Bullet Points: No Shutdown Here Edition

• I mentioned last spring on this page that Raymond Benson, the author of several James Bond continuation novels published between 1997 and 2003, had penned a thrilling adventure for Ian Fleming Publications (IFP) titled The Hook and the Eye, set back in 1952 and centered on ex-CIA op Felix Leiter. A Bond cohort familiar from several of Fleming’s novels, Leiter has become, in Benson’s yarn, a Pinkerton detective tangling with spies in Manhattan and tasked with safely transporting an “impossibly beautiful and impossibly secretive” woman to Texas. Hook was originally intended for release in 10 digital installments, beginning in May, and was then supposed to debut in print in October—this month. So far, however, it seems to be available in book form only for direct purchase from IFP. I don’t see the same edition listed on Amazon in either the United States or the UK, though that online retailer is still satisfying orders for the Kindle version. I asked Benson for an update on this situation. Here’s his reply:

IFP became their own publisher recently and they wanted Hook to be exclusive from them (for the time being). So, yes, right now, while the e-book is on Amazon and other retailer outlets, the print book can only be ordered from IFP. They will likely expand this rollout in the future like the old roadshow movie attractions, slowly offering it on Amazon and such, an audiobook, maybe a U.S. publication, maybe a limited-edition hardcover. It’s all new to them and they’re trying things out, like the e-book serialization that ultimately didn’t work technically (so they released the full e-book at once).

As to the possibility of The Hook and the Eye becoming the initial entry in a whole new Leiter series, Benson answers only, “Not known yet.” That isn’t a “no,” so keep your fingers crossed.

(Above) The full paperback cover of Raymond Benson’s The Hook and the Eye, designed by Thomas Gilbert.

• By the way, Terrance Layhew recently spoke with Benson about The Hook and the Eye for his podcast, Suit Up!

• I missed this news, so thanks to In Reference to Murder for bringing it to my attention. Writes B.V. Lawson: “The winners of the 2025 Lambda Literary Awards (fondly known as the Lammys), established in 1989 to garner national visibility for LGBTQ books, were announced this past weekend. The winner of the Best LBGTQ+ Mystery was Rough Trade by Katrina Carrasco (MCD). The other finalists include: Charlotte Illes is Not a Teacher by Katie Siegel (Kensington); One of Us Knows by Alyssa Cole (William Morrow); Rough Pages by Lev AC Rosen (Tor Publishing Group); and The Night of Baba Yaga by Akira Otani, translated by Sam Bett (Soho Crime).”

• Chicago Review of Books last week announced its shortlist of contenders for the 2025 Chicago Review of Books Awards (what other name did you think they would have?), and among the five fiction rivals is one that might be especially interesting to this blog’s readers: Vanishing Daughters (Thomas & Mercer), by Cynthia Pelayo, a novel of psychological suspense focusing on a Chicago journalist haunted—in more ways than one—by mysteries surrounding her mother’s death and her own hunt for a fiendishly successful serial killer.

• On October 1, Crime Writers of Canada opened the submissions process for its 2026 CWC Awards of Excellence, “celebrating the best in Canadian crime, mystery, and suspense writing.” Eligible for consideration are works published in 2025 by Canadian citizens and permanent residents. There are 10 award categories:

— The Peter Robinson Award for Best Crime Novel ($1,000 prize)
— Best Crime First Novel ($1,000)
— Best Crime Novel Set in Canada ($500)
— The Whodunit Award for Best Traditional Mystery ($500)
— Best Crime Short Story ($200)
— The Best French Language Crime Book ($500)
— Best Juvenile/YA Crime Book ($250)
— The Brass Knuckles Award for Best Non-fiction Crime Book ($300)
— Best Unpublished Crime Novel Manuscript written by an
unpublished author ($500)

Submission deadlines are here. Shortlisted nominees will be publicized next April 24, with the winners to be announced on May 29.

• Meanwhile, writers hoping to contribute articles or reviews to the Winter 2025 edition of Mystery Readers Journal will want to get cracking: the deadline is November 1. This will be the second issue in a row devoted to Northern California mysteries, tying them both in nicely to next year’s Left Coast Crime convention, which is set to take place in San Francisco from February 26 to March 1, 2026.

• Max Allan Collins has been noodling for years with a novel that would embroil his famous series private eye, Nathan Heller, in a 1960s-era investigation involving both labor union leader Jimmy Hoffa and U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. He’s even suggested that such a book might be the last one he writes about Heller. Now, though, Collins says he “might not write it at all,” or might instead pen two more Hellers. He explains the situation in his blog:

I was watching TV and saw Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and
wondered if he had, if not damaged, the Kennedy name, brought it into a kind of doubt. He strikes me as a crank, and a dangerous one; some smart people disagree, but enough people share that view—that as Secretary of Health and Human Services he is a threat to health and human services—that the Robert F. Kennedy name is not something I dare, at the moment, hang a Heller on. It may already have hurt Too Many Bullets [2023], my Heller RFK assassination novel.

I don’t do this lightly. I first asked [my wife] Barb if she agreed that this was a bad time to embark on an RFK novel (the theme was to be RFK/Hoffa, as my previous Kennedy-oriented novels have more than hinted at). She immediately agreed and said, “Write something else.” I called my editor, Charles Ardai, at Hard Case Crime and asked if he thought I should do a different, non-Kennedy novel instead of the one we’d been planning (and that I was contracted to deliver). He was thrilled I was setting that subject aside (for now anyway). I asked my longtime researcher, George Hagenaur, what he thought. He, too, said it was a bad time to do a Kennedy book.

So. I am instead going to write [an early 1970s] Watergate novel, which was already one of two Heller novels I was considering doing, for quite a while now. It seems like a good time to deal with a cover-up.

Indeed, revisiting the paranoia and drive for power that led to the 1972 burglary of Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington, D.C.’s Watergate complex and Republican President Richard M. Nixon’s subsequent concealment of that crime, would draw obvious parallels to Donald Trump’s paranoia, corruption, and autocratic scheming. Personally, I prefer to see Collins’ Heller tackling older cases (the 1934 murder of bank robber John Dillinger, the 1937 disappearance of aviatrix Amelia Earhart, Los Angeles’ 1947 Black Dahlia murder, etc.), and Too Many Bullets did imply that an RFK/Hoffa story was next. Yet any new Heller novel is better than none.

• With The Last Death of the Year, her sixth Hercule Poirot novel, coming out on both sides of the Atlantic later this month, British author-poet Sophie Hannah talks to CrimeReads “about how she writes the Poirot novels, the taunting challenge at the beginning of this new novel, and what crime fiction and poetry have in common.”

• And the Web site Spybrary mentions that John le Carré’s fourth son, who pens fiction as “Nick Harkaway,” is encouraging other writers to “continue the adventures of his father’s famed spymaster George Smiley, opening the way for a potential new wave of espionage novels. Harkaway, who has already published one continuation novel, Karla’s Choice, and has another due next year, said the morally ambiguous world created by le Carré was ‘richer and wider than the original books ever had a chance to show.’ He urged writers to enter the Smiley universe ‘with due deference and due fearlessness.’”

• We’ve known for some while that a spin-off from Reacher, the Amazon Prime TV series based on Lee Child’s Jack Reacher novels, was in the works and that its protagonist would be Frances Neagley (played by Maria Sten), once a member of Reacher’s army special-investigations unit and now a partner with a Chicago private security firm. But not until the author was interviewed by Shots had we heard a recent update on that program’s development. Child revealed that Season 4 of Reacher, based on his 2009 novel, Gone Tomorrow, “is almost done … and the Neagley spin-off is almost through post-production.” As to Neagley’s Season 1 plot, Wikipedia says it will find the character “seek[ing] the truth after an old friend dies in a suspicious accident.”

• Since we’re talking TV, note that Season 2 of Karen Pirie, the ITV show based on Val McDermid’s now eight books about a young Scottish police investigator, will have its U.S. premiere on BritBox come Thursday, October 2. This new season will comprise three 90-minute episodes and is adapted from the second of McDermid’s Pirie tales, A Darker Domain. Mystery Fanfare provides a trailer.

• Lauren Lyle, who plays Karen Pirie, also headlines The Ridge, a six-part drama coming to BBC Scotland and Sky Open on Tuesday, October 21. The Killing Times explains that The Ridge “sees Lyle in the lead role of Mia, who is fleeing addiction and leaving behind a professional life in tatters in Scotland. She accepts a wedding invitation from her estranged sister in New Zealand—only to find the would-be-bride dead upon arrival. Caught up in grief and pulled by a dark attraction to her late-sister’s fiancé Ewan, played by New Zealand star Jay Ryan, Mia soon finds that familiarity among a small community breeds secrets and tensions, endangering the brittle fabric of the town itself.”

• Man From U.N.C.L.E. fans, pay attention! Turner Classic Movies (TCM) has scheduled eight telefilms, all edited from that 1964-1968 TV series but frequently boasting extra footage, to show back to back on Monday, October 13. Click here to learn more.

• One hundred fifty years after Edgar Allan Poe was reburied in Baltimore, Ed Simon considers his legacy, his interest in premature burials, and his Americanism in this splendid essay for Literary Hub.

• Included among Columbia University linguist John McWhorter’s choices of “10 Old Television Series Every Kid Needs to Watch”—prepared partly with his “tween daughters” in mind—is CBS’s Mannix (1967-1975). “Weird choice, I know,” he remarks in The New York Times. “But my girls should know the conventions of the once ubiquitous hourlong private-eye genre, including the way it reduced female characters to just dolls. I found that weird even when I was a kid, and I want my girls to see what we have gotten at least partly beyond. Plus, the look and sound of Mannix were a delight. The fashions, sets and even jazzy three-quarter waltz time theme song are groovy. Especially after the first season, when [Joe] Mannix has left a detective agency and goes it alone, the episodes are pleasingly interchangeable; choose the one with your favorite guest star.”

• “Why Do Priests and Vicars Make Perfect Detectives?” asks a headline in the TV-oriented blog The Killing Times. Editor Paul Hirons submits that it’s because mystery-solving clergy—whether G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown, Sidney Chambers in Grantchester, or Daniel Clement in Murder Before Evensong—“offer not just the satisfaction of seeing a puzzle solved, but a meditation on what it means to be good, or to fall short. The crimes may change, but the questions of conscience, guilt and grace remain timeless.”

• We have a cover already for Hurricane Room, Kim Sherwood’s third and final Double O novel. Its tagline is certainly suggestive: “James Bond Is Alive.” Hurricane Room is being readied for release in the States and UK next May.

• Whenever I order something online from Blackwell’s Books in England (as I do rather frequently), I am impressed by an incidental legal notation at the bottom of its Web pages that reads, “©1879-2025 Blackwell’s.” In an era when bookshops struggle to stay afloat, you have to love an operation that’s been around for 146 years!

• Finally, let us wish a tardy but justly appreciative farewell to Ann Granger, the Portsmouth, England-born author of more than three dozen books in four different mystery series (her first being 1991’s Say It With Poison). She was 86 years old at the time of her death on September 7. An obituary in The Daily Telegraph observes that “Ann Granger’s mysteries were popular with British readers, but she secured her largest readership abroad, feeding the voracious global appetite for the gentle English style of violent crime. Translated into 10 languages, her novels were especially popular in Germany—where she sold millions of copies, with some 30 of her books entering the top-five bestseller list—and the United States. “The village mystery plot should be ingenious, the style witty, the setting picturesque and the characters amusingly idiosyncratic,” the New York Times Book Review declared in 1995. “Ann Granger knows the drill so well she could write a manual.” According to the Web site Fantastic Fiction, she has one further entry—currently untitled—in her series starring Victorian police inspector Ben Ross that’s still in the publishing pipeline.