Did We Really Need This?

It seems my fervent wish that a “reimagining” of the 1985-1989 Edward Woodward crime drama, The Equalizer, never be shot has not been granted. According to In Reference to Murder,

Adam Goldberg has been tapped as a lead opposite Queen Latifah in The Equalizer reboot, which has a straight-to-series order at CBS to launch this season. A reimagining of the classic series, The Equalizer stars Queen Latifah as Robyn McCall, an enigmatic woman with a mysterious background who uses her extensive skills to help those with nowhere else to turn. Goldberg will play Harry Keshegian, an endearing, eccentric, and paranoid tech geek whose experience as a white-hat hacker lets him know what the real conspiracies are. He’s as loyal as they come and like a brother to McCall. The series, which recently started production, also stars Chris Noth, Lorraine Toussaint, Tory Kittles, Liza Lapira, and Laya DeLeon Hayes.

Production of the show was shut down in March, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but expectations are that it will premiere in early 2021.

Bullet Points: Pre-Veterans Day Edition

• The “social cataloguing” Web site Goodreads has opened an online voting process to select the winners of its 2019 Choice Awards. The initial round of polling will continue through tomorrow, Sunday, November 10; a second stage will run from November 12 to 17, with the third one extending from November 19 through December 2. Winners are supposed to be announced on Tuesday, December 10. There are 20 categories of contestants, but those vying for Mystery & Thriller honors can be seen—and voted on—right here. Among the nominees are Adrian McKinty’s The Chain, Ruth Ware’s The Turn of the Key, Jane Harper’s The Lost Man, Alex Michaelides’ The Silent Patient, and Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister, the Serial Killer.

• One of my happiest mail deliveries of late brought a copy of UK critic Barry Forshaw’s brand-new work, Crime Fiction: A Reader’s Guide (Oldcastle). I have been hearing about this endeavor for the last year, as Forshaw plumped and polished his tally of authors and individual books to include. (An appendix in this 448-page paperback features my personal suggestions of 27 writers Forshaw didn’t have room to address elsewhere in his text.) But the results surpass what I had been expecting. Although I might have made some different choices as far as individual recommendations go (why promote David Hewson’s 2003 Nic Costa tale, A Season for the Dead, but none of his equally gripping Pieter Vos novels? And I’d have substituted Robert Wilson’s “grimly bewitching” The Blind Man of Seville for its sequel, The Silent and the Damned), the author’s portrayal of this genre’s international evolution and current breadth is—like his literary taste—outstanding. And rewardingly diverse. I’m particularly pleased to see less-prominent yarns such as Anthony J. Quinn’s The Listeners, Jonathan Gash’s Spend Game, and James Sallis’ Ghost of a Flea given a boost in these pages. Together with mini-reviews of books (and of films adapted from best-sellers), Forshaw offers brief but percipient biographies of numerous authors, from Ross Macdonald and P.D. James to Kathy Reichs and Alan Williams, as well as short features on subjects ranging from “Sleuths on Screen” to “Ethnic Crime Writing.” This is a work to savor, though it’s not necessary to read it all at once; better to dip in and out casually, finding suggestions of authors you’ve never tackled and insights into works that merit your greater attention. The Times of London calls Crime Fiction: A Reader’s Guide “a labour of literary love,” and it’s definitely that. Yet this is also a product of sly scholarship, enticing veteran mystery readers to expand their familiarity with the field, and gently—with a depth of knowledge and wit—giving those less well acquainted with crime fiction a firm grounding on which to build their experience. Forshaw’s magnum opus was released this week in Great Britain; an American edition of the same book is due in June 2020.

• This coming Monday, November 11, will be Veterans Day here in the States (Remembrance Day in the UK). To honor the occasion, Mystery Fanfare has posted links to lists of Veterans Day-related mysteries.

• The following item comes from In Reference to Murder:

The shortlist for the second annual Staunch Book Prize was announced recently. The list includes Only to Sleep (in the Philip Marlowe series) by Lawrence Osborne; the 15th-century literary mystery, The Western Wind, by Samantha Harvey; Liar’s Candle by August Thomas; Honey by Brenda Brooks; and The Godmother by Hannelore Cayre. The £1,000 award was set up in 2018 by author Bridget Lawless for the best thrillers in which no woman gets beaten, stalked, sexually exploited, raped, or murdered. The inaugural prize attracted criticism from authors such as Val McDermid and Sophie Hannah, while CrimeFest organizers withdrew an offer of a complimentary pass and panel appearance for the winning writer. BBC News gathered some authors together to share their thoughts on the controversy.

This year’s Staunch Prize winner should be declared on November 25, which—not coincidentally—will be the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women.

• “An expert panel” assembled by the BBC has chosen “100 novels that have shaped our world,” part of a yearlong British effort to “spark debate about the novels that have had a big impact on us all personally and culturally.” That campaign kicks off tonight at 9 p.m. with the premiere of a three-part BBC Two TV series also titled Novels That Shaped Our World. While I didn’t anticipate crime fiction would dominate this roster, there are several books from the genre included, among them Ken Follett’s Eye of the Needle, Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, James Ellroy’s American Tabloid, Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, and Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley.

• Really? A remake of The Equalizer starring Queen Latifa?

• To learn more about the original, 1985-1989 CBS-TV series The Equalizer, which starred English actor Edward Woodward as an ex-CIA operative who uses his skills to “[help] people who really need it, as penance for his previous life,” click here.

• Now, this looks like my kind of murder mystery vacation!

• What was the best episode of Columbo, Peter Falk’s long-running crime drama? That question could draw many opinions—as it did here. But the unidentified writer behind that wonderful blog, The Columbophile, seems to harbor no doubt as to the correct answer: “The Bye-Bye Sky High I.Q. Murder Case,” first broadcast as part of the NBC Sunday Mystery Movie on May 22, 1977, and guest-starring Theo Bikel as “a genius accountant … [who] has been embezzling funds in order to keep his high-maintenance wife in fine frocks and tropical getaways.” The blog goes on to describe that 40th Columbo installment as “70 minutes of television featuring major plot holes, an almost complete lack of cat-and-mouse suspense and, let’s face it, an episode title so contrived as to be ridiculous. Yet Bye-Bye rises above all this to deliver a thoroughly absorbing and entertaining adventure that doesn’t just salvage Columbo‘s sixth season—it proves that the show could be as good as, if not better than, ever before.”

• Here’s more proof that reading is beneficial. “Studies have shown,” says BookRiot, “that readers are more empathetic and that it can improve cognitive function. A new study by SuperSummary, an online resource that provides in-depth study guides, suggests reading has yet another benefit: self-identified readers are more satisfied with their lives than those who don’t identify as readers.”

• Earlier this week, author Andrea Bartz (The Lost Night) posted, on Twitter, “a very useful breakdown of why it’s important to preorder from independent bookshops.” Literary Hub offers the highlights.

• I’m very much looking forward to watching the BBC Two TV production Vienna Blood, a three-part mini-series filmed in the Austrian capital and based at least in part on Frank Tallis’ 2006 novel of that same name. As The Killing Times explains, “It’s set in 1900s Vienna and follows Max Liebermann [played by Matthew Beard], a brilliant young English doctor, studying under the famed psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. When Max comes into contact with Oskar Rheinhardt [Jürgen Maurer], an Austrian Detective Inspector struggling with a strange case, he offers his assistance. Max’s extraordinary skills of perception and forensics, and his deep understanding of human behaviour and deviance, help Oskar solve some of Vienna’s most mysterious and deadly cases.” Vienna Blood is scheduled to debut in Great Britain on Monday, November 18. I haven’t seen word yet of when the show will be broadcast in the States; for the time being, I must content myself with the short introductory trailer below.



• By the way, this Vienna Blood is not to be confused with the identically titled 1942 German operetta film (no prominent crimes involved), which I learned only today was “one of the most financially successful films of the Nazi era.”

• Also due out from the BBC, though not until next year, is an adaptation of Ian McGuire’s historical thriller, The North Water (2016). That three-part TV drama, says The Killing Times, “tells the story of Patrick Sumner [played by Jack O’Connell], a disgraced ex-army surgeon who signs up as ship’s doctor on a whaling expedition to the Arctic. On board he meets the harpooner Henry Drax [Colin Farrell], a brutish killer whose amorality has been shaped to fit the harshness of his world. Hoping to escape the horrors of his past, Sumner finds himself in a male-dominated world, on an ill-fated journey with a murderous psychopath. In search of redemption, his story becomes a harsh struggle for survival in the Arctic wasteland.” That same Killing Times link contains a few early images from the production.

• Speaking of movie stills, here’s one (and, sadly, only one) from Perry Mason, the forthcoming HBO-TV “origin story” about Erle Stanley Gardner’s famous Los Angeles defense attorney, set in 1931. I have written previously about this project here.

• Finally, Deadline reports that British broadcast network ITV “is in advanced development on a sweeping adaptation of Lindsey Davis’ Falco Roman private detective novels after the project was originally in with the BBC. … [The lead character] Falco is described by Davis as a ‘laid-back’ operator whose adventures take place across the Roman Empire in 70 AD and beyond.”

• In praise of Michael Mann’s 1999 film, The Insider.

• Cincinnati, Ohio, writer T.S. Hottie—better known to crime-fiction fans as “Jim Winter” (a sometime Rap Sheet contributor)—has spent the last several months rewatching, and posting about, the James Bond film series. He began in July with Sean Connery’s Dr. No (1962) and on Friday commented on Pierce Brosnan’s Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), the 18th installment in that profitable spy-fi franchise. Hottie originally predicted his marathon rewatch escapade would take him six months, but with that deadline having already passed, it’s time for a reassessment. Click here to read all of his Bond posts.

• R.I.P., Bernard Slade. Although I don’t see any small-screen crime dramas among this screenwriter’s credits on the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), Slade did create a trio of TV sitcoms I remember quite well: The Partridge Family as well as the much less well-known Bridget Loves Bernie and The Girl with Something Extra.

• Talk about forgotten crime dramas! Who recalls CBS-TV’s Brenner, the father-and-son police drama starring Edward Binns and James Broderick, which—with breaks between spurts of episode broadcasts—took five years to roll out completely, from 1959 to 1964?

• I, for one, did not know this: The first book banned in America was 1637’s New English Canaan, by English businessman Thomas Morton. The Millions observes that the book “mounted a harsh and heretical critique of Puritan customs and power structures that went far beyond what most New English settlers could accept. So they banned it …”

• The latest Paperback Warrior Podcast looks back at Donald Hamilton’s Matt Helm thrillers as well as the 1963 novel Mute Witness, which inspired the 1968 Steve McQueen movie Bullitt.

• Bill S. Ballinger (1912-1980) was an Iowa-born author, college professor, and screenwriter. He penned standalone novels with titles such as The Wife of the Red-Haired Man (1957) and Not I, Said the Vixen (1965), along with episodes of TV shows such as M Squad, Mike Hammer, Ironside, and Kolchak: The Night Stalker. In the 1960s, though, Ballinger also concocted a five-book succession of thrillers starring Joaquin Hawks, a U.S. secret agent of Native American heritage who reported to Horace Burke, CIA Director of Operations in Los Angeles. I have never taken the opportunity to read the Hawks yarns, but have certainly come across mentions of them from time to now. More recently, I found that Joe Kenney, who writes the Glorious Trash blog, has reviewed four of those works already, and will presumably soon enlighten us all about number five, The Spy in the Java Sea (1966). He remarks that “This is a good series,” though Ballinger’s characterization of Hawks is thin and “he really needs to cut back on the arbitrary travelogue stuff and feature some actual pulp espionage thrills.” Worth keeping an eye out for.

• While I haven’t yet seen the new Edward Norton picture, Motherless Brooklyn, I have been reading a lot about it recently: CrimeReads’ Olivia Rutigliano muses on the difficulty of bringing Jonathan Lethem’s original 1999 novel to the silver screen in any coherent fashion; The Bowery Boys, a fine New York City history site, offers a rundown of “10 things to know” about the film’s 1950s setting before you buy your theater tickets; and Slate’s Marissa Martinelli breaks down the many ways in which this flick differs from Lethem’s book (“Edward Norton’s adaptation changes more than it keeps”).

• Yikes! I have been falling behind on my reading of Dervla McTiernan’s fiction. I really enjoyed that Irish-Australian writer’s inaugural novel, The Ruin (2018), but have not yet gotten around to cracking open its sequel, this year’s The Scholar. And now here comes a third tale featuring Galway police detective Cormac Reilly: The Good Turn, planned for publication in March 2020.

• Three CrimeReads features worth finding: Paul French makes the case that Havana, Cuba, is a “capital of crime fiction”; Wendy Trimboli and Alicia Zaloga (The Resurrectionist of Caligo) recount how “‘Penny Dreadfuls’ Scandalized Victorian Society—But Flew Off the Shelves”; and Shamus Dust author Janet Roger pays tribute to The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler’s initial Philip Marlowe novel, which just a few months back celebrated its 80th year in print.

• In a short piece for Criminal Element, Shelley Noble applauds “Four Women Who Forever Changed the Gilded Age Mystery Genre.”

• Happy 10th anniversary to Murder by Gaslight, Robert Wilhelm’s blog about “notable nineteenth century American murders.”

• And I’ve read a great deal over the years about journalist Nellie Bly’s 1887 undercover investigation into brutality and neglect at the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island, in New York City’s East River. Yet I still enjoyed Susannah Cahalan’s account, in Literary Hub, of Bly’s harrowing experiences and how the mentally ill were mistreated during America’s early years. Cahalan is the author of The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission That Changed Our Understanding of Madness (Grand Central).

Who’re You Gonna Call?

It seems to bear scant resemblance to Edward Woodward’s The Equalizer, the well-remembered 1985-1989 CBS-TV series that inspired it. Yet based on the trailer embedded above, Denzel Washington’s new big-screen picture, The Equalizer--due to premiere in theaters this coming September--certainly has much to commend it. As The Huffington Post explains, the plot finds Washington playing Robert McCall, “a man with ‘possible military training,’ who takes on the Russian mob because of an innocent girl he barely knows. As Washington says of the book he is reading in the trailer, ‘It is about a guy who is a knight in shining armor, except he lives in a world where knights don’t exist anymore.’ As per usual, he is really good at killing people, but with this character he likes to time himself when in combat.” There’s already talk of a sequel being made.

Tough But Not Immortal

There’s some very sad news coming out of Britain this morning. To quote from The Daily Mail’s lengthy obituary:

Veteran actor Edward Woodward, who was best known for his roles in The Wicker Man and The Equalizer, died today.

The 79-year-old had been suffering from various illnesses, including pneumonia, and passed away at the Royal Cornwall hospital in Truro, his agent said.

Janet Glass released a statement praising his ‘brave spirit and wonderful humour’.

It said: ‘Universally loved and admired through his unforgettable roles in classic productions such as Breaker Morant, The Wicker Man, Callan, The Equalizer and many more, he was equally fine and courageous in real life, never losing his brave spirit and wonderful humour throughout his illness. ...’

Although he started out as a Shakespearean actor, the success of Callan (the 1967-1972 series in which he played a professional killer employed by a mysterious British government intelligence service) helped to typecast him as a smooth but hard-nosed operator. The Equalizer sent him up that same alley. Again according to The Daily Mail, “one magazine poll voted him ‘the male TV star more women would like to cuddle than any other’, and he was labelled a sex symbol for his portrayal [in The Equalizer] of the ice cool, but charming ex-CIA agent Robert McCall--a vigilante who operates his own one-man security service.” Woodward exploited that image again in the short-lived, action-oriented UK crime drama CI5: The New Professionals (1999), playing the head of a fictional intelligence agency, with a team that included the lovely Lexa Doig.

More recently, Woodward had joined the cast of the long-running British soap opera EastEnders.

READ MORE: “Edward Woodward, 79: British Leading Man Personified ‘the Actor’s Life,’” by Adam Bernstein (The Washington Post); “What Do You Call a Man with Three Planks of Wood on His Head?” by Charlie Williams (The Charlie Williams Blog); “The Horn Section Salutes: Edward Woodward (1930-2009),” by Hal Horn (The Horn Section); “R.I.P., Edward Woodward,” by Tanner (Double O Section).

The Best TV Crime Drama Openers, #21

Series Title: The Equalizer | Years: 1985-1989, CBS | Starring: Edward Woodward, Keith Szarabajka, Robert Lansing | Theme Music: Stewart Copeland

Gotta problem? Odds against you?
Call the Equalizer 212-555-4200.

Although it suffers from some obvious grammatical clumsiness (“Gotta problem?” should be “Have a problem?” or “Do you have a problem?”), this newspaper advertisement was astonishingly effective. At least it was on the Reagan-era TV series The Equalizer, which found British actor Edward Woodward portraying a nattily dressed, well-spoken, and well-read modern-day urban vigilante.

The series’ premise went something like this: Robert McCall (Woodward) was a 50-something ex-senior operative for a CIA-like operation (referred to only as “The Company”) who, ultimately disillusioned with the abundant ethical compromises he’d had to make over his long career, and cynical about the power of America’s justice system to actually right wrongs, took early retirement from the espionage game in order to become a New York City private detective--of sorts. Having invested wisely, and thus no longer in need of a regular paycheck (he already laid claim to a stylish apartment and wheeled about the metropolis in a new-model Jaguar), McCall set himself up as what The Thrilling Detective Web Site calls a “one-man ‘equalizer,’ dedicating himself to helping people who really need it, as penance for his previous life.”

While he looked the part of a proper gentleman, with his neatly clipped gray hair, cuff links and pocket hankies, and bespoke three-piece suits fresh from Saville Row or Brooks Brothers, the 5-foot-10 McCall took to his assignments with a particularly cold-blooded efficiency. His cases came via that classified ad mentioned before, and he sifted through his answering-machine messages for people he thought could benefit the most from his no-cost, distinctive services--those whose lives were endangered by their discoveries at work, or who were threatened by predators, or who were being singled out for abuse because they were somehow considered weaker than their fellows. The message with which McCall greeted folks soliciting his aid demonstrated both how dangerous he knew himself to be and how weary he was of having to repent for his past sins: “This is Robert McCall. If you will leave your name, message, and number I will get back to you as soon as possible. I don’t want to, but I will.” Although he wasn’t prone toward physical violence, McCall may have been the most menacing of small-screen P.I.s. Confronted in one episode of The Equalizer by an arsonist who told him to “Go to hell!,” McCall responded with simple and utter contempt: “After you, sir! After you!” Is it any wonder that family values fringers targeted The Equalizer for expeditious cancellation?

As the Web site TV Acres recalls:

While on a case, McCall’s methods of persuasion varied. At first, he simply informed an offending person, in a fair but firm manner, to please stop their wrong-doing. When that failed, some threats, blackmail, or intimidation followed. And finally, when the initial methods failed (and the target was really, really crummy) Robert might pull out a gun and execute the person. But Robert didn’t take a life on a whim. He genuinely tried to resolve his problems without the use of force, but when it came down to the safety of his clients, McCall’s sharply-honed skills as a spy could quickly kick in for the kill.

Not exactly the sort of guy you want to have over for a friendly little game of Monopoly. However, McCall and his Walther PPK definitely had their place in the Darwinian strata of troubled, late-20th-century society. What saved him from being dismissed as a one-dimensional assassin was the guilt he felt after his years as a spy and the manifest complications of his personal life. As we learned over the four years The Equalizer aired, McCall was divorced, with an estranged son who bitterly resented his progenitor for abandoning him, but who was later drawn into the same nefarious world that had shaped (or, it could be said, misshaped) the elder McCall’s makeup. The show’s protagonist also had a daughter born of another woman he’d once loved, but who had vacated his life without telling him about their child. These personal disappointments and failings contributed to McCall’s weight of guilt, but they also gave substance to a character who desperately needed it in this revenge fantasy.

The Equalizer benefited, too, from featuring Woodward as Robert McCall. A former Shakespearean stage performer who’d earned his tough-guy chops playing a professional killer working for the British government in the 1967-1972 British spy drama Callan, and who’d later portrayed a god-fearing cop in the 1973 horror flick The Wicker Man, Woodward was somehow able to pull off McCall’s “death look”--which he fixed upon the worst of his fictional adversaries--without appearing silly. Had another actor won the McCall role instead, the show might not have survived as long as it did. Similarly premised series, such as 1997’s Delleventura, which posited the usually terrific Danny Aiello as a Gotham gumshoe taking “cases the NYPD can’t or won’t handle,” have been forgotten even faster than John McCain forgets his supposedly principled stands on political issues. Unfortunately, Woodward suffered a heart attack during The Equalizer’s run, and both Richard Jordan and--amazingly--Robert Mitchum stepped in to fill Woodward’s shoes while he was recovering. Without Woodward at the helm, though, the show seemed less convincing than it did otherwise. (A citizen avenger running around New York, bringing down criminals? Who’re you kidding, Batman?)

Contributing significantly to this show’s strength was its dramatic opening, which rolled quickly through a succession of scenes in which men and (mostly) women were being threatened by mendacious figures of one dark stripe or another. It capitalized on the sense many people have these days that their safety is perpetually under threat, no matter how innocent they might be. The opening was lent still greater impact by its theme music, a pounding, tension-creating rhythm that was composed by Stewart Copeland, the founder and drummer of the rock band The Police. (Copeland later release an album that included an extended version of that theme.) It’s surprising that The Equalizer’s weekly introduction didn’t dry up Manhattan’s tourist trade forever. Robert McCall was fictitious; the sort of dangers dramatized in that title sequence are not.

Earlier this year, the first season of The Equalizer was finally released in a DVD set. And crime novelists Terrill Lee Lankford (Blonde Lightning) and Michael Connelly (The Overlook, The Brass Verdict) are reportedly working away on the script for a big-screen adaptation of the series. (The International Movie Database has it scheduled for a 2009 release.) Let’s hope that if the film does happen, its producers find a part for Edward Woodward someplace. Although he’s suffered two heart attacks over the years, and is now said to be undergoing treatment for prostate cancer, the 78-year-old thespian continues to act, appearing most recently in a two-part episode of the very-long-running British police procedural series, The Bill. I, for one, can’t imagine The Equalizer without him.