• “Acknowledging excellence in the field of tie-in writing,” the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers has broadcast the list of nominees for its 2019 Scribe Awards. There are six different categories of contestants, with lots of science fiction represented. The only group that features much crime fiction is “Original Novel – General.” Vying for that commendation are:
— Colt the Outlander: Shadow of Ruin, by Quincy J. Allen
(WordFire Press)
— The Executioner: Dying Art, by Michael A. Black
(Gold Eagle Executioner e-book)
— Killing Town (Mike Hammer), by Mickey Spillane and
Max Allan Collins (Titan)
— Narcos: The Jaguar’s Claw, by Jeff Mariotte
— Tom Clancy’s Line of Sight, by Mike Madden (Putnam)
Winners will be announced during the San Diego ComicCon, July 18-21.
• Meanwhile, the Romance Writers of America has publicized its finalists for this year’s RITA Awards. Among the brackets of contenders is one titled Romantic Suspense, which features these seven works:
— The Bastard’s Bargain, by Katee Robert (Piatkus)
— Before We Were Strangers, by Brenda Novak (Mira)
— Consumed, by J.R. Ward (Gallery)
— Cut and Run, by Mary Burton (Montlake Romance)
— Fearless, by Elizabeth Dyer (Independently published)
— Reckless Honor, by Tonya Burrows (CreateSpace)
— Relentless, by Elizabeth Dyer (Montlake Romance)
You’ll have to wait until this year’s RWA conference (July 24-27), in New York City, to find out which of these books takes the prize.
• Included among this year’s six finalists for the Man Booker International Prize is The Shape of the Ruins (Riverhead), Colombian author Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s “sweeping tale of conspiracy theories, assassinations, and twisted obsessions.”
• Recipients of the 2019 Minnesota Book Awards were announced last weekend. There were nine categories of competitors, but the one of perhaps chief interest to this blog’s readers was Genre Fiction. The winner there was The Voice Inside, by Brian Freeman (Thomas & Mercer). Also nominated were Dreadful Young Ladies and Other Stories, by Kelly Barnhill (Algonquin); Leave No Trace, by Mindy Mejia (Atria); and The Shadows We Hide, by Allen Eskens (Mulholland). Kudos to all the nominees! (Hat tip to Mystery Fanfare.)
• Season 5 of the Amazon TV series Bosch will premiere next week—on Friday, April 19, to be exact. What will this 10-episode season have in store for our favorite Los Angeles police detective? His creator, Michael Connelly, offers clues to the Tampa Bay Times.
• How James Bond influenced the CIA.
• Organizers of 2019’s Mystery Fest Key West (June 28-30) are putting out a last call for entries to their latest Whodunit Mystery Writing Competition. “Candidates wishing to compete,” explains a news release, “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. There is no fee to enter, finalists will be notified by May 1, and will have until May 10 to submit full manuscripts.”
• The Gumshoe Site reports that David Fechheimer, “one of the leading private investigators in America,” died in Redwood City, California, on April 2 “from complications of open-heart surgery.” He was 76 years old. The item goes on to explain that Fechheimer “became a shamus the day after he read Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon. He worked for the Pinkerton Detective Agency and with Hal Lipset. He opened his own office in San Francisco in 1976, and handled cases involving many celebrities such as Kobe Bryant, Angela Davis, John Gotti, Daniel Ellisberg, Timothy McVeigh, [and] Roman Polanski to name just a few. He researched … Hammett’s life for Francis Ford Coppola when the latter was preparing to produce the [1982] movie Hammett, based on the novel of the same title by Joe Gores. He owned a tiny vineyard in Healdsburg, Sonoma County, and named his Cabernet Sauvignon Red Harvest.”
• Don Herron has more to say about Fechheimer here.
• Pulp-fiction authority Andrew Nette brings belated notice that writer Victor J. Banis, “who some have called ‘the godfather of modern popular gay fiction,’ died on February 22, after finally succumbing to cancer.” He was 81 years old and lived in West Virginia. Nette notes that “from 1966 to 1968, [Banis] wrote eight pulp-fiction titles in his [The] Man from C.A.M.P. series, an overtly queer takeoff of the television spy series [The] Man from U.N.C.L.E. The central protagonist of the successful series was the openly gay undercover agent, Jackie Holmes, who did battle with B.U.T.C.H. (Brothers United to Crush Homosexuality). The series helped establish that gay audiences were particularly hungry for stories which portrayed characters in a fun and positive light. In doing so, Banis saw himself as playing a consciously activist role.”
• One more obituary: The Spy Command says that “Noah Keen, a veteran character actor whose career ran from the late 1950s into the 2000s, died last month at 98.” Keen’s film and TV appearances were numerous, ranging from roles in Have Gun—Will Travel, Perry Mason, and Judd, for the Defense to The Name of the Game, The Outsider, Mission: Impossible, Ironside, and The Sopranos.
• Mario Puzo’s The Godfather is now 50 years old!
• I’m pleased to see that two mystery/crime-related movies—the brilliantly moving They Might Be Giants (1971) and Anatomy of a Murder (1959)—made it onto Classic Film & TV Café’s list of “The Five Best George C. Scott Performances.”
• Lee Child was in the television business (under his real name, Jim Grant) for many years before he embarked on his fiction-writing career. So it’s no surprise that he should think himself capable of tackling another small-screen project. The Killing Times reports that Child had proposed to “take his Jack Reacher franchise to a streaming service.” Instead, he will be teaming with Australia-based Dancing Ledge Productions to develop Lee Child: True Crime, an anthology series that “dramatizes the stories of real-life men and women from around the world who have been driven to stand up and put their lives on the line, fighting for justice in the face of great danger.”
• The Killing Times also spreads the news that Company Pictures, the independent UK production company behind such TV favorites as Wolf Hall and Shameless, is hoping to reboot the 1972-1992 series Van der Valk, a Netherlands-set crime drama based on Nicholas Freeling’s succession of novels starring Commissaris Simon "Piet" Van der Valk. British actor Marc Warren will fill the title role.
• Being a big fan of mysteries set in the past, I was immediately attracted to Molly Odintz’s CrimeReads picks of “The Best Historical Fiction of 2019 (So Far).” I wasn’t disappointed by her choices. I’ve already read most of the 14 books mentioned—including Niklas Natt och Dag’s The Wolf and the Watchman, Abir Mukherjee’s Smoke and Ashes, and Guy Bolton’s The Syndicate—and have almost all of the remainder in my ridiculously oversized to-be-read pile. In addition to Odintz’s picks, I’d recommend the following: Blood & Sugar, by Laura Shepherd-Robinson; The Devil Aspect, by Craig Russell; The Unquiet Heart, by Kaite Welsh; and The Mathematical Bridge, by Jim Kelly.
• Another recent CrimeReads piece I enjoyed: Rebecca Rego Barry’s look back at Great Britain’s 18th-century-born Newgate Calendar (subtitled The Malefactors' Bloody Register), “which,” she explains, “collected the most notorious tales of those confined to [London’s] Newgate Prison and subsequently hanged at Tyburn. … Needless to say, The Newgate Calendar was popular with a citizenry that turned a public execution into the equivalent of the Superbowl. At the same time, literacy was increasing among the working class, and cheaper printing methods had helped to create a mass readership. Canny novelists took note of this new market and its interests, sparking an alluring but short-lived genre now referred to as ‘Newgate novels.’ These were stories set in the underworld and based, however loosely, on convicts with lurid or melodramatic biographies.”
• In Reference to Murder brings word that “The CW’s Nancy Drew pilot is giving a nod to the TV history of the iconic character by hiring Pamela Sue Martin, who played the brilliant teen sleuth in the first TV series adaptation of the Nancy Drew books from 1977-79 on ABC. Newcomer Kennedy McMann takes on the title role of the amateur detective, while Martin will play a small-town psychic who offers her talents to help Nancy investigate a murder—and ends up delivering an otherworldly clue that neither of them bargained for.”
• Finally, four author interviews worth noticing: Cara Robertson talks with MysteryPeople about her new non-fiction book, The Trial of Lizzie Borden; Lesa’s Book Critiques fires questions at Catriona McPherson (Scot & Soda); the Amazon Book Review chats with Lydia Fitzpatrick on the matter of Lights All Night Long, her novel about “a Russian exchange student [working] to exonerate the brother left behind, a drug addict who has confessed to murder”; and Paperback Warrior “unmasks” Ralph Hayes, the prolific Michigan writer who, at age 91, is still concocting men's action-adventure novels.
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