Coming First to British Screens

Vienna Blood, the British-Austrian psychological crime drama based on a popular series of novels by Frank Tallis, has been commissioned for a fourth series. If its debut follows the pattern of previous years, UK viewers should be able to watch it by the end of this year, while Americans will have to hang tough till 2024.

According to The Killing Times, these latest episodes—set in 1909 Vienna—will center on “the double murder of an arms dealer in police custody and a senior public official … Doctor Max Liebermann [played by Matthew Beard] has only just returned from a tour of the U.S. when Inspector Rheinhardt [Juergen Maurer] asks for help in what could be the biggest case of their career. Oskar and Max discover a conspiracy that leads to the heart of the government. Can the Freudian psychiatrist and the detective do enough to stop a seditious mole known as ‘Mephisto’ from bringing the Austro-Hungarian Empire to destruction? And will their lives ever be the same again?”

That description suggests that Season 4 is being adapted, at least in part, from Tallis’ outstanding 2018 novel, Mephisto Waltz.

Meanwhile, as we await Season 2 of Beyond Paradise, the Death in Paradise spin-off starring Kris Marshall as Detective Inspector Humphrey Goodman, word comes of the series’ first Christmas special. Again, boob-tube watchers in Great Britain will be first to enjoy the extended episode, which is expected sometime in late 2023. Its story will apparently find Goodman and his partner, Detective Sergeant Esther Williams (Zahra Ahmadi), investigating “a shocking crime on a steam train, an arson attack predicted by a medium and the baffling disappearance of the local fishing legend.”

Some Pre-Thanksgiving Treats

• The Masterpiece Mystery! historical whodunit series Miss Scarlet and the Duke, starring Kate Phillips and Stuart Martin, is slated to return to PBS-TV with its third season, beginning on Sunday, January 8, of next year. However, the network will make that entire six-episode season available to PBS Passport and PBS Masterpiece Prime Video Channel subscribers as of tomorrow, Thursday, November 24. A frustratingly brief Season 3 preview can be found here.

• Speaking of TV reappearances, the Victorian-era detective drama Vienna Blood, based on books by Frank Tallis, is expected back on BBC Two in Britain come Wednesday, December 4. According to The Killing Times, this third season of the delightful Matthew Beard/Jürgen Maurer mystery will be based on Tallis’ fifth Max Liebermann novel, Deadly Communion (aka Vienna Twilight). The PBS Web page devoted to Vienna Blood supplies no information yet on when its third season will debut in America. But the sooner the better, I say.

• And I just learned this morning that there is going to be an eighth novel in Tallis’ Liebermann series, titled Mortal Secrets. Amazon says it’s due out in the UK from Little, Brown on May 9, 2024. The author announced on his Twitter page this last June 15 that he’d finally submitted his manuscript to the publisher. I loved 2018’s Mephisto Waltz, which found Vienna psychiatrist Liebermann and Detective Inspector Oskar Rheinhardt investigating a most peculiar murder in an abandoned piano factory, in 1904. I look forward enthusiastically to getting my hands on this forthcoming sequel. UPDATE: More information about this forthcoming book can be found here.

• We have been aware for the last five months that Douglas Henshall was giving up his starring role as Detective Inspector Jimmy Perez in the BBC One crime drama Shetland, but we didn’t know who would replace him. Until today, that is. The Killing Times reports that 53-year-old Scottish actress Ashley Jensen—“whose illustrious and critically acclaimed career includes cosy crime drama Agatha Raisin—will star as DI Ruth Calder, a native Shetlander who returns to the isles after 20 years working for the Met in London. Ruth takes on the lead detective role left vacant by DI Jimmy Perez …, working closely with DS Alison ‘Tosh’ McIntosh (Alison O’Donnell) and will make her debut when the series returns to BBC One and BBC iPlayer next year.”

• And I neglected to flag this previously. Also from The Killing Times:

Sir Ian Rankin will partner [with the streaming service] Viaplay UK for a major reimagining of his iconic detective, Inspector John Rebus, drawn from the instantly recognisable universe of Rankin’s books.

Set in contemporary Edinburgh, the six-part series places Rebus at the heart of a compelling new story.

In the drama, Rebus is in his 30s, recently divorced and demoted to Detective Sergeant. He has a new colleague, Detective Constable Siobhan Clarke, and is struggling to deal with the changes in his personal and professional life. At the same time, Rebus’s daughter, Sammy, and ex-wife, Rhona, are enjoying an affluent existence with Rhona’s new partner—while Rebus’s brother Michael is finding out that in a society where the gaps between the `haves and have-nots’ keep widening, taking shortcuts to provide for your family is no longer a temptation, but a necessity.”

Casting specifics have not yet been released, but filming on this series is expected to begin this coming spring.

• Wow! I didn’t even know this was in the works. In Reference to Murder brings news that “Steven Spielberg has found his Frank Bullitt, according to Deadline. Bradley Cooper has closed a deal to play the no-nonsense San Francisco cop in the new original Bullitt story centered on the classic character famously played by Steven McQueen in the 1968 thriller. Cooper will also produce the movie along with Spielberg and his producing partner, Kristie Macosko Krieger (marking their second collaboration after Maestro), with Josh Singer on board to pen the script. Steve McQueen’s son, Chad, and granddaughter, Molly McQueen, will exec produce the new movie. Sources are adamant this is not a remake of the original film but a new idea centered on the character.” In case don’t know this, Bullitt was created by author Robert L. Fish for his 1962 novel, Mute Witness. While the film adaptation was based in San Francisco (complete with a renowned car-chase scene), the book takes place in New York City. There’s no word at this time on where Cooper’s flick will be set.

• Really? Singer Taylor Swift played a corpse on CSI?

• Two deadlines to bear in mind: This coming Sunday, November 27, is the cutoff date for votes to be entered in stage one of the annual Goodreads Choice Awards competition. You’ll find the list of 20 contenders for “Best Mystery & Thriller” honors here. And next Wednesday, November 30 (at noon GMT), will be your last chance to choose favorites among shortlisted contenders for the 2022 Crime Fiction Lover Awards. Go here to fill out your ballot.

• And with tomorrow being Thanksgiving Day here in the United States, it’s time to check on Janet Rudolph’s updated list of Thanksgiving-related mysteries. Should you require a reading escape sometime on Thursday, Rudolph suggests Cindy Bell’s Fatal Festivities, Sammi Carter’s Goody Goody Gunshots, Evelyn David’s Murder Takes the Cake, and so many more works from years past.

TV Worth Talking About

Season 6 of Grantchester, the charming historical whodunit series inspired by James Runcie's books and starring Robson Green and Tom Brittney, is evidently already airing in Great Britain. However, its eight episodes won’t start rolling out before American viewers until Sunday, October 3, as part of as part of PBS-TV’s Masterpiece lineup.

As the Masterpiece Web site explains, the show’s action has now moved on to 1958, “and trouble is brewing in the Cambridgeshire village of Grantchester. Reverend Will Davenport (Tom Brittney, Greyhound) relishes his role as a firebrand vicar, but the very role he loves puts him at odds with his own ideals when [gay Anglican curate] Leonard [Fitch] (Al Weaver) is caught up in a scandal. Meanwhile, [Detective Inspector] Geordie [Keating] (Robson Green) finds his principles shaken, Mrs. Chapman (Tessa Peake-Jones) is distraught, and Geordie’s wife, Cathy (Kacey Ainsworth), is defiant. With new crimes around every corner, and morality and legality at odds, it’s going to take all of Will’s skill and empathy to navigate these choppy waters and help the ones he loves.”

Grantchester will continue on Masterpiece through November 21. Mystery Fanfare features a two-minute Season 6 teaser.

In the meantime, Season 2 of the excellent Baptiste will commence on PBS come Sunday, October 17. Here’s the official plot synopsis:

The second season of this spinoff of The Missing follows retired detective Julien Baptiste (Tchéky Karyo) as he delves into Budapest’s corrupt underworld to find a British Ambassador’s family who go missing on a skiing holiday in the Hungarian mountains. Ambassador Emma Chambers, played by Fiona Shaw (Killing Eve), is thrust into the crosshairs of Baptiste’s most complex case to date, as the detective navigates an untrustworthy police force and international media interest as he hunts for her husband and two sons.

Like Baptiste’s premiere season, this new one will be six episodes long, carrying watchers through November 21.

* * *

While we’re talking television, let me point you toward a couple of other stories. First off, the British magazine Radio Times has a bit of information about the sophomore series of Vienna Blood, the Victorian-era mystery drama based on Frank Tallis’ novels. That three-part show—starring Matthew Beard as brilliant young psychoanalyst-in-training Max Liebermann, and Jürgen Maurer as Detective Inspector Oskar Rheinhardt—was one of the programs that helped my wife and I get through the early, lockdown days of the COVID-19 pandemic, and I’m quite pleased at the prospect of its returning to U.S. screens sometime soon, following it’s broadcast in the UK.

Radio Times has still photos from the new production, plus this vague plot description: “At the end of season one, Max hopes he’ll still be able to be involved in criminal investigations. Thankfully his wish is granted when Oskar comes to visit him at his new private practice and lures him back into another fascinating case ripe for a Freudian approach. But while his relationship with his friend Oskar becomes more stable, his private life gets even more chaotic.”

Wikipedia makes clear that this follow-up series of Vienna Blood will also be limited to three installments.

Second, I see that The Killing Times has posted a trailer for The Chestnut Man, a Danish production based on a 2018 novel of the same name by Søren Sveistrup, creator of the crime series The Killing. This show is set to debut on Netflix come September 29. Here’s a description of its suspense-filled story:

The Chestnut Man takes place in a quiet suburb of Copenhagen, where the police make a terrible discovery on a stormy October morning. A young woman is found brutally murdered in a playground and one of her hands is missing. Above her hangs a small man of chestnuts.

Ambitious young detective Naia Thulin (Danica Curcic) and her new partner, Mark Hess (Mikkel Boe Følsgaard), are assigned to the case and before long, they find a piece of mysterious evidence on the ‘chestnut man’—evidence linking it all to a girl who disappeared a year earlier and was presumed dead: the daughter of Social Affairs Minister Rosa Hartung (Iben Dorner).

Hmm. Perhaps that’s not a tale for the faint of heart.

READ MORE: “The Killing Times Impressively ENORMOUS 2021 Autumn/Winter Preview” (The Killing Times).

Bullet Points: One Heck of Giant Edition

• Chris Sullivan, who writes the fine blog Morse, Lewis and Endeavour, confirms that the popular ITV-TV series Endeavour, starring Shaun Evans and Roger Allam, “will end as predicted, at 33 episodes.” Endeavour is, of course, a prequel to the long-running small-screen drama Inspector Morse, both of them based on characters created by Colin Dexter. “It is no surprise to those who believed that Russell Lewis, the creator and writer of all the Endeavour episodes, would not go beyond the number of episodes that the original Morse series and the Lewis series stopped at,” Sullivan remarks. This means there will be eight seasons of Endeavour altogether, with the final one comprising only three episodes. That’s the same number of installments found in Series 7, which was already broadcast in Great Britain this last February, but will debut in the States on PBS-TV’s Masterpiece Mystery! come Sunday, August 9. Here’s a trailer for the new season.

• If you want a jump on that August debut, and aren’t  squeamish about plot spoilers, check out The Killing Times’ reviews of those Series 7 installments: Episode 1, Episode 2, and Episode 3.

• Since I last took note, The Columbophile has rolled out three more posts in its series identifying “The 100 Greatest Columbo Scenes of the 1970s.” Part 6 is here and includes a great clip from the Season 3 episode “Double Exposure,” in which Peter Falk’s Lieutenant Columbo rattles his prime suspect (played by Robert Culp) during his golf game. Part 7 features a scene from the Season 2 installment “Requiem for a Falling Star” in which renowned American costume designer Edith Head has a cameo role. And in Part 8, look for guest murderer Patrick McGoohan to offer Columbo some cigar etiquette in the Season 4 episode “By Dawn's Early Light.” (By the way, McGoohan scored an Emmy Award for that performance.”) The Columbophile’s unnamed author has so far covered 80 of his or her 100 choices. The penultimate post in this project is slated to appear tomorrow.

• When I read that 82-year-old New Mexico author Rudolfo Anaya died on June 28 at his home in Albuquerque, I didn’t immediately recognize any link with crime fiction. After all, I associated him with mainstream fiction, especially his best-selling 1972 novel, Bless Me, Ultima, and also with his children’s stories. It was The Gumshoe Site’s Jiro Kimura who reminded me that, in addition to Anaya being “regarded as one of the founders of contemporary Chicano literature,” he had penned a quartet of mysteries starring a Mexican-American high school teacher turned private eye, Sonny Baca. Three of those novels were published in the 1990s, beginning with Zia Summer (1995). The fourth, Jemez Spring, didn’t appear until 2005.

• It’s been almost half a dozen years since novelist P.D. James passed away at age 94. If you need an introduction to her oeuvre or a reminder of her significant contributions to the genre, click onto this terrific piece from Neil Nyren, in CrimeReads.

• Really, “emoticons” date back to 1881?

• This is good news: Vienna Blood, the BBC-TV drama based on Frank Tallis’ Max Lieberman historical mysteries, and set in early 20th-century Vienna, has been renewed. “Three feature-length episodes have been ordered for the show’s second run,” says The Killing Times, “and BBC Two will once again serve as the UK broadcaster.” The show’s return is expected in Britain in 2021. There’s no word yet on when Americans might enjoy these fresh Vienna Blood stories.

• A six-episode ITV-TV adaptation A Spy Among Friends, Ben McIntyre’s 2014 non-fiction book about the Cambridge spy ring, will bring together an assortment of stars and writers with “some serious spy experience on their résumé,” according to Double O Section. That blog’s Matthew Bradford writes that “Damian Lewis (Our Kind of Traitor) will reunite with his Homeland producer Alexander Cary (the Taken TV show) to star as [Nicholas] Elliott. Dominic West (The Hour, Johnny English Reborn) will play [Kim] Philby, who has been portrayed in the past by Toby Stephens, Tom Hollander, Anthony Bate, and Billy Cruddup.” The show is scheduled for broadcast in fall of 2021.

• Our favorite genre is offering succor to many Brits forced inside by COVID-19. “Britain’s readers have been emerging from lockdown to restock their bookshelves, with book sales—and particularly crime novels—booming in the three weeks since booksellers were allowed to open their doors,” reports Alison Flood of The Guardian.

The print market continued its healthy run since England’s bookshops reopened on 15 June, with 3.8m books sold in the last week, for £32.6m, up from 3.1m (making £26.9m) at the same time last year. This is a 15% increase in value on last week and 21% year-on-year.

Sales in the last three weeks are up 19% on the same period in 2019, according to book sales monitor Nielsen, with almost 11m titles worth £94m sold over the period. Readers have been pouncing on stories of murder and revenge, with nearly 120,000 more crime and thriller books bought in the last two weeks of June, when compared to the same point last year.

• Just as the COVID-19 crisis was beginning, back in March, blogger Evan Lewis brought us a four-part BBC Radio adaptation of Hammett’s early Secret Agent X-9 yarns. (If you missed those, click here, here, here, and here to listen.) Last weekend he followed up by posting the four-hour, 13-episode, action-packed entirety of a 1945 film serial starring future Sea Hunt hunk Lloyd Bridges as Phil Corrigan/X-9. When you have enough free time, tune it in here.

• Chicago Tribune film critic Gene Siskel really didn’t like the 1995 James Bond film GoldenEye, the first in the series to star ex-Remington Steele lead Pierce Brosnan. “I think he isn’t an interesting Bond,” said Siskel. “I like [Sean] Connery and everybody else has been nothing compared to Connery. Frankly, Roger Moore has a more commanding physical performance than this guy. I thought this was an average picture. … I can’t recommend this picture at all.”



• Incidentally, GoldenEye premiered 25 years ago this coming November. Do you think it might be time for a rewatch?

• Why crime fiction might be the perfect genre for our coronavirus times: “Through crime fiction,” explains author Sulari Gentill (A Dangerous Language), “we have faced all manner of peril, defended the unjustly accused, protected intended victims. We have been selfless and fearless, we have been seekers of truth and justice, someone’s last hope. We have trained for crisis.”

• It was a couple of weeks ago that I announced my tally of favorite U.S. crime novels published during the first half of 2020. Last weekend, librarian-turned-blogger Lesa Holstine issued a comparable list of her own. Holstine’s picks extend beyond mystery fiction, but she does include Tracy Clark's What You Don't See, Paul D. Marks’ The Blues Don’t Care, and Katharine Schellman’s The Body in the Garden.

• This item comes from In Reference to Murder:

Killer Nashville is the latest event to announce it’s canceling for 2020 due to the pandemic, … the new travel bans and the recent upsurge of cases in Tennessee. They’re going to postpone Killer Nashville 2020 and roll everyone’s registrations forward to KN 2021 (August 19-22, 2021). Founder Clay Stafford added that “It was a hard choice, but the safety and well-being of our friends is our most important consideration. These are tough and uncharted times.” This year’s special guests were to be Lisa Black, J.T. Ellison, and Walter Mosley.

• Other conventions are seeking ways to carry on. Mystery in the Midlands, for instance, has scheduled a live Webinar for Saturday, July 25, that will include appearances by Charlaine Harris, Jeffery Deaver, Tara Laskowski, Art Taylor, and Dana Cameron. Register here.

• If you didn’t catch it already, here’s my Killer Covers gallery of artist James Bama’s splendid paperback fronts showcasing “teenagers either causing trouble or trying to find their own way in a confusing new world of sex, drugs, and yes, rock ’n’ roll.”

• As you’re probably already aware, Max Allan Collins and A. Brad Schwartz have co-authored a new criminal history, Eliot Ness and the Mad Butcher: Hunting America’s Deadliest Unidentified Serial Killer at the Dawn of Modern Criminology (Morrow), due out in August. (It’s a follow-up to their 2018 collaboration, Scarface and the Untouchable: Al Capone, Eliot Ness, and the Battle for Chicago.) What you may not know, is that Collins has also signed with Las Vegas-based Wolfpack Publishing to reissue his four Eliot Ness historical thrillers, beginning with a new omnibus edition released earlier this month. In his blog, Collins explains that this relationship with Wolfpack—a “hybrid” house that “place[s] primary importance on e-books and secondary importance on real books, which are Print-on-Demand”—will give him the chance to resurrect backlist titles, publish new short-story collections, and add to existing or discontinued series. “I can do a Jack and Maggie Starr or a Mallory or a ‘disaster’ or a Perdition prequel or a Black Hats sequel or even—should the current publishers stop doing them—new Spillane titles. Wolfpack is interested in whatever I might want to do. This feels incredibly liberating.”

• I have enjoyed the blog Paperback Warrior almost since the day it debuted seven years ago this week. And one of its most engaging ingredients is the much-newer Paperback Warrior Podcast, focusing on vintage adventure and crime novels as well as the authors behind those works. A couple of recent entries have been particular standouts: Episode 50, which looks back in part at Thomas B. Dewey’s life and writing career; and Episode 51, addressing the work of “CIA operative, Watergate burglar, and vintage genre fiction author [E.] Howard Hunt.” You can catch up with all of the podcasts here.

• Speaking of Hunt, I see that a couple of the novels he wrote pseudonymously (as “Robert Dietrich”) about “two-fisted, hard-drinking CPA detective, Steve Bentley,” are available again in print, thanks to Lee Goldberg’s new imprint, Cutting Edge Books. The House on Q Street, originally released in 1959, can be purchased here, while The Calypso Caper (1961) is newly obtainable right here. Cutting Edge is offering additional Dietrich works in e-book format only. For more info, click here.

• I somehow missed the welcome news that Steeger Books is reissuing—in both softcover and e-book formats—the 1952-1973 Milo March series, starring “a high-flying, globetrotting investigator for Intercontinental Insurance.” “Written by Green Lama creator Kendell Foster Crossen under the [M.E.] Chaber pen name, the Milo March thrillers are fondly recalled by paperback collectors for the spectacular Robert McGinnis paintings on the covers of the 1970s series,” explains the publisher. “These remastered, uniform editions include the original texts, restored by Kendra Crossen Burroughs, her father’s literary executor and the series editor. New bonus articles, interviews, and rare images are featured in most of the volumes.” Steeger is already selling six March titles, with 17 more to come by the end of this year—“including the final, unpublished March novel,” Death to the Brides.

• Mick Finlay, Glasgow-born author of the new mystery Arrowood and the Thames Corpses, reconsiders the 2007 book Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters and pronounces it “a real treat for Sherlock Holmes fans. The letters were written to Doyle’s family, publishers and others, but most of them are to his ‘Mam,’ who he was very close to all his life. He describes her as a wonderful storyteller, and attributes his own gifts to her influence, while his gift for dramatic effect came from his father, an artist whose alcoholism led to lengthy stays in sanitoria and asylums in the latter part of his life. As well as some fascinating insights into Conan Doyle’s personal life and politics, they also provide some background to the development of the Sherlock Holmes stories.” Finlay’s full essay can be enjoyed at this link.

• An unusually nice photo cover for a crime-fiction mag.

• British actor Peter Cushing, said to have been “a huge fan of Sherlock Holmes,” starred in the 1959 big-screen production The Hound of the Baskervilles. He later returned to sleuthing in a 1968 run of the BBC-TV series Sherlock Holmes. (See the show’s opening titles here.) Cushing apparently played Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous consulting detective in 15 installments of that hour-long series, taking over from Douglas Wilmer. However, only six were known to have survived, the remainder said to have been wiped “to allow tape stock to be re-used.” Now, though, The Killing Times brings word that at least some clips from those missing episodes have been found, thanks to “an intense search” by Yorkshire Post reporter Tony Earnshaw.

• Because I’ve long been a fan of the 1971-1977 NBC Mystery Movie series McMillan & Wife, starring Rock Hudson and Susan Saint James, I must draw your attention to Steve Lewis’ generally complimentary review, in Mystery*File, of that show’s first regular installment, “Murder by the Barrel.” The full-episode video is included.

• This is curious: Midnight Atlanta, the third book in U.S. author Thomas Mullen’s outstanding series about mid-20th-century Georgia police officers Lucius Boggs, Tommy Smith, and Denny Rakestraw, is already available in the UK, from Little, Brown. However, there’s no American edition of the novel. Both of Mullen’s previous series entries appeared in the States (from 37 Ink, an Atria Books imprint) months before the were released in Britain. Why is Midnight Atlanta the exception? So far, I see no word on the Web about when Mullen’s new novel might reach U.S. bookshops.

• Bloomberg Businessweek has studied the murderers in Agatha Christie’s mysteries, and charted the age, sex, profession, relationship to the victim, and homicidal methods used by each of them. The bottom line: “In Agatha Christie’s novels, murder and financial fraud are often intertwined. The murderers are more likely to be men, are partial to poison, and frequently commit the crime as part of a scam such as winning an inheritance.” See all of the results here.

• I’ve never read Joel Townsley Rogers’ The Red Right Hand. But with Penzler Publishers having recently brought that acclaimed 1945 novel back into print as part of its American Mystery Classics line, I have another chance to do so. Joe R. Lansdale’s introduction to this edition leaves me further intrigued. As he observes: “At times, while reading Rogers’s peculiar book, I felt as if I were seeing the world through a dark and grease-smeared window pane that would frequently turn clear and light up in spewing colors like a firework display on the Fourth of July. At the same time there was the sensation of something damp and dark creeping up behind me, a cold chill on the back of my neck. Clues and odd impressions pile up like plague victims, and from time to time the answer to the riddle seems close at hand, as if you could reach out and grasp it. Then the answer that seemed so clear wriggles from your grasp like an electric eel and slithers into darkness.”

• Has it been a while since you last consulted The Rap Sheet’s inventory of Summer 2020 crime-fiction releases? Then you might want to revisit it, as I have made many additions over the last month.


• There’s nothing secret about my fondness for Olivia Rutigliano’s contributions to CrimeReads. I favor her work partly because so much of it glances back at the history of this genre, in all media. Case in point: her recent piece about the jailing of Dashiell Hammett, after the quondam Pinkerton agent and private-eye novelist ran afoul of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York in 1951. Another Rutigliano piece that won my immediate attention remarked on “the endless symbolism of Jaws, which owes its dark soul to Moby Dick.” (The 45th anniversary of that movie’s release was June 20.) Her spoiler-filled essay begins:

I watch Jaws every year on the Fourth of July, in view of its timelessness as well as its seasonality. Jaws is specifically set during Independence Day. It also generally invented the ‘summer blockbuster,’ a detail which makes its 1975 premiere on midsummer’s eve seem quite significant, in hindsight. Like the shark that arrives off the coast of Amity Island in the film’s famous opening scene, Jaws arrived unassumingly at the start of the season and caused a frenzy that would ripple out far past Labor Day. It became one of our greatest filmmaking touchstones: a marvelously intellectual monster movie, an arbiter of cinematic summer, a technical origin story for the boy-genius director who would become Steven Spielberg. It is also a touch prescient. It is one of those eerie films that, to me, feels a little sibylline, a little otherworldly. It seems to sit at the nexus of everything—the past, the future, high art, popular entertainment, mythology, history—as a film whose deliverance certainly revolutionized filmmaking and scared everyone from going in the ocean, but also stands as a vessel for the summoning of mankind for reflection and atonement.

• New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis offers her own take on the initial impact and enduring legacy of Jaws here.

• Could a motion picture based on Luther, the popular BBC psychological crime drama starring Idris Elba, finally be in the offing? While speaking with Deadline about his new Sky-TV comedy, In the Long Run, Elba said: “I’ve made it very clear that I’d like to see Luther come back as a film. And I can tell you this, that we are this close to making a film of Luther.” Of course, as Deadline notes, this is “not the first time Elba has talked about the BBC Studios show heading to the big screen. He told [the British newspaper] Metro in 2018 that Luther writer Neil Cross has been ‘beavering away’ on a feature script.” Will such talk ever amount to something?

• Vulture talks with writers, directors, and others about the challenges of presenting TV cop dramas in the post-George Floyd era.

• How might school history textbooks of the future summarize and try to make sense of this crazy year, 2020? Historian James West Davidson speculates on that subject in The Atlantic.

• Real people have spent the months-long COVID-19 lockdown in different ways, not all of them worth reporting or free of embarrassment. But what about some of our favorite crime-fiction protagonists? What have they been up to amid this health crisis? Scott Montgomery, of Bookpeople, in Austin, Texas, asked Joe R. Lansdale, Laura Lippman, Mark Pryor, Craig Johnson, and Megan Abbott to imagine their creations’ self-quarantine escapades.

• From Elizabeth Foxwell’s The Bunburyist: “The In GAD We Trust podcast chats with short-story sleuth Tony Medawar, who has uncovered unknown or neglected works by authors such as Christianna Brand, John Dickson Carr, Agatha Christie, Anthony Berkeley Cox, Edmund Crispin, Ngaio Marsh, and Dorothy L. Sayers. Medawar talks about his favorite mystery finds and other discoveries he has made. A new volume in Medawar’s Bodies from the Library series will be out in October in the United States.”

• A few other writer exchanges worth finding: For his Author Interviews blog, Marshal Zeringue talks with J. Todd Scott (Lost River) and Chris Nickson (The Molten City); Speaking of Mysteries podcast host Nancie Clare quizzes Cathi Stoler (Bar None) and Michael Elias (You Can Go Home Now); Jeff Rutherford pitches questions at T.R. Ragan (Don’t Make a Sound) for his Reading and Writing Podcast; and Do Some Damage’s Steve Weddle chats with Jay Stringer about the latter’s new book, Marah Chase and the Fountain of Youth.

• In another episode of Open Book on Location, authors Lee Goldberg, Nicholas Meyer, and Leslie S. Klinger got together virtually to talk about their writing processes, movie/TV tie-in novels, their respective reading histories, Hollywood, and more.

• I forgot to mention this before, but The Nick Carter & Carter Brown Blog spent the month of May saluting—with book covers—the prolific work of Alan Geoffrey Yates, who wrote under the Carter Brown pseudonym. Those fronts can all be seen here.

• At the Villa Rose’s Xavier Lechard muses on Golden Age investigators who occasionally took justice into their own hands.

• Finally, Flashbak offers a sometimes-shocking selection of vintage crime-scene images, taken by the Los Angeles Police Department and barely saved from destruction. “In 2014,” the site explains, “Los Angeles-based photographer Merrick Morton (a onetime LAPD reserve officer) spotted a derelict stash of LAPD crime photos dating from the 1920s to 1970s. The cellulose nitrate-based film and negatives were decomposed and deemed as fire hazard. … Now spruced up, the macabre collection includes photographs of crimes, many of them violent. … There’s an unusual photo of Maila Nurmi dressed as Vampira, pictures of comedian Lenny Bruce’s overdose in March of 1966 and images of the Manson Family arriving at their arraignment in 1970.” That post is definitely not safe for work.

Just a Handful of Short Takes

• We’ve now entered the concluding round of Goodreads’ voting process to select the winners of its 2019 Choice Awards. The 10 finalists in the Best Mystery and Thriller category include Ruth Ware’s The Turn of the Key, Alex Michaelides’ The Silent Patient, Jane Harper’s The Lost Man, Sally Hepworth’s The Mother-in-Law, and Harlan Coben’s Run Away. Click here before December 2 to make your preferences known. Winners in this and 19 other book categories are supposed to be announced on Tuesday, December 10.

• Meanwhile, Amazon has chosen The Silent Patient as its “best mystery and thriller of the year.” That site’s top 20 picks are here.

• I’m very pleased to hear that British social historian Hallie Rubenhold has won the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-fiction for her book The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper. It’s an excellent work that overturns some of our most common beliefs about the Ripper’s “canonical victims.”

• Max Allan Collins mentions, in his most recent blog post, that he’s concocting a follow-up to his 1987 novel Spree, which has long been the penultimate entry in his series about professional thief Nolan. That protagonist last appeared in 1999’s Mourn the Living.

• Brash Books publisher Lee Goldberg reports on Facebook that a never-before-published 13th installment in the Ralph Dennis’ Jim Hardman crime series is set for release early next year. He explains:

For decades, it was believed there were only 12 books in the late Ralph Dennis’ legendary and acclaimed Hardman series, which was published in paperback in the 1970s and that inspired a generation of crime writers, including Joe R. Lansdale (Hap & Leonard) and screenwriter Shane Black (Lethal Weapon). But this summer, we discovered an unpublished 13th Hardman manuscript, written by Dennis in London in 1977, that was stashed away decades ago in a cardboard box in an attic in Chapel Hill, NC.

Brash Books is publishing the novel, All Kinds of Ugly, in February 2020 with an afterword that details the exciting discovery and editing of this final, long-lost adventure in the Hardman series.

• I probably watched the entire run of Don Johnson’s second TV crime drama, Nash Bridges, but I never expected to see any more than that show’s original 122 episodes. Now comes this item from B.V. Lawson’s In Reference to Murder:

Don Johnson, set to reprise the title role in USA Network’s upcoming Nash Bridges revival, confirmed today that longtime co-star Cheech Marin will be back for the reboot reprising his role as Inspector Joe Dominguez. The original series, which ran on CBS from 1996 to 2001, starred Johnson as an investigator in an elite Special Investigations Unit of the San Francisco Police Department.

Hmm. Johnson will turn 70 years of age this coming December 15. Might that not make him a tad too old to again be chasing through the Bay Area after big-time criminals? You can watch the main title sequence from the original Nash Bridges here.

• Oh, no. Not a Columbo revival too. Can’t we just be happy with Peter Falk’s long-running classic series? Yes, at least for now. Apparently, Steven Moffat—the co-creator of Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock—was hoping to reboot Columbo for new viewers, but was “thwarted by red tape,” according to The Columbophile.

• As I mentioned previously on this page, I’ve been looking forward to watching BBC Two’s three-part production of Vienna Blood, based on Frank Tallis’ Max Liebermann/Oskar Rheinhardt novels. So I was disappointed to read The Killing Times’ take on Episode 1 of the show, which calls it “pretty much a compendium of clichés, handsomely dressed but fairly pedestrian” that “doesn’t do much original with its source material.” The review continues: “All the expected components are present and correct—a bit of psychoanalysis, a bit of hypnotism, a bit of fascism—and the authentic locations bring something to the party, but neither lead performance is compelling, and we feel we’ve found out everything there is to know about the two characters (one insecure and driven, the other grief-stricken by the death of his daughter). … So will Vienna Blood prove to have hidden depths of meaning in the next two episodes? Well, as Sigmund Freud famously probably didn’t say, ‘Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.’”

• The Killing Times also brings news that British performer Gary Oldman (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Child 44) will star as the politically incorrect and flagrantly flatulent Jackson Lamb in an Apple TV+ adaptation of Mick Herron’s modern espionage series. To be called Slow Horses (the title of Herron’s first book in that series), it will follow “a team of British intelligence agents who serve in a dumping ground department of MI5—Slough House. Lamb is the brilliant but irascible leader of the spies who end up in Slough House due to their career-ending mistakes.” No word yet on a premiere date.

• And here is the trailer for Dare Me, the USA Network program based on Megan Abbott’s 2012 novel of that same name. Dare Me, which will follow the lives of some competitive high school cheerleaders in “a small Midwestern town,” is set to debut on December 29, with Abbott as one of its executive producers.

Bullet Points: Pre-Veterans Day Edition

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

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

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

• The following item comes from In Reference to Murder:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bullet Points: On Heavy Meds Edition

Please pardon my silence of the week, for as tardy schoolchildren worldwide are often heard to say, “I have a good excuse!”

Within an hour of my wife and I returning home last Saturday from a couple of days away, I somehow managed to fall down my back steps and hit the concrete sidewalk below. There were no consequent head or neck injuries, but I did break five ribs on my left side, as well as one small bone in the elbow of my left arm, and I seriously knocked the wind out of myself. Now, I’ve broken ribs on two previous occasions, so I wasn’t terribly worried at first. However, when my left arm started to freeze up, I decided to take my wife’s advice and head for the nearest emergency room. There, it was discovered that my accident offered one further complication: I had a hematoma on my spleen. This combination of ills sent me in an ambulance to an intensive care unit, where I spent Sunday and Monday. After being thoroughly poked and prodded, and reassured that the hematoma was dissipating, I was finally sent home with pain medication and recommendations that I take it easy for a while. That lasted a couple of days, before I felt the need to jump back into at least some modest work schedule.

So look at the “Bullet Points” news compilation below as part of my recovery. I hope to post at least one additional thing on this page before week’s end, but we’ll see how my energy level holds up. Because, of course, I don’t want to tire myself out so greatly that I can’t also spend some of this downtime reading.

• Thirty-one-year-old Swedish actor Adam Pålsson will star as Henning Mankell’s renowned detective protagonist, Kurt Wallander, in a six-episode English-language series for Netflix, due out next year. This Young Wallander, which is apparently hoping to generate some of the same magic that has made a hit of Shaun Evans’ Inspector Morse prequel, Endeavour, will explore “Wallander’s first case and the experiences that shaped him as a person,” explains The Killing Times. “When the series begins, Wallander is in his 20s and a recent graduate from university now working as a uniformed police officer.” Beyond Pålsson, the show will feature Richard Dillane as Police Commissioner Hemberg, Leanne Best as Frida Rask, and Ellise Chappell as Mona Wallander. Filming is said to be currently underway.



• The BBC is spreading a trailer—embedded above—to promote its upcoming TV series Dublin Murders, which is based on Tana French’s succession of haunting modern-day mysteries. The eight episodes of Season 1 have been adapted from French’s first two best-sellers, In the Woods and The Likeness, and will star Killian Scott (Ripper Street) and Sarah Greene (Ransom). Dublin Murders will show next month in the UK, but as The Killing Times points out, it won’t premiere in the States until November 10, courtesy of the premium channel Starz.

• By the way, Dublin Murders is just one of many interesting new crime dramas being readied for small-screen broadcast in Britain over the next several months. Also among that bunch will be Vienna Blood, a BBC Two production based on Frank Tallis’ 2007 historical novel of that same name. Here’s a plot précis:

Starring Matthew Beard, and Jürgen Maurer, Vienna Blood is set in 1900s Vienna, a hotbed of philosophy, science and art, where a clash of cultures and ideas play out in the city’s grand cafés and opera houses. Max Liebermann (Beard) is a brilliant young English doctor, studying under the famed psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. When Max comes into contact with Oskar Rheinhardt (Maurer), an Austrian Detective Inspector struggling with a strange case, he offers his assistance. Max’s extraordinary skills of perception and forensics and his deep understanding of human behaviour and deviance help Oskar solve some of Vienna’s most mysterious and deadly cases.

We can only hope that Vienna Blood will make its way to this side of the Atlantic very soon.

• As TV Guide notes, “Sacha Baron Cohen is best known as the comedian and impersonator who has brought to life quirky characters like Ali G, Borat and Bruno, and whose character work in Who Is America? convinced several real-life politicians to say some hilarious and disturbing things. But his next dramatic role—playing real-life Israeli spy Eli Cohen in Netflix’s [new] thriller The Spy—looks like the perfect fit, especially based on the first trailer for the limited series.” You’ll find that preview here; The Spy debuted on Netflix last Friday, though I haven’t yet found time enough to watch it.

• Organizers of this year’s Bloody Scotland Crime Writing Festival (to be held in Stirling, Scotland, from September 20 to 22) have announced their list of finalists for the 2019 McIlvanney Prize:

— Breakers, by Doug Johnstone (Orenda)
— Conviction, by Denise Mina (Vintage)
— The Way of All Flesh, by “Ambrose Parry,” aka Chris Brookmyre and Marisa Haetzman (Canongate)
— A Treachery of Spies, by Manda Scott (Transworld)

You’ll find the longlist of nominees for that commendation here, together with the five books vying to take home the inaugural Debut Prize. The winners of these two awards will be made known during an opening reception for Bloody Scotland at Stirling’s Church of the Holy Rude on Friday, September 20. (Hat tip to The Gumshoe Site.)

• Meanwhile, the Australian Crime Writers Association has chosen the recipients of its 2019 Ned Kelly Awards as follows:

— Best Fiction: The Lost Man, by Jane Harper (Pan Macmillan Australia)
— Best True Crime: Eggshell Skull, by Bri Lee (Allen & Unwin)
— Best First Fiction: The Ruin, by Dervla McTiernan
(HarperCollins Australia)

Click here to see the shortlisted works in each of those categories.

• Could a woman play British spy James Bond in future installments of the still-popular film series? According to two men who have portrayed Ian Fleming’s protagonist in the past, Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig, the answer is yes. “I think we’ve watched the guys do it for the last 40 years, get out of the way, guys, and put a woman up there,” Brosnan (GoldenEye, Die Another Day) is quoted in The Washington Post as saying. “I think it would be exhilarating, it would be exciting.” Brosnan conceded, though, “that a female James Bond was unlikely, given executive producer Barbara Broccoli’s insistence that ‘Bond is male.’”

• Speaking of Agent 007, The Spy Command reports that French actress Léa Seydoux, who appeared as psychiatrist Dr. Madeleine Swann in 2015’s Spectre, will be given a larger-than-earlier-anticipated part in next year’s 25th Bond flick, No Time to Die. A Google translation of a story published in Brazil says Swann “will also play a considerable role in the plot, as her character will again appear working in a psychiatric clinic.” No Time to Die is due to be released in the UK on April 3, 2020, with its U.S. debut expected on April 8.

• Finally, the James Bond Radio podcast is expected to return sometime in October. Its future had been left in doubt, following the recent departure of co-host Chris Wright. An Apple podcast archive of existing installments can be found here.

• I was saddened to hear this news, in the wake of my being discharged from the hospital: Onetime child model and actress Carol Lynley—known for her roles in such theatrical releases as Under the Yum Yum Tree, Bunny Lake Is Missing and The Poseidon Adventure, as well as in TV programs ranging from Mannix and It Takes a Thief to The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and The Fall Guy—died on September 3 at age 77. I first remember spotting Lynley (who was born in New York City as Carole Ann Jones) in The Night Stalker, a 1972 ABC Movie of the Week in which she played the winsome blonde girlfriend of journalist-turned-monster hunter Carl Kolchak (Darren McGavin). I later enjoyed her performance in a two-part, 1974 episode of Bill Bixby’s The Magician, and subsequently saw her in Quincy, M.E., Kojak, and Richie Brockelman: Private Eye. Variety says that Lynley (left) perished at her home in Pacific Palisades, California, “after suffering a heart attack.”

• Sorry, but not even the addition of Agent Carter star Hayley Atwell to the expanding cast of Tom Cruise’s next Mission: Impossible picture (the seventh entry in that franchise) will convince me to plunk down real money for the “privilege” of watching Cruise struggle to appear tough again on screen.

• I’m far more likely to enjoy a very different Atwell role. This news item comes from B.V. Lawson’s In Reference to Murder:

The first trailer for Netflix’s new procedural drama, Criminal, is out, with David Tennant and Hayley Atwell starring as uncooperative suspects in the “innovative” police-procedural anthology series. Set entirely in the confines of a police interview suite, the show features 12 distinct stories that take place in four countries: the UK, France, Germany, and Spain.

• The latest edition of Clues: The Journal of Detection was recently published. As managing editor Elizabeth Foxwell explains, it’s a “theme issue on interwar mysteries guest edited by Victoria Stewart (University of Leicester, UK).” Topics include: “‘The Ghost of Dr. Freud Haunts Everything Today’: Criminal Minds in the Golden-Age Psychological Thriller”; “Capital Punishment and Women in the British Police Procedural: Josephine Tey’s A Shilling for Candles and To Love and Be Wise”; and “Whose Trauma? Dorothy L. Sayers’s Use of Shell Shock and the Role of Memory in Interwar Detective Fiction.”

• Three terrific historical pieces from CrimeReads: “The Spectacle of Degradation,” in which Dominique Kalifa looks back at 19th-century tours of big-city underworlds; Kerri Maniscalco’s essay, “Was H.H. Holmes the Real Jack the Ripper?”; and “100 Years Ago, the Country Debated Arming Women to Combat Sexual Assaults,” by Amy Stewart, whose fifth and newest entry in her acclaimed Kopp Sisters series, Kopp Sisters on the March, will reach bookstores this month.

• Lee Goldberg makes a good point in this Facebook post:

I don’t get why author Carolyn Weston (1921-2001) is never mentioned in articles about ground-breaking female writers in the crime-writing genre. She was the author of three hard-boiled police procedurals in the late 1960s set in Santa Monica, California, and featuring detectives Al Krug, a seasoned veteran, and his partner Casey Kellog, a younger, college-educated surfer. It was a strong pairing … so strong that it led to [TV producer] Quinn Martin optioning the books, and adapting the first one, Poor, Poor Ophelia, into the pilot for The Streets of San Francisco. The [1972-1977] series was a huge hit, and yet (to my knowledge), Weston and her publisher never capitalized on the success. To my knowledge, no Streets of San Francisco tie-in editions of her books were ever released—which is astonishing. Weston also never wrote another book and is forgotten, even though her books became the basis for one of the best-known TV cop shows in history.

Five years ago, Brash Books acquired the copyright to the trilogy, republished them, and hired Robin Burcell to write a new book, The Last Good Place, in the literary series (though we moved the action to present-day San Francisco to better align it with the TV series. …)

• Pay attention, folks: The submission process for Canada’s 2020 Arthur Ellis Awards opened on September 1. Submission rules and entry forms can be found at the link.

• Last but not least, here are a few author interviews worth checking out: CrimeReads interrogates Rachel Moore on the subject of her new non-fiction book, Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession; Speaking of Mysteries host Nancie Clare chats with Sherri Leigh James about her two Cissy Huntington whodunits, Blood Red and Iced Blue; and MysteryPeople has a few questions for Reed Farrel Coleman, whose brand-new Jessie Stone novel is Robert B. Parker’s The Bitterest Pill.