Bullet Points: Busy Thursday Edition

• There’s now a suspenseful two-minute trailer available for Series 4 of HBO-TV’s True Detective, subtitled Night Country. As The Killing Times explains, it’s set in fictional Ennis, Alaska, and “tells the story of eight men who operate the Tsalal Arctic Research Station and vanish without a trace. To solve the case, Detectives Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster) and Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis) have to confront ‘the darkness they carry in themselves and dig into the haunted truths that lie buried under the eternal ice.’ That and try to get along with one another.” The trailer promises this series of True Detective is “coming this year,” but (frustratingly) gives no specific debut date.


(Above) A trailer for True Detective, Season 4.

• We have finally received word of when several UK-made crime dramas will return to U.S. screens with fresh stories. Grace, based on Peter James’ best-selling Detective Superintendent Roy Grace novels and starring John Simm, will see its Series 3 premiere tonight, Thursday, April 20, on the streaming service BritBox. Expect to see three episodes of Grace. Meanwhile, the historical mystery Grantchester, featuring Robson Green and Tom Brittney, is due to launch its eighth season on Masterpiece Mystery! come July 9, with six new episodes. And Series 5 of Unforgotten, starring Sanjeev Bhaskar and Sinéad Keenan, will reportedly become available “later this year” via PBS Passport, PBS Video, and the PBS Masterpiece Prime Video channel. Six episodes will comprise its latest season.

• Variety brings word that independent film studio Wiip has optioned the rights to The Eden Test (Flatiron), a suspense novel by New York Times editor Adam Sternbergh that is set to reach American bookstores next week. Here’s a plot synopsis:

Daisy and Craig’s marriage is in serious trouble. That’s why Daisy has signed up for The Eden Test, a week-long getaway for couples in need of a fresh start. Yet even as she’s struggling to salvage her marriage, it seems Craig has plans to leave her for another woman. In fact, his bags are already packed―long before he arrives to meet Daisy in this remote cabin in the woods of upstate New York.

At first, their week away is marked by solitude, connection, and natural beauty―and only a few hostile locals. But what Craig doesn’t know is that Daisy, a slyly talented actress, has her own secrets, including a burner phone she’s been using for mysterious texts. Not to mention the Eden Test itself, which poses a searing new question to the couple every day, each more explosive than the last. Their marriage was never perfect, but now the lies and revelations are piling up, as the week becomes much more than they bargained for ... How far are they willing to go?

Wiip intends to turn Sternbergh’s yarn into a TV series.

• Wow! Former flight attendant T.J. Newman’s Drowning, her second airline thriller—due out at the end of May—proved to be one hell of a hot Hollywood property. “Landing the movie rights to Drowning,” says Variety, “triggered an all-out bidding war, one that drew interest from the likes of [Nicole] Kidman, Alfonso Cuarón and Steven Spielberg, along with seven-figure offers from Apple and [Jerry] Bruckheimer, Paramount and Damien Chazelle, Legendary, Universal Television, and Warner Bros. ‘There was an eight-hour period where I never hung up my phone,’ says Shane Salerno, Newman’s agent. ‘People would call my landline, and I’d put them on mute while I answered a call from another bidder on my cell phone. I’d get an offer and before we had a chance to counter, they’d text me and raise it.’” Warner Bros. eventually triumphed, “agreeing to pay $1.5 million for the rights and an additional $1.5 million on the first day of production. The studio also brought the Drowning author on as an executive producer.”

• Did you know that Netflix commissioned a small-screen adaptation of Anthony Doerr’s 2014 Pulitzer-winning novel, All The Light We Cannot See? I didn’t, but among its stars are Mark Ruffalo, Hugh Laurie, and Louis Hofmann, and it is set to premiere on November 2.

• Finally, In Reference to Murder offers two recent items of interest. First, news that “Austin Butler will lead the cast of City on Fire, a movie version of Don Winslow’s novel” from last year. And second, a notice that “Writer and director Michael Mann’s Heat 2 is nearing development with Adam Driver set to star. The original 1995 crime film followed the conflict between an LAPD detective (played by Al Pacino) and a career criminal (played by Robert De Niro), while also depicting its effect on their professional relationships and personal lives. The new [film] project will be an adaptation of Mann’s original follow-up novel, Heat 2, which tells both a prequel and sequel story.”

• Happy 30th birthday to Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine, which editor George Easter says debuted in newsletter form in April 1993. His post on the subject includes a scan of that inaugural issue, which awarded UK crime writer Liza Cody front-page attention.

• With CrimeFest 2023 set to kick off in Bristol, England, on Thursday, May 11, Mike Ripley begins his April “Getting Away with Murder” column with some photographic memories of CrimeFests past. He moves on from there to mentions of Maurizio Di Giovanni’s Inspector Ricciardi series, Joffe Books’ reissuing of James Mitchell’s David Callan thrillers, and new titles by Eli Cranor, Dennis Lehane, Lindsey Davis, and others. You’ll find his full column in Shots.

• When we announced in late March that a new James Bond thriller, On His Majesty’s Secret Service, had been penned by British novelist Charlie Higson and scheduled for release on Thursday, May 4 (just ahead of King Charles III’s coronation), there wasn’t yet a book jacket to show off. However, Amazon UK has now added that cover to its order page. The artwork appears fairly simplistic, but we’re assured that it makes more of an impression in person, with “an eye-catching gold foil effect, fit for a king.”

• Speaking of Agent 007, Kim Sherwood—the author of Double or Nothing (Morrow), set in the world of Bond and unleashed on American consumers earlier this month—has placed an interesting piece in CrimeReads that looks back on “the origins and impact of Ian Fleming’s legendary espionage novel,” Casino Royale (1953).

• From the heterogeneous blog Boing Boing comes news that “Wandering Planet Toys … has just launched a new Kickstarter campaign for a retro-style action figure series inspired by the classic Nancy Drew novels. They’re the first ever officially licensed toys of the iconic detective character in the nearly century since she first debuted.” This campaign’s goal is to raise $60,000 by Wednesday, May 17; at last check, $31,452 had been pledged already. In addition to those action figures, a brand-new, five-chapter Drew novella, The Clue of the Curious Collection—carrying the traditional author byline “Carolyn Keane”—is slated for publication.

• Another fundraiser worth your attention is being mounted by author Max Allan Collins. He’s launched a drive through the crowdfunding Web site Indiegogo to amass $5,000 over the next month and a half, which will be spent on turning his A Christmas Carol-like detective short story, “Blue Christmas” (published in a 2001 collection), into a movie. “It’s kind of a work that pulls together a lot of my interests in one place,” Collins explains in a pitch video, “and something that I’ve wanted to make for a long time.” Contributors at the $100 level will be thanked in the film’s credits; those giving $500 to $2,000 will be recognized as either associate producers or executive producers. What’s more, anyone who donates $25 to $500 can ask Collins to send them books from his backlist. Feeling flush? Go here to chip in. More than $800 has been raised thus far.

• Don Winslow talks with the New Zealand Herald about his current trilogy of crime novels, his “retirement from writing [in order] to concentrate on political activism,” his support of fellow writers, how none of his books expose much about him, and more.

• And Sai Shankar is back with part two of his deep dive into the history of Black Mask magazine. This time, he dissects one of the early issues edited by Florence May Osborne. The first installment of this series can be enjoyed here.

Feats of Daring Drew

Tonight will bring the premiere, on America’s CW-TV network, of Nancy Drew. This marks the third time small-screen content producers have turned for inspiration to that fictional amateur detective—created in 1930 as a female alternative to the popular Hardy Boys—and the first time since rival CBS-TV rejected a pilot that starred Sarah Shahi as a “Nancy Drew reimagined as a thirty-something NYPD detective.”

I haven’t been invited to preview the inaugural episode of this new hour-long series; however, the teasers and trailers released online suggest it might be worth watching—sort of a blend of Veronica Mars with Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Commending it, as well, is the cast, which includes Kennedy McMann as an 18-year-old Nancy, Scott Wolf (Everwood) as her attorney father, Carson Drew, and even Pamela Sue Martin (who played Nancy in the 1977-1979 series The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries) winning a role in the pilot episode. A New York Times piece published this last weekend seemed cautiously optimistic about the venture:

This new “Nancy Drew” raises the heroine’s age to 18 and offers some psychological depth. Her mother has recently died, her relationship with her father is troubled, and she is stuck in Horseshoe Bay, Me.—not the Midwestern River Heights of the books—while she waits to reapply to college. A sleuth since girlhood, she has sworn off investigating. “I don’t go searching in the dark anymore,” she says in voice-over. That resolve lasts about 10 minutes. Oh, and in this world, ghosts are real.

[Showrunner Melinda] Hsu knows that this version (the ghosts, the sex, the teen angst, the effortlessly diverse cast) may surprise some Nancy devotees. “But the way that we chose to do it is a way that is inclusive and updated and modern and relevant and accessible to audiences,” she said.

If you look past the updates, you can still see the outline of the classic heroine. “What’s left behind is a girl who cannot accept that the truth not be told, like she cannot sleep at night, unless the mystery is solved,” said [executive producer Noga] Landau, speaking by telephone. (She apologized for the bad reception: “I’m walking down a weird hidden staircase,” she said, which seemed very on brand.)

All of this just made me want to revisit the Nancy Drew of old, if only for a few moments. I was never a reader of the Carolyn Keene series (or even a Hardy Boys fan), but as every Rap Sheet reader knows, I enjoy digging into the history of mystery fiction. So I rounded up—and have embedded, below—the trailers for a quartet of mostly forgotten Nancy Drew “B-films” from the late 1930s, produced by Warner Bros. and starring Bonita Granville as the “danger-chasing” teenage sleuth: Nancy Drew, Detective (1938); Nancy Drew, Reporter (1939); Nancy Drew, Trouble Shooter (1939); and Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase (1939). Before you sit down to sample The CW’s new Drew, travel backwards 80 years to watch how Hollywood once imagined this young protagonist later described (by novelist Bobbie Ann Mason) as “cool as Mata Hari and as sweet as Betty Crocker.”









If you’re interested in seeing more, a DVD boxed set of Bonita Granville’s four Nancy Drew pictures can be easily obtained.

And just for fun, click here to watch the opening from “The Mystery of the Hollywood Phantom,” an unusual, October 1977 episode of The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries. It features not only Parker Stevenson and Shaun Cassidy as the Hardys, but also a young Pamela Sue Martin in her Nancy Drew role. The episode’s plot finds the attendees at a detectives convention in Los Angeles disappearing during a Hollywood film studio tour. Dennis Weaver and J.D. Cannon, from McCloud, both make cameo appearances, as does Jaclyn Smith, who in ’77 had just begun her run on Charlie’s Angels.

READ MORE: “A Cultural History of Nancy Drew,” by Olivia Rutigliano (CrimeReads); “Nancy Drew Is Not Who You Remember,” by Molly Young (Vulture); “CW Does Wrong by Batwoman and Nancy Drew,” by Hank Stuever (The Washington Post); “Nancy Drew and the Attempted Banishment,” by Taraya Galloway (Fishwrap).

Bullet Points: Rooting About Edition

• Happy birthday to The Mysterious Bookshop. New York City’s famous independent bookstore, founded by Otto Penzler and specializing in crime, mystery, and thriller fiction, will celebrate its 40th anniversary tomorrow, April 13. The latest edition of its newsletter mentions that “We’ll be celebrating this illustrious occasion with a party at the store on Tuesday, April 23rd at 6:00 p.m. This party is free and open to all! In addition to our anniversary, this party doubles as our annual Edgar Awards party (the awards are that Thursday) and many nominees will be in attendance.” Ah, if only I were spending next week in Manhattan ...

• “Acknowledging excellence in the field of tie-in writing,” the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers has broadcast the list of nominees for its 2019 Scribe Awards. There are six different categories of contestants, with lots of science fiction represented. The only group that features much crime fiction is “Original Novel – General.” Vying for that commendation are:

— Colt the Outlander: Shadow of Ruin, by Quincy J. Allen
(WordFire Press)
— The Executioner: Dying Art, by Michael A. Black
(Gold Eagle Executioner e-book)
— Killing Town (Mike Hammer), by Mickey Spillane and
Max Allan Collins (Titan)
— Narcos: The Jaguar’s Claw, by Jeff Mariotte
— Tom Clancy’s Line of Sight, by Mike Madden (Putnam)

Winners will be announced during the San Diego ComicCon, July 18-21.

• Meanwhile, the Romance Writers of America has publicized its finalists for this year’s RITA Awards. Among the brackets of contenders is one titled Romantic Suspense, which features these seven works:

— The Bastard’s Bargain, by Katee Robert (Piatkus)
— Before We Were Strangers, by Brenda Novak (Mira)
— Consumed, by J.R. Ward (Gallery)
— Cut and Run, by Mary Burton (Montlake Romance)
— Fearless, by Elizabeth Dyer (Independently published)
— Reckless Honor, by Tonya Burrows (CreateSpace)
— Relentless, by Elizabeth Dyer (Montlake Romance)

You’ll have to wait until this year’s RWA conference (July 24-27), in New York City, to find out which of these books takes the prize.

• Included among this year’s six finalists for the Man Booker International Prize is The Shape of the Ruins (Riverhead), Colombian author Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s “sweeping tale of conspiracy theories, assassinations, and twisted obsessions.”

• Recipients of the 2019 Minnesota Book Awards were announced last weekend. There were nine categories of competitors, but the one of perhaps chief interest to this blog’s readers was Genre Fiction. The winner there was The Voice Inside, by Brian Freeman (Thomas & Mercer). Also nominated were Dreadful Young Ladies and Other Stories, by Kelly Barnhill (Algonquin); Leave No Trace, by Mindy Mejia (Atria); and The Shadows We Hide, by Allen Eskens (Mulholland). Kudos to all the nominees! (Hat tip to Mystery Fanfare.)

• Season 5 of the Amazon TV series Bosch will premiere next week—on Friday, April 19, to be exact. What will this 10-episode season have in store for our favorite Los Angeles police detective? His creator, Michael Connelly, offers clues to the Tampa Bay Times.



• How James Bond influenced the CIA.

• Organizers of 2019’s Mystery Fest Key West (June 28-30) are putting out a last call for entries to their latest Whodunit Mystery Writing Competition. “Candidates wishing to compete,” explains a news release, “are invited to submit the first three pages (maximum 750 words) of a finished, but unpublished manuscript to whodunitaward@mysteryfestkeywest.com no later than April 15. There is no fee to enter, finalists will be notified by May 1, and will have until May 10 to submit full manuscripts.”

• The Gumshoe Site reports that David Fechheimer, “one of the leading private investigators in America,” died in Redwood City, California, on April 2 “from complications of open-heart surgery.” He was 76 years old. The item goes on to explain that Fechheimer “became a shamus the day after he read Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon. He worked for the Pinkerton Detective Agency and with Hal Lipset. He opened his own office in San Francisco in 1976, and handled cases involving many celebrities such as Kobe Bryant, Angela Davis, John Gotti, Daniel Ellisberg, Timothy McVeigh, [and] Roman Polanski to name just a few. He researched … Hammett’s life for Francis Ford Coppola when the latter was preparing to produce the [1982] movie Hammett, based on the novel of the same title by Joe Gores. He owned a tiny vineyard in Healdsburg, Sonoma County, and named his Cabernet Sauvignon Red Harvest.”

• Don Herron has more to say about Fechheimer here.

• Pulp-fiction authority Andrew Nette brings belated notice that writer Victor J. Banis, “who some have called ‘the godfather of modern popular gay fiction,’ died on February 22, after finally succumbing to cancer.” He was 81 years old and lived in West Virginia. Nette notes that “from 1966 to 1968, [Banis] wrote eight pulp-fiction titles in his [The] Man from C.A.M.P. series, an overtly queer takeoff of the television spy series [The] Man from U.N.C.L.E. The central protagonist of the successful series was the openly gay undercover agent, Jackie Holmes, who did battle with B.U.T.C.H. (Brothers United to Crush Homosexuality). The series helped establish that gay audiences were particularly hungry for stories which portrayed characters in a fun and positive light. In doing so, Banis saw himself as playing a consciously activist role.”

• One more obituary: The Spy Command says that “Noah Keen, a veteran character actor whose career ran from the late 1950s into the 2000s, died last month at 98.” Keen’s film and TV appearances were numerous, ranging from roles in Have Gun—Will Travel, Perry Mason, and Judd, for the Defense to The Name of the Game, The Outsider, Mission: Impossible, Ironside, and The Sopranos.

• Mario Puzo’s The Godfather is now 50 years old!

• I’m pleased to see that two mystery/crime-related movies—the brilliantly moving They Might Be Giants (1971) and Anatomy of a Murder (1959)—made it onto Classic Film & TV Café’s list of “The Five Best George C. Scott Performances.”

• Lee Child was in the television business (under his real name, Jim Grant) for many years before he embarked on his fiction-writing career. So it’s no surprise that he should think himself capable of tackling another small-screen project. The Killing Times reports that Child had proposed to “take his Jack Reacher franchise to a streaming service.” Instead, he will be teaming with Australia-based Dancing Ledge Productions to develop Lee Child: True Crime, an anthology series that “dramatizes the stories of real-life men and women from around the world who have been driven to stand up and put their lives on the line, fighting for justice in the face of great danger.”

• The Killing Times also spreads the news that Company Pictures, the independent UK production company behind such TV favorites as Wolf Hall and Shameless, is hoping to reboot the 1972-1992 series Van der Valk, a Netherlands-set crime drama based on Nicholas Freeling’s succession of novels starring Commissaris Simon "Piet" Van der Valk. British actor Marc Warren will fill the title role.

• Being a big fan of mysteries set in the past, I was immediately attracted to Molly Odintz’s CrimeReads picks of “The Best Historical Fiction of 2019 (So Far).” I wasn’t disappointed by her choices. I’ve already read most of the 14 books mentioned—including Niklas Natt och Dag’s The Wolf and the Watchman, Abir Mukherjee’s Smoke and Ashes, and Guy Bolton’s The Syndicate—and have almost all of the remainder in my ridiculously oversized to-be-read pile. In addition to Odintz’s picks, I’d recommend the following: Blood & Sugar, by Laura Shepherd-Robinson; The Devil Aspect, by Craig Russell; The Unquiet Heart, by Kaite Welsh; and The Mathematical Bridge, by Jim Kelly.

• Another recent CrimeReads piece I enjoyed: Rebecca Rego Barry’s look back at Great Britain’s 18th-century-born Newgate Calendar (subtitled The Malefactors' Bloody Register), “which,” she explains, “collected the most notorious tales of those confined to [London’s] Newgate Prison and subsequently hanged at Tyburn. … Needless to say, The Newgate Calendar was popular with a citizenry that turned a public execution into the equivalent of the Superbowl. At the same time, literacy was increasing among the working class, and cheaper printing methods had helped to create a mass readership. Canny novelists took note of this new market and its interests, sparking an alluring but short-lived genre now referred to as ‘Newgate novels.’ These were stories set in the underworld and based, however loosely, on convicts with lurid or melodramatic biographies.”

• In Reference to Murder brings word that “The CW’s Nancy Drew pilot is giving a nod to the TV history of the iconic character by hiring Pamela Sue Martin, who played the brilliant teen sleuth in the first TV series adaptation of the Nancy Drew books from 1977-79 on ABC. Newcomer Kennedy McMann takes on the title role of the amateur detective, while Martin will play a small-town psychic who offers her talents to help Nancy investigate a murder—and ends up delivering an otherworldly clue that neither of them bargained for.”

• Finally, four author interviews worth noticing: Cara Robertson talks with MysteryPeople about her new non-fiction book, The Trial of Lizzie Borden; Lesa’s Book Critiques fires questions at Catriona McPherson (Scot & Soda); the Amazon Book Review chats with Lydia Fitzpatrick on the matter of Lights All Night Long, her novel about “a Russian exchange student [working] to exonerate the brother left behind, a drug addict who has confessed to murder”; and Paperback Warrior “unmasks” Ralph Hayes, the prolific Michigan writer who, at age 91, is still concocting men's action-adventure novels.

Drew to the Rescue

TV news from B.V. Lawson’s In Reference to Murder:

The CW has found its Nancy Drew. The network cast newcomer Kennedy McMann to play the title role in its pilot, based on the beloved YA novels. The series will follow Nancy whose college plans and sense of self have been derailed by a recent family tragedy–but when she ends up a suspect in a murder, it rekindles her love for detective work, even though the clues lead her to believe a long-dead local girl may be the killer. Charmed's Leah Lewis co-stars as George, a tough, tattooed girl from the wrong side of the tracks, who’s forced to team up with Nancy to track the culprit and clear their names.

The Wrap adds, “This is the third time that CBS TV Studios has attempted to adapt Nancy Drew in the past three years. CBS ordered a pilot starring Sarah Shahi during the 2015-16 development cycle. It was also part of NBC’s development slate this past season. Both of those versions were developed as sequels to the books, while The CW project adheres closer to the source material.”

Bullet Points: Revivals and Retreads Edition

• It has now been just over 12 years since crime-fictionist Dennis Lynds died. I was reminded of this by a note in Mystery*File from his widow, thriller writer Gayle Lynds, who explains that her husband’s best-remembered protagonist, one-armed New York City gumshoe Dan Fortune, has recently been resurrected in print. She writes: “The entire 17-book series of private eye novels”—which Lynds published under his pseudonym Michael Collins—“are available again, for the first time in Kindle and trade paperback. We hope a new generation of readers will discover Dan, and that longtime fans will enjoy re-reading the classic tales.” Click here to find Amazon’s list of these reprinted works, from Act of Fear (1967) to Cassandra in Red (1993).

• Coincidentally, TracyK recently reviewed The Nightrunners—a Fortune yarn originally released in 1978—in her blog Bitter Tea and Mystery. She applauded the fact that it contains “twists and turns I did not anticipate” and that “there is less action and gun play, and more emphasis on brains and persistence” than she’d expected.

• A little behind schedule, but welcome nonetheless. The last I heard, Spinetingler Magazine was planning to release “its first [print] issue in years” sometime this month. Today, however, a news release reached my e-mailbox, saying that Down & Out Books expects to publish the Fall 2017 edition of Spinetingler in November. Its contents will include “original stories by Tracy Falenwolfe, Karen Montin, Jennifer Soosar, B.V. Lawson, Nick Kolakowski, David Rachels, and more. There are author snapshots of Con Lehane, Rusty Barnes, Mindy Tarquini, and others. Book features and reviews fill out the magazine’s pages.” There’s no word yet on ordering this new issue.

• In June, I drew your attention to the first trailer for The Alienist, TNT-TV’s historical mini-series based on Caleb Carr’s 1994 psychological thriller of that same name. ScreenRant has now posted a second trailer (which is also embedded below), and finally shares a date for the debut of that program: Monday, January 22, 2018. It also suggests that there will be eight episodes, rather than the previously mentioned 10, all written by True Detective director Cary Fukunaga and starring Daniel Brühl, Luke Evans, and Dakota Fanning as “19th-century investigators on the trail of a serial killer.” Hmm. With three months to go until this mini-series begins airing, I might actually find free time enough to re-read Carr’s book.



• A British blog called The Killing Times brings word that Bron Studios, a Canadian production company, plans to build a new TV series around Louise Rick, the Copenhagen detective inspector who features in more than half a dozen novels from Danish writer Sara Blædel. “Deadline reports that the first Louise Rick story, The Forgotten Girls, will serve [as] the basis for Season One,” but Bron “has optioned the whole series,” according to The Killing Times.

• Variety carries the unexpected news that actor John Turturro (The Night Of) has been signed to play 14th-century Franciscan friar-cum-sleuth William of Baskerville in a “high-end TV adaptation” of Umberto Eco’s 1980 mystery novel, The Name of the Rose. The eight-episode English-language production will be produced by Italy’s Matteo Levi and Carlo Degli Esposti, and is set to start shooting in January at Rome’s Cinecittà Studios. In addition to the hangdog-faced Turturro, this mini-series will feature English performer Rupert Everett as the monk’s antagonist, Italian inquisitor Bernard Gui. An excellent 1986 film interpretation of Eco’s debut novel starred Sean Connery and F. Murray Abraham, and it’s hard to imagine that an extended remake is really needed. But of course, nobody asked me …

• … Just as no one solicited my opinion on whether the world requires a new version of Tom Selleck’s 1980-1988 private-eye TV series, Magnum, P.I. It seems screenwriters Peter Lenkov and Eric Guggenheim—the guys behind the disappointing current Hawaii Five-0 reboot and the latest version of MacGyver—think we need Magnum back, and have convinced CBS (the series’ original home network) to at least bankroll a pilot. The Hollywood Reporter describes the prospective series as an update of Selleck’s show.

It follows Thomas Magnum …, a decorated ex-Navy SEAL (also like the original) who, upon returning home from Afghanistan, repurposes his military skills to become a private investigator. With help from fellow vets Theodore “T.C.” Calvin and Orville “Rick” Wright, as well as that of disavowed former MI6 agent Juliet Higgins, Magnum takes on the cases no one else will, helping those who have no one else to turn to. Action, adventure and comedy aside, Magnum P.I. will also explore a brotherhood forged by the trauma of combat, what it means to return home an ex-soldier, and a commitment to continuing to serve while in the private sector.

This is the third time I remembering hearing that a Magnum comeback was on the drawing boards. The first was back in 2006, when Ben Affleck was set to star. Then, just last year, news broke that actress Eva Longoria had pitched a sequel that would have refocused the crime drama on “Magnum’s daughter, Lily ‘Tommy’ Magnum, who returns to Hawaii to take up the mantle of her father’s P.I. firm.” Neither of those efforts resulted in an actual show. Maybe we’ll be just as lucky this time around. Has Hollywood considered that not every once-popular series needs to be remade?

• Oh, and as In Reference to Murder relates,

A “Nancy Drew” TV series is once again in the works, with NBC developing a new series based on the iconic novel series after CBS attempted such a project last season. The new series still hails from writers and executive producers Tony Phelan and Joan Rater and executive producer Dan Jinks, who developed the CBS version, but the new series follows the author of the most famous female teen-detective book series who is thrust into a real-life murder mystery. In need of help, she turns to her two best friends from childhood, who were the inspiration for all those books, and the women who have a real axe to grind about the way their supposed best friend chose to portray them all those years ago. This will be a completely different version than the original at CBS. That project would have focused on Drew, now an adult who works as a detective for the NYPD. Sarah Shahi, who starred in the CBS drama Person of Interest since its second season, starred in the pilot as Drew but isn't currently attached to the NBC version.

• Barry Forshaw alerts us that, with this month’s release of Modesty Blaise: The Killing Game, Titan Books has completed its “all-inclusive run of Peter O’Donnell’s imperishable [British] comic strip Modesty Blaise (drawn by a variety of artists, including the great Jim Holdaway who inaugurated the strip and Enric Badia Romero, who concluded it).” Click here to find all of the preceding titles in this series.

• I’ve added several vintage TV openings to The Rap Sheet’s YouTube page, including those from Shotgun Slade, Johnny Bago (which features theme music by Jimmy Buffett), and Jack Palance’s Bronk.

• Florida’s Tampa Bay Times recently carried an interesting feature about how smoothly and satisfyingly author Michael Connelly has transferred his original series protagonist, Harry Bosch, from the page to the TV screen, in Amazon’s Bosch.

• Bookseller-turned-writer/editor Maxim Jakubowski has returned to CrimeTime as a monthly columnist, penning “To the Max.

• Fans of author Ted Lewis (Get Carter, GBH, etc.) should be interested to learn of a new volume, Nick Triplow’s Getting Carter: Ted Lewis and the Birth of Brit Noir, being brought out by No Exit Press. Crime Fiction Lover opines that “meticulous and thorough detective work is at the heart of this compelling and detailed biography of Ted Lewis, the Humberside author of nine novels, who was a huge influence on Brit Noir and remains so for leading names in crime fiction today.” Sadly, Triplow’s work is currently available only in Britain, but a U.S. release (from Oldcastle Books) is slated for May 2018.

• Three author interviews worth your time: Thomas Mullen talks with MysteryPeople about Lightning Men, his exceptional sequel to last year’s Darktown; Speaking of Mysteries host Nancie Clare chats with Joe Ide about Righteous, the second installment in his Isiah Quintabe series; and Geoffrey Girard fields a few queries from Mystery Tribune about his “contemporary gothic ghost story,” Mary Rose.

• And Peter Rozovsky, the Philadelphia editor, essayist, and photographer with whom I have frequently associated at Bouchercons over the last decade, takes questions from S.W. Lauden.

• With Kenneth Branagh’s film version of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express set to reach theaters in November, Crime Fiction Lover has posted a photo tour of the author’s native Devon, England.

• Wow, this blog’s Facebook page seems to be experiencing a remarkable run of attention lately. In early October, I was impressed when a post there about the 60th anniversary of Have Gun—Will Travel “reached” more than 9,000 people. I thought that was some kind of record, but more recently, a post leading to The Rap Sheet’s coverage of the 2017 Anthony Award winners jetted right past that high bar, “reaching” 15,246 people. With 694 followers, the blog’s Facebook presence seems to be justifying my efforts to keep it lively.

• Feeding the grand debate over which of Raymond Chandler’s handful of novels qualifies as his “best,” Tablet magazine columnist Alexander Aciman delivers an outstanding appraisal of 1953’s The Long Goodbye. He writes, in part:

If Raymond Chandler’s earlier novels were detective stories that just so happened to be good, The Long Goodbye is a full reversal; it is a great novel that just so happens to be a detective story. It should be no different than saying Moby-Dick is a great novel that happens to be about whalers, or that Ulysses is a great novel that happens to take place in Dublin. But by describing it as detective fiction, we can obscure the fact for more than 60 years that it was one of the greatest novels ever written in America. There is hardly a novel more human, more heartbreaking, strung together with prose as boozily and as meticulously exacting as The Long Goodbye’s.

• I’ve lived in four U.S. states during my lifetime—Oregon, Michigan, Colorado, and Washington—and have gotten around to reading only one of the books Travel & Leisure magazine editors say best represent those places: Snow Falling on Cedars, by David Guterson, set in the Seattle area. In my defense, I did see the Jack Nicholson movie version of Stephen King’s The Shining (which ostensibly takes place in Colorado), and have read many other works on T&L’s list.

• For fans of “impossible crime” yarns.

• Here’s an excellent review of two new books that explore the fight against World War II-era Nazism in Los Angeles, California, and specifically in its glitziest quarter, Hollywood.

• This, too, sounds like a book I should have. In its write-up on Sinclair MacKay’s new non-fiction work, The Mile End Murder: The Case Conan Doyle Couldn't Solve (Aurum Press), Amazon explains: “In 1860, a 70-year-old widow turned landlady named Mary Emsley was found dead in her own home, killed by a blow to the back of her head. What followed was a murder case that gripped the nation, a veritable locked-room mystery which baffled even legendary Sherlock Holmes author, Arthur Conan Doyle. With an abundance of suspects, from disgruntled stepchildren concerned about their inheritance and a spurned admirer repeatedly rejected by the widow, to a trusted employee, former police officer and spy, the case led to a public trial dominated by surprise revelations and shock witnesses, before culminating with one of the final public executions at Newgate.”

• Your chance to get better acquainted with Frederic Brown: “‘Murder Draws a Crowd’ and ‘Death in the Dark’ by Fredric Brown (Haffner Press, $50 each) are the first two volumes in a well-designed, excellent new series edited by Steve Haffner, collecting all of Brown’s mystery fiction. … If you’ve never read anything by Fredric Brown, (1906-1972) you’re in for a real treat—he’s one of the genre’s most respected authors, long overdue for increased attention.”

• Who’d have thought that reading in bed could be dangerous? Many people once harbored such fears, according to The Atlantic:

Writings from the 18th and 19th centuries frequently dramatize the potentially horrifying consequences of reading in bed. Hannah Robertson’s 1791 memoir, Tale of Truth as well as of Sorrow, offers one example. It is a dramatic story of downward mobility, hinging on the unfortunate bedtime activities of a Norwegian visitor, who falls asleep with a book: “The curtains took fire, and [with] the flames communicating with other parts of the furniture and buildings, a great share of our possessions were consumed.”

Even the famous and the dead could be censured for engaging in the practice. In 1778, a posthumous biography chastised the late Samuel Johnson for his bad bedside reading habits, characterizing the British writer as an insolent child. A biography of Jonathan Swift alleged that the satirist and cleric nearly burned down the Castle of Dublin—and tried to conceal the incident with a bribe.

(Hat tip to January Magazine.)

• The Web’s latest plethora of Halloween-linked stories is just getting started. A site called Thrillist features this piece focusing on “the creepiest urban legend in every state.” BuzzFeed looks to Google Maps to find “the 31 most haunted places in America.” Mental Floss examines “the origins of 25 monsters, ghosts, and spooky things.” And adding a comical coda to these selections, Neatorama presents “The Story of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.”

• Los Angeles’ 1947 “Black Dahlia murder” is among that city’s most unsettling unsolved crimes. So it can only be with a chill that anyone would dress up as victim Elizabeth Short for Halloween.

• I usually think of H.G. Wells as a science-fiction writer (The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, etc.). But he also produced a great deal of non-fiction, and evidently experimented as well with “criminous misadventures,” as Ontos recalls here.

• The Bookseller brings the sad news that Britain’s “campaign group Voices for the Library is to disband due to the pressures of the workload on its members. The group, which counts Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy and author Julia Donaldson among its supporters, was created in 2010 to speak out and fight against the ‘assault’ on public libraries caused by deep cuts to the sector. In a statement posted on the Voices for the Library website, the group said: ‘Unfortunately, we ourselves are volunteers running an organisation in our spare time. We are unhappy to say that we can no longer undertake the work required to be a voice for public libraries. It is with great sorrow that we have decided that it’s time to close the doors on Voices for the Library. The irony of this is not lost on us.’”

• Finally, these are dark days, indeed, for “alternative newsweeklies.” The Village Voice, historically one of the strongest and most influential such newspapers, discontinued its print publication in September (though it’s still available online), and L.A. Weekly is currently experiencing a transition limbo likely to result in employee layoffs and a refocusing on its digital presence. Meanwhile, it appears that 41-year-old Seattle Weekly—which I was proud to work for during the late 1980s—will soon become unrecognizable. The Seattle news Web site Crosscut says that for budgetary reasons South Publishing, which has owned the tabloid-size paper since 2013, will restructure Seattle Weekly as a far less creative or challenging “community news weekly.” The paper’s staff will be slashed to just three employees (down from dozens of people who worked there when I did), and they will have no independent offices, but will be left to share editorial space and production facilities with Sound Publishing’s 16 other local small-time papers. This is tragic news, so far as I am concerned. I started out with “alt-weeklies” after college, working first for Willamette Week in Portland, Oregon, and eventually (after regrettable detours to a monthly magazine in Detroit and a daily broadsheet in Boulder, Colorado) wound up on the staff at Seattle Weekly, which was then known simply as The Weekly. That publication has had its ups and downs since David Brewster founded it in 1976, but it’s also produced a hell of a lot of solid, incisive reporting on politics, civic growth, the arts, local history, and much more. As with other alt-weeklies, Seattle Weekly suffered greatly with the rise of Internet advertising; however, I assumed it would ultimately find a way to make up for lost ad dollars and rebuild its journalistic stature. I guess I was wrong.

Really, That’s a Liability?

This is a rather surprising development. CBS-TV has decided not to pick up a prospective new series, Drew, starring the magnetic Sarah Shahi (Life, Fairly Legal) in the role of “Nancy Drew reimagined as a thirty-something NYPD detective.” Explains The Mary Sue:

Writers Joan Rater and Tony Phelan of Grey’s Anatomy had been working on the concept for the show along with CBS, which co-starred Graceland’s Vanessa Ferlito as George, Nancy’s former partner at the NYPD, and ER’s Anthony Edwards as Nancy’s father. (No news yet on who they’d potentially landed to play that updated version of Bess.)

The reason for the nix? Apparently, “the pilot tested well but skewed too female for CBS’ schedule.” Whatever that means.

Deadline adds Drew “is being shopped to other outlets by CBS TV Studios.” It does seem like a saleable idea, with a good cast attached.

Criminous Tidbits

• In Reference to Murder brings this news: FOX-TV has “announced its literary adventure drama Houdini & Doyle will premiere May 2, taking over the 9 p.m. Monday slot … the week after Lucifer’s season finale. The series focuses on the unlikely real-life friendship between master illusionist Harry Houdini (Michael Weston) and Sherlock Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Stephen Mangan) as they grudgingly join forces with New Scotland Yard to investigate unsolved and inexplicable crimes with a supernatural slant. Rebecca Liddiard plays Adelaide Stratton, whose character is the first female constable ever to work for the London Metropolitan Police Force.”

• While we’re on the subject of TV shows … It seems that the lovely Sarah Shahi, who starred in Life, Fairly Legal, and Person of Interest, is now set to lead the cast of Drew, the upcoming CBS series inspired by Carolyn Keene’s succession of Nancy Drew mystery novels. Crimespree Magazine explains that 36-year-old Shahi “will be playing an adult, contemporary Nancy. In the pilot, Nancy is an NYPD detective [who] “investigates and solves crimes using her uncanny observational skills, all while navigating the complexities of life in a modern world.” This set-up sounds noticeably different from what Pamela Sue Martin offered viewers in the 1977-1979 ABC-TV series, The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries. Thank goodness.

• Mike Ripley is out with the latest edition of his “Getting Away with Murder” column for Shots. His boisterous coverage this month includes notes about the official reopening of London’s “refurbished Sherlock Holmes public house,” a May 6 seminar at the British Library on author Eric Ambler, and new novel releases from Robert Ryan (The Sign of Fear), Philip Kerr (The Other Side of Silence), Elizabeth Wilson (She Died Young), Ken Bruen and Jason Starr (Pimp), and others.

• Mystery Scene’s new edition features Oline H. Cogdill’s cover story about novelist Gregg Hurwitz (Orphan X); profiles of Margaret Millar, Alison Gaylin, and Ausma Zehanet Khan; Kevin Burton Smith’s endorsement of the Netflix TV series Jessica Jones, which offers “a damaged but defiant hero and deftly explores issues of consent, sexual abuse, and trauma”; and a collection of its critics’ favorite books, films, and TV shows from 2015.

• Today is National Grammar Day. Time to stop depending on computer spell-checking programs to correct your errors.

• Congratulations to TracyK for four years of blogging at Bitter Tea and Mystery. Anybody who’s tried the business of blogging knows just how difficult it is to keep up such an enterprise. Bloggers are lucky to clock in one year of regular activity, much less more.

• A big thumbs-up as well to James Reasoner, whose essay “Not Your Ordinary Gun-Dummy: The Western Heroes of Robert E. Howard” has been nominated for a 2016 Robert E. Howard Foundation Award.

• The lifestyle magazine Men’s Journal chose what it calls “The Best Old-School Noir Novels.” Not surprisingly, they include Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, Dorothy B. Hughes’ In a Lonely Place, and Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye.

• Finally, a belated farewell to the late American performer George Kennedy, who during his more than 50-year career, appeared in big-screen productions such as The Dirty Dozen and Cool Hand Luke, as well as the Airport and Naked Gun series, and starred on television in a couple of memorable crime dramas: Sarge (1971-1972; opening title sequence here) and The Blue Knight (1975-1976; opening here). Although he was usually cast in supporting roles, a Web site called The Wrap observes that, especially in his Airport appearances, Kennedy “provided … a practical demonstration of how a supporting player can steal a movie from its stars.” Kennedy, who had long suffered from heart problems, died on February 28 at age 91.