Four in One

• Sweet Freedom blogger Todd Mason has just posted the winners of the 2021 Shirley Jackson Awards, in half a dozen categories. Those prizes—handed out in-person on October 29, during a ceremony at the Boston Book Festival—celebrate “outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic.” Not to keep you in suspense any longer: Stephen Graham Jones’ My Heart Is a Chainsaw (Saga Press) captured Best Novel honors.

• There are just a few days left now to nominate books, authors, and television programs in the second annual Crime Fiction Lover Awards competition. Polls will close at noon (UK time) on Wednesday, November 2. Learn more here.

• Just in time for Halloween, CrimeReads carries author W. Scott Poole’s account of how, during the mid-20th century, the FBI investigated actor Bela Lugosi—most renowned for his film role as Dracula—for alleged communist sympathies.

• And William Shatner makes a surprise guest appearance (well, sort of) on The Columbophile. In extended excerpts from the new book Boldly Go: Reflections on a Life of Awe and Wonder (Atria), the now 91-year-old actor reflects on his two roles—both times as the killer, naturally—on the TV crime drama Columbo, first in 1976, when that show was still part of the NBC Mystery Movie, and then in 1994, after it was revived as an element of The ABC Mystery Movie. The blog’s anonymous Australian author introduces Shatner’s recollections thusly: “So, how did Mr. Shatner enjoy working with Peter Falk? How does he feel knowing he’s part of a select group of actors who played multiple Columbo killers? And, most pertinently, what did he make of the ludicrous, colour-changing moustache he was sporting in ‘Butterfly in Shades of Grey’? Was he in on the joke, or an innocent victim of a makeup malfunction? Those questions will be answered below …”