Bullet Points: Long Overdue Edition

During the four days I spent in San Francisco this last February, attending the latest Left Coast Crime convention, more than one fellow attendee came up to me to say how much they like my periodic, multiple-subject “Bullet Points” posts. While that gladdened my heart, it also reminded me of how long it had been since I’d produced such a compilation. I think the last one went up in October, which in these tense, turbulent times seems like a lifetime ago.

With a few free hours on my hands today, I went trolling through my computer bookmarks to find new subjects worth sharing.

• Well, what do you know: In Reference to Murder reports that the American author who, since 2013, has published best-selling psychological thrillers (such as The Housemaid, The Tenant, and The Divorce) under the name Freida McFadden has finally revealed her true identity. She is “in reality Sara Cohen, a doctor who treats brain disorders and only created the pseudonym because she didn’t want her writing career to conflict with her hospital job. ‘My whole goal was to keep it a secret until I was [ready to] step back from my doctor job, so it wouldn’t be like everyone I work with suddenly knew and it compromised my ability to do my job,’ McFadden says. In late 2023, she stopped working full-time.” But even her nom de plume is rooted in the medical profession; Cohen told the BBC that “She chose the name Freida as a medical in-joke—after a hospital training registry, the Fellowship and Residency Electronic Interactive Database.”

• April 1 marked the 28th anniversary of Kevin Burton Smith launching that essential online crime-fiction resource, The Thrilling Detective Web Site. His page went live on that date back in 1998! Congratulations to my old friend Kevin for sticking with this project for so long and growing it so expertly.

• Speaking of milestones, it was half a century ago this year—on September 22, 1976, to be precise—that the hour-long “jiggle TV” crime drama Charlie’s Angels debuted on America’s ABC network. In early commemoration of that fact, three of the show’s stars, Kate Jackson, Jaclyn Smith, and Cheryl Ladd, “reunited” earlier this week at PaleyFest in Los Angeles (“an annual television festival hosted by the Paley Center”). According to the Associated Press, “They were greeted with a standing ovation and whoops and cheers from an audience at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood.” Smith, now 80 years old (!), may have delivered the occasion’s best line: “I knew the show was different, special and unique. Three women chasing danger instead of getting rescued.” Charlie’s Angels aired for five seasons and was a pop-culture hit (despite talk of it undermining feminism), but underwent several cast changes over time, the first of those coming in 1977, when Fawcett left amid a contract dispute. She was replaced by Ladd.

• London’s two-day Capital Crime festival has issued its full program of 2026 events, which are set to kick off at the Leonardo Royal Hotel on Thursday, June 18. Among the headliners will be authors Elly Griffiths, Jeffrey Archer, Jane Harper, and Sophie Hannah, with Irish comedian and actor Ardal O’Hanlon (formerly of Death in Paradise) also participating. An overview of events can be found here. Winners of the annual Fingerprint Awards, celebrating the foremost crime and thriller fiction in more than half a dozen categories, will be honored in a special ceremony on the 18th.

• Erle Stanley Gardner’s The D.A. Calls It Murder (1937)—the first of his legal mysteries starring small-town California district attorney Douglas Selby—was reissued last summer through Otto Penzler’s American Mystery Classics imprint. What I hadn’t realized until recently, however, was that publisher Open Road Integrated Media has also returned to print seven of the eight other entries in the Selby line. Which is good news! As I wrote in CrimeReads, “While those stories never enjoyed the same level of reader enthusiasm Perry Mason’s escapades did, and were neither as humorous nor as briskly paced as another series Gardner launched in 1939, built around mismatched L.A. gumshoes Bertha Cool and Donald Lam, they certainly offered plenty in the way of knotty plots, ill-starred suspects, and razzle-dazzle legal shenanigans.” Click here for more about those paperbacks.

• By the way, the remaining Selby novel, 1948’s The D.A. Takes a Chance, was last reprinted in 2014 by The Murder Room, an imprint of UK publisher Orion. Although The Murder Room is evidently now defunct, Open Road hasn’t yet added it to its catalogue. Maybe soon?

• There seems be no end of television-related news lately, beginning with word that the ITV and BritBox “reimaginging” of Dalziel and Pascoe has begun filming in the North of England. This sex-switching update of characters born in novels by Reginald Hill—and made additionally famous in a 1996-2007 BBC One series—finds grumpy, intransigent, and very politically incorrect Detective Superintendent Andy Dalziel (played in the original show by Warren Clarke) being transformed into Detective Inspector Andrea Dalziel and portrayed by Kerry Godliman, while Dalziel’s more forward-thinking police partner, DI Peter Pascoe (Colin Buchanan) becomes Detective Sergeant Paige Pascoe, brought to the small screen by Nina Singh. The opening season of this new crime drama will comprise six episodes; there’s no official debut date at present. Jon Farrar, executive vice president of programming, BritBox, is quoted in Variety as assuring fans of the earlier production that this one will hew to familiar themes: “Dalziel and Pascoe has always been about friction, intellect, and the uneasy bond of opposites, forged in pursuit of truth. Dalziel and Pascoe’s chemistry, wit, and moral clarity perfectly complement this richly layered mystery. It’s timeless crime storytelling that not only honours but sharpens its legacy.” I look forward to judging for myself.

• For all of those people who, like me, watched and enjoyed the slow-burning “cat-and-mouse thriller” The Game, and thought its ambiguous but not unsatisfying ending offered zero chance of a sequel … well, what the hell do we know? Even the Web site TVGuide.co.uk concedes this is “rather surprising” news; Channel 5 thrillers are usually one-season wonders, “self-contained nuggets of deliciously daft drama” (e.g., The Au Pair and The Rumour). But The Game, which had its UK airing in 2025 and found Jason Watkins (McDonald & Dodds) playing Huw Miller, a recently retired police detective who becomes convinced that his suave new neighbor, Patrick Harbottle (Grantchester’s Robson Green), is the repeat killer he’s long pursued, “left viewers wanting more,” says TVGuide.co.uk. At the close of Series 1, Patrick was being arrested and Huw was seriously injured. The follow-up is set a year on. It sees Huw having survived and thinking himself free of the psychological grip Patrick held him in. “Retreating with his wife, Alice (Sunetra Sarker), to an isolated house by the sea,” The Killing Times explains, “Huw is determined to rebuild a quiet life, far from the violence that nearly destroyed them. But peace, he soon realises, is an illusion.” Channel 5 says The Game will return in 2027.

• Robson Green is much in demand. The Killing Times reports that, with his work done on Grantchester’s 11th and final season (set to premiere on PBS Masterpiece come June 14), he will assume one of the leading roles in an eight-part BBC serial, The Northumbria Mysteries.

Set against the sweeping Northumberland coastline and its surrounding market towns, the series centres on an unlikely crime-solving duo.

Green will star as Joe Ruby, a jack-of-all-trades whose life has been shaped by mistakes, regrets and missed opportunities, alongside Oxford-educated DI Rose O’Connell (casting to be announced), a rarefied intellectual, a deep thinker with a brilliant mind and an ice-cool disposition. In a classic odd-couple pairing, Joe and Rose combine their talents as they frustrate, confound, and ultimately surprise one another while unravelling a series of compelling crime mysteries.

• Something I should have mentioned long ago: HBO-TV has ordered an eight-episode drama based on Adrian McKinty’s best-selling 2019 child-abduction novel, The Chain. Behind this project is Damon Lindelof, who previously gave us Lost and The Leftovers, and was once a writer on Nash Bridges and Crossing Jordan. As The Wrap recalls, Irish author McKinty’s chilling tale “follows Rachel, a divorcée who is undergoing treatment for cancer, who gets a call that her daughter, Kylie, has been kidnapped and is now part of The Chain. To get Kylie back, she must kidnap another child after paying a ransom. Kylie will be released when the parents of the child Rachel has kidnapped take yet another child and continue the chain.” The Wrap notes, however, that “Lindelof is said to be expanding the mythology of McKinty’s award-winning thriller.”

• Blogger Lou Armagno points me toward a piece in Variety that’s likely to delight fans of Earl Derr Biggers’ renowned Charlie Chan. It says actor Tzi Ma (Mulan, Kung Fu) will executive produce and headline a possible new Canadian Chan TV series reimagining Biggers’ Chinese-American Honolulu policeman as a Hong Kong immigrant to Vancouver, British Columbia, “who, after retiring from the Vancouver police department in frustration, quietly launches a private investigation agency, taking on cases for the city’s overlooked and forgotten.”

• Meanwhile, Stranger Things’ Maya Hawke has signed up to play a criminal investigator in Netflix’s adaptation of Liz Moore’s 2024 hit novel, The God of the Woods. … Actor-writer Stephen Fry will star as a quirky but brilliant former MI6 agent in a forthcoming Fox-TV show called The Interrogator. … See-Saw films, the production company behind Slow Horses, has acquired the rights to develop a fresh TV series from Jonathan Gash’s novels about a British antiques dealer-cum-sleuth known only as Lovejoy—books that were already the source material for a 1986-1984 BBC1 comedy-drama featuring Ian McShane. … Filming is underway on the sophomore season of Lynley, based on Elizabeth George’s Inspector Lynley yarns. … And Murder, She Wrote, a Universal Pictures film inspired by the 1984-1996 CBS-TV series starring Angela Lansbury as a mystery writer and amateur crime-solver, is slated to reach theaters just in time for Christmas, 2027. Jamie Lee Curtis will play Fletcher in this version.

• My other blog, Killer Covers, returns from a too-long hiatus with proof that there are simply too many crime, mystery, and thriller novels fronted by silhouettes of people in windows.

• We still await any information regarding the next James Bond feature film (now under the control of Amazon). But in the meantime, we can look forward to a new Bond novel for adults. Titled King Zero, it’s by Charlie Higson, the author of a half a dozen Young Bond yarns, as well as the 2023 007 adventure, On His Majesty’s Secret Service. Shotsmag Confidential provides this plot précis:

Beginning with the murder of an agent in Saudi Arabia by a weapon never before seen by the Secret Service and spanning the globe in an epic race against time to avert global catastrophe, the novel brings the literary Bond squarely into the twenty-first century, where the old world that made him is crumbling and a terrifying new order emerges while a dangerous villain—the most distinctive since Goldfinger –moves in the shadows. Higson explores themes of power, technology, and international tensions over resources in an extraordinarily timely story.

UK publisher Michael Joseph has promised to deliver King Zero to bookshops on the other side of the pond by September 24.

• Wow, a Kickstarter campaign to create action figures based on monster-hunting reporter Carl Kolchak and other characters featured in two 1970s teleflicks (The Night Stalker and The Night Strangler) and a subsequent TV series collected way more money than was sought! I guess old Carl hasn’t been forgotten, after all.

• Finally, this CrimeReads piece by writer and artist Frank Ladd, comparing the oeuvres of American private eye novelists Ross Macdonald and Raymond Chandler, deserves attention from fans of both. He concludes that “In a way, Macdonald is writing moral ghost stories. The present is haunted by the past, and the novel becomes a kind of exorcism. Chandler is writing moral fever dreams, hallucinatory journeys through corruption. There is no past worth redeeming.”

Adrian McKinty’s Forgotten Early Works

(Editor’s note: This is the third Rap Sheet submission by Northern California resident Peter Handel, who has reviewed and written about crime fiction for the San Francisco Chronicle, the Portland Oregonian, Pages Magazine, Mystery Readers International, and CrimeReads. He previously appraised Peter Swanson’s The Christmas Guest.)

As an inveterate used bookstore browser, and a regular patron of ThriftBooks, I’ve noticed that while Northern Irish author Adrian McKinty has become an established, and now increasingly mainstream novelist (having hit it big with both The Chain and The Island), some of his earlier releases aren’t often found in the usual places. His young-adult series, the Lighthouse Trilogy, is rarely seen, as is his debut work from 1997, Orange Rhymes With Everything.

Much more attention is paid to the standalones mentioned above, as well as to McKinty’s superb series starring Detective Sergeant (later Detective Inspector) Sean Duffy, set largely during “The Troubles” in 1980s Northern Ireland. The latest of the Duffy novels, which takes place in the early ’90s, is titled The Detective Up Late. It came out earlier this year.

The following essay looks at four early McKinty books, which one seldom sees even in a well-stocked used store, or online.

* * *

2009’s Fifty Grand is the rousing story of a Cuban cop (!), told in a first-person narrative by one Detective Mercado, straight from Havana. She’s entered the United States covertly with a small group of unauthorized aliens, lead by a “mule,” but things don’t go so smoothly once they get across the border. Mercado is headed for the state of Colorado, where she hopes to find out who killed her defector father in a hit-and-run accident. And why was he posing as a Mexican pest controller in a rich Hollywood actors’ enclave called Fairview, anyway?

Back to that border crossing, though. A group of men—predators—determine to rob the “illegals” while they are in the middle of nowhere. Fortunately, Mercado knows how to fight. One of the predators seemingly overpowers her and plans to rape her, but when he puts down his knife to take his pants off, she leaps to save herself.

His tossed his cartoon-covered boxers and when they were gone he grinned and reached for the knife.

The knife that wasn’t there.

“Huh?” he said.

Watching his brain tick over was like watching a dinosaur step on volcanic glass. Confusion showed between his eyes and before he could say or do anything his own treasonous hunting knife slashed him across the belly.

Maroon venous blood, stomach fluids, coffee. A deep laceration, nothing punctured, but enough to sear his nerve endings and get his attention. He reacted faster than I was expecting. His fist hammered into the ground a few centimeters from my swerving head. I slashed at his face and the serrated blade opened his cheek like a sushi knife into yellowtail.

The situation gets worse, much worse in fact, and our idiotic wannabe rapist is further sliced and diced, until “blood, piss, [and] one of his testicles [rolled] onto the ground.”

Once Mercado reaches the resort town of Fairview, she is forced to acquiesce to a local “boss” and becomes a faceless maid for a service that exploits illegals. The job at least allows her to meet various suspects her journalist brother, Ricky, had sussed out during his earlier mission to identify their father’s killer.

As she surreptitiously probes her few leads, she encounters B-list Hollywood players, fellow illegals scuffling for work, and a cast that would not be complete without a sadistic sheriff and his lackey deputy.

Sheriff Briggs runs the area’s illicit “trade,” and when one of his dealers oversteps the line, he’s beaten with a nightstick, then humiliatingly dressed down. “Our deal,” Briggs declares, “was for cocaine from Mexico and you’ve been dealing ice and meth and pot, bringing it in from fucking Canada. Who do you think you are, amigo? Where do you think you are? Nothing escapes me ... Nothing. I know everything that goes on in this town. Everything you or anybody else tries to do, I fucking know it. Never forget that.” As you would imagine, both “law-enforcement” officials do get theirs in the end.

Fifty Grand is an unusual thriller, and the Cuba-set segments that open and close this novel add much to the arc of its story.

In the noirish Falling Glass (2011), McKinty’s protagonist is an “enforcer” named Killian, someone who has done dirty work for other white-collar criminals, those who like to keep their hands as clean as possible. Here, he’s offered a half-million dollars to take on one last job: Find the missing, often drug-addled ex-wife and two daughters of a wealthy, powerful, and politically connected Irish businessman, Richard Coulter. Included in the mix of quasi-mobsters is Michael Forsythe, who appeared in three previous McKinty novels, beginning with 2003’s Dead I Well May Be. It is Forsythe who becomes part of what is the novel’s key flaw.

Falling Glass is an engrossing but trope-driven story centered around an opportunity to win redemption after an often-ugly past. Killian does indeed find the missing ex, Rachel, as well as her two young children. And, yes, Rachel and Killian fall in love, a love that can’t last. But leave it to McKinty to keep the plot moving at breakneck speed, much of its action taking place in a richly depicted rural Irish setting.

The unexpected fugitives are forced to hide out when Killian learns the reason Rachel had absconded with the kids. That reason isn’t a particularly revelatory shock, however.

A nice twist in the story is Killian’s personal background—he’s “Pavee” or a “tinker.” When the four absconders need a safe place to stay, it’s a tinker camp of caravans, quickly moveable, yet well hidden.

Regular readers of McKinty’s fiction know of his (at times almost excruciating) propensity for having his characters mull, and mull, concepts and beliefs from a wide range of philosophers and archetypal mythological stories. As a graduate of Oxford with a degree in philosophy, the author does indeed know his Schopenhauers, his Irish folklore, and his famous architects—Le Corbusier, anyone?

In this tale, Killian comes across a book about that famous Swiss-French architect, and as he thumbs through it, he begins to … mull. “He didn’t like Le Corbusier,” we’re told. “Le Corbusier didn’t understand human nature. Humans were biophilic. Half a million years of living on the savannah was bound to select for adaptations linked to open plains, grasslands. In his concrete dreamscapes Le Corbusier didn’t allow for any kind of spiritual longing for vistas, for greenery, for other mammal species, for space. Like other twentieth-century social engineers, Corbusier wanted to remake man in his own image.”

And now we return to our regular programming ...

Falling Glass offers some spectacular set-pieces, derring-do escapes, and an exceptionally grisly scene with some chainsaw, uh, human sculpting. No one writes killing like McKinty does. But then there are those disappointing final few pages that feel anticlimactic—for this reader, one of his few missteps.

* * *

Besides his YA Lighthouse Trilogy, in 2011 McKinty published Deviant. With a wonderfully unnerving cover that belies its made-for-teens content, this story, set in Colorado Springs, Colorado, begins with an unknown person in an isolated, venerated Native American setting, preparing to do away with a stray cat in ritualistic fashion. “He poked the bag with his finger,” McKinty writes, “and the cat thrashed weakly against the sides. There was a little fight left in it, but not much.” Just as he’s about to stab the cat and skin it, “He imagined the deliciously pitiful yell … the light dying from the cat’s eyes, the smell of fear and intestinal gases … his spine tingled, his attention wandered, his grip slackened, the cat seized its opportunity.” It dashes off, leaving its would-be slayer behind, stung by his failure.

Cut now to teenager Danny Lopez, who has just arrived in Colorado Springs from Las Vegas with his Native mother, Juanita, and a stepfather he loathes. Mom has taken an important job managing a new casino, and Danny will be attending a specialized school, where the students and teachers wear white gloves, and there is no talking on campus except by the instructors in class.

This story supplies teenage lust—unrequited, of course; a mega-church pretty much everyone in the city attends; a creepy school principal; and a long boulevard of various prisons—keep that economy humming. Amid it all, Danny feels like a fish out of a Vegas fountain.

As word ricochets through Colorado Springs about missing felines, and cats found dead, Danny and a group of his fellow students from the school resolve to find out what’s going on.

Some of the dialogue here feels dated and clunky, but as a former high school teacher himself, McKinty understands the social milieu well. There’s good suspense in these pages, and enjoyable characters abound; but the solution to the mystery at hand is fairly easy to guess. Deviant is ultimately best read as a parable of religious extremism. Set in a hotbed of evangelical true believers, the unthinking allegiance to a rigid conformism is the real terror in the tale.

McKinty’s most unusual novel is surely 2014’s The Sun Is God. Taking place in a German-colonized part of New Guinea, circa 1906, the story is based on largely true events. A former British military policeman, Will Pryor, is tasked with visiting a cult-like island community inhabited by a small group of Germans. A man has died there, ostensibly from malaria, but an autopsy on the mainland finds evidence of his having drowned. It’s up to Will to figure out what really happened.

“They call themselves the Sonnenoden,” a German emissary, Herr Kessler, says. “Sun Worshippers. They believe that nudity and the eating of coconuts will give them immortality.”

“Coconuts?” exclaims Will.

“The fruit that grows closest to the sun. [The cult’s leader, August Englehardt] believes that worshiping the sun and eating only coconuts purifies the body of ‘the foul pollutants and excesses of modern twentieth-century life.’ Free from these toxins apparently humans can live an unlimited lifespan in paradise. … They call themselves Cocovores, as the coconut is considered to be the only pure food.”

In a 2014 Irish Times interview with Declan Burke, McKinty talked about why he undertook such an offbeat historical novel. “Mostly it was because I was so excited by the story,” said McKinty. “It was a murder case that took place in a German nudist religious cult—and no one has told this story? But, to be honest, I was a bit fed up about reading background material about Northern Ireland in the 1980s, because you know what they’re all going to say. And it was really fun to look at another part of the world, at a different time. In The Sun Is God Will Prior's previous experience of horrific violence has dulled his humanity to the point where he is nowhere as smart, noble or interested in justice as the conventional detective in a crime novel should be.

“One of the things I liked about Will Prior—and this probably won’t be popular at all—is that he doesn’t actually solve the crime,” McKinty added. “He gets it all wrong. We’ve seen that kind of thing before, many times, but it’s always done for comedic effect. But I thought, what about doing it when it’s not for comedic effect? He’s just wrong. Even today, nobody knows the truth about Kabakon Island. I’ve done a lot of research into it, and no one actually knows the answer. It probably was a murder, but no one knows for sure, or who did it, or why. You can only speculate on what happened.” (By the way, that Irish Times piece features a blurry photo of the real Englehardt.)

The first third of The Sun Is God is rather pokey, but once Will arrives on the island, the plot thickens like the heroin-spiked arak the cult followers enjoy—and which certainly keeps them docilely stoned. “From Bayer,” says an islander. “It is a kind of morphine but without morphine’s unfortunate addictive qualities. A remarkable medicine.”

“After a couple pints of this joy-juice,” Will observes, “I’m surprised anyone can walk to their huts.”

In addition to Englehardt, we are also given here another real-life figure, young travel writer Bessie Pullen-Burry. She accompanies Will and a German officer, Klaus Kessler, to the community. She goes all in with the cultists until she sees through the façade of sun and nudity, and plays a key role in the exhilarating finale.

Well worth its occasional slog, The Sun Is God remains the quirkiest book McKinty has given his readers so far.

Hulu Books a Holiday from Hell

The Island, the latest novel from Northern Irish writer Adrian McKinty, won’t even reach bookstores until mid-May, but it has already been lined up for TV adaptation. This news comes from Deadline:

Hulu has acquired the rights to develop Adrian McKinty’s upcoming novel The Island as a limited series. McKinty will executive produce with Shane Salerno and The Story Factory. The author’s previous novel, The Chain, was acquired by Universal and Working Title for Edgar Wright to direct. Wright is rewriting the Jane Goldman script. No numbers were forthcoming on the deal for The Island, but sources said that if the series goes, the author’s deal will exceed the $1.5 million that Universal paid for The Chain. Sasha Silver, head of drama series, was responsible for bringing The Island into Hulu.

The Island is described as an intense thriller that tells the story of a family trip that turns into a living nightmare. After a tragic accident, a young wife with her new husband and his two children find themselves being hunted by locals in harsh bushland. Her husband doesn’t really believe in her, the kids don’t trust her and the locals want to kill her. But Heather has been underestimated most of her life and she knows that she is capable of bringing this family together, becoming the mother her children need, even if it means doing terrible things to keep them all alive. Hulu believes the lead female role (the mother) will attract a major star.

We can probably expect more news on this front soon.

Champions Among Champions

(Editor’s note: The following article comes from Fraser Massey, a freelance journalist living in East London​, England, who has contributed work in the past to British periodicals such as The Radio Times, Now, and The Times of London. His unpublished first novel, Whitechapel Messiah, was shortlisted last year in the “New Voices” category at London’s Capital Crime Festival. He’s currently preparing to submit that manuscript to publishers.)

The 2020 awards season will be remembered for being like no other that came before. This has been a year when winning crime-fictionists couldn’t even receive their prizes in person, but instead had to make do with hearing their names read out during online ceremonies.

Despite the problems presented by the COVID-19 pandemic, most—though not all—of the regular annual awards presentations for crime, mystery, and thriller novels went ahead in some fashion. A survey of 12 different groups or organizations known for offering yearly commendations in this genre shows a number of shared judgments on new releases, but also plenty of diversity in their other choices.

Between them, the Agatha Awards, the Anthonys, the Barrys, the Capital Crime/Amazon Publishing Readers’ Awards, the Crime Writers’ Association Daggers, the International Thriller Writers (ITW) Awards, the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, the Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction, the Macavitys, the Shamus Awards, the Strand Magazine Critics Awards, and the Theakston Old Peculiar Crime Novel Awards assigned prizes to 31 different authors in 39 categories, with a total of 146 titles receiving nominations.

The big winner in 2020 turned out to be Northern Ireland-born, Australia-based thriller writer Adrian McKinty, whose ingeniously coercive tale about American child-snatchers, The Chain, picked up both the ITW Thriller Award for Best Hardcover Novel and the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year prize in July, then collected the Macavity Award for Best Mystery Novel and the Barry Award for Best Thriller in October.

McKinty is one of four male authors to make the top-10 list of most wins and nominations at award ceremonies this year.

Some of the best-known contributors to modern crime fiction found their latest books in contention among various prize juries over the last 12 months. They include David Baldacci (One Good Deed), Stephen King (If It Bleeds), Anthony Horowitz (The Sentence Is Death), and Ann Cleeves, whose first Detective Matthew Venn novel, The Long Call, captured the Agatha Award for Best Contemporary Novel in May.

However, it was Korean-American author Steph Cha who kicked off the 2020 awards season back in mid-April, when her fourth novel, Your House Will Pay, won this year’s L.A. Times Book Prize in the Mystery/Thriller category. She followed that by scoring nominations at five other awards ceremonies.

Spare a thought, too, for Lauren Wilkinson, whose debut novel, the Cold War thriller American Spy, was selected by The New York Times as one of its “100 Notable Books of 2019” and went on to score five nominations without her receiving a single winner’s trophy in the post to place upon her mantelpiece. Do people still have mantelpieces?

Special mention deserves to be made of the impressively prolific Max Allan Collins and Denise Mina, who each managed to collect nominations for two separate titles (Collins for Killing Quarry and Girl Most Likely, Mina for The Less Dead and Conviction), yet were shut out of winners circles this year.

Finally, congratulations are in order for the Capital Crime Festival, held last month in London, which managed to put forth what may have been the most diverse lists of contenders. Their judges nominated 26 different print titles, the majority of them neglected by folks judging other crime-fiction competitions.

The following top-10 list of this year’s acclaimed crime, mystery, and thriller works was created for The Rap Sheet using a points system that credits wins, commendations, nominations, and the numbers of awards ceremonies at which each title was recognized.*

1. The Chain, by Adrian McKinty (Mulholland [U.S.], Orion [UK])
2. Miracle Creek, by Angie Kim (Sarah Crichton [U.S.],
Hodder & Stoughton [UK])
3. One Night Gone, by Tara Laskowski (Graydon House)
4. Death in the East, by Abir Mukherjee (Vintage [U.S.],
Harvill Secker [UK])
5. Your House Will Pay, by Steph Cha (Ecco [U.S.],
Faber and Faber [UK])
6. The Lost Man, by Jane Harper (Flatiron [U.S.],
Little, Brown [UK])
7. American Spy, by Lauren Wilkinson (Random House [U.S.] Dialogue [UK])
8. The Murder List, by Hank Phillippi Ryan (Forge)
9. November Road, by Lou Berney (Morrow [U.S.], Harper [UK])
10. The Sentence Is Death, by Anthony Horowitz (Harper Perennial [U.S.], Harper [UK])

Bubbling just under this list: My Lovely Wife, by Samantha Downing (Penguin [U.S], Michael Joseph [UK]); Lady in the Lake, by Laura Lippman (Morrow [U.S.], Faber and Faber [UK]); The Godmother, by Hannelore Cayre, (ECW [U.S.], Old Street [UK]); Charity’s Burden, by Edith Maxwell (Midnight Ink); Good Girl, Bad Girl, by Michael Robotham (Simon & Schuster [U.S.] Sphere [UK]); and The Secrets We Kept, by Lara Prescott (Vintage [U.S.], Cornerstone UK]).

* A note about list placements: The points system was devised to favor prize winners and books that received commendations over others that received multiple nominations but no awards. However, across-the-board recognition at a number of ceremonies was still reflected in the final calculations. Outright winners were allotted 25 points for each prize, commendations scored 23 points, and nominations (books that didn’t win) received 10 points apiece. Titles were given an additional two points for every ceremony where they were nominated.

Telegraphing Their Intentions

Britain’s Telegraph newspaper has recently been rife with interesting tidbits about the world of crime fiction. Among the gems:

• Norwegian writer Jo Nesbø, who is making his first trip to the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival next month to promote his latest Harry Hole thriller, Nemesis, is a generous and thoughtful person, according to Mark Sanderson:

Jo Nesbø, whose Nemesis is one of the best crime novels published so far this year, has announced, without any government prompting or meddling, that all the proceeds from his fourth thriller, Headhunters, just published in his native Norway, will be donated to a campaign against illiteracy in children.

• Sanderson also reports on the latest paperback issue from Irish author (and Hemingway fan) Adrian McKinty:

Adrian McKinty’s new novel, The Bloomsday Dead, is, naturally enough, being published by Profile tomorrow--16 June, for non-readers of James Joyce, is the day on which the action of Ulysses takes place.

The thriller involves a race against time to rescue a kidnapped girl and features an arresting scene at Dublin airport. McKinty knows of what he writes: he was once strip-searched at the airport on 16 June.

• Meanwhile, Sanderson’s colleague John Sutherland has written an interesting article about how crime writers hook their readers with “signature” titles:

In today’s book world it’s the title which has to grab any prospective purchaser by the eyeballs and close the deal before the book alongside gets its shout in.

In crime fiction, there’s a nifty gimmick that one can call ‘the signature title’. ‘Me again,’ it says. Oddly, it seems to have taken hold in the crime genre only.

The practice goes way back. If, for example, you saw a title beginning The Case of ..., and knew your crime fiction, you’d apprehend instantly it was a ‘Perry Mason’ by Erle Stanley Gardner. And you’d know exactly--down to the final in-court confounding of D.A. Burger--what to expect.

Much subtler were Raymond Chandler’s signature titles. For example: The Little Sister, The Big Sleep, The Long Goodbye, The High Window. What do they have in common? Measurement. Chandler’s out-of-step title, The Lady in the Lake, is subtler still. The lake in question in that novel is--wait for it--Big Bear.

Why Chandler titled his works this way is inscrutable. But it stamps his novels with a distinctive, Chandlerian, hallmark.

Similarly witty in his titling practice is Chandler’s most eminent disciple in L.A. Noir, Walter Mosley, with his Easy Rawlins novels.

The series began with Devil in a Blue Dress (a Bill Clinton favourite). The next four (in as many years) were A Red Death, White Butterfly, Black Betty, and A Little Yellow Dog.

Easy to see the signature theme. But why the palette-play? Because Easy Rawlins is the genre’s most famous African American PI, and Mosley’s the genre’s pre-eminent author of colour. QED.

The rest of Sutherland’s commentary can be found here.