Bullet Points: Channel Surfing Edition

• Comic-actor Bill Cosby is now an understandably controversial figure, thanks to multiple women having levied sexual assault allegations against him over the last decade. However, he was once beloved, in part because of his live and recorded comedy routines (my father was a big listener to his 1973 stand-up comedy album, Fat Albert) and also his starring roles on television and in films. One of his less successful small-screen efforts was The Cosby Mysteries, which debuted in September 1994—two years after his long-running The Cosby Show ended—and was cancelled in April of the following year, with just 19 episodes having aired. Created in part by William Link, who had given us Columbo, the show found Cosby playing Guy Hanks, “a New York City Police Department criminalist, who retired from the police force after winning $44 million in the lottery.” Wikipedia adds that “Link developed the series at Cosby’s request, as Cosby wanted to make an intelligent, character-driven mystery series that did not rely on graphic violence.” I remembered it with a mix of nostalgia (having enjoyed Cosby’s performances at times, but also those of James Naughton as police detective Adam Sully and Rita Moreno as his feisty, health-conscious housekeeper, Angie Corea) and disappointment that Link & Co. hadn’t managed to do more with that crime drama. However, I hadn’t actually seen the show since the ’90s. That changed three weeks ago, when a poster to YouTube began uploading all 19 eps, one per day. I wound up rewatching the 90-minute pilot, which was broadcast originally on January 31, 1994, and have since taken in two or three more installments. At least currently, all are available here. One thing I’d forgotten is that Lee Goldberg, who’d previously penned scripts for Spenser: For Hire and Dick Van Dyke’s Diagnosis: Murder, wrote as well for The Cosby Mysteries. He and his former UCLA classmate William Rabkin later also served as supervising producers on the show. He evidently noticed YouTube’s surprising resurrection of the show as well. In a post on his Web site last week, he gave some background on the April 5, 1995, episode “Goldilocks,” which he and Rabkin wrote jointly with Terence Winter (The Sopranos, Boardwalk Empire, The Wolf of Wall Street):

Cosby called two days before we wrapped the episode and asked us to add ninja assassins to the finale … “with those flying stars and everything.” We thought he was joking. He wasn’t. When we told him there was nothing remotely related to ninjas in the episode, he said “there is now.” So we wrote the damn ninjas into the episode. But when he got the pages, he said it was obviously not our best work, and he wasn’t going to show up to shoot the finale.

So … the bad guys basically out themselves for the crime and then “Cosby” just shows up to arrest them. We used Cosby’s stunt double and footage from another episode to cobble together the incoherent ending.

NBC took one look at the rough cut and said, you know, this is insane, let’s end our misery. We couldn’t agree more. They cancelled the show and we were paid off for the remaining four or five unproduced episodes.

Since I’ve now poured through “Goldilocks” several times, and can spot nary a sign of flying stars (shuriken), I can only assume that in the end, Goldberg, Rabkin, and Winter had their way, and those Japanese concealed weapons were excised from the plot.

• Speaking of my friend Lee, he reports that 26-year-old actress Madison Lintz, late of Prime Video’s Bosch: Legacy, will star in a TV adaptation of his series about Eve Ronin, the Los Angeles County Sherif’s Department’s youngest-ever homicide detective. “I am beyond thrilled to bring Eve Ronin to life,” Lintz is quoted by Variety as saying. “From the moment I picked up Lee’s books, I knew this was a character and a story I needed to be a part of. Eve’s determination, complexity, and resilience make her a dream role, and I am honored to take on this challenge on both sides of the camera.” Ronin was introduced in the 2020 novel Lost Hills and is set to make her sixth appearance in Fallen Star, due out from Thomas & Mercer in October.

• Ballard, based on Michael Connelly’s six novels about L.A. homicide detective Renée Ballard, debuted earlier this week on TV streamer Amazon Prime. All 10 episodes of Season 1 have dropped. Polish-Vietnamese actress Maggie Q (neé Margaret Quigley) headlines this hour-long police procedural, which also stars Courtney Taylor, Michael Mosley, and John Carroll Lynch. A press release explains that Ballard finds Q leading “the LAPD’s new and underfunded cold case division, tackling the city’s most challenging long-forgotten crimes with empathy and relentless determination. As she peels back layers of crimes spanning decades, including a serial killer’s string of murders and a murdered John Doe, she soon uncovers a dangerous conspiracy within the LAPD. With the help of her volunteer team and retired detective Harry Bosch [Titus Welliver, reprising his role from Bosch: Legacy in a trinity of this season’s episodes], Detective Ballard navigates personal trauma, professional challenges, and life-threatening dangers to expose the truth.” I have not yet watched Ballard, but will correct that situation as of this evening.

• The Killing Times' Paul Hirons considers the question of “Where Ballard Fits in Amazon’s Expanding Crime Universe.”

• Meanwhile, Season 2 of The Marlow Murder Club is set to debut in the States on Sunday, August 24, as part of PBS-TV’s Masterpiece Mystery! lineup. (It already aired in the UK this last spring.) Season 1 principals Samantha Bond, Jo Martin, Cara Horgan, and Natalie Dew are all back for more cozy but engaging antics in six new episodes. A one-minute trailer can be enjoyed here.

• Here’s one more trailer worth watching, for She Rides Shotgun. That two-hour film—slated for theatrical release on August 1—has been adapted from Jordan Harper’s propulsive and moving 2017 novel of the same name about “a recently released ex-con who finds himself protecting his estranged 11-year-old daughter Polly against a corrupt sheriff and a brutal gang leader.” Taran Egerton, Ana Sophia Heger, Rob Yang, and (again!) John Carroll Lynch lead the cast.



• American author Martin Cruz Smith, most widely recognized for his novels about Russian police investigator Arkady Renko, died last night at 82 years of age. His 11th Renko yarn, Hotel Ukraine—about the slaying of a deputy defense minister at the outset of Russia’s 2022 Ukraine invasion—was published only just last week. The son of a jazz musician, Smith was a journalist before he began composing fiction in the 1970s, often under pseudonyms, many of his early paperbacks now forgotten. Several of Smith’s works issued under his own moniker, though, were nominated for Edgar Awards, and he twice picked up the Dashiell Hammett Award from the North American Branch of the International Association of Crime Writers—first for the standalone historical mystery Rose (1996), and then for his fourth Renko thriller, Havana Bay, in 1999. The author was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in his mid-50s, but only in 2013 did he begin speaking publicly about it. I’ve read every one of Smith’s Renko tales, my favorites being the first, Gorky Park (1981), along with the aforementioned Havana Bay, Wolves Eat Dogs (2004), Tatiana (2013), and Hotel Ukraine, which takes its title from a Moscow luxury property but also sends the sleuth to the embattled nation of Ukraine, which previously featured in his 2023 novel, Independence Square (the same story in which Renko was told that he, too, has Parkinson’s). Smith announced in the latest novel’s Acknowledgements that it would be his final Renko thriller, but until today’s notice that he died, there still seemed hope he might relent and produce another. Sadly, that is now not to be.

• Maybe I should be reading more James Hadley Chase.

• Although The Rap Sheet has carried a profusion of other awards news lately, I missed mentioning the winner of this year’s Margery Allingham Short Story Competition. Fortunately, B.V. Lawson at In Reference to Murder was more on top of things. Her notice:

The CWA [Crime Writers Association] and the Margery Allingham Society have jointly held an annual international competition since 2014 for a short story of up to 3,500 words. The goal is to find the best unpublished short mystery that fits into Golden Age crime writer Margery Allingham’s definition of what makes a great mystery story: “The Mystery remains box-shaped, at once a prison and a refuge. Its four walls are, roughly, a Crime, a Mystery, an Enquiry and a Conclusion with an Element of Satisfaction in it.” The 2025 winner is Helen Gray for “Unsupervised Dead Women.” The other finalists include: “The Human Imperative” by Michael Bird; “Best Served Cold” by Ajay Chowdhury; “The Treasure Hunter” by Jane Corry; “Only Forward” by Hayley Dunning; and “A Woman of No Consequence” by Laure Van Rensberg.

• And isn’t this a very familiar debate, examined most recently on National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition Saturday program: “Does listening to an audiobook count as reading?”

Bullet Points: Agatha in Bronze Edition

• There are a couple of interesting items contained in author Max Allan Collins’ latest blog post. First off, he says he’s “setting out to do a podcast series based on the Nathan Heller novels. Each multi-episode podcast would take on a single book. I will write these adaptations myself.” Expect to see the announcement of a crowd-funding campaign to get the initial podcast in that series going. Second, despite what Collins has previously termed a “disappointing lack of any support from Greenlight Iowa” to produce a film based on his A Christmas Carol-inspired short story, “Blue Christmas,” the author did succeed in raising $6,375 through an Indiegogo effort (perhaps $13,000+ short of what he says will ultimately be needed), and is in the process of “serious pre-production now.” He reports that actor Gary Sandy, with whom he has worked before, is his top pick to assume the lead role of Jake Marley, and “we are having auditions this week for the rest of the Blue Christmas cast … [T]he shoot is toward the end of October.” Oh, and that same blog post features a quite enjoyable video interview Titan Books’ Andrew Sumner did with Collins about the new Mike Hammer yarn, Dig Two Graves, the 14th Hammer novel he’s penned using material left behind by Spillane, after he died in 2006.

• In time for holiday gift buying: When The Art of Ron Lesser Volume 1: Deadly Dames and Sexy Sirens was first published several months ago, it existed only in hardcover. But now that book on which I worked with Robert Deis and Bill Cunningham boasts a paperback edition, as well. It’s equally beautiful, but $17 less expensive!

• First, some good TV news (from In Reference to Murder): “Masterpiece on PBS has announced the premiere date and released first look images for the upcoming season of Miss Scarlet and the Duke, which returns on January 7, 2024, for its fourth season. In the new season, Eliza (Kate Phillips) has taken over the business of detective agency Nash & Sons, and things are not going entirely smoothly, although help comes from some familiar sources. Outside of work, her relationship with William Wellington, a gruff Scottish detective inspector of Scotland Yard (the ‘Duke,’ played by Stuart Martin) builds towards a looming decision that will shape both their lives.” I’ve much enjoyed this historical mystery series.

• Now the bad news: “The premiere of HBO’s anticipated True Detective: Night Country has been pushed back and is now listed as January of 2024 (the exact day is unknown). In Night Country, when the long winter night falls in Ennis, Alaska, the eight men who operate the Tsalal Arctic Research Station vanish without a trace. To solve the case, detectives Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster) and Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis) must confront their pasts and the dark truths lying underneath the Arctic ice. John Hawkes, Christopher Eccleston, Fiona Shaw, Finn Bennett, Anna Lambe, Aka Niviâna, Isabella Star Lablanc, and Joel D. Montgrand also star.”

• For what it’s worth, Amazon appears to have updated its list of the “best mysteries and thrillers of 2023 so far.” It’s already crowning S.A. Cosby’s All the Sinners Bleed (Flatiron) as this year’s top choice, but also applauds Dennis Lehane’s Small Mercies (Harper), Jesse Q. Sutanto’s Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers (Berkley), Thomas Perry’s Murder Book (‎Mysterious Press), Jacqueline Winspear’s The White Lady (Harper), Charlie Donlea’s Those Empty Eyes (Kensington), T.J. Newman’s Drowning (‎Avid Reader Press), and 13 other works—only a few of which I’ve yet read.

• With the Bloody Scotland crime-writing festival set to begin just two days from now in the central Scottish town of Stirling, take a moment to check out the Nordic Noir blog’s choices of the best events on the festival’s program. Meanwhile, Live and Deadly highlights the ways Bloody Scotland supports writers new to this genre.

• As might have been predicted, opinions are divided on the artistic results here: “A life-sized bronze statue of Agatha Christie has been unveiled in the Oxfordshire town of Wallingford, near where the detective novelist resided for more than 40 years,” The Guardian reports. “The statue depicts the writer holding a book and seated on a bench overlooking the Kinecroft, an area of open grassland. Sculptor Ben Twiston-Davies—who also designed the Agatha Christie memorial in London—said in a YouTube video about the statue that it shows her ‘looking out as if she’s seen a clue for one of her stories.’”

• Southern California author-screenwriter Lee Goldberg is always an entertaining guest speaker, as I was reminded during the recent Bouchercon in San Diego. He demonstrates his humor again in two recent interviews on the subject of his brand-new thriller novel, Malibu Burning (Thomas & Mercer): this one with Murder by the Book’s Sara DiVello, and this other one with Story Blender’s Steven James.

• Another writer who has been receiving widespread attention is UK mystery-maker/TV show host Richard Osman, whose fourth and latest entry in his Thursday Murder Club series, The Last Devil to Die, should be out this week from Viking. The Guardian’s Charlotte Edwardes profiles him here, while The New York Times’ Sarah Weinman composed this story about him for Esquire magazine.

• If you didn’t snag a copy of William Link’s The Columbo Collection 13 years ago, when it debuted, you now have another chance. Publisher Crippen & Landru has announced that the book, which contains 12 original stories featuring television detective Lieutenant Columbo—all written by his co-creator—is back in stock after a long absence. And still available at the 2010 paperback price of $18.

• Finally, a sad note: Eighty-year-old writing teacher/coach, former U.S. Navy cryptographer, and fictionist Les Edgerton died in Fort Wayne, Indiana, on August 31 after “a short battle with COVID 19,” according to his funeral home obituary. With more than 20 books to his credit, including the novels Adrenaline Junkie and The Genuine, Imitation, Plastic Kidnapping, as well as the 2007 writer's resource Hooked: Write Fiction That Grabs Readers at Page One and Never Lets Them Go, Edgerton had been nominated for a wide variety of prizes, from the O. Henry Award to the Edgar Award for Best Short Story. Not long before his passing, he had won the Killer Nashville convention’s Claymore Award with the opening 50 pages of an unpublished manuscript, Francois Roberge—The Fixer.

Bullet Points: Another Overstuffed Edition

• Let’s have a show of hands: Who remembers Sammy Davis Jr. playing private investigator Larry Miller in the 1969 movie The Pigeon? I would’ve counted myself among the uninformed until the other day, when I happened across that 90-minute ABC Movie of the Week on YouTube. (Watch it here, while you can!) Scripted by Edward J. Lakso (The Mod Squad, Mission: Impossible, Charlie’s Angels) and Stanley Roberts (Mannix, Petrocelli, Police Woman), the teleflick “is great,” according to an IMDb review, “because Sammy … doesn’t take himself too seriously and the dialogue uses a number of clichés from the 60’s. Sammy is searching for a girl who doesn’t want to be found. I especially love the scenes between Sammy and Roy Glenn, the veteran actor who plays his dad, a police lieutenant.” Why Wikipedia doesn’t list The Pigeon among Davis’ motion-picture and TV credits, but does include Poor Devil, an awful NBC comedy pilot from 1973, is really anybody’s guess.

• Speaking of forgotten crime-solvers, how about Valerie Bertinelli in the 1990 CBS-TV series Sydney? As Wikipedia recalls, that erstwhile One Day at a Time actress headlined as Sydney Kells, “the daughter of a now-deceased policeman, [who] brings her New York City detective agency (in which she is the only investigator) back to her hometown and her family.” Matthew Perry (later of Friends) held forth as Kells’ rookie-cop brother, while Craig Bierko portrayed an attorney “with whom she shares sexual chemistry.” This spring replacement series lasted only 13 episodes. The best thing about it may have been its opening theme, “Finish What Ya Started,” by Bertinelli’s then-hubby Eddie Van Halen. Clickety-clack right here to watch the main title sequence from Sydney, paired with the introduction to her 1993-1994 sitcom, Café Americain.

• One more YouTube discovery: The Blue Knight, a 1973 NBC mini-series starring William Holden, Lee Remick, Sam Elliott, and Joe Santos, and based on Joseph Wambaugh’s 1972 novel of that same title. It’s been many years since I saw this teleflick with Holden as William “Bumper” Morgan, a 20-year veteran of the Los Angeles Police Department—long enough that I didn’t even remember it was originally broadcast in one-hour segments over four consecutive nights. The production was popular enough to spawn a subsequent series, likewise called The Blue Knight (but on CBS, rather than NBC), starring George Kennedy as Morgan; it ran for two seasons, from 1975 to 1976.

• Oh alright, here’s another: Jigsaw, a 1968 film (“originally made for television,” says Wikipedia, “but shown first in theaters”) starring Bradford Dillman, Harry Guardino, Hope Lange, Michael J. Pollard, and a young Susan Saint James. “After someone places sugar cubes laced with LSD in his cup of coffee,” the YouTube plot synopsis reads, “Jonathan Fields [Dillman] regains consciousness, only to find a woman drowned in his bathtub and flecks of blood on his hands and clothes. Suffering from amnesia, Fields can't think of anyplace else to turn, so he hires Arthur Belding [Guardino], a private detective, to help him find out what happened.” Jigsaw is a remake of 1965’s Mirage.

• Dexter: New Blood, the 10-episode revival of Michael C. Hall’s 2006-2013 drama, Dexter, is now expected to appear on Showtime come November 7. Wikipedia says this show will open “approximately ten years after the original series’ finale.” In the meanwhile, Hall’s Dexter Morgan “has moved to the fictional small town of Iron Lake, New York, hiding his identity under the name of Jimmy Lindsay, a local shopkeeper. He has developed a relationship with Angela Bishop, the town’s chief of police, and has suppressed his serial killing urges. A string of incidents around Iron Lake cause Dexter to fear that the ‘dark passenger’ within him will reveal itself.” The Killing Times offers a 90-second trailer for Dexter: New Blood, which incorporates a version of Del Shannon’s 1961 hit song, “Runaway” (previously employed as the theme for the 1986-1988 NBC police drama Crime Story).

• Almost five years ago, NBC-TV optioned Ben H. Winters’ Edgar Award-winning 2012 science fiction/mystery novel, The Last Policeman, with hopes of creating a series from it. Nothing came of that deal. Now, reports Tor.com, writer-producer Kyle Killen (Awake, Mind Games) is working on a pilot for Fox-TV, based on the same book, the resulting series—to be retitled The Last Police—expected to debut as part of the 2021/2022 season. Deadline explains that this show will follow “a small-town police detective, who, as an asteroid races toward an apocalyptic collision with Earth, believes she’s been chosen to save humanity, while her cynical partner can’t decide what he’ll enjoy more: her delusional failure, or the end of the world itself.” In Winters’ “existential detective novel,” the protagonist was a young male police detective in New Hampshire, one Henry Palace. In 2012, the author suggested that the role go to Jim True-Frost (The Wire, Manifest); no word yet on who might headline Fox’s adaptation.

• This is splendid news, from In Reference to Murder: “The new season of BritBox’s modern cozy mystery series, McDonald & Dodds, premieres on August 3rd. The series follows newly promoted DCI McDonald and veteran sergeant Dodds as they investigate complex mysteries with a web of clues that has everyone guessing who are the real victims and villains. Ahead of the new season, BritBox dropped a trailer, which you can view here.”

• Actress Jessica Walter, who died in March at age 80, has been nominated for a posthumous Emmy Award “for her voice-over work in FX/FXX’s animated comedy series Archer,” according to The Hollywood Reporter. “Walter voiced the toxic matriarch Malory Archer, the abrasive mother of H. Jon Benjamin’s Sterling Archer. She’s being recognized for her work in the sixth episode of the 11th season, ‘The Double Date.’” Should Walter secure this Emmy, it would be the second of her career; in 1975, she won Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited Series honors for her portrayal of San Francisco’s first female chief of detectives in the NBC Mystery Movie rotator Amy Prentiss.

• In the latest edition of her newsletter, The Crime Lady, author and New York Times crime-fiction columnist Sarah Weinman gives us a sneak peek of her latest true-crime book, Scoundrel: How a Convicted Murderer Persuaded the Women Who Loved Him, the Conservative Establishment, and the Courts to Set Him Free. Due out in February 2022, it tells the bizarre story of Edgar Herbert Smith, who killed a 15-year-old New Jersey honor student in 1957, subsequently contested his case in the media—being given special support by conservative pundit William F. Buckley Jr.—and, after winning a retrial and release, kidnapped and tried to kill another woman, this time in California. “By the time Scoundrel is published next year,” Weinman explains, “more than seven years will have passed since I first began researching and reporting the project. I can’t wait to fill you all in on what that entailed, the voluminous trove of documents and letters I consulted across multiple archives, the people I spoke with, and the strange juxtaposition of criminal justice, conservative thought, and book publishing that connected the crimes and misdeeds of one man who fooled so many into looking past his worst instincts to see what was never really there.”

• The Southern California town of Agoura Hills has selected Lee Goldberg’s Lost Hills (2020), his first novel featuring Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department homicide detective Eve Ronin, as its One City One Book 2021 honoree. “That means,” says Goldberg in his blog, “the local libraries, schools, etc. will be encouraging everyone to read the book and to come to City Hall on Sept. 30th to see me in conversation, buy a copy of my book if they haven’t already … and get their copies signed. Past honorees include Michael Connelly and Dick Van Dyke.” Admission to Goldberg’s Thursday, September 30, appearance will be free, but space is limited and advance registration is required; click here after August 1 to find out more.

• A big change for Britain’s Crime Writers’ Association:

For the first time in its 68-year history, the prestigious Crime Writers’ Association will allow self-published authors to join its ranks. The move comes after the CWA consulted its members, who voted with an 84% majority in favour to accept self-published authors.

Maxim Jakubowski, Chair of the Crime Writers’ Association, said: “The founding mission of the CWA was to support, promote and celebrate the crime genre and its authors. In the past, we only accepted traditionally published authors into the CWA, as this was the best indicator of quality. The publishing landscape has changed in recent years, and self-publishing has become a route for professional writers, and indeed there are many trailblazers in this field. The time is right to update our membership criteria.”

The news release adds: “Self-published authors wishing to become a CWA member will need to demonstrate a level of professionalism through a simple-to-complete application form. This will be available on the CWA website from 13 September, when the CWA will first accept applications.”

• It sounds as if this year’s Killer Nashville convention, expected to take place in Franklin, Tennessee, from August 19 to 22, is coming along right on schedule. Keynote speakers at this in-person event will be Walter Mosley, J.T. Ellison, and Lisa Black. More information is available here for anyone who would like to participate, but hasn’t yet registered. The full four-day registration will set you back $419.

• “Mystery Writers of America (MWA) is honoring the memory of its 2020 Grand Master, the late Barbara Neely, with a scholarship to new Black writers …,” writes Mystery Scene magazine’s Oline Cogdill. “MWA will annually present two scholarships of $2,000 each. One scholarship will be for an aspiring Black writer who has yet to publish in the crime or mystery field, and another for Black authors who have already published in crime or mystery.” September 30, 2021, is the deadline for applications (available here); a winner will be declared “in the late fall.” Click here for more information.

• Like millions of other Americans, my wife and I have been watching Season 4 of Unforgotten, part of PBS-TV’s Masterpiece Mystery! summer schedule. There are three additional Sunday-night installments yet to come, but already, Crimespree Magazine’s Erin Mitchell has declared Unforgotten, which stars Nicola Walker and Sanjeev Bhaskar as London-based cold-case detectives, “the best show on television.” She continues: “Unforgotten is one of those rare shows that does not tell a story at its surface, doesn’t just lead us on a step-by-step procedural journey. The procedure is there, of course, but the subtlety of the remarkable performances addresses the characters’ motivation to allow us to experience the often painful journey though the case. In that way, the experience of watching it is more akin to reading a book, which is the highest praise I can give a TV show.” A 90-second introduction to Season 4 is embedded below.



• Regé-Jean Page, a popular alumnus of the Netflix series Bridgerton, is set to star as The Saint, aka Simon Templar, in a new film based around that Leslie Charteris-created, “Robin Hood-esque criminal and thief for hire.” Deadline says the forthcoming Paramount picture “will be a completely new take that reimagines the character and world around him.” Author-screenwriter Lee Goldberg, nephew of Saint authority Burl Barer (The Saint: A Complete History in Print, Radio, Television, and Film), opines on Facebook that Page “will make a great Saint, but I hope they don’t stray too far from what we all loved about Leslie Charteris’ books, the George Sanders movies, and the [1962-1969] Roger Moore TV series.”

• With the abundance of resources provided in The Rap Sheet’s right-hand-column blogroll, you can be excused for not noticing when a new site is added. But let me direct your attention to one in particular: The Ross Macdonald Blog. Composed by Neil Albert, author of the Dave Garrett series (The January Corpse, etc.), it’s turning the critical microscope on every one of Macdonald’s novels, in chronological order, beginning with his non-Lew Archer yarns. Albert—who calls Macdonald (aka Kenneth Millar) “one of the three greatest writers in the genre of the hardboiled private eye, along with Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler” (no argument from yours truly)—has been working on this site primarily since the end of last year, and has so far progressed to The Three Roads (1948), Macdonald’s fourth novel. Each book is being considered in detail, over a succession of postings, The Dark Tunnel (1944) and Trouble Follows Me (1946) having each generated 11 entries. (Hat tip to Kevin Burton Smith.)

• Nobody who reads this page regularly should be surprised to hear that I own the 30th-anniversary edition of Mark Dawidziak’s The Columbo Phile: A Casebook, a work originally published in 1989. But now comes word of Bonaventure Press’ Shooting Columbo: The Lives and Deaths of TV’s Rumpled Detective, due out this coming September and written by David Koenig. Although somewhat shorter than Dawidziak’s book (only 248 pages, compared with 410), Shooting Columbo promises behind-the-scenes intelligence about that iconic Peter Falk series, plus “a blow-by-blow account of the making of all 69 classic mysteries, from the first [figurative] pilot, Prescription: Murder, to the last special, Columbo Likes the Nightlife.” The question is, do I need Koenig’s book on my shelves, too?

• Caroline Crampton hosts the podcast Shedunnit, but she’s also the author of a map and guide called Agatha Christie’s England, from London-based Herb Lester Associates, which years ago produced The Raymond Chandler Map of Los Angeles. Already out in England, and due for a September release in the States, Crampton’s publication focuses on “the real and fictional locations in the Queen of Crime’s canon,” as she writes in her e-mail newsletter. “There are dozens of places included, and for each I’ve researched why and how Christie wrote about them. I certainly felt like I gained a greater understanding of her work in the process of putting the guide together, and if you read it I hope you will feel the same.”

• From the “everything old is new again” department: TV Guide critic Matt Roush recently included this exchange in his blog:

Question: Will some forward-thinking Hollywood executive reboot the George Peppard vehicle Banacek? —Steve O.

Matt Roush: Would a reboot of a 1970s private-eye series really be forward-thinking? I loved the randomness of this suggestion, because there were so many higher-profile spokes of NBC’s “Mystery Movie” wheel: McCloud, McMillan and Wife, and, of course, Columbo. Seriously, though, because Banacek is lesser known, reviving a show and a hero that had a sense of humor about itself wouldn’t be the worst idea. In the bigger picture, I’d like to see a network try the “mystery wheel” format again, rotating its series on a weekly or monthly basis. Something like that could air year-round with fewer episodes per series, and that might be refreshing.

While I cringe a bit at Roush labeling Thomas Banacek a “private eye” (he was actually a Boston insurance investigator), I applaud his optimism on the matter of resuscitating television’s once-widespread “wheel series” format (about which I wrote last summer in CrimeReads). And Banacek—with its suave, totally immodest lead and supposedly impossible crimes—might, indeed, make for a fun reboot. But who do you think should fill Peppard’s loafers?

• Bay Area author-photographer Mark Coggins is out with Season 2 of his podcast, Riordan’s Desk. He launched this project in May 2020, at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, with a chapter-by-chapter reading of his seventh August Riordan private-eye novel, 2019’s The Dead Beat Scroll. Earlier this month, he packaged up the final installment of Season 2, a full reading (35 chapters in all) of his 2015 Riordan yarn, No Hard Feelings. And Coggins has already begun reading from Candy from Strangers (2006), his third Riordan mystery. Listen to the complete run of Riordan’s Desk by clicking here.

• Listen up, Bosch fans! “The Everybody Counts Podcast talks Bosch Season 7, Episode 5 and interviews Michael Connelly.”

• Charlie Chan authority Lou Armagno informs us that 92-year-old actor James Hong, who portrayed “Son No.1 to J. Carrol Naish’s Charlie Chan in The New Adventures of Charlie Chan [1957-1958], is to be honored next year with a star on Los Angeles’ Hollywood Walk of Fame. Hong, born in Minneapolis to Hong Kongese parents, and “the last living actor to star as a primary Chan character, either in film or television,” will be the third Chan cast member honored in this fashion; Keye Luke and the aforementioned J. Carrol Naish both won stars before him. Hong’s list of credits extends well beyond The New Adventures of Charlie Chan to include roles in everything from Richard Diamond, Private Eye and Hawaii Five-O to Kung Fu, Harry O, The Rockford Files, Switch, and the 1974 film Chinatown.

• “Edgar Allan Poe: Self-Help Guru”?

• From a patron of The Rap Sheet’s YouTube page: “I’m not making light of the condominium disaster in Florida, but every time a reporter who is covering that story says ‘Surfside,’ this song pops into my head.” Learn more about this other Surfside here.

• The blog maintained by History (formerly The History Channel) recently highlighted what it claims are “the most influential classic shows” from the 1950s, “TV’s “Golden Age.” In the category of crime (click here, then scroll to the bottom of the page), it mentions Martin Kane, Private Eye (1949-1954), Man Against Crime (1949-1954), and Dragnet (1951-1959). But what about Naked City (1958-1959, 1960-1963), Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer (1958-1959), M Squad (1957-1960), Richard Diamond, Private Detective (1957-1960), Decoy (1957-1959), Have Gun—Will Travel (1957-1963), 77 Sunset Strip (1958-1964), Perry Mason (1957-1966), and Peter Gunn (1958-1961)? Today’s younger viewers may be unaware of this, but the ’50s brought us myriad TV detective shows that are still worth watching.

• On the subject of vintage small-screen shows, how about T.H.E. Cat (1966-1967), which starred Robert Loggia as a San Francisco cat burglar named Thomas Hewitt Edward Cat, and spun off a quartet of comic-book adventures?

• Was this really a good idea? You may recall that Deadline reported last year, “James Patterson and Condé Nast are teaming to revive vintage crime fighter The Shadow in a series of books that will also aim to be adapted for the screen.” Hachette Book Group imprint Little, Brown will publish the original series … The Shadow [aka society gadabout Lamont Cranston], a signature New York vigilante, originated in the 1930s as a series of pulp novels by Walter B. Gibson. A popular radio drama based on the books featured the voice of Orson Welles. In 1994, Universal released a feature film adaptation starring Alec Baldwin.” Anyway, Patterson’s introductory entry in this new series, set in the late 21st century and simply titled The Shadow, came out on July 13, and was greeted with more than a modicum of skepticism. San Francisco tour guide and author Don Herron remarks, “I had thought about giving it a shot, and then I saw the cover [shown on the left]. The only thought I could process was Where the fuck is HIS HAT???”

• Yellow Perils is no more enthusiastic about the book.

• Dashiell Hammett’s first novel, Red Harvest (1929), has inspired a number of cinematic creations over the years, including the 1930 picture Roadhouse Nights and the 2005 neo-noir mystery Brick. But the book, which stars Hammett’s nameless San Francisco private eye, the Continental Op, has never been given a faithful adaptation. It did once come close, however, as a series of newspaper clippings in Davy Crockett’s Almanack of Mystery, Adventure, and the Wild West makes clear. In 1941, the Los Angeles Times carried word of Paramount Pictures decision not to remake its 1935 film based on Hammett’s fourth novel, The Glass Key, but to instead develop a script from Red Harvest. Brian Donlevy was slated to portray the Op, with Paulette Goddard and a young Alan Ladd helping to fill out the cast. Unfortunately, that film was first “postponed” and later abandoned. Hoping to boost Ladd’s Hollywood career, Paramount decided to remake The Glass Key after all. Donlevy was nominally the headliner, but Ladd was the real star of that production, while Veronica Lake replaced Goddard as its distaff attraction.

• Did author Hammett really break the window of a downtown department store in Miami, Florida, during a four-day visit he made to that city in 1934? The Palm Beach Post recalled the story late last year, but it may just be an urban legend.

• Talk about dropping the ball! I realized this week that, while I had reported on nominees for the 2021 Scribe Awards, I never announced the winners. In the category of greatest interested to crime-fiction readers—“General Original Novel and Adapted Novel”—Max Allan Collins and Mickey Spillane’s 12th Mike Hammer novel, Masquerade for Murder (2020), lost out to a video-game-related adventure, Day Zero: Watchdogs Legion, by James Swallow and Josh Reynolds (Aconyte).

• Were I able to attend this year’s PulpFest, taking place in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, from August 19th through 22nd, I would definitely want to be in the audience for “popular culture scholar” Doug Ellis’ presentation, “The Weird Tales of Margaret Brundage.” “Initially disguising her gender by signing her work as M. Brundage, the artist redefined sensuality for the already scandalous pulp market,” observes the PulpFest Web site. “Her work was later targeted by New York Mayor LaGuardia’s 1938 decency campaign. … Margaret Brundage [1900-1976] created 66 covers for Weird Tales between 1932 and 1945, making her the most in-demand cover artist for the fantasy, horror, and science-fiction magazine. Only Virgil Finlay was a close rival.” Ellis’ remarks on Brundage are scheduled for Friday, August 20.

• The best interview I’ve heard with T.J. Newman, the former flight attendant and author of the new thriller Falling (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster), was conducted by Dave Davies on NPR’s Fresh Air program. You can listen to their whole conversation here.

• Powell’s Books, the Portland, Oregon, landmark heralded as “the world’s largest independent bookstore,” is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. As part of the celebration, it has assembled “a curated collection of 50 books from the past 50 years.” I’d be more enthusiastic about this list if—in addition to Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams, and Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future—it contained even one crime, mystery, or thriller novel. No such luck!

• Max Allan Collins mentions in his blog that the 13th Mike Hammer novel he’s “co-authored” with the late Mickey Spillane, is due out from Titan Books in 2022—75 years after the appearance of Spillane’s first Hammer yarn, I, the Jury. This one will be titled Kill Me If You Can.

• There have been so many crime novels backdropped by San Francisco, that Paul French was bound to fail when he determined to collect, for CrimeReads, a representative sample of their diversity. Why, for instance, does he mention Stuart M. Kaminsky’s Poor Butterfly (2012)—the only Toby Peters mystery set in the Bay Area (most of them took place in L.A.)—or Charles Willeford’s one-off, Wild Wives (1956), but completely ignore the oeuvres of Colin Willcox, Stephen Greenleaf, Kelli Stanley, and Bill Pronzini? That said, French’s piece—parked here—is entertaining, and might give you some ideas of things to read as this summer season winds to an end.

• For broader exposure to fictional offenses set in and around San Francisco, consult Randal S. Brandt’s Golden Gate Mysteries wiki.

• And how much fun is this? Blogger Evan Lewis is showcasing the covers, contents pages, copyright information, and occasional lagniappes from every early edition of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. As he explains in this introductory post, “Some months ago, my old friend and fellow book collector Jim Rogers passed away, and left behind a complete run of EQMM from 1941 to 1959. Those mags have now passed into the care of another old friend, Mr. Larry Paschelke, and Larry agreed to let me scan the covers and share them with you here. (Jim, I have no doubt, would have done the same had I asked, but I didn't know he had them!)” Click here to catch up with Lewis’ project in progress.

Bullet Points: Pandemic (Yikes!) Edition

• I mentioned here in January that American network CBS-TV was developing a crime-drama series around Clarice Starling, the FBI agent first introduced in Thomas Harris’ best-selling 1988 novel, The Silence of the Lambs. At the time, there was no star slated to fill the title role in Clarice, but Deadline reported recently that 32-year-old Australian actress Rebecca Breeds (Pretty Little Liars, The Originals) has been hired for the job. Deadline notes that Breeds (right) “is taking on the role that earned Jodie Foster an Oscar for the 1991 movie adaptation directed by Jonathan Demme. In 2001’s Hannibal, based on Harris’ 1999 novel, which was set 10 years after Silence of the Lambs, Clarice was played by Julianne Moore. (Hat tip to January Magazine.)

• The finalists for this year’s Lambda Literary Awards—aka the “Lammys”—have been announced in 24 categories. These annual prizes, now in their 32nd year, are sponsored by Lambda Literary, “the nation’s oldest and largest literary arts organization advancing LGBTQ literature.” Below are the contenders for best lesbian and gay mystery.

Lesbian Mystery:
— The Blood Runs Cold, by Catherine Maiorisi (Bella)
— Galileo, by Ann McMan (Bywater)
— The Hound of Justice, by Claire O’Dell (Harper Voyager)
— The Mirror of Muraro, by Amelia Ellis (Newton Pryce Ingram)
— Twisted at the Root, by Ellen Hart (Minotaur)

Gay Mystery:
— Carved in Bone, by Michael Nava (Persigo Press)
— ChoirMaster, by Michael Craft (Questover Press)
— Death Takes a Bow, by David S. Pederson (Bold Strokes)
— The Fourth Courier, by Timothy Jay Smith (Arcade)
— The Nowhere, by Chris Gill (PRNTD)
— The Quaker, by Liam McIlvanney (World Noir)
— Rewind, by Marshall Thornton (Kenmore)
— Royal Street Reveillon, by Greg Herren (Bold Strokes)

Winners are to be announced during a ceremony held in New York City on Monday, June 8. (Hat tip to Mystery Fanfare.)

• In Reference to Murder reminds us that 2020 brings at least two notable crime-fiction anniversaries: “it’s been sixty years since the [release of the] 1960 Alfred Hitchcock psychological horror film, Psycho, which was based on the Wisconsin killer and graveyard robber, Ed Gein; and it’s also the 50th anniversary of Tony Hillerman’s The Blessing Way, the first book to introduce Navajo police officer Joe Leaphorn.” According to The New Mexican, Hillerman’s novel debuted on March 11, 1970. Psycho saw its premiere on June 16, 1960, at New York City’s DeMille Theatre (aka Columbia Theatre).

• Max Allan Collins’ long-awaited 17th Nathan Heller novel, Do No Harm, was released this week by Forge. Concurrently, Collins recalled in his blog some of the difficulties he’d had fitting his fictional Chicago private eye into the real-life case involving Ohio doctor Sam Sheppard and the July 1954 murder of Sheppard’s first wife, Marilyn—a crime that may have helped inspire David Janssen’s 1963-1967 TV series The Fugitive, and that Collins says “has fascinated me since 1961.” An excerpt from Do No Harm can be found here.

• Did Scottish violinist and mystery author William Crawford Honeyman (1845–1919) provide inspiration to Arthur Conan Doyle in his creation of “consulting detective” Sherlock Holmes?

• Regrettably, I must acknowledge the recent deaths of three people familiar to the mystery-fiction community. First, Barbara Neely, author of the four-novel Blanche White series (Blanche on the Lam, etc.), “which had at its center a nomadic amateur detective and domestic worker who uses the invisibility inherent to her job as an advantage in pursuit of the truth,” as the Associated Press explains. Just three months ago, Neely was named by the Mystery Writers of America as the winner of its 2020 Grand Master Award. She passed away on March 2, at age 78, as a result of a heart ailment. (CrimeReads provides a fine tribute to Neely’s work here.) Second, former trial attorney Laura Caldwell, who, recalls the Chicago Tribune, penned “a trilogy of mysteries (Red Hot Lies, Red Blooded Murder and Red White & Dead) in 2009, all featuring a Chicago-based attorney/private investigator named Izzy McNeil …” Caldwell was only 52 years old when she died of breast cancer on March 1. Finally, we said good-bye on March 8 to Swedish-born actor Max von Sydow. Although he was closely associated with films by director Ingmar Bergman, and made his U.S. movie debut in 1965’s much-criticized The Greatest Story Ever Told, von Sydow also portrayed villains in Three Days of the Condor (1975) and the 1983 James Bond flick, Never Say Never Again. He even did a turn in a 1985 Kojak TV picture, Kojak: The Belarus File, starring Telly Savalas. Von Sydow perished just one month shy of his 91st birthday.

• Shortly after I posted this obituary of author Clive Cussler, Neil Nyren, the former editor-in-chief of G.P. Putnam’s Sons and now editor-at-large for CrimeReads, let me know that Publishers Weekly would soon “be running a piece by me … about being Clive’s editor.” That fine, fond remembrance can finally be relished here.

• For anyone who didn’t know this already:

Humphrey Bogart will go down in history as the actor most associated with the detective character Phillip Marlowe, but he wasn’t the first actor to play him, and he wasn’t author Raymond Chandler’s first preference.

In 1944, the washed-up musical star Dick Powell played the sleuth in the first film adaptation of a Chandler novel, Farewell, My Lovely (retitled to Murder, My Sweet, lest it seem like another musical). The movie relaunched Powell’s career, and Chandler was not disappointed with the casting decision. Powell bought an air of refinement that Chandler had initially envisioned for his P.I. But actually, he said later, the actor he most wanted to play his detective was Cary Grant.

• Deadline reports that “Showtime has found its missing President. Ann Dowd (The Handmaid’s Tale) has been cast in the key role opposite David Oyelowo in The President Is Missing, Showtime’s drama pilot based on the novel by President Bill Clinton and James Patterson from Christopher McQuarrie and Anthony Peckham. In The President Is Missing pilot, a powerless and politically aimless vice president (Oyelowo) unexpectedly becomes president halfway into his administration’s first term when President Jillian Stroud (Dowd) goes missing, despite his every wish to the contrary. He walks right into a secret, world-threatening crisis, both inside and outside the White House. Attacked by friends and enemies alike, with scandal and conspiracy swirling around him, he is confronted with a terrible choice: keep his head down, toe the party line and survive, or act on his stubborn, late-developing conscience and take a stand.”

• Short-story writer Chris McGinley makes the case that Charles Brockden Brown’s forgotten Edgar Huntly, or Memoirs of a Sleepwalker (1798) was “the first true rural noir in American letters.”

• I know Lee Goldberg primarily as a prolific author (Fake Truth) and as the co-founder of Brash Books. But not long ago, he also launched Cutting Edge, an imprint he says was “created for stuff that doesn’t fit into Brash … mostly vintage crime and thrillers from the late ’50s and early ’60s, some non-fiction, some literary fiction, and some westerns.” Among the yarns already available from Cutting Edge are e-book versions of Sterling Noel’s I See Red (1955), Geoffrey Wagner’s Season of Assassins (1961), and The House on Q Street (1959), by “Robert Dietrich,” aka E. Howard Hunt, plus paperback reprints of all four of James Howard’s novels starring “itinerant newspaper man” Steve Ashe. I have read only one of those four, 1957’s Die on Easy Street, but can finally now get my hands on the remainder: I’ll Get You Yet (1954), I Like It Tough (1955), and Blow Out My Torch (1956). Such a treat! To learn more about each of these titles, and more, and to see what’s coming soon from Cutting Edge, refer to the imprint’s Web site or its Facebook page.

• If you’re like me, you are hoping soon to enjoy a fifth entry in David Hewson’s dramatic series starring Amsterdam police detective Pieter Vos and his country-reared colleague, Laura Bakker (The House of Dolls, Little Sister, etc.). Unfortunately, no such book yet seems on the horizon. UK author Hewson has, however, just made available for downloading a Vos short story titled “Bad Apple.”

• CrimeReads posted a fascinating piece earlier this week about “poison pen letter crimes” of the early 20th century, by Curtis Evans (Murder in the Closet). While you’re visiting that online periodical—which celebrated its second birthday on March 7—be sure to also take a gander at Paul French’s appraisal of crime fiction based in Saigon, Vietnam, Katie Orphan’s survey of the Los Angeles locales used in James M. Cain’s novels, and Tessa Wegert’s essay, “How Do You Write a Mystery When Every Plot Is Taken?” A trio of slightly older articles worth tracking down, too: Laura James’ “brief history of beauty as a surprisingly effective legal defense”; Ashawnta Jackson’s analysis of “how Isaac Hayes' soundtrack to Shaft ushered in an era of iconic Blaxploitation cinema”; and L. Wayne Hicks’ look back at the writing career of C.W. Grafton, father of author Sue Grafton.

• One of the books I’m looking forward to reading this season is Loren D. Estleman’s Indigo, his fifth novel about L.A. “film detective” Valentino. In advance of that work’s May 26 release, publisher Forge has posted the initial four chapters online. Hurrah!

• San Francisco-area novelist Mark Coggins’ latest August Riordan private eye novel, The Dead Beat Scroll, was published last September. Since, he contributed this photo feature to Mystery Tribune, showcasing some of the Fog City sites figuring into that yarn.

• In his blog, Men’s Pulp Mags, Robert Deis offers a quite favorable critique of a 2019 book to which I contributed, Sticking It to the Man: Revolution and Counterculture in Pulp and Popular Fiction, 1950 to 1980, edited by Andrew Nette and Iain McIntyre. Deis opines, in part: “Sticking It to the Man is not your typical book about vintage paperbacks. It’s one that combines insightful paperback reviews with heavily-researched cultural and political history, pop culture history, and author profiles and interviews. And, it includes contributions written by more than 20 knowledgeable academics and other experts Nette and McIntyre recruited for the project.” Find out more here.

• Meanwhile, a reviewer for the literary mag NB lists my essay, “Black Is Beautiful,” as one of his favorite pieces in Sticking It to the Man.

• Mystery Fanfare alerts us to a special offer being made by the organizers of Bouchercon 2021, to be held in New Orleans, Louisiana: The first 200 registrants will pay only $175 to participate, while other attendees will be charged $195. At last check, the 200 threshold had not yet been reached. It’s your lucky day!

• In a recent interview, Spy Vibe’s Jason Whiton spoke with Ian Dickerson, author of A Saint I Ain’t: The Biography of Leslie Charteris. Of course, Charteris was “the creator of Simon Templar, a modern-day Robin Hood who was better known as The Saint.”

• For Britain’s Guardian newspaper, Peter Swanson (Eight Perfect Murders) addresses the ever-important question, “what can novels teach us about getting away with murder?”

• Speaking of “Getting Away with Murder,” that’s the name of the column UK reviewer/raconteur Mike Ripley composes each month for Shots. His March edition includes remarks about the annual Penguin Books crime party, Icelander Snorri Sturluson’s King Harald’s Saga (“which was [possibly] first published in 1230),” and new or forthcoming works by Kathryn Harkup (Death by Shakespeare), Peter Morfoot (Knock ’Em Dead), Stephanie Wrobel (The Recovery of Rose Gold, aka Darling Rose Gold), and Jim Kelly (Night Raids).

• And as you negotiate the COVID-19 pandemic, revisit this piece I wrote last year about crime novels set amid disasters.

A “Lost” Dennis Novel Makes Its Debut

(Editor’s note: You have to admire the single-minded determination and industry of Calabasas, California, author Lee Goldberg. After being first introduced, in 2013, to the work of deceased and long-forgotten novelist Ralph Dennis—and finding that he loved it—Goldberg set out to resurrect Dennis’ literary output through his own independent publishing company, Brash Books. Over the past couple of years, Brash has reissued all 12 of Dennis’ crime novels starring Jim Hardman, an Atlanta, Georgia, cop turned private eye—with a previously unpublished 13th installment in the series, All Kinds of Ugly, due out in early February. In addition, Goldberg has brought back into circulation a handful of Dennis’ non-series novels; and drawing from “a suitcase full of unpublished manuscripts” the author left behind at his death more than 30 years ago, he has expanded Dennis’ oeuvre. One of those “new” novels was The Spy in a Box, published in December. The other is Dust in the Heart, a “disturbing” police procedural that’s finally being released today. In the essay below, Goldberg recalls the circuitous path Dust in the Heart followed to finally seeing print.)

Dust in the Heart was Ralph Dennis’ final manuscript. It was completed only a few months before his death in 1988. He was a writer no longer at the top of his game, beaten by his demons and his failures, and it showed in the typewritten manuscript.

I’ve now read most of Ralph’s published and unpublished work. So, for me, reading and editing this book was a revealing glimpse into Ralph’s personality and creative process. Dust in the Heart is a Frankenstein’s monster of sorts, made up of bits and pieces of his other unpublished manuscripts, primarily a book entitled Just Child’s Play, which itself was stitched together from his prior published and unpublished work.

The hero of Just Child’s Play is Phil Hannah, an ex-Atlanta police detective who moves to a small-town force after the long, grueling death of his wife from cancer (a relationship that is lifted from the back story of a key character in his 1975 novel Atlanta, which Brash Books republished last year as The Broken Fixer). The detective investigates the rape and murder of a teenage girl and has a very rushed romance, the substance of which is lifted almost entirely from Ralph’s 1979 novel MacTaggart’s War (and that I largely omitted from our revised edition of the book, entitled The War Heist). The hero is aided in his detecting by a young deputy, who is almost identical to the young deputy in Dust in the Heart.

Many of the relationships and politics of the town in Just Child’s Play are replicated in Dust in the Heart, which also borrows a key plot point from Kane #2, an unpublished sequel to Ralph’s 1976 novel Deadman’s Game (both of which I combined and republished as A Talent for Killing). In Kane #2, the hero pursues the man who raped and murdered two young boys, and who is being protected by the government. Ralph lifted the same situation for Dust in the Heart.

Just Child’s Play is a deeply flawed and often incoherent book that justifiably never attracted a publisher. But there must have been something about the central concept—the heart-broken, small-town police detective seeking redemption and love while pursuing a child-murder investigation—that intrigued Ralph, because he ultimately gave it a second shot.

(Left) Author Ralph Dennis

For Dust in the Heart, Ralph recast the Atlanta detective as Wilt Drake, an injured war hero who is abandoned by his wife. And Ralph swapped out the romance for a new one that he seemingly lifted from Gunsmoke. But that wasn’t the only thing Ralph may have lifted from that long-running TV western series. In Gunsmoke, Marshal Matt Dillon enforces the law in Dodge City, Kansas, with the help of his eager young deputy, Chester Goode … and is romantically involved with Miss Kitty, the local madam and saloon owner. He also often seeks the wise counsel of ornery old Doc Adams, the town’s physician.

In Dust in the Heart, Wilt is Matt Dillon, Deputy Joe is Chester, stripper Diane is Miss Kitty, and Doc is, well, Doc. Ralph even gave Wilt the limp that actor James Arness, who played Dillon, had as a result of a real-life war injury.

And perhaps there’s also a message in the hero’s name. The hero of Ralph’s first novel (1974’s Atlanta Deathwatch) was Jim Hardman. The hero of his last book is Wilton “Wilt” Drake. From a Hard man, to a Wilted man. Coincidence? I don’t think so.

I struggled over whether to publish Dust in the Heart or to keep it in a drawer. The original manuscript was nearly 100,000 words and it was a mess … and yet, there was still something haunting, melancholy, and powerful about the book that wouldn’t let me go. I knew that Ralph was passionate about this novel. He told a newspaper reporter, and several people who were close to him, that he’d put a lot of work into it and had high hopes that it would be his comeback. It was also his final novel. Given all of those factors, I felt we had to release it to complete the full arc of his literary career.

So I dove into the manuscript, found the essence of the characters and the spine of the story … and began reshaping the book around that. I cut more than 30,000 words, including many long, irrelevant asides unrelated to the characters or the story, as well as several gratuitous, explicit sex scenes between a deputy and his rich, older lover, and other scenes with secondary characters that took place outside of the hero’s point of view, or that were repetitive, didn’t further the plot, or slowed the pace. I also fixed some tracking errors and other common mistakes that all writers make in their initial drafts.

I believe that the final, published draft of Dust in the Heart is a strong police procedural, dark and haunting, and a worthy capstone to Ralph’s career. But what really makes it special, at least for scholars and admirers of this author’s work, is the fascinating insight it offers into Ralph Dennis himself, an alcoholic who never found a woman to love him, who was reduced to working as a clerk in a used bookstore after a decade of being rejected by publishers, and who would soon die without achieving the recognition that he deserved.

Bullet Points: Pre-Cinco de Mayo Edition

Sorry for the recent paucity of posts on this page, and for failing to respond in anything like a timely fashion to e-mail messages, but I’ve been quite busy over the last couple of weeks, helping to open a new independent bookshop in Seattle’s Madison Park neighborhood. I hope that my schedule will settle down soon. In the meantime, though, let me take this opportunity to highlight an assortment of crime fiction-related stories appearing elsewhere on the Web.

• I don’t customarily publish news releases, but this item from the organizers of Bouchercon 2019—which is to be held in Dallas, Texas, from October 31 to November 33—seems worth passing along:

We are concentrating on the history of our first fifty years. If you have and are willing to donate historical programs, bags, buttons, pictures, Anthony Awards, mementos, or other articles for display, please contact Carol Puckett, Bouchercon 2019 Chair and a member of the Bouchercon National History Committee at BCon2019@gmail.com. Note that we are hoping to include some of these articles in an archive that we are planning to establish to continue to honor the history of Bouchercon.

• Among the recipients of this year’s Best of Illinois History Awards, presented late last week by the Illinois State Historical Society, was the non-fiction book Scarface and the Untouchable: Al Capone, Eliot Ness, and the Battle for Chicago, by Max Allan Collins and A. Brad Schwartz (Morrow, 2018). The ISHS credits that book with providing “a new look at an old story. An engaging, well-researched, and informative dual biography of Al Capone and Eliot Ness that may be the best book of this genre to come along in this century. Collins and Schwartz tell a story all Illinoisans know in fragments but few know in its entirety. It is the story of the coming of age of Capone when the most disrespected law of the land—Prohibition—is enacted, told in tandem with the story of Ness, an introspective, timid lawman with a passion for justice. For those who grew up with the Hollywood myths of gangster films, and The Untouchables TV series, this will be the book you remember ...”

• While we’re on the subject of author accolades, yesterday brought word of which books and writers have been nominated for the 2018 Shirley Jackson Awards, honoring “exceptional work in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and dark fantasy.” There are six categories of contenders, so I’m not going to list them all. But here are the rivals for this year’s Best Novel commendation:

— Everything Under, by Daisy Johnson (Jonathan Cape)
— In the Night Wood, by Dale Bailey (John Joseph Adams/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
— Little Eve, by Catriona Ward (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
— Social Creature, by Tara Isabella Burton (Double Day/Raven)
— We Sold Our Souls, by Grady Hendrix (Quirk)

Winners of these awards (for books published in 2018) will be declared on Sunday, July 14, during Readercon 30, set to take place in Quincy, Massachusetts, July 11-14.

• Finally, among the half-dozen shortlisted nominees for this year’s Pushkin House Russian Book Prize is a non-fiction release likely to have drawn the attention of Rap Sheet readers: Ben Macintyre’s dramatic Cold War-era tale, The Spy and the Traitor (Viking).

• It’s hard to believe it is time again for the annual running of the Kentucky Derby. In association with that, Mystery Fanfare’s Janet Rudolph has updated her list of Derby-related mystery fiction.

• How’s this for a bit of irony? People magazine reports that the next role for actress Felicity Huffman, recently implicated in the nationwide college admissions cheating scandal, will find her playing a prosecutor. She’ll portray Manhattan assistant district attorney (and later author) Linda Fairstein in Ava DuVernay’s When They See Us, a Netflix production that People says will focus on the notorious 1989 Central Park Five scandal. (It was the legacy of that brutal rape case, you may recall, which led to the Mystery Writers of America withdrawing Fairstein’s Grand Master Award earlier this year.)

• Comfort TV’s David Hofstede has chosen what he declares are “The 100 Most Memorable Songs Introduced by Classic TV.” There aren’t many crime fiction-related tunes listed, but he does include a “melancholy country ballad” from Charlie’s Angels titled “Trippin’ To the Mornin’” as well as the theme from Moonlighting. Part I of Hofsede’s list can be found here, while Part II is here.

• St. Louis’ Riverfront Times reports on a project by Winnipeg, Canada-based filmmaker Guy Maddin to re-interpret Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 psychological thriller, Vertigo, “not through dialogue or specific actions but through purely visual associations. Drawing heavily on ’70s crime shows, including The Streets of San Francisco and McMillan & Wife, Maddin creates connections to Vertigo by reusing a particular camera angle, a detail in the set decoration or even just the rhythm of an edited sequence. Nearly every aspect of the film—the watered-down colors and sledgehammer editing of TV drama and the sudden, unexpected appearances (and just as sudden disappearances) of Karl Malden, Claude Akins, Meg Ryan and dozens of other familiar faces—flaunts its discontinuity and challenges the viewer to find meaning in the clutter. Yet somehow the themes and spirit of Vertigo creep through, almost eerily.” Until this week, I had never heard of Maddin’s hour-long film, titled The Green Fog, but it apparently debuted at the San Francisco International Film Festival back in 2017. I can only hope to see it sometime. A brief trailer is embedded below.



• In his latest “Getting Away with Murder” column for Shots, Mike Ripley writes about a trio of new novels produced by journalists (including Tom Bradby’s Secret Service), Cuban writer Leonardo Padura’s new Mario Conde story (Grab a Snake by the Tail), a highly irregular book-promotion item (“One has to wonder what sort of idiot promotes his novel by sending out review copies accompanied by a real knife …”), the pending debut of a previously undiscovered Desmond Bagley yarn, and a great deal more.

• And since we’re at the start of a new month, let me remind everyone to take a peek at The Rap Sheet’s wrap-up of fresh spring books, which includes more than 115 tales coming out—on both sides of the Atlantic—between now and June 1.

• For The Writer, thriller scribes Paul Doiron and Lee Child ponder how best to develop “realistic female characters that offer way more than sex appeal.” While this may have seemed like a good idea to Writer editors, the piece has been met with a considerable derogatory blowback. Critic Sarah Weinman complained that it was “presented as if they are saving thrillers from needless chest-thumping,” while others suggested—not unreasonably—that if the magazine wanted to know how to create strong women characters, perhaps it should have asked female authors instead of male ones.

• I already mentioned here the demise, on April 15, of 91-year-old New York author-playwright Warren Adler (The War of the Roses, American Quartet). But now comes blogger-critic Michael Carlson with his own obituary of Adler, prepared for Britain’s Guardian.

• I didn’t know, until reading this piece in Shotsmag Confidential, that Swedish writer David Lagercrantz’s third addition to Stieg Larsson’s Dragon Tattoo series, The Girl Who Lived Twice (due out in August), will also be his last.

• Although I’m not a big podcast follower, I do enjoy the Today I Found Out series, available on YouTube. This last Monday’s installment, for instance, found fast-yakking host Simon Whistler introducing the curious to “10 Detectives More Interesting than Sherlock Holmes,” among his picks being “cowboy detective” Charles Siringo and female Pinkerton operative Kate Warne.

• A trio of CrimeReads stories I have enjoyed recently: Craig Pittman’s profile of Donald J. Sobol, the creator of that literary “‘Sherlock in sneakers,’ boy detective Leroy ‘Encyclopedia’ Brown”; Lisa Levy’s examination of “the hipster mystery, or hipstery”; and Curtis Evans’ look back at poet, essayist, and literary critic T.S. Eliot, “the man who rescued Wilkie Collins from obscurity.”

• And I owe a hearty toast to Dwyer Murphy, the managing editor of CrimeReads, who chose my recent piece about the covers of Ross Macdonald’s The Moving Target as one of the site’s “favorite stories of April.” He writes: “It’s hard to think of a crime author who influenced the aesthetic of modern detective fiction more than Ross Macdonald, so it seems appropriate to undertake a visual history on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of Lew Archer’s first appearance, in The Moving Target. J. Kingston Pierce, expert on all things crime, but especially crime fiction covers, takes on the project in this fantastic survey of Macdonald’s first Archer novel, offering up an engaging mixture of history and critique as he tells the story of one of the century’s most important crime novels, cover-by-cover.”

• The Nick Carter & Carter Brown Blog is currently in the midst of posting a selection of Robert McGinnis paperback covers. Because it can. Because they’re that good.

• The Stiletto Gumshoe applauds the paperback cover artistry of “Cecil Calvert Beall (1892-1970), better known as C.C. Beall.” Among the familiar examples of Beall’s work is his “darkly gorgeous painting” for the 1950 edition of Bruno Fischer’s House of Flesh.”

• Vulture argues that even at age 60 (it was first released in April 1959), Richard Condon’s The Manchurian Candidate remains timely.

• Last month I noted, in my Killer Covers blog, that Britain’s Piccadilly Publishing was reissuing the vintage series of Larry Kent novels in e-book form. It began with just five titles from among the hundreds originally published. But this week, Piccadilly co-founder David Whitehead (aka Ben Bridges) announced on Facebook that an additional five (Go-Go for Broke, Call for a Corpse, Crimson Lady, Terror Below, and The Weirdos) have been scheduled for release by the end of May, all with their original cover art. What’s more, Whitehead says he hopes that paperback versions of these tales will soon become available as well.

• Lee Goldberg has compiled the list of musical numbers he listened to while composing his latest novel, Killer Thriller. These same TV and movie themes could be used as a soundtrack to accompany your reading of that book. But if you’re like me, you might find it difficult to concentrate on the page while listening to, say, Richard Markowitz’s galloping theme for The Wild Wild West.

• I don’t think I had ever before seen a list of which Sherlock Holmes stories were Arthur Conan Doyle’s favorites, but here’s one.

• This trailer for the film Anna, “Luc Besson's latest neo-Eurospy spectacle,” slated to premiere on June 21, has me wanting to view the picture in its action-packed entirety.

• In response to a question about the future of his Ethan Gage historical adventure series, 67-year-old Washington newspaperman-turned-author William Dietrich explained recently on Facebook:

I’m flattered to periodically get inquiries about the next Ethan Gage novel, but I need to update my status (in 2019) to explain that no more books in that series are currently planned.

That wasn’t my original intention. I’d hoped to continue the series through the entire period [of] the Napoleonic Wars, but HarperCollins made a business decision to stop its support because of gradually eroding sales. I followed up with one self-published Ethan, The Trojan Icon, which readers enjoyed. However, I found self-publishing of this and two other books (the young adult novel The Murder of Adam and Eve and the non-fiction Napoleon's Rules) limiting because of the difficulty of getting publicity or shelf display.

So, as I entered my late 60s, I decided to retire! This doesn’t mean I’ve stopped writing—I have several projects that might become completed books someday—but I’m not “working” at being an author as I once was. While my 22 books are well short of the hundreds some authors have turned out (Issac Asimov comes to mind), it’s about 22 more than I expected back when I was starting. The journey has been thrilling.

I still hope to someday have screen adaptations of some of my works, and continue to ponder the peripatetic Ethan Gage. I never say never.

But I’m also enjoying more time in a lovely corner of the world (the San Juan Islands of Washington state) and time to read, write, and travel—especially after a couple health scares. I’m delighted that fans are still reading and I hope new readers will keep discovering Ethan and the other adventures I’ve so enjoyed writing. Happy exploring!

• In a rather wonderful piece for Criminal Element, Susanna Calkins revisits Chicago’s peculiar “Canary Murder” case of 1929.

• From Elizabeth Foxwell’s The Bunburyist: “The Detroit News reported that a lawsuit regarding the sale of Elmore Leonard’s papers to the University of South Carolina had been settled. Christine Leonard, Leonard’s ex-wife, had sued alleging that Leonard’s company, trust, and son had sold the archive in secret (stating that a stipulation in the divorce decree entitled her to a share of the proceeds).”

• Last but not least, since I mentioned Cinco de Mayo in this post’s headline, it’s only right and proper that I should point you to a catalogue of mysteries related to Sunday’s holiday.