Tuesday, August 29, 2023

Revue of Reviewers: 8-29-23

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













A Final Summer Reminder

I’ll be posting a lengthy list of fall and early winter crime-fiction releases after Bouchercon. But in the meantime, take a last look at The Rap Sheet’s extensive rundown of books that came out over these last three summer months. What did you miss? Which works do you need to check out before talk of holiday gift-buying begins?

Monday, August 28, 2023

Smatterings of Intelligence

• What is the real identity of Icelandic crime novelist Stella Blómkvist? It’s a long-standing mystery, though some claim to know the answer. In this piece from Crime Fiction Lover, her (?) translator, Quentin Bates, relates the challenges of working with a pseudonymous writer with whom he has “no direct line of communication.” Murder at His Residence (Corylus), Blómkvist’s 13th book—and the first to appear in English—is being released this week.

• Meanwhile, an interview with translator Bates is featured in Linda’s Book Bag, a blog from Linda Hill. Enjoy it here.

• Also of interest is this brief exchange between busy blogger Marshal Zeringue and Edgar Award-winner Erin Flanagan, whose new novel, Come With Me (Thomas & Mercer), offers a tense tale of female friendship, twisted deceptions, and fiercely guarded secrets.

• A curiosity, indeed. This 1900 silent short, Sherlock Holmes Baffled, is “believed to be the earliest film featuring The Great Detective.”

• FX’s black comedy/crime drama, Fargo, is scheduled to return for its fifth-season run beginning on Tuesday, November 21, and streamable on Hulu. As The Killing Times explains, “The plot ... has been teased with the following questions: ‘When is a kidnapping not a kidnapping, and what if your wife isn’t yours?’”

• And I’ll watch pretty much anything that stars British actress Jenna Coleman. So this news, also from The Killing Times, has me smiling: “The BBC has announced a new, four-part crime drama starring Jenna Coleman. In The Jetty, Coleman stars as rookie detective Ember Manning who must work out how a fire in a Lancashire holiday home connects to a podcast journalist investigating a missing persons cold case and an illicit ‘love’ triangle between a man in his twenties and two underage girls. But as Ember gets close to the truth, it threatens to destroy her life—forcing her to re-evaluate everything she thought she knew about her past, present and the town she’s always called home.” I don’t see any word yet regarding a transmission date in either the UK or the States.

Friday, August 25, 2023

The Book You Have to Read:
“White Rabbit,” by David Daniel

(Editor’s note: This is the 180th installment in The Rap Sheet’s continuing series about great but forgotten books.)

By Steven Nester
David Daniel’s White Rabbit (2003) is a 1960s blast from the past, but in this psychedelic police procedural flower power is more of a fashion statement and mindset than a weapon. A few people (all the wrong ones, you dig?) recognize that pie-in-the-sky optimism is useless to foment change, and there are always a few bad apples that are tolerated (until they become really bad), but what else could you expect? It’s 1967 in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district, the epicenter of the counterculture, and the “Summer of Love” is well and truly underway.

The flower children in their eye-grabbing garb (yet anonymous with their noms de paix—Toad, Jester, Circe, among many others) believed they could change the world, force forth utopia with a kind word and a peace sign. A few were adamant that violent revolution was the legit answer (does 1776 ring a bell?), but it appeared to many on either side that beneath the surface this ’hood was a powder keg of antagonism with more us-against-them sentiment than any quantity of love beads or patchouli oil could hide. And as the Establishment and its heirs were busy circling each other with suspicion, into this Garden of Eden slithers real evil.

White Rabbit finds a serial killer at work in the Haight, and no one wants a role in identifying the murderer; that would involve talking to the cops, and cooperating with those “pigs” is not cool, according to Seth, an activist and editor of Rag, an underground newspaper. Seth is the pampered son of Bay Area limousine liberals. He supplies a handy subplot to Daniel’s yarn, as does his counterpoint, former firebrand and University of California, Berkeley professor Terry Gordon, who has literally “bought the farm” and now rusticates as he preaches non-violence. Impetuous Seth can’t see that violence will only hurt his cause and sour his romance with fellow journalist Amy Cole. But enough about him; the real story here is about Amy and San Francisco Police investigating detective John Sparrow. Too busy spitting vitriol and mixing Molotov cocktails, Seth doesn’t notice that Amy and John Sparrow are investigating each other.

Cole’s relationship with Sparrow begins simply enough: she wants a scoop, he wants the killer, pretty much the same thing. Not exactly a “meet cute,” they cross paths at the Hall of Justice during a press conference addressing the murders. A mutual trust begins when Amy becomes the straight-laced Sparrow’s Haight-Ashbury tour guide and apologist for the counterculture. He gets an eyeful of the tramps and prophets, the artists and charlatans, teen runaways, draft dodgers, drug dealers, rockers on the make, and the deeply disturbed. It should come as no surprise that the legendary activist Emmett Grogan has a walk-on role in this very busy and character-laden novel.

All is not groovy with Sparrow, however. Still grieving the death of his wife, transferred from homicide to the repugnant vice squad then back to homicide to work the serial-killer case, Sparrow must also maneuver around SFPD Captain George Moon, an archenemy who knows Sparrow quite well. Once Sparrow’s wingman, professional equal, and long-ago romantic rival (he blames the death of Sparrow’s spouse from cancer on him), Moon is now champing at the bit to unleash his riot squad on an upcoming anti-war rally in Golden Gate Park. His goal is to cleanse his beloved San Francisco of the unwashed hippie scourge, and the hippies know this, deepening their mistrust of law enforcement.

Sparrow at first resists the counterculture community that Amy Cole embraces, but to get anywhere with the investigation he realizes he must make the scene and extend an olive branch as best he can. He doesn’t trade his badge and .38 Police Special for flowers in his hair, but later a fistfight and worse involving fellow officers gets this complicated man relieved of both, allowing him to operate outside department rules. With Sparrow finally sidelined, Moon also hopes to trump him by finding the killer. Sparrow needs to move fast to make an arrest, before City Hall gives Moon the go-ahead to move in and most likely incite the riot he’s supposed to subdue.

Sparrow reminds Cole of her role as a responsible reporter and persuades her to print an appeal for local cooperation in finding the killer. However, the editorial Cole pens also places her on the killer’s radar, turning her into irresistible bait that leads to a showdown where everyone gets what they’ve asked for or deserve—to a point. Lovers for a heartbeat, it almost seemed as if a white picket fence and 2.5 children were in Amy and John’s future, and they still might be. But Daniels wields irony—the whimsical force of surprise—with discretion and tact as this story rolls along. And history seems to deliver its own irony, as if 1967 was the swan song of the Age of Aquarius.

What author Thomas McGuane (himself no stranger to San Franciso during that era) called the “hideous sixties” is often looked upon with awe, disgust, puzzlement, or all three. But what was it really like to be there from, say, 1965 to 1969, when the pot smoke really hit the fan? It’s said that if you can remember the ’60s you “weren’t really there.” That might be true of the participants who had sandals on the ground and a head full of LSD, but the writers who experienced counterculture life during its heyday possessed reliable memories, overflowing notebooks, and rich imaginations to fill in the blanks. Others, intellectuals such as Theodore Roszak, were able to observe the counterculture phenomenon with scientific detachment.

(Right) Author David Daniel.

To some observers, though, the American counterculture of the 1960s was nothing more than the spoiled children of the “greatest generation” disturbing mom and dad’s well-deserved nap after they’d survived the Great Depression, World War II, and threats of nuclear annihilation. But tune in and turn on to Roszak: he gives explanations from technological, spiritual, sociological, and drug-oriented analysis, among several others, in The Making of a Counterculture (1969). Those who immersed themselves into the culture, such as Joan Didion in Slouching Towards Bethlehem and Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, used different techniques: she the cool eye of a journalist, he with an over-the-top-exuberance that attempts to convey the experience of an acid trip. Ringolevio, the above-mentioned Emmett Grogan’s 1972 memoir, is the story of a feral vagabond youth who alit for a while in the Haight where he and others founded the community-action group the Diggers, who were in the thick of things back then.

As for David Daniels, solid plot and character development in White Rabbit are not sacrificed to give the readers a feel for Haight-Ashbury in this solid crime novel. It’s not clear whether he was present during the Summer of Love, but it sure sounds like it.

Thursday, August 24, 2023

And Another Thing …

• The recipients of this year’s Silver Falchion Awards, given out during the recent Killer Nashville convention in Tennessee, have been announced. There were more than two dozen categories of contestants, but below are five winners that may be of particular interest to Rap Sheet readers.

— Best Cozy: Murder in Third Position, by Lori Robbins (Level Best)
— Best Historical: Murder at the Galliano Club, by Carmen Amato (Laurel & Croton)
— Best Investigator: Dead Drop, by James L'Etoile (Level Best)
Best Mystery: The Bone Records, by Rich Zahradnik (1000 Words A Day Press)
— Best Thriller: One of Us Is Dead, by Jeneva Rose (Blackstone)

A full list of the 2023 Silver Falchion winners is here.

• Scottish writer Claire Wilson’s first novel, Five by Five, has won the inaugural Penguin Michael Joseph Undiscovered Writers Prize. As In Reference to Murder explains, “The prize, launched in 2022, aims to discover new writers from underrepresented backgrounds in publishing and focuses on a different genre each year, with the first year dedicated to crime fiction. Wilson, who works as an intelligence analyst in a Scottish prison, impressed the judges with her thriller which follows a protagonist on the trail of a corrupt prison officer who might be her lover. Wilson will receive a publishing contract with Penguin Michael Joseph, worth at least £10,000, and representation by the DHH Literary Agency. All shortlisted writers will also receive one-to-one editorial feedback and guidance from an editor or agent.”

• Six years after its original publication, Karen Dionne’s best-selling novel, The Marsh King’s Daughter, has been adapted to the silver screen and is set to debut in U.S. theaters on October 6. It stars Daisy Ridley and Ben Mendelsohn. Here’s a plot synopsis from distributors Lionsgate and Roadside Attractions:
In the tense thriller The Marsh King’s Daughter, a woman with a secret past will venture into the wilderness she left behind to confront the most dangerous man she's ever met: her father. In the film, Helena’s seemingly ordinary life hides a dark and dangerous truth: her estranged father is the infamous Marsh King, the man who kept her and her mother captive in the wilderness for years. When her father escapes from prison, Helena will need to confront her past. Knowing that he will hunt for her and her family, Helena must find the strength to face her demons and outmaneuver the man who taught her everything she knows about surviving in the wild.
• Occasional Rap Sheet contributor Randal S. Brandt writes in CrimeReads about the “fascinating and complicated life” of Lange Lewis (aka Jane de Lange Lewis), whose fourth novel about Los Angeles police lieutenant Richard Tuck, The Birthday Murder (1945), has been reissued as part of the American Mystery Classics line.

• Finally, Sweet Freedom’s Todd Mason brings the welcome news that Into the Night, author Cornell Woolrich’s final novel—unfinished at the time of his demise in 1968, but completed by Lawrence Block for publication in 1987—has been purchased by Hard Case Crime and is slated for re-release in May 2024, with beautiful cover art by Gregory Manchess. “Is it the best [Woolrich] ever wrote? No,” says HCC editor Charles Ardai. “But I do feel it deserves to be in print, and at its best I feel it’s a potent distillation of his themes and obsessions.”

Wednesday, August 23, 2023

Bullet Points: Broadcast Beat Edition

• Season 3 of Van der Valk, the British-made crime drama starring Marc Warren as Nicolas Freeling’s fictional Amsterdam cop, Piet Van der Valk, is set to premiere as part of PBS-TV’s Masterpiece series on Sunday, September 3. As The Killing Times explains, three new 90-minute episodes will find Commissaris Van der Valk facing “a new set of murders to solve, and as with seasons one and two all sorts of unusual angles and strange characters come into play. In the first episode, a European freerunning champion is gunned down by a sniper as he’s about to head to Paris for a competition. The maverick detective and his team uncover a link between the freerunners in the Netherlands and drug trafficking but there’s something more involved … The second case is pertinent if you’ve been following news stories about the British Museum and crimes taking place therein. An employee in an Amsterdam museum is murdered, which links to a case about the return of artefacts to their countries of origin that Van der Valk worked on early in his career. Finally, episode three of season three involves the death of someone taking part in a ritual to … um … summon a demon. Yes. You read that right.” Also starring in Van der Valk are Maimie McCoy as Inspecteur Lucienne Hassell and Darrell D'Silva as police forensic pathologist Hendrik Davie.

• While we’re on the subject of small-screen mysteries, let me tell you that Season 2 of Professor T, the UK adaptation of a popular Belgian program of the same name, will also debut as part of Masterpiece on September 3 (one hour earlier than Van der Valk, at 8 p.m. ET/PT). Ben Miller, formerly of Death in Paradise, stars as Professor Jasper Tempest, “a genius University of Cambridge criminologist with obsessive–compulsive personality disorder,” to quote from Wikipedia. Mystery Fanfare’s Janet Rudolph gives us the scoop on what to expect from this season: “Across six episodes, the Professor and the team untangle a series of knotty crimes ranging from an unexplained fire in a student block to the mystery of an entire family found dead in their home. From the blossoming affair between the two young detectives, Lisa and Dan, to the start of an exciting new liaison for Police chief DCI Christina Brand, nothing is quite what it seems. Meanwhile, Professor T is dominated and perplexed by the women in his life. As he attempts to improve his relationships with everyone from his mother to the love of his life Christina, he takes the monumental step of seeing a therapist. His sessions with Dr. Helena are painful for the Professor and his mother as they delve deep into his past and chip away at the secrets of his childhood.”

• And I’ve never listened to the BBC Radio 4 comedy-mystery series Mrs. Sidhu Investigates, but I may just have to tune in for the Acorn-TV adaptation of that series, which presents the first of four episodes on Monday, September 18. According to a press release, this show features English comedian Meera Syal (The Kumars at No. 42, The Split, The Devil’s Hour), who also voiced Mrs. Sidhu on the radio airwaves, as “a high-end caterer with a taste for crime. Recently widowed, she juggles her new catering business with encouraging her wayward son Tez (Gurjeet Singh, Ackley Bridge) to find his passion, all while serving up justice to those who believe they are above the law. Her forays into sleuthing see her form unofficial partnership with long-suffering divorcee DCI Burton [Craig Parkinson, familiar from Line of Duty and Grace] who reluctantly accepts that together they’re an unbeatable crime-fighting duo, much to the bemusement of his partner, DS Mint (Naana Agyei-Ampadu, Industry).”

• Another interesting note, this one from a recent post of B.V. Lawson’s In Reference to Murder:
Paramount+ released the first teaser trailer for Taylor Sheridan’s Lawmen: Bass Reeves, which stars David Oyelowo as the titular character. Reeves (Oyelowo), a former slave, was known as the greatest frontier hero in American history, working in the post-Reconstruction era as a federal peace officer in the Indian Territory and capturing over 3,000 of the most dangerous criminals without ever being wounded. Future iterations will follow other iconic lawmen and outlaws who have had an impact on history.
Wikipedia offers more of Reeves’s story here.

• Please excuse the tardiness of my mentioning this news, but the recent brutal summer heat here in Seattle seemed to steal away all of my energy. Anyway, I want to note that author Sara Paretsky has been chosen to receive the 2023 David Thompson Special Service Award, a commendation recognizing “extraordinary efforts to develop and promote the crime fiction field.” She will be given that prize during the coming Bouchercon in San Diego (August 30-September 3). Thompson was a “beloved” Houston, Texas, bookseller who passed away in 2010. Previous winners of the award include Les and Leslie Blatt, Janet Rudolph, and The Rap Sheet’s own Ali Karim.

• Paretsky talks about that new award, as well as her overdue return to Bouchercon, in this 11.5-minute YouTube video.

Friday, August 18, 2023

Spy Novelists Well Worth Shadowing

(Editor’s note: Northern California resident Peter Handel has reviewed and written about crime fiction for the San Francisco Chronicle, the Portland Oregonian, Pages Magazine, Mystery Readers International, and CrimeReads. In the essay below, he recommends three increasingly prominent spy novelists whose work is guaranteed to please even the most jaded espionage-fiction fan.)

John le Carré may be gone, but three writers in particular stand out as his descendants in the spy novel realm: Olen Steinhauer, Charles Cumming and Paul Vidich. Both Steinhauer and Cumming have been at it since early in the 21st century, while Vidich published his first book, An Honorable Man, in 2016.

All three write utterly compelling and smart stories that, like those from le Carré and Graham Greene, take readers into murky territory, where betrayal is common, sex can be dangerous, and violence is always lurking.

Steinhauer was kind enough to answer my questions about his literary efforts, back when I was writing a crime-fiction column for the late—very late—Pages Magazine in 2004. At the time, he was in the middle of creating his five-book series, the Yalta Boulevard Sequence, which began with 2003’s The Bridge of Sighs and concluded with 2007’s Victory Square.

“Essentially,” said Steinhauer, “the idea has always been a series of crime stories in a fictional Eastern European country, one for each decade of the Cold War … to me, this series is a personal and literary experiment to find out what I can pull off within the confines I’ve set for myself.” Obviously, he made it happen; the novels can be read either in order or as standalones.

Then, Steinhauer notes on his Web site: “After finishing the Yalta Boulevard Sequence of Cold War novels, I made a conscious decision to move into the contemporary world. This may seem like an obvious thing to do, but I'd spent my entire professional career writing about a time and place rather distant, and so the idea of moving to ‘today’ was a bit disconcerting. However, it was also necessary, for I was starting to fear I was escaping the confusing present to hide out in the past. So, I jumped feet-first into the post 9/11 world with the CIA's Department of Tourism, and Milo Weaver, a spy who just happened to be my first American main character.” Milo is an antihero, and a “Tourist” is basically a serial killer—just one we happen to like. (Unlike how totally repellant actual serial killers really are—Long Island, I’m talking to you.)

The four Milo Weaver novels truly pick up steam as the series proceeds. While The Tourist (2009) is your basic page-turner, the second and third entries, The Nearest Exit (2010) and An American Spy (2012), respectively, are even better. (I have been sitting on the finale, 2020’s The Last Tourist—one of those books you are dying to read, yet don’t want the “good times” to end!)

Steinhauer also has several standalones, including The Cairo Affair, a straight-ahead espionage thriller set in 2011, and an unusual political parable, 2018’s The Middleman, which considers radical, lefty political activism and a female FBI agent’s efforts to unwind a mysterious movement called The Massive Brigade. No word yet on his next novel, but it’s bound to be as killer as all the rest.

The prolific British novelist Charles Cumming also writes both series and standalones. He began in 2001 with A Spy by Nature, seemingly drawing from his own real-life experience. As his Web sites explains: “In 1995, Charles was approached for recruitment by the United Kingdom’s Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). A Spy by Nature, a novel partly based on his experiences with MI6, was published in the UK in June 2001. The novel’s hero, Alec Milius, is a flawed loner in his early 20s who is recruited by MI5 to sell doctored research data on oil exploration in the Caspian Sea to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).” He rather blows the whole thing. It’s a chastened, hapless Alec we encounter in the sequel, 2006’s The Spanish Game, wherein he gets wrapped up in Basque separatist intrigue.

But back up now to Cumming’s second novel, The Hidden Man (2003). It’s a standalone that follows two argumentative brothers who investigate the murder of their ex-spy father at the hands of Russian bad guys. It does feel at times like the proverbial second novel, but all the same makes for an engaging read.

It was with Cumming’s fourth book, Typhoon (2008), that he began to evolve into the truly remarkable stylist and plotter we know him to be today. So far unread by yours truly (but sitting prominently in my Cumming bedside stack), the story in Typhoon takes place in Hong Kong, as MI6 and CIA agents mix it up.

The Trinity Six, released back in 2011, is Cumming’s take on the biggest spy scandal in Britain’s history: the Cold War moles who were embedded in British intelligence—the infamous “Cambridge spy ring”—and in the pay of the Soviet Union.

But wait, there’s more, much more! Cumming’s Thomas Kell trilogy debuted back in 2012, beginning with A Foreign Country, which revolves around an MI6 officer given a last chance to redeem himself when the first woman head of MI6 disappears. Can Kell sort it all out? Of course he can. It’s thrilling writing and reading. A Colder War (2014) and A Divided Spy (2016) complete that triumvirate.

Another Cumming standalone, 2019’s The Man Between (aka The Moroccan Girl), precedes the utterly smashing soon-to-be-trilogy, the BOX 88 novels. Those latter three books, beginning with BOX 88 (2020), are based on a highly secret sub-organization involved in counterintelligence unknown to most members of both the CIA and MI6. BOX 88 follows the evolution of Lachlan Kite (“Lockie”), recruited as an 18-year-old, initially to gather information about a rich Iranian who may have been involved in the Lockerbie plane explosion over Scotland in 1988. Your intrepid correspondent here is almost finished with that first entry, and I’m chomping at the bit to read its follow up, JUDAS 62 (2021). I very much look forward to finding the third book, Kennedy 35, due out in November from The Mysterious Press.

If you wish to acquaint yourself with Cumming’s work, and you really should, then I recommend starting with BOX 88—it’s a tough call, but somebody has to make it.

The last of this new breed of spy novelists, and one who has wonderfully monopolized my time, is Paul Vidich. He’s published five novels to date, and his deeply researched stories have more than a little dose of reality-based action. His frequent, primary protagonist, George Mueller, is a typical world-weary CIA op. In Vidich’s debut, An Honorable Man, Mueller is tasked with exposing a Soviet mole in the Agency during the early 1950s. (Lots of moles out there …)

A year after The Honorable Man reached bookstores, Mueller was back in The Good Assassin, traveling to pre-Castro, revolutionary Cuba to determine if a CIA agent stationed there—an old friend—has gone rogue. It’s a terrific use of what has been an overlooked setting in recent years.

Mueller is a very peripheral presence in The Coldest Warrior (2020), another fact-based story about the mysterious death of a government scientist who was exploited in the CIA’s infamous experiments with a new drug: LSD. (The things that CIA got up to!) Here is a thriller that begins in the early ’50s and concludes more than 20 years later.

2021’s The Mercenary, set in Moscow, circa 1985, pits a grizzled, troubled ex-CIA agent named Alex Garin against the KGB—for which he once worked as an agent, until he defected to the United States. In this tale, Garin is apparently the only person who is trusted by a high-level Russian intelligence agent wanting to make his own defection.

On to Berlin, 1989—shortly before that city’s Soviet-era Wall came down—and The Matchmaker (2022). It introduces Vidich’s first female protagonist, American translator Anne Simpson—happily married, she believes, to a loving East German man, a “piano tuner” by trade, who disappears suddenly and whose body is soon discovered. So he’s seemingly … dead. It’s up to Anne to find out what the truth is and to maneuver her way through duplicitous Stasi and CIA agents. Vidich again takes real-life events/people and fictionalizes the story around them. And the ending is a genuine stunner.

This fall, Vidich, like Cumming, has a new book due in stores: Beirut Station (Pegasus Crime), set in Lebanon in 2006.

Any reader who wants to escape into the labyrinthine world of espionage will find no better guides than these three gifted offspring of le Carré.

READ MORE:How Paul Vidich Builds His World of Spies,” by Peter Handel (CrimeReads).

Thursday, August 17, 2023

PaperBack: “Deadly Weapon”

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



Deadly Weapon, by “Wade Miller,” aka Robert Wade and Bill Miller (Signet, 1960). This was the authors’ first novel to see print, originally published in 1946. It was also the only book to star their Atlanta, Georgia, private eye, Walter James.

Cover art by Robert K. Abbett.

The Changing Role of Cadavers

American novelist Amor Towles, who may be best known for his books A Gentleman in Moscow and The Lincoln Highway, has also edited the forthcoming collection, The Mysterious Bookshop Presents the Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2023. In his introduction—recently reprinted in The New York Times—Towles looks back at how the cadaver, the central focus of so many whodunits in the 1920s and ’30s, evolved to become a more minor presence in hard-boiled detective fiction, and finally a mere prop in serial-killer yarns.

Tuesday, August 15, 2023

Ripley’s Last, Believe It or Not

British critic Mike Ripley has followed through on his threat, made earlier this year, to discontinue his “Getting Away with Murder” column for Shots. The 200th and final installment was posted earlier today.

As has been typical of Ripley’s columns, this latest one is wide-ranging in its subjects, covering everything from a tribute to his Shots colleagues and the release of Word Monkey, a posthumous memoir by Christopher Fowler, to Swedish book-cover artist Hans Arnold, the reissuing of Doug J. Swanson’s “often very funny crime thrillers,” and new novels by David Hewson, Caro Ramsay, Vaseem Khan, and others.

Ripley concludes by saying he will miss penning a monthly books column, but that that duty has become rather onerous: “[W]ith an estimated 600 new crime novels and thrillers conventionally published this year, plus possibly an equal number appearing as e-books or self-published, keeping tabs on them is very much a young man’s game.”

FOLLOW-UP: I didn’t notice this detail initially, but the banner head above Ripley’s August 2023 column says it’s the “last regular” edition of “Getting Away with Murder.” Does that leave open the possibility of the feature returning on an irregular basis? Time will tell.

* * *

Speaking of milestones, editor George Easter recently sent to subscribers the 100th edition of Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine, dated Summer 2023. Its cover feature focuses on the delightful T.J. Newman (Falling, Drowning), while inside you’ll also find critiques of other action/spy novels by women; an obituary of John Dunning (Booked to Die), who passed away in late May; assistant editor Larry Gandle’s assessments of the 2023 Dagger Award nominees; a piece about Malaysian writer Rozlan Mohd Noor’s Inspector Mislan Latif mysteries; an updated list of DP’s “Best of 2023” list; and much more. Click here to subscribe or to purchase just this latest issue.

Friday, August 11, 2023

Revue of Reviewers: 8-11-23

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











Violent Crime from a Vibrant Region

The following news comes from In Reference to Murder:
Five writers have been shortlisted for the Lindisfarne Prize for Crime Fiction, currently in its fifth year after being established by LJ Ross, writer of the North East-based DCI Ryan series. The prize aims to celebrate outstanding crime and thriller storytelling of those who are from, or whose work celebrates, the North East of England. This year’s finalists [are] Robert Meddes, Those Men, Those Faces; Sarah Jeffery, The Perfect Alibi; Alan Sendall, Double Infidelity; Karys Frank, Stone Cold Truth; and Sarah Williams, Vacancy for Murder.

The winner will be announced on September 6 and will receive a cash prize to support the completion of their work, alongside funding for membership of the Society of Authors (SoA) and the Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLI).
Last year’s Lindisfarne Prize recipient was The Children of Gaia, by Bedlington writer Jacqueline Auld,

Thursday, August 10, 2023

Let Us Now Extol the Marsh-Seekers

Craig Sisterson, the founder of New Zealand’s Ngaio Marsh Awards, is enthusiastic about the diversity of authors included among this year’s finalists in three categories. “Lovely to see three Māori/indigenous authors featured,” he says, “with Renée (Ngāti Kahungunu) and Michael Bennett (Ngāti Pikiao, Ngāti Whakaue) finalists in Best Novel, Michael also in Best First, and Paul Diamond (Ngāti Haua, Te Rarawa and Ngā Puhi) in Best Non-fiction. A Pasifika finalist too, with Emeli Sione in Best Non-Fiction for A New Dawn. So that's a pleasing evolution over the past decade plus.”

The shortlists of 2023 Marsh Award contenders, announced on Thursday morning, New Zealand time, are featured below.

Best Non-fiction (a biennial prize):
A New Dawn, by Emeli Sione (Mila’s Books)
The Devil You Know, by Dr. Gwen Adshead and Eileen Horne (Faber)
Downfall: The Destruction of Charles Mackay, by Paul Diamond (Massey University Press)
The Fix, by Scott Bainbridge (Bateman)
Missing Persons, by Steve Braunias (HarperCollins)

Best First Novel:
One Heart One Spade, by Alistair Luke (Your Books)
Too Far from Antibes, by Bede Scott (Penguin SEA)
Better the Blood, by Michael Bennett (Simon & Schuster)
Surveillance, by Riley Chance (CopyPress)
The Slow Roll, by Simon Lendrum (Upstart Press)
Paper Cage, by Tom Baragwanath (Text)

Best Novel:
Exit .45, by Ben Sanders (Allen & Unwin)
Blue Hotel, by Chad Taylor (Brio)
Remember Me, by Charity Norman (Allen & Unwin)
The Doctor’s Wife, by Fiona Sussman (Bateman)
Better the Blood, by Michael Bennett (Simon & Schuster)
Blood Matters, by Renée (The Cuba Press)
The Slow Roll, by Simon Lendrum (Upstart Press)

“It’s a very strong group of finalists to emerge from a dazzlingly varied longlist,” Sisterson is quoted as saying in a press release. “This year’s entrants gave our international judging panels lots to chew over, and plenty of books judges enjoyed and loved didn’t become finalists. ‘Yeahnoir,’ our local spin on some of the world’s most popular storytelling forms, is certainly in fine health.”

Winners of this year’s Ngaio Marsh Awards are expected to be declared during an event held in association with the WORD Christchurch Festival, probably in mid-November.

Wednesday, August 09, 2023

Busy Farrell Can Finally Rest in Peace

Particularly during the 1960s and ’70s, actress Sharon Farrell—who was recently reported to have died of natural causes on May 15, aged 82—seemed ubiquitous on American television programs.

Farrell was among the stars of Saints and Sinners, a pretty much forgotten, 1962-1963 NBC drama set amid the New York City newspaper business. She also had a recurring role on the original Hawaii Five-O, playing police detective Lori Wilson, and from 1991 to 1997 featured regularly as Florence Webster on the CBS soap opera The Young and the Restless. Scanning her credits on the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) shows her to have guested on everything from Naked City, My Favorite Martian, and Burke’s Law to The Man from U.N.C.L.E., The Fugitive, The Wild Wild West, Police Story, Kolchak: The Night Stalker, The New Perry Mason, McCloud, Petrocelli, Banyon, and Mrs. Columbo. She later executed distinctive turns on T.J. Hooker and Matlock.

I remember the fetching blonde Farrell best, however, for a few other TV appearances. She occupied two very different roles in The Name of the Game, portraying a swindled blues musician in 1969’s “A Hard Case of the Blues,” and subsequently Sandrelle, a prospective love interest for the time-displaced Glenn Howard (Gene Barry) in the now-famous 1971 episode “L.A. 2017.” In the 1974 NBC pilot movie The Underground Man, based on Ross Macdonald’s novel of the same name and starring Peter Graves, Farrell brought emotion aplenty to her part as the mother of a troubled young woman (Kay Lenz) involved in a child kidnapping. And in “For the Love of Money,” the January 16, 1975, installment of David Janssen’s private-eye series, Harry O, she played the bikini-clad, merry-making girlfriend of a prominent booking agent. No matter what character Farrell inhabited, be it a spunky young roommate on Love, American Style or a machine-gun-toting militant on Police Woman, she delivered nothing short of a captivating performance.

Of course, Farrell didn’t confine herself to small-screen jobs. Her cinematic debut came in 1959’s Kiss Her Goodbye, adapted from the same-named, 1956 couple-on-the-run novel by Wade Miller. In its obituary, Deadline contended that Farrell “is best remembered for the [1974] film It’s Alive, in which she played the mother of a murderous deformed infant.” But she was seen as well in 1969’s The Reivers, 1980’s The Stunt Man, and 1987’s Can’t Buy Me Love. The big-screener that brought her to my early attention was Marlowe (1969), starring James Garner as Los Angeles gumshoe Philip Marlowe. In that Hollywood take on Raymond Chandler’s 1949 novel, The Little Sister, Farrell personated Orfamay Quest, a charmingly naïve but worried girl from Kansas who employs Marlowe to find her missing brother, and lends the picture both humor and a modicum of treachery.

(Above) Sharon Farrell starred with James Garner in Marlowe.

Sharon Farrell was born Sharon Lee Forsmoe in Sioux City, Iowa, on December 24, 1940. Her ancestry was Norwegian, and she was reared in a Lutheran family. As a child, she began studying ballet and went on to tour with the American Ballet Theatre Company, which took her to New York City. She was just 18 years old when she made Kiss Her Goodbye, but had already caught the acting bug. As Wikipedia recalls, Farrell bore a son, Chance Boyer, in 1970 with fellow performer John F. Boyer. Afterward, she “suffered an embolism which caused her heart to stop beating for four minutes. She ended up with serious brain damage that resulted in memory loss and physical impairments. With the help of colleagues, Farrell worked to regain her abilities, including her memory, and resumed her acting career, yet she kept her illness a secret under the advice of friend and actor Steve McQueen, who warned her that if word of her illness got out, her career would be over. Keeping her illness hidden, Farrell worked steadily for decades.” By the way, McQueen was another of the men, in addition to Boyer, with whom she was romantically linked over the years. The Hollywood Reporter’s obit of Farrell says that at one point, she was “involved in ‘a love triangle’” with both McQueen (her co-star in The Reivers) and martial arts legend Bruce Lee (who made quite a showing in Marlowe) “that resulted in Lee and McQueen not doing a movie together.”

IMDb lists Farrell’s final television gig as a January 1999 episode of the U.S. Navy legal drama JAG. More than another decade passed before she accepted (in her early 70s) the part of a grandmother in two episodes of the digital drama Broken at Love. Yet there’s little fear of Sharon Farrell being forgotten, as long her vast wealth of Hollywood work continues to bring her broad-smiling, twinkle-eyed face into homes and theaters around the world.

READ MORE:Sharon Farrell Passes On,” by Terence Towles Canote
(A Shroud of Thoughts).

WATCH THEM NOW: At least for the time being, 1974’s The Underground Man, the Name of the Game episode “A Hard Case of the Blues,” and the Harry O installment “For the Love of Money”—all featuring Farrell—can all be enjoyed online.

Aspiring Crime-Fictionists, Take Note

Thanks to a three-way alliance of interested parties, a new crime-writing prize has been founded to encourage the work of “unagented, debut authors, born or resident in the UK and Ireland.” Shotsmag Confidential reports that the London-based literary agency A.M. Heath, the Orion Publishing Group, and the “true-crime obsessed” magazine Crime Monthly are together launching Criminal Lines 2023, which offers £3,500 to the winning entrant.

Organizers and contest judges are looking for everything from psychological thrillers to serial-killer yarns and cozy mysteries. Submissions should comprise the first 5,000 words of a novel “with ‘criminal intent,’” plus a synopsis of the completed work that runs to no more than 1,000 words in length. Entries are already being accepted; the deadline for their presentation is December 7. Details about eligibility and how to submit your work are available here.

Shotsmag Confidential explains that “this year’s judges will include A.M. Heath agents Euan Thorneycroft and Oli Munson, Crime Monthly assistant editor Lisa Howells, Orion Fiction editors Leodora Darlington and Sam Eades, and authors Vaseem Khan and Mari Hannah.” Commenting on his hopes for the new writing award, Khan is quoted as saying, “It took me two ego-bruising decades and seven unpublished novels to finally find myself in print. This new prize aims to help shortcut that journey for unpublished writers with the talent, commitment and sheer bloody-mindedness to become crime and thriller novelists—bloody being the operative word.”

In addition to that £3,500 in cold hard cash, the winner of Criminal Lines 2023 is set to receive an offer of representation from A.M. Heath. The runner-up won’t do badly either: their reward will be a full 12 months of mentoring from Orion.

The results of this competition are to be revealed in the March 2024 edition of Crime Monthly.

Tuesday, August 08, 2023

Prime Cases of Scandi Crime

Drawing from what is described as a “significantly increased number of entries,” organizers of the annual Petrona Award for the Best Scandinavian Crime Novel of the Year have developed their longlist of nominees for 2023. They are:

The Shadow Murders, by Jussi Adler-Olsen,
translated by William Frost (Denmark, Quercus)
Death in Summer, by Lina Areklew,
translated by Tara F Chace (Sweden, Canelo Crime)
Little Drummer, by Kjell Ola Dahl,
translated by Don Bartlett (Norway, Orenda)
Femicide, by Pascal Engma,
translated by Michael Gallagher (Sweden, Legend Press)
The Corpse Flower, by Anne Mette Hancock,
translated by Tara F. Chace (Denmark, Swift Press)
Winter Water, by Susanne Jansson,
translated by Rachel Willson-Broyles (Sweden, Hodder & Stoughton)
The Axe Woman, by Håkan Nesser,
translated by Sarah Death (Sweden, Mantle)
Land of Snow and Ashes, by Petra Rautiainen,
translated by David Hackston (Finland, Pushkin Press)
Kalmann, by Joachim B Schmidt,
translated by Jamie Lee Searle (Switzerland, Bitter Lemon Press)
Red as Blood, by Lilja Sigurðardóttir,
translated by Quentin Bates (Iceland, Orenda)
Codename Faust, by Gustaf Skördeman,
translated by Ian Giles (Sweden, Zaffre)
Bitter Flowers, by Gunnar Staalesen,
translated by Don Bartlett (Norway, Orenda)

As a press notice explains, “both large and small publishers are represented on the longlist, with Orenda Books leading with three entries, and the breakdown by country is Sweden (5), Denmark (2), Norway (2), Finland (1), Iceland (1) and Switzerland (1), with translators Don Bartlett and Tara F. Chace having translated two entries each.” A fine representation of last year’s works in this field.

A shortlist of contenders is set to be announced on September 7.

The Petrona Award, established back in 2013, takes its name from the blog operated by Maxine Clarke, a British editor and “champion of Scandinavian crime fiction,” who had died the year before that.

Monday, August 07, 2023

Hammer’s Silver Screen Return?

Mickey Spillane’s New York City private eye Mike Hammer has featured in multiple films over the years, both on the big screen and on television. Now that rough-edged and relentless protagonist may be headed back for yet another working over by Hollywood—thanks in part to author Max Allan Collins reviving his career in a series of books following Spillane’s demise in the early 2000s.

Deadline reports that California production company Skydance Media “has acquired rights to Mickey Spillane’s and Max Allan Collins’ Mike Hammer franchise with plans to develop and produce the bestselling book series as a feature film based on the iconic character.
Entertainment 360 joins as a producer with Skydance’s David Ellison, Dana Goldberg and Don Granger producing with Guymon Casady producing for Entertainment 360. Benjamin Forkner and Ken F. Levin will also produce. Collins will executive produce, with Jane Spillane serving as co-producer. Carin Sage will oversee the project for Skydance. ...

The producers have the rights to the Hammer catalog which includes dozens of stories, books and graphic novels authored by Mickey Spillane as well as those co-authored by Spillane and his friend the best-selling author Collins ...
As savvy Rap Sheet followers know, Spillane batted out 13 Mike Hammer novels during his 88 years on Earth, from I, the Jury (1947) to Black Alley (1996). Iowa author Collins, to whom Spillane entrusted his unpublished and unfinished works, released his first “collaborative” Hammer novel, The Goliath Bone, in 2008. Since then, he’s completed another 13 novels, plus a 2016 collection of Hammer short stories, A Long Time Dead. His latest joint venture with Spillane is Dig Two Graves, which was originally due out this month from Titan Books, but has been postponed until mid-September.

(Above) Mickey Spillane himself starred as shamus Mike Hammer in 1963’s The Girl Hunters, opposite Shirley Eaton.

Of previous Hammer movies, Deadline recalls: “The Mike Hammer novel Kiss Me, Deadly was adapted into the classic 1955 film directed by Robert Aldrich and starring Ralph Meeker as Hammer. In 1999, it was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress.” The site goes on to say that “The character has not had a chance for any feature film treatment thanks to a long-winded rights dispute. Spillane passed away in 2006, one month after the death of his manager Jay Bernstein. Bernstein’s estate claimed ownership of the Hammer character. Levin spent several years in court before the rights came back to the author’s estate and a clear title could be delivered for a movie deal.”​

It’s high time Hammer, his barking firearms, and his sexy partner, Velda Sterling, were rediscovered by filmgoers. Let us hope the present strikes by both Hollywood screenwriters and actors doesn’t cause serious delays to this production.

(Hat tip to In Reference to Murder.)

Saturday, August 05, 2023

The Neddies Are Coming

The Australian Crime Writers Association today announced its shortlist of contenders for the 2023 Ned Kelly Awards (aka “Neddies”).

Best True Crime:
Tiger! Tiger! Tiger!, by Officer A
Death Row at Truro, by Geoff Plunkett
Rattled, by Ellis Gunn
Betrayed, by Sandi Logan
Out of the Ashes, by Megan Norris

Best International Crime Fiction (published in Australia):
The Lemon Man, by Keith Bruton
Paper Cage, by Tom Baragwanath
The Favour, by Nicci French
The Hitchhiker, by Gerwin van der Werf

Best Debut Crime Fiction:
Wake, by Shelley Burr
No Country for Girls, by Emma Styles
Dirt Town, by Hayley Scrivenor
Black River, by Matthew Spencer
How to Kill a Client, by Joanna Jenkins
The House of Now and Then, by Jo Dixon
Lenny Marks Gets Away with Murder, by Kerryn Mayne
Denizen, by James McKenzie Watson

Best Crime Fiction:
Soulmate, by Sally Hepworth
When the Carnival Is Over, by Greg Woodland
Exiles, by Jane Harper
When We Fall, by Aoife Clifford
The Tilt, by Chris Hammer
Those Who Perish, by Emma Viskic
Seven Sisters, by Katherine Kovacic
Lying Beside You, by Michael Robotham

Publishers of individual works were not mentioned on the press release, and there are simply too many titles for me to look them all up in a timely fashion. Also not given were any particulars as to when a longlist of nominees might be released, or when winners will be declared. We’ll just have to wait and see how things go.

(Hat tip to Mystery Fanfare.)

Bullet Points: No Indictments Here Edition

I’m sorry this blog has offered nothing but crickets over the last week, but several things in my personal life demanded attention. With those now resolved, I can get back to the business of news gathering.

• New York bookshop proprietor, editor, and publisher Otto Penzler has announced that his company, Penzler Publishers, will introduce Crime Ink, a new imprint concentrating on literary true crime. Four to six titles annually are to be expected from this imprint, beginning next year. “Tom Wickersham, formerly the manager of The Mysterious Bookshop, will head the imprint as its editor,” explains a press release. “Charles Perry will be the Publisher, a position he currently holds with The Mysterious Press, American Mystery Classics, Scarlet, and MysteriousPress.com, an electronic book publisher—the other imprints of Penzler Publishers. Luisa Smith will oversee as Editor-in-Chief of Penzler Publishers.” Wickersham is quoted as saying: “We are poised to launch in the spring of 2024 with The Serial Killer’s Apprentice, the first modern examination of 1970s serial killer Dean Corll. Also under contract are a biography of New York crime journalist Jimmy Breslin, a comprehensive account of the Son of Sam killings, and a series in translation from France. We will strive to publish revelatory works that shed new light on old cases, expose modern injustices, and expand the classification of true crime as we know it.”

• It’s the first week of August, and you know very well what that means: time again to check The Rap Sheet’s lengthy list of summer crime-fiction releases. As is my wont, I have expanded that roster over the last month, adding new books as well as others still forthcoming between now and Labor Day. There’s something for every taste.

• Wasn’t I just complaining that Netflix’s The Lincoln Lawyer, based on Michael Connelly’s novels about Los Angeles defense counsel Mickey Haller, had taken an incomprehensible and frustrating break only halfway through its Season 2 run? Well, the show returned on Thursday with five further episodes, bringing the total to 10. Having just finished watching the excellent sophomore (and last) season of HBO-TV’s Perry Mason, I can now pick up where Haller left off—maybe with a little review of where things stood at the end of episode five.

• Good news for American followers of Unforgotten, the British cold-case crime drama starring Sanjeev Bhaskar and now Sinéad Keenan (who joined the program after Nicola Walker’s shocking departure): Season 5 of that popular series will debut as part of PBS-TV’s Masterpiece lineup on Sunday, September 3. According to The Killing Times, its half-dozen episodes will see “big changes in the Metropolitan Police team charged with investigating historical murders.
Cassie Stewart (Nicola Walker) was tragically killed in an RTA at the end of season four leaving her number two, DI Sunny Kahn (Sanjeev Bhaskar) bereft. Now her replacement has arrived but it’s all sandpaper between DCI Jessica James (Sinéad Keenan) and the normally empathetic and easy-going Sunny.

When a body is discovered inside a bricked in fireplace in an old London townhouse, DCI James isn’t even sure she wants to take the case. Police budgets. But the team quickly show that this was a murder and start generating leads, with connections stretching right up into the British government and across the Thames into the down-and-out squats inhabited by heroin addicts and petty thieves.
Watch the new season trailer at the Killing Times link above.

• Meanwhile, Annika, the Alibi-TV series Nicola Walker leapt to after Unforgotten, is set to introduce its second season on British boob-tubes come next Wednesday, August 9.

• Finally, The Chelsea Detective, on which Adrian Scarborough stars as a rather prickly but brilliant policeman working the streets of London’s prosperous Chelsea district, will return to streamer Acorn TV on Monday, August 28. This year, Scarborough’s Inspector Max Arnold will be given a new partner, Detective Sergeant Layla Walsh (Vanessa Emme), a transfer fresh from Exeter. (Season 1 had found him teamed, instead, with Detective Constable Priya Shamsie, played by Sonita Henry.) Again, The Killing Times has a video introduction to The Chelsea Detective’s four new episodes.

• Had he not succumbed to a heart attack 90 years ago, Earl Derr Biggers, the creator of Chinese American police detective Charlie Chan, would be preparing to celebrate his 139th birthday on August 26. In his memory, Lou Armagno, author of the forthcoming book The Wisdom Within Earl Derr Biggers’ Charlie Chan: The Original Aphorisms Inside the Charlie Chan Canon (BookBaby), suggests that any readers who happen to be in Honolulu, Hawaii, on that date toast the author at Earl’s, a new bar inside the Halekulani Hotel’s House Without a Key restaurant, named in his honor.

• Sometimes it seems book publishers believe their readers to be absolute morons. Case in point, from In Reference to Murder: “Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe is getting a trigger warning from publish[ing] house Vintage. The 1939 novel The Big Sleep, considered among the greatest works of crime fiction, has been reprinted with a cautionary note ... Would-be readers of Chandler’s most famous work are now warned that the book may contain ‘outdated language and cultural representations.’ The note addressed to the ‘dear reader’ cautions that while the story centered on Los Angeles detective Philip Marlowe is an outstanding example of crime fiction, it is nevertheless ‘firmly of its time and place.’” Oh gosh, shock, shock!

• Four recent CrimeReads pieces I’ve enjoyed recently: Denise Mina, author of the brand-new Philip Marlowe yarn The Second Murderer, talks with Nancie Clare about Marlowe’s continuing relevancy and what it feels like to be a woman channeling Chandler; Anika Scott (Sinners of Starlight City) on Chicago’s efforts in the early 1930s to bring down local organized crime and build its image-improving Century of Progress International Exposition; and Nathan Ward (Son of the Old West) recalls the strange case of “cowboy mutineers” who vanished in the South Pacific in 1902, only to have their ringleader apparently resurface in Arizona years later.

• And let us remember two people who made significant contributions to modern crime fiction. First, Edward Hume, who (among other things) scripted the pilots for three famous 1970s Quinn Martin TV series: Cannon, The Streets of San Francisco, and Barnaby Jones. He passed away last month at age 87. Second, we bid a respectful adieu to author Jill Churchill, perhaps best remembered for her award-winning Jane Jeffry and Grace and Favor mystery series. Churchill was 80 years old when she died on July 12.