During the four days I spent in San Francisco this last February, attending the latest Left Coast Crime convention, more than one fellow attendee came up to me to say how much they like my periodic, multiple-subject “Bullet Points” posts. While that gladdened my heart, it also reminded me of how long it had been since I’d produced such a compilation. I think the last one went up in October, which in these tense, turbulent times seems like a lifetime ago.
With a few free hours on my hands today, I went trolling through my computer bookmarks to find new subjects worth sharing.
• Well, what do you know:In Reference to Murderreports that the American author who, since 2013, has published best-selling psychological thrillers (such as The Housemaid, The Tenant, and The Divorce) under the name Freida McFadden has finally revealed her true identity. She is “in reality Sara Cohen, a doctor who treats brain disorders and only created the pseudonym because she didn’t want her writing career to conflict with her hospital job. ‘My whole goal was to keep it a secret until I was [ready to] step back from my doctor job, so it wouldn’t be like everyone I work with suddenly knew and it compromised my ability to do my job,’ McFadden says. In late 2023, she stopped working full-time.” But even her nom de plume is rooted in the medical profession; Cohen told the BBC that “She chose the name Freida as a medical in-joke—after a hospital training registry, the Fellowship and Residency Electronic Interactive Database.”
• April 1 marked the 28th anniversary of Kevin Burton Smith launching that essential online crime-fiction resource, The Thrilling Detective Web Site. His page went live on that date back in 1998! Congratulations to my old friend Kevin for sticking with this project for so long and growing it so expertly.
• Speaking of milestones, it was half a century ago this year—on September 22, 1976, to be precise—that the hour-long “jiggle TV” crime drama Charlie’s Angels debuted on America’s ABC network. In early commemoration of that fact, three of the show’s stars, Kate Jackson, Jaclyn Smith, and Cheryl Ladd, “reunited” earlier this week at PaleyFest in Los Angeles (“an annual television festival hosted by the Paley Center”). According to the Associated Press, “They were greeted with a standing ovation and whoops and cheers from an audience at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood.” Smith, now 80 years old (!), may have delivered the occasion’s best line: “I knew the show was different, special and unique. Three women chasing danger instead of getting rescued.” Charlie’s Angels aired for five seasons and was a pop-culture hit (despite talk of it undermining feminism), but underwent several cast changes over time, the first of those coming in 1977, when Fawcett left amid a contract dispute. She was replaced by Ladd.
• London’s two-day Capital Crime festival has issued its full program of 2026 events, which are set to kick off at the Leonardo Royal Hotel on Thursday, June 18. Among the headliners will be authors Elly Griffiths, Jeffrey Archer, Jane Harper, and Sophie Hannah, with Irish comedian and actor Ardal O’Hanlon (formerly of Death in Paradise) also participating. An overview of events can be found here. Winners of the annual Fingerprint Awards, celebrating the foremost crime and thriller fiction in more than half a dozen categories, will be honored in a special ceremony on the 18th.
• Erle Stanley Gardner’sThe D.A. Calls It Murder (1937)—the first of his legal mysteries starring small-town California district attorney Douglas Selby—was reissued last summer through Otto Penzler’s American Mystery Classics imprint. What I hadn’t realized until recently, however, was that publisher Open Road Integrated Media has also returned to print seven of the eight other entries in the Selby line. Which is good news! As I wrote in CrimeReads, “While those stories never enjoyed the same level of reader enthusiasm Perry Mason’s escapades did, and were neither as humorous nor as briskly paced as another series Gardner launched in 1939, built around mismatched L.A. gumshoes Bertha Cool and Donald Lam, they certainly offered plenty in the way of knotty plots, ill-starred suspects, and razzle-dazzle legal shenanigans.” Click here for more about those paperbacks.
• By the way, the remaining Selby novel, 1948’s The D.A. Takes a Chance, was last reprinted in 2014 by The Murder Room, an imprint of UK publisher Orion. Although The Murder Room is evidently now defunct, Open Road hasn’t yet added it to its catalogue. Maybe soon?
• There seems be no end of television-related news lately, beginning with word that the ITV and BritBox “reimaginging” of Dalziel and Pascoe has begun filming in the North of England. This sex-switching update of characters born in novels by Reginald Hill—and made additionally famous in a 1996-2007 BBC One series—finds grumpy, intransigent, and very politically incorrect Detective Superintendent Andy Dalziel (played in the original show by Warren Clarke) being transformed into Detective Inspector Andrea Dalziel and portrayed by Kerry Godliman, while Dalziel’s more forward-thinking police partner, DI Peter Pascoe (Colin Buchanan) becomes Detective Sergeant Paige Pascoe, brought to the small screen by Nina Singh. The opening season of this new crime drama will comprise six episodes; there’s no official debut date at present. Jon Farrar, executive vice president of programming, BritBox, is quoted in Variety as assuring fans of the earlier production that this one will hew to familiar themes: “Dalziel and Pascoe has always been about friction, intellect, and the uneasy bond of opposites, forged in pursuit of truth. Dalziel and Pascoe’s chemistry, wit, and moral clarity perfectly complement this richly layered mystery. It’s timeless crime storytelling that not only honours but sharpens its legacy.” I look forward to judging for myself.
• For all of those people who, like me, watched and enjoyed the slow-burning “cat-and-mouse thriller” The Game, and thought its ambiguous but not unsatisfying ending offered zero chance of a sequel … well, what the hell do we know? Even the Web site TVGuide.co.uk concedes this is “rather surprising” news; Channel 5 thrillers are usually one-season wonders, “self-contained nuggets of deliciously daft drama” (e.g., The Au Pair and The Rumour). But The Game, which had its UK airing in 2025 and found Jason Watkins (McDonald & Dodds) playing Huw Miller, a recently retired police detective who becomes convinced that his suave new neighbor, Patrick Harbottle (Grantchester’s Robson Green), is the repeat killer he’s long pursued, “left viewers wanting more,” says TVGuide.co.uk. At the close of Series 1, Patrick was being arrested and Huw was seriously injured. The follow-up is set a year on. It sees Huw having survived and thinking himself free of the psychological grip Patrick held him in. “Retreating with his wife, Alice (Sunetra Sarker), to an isolated house by the sea,” The Killing Timesexplains, “Huw is determined to rebuild a quiet life, far from the violence that nearly destroyed them. But peace, he soon realises, is an illusion.” Channel 5 says The Game will return in 2027.
• Robson Green is much in demand.The Killing Timesreports that, with his work done on Grantchester’s 11th and final season (set to premiere on PBS Masterpiececome June 14), he will assume one of the leading roles in an eight-part BBC serial, The Northumbria Mysteries.
Set against the sweeping Northumberland coastline and its surrounding market towns, the series centres on an unlikely crime-solving duo.
Green will star as Joe Ruby, a jack-of-all-trades whose life has been shaped by mistakes, regrets and missed opportunities, alongside Oxford-educated DI Rose O’Connell (casting to be announced), a rarefied intellectual, a deep thinker with a brilliant mind and an ice-cool disposition. In a classic odd-couple pairing, Joe and Rose combine their talents as they frustrate, confound, and ultimately surprise one another while unravelling a series of compelling crime mysteries.
• Something I should have mentioned long ago: HBO-TV has ordered an eight-episode drama based on Adrian McKinty’s best-selling 2019 child-abduction novel, The Chain. Behind this project is Damon Lindelof, who previously gave us Lost and The Leftovers, and was once a writer on Nash Bridges and Crossing Jordan. As The Wraprecalls, Irish author McKinty’s chilling tale “follows Rachel, a divorcée who is undergoing treatment for cancer, who gets a call that her daughter, Kylie, has been kidnapped and is now part of The Chain. To get Kylie back, she must kidnap another child after paying a ransom. Kylie will be released when the parents of the child Rachel has kidnapped take yet another child and continue the chain.” The Wrap notes, however, that “Lindelof is said to be expanding the mythology of McKinty’s award-winning thriller.”
• Blogger Lou Armagno points me toward a piece in Variety that’s likely to delight fans of Earl Derr Biggers’ renowned Charlie Chan. It says actor Tzi Ma (Mulan, Kung Fu) will executive produce and headline a possible new Canadian Chan TV series reimagining Biggers’ Chinese-American Honolulu policeman as a Hong Kong immigrant to Vancouver, British Columbia, “who, after retiring from the Vancouver police department in frustration, quietly launches a private investigation agency, taking on cases for the city’s overlooked and forgotten.”
• Meanwhile, Stranger Things’ Maya Hawkehas signed up to play a criminal investigator in Netflix’s adaptation of Liz Moore’s 2024 hit novel, The God of the Woods. … Actor-writer Stephen Fry will star as a quirky but brilliant former MI6 agent in a forthcoming Fox-TV show called The Interrogator. … See-Saw films, the production company behind Slow Horses, has acquired the rights to develop a fresh TV series from Jonathan Gash’s novels about a British antiques dealer-cum-sleuth known only as Lovejoy—books that were already the source material for a 1986-1984 BBC1 comedy-drama featuring Ian McShane. … Filming is underway on the sophomore season of Lynley, based on Elizabeth George’s Inspector Lynley yarns. … And Murder, She Wrote, a Universal Pictures film inspired by the 1984-1996 CBS-TV series starring Angela Lansbury as a mystery writer and amateur crime-solver, is slated to reach theaters just in time for Christmas, 2027. Jamie Lee Curtis will play Fletcher in this version.
• My other blog, Killer Covers, returns from a too-long hiatus with proof that there are simply too many crime, mystery, and thriller novels fronted by silhouettes of people in windows.
• We still await any information regarding the next James Bond feature film (now under the control of Amazon). But in the meantime, we can look forward to a new Bond novel for adults. Titled King Zero, it’s by Charlie Higson, the author of a half a dozen Young Bond yarns, as well as the 2023 007 adventure, On His Majesty’s Secret Service. Shotsmag Confidential provides this plot précis:
Beginning with the murder of an agent in Saudi Arabia by a weapon never before seen by the Secret Service and spanning the globe in an epic race against time to avert global catastrophe, the novel brings the literary Bond squarely into the twenty-first century, where the old world that made him is crumbling and a terrifying new order emerges while a dangerous villain—the most distinctive since Goldfinger –moves in the shadows. Higson explores themes of power, technology, and international tensions over resources in an extraordinarily timely story.
UK publisher Michael Joseph has promised to deliver King Zero to bookshops on the other side of the pond by September 24.
• Wow, a Kickstarter campaign to create action figures based on monster-hunting reporter Carl Kolchak and other characters featured in two 1970s teleflicks (The Night Stalker and The Night Strangler) and a subsequent TV series collected way more money than was sought! I guess old Carl hasn’t been forgotten, after all.
• Finally, this CrimeReads piece by writer and artist Frank Ladd, comparing the oeuvres of American private eye novelists Ross Macdonald and Raymond Chandler, deserves attention from fans of both. He concludes that “In a way, Macdonald is writing moral ghost stories. The present is haunted by the past, and the novel becomes a kind of exorcism. Chandler is writing moral fever dreams, hallucinatory journeys through corruption. There is no past worth redeeming.”
• Today marks 19 years since The Rap Sheet was launched as a blog separate from January Magazine. I’m not really in the mood to make a big deal of this occasion; I would prefer to reserve that for our 20th-anniversary celebration. But let me share a couple of statistics. November of last year saw the publication of our 9,000th post. Over the five succeeding months, we’ve put up another 124. And as of today, The Rap Sheet has registered 10,084,287 pageviews. Thank you to everyone who has found value in this site over the years!
• In Reference to Murderbrings word that “Netflix has ordered a series adaptation of S.A. Cosby’s [2023] novel, All the Sinners Bleed, from the Obamas’ Higher Ground and Amblin Television. The story follows the first Black sheriff in a small Bible Belt county, haunted by his past in the FBI and his devout mother’s untimely death, as he must lead the hunt for a serial killer who has quietly been preying on Black communities in Southern Virginia for years in the name of God. Joe Robert Cole (Black Panther) will adapt and serve as showrunner for the nine-part series.” Sinnersplaced on many best books of 2023 lists.
• Prolific novelist James Reasonergives a hearty thumbs-up to the new, 12th issue of Men’s Adventure Quarterly, which is devoted to fictional private eyes. The contents include vintage tales by Michael Avallone, Frank Kane, Walter Kaylin, and G.G. Fickling (represented in these pages by “The Red Hairing,” the only Honey West short story); Reasoner’s own essay about detectives in Western fiction; a survey of new Sherlock Holmes pastiches by Paul Bishop; “plus a feature on early Sixties TV series 77 Sunset Strip and Hawaian Eye, both of which were favorites of mine, especially 77 Sunset Strip,” writes Reasoner. “I never missed an episode back in those days. If you’re the right age, you can hear the show’s theme song in your head right now, can’t you? I miss the Sixties just thinking about all this stuff!” I just bought a copy of the magazine here.
• In CrimeReads, Los Angeles lawyer Bruce Riordan celebrates Ross Macdonald’s 1958 crime novel, The Doomsters, as “a turning point in the history of crime fiction.” He adds: “After six well written, but not quite original, Lew Archer novels, Ross Macdonald was searching for something original. With The Doomsters, he broke away from the influence of Raymond Chandler, the writer who cast a giant shadow over Macdonald and American crime fiction.”
• This will force me to locate and replace many Rap Sheet links, especially in our regular “Revue of Reviewers” posts: The excellent free review site New York Journal of Books, which debuted in 2010 “to fill the gap left by the newspaper book review sections that have folded in recent years,” just recently folded itself. Publishers Weeklyquotes founder Ted Sturtz as blaming Donald Trump’s tariff chaos for his site’s failure. He observes that NYJB “relied on Amazon commissions and Google Adsense for revenue … The wide-ranging tariffs imposed by the Trump administration last month, he explained, ‘transform[ed] consumer behavior so that these revenues entirely collapsed. This was so quick and breathtaking that we in a very short ... time saw our revenues sink from a surplus to a fraction of our costs.’” He stresses: “Our actual undoing was not publishing industry conditions. It was the current tariff war.”
• The Rap Sheet dumped Twitter/Xback in January. Now the Chicago Review of Books is doing the same, “because why be part of a crypto-neo-Nazi-hellsphere when we could, just, well, not.” Like this blog, CHIRB has moved its social media activities to Bluesky.
• The British Crime Writers’ Association has announced that it has two new sponsors for its annual Dagger awards.
• And after much hemming and hawing, I have finally made arrangements to attend Bouchercon 2025 in New Orleans. I haven’t been to the Big Easy since the last Bouchercon held there, back in 2016. This time, my good friend and fellow Rap Sheeter Ali Karim will serve as International Fan Guest of Honor, so I could hardly excuse myself from the festivities. See a list of other attendees here.
Forgive me, dear readers, for I have sinned. It’s been three and a half months since my last “Bullet Points” news wrap-up. Which doesn’t mean I’ve been sitting on my ass in the meantime, doing nothing. In fact, the closing months of 2023 were some of last year’s busiest here at The Rap Sheet. But they were crammed full of “best books of the year” posts, leaving me little time to concentrate on compiling miscellaneous items related to this genre. Which is too bad, because I’ve always enjoyed producing pieces of this sort.
Long before The Rap Sheet existed, way back in my college days, I penned (actually, typed—on a manual typewriter!) a column of information and opinion for the school’s weekly newspaper called “In the Fast Lane.” Since that time, I’ve launched similar wrap-ups for the assorted publications at which I found employment (most of which no longer exist), from Oregon Magazine’s “Grapevine” and Monthly Detroit’s “Lip Service” to “Native Intelligence” (Washington Magazine) and a media-news compendium known as “Cuff Notes” (Seattle Weekly). While my journalism career has allowed me ample opportunities to compose longer, more in-depth pieces, I’ve never lost my taste for gathering together tidings of greater and lesser import, all for the education and entertainment of the reading public.
In that sense, “Bullet Points” might be thought of as the latest incarnation of an enterprise I’ve engaged in since I was too young to order bar service. Herewith, my first wrap-up of 2024.
• At almost 900 pages in length, there’s no question that The FBI Dossier: A Guide to the Classic TV Series Produced by Quinn Martin and Starring Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. (Black Pawn Press), by Bill Sullivan with Ed Robertson, is the definitive resource for fans of ABC’s The FBI (1965-1974). It may also provide a supposedly large segment of modern society with an introduction—or reintroduction—to that hour-long law-enforcement procedural. Despite the broadcast having scored top-10 or at least top-20 ratings during most of its nine years on the boob-tube, Sullivan and Robertson quote one source as calling it “the most successful long-running show that no one seems to remember.” And they appear determined, with this paperback doorstopper, to overcome that astonishing cultural amnesia. The FBI Dossier isn’t merely an episode guide, though you can certainly find in its pages detailed material about all 241 installments of the series. It boasts, as well, a brief history of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation; listings of the various performers who trod across the program’s sets (Ed Asner, Suzanne Pleshette, Henry Darrow, Lindsay Wagner, Roy Thinnes, etc.); promotional materials and advertisements for The FBI; and a veritable flood of intriguing info about the show’s regulars (notably the friendship between Zimbalist and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover), its creators (Quinn Martin and Philip Saltzman), and its place in the history of American television. I was far from a loyal follower of The FBI, yet I found myself sitting for significant stretches of time recently with this book propped open on my lap, jumping randomly between its sections, enthralled throughout by the knowledge and insights its authors have to share. An index at the back might have made finding such particulars easier, but its lack isn’t a terrible knock on the product as a whole. As It’s About TV! blogger Mitchell Hadley wrote in his own critique of this work, “Don’t let the book’s size be daunting; if you’re a fan of The FBI—either from its original run or through the DVDs that Warner [Bros.] issued in the last few years—The FBI Dossier is a must-have. If you’re unfamiliar with the series, or have seen just a few episodes, you’ll find yourself wanting to read, and watch, more.”
• Remember A.J. Finn, otherwise known by his real moniker, Daniel Mallory? His 2018 psychological thriller, The Woman in the Window, became an international best-seller and was adapted into a 2021 film of that same name. But as The Real Book Spy’s Ryan Steck recalls, the book editor-turned-novelist’s skyrocketing renown took a severe hit in 2019, when The New Yorkerpublished a “scathing and surgical takedown of Mallory/Finn, taking nearly 12,000 words to paint a full picture of Mallory’s antics—which range from ‘borrowing story ideas’ to lying about having brain cancer to lying about relatives dying to lying about his own background and education (specifically that he had a master’s degree from Oxford; he, apparently, does not) to lying about his past work history.” Only now, five years after The Woman in the Window debuted, does Finn have a second novel in the offing: End of Story, due out from William Morrow on February 20. Bookpagesays that its story, “billed as “part Knives Out, part Agatha Christie, … centers on mystery novelist Sebastian Trapp, who invites Nicky Hunter, an expert on detective fiction, to his luxurious home to help draft his memoirs. But while there, Nicky becomes obsessed with solving the mysterious disappearance of Sebastian’s first wife and son.”
• Next Wednesday, February 14, will be Valentine’s Day. In anticipation of that, The Book Decoder has selected “10 Gripping Mystery Novels Where Romance Takes a Dark Turn.” And yes, before you ask, Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl is included.
• U.S. publisher Soho Press is introducing a new horror-fiction imprint called Hell’s Hundred. “Named after the once bleak, now chic New York City neighborhood of SoHo—formerly known as ‘hell’s hundred acres’ for its grim industrial facades and deadly fires—Hell’s Hundred provides fertile ground for new nightmares to take root,” explains the imprint’s inaugral catalogue. Publishers Weekly adds: “The first two books from Hell’s Hundred will debut this summer. First up is youthjuice, by former beauty editor E.K. Sathue [the pseudonym of Erin Mayer], which Soho associate editor Taz Urnov bills as ‘a horror satire about the beauty industry that really puts the gore in gorgeous,’ slated for June. And in August, Soho Crime list stalwart Stuart Neville, whose noir mysteries often incorporate supernatural elements and regularly border on horror proper, will jump to the Hell’s Hundred list with Blood Like Mine, his tenth book for the publisher. Soho calls the novel ‘a chilling monster story about a mother and daughter on the run across the Southwest’ and ‘as much an inauguration of Hell’s Hundred as it is a new chapter in Neville’s oeuvre.’”
• Deadline notes that, 30 years after his initial appearance on NBC-TV’s Law & Order, actor Sam Waterston is leaving the show. “Waterston’s final appearance as District Attorney Jack McCoy, whom he played across more than 400 episodes, will air on February 22,” we’re told. “As Waterston exits, the cast will be joined by Tony Goldwyn (Oppenheimer, Scandal), who will portray the new district attorney. Goldwyn has previously starred in the Law & Order spinoff Criminal Intent as Frank Goren, a character who died in the series. Goldwyn will be playing a new character on Law & Order.”
• Editor George Easter is out with the first issue of Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine for 2024. Roughly the opening quarter of this 88-page PDF-only quarterly is devoted to “best crime fiction of 2023” lists, gleaned from DP’s own critics as well as those from assorted other sources (including The Rap Sheet). In addition, there are myriad reviews of new and soon-to-be-published fiction released on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as in Australia (thanks to contributor Jeff Popple), and a selection of the “most anticipated mysteries of 2024.” Robin Agnew’s “Historical Emporium” column of historical mysteries is always a DP go-to for me, and Easter introduces here “Ripster’s Revivals,” a new feature by Mike Ripley (also to be found in Shots) that focuses on crime novels and thrillers he’s been intending to read for years, but never quite got around to. Finally, Easter’s “Editor’s Message” contains tidbits of news about the health of people long involved with the magazine, including L.J. Roberts, who he says “has unfortunately not rebounded from her most recent health crisis and will have to discontinue her review column for the foreseeable future.” Click here to subscribe to Deadly Pleasures for $10 per annum.
• After many years as a journalist, I am naturally drawn to books and movies in which reporters play prominent roles. A few years back I wrote a CrimeReads piece about news gatherers involved in the solving of fictional mysteries. More recently, and for the same online publication, fellow ink-stained wretch Keith Roysdon dwelt upon the intersection of films and newspapers, while in an earlier piece author Tara Lush celebrated the appearance of reporters in cozy whodunits. It all makes me want to break out one of my old reporter’s notebooks and set to questioning somebody about something!
• Brydon Coverdale, a journalist based in Melbourne, has won the 2024 Louie Award, given by the Australian Crime Writers Association for best fast fiction (stories of up to 500 words in length). His entry, “Good Old Collingwood Forever,” followed this year’s theme of “artificial intelligence.” The ACWA also commended two other writers for their submissions: Catherine Craig for “Abe Taught Me,” and Brent Towns for “She Made Me.” According to a press notice, “The winner receives $500 cash and the two highly commended writers receive $125 each.” You will find links to all of their stories here.
• The Essential Chester Himes, a new Everyman’s Library collection of that author’s four best-remembered Grave Digger Jones/Coffin Ed Johnson novels, is prominently on my birthday wishlist this spring. So I was delighted to read, in advance, this adaptation of S.A. Cosby’s introduction to said work in The New York Times. “If Chandler is considered the poet of crime fiction and Hammett its great journalist,” Cosby opines, “then Himes is the songwriter of the downtrodden. His stories sing with a fire and light that comes from a simmering sense of loss. A loss of respect, of humanity, of honor.”
(Left) Toby Jones stars in Mr. Bates vs. the Post Office on PBS.
• My TV viewing habits have been all over the map so far in 2024. I really enjoyed watching former Happy Valley star Sarah Lancashire’s warm-hearted and multi-layered portrayal of cookbook author/cooking show chef Julia Child in HBO Max’s Julia, only to learn that series was cancelled after two seasons on the air. I’m four episodes into Monsieur Spade, which casts Clive Owen as Dashiell Hammett’s former San Francisco gumshoe, Sam Spade, in a complex yarn about slain nuns and a much-sought-after but mysterious boy. Owen is entirely credible as Spade, and the program’s periodic references to The Maltese Falcon just make me smile. Hulu-TV’s Death and Other Details, about a locked-room murder on board a luxury cruise line, I find far less captivating—and more than moderately confusing—but will try to stick with it through all 10 of its weekly installments. And now I’m looking forward to the U.S. presentation of Mr. Bates vs. the Post Office, set to premiere under PBS’ Masterpiece umbrella on Sunday, April 7. This four-part drama, based on a true story and aired originally on UK screens in January, isn’t crime fiction, but it is certainly rooted in wrongdoings. Here’s a plot synopsis supplied by PBS:
When money started to seemingly disappear from its local branches, [Great Britain’s] government-owned Post Office wrongly blamed their own managers for its apparent loss. For more than a decade, hundreds were accused of theft and fraud, and many were even sent to prison—leaving lives, marriages, and reputations in ruins. But the issue was actually caused by errors in the Post Office’s own computer system—something it denied for years. Revealing a shocking David vs. Goliath fight for justice, this is the story of the decent ordinary people who were relentlessly pursued, coerced and controlled by a powerful corporation, and their ongoing battle, against seemingly insurmountable odds, to right so many horrific wrongs.
Toby Jones (The Witness for the Prosecution, The Pale Blue Eye) leads the ensemble cast of this series, which The Guardiancalled “a devastating tale of a national scandal.”
• Oh, and I still haven’t seen all of Jodi Foster’s True Detective: Night Country. I tuned in to the first of its half-dozen episodes on HBO back in mid-January, but found the plot—with its supernatural elements—more than a tad confounding. Maybe I simply wasn’t in the right mood, or my workday had left me unable to relax and soak it in. Whatever the case might have been, I determined to wait until the final installment was broadcast on February 18, and then binge-watch this fourth season of True Detective over a week. I’ve done that on occasions when a show’s story is so involved that viewing one episode every seven days allows me time to forget plot nuances.
• I came to Danish writer Jussi Adler-Olsen’s fiction fairly early, reviewing his first Department Q mystery, One Last Chance, for Kirkus Reviews back in 2011. Now The Killing Times brings word that Netflix is preparing a small-screen series based on those books, actually adapted from a succession of earlier Danish films and featuring British actor Matthew Goode (Downtown Abbey, The Crown) as homicide cop Carl Morck. This new show will be set in Edinburgh, rather than Copenhagen. The Killing Times offers the following summary of its storyline: “After a violent incident turns Morck’s life upside down, the emotionally scarred detective is charged with setting up a cold case unit, Department Q, upon his return to work. At first, the disillusioned cop is happy to waste his days away, but his detective instincts are ultimately reawakened and his new department becomes a magnet for a crew of misfits and mavericks.” There is as yet no reliable estimation of a debut date for this program.
The BBC is keeping its Agatha Christie tradition alive by setting Towards Zero as its next adaptation of the great author’s work.
Following on from 2023’s limited series Murder Is Easy, the BBC has commissioned Mammoth Screen and Agatha Christie Limited to reimagine the writer’s 1944 novel.
Towards Zero unfolds around the murder of an elderly widow at a clifftop seaside house, linking a failed suicide attempt, a schoolgirl wrongfully accused of theft, and the romantic life of a famous tennis player.
• Neil Albert, author of theDave Garrett detective series, has spent much of the last few years writing an excellent blog about another crime-fictionist, the renowned Ross Macdonald. However, he has determined that his multi-post approach to analyzing each of Macdonald’s books hasn’t been paying off in readership stats. So he announced recently that he’s changing his approach. “I will write one post per book, briefly summarizing the plot without spoilers,” he says. “I will start again at the beginning, with The Dark Tunnel. The follow-up posts, released every five days, will be posts on specific subjects related to the book under discussion. No more chapter-by-chapter summaries; if you want to see those, they will remain available and are searchable. I expect to have two or three follow-up posts per book. … I hope the readership finds it more agreeable. Ross Macdonald deserves to be remembered one way or another.” Do check out Albert’s endeavors here when you get a free moment or two.
• The online platform Substack doesn’t draw a great deal of my attention, but I have become fond of one weekly offering there: “Secret Sleuths,” by British crime historian (and host of Murder by the Sea) Dr. Nell Darby. A source of fascination for those of us hungry for more unusual stories of crimes through time.
• R.I.P., Don Murray. The California-born actor, who earned an Oscar nomination for his performance in the 1956 film Bus Stop, and who starred on TV in The Outcasts (1968-1969) and Knots Landing (1979-1981), died on February 2at age 94. In addition to those better-known parts, Murray appeared in episodes of Amy Prentiss, Police Story, T.J. Hooker, Matlock, Murder, She Wrote, and Twin Peaks.
• It’s nice to see Christopher Huang’s second mystery, Unnatural Ends—one of my favorite books of 2023—selected by Cross-Examining Crime blogger Kate Jackson as her January “Book of the Month.” She observed recently that Unnatural Ends “is not an alibi-focused mystery, nor is it one in which lots of physical evidence is poured over for postmarks, fingerprints, or DNA. In that sense it reminds me of Five Little Pigs (1942) by Agatha Christie. It is a mystery of character and only by understanding the people involved and the past, will the truth emerge. You really get to know the characters, but it doesn’t drag as a book. I did anticipate the final solution, as it fits the characters perfectly, but I don’t think it was a cast-iron idea in my head—I did consider other possibilities as I went along. Given its character-driven nature, its dramatic secrets, and the engaging way the story is told, I think this would make for a great TV series.”
• Joe Peschi starred in a TV crime drama? Well, 1985’s Half Nelson was really more of a comedy-drama that found the pint-size Peschi portraying Rocky Nelson, described by Wikipedia as “a former New York City cop who moved to Beverly Hills, where he got a job at a private security service for the rich and famous, while attempting to make it as an actor. In addition to guarding celebrities, he also helps solve crimes.” Professional football players Bubba Smith and Dick Butkus, and singer-actor Dean Martin, helped fill out the cast of this show from producer Glen A. Larson. With such a lineup, you would have expected its run to be longer than six episodes. For the time being, you can watch the first episode of Half Nelson on YouTube.
• Shortly after I posted on this page about the 50th anniversary of the debut of Columbo as part of the NBC Mystery Movie “wheel series,” I was contacted by Jeffrey Marks, the publisher at Crippen & Landru, who told me his company has in the works a posthumous collection of short stories by the two creators of that landmark TV crime drama, William Link and Richard Levinson. (Link passed away in 2020, Levinson in 1987). “Shooting Script and Other Mysteries is the title,” states Marks, “and it will be published this fall. I’m guessing November at this time.” Levinson and Link, as you may already know, became friends when they attended the same junior high school in Philadelphia, and they went on to be writing partners for 43 years. In addition to creating TV series and scripting films, they penned short pieces of fiction. Back in 2010, Crippen & Landru released Link’s The Columbo Collection, which featured a dozen of his new yarns starring Los Angeles’ best-known rumpled police detective. During a contemporaneous interview, Link told me he had another 16 that hadn’t made the cut; so “if it’s successful, I’ve already got enough for a follow-up book.” None of those 16 will be found in Shooting Script, according to Marks, though he adds, “I do plan on asking the [Link] estate about these stories after we complete this book. The Columbo Collection was one of our most popular collections.”
• Over the last month, Max Allan Collins has been writing, for the Web site of independent publisher NeoText, a lavishly illustrated column called “A Life in Crime.” Together, those essays will constitute what he calls “a kind of literary memoir about my various book series.” The first entry looked back at Collins’ youthful introduction to mystery and crime fiction; the second at his Nolan books; the third at his durable Quarry series; the fourth at the history and development of his Nathan Heller saga; and number five—posted earlier this week—tackles what he says is “the story of how Ms. Tree came to be, and includes a fantastic array of Terry Beatty’s cover art.” There are still two more columns to come, the lot of them intended to help promote the official release, early next month, of Fancy Anders Goes to War: Who Killed Rosie the Riveter?, Collins’ first—of three—World War II-backdropped mystery novellas for NeoText (available in both e-book and print form), with artwork by Fay Dalton.
• Publishing imprint HarperFiction has named the victors in its Killing It Competition for Undiscovered Writers, which was launched back in January as a way “to find unpublished writers from Black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds.” Entrants were asked to submit the first 10,000 words of a crime, thriller, or suspense novel, plus a synopsis of their book running no more than 500 words in length. The judges ultimately chose three winners: information technology consultant Rama Varma, for a work-in-progress titled The Banana Leaf Murder; Stacey Thomas, a civil servant and staff reviewer at Bad Form Review, for The Revels; and BBC radio and TV producer Shabnam Grewal, for Secrets and Shame. “Each winner,” explains the blog Shotsmag Confidential, “will receive a comprehensive editorial report from a HarperFiction editor covering pace, characterisation, pitch and more, as well as three mentoring sessions.”
• Have you ever wanted to live in the Malloch Building, the Streamline Moderne-style apartment structure in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood made famous by the 1947 Humphrey Bogart/Lauren Bacall picture Dark Passage? Your chance may finally have arrived! (Hat tip to Up and Down These Mean Streets.)
• Not only does Hillary Clinton, former U.S. secretary of state and presidential candidate, have a new novel due out next month (State of Terror, co-authored with Louise Penny), but she and her daughter, Chelsea, have announced that one of their enterprises, Global Light Productions, “has optioned film and TV rights to Jacqueline Winspear’s Maisie Dobbs series.” Deadline reports that Hillary Clinton, “who has made no secret of her love of the mystery series throughout the years, featuring them on many of her reading lists,” recently broke this news to attendees at England’s Royal Television Society Cambridge Convention. “‘We’re also doing scripted projects so, for example, one of our favorite books that Chelsea and I have shared over the years is a book about a character called Maisie Dobbs, which is a series about a World War I field nurse who turns into a detective and we’ve just optioned it,’ Hillary Clinton said, adding how much she and Chelsea love the character and her journey during a time of ‘great social upheaval.’” Not surprisingly, there’s no word yet on when any Maisie Dobbs movie might actually reach theaters worldwide.
• Hoping that the COVID-19 pandemic will be at least more manageable a year from now, London’s Capital Crime Writing Festival has already begun selling tickets for its September 29-October 1, 2022, gathering. Plans are to hold next year’s festival in “a new, tented, venue in a central London park.” Organizers promise “a wide-ranging line-up of events focused on accessible, mainstream fiction loved by readers around the world, which entertain crime and thriller fans, readers and authors alike in the UK’s capital.” Tickets can be purchased here. Press materials say the celebrity guest lineup and further details will “be announced later this year.”
• Sri Lankan author Amanda Jayatissa has amassed an enviable amount of media attention for her brand-new debut novel, My Sweet Girl, described by one reviewer as a “darkly hilarious” thriller. Roughly put, the story concerns a young, borderline-alcoholic graphic designer, Paloma Evans, who insists she found her roommate, Arun, dead in their San Francisco apartment … yet there’s no corpse and no evidence that this roommate ever existed. Complicating the situation is that Arun had recently discovered a troubling secret from Paloma’s childhood as an orphan back in Sri Lanka, and was blackmailing her to stay quiet about it. Part of what’s brought such attention to this author’s work may be that Jayatissa has made herself widely available for interviews (at least via Zoom). Among the most entertaining such exchanges may come from the podcast Speaking of Mysteries, which recently found host Nancie Clare talking with the author about the gothic elements of her story, her personal experiences with orphanages, “white savior syndrome,” the difficulty she finds in writing “sensitive” scenes, her cookie business, and much more. Click here to listen in on their conversation.
(Above) Novelist Amanda Jayatissa
• Oh, and check out this list Jayatissa assembled, for CrimeReads, of six suspense thrillers set in South and East Asia. “Thrillers coming from South-East Asia are usually paced very differently,” she explains. “Rather than immediately diving into solving the crime, these thrillers take their time—giving the reader a slightly claustrophobic look at the killers themselves, their motivations, and the situations that have lead them there. More often than not, the reader is fully aware of who the killer is from the very beginning, but must instead piece together the rationalization for their crimes. The stakes are still high, but the suspense is often a slow burn, with a very high payoff.”
• From the “Fun Facts to Know and Tell” File: “It might be surprising for a John D MacDonald fan to learn,” writes Steve Scott in The Trap of Gold blog, “that Travis McGee’s 52-foot houseboat, The Busted Flush—which plays such a prominent role in so many of the 21 novels starring the author’s series character—has only been depicted by cover artists a handful of times. It was certainly surprising for me as I was researching this piece: I could have sworn I’d seen it more often. By my count I can find only four illustrations of the Flush on any of the various editions published in the United States prior to 1988, and I don’t think there have been any after that. All of the illustrations were inked by the great Robert McGinnis.”
After The Spy Who Came in from the Cold was published in 1963 it went on to become John le Carré’s most widely acclaimed book, winning several awards, being adapted for a Richard Burton-led feature film and becoming one of the most highly regarded novels of the cold war era.
A year earlier another spy book had been published in Britain: the English translation of a work by Willem Frederik Hermans, one of the greatest Dutch authors of the 20th century. The book, The Darkroom of Damocles, was an immediate success when it was published in the Netherlands, winning acclaim and also being adapted for film.
But while Le Carré admitted to being a fan of Hermans, and in particular of The Darkroom of Damocles, the feeling was far from mutual. According to an interview that has come to light on the eve of the British publication of another of the Dutch author’s books, Hermans regarded Le Carré as an inferior novelist and someone who had plagiarised his work.
• Was Agatha Christie’s biggest-selling novel, 1939’s And Then There Were None, also inspired by a previous and now largely forgotten tale? Perhaps, says crime-fiction historian Curtis Evans, who penned the introduction to a forthcoming Dean Street Press re-release of 1930’s The Invisible Host, by Gwen Bristow and Bruce Manning, husband-and-wife newspaper journalists in New Orleans. The Guardian’s Alison Flood notes that The Invisible Host “begins with eight guests invited to a penthouse by telegram, where they are then told over the radio that they will all soon be dead. ‘Do not doubt me, my friends; you shall all be dead before morning.’” Although Evans has conceded before that The Invisible Guest “lack[s] Christie's plausibility and ingenuity,” he tells Flood that the comparisons between these two venerable yarns are “not just a matter of similar elements being in play: the entire basic plot idea is the same …” Anna Hervé, the editorial director for literary estates at Christie’s publishing house, HarperCollins, remains unconvinced. “‘It’s always possible she heard something in passing,’ said Hervé. ‘There was a real fashion in the 1930s for locked-room mysteries, and The Invisible Host is a good example of one of those, but there is no evidence that Christie was aware of it. … The Invisible Host does have similarities,’ said Hervé, ‘but I don’t think anyone’s been able to find a connection. And I also think Christie being the person she was, if there had been a link she would have acknowledged it.” Judge the parallels for yourself; The Invisible Hostgoes on sale on both sides of the Atlantic on October 4.
• Another classic work given new life:A Pin to See the Peepshow, by F. (Fryniwyd) Tennyson Jesse (1888-1958), originally published in 1934, but scheduled to reach stores again in mid-October, courtesy of the British Library. As Elizabeth Foxwell explains in her blog, The Bunburyist, “The novel is based on the Thompson-Bywaters murder case of 1922-23. Jesse—the great-niece of Alfred, Lord Tennyson and a war correspondent, playwright, screenwriter, and novelist—was known for involvement in the series on notable British trialsas well as her works with female detective Solange Fontaine.” Amazon’s plot synopsis for Peepshow reads: “Julia Almond believes she is special and dreams of a more exciting and glamorous life away from the drab suburbia of her upbringing. Her work in a fashionable boutique in the West End gives her the personal freedom that she craves, but escape from her parental home into marriage soon leads to boredom and frustration. She begins a passionate affair with a younger man, which has deadly consequences. … Julia becomes trapped by her sex and class in a criminal justice system in which she has no control. Julia finds herself the victim of society’s expectations of lower-middle-class female behavior and incriminated by her own words. F. Tennyson Jesse creates a flawed, doomed heroine in a novel of creeping unease that continues to haunt long after the last page is turned.”
• Three recent CrimeReads articles I enjoyed:Neil Nyren’s tour through the fictionalized Sicily of Inspector Salvo Montalbano, on the occasion of Penguin releasing Andrea Camilleri’s 28th and final Montalbano yarn, Riccardino; Olivia Rutigliano’s delightful essay about the delightful 2007-2009 ABC black comedy series, Pushing Daisies; and novelist Julia Dahl’s reflections on how she learned to “use the questions I had about the people in the articles I wrote in my day job as a reporter to explore—in fiction—the issues of trauma and regret and love and justice. To explore, in a word, humanity.”
• Meanwhile, Dahl submits to an interview with the Los Angeles Review of Books that includes her explanation of how her new novel, The Missing Hours, became a standalone. As she relates:
The initial idea was always drawn from reporting I’d done at CBS, mostly about the Steubenville rape case in 2012, an awful case of this teenager who’d been raped at a party. There were all these details that made me think, “What would it be like to be that girl? What would it be like to be her family?” I had a contract for another Rebekah [Roberts] book so I started thinking about how Rebekah could be connected. But as I started writing, I realized that this is not a Rebekah story, that forcing Rebekah in didn’t make sense. Happily, my editor was supportive. When I realized that maybe I could just not write a Rebekah book, just write the story that I was interested in, that was cool and freeing. As much as I love Rebekah—I will probably write another book about her someday—I was ready to write about other people. It was fun and challenging because suddenly I didn’t have an anchor character who I knew so well.”
• It seems rather close to the end of 2021 to bother naming “Best Books of the Year (So Far)” now, yet here’s The Real Book Spy’s Ryan Steck doing just that. His 20 selections are all thrillers, of course. They include Daniel Silva’s The Cellist, T.J. Newman’s Falling, Jack Carr’s The Devil’s Hand, S.A. Cosby’s Razorblade Tears, Lisa Jewell’s The Night She Disappeared, and Connor Sullivan’s Sleeping Bear.
• Here’s another similar list, this one compiled by Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine’s Down Under correspondent, Jeff Popple, and highlighting U.S., British, and Australian titles. Among his choices of 2021’s foremost crime, thriller, and debut novels so far: Jane Casey’s The Killing Kind, William McIlvanney and Ian Rankin’s The Dark Remains, Simon Rowell’s The Long Game, Sarah Bailey’s The Housemate, Jack Grimwood’s Island Reich, and Margaret Hickey’s Cutters End. If you want to order any of the Aussie releases, try the UK-based sales site Book Depository.
• I was very grateful when editor Rick Ollerman invited me, at the end of 2016, to write a regular column for Down & Out: The Magazine, a new digest-size publication being launched by book publisher Down & Out. The first perfect-bound issue, containing works of short fiction as well as non-fiction, rolled out in late summer 2017, and expectations of a steady stream of sequels were high. However, only half a dozen subsequent numbers of Down & Out: The Magazine have been mailed away to subscribers since that time, the last of those arriving in December 2020. So erratic did the publishing schedule become, that I felt it valuable at one point to reassure readers the mag hadn’t gone out of business without their being aware. Nonetheless, its future seems far from certain. Publisher Eric Campbell assured me not long ago, “We haven’t shut it down … just on a pause right now.” Still, Ollerman doesn’t leave me hopeful when he recounts the multiple health problems (a broken wrist, an “unidentified flu,” a brain hemorrhage, and cancer) that have kept him away from his editor’s responsibilities, and have left the periodical in limbo. At last check, he was dealing with “normal chronic back and neck pain,” and learning to eat again after surgery and radiation treatment. There’s been talk of bringing a new editor in to revive Down & Out: The Magazine, but Ollerman has trouble predicting the results of such a move. “The original version was so much out of my little brain,” he says, “I imagine a new person’s product would be something very different. That’s an interesting thought, anyway.” Where all of this leads might be anybody’s guess.
• On Tuesday, October 5, Hallie Rubenhold, British social historian and author of the oustanding, award-winning 2019 non-fiction book The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper, will debut a 15-part podcast called Bad Women: the Ripper Retold. Available wherever you usually get your podcasts, Bad Women will tell the real story of the Ripper’s victims “and how they came to be in the path of a serial killer—completely overturning the Ripper story we’ve been told up until now.” Listen to a preview here.
• The podcast Shedunnit is back, with host Caroline Crampton looking at mystery-writing partnerships, such as that between Gordon Neil Stewart and Pamela Hansford Johnson (who, as “Nap Leonard,” produced Murder’s a Swine), and Cordelia Biddle and Steve Zettler, who concoct crossword mysteries under the pseudonym Nero Blanc.
• Author Neil Albert has been writing his Ross Macdonald Blog since late 2020, but only this month did he finally begin to tackle Macdonald’s The Moving Target, for which he created one of the 20th century’s finest fictional sleuths, Lew Archer. Remarks Albert:
Macdonald’s fifth book is a watershed event for two reasons. First, Macdonald begins to display a sense of his own voice. Second, he introduces [Los Angeles private eye] Lew Archer as a tool in developing that voice.
By 1949, the year of publication, he had four books under his belt. He has paid his dues by writing sensationalized potboilers, derivative tough-guy stories, and overambitious psychological thrillers. As [Canadian novelist and short-story author] Carol Shields said, all writers have a lot of bad material inside themselves and when they get through that, their true worth emerges. I will put it more kindly by saying that in The Moving Target, Ross Macdonald begins to find his voice.
At press time, Albert had posted five pieces about The Moving Target, a book I tackled as well in this 2019 article for CrimeReads.
• There must be something special awash in the zeitgeist, because Guy Savage chose Macdonald’s second Archer outing, The Drowning Pool, to review this week in His Futile Preoccupations …
• A promised six-part TV adaptation of Anthony Horowitz’s Magpie Murders appears to be coming along quite smartly, despite actor Timothy Spall’s decision this last spring to pull out of the production “due to a scheduling clash.” (He’s since been replaced in the role of detective Atticus Pünd by Tim McMullan.) According to Mystery Fanfare, the mini-series “wrapped production in London, Suffolk and Ireland last month.” That same blog features a trio of still photos from the project. There’s no trailer yet, nor a scheduled date when Magpie Murders might begin airing on PBS-TV’s Masterpiece and Britfox in the UK, but the release is expected sometime in 2022.
• The historical crime drama Endeavour, starring Shaun Evans and Roger Allam, isn’t likely to return to PBS-TV’s Masterpiece series in America until next year. However, its three-episode Series 8 is showing already in Great Britain. If you don’t mind spoilers, The Killing Times critiques Episode 1 here, and Episode 2 here. Chris Sullivan, of the blog Morse, Lewis and Endeavour, presents his own review of the opening entry in this latest—and last—run of Endeavourhere.
• True-crime fan Alyse Burnside tries to get to the bottom of some readers’ fondness for cozy mysteries in this piece for The Atlantic.
• Talk about coincidences! In the same fortnight that Mystery and Suspense posted author Glen Robins’ thoughtful piece about the use of martial arts in thrillers, Charlie Chan specialist Lou Armagno blogged about the once-frequent use of karate chops to subdue adversaries in films and on television. The karate chop, Armagno observed, “was the extent of violence you’d see in [vintage] shows like: Peter Gunn, The Chevy Mystery Show, Dragnet, 77 Sunset Strip, T.H.E. Cat, Danger Man, The Saint and I Spy. Of course there were shootings! But usually never much blood and normally ‘He’ll be all right, it’s just a flesh wound.’ And should a mortal wound be required by gun or knife, it usually went unseen. No blood, or just a dollop or so, then a quick double-over and fall down you’re dead. But the karate chop! You might get chopped two or three times in one show and still come out OK. … ‘Uhg, what hit me?’” Ah, the good ol’ days.
• Let’s have a show of hands: Who remembers Sammy Davis Jr. playing private investigator Larry Miller in the 1969 movie The Pigeon? I would’ve counted myself among the uninformed until the other day, when I happened across that 90-minute ABC Movie of the Week on YouTube. (Watch it here, while you can!) Scripted by Edward J. Lakso (The Mod Squad, Mission: Impossible, Charlie’s Angels) and Stanley Roberts (Mannix, Petrocelli, Police Woman), the teleflick “is great,” according to an IMDb review, “because Sammy … doesn’t take himself too seriously and the dialogue uses a number of clichés from the 60’s. Sammy is searching for a girl who doesn’t want to be found. I especially love the scenes between Sammy and Roy Glenn, the veteran actor who plays his dad, a police lieutenant.” Why Wikipedia doesn’t list The Pigeonamong Davis’ motion-picture and TV credits, but does include Poor Devil, an awful NBC comedy pilot from 1973, is really anybody’s guess.
• Speaking of forgotten crime-solvers, how about Valerie Bertinelli in the 1990 CBS-TV series Sydney? As Wikipedia recalls, that erstwhile One Day at a Time actress headlined as Sydney Kells, “the daughter of a now-deceased policeman, [who] brings her New York City detective agency (in which she is the only investigator) back to her hometown and her family.” Matthew Perry (later of Friends) held forth as Kells’ rookie-cop brother, while Craig Bierko portrayed an attorney “with whom she shares sexual chemistry.” This spring replacement series lasted only 13 episodes. The best thing about it may have been its opening theme, “Finish What Ya Started,” by Bertinelli’s then-hubby Eddie Van Halen. Clickety-clack right here to watch the main title sequence from Sydney, paired with the introduction to her 1993-1994 sitcom, Café Americain.
• One more YouTube discovery:The Blue Knight, a 1973 NBC mini-series starring William Holden, Lee Remick, Sam Elliott, and Joe Santos, and based on Joseph Wambaugh’s 1972 novel of that same title. It’s been many years since I saw this teleflick with Holden as William “Bumper” Morgan, a 20-year veteran of the Los Angeles Police Department—long enough that I didn’t even remember it was originally broadcast in one-hour segments over four consecutive nights. The production was popular enough to spawn a subsequent series, likewise called The Blue Knight (but on CBS, rather than NBC), starring George Kennedy as Morgan; it ran for two seasons, from 1975 to 1976.
• Oh alright, here’s another:Jigsaw, a 1968 film (“originally made for television,” says Wikipedia, “but shown first in theaters”)
starring Bradford Dillman, Harry Guardino, Hope Lange, Michael J. Pollard, and a young Susan Saint James. “After someone places sugar cubes laced with LSD in his cup of coffee,” the YouTube plot synopsis reads, “Jonathan Fields [Dillman] regains consciousness, only to find a woman drowned in his bathtub and flecks of blood on his hands and clothes.
Suffering from amnesia, Fields can't think of anyplace else to turn, so he hires Arthur Belding [Guardino], a private detective, to help him find out what
happened.” Jigsaw is a remake of 1965’s Mirage.
• Dexter: New Blood, the 10-episode revival of Michael C. Hall’s 2006-2013 drama, Dexter, is now expected to appear on Showtime come November 7. Wikipedia says this show will open “approximately ten years after the original series’ finale.” In the meanwhile, Hall’s Dexter Morgan “has moved to the fictional small town of Iron Lake, New York, hiding his identity under the name of Jimmy Lindsay, a local shopkeeper. He has developed a relationship with Angela Bishop, the town’s chief of police, and has suppressed his serial killing urges. A string of incidents around Iron Lake cause Dexter to fear that the ‘dark passenger’ within him will reveal itself.” The Killing Times offers a 90-second trailer for Dexter: New Blood, which incorporates a version of
Del Shannon’s 1961 hit song, “Runaway” (previously employed as the theme for the 1986-1988 NBC police drama Crime Story).
• Almost five years ago, NBC-TV optioned Ben H. Winters’ Edgar Award-winning 2012 science fiction/mystery novel, The Last Policeman, with hopes of creating a series from it. Nothing came of that deal. Now, reports Tor.com, writer-producer Kyle Killen (Awake, Mind Games) is working on a pilot for Fox-TV, based on the same book, the resulting series—to be retitled The Last Police—expected to debut as part of the 2021/2022 season. Deadline explains that this show will follow “a small-town police detective, who, as an asteroid races toward an apocalyptic collision with Earth, believes she’s been chosen to save humanity, while her cynical partner can’t decide what he’ll enjoy more: her delusional failure, or the end of the world itself.” In Winters’ “existential detective novel,” the protagonist was a young male police detective in New Hampshire, one Henry Palace. In 2012, the author suggested that the role go to Jim True-Frost (The Wire, Manifest); no word yet on who might headline Fox’s adaptation.
• This is splendid news, from
In Reference to Murder: “The new season of BritBox’s modern cozy mystery series, McDonald & Dodds, premieres on August 3rd. The series follows newly promoted DCI McDonald and veteran sergeant Dodds as they investigate complex mysteries with a web of clues that has everyone guessing who are the real victims and villains. Ahead of the new season, BritBox dropped a trailer, which you can view here.”
• Actress Jessica Walter, who died in March at age 80, has been nominated for a posthumous Emmy Award “for her voice-over work in FX/FXX’s animated comedy series Archer,” according to The Hollywood Reporter. “Walter voiced the toxic matriarch Malory Archer, the abrasive mother of H. Jon Benjamin’s Sterling Archer. She’s being recognized for her work in the sixth episode of the 11th season, ‘The Double Date.’” Should Walter secure this Emmy, it would be the second of her career; in 1975, she won Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited Series honors for her portrayal of San Francisco’s first female chief of detectives in the NBC Mystery Movie rotator Amy Prentiss.
• In the latest edition of her newsletter, The Crime Lady, author and New York Times crime-fiction columnist Sarah Weinman gives us a sneak peek of her latest true-crime book, Scoundrel: How a
Convicted Murderer Persuaded the Women Who Loved Him, the Conservative Establishment, and the Courts to Set Him Free. Due out in February 2022, it tells the bizarre story of Edgar Herbert Smith, who killed a 15-year-old New Jersey honor student in 1957, subsequently contested his case in the media—being given special support by conservative pundit William F. Buckley Jr.—and, after winning a retrial and release, kidnapped and tried to kill another woman, this time in California. “By the time Scoundrel is published next year,” Weinman explains, “more than seven years will have passed since I first began researching and reporting the project. I can’t wait to fill you all in on what that entailed, the voluminous trove of documents and letters I consulted across multiple archives, the people I spoke with, and the strange juxtaposition of criminal justice, conservative thought, and book publishing that connected the crimes and misdeeds of one man who fooled so many into looking past his worst instincts to see what was never really there.”
• The Southern California town of Agoura Hills has selected Lee Goldberg’s Lost Hills (2020), his first novel featuring Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department homicide detective Eve Ronin, as its One City One Book 2021 honoree. “That means,” says Goldberg in his blog, “the local libraries, schools, etc. will be encouraging everyone to read the book and to come to City Hall on Sept. 30th to see me in conversation, buy a copy of my book if they haven’t already … and get their copies signed. Past honorees include Michael Connelly and Dick Van Dyke.” Admission to Goldberg’s Thursday, September 30, appearance will be free, but space is limited and advance registration is required; click here after August 1 to find out more.
• A big change for Britain’s Crime Writers’ Association:
For the first time in its 68-year history, the prestigious Crime Writers’ Association will allow self-published authors to join its ranks. The move comes after the CWA consulted its members, who voted with an 84% majority in favour to accept self-published authors.
Maxim Jakubowski, Chair of the Crime Writers’ Association, said: “The founding mission of the CWA was to support, promote and celebrate the crime genre and its authors. In the past, we only accepted traditionally published authors into the CWA, as this was the best indicator of quality. The publishing landscape has changed in recent years, and self-publishing has become a route for professional writers, and indeed there are many trailblazers in this field. The time is right to update our membership criteria.”
The news release adds: “Self-published authors wishing to become a CWA member will need to demonstrate a level of professionalism through a simple-to-complete application form. This will be available on the CWA website
from 13 September, when the CWA will first accept applications.”
• It sounds as if this year’s Killer Nashville convention, expected to take place in Franklin, Tennessee, from August 19 to 22, is coming along right on schedule. Keynote speakers at this in-person event will be Walter Mosley, J.T. Ellison, and Lisa Black. More information is available here for anyone who would like to participate, but hasn’t yet registered. The full four-day registration will set you back $419.
• “Mystery Writers of America (MWA) is honoring the memory of its 2020 Grand Master, the late Barbara Neely, with a scholarship to new Black writers …,” writesMystery Scene magazine’s Oline Cogdill. “MWA will annually present two scholarships of $2,000 each. One scholarship will be for an aspiring Black writer who has yet to publish in the crime or mystery field, and another for Black authors who have already published in crime or mystery.” September 30, 2021, is the deadline for applications (available here); a winner will be declared “in the late fall.” Click here for more information.
• Like millions of other Americans, my wife and I have been watching Season 4 of Unforgotten, part of PBS-TV’s Masterpiece Mystery! summer schedule. There are three additional Sunday-night installments yet to come, but already, Crimespree Magazine’s Erin Mitchell has declared Unforgotten, which stars Nicola Walker and Sanjeev Bhaskar as London-based cold-case detectives, “the best show on television.” She continues: “Unforgotten is one of those rare shows that does not tell a story at its surface, doesn’t just lead us on a step-by-step procedural journey. The procedure is there, of course, but the subtlety of the remarkable performances addresses the characters’ motivation to allow us to experience the often painful journey though the case. In that way, the experience of watching it is more akin to reading a book, which is the highest praise I can give a TV show.” A 90-second introduction to Season 4 is embedded below.
• Regé-Jean Page, a popular alumnus of the Netflix series Bridgerton, is set to star as The Saint, aka Simon Templar, in a new film based around that Leslie Charteris-created, “Robin Hood-esque criminal and thief for hire.” Deadline says the forthcoming Paramount picture “will be a completely new take that reimagines the character and world around him.” Author-screenwriter Lee Goldberg, nephew of Saint authority Burl Barer (The Saint: A Complete History in Print, Radio, Television, and Film), opines on Facebook that Page “will make a great Saint, but I hope they don’t stray too far from what we all loved about Leslie Charteris’ books, the George Sanders movies, and the [1962-1969] Roger Moore TV series.”
• With the abundance of resources provided in The Rap Sheet’s right-hand-column blogroll, you can be excused for not noticing when a new site is added. But let me direct your attention to one in particular: The Ross Macdonald Blog. Composed by Neil Albert, author of the Dave Garrett series (The January Corpse, etc.), it’s turning the critical microscope on every one of Macdonald’s novels, in chronological order, beginning with his non-Lew Archer yarns. Albert—who calls Macdonald (aka Kenneth Millar) “one of the three greatest writers in the genre of the hardboiled private eye, along with Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler” (no argument from yours truly)—has been working on this site primarily since the end of last year, and has so far progressed to The Three Roads (1948), Macdonald’s fourth novel. Each book is being considered in detail, over a succession of postings, The Dark Tunnel (1944) and Trouble Follows Me (1946) having each generated 11 entries. (Hat tip to Kevin Burton Smith.)
• Nobody who reads this page regularly should be surprised to hear that I own the 30th-anniversary edition of Mark Dawidziak’s The Columbo Phile: A Casebook, a work originally published in 1989. But now comes word of Bonaventure Press’ Shooting Columbo: The Lives and Deaths of TV’s Rumpled Detective, due out this coming September and written by David Koenig. Although somewhat shorter than Dawidziak’s book (only 248 pages, compared with 410), Shooting Columbo promises behind-the-scenes intelligence about that iconic Peter Falk series, plus “a blow-by-blow account of the making of all 69 classic mysteries, from the first [figurative] pilot, Prescription: Murder, to the last special, Columbo Likes the Nightlife.” The question is, do I need Koenig’s book on my shelves, too?
• Caroline Crampton hosts the podcastShedunnit, but she’s also the author of a map and guide called Agatha Christie’s England, from London-based Herb Lester Associates, which years ago produced The Raymond Chandler Map of Los Angeles. Already out in England, and due for a September release in the States, Crampton’s publication focuses on “the real and fictional locations in the Queen of Crime’s canon,” as she writes in her e-mail newsletter. “There are dozens of places included, and for each I’ve researched why and how Christie wrote about them. I certainly felt like I gained a greater understanding of her work in the process of putting the guide together, and if you read it I hope you will feel the same.”
• From the “everything old is new again” department:TV Guide critic Matt Roush recently included this exchange in his blog:
Question: Will some forward-thinking Hollywood executive reboot the George Peppard vehicle Banacek? —Steve O.
Matt Roush: Would a reboot of a 1970s private-eye series really be forward-thinking? I loved the randomness of this suggestion, because there were so many higher-profile spokes of NBC’s “Mystery Movie” wheel: McCloud, McMillan and Wife, and, of course, Columbo. Seriously, though, because Banacek is lesser known, reviving a show and a hero that had a sense of humor about itself wouldn’t be the worst idea. In the bigger picture, I’d like to see a network try the “mystery wheel” format again, rotating its series on a weekly or monthly basis. Something like that could air year-round with fewer episodes per series, and that might be refreshing.
While I cringe a bit at Roush labeling Thomas Banacek a “private eye” (he was actually a Boston insurance investigator), I applaud his optimism on the matter of resuscitating television’s once-widespread “wheel series” format (about which I wrote last summer in CrimeReads). And Banacek—with its suave, totally immodest lead and supposedly impossible crimes—might, indeed, make for a fun reboot. But who do you think should fill Peppard’s loafers?
• Bay Area author-photographer Mark Coggins is out with Season 2 of his podcast, Riordan’s Desk. He launched this project in May 2020, at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, with a chapter-by-chapter reading of his seventh August Riordan private-eye novel, 2019’s The Dead Beat Scroll. Earlier this month, he packaged up the final installment of Season 2, a full reading (35 chapters in all) of his 2015 Riordan yarn, No Hard Feelings. And Coggins has already begun reading from Candy from Strangers (2006), his third Riordan mystery. Listen to the complete run of Riordan’s Desk by clicking here.
• Listen up, Bosch fans! “The Everybody Counts Podcast talks Bosch Season 7, Episode 5 and interviews Michael Connelly.”
• Charlie Chan authority Lou Armagnoinforms us that 92-year-old actor James Hong, who portrayed “Son No.1 to J. Carrol Naish’s Charlie Chan in The New Adventures of Charlie Chan [1957-1958], is to be honored next year with a star on Los Angeles’ Hollywood Walk of Fame. Hong, born in Minneapolis to Hong Kongese parents, and “the last living actor to star as a primary Chan character, either in film or television,” will be the third Chan cast member honored in this fashion; Keye Luke and the aforementioned J. Carrol Naish both won stars before him. Hong’s list of credits extends well beyond The New Adventures of Charlie Chan to include roles in everything from Richard Diamond, Private Eye and Hawaii Five-O to Kung Fu, Harry O, The Rockford Files, Switch, and the 1974 film Chinatown.
• From a patron of The Rap Sheet’s YouTube page: “I’m not making light of the condominium disaster in Florida, but every time a reporter who is covering that story says ‘Surfside,’ this song pops into my head.” Learn more about this other Surfside here.
• The blog maintained by History (formerly The History Channel) recently highlighted what it claims are “the most influential classic shows” from the 1950s, “TV’s “Golden Age.” In the category of crime (click
here, then scroll to the bottom of the page), it mentions Martin Kane, Private Eye (1949-1954), Man Against Crime (1949-1954), and Dragnet (1951-1959). But what about Naked City (1958-1959, 1960-1963), Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer (1958-1959), M Squad (1957-1960), Richard Diamond, Private Detective (1957-1960), Decoy (1957-1959), Have Gun—Will Travel (1957-1963), 77 Sunset Strip (1958-1964), Perry Mason (1957-1966), and Peter Gunn (1958-1961)? Today’s younger viewers may be unaware of this, but the ’50s brought us myriad TV detective shows that are still worth watching.
• Was this really a good idea? You may recall that Deadline reported last year, “James Patterson and Condé Nast are teaming to revive vintage crime fighter The Shadow in a series of books that will also aim to be adapted for the screen.” Hachette Book Group imprint Little, Brown will publish the original series … The Shadow [aka society gadabout Lamont Cranston], a signature New York vigilante, originated in the 1930s as a series of pulp novels by Walter B. Gibson. A popular radio drama based on the books featured the voice of Orson Welles. In 1994, Universal released a feature film adaptation starring Alec Baldwin.” Anyway, Patterson’s introductory entry in this new series, set in the late 21st century and simply titled The Shadow, came out on July 13, and was greeted with more than a modicum of skepticism. San Francisco tour guide and author Don Herron remarks, “I had thought about giving it a shot, and then I saw the cover [shown on the left]. The only thought I could process was Where the fuck is HIS HAT???”
• Dashiell Hammett’s first novel, Red Harvest (1929), has inspired a number of cinematic creations over the years, including the 1930 picture Roadhouse Nights and the 2005 neo-noir mystery Brick. But the book, which stars Hammett’s nameless San Francisco private eye, the Continental Op, has never been given a faithful adaptation. It did once come close, however, as a series of newspaper clippings in Davy Crockett’s Almanack of Mystery, Adventure, and the Wild West makes clear. In 1941, the Los Angeles Times carried word of Paramount Pictures decision not to remake its 1935 film based on Hammett’s fourth novel, The Glass Key, but to instead develop a script from Red Harvest. Brian Donlevy was slated to portray the Op, with Paulette Goddard and a young Alan Ladd helping to fill out the cast. Unfortunately, that film was first “postponed” and later abandoned. Hoping to boost Ladd’s Hollywood career, Paramount decided to remake The Glass Key after all. Donlevy was nominally the headliner, but Ladd was the real star of that production, while Veronica Lake replaced Goddard as its distaff attraction.
• Did author Hammett really break the window of a downtown department store in Miami, Florida, during a
four-day visit he made to that city in 1934? The Palm Beach Postrecalled the story late last year, but it may just be an urban legend.
• Talk about dropping the ball! I realized this week that, while I had reported on nominees for the 2021 Scribe Awards, I never announced the winners. In the category of greatest interested to crime-fiction readers—“General Original Novel and Adapted Novel”—Max Allan Collins and Mickey Spillane’s 12th Mike
Hammer novel, Masquerade for Murder (2020), lost out to a video-game-related adventure, Day Zero: Watchdogs Legion, by James Swallow and Josh Reynolds (Aconyte).
• Were I able to attend this year’s PulpFest, taking place in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, from August 19th through 22nd, I would definitely want to be in the audience for “popular culture scholar” Doug Ellis’ presentation, “The Weird Tales of Margaret Brundage.” “Initially disguising her gender by signing her work as M. Brundage, the artist redefined sensuality for the already scandalous pulp market,” observes the PulpFest Web site. “Her work was later targeted by New York Mayor LaGuardia’s 1938 decency campaign. … Margaret Brundage [1900-1976] created 66 covers for Weird Tales between 1932 and 1945, making her the most in-demand cover artist for the fantasy, horror, and science-fiction magazine. Only Virgil Finlay was a close rival.” Ellis’ remarks on Brundage are scheduled for Friday, August 20.
• The best interview I’ve heard with T.J. Newman, the former flight attendant and author of the new thriller Falling (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster), was conducted by Dave Davies on NPR’s Fresh Air program. You can listen to their whole conversation here.
• Powell’s Books, the Portland, Oregon, landmark heralded as “the world’s largest independent bookstore,” is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. As part of the celebration, it has assembled “a curated collection of 50 books from the past 50 years.” I’d be more enthusiastic about this list if—in addition to Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams, and Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future—it contained even one crime, mystery, or thriller novel. No such luck!
• Max Allan Collins mentions in his blog that the 13th Mike Hammer novel he’s “co-authored” with the late Mickey Spillane, is due out from Titan Books in 2022—75 years after the appearance of Spillane’s
first Hammer yarn, I, the Jury. This one will be titled Kill Me If You Can.
• There have been so many crime novels backdropped by San Francisco, that Paul French was bound to fail when he determined to collect, for CrimeReads, a representative sample of their diversity. Why, for instance, does he mention Stuart M. Kaminsky’s Poor Butterfly (2012)—the only Toby Peters mystery set in the Bay Area (most of them took place in L.A.)—or Charles Willeford’s one-off, Wild Wives (1956), but completely ignore the oeuvres of Colin Willcox, Stephen Greenleaf, Kelli Stanley, and Bill Pronzini? That said, French’s piece—parked here—is entertaining, and might give you some ideas of things to read as this summer season winds to an end.
• For broader exposure to fictional offenses set in and around San Francisco, consult Randal S. Brandt’s Golden Gate Mysteries wiki.
• And how much fun is this? Blogger Evan Lewis is showcasing the covers, contents pages, copyright information, and occasional lagniappes from every early edition of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. As he explains in this introductory post, “Some months ago, my old friend and fellow book collector Jim Rogers passed away, and left behind a complete run of EQMM from 1941 to 1959. Those mags have now passed into the care of another old friend, Mr. Larry Paschelke, and Larry agreed to let me scan the covers and share them with you here. (Jim, I have no doubt, would have done the same had I asked, but I didn't know he had them!)” Click here to catch up with Lewis’ project in progress.
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.
• April 1 marked the 28th anniversary of Kevin Burton Smith launching that essential online crime-fiction resource, The Thrilling Detective Web Site. His page went live on that date back in 1998! Congratulations to my old friend Kevin for sticking with this project for so long and growing it so expertly.
Channel 5 thrillers are usually one-season wonders, “self-contained nuggets of deliciously daft drama” (e.g., The Au Pair and The Rumour). But The Game, which had its UK airing in 2025 and found Jason Watkins (McDonald & Dodds) playing Huw Miller, a recently retired police detective who becomes convinced that his suave new neighbor, Patrick Harbottle (Grantchester’s Robson Green), is the repeat killer he’s long pursued, “left viewers wanting more,” says TVGuide.co.uk. At the close of Series 1, Patrick was being arrested and Huw was seriously injured. The follow-up is set a year on. It sees Huw having survived and thinking himself free of the psychological grip Patrick held him in. “Retreating with his wife, Alice (Sunetra Sarker), to an isolated house by the sea,” The Killing Times explains, “Huw is determined to rebuild a quiet life, far from the violence that nearly destroyed them. But peace, he soon realises, is an illusion.” Channel 5 says The Game will return in 2027.
