Bullet Points: Eclipse Day Edition

• The Columbophile Blog reports that David Koenig, author of the 2021 book Shooting Columbo, will be back in print next month with Unshot Columbo: Cracking the Cases That Never Got Filmed (Bonaventure Press), which “focuses on 19 murder mysteries that never made it to our screens—and outline why we never got to see them. ... [T]he many Columbo stories crafted but never filmed include 1970s tales by ‘murder consultant’ Larry Cohen and a young Brian De Palma, an aborted pilot for Mrs. Columbo that was reimagined for the good Lieutenant, and the legendary last case that Peter Falk desperately hoped would drop the curtain on Columbo’s televisual career.” Yeah, you should know by now that this is on my “preorder” list.

• North Carolina resident Ashley-Ruth M. Bernier, whose short stories have appeared in various magazines, and Audrea Sallis, a South Dakota technical writer hoping to expand her fiction portfolio, have been named as the 2024 Barbara Neely Grant recipients. This scholarship program, named for the late Barbara Neely (creator of the Blanche White mystery series), is designed to promote Black crime-fiction writers. A pair of winners is selected each year—one an already published author, the other a writer just getting started in publishing. More information about Bernier and Sallis can be found here.

• Mike Ripley expands his oft-amusing “Ripster Revivals” series for Shots with this piece looking back fondly at the oeuvre of Walter Satterthwait (1946-2020). Ripley calls him “an American with a passport, who knew how to use it. Not only did his nomadic existence find him living in numerous locations in the U.S., particularly New York, Santa Fe, California and Florida, but in Greece, Kenya and the Caribbean, with frequent visits to Germany, France, Holland and England. Along the way he wrote numerous short stories, a series of classic private eye investigations, a historical series set in the Europe of the 1920s featuring cameos from Arthur Conan Doyle, Harry Houdini, Ernest Hemingway and Adolf Hitler (!), plus stand-alone thrillers and novels featuring Lizzie Borden and Oscar Wilde.”

• The annual CrimeFest convention, held in Bristol, England, has revealed its program lineup for this coming May. In attendance should be crime-fiction stars running from Laura Lippman and Ajay Chowdhury to Denise Mina and Abir Mukherjee. More details are here.

• Perhaps in anticipation of what would have been actor Rock Hudson’s 100th birthday coming up next year (he succumbed to AIDS-related illness in 1985), the celebrity magazine Closer recently profiled Susan Saint James, now 77, who starred with Hudson in the 1971-1977 NBC Mystery Movie series McMillan & Wife. The article begins with Saint James’ statement that “kissing Rock Hudson on the set … never felt like a hardship. ‘We were kissing all the time, and it was fun,” she tells Closer exclusively, calling her late costar “engaging, wonderful, friendly and sexy.’” It goes on to mention Hudson’s “gregarious, upbeat personality” and how he personally welcomed famous guest stars to the McMillan & Wife set. “‘He would send flowers to their trailer, and he’d go over first thing in the morning to say hello,’ recalls Susan, who notes that stars of hit TV series are rarely so gracious. ‘He had this kind of Old Hollywood courtesy and kindness.’”

• Speaking of Susan Saint James, I was contacted not long ago by northern Virginia resident Frank Gregorsky, a non-fiction editor specializing in economics and political history who, in his spare time, pens a free, PDF-formatted Web quarterly called Detective Drama Gems. He’s apparently been doing that—ever so quietly, and with no professional background in his subject matter—since 2020, long enough to have analyzed “roughly four dozen episodes” of vintage American crime and detective TV shows. “I look for plausibility of events; spectacular character clarity; and the power and precision of dialogue,” Gregorsky tells me. The reason he reached out to me was that he’d come across my 2011 Rap Sheet tribute to McMillan & Wife, and had referred to it while producing this enjoyable Gems recollection of “Point of Law,” a 1976 episode of the series—and the last to feature Saint James in the role of Sally McMillan (left), spouse to Hudson’s San Francisco police commissioner, Stewart “Mac” McMillan.

• By the way, I’d love to direct you to previous issues of Detective Drama Gems, but Gregorsky has (sadly) provided no easy way to access them. The first issue, focusing on episodes of Barrie Craig, Confidential Investigator, Hawaii Five-O, and The Streets of San Francisco, can be enjoyed here. But after that, the Web addresses begin with http://www.exactingeditor.com/Detective-Gems-1.pdf, and you must change the number in that address each time to find the next one. There are 13 issues thus far, looking back at installments of everything from The Mod Squad and 77 Sunset Strip to The Name of the Game and M Squad.

• Here’s an episode that seems to have passed from my recollection: “In the final season of Perry Mason (1957-66), the intrepid attorney went behind the Iron Curtain for an adventure.”

• This is good news, indeed. New episodes of Beyond Paradise, the Death in Paradise spin-off series starring Kris Marshall, have just begun to drop on the streaming service BritBox. A Christmas special was shown in December, but only last week did a second ep suddenly appear. Here’s a synopsis: “As a steam train races through the Devonshire countryside, [Detective Inspector] Humphrey [Goodman, played by Marshall] and [Deteetive Sergeant] Esther [Williams, played by Zahra Ahmadi] join the Shipton Abbott Players for a murder mystery rehearsal. Though Humphrey is only playing a detective, things turn from amateur to professional when the actor playing the victim is found dead with a real knife in his back.” Wikipedia says six Season 2 episodes are in the hopper (and began showing in the UK in March). Marshall was my favorite among the fish-out-of-water British detective stars of Death in Paradise, and it’s nice to see him return in this rather different series, which will apparently find Goodman and his fiancée, Sally Bretton (Martha Lloyd) becoming foster parents.

• Meanwhile, American streamer Hulu has decided to end the cruise of Death and Other Details after 10 installments. “Now we’ll never know which poor soul these severed limbs belonged to,” observes Deadline. “Hulu has opted not to renew murder mystery series Death and Other Details for a second season. The news is not really surprising; the visually stylish series starring Mandy Patinkin and Violett Beane had a pretty quiet run, not able to break into Nielsen’s weekly Top 10 streaming ratings.”

• And if you missed seeing today’s total solar eclipse, visible in North America, here’s NASA’s broadcast of that “celestial spectacle.”

Two More Distinctive Voices, Stilled

One of the things you learn as a book blogger is there’s simply no good time to go out of town. You never know when news of importance in your field will break. Case in point: The deaths of two prominent authors during my mini-vacation of the last several days.

First to mention: Walter Satterthwait, who passed away on Wednesday, February 26, at age 73. The Philadelphia-born writer left a trail of memorable mysteries behind him, including five novels (Wall of Glass, Accustomed to the Dark, etc.) starring Santa Fe, New Mexico, private eye Joshua Croft; a pair of historical whodunits (Miss Lizzie and New York Nocturne) featuring Lizzie Borden, who was accused of murdering her father and stepmother in 1892; and three spirited mysteries led by Pinkerton detectives Phil Beaumont and Jane Turner (among them 1998’s Masquerade). Satterthwait’s most recent publication was a short story, “The Death of Mr. Jayacody,” which appeared in the November 2019 edition of Down & Out: The Magazine. He was also, apparently, working on a novel titled Blood Imperative, an excerpt of which can be found—at least for now—on his Web site. When New York Nocturne was released during the summer of 2016, Satterthwait was kind enough to be interviewed, by yours truly, for Kirkus Reviews. Most of our exchange can be read here, with a bit of extra material available here. As Mystery Fanfare’s Janet Rudolph reports, the author—whom she calls “clever, funny, and quirky”—died “after a battle with COPD and congestive heart failure.”

(An obituary has now been added to Satterthwait’s Web site.)

Perishing just two days prior to Satterthwait, on February 24, was the prolific and best-selling Clive Cussler, who was surely recognized best for his Dirk Pitt adventure novels (Raise the Titanic!, Night Probe!, Atlantis Found, etc.). As The Guardian recalls in its obituary,

Cussler’s writing was unusual in the way he wove it and his own life together. His recurring hero, Dirk Pitt, named after his son, was a marine engineer who worked for a government agency, the National Underwater and Marine Agency (Numa), an ocean-going version of James Bond. After Cussler’s third Pitt novel, Raise the Titanic! (1976), became an unexpected hit, he founded his own organisation called Numa, and led more than 60 underwater missions that located wrecks.

These included the Carpathia, the first ship to reach the Titanic; the Confederate ship Manassas, the first ironclad to see action in the American civil war; and both the Confederate submarine Hunley, the first to sink a ship, and the Housatonic, which it sank. Not all were at sea: Numa raised a warship, Zavala, which had belonged to the short-lived Republic of Texas navy, from beneath a car park in Galveston.

Cussler also began writing himself into his novels as a character providing help to Pitt.

This Aurora, Illinois-born college dropout was, as Britain’s Guardian characterizes it, a “serviceable” writer, and his “characters were redolent of the pulp magazines of his childhood.” However, “he combined the exciting elements of Bond or Matt Helm spy thrillers with plot twists drawn from Alistair MacLean … and was an influence on writers who followed, such as Tom Clancy.” Cussler was only 88 years old when he breathed his last in Scottsdale, Arizona.

BY THE WAY: Neil Nyren, the former editor-in-chief of G.P. Putnam’s Sons and now editor-at-large for CrimeReads, dropped me a note during my recent absence, saying that Publishers Weekly “will be running a piece by me either Monday or Tuesday about being Clive’s editor.” I very much look forward to reading it.

Another Whack at Lizzie

There’s every chance you haven’t noticed this yet, but my latest Kirkus Reviews column—this one focused around an interview with Walter Satterthwait about his second delightful Lizzie Borden whodunit, New York Nocturne—was posted this morning. You’ll find it here.

As frequently happens, the interview material I had available exceeded what I could use in Kirkus (though not by much this time). So, as a bonus for Rap Sheet readers, I am embedding my last three questions to Florida author Satterthwait below.

J. Kingston Pierce: Over the last 20 years, you’ve had to give up two different series—one starring Santa Fe, New Mexico, private eye Joshua Croft, the other featuring Pinkerton agents Philip Beaumont and Jane Tanner. Did poor sales figures doom both of those series, or were there other issues involved?

Walter Satterthwait: The Joshua Croft novels ended just about exactly where I wanted them to end—in a kind of uncertainty. As for the Pinkertons, I may see both of them again. When we saw them last, they were on their way to Greece. There was a lot of stuff going on in Athens in the early 1920s, and, so far as I know, no one’s ever written a thriller that used any of it.

JKP: Are you currently laboring over a different work of fiction? If so, can you tell me something about its storyline?

WS: It’s another story about New York at night. That’s about as much as I can say. It’s never a great idea, I think, to talk too much about the stuff that’s not finished. To some extent, talking about it can drain away the energy you might need to finish it.

JKP: Finally, if you could have written any novel that doesn’t already carry your byline, what would it be?

WS: Pale Fire, the [Vladimir] Nabokov novel that purports to be the editor’s notes to a poem of 999 lines. Like Lolita, it’s a very nearly perfect book, but the monster at the heart of Pale Fire isn’t quite as monstrous as the monster in Lolita.