100 Years of Travis McGee’s “Father”

Should this have escaped your radar somehow, listen up: July 24 will mark the passage of a full century since John D. MacDonald—the Florida author Stephen King once called “the great entertainer of our age, and a mesmerizing storyteller”—was born in Pennsylvania.

By way of celebrating, our sister blog Killer Covers has just begun two weeks of posting the fronts from assorted MacDonald works. In addition to editions of his famous Travis McGee novels, you can expect to see the façades from a number of his standalone tales of crime, suspense, and science fiction. Today’s opening post looks back at MacDonald’s first published novel, 1950’s The Brass Cupcake.

Bookmark this link to follow the series as it develops.

How Thrilling Is That?

Having kept a close eye this evening on the International Thriller Writers’ Twitter feed, I can now report which books and authors have won the 2016 Thriller Awards, given out during a banquet at the ThrillerFest XI convention in New York City.

Best Hardcover Novel:
The Fifth Gospel, by Ian Caldwell (Simon & Schuster)

Also nominated: Playing with Fire, by Tess Gerritsen (Ballantine); The Girl on the Train, by Paula Hawkins (Riverhead); Inspector of the Dead, by David Morrell (Mulholland); and Pretty Girls, by Karin Slaughter (Morrow)

Best First Novel:
Bull Mountain, by Brian Panowich (Putnam)

Also nominated: Little Black Lies, by Sandra Block (Grand Central); The Drowning Game, by L.S. Hawker (Witness Impulse); What She Knew, by Gilly Macmillan (Morrow); and The Gates of Evangeline, by Hester Young (Putnam)

Best Paperback Original Novel:
Against All Enemies, by John Gilstrap (Pinnacle)

Also nominated: Day Zero, by Marc Cameron (Pinnacle); Name of the Devil, by Andrew Mayne (Bourbon Street); The Angel of Eden, by D.J. McIntosh (Penguin Canada); and Pockets of Darkness, by Jean Rabe (WordFire Press)

Best Short Story:
“Gun Accident: An Investigation,” by Joyce Carol Oates (Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine [EQMM], July 2015)

Also nominated: “Feeding the Crocodile,” by Reed Farrel Coleman (from Jewish Noir, edited by Kenneth Wishnia; PM Press); “Repressed,” Jeffery Deaver (from Killer Nashville Noir: Cold Blooded, edited by Clay Stafford; Diversion); “The Water Was Rising,” by Sharon Hunt (EQMM, August 2015); and “El Cambalache,” by Terrence McCauley (ThugLit 17, edited by Todd Robinson; ThugLit)

Best Young Adult Novel:
Pretending to Be Erica, by Michelle Painchaud (Viking Books
for Young Readers)

Also nominated: Code of Honor, by Alan Gratz (Scholastic Press); The Forgetting, by Nicole Maggi (Sourcebooks Fire); Half In Love with Death, by Emily Ross (Merit Press); and The Dogs, by Allan Stratton (Sourcebooks Fire)

Best E-book Original Novel:
The Prisoner’s Gold, by Chris Kuzneski (Chris Kuzneski)

Also nominated: Jack and Joe, by Diane Capri (AugustBooks); Deadly Lullaby, by Robert McClure (Alibi); Ivory Ghosts, by Caitlin O’Connell (Alibi); and Lie in Wait, by Eric Rickstad (Witness Impulse)

Congratulations to all of this year’s contenders.

READ MORE: “ThrillerFest XI: Sights, Sounds, and Screams,” by Thomas Pluck (Criminal Element).

Bullet Points: Serene Saturday Edition

• It appears there will be no 2016 Tony Hillerman Prize competition, while a new partnership is being established to organize that annual contest. The Hillerman Prize, you will recall, promotes debut mysteries based in the American Southwest. A press release carried in the Crimespree Magazine blog explains that “Minotaur Books/A Thomas Dunne Book and Wordharvest are delighted to announce that we have joined forces with Western Writers of America, who will host the Tony Hillerman Prize going forward. With this change come a new submission deadline, an option for electronic manuscript submission, and a new venue for the announcement of the winner at the annual Western Writers of America convention. In order to prepare for these changes, we have made the decision to suspend the competition for 2016. The deadline for the 2017 competition will be January 2, 2017. You can view the guidelines and online submission form online at http://us.macmillan.com/minotaurbooks/tonyhillermanprize.” A list of previous prize winners is available here.

• Mike Ripley’s latest “Getting Away with Murder” column in Shots features remarks pertaining to the 50th anniversary of the death of Margery Allingham, the upcoming Bloody Scotland Crime Writing Festival (September 9-11), Walter Satterthwait’s New York Nocturne, a theatrical staging of John Harvey’s Darkness, Darkness, and the Sicily-set novel Ripley declares is “the feel-good-Euro-read of the summer.” Read all about these matters and more here.

• By the way, I’m not sure that I mentioned Ripley’s June 2016 column on this page. You should look that one up here.

• The Los Angeles Times carries this interesting look at the new eight-part HBO-TV miniseries, The Night Of, which is set to premiere tomorrow evening. “Created by acclaimed writers Steven Zaillian and Richard Price, and starring John Turturro and Riz Ahmed, the New York-set show examines what happens when the 23-year-old son of a Pakistani-immigrant cab driver is tossed into the criminal justice system for a murder he may or may not have committed,” writes the Times’ Steven Zeitchik. Wikipedia will be rolling out individual episode synopses as the series progresses.

• Based on a UK series titled Criminal Justice, The Night Of was “the passion project of the late James Gandolfini,” according to this 2014 piece from Deadline Hollywood. Following Gandolfini’s sudden death in 2014, Robert De Niro was brought in to fill his role in the miniseries, playing “ambulance-chasing New York City attorney” Jack Stone. But De Niro later had to withdraw from the project for “scheduling reasons.” John Turturro (who is starting to look a lot like Al Pacino as he ages, don’t you think?) was ultimately brought in to star. I look forward to seeing what he can do here.

• What a great, humorous title for a work of crime fiction! On the left you’ll see the cover from a 1950s edition of Colin Calhoun Detective, a digest-size pulp periodical published in Australia. The cover story, “The Stripper Died Dressed,” is credited to one Conrad Paul. Also in that issue were the stories “Redheads in Jeopardy” and “The Callgirl and the Cop,” both by Benn Raymond. (Hat tip to The Seattle Mystery Bookshop Hardboiled blog.)

• The shortlist of nominees for this year’s first-ever HWA (Historical Writers’ Association) Goldsboro Debut Crown award, recognizing excellence in historical fiction, includes a work of crime fiction, so it merits mention here. The half-dozen contenders are: Death and Mr. Pickwick, by Stephen Jarvis (Jonathan Cape); Eden Gardens, by Louise Brown (Headline); The Hoarse Oaths of Fife, by Chris Moore (Uniform Press); Mrs. Engels, by Gavin McCrea (Scribe); Summertime, by Vanessa Lafaye (Orion); and Wolf Winter, by Cecilia Ekbäck (Hodder), described as “a powerful, beautifully written gothic murder mystery in a remote area of 18th-century Lapland.” The winner is expected to be declared during Britain’s Harrogate History Festival (October 21-23).

• Sad news. Omaha, Nebraska’s Mystery Bookstore, founded back in 1995, will shut its doors at the end of September. Owner Kate Birkel wrote in a Facebook post: “As many of you know, I am located next to the Bohemian Café, an Omaha landmark for many decades. (They also happen to be my landlords—the greatest landlords anyone could ever hope to have.) Like many of Omaha’s traditional, family-owned restaurants, the Bohemian recently decided to close. The current generation running the Café is more than ready to retire and none of their kids wants to buy them out. (The common explanation is: “Hell, no! I’m not working my butt off 60 to 80 hours a week! I want a life!”) Much of my walk-in traffic comes from the Bohemian. Sales at the bookstore have been nose diving for the past several years, and I just see no way forward without that walk-in traffic from the Café. Between now and 30 September, I will be selling books, embroidery supplies, and beads on eBay; my seller name is mysteries-to-go. Please check in occasionally. You’d be surprised what I have laying around after nearly 25 years.” Minnesota writer William Kent Krueger mentions in his blog that he will be signing copies of his new Cork O’Connor mystery, Manitou Canyon (Atria), at Birkel’s shop on September 17—“the store’s last official author event.” He adds, “I’ve decided to use the occasion to throw Kate a ‘Goodbye and Thank You’ celebration.”

• Anyone who has ever tried to compose a crime-fiction blog knows just how difficult it can be to remain active and relevant in the game. So author James Reasoner deserves hearty applause for 12 years of writing Rough Edges. Thank you, Jim.

• PBS-TV host Tavis Smiley talks with Walter Mosley about his excellent new, 13th Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins novel, Charcoal Joe.

• Meanwhile, Eric Beetner revisits Mosley’s first Rawlins tale, 1990’s Devil in a Blue Dress, in a nice piece for Criminal Intent.

• Pennsylvania educator and writer Brian R. Sheridan has started a petition on Change.org, asking that Warner Archives release the 1971-72 NBC-TV series Banyon in DVD format. “The show was created by Ed Adamson,” Sheridan explains, “and became a Quinn Martin production starring the outstanding actor Robert Forster as a 1930s private eye, Miles Banyon. The show lasted only 16 episodes [including a 1971 pilot film] but is highly regarded by detective-show fans. The outstanding pilot used to turn up on TV stations but, like the series, seems to have faded into obscurity. We are asking the show to be a MOD-DVD release.” I don’t know whether a petition such as this can have much impact on bottom-line-focused Warner execs, but I do remember Banyon fondly, and I’d love to watch that series again. So I signed. You can do so here. What’s the harm?

• Given the shootings earlier this week in Baton Rouge, St. Paul, and Dallas, I’m not sure The Guardian’s rundown of the “Top 10 Novels About Deranged Killers” will find widespread readership in the States, but the piece is out there for your delectation.

• It’s nice to see that readers are still discovering Arthur Lyons’ 11 novels about Los Angeles private investigator Jacob Asch, even eight years after the author passed away.

• This last April 18 brought the 110th anniversary of San Francisco’s devastating 1906 earthquake and fire, a disaster about which I have written on more than one occasion. What’s really amazing about the downtown destruction is that so much film footage of its aftermath exists. Silent footage, yes, but dramatic nonetheless. Here’s one “haunting” example.

• A few interviews worth noticing: John Farrow, aka Trevor Ferguson, answers questions from Criminal Element about his new Émile Cinq-Mars novel, Seven Days Dead; Benjamin Whitmer (Pike, Cry Father) survives interrogation by S.W. Lauden; Dana King (Dangerous Lesson, The Man in the Window) fields queries lobbed his way by New Mystery Reader Magazine; Speaking of Mysteries’ Nancie Clare talks with Mark Billingham (Die of Shame) and Martin Walker (Fatal Pursuit); and crime analyst-turned-author Spencer Kope chats with Criminal Element about Collecting the Dead.

• Thanks to a recommendation from John and Muriel Higgins, who operate The Victor Canning Pages (devoted to the life and work of that prolific 20th-century writer), I have added a link from The Rap Sheet’s Author Web Sites/Blogs page to this tribute site focused on British journalist-novelist Desmond Bagley (1923-1983), the author of such thrillers as 1967’s Landslide and 1971’s The Freedom Trap (later filmed as The Mackintosh Man). Check it out.

• Finally, Elizabeth Foxwell informs us of an “effort by Edgar winner LeRoy Lad Panek (Introduction to the Detective Story) and Mary Bendel-Simso (McDaniel College, MD) to compile”—for the Westminster Detective Library—“an online repository of short detective works published in the United States prior to 1891 … The pieces include 87 stories by 48 female authors, and Panek states, ‘There are no doubt many more as the majority of the stories we have catalogued have no author listed in the original.’” Foxwell’s post provides some direct links to individual stories, but you can access the Detective Library’s new Web interface here. What a splendid resource!

The Book You Have to Read: “The Hunter,” by Richard Stark

(Editor’s note: This is the 138th installment in The Rap Sheet’s continuing series about great but forgotten books. It comes from Bronx native Terrence P. McCauley, whose latest thriller, A Murder of Crows, will be released next week by Polis Books. Below, McCauley champions The Hunter, the first entry in a long-running series penned by Donald E. Westlake under the alias Richard Stark, and starring the professional thief known as Parker.)

I suppose some people might be surprised that I’ve selected an iconic book such as The Hunter as a “forgotten” novel, but I have my reasons. Although the work itself may not have been forgotten, I believe the revolutionary aspect of the story has been lost in the years since it was first published.

This book has been the source material for movies such as Point Blank, starring Lee Marvin, and Payback, starring Mel Gibson. Both films have their own cult following, and for good reason. They were stylish flicks with good direction and talented actors. More recently, The Hunter was adapted as a graphic novel by the late Darwyn Cooke, whose artwork successfully blended the rawness of the protagonist with familiar iconic imagery that reflects the time in which the story was written: 1962.

The time in which The Hunter was written has always held a special interest for me. The early 1960s was a unique era in U.S. history, a time when the afterglow of our victory over the Axis powers had begun to fade. After more than a decade of peace and prosperity, the American people were beginning to grow bored with the humdrum status quo of post-World War II life. People were looking to the future, eager to embrace something new. Eisenhower was gone, Nixon had lost, and Camelot was in its infancy. Individualism had taken a back seat to blending in. Large numbers of Americans belonged to social organizations such as Rotary Clubs and PTAs and Elks Lodges, to name only a few. Television shows and movies constantly reinforced the belief that we should all follow the rules and showed the price one paid for lawlessness. Americans wanted to get along. They wanted to fit in. It’s hard to blame them, even now with the benefit of decades of hindsight. Life is always easier when you move with the crowd.

But the Parker character was antithetical to that collectivist philosophy. In fact, it could be argued that he was a harbinger of the legions of successful anti-heroes that would follow him in the literary universe. Parker wasn’t hip or trendy. He wasn’t a maniacal gunman or a disillusioned young man, either. He was exactly what he wanted to be: a professional criminal who was very good at what he did.

We immediately get a sense of who this character is by reading the first line of The Hunter: “When a fresh-faced guy in a Chevy offered him a lift, Parker told him to go to hell.” After the insulted driver pulls away, what does Parker do? “[He] spat in the right-hand lane, lit his last cigarette, and walked across the George Washington Bridge.”

That passage is one of my all-time favorites, perhaps second only to Philip Marlowe’s description of a streetscape in The High Window. The reason why it’s my favorite is the same reason why I believe The Hunter could be considered a forgotten book. We’ve forgotten how revolutionary it was for its time.

Parker knew he didn’t fit in with society’s norms and he didn’t even try. He was a rebel with a cause. He had clear intent and purpose.

Today’s audiences can be forgiven for forgetting about the overall story and allow various key scenes to obscure the character. Lee Marvin storming down a long hallway or Mel Gibson stomping across a bridge. Both characters sat on the bed of the dead wife who’d opted to overdose now that her previously deceased husband was back in the picture to collect his due.

The movies are great, but the book is even better because, right from the outset, we see Parker is his own man. He’s driven by a single goal: to get back his share of the money stolen from him. No more, no less. In today’s world, the rebel loner is commonplace, almost to the point of being a cliché. But in the early 1960s, being anti-social wasn’t as accepted.

The reason why I consider The Hunter a forgotten novel is because the subtle character development we witness in the opening scene is lost in the overwhelming iconic imagery of what we see on the screen or in the wonderful drawings of the graphic novel. The character of Parker isn’t just a tough guy who knows how to handle himself. He isn’t just a man out for bloody revenge. He’s a solitary figure, a lonely man who lives that way not only by choice, but by necessity. He tried being a human being once. He had friends. He trusted people. He fell in love. He was normal for a while and it cost him big-time. He learned from his mistake and he goes to great lengths to correct it.

Richard Stark, aka Donald E. Westlake, was far from the first author who wrote about a committed loner, much less a criminal. David Goodis and other writers had created similar characters long before Parker came on the scene. But few of them had ever created a character that resonated with audiences the way the Parker of Stark’s novels did. Behind the Stark guise, Westlake wrote in a style that lived up to the name: stark and spare, but never boring and always far deeper than a casual reader might appreciate. He must have done something right, because Parker hung around off and on over the years from the early 1960s all the way into the 2000s.

Unfortunately, Westlake died in 2008 at the age of 75. But fortunately for the rest of us, he created a tough, timeless character with whom audiences of many generations could relate. I may consider The Hunter a forgotten book, but the legacy of that first work—and of all the subsequent Parker stories—is still with us.

Critical Darlings

Via Mystery Fanfare, we now have the two winners of this year’s Strand Magazine Critics Awards, organized by the Michigan-based Strand Magazine and announced last night during an invitation-only cocktail party in New York City. They are as follows:

Best Novel:
The Whites, by Richard Price writing as Harry Brandt (Picador)

Also nominated: Career of Evil, by Robert Galbraith (Mulholland); A Banquet of Consequences, by Elizabeth George (Viking); The Lady from Zagreb, by Phillip Kerr (Putnam); Forty Thieves, by Thomas Perry (Mysterious Press); and The Cartel, by Don Winslow (Knopf)

Best First Novel:
Past Crimes, by Glen Erik Hamilton (HarperCollins)

Also nominated: The Truth and Other Lies, by Sascha Arango (Atria); Normal, by Graeme Cameron (Mira); The Marauders, by Tom Cooper (Crown); The Girl on the Train, by Paula Hawkins (Riverhead); and Disclaimer, by Renée Knight (Harper)

As reported previously on this page, Colin Dexter, the creator of Inspector Endeavour Morse, and Jeffery Deaver, the inventor of New York City forensic criminalist Lincoln Rhyme, were selected as this year’s Strand Critics lifetime achievement award recipients.

Congratulations to all of the honorees!

Deming Did It

Although I’ve had a couple of Richard Deming’s 1960s Sergeant Matt Rudd novels on my shelves for some time now, it was only while flying back recently from a Midwest vacation that I cracked one of them open. And I enjoyed it so much, I went on to read the second, and am currently looking for an old copy of the third book in that trilogy.

If you’ve never dived into Deming’s too-short Rudd series (Vice-Cop, Anything But Saintly, Death of a Pusher), I hope my new Kirkus Reviews column will encourage you to do so. As I write:

At his best, Richard Deming was a smooth, solid mystery-maker, who offered up enough dynamic twists to keep readers awake into the wee hours. Yes, like other U.S. crime writers of his era, he made sure his stories blended violence with sometimes unnecessary, titillating sex; and though he was less guilty of this than, say, Frank Kane, Deming had the habit of repeating—almost word for word—chunks of basic information about his main players (particularly, in the case of Rudd, on the subject of the man’s brown eyes, which seemed devastating to women). But those things can be forgiven in tales that, while short, deliver multi-dimensional characters and ample
droll dialogue.

You’ll find the whole of my new column here.

LISTEN UP: In its 32nd podcast, the blog Paperback Warrior undertook what it called “a deep-dive into the life and work of Richard Deming, including a review of his novel, She’ll Hate Me Tomorrow.”

Copycat Covers: So, Which Animal Is It?

A new entry in our series about remarkably look-alike book fronts.



Think Wolf, by Michael Gregorio (Severn House, 2016); and Rain Dogs, by Adrian McKinty (Serpent’s Tail UK, 2016).

(Hat tip to Michael Gregorio.)

Bruen Captures Irish Lit Honor

Here’s something to brighten up your Sunday a bit.

Irish novelist Ken Bruen has been declared as this year’s iBAM! Awardee for Literature. He will receive his prize during a “gala dinner” to be held on October 14—the opening day of the 2016 iBAM! (Irish Books, Arts, and Music) celebration—in the Erin Room at Chicago’s Irish American Heritage Center. Previous recipients of the same award include Maeve Binchy and Frank McCourt.

In response to news of his win, Bruen told the Galway Advertiser, “I’m truly delighted and stunned. I’m over the moon.”

The iBAM Chicago Web site explains that “Ken has written over 50 books and is one of the most prominent Irish crime writers of the last two decades. Born in Galway in 1951, he spent 25 years traveling the world before he began writing in the mid-1990s. As an English teacher, Bruen worked in South Africa, Japan, and South America, where he once spent a short time in a Brazilian jail. He has two long-running series: one starring a disgraced former policeman named Jack Taylor, the other a London police detective named Inspector Brant.”

Bruen’s 12th and latest Taylor novel, The Emerald Lie, is due out from Mysterious Press this coming September.

Winslow Wins Again

Jiro Kimura of The Gumshoe Site reports that California author Don Winslow has won this year’s Falcon Award for his 2014 novel, Missing: New York (which is available in a German-language edition, but evidently not yet in an English translation). The Falcon, given out by Japan’s Maltese Falcon Society, is meant to honor “the best hard-boiled/private eye novel published in Japan in the previous year.”

This marks Winslow’s fourth Falcon victory. He won the same prize in 1994 for A Cool Breeze on the Underground, in 2010 for The Power of the Dog, and in 2011 for The Winter of Frankie Machine.

Relative Merits

I don’t know precisely how rare it is to find siblings vying for top positions on a major newspaper’s bestseller list (the only comparison that comes to mind right now is sisters A.S. Byatt and Margaret Drabble). But I have to agree with author, screenwriter, and publisher Lee Goldberg that it’s not exactly a common occurrence. So he could be excused for voicing a cheer or two this week when The Pursuit (Bantam)—his latest Nicolas Fox-Kate O’Hare novel, written in partnership with Janet Evanovich—earned the eighth spot on the New York Times hardcover bestseller list … at the same time as The House of Secrets (Grand Central), a new thriller co-written by Brad Meltzer and Goldberg’s brother, Tod, ranked No. 16.

“We’ve both fantasized about this happening,” Goldberg confides today in his blog, “and now it actually has. We both have a hard time believing it.” Equally incredible might be that The Pursuit also debuted at No. 1 on the Times rundown of e-book bestsellers. Go ahead and pinch yourself, guys. This time it’s for real!

Up with the Scots!

Organizers of this year’s Bloody Scotland International Crime Writing Festival, set to take place in the central Scottish town of Stirling during the weekend of September 9-11, have announced their longlist of nominees for the 2016 McIlvanney Prize, previously known as the Scottish Crime Book of the Year award. This commendation—now dedicated in honor of Glasgow writer William McIlvanney (Laidlaw), who died last year—“recognizes excellence in Scottish crime writing, [and] includes a prize of £1,000 and nationwide promotion in Waterstones.” It will be presented to one of the following 10 books and authors on Bloody Scotland’s opening night, September 9:

• Even Dogs in the Wild, by Ian Rankin (Orion)
• Open Wounds, by Douglas Skelton (Luath)
• The Damage Done, by James Oswald (Michael Joseph)
• The Special Dead, by Lin Anderson (Macmillan)
• In the Cold Dark Ground, by Stuart MacBride (HarperCollins)
• Black Widow, by Chris Brookmyre (Little, Brown)
• The Jump, by Doug Johnstone (Faber)
• Splinter the Silence, by Val McDermid (Little, Brown)
• Beloved Poison, by E.S. Thomson (Little, Brown)
• A Fine House in Trinity, by Lesley Kelly (Sandstone)

As a press release explains, “Previous winners are Craig Russell with The Ghosts of Altona in 2015, Peter May with Entry Island in 2014, Malcolm Mackay with How a Gunman Says Goodbye in 2013, and Charles Cumming with A Foreign Country in 2012.”

Bullet Points: Post-Vacation Edition

If you were wondering last week why The Rap Sheet seemed so paltry with its postings, it was because I took eight days off for a trip to Minneapolis to see my best friend, Byron. We’ve known each other since college (he was a class year ahead of me), and have since been in the habit of visiting each other during the summer months, alternating back and forth; this was my year to fly east. We’d talked in advance of my departure about doing all kinds of active things when I was in Minnesota, including taking a long drive north to the shores of Lake Superior and maybe taking a hike someplace. But once I was in the company of my friend and his wife, all such planning went out the window.

Byron and I actually wound up doing the things we so often do together: comparing observations about our lives while sampling beers at local pubs (The Lowbrow on Nicollet Avenue has become a favorite stop), checking out new-to-us eateries (among them, on this trip, the Hot Plate Diner for breakfast), going for long walks around the lakes near his suburban neighborhood, and of course, sitting out on his home’s sun-baked back patio, just reading. I’d packed along a quartet of novels, including David Fuller’s terrific Sweetsmoke and William Kittredge’s The Willow Field, and made it through all of them, while helping to keep Byron’s dog, Shiloh, exercised with occasionally thrown tennis balls. Worried that I might be without books for the return flight to Seattle, we made a trip to Once Upon a Crime, the local independent mystery bookstore that successfully changed hands earlier this year. (For evidence of our drop-in, see the photograph above: I am the dumpy, overheated guy on the left, with Byron on the right.) We also paid a call on radio legend Garrison Keillor’s Common Good Books, situated along Snelling Avenue in St. Paul, which turned out to be an uncommonly handsome and appealing shop—definitely one worth revisiting sometime.

I don’t often find the time for holidays, but this one was made especially, if unexpectedly, relaxing by the fact that I couldn’t seem to recall my e-mail password. Therefore, I had no way to check my messages remotely for a week. Yes, it meant that I needed to scroll through and weed the junk mail from among 871 e-notes when I returned home. Yet for eight blissful days, all I really had to do was think about what to read next, where to eat with my friends, and what movies we all wanted to screen during the evening hours. My batteries were thus recharged for another few months.

My file of intriguing crime-fiction links was overflowing before I left, and is even larger now that I’ve been looking around to see what I missed last week. I can’t hope to mention everything of interest, but here a few items I think you will find worthy of attention.

• A very well-deserved commendation: New York City bookseller, editor, and publisher Otto Penzler, 73, has been named as the winner of this year’s David Thompson Special Service Award for his “extraordinary efforts to develop and promote the crime-fiction field.” Penzler should receive his prize during Bouchercon 2016 in New Orleans, Louisiana (September 15-18). Previous recipients of this accolade, named for the late co-owner of Houston’s Murder by the Book, are my Rap Sheet colleague Ali Karim, Len and June Moffatt, Judy Bobalik, and Bill and Toby Gottfried.

• If you haven’t already voted for your favorite nominees in the 2016 Dead Good Reader Awards competition, you can still do so here. As I stated in an earlier post, the winners are set to be declared at a special event on Friday, July 22, during this year’s Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate, England.

• The Twenty-Three, the concluding volume in Linwood Barclay’s Promise Falls Trilogy, isn’t even due out in the States till November. But already there’s word of this Ontario author’s next novel—and it’s a work for children. As The Bookseller explains, “Chase is a middle-grade novel about a dog called Chipper who has been melded with state-of-the-art computer technology to carry out secret missions for an organization called The Institute. When Chipper’s natural instincts, such as chasing squirrels, start taking over during missions, The Institute decides to pull the plug on him.” Expect to see Chipper in bookstores sometime next year.

• While we’re on the subject of Canadian crime-fictionists (and with Canada Day fast approaching on July 1), note that Mystery Scene’s Oline H. Cogdill has put together “a quick primer” on some of that country’s finest genre writers, including Giles Blunt, Maureen Jennings, Howard Engel, and Ausma Zehanat Khan. If you’d like to learn more about the field’s history and present stars, refer to a two-part survey of Canadian mystery-makers I wrote for Kirkus Reviews back in 2013. Part I of that report is here, with Part II to be found here.

• With the sunny season having finally begun in North America, it’s totally appropriate for Janet Rudolph to have posted this list of summer-oriented mysteries in her blog.

• Just when I thought Plots with Guns was dead, buried, and eulogized, that once-popular e-zine abruptly reappears with an issue containing stories by Patricia Abbott, Rusty Barnes, Benjamin Whitmer, and others. Read them all for free here.

• Isn’t it a bit early to be writing about the best books of 2016? Well, apparently not if you’re working for BookRiot or Omnivoracious: The Amazon Book Review, both of which have weighed in recently with their initial-six-months assessments. The BookRiot rundown includes Lyndsay Faye’s Jane Steele and John Lawton’s The Unfortunate Englishman, as well as Skip Hollandsworth’s gripping non-fiction serial-killer yarn, The Midnight Assassin. Introducing its own list, Omnivoracious calls Noah Hawley’s Before the Fall “[one of] our universally favorite novels of the year so far,” and then goes on to applaud Stephen King’s End of Watch, John Hart’s Redemption Road, Mary Kubica’s Don’t You Cry, Bill Beverly’s Dodgers, Joyce Maynard’s Under the Influence, and 15 additional titles.

• To nobody’s surprise, Criminal Element’s Leslie Gilbert Elman—who most ably covered the opening two seasons of Endeavour on PBS-TV’s Masterpiece Mystery!—is now writing about Season 3 of that Shaun Evans series. Click here to enjoy her write-up on “Ride,” the first of this season’s four episodes, and here to see what she had to say about last weekend’s installment, “Arcadia.” (By the way, for anyone not conversant in the classic Inspector Morse TV series, from which Endeavour derives, the English actress Abigail Thaw, to whom Elman refers in her post, and who plays newspaper editor Dorothea Frazil in Endeavour, happens to be the now 50-year-old daughter of John Thaw, who portrayed Morse in that previous, 1987-2000 series.)

• In case I failed to mention this before, once Endeavour has completed its broadcast run for the year (it has already been renewed for a fourth season—hurrah!), you can look forward to the final season of Inspector Lewis on Masterpiece Mystery! Three episodes will be shown, beginning on Sunday, August 7.

• Mystery Scene celebrates yet another British TV whodunit in its new issue: Grantchester, starring James Norton and Robson Green (which recently concluded its second-season run on PBS). The brightly penned cover feature has Craig Sisterson, the New Zealander behind the annual Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Crime Novel, interviewing James Runcie, author of the The Grantchester Mysteries (the latest of which is Sidney Chambers and the Dangers of Temptation). Elsewhere in that same issue, Kevin Burton Smith offers a survey of fictionists famous in other fields who have tried their hand at composing private-eye yarns; Tom Nolan profiles both Naomi Hirahara (Sayonara Slam) and another California writer—one who has heretofore escaped my radar—Bart Paul (Cheatgrass); and Kate Jackson, who blogs at Cross-Examining Crime, looks back at “The Wimsey Papers,” Dorothy L. Sayers’ serialized observations on World War II through the eyes of her fictitious sleuth, Lord Peter Wimsey.

• Oh, and happy first birthday to Cross-Examining Crime!

• Den of Geek! offers a new teaser trailer for Quarry, the eight-episode Cinemax TV series—based on Max Allan Collins’ novels about an itinerant Vietnam War vet turned hit man (Quarry’s Choice, Quarry in the Black), and starring Logan Marshall-Green—that’s set to premiere on September 9 at 10 p.m.

• “10 Hit Man Novels that Everyone Should Read.”

• I’ve been a fan of actress Carla Gugino ever since she starred in the 2003-2004 ABC-TV series Karen Sisco, based on the character created by Elmore Leonard, so I am pleased to hear that she’s returned to the boob tube with Roadies, a Cameron Crowe-created comedy-drama that debuted on Showtime on June 26.

• Note to Karen Sisco fans: Although that short-lived series hasn’t yet earned a DVD release (and why the hell not?), I see all 10 episodes of the show have suddenly become available on YouTube, thanks to a kind soul calling himself Oliver Martin. Check them out quickly before the copyright police come to steal them away!

• Speaking of unexpected YouTube discoveries, click here to watch a 1971 teleflick called Love Hate Love, which as far as I can tell was made from the last screenplay composed by British spy-fictionist Eric Ambler (A Coffin for Dimitrios). The plot description reads: “Ryan O’Neal plays Russ Emery, a glib engineer who steals the heart of a fashion model named Sheila Blunden [played by the lovely Lesley Ann Warren]. She in turn leaves her jet-setter fiancé, who turns out to be a psychotic who will not let go of Sheila that easily.”

• OK, I’m just stealing these next two items straight from B.V. Lawson’s In Reference to Murder. First on the docket:

Hulu announced the premiere date of Hugh Laurie's new ten-part psychological thriller Chance, set for Wednesday, October 19. Laurie will star as forensic neuropsychiatrist Dr. Eldon Chance, who is dragged against his better wishes into an extremely dangerous world of corrupt cops, mistaken identities and mental illness. The cast also includes Gretchen Mol as Jaclyn Blackstone, the abused wife of a detective (Paul Adelstein) whose possible dissociative identity disorder causes big problems for the doc. Chance was created by Desperate Housewives and Bates Motel writer/director Alexandra Cunningham and author Kem Nunn, who wrote the novel that the show is based on.

• And then there’s this reminder:

First Monday is a new monthly crime fiction/thriller night held in Central London at the College Building of City University. The upcoming July 4th event, sponsored by Killer Reads, will feature award-winning authors Andrew Taylor, Stephen Booth, Anna Mazzola, and Beth Lewis. The evening will be chaired by Claire McGowan, bestselling author of the Paula Maguire series and senior lecturer on the City University Crime Writing MA course.

• For The Strand Magazine’s Web site, author William Lashner (The Four-Night Run) has compiled a list of “ten writing tips I learned from the books of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, who together pretty much invented the modern detective story.”

• What does Chandler owe to The Mary Tyler Moore Show?

• I have definitely fallen behind in recommending new installments of Nancie Clare’s excellent Speaking of Mysteries podcast. A few recent guests worth hearing from: Cara Black (Murder on the Quai), Erik Axl Sund (The Crow Girl), Steve Hamilton (The Second Life of Nick Mason), and Dan Fesperman (The Letter Writer).

• Several other author interviews worth reading: Former ThugLit editor and author (Rough Trade) Todd Robinson chats with Entropy; Joe Clifford (December Boys) goes one-on-one with S.W. Lauden; Paul Bishop posts a two-part interview with W.L. Ripley (Hail Storme)—Part I here, Part II here; Patricia Abbott (Shot in Detroit) answers 20 questions posed by fellow novelist Dana King; All Is Not Forgotten writer Wendy Walker fields queries from BOLO Books; and Double O Section grills Warren Ellis about his James Bond comic books.

• For some bizarre reason, failing Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump believes he’s mentally far superior to other human beings (a real “man of the people,” eh?). Yet there are apparently no books or bookcases in his home.

• In a welcome break from all the sorry economic predictions surrounding Great Britain’s public vote to leave the European Union, Crime Fiction Lover has posted blurbs covering a dozen “great” crime novels set in as many UK cities. The list includes Ian Rankin’s Even Dogs in the Wild (Edinburgh), Belinda Bauer’s Rubbernecker (Cardiff), Adrian McKinty’s Rain Dogs (Belfast), and a book that completely escaped my notice when it was distributed last year, Shallow Waters, by Rebecca Bradley (Nottingham).

• Maybe it’s time to pay more attention to women crime writers. Both Terrence Rafferty, in The Atlantic, and Barry Forshaw, in The Independent, have recently made that argument quite convincingly.

• Michael Herr wasn’t a crime novelist. The Kentucky native was instead best known for penning Dispatches, an entertaining and often moving 1977 memoir of his work as a correspondent for Esquire magazine, covering the Vietnam War during the late 1960s. When I heard the news last week that Herr had died at age 76, I recalled how Dispatches had been one of the first non-fiction works I’d really enjoyed in my early 20s, a splendid example of what was once called “new journalism,” combining serious reportage with literary storytelling techniques. It had led me to other Vietnam books, such as Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried and Philip Caputo’s A Rumor of War, as well as to Herr’s memorable 1990 novel, Walter Winchell. Long ago, in a faraway life that I only barely recognize, I’d hoped one day to write a journalistic work as classic as Dispatches. That I never accomplished that goal is my own damn fault. That I can at least look back upon Dispatches and marvel at the dexterity with which its author delivered his yarn is pale succor, but succor nonetheless. Thank you, Michael Herr. (More here and here.)

• Don Winslow is writing a sequel to The Cartel.

• The Seattle Times provides a guide to some of the best TV series adaptations of literary sleuths, including both Bosch and Jack Irish.

• Being among those many readers who’ve refused to make a transition from traditional print books to e-books, I was pleased to see Alexis Boncy’s recent short essay, “Why I Still Love Actual Paper Books,” in The Week. She writes, in part:

I want to be absorbed by a book in a way that actual page-turning, not pixel-moving finger flips, allows. Choosing print over e-books means separating my reading from anything else—everything else, I should say, given the enormity of what we can do and information we can access from smartphones and tablets. It means I put down one thing before I pick up another, that I allow my attention to be taken wholly and open myself to feeling the full weight of the words on the page. That they will make me laugh or cry or think a little differently or discover something new.

And I want to finish a book and slot it on the shelf according to my personal Dewey Decimal system, a complex algorithm that accounts for genre, subject, author, how much I liked it, and how much I liked it compared to everything else. The e-alternative is to finish and watch as the book’s cover, once a full-screen image, shrinks and recedes to its tiny place on my e-bookshelf. The diminishment extends to the whole experience; the story fades, the memories go unvisited.

• Someday I want to put together a feature about the numerous novels combining crime fiction with science fiction. In the meantime, though, I can appreciate David Cranmer’s reviews, in Criminal Element, of Isaac Asimov’s Elijah Baley/Daneel Olivaw yarns. He’s already commented on The Caves of Steel (1954) and The Naked Sun (1957). I hope he will soon cover The Robots of Dawn (1983), the third book in Asimov’s Robot series, as well.

• This is a book I should definitely add to my shelves.

• Finally, what did Donald Hamilton think of the four 1960s Matt Helm films adapted from his novels and starring Dean Martin? A letter he wrote in 1991 gives us some clues: “[M]y philosophy is that I write to entertain and once I’ve done a book or story to my satisfaction, anybody who can use my material entertainingly, and is willing to pay me for the privilege, is welcome, even if he doesn’t stick very closely to my original vision (if I may use a fancy word for it).”

Can We “Brighton” Your Day?

In mid-June we announced the terms of entry for The Rap Sheet’s latest book-giveaway contest. (Our fourth for this year, by the way.) The prizes were three copies of Michael Harvey’s excellent new Boston-set thriller, Brighton. After a random selection among the 80 entries we received, the winners have been chosen:

• Michael Carter of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
• Helene Androski of Madison, Wisconsin
• Ryan Gilbert of Brooklyn, New York

If you are among this fortunate trio, then congratulations! Your book should soon be winging its way to your mailbox, sent directly from Harvey’s publisher, Ecco. If your name doesn’t appear here, never fret: we are already working to arrange other such drawings.

Copycat Covers: You Do Get Around, Sir

A new entry in our series about remarkably look-alike book fronts.



The Detective and the Devil, by Lloyd Shepherd (Simon & Schuster UK, 2016); and Hell Bay, by Will Thomas (Minotaur, 2016).

Interestingly, that same little man with the cane also appeared on what looks to have been an early cover design for Sam Christer’s The House of Smoke (Sphere, 2016), seen below and on the left. But that book was eventually modified as shown below and on the right.




Even with that change, though, Christer’s historical novel about a criminal employee of the notorious Professor James Moriarty (yes, Sherlock Holmes’ archrival) cannot escape charges of imitation. You’ll find the very same tophatted gent, leaning into his cane, on the jacket of Will Thomas’ 2015 mystery, Anatomy of Evil (Minotaur)—only there, the figure conceals a long knife behind his back.

Are You in the Running Yet?

Don’t forget, folks: You have only two days left to enter The Rap Sheet’s latest book-giveaway contest. Up for grabs are three copies of Michael Harvey’s new Boston-set thriller, Brighton (previewed here). To have a shot at winning one of those, the only thing you must do is e-mail your name and postal address to jpwrites@wordcuts.org. And be sure to type “Brighton Contest” in the subject line. Entries will be accepted between now and midnight on Friday, June 24. The winners will be chosen completely at random.

Sorry, but at the publisher’s request, this drawing is open only to residents of the United States and Canada.

Isn’t it about time you hopped on this opportunity?

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.

The Book You Have to Read: “Epitaph for a Tramp,” by David Markson

(Editor’s note: This is the 137th installment in The Rap Sheet’s continuing series about great but forgotten books.)

By Steven Nester
What makes detective fiction fun (for me, anyway) is what happens when the detective isn’t detecting. For some writers, the form is a framework that allows them to investigate various segments of society and make comments with an outsider’s point of view. In addition, I appreciate a glimpse at the personalities of private eyes—some of them quirky, most unsentimental grinds, but the majority of them being intelligent, independent, and possessing a distinct point of view. In the case of David Markson’s Harry Fannin, one might add impulsive; but nowhere near as bad a decision-maker as the round-heeled adventuress he marries in 1959’s Epitaph for a Tramp.

In this first novel of a two-part series (the sequel, Epitaph for a Dead Beat, was published in 1961), Markson drops a situation of personal loss into Fannin’s life which could have provided sufficient motivation for a P.I. on a quest for many books thereafter. Flippant and well-read, Fannin meets his match on a Long Island beach after a midnight skinny dip. Coming upon the beautiful and brainy Catherine Hawes, Fannin finds this 24-year-old has all the requirements for a bookish man of action: studied at Barnard College, with a Greenwich Village apartment and employment in the sales department at a New York City publishing house—and a reckless sense of adventure. The two quip over T.S. Eliot, then the “meet cute” is fleshed out with some hard-boiled flirtation.

“You’re staring at me.”

“The way you stare at four aces,” I told her.

“Because you always think you misread the hand?”

“Partly. Mainly because you’re sure somebody’s going to call a misdeal before you get a chance to bet.”

Don’t say she didn’t try to tell him. Fannin should’ve asked for a new deal—and for a fresh deck of cards, too. He refuses to listen to Hawes’ advice, and the next thing he knows he’s married to a nymphomaniac with enough kinks to make the marriage bed feel like Freud’s couch. She’s as “promiscuous as a mink” and “as discriminating as a hungry hound at the town dump.” Markson pulls no punches with Cathy, and he reveals no appeal in her with which the reader might empathize either, except perhaps for her abject vulnerability. She’s a tool for the plot as much as men are a tool for her. Cathy philanders, Fannin suspects and snoops, and it’s no surprise the marriage doesn’t last a year.

Cathy is a capricious risk-taker, that’s why she married Fannin in the first place. She leaves Fannin and, “fed up enough with her Keats-spouting Village boyfriends,” ups the ante and takes kicks to the next level. With her new man, Duke Sabatini, and his “greasy” punk sidekick, she and these knock-around characters rob a factory payroll in Troy, New York. The last time Fannin sees his lost-love is in the aftermath of the heist. She staggers into his apartment, mortally wounded by a knife attack, “the stain as big as a six-dollar sirloin beneath her breast, dark and seeping.” Cathy dies in Fannin’s arms.

Nobody seems to know what Cathy has done with the $40,000 payday, not even Sabatini or his accomplice, who are quickly rounded up. So it falls to Fannin to retrace her steps in hopes of finding the money as well as her killer. That’s when Markson begins the tour of beatnik hangouts, hipster pads, and habitués of small-time criminals.

(Left) The back cover of Tramp

Homing in on the killers, Fannin and a police homicide detective named Brannigan roust some uptown hipsters. One, thinking he’s about to get busted for dope, jumps to his death. The other, a jazz musician and a master of baffling beatnik banter, leads Fannin on a merry verbal chase through the intricacies of that patois. When Fannin and Nate Brannigan lean on him for the facts plainly explained, this is what they get:

“Okay, dads, okay. But give a cat room, stand back, you’re fogging my spectacles. I’ll reconstruct, I’ll come on strong in all details. But like allow me room to stroll my thoughts, huh, man?”

Plot-wise, Epitaph for a Tramp is pretty routine. Fannin eliminates the obvious suspects, bumps heads with Manhattan detectives investigating the murder, and eliminates the red herrings. When Fannin breaks the tragic news to Cathy’s schoolmarm older sister early on (she “needed a man a lot more than she needed consolation,” opines Fannin), eyebrows might raise and readers may place her on the short-list of suspects.

Fannin has plenty of opinions on literature, too, and he isn’t shy about sharing them. He quotes English philosopher Thomas Hobbes. The Magic Mountain, he says, is “a gay little thing.” He attempts to “make sense out of something called The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot,” and finds praise for avant-garde novelist William Gaddis’ The Recognitions. Surely Fannin must have known his way around the little literary magazines of his day, but this doesn’t prevent him from getting his head into pulp-fiction gumshoe-mode and giving pulp writer Donald Honig, author of Sidewalk Caesar (1958), a shout-out. Fannin also expresses some crisp and world-weary observations—such as, when he lights a cigarette, “the smoke turned to steel wool in my mouth.”

As good as Markson is in the P.I. genre, and I think he gives as good as Raymond Chandler can dish out, Markson eventually put aside pulp in favor of experimental literature, joining the ranks of Gaddis and his ilk. For other writers, it sometimes worked the other way around. In need of quick cash to keep the dolce vita afloat in champagne, Gore Vidal wrote a pulp thriller (1953’s Thieves Fall Out) and three detective novels. The great Ezra Pound, while taking a break from nursing modern literature into being, had the audacity to attempt a detective novel with his lover Olga Rudge. Mercifully, that book (The Blue Spill) was abandoned, only to be published after their deaths.

There are some fingernail-raking-across-the-blackboard moments in Epitaph for a Tramp, such as when “Village fag” is used dismissively, and a slovenly apartment is described as “inviting as the rumpus room at Buchenwald.” I suppose these could be chalked up to a certain brash naiveté rather than callous animosity, and they are perhaps lingering evidence of an era that strove for homogeneity of thought and attitude in a less sensitive manner than is practiced today.

Harry Fannin is skeptical man, a trait that’s crucial for a detective. Without his bullshit detector, he’s out of business. But Fannin is also a hopeful man. His personal life adrift, he washes ashore one hot summer night on a lonely beach to find Catherine Hawes, half-naked and all-beautiful. She teases and taunts but Fannin hears a kindred spirit singing a siren’s song and he’s smitten. In a moment of clarity, Catherine tells him to “take another swim and wash the hayseed out of your hair.” He ignores her, and his life is soon after dashed upon the rocks. No fictional private eyes are perfect or infallible, and it is these humanizing traits, along with the characters’ dogged search for the truth, that keeps readers returning to them over and over.

Dead Good and Loving It

The UK-based crime-fiction Web site Dead Good has announced its shortlists of nominees, in six categories, for the 2016 Dead Good Reader Awards. Members of the book-loving public are invited to choose their favorites, with the winners to be declared during a special event on Friday, July 22, during this year’s Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate, England.

The Dead Good Recommends Award for Most Recommended Book:
• Career of Evil, by Robert Galbraith (Little, Brown)
• Die of Shame, by Mark Billingham (Little, Brown)
• In Her Wake, by Amanda Jennings (Orenda)
• The Missing, by C.L. Taylor (Avon)
• Tastes Like Fear, by Sarah Hilary (Headline)
• Untouchable Things, by Tara Guha (Legend Press)

The Tess Gerritsen Award for Best Series:
• Jack Reacher, created by Lee Child (Transworld)
• Roy Grace, created by Peter James (Macmillan)
• Marnie Rome, created by Sarah Hilary (Headline)
• Logan McRae, created by Stuart MacBride (Harper Collins)
• Ruth Galloway, created by Elly Griffiths (Quercus)
• Georgina MacKenzie, created by Marnie Riches (Maze)

The Linwood Barclay Award for Most Surprising Twist:
• Disclaimer, by Renee Knight (Transworld)
• The Ice Twins, by S.K. Tremayne (HarperCollins)
• I Let You Go, by Clare Mackintosh (Sphere)
• The Kind Worth Killing, by Peter Swanson (Faber & Faber)
• Little Black Lies, by Sharon Bolton (Transworld)
• When She Was Bad, by Tammy Cohen (Transworld)

The Papercut Award for Best Page Turner:
• Broken Promise, by Linwood Barclay (Orion)
• Career of Evil, by Robert Galbraith (Little Brown)
• Follow Me, by Angela Clarke (Avon)
• The Girl in the Ice, by Robert Bryndza (Bookouture)
• In a Dark, Dark Wood, by Ruth Ware (Vintage)
• Splinter the Silence, by Val McDermid (Little Brown)

The Hotel Chocolat Award for Darkest Moment:
• Behind Closed Doors, by B.A. Paris (Mira)
• The Darkest Secret, by Alex Marwood (Sphere)
• In the Cold Dark Ground, by Stuart MacBride (Harper Collins)
• Little Boy Blue, by M.J. Arlidge (Michael Joseph)
• The Teacher, by Katerina Diamond (Avon)
• Viral, by Helen Fitzgerald (Faber & Faber)

The Mörda Award for Captivating Crime in Translation:
• Camille, by Pierre Lemaitre (MacLehose Press)
• The Crow Girl, by Erik Axl Sund (Vintage)
• The Defenceless, by Kati Hiekkapelto (Orenda Books)
• I’m Travelling Alone, by Samuel Bjork (Doubleday)
• Nightblind, by Ragnar Jónasson (Orenda Books)
• The Undesired, by Yrsa Sigurdardóttir (Hodder & Stoughton)

To register your favorites in each category, click here.

Return of a Man Called Morse

All I can say is, it’s about damn time!

The third season of the British crime drama Endeavour, starring Shaun Evans as a young and brilliant Endeavour Morse—the Oxford police detective created by Colin Dexter—will return to PBS-TV’s Masterpiece Mystery! series beginning this coming Sunday, June 19. The four episodes featured this time around are all set in 1967, which gives the show a bit of a “groovy” aspect, as you can see in the UK trailer for Endeavour embedded above. The blog TV Series Finale provides previews of that quartet of mysteries, plus a welcome reminder that Endeavour has already been renewed for a fourth season.

Losing Lois

Just a year after being fêted (along with James Ellroy) as one of the newest Mystery Writers of America’s Grand Masters, New Mexico author Lois Duncan has passed away at age 82. In a Facebook post from earlier today, her husband of half a century, Don Arquette, said, “She died sometime early this morning. I awoke and found her collapsed in the kitchen. I will miss her so very, very much.”

The Philadelphia-born Duncan penned works of non-fiction for adults, including 1992’s Who Killed My Daughter?, about the 1989 shooting death of her youngest child, 18-year-old Kaitlyn. However, she’s best known for having produced a succession of young adult mystery and suspense novels, including Debutante Hill (1958), A Gift of Magic (1960), Down a Dark Hall (1974), Stranger with My Face (1981), and The Third Eye (1984). More biographical details can be found in this piece from Mystery Fanfare. Duncan’s Web site doesn’t yet acknowledge the author’s demise, but it offers a message board where you can register your condolences to her family.

READ MORE: “Remembering Lois Duncan, the Queen of Teen Suspense,” by Petra Mayer (National Public Radio); “Lois Duncan’s Teenage Screams,” by Sarah Weinman (The New Republic).