Bidding Good-bye to Gottfried

An outdoor memorial service has been planned for William “Bill” Gottfried, a retired physician and well-loved mystery-convention-goer who passed away earlier this week at age 85.

According to the blog Mystery Fanfare, that service will take place tomorrow, Friday, October 1, at Walnut Creek, California’s Congregation B’nai Shalom (74 Eckley Lane), beginning at 11 a.m. PDT. Guests must wear masks, and are advised to “dress for warm weather.” Friends and acquaintances who cannot attend in person are invited to participate via this Zoom link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88298354925. Meeting ID: 882 9835 4925. Passcode: 154146.

A graveside observance and a subsequent reception on the front lawn at the residence of Gottfried’s son Harry, in the nearby town of Lafayette, will follow those ceremonies.

In addition, mourners will be sitting shiva virtually on Monday, October 4, starting at 5 p.m. Zoom link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87843760879. Meeting ID: 878 4376 0879. Passcode: 017484. “There will be opportunities for informal sharing during shiva,” says Mystery Fanfare. Undoubtedly, this will lead to many stories being recalled of Gottfried’s kindness, curiosity, and enthusiasms.

Who Will Pick Up the Petrona?

Out of a collection of 28 books—submitted from six countries—all vying to take home the 2021 Petrona Award for the Best Scandinavian Crime Novel of the Year, that prize’s organizers have chosen half a dozen finalists. They were announced this morning:

• A Necessary Death, by Anne Holt,
translated by Anne Bruce (Corvus; Norway)
• Death Deserved, by Jørn Lier Horst and Thomas Enger,
translated by Anne Bruce (Orenda; Norway)
• The Secret Life of Mr. Roos, by Håkan Nesser,
translated by Sarah Death (Mantle; Sweden)
• To Cook a Bear, by Mikael Niemi,
translated by Deborah Bragan-Turner (MacLehose Press; Sweden)
• The Seven Doors, by Agnes Ravatn,
translated by Rosie Hedger (Orenda; Norway)
• Gallows Rock, by Yrsa Sigurðardóttir,
translated by Victoria Cribb (Hodder & Stoughton; Iceland)

To read the judges’ comments about each work, click here.

The Petrona Award, established back in 2013, derives its name from a blog written by Maxine Clarke, a British editor and “champion of Scandinavian crime fiction,” who had died the year before that. This competition is open to “crime fiction in translation, either written by a Scandinavian author or set in Scandinavia, and published in the UK in the previous calendar year.”

Euro Crime notes that “The winning title, usually announced at the international crime-fiction convention CrimeFest, will now be announced on Thursday, 4 November 2021. The winning author and the translator of the winning title will both receive a cash prize, and the winning author will receive a full pass to and a guaranteed panel at CrimeFest 2022.”

Last year’s Petrona Award recipient was Finnish writer Antti Tuomainen, who captured the honor with his humorous novel Little Siberia (Orenda), translated by David Hackston.

Congratulations to every one of the 2021 nominees!

Bullet Points: There’s Always More Edition

• Having enjoyed Simon Scarrow’s Blackout, a World War II-era thriller released in Great Britain earlier this year, I was overjoyed to hear him tell Crime Time FM podcast host Paul Burke that the book is only the beginning of a series starring German Criminal Inspector Horst Schenke. Regarding the second installment, he says: “I’m busy doing the last bit of research before I start writing it … I know exactly how it’s going to start and where it’s going. … I have no idea how long the series will last, because even though it may be five or six novels across five years of war, but I do have a view of how it might end, and that would be after the war, because I think that’s an interesting time as well.” You can listen to their whole conversation here.

• France’s capital, on the edge of violence, is the setting for Paris Police 1900, premiering on BBC Four in the UK on Saturday, October 9. Variety supplies this plot summary: “The eight-part series kicks off with a scandal: Félix Faure, president of the French Republic, collapsing and dying after being intimately pleasured by his lover Meg Steinheil. As anti-Semitism rages in Paris—a young newspaper seller is viciously beaten by Anti-Semitic League leader Jules Guérin for merely selling the liberal paper L’Aurore, with an article by Émile Zola—a young woman’s torso is found in a suit-case floating down the Seine. Based out of the Paris Prefecture, its police H.Q., Antoine Jouin, an ambitious but principled young inspector, volunteers to investigate—and begin to put together the pieces behind the woman’s death, stumbling on far more evil than a single psychopath.” Despite its title, this English-subtitled series takes place in 1899, as anarchists, nationalists, and anti-Semites—all enraged by the Dreyfuss Affair—threaten the city’s harmony and future. Look to The Killing Times for a terrific trailer. There’s no word yet on when this program might reach American audiences, but it will reportedly come via Netflix.

• BBC One has announced the return of Shetland at an as-yet-unspecified date in autumn 2021. “Soon, then!” enthuses The Killing Times, which provides a first image from Season 6 of that crime drama based on Ann Cleeves’ Detective Inspector Jimmy Perez novels, along with this modicum of news: “The forthcoming new series centres on the doorstep murder of a prominent local figure, a case which strikes at the heart of the Shetland Isles and its people. As Perez and his team uncover a kaleidoscope of motives for the murder, their investigation soon takes a shockingly sinister turn.”

• And this is unquestionably off-topic … but how did I miss word that a second Downton Abbey film is in rapid development? “The eagerly-anticipated Downton Abbey sequel has been given an official title along with a new release date,” Harper’s Bazaar magazine reported in late August. “Downton Abbey: A New Era will arrive in cinemas globally on March 18, 2022, it was confirmed at the Las Vegas CinemaCon last week (via Deadline). An exclusive clip from the film was also unveiled during the event, which features the aristocratic Crawley family preparing for a trip overseas. Jim Carter’s beloved Mr. Carson announces in the footage: ‘The British are coming.’” Deadline adds that this movie will feature “lots of glitz and glamour and jazz, as well as, evidently, a wedding. … The pic’s original principal cast including Maggie Smith, Hugh Bonneville, Michelle Dockery, Elizabeth McGovern, Laura Charmichael, Carter and more have returned for the second film. New additions include Hugh Dancy, Laura Haddock, Nathalie Baye and Dominic West.” The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) page for this release shows that Tuppence Middleton—introduced in the 2019 Downton Abbey big-screener as Lucy Smith, hush-hush heiress and new romantic interest of ex-chauffeur Tom Branson—will be back in New Era, too. Might it be their nuptials we’re to anticipate?

• I did not read Richard Osman’s first novel, last year’s The Thursday Murder Club, nor have I picked up its new sequel. Yet that apparently leaves me among a minority. As The Guardian states, The Man Who Died Twice—released on September 16 in the UK—“has become one of the fastest-selling novels since [British] records began. … It sold 114,202 copies in its first three days on sale … (including pre-orders), according to Nielsen BookScan—a performance which the sales monitor said made it one of the fastest-selling novels since it began to track sales in the late 1990s. Since that time, explains the paper’s books reporter, Alison Flood, “just four hardback adult novels just four hardback adult novels have sold more in their first week on shelves: Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol (550,946 sold in its first week) and Inferno (228,961), J.K. Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy (124,603), and the late Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman (168,455).”

• I mentioned in last week's “Bullet Points” post that author Max Allan Collins has recently been contributing a very handsomely illustrated literary memoir in column form to the Web site of publisher NeoText, with his latest “A Life in Crime” entry focusing on the roots of Road to Perdition. Now it seems that column’s life is to be extended. “Next week,” Collins notes in his blog, “will be part seven and focus on Fancy Anders on the very week of Fancy Anders Goes to War being published. … Initially, this was to end this run of ‘A Life in Crime’ for now, with appropriate installments to be written and appearing in support of future books. But I decided to keep going with these essays right up to the publication of The Many Lives of Jimmy Leighton [co-authored with Dave Thomas, and due out October 25], so three more installments are (as they delicately say) in the can.”


(Above) Bill and Toby Gottfried attend CrimeFest 2018 in Bristol, England. (Photo copyright © by Ali Karim)

• Retired physician and reading enthusiast William Gottfried, who—together with his wife, Toby—became a welcome fixture on the mystery-fiction convention circuit, passed away last night at age 85. From what I can tell via a Web search, Gottfried was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1936; received his medical degree from that same city’s Jefferson Medical College, and became a pediatrician; then eventually moved to Northern California. At the time of his death, he and Toby were living in the Contra Costa County town of Orinda, east of Berkeley. His longtime friend Janet Rudolph, who met Gottfried at the 1985 Bouchercon in San Francisco and later worked with him on other conventions, writes today in Mystery Fanfare:

Bill was a terrific resource for all things mystery and medical. That was a great combination for me, personally, as it was always good to have a ‘doctor in the house.’ And, in case you didn't know, Bill personally saved the lives of several of our mystery friends. Bill was a world traveler, a collector of masks and ethnic artifacts, a gardener, a bird watcher, a scholar. Religion played an important part in his life, and recently during the pandemic, he continued to expand his personal education in a number of fields. He always wanted to learn more, taking classes online and before that in person during his retirement. He also shared information about these courses to make sure others got the opportunity to attend. Bill loved to share his knowledge and his love of many different subjects. …

We had so many things we shared: collecting, mystery, history, maps, religion, art, reference books. If you knew Bill you knew he bought books, often several copies of the same one, much to Toby’s chagrin. But instead of returning the extra copy or two, he gave them to others who would appreciate them.

Even though we were not related by blood, I thought of him as family. … He was brilliant and loving, warm, and unique. But most of all, he will be remembered for his acts of Chesed (Look it up, Bill would say!).

Unlike Janet, I didn’t know Bill Gottfried well. However, I enjoyed chatting with him at two or three Bouchercons over the years, and we were “Facebook friends” (for what that’s worth). He seemed to be as interested as I am in both historical mysteries and older, largely forgotten crime novelists; and we certainly shared a liberal political perspective. My sympathies go out to his family. The Gottfrieds’ son Louis wrote on Facebook this morning that “Right now we are all in state of shock and processing the passing of this great father, husband and grandfather. As we know about funeral arrangements we will let everyone know. Right now we just wanted you to know so you can grieve in your own way. His memory will be for a blessing.”

• Jiro Kimura adds more information about Bill Gottfried in The Gumshoe Site, writing that “He and his wife, Toby, co-chaired the 2004 Left Coast Crime (LCC) in Monterey [California], the 2009 LCC in Hawaii, and the 2014 LCC with Lucinda Suber and Stan Ulrich in Monterey …” In addition, the couple “received the 2008 Don Sandstrom Award for Lifetime Achievement in Mystery Fandom from Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine and the 2015 David Thompson Special Service Award from the Bouchercon committee.”

• Gone now, too, is Samoan-American actor Al Harrington, who died in Honolulu, Hawaii, on September 21 after suffering a “massive stroke.” He had been “a regular cast member on the original Hawaii Five-O series …,” recalls The Spy Command. “Harrington played detective Ben Kokua during the fifth through seventh seasons. Harrington was a local entertainer who was hired by Leonard Freeman, the creator and executive producer of the series. Harrington had played criminals in earlier Five-O seasons.” He later signed up for a recurring role as Mamo Kahike on the 2010 reboot of Hawaii Five-0.

• This sounds like a promising partnership: “Wolfpack Publishing announced the acquisition of Rough Edges Press (REP), an independent publisher started by award-winning author James Reasoner. As Wolfpack’s newest imprint, REP will focus on publishing crime, mystery and thriller novels. The acquisition also includes REP’s existing catalogue of work, including several novels written by current Wolfpack authors such as Robert J. Randisi, Wayne Dundee, Steve Mertz and many others. ... Wolfpack will be announcing new titles to be released under the Rough Edges Press imprint in coming weeks.”

• Les Blatt, New Jersey author of that excellent blog Classic Mysteries, has for months now been complaining about assorted computer issues. So when I noticed that his site hadn’t been updated since mid-July, I e-mailed him an inquiry. He responded thusly: “I'm still struggling with in-your-face Microsoft, and I’m trying to learn a lot of new software at one time. I WILL be back, and sooner rather than later—like most of us, I have WAY too many books awaiting me. So yes, I’ll be back. Soon, I hope! And thanks for checking—which acts as a powerful motive for getting off my backside and back online.”

• The Invisible Event is pretty brutal in its late-to-the-party assessment of Dashiell Hammett’s debut novel, Red Harvest (1929), calling it “a classic because of all the imitators who flocked in to occasionally improve on what Hammett showed them how to do. As a novel in its own right, however, it is unpleasantly unrepentant, glorying in a dismissal of human life in a manner that is tawdry in the worst incarnation of its Pulpish roots. The fascination of disbelief is strong here, and not something I’m keen to revisit any time soon.”

• Meanwhile, Lit Reactor humorously chastises Lee Child for the number of times his characters “shrug” or “nod” or pointedly “say nothing.” I’ll never read Child’s work the same way again!

Revue of Reviewers: 9-27-21

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

Bond Releases — Official and Not So Much

For the benefit of James Bond film fans (myself included, of course), The Spy Command remarks on this week’s significance:

After an almost six-year wait, the 25th James Bond film made by Eon Productions becomes a reality this week.

No Time to Die, after many, many hiccups (to put it kindly), will be seen by its first audiences this week.

The official premiere is Sept. 28 in London. There will be other showings in other countries. At long last, Daniel Craig’s Bond farewell will be seen by audiences.

September 30 is the date on which UK moviegoers can finally watch Craig’s swan song as 007; Americans must wait until October 8.

* * *

In other Bond news, it seems the plot of Anthony Horowitz’s next 007 novel has been accidentally leaked by its publisher, HarperCollins:

Iconic spy 007 must pose as a double agent to infiltrate a secret Soviet intelligence organization planning an attack on the West—and face off against a man who could be the most diabolical enemy he’s ever encountered—in internationally bestselling author Anthony Horowitz’s third James Bond novel.

The Soviet counterintelligence agency SMERSH may be defeated, but a new organization, Stalnaya Ruska, has arisen from its ashes. Under Moscow’s direction, the group is planning a major act of terrorism which, if successful, will destabilize relations between East and West.

Returning from Jamaica and his encounter with Scaramanga (The Man with the Golden Gun), James Bond ponders his future. He is aware of a world that is changing all too rapidly around him. The old certainties of the early postwar years are gone. Disdain for the establishment is rising, and the intelligence services are no longer trusted. Bond is beginning to wonder if his “license to kill” is still valid.

But the threat to the free world remains all too real, and now 007 has a new assignment: discover what Stalnaya Ruska is planning and prevent it from happening. To succeed, Bond will have to make the Russians believe he’s a double agent and travel behind the Iron Curtain.

First, though, he will have to convince Sonya Dragunova, the Soviet psychiatric analyst as brilliant—and as dangerous—as she is beautiful. Sonya knows more of what’s happening in Bond’s mind than he does himself. She’s also hiding secrets of her own. It’s a love affair that is also a treacherous game.

Sonya’s boss is a man who has previously played his part to bring Bond and the West down behind the scenes in two previous Bond novels—but who has never yet appeared, until now. A Fleming creation, the evil genius responsible for Stalnaya Ruka just may be Bond’s most dangerous enemy yet.

Word is that Horowitz has a title for his third Bond adventure (following 2015’s Trigger Mortis and 2018’s Forever and a Day), but at least that information remains under wraps. For now. The novel is scheduled to reach stores in May 2022.

READ MORE: “Daniel Craig Gets Emotional in His Goodbye Speech After Wrapping No Time to Die,” by Justin Kirkland (Esquire); “The NTTD-NSNA Coincidence,” by Bill Koenig (The Spy Command).

TV Worth Talking About

Season 6 of Grantchester, the charming historical whodunit series inspired by James Runcie's books and starring Robson Green and Tom Brittney, is evidently already airing in Great Britain. However, its eight episodes won’t start rolling out before American viewers until Sunday, October 3, as part of as part of PBS-TV’s Masterpiece lineup.

As the Masterpiece Web site explains, the show’s action has now moved on to 1958, “and trouble is brewing in the Cambridgeshire village of Grantchester. Reverend Will Davenport (Tom Brittney, Greyhound) relishes his role as a firebrand vicar, but the very role he loves puts him at odds with his own ideals when [gay Anglican curate] Leonard [Fitch] (Al Weaver) is caught up in a scandal. Meanwhile, [Detective Inspector] Geordie [Keating] (Robson Green) finds his principles shaken, Mrs. Chapman (Tessa Peake-Jones) is distraught, and Geordie’s wife, Cathy (Kacey Ainsworth), is defiant. With new crimes around every corner, and morality and legality at odds, it’s going to take all of Will’s skill and empathy to navigate these choppy waters and help the ones he loves.”

Grantchester will continue on Masterpiece through November 21. Mystery Fanfare features a two-minute Season 6 teaser.

In the meantime, Season 2 of the excellent Baptiste will commence on PBS come Sunday, October 17. Here’s the official plot synopsis:

The second season of this spinoff of The Missing follows retired detective Julien Baptiste (Tchéky Karyo) as he delves into Budapest’s corrupt underworld to find a British Ambassador’s family who go missing on a skiing holiday in the Hungarian mountains. Ambassador Emma Chambers, played by Fiona Shaw (Killing Eve), is thrust into the crosshairs of Baptiste’s most complex case to date, as the detective navigates an untrustworthy police force and international media interest as he hunts for her husband and two sons.

Like Baptiste’s premiere season, this new one will be six episodes long, carrying watchers through November 21.

* * *

While we’re talking television, let me point you toward a couple of other stories. First off, the British magazine Radio Times has a bit of information about the sophomore series of Vienna Blood, the Victorian-era mystery drama based on Frank Tallis’ novels. That three-part show—starring Matthew Beard as brilliant young psychoanalyst-in-training Max Liebermann, and Jürgen Maurer as Detective Inspector Oskar Rheinhardt—was one of the programs that helped my wife and I get through the early, lockdown days of the COVID-19 pandemic, and I’m quite pleased at the prospect of its returning to U.S. screens sometime soon, following it’s broadcast in the UK.

Radio Times has still photos from the new production, plus this vague plot description: “At the end of season one, Max hopes he’ll still be able to be involved in criminal investigations. Thankfully his wish is granted when Oskar comes to visit him at his new private practice and lures him back into another fascinating case ripe for a Freudian approach. But while his relationship with his friend Oskar becomes more stable, his private life gets even more chaotic.”

Wikipedia makes clear that this follow-up series of Vienna Blood will also be limited to three installments.

Second, I see that The Killing Times has posted a trailer for The Chestnut Man, a Danish production based on a 2018 novel of the same name by Søren Sveistrup, creator of the crime series The Killing. This show is set to debut on Netflix come September 29. Here’s a description of its suspense-filled story:

The Chestnut Man takes place in a quiet suburb of Copenhagen, where the police make a terrible discovery on a stormy October morning. A young woman is found brutally murdered in a playground and one of her hands is missing. Above her hangs a small man of chestnuts.

Ambitious young detective Naia Thulin (Danica Curcic) and her new partner, Mark Hess (Mikkel Boe Følsgaard), are assigned to the case and before long, they find a piece of mysterious evidence on the ‘chestnut man’—evidence linking it all to a girl who disappeared a year earlier and was presumed dead: the daughter of Social Affairs Minister Rosa Hartung (Iben Dorner).

Hmm. Perhaps that’s not a tale for the faint of heart.

READ MORE: “The Killing Times Impressively ENORMOUS 2021 Autumn/Winter Preview” (The Killing Times).

Bullet Points: First of Fall Edition

• Shortly after I posted on this page about the 50th anniversary of the debut of Columbo as part of the NBC Mystery Movie “wheel series,” I was contacted by Jeffrey Marks, the publisher at Crippen & Landru, who told me his company has in the works a posthumous collection of short stories by the two creators of that landmark TV crime drama, William Link and Richard Levinson. (Link passed away in 2020, Levinson in 1987). “Shooting Script and Other Mysteries is the title,” states Marks, “and it will be published this fall. I’m guessing November at this time.” Levinson and Link, as you may already know, became friends when they attended the same junior high school in Philadelphia, and they went on to be writing partners for 43 years. In addition to creating TV series and scripting films, they penned short pieces of fiction. Back in 2010, Crippen & Landru released Link’s The Columbo Collection, which featured a dozen of his new yarns starring Los Angeles’ best-known rumpled police detective. During a contemporaneous interview, Link told me he had another 16 that hadn’t made the cut; so “if it’s successful, I’ve already got enough for a follow-up book.” None of those 16 will be found in Shooting Script, according to Marks, though he adds, “I do plan on asking the [Link] estate about these stories after we complete this book. The Columbo Collection was one of our most popular collections.”

• Over the last month, Max Allan Collins has been writing, for the Web site of independent publisher NeoText, a lavishly illustrated column called “A Life in Crime.” Together, those essays will constitute what he calls “a kind of literary memoir about my various book series.” The first entry looked back at Collins’ youthful introduction to mystery and crime fiction; the second at his Nolan books; the third at his durable Quarry series; the fourth at the history and development of his Nathan Heller saga; and number five—posted earlier this week—tackles what he says is “the story of how Ms. Tree came to be, and includes a fantastic array of Terry Beatty’s cover art.” There are still two more columns to come, the lot of them intended to help promote the official release, early next month, of Fancy Anders Goes to War: Who Killed Rosie the Riveter?, Collins’ first—of three—World War II-backdropped mystery novellas for NeoText (available in both e-book and print form), with artwork by Fay Dalton.

• Publishing imprint HarperFiction has named the victors in its Killing It Competition for Undiscovered Writers, which was launched back in January as a way “to find unpublished writers from Black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds.” Entrants were asked to submit the first 10,000 words of a crime, thriller, or suspense novel, plus a synopsis of their book running no more than 500 words in length. The judges ultimately chose three winners: information technology consultant Rama Varma, for a work-in-progress titled The Banana Leaf Murder; Stacey Thomas, a civil servant and staff reviewer at Bad Form Review, for The Revels; and BBC radio and TV producer Shabnam Grewal, for Secrets and Shame. “Each winner,” explains the blog Shotsmag Confidential, “will receive a comprehensive editorial report from a HarperFiction editor covering pace, characterisation, pitch and more, as well as three mentoring sessions.”

• Have you ever wanted to live in the Malloch Building, the Streamline Moderne-style apartment structure in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood made famous by the 1947 Humphrey Bogart/Lauren Bacall picture Dark Passage? Your chance may finally have arrived! (Hat tip to Up and Down These Mean Streets.)

• Not only does Hillary Clinton, former U.S. secretary of state and presidential candidate, have a new novel due out next month (State of Terror, co-authored with Louise Penny), but she and her daughter, Chelsea, have announced that one of their enterprises, Global Light Productions, “has optioned film and TV rights to Jacqueline Winspear’s Maisie Dobbs series.” Deadline reports that Hillary Clinton, “who has made no secret of her love of the mystery series throughout the years, featuring them on many of her reading lists,” recently broke this news to attendees at England’s Royal Television Society Cambridge Convention. “‘We’re also doing scripted projects so, for example, one of our favorite books that Chelsea and I have shared over the years is a book about a character called Maisie Dobbs, which is a series about a World War I field nurse who turns into a detective and we’ve just optioned it,’ Hillary Clinton said, adding how much she and Chelsea love the character and her journey during a time of ‘great social upheaval.’” Not surprisingly, there’s no word yet on when any Maisie Dobbs movie might actually reach theaters worldwide.

• Hoping that the COVID-19 pandemic will be at least more manageable a year from now, London’s Capital Crime Writing Festival has already begun selling tickets for its September 29-October 1, 2022, gathering. Plans are to hold next year’s festival in “a new, tented, venue in a central London park.” Organizers promise “a wide-ranging line-up of events focused on accessible, mainstream fiction loved by readers around the world, which entertain crime and thriller fans, readers and authors alike in the UK’s capital.” Tickets can be purchased here. Press materials say the celebrity guest lineup and further details will “be announced later this year.”

• Sri Lankan author Amanda Jayatissa has amassed an enviable amount of media attention for her brand-new debut novel, My Sweet Girl, described by one reviewer as a “darkly hilarious” thriller. Roughly put, the story concerns a young, borderline-alcoholic graphic designer, Paloma Evans, who insists she found her roommate, Arun, dead in their San Francisco apartment … yet there’s no corpse and no evidence that this roommate ever existed. Complicating the situation is that Arun had recently discovered a troubling secret from Paloma’s childhood as an orphan back in Sri Lanka, and was blackmailing her to stay quiet about it. Part of what’s brought such attention to this author’s work may be that Jayatissa has made herself widely available for interviews (at least via Zoom). Among the most entertaining such exchanges may come from the podcast Speaking of Mysteries, which recently found host Nancie Clare talking with the author about the gothic elements of her story, her personal experiences with orphanages, “white savior syndrome,” the difficulty she finds in writing “sensitive” scenes, her cookie business, and much more. Click here to listen in on their conversation.

(Above) Novelist Amanda Jayatissa

• Oh, and check out this list Jayatissa assembled, for CrimeReads, of six suspense thrillers set in South and East Asia. “Thrillers coming from South-East Asia are usually paced very differently,” she explains. “Rather than immediately diving into solving the crime, these thrillers take their time—giving the reader a slightly claustrophobic look at the killers themselves, their motivations, and the situations that have lead them there. More often than not, the reader is fully aware of who the killer is from the very beginning, but must instead piece together the rationalization for their crimes. The stakes are still high, but the suspense is often a slow burn, with a very high payoff.”

• From the “Fun Facts to Know and Tell” File: “It might be surprising for a John D MacDonald fan to learn,” writes Steve Scott in The Trap of Gold blog, “that Travis McGee’s 52-foot houseboat, The Busted Flush—which plays such a prominent role in so many of the 21 novels starring the author’s series character—has only been depicted by cover artists a handful of times. It was certainly surprising for me as I was researching this piece: I could have sworn I’d seen it more often. By my count I can find only four illustrations of the Flush on any of the various editions published in the United States prior to 1988, and I don’t think there have been any after that. All of the illustrations were inked by the great Robert McGinnis.”

• A curious story of literary rivalry, from The Guardian:

After The Spy Who Came in from the Cold was published in 1963 it went on to become John le Carré’s most widely acclaimed book, winning several awards, being adapted for a Richard Burton-led feature film and becoming one of the most highly regarded novels of the cold war era.

A year earlier another spy book had been published in Britain: the English translation of a work by Willem Frederik Hermans, one of the greatest Dutch authors of the 20th century. The book, The Darkroom of Damocles, was an immediate success when it was published in the Netherlands, winning acclaim and also being adapted for film.

But while Le Carré admitted to being a fan of Hermans, and in particular of The Darkroom of Damocles, the feeling was far from mutual. According to an interview that has come to light on the eve of the British publication of another of the Dutch author’s books, Hermans regarded Le Carré as an inferior novelist and someone who had plagiarised his work.

• Was Agatha Christie’s biggest-selling novel, 1939’s And Then There Were None, also inspired by a previous and now largely forgotten tale? Perhaps, says crime-fiction historian Curtis Evans, who penned the introduction to a forthcoming Dean Street Press re-release of 1930’s The Invisible Host, by Gwen Bristow and Bruce Manning, husband-and-wife newspaper journalists in New Orleans. The Guardian’s Alison Flood notes that The Invisible Host “begins with eight guests invited to a penthouse by telegram, where they are then told over the radio that they will all soon be dead. ‘Do not doubt me, my friends; you shall all be dead before morning.’” Although Evans has conceded before that The Invisible Guest “lack[s] Christie's plausibility and ingenuity,” he tells Flood that the comparisons between these two venerable yarns are “not just a matter of similar elements being in play: the entire basic plot idea is the same …” Anna Hervé, the editorial director for literary estates at Christie’s publishing house, HarperCollins, remains unconvinced. “‘It’s always possible she heard something in passing,’ said Hervé. ‘There was a real fashion in the 1930s for locked-room mysteries, and The Invisible Host is a good example of one of those, but there is no evidence that Christie was aware of it. … The Invisible Host does have similarities,’ said Hervé, ‘but I don’t think anyone’s been able to find a connection. And I also think Christie being the person she was, if there had been a link she would have acknowledged it.” Judge the parallels for yourself; The Invisible Host goes on sale on both sides of the Atlantic on October 4.

• Another classic work given new life: A Pin to See the Peepshow, by F. (Fryniwyd) Tennyson Jesse (1888-1958), originally published in 1934, but scheduled to reach stores again in mid-October, courtesy of the British Library. As Elizabeth Foxwell explains in her blog, The Bunburyist, “The novel is based on the Thompson-Bywaters murder case of 1922-23. Jesse—the great-niece of Alfred, Lord Tennyson and a war correspondent, playwright, screenwriter, and novelist—was known for involvement in the series on notable British trials as well as her works with female detective Solange Fontaine.” Amazon’s plot synopsis for Peepshow reads: “Julia Almond believes she is special and dreams of a more exciting and glamorous life away from the drab suburbia of her upbringing. Her work in a fashionable boutique in the West End gives her the personal freedom that she craves, but escape from her parental home into marriage soon leads to boredom and frustration. She begins a passionate affair with a younger man, which has deadly consequences. … Julia becomes trapped by her sex and class in a criminal justice system in which she has no control. Julia finds herself the victim of society’s expectations of lower-middle-class female behavior and incriminated by her own words. F. Tennyson Jesse creates a flawed, doomed heroine in a novel of creeping unease that continues to haunt long after the last page is turned.”

• Three recent CrimeReads articles I enjoyed: Neil Nyren’s tour through the fictionalized Sicily of Inspector Salvo Montalbano, on the occasion of Penguin releasing Andrea Camilleri’s 28th and final Montalbano yarn, Riccardino; Olivia Rutigliano’s delightful essay about the delightful 2007-2009 ABC black comedy series, Pushing Daisies; and novelist Julia Dahl’s reflections on how she learned to “use the questions I had about the people in the articles I wrote in my day job as a reporter to explore—in fiction—the issues of trauma and regret and love and justice. To explore, in a word, humanity.”

• Meanwhile, Dahl submits to an interview with the Los Angeles Review of Books that includes her explanation of how her new novel, The Missing Hours, became a standalone. As she relates:

The initial idea was always drawn from reporting I’d done at CBS, mostly about the Steubenville rape case in 2012, an awful case of this teenager who’d been raped at a party. There were all these details that made me think, “What would it be like to be that girl? What would it be like to be her family?” I had a contract for another Rebekah [Roberts] book so I started thinking about how Rebekah could be connected. But as I started writing, I realized that this is not a Rebekah story, that forcing Rebekah in didn’t make sense. Happily, my editor was supportive. When I realized that maybe I could just not write a Rebekah book, just write the story that I was interested in, that was cool and freeing. As much as I love Rebekah—I will probably write another book about her someday—I was ready to write about other people. It was fun and challenging because suddenly I didn’t have an anchor character who I knew so well.”

• It seems rather close to the end of 2021 to bother naming “Best Books of the Year (So Far)” now, yet here’s The Real Book Spy’s Ryan Steck doing just that. His 20 selections are all thrillers, of course. They include Daniel Silva’s The Cellist, T.J. Newman’s Falling, Jack Carr’s The Devil’s Hand, S.A. Cosby’s Razorblade Tears, Lisa Jewell’s The Night She Disappeared, and Connor Sullivan’s Sleeping Bear.

• Here’s another similar list, this one compiled by Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine’s Down Under correspondent, Jeff Popple, and highlighting U.S., British, and Australian titles. Among his choices of 2021’s foremost crime, thriller, and debut novels so far: Jane Casey’s The Killing Kind, William McIlvanney and Ian Rankin’s The Dark Remains, Simon Rowell’s The Long Game, Sarah Bailey’s The Housemate, Jack Grimwood’s Island Reich, and Margaret Hickey’s Cutters End. If you want to order any of the Aussie releases, try the UK-based sales site Book Depository.

• I was very grateful when editor Rick Ollerman invited me, at the end of 2016, to write a regular column for Down & Out: The Magazine, a new digest-size publication being launched by book publisher Down & Out. The first perfect-bound issue, containing works of short fiction as well as non-fiction, rolled out in late summer 2017, and expectations of a steady stream of sequels were high. However, only half a dozen subsequent numbers of Down & Out: The Magazine have been mailed away to subscribers since that time, the last of those arriving in December 2020. So erratic did the publishing schedule become, that I felt it valuable at one point to reassure readers the mag hadn’t gone out of business without their being aware. Nonetheless, its future seems far from certain. Publisher Eric Campbell assured me not long ago, “We haven’t shut it down … just on a pause right now.” Still, Ollerman doesn’t leave me hopeful when he recounts the multiple health problems (a broken wrist, an “unidentified flu,” a brain hemorrhage, and cancer) that have kept him away from his editor’s responsibilities, and have left the periodical in limbo. At last check, he was dealing with “normal chronic back and neck pain,” and learning to eat again after surgery and radiation treatment. There’s been talk of bringing a new editor in to revive Down & Out: The Magazine, but Ollerman has trouble predicting the results of such a move. “The original version was so much out of my little brain,” he says, “I imagine a new person’s product would be something very different. That’s an interesting thought, anyway.” Where all of this leads might be anybody’s guess.

• How Aja Raden could choose, for The Guardian, what she says are the “Top 10 Books About Lies and Liars,” without mentioning a single book about the most destructive liar of our era, Donald Trump, is beyond me. (Hat tip to Campaign for the American Reader.)

• On Tuesday, October 5, Hallie Rubenhold, British social historian and author of the oustanding, award-winning 2019 non-fiction book The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper, will debut a 15-part podcast called Bad Women: the Ripper Retold. Available wherever you usually get your podcasts, Bad Women will tell the real story of the Ripper’s victims “and how they came to be in the path of a serial killer—completely overturning the Ripper story we’ve been told up until now.” Listen to a preview here.

• The podcast Shedunnit is back, with host Caroline Crampton looking at mystery-writing partnerships, such as that between Gordon Neil Stewart and Pamela Hansford Johnson (who, as “Nap Leonard,” produced Murder’s a Swine), and Cordelia Biddle and Steve Zettler, who concoct crossword mysteries under the pseudonym Nero Blanc.

• Author Neil Albert has been writing his Ross Macdonald Blog since late 2020, but only this month did he finally begin to tackle Macdonald’s The Moving Target, for which he created one of the 20th century’s finest fictional sleuths, Lew Archer. Remarks Albert:

Macdonald’s fifth book is a watershed event for two reasons. First, Macdonald begins to display a sense of his own voice. Second, he introduces [Los Angeles private eye] Lew Archer as a tool in developing that voice.

By 1949, the year of publication, he had four books under his belt. He has paid his dues by writing sensationalized potboilers, derivative tough-guy stories, and overambitious psychological thrillers. As [Canadian novelist and short-story author] Carol Shields said, all writers have a lot of bad material inside themselves and when they get through that, their true worth emerges. I will put it more kindly by saying that in The Moving Target, Ross Macdonald begins to find his voice.

At press time, Albert had posted five pieces about The Moving Target, a book I tackled as well in this 2019 article for CrimeReads.

• There must be something special awash in the zeitgeist, because Guy Savage chose Macdonald’s second Archer outing, The Drowning Pool, to review this week in His Futile Preoccupations …

• A promised six-part TV adaptation of Anthony Horowitz’s Magpie Murders appears to be coming along quite smartly, despite actor Timothy Spall’s decision this last spring to pull out of the production “due to a scheduling clash.” (He’s since been replaced in the role of detective Atticus Pünd by Tim McMullan.) According to Mystery Fanfare, the mini-series “wrapped production in London, Suffolk and Ireland last month.” That same blog features a trio of still photos from the project. There’s no trailer yet, nor a scheduled date when Magpie Murders might begin airing on PBS-TV’s Masterpiece and Britfox in the UK, but the release is expected sometime in 2022.

• The historical crime drama Endeavour, starring Shaun Evans and Roger Allam, isn’t likely to return to PBS-TV’s Masterpiece series in America until next year. However, its three-episode Series 8 is showing already in Great Britain. If you don’t mind spoilers, The Killing Times critiques Episode 1 here, and Episode 2 here. Chris Sullivan, of the blog Morse, Lewis and Endeavour, presents his own review of the opening entry in this latest—and last—run of Endeavour here.

• True-crime fan Alyse Burnside tries to get to the bottom of some readers’ fondness for cozy mysteries in this piece for The Atlantic.

• Talk about coincidences! In the same fortnight that Mystery and Suspense posted author Glen Robins’ thoughtful piece about the use of martial arts in thrillers, Charlie Chan specialist Lou Armagno blogged about the once-frequent use of karate chops to subdue adversaries in films and on television. The karate chop, Armagno observed, “was the extent of violence you’d see in [vintage] shows like: Peter Gunn, The Chevy Mystery Show, Dragnet, 77 Sunset Strip, T.H.E. Cat, Danger Man, The Saint and I Spy. Of course there were shootings! But usually never much blood and normally ‘He’ll be all right, it’s just a flesh wound.’ And should a mortal wound be required by gun or knife, it usually went unseen. No blood, or just a dollop or so, then a quick double-over and fall down you’re dead. But the karate chop! You might get chopped two or three times in one show and still come out OK. … ‘Uhg, what hit me?’” Ah, the good ol’ days.

PaperBack: “Like Wild”

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



Like Wild, by Eric Allen (Monarch, 1963).
Cover illustration by George Erickson.

The Passing Parade

I’ve been trying for some while now to find time enough to compile one of my lengthy “Bullet Points” posts, in which I could mention a few recent deaths among members of the crime-fiction community. However, those free hours never seem to be available. Rather than wait longer, let me pay final respects here to six different people who have made contributions of one sort or another to this genre.

• Character actor Michael Constantine, who passed away from natural causes on August 31 at age 94, may now be—as Deadline insists—“best known as the fruit- and Windex-obsessed father Gus Portokalos in My Big Fat Greek Wedding, an indie film that rose out of nowhere to become a smash hit.” However, Constantine’s extensive list of TV and movie credits collected over a more-than-half-century-long career found him in everything from comedies to crime dramas, in both starring and secondary roles. For instance, he featured in films such as The Hustler (1961), The North Avenue Irregulars (1979), and Prancer (1989). On the small screen he played the beleaguered school principal on Room 222; a night court judge in the short-lived sitcom Sirota’s Court; a wannabe private eye in his first of two turns on Perry Mason; and the lovable loser George Edward Mulch in three episodes of Remington Steele. Constantine scored parts as well on The Untouchables, The Fugitive, The Name of the Game, The Streets of San Francisco, McMillan & Wife, Ellery Queen, Quincy, M.E., Crazy Like a Fox, Simon & Simon, Homicide: Life on the Street, and Law & Order. He was born Constantine Ioannides on May 22, 1927, in Reading, Pennsylvania—the same city in which he’s said to have died.

• Art Metrano, born in Brooklyn, New York, on September 22, 1936, evidently made his big-screen debut playing a truck driver in the 1958 espionage/science-fiction thriller Rocket Attack U.S.A. He was later cast in other pictures, among them They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969), They Only Kill Their Masters (1972), and a pair of Police Academy comedies. Nonetheless, Metrano is better remembered for his small-screen work, which included roles on The Mod Squad, Mannix, Kojak, Ironside, Kolchak: The Night Stalker, Police Story, Baretta, Hill Street Blues, and L.A. Law. In addition, he was a regular on the Ironside spin-off Amy Prentiss, playing San Francisco Detective Rod Pena. In 1989, Metrano tumbled from a ladder while repairing the roof of his Los Angeles home, and broke three vertebrae, leaving him a quadriplegic. That misfortune, says the entertainment Web site Enstars, “did not let it stop him from pursuing his career. Even after the fall, he returned in a one-man play, ‘Metrano’s Accidental Comedy,’ where he performed while riding on a motorized wheelchair.” Metrano perished in Florida on September 8 at 84 years of age.

• It was author Martin Edwards who first brought to my attention the demise, on August 31, of Robert Richardson, an author who served twice as chair of Britain’s Crime Writers’ Association (1993-1994 and again in 2006-2007). “Robert,” Edwards explained here, “was a journalist who moved from writing whodunits featuring an amateur sleuth to novels of psychological suspense.

His first crime novel, The Latimer Mercy (1985), won the John Creasey Memorial Award for the best debut of the year. Firmly in the classic detective story tradition, it benefited from a cathedral setting (in Vercaster, a fictionalised St. Albans), and an amateur detective [and playwright] who rejoiced in the name of Augustus Maltravers. … Maltravers appeared in three more novels before Robert published The Hand of Strange Children (1993), a book nominated for the CWA Gold Dagger. He blended extracts from news agency reports detailing the discovery of two bodies in a wealthy banker’s house with flashbacks so as to build considerable tension. Significant Others (1995), in which he made use of his knowledge of the newspaper industry, and Victims (1997), are also entertaining stand-alone novels.

Shotsmag Confidential adds that Richardson was presented with the CWA Red Herring Award in 2020 “for giving generously of his time and expertise, benefiting not only the CWA but the wider crime-writing community.” Eighty years old, he succumbed in South Yorkshire, England, after what’s said to have been a short, unspecified illness.

• The Gumshoe Site’s Jiro Kimura writes: “J. Randolph Cox died on September 14 at a care center in Northfield, Minnesota. The former librarian at St. Olaf College in Northfield served as the editor-publisher of Dime Novel Round-Up for more than 20 years, edited Masters of Mystery and Detective Fiction (Scarecrow Press, 1989), and authored Man of Magic and Mystery (Scarecrow Press, 1989; a biblio-biography of the creator of The Shadow), The Dime Novel Companion (Greenwood Press, 2000), and Flashgun Casey, Crime Photographer (Book Hunter Press, 2005; with David S. Siegel), among other [books]. He frequently contributed articles for many mystery reference books and fanzines and received the 2014 Munsey Award presented by PulpFest.” Cox had achieved 84 years of life before he took his last breath. UPDATE: Mystery*File supplies a bit more info about Cox here.

• Being a regular reader of his eclectic, often humorous, and long-running blog, Matt Paust’s Crime Time, I was surprised, along with so many others, to hear that journalist-turned-fictionist Paust has died from bladder cancer. Or, as he phrased it in an obituary he penned and left behind, “Mathew David Paust has at last slipped quietly away from the furiously whirling social experiment known throughout the galaxy, and perhaps beyond—and not without a chuckle, groan, snort, or perhaps something more imaginative—as ‘Earth.’” The brief biographical sketch explains that Paust—who had retired from the Newport News, Virginia, Daily Press to concoct and self-publish several books, among them the satirical Executive Pink (2010) and Sacrifice (2012)—“was born in Columbus, Wisconsin, two days before Japanese war planes bombed U.S. Naval ships at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.” Which made him 79 years old. The final entry in his blog, which he launched eight years ago, was posted in July.

• Finally, a few words about the late, great Ed Asner. I was introduced to this Kansas City, Missouri-born actor by my mother, who was a loyal fan of The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970-1977), on which Asner played a news producer at Minneapolis station WJM-TV. My interest in him was significantly enhanced when, after that situation comedy’s cancellation, he reappeared on the wonderful spinoff series Lou Grant (1977–1982), portraying the same tough-talking character in a much different setting, as city editor of the fictional Los Angeles Tribune. As David Von Drehle wrote in The Washington Post, Asner became “the first actor to win Emmy awards for the same role in both a comedy and a drama. That tells you something about the depth of the character and of Asner’s portrayal—for what is more true of human existence than its inseparable tangle of comedy and drama?” However, Asner’s TV and movie credits extended well beyond those two landmark series. As The Spy Command recalls, he earned screen time on The Girl from U.N.C.L.E., The Wild Wild West, and House on Greenapple Road, a teleflick that spawned the Burt Reynolds series Dan August. Asner racked up roles, too, on everything from Naked City, Cain’s Hundred, Route 66, The Untouchables, and The Defenders to Burke’s Law, The Fugitive, Judd, for the Defense, They Call It Murder (the unsuccessful 1971 pilot for a TV series based on Erle Stanley Gardner’s Doug Selby novels), The Mod Squad, Police Story, Roots, The Trials of Rosie O’Neill, and even Mad About You. Asner’s face was hardly less familiar on the silver screen; he was seen in The Satan Bug (1965), Gunn (1967, based on the TV series Peter Gunn), James Garner’s Skin Game (1971), Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991), Elf (2003), and the 2009 animated film Up. Variety notes in addition that “Within the industry he was respected for his activism on liberal causes that were close to his heart and for his service as Screen Actors Guild president from 1981 to 1985. In recent years he had been vocal in his opposition to the current SAG-AFTRA leadership regime. In December Asner was one of 10 actors who filed a class-action lawsuit against the union over changes made to its health care plan.” Ed Asner was 91 when he expired this last August 29, reportedly of natural causes.

Clear the Way for Mac and Sally

This last Wednesday brought us one significant small-screen anniversary, a full half-century having passed since Columbo made its debut as part of the equally new NBC Mystery Movie “wheel series.” Today offers another. It has now been an amazing 50 years since Once Upon a Dead Man—the two-hour pilot film for McMillan & Wife, another popular Mystery Movie component—was first broadcast on Friday, September 17, 1971. The teleflick’s competition that evening included the second-season opener of the ABC sitcom The Partridge Family; the debut of David Janssen’s third boob-tube drama, CBS’ ill-fated O’Hara, United States Treasury; the ABC comedy Love, American Style; and the CBS “world premiere” of Terror in the Sky, based on blockbuster best-seller Arthur Hailey’s 1956 television play, Flight into Danger.

Once Upon a Dead Man starred Rock Hudson as Stewart “Mac” McMillan, a defense attorney turned police commissioner of San Francisco, who took an extraordinarily active role in criminal investigations; and Susan Saint James (formerly of The Name of the Game) playing Sally McMillan, the commissioner’s two-decades-younger spouse, whose tendency to attract trouble was fortunately paired with her own skills at crime solving—she was, after all, born to a legendary Bay Area criminologist. Regarding the plot of that teleflick (written by Leonard B. Stern and Chester Krumholz), it found Sally drawing Mac into a charity-auction theft … which inevitably led to murder. John Schuck (who’d previously been seen in episodes of M*A*S*H, Gunsmoke, and Mission: Impossible) took the role of Sergeant Charles Enright, Mac’s phlegmatic and sometimes laughably obtuse assistant. Further filling out the cast were Jack Albertson, René Auberjonois, Kurt Kasznar, James Wainwright, the then-ubiquitous Herb Edelman, and Lost in Space’s Jonathan Harris. (Nancy Walker, who would receive three Emmy Award nominations for her supporting role as the McMillans’ grouchy housekeeper, Mildred, didn’t appear in this pilot; she only joined the series with its first regular episode, “Murder by the Barrel,” shown on September 29, 1971.)

As the TV Guide ad above asserts, Once Upon a Dead Man was intended to “generate laughs and suspense.” That should’ve been amended to read “smiles and suspense”—it wasn’t a comedy, after all. However, it did feature splendid, playful repartee between Hudson and Saint James, as well as an unusual but delightful bicycle pursuit through the streets of San Francisco, surely meant as a spoof on Steve McQueen’s squealing car chase in the 1968 film Bullitt.

Curiously, while McMillan & Wife is one of the vintage TV series (together with Banacek, McCloud, and others) added just this month to the lineup at IMDb TV, Amazon’s free, ad-supported streaming service, Once Upon a Dead Man is omitted from the episodes available. To watch it nowadays, you may have to spring for the complete series on DVD. Below you’ll find the movie’s opening title sequence.



Oh, and if you’re confused by the second new show being promoted in the ad atop this post, you’re probably not alone. The D.A., which also debuted on this date 50 years ago, was Robert Conrad’s third series, following Hawaiian Eye and The Wild Wild West. According to Wikipedia, the half-hour drama had Conrad playing Paul Ryan, “a tough-minded, hard-hitting prosecutor” for Los Angeles County. Aided by criminal investigator Bob Ramirez (ex-Dan August co-star Ned Romero), Ryan “prosecuted all types of cases under the watchful eye of his supervisor, Chief Deputy District Attorney H.M. ‘Staff’ Stafford (Harry Morgan, who directed at least one episode himself). His opponent was usually Public Defender Katherine Benson (Julie Cobb).”

Employing a half-investigation, half-prosecution format that had been used in the earlier ABC-TV series Arrest and Trial (1963-1964), and would work to superior effect on NBC’s Law & Order (1990-2010), The D.A. was a production from actor, director, and screenwriter Jack Webb, spun off from a couple of TV films made by Webb’s company, Mark VII Ltd.: 1969’s Murder One and Conspiracy to Kill from 1971, “both of which fictionalized cases prosecuted by Vincent Bugliosi, world-famous as the prosecutor of Charles Manson.” Despite helpful hype in TV Guide and other sources, the series lasted only 15 episodes, the final regular installment appearing on January 7, 1972. However, again quoting Wikipedia, "some episodes were later compiled in 1978 as a two-hour TV movie titled Confessions of the D.A. Man which aired on CBS on January 20, 1978, as part of The CBS Late Movie.”

To read more about The D.A., click here.