Short Subjects

• Lambda Literary, a self-described champion of LGBTQ+ books and their authors, has released its list of finalists for the 2025 Lambda Literary Awards, aka the “Lammys.” There are 26 brackets of contenders, but here are the five titles vying for designation this year as Best LGBTQ+ Mystery:

— Charlotte Illes Is Not a Teacher, by Katie Siegel (Kensington)
— One of Us Knows, by Alyssa Cole (Morrow)
— Rough Pages, by Lev AC Rosen (Tor)
— Rough Trade, by Katrina Carrasco (MCD)
— The Night of Baba Yaga, by Akira Otani (Soho Crime)

All of the winners are expected to be honored during a virtual ceremony on Saturday, October 4.

• I attended only a single summer camp during the years of my youth, a week-long Boy Scout outing that I remember mostly for its mosquitoes and invariably malodorous outhouses. (Believe me, I searched for one that didn’t make my eyes water every time I creaked open its door, but without success!) Other children, however, have apparently had more enjoyable or at least more interesting experiences than my own, which is why there are now sufficient summer-camp mysteries to justify Janet Rudolph compiling their titles in this post. I think that of those works, the only one I’ve tackled is Liz Moore’s The God of the Woods. And if that tale had existed for me to read as a tyke, I never would have gone to camp even once!

• Has the quarterly crime-fiction journal Mysterical-E folded? I just noticed that the last issue available online is dated “Summer 2022.”

• Screenwriter Steven Wright (A Thousand Blows, All the Light We Cannot See, Peaky Blinders) has been recruited to script Amazon’s first James Bond film. This announcement, notes The Spy Command, “follows Amazon MGM hiring Denis Villeneuve in June to direct its first Bond entry. In March, Amazon MGM installed David Heyman and Amy Pascal as the new Bond producers. Amazon gained creative control of the Bond movie franchise early this year from Eon Productions.”

• Meanwhile, The Book Bond brings word that Kim Sherwood’s third and last Double O spy thriller, due for publication (at least in Great Britain so far) in May 2026, will be titled Hurricane Room.

• This item comes from In Reference to Murder:

Golden Age authors Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers (the Lord Peter Wimsey series), and G.K. Chesterton (the Father Brown series) are to be brought to life in a TV series titled The Detection Club from the BBC and BritBox International. Produced by BBC Studios Drama Productions, the show is understood to be taking a “mystery-of-the-week”-style approach with fictional versions of Christie, Sayers, and Chesterton set as the main characters solving crimes each episode. Formed nearly 100 years ago, the elusive and exclusive Detection Club met regularly as its members dined and helped each other with technical aspects of their writing. As well as meeting, they also adhered to [clergyman and writer Ronald] Knox’s Commandments, which instructed that a reader of their books must always be given a fair chance at guessing the guilty party. Casting is said to be underway.

While that write-up makes it sound rather like the Detection Club is a historical relic, it is fact still active, with author Martin Edwards serving as its current president.

• The Stiletto Gumshoe’s C.J. Thomas draws my attention to a fine piece, printed earlier this year in a Montana lifestyle magazine, that he says recalls “how these things called ‘noir’ and ‘hard-boiled’ didn’t begin in the back alleys of New York or the mean streets of L.A., but more as ‘rural noir’ with Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest back in 1929.” You can enjoy that full essay here.

• Did you know Netflix has adapted S.A. Cosby’s 2023 novel, All the Sinners Bleed, as a nine-episode TV series? The show is to begin filming this coming November, with the finished product to debut in 2027.

• And here’s a trailer for Lynley, the new BBC/BritBox adaptation of Elizabeth George’s best-selling Inspector Lynley crime series. Starring Leo Suter and Sofia Barclay, the show is an updated version of the 2001-2008 BBC One drama The Inspector Lynley Mysteries, which featured Nathaniel Parker and Sharon Small. Lynley will premiere on BritBox come Thursday, September 4.