HAPPY NEW YEARS EDITION
If everything goes right (HAH!), 2023 is gonna be a good year. The THRILLING DETECTIVE WEB SITE (you may have heard of it) will be celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary on April 1, 2023, which may be even more of a shock to me as it is to you. Hopefully this is the year I finally finish The Big Move.
And that’s not all–the Girl Detective and I will be attending our first mystery convention in way too long, when we load up the Mystery Machine and head south to San Diego for Bouchercon. Hopefully we’ll be seeing all our old friends—it’s been just too damn long.
As for our new “cover,” it’s just a little thang I dashed off, a pretty straightforward tweak of the April 1971 cover of Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine with links to a few items that might interest you.
First off is My Favourite Private Eye Things of 2022, a look back at some of the P.I.-related stuff that caught my eye. Of course, now that I’ve finally made the list, I’m immediately wanting to tweak it.
Also featured is Night Moves: An Introduction , taken from private eye writer.Sam Wiebe’s introduction to the 1974 classic when it was presented at the Vancouver Film Center in August 2022. Wiebe, the creator of private eyes  Dave Wakeland and Michael Drayton,  confessed that Night Moves is “one of my favorite PI films and neo-noirs, and a million times better than Altman’s very good The Long Goodbye, striking the same notes more percussively, more gracefully, and with more style.”
And finally there’s Welcome to LA, an oldie but goodie from Robert Crais, creator of Elvis Cole and Joe Pike. It’s taken from his brief but effective speech welcoming attendees to 2003 Left Coast Crime in Pasadena in February 2003. It was a pleasure to stumble across this brief but blood-splattered ode to the City of Angels and its, uh, colourful past.
Meanwhile, I’m still working on The Big Move–what else can I do? Right now, there’s no real rhyme or reason as to what gets moved here, and when–it’s all pretty much impulse and stream-of-consciousness, as I try to figure it all out. But don’t panic–we’ll get there. Likewise, don’t get your panties all twisted about us losing anything. We’re going to save it all. We’re simply tweaking and simplifying and updating it, moving things from one site to another. Yes, it’s taking a while, but it’s also sorta fun, as entries that haven’t been touched for years (like Crais’ piece) suddenly get tasered back to life, and decades-old typos and run-on sentences get slapped into submission (replaced, of course, by brand new typos and new run-on sentences).
Kevin Burton Smith
Editor/Founder
