Bullet Points: World Cup Edition

• We’ve now entered the final round of voting in this year’s Goodreads Choice Awards competition. The original collection of 20 books vying for “Best Mystery & Thriller” honors has now been chopped in half, with the following candidates remaining:

— All Good People Here, by Ashley Flowers (Bantam)
— The It Girl, by Ruth Ware (Scout Press)
— Daisy Darker, by Alice Feeney (Flatiron)
— The Maid, by Nita Prose (Ballantine)
— Killers of a Certain Age, by Deanna Raybourn (Berkley)
— A Flicker in the Dark, by Stacy Willingham (Minotaur)
— Wrong Place, Wrong Time, by Gillian McAllister (Morrow)
— The Paris Apartment, by Lucy Foley (Morrow)
— The Book of Cold Cases, by Simone St. James (Berkley)
— The Bullet That Missed, by Richard Osman (Pamela Dorman/Viking)

Click here to select your favorite from among those, but tarry not—voting in this round will end on December 4, with winners in this and other categories to be announced on Thursday, December 8.

• Just when you thought you had heard the last of Lisbeth Salander, she’s back. The antisocial and troubled computer hacker, who made her initial appearance in Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2007) and was last spotted in David Lagercrantz’s third series continuation novel, The Girl Who Lived Twice (2019), returned earlier this month in Swedish author Karin Smirnoff’s Havsörnens Skrik, a thriller that’s set to be published in English next August 29 as The Girl in the Eagle’s Talons. The Guardian reported recently that “Smirnoff’s book moves Salander’s story from Stockholm to northern Sweden, which [the yarn’s] UK publisher MacLehose Press said was ‘an area vast and beautiful, but also dealing with economic and social problems and the effects of climate change and environmental exploitation,’” American readers should be pleased to learn that The Girl in the Eagle’s Talons will be brought out simultaneously on this side of the Atlantic under the Alfred A. Knopf imprint.

• English author Stuart Turton has won Germany’s 2022 Viktor Crime Award for The Devil and Dark Water, a standalone historical thriller first released in English in 2020—and one of my favorite books of that year. This announcement was made earlier in November at Mord am Hellweg, described as “Europe’s largest international crime film festival.” Also shortlisted for the 2022 Viktor Award were Kazltes Herz (Cold Heart), by Henri Faber, and Horvath und die verschwundenen Schüler (Horvath and the Missing Students), by Marc Hofmann. The Viktor Crime Award has been presented ever since 2018, when Michaela Kastel won it for her thriller So Dark the Forest.

• Double or Nothing, Kim Sherwood’s first (of three) Double 0 agents thrillers, hit the shelves in Britain early this last September; it won’t see print in the United States until April 2023. However, the author says she has already completed work on her second installment, which runs 101,042 words in length (before editing). That sequel’s title—if it even has one yet—has not been publicly circulated.

• Entries in next year’s Glencairn Glass Crime Short Story Competition are due by Saturday, December 31. Those stories should not exceed 2,000 words in length, and must not have been published previously in any format. The theme for this year’s brief yarns is “A Crime Story Set in Scotland.” Writers from anywhere in the world are eligible to take part in this contest, but all must be over 16 years old. Prizes of £1,000 and £500 will go, respectively, to the First Place winner and a Runner-up. “The overall winning entry,” says the Glencairn Glass Web site, “will be published in Scottish Field Magazine and online at www.whiskyglass.com.” Click here to enter.

• Well, this is unfortunate TV news. From Variety:

ABC has reversed course on the drama series “Avalon,” opting not to move forward with the show despite giving it a straight-to-series order in February.

“Avalon” hailed from David E. Kelley and executive producer Michael Connelly, with the show based on a short story that Connelly wrote. Neve Campbell was set to star in the lead role. Other cast members included Demetrius Grosse, Alexa Mansour, Steven Pasquale, and Roslyn Ruff.

Per the official logline, the show “takes place in the main city of Avalon on Catalina Island, where LA Sheriff Department Detective Nicole “Nic” Searcy (Campbell) heads up a small office. Catalina has a local population that serves more than 1 million tourists a year, and each day when the ferries arrive, hundreds of potential new stories enter the island. Detective Searcy is pulled into a career-defining mystery that will challenge everything she knows about herself and the island.”

According to an individual with knowledge of the situation, ABC opted not to move forward with the series order for “Avalon” after screening the pilot. A+E Studios is said to still be bullish about the project and are weighing options on how to proceed.

• Adam Graham, host of The Great Detectives of Old Time Radio, shares his authoritative opinions about “The Top Ten Police Foils In Old Time Radio” (click here and here), and “The Four Worst Old Time Radio Detective Police Characters.”

• The mid-November edition of Mike Ripley’s “Getting Away with Murder” column for Shots includes observations on the annual Richard Lancelyn Green lecture; Francis Clifford’s 1976 novel, Drummer in the Dark; this year’s “ultimate Christmas mystery,” Alexandra Benedict’s Murder on the Christmas Express; a quartet of Czechoslovakian thrillers; plus fresh releases from Louise Penny, Ant Middleton, and B.A. Paris. Read about all of that and more here.

• Congratulations to The Bunburyist for having clocked its one-millionth pageview! As I wrote in a brief comment attached to blogger Elizabeth Foxwell’s post yesterday about this achievement, “I check The Bunburyist regularly, and consider it a great source of both information and enjoyment.”

• Max Allan Collins’ 18th Nate Heller novel, The Big Bundle, isn’t due out until January (a month later than expected, because of shipping issues). But he says he’s already completed the writing of his 19th series entry, Too Many Bullets, which finds private eye Heller investigating Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 assassination. “It’s a big book,” he writes in his blog, “on the lines of [1983’s] True Detective, and in a sense it’s the bookend to that first Heller memoir. It’s been very difficult, in part because of my health issues (doing better, thanks) but also because it’s one of the most complicated cases I’ve dealt with.” The 74-year-old author says his next Heller tale for publisher Hard Case Crime will tackle the mysterious 1975 disappearance of labor union leader Jimmy Hoffa. After that? Collins admits he’s “wrestling with … how long I should to stay at it with Heller. The degree of difficulty ... is tough at this age. Right now I am considering a kind of coda novel (much like Skim Deep for Nolan and Quarry’s Blood for Quarry) that would wrap things up. … Should I go that direction, and should my health and degree of interest continue on a positive course, I might do an occasional Heller in a somewhat shorter format. Of course, the problem with that is these crimes are always more complex than I think they’re going to be.”

• On the subject of forthcoming works, English professor and author Art Taylor mentions in his blog that he has a new short-story collection, The Adventure of the Castle Thief and Other Expeditions and Indiscretions, due out from Crippen & Landru in February 2023 (though I see no Amazon ordering link yet). Packing in 14 abbreviated yarns, plus an introduction by the esteemed Martin Edwards, Castle Thief will be Taylor’s second book from Crippen, following 2020’s The Boy Detective & The Summer of ’74 and Other Tales of Suspense. Taylor was generous enough to send me an advanced readers copy of his new collection, but I’ve had to hold off opening it until after I get The Rap Sheet’s end-of-the-year features organized.

• Seriously, Universal Pictures is going to shoot a big-screen flick based on the 1981-1986 Lee Majors TV series The Fall Guy? Deadline reports Ryan Gosling, Emily Blunt, and Teresa Palmer are all in the cast, and that this movie will premiere in March 2024. The original series was about Hollywood stunt people who moonlight as bounty hunters. Click here to watch that show’s opening title sequence.

• Crime by the Book’s Abby Endler attended this month’s Iceland Noir festival in Reykjavik, and she wants to tell us all about it.

• Having greatly enjoyed the six-part, 2016 BBC One/AMC TV drama The Night Manager, based on John le Carré’s 1993 novel of that same name, I look forward to seeing how this project from the same producer turns out. As stated In Reference to Murder:

The Night Manager producer, The Ink Factory, is creating a TV version of John le Carré’s A Most Wanted Man almost a decade after making a feature film version, with Snabba Cash writer, Oskar Söderlund, serving as showrunner. No broadcaster is attached as of yet, although Söderlund’s version is said to be updated to a modern-day European context. One of le Carré’s best known works, A Most Wanted Man follows a young Chechen ex-prisoner who arrives illegally in Germany with a claim to a fortune held in a private bank. It was written against the backdrop of George W. Bush’s policy of “extraordinary rendition” and inspired by the real-life story of Murat Kurnaz.

• In The New Yorker, Jill Lepore asks that immortal question, “Is Mick Herron the Best Spy Novelist of His Generation?”

• There’s no topping George Easter when it comes to tracking down lists of 2022’s best crime, mystery, and thriller works. Just over the last few days, the Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine editor has pointed us toward collections in The Financial Times (by both Barry Forshaw and Adam LeBor), Crime Time (by columnist Maxim Jakubowski), The Irish Times (by author Jane Casey), New Zealand Listener magazine, and a couple of Web sites that are new to me: The List and Lifehacker AU. He has also helpfully edited National Public Radio’s original list of what it calls this year’s 46 best mysteries to remove horror fiction, young-adult works, non-fiction books, and others that exceed the limits of the genre.

• The only picks I don’t think Easter has mentioned yet are those from British blogger Rekha Rao, at The Book Decoder. She’s assembled a long post of book covers that lead to reviews written over the last 12 months. Her many categories of choices include Best Cozy Mystery (Series Debut), Best Crime and Mystery (in a Series), and Best Standalone Mysteries and Thrillers. There are also selections in the fields of general fiction and romance, if you swing that way.

• Although The New York Times hasn’t yet revealed its crime, mystery, and thriller “bests” of this year, it did recently come out with a rundown of “100 Notable Books of 2022.” Featured there are Harini Nagendra’s The Bangalore Detectives Club, Percival Everett’s Dr. No, and Elizabeth Hand’s Hokuloa Road.

• Mere days after announcing that Scottish actress Ashley Jensen will assume the helm of BBC One’s Shetland, now that Douglas Henshall has left his role on that TV series as Detective Inspector Jimmy Perez, The Killing Times asks: Was this new hire really a good idea? After all, it’s noted, viewers expected Perez’s number two, Detective Sergeant Alison “Tosh” McIntosh (played by Alison O’Donnell) to step into the breach. Editor Paul Hirons writes that “it felt like she was primed for a promotion—she had just become a mum, had come through a sticky moment after surviving a bomb attack in series seven, and had seemed to have accrued and soaked up all the knowledge and expertise from Jimmy she needed. Many will be disappointed that Tosh is not the show lead.” We’ll have to wait until Shetland’s eighth-season debut to see how Tosh herself views this surprising turn of events.

• This seems right: Dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster’s 2022 Word of the Year is … gaslighting. “In our age of misinformation—‘fake news,’ conspiracy theories, Twitter trolls, and deepfakes—gaslighting has emerged as a word for our time,” explains M-W editor at large Peter Sokolowski. “From politics to pop culture to relationships, it has become a favored word for the perception of deception.” Meanwhile, Washington Post columnist Paul Waldman reflects here on the recent history of gaslighting in politics.

• And Mystery Fanfare notes the death, on November 10, of Shelley Singer. It goes on to say that she was “the author of 12 novels, including the Jake Samson mystery series. She taught fiction writing and worked one-on-one with writers as a manuscript consultant on non-fiction, literary novels, and in every genre from memoir to mystery to science fiction to horror.” A resident of Minneapolis, Minnesota, Singer was 83 when she died of “heart failure and other complications.”

Bullet Points: Pre-Father’s Day Edition

• If you’re not sufficiently aware of this already, tomorrow night will bring the debut of HBO-TV’s eight-part Perry Mason mini-series starring Matthew Rhys (The Americans). It’s conceived as a prequel to the classic 1957-1966 CBS series of that same name, which cast Raymond Burr as the almost unbeatable Los Angeles criminal defense attorney introduced by Erle Stanley Gardner in 1933’s The Case of the Velvet Claws. HBO’s version, set just one year before that—in 1932—imagines Mason as a down-and-out, heavy-drinking private eye “retained for a sensational child kidnapping trial, and his investigation portends major consequences for Mason, his client, and the city itself.” The character Rhys plays here is actually closer than Burr’s portrayal was to Gardner’s original conception of Mason as (to quote from Otto Penzler’s The Private Lives of Private Eyes, Spies, Crime Fighters and Other Good Guys) a “hard-boiled, two-fisted and noncerebral” advocate for justice. But writers/showrunners Ron Fitzgerald and Rolin Jones have sought to flesh out their protagonist’s back story, as well. The Killing Times explains: “Mason is haunted by his wartime experiences in France and suffering the effects of a broken marriage.” An extended, noir-accented trailer (found here) nicely captures Depression-era L.A., with its recent Olympic Games, its unlikely “evangelical fervor,” the rise of the oil industry, and of course its Hollywood glamour. Vulture calls this new Perry Mason “a simultaneously gorgeous, gritty, and sometimes downright gory period piece filled with fine performances.” John Lithgow, Tatiana Maslany, Shea Whigham, Stephen Root, and Robert Patrick join Rhys in the cast. After disappointing previous attempts to revive Perry Mason (remember Monte Markham’s The New Perry Mason of 1973-1974?), it will be nice if HBO can draw upon what fans like about Gardner’s protagonist, while imbuing his story with greater emotional depth and substance. I’ll be watching with my fingers crossed.

• Scottish writer Lee Randall contributes a useful backgrounder about Gardner to CrimeReads, in which she recalls the lawyer-turned-author’s original intent with Mason: “I want to make my hero a fighter, not by having him be ruthless with women and underlings, but by having him wade into the opposition and battle his way through to victory. … [T]he character I am trying to create for him is that of a fighter who is possessed of infinite patience. He tries to jockey his enemies into a position where he can deliver one good knockout punch.” Yep, that nicely sums up the typical Mason yarn.

• Florida journalist Craig Pittman provides something of a public-service piece to aspiring legal-thriller writers, consulting various attorneys who have become novelists on how one might best compose realistic courtroom dramas. “I would suggest that authors treat courtroom scenes much like any other and not let the legal and technical details override the narrative,” says Alafair Burke, once a prosecutor in Oregon and now a professor at New York’s Hofstra University School of Law. “Too many courtroom scenes read like an intentional display of the research the author conducted to prepare for the scene. Instead, focus on character, setting, plot, dialogue—all the things that drive a good book. If the legal details don’t further a critical aspect of the narrative, skip them.”

• Crimespree Magazine brings word that writer Val McDermid “has unveiled the hotly tipped ‘New Blood’ authors for 2020, showcasing the year’s best breakout crime-writing talent.” Her choices:

— Deepa Anappara, Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line (Chatto & Windus)
— Elizabeth Kay, Seven Lies (Sphere)
— Jessica Moor, Keeper (Penguin)
— Trevor Wood, The Man on the Street (Quercus)

“Since 2004,” explains Crimespree’s Erin Mitchell, “the best-selling Scottish author of the Tony Hill and Carol Jordan series has curated an annual celebration of the most formidable debuts taking the crime and thriller genre by storm, with an invitation to join the line-up of the world’s largest and most prestigious crime-fiction festival: Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival.” Although this year’s festival was cancelled due to the pandemic, Mitchell says McDermid’s 2020 “New Blood” showcase “will be streamed on the festival’s HIF Player on what would have been the legendary weekender on Saturday 25 July 2020.” You should be able to access the audio here at that time.

• I know, I know, it’s the frickin’ middle of June already, but only now am I finally getting around to remarking upon Mike Ripley’s latest edition of his “Getting Away with Murder” column for Shots. Featured among his plentiful subjects this time are: older books he’s taken up reading during the COVID-19 lockdown; forgotten writers Douglas Sanderson (Blondes Are My Trouble) and Peter Leslie (Bootleg Angel); fresh crime fiction by Sharon Bolton, Douglas Lindsay, Barbara Nadel, and Martin Walker; and the end of the line for the Top Notch Thrillers and Ostara Crime imprints, for which Ripley served as editor.

• In Reference to Murder features this tidbit:

Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards announced this year's winners, including in the Mystery Category. The Gold winner was Below the Fold by R.G. Belsky; Silver winner was A Plain Vanilla Murder by Susan Wittig Albert; and Bronze winner was Moonscape by Julie Weston. In the Thriller Category, the Gold winner was The Nine by Jeanne Blasberg; the Silver winner was The Unrepentant by E.A. Aymar; and the Bronze winner was Green Valley by Louis Greenberg. The Guilt We Carry by Samuel W. Gailey was also a Thriller Honorable Mention.

• Congratulations to Joe Kenney for 10 years at the helm of Glorious Trash, one of the best blogs about forgotten (and sometimes best-forgotten) works of paperback fiction.

• What a beautiful selection of vintage B-movie posters, all painted by Albert Kallis. I’m particularly fond of his placards for The Brain Eaters and The Astounding She-Monster, two science-fiction productions released in 1958.

• Like so many other writers, San Francisco-area author Mark Coggins has decided to launch a podcast during the COVID-19 lockdown. It’s called Riordan’s Desk, after his series private eye, August Riordan, and he’s currently reading chapters from his latest Riordan novel, The Dead Beat Scroll (2019). Chapter 15 just went up a few days ago. To listen, look for Riordan's Desk on iTunes or any of the popular podcast directories. Or, to listen from the Web, click here.



• Seeing as we’re now just a little over a month away from the TNT-TV premiere of The Alienist: Angel of Darkness, the eight-episode mini-series sequel to last year’s acclaimed Victorian-era thriller, The Alienist, don’t you think it’s time to watch a trailer for that new production? You’ll find a good one embedded above. Both shows are adapted from crime novels published in the 1990s by Caleb Carr. The Killing Times offers this synopsis of the coming sequel:

In The Alienist: Angel of Darkness, Sara [Howard] has opened her own private detective agency and is leading the charge on a brand-new case. She reunites with Dr. [Laszlo] Kreizler and John Moore, now a New York Times reporter, to find Ana Linares, the kidnapped infant daughter of the Spanish Consular. Their investigation leads them down a sinister path of murder and deceit, heading towards a dangerous and elusive killer.

The promo blurb says that series two will “shine a light on the provocative issues of the era—the corruption of institutions, income inequality, yellow press sensationalism, and the role of women in society—themes that still resonate today.”

This new mini-series is set to drop on Sunday, July 26.

• In other small-screen news, Variety reports that “Amazon is developing a series centered on Lisbeth Salander, the character created by Stieg Larsson for the so-called Millenium books. The project, which is currently titled The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, will not be a sequel or continuation of the story from the books or the films into which they were adapted. It will instead take Salander and place her in today’s world with a wholly new setting, new characters, and a new story. No writer or lead actress is currently attached to the series.”

• And January Magazine recommends that Harlan Coben followers tune in to “a six-part Netflix mini-series based on The Woods, Coben’s 2007 novel,” it’s action transferred from New Jersey to Poland. “The switch creates some real magic: Coben’s terrific storytelling reimagined here with a gritty European sensibility,” January enthuses. Netflix debuted this six-part mini-series on June 12.

• For some reason, Janet Rudolph posted her list of Father’s Day mysteries last month. But tomorrow is actually Father’s Day here in the States, so let’s revisit that collection of titles now.

• As a veteran newspaper guy, I was interested to read this excerpt of a story from The Wall Street Journal about how some struggling local papers “are shutting down their [printing] presses and, to save money for distant corporate owners, printing their daily editions at other newspaper headquarters hours away. The papers still bear the names of the cities where they’re read, but they roll off presses elsewhere, sometimes in different states.” Included with that excerpt is a fabulous scene from the 1952 picture Deadline—U.S.A., in which “crusading managing editor” Humphrey Bogart instructs his press room foreman to start running the giant presses, churning out copies of the broadsheet containing an exposé of a mobster’s misdeeds. “That’s the press, baby. The press,” he tells the doomed hood over the phone. “And there’s nothing you can do about it. Nothing.”

• November 1 is the deadline for essay proposals on the theme of “Historical Crime Fiction,” the focus of a future edition of Clues: A Journal of Detection. The mag’s managing editor, Elizabeth Foxwell, explains that Rosemary Erickson Johnsen (Contemporary Feminist Historical Crime Fiction) will act guest-edit that issue.

• I’m very sorry to learn that Spanish novelist Carlos Ruiz Zafón, best known worldwide for penning 2001’s The Shadow of the Wind, died Friday from colorectal cancer. He was only 55 years old. An obituary in The Guardian notes that this Barcelona-born fictionist “was frequently described as the most-read Spanish author since Cervantes,” and it quotes Zafón as saying “he felt he had ‘no other choice’ but to be a writer: ‘Sometimes people ask me what piece of advice I would give to an aspiring author. I’d tell them that you should only become a writer if the possibility of not becoming one would kill you. Otherwise, you’d be better off doing something else. I became a writer, a teller of tales, because otherwise I would have died, or worse.’”

• Also announced was the demise of Grace F. Edwards, a Harlem mystery writer and former executive director of the Harlem Writers Guild, who passed away on February 25 of this year, at age 87. “Though she began writing at age 7,” recalls The New York Times, “Grace F. Edwards waited until she was 55 to publish her first novel. That book, In the Shadow of the Peacock, was a lush portrayal of Harlem during World War II, a girl’s coming-of-age story set against the race riots of the time. It was a placeholder for the six detective stories she would later write, mysteries set in Harlem starring a female cop turned sociologist and accidental sleuth named Mali Anderson, always with a backbeat of jazz. The first of these, If I Should Die, was published in 1997, when Ms. Edwards was 64.”

• Finally, I offer a sad good-bye to Dennis “Denny” O’Neil. The Spy Command explains that O’Neil was “a comic book writer and editor who [in the 1970s] returned Batman to his dark origins,” following a very lighthearted period “during the run of the 1966-68 television series starring Adam West.” In an obituary of his own, author Scott D. Parker describes O’Neil as “easily one of the people you’d put on the Mt. Rushmore of Batman creators.” Meanwhile, Terence Towles Canote writes that “In addition to his work in comic books, Dennis O’Neil also wrote several novels, including The Bite of Monsters (1971) and Dragon’s Fists – Richard Dragon, Kung Fu Master (with Jim Berry, 1974), as well as novels ... featuring Batman and Green Lantern. Over the years he also wrote several stories and novellas published in such magazines as Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Fantastic Stories, and Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction.” O’Neil died on June 11 at age 81.

• A few author interviews worth your attention: For her excellent Speaking of Mysteries podcast, Nancie Clare talks with both Craig Robertson (Watch Him Die) and Paul D. Marks (The Blues Don’t Care); Steve Powell goes one-on-one with Shelley Blanton Stroud (Copy Boy); Rich Ehisen quizzes Timothy Jay Smith (A Fire on the Island); and MysteryPeople’s Scott Montgomery chats with James Wade about the latter’s new novel, All Things Left Wild.

• Len Deighton enthusiast Rob Mallows relates the tale of his longtime search for “a simple postcard, part of the marketing materials for the first UK edition of SS-GB.”

• My late father and I generally had quite different TV-watching tastes. He was partial to fare such as Hee Haw, The Benny Hill Show, Hunter, The A-Team, and Walker, Texas Ranger, none of which I fancied. However, we did watch The Rockford Files together. In fact, I think I may have introduced him to that 1974-1980 NBC detective series, after enjoying its pilot film. Only later did I learn that my father had been a fan of actor James Garner ever since the late 1950s, when he starred in Maverick. But my point here is that I enjoyed Rockford when it was originally broadcast, and I take just as much pleasure in watching episodes occasionally more than four decades later. So I was a prime candidate to appreciate Nathan Ward’s recent tribute to the show, in CrimeReads. It contains numerous smile-inducing reminders of what the series offered, the first of those being Ward’s fond memory of the 1974 pilot:

The first show did not reek of tough-guy promise. First of all, [Rockford] turned down the job he was hired for not once but twice, and except for his California P.I. license he seemed like just another big affable guy with ordinary problems: an understocked fridge, people hectoring him through his answering machine. His concerns seemed unheroic and, perhaps worst of all, he did not even carry a gun, keeping one only for emergencies in a cookie jar in the kitchen of his house trailer. And when at one point his client asked, a little concerned, “You’re not afraid of him, are you?” he told her the truth, “You’re damn right I am.”

But what grabbed me from the first episode was one hilarious scene: Jim Rockford, tired of being trailed by … [a] muscular killer (William Smith) in a long red convertible, pulls into the Mayfair Music Hall, a Santa Monica venue of vaudeville-era entertainments. The bow-tied bartender greets Rockford and asks “The usual?” as a young woman performs a slow split atop a wire, meaning Jim either comes here often to lose a tail or he likes novelty acts. After his brawny pursuer enters the bar and growls his drink order, Jim heads to the men’s room to prepare his trap. The Mayfair switches to a troupe of dancing poodles as Rockford’s man stalks to the bathroom, where Jim has drizzled hand soap across the floor and retrieved a roll of nickels from his coat pocket, taunting, “You musclebound guys are always overcompensating.” The charge of latency draws a macho scream and a high kick that slides him back onto the soapy tile, where Jim lands a cheap insurance shot. According to Ed Robertson’s history of The Rockford Files, this scene nearly broke the ASI meter when the pilot was tested, and may have made the show. It did for me. By cheating a little, it seemed a clever man could take down a bully. I was hooked.

Ward has much more to say about The Rockford Files here.

• Not to go overboard in promoting recent CrimeReads articles, but here are a few more I have enjoyed: Olivia Rutigliano’s excellent analysis of Inspector Bucket, Charles Dickens’ “devious, hypocritical ‘nice guy’ cop” in Bleak House (1853); Shane Mawe’s profile of Freeman Wills Crofts, once a prolific Irish mystery novelist (The Cask, The 12:30 from Croydon, etc.) and “a contemporary of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, … [whose] reputation has failed to match that of these luminaries”; Chris McGinley’s profile of Virginia Kellogg, who “wrote some of the greatest crime movies in Hollywood's Golden Age,” but is today pretty much forgotten; and Paul French’s exploration of the various books and authors that have helped make Sydney “Australia’s undisputed capital of Noir.”

• Are you a big Ian Rankin admirer? If you, you might be interested to know that the Scottish creator of Inspector John Rebus is the subject of the latest entry in the McFarland Companions to Mystery Fiction series. At more than 400 pages long, Ian Rankin: A Companion to the Mystery Fiction is said to include “alphabetized entries on Rankin’s works, characters, and themes; a biography; a chronology; maps of Rebus’ Edinburgh; and an annotated bibliography.”

• Martin Edwards also recommends H.R.F. Keating: A Life of Crime, by Sheila Mitchell (Level Best). He describes this study of the British author behind Indian policeman Inspector Ganesh Ghote as “affectionate and entertaining” and says it “gives wonderful insights into the ups and downs of the crime writing life,” as well as a few curious bits of triva. “For instance,” remarks Edwards, “one thing I didn’t know was that Harry wrote the novelisation of Neil Simon’s Murder by Death.” The prolific Keating passed away in 2011.

• Thirteen years after The Sopranos ended its six-season run on HBO, creator/writer David Chase has finally revealed the meaning of its last episode’s ambiguous ending.

• And the next time you need a musical pick-me-up, try this.

Bullet Points: Pre-Cinco de Mayo Edition

Sorry for the recent paucity of posts on this page, and for failing to respond in anything like a timely fashion to e-mail messages, but I’ve been quite busy over the last couple of weeks, helping to open a new independent bookshop in Seattle’s Madison Park neighborhood. I hope that my schedule will settle down soon. In the meantime, though, let me take this opportunity to highlight an assortment of crime fiction-related stories appearing elsewhere on the Web.

• I don’t customarily publish news releases, but this item from the organizers of Bouchercon 2019—which is to be held in Dallas, Texas, from October 31 to November 33—seems worth passing along:

We are concentrating on the history of our first fifty years. If you have and are willing to donate historical programs, bags, buttons, pictures, Anthony Awards, mementos, or other articles for display, please contact Carol Puckett, Bouchercon 2019 Chair and a member of the Bouchercon National History Committee at BCon2019@gmail.com. Note that we are hoping to include some of these articles in an archive that we are planning to establish to continue to honor the history of Bouchercon.

• Among the recipients of this year’s Best of Illinois History Awards, presented late last week by the Illinois State Historical Society, was the non-fiction book Scarface and the Untouchable: Al Capone, Eliot Ness, and the Battle for Chicago, by Max Allan Collins and A. Brad Schwartz (Morrow, 2018). The ISHS credits that book with providing “a new look at an old story. An engaging, well-researched, and informative dual biography of Al Capone and Eliot Ness that may be the best book of this genre to come along in this century. Collins and Schwartz tell a story all Illinoisans know in fragments but few know in its entirety. It is the story of the coming of age of Capone when the most disrespected law of the land—Prohibition—is enacted, told in tandem with the story of Ness, an introspective, timid lawman with a passion for justice. For those who grew up with the Hollywood myths of gangster films, and The Untouchables TV series, this will be the book you remember ...”

• While we’re on the subject of author accolades, yesterday brought word of which books and writers have been nominated for the 2018 Shirley Jackson Awards, honoring “exceptional work in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and dark fantasy.” There are six categories of contenders, so I’m not going to list them all. But here are the rivals for this year’s Best Novel commendation:

— Everything Under, by Daisy Johnson (Jonathan Cape)
— In the Night Wood, by Dale Bailey (John Joseph Adams/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
— Little Eve, by Catriona Ward (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
— Social Creature, by Tara Isabella Burton (Double Day/Raven)
— We Sold Our Souls, by Grady Hendrix (Quirk)

Winners of these awards (for books published in 2018) will be declared on Sunday, July 14, during Readercon 30, set to take place in Quincy, Massachusetts, July 11-14.

• Finally, among the half-dozen shortlisted nominees for this year’s Pushkin House Russian Book Prize is a non-fiction release likely to have drawn the attention of Rap Sheet readers: Ben Macintyre’s dramatic Cold War-era tale, The Spy and the Traitor (Viking).

• It’s hard to believe it is time again for the annual running of the Kentucky Derby. In association with that, Mystery Fanfare’s Janet Rudolph has updated her list of Derby-related mystery fiction.

• How’s this for a bit of irony? People magazine reports that the next role for actress Felicity Huffman, recently implicated in the nationwide college admissions cheating scandal, will find her playing a prosecutor. She’ll portray Manhattan assistant district attorney (and later author) Linda Fairstein in Ava DuVernay’s When They See Us, a Netflix production that People says will focus on the notorious 1989 Central Park Five scandal. (It was the legacy of that brutal rape case, you may recall, which led to the Mystery Writers of America withdrawing Fairstein’s Grand Master Award earlier this year.)

• Comfort TV’s David Hofstede has chosen what he declares are “The 100 Most Memorable Songs Introduced by Classic TV.” There aren’t many crime fiction-related tunes listed, but he does include a “melancholy country ballad” from Charlie’s Angels titled “Trippin’ To the Mornin’” as well as the theme from Moonlighting. Part I of Hofsede’s list can be found here, while Part II is here.

• St. Louis’ Riverfront Times reports on a project by Winnipeg, Canada-based filmmaker Guy Maddin to re-interpret Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 psychological thriller, Vertigo, “not through dialogue or specific actions but through purely visual associations. Drawing heavily on ’70s crime shows, including The Streets of San Francisco and McMillan & Wife, Maddin creates connections to Vertigo by reusing a particular camera angle, a detail in the set decoration or even just the rhythm of an edited sequence. Nearly every aspect of the film—the watered-down colors and sledgehammer editing of TV drama and the sudden, unexpected appearances (and just as sudden disappearances) of Karl Malden, Claude Akins, Meg Ryan and dozens of other familiar faces—flaunts its discontinuity and challenges the viewer to find meaning in the clutter. Yet somehow the themes and spirit of Vertigo creep through, almost eerily.” Until this week, I had never heard of Maddin’s hour-long film, titled The Green Fog, but it apparently debuted at the San Francisco International Film Festival back in 2017. I can only hope to see it sometime. A brief trailer is embedded below.



• In his latest “Getting Away with Murder” column for Shots, Mike Ripley writes about a trio of new novels produced by journalists (including Tom Bradby’s Secret Service), Cuban writer Leonardo Padura’s new Mario Conde story (Grab a Snake by the Tail), a highly irregular book-promotion item (“One has to wonder what sort of idiot promotes his novel by sending out review copies accompanied by a real knife …”), the pending debut of a previously undiscovered Desmond Bagley yarn, and a great deal more.

• And since we’re at the start of a new month, let me remind everyone to take a peek at The Rap Sheet’s wrap-up of fresh spring books, which includes more than 115 tales coming out—on both sides of the Atlantic—between now and June 1.

• For The Writer, thriller scribes Paul Doiron and Lee Child ponder how best to develop “realistic female characters that offer way more than sex appeal.” While this may have seemed like a good idea to Writer editors, the piece has been met with a considerable derogatory blowback. Critic Sarah Weinman complained that it was “presented as if they are saving thrillers from needless chest-thumping,” while others suggested—not unreasonably—that if the magazine wanted to know how to create strong women characters, perhaps it should have asked female authors instead of male ones.

• I already mentioned here the demise, on April 15, of 91-year-old New York author-playwright Warren Adler (The War of the Roses, American Quartet). But now comes blogger-critic Michael Carlson with his own obituary of Adler, prepared for Britain’s Guardian.

• I didn’t know, until reading this piece in Shotsmag Confidential, that Swedish writer David Lagercrantz’s third addition to Stieg Larsson’s Dragon Tattoo series, The Girl Who Lived Twice (due out in August), will also be his last.

• Although I’m not a big podcast follower, I do enjoy the Today I Found Out series, available on YouTube. This last Monday’s installment, for instance, found fast-yakking host Simon Whistler introducing the curious to “10 Detectives More Interesting than Sherlock Holmes,” among his picks being “cowboy detective” Charles Siringo and female Pinkerton operative Kate Warne.

• A trio of CrimeReads stories I have enjoyed recently: Craig Pittman’s profile of Donald J. Sobol, the creator of that literary “‘Sherlock in sneakers,’ boy detective Leroy ‘Encyclopedia’ Brown”; Lisa Levy’s examination of “the hipster mystery, or hipstery”; and Curtis Evans’ look back at poet, essayist, and literary critic T.S. Eliot, “the man who rescued Wilkie Collins from obscurity.”

• And I owe a hearty toast to Dwyer Murphy, the managing editor of CrimeReads, who chose my recent piece about the covers of Ross Macdonald’s The Moving Target as one of the site’s “favorite stories of April.” He writes: “It’s hard to think of a crime author who influenced the aesthetic of modern detective fiction more than Ross Macdonald, so it seems appropriate to undertake a visual history on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of Lew Archer’s first appearance, in The Moving Target. J. Kingston Pierce, expert on all things crime, but especially crime fiction covers, takes on the project in this fantastic survey of Macdonald’s first Archer novel, offering up an engaging mixture of history and critique as he tells the story of one of the century’s most important crime novels, cover-by-cover.”

• The Nick Carter & Carter Brown Blog is currently in the midst of posting a selection of Robert McGinnis paperback covers. Because it can. Because they’re that good.

• The Stiletto Gumshoe applauds the paperback cover artistry of “Cecil Calvert Beall (1892-1970), better known as C.C. Beall.” Among the familiar examples of Beall’s work is his “darkly gorgeous painting” for the 1950 edition of Bruno Fischer’s House of Flesh.”

• Vulture argues that even at age 60 (it was first released in April 1959), Richard Condon’s The Manchurian Candidate remains timely.

• Last month I noted, in my Killer Covers blog, that Britain’s Piccadilly Publishing was reissuing the vintage series of Larry Kent novels in e-book form. It began with just five titles from among the hundreds originally published. But this week, Piccadilly co-founder David Whitehead (aka Ben Bridges) announced on Facebook that an additional five (Go-Go for Broke, Call for a Corpse, Crimson Lady, Terror Below, and The Weirdos) have been scheduled for release by the end of May, all with their original cover art. What’s more, Whitehead says he hopes that paperback versions of these tales will soon become available as well.

• Lee Goldberg has compiled the list of musical numbers he listened to while composing his latest novel, Killer Thriller. These same TV and movie themes could be used as a soundtrack to accompany your reading of that book. But if you’re like me, you might find it difficult to concentrate on the page while listening to, say, Richard Markowitz’s galloping theme for The Wild Wild West.

• I don’t think I had ever before seen a list of which Sherlock Holmes stories were Arthur Conan Doyle’s favorites, but here’s one.

• This trailer for the film Anna, “Luc Besson's latest neo-Eurospy spectacle,” slated to premiere on June 21, has me wanting to view the picture in its action-packed entirety.

• In response to a question about the future of his Ethan Gage historical adventure series, 67-year-old Washington newspaperman-turned-author William Dietrich explained recently on Facebook:

I’m flattered to periodically get inquiries about the next Ethan Gage novel, but I need to update my status (in 2019) to explain that no more books in that series are currently planned.

That wasn’t my original intention. I’d hoped to continue the series through the entire period [of] the Napoleonic Wars, but HarperCollins made a business decision to stop its support because of gradually eroding sales. I followed up with one self-published Ethan, The Trojan Icon, which readers enjoyed. However, I found self-publishing of this and two other books (the young adult novel The Murder of Adam and Eve and the non-fiction Napoleon's Rules) limiting because of the difficulty of getting publicity or shelf display.

So, as I entered my late 60s, I decided to retire! This doesn’t mean I’ve stopped writing—I have several projects that might become completed books someday—but I’m not “working” at being an author as I once was. While my 22 books are well short of the hundreds some authors have turned out (Issac Asimov comes to mind), it’s about 22 more than I expected back when I was starting. The journey has been thrilling.

I still hope to someday have screen adaptations of some of my works, and continue to ponder the peripatetic Ethan Gage. I never say never.

But I’m also enjoying more time in a lovely corner of the world (the San Juan Islands of Washington state) and time to read, write, and travel—especially after a couple health scares. I’m delighted that fans are still reading and I hope new readers will keep discovering Ethan and the other adventures I’ve so enjoyed writing. Happy exploring!

• In a rather wonderful piece for Criminal Element, Susanna Calkins revisits Chicago’s peculiar “Canary Murder” case of 1929.

• From Elizabeth Foxwell’s The Bunburyist: “The Detroit News reported that a lawsuit regarding the sale of Elmore Leonard’s papers to the University of South Carolina had been settled. Christine Leonard, Leonard’s ex-wife, had sued alleging that Leonard’s company, trust, and son had sold the archive in secret (stating that a stipulation in the divorce decree entitled her to a share of the proceeds).”

• Last but not least, since I mentioned Cinco de Mayo in this post’s headline, it’s only right and proper that I should point you to a catalogue of mysteries related to Sunday’s holiday.

Bullet Points: Hunkered Down Edition

It’s been more than a couple of months since I’ve taken on the task of  compiling crime-fiction news bits that don’t necessarily merit posts of their own ... which means I have a lot of information to impart. Fortunately, Seattle is heavily socked in with snow today, so I have little interest in spending much time outside in the cold. Better to snug in with a cup of coffee and my computer keyboard. Let us begin ...

• Lisbeth Salander fans, take note: BookRiot reports that “An unseen investigation by Stieg Larsson, the late journalist and author of the Millennium Trilogy, has come to light and will be revealed in a new true-crime book. Larsson was a leading expert on antidemocratic, right-wing, extremist organizations.” The site goes on to synopsize the plot of the new book, which is due out from AmazonCrossing in October:

On February 28, 1986, Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme was shot dead in Stockholm. The crime is still unsolved today. It’s now known that Larsson began his own investigation into the assassination—continuing the search until his own death. In 2014, journalist and documentary filmmaker, Jan Stocklassa gained access to the 20 boxes of Larsson’s research into the case.

To quote from an Amazon press release:

In The Man Who Played with Fire: Stieg Larsson’s Lost Files and the Hunt for an Assassin, Stocklassa reveals new facts about the case and reveals the hitherto unknown research of the best-selling author in a fascinating true crime story. For the first time in many years, the police in Sweden have taken active measures to investigate a new suspect in the murder case and are pursuing leads based on the research revealed in Stocklassa’s book.

• What matters most is making money, right? The New Yorker reported recently that Dan Mallory, the book editor turned author who—as “A.J. Finn”—penned last year’s best-selling The Woman in the Window, has made a variety of false assertions regarding his health, his education, and his career achievements. Mallory has since sought to excuse his actions, but his deceptions have left many folks in the publishing industry wary of the author. In The Washington Post, critic Ron Charles wrote: “If James Frey taught us anything with his infamous memoir, it’s that autobiographical claims can collapse into a million little pieces of exaggeration and deception. Mallory’s situation is different, though, if more bizarre. How do we reconsider a work of fiction—or any work of art—when confronted with troubling information about its creator?” Despite all of this controversy, Mallory’s publisher, HarperCollins, says it is holding firm on plans to bring out his sophomore novel in January 2020—a San Francisco-set yarn The New Yorker describes as “a story of revenge … involving a female thriller writer and an interviewer who learns of a dark past.”

• Julie Adams, an Iowa-born actress who co-starred opposite an amphibious “Gill man” in the 1954 movie The Creature from the Black Lagoon before going on to a long and prolific TV career, passed away in Los Angeles on February 3 at age 92. Among her many television roles were appearances on Hawaiian Eye, Perry Mason, Darren McGavin’s The Outsider, Ironside, Kolchak: The Night Stalker, Ellery Queen, Mannix, Cagney & Lacey, Murder, She Wrote, and Diagnosis: Murder. An interesting tidbit: Adams’ fleeting first marriage was to Leonard B. Stern, a screenwriter and producer responsible for such memorable series as Get Smart, McMillan & Wife, and The Snoop Sisters.

• Via Shotsmag Confidential comes news that Karin Slaughter’s 2018 novel, Pieces of Her, will become an eight-episode Netflix series directed—at least initially—by Lesli Linka Glatter. “The story,” explains the blog (quoting from a press release), “follows as an adrift young woman’s conception of her mother is forever changed after a Saturday afternoon trip to the mall together suddenly explodes into violence. As figures from her mother’s past start to resurface, she is forced to go on the run and on that journey, begins to piece together the truth of her mother’s previous identity and uncovers secrets of her childhood.”

• With Series 6 of Endeavour scheduled to debut in Great Britain tomorrow, February 10, ITV Magazine—a consumer periodical just launched last month by the show’s principal broadcasting network—has published a rather satisfying article about what viewers can expect from Endeavour’s latest four episodes. Chris Sullivan has posted scans of that piece in his blog, Morse, Lewis and Endeavour. Meanwhile, he has embedded a new morning TV show interview with a bushy-bearded Roger Allam, who plays Detective Chief Inspector Fred Thursday on the program opposite Shaun Evans, starring as Detective Sergeant Endeavour Morse.

• From B.V. Lawson’s In Reference to Murder:

USA Network has picked up to series its drama pilot Dare Me, based on Megan Abbott’s 2012 novel of the same name. Set in the world of competitive high school cheerleading, it follows the fraught relationship between two best friends (Herizen Guardiola and Mario Kelly) after a new coach (Willa Fitzgerald) arrives to bring their team to prominence. While the girls’ friendship is put to the test, their young lives are changed forever when a shocking crime rocks their quiet suburban world.

• Lawson also reports that “ABC has ordered the drama pilot Stumptown, inspired by the graphic novels published by Oni Press. It follows Dex Parios, a strong, assertive, and unapologetically sharp-witted Army veteran working as a P.I. in Portland, Oregon. With a complicated personal history and only herself to rely on, she solves other people’s messes with a blind eye toward her own.”

• As an unflagging fan of Lou Grant, the 1977-1982 CBS-TV series starring Ed Asner as the sometimes crusty city editor of a fictional Southern California daily newspaper called the Los Angeles Tribune, I was pleased to discover at least the vast majority of that show’s episodes are available for free on YouTube. The picture quality is sometimes less than ideal, but until I drop the dough for Shout! Factory’s DVD releases of all five seasons, it’s probably the best I can expect. If you want to learn more about this drama series—which was a spin-off from The Mary Tyler Moore Show—check out The Canonical Lou Grant Episode Guide. And I’ve added the main title sequences from the first three seasons of Lou Grant to The Rap Sheet’s YouTube page.

• Speaking of vintage shows, The Spy Command alerts me to the fact that La-La Land Records will soon release “Jerry Goldsmith[‘s] music to a mostly forgotten 1975 TV show, Archer.” Wikipedia explains that this is “a limited-edition soundtrack containing the one episode … Goldsmith scored (paired with a re-issue of the score to the film Warning Shot, from newly discovered better elements).” If you, too, have difficulties remembering Archer, let me point out that it was a short-lived NBC mid-season replacement series starred Brian Keith (Family Affair) as L.A. private investigator Lew Archer, the character so masterfully developed over three decades by Ross Macdonald. Keith’ show wasn’t awful, without ever being really good; I much preferred Peter Graves’ portrayal of the same protagonist in an unsuccessful 1974 TV pilot based on one of Macdonald’s later yarns, The Underground Man. And though, as one TV critic observed, Keith was mustered up “weary cynicism” enough to play Archer, he did not seem to respect the source material. In fact, Keith even had visions of moving the series’ setting from the City of Angels to Honolulu! Regardless, I’d like to get my hands on the six episodes of Archer that were originally broadcast, if only for nostalgic reasons. I might even be willing to purchase La-La Land’s presumably high-quality cut of Goldsmith’s Archer theme, if only because the version I have—and which is featured in The Spy Command’s post—is terrible.


(Above) J. Kingston Pierce and Chelsea Cain enjoy a bit of fun at Bouchercon 2011, high above St. Louis’ Gateway Arch.

• I have many fond memories of attending Bouchercon 2011, which took place in St. Louis, Missouri. But one of the few captured on film was my meeting with Portland, Oregon, author Chelsea Cain, who turned out to be personable, downright funny, and nowhere near as dark-spirited a woman as her fiction might suggest. So I was pleased to read that her 2014 novel, One Kick, has been adapted as a 12-part TV series titled Gone, scheduled for broadcast on WGN America, beginning on 9 p.m. ET/PT on Wednesday, February 27. Deadline Hollywood sums up the plot this way: “Gone follows the story of Kit ‘Kick’ Lannigan ([played by] Leven Rambin), survivor of a highly publicized child-abduction case, and 20-year veteran Frank Novak ([Chris]Noth), the FBI agent who rescued her. Years later, he recruits her to join a special task force dedicated to solving abductions and missing-persons cases. Paired with former Army intelligence officer John Bishop (Danny Pino), Lannigan uses her intuitive wit and martial arts skills to solve cases and bring victims home.”

• Yet another Agatha Christie yarn appears due for big-screen treatment, with a possible 2020 release date. The Killing Times reports that UK screenwriter Sarah Phelps (The A.B.C. Murders, Murder by Innocence, And Then There Were None) “has signed up to adapt Christie’s [1961] stand-alone novel, The Pale Horse.”

• Also to be filmed: Stephen King’s Mile 81.

• Ann Cleeves closed out her nine-volume Shetland Islands/Jimmy Perez series with last year’s Wild Fire. Fear not, though, for EuroCrime says she’s “turning her hand to a new series set in Devon.” The first of those new books, introducing Detective Matthew Venn, will be The Long Call, due out from Minotaur in September.

• Two other far-off releases to watch for: Kate Atkinson’s Big Sky (Little, Brown), her fifth novel starring Cambridge private eye Jackson Brodie, is scheduled for publication on both sides of the Atlanticin June; and Anne Perry will inaugurate a brand-new, pre-World War II series, starring “intrepid photographer” Elena Standish, with the September release Death in Focus (Ballantine).

• Before we leave Ann Cleeves too far behind, a reminder should be issued that Series 5 of Shetland, starring Douglas Henshall as Detective Inspector Jimmy Perez, will debut in the UK on BBC One next Tuesday, February 12. There’s no word yet n when those six new episodes will become available to Netflix users in the States.

• Among the digital audio series CrimeReads contributing editor Emily Stein showcases on her list of the “8 True-Crime Podcasts to Listen to in 2019” is The Murder Book, which premiered on January 28, and which Stein says “is the first podcast produced by bestselling crime novelist Michael Connelly.” She continues:

In Season 1, “The Tell Tale Bullet,” Connelly returns to his roots as a crime beat reporter to investigate a real, 30-year-old cold case of a fatal carjacking in Hollywood, and of a murderer who walked free. Connelly promises that every season of Murder Book will end with a crime solved; to get there, he employs a wide array of sources, including court recordings, wiretaps, and interviews with witnesses and detectives.

Complete with hardboiled narration and a jazzy soundtrack, Murder Book is the perfect podcast both for fans of true crime, and fans of classic noir. It also takes a serious look at the limitations and flaws of our criminal justice system, which leaves the listener with the unavoidable impression that in the past three decades, far too little has changed.

Listen to Connelly’s episodes on the Murder Book Web site or via Apple Podcasts. Full transcripts of each installment are also available on the Web site. New episodes drop every Monday for 10 or 12 weeks.

• One podcast that isn’t mentioned in Stein’s wrap-up is We Never Solved Anything. No, I’d never heard of it either, until its hosts e-mailed me an invitation to listen. As they explain, “It is a funny podcast where we explore a new unsolved mystery theme each week such as serial killers, spontaneous human combustion, and medical mystery stories.” Find the 11 existing episode here.

• Literary Hub’s Emily Temple chooses “10 Contemporary ‘Dickensian’ Novels,” including Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch (2013), Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith (2002), and Peter Carey’s The True History of the Kelly Gang (2001).

• “A great teacher is a gift. A great line editor is a miracle,” declares Nick Ripatrazone, a staff writer for The Millions.

• The Winter 2018/2019 edition of Mystery Readers Journal—built around the theme “Mystery in the American South—“is available now as a PDF and will shortly be available in hardcopy …,” writes editor Janet Rudolph. “We had so many articles, author essays, and reviews, that we had to split this themed issue into two.” A list of contents for this new issue, plus info on buying a copy, can be found here.

• I periodically like to revisit episodes from the classic NBC Mystery Movie series Columbo. Knowing whodunit, and sometimes remembering exactly how the rumpled Los Angeles police lieutenant pins the blame, doesn’t spoil the re-watching one iota. Not long ago I came across this piece The Columbophile, revealing which four among the almost 70 episodes of that show were star Peter Falk’s favorites. “It might come as a surprise to fans,” writes the blog’s anonymous editor, “that pivotal episodes ‘Etude in Black’ and ‘Murder by the Book’ don’t feature here—particularly ‘Etude,’ which starred Falk’s BFF John Cassavetes. Instead, all of Falk’s personal favourites come from Seasons 3 or 5, when the show was more firmly established. Notably, three of the four are from Season 5 alone. What does this tell us? Well for one thing it suggests that Falk was at his happiest in the crumpled raincoat once he had a couple of full seasons under his belt.”

• As we prepare for the June release of James Ellroy’s This Storm (Knopf)—book two in his “Second L.A. Quartet” (following 2014’s Perfidia)—Steve Powell, a British student of that author’s work, feels compelled to ask, “is James Ellroy losing his touch?” Writing in his blog, The Venetian Vase, Powell continues: “I’ve decided to broach the subject as the critical response to Ellroy’s last novel Perfidia was mixed, as were the reviews for his novel before that Blood’s a Rover. … I’ve sensed a certain weariness about Ellroy’s recent efforts when I talk with fans of the author. … So Ellroy cannot expect his new novel, This Storm, to be met with universal acclaim as critical opinion has started to shift. In fact, the opposite may be the case. Ellroy may have to win back some critics who are getting cynical about the author’s once unassailable reputation.”

• What a terrific couple of short-story titles, from classic crime-fiction magazines found here and here. On top of that, both of these publications feature cover art by the great Norman Saunders.

• Mystery Tribune chooses the “45 Best Cozy Mystery Novels.”

• New York bookshop proprietor and anthologist Otto Penzler continues to count down what he contends are the “Greatest Crime Films of All-Time.” Most recently he has considered The Ipcress File (1965), The Kennel Murder Case (1933), and The Glass Key (1942). Keep track of this developing series here.

• While we’re on the subject of Penzler, it should be mentioned that he will be partnering with Pegasus Books to launch Scarlet, an imprint “specializing in psychological suspense aimed at female readers.” Publishers Weekly explains: “The new venture has [tapped] Luisa Smith, longtime buying director at Book Passage, a Corte Madera, Ca., bookstore, to be Scarlet editor-in-chief. Nat Sobel, founder of the Nat Sobel Associates literary agency, will act as a consultant to the imprint. Scarlet will launch in winter 2020 with six to eight titles. The Scarlet list will be distributed by W.W. Norton, which also distributes the titles of its parent companies, Penzler Publishing and Pegasus Books.” Although there’s been some grumbling about the name Scarlet being applied to a literary line intended to promote women’s fiction and female authors (shades of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter!), and Penzler’s heated objections to the Mystery Writers of America’s decision to deny Linda Fairstein a Grand Master Award due to her involvement in a 1990 New York City rape-case prosecution left some authors questioning his compassion toward women, I look forward to seeing what Scarlet can contribute to the already rich field of psychological suspense novels.

• A similarly promising venture comes from Polis Books, which has announced the creation of Agora, an imprint designed to “focus on diverse voices, putting out between six and ten books per year.” Chantelle Aimée Osman will serve as the editor of this line, which plans to begin releasing books in the fall of 2019. Read more here.

• I’m not a big social-media user, but over the years I have established a Rap Sheet presence on Facebook, on Twitter, and on Google+. Now it appears that last page is set to vanish forever. I was recently given this warning:

In December 2018, we announced our decision to shut down Google+ for consumers in April 2019 due to low usage and challenges involved in maintaining a successful product that meets consumers’ expectations. We want to thank you for being part of Google+ and provide next steps, including how to download your photos and other content.

On April 2nd, your Google+ account and any Google+ pages you created will be shut down and we will begin deleting content from consumer Google+ accounts. Photos and videos from Google+ in your Album Archive and your Google+ pages will also be deleted. You can download and save your content, just make sure to do so before April. Note that photos and videos backed up in Google Photos will not be deleted.

The process of deleting content from consumer Google+ accounts, Google+ Pages, and Album Archive will take a few months, and content may remain through this time. For example, users may still see parts of their Google+ account via activity log and some consumer Google+ content may remain visible to G Suite users until consumer Google+ is deleted.

I don’t remember when I signed up for Google+, but I know I only did so because fellow blogger Bill Crider already had. Thankfully, my contributions to The Rap Sheet’s page there have been minimal. I’ll keep updating it for as long as possible, but if you notice that the Google+ link available from the right-hand column of this blog disappears in the next couple of months, you’ll know why.

• In its latest look back at Edgar Award winners of the past, Criminal Element revisits one of my favorite private-eye novels of the past: 1958’s The Eighth Circle, by Stanley Ellin. Sadly, critic Joe Brosnan is too rigid in applying our modern social and sexual sensibilities to a work that was penned more than six decades ago.

• TV fandom is no crazier today than it’s always been. According to this 1959 newspaper report, overenthusiastic followers of the 1958-1964 ABC private-eye series 77 Sunset Strip flocked to the Los Angeles site that stood in for the agency’s offices.

• Finally, here are a few author interviews worth checking out: Jane Harper talks with The New York Times about her new Australia-set crime novel, The Lost Man; Christobel Kent chats with CrimeReads about What We Did; Speaking of Mysteries host Nancie Clare goes one-on-one with H.B. Lyle (The Red Ribbon), Val McDermid (Broken Ground), and James Rollins (Crucible); Ronald H. Balson answers questions from Crimespree Magazine’s Elise Cooper about The Girl from Berlin; and Laura K. Benedict discusses The Stranger Inside with Criminal Element’s John Valeri.