All the Crime in Half the Time

I returned home this afternoon from a short, out-of-Seattle fishing excursion with my nephew, only to discover 411 new junk-mail messages needing to be removed from my e-maibox … and my latest CrimeReads piece having been posted for public consumption.

My subject on this occasion is half-hour American TV crime dramas. Although such offerings long ago fell out of favor—overwhelmed by the spread of hour-long series—there were myriad 30-minute shows available from the 1950s through the early ’70s. As I write:

Billboard brought word in May 1948 that “the first half-hour mystery series,” NBC-TV’s Barney Blake, Police Reporter—centered on an indomitable newspaperman (played by Gene O’Donnell) and his trusty secretary, who together interview suspects and solve crimes—had recently flashed onto American television sets. The magazine then proceeded to excoriate that live-action drama for employing “just about every cliché in the whodunit book.” Barney Blake hung on for 13 weeks before being axed.

By the fall of 1959, the U.S. television landscape had changed markedly. Westerns continued to ride high on the nighttime schedule, but as Time magazine explained in an October cover story, that season also dished up a whopping “62 shows (network and syndicated) devoted to some variation of Cops & Robbers”—the majority of them lasting 30 minutes and headlined by fictional private eyes. There were so many such programs, Time quipped, that “as the evenings pass, one Eye blurs inevitably into another, a TV trouble that even an honest repairman cannot cure.”

Do you remember Peter Gunn or Staccato? How about Martin Kane, Private Eye or Honey West? And it wasn’t only gumshoe dramas shooting up the mid-20th-century airwaves. Divertissements also came in the form of abbreviated police procedurals, such as The Naked City, M Squad, and Decoy, in addition to amateur or part-time detective mysteries, among them The Adventures of Ellery Queen, Mr. and Mrs. North, Man with a Camera, and T.H.E. Cat.

Chances are, the majority of people reading this post weren’t around to take in those programs when they originally aired on network television or in syndication. (I was not either.) However, episodes of vintage half-hour series can still be found and enjoyed on YouTube, or can be purchased in DVD sets. I say they can be “enjoyed,” because over the months I spent sampling early, mostly black-and-white whodunits and cop shows on behalf of CrimeReads, I found myself far from bored. Yes, a few of the programs now seem hopelessly dated; yet many hold up reasonably well after half a century or more of gathering dust and being forgotten.

So recognize my latest CrimeReads piece as a curated guide to the lost world of classic, condensed TV crime and mystery dramas. And on some evening when you’re stumped for what to watch next, ditch the supposedly must-see shows of today in favor of a streaming installment of Peter Gunn or Decoy or Mr. Lucky, or a YouTube-borne episode of Dante or N.Y.P.D. or Markham. You just might find that half-hour stories can be as entertaining as their 60-minute cousins.

Begin your boob-tube investigations right here.

Rating the Queens

Late last week we drew your attention to Brad Friedman’s reviews, in Ah Sweet Mystery!, of the 22 regular episodes of Ellery Queen, a 1975-1976 NBC-TV series created by William Link and Richard Levinson. And we mentioned that he was in the process of polling his readers about which episodes they liked best.

He’s now posted the results of that survey, and while we won’t give away the surprise, let us repeat Friedman’s clue that it’s “an homage to Ellery in Hollywood, which—if you know the canon—was a real thing!”

Bullet Points: Full Meal Deal Edition

It’s been too long since I found the time to write one of these news wrap-ups, so I have much to share. Let’s dive right in.

• I was overjoyed last September to learn that Crippen & Landru would be releasing a posthumous collection of short stories by screenwriting partners William Link and Richard Levinson, best known for having created the NBC Mystery Movie series Columbo. C&L publisher Jeffrey Marks said the book was to be titled Shooting Script and Other Mysteries, and that he would send me a copy. Four months passed, no book found its way into my mailbox, and I became busy with other things. It wasn’t until mid-January that I thought to check on Shooting Script’s status … only to learn that it had gone on sale in November, and I just wasn’t aware. Naturally, I ordered a copy immediately, and have been working my way slowly through its 194 pages ever since. The book comprises 17 abbreviated yarns, written between 1954 and 1966. Most appeared originally in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. One, “Whistle While You Work,” was composed by the pair while they were still high school students in Philadelphia, and sold to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, but the remainder, explains Jim Noy in The Invisible Event, were turned out when Link and Levinson were in their 30s. “[S]traight away the tonal shift is evident,” he says, “concerned less with immediate narrative cleverness than with capturing the intrusion of crime as a terrifying-but-regenerative thing. ‘Shooting Script’ (1959), ‘Operation Staying-Alive’ (1959), and ‘Robbery, Robbery, Robbery’ (1959)—this last also published under the title ‘Robbery, Robbery!’, which manages to miss the point quite impressively—see ordinary people pulled into the maelstrom and emerging in different ways: bewildered, energised, sometimes terrified.” In Noy’s opinion, the best of the bunch here is “Dear Corpus Delicti” (1960), “in which we follow a man’s perfect scheme to murder his wife and start a new life with his mistress.” It’s obvious from the outset that “Dear Corpus Delicti” was part of the source material these authors harvested when they sat down to write the play and, later, the TV film Prescription: Murder, the figurative first pilot for Columbo.

Earlier this week, I asked Joseph Goodrich, who edited Shooting Script, what he learned about Link and Levinson by bringing their forgotten short stories back to print. He got back to me pronto:

First of all, as a fan of Link and Levinson’s work, it was a pleasure to read the stories and watch them apply what they learned from reading mystery fiction to the writing of it. These aren’t detective stories, even though Columbo’s origins are contained in the collection; to me they have more in common with, say, Stanley Ellin’s stories, in which a shift of focus or perspective throws a new and unexpected (and often-shocking) light on what we assumed was happening.

Apart from 1954’s “Whistle While You Work,” the majority of the stories were written in the late ’50s and early ’60s, and reflect a world that was in the process of vanishing, the world of down-at-heels boarding houses and small-town postmen, and patients who smoke in doctors’ offices. I think there’s also just a hint of the turbulent world that would soon take over in stories like “Top-Flight Aquarium” and "The Man in the Lobby." Gruesome death and a deadly resignation …

Shooting Script and Other Mysteries offers insight into the evolution of Link and Levinson as storytelling masters. Highly recommended.

• Speaking of Messieurs Link and Levinson, what’s been swirling around in the zeitgeist that might explain why so much has been written recently about their 1975-1976 NBC-TV series, Ellery Queen? Early last month, Ah Sweet Mystery! blogger Brad Friedman undertook the formidable task of reviewing—in pairs—all 22 weekly episodes. You should be able to access those pieces here. (Friedman remarked on the March 23, 1975, pilot, “Too Many Suspects,” in his introduction to that project.) After concluding his efforts, he presented this poll page, inviting veteran Ellery Queen enthusiasts as well as newcomers to that hour-long whodunit to identify their favorite episodes. Friedman will keep his survey up until February 16, then reveal its results.

• Meanwhile, Curtis Evans—spurred on by Friedman’s deep dive—presented his own memories and opinions of Ellery Queen in The Passing Tramp. In his case, he covered that short-lived Jim Hutton/David Wayne series in five installments (see here, here, here, here, and here), before presenting his top-10 list of favorite episodes. This all makes me want to go back and watch the full run of the show myself. Maybe after I finish Reacher.

• Author Robert Crais announced this week that his next novel, Racing the Light—starring P.I. Elvis Cole, Joe Pike, and mercenary John Stone—will be released by Putnam on November 1.

• News that Monica Vitti, often referred to as “the Queen of Italian Cinema,” died on February 2 at age 90, left me wondering how best to honor her memory in The Rap Sheet. Then, while reading Terence Towles Canote’s obituary of Vitti, I was reminded that she’d starred as the eponymous criminal-turned-crime fighter in Modesty Blaise, a lightweight but diverting 1966 British spy-fi picture. She also became artist Robert McGinnis’ model for that character, when he sat down to paint the cover for Fawcett’s paperback tie-in novel, Modesty Blaise, by Peter O’Donnell. The book front and actress are shown below.

• By the way, at least for now can watch the full two-hour length of Modesty Blaise by clicking over to YouTube.

• The lineup of prominent international authors invited as guests to this year’s Iceland Noir festival, taking place in Reykjavik from November 16 to 19, has been broadcast. It includes Ruth Ware, Richard Osman, Paula Hawkins, Mark Billingham, and Sophie Hannah. Tickets to the popular literary event can be purchased here.

• Coming up sooner than that is Mystery Fest, being planned for Saturday, March 12, in Portsmouth, England. The Guest of Honor at this year’s gathering will be Priscilla Masters, the creator of Detective Inspector Joanna Piercy (Almost a Whisper) and coroner Martha Gunn (Bridge of Sighs). Also appearing for panel discussions that day will be authors Edward Marston, Leigh Russell, and Judith Cutler. Events will take place on the third floor of the Portsmouth Central Library, beginning at 10 a.m. and concluding at 5 p.m.

• Oh, and let us not forget Lyme Crime, which—according to its Web site—“launched online in June 2020 and returns with a full, three-day festival 23 to 25 June 2022.” Tickets go on sale in March, and the program is expected to be publicized soon. For now, Shotsmag Confidential at least provides us with a look at the authors attending this convocation in the Dorset coastal town of Lyme Regis.

• Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine is out with its new, digital-only Winter 2022 issue, devoted in substantial part to what its editors (and others) say were the best mysteries, crime novels, and thrillers published over the course of 2021. Editor George Easter has filled these pages with numerous “best of the year” lists he posted in his blog at the end of 2021, then broken the top picks down according to the number of times they were mentioned. (S.A. Cosby’s Razorblade Tears scored best, with an astonishing 44 recommendations!) Elsewhere in the issue, assistant editor Larry Gandle assesses this year’s Edgar Award-nominated books; recent deaths within the crime-fiction community are acknowledged (goodbye again, G.M. Ford); contributor George H. Madison looks back at the rough road to making the Raymond Chandler-scripted 1946 film, The Blue Dahlia; Ted Hertel and Brian Ritt both revisit the work of George Harmon Coxe (1901-1984); and there are myriad critiques of recent releases, including from debut columnist Meredith Anthony. That’s a hell of a lot of copy to cram into one magazine. Good thing that Deadly Pleasures no longer needs to worry about paper and printing costs.

• A rare “best of 2021” compilation that didn’t make it into Deadly Pleasures comes from The Strand Magazine. Its absence may be chalked up simply to the fact that it came out so tardily: managing editor Andrew Gulli posted his top 20 favorites in late January. They include Sleep Well, My Lady, by Kwei Quartey (Soho Crime); The Whispering Dead, by Darcy Coates (Black Owl ); The Wayward Spy, by Susan Ouellette (CamCat); Her Perfect Life, by Hank Phillippi Ryan (Forge); and The Maidens, by Alex Michaelides (Celadon).

• A different sort of “bests” roster was presented more recently by Robert Lopresti in the Sleuth Sayers blog. As he explains, it’s his “thirteenth annual list of the year’s best mystery [short] stories as determined by yours truly. It goes without saying that the verdicts are subjective, personal, and entirely correct.” Almost a third of Lopresti’s 16 picks originated in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, with almost as many drawn from Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.

• How his hoax execution affected Fyodor Dostoevsky’s fiction.

• It’s been a long time in coming, but the six-part Apple+ TV series Slow Horses is finally set to premiere on Friday, April 1. And that’s no joke, folks. Mystery Fanfare reports that this spy drama, adapted from Mick Herron’s first Slough House novel of the same name, will start with back-to-back presentations of its opening two installments, “followed by one new episode weekly every Friday.” Slow Horses focuses on a team of British intelligence agents who are considered, well, troublesome and expendable. Gary Oldman plays the arrogant and oft-offensive head of that misfit squad, Jackson Lamb. Also among the cast are Kristin Scott Thomas, Jonathan Pryce, and Olivia Cooke. Anyone who doesn’t know about Herron’s series should check out the cover story from last spring’s edition of Deadly Pleasures.

(Left) Joe Cole plays Harry Palmer in The Ipcress File.

• In other small-screen news, Crime Fiction Lover alerts us that UK network ITV will roll out, sometime in March, its six-part series The Ipcress File, based on both Len Deighton’s 1962 espionage novel, The IPCRESS File, and the 1965 Michael Caine film adapted from that book. Judging by a one-minute trailer, says CFL, “It looks like no expense has been spared … and the initial impression is sexy, witty and dangerous.” Deighton Dossier blogger Rob Mallows adds: “While little of the plot is given away, it’s clear that the series will make some significant departures from both the book and the [film] …, such as the more active agent role for Jean, played by Lucy Boynton, evidence of the backstory of the ‘unnamed spy’—Harry Palmer—and his role in the Berlin black market which led to military prison and ultimately, the job with W.O.O.C.(P)., plus the sidebar story involving the nuclear test in the Pacific, which is a big part of the book but which was of course not featured in the original film.” In addition to Boynton, The Ipcress Files’ cast features Joe Cole and Tom Hollander. UPDATE: This mini-series is supposed to be carried in the States on AMC+, but no airdate has yet been publicized.

• I can’t say I’m terribly surprised to hear this. From Deadline:

Marg Helgenberger is eyeing a possible return to the CSI franchise with a reprisal of her role as Catherine Willows ... Helgenberg would appear in the upcoming second season of CSI: Vegas, the sequel to the groundbreaking 2000 series, in which Helgenberger starred for the first 12 seasons. …

Season 1 opened a new chapter in Las Vegas—the city where it all began, introducing a serialized storytelling to the classic crime procedural drama. Facing an existential threat that could bring down the entire Crime Lab and release thousands of convicted killers back onto the neon-lit streets of Vegas, a brilliant new team of investigators led by Maxine Roby (Paula Newsome) enlisted the help of old friends, Gil Grissom (William Petersen) and Sara Sidle (Jorja Fox), to investigate a case centered around former colleague David Hodges (Wallace Langham). This combined force deployed the latest forensic techniques to follow the evidence—to preserve and serve justice in Sin City.

Actors Petersen and Fox had earlier announced they will not be returning for the sophomore season of CSI: Vegas.

• This Monday is Valentine’s Day. Do you know what books you’ll crack for that occasion? Janet Rudolph offers some suggestions.

• CrimeReads senior editor Molly Odintz supplies an alternative reading list: “Your Anti-Valentine’s Day Round-Up of the Sexiest Mysteries to Read with Your FWBs.” Yes, I had to look up that initialism, too: it stands for “friends with benefits.”

• Wait just a darn minute here, I thought Christopher Fowler was done penning his time-spanning yarns about detectives Arthur Bryant and John May of London’s fictional Peculiar Crimes Unit. When the 20th such mystery, Bryant & May: London Bridge Is Falling Down, came out last summer, The Guardian made quite clear that it was “bringing to a close a much-loved series that started in 2003 with Full Dark House.” So much for that. Fowler writes this week in his blog that he’s now “in the final stages of the edit” of a 21st Peculiar Crimes book, which sounds more like a tour guide than a novel. Says Fowler:

For 20 books, London has been a central character in the Bryant & May series, so I decided that the detectives’ next investigation should be of London itself. And that this investigation has been going on—in a sort of louche way—for the last twenty years.

After all, the nation’s oldest serving detectives have spent a lifetime investigating crimes in the murkiest corners of London. They’ve been walking the streets and impulsively arresting citizens for decades. Who better to take you through London’s less savoury side?

They’re going to be remembering old buildings and odd characters, lost venues, forgotten disasters, confusing travel routes, dubious gossip, illicit pleasures and hidden pubs. The idea is to make strange connections and show readers why it’s almost impossible to tell separate and fiction in the city.

The book will be very much a part of the existing canon; Volume 21, Bryant & May’s Peculiar London. It will have a cover by our usual superb artist Max Schindler and will be the same size and format as all earlier volumes.

Amazon UK says Fowler’s new book will be released on July 14.

• Funny, this 1977 NBC-TV movie was supposed to be set in my hometown of Seattle, Washington, but I’ve never heard of it before. The Modcinema sales site describes Ransom for Alice as “the pilot film for the unsold series The Busters. The protagonists are not narcotics agents as might be assumed, but instead a male-female team of government undercover agents (Gil Gerard, Yvette Mimieux) operating in Seattle in the 1890s. … Ransom for Alice is an uncertain blend of cop drama, western, and espionage caper.” Do any Rap Sheet readers remember watching this 75-minute feature?

• A couple of podcasts have been added to The Rap Sheet’s right-hand column of crime-fiction resources: Hark! The 87th Precinct Podcast, which deals with the varied works of Ed McBain, and The le Carré Cast, concentrating on espionage novelist John le Carré.

• While we’re on the topic of le Carré, let us note the coming publication of a new collection of his writings. The following comes from Jeff Quest’s blog, Spy Write: “After being teased by Nick Harkaway, one of le Carré’s sons, during book events surrounding the release of Silverview, we now have additional details on a book of John le Carré/David Cornwell correspondence. The book, currently titled A Private Spy: The Letters of John le Carré, 1945-2020, has a UK release date of November 3rd, 2022 and a healthy page count of 400, although [publisher Viking’s] U.S. page lists a release date of October 11th, 2022 and 144 pages. So there is some conflicting information that will hopefully be cleared up soon.”

• Beware, spoilers ahead! Although the British-French crime drama Death in Paradise debuted way back in 2011, my wife and I only became fans during the months of COVID-19 isolation. That program’s cast has changed a good deal over the last decade, offering viewers four different male leads (my favorite being Kris Marshall as Detective Inspector Humphrey Goodman), backed up by a trio of female detective sergeants—the best of whom, to my mind, is six-season veteran Florence Cassell, played by lovely French actress Joséphine Jobert. Season 11 was introduced with a 90-minute Christmas special this last December, and has been airing new episodes in Great Britain since early January. So far, there seems to be no U.S. premiere scheduled for this latest series; however, word of its plot progress has been leaking across the pond—including sad news that Jobert is no longer part of the show after Episode 4. Indeed, the UK’s Hello! magazine confirms that in the fifth episode, she’s replaced by Shantol Jackson playing newly promoted DS Naomi Thomas.

• Why is strychnine the mystery writers’ poison of choice?

• Saima Mir, author of the 2021 debut novel Khan, has been named as “the first recipient of the CrimeFest bursary for a crime fiction author of colour.” According to a news release, that scholarship “will cover the cost of a full weekend pass to CrimeFest this May, a night’s accommodation at the Mercure Bristol Grand Hotel, and a guaranteed panel appearance. … Three runners-up were also chosen to receive complementary passes to this year’s convention: Elizabeth Chakrabarty, Amita Murray, and Stella Oni.”

• Sioux Falls, South Dakota, fictionist William Reynolds has been enjoying some favorable press notices of recent date, thanks to the fact of Brash Books reissuing his half-dozen crime novels about Nebraska, a single-monikered writer and private eye operating in Omaha, Nebraska. “From the beginning,” he tells the Sioux Falls blog Pigeon 605, “I wanted him to be sort of this average guy. He’s not 6-foot-6 and 250 pounds of square-jawed raw muscle; he’s average. In fact, there’s instances in which he deliberately uses his averageness to kind of blend in. He’s self-aware, and sometimes he screws up. He blunders into things he shouldn’t blunder into.” Reynolds’ series commences with The Nebraska Quotient (1984) and runs through Drive-By (1995)—at least, so far. Might all of this fresh attention to his work spur the author to compose a new Nebraska tale? Pigeon 605’s Jill Callison says, Reynolds “doesn’t have a new plot in mind. But he did spend time over the summer thinking about it.”

• Also receiving attention is the fourth issue of Men’s Adventure Quarterly, edited by Robert Deis and Bill Cunningham, and released last month. “I’m running out of superlatives to describe what a beautiful publication Men’s Adventure Quarterly is,” enthuses prolific novelist James Reasoner. “Every issue lovingly reprints great covers and interior art from the men’s adventure magazines of the Fifties, Sixties, and Seventies, along with stories and features from those magazines, all of it enhanced by well-written and informative editorials and introductions.” Glorious Trash’s Joe Kenney adds that this edition “is different from the previous three, not only due to its focus on female characters, but also because it features a few stories that were actually written by a female author. As Bob Deis notes in his intro, Jane Dolinger was definitely unique in the world of men’s magazines: a female writer who turned out escapist adventure yarns and who also happened to be a stacked beauty who posed nude for the very magazines she wrote for!” I admit, I haven’t yet purchased any of these magazines. Clearly I have been missing out.

• Count me as lax, too, for not having already mentioned Michael Stradford’s beautiful coffee-table book, Steve Holland: The World’s Greatest Illustration Art Model (‎St. Clair). Stradford has turned his boyhood fascination with the old Doc Savage paperback series—fronted so often by illustrations including actor-model Steve Holland—into a tribute volume that Paperback Warrior calls “absolutely a mandatory reference for anyone fascinated by 20th-century paperbacks, magazines and male-oriented advertisements. … More than 20 years after his death, Holland’s face is still selling publications. That is a testament to his phenomenal physique, likable face and ability to provide the perfect likeness for all of these amazing visuals. Stradford has honored Holland in such a beautiful way and I can’t thank him enough for his labors in creating it.”

• Should you be unacquainted with Steve Holland’s once-ubiquitous presence on paperbacks and magazines, see examples here.

• PulpFest, the annual celebration of pulp magazines and genre fiction—scheduled to take place this year in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, from August 4 to 7—is soliciting nominations for two familiar prizes. First is the Munsey Award, named for America’s first pulp mag publisher, Frank A. Munsey, and recognizing “an individual or organization that has bettered the pulp community, be it through disseminating knowledge about the pulps or through publishing or other efforts to preserve and foster interest in the pulp magazines we all love and enjoy.” (Last year’s Munsey recipient was publisher and book designer Rich Harvey.) The second commendation seeking nominees is the Rusty Hevelin Service Award, “designed to recognize those persons who have worked long and hard for the pulp community with little thought for individual recognition.” More info about these honors and how to submit names for consideration is available here.

Bullet Points: Justly Overloaded Edition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

• Your quirky musical entertainment for this weekend.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And I Can’t Fail to Mention …

• Criminal Element’s continuing series focusing on works that, over the last 65 years, have won the prestigious Edgar Award for Best Novel, last Friday showcased Margaret Maron’s The Bootlegger’s Daughter, which captured that prize way back in 1993. In a departure from the norm, on that same day Hector DeJean, the associate director of publicity at Minotaur Books, posted a fine essay in Criminal Element about Michael Connelly’s The Black Echo, which won the 1993 Edgar for Best First Novel and launched the fictional career of Los Angeles homicide detective Hieronymus “Harry” Bosch. Reflecting on that novel and its many sequels, DeJean wrote:

Adjustments have been made to Bosch over the years, as the character and his city have evolved. For one thing, he no longer sports a mustache, that once-standard identifying trait of all veteran cops. His past has been filled in a little more, and on the TV series his military service has been updated to the Gulf War. Connelly has tackled such topics as the Los Angeles Riots and the police department opening up to LGBTQ officers in later books. But what may work so well about Bosch is that he basically fits the mold; he’s a close cousin of several other thick-skinned knights-errant policemen, one brought to fuller life and given a deeper relationship with his city.

• Lawrence Block is already teasing his February release, The Burglar in Short Order (Subterranean), which he describes as “a complete collection” of short-form appearances by his series thief, Bernie Rhodenbarr. He says “its fifteen chapters include four short stories, three extracts from novels, five op-ed columns, and an essay—well, some would call it a rant—about Bernie’s experiences in Hollywood.” The Amazon page for this book adds that “you’ll find every published story, article, and standalone excerpt Bernie has ever appeared in—plus two new, unpublished pieces: an introduction discussing the character’s colorful origins and an afterword in which the author, contemplating retirement, comes face to face with his own creation.”

• Congratulations to The Spy Command, which today celebrates its 11th birthday! Managing editor Bill Koenig’s espionage fiction-oriented blog debuted in 2008 as The HMSS Weblog, but was renamed in 2015, following the failure of its partner Web site, Her Majesty’s Secret Servant. It remains a superior source of news about James Bond projects as well as other crime and cloak-and-dagger works.

• As we move ever closer to New Year’s Day, 2020, these sorts of features are bound to multiply. The Killing Times recently began enumerating what it says have been “the top 20 crime dramas of the decade.” So far, it has rolled out only the first half of its choices—in two parts, here and here—but I presume the balance of that Web site’s selections will soon follow. Watch for updates here.

• The Australia-based Columbophile blog typically celebrates the legacy of Peter Falk’s long-running NBC-TV series, Columbo. But not long ago, its unnamed editor put together a list of “the 10 least-satisfying Columbo ‘gotchas’ of the ’70s.” As he explains: “A Columbo without a magnificent ‘gotcha’ is like a porcupine without quills; a snake without fangs; a cat without claws. In short, it lacks a certain clout. Granted, not every episode can have a rousing finale in the mould of ‘Suitable for Framing’ [1971] or ‘Candidate for Crime’ [1973], but the strength of the gotcha plays a big part in our overall enjoyment of the episode.” Indeed, most of the 10 episodes The Columbophile cites for their disappointing denouements are also among those I remember least well, though I am fond of one: 1973’s “Requiem for a Falling Star,” which features Anne Baxter as a fading actress and includes a cameo by eminent costume designer Edith Head.

• Two CrimeReads pieces worth investigating: Sarah Weinman recalls how, during the summer of 1947, U.S. mystery novelist Mary Roberts Rinehart narrowly escaped being murdered by her longtime chef; and Crawford Smith, the author of this year’s Jackrabbit (Sweet Weasel Words), writes here about persist rumors that John Dillinger—“America’s first celebrity criminal”—escaped being gunned down outside a Chicago theater in 1934, and how such talk has resulted in efforts to disinter Dillinger’s remains from an Indiana cemetery.

• I’ve long been a fan of Ellery Queen, the 1975-1976 series developed for NBC-TV by Richard Levinson and William Link, and starring Jim Hutton. So I was pleased to learn recently that the anonymous blogger “dfordoom” has been slowly reviewing that show’s episodes for Cult TV Lounge. He tackles three of them here, and another trio here. To read his overview of the show, click here.

• Having been a Star Trek enthusiast since childhood, I am naturally thrilled by the prospect of a new series that will bring Patrick Stewart back to the role of Jean-Luc Picard, which he created for Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994). A new trailer for Star Trek: Picard, released during this month’s New York Comic Con, carries the same adventurous, hopeful spirit that has always drawn me to the Star Trek universe. And the moment in that trailer when Picard revisits his old Enterprise shipmates William Riker and Deanna Troi … well, it brought cheerful tears to my eyes. Although I resisted subscribing to the CBS All Access streaming service in order to watch Star Trek: Discovery (I instead purchased Season 1 on DVD), Star Trek: Picard—slated to debut there on January 23, 2020—may finally compel me to take that step.

• While we’re on the subject of Star Trek (and yes, I’ll get back to matters of crime fiction anon), my fellow fans should check out Trek on the Tube, the YouTube channel created by a Trekkie named Sean and covering what seems like an ever-growing assortment of Star Trek projects. Sean has set up a Patreon page, too, to solicit funds to keep his efforts on track. It seems a worthwhile cause.

• Also deserving of consideration, I think, is a solicitation from “Norman Conquest,” aka Derek Pell, who has published my work in his literary magazine, Black Scat Review. He has established an Indiegogo crowd-funding page in hopes of raising money enough to keep his enterprises afloat. This “Fund-o-Rama,” as he calls it, will continue through Halloween. Please send him treats, not tricks.

• New author interviews of note: Speaking of Mysteries host Nancie Clare fires questions at both Deborah Crombie (A Bitter Feast) and “Nicci French” (aka Nicci Gerrard and Sean French), whose latest thriller is The Lying Room; and blogger Lesa Holstine chats with Dana Ridenour about her new novel, Below the Radar.

• Finally, some essay-writing fun for students: The Bunburyist’s Elizabeth Foxwell reports that the Beacon Society, a “scion society” of that well-known Sherlock Holmes fan group, the Baker Street Irregulars, “is sponsoring an essay contest for U.S. and Canadian students in 4th to 12th grades that focuses on the Sherlock Holmes stories ‘The Adventure of the Red-Headed League,’ ‘The Adventure of the Copper Beeches,’ and ‘The Greek Interpreter.’ There are cash prizes for first to third place. The submission deadline is February 1, 2020.” Click here to find more entry details.

Bullet Points: Wednesday Supersize Edition

• There’s something odd about an article setting out to highlight crime novels “that don’t start with a dead girl.” Aren’t there thousands of such works? Well, apparently killing off young women at the beginning of books has become a trend recently, enough of one at least that Bustle’s Charlotte Ahlin wants to give readers some alternatives. “Look,” she makes clear right up front, “I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with a murder mystery that centers on a young, non-living lady. But every once in a while you might want to read a mystery novel that doesn’t star a grizzled male detective hunting down the killer of a super hot female corpse. Maybe, maybe even a thriller where the non-male lead makes it all the way to the end without getting killed or horrifically brutalized at all. I know it’s a lot to ask, but there are a few books out there that manage to be mysterious and gripping without killing a woman off in the first few pages.” Ahlin’s choices include novels by Brandi Reeds, Tara French, Sujata Massey, and Sheena Kamal. (Hat tip to Mystery Fanfare.)

• While writing recently about the death of actor Burt Reynolds, I happened across a YouTube clip from a 1976 NBC-TV pilot film titled A Matter of Wife … and Death. Remembering nothing about that project, I promptly reached for Lee Goldberg’s fat and essential reference book, Unsold Television Pilots: 1955-1989, and looked it up. Goldberg explains that the 90-minute flick was a follow-up to Reynolds’ 1973 big-screener Shamus, in which he played a pool hustler-turned-New York private investigator, Shamus McCoy. The pilot placed Rod Taylor in Reynolds’ shoes, and also starred Dick Butkus, Joe Santos (who’d appeared alongside Reynolds in Shamus, but is better known for his role on The Rockford Files), and a 24-year-old Lynda Carter. This plot briefing was found on the Web’s Complete Rod Taylor Site:

The show opens with the apparent murder of a [small-time P.I.] friend of Shamus’. Shamus has to deal with an assortment of underworld types as he uncovers a gambling scheme.

In the course of the story, his romancing of (a) Zelda (Lynda Carter—the future Wonder Woman) and (b) Carol (Anne Archer) is continually cut short when duty calls. Shamus also shows off his prowess at playing pool and making scrambled eggs. He also changes his shirt a lot.

A big difference between the Burt Reynolds movie and the Rod Taylor TV show is the location. “We’ve moved the locale from New York to Los Angeles, and we have more high comedy than low,” Rod said in an April 1975 interview. But then, here’s a similarity between the actor and his character: “Shamus is a guy who is gentle with women and tough with guys.”

I have no memory of ever sitting down to watch that Taylor pilot, but it’s apparently available on the Walmart Web site for $17.99. Does anyone have an opinion on whether it’s worth buying? Maybe YouTube’s clip—embedded below—will summon up a recollection or two.



• Speaking of failed pilot films, North Carolina’s Winston-Salem Journal notes, in a wrap-up of new DVD and Blue-ray sets, the release this month of Television’s Lost Classics, Volume 2: Rare Pilots (VCI Entertainment), a collection featuring four vintage, half-hour tryout flicks that never generated small-screen series. Among those is Cool and Lam, a 1958 production based on Erle Stanley Gardner’s novels starring mismatched Los Angeles gumshoes Bertha Cool and Donald Lam, which he published under the pseudonym A.A. Fair. Gardner himself explains, in the TV pilot’s short introductory message to would-be sponsors, that “the Cool and Lam books have been successful for many years” (beginning with 1939’s The Bigger They Come). Sadly, neither that fact nor the lighthearted performances of stars Billy Pearson and Benay Venuta was enough to convince CBS, the network for which this pilot was made—already the home of Gardner’s Perry Mason—that Cool and Lam deserved placement on its weekly broadcasting schedule. If you get a chance to watch Cool and Lam either on YouTube (where a version of marginal quality can be found) or on VCI Entertainment’s new discs (which promise a “high-definition restoration” of the film), it’s easy to imagine CBS execs grousing that the plot was simply too complex for its half-hour format.

• That Cool and Lam pilot, incidentally, appears to have been shot from a script based on Gardner’s much-superior 1940 novel Turn on the Heat, which was re-released by Hard Case Crime just last year.

• Oh, and before we deviate too far from the subject of Burt Reynolds, let me direct you to Vox’s picks of half a dozen performances that defined the late actor. And for your viewing pleasure, YouTube has available full episodes from Reynolds’ 1989-1990 private-eye series, B.L. Stryker. Episodes of his previous crime drama, 1966’s Hawk, can be found here—at least as of this writing.

• One more thing: Don’t miss reading Ace Atkins’ tribute to Reynolds, found on the Web site of the South-focused Garden & Gun.

• Considering how difficult these things are to maintain at an active level, I am always quite impressed when a blog survives for more than two or three years. So hats off to The Nick Carter & Carter Brown Blog, which last week celebrated its eighth anniversary.

• If it’s such a hard, unremunerative enterprise, why do mystery/crime-fiction bloggers go to all the effort? For Sisters in Crime’s bimonthly First Draft publication, Eona Calli asked that of four familiar figures in this field, including Classic Mysteries’ Les Blatt. (Although she never spoke with yours truly, Calli was kind enough to list The Rap Sheet among crime-fiction blogs worth checking out.)

• Why mystery-fiction readers make difficult jurors.

• A good books-related question, posed by Terena Bell of The Guardian: “Why does the U.S. change so many titles?” Bell points out that those renamed books are “disproportionately” mysteries, and that altering their titles is usually a marketing decision. She adds, however, that “sometimes publishers themselves don’t know” why a book has been given a new name. Bell continues:

For example, Hitler’s Scapegoat by Stephen Koch will be released ... in the US next year as Hitler’s Pawn. I asked their publicity manager why, but she wasn’t sure and said the editor didn’t know either. Ask the Brits, she suggested.

Then there’s The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, a Stuart Turton novel renamed The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle in the States because, apparently, Americans die more frequently. When asked about the change, US publisher Sourcebooks initially joked: “Our editorial team decided to supersize it.” We’re lucky [Agatha] Christie’s Three Act [Tragedy] wasn’t upgraded to 3¼ or—horror of horrors—Tragedy 3.0. After all, this is the country that slapped the title Little Women II on Louisa May Alcott’s Good Wives.

• Coincidentally, Matthew Bradford’s post last week, in Double O Section, about how Sony and Eleventh Hour Films will be bringing Anthony Horowitz’s teenage super-spy, Alex Rider, to the small screen, provides yet another example of a dumb book-title change.

• I always enjoy a good “listicle” piece, and here are three that caught my attention recently: For CrimeReads, author Stephanie Gayle picks seven of her favorite race-against-time thrillers; that same Web site features Steve Goble, author of The Bloody Black Flag and the new The Devil’s Wind, writing about seven “pirate novels that might appeal to lovers of crime fiction”; and The Guardian hosts Sarah Ward’s choices of the “top 10 trains in novels,” including those in Ian Fleming’s From Russia, with Love and Graham Greene’s Stamboul Train. (If you’d like more suggestions of train-based mysteries, track down a copy of the Summer 2017 issue of Mystery Scene, which offers bookseller Ann Whetstone’s piece on that very subject.)

• I mentioned a couple of weeks back that, in December, U.S. publisher Brash Books will begin re-releasing Ralph Dennis’ fondly remembered Hardman series of private-eye novels. In advance of that, you can also read a “long-lost short story” by Dennis titled “Wind Spirit,” available from Amazon for just 99 cents. “It’s not vintage pulp,” says Brash co-creator Lee Goldberg, “but it might be of interest to fans of Ralph’s work for what it may reveal about his own life at the time (the late ’60s). The parallels are striking.”

• Shotsmag Confidential reports that Belfast’s NOIRELAND International Crime Festival, launched back in October 2017, will become a spring gathering next year, with events set to take place in the Northern Ireland capital from March 8 to 10, 2019. “The festival programme,” explains blogger Ayo Onatade, “will be announced and the ticket office will open on 16 November 2018.”

• I recently made the tough decision to give up Esquire, after subscribing to the magazine for more than half of my lifetime. (I just didn’t feel I fit the slick’s demographic profile any longer.) So I’m still susceptible to a bit of Esquire nostalgia. Which drew me to this short piece by Samuel Wilson of the True Pulp Fiction blog, recalling that mag’s role—primarily between 1947 and 1952—as a venue for “pulp-esque genre fiction.” One thing I hadn’t known before was how important Esquire was in promoting Henry Kane’s swingin’ Manhattan private eye, Peter Chambers. As Wilson recalls, Chambers “made his debut in February 1947 [with ‘A Matter of Motive’] and remained an Esquire exclusive through the end of the decade.”

• Leave it to Jimmy Buffett to find fun in imminent disaster. As The Washington Post reported last week, in advance of Hurricane Florence’s brutal touchdown in the southeastern United States, the singer-songwriter finally got to live out his 2009 song lyric about “goin’ surfing in a hurricane.”

• New York author and music critic Jim Fusilli announced on Facebook last week that publisher Open Road Media will soon be reissuing his three well-regarded Terry Orr private-eye novels—at least in e-book format. Kindle editions of Closing Time (originally published in 2001), A Well-Known Secret (from 2002), and Tribeca Blues (2003) are all scheduled go on sale on October 9.

• The trailer for The Ballard of Buster Scruggs looks fantastic! That anthology-format Western film (more details here), directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, will begin streaming on Netflix on November 13.

• “Reading fiction from around the world can be key to understanding larger geopolitical questions,” opines Tobias Carroll. “Reading procedurals, which innately focus on questions of the law, societal norms, and questions of history, is especially edifying.”

• Some of the all-time-worst covers have been made for Kindle e-books. (Hell, there’s a whole Tumblr blog devoted to such design disasters.) But the front of Tom Leins’ Slug Bait (Dirty Books)—shown on the left—is powerful and ugly enough to draw attention from a dead man. It also seems appropriate for a violent story that reviewer David Nemeth says “is like immersing yourself in a vat of feces, vomit, and blood.”

• I don’t know who’s behind the pseudonym “dfordoom,” but he or she deserves my Big Thumbs-Up of the Week, based on this Cult TV Lounge post extolling the virtues of the 1975-1976 NBC-TV series Ellery Queen, which starred Jim Hutton as mystery writer/sleuth Ellery and David Wayne as his father, Inspector Richard Queen. I, too, remain a fan of that show (developed by Columbo creators Richard Levinson and William Link), as I slowly but surely make my way through the many Ellery Queen novels.

• This is excellent news! From The Hollywood Reporter:

Vincent D’Onofrio is headed to Epix.

The actor, who has been recurring on Netflix’s Marvel drama Daredevil, has booked a co-starring role on the premium cable network's forthcoming series Godfather of Harlem.

Picked up straight to series in April, Godfather of Harlem tells the true story of crime boss Bumpy Johnson (Forest Whitaker), who in the early 1960s returned after 10 years in prison to find the neighborhood he once ruled in shambles. With the streets controlled by the Italian mob, Bumpy takes on the Genovese crime family to regain control. During the brutal battle, he forms an alliance with radical preacher Malcolm X—catching his political rise in the crosshairs of social upheaval and a mob war that threatens to tear the city apart.

The project is described as a collision of the criminal underworld and the civil rights movement during one of the most tumultuous times in American history.

• From the blog Vintage Everyday: “The Story Behind the Iconic Farrah Fawcett Red Swimsuit Poster That Wound Up Plastered on Millions of Bedroom Walls.”

• “Stephen King knows crime,” explains Max Booth III. “He grew up mainlining pulp legends like Richard Stark and John D. MacDonald. He was a goddamn noir geek, if you want to know the truth. When MacDonald agreed to write the introduction for King’s debut collection, Night Shift, he nearly pissed himself.” Booth’s look at the broad diversity of King’s crime and mystery fiction is here.

• Julia Roberts has sure come a long way since her role in 1990’s Pretty Woman. In the upcoming Amazon Prime psychological drama Homecoming—based on a podcast of the same name created by Eli Horowitz and Micah Bloomberg—she plays Heidi Bergman, described by the Killing Times blog as “a caseworker at the Homecoming Transitional Support Center, a Geist Group facility helping soldiers transition back to civilian life. … Four years later, Heidi has started a new life, living with her mother (Sissy Spacek) and working as a small-town waitress, when a Department of Defense auditor (Shea Whigham) comes to her with questions about why she left the facility. Heidi begins to realize there’s a whole other story behind the story she’s been telling herself.” Homecoming will debut on November 2.

• The presence in American culture of Richard Boone’s 1957-1963 CBS-TV Western series, Have Gun–Will Travel, extended well beyond the small screen. Paul Bishop presents the evidence.

• I have launched a fun new series in my Killer Covers blog, looking at how vintage artists might differ substantially in what they emphasized when painting fronts for the same book. We’re only two installments into this series so far, found here and here.

• How to look like … Modesty Blaise!

• Those darn crime-fiction writers, they just keep on talking, don’t they! Here are some interviews that have turned up recently around the Web: Scott Von Doviak chats with MysteryPeople’s Scott Montgomery about his “one-of-a-kind” debut novel, Charlesgate Confidential; Paula Hawkins (The Girl on the Train) answers questions from The Guardian; NPR Weekend Edition Saturday host Scott Simon speaks with Sarah Weinman about her new non-fiction book, The Real Lolita; Nancie Clare’s latest podcast conversation is with Margaret Mizushima, the author of Burning Ridge, her fourth Timber Creek K-9 mystery; January Magazine’s Linda L. Richards goes one-on-one with Dietrich Kalteis (Poughkeepsie Shuffle); The New York Times manages a chinwag with the ever-elusive “Robert Galbraith” (J.K. Rowling), author of the new Cormoran Strike mystery, Lethal White; Saskatchewan lawyer/blogger Bill Selnes conducts a short exchange with Jayne “J.E.” Baynard, who penned When the Flood Falls; and Crimespree Magazine quizzes Warren C. Easley about Moving Targets, the sixth of his Oregon-set Cal Claxton mysteries.

• Author Scott Von Doviak is a resident of Austin, Texas, but his new novel, Charlesgate Confidential (Hard Case Crime), is set in Boston, Massachusetts. That makes him eligible to comment on “How George V. Higgins Invented the Boston Crime Novel,” as he does for CrimeReads; and about five writers—younger than either Higgins or Robert B. Parker—who are “taking Boston noir in exciting new directions,” his topic for the Strand Magazine blog.

• By the way, the story Von Doviak rolls out in Charlesgate Confidential was inspired by the mysterious and shocking theft, in March 1990, of 13 irreplaceable works of art from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. If you’d like to learn more about that “largest unsolved art heist in history,” note that The Boston Globe and public radio station WBUR-FM have just launched a podcast, “Last Seen,” which is re-examining and unearthing new details about the 28-year-old crime. You can listen to the episodes here.

• And for its next issue, Mystery Readers Journal is on the hunt for articles about “mysteries that take place in the Far East.” The deadline is October 10. For additional submission details, click here.