Bullet Points: Almost Mother’s Day Edition

• The Strand Magazine has gained fame in recent years for unearthing previously unpublished works by well-recognized authors, among them James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, and Shirley Jackson. Its latest issue includes “First Squad, First Platoon,” a story penned in the 1940s by future Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling. As The Guardian explains, this 70-year-old tale “concerns the experiences of American paratroopers in the Philippines towards the end of [World War II].” Serling had fought with the U.S. Army against Japanese forces in the Philippines, and as National Public Radio relates, “First Squad, First Platoon” was “one of his earliest stories, starting a writing career that Serling once said helped him get the war ‘out of his gut.’”

• In its mammoth preview of the finest new TV crime series coming to British screens in 2024, The Killing Times mentioned ITV’s After the Flood. starring Sophie Rundle and Philip Glenister. That program debuted on the other side of the pond in January, and will finally make its way to BritBox beginning on Monday, May 13. Its six episodes, we’re told, are “set in a town hit by a devastating flood. When an unidentified man is found dead in a lift in an underground car park, police assume he became trapped as the waters rose, and as the investigation unfolds PC Joanna Marshall [Rundle] … becomes obsessed with discovering what happened to him. How did he get in the lift and why does no one know who he is? The mystery unfolds across the series while we also see the real impact of climate change on the lives of residents in this small town. The floods threaten to expose secrets, and fortunes and reputations are at stake. But how far will people go to protect themselves?” After the Flood’s first two episodes will drop on May 13, with two more due on successive Mondays until May 27.



• The recent announcement of 18 nominees longlisted for this year’s Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year prize has drawn criticism, due to an absence of books by authors of color. Part of the reason for said dearth, a spokesperson for the Theakston Old Peculier crime writing festival in Harrogate told The Guardian, is that “of the books submitted for the awards this year, just 7% were by known authors of colour ... ‘This year’s longlist is unusual—the longlist for the awards over the last six years have all featured writers of colour—but not something we take lightly.” Author Vaseem Khan, chair of the British Crime Writers’ Association and last year’s Theakston festival programming chair, told the newspaper: “I have seen, first-hand, the efforts the committee has made to bring more writers from minority communities on to the programme. While these efforts have seen more writers of colour being programmed in recent years, we haven’t yet seen as many submitted for the awards. This is something the committee is acutely aware of and is actively working with the industry to find solutions to.” The winner of the 2024 Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel is scheduled to be declared on Thursday, July 18.

• Sherlock Holmes fans are already looking forward to the premiere, in August, of Nicholas Meyer’s sixth novel featuring the great detective, Sherlock Holmes and the Telegram from Hell (Mysterious Press), and Bonnie MacBird’s The Serpent Under (Collins Crime Club), coming in January 2025. Now, In Reference to Murder brings word that “The estate of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has approved a new novel from thriller writer Gareth Rubin [The Turnglass] that will focus on Professor Moriarty, Sherlock Holmes’s greatest nemesis, endorsing Rubin’s book, Holmes and Moriarty, as a worthy successor. ‘Gareth has drawn these characters very well, including Colonel Moran, who is key to this story,’ said Richard Pooley, Conan Doyle’s step-great-grandson. ‘Moran was once described by Holmes as “the second most dangerous man in London,” and he tells half of this new mystery. As Moriarty’s right-hand man, he only crops up in a couple of original Holmes stories, I believe.’” Publisher Simon & Schuster plans to release Holmes and Moriarty in the UK on September 12.

• Iowa author Max Allan Collins says a Kickstarter crowd-funding campaign will be launched imminently in support of True Noir: The Nathan Heller Casebooks, “a fully immersive audio production based on the first book in the series, True Detective. I am writing all ten scripts myself.” The drama will star Todd Stashwick (Star Trek: Picard) as Depression-era Chicago gumshoe Heller. “It’s truly odd returning to True Detective (no relation to the HBO show that came after) for the first time in over forty years (!),” writes Collins. “Also the form is one that has special challenges. The story has to be told in completely audio terms. Its length ultimately will be three times longer than a film adaptation, but still substantially shorter than the 100,000-word novel I’m adapting.” Click here to listen to a “proof-of-concept audio” based on the first chapter of Collins’ 1991 novel Stolen Away.

• Here’s a new book destined to find a place on my shelves: Jon Burlingame’s Dreamsville: Henry Mancini, Peter Gunn, and Music for TV (BearMedia). Spy Vibe quotes a press release as saying:

Henry Mancini (1924-1994) is renowned as the Oscar- and Grammy-winning composer of such timeless standards as “Moon River” and “Days of Wine and Roses,” as well as such memorable instrumental themes as “The Pink Panther” and “Baby Elephant Walk.” But preceding all of them was the wildly popular theme from Peter Gunn, a television series whose soundtrack won the very first Grammy ever awarded for Album of the Year. Award-winning author and journalist Jon Burlingame chronicles the back-story of Peter Gunn and how its music propelled Mancini to fame and fortune, launching a decades-long collaboration with filmmaker Blake Edwards that encompassed nearly 30 movies, from Breakfast at Tiffany’s to Victor/Victoria and beyond.

Burlingame (author of six books including The Music of James Bond and Music for Prime Time) relates the untold story of Peter Gunn and its companion series Mr. Lucky; examines the music Mancini wrote for both series and their chart-topping success as modern jazz albums; and tells how this 1958-61 period in TV history set the stage for one of the most remarkable careers of any American composer in the Twentieth Century.

• With Mother’s Day coming on Sunday, Janet Rudolph has updated her list of associated mysteries for the blog Mystery Fanfare.

• From The Guardian: “Three of the four leading roles in the film adaptation of Richard Osman’s bestselling mystery book [The Thursday Murder Club] have now been cast, with A-listers Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan and Ben Kingsley set to play septuagenarian sleuths in a retirement community.”

• I had forgotten that Apple TV+ commissioned an adaptation of Scott Turow’s 1987 novel, Presumed Innocent, as an eight-part limited series starring and executive produced by Jake Gyllenhaal. But Crimespree Magazine has posted a trailer for it. The show itself will premiere on Wednesday, June 12.

• And British network ITV confirms that the coming 14th season of Vera, the TV mystery series starring Brenda Blethyn and based on popular novels by Ann Cleeves, is going to be its last. The Killing Times says that that new season, to air initially in early 2025, “will comprise two feature-length episodes.”

• Released yesterday: The Spring 2024 issue of Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine. Its cover story looks at the career of best-selling Northern Irish writer Steve Cavanagh, the author most recently of a standalone thriller titled Kill for Me, Kill for You. Other contents include a profile of British crime-fictionist Cara Hunter (Murder in the Family); the early nominees to DP’s “Best of 2024” list; Kevin Burton Smith’ wrap-up of recent private-eye yarns; Robin Agnew’s cozy-crime and historical-crime reviews; Craig Sisterson’s interview with Michael Bennett, author of Better the Blood and Return to Blood; and Mike Ripley’s retrospective on English litterateur Nevil Shute. Subscriptions to Deadly Pleasures are available here.

• Late last month, when I posted the longlists of contenders for this year’s Dagger Awards, sponsored by the British Crime Writers’ Association, I neglected to mention that the CWA had also announced its shortlist of a nominees for the 2024 Margery Allingham Short Mystery prize. Those candidates are:

— “Olga Popova,” by Susan Breen
— “The Pact,” by Kirsten Ehrlich Davies
— “A Quarrel Between Friends,” by Emma O’Driscoll
— “The Ladies’ Tailor,” by Meeti Shah
— “Horses for Courses,” by Camilla Smith
— “Right Place Wrong Time,” Yvonne Walus

Tales submitted to this annual contest must be under 3,500 words in length and follow the spirit of English author Allingham’s rule that “The Mystery remains box-shaped, at once a prison and a refuge. Its four walls are, roughly, a Crime, a Mystery, an Enquiry and a Conclusion with an Element of Satisfaction in it.” This year’s winner will be declared on Friday, May 10, during an evening Daggers shortlist reception at CrimeFest, in Bristol, England.

• I’m very sorry to hear about the passing of Frederick W. Zackel at age 77. In addition to his two decades spent as a teacher of literature, writing, and the humanities at Ohio’s Bowling Green State University, Zackel published a variety of crime-fiction works, beginning with the 1978 private-eye novel Cocaine and Blue Eyes (1978), which was adapted as a TV movie in 1983 starring O.J. Simpson. In this long-ago piece for January Magazine, he recalled how he got start in fiction writing with help from the great Ross Macdonald. Zackel periodically sent me e-mail notes about pieces in The Rap Sheet, and was generous in his encouragement of my efforts to stay apprised of developments in the crime-fiction field. I believe the last time I heard from him, though, was at the end of 2022. He died on December 24, 2023, but it was only a recent note from blogger-author Patti Abbott’s that brought his demise to my attention. Rest in peace, my friend.

• And a moderately less-belated farewell to New York City-reared actor Terry Carter (born John Everett DeCoste), who breathed his last on April 23 at age 95. Although I remember him best for his seven years spent playing Dennis Weaver’s sidekick, Sergeant Joe Broadhurst, on the NBC Mystery Movie segment McCloud, Carter first became widely known as a weekend newscaster—“the first Black TV news anchor for Boston’s WBZ-TV Eyewitness News, where he also became their first opening night drama and movie critic,” recalls Variety. His initial small-screen TV entertainment break came with his casting as Private Sugie Sugarman on the 1955-1959 CBS sitcom The Phil Silvers Show. He went on to guest spots on Naked City, The Defenders, and The Bold Ones before landing his McCloud gig. Carter subsequently took the regular role of Colonel Tigh on the original Battlestar Galactica series, and also appeared on The Jeffersons, The Fall Guy, and One West Waikiki. But his career was not spent only in front of the cameras; as The New York Times notes, “Mr. Carter formed his own production company in 1975 and made educational documentaries. In the 1980s, he expanded into more sophisticated documentaries for PBS, the Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1988, his two-part documentary, A Duke Named Ellington, for the PBS American Masters Series, became the United States entry in television festivals around the world.”