Down & Out Is Dead & Gone

If you click over to the Web site of publisher Down & Out Books, you’ll find a short notice offering nothing but bad news:

For 15 remarkable years, Down & Out Books proudly published nearly 1,000 titles, collaborated with over 500 talented authors, and earned more than 50 prestigious awards. Today, however, we must announce the closure of our operations.

We extend our deepest gratitude to the gifted authors who entrusted us with their stories and to our loyal readers who brought those stories to life through their passion and support. Your unwavering dedication has been the heart of our journey, and we are profoundly grateful for every moment.

Founded in 2011, Down & Out was based in Tampa, Florida, and led by editor-publisher Eric Campbell. In a long-ago interview with the blog Mystery Playground, Campbell explained that he’d been an early investor in Ben LeRoy’s Tyrus Books, but “when the company was sold [in November 2016 to Simon & Schuster—which killed the Tyrus imprint just six month later], I still had a burning desire to be involved in the publishing business. Rather than join another established publisher, I decided I wanted to see if I could do something on my own.”

Down & Out went on to release a plethora of crime, mystery, and thriller works from writers as varied as Patricia Abbott, Richard Barre, Eric Beetner, Sarah M. Chen, Tony Black, Michael Bracken, Mark Coggins, Jim Fusilli, David Housewright, Marietta Miles, Jerry Kennealy, and Josh Pachter. (At least for now, this page features all of the Down & Out authors and editors.) It issued the 35-“episode” e-book series of novellas titled A Grifter’s Song, created and edited by Frank Zafiro, and published half a dozen issues of Down & Out: The Magazine (August 2017-December 2020), an excellent quarterly edited by Rick Ollerman and with regular contributions from yours truly.

The house was reportedly shuttered due to serious sales declines, which made it financially impossible to stay in business.

Author Reed Farrel Coleman (who had a short story in the debut issue of Down & Out: The Magazine) posted this tribute on Facebook:

I read the news today, oh boy. Down & Out Books is closing shop and that’s bad for all of us with writing careers. I’ve known Eric Campbell, the head honcho at D&O, for decades. At the very beginning of D&O, I contributed a short story to what I believe was their first anthology and my work has appeared in other anthologies published by them.

I hope this isn’t too much of a financial burden for Eric. I’ve always known him to be a good guy. The closure of even a small publishing house has negative ripple effects, some obvious, others not. It leaves authors whose books were scheduled for future release by D&O scrambling to find new publishers in a field of shrinking options. It hurts authors already published by D&O. Once the stock from current print runs sell through, those authors will have no way to furnish books to stores, conventions, or other events. The less obvious damage is how it effects authors trying to keep their heads above water.

During a long period of my career, small houses like Bleak House, Tyrus, and Busted Flush kept my new books available and my name out there. I doubt I would have landed on my feet and gotten the Robert B. Parker Jesse Stone gig and the chance to write Gus Murphy books if those small houses hadn’t enabled me to keep my career alive.

We offer our best wishes to Eric Campbell and all of the authors affected by this sad turn of events.

UPDATE: As part of Down & Out’s shutdown, the company said it was withdrawing its numerous titles from distribution channels, ending further payments, and allowing publishing rights to revert to the authors and editors responsible for its books—most of which fell into the crime-fiction category. Now In Reference to Murder brings word that “Jay Hartman, with Misti Media and its various imprints, has offered to republish the orphaned titles as the schedule allows.”

READ MORE: “Down and All the Way Out,” by Dana King (One Bite at a Time); “Down & Out Books Closes Its Doors After 15 Years of Championing Crime Fiction” (The Romance Studio).

Bullet Points: First of Fall Edition

• Shortly after I posted on this page about the 50th anniversary of the debut of Columbo as part of the NBC Mystery Movie “wheel series,” I was contacted by Jeffrey Marks, the publisher at Crippen & Landru, who told me his company has in the works a posthumous collection of short stories by the two creators of that landmark TV crime drama, William Link and Richard Levinson. (Link passed away in 2020, Levinson in 1987). “Shooting Script and Other Mysteries is the title,” states Marks, “and it will be published this fall. I’m guessing November at this time.” Levinson and Link, as you may already know, became friends when they attended the same junior high school in Philadelphia, and they went on to be writing partners for 43 years. In addition to creating TV series and scripting films, they penned short pieces of fiction. Back in 2010, Crippen & Landru released Link’s The Columbo Collection, which featured a dozen of his new yarns starring Los Angeles’ best-known rumpled police detective. During a contemporaneous interview, Link told me he had another 16 that hadn’t made the cut; so “if it’s successful, I’ve already got enough for a follow-up book.” None of those 16 will be found in Shooting Script, according to Marks, though he adds, “I do plan on asking the [Link] estate about these stories after we complete this book. The Columbo Collection was one of our most popular collections.”

• Over the last month, Max Allan Collins has been writing, for the Web site of independent publisher NeoText, a lavishly illustrated column called “A Life in Crime.” Together, those essays will constitute what he calls “a kind of literary memoir about my various book series.” The first entry looked back at Collins’ youthful introduction to mystery and crime fiction; the second at his Nolan books; the third at his durable Quarry series; the fourth at the history and development of his Nathan Heller saga; and number five—posted earlier this week—tackles what he says is “the story of how Ms. Tree came to be, and includes a fantastic array of Terry Beatty’s cover art.” There are still two more columns to come, the lot of them intended to help promote the official release, early next month, of Fancy Anders Goes to War: Who Killed Rosie the Riveter?, Collins’ first—of three—World War II-backdropped mystery novellas for NeoText (available in both e-book and print form), with artwork by Fay Dalton.

• Publishing imprint HarperFiction has named the victors in its Killing It Competition for Undiscovered Writers, which was launched back in January as a way “to find unpublished writers from Black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds.” Entrants were asked to submit the first 10,000 words of a crime, thriller, or suspense novel, plus a synopsis of their book running no more than 500 words in length. The judges ultimately chose three winners: information technology consultant Rama Varma, for a work-in-progress titled The Banana Leaf Murder; Stacey Thomas, a civil servant and staff reviewer at Bad Form Review, for The Revels; and BBC radio and TV producer Shabnam Grewal, for Secrets and Shame. “Each winner,” explains the blog Shotsmag Confidential, “will receive a comprehensive editorial report from a HarperFiction editor covering pace, characterisation, pitch and more, as well as three mentoring sessions.”

• Have you ever wanted to live in the Malloch Building, the Streamline Moderne-style apartment structure in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood made famous by the 1947 Humphrey Bogart/Lauren Bacall picture Dark Passage? Your chance may finally have arrived! (Hat tip to Up and Down These Mean Streets.)

• Not only does Hillary Clinton, former U.S. secretary of state and presidential candidate, have a new novel due out next month (State of Terror, co-authored with Louise Penny), but she and her daughter, Chelsea, have announced that one of their enterprises, Global Light Productions, “has optioned film and TV rights to Jacqueline Winspear’s Maisie Dobbs series.” Deadline reports that Hillary Clinton, “who has made no secret of her love of the mystery series throughout the years, featuring them on many of her reading lists,” recently broke this news to attendees at England’s Royal Television Society Cambridge Convention. “‘We’re also doing scripted projects so, for example, one of our favorite books that Chelsea and I have shared over the years is a book about a character called Maisie Dobbs, which is a series about a World War I field nurse who turns into a detective and we’ve just optioned it,’ Hillary Clinton said, adding how much she and Chelsea love the character and her journey during a time of ‘great social upheaval.’” Not surprisingly, there’s no word yet on when any Maisie Dobbs movie might actually reach theaters worldwide.

• Hoping that the COVID-19 pandemic will be at least more manageable a year from now, London’s Capital Crime Writing Festival has already begun selling tickets for its September 29-October 1, 2022, gathering. Plans are to hold next year’s festival in “a new, tented, venue in a central London park.” Organizers promise “a wide-ranging line-up of events focused on accessible, mainstream fiction loved by readers around the world, which entertain crime and thriller fans, readers and authors alike in the UK’s capital.” Tickets can be purchased here. Press materials say the celebrity guest lineup and further details will “be announced later this year.”

• Sri Lankan author Amanda Jayatissa has amassed an enviable amount of media attention for her brand-new debut novel, My Sweet Girl, described by one reviewer as a “darkly hilarious” thriller. Roughly put, the story concerns a young, borderline-alcoholic graphic designer, Paloma Evans, who insists she found her roommate, Arun, dead in their San Francisco apartment … yet there’s no corpse and no evidence that this roommate ever existed. Complicating the situation is that Arun had recently discovered a troubling secret from Paloma’s childhood as an orphan back in Sri Lanka, and was blackmailing her to stay quiet about it. Part of what’s brought such attention to this author’s work may be that Jayatissa has made herself widely available for interviews (at least via Zoom). Among the most entertaining such exchanges may come from the podcast Speaking of Mysteries, which recently found host Nancie Clare talking with the author about the gothic elements of her story, her personal experiences with orphanages, “white savior syndrome,” the difficulty she finds in writing “sensitive” scenes, her cookie business, and much more. Click here to listen in on their conversation.

(Above) Novelist Amanda Jayatissa

• Oh, and check out this list Jayatissa assembled, for CrimeReads, of six suspense thrillers set in South and East Asia. “Thrillers coming from South-East Asia are usually paced very differently,” she explains. “Rather than immediately diving into solving the crime, these thrillers take their time—giving the reader a slightly claustrophobic look at the killers themselves, their motivations, and the situations that have lead them there. More often than not, the reader is fully aware of who the killer is from the very beginning, but must instead piece together the rationalization for their crimes. The stakes are still high, but the suspense is often a slow burn, with a very high payoff.”

• From the “Fun Facts to Know and Tell” File: “It might be surprising for a John D MacDonald fan to learn,” writes Steve Scott in The Trap of Gold blog, “that Travis McGee’s 52-foot houseboat, The Busted Flush—which plays such a prominent role in so many of the 21 novels starring the author’s series character—has only been depicted by cover artists a handful of times. It was certainly surprising for me as I was researching this piece: I could have sworn I’d seen it more often. By my count I can find only four illustrations of the Flush on any of the various editions published in the United States prior to 1988, and I don’t think there have been any after that. All of the illustrations were inked by the great Robert McGinnis.”

• A curious story of literary rivalry, from The Guardian:

After The Spy Who Came in from the Cold was published in 1963 it went on to become John le Carré’s most widely acclaimed book, winning several awards, being adapted for a Richard Burton-led feature film and becoming one of the most highly regarded novels of the cold war era.

A year earlier another spy book had been published in Britain: the English translation of a work by Willem Frederik Hermans, one of the greatest Dutch authors of the 20th century. The book, The Darkroom of Damocles, was an immediate success when it was published in the Netherlands, winning acclaim and also being adapted for film.

But while Le Carré admitted to being a fan of Hermans, and in particular of The Darkroom of Damocles, the feeling was far from mutual. According to an interview that has come to light on the eve of the British publication of another of the Dutch author’s books, Hermans regarded Le Carré as an inferior novelist and someone who had plagiarised his work.

• Was Agatha Christie’s biggest-selling novel, 1939’s And Then There Were None, also inspired by a previous and now largely forgotten tale? Perhaps, says crime-fiction historian Curtis Evans, who penned the introduction to a forthcoming Dean Street Press re-release of 1930’s The Invisible Host, by Gwen Bristow and Bruce Manning, husband-and-wife newspaper journalists in New Orleans. The Guardian’s Alison Flood notes that The Invisible Host “begins with eight guests invited to a penthouse by telegram, where they are then told over the radio that they will all soon be dead. ‘Do not doubt me, my friends; you shall all be dead before morning.’” Although Evans has conceded before that The Invisible Guest “lack[s] Christie's plausibility and ingenuity,” he tells Flood that the comparisons between these two venerable yarns are “not just a matter of similar elements being in play: the entire basic plot idea is the same …” Anna Hervé, the editorial director for literary estates at Christie’s publishing house, HarperCollins, remains unconvinced. “‘It’s always possible she heard something in passing,’ said Hervé. ‘There was a real fashion in the 1930s for locked-room mysteries, and The Invisible Host is a good example of one of those, but there is no evidence that Christie was aware of it. … The Invisible Host does have similarities,’ said Hervé, ‘but I don’t think anyone’s been able to find a connection. And I also think Christie being the person she was, if there had been a link she would have acknowledged it.” Judge the parallels for yourself; The Invisible Host goes on sale on both sides of the Atlantic on October 4.

• Another classic work given new life: A Pin to See the Peepshow, by F. (Fryniwyd) Tennyson Jesse (1888-1958), originally published in 1934, but scheduled to reach stores again in mid-October, courtesy of the British Library. As Elizabeth Foxwell explains in her blog, The Bunburyist, “The novel is based on the Thompson-Bywaters murder case of 1922-23. Jesse—the great-niece of Alfred, Lord Tennyson and a war correspondent, playwright, screenwriter, and novelist—was known for involvement in the series on notable British trials as well as her works with female detective Solange Fontaine.” Amazon’s plot synopsis for Peepshow reads: “Julia Almond believes she is special and dreams of a more exciting and glamorous life away from the drab suburbia of her upbringing. Her work in a fashionable boutique in the West End gives her the personal freedom that she craves, but escape from her parental home into marriage soon leads to boredom and frustration. She begins a passionate affair with a younger man, which has deadly consequences. … Julia becomes trapped by her sex and class in a criminal justice system in which she has no control. Julia finds herself the victim of society’s expectations of lower-middle-class female behavior and incriminated by her own words. F. Tennyson Jesse creates a flawed, doomed heroine in a novel of creeping unease that continues to haunt long after the last page is turned.”

• Three recent CrimeReads articles I enjoyed: Neil Nyren’s tour through the fictionalized Sicily of Inspector Salvo Montalbano, on the occasion of Penguin releasing Andrea Camilleri’s 28th and final Montalbano yarn, Riccardino; Olivia Rutigliano’s delightful essay about the delightful 2007-2009 ABC black comedy series, Pushing Daisies; and novelist Julia Dahl’s reflections on how she learned to “use the questions I had about the people in the articles I wrote in my day job as a reporter to explore—in fiction—the issues of trauma and regret and love and justice. To explore, in a word, humanity.”

• Meanwhile, Dahl submits to an interview with the Los Angeles Review of Books that includes her explanation of how her new novel, The Missing Hours, became a standalone. As she relates:

The initial idea was always drawn from reporting I’d done at CBS, mostly about the Steubenville rape case in 2012, an awful case of this teenager who’d been raped at a party. There were all these details that made me think, “What would it be like to be that girl? What would it be like to be her family?” I had a contract for another Rebekah [Roberts] book so I started thinking about how Rebekah could be connected. But as I started writing, I realized that this is not a Rebekah story, that forcing Rebekah in didn’t make sense. Happily, my editor was supportive. When I realized that maybe I could just not write a Rebekah book, just write the story that I was interested in, that was cool and freeing. As much as I love Rebekah—I will probably write another book about her someday—I was ready to write about other people. It was fun and challenging because suddenly I didn’t have an anchor character who I knew so well.”

• It seems rather close to the end of 2021 to bother naming “Best Books of the Year (So Far)” now, yet here’s The Real Book Spy’s Ryan Steck doing just that. His 20 selections are all thrillers, of course. They include Daniel Silva’s The Cellist, T.J. Newman’s Falling, Jack Carr’s The Devil’s Hand, S.A. Cosby’s Razorblade Tears, Lisa Jewell’s The Night She Disappeared, and Connor Sullivan’s Sleeping Bear.

• Here’s another similar list, this one compiled by Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine’s Down Under correspondent, Jeff Popple, and highlighting U.S., British, and Australian titles. Among his choices of 2021’s foremost crime, thriller, and debut novels so far: Jane Casey’s The Killing Kind, William McIlvanney and Ian Rankin’s The Dark Remains, Simon Rowell’s The Long Game, Sarah Bailey’s The Housemate, Jack Grimwood’s Island Reich, and Margaret Hickey’s Cutters End. If you want to order any of the Aussie releases, try the UK-based sales site Book Depository.

• I was very grateful when editor Rick Ollerman invited me, at the end of 2016, to write a regular column for Down & Out: The Magazine, a new digest-size publication being launched by book publisher Down & Out. The first perfect-bound issue, containing works of short fiction as well as non-fiction, rolled out in late summer 2017, and expectations of a steady stream of sequels were high. However, only half a dozen subsequent numbers of Down & Out: The Magazine have been mailed away to subscribers since that time, the last of those arriving in December 2020. So erratic did the publishing schedule become, that I felt it valuable at one point to reassure readers the mag hadn’t gone out of business without their being aware. Nonetheless, its future seems far from certain. Publisher Eric Campbell assured me not long ago, “We haven’t shut it down … just on a pause right now.” Still, Ollerman doesn’t leave me hopeful when he recounts the multiple health problems (a broken wrist, an “unidentified flu,” a brain hemorrhage, and cancer) that have kept him away from his editor’s responsibilities, and have left the periodical in limbo. At last check, he was dealing with “normal chronic back and neck pain,” and learning to eat again after surgery and radiation treatment. There’s been talk of bringing a new editor in to revive Down & Out: The Magazine, but Ollerman has trouble predicting the results of such a move. “The original version was so much out of my little brain,” he says, “I imagine a new person’s product would be something very different. That’s an interesting thought, anyway.” Where all of this leads might be anybody’s guess.

• How Aja Raden could choose, for The Guardian, what she says are the “Top 10 Books About Lies and Liars,” without mentioning a single book about the most destructive liar of our era, Donald Trump, is beyond me. (Hat tip to Campaign for the American Reader.)

• On Tuesday, October 5, Hallie Rubenhold, British social historian and author of the oustanding, award-winning 2019 non-fiction book The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper, will debut a 15-part podcast called Bad Women: the Ripper Retold. Available wherever you usually get your podcasts, Bad Women will tell the real story of the Ripper’s victims “and how they came to be in the path of a serial killer—completely overturning the Ripper story we’ve been told up until now.” Listen to a preview here.

• The podcast Shedunnit is back, with host Caroline Crampton looking at mystery-writing partnerships, such as that between Gordon Neil Stewart and Pamela Hansford Johnson (who, as “Nap Leonard,” produced Murder’s a Swine), and Cordelia Biddle and Steve Zettler, who concoct crossword mysteries under the pseudonym Nero Blanc.

• Author Neil Albert has been writing his Ross Macdonald Blog since late 2020, but only this month did he finally begin to tackle Macdonald’s The Moving Target, for which he created one of the 20th century’s finest fictional sleuths, Lew Archer. Remarks Albert:

Macdonald’s fifth book is a watershed event for two reasons. First, Macdonald begins to display a sense of his own voice. Second, he introduces [Los Angeles private eye] Lew Archer as a tool in developing that voice.

By 1949, the year of publication, he had four books under his belt. He has paid his dues by writing sensationalized potboilers, derivative tough-guy stories, and overambitious psychological thrillers. As [Canadian novelist and short-story author] Carol Shields said, all writers have a lot of bad material inside themselves and when they get through that, their true worth emerges. I will put it more kindly by saying that in The Moving Target, Ross Macdonald begins to find his voice.

At press time, Albert had posted five pieces about The Moving Target, a book I tackled as well in this 2019 article for CrimeReads.

• There must be something special awash in the zeitgeist, because Guy Savage chose Macdonald’s second Archer outing, The Drowning Pool, to review this week in His Futile Preoccupations …

• A promised six-part TV adaptation of Anthony Horowitz’s Magpie Murders appears to be coming along quite smartly, despite actor Timothy Spall’s decision this last spring to pull out of the production “due to a scheduling clash.” (He’s since been replaced in the role of detective Atticus Pünd by Tim McMullan.) According to Mystery Fanfare, the mini-series “wrapped production in London, Suffolk and Ireland last month.” That same blog features a trio of still photos from the project. There’s no trailer yet, nor a scheduled date when Magpie Murders might begin airing on PBS-TV’s Masterpiece and Britfox in the UK, but the release is expected sometime in 2022.

• The historical crime drama Endeavour, starring Shaun Evans and Roger Allam, isn’t likely to return to PBS-TV’s Masterpiece series in America until next year. However, its three-episode Series 8 is showing already in Great Britain. If you don’t mind spoilers, The Killing Times critiques Episode 1 here, and Episode 2 here. Chris Sullivan, of the blog Morse, Lewis and Endeavour, presents his own review of the opening entry in this latest—and last—run of Endeavour here.

• True-crime fan Alyse Burnside tries to get to the bottom of some readers’ fondness for cozy mysteries in this piece for The Atlantic.

• Talk about coincidences! In the same fortnight that Mystery and Suspense posted author Glen Robins’ thoughtful piece about the use of martial arts in thrillers, Charlie Chan specialist Lou Armagno blogged about the once-frequent use of karate chops to subdue adversaries in films and on television. The karate chop, Armagno observed, “was the extent of violence you’d see in [vintage] shows like: Peter Gunn, The Chevy Mystery Show, Dragnet, 77 Sunset Strip, T.H.E. Cat, Danger Man, The Saint and I Spy. Of course there were shootings! But usually never much blood and normally ‘He’ll be all right, it’s just a flesh wound.’ And should a mortal wound be required by gun or knife, it usually went unseen. No blood, or just a dollop or so, then a quick double-over and fall down you’re dead. But the karate chop! You might get chopped two or three times in one show and still come out OK. … ‘Uhg, what hit me?’” Ah, the good ol’ days.

Bullet Points: 2021—At Last Edition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Steele Curry offers up his own le Carré tribute.

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bullet Points: Heavy on Nostalgia Edition

• A much-deserved accolade, mentioned yesterday in Literary Hub: “John le Carré, perhaps history’s greatest spy novelist, was this morning announced as the latest recipient of the $100,000 Olof Palme Prize, an award given for ‘an outstanding achievement in any of the areas of anti-racism, human rights, international understanding, peace and common security.’ In their citation, the prize organizers praised le Carré ‘for his engaging and humanistic opinion-making in literary form regarding the freedom of the individual and the fundamental issues of mankind,’ and called his career ‘an extraordinary contribution to the necessary fight for freedom, democracy and social justice.’”

• There are plenty of interesting pieces in the latest edition of Mystery Scene magazine, among them profiles of authors William Kent Krueger and Elly Griffiths, and Kevin Burton Smith’s “2019 Gift Guide for Mystery Lovers” (still worth perusing, even with the holidays now past). However, I was most drawn to Michael Mallory’s retrospective on the 1973-1976 late-night ABC-TV anthology series Wide World of Mystery. As Mallory recalls, that succession of original “mysteries, horror stories, and science-fiction tales”—all of which began at 11:30 p.m.—was ABC’s several-nights-a-week alternative to The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. “While the show’s stories and settings ran the gamut,” Mallory writes, “other things remained constant. One was the 90-minute length—actually 70 or so minutes plus commercials. Another was the fact that they were all recorded on videotape rather than being filmed, as were then-popular prime-time movies of the week. Because of this, viewers were occasionally treated to the occupational hazard of live-on-tape shows: bloopers.” Ed Asner, Lynda Day George, Christopher Reeve, Susan Sarandon, and Tom Selleck were all cast in WWoM installments, only a handful of which are available on DVD (with one—1975’s “Alien Lover,” introducing Kate Mulgrew, to be found on YouTube). I wasn’t a big late-night TV viewer as a boy, but I do remember seeing a few of those teleflicks, notably the March 14, 1975, presentation “Nick and Nora.” An unsuccessful “backdoor pilot” for a separate ABC series, it starred Peter Gunn’s Craig Stevens and small-screen fixture Jo Ann Pflug as Dashiell Hammett’s tippling snoops, Nick and Nora Charles, who in this movie “investigated the death of a man found floating in the pool of a posh L.A. hotel,” according to Mallory.

• By the way, The Stiletto Gumshoe notes that in this new issue of Mystery Scene, “publishers Kate Stine and Brian Skupin officially announced the magazine’s switch to a quarterly starting this year. It’ll be tough to wait longer between issues, but the promise of an increased page count while keeping the subscription price untouched was welcome news.”

• Found recently among my mail, too, was the fifth edition of Down & Out: The Magazine. This was long overdue: the previous issue came out in August 2018. In his editor’s note, Rick Ollerman chalks this delay up to multiple personal mishaps—which wouldn’t have been as big a problem at a larger publication, where other employees could have filled in for the recuperating editor, but at shorthanded Down & Out, it spelled trouble. The sad part is that this tardiness probably cost the periodical subscribers, who thought they could no longer trust in its regularity and future. I can only hope that enough readers will give Down & Out: The Magazine a second chance, because it’s new issue is guaranteed to please, with fiction from the likes of Walter Satterthwait, April Kelly, and Brendan DuBois, plus a column I wrote about Erle Stanley Gardner’s Doug Selby mysteries.

• The original 1968 Ford Mustang GT driven by Steve McQueen in the Warner Bros. film Bullitt, was sold at auction recently for a whopping $3,400,000. That car is renowned for having participated in this thrilling on-screen chase scene.

• In 1985, author Ross Thomas won the Edgar Award for Best Novel with Briarpatch. Now that standalone thriller has been adapted as a USA Network series, set to premiere on February 6. Taking the lead in Thomas’ novel was Ben “Pick” Dill, a white former reporter. However, the gender and race of the protagonist in USA’s series have both been flipped, with Rosario Dawson starring. The Hollywood Reporter explains: “Briarpatch follows Allegra Dill (Dawson), an investigator returning to her border-town Texas home after her sister is murdered. What begins as a search for a killer turns into an all-consuming fight to bring her corrupt city to its knees. The series is described as a blend of crime and pulp fiction.” If you’re interested, you can watch a short trailer is here. (Hat tip to Craig Pittman.)

• Also headed for television: Jonathan Lethem’s first novel, 1994’s Gun, with Occasional Music. “The novel,” says Deadline, “is a blend of sci-fi, noir and satire, set in the near future in a trippy world. Evolved animals are part of society, the government placates its citizens with free mind-numbing drugs, and the police monitor people by their karma levels. The protagonist is Conrad Metcalf, a down-and-out P.I. on a loser of a case. His last client—a prominent doctor—just turned up dead, and in order to clear his name and stay out of the deep freeze, the P.I. works for free to get to the bottom of it all. Turns out there is no bottom to this one, though, and Metcalf soon finds there’s nothing simple about this murder.” Deadline adds that “The series will be produced by Aggregate Films’ Jason Bateman, Michael Costigan and Daniel Pipski, along with Francey Grace.”

• Better late than never, let me direct your attention to the second annual Charlie Chan Family Home newsletter. Ohio Chan fan Lou Armagno notes that the newsletter (available here as a PDF document), addresses “two new book releases; a fall ‘Chan’ class taught at the University of Las Vegas, NV; ‘The Other Guys,’ an article on Mr. Wong and Mr. Moto; a recap of my first year blogging at The Postman on Holiday; and a ‘very special’ narrative by Charlie Chan Family Home webmaster, Rush Glick, on his adventure (20 years ago) to pursue the four lost Chan film-scripts. Finally, [there’s] a look at the upcoming Chinese New Year (The Year of the Rat, January 25) and three Charlie Chan events happening at various locations in 2020.”

• Among the “artists, innovators, and thinkers” we lost in 2019, The New York Times honors Peggy Lipton, co-star of The Mod Squad.

• The blog Up and Down These Mean Streets points out that Angel Eyes, Ace Atkins’ recent novel starring Boston private eye Spenser, features a few nods to the work of Dashiell Hammett.

• Speaking of Hammett, Nick Kolakowski records the multiple efforts over the decades to adapt 1929’s Red Harvest for the silver screen. “Red Harvest,” he opines, “seems doomed to remain the Schrödinger’s cat of noir adaptations: often made—and yet never made.”

• This item comes from In Reference to Murder:

The Audio Publishers Association announced that they will be presenting bestselling author Stephen King with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Audie Awards in March in New York City. King is known for his horror novels such as The Shining and Carrie but also for his crime novels, the Mr. Mercedes Trilogy (Mr. Mercedes, Finders Keepers, End of Watch), The Outsider, The Colorado Kid, and Joyland.

• I’m not usually a Marie Claire reader, but this recent piece in the magazine had me at the headline: “Megan Abbott Wants You to Feel Everything,” with a subhead reading, “With the premiere of her TV series ‘Dare Me’ on December 29, the novelist-turned-showrunner is taking her knack for humanizing the dynamics of gender, rage, and power beyond the page.” Good job, Megan!

• In the blog Mystery*File (which last month celebrated its 13th anniversary), critic Michael Shonk identified his favorite TV series of the last decade, mostly crime dramas, a couple of which I’d never heard of before. So what was his top 2010-2019 pick? “The underrated Person of Interest” (2011-2016).

• Have you seen these Bonnie and Clyde photos?

• Almost a year ago, I mentioned on this page that the 1978 CBS-TV pilot for an unsold series titled The Jordan Chance, starring Raymond Burr, had been posted on YouTube, but that a previous Burr pilot, 1976’s Mallory: Circumstantial Evidence, remained unavailable. Suddenly, though, that latter movie has popped up on the video sales site Modcinema. Here’s its plot synopsis: “Raymond Burr stars again as a lawyer, this time named Arthur Mallory. No Perry Mason here, Mallory has been on the outs since being falsely accused of encouraging a witness to lie on the stand. Eventually cleared, Mallory lives hand to mouth as a public defender, with a heightened sense of fair play when it comes to the downtrodden. In this pilot film for the never-sold TV series Mallory, the attorney defends a jailed car thief (Mark Hamill) who has been framed for the killing of another prisoner.” You can buy the video here.

• It’s hard to believe that California-born actress Karen Valentine will turn 73 years old this coming May. As an early birthday present (to the rest of us), Comfort TV blogger David Hofstede has compiled briefs on some of her most prominent small-screen roles, including in Room 222, her short-lived eponymous TV series from 1975, and an ABC Movie of the Week titled The Girl Who Came Gift-Wrapped (1974)—that last being a flick I recall liking, but hadn’t thought about in years. Here’s Hofstede’s description of the story: “A magazine publisher (Richard Long) receives a bikini-clad girl (Karen Valentine) as a birthday present. Sounds like a set-up for a skit on Love, American Style. But there’s a lot more going on in this surprisingly touching (and funny) TV movie with a wonderful cast—Farrah Fawcett, Tom Bosley, Dave Madden, and Reta Shaw. This may be the best remembered of Valentine’s TV movies—and that’s not a bad choice if it is.” Sadly, you can’t watch The Girl Who Came Gift-Wrapped online; but I see that Modcinema (again, a site after my own heart) has copies for sale here.

• Incidentally, I glanced through Karen Valentine’s IMDb page and discovered that she was cast not only in comedies, but also in a number of crime, mystery, and legal dramas as well—everything from Eischied and The New Mike Hammer to Murder, She Wrote and Family Law. The site says her last TV performance was in the 2004 teleflick Wedding Daze, in which she co-starred with John Larroquette.

• Before we venture too deep into 2020, let’s look back for a moment at 2019’s “best” book covers, as judged by the sites Literary Hub, Spine, and The Casual Optimist. What do you think?

• Hah! Just as we thought all along: “Why Do So Many Book Covers Look the Same? Blame Getty Images.”

• “Craig Stevens discusses his life and career, including his classic role on Peter Gunn, as well as his long marriage to Alexis Smith, in this 1993 interview with cable TV host Skip E Lowe.”

• If you missed Killer Cover’s end-of-the-year tribute to Anglo-Scots painter and book-cover artist Tom Adams—who created iconic fronts for novels by Agatha Christie and Raymond Chandler, among others—you can catch up with that whole series here.

• David Zucchino recalls the notorious, long-ago white-supremacist takeover of Wilmington, North Carolina. He writes:

Throughout that summer and autumn, white men had been buying shotguns, six-shot pistols, and repeating rifles at hardware stores in Wilmington ..., a port city set in the low Cape Fear country along the state’s jagged coast. It was 1898, a tumultuous mid-term election year. The city’s white leadership had vowed to remove the city’s multi-racial government by the ballot or the bullet, or both. Few white
men in Wilmington intended to back their candidates that November without a firearm within easy reach. There was concern among whites in Wilmington, where they were outnumbered by blacks, that stores would run dry on guns, and that suppliers in the rest of the state and in South Carolina would be unable to meet demand.

• Chicago-born author Mike Resnick died this last Thursday of lymphoma at age 77. Although he’s most often thought of as a prolific and multiple award-winning producer of science-fiction stories, The Gumshoe Site’s Jiro Kimura observes that Resnick also penned “several mystery novels and fantasy novels with mystery elements. John Justice Mallory is a hard-boiled private detective in a fantastical New York, where humans co-habit with vampires and fairy tale beasts such as dragons. Mallory was introduced in Stalking the Unicorn (Tor, 1987) and featured in two more novels and a collection of short stories, Stalking the Zombie (American Fantasy, 2012). The Eli Paxton series features a Cincinnati private eye who appeared in Dog in the Manger (Alexander, 1995) and two more novels.”

• And while I had my attention turned elsewhere, The Rap Sheet somehow registered its 7,600th post.

Down & Out Still Up and Running

Over the last few weeks, I have received several notes asking me about the future of Down & Out: The Magazine. That handsome, perfect-bound quarterly debuted in August 2017, and the most recent issue—Volume 1, Issue 4—came out in August 2018. Had the publication adhered to its previous schedule, the fifth edition should have appeared in December of last year. But it didn’t, which concerned both readers and the mag’s contributors (including yours truly).

So what gives? I sent a message yesterday to editor Rick Ollerman, asking for an update on the publication’s future. Here’s his reply:

Down & Out: The Magazine has fallen into a delay along with the health of its editor. Work on Volume 2, Issue 1 is significantly completed, but a form of pneumonia has taken its toll on the human element. We’re off schedule due to illness, a serious one, but nothing more nefarious than that. The magazine is more alive than its editor, but we hope that situation will begin to stabilize itself some point soon.

Eric Campbell, the publisher of Down & Out Books, tells me that an e-mail message was distributed to the magazine’s subscribers “about 30 days ago,” alerting them to the next issue’s delay, but no broader announcement was made. Until now.

I’m pleased to hear that the delay in releasing this periodical’s next edition doesn’t portend anything serious. I have very much enjoyed Down & Out: The Magazine and my association with it (I write a regular non-fiction column, most recently about Jack the Ripper novels). Let’s all wish for Ollerman’s imminent recovery.

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.