Bullet Points: Kicking Off Autumn Edition

• Former U.S. President Bill Clinton, ex-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and country singer Dolly Parton have all claimed authorship of crime or thriller novels over the last few years, so why not James Comey? The ex-U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York and onetime FBI director was bluntly fired from that latter post in 2017 by Donald Trump amid the worsening scandal over Russian influence on Trump’s 2016 presidential bid. Comey has since delivered speeches and written op-ed pieces for newspapers, but those endeavors were apparently not satisfying enough. So now he has signed with The Mysterious Press, an imprint of Penzler Publishers, to produce a pair of crime novels. As explained this week in a press release,

Central Park West, the first book of a planned series, features an assistant U.S. Attorney whose case against a high-profile mobster is derailed when a shocking turn of events reveals possible ties between the Mafia and the headline-making murder of a local politician. Drawing from the author’s personal experience, this high-stakes legal thriller reveals the detective work, backdoor dealings, and tradecraft involved as the FBI and Department of Justice attempt to build a case against an elusive member of one of the oldest criminal organizations in the world.

“I’m excited to take readers inside fascinating worlds I’ve come to know from my time in government and the private sector,” Comey is quoted as saying. “These stories are fiction, but, inspired by real work I’ve done, they will offer a rarely-seen view of interesting people and institutions. And I’m honored to be doing it with a legendary publisher.” Central Park West is scheduled for release in late spring 2023. There’s no word yet on the plot of book two.

• Literary Hub managing editor Emily Temple surveyed 25 reading lists for this fall season from 22 notable outlets (newspapers, magazines, and some Web sites) in order to come up with a tally of the 72 most-recommended books, fiction and non-fiction. Of those dozens of choices, I believe only two novels—Deanna Raybourn’s Killers of a Certain Age and Richard Osman’s The Bullet That Missed—can unquestionably be defined as crime or mystery fiction.

• The annual Irish crime-writing festival Murder One was launched only in 2018, and for the last two years—ever since the COVID-19 pandemic struck—it has had to be presented exclusively online. Not this year, though. From October 4 to 9, Murder One is scheduling events to take place at the DLR LexIcon Library and Cultural Centre in Dún Laoghaire, just south of Dublin. Among 2022’s scheduled guests will be U.S. novelists Laura Lippman and Jean Hanff Korelitz, English fictionists Ann Cleeves and Mick Herron, Irish writers Catherine Ryan Howard and Brian McGilloway, and Agatha Christie biographer/TV presenter Lucy Worsley. Many of the in-person events will also be live-streamed online. For booking details, click here.

• In Reference to Murder reports that actor Shaun Sipos (Outer Range) “has been tapped as a major lead opposite Alan Ritchson in the upcoming second season of Reacher. From writer and showrunner Nick Santora and based on the novels by Lee Child, the series follows Jack Reacher (Ritchson), a veteran military police investigator who has just recently entered civilian life. In a one-year deal, Sipos will play David O’Donnell, who served with Reacher in the Army’s unit of special investigators and is like a brother to Reacher. While Season 1 was based on the first book in Child’s Jack Reacher series, Ritchson revealed in May on Instagram that Season 2 will follow the eleventh book in Child’s series, Bad Luck and Trouble. David O’Donnell is a prominent character in that book, the only novel in the series he is featured in, which explains Sipos’ one-season deal.”

• Congratulations to the Sisters in Crime organization for 35 years spent “fighting the patriarchy.”

• How does Peter Falk’s Lieutenant Columbo compare with the great Sherlock Holmes? “Despite being a very different character, and harking from an entirely different time and space,” The Columbophile blog opines, “Columbo may be the closest to Holmes of all their peers in terms of mental dexterity. But how much do these men really have in common when making a detailed comparison? Well, despite one being an upper-crust, cynical and occasionally drug-dependent Victorian-era Brit, and the other being from humble Italian-American stock, a grafter who has worked harder than others to get ahead, there is much to connect the two detectives—and those similarities expand way beyond a mutual love of tobacco.” Enjoy the whole story here.

• So much for that dream... In answer to the question, “At what point in human history were there too many (English) books to be able to read them all in one lifetime?,” Randall Munroe, the author of What If? 2, estimates the threshold was passed “sometime before the population of active English writers reached a few hundred,” which would have been right around the year 1500.

• Sadly, my book radar sometimes fails me. For instance, I entirely missed noticing this last July’s release of The Blood Ogre, the latest novel from Craig McDonald, best known for his pulpish Hector Lassiter series. Steven Powell offers this description:

The story revolves around the reputation of two remarkably prolific writers, Lester Dent and Walter B. Gibson. Dent suffered a nervous breakdown and early death in 1959, perhaps brought on by the impossible schedule of churning out Doc Savage novels by the dozen and averaging two million words a year on his typewriter. In his final days, Dent had hallucinations in which he would see and interact with Doc Savage characters. In 1965, Doc Savage and The Shadow novels are enjoying renewed popularity. The Shadow author Walter B. Gibson has a knack for publicity rooted in his parallel career as a magician. People start witnessing a black-clad figure looming around the Greenwich Village house where Gibson penned the final Shadow novel in 1949. Gibson claims it is a ‘living mind-projection’ of The Shadow. But if a hero can rise from the pages of an authors literary output, then what other, more sinister, characters will follow him?

Powell calls The Blood Ogre “devilishly good” and “an affectionate tribute to a bygone era.” Frankly, it’s meta-fictional conceit reminds me rather too much of Paul Malmont’s The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril (2006), a novel I was unable to finish. Nonetheless, I’ve enjoyed McDonald’s books in the past, so will likely look this one up, too.

• Not long before he starred in the high-tech NBC-TV private eye drama Search, actor Tony Franciosa appeared in an unsold pilot for the same network called The Catcher. The weekly program would’ve starred Michael Witney as Noah Hendrix, a former agent with the Seattle Bureau of Missing Persons, who now operates as an investigator chasing runaways and fugitives. I’ve never seen the full pilot, but I did discover a four-minute clip on YouTube that features Franciosa, Witney, Jan-Michael Vincent as Hendrix’s associate Sam Callende, and blues musician Piano Red. See it while you can!

• My, how times—and budgets—have changed! Back in 1968, it was considered extravagant for NBC to fork out $400,000 for every 90-minute episode of the crime-drama “wheel series” The Name of the Game. Compare that with some of today’s most expensive small-screen shows. According to the Internet research company VPN Overview, the Amazon Prime production Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power costs $60 million per installment. The Disney+ programs Hawkeye (2021), The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (2021), WandaVision (2021), Loki (2021), and Obi Wan Kenobi (2022) each budgeted $25,000,000 per episode, while Netflix spends $13,000,000 per episode on The Crown (2016-).

• Have you ever wanted to watch the first, black-and-white, half-hour episode of Jack Webb’s police drama, Dragnet, dating back to December 14, 1951? Well, here’s your chance.

• I didn’t realize, when I applauded the recent revival of The Washington Post’s Sunday Book World section after a dozen years, that its return would coincide with the end of another Sunday Post component I have come to appreciate immensely: the nearly 68-year-old Outlook section of commentary and news analysis. “The decision to retire the Outlook section,” Robert G. Kaiser and Steve Luxenberg explained in its last edition, on September 16, “and to consolidate the paper’s opinion journalism in the editorial department, is a measure of how dramatically the newspaper business has changed in its march from print to digital publication.” Outlook was one of the models I used when I created a four-page editorials section for my college newspaper, and I’ve enjoyed reading it whenever I have been in D.C. since, or have picked up the Sunday Post from a newsstand. Rolling its variety of contents into the Opinions pages is not an unreasonable solution, but it’s also not a happy one for those of us who once traveled directly from the front section of the Post to Outlook.

An Author Affronted

The World of Shaft author Steve Aldous reminds us it was 50 years ago today that Shaft’s Big Score!, Ernest Tidyman’s novelization of his screenplay for the 1972 movie of that same title, reached print. But it “nearly wasn’t published at all,” he writes, adding:

Production of the film had run from January to April 1972 and it was intended the paperback adaptation be published in May ahead of the film’s release.

However, a disagreement over royalties between Tidyman and MGM (who had determined the split) along with his partners in Shaft Productions (who claimed others were also involved with screenplay development), led to the paperback release being postponed and it seemed the book may never be published. “MGM let it be known they wanted 25% of the royalties,” said Tidyman, “and my partners said they wanted a slice. I insisted no one was to get a piece of any novel, [n]or would I let anyone do a novelization of my Shaft character. He’s a valuable entity—he’s been bastardized in films.” ...

Tidyman informed The Pittsburgh Press: “I told them I would tear up the book, which represented six months’ hard work, and give the publisher back the money rather than give MGM money it had not earned nor in any way contributed to. I startled the hell out of them. They never heard of a writer who would give back money or tear up a book because of a principle. They were very upset.”

Read about how this squabble concluded in Aldous’ full post.

Bullet Points: Dog Days Edition

It feels like forever ago that I last compiled a “Bullet Points” post of crime-fiction news items. In fact, the last time was in early June. My preference is to write these every couple of weeks, but editorial responsibilities unrelated to The Rap Sheet stood in my way for almost two months. With any luck, I can now return to my usual timetable.

• Count me among those delighted by news of a Death in Paradise spin-off series starring Kris Marshall, who played Detective Inspector Humphrey Goodman for roughly three and a half seasons (after replacing Ben Miller as DI Richard Poole). As The Killing Times reports, this new BBC-TV show—to be titled Beyond Paradise—“will tell the story of what happened to Goodman … after he returned to the UK. Seeking a quieter life away from the stress of the city, Humphrey has taken a job as Detective Inspector in fiancée Martha’s hometown. However, they soon find that country life is anything but peaceful and Humphrey can’t help but be distracted by the town’s surprisingly high crime rate with a new, and very different, case challenging him each week.” Mystery Fanfare adds that Beyond Paradise will begin airing on BBC and, in the States, on BritBox in 2023, and that “many of the characters from Death in Paradise will make cameo appearances.” I hope producers can convince the lovely Joséphine Jobert to reprise her role as Detective Sergeant Florence Cassell. She and Marshall made a splendid team on the fictional Caribbean island of Saint Marie.

• While we’re on the subject of Death in Paradise, the TV site WhatToWatch says the 12th season of that popular series is “very likely to start in January 2023,” again with Ralf Little playing DI Neville Parker. In advance of that, a second Christmas special is due!

• When last we checked on ITV-TV’s McDonald & Dodds, in mid-June, word was that its third season would debut in Britain on June 19. However, there was no clue then as to a U.S. showing. Now, finally, Mystery Fanfare brings news that this lighthearted whodunit, starring Tala Gouveia and Jason Watkins as mismatched police partners in modern Bath, England, will have its BritBox premiere here in the States on Tuesday, August 16. Three 90-minute episodes are due, with the streaming service dropping one per week.

• Still reeling from the sad news that star Douglas Henshall has quit Shetland, we learn that his last, six-episode season with the BBC-TV series will begin airing in the UK on Wednesday, August 10.

• A confession: I haven’t yet watched the opening season of Slow Horses, the AppleTV+ spy series based on Mick Herron’s Slough House novels and starring Gary Olman, Jack Lowden, and Kristin Scott Thomas. But I am hoping to get around to it soon. I’d like to least take in those half-dozen episodes before the program’s sophomore season—based on Herron’s Dead Lions (2013)—premieres, probably in November. (You can already enjoy the trailer by clicking here.) But it’s becoming difficult to keep up: The Killing Times reports that production of Seasons 3 and 4—being shot back-to-back—is already underway, though there are no particulars regarding which other Slough House novels are being adapted for the small screen.

• Despite the numerous accolades Herron has received for his novels about a band of misfit former MI5 agents (including his recently capturing the 2022 Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year award for Slough House), the author is apparently stepping away from those characters in order to next pen another standalone yarn. Soho Press, though, intends to keep fans happy by releasing, in November, a paperback collection of Slough House novellas. The List, The Drop, The Last Dead Letter, and The Catch—all of which have previously been published—are to be featured, together with a new, Christmas-themed tale that gives the book its title, Standing by the Wall.

• The folks behind PBS-TV’s Masterpiece have posted a trailer (see below) for Magpie Murders, the six-part mini-series scripted by Anthony Horowitz and based on his 2017 whodunit of the same name. This show stars Lesley Manville and Tim McMullan, and is scheduled to commence its Masterpiece run on Sunday, October 16.



• Speaking of Masterpiece, it has now not only confirmed that the historical mystery drama Miss Scarlet and the Duke will kick off its six-episode Season 2 run on Sunday, October 16 (see the video trailer here), but that Season 3 of that show will follow closely on its heels, beginning on Sunday, January 8, 2023. This British-Irish production is set in 1880s London, and stars Kate Phillips as Eliza Scarlet, a spirited young female private investigator who often finds herself in professional (and personal) rivalry with Detective Inspector William Wellington, aka “The Duke,” played by Stuart Martin.

• This show sneaked right up on me. The U.S. streaming service Acorn TV will introduce a new Australian series on Monday, August 8. Titled Darby and Joan, it’s a road-trip dramedy starring Breaker Morant’s Bryan Brown as retired Australian homicide detective Jack Darby, and Greta Saachi (Presumed Innocent) playing widowed English nurse Joan Kirkhope. As Mystery Tribune says, “They couldn’t be more different: the low key, ruggedly charming Aussie and the tightly-wound, yet warm, witty and determined Englishwoman, but when they collide in the Australian outback, and become drawn into a series of unexpected mysteries, this unlikely investigative duo soon realize the most intriguing puzzle they face is each other.” Darby and Joan is slated to continue through August 29.

• Last but hardly least important on the boob-tube beat, Crime Fiction Lover lets it be known that “Val McDermid’s cold case police detective Karen Pirie is coming to the small screen in September 2022 in a new three-part ITV crime drama. Adapted from the first novel in the six-book series, The Distant Echo, the programme will star Lauren Lyle of Outlander fame as the lead detective.” McDermid herself is one of this show’s co-producers. You’ll find a short trailer at the link.

• Five authors are shortlisted for the 2022 Lindisfarne Prize for Crime Fiction, a competition “open to all writers who are from, or whose work celebrates the North East of England, and who have not previously had their submission published in any form.” They are:

— Clare Sewell, Can't Hide
— Duncan Robb, Sharp Focus
— Katherine Graham, Salted Earth
— Jacqueline Auld, The Children of Gaia
— Ramona Slusarczyk, The Taste of Iron

Founded in 2019 by British author L.J. Ross, this commendation is sponsored by her publishing imprint, Dark Skies Publishing, along with the Newcastle Noir Crime Writing Festival and Newcastle Libraries. According to the prize’s Web site, “The winning entry”—to be announced on August 31—“will be awarded a prize of £2,500 to support the completion of their work and funding towards a year’s membership of both the Society of Authors (SoA) and the Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi),” with other shortlisted candidates receiving lesser sums of prize money. To find previous winners, click here.

• As summer winds down, it’s time to re-check The Rap Sheet’s compilation of crime, mystery, and thriller works set to go on sale—on both sides of the Atlantic—between now and Labor Day. The number of picks has grown greatly since I initially posted that list on June 1.

• Also peruse Crime by the Book’s list of 16 novels that it says are must-reads for these closing days of the sunny season.

• Although the actual date was more than a week ago, I want to wish In Reference to Murder a happy 15th blogiversary! Writer B.V. Lawson does an outstanding job with her site … and somehow manages to keep up a consistent schedule, unlike some bloggers we know.

• Can it really have been 50 years ago? The blaxploitation crime film Super Fly, starring Ron O’Neil and directed by Gordon Parks Jr., was released on August 4, 1972. While many African Americans were displeased with that picture’s glorification of “black males as pimps, dope pushers, gangsters, and super males,” few could complain about Curtis Mayfield’s eminently danceable theme music. As George Kelley opined last week, “Mayfield’s soundtrack … became a landmark in exposing the threat of drugs to the Black Community.”

• My e-mail brings this note from frequent Rap Sheet contributor Fraser Massey, based in London: “While reading The Observer today (my favourite of Britain’s Sunday papers), I came across a fascinating piece where they asked a range of top crime novelists to list both their favourite crime novels of all time, but also their favourite recent thrillers. It makes for an impressive reading list.” That piece is walled off to non-subscribers, but fortunately The Observer’s sister newspaper, The Guardian, carries it here for free.

• Another missive comes from Ohioan Lou Armagno, author of the blog The Postman’s Holiday, who reminds me that this coming August 26 will mark the 138th birthday of Earl Derr Biggers, the creator of Chinese-American detective Charlie Chan. Don’t bother buying Biggers a present; he died way back in 1933. But fan Armagno would appreciate the gift of some assistance in tracking down three “rare treasures” associated with Biggers and the vintage Chan films, among them a waxwork representation of the fictional Honolulu police officer that was used in 1940’s Charlie Chan at the Wax Museum, one of 22 Chan movies starring Sidney Toler. Click here to read more about Armagno’s search for those long-gone artifacts.

• I’m not sure many people noticed, but in July Bouchercon rolled out a new look for the Anthony Award—“a design which will be used each year from now on,” says author Art Taylor, “as opposed to having each new Bouchercon design a specific award for their host year.” The official introduction of the prize came in this video.

• In a blog post devoted chiefly to the movies he takes in while writing fiction, author Max Allan Collins drops news that the book he’s currently working on—his 18th, and possibly last, Nate Heller novel—will be titled Too Many Bullets. It involves Chicago-based private dick Heller in the 1968 assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, he explains, but will also “cover both Jimmy Hoffa and Sirhan Sirhan.” Expect Bullets to come from Hard Case Crime, which is already readying Collins’ 17th Heller yarn, The Big Bundle, for release in early December. [FOLLOW-UP: In a subsequent blog post, Collins updated this account, explaining that “I have already decided to turn Too Many Bullets into two Heller novels. Too Many Bullets will be the RFK assassination novel. The as-yet-untitled Heller after that will go back and deal with the Jimmy Hoffa story. This came about because—as is always the case—the research has led me places I did not expect to go.”]

• Now joining Amazon in selecting the “best books of the years (so far)” is CrimeReads, which last month posted a list of 10 crime, mystery, and thrillers yarns (heavy on the noir) that it declares stood out from all others reaching print in the first six months of 2022. It’s not a bad list, though I was considerably less fond of Brendan Slocumb’s The Violin Conspiracy than others seem to have been. Interestingly, I’ve read more of CrimeReads’ second string of “Notable Selections” than I have its top 10.

• A few other CrimeReads pieces I have enjoyed lately: Lisa Levy’s interview with “the people behind some of today’s best small publishers specializing in crime fiction,” among them Hard Case Crime’s Charles Ardai, Paul Oliver of Syndicate Books, and Dreamland Books’ Sara Gran; Keith Roysdon’s look back at producer Quinn Martin’s remarkable string of popular TV crime dramas; this piece about New York City’s notorious heat wave of 1896, which provides the setting for Hot Time (Arcade Crimewise), W.H. Flint’s terrific debut historical mystery; Curtis Evans’ outstanding but sad story about Milton M. Propper, a once-applauded American writer of police procedurals (The Strange Disappearance of Mary Young, The Ticker-Tape Murder, etc.), who ended up destitute and suicidal in Philadelphia; a listicle of choice locked-room mysteries by Tom Mead, UK-based author of the new locked-room whodunit Death and the Conjuror (Mysterious Press); and an extract from the new non-fiction book Dangerous Rhythms: Jazz and the Underworld (Morrow), recalling how, “in the early days of jazz, the music and the mob were inextricable” down in New Orleans.

• One final CrimeReads-related subject: Dwyer Murphy, my editor at that excellent Web site, has seen his new sort-of-detective-novel, An Honest Living (Viking), greeted warmly by critics. Christopher Bollen offers this plot précis in The New York Times:

Murphy’s lonely, misanthropic [and unnamed] narrator, fitted with the soul of a poet and the ethics of a dice thrower, is hired by a wealthy young woman to investigate the illicit behavior of her estranged husband. The narrator quickly catches the husband in the act; however, it turns out that the woman who hired him was only masquerading as the man’s wife. Following the rules of the noir genre, the would-be detective is ruled by the stars of pride and lust, determined to discover who duped him even as he finds himself inexplicably drawn to an enigmatic femme fatale, the real wife.

Murphy has also been the subject of several interviews, one of the best being his exchange with Speaking of Mysteries host Nancie Clare, which you can listen to here.

• Worth tuning in for, too, is this conversation between National Public Radio’s Elissa Nadworny and Megan Miranda about the latter’s brand-new woodlands thriller, The Last to Vanish (Scribner). Among the things focused on is that North Carolina author’s multiple fears. “‘I have an overactive imagination, so I am afraid of many things,’ [Miranda] says. She’s especially afraid of being alone in the woods at night. Feeling vulnerable and on edge, not knowing what else is out there. ‘The idea that you hear footsteps behind you and you can’t see it and they stop when you stop,’ she says, ‘that to me is this terrifying idea.’ That feeling when the hair on the back of your neck stands up, you feel the tension in your shoulders, and you have a sharp focus on just getting to safety—that’s the feeling Miranda is trying to capture in her books.” The Last to Vanish is Miranda’s sixth adult novel.

• This year’s winners of the Scribe Awards, given out by the International Association of Media Tie-in Writers, were announced late last month during San Diego Comic-Con. As far as I can discern, there was only one category that included works definable as crime or mystery fiction: Original Novel, General. The vast majority of nominees were either fantasy or science fiction. Taking home the Original Novel, General prize was Pandemic: Patient Zero, by Amanda Bridgeman (Aconyte), which as you might guess is about a fast-spreading killer virus. Also nominated in that category were Murder She Wrote: Debonair in Death, by Terrie Farley Moran (Berkley), and Shootout at Sugar Creek, by Max Allan Collins (Kensington). A complete rundown of the 2022 nominees is located here.

• Darn lucky Londoners! Capital Crime, trumpeted as the city’s “only crime and thriller festival,” is set to return on Thursday, September 29, and continue through Saturday, October 1, bringing more than 164 panelists, plus readers, others authors, and book-publishing execs to Battersea Park on the River Thames’ south bank. Shotsmag Confidential offers a handy round-up of main festival events, which will kick off with a Thursday evening discussion of James Bond and London’s role in that fictional spy’s life, featuring Anthony Horowitz, Charlie Higson and Kim Sherwood, author of Double or Nothing (HarperCollins), the first in a triology of novels focusing on Double O Section agents other than Bond, due out in September. The full program and ticket info can be accessed here.

• The Gumshoe Site notes the death, on July 22, of Stuart Woods, author of the Stone Barrington series. “The former advertising man’s first book, Blue Water, Green Skipper (Norton, 1977), was not a novel, but a non-fiction book about the 1976 adventure in the Observer Single-handed Trans-Atlantic Race,” recalls blogger Jiro Kimura. “His third book was a novel, entitled Chiefs (Norton, 1981), about three generations of lawmen and the murder of a teenager in a small town in Georgia, which won the 1982 Edgar Award in the first novel category, and was made into the TV miniseries starring Charlton Heston and Danny Glover, among others. He wrote about five books a year singularly or collaboratively with several series characters. New York Dead (Harper & Row, 1991) is the first novel featuring Stone Barrington, an ex-cop and attorney in New York City. His 62nd Barrington book, Black Dog, will be released in August, the 63rd book in the Barrington series, Distant Thunder (both from Putnam) in October, [and] the 64th Barrington book (untitled yet) next year.” Kimura adds that Woods “died in his sleep on July 22 at his home in Litchfield County, Connecticut.” He was 84.

• Woods is not the only loss the crime-fiction community has had to endure during the last month. Gone now, as well, are actor James Caan (The Godfather, Misery, Poodle Springs), actress Rhonda Fleming (Spellbound, Out of the Past, McMillan & Wife), author Susie Steiner (Missing, Presumed), James Bond theme composer Monty Norman, and Douglas Dannay, author and the eldest son of Frederic Dannay, who co-created the Ellery Queen mystery series. Farewell, too, to Leave It to Beaver’s Tony Dow, Star Trek’s Nichelle Nichols, and F Troop’s Larry Storch, all three of whom made an impact on me as a boy.

• Having grown up in the glow of 1970s films, I’m very much a fan of Peter Hanson’s blog, Every ’70s Movie, which recently clocked in its six-millionth pageview. Congratulations! (Just for perspective, The Rap Sheet has almost reached its eight-millionth pageview.)

• And still more bodies are turning up in Lake Mead, a mammoth reservoir created in the 1930s by construction of the Hoover Dam, located on the border between Nevada and Arizona. As I wrote back in May, global warming is causing the lake’s water level to recede to historic lows, exposing sunken boats, a World War II landing craft, and other articles previously hidden from sight. Bones among them! CNN reported late last month that a third set of human remains was found in the reservoir. The earlier discovery of a long-ago murder victim raised serious questions as to whether these skeletons might be related to nearby Las Vegas’ mobster past.

Double O Spies, Both Classic and Coming

Although the actual 60th anniversary of the first James Bond film, Dr. No, debuting in London, England, won’t come until October of this year, you can expect to see plenty of advance publicity.

Managing editor Bill Koenig of The Spy Command, for instance, recently posted a six-part series looking back at that earliest entry in what has since become a highly profitable big-screen movie franchise. Part I focuses on “odd couple” business partners Albert R. Broccoli, an American, and Canadian Harry Saltzman, who collaborated in establishing the series. Part II recalls how Terence Young snared the job of directing Dr. No, and then went on to direct two more of the first four 007 flicks. In Part III, Koenig tells how Scottish actor Sean Connery (“an uncut diamond at the time”) wound up playing Ian Fleming’s suave secret agent, while Part IV sings the praises of Ursula Andress, the franchise’s first “Bond girl.” Part V explains how the movie’s production designer, Ken Adam, established the look of Dr. No. Finally, Part VI assesses that first movie’s legacy, six decades on.

Just for future reference, Dr. No premiered in the United Kingdom on October 5, 1962. It’s U.S. debut wasn’t until May 8, 1963.

* * *

Speaking of 007 and his world, there’s some fresh news regarding that trilogy of modern-day thrillers English author Kim Sherwood has contracted to compose for Ian Fleming Publications and HarperCollins. The Book Bond blog says the first of those three novels (all of which will build around Double O agents other than Mr. Bond himself) is to be titled Double or Nothing, and should reach booksellers by September 1 of this year. Here’s a teaser offering a few plot specifics and the names of Sherwood’s new espionage agents:

James Bond is missing ...
007 has been captured, perhaps even killed, by a sinister private military company. His whereabouts are unknown.

Meet the new generation of spies ...
Johanna Harwood, 003. Joseph Dryden, 004. Sid Bashir, 009. Together, they represent the very best and brightest of MI6. Skilled, determined and with a licence to kill, they will do anything to protect their country.

The fate of the world rests in their hands ...
Tech billionaire Sir Bertram Paradise claims he can reverse the climate crisis and save the planet. But can he really? The new spies must uncover the truth, because the future of humanity hangs in the balance.

Time is running out.

The Web site MI6 notes that “Kim Sherwood makes a nice nod to a fellow female writer in the James Bond sphere with the name of her new agent 003, Johanna Harwood, who in real life worked on the screenplays for Dr. No and From Russia With Love.”