Finding Forgotten Fleming Works

Wealthy British writer Ian Fleming died from a heart attack more than 60 years ago, yet he’s suddenly back in the news, thanks to the discovery of two different works he left behind.

The first is a short story titled “The Shameful Dream,” which appears in the latest edition of Strand Magazine. As the Associated Press explains, that tale dates back to 1951, just two years prior to the publication of Fleming’s first James Bond spy novel, Casino Royale. It focuses on a character named Caffery Bone, who is “the literary editor of Our World, a periodical ‘designed to bring power and social advancement to Lord Ower,’ its owner. Bone has been summoned to spend Saturday evening with Lord and Lady Ower, transported to them in a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce.”

Bone is more than a bit anxious at the prospects for this encounter, fearing Lord Ower is preparing to dismiss him, as he has done to so many others on his payroll. “For Lord Ower sacked everyone sooner or later,” Fleming writes, “harshly if they belonged to no union or with a fat check if they did and were in a position to hit back. If one worked for Lord Ower one was expendable and one just spent oneself until one had gone over the cliff edge and disappeared beneath the waves with a fat splash.”

The quarterly Strand says “The Shameful Dream” finds Fleming “dryly amused by power and its excesses,” casting “a wry eye on the world of newspapers and tabloids, and a media tycoon whose flair for cruelty carries unmistakable shades of Blofeld and Fleming’s other iconic villains—calculating, merciless, and unsettlingly absurd.”

You can order a copy of that issue, the magazine’s 75th, here. Also inside is “Reading at Night,” an obscure Graham Greene yarn that was his “sole venture into the supernatural-themed genre.”

* * *

In the meantime, The Spy Command reports that UK journalist-novelist Jeremy Duns “has found an Ian Fleming-penned pilot script for a proposed television series to be called James Gunn—Secret Agent.” Duns describes Gunn as “an American secret agent operating in Jamaica using a boat as his base, pretending he is looking for treasure” while pursuing a powerful gang boss called Dr. No (a likely precursor to the Dr. No from Fleming’s 1958 novel of the same name).

Bill Koenig goes on to write in The Spy Command that this 28-page script was the result of efforts by U.S. TV producer Henry Morgenthau III “to develop a show to be called Captain Jamaica beginning in late 1955. Morgenthau contacted Ian Fleming concerning the project, according to Duns. Eventually, Fleming wrote the outline and script.” Sadly, by the end of 1956, the Gunn project was shelved.

Duns offers a two-part article on his Web site that supplies additional background on James Gunn and tells more about both the pilot’s storyline and the nine-page outline Fleming wrote for the proposed spy series. Part I is here, with Part II being available here.

Right on Q

If Miss Moneypenny can have her own James Bond spin-off series, then why not Q, head of the British Secret Service’s research and development division? The Book Bond highlights plans to introduce Q as the main protagonist in Quantum of Menace, which is being written by Vaseem Khan, an acclaimed crime fictionist and chair of the British Crime Writers’ Association. Here’s a plot synopsis:

After Q (aka Major Boothroyd) is unexpectedly ousted from his role with British Intelligence developing technologies for MI6’s OO agents, he finds himself back in his sleepy hometown of Wickstone-on-Water. His childhood friend, renowned quantum computer scientist Peter Napier, has died in mysterious circumstances, leaving behind a cryptic note. The police seem disinterested, but Q feels compelled to investigate and soon discovers that Napier’s ground-breaking work may have attracted sinister forces … Can Q decode the truth behind Napier's death, even as danger closes in?

A joint venture between Ian Fleming Publications and the UK imprint Zaffre will introduce this first Q Mysteries entry in October 2025.

READ MORE: “Now It’s Q’s Turn for a Spin-off Book Series,” by Bill Koenig (The Spy Command).

The Mystery of Dana Wilson

(Editor’s note: Randal S. Brandt’s fine work has graced both this blog and Killer Covers before, in posts about the inspiration behind David Dodge’s To Catch a Thief, the 1961 Dodge novel Carambola, and paperback cover artist Robert Stanley. Today, he profiles an obscure American mystery writer named Dana Wilson. “I've uncovered a fascinating story,” he told me in pitching this piece. “Hint: after her second marriage she changed her last name to Broccoli.” “Fascinating” is definitely the adjective to describe the results of his digging.)

Before I tell you this story—a story about the literary mystery surrounding a crime novel with one of the strangest titles of all time and the genealogical research that led to its connection to the original James Bond girl—I must tell you a little bit about myself.

I’m a librarian at the University of California, Berkeley, where I am Head of Cataloging at the Bancroft Library, the university’s primary special collections and rare books library. As the flagship campus of the University of California system, Berkeley has a long tradition of collecting the literature of California and, since 2013, I have also served as the curator of the California Detective Fiction Collection. This means that I get a small budget to acquire titles of crime and mystery fiction that are set in California. A book that I acquired recently for the collection, with a decidedly odd title, made me take on a third role; I had to put on my fedora and play literary detective to solve the surprising mystery of its author, Dana Wilson.

Dana Wilson published exactly one crime novel. That book, Make with the Brains, Pierre, appeared in 1946 under the Julian Messner imprint. The story is narrated by Pierre Bernet, a French “film cutter” who emigrated to Hollywood to escape the Nazi occupation of France and has been unable to secure work for several years. Finding himself in the middle of a romantic triangle—Pierre is desperately in love with Eleanor, an aspiring young actress, but Eleanor is in love with Joe, who also loves Eleanor but is married and refuses to seek a divorce—Pierre gets involved in a blackmail plot that leads to murder.

Bill Pronzini reviewed the book in 1001 Midnights: The Aficionado’s Guide to Mystery and Detective Fiction and opined that, “despite having one of crime fiction’s worst and most misleading titles,” it is “neither a bad nor a whimsical nor a detective novel” but rather “a grim tale of psychological suspense reminiscent of the work of Cornell Woolrich in its incisive examination of a man destroyed by love, hate, and the dark side of his own soul.” He concluded by declaring the tale “a surprising accomplishment in its evocation of the Gallic character, the postwar Hollywood lifestyle, and the elements of human tragedy.” (Pronzini and Muller 1986, 855)

As I began working on the catalogue record for this novel (library cataloguing is essentially recording and describing a library’s holdings in order to provide access to readers and researchers), I kept coming back to a key question: Who is Dana Wilson?

The book itself, including the original dust jacket, was no help at all. There is no author’s biography, photograph, or blurb on this edition. I didn’t even know if Dana was a man or a woman (and apparently Pronzini didn’t either, as the 1001 Midnights entry is gender-neutral), or whether the name was real or a pseudonym. The Library of Congress, usually the authority on matters of book authorship, was no help whatsoever here. In its catalogue, the novel was entered under the simple heading of “Wilson, Dana,” which was linked to a composer and professor of music born in 1946. Nope, definitely not the author of this 1946 novel. The database contained entries for several other similarly named writers, but none were the one I was looking for. Disambiguating authors from one another and identifying them with the works that they produce is called, in library parlance, “authority control” and is a critical component of cataloguing, so I was determined to do something to distinguish Dana Wilson the mystery writer from the other Dana Wilsons. I turned next to another, usually reliable resource: Allen J. Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV bibliography. Alas, Hubin was no help either, as no additional biographical details were included there.

(Left) Dana Wilson in the 1940s.

“Dana Wilson” is a pretty generic name, and I thought that, without any other data points, I would have a hard time closing in on likely authors using genealogical resources available via the Ancestry database, which has provided me with a wealth of information for tracing authors’ identities. I was just about to give up hope of uncovering this mysterious writer’s identity when I looked through the book one more time and noticed that it contained a dedication, “To Stella, Michael, and Lewis.” Family members? Perhaps Stella was the author’s wife, and Michael and Lewis, his sons? Armed with this additional bit of potential information, I decided to give Ancestry a whirl.

One of the first results that came up was for the recently released 1950 U.S. Census. The record I found was for a Dana Wilson living in Los Angeles and working as a “screen treatments writer” in the movie industry, which seemed a likely occupation for the author of Make with the Brains, Pierre, given the inside-Hollywood angle of the novel. This Dana was female, aged 26, and listed in the census as “wife,” along with Lewis G. Wilson, as head of the household; the census also listed an 8-year-old son, Michael G. Wilson, and a mother-in-law, Stella Natol. I felt pretty confident that I’d found my Dana. What would be the odds of another family quartet with those names? The only thing that surprised me was Dana’s age. If she was 26 in 1950, that meant she would have been only 22 when her novel was published—and she was the mother of a young child at the time!

My second surprise came when I did another search in Ancestry, this time adding an approximate birth date of 1924 and her maiden name, Natol. I immediately landed on the 2004 death record of “Dana Dorothy Natol Broccoli.” The information there included that she was the widow of American film producer Albert R. Broccoli and the mother of Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli.

Wait. What?

As a longtime fan of the James Bond books and films, I immediately recognized the name Albert R. Broccoli. Broccoli and his partner Harry Saltzman were the producers behind the cinematic adaptations of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels. Now, my search took a completely different turn.

A Wikipedia page dedicated to Dana Broccoli revealed more information. It said that she was born Dana Natol in New York City on January 3, 1922 (making her the ripe old age of 24 when her novel was published), and met her first husband, Lewis Wilson, when they were both acting students at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts at Carnegie Hall. After Dana and Lewis divorced, she married Albert R. “Cubby” Broccoli in 1959. When Broccoli and Saltzman formed a holding company to control the licensing and rights to the Bond films, they named it Danjaq S.A., which is a combination of their wives’ first names (Dana Broccoli and Jacqueline Saltzman). After Cubby’s death in 1996, Dana became president of Danjaq and was instrumental in developing the musical theater version of another Ian Fleming work, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. She died at age 82 of cancer on February 29, 2004. Wikipedia also mentioned that Dana had written two novels, Scenario for Murder (1949) and Florinda (1977).

(Right) Scenario for Murder, 1949.

Hubin gives “Scenario for Murder” as the British title of Make with the Brains, Pierre, and the dust jacket of that edition does include an author photograph, depicting an attractive young woman, and a biographical sketch. So that solves the mystery of Dana Wilson.

Or, does it?

Further digging revealed that Dana Wilson Broccoli was a complex woman who led a fascinating life and had a lasting impact on one of the most iconic film series of all time.

It turns out that Dana was actually born Dorothy K. Natoli into an Italian-Irish family in Brooklyn (I haven’t been able to discover what the “K” stands for). Her parents were Giuseppe “Joseph” Natoli and Stella (White) Natoli. Her father was the son of Italian immigrants and a veteran of World War I. Shortly after Dana’s birth, the family name was shortened to Natol, but at the time of her marriage to Lewis Gilbert Wilson on June 7, 1941 (when she was 19 years old), she was still using Dorothy as her first name. The following year their son, Michael, was born in New York.

She likely changed her name to Dana after they moved to Los Angeles to pursue careers in Hollywood. Lewis was first to achieve some level of success. After a couple of bit parts in movies, including one in which he wasn’t even credited, he got his big break. In 1943, Columbia Pictures created the first live-action depiction of the DC Comics superhero Batman in a 15-part serial, and Lewis was cast in the titular role, giving him the distinction of being the first actor ever to portray the Caped Crusader. He then landed several other small parts in various films in 1943 and 1944, but his acting career was put on hold when he enlisted in the U.S. Army on June 27, 1944.

(Above) Douglas Croft and Lewis Wilson played Robin and Batman, respectively, in Columbia Pictures’ Batman film serial.

After Dana’s death, several obituaries reported that their long time apart during World War II had led to the failure of Lewis and Dana’s marriage. Later, during an interview, Dana confirmed that the separation was a turning point in their relationship: “Being separated with the war for five years just changed everything. And when my husband returned, we were two entirely different people. It was inevitable that we would divorce.” (Cork 2000)

However, the exact date of their divorce is unknown. In his autobiography Fragments, film director Andre de Toth, a longtime friend of the Broccolis, recalled meeting Dana “in Hollywood, years before she met Cubby,” remembering her as “a budding writer with a promising future, a single parent bringing up a son,” and noting that “in the forties [that] took guts.” (De Toth 1994, 460) However, aside from the fact that they appeared as a family in the 1950 census, there is evidence that their relationship continued at least into the early 1950s, and de Toth got either his timeline or Dana’s marital status wrong. Lewis remarried in 1956.

What is known is that it was during the war that Dana turned her hand to novel writing. Following the 1946 hardcover publication of Make with the Brains, Pierre, with its dedication to her mother, son, and husband, two cheap paperback editions appeared in 1948 and 1949, re-titled as Uneasy Virtue. Then, also in 1949, the British hardcover came out, this time re-titled as Scenario for Murder, with its dust jacket author blurb identifying her as a “wife, mother, actress and producer” living “in Hollywood with her actor-producer husband and small son.”

In 1950, Dana Wilson’s Hollywood acting career got started with a bit part in a film noir called Once a Thief starring Cesar Romero and June Havoc. Then, in 1951, Dana won her first (and only) lead role, as the Queen in Wild Women, opposite Lewis, who also had a lead role. If they were still married at the time, and if Lewis had anything to do with Dana taking that part, that truly awful film could very well have provided ample grounds for divorce.

(Left) Dana Wilson starred in 1951’s Wild Women.

Also, in 1951, both Dana and Lewis were cast in Trigger Tales, the half-hour pilot for a Western TV series that was not picked up. Dana had the supporting female role, in which she turned out to be the villain, but Lewis had a blink-and-you-miss-it appearance with barely a word of dialogue (although he did get to show off the stage-fighting skills he’d honed as Batman in a brief but rowdy dustup with the hero, Trigger Saunders). Then, Lewis got another big break when he was cast as a regular in the half-hour TV crime series Craig Kennedy, Criminologist. Although Donald Woods had the title role, Lewis, as newspaper reporter Walt Jameson, and Sydney Mason, playing New York City police Inspector J.J. Burke, shared nearly as much screen time. The series was short-lived, however, airing for one season (1952-1953) of 26 episodes. Dana guest-starred in one of the episodes near the end of the run.

Dana first met Albert R. “Cubby” Broccoli in December 1947. Struggling to earn a living in the movie business, Cubby decided to make some extra cash that year by trying his hand at selling Christmas trees on a street corner in the upscale L.A. suburb of Beverly Hills. In his posthumously published memoir, When the Snow Melts (1998), he described the “incredible, memorable coincidence” that occurred during his brief time in that job:

Early one evening, just before Christmas, a stunning-looking lady stopped at my lot to buy a tree. She had her small son with her. She had raven-black hair, large eyes and pale, delicate features. Having chosen a tree, she wondered where she could get a stand for it. I offered to make one for her, nailing a couple of crossed boards together and then pinning the tree to it. We wished each other ‘Happy Christmas’ and she walked away into the night. No reason for me to believe I’d ever see her again. To chic beauties of that class, when you’ve seen one Christmas tree salesman you’ve seen them all. But not in this particular scenario.

For that lady, my lovely Dana, and I were destined to meet again twelve years later. She remembers my selling her that tree on the corner of Wilshire and Doheny. I recall it even more vividly. There are some customers you just cannot forget. (Broccoli 1998, 84)

The pair re-encountered each other in 1958, at a New Year’s Eve party at the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas, and at least on Cubby’s end, it was love at second sight. Cubby was a widower, his wife Nedra having succumbed to cancer two years earlier, and a single father of two young children. He got Dana’s phone number before the night was out, but they did not get together again until a few months later, again by chance and this time in New York—they were both out with other dates. They made arrangements to meet once more back in Los Angeles, and after a five-week courtship, they were married on June 21, 1959. The wedding was in Las Vegas. Cary Grant was best man, and Dana’s 16-year-old son, Michael, who had spent the night before the wedding on the town with Cubby, was a hungover member of the wedding party. (Broccoli 1998, 140-41) With both her son and fiancé suffering the effects of the stag night, Dana had a chance at a very different future when Cary Grant came to tell her about the situation. “I did a film once,” he said, “where the best man ran off with the bride. How about it?” Dana laughed off the proposition. “As tempting as it may sound, I don’t think it’s going to happen this time.” (Cork 2000; Sellers 2019, 40)

(Right) “Cubby” Broccoli.

That Las Vegas ceremony was the start of a stunning second act for Dana Wilson. “I married Cubby,” she recalled, “and my life changed completely. I left my home in California. I left my country. I left my friends. I left everything that was familiar to me … But I followed Cubby [to London] and I trusted him, and I knew he was going to make everything all right.” (Cork 2000)

Dana immediately threw herself into her new role. She had always hoped to have a large family and insisted on formally adopting Cubby’s two children, Tony and Tina. On June 18, 1960, Dana gave birth to a daughter, Barbara Dana Broccoli, and, as Cubby wrote, “now [the] family was complete.” (Broccoli 1998, 147)

It was at about this time that Cubby met Harry Saltzman. Cubby had long wanted to film Fleming’s James Bond novels, but had never been able to secure the option. Saltzman had the option, which was about to expire, but could not convince anyone to finance him. Cubby had the connections in Hollywood to get the project off the ground and the pair entered into a partnership. They inked a deal with United Artists for $1 million on June 21, 1961 (Cubby and Dana’s second wedding anniversary), and the rest is movie history. (Broccoli 1998, 151-153)

Although Dana’s name never appears in the credits of any Bond film, she was an active behind-the-scenes partner to her husband and her fingerprints are all over the series:

• When Cubby and Harry were casting the lead role in Dr. No, they became interested in a young Scotsman with limited screen credits named Sean Connery. There are many versions of how Connery came to the producers’ attention, but it is generally accepted that the key to him getting the part lay with Dana Broccoli. (Pfeiffer and Lisa 1993, 14, 42, 55) Cubby thought he had terrific potential, but was unsure that he had the requisite sex appeal to play James Bond. So he asked Dana to take a look at the only footage he had available of Connery, the 1959 Disney film Darby O’Gill and the Little People. “Dana’s reaction,” Cubby recalled, “was immediate: ‘That’s our Bond!’” (Broccoli 1998, 165; Duncan 2015, 33) Dana confirmed this story: “I was just knocked out by [Connery]. I thought he was just incredible.” (Cork 2000; Field and Chowdhury 2015, 60)

• As a writer herself, Dana contributed to several scripts, making practical, informed, and helpful suggestions. As they struggled to put together a script for The Spy Who Loved Me (14 writers had tried and failed to come up with a coherent story), Cubby and Dana, themselves, “sat and talked for hours, with Dana scribbling ideas down on paper” and “rewrote the whole story.” When they presented their new screenplay to director Lewis Gilbert, he “said it was the first time a producer had come to him with a storyline that worked.” (Duncan 2015, 262) Barbara Broccoli later claimed that “all the major decisions [Cubby] made he discussed with her. It was a real partnership.” (Sellers 2019, 114; Cork 2000)

(Above) Maryam d'Abo, Timothy Dalton, Barbara Broccoli, Albert R. Broccoli, Dana Broccoli, and John Glen attend an event celebrating the release of the Bond film The Living Daylights (1987).

• Dana often functioned as an unofficial casting director. In For Your Eyes Only, she recommended Topol for his role and gave final approval on casting Julian Glover. (Field and Chowdhury 2015, 328-29) She “was absolutely convinced from the start that [Timothy Dalton] would make a first-class Bond” and pressed Cubby to cast him as Roger Moore’s successor; and she helped convince Dalton to accept the role. (Broccoli 1998, 280-81) Many of the actresses in the series remember that she was part of the casting process and had some influence in how the women were portrayed. (d’Abo and Cork 2003, 174)

• She provided unswerving support and expert advice to Cubby during his legal battles with Harry Saltzman. The breakup of the Broccoli-Saltzman partnership in 1975 was marked by accusations, lawsuits, and hard feelings. Michael Wilson, who had spent the previous two years at a prestigious Washington, D.C., law firm, came to London to help on the legal side, and Cubby credited Dana with giving him the strength to see it through: “But for Dana’s fantastic resources and devotion, I might have thrown in the towel. As it was, we took on the battle of a lifetime—and won.” (Broccoli 1998, 231)

• On December 5, 1976, Dana christened the 007 Stage at Pinewood Studios, which had been constructed specially for the filming of The Spy Who Loved Me, by breaking a bottle of champagne over the conning tower of the American submarine. (Owen and Burford 2000, 119)

• At the 1982 Oscars ceremony, the Academy bestowed its highest honor, the Irving G. Thalberg Award, on Cubby Broccoli. Roger Moore, who was in the middle of his long run portraying James Bond, was tasked with making the presentation. As Moore remembered, Cubby and Dana “were terrified that I would make light of the situation and say something silly.” Consequently, during rehearsals, “Dana sat right at the front of the auditorium to ensure I stuck to the script. I did indeed stick to the script, and Cubby accepted his award with great pride and modesty.” (Moore 2008, 244-45)

• Following Cubby’s death in 1996, Dana assumed the leadership of Danjaq and oversaw the transition of production duties to her children, Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli, who are still running the operation today.

Curiously, aside from that brief mention of the British title, Scenario for Murder, on Dana’s Wikipedia page, none of the sources that I uncovered refer in any way to Make with the Brains, Pierre. In 1977, Dana returned to fiction writing, penning Florinda, a historical novel set in 8th-century Spain, which was apparently inspired while scouting locations for the Bond series. Even the dust jacket copy of that book claims that it was her first novel. And, unlike Pierre, Florinda at least merits a mention in Cubby’s autobiography. Dana, herself, adapted the novel into a musical that had a modestly successful run in Los Angeles in 1995 and was revived as La Cava, which played in London’s West End in 2000-2001.

(Left) The 1977 novel Florinda, with cover art by Robert McGinnis.

Nothing in my previous experience in identifying crime writers and expanding on their biographies had prepared me for what I would find when I went looking for Dana Wilson, the author of an obscure 1940s Hollywood mystery novel. I found a young woman who carved out a career for herself in Hollywood, as both a writer and an actor, who turned her talents to psychological suspense fiction and made her way as a single mother. Then, in her stunning second act, she became one of the architects of the most famous and successful film franchise in history. Not only did Dana Natol Wilson Broccoli live twice, she was the original Bond girl.

SOURCES
Broccoli, Albert R., with Donald Zec. 1998. When the Snow Melts: The Autobiography of Cubby Broccoli. London: Boxtree.

Cork, John, dir. 2000. “Cubby Broccoli: The Man Behind Bond.” Diamonds Are Forever, Blu-ray Disc. Directed by Guy Hamilton. Beverly Hills, CA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, Inc., 2012.

d’Abo, Maryam, and John Cork. 2003. Bond Girls Are Forever: The Women of James Bond. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc.

De Toth, Andre. 1994. Fragments: Portraits from the Inside. London: Faber and Faber.

Field, Matthew, and Ajay Chowdhury. 2015. Some Kind of Hero, 007: The Remarkable Story of the James Bond Films. Gloucestershire: The History Press.

Duncan, Paul, ed. 2015. The James Bond Archives. Cologne: Taschen.

Moore, Roger, with Gareth Owen. 2008. My Word Is My Bond: A Memoir. New York: Collins.

Owen, Gareth, and Brian Burford. 2000. The Pinewood Story: The Authorised History of the World’s Most Famous Film Studio. London: Reynolds & Hearn Ltd.

Pfeiffer, Lee, and Philip Lisa. 1993. The Films of Sean Connery. New York: Carol Publishing Group.

Pronzini, Bill, and Marcia Muller. 1986. 1001 Midnights: The Aficionado’s Guide to Mystery and Detective Fiction. New York: Arbor House.

Sellers, Robert. 2019. When Harry Met Cubby: The Story of the James Bond Producers. Gloucestershire: The History Press.

STREAMING VIDEO
Batman
Release date: July 16, 1943
Trailer on YouTube: https://youtu.be/dyXp-8ZZkbg?si=HZ-hgukOpnDfgLMd (other trailers available)
Full film on Tubi: https://tubitv.com/movies/636895/batman>

Once a Thief (1950)
Release date: July 7, 1950
Full film on Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/once-a-thief

Wild Women, aka Bowanga, Bowanga: White Sirens of Africa (1951)
Release date: September 23, 1951
Clip on YouTube: https://youtu.be/hCdORg973bU?si=WEDvkkm4D6Hz-5Au (featuring Dana Wilson as the Queen and Lewis Wilson as the “strong white man”)
Full film on Plex: https://watch.plex.tv/movie/wild-women
Full film on Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/BowangaBowangaA.k.a.WildWomen

“Gun Blazers,” episode of Trigger Tales (1951)
Full film on YouTube: https://youtu.be/MPOJL-KfQv0?si=B-GGn40biOyDhzXo (fight scene starts at 13:45)

“The Golden Dagger,” S1, E24, Craig Kennedy, Criminologist (1952)
This episode is not available, but several others, all prominently featuring Lewis Wilson, can be found on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLY0ESviuN3DqTvOjrHh6uSE-OiE80_iy1

READ MORE: “Inside the Family Behind the James Bond Empire,” by Cari Beauchamp (Town & Country).

Bullet Points: Pre-Corned Beef Feast Edition

Today’s installment of crime-fiction-related news items that don’t necessarily merit their own posts, but may still be of interest.

• Mike Ripley’s latest “Getting Away with Murder” column is up at Shots, and it’s packed with his usual amalgam of substantive and sassy items. You’ll find observations about The Shadows of London, the sixth of Andrew Taylor’s 17th-century thrillers starring Cat Hakesby (née Lovett) and James Marwood; Peter Robinson’s posthumously published, 28th Alan Banks novel, Standing in the Shadows; hard-boiled British author Douglas Sanderson (Pure Sweet Hell); Blessin Adams’ forthcoming historical true-crime release, Great and Horrible News; and a crowd of other March mystery/crime premieres, including Owen Matthews’ White Fox, T.M. Logan’s The Mother, and Rebecca Rogers’ The Purgatory Poisoning.

• This year’s 70th-anniversary celebration of James Bond, the British super-spy introduced in the 1953 novel Casino Royale, includes fresh paperback editions of Ian Fleming’s famous Agent 007 yarns. As The Spy Command explains, credit for their simple but striking new look belongs to UK-based Webb & Webb Design, which previously created posters and book art for a world-traveling exhibition called Bond Bound: Ian Fleming and the Art of Cover Design. In addition to the 007 adventures, Webb & Webb has developed new fronts for Fleming’s non-fiction books, The Diamond Smugglers (1957) and Thrilling Cities (1963). They’re all set to debut on April 13.

• A rather belated “happy birthday” to Pennsylvania-born actress Barbara Feldon, who played eye-catching Agent 99 in the 1965–1970 spy sitcom Get Smart. She turned 90 years old on March 12!

• This Friday is Saint Patrick’s Day, which means the enforced wearing of green and plentiful servings of corned beef and cabbage. Mystery Fanfare suggests it might also be time to pick up a celebration-related crime or mystery novel. The blog has a wide variety of suggestions, from Kathi Daley’s Shamrock Shenanigans and Ralph M. McInerny’s Lack of the Irish to The Whites, by Harry Brandt (aka Richard Price) and Paddy Whacked, by S. Furlong-Bollinger.

• Deadly Pleasures editor George Easter surveys the growing field of do-it-yourself murder yarns. “Authors are coming up with such words as ‘how to’ or ‘guide’ to describe their mysteries,” he observes. “Others use ‘art of’ or ‘unsolicited advice.’ If you are planning to knock off your significant other, my unsolicited advice to you would be to discard these before the police show up.”

• Deadline brings word that David Kane, lead writer for the BBC One crime drama Shetland, will adapt Denise Mina’s Alex Morrow novels for the small screen. “Set in Glasgow, Morrow, which consists of five books, follows [Detective Sergeant] Alex Morrow, a formidable detective who can’t face talking to her husband or bear to sleep in the family home following a recent trauma. As she investigates a crime with partner Bannerman for season one titled Still Midnight, questions arise about whether their ambitious Machiavellian boss McKechnie has their backs. … Kane and Mina are exec producing Morrow, having combined on BBC drama cult hit The Field of Blood, which starred Peter Capaldi and David Morrissey and was also BAFTA Scotland nominated.”

• There’s still no announced date for the U.S. launch of Endeavour, Season 9. However, that final three-episode run of the Inspector Morse prequel series starring Shaun Evans and Roger Allam concluded last weekend in Great Britain. Sad to report, The Killing Times says that it left “big questions unanswered.” The site goes on to rate all nine seasons of the show (with the 2012 pilot and Series 2 winning the most stars), and muses on whether there might be more stories from the Morse universe deserving to be told.

• At least a couple of crime-themed works are among the victors in this year’s Spur Awards competition, hosted by the Western Writers of America. Ann Parker’s The Secret in the Wall (Poisoned Pen Press) won in the Traditional Novel category, while Dead Man’s Trail, by Nate Morgan (Kensington), trotted away with Original Mass-Market Paperback Novel honors. These prizes will be bestowed during the 70th annual WWA convention to be held in Rapid City, South Dakota, from June 21 to 24. Registration information is available here.

• R.I.P., Rupert Heath, the founder and publisher of Dean Street Press, who died of a heart attack on March 6 at the tender age of 54. Both Curtis J. Evans, at The Passing Tramp, and Steve Barge, at In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, have posted tributes.

• We mentioned last month that Michael Stradford, author of the 2021 book Steve Holland: The World’s Greatest Illustration Art Model, had completed another look back at Holland’s prolific appearances, this time on paperback fronts. But there wasn’t yet an Amazon link available for those wishing to purchase the new, 216-page book, Steve Holland: Paperback Hero (St. Clair). Now there is!

• Have you checked out The Rap Sheet’s YouTube page recently? We’ve added to it a number of TV opening title sequences, including those from M Squad, Bosch: Legacy, Leverage, My Friend Tony, 87th Precinct, and David Caruso’s forgotten Michael Hayes.

• And in an amusing extract from his new book, Gentleman Bandit: The True Story of Black Bart, the Old West’s Most Infamous Stagecoach Robber (Hanover Street Press), John Boessenecker recalls his stylish subject’s initial California stagecoach robbery, in 1875.

Purging “Offensive” Content from 007 Novels

Following protests that greeted a decision by children’s book author Roald Dahl’s UK publisher to alter or “remove and update” language in his fiction which some young readers might find offensive (“An exercise in priggish stupidity,” lamented the Sydney Morning Herald), it was only to be expected that similar objections would attend an announcement that Ian Fleming Publications (IFP) has “commissioned a review by sensitivity readers of the classic texts under its control.”

This year we celebrate the 70th anniversary of British super-spy James Bond’s introduction to the world. In April, a new IFP edition of 1953’s Casino Royale, the first Agent 007 yarn, will begin a succession of reissues, all edited to “remove perceived racist content,” as The Book Bond explains. That blog goes on to quote from a report in Variety, which lays out some specific revisions being made, in particular to Fleming’s second Bond adventure, Live and Let Die (1954):

A commonly used pejorative term used for Black people by Fleming, whose Bond books were published between 1951 and 1966, has been removed almost entirely and replaced with “Black person” or “Black man.” In other instances, references have been edited.

For example, in “Live and Let Die” (1954), Bond’s opinion of Africans in the gold and diamond trades as “pretty law-abiding chaps I should have thought, except when they’ve drunk too much” has been altered to “pretty law-abiding chaps I should have thought.”

Another scene in the book, set during a strip tease at a Harlem nightclub, was originally “Bond could hear the audience panting and grunting like pigs at the trough. He felt his own hands gripping the tablecloth. His mouth was dry.” This has been revised to “Bond could sense the electric tension in the room.” A segment in the book describing accented dialogue as “straight Harlem-Deep South with a lot of New York thrown in,” has been removed.

In several of the books, including “Thunderball” (1961), “Quantum of Solace” (1960) and “Goldfinger” (1959), ethnicities have been removed.

IFP contends that many of these changes are in line with what Ian Fleming himself “would have wanted.” Returning to the matter of Live and Let Die, for instance, the company (which has taken over publication of this author’s books and short stories) notes that “The original U.S. version …, approved and apparently favored by Ian, had removed some racial terms which were problematic even in mid-1950s America, and would certainly be considered deeply offensive now by the vast majority of readers.” The Spy Command says IFP will bring “similar standards” to bear on other Fleming yarns: “Racial words ‘likely to cause great offense now, and detract from a reader’s enjoyment, have been altered, while keeping as close as possible to the original text and period.’”

Responses to this latter-day sanitizing have been mixed. Andrew Lycett, author of the 1996 biography, Ian Fleming: The Man Behind James Bond, writes in Britain’s Independent newspaper: “I feel strongly that what an author commits to paper is sacrosanct and shouldn’t be altered. It stands as evidence of that writer’s—and society’s—attitudes at a particular moment in time, whether it’s by Shakespeare, Dickens, or Ian Fleming. … [T]here’s no way Bond’s character in the Fleming books can be modified to make him politically correct. Fleming created a sexist, often sadistic, killer, with anachronistic attitudes to homosexuals, and to a range of people of different nationalities. These stand as evidence of how Britons (or at least some of them) thought at a particular moment in time.”

The Book Bond’s John Cox has a rather more equanimous perspective on this subject. “For me personally,” he says, “I want the original unedited texts. Full stop. … But I also understand IFP’s dilemma. They are marketing these editions to a mass audience and they have to deal with the times we are in. For those who want the unedited texts, you can certainly still find those. And maybe some day the texts will be returned to the original. I'm not sure if these changes will make these 70th anniversary editions more collectible or less so, but they better have some pretty spectacular cover art to overcome the taint that I think these will forever have for Fleming purists.”

READ MORE: “A Bond Is a Bond Is a Bond,” by John Cork (Double-O-Seven Magazine); “Phillip Kennedy Johnson Writes New James Bond for 70th Anniversary,” by Rich Johnston (Bleeding Cool).

In Case You Haven’t Heard …

• I’m fairly certain I have never read any works by Anglo-American author Alice Campbell. But In Reference to Murder says we may all have access to her entire oeuvre.

Dean Street Press is republishing the works of golden age crime novelist, Alice Campbell, beginning June 6th. They’ll be reissuing the first ten of her mysteries initially, with the remainder to follow next year. As the publisher noted, the novels are “not merely excellent detective stories, but atmospheric works of suspense, many set in France.” This is [the] first time these novels have been in print for over seventy years, and are prefaced by an introduction from crime-fiction historian Curtis Evans.

Campbell (1887-1955) came originally from Atlanta, Georgia, where she was part of the socially prominent Ormond family, before she moved to New York City at the age of nineteen and quickly became a socialist and women’s suffragist. She later moved to Paris, marrying the American-born artist and writer, James Lawrence Campbell, and ultimately to England just before World War One. Campbell wrote crime fiction until 1950, though many of her novels continued to have French settings. She published her first work (Juggernaut) in 1928 and published nineteen detective novels during her career.

The aforementioned Mr. Evans offers the covers from Dean Street’s first 10 Campbell reissues here, plus this look back at classic Campbell dust jackets. A decade ago, he also reviewed her sixth crime novel, Desire to Kill (1934), for Mystery*File. If you’d like to sample Campbell’s work yourself, Juggernaut is due for release on June 6.

• The May edition of Mike Ripley’s Shots column, “Getting Away with Murder,” carries news about fresh releases from Tom Bradby (Yesterday’s Spy), Anthony Horowitz (With a Mind to Kill), Jo Spain (The Last to Disappear), and William Shaw (Dead Rich, published under his pseudonym G.W. Shaw); a glance back at the crime novels Ripley touted a quarter-century ago; odd publisher’s freebies; and the results of a poll asking readers to name their favorite Harry Patterson/Jack Higgins novel (other than The Eagle Has Landed).

• In a piece for CrimeReads, Connie Berry, author of the new historical mystery The Shadow of Memory, offers “10 Reasons Why Victorian England Is the Perfect Setting for Murder.”

• The series Bosch: Legacy just debuted last Friday on Amazon-owned Freevee (formerly IMDb TV), but the show—a follow-up to Prime’s Bosch—has already been renewed for a second season.

• The Guardian compares Ian Fleming’s long-forgotten and “much more serious,” 1956 film treatment for his novel Moonraker to the “lightweight” Roger Moore picture brought to theaters in 1979.

• And here’s an unlikely result of global warming. The water level at Lake Mead, a reservoir created by the Hoover Dam and located not far east of Las Vegas, Nevada, “has dropped more than 170 feet since 1983,” says NBC News. As a result, the drinking water supplies of homes, casinos, and farms in the area are at risk—and some disappearances linked to Vegas’ underworld history may finally be solved. In early May, “boaters spotted the decomposed body of a man in a rusted barrel stuck in the mud of newly exposed shoreline. The corpse has not been identified, but Las Vegas police say he had been shot, probably between the mid-1970s and the early 1980s, according to the shoes found with him. The death is being investigated as a homicide. A few days later, a second barrel was found by a KLAS-TV news crew, not far from the first. It was empty.” NBC goes on to quote Michael Green, a history professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas as saying, “‘If the lake goes down much farther, it’s very possible we’re going to have some very interesting things surface. … I wouldn’t bet the mortgage that we’re going to solve who killed Bugsy Siegel,’ Green said, referring to the infamous gangster who opened the Flamingo in 1946 on what would become the Strip. Siegel was shot dead in 1947 in Beverly Hills, California. His assassin has never been identified. ‘But I would be willing to bet there are going to be a few more bodies,’ Green said.”

A Late-Career Addition to 007’s Saga

Since I very much enjoyed this British screenwriter-author’s first couple of Agent 007 adventures, Trigger Mortis (2015) and Forever and a Day (2018), this is terrific news to begin my Friday: “A third James Bond continuation novel by Anthony Horowitz is scheduled to be published next year ...,” managing editor Bill Koenig writes in The Spy Command. “The story picks up after the events of The Man with the Golden Gun [1965], Bond creator Ian Fleming’s final 007 novel.”

Horowitz tells The Bookseller, "I am very excited to have started my third Bond novel with the continuing support of the Ian Fleming estate. Forever and a Day looked at Bond’s first assignment. Trigger Mortis was mid-career. The new book begins with the death of Scaramanga and Bond’s return from Jamaica to confront an old enemy.”

This author’s next Bond yarn will follow the publication of A Line to Kill, Horowitz’s third Daniel Hawthorne novel. It’s set to debut in the UK this coming August, and in the States in October.

Koenig adds that “Today’s announcement comes on the 113th anniversary of the birth of Bond’s creator.”

A Monday Morning Medley

• Double O Section brings word that, five years after its development was initially announced, the William Boyd-created, Cold War-backdropped series Spy City finally appears to be taking off: “Originally set up as a 10-part series at Gaumont, Deadline reports that Boyd’s vision will finally come to life as a 6-part series for Miramax and Germany’s H&V Entertainment and ZDF.” The show will star Dominic Cooper (of Agent Carter and Fleming fame) as “a British agent dispatched to Berlin in 1961 to root out a traitor in the UK Embassy or among the Allies, shortly before the construction of the Berlin Wall. ‘The city, declared by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev as “the most dangerous place on earth,” is teeming with spies and double agents. One wrong move could trigger the looming threat of nuclear war as American, British and French troops in West Berlin remain separated from their Soviet and East German counterparts by nothing more than an imaginary line.’” No debut date has yet been publicized.

• Maine author Lea Wait, who penned the Mainely Needlepoint Mysteries series, the Shadows Antique Print mysteries, and the Maine Murder Mystery series, died on August 9 of pancreatic cancer, according to this obituary in Janet Rudolph’s Mystery Fanfare. Wait was 73 years old. Her latest Needlepoint Mystery, Thread on Arrival, was published in April 2019, and she has another, Thread and Buried, due out this coming November. In The Gumshoe Site, Jiro Kimura recalls that Lea Wait was “the single mother of four adopted daughters,” and Shadows at the Fair (2002)—the first novel in her Shadows Antique Print series featuring Maggie Summer—was nominated for the 2003 Agatha Award for Best First Novel.

• Somehow, I missed seeing this news before: Brash Books, which has already published a couple of novels by the late British screenwriter and director, Jimmy Sangster (Touchfeather and Touchfeather, Too), is bringing back into print Sangster’s trilogy of hard-boiled thrillers starring former Scotland Yard detective and now self-styled beach bum James Reed. The first of those books, Snowball (1986), came out at the end of July. Hardball (1988) is due for re-release later this month, with Blackball (1987) to follow. Meanwhile, Brash paperback editions of Sangster’s two John Smith espionage novels, The Spy Killer (aka Private I, 1967) and Foreign Exchange (1968), should turn up in stores come September.

• Although he died in February 2018, author Bill Crider is far from forgotten. Designer Richard Greene notes in Facebook that Issue 104 of Paperback Parade (left)—currently being printed—features a tribute to the Texas creator of Sheriff Dan Rhodes.

• Happy 10th anniversary to Do Some Damage!

• I learned this last weekend that publication of the non-fiction book Sticking It to the Man: Revolution and Counterculture in Pulp and Popular Fiction, 1950 to 1980, edited by Andrew Nette and Iain McIntyre (PM Press)—a work to which I contributed a piece—has been postponed until October 1. Grrr!

• The Web site BookRiot is proving to be a useful cheerleader for Polis Books’ brand-new crime-fiction imprint, Agora, which it says will “focus on diverse voices, putting out between six and ten books per year.” Under the direction of Polis founder Jason Pinter and editor Chantelle Aimée Osman, the Agora line is being readied for a September launch. BookRiot takes a peek at some of those Agora titles due out this fall, as well as others for 2020—fresh works by John Vercher, Patricia Smith, Gary Phillips, and others.

• This is an unexpected turn. From In Reference to Murder:

In one of the biggest surprises this past pilot season, ABC’s NYPD Blue reboot did not go to series but was kept in midseason contention with a possibility for redevelopment. It now appears that particular iteration of NYPD Blue, a sequel to the original Emmy-winning series, is dead. However, it’s not the end of NYPD Blue’s comeback at the network, which aired the iconic 1990s cop drama series. According to ABC Entertainment president Karey Burke, “There are conversations about continuing it but possibly in a different iteration.” The recent NYPD Blue pilot starred newcomer Fabien Frankel and co-starred original cast members Kim Delaney and Bill Brochtrup. The sequel centers on Theo (Frankel), the son of Dennis Franz’s Detective Andy Sipowicz character from the original series, who tries to earn his detective shield and work in the 15th squad while investigating his father’s murder.

• Will Lee Child join the judging panel for the 2020 Booker Prize? The Bookseller quotes Child biographer Andy Martin as saying that the author of the Jack Reacher thriller series, who “also won Author of the Year at this year’s British Book Awards and has sold 13.2 million books for £80m, would be a ‘natural’ judge. ‘Lee’s a natural because he reads so many books already (300 a year roughly). Although he is a commercial writer, there is an intellectual, professorial side to him. As he says, he is “100% commerce, 100% art.”’”

• Editor Elizabeth Foxwell alerts me to the fact that the latest installment in her McFarland Companions to Mystery Fiction series—this one focusing on the works of Ian Rankin—is due out in February 2020. The volume, she explains in her blog, “provides a comprehensive examination of Rankin’s writing career, including short stories that the Scottish author had forgotten he had written and interesting sidelights such as the Rebus play Long Shadows.”

• The sixth and newest episode of the Paperback Warrior Podcast examines “the mysterious career of author and publisher Peter McCurtin,” notes host Tom Simon. “We examine McCurtin’s Escape from Devil’s Island as well as [offer] two new reviews—[of] Duel in the Snow by German author Hans Meissner and the debut Malko novel, West of Jerusalem by Gerard De Villiers.” Listen here.

• It was on this date in 1964 that “Ian Fleming, a World War II naval intelligence officer, journalist and author of the James Bond thrillers, died.” He was only 56 years old.

• Following last week’s news that the 1981-1991 British TV series Bergerac may be rebooted for modern audiences, World of Shaft author Steve Aldous has posted a short review of the original show’s first episode, starring John Nettles.

• Classic Film and TV Café revisits 1973’s “gritty, urban cop picture,” The Seven-Ups, starring Roy Scheider and featuring a 10-minute car chase that’s arguably “the best … in movie history.”

• In the wake of America’s most recent mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio—and Republican Donald Trump’s resistance to gun reforms—The Washington Post’s Ronald G. Shafer looks back in this piece to the 1930s, when a rash of gangsters wielding Thompson submachine guns convinced a very different president, Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt, to champion what was known unofficially as the “Anti-Machine Gun Bill.” As Shafer recalls, “Rather than a federal ban on machine guns, the Roosevelt administration proposed taxing the high-powered weapons virtually out of existence. It would place a $200 tax on the purchase of machine guns and sawed-off shotguns. The tax—equal to about $3,800 today—was steep at a time when the average annual income was about $1,780.” Although “Congress eventually stripped the bill of regulations on pistols and revolvers,” it “passed the firearms act in June [1934[, and Roosevelt signed it into law along with more than 100 other bills.” Why do the White House and Congress today lack the same sort of courage to take decisive action in defense of American lives?

Sex, Sadism, and Centipedes

I might well have forgotten all about this, had it not been for the blog Spy Vibe, which mentioned earlier this morning that

Ian Fleming's sixth James Bond novel, Dr. No, was published on this day in 1958. With elements such as the villain’s steel-pincer hands, a flame-throwing tractor/dragon, a killer centipede, death traps, tests of pain, and a climactic fight with a giant cephalopod, Dr. No is perhaps one [of] the most Pulp-styled adventures in the series.

If you are in the mood for a bit of celebrating, click here to see Killer Covers’ delightful selection of Dr. No book covers produced over the decades. And click here to watch the trailer for the 1962 Sean Connery version of Dr. No—the first big-screen outing for Agent 007.

Additionally, Spy Vibe notes that “Ian Fleming Publications celebrates the novel’s release today in a 60th-anniversary post of excerpts from period reviews and Fleming’s text from the novel.

Bullet Points: Pre-Solar Eclipse Edition

• Things are definitely shaping up for this year’s Bloody Scotland International Crime Writing Festival, set to take place in Stirling, Scotland, from September 8 to 10. We already welcomed the longlist of nominees for the 2017 McIlvanney Prize, and pored over the general convention program. Now comes the list of “exciting new authors” in the genre who’ve been asked to participate in Bloody Scotland’s “Crime in the Spotlight” presentations, meaning they’ll act sort of like warm-up bands for better-known wordsmiths. Shotsmag Confidential observes that “Two years ago Graeme Macrae Burnet appeared ‘in the spotlight’ immediately before Ian Rankin, one year later he was shortlisted for the Man Booker. It’s a great opportunity to perform in front of a vast audience of potential fans.”

• It’s regrettable news, indeed, that an upcoming movie featuring Ernest Tidyman’s renowned black Manhattan private eye, John Shaft, “is going to be definitely not straight action. We’re going action-comedy or comedy-action, I’m not exactly sure which one comes first,” explains this big-screen reboot’s director, Tim Story. As Steve Aldous, UK author of The World of Shaft, grumbles in his blog: “I hold no confidence [this production] will add anything positive to the Shaft legacy.”

• On the other hand, a trailer for The Deuce—the David Simon/George Pelecanos-created drama scheduled to premiere on HBO-TV come Sunday, September 10—looks fabulous! As Criminal Element explains, the eight-episode first season of this series “explores the rise of the porn culture in New York during the 1970s and ’80s, as a cultural revolution in American sexuality met a change in the legal definitions of obscenity to create the billion-dollar industry it is today.” James Franco and Maggie Gyllenhaal star in the show, but also noteworthy is that novelists Richard Price, Megan Abbott, and Lisa Lutz have all taken a hand in writing for the program.

• Was recent hand-wringing in the press over whether Daniel Craig would return to star in the as-yet-unnamed 25th James Bond film unwarranted? Had Craig pledged himself to the project long ago? The Spy Command sifts through the evidence.

• R.I.P., Blanche Blackwell, described by The Washington Post as “a member of one of Jamaica’s richest families but … best known as the mistress and muse of Ian Fleming, the rakish author who was the creator of James Bond.” She died on August 8 at age 104.

• In an interview with BBC Radio, Ian Fleming's actress niece, Lucy Fleming, remarks on how the on-screen 007s have evolved over time “to reflect the generation they are made in.” Today, she says, “you need a tougher, more ruthless Bond than we did in 1960s.”

• And The Book Bond brings news that Vintage Classics is readying yet another fresh series of covers for Fleming’s spy novels.

• In the wake of last week’s announcement of finalists for Australia’s 2017 Ned Kelly Awards, the Australian Crime Writers Association—in partnership with the crime-fiction Web site Kill Your Darlings—has broadcast its shortlist of contenders for this year’s S.D. Harvey Short Story Competition, honoring the late Sydney journalist/TV producer Sandra Harvey. The nominees are:

— “Rules to Live By,” by Louise Bassett
— “The Ridge,” by Katherine Kovacic
— “The Enthusiastic Amateur,” by Melanie Myers
— “Shafted,” by Roni O’Brien
— “Flesh,” by Stephen Samuel
— “How to Cease Being a Man Killer,” by Roger Vickery

A winner as well as a runner-up will be declared on September 1 during the annual Ned Kelly Awards Presentation in Melbourne, Victoria.

• This item comes from In Reference to Murder:

The Malice Domestic conference announced that Brenda Blethyn will be the Poirot Award Honoree for the 2017 conference. Ms. Blethyn is an Academy Award- and Emmy-nominated, Golden Globe-winning actress who stars as DCI Vera Stanhope in the series Vera, based on the books by Ann Cleeves. She joins the already-announced lineup that includes Guest of Honor Louise Penny; Toastmaster Catriona McPherson; Lifetime Achievement Award winner Nancy Pickard; Amelia Award winner David Suchet; and Fan Guest of Honor Janet Blizard.

• Only after posting my list of favorite crime-fiction blogs last week did it occur to me that I had neglected to mention Sarah Weinman’s The Crime Lady. Of course, that’s not a blog or a Web site, but is instead a once-or-twice-a-month newsletter, and I wasn’t focused on such things when compiling my recommendations. Nonetheless, The Crime Lady deserves reader attention. The New York-based Weinman, who for a long time wrote the excellent blog Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind, and subsequently edited Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s & ’50s, addresses crime and mystery fiction in her newsletter, as well as true-crime subjects, and always brings insight to her writing. You will find an archive of The Crime Lady here, and you can subscribe to it by clicking here.

• Speaking of Weinman’s bulletins, the last edition featured an interview with Mattias Boström, the Swedish author of From Holmes to Sherlock: The Story of the Men and Women Who Created an Icon (Mysterious Press). She describes his new book as a “narrative history paced like a suspense novel, and packed full of information about [Arthur] Conan Doyle, the early wild success of Holmes & Watson, and the century-plus since of how the characters were transformed in books, film, television, radio, podcasts, and fanfic.”

• Other recent author interviews worth your time: Augustus Rose talks with the Chicago Review of Books about his new novel, The Readymade Thief; Rose is also interviewed for the Speaking of Mysteries podcast by Nancie Clare, whose other latest program guest was Rachel Howzell Hall (City of Saviors); Mystery Playground chats with Karin Slaughter about The Good Daughter; Boston native Adam Abramowitz is quizzed by both DigBoston and Jewish Boston about his debut thriller, Bosstown; and MysteryPeople engages in conversation with Traci Lambrecht about Nothing Stays Buried, the last Monkeewrench gang yarn she co-wrote—under the pseudonym P.J. Tracy—with her mother, P.J. Lambrecht, who passed away late last year.

• Whodunit writer Bonnie “B.K.” Stevens died “suddenly” on August 14, according to The Gumshoe Site. It goes on to explain:

The former college professor had the old dream of becoming a fiction writer and started writing mystery short stories. The fourth story, “True Detective,” introducing Lt. Walt Johnson and Sgt. Gordon Bolt, was sold and printed in the June 1988 issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine (AHMM). She contributed a number of short stories mostly for AHMM and sometimes for Woman’s World, featuring Johnson & Bolt, female private eye Iphigenia Woodhouse, and temp secretary/amateur sleuth Leah Abrams. She published both her first novel, Interpretation of Murder (Black Opal Books), featuring sign language interpreter Jane Ciardi, and her second one, Fighting Chance (Poisoned Pen Press), a martial arts mystery for teens, in 2015. Her recent novella, “The Last Blue Glass” (AHMM, April 2016) has been nominated for Agatha and Anthony Awards.

Mystery Fanfare’s obituary of Stevens includes her husband’s painful Facebook announcement that “the greatest wife, friend, and companion a man could have” collapsed at the Suffolk, Virginia, Mystery Writers’ Festival “and never recovered.” Our sympathies go out to all of Stevens’ family.

• Art Taylor offers up his own fine remembrance of B.K. Stevens, in SleuthSayers. “Both professionally and personally,” he concludes, “Bonnie Stevens was one of my dearest friends, and her death is sudden and sharply felt—a loss to all of us in the mystery community. I will miss her in so very many ways.”

• Also gone is Brooklyn-born actor Joseph Bologna, who The New York Times said “looked like the quintessential tough guy but couldn’t seem to resist writing and playing sensitive male characters who longed for love and commitment in films like ‘Lovers and Other Strangers’ and ‘Made for Each Other.’” Over the course of his career, Bologna appeared as well on TV series such as L.A. Law, Burke’s Law, Marshall Law (do you detect a pattern here?), Everwood, and CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. He died on August 13 at 82 years of age.

• Now, that’s incredible! The underappreciated 1973-1974 NBC-TV drama The Magician—which I initially wrote about in The Rap Sheet 11 years ago—is finally set to receive a complete video release, according to TV Shows on DVD. The on-sale date is supposed to be next Friday, August 25. I don’t yet find it available on Amazon, but Toronto-based home video distribution company VEI has made the show available for “preorder.” As TV Shows on DVD recalls, this series starred “Bill Bixby … as master stage magician Tony Blake [originally Anthony Dorian], a playboy philanthropist who uses his talents as an illusionist to solve crimes and help others in need. After being falsely imprisoned, Blake escapes and uses his unjust imprisonment as a motivator to seek justice for others.” Only 21 hour-long weekly episodes of The Magician were made, along with a 90-minute pilot, and the show underwent serious mid-season adjustments, during which Blake lost his private Boeing 720 jet and relocated from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Still, I enjoyed Bixby’s series enough that several years ago I tracked down and bought bootleg copies of all the episodes. Should I now add the official DVD release to my collection of vintage TV shows? Click here to watch the pilot’s opening title sequence.

• “American movies changed 50 years ago, when two seemingly unassailable outlaws met a parade of bullets and became the ultimate antiheroes.” So writes Matthew Jacobs in The Huffington Post, noting it was on August 13, 1967, that the Warren Beatty/Faye Dunaway film Bonnie and Clyde opened in theaters. The violent, sexy yarn director Arthur Penn wove had only a scant relationship to the real story of small-time Depression-era outlaws Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. But as Jacobs asserts, it has become a “hip and bold” classic.

• Thanks to the podcast Serial, literary true crime/memoir hybrids are currently on the rise, according to Slate’s Laura Miller.

• I like to think of myself as being quite well read in the field of classic mystery novels, but this lengthy list from BuzzFeed reminds me that I still have more work to do.

• Mystery Tribune reports that television’s “Hallmark Channel is looking for original mystery and suspense manuscripts.” It goes on to note that “The channel is particularly interested in romances and mysteries that also celebrate friendship, family, and/or community ties.” Then it delivers this cause for head shaking: “All stories must have happy endings.” Yeah, that’s the Hallmark Channel for you.

• Philip Kerr’s The Other Side of Silence, his 11th historical thriller starring Berlin ex-cop Bernie Gunther, was originally released in hardcover in 2016. But the paperback edition came out this year—much to critic Jim Napier’s delight, as he explains in January Magazine.

• Bill Crider submits his new Sheriff Dan Rhodes mystery, Dead, to Begin With (Minotaur), to Marshal Zerigue’s infamous Page 69 Test.

• Most book trailers are pretty lame, in my opinion. But this one, promoting Australian Sarah Schmidt’s creepy new literary look back at the 1892 Lizzie Borden homicides, See What I Have Done (Atlantic Monthly Press), is positively haunting.

• For the Strand Magazine blog, Jason Pinter—the publisher of Polis Books and the author most recently of a well-received political thriller titled The Castle (Armina Press)—names half a dozen other works in that same subgenre that he thinks we should all read. And yes, David Baldacci’s Absolute Power is included.

• Finally, there’s still no word yet on whether Grantchester, the 1950s-set British mystery TV series that concluded its Season 3 run on Masterpiece Mystery! last month, will return with a fourth set of episodes. A blog called Telly Visions (yeah, I hadn’t heard of it before either) quotes author James Runcie (not “Ruchie”) as saying the problem lies primarily with star James Norton, “who has ‘gotten too popular.’ Speaking to The Sun, he complained that since Norton’s turn on [the BBC One crime drama] Happy Valley, the actor is now a ‘hot property.’” So we continue to wait on tenterhooks for updates.