Brushing Up on the Latest News

• Several months ago we mentioned that British actress Lucy Boynton had been signed to play Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in the United Kingdom (back in 1955), in a four-part ITV-TV drama simply titled Ruth. The Killing Times now brings word that Toby Jones, Laurie Davidson, Mark Stanley, Juliet Stevenson, and others have been added to the cast. Still no news about a broadcast date, though.

• We finally have a new date for the previously delayed, fourth-season premiere of HBO-TV’s uneven anthology series, True Detective. This latest story, subtitled Night Country, will be set in Alaska and star Jodie Foster. The Killing Times says we should expect its U.S. run to begin on Sunday, January 14, on HBO, and adds that it will be simulcast in the UK at 2 a.m. on Monday, January 15.

• Hulu-TV will commence streaming remastered episodes of Moonlighting on Tuesday, October 10. As Mystery Fanfare recalls, that 1985-1989 comedy-detective series starred Cybill Shepherd as ex-fashion model Maddie Hayes, who, after going bankrupt, “finds that one of her few remaining assets is ownership of the Blue Moon Detective Agency” in Los Angeles. “[S]he’s tempted to liquidate it until she meets the quirky employees”—among them Bruce Willis’ David Addison Jr.—“and gets involved in their even quirkier cases.”

• From the British online newspaper The Independent:

First edition copies of The Hound of the Baskervilles and Agatha Christie’s The Thirteen Problems, which once belonged to late Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts, set two world auction records on Thursday (28 September).

The musician’s extensive collection of first edition books went under the hammer at British auction house Christie’s as part of a specialised sale, which saw F Scott Fitzgerald’s acclaimed novel The Great Gatsby, first published in 1925, receive the highest bid, at £226,800. ...

Elsewhere, a first edition of Sherlock Holmes tale The Hound of the Baskervilles sold for £214,200, which set a new world auction record for a printed book by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. This surpasses the previous record $201,600 (£165,279) for The Sign of Four, which was sold in 2022.

• Forward discovers that, even at “97-and-a half,” Oscar-winning actress and director Lee Grant is “just as feisty as ever.”

• And this book does not belong on the crime- or mystery-fiction shelves, but still I must note that Ayanna Lloyd Banwo’s debut novel, When We Were Birds, “a mythic love story set in Trinidad and Tobago” and published by Hamish Hamilton, has won the 2023 Glass Bell Award, again sponsored by London-based Goldsboro Books. There was one crime novel among this year’s longlisted contenders—the Edgar-winning Notes on an Execution, by Danya Kukafka (Phoenix)—but along with 10 others, all released in 2022, it did not capture the prize.