Bullet Points: Winding Down Edition

• Deadline reports that “Madison Wells, Gigi Pritzker’s award-winning, independent entertainment company, has acquired and will develop a feature adaptation of State of Terror, the best-selling novel by former Secretary of State, U.S. Senator and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton and New York Times best-selling novelist Louise Penny. This high-stakes thriller of international intrigue follows novice Secretary of State Ellen Adams, who is unexpectedly brought into the administration by a newly-elected President, her political and personal adversary. Events soon erupt that sweep her into a world of global intrigue and diplomacy where the stakes could not be higher and the potential consequences, both personal and global, could not be greater.” Clinton and Penny have both signed on as executive producers of the picture. (Hat tip to Mystery Fanfare.)

• Adding to recent coverage of Kenneth Branagh’s new film, Death on the Nile, Smithsonian magazine looks back at how Nile author Agatha Christie’s interest in archaeology (no doubt enhanced as a result of her second marriage, to British archaeologist Max Mallowan) influenced not only that 1937 Hercule Poirot novel, but also other of her works.

• Following a two-year, COVID-caused hiatus, CrimeFest will return as an in-person event this coming spring, and has booked a distinguished lineup of guests. Among those will be Ann Cleeves, Andrew Child (aka Andrew Grant), Robert Goddard, and Martin Edwards. Dick Francis has been chosen as this year’s Ghost of Honour. CrimeFest will take place in Bristol, England, from May 12 to 15. More details at the convention’s Web site.

• Meanwhile, Mystery Writers of America has announced that its 2022 Edgar Awards Banquet will also be held in person. The gala affair is scheduled for Thursday, April 28, at the New York Marriott Marquis, beginning at 6:30 p.m. An MWA press release explains that “In compliance with local guidelines, Mystery Writers of America is requiring that all Edgar Awards banquet attendees on April 28th be fully vaccinated.” A list of Edgar nominees can be found here.

• John Powers, the critic-at-large on National Public Radio’s Fresh Air program, has more than a few nice things to say about Soho Syndicate’s reprints of the dozen mysteries Joseph Hansen wrote starring gay death claims investigator Dave Brandstetter. “[E]ven if his books weren’t trailblazing,” Powers contends,

Hansen would still be a terrific mystery writer. He's every bit as good a stylist as Ross Macdonald, with a similarly poetic eye for Southern California's defining blend of the sun-dazzled and the bleak. He populates his books with niftily sketched characters — from chirpy innkeepers and bellicose mechanics to fading movie stars and self-satisfied hippies.

And in Brandstetter, Hansen has created a hero worthy of such predecessors as Chandler's Philip Marlowe and Macdonald's Lew Archer. Smart, tough, witty and honorable, Dave Brandstetter is also too good to be true. But who cares? Hansen's a talented enough storyteller that, book after book, we're happy to walk down the mean streets in his company.

Hansen’s Brandstetter series begins with Fadeout (1970).

• There are many things I appreciate about Paperback Warrior, but as someone who’s always hungry to learn more about the history of crime and detective fiction, I am especially drawn to that blog’s too-infrequent author primers. Past subjects have included Edward S. Aarons, Lionel White, Orrie Hitt, and Jonathan Craig. You should find the whole lot by clicking here.

• Killer Covers today carries the story of a captivating men’s magazine spread featuring a rather ahead-of-her-time female pirate.

• I’ve been watching for more news about Britain’s ITV-TV production, Our House, ever since I first read about it in a January Killing Times preview. Based on Louise Candlish’s 2018 thriller of the same name, this four-part drama stars Tuppence Middleton (Downton Abbey) and Martin Compston (Line of Duty). A new piece from The Killing Times explains the premise: “Fi (Middleton) arrives home one day to find strangers moving into her house. With all her family’s possessions and furniture nowhere to be seen, Fi believes there’s been a huge mistake and insists her home isn’t for sale. With events spiralling beyond her control, we feel her panic rising as she can’t reach estranged husband, Bram (Compston). As she reflects upon the safe space in which she and her family had made a life together, Fi begins to peel back the layers of her relationship and discovers her husband has also disappeared. With her life shattered, she realises the secrets and lies have only just begun, but her husband isn’t the only one with things to hide.” That same Killing Times post includes a trailer for Our House, and says the mini-series should debut in the UK next month. I see no word yet about a U.S. premiere.


(Above) Tuppence Middleton stars in Our House as Fiona Lawson.

• Was Ian Fleming’s James Bond actually “the worst spy in the world?” “Bond’s flashy dress, catchphrase, and need to win at every game he plays make him conspicuous,” writes Frieda Toth in the blog Artistic Licence Renewed, “but nothing for ineptitude compares with Bond’s terrible aliases, both in the books and in the movies. From John Bryce of Live and Let Die to Mark Hazard in The Man with the Golden Gun, Bond’s pseudonyms and personas are a joke, just as meme-worthy as Captain Kirk’s satyriasis. But why? Why does this continue to happen? Why did it EVER happen?”

• Georges Simenon is certainly best known for penning dozens of crime procedurals starring French police detective Jules Maigret. But Andrew Nette says readers would be doing themselves a favor to explore, as well, “his other, somewhat more shadowy body of work, his so-called romans durs or ‘hard novels’: tightly plotted, intensely psychological, often quite slim stand-alone volumes that have so far yielded some of the best noir fiction I can remember reading.”

• Charles Ardai talks about his new comic, Gun Honey.

• There are negative reviews … and then there are just brutal ones. These comments come from The New York Journal of Books’ recent critique of Diablo Mesa, by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child:

As for the plot, it begins slowly and coasts through a lukewarm middle portion before exploding in a violent and bloody climax that seems cribbed from an old Matt Helm novel. Actually, it’s likely that Donald Hamilton would have handled this story idea rather better than Preston and Child have done.

Once readers become fans of certain bestselling authors and their various characters, publishers are confident they’ll consume whatever they release. The fact that Preston and Child continue to dominate the top of the charts each time out is proof that quality work is not necessary for success when you can rely on prolific production and careful adherence to the formula into which fans have already proven willing to invest their time and money.

NYJB’s reviewer concluded by saying, “Diablo Mesa is another contrived thriller that will appeal only to Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child’s loyal and unquestioning fan base.” Ouch!

• An interesting notion: Author Michelle Hillen Klump asks, “Can The Thin Man Serve as a Gateway to Cozy Mysteries?”

• Janet Hutchings, the editor of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, has announced the winners of that publication’s 80th anniversary trivia contest. She provides both the questions and answers in this post.

• And just when I thought the blog Clews, by self-described crime historian Laura James, was certifiably defunct, it has suddenly emerged from the grave! Michigan attorney-author James (The Love Pirate and the Bandit’s Son) launched Clews in April 2005, making it a year older than The Rap Sheet. But she didn’t post anything between November 2014 and September 2021. The longer her quiet persisted, the more convinced I was of its permanence. Yes, in February 2020 CrimeReads posted an article by James about femme fatales, promoting her then-new book, The Beauty Defense, but meanwhile allowed Clews—which she asserted had “earned millions of hits”—to remain fallow. Now, though, she appears to have gotten a second wind, putting up fresh book reviews, plus pieces about true-crime writer Bernard O’Donnell, Abraham Lincoln’s defense of “a damsel in legal distress of her own making,” and much more. Her mention here that she’s finishing work on a new book about a 175-year-old murder mystery may be the motive for her reviving Clews. Let’s hope she doesn’t again abandon that blog once the book sees print.