Bullet Points: Break Out the Piñatas Edition

• This summer, Penguin Modern Classics will revive its once-iconic line of “bottle-green”-fronted crime and espionage novels. This new series will be curated by Penguin Press publishing director Simon Winder. Shotsmag Confidential provides an overview of the project: “Combining a careful selection of the very best from Penguin Classics’ extensive archives, including John le Carré, Josephine Tey, and Chester Himes, with exciting forgotten treasures which are well overdue a rediscovery, such as Edogawa Rampo and Davis Grubb, the first tranche of ten titles takes us from a sunshine soaked, yet bullet ridden California to a macabre Tokyo flat, through English country estates to the streets of Harlem. Transporting the reader through time and space, these novels can be outrageously entertaining but also chilling, filled with the darkest politics, vices, and betrayals.” There’s no word yet on when the next 10 paperbacks will see print, but Kate Jackson of Cross-Examining Crime already has a few suggestions of classic works Winder should add to his line sometime in the future.

• Ali Karim has posted, in Shots, a thoughtful interview with Dennis Lehane, author the new historical crime novel Small Mercies.

• A few recent pieces from CrimeReads, all of which are worth checking out: Katharine Coldiron’s fascinating look back at ABC-TV’s much-maligned 1990 police procedural/musical series, Cop Rock; Dean Jobb’s history of Gaston Derohan, a phony monk but successful swindler, who became a footnote in the early 1880s assassination of U.S. President James A. Garfield; Peter Handel’s interview with Sheila Halladay, the widow of British-born Canadian crime fictionist Peter Robinson, who died last October; and this essay, by writer Burt Weissbourd (Rough Justice), on why Seattle, Washington, is “such an attractive place to write thrillers.” That last article reminds me of one I penned a few years back, also for CrimeReads, highlighting various crime and mystery novels set in the Emerald City.

• Britain’s national Crime Writing Month will return this coming June with an assortment of special events planned.

• Says In Reference to Murder: “Netflix has acquired the rights to adapt the Danish novel series Department Q, which it plans to turn into a series adaptation, with one twist: it’s going to be filmed in Edinburgh, Scotland, not Denmark. Department Q is based on a best-selling series of crime novels by Danish author Jussi Adler-Olsen and centers on guilt-wracked Copenhagen detective Carl Mørck, demoted to a cold-case unit after a botched raid in which his partner is paralyzed and another police officer killed. Scott Frank, whose adaptation of The Queen’s Gambit was a smash hit for Netflix in 2020, will direct.”

(Right) Author Jussi Adler-Olsen

• Meanwhile, Mystery Fanfare carries word that a feature film adaptation of Alan Bradley’s beloved 2009 novel, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie—which introduced young amateur investigator Flavia de Luce—“is being shopped at the Cannes Film Market.” Actors Isla Gee and Martin Freeman are both attached to the project.

• Did you know Apple TV+ offers an animated Harriet the Spy series? OK, maybe I was the only one in the dark. The show kicked off in November 2021, and its second season debuts today.

• The first and only time I met best-selling Swedish author Håkan Nesser was at the 2007 Left Coast Crime convention in Seattle. Back then, I hadn’t read any of his novels, and in fact, had no frickin’ idea who he was when I was seated beside him at the convention’s awards banquet. Thankfully, Nesser was kind enough to overlook my incompetence and to supply me with reading suggestions from his growing oeuvre. I flashed back on that encounter yesterday, when I read on the online news site The Shift that the author has gotten into hot water over companies he registered on the Mediterranean island of Malta years ago, when it was “financially advantageous” to do so. Nesser now faces “court proceedings for withdrawing over €1.3 million” from said companies “without reporting it to the Swedish tax authorities.” These dubious doings were evidently brought to light in the Paradise Papers, “a set of over 13.4 million confidential electronic documents relating to offshore investments” that were leaked to German reporters in 2017. The Shift goes on to explain that Nesser has been “charged with aggravated tax evasion and his business advisor was charged with aiding and abetting aggravated tax evasion by assisting Nesser with his tax returns.” The writer denies wrongdoing, “and insists that both the company in Malta and the dividends sent to Sweden were done on the advice of his business advisors and that he had no intention of committing any crime.”

• And of course, this being Cinco de Mayo, Janet Rudolph celebrates with a selection of associated mystery tales.