A Monday Morning Medley

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

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

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

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

• Happy 10th anniversary to Do Some Damage!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back to “Blue”

I first heard about this project from The Killing Times. But now In Reference to Murder brings confirmation that a sequel to the 1993-2005 TV cop drama NYPD Blue is currently in the works:

Another classic series is coming back to television without rebooting its entire universe—in fact, it’s killing off a major character. NYPD Blue is getting a revival, but the premise revolves around the death of original series protagonist [Sergeant] Andy Sipowicz (played by Dennis Franz). The new show would be based on Theo Sipowicz, who followed in his father’s footsteps and pursued law enforcement. His goal is to earn his shield as a detective and investigate crime out of his dad’s old 15th precinct, including using his NYPD resources to investigate his dad’s murder.

Sadly, original series co-creator Steven Bochco won’t be around to help with this revival. He died earlier this year at age 74.

The Master Was a Mensch

I knew what Steven Bochco could accomplish, long before I knew who Steven Bochco was. The New York City-born screenwriter-producer—who died from leukemia on Sunday at age 74—was behind many of the television presentations I watched during the 1970s and ’80s, my formative years as a boob-tube viewer.

According to his extensive list of credits on the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), Bochco helped create The New Doctors, one of the rotating segments of NBC’s The Bold Ones, and then scripted 45 episodes of that influential series. He developed stories for the science-fiction drama The Invisible Man, the underappreciated cop show Delvecchio, the NBC Mystery Movie cornerstones Columbo and McMillan & Wife, the Rockford Files spinoff Richie Brockelman, Private Eye, and Lorne Greene’s ill-fated Griff. He also wrote one of the Robert Stack episodes I remember best from The Name of the Game: 1970’s “So Long, Baby, and Amen,” starring Sal Mineo.

Bochco went on to still greater fame creating (or co-creating) shows that ranged from James Earl Jones’ Paris and John Ritter’s Hooperman to landmark dramas such as Hill Street Blues, L.A. Law, and the initially controversial police procedural NYPD Blue. He also gave us the medical comedy-drama Doogie Howser, M.D. Although Bochco was a 10-time Primetime Emmy Award winner, he didn’t always have a magical touch; some of his creations died an early—if not always justified—death, such as Murder One, Brooklyn South, Philly, and the odd musical police drama Cop Rock. In more recent years, Bochco’s influence lessened significantly, though he continued to turn out high-quality programs such as Raising the Bar and Murder in the First (the latter a reworking of Murder One). Amid all of this, in 2003 he somehow found time enough to pen a crime novel titled Death by Hollywood, which Kirkus Reviews called “a vulgar, sex-filled romp—in the best sense: good, nasty fun.”

The Web is filled today with tributes to Bochco, but what they say is fairly well summed up in TV writer Ken Levine’s new post:

Television has lost a GIANT. There’s just no way to overstate the impact Steven Bochco had on the medium. All the David Chase’s and Matthew Weiner’s and Vince Gilligan’s and other masterful storytellers who created series that elevated the TV drama to an art owe a huge debt to Steven Bochco. And I bet each and every one would be the first to agree.
Hill Street Blues was revolutionary. Viewers had never seen a TV drama that complex, that gripping, that real. To be honest, most viewers didn’t know what to make of it at the start. It took the unflagging support of Grant Tinker, who presided over NBC, to keep the show on the air despite it’s paltry initial ratings. … More groundbreaking shows like NYPD Blue and L.A. Law followed. Bochco also discovered and nurtured some pretty astounding writers like David Milch and David E. Kelley. Bochco pushed envelopes, he challenged networks, and he challenged audiences.

And all the while, he was a mensch.

That’s an important key. Without naming names, there are a number of these brilliant show creators that followed who were horrible to work for. They’d pummel their writers, take all the credit they could, and create a toxic atmosphere. Not Steven Bochco. He supported writers, protected writers, and allowed them to blossom.

READ MORE: “Steven Bochco, Producer of Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue, Dies at 74,” by Matthew Haag and Christopher Mele (The New York Times); “Steven Bochco, Innovative Co-Creator of NYPD Blue, Hill Street Blues, Dies at 74,” by Brian Lowry (Variety); “Steven Bochco, Creative Force Behind Hill Street Blues, L.A. Law, and NYPD Blue, Dies at 74,” by Mike Barnes (The Hollywood Reporter); “Iconic Producer Steven Bochco Has Died at 74. These 5 Shows Explain How He Changed TV,” by Todd VanDerWerff (Vox); “R.I.P., Steven Bochco, Who Willed Broadcast TV Into Adulthood,” by Ed Bark (TV Worth Watching); “Godspeed Steven Bochco,” by Terence Towles Canote (A Shroud of Thoughts); “A Word on Steven Bochco, Columbo Contributor Par Excellence” (The Columbophile).

Still “Blue” After All These Years

Incredible as this may seem to the program’s numerous fans, it was a full 20 years ago today--at 10 p.m. on September 21, 1993 (then a Tuesday)--that the ABC-TV crime drama NYPD Blue premiered.

Not to be confused with Jack Warden’s 1967-1969 cop series, N.Y.P.D., the hour-long Blue was co-created by Steven Bochco (whose credits also included Hill Street Blues and L.A. Law) and David Milch (later best known for giving viewers the Western drama Deadwood). It focused on an ensemble of weary cops working out of Manhattan’s 15th Precinct, most prominently Detective John Kelly (played by David Caruso), Sergeant Andy Sipowicz (Dennis Franz), Kelly’s lovely ex-wife, Assistant District Attorney Laura Michaels (Sherry Springfield), and Captain Arthur Fancy (James McDaniel). TV Guide, in its 1993 Fall Preview write-up (see below), voiced concern that Blue was “another cop show--and TV has had so many, they do start to sound the same.” At the same time, though, the mag applauded the series’ “killer cast” and opined that it “is one of those rare shows that think we, the audience members, are smart.”

Between its debut and the airing of its final, 261st episode, “Moving Day,” on March 1, 2005, NYPD Blue lost some notable cast members, among them Caruso (later to resurface on CSI: Miami, Stringfield (who moved to ER), and subsequently Jimmy Smits (who’d played Detective Bobby Simone) and Kim Delaney (who had done a long stint as Detective Diane Russell). It also incited controversies with its occasional, modest nudity and its sometimes course language.

Yet the series carried on, blending often tense criminal encounters with close looks inside the personal travails confronting its lead characters--on and off the job. As was obvious by the number of awards it received, NYPD Blue maintained a high quality throughout its 12-year run, confirming what TV Guide had said way back in 1993, that “This show is a Bochco classic all around.”

Above: NYPD Blue’s write-up in the September 18-24, 1993, edition of TV Guide. Of the series that debuted with it that fall--from seaQuest DSV and The Nanny to The Adventures of Brisco County Jr. and Saved by the Bell: The College Years--only two, The X Files (which went off the air in 2002) and Frasier (which was cancelled in 2004), remained on the air nearly as long as Blue. Right-click on the image above for a more readable enlargement.

READ MORE: “The Groundbreaking NYPD Blue,” by Teri Duerr
(Mystery Scene); “Throwback Thursday: How NYPD Blue Revolutionised TV Crime Drama and Redefined the Cop Show,” by Paul Hirons (The Killing Times).