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?”

Making Masters of Smith and Fairstein

Authors Martin Cruz Smith and Linda Fairstein (shown above) have been selected by the Mystery Writers of America as the winners of its 2019 Grand Master Awards. To quote from an MWA news release:

MWA’s Grand Master Award represents the pinnacle of achievement in mystery writing and was established to acknowledge important contributions to this genre, as well as for a body of work that is both significant and of consistent high quality. Ms. Fairstein and Mr. Smith will receive their awards at the 73rd Annual Edgar Awards Banquet, which will be held at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in New York City on April 25, 2019.”

Previous Grand Masters include William Link, Peter Lovesey, Jane Langton, Max Allan Collins, Ellen Hart, Walter Mosley, James Ellroy, Robert Crais, Carolyn Hart, Ken Follett, Margaret Maron, Martha Grimes, Bill Pronzini, Sara Paretsky, and James Lee Burke.

At the same time, the MWA has announced that veteran New York Times mystery-fiction columnist Marilyn Stasio will be the recipient of this next year’s Raven Award (honoring “outstanding achievement in the mystery field outside the realm of creative writing”). And Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine editor Linda Landrigan is to be given the 2019 Ellery Queen Award, which recognizes “outstanding writing teams and outstanding people in the mystery-publishing industry.”

Congratulations to all of these prize winners.

UPDATE: The MWA seems to have stirred up more than a bit of controversy with its decision to name prosecutor-turned-novelist Linda Fairstein as one of this year’s Grand Masters. Author Attica Locke (Bluebird, Bluebird) wrote this morning on Twitter:

As a member and 2018 Edgar winner, I am begging you to reconsider having Linda Fairstein serve as a Grand Master in next year’s awards ceremony. She is almost single-handedly responsible for the wrongful incarceration of the Central Park Five. … For which she has never apologized or recanted her insistence on their guilt for the most heinous of crimes, ‘guilt’ based solely on evidence procured through violence and ill treatment of children in lock up.”

Locke is referring here to a case brought by Fairstein, in her then-role as head of the sex crimes unit of the Manhattan District Attorney’s office, against five teenage boys—four African Americans and one Hispanic—who allegedly attacked a white female jogger in Central Park on the night of April 19, 1989. Charges were leveled against Fairstein that she and police detectives had intimidated the arrested teens into making false confessions. In 1990, all of the Central Park Five, as they became known, were convicted on charges of assault and sexual battery; but those convictions were vacated in 2002 after another man, “convicted serial rapist and murderer Matias Reyes,” confessed to having attacked the woman instead.

This afternoon, the MWA put out the following message: “We are taking seriously the issues raised by Attica Locke. Our Board is going to discuss these concerns as soon as possible and make a further statement soon.” Stay tuned for more on this matter.

READ MORE: “Writer Linda Fairstein’s Past as a Prosecutor Overseeing the Central Park Five Case Causes Award Controversy,” by Steph Cha (Los Angeles Times).

Bullet Points: Taxing Tuesday Edition

• We’re still nine months away from the centennial of Mickey Spillane’s birth (March 9, 2018). But his friend and fellow crime-fictionist, Max Allan Collins—who’s spent the last decade, ever since Spillane succumbed in 2006, editing and finishing work he left behind—is already looking at ways to celebrate this occasion. It seems he’s been holding back some of Spillane’s most interesting unpublished material, with the intention of releasing it in association with what would’ve been The Mick’s 100th birthday. As he explains in his blog, these hidden riches include an adventure yarn titled The Last Stand and another book, Killing Town. Collins says the latter “represents Mickey’s first go at doing Mike Hammer, probably circa 1945 … predating I, the Jury. I will tell more of the story behind it later, but it’s a novel that takes place in an industrial town in upstate New York with Mike Hammer running a dangerous errand for an army buddy. It could not be more typically vintage Spillane in tone and approach.”

• Sink your fangs into this! With a premiere date for Season 5 of Sherlock so far uncertain (and probably not to be expected anytime soon), that program’s creative team of Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat are turning to another Victorian-era work of fiction for inspiration: Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Variety says, “Work on the new series has yet to begin in earnest, as Gatiss and Moffat are currently working on solo projects. But talks are already underway with the BBC—which enjoyed huge success with Sherlock—on broadcast rights in the UK. Dracula will adopt the same format as Sherlock, with a miniseries run of feature-length episodes.”

• Among the best elements of Mystery Scene’s Summer 2017 issue are: Jake Hinkson’s profile of film-noir authority Eddie Muller; Craig Sisterson’s study of Michael Connelly’s new protagonist, Renée Ballard (The Late Show); Tom Nolan’s look at the socially relevant work of Denise Mina; and Kevin Burton Smith’s feature on gumshoe yarns bearing locked-room mystery components.

• During the Western Writers of America Conference, held last week in Kansas City, Missouri, it was announced that Carol Potenza’s as-yet-unpublished Hearts of the Missing has won the 2017 Tony Hillerman Prize for best first mystery novel. As part of her award, Potenza—presently an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at New Mexico State University—will receive a publishing contract from Minotaur Books, which has already slated Hearts of the Missing for a fall 2018 release. Previous Hillerman Prize beneficiaries include John Fortunato (Dark Reservations), C.B. McKenzie (Bad Country), and Andrew Hunt (City of Saints).

• Author Ilene Schneider (that’s Rabbi Ilene Schneider to you) has captured the 2017 David Award for her novel Yom Killer (Aakenbaaken & Kent). Named in memory of David G. Sasher Sr., this commendation is given out annually by organizers of the Deadly Ink conference, which took place this last June 16 to 18 in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Also nominated for the David Award were: Blonde Ice, by R.G. Belsky (Atria); Written Off, by E. J. Copperman (Crooked Lane); Death of a Toy Soldier, by Barbara Early (Crooked Lane); and Seconds to Live, by Melinda Leigh (Montlake Romance).

• There will be more to read here later this week about Martin Edwards’ The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books, as The Rap Sheet takes part in a blog tour for that new volume of non-fiction. Meanwhile, though, Cross-Examining Crime offers this review of the work, which includes a list of lesser-known yarns Edwards cites by way of examining “100 books which have something to say about the journey crime fiction took in the first half of the 20th century.”

• In my previous “Bullet Points” post, I cited two publications producing selections of the “Best Books of 2017 … So Far.” Now comes another such rundown, this one from Mystery Tribune. Among its 20 picks: Lisa Gardner’s Right Behind You, Philip Kerr’s Prussian Blue, Peter Heller’s Celine, J.P. Delaney’s The Girl Before, Anthony Horowitz’s Magpie Murders, and Malin Persson Giolito’s Quicksand.

• How did I forget to mention that there’s finally a trailer for The Alienist, TNT’s psychological thriller series based on Caleb Carr’s 1994 novel of that same name? No firm launch date for the program is yet available (“late 2017” remains the best guess), but the International Movie Database (IMDb) entry suggests there will be 10 episodes. And we know that this drama, set in New York City in 1896 and focusing on the pursuit of a serial killer targeting “boy whores,” will star Daniel Brühl as pioneering psychologist Dr. Laszlo Kreizler, Luke Evans as crime reporter John Moore, Dakota Fanning as “intrepid police secretary Sara Howard,” and Brian Geraghty as Theodore Roosevelt, then New York’s police commissioner. We await further info.

• If you’ve wondered what became of former Who’s the Boss? star Tony Danza, then this item from In Reference to Murder is for you:

Tony Danza is returning to television in the Netflix dramedy The Good Cop for ten one-hour episodes. Danza will play a disgraced former NYPD officer who never followed the rules and lives with his son—who is currently a detective for the NYPD and the complete opposite personality type from this father. Andy Breckman, who created Monk, will be the showrunner and executive producer for the series, and Randy Zisk, who worked on Bones, will direct the first episode.

• Shades of 007: What was the real “Operation Goldfinger”?

• It’s good to see Leslie Gilbert Elman back on the Grantchester beat for Criminal Element. Last week she reviewed that show’s third-season (and much out of season) Christmas special, and yesterday she posted her critique of Episode 2, which I thought was a rather unusual but especially compelling entry in this British historical mystery series. I’m also pleased to see that screenwriter Daisy Coulam has been able to reunite small-town vicar Sidney Chambers (James Norton) with his longtime love, Amanda Hopkins (née Kendall, played by Morven Christie), while also making it seem impossible that their relationship can endure. Of these turns, and more, Elman asks: “Should Sidney be worried? Yep, it seems Sidney should be worried.”

• Following up on the recent death, at age 88, of Batman star Adam West, Elizabeth Foxwell tracks down a partial episode of The Detectives, the 1959-1962 TV crime drama in which West played Sergeant Steve Nelson opposite Robert Taylor. Watch it here.

• R.I.P., Bill Dana, former Get Smart hotel house dick.

• Also gone: Michael Nyqvist, the Swedish actor who played investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist in the original succession of movies based on Stieg Larsson’s Millenium trilogy. He passed away on June 27 at just 56 years of age.

• Rap Sheet reader Patrick Balester shot me a message not long ago, asking whether I’d ever come across a syndicated 1957-1958 TV crime drama called Decoy, which the New Jersey Web site NJ.com recently noted was “the first TV series with a female cop as its protagonist,” “the first series to be shot on location in New York City,” and “one of the earliest cop dramas to delve into social issues, rather than cavalierly divide the world into good and bad people.” Yes, in fact, I have heard of Decoy—aka Decoy Police Woman—a half-hour black-and-white production that starred Beverly Garland (perhaps better known today for her roles on My Three Sons and Scarecrow & Mrs. King). As Wikipedia explains, she played Casey Jones, “a female police officer who is often assigned to work undercover (hence becoming the ‘decoy’ of the title). The cast changed each week with Garland the only main continuing character, although there were several recurring characters, mostly her commanding officer and immediate colleagues. The series was inspired by Jack Webb’s Dragnet … [It] used a similar format to that series, with Jones portrayed as a serious, by-the-book, yet sympathetic cop with no personal life outside of her job. In the episode ‘The Sound of Tears,’ she reveals that the man she loved was a police officer who was shot and killed by the man he was sent to apprehend.” At least four Decoy episodes can be found on YouTube, and a low-cost DVD set containing all 39 episodes is available here.

• While we’re on the subject of mostly forgotten small-screen productions … Just the other day I happened across this short opening segment from the 1983 teleflick Travis McGee, featuring Sam Elliott in the title role, with Gene Evans, Katharine Ross, Vera Miles, Barry Corbin, and Richard Farnsworth helping to fill out the cast. This unsuccessful ABC-TV pilot film had still more talent behind it, with a script by Stirling Silliphant (Route 66, Longstreet, Marlowe) and George Eckstein (The Fugitive, The Name of the Game, Cool Million, Banacek) in the producer’s chair. It’s story was adapted from John D. MacDonald’s 1978 novel, The Empty Copper Sea. However, those components didn’t add up to a satisfying whole. The Thrilling Detective Web Site grouses that “Somnolent Magnum, P.I./Marlboro Man-lookalike Sam Elliot wasn’t even a half-good choice to play McGee, even if he could wake up,” and it questions the choice to move MacDonald’s story from Florida to California. At the time of is original broadcast, Washington Post critic Tom Shales opined that Travis McGee “brings the detective hero created by John D. MacDonald to life, but just barely. It really brings him to more of a catatonic state.” Nonetheless, I’d be interested to watch this pilot. And apparently, I can, so long as I fork over $19.95 to Roberts Hard to Find Videos, an online retailer currently selling Travis McGee in DVD format.

• And one more YouTube find: Twelve out of 13 episodes of the 2002, Michael Mann-produced CBS-TV series Robbery Homicide Division. The show has been described as “an intense, no-nonsense look at the present-day Los Angeles Police Department’s Robbery Homicide Division. Lt. Sam Cole [played by Tom Sizemore] is the driven chief detective of a squad that is dedicated to solving some of the worst crimes the city has to offer.” I remember Robbery Homicide Division as being quite good. Now’s my chance to screen it again.

• Nancie Clare’s two most recent guests on her Speaking of Mysteries podcast are well worth your listening to: Don Winslow, author of The Force, about camaraderie and corruption in the New York Police Department; and Martin Walker, whose latest Bruno, Chief of Police mystery, The Templars’ Last Secret, was released earlier this month.

• Speaking of Winslow, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported last week that “for the second time in three years, … [he] has taken out a full-page ad in a national newspaper criticizing the government’s war on drugs, an issue that has formed the backbone of several of his bestselling books. The Julian resident’s newest salvo is in Sunday’s New York Times, framed as a series of posts on Twitter from Winslow to President Donald Trump, who uses the social media platform often to air his thoughts.” I can’t find an online image of that advertisement, but I assume its text is similar to this essay, titled “Trump’s Catastrophic Drug Policy,” which was posted on Winslow’s Web site the same day, June 25. It reads, in part:

The president wants to return to a bygone era of mass incarceration and a full-blown War on Drugs that significantly contributed to the current American prison population of 2.2 million, the largest in the world. Apparently, that isn’t enough for the “law and order” president and his accomplice, Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

Trump and Sessions think the War on Drugs has been a very good thing. They are either woefully or willfully ignorant of the facts. …

We know that rehabilitation programs and treatment are vastly more effective at reducing drug use than imprisonment. In fact, our jails and prisons are rife with illegal drugs, and those who go in as addicts usually come out as addicts. If mass incarceration worked, wouldn’t our drug problem now be better instead of worse?

But rather than make a real effort to address the drug problem at its roots—at a time when more Americans die from opiate overdose than from car accidents—Trump and Sessions hand us fantasies such as the border wall, which will do absolutely nothing to slow the flow of drugs, and facile, intellectually lazy, “lock `em up” sound bites that make for good politics but horrible policy.

• Are rumors of a Downton Abbey movie true? Yes!

• Crime Fiction Lover chooses half a dozen British-Asian crime novelists “to watch,” among them Abir Mukherjee (A Rising Man), Rosie Claverton (Terror 404), and Amer Anwar (Western Fringes).

• A recent profile in her own newspaper cast critic Marilyn Stasio—who has been penning The New York Times Book Review’s crime-fiction column since 1988—as “a kind of mystery herself, removed from the book events, parties and online debates that bind so many crime and mystery fanatics together. She would rather be reading, surrounded by her fortifications of novels.” Sounds good to me!

• In a piece for Britain’s Telegraph, John Banville (aka Benjamin Black) insists the best crime and mystery fiction is the urban sort. “The city is God’s gift to the crime writer,” he writes. “Yes, there is just as much scope, if not more, for blood-letting, skulduggery and devilment in the countryside as there is in town. However, the urban wilderness lends itself with particular aptness to noir fiction, whether it be Maigret’s Paris, Philip Marlowe’s Bay City, a lightly fictionalized version of Santa Monica, or Dostoevsky’s St. Petersburg.”

• Scroll.in contributor Nicholas Rixon looks back at how Raymond Chandler’s 1939 first novel, The Big Sleep, marked a sea change for detective fiction. “Nearly six decades after his death,” remarks Rixon, “Chandler’s novel remains exactly what the man intended it to be: hard-boiled detective fiction that doesn’t just walk tenderly across the tightrope between literariness and pulp. It hops and summersaults with wild abandon to the other side.”

• And finally, 37 years after its debut, Crime Fiction Lover revisits Gorky Park, Martin Cruz Smith’s “wonderfully textured, vivid look behind the Iron Curtain,” which it goes on to call “a tense, atmospheric and memorable crime story with an outstanding detective character—Arkady Renko.”

Pierce’s Picks: “Tatiana”

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

Tatiana, by Martin Cruz Smith (Simon & Schuster):
American novelist Martin Cruz Smith has had a good run over the last 40 years, turning out such memorable standalone novels as Rose (1996) and December 6 (one of my favorite works of 2002). But it’s been his tales of Moscow investigator Arkady Renko--beginning with the Golden Dagger Award-winning Gorky Park (1981)--that have earned him the most widespread recognition. Tatiana, the eighth installment in the Renko series, finds our cynical sleuth probing the demise of journalist Tatiana Petrovna, who plummeted from a sixth-floor window. Curiously, that tragedy happened around the same time that a deep-pocketed mobster was exterminated. Are these incidents somehow connected? Renko’s struggle to find out sends him to a “secret” Cold War city, compels him to listen to tapes left behind by Tatiana--recordings that expose crimes notably absent from Russia’s official histories, and bring him closer to the deceased--and presents him with a code-filled notebook that might only be deciphered by his chess-hustling teenage associate, Zhenya. Smith’s nuanced portrayal of the New Russia--corrupt and violent, and no less in need of his services than its Soviet predecessor--is as tragic as it is seductive.

* * *

This week also brings us A Nasty Piece of Work (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin’s Press), by Robert Littell, an author best known for such classics of espionage fiction as The Defection of A.J. Lewinter (1973), The Once and Future Spy (1990), and The Company (2002). Nasty Piece finds him taking a holiday from that world in order to deliver the oft-amusing, energetic, and digression-suffused adventures of Lemuel Gunn, a cynical ex-CIA agent who’s currently living in a mobile home in the New Mexico desert and scratching out what living he can make as a private eye. (Think of him as the opposite of television’s suave and successful Peter Gunn.) He’s just been hired by Ornella Neppi, a 30-something bail bondswoman whose business has been shaken by a cokehead, Emilio Gava, who’s anxious to flee and leave her on the hook for $125,000. Gunn agrees to help this woman, but with few clues and seeming no photographs of Gava available, he’s starting to wonder whether his quarry even exists. Littell takes such obvious delight in working the tropes and traditions of P.I. fiction, it’s hard not to enjoy the ride he offers in these pages.

READ MORE: “Ticking Time Bombs,” by Clayton Moore
(Kirkus Reviews).

Bullet Points: Bursting at the Seams Edition

• In the Great Detectives of Old Time Radio blog, Adam Graham counts down what he thinks are the best and worst of the old Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes films. Part I is here, Part II is here, and click here for Part III. It’s been years since I last saw those pictures, but Graham’s series makes me want to rent a few.

• Among this week’s many “forgotten books” suggestions were a number of crime-related works, including: Wycliffe and the Three-Toed Pussy, by W.J. Burley; Sinners and Shrouds, by Jonathan Latimer; Episode of the Wandering Knife, by Mary Roberts Rinehart; The Case of the Vanishing Beauty, by Richard S. Prather; Girl Possessed, by Dean Owen; The Poisoned Chocolates Case, by Anthony Berkeley; and White Shadow, by Ace Atkins. A complete list of contributions can be found in Todd Mason’s Sweet Freedom blog.

• R.I.P., Geraldine Ferraro, the former New York Democratic congresswoman who became the first woman ever nominated to become the vice president of the United States. Salon offers two terrific pieces about Ferraro’s place in history, here and here.

• I’d forgotten that Martin Cruz Smith wrote Nick Carter thrillers.

• While you await HBO-TV’s airing of its multipart adaptation of Mildred Pierce, beginning tomorrow night and starring Kate Winslet, head over to the Los Angeles Times’ Jacket Copy blog for a refresher on James M. Cain’s original, 1941 novel.

• I have added two new blogs to The Rap Sheet’s lengthy list: The Abbott Gran Old Tyme Medicine Show, written by novelists Megan Abbott (an all-too-occasional contributor to this page) and Sara Gran; and The House of Crime and Mystery, by Montreal’s Jacques Filippi. Give them both a visit, when you have a chance.

• I’m going to have to find some Jonathan Craig novels for myself.

• Do we really need a remake of The Thin Man?

• Happy Birthday, Leonard Nimoy! Although best known for playing Commander Spock on the original Star Trek series, Nimoy also starred for a time in Mission: Impossible and did guest turns in everything from Highway Patrol and 87 Precinct to Perry Mason, The Lieutenant, and Columbo. He turned 80 today, less than a week after fellow Trek star William Shatner hit that same mark.

• Mystery*File’s Steve Lewis features the results of a 1994 survey by The Armchair Detective magazine (now, regrettably, defunct). While a similar poll taken today might bring a like list of “All-Time Favorite Authors,” it would be interesting to know who would appear under “Favorite Currently Active Mystery Writers.” For one thing, four of the 10 novelists mentioned in 1994 have since died.

• New seasons of the USA Network series White Collar and Covert Affairs are set to start on June 7. Meanwhile, Sunday, May 1, will bring the season premieres of Law & Order: Criminal Intent (with Vincent D’Onofrio and Kathryn Erbe once more occupying their starring roles) and In Plain Sight. I don’t yet see information about a return date for Burn Notice, but it will evidently come sometime after the showing of the Burn Notice prequel movie, The Fall of Sam Axe, on Sunday, April 17.

• Congratulations to TV Squad. That blog turns six this month.

• Russel D. McLean (The Lost Sister) picks his 10 favorite crime movies. This follows his list of 10 favorite crime novels. McLean suddenly seems ubiquitous. Oh, yeah, he’s here as well.

• Yikes! Detroit, Michigan--once among the fastest-growing cities in the United States--has lost a quarter of its population in just the last decade. It’s part of a larger migratory trend: Americans are leaving the Midwest to settle in the West and South. The largely conservative “heartland” already enjoys political sway in Washington, D.C., disproportionate to its population. These changes will only exacerbate that problem.

• The latest two short-story offerings in Beat to a Pulp are “Old Wives’ Tales,” by Dave Zeltserman, and “Big Cat,” by Jim Wilsky.

• A most unhappy anniversary.

• Maxim Jakubowski has an interesting piece in the Mulholland Books blog about “science-fiction noir.” He writes: “As strange as it may initially appear, SF is fertile ground for harvesting the tropes of noir, and the disconnect between everyday reality and the fully imagined alien environment the speculative genre offers is an ideal breeding ground for all that is best about noir.” Read more here.

• This just goes to show how out of touch today’s Republican Party is from the American values of racial and religious equality. Former Godfather’s Pizza CEO Herman Cain, currently auditioning to become the GOP’s presidential candidate for 2012, tells the blog Think Progress that he wouldn’t hire any Muslims into his administration.

• Left Coast Crime 2011 in Santa Fe isn’t even over yet, but already there’s publicity regarding next year’s LCC event in Sacramento.

• Finally, I agree with Dan Fleming: Henry’s Crime shows promise.

The Book You Have to Read: “Rose,” by Martin Cruz Smith

(Editor’s note: This is the 107th installment of our ongoing Friday blog series highlighting great but forgotten books. Today’s pick comes from San Francisco Bay Area science writer and novelist Ann Parker, author of the Silver Rush Mystery Series, the most recent installment of which is Leaden Skies.)

I’ll begin by saying I’m not certain that Martin Cruz Smith’s Rose is a “forgotten book.” But if you, like me, somehow missed it when it originally came out in 1996, and you love historical mysteries, well-defined unusual settings, and/or complex and well-drawn characters, then put it on your to-be-read list.

I was first alerted to Rose about 10 years ago, when I was thrashing through early drafts of the first book of my series set in the 1880s silver-mining town of Leadville, Colorado. A friend commented, “Your setting is a 19th-century mining town? So you’ve read Rose, of course.”

Well, no, I hadn’t. Which was a little odd because I was (and still am) a major fan of Smith’s books, beginning (as probably many others did) with Gorky Park and gobbling up every Arkady Renko book from there on out. Yet, I hadn’t heard of, much less read, Rose. I corrected that error in short order, and, in the process, discovered what a gem Rose is.

In that novel, Smith turned for inspiration to 1872 Wigan, an English coal-mining town. Smith’s sense of time and place is always “spot on” and his writing reinforces the setting, resonating in ways that few can equal. As a 1996 Time magazine book review of Rose said, “[T]he setting drives the plot and makes the crime.”

Every description and turn of the plot pulls the reader into the world Smith has created. For instance, there’s this passage, which takes the reader on a queasy ride down a mining shaft with protagonist Jonathan Blair and a cage full of miners:

The cage started slowly, down through the round, brick-lined upper mouth of the shaft, past round garlands of Yorkshire iron, good as steel, into a crosshatched well of stone and timber, and then simply down. Down into an unlit abyss. Down at twenty, thirty, forty miles per hour. Down faster than any men anywhere else on earth could travel. So fast that breath flew from the lungs and pressed against the ears. So fast that nothing could be seen at the open end of the cage except a blur that could whip away an inattentive hand or leg. Down seemingly forever.

… At its fastest, the cage dropped so smoothly that the men almost floated. In a shaft it was always the moment of greatest danger and greatest bliss. Blair thought that with their massed lamps they might resemble a meteor to a spectator, to a dazzled worm.

It’s no surprise to read in a 1996 Salon interview with Smith that while doing research for Rose, he actually went to Wigan and journeyed down into a mine: He captures it all--sight, touch, sound, and that drop-down feeling right there in the pit of the stomach.

Smith brings the same richness in writing to his plot and characters. The protagonist, down-on-his-luck American mining engineer Jonathan Blair, has been “conned” (emotionally, financially) into a single-handed search for Wigan’s missing curate, John Maypole. Bishop Hannay, who owns the town and its mines, is the one who makes the initial proposition and dangles the reward: uncover Maypole’s whereabouts and earn a one-way trip back to Blair’s beloved Africa, all expenses paid. To solve the mystery, Blair must steer through the various social strata of Wigan, from the lowest to the highest, and navigate Wigan’s crooked ancient alleys and vast underground tunnels and drifts, as well as the posh ancestral Hannay estate. He is, like the dazzled worm in the passage above, an outsider to this complex world, but of it as well. (To say more than that would give some of the mystery away).

As Blair ferrets about, trying to unravel what happened to the missing cleric, the people who he assumes would be the most eager to help him seem instead to ignore or actively work against his efforts. Those folks include Charlotte Hannay, Maypole’s fiancée and Bishop Hannay’s daughter; Reverend Chubb, Maypole’s superior; and the miners and “pit girls”--including the mysterious Rose of the title--that Maypole longed to convert. Through it all, Smith weaves in details about 19th-century mining life, the status of women, African exploration, and more (including some of the nasty concoctions for alleviating symptoms of malaria—arsenic and quinine, anyone?). Smith wraps a whacking good mystery and a surprising romance into this world he’s built, using prose that reads like poetry, in description and dialogue alike.

In the Salon interview, Smith says, “We all love the rhythm of English speech, probably for the same reason we love the King James version of the Bible, the up and downness of it.” Throughout Rose, Smith’s voice is pitch perfect, and the end result is a perfect jewel of a book.