Bullet Points: Long Overdue Edition

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 Murder reports 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’s The 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 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.

• Robson Green is much in demand. The Killing Times reports that, with his work done on Grantchester’s 11th and final season (set to premiere on PBS Masterpiece come 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 Wrap recalls, 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 Hawke has 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.”

What I’ll Do for Free Merch

Generally, I abhor having photographs taken of myself. But at Bouchercon in San Diego earlier this month, I promised Kevin Burton Smith, the creator and editor of The Thrilling Detective Web Site, that I would pose for a shot and post it here in exchange for him giving me one of the T-shirts he brought with him to that convention commemorating his site’s 25 years in business.

Thanks, Kevin. And here’s to your page’s next quarter-century!

Snoops Site Thrives at 25

You’ve gotta give the guy credit for longevity! April 2023 marks 25 years—a full quarter-century—that Kevin Burton Smith has been writing, editing, expanding, and forever tinkering with his indispensable online resource, The Thrilling Detective Web Site. Taking its name from a crime-fiction pulp magazine popular on newsstands between 1931 and 1953, Smith’s Thrilling Detective is an encyclopedia of information, primarily about fictional private eyes (those appearing in books and journals, as well as on radio, television, and in other electronic media), but occasionally he slips in a character who acts just like a gumshoe without officially being one.

The results, despite Smith’s persistent modesty about them, are outstanding. Now, I may be a particularly receptive audience for this sort of intelligence, but I can’t tell you how many times each week I refer to The Thrilling Detective, whether it’s to investigate the background of a vintage shamus, search for details on a forgotten scribbler, examine the editor’s periodic (and often delightfully snarky) news bits, sample the evolving “This Day in P.I. History” listings, or check out the site’s intermittent presentations of short fiction. And I’m quite chuffed to see that Smith has resumed updating his “Dick of the Day” page, on which he directs readers to fresh and updated entries to his rogue’s gallery of pertinacious peepers.

Specifically for this 25th anniversary, Smith has posted “The Autobiography of Matthew Scudder,” an excerpted work of fiction from Lawrence Block. He also provides author-screenwriter Lee Goldberg’s blunt assessment of the Magnum, P.I. TV reboot. And he introduces the whole package with cover art by Oregon artist Leslie Peterson Sapp, who he says, “does these simply amazing paintings inspired by noir. The one I’ve chosen was the most ‘private-eyish’ one I could find, but Leslie’s noir visions go far beyond that. You can read all about her and her work in ‘Leslie Peterson Sapp: I Paint What I Feel—And I Feel Noir.’ And be sure to check out some of her other work in ‘My Scrapbook.’”

As much delight as I find in Smith’s ongoing project, he’s caused me some definite headaches over the last couple of years, as he’s gone through the fitful process of transferring The Thrilling Detective’s pages to a new, apparently more reliable cyberspace address, causing multitudes of links from The Rap Sheet to become inoperable. (Those connections are still being fixed.) But I can forgive him that irksome move, so long as he persists in enhancing the Web’s foremost compendium of knowledge regarding invented sleuths.

Here’s to many more years behind your keyboard, Kevin!

By the way, if you’d like to help The Thrilling Detective Web Site grow, pitch a few bucks toward the cause. Click here to learn how.

Of Things Past

While looking through editor Kevin Burton Smith’s recent additions to The Thrilling Detective Web Site, I noticed something I had not spotted before, even though it has apparently been offered since at least 2018: “This Day in P.I. History,” a list of significant events from the lengthy heritage of private-eye fiction. Today’s entries, for instance, read:

• Allan J. Pinkerton signs this contract between the Illinois Central Railroad and the Pinkerton’s Detective Agency, Pinkerton & Company, agreeing to establish a “Police Agency” in Chicago to assist the Railroad in the “prompt and efficient performance of their business,” on this date in 1855.

• On this day in 1929, Dashiell Hammett’s first novel, Red Harvest, featuring the Continental Op, was published by Alfred A. Knopf, following a four-part run in Black Mask in 1927 and 1928.

I look forward to re-checking “This Day in History” regularly, to see what’s new—or, rather, what’s old news—regarding this genre.

Bullet Points: Oddments and Endings Edition

• First it was former U.S. president Bill Clinton. Now country singer-songwriter Dolly Parton is collaborating with best-seller James Patterson to produce a work of fiction. Titled Run, Rose, Run, and due out from Little, Brown in March 2022, this will be Parton’s first novel. As Literary Hub explains, the yarn follows “a young woman who moves to Nashville to fulfill her dreams of becoming a star while simultaneously hiding from her past … An accompanying Dolly Parton album containing 12 original songs inspired by the book will be released simultaneously on Parton’s label Butterfly Records. ‘The mind-blowing thing about this project is that reading the novel is enhanced by listening to the album and vice versa,’ Patterson told People. ‘It’s a really unique experience that I know readers (and listeners) will love.’” We’ll just have to see about that.

• Lee Goldberg and Joel Goldman have worked on and off over the last seven years—ever since they founded their publishing imprint, Brash Books—to convince South Dakota author William J. Reynolds that he should let them republish his once-popular novels starring an Omaha-based private investigator-turned-writer known only as Nebraska. The effort finally paid off. “We have licensed all six novels in the Nebraska series,” Goldberg tells me. “Our intention is to release them all at once in October in e-book and trade paperback.” The Nebraska Quotient (1984) is the opening entry in that series, but Goldberg sent me the cover art for its 1986 sequel, Moving Targets, displayed on the right. I, for one, look forward to re-reading the whole set!

• Good for Charles Ardai! From Mystery Tribune:

Gun Honey, the new 4-part [Titan] comic book series launching in September 2021 by Charles Ardai, the Edgar and Shamus award winning author and co-founder of Hard Case Crime, is being developed for television by Piller/Segan, producers of Private Eyes, Haven, Greek, Wildfire, and The Dead Zone, and Malaysia-based Double Vision, the production arm of the Vision New Media Group and the award-winning producers behind the acclaimed Asian adaptation of The Bridge.

Featuring interior art by Malaysian illustrator Ang Hor Kheng as well as two covers by legendary movie-poster painter Robert McGinnis (creator of the posters for the original James Bond films), Gun Honey tells the story of Singapore-born weapons expert Joanna Tan, the best in the world at providing her clients with the perfect weapon at the perfect moment. When her new assignment leads to the escape of a brutal criminal from a high-security prison, Joanna is forced to track him down—and to confront secrets about her own past that will challenge her sense of who she is.

Gun Honey will be the second television collaboration between Hard Case Crime and Piller/Segan, who previously worked together to produce Haven, based on the first of three bestselling novels written for Hard Case Crime by Stephen King. Haven ran for six years on SyFy in the U.S. and was distributed in 185 territories worldwide.

• Well, it’s about damn time! After witnessing its release date delayed five times over the last two years—three of those due to the spread of COVID-19—the 25th James Bond picture, No Time to Die, looks to finally be rolling out on September 30 in the UK, and on October 8 in the States. Eon Productions has already announced the film’s world premiere will come on September 28, at London’s Royal Albert Hall. But Bill Koenig of The Spy Command notes that the Bond Web site MI6 HQ “tweeted out that Australia has postponed No Time to Die to Nov. 11 from Oct. 8. Theater lists like this one from an IMAX​ theater carry the Nov. 11 date. Later, MI6 HQ tweeted that New Zealand is also delayed to Nov. 11.” It seems even 007 is powerless against this persistent pandemic.

• Word from In Reference to Murder is that, “Following a highly competitive auction, Amazon Studios has acquired a star vehicle that will have Emily Blunt playing Kate Warne, the first woman to become a detective at the Pinkerton Agency. Based on a script by Gustin Nash, the movie is a propulsive action adventure built around Warne, a real-life female Sherlock Holmes in a male-dominated industry whose singular sleuthing skills paved the way for future women in law enforcement and forever changed how detective work was done.” Writer and producer Nile Cappello supplies interesting background on Warne in this 2019 piece for CrimeReads.

• I mentioned not long ago that Season 6 of Grantchester is scheduled to begin broadcasting in the States on Sunday, October 3, as part of PBS-TV’s Masterpiece Mystery! lineup. British viewers, though, won’t have such a lengthy wait. According to The Killing Times, that historical whodunit will debut in the UK on September 3.

• British actor Martin Clunes is returning for a second series of Manhunt, the ITV-TV crime drama he headlined back in 2019. As before, he’ll portray real-life Detective Chief Inspector Colin Sutton of London’s Metropolitan Police. Radio Times provides this plot synopsis for Manhunt II: The Night Stalker: “Based on a true story, Manhunt series two will see … Sutton pursue a notorious southeast London serial rapist whose 17-year reign of terror left thousands of elderly people fearing for their lives.” Digital Spy says Manhunt II will reach TV screens across the pond sometime this fall.

• Here’s a story I missed earlier in the month: The Showtime network is “in its early stages” of developing a TV series about Depression-era Chicago gangster Al Capone and his most ardent pursuer, Prohibition agent Eliot Ness. “The show will delve into Prohibition-era politics, industrialization, mass media, the immigrant experience, law enforcement and the birth of organized crime,” according to Deadline. “It will show how Al Capone corporatized crime on a level never before imagined, and how Eliot Ness, one of the most revolutionary cops in American history, fought an uphill battle to reform law enforcement, a battle that continues to this day.” This potential drama finds its inspiration in 2018’s Scarface and the Untouchable: Al Capone, Eliot Ness, and the Battle for Chicago, by Max Allan Collins and A. Brad Schwartz. While that all sounds promising, Collins cautions in his blog that Scarface has only been “optioned” for adaptation: “[R]esist holding your breaths ... for the show to appear.”

• Robert Louis Stevenson—wannabe detective-fictionist?

• Bloody Scotland, set this year to be a hybrid festival of on-site events and video presentations, will begin in Stirling, Scotland, on September 17 and run through the 19th. A news release says, “huge names including Stephen King, Kathy Reichs, Karin Slaughter, Lee Child, Jeanine Cummins, Linwood Barclay and Robert Peston” will be available on-screen, while interviewers fire questions at them in front of live audiences. “Meanwhile,” it adds, “pacing the boards in Stirling itself will be the great and the good of the Scottish crime scene, including Val McDermid, Ian Rankin, Denise Mina, Chris Brookmyre, Marisa Haetzman, Lin Anderson, Abir Mukherjee, Craig Robertson, Alan Parks, Morgan Cry, Craig Russell and Stuart MacBride. Plus some big names from outside Scotland: Paula Hawkins, Luca Veste, Mark Billingham, Mick Herron, S.J. Watson, Lisa Jewell, Stuart Neville, Kia Abdullah, E.S. Thomson and Louise Candlish.” Opening-night festivities will feature the presentation of two awards: the 2021 McIlvanney Prize and Bloody Scotland Debut Prize. The full program of convention events, plus ticket information, can be accessed here.

• Speaking of crime-fiction conventions, SlaughterFest—a single-day online event “curated by internationally best-selling author Karin Slaughter”—is scheduled for Saturday, September 4. Click here to see the lineup of speakers. All of the conversations will be broadcast on the Killer Reads Facebook page, which is also where you should go to make your interest in SlaughterFest known.

• Just to remind you, the abbreviated roster of online events comprising this year’s postponed Bouchercon will kick off next Friday, August 27. In the run-up to that date, organizers are reminding everyone that “the hilariously ironically titled This Time for Sure, the 2021 Bouchercon short-story anthology,” is ready for ordering. Edited by Hank Phillippi Ryan and published by Down & Out, the book features tales by such familiar authors as Karen Dionne, Heather Graham, G. Miki Hayden, Edwin Hill, Craig Johnson, Ellen Clair Lamb, Kristen Lepionka, Alan Orloff, Alex Segura, Charles Todd, Gabriel Valjan, David Heska Wanbli Weiden, and Andrew Welsh-Huggins.

• As always, I hesitate to recommend films and TV shows I stumble across on YouTube, fearing they might disappear at any moment. (That’s exactly what happened to “Enough Rope,” for instance, a rare 1960 episode of the TV anthology series The Chevy Mystery Show that introduced Bert Freed as the later-legendary Lieutenant Columbo; it flashed onto YouTube recently, but was gone again before I could alert readers.) Nonetheless, I must draw attention to the fact that Travis McGee, a 1983 pilot for an ABC series starring Sam Elliott and based on John D. MacDonald’s The Empty Copper Sea (1978), is ready for your viewing pleasure here. My opinion of Travis McGee both before and after rewatching it is identical: I like Elliott in this role, and find the flick generally entertaining, but don’t think it accurately captures MacDonald’s “salvage consultant”-cum-sleuth. Steve Scott, who writes the fine MacDonald-focused blog The Trap of Solid Gold, is rather less generous:

I watched it when it was first broadcast, then forced myself to watch it again on videotape, then erased the tape. I recall it as possibly the worst attempt of adapting JDM to the screen, ever. Elliott apparently couldn’t be bothered to shave his bushy mustache, so he looked nothing like Travis. He spoke in his characteristic twang, dropping his g’s and sounding more like a rodeo clown than MacDonald’s melancholy, intelligent hero. The feel of the thing was all wrong, so that even the sections of dialogue and voice-over that were taken directly from the book sounded trite and worn. Writing in The Washington Post, Tom Shales called Elliott “not so much a craggy actor as one great crag; his voice comes up straight from Middle Earth and his countenance is rangy and dry to the point of characterature.”

JDM was not happy with the result either. He called Elliott “an OK actor, but he was swimming upstream.” [MacDonald] was especially angry at the changing of the title. “What did they expect to call the sequel?” he fumed, and labeled the whole project a “mishmash.”

The ratings, however, were apparently good enough to get Warners to green-light a series, but the producers diddled, and by the time they had made up their minds to go forward, Elliott was committed to other projects and unavailable.

Scott offers more background on Travis McGee here.

• Cross-Examining Crime reviews a new book titled Sherlock in the Seventies: A Wild Decade of Sherlock Holmes Films, by Derham Groves (Visible Spectrum), and in the course of it argues that that those offerings were not only varied, but also “weird and bizarre.” Do you remember, for example, 1970’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, or 1971’s They Might Be Giants? How about The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1976), the teleflick Sherlock Holmes in New York (1976), or Murder by Decree (1979)? I don’t know. In my opinion, most of these movies weren’t so “weird and bizarre” as they were ... wonderful.

• Whilst we’re on the subject of Messrs. Holmes and Watson, let me direct your attention to Murder & Mayhem’s selection of nine books that take an unusual approach toward the world of Arthur Conan Doyle’s renowned Victorian investigators.

• On a related note, The Bunburyist’s Elizabeth Foxwell writes: “The new Arthur Conan Doyle Society (spearheaded by George Mason University’s Ross Davies) is devoted to the study and enjoyment of the works of Conan Doyle. It is accepting nominations until November 1, 2021, for the best scholarly writing on Conan Doyle’s works or life that was published in 2020–21.” Any suggestions?

• I didn’t even know there was a Public Library of the Year award, presented by the Scotland-based International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions. Evidently, though, it exists, and has just chosen a winner from among five finalists. The only hint I’ll give, is that you probably live nowhere near this signal institution.

• New York-born actor—and childhood polio survivor—Alex Cord passed away on August 9 at age 88. As blogger Terence Towles Canote reminds us, Cord (originally Alexander Viespi Jr.) “was a particularly talented actor who played a variety of roles. He was the Ringo Kid in the 1966 remake of Stagecoach, Dylan Hunt in Gene Roddenberry’s failed pilot Genesis II, and Archangel on Airwolf. He could play heroes as easily as he could play villains, and was as comfortable in Westerns as he was science fiction or action movies.” My strongest memories of Cord, who was once married to actress Joanna Pettet, come from his starring role in 1973’s Genesis II, which I fervently hoped at the time would generate a series for CBS; unfortunately, that wasn’t the case, and Cord found himself replaced in the 1974 follow-up pilot, Planet Earth, by John Saxon (who died about a year ago). Cord’s other credits included parts on Naked City, Route 66, Police Story, Simon & Simon, and Jake and the Fatman. In addition, he appeared as Angie Dickinson’s ex-husband on the 1982 P.I. series Cassie & Co. (watch that show’s leggy main title sequence here).

• The Reprobate looks back at the “double life” of Clare Dunkel, “one of the biggest glamour models of the 1980s,” who “became an acclaimed author of ultra-violent crime fiction”: the recently deceased Mo Hayder (Birdman, The Devil of Nanking).

• Who knew Russians were so hungry for crime fiction?

• Solicitations and more solicitations: First off, Mystery Readers Journal has put out a call for reviews, articles, and essays having to do with cold-case mysteries, all to be featured in its next quarterly issue. Second, Gerald So is asking for submissions of crime-related poetry to his blog The Five-Two, which is about to begin its 11th year in business; he says he needs them by August 31. And third, Kevin R. Tipple is welcoming guest posts to his own site, Kevin’s Corner. “Topic—pretty much anything goes,” he explains. “While my blog is mainly aimed towards items of interest for readers and writers of mystery and crime fiction, I am open to pretty much anything. I do ask that folks avoid the topics of religion and politics unless either or both directly relate to the work being discussed or promoted.”

• What’s The Private Eye Writers Bulletin Board? Kevin Burton Smith, who cooked up this project for The Thrilling Detective Web Site, explains: “If you’re a private eye writer, and you’ve got something in a private eye vein coming out in the next little while, please let me know via e-mail (or DM me, for you youngsters) and I’ll post the news here. All I ask is that you keep it short, keep it pithy and keep it relevant. If you’re not sure, check out “What the Hell Is a Private Eye, Anyway?”

• Finally, if you haven’t noticed yet, I have added a link from the right-hand column of this page to “The Dick of the Day,” a delightful Thrilling Detective feature that introduces—or reintroduces—detective-fiction fans to familiar or obscure protagonists plucked from the pages of history. Of late, it has spotlighted everyone from Peter Scratch and Mitch Roberts to Jinx Alameda, Nameless (no, not Bill Pronzini’s Nameless), and … Donald J. Trump. Yes, before he was a failed, serial-lying former White House occupant, Trump did gumshoe work in a story River Clegg sold to The New Yorker.

You’re Loving Eyes

Can you believe that The Thrilling Detective Web Site has now been around for 14 years? To celebrate that achievement, editor Kevin Burton Smith asked his many astute readers to choose their 14 favorite private-eye novels of all time. Here are the biggest vote-getters:

• The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiell Hammett (starring Sam Spade)
• The Long Goodbye, by Raymond Chandler (Philip Marlowe)
• Farewell, My Lovely, by Raymond Chandler (Philip Marlowe)
• Devil in a Blue Dress, by Walter Mosley (Easy Rawlins)
• L.A. Requiem, by Robert Crais (Elvis Cole)
• When the Sacred Ginmill Closes, by Lawrence Block (Matt Scudder)
• The Last Good Kiss, by James Crumley (C.W. Sughrue)
• I, the Jury, by Mickey Spillane (Mike Hammer)
• Gone, Baby, Gone, by Dennis Lehane (Patrick Kenzie and
Angela Gennaro)
• The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler (Philip Marlowe)
• The Drowning Pool, by Ross Macdonald (Lew Archer)
• Solomon’s Vineyard, by Jonathan Latimer (Karl Craven)
• The Promised Land, by Robert B. Parker (Spenser)
• The Taste of Ashes, by Howard Browne (Paul Pine)

I’m pleased to say that I have read all but one of these novels (Brown’s 1957 work, The Taste of Ashes), and agree they’re all deserving of accolades--though I would certainly have chosen The Chill to represent Macdonald, rather than The Drowning Pool.

And there are other books among Smith’s lists of also-rans that deserve at least as much attention as these 14, including Looking for Rachel Wallace, by Robert B. Parker (Spenser); True Detective, by Max Allan Collins (Nate Heller); The Eighth Circle, by Stanley Ellin (Murray Kirk); The Convertible Hearse, by William Campbell Gault (Brock Callahan); Interface, by Joe Gores (Neal Fargo); Castles Burning, by Arthur Lyons (Jacob Asch); Indemnity Only, by Sara Paretsky (V.I. Warshawski); Hell to Pay, by George Pelecanos (Derek Strange and Terry Quinn); Stone Quarry, by S.J. Rozan (Bill Smith and Lydia Chin); and ... well, this list could go on and on.

The wealth of excellent private-eye fiction is truly astounding. Consider The Thrilling Detective’s selections a good place to start in exploring the genre.

Smith’s full tally of top choices can be found here.

The Power of 10

I toy every now and then with the idea of rearranging The Rap Sheet’s right-hand column of crime-fiction links. Rather than simply listing them all together alphabetically, I’ve considered breaking out a shorter list of blogs/sites that I visit daily, versus those that I keep track of on a less regular basis. If I were to do such a thing, one of the sites I would definitely place in the top category would be The Thrilling Detective Web Site, Kevin Burton Smith’s amazingly extensive resource for all of us with a deep curiosity about fictional sleuths. It’s one of those sites worth prospecting on a quiet afternoon. But I warn you: An intended dalliance with The Thrilling Detective may instead lead to a continuing and passionate involvement. The thing is just that seductive.

This week, Smith and his cohorts in criminous compilation are celebrating their project’s 10th anniversary, which seems amazing, given the flea’s-life longevities of most Web sites. Of course, it takes no more than a little probing within the back pages of Thrilling Detective to realize that only such a long-term commitment could have produced this extensive a resource. It is rare that I go looking for information there, and don’t find it. Which is why you’ll discover many links to Smith’s site throughout The Rap Sheet. If he ever decides to shut down The Thrilling Detective, a good chunk of my links are going to go dead. So, Kevin, don’t even think about it, buddy.

In a half-humble, half-hard-boiled recollection of his site’s first decade in business, posted on Monday, Smith writes:

Today marks the tenth anniversary of the Thrilling Detective Web Site. Or at least the “official” anniversary. The site existed unofficially for a few months prior to April 1, 1998, as a sort of rudimentary private resource for a selected diehard P.I. fans and Rara-Avians who kept urging me to go public. I wasn’t convinced there’d be much interest, but I gave in, and on so on April 1 I unleashed the beast. It was April Fools’ Day, of course, but that seemed appropriate, since the site had started as a joke, more or less, a harmless way to practice html with something that wouldn't bore me to tears. But I figured it would sure bore the hell out of everyone else. I was wrong.

Suffice it to say that the last ten years have been a lot of things, but they’ve rarely been boring. But ten years, man. That’s gotta be worth something, right?

So please forgive the horn-tooting. Ten years on the “information superhighway.” That’s what? Thirty or forty years in human years? Long enough, anyway, to have outlasted (or out-updated) almost almost every other crime-fiction-related site and newsgroup on the Internet. I’ve outlasted Blue Murder, Judas, 3rd Degree, White Fedora, Shred of Evidence, HandHeldCrime, Futures, Hardluck Stories and Plots with Guns (well, version 1.0). As far as I can tell, only DorothyL and Rara-Avis have been around longer, and they’re discussion groups.

(And certainly long enough to say “HAH!” to a few of the naysayers who have gone ballistic every time I opened my mouth anywhere anytime. I’m pleased to say that more people will probably visit my Web site in one day than will ever read their sorry-ass “reviews” and self-published crapfests.)

The site has been a labour of love, mostly, and occasionally a thorn in my side. Because of the site, I’ve appeared on radio and television (and DVD, of all things), and been cited as a source in newspaper articles on crime fiction. I’ve met plenty of authors, some of whom I’m honoured to now call friends. It’s led to a writing career of sorts, speaking engagements and even a certain minor-league celebrity. But just as the site giveth, it also taketh away. I haven’t actually had a real vacation--or even much free time--in close to ten years.

Yeah, I know how that goes. But The Thrilling Detective’s endurance proves that other small-scale, tight-budgeted, Web-born editorial products (The Rap Sheet, for instance) can have long, productive lives. That’s certainly worth something, right? As are the contents Smith is rolling out as part of his site’s 10th anniversary update. There’s already new fiction by Robert Petyos (“The Truth About Lang Tri”), Paul Guyot (“Ace in the Hole”), Jim Winter (“Lady Luck”), and Stephen D. Rogers (“A Friendly Game”); several new comics; a couple of excerpts from recently published novels; and the usual slew of fresh and expanded back-matter, including pages about detectives Frank Cannon, Izzy Spellman, P.G. Wodehouse’s Mr. McGee, and Brock Devlin. Smith promises additions to come, including a page about the late Arthur Lyons that I (in a moment of ambitious foolhardiness) offered to write.

All of this just makes an already essential resource the site that much richer. And more useful. Imagine what The Thrilling Detective will be like in 10 more years. (OK, Kevin, you can stop hyperventilating now--I’m only supposing here.)

Happy anniversary, everybody!

Rumors of His Demise ...

It’s great to see the original thrilling detective, Kevin Burton Smith, back in the saddle at The Thrilling Detective Web Site. Smith has had the site on hiatus for the last few months, partly because, as he remarks today in his blog, the site is “one big boulder to be pushing uphill all the time.” He’s being witty (he’s quite often witty), but the reality is, with this project, Smith has created the most significant repository for detective fiction of a ... er ... thrilling nature.

As Smith remarks in his longstanding introduction to the site:

What is a private eye? I'll be rounding up a few attempts at a definition later, but simply put, I'm talking private eyes here. Think gumshoe, shamus, peeper, private dick. He doesn't necessarily have to be licensed, he may consider himself a "salvage consultant" and a "guy that helps people out", he may be a bounty hunter or a troubleshooter or a freelance reporter, but he's generally a freelancer, a loner, an outsider, with an essence of toughness that has more to do with character than how many sailors he can toss out of a bar. And it goes without saying (or it should) that he might very well be a she.

If that’s the sort of fiction that spins your wheels, The Thrilling Detective Web Site should be an important surfing stop.

Despite the hiatus, the new issue is a corker. There’s new short fiction from Kim Harrington, Daniel Hatadi, Russel McLean, D.H. Reddall, and Sarah Weinman (“It’s an intriguing mix of virgins and those who’ve been around the block a few times,” the editor remarks); an excerpt from Brett Martin’s A Dum-Dum for the President; and more than 300 new or updated files “just to show there’s more to my life than painkillers and The Rockford Files.”

The Thrilling Detective Web Site can be found here.

Thrilling’s Days of Yesteryear?

Kevin Burton Smith is more interested in, and more committed to the study and advancement of detective fiction than anyone I know. Although he’s been writing for me at January Magazine for years, I’ve only had the chance to meet him one time, during a trip I made to Los Angeles to do some research for a novel I am writing. We met for lunch on a sunny afternoon, and sat out on the patio of a hotel restaurant, yapping about the authors we’ve enjoyed reading over the years, as well as the books here and there that we would probably have been better off never picking up. Though there are some delicate souls who find Kevin’s commentary rather abrasive at times, he’s a man who knows his business--no doubt about that--and his business is crime. Well, the fictional variety, anyway.

As a result, I was saddened this morning to read his blog post about his decision to put The Thrilling Detective Web Site, that vast storehouse of information about crime fiction he’s been assembling for the last eight years, “officially on hiatus.” Of course, it had become pretty obvious to those of us who are regular Thrilling Detective visitors that something was wrong; there hadn’t been a site update since January of this year. And I’m sure I was not alone in hearing from Kevin about his increasingly busy life in Southern California (after a move from Montreal), and his need to actually make money now and then, Web sites and blogs not being the most lucrative endeavors of the 21st century. I guess those other responsibilities just didn’t leave him time enough to maintain and update the Thrilling Detective site. As Kevin explains:

So, for the month of June, and maybe a little longer, the site is officially on hiatus. I’ll be regrouping, considering my options. And recharging myself, hopefully. Right now, I hope to be back on track by summer, but we’ll see. I’ll be discussing those options with Gerald So, our fiction editor, and with She Who Must Be Obeyed, and with anyone else who cares to write me on the topic. And of course I’ll also be in Toronto at Bloody Words, no doubt keeping a bar stool warm. If you’re in the area, drop by. Despite rumours to the contrary, I don’t bite.

I know well how draining it is to keep up a Web-based project of any size, which is why I put The Rap Sheet on a hiatus last year. It’s especially tough if you must balance nonpaying Web work against halfway lucrative and interesting employment of other sorts. Kevin’s decision to take a vacation from The Thrilling Detective Web Site is surely the right one. Like others, I’m sad to see the site lay fallow for a time--and worried, because I know how easy it is to give up on a demanding but largely unrewarding project permanently, once you’re content with having given it up temporarily. But I am glad to know that the site’s contents aren’t going away, that they will remain available to researchers and readers even though Kevin is off drinking mai tais in Chandler’s red wind for a while, and recharging his creative batteries. I hope that he’ll continue to keep up his Thrilling Detective blog and contribute occasionally to The Rap Sheet in the interim. And, like so many of the fans he doesn’t really know he has, I’ll look forward to welcoming The Thrilling Detective Web Site back when it’s tanned, rested, and ready.

* * *

Now for a contrasting bit of good news. Pseudonymous publisher “Dash Courageous” has announced the creation of a new pulp mag for the Web. Blazing! Adventures Magazine, as it’s to be called, is currently on the lookout for new short stories. It sounds like he wants tales set during the guns-and-gams era of Hammett, Chandler, Daly, et al., as well as yarns that boast modern settings but play by pulpish rules about “explicit language, sex, alternative lifestyles, etc.” Story lengths can run to 5,000 words, and there’s even real cash money for contributors--well, $5 per story, anyway. It’s hard to tell exactly when this new pulp periodical will debut, but Messr. Courageous says he’ll be accepting submissions between June 20 and August 20. I’m curious to see what results from all this promotional hype.