America's Next Top Model Cycle 16

America's Next Top Model Cycle 16

Cycle 16 of America's Next Top Model has been great. The photoshoots has been cool and there has been plenty of drama. What a great season!

I liked a lot of last week's episode Sonia Dara. The photoshoot in this episode with the mud and everything was nice. The blonds vs. brunettes. Episode 6 aired 30th of March 2011. It was a really good episode. Here are some clips.

Here are the final pictures! The blonds and the brunettes.

Next week's episode of America's Next Top Model Cycle 16, Eric Daman, will air 6th of April 2011. Don't miss it. Only seven girls left!

America's Next Top Model Cycle 16

America's Next Top Model Cycle 16

Cycle 16 of America's Next Top Model has been great. The photoshoots has been cool and there has been plenty of drama. What a great season!

I liked a lot of last week's episode Sonia Dara. The photoshoot in this episode with the mud and everything was nice. The blonds vs. brunettes. Episode 6 aired 30th of March 2011. It was a really good episode. Here are some clips.

Here are the final pictures! The blonds and the brunettes.

Next week's episode of America's Next Top Model Cycle 16, Eric Daman, will air 6th of April 2011. Don't miss it. Only seven girls left!

M is for MURDER AND CHIPS by Laurie Mantell

For my second go around at the Crime Fiction Alphabet (read my 2010 posts here), I've set myself the challenging task of focusing not only just on New Zealand-themed posts, but just on Kiwi crime fiction books (ie I won't do any author profiles etc this time around) - although sometimes it may be the author's name that is relevant to the letter of the week.

This week I'm featuring MURDER AND CHIPS by Laurie Mantell. From 1978-1984, Mantell wrote five Wellington-set murder mysteries featuring Detective Sergeant Steve Arrow of the New Zealand Police - her books were published in the UK and the US as well, I understand. She also wrote a sixth crime novel, the standalone MATES, in the late 1990s. Unfortunattely Mantell passed away at the age of 93 last year.

MURDER AND CHIPS (1981) was Mantell's third murder mystery, following on from her debut MURDER IN FANCY DRESS (1978) and A MURDER OR THREE (1980). Although 'Fish'n'chips' have always been a very popular takeaway in New Zealand, and the title is probably a play on that, in the novel the chips in questions are actually wood, not potato.

MURDER AND CHIPS continues the adventures of Detective Sergeant Steve Arrow and his wife’s uncle, Chief Inspector Peacock. Here’s the blurb from the inside flap: “First, Cody Pyke is found smothered in a wood chip pile... Accidental death? Steve Arrow doesn’t think so, but that’s what the coroner, under pressure, decides. And then Carter Ancell is bashed to death. No doubt that it’s murder this time; but is the robbery - of no more than some costume jewellery - merely a cover for what the police call a ‘domestic’ crime? The investigations of the two deaths become most cunningly interwoven, and it might be said that each crime leads to the solution of the other. It’s a beautifully dovetailed plot, and another bright feather in Laurie Mantell’s hat.”

After her funeral last year, her family sent me some rembrances of Mantell. At her funeral service, Ray Mantell spoke of how his mother took everything she saw in, and often used it later in her mystery stories: "When I was young I set up my 8mm movie camera to take time motion of flowers opening & closing etc. One day I set it up on the roof to film cloud movements and thought mum did not even know what I was doing. Then in one of her books there it was a boy who set up a camera with time motion on the roof of his house to film a possum in the tree next door and in one of the frame he had the killer on film... [Another time], Linda & Barry took Mum & Dad down to Nelson and Mum saw the wood chips piles waiting to be shipped so she came up with MURDER AND CHIPS."

Some copies of MURDER AND CHIPS can still be found in secondhand stores (physical and online) and libraries, although the book does unfortunately fall into the 'out of print and hard to find' category. I have sourced a copy, thanks to the family, and I'm looking forward to reading this one. I enjoyed Mantell's Steve Arrow books A MURDER OR THREE and MURDER TO BURN last year.

Have you read Laurie Mantell? Do you like trying some out of print crime fiction from days gone by, from libraries or secondhand stores, to go with the modern stuff on booksellers' shelves?

'The Borgias' Tonight on Showtime

i'm really looking forward to this

Currently reading: MIXED BLOOD by Roger Smith

I've been doing a lot of reading the first three months of this year, but I am a little behind in my reviewing. And my reading choices have been a little constrained too - along with reading new New Zealand books and upcoming or recently released books for some newspaper columns and in preparation for feature interviews with the likes of Robert Crais, Peter Corris, Michael Connelly, and Henning Mankell, I am also participating in Dorte Jakobsen's excellent 2011 Global Reading Challenge.

For one of my 'Africa' crime novels for the expert level of the challenge, I have now started reading a book from a 'new-to-me' author, Roger Smith. I've heard some very good things about Smith's writing, so when I saw a new copy of MIXED BLOOD on a discount table at Whitcoulls a couple of weeks ago, I couldn't resist grabbing it.

Here's the short blurb for MIXED BLOOD: "An American, hiding out in Cape Town, South Africa, after being blackmailed into a bank heist back home, is building a new life for his pregnant wife and young son, when an incident of random violence sets him on a collision course with street gangs and a rogue cop who loves killing almost as much as he loves Jesus Christ."

Smith was born in Johannesburg, and now lives in Cape Town. Before becoming a crime writer, he was a screenwriter, producer and director. MIXED BLOOD was his debut novel, and was published in the US and Germany in 2009. It won the Deutschen Krimi Preis 2010 in Germany and has been nominated for a Spinetingler Best Novel award. His second book is WAKE UP DEAD. According to Smith's website, GreeneStreet Films (NYC) is developing the movie version of MIXED BLOOD – scheduled to start shooting in Cape Town in 2011 – starring Samuel L. Jackson, with Phillip Noyce directing.

Have you read MIXED BLOOD or WAKE UP DEAD? Do you like South African-set crime fiction? Are you participating in the 2011 Global Reading Challenge? If so, what African novels have you chosen? Thoughts welcome.

Kiwi crime queen Vanda Symon tours the West Coast

As I noted several days ago, acclaimed Kiwi crime queen Vanda Symon was heading this past week to the wild West Coast for several New Zealand Book Month events at libraries and schools in Hokitika, Greymouth, and Westport. It's great to see local crime writers getting out and about for events like this, and meeting readers.

Symon reports on her West Coast tour at her blog, Overkill, here. Symon's latest Sam Shephard tale, BOUND, debuted at the #1 spot earlier this year, and has remained on the NZ bestseller list since, which is great news. It's good to see Kiwi readers giving tales from our own crime writers a go. Hopefully more and more people will continue to discover Symon and her terrific heroine Sam Shephard. I'm sure they won't be disappointed.

BOUND was one of my 'crime picks' in February for my regular column in the Herald on Sunday. Here's what I had to say:

"A leading light amongst the recent surge in quality Kiwi crime fiction, Vanda Symon kick-starts her latest thrilling tale with a brutal home invasion; a dodgy businessman is shot gunned, his wife nearly chokes to death on a gag. Feisty heroine Sam Shephard’s Dunedin CID colleagues zero in on two lowlifes suspected of an earlier cop killing, but she’s uneasy, and keeps investigating. Excellent storytelling with real verve and energy, starring one of the most enjoyably readable heroines on the crime fiction scene."

Weeks later, I still stand by that final comment. I can think of very few crime fiction heroines that I enjoy reading, book-in, book-out, more than Sam Shephard. Symon is a world class crime writer that the wider world just hasn't found out about yet.

Friday's Forgotten Kiwi crime writer: Simon Jay

Over the past couple of years I've been keeping a keen eye out for any New Zealand-written crime, mystery or thriller fiction, both contemporary and from days gone by. Here at Crime Watch I have shared some information about such 'forgotten' Kiwi crime writers, whose work isout-of-print and had to find, including the likes of:

• Laurie Mantell (five Steve Arrow murder mysteries, 1978-1984, plus a standalone in the lates 1990s);


• Freda Bream (who while retired published 13 murder mysteries starring the Rev Jabal Jarrett between 1982-1997);


• Edmund Bohan (who wrote five historic Inspector O'Rorke novels between 1996-2003);


• Carol Dawber (who wrote three Top of the South-set mysteries around the same period);


• Elizabeth Messenger (who wrote at least nine crime thrillers that I know of, in the 1950s-1960s); and


• V. Merle Grayland (at least three books in the 1960s).

Another forgotten Kiwi author from the era of Messenger and Grayland is Simon Jay, who published two mystery novels in the 1960s. I first read about Jay in the digital version of Joan Stevens' book THE NEW ZEALAND NOVEL 1860-1965 (Reed, 1966), available courtesy of the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre. In a subsection on crime fiction, Stevens says:

" Another sub-type flourishing in recent years is the detective story, where we have at least one remarkable success, Simon Jay's Death of a Skin Diver, 1964. This has a tight plot, good writing, and a really knowledgeable exploitation of the New Zealand setting. What could be better ingredients for a local thriller than skindiving, yachting and yachtsmen, expeditions by day and by night on the intricacies of the Waitemata Harbour (with maps), plus some smuggling, some science, some humour, and some murder? Simon Jay is a pseudonym disguising an Auckland pathologist; his amateur detective is, naturally, also a pathologist, Dr Peter Much, who looks like a winner."

It certainly sounds intriguing to me, although I have found the book very hard to find. I am also curious as to what constituted a "remarkable success" for DEATH OF A SKIN DIVER - perhaps it had great reviews or large sales for a New Zealand book of the time, although I haven't been able to find much more in the way of information.

Thanks to Scott McPherson at the Classic Crime Fiction website, you can read a short biography of 'Simon Jay' (with photo) and a decent synopsis of DEATH OF A SKIN DIVER here.