Bullet Points: Novedecennial Edition

• Today marks 19 years since The Rap Sheet was launched as a blog separate from January Magazine. I’m not really in the mood to make a big deal of this occasion; I would prefer to reserve that for our 20th-anniversary celebration. But let me share a couple of statistics. November of last year saw the publication of our 9,000th post. Over the five succeeding months, we’ve put up another 124. And as of today, The Rap Sheet has registered 10,084,287 pageviews. Thank you to everyone who has found value in this site over the years!

• In Reference to Murder brings word that “Netflix has ordered a series adaptation of S.A. Cosby’s [2023] novel, All the Sinners Bleed, from the Obamas’ Higher Ground and Amblin Television. The story follows the first Black sheriff in a small Bible Belt county, haunted by his past in the FBI and his devout mother’s untimely death, as he must lead the hunt for a serial killer who has quietly been preying on Black communities in Southern Virginia for years in the name of God. Joe Robert Cole (Black Panther) will adapt and serve as showrunner for the nine-part series.” Sinners placed on many best books of 2023 lists.

• Prolific novelist James Reasoner gives a hearty thumbs-up to the new, 12th issue of Men’s Adventure Quarterly, which is devoted to fictional private eyes. The contents include vintage tales by Michael Avallone, Frank Kane, Walter Kaylin, and G.G. Fickling (represented in these pages by “The Red Hairing,” the only Honey West short story); Reasoner’s own essay about detectives in Western fiction; a survey of new Sherlock Holmes pastiches by Paul Bishop; “plus a feature on early Sixties TV series 77 Sunset Strip and Hawaian Eye, both of which were favorites of mine, especially 77 Sunset Strip,” writes Reasoner. “I never missed an episode back in those days. If you’re the right age, you can hear the show’s theme song in your head right now, can’t you? I miss the Sixties just thinking about all this stuff!” I just bought a copy of the magazine here.

• In CrimeReads, Los Angeles lawyer Bruce Riordan celebrates Ross Macdonald’s 1958 crime novel, The Doomsters, as “a turning point in the history of crime fiction.” He adds: “After six well written, but not quite original, Lew Archer novels, Ross Macdonald was searching for something original. With The Doomsters, he broke away from the influence of Raymond Chandler, the writer who cast a giant shadow over Macdonald and American crime fiction.”

• Author Don Winslow (California Fire and Life, The Dawn Patrol, City in Ruins) has been named as the editor of Mariner Books’ The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2025 anthology.

• This will force me to locate and replace many Rap Sheet links, especially in our regular “Revue of Reviewers” posts: The excellent free review site New York Journal of Books, which debuted in 2010 “to fill the gap left by the newspaper book review sections that have folded in recent years,” just recently folded itself. Publishers Weekly quotes founder Ted Sturtz as blaming Donald Trump’s tariff chaos for his site’s failure. He observes that NYJB “relied on Amazon commissions and Google Adsense for revenue … The wide-ranging tariffs imposed by the Trump administration last month, he explained, ‘transform[ed] consumer behavior so that these revenues entirely collapsed. This was so quick and breathtaking that we in a very short ... time saw our revenues sink from a surplus to a fraction of our costs.’” He stresses: “Our actual undoing was not publishing industry conditions. It was the current tariff war.”

• The Rap Sheet dumped Twitter/X back in January. Now the Chicago Review of Books is doing the same, “because why be part of a crypto-neo-Nazi-hellsphere when we could, just, well, not.” Like this blog, CHIRB has moved its social media activities to Bluesky.

• Hart to Hart’s Stefanie Powers profiled by TV Guide in 1980.

• The British Crime Writers’ Association has announced that it has two new sponsors for its annual Dagger awards.

• And after much hemming and hawing, I have finally made arrangements to attend Bouchercon 2025 in New Orleans. I haven’t been to the Big Easy since the last Bouchercon held there, back in 2016. This time, my good friend and fellow Rap Sheeter Ali Karim will serve as International Fan Guest of Honor, so I could hardly excuse myself from the festivities. See a list of other attendees here.