Remembering Garfield and Langton

Much to my chagrin, the recent holiday rush caused a delay in my observing the deaths of two people prominent in the world of mystery and crime fiction. First off, of course, was Brian Garfield, who passed away on December 29 at age 79 “after a battle with Parkinson's disease,” according to The Hollywood Reporter. Although he produced a wide variety of books, including crime novels, Westerns, and volumes of non-fiction, he may still be best remembered for giving the world 1972’s Death Wish, which was made into a film two years later starring Charles Bronson. The Reporter explains:

Garfield was the author of more than 70 books that sold more than 20 million copies worldwide, and 19 of his works were made into films or TV shows. …

Brian Francis Wynne Garfield was born in New York City on Jan. 26, 1939. He was the son of Frances O’Brien, a protégé of Georgia O’Keeffe; the famed artist introduced his mother to her future husband, George Garfield.

He grew up in Arizona “accustomed to having writers around the house,” he said, and wrote his first book, a Western titled Range Justice, when he was 18.

In the 1950s, Garfield toured with The Palisades, a group that recorded the doo-wop song “I Can’t Quit.” He also attended the University of Arizona and served in the U.S. Army and the Army Reserves from 1957-65.

Garfield's 1969 non-fiction book The Thousand-Mile War: World War II in Alaska and the Aleutians was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in non-fiction. And according to his literary agency, John Grisham credited Garfield’s article “Ten Rules for Suspense Fiction” with “giving him the tools” to create The Firm.

He also served as president of the Western Writers of America and the Mystery Writers of America.

I confess to never having read Death Wish or Garfield’s 1975 sequel, Death Sentence. However, there are several other of this author’s works on my bookshelves, thoroughly enjoyable fare such as Hopscotch (1975), The Paladin, (1979), and Manifest Destiny (1989). If you aren’t yet familiar with Garfield’s storytelling, check out some of The Mysterious Press’ brief plot synopses here.

* * *

Jane Langton is gone, as well. While she wrote a number of children’s books over the years, it was for her crime fiction that Rap Sheet readers are most likely to recognize this prolific Boston-born author. As Mystery Scene’s Brian Skupin recalled, “For over 40 years, Jane Langton’s mysteries about Homer Kelly, a homicide detective turned Harvard professor, have delighted fans with their wide-ranging erudition, intriguing characters, gentle humor, acute sense of place, social conscience, and charming illustrations.”

The first of Langton’s 18 Kelly novels was 1964’s The Transcendental Murder (aka The Minuteman Murder); the last was Steeplechase (2005). The series’ fifth entry, Emily Dickinson Is Dead, captured the 1984 Nero Wolfe Award (given out by the New York-based Nero Wolfe Society) and was nominated for an Edgar Award. Just last year, Langton received the Mystery Writers of America’s Grand Master Award. Mystery Fanfare offers a bit more information about her career here.

The New York Times reports that Langton “died on [December 22] in hospice care near her home in Lincoln, Mass. She was 95.”

READ MORE: “Metaphysical Coincidence: Brian Garfield, 1939-2018,” by Fred Fitch (The Westlake Review).

Bullet Points: Media Medley Edition

• Argentina-born pianist and composer Lalo Schifrin, who has scored such films as Cool Hand Luke, Bullitt, and Dirty Harry, and created the theme music for TV productions including Mission: Impossible, Petrocelli, and Mannix, was honored this last weekend with a Governors Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. In addition to the 86-year-old Schifrin, two other recognizable Hollywood figures received Governors Awards: 93-year-old actress Cicely Tyson and Marvin Levy, a longtime public relations exec who was once a member of the AMPAS board of governors. You can watch Schifrin accept his award on YouTube.

• The Classic Film and TV Café calls producer-writer Stirling Silliphant “the poet laureate of 1960s television” in this tribute looking back at his scripts for the 1960-1964 CBS series Route 66. “Silliphant, who co-created the series with producer Herbert B. Leonard, wrote an incredible 73 of the 116 episodes over the show’s four-year run,” observes the blogger known as Rick29. “In terms of entertainment value, the plots were consistently above-average, but it’s Silliphant's dialogue that gave Route 66 its unique voice. As David Mamet would do later, Silliphant embellished his characters with dialogue that would never pass for natural—but which conveyed a singular poetry all its own.” In addition to Route 66, Silliphant (shown on the left) is remembered for his work on the TV programs Naked City and Longstreet, and his screenplays for such pictures as In the Heat of the Night (1967) and Marlowe (1969), which starred James Garner as Raymond Chandler’s justly famous Los Angeles private eye, Philip Marlowe.

• While we’re on the subject of bygone boob-tube shows, check out Michael Shonk’s new Mystery*File post about Gavilan, a 1982-1983 NBC series that featured Robert Urich (later of Spenser: For Hire fame) as a former intelligence operative who has gone to work for an oceanographic research organization called the Dewitt Institute, but keeps trying to help people—especially attractive young females—in trouble. Shonk opines:

The series had its good moments, but it also had many of the flaws of 1980s television. The plots were better than average but had to really stretch to connect to the Institute. In “By the Sword” the brilliant beautiful woman was a scientist working on a project to study the krill as a food source, but the plot was about an ancient samurai sword she stole from the Yakuza to regain her family honor.

The stories were entertaining but mindless, predictable and too willing to sacrifice story and character for a joke or twist. In “By the Sword,” the female scientist is trained in the martial arts and had done something her entire family had not done in over a hundred years, got her family’s ancient honored Japanese sword back from the Yakuza. So in the final confrontation for the sword it is Gavilan—as she watched—who sword fights to the death for the sword and her family honor. Of course, Gavilan out duels the unbeatable Master Samurai.

Shonk’s piece includes two episodes of Gavilan found on YouTube. A few of my own thoughts on this show can be found here.

• NBC-TV has reportedly made a script commitment for The Bone Collector, a series based both on Jeffery Deaver’s 1997 psychological thriller of the same name and on the 1990 Denzel Washington movie already adapted from that novel. According to Deadline Hollywood, NBC’s project “hails from writers V.J. Boyd and Mark Bianculli (S.W.A.T.), Universal Television and Sony Pictures Television … Written by Boyd and Bianculli, The Bone Collector follows Lincoln Rhyme, a retired genius forensic criminologist left paralyzed after an accident on the job. When a harrowing case brings him back to the force, Rhyme partners up with an ambitious young detective, Amelia Sachs, to take down some of the most dangerous criminals in the U.S.” There’s no information yet on who might star in this series, but plenty of speculation on what it could draw from Deaver’s 14 existing Rhyme novels, the latest of which is 2017’s The Cutting Edge.

• The Killing Times says that America’s Audience Network has renewed the Stephen King-inspired, David E. Kelley-developed crime drama, Mr. Mercedes, for a third season.

• I’m not surprised by news that Netflix’s Tony Danza/Josh Groban “dramedy,” The Good Cop, hasn’t been picked up for a second season. While I really wanted to like the series—in part because its creator-showrunner was Monk mastermind Andy Breckman—it came off as way too cute too much of the time, with an excess of thin plots and ridiculous turns. I did, however, like Danza’s portrayal of a disgraced ex-New York City policeman as part con man, part reluctant troubleshooter; and dancer-actress Monica Barbaro consistently brightened up the screen playing Grogan’s ballsier partner, Cora Vasquez. I’ve only seen half of the 10 episodes of The Good Cop, but their performances will keep me watching through to the end.

• I’d heard about this before, and was convinced that I’d mentioned it here, but evidently I was wrong. Anyway, Mystery Tribune notes that Christopher Huang’s debut novel, A Gentleman’s Murder—which featured in my recent CrimeReads piece about nine post-World War I mysteries—has been optioned for TV adaptation.

• Deadline Hollywood brings word that Tom Shepherd, who scripted Robert Downey Jr.’s forthcoming The Voyage of Doctor Dolittle, has been signed to pen Matt Helm, based on Donald Hamilton’s long-running series of spy thrillers. Bradley Cooper will star in this Paramount project, with George Clooney, Grant Heslov, Alex Kurtzman, and Roberto Orci all serving as executive producers.



• Continuing The Rap Sheet’s series on “copycat covers,” book fronts that employ artwork previously displayed on other titles, we offer—above—the façades of Blow Out the Candles and Say Goodbye (Lamplighter Suspense), Linda S. Glaz’s 2017 novel, and 2016’s Stealing People (Europa Editions), the third entry in Robert Wilson’s series starring kidnap consultant Charlie Boxer.

• A new book suggests that Arthur Conan Doyle based the character of Professor James Moriarty, sleuth Sherlock Holmes’ principal nemesis, on a brilliant 19th-century professor of mathematics named George Boole. “A thorough comparison between Conan Doyle’s fictional Moriarty and the real Boole,” writes The Irish Times, “reveals numerous persuasive similarities. Both characters held chairs at small provincial universities; both won appointments on the basis of outstanding early work; both had interests in astronomy; the two were of similar appearance—an illustration of Moriarty in Conan Doyle’s work bears a striking resemblance to a photograph of Boole and may well have been based on it. The major discrepancy between Boole and Moriarty is that Boole was a man of high morals and excellent character, a social reformer, religious thinker and family man.” While Moriarty … well, as Conan Doyle put it in The Valley of Fear, he was “the greatest schemer of all time, the organizer of every devilry …”

• Murder & Mayhem picks “11 must-read mysteries set in Los Angeles,” and I’m relieved to discover that I’ve read all but one: Dorothy B. Hughes’ The Expendable Man (1963).

• To his excellent John D. MacDonald blog, The Trap of Solid Gold, Steve Scott has recently added two worth-reading vintage profiles of Travis McGee’s creator—one from Florida’s Tampa Bay Times, dated April 26, 1981; and the other from a 1978 edition of the Canadian news magazine Maclean’s (you’ll find that second piece here).

• Authors are generally quite reticent to reveal which books they prefer among those they have written, so it’s interesting to see Max Allan Collins identify his two favorite entries in his rapidly expanding series about the hit man known as Quarry.

• Which reminds me, I wasn’t aware before reading this piece in The Guardian, that Agatha Christie’s 1967 novel, Endless Night, was her favorite. Sam Jordison says more about that standalone here.

• A weekend spent organizing my late in-laws' long-forgotten boxes of books turned up some surprising and welcome literary gems.

• I am, of course, an enthusiastic follower of the Web site Pulp Covers, with its ever-growing abundance of classic book and magazine fronts. And one of the reasons for my interest is that the site’s unidentified editor frequently posts links to full issues of periodicals such as Dime Mystery Magazine, Detective Book Magazine, Manhunt, and New Detective. Those issues are easily downloaded and can be wonderfully entertaining.

• So much has already been said about the demise, late last week, of 87-year-old novelist and screenwriter William Goldman, that I fear I have nothing to add. Obituaries in The New York Times and in the British Guardian covered the highlights of his career: his scripting of movies such as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President’s Men, Maverick, and Paul Newman’s Harper; his penning of novels that included Marathon Man, The Princess Bride, and Magic; and his late-life success with a memoir titled Adventures in the Screen Trade. CrimeReads adds to those encomia a collection of notable Goldman quotes. My own first experience with Goldman was way back in high school, when I was introduced to Magic … which put me off of ventriloquist’s dummies for the remainder of my mortal life. I’ve often watched Goldman’s motion pictures, with Harper—based on Ross Macdonald’s 1949 private-eye novel, The Moving Target—and Butch Cassidy being my favorites. I never met the man, but the power and precision of his prose, and the pleasure I’ve derived from listening to his dialogue and reading his stories made me care about him nonetheless. Really, a storyteller could hope for nothing better than that.

• The Gumshoe Site reminds us that William Goldman’s first mystery novel was No Way to Treat a Lady. In another blog, Tipping My Fedora, Sergio Angelini recalls that that book was “originally published in 1964 under the pseudonym ‘Harry Longbaugh,’ the real name of the outlaw ‘The Sundance Kid.’ Written in just 10 days, this brief novel is 160 pages long and broken down into 53 chapters and is an exciting, blackly comic work reminiscent of the best of the Ed McBain thrillers of the time.” Adam Groves of The Bedlam Files adds that No Way to Treat a Lady “lacks the slickness and polish of [Goldman’s] later novels, with much slapdash prose and an uncertain grasp of tone (it’s difficult to discern if all the comedic elements were meant to be funny). Yet the wit, verve and imagination that characterize Goldman’s best work are very much evident in this suspenseful and macabre novel that predates everything from Dexter to Natural Born Killers in its furiously inventive account of the fortunes of a mass murderer.” Concludes Groves: “I say it’s one of William Goldman’s finest books.”

• By the way, No Way to Treat a Lady was made into a 1968 film starring Rod Steiger, Lee Remick, and George Segal. As I’ve never read Goldman’s original book, or seen the movie, I guess I have some serious catching up to do.

• Want to learn more about classic New Zealand mystery writer Ngaio Marsh? CrimeReads’ Neil Nyren provides a bit of background as well as recommendations of four works from her oeuvre.

• Here’s something I didn’t know before: Wisconsin-born, Japanese-American crime novelist Milton K Ozaki (1913-1989)—who often wrote under the moniker Robert O Saber—was not only “a newspaperman, an artist, and the operator of a beauty parlor” (per Bill Crider), but also something of a con man, according to Paperback Warrior.

• In The Spy Command, Bill Koenig traces the complicated roots of the 1964-1968 NBC-TV spy series The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and its connections to James Bond creator Ian Fleming. This is a continuing series, but you can find Part I here, with Part II here.

• The New York Times’ Alexandra Alter recently caught up with Megan Abbott, whose commitments both as an author and as the executive producer of a TV pilot film based on her 2012 novel, Dare Me, must leave her little time for relaxation.

• Leo W. Banks has claimed another prize for his 2017 debut novel, Double Wide. His publisher’s Web site says Banks “just received the 2018 Best Mystery Novel award from the New Mexico Book Co-op, announced at a gala awards banquet in Albuquerque on November 16th. Along with this latest honor, Double Wide also has received two Western Writers of America 2018 Spur Awards and [the] Best Crime Novel of the Year Award by True West magazine.”

• Finally, I’ve spent several years now trying to procure copies of the four episodes made of Faraday and Company, a 1973-1974 detective series that starred Dan Dailey and James Naughton, and was part of the NBC Wednesday Mystery Movie line-up. Then, just today, I happened across a Web site called DVD Planet Store, which offers the full run of Faraday for $16. The trouble is, after reading negative online reviews of this Pakistan-based enterprise, I fear I might never receive the DVDs I sought to purchase. Has anybody else tried to buy from DVD Planet Store? What were your experiences with it?

Quick Hits Parade

• Three months after Burt Reynolds’ death, at age 82, Visual Entertainment Inc. will release a complete DVD set of episodes from his 1970-1971 ABC-TV series, Dan August, the Quinn Martin production in which he portrayed a police lieutenant investigating homicides in the fictional Southern California town of Santa Luisa. That hour-long drama also starred Norman Fell, Ned Romero, Richard Anderson, and Ena Hartman. The Spy Command says VEI’s release of Dan August, on December 7, will include not only the 26 weekly episodes, but also the pilot film, House on Greenapple Road, which starred Christopher George as August. (George later bowed out of the Dan August series in order to star in another short-lived show, The Immortal.) The familiar theme music from Dan August was composed by Dave Grussin.

• This isn’t too surprising, but is welcome news: Bosch, the Amazon Prime TV series based on Michael Connelly’s long-running series of Harry Bosch police procedurals, and starring Titus Welliver, has already been renewed for a sixth season, even though Season 5 has not yet debuted—and likely won’t before the spring of 2019.

• Art Taylor has fine new review of Leslie S. Klinger’s annotated Classic American Crime Fiction of the 1920s in Washington Independent Review of Books. He calls that 1,152-page collection of five novels—all of them (by Dashiell Hammett, Ellery Queen, and others) quite pivotal in the development of early 20th-century mystery and detective fiction—“a treasure of information and a joy to study or simply read. By gathering these texts together and diving into them with insight and research, ... Klinger brings them to today’s readers in an accessible, enlightening, and entertaining way.”

• In business news … from In Reference to Murder:

Prometheus Books, which is nearing its 50th anniversary, has decided to refocus on nonfiction titles and sold its two genre imprints to Start Publishing. One of those, the crime fiction imprint Seventh Street Books, currently has a backlist of about ninety titles including award-winning books by Allen Eskens, Adrian McKinty, Lori Rader-Day, and Terry Shames. Start Publishing began has an exclusively digital publisher but has expanded to include print editions as well. Start will publish both print and digital editions of the newly acquired Seventh Street titles.

• Quercus Books imprint MacLehose Press has revealed the unarguably eye-catching cover of David Lagercrantz’s The Girl Who Lived Twice, his third and latest entry in the Millennium/Lisbeth Salander series created by Stieg Larsson. The Amazon UK site mentions that The Girl Who Lived Twice (which follows Lagercrantz’s The Girl in the Spider’s Web and The Girl Who Takes and Eye for and Eye) won’t be available to British readers until August 2019. There’s still no word on when the novel will reach Salander’s U.S. fans.

• Strand Magazine editor Andrew F. Gulli presents a list of what he thinks are the “top 20 novels of 2018” here. His choices are mostly, but not all, crime novels. And mostly, but not all, contemporary stories. How many of them wind up vying for The Strand’s 2018 Critics Awards is something we’ll have to wait until next spring to find out.

• And if you don’t know this already: “Douglas Rain, voice of the computer HAL 9000 in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, died on [November 11]. He was 90 years old,” reports the blog Paleofuture. “Born in Canada, Rain started on the stage and was known in both the Canadian and British theater communities for his roles in William Shakespeare’s classics like Othello and Twelfth Night. But Rain is best known in the sci-fi community as the voice of HAL—a cold, monotone voice that immediately evokes fear in anyone who hears it.”

Bullet Points: Post-Midterm Elections Edition

OK, that’s done. After putting the finishing touches on two different CrimeReads pieces—one of which should be posted tomorrow morning—I can finally return to my regular duties at The Rap Sheet. Let’s start off with a wrap-up of recent news.

• We’ve been talking for some while about the Staunch Book Prize, a brand-new commendation—proposed earlier in the year by author-screenwriter Bridget Lawless—to honor the best thriller novel “in which no woman is beaten, stalked, sexually exploited, raped, or murdered.” It wasn’t until this month, however, that a shortlist of nominees for the first such award was announced:

— The Appraisal, by Anna Porter (ECW Press)
— East of Hounslow, by Khurrum Rahman (HQ)
— If I Die Tonight, by A.L. Gaylin (PRH)
— On the Java Ridge, by Jock Serong (Text)
— The Kennedy Moment, by Peter Adamson (Myriad Editions)
— Cops and Queens, by Joyce Thompson (seeking publisher)

The Bookseller explains that a winner of the premiere Staunch Book Prize will be declared during a special ceremony “at Sony Pictures in central London on 26th November.” Stay tuned.

• The “social cataloguing” Web site GoodReads has launched the voting process for its 2018 Choice Awards competition, and we’re already into the semifinal round of selecting winners (which will run through this coming Sunday, November 11). Among the contenders in the Best Mystery and Thriller category are Sujata Massey’s The Widows of Malabar Hill, Stuart Turton’s The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, Tana French’s The Witch Elm, Joe Ide’s Wrecked, and Robert Galbraith’s Lethal White. Click here to cast a ballot. The final round of voting will begin on November 13, with winners in all 20 categories to be announced on December 4.

• Deadline Hollywood reports that Stephen King’s 2013 Hard Case Crime novel, Joyland, will be adapted as a TV series. The site reminds us that “Joyland tells the story of Devin, a college student who takes a summer job at an amusement park in a North Carolina tourist town, confronts the legacy of a vicious murder, the fate of a dying child, and the way both will change his life forever.” Chris Peña (Jane the Virgin) and Cyrus Nowrasteh (The Stoning of Soraya M.) will pen the script.

• Holliday Grainger, the British actress I so enjoyed watching in the 2013 teleflick Bonnie & Clyde (you can see the trailer here) and the more recent BBC-TV crime series Strike, is preparing to star, with Callum Turner, in a BBC surveillance thriller titled The Capture. The Killing Times offers just a modicum of plot information:

When proud British soldier Shaun Emery’s (Turner) conviction for a murder in Afghanistan is successfully overturned due to flawed video evidence, he begins to plan for his life as a free man with his six-year-old daughter. However, when damning CCTV footage emerges from an incident in London, it isn’t long before Shaun finds himself fighting for his freedom once more, only with lies, betrayal and corruption spreading further than he ever could have imagined.

With DI Rachel Carey (Grainger) drafted in to investigate in what could be a career-defining case, she must discover if there is more to the shocking evidence than first meets the eye. Rachel will soon learn that the truth is merely a matter of perspective—before deciding what hers is.

• Meanwhile, here’s a short new trailer promoting the third season of True Detective. This latest iteration of Nicolas Pizzolatto’s crime anthology series is scheduled to debut in the States on January 13 of next year, with Mahershala Ali starring as Wayne Hays, “an Arkansas state police detective who can’t stop thinking about the two children who went missing 30 years before.”

• And January Magazine notes that HBO-TV has given the go-ahead for a film sequel to the fine 2004-2006 Western series, Deadwood. Viewers are told to expect that movie’s premiere next spring.

• Among the items in B.V. Lawson’s latest “Media Murder for Monday” post for In Reference to Murder is news about turning Howard Michael Gould’s 2018 debut novel, Last Looks, into a big-screen picture:

Mel Gibson is teaming up with Charlie Hunnam and Eiza Gonzalez for Waldo, the action-packed thriller from Brit filmmaker Tim Kirkby, best known for directing episodes of Veep. The film … follows the brilliant but disgraced former LAPD detective Charlie Waldo (Hunnam), currently living the life of a minimalist in the woods. His quiet life comes to a startling halt when he is roped back into working as a private eye to investigate the murder of an eccentric TV star’s wife.

• I was sorry to hear that prolific Illinois-born actor Ken Swofford died on November 1, at age 85. The Hollywood Reporter’s obituary mentions that in addition to his role as “stubborn vice principal Quentin Morloch … on the TV adaptation of Fame,” “the red-headed Swofford … portrayed the reporter Frank Flannigan on the admired but short-lived 1975-76 NBC series Ellery Queen, starring Jim Hutton, and he recurred as Lt. Catalano on several episodes of another sleuthing series, Angela Lansbury’s Murder, She Wrote.” Swofford’s other small-screen credits included roles on Surfiside 6, Columbo, Petrocelli, The Rockford Files, The Fall Guy, Remington Steele, and Diagnosis: Murder. He also played a major in the 1991 film Thelma & Louise. A clip of his performance in Ellery Queen can be enjoyed here.

• Wouldn’t you know it? Shortly after I assembled my revised (and unapologetically biased) rundown of the 95 best English-language crime-fiction blogs and Web sites, another worthy candidate came to my attention: Paperback Warrior. Trading in reviews of hard-boiled crime, mystery, men’s adventure, espionage, and western fiction, Paperback Warrior was launched during the summer of 2013 (which means I really should have discovered it sooner). Its author doesn’t sign his/her reviews, but clearly shares my taste for vintage paperbacks. The main blog and its associated Facebook page are well worth exploring when you have some free time.

• Emily Temple is one of my favorite Literary Hub writers, and she recently put together quite wonderful “list-icles” of books that defined every single decade of 1900s, as well as the first two decades of our present century. Crime, mystery, and thriller novels don’t show up often in the mix, but a couple—Agatha Christie’s The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920) and Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon (1930)—receive paragraph write-ups, with others (such as Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time, and Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal) at least being name-checked in their respective decennia of publication.

• Lee Goldberg, who literally wrote the book on unsold small-screen pilot film projects, points me toward a 10-minute YouTube collection of scenes from Egan, a 1973 pilot commissioned by ABC-TV and starring prolific American actor Eugene Roche. As Golberg relates in Unsold Television Pilots: 1955-1989, that teleflick—produced by Thomas L. Miller and Edward K. Milkis (who also gave us Barry Newman’s Petrocelli)—was “based on the true exploits of NYPD detective Eddie Egan, whose adventures were dramatized in the Oscar-winning movie The French Connection.” The YouTube clips—embedded below—are rather blurry, but they show the authority-allergic Egan (a master of disguise) leaving Manhattan to become a police detective in Los Angeles. The scenes feature plenty of action and a great theme by Lalo Schifrin. Too bad that ABC didn’t pick up Egan as a series.



• Speaking of YouTube delights, the site’s TV Archive page recently posted complete episodes of Mr. & Mrs. Smith. That short-lived 1996 CBS-TV spy series starred Scott Bakula and Maria Bello as covert operatives who posed as a married couple and worked for a super-secret private security agency known only as “The Factory.” I remember the series fondly, even though it lasted a mere 13 episodes—all of which can be watched, for the time being, by clicking here.

• I also recall watching the 1983 NBC-TV series Casablanca, which gave former Starsky & Hutch co-star David Soul the unenviable task of playing World War II-era Morocco nightclub owner Rick Blaine, the role Humphrey Bogart had filled in the 1941 film of the same name. But I wasn’t even born yet when Charles McGraw featured in a 1955-1956 spin-off of Casablanca, which Roy Huggins produced, and that Mystery*File contributor Michael Shonk calls “a better than average TV noir drama for the early days of television.” Shonk includes a full episode of the show in this post.

• Happy 10th birthday to the blog Pulp International!

• Halloween has passed, but you should still look over CrimeReads’ “25 Most Terrifyingly Beautiful Edgar Allan Poe Illustrations.”

• For anyone wishing to get better acquainted with Edgar Award-winning author Ross Thomas, Neil Nyren provides this handy guide to his novels about “con men, spies, politicians, and double crossers.”

• The Killing Times chooses “15 essential spy TV series,” including Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Alias, Callan, and The Sandbaggers.

• Crime Fiction Lover selects what it says are the seven best crime-fiction debuts of 2018. I’ve read a couple of those books already, but have still more reading to do before the year runs its course.

• For Criminal Element, author Tom Wood (Kill for Me) weighs in on “The Top 7 Cinematic Assassins,” a rogues gallery that embraces Nikita from La Femme Nikita, Anton Chigurh from No Country for Old Men, and Martin Blank from Grosse Pointe Blank.

• Another list: Kirkus Reviews picks nine thrilling page-turners.

• And I like Erica Wright’s picks of “9 Mysteries That Challenge Our Expectations of Crime Fighters.” Wright, by the way, wrote recently on this page about Charlotte Armstrong’s A Dram of Poison (1956).

• On the heels of news that the release of Kenneth Branagh’s second Hercule Poirot movie, Death on the Nile, has been delayed until 2020, BookRiot has compiled a “definitive ranking of Agatha Christie movies.” I’m surprised at how many of the 25 I haven’t yet seen.

• Authors interviews and profiles seem to have popped up everywhere you turn on the Internet lately. The writers being questioned include Jonathan Lethem (The Feral Detective), Timothy Hallinan (Nighttown), Tana French (The Witch Elm), Leye Adenle (When Trouble Sleeps), Henry Porter (Firefly), Jon Land (Manuscript for Murder), Libby Fischer Hellmann (High Crimes), Martin Limón (The Line), and Tom Leins (Repetition Kills You!).

• If you wait long enough, every good idea can be used again. That’s certainly the case with a 1958 interview James Bond creator Ian Fleming conducted with Raymond Chandler, who’s of course best known for giving us private eye Philip Marlowe. I wrote about their conversation way back in 2007, but it was only this month that CrimeReads revisited their discussion, which covers “what the two authors thought of one another’s work, as well as how they believed the murder of [mobster] Albert Anastasia was carried out.”

• While we’re on the subject of Fleming, note that British author Anthony Horowitz—whose second Agent 007 novel, Forever and a Day, was released this week in the States—has composed a piece for Criminal Element about James Bond’s influence on him as both a reader and a writer. You’ll find that post here.

• In his blog, Studies in Starrett, Ray Betzner traces the early 20th-century revival of interest in Sherlock Holmes. Betzner proclaims this the opening installment in a multipart report. Watch for the follow-up. POSTSCRIPT: I believe this is the first sequel post.

• Really, do we need a Jonny Quest movie?

• Wow, Toe Six Press debuted just this last April, but editor Sandra Ruttan is already out with her 17th issue, “Living My Best Life.”

• Lynne Truss remarks here on her experience with—and the history of—Britain’s Detection Club. For more about that club, see Martin Edwards’ 2015 non-fiction book, The Golden Age of Murder.

• In a post for In Reference to Murder, Jay A. Gertzman, professor emeritus of English at Mansfield University, tells about writing and researching his new book, Pulp According to David Goodis.

• Finally, while the results of this week’s U.S. midterm elections brought hope to many citizens who want Congress to finally reassert its vital oversight function and curb the more corrupt, anti-democratic antics of the country’s scandal-ridden prez, there were also cases across the country of voter suppression. How timely it was, then, that Curtis Evans should have written earlier this week about The Election Booth Murder, by Milton M. Propper, a 1935 novel having to do with Philadelphia’s “corrupt machine politics” and “the shooting murder of a reform political candidate on Election Day …”

Kakonis Ends His Roll

Staring the work week off with an obituary is never pleasant, but it’s necessary today. As author-publisher Lee Goldberg reports:

I’ve just learned the sad news that author Tom Kakonis has passed away. I first met Tom at the 1994 Bouchercon in Seattle. I was a big fan of his work and was delighted when he invited me to sit and chat with him … and I was thrilled when he later blurbed my book My Gun Has Bullets. It meant a lot to me that a writer I admired as much as Tom would endorse my work.

Two decades later, when author Joel Goldman and I launched Brash Books, I called Tom about publishing his out-of-print backlist. Not only did he say yes, but he surprised me by offering us an unpublished manuscript that had been sitting in his drawer for years. His dark-comic thriller Treasure Coast was the first original novel that we released, so as long as Brash Books is in business, he will be an integral part of who we are as publishers, what we stand for, and what we aspire to achieve.

Tom was a great writer who didn’t get the recognition or wide readership that he deserved. I wish I’d been able to change that. Do yourself a favor and read Michigan Roll, his first and most acclaimed novel. I guarantee you’ll be hooked by this man’s talent and humor. He was a hell of a storyteller.

There doesn’t seem to be a great deal of biographical information on the Web about Thomas E. Kakonis (who also published as “Adam Barrow”), but this is his Amazon background blurb:

Tom Kakonis was born in California, squarely at the onset of the Depression, the offspring of a nomadic Greek immigrant and a South Dakota farm girl of Anglo-Saxon descent gone west on the single great adventure of her life. He has worked variously as a railroad section laborer, lifeguard, pool hall and beach idler, army officer, technical writer, and professor at several colleges in the Midwest. He published six crime novels before retiring for over a decade, then resumed fiction writing with the novel Treasure Coast. Currently he makes his home in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

An interview with Kakonis, published at the time Treasure Coast originally saw print, can be found here. And a “Behind the Story” piece on that novel is available here.

FOLLOW-UP: The Gumshoe Site notes that Kakonis, a retired college professor, died in Michigan on August 31.

Gorman and Anthony Pass On

In recent days, we’ve been alerted to the deaths of two people quite well-known in the mystery-fiction community. The first was Mary Alice Gorman, who—with her husband, Richard Goldman—founded and owned the Mystery Lovers Bookshop in Oakmont, Pennsylvania. She died on October 9, aged 74. As Mystery Fanfare’s Janet Rudolph remembers, Gorman “was a great supporter of the mystery community and a mentor, role model, and friend to so many.” The Gumshoe Site’s Jiro Kimura adds that Gorman and Goldman “were awarded the 2010 Raven Award from the Mystery Writers of America as the owners of the Mystery Lovers Bookshop for ‘outstanding achievements and leadership contributions to the mystery genre.’” The store was purchased in 2018 by Oakmont residents Tara Goldberg-DeLeo and Kristy Bodnar.

Also having passed away, in her case at 92 years of age, is London-born British author Evelyn Anthony (aka Evelyn Bridgett Patricia Ward-Thomas). According to The Gumshoe Site,

She started her writing career after World War Two with short stories for women’s magazines. She wrote her first novel, Imperial Highness (Museum Press; U.S. title: Rebel Princess, Crowell), in 1953. After that she produced nearly a book a year, and in 1967 she switched from historical romances to spy thrillers, including The Tamarind Seed (Hutchinson, 1971), which was turned into the 1974 movie starring Julie Andrews and Omar Sharif. She created her series character, Davina Graham, a British spy during the Cold War, who appeared in four novels starting with The Defector (Hutchinson, 1980) and ending with The Company of Saints (Hutchinson, 1983 ...).

Editor Kimura says Anthony “died peacefully on September 25 at her home in Essex, England.”

READ MORE: “Evelyn Anthony Obituary,” by Danuta Kean
(The Guardian).

That’s a Wrap for Reynolds

This sad news comes from The Hollywood Reporter:

Burt Reynolds, the charismatic star of such films as Deliverance, The Longest Yard and Smokey and the Bandit who set out to have as much fun as possible on and off the screen—and wildly succeeded—has died. He was 82.

Reynolds, who received an Oscar nomination when he portrayed porn director Jack Horner in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights (1997) and was the No. 1 box-office attraction for a five-year stretch starting in the late 1970s, died Thursday morning at Jupiter Medical Center in Florida, his manager, Erik Kritzer, told The Hollywood Reporter.

Always with a wink, Reynolds shined in many action films (often doing his own stunts) and in such romantic comedies as Starting Over (1979) opposite Jill Clayburgh and Candice Bergen; The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1982) with Dolly Parton; Best Friends (1982) with Goldie Hawn; and, quite aptly, The Man Who Loved Women (1983) with Julie Andrews.

Reynolds’ on-screen crime-fiction credentials were also solid. Following guest roles on early TV series such as M Squad, Michael Shayne, and Perry Mason, he starred in the short-lived, 1966 ABC-TV series Hawk, cast as “a full-blooded Iroquois working the streets of New York City as a special detective for the city’s District Attorney’s office,” to quote from Wikipedia. Four years later, he had slightly more success as the eponymous star of Dan August (1970-1971), playing a California police homicide detective. Not until 1989 did he again sign on for a small-screen crime drama, this time in the role of a Palm Beach, Florida, private eye in B.L. Stryker (1989-1990), one of three shows broadcast under the banner of The ABC Mystery Movie.

In the way of crime and thriller films, Reynolds is destined to be remembered not only for Deliverance, but for his roles in 1972’s Fuzz, 1973’s Shamus (in which he played pool hustler-turned-New York private eye Shamus McCoy), 1975’s Lucky Lady and Hustle, 1981’s Sharky’s Machine, 1985’s Stick, 1986’s Heat, 1987’s Malone, and 1996’s Striptease, among others. The Spy Command notes this morning that “In the ’70s, Reynolds’ name came up as a possible James Bond. Director Guy Hamilton was keen on the idea after seeing the actor on television. But nothing came of it.”

The Internet Movie Database offers a long list of Reynolds’ credits.

READ MORE: “Burt Reynolds, Self-Mocking Hollywood Heartthrob, Dies at 82,” by Ralph Blumenthal (The New York Times); “Burt Reynolds, Swaggering Star Actor, Has Died at 82,” by Bob Mondello (NPR); “Appreciation: So Long, Bandit. They Just Don’t Make ’Em Like Burt Reynolds Anymore,” by Chris Erskine (Los Angeles Times); “Six Performances That Explain Burt Reynolds” (Vox); “The Late Great Burt Reynolds,” by Terence Towles Canote (A Shroud of Thoughts).

What Oz Owes Peter Corris

I admit, it has been a while since I last read a novel by Peter Corris, but just the other day I discovered a couple of his Cliff Hardy private-eye novels among my collection of older paperbacks, waiting patiently for attention. I hadn’t expected to read them after the author had passed from this world. As The Canberra Times reports:

Australian readers owe a great debt to Peter Corris, the man dubbed the godfather of Australian crime fiction, who has died at his home in Sydney at the age of 76.

At a time when the genre lacked a genuinely local character, he employed the hard-boiled characteristics seen in the work of Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald, but with Australian vernacular characters and settings that proved irresistible.

He published his first novel, The Dying Trade, in 1980, introducing his best-known character, Cliff Hardy. To many readers' surprise Hardy, a big drinker, fighter and womaniser, managed to survive intact through 42 books and featured in Corris’ final book, Win, Lose or Draw, which was published early last year. Both the first and last books were dedicated to his novelist wife, Jean Bedford. …

Corris had been a Type 1 diabetic since he was 16 and that had taken [its] toll. Last year he told Fairfax Media that his deteriorating eyesight made it harder to work. But Corris didn't stop writing, filing a weekly column called The Godfather for the online Newtown Review of Books, which was established by Bedford, and his former publisher and long-time friend, Linda Funnell. In his most recent column, Corris reminisced about reading Josephine Tey's innovative crime novel about Richard III, The Daughter of Time, while he was a tutor in the history department of Monash University in 1964.

In his blog, Pulp Curry, author-editor Andrew Nette recalls reading The Dying Trade while he was living in Laos in the early 1990s:

In The Dying Trade, Hardy is hired by a property developer to discover who is behind harassing phone threats to the man’s sister. As is so often the case in a good PI story, the apparent simplicity of the case is in inverse proportion to what is really going on. No sooner has Hardy started to probe for answers than it becomes clear the developer’s family harbours very dark secrets.

What I particularly liked about The Dying Trade was how Hardy’s work not only pushed him up against Sydney’s dregs but also its elites, the shonky developers, greedy financiers and corrupt politicians. Indeed, all the Hardy books are shot through with a keen awareness that the misdeeds of the rich and powerful are usually far greater than anything the underclass can dish up, as well as harder to detect and prosecute. The book also oozes an egalitarian point of view that pre-dates the wave of economic deregulation introduced in the 1980s, which would fundamentally transform the country.

Nette goes on to note that “It took Corris four years to find a publisher for The Dying Trade. ‘They said that Australian crime readers wanted books about New York, Los Angeles or London,’ Corris said in an interview he did with Sydney crime fiction buff Andrew Prentice, for the now-defunct magazine I used to help edit, Crime Factory.

I loved how Corris looked back on the time he was struggling to get The Dying Trade published.

‘They weren’t interested in local crime apart from, as you say, the pulp stuff, Carter Brown, Larry Kent, which was really sort of faux-American. It really wasn’t set anywhere. But those publishers were wrong. There are letters in the Mitchell Library [one of the reference collections in the State Library of New South Wales] from some of those publishers saying, this will never work, Peter should do something else. Fuck ’em.’

As mentioned, Corris published more than 40 Cliff Hardy novels. He also composed dozens of short stories featuring the same gumshoe, as well as half a dozen short-story collections. One might say he proved his early doubters wrong.

FOLLOW-UP: Jiro Kimura mentions a couple of interesting things in his Gumshoe Site obituary of Peter Corris that I had forgotten: “He also wrote crime novels about other Australian series characters [than Cliff Hardy], such as Richard Bowning (Hollywood-linked detective), Ray ‘Creepy’ Crawley (Federal Security agent), and Luke Dunlop (Witness Protection agent). He received the 1999 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Australian Crime Writers Association (ACWA), and won a Ned Kelly Award for Deep Water (Allen & Unwin, 2009) from ACWA after many Neddie nominations.”

READ MORE: “Peter Corris: A Cascade of Fiction,” by Peter Pierce (Sydney Review of Books); “A Sit-down with the Godfather: An Interview with Peter Corris,” by Andrew Prentice (Pulp Curry).

Bullet Points: Encore Edition

Now you know what happens when I spend too much time away from my office: I return with more to say than will fit into one post.

• This seemed rather inevitable, didn’t it? Following the success of TNT-TV’s 10-part adaptation of The Alienist, Caleb Carr’s 1995 Victorian thriller, the same U.S. network has decided to bring Carr’s sequel, The Angel of Darkness (1997), to the small screen. There’s no word yet on when the finished product might be broadcast, but The Killing Times offers this plot synopsis:

It is June 1897. A year has passed since Dr. Laszlo Kreizler, a pioneer in forensic psychiatry, tracked down the brutal serial killer John Beecham with the help of a team of trusted companions and a revolutionary application of the principles of his discipline. Kreizler and his friends—high-living crime reporter Schuyler Moore; indomitable, derringer-toting Sara Howard; the brilliant (and bickering) detective brothers Marcus and Lucius Isaacson; powerful and compassionate Cyrus Montrose; and Stevie Taggert, the boy Kreizler saved from a life of street crime—have returned to their former pursuits and tried to forget the horror of the Beecham case. But when the distraught wife of a Spanish diplomat begs Sara’s aid, the team reunites to help her find her kidnapped infant daughter. It is a case fraught with danger, since Spain and the United States are on the verge of war. Their investigation leads the team to a shocking suspect: a woman who appears to the world to be a heroic nurse and a loving mother, but who may in reality be a ruthless murderer of children.

• By the way, I see that Carr’s long-promised third novel in the Laszlo Kreizler series is now being offered for “pre-order” by Amazon. Titled The Alienist at Armageddon, it appears set for a U.S. release in September of next year (from Mulholland Books).

• In a fine article for CrimeReads, Christopher Huang, Montreal-based author of the new novel A Gentleman’s Murder, reflects on how World War I gave rise to the traditional mystery story.

• This past August 4 marked the 126th anniversary of the infamous Fall River, Massachusetts, ax murders supposedly committed by Lizzie Borden and resulting in the demise of her father and stepmother. But it won’t be until September 14 that Lizzie, the latest film from director Craig William Macneill, premieres in U.S. theaters. Judging from a trailer posted in Slate, the movie suggests a sexual relationship between Lizzie (portrayed by Chloë Sevigny) and the Bordens’ live-in maid, Bridget Sullivan (Kristen Stewart), precipitated the violence—a theory previously explored in Evan Hunter’s 1984 novel, Lizzie.

• Would you like to attend next year’s Left Coast Crime convention—to take place in Vancouver, British Columbia, from March 28 to 31—but can’t afford the $300 (Canadian) registration fee? Well, it seems the convention’s organizing committee is offering three financial-assistance scholarships, which include the registration payment as well as $200 (U.S.) in expense money. All you have to do is apply by November 30. Click here for more information.

• The New York-born jazz singer and actress Morgana King, who played Vito Corleone’s wife in The Godfather and The Godfather, Part II, has died at age 87. She actually passed away in Palm Springs, California, on March 22 of this year, but as Star magazine explains, “Her death had gone unreported until a friend, [entertainment writer] John Hoglund, wrote about her this week … on Facebook.”

• In case you were wondering what became of Morven Christie, the Scottish actress who played Anglican vicar Sidney Chambers’ on-and-off love interest, Amanda Kendall, in the UK mystery drama Grantchester, she’s now set to star in a modern ITV-TV crime series called The Bay. As Radio Times notes, that six-part program is likely to be compared with the surprisingly popular Broadchurch. “Like the Dorset-set Broadchurch,” Radio Times writes, “The Bay takes place in a coastal town—in this case Morecambe—and is described by ITV’s drama boss Polly Hill as ‘a very real crime story about family and community … compelling and beautifully crafted,’ all of which will also strike a chord with Broadchurch fans.” Christie has been cast as Detective Sergeant Lisa Armstrong, “a fierce and hard-working Family Liaison Officer,” to quote from Killing Times, which goes on to provide these clues as to the show’s storyline:

When Detective Sergeant Lisa Armstrong is assigned to a missing persons investigation, at first it seems like any other—tragic, but all too familiar. As a Family Liaison Officer, she’s trained never to get emotionally involved. Her job is to support families during the worst time of their lives whilst also to be the eyes and ears of the police investigation; a cuckoo in the nest. But there’s something very different about this particular case. With horror Lisa realizes she’s got a personal connection with this frightened family; one that could compromise her and the investigation. As she grapples to get justice for the grieving family, Lisa discovers it could come at a cost.

• While writing recently about the 36th birthday of Yvonne Strahovski, who co-starred in the 2007-2012 NBC-TV spy series Chuck, I happened across this dream sequence spoofing the start of Hart to Hart, ABC’s older mystery starring Robert Wagner and Stefanie Powers. I thought others might enjoy watching that video, too.

• Needless to say, I already own a copy of John le Carré’s 1963 novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. However, I may need to add to my collection The Folio Society’s beautiful new edition of that “breakthrough work that redefined the spy story.” It features interior illustrations by British artist Matt Taylor, whose cover for Penguin’s most recent paperback version of Le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy won The Rap Sheet’s 2011 Best Crime Novel Cover contest.

• “So how was the wife of the professional police detective portrayed in most Golden Age police procedurals?” short-story writer Carol Westron asks in Lizzie Hayes’ blog. “On the whole, she was hardly portrayed at all. She was mentioned as part of his background but played no part in the intellectual or emotional process that leads to the resolution of the case.”

• For the MysteryPeople blog, Scott Montgomery interviews author Max Allan Collins on the subject of his new non-fiction book, Scarface and the Untouchable: Al Capone, Eliot Ness, and the Battle for Chicago (Morrow), which he penned with A. Brad Schwartz.

• And I long ago added to The Rap Sheet’s YouTube page the original opening from the NBC Mystery Movie series McMillan & Wife, starring Rock Hudson and Susan Saint James. But only yesterday did I realize that I never followed up by posting the main title sequence from Once Upon a Dead Man, the pilot film that gave birth to that beloved, 1971-1977 mystery drama. So here it is. Once Upon a Dead Man was directed by Leonard B. Stern and was first broadcast on September 17, 1971. Jerry Fielding composed the theme music.

Just a Few Things to Mention

• Good for Megan Abbott! Variety reports that cable television’s USA Network has ordered a pilot film based on her 2012 novel, Dare Me. The entertainment trade mag explains that the series will dive into “the cutthroat world of competitive high school cheerleading in a small Midwestern town through the eyes of two best friends after a new coach arrives to bring their team to prominence.” Abbott, who’s been working on scripts and as a story editor for the HBO-TV period drama The Deuce, is slated also to write USA’s Dare Me.

• Meanwhile, In Reference to Murder brings word that “HBO Documentary Films has acquired the rights to journalist Michelle McNamara’s bestselling true-crime book, I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer, to develop as a docuseries. The project is a meticulous exploration of the case of an elusive, violent predator who terrorized California in the late 1970s and early ’80s. McNamara, the late wife of [comedian] Patton Oswalt, was in the midst of writing the book when she unexpectedly died in her sleep in 2016, leaving the book to be completed by McNamara’s lead researcher, Paul Haynes, and a close colleague, Billy Jenkin.”

• Like Martin Edwards, I’d not heard that prolific British mystery novelist Roderic Jeffries, “who also wrote as Jeffrey Ashford and Peter Alding, died last year at the age of 90.” Edwards goes on to write in his blog that Jeffries had been “living in Mallorca for over forty years, which perhaps explains not only why I’ve never come across him in person but also why his books have tended, in recent years, to be rather overlooked.”

• A huge loss to America’s airwaves: “Every weekday for more than three decades, his baritone steadied our mornings [on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition]. Even in moments of chaos and crisis, Carl Kasell brought unflappable authority to the news. But behind that hid a lively sense of humor, revealed to listeners late in his career, when he became the beloved judge and official scorekeeper for Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me! NPR’s news quiz show. Kasell died Tuesday from complications from Alzheimer’s disease in Potomac, Md. He was 84.” Remembrances of Kasell’s career and kindnesses can be found here, here, and here.

• Not to be dwell overmuch on death … but I should also mention the passing of Tim O’Connor, the Chicago-born actor whose face was for so long a U.S. television fixture. He was 90 years old when he passed away in California on April 5. In his O’Connor obituary, blogger Terence Towles Canote observes that in the 1970s alone, O’Connor “guest starred on such shows as Mannix, Longstreet, Hawaii Five-O, Gunsmoke, The F.B.I., The Manhunter, Get Christie Love!, The Rockford Files, All in the Family, The Six Million Dollar Man, Police Story, Cannon, Maude, Columbo, The Streets of San Francisco, Lou Grant, Police Woman, Wonder Woman, Barnaby Jones, and M*A*S*H. He starred in the first season of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. He appeared in the films Wild in the Sky (1972), The Groundstar Conspiracy (1972), Across 110th Street (1972), Sssssss (1973), and [the theatrical release] Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (1979).”

• In the latest edition of Fiction/Non/Fiction, Literary Hub’s popular podcast, V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell, together with author Mat Johnson (Pym, Loving Day), “examine the omnipresent American comfort narrative of mystery and crime fiction,” and conclude that “all fiction is crime fiction.”

• Having enjoyed the previous comedic work of both Mila Kunis (Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Friends with Benefits) and Saturday Night Live’s Kate McKinnon, I cannot help but hope that this summer’s The Spy Who Dumped Me is as quirky and fun as its trailer suggests. However, I’m not taking bets on that. According to Double O Section’s Matthew Bradford, the movie—due to premiere in August—focuses on “best friends who become embroiled in espionage when one of them (Kunis) discovers her ex was a secret agent.”

• New York journalist-author Julia Dahl picks her “top 10 books about miscarriages of justice” for The Guardian. Among her selections: Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, and Gillian Flynn’s Dark Places.

• Good news from novelist Sophie Hannah: “It has happened at last! Finally, the literary world is a meritocracy! Crime fiction—which I first became aware of as the Best Genre Ever when I read my first Enid Blyton mystery at six years old—is now officially the UK’s bestselling genre. Nielsen Bookscan data at the London book fair has revealed that crime novels in 2017, for the first time since Nielsen’s records began, sold more than the category rather vaguely labelled ‘general and literary fiction.’ Crime sales of have increased by 19% since 2015 to 18.7m, compared to the 18.1m fiction books sold in 2017.”

• Now this is my kind of public library!

• Looking for a Canadian suspense novel to take on vacation? Toronto’s Globe and Mail provides some worthy suggestions.

• Wow, Americans can find a way to get upset about nearly anything. Case in point: the hubbub over Taylor Swift’s cover version of “September,” a 1978 song recorded originally by Earth, Wind & Fire. To tell you the truth, I developed a serious dislike of the original, back when it was still so popular. It was standard fare at disco-music events when I was in college. There was a fairly attractive younger woman I knew there, who didn’t pay much attention to me—except during dances, when she seemed drawn to my side like an electromagnet, because I was a pretty good dancer, and I had great stamina. (Another partner and I actually won “Most Energetic Couple” honors after completing a dance marathon during my senior year.) Anyway, one of this woman’s favorite songs was “September,” so I danced to it frequently—enough times, that I swore I would promptly turn it off whenever I heard it on the radio in the future. That Ms. Swift has now adopted “September” for her own doesn’t make it any better or worse. I still cringe at hearing those lyrics.

• Some author interviews worth checking out: In both Crime Fiction Lover and BookRiot, Alison Gaylin and Megan Abbott talk about their new graphic novel, Normandy Gold; Crimespree Magazine’s Elise Cooper quizzes Kimberley “K.J.” Howe about her second thriller, Skyjack; Welsh writer Amy Lloyd (The Innocent Wife) is the latest subject of Crime Watch’s 9mm Q&A series; Speaking of Mysteries podcast host Nancie Clare chats with Mariah Fredericks (A Death of No Importance); Jeff Rutherford speaks with Matthew Pearl (The Last Bookaneer, The Dante Chamber) in Episode 224 of his own podcast, Reading and Writing; and the great Peter Lovesey takes the opportunity to fire questions at Anthea Fraser in advance of her 50th novel, Sins of the Fathers, to be released later this month.

• And it was nice to see The Rap Sheet chosen by author Julia Spencer-Fleming as one of her favorite mystery blogs.

McManus Leaves Behind Lots of Laughs

From The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Washington:

Patrick F. McManus, the New York Times best-selling author of books such as “Real Ponies Don’t Go Oink!” and “The Night the Bear Ate Goombaw,” died on Wednesday in Spokane. He was 84.

Patrick Francis McManus was born on Aug. 25, 1933, and grew up along the banks of Sand Creek outside Sandpoint [Idaho]. His father died when he was 6, leaving his mother, a school teacher, to raise him and his older sister. In interviews over the years, he spoke glowingly of his childhood as one where he would spend hours outdoors. His family may not have had a lot of money, but there was time and freedom to explore the world.

“I had a wonderful time as a child growing up,” he told Sandpoint Magazine in 1995. “I was down by the creek all the time and had all this freedom, running around all these mountains. (His friend) Vern and I took off one time and wandered around those mountains for a week. That’s not a bad way to grow up.”

As a humor columnist [for Outdoor Life magazine], he mined his own life for his stories, creating a beloved cast of characters based on people he knew from his childhood, guys like Rancid Crabtree and Crazy Eddie Muldoon, a dog named Strange, and even his sister, Patricia the Troll. McManus published two dozen books, and sold roughly 6 million copies, in his lengthy career. Several of those books were collections of his magazine humor columns, but he also wrote novels.

Among those novels the newspaper casually references were six “charmingly wry” (to quote Kirkus Reviews) mysteries starring Bo Tully, the middle-aged sheriff of fictional Blight County, Idaho. The first of the Tully books was 2006’s The Blight Way, while McManus’ final installment in the series was 2014’s Cicles in the Snow.