Bullet Points: Bursting at the Seams Edition

It’s been a good long while since I put together one of these news bits columns, so I have some serious catching-up to do!



• The finalists for 2026’s Hammett Prize have been announced by the International Association of Crime Writers, North American Branch. This commendation is presented annually to a work, published in the previous year, that judges say demonstrates “literary excellence in crime writing.” Here are the five latest candidates:

— El Dorado Drive, by Megan Abbott (Putnam)
— Party of Liars, by Kelsey Cox (Minotaur)
— The Big Empty, by Robert Crais (Putnam)
— The Savage Noble Death of Babs Dionne, by Ron Currie (Putnam)
— The Lizard, by Domenic Stansberry (Molotov Editions)

Expect to hear news of the winner later this summer. Lists of previous Hammett Prize nominees and recipients are available here.

• Believe it or not, among the 13 novels on this year’s longlist of Booker Prize nominees is one plucked straight from the crime/thriller category: All Them Dogs (Riverhead), by Irish fictionist Djamel White. The award’s Web site calls it “by turns savage, thrilling and unexpectedly tender, ... a gripping story of violence, lust, and greed that explores one man's struggles to find his place in an unsparing world.” Whether All Them Dogs will find a place on the Booker shortlist, slated to be revealed on September 22, is anybody’s guess.

• Following this year’s release of A River Red with Blood, the 23rd outing for cop-turned-P.I. Charlie Parker, John Connolly explains in his latest newsletter that his next novel—due out in May 2027—will be The Castle, “a standalone thriller with political overtones, set in a Connecticut suburb in 1973.” He goes on to say:

The Castle is a safe haven, a gated community in a U.S. nation troubled by the war in Vietnam, political assassinations, and the growing shadow of Watergate. For the disillusioned publisher Hamer, it is an escape from a world that has disappointed him.

But something is very wrong in the Castle. A teenage boy has gone missing. There are thefts, threats, shootings. Hamer has begun to fear the Castle may not be so safe after all, and he and his neighbors are the targets of a conspiracy with a single purpose: to destroy five families and punish them for the sins of their children. And one of those families could be his own.

Connolly calls this “a book about secrets: the secrets of the state, the secrets of families, and perhaps the secrets we hide even from ourselves. I’ve been working on it for three years now, and I think—I hope—that it’s about as good a thriller as I can write.”

• If you haven’t yet noticed, my Killer Covers blog is currently rolling out a succession of posts celebrating private eyes.

• I’m a huge fan of stories that illuminate small, seemingly insignificant aspects of crime-fiction storytelling. So Olivia Rutigliano’s new CrimeReads piece, “The 8 Best Fake Crime Novels in Film and TV, Ranked,” is right up my alley.

• The debut of Amazon Prime’s Reacher, Season 4, is teed up for Wednesday, August 12. This latest run of eight episodes will be based on Lee Child’s 2009 novel, Gone Tomorrow. It finds Reacher (played by Alan Ritchson) having “a chance encounter with a distraught stranger on a train [that] goes horribly wrong,” only to see our hero “drawn into a complex and deadly game that pits him against ruthless foes from the highest echelons of power.” A trailer for Reacher is below.



• The program is already looking ahead to its next season. “Amanda Ip, Jay Baruchel, Ciara Bravo and Kevin Durand will star opposite Alan Ritchson,” says The Hollywood Reporter, “as Reacher in the fifth season ... will be based on Lee Child’s novel Make Me. The series ... will catch up with Ritchson’s title character after his train stops in the mysterious town of Mother’s Rest where he teams with a private investigator in the search for a missing person.”

• Meanwhile, watch for the premiere of Prime’s Reacher spin-off series, Neagley, starring Danish actress Maria Sten as the most dangerous operative among Jack Reacher’s Special Investigators, on Wednesday, September 16. (It has its own trailer here.) And Kill Zone, the third entry in Dan Ames’ Frances Neagley novel series, is due out on August 17, with another, Blow Back, coming in November.

• In other television news, The Chelsea Detective, with Adrian Scarborough and Vanessa Emme, will return to Acorn TV for a fourth season on Monday, August 10. A trailer and brief synopses of the four new 90-minute episodes can be found here.

• Max Allan Collins reports that Death by Fruitcake, his 90-minute indie film that brings to life main characters from the Trash ’n’ Treasures mystery series he’s been penning for almost two decades with his wife, Barbara (under their joint pseudonym, Barbara Allan) recently debuted on the streaming TV service Tubi.

• Deadline brings word that “Cooper & Fry are heading to the U.S. after streamer BritBox snapped up the British crime drama. The show has performed well on Paramount-owned broadcast network 5 in the UK and now has a U.S. home. BritBox has snagged Season 1 of the show for U.S. and Canada, while Netflix has taken second window UK rights. Adapted from Stephen Booth’s bestselling detective novels, Cooper & Fry follows unlikely detective duo Ben Cooper and Diane Fry, played by Robert James-Collier (Downton Abbey) and Mandip Gill (Doctor Who). Set in and around England’s picturesque Peak District, the series follows Cooper, who is struggling to emerge from the shadow of his late father, while Fry is an outsider fleeing tragedies in her past. Together, they tackle grisly crimes in the remote countryside.” All eight episodes of Season 1 will drop on Monday, August 17; look for a one-minute trailer here. A second season has already been commissioned, with episodes adapted from Booth’s novels The Devil’s Edge, Fall Down Dead, One Last Breath, and The Murder Road. 

• Maigret, based on Georges Simenon’s many mysteries, will return to PBS-TV’s Masterpiece rotation for a sophomore season beginning on Sunday, October 18. Benjamin Wainwright (Belgravia: The Next Chapter, Lord of the Rings: War of the Rohirrim) reprises his lead role as French police detective Jules Maigret, with Stephanie Martini (The Gold, Last Kingdom) playing his wife, Louise. What can we expect from the half-dozen new episodes? PBS offers this plot brief:

An epic power struggle is happening in La Brigade Criminelle in Maigret Season 2. Maigret’s boss, Director of Police Xavier Guichard, has become suspicious of Maigret’s methods and decides to ‘take him down a peg.’ One of Maigret’s colleagues leaves, another is transferred by Guichard and replaced by George Bonfils, who is immediately unpopular with Les Maigrets. As Maigret investigates new crimes, the line between guilt and innocence is blurred. The unconventional detective will have to work out his own unique form of justice for victims and perpetrators alike.

These stories are adapted from Simenon’s The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien, Maigret’s Revolver, and The Yellow Dog.

• Agatha Christie created the characters Thomas Beresford and his wife, Prudence (née Cowley), for her 1922 novel, The Secret Adversary. They carried on their detecting escapades through four more books, into the early 1970s. Their debut on television came in the 10-part, 1983-1984 series Agatha Christie’s Partners in Crime, starring Francesca Annis and James Warwick. A terrific six-episode show, Partners in Crime, resurrected the pair in 2015, this time portrayed by David Walliams and Call the Midwife’s Jessica Raine in a drama set during the 1950s. Now, Britbox has scheduled a six-part reboot, Agatha Christie’s Tommy & Tuppence, to commence airing on Tuesday, September 15. The action in this new TV serial takes place in the present day, with the private detective protagonists reimagined as on-and-off romantic partners. Antonia Thomas (The Good Doctor, Still Up) will play “spirited actress” Tuppence, while Josh Dylan (The Buccaneers, Mamma Mia 2) portrays Tommy, “a meticulous and charming crime writer.” Mystery Fanfare furnishes a video preview.

• According to In Reference to Murder, “Morgan Spector is in talks to headline Netflix’s series adaptation of Dan Brown‘s latest novel, The Secret of Secrets, tackling the role of Professor Robert Landgon played by Tom Hanks in the film versions. Rebecca Hall (The Town) is also in talks for the female lead opposite Morgan. Spector already stars in HBO’s The Gilded Age as railroad tycoon George Russell, but sources say he would be able to do both series with proper scheduling should Gilded Age get renewed for a fifth season. In The Secret of Secrets, symbologist Robert Langdon (Spector) races against ancient forces and time to rescue his girlfriend, missing scientist Katherine Solomon (Hall), and her groundbreaking manuscript whose discoveries have the power to forever change humanity’s understanding of the mind. If the deals come to fruition, it will mark the first TV series acting collaboration for real-life couple Spector and Hall, who have starred together in a handful of plays and movies, including the Broadway revival of Machinal, Christine, and Permission.”

• And Icelandic author Lilja Sigurðardóttir has reached a deal with Germany’s ZDF Studios and Iceland producer Glassriver to translate her five “Áróra Investigation” novels for the small screen. Variety delivers this synopsis of Sigurðardóttir’s popular yarns: “Set across Iceland and London, the series follows Áróra, a tough fraud investigator with Icelandic roots who returns home to search for her missing sister. What begins as a family mission soon expands into a wider criminal investigation as she teams with Daniel, an Icelandic police detective and potential love interest, exposing corruption, betrayal and violence beneath Iceland’s rugged landscape.”

• It seems every time I think about how many free hours I might gain by signing off from Facebook, that social-networking site dispenses some fresh nugget of information I didn’t know I needed. Case in point: A post from somebody named Donald Bishop, who writes:

If you ever wondered who that beautiful young woman was who was running down the beach combing her hair and then turning to face the camera in the opening of [the original] Hawaii Five-O, now you know, her name is Elizabeth Logue. She is a native Hawaiian, apparently still alive. Her full name is Elizabeth Louise Malamalamaokalani White Logue. Apart from that iconic shot in the intro, she has only 2 other screen credits to her name. In 1961, she had a role in a low-budget Italian exploitation film shot in Tahiti called Nude Odyssey. Her only other part was in the Julie Andrews/Max Von Sydow film Hawaii, based on James Michener’s novel of the same name. She also did a short promotional film for the state of Hawaii to lure tourists to the island paradise.

Below is a compilation of opening sequences from Hawaii Five-O’s 12 seasons as part of CBS’s prime-time line-up (1968-1970).



• Speaking of Facebook, Frederick, Maryland-based publisher Level Best Books declared there weeks ago that it has formed Level Best Books UK, “a wholly owned subsidiary based in London that will serve as the publisher's official presence in the United Kingdom and represent the company's interests throughout Great Britain.” The venture “will be led by Shawn Reilly Simmons, publisher and CEO of Level Best Books, and internationally acclaimed mystery author Martin Edwards, who will serve together as co-directors.”

• This “collaborative mystery” from Britain’s Detection Club should be fun. Sadly, we must wait until 2028 for its appearance.

• I’m quite behind in drawing reader attention to Frank Gregorsky’s fine Detective Drama Gems. Issue 18 marks the start of that publication’s sixth year, and contains background on the 1961-1962 ABC-TV series The New Breed, as well as the Canadian cop drama Night Heat (1985-1989) and “Fade in to Murder,” a memorable 1976 episode of Columbo that pitted Peter Falk’s shabby but clever Los Angeles police lieutenant against former Star Trek captain William Shatner, who played the self-obsessed star of a TV detective show. Issue 19 celebrates the radio version of Dragnet, the 1966-1969 ABC program Felony Squad, and another episode of Night Heat. The next edition of Gems is expected in November.

• Published and unpublished works alike have achieved wins in this year’s contest for the Daphne du Maurier Awards for Excellence in Mystery/Suspense, sponsored by the Kiss of Death Chapter of Romance Writers of America. Click here to see the full results.

• A new crime-fiction periodical is to be launched soon! Beginning in October (so, in time for it to be heavily promoted at Bouchercon in Calgary), SMFS Mystery Magazine will appear three times a year featuring content from some familiar members of the Short Mystery Fiction Society. In addition to short stories, the mag is expected to incorporate interviews by Kevin Tipple and M.E. Proctor, and reviews by June Lorraine Roberts and Mat Coward. I’m guessing we will hear more about buying subscriptions once we get closer to the publication date. The cover of Issue 1 is embedded on the left.

• Hot off the presses (or at least still warm) is the Summer 2026 “Mysteries Set in France” edition of Mystery Readers Journal. Grab a copy for yourself here. And note that this follows a similarly themed number of the magazine from the spring of 2012, which looks to be available now only in PDF format.

• The next issue of MRJ will address the topic of “Cross-Genre Mysteries.” Submissions of articles, reviews, and author essays are due by August 20. Guidelines can be accessed here.

• This is good news, indeed! Scottish novelist Peter May wrote recently on Facebook (yeah, damn Facebook again!): “I know that I indicated strongly that The Black Loch [2024] would be my last book. But I also said, never say never. So there’s going to be just one more.” His post also drops “some visual clues” to a location he suggests is “very similar” to an imaginary one featured in Island of the Dead, set to go on sale from Riverrun next January.

• Sometime Rap Sheet contributor Peter Handel hatched his own blog almost a year ago. It’s called Carnivorous: A Steady Diet of Crime Fiction and has of late brought forth a couple of interviews destined to reward your scrutiny. The first is with Amy Bloom and focuses around Blunt Instrument (Mysterious Press), which marks her entry into the mystery-fiction world. The second finds Handel talking with Greg Shepard, the director of vintage publisher Stark House Press. Bookmark Carnivorous, if you have not already done so.

• Finally, we must say good-bye to some people who greatly impacted this field of fiction. Gail Bowen, the Canadian author of more than 20 novels starring Joanne Kilbourn, a political science professor in Saskatchewan with a sideline in solving crimes, passed away on June 25 at age 83, “following a brief battle with cancer.” Japanese writer Keigo Higashino, who reportedly produced 106 books during his lifetime, but may be remembered best for his Detective Galileo mysteries (The Devotion of Suspect X, etc.), perished on July 23 as a result of colorectal cancer; he was 68 years old. And Joanna Pettet may have been a London-born actress, rather than a wordsmith, but her contributions to crime and mystery fiction were still important. She guested on such boob-tube series as The Fugitive, Mannix, The Delphi Bureau, Banacek, Harry O, and Murder, She Wrote, and played “the scantily clad Mata Bond,” daughter of David Niven’s James Bond, in the 1967 spy parody Casino Royale. Pettet was 83 when she died in Temecula, California, on July 7.

Dobyns Reaches His Finish Line

Stephen Dobyns, the New Jersey-born poet, ex-reporter and former English professor, and crime fictionist, died on June 14 at age 85. Among his many books were 11 novels starring Charlie Bradshaw, described by The Thrilling Detective Web Site as a onetime cop and “small-town private eye in Saratoga Springs, New York.” The first entry in that series was Saratoga Longshot, which reached print in 1976. The final Bradshaw yarn appeared in 2017 under the title Saratoga Payback. He also penned standalone works of crime fiction, such as Is Fat Bob Dead Yet? (2015) and The Two Deaths of Senora Puccini (1988).

In a Facebook post this week, editor, critic, and occasional Rap Sheet contributor Jim Thomsen explained that he’d been in the midst of composing an article for Substack about Dobyn’s 1987 noir yarn, A Boat Off the Coast, when he learned of the author’s demise. At the conclusion of that article, he notes:

I’m a big admirer of Stephen Dobyns, though I’m guessing he’s neither the first or even hundred and first name you might think of when you think of a “noir author,” nor was he the type to habituate the hotel bar at a Bouchercon-type conclave and thus gain the slavish admiration of the social-media class.

First, because he’s primarily thought of as a poet (fourteen published volumes of verse since 1972). Second, because his fiction worked in many idioms. His first published novel, A Man of Little Evils (1973), was a John le Carré-like spy novel set in England. And soon after he wrote the first of eleven non-noirish private-detective novels set in Saratoga Springs, New York, and starring the hangdog, sad-sack Charlie Bradshaw. The rest of his novels, while all having elements of crime, defy easy categorization beyond “literary,” and his latter-day efforts had something of a madcap comic bent, as witnessed by his last, Is Fat Bob Dead Yet?

Some of his crime novels are noir-inflected, but only A Boat Off the Coast has the bullet that hits the noir bone.

According to an online obituary, “a memorial service will be held in September” in Connecticut, where Dobyns passed away.

Bullet Points: No AI Content Here Edition

• Albert Finney, Peter Ustinov, Kenneth Branagh, David Suchet, Alfred Molina, John Malkovich, even Tony Randall—over the decades, they have all portrayed Agatha Christie’s most famous fictional private detective, Hercule Poirot, on the large or small screens. But now 33-year-old English actor Edward Bluemel (Killing Eve, My Lady Jane, Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials) is stepping into the role of that fastidious, mustachioed Belgian in Hercule, a BBC/Britbox TV reboot set to start filming in Liverpool, England, this summer and expected to premiere with six episodes in the latter half of 2027. Deadline says “there is a three-season commitment to Hercule,” though that has not been confirmed by either of the production partners. The show is being described as “an intimate study of Hercule the man and an epic portrait of Britain between the wars. The series takes a magnifying glass to three of Christie’s most celebrated stories, while also charting Hercule’s burgeoning friendship with Captain Arthur Hastings, his early encounters with Scotland Yard’s James Japp, and introducing him to one particular nemesis.” Deadline adds that “Responsibility for adapting Christie’s work has fallen to Benji Walters, a relatively unknown writer who has credits on BBC series Noughts + Crosses and spent time developing an adaptation of Brideshead Revisited with Call Me by Your Name director Luca Guadagnino in 2020.”

• By the way, did you know that Christie’s third and probably most famous Poirot novel, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, celebrates its centennial this month? The story was serialized as Who Killed Ackroyd? in the London Evening News between July and September 1925, then released in book form by UK publisher Williams Collins, Sons in June of 1926. (An American edition soon followed.) While Ackroyd—with its deliberate subversion of reader expectations—may not be the perfect place to start in exploring Christie’s extensive oeuvre (instead, try And Then There Were None or a later Poirot tale such as Death on the Nile), it is nonetheless acclaimed for its shell-game plotting and final twist. In his well-respected 1941 study of this genre, Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective Story, American writer-editor Howard Haycraft placed Ackroyd in the 16th spot on his list of “the best and most influential” crime novels in print, right behind Christie’s first Poirot yarn, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920).

• Although the “news” is less than timely, let me just point out that Mike Lawson has won 2026’s Spotted Owl Award for Untouchable (Atlantic Monthly Press ), his 18th novel about Washington, D.C., troubleshooter Joe DeMarco. By my count, this is the third occasion on which Lawson has scored the Owl, an honor handed out annually by the Portland, Oregon-based Friends of Mystery fan organization to what it deems was the Best Pacific Northwest Crime Novel published during the previous year. Also in contention were Marc Cameron’s Deadline, Robert Dugoni’s A Dead Draw, Sam Wiebe’s The Last Exile, Elizabeth George’s A Slowly Dying Cause, James Bryne’s Chain Reaction, Daniel Kalla’s The Deepest Fake, J.A. Jance’s Overkill, Phillip Margolin’s False Witness, and Nolan Chase’s A Lonesome Place for Murder.

• As you have probably heard, Netflix’s The Lincoln Lawyer will end its run after Season 5, which is due for streaming next year. The concluding 10 episodes are “inspired by” Michael Connelly’s Resurrection Walk (2025), the seventh installment in his series about L.A. defense attorney Mickey Haller, played on the show by Mexican actor Manuel Garcia-Rulfo. Netflix supplies this plot description:

Mickey Haller’s world is upended when the half-sister he never knew existed, Emi [Cobie Smulders], comes to him with a plea to help free a wrongfully convicted woman. In a season defined by blood ties and buried secrets, Mickey takes on a grueling habeas petition to overturn a six-year-old murder conviction, but the deeper he digs, the more nefarious the forces arrayed against him become.

Meanwhile, the stakes rise for his trusted team as Lorna [Becki Newton], Izzy [Jazz Raycole], and Cisco [Angus Sampson] step up to tackle high-profile challenges of their own. Having just saved himself from a wrongful conviction in Season 4, Mickey is now determined to set right an enormous miscarriage of justice. But as he unravels a dangerous web of corruption and lies, he must grapple with the fractured legacy of his family—both his chosen family and the family he never knew he had.

Lincoln Lawyer’s departure from its schedule has left Netflix looking for a legal-drama replacement to satisfy viewers. One option might be And Justice for All, a series based on Al Pacino’s powerful, Emmy-nominated 1979 film of that same name. Deadline depicts it as “a gritty look at an idealistic attorney’s flawed life as he struggles to fight a corrupted legal system until he finally snaps.” The program will be scripted by Jeremy Miller and Dan Cohn (That Was Then).

• Concurrently, Lincoln Lawyer creator David E. Kelley is adapting another Connelly work for television, the 2025 novel Nightshade. Deadline says, “The project, titled Welcome to Catalina, is in development at HBO Max under the streamer’s model for drama procedurals intended to return each year with sizable orders and moderate cost. … Written by Kelley, Welcome to Catalina centers on Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Detective Stilwell who has been ‘exiled’ to a low-key post policing [Southern California’s] rustic Catalina Island. But while following up the usual drunk-and-disorderlies and petty thefts that come with his new territory, Stilwell gets a report of a body found weighed down at the bottom of the harbor.” There’s no word yet on when Welcome to Catalina might be welcomed to your big-screen set, but if it proves a winner, there’s at least one other Stilwell story to turn into a screenplay: Connelly’s Ironwood, which reached U.S. bookstores only last month.

• Sherlock Holmes’ arch-rival, Professor James Moriarty, is finally getting a TV series of his own, in which he will demonstrate his previously undisplayed array of sleuthing skills.

• Are these really the 20 greatest film sleuths of all time?

• It’s always great to see Donald E. Westlake’s storytelling mastery recognized, as The Daily Telegraph’s Jake Kerridge does in this recent essay reprinted by MSN. But how fragile is fame, that the headline labels Westlake—who just died back in 2009 (see our tributes here and here)—“The greatest crime novelist you have probably never heard of.”

• And the crime-fiction community has seen other deaths of late. Actress-turned-writer Sheila Keating (née Mitchell), who for almost six decades was wife to the English crime novelist H.R.F. Keating (creator of the Inspector Ganesh Ghote series), passed away on June 4 just short of her 101st birthday. Canadian fictionist Alan Bradley, the author of a dozen books in the Flavia de Luce mystery series (beginning with 2009’s The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie) died on the Isle of Man in the Irish Sea on May 18 at age of 87. Finally, Dennis McMillan, a San Francisco small-press publisher of “the hard-boiled, the noir, and the strikingly unusual,” met his end on May 5 in a Phoenix, Arizona, hospital. Among the authors McMillan published over the years were Kent Anderson, Michael Connelly, Fredric Brown, Leigh Brackett, James Crumley, and Rick DeMarinis.

(Hat tips to In Reference to Murder and Mark Coggins.)

A Modest Man, a Masterful Career

Just a month after celebrating his 97th birthday, British spy novelist Len Deighton—author of The IPCRESS File, Funeral in Berlin, SS-GB, and other classics of the genre—died Sunday at his home on the island of Guernsey. No cause for his passing has yet been specified.

In his excellent obituary for The Guardian, Mike Ripley recalls,

When he made the remark that he was “the most illiterate writer ever”, in an interview with Argosy magazine in 1969, Len Deighton ... had already published five bestselling spy novels, starting with The Ipcress File, three of which had been made into successful films. He had also written two cookbooks and a comic novel, edited an iconic guide to London in the swinging 60s and a book on fine wines and spirits, written a television play for the Armchair Theatre [TV anthology] series and two film scripts, become travel editor for Playboy and produced two films. He was to go on to write a further 21 novels and a collection of short stories, and to establish a reputation as a military historian.

Deighton was an established and “quite comfortable” freelance graphic artist when he began writing The Ipcress File “for a lark” while living in France in 1960, completing it the following year while on holiday, but it was not until he met the literary agent Jonathan Clowes at a party in London that he was persuaded to submit it for publication.

Rejected by two publishers, one of whom remarked sniffily that there was no market for spy stories, it was taken by a third and published in November 1962 after serialisation in the London Evening Standard. It was an instant success, the first print-run of 4,000 copies selling out on the day of publication, and its impact on spy fiction has been called seismic.

The New York Times mentions that the London-born Deighton regarded The IPCRESS File (as its title appeared originally) as “a riposte to the James Bond novels of Ian Fleming.

Instead of Bond’s cartoonish and morally simplistic take on spycraft, Mr. Deighton offered a shadow world through which his unnamed hero—christened Harry Palmer for the film versions—made his way, beset by disinformation, triple-crosses and dim bureaucrats.

Unlike the impossibly suave, action-oriented Bond or George Smiley, John le Carré’s dumpy, cerebral, upper-class spy hero, Mr. Deighton’s central character is self-consciously proletarian, with a jaded, frequently hostile attitude toward his superiors, a droll sense of humor and a love of cooking.

Mr. Deighton took a sardonic view of his sudden achievement as a brand-name writer. “All you need is a profound inferiority complex, no training as a writer and growing up a victim of the English class system,” he told Publishers Weekly in 1993.

In its own posthumous tribute, The Washington Post adds,

Mr. Deighton dismissed writing as a “goof-off profession,” but he said he thrilled at the impact his novels had on readers. “When you make a book, it’s like making a hand grenade,” he told the Telegraph. “It’s a dull process but when you throw it, the person at the other end gets the effect.”

His spy works are marked by elliptical narratives short on explanatory details, reflecting the mysteries of espionage, yet filled with unforgettable moles, traitors and other characters who double- and triple-cross one another.

“Deighton’s wry and ironic recognition of the realities of espionage and the crackling energy that motivates his fiction place him in the first rank of spy novelists,” critic George Grella wrote in the 1985 edition of Twentieth Century Crime and Mystery Writers. “He writes thrillers that are witty, thoughtful, authentic, and entertaining, a rare combination of merits.”

In his later years, Mr. Deighton’s shyness and his pivot to historical fiction and nonfiction works left him more removed from public awareness. “I’ve never written books for people more clever than I am, or more stupid,” he once said. “I’ve always tried to direct things at people like me.”

“Fiercely protective of his private life, he rarely gave interviews and avoided public appearances at festivals and conventions,” Ripley observes. “He was elected to the Detection Club in 1969, but turned down the offer of a Diamond Dagger for lifetime achievement from the Crime Writers’ Association on three occasions, maintaining that ‘two things destroy writers—alcohol and praise.”

Len Deighton was a fictionist of distinction, for sure.

READ MORE: “Len Deighton, R.I.P.,” by Martin Edwards (‘Do You Write Under Your Own Name?’); “Len Deighton Dies at 97,” by Bill Koenig (The Spy Command); “Len Deighton: A Personal Appreciation,” by Mike Ripley (Shotsmag Confidential); “Len Deighton (1929-2026) Remembered,” by Chris Connor (Crime Fiction Lover).

Sam, Scarlett, and the Tarts All Weep

This wasn’t the sort of news I was longing to receive on a Thursday morning. As Shotsmag Confidential’s Ayo Onatade reports,

It is with deep sadness that the crime writing community have learned of the recent death of the award-winning crime writer Lauren Milne Henderson. As well as being an author, Lauren worked as a journalist for a number of well-known newspapers and magazines. [She was 59 years old.]

Under the name of Lauren Milne Henderson, she was the author of the Sam Jones series featuring sculptor-turned-sleuth Sam Jones. The first book in the series is Dead White Female [which] was published in 1995 and … was followed by six more books: Too Many Blondes (1996), The Black Rubber Dress (1997), Freeze My Margarita (1998), The Strawberry Tattoo (1999), Chained (2001) and Pretty Boy (2002).

Following on from her Sam Jones series, she also wrote the Young Adult Kiss/Scarlett series starting with Kiss Me Kill Me in 2008, which featured 16-year-old Scarlett Wakefield, who must clear her name after the last boy she kisses dies in her arms and she is accused of his death. There were 3 more books in this series published: Kisses and Lies (2009), Kisses in the Dark (2010) and Kisses of Death (2011). Kiss Me Kill Me was nominated for an Anthony Award in 2009. ...

Under the name Rebecca Chance she was also the author of 10 glamourous thrillers and what was known as ‘Bonkbusters’. Whilst all standalones, previous characters could be found in other books. The first book in the series was Divas (2009), and the last book Killer Affair (2017). Killer Heels (2012), Bad Angels (2012), Killer Queens (2013) and Bad Brides (2014) all made the Sunday Times best-seller list.

Wikipedia adds that Henderson helped establish Tart Noir, “a branch of crime fiction that is characterized by strong, independent female detectives with an amount of sexuality often involved. The books in the genre also occasionally feature a murderer protagonist and are sometimes presented in a first person point of view.” What I hope is a full list of her books can be found here.

End of a Splendid Pairing

This is very sad news. I learned from Facebook earlier this week that Michael G. Jacob, who with his wife, Daniela De Gregorio (and under their joint pen name, Michael Gregorio), wrote the excellent Hanno Stiffeniis and Sebastiano Cangio series, “died suddenly back in November,” just a month after his 77th birthday. I haven’t found an obituary published anywhere that cites his cause of death.

What little I can easily piece together of Michael’s backstory is this: He was born in Liverpool, England, on October 8, 1948, and eventually graduated from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne before moving to Italy. He and Daniela lived in Spoleto, a small town in that country’s Umbria region. At one point he taught English and the history of photography. But both Michael and Daniela wished to publish novels. He recounted during a 2010 interview with The Rap Sheet how they finally made that dream come true:

Back in 2000, we were working separately on novels, but neither of us seemed to be going any­­where. Daniela was teaching philosophy, and she was fascinated by something she had read about the Prussian philosopher, Immanuel Kant. Indeed, she had plans to write a short story about the great thinker, and the rough ex-soldier, Martin Lampe, who was his personal valet. The two men had been living under the same roof for almost 30 years when, one day, the servant was sacked on the spot. What had Lampe done to give offense? And why did the “most rational man in the world” paste notices around his house, reminding himself to “Forget Martin Lampe”? Kant’s biographers had little to say on the subject, so we began working together on a possible explanation. The result in 2006 was A Critique of Criminal Reason.

Although Kant plays a role in the serial-murder investigation central to that novel, set in 1804 in the then-Prussian town of Königsberg (now part of Russia), the protagonist is actually a young magistrate and reluctant investigator, Hanno Stiffeniis. Michael and Daniela later produced another three tales starring Stiffeniis, the last of which was Unholy Awakening (2010). After announcing it was “time for Hanno to take a break,” they created another mystery series, this one set in modern times and led by Sebastiano Cangio, a park ranger in central Italy’s “stunning” Sybilline Mountains National Park. The first of those three works was Cry Wolf, which appeared in 2014. At least one other work of historical fiction carries the Michael Gregorio byline: Your Money or Your Life, published in France in 2013 and featuring Renaissance-era fresco artists traveling through Italy.

Although we never met, Michael was a fine and thoughtful correspondent. He contributed a variety of posts to The Rap Sheet over the years, on subjects ranging from the 2008 Italian Mafia movie Gomorra to Mike Ripley’s 2017 study of British thrillers, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. I read and greatly enjoyed all four of the Stiffeniis novels he penned with Daniela, and I still look at them fondly on my bookcases. He will be greatly and truly missed.

I wish Daniela the best in the face of this loss.

READ MORE: “Michael Gregorio on the Mafia, Pseudonyms and More” (Publishers Weekly).

A Few Last Words About Sallis

His publisher, Soho Press, shared the news last evening that James Sallis, Arkansas-born author of the Lew Griffin private-eye series and popular standalone novels such as 2005’s Drive (later made into a movie of the same name), died on January 27 at age 81:

In many ways Jim was the platonic ideal of what a writer can be, though he probably would not like it put thus. As an artist the work was everything to Jim, and he worked without boundaries or careerism. Perhaps best known for his existentialist crime fiction and neo-noirs ..., Jim was also a poet, musicologist, literary historian, critic, editor and teacher.

His career began writing science fiction for publications edited by the likes of Damon Knight and Harlan Ellison, who was an ardent fan of Sallis and championed his work in the 1960s and ’70s. At this time Jim helped edit the influential New Worlds publication under the direction of Michael Moorcock.

As a reader and appreciator of culture, Jim was as curious and uninhibited as he was as a writer. It was a joy to talk about art in all forms with him, but his grand view of literature matched his personal approach to craft. To Jim it didn’t matter where or how good work came into existence, or how it was shelved. His groundbreaking collection of short biographical work on Jim Thompson, David Goodis and Chester Himes, collected as Difficult Lives Hitching Rides [originally published in 1993], had no critical precedent and helped usher in a new era of appraisal for now legendary writers who at the time were nearly or totally out of print. He collected and played with alacrity an impressive number of string instruments and his love of the blues and jazz was lifelong.

Sallis’ first novel starring New Orleans’ Lew Griffin, a Black “professor, poet, novelist, and occasional private eye” was The Long-Legged Fly, which saw print in 1992. It was followed by what Kevin Burton Smith, of The Thrilling Detective Web Site, calls “six dark, defiantly literate novels that brought author James Sallis instant comparisons to Walter Mosely, Chester Himes and James Lee Burke. But for once the comparisons are apt. Lew’s obsession with missing children—and his quest to find them—may permeate the series, but the real thrust seems to be the art of writing itself.” The final Griffin tale, Ghost of a Flea, was released back in 2000. Sallis was presented with Bouchercon’s Lifetime Achievement award in 2007, and received the Hammett Prize for his 2011 novel, The Killer Is Dying.

Beyond those works, Sallis penned a trilogy of novels about a different gumshoe, Tennessee’s John Turner, beginning with Cypress Grove (2003). Among his other books are Death Will Have Your Eyes (1997), Others of My Kind (2013), and Sarah Jane (2019). He remembered, too, for his biography Chester Himes: A Life, published in 2001.

Soho Press reports that “No funeral is planned. If you feel moved to donate in [Sallis’] memory, the family suggests the ACLU or the Humane Society as worthy charities that Jim valued. He was preceded in death by his parents, his brother (the philosopher John Sallis), and his son, Dylan. He is survived by his wife of 35 years, Karyn.”

World’s Edge, Sallis’ “mosaic novel” comprising five linked science-fiction stories, is still due out out from Soho Press next month. And the James Sallis Web site says it will continue to “be maintained as Jim’s work continues to be published, shared, and appreciated.”

(Hat tip to Mystery Fanfare.)

READ MORE: “James Sallis, 1944–2026,” by Elizabeth Foxwell (The Bunburyist); “James Sallis—1944-2026: Blues No More,” by John Harvey (Some Days You Do …); “James Sallis: A Remembrance,” by Adrian McKinty (CrimeReads); “James Sallis, 81, Dies; Novelist Whose ‘Drive’ Became a Hit Movie,” by Alex Traub (The New York Times).