gnaw the Rope”

Part of a series honoring the late author and blogger Bill Crider.



The Rat Began to Gnaw the Rope, by C.W. Grafton (Dell, 1947). Published originally in 1943—but recently reissued by Poisoned Pen Press—this was the first of four novels penned by Grafton, the father of better-known mystery writer Sue Grafton. It’s a spirited little whodunit tinged with humor, starring Gilmore “Gil” Henry, a “pudgy,” self-deprecating young attorney of short stature and scant attractiveness to women, who practices in fictional Calhoun County, Kentucky, south of Louisville. A second Henry yarn, The Rope Began to Hang the Butcher, was released in 1944.

Dell’s 1947 soft-cover edition of Rat was part of its famous “mapback” series, with cover art by Gerald Gregg and a rear-side scene-of-the-crime illustration by Ruth Belew.

A TV Addict Remembered

I never met Michael D. Shonk. Yet I often wanted to be him. For at least the last decade, he wrote about vintage radio shows, music, and mostly TV crime dramas for the Mystery*File blog. Remarkably prolific, he critiqued small-screen programs such as Cain’s Hundred, T.H.E. Cat, The Brothers Brannagan, The Outsider (see here and here), Banyon, Search, Harry O (here, here, and here), Matt Helm, Tucker’s Witch, Remington Steele, and Mr. and Mrs. Smith. He commented on teleflicks such as They Call It Murder and Marlowe, addressed the burgeoning of TV series remakes and the composing of top-notch TV themes, and late last year revealed his favorite 20 series of the last decade (2010-2019). Shonk also managed to spread his talents around, contributing several pieces to Criminal Element, including this remembrance of the troubled private-eye series The Cases of Eddie Drake, and this one about forgotten TV spy dramas.

He had what seemed like the best gig going.

As a fellow fan of TV crime series, I greeted each new Shonk story as an opportunity to learn more about the genre, and invariably to discover fresh details about even shows that I thought I knew well.

Unfortunately, those days are gone. Steve Lewis, Shonk’s editor at Mystery*File, announced this week that the columnist has died:

I have some bad news to report. Those of you who have been readers of this blog for a long time will recognize Michael’s name for sure. He started out by leaving comments on posts he found interesting and ended up being one of this blog’s most frequent reviewers.

I have been informed by a close friend of his that he passed away on July 17, 2020. He suffered from a variety of serious ailments, including bad vision, extreme diabetes, and heart disease. He was 65 years old.

As I said before, I never had the chance to meet or talk in person with Michael Shonk. Over the years, though, as I wrote about classic TV crime, mystery, and espionage dramas for The Rap Sheet, he’d occasionally drop me an e-mail note or add a comment to a post here and there. I always found him to be kind and generous in his communications. After I remarked, in a 2012 post, that I had never seen a full episode of Darren McGavin’s 1968-1969 NBC-TV series, The Outsider, he sent me a DVD containing multiple episodes, which I greatly enjoyed watching.

I occasionally thought about interviewing Shonk, but never got around to it. Which is sad, because we shared an appreciation for the NBC Mystery Movie as well as for 1970s P.I. series, and my asking him questions about those subjects and so many others would surely have provided us all with entertainment and enlightenment. As he demonstrated in this Mystery*File post about a Season 1 installment of Mike Conners’ Mannix, Shonk enjoyed discussing with other TV enthusiasts the highs and lows of that medium.

Although he’s now passed away—and at a relatively early age, too—Shonk’s work for Mystery*File remains available (though a few YouTube videos he offered have disappeared). Should you have some leisure time coming in the near future, you could spend it in less valuable ways than to revisit his decade’s worth of posts.

How Much Stress Can One Man Take?

By Jim Napier
Canadian private investigator Sam Jones has had a difficult life, and recently it’s only gotten worse. A 42-year-old veteran of the war in Iraq, Sam had lost an arm in that conflict. Returned from the fighting and now a civilian again, he is in a Toronto coffee bar trying to come to terms with what he just saw, and what he just did. Noticing spots of blood on his sleeve, he goes to the washroom to get rid of them. The blood isn’t his, but he knows police will soon be searching for him, and wanting an explanation for the two dead people—one a mere boy—who are lying in the basement of a house Sam vacated not long ago.

As we learn in Mike Knowles’ latest novel, Running from the Dead (ECW Press), Sam is bothered as well by thoughts of what he will tell the dead boy’s mother. Six years earlier he’d set out to find that youngster, hoping to bring him back to her alive. Today, though, he realizes he’s failed. That, more than anything else, concerns him greatly.

While he is scrubbing the blood from his shirt, Sam notices a bit of graffiti containing a cryptic message near a hinge on the bathroom door: I know you are, but what am I? A belligerent challenge, or a cry for help? Sheena, a 20-something tattooed barista with an attitude, is tending the coffee bar counter. She is unable to help Sam identify the author of those words, so the task falls to him. Remorseful over the fact that he failed to find the boy alive and restore him to his mother, Sam is driven to try at least to identify the obviously troubled graffiti writer and maybe lend that person some help.

Thus begins the odyssey of a good man caught up in an evil world. Before it ends, Sam will enlist the improbable aid of an aging ex-bank robber as he navigates the dark streets of Toronto, where vulnerable young women are easy prey for men who cannot see beyond their own twisted lives; and he’ll do his best to remain on the run from cops wanting to question him about those bodies in the basement.

As if all that weren’t enough weight upon his already burdened shoulders, while Sam grapples with a distressed young woman who might not want to be found—and might not want to be helped—he’s also anxious about his looming meeting with the dead boy’s mother. And he’s having to care for his own 80-year-old father, who is in a residential care home, unable to speak following a stroke.

Running from the Dead is the layered and nuanced eighth novel by Hamilton, Ontario, writer Knowles. It is a highly charged tale, marked by crackling dialogue and leavened only by brooding narration and a deft use of metaphor, as in this passage, which finds Sam comparing his race to evade the police with the behavior of sharks:

Sharks needed to remain in a constant state of motion in order to breathe. It didn’t matter how much water was around—if the shark stopped swimming it would suffocate in the middle of the ocean … [F]or the same reason he was driving across the city on a Monday—it kept him from stopping. If he stopped, if he lost momentum, it would mean confronting the inevitable, and ... Jones had a week before the inevitable became unavoidable. Seven days—his own Shark Week—unless he stopped moving.

There are also moments of dark humor scattered about this yarn, as when Sam is asked how he happened to lose his arm and he replies, “I didn’t lose it. I know exactly where it is.”

Readers in search of an uncompromising chronicle of our troubled times, exquisitely told, will find much to admire in Knowles’ new book, and will, I suspect, be drawn afterward to his earlier writing.

Highly recommended.

* * *

Since 2005 Jim Napier’s book reviews and author interviews have appeared in several Canadian newspapers and on various crime-fiction and literary Web sites, including his own award-winning review site, Deadly Diversions. His debut crime novel, Legacy, was published in the spring of 2017, and its sequel, Ridley’s War, is scheduled for release in the late summer of 2020. He can be reached at jnapier@deadlydiversions.com

Red Tape Impedes Uncle Edgar’s Recovery

As I noted in early June, one of the casualties of the Minneapolis protests that followed George Floyd’s police-assisted killing in that city was Uncle Edgar’s Mystery Bookstore. The commercial shopfront in which that establishment had operated for four decades, alongside its sister enterprise, the slightly older Uncle Hugo’s Science Fiction Bookstore, was burned to the ground by rioting vandals (not protesters) in the early morning hours of Saturday, May 30. Owner Don Blyly couldn’t say at the time whether he would reopen his much-loved conjoined shops, but a GoFundMe campaign was launched soon afterward to raise funds needed to make that possible. (At last check, $166,762 had been promised toward a $500,000 goal.)

Now Blyly is facing another recovery hurdle, this one of the distinctly bureaucratic sort. Today’s Minneapolis Star Tribune explains:

In Minneapolis, on a desolate lot where Don Blyly’s bookstore stood before being destroyed in the May riots, two men finish their cigarettes and then walk through a dangerous landscape filled with slippery debris and sharp objects. The city won’t let Blyly haul away his wreckage without a permit, and he can’t get a contractor to tell him how much it will cost to rebuild the store until that happens.

In [neighboring] St. Paul, where Jim Stage’s pharmacy burned down during the same disturbances, crews have already removed the bricks and scorched timbers. A steel fence keeps out trespassers. Stage expects construction of his new Lloyd’s Pharmacy to begin later this month.

The main reason for the different recoveries is simple: Minneapolis requires owners to prepay the second half of their 2020 property taxes in order to obtain a demolition permit. St. Paul does not.

“Minneapolis has not been particularly friendly toward business for some time,” said Blyly, who prepaid $8,847 in taxes last week but still hasn’t received his demolition permit. “They say they want to be helpful, but they certainly have not been.”

City officials say their hands are tied, pointing to a state
law that prohibits the removal of any structures or standing timber until all of the taxes assessed against the building have been fully paid. ...

Local business owners are appalled by the finger-pointing, noting that nearly 100 properties in Minneapolis were destroyed or severely damaged in the riots ... The vast majority of those properties are either still standing or have been turned into ugly and often dangerous piles of rubble. Owners say the lack of progress is discouraging reinvestment and sending customers to other parts of the metro.

You can read the complete Star Tribune piece here.

Leap Years

Being a fan, myself, of time-travel mysteries, I was intrigued to discover that California author Julie McElwain (Shadows in Time) had collected some of her favorite such yarns for CrimeReads. Included among her half-dozen picks are Dean Koontz’s Lightning, Lauren Beukes’ The Shining Girls, and Stephen King’s 11/22/63.

Curiously absent from her recommendations, though, are Karl Alexander’s Time After Time (1979), in which 19th-century science-fictionist H.G. Wells travels to late-20th-century San Francisco in hot pursuit of Jack the Ripper, and Jack Finney’s Time and Again (1970), wherein an advertising artist leaps back to 1882 New York City on the trail of a much-damaged letter penned that very year.

Bullet Points: Never a Dull Moment Edition

• Renowned movie and TV composer Billy Goldenberg—who died on Monday, August 3, at age 84—was the son of two musicians and took his first breaths in Brooklyn, New York, in 1936. He began his Hollywood career directing music for TV programs such as Hullabaloo and 1968’s Elvis: The Comeback Special. As Variety recalls, “In late 1968, Goldenberg became assistant to Universal TV music director Stanley Wilson, who assigned him scores for series [such] as Ironside, It Takes a Thief and The Name of the Game. He met [director Steven] Spielberg on Name of the Game and later did the director’s television work, including Night Gallery, Duel and three installments of Amazing Stories in the 1980s.” Goldbenberg wrote the music for 1971’s Ransom for a Dead Man, the teleflick that served as the actual pilot for Columbo, and went on to create the music for “Murder by the Book,” that series’ first regular episode. Among his other crime-drama credits are the themes for Harry O, Banacek, Kojak, and Delvecchio. When asked about Goldenberg’s contributions to the TV mystery field, Gary Gerani, a screenwriter and film historian now working on a documentary about the composer, offered these comments:

Billy Goldenberg certainly didn’t invent crime and mystery TV music. But what he brought to the genre was a perverse, transcendent elegance, something missed even by immortal composers like Bernard Herrmann and Jerry Goldsmith. Having followed his career from the very beginning, I think it’s significant that Broadway-based Goldenberg began his TV-film work with supernatural music (Fear No Evil, Ritual of Evil, Night Gallery). This led his aural ideas and arrangements in a darkly surreal direction … ”romantic mysticism” he called it. It was just a short walk from the demonic investigations of Dr. David Sorell (Louis Jourdan) to the insanely upper-class, full of themselves, larger-than-life villains facing Columbo. And in all of this … beauty. Elegance. Class. Billy was able to find an elegant “inner life" even in the bald-headed, lollipop-slurping countenance of Telly Savalas, his Kojak theme finding something eternal in the man and his city.

What will Mr. Goldenberg be remembered for? The Spielberg collaborations, of course; before John Williams, Goldenberg was Spielberg’s go-to composer, with Duel a very high-profile title on Billy’s résumé. And his Bartok-inspired supernatural music clearly defined the TV-movie flavors of the ’70s. But Columbo, beloved by fans all over the world, is probably the pop-culture property he’s most identified with. [His] Ransom for a Dead Man score was essentially the next step from his more cosmic television movies. This score influenced the “elegant beauty” style of music used in most detective TV shows produced by Dean Hargrove later in the decade, and beyond; even Murder, She Wrote’s harpsichord owes something to what Billy brought to the genre with Ransom. His approach captures the off-center personality of the Columbo episodes themselves far better than Henry Mancini’s [NBC] Mystery Movie theme, which is loads of fun, but clearly doesn’t belong in the same provocative, “perverted melodious” universe as Goldenberg’s creations. So yes, it’s fair to say that Billy Goldenberg’s compositions defined the signature sound of the 1970s mystery movie, and much of what followed in its wake.

Goldenberg collected almost two dozen Emmy nominations during his lengthy career, winning for such small-screen gems as Queen of the Stardust Ballroom (1975) and for miniseries including The Lives of Benjamin Franklin (1974) and King (1978). The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) carries an extensive list of his work.


(Above) The opening scene from Ransom for a Dead Man—with music by Billy Goldenberg—finds a lawyer (played by Lee Grant) assembling a ransom note for her husband (actor Harlan Warde), editing a tape recording to prove that he was indeed snatched, and finally shooting him in their living room.

• Also lost last week: journalist and author Pete Hamill. A longtime, much-admired New York City newspaperman, Hamill also published in The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Playboy, and Esquire. (A variety of his pieces can be read here, with one of his best-known Esquire features available at this link.) On top of all those credits, he penned close to a dozen novels, recalls Jiro Kimura of The Gumshoe Site, “including A Killing for Christ (Little, Brown, 1968), his first novel which was a thriller about a plot to assassinate the Pope in Rome.” Hamill produced, as well, a quartet of action-packed thrillers starring Gotham freelance reporter Sam Briscoe, beginning with 1978’s Dirty Laundry (about which I wrote in CrimeReads) and running through 2011’s Tabloid City. Kimura goes on to note that Hamill’s “mystery short stories include ‘The Men in Black Raincoats,’ first published in the December 1977 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and ‘The Book Signing’ (first published in Brooklyn Noir; Akashic, 2004), which was an Edgar nominee. His teleplays include Laguna Heat (1987, based on the novel by T. Jefferson Parker) and Split Images (1992, based on the novel by Elmore Leonard).” Click here to enjoy New York magazine’s fine tribute to Hamill, who passed away from heart and kidney failure on August 5. He was 85 years of age.

• Like so many other crime-fiction gatherings, Belfast, Ireland’s NOIRELAND International Crime Fiction Festival has had its ups and downs this year. A one-day event had been planned for March 28, only to be postponed until October due to the novel coronavirus. And now … “Sadly, it seems we were a little optimistic!” writes festival manager Angela McMahon. “The risk to public health from COVID-19 is still significant and unlikely to change for some time. As the well-being of our audiences, our authors and our many wonderful volunteers is paramount, we have concluded that in the circumstances we cannot go ahead with NOIRELAND this year.” She promises that tickets will be refunded over the next couple of weeks.

• Also cancelled was this year’s Pulpfest. Nonetheless, organizers announced that the winner of that planned convention’s 2020 Munsey Award is Mike Ashley, “the author or co-author of numerous works related to the pulps, science fiction, and fantasy. … Ashley has also edited many anthologies and single-author collections, often drawing work from the pulps. He is currently part of a team compiling an index to the most important British popular fiction magazines published between 1880 and 1950, including all the British pulps.” In 2003, Ashley’s Mammoth Encyclopedia of Modern Crime Fiction captured the Edgar Award for Best Critical/Biographical Work.

• Plans are quite different for another annual get-together, the Crime Fiction Weekend at St. Hilda’s College, University of Oxford. The two-day conference (August 14-15) will take place entirely online. As publicity committee member Jean Harker says in an e-mail note, “This year’s theme is ‘All Our Yesterdays: Historical Crime Fiction’ … and speakers include Andrew Taylor, Mick Herron, Andrew Wilson, Elly Griffiths, Anna Mazzola, etc.” She adds that “St. Hilda’s alumna and Honorary Fellow Val McDermid will preside over some of the proceedings. There will also be a tribute to Dame Agatha Christie as we celebrate the centenary of the publication of The Mysterious Affair at Styles—and a solve-it-yourself Whodunnit playlet written by Andrew Taylor and acted by a cast of crime writers.” Click here to find the full program. Proceedings are supposed to be recorded and made available to ticket-holders for a month. The ticket price is £30, with a discount available to students. You can register here.

• As the coronavirus lockdown continues, you may be curious to know how retired Edinburgh Detective Inspector John Rebus (soon to return in A Song for the Dark Times) is managing the isolation. His creator, Ian Rankin, answers that question in this delightful scripted video short starring Emmy Award-winning Scottish actor Brian Cox. It imagines Rebus coping with the absence of pubs, the need for exercise, the ubiquity of Zoom communications, and much more. (Hat tip to Randal S. Brandt)

• I’m just in the midst of reading Sam Wasson’s The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood (Flatiron), and here comes news that Ben Affleck is spearheading a film based on that character-rich tale about the making of Chinatown (1974). The Hollywood Reporter says he’ll pen the script and direct the picture, and co-produce with Lorne Michaels, “who initially nabbed the rights to the book.” Let’s hope for the best from this project.

• In other story-to-screen news, The Killing Times brings word that Megan Abbott’s next novel, The Turnout—to be published in the summer of 2021—is already scheduled for television treatment. It says the story “is set in the hothouse world of a ballet school led by the Durant sisters, Dara and Marie, and Dara’s husband Charlie. Their connection is intense, forged by a glamorous but troubled family history. But after they hire Derek, a charismatic, possibly shady contractor to renovate the studio, Marie throws herself into an intense affair with him that threatens their tight bonds and brings forward family secrets until an act of violence overturns everything.”

• Meanwhile, it’s been reported that actress Elisabeth Moss (The West Wing, The Handmaid’s Tale) “will be developing Araminta Hall’s forthcoming Imperfect Women as one of the first projects of her new production company, Love & Squalor Pictures.” Publishers Weekly calls that novel a “heart-wrenching psychological thriller.”

• Netflix has chosen September 3 as the debut date for Young Wallander, its six-episode series inspired by Henning Mankell’s tales of Swedish police inspector Kurt Wallander.

• Here’s a show I didn’t expect: HBO’s The Undoing, a psychological drama starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant. Variety explains,

The six-episode series follows Grace Fraser (Kidman), a successful therapist who discovers that her husband Jonathan (Grant) may be wrapped up in the death of another woman. She must unravel a chain of mysteries to reclaim her family’s life. The limited series, based on Jean Hanff Korelitz’s [2014] novel You Should Have Known, is written and executive produced by David E. Kelley. Susanne Bier, Per Saari, Bruna Papandrea, Stephen Garrett, Celia Costas and Kidman also executive produce. Bier also directs.

The Undoing is slated to start its run on October 25.

• And Netflix is offering images from its adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 Gothic novel, Rebecca, which was already so well filmed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1940. Netflix’s interpretation will premiere on October 21. As Deadline explains, “Lily James and Armie Hammer lead the cast this time out, playing the aristocratic widower Maxim de Winter (Laurence Olivier in Hitchcock’s version) and his new wife (previously Joan Fontaine), with Kristin Scott Thomas as Mrs Danvers.”

• August brings what would have been Earl Derr Biggers’ 136th birthday, were the creator of Charlie Chan still around to enjoy such festivities. (He perished in 1933, aged 48.) To celebrate, Lou Armagno, who blogs at The Postman on Holiday, has compiled a “musical montage” of compositions and musicians associated with Biggers’ Chinese-American detective, the majority of which relate to the 44 vintage Chan films. Among the many things I hadn’t know before: David Raksin, who created music for the 1941’s Dead Men Tell, starring Sidney Toler as Chan, would three years later compose the eerily beautiful score for that film noir classic, Laura.

• Laura seems to be burning bright in the zeitgeist lately. Otto Penzler placed that 1944 Gene Tierney/Dana Andrews picture at Number 6 in his CrimeReads countdown of “The Greatest Crime Films of All Time.” And in Loren D. Estleman’s new, sixth Valentino mystery, Indigo (Forge), his imperfect film detective is presented with the original Laura Hunt portrait painted for that movie.

• Regarding Penzler’s picks, he’s identified his top two—Chinatown (1974) and The Maltese Falcon (1941)—but we’re still waiting to see which motion picture he thinks belongs at the top of the heap.

• In a new interview with Hollywood Soapbox, Hard Case Crime editor Charles Ardai talks about his company’s initial inspiration, forthcoming works by Ray Bradbury and Max Allan Collins, and the importance of original cover artwork for HCC titles.

• Speaking of Hard Case, Entertainment Weekly has revealed the Paul Mann-painted cover of Later, Stephen King’s third contribution to that paperback line (following 2005’s The Colorado Kid and 2013’s top-selling Joyland). Due out in March 2021, Later is described by Ardai as “a beautiful story about growing up and facing your demons—whether they’re metaphorical or (as sometimes happens when you’re in a Stephen King novel) the real thing. It’s terrifying, tender, heartbreaking and honest, and we’re so excited to bring it to readers.”

• When it comes to crime- and mystery-fiction blogs, patience is sometimes rewarded. In July 2018, Brooklyn writer, critic, and musician Cullen Gallagher put up what appeared to be the final contribution to his fine site, Pulp Serenade: an interview with author Paul D. Brazill. Given Gallagher’s previous posting prolificacy, though, I hesitated to delete Pulp Serenade from The Rap Sheet’s blogroll—and now my restraint has been vindicated. Almost a full two years after Gallagher seemed to disappear, he suddenly returned in mid-June with a flood of posts, some of them reprints but others new (such as his reviews of S.A. Cosby’s Blacktop Wasteland and Lawrence Block’s Dead Girl Blues). I don’t know how long his renewed commitment to Pulp Serenade will last, but let’s hope it will not flag any time soon.

• So what’s happened to Reviewing the Evidence? Created in 2001 by Barbara Franchi, it has more recently been managed by Yvonne Klein. However, the last time that site saw an update was back in January of this year. I hope the pandemic has not spelled an end to RTE. I recently sent an e-mail inquiry to Klein, but have not yet received a response. If anybody out there knows about the site’s future, I hope they’ll reveal it in the Comments section at the end of this post.

• This could be interesting. From In Reference to Murder:

Independent publisher Canelo is launching a new crime fiction imprint, Canelo Crime, and has promoted Louise Cullen as publishing director to oversee the list. The imprint will launch with a selection of eight titles, including novels by Rachel Lynch and Nick Louth, due for release on September 24. Cullen is now actively seeking new novels with “bestseller potential” for inclusion in the imprint in 2021 and beyond, with a target of 15–18 new releases next year.

• If you’ve ever wondered what it would like to be in the company of prolific Texas author James Reasoner, click over to this YouTube interview he did with Paul Bishop of Wolfpack Publishing and fellow writer Robert Vaughan. By the way, Reasoner just declared that he’s finished work on his 386th novel. I suddenly feel very lazy …

• Tied to the recent release of Eliot Ness and the Mad Butcher: Hunting America’s Deadliest Unidentified Serial Killer at the Dawn of Modern Criminology (Morrow), which he wrote with A. Brad Schwartz, author Max Allan Collins submits to The Strand Magazine’s blog a list containing “10 Additional Surprising Facts About Eliot Ness.”

• Collins also posted a piece in CrimeReads that answers the question, “Whatever Happened to Eliot Ness After Prohibition?”

• Let me recommend one other story in CrimeReads: Andrew Cartmel’s look back at the “lost classics” of 20th-century hard-boiled author Charles Williams.

• I’m not much for audiobooks, since I can generally read a work faster myself than somebody else can read it to me. However, I have enjoyed listening to Phoebe Judge’s presentations at Phoebe Reads a Mystery, a podcast I first heard about from blogger Dave Knadler. Since the novel coronavirus struck, she’s been recording chapter-by-chapter deliveries of classic works, some of the most recent being Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Anna Katharine Green’s The Leavenworth Case, Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Links, and Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone. While I still shy away from audio versions of new novels, I find that I quite enjoy revisiting books I have already read, transported into another time and place by Judge’s soothing voice.

Narrowing the Ngaio Field

This season’s flurry of crime-fiction awards news continues, as organizers of New Zealand’s annual Ngaio Marsh Awards announce their finalists for two separate 2020 prizes:

Best Novel:
• Whatever It Takes, by Paul Cleave (Upstart Press)
• Girl from the Tree House, by Gudrun Frerichs (Self-published)
• Auē, by Becky Manawatu (Mākaro Press)
• The Nancys, by R.W.R. McDonald (Allen & Unwin)
• In the Clearing, by J.P. Pomare (Hachette New Zealand)
• The Wild Card, by Renée (Cuba Press)

Best First Novel:
• Tugga’s Mob, by Stephen Johnson (Clan Destine Press)
• Auē, by Becky Manawatu (Mākaro Press)
• The Nancys, by R.W.R. McDonald (Allen & Unwin)
• Into the Void, by Christina O’Reilly (Self-published e-book)

A news release says, “This year’s finalists are a fascinating group of Kiwi storytellers who’ve collectively won or been shortlisted for accolades in New Zealand and overseas, including the Prime Minister’s Awards for Literary Achievement, the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction, the Australian Book Industry Awards, the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, the Saint-Maur Crime Novel of the Year in France, and the Edgar Awards and Barry Awards in the United States.

“‘Our international judging panels have been dealing with a range of rāhui and lockdown situations this year but have thoroughly enjoyed reading the range and quality of stories offered by our Kiwi authors,’ says [founder and judging convenor Craig] Sisterson. ‘There were differing favourites, tough decisions, and some great reads our judges loved that didn’t become finalists. A decade on from our inaugural Ngaio Marsh Awards, our local genre is certainly in great health.’”

The longlist of contenders for Best Novel can be found here.

Winners of this year’s Ngaio Marsh Awards are to be declared during the WORD Christchurch Spring Festival, October 29-November 1. Congratulations to all of the nominees!

Revue of Reviewers, 8-7-20

Critiquing some of the most interesting recent crime, mystery, and thriller releases. Click on the individual covers to read more.

Making the Claymore Cut

Just a fortnight ago, we brought you the two categories of this year’s finalists for the Silver Falchion Awards, to be given out during Tennessee’s annual Killer Nashville conference. Today we follow that up with the list of as-yet-unpublished novels that have been shortlisted for the 2020 Claymore Award, courtesy of Mystery Fanfare:

• C.C. Anderson, Sunday Split
• R.G. Belsky, The Baghdad Conspiracy
• Alexander Bruce, Of Empires and Eternities
• Mary Bush, Crooked
• Kathy Cuddihy, Safe Harbours
• Nicholas Holloway, Three Houses on a Hill
• Geoffrey Hyatt, A Coffin for Mr. Blackpoole
• Michael Jordan, A Desperate Race
• William Kaufmann, Killing Bodhi
• Edson Knapp, Ghosts of Kilimanjaro
• Grace Lawler, Astral Exile
• Michael Byers Lewis, The Pilate Scroll
• Lisa Malice, Dead Ringer
• Kevin Maris, Forged in Lightning
• William Burton McCormick, Ghost
• Mark Renshaw, Cyborn
• Steven Sanders, War Wolves
• Sheila Sobel, Time Flies
• J.B. Stevens, The Red Exit
• Victory Witherkeigh, The Girl

According to the Killer Nashville Web site, the Claymore “assists new and rebranding English-language fiction authors to get published, including possible agent representation, book advances, editor deals, and movie and television sales.” Entries can come from an extensive variety of genres, but they all must contain “elements of thriller, mystery, crime, or suspense.”

Since this month’s in-person Killer Nashville event was cancelled as a result of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the winner of the Claymore Award will be announced online come August 22.

Tightening the Daggers’ Aim

Britain’s Crime Writers’ Association today announced the shortlists of nominees for its 2020 Dagger Awards, in 10 categories. “As the CWA Daggers are unmatched for their reputation and longevity,” says the organization’s chair, Linda Stratmann, “these shortlists offer a showcase of the finest writing in crime fiction and non-fiction. They reveal the remarkable variety and huge relevance of the genre, which continues to dominate book sales and to shape our cultural landscape.”

The winners of these commendations will be declared during an awards ceremony (presumably online) scheduled for October 22.

Gold Dagger:
• What You Pay For, by Claire Askew (Hodder & Stoughton)
• November Road, by Lou Berney (Harper)
• Forced Confessions, by John Fairfax (Little, Brown)
• Joe Country, by Mick Herron (John Murray)
• Death in the East, by Abir Mukherjee (Harvill Secker)
• Good Girl, Bad Girl, by Michael Robotham (Sphere)

Ian Fleming Steel Dagger:
• November Road, by Lou Berney (Harper)
• This Is Gomorrah, by Tom Chatfield (Hodder & Stoughton)
• One Way Out, by A.A. Dhand (Bantam Press)
• Between Two Evils, by Eva Dolan (Raven)
• Cold Storage, by David Koepp (HQ)
• The Whisper Man, by Alex North:(Michael Joseph)

John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger:
• Your House Will Pay, by Steph Cha (Faber and Faber)
• My Lovely Wife, by Samantha Downing (Michael Joseph)
• Little White Lies, by Philippa East (HQ)
• The Wreckage, by Robin Morgan-Bentley (Trapeze)
• The Man on the Street, by Trevor Wood (Quercus)

Sapere Books Historical Dagger:
• In Two Minds, by Alis Hawkins (The Dome Press)
• Metropolis, by Philip Kerr (Quercus)
• The Bear Pit, by SG MacLean (Quercus)
• Death in the East, by Abir Mukherjee (Harvill Secker)
• The Anarchists’ Club, by Alex Reeve (Raven)
• The Paper Bark Tree Mystery, by Ovidia Yu (Constable)

Crime Fiction in Translation Dagger:
• Summer of Reckoning, by Marion Brunet;
translated by Katherine Gregor (Bitter Lemon Press)
• The Godmother, by Hannelore Cayre;
translated by Stephanie Smee (Old Street Publishing)
• Like Flies from Afar, by K. Ferrari;
translated by Adrian Nathan West (Canongate)
• November, by Jorge Galán;
translated by Jason Wilson (Constable)
• The Fragility of Bodies, by Sergio Olguín;
translated by Miranda France (Bitter Lemon Press)
• Little Siberia, by Antti Tuomainen;
translated by David Hackston (Orenda)

Short Story Dagger:
• “The Bully,” by Jeffery Deaver (from Exit Wounds, edited by Paul B. Kane and Marie O’Regan; Titan)
• “The New Lad,” by Paul Finch (from Exit Wounds)
• “The Washing,” by Christopher Fowler (from Invisible Blood, edited by Maxim Jakubowski; Titan)
• “#Me Too,” by Lauren Henderson (from Invisible Blood)
• “The Recipe,” by Louise Jensen (from Exit Wounds)
• “Easily Made,” by Syd Moore (from The Twelve Strange Days of Christmas, by Syd Moore; Point Blank Press)

ALCS Gold Dagger for Non-fiction:
• Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud and the Last Trial of Harper Lee,
by Casey Cep (Heinemann)
• Corrupt Bodies: Death and Dirty Dealing in a London Morgue,
by Peter Everett (Icon)
• Honour: Achieving Justice for Banaz Mahmod,
by Caroline Goode (Oneworld)
• The Fatal Passion of Alma Rattenbury, by Sean O’Connor
(Simon & Schuster)
• The Professor and the Parson: A Story of Desire, Deceit and Defrocking, by Adam Sisman (Profile)
• The Adventures of Maud West, Lady Detective,
by Susannah Stapleton (Picador)

Dagger in the Library:
• Christopher Brookmyre
• Jane Casey
• Alex Gray
• Quintin Jardine

Debut Dagger:
• The Spae-Wife, by Anna Caig
• Whipstick, by Leanne Fry
• Pesticide, by Kim Hays
• Emergency Drill, by Nicholas Morrish
• Revolution Never Lies, by Josephine Moulds
• Bitter Lake, by Michael Munro

Publishers’ Dagger:
• Bitter Lemon Press
• Harvill Secker
• Head of Zeus
• HQ
• Michael Joseph
• Orenda
• Raven
• Severn House

Congratulations to all of the finalists! If you would like to revisit the longlist of contenders for these prizes, simply click 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.

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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.