Tuesday Ragbag

• It seemed almost inevitable that The President Is Missing, a 2018 thriller by former president Bill Clinton and bestselling scribe James Patterson, would become a Hollywood property. And sure enough, In Reference to Murder now reports that “Oscar winner Christopher McQuarrie and Anthony Peckham have boarded … the [Showtime] drama series adaptation of the novel.” As Deadline Hollywood explains, the story centers on “a powerless and politically aimless Vice President [who] unexpectedly becomes President halfway into his administration’s first term, despite his every wish to the contrary. He walks right into a secret, world-threatening crisis, both inside and outside the White House. Attacked by both friends and enemies alike, with scandal and conspiracy swirling around him, he is confronted with a terrible choice: keep his head down, toe the party line and survive, or act on his stubborn, late-developing conscience and take a stand.” See what I mean about the yarn being Hollywood bait?

• The President Is Missing is just one of many “political suspense novels featuring current presidents, future presidents, or their wives as the victims, perpetrators, or solvers of crimes,” as I explained in one of my first pieces for CrimeReads last year.

• With just a few days left before Valentine’s Day, Mystery Fanfare has updated its extensive roster of “sweetheart sleuths.”

• Finally, PBS-TV’s Masterpiece series has announced that the British TV mystery drama Endeavour, starring Shaun Evans and Roger Allam, will return for its four-episode sixth season in the States on June 16. Meanwhile, the show (inspired by Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse novels) is already being broadcast in the UK, and The Killing Times has a review of episode one that reveals where the characters find themselves working as the story charges forward.

• In addition, The Killing Times offers this review of episode one in the fifth season of Shetland. That BBC One crime drama, which stars Douglas Henshall and is based on a succession of novels by Ann Cleeves, returned to UK TV sets this evening.

• It was a year ago today, on the evening of February 12, 2018, that Texas novelist and blogger Bill Crider passed away after a lengthy battle with prostate cancer. He was 76 years old.

• More recently, actor Joseph Sirola—who I remember best from his regular appearances on Bill Bixby’s The Magician as Dominick, an employee at Los Angeles’ Magic Castle nightclub—died in New York City at age 89. The Spy Command reminds us that Sirola “played villains in second-, third- and fourth-season episodes of The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” and “portrayed U.S. spymaster Jonathan Kaye in five episodes of the original Hawaii Five-O series.” According to his IMDb filmography, Sirola’s half-century-long career also included roles on Perry Mason, The Green Hornet, Kolchak: The Night Stalker, Mannix, The Rockford Files, and NYPD Blue. Sirola played the family patriarch on a 1975 NBC-TV comedy called The Montefuscos, and Jack Scalia’s father on the 1989-1990 CBS private eye series Wolf.

• Ex-policeman David Swinson talks with MysteryPeople about Trigger, his third novel starring Frank Marr, “a private detective who is also a drug addict.” And Lauren Wilkinson, author of the new novel American Spy, submits to an interview by Electric Literature.

• Lee Goldberg recalls in CrimeReads how he discovered Ralph Dennis’ underappreciated Hardman series of Atlanta-set private-eye yarns, and how he has brought them back into print for a new audience through his independent publishing company, Brash Books. “The new editions,” writes Goldberg, “all 12 of which will be out before the end of 2019, also include deeply personal, and often very moving, ‘afterword’ essays by some of Ralph’s oldest friends and former students, giving readers a unique perspective on the man and a deeper appreciation of his work. There are also essays by some novelists who love the Hardman books and are almost as addicted to them as I am. I say ‘almost’ because I can safely say none of those writers has it quite as bad as me … or would have gone to the lengths I have to feed it. First, I became a publisher and now I’ve become Ralph Dennis, at least as far as his literary life is concerned.”

• Literary Hub’s Emily Temple cites “10 Specialty Bookshops That Are Definitely Worth a Visit.” I’m surprised to realize that I have patronized half of them. My life seems somehow more complete now …

• And it looks as if plans to turn Erik Larson’s 2003 non-fiction book, The Devil in the White City, into a small-screen series have found new life, with Leonardo DiCaprio and Martin Scorsese signing on to produce the Hulu-TV project. As Variety notes, “DiCaprio acquired the rights [to the novel] nearly a decade ago with plans to adapt it as a film in which he would star,” but the picture never came together, and DiCaprio’s option lapsed. “The Devil in the White City is yet another pricey, long-delayed adaptation to be rescued from development hell,” says the Los Angeles Times. “A series adaptation of The Alienist, also produced by Paramount Television, finally made it to TNT last year, 24 years after the novel was first published.”