Bullet Points: No Shutdown Here Edition

• I mentioned last spring on this page that Raymond Benson, the author of several James Bond continuation novels published between 1997 and 2003, had penned a thrilling adventure for Ian Fleming Publications (IFP) titled The Hook and the Eye, set back in 1952 and centered on ex-CIA op Felix Leiter. A Bond cohort familiar from several of Fleming’s novels, Leiter has become, in Benson’s yarn, a Pinkerton detective tangling with spies in Manhattan and tasked with safely transporting an “impossibly beautiful and impossibly secretive” woman to Texas. Hook was originally intended for release in 10 digital installments, beginning in May, and was then supposed to debut in print in October—this month. So far, however, it seems to be available in book form only for direct purchase from IFP. I don’t see the same edition listed on Amazon in either the United States or the UK, though that online retailer is still satisfying orders for the Kindle version. I asked Benson for an update on this situation. Here’s his reply:

IFP became their own publisher recently and they wanted Hook to be exclusive from them (for the time being). So, yes, right now, while the e-book is on Amazon and other retailer outlets, the print book can only be ordered from IFP. They will likely expand this rollout in the future like the old roadshow movie attractions, slowly offering it on Amazon and such, an audiobook, maybe a U.S. publication, maybe a limited-edition hardcover. It’s all new to them and they’re trying things out, like the e-book serialization that ultimately didn’t work technically (so they released the full e-book at once).

As to the possibility of The Hook and the Eye becoming the initial entry in a whole new Leiter series, Benson answers only, “Not known yet.” That isn’t a “no,” so keep your fingers crossed.

(Above) The full paperback cover of Raymond Benson’s The Hook and the Eye, designed by Thomas Gilbert.

• By the way, Terrance Layhew recently spoke with Benson about The Hook and the Eye for his podcast, Suit Up!

• I missed this news, so thanks to In Reference to Murder for bringing it to my attention. Writes B.V. Lawson: “The winners of the 2025 Lambda Literary Awards (fondly known as the Lammys), established in 1989 to garner national visibility for LGBTQ books, were announced this past weekend. The winner of the Best LBGTQ+ Mystery was Rough Trade by Katrina Carrasco (MCD). The other finalists include: Charlotte Illes is Not a Teacher by Katie Siegel (Kensington); One of Us Knows by Alyssa Cole (William Morrow); Rough Pages by Lev AC Rosen (Tor Publishing Group); and The Night of Baba Yaga by Akira Otani, translated by Sam Bett (Soho Crime).”

• Chicago Review of Books last week announced its shortlist of contenders for the 2025 Chicago Review of Books Awards (what other name did you think they would have?), and among the five fiction rivals is one that might be especially interesting to this blog’s readers: Vanishing Daughters (Thomas & Mercer), by Cynthia Pelayo, a novel of psychological suspense focusing on a Chicago journalist haunted—in more ways than one—by mysteries surrounding her mother’s death and her own hunt for a fiendishly successful serial killer.

• On October 1, Crime Writers of Canada opened the submissions process for its 2026 CWC Awards of Excellence, “celebrating the best in Canadian crime, mystery, and suspense writing.” Eligible for consideration are works published in 2025 by Canadian citizens and permanent residents. There are 10 award categories:

— The Peter Robinson Award for Best Crime Novel ($1,000 prize)
— Best Crime First Novel ($1,000)
— Best Crime Novel Set in Canada ($500)
— The Whodunit Award for Best Traditional Mystery ($500)
— Best Crime Short Story ($200)
— The Best French Language Crime Book ($500)
— Best Juvenile/YA Crime Book ($250)
— The Brass Knuckles Award for Best Non-fiction Crime Book ($300)
— Best Unpublished Crime Novel Manuscript written by an
unpublished author ($500)

Submission deadlines are here. Shortlisted nominees will be publicized next April 24, with the winners to be announced on May 29.

• Meanwhile, writers hoping to contribute articles or reviews to the Winter 2025 edition of Mystery Readers Journal will want to get cracking: the deadline is November 1. This will be the second issue in a row devoted to Northern California mysteries, tying them both in nicely to next year’s Left Coast Crime convention, which is set to take place in San Francisco from February 26 to March 1, 2026.

• Max Allan Collins has been noodling for years with a novel that would embroil his famous series private eye, Nathan Heller, in a 1960s-era investigation involving both labor union leader Jimmy Hoffa and U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. He’s even suggested that such a book might be the last one he writes about Heller. Now, though, Collins says he “might not write it at all,” or might instead pen two more Hellers. He explains the situation in his blog:

I was watching TV and saw Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and
wondered if he had, if not damaged, the Kennedy name, brought it into a kind of doubt. He strikes me as a crank, and a dangerous one; some smart people disagree, but enough people share that view—that as Secretary of Health and Human Services he is a threat to health and human services—that the Robert F. Kennedy name is not something I dare, at the moment, hang a Heller on. It may already have hurt Too Many Bullets [2023], my Heller RFK assassination novel.

I don’t do this lightly. I first asked [my wife] Barb if she agreed that this was a bad time to embark on an RFK novel (the theme was to be RFK/Hoffa, as my previous Kennedy-oriented novels have more than hinted at). She immediately agreed and said, “Write something else.” I called my editor, Charles Ardai, at Hard Case Crime and asked if he thought I should do a different, non-Kennedy novel instead of the one we’d been planning (and that I was contracted to deliver). He was thrilled I was setting that subject aside (for now anyway). I asked my longtime researcher, George Hagenaur, what he thought. He, too, said it was a bad time to do a Kennedy book.

So. I am instead going to write [an early 1970s] Watergate novel, which was already one of two Heller novels I was considering doing, for quite a while now. It seems like a good time to deal with a cover-up.

Indeed, revisiting the paranoia and drive for power that led to the 1972 burglary of Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington, D.C.’s Watergate complex and Republican President Richard M. Nixon’s subsequent concealment of that crime, would draw obvious parallels to Donald Trump’s paranoia, corruption, and autocratic scheming. Personally, I prefer to see Collins’ Heller tackling older cases (the 1934 murder of bank robber John Dillinger, the 1937 disappearance of aviatrix Amelia Earhart, Los Angeles’ 1947 Black Dahlia murder, etc.), and Too Many Bullets did imply that an RFK/Hoffa story was next. Yet any new Heller novel is better than none.

• With The Last Death of the Year, her sixth Hercule Poirot novel, coming out on both sides of the Atlantic later this month, British author-poet Sophie Hannah talks to CrimeReads “about how she writes the Poirot novels, the taunting challenge at the beginning of this new novel, and what crime fiction and poetry have in common.”

• And the Web site Spybrary mentions that John le Carré’s fourth son, who pens fiction as “Nick Harkaway,” is encouraging other writers to “continue the adventures of his father’s famed spymaster George Smiley, opening the way for a potential new wave of espionage novels. Harkaway, who has already published one continuation novel, Karla’s Choice, and has another due next year, said the morally ambiguous world created by le Carré was ‘richer and wider than the original books ever had a chance to show.’ He urged writers to enter the Smiley universe ‘with due deference and due fearlessness.’”

• We’ve known for some while that a spin-off from Reacher, the Amazon Prime TV series based on Lee Child’s Jack Reacher novels, was in the works and that its protagonist would be Frances Neagley (played by Maria Sten), once a member of Reacher’s army special-investigations unit and now a partner with a Chicago private security firm. But not until the author was interviewed by Shots had we heard a recent update on that program’s development. Child revealed that Season 4 of Reacher, based on his 2009 novel, Gone Tomorrow, “is almost done … and the Neagley spin-off is almost through post-production.” As to Neagley’s Season 1 plot, Wikipedia says it will find the character “seek[ing] the truth after an old friend dies in a suspicious accident.”

• Since we’re talking TV, note that Season 2 of Karen Pirie, the ITV show based on Val McDermid’s now eight books about a young Scottish police investigator, will have its U.S. premiere on BritBox come Thursday, October 2. This new season will comprise three 90-minute episodes and is adapted from the second of McDermid’s Pirie tales, A Darker Domain. Mystery Fanfare provides a trailer.

• Lauren Lyle, who plays Karen Pirie, also headlines The Ridge, a six-part drama coming to BBC Scotland and Sky Open on Tuesday, October 21. The Killing Times explains that The Ridge “sees Lyle in the lead role of Mia, who is fleeing addiction and leaving behind a professional life in tatters in Scotland. She accepts a wedding invitation from her estranged sister in New Zealand—only to find the would-be-bride dead upon arrival. Caught up in grief and pulled by a dark attraction to her late-sister’s fiancé Ewan, played by New Zealand star Jay Ryan, Mia soon finds that familiarity among a small community breeds secrets and tensions, endangering the brittle fabric of the town itself.”

• Man From U.N.C.L.E. fans, pay attention! Turner Classic Movies (TCM) has scheduled eight telefilms, all edited from that 1964-1968 TV series but frequently boasting extra footage, to show back to back on Monday, October 13. Click here to learn more.

• One hundred fifty years after Edgar Allan Poe was reburied in Baltimore, Ed Simon considers his legacy, his interest in premature burials, and his Americanism in this splendid essay for Literary Hub.

• Included among Columbia University linguist John McWhorter’s choices of “10 Old Television Series Every Kid Needs to Watch”—prepared partly with his “tween daughters” in mind—is CBS’s Mannix (1967-1975). “Weird choice, I know,” he remarks in The New York Times. “But my girls should know the conventions of the once ubiquitous hourlong private-eye genre, including the way it reduced female characters to just dolls. I found that weird even when I was a kid, and I want my girls to see what we have gotten at least partly beyond. Plus, the look and sound of Mannix were a delight. The fashions, sets and even jazzy three-quarter waltz time theme song are groovy. Especially after the first season, when [Joe] Mannix has left a detective agency and goes it alone, the episodes are pleasingly interchangeable; choose the one with your favorite guest star.”

• “Why Do Priests and Vicars Make Perfect Detectives?” asks a headline in the TV-oriented blog The Killing Times. Editor Paul Hirons submits that it’s because mystery-solving clergy—whether G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown, Sidney Chambers in Grantchester, or Daniel Clement in Murder Before Evensong—“offer not just the satisfaction of seeing a puzzle solved, but a meditation on what it means to be good, or to fall short. The crimes may change, but the questions of conscience, guilt and grace remain timeless.”

• We have a cover already for Hurricane Room, Kim Sherwood’s third and final Double O novel. Its tagline is certainly suggestive: “James Bond Is Alive.” Hurricane Room is being readied for release in the States and UK next May.

• Whenever I order something online from Blackwell’s Books in England (as I do rather frequently), I am impressed by an incidental legal notation at the bottom of its Web pages that reads, “©1879-2025 Blackwell’s.” In an era when bookshops struggle to stay afloat, you have to love an operation that’s been around for 146 years!

• Finally, let us wish a tardy but justly appreciative farewell to Ann Granger, the Portsmouth, England-born author of more than three dozen books in four different mystery series (her first being 1991’s Say It With Poison). She was 86 years old at the time of her death on September 7. An obituary in The Daily Telegraph observes that “Ann Granger’s mysteries were popular with British readers, but she secured her largest readership abroad, feeding the voracious global appetite for the gentle English style of violent crime. Translated into 10 languages, her novels were especially popular in Germany—where she sold millions of copies, with some 30 of her books entering the top-five bestseller list—and the United States. “The village mystery plot should be ingenious, the style witty, the setting picturesque and the characters amusingly idiosyncratic,” the New York Times Book Review declared in 1995. “Ann Granger knows the drill so well she could write a manual.” According to the Web site Fantastic Fiction, she has one further entry—currently untitled—in her series starring Victorian police inspector Ben Ross that’s still in the publishing pipeline.

Of Pride, Premieres, and Peggy Fair

• Concurrent with President Joe Biden declaring June to be LGBTQ Pride Month in the United States, Sisters in Crime has opened the submissions process for its second annual Pride Award for Emerging LGBTQIA+ Crime Writers. Up for grabs is a $2,000 grant for an unpublished piece of fiction. Entries of 2,500 to 5,000 words in length will be accepted between now and July 31, with this year’s winner to be announced in the fall. “Established in 2021 as part of the legacy project by former Sisters in Crime president Sherry Harris,” a news release explains, “the grant aims to raise visibility of diverse voices in the genre and is intended for a crime writer beginning their career, and will support activities related to career development including workshops, seminars, conferences, retreats, online courses, and research activities required for completion of his, her or their work. One winner and five runners-up will also be awarded a one-year Sisters in Crime membership, as well as a critique from an established Sisters in Crime member.” West Orange, New Jersey, writer C.J. Prince captured last year’s Pride Award. To find further information and the application, simply click here.

• I haven’t yet watched Slow Horses, the Apple+ TV spy series based on Mick Herron’s Slough House novels, and starring Gary Oldman. Nonetheless, The Hollywood Reporter says it has already been greenlit for two more seasons. “The renewal,” it explains, “will take the show through its fourth season … Season two of Slow Horses is set to premiere later this year. The first two seasons were shot at the same time (though only the first was announced), and Apple TV+ teased the next installment at the end of the six-episode first season. Season two is based on Dead Lions, … and follows Jackson Lamb (Oldman) and his team as they seek to prove a Cold War-era colleague of Lamb’s was murdered. Seasons three and four will be based on the corresponding books in Herron’s series, Real Tigers and Spook Street.”

• Slowly but surely, the good folks behind PBS-TV’s Sunday Masterpiece series are spreading news about when their popular shows will return to the screen—or, in one case, debut. Here’s the complete lineup: Endeavour, Season 8, will premiere on June 19; Grantchester, Season 7, on July 10; Guilt, Season 2, on August 28; Van Der Valk, Season 2, on September 25; Miss Scarlet and the Duke, Season 2, on October 16; Magpie Murders, on October 16; and Annika, Season 1, on October 16 (though it’s already available via PBS Passport and the PBS Masterpiece streaming service). A trailer highlighting these shows can be enjoyed here.

• TV critic Stephen Taylor takes a fond look back at Gail Fisher, who played secretary Peggy Fair on the 1967-1975 CBS series Mannix.

• According to In Reference to Murder, “The shortlist was announced for the 2022 Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize, culled from a panel of UK librarians and library staff. These six titles are now with a judging panel and over the summer months, readers will be invited to participate in the Reader's Vote, which equates to one seat on the judge's panel. The finalists include The Apollo Murders by Chris Hadfield; Where Blood Runs Cold by Giles Kristian; The Vacation by John Marrs; The Plant Hunter by T.L. Mogford; Sankofa by Chibundu Onuzo; and Moonlight and the Pearler's Daughter by Lizzie Pook.” This year’s winner is to be revealed on September 21.

• R.I.P., Bo Hopkins, the South Carolina-born actor whose face was so familiar in TV productions of the 1970s and ’80s, among them The Rockford Files, Charlie’s Angels, The Manhunter, Doc Elliott, and Dynasty. Hopkins featured as well in big-screen films such as The Wild Bunch and American Graffiti, and in the boob-tube flicks The Kansas City Massacre and The Invasion of Johnson County, the latter of which was an unsuccessful 1976 pilot also starring Bill Bixby. The actor was 84 years old, and died from a heart attack.

• Finally, here are a couple of lists you might enjoy: The Columbophile Blog gathers together what it suggests are the 12 funniest scenes from the vintage Peter Falk crime drama, Columbo—one of them featuring Jamie Lee Curtis in an early acting role; and Great Detectives of Old Time Radio host Adam Graham identifies what he claims are the “Top Five Forgotten OId Time Radio Detective Programs.” The Airmail Mystery, from 1932? I, for one, have no memory at all of that series of 13 fifteen-minute episodes.

Bullet Points: Caffeine-Powered Edition

Since I woke up way too early on this cold Friday morning, and am already halfway through my second cup of coffee, I might as well dive into some recent crime-fiction-related news.

• During this year’s Black Orchid Banquet, held on December 4 in New York City, it was announced that Washington, D.C., author Stephen Spotswood has won the 2021 Nero Award for his 2020 novel, Fortune Favors the Dead. The Nero is presented annually by the fan organization The Wolfe Pack to “the best American mystery written in the tradition of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe stories.” (Last year’s recipient was David Baldacci.) That same festive event saw Alexis Stefanovich-Thomson being given the 2021 Black Orchid Novella Award for her story “The Man Who Went Down Under,” published in the July 2022 issue of Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. The Black Orchid is sponsored jointly by The Wolfe Pack and AHMM and honors the novella format popularized by Stout. Honorable mentions for the Black Orchid went to “Bad Apples,” by Kathleen Marple Kalb (writing as Nikki Knight); “The Inside Shake,” by Jason Koontz; “House of Tigers,” by William Burton McCormick; “The Mystery of the Missing Woman,” by Regina M. Sestak; and “Lovely As,” by Jacqueline Vick.

• The Bookseller reports that “Dettie Gould has won the Harvill Secker Bloody Scotland Crime Writing Award with her ‘deliciously dark thriller’ The Light and Shade of Ellen Swithin. Her story follows Swithin, who is a skilled actuary in an accounting firm, a dutiful daughter, and a latent serial killer.” It adds that “Gould will have her book published under the Harvill Secker imprint, in a publishing deal with an advance of £5,000. She will also appear on a panel at the Bloody Scotland festival and receive a guest pass for the weekend’s events. The Arvon Foundation, which sponsored the competition, has also offered the winner the chance to attend any one of its creative writing courses.” (Hat tip to In Reference to Murder.)

• Crime Time FM, an interview podcast hosted by Paul Burke in affiliation with the Web site Crime Time, has named its first Crime Novel of the Year: S.A. Cosby’s Razorblade Tears (Headline). Receiving runner-up honors is Dominic Nolan’s Vine Street (Headline). Also shortlisted for this inaugural commendation were The Village of Eight Graves, by Seichi Yokomizo (Pushkin Press); The Turnout, by Megan Abbott (Faber & Faber); The First Day of Spring, by Nancy Tucker (Hutchinson); and Future Perfect, by Felicia Yap (Wildfire).

• While I have online subscriptions to both The New York Times and The Washington Post, I don’t enjoy similarly unfettered access to Dublin’s Irish Times. So I have not been able to look through that broadsheet’s recent “Best Crime Fiction of 2021” list. However, author-playwright Declan Hughes, who put the piece together along with fellow Irish writer Declan Burke, sent George Easter of Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine his 10 choices, via e-mail. They are:

— Dream Girl, by Laura Lippman
— The Survivors, by Jane Harper
— Hidden Lies, by Rachel Ryan
— Blood Ties, by Brian McGilloway
— A Man Named Doll, by Jonathan Ames
— Vera Kelly Is Not a Mystery, by Rosalie Knecht
— Palace of the Drowned, by Christine Mangan
— The Plot, by Jean Hanff Korelitz
— A Slow Fire Burning, by Paula Hawkins
— 56 Days, by Catherine Ryan Howard

• English professor Carole E. Barrowman offers her own roll of favorite mysteries in Wisconsin’s Milwaukee Journal.

• Speaking of “best” books, CrimeReads this morning posted its selections of “The Best True Crime Books of 2021.” I’m pleased to see that its 10 picks include Dean Jobb’s The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream: The Hunt for a Victorian Era Serial Killer (Algonquin), a work I consumed in a captivated rush this last summer.

• Another CrimeReads piece worth noticing: Keith Roysdon’s tribute to the 1967-1975 TV detective drama Mannix, which starred Mike Connors. As Roysdon writes:

Sure, there have been cool P.I.s (Craig Stevens’ “Peter Gunn” with Henry Mancini’s theme music, full of smooth menace) and affably hot P.I.s (our boy Thomas Magnum) and cerebral consulting detectives (“Sherlock”) and the most charming, hard-luck P.I. on the California coast (“This is Jim Rockford, at the tone leave your name and message …”)

But as far as a play-it-straight-down-the-middle investigator who could take a blow to the head and come back swinging, nobody topped Mike Connors’ “Mannix.” And the show had a hell of a theme too, by Lalo Schifrin.

Roysdon’s full article can be found here. Click here if you’re interested in my own comments on that CBS-TV series.

• Television tidbits: Veronica Mars alumna Kristen Bell has a new psychological thriller coming to Netflix on January 28, The Woman in the Street, a trailer for which can be enjoyed in The Killing Times. And Deadline brings word that “Jo Nesbø’s Headhunters is returning to screens, this time as a TV series for Sweden’s C More and TV2 Norway starring Betrayed’s Axel Bøyum and Mr. Robot’s Martin Wallström. … Headhunters, which was made into a highly-rated Norwegian film 10 years ago … follows a headhunter lying and manipulating his way to success both in his career and in his love life. But one lie leads to another, and soon he is so entangled in his own stories that it becomes a danger to both himself and the people around him.”

• There have been far too many deaths among members of the crime-fiction community lately. The Gumshoe Site mentions one that I somehow missed: “Gordon McAlpine died on November 29. The former college writing teacher wrote his first novel, Joy in Mudville (Dutton, 1989), set in 1930s Chicago’s Wrigley Field. Woman with a Blue Pencil (Seventh Street Books, 2015) was nominated for the 2016 Edgar Award for best paperback. He used his pseudonym Owen Fitzstephen to write Hammett Unwritten (2013) and The Big Man’s Daughter (2020; both from Seven Street Books). The last two novels feature Dashiell Hammett and some people on whom Hammett modeled … the colorful characters in The Maltese Falcon. He was 62.”

• I’m tardy in bringing attention to a pair of posts focused on this year’s Iceland Noir festival (November 16-20), but I don’t want to just let them go unmentioned. Kristopher Zgorski’s report is in BOLO Books; Abby Endler’s recollections are in Crime by the Book.

• Randal S. Brandt, a friend of this blog and a librarian at the University of California Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, was profiled last month in the San Jose Mercury News because of his labors as curator of the Bancroft’s massive California Detective Fiction Collection. The story includes news that Mark Coggins, a Stanford University graduate and infrequent Rap Sheet contributor, added “a complete set of [Raymond] Chandler and [Dashiell] Hammett first editions” to the collection. Explains the News’ Chuck Barney: “Coggins, known for his August Riordan private eye novels, which are also in the Bancroft collection, had been acquiring the books since the early ’90s. He viewed himself as ‘sort of a custodian.’”

• Finally, yesterday’s episode of Terry Gross’ Fresh Air radio program focused on crime of a different sort—and a truly frightening scenario: the end of American democracy, engineered by Donald Trump’s Republican Party. “In a new article titled ‘Trump’s Next Coup Has Already Begun,’ published in The Atlantic,” she told listeners, “my guest, journalist Barton Gellman, warns January 6 was just practice. We face a serious risk that American democracy as we know it will come to an end in 2024. The attempt by Trump and other Republicans to overturn the results of the 2020 election failed. But Gellman reports that Republicans have been building an apparatus for election theft. They’ve studied Trump’s crusade to overturn the 2020 results. They’ve noted points of failure and have taken steps to avoid failure next time by working to change whose votes are counted, who oversees the election, who chooses the electors and what happens in the courts.” You can listen to the whole interview here. If you’re an Atlantic subscriber, you can read Gellman’s article here.

Mannix Steers You Right

Several fictional TV detectives became famous in part for the automobiles they drove. Think Lieutenant Columbo with his beat-up 1959 Peugeot 403 Cabriolet, or Jim Rockford with his road-chase-ready Pontiac Firebird Esprit; Harry Orwell with his wheezy, gray 1960s Austin-Healey Sprite, Inspector Morse with his 1960 Jaguar Mk II 2.4, and Thomas Magnum with his Ferrari 308 GTS.

Los Angeles private eye Joe Mannix (Mike Connors), star of the CBS-TV series Mannix (1967-1975), may not have been the most stylish dresser, what with his wool sports coats and knife-edge-creased slacks, but he wheeled about the City of Angels in a heavenly selection of convertibles. The video below collects them all, from a 1967 Oldsmobile Toronado and a George Barris-customized 1968 Dodge Dart GTS 340 to a flashy succession of Plymouth Barracudas, a 1974 Dodge Challenger, a 1974 Chevy Camaro LT, and more. Let’s ride!



READ MORE: “Curbside TV—The Cars of Mannix,” by J.P. Cavanaugh (Curbside Classic).

Bullet Points: A Heady Mix Edition

• When Nellie Bly is remembered at all in our age, it’s usually for her 72-day circumnavigation of the earth in 1889, a stunt meant to beat the fictional record set by Phileas Fogg, in Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eight Days (1872). However, Bly—born Elizabeth Jane Cochran—was also a pioneering female newspaper journalist and, less well-recalled, a novelist. As January Magazine explains, she penned 11 tales in regular installments, mostly for The New York Family Story Paper. “Titles of two of her serial novels, Eva the Adventuress and New York By Night, have long been known,” the blog states. “But the novels themselves were lost …” That is, until their 2019 rediscovery by Michigan writer David Blixt, the author of What Girls Are Good For, a 2018 novel starring the daring Ms. Bly. Those missing works were finally released this month in brand-new editions by Sordelet Ink. The majority of them look to be adventure stories or romances, but the first—The Mystery of Central Park—fits snuggly in the crime category. Here’s a plot synopsis:

Dick and his sweetheart Penelope discover the body of a beautiful young woman posed upon a Central Park bench. Instantly Dick is suspected of having something to do with the young woman’s death. Moreover, Penelope has long been urging the ne’er-do-well Dick to accomplish something with his life. So he sets out to discover the dead woman’s identity and solve the riddle of her death. Was it innocent? Suicide? Or was it murder?

From the twinkling lights of New York’s high society to dens of iniquity, Dick follows every trail until he uncovers a tenuous lead. Saving another young woman from the jaws of death, he puts his happiness in jeopardy to confront the scoundrel responsible for the dead woman’s fate.

• The Women’s National Book Association of New Orleans has announced the recipients of its 2021 Pinckley Prizes for Crime Fiction, each “intended to honor a book which illuminates the reality of women’s lives …” This year’s Pinckley Prize for Distinguished Body of Work goes to C.S. Harris (aka Candice Proctor), author of the Sebastian St. Cyr Regency mystery series, while the Pinckley Prize for Debut Fiction goes to Angie Kim for her 2019 novel, Miracle Creek (Sarah Crichton)—a work that has already claimed an ITW Thriller Award for Best First Novel and the Edgar Award for Best First Novel by an American Author. A new commendation, the Pinckley Prize for True Crime Writing, is being given to Emma Copley Eisenberg, author of The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia (Hachette). Provided the worldwide coronavirus doesn’t alter plans, these honors will be presented during the 2021 Bouchercon, set to take place in New Orleans this coming August.

• Although I wasn’t bowled over by Miss Scarlet and The Duke, the six-part, British-Irish historical crime drama broadcast under PBS-TV’s Masterpiece umbrella earlier this year, I did think it merited further episodes. It’s now clear that was not my opinion alone. Mystery Fanfare brings news that the hour-long program, which is set in 1880s London and stars Kate Phillips and Stuart Martin, has had its run extended. Masterpiece executive producer Susanne Simpson is quoted as saying: “Miss Scarlet and The Duke was an instant fan favorite. Our audience couldn’t resist its lighthearted tone and the appealing characters so wonderfully portrayed by Kate Phillips and Stuart Martin. We’re delighted the show will return for a second season.” Season 2 is expected to debut on Masterpiece in 2022, but like its predecessor, will undoubtedly air earlier on the UK’s Alibi channel.

• According to The Killing Times, the ITV-TV series Unforgotten is “currently the most-watched crime drama in the UK.” Its Season 4 episodes just finished showing in Great Britain this week, and it hasn’t yet made it across the pond for the entertainment of American viewers. But Unforgotten has already been renewed for a fifth season. (Warning: Serious spoilers at that last link!)

• “Columbo, for the most part, was a pretty family-friendly show,” recalls the anonymous author of The Columbophile. “Negligible use of bad language and sex scenes allied with an absence of violence and gore ensured that even a show about murder—that darkest of human acts—rarely made for unsettling viewing. There were exceptions, though. Sometimes the show dropped stark reminders that murder really is a most foul and grisly business—and at its worst could be cruel and disturbing to boot.” Read more … if you dare!

• Delays, delays, and more delays: In Reference to Murder’s B.V. Lawson says that “Kenneth Branagh’s mystery ensemble-cast movie, Death on the Nile, has seen its premiere date pushed back again, this time to February 11, 2022. The 20th Century Studios production, which also stars Gal Gadot, Tom Bateman, and Annette Bening, has changed release dates several times due to the pandemic. [It was originally slated for release on December 20, 2019.] However, Deadline reports that the new release date has nothing to do with co-star Armie Hammer, who has been besieged by an alleged sex scandal.”



• Well, here I am again, recommending something I’ve spotted on YouTube, even though I know that videos there can vanish unexpectedly. Nonetheless, I feel compelled to point out the recent appearance of Michael O’Hara the Fourth, a 90-minute film that debuted on the television anthology series The Wonderful World of Disney in 1972. When I was growing up, Disney’s Sunday night presentations were must-see TV in my household. Yet aside from The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh (1963), starring Patrick McGoohan, and a rebroadcast of Fess Parker’s Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier (comprising the first three episodes of a five-part serial originally shot for Disney in the 1950s), I don’t recall many of the shows produced specifically for Wonderful World, as opposed to Disney theatrical pictures that were subsequently rerun on Sunday nights. Oddly, however, I have strong memories of Michael O’Hara the Fourth. Or perhaps it’s not so very odd, as that film left me with a huge crush on its star, Jo Ann Harris. Although she was then 22 years old, Harris was cast as Michael “Mike” O’Hara IV, a teenage wannabe sleuth—very much in the Nancy Drew mode—whose father was Michael O’Hara III, a police captain in an unnamed city, played by Dan Dailey (later to feature in the NBC Wednesday Mystery Movie segment Faraday and Company). The Disney Wiki explains how Harris’ character came by her distinctly masculine moniker:

The name Michael O’Hara has become synonymous with law enforcement. There have been three generations of Michael O’Hara’s and all have been exemplary policemen. When Michael O’Hara III’s child was born, he was told that [he and his wife would] not be able to have any more children, and there ha[d] always been a Michael O’Hara, so he named his child Michael O’Hara IV, despite the fact that she [was] a girl.

Now, Mike has a tendency to get involved with police matters and not always with good results, which annoys her father. And despite being told repeatedly to stay out of it, she continues her amateurish detective activities.

Michael O’Hara the Fourth was first shown in two parts, on successive Sunday nights: March 26, 1972, and April 2, 1972. It found the delightful, blonde Miss Mike recruiting her friends, especially her sort-of-boyfriend, Norman (Michael McGreevey), into one harebrained escapade after another, always intending to help her father with his crime-solving—but usually resulting in minor disasters. Although Mike wasn’t a tomboy (she favored short skirts), she didn’t shy away from mixing it up with crooks and killers. In the first part of this film, she and Norman try to get to the bottom of a money-counterfeiting operation, while the second half finds them seeking to crack the alibis of businessmen implicated in a murder. This picture may have been intended for young audiences, but it’s far from silly, and its humor and high jinks remain entertaining even after all these years. I’m a bit surprised Disney didn’t shoot a sequel. Or two.

• By the way, if you are curious, Jo Ann Harris went on to amass a lengthy résumé of credits, including guest roles on The Mod Squad, Banyon, The F.B.I., Nakia, The Manhunter, and Barnaby Jones. She also co-starred with Robert Stack in Most Wanted, a 1976-1977 Quinn Martin series on ABC-TV that “focused on an elite task force of the Los Angeles Police Department … [concentrating] exclusively on criminals on the mayor’s most-wanted list.” (You can watch the original title sequence here.) And no, I don’t have a crush on Harris any longer. Through some cruel trick of time, she’s now 71, not 22.

• This 1965 TV promo spot for The Wild Wild West must have left action-adventure fans in drooling anticipation of that CBS series’ September 17 premiere. Firearms, secret smoke bombs, and a quietly calculating Suzanne Pleshette—what’s not to like?

• How late-night repeats brought an end to Mannix’s run.

• How does Sherlock Holmes figure into the legend of the Loch Ness monster? CrimeReads’ Olivia Rutigliano recalls the tale. And you can click here for a brief film clip of that “Nessie” in action.

• I neglected to mention, in The Rap Sheet’s last “Bullet Points” round-up, another delightful piece that found its way into CrimeReads earlier this month: “How Shane Black’s Love Letter to 1970s Crime Fiction Put a Spotlight on Robert Terrall.” Composed by Bay Area freelancer (and occasional January Magazine contributor) Ben Terrall, it recounts the story of how his prolific author father, Robert Terrall (aka Robert Kyle), became a ghost writer on the Mike Shayne private-eye series back in the 1960s, after the protagonist’s creator, Davis Dresser, “developed a severe writer’s block.” The piece goes on to note that one of Terrall’s Shayne yarns, 1973’s Blue Murder, became source material for director Shane Black’s 2016 “slapstick buddy movie,” The Nice Guys, starring Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling—as was acknowledged in the picture’s collection of credits. “I have no doubt Dad would have loved to see his name on the silver screen,” remarks Ben Terrall. “He was a moviegoer from an early age and was always ready to write for Hollywood, but that never happened. He wrote several movie tie-ins (including one for Moses and the Ten Commandments, which made it possible for me to answer the question ‘What has your father written?’ with ‘The Ten Commandments’), but none of his fifty or so original novels were ever made into films.”

• Coincidentally, the latest episode of the Paperback Warrior Podcast focuses on, among assorted other topics, Robert Terrall’s life and literary endeavors. You can listen to that here.

• In his April “Getting Away with Murder” column for Shots, Mike Ripley covers subjects ranging from his lockdown reading choices and a case of mistaken author identity to new crime-fiction releases by James Woolf, Erin Kelly, Tom Bradby, and others.

• Who knew there were so many birthday-themed mysteries?

• The Gumshoe Site’s Jiro Kimura mentioned recently that William Heffernan, a Pulitzer Prize-nominated former journalist and the author most recently of The Scientology Murders (2017), died this last December 4 at age 80. Born in New Haven, Connecticut, Heffernan labored on behalf of both the New York Post and the Daily News, but left his investigative reporting career in 1978 after scoring a publishing contract for his first novel, Broderick (1980). As blogger Cullen Gallagher wrote, that book “is based on the real-life figure of Johnny Broderick, a tough New York cop as legendary as he is notorious. Nicknamed ‘The Beater,’ Broderick is anything but your conventional heroic policeman; he’s as corrupt, violent, and as crooked as the gangster and hoods he hunts down.” Heffernan went on to compose 18 more books, including 1988’s Ritual (which introduced series protagonist Paul Devlin, a New York City police detective), 1995’s Tarnished Blue (a Devlin yarn that captured the 1996 Edgar Award for Best Paperback Original Novel), his 2003 historical thriller, A Time Gone By, and 2010’s The Dead Detective (which launched Heffernan’s second series lead, Henry Doyle, a Tampa, Florida, homicide detective who can hear the postmortem whispers of murder victims). Kimura adds that Heffernan “once served as president of the International Association of Crime Writers/North America.” Oddly, I seem unable to locate an official online obituary of William Heffernan, and his Facebook page is no help—it hasn’t been updated since February 2016. If anyone reading this has spotted more information about the author’s demise, please let me know.

• More recently deceased is Richard Gilliland, a Texas native who, according to The Hollywood Reporter, “starred as Sgt. Steve DiMaggio on NBC’s McMillan & Wife in 1976-77 and as Lt. Nick Holden on ABC’s adaptation of Operation Petticoat in 1977-78, and he was a series regular on ABC’s Just Our Luck in 1983 and the CBC’s Heartland in 1989. Gilliland also had recurring roles on other shows, including Party of Five, The Waltons, Thirtysomething, Dark Skies and Desperate Housewives and guest-starring appearances on Criminal Minds, Dexter, Becker, Scandal, Joan of Arcadia, The Practice and Crossing Jordan, among many other shows.” Gilliland was married to Emmy-winning actress Jean Smart, whom he met when they worked together on the sitcom Designing Women in the 1980s. He was 71 years old at the time of his passing on March 18. More here.

• Last but not least, I am sorry to hear that another child of the Lone Star State, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Larry McMurtry breathed his last on March 25 at age 84. McMurtry will be remembered for many novels, among them The Last Picture Show (1966), Terms of Endearment (1975), and Anything for Billy (1988), but for me, it was his 1985 Old West adventure, Lonesome Dove, that most stood out. As I wrote in a piece for January Magazine, naming the 20th century’s foremost books, “McMurtry reinvented the western novel for a modern audience, filling Dove (and its sequel and prequels) with spectacularly quirky characters, oddball episodes that would never have made it into the works of either Louis L'Amour or Zane Grey, and heartwarming scenes that will stick with you forever.” Links to more McMurtry obituaries can be found here. And in the wake of his demise, this fine Texas Monthly profile from 2016 has been resurrected.

• Great Britain will celebrate National Crime Reading Month this coming June, though most of the events are to take place online, due to the continuing COVID-19 crisis. Linda Stratmann, chair of the Crime Writers’ Association, which hosts this annual literary fête, says: “We want to invite bookshops, libraries, publishers, conventions and festivals that celebrate the crime genre, to take part. Our sister network, the Crime Readers’ Association (CRA), is one of the largest communities of crime genre readers in the world, so this June is a unique opportunity to get an author event or reading initiative in front of that dedicated audience.” It’s only too bad the United States—which already dedicates months to recognition of mentoring, ice cream, and country music—can’t similarly honor crime and mystery fiction.

• Wales’ first international celebration of crime literature, the Gŵyl Crime Cymru Festival, is set to take place online from April 26 to May 3. As Mystery Fanfare explains, “Lee and Andrew Child, Yrsa Sigurðardóttir, Ragnar Jónasson, Peter James, Elly Griffiths, Abir Mukherjee, Vaseem Khan, and Martin Edwards—amongst others—will discuss their work alongside Welsh crime writers who might not be as well-known, but are playing their part in bringing Welsh crime writing to the fore. There will also be a panel focusing on the great success Welsh crime fiction is enjoying on the small screen, featuring the team that created the globally popular Keeping Faith TV series.” The complete schedule of events can be found here.

• Meanwhile, Crime Fiction Lover offers this handy overview of Welsh contributions to the genre, both on the page and on the screen. It includes a selection of novels and authors to get your explorations of that country’s bilingual crime fiction started.

• Florida journalist Craig Pittman passes along this piece from The New Yorker. It looks at a new film project from Yuko Torihara, focusing on Manhattan’s Chinatown at night. A principal player in that feature? Henry Chang, the 70-year-old author of detective novels such as Chinatown Beat (2006) and Lucky (2017), set in the neighborhood.

• I recently reported on the numerous nominees for this year’s Agatha Awards, which are to be dispensed during an online-only Malice Domestic festival in mid-July. Coincidentally, Elizabeth Foxwell now points me toward a two-part remembrance of the late author Elizabeth Peters (aka Barbara Mertz), who “played such an integral role” in founding that annual convention. Part I here, Part II here.

• Craig Sisterson, a New Zealand writer (and the creator of that country’s Ngaio Marsh Awards), who is currently living in London, has become a contributor to the international blog Murder Is Everywhere. His posts are supposed to appear every second Tuesday. The first, from March 23, is principally an ode to children’s mysteries.

• Speaking of lands Down Under, check out the results of Reading Matters’ month-long tribute to Southern Cross Crime.

• Sometime Rap Sheet contributor Mark Coggins (The Dead Beat Scroll) is also a Bay Area photographer, and for years he’s posted examples of his street shots on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. He has also used those black-and-white images as chapter illustrations in his novels. Now, says Coggins, he’s put together Street Stories, “a street photography monograph with the best of my work from the last dozen years or so. Published by Poltroon Press—the house that published my first novel—the coffee table-sized book includes 52 images reproduced in tritone by a printer in Italy. It incorporates a reproduction of my Japanese ‘hanko’ stamp on the cover and features end papers in a matching red color.” This $50 book won’t released until mid-May, but in the meantime, Coggins tells me, “Poltroon Press is offering a $10 discount on pre-orders …” Click here to learn more.

Bullet Points: Myriad Morsels Edition

• Why am I not surprised by this? “Lisbeth Salander, the cult figure and title character of the acclaimed Millennium book series created by Stieg Larsson, will return to the screen in The Girl in the Spider’s Web, a first-time adaptation of the recent global bestseller written by David Lagercrantz,” reads a news alert from MacLehose Press. “Fede Alvarez, the director of 2016’s breakout thriller Don’t Breathe, will helm the project from a screenplay by Steven Knight and Fede Alvarez and Jay Basu. … The new film will feature an entirely new cast, and the announcement marks the kickoff of a global search for an actress to portray in the iconic role of Lisbeth Salander. The production will begin principal photography in September of this year with a release date scheduled for October 5, 2018.”

• Two months after the death of actor Mike Connors, TV Shows on DVD has announced that a complete series set of Mannix, the 1967-1975 private-eye drama with which he is best associated, will be released by CBS/Paramount on May 9. Reads a press release: “Here are all 194 episodes together, that bring the action, the music, and the style of an era back to life. Developed for television by executive producer Bruce Geller (TV’s Mission: Impossible), Mannix cruises the mean streets of Los Angeles, cracking cases that feature an array of ne’er-do-wells, from the most dangerous of criminals to the syndicates of high society.” The 48-disc set will retail for $129.98.

• Via Eurocrime comes news that Booker Award-winning author Eleanor Catton’s third novel (following The Luminaries) will be Birnam Wood, “a psychological thriller, set in a remote area of New Zealand where scores of ultra-rich foreigners are building fortress-like homes, … following the guerilla gardening outfit Birnam Wood, a ragtag group of leftists who move about the country cultivating other people's land … [Their] chance encounter with an American billionaire sparks a tragic sequence of events which questions how far each of us would go to ensure our own survival—and at what cost.” The book has been sold “to Farrar, Straus (U.S.); McClelland & Stewart (Canada); Granta (UK/Australia); and Victoria University Press (NZ).”

• And this from In Reference to Murder: “Mystery Fest Key West has announced a call for submissions for this year’s Whodunit Mystery Writing Competition. The winner will claim a book-publishing contract with Absolutely Amazing eBooks, free Mystery Fest Key West 2017 registration, airfare, hotel accommodations for two nights, meals, and a Whodunit Award trophy to be presented at the 4th Annual Mystery Fest Key West, set for June 16-18 in Key West, Florida. For more information and deadlines, follow this link.”

• I feel like I’m always behind in listening to Nancie Clare’s Speaking of Mysteries podcasts. That may be because they tend to come out irregularly, yet in bunches at a time. Since I last made note of Clare’s work here, she has added exchanges with Scott Reardon (The Prometheus Man), David Mark (Cruel Mercy), Suzanne Chazin (No Witness But the Moon), David Joy (Weight of this World), Rhys Bowen (In Farleigh Field), and Kate White (The Secrets You Keep). Clare’s count of podcast interviewees now exceeds 110, and the previous installments remain available for your listening pleasure.

• Speaking of Nancie Clare, she sent me an e-mail note not too long ago, posing a question that I have so far been unable to answer on my own, so let me seek assistance from The Rap Sheet’s extraordinarily well-read audience. Her note reads: “A friend of mine is trying to recall a series of mysteries set in Boston. The detective/fixer works for a bank executive (who has something over him) and looks into things that the bank’s clients wouldn’t, or couldn’t, go to the authorities for. He describes them as funny and a bit quirky, Joe Lansdale-esque (that’s my interpretation anyway). Any, ahem, clue?” If you think you know which mystery series Clare is describing here, please drop me a message in the Comments section at the end of this post.

• In advance of marketing its paperback edition of Patrick E. McLean’s The Soak in May, publisher Brash Books has released its very first audiobook: an adaptation of McLean’s novella prequel, The Lucky Dime, read by none other than the author himself.

• Here’s a work I look forward to reading: Mike Ripley’s Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang: The Boom in British Thrillers from Casino Royale to The Eagle Has Landed (HarperCollins). In a preview for Shots, Ripley explains that “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang—or KK-BB as it is known in certain circles in honor of Len Deighton—has been many years in its gestation, you might say about 50 years since, as a callow youth, I realized that I was reading my way through a purple path of British thriller writing. Was it a ‘Golden Age’? Well, that is, as with all ‘Golden Ages’ a matter for debate, but it was undeniably a boom time for British thriller writers, who dominated international bestseller lists.” Ripley’s volume seems destined to find a choice spot on my overcrowded bookshelves beside Martin Edwards’ The Golden Age of Murder.

• The third episode of Writer Types, a podcast hosted by S.W. Lauden and Eric Beetner, is now ready for your inspection. Lauden touts the contents thusly: “Check out interviews with Johnny Shaw and Sue Ann Jaffarian. Spend a night at Noir at the Bar—L.A. with Glen Erik Hamilton, Nolan Knight, Sarah M. Chen, Travis Richardson, John Lansing, and Stephen Blackmoore. Go to rock school with Alex Segura, Joe Clifford, and Corey Lynn Fayman. And listen to a haunting short story from Jen Conley. Plus, reviews from Kate Hackbarth Malmon and Dan Malmon.” Lots to keep you interested.

• I’ve added a couple more vintage TV show intros to The Rap Sheet’s YouTube page—from the Elmore Leonard-inspired Maximum Bob (1998) and Stephen J. Cannell’s Broken Badges (1990-1991).

• Foreword Reviews has broadcast its lists of finalists for the annual INDIES Book of the Year Awards, including contenders in both the Mystery and Thriller categories. The winners in each category will be declared on June 24 during the 2017 American Library Association Annual Conference in Chicago.

• Say good-bye to Blasted Heath. That small press, spearheaded by Al Guthrie and Kyle MacRae, is closing up shop. Which is a damn shame, because ever since it was launched in November 2011, it’s been turning out intriguing crime fiction by the likes of Anthony Neil Smith, Elaine Ash (aka Anonymous-9), Nigel Bird, Gerard Brennan, Ray Banks, and others. As Brennan notes in his blog, “the books are going to be available for a few more days, I think. You can’t keep good talent down, so they won’t be unavailable forever, but if you want the Blasted Heath version of any of their great titles, you need to move your hole.” Oh so quaintly put.

• While Crimespree Magazine celebrates the 30th anniversary of the release of Ian Rankin’s Knots and Crosses, the novel that introduced maverick Detective Inspector John Rebus, the author himself brings us new details about the program for the inaugural RebusFest, to be held in Edinburgh, Scotland, from June 30 to July 2.

• Also online now is the schedule of events being put in place for this year’s Newcastle Noir (April 29-30), “a festival dedicated to promoting crime fiction under all its guises from all over the world.” Authors taking part include William Ryan, Erik Axl Sund, Quentin Bates, Sarah Ward, and Michael J. Malone.

• I did something last week that was fairly unusual for me: I registered early for this year’s Bouchercon, which is set to take place in Toronto, Canada, from October 12 to 15. If memory serves, I finally signed up for Bouchercon 2015 sometime late in the summer preceding that Raleigh event, and for Bouchercon 2016 only two months prior to festivities beginning in New Orleans. This could well be the last Bouchercon I attend for a while (subsequent conventions in St. Petersburg, Florida, Dallas, Texas, and Sacramento, California, aren’t big draws for me), so I wanted to make sure I had all of my ducks in a row as soon as possible. See who else will be at Bouchercon 2017 by clicking here. And if you’d like to register yourself, you can do so here.

• From Kevin Burton Smith of The Thrilling Detective Web Site:

Adam Lerner and Bill Boyle have launched a fund-raising IndieGoGo campaign to get Raymond Chandler a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, with the approval of the Chandler Estate and the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce. This would make Chandler the first writer (who is not also a director, producer, or animator) to get a star.

They argue that “If there were no Raymond Chandler there would certainly be no Philip Marlowe. and if there were no Philip Marlowe there would arguably be no Hollywood Noir or Hollywood Walk of Fame.”

I’m not sure if I buy all that argument, but if there’s a writer who deserves that star, it’s definitely Chandler. Let’s help give him his due.

• As part of a piece in The Guardian about the 21st-century relevance of fictional private eyes, author Christa Faust argues that the hard-boiled essence of such protagonists remains vital. That is, she says, “if you mean a complex, conflicted loner with a generally cynical worldview who gets mixed up in criminal endeavors but maintains a strong, though often unconventional, moral code. A wise-cracking, ruggedly handsome middle-aged white guy in a fedora and trenchcoat who slaps women and then kisses them? Maybe not so much.”

• Hooray for the return of Dan Wagner’s The Hungry Detective!

• A few author interviews worth reading: In Criminal Element, Ardi Alspach questions Lyndsay Faye about her new Sherlock Holmes short-story collection, The Whole Art of Detection; Melissa Scrivner Love chats with Mystery Tribune about her debut thriller, Lola; Crime Fiction Lover quizzes Iceland’s Arnaldur Indridason on the subject of his new novel, The Shadow District, which is the opening entry in a new series; an Australian Web site called Daily Review does a quickie interview with Peter Robinson, whose next Alan Banks yarn, Sleeping in the Ground, is due out in the States come August; and Do Some Damage’s Steve Weddle talks briefly with Kieran Shea about his soon- forthcoming “space heist” yarn, Off Rock.

• R.I.P., Robert Day, the UK director behind four Tarzan flicks, who devoted a majority of his efforts during the mid-20th-century to TV projects. According to Deadline Hollywood, he helmed “multiple episodes of The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Avengers, The F.B.I., The Name of the Game, Cade’s County and earn[ed] a DGA [Directors Guild of America] nom for 1970’s The Bold Ones: The Senator. He continued to direct TV dramas throughout the ’70s, including episodes of such classics as Police Story, The Streets of San Francisco, McCloud, Kojak, and Dallas.” Day was 94 years old.

• Talk about depressing charts!

• And this news, reported last year, reminds me of another, older TV series of the same name. According to Deadline Hollywood, “The Mark Gordon Company has put together big TV series package The Barbary Coast. The series will be directed and co-written by Mel Gibson, with Kurt Russell and Kate Hudson set to star. Gibson also will have a recurring role on the series. The project is inspired by Gangs of New York author Herbert Asbury’s book The Barbary Coast, about the birth of San Francisco. … The Barbary Coast begins with the [California] Gold Rush in 1849 which saw the biggest influx of gold-seekers, gamblers, thieves, harlots, politicians. and other felonious parasites to the infant city. Thus arose a unique criminal district that for almost 70 years was the scene of more viciousness and depravity—yet at the same time possessed more glamour and intrigue—than any other area of vice and iniquity on the American continent.” I wonder whatever happened to this project. I’ve seen only one small update since.

Two TV Icons Depart the Stage

(Above) Mike Connors on the June 24, 1972, TV Guide.

What a dismal, discouraging last week we’ve all had to experience. While Donald Trump has done his damnedest, through one executive order after another, to undermine America’s values and leadership in the world, we’ve also witnessed the deaths of three Hollywood performers with ties to crime and mystery fiction.

First off, of course, there was 80-year-old Mary Tyler Moore, about whom I wrote here. But while Moore’s success really derived from her work in situation comedies rather than on TV crime dramas, the same cannot be said of Mike Connors, who died on Thursday at age 91. Born Krekor Ohanian in Fresno, California, on August 15, 1925, the Armenian-descended former college basketball standout appeared in several movies and did guest shots on small-screen programs such as Mr. and Mrs. North, City Detective, M Squad, Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer, and Maverick before landing the lead in Tightrope! (1959–1960), playing a deep-undercover police officer charged with infiltrating criminal gangs. After that program was cancelled, and following Connors’ work in films such as Kiss the Girls and Make Them Die (1966), he returned to television as Joe Mannix, a notably hard-headed Los Angeles private eye, in the William Link/Richard Levinson-created CBS series Mannix (1967-1975). In its obituary of Connors, The New York Times recalled that

Unlike many a smooth TV private eye, Mannix took his lumps. The Washington Post, tabulating the wear and tear the character withstood over eight seasons, found that he had endured 17 gunshot wounds and 55 beatings that left him unconscious. …

“Mannix” made Mr. Connors one of the highest-paid television actors of the 1970s; by the end of its run he was earning $40,000 an episode (almost $180,000 in today’s dollars). The role brought him four Emmy Award nominations and a Golden Globe Award.

“Mannix” was also notable as one of the first regular series to provide a leading role to an African-American: Gail Fisher joined the show in its second season as Mannix’s secretary, frequent damsel in distress and occasional potential love interest. She died at 65 in 2000.

TV Guide issues of May 18, 1968, and October 31, 1970.

Meanwhile, in a 2014 retrospective of Mannix, Stephen Bowie wrote:

Likable but flinty, Connors was a tough guy who didn’t have to show off. An idealist and a nice guy, Mannix was perfectly willing to take on a lost little girl as a client and negotiate his fee in lunch money (never actually collected, of course). Connors had a rare sincerity that kept scenes like that from getting corny. (When cynical private-eye shows like Harry O and The Rockford Files made a point of their protagonists’ pragmatic eye for a buck, it was mainly Mannix they were rebuking.) Working out of a comfy Spanish-styled home office, dressed in plaid sport coats made out of fabric as thick as carpet, driving a snazzy muscle car painted a hideous shade of army-Jeep green, Joe Mannix was functional but square. It was all of a piece. Mannix was the audience’s uncle or its brother-in-law—that quiet, comforting fellow who never let on that he’d mowed down a whole squadron of advancing enemies during the war. (Joe’s actual back-story included service in Korea; another often-mocked TV trope, the one where the deranged vet returns to kill off all the members of his old platoon, comes more from Mannix than any other single show.) Mannix’s secretary, Peggy Fair, was cannily drawn to underscore his avuncular solidity. Played by Gail Fisher, one of the more prominent African-American actors on television at the time, Peggy was the widow of a cop, so naturally he’d never make a pass. She was also a single mother, which meant that the producers could show Mannix in surrogate dad mode whenever little Toby (Mark Stewart) turned up.

Unfortunately, after eight seasons on the air, Mannix (which TV blogger Mitchell Hadley says was, “next to The Rockford Files, … probably the most loved, most well-remembered P.I. show of the era”), was dropped from American prime-time viewing schedules, though it has continued to show up in syndication, and was released in DVD format between 2008 and 2012. Connors spent a few years after that doing teleflicks (such as 1980’s Casino) and filling guest spots on programs that included Police Story, before landing his last starring role in a TV crime drama: Today’s F.B.I., a 1981-1982 revamp of the original Efrem Zimbalist Jr. series, on which he played a “veteran ‘G-Man,’” Ben Slater, commanding a select group of agents.

He subsequently featured in shows such as The Love Boat, Murder, She Wrote, and a 1990s revival of Gene Barry’s Burke’s Law, and reprised his Mannix role in a 1997 episode of Diagnosis: Murder (which, at least for now, you can watch here). “All told,” says A.V. Club, “he ended his career with more than a hundred credits to his name, and worked steadily in the business for a total of 65 years.” According to the Times, Connors died on January 26, from “complications of leukemia, which had been diagnosed a week earlier.”

* * *

Just one day after word of Mike Connors’ passing, news broke that Barbara Hale—the striking actress best known for playing resourceful and highly observant secretary Della Street on Raymond Burr’s 1957-1966 series, Perry Mason—had died “peacefully” at her home in Sherman Oaks, California. She was 94 years old.

Born in DeKalb, Illinois, on April 18, 1922, Hale started her adulthood wanting to be an artist, and doing modeling work to pay for her education at the Chicago Academy of Fine Art. The modeling attracted Hollywood’s interest. In his blog, A Shroud of Thoughts, Terence Towles Canote notes that Hale “signed a contract with RKO Radio Pictures. She made her film debut in 1943 in an uncredited, bit part in Gildersleeve’s Bad Day (1943).” He adds: “[I]t must be remembered that she had a highly successful film career prior to starting her long run on Perry Mason. She played opposite some of Hollywood’s most popular leading men, including Robert Mitchum in West of the Pecos (1945 film), Jimmy Stewart in The Jackpot (1951), James Cagney in A Lion Is in the Streets (1953), and Rock Hudson in Seminole (1953). She even received top billing in two films: The Window (1949) and Lorna Doone (1951). While many of us loved her as Della Street, she played so many more roles during her career.”

(Left) Raymond Burr and Barbara Hale on TV Guide, March 19, 1960.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, in the late 1950s, “Hale was mulling retirement to raise her three young children with her husband, actor Bill Williams (The Adventures of Kit Carson), when producer Gail Patrick Jackson approached her about playing Della on Perry Mason. She quickly accepted the gig when she discovered that Burr, her old friend from RKO, was going to star as the fictional defense attorney in the series based on the Erle Stanley Gardner mystery novels.” Hale is credited with participating in all 271 episodes of that CBS courtroom drama, opposite Burr, William Hopper (who played private detective Paul Drake), and William Talman (as persistently unsuccessful Los Angeles District Attorney Hamilton Burger). For her portrayal of Street, in 1959 Hale received an Emmy Award for Best Supporting Actress (Continuing Character) in a Dramatic Series. A year later, she was immortalized with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Hale maintained her acting career after Perry Mason, appearing in big-screen pictures such as Airport (1970) and The Giant Spider Invasion (1975), and popping up on TV screens as a guest on Ironside (playing a murder suspect), Adam-12, Marcus Welby, M.D., and The Greatest American Hero, which starred her son, William Katt. “In 198[5],” explains Canote, “she reprised her role as Della Street in the television reunion movie Perry Mason Returns alongside Raymond Burr in the title role. The TV movie proved so successful that there would be 26 more Perry Mason TV movies starring Raymond Burr and Barbara Hale.” In the first nine of those, Katt played P.I. Paul Drake Jr. (The original Drake, Hopper, had died in 1970.)

Reports are that Barbara Hale perished as a result of complications from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. In its obituary of the actress, The New York Times recalls that, despite having played one of the most memorable secretaries on television, Hale “never learned shorthand and could type only 33 words a minute.”

READ MORE: “Mike Connors, an Appreciation” and “Mannix vs. Spies,” by Bill Koenig (The Spy Command); “Dinner with Perry and Della,”
by Max Allan Collins.