In the past, I have found time at each year’s end to write about the people from the broader crime-fiction community who died during the previous 12 months. No such flexibility presents itself this week. Therefore, I am glad that Mystery Fanfare’s Janet Rudolph put together this record of contributors to the genre who passed away in 2023. It includes authors as diverse as Carol Higgins Clark, Tim Dorsey, Patricia Holt, Tom Savage, and Anne Perry. Mentioned, as well, is Jim Napier, a longtime Rap Sheet contributor from Canada, who apparently died on December 23 at age 81—though this is the first I’ve heard of it.
Born in 1942 and reared in California, James E. Napier later moved to Ontario to study philosophy at the University of Waterloo. He went on to pursue a teaching career, but retired in 2004 to take up crime-fiction reviewing and writing. “Author of the Colin McDermott series in Legacy (2017) and Ridley’s War (2020), Jim was writing his third novel and looking forward to publishing it in 2024,” according to this obituary. In addition to critiquing books for the Montreal Review of Books, the Ottawa Review of Books, and January Magazine, and maintaining an award-winning crime-fiction site called Deadly Diversions, Jim composed occasional reviews for The Rap Sheet. Since 2014, he had also participated in this blog’s annual “favorite crime fiction of the year” features. However, he never responded to my requests this last fall that he submit a favorites list for 2023; I might have recognized that as being significant, but did not.
I knew Jim had suffered vision problems in his right eye for a long while, which limited his print-reading opportunities to a mere 20-30 minutes at a stretch. I didn’t think, though, that he was on the verge of leaving us. I’m only glad to read in his obituary that he “died peacefully surrounded by loved ones.” I offer my condolences to Jim’s family. Thank you for sharing him with the rest of us.
* * *
In addition to the late authors Mystery Fanfare recognizes, let us remember several people who, before they breathed their last in 2023, lent their abundant talents to crime and mystery films or television shows: Peter S. Fischer, who, among other things, co-created the CBS-TV series Murder, She Wrote; Richard Roundtree, who played super-cool, super-tough New York City private eye John Shaft on both the large and small screens; Man From U.N.C.L.E. co-star David McCallum; actress Sharon Farrell, who appeared with James Garner in Marlowe (1969) and later featured in series such as The Name of the Game and Harry O; Canadian-born Sharon Acker, who was seen regularly on Hec Ramsey and The New Perry Mason; Barry Newman, who led the 1974-1976 NBC-TV legal drama Petrocelli; Rupert Heath, the founder and publisher of Dean Street Press; Robert Blake, who went from headlining ABC-TV’s Baretta to defending himself from charges that he murdered his wife in 2001; Barbara Bosson, a frequent fixture in her husband, Steven Bochco’s shows, from Hill Street Blues to Hooperman; and two familiar faces from Homicide: Life on the Street—Andre Braugher and Richard Belzer.
This isn’t the sort of news I wanted to receive on a crisp, clear Wednesday morning. From The Tampa Bay Times:
Tim Dorsey, author of 26 popular novels about a unique Florida Man named Serge Storms, has died at age 62. ...
Randy Wayne White, a friend and fellow Florida author (of the Doc Ford novels and other books), said by phone Tuesday, “When he started writing a series about an insane serial killer, I thought, how long can that bulls—t go on?
“But he wrote about every nook and cranny of Florida. He colonized it. That will last. He was not a haphazard researcher; he was a field historian. Plus the books are freaking hilarious,” White said. “Humor plus history—that’s a winning combination.”
Dorsey took his first breaths in Carmel, Indiana, a suburb north of Indianapolis, on January 25, 1961. The Times says “his family moved to Florida when he was a baby, and he grew up in Riviera Beach. After graduating from Auburn University, he worked as a reporter at The Alabama Journal, then joined the Tampa Tribune staff in 1987.”
He resigned from the latter newspaper in 1999 to become a full-time writer, turning out his first novel, a black comedy titled Florida Roadkill, in that same year. As with so many of Dorsey’s books, it starred “intelligent but sociopathic criminal” Serge A. Storms, a character the author had conceived of originally as the sort of villain who might appear in a James Bond adventure, but who soon became his series protagonist. Dorsey went on to pen 25 more Storms yarns, including The Maltese Iguana, which was released last February.
The Times notes that Dorsey “had recently had health problems,” but fails to specify exactly what they were. He died at his home in Islamorada, in the Florida Keys.
Peter S. Fischer, who co-created the CBS-TV mystery series Murder, She Wrote, in addition to scripting episodes of Columbo, Ellery Queen, and McMillan & Wife, passed away on October 30 in a Pacific Grove, California, care facility. He was 88 years old.
Born in 1935, Fischer went on to study drama at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland. After deciding that his destiny was not as an actor, he turned instead to writing. Fischer was 34 years old and living on New York’s Long Island, editing and publishing a sports car magazine, when he decided to try his hand at writing for Hollywood. He sent the script for a tense science-fiction tale to his younger brother, a casting director at Universal Studios, and after some reworking, it became the basis for an October 1971 ABC Movie of the Week feature, The Last Child. That first success convinced him to move to Los Angeles and embark on a television career.
Fischer soon had his hands full contributing stories to ABC’s Marcus Welby, M.D., and Owen Marshall, Counselor at Law, as well as to crime dramas such as Griff, Kojak, Baretta, and Judd Hirsch’s Delvecchio. After turning out several episodes of the underrated, 1975-1976 period whodunit Ellery Queen, starring Jim Hutton and created by Richard Levinson and William Link, Fischer concocted his first script for another, more famous Levinson-Link series, Columbo. He’d subsequently pen five further Columbo installments, among them 1974’s “An Exercise in Fatality” (which cast Robert Conrad as a homicidal health club owner) and “Negative Reaction” (in which Dick Van Dyke played a photographer who did away with his spouse). Fischer developed the screenplay for the 1976 NBC mini-series Once an Eagle; joined Levinson and Link in devising the pilot film Charlie Cobb: Nice Night for a Hanging, which they hoped would generate a western-detective series starring Clu Gulagher (it didn’t); created the 1978-1979 Vincent Baggetta drama The Eddie Capra Mysteries, and wrote all 13 episodes of Blacke’s Magic, starring Hal Linden.
In 1984 Fischer teamed up again with Levinson and Link, this time to launch the Angela Lansbury mystery series Murder, She Wrote. He penned dozens of episodes of that CBS show before it ended its weekly run in 1996, and even created a short-lived spin-off mystery titled The Law & Harry McGraw, starring Jerry Orbach and Barbara Babcock. The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) lists his final small-screen production as the 1997 teleflick Murder, She Wrote: South by Southwest.
After bidding adios to Hollywood, Fischer assumed the role of full-time author. In 2010 he released Jezebel in Blue Satin, the first of 22 “Hollywood Murder Mysteries,” their plots spanning the latter half of the 20th century. The protagonist in those yarns was a studio press agent by the name of Joe Bernardi, but Fischer also incorporated into his plots real-life headliners on the order of Alfred Hitchcock, Humphrey Bogart, Orson Welles, and Robert Wagner. The concluding entry in that series was 2019’s The Man in the Raincoat, which found Bernardi struggling to protect Peter Falk from the publisher of a scandal mag. Beyond his novels, Fischer released an “unauthorized autobiography” called Me and Murder, She Wrote in 2013.
Varietyrecalls that “Fischer was nominated for three Emmys and two Golden Globes for Best Television Series – Drama throughout his career.” He received an Edgar Award nomination for “Deadly Lady,” the second episode of Murder, She Wrote. And in 2013, the author picked up the gold medal in the Mystery/Suspense category of the Benjamin Franklin Awards competition for his fifth Hollywood Murder Mystery, The Unkindness of Strangers.
The cause of Fischer’s demise hasn’t been publicized.
His passing comes just over a year after Angela Lansbury died in her sleep at her home in Los Angeles. She was 96.
I first encountered this news last evening, and hoped that by morning it would be revealed as fiction. No such luck. From Variety:
Richard Roundtree, an icon of Blaxploitation film who starred as detective John Shaft in [film director] Gordon Parks’ 1971 action thriller, died Tuesday afternoon after a short battle with pancreatic cancer. He was 81 years old.
His death was confirmed by Patrick McMinn, his manager since 1987. “Richard’s work and career served as a turning point for African American leading men in film,” McMinn said ... “The impact he had on the industry cannot be overstated.”
Roundtree was a leading man from the very start of his lifetime in screen acting. After beginning his career in modeling, he secured “Shaft” at the age of 28, marking his feature debut. The MGM release earned $12 million in ticket sales off of a $500,000 production budget, helping to save the studio from bankruptcy. A breakthrough hit, “Shaft” set the tone for a prolific decade of Blaxploitation filmmaking and demonstrated Hollywood’s historical failure to consider Black talent and the moviegoing audiences that they could reach.
The Guardian goes on to note that “Throughout his more than four decade career in Hollywood, Roundtree played numerous roles in films and television shows including the 1977 limited series Roots and 1974’s Earthquake in which he played motorcycle daredevil Miles. Among his more poignant films was 1996’s Once Upon a Time … When We Were Colored, the story a tight-knit Black community confronting the racism of post-war Mississippi. … Roundtree worked regularly until the end, with 159 acting credits to his name plus three upcoming projects yet to be released, according to IMDB.com.”
But certainly the most substantive Roundtree obituary comes from Steve Aldous, author of The World of Shaft (2015), who remembers this performer as “the epitome of cool. A humble man and an underrated actor, he was a huge inspiration and helped pave the way into Hollywood for many black actors and technicians.” You can (and should) read his account of Roundtree’s career highs and lows here.
Today brings the sad news that Marvin S. Lachman—“one of the world’s preeminent [mystery fiction] scholars, writing extensively about the field in books and magazines”—has passed away at age 91 from “complications related to cancer.”
Born in 1932, a child of the Bronx, New York, Lachman went on to attend City College of New York and then spend two years in the U.S. Army, conveniently stationed in New York. During his service stint, he developed a fondness for live theater and remained passionate about theater for the remainder of his life. He was also an early fan of mystery fiction, reading his first published mystery in 1943, when he was 11 years old. Little did Lachman know then that the study of crime and mystery fiction would become his principal work.
He spent more than 40 years reviewing short stories for Mystery Readers Journal, wrote columns for The Armchair Detective and the print edition of Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine, and contributed his knowledge and judgment to other periodicals such as Mystery FANcier, CADS (Crime and Detective Stories), and Mystery*File. In 1976 Lachman, together with his co-authors Chris Steinbrunner, Otto Penzler, and Charles Shibuk, won the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Award for Best Critical/Biographical Work with their Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection. According to Deadly Pleasures, “He was nominated for the same award in 1994 for A Reader’s Guide to the American Novel of Detection, which was also nominated for an Agatha, an Anthony, and a Macavity Award. Lachman won the Macavity Award in 2001 for The American Regional Mystery (2000), which was also nominated for an Anthony and an Agatha.” His 2005 book, The Heirs of Anthony Boucher: A History of Mystery Fandom, picked up the Anthony Award for Best Critical Non-fiction. (A revised and updated edition of that work was released in 2019.) I own one additional product of Lachman’s scholarship: Detectionary (1977), which he co-edited with Otto Penzler and Chris Steinbrunner.
Lachman received the MWA’s Raven Award in 1997, recognizing his “outstanding achievement in the mystery field outside of the realm of creative writing.” in 2001, Deadly Pleasures conferred upon him its Don Sandstrom Memorial Award for Lifetime Achievement in Mystery Fandom. A dozen years later, the Bouchercon Board of Directors gave him the David Thompson Special Service Award for his “exemplary life-long service to the mystery and crime fiction community.” And although he couldn’t attend the convention due to illness, this last September the organizers of Bouchercon in San Diego named him as the winner of their Star Award. Convention attendees were told that Lachman had participated in 40 previous Bouchercons, and they regretted he couldn’t be on hand to accept his latest prize.
If you have memories of Marv Lachman you’d like to share, I hope you will do so in the Comments section at the bottom of this post.
• It’s only the third week of October, but already American bookseller Barnes & Noble has announced what it says are the “Best Mystery Books of 2023.” Here are that chain’s 10 selections:
— After That Night, by Karin Slaughter (HarperCollins)
— The River We Remember, by William Kent Krueger (Atria)
— The Last Devil to Die, by Richard Osman (Pamela Dorman)
— The Raging Storm, by Ann Cleeves (Minotaur)
— The Only One Left, by Riley Sager (Dutton)
— Zero Days, by Ruth Ware (Gallery/Scout Press)
— Small Mercies, by Dennis Lehane (Harper)
— All the Sinners Bleed, by S.A. Cosby (Flatiron)
— You Shouldn’t Have Come Here, by Jeneva Rose (Blackstone)
— Murder Your Employer: The McMasters Guide to Homicide, by Rupert Holmes (Avid Reader Press)
Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine editor George Easter observes that, in addition to those, B&N’s “Best Fiction of 2023 list [contains] two titles that some consider mystery fiction”: Bright Young Women, by Jessica Knoll (Simon & Schuster/Marysue Rucci); and I Have Some Questions for You, by Rebecca Makkai (Viking).
• Author Max Allan Collins spreads the word that actor Todd Stashwick, who commanded such attention as the irksome Captain Liam Shaw in Season 3 of Star Trek: Picard, has been cast as Chicago private investigator Nathan Heller in the pilot for a podcast version of Collins’ longest-running crime series. Said pilot is adapted from Chapter 1 of Stolen Away (1991), the fifth Heller yarn.
• This page has frequently highlighted instances of stock photography being overused on crime and thriller novels. Here are two additional examples: Last Night at the Hollywood Canteen, by Sarah James (Sourcebooks Landmark, November 2024); Hard Girls, by J. Robert Lennon (Mulholland, February 2024).
Do publishers think readers don’t notice such blatant duplications, or that we just don’t care about them? I can’t decide.
• It’s sad to hear that the respected books Web site LitReactor is going out of business after a dozen years. Financing problems and the death of one of its co-founders are cited as reasons for LitReactor shutting down as of December 31. “The site will no longer be accessible after that,” we are informed. As it turns out, there were several links to LitReactor pieces in The Rap Sheet. I have already replaced those with archive pages from The Wayback Machine.
• Just in time for Halloween, Mystery Fanfare blogger Janet Rudolph has posted her updated (and remarkably lengthy) lists of mystery novels and short-story anthologies linked to that celebration.
• In a CrimeReads piece from 2019, Olivia Rutigliano argues that Bram Stoker’s 1897 horror novel, Dracula, is also “an incredibly complex, fascinating mystery.” Well, I for one am convinced.
• Longtime boob-tube fanatics should find more treats than tricks in this post from Comfort TV that sees David Hofstede digging up an assortment of haunted houses in classic television shows.
• And Caroline Crampton is back with the latest episode of her podcast, Shedunnit. The topic this time around is how “the supernatural and the rational come together in the murder mystery.” Works referenced include Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone, Margery Allingham’s Look to the Lady, John Dickson Carr’s The Red Widow Murders, and Gladys Mitchell’s Wraiths and Changelings.
For all of the foreboding tales within, Houston’s Murder by the Book feels soft and inviting, with massive windows up front and plenty of places inside to kick back and dig into something grisly. With its coffee mugs and T-shirts shouting out famous crime-solving heroes (plenty of “Holmes& Watson& Marple& Poirot” merch), the place looks downright friendly. “There’s a lot of natural light and, depending on the time of day, natural darkness,” says Lou Berney, an Edgar-winning thriller author, who always looks forward to reading from his novels at the venerable crime bookstore. “Events start out cheerful and end up kind of ominous and spooky. I love that.”
Don Winslow, a dean of crime fiction, visits Murder by the Book whenever he’s on tour, including a recent stop to discuss his new novel, City of Dreams. The British thriller master Ruth Ware came through in June to promote Zero Days. Best-selling novelists Michael Connelly and James Lee Burke are regulars. The store, a Houston literary staple since 1980, draws throngs of crime aficionados to these events, and at four thousand square feet, it has plenty of room for them to roam.
Murder by the Book harvests a sort of glee in terrible doings. It serves up bloodshed not just with a smile, but also with a flurry of knowledgeable recommendations based on devoted clients’ interests. “I never get out of there without buying three or four excellent novels I wouldn’t have found otherwise,” Berney says. It’s like Cheers, but with poison in the beer.
• Owlcation’s Ronald E. Franklin once more raises that eternal question: Were Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason and Della Street ever connected romantically? “The fact that his secretary never became Mrs. Della Mason,” he explains, “was certainly not due to lack of trying on Perry’s part—he proposed five separate times, but Della turned him down every time.” (Hat tip to The Bunburyist.)
• Speaking of Mason, a video games and sports Web site called JStationX has posted a piece about the 1960 Perry Mason episode “The Case of the Violent Village.” It’s pretty bland, overall, but mentions that Mason “made appearances in other novels written [by] Erle Stanley Gardner, such as the Cool and Lam series.” What? Thanks to an extraordinary bit of luck, I own all 30 of the Bertha Cool/Donald Lam detective novels. And though I haven’t worked my way through every single one of those yet, nowhere have I come across a cameo appearance by Los Angeles’ best-known fictional defense attorney. Can anyone tell me in which book Mason figures, if he does?
• Hard as this may be to believe, I completely failed to notice the 65th anniversary of 77 Sunset Strip’s ABC-TV premiere in 1958. Fortunately, blogger Terence Towles Canote’s did not.
• It was half a century ago this month that “Shaft made its move from big to small screen with the broadcast of ‘The Executioners’ as part of the CBS New Tuesday Night Movie series,” recalls Steve Aldous, author of The World of Shaft (2015). The show didn’t fare well in prime time, not well at all. “The series,” adds Aldous, “lasted for only seven feature-length episodes playing every third week as part of a rotating series with James Stewart’s country lawyer show Hawkins and a standalone CBS TV movie on a Tuesday night over five months.” A 111-day Hollywood writers strike in 1973 and an egregious watering-down of the sexy, ass-kicking protagonist Richard Roundtree had made famous in theaters were blamed for the show’s early demise.
• Meanwhile, Aldous has lately been stuffing his World of Shaft Facebook page with historical ephemera (newspaper clippings, magazine stories, etc.) related not only to the Shaft TV show, but also to the third and final Shaft film, Shaft in Africa, which marked its 50th anniversary this year, too.
• Season 8 of the BBC One TV series Shetland, with Scottish actress Ashley Jensen taking over as lead from Douglas Henshall (who left after seven seasons), is set to debut in the UK on Wednesday, November 1. You can watch a brief trailer below. So far, there hasn’t been any announcement of when the new set of episodes will reach American TV screens, but we are hoping to hear soon.
Margot Robbie’s LuckyChap and Brad Pitt’s Plan B production company are in talks to co-produce a remake of the classic 1934 comedy mystery, The Thin Man, after the rights recently became available. Previously, Rob Marshall and Johnny Depp were set to direct and star, respectively, in a remake, until Warner Brothers scrapped that project in 2012. Based on the Dashiell Hammett crime novel, The Thin Man is a murder mystery about a husband and wife who partner up to find a missing acquaintance, later discovered to be murdered. Directed by W.S. Van Dyke, the 1934 film starred William Powell as husband Nick Charles and Myrna Loy as wife Nora Charles and was nominated for four Academy Awards, including best picture and best actor for William Powell. (It was followed by five sequels.)
• The graphic novel version of Agatha Christie’s 1934 Hercule Poirot whodunit, Murder on the Orient Express—adapted and illustrated by Bob Al-Greene—was released in September and has been enjoying favorable notices since. BOLO Books’ Kristopher Zgorski, for instance, calls it “a beautiful and faithful recreation of the narrative we all know and love in visual format.” His fellow critic Lesa Holstine opines, “This is an excellent way to introduce Agatha Christie to fans of graphic novels or new readers of the author.” I have a copy of that paperback book myself, and have been wending my way through it before bed each night. The fact that I know how the story ends doesn’t inhibit my relishing this new treatment; nor am I bothered by Al-Greene having condensed portions of the text for visual-storytelling purposes. Frankly, the only thing I find slightly jarring is the artist’s portrayal of Poirot as having a completely bald noggin and an imposing mustache that sweeps up to the tops of his ears (but is still less peculiar than the cookie duster Kenneth Branaugh sported in his three Poirot pictures). I don’t remember either of those from the many book-cover illustrations of Christie’s brilliant Belgian sleuth.
• Although you may not have noticed, I followed through on my commitment to give this page’s right-hand blogroll a trim. But one of the sites I’d targeted, Alpha-60 books, managed to stave off the knife by posting a new review (of William Campbell Gault’s 1958 Joe Puma novel, Night Lady) right before I began pruning.
• In The Girl with All the Crime Books, critic and blogger Louise Fairbairn interviews E.S. (Elaine) Thomson, whose fifth Jem Flockhart/Will Quartermain historical mystery, Under Ground, is new on shelves in Great Britain this month. (It’s not slated for distribution in the States until next March.)
• Young Depression-era robbersBonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow hold a prominent, infamous place in U.S. history. But how many remember Lucille Walker and Alexander Mackay, who “captured countless headlines as they led a six-week rampage of robberies across Los Angeles,” commencing in late 1930?
• Finally, let us pay our respects to California-born actress Suzanne Somers, who passed away on October 15. As A Shroud of Thoughts notes, she was most familiar for co-starring in the TV sitcoms Three's Company and Step by Step. However, my earliest memory of Somers comes from a 1974 Rockford Files episode, “The Big Rip-off,” that was broadcast three years before Three’s Company hit the airwaves, and in which the then-28-year-old blonde played a woman suspected of offing her husband. Her list of subsequent TV drama guest spots is short (Starsky and Hutch, The Six Million Dollar Man), but prior to Rockford she did have uncredited roles in the films Bullitt and Magnum Force. Eventually, Somers became a controversial spokesperson on subjects related to health and well-being. She died at age 76 after being diagnosed with stage II breast cancer. FOLLOW-UP: The Los Angeles Timessays Somers “died of ‘breast cancer with metastasis to the brain,’ according to a report citing her death certificate.”
In the absence of major crime-fiction news, I again offer you some items of interest that don’t require lengthy consideration.
• A trailer has finally dropped for the er, unusual forthcoming spy film Argylle, directed by Matthew Vaughn (Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, The King’s Men) and starring Henry Cavill and Bryce Dallas Howard. The Spy Command’s Bill Koenig describes the plot this way: “Novelist Elly Conway [Howard] has created the wildly successful Argylle spy novel series. … But Conway now is the target of real spies. The reason? What the author writes has a way of turning out to happen.” According to Wikipedia, “Argylle is scheduled to be released in the United States on February 2, 2024, by Universal Pictures theatrically, and on Apple TV+ at an undetermined date.” FOLLOW-UP: A podcast interview with director Matthew Vaughn, partly on the subject of Argylle, can be enjoyed here.
• Speaking of The Spy Command, the recent passing of Man From U.N.C.L.E. co-star David McCallum has led that blog to compile a list of “surviving stars of the 1960s spy craze.” I cringe at the thought that this might be inviting further deaths (“Aha,” says the Grim Reaper, “I didn’t realize they were still alive!”). On the other hand, I am pleased to see that so many familiar figures from my early TV years are still with us, including Mission: Impossible’s Barbara Bain, It Takes a Thief’s Robert Wagner, and The Avengers’ Linda Thorson.
• Many years ago, I added The Westlake Review to this page’s extensive blogroll. Managed by the pseudonymous Fred Fitch, it focused on the much-admired work of Donald E. Westlake. Postings there have dropped off of late, because as Fitch explains, “I ran out of books to review.” However he wrote this morning to tell me of “a new obsession, and even for me, an odd one.” I thought his note might interest other Rap Sheet readers, as well. Fitch writes:
I very unexpectedly got into the [2023 TV] show Gotham Knights, which only ran for thirteen episodes on the CW network, and was unceremoniously canceled, on a very disheartening cliffhanger. It was yet another show set in Gotham City where Batman doesn’t exist, because the rights for Batman are expensive (and if we’re being honest, he’s been done to death, in more ways than one).
Many dismissed it on this score alone, and the writing was all over the place (they were on a very tight budget), but I found all kinds of interesting themes in there, and some very compelling characters, most of whom never got much love in the comics or anywhere else. I just couldn’t accept the ending, and started writing my own. A chapter at a time. This is the result so far.
Gotham Knights wasn’t about superheroes (these days, it’s hard to find anything that isn’t). It was about detectives, young people with many different skill sets pooling their knowledge and abilities to solve mysteries (a fair bit of romance as well—not entirely heterosexual in nature, since technically only two of the six main characters are straight and ‘cisgender’—I suppose I'll get used to that word eventually). My focus is heavily on Duela Dent, first introduced in the 70’s, as The Joker’s Daughter. Called herself Harlequin at one point, and yes, it’s pretty obvious she was one of the major influences on Harley Quinn. But she never really took form in the comics. She did on the show.
This is all inspired by Batman, but not following in his footsteps, because it’s a very lonely path, and this story is about making a family out of seemingly mismatching parts. Anyway, I’ve been at it almost two months now, the readership is growing, and so I’m going to humbly request you help me grow it a bit more.
Obviously this is fanfiction—pastiche, if you want to get fancy about it. So are all those off-brand Sherlock Holmes novels people keep putting out, and many a detective whose creator is long gone has managed to keep gumshoeing around, all the same. The difference is, I don’t have the rights to the characters—or all the song lyrics I keep sticking in there. I’m not making any money here, nor will I, ever. I’m just doing it for love. I feel like it’s fair use, and it’s unlikely I’ll ever have a large enough readership for those who do have the rights to care. They don’t care enough about these characters to give them a fair shot. I do.
I have gone ahead and added Fitch’s new Not Offended to the blogroll under “Short Fiction.” Let’s see what its future holds.
• This Zoom presentation by The Book Club of California, slated for Monday, October 30, sounds most intriguing. From Mystery Fanfare: “The Poison Book Project investigates potentially toxic pigments used in the manufacture of Victorian-era bookcloth. Lead scientist Dr. Rosie Grayburn will situate the use of English bookcloth colored with highly poisonous emerald green pigment and other toxic pigments within a broader historical context; recommend safe handling and storage practices for emerald green bookbindings; and report on the Poison Book Project’s most recent findings.” Register here.
• The Killing Times’ Paul Hirons uses the occasion of actor Michael Gambon’s demise earlier this week, at age 82, to revisit what he calls “one of my favourite TV shows ever,” The Singing Detective, on which Gambon starred as private eye Philip E. Marlow in the mid-1980s.
• Fans of the UK TV series The Persuaders!, starring Roger Moore and Tony Curtis, should be pleased to learn that historian Jaz Wiseman has a new book out about that 1971-1972 adventure-comedy.
• And I was finally able to watch Kenneth Branaugh’s A Haunting in Venice at a nearby theater. I agree with the blogger known as The Puzzle Doctor, who remarks that this film—loosely adapted from Agatha Christie’s 1969 Hercule Poirot novel, Hallowe’en Party—is “beautifully shot,” with “an effective creepiness throughout the whole thing.” It’s certainly my favorite of Branaugh’s now three Poirot pictures. If you’re looking for something to get you in the mood for next month’s Halloween, this just might be the ticket.
This is sad. It was only a week ago that the Scottish-born performer was celebrating his 90th birthday. From the Associated Press:
Actor David McCallum, who became a teen heartthrob in the hit series “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” in the 1960s and was the eccentric medical examiner in the popular “NCIS” 40 years later, has died. ... McCallum died Monday of natural causes surrounded by family at New York Presbyterian Hospital ...
The blog Spy Vibe goes on to note that “McCallum grew up between Scotland and London, where his father became a prominent figure in the London Philharmonic Orchestra (he played on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band!). Young David studied the oboe and, later in his career, recorded a number of albums for Capitol Records as an arranger interpreting hits of the mid-to-late Sixties.” Wikipedia recalls that, after he served a stint in the British Army, McCallum “attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art …, where Joan Collins was a classmate. ... He began his acting career doing boy voices for BBC Radio in 1947 and taking bit parts in British films from the late 1950s.”
McCallum went on to appear in the movies Hell Drivers (with Sean Connery and Patrick McGoohan), A Night to Remember (1958, playing a radio operative on the ill-fated RMS Titanic), The Great Escape (1963), and The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965). In 1964, he began co-starring with Robert Vaughn in The Man From U.N.C.L.E., an NBC-TV series hoping to capitalize on growing public interest in spy fiction—a craze kicked off in large part by the recent success of Connery’s James Bond films. (In fact, Bond creator Ian Fleming contributed ideas to the program’s initial conception.)
The Spy Command writes of McCallum’s U.N.C.L.E. role:
Illya Kuryakin, a Russian agent who worked for the multi-national U.N.C.L.E. (United Network Command for Law and Enforcement) was envisioned as a secondary character for The Man From U.N.C.L.E. The show originally was titled Solo, after Napoleon Solo, played by Robert Vaughn.
Still, even in the earliest days of the project, the makers of the show apparently felt they had something more. …
Starting with the third episode, “The Quadripartite Affair,” Illya began to get more attention. Writer Alan Caillou, a British spy during World War II, provided scripts that hinted at an intriguing character. That combined with McCallum’s acting, caught the attention of audiences.
Something else helped. Robert Vaughn began studying for a Ph.D. Starring in a television series is time-consuming. David McCallum’s rising popularity meant someone else could shoulder some of the responsibility for carrying the show. Before the end of the first season, Solo and Illya were a duo.
Despite early mixed revises, and concern in those Cold War years about Kuryakin being a Russian espionage agent, U.N.C.L.E. eventually attracted a wide audience, and turned McCallum’s intelligent, enigmatic character—who sported a Beatles-style blond haircut—into a sex symbol among teenage girls. “Kuryakin became so popular,” says The Spy Command’s Bill Koenig, that “he appeared in ads marketing U.S. Savings Bonds. For American audiences, Illya may have been a Soviet, but he was our Soviet.”
After The Man From U.N.C.L.E. was cancelled in early 1968—halfway through its fourth season (and with 105 episodes already in the can)—McCallum returned to the boob tube in shows such as Colditz (1972-1974), the science-fiction series Sapphire & Steel (1979-1982), and The Invisible Man (1975-1976, which also featured former Peter Gunn headliner Craig Stevens). He guested as well on programs ranging from The A-Team and McCloud to Murder, She Wrote, Father Dowling Mysteries, and Mr. & Mrs. Smith. Not until 2003 did McCallum win another small-screen role worthy of his talents, playing an erudite pathologist for the Naval Criminal Investigation Service, Dr. Donald “Ducky” Mallard, on CBS-TV’s military police series, NCIS.
Variety’s obituary mentions that, in addition to his work on-screen and on four Capitol Records albums, McCallum wrote an oft-humorous crime novel titled Once a Crooked Man (2016). As his son Peter said in a statement, David McCallum was “a true Renaissance man.”
• We still have a month to go before the U.S. release of director Martin Scorcese’s western crime drama, Killers of the Flower Moon. So for now, we’ll just have to be happy watching the trailer for that picture, featured below. Based on David Grann’s widely acclaimed non-fiction book of the same title, the story—set in the early 1920s—focuses on a succession of bewildering murders of dozens of wealthy members of the Osage tribe in northeastern Oklahoma, following the discovery of large oil deposits under their land. The U.S. Bureau of Investigation (predecessor of today’s FBI) was called in to investigate. Headlining this likely cinematic blockbuster are Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, Lily Gladstone, and Brendan Fraser. Killers of the Flower Moon is set to debut in U.S. theaters on October 20.
• Kenneth Branaugh’s A Haunting in Venice opened in U.S. theaters last week. I haven’t yet gotten around to seeing that big-screener, which is based on Agatha Christie’s 1969 Hercule Poirot novel, Hallowe’en Party, and stars Branaugh as the brainy Belgian sleuth. But based on Olivia Rutigliano’s assessment in CrimeReads, it sounds as if I might enjoy this one more than I did Branaugh’s previous Poirot picture, the scandal-plaguedDeath on the Nile. Rutigliano calls Haunting “a vibrant tapestry of drama and feeling, fueled by magnetic performances, splendid effects, and some of the best camerawork, lighting, and art direction of the year.” She concludes: “But the grandest, greatest thing about A Haunting in Venice is that it feels firmly tied to its location. Venice is Branagh’s idea, not Christie’s, but it works beautifully with the themes in the script. The camera lingers lovingly on the decaying walls and splintering wood and chipping paints of the once-opulent Venice, a spooky, creamy mysterious relic, itself. With all of this, Branagh has engineered one of the most effusive, hypnotic films I’ve seen all year ...”
• Using A Haunting in Venice as its springboard, the A.V. Club site selects its favorite Christie movie adaptations, including 1963’s Murder at the Gallop, 2022’s Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? (a favorite of mine, too), and 1957’s Witness for the Prosecution. Those 15 write-ups are presented in slideshow fashion; click the “Start Slideshow” link within the artwork at the top of the page to get started.
• For his part, author Martin Edwards has little nice to say about director Peter Collinson’s suspense-deficient, 1974 version of Christie’s renowned And Then There Were None.
• Meanwhile, UK author Cara Hunter (Murder in the Family) muses on the continuing literary appeal of Dame Agatha’s “closed circle crime” narrative trope, which Hunter describes thusly: “A group of apparently random people gathered in some more or less artificial isolation—a train, an island, a ship, a country house—whereupon everything starts to go horribly wrong and they realise, with growing horror, that one among their number is a killer.” As examples of such yarns, she cites Christie’s Evil Under the Sun (1941), as well as eight other books, one of them a work of non-fiction.
• Rounding out today’s Christie-related coverage are two posts playing off the fun new book Agatha Whiskey: 50 Cocktails to Celebrate the Bestselling Novelist of All Time, by Colleen Mullaney (Skyhorse). Both Dave Bradley, in Crime Fiction Lover, and Doreen Sheridan, in Criminal Element, decided to mix up and judge some of this book’s libations for themselves. Nice work, if you can get it …
• As 2023 winds into its fourth and final quarter, Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine editor George Easter is seeing more agreement among his cadre of book critics as to which of this year’s releases will wind up on the mag’s “best of the year” list. He observes that the following 16 novels now appear on multiple lists:
— All the Sinners Bleed, by S. A. Cosby
— My Father’s House, by Joseph O’connor
— Resurrection Walk, by Michael Connelly
— Going Zero, by Anthony Mccarten
— Everybody Knows, by Jordan Harper
— Small Mercies, by Dennis Lehane
— The River We Remember, by William Kent Krueger
— Expectant, by Vonda Symon
— Lying Beside You, by Michael Robotham
— The Detective Up Late, by Adrian McKinty
— The Secret Hours, by Mick Herron
— Independence Square, by Martin Cruz Smith
— Moscow Exile, by John Lawton
— Drowning, T.J. Newman
— Ozark Dogs, by Eli Cranor
— Assassin Eighteen, by John Brownlow
• Sadly, editor Gerald So has discontinued regular updates of his “crime poetry weekly,” The Five-Two, due to an inadequacy of submissions. Its September 4 poem, “‘Something Fishy’ by J.H. Johns, about the recent arrest of a suspect in the Gilgo Beach murders,” was the last published entry, he says. So, a teacher, book reviewer, contributing editor to The Thrilling Detective We Site, and co-founder of The Lineup: Poems on Crime, launched the Five-Two in 2011, bringing readers new crime-related verse each week—52 entries per year. But in 2022, So recalls, “Elon Musk chaotically took over Twitter, upending an important news outlet for the site, and Blogger’s post editor became unreliable in the wee hours, the time I usually worked on the site.” In the future, So says, the blog will be given over to “sporadically” publicizing news about Five-Two alumni.
• I very much enjoyed British crime novelist David Hewson’s complex, four-book series about “Pieter Vos, a rather eccentric detective living a bohemian life in a canalboat” in Amsterdam, and have been disappointed at the utter lack of fresh entries since Sleep Baby Sleep came out in 2017. Hewson, though, is at least celebrating the fact that the original novels are “now back in my hands and available as revised e-book and print editions exclusively on Amazon worldwide. Plus there’s an omnibus e-book edition of all four titles too.”
• Happy 90th birthday this week to David McCallum, the Scottish-born actor who co-starred with Robert Vaughn in the trendsetting 1960s spy-fi series The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
• Here’s a delightful CrimeReads piece about the history of true-crime storytelling. “Long before Stitcher, Netflix, and TikTok, stories of young women being killed were shared through folksongs that were often inspired by real events—just like Lifetime movies,” writes Janet Beard, author of The Ballad of Laurel Springs. “Murder ballads are folksongs that tell the story of a violent crime, usually the murder of a young woman, most often by a lover. These songs were popular throughout the United States in the nineteenth century, though they have become particularly associated with southern Appalachia, where they are an essential part of the region’s musical traditions. Earlier versions of many of the popular Appalachian murder ballads, such as ‘Pretty Polly’ or ‘Silver Dagger,’ can be traced back hundreds of years to England and Scotland, though in their heyday, plenty of homegrown American ballads, like ‘The Banks of the Ohio’ or ‘Tom Dooley,’ made their way around the country, telling the stories of real-life murders in a time before people could tune into Dateline to hear them.”
• R.I.P., James Hayman, author of the McCabe & Savage police procedural mysteries. Mystery Fanfare notes he died on June 15 “after a six month battle with glioblastoma.”
• Following the great time I had at Bouchercon in San Diego earlier this month, I’m giving serious thought to attending the next Left Coast Crime convention, scheduled to be held in Bellevue, Washington, from April 11 to 14, 2024. Getting there each morning would require only a short drive (much longer during rush hour) across Lake Washington from my home in Seattle. But what’s stopping me so far is the registration price: $329, compared with Bouchercon’s $230. Fortunately, I need not commit myself at this stage, though to take advantage of that $329 fee, I must register by December 31; after that the price will shoot up to $349. It’s been years since my last time at LCC—is participation always this pricey?
• Campaigns by narrow-minded right-wingers to censor books are an insult to the intelligence of readers. Nonetheless, they are relentless. From National Public Radio:
There were nearly 700 attempts to ban library books in the first eight months of 2023, according to data released Tuesday by the American Library Association. From Jan. 1 to Aug 31, the attempts sought to challenge or censor 1,915 titles, a 20% increase compared to the same months in 2022, the organization said. Last year saw the most challenges since the ALA began tracking book censorship more than two decades ago. But the real numbers may even be higher. The ALA collects data on book bans through library professionals and news reports, and therefore, its numbers may not encompass all attempts to ban or censor certain books.
Ideology-driven reading restraints in American schools are an especially pernicious problem, denying students the right to learn the complete breadth and truth of their history, and to possibly expand their perspectives on the world. Again from NPR: “School book bans and restrictions in the U.S. rose 33% in the last school year, according to a new report from the free speech group PEN America, continuing what it calls a worrisome effort aimed at the ‘suppression of stories and ideas.’ Florida had more bans than any other state.”
• And Bookgasm is finally back—sort of. The blog disappeared suddenly last December, the victim of a belligerent hacking. Since then, editor Rod Lott says he’s “fought a constant battle between my URL registrant, site host and site security provider, all pointing fingers at one another, some promising multiple times it would be up within 24 hours.” While a stripped-down version of Bookgasm’s front page is visible at its former location, Lott notes that “The old reviews aren’t accessible at the moment. The good news: They’re not gone; I can click into them on the back end and all the content is there.” Now he just has to figure out how to make everything work right again. “I’m not highly skilled at this thing,” he acknowledges, “nor do I have the allotted free time to devote [to it that] I did when I started this site two decades ago! Bear with me as I get this thing rebuilt.”
• There are a couple of interesting items contained in author Max Allan Collins’ latest blog post. First off, he says he’s “setting out to do a podcast series based on the Nathan Heller novels. Each multi-episode podcast would take on a single book. I will write these adaptations myself.” Expect to see the announcement of a crowd-funding campaign to get the initial podcast in that series going. Second, despite what Collins has previously termed a “disappointing lack of any support from Greenlight Iowa” to produce a film based on his A Christmas Carol-inspired short story, “Blue Christmas,” the author did succeed in raising $6,375 through an Indiegogo effort (perhaps $13,000+ short of what he says will ultimately be needed), and is in the process of “serious pre-production now.” He reports that actor Gary Sandy, with whom he has worked before, is his top pick to assume the lead role of Jake Marley, and “we are having auditions this week for the rest of the Blue Christmas cast … [T]he shoot is toward the end of October.” Oh, and that same blog post features a quite enjoyable video interview Titan Books’ Andrew Sumner did with Collins about the new Mike Hammer yarn, Dig Two Graves, the 14th Hammer novel he’s penned using material left behind by Spillane, after he died in 2006.
• First, some good TV news (from In Reference to Murder): “Masterpiece on PBS has announced the premiere date and released first look images for the upcoming season of Miss Scarlet and the Duke, which returns on January 7, 2024, for its fourth season. In the new season, Eliza (Kate Phillips) has taken over the business of detective agency Nash & Sons, and things are not going entirely smoothly, although help comes from some familiar sources. Outside of work, her relationship with William Wellington, a gruff Scottish detective inspector of Scotland Yard (the ‘Duke,’ played by Stuart Martin) builds towards a looming decision that will shape both their lives.” I’ve much enjoyed this historical mystery series.
• Now the bad news: “The premiere of HBO’s anticipated True Detective: Night Countryhas been pushed back and is now listed as January of 2024 (the exact day is unknown). In Night Country, when the long winter night falls in Ennis, Alaska, the eight men who operate the Tsalal Arctic Research Station vanish without a trace. To solve the case, detectives Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster) and Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis) must confront their pasts and the dark truths lying underneath the Arctic ice. John Hawkes, Christopher Eccleston, Fiona Shaw, Finn Bennett, Anna Lambe, Aka Niviâna, Isabella Star Lablanc, and Joel D. Montgrand also star.”
• For what it’s worth, Amazon appears to have updated its list of the “best mysteries and thrillers of 2023 so far.” It’s already crowning S.A. Cosby’s All the Sinners Bleed (Flatiron) as this year’s top choice, but also applauds Dennis Lehane’s Small Mercies (Harper), Jesse Q. Sutanto’s Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers (Berkley), Thomas Perry’s Murder Book (Mysterious Press), Jacqueline Winspear’s The White Lady (Harper), Charlie Donlea’s Those Empty Eyes (Kensington), T.J. Newman’s Drowning (Avid Reader Press), and 13 other works—only a few of which I’ve yet read.
• With the Bloody Scotland crime-writing festival set to begin just two days from now in the central Scottish town of Stirling, take a moment to check out the Nordic Noir blog’s choices of the best events on the festival’s program. Meanwhile, Live and Deadly highlights the ways Bloody Scotland supports writers new to this genre.
• As might have been predicted, opinions are divided on the artistic results here: “A life-sized bronze statue of Agatha Christie has been unveiled in the Oxfordshire town of Wallingford, near where the detective novelist resided for more than 40 years,” The Guardianreports. “The statue depicts the writer holding a book and seated on a bench overlooking the Kinecroft, an area of open grassland. Sculptor Ben Twiston-Davies—who also designed the Agatha Christie memorial in London—said in a YouTube video about the statue that it shows her ‘looking out as if she’s seen a clue for one of her stories.’”
• Southern California author-screenwriter Lee Goldberg is always an entertaining guest speaker, as I was reminded during the recent Bouchercon in San Diego. He demonstrates his humor again in two recent interviews on the subject of his brand-new thriller novel, Malibu Burning (Thomas & Mercer): this one with Murder by the Book’s Sara DiVello, and this other one with Story Blender’s Steven James.
• Another writer who has been receiving widespread attention is UK mystery-maker/TV show host Richard Osman, whose fourth and latest entry in his Thursday Murder Club series, The Last Devil to Die, should be out this week from Viking. The Guardian’s Charlotte Edwardes profiles him here, while The New York Times’ Sarah Weinman composed this story about him for Esquire magazine.
• If you didn’t snag a copy of William Link’s The Columbo Collection 13 years ago, when it debuted, you now have another chance. Publisher Crippen & Landru has announced that the book, which contains 12 original stories featuring television detective Lieutenant Columbo—all written by his co-creator—is back in stock after a long absence. And still available at the 2010 paperback price of $18.
• Finally, a sad note: Eighty-year-old writing teacher/coach, former U.S. Navy cryptographer, and fictionist Les Edgerton died in Fort Wayne, Indiana, on August 31 after “a short battle with COVID 19,” according to his funeral home obituary. With more than 20 books to his credit, including the novels Adrenaline Junkie and The Genuine, Imitation, Plastic Kidnapping, as well as the 2007 writer's resource Hooked: Write Fiction That Grabs Readers at Page One and Never Lets Them Go, Edgerton had been nominated for a wide variety of prizes, from the O. Henry Award to the Edgar Award for Best Short Story. Not long before his passing, he had won the Killer Nashville convention’s Claymore Award with the opening 50 pages of an unpublished manuscript, Francois Roberge—The Fixer.
Particularly during the 1960s and ’70s, actress Sharon Farrell—who was recently reported to have died of natural causes on May 15, aged 82—seemed ubiquitous on American television programs.
Farrell was among the stars of Saints and Sinners, a pretty much forgotten, 1962-1963 NBC drama set amid the New York City newspaper business. She also had a recurring role on the original Hawaii Five-O, playing police detective Lori Wilson, and from 1991 to 1997 featured regularly as Florence Webster on the CBS soap opera The Young and the Restless. Scanning her credits on the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) shows her to have guested on everything from Naked City, My Favorite Martian, and Burke’s Lawto The Man from U.N.C.L.E., The Fugitive, The Wild Wild West, Police Story, Kolchak: The Night Stalker, The New Perry Mason, McCloud, Petrocelli, Banyon, and Mrs. Columbo. She later executed distinctive turns on T.J. Hooker and Matlock.
I remember the fetching blonde Farrell best, however, for a few other TV appearances. She occupied two very different roles in The Name of the Game, portraying a swindled blues musician in 1969’s “A Hard Case of the Blues,” and subsequently Sandrelle, a prospective love interest for the time-displaced Glenn Howard (Gene Barry) in the now-famous 1971 episode “L.A. 2017.” In the 1974 NBC pilot movie The Underground Man, based on Ross Macdonald’s novel of the same name and starring Peter Graves, Farrell brought emotion aplenty to her part as the mother of a troubled young woman (Kay Lenz) involved in a child kidnapping. And in “For the Love of Money,” the January 16, 1975, installment of David Janssen’s private-eye series, Harry O, she played the bikini-clad, merry-making girlfriend of a prominent booking agent. No matter what character Farrell inhabited, be it a spunky young roommate on Love, American Style or a machine-gun-toting militant on Police Woman, she delivered nothing short of a captivating performance.
Of course, Farrell didn’t confine herself to small-screen jobs. Her cinematic debut came in 1959’s Kiss Her Goodbye, adapted from the same-named, 1956 couple-on-the-run novel by Wade Miller. In its obituary, Deadline contended that Farrell “is best remembered for the [1974] film It’s Alive, in which she played the mother of a murderous deformed infant.” But she was seen as well in 1969’s The Reivers, 1980’s The Stunt Man, and 1987’s Can’t Buy Me Love. The big-screener that brought her to my early attention was Marlowe (1969), starring James Garner as Los Angeles gumshoe Philip Marlowe. In that Hollywood take on Raymond Chandler’s 1949 novel, The Little Sister, Farrell personated Orfamay Quest, a charmingly naïve but worried girl from Kansas who employs Marlowe to find her missing brother, and lends the picture both humor and a modicum of treachery.
(Above) Sharon Farrell starred with James Garner in Marlowe.
Sharon Farrell was born Sharon Lee Forsmoe in Sioux City, Iowa, on December 24, 1940. Her ancestry was Norwegian, and she was reared in a Lutheran family. As a child, she began studying ballet and went on to tour with the American Ballet Theatre Company, which took her to New York City. She was just 18 years old when she made Kiss Her Goodbye, but had already caught the acting bug. As Wikipedia recalls, Farrell bore a son, Chance Boyer, in 1970 with fellow performer John F. Boyer. Afterward, she “suffered an embolism which caused her heart to stop beating for four minutes. She ended up with serious brain damage that resulted in memory loss and physical impairments. With the help of colleagues, Farrell worked to regain her abilities, including her memory, and resumed her acting career, yet she kept her illness a secret under the advice of friend and actor Steve McQueen, who warned her that if word of her illness got out, her career would be over. Keeping her illness hidden, Farrell worked steadily for decades.” By the way, McQueen was another of the men, in addition to Boyer, with whom she was romantically linked over the years. The Hollywood Reporter’s obit of Farrell says that at one point, she was “involved in ‘a love triangle’” with both McQueen (her co-star in The Reivers) and martial arts legend Bruce Lee (who made quite a showing in Marlowe) “that resulted in Lee and McQueen not doing a movie together.”
IMDb lists Farrell’s final television gig as a January 1999 episode of the U.S. Navy legal drama JAG. More than another decade passed before she accepted (in her early 70s) the part of a grandmother in two episodes of the digital drama Broken at Love. Yet there’s little fear of Sharon Farrell being forgotten, as long her vast wealth of Hollywood work continues to bring her broad-smiling, twinkle-eyed face into homes and theaters around the world.
I’m sorry this blog has offered nothing but crickets over the last week, but several things in my personal life demanded attention. With those now resolved, I can get back to the business of news gathering.
• New York bookshop proprietor, editor, and publisher Otto Penzler has announced that his company, Penzler Publishers, will introduce Crime Ink, a new imprint concentrating on literary true crime. Four to six titles annually are to be expected from this imprint, beginning next year. “Tom Wickersham, formerly the manager of The Mysterious Bookshop, will head the imprint as its editor,”explains a press release. “Charles Perry will be the Publisher, a position he currently holds with The Mysterious Press, American Mystery Classics, Scarlet, and MysteriousPress.com, an electronic book publisher—the other imprints of Penzler Publishers. Luisa Smith will oversee as Editor-in-Chief of Penzler Publishers.” Wickersham is quoted as saying: “We are poised to launch in the spring of 2024 with The Serial Killer’s Apprentice, the first modern examination of 1970s serial killer Dean Corll. Also under contract are a biography of New York crime journalist Jimmy Breslin, a comprehensive account of the Son of Sam killings, and a series in translation from France. We will strive to publish revelatory works that shed new light on old cases, expose modern injustices, and expand the classification of true crime as we know it.”
• It’s the first week of August, and you know very well what that means: time again to check The Rap Sheet’s lengthy list of summer crime-fiction releases. As is my wont, I have expanded that roster over the last month, adding new books as well as others still forthcoming between now and Labor Day. There’s something for every taste.
• Wasn’t I just complaining that Netflix’s The Lincoln Lawyer, based on Michael Connelly’s novels about Los Angeles defense counsel Mickey Haller, had taken an incomprehensible and frustrating break only halfway through its Season 2 run? Well, the show returned on Thursday with five further episodes, bringing the total to 10. Having just finished watching the excellent sophomore (and last) season of HBO-TV’s Perry Mason, I can now pick up where Haller left off—maybe with a little review of where things stood at the end of episode five.
When a body is discovered inside a bricked in fireplace in an old London townhouse, DCI James isn’t even sure she wants to take the case. Police budgets. But the team quickly show that this was a murder and start generating leads, with connections stretching right up into the British government and across the Thames into the down-and-out squats inhabited by heroin addicts and petty thieves.
Watch the new season trailer at the Killing Times link above.
• Meanwhile, Annika, the Alibi-TV series Nicola Walker leapt to after Unforgotten, is set to introduce its second season on British boob-tubes come next Wednesday, August 9.
• Finally, The Chelsea Detective, on which Adrian Scarborough stars as a rather prickly but brilliant policeman working the streets of London’s prosperous Chelsea district, will return to streamer Acorn TV on Monday, August 28. This year, Scarborough’s Inspector Max Arnold will be given a new partner, Detective Sergeant Layla Walsh (Vanessa Emme), a transfer fresh from Exeter. (Season 1 had found him teamed, instead, with Detective Constable Priya Shamsie, played by Sonita Henry.) Again, The Killing Times has a video introduction to The Chelsea Detective’s four new episodes.
• Sometimes it seems book publishers believe their readers to be absolute morons. Case in point, from In Reference to Murder: “Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe is getting a trigger warning from publish[ing] house Vintage. The 1939 novel The Big Sleep, considered among the greatest works of crime fiction, has been reprinted with a cautionary note ... Would-be readers of Chandler’s most famous work are now warned that the book may contain ‘outdated language and cultural representations.’ The note addressed to the ‘dear reader’ cautions that while the story centered on Los Angeles detective Philip Marlowe is an outstanding example of crime fiction, it is nevertheless ‘firmly of its time and place.’” Oh gosh, shock, shock!
• Four recent CrimeReads pieces I’ve enjoyed recently: Denise Mina, author of the brand-new Philip Marlowe yarn The Second Murderer, talks with Nancie Clare about Marlowe’s continuing relevancy and what it feels like to be a woman channeling Chandler; Anika Scott (Sinners of Starlight City) on Chicago’s efforts in the early 1930s to bring down local organized crime and build its image-improving Century of Progress International Exposition; and Nathan Ward (Son of the Old West) recalls the strange case of “cowboy mutineers” who vanished in the South Pacific in 1902, only to have their ringleader apparently resurface in Arizona years later.
• And let us remember two people who made significant contributions to modern crime fiction. First, Edward Hume, who (among other things) scripted the pilots for three famous 1970s Quinn Martin TV series: Cannon, The Streets of San Francisco, and Barnaby Jones. He passed away last month at age 87. Second, we bid a respectful adieu to author Jill Churchill, perhaps best remembered for her award-winning Jane Jeffry and Grace and Favor mystery series. Churchill was 80 years old when she died on July 12.
Send Us News:
The Rap Sheet is always on the lookout for information about new and soon-forthcoming books, special author projects, and distinctive crime-fiction-related Web sites. Shoot us an e-mail note here.
Check out The Rap Sheet’s picks of more than 400 books for crime, mystery, and thriller lovers, all due to be released between now and New Year’s Day. Click here.
The Rap Sheet has now been around long enough that some older posts may include links to stories or Web sites that no longer exist. If you encounter such broken links, try searching for the original material via the Wayback Machine, an invaluable archive of digital content.
Also, we’d be very grateful if you could let us know where those inoperable links can be found. We’ll update them as soon as possible.
If You Can, Please Help The Rap Sheet to Survive and Thrive
Your Vigilance Is Welcome
Those of us responsible for The Rap Sheet try to get everything right, and we work to keep our Web links up to date. But we’re not perfect. So, if you spot any errors (typographical or otherwise) in this blog, or discover links or embedded videos that aren’t functioning properly, please let us know via e-mail.
The Rap Sheet Faithful
Disclosure Notice
The Rap Sheet accepts books sent free of charge from publishers, publicists, and authors. Those works may inspire comments on this page. However, in no case is there any promise given that a book will be the subject of an endorsement or review, either positive or negative.
Back in the fall of 1971, NBC-TV introduced its most successful “wheel series,” the NBC Mystery Movie. Look for our anniversary posts here.
Videos Disclaimer
From time to time, The Rap Sheet features short video clips. Use of these is for historical and entertainment purposes only, and is not meant to establish ownership of such materials. Rights to those clips stay with their owners/creators.
The One Book Project
In honor of The Rap Sheet’s first birthday, we invited more than 100 crime writers, book critics, and bloggers from all over the English-speaking world to choose the one crime/mystery/thriller novel that they thought had been “most unjustly overlooked, criminally forgotten, or underappreciated over the years.” Their choices can be found here.
In the Beginning ...
Before The Rap Sheet was a blog, it was a monthly newsletter in January Magazine. To find all the old editions of that newsletter, just click here.
