I’ve been a fan of spy fiction since I was a teenager in the 1960s. The 1960s was a time of spy mania in novels, films and on TV. 

I read Ian Fleming, Len Deighton, Eric Ambler, Graham Greene, John le Carre and many other spy thriller writers. I went to the movies and saw the Sean Connery-James Bond films, and I watched Patrick McGoohan on TV in Secret Agent and The Prisoner. I also liked the early Mission Impossible TV show and I loved the TV spy satire Get Smart.

I went on to do security work as a young sailor in the U.S. Navy and later as a Defense Department civilian. Over the years I met, worked and trained with, and was briefed by the sort of people I had read about and watched on the small and large screen as a teenager.

As a writer I’ve also met and interviewed a good number of retired and active duty intelligence officers and special warfare operators. Some these men and women are as extraordinary and interesting as their fictional counterparts.     

I still like a good spy story, so I was pleased to read Agents of Treachery: Never Before Published Spy Fiction From Today’s Most Exciting Writers (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard), edited by Otto Penzler.

Penzler, an author, editor and owner of The Mysterious Bookshop, one of the oldest, largest and finest specialty bookstores in the country, was able to enlist 14 good writers to donate an original spy story for the book.

“The international thriller is one of the most successful literary genres in the world, its primary practitioners becoming household names, insofar as any author’s level of fame can compete with an entertainer, sports figure, or world-class criminal,” Penzler wrote in his introduction to the book.

“Ian Fleming, John le Carre, Graham Greene, Lee Child, Nelson DeMille, Frederick Forsyth, Robert Ludlum, Ken Follet, and Eric Ambler, among many others, are familiar to readers around the world,” Penzler wrote. “It will come as little surprise to learn that for many years, one of every four novels sold in the United States fell into the espionage or international adventure category.”

But, Penzler added, it may come as a surprise that there has never been, until now, a collection of original stories devoted to this highly respected and challenging genre.

As Penzler noted, there have been a modest number of collections of spy stories by individual authors, such as Ian Fleming’s For Your Eyes Only, but most are reprint collections or excerpts from novels.

In Agents of Treachery, Penzler offers original short stories from the top writers of spy novels.

“The assignment given to the contributors to this unique collection was deceptively straightforward and simple,” Penzler wrote. “Write an international espionage or thriller story and set it anyplace in the world you like, in any era. No subject was forbidden, no word length specified or hindered. The wide range of styles and focus contained herein will attest to the fact that the men and women who labored over these stories and produced such masterly tales accepted the invitation in the proper spirit.”

I especially liked Charles McCarry’s story, The End of the String. McCarry is perhaps America’s best spy novelist. His Tears of Autumn is one of the best spy thrillers I’ve read.

McCarry served in the U.S. Army as a correspondent for Stars and Stripes and later worked as a newspaper reporter and speechwriter in the Eisenhower administration.

McCarry also worked as a deep cover CIA officer from 1958 to 1967. He CIA work took him to Europe, Asia and Africa. McCarry later became an editor-at-large for National Geographic and he went on to write several outstanding novels, such as Christopher’s Ghosts, The Better Angels, and Shelly’s Hear.

In The End of the String, McCarry offers a suspenseful and atmospheric tale of the birth of a coup in an African nation.

McCarry’s narrator, a man called Brown, is an American operative who is approached by the head of the national police, a man Brown simply identifies as “Benjamin.” Benjamin is about to overthrow the county’s dictator and he wants Brown to observe the coup and then report the events back to the U.S.

I also enjoyed Andrew Klavan’s clever tale of a Soviet sleeper agent from the Cold War who finds himself activated in the war on terrorism, and I enjoyed Stephen Hunter’s World War II story of espionage and behind the lines combat.

John Weisman’s Father’s Day is a suspenseful story set during the Iraq War and Stella Rimington, the former head of the British Security Service MI5, provides an interesting story about a British counterintelligence operation.

There are other fine stories in this collection as well.

So if you like a good spy story, I suggest you read Agents of Treachery.                                

I’ve been reading Frederick Forsyth since his classic thriller The Day of the Jackal came out in 1971.  

I like that Forsyth uses his skills as a journalist to infuse his thrillers with true facts and details about crime, espionage, terrorism and war. Forsyth also offers a good, thrilling and suspenseful story. 

His new thriller, The Cobra (G.P. Putnam’s Sons), continues in that fine tradition.

“There are two ways of doing this job, a news agency bureau chief told me once,” Forsyth wrote in a piece called Behind the Story: The Cobra. “You can not bother and get it wrong, or take the trouble and get it right. In my office, we get it right.”

Forsyth went on to write that the bureau chief was a good journalist who taught him a lot. And when Forsyth switched from being a foreign correspondent to novelist, the training stuck. Even though it is fiction, Forsyth says he tries to get even the smallest detail right.

“That includes the weird places to be visited,” Forsyth wrote in Behind the Story. “For The Cobra, a deep delve into the murky world of cocaine, smugglers, Coast Guards, cops and gangsters, there were “must go” targets. The HQ of the DEA in Washington, the back streets of Bogotá, the dockside dives of Cartagena. But the more I researched, the more I came across a recurring name: Guinea-Bissau.”

Forsyth called the African state a shattered, burned-out hellhole: the ultimate failed state. Of course, this hellhole is the perfect shipment point for cocaine going from South America to Europe.

It was while Forsyth was researching his novel there, posing as a bird watcher, that the country suffered yet another coup d’atat. Forsyth wrote that the airport and the borders were closed, so he was trapped inside and no one could get into the country.

“In the trade, it’s called an exclusive,” Forsyth explained. “So I borrowed my host’s mobile and filed a thousand-word summing-up to London’s Daily Express, for whom I do a weekly column.”

The intensive research paid off.

Forsyth’s new thriller begins with the American president determined to smash the illegal drug trade after coming into contact with the parent of a teenager who died from a drug overdose. The president decides to use a retired CIA officer known as “the Cobra.”

Paul Devereaux, 70, a CIA legend in the mold of real-life CIA legends James Jesus Angleton and Cofer Black, was sent into retirement because he was too ruthless for the CIA.

Devereaux skirts American law and gives himself more authority by declaring the drug smugglers to be terrorists. He is given carte blanche to take down a truly vicious and truly successful Colombian drug cartel known as the Hermandad — the Brotherhood.

The chief of the Brotherhood is Don Diego Estaban, an educated, cultured and aristocratic Colombian. By force of personality, Estaban was able to forge the other major cocaine warlords into a single and all-powerful syndicate.

To assist him in the battle with the Brotherhood Devereaux hires as his number two, Cal Dexter, a former Vietnam “tunnel rat” and bounty hunter known as the “Avenger.” Devereaux and Dexter both appeared in Forsyth’s previous novels The Afghan and The Avenger.

Devereaux and Dexter bring in Navy SEALs, the British Special Boat Service (SBS), and other specialized military units to stop the flow of the cocaine into Europe and the United States.

Dexter has the British and American naval special operations teams placed on converted merchant vessels that can track, isolate and sink the ships that are carrying smuggled cocaine. The teams place the crews and the cocaine cargoes in secret locations.

Dexter also recruits a pilot who flies a British Blackburn Buccaneer and shoots down aircraft carrying drug shipments.

The Brotherhood are aware that their drug shipments are not reaching their destinations, but how, and who, are the questions the drug lords want answers to. Being violent and paranoid, they turn on each other.   

 ”So if you’re interested, dear reader,” Forsyth wrote in Behind the Story. “It’s all in The Cobra. The dives of Cartagena, the U.S. Navy SEALs, their British equivalents, the SBS, the Global Predator UAVs, oh, and dear old Guinea-Bissau.

“And it’s all true. Well, okay, it’s not all true, it’s a novel,” Forsyth stated. “But it’s accurate.”

If you like fast-paced and fact-based thrillers, as I do, then I highly recommend Frederick Forsyth’s The Cobra.    

Last month I wrote a piece here about John le Carre’s disparaging remarks about Ian Fleming’s iconic character James Bond. The piece generated some interesting responses.

Although I attempted to offer a spirited defense of Ian Fleming and James Bond (the character from the novels not the films), I did note that I also liked le Carre’s novels, especially Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.    

This is perhaps le Carre’s year as a film is being made of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy  (the TV miniseries based on the novel was outstanding), and he has a new novel coming out called Our Kind of Traitor.

To promote his new book, the 79-year-old author gave an interesting interview to the British newspaper the Sunday Telegraph.

In the interview, le Carre, aka David Cornwell, spoke of how he struggled to demystify and de-romanticise the spook world in his thrillers. He also spoke of his time in the British Security Services and of his con-artist father.

He explained why he refused to meet the British traitor and spy Kim Philby when he was visiting Russia. I admire his stance.

Although le Carre’s spy novels are known for their moral ambiguity, le Carre spoke of the difference between the West’s intelligence officers and the Communists on the other side of the Iron Curtain in the Cold War.

“But there is a big difference in working for the West and working for a totalitarian state,” le Carre told the  Telegraph. “I promise you that even when quite ruthless operations are being contemplated, the process of democratic consultation was still relatively intact and decent humanitarian instincts came into play.

“Totalitarian states killed with impunity and no one was held accountable. That didn’t happen in the West,” le Carre said.           

Le Carre is right. According to The Black Book of Communism, the communists murdered more than 94 million people.

Although I disagree with le Carre’s politics and worldview, I look forward to seeing the film version of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and I look forward to reading his new novel, Our Kind of Traitor.

A team of U.S. Navy SEALs huddles around a coffee urn at their firebase in Afghanistan after an exhausting firefight with the Taliban.

“How can you account for people doing something so … savage?” asks the team’s shocked and appalled medic.

“Easy,” replies the more jaded SEAL team leader. “They’re savages.”

Don Winslow’s crime thriller Savages (Simon and Schuster) opens with two words:

Fuck you.

This is pretty much Chon’s attitude. But Chon, formerly known as John, a former Navy SEAL and ex-mercenary, doesn’t have attitude, according to his friend Ophelia, he has “baditude.”

Chon, the son of one of the original California marijuana kings, was a bad kid, but he earned his GED, joined the Navy and became a SEAL.

“They taught him to do everything that a seriously crazy, crazily athletic man could do in H2O.

Then they sent him to Stanland.

Afghanistan.

Where…

You got sand, you got snow, you ain’t got no ocean.

The Taliban don’t surf.”

The above is the sort of free verse that Winslow sprinkles through out the novel.

(Note to author Winslow: The L in SEAL stands for land. The SEALs train and operate in the sea, in the air and on land — Sea Air Land — SEAL).

Chon is one of three good friends who live in Laguna Beach.

Ben is the second of the close-knit trio. Ben, the son of leftist, Jewish shrinks (both his mother and father have lucrative psychotherapy practices), is a wealthy environmentalist and philanthropist.

His good deeds are financed by his highly successful marijuana business. Chon, who provides the muscle, is Ben’s partner in the mostly mellow pot business.

Ophelia, known as O for her loud multiple orgasms, is the third friend. O is a slim, “pixie like’ slacker who lives to shop. She has serious issues with her mother, whom she calls “Paqu.” It’s an acronym, O explains, for Passive Aggressive Queen of the Universe.

Her mother is South Orange County rich and beautiful. “Blonde hair, blue eyes and BRMCB — Best Rack Money Can Buy (you have real boobs here, you’re, like, Amish)”

O is happily sleeping with both Chon and Ben and the three friends led an idyllic life on Laguna Beach.

And then the Mexican Baja Cartel made them an offer that they can’t refuse.

The notorious Mexican drug gang wants to take over Ben and Chon’s pot business and make them employees of the cartel. To help convince them of their serious intentions, the cartel sent along a video of several men being beheaded.

Chon wants to respond in the same manner in which he handled an earlier threat from an outlaw biker gang. He killed them.

Ben wants to negotiate with the cartel and he agrees to meet with them. The Mexicans don’t want to negotiate; they want to take over the pot business.

And this impasse begins the conflict in this fast-paced, violent, irreverent and very funny thriller.

I first became acquainted with Don Winslow when I read his crime novel The Winter of Frankie Machine. 

In the novel Frank Machiano, known as “Frank the Bait Guy,” runs a bait shop and laundry service in San Diego, California. Machiano, who is known in other certain circles as ”Frankie Machine” for his cold-blooded killing ability, is a retired mob soldier.

He is drawn back into the world organized crime after someone orders a hit on the retired hitman.

Like Savages, The Winter of Frankie Machine is wickedly funny and a fast-paced thriller.

There is talk of Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro making a film of the novel. The character of Machiano’s partner-in-crime would be a good role for Joe Pesci. I’d liked to see Scorsese once again team up with his Raging Bull, Goodfellas and Casino actors, De Niro and Pesci.

(I’m not so fond of Oliver Stone. There are reports that he has signed on to direct Savages).

I enjoyed Savages but I have two problems with the thriller. My main beef is the character Chon being a former Navy SEAL.

I suppose there are one or two former SEALs who have gone bad in real life, but I’m old enough to recall when every psychotic killer and nut job in novels, on TV and in the movies during the 1960s and 1970s was a Vietnam veteran.

This trend began to wane when Magnum P.I. came on TV in 1980. Magnum offered not only one, but three positive characters who were Vietnam veterans. Thomas Magnum, portrayed by Tom Selleck, was a former Navy SEAL.

Magnum’s two friends, Rick and TC, were also Vietnam veterans. Higgins, the major domo of the Robin Master’s estate, was an honorable World War II veteran.

Magnum P.I., an amusing, lighhearted crime show, was very popular throughout the 1980s. I believe the pro-military show was instrumental in curtailing the veteran as killer and criminal stereotype in novels and on the big and small screen.

I would hate to see that stereotype begin to grow in popular fiction once again.

I also had a problem with the ending of Savages. Of course, I won’t reveal the ending here, but I thought the conclusion of the novel was too pat.

But otherwise I enjoyed the novel, and if you like humorous, irreverent and fast-paced crime thrillers, then you’ll like Savages as well.  

Regarding John le Carre’s recent critical remarks  about fellow thriller writer Ian Fleming’s iconic character James Bond, the author of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold  and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy  is right about one thing.

Le Carre is correct in stating that the Bond films have overtaken the books. Its true that the general public’s image of the fictional secret agent is that of the often silly, superman-like film character, rather than the darker, more complex and more realistic Bond character in the novels.

Le Carre is wrong about everything else.

Le Carre, aka former British intelligence officer David Cornwell, upon reviewing a 1966 BBC broadcast in which he was highly critical of Ian Fleming, calling his character James Bond “a neo-fascist gangster,” noted that he would be “much kinder” in his remarks today.

The 78-year-old, bitter leftist spy novelist then went on to state that Bond “would have gone through the same antics for any country if the girls had been so pretty and the martinis so dry.”

So much for being kinder.    

“I dislike Bond,” le Carre told the BBC in 1966. “I’m not sure that Bond is a spy. I think that it’s a great mistake if one’s talking about espionage literature to include Bond in that category.’

“It seems to me he’s more some kind of international gangster with, as it is said, a license to kill… he’s a man entirely out of the political context. It’s no interest to Bond who, for instance, is president of the United States or the Union of Soviet Republics.”

It was a pity that Fleming, who died in August of 1964, was not alive to respond. 

I suggest that le Carre, like millions of thriller readers around the world, re-read the Fleming stories.  

Although Fleming wrote the James Bond thrillers unabashedly for entertainment (the public’s as well as his own), the novels portray a character based on the secret agents and military commandos Fleming met while serving as a naval commander attached to British naval intelligence in World War II. He also added a good bit his own likes, dislikes and personality to the character.

The Bond character was driven primarily by a love of adventure and a strong sense of patriotism. He was all Queen and Country. He fought the good fight against communists, terrorists and criminals. He was a modern day knight.

As for le Carre’s comment that Bond was not truly a spy, if he were to re-read the novels, he would discover that the character was a senior intelligence officer in the British Secret Service – the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), often referred to as MI6.

Although he did not perform traditional intelligence officer duties, such as recruiting and controlling agents, Bond was sent out on missions to “spy” on potential enemies of the Crown. Bond was a special intelligence operative who undertook what is called in the trade ”direct action.”      

Although the double-00 license to kill was a fictional device, there are in reality special operatives in the intelligence services of both the U.S. and the U.k who have special operations backgrounds and have skills in guns, knives, unarmed combat and explosives. These men, and some women, are hunting al Qaeda today.  

“Everything I write has a precedent in truth,” Fleming said. 

Although his thrillers had fantasic elements, many of his plots and characters were inspired by true events. A case in point is the plot of Goldfinger, in which a gold-crazed criminal mastermind plans to rob Fort Knox.

Ben Macintyre recently wrote a good piece for the London Times in which he informs us that a German spy in WWII named Gustav Steinhauer planned to blow up the gold reserves of the Bank of England. Macintrye wrote that Fleming liked the interplay between truth and fiction.

In 1966, when le Carre recorded his disparaging remarks, Fleming was dead but the Bond-mania was in full bloom. Although le Carre’s novels sold well and he was critically acclaimed, Fleming’s thrillers were well on their way to selling 100 million copies world-wide. James Bond was a house-hold name around the world.

As for le Carre’s realism, I’ve interviewed a good number of former and current CIA and military intelligence officers who object strongly to the moral ambiguity found in his novels. Most Cold War intelligence officers were, like Bond, patriots who were dedicated to fighting communism.  

British, American and other Western intelligence officers were certainly not like their utterly ruthless KGB and Eastern bloc counterparts who were defending a totalitarian, evil empire. There was a moral distinction between the Cold Warriors that you will not find not in a le Carre novel. 

William F. Buckley Jr, the late author, columnist and political talk show host, noted that films and novels in the 1960s and 1970s often portrayed CIA officers as no better than the KGB.

Having served briefly as a CIA officer, he objected. Buckley, who wrote his own series of spy thrillers, believed the CIA and the Western intelligence services were a force for good in the Cold War. I agree.

Despite the moral ambiguity, I used to like le Carre’s novels. But his most recent novels have been marred by his increasing anti-Americanism and leftist opinions.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is a first-rate spy thriller, but so is Fleming’s From Russia With Love.   

Lastly, it should be noted that Fleming lost his father in combat in World War I and his younger brother in World War II. Ian Fleming was a British patriot, as was his creation, James Bond.

To learn more about Fleming, you can read some of my previous posts here 

As I’ve noted here before, I believe thrillers are an art form. Thrillers are like jazz to literary fiction’s classical music.

I devoured thrillers when I was a teenager and I still read and love them today.  

So I was very interested in reading Thrillers: 100 Must-Reads (Oceanview), edited by thriller writer David Morrell and critic Hank Wagner.

The book offers interesting essays by noted thriller writers on 100 selected thrillers deemed “must-reads” by the International Thriller Writers (ITW) organization. With each selection, the essayist offers a short biographical passage on the thriller’s author and provides an historical and literary perspective to the selected thriller. 

Any list of best (or worst) of anything is open to debate, and this list of must-read thrillers is no exception. But the essays here are well written and thought provoking, even if I didn’t agree with the writer or the selection.

Storytellers were thrilling their audiences before we learned to write, David Hewson, a British thriller writer, notes in his introduction to the book.

“Today, thrillers provide a rich literary feast embracing a wide variety of worlds – the law, espionage, action-adventure, medicine, police and crime, romance, history, politics, high-tech, religion, and many more,” wrote Hewson in his introduction to Thrillers: 100 Must-Reads.

“But old or new — and this vibrant field never remains still — all thrillers share certain characteristics. Like Homer trying to keep his audience captive while telling his tale in ancient Greece, thriller authors are constantly aware that their readers want them to provide the sudden rush of emotions: the excitement, suspense, apprehension, and exhilaration that drive the narrative, sometimes subtly, with peaks and lulls, sometimes at a constant, breakneck pace. By definition, if a thriller does not thrill, it is not doing its job.

“But thrillers are also intensely human stories, allegories that find truths in fiction in order to tell us more about the world we inhabit and the kind of people we are,” Hewson explained. “The thriller is the oldest kind of story — rooted in our deepest hopes and fears, for ourselves, those we love, and the world around us.”    

According to the editors, Morrell and Wagner, the 100 thrillers were chosen on the basis of the impact each had on the genre.

“Did the author contribute a new subject, direction, character, and/or technique that had a lasting effect?” the editors asked. “Did a work make such an impression that it had that it was frequently imitated?”

One may be surprised to see Homer or Shakespeare included in this book, but the essayists explain why the classics have all of the elements of a thriller. Some other selections, such as Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes and H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, may also surprise the thriller reader.   

I was pleased to see Rudyard Kipling’s Kim include, as this was perhaps the first spy thriller I read. My father had a bookcase in our living room that held many of the children’s classics. I read them all at a very young age, but Kim was a special favorite. This was a thriller that grabbed my young mind and imagination.

In the early 1960s I saw Sean Connery as James Bond in the film Dr. No and I quickly read the Ian Fleming thrillers. I discovered that the novels were darker and more complex than the films and I remain a Fleming aficionado today.

I’m glad that the editors included Fleming’s great Cold War thriller From Russia With Love. Raymond Benson, who authored several of the Bond continuation novels, wrote the essay about the thriller.

Benson wrote that Fleming created a new genre with the “fantasy” spy novel. I don’t agree with this label. From Russia With Love is a realistic and hard-edged 1957 novel that I would stack against any of the other Cold War thrillers.

A World War II naval intelligence officer and a journalist before and after the war, Fleming knew crime and espionage. Although he wrote unabashedly entertaining thrillers, most of his ideas were in fact based on true events. On occasion, Fleming noted, a news story would “lift a corner of the veil” and reveal the real world of espionage

“Everything I write has a precedent in truth,” Fleming wrote.

Although some of Fleming’s other thrillers included fantastic elements, his novels were always grounded in reality (unlike the silly films).

For example, Goldfinger’s plot to rob Fort Knox of America’s gold reserves may seem fantastic, but then a story comes out that reveals that Gustav Steinhauer, a German spy before and during WWII, plotted to blow up the gold reserves at the Bank of England.

There are also essays on other Brit thriller writers and wonderful thrillers that I grew up with. There is an essay on Eric Ambler’s A Coffin for Dimitrios, an essay on Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden or the British Agent, and an essay on Graham Greene’s The Third Man.

On the American side, there is an essay on America’s answer to Graham Greene (in my view), Charles McCarry.

Hank Wagner wrote an essay on McCarry’s great thriller The Tears of Autumn. There is also an essay on Richard Condon’s The Manchurian Candidate. The police thriller is represented here by Joseph Wambaugh’s great satiric novel, The Choir Boys.

I particularly enjoyed reading about several thrillers I knew only from the film adaptation. I have to now pick up copies of the thrillers these films were based on.

Of course, with 100 thrillers, I can’t list or comment on them all, but if you love thrillers, Thrillers: 100 Must Reads is a book you will want to read.

This is a book you will want as part of your library.

I love short stories and I truly love short stories about crime.     

Back in May I wrote a column about a collection of short stories called Boston Noir. At the end of my column I asked why there was no Philly noir collection and an editor at Akashic Books subsequently informed me that a collection of Philly crime noir stories would soon be published.

So while I wait for the Philly collection, I read another one of Akashic’s noir series, Manhattan Noir 2, The Classics.

This book greatly interested me as it contained short stories by several writers that I’m very fond of, including O. Henry and Damon Runyon.

One of the movies I try to watch every Christmas season is O. Henry’s Full House. The 1952 film featured five O. Henry stories, each segment with a different director. Author John Steinbeck introduced each segment. Some of the stories have a Christmas theme and all of the stories contain the famous twist at the end.

The film features two moving segments based on O. Henry’s The Gift of the Magi and The Last Leaf. The other three stories in the film deal with crime.

Actor Charles Laughton is brilliant in The Cop and the Anthem. The Clarion Call, directed by Henry Hathaway, features Dale Robertson as a cop who is beholding to a hoodlum portrayed by Richard Widmark. Both actors are superb. And The Ransom of Red Chief, directed by Howard Hawks, features the great comic Fred Allen as the con man and crook who wishes he didn’t kidnap the odd and terrible little boy who calls himself Red Chief.

I love these stories and the film does them justice, I believe.

Lawrence Block, the author of Eight Million Ways to Die and other crime stories, edited Manhattan Noir and Manhattan Noir 2, The Classics.  He wrote in the introduction of Manhattan Noir 2 that for the first book all he had to do was to persuade some of the best writers in the country to produce new dark stories set in Manhattan.

“And to do so for a fee that fell somewhere between honorarium and pittance,” Block added.

“They turned in magnificent work, and I turned in the fruits of their labors, and that was pretty much it,” Block explained. “Nice work if you can get it.”

But with this book, Block had to find the stories and he noted that it was not that easy.

“I knew I wanted to include O. Henry and Damon Runyon — but which O.Henry story? Which story of Runyon’s? I did not want to resort to the anthologist’s ploy of picking stories from other people’s anthologies — this, of course, is one reason everybody knows The Gift of the Magi and Little Miss Marker, while so many equally delightful stories remain unknown to the general reader,” Block explained.

Block stated that he read all of O. Henry’s New York stories and all of Damon Runyon’s stories and then he narrowed the field until he could select a single story from each author.

Block informs us that money had much to do with the publishing of these classic short stories. 

“Consider this: In 1902, William Sydney Porter, whom you and the rest of the world know as O. Henry, moved to New York after serving a prison sentence in Ohio (he’d been convicted of embezzling $854.08 from a bank in Austin, Texas.) Within a year he had been contracted to write a weekly short story for a newspaper, the New York World,” Block wrote.

Block wrote that Porter received $100 for each story, which was very good money in those days (and not too bad these days, I might add).

“O. Henry published his first short story collection in 1904, and his tenth in1910,” Block wrote. “He never wrote a novel. He never had to.”

Block selected O. Henry’s The Furnished Room for his collection. 

“Restless, shifting, fugacious as time itself is a certain vast bulk of the population of the red brick district of the lower West Side,” O. Henry wrote. “Homeless, they have a hundred homes. They flit from furnished room to furnished room, transients forever — transients in abode, transients in heart and mind. They sing “Home Sweet Home” in ragtime; they carry their lares et penates in a bandbox; their vine is entwined about a picture hat; a rubber plant is their fig tree.

“Hence the houses of this district, having had a thousand dwellers, should have a thousand tales to tell, mostly dull ones, no doubt; but it would be strange if there could not be found a ghost or two in the wake of all these vagrant guests.’

O. Henry’s story deals with a young man who is searching through these boarding houses that are home to transient theatrical entertainers. He is searching for a young woman.

“Consider Damon Runyon,” Block wrote in the introduction. “”Today’s readers know him chiefly for Guys and Dolls, the brilliant musical based on his stories.”

Block noted that Runyon was already a great success as a Broadway columnist when he began writing fiction in 1929. His stories about gangsters, gamblers, entertainers and other Broadway characters appeared in Cosmopolitan, Colliers and the Saturday Evening Post.

“Damon Runyon never wrote a novel. He never had to either.”

Block selected Johnny One-Eye as the Runyon story for this collection.

The story is about a showdown and shoot-out between two gangsters and how a scruffy and injured kitten enters between them. One of the kitten’s eyes is closed, hence the name one of the gangsters gives him. 

Manhattan Noir 2, the Classics also offers short stories by Evan Hunter, Irwin Shaw, Stephen Crane, Donald E. Westlake, Joyce Carol Oates and other great writers. The book also includes Edgar Allen Poe’s great poem The Raven.

I’ve been a student of crime since I was an aspiring writer growing up in South Philadelphia in the early 1960s.

My interest in crime, and my particular interest in organized crime, stems partly from my being half-Italian and my coming of age in South Philly, the hub of the Philadelphia-South Jersey Cosa Nostra organized crime family. Angelo Bruno, the long-time local mob boss, lived around the corner from my home.

Richard Zappile, an Italian-American who rose in the Philadelphia Police Department to become the Deputy Police Commissioner, also lived around the corner from my boyhood home. When he was the Chief of Detectives, Zappile was the cop who locked up the mob guys.

During one of my interviews with Zappile in the 1990s, he said that organized crime members were very small in numbers and that most Italian-Americans, and most South Philadelphians, were honest and hard working. 

Zappile was right, of course. South Philly was not then or now all mob guys, racketeers and gamblers – but they just sort of stood out. 

My early interest in organized crime also stems from the TV program The Untouchables, which aired from 1959 to 1963. I loved that program as a kid and I don’t think I missed an episode. Robert Stack as the incorruptible federal prohibition agent Eliot Ness was an early hero of mine, and I loved the voice of former columnist and radio broadcaster Walter Winchell, who narrated the program as if it were a crime documentary.

I recently watched the program on DVD and I’m sad to say that it does not hold up. The show is historically inaccurate and the acting is at turns wooden and over-the-top. The Italians are portrayed as caricatures and real mob guys, according to Gay Talese, the author of Honor Thy Father, got a kick out of the show and they watched it as if it were an early version of Saturday Night Live. 

The TV program was not realistic – nor was Brian De Palma’s 1987 film The Untouchables, although I thought Sean Connery and Robert De Niro were great in the film – but TV’s The Untouchables introduced me to the Prohibition era, Elliot Ness and a larger-than-life character named Al Capone. Actor Neville Brand was miscast as the notorious gangster, but the TV show led me to read about Al Capone and true crime history.

Later, while attending Navy Boot Camp at Great Lakes, Ill in 1970, I visited Chicago and I took the crime tour. We stopped at several notorious crime landmarks, including the site of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, where on February 14, 1929 seven men were brutally murdered during the Prohibition-era gangland wars. Al Capone, although he was in Florida at the time, was and remains a prime suspect. The horrific crime is unsolved to this day.

Although I’ve read several books about Capone and the Prohibition era – including John Kobler’s Capone: The Life and World of Al Capone and Laurence Bergreen’s Capone: The Man and the Era - my interest has not waned, so I picked up Jonathan Eig’s Get Capone: The Secret Plot That Captured America’s Most Wanted Gangster (Simon & Schuster).   

Eig, a Chicago writer who previously wrote about Jackie Robinson and Lou Gehrig, states in Get Capone that he kicked around the idea of writing a book on Capone, but he couldn’t find the right angle. Then while reading an article in the library about the prosecutor who led the government’s case against Capone, George E.Q. Johnson, he read that the prosecutor’s son stated that all of his father’s papers had been turned over to a college professor at the University of Nebraska. Eig tracked down the prosecutor’s papers, which were stacked in old boxes. Eig described the boxes as “treasure chests.”

“Here were transcripts of wiretaps typed by Elliot Ness; memos and telegrams from Herbert Hoover and his cabinet members plotting to put Capone behind bars; and handwritten notes jotted by prosecutors expressing their innermost doubts and fears as they tried to build a case they knew from the start was fundamentally flawed,” Eig wrote in Get Capone. “Here was the real story of Al Capone.”

Eig wrote he went on to receive from the IRS formally secret, raw intelligence files that had never been released to the public and he received Capone’s prison records, which included his personal letters and medical records. Eig also came across a hundred pages of notes that Chicago journalist Howard O’Brien made from his meetings with Capone when the crime lord was thinking of having O’Brien ghostwrite his life story. The book never came about, but the notes survived.

This was the “Roaring 20s,” the “Jazz Age.” A time of alcohol prohibition, yet many people still wanted to drink and party, which gave rise to the bootleggers and small-time crooks. Eig chronicles the rise of Al Capone and does a fine job of describing the crime boss and his era.

Not as well known as Capone and far less colorful, Eig also offers the story of the U.S. attorney at the time, George E.Q. Johnson. Coming from Swedish farmer stock, as Johnson himself put it, the fiercely principled and fiercely honest lawyer led the federal government’s fight to get Capone.

Due to the many murders in Chicago, the near-total disregard for Prohibition laws, and Capone’s public image, President Herbert Hoover ordered the Justice Department to “Get Capone.”

The best part of Eig’s book is his description of how the President, the Attorney General, the U.S. attorney, and a federal judge, James H. Wilkerson, conspired to bring Capone down.

I thought Eig went a bit overboard describing how much Capone was a loving family man (OK, but he was also a murderer), and I’m not convinced that Capone didn’t order the most notorious murders in American history, the St. Valentine Day murders.

Eig offers a theory that police officers killed the North Side Gangsters in revenge for the murder of a Chicago police officer’s son. Had the killers been cops, as Eig suggests, I don’t think they would have worn police uniforms to the shooting. I also believe had the shooters been cops, they would have taken the gangsters’ money.

Capone’s involvement in the murders is only a theory as well. He was in Florida when the killers (all of the suspected killers had ties to Capone) opened up their Thompson machine guns on Bugs Moran’s underlings.

Capone then traveled to Atlantic City to meet with Charles “Charley Lucky” Luciano, Meyer Lansky and other crime lords at the first national crime syndicate convention. Capone then went on to be arrested in Philadelphia for carrying a concealed gun.

Civic pride would like me to believe that the Philly detectives were on the job, but I subscribe to the theory that it was “suggested” to Capone by Charlie Lucky that he lay low until the clamor over the St. Valentine murders quiet down. What better place than a Philly prison, so Capone arranged to have himself arrested.

I visited Eastern Penitentiary a while back and I saw Capone’s cell. The prison, now a museum, has placed period furniture in the cell that matched photographs of Capone’s incarceration there. Capone lived better than most prisoners.

But laying low in a prison cell did not help Capone in the end. The St. Valentine Day’s murders were Capone’s undoing, whether he committed the deed or not. The murders pushed the feds to finally get Capone.    

Eig’s Get Capone is a good addition to the many books about the most notorious gangster in American history, Al Capone.

In My Little Chickadee the late, great comedian W.C. Fields played a wily card sharp.

In this classic comedy film an eager sucker sees Fields spreading cards across a table and asks excitedly, “Is this a game of chance?”

“Not the way I play it, no,” was Fields’ classic answer. 

I grew up on movies and TV shows that revolved around poker games and I read crime fiction and thrillers that also featured poker in the stories.

I also grew up playing poker. I began at an early age, playing poker for nickels, dimes and quarters in the Francis Scott Key elementary school yard in South Philadelphia. As a kid I watched high-stake gamblers and racket guys play poker at a club in South Philly long before there were casinos in nearby Atlantic City. I used to run to a nearby luncheonette and bring back sandwiches and coffee to the players. The game’s big winner always gave me a huge tip.  

I joined the U.S. Navy when I was 17 and I continued to play poker on an aircraft carrier on our down time off the coast of Vietnam. Many of the sailors never played poker prior to joining the Navy, so I and a few other more experienced players always did well.

After leaving the Navy I began to play poker for somewhat higher stakes and I played cards often during my 20s. I also bet on sporting events heavily, and if there were two bugs on the ground, I would put twenty bucks on the one of the right.

I was a relatively good poker player, as I won more often than I lost, but I didn’t care much about money in my youth. I spent it as fast as I made it. When I won I went out with girl friends or the guys and I promptly blew all of my winnings at stores, bars, clubs and restaurants. When I lost I borrowed money from the local loan sharks. These guys circle poker games like a shark circles his prey in the ocean.

I liked the active “sporting life” and I truly loved playing poker in my younger days. Although I gave up serious gambling when I married at age 30, I still play an occasional “friendly” game of poker with friends.

So with my life-long interest in poker, as well as my life-long interest in crime, I was eager to read Dead Man’s Hand: Crime Fiction at the Poker Table (Harcourt).

Otto Penzler, the editor of Dead Man’s Hand, wrote in the forward that he was surprised that no one had put together a collection of stories combining poker and crime before this.

“If ever a subject begged to be associated with crime it is gambling,” noted Penzler. “And if you think poker doesn’t involve gambling, you are seven years old and think it’s fun to play for matchsticks.”

Penzler, the founder of the Mysterious Press and owner of the Mysterious Bookstore in New York, collected 15 short stories that feature poker and crime. The stories were written by some of today’s top crime and thriller writers.

“For well over 150 years, poker has been America’s game of choice,” Howard Lederer wrote in his introduction to the stories. “The mere mention of the game would conjure images of Mississippi riverboat gamblers, cowboys willing to a man if he thought his opponent had an ace up his sleeve, and brazen Vegas hustlers drinking whiskey and smoking cigars while using marked cards to take the unsuspecting.”

Lederer, a professional poker player known as the “poker professor,” added that for the last 150 years poker has become inextricably woven into the fabric of the American experience. He noted that the game is played by American presidents, Supreme Court justices and friends who use the game as an excuse to get together each week.

“Otto Penzler assembled a staggering array of crime novelists and asked each of them to weave the great game of poker into an original short story,” Lederer explained. “John Lescroart writes a story about how the memories of a father’s home poker game still haunt the son many years after his death. Rubert Holmes tells a tale of a poker game that is more than it appears. Eric Van Lustbader shows how the game can form the basis for a unique father/daughter relationship. Walter Mosley examines how the game of poker can provide a unique platform for nonverbal communication. And Sam Hill examines a poker pro coming to grips with his own mortality, both physically and professionally.”

In my view, one of the better stories in the book is called Bump. The story was written by Jeffery Deaver, the author of a series of thrillers that feature a quadriplegic detective named Lincoln Rhyme and his partner Amelia Sachs. One of Deaver’s novels, The Bone Collector, was made into a film with Denzel Washington.

Deaver was also recently chosen by the family of the late Ian Fleming to write the next James Bond continuation novel.

Bump is about an actor who once starred in a successful TV crime show, but is now reduced to sheepishly pitching an idea for a new show to a TV producer. The producer was not interested in the idea, but he offers the older actor a chance to appear on a reality show called Go for Broke. The live program will film a high stake poker game between “celebrities.”

The celebrities will use their own money at the game and they will use cash, not chips. If the actor wins the poker game, the producer tells him, he would receive a “bump,” which is a buzzword in the entertainment world that means a “leg-up,” or getting recognized on the media radar. Bump also means a raise in poker.

As the reality show uses cash instead of chips, the criminal element becomes interested and two hoodlums plan to take the game down.

Deaver’s story is clever and interesting and he packs a lot of character, plot and details into a short story.

I also liked One-Dollar Jackpot by noted crime novelist Michael Connelly. In Connelly’s short story a professional poker player is murdered in her parked car in front of her home. Connelly’s popular character LAPD Homicide-Robbery Detective Harry Bosch catches the case.

The woman won a considerable amount of money at a casino and Bosch wonders if she were followed from the casino by a thief and killed for her winnings. He also suspects her husband, a less successful poker player. This is a well-written, suspenseful story.

Otto Penzler offers a very good collection of stories, so if you’re interested in crime, poker, crime fiction, or all of the above, I recommend you read Dead Man’s Hand: Crime Fiction at the Poker Table. 

John Timoney, the man Esquire magazine called “America’s Top Cop,’ has written a book about his experiences commanding police forces in New York City, Philadelphia and Miami. The book is called Beat Cop to Top Cop: A Tale of Three Cities (University of Penn Press).

Although Timoney rose from a patrolman to become the youngest four-star chief in the history of the New York Police Department, he was not asked to be the police commissioner. In 1998 Philadelphia Mayor Ed Rendell asked Timoney to come 90 miles south to become Philadelphia’s police commissioner, making him the city’s top cop. 

So Timoney told an audience of about 100 people on April 11^th  at the Philadelphia Free Library in Center City that it was appropriate he was kicking off his national book tour in Philadelphia.

I was in the audience that night as Timoney said that unlike many cops who say they always wanted to be a police officer, he didn’t want to be a policeman. He said he didn’t much like cops as a child growing up in Dublin, Ireland, and later in Washington Heights, New York City.

“Like parents and teachers, they told you all the things you couldn’t do, like they arbitrarily took stickball bats from you on 175^thStreet just because Mrs. Randolph was complaining we were hitting her window,” Timoney told the audience at the library.

Timoney went on to say that he followed a group of friends who all took the police exam in 1967 and entered the NYPD. While he initially didn’t like being a police officer, he said that after some weeks he began what was up to now a 40-year love affair with the police profession.

Timoney added that he was also fortunate to live through some tumultuous times and he saw the process of much social change over those 40 years.

I first met Timoney outside his office at Philadelphia Police Headquarters – the place old-time cops, crooks and Philly residents called the Roundhouse because of its circular structure.

On assignment for Counterterrorism magazine, I was on my way to interview then-First Deputy Commissioner Sylvester Johnson about “Operation Sunrise,” a major Philly Police, DEA and FBI counter-drug operation in “the Badlands” of North Philadelphia.

Timoney was talking in the hall to then-Chief Inspector Patricia Giorgio-Fox, the commander of the South Police Division, whom I knew as I was at the time a columnist for a South Philly weekly newspaper.

She said hello and introduced me to Timoney. Although Timoney is critical of the press and he has had some difficulty with the press over the years, he is very smooth and personable with reporters.

I would later see Timoney at South Philly and Center City community meetings, at crime scenes, at CompStat meetings at the Philadelphia Police Academy, and I witnessed him dealing with rioting street protesters during the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia in 2000.

Many hard-core protest groups came to the city with the intent to disrupt the convention and to cause general mayhem. Timoney decided not to deploy officers in full riot gear as he believed the look was provocative. Instead, he opted to use the city’s bike cops, who wore their standard bike helmets and rode Raleigh Mountain bikes.

The protesters knew that the city’s convention center in South Philadelphia was heavily protected, so they opted to take their disruptive demonstrations to the Center City restaurants and hotels were the delegates were staying.

On Tuesday night of the week of the convention, nearly 300 protesters were arrested as they overturned trash dumpsters, defaced buildings and police cars and assaulted police officers. Chemicals and urine were also tossed on some of the officers. Timoney was out on the street on a bike and he and another officer scuffled with a group of protesters.

I was there, covering the protests for Counterterrorism magazine, and I witnessed how Timoney led the police response to the violence organized by the protesters.

I saw how the police effectively used their bikes to move quickly in and out of crowds. The bikes were also used as barriers when the officers turned them sideways and held them waist-high.

The mountain bikes were also a useful tool to ram, prod and herd the unruly and violent protesters. The bikes were used much like earlier police and military forces used a more deadly tool – bayonets.

I was impressed with Timoney’s leadership of the police that week.

That is not to say that I subscribe to all of Timoney’s views. I disagree with his view on gun control. Timoney believes that strict gun control can control crime. Of course strict gun control in Chicago has hardly curbed violence, as the government’s ban on drugs has hardly curbed illegal drug sales and use. 

Although initially I wanted a commissioner promoted from within the Philadelphia Police Department, as did the police rank-and-file, I came to believe Timoney was a very good police commissioner. I was sorry to see him leave Philadelphia.

“Ecce facies! Behold the face!” author Tom Wolfe wrote in his introduction to Timoney’s book. “That face, belonging to John Timoney, now chief of the Miami Police Department, has become a legend in its own time.”

“According to the legend, Timoney never had to draw a weapon to arrest a felon and take him in. He just gave him a good look at…that face…and even the most obtuse and poisonous viper became a mewling little pussy… and that face became a legend in its own time.”

Wolfe went to write that he meet Timoney when he had risen to Inspector, the third highest rank in the NYPD. Four years later, Wolfe writes, Timoney would become, at age forty-five, the youngest four-star chief in the department’s history.

“Even someone in the grandstand, like me, could read the lines incised in that face, punctuated by a blunt nose, and immediately make out the words “tough Irish cop,” Wolfe wrote.

Wolfe, a great journalist and novelist, wrote a fine introduction to Timoney’s book.

Timoney writes of his early days as a patrolman and his steady rise to high rank in the department. The 1970s were a tough time to be a cop and perhaps it was even tougher to be a police supervisor and commander. I especially enjoyed the account of his time as the captain of the Chinatown precinct.

Timoney’s observations and insights into crime fighting and police management are thoughtful and serious, but he also adds a dash of good humor. Serving under Police Commissioner Bill Bratton, Timoney and the rest of the command staff instituted radical means of fighting crime, including CompStat and other initiatives that drastically reduced crime in New York.

His account of his time as the Philadelphia Police Commissioner interested me the most. I know some of the people he writes about and I was interested in his impressions of them and of Philadelphia. He writes about quickly identifying the department’s problems and making sweeping personnel and policy changes. He also writes about the cases, issues, events and his missteps of his time here.   

Timoney left Philadelphia in early 2002 to take a job in private security, but a year later he was back in uniform as Miami’s Police Chief.

Miami held a new set of issues and problems, including the accusation that his used his position to receive a favorable lease of a Lexus SUV from a local car dealer. Timoney explains the situation and how it was resolved.

When a new mayor was elected in 2009, Timoney resigned as the chief of police.  He is now working for a private security firm. 

“I have learned more from my mistakes than I have from my successes,” Timoney wrote in the book. “That doesn’t mean mistakes are good. Mistakes are bad, but they do teach.”

Timoney’s book outlines both his successes and mistakes in policing three cities.  Timoney has led an interesting life and he has written an interesting book.