Bullet Points: Channel Surfing Edition

• Comic-actor Bill Cosby is now an understandably controversial figure, thanks to multiple women having levied sexual assault allegations against him over the last decade. However, he was once beloved, in part because of his live and recorded comedy routines (my father was a big listener to his 1973 stand-up comedy album, Fat Albert) and also his starring roles on television and in films. One of his less successful small-screen efforts was The Cosby Mysteries, which debuted in September 1994—two years after his long-running The Cosby Show ended—and was cancelled in April of the following year, with just 19 episodes having aired. Created in part by William Link, who had given us Columbo, the show found Cosby playing Guy Hanks, “a New York City Police Department criminalist, who retired from the police force after winning $44 million in the lottery.” Wikipedia adds that “Link developed the series at Cosby’s request, as Cosby wanted to make an intelligent, character-driven mystery series that did not rely on graphic violence.” I remembered it with a mix of nostalgia (having enjoyed Cosby’s performances at times, but also those of James Naughton as police detective Adam Sully and Rita Moreno as his feisty, health-conscious housekeeper, Angie Corea) and disappointment that Link & Co. hadn’t managed to do more with that crime drama. However, I hadn’t actually seen the show since the ’90s. That changed three weeks ago, when a poster to YouTube began uploading all 19 eps, one per day. I wound up rewatching the 90-minute pilot, which was broadcast originally on January 31, 1994, and have since taken in two or three more installments. At least currently, all are available here. One thing I’d forgotten is that Lee Goldberg, who’d previously penned scripts for Spenser: For Hire and Dick Van Dyke’s Diagnosis: Murder, wrote as well for The Cosby Mysteries. He and his former UCLA classmate William Rabkin later also served as supervising producers on the show. He evidently noticed YouTube’s surprising resurrection of the show as well. In a post on his Web site last week, he gave some background on the April 5, 1995, episode “Goldilocks,” which he and Rabkin wrote jointly with Terence Winter (The Sopranos, Boardwalk Empire, The Wolf of Wall Street):

Cosby called two days before we wrapped the episode and asked us to add ninja assassins to the finale … “with those flying stars and everything.” We thought he was joking. He wasn’t. When we told him there was nothing remotely related to ninjas in the episode, he said “there is now.” So we wrote the damn ninjas into the episode. But when he got the pages, he said it was obviously not our best work, and he wasn’t going to show up to shoot the finale.

So … the bad guys basically out themselves for the crime and then “Cosby” just shows up to arrest them. We used Cosby’s stunt double and footage from another episode to cobble together the incoherent ending.

NBC took one look at the rough cut and said, you know, this is insane, let’s end our misery. We couldn’t agree more. They cancelled the show and we were paid off for the remaining four or five unproduced episodes.

Since I’ve now poured through “Goldilocks” several times, and can spot nary a sign of flying stars (shuriken), I can only assume that in the end, Goldberg, Rabkin, and Winter had their way, and those Japanese concealed weapons were excised from the plot.

• Speaking of my friend Lee, he reports that 26-year-old actress Madison Lintz, late of Prime Video’s Bosch: Legacy, will star in a TV adaptation of his series about Eve Ronin, the Los Angeles County Sherif’s Department’s youngest-ever homicide detective. “I am beyond thrilled to bring Eve Ronin to life,” Lintz is quoted by Variety as saying. “From the moment I picked up Lee’s books, I knew this was a character and a story I needed to be a part of. Eve’s determination, complexity, and resilience make her a dream role, and I am honored to take on this challenge on both sides of the camera.” Ronin was introduced in the 2020 novel Lost Hills and is set to make her sixth appearance in Fallen Star, due out from Thomas & Mercer in October.

• Ballard, based on Michael Connelly’s six novels about L.A. homicide detective Renée Ballard, debuted earlier this week on TV streamer Amazon Prime. All 10 episodes of Season 1 have dropped. Polish-Vietnamese actress Maggie Q (neé Margaret Quigley) headlines this hour-long police procedural, which also stars Courtney Taylor, Michael Mosley, and John Carroll Lynch. A press release explains that Ballard finds Q leading “the LAPD’s new and underfunded cold case division, tackling the city’s most challenging long-forgotten crimes with empathy and relentless determination. As she peels back layers of crimes spanning decades, including a serial killer’s string of murders and a murdered John Doe, she soon uncovers a dangerous conspiracy within the LAPD. With the help of her volunteer team and retired detective Harry Bosch [Titus Welliver, reprising his role from Bosch: Legacy in a trinity of this season’s episodes], Detective Ballard navigates personal trauma, professional challenges, and life-threatening dangers to expose the truth.” I have not yet watched Ballard, but will correct that situation as of this evening.

• The Killing Times' Paul Hirons considers the question of “Where Ballard Fits in Amazon’s Expanding Crime Universe.”

• Meanwhile, Season 2 of The Marlow Murder Club is set to debut in the States on Sunday, August 24, as part of PBS-TV’s Masterpiece Mystery! lineup. (It already aired in the UK this last spring.) Season 1 principals Samantha Bond, Jo Martin, Cara Horgan, and Natalie Dew are all back for more cozy but engaging antics in six new episodes. A one-minute trailer can be enjoyed here.

• Here’s one more trailer worth watching, for She Rides Shotgun. That two-hour film—slated for theatrical release on August 1—has been adapted from Jordan Harper’s propulsive and moving 2017 novel of the same name about “a recently released ex-con who finds himself protecting his estranged 11-year-old daughter Polly against a corrupt sheriff and a brutal gang leader.” Taran Egerton, Ana Sophia Heger, Rob Yang, and (again!) John Carroll Lynch lead the cast.



• American author Martin Cruz Smith, most widely recognized for his novels about Russian police investigator Arkady Renko, died last night at 82 years of age. His 11th Renko yarn, Hotel Ukraine—about the slaying of a deputy defense minister at the outset of Russia’s 2022 Ukraine invasion—was published only just last week. The son of a jazz musician, Smith was a journalist before he began composing fiction in the 1970s, often under pseudonyms, many of his early paperbacks now forgotten. Several of Smith’s works issued under his own moniker, though, were nominated for Edgar Awards, and he twice picked up the Dashiell Hammett Award from the North American Branch of the International Association of Crime Writers—first for the standalone historical mystery Rose (1996), and then for his fourth Renko thriller, Havana Bay, in 1999. The author was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in his mid-50s, but only in 2013 did he begin speaking publicly about it. I’ve read every one of Smith’s Renko tales, my favorites being the first, Gorky Park (1981), along with the aforementioned Havana Bay, Wolves Eat Dogs (2004), Tatiana (2013), and Hotel Ukraine, which takes its title from a Moscow luxury property but also sends the sleuth to the embattled nation of Ukraine, which previously featured in his 2023 novel, Independence Square (the same story in which Renko was told that he, too, has Parkinson’s). Smith announced in the latest novel’s Acknowledgements that it would be his final Renko thriller, but until today’s notice that he died, there still seemed hope he might relent and produce another. Sadly, that is now not to be.

• Maybe I should be reading more James Hadley Chase.

• Although The Rap Sheet has carried a profusion of other awards news lately, I missed mentioning the winner of this year’s Margery Allingham Short Story Competition. Fortunately, B.V. Lawson at In Reference to Murder was more on top of things. Her notice:

The CWA [Crime Writers Association] and the Margery Allingham Society have jointly held an annual international competition since 2014 for a short story of up to 3,500 words. The goal is to find the best unpublished short mystery that fits into Golden Age crime writer Margery Allingham’s definition of what makes a great mystery story: “The Mystery remains box-shaped, at once a prison and a refuge. Its four walls are, roughly, a Crime, a Mystery, an Enquiry and a Conclusion with an Element of Satisfaction in it.” The 2025 winner is Helen Gray for “Unsupervised Dead Women.” The other finalists include: “The Human Imperative” by Michael Bird; “Best Served Cold” by Ajay Chowdhury; “The Treasure Hunter” by Jane Corry; “Only Forward” by Hayley Dunning; and “A Woman of No Consequence” by Laure Van Rensberg.

• And isn’t this a very familiar debate, examined most recently on National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition Saturday program: “Does listening to an audiobook count as reading?”

PaperBack: “The Marijuana Mob”

Part of a series honoring the late author and blogger Bill Crider.



The Marijuana Mob, by “James Hadley Chase,” aka René Lodge Brabazon (Eton, 1952). Originally published in 1950 as Figure It Out for Yourself. Cover illustration by Victor Olson.

The Book You Have to Read: “No Orchids for Miss Blandish,” by James Hadley Chase

(Editor’s note: This is the 47th installment of our Friday blog series highlighting great but forgotten books. Today’s selection comes from James R. Benn, author of the Billy Boyle World War II Mysteries. The third and most recent entry in that series, Blood Alone (2008), was selected by BookPage as a Mystery of the Month. It was also an Indie Next Pick, and was tagged as a “Killer Book” by the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association. Benn’s fourth Boyle title, Evil for Evil, is set to be released in September 2009 by Soho Press.)

James M. Cain (The Postman Always Rings Twice, 1934) and Dashiell Hammett (The Maltese Falcon, 1930) are often cited as the fathers of crime noir, frequently in the company of Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep, 1939).

Those three, and others of course, put their mark on this genre, a mark as genuinely American as were the authors and their settings. Los Angeles, San Francisco, and the backroads of California were all distinct New World settings for this new, groundbreaking genre in which the hero is a loner, a violent, individualistic man who makes his own rules and lives by his own code. Some definitions of noir crime fiction point to it as a clear reaction against the cozy and conventional British mysteries of the day.

But as I found recently, there’s an Englishman squatting in that noir family tree. James Hadley Chase (whose real name was Rene Brabazon Raymond) came out with his first novel, No Orchids for Miss Blandish, in 1939, and extinguished any faint light of hope that may have remained in the hard-boiled universe, as if the story had been telegraphed from the dark side of the moon.

That Chase borrowed themes and characters heavily, as well as playing fast and loose with his personal and writing history, is fairly clear. What is remarkable is that he composed this story at all. Inspired by a reading of The Postman Always Rings Twice, he set out to compose an American gangster novel, armed only with what he could learn from encyclopedias and books about Depression-era U.S. settings. Chase also firmly put the rape of a kidnapping victim at the center of his narrative, pulling so few punches (for the time) that in subsequent editions, some of the most violent acts were toned down or removed entirely.

The Miss Blandish of the title is the beautiful, red-haired daughter of a rich tycoon, who is known as the Meat King, a wonderful moniker for a book in which so much flesh is violated in so many different ways. Miss Blandish (she never has a first name) is kidnapped by a family gang, inspired by the real-life Ma Barker and her brood. Here, Ma Grisson sees in Miss Blandish not only the potential for ransom, but in a warped gesture of motherly love, a source of affection for her brutal and sadistic son Slim (not to mention a cure for his impotence). Using drugs and a rubber truncheon, Ma Grisson turns Miss Blandish into a sex slave for Slim. After months of captivity, with the police and FBI ineffectual in locating the young lady, the Meat King finally hires private eye Dave Fenner to track down the gang and free his daughter. He does have one requirement, though: “Better dead than deflowered.”

By the time Fenner is introduced, readers of this novel will be yearning for a hero, after the violence and death that precedes him. Chase, though, does not relent in his theme, which focuses on getting the job done, whatever it takes. Might is indeed right, so much so that George Orwell, in his famous Horizon magazine essay from 1944, “Raffles and Miss Blandish,” equates Chase’s realism with fascism, primly stating that “in lowbrow fiction one still expects to find a sharp distinction between right and wrong and between legality and illegality.”

Given the state of the world in 1944, Orwell’s concern about fascist tendencies infecting the populace through “lowbrow” fiction can be understood. Overblown or not, he was dead on about the lack of any sharp distinction in Chase’s debut novel. When Dave Fenner needs information from a gun moll, he succeeds by threatening to brand her boyfriend’s face with an electric grill. When he turns Eddie Schultz, who has critical information but who won’t spill the beans, over to the police for a good old-fashioned third-degree, Eddie takes the punishment. It’s Dave who gets impatient.

Fenner turned sour. “Quit playin’ with him, can’t you?” he said to the cops. “This guy’s tough, ain’t he? Well, get tough too.”

They do. Eddie spills. The end justifies the means. Later, Fenner sends in a hat-check girl to look for Miss Blandish in Ma Grisson’s hideout, only to see her killed. No orchids for the hat-check girl, either. Not for nothing does Orwell introduce his description of the novel in his essay with this line:

Now for a header into the cesspool.

No Orchids for Miss Blandish is said to be one of the best-selling mysteries ever published. It was a huge and immediate success, and was the most popular book among British troops during the Second World War. At the height of the Blitz, it was said that in any bomb shelter, you could find someone reading it. Orwell chalked this up to “the mingled boredom and brutality of war.”

He may have been on to something, but his condescending tone gets in the way. In 1940, with the Blitz in full swing, England standing alone against Nazi Germany, and defeat following defeat, the situation may have seemed like a “daydream appropriate to a totalitarian age,” as Orwell characterized it. A British infantryman in the North African desert might have sharpened his bayonet, thinking of what had to be done in the coming battle, where might, if it did not mean right, certainly meant life.

One of the advertisements for No Orchids book laid this claim, that it “will take you by the scruff of the neck and beat the daylight out of you.” After years of political isolation, and having been dubbed a cranky old fool, Prime Minister Winston Churchill was doing much the same thing to the British people. Grabbing them by the scruff of the neck for a good shaking, at least.

I won’t spoil the ending, but the publisher’s blurb to a subsequent edition will prepare the reader. “The sufferings and ultimate fate of the kidnapped Miss Blandish leave one gasping ...” Indeed.

James Hadley Chase wrote more than 80 books during his lifetime, one other of which also featured Dave Fenner. In addition, he penned series about a former CIA agent and a California private eye. His protagonists were always Americans, even though Chase paid only three brief trips to the United States. One of my favorite lines is from his 1945 thriller, Eve, which was made into a film:

Do you know how much this weekend’s going to cost me? Two friends, thirty thousand dollars ... and a wife.

And who is the character talking to? His wife.