Tess to the Tube

This is a bit of good news, from Deadline:

Laura Lippman’s series of books following private investigator Tess Monaghan may soon hit the small screen: Tomorrow Studios (The Better Sister, One Piece) has acquired the series.

Lippman, a New York Times bestselling author, will co-write the television series with Edgar-winning author Megan Abbott. The Tess Monaghan series follows the investigative pursuits of Tess Monaghan, a former reporter turned private investigator in Baltimore. Each book explores intricate plots with intriguing characters in Baltimore’s diverse neighborhoods.

(Hat tip to In Reference to Murder.)

For Your Entertainment

• Not being an Apple TV+ subscriber, I haven’t yet begun watching Lady in the Lake, the seven-part series based on Laura Lippman’s 2019 novel of that same title. But it premiered last Friday, July 19. The Guardian offers the following plot synopsis:

This is the story of two Baltimore women in the 1960s: affluent white Jewish housewife and mother Maddie Schwartz [played by Natalie Portman] and Black, all-but-single mother Cleo [Moses Ingram] who is working three jobs to try to lift herself and her children out of the life of struggle that otherwise beckons, and away from the temptations and dangers offered by the underbelly of the city.

Their lives begin to converge when a child, Tessie, goes missing at the Thanksgiving Day parade. The indifference of Maddie’s husband, Milton (Brett Gelman), triggers a fury in his long-frustrated wife, who ends up finding Tessie’s body herself and leaving Milton and her son, Seth (Noah Jupe), to start afresh. The only place she can afford on her own is in a Black area [of Baltimore, Maryland] and even that requires faking a robbery of her insured jewellery when she falls behind in rent. As the investigation into Tessie’s murder continues, Maddie’s latent journalistic ambitions stir and she begins to claw her way into the favour of the Baltimore Sun.

Guardian critic Lucy Mangan calls this mini-series “altogether masterly” and “an incredibly sumptuous and fearless aesthetic experience.” She goes on to write: “The whole endeavour is a dense, clever, impeccably written, acted, shot and scored offering that is designed to be consumed slowly, episode by episode, not binged. You may finish each one feeling slightly battered and exhausted—perhaps more impressed than moved, but that’s OK. Give it a few days to bed in and the love will come.”

Lady in the Lake will run through August 23. A trailer is below.



• In Reference to Murder reports that “Michael Mann is making a sequel to his 1995 film Heat and is working on writing the screenplay, which is based on the novel Heat 2 that he co-authored with Meg Gardiner. Mann told the Los Angeles Times that he wants to begin shooting the film by the end of 2024 or the beginning of 2025. Heat followed the conflict between LAPD detective Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino) and a career thief, Neil McCauley (Robert DeNiro), and also starred Val Kilmer as McCauley's right-hand man. Heat 2 will function as both a prequel and a sequel to Heat, jumping between two time periods. Although there's no word official yet on casting, Adam Driver and Austin Butler are rumored to be taking over DeNiro and Kilmer’s roles.”

• Sherlock Holmes once again demonstrates his durability, as Deadline brings more news about the casting of Young Sherlock, a Prime Video series from director Guy Ritchie. The latest recruit is English actor Colin Firth, who is slated to play a character with a mouthful of a moniker, Sir Bucephalus Hodge. He joins previously confirmed cast members Hero Fiennes, Zine Tseng, Joseph Fiennes, and Natascha McElhone. “Written by Matthew Parkhill [and] inspired by Andy Lane’s Young Sherlock Holmes book series, the show re-imagines Sherlock Holmes at age 19,” Deadline explains. “Disgraced, raw, unfiltered, and unformed, he finds himself caught up in a murder mystery at Oxford University which threatens his freedom. Diving into his first-ever case with a wild lack of discipline, Sherlock (Fiennes Tiffin) manages to unravel a globe-trotting conspiracy that will change his life forever.” Filming of Young Sherlock began earlier this month.

• Speaking of Prime, we have finally received word that the crime thriller series Cross—produced by and starring Aldis Hodge—will debut on that Amazon premium channel come November 14. It is based on James Patterson’s long-running succession of novels about Alex Cross, described by Deadline as “a detective and forensic psychologist, uniquely capable of digging into the psyches of killers and their victims, to identify—and ultimately capture—the murderers.” I recall Hodge fondly from Leverage and its sequel, Leverage: Redemption; it’ll be nice to see him back on the small screen. He will be joined on Cross by Isaiah Mustafa, Juanita Jennings, Alona Tal, Samantha Walkes, Caleb Elijah, and others. Ben Watkins, formerly of Truth Be Told and Burn Notice, will serve as the drama’s showrunner.

• Tucked deep in this Variety piece about the influential Hollywood talent agency Independent Artists Group is news that a series adapted from John Connolly’s “beloved novels about the detective Charlie Parker” is in “early development” by Village Roadshow Television. Its producers include Colin Farrell and Bryan Cranston.

• A final TV-related note: Filming of the second season of Peacock’s Poker Face, starring Natasha Lyonne and created by Rian Johnson (Knives Out), began on July 1. Among the guest stars signed to appear in the new episodes, says Variety, are Giancarlo Esposito, Katie Holmes, Gaby Hoffmann, and Kumail Nanjiani. Lyonne directed one of those forthcoming installments.

Women on the Case

Laura Lippman earns her second mention in The Rap Sheet this week, thanks to the following news item from In Reference to Murder:

Apple TV+ released a first-look at its upcoming limited seven-part series, Lady in the Lake, ahead of its premiere on Friday, July 19. The film is based on Laura Lippman’s bestselling [2020] novel of the same name and takes place in ’60s Baltimore. An unsolved murder pushes housewife and mother Maddie Schwartz (Natalie Portman) to reinvent her life as an investigative journalist and sets her on a collision course with Cleo Sherwood (Moses Ingram), a hardworking woman juggling motherhood, many jobs, and a passionate commitment to advancing Baltimore’s Black progressive agenda.

Speaking of propitious book-to-screen ventures, Variety reports that “Elizabeth Banks and Jessica Biel are set to headline a series adaptation of the Alafair Burke novel The Better Sister at Amazon Prime Video.” It goes on to describe the story as a thriller about “Chloe (Biel), who moves through the world with her handsome lawyer husband Adam and teenage son Ethan by her side, while her estranged sister Nicky (Banks) hustles to make ends meet while trying to stay clean … When Adam is brutally murdered, the prime suspect sends shockwaves through the family, laying bare long-buried secrets.”

Lippman and the Lieutenant

Peter Falk in his famous role as Lieutenant Columbo.

This last weekend brought the 16th CrimeFest convention to Bristol, England. Although, much to my regret, I was unable to be there in person, I did play a modest role in its programming.

Two months ago, author and past chair of the Crime Writers’ Association Maxim Jakubowski sent me the following e-mail note:

For the past 10 years or so, I’ve run the Criminal Mastermind quiz at the Bristol CrimeFest. It’s a mystery and thriller variation on a highly popular British TV programme where participants have to answer a set of questions on both a specialist subject and then on general knowledge.

Laura Lippman has agreed to participate and as her specialist subject chosen the Columbo TV series!

I was wondering whether you’d be willing to set these questions, in view of your own expertise and knowledge of the subject? I’d need 20 or so questions by mid-April ranging from easy to more arduous. The questions should be around 2 lines long. Would you be willing?

Now, I can’t legitimately claim to be a Columbo “authority,” not like writers Mark Dawidziak (The Columbo Phile) and David Koenig (Shooting Columbo and Unshot Columbo), or the anonymous Australian author of The Columbophile Blog. But I have written about that long-running series for The Rap Sheet on many occasions (notably here), and did score a lengthy interview with Columbo co-creator William Link back in 2010. Plus, I own all of the episodes (if not the later teleflicks, which I have never thought quite measured up to the original NBC Mystery Movie drama), as well as Link’s 2010 short-story compilation, The Columbo Collection. So I am at least a fan.

After pondering the matter, I finally deciding to take Jakubowski up on his invitation. It sounded like fun, and the opportunity to test the popular culture competence of Laura Lippman—a novelist I very much respect—at a British crime-fiction convention I hope to someday attend was simply too enticing to pass up.

In the end, I sent Jakubowski 21 questions, just to be sure he had enough good ones from which to choose. I arranged them in descending order, beginning with those I thought were the least challenging and finishing with others that might test a real Columbo nerd’s knowledge. My questions were finally posed to Lippman midday on Sunday, as part of this year’s Criminal Mastermind quiz. Joining her as contestants were Stuart Field, creator of the Detective John Steel thrillers, who had volunteered to answer trivia questions about M.J. Craven’s Washington Poe novels; and Zoë Sharp, fielding queries about the Amazon Prime TV series Reacher, which had been submitted by my friend and fellow Rap Sheet contributor, Ali Karim.

(Left to right) Novelists Zoë Sharp, Stuart Field, and Laura Lippman prepare to meet the challenge of this year’s CrimeFest Criminal Mastermind quiz. (Photo © Ali Karim 2024.)

So how did Laura Lippman fare against my trivia test? “Very well—she is a Columbo fan,” Ali tells me. “And she enjoyed your questions, though she did say they were tough (with a twinkle in her eye), as she got most of them correct.” There was evidently some controversy regarding the breed of the Los Angeles police detective’s dog, but Ali suggests that was provoked by Jakubowski trying to pull Lippman’s leg. (It seems the attendees all had a good laugh about it.) In the end, Lippman earned second place in this quiz, behind Zoë Sharp.

Are you curious about your own Columbo expertise? Rather than shove my quiz questions into a dusty corner of my computer, and forget about them, I have decided to post them below. See how many you can answer. The correct responses can be found here.

1: Richard Levinson and William Link co-created the series, but how many of the shows in which Columbo appeared did they actually write?

2: Link said that he and Levinson never had a first name in mind for Columbo. But in a Season 1 episode, we got a quick screen shot of the lieutenant’s LAPD badge, which featured a first name. What was it?

3: Columbo came from a large Italian family. How many siblings did he have?

4: Columbo often arrives hungry at murder scenes in the middle of the night. What snack item does he commonly bring with him?

5: What musical instrument can Columbo play?

6: Columbo once said that his boyhood hero was who?

7: Name the single most featured recurring guest character on the show.

8: What was his dog’s favorite food?

9: In the Season 10 episode “No Time to Die,” Columbo says that he and his never-seen wife were married where?

10: And what was said to be Mrs. Columbo’s favorite piece of music?

11: Columbo episodes generally followed an “inverted mystery” format, showing the crime taking place first and then having Lieutenant Columbo solve it. But there was one episode that reversed that format, and was a genuine whodunit—what was the episode’s title?

12: Peter Falk personally supplied the tatty wardrobe for his L.A. police detective. He purchased the famous raincoat from a store on 57th Street in New York City when he was caught in a rainstorm in 1967. How much did he pay for that garment?

13: Columbo drove a battered and unreliable 1959 (or 1960) Peugeot 403 convertible. Over the course of the show’s 69-episode run—first on NBC-TV, then on ABC—that car sported two different license plate numbers. What was the second one?

14: In only one episode did Lieutenant Columbo let the killer get away with the crime. Which episode was that, and who was its big-name guest murderer?

15: “Forgotten Lady” was one of Peter Falk’s four favorite Columbo episodes. Name one of the other three.

16: Beginning with an ad-libbed performance in the Season 3 episode “Any Old Port in a Storm,” Columbo is periodically heard whistling a traditional children’s song. What is it?

17: It was a love of magic that first brought Levinson and Link together, when they were boys and shopped at the same magic store in downtown Philadelphia. But it wasn’t until Season 5 that they and their writing collaborators finally built an episode around magic. What was the name of that episode, and who played the illusionist?

18: Speaking of that episode, the solution to its crime turned on a once-ubiquitous piece of office equipment. What was that instrument?

19: Columbo’s first police assignment was with New York City’s 12th Precinct. There he trained under an Irish officer who mentored him and who he mentions often. What was that officer’s name?

20: Even before Lieutenant Columbo’s first introduction to TV audiences, in “Enough Rope,” a 1960 Chevy Mystery Show production that starred Bert Freed in the role, Levinson and Link created a prototype for the character in “Dear Corpus Delicti,” a short story they sold to Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine in 1960. What name did they give to their slight, seemingly insignificant police detective in that story?

21: During the early 2000s, Falk was asked by a newspaper reporter which other actor he could have imagined playing Columbo instead of him. Who did he suggest? (Hint: It wasn’t Bing Crosby.)

I don’t how many of these 21 queries “inquizitor” Jakubowski had a chance to fire at Lippman, or which of them she answered without fault. But the big question is, how did you do at this same game? Please let us all know in the Comments section of this post.

Bullet Points: March Gladness Edition

• I despise having broken links in The Rap Sheet, so I’m leery of writing about YouTube videos, as those things have a habit of disappearing suddenly and without explanation. Nonetheless, I would be remiss were I not to point out the unexpected availability there of Cutter, a 1972 pilot film for what its developers hoped would become a new NBC Mystery Movie segment. Scripted by Dean Hargrove and directed by Richard Irving, this 90-minute feature starred Peter DeAnda (1938-2016) as Frank Cutter, a black, Texas-reared Chicago private investigator in the John Shaft mode, who was hired to find a missing football quarterback. Former High Chaparral regular Cameron Mitchell guest-starred, along with Barbara Rush, Robert Webber, Janet MacLachlan, and ex-vaudevillian Stepin Fetchit. Protagonist Cutter came off as cool, sophisticated, but with ample street toughness when he needed it. He had an answering service, but no office. His seeming preference for white women added a daring-for-the-time element to the story, and an ambulance pursuit in the dénouement brought at least some novelty to the usual TV car chase scene.



I’d been looking for Cutter online for a decade, before I finally stumbled on it last week. While I enjoyed watching this picture as a cultural artifact, I can’t imagine a subsequent series succeeding alongside McCloud, McMillan & Wife, and Banacek. Apparently, NBC executives were of a like mind, for they passed on Cutter in favor of Tenafly, another show about an African-American gumshoe (played by James McEachin), but one who was rather less courageous and prosperous. Cutter’s opening title sequence is embedded above. Oliver Nelson, who also composed music for It Takes a Thief, The Name of the Game, and Ironside, gave us the Cutter theme.

• Another notable YouTube offering is Charlie Cobb: Nice Night for a Hanging (1977). Again the pilot for a prospective NBC series, it finds Clu Gulager playing Charles A. Cobb, a cheapskate, unabashedly unheroic private detective working the dusty trails of America’s Old West. This really quite enjoyable movie has Cobb being employed by a rancher to find and return his long-lost daughter, kidnapped many years before. Blair Brown puts in a fine performance as the said kidnappee, with Ralph Bellamy, Stella Stevens, and Pernell Roberts helping to further fill out the cast. The pilot was written by Peter S. Fischer, and executive produced by Columbo creators William Link and Richard Levinson, with music by Mike Post and Pete Carpenter.

• March marks a full half-century since the big-screen debut of Get Carter, the British crime film starring Michael Caine and adapted from Ted Lewis’ 1970 novel, Jack’s Return Home. In CrimeReads, author and pop-culture critic Andrew Nette examines that movie’s history and lasting impact, while in Shotsmag Confidential, Nick Triplow contemplates Lewis’ past and how his novel influences planning for England’s second Hull Noir festival.

• There’s been plenty of awards news lately, beginning with finalists for the 2021 Lambda Literary Awards. I count 24 categories of contenders this year. Those include the following five nominees under the LGBTQ Mystery heading:

— Death Before Dessert, by A.E. Radley (Heartsome)
— Find Me When I’m Lost, by Cheryl A. Head (Bywater)
— Fortune Favors the Dead, Stephen Spotswood, Doubleday
— I Hope You’re Listening, by Tom Ryan (Albert Whitman)
— Vera Kelly Is Not a Mystery, by Rosalie Knecht (Tin House)

Curiously, there’s only one “Lammys” category for mystery novels this time around. Previous years have offered separate Gay Mystery and Lesbian Mystery lists. Winners are expected to be announced during a virtual ceremony on June 1.

• Walter Mosley is competing for a 2021 NAACP Image Award in the Outstanding Literary Works category. Under consideration is not one of his many crime novels, but instead his 2020 diverse short-story collection, The Awkward Black Man (Grove Atlantic). Mystery Fanfare has more here. Image Award recipients will be celebrated during a March 27 event, to be televised on BET.

• Icelandic author Yrsa Sigurðardóttir’s latest standalone work, Bráðin (The Prey), has received the Icelandic Blood Drop Award (Blóðdropinn) for the best crime novel of 2020. As Shotsmag Confidential explains, “The ‘Blood Drop’ Award is a crime fiction prize, hosted by Crime Writers of Iceland. The novel that receives the prize becomes the Icelandic nomination for the Glass Key, an award given annually to a crime novel from one of the Nordic countries—Iceland, Denmark, Finland, Sweden and Norway. Usually, every Icelandic crime novel published each year is automatically nominated.”

• Last but not least, Winter Counts (Echo)—David Heska Wanbli Weiden’s debut work in the crime-fiction field—has captured the 2021 Spur Awards for both Best Contemporary Novel and Best First Novel. The annual Spur Awards are sponsored by the Western Writers of America (WWA), and are designed to “honor writers for distinguished writing about the American West,” according to Wikipedia. The full tally of this year’s Spur champs is available here. Weiden, an enrolled citizen of the Sicangu Lakota nation, will be applauded along with the other winners during the WWA’s convention in Loveland, Colorado, to held June 16-19.

• As regular Rap Sheet readers know, I wasn’t exactly thrilled by news that 64-year-old British actress Lesley Manville had been hired to portray books editor-cum-investigator Susan Ryeland in a six-part small-screen adaptation of Anthony Horowitz’s 2017 whodunit, Magpie Murders; I would have preferred somebody a bit younger (Horowitz imagined Ryeland being in her mid-40s), with greater potential to earn audience sympathy, such as Jodie Whittaker. However, I am pleased to hear that Timothy Spall (The King’s Speech, Mr. Turner) will undertake the plum role of fictitious half-Greek, half-German detective Atticus Pünd is that same Eleventh Hour Films/PBS production. I look forward next to hearing who’ll fill the shoes of prickly Alan Conway, one of Ryeland’s authors and the creator of series sleuth Pünd.

• Meanwhile, Deadline reports that actresses Natalie Portman and Lupita Nyong’o have been engaged to star in an Apple TV+ limited-run drama based on Laura Lippman’s 2019 standalone novel, Lady in the Lake. According to Deadline,

The series will be directed by Honey Boy director Alma Har’el, who co-created and will co-write with Colony and The Man in the High Castle writer Dre Ryan. Lady in the Lake is produced by Jean-Marc Vallée’s Crazyrose and Bad Wolf America, the U.S. arm of the His Dark Materials producer. Endeavor Content is the studio. Har’el is writing the pilot episode.

The limited series takes place in ’60s Baltimore, where an unsolved murder pushes housewife and mother, Maddie Schwartz, played by Portman, to reinvent her life as an investigative journalist and sets her on a collision course with Cleo Sherwood, played by Nyong’o, a hard-working woman juggling motherhood, many jobs and a passionate commitment to advancing Baltimore’s Black progressive agenda.

• From In Reference to Murder comes word that “Queen Latifah is going to hunt more bad guys following the news that CBS has renewed The Equalizer for a second season after only four episodes. The Equalizer stars Latifah as Robyn McCall, an enigmatic woman with a mysterious background who uses her extensive skills as a former CIA operative to help those with nowhere else to turn.” The show is based on Edward Woodward’s 1985-1989 series of the same name.

• The Killing Times features some early still shots from The Ipcress File, British television network ITV’s forthcoming 1960s espionage thriller based, of course, on Len Deighton’s 1962 first novel. “Starring Joe Cole in the iconic role of Harry Palmer alongside Lucy Boynton as Jean and BAFTA award-winning actor Tom Hollander as Dalby, the drama,” explains The Killing Times, “is directed by Emmy award-winner James Watkins … Joining the cast to play further significant roles are Ashley Thomas as Maddox, Joshua James as Chico, David Dencik as Colonel Stok and Tom Vaughan-Lawlor as Cathcart.” Hopes are for an Ipcress launch sometime later this year.

• The second five-part run of Lupin, Netflix’s French crime drama starring Omar Sy as a cool criminal whose escapades are inspired by the classic stories of gentleman thief and master of disguise Arsène Lupin, isn’t expected to commence streaming until this summer. A short trailer, though, can already be enjoyed here.

• After reading Chris Whitaker’s exceptional novel, We Begin at the End (Henry Holt)—newly released in the States—I can easily see it being adapted for television. So I’m not surprised to learn that Disney has snapped up the rights to do so.

• In CrimeReads, Whitaker recalls how he quit his job in finance and went to work for a local library in order to write his book.

• The 25th James Bond film, No Time to Die, is currently slated to premiere on both sides of the Atlantic during the fall 2021, after multiple delays caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet it’s title song by Billie Eilish has already scored a Grammy Award.

• Director Theodore J. Flicker’s 1967 political satire film, The President’s Analyst, is on track to be remade by Paramount Pictures. The Hollywood Reporter says: “Pat Cunnane, who served for six years as President Barack Obama’s senior writer and deputy director of messaging at the White House, wrote the script for the project, which is being developed as a potential star vehicle for [Trevor] Noah,” of The Daily Show fame. The Reporter recalls that “the 1967 movie starred James Coburn as a psychiatrist chosen to act as the President’s top-secret therapist. As the President unloads his troubles on the psychoanalyst, the man begins to crack under the strain of all the secrets, becoming paranoid that agencies, both foreign and national, want what’s inside his head. It’s not a spoiler to say his fears turn out to be real. … Details for the new take are being kept under the couch but it is described as a re-examining the 1967 satire through the lens of the contemporary political landscape.” (A big hat tip to Double O Section.)

• Most of the headlines following American actor Yaphet Kotto’s demise, this last Monday, recalled his villainous role in the 1973 James Bond flick Live and Let Die. While his portrayal of a reprehensible Caribbean dictator as well as that man’s drug-pusher alter ego, Mr. Big, was certainly magnetic and unforgettable, Kotto’s career extended well beyond his menacing Agent 007 and the lovely psychic Solitaire. Variety notes he was born in New York City in 1939, and his acting studies began at age 16. Kotto made his professional theater debut at 19, and he chalked up early movie appearances in Nothing But a Man (1964) and The Thomas Crown Affair (1968). His Live and Let Die acclaim led to his winning parts in pictures on the order of Alien (1975), Brubaker (1980), and The Running Man (1987). Kotto’s introduction to television audiences came on The Big Valley; he soon returned to the boob tube on such programs as Bonanza, Mannix, Hawaii Five-O, The A-Team, Murder, She Wrote, and eventually Homicide: Life on the Street, where he could be seen for seven seasons playing Baltimore Police lieutenant Al Giardello. Kotto was 81 years old when he died in the Philippines.

• The Spy Command draws our attention to the death, at age 85, of another figure well known in Bond World: “Nikki van der Zyl, a German-born actress who provided the voice for various Bond women characters …” Managing editor Bill Koenig observes that “Van der Zyl was used to dub over, among others, Ursula Andress in Dr. No, Eunice Gayson in Dr. No and From Russia With Love, Shirley Eaton in Goldfinger and Claudine Auger in Thunderball. She worked on various Bond films through Moonraker.” In addition, Van der Zyl lent her voice to The Blue Max, Funeral in Berlin, Krakatoa: East of Java, and assorted other movies. She breathed her last in London.

• I must, too, acknowledge the passing, on January 12, of Judith Van Gieson. Jiro Kimura provides this obituary on The Gumshoe Site:

The former American editor of John le Carré started to write her fiction when she moved to New Mexico. She wrote eight novels, which feature Neil Hamel, an attorney and investigator in Albuquerque, starting with North of the Border (Walker, 1988) and ending with Ditch Rider (HarperCollins, 1998). The Hamel novel The Lies That Bind (1993) was nominated for the 1994 Shamus Award in the best novel category. Her other series of five novels features Claire Reynier (prounced ray-NEER), a buyer of rare books and librarian [at] the University of New Mexico, starting with The Stolen Blue (University of New Mexico Press/Signet Books, 2000) and ending with The Shadow of Venus (2004), which was nominated for the 2004 Barry Award in the best paperback category.

After she retired from writing novels, she formed ABQ Press, an online publishing company, and helped aspiring writers to edit and publish their works. She was 79.

• Even Lieutenant Columbo wasn’t perfect. That’s the bottom line of this piece in The Columbophile, which looks back at “10 times Columbo should have been reported to his superiors.” That blog’s still-anonymous Australian author opines: “[W]hile we know Columbo is pure of heart, there are times when his methods and actions could be considered questionable, if not utterly inappropriate.”

• Speaking of Columbo, The Postman on Holiday’s Lou Armagno recommends this article from Mental Floss that includes mention of star Peter Falk having been “a government worker before becoming an actor.” That piece continues: “Peter Falk wasn’t too far removed from the character he played. In real life he tended to be rumpled and disheveled and was forever misplacing things (he was famous for losing his car keys and having to be driven home from the studio by someone else). He was also intelligent, having earned a master’s degree in Public Administration from Syracuse University, which led to him working for the State of Connecticut’s Budget Bureau as an efficiency expert until the acting bug bit him. He was also used to being underestimated due to his appearance; he’d lost his right eye to cancer at age three, and many of his drama teachers in college warned him of his limited chances in film due to his cockeyed stare. Indeed, after a screen test at Columbia Pictures’ Harry Cohn dismissed him by saying, ‘For the same price I can get an actor with two eyes.’”

• Finally, here’s something to anticipate: The latest newsletter from Portland, Oregon’s Friends of Mystery promises that the winner of its 2021 Spotted Owl Award, plus the runners-up, will be announced during the group’s next meeting, on Thursday, March 25. A preliminary list of novels vying for that coveted prize is here.

And Now for the Pinckleys

Author and former journalist Laura Lippman (After I’m Gone) has been declared one of the two winners of this year’s inaugural Pinckley Prizes for Crime Fiction, “named to honor the memory of Diana Pinckley, longtime crime fiction columnist for the New Orleans Times-Picayune.” After a quarter-century as a novelist, she walks away with the Pinckley Prize for a Distinguished Body of Work.

A statement from members of the prize committee calls Lippman “one of those writers whose dedication to her home town of Baltimore has captivated American readers. She has created an enduring sleuth in Tess Monaghan, a complex character dealing with the issues that every contemporary woman confronts. And more than that, in her stand-alone works, Lippman has transcended the limits and challenges of genre to become a distinguished writer of social realism.  All that, and she has a wicked sense of humor!”

Sharing today’s spotlight is Montana resident Gwen Florio, who has won the Pinckley Prize for a Debut Novel for her 2013 book, Montana.

These commendations are to be handed out on March 22 during the 28th annual Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival. They’ll be presented by the Women’s National Book Association of New Orleans, which counted Diana Pinckley among its founding members.

Pierce’s Picks: “After I’m Gone”

A weekly alert for followers of crime, mystery, and thriller fiction.

After I’m Gone, by Laura Lippman (Morrow):
Felix Brewer created a handsome life for himself in Baltimore, even if his income wasn’t all made in the old-fashioned, legal way. In 1976, though--facing a lengthy incarceration--he fled with his money to Montreal, Canada, leaving his wife of almost two decades, Bambi, to take care of their three daughters. Felix also left behind his girlfriend, Julie Saxony, who Bambi believed knew more about her husband’s whereabouts than she’d admit. When Julie eventually vanishes, she’s thought to have rejoined her former paramour; only the unearthing of her corpse from a wooded area puts an end to that neat conclusion. And it’s not until years later, when a retired police detective, Roberto “Sandy” Sanchez, starts digging into Julie’s slaying, that there’s hope of untangling the manifold mysteries scattered in Felix’s wake. Lippman unfurls her narrative slowly, jumping between time periods and points of view; but the character depth and surprises she packs in here certainly reward patient readers.

READ MORE: “Laura Lippman: By the Book” (The New York Times).

Pierce’s Picks: “And When She Was Good”

A weekly alert for followers of crime, mystery, and thriller fiction.

And When She Was Good, by Laura Lippman (Morrow):
Edgar Award winner Lippman continues to stretch herself with this high-stakes yarn featuring Heloise Lewis, a seemingly upstanding young suburbanite who actually operates a profitable call-girl service. Following a traumatic childhood, red-headed Heloise (introduced in “Scratch a Woman,” from Lippman’s 2008 short-story collection, Hardly Knew Her) has carved out a steady, if secrets-filled existence for herself in Maryland, with a son, Scott, in middle-school and what the Internal Revenue Service has been led to believe is a successful lobbying practice with several female employees. All of that hard-won order and compartmentalization is threatened, however, after another “suburban madam” is found dead (a possible suicide) and Heloise receives word that Scott’s father, Val Deluca--who also happens to be her former pimp, and doesn’t know that he has a child or that Heloise helped send him to prison for murder--may soon be free again. Even the other men she’s come to depend on most might not be able to protect Heloise Lewis from the consequences of choices she made long ago. Partly an arm’s-length dip into the world of sex workers but mostly an intense character study, And When She Was Good succeeds on both levels.

* * *

Also new in bookstores this week--at least in Britain--is Watching the Dark, by Peter Robinson (Hodder & Stoughton). This 20th installment in his Alan Banks series finds the detective chief inspector probing the crossbow death of a police colleague, who apparently left behind a number of rather compromising photographs. The DCI won’t pronounce a fellow cop guilty without ample convincing evidence, but he’s having a hard time collecting any, what with a fellow inspector dogging his every step to ensure against corruption. How might all of this present-day mess relate to an English girl who disappeared in the Baltics half a dozen years ago? (Watching the Dark isn’t scheduled to debut in the States until January 2013.)

Be on the lookout as well for Shake Off, by Mischa Hiller (Mulholland), a thriller focused around Michel Khoury, a Palestinian-born intelligence operative who’s committed to bringing a peaceful end to the Middle East conflict that caused the tragic loss of his own family. As the habitually careful Khoury develops a relationship with his young London housemate, the intriguing Helen, he unwittingly places her in a state of jeopardy that will soon cause them both to flee to Germany and Scotland for the sake not only of their love, but their lives.

Charm City, You Say?

As part of its delightful “Literary Guide to the World” series, Salon today hosts none other than Laura Lippman on the subject of her hometown--Baltimore, Maryland--as seen through the authorial eyes of Robert Ward (Red Baker), John Waters (Shock Value), Anne Tyler (The Accidental Tourist), and others. In her introduction to the piece, though, Lippman shows she can be as adoring and skeptical about Baltimore as anyone else:

To understand Baltimore, it’s helpful to get a grip on its geography. Baltimore is one of those odd American cities that lies in no county; instead, it dangles in the water, surrounded by a ragged blob of land. It has been said that Baltimore County looks like a monkey wrench hanging from the Mason-Dixon Line, which makes Baltimore City the bolt--one that has been tightened a hair too much. Incapable of expanding, the city has been losing population and political clout since the 1960s, when white residents began to flee for the suburbs. Fittingly, all quintessentially Baltimore stories have a “Wizard of Oz” quality: Characters dream of escaping to someplace new, only to yearn for home. Or, as we say in Bawlmer: Hooooooohme.

You’ll find the full write-up here.

News from Charm City

Laura Lippman reported today on her Memory Project site that Baltimore Noir won the local City Paper Readers’ Poll for Best Local Book of the year (if there’s a link to the poll, I was unable to find it). Lippman edited the anthology, which included contributions from Jack Bludis, Sarah Weinman, Sujata Massey, and Marcia Talley.

A nice affirmation not only for Lippman, but for the evolving series from the folks at Akashic Books. Well done!

UPDATE: The link can be found here.

The Sincerest Form of Something

It seems that when Robert B. Parker isn’t reworking his own good story ideas into new novels, others are borrowing them from him. In 1981, just a year after this Boston novelist heralded the publication of his sixth (and, I still believe, his best) novel, Looking for Rachel Wallace, he was back in the limelight with Early Autumn, a tale in which his Beantown private eye, the single-monikered Spenser, rescues and then helps to rehabilitate a 15-year-old boy named Paul Giacomin using exercise, music, and cabin-building up in Maine. It was an unusual and memorable plot--so remarkable, in fact, that Parker pretty much ripped it off for his 1999 book, Family Honor, which introduced another Boston P.I., the comely Sunny Randall.

Now, another writer, Baltimore’s own Laura Lippman, acknowledges Parker’s inspiration behind her ninth and forthcoming Tess Monaghan novel, No Good Deeds. As she explains on her Web site,

No Good Deeds deliberately invokes Donald Westlake, Michael Chabon, Kate Atkinson, Phillip K. Dick, Walter Mosley, Stephen King. But it is, first and foremost, an homage to Early Autumn, my favorite Robert B. Parker novel.

I’ve tagged Parker before in my books. (Didn’t anyone pick up on the coffee house called Pearl’s in By a Spider’s Thread, the one decorated with photos of German short-hair pointers? No? My editor must be right about these inside jokes.) But No Good Deeds was meant to be a straight-up tribute, a reworking of a classic story, in which a man helps a boy become a man. Dave White has called the result “Early Autumn on speed.” ...

But a funny thing happened on the way to the homage. It turned out that the teenager in my tale, Lloyd Jupiter, was even more truculent and difficult that Spenser’s protégé, Paul. He’s also African-American, a high school drop-out and essentially homeless, while Paul was a rich white kid. Could I really give Lloyd a straight-up happy ending, or should I acknowledge the more formidable odds against him?

To say more would be a spoiler ...

Mommie Damndest

When James M. Cain is mentioned nowadays, it’s usually in association with his first novel, 1934’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, which has been filmed three times, most recently in 1981 (with Jessica Lange and Jack Nicholson). As hard as a “six-minute egg” (to quote The New York Times), fatalistic in its viewpoint and unusually open in its treatment of sex and violence, Postman was banned as obscene in Boston and Canada, but won Cain the admiration of American critic Edmund Wilson, who labeled the novelist the “poet of the tabloid murder.” (Raymond Chandler wasn’t nearly so admiring; he dismissed Cain as “a Proust in greasy overalls.”) Cain went on to publish more than a dozen subsequent novels, many with historical settings, and put his stamp on the field of film noir, before he died at age 85 in 1977. However, explains novelist Laura Lippman, “the conventional wisdom is that he never equaled his debut novel, The Postman Always Rings Twice.”

But Lippman insists that conventional wisdom is wrong. Writing in Slate, the Baltimore author (whose ninth private eye Tess Monaghan novel, No Good Deeds, should hit bookstores late next month) instead applauds Mildred Pierce, Cain’s somewhat less-celebrated 1941 novel of greed, ambition, and betrayal, as “my favorite Cain work ... the unicorn of crime fiction, a noir novel with no murder and very little crime.”

Lippman observes: “With this book’s subversively skeptical view of maternal love, Cain proved that noir could be set in the most domestic, middle-class locales. He also showed that a man can write beautifully from a woman’s point of view.” She goes on to decry the sanitized 1941 film version of Mildred Pierce, for which star Joan Crawford won an Academy Award, because it eliminated the adultery from Cain’s grim yarn and substituted murder--considered somehow more acceptable to film audiences. The movie also changed the novel’s “cleverer” ending. And Lippman concludes with an anecdote sure to send Cain fans running to their bookshelves for confirmation:

Cain, who didn’t believe in advances, sold Mildred Pierce, his fourth novel, for $5,000, a significant sum at the time. To celebrate the sale, [biographer Roy] Hoopes writes, Cain bought a snowball maker, like the one he remembered from his boyhood. The snowballs weren’t much good, but the machine made divine mint juleps. This is an apt metaphor for Mildred Pierce, a book that delivers much more of a wicked kick than expected, especially if you’ve been raised on the saccharine pieties of the film.

Read Lippman’s full essay here.