Quick Hits Parade

• Three months after Burt Reynolds’ death, at age 82, Visual Entertainment Inc. will release a complete DVD set of episodes from his 1970-1971 ABC-TV series, Dan August, the Quinn Martin production in which he portrayed a police lieutenant investigating homicides in the fictional Southern California town of Santa Luisa. That hour-long drama also starred Norman Fell, Ned Romero, Richard Anderson, and Ena Hartman. The Spy Command says VEI’s release of Dan August, on December 7, will include not only the 26 weekly episodes, but also the pilot film, House on Greenapple Road, which starred Christopher George as August. (George later bowed out of the Dan August series in order to star in another short-lived show, The Immortal.) The familiar theme music from Dan August was composed by Dave Grussin.

• This isn’t too surprising, but is welcome news: Bosch, the Amazon Prime TV series based on Michael Connelly’s long-running series of Harry Bosch police procedurals, and starring Titus Welliver, has already been renewed for a sixth season, even though Season 5 has not yet debuted—and likely won’t before the spring of 2019.

• Art Taylor has fine new review of Leslie S. Klinger’s annotated Classic American Crime Fiction of the 1920s in Washington Independent Review of Books. He calls that 1,152-page collection of five novels—all of them (by Dashiell Hammett, Ellery Queen, and others) quite pivotal in the development of early 20th-century mystery and detective fiction—“a treasure of information and a joy to study or simply read. By gathering these texts together and diving into them with insight and research, ... Klinger brings them to today’s readers in an accessible, enlightening, and entertaining way.”

• In business news … from In Reference to Murder:

Prometheus Books, which is nearing its 50th anniversary, has decided to refocus on nonfiction titles and sold its two genre imprints to Start Publishing. One of those, the crime fiction imprint Seventh Street Books, currently has a backlist of about ninety titles including award-winning books by Allen Eskens, Adrian McKinty, Lori Rader-Day, and Terry Shames. Start Publishing began has an exclusively digital publisher but has expanded to include print editions as well. Start will publish both print and digital editions of the newly acquired Seventh Street titles.

• Quercus Books imprint MacLehose Press has revealed the unarguably eye-catching cover of David Lagercrantz’s The Girl Who Lived Twice, his third and latest entry in the Millennium/Lisbeth Salander series created by Stieg Larsson. The Amazon UK site mentions that The Girl Who Lived Twice (which follows Lagercrantz’s The Girl in the Spider’s Web and The Girl Who Takes and Eye for and Eye) won’t be available to British readers until August 2019. There’s still no word on when the novel will reach Salander’s U.S. fans.

• Strand Magazine editor Andrew F. Gulli presents a list of what he thinks are the “top 20 novels of 2018” here. His choices are mostly, but not all, crime novels. And mostly, but not all, contemporary stories. How many of them wind up vying for The Strand’s 2018 Critics Awards is something we’ll have to wait until next spring to find out.

• And if you don’t know this already: “Douglas Rain, voice of the computer HAL 9000 in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, died on [November 11]. He was 90 years old,” reports the blog Paleofuture. “Born in Canada, Rain started on the stage and was known in both the Canadian and British theater communities for his roles in William Shakespeare’s classics like Othello and Twelfth Night. But Rain is best known in the sci-fi community as the voice of HAL—a cold, monotone voice that immediately evokes fear in anyone who hears it.”