Troubles in “Paradise”

Brilliant but bungling Humphrey Goodman is back, and not a moment too soon! Viewers in the States haven’t seen him or the rest of the Beyond Paradise cast since that lighthearted TV mystery series aired its latest Christmas special here in early 2026. But the show, spun off in 2023 from BBC One’s Death in Paradise, returns to Britbox with its fourth-season opener this coming Tuesday, June 9.

As we rejoin Detective Inspector Goodman (played by Kris Marshall) and his extraordinarily patient restaurateur wife, Martha (Sally Bretton), we find that problems with their houseboat are driving them to locate fresh digs in Shipton Abbott, their small fictional town on England’s Devon coast. Meanwhile, Goodman’s police colleague, Detective Sergeant Esther Williams (Zahra Ahmadi), faces shifts in her own domestic situation, which may finally overcome her tendency to push people away, and lead her to reunite with local vineyard owner Archie Hughes (Jamie Bamber). And Goodman’s new boss, Chief Superintendent James Smith (Vincent Franklin), is demanding budget cuts be made in the Shipton Abbott squad room that might only be satisfied by cutting someone from the team—an eventuality over which Goodman is destined to agonize throughout the season.

Amidst it all, Goodman, Williams, and the other members of their team (Dylan Llewellyn’s earnest Constable Kelby Hartford and Felicity Montagu’s habitually cranky Margo Martins) must contend with unusual cases involving mermaids, a missing treasure map, and more. Goodman’s mother in law, Anne Lloyd (Barbara Flynn), even gets to demonstrate her amateur sleuthing skills along the way.

There will be half a dozen weekly episodes in Season 4, which ran on British TV earlier this spring. Click here to watch a preview.

Bullet Points: Alarming Week Edition

After the horrific results of this week’s U.S. national elections, I’ve done my best to avoid major news sources. However, as always, I have kept my eyes open for developments in the world of crime, mystery, and thriller fiction. Here are a few items worth sharing.

(Above) Author Paretsky, from her Facebook page.

• Sara Paretsky has been chosen to receive the 2025 Killer Nashville John Seigenthaler Legends Award. As In Reference to Murder notes, that prize—named for an ex-editorial director of USA Today—is “bestowed upon an individual within the publishing industry who has championed First Amendment Rights to ensure that all opinions are given a voice, has exemplified mentorship and example to authors, supporting the new voices of tomorrow, and/or has written an influential canon of work that will continue to influence authors for many years to come.” The Killer Nashville Web site relates some of the reasons Paretsky deserves this commendation:

Sara Paretsky revolutionized the mystery world in 1982 by introducing V.I. Warshawski in Indemnity Only. Paretsky challenged a genre in which women historically were vamps or victims by creating a detective with the grit and smarts to take on the mean streets. V.I. struck a chord with readers and critics; Indemnity Only was followed by twenty more V.I. novels. Her voice and world remain vital to readers; the New York Times calls V.I. “a proper hero for these times,” adding, “To us, V.I. is perfect.”

While Paretsky’s fiction changed the narrative about women, her work also opened doors for other writers. In 1986, she created Sisters in Crime, a worldwide organization that advocates for women crime writers. This organization earned her Ms. Magazine's 1987 Woman of the Year award. More accolades followed: the British Crime Writers awarded her the Cartier Diamond Dagger for lifetime achievement; Blacklist won the Gold Dagger from the British Crime Writers for best novel of 2004, and she has received the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters from several universities.

Called “"passionate” and “electrifying,” V.I. reflects her creator’s passion for social justice. After chairing the school's first Commission on the Status of Women as a Kansas University undergraduate, Paretsky worked as a community organizer on Chicago's South Side during the turbulent race riots of 1966. Since then, Paretsky’s volunteer work has included advocating for healthcare for the mentally ill homeless, mentoring teens in Chicago's most troubled schools, and working for reproductive rights. Through her Sara & Two C-Dogs foundation, she also helps build STEM and arts programs for young people.

The author will be presented with her award during a special dinner at next year’s Killer Nashville conference, to be held in Nashville, Tennessee, from August 21 to 24.

• The shortlists have been announced of this year’s An Post Irish Book Awards contenders. Categories range from Popular Fiction, Non-fiction, and Cookbook to Poetry, Short Story, Newcomer, and Teen and Young Adult. There are also half a dozen candidates for the 2024 Irish Independent Crime Fiction Book of the Year. They are:

— A Stranger in the Family, by Jane Casey (Hemlock Press)
— Witness 8, by Steve Cavanagh (Headline)
— Where They Lie, by Claire Coughlan (Simon & Schuster)
— Someone in the Attic, by Andrea Mara (Bantam)
— Somebody Knows, by Michelle McDonagh (Hachette Ireland)
— When We Were Silent, by Fiona McPhillips (Bantam)

Winners will be revealed during a ceremony in the Convention Centre Dublin on Wednesday, November 27.

• Elizabeth Foxwell points us toward this fascinating piece in Humanities Magazine, which recalls “how a copyright tussle between author Dashiell Hammett and Warner Bros. over his detective Sam Spade changed copyright law.”

• On this first day of Veterans Day Weekend, blogger-editor Janet Rudolph serves up a substantial list of mystery fiction related to this holiday. You will find works ranging from Rennie Airth’s River of Darkness and Susan Elia MacNeal’s Mr. Churchill's Secretary to Max Allan Collins’ The Million Dollar Wound, Elizabeth Speller’s The Return of Captain John Emmett, and Philip Kerr’s earliest Bernie Gunther yarns (March Violets, The Pale Criminal, and A German Requiem).

• Having himself penned a trio of James Bond continuation novels, it’s understandable that Anthony Horowitz might concoct a character in his own fiction who undertakes that same sort of assignment. And so he does in Marble Hall Murders, the forthcoming third entry in his Susan Ryeland/Atticus Pünd series (Magpie Murders, Moonflower Murders). This new work is due out in the UK in April 2025, and in the States come May. Here’s the plot summary from Amazon:

Editor Susan Ryeland has left her Greek island, her hotel, and her Greek boyfriend Andreas in search of a new life back in England.

Freelancing for Causton Books, she’s working on the manuscript of a novel, Pünd’s Last Case, by a young author named Eliot Crace, a continuation of the popular Alan Conway series. Susan is surprised to learn that Eliot is the grandson of legendary children’s author Marian Crace, who died some fifteen years ago—murdered, Elliot insists, by poison.

As Susan begins to read the manuscript’s opening chapters, the skeptical editor is relieved to find that Pünd’s Last Case is actually very good. Set in the South of France, it revolves around the mysterious death of Lady Margaret Chalfont, who, though mortally ill, is poisoned—perhaps by a member of her own family. But who did it? And why?

The deeper Susan reads, the more it becomes clear that the clues leading to the truth of Marian Crace’s death are hidden within this Atticus Pünd mystery.

While Eliot’s accusation becomes more plausible, his behavior grows increasingly erratic. Then he is suddenly killed in a hit-and-run accident, and Susan finds herself under police scrutiny as a suspect in his killing.

Three mysterious deaths. Multiple motives and possible murderers. If Susan doesn’t solve the mystery of Pund’s Last Case, she may well be the next victim.

I very much enjoyed the first two Ryeland outings, so should be early in line to pick up a copy of this book as well.

• Mystery Fanfare brings word that the latest Death in Paradise Christmas special is coming to UK screens on December 25, courtesy of BBC-TV. That feature-length installment will star Don Gilét, who replaces Ralf Little as the British lead detective on the show. Series 14 of Death in Paradise is expected to debut on the opposite side of the Atlantic early in 2025. There’s no word yet on when it might be available to American viewers.

• Meanwhile, Series 3 of the Death spin-off series Beyond Paradise, featuring Kris Marshall and Sally Bretton, has its own Christmas special planned (the broadcast date will be December 25), with new episodes expected in the spring of next year. And a third spin-off, the Australia-set Return to Paradise, is scheduled to air in the UK beginning on November 22. Six episodes will be on offer this first season.

• Not only has the Prime Video series Reacher received an early fourth-season renewal (Season 3—based on Persuader, Lee Child’s seventh Jack Reacher novel—won’t even debut until 2025), but a spin-off drama is also in the works. As Deadline reports, it will find Danish actress Maria Sten reprising her “fan-favorite” role as Frances Neagley, a corporate security professional in Chicago who served with Reacher in the U.S. Army's 110th Special Investigations Unit. The blog In Reference to Murder says that in this spin-off’s first season, Neagley “learns that a beloved friend from her past has been killed in a suspicious accident, [and] becomes hell bent on justice. Using everything she’s learned from Jack Reacher and her time as a member of the 110th Special Investigators, Neagley puts herself on a dangerous path to uncover a menacing evil.” Look for Alan Ritchson, who plays Reacher in the original series, to guest star in the offshoot.

• They don’t amount to much, but The Killing Times has posted a handful of “first look” images from Series 6 of Strike, which BBC One promises to premiere in the UK next month. These latest episodes are adapted from the 2022 novel The Ink Black Heart, by “Robert Gailbraith” (aka J.K. Rowling), and will star Tom Burke and Holliday Grainger. The Web site TVDrama.com provides this plot synopsis:

In the new season, the co-creator of the popular [YouTube cartoon series] The Ink Black Heart shows up frantic at Cormoran Strike [Burke] and Robin Ellacott’s office because she is being persecuted by a mysterious online figure. Ellacott [Grainger] informs her that the agency is too busy to take on the case, but regrets doing so when, weeks later, she discovers that the cartoon co-creator has been murdered in Highgate Cemetery, the location of The Ink Black Heart.

Ellacott and Strike are drawn into a quest to uncover the anonymous online figure who was tormenting the co-creator and are pulled into a complex web of online aliases, business interests and family conflicts.

Strike has previously aired in the States on HBO-TV, as C.B. Strike. But I have found no news yet of a U.S. debut for Series 6.

• One final boob tube-related item: The eight-episode Apple TV+ series Presumed Innocent is morphing into an anthology drama. Its acclaimed first season was of course based on Scott Turow’s 1987 novel of the same name, But, according to Deadline, the David E. Kelley-run production may take its sophomore-season inspiration from a legal thriller not even due for publication until 2026: Dissection of a Murder, by Jo Murray. It goes on to explain that Murray’s tale “follows Leila Reynolds who has just been handed her first murder case. She’s way out of her depth but the defendant only wants her—and to make matters worse, her husband is the prosecutor. Soon Leila is fighting to keep her own secrets buried too.”

• The British Crime Writers’ Association has brought on two new sponsors. The editorial consultancy Fiction Feedback, founded in 2008 by editor and former CWA secretary Dea Parkin, will support its Emerging Author Dagger prize. Writer/lecturer Morgen Witzel has volunteered to sponsor the Historical Dagger in memory of his wife, Dr Marilyn Livingstone, with whom—under the pseudonyms A.J. MacKenzie and R.L. Graham—he wrote 13 historical crime novels and thrillers. Livingstone passed away in September 2023.

• Scotland’s Glencairn Crystal Limited, which manufactures the famous Glencairn whisky glass and has for four years underwritten the McIlvanney and Bloody Scotland Debut crime-writing literary awards, is out with a new anthology, The Last Dram, that “features tales from 16 different authors, all of whom have previously entered the Glencairn Glass Crime Short Story competition over the last three years.” Among those writers, says The Bookseller, are “Allan Gaw (2022/23 runner-up, who has since gone on to win this year’s Bloody Scotland Debut Prize); Phillip Wilson (2023/24 winner); Elisabeth Ingram Wallace (2023/24 runner-up); Brid Cummings (2021/22 winner); Jennifer Harvey (2021/22 runner-up); Judith O’Reilly (2021/22 runner-up).” Funds raised through the sale of this anthology will go to Maggie’s, a network of cancer-care drop-in centers located across the United Kingdom.

• While re-reading The Little Sister, Raymond Chandler’s fifth Philip Marlowe novel, author Dana King finds himself surprised by the author’s “misogynistic tendencies.”

• As the DVD and Blu-ray editions of his latest indie film, Blue Christmas, are being readied for Christmastime sale, crime novelist Max Allan Collins reports that he and his fellow-author spouse, Barbara, recently celebrated the “world premiere” of a second new picture, Death by Fruitcake, with two showings in their home town of Muscatine, Iowa. Fruitcake brings to life the main characters in their almost two-decades-old Trash ’n’ Treasures mystery series, published under the nom de plume Barbara Allan. “The screenings weren’t flawless,” Collins writes. “These were our first showings anywhere other than on our computers, and Death by Fruitcake is primarily intended for television (streaming most likely) and physical media (Blu-ray and DVD). None of that marketing has begun, as the film is intended for a 2025 holiday release. So there were bumps, chiefly of the audio variety (softer image and audio on Friday, and still not ideal audio on Saturday). But they were eminently watchable and got a terrific reaction from both audiences, with lots of laughs and a good deal of fun at the red carpet event before and after …”

• I’m always a reluctant convention-goer, but I have promised to attend next year’s Bouchercon in New Orleans, during which my friend Ali Karim will serve as Fan Guest of Honor. And now I am giving serious thought to attending the Left Coast Crime get-together in late February 2026. It will be held in San Francisco, which is one of my favorite cities in the world, and feature as its Fan Guest of Honor Randal S. Brandt, a librarian at the University of California, Berkeley’s Bancroft Library and an infrequent contributor to The Rap Sheet. For more info or to register for the ’26 LCC, click here.

• Let me wish fond farewells to two lately deceased performers who appeared over the years on many TV programs, including crime dramas: Teri Garr and Alan Rachins.

• And for the many millions of Americans traumatized by the prospect of convicted felon Donald Trump returning to the White House next year, MSNBC-TV’s Rachel Maddow offers this to-do list to defend the nation’s democracy from authoritarian assault.

Bullet Points: Eclipse Day Edition

• The Columbophile Blog reports that David Koenig, author of the 2021 book Shooting Columbo, will be back in print next month with Unshot Columbo: Cracking the Cases That Never Got Filmed (Bonaventure Press), which “focuses on 19 murder mysteries that never made it to our screens—and outline why we never got to see them. ... [T]he many Columbo stories crafted but never filmed include 1970s tales by ‘murder consultant’ Larry Cohen and a young Brian De Palma, an aborted pilot for Mrs. Columbo that was reimagined for the good Lieutenant, and the legendary last case that Peter Falk desperately hoped would drop the curtain on Columbo’s televisual career.” Yeah, you should know by now that this is on my “preorder” list.

• North Carolina resident Ashley-Ruth M. Bernier, whose short stories have appeared in various magazines, and Audrea Sallis, a South Dakota technical writer hoping to expand her fiction portfolio, have been named as the 2024 Barbara Neely Grant recipients. This scholarship program, named for the late Barbara Neely (creator of the Blanche White mystery series), is designed to promote Black crime-fiction writers. A pair of winners is selected each year—one an already published author, the other a writer just getting started in publishing. More information about Bernier and Sallis can be found here.

• Mike Ripley expands his oft-amusing “Ripster Revivals” series for Shots with this piece looking back fondly at the oeuvre of Walter Satterthwait (1946-2020). Ripley calls him “an American with a passport, who knew how to use it. Not only did his nomadic existence find him living in numerous locations in the U.S., particularly New York, Santa Fe, California and Florida, but in Greece, Kenya and the Caribbean, with frequent visits to Germany, France, Holland and England. Along the way he wrote numerous short stories, a series of classic private eye investigations, a historical series set in the Europe of the 1920s featuring cameos from Arthur Conan Doyle, Harry Houdini, Ernest Hemingway and Adolf Hitler (!), plus stand-alone thrillers and novels featuring Lizzie Borden and Oscar Wilde.”

• The annual CrimeFest convention, held in Bristol, England, has revealed its program lineup for this coming May. In attendance should be crime-fiction stars running from Laura Lippman and Ajay Chowdhury to Denise Mina and Abir Mukherjee. More details are here.

• Perhaps in anticipation of what would have been actor Rock Hudson’s 100th birthday coming up next year (he succumbed to AIDS-related illness in 1985), the celebrity magazine Closer recently profiled Susan Saint James, now 77, who starred with Hudson in the 1971-1977 NBC Mystery Movie series McMillan & Wife. The article begins with Saint James’ statement that “kissing Rock Hudson on the set … never felt like a hardship. ‘We were kissing all the time, and it was fun,” she tells Closer exclusively, calling her late costar “engaging, wonderful, friendly and sexy.’” It goes on to mention Hudson’s “gregarious, upbeat personality” and how he personally welcomed famous guest stars to the McMillan & Wife set. “‘He would send flowers to their trailer, and he’d go over first thing in the morning to say hello,’ recalls Susan, who notes that stars of hit TV series are rarely so gracious. ‘He had this kind of Old Hollywood courtesy and kindness.’”

• Speaking of Susan Saint James, I was contacted not long ago by northern Virginia resident Frank Gregorsky, a non-fiction editor specializing in economics and political history who, in his spare time, pens a free, PDF-formatted Web quarterly called Detective Drama Gems. He’s apparently been doing that—ever so quietly, and with no professional background in his subject matter—since 2020, long enough to have analyzed “roughly four dozen episodes” of vintage American crime and detective TV shows. “I look for plausibility of events; spectacular character clarity; and the power and precision of dialogue,” Gregorsky tells me. The reason he reached out to me was that he’d come across my 2011 Rap Sheet tribute to McMillan & Wife, and had referred to it while producing this enjoyable Gems recollection of “Point of Law,” a 1976 episode of the series—and the last to feature Saint James in the role of Sally McMillan (left), spouse to Hudson’s San Francisco police commissioner, Stewart “Mac” McMillan.

• By the way, I’d love to direct you to previous issues of Detective Drama Gems, but Gregorsky has (sadly) provided no easy way to access them. The first issue, focusing on episodes of Barrie Craig, Confidential Investigator, Hawaii Five-O, and The Streets of San Francisco, can be enjoyed here. But after that, the Web addresses begin with http://www.exactingeditor.com/Detective-Gems-1.pdf, and you must change the number in that address each time to find the next one. There are 13 issues thus far, looking back at installments of everything from The Mod Squad and 77 Sunset Strip to The Name of the Game and M Squad.

• Here’s an episode that seems to have passed from my recollection: “In the final season of Perry Mason (1957-66), the intrepid attorney went behind the Iron Curtain for an adventure.”

• This is good news, indeed. New episodes of Beyond Paradise, the Death in Paradise spin-off series starring Kris Marshall, have just begun to drop on the streaming service BritBox. A Christmas special was shown in December, but only last week did a second ep suddenly appear. Here’s a synopsis: “As a steam train races through the Devonshire countryside, [Detective Inspector] Humphrey [Goodman, played by Marshall] and [Deteetive Sergeant] Esther [Williams, played by Zahra Ahmadi] join the Shipton Abbott Players for a murder mystery rehearsal. Though Humphrey is only playing a detective, things turn from amateur to professional when the actor playing the victim is found dead with a real knife in his back.” Wikipedia says six Season 2 episodes are in the hopper (and began showing in the UK in March). Marshall was my favorite among the fish-out-of-water British detective stars of Death in Paradise, and it’s nice to see him return in this rather different series, which will apparently find Goodman and his fiancée, Sally Bretton (Martha Lloyd) becoming foster parents.

• Meanwhile, American streamer Hulu has decided to end the cruise of Death and Other Details after 10 installments. “Now we’ll never know which poor soul these severed limbs belonged to,” observes Deadline. “Hulu has opted not to renew murder mystery series Death and Other Details for a second season. The news is not really surprising; the visually stylish series starring Mandy Patinkin and Violett Beane had a pretty quiet run, not able to break into Nielsen’s weekly Top 10 streaming ratings.”

• And if you missed seeing today’s total solar eclipse, visible in North America, here’s NASA’s broadcast of that “celestial spectacle.”

Coming First to British Screens

Vienna Blood, the British-Austrian psychological crime drama based on a popular series of novels by Frank Tallis, has been commissioned for a fourth series. If its debut follows the pattern of previous years, UK viewers should be able to watch it by the end of this year, while Americans will have to hang tough till 2024.

According to The Killing Times, these latest episodes—set in 1909 Vienna—will center on “the double murder of an arms dealer in police custody and a senior public official … Doctor Max Liebermann [played by Matthew Beard] has only just returned from a tour of the U.S. when Inspector Rheinhardt [Juergen Maurer] asks for help in what could be the biggest case of their career. Oskar and Max discover a conspiracy that leads to the heart of the government. Can the Freudian psychiatrist and the detective do enough to stop a seditious mole known as ‘Mephisto’ from bringing the Austro-Hungarian Empire to destruction? And will their lives ever be the same again?”

That description suggests that Season 4 is being adapted, at least in part, from Tallis’ outstanding 2018 novel, Mephisto Waltz.

Meanwhile, as we await Season 2 of Beyond Paradise, the Death in Paradise spin-off starring Kris Marshall as Detective Inspector Humphrey Goodman, word comes of the series’ first Christmas special. Again, boob-tube watchers in Great Britain will be first to enjoy the extended episode, which is expected sometime in late 2023. Its story will apparently find Goodman and his partner, Detective Sergeant Esther Williams (Zahra Ahmadi), investigating “a shocking crime on a steam train, an arson attack predicted by a medium and the baffling disappearance of the local fishing legend.”

Marshall’s Comeback Series Coming Back

Here’s good news: the cozyish BBC-TV crime drama Beyond Paradise, a Death in Paradise spin-off, has been renewed for a second season.

This show debuted in late February on both BBC One and the international streaming service BritBox. It stars Kris Marshall as accident-prone Detective Inspector Humphrey Goodman, a role he originally developed over three seasons on Death in Paradise. The spin-off finds Goodman having departed the Caribbean island of Saint Marie and moved with his fiancée, Martha Lloyd (Sally Bretton), to her hometown: fictional Shipton Abbott, near England’s Devon coast. There she has opened a small restaurant specializing in locally sourced fare, while he’s joined the local police force, leading a quirky squad that includes Detective Sergeant Esther Williams (Zahra Ahmadi), a single mother whose law-enforcement efficiency and general level-headedness have met their match in Goodman’s brilliant eccentricity.

Although I’d hoped Season 1 would extend further than six episodes long (Death in Paradise typically offers eight per season), those initial installments did yeoman’s work to establish Beyond Paradise as distinct from its predecessor. Yes, we are still given a compact contingent of small-town coppers—not just DI Williams, but also Dylan Llewellyn playing Police Constable Kelby Hartford and Felicity Montagu as Margo Martins, the cantankerous office support person with risqué doings in her past. However, slotting Martha and her prickly mother, Anna (Barbara Flynn), into the ensemble helps shake up the format that was established almost a dozen years ago, in Death, by series creator Robert Thorogood. It’s plain that Humphrey and Martha are very much in love, but equally obvious that they can go far out of their way to second-guess what will make the other happy, resulting in misunderstandings and too much left unsaid. This is still a largely lighthearted drama, but that relationship lends it modest depth.

Steve Barge (aka The Puzzle Doctor), who writes the excellent blog In Search of the Classic Mystery, carps that the crimes committed on Beyond Paradise are quite “small-scale … with not a lot of harm done by the end of things.” And he’s correct: there’s less carnage in Marshall’s new series than in the older Death. But that just adds a welcome—if hardly complete—air of believability to this program, and leaves room for more potential casualties in the future. The proliferation of homicides on Death in Paradise makes one marvel that Saint Marie still has any population left to finish off. One point on which I do agree with Barge is that the mysteries tackled thus far on Beyond Paradise haven’t been as challenging as those on the original series, though more than a handful of Death story lines over the years have been rather too convoluted for my taste.

One final structural modification is much appreciated, by Barge as well as yours truly. The tattered trope of gathering all of the suspects together at the conclusion of each Death in Paradise episode, and then unmasking the killer or killers, is certainly one of that show’s weaker elements. Beyond Paradise substitutes a re-creation of each plot’s offenses, with Goodman and Williams inserted into the crime scene as he explains who did the dirty deeds, and how. “It’s a really nice idea that works well,” remarks The Puzzle Doctor.

There is no information yet as to when Season 2 of Beyond Paradise, or the special Christmas episode planned in addition, will reach TV viewers. But filming is slated to begin later this year.

Around the Dial

• Mystery Fanfare reports that Beyond Paradise, a spin-off series from the long-running comedy-mystery Death in Paradise, is set to debut simultaneously on BritBox (in the United States) and BBC One (in the UK) on Friday, February 24. It will find actor Kris Marshall returning as Detective Inspector Humphrey Goodman, a role he occupied in the original series for more than three seasons. You’ll recall that Goodman left the police department on the Caribbean island of Saint Marie partway through Season 6 to head back to England with his new girlfriend, Martha Lloyd (Sally Bretton). Beyond Paradise finds them “arriving in Shipton Abbott, Martha’s hometown near the beautiful Devonshire coast ... As they embark on their new life whilst temporarily living with Martha’s mum, Anne Lloyd [Barbara Flynn​], the couple is quickly thrown in at the deep end as Martha sets out to pursue her dream of running her own restaurant, and Humphrey joins the local police force. Each week the team will face a new crime with a unique puzzle at its heart. As Humphrey gets stuck into his new job, he and Martha must also navigate life’s ups and downs, as faces from the past, the decisions they make, and the challenges of setting up life in a new town put their relationship to the ultimate test.” Also among this show’s cast will be Dylan Llewellyn (Derry Girls) playing Police Constable Kelby Hartford, and Zahra Ahmadi (Innocent) as Detective Sergeant Esther Williams. UPDATE: The Killing Times says that Season 1 of Beyond Paradise will run just six episodes long.

• Well, I didn’t see this coming: CBS Studios has ordered up a gender-swap reboot of the popular 1986–1995 legal drama Matlock, replacing the late Andy Griffith with Kathy Bates as series lead. “The Matlock reboot,” explains In Reference to Murder, “is centered on Madeline Matlock, a brilliant septuagenarian who rejoins the work force at a prestigious law firm, where she uses her unassuming demeanor and wily tactics to win cases and expose corruption from within.” Actress Bates previously played an attorney on the 2011–2012 series Harry’s Law. If this version of Matlock does, indeed, wind up on the CBS schedule, that will be its third television network home. It started out on NBC, but moved over to ABC in 1992.

• Amazon Studios is developing two new small-screen series based on Michael Connelly’s police procedurals. The first would return Jamie Hector to his Bosch role as Detective Jerry Edgar, but send him from Los Angeles to Little Haiti, Miami, on an undercover FBI mission. “In this glamorous city,” says Deadline, “he is forced to balance his new life with the gritty underbelly of the city, while being chased by his mysterious past.” In the meantime, L.A. police detective Renée Ballard, who was first introduced in Connelly’s 2017 novel, The Late Show, is set to star in a different as-yet-unnamed drama that finds her “tasked with running the LAPD’s new cold case division. Beyond simply investigating unsolved crimes, Renée is dedicated to bringing credibility to the department and justice to the community. Having learned from retired ally and mentor Harry Bosch, Renee does things her way—solving cases in unconventional ways while navigating the politics of being a woman on the rise in the LAPD.” There’s no word yet on when or where these new programs might debut.

• Happy Valley, the award-winning BBC One TV series starring Sarah Lancashire, just ended its third-season run in Great Britain. It’s not expected to reach U.S. screens until this coming May. If you can’t wait to learn more, check out the following reviews of individual Season 3 episodes: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.

• The blog Crime Fiction Lover is already hoping for the launch of a novel series to continue the character stories from Happy Valley.

• Hallmark Movies & Mysteries has begun filming a brand-new whodunit series titled The Cases of Mystery Lane. It will star Aimee Garcia and Paul Campbell as Birdie and Alden Case, “a married couple who find a new way to keep to keep the mystery alive … quite literally.” Hallmark Media’s director of development, Laura Gaines, is quoted as saying this show will combine “romance, humor, and intrigue, reminiscent of some of my favorite stories of amateur sleuths, in over their heads,” such as McMillan & Wife and the later Hart to Hart. Again, there’s no news regarding a premiere date.​

• And as part of the promotions campaign for his latest Peter Diamond detective novel, Showstopper—which concerns the supposed jinxing of a TV crime drama—author Peter Lovesey recounts here a jumbo-sized case of bad luck that struck Cribb, the 1980-1981 program based on his early Sergeant Cribb mysteries.

Bullet Points: Dog Days Edition

It feels like forever ago that I last compiled a “Bullet Points” post of crime-fiction news items. In fact, the last time was in early June. My preference is to write these every couple of weeks, but editorial responsibilities unrelated to The Rap Sheet stood in my way for almost two months. With any luck, I can now return to my usual timetable.

• Count me among those delighted by news of a Death in Paradise spin-off series starring Kris Marshall, who played Detective Inspector Humphrey Goodman for roughly three and a half seasons (after replacing Ben Miller as DI Richard Poole). As The Killing Times reports, this new BBC-TV show—to be titled Beyond Paradise—“will tell the story of what happened to Goodman … after he returned to the UK. Seeking a quieter life away from the stress of the city, Humphrey has taken a job as Detective Inspector in fiancée Martha’s hometown. However, they soon find that country life is anything but peaceful and Humphrey can’t help but be distracted by the town’s surprisingly high crime rate with a new, and very different, case challenging him each week.” Mystery Fanfare adds that Beyond Paradise will begin airing on BBC and, in the States, on BritBox in 2023, and that “many of the characters from Death in Paradise will make cameo appearances.” I hope producers can convince the lovely Joséphine Jobert to reprise her role as Detective Sergeant Florence Cassell. She and Marshall made a splendid team on the fictional Caribbean island of Saint Marie.

• While we’re on the subject of Death in Paradise, the TV site WhatToWatch says the 12th season of that popular series is “very likely to start in January 2023,” again with Ralf Little playing DI Neville Parker. In advance of that, a second Christmas special is due!

• When last we checked on ITV-TV’s McDonald & Dodds, in mid-June, word was that its third season would debut in Britain on June 19. However, there was no clue then as to a U.S. showing. Now, finally, Mystery Fanfare brings news that this lighthearted whodunit, starring Tala Gouveia and Jason Watkins as mismatched police partners in modern Bath, England, will have its BritBox premiere here in the States on Tuesday, August 16. Three 90-minute episodes are due, with the streaming service dropping one per week.

• Still reeling from the sad news that star Douglas Henshall has quit Shetland, we learn that his last, six-episode season with the BBC-TV series will begin airing in the UK on Wednesday, August 10.

• A confession: I haven’t yet watched the opening season of Slow Horses, the AppleTV+ spy series based on Mick Herron’s Slough House novels and starring Gary Olman, Jack Lowden, and Kristin Scott Thomas. But I am hoping to get around to it soon. I’d like to least take in those half-dozen episodes before the program’s sophomore season—based on Herron’s Dead Lions (2013)—premieres, probably in November. (You can already enjoy the trailer by clicking here.) But it’s becoming difficult to keep up: The Killing Times reports that production of Seasons 3 and 4—being shot back-to-back—is already underway, though there are no particulars regarding which other Slough House novels are being adapted for the small screen.

• Despite the numerous accolades Herron has received for his novels about a band of misfit former MI5 agents (including his recently capturing the 2022 Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year award for Slough House), the author is apparently stepping away from those characters in order to next pen another standalone yarn. Soho Press, though, intends to keep fans happy by releasing, in November, a paperback collection of Slough House novellas. The List, The Drop, The Last Dead Letter, and The Catch—all of which have previously been published—are to be featured, together with a new, Christmas-themed tale that gives the book its title, Standing by the Wall.

• The folks behind PBS-TV’s Masterpiece have posted a trailer (see below) for Magpie Murders, the six-part mini-series scripted by Anthony Horowitz and based on his 2017 whodunit of the same name. This show stars Lesley Manville and Tim McMullan, and is scheduled to commence its Masterpiece run on Sunday, October 16.



• Speaking of Masterpiece, it has now not only confirmed that the historical mystery drama Miss Scarlet and the Duke will kick off its six-episode Season 2 run on Sunday, October 16 (see the video trailer here), but that Season 3 of that show will follow closely on its heels, beginning on Sunday, January 8, 2023. This British-Irish production is set in 1880s London, and stars Kate Phillips as Eliza Scarlet, a spirited young female private investigator who often finds herself in professional (and personal) rivalry with Detective Inspector William Wellington, aka “The Duke,” played by Stuart Martin.

• This show sneaked right up on me. The U.S. streaming service Acorn TV will introduce a new Australian series on Monday, August 8. Titled Darby and Joan, it’s a road-trip dramedy starring Breaker Morant’s Bryan Brown as retired Australian homicide detective Jack Darby, and Greta Saachi (Presumed Innocent) playing widowed English nurse Joan Kirkhope. As Mystery Tribune says, “They couldn’t be more different: the low key, ruggedly charming Aussie and the tightly-wound, yet warm, witty and determined Englishwoman, but when they collide in the Australian outback, and become drawn into a series of unexpected mysteries, this unlikely investigative duo soon realize the most intriguing puzzle they face is each other.” Darby and Joan is slated to continue through August 29.

• Last but hardly least important on the boob-tube beat, Crime Fiction Lover lets it be known that “Val McDermid’s cold case police detective Karen Pirie is coming to the small screen in September 2022 in a new three-part ITV crime drama. Adapted from the first novel in the six-book series, The Distant Echo, the programme will star Lauren Lyle of Outlander fame as the lead detective.” McDermid herself is one of this show’s co-producers. You’ll find a short trailer at the link.

• Five authors are shortlisted for the 2022 Lindisfarne Prize for Crime Fiction, a competition “open to all writers who are from, or whose work celebrates the North East of England, and who have not previously had their submission published in any form.” They are:

— Clare Sewell, Can't Hide
— Duncan Robb, Sharp Focus
— Katherine Graham, Salted Earth
— Jacqueline Auld, The Children of Gaia
— Ramona Slusarczyk, The Taste of Iron

Founded in 2019 by British author L.J. Ross, this commendation is sponsored by her publishing imprint, Dark Skies Publishing, along with the Newcastle Noir Crime Writing Festival and Newcastle Libraries. According to the prize’s Web site, “The winning entry”—to be announced on August 31—“will be awarded a prize of £2,500 to support the completion of their work and funding towards a year’s membership of both the Society of Authors (SoA) and the Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi),” with other shortlisted candidates receiving lesser sums of prize money. To find previous winners, click here.

• As summer winds down, it’s time to re-check The Rap Sheet’s compilation of crime, mystery, and thriller works set to go on sale—on both sides of the Atlantic—between now and Labor Day. The number of picks has grown greatly since I initially posted that list on June 1.

• Also peruse Crime by the Book’s list of 16 novels that it says are must-reads for these closing days of the sunny season.

• Although the actual date was more than a week ago, I want to wish In Reference to Murder a happy 15th blogiversary! Writer B.V. Lawson does an outstanding job with her site … and somehow manages to keep up a consistent schedule, unlike some bloggers we know.

• Can it really have been 50 years ago? The blaxploitation crime film Super Fly, starring Ron O’Neil and directed by Gordon Parks Jr., was released on August 4, 1972. While many African Americans were displeased with that picture’s glorification of “black males as pimps, dope pushers, gangsters, and super males,” few could complain about Curtis Mayfield’s eminently danceable theme music. As George Kelley opined last week, “Mayfield’s soundtrack … became a landmark in exposing the threat of drugs to the Black Community.”

• My e-mail brings this note from frequent Rap Sheet contributor Fraser Massey, based in London: “While reading The Observer today (my favourite of Britain’s Sunday papers), I came across a fascinating piece where they asked a range of top crime novelists to list both their favourite crime novels of all time, but also their favourite recent thrillers. It makes for an impressive reading list.” That piece is walled off to non-subscribers, but fortunately The Observer’s sister newspaper, The Guardian, carries it here for free.

• Another missive comes from Ohioan Lou Armagno, author of the blog The Postman’s Holiday, who reminds me that this coming August 26 will mark the 138th birthday of Earl Derr Biggers, the creator of Chinese-American detective Charlie Chan. Don’t bother buying Biggers a present; he died way back in 1933. But fan Armagno would appreciate the gift of some assistance in tracking down three “rare treasures” associated with Biggers and the vintage Chan films, among them a waxwork representation of the fictional Honolulu police officer that was used in 1940’s Charlie Chan at the Wax Museum, one of 22 Chan movies starring Sidney Toler. Click here to read more about Armagno’s search for those long-gone artifacts.

• I’m not sure many people noticed, but in July Bouchercon rolled out a new look for the Anthony Award—“a design which will be used each year from now on,” says author Art Taylor, “as opposed to having each new Bouchercon design a specific award for their host year.” The official introduction of the prize came in this video.

• In a blog post devoted chiefly to the movies he takes in while writing fiction, author Max Allan Collins drops news that the book he’s currently working on—his 18th, and possibly last, Nate Heller novel—will be titled Too Many Bullets. It involves Chicago-based private dick Heller in the 1968 assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, he explains, but will also “cover both Jimmy Hoffa and Sirhan Sirhan.” Expect Bullets to come from Hard Case Crime, which is already readying Collins’ 17th Heller yarn, The Big Bundle, for release in early December. [FOLLOW-UP: In a subsequent blog post, Collins updated this account, explaining that “I have already decided to turn Too Many Bullets into two Heller novels. Too Many Bullets will be the RFK assassination novel. The as-yet-untitled Heller after that will go back and deal with the Jimmy Hoffa story. This came about because—as is always the case—the research has led me places I did not expect to go.”]

• Now joining Amazon in selecting the “best books of the years (so far)” is CrimeReads, which last month posted a list of 10 crime, mystery, and thrillers yarns (heavy on the noir) that it declares stood out from all others reaching print in the first six months of 2022. It’s not a bad list, though I was considerably less fond of Brendan Slocumb’s The Violin Conspiracy than others seem to have been. Interestingly, I’ve read more of CrimeReads’ second string of “Notable Selections” than I have its top 10.

• A few other CrimeReads pieces I have enjoyed lately: Lisa Levy’s interview with “the people behind some of today’s best small publishers specializing in crime fiction,” among them Hard Case Crime’s Charles Ardai, Paul Oliver of Syndicate Books, and Dreamland Books’ Sara Gran; Keith Roysdon’s look back at producer Quinn Martin’s remarkable string of popular TV crime dramas; this piece about New York City’s notorious heat wave of 1896, which provides the setting for Hot Time (Arcade Crimewise), W.H. Flint’s terrific debut historical mystery; Curtis Evans’ outstanding but sad story about Milton M. Propper, a once-applauded American writer of police procedurals (The Strange Disappearance of Mary Young, The Ticker-Tape Murder, etc.), who ended up destitute and suicidal in Philadelphia; a listicle of choice locked-room mysteries by Tom Mead, UK-based author of the new locked-room whodunit Death and the Conjuror (Mysterious Press); and an extract from the new non-fiction book Dangerous Rhythms: Jazz and the Underworld (Morrow), recalling how, “in the early days of jazz, the music and the mob were inextricable” down in New Orleans.

• One final CrimeReads-related subject: Dwyer Murphy, my editor at that excellent Web site, has seen his new sort-of-detective-novel, An Honest Living (Viking), greeted warmly by critics. Christopher Bollen offers this plot précis in The New York Times:

Murphy’s lonely, misanthropic [and unnamed] narrator, fitted with the soul of a poet and the ethics of a dice thrower, is hired by a wealthy young woman to investigate the illicit behavior of her estranged husband. The narrator quickly catches the husband in the act; however, it turns out that the woman who hired him was only masquerading as the man’s wife. Following the rules of the noir genre, the would-be detective is ruled by the stars of pride and lust, determined to discover who duped him even as he finds himself inexplicably drawn to an enigmatic femme fatale, the real wife.

Murphy has also been the subject of several interviews, one of the best being his exchange with Speaking of Mysteries host Nancie Clare, which you can listen to here.

• Worth tuning in for, too, is this conversation between National Public Radio’s Elissa Nadworny and Megan Miranda about the latter’s brand-new woodlands thriller, The Last to Vanish (Scribner). Among the things focused on is that North Carolina author’s multiple fears. “‘I have an overactive imagination, so I am afraid of many things,’ [Miranda] says. She’s especially afraid of being alone in the woods at night. Feeling vulnerable and on edge, not knowing what else is out there. ‘The idea that you hear footsteps behind you and you can’t see it and they stop when you stop,’ she says, ‘that to me is this terrifying idea.’ That feeling when the hair on the back of your neck stands up, you feel the tension in your shoulders, and you have a sharp focus on just getting to safety—that’s the feeling Miranda is trying to capture in her books.” The Last to Vanish is Miranda’s sixth adult novel.

• This year’s winners of the Scribe Awards, given out by the International Association of Media Tie-in Writers, were announced late last month during San Diego Comic-Con. As far as I can discern, there was only one category that included works definable as crime or mystery fiction: Original Novel, General. The vast majority of nominees were either fantasy or science fiction. Taking home the Original Novel, General prize was Pandemic: Patient Zero, by Amanda Bridgeman (Aconyte), which as you might guess is about a fast-spreading killer virus. Also nominated in that category were Murder She Wrote: Debonair in Death, by Terrie Farley Moran (Berkley), and Shootout at Sugar Creek, by Max Allan Collins (Kensington). A complete rundown of the 2022 nominees is located here.

• Darn lucky Londoners! Capital Crime, trumpeted as the city’s “only crime and thriller festival,” is set to return on Thursday, September 29, and continue through Saturday, October 1, bringing more than 164 panelists, plus readers, others authors, and book-publishing execs to Battersea Park on the River Thames’ south bank. Shotsmag Confidential offers a handy round-up of main festival events, which will kick off with a Thursday evening discussion of James Bond and London’s role in that fictional spy’s life, featuring Anthony Horowitz, Charlie Higson and Kim Sherwood, author of Double or Nothing (HarperCollins), the first in a triology of novels focusing on Double O Section agents other than Bond, due out in September. The full program and ticket info can be accessed here.

• The Gumshoe Site notes the death, on July 22, of Stuart Woods, author of the Stone Barrington series. “The former advertising man’s first book, Blue Water, Green Skipper (Norton, 1977), was not a novel, but a non-fiction book about the 1976 adventure in the Observer Single-handed Trans-Atlantic Race,” recalls blogger Jiro Kimura. “His third book was a novel, entitled Chiefs (Norton, 1981), about three generations of lawmen and the murder of a teenager in a small town in Georgia, which won the 1982 Edgar Award in the first novel category, and was made into the TV miniseries starring Charlton Heston and Danny Glover, among others. He wrote about five books a year singularly or collaboratively with several series characters. New York Dead (Harper & Row, 1991) is the first novel featuring Stone Barrington, an ex-cop and attorney in New York City. His 62nd Barrington book, Black Dog, will be released in August, the 63rd book in the Barrington series, Distant Thunder (both from Putnam) in October, [and] the 64th Barrington book (untitled yet) next year.” Kimura adds that Woods “died in his sleep on July 22 at his home in Litchfield County, Connecticut.” He was 84.

• Woods is not the only loss the crime-fiction community has had to endure during the last month. Gone now, as well, are actor James Caan (The Godfather, Misery, Poodle Springs), actress Rhonda Fleming (Spellbound, Out of the Past, McMillan & Wife), author Susie Steiner (Missing, Presumed), James Bond theme composer Monty Norman, and Douglas Dannay, author and the eldest son of Frederic Dannay, who co-created the Ellery Queen mystery series. Farewell, too, to Leave It to Beaver’s Tony Dow, Star Trek’s Nichelle Nichols, and F Troop’s Larry Storch, all three of whom made an impact on me as a boy.

• Having grown up in the glow of 1970s films, I’m very much a fan of Peter Hanson’s blog, Every ’70s Movie, which recently clocked in its six-millionth pageview. Congratulations! (Just for perspective, The Rap Sheet has almost reached its eight-millionth pageview.)

• And still more bodies are turning up in Lake Mead, a mammoth reservoir created in the 1930s by construction of the Hoover Dam, located on the border between Nevada and Arizona. As I wrote back in May, global warming is causing the lake’s water level to recede to historic lows, exposing sunken boats, a World War II landing craft, and other articles previously hidden from sight. Bones among them! CNN reported late last month that a third set of human remains was found in the reservoir. The earlier discovery of a long-ago murder victim raised serious questions as to whether these skeletons might be related to nearby Las Vegas’ mobster past.