Bullet Points: No AI Content Here Edition

• Albert Finney, Peter Ustinov, Kenneth Branagh, David Suchet, Alfred Molina, John Malkovich, even Tony Randall—over the decades, they have all portrayed Agatha Christie’s most famous fictional private detective, Hercule Poirot, on the large or small screens. But now 33-year-old English actor Edward Bluemel (Killing Eve, My Lady Jane, Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials) is stepping into the role of that fastidious, mustachioed Belgian in Hercule, a BBC/Britbox TV reboot set to start filming in Liverpool, England, this summer and expected to premiere with six episodes in the latter half of 2027. Deadline says “there is a three-season commitment to Hercule,” though that has not been confirmed by either of the production partners. The show is being described as “an intimate study of Hercule the man and an epic portrait of Britain between the wars. The series takes a magnifying glass to three of Christie’s most celebrated stories, while also charting Hercule’s burgeoning friendship with Captain Arthur Hastings, his early encounters with Scotland Yard’s James Japp, and introducing him to one particular nemesis.” Deadline adds that “Responsibility for adapting Christie’s work has fallen to Benji Walters, a relatively unknown writer who has credits on BBC series Noughts + Crosses and spent time developing an adaptation of Brideshead Revisited with Call Me by Your Name director Luca Guadagnino in 2020.”

• By the way, did you know that Christie’s third and probably most famous Poirot novel, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, celebrates its centennial this month? The story was serialized as Who Killed Ackroyd? in the London Evening News between July and September 1925, then released in book form by UK publisher Williams Collins, Sons in June of 1926. (An American edition soon followed.) While Ackroyd—with its deliberate subversion of reader expectations—may not be the perfect place to start in exploring Christie’s extensive oeuvre (instead, try And Then There Were None or a later Poirot tale such as Death on the Nile), it is nonetheless acclaimed for its shell-game plotting and final twist. In his well-respected 1941 study of this genre, Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective Story, American writer-editor Howard Haycraft placed Ackroyd in the 16th spot on his list of “the best and most influential” crime novels in print, right behind Christie’s first Poirot yarn, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920).

• Although the “news” is less than timely, let me just point out that Mike Lawson has won 2026’s Spotted Owl Award for Untouchable (Atlantic Monthly Press ), his 18th novel about Washington, D.C., troubleshooter Joe DeMarco. By my count, this is the third occasion on which Lawson has scored the Owl, an honor handed out annually by the Portland, Oregon-based Friends of Mystery fan organization to what it deems was the Best Pacific Northwest Crime Novel published during the previous year. Also in contention were Marc Cameron’s Deadline, Robert Dugoni’s A Dead Draw, Sam Wiebe’s The Last Exile, Elizabeth George’s A Slowly Dying Cause, James Bryne’s Chain Reaction, Daniel Kalla’s The Deepest Fake, J.A. Jance’s Overkill, Phillip Margolin’s False Witness, and Nolan Chase’s A Lonesome Place for Murder.

• As you have probably heard, Netflix’s The Lincoln Lawyer will end its run after Season 5, which is due for streaming next year. The concluding 10 episodes are “inspired by” Michael Connelly’s Resurrection Walk (2025), the seventh installment in his series about L.A. defense attorney Mickey Haller, played on the show by Mexican actor Manuel Garcia-Rulfo. Netflix supplies this plot description:

Mickey Haller’s world is upended when the half-sister he never knew existed, Emi [Cobie Smulders], comes to him with a plea to help free a wrongfully convicted woman. In a season defined by blood ties and buried secrets, Mickey takes on a grueling habeas petition to overturn a six-year-old murder conviction, but the deeper he digs, the more nefarious the forces arrayed against him become.

Meanwhile, the stakes rise for his trusted team as Lorna [Becki Newton], Izzy [Jazz Raycole], and Cisco [Angus Sampson] step up to tackle high-profile challenges of their own. Having just saved himself from a wrongful conviction in Season 4, Mickey is now determined to set right an enormous miscarriage of justice. But as he unravels a dangerous web of corruption and lies, he must grapple with the fractured legacy of his family—both his chosen family and the family he never knew he had.

Lincoln Lawyer’s departure from its schedule has left Netflix looking for a legal-drama replacement to satisfy viewers. One option might be And Justice for All, a series based on Al Pacino’s powerful, Emmy-nominated 1979 film of that same name. Deadline depicts it as “a gritty look at an idealistic attorney’s flawed life as he struggles to fight a corrupted legal system until he finally snaps.” The program will be scripted by Jeremy Miller and Dan Cohn (That Was Then).

• Concurrently, Lincoln Lawyer creator David E. Kelley is adapting another Connelly work for television, the 2025 novel Nightshade. Deadline says, “The project, titled Welcome to Catalina, is in development at HBO Max under the streamer’s model for drama procedurals intended to return each year with sizable orders and moderate cost. … Written by Kelley, Welcome to Catalina centers on Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Detective Stilwell who has been ‘exiled’ to a low-key post policing [Southern California’s] rustic Catalina Island. But while following up the usual drunk-and-disorderlies and petty thefts that come with his new territory, Stilwell gets a report of a body found weighed down at the bottom of the harbor.” There’s no word yet on when Welcome to Catalina might be welcomed to your big-screen set, but if it proves a winner, there’s at least one other Stilwell story to turn into a screenplay: Connelly’s Ironwood, which reached U.S. bookstores only last month.

• Sherlock Holmes’ arch-rival, Professor James Moriarty, is finally getting a TV series of his own, in which he will demonstrate his previously undisplayed array of sleuthing skills.

• Are these really the 20 greatest film sleuths of all time?

• It’s always great to see Donald E. Westlake’s storytelling mastery recognized, as The Daily Telegraph’s Jake Kerridge does in this recent essay reprinted by MSN. But how fragile is fame, that the headline labels Westlake—who just died back in 2009 (see our tributes here and here)—“The greatest crime novelist you have probably never heard of.”

• And the crime-fiction community has seen other deaths of late. Actress-turned-writer Sheila Keating (née Mitchell), who for almost six decades was wife to the English crime novelist H.R.F. Keating (creator of the Inspector Ganesh Ghote series), passed away on June 4 just short of her 101st birthday. Canadian fictionist Alan Bradley, the author of a dozen books in the Flavia de Luce mystery series (beginning with 2009’s The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie) died on the Isle of Man in the Irish Sea on May 18 at age of 87. Finally, Dennis McMillan, a San Francisco small-press publisher of “the hard-boiled, the noir, and the strikingly unusual,” met his end on May 5 in a Phoenix, Arizona, hospital. Among the authors McMillan published over the years were Kent Anderson, Michael Connelly, Fredric Brown, Leigh Brackett, James Crumley, and Rick DeMarinis.

(Hat tips to In Reference to Murder and Mark Coggins.)