Short in Length, Long on Talent

A couple of days after this news started leaking out into corners of the Web, the Short Mystery Fiction Society has officially announced the finalists for its 2019 Derringer Awards. These commendations, explains a news release, “recognize outstanding [short] stories published during 2018.” SMFS members will vote for their favorites in each of four categories, with the winners scheduled to be posted on May 1.

Best Flash Story (up to 1,000 words):
• “The Bicycle Thief,” by James Blakey (The Norwegian American, September 21, 2018)
• “Listen Up,” by Peter DiChellis (Flash Bang Mysteries, Winter 2018)
• “Sonny the Wonder Beast,” by Nick Kolakowski (Out of the Gutter, September 16, 2018)
• “Don’t Text and Drive,” by Robert Petyo (Flash Bang Mysteries, Spring 2018)
• “A Misunderstanding,” by Travis Richardson (Out of the Gutter, May 27, 2018)

Best Short Story (1,001 to 4,000 words):
• “The Belle Hope,” by Peter DiChellis (from Malice Domestic 13: Mystery Most Geographical, edited by Verena Rose, Rita Owen, and Shawn Reilly Simmons; Wildside Press)
• “The Crucial Game,” by Janice Law (Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, January-February 2018)
• “Dying in Dokesville,” by Alan Orloff (from Malice Domestic 13: Mystery Most Geographical)
• “If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Murder,” by Josh Pachter (from Malice Domestic 13: Mystery Most Geographical)
• “The Cabin in the Woods,” by Sylvia Maultash Warsh (from Malice Domestic 13: Mystery Most Geographical)

Best Long Story (4,001 to 8,000 words):
• “With My Eyes,” by Leslie Budewitz (Suspense Magazine, January/February 2018)
• “Mercy Find Me,” by Diana Deverell (from Fiction River: Justice, edited by Kristine Kathryn Rusch; WMG, January 2018)
• “The Case of the Missing Pot Roast,” by Barb Goffman (from Florida Happens, edited by Greg Herren; Three Rooms Press)
• “Till Murder Do Us Part,” by Barb Goffman (from Chesapeake Crimes: Fur, Feathers, and Felonies, edited by Donna Andrews, Barb Goffman, and Marcia Talley; Wildside Press)
• “The Vanishing Volume,” by Janet Raye Stevens (from Shhhh…Murder!: Cozy Crimes in Libraries, edited by Andrew MacRae; Darkhouse)

Best Novelette (8,001 to 20,000 words):
• “The Adventure of the Manhunting Marshal,” by “Peter Basile,” aka Jim Doherty (from Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective, Volume 11; Airship 27, March 2018)
• “Three-Star Sushi,” by Barry Lancet (Down & Out: The Magazine, March 2018)
• “The Cambodian Curse,” by Gigi Pandian (from The Cambodian Curse & Other Stories, by Gigi Pandian; Henery Press)
• “Oil Down,” by Brian Silverman (Mystery Tribune, Winter 2018)
• “I’ve Got to Get Me a Gun,” by Vincent Zandri (from The Black Car Business: Vol. 1, edited by Lawrence Kelter; Down & Out Books)

Congratulations to all of this year’s nominees!

(This post has been updated in order to add the publishing information on each finalist, compiled by SMFS member Gerald So.)

Bullet Points: Various and Sundry Edition

• With production on the 25th James Bond film having been pushed back, and the picture’s release now delayed until April 2020, that leaves extra time for rumors to fill in where facts are so far absent. Talk that Agent 007 (again played by Daniel Craig) will be killed off in the next movie is probably bogus. But word that the still-untitled film might be shot, at least partly, in Jamaica appears to be true. The Spy Command reports that “The government of Jamaica on March 29 confirmed it’s in ‘advanced’ talks about having Bond 25 shooting on the island nation.” This wouldn’t be the first time 007 has invaded the lush land of reggae and jerk spices. Spy Command managing editor Bill Koenig writes, “Both Dr. No (1962) and Live and Let Die (1973) were filmed in Jamaica (it doubled for the fictional San Monique in the latter movie). Ian Fleming also wrote the first drafts for his 007 stories while in Jamaica during the winter.”

• Sadder Bond-related news: The Spy Command brings word that English actress/model Tania Mallet, “who had a small but key role in Goldfinger, has died at 77.” It goes on to tell that “In 1964’s Goldfinger, Mallet played Tilly Masterson, sister to Jill Masterson (Shirley Eaton), who had been killed by being ‘painted gold,’ causing skin suffocation. Tilly seeks to avenge her sister’s death and is tailing Auric Goldfinger (Gert Frobe) in Switzerland. She takes a rifle shot at Goldfinger but almost hits Bond (Sean Connery).” Following that big-screen debut, Mallett (a cousin of actress Helen Mirren) resumed modeling, though she did appear as herself in several TV shows, and took an uncredited role in “The Midas Touch,” a 1978 episode of The New Avengers.

• Britain’s Piccadilly Publishing, which usually specializes in Westerns and men’s adventure yarns, will be making at least some of the numerous tales about newhound-turned-private eye Larry Kent available in e-book format—with their original “good girl” artwork. (See Curves Can Kill on the right.) Kent, if you don’t remember, began life on a 1950s Australian radio drama series (created by Ron Ingleby), then became a phenomenon in print—initially in a succession of novelettes, but ultimately in hundreds of novels, all of them with high body counts. More info is on the Piccadilly Web site.

• Criminal Element continues to roll out its posts revisiting books that, over the last 65 years, have won the Edgar Award for Best Novel. Although the quality of entries is inconsistent, and some participating critics have insisted on judging works according to modern viewpoints rather than historical ones, in general, the series has offered an interesting look back at wonderful—if sometimes forgotten—criminal yarns. The latest installment, contributed by novelist Philip Margolin (The Perfect Alibi) re-examines The Quiller Memorandum (aka The Berlin Memorandum), the first book in Adam Hall’s 20-volume series starring the spy known only as Quiller. Margolin writes:

The Quiller Memorandum is in many was an experimental novel. It is narrated in a stream of consciousness style by Quiller, and the narrative is frequently exhausting as we are forced to read page after page detailing the mechanics of losing a tail and other spycraft. What saves the book is Hall’s description of the Nazi horrors that motivate Quiller to find the Nazis in hiding and bring them to justice. There are some good twists and an interesting relationship between Quiller and Inga, the mysterious femme fatale. I moved back and forth between fascination, boredom, and misbelief while reading the novel, especially the interrogation sequences.

If you’ve fallen behind in reading Criminal Element’s Edgar Awards series, you can catch up with all of the posts here.

• Philip Kerr’s Metropolis, his 14th and final Bernie Gunther novel, won’t go on sale for another week. But its welcome is already in full swing. Crime Fiction Lover has posted a handy guide to the series, all of the books—whether set in Europe, South America, or Cuba—starring Gunther, a mordantly humorous, half-Jewish, Nazi-hating Berlin homicide detective turned (sometimes reluctant) private eye. Meanwhile, the Rap Sheet’s UK correspondent, Ali Karim, has posted this video of the book’s official launch at London’s Daunt Books, well attended by publishing types and critics pleased to celebrate author Kerr, who died a year ago, at age 62. On hand, too, were Kerr’s editor, Jane Wood, and his wife, journalist-novelist Jane Thynne, who delivered a warm, revealing tribute to her late husband.

• While I remain skeptical of the whole enterprise, I’m not surprised by this news: HBO-TV has greenlighted a new “Perry Mason origin series, starring Matthew Rhys as the titular icon.” Deadline Hollywood notes that “prolific TV director, writer, and producer Tim Van Patten (Boardwalk Empire, The Sopranos, Game of Thrones) has been tapped to direct and executive produce” the show.

• I wish this Rockford Files diorama was widely available.

• Sopranos fans, looking forward to the September 25, 2020, release of David Chase’s prequel film, The Many Saints of Newark, will be interested in a tidbit contained in B.V. Lawson’s latest “Media for Murder” column, explaining that the movie “has cast its final major lead role. Michela De Rossi, the Italian-born actress who made her debut in Boys Cry, has been set to join Alessandro Nivola, Vera Farmiga, Ray Liotta, Jon Bernthal, Corey Stoll, Billy Magnussen, John Magaro, Michael Gandolfini, and the just-cast Leslie Odom Jr. in the ensemble drama for New Line.” A bit more information about De Rossi can be found in Entertainment CheatSheet.

• I’ve been a fan of James McClure’s novels ever since college. Beginning with 1971’s The Steam Pig, this author—who died in 2006—composed eight police procedurals set in apartheid-era South Africa, all starring a racially mixed pair of sleuths, Afrikaan Lieutenant Tromp Kramer of the Murder and Robbery Squad and his Zulu assistant, Sergeant Mickey Zondi. If you haven’t yet discovered these works, definitely check out Neil Nyren’s briefing on his fiction.

• It was nice to see the 1986-1988 TV series Crime Story receive a little love recently from New York magazine’s Vulture site. Comparing that 1960s-set Michael Mann drama with another, better-known Mann project, Miami Vice, Nathan Smith opines:

Where Miami Vice brought the police procedural into the future—flashy clothes, big tunes, heaps of style—Crime Story went back in time, and even if it’s the lesser-known of the two series, it revolutionized the genre on a molecular level, whereas Miami Vice achieved the same only on the surface. Two decades before The Sopranos and The Wire, Crime Story was one of the very first serialized prime-time dramas to ditch the procedural format and tell a season-long story. …

Crime Story unlocked the gates for shows like Wiseguy, Twin Peaks, and The X-Files, the wayward step-children of the police procedural. Its gritty realism would be carried on by the likes of Homicide: Life on the Street and NYPD Blue. But its most important contribution, the three words “to be continued … ” at the end of every single episode, influenced nearly every subsequent drama on prime time. Though Crime Story wasn’t the first series to flash those words across the screen—every show from Dallas to The Brady Bunch had done a multi-episode arc—the idea of a story that continued seemingly without end or resolution in sight, was new.

• For your amusement, from Flavorwire: “Classic Songs Reimagined as Vintage Pulp Book Covers.”

• During the mid-1960s, the American TV network NBC broadcast a 26-episode animated series called The Famous Adventures of Mr. Magoo. It starred the popular elderly, short, and extremely near-sighted character Quincy Magoo (voiced by Jim Backus of Gilligan’s Island fame), who in this show played an actor appearing in abbreviated stage productions of classic works of fiction. “The series was originally shown in prime time …,” explains Wikipedia, “therefore certain more mature elements were present. These included death threats (William Tell, Robin Hood, Don Quixote, The Three Musketeers, Sherlock Holmes), children in danger (Treasure Island, Gunga Din, William Tell), insanity (Don Quixote, Moby Dick), heroic self-sacrifice (Gunga Din), religious themes (Noah’s Ark), and realistic (although mostly bloodless) violence including swordplay, shooting, clubbing, drowning, and character deaths (most episodes).” I remember watching reruns of the episodes based on Frankenstein, Cyrano de Bergerac, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and The Count of Monte Cristo. But I’d forgotten until this last weekend that there was a Sherlock Holmes episode, featuring Magoo as the faithful Doctor John H. Watson. (Thank you to the Man from U.N.C.L.E.—Spies & Detectives Facebook page for reminding me.) The case undertaken in that episode, writes Scott Monty in his blog I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere, “is a clever little mystery that includes touches of a number of Sherlock Holmes stories, including The Sign of Four, ‘The Speckled Band,’ ‘The Musgrave Ritual,’ and ‘The Six Napoleons’ to name a few.” Providing the voice of Holmes was actor Paul Frees, who also voiced antagonist Boris Badenov on The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. The episode is only 23 minutes long, and at least for the nonce, can be enjoyed here.

• This year’s Mystery Fest Key West won’t take place until late June, but its publicity minions are already heralding its scheduled components. This year’s headliner will be psychological suspense master Jeffery Deaver, with special host Heather Graham. And a Whodunit Mystery Writing Competition has been organized in association with the convention. From a news release: “Sponsored by Absolutely Amazing eBooks, candidates wishing to compete are invited to submit the first three pages (maximum 750 words) of a finished, but unpublished manuscript to whodunitaward@mysteryfestkeywest.com no later than April 15, 2019. There is no fee to enter; finalists will be notified by May 1, and will have until May 10 to submit full manuscripts.” You will find more news about the 2019 Mystery Fest here.

• There’s been a lot written of late about Jack the Ripper—not bad for a guy (presumably) whose claim to infamy dates back more than 130 years. Media reports in March suggested that DNA analysis had finally identified the Ripper as being “Aaron Kosminski, a 23-year-old barber of Polish descent who lived in London at the time [1888],” but was subsequently committed to an insane asylum. Proof, it was said, could be found in seminal fluid left behind on a shawl belonging to Catherine Eddowes, the killer’s fourth recorded victim. However, doubts were soon raised as to whether Eddowes had ever owned such a scarf, and whether DNA found upon it could be trusted, given that it would’ve been “handled by countless people over the years.” In the midst of these debates, British social historian Hallie Rubenhold’s latest work of non-fiction, The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper, was published in the UK (with a U.S. edition due for release next week). The Guardian greeted the book as “a landmark study [that] calls time on the misogyny that fed the Jack the Ripper myth.” Reviewer Frances Wilson writes:

Few women have had the moment of their deaths returned to more often, and with as much relish, as Mary Ann “Polly” Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly. In each case their throats were cut, and four of them had their entrails removed. Kelly, the only one of “the canonical five”, as Jack the Ripper’s known victims are called, to die in her bed, was completely mutilated. Forests have been felled in the interests of unmasking the murderer, but until now no one has bothered to discover the identity of his victims. The Five is thus an angry and important work of historical detection, calling time on the misogyny that has fed the Ripper myth.

It is astonishing how little we know about these five, apart from their names. Hallie Rubenhold fleshes out their stories from the scraps that are available: coroner’s inquests (three of which are missing); “a body of edited, embellished, misheard and re-interpreted newspaper reports”; parish registers; court registers; birth, marriage and death records; rate books and the archives of the London workhouses. For accounts of poverty in London she turns to Francis Place, Henry Mayhew and Charles Booth; she gets facts and figures from Mrs Beaton. With the documentary veracity of a set of Hogarth prints, Rubenhold follows the victims’ doomed footsteps from birth to death. Except that there is no attempt to imagine each woman’s last moments, or describe the state of her body, or further the search for their killer. Instead she asks how it is that these women—all of them somebody’s daughter, somebody’s sister, somebody’s lover—ended up alone and destitute on the streets of Whitechapel.

• Happy 80th birthday, Batman!

• Speaking of Gotham’s Caped Crusader, it seems his family’s butler, Alfred Pennyworth, is about to get his own 1960s spy show, appropriately titled Pennyworth. The Double O Section informs us that “In the 10-episode drama series, Alfred Pennyworth (The Imitation Game’s Jack Bannon), described by Deadline as ‘a former British SAS soldier in his 20s,’ forms a private security company ‘and goes to work with young billionaire Thomas Wayne (Fleabag’s Ben Aldridge), who’s not yet Bruce’s father, in 1960s London.’” Pennyworth is set to premiere this summer on EPIX. By the way, that Double O Section post includes a very brief trailer for the series.

• In a new piece for CrimeReads, author Stephanie Jo Harris (The Poet Recusant) contends that Victor Hugo’s 1862 masterpiece, Les Miserables, both “created a model for police procedurals” and, in the person of Inspector Javert, gave us a “standard for the unyielding, driven law enforcement officer obsessed with justice.”

• I was surprised to learn, while reading Bill Selnes’ Mysteries and More from Saskatchewan, that Margot Kinberg “has decided to cease writing her blog,” Confessions of a Mystery Novelist. Selnes notes: “For almost 10 years Margot provided a daily post. By my calculations she wrote over 3,000 posts. She highlighted at least 500 different authors!” I would have included a link here to Confessions of a Mystery Novelist, so that people less than familiar with Kinberg’s work could check out what she had accomplished. However, it seems she’s not just stopped writing her blog, but has removed it entirely from the Web. What a shame, not only because good blogs like Kinberg’s can still provide useful information to readers, even when they’re no longer being updated, but because all of the links other blogs established to hers over the last decade are now broken. I have sifted through the full run of The Rap Sheet, scouting for links to Confessions of a Mystery Novelist, and have changed most of them to connect instead with pages in the Internet archive Wayback Machine, but a handful remain inoperative. I don’t mean to criticize Kinberg for her actions; I’m sure they made sense to her at the time. However, I really wish that when bloggers stop working on their sites, they would simply leave them dormant, rather than deleting them entirely.

• Maybe, though, I’m just more sensitive to these matters than most people. I cannot imagine deliberately scrubbing The Rap Sheet from the Web. I have put far too many hours of work into writing and editing this blog to see it all disappear. Unless the world experiences electronic catastrophe, I expect The Rap Sheet to outlast me.

• Despite its impersonal salutation (“Dear Journalists”), I was intrigued recently by a letter sent my way by Bloomsbury Publishing, promoting a forthcoming biography called Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps: A Life of John Buchan. The author is Buchan’s granddaughter, Ursula Buchan. Bloomsbury offered this brief on her work:

John Buchan’s name is known across the world for The Thirty-Nine Steps. In the past one hundred years the classic thriller has never been out of print and has inspired numerous adaptations for film, television, radio and stage, beginning with the celebrated version by Alfred Hitchcock.

Yet there was vastly more to “J.B.” He wrote more than a hundred books—fiction and non-fiction—and a thousand articles for newspapers and magazines. He was a scholar, antiquarian, barrister, colonial administrator, journal editor, literary critic, publisher, war correspondent, director of wartime propaganda, member of parliament and imperial proconsul—given a state funeral when he died, a deeply admired and loved Governor-General of Canada.

His teenage years in Glasgow’s Gorbals, where his father was the Free Church minister, contributed to his ease with shepherds and ambassadors, fur-trappers and prime ministers. His improbable marriage to a member of the aristocratic Grosvenor family means that this account of his life contains, at its heart, an enduring love story.

Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps is due out on June 18.

• An entirely different letter informed me that Crossroad Press, a North Carolina-based digital publishing venture, last month reissued the 1967 spy novel The Man from Pansy, by Don Rico. Now, you may be shocked to learn this, but I’d never heard of such a book or its star, Pentagon agent Buzz Cardigan. Crossroad helpfully characterized it as a “Swingin’ ’60s spy spoof—think James Bond with LOTS of snark—a time capsule for genre fans and fun for any reader.” What makes the three-book series distinctive, too, is that Cardigan (as in the sweater?) is “a dedicated straight spy [who] must take on the role of a gay man to root out enemies of the U.S. who lurk in the shadows of the sexual revolution.” In addition to The Man from Pansy, Crossroad has made its sequels, The Daisy Dilemma (1967) and The Passion Flower Puzzle (1968), available to Kindle users. If any Rap Sheet followers have read these novels, and can offer their opinions I hope they’ll do so.

• Here’s another series that tried to capitalize on the 1960s interest in spy fiction, this one starring Dan Walker, “a businessman and former Naval Intelligence Officer who takes periodic assignments from the CIA where he saves the world and gets laid.”

• Chris Sullivan, who writes the blog Morse, Lewis and Endeavour, has created two YouTube playlists showcasing the music featured in all three TV series based on or inspired by Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse stories. If you click here, you can listen to either the opera music or the other classical music heard in all of those shows.

• More than a few fine author interviews have sprouted up on the Web recently. Among them are conversations with Joe R. Lansdale (The Elephant of Surprise), Betty Webb (Desert Redemption), Max Allan Collins (Girl Most Likely), Jacqueline Winspear (The American Agent), Harlan Coben (Run Away), Jane Stanton Hitchcock (Bluff), Tim O’Mara (Down to the River), Edith Maxwell (Charity’s Burden), Glen Erik Hamilton (Mercy River), and Megan Collins (The Winter Sister).

• Along with so many others, The Rap Sheet’s Google+ page disappeared earlier today, never to be seen again.

• And though I’m not a big reader of spooky yarns, the new anthology Ghost Stories: Classic Tales of Horror and Suspense, edited by Lisa Morton and Leslie S. Klinger (Pegasus), certainly has me intrigued. That’s because it includes lesser-known stories by such authors as Charles Dickens, Edith Wharton, and Mark Twain right alongside “overlooked works” by horror-fiction favorites such as Edgar Allan Poe and M.R. James. Co-editors Morton and Klinger introduce their collection with this essay.

Revue of Reviewers, 4-1-19

Critiquing some of the most interesting recent crime, mystery, and thriller releases. Click on the individual covers to read more.

All Kidding Aside ...

Because it’s April Fool’s Day, Mystery Fanfare’s Janet Rudolph has reposted her short catalogue of mystery and murder tales that happen to take place on or around this annual celebration. Meanwhile, Jerry House points us to the Museum of Hoaxes’ “list of what they feel are the one hundred greatest April Fools’ Day hoaxes of all time.”

Treats Delivered in Terminal City

Despite it taking place in Vancouver, British Columbia, which is not so very far north of my home in Seattle, I wasn’t able to attend this weekend’s Left Coast Crime convention. Fortunately, Classic Mysteries blogger Les Blatt was on hand there to report the winners of this year’s Lefty Awards, in four categories.

Lefty for Best Humorous Mystery Novel: Scot Free, by Catriona McPherson (Midnight Ink)

Also nominated: Mardi Gras Murder, by Ellen Byron (Crooked Lane); Hollywood Ending, by Kellye Garrett (Midnight Ink); Nighttown, by Timothy Hallinan (Soho Crime); Death al Fresco, by Leslie Karst (Crooked Lane); and The Spirit in Question, by Cynthia Kuhn (Henery Press)

Lefty for Best Historical Mystery Novel (Bruce Alexander Memorial), for books covering events before 1960: The Widows of Malabar Hill, by Sujata Massey (Soho Crime)

Also nominated: Four Funerals and Maybe a Wedding, by Rhys Bowen (Berkeley Prime Crime); The Long-Lost Love Letters of Doc Holliday, by David Corbett (Black Opal); Island of the Mad, by Laurie R. King (Bantam); A Dying Note, by Ann Parker (Poisoned Pen Press); and It Begins in Betrayal, by Iona Whishaw (Touchwood Editions)

Lefty for Best Debut Mystery Novel: A Lady’s Guide to Etiquette and Murder, by Dianne Freeman (Kensington)

Also nominated: Broken Places, by Tracy Clark (Kensington); Cobra Clutch, by A.J. Devlin (NeWest Press); The Woman in the Window, by A.J. Finn (Morrow); What Doesn’t Kill You, by Aimee Hix (Midnight Ink); Deadly Solution, by Keenan Powell (Level Best); and Give Out Creek, by J.G. Toews (Mosaic Press)

Lefty for Best Mystery Novel (not in other categories): November Road, by Lou Berney (Morrow)

Also nominated: Wrong Light, by Matt Coyle (Oceanview); Kingdom of the Blind, by Louise Penny (Minotaur); Under a Dark Sky, by Lori Rader-Day (Morrow); A Reckoning in the Back Country, by Terry Shames (Seventh Street); and A Stone’s Throw, by James W. Ziskin (Seventh Street)

Lifetime Achievement Honoree: Sue Grafton (1940-2017). Grafton’s daughter, Jamie Clark, was on hand to accept this award for her.

This year’s Guests of Honor were authors C.J. Box and Maureen Jennings, with William Deverell being honored as the Local Legend.

These prizes were handed out last evening at Vancouver’s Hyatt Regency hotel. Congratulations to all of the nominees!

MMC Rules in Favor of Turow

Scott Turow, the author of such best-selling novels as Presumed Innocent (1987), Reversible Errors (2002) and Testimony (2017), has received the annual Paretsky Award for his work. That commendation was presented to him during the third annual Murder and Mayhem in Chicago convention, held this last Saturday. The Paretsky Award, named after Sara Paretsky, the creator of Windy City private detective V.I. Warshawski, “honors mysteries set in the Midwest.”

According to a press release, this year’s one-day Murder and Mayhem in Chicago—chaired by book publicist Dana Kaye and award-winning author Lori Rader-Day—featured “over 240 crime-fiction authors, publishing pros, librarians, booksellers, and readers … plus interviews with [keynote speakers] Turow and international bestselling author Sophie Hannah. Kaye and Rader-Day are already planning next year’s event, which will take place in March of 2020 and will feature New York Times bestselling author, William Kent Krueger.”

PaperBack: “The Dead Darling”

Part of a series honoring the late author and blogger Bill Crider.



The Dead Darling, by “Jonathan Craig,” aka Frank E. Smith (Belmont Tower, 1973). This novel, originally published in 1955, was the first entry in a 10-book police procedural series. Centered on New York City’s Sixth Precinct, the series starred homicide detectives Pete Selby and his partner, Stan Rayder.
Cover illustration by Robert Maguire.

READ MORE: “Pete Selby and the Sixth Precinct: A Paperback Warrior Primer,” by Tom Simon (Paperback Warrior).

Three Final, Fond Farewells

As I return to blogging mode, after a week spent on unrelated projects, let me mention three deaths that occurred during my hiatus.

First off, there was San Francisco resident Rabbi Lawrence W. Raphael, who passed away on March 17 at age 74. As Janet Rudolph recalls in Mystery Fanfare, Rabbi Raphael—who, in 2003, “became the ninth senior rabbi of Sherith Israel in San Francisco, where he served until 2016”—“played a vital role in the admission, education, and professional training of over a thousand Reform rabbis, cantors, and educators. He was instrumental in the founding and supervision of the Soup Kitchen, which has fed over 150,000 guests since its inception over 30 years ago, and implemented educational initiatives, using the latest computer technologies and the newly emerging Internet, for students, faculty, and alumni.”

Raphael was also the editor of Mystery Midrash: An Anthology of Jewish Mystery & Detective Fiction (1999), a fine book about which I wrote, in one of the earliest versions of The Rap Sheet:

Remember when Harry Kemelman’s Rabbi Small tales were about all there was of Jewish crime fiction? No longer, as editor Lawrence W. Raphael makes clear in Mystery Midrash: An Anthology of Jewish Mystery and Detective Fiction (Jewish Lights Publishing).

Some familiar wordsmiths and characters are to be found in these pages, from Stuart M. Kaminsky (whose Chicago detective, Abe Lieberman, here takes a confession from a lapsed and irate Jew) to Ronald Levitsky (contributing a story in which civil-liberties lawyer Nate Rosen faces a truly unique First Amendment case) and Howard Engel (providing P.I. Benny Cooperman with a light-hearted locked-room puzzle). Although Raphael’s selections often deal with Jewish issues, fans of this book will likely stretch across the religious spectrum.

Raphael published a sequel in 2001: Criminal Kabbalah: An Intriguing Anthology of Jewish Mystery & Detective Fiction.

* * *

Gone as well is American film producer and screenwriter Larry Cohen, who died on March 23 in Los Angeles. He was 77 years old.

Britain’s Guardian newspaper notes that Cohen “was a key figure in exploitation movie circles in the ’70s and ’80s, as well as writing scripts and storylines for TV shows such as The Fugitive and Columbo, before staging a feature film comeback with the script for the Colin Farrell thriller Phone Booth in 2002. … Cohen then came up with another phone-oriented thriller, Cellular, that became a vehicle for Kim Basinger. Cohen’s second coming eventually tailed off, but he appeared in the 2017 documentary tribute King Cohen, in which he defended his film-making habits: ‘I don’t know what exploitation means. Every movie is exploitation. So what?’”

I have to admit, I didn’t connect significantly with Cohen as a director or producer. My memories of his career relate to his small-screen escapades. In addition to his work on Columbo and The Fugitive, Cohen crafted scripts for Checkmate, The Defenders, and NYPD Blue. He also created the Robert Goulet espionage series Blue Light, the Western drama Branded, Roy Thinnes’ alien-invasion show, The Invaders, and one of the NBC Wednesday Mystery Movie series, Cool Million, starring James Farentino. Several years ago, I tried hard to contact Larry Cohen via e-mail, hoping to ask him some questions about that Farentino program, but I never heard a word back.

* * *

Finally, The Gumshoe Site reports the demise, at age 90, of Majorie Weinman Sharmat. Blogger Jiro Kimura writes:

One of America’s most prolific authors of children’s books, [Sharmat] had two dreams as a child—to be a detective and to be a writer, and the wish of hers came true when she created Nate the Great. Nate is a boy detective with a Sherlock Holmes deerstalker who catches culprits with the help of his dog, Sludge. The Nate the Great series started with Nate the Great (Putnam, 1972) and ended with Nate the Great and the Missing Birthday Snake (Delacorte, 2017; with Andrew Sharmat, her son). Nate has a cousin Olivia Sharp, a girl detective, who appears in four novels, starting with The Pizza Monster (1989) and ending with The Green Toenails Gang (1991, all from Delacorte, with Mitchell Sharmat, her husband). She wrote more than 130 books for children and young adults, and three of them were written as by Wendy Andrews: The Supergirl Storybook (1984), Vacation Fever! (1984), and Are We There Yet? (1985, all from Putnam).

Sharmat, who lived in Munster, Indiana, was taken by respiratory failure on March 12.

READ MORE: “The Late Great Larry Cohen,” by Terence Towles Canote (A Shroud of Thoughts).

News of the Nibbies

This year’s many shortlisted nominees for the British Book Awards—also known as the Nibbies—have just been announced. There are more than 20 categories of contenders, but the two that will presumably interest Rap Sheet readers most are below.

Crime & Thriller Book of the Year:
• Our House, by Louise Candlish (Simon & Schuster)
• The Woman in the Window, by A.J. Finn (HarperFiction)
• The Wife Between Us, by Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen (Pan)
• Close to Home, by Cara Hunter (Penguin)
• Macbeth, by Jo Nesbø (Hogarth)
• In a House of Lies, by Ian Rankin (Orion)

Debut Book of the Year:
• The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock, by Imogen Hermes Gowar
(Harvill Secker)
• Never Greener, by Ruth Jones (Bantam Press)
• The Tattooist of Auschwitz, by Heather Morris (Zaffre)
• Dear Mrs. Bird, by A.J. Pearce (Picador)
• Lullaby, by Leila Slimani (Faber and Faber)
• The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, by Stuart Turton (Raven)

Winners in all of the categories will be declared during a ceremony scheduled to be held on Monday, May 13.

According to press materials, “The Nibbies was launched in 1990 by Fred Newman, founder and editor of Publishing News, and taken over by The Bookseller in 2017.” Previous winners can be found here.

(Hat tip to Mystery Fanfare.)

READ MORE: “Dan Mallory, Author Who Once Faked Being British, Nominated for British Book Award,” by Katie Rothstein (Vulture).

Revue of Reviewers, 3-22-19

Critiquing some of the most interesting recent crime, mystery, and thriller releases. Click on the individual covers to read more.

A Bit of Love for the Indies

This comes from B.V. Lawson’s In Reference to Murder:

The Independent Book Publishers Association officially announced finalists for the Benjamin Franklin Awards program, recognizing excellence and innovation in independent publishing. The nods in the Mystery/Suspense category [go to] An Accidental Corpse by Helen A. Harrison; Black Hearts White Minds: A Carl Gordon Legal Thriller by Mitch Margo; Burning Ridge: A Timber Creek K-9 Mystery by Margaret Mizushima, and Welcome to Sugarville: A Novel in Stories by J.J. Haas.

There are more than 50 categories of contenders for the 2019 Benjamin Franklin Awards. See them all here.

Macdonald’s Changing Faces

I’ve had reason recently to investigate the covers on various paperback editions of Ross Macdonald’s novels. In the course of doing so, I’ve posted some of those classic fronts in my Killer Covers blog. If you have missed noticing, click here to see the only cover Robert McGinnis painted for a Macdonald work. Click here to gaze in appreciation at Mitchell Hooks’ 1970s fronts for the Lew Archer series. And click here to compare those latter covers with Hooks’ illustrations for a pair of 1955 Macdonald releases.

Want to Be in the Bouchercon Anthology?

We still have seven months to go before Bouchercon 2019 opens its doors in Dallas, Texas. However, writers interested in seeing their work published in this year’s convention anthology should be aware right now of several refinements to the submissions process.

As previously reported on this page, Rick Ollerman, the editor of Down & Out: The Magazine, will serve as editor of the coming collection, with the finished product to be published by Down & Out Books. But Paula Gail Benson, who serves as contest coordinator for the inaugural Bill Crider Prize for Short Fiction, today sent me a “call for submissions” notice with the following information, which I have bullet-pointed for easier reference:

• All proceeds from the anthology’s sales will benefit LIFT, Literary Instruction For Texas, which works to enhance and strengthen communities by teaching adults to read.

• Stories must be original works (no reprints) of fewer than
5,000 words. The theme is the conference slogan: “Denim, Diamonds, and Death!”

• The deadline for submissions is June 1, 2019.

• Please send submissions to rick@downandoutmagazine.com. For additional information about the anthology, please contact rick@downandoutmagazine.com.

• The anthology will be published for distribution and signings at Bouchercon in Dallas.

• A story entered in the Bill Crider Contest may be submitted to the Bouchercon anthology; however, if the story is selected and the author agrees to publication in the anthology, the story must be withdrawn from the Crider Contest because the contest rules require that submitted stories not be published before the end of Bouchercon 2019. For additional information about Crider Contest entries, please contact subs.deepintheheart@gmail.com or Paula Gail Benson at pgbenson_4@msn.com.

Everyone hoping to see his or her work included in this anthology’s contents should probably get started soon on their writing.

Fair Play Can Be Fatal

This week marks the welcome return of Monkey Justice and Other Stories, a collection of short fiction by Michigan author Patricia Abbott. Originally released in 2011 by Snubnose Press, an e-book imprint launched by the now late, lamented Spinetingler Magazine, Monkey Justice has been reissued in both paperback and Kindle formats by Down & Out Books, with a new cover design by J.T. Lindroos.

I’m a big fan of Patti Abbott, who has contributed a couple of essays to The Rap Sheet over time (see here and here), and who I interviewed when her first novel, Concrete Angel, saw printed back in 2015. I also coordinated with her for many years on the Friday “forgotten books” series. Yet for some reason, I never read Monkey Justice when it first appeared, so it’s nice to have a second chance at poring over the contents.

As far as I can tell, all 23 of the original stories are contained in this new edition. It’s a very mixed set, the pieces focusing on people who live under great stresses, and showcasing how they make decisions that will change their lives—not always for the better. For instance, the opening yarn, “Like a Hawk Rising,” gives us a burglar who has been laid up with a badly broken leg, and in his boredom has taken to peeping on the kid in the suburban house next door—a boy with a serially abusive father and a peculiar menagerie of caged animals. In “The Instrument of Their Desire,” the year is 1931, and a brother has engineered a scheme to save the family home—one that necessitates him pimping out his sister. “My Hero” finds Superman intervening in a marital dispute, with unexpected consequences. In “The Tortoise and the Tortoise,” which Abbott explains was inspired by an episode involving her own father, a man in a nursing home isn’t happy that the arrival of a priest in the room next door has caused his status in the place to slip. And Abbott wrote in her blog years ago about how this book’s title story, “Monkey Justice,” came into being:

Its genesis is easy to remember. I overheard the entire story on a bus ride into work [in Detroit]. No kidding. Well, not the part about the protagonist working with monkeys, but the rest of it.

Who could resist using a story about a man's wife and mistress giving birth to his daughters on the same day? The guy on the bus becomes Gene, the beta male, in my story. I even watched him de-bus at the [Michigan] Science Center.

He will never know that his story became my story and the title of this collection.

It was almost too easy to write it until I thought to insert the part about monkey behavior. ... Spending a week or two looking over recent capuchin monkey experiments was a treat. And those four anthropology courses finally paid off.

Abbott (the mother of fellow writer Megan Abbott) has penned more than 125 short stories, and in 2008 won the Derringer Award for one of them, “My Hero,” which features in Monkey Justice. Concrete Angel was nominated for an Anthony and Macavity award, and her subsequent novel, Shot in Detroit (2016), was in the running for both an Edgar Award and an Anthony Award. All of this should make clear that Abbott has had the opportunity to polish her storytelling style. The stories here aren’t always easily classified as crime fiction, and some of the choices their players make in pursuit of justice may cause you to shake your head with undue force. But they’re just as likely to launch you on the hunt for more of this author’s work.

Fostering a Richer Range of Writers

Beginning today, the Sisters in Crime organization is accepting submissions to its 2019 competition for the Eleanor Taylor Bland Crime Fiction Writers of Color Award, a prize—now in its sixth year—intended to promote “an emerging female or male writer of color.”

A SinC press release says, “The award honors the late, pioneering African-American crime-fiction author Eleanor Taylor Bland,” creator of the police detective Marti McAllister series (Dead Time, A Cold and Silent Dying, Suddenly a Stranger). Candidates must apply by June 9, 2019, and the winner will be announced by July 1, 2019.” In addition to the commendation itself, the recipient will collect $2,000 in grant money. That SinC announcement goes on to explain:

The Eleanor Taylor Bland Award was created in 2014 with a bequest from Bland’s estate to support Sisters in Crime’s vision statement that the organization should serve as the voice for excellence and diversity in crime writing. The grant is intended for a writer beginning their crime writing career and will support activities related to career development including workshops, seminars, conferences, and retreats; online courses; and research activities required for completion of his or her work. This year, Sisters in Crime raised the grant amount from $1,500 to $2,000.

Past winners of this prize have been Mia Manansala (2018), Jessica Ellis Laine (2017), Stephane Dunn (2016), Vera H-C Chan (2015), and Maria Kelson (2014).

Complete guidelines for entering this year’s Eleanor Taylor Bland Award contest, as well as an official application, can be found here.

Taking a Brief Break

Due to conflicting professional and personal responsibilities, I find myself in the position of needing to take a short break from blogging. I have several things scheduled to go up on this page as well as at Killer Covers during the coming days, and I shall of course be keeping track, should any major crime-fiction news break. But otherwise, yours truly will be pretty quiet over the next week and a half. Stay well.

Brewskis, Books, and Bedtime

I’m not one for excessive celebrations of Saint Patrick’s Day. But I do like to commemorate the occasion each year with a plate of corned beef, cabbage and potatoes, and maybe a couple of beers to wash it all down. And since that often results in my feeling weary, I am prone to retire to a comfortable chair with a book in hand. Lucky for me, Janet Rudolph has updated Mystery Fanfare’s list of St. Patrick’s Day mysteries. Surely there’s something there enjoy this Sunday, the 17th, until my eyelids finally grow too heavy to keep open.

Revue of Reviewers, 3-11-19

Critiquing some of the most interesting recent crime, mystery, and thriller releases. Click on the individual covers to read more.