ELEGY FOR A STORY-TELLING COP: Guest post by Jim Doherty

 

It must be said from the start that Joe Wambaugh, who passed away on 28 February at the age of 88, was not the first cop to turn his professional experiences into fiction.
            

Way back in the 1930’s, Basil Thomson, a former Assistant Commissioner at Scotland Yard, wrote eight books about a London Met policeman named Richardson (no first name is ever mentioned) who in eight books, enjoys a meteoric rise from rookie police constable to chief constable of the CID.
            

Thomson was followed by cops from other parts of Britain like Maurice Procter, of the Halifax Borough Police; John Wainwright, of the West Riding County Constabulary; Peter Walker, of the North Riding County Constabulary; Hamilton Jobson of the Southend-on-Sea Borough Constabulary; among others.
           

 In the Netherlands, Albert Cornelis Baantjer’s novels about Detective Inspector DeCock (“DeKok” in English-language editions), which began in 1964, became international best-sellers.
            

In the US, Wambaugh was preceded by LA County DA’s Investigator Leslie T. White, FBI Agent Gordon Gordon (who collaborated with his wife Mildred), collaborating NYPD officers John P. Connors and Paul Glaser, LA County Deputy Sheriff William Camp, and NYC Transit Authority Police Detective Dorothy Uhnak.
            

And yet, despite all those antecedents, when Joseph Wambaugh’s The New Centurions (Little, Brown, 1970) appeared in bookstores, it somehow seemed to be unprecedented.
            

To a degree, this was less because of the book, excellent though it was, than because of how it was marketed.  Previous cop-written novels were consigned to the literary ghetto of “category mysteries,” published by imprints like Doubleday’s Crime Club, or Simon and Schuster’s Inner Sanctum Mysteries.  

Centurions, a comparative “door-stopper” at 376 pages, was marketed as straight fiction.  Charting the career paths of three young cops, from their academy training, through their field training, following them through their first few years on the Job, and culminating in the 1965 Watts riots, it got featured reviews in publications like the New York Times and made all the major best-seller lists.  A high-budget movie followed in 1972, starring George C. Scott as a veteran beat cop, and Stacy Keach as the rookie he’s training.
            

Wambaugh followed with The Blue Knight (Little, Brown, 1972), another door-stopping novel, but a more intimate character study, it follows veteran foot patrolman William “Bumper” Morgan, a cop on the verge of retirement as he approaches his 20^th anniversary on the job, who hopes to make one more major league bust before he pulls the pin. This became an award-winning TV-movie starring William Holden, shown on NBC in 1973 in four parts on four consecutive evenings, leading to the coining of the term “mini-series.”  A regular weekly series, starring George Kennedy as Bumper, followed a few years later on CBS.
            

Between the Blue Knight mini-series and the follow-up regular weekly series, Wambaugh created an award-winning anthology TV show, Police Story (NBC, 1973-80).  Wambaugh described the show as, being, like his books, “less about how cops work on the Job, then how the Job works on cops.”  Using a different cast every week, the show was able to depict a wide variety of law enforcement activities.  
It also made it possible to use specific episodes as, essentially, pilots for additional series, and Police Woman (NBC, 1974-78), Joe Forrester (NBC, 1975-76), and Man Undercover (NBC, 1978-79) were all spun off from Police Story episodes.  
            

The same year that Police Story and The Blue Knight mini-series debuted, Wambaugh released his third, and most ambitious book, The Onion Field (Delacorte, 1973). This was his first piece of non-fiction, describing the kidnapping of two LAPD officers, leading to brutal murder of one, and the hairbreadth escape of the other.  More importantly, it described the emotional toll that Officer Karl Hettinger paid for being the “one who got away.”  This book got Wambaugh his best notices to that point, and, many books later, it was still the one in which he took the most pride.  It was the most praised and admired true-crime book since Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (Random, 1965).
            

Oddly, it did not win the Edgar for Best Fact Crime.  Instead, the Mystery Writers of America gave it a Special Edgar, the Herbert Brean Award, probably thinking that it sucked so much air out of the room, no other true-crimer had a chance.  This would be the first of five Edgars the MWA would award Wambaugh, including a Grand Master.
            

I’ll spare you a book-by-book description of the rest of his corpus.  Suffice it to say that Wambaugh rarely hit anything less than a home run.
            

Aside from triumphing across several different mediums, books, screenplays, and television, fiction and non-fiction, Wambaugh’s success opened the doors for other cops-turned-writers, like NYPD’s William Caunitz, New Orleans PD’s O’Neil de Noux, the US Secret Service’s Gerald Petievich, LAPD’s Dallas Barnes, LAPD’s Connie Dial, the FBI’s Paul Lindsay, Wright County, MN, Sheriff’s Office’s Christine Husom, Portland PD’s Frank Zafiro, and, quite literally, hundreds of others, including your obedient servant.  There is now an organization of crime writers, the Public Safety Writers Association (formerly the Police Writers Association) made up primarily of law enforcement professionals who’ve been inspired to get their stories written and published.  Wambaugh, by his success, was the root of this explosion of cops-turned-writers.  What had been a trickle before Wambaugh became a tidal wave after him.

            

That may be his greatest legacy.
            

And, I think because he knew this, he was always encouraging to new writers.  When my first book, Just the Facts (Deadly Serious, 2004) a collection of true-crime articles (most of which had first appeared in Janet’s Mystery Readers Journal) was being prepared for publication, I contacted Sergeant Wambaugh and shyly asked if he’d be willing to provide a blurb.  He invited me to send some of the chapters, and, after reading them, sent the following comment.
           

“This is a well researched, addictive collection of true case studies, some sensational, others little known, all intensely interesting. And one, ‘The Mad Doctor and The Untouchable,’ will no doubt become a terrific movie.” 

            

The year after the book came out, one of the chapters won a WWA Spur for Best Short Non-Fiction.  That was a wonderful moment.  

But getting that blurb from Wambaugh was, all by itself, almost as terrific.

 

LOW DOWN, DIRTY VOTE - VOLUME 2: Guest Post by Jim Doherty

JIM DOHERTY:
LOW DOWN, DIRTY VOTE – VOLUME 2

Winston Churchill, one of the greatest leaders of a democracy in the history of leaders of democracies, has been quoted as saying, “Democracy is the worst form of government . . . except for all the others.”

Actually, what he said was, “No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said” [italics mine] “that ‘Democracy is the worst form of Government . . . except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.’”

So he was quoting someone else. He just never said who.

But here’s an original comment he made about democracy during a 1944 speech in Commons that is especially pertinent to this particular guest ‘blog.

“At the bottom of all the tributes paid to democracy is the little man, walking into the little booth, with a little pencil, making a little cross on a little bit of paper—no amount of rhetoric or voluminous discussion can possibly diminish the overwhelming importance of that point.”

Democracy, for all its faults, and they are many, is better than all the others because it gives its citizens the final say in their own governance. And this “little cross on a little bit of paper” is how each individual citizen expresses that final say.

That was the theme in a splendid mystery anthology, edited by Mysti Berry, called Low Down Dirty Vote (Berry Content Corp., 2018). Each story dealt with different ways that votes could be subverted. Stolen votes, phony votes, suppressed votes, etc., etc., etc. The pity of it is that, although these were fictional stories, such corruptions of the electoral process happen all too often in real life.

‘Cause if that final say, that “little cross” that Churchill held so sacred, is deliberately overlooked, or suppressed, or overtaken by phony votes that no actual voter ever cast, the whole point of democracy is subverted. The bedrock of the democratic system is that every eligible citizen should have the opportunity to vote, and that every eligible vote must be counted.

This is not an issue that people of good will can disagree about. It’s not a right-wing/left-wing bone of contention. Conservatives and leftists must both, above all, want honest elections in which every eligible citizen has the opportunity to make his or her opinions known in the ballot box. The battle for those votes must be waged fairly, in the marketplace of ideas, not in the darkness of back rooms.

The proceeds from Low Down Dirty Vote went to fight voter fraud and suppression. And it was successful enough that, for this Presidential election year, Mysti Berry decided to do a second crime fiction anthology to alert people to the problem, Low Down Dirty Vote, Volume 2 (Berry Content Corp, 2020). It was released, appropriately enough, on the 4th of July 2020.

I’m proud to say that a story of mine is included.

The stories are all listed below. It’s a great selection of short crime fiction, and worth buying for that reason alone. But buying Low Down Dirty Vote, Vol. 2 also gives you chance to help “hit a lick against what’s wrong and maybe say a word for what’s right.” (John Wayne as Davy Crockett in The Alamo).

“One Bullet. One Vote” by Faye Snowden
“Nicking Votes” by Stephen Buehler
“Voting Block” by Tim O’Mara
“Two Dead, Two Wounded” by Jackie Ross Flaum
“The Sentencing Conundrum” by S.B. White
“No Statute of Limitations” by M.J. Holt
“A Moral Assassin” by Frank Rankin
“Kane and the Candidate” by Bev Vincent
“An ERA of Inequality” by David Hagerty
“Somebody Else’s Game” by Puja Guha
“High Sheriff Blues” by Gary Phillips
“Numbers Don’t Lie” by James McCrone
“Benevolent Dictatorship” by Madeline McEwen
“Shanks Gets Out the Vote” by Robert Lopresti
“Three Funny Things Happened on the Way to Vote” by Camille Minichino
“The Lord of LaValle” by Jim Doherty
“Purged” by Ann Parker
“Pro Bono” by Terry Sanville
“Sometimes It Makes a Difference” by Ben Harshman
“Unit 805” by Sarah M. Chen
“Goodbye, Beautiful” by Gabriel Valjan
“The Cost of Ethics” by Travis Richardson

The introduction to the volume of fine stories is by no less a mystery superstar than Scott Turow, whose latest novel, The Last Trial (Grand Central, 2020), came out last month.

***

A cop for more than 20 years, JIM DOHERTY has served American law enforcement at the federal, state, and local levels, policing everything from inner city streets to rural dirt roads, from college campuses to military bases, from suburban parks to urban railroad yards. 

His first book JUST THE FACTS - TRUE TALES OF COPS & CRIMINALS, was a finalist for the Macavity Award in the non-fiction category. One of the articles included in the book, "Blood for Oil," about the Osage Indian Murder Case, the FBI's first high-profile investigation, won a Spur Award from the Western Writers of America for Best Short Non-Fiction. 

His first novel, AN OBSCURE GRAVE, set in Berkeley, CA, where he began his law enforcement career, is a police procedural featuring Dan Sullivan, a character Jim has developed in a number of short stories. It involves the part-time cop and full-time Cal undergrad in a missing persons case that is getting a lot of media attention. Is it an abduction? Or murder? AN OBSCURE GRAVE was a finalist for the Debut Dagger Award given by the British Crime Writers Association. 

In addition, Jim served for several years as the police technical advisor for the venerable cops-bn-robbers comic strip DICK TRACY, and will be a guest writer on strip for a short, two week "Minute Mystery" sequence. 

Jim is also the author of RAYMOND CHANDLER - MASTER OF AMERICAN NOIR, a series of lectures about the hard-boiled pioneer, that was used in an on-line class on Chandler, which Jim also taught. 

Read Hallie Ephron's interview with Jim Doherty about Low Down Dirty Vote, Volume 2 on Jungle Red Writers here.

DICK TRACY AND THE TWO-WEEK MINUTE: Guest Post by Jim Doherty

JIM DOHERTY: 
DICK TRACY AND THE TWO-WEEK MINUTE 

How did you get into mysteries? What led you to the genre, and what led you to love it?

For some, it might have been Sherlock Holmes. For others a classic movie, like Laura, or The Third Man, or Vertigo, or a TV show, like Columbo, or Peter Gunn, or Murder She Wrote. For an awful lot of people, it might have been reading about Nancy Drew or the Hardy Boys as kids.

My gateway drug to the mystery genre was a comic strip to which I was introduced before I could even read. Every Sunday, my dad would read me the Sunday comics, and one of my favorites, perhaps my very favorite, was Dick Tracy.

From Tracy, I graduated to Holmes, to Perry Mason, to Sam Spade and the Continental Op, to Gideon of the Yard, the 87th Precinct, James Bond, Phil Marlowe, and Mike Hammer. But Tracy was my introduction to the genre, the reason I became a mystery fan, and, eventually a mystery writer.

In fact, it’s likely that Tracy had some influence on my non-writing career, too. Of course, having a lot of cops in my family had its effect, but, in my heart of hearts, when I first pinned on a badge, it was Dick Tracy I was trying to emulate.

So when, some years after moving to Chicago (Dick Tracy’s City, though this is never explicitly stated), I was offered the chance to be part of the team that put the strip out, of course I jumped at the chance.

When, upon the retirement of Dick Locher, the Pulitzer-winning cartoonist who had illustrated the strip since 1983, and written it since 2005, Mike Curtis was hired to write the strip, and Joe Staton to illustrate it, Mike brought me in as the strip’s police technical advisor, which meant that, among other things, I would write the copy for the weekly “Crimestoppers Textbook” panel.

 I’ve since left the strip, but was recently invited back as a guest writer.

Mike Curtis likes to try new things, and he had the idea of interspersing the long, complex storylines that play out over several months, with occasional short sequences in which guest writers and artists would have a chance to take a crack at the iconic character in the medium in which he was first introduced to the world.

Mike calls them “Minit Mysteries,” storylines that play out in only a week or two, “fair-play whodunits” (in contrast to the longer storylines, which are typically pursuits, with the villain known to the audience) in which readers are invited to compete with Tracy in figuring out the correct solution.

He based the notion on the “Minute Mysteries” that used to appear as back-up features in the last few pages of the old Dick Tracy Monthly comic book. The regular stories in DTM were reprints of the newspaper strip, reconfigured to fit a comic book page. But the “Minute Mysteries,” sometimes featuring Tracy, sometimes another sleuth such as “The Count” or clues-spotting legal secretary Myra Wilson, were original stories, created specifically for the comic book. Here’s an example from a 1949 issue of Dick Tracy Monthly.

 

Naturally, I jumped at the chance to write a story about the character who introduced me to the genre we all love, one that would appear in newspapers all across the world. Potentially, it might give me a wider readership than any other story I’d ever written.

Aside from that, it would put me in heady company. Last year I had a Sherlock Holmes pastiche, “The Adventure of the Manhunting Marshal,” published in Sherlock Holmes – Consulting Detective, Vol. 11 (Airship 27, 2018). Writing about the two most famous detectives in fiction would put me on a very short list. In fact, the only other writer I know of who has done this is the late and legendary Edward D. Hoch.

My “Minit Mystery” is called “The Occam’s Razor Case,” and in it, Tracy is being interviewed by a pair of writers who are collaborating on a biography of the square-jawed cop, Patrick Culhane (who looks an awful lot like Max Allan Collins, another one-time Tracy writer) and Austin Black (a fictional counterpart for A. Brad Shwartz, who collaborated with Al on a biography of Eliot Ness). In the course of the interview, Tracy reminisces about his tenure, early in his law enforcement career, as the reform police chief of a gangster-ridden suburb called “Homeville” (a fictional analog for Cicero, IL). He recounts to the two writers the story of how he had to solve a puzzling cop-killing. The issue wasn’t who killed Officer Adrienne Hart. She was murdered by a contract killer named Rev O. Lucian, a professional assassin who specializes in cops (a target most hit men avoid like the plague).

The mystery is trying to figure out who hired Lucian.

The sequence begins Sunday, 28 April 2019, and runs through Sunday, 12 May 2019. 

If your paper doesn’t happen to carry Tracy, you can follow the story on the Internet here:

https://www.gocomics.com/dicktracy

The one mystery Tracy can’t solve? How can a “Minute Mystery” (or “Minit” to use Mike’s preferred spelling) last two weeks?

***

By the way, while I’ve got your attention, my first novel, An Obscure Grave (Pro Se Press, 2018) is still getting five-star reviews over at Amazon. If you’ve got Kindle Unlimited, you can read it for free.

Brian Garfield: R.I.P.

Sad news. Brian Garfield: R.I.P. Garfield was 79. 
Jim Doherty wrote the following memorial:

Award-winning crime novelist Brian Garfield passed away on 29 December, in Pasadena, California. That rare combination of high productivity and excellence, his fiction was wide-ranging in its themes, settings, and plots.

He began in the western genre with novels like Trail Drive (Avalon, 1962) and Vultures in the Sun (Macmillan, 1963), and a seven novel series about a frontier lawman named Jeremy Six that he wrote under the pseudonym “Brian Wynne.” During this time, he served a term as the president of the Western Writers of America.

He never really left westerns behind and, even when he did switch to crime, his contemporary crime fiction tended to have a western flavor. His first series character in the mystery genre, for example, Arizona State Trooper Sam Watchman, was a Navajo who pursued bad guys across the broad expanses of the Southwest. Introduced in Relentless (World, 1972), in which he hunts a gang of cop-killing bank robbers into the snowbound wilderness of northern Arizona, Watchman returned for one encore in The Threepersons Hunt (Evans, 1974), a whodunit set on an Apache reservation. Relentless was made into a top-flight TV-movie, first broadcast in 1977, with Will Sampson as Watchman, the first time an Indian lead character in a Hollywood production was played by an Indian actor. Sampson was cast in the role at Garfield’s suggestion.

His best-known crime novel, Death Wish (McKay, 1972), was adapted into a film starring Charles Bronson, perhaps the most popular of all of Bronson’s movies. Superficially faithful to the novel, the film version was considerably more sympathetic to the protagonist’s vigilante actions. Displeased that the film took this approach, Garfield wrote a sequel, Death Sentence (Evans, 1975), in which he made his anti-vigilante opinions more clear. Not surprisingly, it wasn’t adapted into any of the many film sequels that also starred Bronson.

Aside from Death Wish, Garfield will probably be best-remembered for Hopscotch (Evans, 1975), a Cold War espionage thriller in which a cashiered CIA agent tries to recapture the excitement of his spy career by writing a book exposing the worst aspects of US intelligence operations, sending the manuscript to his publisher in installments, and challenging his old employers to try to stop him while he leads them on a merry chase all over the world. Hopscotch won Garfield an Edgar for Best Mystery Novel. Five years later, his script (on which he collaborated with Bryan Forbes) for a film adaptation released by Avco Embassy was a finalist for an Edgar in the Screenplay category.

Garfield also wrote a lot of short fiction in both the western and mystery genres, and, as with his novels, often seemed to combine the two. His Edgar-nominated “Jode’s Last Hunt” (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Jan. 1977), for example, told the story of a legendary small-town sheriff, whose adventures as a kick-ass lawman have been fictionalized in movies and TV shows (not unlike the real-life Buford Pusser), enjoying his one last chance at high-publicity glory. “Scrimshaw” (EQMM, Dec.1979), a tight little horror tale, earned him another Edgar nomination, And eleven pieces of short spy fiction featuring top-flight US operative Charlie Dark, set in the same universe as Hopscotch, were collected in Checkpoint Charlie (Mysterious, 1981). In 1983, he was elected President of the Mystery Writers of America, the only author to serve as president of both the WWA and the MWA.

Through the late ‘70’s and ‘80’s, Garfield tended to devote himself to “big” projects, returning to the western with epic novels like Wild Times (Simon & Schuster, 1978), about a frontiersman turned showman inspired by, if not precisely based on, Buffalo Bill Cody; and Manifest Destiny (Grand Central, 1989), a novel fictionalizing the frontier adventures of young Theodore Roosevelt. The Paladin (Simon and Schuster, 1989), was a World II-set espionage thriller about a teen-aged schoolboy who becomes Winston Churchill’s top undercover operative.

In later years, Garfield devoted himself to non-fiction. The Thousand Mile War (Aurum, 2004), a history of World War II in the Aleutians and the mainland of Alaska, was a finalist for a Pulitzer. The Meinertzhagen Mystery (Potomac, 2008) was a biography of a flamboyant British secret agent, who was a trusted associate of such diverse figures as Churchill, T.E. Lawrence, David Ben Gurion, and Elspeth Huxley, but who may, through it all, have been a colossal fraud.

A respected pro, Garfield was a friendly and self-effacing person, regarded as a true gentleman by his friends and acquaintances. He’ll be missed, but he leaves a large body of work by which he will be remembered.

I'LL COP TO IT: Guest post by Jim Doherty

JIM DOHERTY:
I'LL COP TO IT

When a policeman writes a police procedural novel, people are bound to wonder if the main character is a self-portrait.

So I’ll cop to it.

Dan Sullivan, the hero of my first novel, An Obscure Grave (available in both trade paperback and Kindle editions on Amazon), is basically me. I mean, after all, he’s a third generation Irish-American cop, a devout Catholic, grew up in the Bay Area, went to Catholic schools for twelve years until he entered Cal. Of course he’s me. With, y’know, improvements.

Which is to say he’s handsomer, braver, stronger, wittier, does better with the ladies (not that much better, but still). And, lately, lighter. More to the point, he, like me, started his career as a part-time reserve cop in Berkeley, CA. And a lot of his experiences grew out of actual experiences I’ve had in more than twenty years of law enforcement.

I developed him in a series of short stories (some of which, those set in and around Berkeley, I hope will be collected in the next Sullivan book) that’ve appeared in various magazines and anthologies (the two most recent in the Fall 2017 issue of Mystery Tribune and the July 2018 issue of Mystery Weekly), and told myself I’d write a novel about him “when I thought the time was right.”

Which meant it inevitably became fairly easy to find excuses for putting off the daunting task of writing a book-length piece of fiction. After all, I was pursuing a real-life crimefighting career, and also pursuing Miss Katy Kozlowski, the lovely lady who eventually became my wife. And when I finally caught her, we had a house we had to fix up into a home, and two careers to juggle, and a mortgage to pay off, and so on, and etc. No, really. A whole lot of so on, and scads of et cetera.

The impetus behind my finally writing the book was learning about the CWA’s Debut Dagger competition during a presentation given by Mike Jecks, then the CWA Chairman, at Magna Cum Murder one year. The Debut Dagger is given to the most promising unpublished first novel. Unlike the MWA’s First Novel Edgar, or the CWA’s own John Creasey Dagger, actual published novels are ineligible for the Debut Dagger. But novels that win the Debut Dagger usually wind up being published.

I realized that all the horror stories I’d heard about trying to get a novel published without an agent, or trying to get an agent without being published, were intimidating me, but this competition was a way to get around that. So I worked up an entry, and sent it off, and,, against all odds, it was one of the finalists, which gave me an excuse to go to London for the CWA Daggers ceremony. I lost, but all those folks who say it’s an honor just be nominated are right. It is. More importantly, I now had a manuscript with a pretty impressive pedigree. Not that it sold immediately. But it did sell eventually. Pro Se Press, a small publisher specializing in genre fiction, finally picked it up.

By the way, I’d like to give a shout-out to Mike Jecks (author of the Puttock and Furnshill medieval mysteries), who was, as I said, the CWA chairman, and to Kay Mitchell (author of the Inspector Morrissey novels), who was the Debut Dagger Coordinator that year. Thanks, guys! Without you I might still be finding excuses to put the damned thing off.

Like Hillary Waugh’s classic Last Seen Wearing . . . , An Obscure Grave is about a missing persons case in a college town, a missing persons case that turns into a murder investigation. Dan Sullivan’s a pretty square peg in the round hole that is Berkeley, CA, being devoutly religious, politically conservative, and working his way through school as, of all things, a part-time cop. He’s pulled into the periphery of the investigation to take care of some of the scut work, so the full-time detectives can do the actual investigating. Taking phone calls on the tip line. Following up on some of the less promising leads, stuff like that.

But when one of those unpromising tips seems to bear fruit, Dan becomes more deeply involved in the case, now convinced that the missing person, DeeDee Merryweather, a girl Dan knew personally and even crushed on a little, has been murdered, and that another student, also an acquaintance of Dan’s was her murderer, But a part-time semi-amateur volunteer’s not in a position to turn seasoned homicide investigators from the prevailing theory of the case, that DeeDee was kidnapped. The only way he can prove his theory is to find her “obscure grave” in the massive expanses of the Berkeley Hills.

That title, by the way, derives from Shakespeare. Specifically from The Merchant of Venice (Act II, scene vii, “It were too gross to rib her cerecloth in the obscure grave”). Y’ever notice how all the best titles seem to derive from either Shakespeare or the Bible? I was pretty proud of it, but, just as the book was about to come out, I found that I wasn’t the first one to use it. Back in 1985, Sara Woods adopted the same title for the 43rd novel in her series about crime-solving barrister Anthony Maitland.

Well, nothing’s new under the sun.

**

An Obscure Grave is available for $2.99 on Kindle (or free if you’re on Kindle Unlimited) here: https://www.amazon.com/Obscure-Grave-Jim-Doherty-ebook/dp/B07DT1JPZC/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1529796419&sr=1-1

And in trade paperback for $15.00 here:
https://www.amazon.com/Obscure-Grave-Jim-Doherty/dp/1720984956/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1529796419&sr=1-1

Or, if you just have to have it in hard cover, and Lord knows I certainly won’t try to talk you out of that, it’s yours for a mere $29.00 here:
http://www.lulu.com/shop/jim-doherty/an-obscure-grave/hardcover/product-23696461.html

Make sure to give it rave reviews.

Even if you hated it.

Just pretend you wrote it yourself and say what you’d want me to say about it if I was the one reviewing it.

***

WHAT JIM’S BROTHER AND SISTER COP/WRITERS ARE SAYING ABOUT HIM AND AN OBSCURE GRAVE

 
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“This is a well-researched, addictive collection of true case studies, some sensational, others little known, all intensely interesting. And one, ‘The Mad Doctor and the Untouchable,’ will no doubt become a terrific movie.” 
Detective Sergeant Joseph Wambaugh, LAPD (retired), MWA Grand Master, author of The New Centurions, The Blue Knight, The Onion Field, and Hollywood Station, on Jim’s true-crime collection Just the Facts 

“An Obscure Grave hits with the power and fury of a twister racing across a trailer park. Jim Doherty has created a complex mystery in his first full-length novel to feature his hero, part-time cop Dan Sullivan. More please!” 
Detective Paul Bishop, LAPD (retired), author of the Fey Croaker series, the “Felony” Flynn series, and Pulp Factory Award-winning novel Lie Catchers 

“Gritty, realistic story by someone who knows the heartbeat of an officer in trouble.” 
Detective O’Neil DeNoux, Jefferson Parish, LA, Sheriff’s Homicide (retired), Police Book Award and Derringer Award recipient, author of the Dino LaStanza series, the John Raven Beau series, and the Jacques Dugas series 

“Police and FBI are stumped by the disappearance of a U. Cal. Berkeley campus beauty. Has she been kidnapped? Is she alive or is she dead? Working only on the fringes of the case, Officer Dan Sullivan ferrets out all the answers with the help of a local clairvoyant. Great story. Great writing. Great read.” 
Sergeant John Mackie, NYPD (retired), author of the Sergeant Thorn Savage, Manhattan South Homicide, series 

“Doherty’s first novel, An Obscure Grave, takes Officer Dan Sullivan back to his early days as a reserve officer working his way through college at Berkeley, and treats us to a deep and satisfying dive into homicide police procedure with added forays into film noir and detective fiction. We should all look forward to more from Jim Doherty and Officer Sullivan.” 
Commissioner Louisa Dixon, Mississippi Dept. of Public Safety (retired), author of Next to Last Chance and Outside Chance. 

HARVEY AWARD FOR BEST SYNDICATED COMIC STRIP OR PANEL

On 7 September 2013, DICK TRACY won the Harvey Award for "Best Syndicated Strip or Panel."  The Harvey, named for legendary EC Comics artist Harvey Kurtzman, and given each year at the Baltimore Comics Convention, is one of two major awards in the comics industry, the other being the Eisner, named for Will Eisner, the creator of The Spirit, which is given at the San Diego Comics Convention.  Of the two, however, only the Harvey has a category for newspaper strips.

Present to accept the award on behalf of the entire team, were Joe Staton, the legendary illustrator who is the strip's current artist, and our own Sgt. Jim Doherty, the strip's current police consultant.  Joe thanked the other members of the team, who were not able to be present, script writer Mike Curtis, inker Shelley Pleger, and colorist Shane Fisher, and acknowledged the genius of the strip's creator, Chester Gould.  "A craftsman's only as good as his tools," said Joe, "and Chester Gould left us with some great tools."

Jim echoed Joe's comments about the team, and about Gould, and added thanks to the other "Keepers of the Flame" who had worked on the strip after Gould's retirement, keeping the iconic cop alive so that Mike, Joe, and the rest of the new team had a property in great condition to take over.  Jim particularly mentioned script writers Max Allan Collins and Michael Killian, and artists Rick Fletcher and Dick Locher.
Since the Harvey's newspaper strip category was instituted in 1990, TRACY is the only adventure strip ever to win the award.  It is also, at 80+ years, the oldest strip ever to win.  DICK TRACY made his first appearance in the Detroit MIRROR on 4 Oct 1931.  From that single paper, he would soon spread to over 600. 

The Harvey is the latest award the strip has won.  It was also one of the few strips to win the National Cartoonist Society's Reuben Award (named for Rube Goldberg) twice, once in 1959 and the second time in 1977 (Gould's last year on the strip).  In 1980, TRACY became the only comic strip ever to win a Special Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America.

HT: Jim Doherty