Rapid-Fire Crime Hits

Today’s collection of crime-fiction-related news items that don’t justify posts of their own, but may be of interest to readers:

• The British TV crime drama Grace, starring John Simm and Richie Campbell, and based on Peter James’ popular series about Detective Superintendent Roy Grace, has been renewed for a fifth season. Meanwhile, a second ITV show, Professor T, featuring Ben Miller, has won a fourth season, even before its third is broadcast.

• And did I mention previously that the HBO-TV anthology drama True Detective, having recently completed the airing of its fourth series, Night Country (starring Jodie Foster and Kali Reis), has been re-upped for a fifth run? The Hollywood Reporter adds that “Night Country showrunner Issa López has signed an overall deal with the Warner Bros. Discovery-owned cabler and will return to steer the fifth season after taking over the franchise from creator Nic Pizzolatto.”

• We’re nearing the March 4 premiere of Dark City: The Cleaner, a TV thriller set in Christchurch, New Zealand, and based on a 2006 novel by Paul Cleave. Sadly, it isn’t yet available to U.S. viewers.

• Meryl Streep will reprise her role as actress Loretta Durkin in Season 4 of the Hulu mystery-comedy streaming series Only Murders in the Building. Eva Longoria has joined the cast as well.

• Entries are now being accepted in Great Britain’s 2025 Crime Writers’ Association Dagger awards competition. Submission guidelines can be found here.

• R.I.P., Anne Whitefield. She portrayed Dean Jagger’s daughter in the 1954 film White Christmas, and later went on to appear in The Thin Man, Peter Gunn, Hawaiian Eye, Ironside, Adam-12, Kolchak: The Night Stalker, and numerous other TV shows before leaving Hollywood to become “a steward for Clean Water at the State of Washington’s Department of Ecology.” Whitefield died on February 15 at age 85.

• Also recently deceased, according to The Hollywood Reporter: “Charles Dierkop, the busy character actor who played tough guys in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting and the 1970s Angie Dickinson series Police Woman …” He was 87 years old when he perished on February 25.

• Author, critic, and blogger Michael Hadley looks back at legendary TV producer Quinn Martin (Cannon, The Streets of San Francisco, Barnaby Jones, etc.) in this video interview hosted by Dan Schneider.

• Mike Ripley’s latest “Ripster Revivals” column for Shots focuses on “the influence of World War II on British thriller writers.”

• Finally, congratulations to indie crime publisher Crippen & Landru on its 30th anniversary in business. B.V. Lawson, Martin Edwards, and Lesa Holstine all celebrate this milestone in their blogs.

Brushing Up on the Latest News

• Several months ago we mentioned that British actress Lucy Boynton had been signed to play Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in the United Kingdom (back in 1955), in a four-part ITV-TV drama simply titled Ruth. The Killing Times now brings word that Toby Jones, Laurie Davidson, Mark Stanley, Juliet Stevenson, and others have been added to the cast. Still no news about a broadcast date, though.

• We finally have a new date for the previously delayed, fourth-season premiere of HBO-TV’s uneven anthology series, True Detective. This latest story, subtitled Night Country, will be set in Alaska and star Jodie Foster. The Killing Times says we should expect its U.S. run to begin on Sunday, January 14, on HBO, and adds that it will be simulcast in the UK at 2 a.m. on Monday, January 15.

• Hulu-TV will commence streaming remastered episodes of Moonlighting on Tuesday, October 10. As Mystery Fanfare recalls, that 1985-1989 comedy-detective series starred Cybill Shepherd as ex-fashion model Maddie Hayes, who, after going bankrupt, “finds that one of her few remaining assets is ownership of the Blue Moon Detective Agency” in Los Angeles. “[S]he’s tempted to liquidate it until she meets the quirky employees”—among them Bruce Willis’ David Addison Jr.—“and gets involved in their even quirkier cases.”

• From the British online newspaper The Independent:

First edition copies of The Hound of the Baskervilles and Agatha Christie’s The Thirteen Problems, which once belonged to late Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts, set two world auction records on Thursday (28 September).

The musician’s extensive collection of first edition books went under the hammer at British auction house Christie’s as part of a specialised sale, which saw F Scott Fitzgerald’s acclaimed novel The Great Gatsby, first published in 1925, receive the highest bid, at £226,800. ...

Elsewhere, a first edition of Sherlock Holmes tale The Hound of the Baskervilles sold for £214,200, which set a new world auction record for a printed book by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. This surpasses the previous record $201,600 (£165,279) for The Sign of Four, which was sold in 2022.

• Forward discovers that, even at “97-and-a half,” Oscar-winning actress and director Lee Grant is “just as feisty as ever.”

• And this book does not belong on the crime- or mystery-fiction shelves, but still I must note that Ayanna Lloyd Banwo’s debut novel, When We Were Birds, “a mythic love story set in Trinidad and Tobago” and published by Hamish Hamilton, has won the 2023 Glass Bell Award, again sponsored by London-based Goldsboro Books. There was one crime novel among this year’s longlisted contenders—the Edgar-winning Notes on an Execution, by Danya Kukafka (Phoenix)—but along with 10 others, all released in 2022, it did not capture the prize.

Bullet Points: Agatha in Bronze Edition

• There are a couple of interesting items contained in author Max Allan Collins’ latest blog post. First off, he says he’s “setting out to do a podcast series based on the Nathan Heller novels. Each multi-episode podcast would take on a single book. I will write these adaptations myself.” Expect to see the announcement of a crowd-funding campaign to get the initial podcast in that series going. Second, despite what Collins has previously termed a “disappointing lack of any support from Greenlight Iowa” to produce a film based on his A Christmas Carol-inspired short story, “Blue Christmas,” the author did succeed in raising $6,375 through an Indiegogo effort (perhaps $13,000+ short of what he says will ultimately be needed), and is in the process of “serious pre-production now.” He reports that actor Gary Sandy, with whom he has worked before, is his top pick to assume the lead role of Jake Marley, and “we are having auditions this week for the rest of the Blue Christmas cast … [T]he shoot is toward the end of October.” Oh, and that same blog post features a quite enjoyable video interview Titan Books’ Andrew Sumner did with Collins about the new Mike Hammer yarn, Dig Two Graves, the 14th Hammer novel he’s penned using material left behind by Spillane, after he died in 2006.

• In time for holiday gift buying: When The Art of Ron Lesser Volume 1: Deadly Dames and Sexy Sirens was first published several months ago, it existed only in hardcover. But now that book on which I worked with Robert Deis and Bill Cunningham boasts a paperback edition, as well. It’s equally beautiful, but $17 less expensive!

• First, some good TV news (from In Reference to Murder): “Masterpiece on PBS has announced the premiere date and released first look images for the upcoming season of Miss Scarlet and the Duke, which returns on January 7, 2024, for its fourth season. In the new season, Eliza (Kate Phillips) has taken over the business of detective agency Nash & Sons, and things are not going entirely smoothly, although help comes from some familiar sources. Outside of work, her relationship with William Wellington, a gruff Scottish detective inspector of Scotland Yard (the ‘Duke,’ played by Stuart Martin) builds towards a looming decision that will shape both their lives.” I’ve much enjoyed this historical mystery series.

• Now the bad news: “The premiere of HBO’s anticipated True Detective: Night Country has been pushed back and is now listed as January of 2024 (the exact day is unknown). In Night Country, when the long winter night falls in Ennis, Alaska, the eight men who operate the Tsalal Arctic Research Station vanish without a trace. To solve the case, detectives Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster) and Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis) must confront their pasts and the dark truths lying underneath the Arctic ice. John Hawkes, Christopher Eccleston, Fiona Shaw, Finn Bennett, Anna Lambe, Aka Niviâna, Isabella Star Lablanc, and Joel D. Montgrand also star.”

• For what it’s worth, Amazon appears to have updated its list of the “best mysteries and thrillers of 2023 so far.” It’s already crowning S.A. Cosby’s All the Sinners Bleed (Flatiron) as this year’s top choice, but also applauds Dennis Lehane’s Small Mercies (Harper), Jesse Q. Sutanto’s Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers (Berkley), Thomas Perry’s Murder Book (‎Mysterious Press), Jacqueline Winspear’s The White Lady (Harper), Charlie Donlea’s Those Empty Eyes (Kensington), T.J. Newman’s Drowning (‎Avid Reader Press), and 13 other works—only a few of which I’ve yet read.

• With the Bloody Scotland crime-writing festival set to begin just two days from now in the central Scottish town of Stirling, take a moment to check out the Nordic Noir blog’s choices of the best events on the festival’s program. Meanwhile, Live and Deadly highlights the ways Bloody Scotland supports writers new to this genre.

• As might have been predicted, opinions are divided on the artistic results here: “A life-sized bronze statue of Agatha Christie has been unveiled in the Oxfordshire town of Wallingford, near where the detective novelist resided for more than 40 years,” The Guardian reports. “The statue depicts the writer holding a book and seated on a bench overlooking the Kinecroft, an area of open grassland. Sculptor Ben Twiston-Davies—who also designed the Agatha Christie memorial in London—said in a YouTube video about the statue that it shows her ‘looking out as if she’s seen a clue for one of her stories.’”

• Southern California author-screenwriter Lee Goldberg is always an entertaining guest speaker, as I was reminded during the recent Bouchercon in San Diego. He demonstrates his humor again in two recent interviews on the subject of his brand-new thriller novel, Malibu Burning (Thomas & Mercer): this one with Murder by the Book’s Sara DiVello, and this other one with Story Blender’s Steven James.

• Another writer who has been receiving widespread attention is UK mystery-maker/TV show host Richard Osman, whose fourth and latest entry in his Thursday Murder Club series, The Last Devil to Die, should be out this week from Viking. The Guardian’s Charlotte Edwardes profiles him here, while The New York Times’ Sarah Weinman composed this story about him for Esquire magazine.

• If you didn’t snag a copy of William Link’s The Columbo Collection 13 years ago, when it debuted, you now have another chance. Publisher Crippen & Landru has announced that the book, which contains 12 original stories featuring television detective Lieutenant Columbo—all written by his co-creator—is back in stock after a long absence. And still available at the 2010 paperback price of $18.

• Finally, a sad note: Eighty-year-old writing teacher/coach, former U.S. Navy cryptographer, and fictionist Les Edgerton died in Fort Wayne, Indiana, on August 31 after “a short battle with COVID 19,” according to his funeral home obituary. With more than 20 books to his credit, including the novels Adrenaline Junkie and The Genuine, Imitation, Plastic Kidnapping, as well as the 2007 writer's resource Hooked: Write Fiction That Grabs Readers at Page One and Never Lets Them Go, Edgerton had been nominated for a wide variety of prizes, from the O. Henry Award to the Edgar Award for Best Short Story. Not long before his passing, he had won the Killer Nashville convention’s Claymore Award with the opening 50 pages of an unpublished manuscript, Francois Roberge—The Fixer.

Bullet Points: Busy Thursday Edition

• There’s now a suspenseful two-minute trailer available for Series 4 of HBO-TV’s True Detective, subtitled Night Country. As The Killing Times explains, it’s set in fictional Ennis, Alaska, and “tells the story of eight men who operate the Tsalal Arctic Research Station and vanish without a trace. To solve the case, Detectives Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster) and Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis) have to confront ‘the darkness they carry in themselves and dig into the haunted truths that lie buried under the eternal ice.’ That and try to get along with one another.” The trailer promises this series of True Detective is “coming this year,” but (frustratingly) gives no specific debut date.


(Above) A trailer for True Detective, Season 4.

• We have finally received word of when several UK-made crime dramas will return to U.S. screens with fresh stories. Grace, based on Peter James’ best-selling Detective Superintendent Roy Grace novels and starring John Simm, will see its Series 3 premiere tonight, Thursday, April 20, on the streaming service BritBox. Expect to see three episodes of Grace. Meanwhile, the historical mystery Grantchester, featuring Robson Green and Tom Brittney, is due to launch its eighth season on Masterpiece Mystery! come July 9, with six new episodes. And Series 5 of Unforgotten, starring Sanjeev Bhaskar and Sinéad Keenan, will reportedly become available “later this year” via PBS Passport, PBS Video, and the PBS Masterpiece Prime Video channel. Six episodes will comprise its latest season.

• Variety brings word that independent film studio Wiip has optioned the rights to The Eden Test (Flatiron), a suspense novel by New York Times editor Adam Sternbergh that is set to reach American bookstores next week. Here’s a plot synopsis:

Daisy and Craig’s marriage is in serious trouble. That’s why Daisy has signed up for The Eden Test, a week-long getaway for couples in need of a fresh start. Yet even as she’s struggling to salvage her marriage, it seems Craig has plans to leave her for another woman. In fact, his bags are already packed―long before he arrives to meet Daisy in this remote cabin in the woods of upstate New York.

At first, their week away is marked by solitude, connection, and natural beauty―and only a few hostile locals. But what Craig doesn’t know is that Daisy, a slyly talented actress, has her own secrets, including a burner phone she’s been using for mysterious texts. Not to mention the Eden Test itself, which poses a searing new question to the couple every day, each more explosive than the last. Their marriage was never perfect, but now the lies and revelations are piling up, as the week becomes much more than they bargained for ... How far are they willing to go?

Wiip intends to turn Sternbergh’s yarn into a TV series.

• Wow! Former flight attendant T.J. Newman’s Drowning, her second airline thriller—due out at the end of May—proved to be one hell of a hot Hollywood property. “Landing the movie rights to Drowning,” says Variety, “triggered an all-out bidding war, one that drew interest from the likes of [Nicole] Kidman, Alfonso Cuarón and Steven Spielberg, along with seven-figure offers from Apple and [Jerry] Bruckheimer, Paramount and Damien Chazelle, Legendary, Universal Television, and Warner Bros. ‘There was an eight-hour period where I never hung up my phone,’ says Shane Salerno, Newman’s agent. ‘People would call my landline, and I’d put them on mute while I answered a call from another bidder on my cell phone. I’d get an offer and before we had a chance to counter, they’d text me and raise it.’” Warner Bros. eventually triumphed, “agreeing to pay $1.5 million for the rights and an additional $1.5 million on the first day of production. The studio also brought the Drowning author on as an executive producer.”

• Did you know that Netflix commissioned a small-screen adaptation of Anthony Doerr’s 2014 Pulitzer-winning novel, All The Light We Cannot See? I didn’t, but among its stars are Mark Ruffalo, Hugh Laurie, and Louis Hofmann, and it is set to premiere on November 2.

• Finally, In Reference to Murder offers two recent items of interest. First, news that “Austin Butler will lead the cast of City on Fire, a movie version of Don Winslow’s novel” from last year. And second, a notice that “Writer and director Michael Mann’s Heat 2 is nearing development with Adam Driver set to star. The original 1995 crime film followed the conflict between an LAPD detective (played by Al Pacino) and a career criminal (played by Robert De Niro), while also depicting its effect on their professional relationships and personal lives. The new [film] project will be an adaptation of Mann’s original follow-up novel, Heat 2, which tells both a prequel and sequel story.”

• Happy 30th birthday to Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine, which editor George Easter says debuted in newsletter form in April 1993. His post on the subject includes a scan of that inaugural issue, which awarded UK crime writer Liza Cody front-page attention.

• With CrimeFest 2023 set to kick off in Bristol, England, on Thursday, May 11, Mike Ripley begins his April “Getting Away with Murder” column with some photographic memories of CrimeFests past. He moves on from there to mentions of Maurizio Di Giovanni’s Inspector Ricciardi series, Joffe Books’ reissuing of James Mitchell’s David Callan thrillers, and new titles by Eli Cranor, Dennis Lehane, Lindsey Davis, and others. You’ll find his full column in Shots.

• When we announced in late March that a new James Bond thriller, On His Majesty’s Secret Service, had been penned by British novelist Charlie Higson and scheduled for release on Thursday, May 4 (just ahead of King Charles III’s coronation), there wasn’t yet a book jacket to show off. However, Amazon UK has now added that cover to its order page. The artwork appears fairly simplistic, but we’re assured that it makes more of an impression in person, with “an eye-catching gold foil effect, fit for a king.”

• Speaking of Agent 007, Kim Sherwood—the author of Double or Nothing (Morrow), set in the world of Bond and unleashed on American consumers earlier this month—has placed an interesting piece in CrimeReads that looks back on “the origins and impact of Ian Fleming’s legendary espionage novel,” Casino Royale (1953).

• From the heterogeneous blog Boing Boing comes news that “Wandering Planet Toys … has just launched a new Kickstarter campaign for a retro-style action figure series inspired by the classic Nancy Drew novels. They’re the first ever officially licensed toys of the iconic detective character in the nearly century since she first debuted.” This campaign’s goal is to raise $60,000 by Wednesday, May 17; at last check, $31,452 had been pledged already. In addition to those action figures, a brand-new, five-chapter Drew novella, The Clue of the Curious Collection—carrying the traditional author byline “Carolyn Keane”—is slated for publication.

• Another fundraiser worth your attention is being mounted by author Max Allan Collins. He’s launched a drive through the crowdfunding Web site Indiegogo to amass $5,000 over the next month and a half, which will be spent on turning his A Christmas Carol-like detective short story, “Blue Christmas” (published in a 2001 collection), into a movie. “It’s kind of a work that pulls together a lot of my interests in one place,” Collins explains in a pitch video, “and something that I’ve wanted to make for a long time.” Contributors at the $100 level will be thanked in the film’s credits; those giving $500 to $2,000 will be recognized as either associate producers or executive producers. What’s more, anyone who donates $25 to $500 can ask Collins to send them books from his backlist. Feeling flush? Go here to chip in. More than $800 has been raised thus far.

• Don Winslow talks with the New Zealand Herald about his current trilogy of crime novels, his “retirement from writing [in order] to concentrate on political activism,” his support of fellow writers, how none of his books expose much about him, and more.

• And Sai Shankar is back with part two of his deep dive into the history of Black Mask magazine. This time, he dissects one of the early issues edited by Florence May Osborne. The first installment of this series can be enjoyed here.

Noted in Passing

• Jodie Foster, whose last regular TV series role was as Addie Loggins in ABC’s short-lived movie spin-off, Paper Moon (1974-1975), has been signed to star in the third version of True Detective, subtitled Night Country. As In Reference to Murder reports,

The story centers on Detectives Liz Danvers (Foster) and Evangeline Navarro who are looking to solve the case of six men who operate the Tsalal Arctic Research Station and vanish without a trace when the long winter night falls in Ennis, Alaska. The detective duo will have to confront the darkness they carry in themselves and dig into the haunted truths that lie buried under the eternal ice.

True Detective, which was created and written by Nic Pizzolatto, ran for three seasons between 2014 and 2019. The third and most recent season, set in the Ozarks, aired on HBO in 2019 and starred Mahershala Ali and Stephen Dorff.

• Today is Memorial Day here in the United States. Mystery Fanfare’s Janet Rudolph is celebrating it with updated lists of Memorial Day mysteries and crime fiction that incorporates barbecuing, an activity in which Americans often engage on this holiday.

• I’ve already mentioned that Season 8 of Endeavour will premiere as part of PBS-TV’s Masterpiece series on Sunday, June 19. But I failed to point out, too, that the seventh season of Grantchester, starring Robson Green and Tom Brittney, will return to Masterpiece with half a dozen new episodes, beginning on Sunday, July 10. (Watch a trailer here.) Also worth remembering is that the Victorian-era whodunit Miss Scarlet and the Duke, featuring Kate Phillips and Stuart Martin, is set to kick off its Season 2, six-episode run in the States on Sunday, October 16. (The trailer can be enjoyed here.) Incidentally, while American boob-tubers will have to wait until the fall for Miss Scarlet, it is scheduled to debut in Britain on June 14.

• And two months ago, I noted that Madison Books, the Seattle neighborhood shop at which I help out a couple of days each week, had been nominated for this year’s Publishers Weekly Bookstore of the Year award. Well, the winner was announced last week … and it was one of the other five finalists—The Raven Book Store in Lawrence, Kansas, to be specific. Madison Books manager James Crossley tries to put the best face on this turn of events in his latest newsletter.

Delight or Disappointment?

Tonight at 9 p.m. ET/PT, HBO will premiere the third season of its Nic Pizzolatto-created anthology crime series, True Detective, and reviews have been rather mixed. Vox, for instance, has this to say:

In many ways, season three feels like season one with the latter’s more idiosyncratic edges sanded off. There are hints of some terrible horror lurking in the heart of Southern rural America (in this case via the form of strange dolls that keep turning up at the scenes of children’s murders and disappearances). There's a fascination with how systemic corruption approaches the level of Lovecraftian horror. There are long, philosophical ramblings in cop cars. …

But season three is bolstered by centralizing just one character instead of a duo. As Wayne Hays, Mahershala Ali commands the story’s center—he’s the one character who is consistently presented across all three timelines—and creates a mesmerizing portrait of a man cracking apart under his glimpses at true inhumanity.

Meanwhile, the entertainment Web site Collider opines:

Each episode ends with a very fine cliffhanger, but the overall pace is slow and rich, building an interesting, layered, and very personal story. The turning points of the case aren’t dragged out—there’s no time, so the narrative dolls things out at a reasonable pace—and T Bone Burnett’s soundtrack is again a perfect, twangy accompaniment that sets a gloomy, uneasy mood. It may not be as arresting or iconic as the first season, but time is a flat circle. True Detective has come back around with a true return to form.

(Collider has also posted a good interview with series creator Nic Pizzolatto and star Mahershala Ali, which you can enjoy here.)

Finally, Salon’s Melanie McFarland serves up some contrary views:

Laced throughout these new “True Detective” episodes are replays of first season details, down to the creepy sculptures left by crime scenes; this time it’s corn husk dolls instead of sticks held together with mud and hair and who knows what else.

The plot’s framework may be a retread, but those who kept the faith through the three-and-a-half-year gap between the disastrous season 2 and this new story may be heartened by its intentional recall to the [Matthew] McConaughey-[Woody] Harrelson chapter. If this is Pizzolatto asking for a do-over, Ali’s smolder lends the writer enough currency to buy at least a few hours of patience.

But from there it’s hard to definitively characterize this season as more of a success than the season it resembles most.

Mind you, one lesson Pizzolatto seems to have learned (somewhat) is that he’s given the piece at least one woman who is a fully realized human being and not simply a cipher waiting to be completed or broken by a male hero, or a female character who might as well be a guy, as Rachel McAdams played her role in season 2.

Ali and [Carmen] Ejogo [who plays his school teacher wife] have stronger chemistry here than Ali and [Stephen] Dorff [who appears as his partner, Roland West], and that seems to be a purposeful choice and, given Dorff’s more limited dramatic range, the right one.

But this is still Nic Pizzolatto after all, which means the other significant female role, that of Mamie Gummer’s Lucy Purcell, is a screaming harpy who, in one scene, declares that she knows she has the “soul of a whore.” And maybe that wouldn’t be so vexing from another auteur creator. A better one wouldn’t make Ali sell a recollection’s permanence by explaining he remembers the date the kids went missing because it happened on the same day Steve McQueen died. I’m not saying that note is implausible, but that regardless of how smoothly Ali delivers that line it might as well be spilling out of Pizzolatto’s mouth; in the context of the series, it's a too-obvious flourish of ersatz cool.

At the very least Ali’s muscular performance, and that of Scoot McNairy as the bereaved father of the missing kids, earn the show a little more rope at the end of each episode.

Nevertheless it’s tough to shake the sense that the third outing for “True Detective” could leave us with as much of a contentment gap as the close of the Rusty and Marty chronicles. Circling back is a fine plan, especially given the amount of time that has gone by. But if the action spins off into nothing again at the end of this Lazarus act, and after so much hype, I suspect fewer people will be jonesing to re-open the case again.

Let us know what you think of the new True Detective after you’ve had a chance to screen and consider Episode 1.

READ MORE: “True Detective: The Crucial Literary Allusions You Might Have Missed in the Premiere,” by Joanna Robinson (Vanity Fair); “Review: True Detective (S3 E1&2),” by Andy D. (The Killing Times).

Bullet Points: Post-Midterm Elections Edition

OK, that’s done. After putting the finishing touches on two different CrimeReads pieces—one of which should be posted tomorrow morning—I can finally return to my regular duties at The Rap Sheet. Let’s start off with a wrap-up of recent news.

• We’ve been talking for some while about the Staunch Book Prize, a brand-new commendation—proposed earlier in the year by author-screenwriter Bridget Lawless—to honor the best thriller novel “in which no woman is beaten, stalked, sexually exploited, raped, or murdered.” It wasn’t until this month, however, that a shortlist of nominees for the first such award was announced:

— The Appraisal, by Anna Porter (ECW Press)
— East of Hounslow, by Khurrum Rahman (HQ)
— If I Die Tonight, by A.L. Gaylin (PRH)
— On the Java Ridge, by Jock Serong (Text)
— The Kennedy Moment, by Peter Adamson (Myriad Editions)
— Cops and Queens, by Joyce Thompson (seeking publisher)

The Bookseller explains that a winner of the premiere Staunch Book Prize will be declared during a special ceremony “at Sony Pictures in central London on 26th November.” Stay tuned.

• The “social cataloguing” Web site GoodReads has launched the voting process for its 2018 Choice Awards competition, and we’re already into the semifinal round of selecting winners (which will run through this coming Sunday, November 11). Among the contenders in the Best Mystery and Thriller category are Sujata Massey’s The Widows of Malabar Hill, Stuart Turton’s The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, Tana French’s The Witch Elm, Joe Ide’s Wrecked, and Robert Galbraith’s Lethal White. Click here to cast a ballot. The final round of voting will begin on November 13, with winners in all 20 categories to be announced on December 4.

• Deadline Hollywood reports that Stephen King’s 2013 Hard Case Crime novel, Joyland, will be adapted as a TV series. The site reminds us that “Joyland tells the story of Devin, a college student who takes a summer job at an amusement park in a North Carolina tourist town, confronts the legacy of a vicious murder, the fate of a dying child, and the way both will change his life forever.” Chris Peña (Jane the Virgin) and Cyrus Nowrasteh (The Stoning of Soraya M.) will pen the script.

• Holliday Grainger, the British actress I so enjoyed watching in the 2013 teleflick Bonnie & Clyde (you can see the trailer here) and the more recent BBC-TV crime series Strike, is preparing to star, with Callum Turner, in a BBC surveillance thriller titled The Capture. The Killing Times offers just a modicum of plot information:

When proud British soldier Shaun Emery’s (Turner) conviction for a murder in Afghanistan is successfully overturned due to flawed video evidence, he begins to plan for his life as a free man with his six-year-old daughter. However, when damning CCTV footage emerges from an incident in London, it isn’t long before Shaun finds himself fighting for his freedom once more, only with lies, betrayal and corruption spreading further than he ever could have imagined.

With DI Rachel Carey (Grainger) drafted in to investigate in what could be a career-defining case, she must discover if there is more to the shocking evidence than first meets the eye. Rachel will soon learn that the truth is merely a matter of perspective—before deciding what hers is.

• Meanwhile, here’s a short new trailer promoting the third season of True Detective. This latest iteration of Nicolas Pizzolatto’s crime anthology series is scheduled to debut in the States on January 13 of next year, with Mahershala Ali starring as Wayne Hays, “an Arkansas state police detective who can’t stop thinking about the two children who went missing 30 years before.”

• And January Magazine notes that HBO-TV has given the go-ahead for a film sequel to the fine 2004-2006 Western series, Deadwood. Viewers are told to expect that movie’s premiere next spring.

• Among the items in B.V. Lawson’s latest “Media Murder for Monday” post for In Reference to Murder is news about turning Howard Michael Gould’s 2018 debut novel, Last Looks, into a big-screen picture:

Mel Gibson is teaming up with Charlie Hunnam and Eiza Gonzalez for Waldo, the action-packed thriller from Brit filmmaker Tim Kirkby, best known for directing episodes of Veep. The film … follows the brilliant but disgraced former LAPD detective Charlie Waldo (Hunnam), currently living the life of a minimalist in the woods. His quiet life comes to a startling halt when he is roped back into working as a private eye to investigate the murder of an eccentric TV star’s wife.

• I was sorry to hear that prolific Illinois-born actor Ken Swofford died on November 1, at age 85. The Hollywood Reporter’s obituary mentions that in addition to his role as “stubborn vice principal Quentin Morloch … on the TV adaptation of Fame,” “the red-headed Swofford … portrayed the reporter Frank Flannigan on the admired but short-lived 1975-76 NBC series Ellery Queen, starring Jim Hutton, and he recurred as Lt. Catalano on several episodes of another sleuthing series, Angela Lansbury’s Murder, She Wrote.” Swofford’s other small-screen credits included roles on Surfiside 6, Columbo, Petrocelli, The Rockford Files, The Fall Guy, Remington Steele, and Diagnosis: Murder. He also played a major in the 1991 film Thelma & Louise. A clip of his performance in Ellery Queen can be enjoyed here.

• Wouldn’t you know it? Shortly after I assembled my revised (and unapologetically biased) rundown of the 95 best English-language crime-fiction blogs and Web sites, another worthy candidate came to my attention: Paperback Warrior. Trading in reviews of hard-boiled crime, mystery, men’s adventure, espionage, and western fiction, Paperback Warrior was launched during the summer of 2013 (which means I really should have discovered it sooner). Its author doesn’t sign his/her reviews, but clearly shares my taste for vintage paperbacks. The main blog and its associated Facebook page are well worth exploring when you have some free time.

• Emily Temple is one of my favorite Literary Hub writers, and she recently put together quite wonderful “list-icles” of books that defined every single decade of 1900s, as well as the first two decades of our present century. Crime, mystery, and thriller novels don’t show up often in the mix, but a couple—Agatha Christie’s The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920) and Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon (1930)—receive paragraph write-ups, with others (such as Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time, and Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal) at least being name-checked in their respective decennia of publication.

• Lee Goldberg, who literally wrote the book on unsold small-screen pilot film projects, points me toward a 10-minute YouTube collection of scenes from Egan, a 1973 pilot commissioned by ABC-TV and starring prolific American actor Eugene Roche. As Golberg relates in Unsold Television Pilots: 1955-1989, that teleflick—produced by Thomas L. Miller and Edward K. Milkis (who also gave us Barry Newman’s Petrocelli)—was “based on the true exploits of NYPD detective Eddie Egan, whose adventures were dramatized in the Oscar-winning movie The French Connection.” The YouTube clips—embedded below—are rather blurry, but they show the authority-allergic Egan (a master of disguise) leaving Manhattan to become a police detective in Los Angeles. The scenes feature plenty of action and a great theme by Lalo Schifrin. Too bad that ABC didn’t pick up Egan as a series.



• Speaking of YouTube delights, the site’s TV Archive page recently posted complete episodes of Mr. & Mrs. Smith. That short-lived 1996 CBS-TV spy series starred Scott Bakula and Maria Bello as covert operatives who posed as a married couple and worked for a super-secret private security agency known only as “The Factory.” I remember the series fondly, even though it lasted a mere 13 episodes—all of which can be watched, for the time being, by clicking here.

• I also recall watching the 1983 NBC-TV series Casablanca, which gave former Starsky & Hutch co-star David Soul the unenviable task of playing World War II-era Morocco nightclub owner Rick Blaine, the role Humphrey Bogart had filled in the 1941 film of the same name. But I wasn’t even born yet when Charles McGraw featured in a 1955-1956 spin-off of Casablanca, which Roy Huggins produced, and that Mystery*File contributor Michael Shonk calls “a better than average TV noir drama for the early days of television.” Shonk includes a full episode of the show in this post.

• Happy 10th birthday to the blog Pulp International!

• Halloween has passed, but you should still look over CrimeReads’ “25 Most Terrifyingly Beautiful Edgar Allan Poe Illustrations.”

• For anyone wishing to get better acquainted with Edgar Award-winning author Ross Thomas, Neil Nyren provides this handy guide to his novels about “con men, spies, politicians, and double crossers.”

• The Killing Times chooses “15 essential spy TV series,” including Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Alias, Callan, and The Sandbaggers.

• Crime Fiction Lover selects what it says are the seven best crime-fiction debuts of 2018. I’ve read a couple of those books already, but have still more reading to do before the year runs its course.

• For Criminal Element, author Tom Wood (Kill for Me) weighs in on “The Top 7 Cinematic Assassins,” a rogues gallery that embraces Nikita from La Femme Nikita, Anton Chigurh from No Country for Old Men, and Martin Blank from Grosse Pointe Blank.

• Another list: Kirkus Reviews picks nine thrilling page-turners.

• And I like Erica Wright’s picks of “9 Mysteries That Challenge Our Expectations of Crime Fighters.” Wright, by the way, wrote recently on this page about Charlotte Armstrong’s A Dram of Poison (1956).

• On the heels of news that the release of Kenneth Branagh’s second Hercule Poirot movie, Death on the Nile, has been delayed until 2020, BookRiot has compiled a “definitive ranking of Agatha Christie movies.” I’m surprised at how many of the 25 I haven’t yet seen.

• Authors interviews and profiles seem to have popped up everywhere you turn on the Internet lately. The writers being questioned include Jonathan Lethem (The Feral Detective), Timothy Hallinan (Nighttown), Tana French (The Witch Elm), Leye Adenle (When Trouble Sleeps), Henry Porter (Firefly), Jon Land (Manuscript for Murder), Libby Fischer Hellmann (High Crimes), Martin Limón (The Line), and Tom Leins (Repetition Kills You!).

• If you wait long enough, every good idea can be used again. That’s certainly the case with a 1958 interview James Bond creator Ian Fleming conducted with Raymond Chandler, who’s of course best known for giving us private eye Philip Marlowe. I wrote about their conversation way back in 2007, but it was only this month that CrimeReads revisited their discussion, which covers “what the two authors thought of one another’s work, as well as how they believed the murder of [mobster] Albert Anastasia was carried out.”

• While we’re on the subject of Fleming, note that British author Anthony Horowitz—whose second Agent 007 novel, Forever and a Day, was released this week in the States—has composed a piece for Criminal Element about James Bond’s influence on him as both a reader and a writer. You’ll find that post here.

• In his blog, Studies in Starrett, Ray Betzner traces the early 20th-century revival of interest in Sherlock Holmes. Betzner proclaims this the opening installment in a multipart report. Watch for the follow-up. POSTSCRIPT: I believe this is the first sequel post.

• Really, do we need a Jonny Quest movie?

• Wow, Toe Six Press debuted just this last April, but editor Sandra Ruttan is already out with her 17th issue, “Living My Best Life.”

• Lynne Truss remarks here on her experience with—and the history of—Britain’s Detection Club. For more about that club, see Martin Edwards’ 2015 non-fiction book, The Golden Age of Murder.

• In a post for In Reference to Murder, Jay A. Gertzman, professor emeritus of English at Mansfield University, tells about writing and researching his new book, Pulp According to David Goodis.

• Finally, while the results of this week’s U.S. midterm elections brought hope to many citizens who want Congress to finally reassert its vital oversight function and curb the more corrupt, anti-democratic antics of the country’s scandal-ridden prez, there were also cases across the country of voter suppression. How timely it was, then, that Curtis Evans should have written earlier this week about The Election Booth Murder, by Milton M. Propper, a 1935 novel having to do with Philadelphia’s “corrupt machine politics” and “the shooting murder of a reform political candidate on Election Day …”

It’s True, It’s “True”

We finally have a firm premiere date for Season Three of True Detective. According to The Killing Times, this latest version of the anthology crime drama will debut on HBO-TV in the United States on Sunday, January 13, 2019. Expectations are that it will begin broadcasting on Sky Atlantic in Britain soon thereafter.

Bullet Points: Thanksgiving Links Feast

• As part of its 2017 “New Talent November” celebration, Crime Fiction Lover identifies five women writers it predicts will become much better known over the coming year. Among them are Australia’s Jane Harper, whose debut novel, The Dry, won this year’s Gold Dagger award from the British Crime Writers’ Association; and American Hannah Tinti, who CFL says showed a “talent for almost old-fashioned, proper storytelling ... in her second novel, The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley [2017].” To keep up with the “New Talent November” series, which will run through the end of this month, click here.

• Deadline brings this news: “Carmen Ejogo is set to star opposite Mahershala Ali in the third season of Nic Pizzolatto’s HBO crime anthology series, True Detective. The new installment of True Detective tells the story of a macabre crime in the heart of the Ozarks and a mystery that deepens over decades and plays out in three separate time periods. Ejogo will play Amelia Reardon, an Arkansas schoolteacher with a connection to two missing children in 1980. Ali plays the lead role of Wayne Hays, a state police detective from Northwest Arkansas.” Sounds good.

• There’s no shortage of Thanksgiving-related mysteries.

• You have to be of a certain age to understand what a big deal David Cassidy—who died this week at age 67—was in the early 1970s. The son of actor Jack Cassidy and the stepson of singer-vedette Shirley Jones, David Cassidy was the teen idol of the time. “With pretty-boy good looks and a long mane of dark hair, Cassidy was every girl’s favorite teen crush,” Variety wrote in its obituary of the New Jersey-born songster and guitarist. His featured role on the popular ABC-TV musical sitcom The Partridge Family (1970-1974), which had him playing opposite Shirley Jones, gave Cassidy immense public exposure, while songs such as “I Think I Love You” made him a chart-topping sensation in his own right. “During an era when the Big Three broadcast networks still had a monolithic hold on pop culture, Cassidy’s picture was suddenly everywhere—not just on the fronts of magazines and record albums, but on lunch boxes, posters, cereal boxes and toys,” recalls National Public Radio (NPR). “He sold out concert venues across the globe, from New York’s Madison Square Garden to stadiums in London and Melbourne.” Following Partridge’s cancellation, Cassidy expanded his acting résumé (which had previously included turns on Ironside and The Mod Squad), making guest appearances on The Love Boat, Matt Houston, and even CSI. His performance as an undercover officer, Dan Shay, in a 1978 episode of NBC’s Police Story titled “A Chance to Live,” scored Cassidy an Emmy Award nomination for Best Dramatic Actor and led to his reprising the Shay role in David Cassidy: Man Undercover (1978-1979), a Los Angeles-set show that lasted only 10 episodes. But all was not well in his personal life. His six-year marriage to actress Kay Lenz (Breezy, The Underground Man), ended in divorce in 1983; he would wed twice more over the years. “In the 2010s,” NPR recalls, “he had a string of arrests on drunk-driving charges in Florida, New York and California. In 2014 he told CNN, ‘I am most definitely an alcoholic.’ The following year, he declared bankruptcy and was charged with a hit-and-run in Fort Lauderdale.” Wikipedia adds: “On February 20, 2017, Cassidy announced that he was living with non-Alzheimer’s dementia, the condition that his mother suffered from at the end of her life. He retired from performing in early 2017 when the condition became noticeable during a performance in which he forgot lyrics and otherwise struggled.” After being hospitalized in Florida for several days, David Cassidy perished from liver failure on November 21.

• Vox has more to say about Cassidy’s life and career.


(Above) The opening teaser and titles from “RX for Dying,” the December 21, 1978, episode of David Cassidy: Man Undercover.

• Lisa Levy looks at our modern “rape culture” and how it’s reflected in crime fiction. In a piece for Literary Hub, she writes:

[R]ape culture is everywhere in crime fiction. It is in every missing girl or woman. It is in every female cop protagonist who is slighted or doubted by her colleagues and her superiors. It’s in every P.I. novel with a woman at its center, as she negotiates a sexually hostile world to do her job. ... If crime fiction is a mirror of society that reveals our deepest and longest held fears, as I believe it is, then rape culture is one of those fears writ large in novels about men who violate women (sexually or otherwise). But it is also subtext in many, many other novels, where women are denigrated, pushed aside, ignored, hit on, groped, and verbally assaulted.

When I set out to look at rape culture in crime fiction, I found it everywhere. To take a very popular example, it’s no accident that the original title of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in Swedish translates to The Man Who Hated Women. One of the hallmarks of that series is heroine Lisbeth Salander’s repeated victimization at the hands of men, including her father and her court-appointed guardian, who raped her repeatedly when she was institutionalized as a child.

• In the blog Criminal Element, Con Lehane writes about his decision to set his latest series at New York City’s iconic 42nd Street Library. His second Raymond Ambler mystery, Murder in the Manuscript Room, is out just this week from Minotaur Books.

• Had Anthony Horowitz not done such a convincing job of capturing the character of British spy James Bond in his 2015 novel, Trigger Mortis, we’d probably not now be hanging on every Twitter update of his work on its sequel. But we’re doing just that, with the latest mere morsel, the latest crumb, the latest speck of information being showcased in The Spy Command. I sure hope Horowitz’s finished work rewards all this anticipation.

• In February of next year, Dynamite Entertainment will premiere a 40-page, one-shot James Bond comic spin-off that “centers on the head of the [British] Secret Intelligence Service (better known as MI-6), Miles Messervy—we know him more famously as ‘M.’” As The Secret Agent Lair reports, “this incarnation of M is rather different from the source material as well as [from Ms] portrayed in the film franchise. Unlike the original Sir Miles Messervy, a full Anglo-Saxon, this version of M is British of African descent, much like Moneypenny herself in the comics as well as the rebooted 007 timeline of the movies.” The blog adds that the graphic novel, titled simply M, will “delve into [Messervy’s] past and his time in the field before his ascension to the head of Her Majesty’s Secret Service.”

• This month marks 15 years since the release of Die Another Day, the 20th James Bond film—and the fourth and final one to feature Pierce Brosnan as Agent 007. Commemorating this occasion, The Secret Agent Lair revisits the poster campaign that promoted that film back in 1997, observing that its imagery was “too flashy for today’s standards, where most action movies get the minimalistic and desaturated artwork treatment—the Daniel Craig-era posters, where the protagonist is set to rather insipid backgrounds, look like a strange cousin in comparison to these pieces. Yet, it is a heartfelt testimony to the days where the 007 films let the drama [run] for a couple of hours, and a cocktail of Martinis, girls and guns were … the order of the day.”

• Speaking of milestones, it was 13 years ago in September that the paperback book line Hard Case Crime was launched, with Lawrence Block’s Grifter’s Game and Max Phillips’ Fade to Blonde being its initial pair of releases. In an interview with small-press publisher Paul Suntup, Hard Case editor Charles Ardai reflects on his company’s history, the process of adding new titles to its hard-boiled catalogue, and the works that helped make it successful. He also reveals why Hard Case’s logo looks the way it does. “Initially,” Ardai explains, “we were going to call the line ‘Kingpin,’ which is why the logo features a crown over the gun. But the day before we went to register the trademark, TV producer Aaron Spelling beat us to the punch, registering it for a TV mini-series about a drug kingpin. So we scrapped the name and came up with ‘Hard Case Crime’ instead. But the logo felt so good and so right that we kept it, even though the crown no longer made any sense.”

• Max Allan Collins gives us an update on the status of his next Nate Heller novel, Do No Harm, which finds the Chicago-based private eye working the 1954 Sam Sheppard homicide case:

The process with Heller has remained largely the same since True Detective back in the early ’80s. I select the historical incident—usually a crime, either unsolved or controversially solved—and approach it as if I’m researching the definitive book on the subject. I never have a firm opinion on the case before research proper begins, even if I’ve read a little about it or seen movies or documentaries on the subject, just as somebody interested in famous true crimes. …

This time I changed my mind about who murdered Marilyn Sheppard, oh, a dozen times. I in part selected the case because it was a more traditional murder mystery than the political subjects of the last four Heller novels—sort of back to basics, plus giving me something that would be a little easier to do, since I was coming out of some health problems and major surgeries.

But it’s turned out to be one of the trickiest Heller novels of all. Figuring out what happened here is very tough. There is no shortage of suspects, and no shortage of existing theories. In addition, a number of the players are still alive (Sam Sheppard’s brother Stephen is 97) and those who aren’t have grown children who are, none of whom would likely be thrilled with me should I lay a murder at the feet of their deceased parents.

• Fascinating. I didn’t know that a film noir had been made from Steve Fisher’s 1941 novel, I Wake Up Screaming. Or that said movie, which was eventually retitled Hot Spot, starred Betty Grable (in a rare dramatic role), along with Victor Mature and Carole Landis. Nor was I aware that Fisher scripted the picture together with Dwight Taylor. I was privy to none of this until I happened across an apparently “unreleased trailer” to I Wake Up Screaming in Elizabeth Foxwell’s blog, The Bunburyist. Now I have to go out and find the full flick. (By the way, this film was remade in 1953 as Vicki.)

• The Lineup selects “35 gripping true-crime books from the last 55 year,” for those moments when you need creepiness in your life.

• Crime Fiction Lover briefs us on the Hull Noir festival, held this month in the Yorkshire town of Kingston Upon Hull (aka Hull).

• As I’ve made clear in a couple of previous “Bullet Points” posts (see here and here), I’m highly skeptical of plans to make a new film inspired by Ernest Tidyman’s succession of novels featuring 1970s-cool Manhattan private eye John Shaft. Nonetheless, Steve Aldous (whose 2015 book, The World of Shaft, is a must-have for fans of Tidyman’s yarns) keeps posting updates on the movie in his blog. Recently, for instance, he offered this synopsis of the picture’s plot: “Working for the FBI, estranged from his father and determined not to be anything like him, John Shaft Jr. reluctantly enlists his father’s help to find out who killed his best friend Karim and bring down a drug-trafficking/money-laundering operation in NYC.” Aldous adds that this film, presently titled Son of Shaft, is due to start production in December. Jessie T. Usher (Survivor’s Romance) has signed up to portray the aforementioned John Shaft Jr. … who is supposedly the child of Samuel L. Jackson’s John Shaft, from the awful 2000 film Shaft … who was, in turn, the nephew of Richard Roundtree’s original Shaft. Got all that?

• It was almost exactly two years ago that I reported on plans by Visual Entertainment Inc. (VEI), a Toronto-based home video/television distribution company, to produce a DVD collection of James Franciscus’ 1971-1972 detective series, Longstreet. Only now, however, is the Web site TV Shows on DVD finally announcing the release of that boxed set. Although Amazon doesn’t yet show Longstreet: The Complete Series as being available for advance purchase, the $29.99 compilation is scheduled to ship on December 1, and will “contain the pilot telefilm and all 23 regular weekly episodes.” (Click here to buy it directly from VEI.) For those of you who don’t remember Franciscus’ fourth small-screen series (following Mr. Novak, which is being prepared for its own DVD rollout this coming spring), here’s TV Shows on DVD’s short explanation of its concept:

Following a bomb blast that leaves him blind and a widower, New Orleans insurance detective Mike Longstreet (James Franciscus) refuses to quit the business. Together with the help of his dog Pax, assistant Nikki [Marlyn Mason] and friend Duke [Peter Mark Richman], Longstreet continues to investigate thefts, kidnappings, and murders. … Bruce Lee made four guest appearances as Longstreet’s martial arts teacher.

• There’s still no word from Netflix on a U.S. debut date for Babylon Berlin, the much-heralded German drama “set in the seamy, steamy, scheming underworld of 1920s and ’30s Berlin.” While Americans wait, though, The Killing Times has begun reviewing each of the eight Season 1 episodes, currently being shown in Britain. So if, like me, you must hold tight in expectation of this program based on Volker Kutscher’s detective novels, at least you can read a little about the series’ unfurling plot lines and characters.

• Another series to watch for: The Indian Detective. Deadline says this show casts Indian-descended Canadian comedian Russell Peters as “Doug D’Mello, a Toronto cop who unexpectedly finds himself investigating a murder in his parents’ Indian homeland. The investigation leads Doug to uncover a dangerous conspiracy involving David Marlowe (William Shatner), a billionaire property developer, while dealing with his own ambivalence toward a country where, despite his heritage, he is an outsider.” Netflix will launch The Indian Detective on Tuesday, December 19. Canada’s National Post >says there are four episodes in Season 1.

• Also from Deadline comes word that the creators of Columbo, the long-running TV mystery series, are suing Universal City Studios for “holding out on profits from the series.” In a 15-page complaint filed earlier this month in the Los Angeles Superior Court, screenwriter/short-story author William Link, together with the estate of the late Richard Levinson, insist they are owed 15 percent to 20 percent of the Columbo profits, and that Universal took four decades to acknowledge “that they were owed profit participation.”

• James Garner, star of The Rockford Files, Maverick, and an impressive catalogue of films, died during the summer of 2014, but only now have I come across a long, beautifully penned tribute to his work, composed by critic Clive James and published in The Atlantic in 2011, at the time the actor’s memoir, The Garner Files, reached bookstores. Here’s part of what James had to say:

Every sane person’s favorite modern male movie star, Garner might have done even better if he’d been less articulate. In his generation, three male TV stars made it big in the movies: Steve McQueen, Clint Eastwood, and Garner. All of them became stars in TV Westerns: McQueen in Wanted: Dead or Alive, Eastwood in Rawhide, and Garner in Maverick. The only one of them who looked and sounded as if he enjoyed communicating by means of the spoken word was Garner. McQueen never felt ready for a film role until he had figured out what the character should do with his hands: that scene-stealing bit in his breakout movie, The Magnificent Seven, in which he shakes the shotgun cartridges beside his ear, was McQueen’s equivalent of a Shakespearean soliloquy, or of a practice session for a postatomic future in which language had ceased to exist.

As for Eastwood, he puts all that effort into gritting his teeth, because his tongue is tied. …

Garner, a quick study who could learn and deliver speeches long enough to make his awed listeners hold their breath to the breaking point, was the only one who seemed to enjoy producing intelligible noise. But Garner, compared with the other two, never really caught on as a big-screen leading man. Though tall and handsome, he was never remote: he had an air of belonging down here with us. As a small-screen leading man, he had done too thorough a job with the 20 or 30 good lines in every episode of Maverick or The Rockford Files to make an easy transition into a putatively larger medium that gave him many times more square feet of screen to inhabit, but many times less to say.

You can read James’ remarks in their entirety by clicking here.

• Finally, because the season is right for it, I want to give thanks to all of you who regularly read The Rap Sheet. You’ll never know how much your attention, loyalty, and comments mean to me.

Scanning the Web

• As part of its 2017 “Classics in September” celebration, Crime Fiction Lover has posted this terrific piece, by Jeremy Megraw, revisiting Raymond Chandler’s first Philip Marlowe yarn, The Big Sleep. “Although forged from Black Mask’s tough-guy mold,” Megraw observes, “Chandler’s Marlowe is a far cry from Hammett’s iconic blond satan, Sam Spade, who wades indifferently through the mean streets of crime and carnage. Marlowe is tempered by distinct morals. In the steamy, corrupt heart of 1930s Los Angeles, he is a shining knight striving to do the right thing. He is synonymous with the dark sensibility that thrived in Black Mask and was canonized forever in the popular imagination by Humphrey Bogart on film, but Marlowe is a bit more evolved. The contemplative dick plays chess, listens to classical music, and is comfortable with his feminine side. A fastidious dresser, Marlowe’s discerning eye extends to fashion, architecture, and interior design. He is the very model of the metrosexual detective—ahead of his time—in the burgeoning urban sprawl of L.A.” Click here to read the other entries in Crime Fiction Lover’s extensive series.

• Ngaio Marsh Awards organizer Craig Sisterson has launched a month-long blog tour to celebrate this year’s contenders for those prizes. The tour began in Liz Loves Books, with The Rap Sheet scheduled to take part this coming Sunday, September 10. Follow the day-to-day progress of the venture on Facebook or on Twitter.

• The September edition of Mike Ripley’s “Getting Away with Murder” column is currently available for your consideration.

• In her latest podcast, Speaking of Mystery’s Nancie Clare interviews Sheena Kamal, author of the debut crime novel, The Lost Ones.

• I didn’t even know there was an interesting story behind the wristwatch James Garner wore on The Rockford Files. But a blog called Calibre 11 brings it directly to us.

• To accompany today’s release of Legacy of Spies (Viking), the latest entry in John le Carré’s George Smiley series, David Cranmer has put together an excellent primer covering that fictional master espionage agent’s eight previous adventures.

• Since we’re on the subject, let me also point you toward Terry Gross’ fascinating interview with the 85-year-old le Carré, conducted for her National Public Radio show, Fresh Air.

• The Spy Command picks up on a rumor, spread by Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, that the next James Bond film “may rework the plot of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969).” “‘Bond quits the secret service, and he’s in love and gets married,’ Page Six said. ‘The [Hollywood] source continues that “his wife then gets killed,” bringing Bond back into action.’” In a subsequent post, The Spy Command muses over whether remaking OHMSS might actually be a good idea.

• People like me, who are way behind in their reading of Georges Simenon’s extensive literary oeuvre, really ought to take note of Spanish blogger José Ignacio Escribano’s regular efforts to review that French author’s Inspector Maigret novels.

• With the sixth and final season of Longmire set to be released on Netflix this month, actor Lou Diamond Phillips—who plays Henry Standing Bear on the show—gives Cowboys & Indians a slight preview of what viewers should expect from the season’s 10 episodes.

• Meanwhile, it has been announced that cable-TV network HBO wants a third season of its oft-praised but uneven crime drama, True Detective, with Mahershala Ali (House of Cards) starring as Wayne Hays, “a detective from northwest Arkansas.” TV Insider reports: “Series creator Nic Pizzolatto is helming the new season and has written all the episodes for Season 3 except for the fourth episode which he co-wrote with David Milch (Deadwood, NYPD Blue) … The next entry in the anthology series ‘tells the story of a macabre crime in the heart of the Ozarks, and a mystery that deepens over decades and plays out in three separate time periods.’”

• Amazing! A month after I questioned the methodology employed by aggregator Feedspot in developing its “best blogs” lists, I find that The Rap Sheet has suddenly been added to that site’s catalogue of the “Top 50 Mystery Blogs and Websites for Mystery Lovers and Authors.” You’ll find it in the No. 16 position, behind author Joanna Fluke’s blog, but just ahead of Reviewing the Evidence. At least this time, Feedspot correctly states that The Rap Sheet produces “about 5 posts per week,” which is better than can be said for the site’s previous Rap Sheet mention, in its “Top 50 Crime Novel Blogs” tally, which suggested our frequency was about “about 1 posts [sic] per week.”

“We Get the World We Deserve”

There isn’t much to it, really, but earlier today HBO-TV released a trailer for the second season of True Detective, which is scheduled to debut on Sunday, June 21, at 9 p.m. ET/PT. Watch it below.



READ MORE: “The True Detective Season 2 Trailer Is Here — and It Looks Just as Gritty as Ever,” by Christophe Haubursin (Vox); “Teasing True Detective 2,” by J. Kingston Pierce (The Rap Sheet).

Teasing “True Detective” 2

Over the last several months we’ve received dribs and drabs of information regarding the cast and story lined up for Season 2 of the HBO-TV crime drama True Detective, but haven’t really learned much about what to expect. Until today. HBO has released a teaser video for Season 2, which comes with this brief story description:

A bizarre murder brings together three law-enforcement officers and a career criminal, each of whom must navigate a web of conspiracy and betrayal in the scorched landscapes of California. Colin Farrell is Ray Velcoro, a compromised detective in the all-industrial City of Vinci, L.A. County. Vince Vaughn plays Frank Semyon, a criminal and entrepreneur in danger of losing his life’s work, while his wife and closest ally (Kelly Reilly) struggles with his choices and her own. Rachel McAdams is Ani Bezzerides, a Ventura County Sheriff’s detective often at odds with the system she serves, while Taylor Kitsch plays Paul Woodrugh, a war veteran and motorcycle cop for the California Highway Patrol who discovers a crime scene which triggers an investigation involving three law-enforcement groups, multiple criminal collusions, and billions of dollars.

We also hear that the first two of this coming season’s episodes will be directed by Justin Lin, who’s known for his work on The Fast and the Furious 3–6 and the TV series Community.

True Detective is set to return to HBO on Sunday, June 21.