Bullet Points: Frenzied Friday Edition

• This weekend promises to bring the annual Deadly Ink Mystery Conference to New Brunswick, New Jersey. The August 5-7 event will feature Reed Farrel Coleman as guest of honor, and Hilary Davidson as toastmaster. Blogger Les Blatt explains that “events [are scheduled] from Friday through the middle of the day Sunday. Friday night, after opening ceremonies, there’s a ‘Deadly Desserts’ party—always a highlight of the conference. Saturday and Sunday, there are entertaining and informative panels with mystery authors and fans talking about a variety of mystery-related topics. There’s a buffet lunch on Saturday; Saturday night, there’s an awards banquet, and on Sunday there’s a brunch. Mystery readers do eat well.” During that Saturday banquet he mentions, the 2016 David Award will be handed out to one of five deserving authors.

• The publication late last week of the panel/events schedule for next month’s Bouchercon in New Orleans, Louisiana (September 15-18) has provoked crime-fiction bloggers to begin announcing what they intend to do during the conference. Peter Rozovsky of Detectives Beyond Borders, for instance, reports that he’ll moderate an early Thursday panel discussion focusing on “Lesser Known Writers of the Pulp and Paperback Original Eras” (which will include Patti Abbott among its speakers), while Kristopher Zgorski of BOLO Books says he’ll host a Wednesday evening “wine/lemoncello event to thank all the authors and fans who [have] supported BOLO Books during its early years.” In that same post, Zgorski cites a variety of panel presentations and other events that he’s “most excited about.”

• R.I.P., Jack Davis. The Georgia-born cartoonist, who became famous for his movie-poster art (It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, The Bank Shot, The Long Goodbye, etc.) and his easily recognizable caricatures in Mad magazine (illustrations that made my father a fan), died on July 27 at age 91. The Spy Command has information about Davis’ comical salutes to TV spy shows here.

• TV and film actor David Huddleston has passed away in Santa Fe, New Mexico, according to Deadline Hollywood. Most of his obituaries mention Huddleston’s roles in The Big Lebowski, Blazing Saddles, and the 1975 film adaptation of Alistair MacLean’s Breakheart Pass, as well as his appearances on small-screen series such as Petrocelli, The West Wing, Gilmore Girls, The Wonder Years, and Murder, She Wrote. But I recall him best from the 1973-1974 NBC Wednesday Mystery Movie series Tenafly, on which he played Lieutenant Sam Church opposite James McEachin’s happily married private eye, Harry Tenafly. Huddleston died on August 2, six weeks short of his 86th birthday.

• Good-bye, too, to Clue/Cluedo’s Mrs. White.

• Thanks to a closed fan group on Facebook called The Busted Flush, I now know that NBC-TV was seriously planning in 1971 to produce a “World Premiere Movie” based on John D. MacDonald’s 1965 Travis McGee novel, A Deadly Shade of Gold. The site links to this piece from the Chicago Tribune, which explains how NBC imagined its film spawning a TV series, but MacDonald wasn’t so optimistic. He’s quoted in the Tribune article complaining about cheapskate Hollywood types who refuse to spend enough money to get high-quality scripts. Needless to say, the teleflick A Deadly Shade of Gold was never made. To date, only two films based on MacDonald’s McGee yarns have been produced: the 1970 Rod Taylor picture Darker Than Amber (which you can watch in its entirety on YouTube), and a 1973 small-screen movie/pilot starring Sam Elliott, titled simply Travis McGee, based on MacDonald’s The Empty Copper Sea (1978). Plans to adapt the first McGee novel, 1964’s The Deep Blue Good-by, into a big-screen picture starring Christian Bale were delayed at the very least as a result of a knee injury Bale sustained last year.

• Yes, I too was surprised to learn that His Bloody Project, an “ingenious” psychological crime thriller by Scottish writer Graeme Macrae Burnet, was among the 13 novels shortlisted for this year’s Man Booker Prize. Good luck, Mr. Burnet!

• From In Reference to Murder: “The Detection Club will publish in November a new collection of short stories, Motives for Murder, to celebrate the 80th birthday of one of the Club’s most distinguished members, Peter Lovesey. The book will be published in Britain as a paperback original by Little, Brown and in the U.S. (with a limited hardback edition as well) by Crippen & Landru. Each of the nineteen stories and one sonnet was written specially for the book, with each prefaced by a few words from the author about Peter’s contribution to the genre. Contributors include Ann Cleeves, Andrew Taylor, Len Tyler, Michael Ridpath, [and] Liza Cody.” A foreword to this volume was penned by “the legendary Len Deighton.”

• Happy fifth anniversary to Crime Fiction Lover!

• Steve Thompson of Booksteve’s Library reminds us that July 30 marked half a century since the release of Batman, the big-screen picture based on the 1966-1968 ABC-TV series of that same name starring Adam West and Burt Ward. I well remember seeing that campy feature in a drive-in theater as a small boy, my parents having wheeled my brother and me out for an evening of POW!, WHAM!, and ZOWIE! Click here to watch a trailer for the movie. National Public Radio’s Monkey See blog has more to say more about this anniversary.

• The Spy Command gets all nostalgic about 2015 as “The Year of the Spy,” a designation greatly bolstered by the release last August of Guy Ritchie’s underappreciated film, The Man from U.N.C.L.E.

• August 3 marked singer Tony Bennett’s 90th birthday! When I was a kid, and my parents played Bennett’s music on the stereo, I thought it was so corny. But something about being an adult has made everything he sings much more charming. Hard to believe that my parents were right about his music all along …

• The Hollywood Reporter brings the news that Benedict Cumberbatch of the BBC One series Sherlock “will star in and produce a film adaptation of Rogue Male, the 1939 survivalist thriller by Geoffrey Household” about “a hunter who attempts to assassinate a dictator but is caught, tortured, and left for dead.”

• Editor-author Vince Keenan offers this postmortem of Seattle, Washington’s recent Noir City film festival (July 22-28). “After a hiatus of almost two and a half years …,” he writes, “the return engagement on Capitol Hill was a success, with solid crowds every night for a week. The theme this go-round was Film Noir from A to B: double-bills that moved chronologically through the 1940s, pairing prestige pictures with shorter, grittier productions to re-create the movie-going experience of the era.”

• A couple of good recent lists from The Strand Magazine’s Web site: Author Anne Frasier selected what she claims are the “Top 10 Investigators with Dark Pasts,” while writer-editor Maxim Jakubowski picks “10 Overlooked Modern Crime Novels,” one of which is 1993’s Tony and Susan, by Austin Wright—a novel about which he commented at greater length in The Rap Sheet a few years back.

• Speaking of lists (and don’t we often do so?), Book Riot’s rundown of “100 Must-Read New York City Novels” includes Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn, Caleb Carr’s The Alienist, Lyndsay Faye’s The Gods of Gotham, and more than a few other mystery novels.

• More than 15 recognizable women mystery writers are set to participate in the third annual Ladies of Intrigue event, which will take place on Sunday, October 2, in Huntington Beach, California. Leading the list of speakers will be Agatha Award winner Carolyn Hart and Robin Burcell, the co-author—with Clive Cussler—of Pirate and the author of The Last Good Place, a 2015 work continuing the Al Krug/Casey Kellog police procedural series created by Carolyn Weston. Also set to take part are Lisa Brackmann, Kate Carlisle, Earlene Fowler, Naomi Hirahara, and others. Registration info is available here.

• Cable-TV network Cinemax has set Friday, September 9, as the debut date for Quarry, its new TV series based on Max Allan Collins’ novels about a peripatetic hit man. The eight-episode first season stars Logan Marshall-Green, Jodi Balfour, and Peter Mullan.

• Meanwhile, the espionage drama Berlin Station, created by spy novelist Olen Steinhauer, is being readied for an October 16 launch. Double O Section offers a trailer for the 10-episode opening season.

• Finally, a handful of interviews worthy of your attention: Crimespree Magazine’s Elise Cooper talks with Linda Castillo about the latter’s new novel, Among the Wicked; Amy Gentry chats with Kirkus Reviews’ Rachel Sugar about Good as Gone; Polish fictionist Zygmunt Miloszewski answers questions from Crime Fiction Lover about Rage; and Scott Montgomery from the Austin, Texas, bookshop MysteryPeople, grills Megan Abbott (You Will Know Me), Bill Loehfelm (Let the Devil Out), and Alison Gaylin (What Remains of Me).

Best Wishes to Bill Crider

Judging from his previous online notes, today is the 75th birthday of prolific Alvin, Texas, educator-turned-novelist Bill Crider. This would also have been his father’s 101st birthday, and it’s the 14th anniversary of his launching the widely read, often-humorous, and usually active blog Bill Crider’s Pop Culture Magazine.

As most Rap Sheet readers probably know, Bill has been hit recently with a health scare. He reported last week that his doctor wanted him to “check into the hospital ASAP, as he thinks I might be having kidney failure. This can’t be good.” A few days later he confided that he’d been diagnosed with a “very aggressive form” of cancer. “Looks bad,” he added. “Love to you all.” That note—which elicited a flurry of sympathetic comments from his fans and friends—was followed in short order by this still more worrisome one:

Hey, blog fans. I’m out of the hospital after being poked, prodded, tested. and humiliated. I’m in much worse shape than when I went in. It’s a long story. Next week I’ll try to get into [the University of Texas] M.D. Anderson [Cancer Center]. The outlook isn’t brilliant for the Mudville Nine. I might not be posting here again, so I want to say now how moved I’ve been by your comments. You guys are the best. Even if we’ve never met in person, you are truly my friends. Love to you all.

Then, on Tuesday of this week, Bill reported that he had been successful in scheduling his first appointment at M.D. Anderson for today, Thursday. No word yet on the results of his tests.

I don’t know Bill well. I’ve seen him during a few Bouchercons (the last time at the 2015 convention in Raleigh, North Carolina), corresponded with him on and off over the last 15 years or so, and once upon a time published an excellent piece he wrote for January Magazine about mysteries set in America’s Wild West. Nonetheless, I’ve managed to stay current with his life, thanks to his blog, which—though it often concentrates on crocodiles, Paris Hilton and Nicolas Cage, old paperback covers, baseball, vintage music and advertisements, forgotten books and movies, and people who’ve somehow tumbled across remarkable riches (while Bill has not been so lucky)—has also been deeply personal at times. I was sad to hear when his wife of 49 years, Judy, passed away back in 2014, and then delighted to learn that he’d recently adopted three abandoned kittens—the ever-mischievous “VBKs” (or Very Bad Kitties): Keanu, Ginger Tom, and Gilligan—who quickly became Internet sensations. Bill is acclaimed by those who know him better than I do as perhaps the nicest author in the Lone Star State, while his fellow writers have often thanked him for his generosity in either promoting their books or assisting them in their fiction-writing efforts. I’m sorry that I haven’t spent more time with Bill when we’ve encountered each other in the past. I only hope that the future will offer me chances to rectify that negligence. We can only hope his diagnosis is encouraging, and that he’ll be with us for a great deal longer. Borrowing a headline he’s often set atop posts having to do with remarkable turns of events, “I want to believe!”

Meanwhile, with this being Bill Crider’s birthday, it would be great if we could all send him our best and warmest wishes. You’re welcome to do so in the Comments section at the bottom of this post (I’ll let him know to look there). Or drop him a fond note at his own blog. And remember that Bill has a new novel coming out early next month, Survivors Will Be Shot Again (Minotaur), starring his series sleuth Sheriff Dan Rhodes (who is already set to make another appearance in 2017’s Dead, to Begin With, which he sent away to his agent before he learned he was ill). Since Bill might not be in the position to promote this book much, he’d probably appreciate the assistance of anyone who can help spread the word about its publication. I’ve already ordered my own copy.

Happy birthday, Bill. We’re all rooting for you!

UPDATE: It seems Bill Crider received at least one welcome present on his birthday—the fragile gift of hope. “My visit to M.D. Anderson today was a good one,” he wrote this afternoon on his Facebook page. “I like my doctor [Eleni Efstathiou] very much, and she was very optimistic about the whole situation. They still haven’t determined the exact problem, so I’ll have to undergo a whole new battery of tests. It’s too soon, then, to be sure or anything, but at the moment the future looks brighter than it did a few days ago. I’ll be getting the tests ASAP, and the doctor wants to begin treatment ASAP, too. Can’t do too much until all the test results are in, of course, but if all goes as planned, I’ll be meeting the doctor again next week for a more complete plan of action. I learned from going through Judy’s treatments that optimism can turn to despair in minutes, so I’m not getting too carried away. Still, things do look better for the moment.”

He added in a short post on his blog that his new doctor “believes I have a treatable form of prostate cancer, but that’s yet to be determined. If I do, it’s odd because some of the indicators don’t point to that. Let’s hope she's right.”

Bullet Points: Pre-Mother’s Day Edition

• UK critic Mike Ripley is out with the May edition of his Shots column, “Getting Away with Murder.” His wide coverage this time ranges from his experiences at a “select dinner given in honour of Lindsey Davis” and a brief tribute to the late William McIlvanney, to notes about Émile Gaboriau (“widely regarded as France’s greatest writer of detective stories with the creation of his archetypal detective Monsieur Lecoq”), the London-based collective of female crime writers Killer Women, and new books from Andrew Taylor, Pierre Lemaitre, Joyce Carol Oates, Tony Parson, and others.

• Yesterday, April 2, marked the 14th birthday of Bookslut, the book review/author interview site founded in 2002 by Austin, Texas, resident Jessa Crispin. Unfortunately, there won’t be a 15th anniversary celebration. The publication just debuted its May 2016 issue and made clear that this will be the final installment of Bookslut. I only hope the site remains online as an archive, because there’s been a lot of excellent stuff in there over the years, well worth revisiting. Oh, and if you happen to be in New York City, note that a good-bye cocktail-and-conversation event will be held this coming Friday, May 6, at the Melville House Bookstore (46 John St., Brooklyn) for readers who’d like to give Bookslut editors a fond send-off.

• Adios, too, to ThugLit, the short-fiction publication—created and edited by Todd Robinson—that was launched as a free Webzine back in 2007, disappeared in 2010, and in 2012 was re-launched in e-book form. Contributor Jedidiah Ayres serves up a fond remembrance of his association with ThugLit in his blog, Hardboiled Wonderland.

• Back on the subject of birthdays … Today would have been Mary Astor’s 100th, had she not already died back in 1987, at age 81. Born Lucile Vasconcellos Langhanke in Illinois, she debuted in a 1921 film called Sentimental Tommy, but apparently her small part was ultimately trimmed from the picture. As Astor, she had much better success starring opposite Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon (1941). It’s that movie in which she is now best remembered (and from which the clip below comes), though she was also featured in Red Dust (1932), The Hurricane and The Prisoner of Zenda (both from 1937), Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), A Kiss Before Dying (1956, based on Ira Levin’s novel of the same name), and Hush … Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964), which apparently marked her final screen appearance.



• A brief look back at Bogart’s film career.

• This seems unlikely, but according to In Reference to Murder, it’s true: “Office alum[nus] John Krasinski has been cast as the next Jack Ryan in the TV series project based on Tom Clancy’s popular CIA hero, coming to Amazon via Paramount TV. While there is no official green light yet, the move is seen as a way to help secure a series order.”

• Check out Killer Covers’ quite beautiful, and certainly diverse, gallery of vintage paperback fronts featuring brass beds.

• An Agatha Christie graphic novel? That’s right, next week brings the release of Agatha: The Real Life of Agatha Christie. It’s written by Anne Martinetti and Guillaume Lebeau, illustrated by Alexandre Franc, and published by British imprint SelfMadeHero. As the blog Past Offences explains, “the 128-page book uses ... Christie’s infamous [1926] disappearance as a way into her life story.”

• You can tell that summer’s on its way, because both Cross-Examining Crime and Brad Friedman’s Ah Sweet Mystery Blog (a new discovery for me) have stories up about novels to take along on your next warm-weather vacation.

• Lovely Swedish actress Alicia Vikander was such a delight in last year’s The Man from U.N.C.L.E. film, that I was dearly hoping for a sequel. That’s unlikely to happen, according to The Spy Command, but at least Vikander won’t be without work. Moviefone reports that the 27-year-old “has just landed the plum role of Lara Croft in the upcoming Tomb Raider reboot,” replacing Angelina Jolie.

• David Hofstede pays tribute to Get Smart’s ludicrous Cone of Silence in his blog, Comfort TV. “Introduced in the first episode of Get Smart, the Cone of Silence would inspire some of the biggest laughs on what many would argue is still the funniest television series ever created,” he observes.

• If you’re a regular Rap Sheet reader, you know I’m a confirmed fan of the 1972-1974 NBC whodunit Banacek. You can also assume that I gave a small but discernible gasp at learning (only this afternoon!) that a new book about that stylish George Peppard series has been published by BearManor Media. Titled “There’s An Old Polish Proverb That Says, ‘BANACEK’”: A Behind-the-Scenes History and Episode Guide to the 1972-1974 NBC Mystery Movie Series, it was composed by TV historian Jonathan Etter, who also wrote the book Quinn Martin, Producer. Frankly, I can’t order this book fast enough!

• Another work to anticipate: People (like yours truly) who enjoyed Walter Satterthwait’s Miss Lizzie, a 1989 novel that found alleged Massachusetts murderess Lizzie Borden helping pubescent Amanda Burton to solve a 1921 ax slaying, will be interested to know that Satterthwait has penned a sequel. Titled New York Nocturne: The Return of Miss Lizzie and set in 1925 Manhattan, it reunites the now 16-year-old Amanda with Borden in a case involving the hatchet murder of Amanda’s uncle. Publishers Weekly opines that “The novel’s assured and witty voice holds its disparate elements together, and Satterthwait deftly captures the verve of the Prohibition era as well as its unsavory edges.” New York Nocture is due out from Mysterious Press/Open Road in early June.

• How did readers come by their image of Florida “salvage consultant”/investigator Travis McGee? Steve Scott answers that question in The Trap of Solid Gold:

Once John D. MacDonald made the decision to create the series character Travis McGee, he wrote three versions of the first novel before coming up with a person he could “live with.” He sent the book off to his editor at Fawcett Gold Medal, Knox Burger, with the request to hold off publishing it until he could come up with some additional adventures, and once he had three done the go-ahead was given to begin publishing. Then began the editorial preparations for publication, including cover art.

In what seems like an unusual move, Burger chose to have the early covers illustrated by two different artists: one for the main cover and one for an inset of a portrait of McGee himself. Why this was done is anybody’s guess at this point, although I’m sure there is evidence among the MacDonald papers at the University of Florida. Perhaps a clue can be found in the particular artists Burger chose to do these covers, Ron Lesser and, for the likeness of McGee, John McDermott.

Both had done work for Gold Medal up to that point in late 1963, but McDermott was responsible for doing the covers of another crime series, Donald Hamilton’s Matt Helm. Beginning with the sixth entry in the series, The Ambushers, published in 1963, McDermott took over the cover duties and began adding an inset depiction of Helm. When Fawcett began reprinting earlier titles they had McDermott create new illustrations along with his version of Helm. This was right around the time that MacDonald was submitting his manuscripts of the McGee novels, and I guess Burger thought it a good idea to have McDermott do the same for McGee. Why he chose Lesser to do the covers proper—always a beautiful girl in some unusual pose—and not McDermott is not known. Perhaps he didn’t want the two series to become confused in the minds of his customers.

• Meanwhile, Dennis Lehane delivers this tribute to John D. MacDonald, which is part of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune’s evolving “John D. and Me” series being published in anticipation of the July 24 centennial of MacDonald’s birth.

• In Paste Monthly, Kenneth Lowe looks at Hollywood’s fascination with Dashiell Hammett’s crime and detective fiction.

• If you missed President Barack Obama’s uproarious performance at last weekend’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner, you can still catch it in Slate. Remarks Daniel Politi: “The best part … came at the end. ‘I would like to close on these two words: Obama out,’ the president said before literally dropping the mic.”

• This trailer for Penny Dreadful, the Showtime TV horror drama starring Eva Green and Timothy Dalton, is so compelling that I might actually have to give that show (the third season of which debuted on May 1) another chance. I watched the first few episodes of Penny Dreadful, but it seemed too dark even for me.

• More here about the original “penny dreadfuls.”

• I may have heard this story before, or maybe not, but evidently South African-born British actor Basil Rathbone resented his over-identification with Sherlock Holmes, the character he played in 14 feature films during the 1930s and ’40s. “‘I was … deeply concerned with the problem of being “typed,” more completely “typed” than any other classic actor has ever been or ever will be again,’ he wrote in his autobiography,” according to Bright Lights Film Journal.

• And that might well be the most awkward way possible of introducing this piece from Tipping My Fedora, in which Sergio Angelini recalls that “For many [1944’s The Scarlet Claw] is the best of the Holmes and Watson films made by Universal.”

• Listen up, all you Star Trek fans: Keith DeCandido is currently in the midst of a Star Trek: The Original Series Rewatch over at Tor.com. He’s just finished commenting on Season 2—which included three of my favorite episodes, “The Trouble with Tribbles,” “A Piece of the Action,” and the back-door pilot, “Assignment: Earth”—and is now moving on to Season 3. Catch up with all of his posts here.

• Last but not least, The Raymond Chandler Website is back! Its founder-editor, Robert F. Moss, who wrote Raymond Chandler: A Literary Reference (as well as an essay for The Rap Sheet about Chandler’s fondness for gimlets), noted in his blog how the site had “disappeared from the Internet for a while when we lost the server on which it was being hosted. Now we’ve finally gotten the site back up and live … [though] we are still in the process of shaking out the broken links and doing a general bit of dusting and polishing …”

Bullet Points: Be My Valentine Edition

• Southern Louisiana’s Iberia Parish, which as every Rap Sheet reader surely knows is home to James Lee Burke’s fictional sheriff’s deputy, Dave Robicheaux, is preparing to host its first official Dave Robicheaux’s Hometown Literary Festival, April 8-10. “Various venues will celebrate literature and its impact on our parish’s culture with storytelling, workshops, theatrical vignettes, music, local cuisine, bourré lessons and a tournament, Dave Robicheaux tours and a 5K run,” says the festival’s Web page. More info and ticket purchases are available here. (Hat tip to Linda L. Richards.)

• I missed it by a couple of days, but actor Burt Reynolds’ 80th birthday was this last Friday, February 11. Over the years he has been featured in plenty of films with a criminal slant, including Fuzz (1972), Deliverance (1972), Shamus (1973), Sharky’s Machine (1981), Stick (1985), and Heat (1986). But no less important are his credits from small-screen crime dramas, everything from M Squad and Naked City to Perry Mason and The F.B.I. Reynolds also starred as Detective Lieutenant John Hawk (a full-blooded Iroquois) in the short-lived, 1966 series Hawk; as the eponymous Southern California homicide detective in Dan August (1970-1971, opening titles here); and as a Florida gumshoe who drove around in a 1960 Cadillac convertible in B.L. Stryker (1989-1990, opening titles here). In addition, notes The Spy Command, “in the very early 1970s, some (such as director Guy Hamilton) thought he could have been a good James Bond.”

• If you haven’t seen it, here’s the trailer for Season 2 of Bosch, the Los Angeles-based drama starring Titus Welliver as Michael Connelly’s fictional police detective, Harry Bosch. The series is scheduled to return to Amazon’s TV-streaming service on Friday, March 11.



• Speaking of trailers, here are two for The Night Manager, a six-part British-American miniseries based on John le Carré’s 1993 novel of the same name. According to Wikipedia, The Night Manager—which stars Tom Hiddleston, Olivia Colman, and Hugh Laurie—will debut on BBC One on February 21 and then on AMC in the States on April 19.

• This is interesting: Flavorwire explains that “Ashley Judd, who had a starring spot as a retired CIA agent in the canceled ABC series Missing, will return to TV for David Lynch’s Twin Peaks reboot. The surreal series is set to premiere on Showtime in 2017. Deadline reported the news, but does not indicate what role Judd will play in the show. Twin Peaks originally aired in 1990 and centered on the murder of high school student Laura Palmer.”

• Now for a bit of unfortunate news: ABC-TV’s Agent Carter, starring lovely actress Hayley Atwell as a clever, kick-ass American spy in the 1940s, has reportedly been cancelled due to its underwhelming Season 2 viewership stats. I’ve enjoyed this show a great deal, and will be sorry to see it disappear. At least all 10 episodes of the current season—which debuted on January 19—are expected to be broadcast through March 1. If you need to catch up with Agent Carter, click here to find the five Season 2 episodes that have been shown so far.

• Tim Dorsey, who pens crime-caper novels such as the new Coconut Cowboy, is the seventh and latest recipient of the John D. MacDonald Award for Excellence in Florida Fiction. He received his prize during an event on January 26. As this press release states, “Some past winners of the award include Elmore Leonard, James W. Hall, Randy Wayne White, and Stuart Kaminsky.” (Hat tip to Mystery Fanfare.)

• Seriously, a big-screen MacGyver movie?

• The guest line-up for the 2016 Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival (July 21-25 in Harrogate, England) has been announced. It includes not only Crime Writers’ Association Diamond Dagger winner Peter James and Gerald Seymour, but also Linwood Barclay, Jeffery Deaver, Martina Cole, and many others.

• Shotsmag Confidential highlights two opportunities to show your crime-fiction scholarship. Click here to find out about submitting chapters to a book about “domestic noir,” and here to learn how your knowledge of author Agatha Christie might come in handy.

• Saskatchewan lawyer/book critic Bill Selnes has recently focused his attention on UK novelist Philip Kerr and his acclaimed Bernie Gunther crime series, set around World War II. So far, he has reviewed Kerr’s first three Gunther novels—March Violets, The Pale Criminal, and A German Requiem—and looked at how the Gunther books treat the subject of the Jewish Holocaust in two posts, here and here.

• Not to brag or anything, but I have read all 14 of Stephen Greenleaf’s San Francisco-based John Marshall Tanner P.I. novels, from Grave Error (1979) to Ellipsis (2000). If you’ve missed out, note that Mysterious Press is offering 12 of those tales in e-book format. The only two missing seem to be 1994’s False Conception and 1997’s Past Tense, but the publisher also has for sale two of Greenleaf’s non-Tanner thrillers, The Ditto List (1985) and Impact (1989).

• I’ve long been a fan of Alistair MacLean’s thrillers, but I confess that, while I own a copy of Caravan to Vaccarès (1970), I haven’t yet read it. So Vintage Pop Fiction’s recent review of that novel is a good reminder of what I expect will be a pleasurable task ahead.

• David F. Walker’s new Shaft comic-book series, subtitled “Imitation of Life,” is winning plenty of favorable comments.

• I love this quote from author Douglas Adams, brought to my attention by The Passive Voice: “Wandering around the web is like living in a world in which every doorway is actually one of those science fiction devices which deposit you in a completely different part of the world when you walk through them. In fact, it isn’t like it, it is it.”

• While I know Rap Sheet contributor Mark Coggins best for having created the August Riordan private eye series (No Hard Feelings), he’s also a photographer, and he’s out now with a new book of his work in that field, titled The Space Between. As he explains, this is “a thoughtfully curated set of fifty street scenes from cities in France, Italy, Japan, and the U.S.” that “conveys the energy, communal bonds, and in some cases, inherent mystery and alienation of urban life.”

• A nice piece about Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon.

• David Morrell has a few things to say about fellow author John D. MacDonald, adding to the Sarasota Herald-Tribune’s series of pieces printed in the run-up to the July centennial of MacDonald’s birth.

• And since today is Valentine’s Day (tell me you didn’t forget, guys), click over to Mystery Fanfare for a rundown of crime novels that somehow feature this annual celebration of love.

Happy Birthday, Robert McGinnis!

Today brings the 90th birthday of acclaimed American artist Robert McGinnis, who for decades now has been producing eye-catching, frequently sexy paperback cover illustrations—often for works of crime and mystery fiction—as well as iconic film posters. To celebrate, our sister blog Killer Covers will present nine of McGinnis’ most appealing book fronts, one per hour, in recognition of his first nine decades of life. You’ll find the completed set of those offerings here.

(The artwork topping this post comes from the 1972 Signet edition of Carter Brown’s The Aseptic Murders, one of many Brown paperbacks graced by McGinnis’ paintings over the years.)