Sleuth’s Sedate Shuttering

Rap Sheet contributor Kevin Burton Smith alerts me to the sad news that Toronto, Ontario’s “mighty Sleuth of Baker Street, one of the world’s great mystery bookstores, is closing.” As Marian Misters and J.D. Singh, who assumed ownership of that business in 1982, explain in the latest (and last) edition of their store newsletter,

Forty years of owing and running Sleuth has been forty years of great fun and, fortunately, the bookstore has done well enough to allow us a comfortable retirement. We are also very much aware that it’s thanks to the thousands of our loyal customers, over all these decades, who have supported us so generously that we can consider this next chapter. That our decision to close will not go over well with some of you, is something else we’re very much aware of. Spending forty years doing something we love has been a great pleasure, but the time has come for other things.

The pair make clear that they’re flexible as to when exactly they’ll shut the doors of their beloved shop for good. “We’ll stop ordering new releases and stop re-stocking backlist. Essentially, we will now work towards disposing of the inventory and, sooner or later, proceed to put the building up for sale. While we’re around, we’ll continue taking special orders for any book you might want. Feel free to ask and we’ll get it. This’ll give you a chance to use up whatever gift certificates or account credits that you might have. Of course, we’ll issue refunds for any unused balances if you’d rather.”

I’m sorry now that I never had the opportunity to visit Sleuth of Baker Street at one of its evolving locations. It sounds like it provide a wonderful, warm, and understanding environment for all who entered there. Bill Selnes, who writes the Mysteries and More from Saskatchewan blog, and has long been a regular patron of the shop, once wrote: “Walking into Sleuth is to enter a mystery lovers’ paradise. Floor displays, table displays and four walls are filled with books. Around the counter J.D. and/or Marian welcome all customers. For many years joining the greeting were the cats with Paddington the last of the group. A dog, Percy, has replaced the cats. It is a special place. When I enter the store my body relaxes and I am at home.”

I offer Misters and Singh my best wishes for their retirement—whenever it may finally begin.

READ MORE: “Marian Misters, Bookseller and Award Winner,” by Bill Selnes (Mysteries and More from Saskatchewan).

“The Uncles” Are Both Back

This is great news! I hope the Bouchercon attendees now in Minnesota’s Twin Cities will avail themselves of the opportunity to visit this resurrected enterprise. From Shelf Awareness:

Uncle Hugo’s Science Fiction Bookstore in Minneapolis, Minn., which was burned down in May 2020 during the unrest following the murder of George Floyd, has fully reopened in its new location, CBS News reported.

Owner Don Blyly has moved the science fiction bookstore, along with its mystery-focused counterpart Uncle Edgar’s, to a building at 2716 E. 31st St. It is across the street from Minneapolis indie Moon Palace Books and roughly two miles from the building that burned in May 2020.

The new store opened to the public on a limited basis on August 14, and on Tuesday opened with regular hours. Blyly told CBS that he lost some 200,000 books in the fire and is still rebuilding the inventory. Most of the store’s new inventory has arrived, and about 95% of the store’s used book inventory has come from his own personal collection.

The new space is about 20% smaller than the previous location, and as a result Uncle Hugo's will cut down some categories of used books, including paranormal romance, submarine adventure novels and a lot of true crime books. The store has resumed buying used books, and it will host its first author event in more than two years on Saturday, with Mike Kupari (Trouble Walked In).

You can read more about the shop’s long-awaited reopening here.

The Pandemic’s Boost to Bookstores

How can you not love this report from The New York Times?:

Two years ago, the future of independent book selling looked bleak. As the coronavirus forced retailers to shut down, hundreds of small booksellers around the United States seemed doomed. Bookstore sales fell nearly 30 percent in 2020, U.S. Census Bureau data showed. The publishing industry was braced for a blow to its retail ecosystem, one that could permanently reshape the way readers discover and buy books.

Instead, something unexpected happened: Small booksellers not only survived the pandemic, but many are thriving.

“It’s kind of shocking when you think about what dire straits the stores were in in 2020,” said Allison Hill, the chief executive of the American Booksellers Association, a trade organization for independent bookstores. “We saw a rally like we’ve never seen before.”

The paper makes clear the extent of these developments, saying that “more than 300 new independent bookstores … have sprouted across the United States in the past couple of years … And as the number of stores has grown, the book selling business—traditionally overwhelmingly white—has also become much more diverse.”

You will find the whole Times piece here.

Amazon Gets a Little Less Physical

Out of curiosity, I visited the first physical Amazon Books store, at Seattle’s University Village shopping center, shortly before Thanksgiving Day in 2015. That was not long after its doors had opened. The experience was, well, rather peculiar: almost all of the books were placed face-out on shelves, suggesting the stock level was fairly minimal, for how else could there have been sufficient room for that sort of display? Reportedly, titles were chosen for sale based on their having won four- or five-star reviews on Amazon.com.

Pleased enough with that experiment, Amazon soon opened another 23 brick-and-mortar outlets across the United States, making Amazon Books “one of the largest bookstore chains in the country.”

But that’s all now history. Publishers Weekly says the e-commerce giant has announced “it is closing all of its physical bookstores, as well as its 4-star and pop-up stores, which carry a mix of items, including some books. All told, Amazon will close about 68 stores, including its 24 bookstores.” Going forward, explains CNN, Amazon intends to “‘focus more’ on other physical retail efforts, including its dedicated stores for groceries, Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods, as well as its recently launched apparel shop, Amazon Style. It will also continue to focus on Amazon Go, its cashierless grocery store concept.”

Closing dates for the two dozen Amazon Books outlets will vary, depending on location. The company has declined to specify how many jobs will be lost because of this change in focus.

“The Uncles” Rise from the Ashes

I was saddened to learn, back in early June of 2020, that Uncle Edgar’s Mystery Bookstore—one of my favorite stops during visits to Minneapolis, Minnesota—had been burned down. The blaze was reportedly started by “rioting vandals (not protesters),” during demonstrations in that city following the police-assisted killing of a 46-year-old Black man named George Floyd.

Don Blyly, who owned Uncle Edgar’s as well as its conjoined sister enterprise, Uncle Hugo’s Science Fiction Bookstore, said at the time that his business had already been suffering, due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the fire might be the last straw. He wasn’t sure it would be possible to reopen what he called “the Uncles.” Nonetheless, a GoFundMe campaign was launched on the bookstores’ behalf; it has since raised $194,101 of its $500,000 goal.

Now comes more good news, courtesy of In Reference to Murder:

Don Blyly, owner of Uncle Hugo’s Science Fiction Bookstore and Uncle Edgar’s Mystery Bookstore in Minneapolis … has found a new site for the stores. The new building is about two miles east of the old location and a short block and a half from Moon Palace Books [a general-interest independent bookstore at 3032 Minnehaha Avenue]. Blyly noted that “the Moon Palace people and I believe that having two bookstores with such different selections so close will do good things for both stores.” Blyly sold the stores' destroyed old site and has some insurance money. … Blyly hopes to open for business in June.”

It seems likely that Uncle Edgar’s will take some while to rebuild its stock; after the fire, the Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal estimated the two shops “contained over 100,000 used and new volumes.” And of course, some of the choicest vintage works in its collection will never be recovered. But it brings a smile to my face knowing that the next time I’m in Minneapolis—probably in 2023—I can stop by Uncle Edgar’s again and spend a couple of hours looking for treasures that really belong on my own shelves.

Another Books Purveyor on the Brink

Oh no! This worrying news comes from Slate:

On Friday, New York City’s legendary Strand bookstore announced it was in trouble. With revenue down 70 percent because of the pandemic, owner Nancy Bass Wyden warned in a post on social media, the “loans and cash reserves that have kept us afloat these past months are depleted,” and the 93-year-old landmark is fighting for its survival.

Just as so many businesses and institutions have since March, Bass Wyden turned to her loyal customers for help, asking them to spend their money and spread the word, using the hashtag #SaveThe Strand. But alongside encomia from celebrities and Slate’s former editor in chief, another chorus arose, asking why Bass Wyden, a multimillionaire who is also the wife of a U.S. senator, was passing the hat rather than raiding her own piggy bank. As an article in the Baffler laid out in detail last month, the store received a Paycheck Protection Program loan of between $1 million and 2 million in April with the purpose of protecting the 212 jobs spread across its three locations, including the 188 workers Bass Wyden laid off in late March. Ultimately fewer than two dozen union jobs were restored, and Bass Wyden put her personal fortune to work purchasing stock in Amazon, a mortal enemy of brick-and-mortar booksellers she described as a necessary step toward keeping the Strand afloat.

READ MORE: “‘We Cannot Survive’: New York’s Strand Bookstore Appeals for Help,” by Martin Pengelly (The Guardian).

A Basketful of Oddments

• In late August, Rap Sheet contributor Steven Nester wrote a review of the “forgotten” 1999 neo-noir novel East of A, Russell Atwood’s first of two mysteries starring New York City private eye Payton Sherwood. (Its sequel was 2009’s Losers Live Longer.) Then just last week, I received an e-note from Atwood himself, saying, “I have a new novel out, not a Payton Sherwood mystery but a haunted house novel with a difference.” Titled Apartment Five Is Alive, the book was released in late September. Atwood adds: “Currently, I am a bookshop owner in my hometown of Westfield, Massachusetts, and I wrote this novel specifically to save my bookstore from closing, so I hope you can see your way to promoting it.” His business, it turns out, is Blue Umbrella Books, in downtown Westfield, and as this story for Western Mass News makes clear, it has been hurt partly by “a combination of online book sales, Audibles, and digital books.” This year’s COVID-19 pandemic has done further damage to Blue Umbrella’s prospects. Atwood created a GoFundMe page last December, but he’s apparently not yet achieved his funding goal of $10,000. With Halloween on the horizon, it’s certainly the right time to think about buying a haunted house tale. If your purchase can also improve the chances that an independent bookstore can keep its lights on, so much the better. To learn more about Apartment Five Is Alive, visit its Amazon page. Then scroll down to a video of Atwood reading his new novel’s opening chapter.

• Despite it being only late October, Publishers Weekly is already out with its “best books of 2020” list. Included are a dozen picks from the mystery/thriller stacks, among them Rachel Howzell Hall’s And Now She’s Gone, Matthew Carr’s Black Sun Rising, Stuart Turton’s The Devil and the Dark Water, Karen Dionne’s The Wicked Sister, and David Heska Wanbli Weiden’s Winter Counts.

• From In Reference to Murder: The finalists for the An Post Irish Book Awards were announced this week. Readers and fans will be able to vote online for their favorites through November 16, with the category winners to be announced in a virtual awards ceremony on November 25th. Those vying for Best Crime Fiction [are] The Nothing Man by Catherine Ryan Howard; The Cutting Place by Jane Casey; Our Little Cruelties by Liz Nugent; After the Silence by Louise O'Neill; The Guest List by Lucy Foley; and Fifty Fifty by Steve Cavanagh.” Click here to choose your favorite from among those.

• Deadline reports that The Son, Norwegian writer Jo Nesbø’s 2014 standalone vengeance thriller, The Son, is being adapted as a TV series for HBO. Jake Gyllenhaal (The Sisters Brothers, Velvet Buzzsaw) has been signed to star in the production.

• Meanwhile, actor Bertie Carvel (Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell) will take the lead in a six-episode UK TV series based on P.D. James’ stories about UK police detective Adam Dalgliesh. The Killing Times says this show “starts in 1970s England and follows Dalgliesh’s career to present day as he solves unusual murders and reveals buried secrets. Each murder mystery will offer its own unique setting and extraordinary cast. The six episodes will comprise three two-part stories, all of which are based on three of the Dalgiesh novels. The novels being adapted for the first season are Shroud for a Nightingale, The Black Tower, and A Taste for Death.” This new Dalgliesh (not to be confused with previous ITV adaptations starring Roy Marsden and Martin Shaw) is expected to air sometime in 2021.

• And this is more ammunition for critics who say there are no new ideas on television these days. Blogger B.V. Lawson says that “NBC has put in development Always Wright, a drama from For Life executive producer Sonay Hoffman and Sony Pictures TV. Written by Hoffman, Always Wright is set in Los Angeles and revolves around a young, wealthy, and jet-setting African-American couple who solve mysteries, run their own successful empires, and are completely head-over-heels in love with each other.” That sounds suspiciously similar to the premise of that 1979-1984 ABC series Hart to Hart?

• What a cock-up! Last week, the small bookshop where I help out had to send back its copies of John Grisham’s latest novel, A Time for Mercy. Shelf Awareness explains why:

At least some copies of A Time for Mercy by John Grisham contain printing errors so extensive that Doubleday has recalled copies and is replacing them. The book’s pub date was last Tuesday, October 13.

The publisher commented: “Doubleday has discovered some defective copies in the first printing of John Grisham’s A Time for Mercy. We are currently working with our accounts to replace inventory, and have already begun shipping out corrected copies."

One bookseller who is receiving replacement copies tomorrow described the printing errors as including “pages in the wrong order and some repeated with chapter numbers following themselves.” The books were printed in the U.S.

• Finally, we bid a sad good-bye to English novelist Jill Paton Walsh, who died on October 18. Walsh was likely best known to Rap Sheet readers for having completed Dorothy L. Sayers’ previously unfinished Lord Peter Wimsey/Harriet Vane murder mystery, Thrones, Dominations (1998), and then going on to pen three Wimsey continuation novels, including The Last Scholar, which was shortlisted for the Crime Writers’ Association’s Endeavour Historical Dagger award in 2014. Walsh, who also wrote children’s books, was 83 years old. Martin Edwards offers a fond remembrance of her here.

“The Uncles” Consumed by Flames

My best friend from college, Byron Rice, lives with his family in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Over the decades, every time I’ve visited Byron there, he and I have made a special point of swinging by Uncle Edgar’s Mystery Bookstore (at 2864 Chicago Avenue South) to browse and, more often than not, buy fistfuls of books. While the ridiculously overstuffed shop offered new books, it was usually the old paperbacks that drew my attention. Thanks to Uncle Edgar’s, my collection has beefed up to include vintage yarns by Robert Terrall, Thomas B. Dewey, Harold Q. Masur, Richard Dougherty, and many other writers.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic pretty much shut down air travel worldwide, I’d been planning to fly out to Minneapolis early this month and spend a week there. Trips to Uncle Edgar’s as well as to Once Upon a Crime were, of course, on the agenda. Needless to say, I had to scrap those plans altogether as the pandemic worsened.

(Right) Uncle Edgar’s stuffed its shelves full of wonders.

And now comes worse news, from The Gumshoe Site: “Uncle Edgar’s Mystery Bookstore and its sister store, Uncle Hugo's Science Fiction Bookstore, two of the most famous genre bookstores in America, were torched and burned down by rioting vandals (not protesters) in the very early morning of Saturday, May 30, in … the wake of the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer.” The Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal points out that those twin shops, located in the same modest “century-old commercial storefront,” were “located on Chicago Avenue just one block north of Lake Street and about nine blocks north of the intersection where Floyd died.” As Byron informs me, such a location put them too near the protest zone to be safe from spillover violence.

Publishers Weekly provides this account of the destruction:

On Saturday, owner Don Blyly posted on the store’s website under the headline, “Uncle Hugo’s and Uncle Edgar’s Foully Slain,” the same statement he sent employees and posted on Facebook earlier that day: vandals had broken all the windows in the two stores and then squirted accelerant through them. By the time he arrived on the scene in the wee hours of Saturday morning, both stores were too full of smoke for him to save anything. Buildings on both sides of the street were burning as “dozens of people were dancing around.”

“No sign of any cops, national guard troops, or any help,” Blyly wrote. “I’m pretty sure the insurance policy excludes damage from a civil insurrection, so I suspect I won’t get a cent for either the building or the contents.”

Blyly founded Uncle Hugo’s in 1974, and six years later opened Uncle Edgar’s. They eventually became major attractions for readers.

The Business Journal explains: “‘The Uncles,’ as Blyly refers to the stores, contained over 100,000 used and new volumes when they burned. There were rare signed editions and decades of collectibles. He estimated the retail value at around $1 million.” That publication adds that even before the recent Minneapolis riots, Blyly’s business was in trouble. “Like many retailers, Blyly was already struggling due to the coronavirus pandemic, which had prevented him from opening his stores to walk-in traffic since March. Four of his six employees had gone on unemployment, returning to work not long before the stores were destroyed. While Blyly worked long hours to fill mail orders alone during the shutdown, cashflow was limited. He estimated he owes publishers about $50,000 for books delivered before the fire.”

It’s not yet clear whether Blyly will rebuild his conjoined bookstores. However, he’s been told that—fortunately—his insurance policy for the structure and its inventory will indeed cover his loss, though it may not provide him with sufficient funds for reconstruction. “In the meantime,” the Business Journal reports, “Blyly plans to run a small mail-order business out of his home. He’ll start by selling Uncle Hugo’s and Uncle Edgar’s branded T-shirts and sweatshirts; he recently ordered a two-year supply.” A GoFundMe campaign (with a whopping $500,000 goal!) has also been launched to assist Blyly in whatever direction he decides to take his business.

Check the stores’ Facebook page for news updates.

It’s Time to Step Up and Help Again

Damn! It seems that small American bookstores specializing in crime, mystery, and thriller fiction can never rest secure of their finances these days. In Reference to Murder’s B.V. Lawson brings the unwelcome news that “Once Upon a Crime, an independent mystery bookstore in Minneapolis for 31 years, has launched a GoFundMe page after suffering financial difficulties.”

Proprietors Dennis Abraham and Meg King-Abraham, who bought that shop in the spring of 2016 (and have since put their daughter, Devin, in charge of managing its impressive stock), report that decreases in sales have left them carrying somewhat more debt on the venture than they’d expected, “in addition to the original loan allowing us to purchase the store.” To pay off a portion of said debt, their new GoFundMe campaign is hoping to raise $50,000 necessary to keep the shop running. After three days, it has already brought in promises of (at last count) $16,238 of that total, contributed by 243 people.

I have a good friend who lives in Minneapolis, and I visit Once Upon a Crime on every occasion I roll into town. Last summer I finally discovered the store’s down-the-hall Annex, which is chock-a-block with first-edition hardcover works and vintage paperbacks. Several books from that trove came home with me, and I’ve since asked that more out-of-print books be sent my way. Once Upon a Crime is a splendid example of a friendly, knowledgeable business catering to the sometimes-eccentric demands of mystery-fiction readers. It would be a terrible shame to see it fail, while corporate booksellers survive.

If you can it in this hour of need, please do.

Bullet Points: Chasing Down Leads Edition

I just returned from a few days away, spent in a place where (thank heavens!) I had absolutely no access to computers but plenty of opportunities to shop used bookstores. In other words, it was a most welcome break. But now it’s time to return to business, starting with this compilation of curious and interesting Web links.

• Lest we forget: “Friday is Global James Bond Day,” mentions Bill Koenig in The Spy Command, “the event that was invented six years ago for the 50th anniversary of the premiere of Dr. No.” One obvious way to celebrate this occasion is with a rewatching of the 1962 Sean Connery film based on Ian Fleming’s original novel. But Koenig suggests, instead, taking in a handful of episodes of Hawaii Five-O and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. that boast “significant 007 connections.” Not a bad idea.

• Peter Stone, author of the new young-adult novel The Perfect Candidate, has selected what he calls “12 Essential Political Scandal Thrillers” for CrimeReads. His choices include Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Jason Matthews’ Red Sparrow, and William Shakespeare’s Macbeth. They’re quite different from the books featured in another list, one that I put together for CrimeReads a few months back, of U.S. presidential mysteries and thrillers.

• This is certainly good news! New Mexico mystery-fictionist Steve Brewer (Cold Cuts) and his wife are preparing to open a new independent bookstore in Albuquerque this coming November. As he explains in his blog, “Kelly and I signed a lease yesterday for space in the historic Nob Hill Business Center on Route 66. In keeping with Nob Hill’s all-natural hipster vibe, the independent bookstore will be called Organic Books. Our two sons, Max and Seth, will work at the store, so it’ll truly be a family business.” Brewer says the store will “feature new books by New Mexico authors as well as a curated selection of thousands of used books.” (Hat tip to Mystery Fanfare.)

• January Magazine reports that Israeli actress Gal Gadot (Wonder Woman) has joined the cast of Kenneth Branagh’s Death on the Nile, his film adaptation of Agatha Christie’s 1937 Hercule Poirot novel of that same name. The movie, a box-office sequel to Branagh’s Murder on the Orient Express (2017)—best recalled for Branagh’s scene-stealing ’stache—is set for release in December 2019.

• I confess, I haven’t yet watched any episodes of Strike, the BBC One TV series based on J.K. Rowling’s novels (which she writes as “Robert Galbraith”), featuring modern-day London gumshoe Cormoran Strike. However, I see in The Killing Times that more episodes of that drama, starring Tom Burke and Holliday Grainger, are to be made. This time, it’s Rowling’s Lethal White that will be adapted for the small screen, in four parts. The Killing Times explains that the plot finds “Billy, a troubled young man, com[ing] to private eye Cormoran Strike’s office to ask for his help investigating a crime he thinks he witnessed as a child … While Billy is obviously mentally distressed and cannot remember many concrete details, there is something sincere about him and his story. Strike and Robin [his assistant, played by Grainger] set off on a twisting trail that leads them through the backstreets of London, into a secretive inner sanctum within Parliament, and to a beautiful but sinister manor house deep in the countryside.”

• In Reference to Murder alerts us to news that “Emmy-nominated writer and producer Frank Pugliese (House of Cards) has been set as showrunner for TNT’s The Angel of Darkness, a limited series based on the sequel to [the] best-selling The Alienist by Caleb Carr. The Alienist’s lead cast, including Daniel Brühl, Luke Evans, and Dakota Fanning, will return for The Angel of Darkness with a new story line that finds Sara Howard (Fanning), who has opened her own private detective agency, enlisting the help of Dr. Laszlo Kreizler (Brühl) and John Moore (Evans) to hunt down an elusive killer.”

• Eight years ago, I put together a small succession of posts for The Rap Sheet called “Killed in the Ratings.” My focus was on “American TV crime dramas that debuted with fanfare, but are now largely forgotten.” One of those programs was Griff (1973-1974), starring ex-Bonanza patriarch Lorne Greene as a Los Angeles police captain turned P.I. At the time, I was unable to track down the opening title sequence from Griff; I wound up including in my post just a short video clip from one of the episodes. But recently I finally found on YouTube the hard-charging theme from Griff. I understand it was composed by Elliot Kaplan, though the version at the link comes from John Gregory & His Orchestra. I’ll add this to my original post at some point.

• Speaking of YouTube finds, a poster calling herself Izolda Orlovskaya has uploaded there two hour-long episodes—to be found here and here—from the 1965 CBS-TV legal drama For the People. Broadcast a year before the debut of Star Trek, For the People also starred William Shatner, only in this latter series he had the role of David Koster, an assistant district attorney in New York City. Among the cast, too, was Jessica Walter, who played Koster’s wife, Phyllis (and would much later re-team with Shatner in the underappreciated 1974-1975 NBC Mystery Movie series Amy Prentiss).

• One more video treat: “The Murder Game,” the December 15, 1972, episode of Banyon, a largely forgotten NBC-TV series that imagined Robert Forster as a gumshoe in 1930s L.A. “The Murder Game,” which guest-starred Skye Aubrey and Kaz Garas, was the 13th episode of Banyon; only 15 were shot in total. As I always recommend when dealing with YouTube, watch this show soon, because you never know when the YouTube police will find cause to delete it.

• From Down These Mean Streets: “Of all the actors to play private eyes and gumshoes during the Golden Age of Radio, William Gargan may have been the most uniquely qualified. Ironically, while success as a detective seemed to elude him, he enjoyed a great deal of success by playing detectives on film, television, and radio. Chief among his sleuth shows was Barrie Craig, Confidential Investigator—the adventures of a sardonic private eye that premiered on NBC today in 1951.” If you are interested, you’ll find episodes of Barry Craig by clicking here, here, and here.

• Although the Seattle Mystery Bookshop closed a year ago, members of its former staff continue to produce a blog—updated once a month, so far—that’s filled with mini-reviews and tidbits of interest to readers of crime, mystery, and thriller fiction. For instance, the October “newzine” passes along this link to a BBC story about how Agatha Christie shaped the way the world now sees Great Britain.

• Another once-a-month offering is Mike Ripley’s delightful “Getting Away with Murder” column for Shots. His October wrap-up includes word of CrimeFest’s move to a different venue in 2019; a crowd-funding project to republish Adam Diment’s vintage Philip McAlpine thrillers (e.g., The Dolly Dolly Spy); new novels by Dominick Donald, Robert Galbraith, and John Simpson; and forthcoming works by the likes of Jane Harper, Christian White, and Ben Pastor.

• Max Allan Collins is touting a brand-new edition of Primal Spillane: Early Stories 1941-1942 (Bold Venture), “a much expanded collection of Mickey’s comic-book filler prose stories, written in the early to mid-’40s, mostly for Timely, the precursor of Marvel.” I could have sworn that I owned a copy of the 2003 edition of Primal Spillane, which Collins edited with Lynn F. Myers Jr., but I’ll be damned if I can find it anywhere. I might have to resort to buying a copy of this revised edition, especially since Collins says that it contains a never-before-published Spillane filler piece.

• And while we’re on the subject of Mickey Spillane, let me point out that Evan Lewis has posted the Mick’s first two Mike Danger comic stories in his blog. He explains that they were “written in 1946, but unpublished until 1954, after Mickey had hit the Big Time.”

Bullet Points: Too-Busy Tuesday Edition

• This is an exciting development, indeed. Publisher Brash Books has acquired the rights to all of teacher-turned-crime novelist Ralph Dennis’ work—“his published and unpublished novels.” Dennis (who died in 1988), is best known for producing a long-lost series starring Jim Hardman, an Atlanta, Georgia, cop who becomes an unlicensed private eye after being wrongly accused of corruption and stripped of his badge. The series began in 1974 with Atlanta Deathwatch. As Brash’s Lee Goldberg tells me in an e-mail note:

We will be re-releasing the 12 Hardman novels, starting with the first four in December, and the rest through 2019. The books include an introduction by Joe R. Lansdale. The third book includes an afterword by Richard Moore and the fourth book an afterword by Paul Bishop. Other authors and mystery fans will be providing afterwords in subsequent books.

We’ll also be re-releasing, in 2019, a substantially revised version of [Dennis’] World War II thriller, MacTaggart’s War [1979], which we’ve retitled The War Heist. It was his last published title and didn’t do as well as he, or the publisher, hoped. I believe I know why … I’ve gone back to his original manuscript, rearranged chapters, deleted chapters, and made other revisions to heighten suspense, sharpen characters, etc., cutting the book by about 35,000 words along the way (it still clocks it at 100K words).

We’re also going to be releasing his unpublished novels—which, if they need revision, I will be doing myself. One of the manuscripts is going to be slightly reworked as a sequel to his previously published novel Atlanta [1975] (which we are likely to retitle before re-publishing).

• Actress Jacqueline Obradors, who you should remember from her captivating turn as Detective Rita Ortiz on NYPD Blue, “is set for a key recurring role on the upcoming fifth season of Amazon’s Bosch,” according to Deadline Hollywood. The site explains that “Obradors will play the fast-learning and good-at-hiding-her-nerves Detective Christina Vega, who’s been brought up to work in homicide. She feels the promotion has been a long time coming and is determined to prove her worth as quickly as possible.” The only sad thing here is, we’ll have to wait until early next year to welcome her debut on Bosch.

• Robert Olen Butler, the author of Paris in the Dark, is Nancie Clare’s latest guest on the podcast Speaking of Mysteries.

• Other writer interviews worth your time: Dietrich Kalteis, author of the new novel Poughkeepsie Shuffle, chats with Dana King on his blog; Caz Frear talks about Sweet Little Lies with Crimespree Magazine’s Elise Cooper; and Criminal Element grills both Mindy Mejia (Leave No Trace) and Dolores Redondo (All This I Will Give You).

• Just when you thought I’d run out of summer-themed vintage paperbacks to post in my Killer Covers blog ...

• The next Law & Order TV series from producer Dick Wolf will be called Law & Order: Hate Crimes. According to a news release, NBC has already ordered 13 episodes of the show “based on New York’s actual Hate Crimes Task Force, the second oldest bias-based task force in the U.S. The unit, which pledges to uphold a zero tolerance policy against discrimination of any kind, works under the NYPD’s real Special Victims Unit and often borrows SVU’s detectives to assist in their investigations.” Wolf’s fictional version will be introduced next year on his long-running crime drama, Law & Order: SVU.

• The 50th anniversary of Lieutenant Columbo’s memorable debut on the small screen, in the 1968 made-for-TV-movie Prescription: Murder, was actually last February. However, it’s still nice to see this belated anniversary retrospective on the character published in Cleveland, Ohio’s Plain Dealer newspaper. The piece was penned by Mark Dawidziak, author of the 1989 book The Columbo Phile: A Casebook. Dawidziak concludes his remembrance thusly:

During one of our many talks after “The Columbo Phile” was published, Falk told me he knew that “Columbo” would be mentioned in the first sentence of every obituary about him. He said this with a smile because he never resented or fought the overwhelming identification with the role.

“It never bothered me about the identification,” he said. “I think anybody who’s troubled by that has got to be crazy. The whole world knows it and loves it.”

A testament to the character’s enduring appeal is that Falk played Columbo in five different decades.

“They like the man a lot,” Falk said of Columbo. “Columbo is a man who seems to know who he is. He’s content with himself. He’s good at his job. And he’s not preoccupied with the shallow things in life … I like the guy a lot.”

• Crusin’, the ’60s revival band with which author Max Allan Collins has performed (as lead singer and keyboard player) since 1974, was inducted into the Iowa Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame this last weekend.

• Finally, B.V. Lawson, of In Reference to Murder, recently posted this news: “Mystery Lovers Bookshop in Oakmont, Pennsylvania, has received another new lease on life. Tara Goldberg-DeLeo and Kristy Bodnar bought the bookstore from Natalie Sacco and Trevor Thomas, who put the store up for sale in May. They plan on expanding the children’s literature section, increasing the store’s online presence, and reviving coffee service. Mary Alice Gorman and Richard Goldman opened Mystery Lovers Bookshop in 1990 and sold it in 2012 to Laurie Stephens, a librarian with bookstore experience. Stephens sold it to Sacco and Thomas in 2015.”

Bullet Points: Post-Getaway Edition

So I have finally returned to Rap Sheet headquarters after an almost two-weeks-long train journey through western Canada, mostly touring Banff National Park and Jasper National Park on the British Columbia/Alberta border. The relaxation time was much needed; I didn’t touch a computer or cell phone the whole time I was away, and only read a newspaper twice. I’m feeling rested and ready to gather my latest assortment of crime fiction-related news items.

• Five years after Elmore Leonard passed away, his son Peter is set to reinvigorate one of Leonard’s best-recalled series characters, Raylan Givens, in Raylan Goes to Detroit, which is due out next month from Rare Bird Books. Here’s the plot synopsis offered by Amazon:

After an altercation with his superiors in Harlan County, Kentucky, Deputy U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens is offered two choices. He can either retire or finish his career on the fugitive task force in the crime-ridden precincts of Detroit.

Acting on a tip, Raylan and his new partner, Deputy Marshal Bobby Torres, arrest Jose Rindo, a destructive and violent criminal. Rindo is also being pursued by the FBI, who arrive shortly after he is in custody. Raylan bumps heads with a beautiful FBI agent named Nora Sanchez, who wants Rindo for the murder of a one of their own.

When Rindo escapes from the county jail and is arrested in Ohio, Raylan and FBI Special Agent Sanchez drive south to pick up the fugitive and bring him back to stand trial. Later, when Rindo escapes again, Raylan and Nora―still at odds―are reunited and follow the elusive fugitive’s trail across Arizona to El Centro, California, and into Mexico, where they have no jurisdiction or authority. How are they going to bring Rindo, a Mexican citizen, across the border without anyone knowing?

• While I was away on vacation, I received word from publisher Eric Campbell that the fourth edition of Down & Out: The Magazine is now ready for purchase. Featured among the contents of this issue: a new Inspector Kubu short story from the writing team of Michael Stanley; a vintage yarn by Frederick C. Davis; new fiction by Arthur Klepchukov, Lissa Marie Redmond, and Brian Silverman; and my latest “Placed in Evidence” column, which surveys the extensive field of Jack the Ripper novels—just in time for the 130th anniversary of that murderous fiend’s rampage through London.

• By the way, I just noticed that Kevin R. Tipple has reviewed the first two issues of Down & Out: The Magazine in his blog, Kevin’s Corner. Look here for his Issue 1 assessment, and here to see what he said about Issue 2. I am pleased to learn that he’s enjoying my “Placed in Evidence” contributions.

• This week’s release, by William Morrow, of Scarface and the Untouchable: Al Capone, Eliot Ness, and the Battle for Chicago has brought with it a spate of associated Web postings by co-authors Max Allan Collins and A. Brad Schwartz. In CrimeReads, for instance, the pair look back at Capone’s fondness for self-publicity, while on the Strand Magazine’s Web site they compile “10 Surprising Facts About Al Capone and Eliot Ness.” The authors fielded questions today from Reddit users. And in a piece for History News Network they try to make sense of Donald Trump’s bizarre effort to compare Capone with his indicted former campaign manager, Paul Manafort.

• Who will play Perry Mason now? Deadline Hollywood reports that Robert Downey Jr., who’d long hoped to portray Erle Stanley Gardner’s highly successful criminal defense attorney on screen, doesn’t have time enough in his schedule to star in an HBO-TV series that “reimagines” the protagonist. Deadline Hollywood adds, though, that “Robert and Susan Downey, who developed the project, remain executive producers along with Joe Horaceck. Team Downey originally had a Perry Mason feature reboot set up at Warner Bros. six years ago with Downey Jr. attached to star.” Also stepping aside from this project is Nic Pizzolatto, who had been on board to write the Mason series, but is now devoting himself to Season 3 of HBO’s True Detective.

• Nancie Clare’s most recent guest on her Speaking of Mysteries podcast is the frequently funny Chicago novelist Lori Rader-Day, who has much to say about her new novel, Under a Dark Sky.

• Happy 16th birthday to the Literary Saloon blog.

• Canada’s Globe and Mail carries a good profile of Linwood Barclay, emphasizing his interest in scripting films and TV shows.

• I missed this news during my holiday travels. Fortunately, B.V. Lawson picked it up in her blog, In Reference to Murder:

Sisters in Crime Australia announced the winners of this year’s Davitt Awards at the annual awards dinner this past weekend. Best Adult Crime Novel was won by And Fire Came Down by Emma Viskic; the Readers’ Choice winner was Force of Nature by Jane Harper; Best Debut, The Dark Lake by Sarah Bailey; Best Non-fiction Book, Whiteley on Trial by Gabriella Coslovich; Best Young Adult, Ballad for a Mad Girl by Vikki Wakefield; and Best Children’s Novel, The Turnkey by Allison Rushby. The awards are named after Ellen Davitt, author of Australia’s first mystery novel, Force and Fraud (1865), and as of 2018, are sponsored by Swinburne University of Technology.

• Meanwhile, Mystery Fanfare has posted the list of finalists for the 2018 Silver Fanchion Awards, to be dispensed during the Killer Nashville conference in Tennessee (August 23-26). The categories of contenders include Best Mystery, Best Thriller, and Best Suspense.

• The Detroit Free Press bids a fond farewell to Aunt Agatha’s. After 26 years in business, that popular Ann Arbor, Michigan, bookshop will close its doors for the last time on August 31.

• In mid-July, editor and scholar Steven Powell wrote in The Rap Sheet about his latest book, The Big Somewhere: Essays on James Ellroy’s Noir World (Bloomsbury Academic). More recently, he excerpted the opening chapter from that work in his blog, The Venetian Vase. As he explains, it “examine[s] the influence of Raymond Chandler’s writing on Ellroy’s work.”

• Speaking of Chandler—and following on from my July 26 piece for CrimeReads about how other authors have “revived and reinterpreted” his series private eye, Philip Marlowe—note that Open Letters Review features a thoughtful critique of what it calls “one of the summer’s least likely and most fascinating volumes”: The Annotated Big Sleep, edited by Owen Hill, Pamela Jackson, and Anthony Dean Rizzuto (Vintage Crime). Kevin Burton Smith supplies his own generally favorable comments about that notes-heavy version of the first Marlowe novel in The Thrilling Detective Web Site, together with some unexpectedly laudatory remarks about Only to Sleep, Lawrence Osborne’s new tale imagining Marlowe as an older gent investigating an insurance scam in 1980s Mexico. Smith’s bottom line: “what works best in this book is all the ways it’s not Chandler, but merely Chandleresque.” I couldn’t agree more.

• A books and culture site I’d never heard of before, called Signature, has posted a worthwhile rundown of what it claims are the “100 Best Thrillers of All Time.”

• Not to be outdone as a cultural arbiter, National Public Radio has compiled a list of its “100 Favorite Horror Stories.”

• Oh, and cable-TV provider AMC has slated November as the broadcast month for its mini-series adaptation (co-produced with the BBC) of John le Carré’s Little Drummer Girl.

• Finally, the Columbophile recently asked its readers to choose their favorite episodes of Peter Falk’s 1971-1978 NBC Mystery Movie series, Columbo. Not surprisingly, the top 10 list resulting from that poll includes 1974’s “Exercise in Fatality” (guest starring Robert Conrad) and “Negative Reaction” (with Dick Van Dyke), along with 1973’s “A Stitch in Crime” (featuring Leonard Nimoy) and “Any Old Port in a Storm” (also from 1973, with Donald Pleasance as the murderer). It’s a shock, however, to not see on this roster any eps guest starring multiple offenders Robert Culp (who appeared in three installments) or Patrick McGoohan (who featured in four).

Worthy of Appraisal

• Mystery Fanfare brings the unhappy news that Aunt Agatha’s Mystery Bookshop in Ann Arbor, Michigan—which won the 2014 Raven Award from the Mystery Writers of America for “outstanding achievement in the mystery field outside the realm of creative writing”—will shut its doors for good this coming August, after 26 years in business. Owners Robin and Jamie Agnew say they’ve scheduled a closing event for Sunday, August 26, with guest author William Kent Krueger, “and we hope you’ll join us for a final gather round the communal mysterious hearth.”

• If you were too busy yesterday with chocolate bunnies and secreted Easter eggs to have noticed that the Thrilling Detective Web Site celebrated its 20th anniversary, there’s plenty of time now to check out editor Kevin Burton Smith’s commemorative additions to the site.

• The latest “Getting Away with Murder,” Mike Ripley’s monthly column for Shots, contains notes about Philip Kerr’s recent and untimely demise, Stella Duffy’s success in completing a previously unfinished last novel by Ngaio Marsh, and new fiction releases from the likes of Lindsey Davis, Peter Morfoot, and Andrew Taylor.

• Speaking of Philip Kerr, CrimeReads has posted a rather excellent piece by associate editor Molly Odintz remarking on the literary impact and lasting value of Kerr’s Bernie Gunther series.

• I see the third issue of Down & Out: The Magazine is now available in print and e-book versions. Its contents include new short fiction by Barry Lancet, Art Taylor, Patricia Abbott, and Peter Sellers; “a discussion and a story by one of the hard-boiled school’s originators, Raoul Whitfield”; and the latest edition of my “Placed in Evidence” column, focused on the private-eye novels of Stanley Ellin.

• Congratulations to Spanish writer José Ignacio Escribano on the ninth birthday of his blog, A Crime Is Afoot.

• The Web site Inside Hook was not familiar to me until this afternoon. Yet it contains an intriguing interview with Jim Heimann about Los Angeles’ “seedy underbelly.” L.A. native Heimann, of course, is the author of Dark City: The Real Los Angeles Noir (Taschen America), a volume filled with photographs of places that have “provided inspiration for journalists, pulp fiction scribes, and filmland script writers in their creation of the noir genre.” (Hat tip to Elizabeth Foxwell’s blog, The Bunburyist.)

• And while this isn’t about crime fiction, it’s worth mentioning nonetheless. Today marks 50 years since the big-screen debut of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the landmark science-fiction adventure written by motion-picture director Stanley Kubrick and noted SF author Arthur C. Clarke (whose 1951 short story “The Sentinel” helped inspire the movie). 2001 premiered on April 2, 1968, at the Uptown Theater in Washington, D.C., and then opened to wider U.S. distribution the next day. One of the most beautiful and memorable aspects of that film was its musical score, employing a variety of classical works, among them Richard Strauss’ “Also sprach Zarathustra,” which served as the main title theme. (Click here to relive the drama of that opening number.) What people forget, especially half a century on, is that Kubrick had commissioned Hollywood composer Alex North to create an original soundtrack for his film. But as Wikipedia notes, Kubrick decided during his post-production work to toss that score “in favor of the now-familiar classical pieces he had earlier chosen as ‘guide pieces’ for the soundtrack.” Wikipedia adds that “North did not know of the abandonment of the score until after he saw the film’s premiere screening.” One can’t help wondering whether 2001: A Space Odyssey might be remembered differently had Kubrick stuck with North’s musical score, the beginning of which—including an alternative main title theme—can be heard here. Additional selections from North’s 2001 score can be sampled here. UPDATE: You can read more about this movie’s 50th anniversary by clicking here.

Seattle Losing a Major Attraction

Sadly, it appears that Seattle Mystery Bookshop, which has been a must-visit fixture in my hometown’s historic Pioneer Square district for the last 27 years, will be closing at the end of its business day on Saturday, September 30. Owner J.B. Dickey, who purchased the store from founder Bill Farley near the end of Bill Clinton’s presidency, blames a variety of factors—including giant book outlets that discounted their wares, the sale of cheaper e-books, the demise of first-edition-collector culture, and the Great Recession’s hurtful impact on Seattle’s downtown—for this sad turn. In a short piece posted on the shop’s Web site this morning, Dickey writes:

I’ve worked here almost since the day it was open for business. At first, I was here just one day a week, so that Bill could have a day off—which he used to do bookkeeping at home. I remember [the Farleys’] long dining room table, which was covered with pile after pile of paperwork. I don’t know where they ate dinner. Slowly, this place absorbed my life until my brain looked like Bill’s dining room table. In ’98, when he felt like stepping back from ownership, Bill offered to sell it to me but, happily, he kept working with us all. It has been a great honor to own the Seattle Mystery Bookshop since 1999. Sadly, that is now going to come to an end. …

At one time, when this shop was young, there were at least three dozen independent mystery bookshops around the globe. NYC had four. DC had three. Now there are but a handful. It isn’t just us. I am dead certain that none of those that closed wanted to, but, in the end, there was no choice.

We’re all heartbroken to close the shop. I personally feel as if I have failed Bill. But we all fought hard to keep it going for years, but the sharp bottom line is people have not been buying enough books from us to keep it working for a long time. Time to say goodbye.

I want to thank all of those loyal customers who have been regulars over the years. It’s been a gas.

What happens next? It’s a mystery.

It’s difficult to imagine my going to Pioneer Square without stopping by the Seattle Mystery Bookshop on Cherry Street. I can’t tell you how many of the volumes decorating the walls of my home and office were purchased at that small store, but there would be significant holes on my shelves had it not been for Bill Farley, J.B. Dickey, and their wonderful, knowledgeable crew. It was also at the Mystery Bookshop that I had the great pleasure just last year of meeting and talking with one of my all-time-favorite authors, Philip Kerr.

I always used to feel proud that Seattle could support a crime- and mystery-fiction retailer, when other major U.S. cities could not. I will soon lose those bragging rights. Don’t be surprised if you see me paying a call or two on the Seattle Mystery Bookshop before the end of this month. There’s still room on my shelves that needs filling.

In Seattle, Use It or Lose It

There’s still no word on the future of the Seattle Mystery Bookshop, a 27-year fixture in Seattle’s downtown historic district. It was announced in early August that the store, which has been struggling financially for a while, was for sale. Since then, the stock has been reduced, and employees have ceased accepting used books in exchange for credit. Additionally, patrons were told they must redeem any outstanding credit slips and gift certificates by the end of this month—which just happens to be tomorrow, August 31.

Because folks get busy and tend to forget deadlines like that, I figured a friendly reminder in The Rap Sheet wouldn’t hurt one bit.

Of Spies, Sales, and Speculations

Today’s quick hits from around the crime-fiction world.

• The August edition of Mike Ripley’s “Getting Away with Murder” column for Shots includes brief mentions of London’s “Summer of Spies” promotion, HarperCollins UK’s decision to reissue Desmond Bagley’s adventure thrillers, an “absolutely magnificent” John le Carré book cover, Mattias Boström’s thorough study of Sherlock Holmes’ rise “from fictional creation to media megastar,” and new novels by Will Dean, Brooke Magnanti, Karen Ellis, and others.

• Worrisome news from In Reference to Murder:

[T]he Seattle Mystery Bookshop is up for sale. Founded by Bill Farley 27 years ago, the shop has hosted a veritable who's who of crime-fiction authors through the years for talks and signings. The store sells both new and used books within the genre, from noir to cozy, espionage, classics, [and] historical, and also specializes in hard-to-find, collectible, and signed first editions and Northwest mysteries.

Current owner J.B. Dickey hastened to add that the store isn't closing … yet. But they already had to resort to a GoFundMe drive which brought in enough funds to pay off overdue bills and sock away enough to last through this past winter. As Dickey noted, “It bought us a year—but barely, and that has taken its toll. While we could do another such fundraiser, that’s not a viable way to continue in business.”

My fingers are crossed that Seattle Mystery Bookshop will find a buyer able to steady that store’s financial outlook for the long term.

• If you remember CBS-TV’s Q.E.D., you may be among the few people who do. As explained by Wikipedia, it was “a 1982 adventure television series set in Edwardian England, starring Sam Waterston as Professor Quentin Everett Deverill. The Professor was a scientific detective in the mold of Sherlock Holmes, and the series had a smattering of what would later be called steampunk [devices]. In the show, the lead character was known primarily by his initials, Q.E.D; the reference here is that Q.E.D. usually stands for quod erat demonstrandum, a statement signaling the end of a proof.” I barely recall this show, and I’m not sure I ever watched it when it was originally broadcast. But suddenly, I have a second chance. Somebody signing himself “Howard Carson” has posted all six of the hour-long Q.E.D. episodes on YouTube. Enjoy them while you can!

• Oops! Britain’s Daily Mirror newspaper is enduring a public thrashing over its allegedly “fabricated story” (cited recently in The Rap Sheet) about the next, 25th James Bond motion picture being set in Croatia and based on U.S. author Raymond Benson’s 2001 Bond continuation novel, Never Dream of Dying. “What has yet to be uncovered in this tale,” writes the Bond blog MI6, “is the original source of the false rumour. Most likely, someone e-mailed the Mirror’s showbiz tip line with the claims of having inside information.”

• In a piece for The Paris Review, Megan Abbott remarks on In a Lonely Place, Dorothy B. Hughes’ 1947 genre-bending noir novel, which is set to be reissued by publisher NYRB Classics on August 15.

• Meanwhile, New York journalist-turned-fictionist Julia Dahl (Conviction) writes in the Columbia Journalism Review about her years as a freelancer for the tabloid New York Post—an experience that, as she has written elsewhere, “changed my life in more ways than I could have ever imagined.” Click here to read her recollections in CJR.

• For the list fanatics among us: Kirkus Reviews’ rundown of the “10 Most Overlooked Books of This Summer” includes Riley Sager’s Final Girls and Bill Loehfelm’s The Devil’s Muse. Among the Chicago Review of Books’ “12 Books You Should Definitely Read This August” are Ryan Gattis’ Safe, Christopher Swann’s Shadow of the Lions, and Augustus Rose’s The Readymade Thief. For the Strand Magazine blog, British Columbia author Sam Wiebe names his “Top 10 Vancouver Crime Novels.” And U.S. novelist Warren Adler delivers to Crime Fiction Lover a selection of his “Top 5 British [TV] Crime Shows.”

• Finally, congratulations are due The Spy Command and its managing editor, Bill Koenig, for reaching their first million pageviews. Koenig’s spy fiction-oriented blog debuted in 2008 as The HMSS Weblog, but was renamed in 2015, following the failure of its associated Web site, Her Majesty’s Secret Servant.

Technology to the Rescue of Indie Bookshops?

We have recently become quite unaccustomed to hearing hopeful news about small independent bookstores, so it’s interesting to read this piece in the Seattle Review of Books blog that focuses on Oren Teicher, the chief executive officer of the American Booksellers Association (ABA). It seems he has developed a contrary opinion to the received wisdom that such shops are “always just about to be wiped off the face of the country because of a new challenge.

First, he says, it was that the B. Dalton and Waldenbooks outlets in every mall would kill local stores. Then, the big boxes like Barnes & Nobles and Borders. After that, the deep discounters like Crown Books. And onward to mass merchandisers like Walmart and membership stores like Costco. And, finally, along came Amazon, he says, followed by Amazon selling e-books.

But after years of shrinking sales and locations, indie stores have seen a slightly accelerating tick upwards since 2009 in new businesses, more stores, a bigger slice of the retailing pie, and a growth in overall revenue. Teicher cites several reasons, but one of them is the same wave of technology that, the story was supposed to go, would drown non-chain stores once and for all.

Freelancer Glenn Fleishman’s article could have benefited from more assiduous copy editing, but it’s still worth reading.

Bullet Points: Serene Saturday Edition

• It appears there will be no 2016 Tony Hillerman Prize competition, while a new partnership is being established to organize that annual contest. The Hillerman Prize, you will recall, promotes debut mysteries based in the American Southwest. A press release carried in the Crimespree Magazine blog explains that “Minotaur Books/A Thomas Dunne Book and Wordharvest are delighted to announce that we have joined forces with Western Writers of America, who will host the Tony Hillerman Prize going forward. With this change come a new submission deadline, an option for electronic manuscript submission, and a new venue for the announcement of the winner at the annual Western Writers of America convention. In order to prepare for these changes, we have made the decision to suspend the competition for 2016. The deadline for the 2017 competition will be January 2, 2017. You can view the guidelines and online submission form online at http://us.macmillan.com/minotaurbooks/tonyhillermanprize.” A list of previous prize winners is available here.

• Mike Ripley’s latest “Getting Away with Murder” column in Shots features remarks pertaining to the 50th anniversary of the death of Margery Allingham, the upcoming Bloody Scotland Crime Writing Festival (September 9-11), Walter Satterthwait’s New York Nocturne, a theatrical staging of John Harvey’s Darkness, Darkness, and the Sicily-set novel Ripley declares is “the feel-good-Euro-read of the summer.” Read all about these matters and more here.

• By the way, I’m not sure that I mentioned Ripley’s June 2016 column on this page. You should look that one up here.

• The Los Angeles Times carries this interesting look at the new eight-part HBO-TV miniseries, The Night Of, which is set to premiere tomorrow evening. “Created by acclaimed writers Steven Zaillian and Richard Price, and starring John Turturro and Riz Ahmed, the New York-set show examines what happens when the 23-year-old son of a Pakistani-immigrant cab driver is tossed into the criminal justice system for a murder he may or may not have committed,” writes the Times’ Steven Zeitchik. Wikipedia will be rolling out individual episode synopses as the series progresses.

• Based on a UK series titled Criminal Justice, The Night Of was “the passion project of the late James Gandolfini,” according to this 2014 piece from Deadline Hollywood. Following Gandolfini’s sudden death in 2014, Robert De Niro was brought in to fill his role in the miniseries, playing “ambulance-chasing New York City attorney” Jack Stone. But De Niro later had to withdraw from the project for “scheduling reasons.” John Turturro (who is starting to look a lot like Al Pacino as he ages, don’t you think?) was ultimately brought in to star. I look forward to seeing what he can do here.

• What a great, humorous title for a work of crime fiction! On the left you’ll see the cover from a 1950s edition of Colin Calhoun Detective, a digest-size pulp periodical published in Australia. The cover story, “The Stripper Died Dressed,” is credited to one Conrad Paul. Also in that issue were the stories “Redheads in Jeopardy” and “The Callgirl and the Cop,” both by Benn Raymond. (Hat tip to The Seattle Mystery Bookshop Hardboiled blog.)

• The shortlist of nominees for this year’s first-ever HWA (Historical Writers’ Association) Goldsboro Debut Crown award, recognizing excellence in historical fiction, includes a work of crime fiction, so it merits mention here. The half-dozen contenders are: Death and Mr. Pickwick, by Stephen Jarvis (Jonathan Cape); Eden Gardens, by Louise Brown (Headline); The Hoarse Oaths of Fife, by Chris Moore (Uniform Press); Mrs. Engels, by Gavin McCrea (Scribe); Summertime, by Vanessa Lafaye (Orion); and Wolf Winter, by Cecilia Ekbäck (Hodder), described as “a powerful, beautifully written gothic murder mystery in a remote area of 18th-century Lapland.” The winner is expected to be declared during Britain’s Harrogate History Festival (October 21-23).

• Sad news. Omaha, Nebraska’s Mystery Bookstore, founded back in 1995, will shut its doors at the end of September. Owner Kate Birkel wrote in a Facebook post: “As many of you know, I am located next to the Bohemian Café, an Omaha landmark for many decades. (They also happen to be my landlords—the greatest landlords anyone could ever hope to have.) Like many of Omaha’s traditional, family-owned restaurants, the Bohemian recently decided to close. The current generation running the Café is more than ready to retire and none of their kids wants to buy them out. (The common explanation is: “Hell, no! I’m not working my butt off 60 to 80 hours a week! I want a life!”) Much of my walk-in traffic comes from the Bohemian. Sales at the bookstore have been nose diving for the past several years, and I just see no way forward without that walk-in traffic from the Café. Between now and 30 September, I will be selling books, embroidery supplies, and beads on eBay; my seller name is mysteries-to-go. Please check in occasionally. You’d be surprised what I have laying around after nearly 25 years.” Minnesota writer William Kent Krueger mentions in his blog that he will be signing copies of his new Cork O’Connor mystery, Manitou Canyon (Atria), at Birkel’s shop on September 17—“the store’s last official author event.” He adds, “I’ve decided to use the occasion to throw Kate a ‘Goodbye and Thank You’ celebration.”

• Anyone who has ever tried to compose a crime-fiction blog knows just how difficult it can be to remain active and relevant in the game. So author James Reasoner deserves hearty applause for 12 years of writing Rough Edges. Thank you, Jim.

• PBS-TV host Tavis Smiley talks with Walter Mosley about his excellent new, 13th Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins novel, Charcoal Joe.

• Meanwhile, Eric Beetner revisits Mosley’s first Rawlins tale, 1990’s Devil in a Blue Dress, in a nice piece for Criminal Intent.

• Pennsylvania educator and writer Brian R. Sheridan has started a petition on Change.org, asking that Warner Archives release the 1971-72 NBC-TV series Banyon in DVD format. “The show was created by Ed Adamson,” Sheridan explains, “and became a Quinn Martin production starring the outstanding actor Robert Forster as a 1930s private eye, Miles Banyon. The show lasted only 16 episodes [including a 1971 pilot film] but is highly regarded by detective-show fans. The outstanding pilot used to turn up on TV stations but, like the series, seems to have faded into obscurity. We are asking the show to be a MOD-DVD release.” I don’t know whether a petition such as this can have much impact on bottom-line-focused Warner execs, but I do remember Banyon fondly, and I’d love to watch that series again. So I signed. You can do so here. What’s the harm?

• Given the shootings earlier this week in Baton Rouge, St. Paul, and Dallas, I’m not sure The Guardian’s rundown of the “Top 10 Novels About Deranged Killers” will find widespread readership in the States, but the piece is out there for your delectation.

• It’s nice to see that readers are still discovering Arthur Lyons’ 11 novels about Los Angeles private investigator Jacob Asch, even eight years after the author passed away.

• This last April 18 brought the 110th anniversary of San Francisco’s devastating 1906 earthquake and fire, a disaster about which I have written on more than one occasion. What’s really amazing about the downtown destruction is that so much film footage of its aftermath exists. Silent footage, yes, but dramatic nonetheless. Here’s one “haunting” example.

• A few interviews worth noticing: John Farrow, aka Trevor Ferguson, answers questions from Criminal Element about his new Émile Cinq-Mars novel, Seven Days Dead; Benjamin Whitmer (Pike, Cry Father) survives interrogation by S.W. Lauden; Dana King (Dangerous Lesson, The Man in the Window) fields queries lobbed his way by New Mystery Reader Magazine; Speaking of Mysteries’ Nancie Clare talks with Mark Billingham (Die of Shame) and Martin Walker (Fatal Pursuit); and crime analyst-turned-author Spencer Kope chats with Criminal Element about Collecting the Dead.

• Thanks to a recommendation from John and Muriel Higgins, who operate The Victor Canning Pages (devoted to the life and work of that prolific 20th-century writer), I have added a link from The Rap Sheet’s Author Web Sites/Blogs page to this tribute site focused on British journalist-novelist Desmond Bagley (1923-1983), the author of such thrillers as 1967’s Landslide and 1971’s The Freedom Trap (later filmed as The Mackintosh Man). Check it out.

• Finally, Elizabeth Foxwell informs us of an “effort by Edgar winner LeRoy Lad Panek (Introduction to the Detective Story) and Mary Bendel-Simso (McDaniel College, MD) to compile”—for the Westminster Detective Library—“an online repository of short detective works published in the United States prior to 1891 … The pieces include 87 stories by 48 female authors, and Panek states, ‘There are no doubt many more as the majority of the stories we have catalogued have no author listed in the original.’” Foxwell’s post provides some direct links to individual stories, but you can access the Detective Library’s new Web interface here. What a splendid resource!