Unpunctual Plugs

Just when I thought the publication of “best of 2020” lists was done and dusted, here come a few stragglers demanding attention.

In The Hungry Detective, Dan Wagner has posted his top picks from among the myriad books released last year (Olen Steinhauer’s The Last Tourist and James Lee Burke’s A Private Cathedral topping those selections). He also names his favorite books from previous years that he only got around to enjoying in 2020, and presents his inaugural “I Regret Not Reading This Book” Award to S.A. Cosby’s Blacktop Wasteland, a work that won more than a little attention. All of these titles, of course, fall under the “crime fiction” rubric.

Meanwhile, Strand Magazine editor Andrew Gulli chooses his “Top Twelve Mystery Novels of 2020.” Among them are The Finisher, by Peter Lovesey (Soho Press); The Dark Corners of the Night, by Meg Gardiner (Blackstone); The Devil and the Dark Water, by Stuart Turton (Sourcebooks Landmark); and The Last Flight, by Julie Clark (Sourcebooks Landmark).

Finally, after watching 1,111 movies in 2020 (holy bleary eyes, Batman!) Hardboiled Wonderland blogger Jedediah Ayres admits, “I had a hard time picking 10 favorites from the year (a couple of these go back to 2018/19) and I think that my favorites for the next few years will have met me still reeling and dealing with personal, emotional and spiritual fallout (hopefully not physical) from this time.” Not surprisingly, he adds, “The picks I’ve settled on are collectively more downbeat than previous years.” Ayres’ preferences are here.

Bullet Points: Justly Overloaded Edition

• Earlier this month, I noted that among the authors whose work I read for the first time in 2020 were Rachel Maddow and Michael Yarvitz, who last year gave us the remarkable—and remarkably sleazy—Bag Man: The Wild Crimes, Audacious Cover-up, and Spectacular Downfall of a Brazen Crook in the White House. That non-fiction tale recounts the swift rise and ignominious toppling, in 1973, of Spiro Agnew, U.S. President Richard M. Nixon’s first vice president. Prior to picking up Maddow and Yarvitz’s book, I had only a vague recollection of the financial kicbacks that had provoked Agnew’s (not wholly voluntary) resignation, just 10 months before Nixon himself quit in the wake of the Watergate scandal. And I had no memory whatsoever of the fact, mentioned in their penultimate chapter, that Agnew had tried his hand at fiction writing after leaving government. They explain that his 1976 political thriller, The Canfield Decision,

centered on a fictional vice president who—and this was not much of a stretch—was eventually crippled by his own ambition. The protagonist, Porter Canfield (“wealthy, handsome and self-assured”), did manage to bed the “beautiful, amber-eyed” secretary of health, education and welfare. Agnew was sarcastically credited for “extreme inventiveness,” in a New York Times review, but that was as good as it got. The book was widely panned as a “mean-spirited piece of work” in which Agnew bitterly took aim at his old targets. “The book is anti-press, anti-Semitic, anti-woman and anti-black,” wrote one reviewer.

A frequent Goodreads reviewer describes The Canfield Decision as “wondrous in its baffling badness.” Nonetheless, if you would like a copy for yourself, I see Abebooks currently has used editions available for as little as $1 for a paperback, and $4 for a hardcover. Before his death in 1996, Agnew penned one more book, this time a memoir, Go Quietly ... or Else (1980), which Wikipedia says “protested his total innocence of the charges that had brought his resignation, and claimed that he had been coerced by the White House to ‘go quietly’ or face an unspoken threat of possible assassination.”

• The British Crime Writers’ Association has a new sponsor for its annual international writing competition for unpublished authors. Crimespree Magazine reports that “ProWritingAid, a platform that operates as a grammar checker, style editor and writing mentor,” will lend its support to the CWA’s Debut Dagger award. Incidentally, submissions to the 2021 contest are currently being accepted. Entrants should “send in their first 3,000 words and a 1,500-word synopsis of their novel. Writers do not need to have completed their novel in order to enter.” The deadline for entries is Friday, February 26.

• With COVID-19 still raging around the globe, is anybody remotely shocked by news that the release of the 25th James Bond picture, No Time to Die, has been delayed—again? As The Hollywood Reporter recalls, that picture “was set to open on April 2. Now, it is planning to hit the big screen on Oct. 8 as Hollywood faces more delays before moviegoing resumes in earnest. No Time to Die is likely to spark another wave of high-profile moves among spring and early summer movies.” There’s one surprise regarding this latest rescheduling, though, writes Bill Koenig in The Spy Command: “The announcement on [production company] Eon’s official website said No Time to Die will be released ‘globally’ on Oct. 8. Typically, Bond films are spread out a bit, often starting in the U.K. but not arriving in the U.S. until days later. We’ll see if a simultaneous release actually happens.”

• I mentioned on this page last summer that the PBS-TV umbrella series Masterpiece is co-producing, with Eleventh Hour Films, a six-part drama based on Anthony Horowitz’s 2017 whodunit, Magpie Murders. Now comes word that 64-year-old British actress Lesley Manville has been cast in the prominent role of Susan Ryeland, a book editor “who is given an unfinished manuscript of author Alan Conway’s latest mystery novel, with little idea it will change her life.” A Masterpiece news release quotes Manville as saying, “I could not be happier to be playing Susan Ryeland—what a fabulous character for me to grapple with!” The actress’ stage, film, and TV career of more than four decades long has made her a critical success, but I’m not sure I would have signed her up to play Ryeland. For one thing, she’s quite a bit older than the character Horowitz describes. In last year’s Magpie sequel, Moonflower Murders, the author gives Ryeland’s age as 48, which means that she would’ve been in her mid-40s in Magpie Murders, not her mid-60s. I might have hesitated over hiring Manville, too, because I see Ryeland as a sympathetic figure, and Manville has made herself synonymous with some demonstrably unsympathetic characters in the past. For instance, she appeared as starchy British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the UK’s 2009 drama-documentary The Queen; as James Bond creator Ian Fleming’s snobbish mother in the 2014 mini-series Fleming: The Man Who Would Be Bond; and as the chilly, misanthropic Robina Chase in BBC One’s more recent World on Fire. Still, part of appreciating fiction to the fullest is suspending one’s disbelief in the improbable. So let’s wait and see what Manville can bring to her portrayal of Susan Ryeland. Horowitz is preparing the script for this small-screen rendering, and he’s sufficiently creative to reshape his character to fit whoever plays her.

• A new series based on P.D. James’ Adam Dalgliesh novels is coming to Acorn TV, according to Mystery Fanfare. “Bertie Carvel will play Detective Chief Inspector Dalgliesh,” explains Janet Rudolph. “The 43-year-old English actor is best known for his roles in Doctor Foster, The Crown, The Pale Horse, and Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. [This new] Dalgliesh will begin in 1970s England, following Dalgliesh’s career as he solves unusual murders and reveals buried secrets.” Watch for this show’s premiere sometime later in 2021.

• It seems next month is shaping up to be a good one for television viewing. Literary Hub reports that The Luminaries, a six-part adaptation of Eleanor Catton’s Man Booker Prize-winning 2013 novel of that same name, will finally begin streaming in the States on Valentine’s Day, February 14, via STARZ. This British-New Zealand mini-series starring Eve Hewson, Himesh Patel, and ex-“Bond girl” Eva Green was broadcast last summer in the UK. A trailer is below.



• The recent posting of an official teaser for the CBS-TV psychological thriller Clarice—inspired by Thomas Harris’ best-selling 1988 novel, The Silence of the Lambs, and debuting on February 11—has Literary Hub wondering when Dr. Hannibal Lecter will make an appearance on this midseason replacement series.

• In Reference to Murder brings word that “Netflix has given a series order to The Lincoln Lawyer, a drama based on Michael Connelly’s series of bestselling novels, from Big Little Lies and Big Sky creator, David E. Kelley and A+E Studios. This is a new incarnation of the project, which originally was set up at CBS with a series production commitment last season. Manuel Garcia-Rulfo (The Magnificent Seven) has been tapped to play the titular character in the Netflix series as it honors the story’s Hispanic origins. The 10-episode first season is based on the second book in the Lincoln Lawyer series, The Brass Verdict.” A big-screen adaptation of Connelly’s 2005 Edgar-nominated novel, The Lincoln Lawyer, debuted in 2011.

• The Fall River, Massachusetts, home in which Lizzie Borden resided when her father and stepmother were murdered in August 1892—allegedly by Lizzie’s own axe-wielding hand—is currently for sale. CNN says that eight-bedroom house, built in 1845, can be yours for the paltry sum of $2 million. Any takers out there?

• Your quirky musical entertainment for this weekend.

• Perfect for Ellery Queen fans: “The American Mystery Classics Book Club”—linked to Otto Penzler’s publishing line of that same name, which last year released a fresh edition of Queen’s The Dutch Shoe Mystery—“will be meeting on Zoom on February 1st at 6:30 p.m. EST to discuss [that] puzzling tale of murder in the hospital …” The event will be free to the public, and feature a special guest: Richard Dannay, the son of Ellery Queen co-creator Frederic Dannay. Simply drop an e-mail note to charles@penzlerpublishers.com to RSVP.

• Well, this should be fun! Down & Out Books will publish, in February, The Great Filling Station Holdup: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Songs of Jimmy Buffett. The collection takes its title from an early and boisterous Buffett song, first released as a single in 1973. (On the flipside was “Why Don’t We Get Drunk.”) As Kristopher Zgorski writes in BOLO Books, “editor Josh Pachter presents sixteen short crime stories by sixteen popular and up-and-coming crime writers, each story based on a song from one of the twenty-eight studio albums Jimmy has released over the last half century, from Leigh Lundin’s take on ‘Truckstop Salvation’ (which appeared on Jimmy’s first LP, 1970’s Down to Earth) to M.E. Browning’s interpretation of ‘Einstein Was a Surfer’ (from Jimmy’s most recent recording, 2013’s Songs from St. Somewhere).” Other contributors include Michael Bracken, Don Bruns, Isabella Maldonado, Rick Ollerman, John M. Floyd, Alison McMahan, and Robert J. Randisi. As a veteran fan of Buffett’s music (I was introduced to it by my roommates way back in college), I’m more than likely to procure a copy of this book for my library. There’s no listing for it yet on Amazon, but Down & Out invites you to “pre-order” it here. The book boasts a most eye-catching cover!

• Author Max Allan Collins wrote, in a recent blog post, that he’s working on a “coda” to his popular series about the hired killer known only as Quarry. Since Collins referenced this in association with remarks about Skim Deep (2020), which he says is “a coda”—or concluding entry—“to the Nolan series,” I presumed that his forthcoming Quarry novel, to be titled Quarry’s Blood and published by Hard Case Crime, would also bring the Quarry series to a close. Au contraire! As Collins tells me in an e-mail note, “Quarry’s Blood is a coda but not necessarily the last book. If we know anything about the series, it’s that I don’t write them in chronological order.” Ah, so Quarry’s Blood will follow chronologically from The Last Quarry (2006), but won’t mark an end to the often-sexy adventures of Collins’ hit man. I haven’t seen a publication date yet for Quarry’s Blood, but it will carry cover art (left) by the great Ron Lesser.

• Although Quarry’s end isn’t near, Collins explains that “Quarry production will likely slow” in the near future, because the author is planning to move his longer-running series, about Chicago private eye Nathan Heller (Do No Harm), to Hard Case Crime as well. And HCC editor “Charles [Ardai]—who is incredibly supportive—doesn’t want more than one book a year from me. So I’ll likely do a Heller, a Quarry, a Heller, and so on in a yearly fashion until the show is over.”

• I’m a bit tardy in offering my condolences to the family of Peter Mark Richman, the Philadelphia-born actor who passed away on January 14, aged 93, but am no less sincere because of that delay. If you look at Richman’s credits on the International Movie Database (IMDb), you’ll see he was incredibly prolific during his six-decades-long career. Richman appeared in more than two dozens films and on TV shows ranging from The Wild Wild West, Blue Light, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Hawaii Five-O, Banacek, and McCloud to Barnaby Jones, Starsky and Hutch, T.J. Hooker, Matlock, and Star Trek: The Next Generation. He starred in the 1961-1962 TV crime drama Cain’s Hundred (see its opening and closing sequences here), and he played Duke Paige, the friend and occasional employer of blinded insurance investigator Mike Longstreet (James Franciscus) on ABC-TV’s 1971-1972 series Longstreet. Richman also produced at least three books: Hollander’s Deal (2000) and The Rebirth of Ira Masters (2001), both novels; and Peter Mark Richman: I Saw a Molten, White Light …: An Autobiography of My Artistic and Spiritual Journey (2018).

• Also now deceased is Gregory Sierra, who—to quote from The Hollywood Reporter—“endeared himself to 1970s sitcom fans as the genial Julio Fuentes on Sanford and Son and the impassioned Sgt. Miguel ‘Chano’ Amenguale on Barney Miller.” Defined by the Reporter as a “proud Puerto Rican New Yorker,” Sierra died on January 4 at age 83, following “a battle with cancer.” In addition to his aforementioned small-screen roles, Sierra filled guest slots on It Takes a Thief, Ironside, Mission: Impossible, Banyon, Columbo, Hill Street Blues, Miami Vice, and Murder, She Wrote.

• Before we venture too far from the subject of Longstreet, let me point out that it’s one of seven series highlighted in Keith Roysdon’s CrimeReads piece about “classic TV’s most unusual investigators.” Other shows he recalls include Coronet Blue, The Immortal, and Cannon. I’m only surprised he didn’t bring up Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), the 1969-1970 British series featuring a really offbeat mystery-solver—the ghost of a gumshoe slain in the line of duty.

• Four other CrimeReads pieces worth reading: Olivia Rutigliano’s introduction to Arsène Lupin, the gentleman thief created in 1905 by French writer Maurice Leblanc, who also inspired the character played by Omar Sy in the new Netflix series Lupin; a second piece by Rutigliano, looking back at how Leblanc endeavored to incorporate Sherlock Holmes into a Lupin story; Neil Nyren’s excellent primer on the 10 Martin Beck detective novels composed in the 1960s and ’70s by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö; Camilla Bruce’s mini-biographies of “The Most Notorious Lonely Hearts Killers of All Time”; Sabina Stent’s reassessment of Hollywoodland, the 2006 movie portraying the complex life and alleged 1959 suicide of George Reeves, who starred in The Adventures of Superman; and yet another Rutigliano article (she has been busy of late), this one about how Edgar Allan Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin changed detective fiction forever.

• I, for one, am enjoying the new, all-digital, full-color version of Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine, edited by George Easter. Its latest quarterly edition (#90) was sent out earlier this week. Among the contents can be found a profile of author Louise Penny; George H. Madison’s delightful remembrance of Harold Q. Masur’s Scott Jordan mysteries; another recap of Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s Martin Beck tales, this one by Donus Roberts; obituaries of Parnell Hall, John le Carré, Alanna Knight, John Lutz, and DPMM reviewer Sally Sugarman; and the typical abundance of reviews covering books issued on both sides of the Atlantic. The magazine is now e-mailed to subscribers, for the low annual price of $10. Click here for ordering information.

• If you thought critics had long ago finished applauding the crime and mystery fiction of 2020, you would be incorrect. Earlier this month Sons of Spade’s Jochem van der Steen identified his favorite private-eye stories from last year, while Robert Lopresti provides his 12th annual list of best short stories in this SleuthSayers post.

• Finally, Amazon’s online book review, formerly called Omnivoracious, has sadly gone downhill over the last few years, becoming even more celebrity-oriented than it started. I have continued, however, to check out its contents every once in a while, and even included it in Killer Covers’ news-aggregating blogroll. But now I give up. An announcement reached my e-mailbox yesterday, saying that what’s now known simply as The Amazon Book Review (boy, I hope nobody made a dime off that pinheaded name change!) has migrated from its previous location to this one inside the larger Amazon.com sales realm. In the process it abandoned its RSS Web feed, so can no longer be accessed by news-aggregating tools built into blog-publishing services. So arrivederci, Amazon Book Review!

Bullet Points: 2021—At Last Edition

• Down & Out: The Magazine, founded as a quarterly print/e-book periodical and helmed by the ever-resilient Rick Ollerman, debuted in the summer of 2017 and has since produced just five additional issues, their frequency having become quite unpredictable. The fifth edition came out in November 2019, and the sixth went on sale last month. This new one, by the way, is the first not to carry a “Placed in Evidence” column from yours truly. My schedule made it impossible for me to produce a creditable non-fiction essay by the deadline of January 31, 2020. Had I known that this issue wouldn’t be appearing until 11 months later, I might have asked for an extension on that due date. Oh, well. It sounds as if the latest number has enough to commend it, including “correspondence between two legends of crime fiction, Walter Satterthwait and Bill Crider, both of whom recently passed away”; a short story by the prolific Stephen Marlowe (1928-2008), plus an introduction to Marlowe’s work by Jeff Vorzimmer, the editor of last year’s The Best of Manhunt collection; and fresh short stories from James O. Born, Josh Pachter, and Rap Sheet regular Steven Nester.

• Is it merely my imagination, or has there really been less and less attention paid annually to Britain’s Staunch Book Prize ever since that commendation—which honors “a thriller novel in which no woman is beaten, stalked, sexually exploited, raped or murdered”—was created back in 2018? I do not remember seeing any significant coverage of the 2020 shortlist when it was announced in early November. And I wasn’t aware until today (courtesy of Shotmag Confidential) that a winner had been declared on November 25: Heaven, My Home, by Attica Locke (Serpent’s Tail). Locke, incidentally, is the first American to walk off with this award, which comes with £1000 in prize money. For the record, here are this year’s other five Staunch finalists:

— The Chemical Reaction, by Fiona Erskine (Point Blank)
— Glorious Boy, by Aimee Liu (Red Hen Press)
— Death in Her Hands, by Ottessa Moshfegh (Vintage)
— The Burning Island, by Jock Serong (Text)
— The Coldest Warrior, by Paul Vidich (No Exit Press)

• As everyone knows by now, writer and Columbo co-creator William Link died earlier this week. The Columbophile, though, doesn’t want us to forget about these other Columboworld stars we lost in 2020—Robert Conrad, Honor Blackman, and yes, Dawn Wells among them.

• Immediately before Christmas, CrimeReads published a fairly wonderful piece by Paul Vidich (The Coldest Warrior, The Mercenary) about his fellow author John le Carré, who died on December 12 at 89 years of age. In it, Vidich observes:

Le Carré’s distinction and originality is that he used the conventions of the spy novel for the purposes of social criticism. The British intelligence bureaucracy and the men (and they are largely men) represent the social attitudes and vanities of a certain class of Englishmen. They marry, cheat, divorce, spy and play their games of political and sexual betrayal. Le Carré used espionage as Conrad used the sea and Kipling India, as an exotic world in which to explore the inconvenient truths that exist in a democracy that finds it hard to balance openness with the need to keep secrets.

Intelligence agents in this world often act as legally sanctioned criminals. Lies are told in the service of truth, friends suborned in the name of national security, and extrajudicial murder qualifies as justice. We are fascinated by these contradictions and are entertained by the inherent hypocrisy.

• Steele Curry offers up his own le Carré tribute.

• The Killing Times spent this week applauding what it declares are the top 20 TV crime dramas shown in 2020. Among its picks: The Outsider, The Undoing, Deadwater Fell, Perry Mason, Deadwind, Dare Me, Baghdad Central, and I May Destroy You. Obviously, those good folks at The Killing Times spent way more time staring at small screens over the last 12 months than I did! They count down their endorsements in four posts: Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV.

• That site’s focus isn’t only rearward, though. In this long feature, Killing Times editors preview some of the new crime, mystery, and thriller programming bound for TV screens in 2021—all of it accessible to British audiences, some of it available to American watchers as well. Who knows what will draw the biggest ratings, but I am looking forward to seeing The Serpent (starring Tahar Rahim and the magnetic Jenna Coleman), Series 2 of Baptiste, The North Water (based on Ian McGuire’s 2016 historical adventure), Series 2 of McDonald & Dodds, Lupin, Amsterdam Vice, and of course Season 6 of Endeavour. The post also includes the first trailer I’ve seen for Clarice, a sequel to The Silence of the Lambs, starring Rebecca Breeds as FBI agent Clarice Starling. It’s not very revealing, but still welcome.

• There’s more than a modicum of overlap between the aforementioned recommendations and Dead Good Books’ tally of “20 Crime Shows You Shouldn’t Miss in 2021.”

• One of the programs I most look forward to seeing this season is Miss Scarlet and the Duke, a period mystery premiering under PBS-TV’s Masterpiece banner on Sunday, January 17. Already broadcast last spring in the UK, this six-part production is “set in 1882 Victorian London, with a fearless, quick-witted, and sassy female aspiring detective facing all manner of obstacles, from Victorian conventions to the efforts of her rakish and wily longtime friend/competition/potential love interest!” Kate Phillips, who portrayed Princess Mary (Queen Elizabeth II’s aunt) in The Crown, stars as Eliza Scarlet, the daughter of a London private detective who takes over her father’s agency after he dies in order to avoid penury. Stuart Martin, familiar as Silas Sharrow on Jamestown, plays Scotland Yard Detective Inspector William Wellington, aka The Duke, Eliza’s childhood companion and reluctant colleague. The PBS Masterpiece site offers more information about this drama. Below is a video trailer.



• CrimeReads editor-in-chief Dwyer Murphy touts “The Best Crime Shows of the Decade.” If I didn’t sit through all of them, I at least knew about these programs, which range from The Night Of and True Detective to Bosch and Justified. Just one exception: the American psychological thriller You. That Lifetime-turned-Netflix series, entering its third season in 2021, passed me by completely.

• It’s good to see that “The estate of Arthur Conan Doyle and Netflix have agreed to dismiss a lawsuit brought by the author’s estate, which alleged that the film Enola Holmes infringed copyright by depicting a warmer and more emotional version of Sherlock Holmes.” The Guardian adds, “The lawsuit, brought against Netflix, the film’s producers Legendary Pictures, the Enola Holmes author Nancy Springer and others associated with the adaptation, argued that Conan Doyle created ‘significant new character traits for Holmes and Watson’ in the 10 stories still under copyright in the U.S., which were written between 1923 and 1927.” Lets hope this settlement clears the way to shoot a sequel to Enola Holmes, as I quite enjoyed that lighthearted picture starring Millie Bobby Brown, released this last September.

• Significant dates to remember, from In Reference to Murder:

Somehow, these deadlines slipped past me until now, but there are a couple of contests seeking submissions for first novelists due soon if you just happen to have an unpublished manuscript in your desk drawer.

The St. Martin’s Press Tony Hillerman Prize is accepting submissions for a debut mystery novel set in the American Southwest, with a prize of $10,000 advance against royalties and publication. The deadline for that one is January 2, 2021.

Also, the Minotaur Books/Mystery Writers of America Best First Crime Novel Competition is taking submissions from the author of any unpublished novel who is not under contract with a publisher for publication of a novel (except that authors of self-published works may enter, as long as the manuscript submitted is not the self-published work). That one also has a prize of [a] $10,000 advance, with a deadline of 11:59 p.m. EST on January 1, 2021. Fortunately, you have more time to enter the CWA’s Debut Dagger competition, with a deadline of February 26th.

• The Private Eye Writers of America is currrently accepting submissions to its 2021 Shamus Awards competition. There will be four categories of honorees: Best Hardcover P.I. Novel, Best First P.I. Novel, Best Original Paperback P.I. Novel, and Best P.I. Short Story. As Guns, Gams & Gumshoes explains, “Submissions must be postmarked by March 31, 2021. No extensions can be given.”

• I’m still cobbling together The Rap Sheet’s lengthy rundown of crime-fiction works set for original release in the first quarter of this brand-new year. But already, Ayo Onatade has posted her list of British titles she’s most looking forward to reading in 2021, among them Will Dean’s The Last Thing to Burn, Laura Shepherd-Robinson’s Daughters of Night, and K.J. Maitland’s The Drowned City. George Easter of Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine has assembled his own inventory of anticipated novels, running from Mick Herron’s Slough House to Jonathan Ames’ A Man Named Doll.

• “Best of 2020” lists continue to draw attention. MysteryPeople’s Scott Montgomery identifies his 10 favorite crime releases here, including one book I missed completely: James Queally’s Line of Sight, which Montgomery calls “my favorite private eye novel of the year.” The Web site Crime Fiction Lover has posted two additional sets of endorsements here and here. Librarian-turned-blogger Lesa Holstine has fond memories of S.J. Bennett’s The Windsor Knot, Bree Baker’s Closely Harbored Secrets, Harlan Coben’s The Boy from the Woods, and other yarns. Choices from the anonymous blogger at For Winter Nights take in Jane Casey’s The Cutting Place, Stuart Turton’s The Devil and the Dark Water, Antonia Hodgson’s The Silver Collar, and We Begin at the End, by Chris Whitaker. CrimeReads and Book Marks present “The Best-Reviewed Crime and Mystery Fiction of 2020” (spoiler: Tana French’s The Searcher scored top honors, according to their accounting). Finally, a non-book compilation: Art of the Title’s top-10 movie and TV openings from 2020, featuring the title sequences from both Defending Jacob (adapted from William Landay’s 2012 novel of the same name) and The Good Lord Bird (based on James McBride’s 2013 book).

• Tardy though I am, I wish to direct your attention to this piece in The Stiletto Gumshoe, which recounts how famous American paperback illustrator Robert McGinnis employed, among his many models, one Shere Hite. That’s right, the very same Ms. Hite who composed such sexology classics as Sexual Honesty, by Women, for Women (1974) and The Hite Report on Female Sexuality (1976). Hite died this last September 9 at age 77.

• Rest in peace, as well, Guy N. Smith. A hard-working English concocter of pulpy horror fiction, Smith passed away on December 24 after testing positive for COVID-19. He was 81 years old. Smith may be best remembered for having penned a strangely popular series of novels about giant killer crabs, but he also wrote non-fiction, soft-core porn, and children’s stories. The blog Too Much Horror Fiction has posted a gallery of his creepy book covers. FOLLOW-UP: In his Dispatches from the Last Outlaw blog, Thomas McNulty recalls his meeting with author Smith in the fall of 2019.

• What a fun end-of-the-year project! Houston author and blogger Scott D. Parker devoted part of December to screening all half-dozen of the 1930s and ’40s Thin Man movies starring William Powell and Myrna Loy, and inspired by Dashiell Hammett’s 1934 novel, The Thin Man. You will find his spirited assessments here. “I enjoyed these films so much,” Parker remarks in conclusion, “that I’m going to seek out and find the other films Powell and Loy starred in together.”

• Kudos to Publishers Weekly! After considering the abundant challenges and disruptions that faced the book-publishing industry in COVID-clobbered 2020, that American trade magazine announced that its Person of the Year (actually, People of the Year) “are not the powerhouse agents or the megabestselling authors or the Big Five CEOs. They are the booksellers, debut and midlist authors, editors, librarians, printers, publicists, sales representatives, and warehouse workers, to mention just a few—the workers, who have been the most important people in the business all along.” Without those individual booksellers and the products they continued to place in our hands, despite the rigors of the pandemic and their risks of exposure to the disease, 2020 would have been an even more lonely and agitating time than it was. They may not have been considered “essential workers,” but for many of us, they were essential, indeed.

• And of course there’s a Free Little Library in Antarctica.

On the Critical List

(Editor’s note: The following article comes from Fraser Massey, a freelance journalist living in East London​, England, who has contributed work in the past to British periodicals such as the Radio Times, Now, and The Times of London. His unpublished first novel, Whitechapel Messiah, was shortlisted last year in the “New Voices” category at London’s Capital Crime Festival. He’s currently preparing to submit that manuscript to publishers.)

Santa wasn’t the only one who, during this season, could be found making lists and checking them twice. Crime-fiction reviewers have been equally industrious, looking back over the last 12 months and jotting down their favorite mystery and thriller reads of 2020.

Rap Sheet critics weighed in on this subject, of course, as did myriad other usual suspects, among them Marilyn Stasio and Sarah Lyall of The New York Times; Laura Wilson of The Guardian; The Washington Post’s Maureen Corrigan and Richard Lipez; the two Declans, Burke and Hughes, at The Irish Times; the overworked editors of CrimeReads; Will Gore of The Spectator; Adam Woog of The Seattle Times; Ayo Onatade of Shots; and the Daily Mirror’s Jon Coates (please note that if you wish to find his selections, you must scroll through the recommendations of that British paper’s other reviewers). A variety of print publications place viewing restrictions on non-subscribers. Therefore, we’re indebted to George Easter, the editor of Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine, for breaching such firewalls in order to provide us with a splendidly detailed round-up that includes choices from Mark Sanderson, Joan Smith, John Dugdale, and James Owen of the London Times and Sunday Times; Barry Forshaw and Adam LeBor of The Financial Times; The Wall Street Journal’s Tom Nolan; Jake Kerridge of The Daily Telegraph, and Oline H. Cogdill from the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. Easter’s compilation mentions, as well, the reading choices of his publication’s own commentators. An accounting of additional reviewers’ inventories consulted while putting this story together can be found at the post’s end.

Between all of these knowledgeable readers, we found 328 separate books being endorsed—212 of those finding favor with only a single reviewer each.

So is there a critical consensus of which recent crime, mystery, and thriller novels deserve the greatest acclaim? Yes, there is definitely a clear winner, plus a further 10 titles which stood out above the rest. Below, then, are 2020’s most frequently recommended books in this genre, arranged in descending order of their number of mentions on “bests” lists.

1. Blacktop Wasteland, by S.A. Cosby (Flatiron [U.S.], Headline [UK]). Cosby’s muscular slice of American Deep South rural noir ranked way ahead of its competition, finding more than a few champions among reviewers. One of those was Dwyer Murphy, the editor-in-chief of CrimeReads, who enthused of this book, “Dread and excitement combine to create a unique sense of atmosphere, one that will keep readers pushing ahead toward a genuinely powerful conclusion.”

2. The Searcher, by Tana French (Viking), was praised by “Booklist Queen” Rachael Pingel as a “slow-burn mystery that will reward those who love a good character study.”

3. The Thursday Murder Club, by Richard Osman (Penguin [U.S.], Viking [UK]). Declan Hughes wrote in The Irish Times, “Osman’s hugely successful debut is that rare thing, a genuinely funny comic mystery that succeeds completely as a crime novel.”

Three titles tied for fourth place:

4. Winter Counts, by David Heska Wanbli Weiden (Ecco [U.S.])

4. One by One, by Ruth Ware (Gallery/Scout Press [U.S.],
Harvill Secker [UK])

4. Long Bright River, by Liz Moore (Riverhead [U.S.],
Hutchinson [UK])



Followed by:

7. The Devil and the Dark Water, by Stuart Turton (Sourcebooks Landmark [U.S.], Raven [UK])

And then four titles tied for eighth place:

8. These Women, by Ivy Pochoda (Ecco [U.S.], Faber and Faber [UK])

8. When No One Is Watching, by Alyssa Cole (Morrow [U.S.])

8. A Song for the Dark Times, by Ian Rankin (Little, Brown [U.S.], Orion [UK])

8. Moonflower Murders, by Anthony Horowitz (Harper [U.S.], Century [UK])

This top-11 lineup features six male writers and five women. Five of the novelists here are American and five others are British, plus Ireland’s Tana French.

Sifting through the complete roster of 2020 selections reveals that this was a good year for familiar authors and characters. A Song for Dark Times, for instance, marked the 23rd outing for Rankin’s heavy-drinking, irascible Edinburgh detective, John Rebus. The Sicilian Method, the 26th Inspector Montalbano novel from the late Andrea Camilleri, didn’t quite make the top-11 cut, but still ranked high in critical praise. So did Guilt at the Garage, the 20th among Simon Brett’s cozy Fethering mysteries, starring amateur seaside sleuths Carole Seddon and Jude Nichols; Peter James’s 16th Roy Grace novel, Find Them Dead; and Troubled Blood, the fifth “Robert Galbraith” book, actually penned by J.K. Rowling and featuring comparative newcomer Cormoran Strike, a wounded Afghanistan war veteran turned London private eye.

At the complete other end of the spectrum, Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club is his first book. American director and producer Steven Spielberg​ has already purchased the film rights, and that quirky mystery, set in a retirement home, has become the first debut novel ever to top the British bestseller charts at Christmastime.

For any Rap Sheet followers who don’t already know this, Osman is an English comedian and television host, the co-presenter of BBC One’s 11-year-old TV quiz show, Pointless. But he isn’t the only well-known British TV figure to find his work celebrated on this year’s “best of” lists. Journalist Tom Bradby, the anchor of ITV News at Ten, also found his second Kate Henderson spy thriller, Double Agent, included among reviewers’ favorites. As a result of this pair’s sales figures, don’t be surprised if—in Britain at least—book publishers make a New Year’s resolution over the next several days to contact literary agents, inquiring as to whether they have a small-screen stalwart or two under contract who might fancy having a go at a crime thriller.

* * *

Beyond the diverse sources mentioned above, we consulted “best crime fiction of 2020” listicles from the following sources when preparing this post: Natasha Cooper at The Literary Review; NB magazine’s Paul Burke; Vicki Briner, Liz French, and Lesa Holstine of Library Journal; the team at Publishers Weekly; Sonjia van der Westhuizen and Catherine Turnbell of Crime Fiction Lover; Sophie Roell’s selections for FiveBooks; Sarah Weinman’s listings in The Crime Lady newsletter; Michael J. Seidlinger’s choices at Murder & Mayhem; blogger Jacob Collins’ picks at Hooked from Page One; Rachael Pingel’s “17 Best Thriller Books of 2020”; Novel Suspects contributor Jamie Canavés’ “Top 5 Picks for Mystery and Suspense of 2020”; Jennifer Marie Lin’s “20 Best Mystery Novels & Thrillers” rundown for The Bibliofile; Victoria Selman and the rest of the CrimeTime UK panel; the She Reads editors’ “Best Thrillers of 2020” feature; Literary Hub’s “Best Reviewed Mystery and Crime Fiction of 2020”; Criminal Element’s nominations for “Best Books of 2020”; and BookPage’s 2020 mystery and suspense picks.

Several crime-fictionists, among them Tana French, Ragnar Jónasson, and Rosamund Lupton, identified their own favorite works in this entertaining wrap-up for Dead Good Books, while their fellow author Kellye Garrett offered her preferences at Goodreads. We’ve added into our totals this year’s Goodreads Choice Award winners; the New York Public Library’s half-dozen best crime fiction, mystery, and thriller recommendations; and National Public Radio’s suggestions of 2020’s top-notch thriller and mysteries. The Amazon Book Review’s picks are here, and British bookseller Waterstones’ top-30 choices among the year’s numerous detective novels and thrillers are to be found right here. Finally, we consulted this inventory of 2020 preferences from First Monday Crime mover and shaker Joy Kluver.

Note that certain reviewers’ picks appeared in multiple sources. Where this happened, they’ve been counted only once in our tally. And books that were suggested, but were released in either the U.S. or the UK prior to 2020, were not counted in the totals.

Bullet Points: Stocking Stuffers Edition

• Agatha Christie fans are familiar with Ariadne Oliver, a fictional mystery writer who occasionally (in novels such as Cards on the Table and Mrs. McGinty’s Dead) helps Christie’s famous Belgian sleuth, Hercule Poirot, solve crimes—and provides a modicum of comic relief in the process. Now for the first time ever, the Swedo-Finnish master detective from Oliver’s books, Sven Hjerson, is set to star in his own TV series, according to The Killing Times. That Swedish production, Agatha Christie’s Sven Hjerson, began shooting earlier this month in southern Finland. The plan is to make four classic whodunit films for airing in Sweden and Germany during the fall of 2021. Actor-comedian Johan Rheborg has signed on to portray Hjerson, described as a retired star criminal investigator “who loves crudités, cold winter baths and solving murder mysteries.” His partner-sidekick is Klara Sandberg (played by Hanna Alström), a former trash TV producer who successfully pitches a true-life crime show starring Hjerson, who will solve a real crime each week.” The Killing Times notes that “no UK broadcaster has been announced yet.” As to when the show might reach the States, well, that is pretty much anybody’s guess.

• Len Deighton’s 1962 spy novel, The IPCRESS File—which was turned into a well-respected 1965 cinematic feature starring Michael Caine—is now also being refashioned as a six-part, Berlin-set television series by British network ITV. Deadline reports, “The adaptation will be penned by BAFTA-winning Trainspotting writer John Hodge, while the cast will be led by Gangs of London and Peaky Blinders star Joe Cole, alongside Bohemian Rhapsody actress Lucy Boynton, and The Night Manager’s Tom Hollander.” The Killing Times offers this plot précis:

It’s 1963. Cold war rages between West and East. Nuclear bombers are permanently airborne. In this highly charged atmosphere, we join Harry Palmer—a British army sergeant on the make in Berlin. In this newly partitioned city, a sharp working-class young man with sophisticated tastes can make a lot of money. Wholesaler, retailer, fixer, smuggler, Harry’s varied interests bring him into contact with everything and everyone—until the law catches up and it all comes crashing to a halt. Harry finds himself sentenced to eight years in a grim military jail in England, all his prospects abruptly torn away.

But his impressive network and efficiency have not gone unnoticed, and a gentleman from British intelligence has a proposal. To avoid prison, Harry Palmer will become a spy. And the case on which he cuts his teeth will be The Ipcress File.

• Mick Herron’s espionage novels will provide the source material for yet another televised drama, this one from AppleTV+. Gary Oldman is signed to star in Slow Horses as Jackson Lamb, “a brilliant but irascible leader of a group of spies who end up in MI5’s Slough House, having been exiled from the mainstream for their mistakes.” Kristin Scott Thomas, Jack Lowden, Olivia Cooke, and Jonathan Pryce round out the main cast. “Six of these episodes will be based on Herron’s first book, [2010’s] Slow Horses,” says Deadline, “and the other six will be based on his second novel, Dead Lions [2013]. Production sources are referring to it as two seasons, or at the very least, two sets of six episodes. Apple sees it as one season, but declined to comment on release plans.” Filming began in November.

• The Killing Times asked “some of the world’s best crime novelists”—Ragnar Jónasson, C.L. Taylor, Doug Johnstone, Laura Lippman, etc.—to identify which TV crime dramas they have most enjoyed watching during this frustrating pandemic year. Among their choices are Baghdad Central, The Nest, Dead to Me, and the classic American detective series Columbo. The Killing Times promises to publish its own “countdown of the best crime dramas of 2020 at the end of this month.”

• The Atlantic magazine’s catalogue of “The 15 Best TV Shows of 2020” is light on mystery and crime fiction, but it does feature the too-soon-cancelled Dare Me. “Glitter and pom-poms shouldn’t pair so well with a murder mystery,” writes Shirley Li. “Yet the peppy positivity and fierce discipline of cheerleading contrasts beautifully with the genre’s messy violence in Dare Me. USA Network’s addictive, seductively shot adaptation of Megan Abbott’s [2012] novel follows a pair of best friends rattled by the arrival of their high-school squad’s enigmatic new coach.” Li adds a thumbs-up to Cobie Smulders’ private-eye series, Stumptown, which was given the ax after a single season on ABC, but is currently being shopped elsewhere.

• Both Season 4 of The Crown (brightened by the presence of Emma Corrin as Princess Diana) and Anya Taylor-Joy’s mini-series, The Queen’s Gambit, also earned The Atlantic’s appreciation ... as they did positive acclaim from Kristi Turnquist, longtime TV critic for The Oregonian, in Portland. Making Turnquist’s picks list, too, are the fifth, penultimate season of Better Call Saul (FX); Season 4 of the anthology series Fargo; and the debut run of HBO’s Perry Mason, starring Matthew Rhys, which has been renewed for a sophomore series of episodes to stream sometime next year.

• Continuing our inventory of “best books” lists, note that critics with the British blog Crime Fiction Lover are slowly rolling out their individual top-five selections for 2020. We’ve heard so far from Sonja van der Westhuizen and Catherine Turnbull, with more still to come. Meanwhile, CrimeReads has added further to it already significant set of favorites with registers of what it dubs “The Best Psychological Thrillers of 2020” and “The Best Espionage Novels of 2020.”

• In Reference to Murder brings word that the Tucson, Arizona, mystery bookshop Clues Unlimited is closing. Christine Burke, who’s owned Clues since 1996, calls it a casualty of ”the global pandemic and advancing age.” The blog adds that “Until the store closes, all new releases will be 20% off, and all used mass-market paperbacks will be $2. Used trade paperbacks and hardcovers will go for $5. The store will be open for appointments until Saturday, December 26.”

• The Strand Magazine has already released previously unpublished work by Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Ernest Hemingway, and others. But its latest issue, says The Guardian, includes “Adventure on a Bad Night,” “a ‘lost’ story by Shirley Jackson, in which the author of The Haunting of Hill House shows a microcosm of the racism and sexism in U.S. society through a dissatisfied woman’s trip to a corner shop …” The paper explains further that “Jackson’s [eldest] son, Laurence Hyman, said he found the story ‘among many others haphazardly stuffed into 52 cartons at the Library of Congress.’ All of Jackson’s papers were donated to the library by her husband Stanley a few years after her death” in 1965.

• National Public Radio host Michel Martin spoke with Laurence Hyman about the recent discovery of “Adventure on a Bad Night.”

• With Christmas now less than a week away, Mystery Fanfare’s Janet Rudolph has finally posted all three parts of her extensive collection of holiday-appropriate crime fiction. The listings are arranged alphabetically by author: A-E, F-L, and M-Z. Additionally, she offers lists of mystery short stories and anthologies that are perfect to tackle at this more-festive-than-normal time of year.

• Separately, Rudolph has compiled a shorter roster of winter solstice-related mysteries. The solstice will take place in the Northern Hemisphere this coming Monday, December 21.

• I, for one, did not know there was a Charlie Chan Christmas mystery! The Postman on Holiday’s Lou Armagno acquaints us with “The Man Who Murdered Santa Claus,” a circa-1946 episode of NBC radio’s The Adventures of Charlie Chan.

• Making the best of a bad situation: Mystery Tribune reports that “Due to COVID-19, one of Canada’s most beloved, long-running period dramas, Murdoch Mysteries, is without a new season this Christmas, which is usually when new episodes premiere. But the good news is that the streaming service Acorn TV and the show’s producers have the next best thing: an intimate concert special shot on the series set, hosted by the Detective William Murdoch himself (Yannick Bisson), consisting of music popular during the Victorian and Edwardian eras, along with the show’s favorite themes– performed by a world-class ensemble from the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. A Music Lover’s Guide to Murdoch Mysteries will premiere in the U.S. and Canada, on Christmas Eve, on Thursday, December 24, 2020 on Acorn TV.”

• A Shroud of Thoughts has a nice piece up about the historical association between holiday shopping and department stores. “The Christmas shopping season has long been important to American retailers,” he writes, “and the Christmas shopping season evolved rather early in the United States. It was as early as the 1820s and 1830s that sweet shops and candy stores in New York City began capitalizing on Christmas. By the 1840s many retail shops were already advertising themselves as ‘Santa Claus's headquarters.’”

• Another loss for mystery fiction: Parnell Hall, a California-born former private detective and actor turned novelist, passed away on December 15 at age 76. He was best known for penning separate series about an ambulance-chasing New York City private investigator Stanley Hastings (Detective, A Fool for a Client) and “Puzzle Lady” Cora Felton (Lights! Cameras! Puzzles!), In her obituary, Janet Rudolph remembers Hall as a “funny, supportive, musical, generous, and all around good guy. … Everyone loved him.” His most recent novel, Chasing Jack, was released by Brash Books in September. The Gumshoe Site says Hall died of COVID-19. FOLLOW-UP: Author Robert J. Randisi sent me a note explaining: “Parnell succumbed to COVID-19, but it all started with a lung transplant, after which he had to take dialysis treatments every day until he could get a kidney transplant (didn’t happen), and then he got pneumonia and went into the hospital, where he contracted the COVID. He fought a long time.”

• And though I included, in The Rap Sheet’s last news round-up, a few brief comments about Scottish romance and crime writer Alanna Knight succumbing to illness in early December, at age 97, Mike Ripley’s longer obituary of that prolific author in The Guardian provides a great deal more interesting information.

So Many Choices

Not content with already having announced their nominees for “the best crime novels of 2020,” CrimeReads editors have followed that up by posting lists of this year’s top-notch noir novels, debut novels, gothic-flavored tales, and true-crime books. It all reminds me of how many books I never got around to reading these last 12 months.

Meanwhile, George Easter, the editor of Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine, has made a valiant attempt to compile a master list of as many “best crime fiction of 2020” choices as he can find. Predictably, there will be more such offerings to come between now and the close of December, but this is a useful overview for the nonce.

Ayo Hands Down Her Decisions

Further adding to our inventory of “best crime novels of 2020” lists, here comes Shots critic and blogger Ayo Onatade with a very fine top-12 pile of her own. Among her choices:

• The Law of Innocence, by Michael Connelly (Orion)
• Like Flies from Afar, by K. Ferrari (Cannongate)
• The Less Dead, by Denise Mina (Vintage)
• City of Spies, by Mara Timon (Bonnier Zaffre)

Separately, Onatade remarks on her favorites from “an eclectic range of non-fiction crime books.” Those include Agatha Christie’s Poirot: The Greatest Detective in the World, by Dr Mark Aldridge (HarperCollins); Cover Me: The Vintage Art of Pan Books, 1950-1965, by Colin Larkin (Telos); Detectives in the Shadows: A Hard-Boiled History, by Susanna Lee (John Hopkins University Press); and Southern Cross Crime, by Craig Sisterton (No Exit Press).

Hmm. It seems I missed reading a few good books this year …

Bullet Points: Totally Jam-Packed Edition

• Coming off his recent success with the Netflix mini-series The Queen’s Gambit, filmmaker Scott Frank is said to now be “working on the development of a Sam Spade TV series that he is hoping [English actor] Clive Owen will star in. And his pitch for the series, which follows the adventures of the protagonist from The Maltese Falcon, sounds like it could be pretty incredible,” remarks The Playlist. “‘What if you do Sam Spade later in life, when he’s 60 years old?’ explained Frank. ‘He’s now an ex-pat living in the South of France … And his past finds him in this small town. We’re doing six episodes. Clive Owen is going to play Sam Spade.’” The idea reminds me of the concept behind Lawrence Osborne’s Only to Sleep, a remarkably satisfying 2018 Philip Marlowe novel that imagined Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles private eye as a 72-year-old man, living in retirement in Baja California and being hired to investigate the suspicious swimming death of a debt-ridden con man/developer. Owen, as you might recall, was talked of years ago as the perfect person to play Marlowe in a feature-length film based on one of Chandler’s famous yarns. Are we any more likely to see him star in a Sam Spade TV drama than we were to witness his performance in a Marlowe flick? Time will tell. (Hat tip to Frederick Zackel.)

• The Gumshoe Site brings this exciting news: “Canogate Books asked [Scottish author] Ian Rankin to complete William McIlvanney’s handwritten manuscript of [a] final Inspector Jack Laidlaw novel. McIlvanney, often called ‘The Godfather of Tartan Noir,’ was the author of three novels featuring Inspector Jack Laidlaw of Glasgow CID, and died in December 2015 at the age of 79. His living partner, Siobhan Lynch, found an unfinished novel, The Dark Remains, the story of Laidlaw’s first case, and took the manuscript to Canongate Books, which had republished McIlvanney’s books in 2013. As McIlvanney was a literary hero of Rankin, Rankin … accepted the offer [to complete that novel]. The Dark Remains will be published by Canongate in September 2021.” In its own report on this posthumous literary partnership, The Guardian quotes Rankin as saying that McIlvanney left behind only “notes towards a book, a few scenes, some central characters, a sense of what the story might actually be about, but fairly incomplete. … Willie doesn’t quite lay out who the killer is, so I had to get inside his head to see what he was actually saying,’ he said. ‘It seemed like he had two or three stories that he was juggling … It was an act of archaeology, and an act of detection.’” Regardless, you can count on me to purchase a copy of the finished product!

• This item comes from In Reference to Murder:

Sisters in Crime announced the creation of the new SinC Pride Award for Emerging LGBTQIA+ Crime Writers. The SinC Pride Award will be a $2,000 annual award to support an emerging writer of the LGBTQIA+ crime-fiction writing community with both financial and practical career guidance and support. Similar to the Eleanor Taylor Bland Crime Fiction Writers of Color Award, the recipient of the SinC Pride Award may use funds for activities including workshops, seminars, conferences, retreats, online courses, and research activities required for completion of the work. An unpublished writer is preferred, however, publication of not more than 10 pieces of short fiction and/or up to two self-published or traditionally published books will not disqualify an applicant. John Copenhaver, Cheryl Head, and Kristen Lepionka will serve as judges for the inaugural award. Applications will open on January 15 and run through March 15, with the winner announced in early April. For more information, contact grants@sistersincrime.org.

• I never knew that H.G. Wells wrote a mermaid novel.

• CrimeReads is out with its “choices for 2020’s best crime novels, mysteries, and thrillers.” Several of its 10 top titles were predictable, but there are a few surprises. Liz Nugent’s Little Cruelties (Scout), for one. Elizabeth Hand’s The Book of Lamps and Banners (Mulholland), for another. And Alexandra Burt’s Shadow Garden (Berkley).

• Tom Nolan’s 10-best list for The Wall Street Journal contains another handful of eye-openers. He turns thumbs-up on not only Cara Black’s Three Hours in Paris (Soho Crime) and Tom Bouman’s The Bramble and the Rose (Norton), but also Anne Perry’s One Fatal Flaw (Ballantine) and Peter Swanson’s Eight Perfect Murders (Morrow).

• Despite all of my recent attention to “best crime fiction of the year” lists, I missed spotting BookPage’s post about its own 10 mystery and suspense choices. Among that monthly review’s picks are Sophie Hannah’s Perfect Little Children (Morrow), Stuart Turton’s The Devil and the Dark Water (Sourcebooks Landmark), Sara Sliger’s Take Me Apart (MCD), and Heather Young’s The Distant Dead (Morrow).

• Earlier this week I provided a link to New York Times columnist Marilyn Stasio’s inventory of her favorite crime novels of 2020, but I failed to note the publication of Times writer-at-large Sarah Lyall’s list of what she claims are “The Best Thrillers of 2020.” Her nominees stretch from Tana French’s The Searcher (Viking) and Gilly Macmillan’s To Tell You the Truth (Morrow) to Debra Jo Immergut’s “startling” You Again (Ecco). The question, however, is do these books really qualify as “thrillers”?

• Meanwhile, George Easter at Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine has collected his own review staff’s reading favorites from the last dozen months. There are eight contributors represented in his compilation—too many titles for me to mention. But offered below are editor Easter’s 12 “best novel” selections:

— The Last Flight, by Julie Clark (Sourcebooks Landmark)
— Victim 2117, by Jussi Adler-Olsen (Dutton)
— The Finisher, by Peter Lovesey (Soho Crime)
— The Last Hunt, by Deon Meyer (Atlantic Monthly Press)
— Troubled Blood, by Robert Galbraith (Sphere)
— Blacktop Wasteland, by S.A. Cosby (Flatiron)
— The Law of Innocence, by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown)
— House Privilege, by Mike Lawson (Atlantic Monthly Press)
— Blind Vigil, by Matt Coyle (Oceanview)
— The Boy in the Woods, by Harlan Coben (Grand Central)
— Moonflower Murders, by Anthony Horowitz (Harper)
— The Curator, by M.W. Craven (Constable)

• By the way, not long ago Deadly Pleasures launched a brand-new Web site to coincide with its transformation from a print publication to a full-color quarterly digital periodical. Easter says his “goal is to post something new [there] every day or two.” Online contents will include book reviews and newsy bits about crime-fiction commendations, as well as vintage reprints from the magazine’s past (such as Ted Fitzgerald’s 1997 interview with author Stephen Marlowe). The editor has also begun a series called “George’s Mystery Library Videos,” episodes of which are fairly short (lasting 15 or fewer minutes) and have thus far found him talking on camera about “signed material with the same cover art,” James Grady’s “Condor” novels and short fiction, and what makes a “true” first edition. I look forward to seeing how the Deadly Pleasures site evolves in the near future.

• Deadline brings word that “Netflix has greenlit a five-part Swedish-language series on Stig Engström, the man who was named as the probable murderer [in 1986] of former Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme. The Unlikely Murderer is made by Swedish producer FLX—which is behind Netflix series Quicksand and Love & Anarchy—and stars Robert Gustafsson as Engström. The part-fictionalized story is based on a 2018 book [The Unbelievable Truth] by Thomas Pettersson. Following the assassination of Palme in 1986, Engström managed to elude justice right up to his death through a combination of audacity, luck, and a perplexed police force.”

• Jane Harper’s The Dry was one of my favorite crime novels of 2017, so I’m pleased to learn that a big-screen adaptation of that suspenseful yarn is due out on January 1. The bad news is that it will only be showing in Australian theaters—for the time being, anyway. As a post on Harper’s Web site explains, this movie stars Aussie actor Eric Bana, was directed by Robert Connolly (Balibo, Paper Planes, Deep State), and “was filmed across more than 15 towns in rural Victoria, Australia, last year.” The Dry had originally been planned to premiere last August, but was delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic. There’s no word yet on when it might reach viewers outside of Australia.

• My breath caught for a moment when I heard that FOX-TV was preparing a new Banyon series. What came immediately to mind was the short-lived, 1972 NBC crime drama Banyon, starring Robert Forster as a hard-headed private investigator in 1930s Los Angeles. Could it really be that after all these years, someone was intending to revive/reboot that underrated show? Alas, no. As The Hollywood Reporter makes clear, FOX is “developing an animated comedy based on the Crag Banyon Mysteries books by James Mullaney.

Mullaney and Shane Black will write and executive produce the project, which is titled “Crag Banyon P.I.” It follows the supernatural adventures of an alcoholic ex-cop and current private investigator, Banyon, as he solves cases in an alternate noir, otherworldly reality.

The project marks Mullaney’s first television writing gig. He has published nine books in the Crag Banyon series to date, as well as writing numerous entries in the “Destroyer” and “Red Menace” book series.

• January 8 will bring, to British TV viewers, the return of Rebecka Martinsson, a crime series based on a succession of books by Åsa Larsson—only this season’s episodes introduce a new lead actress.  “[S]eries one of Rebecka Martinsson was a big hit with Nordic Noir fans,” notes The Killing Times. “Starring Ida Engvoll, the Swedish series told the story of a prosecutor who returned to her roots in Kiruna to attend the funeral of the priest that confirmed her. Series two sees Engvoll replaced by Sascha Zacharias in the lead role.” Setting up the storytelling arc of this eight-installment run, The Killing Times says: “Several years have passed and Rebecka’s anxieties about truly fitting in and whether she made the right choice have worsened. As a distraction she throws herself head-first into work to solve gruesome crimes in the area.” Click on the Killing Times link for a trailer.

• In the States, Rebecka Martinsson is available via Acorn TV.

• With the novel coronavirus continuing to discourage social activities of any sort, my search continues for spirited, thoughtful, and at least moderately distinctive small-screen entertainments. A recent discovery was McDonald & Dodds, a light-hearted and oft-clever two-episode ITV show initially broadcast in the spring of 2020. It features Tala Gouveia as Detective Chief Inspector Lauren McDonald, a young, black, thorough-going go-getter from London who has been reassigned to the much quieter city of Bath, England. There she’s partnered with Detective Sergeant Dodds (Jason Watkins), an older white male who has spent years trapped behind a desk, yet retains an uncommon perspicacity when it comes to crime solving. In his review of that program’s pilot, Steve Lewis of Mystery*File writes: “I don’t know about you, but I’m always interested in yet another pair of mismatched homicide policemen, whether British or American. I love watching how their differences play off each other, how get to know each other, and maybe even get to respect each other. Old and worn-out stuff, I know, but when the show is well-written, which it is in this case, and when the players are perfectly selected, even more so this time around, well, to sum it up, I enjoyed this one.” You can see a trailer for the series here. Radio Times reports that a second three-part series of McDonald & Dodds is already in production. Hurrah!

• The Guardian posted a fine review of that series last spring.



• Next up on my to-be-screened list: Amazon Prime’s new neo-noir film I’m Your Woman (trailer above), starring The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’s Rachel Brosnahan as a sheltered wife and mother who’s “forced to go on the run after her [thief] husband betrays his business partner.” Have any of you faithful Rap Sheet readers seen this two-hour picture? Are you willing to share your opinions of it?

• TV Guide’s look back at what it calls “The 15 Best TV Performances of 2020” applauds, among others, Nathan Lane for his appearance in Showtime’s quirky Penny Dreadful: City of Angels and Matthew Rhys for his headline turn in HBO’s eight-episode Perry Mason. “The mostly-good-but-definitely-not-perfect reboot of Perry Mason was buoyed by an all-good-and-damn-near-perfect performance by Matthew Rhys,” writes Tim Surette, “who brought the classic character to the modern age not just with boozing and f---ing, but with an inner rage that we all could relate to. Rhys was actually the second choice to play Perry Mason; Robert Downey Jr. (who is an executive producer on the series) was slated to take on the role, but his feature film commitments made it impossible, and frankly, we’re all better for it. Fresh off receiving long overdue recognition for The Americans, Rhys made Perry an exhausted grump with a bent moral compass that saw him skirt the law to get justice, but with his soulful eyes during times of defeat and menacing outbursts during times of rage, we not only allowed it, we forgave it. Rhys is the regular-guy hero that our generation needs.”

• IndieWire names Max Allan Collins’ Nate Heller P.I. books among several others that it says deserve TV series treatment:

There’s a reason there are so many detective series on this list—they’re addictive, easily digestible, and the format lends itself perfectly to television. IndieWire’s Kristen Lopez recommends Max Allan Collins’ Nathan Heller series, which follows a wise-cracking private detective who is instrumental in cracking plenty of historically significant cases. The books [17 of them published so far] vacillate between hard-boiled detective novels and historical thrillers, and the ride begins with 1983’s “True Detective,” which finds Heller investigating mob corruption in 1932 Chicago.

• Andrew Nette, my editor on 2019’s wonderful Sticking It to the Man: Revolution and Counterculture in Pulp and Popular Fiction, 1950 to 1980, has a new post up in CrimeReads about the late William Hjortsberg and his recently published posthumous novel, Angel’s Inferno (No Exit Press), a sequel to Hjortsberg’s 1978 occult-tinged crime tale, Falling Angel. Much of Nette’s article focuses on differences between the novel Falling Angel and its cinematic adaptation, 1987’s Angel Heart. “A posthumously published book can be tricky property,” writes Nette in CrimeReads, “given the inevitable question of whether the author was able to finalize the manuscript to the degree they wanted, were they alive. Although Angel’s Inferno does not feel incomplete, it lacks the economy and flow of Falling Angel. It is also far darker, more debauched and violent. When you’ve made a pact to sell your soul to Satan, in terms of what you’re prepared to do, the sky, or in Angel’s case, the depths are the limit.”

• Three other CrimeReads pieces worth finding: Dwyer Murphy unearths a 1965 BBC interview between British spy-turned-talk-show host Malcolm Muggeridge and British intelligence officer-turned-espionage-novelist John le Carré; Gabino Iglesias praises the “politically engaged, wildly entertaining novels of Paco Ignacio Taibo II”; and Olivia Rutigliano recalls UK author Evelyn Waugh’s unexpected admiration for the works of Erle Stanley Gardner.

• Happy 10th anniversary to Pulp Covers, a Web site presenting some of the finest scans available of classic novel and magazine fronts. (As you might expect, I’m a frequent visitor.) I don’t see any notice of this milestone on the Pulp Covers main page, but its associated Twitter page mentions that the site now boasts “over 20,000 posts,” and its unidentified editor offers “a big shout-out to all the loyal fans who have stuck with this project over the past decade and encouraged us to continue. Without you, I’d have a lot more free time on my hands.” If you’d like to see how Pulp Covers started, visit its December 2010 postings.

• A half-century-old Columbo mystery, finally solved.

• Interviews to enjoy: Nancie Clare chats with E.A. Barres (They’re Gone), Anthony Horowitz (Moonflower Murders), and H.B. Lyle (The Year of the Gun) for her Speaking of Mysteries podcast; Max Allan Collins—yes, him again—talks with Andrew Sumner of Forbidden Planet about his latest paperback original, Skim Deep, his first Nolan novel in 21 years; and Scott Montgomery of Mystery People scores a brief Q&A with Jeff Vorzimmer, editor of 2020’s The Best of Manhunt 2.

• Finally, a couple of belated good-byes. First, to Sue Henry, who penned separate mystery series featuring either dog-sled racer Jessie Arnold or peripatetic Alaska widow Maxine “Maxie” McNabb. My introduction to her work came in the late 1990s, after I returned from a hike over the historic Chilkoot Pass Trail between Alaska and the Canadian Yukon, and was hungry for books about that path to Klondike gold; Henry’s Termination Dust (1995) fit the bill perfectly. Henry died on November 20 at age 80. Also no longer with us is Alanna Knight, the prolific Scottish author of historical mysteries and romantic thrillers, who passed away on December 2 at age 97. Fellow novelist Martin Edwards remembers her in his blog as “a leading light in Scottish literary circles” and a “stalwart” of the British Crime Writers’ Association, as well as “a biographer and playwright and expert on the work of that gifted fellow Scot, Robert Louis Stevenson.” Knight has at least one last novel, Murder at the World’s Edge (Allison & Busby), due out next year. I offer my condolences to both of their families.