Revue of Reviewers, 12-31-20

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

Toasts and Transgressions

As we prepare for the long-awaited advent of 2021, Janet Rudolph has posted a lengthy list of mysteries and thrillers—both books and movies—that feature New Year’s celebrations. I’ve read or watched a number of them, but certainly not all. How about you?

A Golden Bounty, Indeed

By Fraser Massey
James Bond fans have not had a great year. The next 007 movie, No Time to Die, saw its release date repeatedly postponed—currently it’s set for early April 2021. And the greatest of the cinematic Bonds, Sean Connery, died at the end of October—just six weeks after the passing of the film world’s only Mrs. Bond, Dame Diana Rigg (who, as the Countess Tracy di Vicenzo, married James in 1969’s big-screen adaptation of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service).

However, 2020 has concluded with some heart-warming evidence, for fans of Ian Fleming’s king of spies, that the original books are still greatly treasured.

The latest list of Most Expensive Sales of the Year generated by Canada-based secondhand online books retailer AbeBooks features among its top 10 a signed first edition of Fleming’s 1959 novel, Goldfinger. This copy of the seventh Bond adventure, in its original dust jacket and in “fine” condition, was had for £19,345 ($26,354).

AbeBooks’ list was topped by the sale of a 1936 first edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses, which went for £34,635 (£47,182), but it also featured other works that might interest thriller fans. An unread copy of Michael Crichton’s 1995 Jurassic Park sequel, The Lost World, signed by director Steven Spielberg and cast members from the film version, scored the same price as the aforementioned Bond novel, £19,345 ($26,353). And a 12-volume collection of Stephen King’s Dark Tower series of post-apocalyptic gunslinger fantasy yarns—all signed by the author—fetched £17,100 ($23,294).

Missing Link

Here are five words I hoped never to type: William Link has passed away. As Deadline reports, the renowned Pennsylvania-born screenwriter and producer was 87 years old when he died of congestive heart failure in Los Angeles this last Sunday, December 27. Deadline’s obituary goes on to explain:

In a career spanning more than 60 years, Link was best known for his collaboration with the late Richard Levinson. The two—who first met at the age of 14 and began collaborating almost immediately on stories, radio scripts, and dramas—saw television’s potential to capture the current scene and contribute to the national discussion about such subjects as race relations, student unrest, and gun violence.

Co-created by Link and Levinson, Columbo, starring Peter Falk as LAPD homicide detective Columbo, aired on NBC from 1971 to 1978. The character and show popularized the inverted detective story format, which begins by showing the commission of the crime and its perpetrator.

Of course, over the four-decades-long span of his TV writing career, Link gave viewers much more than just Columbo (for which he co-wrote only a single episode—the figurative first pilot, 1968’s Prescription: Murder). With Levinson (1934-1987), he scripted installments of weekly shows such as Richard Diamond, Private Detective, Michael Shayne, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Burke’s Law, Honey West, and “wheel series” including McCloud, The Name of the Game, The Psychiatrist, and San Francisco International Airport. The pair also created memorable crime dramas, among them Mannix, Tenafly, Ellery Queen, Blacke’s Magic, and Murder, She Wrote. In addition, Deadline explains, the prolific pair

co-created several groundbreaking television movies including My Sweet Charlie (1970), about the burgeoning friendship between a white pregnant runaway in her late teens and an African American lawyer wrongly accused of murder; That Certain Summer (1972), one of television’s first sympathetic portrayals of homosexuality; and The Execution of Private Slovik (1974), a powerful account of the only soldier executed for desertion during World War II. Both of the latter films featured a young Martin Sheen.

In addition to their television work, Link and Levinson wrote the scripts for the feature films The Hindenburg (1975), Rollercoaster (1977), and Steve McQueen’s last film, The Hunter (1980).

Although Link was less familiar for his short stories, he and Levinson—both of whom had grown up as Ellery Queen followers—made their first professional sale as writers to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, providing a tale called “Whistle While You Work” to that monthly’s November 1954 issue. Much later, publisher Crippen & Landru released The Columbo Collection (2010), offering a dozen new mystery yarns starring Falk’s police protagonist. Back when that book debuted, Link said, “I’ve already got enough [other Columbo stories] for a follow-up book.” Perhaps this author’s demise will convince Crippen & Landru to procure those for a sequel. We can only hope.

I didn’t know Bill Link well. But I treasure the fact that I knew him at all. I grew up as a fan of Columbo, and to a lesser extent James McEachin’s Tenafly. Later, thanks to YouTube, I enjoyed many of the Levinson and Link teleflicks. In 2010, I convinced Link to let me interview him for The Rap Sheet, the results of which are here. As I recall, I spent a good hour and half on the telephone with him (he preferred talking to answering questions via e-mail), and was thrilled to chat with this man who’d given me so many entertaining hours in front of the boob tube. Later that same year I finally met Link (and his wife, Margery Nelson) in person at Bouchercon in San Francisco, which I consider one of that convention’s highlights. He came across as warm, thoughtful, and happy to relive the triumphs and vicissitudes of his years making television history.

Link and Levinson won diverse commendations during their collaborating years, among them Emmys, Golden Globes, and Edgars. In 2018, Link was presented with the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America for “lifetime achievement and consistent quality.” (Click here to watch his acceptance speech.) But it seemed to me that Bill Link most prized the knowledge that other people remained fond of and curious about his work. He can rest (in peace) assured that, for me at least, that will always be the case.

READ MORE: “Thanks for the Memories: R.I.P., William Link” (The Columbophile); “William Link, Columbo and Murder, She Wrote Co-Creator, Dies at 87,” by Eli Countryman (Variety).

Baldacci Takes the Nero

Virginia author David Baldacci has won the 2020 Nero Award for his novel One Good Deed (Grand Central), the first to star Aloysius Archer, a “straight-talking World War II veteran fresh out of prison.” The Nero Award is presented annually by the New York City-based fan organization The Wolfe Pack to what it calls “the best American mystery written in the tradition of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe stories.”

Strangely, the Wolfe Pack press release carrying that news makes no mention of other finalists for this commendation. However, we’ve heard (through Twitter) that David C. Taylor’s Night Watch (Severn House) was also in contention for the 2020 Nero. If anyone out there has a complete list of the Nero nominees, please let us know.

The Wolfe Pack’s news release reports as well that “El Cuerpo en el Barril” (“The Body in the Barrel”), by Tom Larsen, will receive the 2020 Black Orchid Novella Award. This prize is given out jointly by The Wolfe Pack and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Larsen’s tale will be published in the July 2021 issue of AHMM.

(Hat tip to The Gumshoe Site.)

On the Critical List

(Editor’s note: The following article comes from Fraser Massey, a freelance journalist living in East London​, England, who has contributed work in the past to British periodicals such as the Radio Times, Now, and The Times of London. His unpublished first novel, Whitechapel Messiah, was shortlisted last year in the “New Voices” category at London’s Capital Crime Festival. He’s currently preparing to submit that manuscript to publishers.)

Santa wasn’t the only one who, during this season, could be found making lists and checking them twice. Crime-fiction reviewers have been equally industrious, looking back over the last 12 months and jotting down their favorite mystery and thriller reads of 2020.

Rap Sheet critics weighed in on this subject, of course, as did myriad other usual suspects, among them Marilyn Stasio and Sarah Lyall of The New York Times; Laura Wilson of The Guardian; The Washington Post’s Maureen Corrigan and Richard Lipez; the two Declans, Burke and Hughes, at The Irish Times; the overworked editors of CrimeReads; Will Gore of The Spectator; Adam Woog of The Seattle Times; Ayo Onatade of Shots; and the Daily Mirror’s Jon Coates (please note that if you wish to find his selections, you must scroll through the recommendations of that British paper’s other reviewers). A variety of print publications place viewing restrictions on non-subscribers. Therefore, we’re indebted to George Easter, the editor of Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine, for breaching such firewalls in order to provide us with a splendidly detailed round-up that includes choices from Mark Sanderson, Joan Smith, John Dugdale, and James Owen of the London Times and Sunday Times; Barry Forshaw and Adam LeBor of The Financial Times; The Wall Street Journal’s Tom Nolan; Jake Kerridge of The Daily Telegraph, and Oline H. Cogdill from the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. Easter’s compilation mentions, as well, the reading choices of his publication’s own commentators. An accounting of additional reviewers’ inventories consulted while putting this story together can be found at the post’s end.

Between all of these knowledgeable readers, we found 328 separate books being endorsed—212 of those finding favor with only a single reviewer each.

So is there a critical consensus of which recent crime, mystery, and thriller novels deserve the greatest acclaim? Yes, there is definitely a clear winner, plus a further 10 titles which stood out above the rest. Below, then, are 2020’s most frequently recommended books in this genre, arranged in descending order of their number of mentions on “bests” lists.

1. Blacktop Wasteland, by S.A. Cosby (Flatiron [U.S.], Headline [UK]). Cosby’s muscular slice of American Deep South rural noir ranked way ahead of its competition, finding more than a few champions among reviewers. One of those was Dwyer Murphy, the editor-in-chief of CrimeReads, who enthused of this book, “Dread and excitement combine to create a unique sense of atmosphere, one that will keep readers pushing ahead toward a genuinely powerful conclusion.”

2. The Searcher, by Tana French (Viking), was praised by “Booklist Queen” Rachael Pingel as a “slow-burn mystery that will reward those who love a good character study.”

3. The Thursday Murder Club, by Richard Osman (Penguin [U.S.], Viking [UK]). Declan Hughes wrote in The Irish Times, “Osman’s hugely successful debut is that rare thing, a genuinely funny comic mystery that succeeds completely as a crime novel.”

Three titles tied for fourth place:

4. Winter Counts, by David Heska Wanbli Weiden (Ecco [U.S.])

4. One by One, by Ruth Ware (Gallery/Scout Press [U.S.],
Harvill Secker [UK])

4. Long Bright River, by Liz Moore (Riverhead [U.S.],
Hutchinson [UK])



Followed by:

7. The Devil and the Dark Water, by Stuart Turton (Sourcebooks Landmark [U.S.], Raven [UK])

And then four titles tied for eighth place:

8. These Women, by Ivy Pochoda (Ecco [U.S.], Faber and Faber [UK])

8. When No One Is Watching, by Alyssa Cole (Morrow [U.S.])

8. A Song for the Dark Times, by Ian Rankin (Little, Brown [U.S.], Orion [UK])

8. Moonflower Murders, by Anthony Horowitz (Harper [U.S.], Century [UK])

This top-11 lineup features six male writers and five women. Five of the novelists here are American and five others are British, plus Ireland’s Tana French.

Sifting through the complete roster of 2020 selections reveals that this was a good year for familiar authors and characters. A Song for Dark Times, for instance, marked the 23rd outing for Rankin’s heavy-drinking, irascible Edinburgh detective, John Rebus. The Sicilian Method, the 26th Inspector Montalbano novel from the late Andrea Camilleri, didn’t quite make the top-11 cut, but still ranked high in critical praise. So did Guilt at the Garage, the 20th among Simon Brett’s cozy Fethering mysteries, starring amateur seaside sleuths Carole Seddon and Jude Nichols; Peter James’s 16th Roy Grace novel, Find Them Dead; and Troubled Blood, the fifth “Robert Galbraith” book, actually penned by J.K. Rowling and featuring comparative newcomer Cormoran Strike, a wounded Afghanistan war veteran turned London private eye.

At the complete other end of the spectrum, Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club is his first book. American director and producer Steven Spielberg​ has already purchased the film rights, and that quirky mystery, set in a retirement home, has become the first debut novel ever to top the British bestseller charts at Christmastime.

For any Rap Sheet followers who don’t already know this, Osman is an English comedian and television host, the co-presenter of BBC One’s 11-year-old TV quiz show, Pointless. But he isn’t the only well-known British TV figure to find his work celebrated on this year’s “best of” lists. Journalist Tom Bradby, the anchor of ITV News at Ten, also found his second Kate Henderson spy thriller, Double Agent, included among reviewers’ favorites. As a result of this pair’s sales figures, don’t be surprised if—in Britain at least—book publishers make a New Year’s resolution over the next several days to contact literary agents, inquiring as to whether they have a small-screen stalwart or two under contract who might fancy having a go at a crime thriller.

* * *

Beyond the diverse sources mentioned above, we consulted “best crime fiction of 2020” listicles from the following sources when preparing this post: Natasha Cooper at The Literary Review; NB magazine’s Paul Burke; Vicki Briner, Liz French, and Lesa Holstine of Library Journal; the team at Publishers Weekly; Sonjia van der Westhuizen and Catherine Turnbell of Crime Fiction Lover; Sophie Roell’s selections for FiveBooks; Sarah Weinman’s listings in The Crime Lady newsletter; Michael J. Seidlinger’s choices at Murder & Mayhem; blogger Jacob Collins’ picks at Hooked from Page One; Rachael Pingel’s “17 Best Thriller Books of 2020”; Novel Suspects contributor Jamie Canavés’ “Top 5 Picks for Mystery and Suspense of 2020”; Jennifer Marie Lin’s “20 Best Mystery Novels & Thrillers” rundown for The Bibliofile; Victoria Selman and the rest of the CrimeTime UK panel; the She Reads editors’ “Best Thrillers of 2020” feature; Literary Hub’s “Best Reviewed Mystery and Crime Fiction of 2020”; Criminal Element’s nominations for “Best Books of 2020”; and BookPage’s 2020 mystery and suspense picks.

Several crime-fictionists, among them Tana French, Ragnar Jónasson, and Rosamund Lupton, identified their own favorite works in this entertaining wrap-up for Dead Good Books, while their fellow author Kellye Garrett offered her preferences at Goodreads. We’ve added into our totals this year’s Goodreads Choice Award winners; the New York Public Library’s half-dozen best crime fiction, mystery, and thriller recommendations; and National Public Radio’s suggestions of 2020’s top-notch thriller and mysteries. The Amazon Book Review’s picks are here, and British bookseller Waterstones’ top-30 choices among the year’s numerous detective novels and thrillers are to be found right here. Finally, we consulted this inventory of 2020 preferences from First Monday Crime mover and shaker Joy Kluver.

Note that certain reviewers’ picks appeared in multiple sources. Where this happened, they’ve been counted only once in our tally. And books that were suggested, but were released in either the U.S. or the UK prior to 2020, were not counted in the totals.

Cruel Yule

Mystery Fanfare’s Janet Rudolph recently posted her three-part selection of Christmas-related crime and mystery novels. (See titles A-E, F-L, and M-Z.) Not to be shown up, author Peter Swanson (Eight Perfect Murders) is out today with a piece, in The Guardian, that highlights what he calls the “Top 10 Christmas Crime Stories.”

“In the golden age of detective fiction,” he writes, “most of the big-name authors took a crack at a Christmas-themed whodunnit. And quite a few are worth a read. But it’s not just the practitioners of locked-room mysteries who have inserted a yuletide spirit into a murderous tale. There are a few decent hard-boiled novels that tackle the subject as well. Christmas can be a lonely time, especially in the big city, and that can lead to unfortunate consequences.”

Among Swanson’s favorites: The Thin Man, by Dashiell Hammett (1934); The Corpse in the Snowman, by Nicholas Blake (1941); The Long Shadow, by Celia Fremlin (1975); and A Fatal Grace, by Louise Penny (2011). Click here to read all about them, and more.

Brandt’s Honor on the Books

Congratulations to Randal S. Brandt, who has been given the Distinguished Librarian Award from the Librarians Association of the University of California’s Berkeley chapter. Brandt, you may recall, is a librarian at UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library and the curator of that institution’s California Detective Fiction Collection. He also happens to be the creator of the Web’s A David Dodge Companion and an occasional contributor to The Rap Sheet. (Among other things, he wrote our wonderful piece this last August about the real-life burglary that inspired David Dodge to write To Catch a Thief).

(Hat tip to Elizabeth Foxwell.)

READ MORE: “Shrouded in Mysteries: A Conversation with Randal S. Brandt,” by Grace Lemon (Choice).

Bullet Points: Stocking Stuffers Edition

• Agatha Christie fans are familiar with Ariadne Oliver, a fictional mystery writer who occasionally (in novels such as Cards on the Table and Mrs. McGinty’s Dead) helps Christie’s famous Belgian sleuth, Hercule Poirot, solve crimes—and provides a modicum of comic relief in the process. Now for the first time ever, the Swedo-Finnish master detective from Oliver’s books, Sven Hjerson, is set to star in his own TV series, according to The Killing Times. That Swedish production, Agatha Christie’s Sven Hjerson, began shooting earlier this month in southern Finland. The plan is to make four classic whodunit films for airing in Sweden and Germany during the fall of 2021. Actor-comedian Johan Rheborg has signed on to portray Hjerson, described as a retired star criminal investigator “who loves crudités, cold winter baths and solving murder mysteries.” His partner-sidekick is Klara Sandberg (played by Hanna Alström), a former trash TV producer who successfully pitches a true-life crime show starring Hjerson, who will solve a real crime each week.” The Killing Times notes that “no UK broadcaster has been announced yet.” As to when the show might reach the States, well, that is pretty much anybody’s guess.

• Len Deighton’s 1962 spy novel, The IPCRESS File—which was turned into a well-respected 1965 cinematic feature starring Michael Caine—is now also being refashioned as a six-part, Berlin-set television series by British network ITV. Deadline reports, “The adaptation will be penned by BAFTA-winning Trainspotting writer John Hodge, while the cast will be led by Gangs of London and Peaky Blinders star Joe Cole, alongside Bohemian Rhapsody actress Lucy Boynton, and The Night Manager’s Tom Hollander.” The Killing Times offers this plot précis:

It’s 1963. Cold war rages between West and East. Nuclear bombers are permanently airborne. In this highly charged atmosphere, we join Harry Palmer—a British army sergeant on the make in Berlin. In this newly partitioned city, a sharp working-class young man with sophisticated tastes can make a lot of money. Wholesaler, retailer, fixer, smuggler, Harry’s varied interests bring him into contact with everything and everyone—until the law catches up and it all comes crashing to a halt. Harry finds himself sentenced to eight years in a grim military jail in England, all his prospects abruptly torn away.

But his impressive network and efficiency have not gone unnoticed, and a gentleman from British intelligence has a proposal. To avoid prison, Harry Palmer will become a spy. And the case on which he cuts his teeth will be The Ipcress File.

• Mick Herron’s espionage novels will provide the source material for yet another televised drama, this one from AppleTV+. Gary Oldman is signed to star in Slow Horses as Jackson Lamb, “a brilliant but irascible leader of a group of spies who end up in MI5’s Slough House, having been exiled from the mainstream for their mistakes.” Kristin Scott Thomas, Jack Lowden, Olivia Cooke, and Jonathan Pryce round out the main cast. “Six of these episodes will be based on Herron’s first book, [2010’s] Slow Horses,” says Deadline, “and the other six will be based on his second novel, Dead Lions [2013]. Production sources are referring to it as two seasons, or at the very least, two sets of six episodes. Apple sees it as one season, but declined to comment on release plans.” Filming began in November.

• The Killing Times asked “some of the world’s best crime novelists”—Ragnar Jónasson, C.L. Taylor, Doug Johnstone, Laura Lippman, etc.—to identify which TV crime dramas they have most enjoyed watching during this frustrating pandemic year. Among their choices are Baghdad Central, The Nest, Dead to Me, and the classic American detective series Columbo. The Killing Times promises to publish its own “countdown of the best crime dramas of 2020 at the end of this month.”

• The Atlantic magazine’s catalogue of “The 15 Best TV Shows of 2020” is light on mystery and crime fiction, but it does feature the too-soon-cancelled Dare Me. “Glitter and pom-poms shouldn’t pair so well with a murder mystery,” writes Shirley Li. “Yet the peppy positivity and fierce discipline of cheerleading contrasts beautifully with the genre’s messy violence in Dare Me. USA Network’s addictive, seductively shot adaptation of Megan Abbott’s [2012] novel follows a pair of best friends rattled by the arrival of their high-school squad’s enigmatic new coach.” Li adds a thumbs-up to Cobie Smulders’ private-eye series, Stumptown, which was given the ax after a single season on ABC, but is currently being shopped elsewhere.

• Both Season 4 of The Crown (brightened by the presence of Emma Corrin as Princess Diana) and Anya Taylor-Joy’s mini-series, The Queen’s Gambit, also earned The Atlantic’s appreciation ... as they did positive acclaim from Kristi Turnquist, longtime TV critic for The Oregonian, in Portland. Making Turnquist’s picks list, too, are the fifth, penultimate season of Better Call Saul (FX); Season 4 of the anthology series Fargo; and the debut run of HBO’s Perry Mason, starring Matthew Rhys, which has been renewed for a sophomore series of episodes to stream sometime next year.

• Continuing our inventory of “best books” lists, note that critics with the British blog Crime Fiction Lover are slowly rolling out their individual top-five selections for 2020. We’ve heard so far from Sonja van der Westhuizen and Catherine Turnbull, with more still to come. Meanwhile, CrimeReads has added further to it already significant set of favorites with registers of what it dubs “The Best Psychological Thrillers of 2020” and “The Best Espionage Novels of 2020.”

• In Reference to Murder brings word that the Tucson, Arizona, mystery bookshop Clues Unlimited is closing. Christine Burke, who’s owned Clues since 1996, calls it a casualty of ”the global pandemic and advancing age.” The blog adds that “Until the store closes, all new releases will be 20% off, and all used mass-market paperbacks will be $2. Used trade paperbacks and hardcovers will go for $5. The store will be open for appointments until Saturday, December 26.”

• The Strand Magazine has already released previously unpublished work by Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Ernest Hemingway, and others. But its latest issue, says The Guardian, includes “Adventure on a Bad Night,” “a ‘lost’ story by Shirley Jackson, in which the author of The Haunting of Hill House shows a microcosm of the racism and sexism in U.S. society through a dissatisfied woman’s trip to a corner shop …” The paper explains further that “Jackson’s [eldest] son, Laurence Hyman, said he found the story ‘among many others haphazardly stuffed into 52 cartons at the Library of Congress.’ All of Jackson’s papers were donated to the library by her husband Stanley a few years after her death” in 1965.

• National Public Radio host Michel Martin spoke with Laurence Hyman about the recent discovery of “Adventure on a Bad Night.”

• With Christmas now less than a week away, Mystery Fanfare’s Janet Rudolph has finally posted all three parts of her extensive collection of holiday-appropriate crime fiction. The listings are arranged alphabetically by author: A-E, F-L, and M-Z. Additionally, she offers lists of mystery short stories and anthologies that are perfect to tackle at this more-festive-than-normal time of year.

• Separately, Rudolph has compiled a shorter roster of winter solstice-related mysteries. The solstice will take place in the Northern Hemisphere this coming Monday, December 21.

• I, for one, did not know there was a Charlie Chan Christmas mystery! The Postman on Holiday’s Lou Armagno acquaints us with “The Man Who Murdered Santa Claus,” a circa-1946 episode of NBC radio’s The Adventures of Charlie Chan.

• Making the best of a bad situation: Mystery Tribune reports that “Due to COVID-19, one of Canada’s most beloved, long-running period dramas, Murdoch Mysteries, is without a new season this Christmas, which is usually when new episodes premiere. But the good news is that the streaming service Acorn TV and the show’s producers have the next best thing: an intimate concert special shot on the series set, hosted by the Detective William Murdoch himself (Yannick Bisson), consisting of music popular during the Victorian and Edwardian eras, along with the show’s favorite themes– performed by a world-class ensemble from the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. A Music Lover’s Guide to Murdoch Mysteries will premiere in the U.S. and Canada, on Christmas Eve, on Thursday, December 24, 2020 on Acorn TV.”

• A Shroud of Thoughts has a nice piece up about the historical association between holiday shopping and department stores. “The Christmas shopping season has long been important to American retailers,” he writes, “and the Christmas shopping season evolved rather early in the United States. It was as early as the 1820s and 1830s that sweet shops and candy stores in New York City began capitalizing on Christmas. By the 1840s many retail shops were already advertising themselves as ‘Santa Claus's headquarters.’”

• Another loss for mystery fiction: Parnell Hall, a California-born former private detective and actor turned novelist, passed away on December 15 at age 76. He was best known for penning separate series about an ambulance-chasing New York City private investigator Stanley Hastings (Detective, A Fool for a Client) and “Puzzle Lady” Cora Felton (Lights! Cameras! Puzzles!), In her obituary, Janet Rudolph remembers Hall as a “funny, supportive, musical, generous, and all around good guy. … Everyone loved him.” His most recent novel, Chasing Jack, was released by Brash Books in September. The Gumshoe Site says Hall died of COVID-19. FOLLOW-UP: Author Robert J. Randisi sent me a note explaining: “Parnell succumbed to COVID-19, but it all started with a lung transplant, after which he had to take dialysis treatments every day until he could get a kidney transplant (didn’t happen), and then he got pneumonia and went into the hospital, where he contracted the COVID. He fought a long time.”

• And though I included, in The Rap Sheet’s last news round-up, a few brief comments about Scottish romance and crime writer Alanna Knight succumbing to illness in early December, at age 97, Mike Ripley’s longer obituary of that prolific author in The Guardian provides a great deal more interesting information.

PaperBack: “My Kind of Game”

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



My Kind of Game, by “Anthony Rome,” aka Marvin H. Albert. This was the third and last novel in Albert’s series starring “hard-loving, hard-living” Miami, Florida, private detective Tony Rome, who makes his home aboard a 36-foot cruiser, The Straight Pass, that he scored in a craps game and has a two-room office in downtown Miami. Cover illustration by Victor Kalin.

So Many Choices

Not content with already having announced their nominees for “the best crime novels of 2020,” CrimeReads editors have followed that up by posting lists of this year’s top-notch noir novels, debut novels, gothic-flavored tales, and true-crime books. It all reminds me of how many books I never got around to reading these last 12 months.

Meanwhile, George Easter, the editor of Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine, has made a valiant attempt to compile a master list of as many “best crime fiction of 2020” choices as he can find. Predictably, there will be more such offerings to come between now and the close of December, but this is a useful overview for the nonce.

Attracting Eyeballs

I was unimpressed by Blogger’s most recent software update—and I certainly wasn’t alone in my displeasure. In fact, fellow mystery-fiction blogger Lesa Holstine switched over to the content-management system WordPress just to avoid having to learn the quirks of dealing with all of Blogger’s clumsy modifications.

One Blogger change I do like, though, is that its statistics-counting system finally lets me find out what the most popular posts have been in any given year. (Previously, I could filter for days, weeks, and single months, but not for a full 12 months). Using that new toy, here are the five most-read Rap Sheet postings since mid-December of 2019:

• “The Easiest Eighty Thousand Words Ever Put Together”: The Story Behind the Story of David Dodge’s “To Catch a Thief,” by Randal S. Brandt (August 5, 2020)
• A “Lost” Dennis Novel Makes Its Debut, by Lee Goldberg
(January 2, 2020)
• Thrilling Escapes for a Lockdown Summer (June 12, 2020)
• The Book You Have to Read: “To Kiss, or Kill,” by Day Keene, by Steven Nester (December 20, 2019)
• “The Uncles” Consumed by Flames (June 4, 2020)

Posts provided by guest writers include their names. The others were all my own humble contributions.

I am particularly pleased to see included among these top-draws librarian Randal Brandt’s wonderful backgrounder on David Dodge’s 1952 novel, To Catch a Thief. As he explains in his article, that work was inspired by a real-life burglary that took place on France’s Côte d'Azur, committed 70 years ago this last August. If not for that audacious crime, and for Dodge’s imagination, we wouldn’t now also be able to enjoy Alfred Hitchcock’s romantic thriller To Catch a Thief, released by Paramount Pictures in August 1955.

The Bygone Delights of Cast Listings

Am I the only one who loves the “Cast of Characters” pages that so often introduced paperback crime novels during the mid-20th century? Probably not, but they definitely rank nowadays among the ugly stepchildren of publishing. With rare exceptions, such prefatory pages don’t appear in new books; even Hard Case Crime—normally a supporter of all things old-fashioned—excised from its November re-release of Erle Stanley Gardner’s Shills Can’t Cash Chips the roll call of players that had appeared in that book’s 1970 Pocket edition.

Too bad, because those one- or two-page lists of dramatis personae were often witty, filled with wordplay, and delightfully provocative. As I explain in a piece posted this morning in CrimeReads,

“Cast of Characters” pages date back at least to the 19th century and such densely populated yarns as Charles Dickens’ Bleak House (1853), which limned one of literature’s early eccentric sleuths thus: “Mr. Inspector Bucket, a sagacious, indefatigable detective officer.” Yet they enjoyed a particular and particularly creative later flowering during the mid-20th-century American paperback boom. It became de rigueur back then for crime-fiction publishers such as Pocket, Dell, Ace, and Permabooks to open their releases with rosters of this sort. (Those might disappear from subsequent versions, however, which is why I mention the publication year of each vintage edition cited here.) Some lists included not only provocative or revealing personality details, but also the page numbers on which the players were set to enter the plot line. The choicest examples were pawky and piquant in comparable measure; they were intended to bring a smile to the reader’s face and perhaps even mine a chuckle from his or her throat.

I have collected many examples of “Cast of Characters” write-ups, which you can enjoy by clicking here.

The Spy Who Came to Write

Although I was an early watcher of spy movies, thanks to my father’s fondness for the James Bond flicks, I did not become a reader of espionage novels until much later. My youthful bent was more toward private-eye tales than espionage yarns, and it wasn’t until the 1980s that I finally discovered John le Carré. Unfortunately, my introduction to his best-selling work came with 1979’s Smiley’s People, the concluding installment in his “Karla Trilogy” ... and no place to begin an exploration of his oeuvre if you wish to understand the complex world of fictional British intelligence agent George Smiley.

Perhaps my not-inconsiderable confusion over that novel and its back-story was what led to my continuing preference for le Carré’s standalones, rather than his nine-novel Smiley series. Just in the last few years, I’ve read a number of le Carré’s one-offs, including A Small Town in Germany (1968), The Night Manager (1993), The Tailor of Panama (1996), The Mission Song (2006), A Delicate Truth (2013), and Agent Running in the Field (2019). And it was only a few weeks ago that I polished off his semi-autobiographical novel A Perfect Spy, which the author claimed was his favorite among the lot.

When I heard last night that le Carré had passed away, at age 89, I immediately visited my bookcases for reassurance that I had more of his fiction at hand yet to enjoy.

Better obituarists than I have weighed in on the long and eventful life of le Carré. The New York Times, for instance, observes that

John le Carré knew deception intimately because he was born into it. (For one thing, “John le Carré” was not his real name.) Born David John Moore Cornwell in Poole, Dorset, on Oct. 19, 1931, he had a ragged, destabilizing childhood dominated by his father, Ronald, an amoral, flamboyant, silver-tongued con man who palled around with celebrities and crooks, left trails of unpaid bills wherever he went, and was forever on the verge of carrying out a huge scam or going to jail. (He was in and out of prison for fraud.)

“Manipulative, powerful, charismatic, clever, untrustworthy,” Mr. Le Carré once described him.

The family lurched between extremes. “When father was flush, the chauffeur-driven Bentley would be parked outside,” he said. “When things were a bit iffy, it was parked in the back garden, and when we were down and out, it disappeared altogether.” Often, debts would be called in.

“You have no idea how humiliating it was, as a boy, to suddenly have all your clothes, your toys, snatched by the bailiff,” Mr. le Carré told an interviewer.

The Guardian notes that Cornwall “began working for the secret services while studying German in Switzerland at the end of the 1940s. After teaching at Eton he joined the British Foreign Service as an intelligence officer, recruiting, running and looking after spies behind the Iron Curtain from a back office at the MI5 building on London’s Curzon Street. Inspired by his MI5 colleague, the novelist John Bingham, he began publishing thrillers under the pseudonym of John le Carré—despite his publisher’s advice that he opt for two Anglo-Saxon monosyllables such as ‘Chunk-Smith.’”

And National Public Radio recalls:

He wrote his first three books while working for Britain’s MI5 and MI6, and became a full-time author after catapulting onto the global scene with the publication of his third novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, in 1963.

“From the day my novel was published, I realised that now and for ever more I was to be branded as the spy turned writer, rather than as a writer who, like scores of his kind, had done a stint in the secret world, and written about it,” le Carré wrote in a postscript to the 50th anniversary edition of the book. “The novel’s merit, then—or its offence, depending on where you stood—was not that it was authentic, but that it was credible.”

Le Carré himself seemed shocked by how credible people found the book. Writing in The Guardian in 2013, he recalled that the British government had vetted the book and approved it as “sheer fiction from start to finish,” and therefore not a security breach.

“This was not, however, the view taken by the world’s press,” he wrote, “which with one voice decided that the book was not merely authentic but some kind of revelatory Message From The Other Side, leaving me with nothing to do but sit tight and watch, in a kind of frozen awe, as it climbed the bestseller list and stuck there, while pundit after pundit heralded it as the real thing.” One of those was another novelist, Graham Greene, who called it “the best spy story I have ever read.”

While The Spy Who Came in from the Cold didn’t exactly launch his career (he had previously penned two other books), it did give him the critical attention he so needed to turn his interest in writing fiction into a lifelong occupation. Again from The New York Times:

In a career spanning more than a half-century, Mr. le Carré wrote more than two-dozen books and set them as far afield as Rwanda, Chechnya, Turkey, the Caribbean and Southeast Asia. He addressed topics as diverse as the power of pharmaceutical companies, the Arab-Israeli conflict and—after the Berlin Wall fell and his novels became more polemical, and he became more politicized—American and British human-rights excesses in countering terrorism.

If he had political points to make, and he increasingly did, he still gift-wrapped them with elegant, complicated plots and dead-on descriptions; he could paint a whole character in a single sentence. He was a best seller many times over, and at least a half dozen of his novels—including “A Perfect Spy” (1986), which Philip Roth pronounced “the best English novel since the war”—can be considered classics. But he will always be best known for his Cold War novels, a perfect match of author and subject.

In addition to reader acclaim, le Carré’s fiction brought him more than a few commendations, among them the 1963 Gold Dagger award for Best Crime Novel from Britain’s Crime Writers’ Association (CWA) and the 1965 Edgar Award for Best Mystery Novel from the Mystery Writers of America (MWA), both given for The Spy Who Came in from the Cold; the MWA’s 1984 Grand Master award and the CWA’s 1988 Diamond Dagger for Lifetime Achievement; and the $100,000 Olof Palme Prize, given to him last January and honoring “outstanding achievement in any of the areas of anti-racism, human rights, international understanding, peace and common security.” Even in his early years, le Carré was a favorite radio and TV guest, appearing on the U.S. game show To Tell the Truth in 1964, being interviewed on the BBC in 1965 by British spy-turned-talk-show host Malcolm Muggeridge, and conversing with Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air show back in 2017.

Further, his high profile gave him the soapbox he needed in his later years to criticize politicians. Prominent among his targets were Tony Blair, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump, the last of whom he denigrated as “[Vladimir] Putin’s s**thouse cleaner,” in Agent Running in the Field, adding that Trump “does everything for little Vladi that little Vladi can’t do for himself: pisses on European unity, pisses on human rights, pisses on NATO. Assures us that Crimea and Ukraine belong to the Holy Russian Empire, the Middle East belongs to the Jews and the Saudis, and to hell with the world order.”

By the time he died from pneumonia this last Saturday, December 12, le Carré was, to quote his agent, Jonny Geller, an “undisputed giant of English literature” who “defined the Cold War era and fearlessly spoke truth to power.” Thank goodness I still have some le Carré novels to crack open for the first time, including all those Smileys.

(All three covers in this post were created by Matthew Taylor.)

READ MORE: “John le Carré Missed Nothing,” by Anthony Lane (The New Yorker); “John Le Carré Didn’t Just Invent the Characters in the Foreground of the Spy World. He Designed the Entire Set,” by David Ignatius (The Washington Post); “The Double Life of John le Carré” and “The Singular Achievement of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” by James Parker (The Atlantic); “The Essential John le Carré,” by Joumana Khatib (The New York Times); “John le Carré’s Call for the Dead” (Vintage Pop Fictions); “Why John le Carré Is More Than a Spy Novelist,” by William Boyd (New Statesman); “John le Carré: Writer, Spy, Neighbor, Friend,” by Philippe Sands (The New York Times); “Searching for Decency: John le Carré, 1931-2020,” by Craig Sisterson (The Spinoff).

Ayo Hands Down Her Decisions

Further adding to our inventory of “best crime novels of 2020” lists, here comes Shots critic and blogger Ayo Onatade with a very fine top-12 pile of her own. Among her choices:

• The Law of Innocence, by Michael Connelly (Orion)
• Like Flies from Afar, by K. Ferrari (Cannongate)
• The Less Dead, by Denise Mina (Vintage)
• City of Spies, by Mara Timon (Bonnier Zaffre)

Separately, Onatade remarks on her favorites from “an eclectic range of non-fiction crime books.” Those include Agatha Christie’s Poirot: The Greatest Detective in the World, by Dr Mark Aldridge (HarperCollins); Cover Me: The Vintage Art of Pan Books, 1950-1965, by Colin Larkin (Telos); Detectives in the Shadows: A Hard-Boiled History, by Susanna Lee (John Hopkins University Press); and Southern Cross Crime, by Craig Sisterton (No Exit Press).

Hmm. It seems I missed reading a few good books this year …

Mystery of a Murderer’s Message

The case of the so-called Zodiac Killer—a never-identified serial slayer who terrorized Northern California during the late 1960s and early ’70s—is old enough, that many readers of this blog have probably heard little about it. Not so David Oranchak, a 46-year-old Web designer in Virginia. From The Washington Post:

For 51 years, one of the Zodiac Killer’s puzzling codes he sent in letters to newspapers in the late 1960s and early 1970s has confounded the cryptography community, law enforcement and curious citizens.

But the Bay Area killer’s 340-character cipher mailed to the San Francisco Chronicle has been cracked by an international team of code-breakers. The breakthrough, first reported by the Chronicle, was verified by the FBI.

“I felt vindicated,” said American code-breaker David Oranchak, who told The Washington Post that he first saw the cipher 14 years ago and thought he could decipher it quickly.

Click here to find out what that cipher “roughly translates to.”

READ MORE: “Zodiac ‘340 Cipher’ Cracked by Code Experts 51
Years After It Was Sent to the S.F. Chronicle,” by Kevin Fagan (San Francisco Chronicle).

Bullet Points: Totally Jam-Packed Edition

• Coming off his recent success with the Netflix mini-series The Queen’s Gambit, filmmaker Scott Frank is said to now be “working on the development of a Sam Spade TV series that he is hoping [English actor] Clive Owen will star in. And his pitch for the series, which follows the adventures of the protagonist from The Maltese Falcon, sounds like it could be pretty incredible,” remarks The Playlist. “‘What if you do Sam Spade later in life, when he’s 60 years old?’ explained Frank. ‘He’s now an ex-pat living in the South of France … And his past finds him in this small town. We’re doing six episodes. Clive Owen is going to play Sam Spade.’” The idea reminds me of the concept behind Lawrence Osborne’s Only to Sleep, a remarkably satisfying 2018 Philip Marlowe novel that imagined Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles private eye as a 72-year-old man, living in retirement in Baja California and being hired to investigate the suspicious swimming death of a debt-ridden con man/developer. Owen, as you might recall, was talked of years ago as the perfect person to play Marlowe in a feature-length film based on one of Chandler’s famous yarns. Are we any more likely to see him star in a Sam Spade TV drama than we were to witness his performance in a Marlowe flick? Time will tell. (Hat tip to Frederick Zackel.)

• The Gumshoe Site brings this exciting news: “Canogate Books asked [Scottish author] Ian Rankin to complete William McIlvanney’s handwritten manuscript of [a] final Inspector Jack Laidlaw novel. McIlvanney, often called ‘The Godfather of Tartan Noir,’ was the author of three novels featuring Inspector Jack Laidlaw of Glasgow CID, and died in December 2015 at the age of 79. His living partner, Siobhan Lynch, found an unfinished novel, The Dark Remains, the story of Laidlaw’s first case, and took the manuscript to Canongate Books, which had republished McIlvanney’s books in 2013. As McIlvanney was a literary hero of Rankin, Rankin … accepted the offer [to complete that novel]. The Dark Remains will be published by Canongate in September 2021.” In its own report on this posthumous literary partnership, The Guardian quotes Rankin as saying that McIlvanney left behind only “notes towards a book, a few scenes, some central characters, a sense of what the story might actually be about, but fairly incomplete. … Willie doesn’t quite lay out who the killer is, so I had to get inside his head to see what he was actually saying,’ he said. ‘It seemed like he had two or three stories that he was juggling … It was an act of archaeology, and an act of detection.’” Regardless, you can count on me to purchase a copy of the finished product!

• This item comes from In Reference to Murder:

Sisters in Crime announced the creation of the new SinC Pride Award for Emerging LGBTQIA+ Crime Writers. The SinC Pride Award will be a $2,000 annual award to support an emerging writer of the LGBTQIA+ crime-fiction writing community with both financial and practical career guidance and support. Similar to the Eleanor Taylor Bland Crime Fiction Writers of Color Award, the recipient of the SinC Pride Award may use funds for activities including workshops, seminars, conferences, retreats, online courses, and research activities required for completion of the work. An unpublished writer is preferred, however, publication of not more than 10 pieces of short fiction and/or up to two self-published or traditionally published books will not disqualify an applicant. John Copenhaver, Cheryl Head, and Kristen Lepionka will serve as judges for the inaugural award. Applications will open on January 15 and run through March 15, with the winner announced in early April. For more information, contact grants@sistersincrime.org.

• I never knew that H.G. Wells wrote a mermaid novel.

• CrimeReads is out with its “choices for 2020’s best crime novels, mysteries, and thrillers.” Several of its 10 top titles were predictable, but there are a few surprises. Liz Nugent’s Little Cruelties (Scout), for one. Elizabeth Hand’s The Book of Lamps and Banners (Mulholland), for another. And Alexandra Burt’s Shadow Garden (Berkley).

• Tom Nolan’s 10-best list for The Wall Street Journal contains another handful of eye-openers. He turns thumbs-up on not only Cara Black’s Three Hours in Paris (Soho Crime) and Tom Bouman’s The Bramble and the Rose (Norton), but also Anne Perry’s One Fatal Flaw (Ballantine) and Peter Swanson’s Eight Perfect Murders (Morrow).

• Despite all of my recent attention to “best crime fiction of the year” lists, I missed spotting BookPage’s post about its own 10 mystery and suspense choices. Among that monthly review’s picks are Sophie Hannah’s Perfect Little Children (Morrow), Stuart Turton’s The Devil and the Dark Water (Sourcebooks Landmark), Sara Sliger’s Take Me Apart (MCD), and Heather Young’s The Distant Dead (Morrow).

• Earlier this week I provided a link to New York Times columnist Marilyn Stasio’s inventory of her favorite crime novels of 2020, but I failed to note the publication of Times writer-at-large Sarah Lyall’s list of what she claims are “The Best Thrillers of 2020.” Her nominees stretch from Tana French’s The Searcher (Viking) and Gilly Macmillan’s To Tell You the Truth (Morrow) to Debra Jo Immergut’s “startling” You Again (Ecco). The question, however, is do these books really qualify as “thrillers”?

• Meanwhile, George Easter at Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine has collected his own review staff’s reading favorites from the last dozen months. There are eight contributors represented in his compilation—too many titles for me to mention. But offered below are editor Easter’s 12 “best novel” selections:

— The Last Flight, by Julie Clark (Sourcebooks Landmark)
— Victim 2117, by Jussi Adler-Olsen (Dutton)
— The Finisher, by Peter Lovesey (Soho Crime)
— The Last Hunt, by Deon Meyer (Atlantic Monthly Press)
— Troubled Blood, by Robert Galbraith (Sphere)
— Blacktop Wasteland, by S.A. Cosby (Flatiron)
— The Law of Innocence, by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown)
— House Privilege, by Mike Lawson (Atlantic Monthly Press)
— Blind Vigil, by Matt Coyle (Oceanview)
— The Boy in the Woods, by Harlan Coben (Grand Central)
— Moonflower Murders, by Anthony Horowitz (Harper)
— The Curator, by M.W. Craven (Constable)

• By the way, not long ago Deadly Pleasures launched a brand-new Web site to coincide with its transformation from a print publication to a full-color quarterly digital periodical. Easter says his “goal is to post something new [there] every day or two.” Online contents will include book reviews and newsy bits about crime-fiction commendations, as well as vintage reprints from the magazine’s past (such as Ted Fitzgerald’s 1997 interview with author Stephen Marlowe). The editor has also begun a series called “George’s Mystery Library Videos,” episodes of which are fairly short (lasting 15 or fewer minutes) and have thus far found him talking on camera about “signed material with the same cover art,” James Grady’s “Condor” novels and short fiction, and what makes a “true” first edition. I look forward to seeing how the Deadly Pleasures site evolves in the near future.

• Deadline brings word that “Netflix has greenlit a five-part Swedish-language series on Stig Engström, the man who was named as the probable murderer [in 1986] of former Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme. The Unlikely Murderer is made by Swedish producer FLX—which is behind Netflix series Quicksand and Love & Anarchy—and stars Robert Gustafsson as Engström. The part-fictionalized story is based on a 2018 book [The Unbelievable Truth] by Thomas Pettersson. Following the assassination of Palme in 1986, Engström managed to elude justice right up to his death through a combination of audacity, luck, and a perplexed police force.”

• Jane Harper’s The Dry was one of my favorite crime novels of 2017, so I’m pleased to learn that a big-screen adaptation of that suspenseful yarn is due out on January 1. The bad news is that it will only be showing in Australian theaters—for the time being, anyway. As a post on Harper’s Web site explains, this movie stars Aussie actor Eric Bana, was directed by Robert Connolly (Balibo, Paper Planes, Deep State), and “was filmed across more than 15 towns in rural Victoria, Australia, last year.” The Dry had originally been planned to premiere last August, but was delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic. There’s no word yet on when it might reach viewers outside of Australia.

• My breath caught for a moment when I heard that FOX-TV was preparing a new Banyon series. What came immediately to mind was the short-lived, 1972 NBC crime drama Banyon, starring Robert Forster as a hard-headed private investigator in 1930s Los Angeles. Could it really be that after all these years, someone was intending to revive/reboot that underrated show? Alas, no. As The Hollywood Reporter makes clear, FOX is “developing an animated comedy based on the Crag Banyon Mysteries books by James Mullaney.

Mullaney and Shane Black will write and executive produce the project, which is titled “Crag Banyon P.I.” It follows the supernatural adventures of an alcoholic ex-cop and current private investigator, Banyon, as he solves cases in an alternate noir, otherworldly reality.

The project marks Mullaney’s first television writing gig. He has published nine books in the Crag Banyon series to date, as well as writing numerous entries in the “Destroyer” and “Red Menace” book series.

• January 8 will bring, to British TV viewers, the return of Rebecka Martinsson, a crime series based on a succession of books by Åsa Larsson—only this season’s episodes introduce a new lead actress.  “[S]eries one of Rebecka Martinsson was a big hit with Nordic Noir fans,” notes The Killing Times. “Starring Ida Engvoll, the Swedish series told the story of a prosecutor who returned to her roots in Kiruna to attend the funeral of the priest that confirmed her. Series two sees Engvoll replaced by Sascha Zacharias in the lead role.” Setting up the storytelling arc of this eight-installment run, The Killing Times says: “Several years have passed and Rebecka’s anxieties about truly fitting in and whether she made the right choice have worsened. As a distraction she throws herself head-first into work to solve gruesome crimes in the area.” Click on the Killing Times link for a trailer.

• In the States, Rebecka Martinsson is available via Acorn TV.

• With the novel coronavirus continuing to discourage social activities of any sort, my search continues for spirited, thoughtful, and at least moderately distinctive small-screen entertainments. A recent discovery was McDonald & Dodds, a light-hearted and oft-clever two-episode ITV show initially broadcast in the spring of 2020. It features Tala Gouveia as Detective Chief Inspector Lauren McDonald, a young, black, thorough-going go-getter from London who has been reassigned to the much quieter city of Bath, England. There she’s partnered with Detective Sergeant Dodds (Jason Watkins), an older white male who has spent years trapped behind a desk, yet retains an uncommon perspicacity when it comes to crime solving. In his review of that program’s pilot, Steve Lewis of Mystery*File writes: “I don’t know about you, but I’m always interested in yet another pair of mismatched homicide policemen, whether British or American. I love watching how their differences play off each other, how get to know each other, and maybe even get to respect each other. Old and worn-out stuff, I know, but when the show is well-written, which it is in this case, and when the players are perfectly selected, even more so this time around, well, to sum it up, I enjoyed this one.” You can see a trailer for the series here. Radio Times reports that a second three-part series of McDonald & Dodds is already in production. Hurrah!

• The Guardian posted a fine review of that series last spring.



• Next up on my to-be-screened list: Amazon Prime’s new neo-noir film I’m Your Woman (trailer above), starring The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’s Rachel Brosnahan as a sheltered wife and mother who’s “forced to go on the run after her [thief] husband betrays his business partner.” Have any of you faithful Rap Sheet readers seen this two-hour picture? Are you willing to share your opinions of it?

• TV Guide’s look back at what it calls “The 15 Best TV Performances of 2020” applauds, among others, Nathan Lane for his appearance in Showtime’s quirky Penny Dreadful: City of Angels and Matthew Rhys for his headline turn in HBO’s eight-episode Perry Mason. “The mostly-good-but-definitely-not-perfect reboot of Perry Mason was buoyed by an all-good-and-damn-near-perfect performance by Matthew Rhys,” writes Tim Surette, “who brought the classic character to the modern age not just with boozing and f---ing, but with an inner rage that we all could relate to. Rhys was actually the second choice to play Perry Mason; Robert Downey Jr. (who is an executive producer on the series) was slated to take on the role, but his feature film commitments made it impossible, and frankly, we’re all better for it. Fresh off receiving long overdue recognition for The Americans, Rhys made Perry an exhausted grump with a bent moral compass that saw him skirt the law to get justice, but with his soulful eyes during times of defeat and menacing outbursts during times of rage, we not only allowed it, we forgave it. Rhys is the regular-guy hero that our generation needs.”

• IndieWire names Max Allan Collins’ Nate Heller P.I. books among several others that it says deserve TV series treatment:

There’s a reason there are so many detective series on this list—they’re addictive, easily digestible, and the format lends itself perfectly to television. IndieWire’s Kristen Lopez recommends Max Allan Collins’ Nathan Heller series, which follows a wise-cracking private detective who is instrumental in cracking plenty of historically significant cases. The books [17 of them published so far] vacillate between hard-boiled detective novels and historical thrillers, and the ride begins with 1983’s “True Detective,” which finds Heller investigating mob corruption in 1932 Chicago.

• Andrew Nette, my editor on 2019’s wonderful Sticking It to the Man: Revolution and Counterculture in Pulp and Popular Fiction, 1950 to 1980, has a new post up in CrimeReads about the late William Hjortsberg and his recently published posthumous novel, Angel’s Inferno (No Exit Press), a sequel to Hjortsberg’s 1978 occult-tinged crime tale, Falling Angel. Much of Nette’s article focuses on differences between the novel Falling Angel and its cinematic adaptation, 1987’s Angel Heart. “A posthumously published book can be tricky property,” writes Nette in CrimeReads, “given the inevitable question of whether the author was able to finalize the manuscript to the degree they wanted, were they alive. Although Angel’s Inferno does not feel incomplete, it lacks the economy and flow of Falling Angel. It is also far darker, more debauched and violent. When you’ve made a pact to sell your soul to Satan, in terms of what you’re prepared to do, the sky, or in Angel’s case, the depths are the limit.”

• Three other CrimeReads pieces worth finding: Dwyer Murphy unearths a 1965 BBC interview between British spy-turned-talk-show host Malcolm Muggeridge and British intelligence officer-turned-espionage-novelist John le Carré; Gabino Iglesias praises the “politically engaged, wildly entertaining novels of Paco Ignacio Taibo II”; and Olivia Rutigliano recalls UK author Evelyn Waugh’s unexpected admiration for the works of Erle Stanley Gardner.

• Happy 10th anniversary to Pulp Covers, a Web site presenting some of the finest scans available of classic novel and magazine fronts. (As you might expect, I’m a frequent visitor.) I don’t see any notice of this milestone on the Pulp Covers main page, but its associated Twitter page mentions that the site now boasts “over 20,000 posts,” and its unidentified editor offers “a big shout-out to all the loyal fans who have stuck with this project over the past decade and encouraged us to continue. Without you, I’d have a lot more free time on my hands.” If you’d like to see how Pulp Covers started, visit its December 2010 postings.

• A half-century-old Columbo mystery, finally solved.

• Interviews to enjoy: Nancie Clare chats with E.A. Barres (They’re Gone), Anthony Horowitz (Moonflower Murders), and H.B. Lyle (The Year of the Gun) for her Speaking of Mysteries podcast; Max Allan Collins—yes, him again—talks with Andrew Sumner of Forbidden Planet about his latest paperback original, Skim Deep, his first Nolan novel in 21 years; and Scott Montgomery of Mystery People scores a brief Q&A with Jeff Vorzimmer, editor of 2020’s The Best of Manhunt 2.

• Finally, a couple of belated good-byes. First, to Sue Henry, who penned separate mystery series featuring either dog-sled racer Jessie Arnold or peripatetic Alaska widow Maxine “Maxie” McNabb. My introduction to her work came in the late 1990s, after I returned from a hike over the historic Chilkoot Pass Trail between Alaska and the Canadian Yukon, and was hungry for books about that path to Klondike gold; Henry’s Termination Dust (1995) fit the bill perfectly. Henry died on November 20 at age 80. Also no longer with us is Alanna Knight, the prolific Scottish author of historical mysteries and romantic thrillers, who passed away on December 2 at age 97. Fellow novelist Martin Edwards remembers her in his blog as “a leading light in Scottish literary circles” and a “stalwart” of the British Crime Writers’ Association, as well as “a biographer and playwright and expert on the work of that gifted fellow Scot, Robert Louis Stevenson.” Knight has at least one last novel, Murder at the World’s Edge (Allison & Busby), due out next year. I offer my condolences to both of their families.