Taking a Spin Through the Blogosphere

• Janet Rudolph’s Mystery Fanfare blog has been positively rampant with news—good and bad—about TV crime series lately. On the good side: Season 14 of Death in Paradise, introducing Don Gilet as Detective Inspector Mervin Wilson, is set to commence streaming via BritBox come Wednesday, February 19; the third and concluding season of Bosch: Legacy, starring Titus Welliver, will debut on Prime Video on Monday, March 27; PBS-TV’s Masterpiece has commissioned an adaptation of UK author Anthony Horowitz’s Marble Hall Murders, the third and last Susan Ryeland/Atticus Pünd novel (which is to be released in the States in mid-May); and we can look forward to a 10-episode fourth season (maybe later this year?) of The Lincoln Lawyer. Now for the bad news: ITV’s McDonald & Dodds, the Bath, England-set whodunit starring Tala Gouveia and Jason Watkins, has been cancelled after what I thought were four outstanding seasons.

• Weep not for Watkins, though. Late last year it was announced that he and Grantchester co-star Robson Green would play the leads in Catch You Later, a new Channel 5 (UK) crime drama from Death in Paradise director Toby Frow. Digital Spy describes the show as a cat-and-mouse thriller about “a police detective named Huw Miller (Watkins) who is haunted by a case he failed to solve: a stalker in his town who toyed with his victims before murdering them.

Per the synopsis: “As Huw attempts to settle into retirement, the case is never far from his mind – and when new neighbour Patrick Harbottle (Green) moves in and utters the chilling phrase ‘catch you later’–the sign-off the stalker used to taunt Huw during the investigation–Huw is determined he’s finally got his man. What follows is a high stakes game of psychological chess between the two neighbours as Huw’s world begins to crumble around him.

“Unable to bear the guilt of the stalker taking another victim under his nose, Huw risks everything to unearth the truth. But has he set his sights on the right man, or is his obsession pushing him ever closer to the brink?”

Catch You Later is expected to air before this year is over.

• I evidently missed seeing that the Audio Publishers Association announced its finalists for the 30th annual Audie Awards. There are 28 competitive categories—too many to consider here. Below, though, are the contenders for best mystery audiobook of 2024:

— Listen for the Lie, by Amy Tintera; narrated by Will Damron and January LaVoy (Macmillan Audio)
— The Midnight Feast, by Lucy Foley; narrated by Joe Eyre, Sarah Slimani, Roly Botha, Laurence Dobiesz, and Tuppence Middleton (HarperAudio)
— Rough Pages, by Lev AC Rosen; narrated by Vikas Adam
(Macmillan Audio)
— Still See You Everywhere, by Lisa Gardner; narrated by Hillary
Huber (Hachette Audio)
— This Is Why We Lied, by Karin Slaughter; narrated by Kathleen
Early (HarperAudio)

The winners will be revealed in New York City on March 4, during a ceremony hosted by actress-comedian Amy Sedaris.

• Author and friend of The Rap Sheet Mark Coggins recently sent along the photo below together with a note reading: “I happened to be in the Manoa Chinese Cemetery in Honolulu and came across the grave of Chang Apana, who supposedly was the inspiration for Charlie Chan.”



• Since January 24, 2025, marked 100 years since Earl Derr Biggers’ The House Without a Key began its serialization in The Saturday Evening Post—introducing Chan to the reading public—this seemed like a good time to post Coggins’ shot. You can learn more about Chan’s literary introduction here and here.

• As we jump into this new month, it might be worth your while to spend a few moments looking back at The Rap Sheet’s extensive roster of crime, mystery, and thriller novels due out during the first quarter of 2025. Since that list went up in mid-January, I’ve added at least a dozen titles, with more to come before the end of March.

• This last January 8, Japanese crime-fiction critic and writer Jiro Kimura kicked off his 30th year (!) in charge of The Gumshoe Site, one of the longest-running Web sources of news regarding crime, mystery, and thriller fiction. (By comparison, The Rap Sheet will celebrate its 20th year in business in 2026.) I last interviewed Kimura when his blog was just 15 years old; you’ll find the results of our exchange here.

• Four interviews worth finding: Crime Fiction Lover talks with Ken Harris about The Ballad of the Great Value Boys (Black Rose), his fourth novel featuring witty Baltimore, Maryland, private detective Steve Rockfish. Meanwhile, renowned American spy novelist Robert Littell sits for conversations with both National Public Radio’s Scott Simon and New York Times book critic Sarah Weinman about Bronshtein in the Bronx (Soho Press), his new historical novel about Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky. And And for CrimeReads, Peter Handel quizzes Thomas Perry about his 32nd novel, Pro Bono.

• “Science,” writes James Folta in Literary Hub, “has backed up what many of us have long been saying: the library rocks. A study from the New York Public Library surveyed 1,974 users on how the library makes them feel and how it affects their lives, and the results are overwhelmingly positive.”

• Finally, welcome back, John Norris, the host at Pretty Sinister Books! When that blog appeared to go dark in September 2023, it was a sad day, because for the previous dozen years Norris had presented readers with interesting material having to do with classic mystery, adventure, and supernatural fiction. But then suddenly, this last January 16, he was back, first wrapping up his last year of reading (see here and here), and then moving on to other subjects. Let’s hope Norris’ batteries are now recharged, and he will continue updating his blog for many years to come.

Bath’s Odd Couple Is Back

I have grown quite fond of the ITV-TV crime drama McDonald & Dodds over the last few years, so am pleased to hear that the first of three brand-new episodes is coming to BritBox on Thursday, May 23.

Telly Visions tells us what to expect from this new season:

Return to the beautiful city of Bath as mismatched detective duo [Detective Chief Inspector Lauren] McDonald and [Detective Sergeant] Dodds are presented with more original and inventive crimes to solve. Season 4 features three new emotionally engaging feature-length crime stories told with flair and mischief. In the first story, McDonald and Dodds begin to investigate when a middle-aged woman is found shot dead in a rented flat. The killer has removed all clues to her identity, but DNA reveals she went missing over 35 years ago. Where has she been all those years? And why has she been murdered?

Tala Gouveia and Jason Watkins will return in their title roles as McDonald and Dobbs, respectively. They’ll be joined this time around by Bhavik C. Pankhania (Misophonia) as Detective Constable Lee, plus guest stars including Toby Stephens (Black Sails), singer/songwriter Pixie Lott, and Ace Bhatti (Line of Duty).

I’m only disappointed there will be a mere three new episodes aired this year, rather than the four we were shown in 2022.

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.

A Few End-of-the-Week Links

• The Sisters in Crime organization has announced that Shizuka Otake, a resident of Jackson Heights, New York, has won the 2022 Eleanor Taylor Bland Crime Fiction Writers of Color Award. According to a news release, “Her submission, Murder in Tokyo, is a story of a Japanese American teen’s life which is shattered when her boyfriend is arrested as the prime suspect in a classmate’s murder. ‘I lived in Tokyo as an adult and found it painful to be viewed as different,’ said Otake. ‘I expected to fit in and wondered how much harder that experience would have been if I was a vulnerable teen.’” Otake’s victory brings her a $2,000 grant, which she can apply toward “workshops, seminars, conferences, retreats, online courses and research activities to assist in completion of their work.” Five runners-up in this contest, which is named for police-procedural author Bland (who died in 2010), will receive a one-year membership to Sisters in Crime. They are Danielle Arceneaux (Brooklyn, N.Y.), Amber Boothe (Crowthorne, England), Jennifer K. Morita (Sacramento, Calif.), Valerie Kemp (Ann Arbor, Mich.), and Kathy A. Norris (Los Angeles, Calif.).

• It’s been so long since I last heard about third-series plans for the genial ITV-TV crime drama McDonald & Dodds, that I’d stopped checking for them. But The Killing Times brings news now that four fresh 90-minute episodes of the ofttimes humorous whodunit are due for transmission in the UK, beginning on Sunday, June 19. You’ll remember that Tala Gouveia and Jason Watkins play Detective Chief Inspector Lauren McDonald and Detective Sergeant Dodds, respectively, in this program set in modern-day Bath, England. The Killing Times tells us what they’ll be up to right out of the gate:

In episode one, a young woman dies in a busy park in broad daylight and the mismatched McDonald and Dodds are called in to untangle the mysterious circumstances of her death. Who is she? How did she die surrounded by witnesses? And how is it possible that she is … smiling? All roads seem to lead to Professor George Gillan [Alan Davies], a linguistic anthropologist who lives in a rambling mansion with his eccentric mother, Agnes, whose 100th birthday is days away. DS Dodds is sure that the house has something to do with the murder, but in uncovering Belvedere’s history, Dodds also unearths secrets in his own past.

Radio Times shares the basic plot lines of subsequent installments. There’s no word yet on when this latest set of McDonald & Dodds stories will become available to Amazon Prime subscribers, but as one who’s enjoyed the previous seasons, I hope it will be soon!

• Did you know that Shutter Island author Dennis Lehane was working on Black Bird, a psychological thriller for the Apple TV+ streaming service, and that it’s scheduled to debut on July 8? Deadline reports that the six-episode drama features Taron Egerton, Paul Walter Hauser, Greg Kinnear, Sepideh Moafi, and Ray Liotta—in his last screen role (he died in May)—“and was adapted from the true-crime memoir In With the Devil: A Fallen Hero, a Serial Killer, and a Dangerous Bargain for Redemption by James Keene and Hillel Levin.” The plot is said to follow “high school football hero and Big Jim Keene’s son Jimmy Keene (Egerton), who is sentenced to 10 years in a minimum security prison. He is given a choice: enter a maximum-security prison for the criminally insane and befriend suspected serial killer Larry Hall (Hauser), or stay where he is and serve his full sentence with no possibility of parole. Keene’s only way out is to elicit a confession and find out where the bodies of several young girls are buried before Hall’s appeal goes through. But is this suspected killer telling the truth?” Deadline’s story includes a trailer for the show.

• Last but not least, Sunshine State journalist Craig Pittman points me toward his recent story about how a Florida Panhandle town became the site of “enough grisly discoveries to fuel a couple of seasons of Forensic Files,” thanks to a Tennessee fiction writer.

“Call” Set to Be Received

British television network ITV has scheduled its four-part adaptation of The Long Call, Ann Cleeves’ first Detective Inspector Venn novel (published in 2019). It will premiere on Monday, October 25, and run till the 28th. Here’s The Killing Times’ thumbnail of the plot:

Matthew was brought up in the Barum Brethren before leaving to go to University. At 19 he knew he couldn’t continue amongst the [religious] community and to his mother’s shock and dismay, he declared publicly he no longer believed. Now he’s back, not just to grieve for his father, but to lead a shocking murder investigation back where it all began for him.

The Long Call, we’re told, is set “in a small community in North Devon [where Venn lives] with his husband, Jonathan.” There’s no word yet on when this program might become available to U.S. audiences.

* * *

Meanwhile, the same source alerts us that “Filming has begun on the third series of ITV crime drama McDonald & Dodds starring Tala Gouveia and Jason Watkins … The four-part series starts with ‘Belvedere,’ where a young woman is found dead sitting in a deckchair in broad daylight in one of Bath’s most beautiful and populated parks. Why did this woman die with a smile on her face?”

McDonald & Dodds’ return is expected sometime in 2022.

Bullet Points: Another Overstuffed Edition

• Let’s have a show of hands: Who remembers Sammy Davis Jr. playing private investigator Larry Miller in the 1969 movie The Pigeon? I would’ve counted myself among the uninformed until the other day, when I happened across that 90-minute ABC Movie of the Week on YouTube. (Watch it here, while you can!) Scripted by Edward J. Lakso (The Mod Squad, Mission: Impossible, Charlie’s Angels) and Stanley Roberts (Mannix, Petrocelli, Police Woman), the teleflick “is great,” according to an IMDb review, “because Sammy … doesn’t take himself too seriously and the dialogue uses a number of clichés from the 60’s. Sammy is searching for a girl who doesn’t want to be found. I especially love the scenes between Sammy and Roy Glenn, the veteran actor who plays his dad, a police lieutenant.” Why Wikipedia doesn’t list The Pigeon among Davis’ motion-picture and TV credits, but does include Poor Devil, an awful NBC comedy pilot from 1973, is really anybody’s guess.

• Speaking of forgotten crime-solvers, how about Valerie Bertinelli in the 1990 CBS-TV series Sydney? As Wikipedia recalls, that erstwhile One Day at a Time actress headlined as Sydney Kells, “the daughter of a now-deceased policeman, [who] brings her New York City detective agency (in which she is the only investigator) back to her hometown and her family.” Matthew Perry (later of Friends) held forth as Kells’ rookie-cop brother, while Craig Bierko portrayed an attorney “with whom she shares sexual chemistry.” This spring replacement series lasted only 13 episodes. The best thing about it may have been its opening theme, “Finish What Ya Started,” by Bertinelli’s then-hubby Eddie Van Halen. Clickety-clack right here to watch the main title sequence from Sydney, paired with the introduction to her 1993-1994 sitcom, Café Americain.

• One more YouTube discovery: The Blue Knight, a 1973 NBC mini-series starring William Holden, Lee Remick, Sam Elliott, and Joe Santos, and based on Joseph Wambaugh’s 1972 novel of that same title. It’s been many years since I saw this teleflick with Holden as William “Bumper” Morgan, a 20-year veteran of the Los Angeles Police Department—long enough that I didn’t even remember it was originally broadcast in one-hour segments over four consecutive nights. The production was popular enough to spawn a subsequent series, likewise called The Blue Knight (but on CBS, rather than NBC), starring George Kennedy as Morgan; it ran for two seasons, from 1975 to 1976.

• Oh alright, here’s another: Jigsaw, a 1968 film (“originally made for television,” says Wikipedia, “but shown first in theaters”) starring Bradford Dillman, Harry Guardino, Hope Lange, Michael J. Pollard, and a young Susan Saint James. “After someone places sugar cubes laced with LSD in his cup of coffee,” the YouTube plot synopsis reads, “Jonathan Fields [Dillman] regains consciousness, only to find a woman drowned in his bathtub and flecks of blood on his hands and clothes. Suffering from amnesia, Fields can't think of anyplace else to turn, so he hires Arthur Belding [Guardino], a private detective, to help him find out what happened.” Jigsaw is a remake of 1965’s Mirage.

• Dexter: New Blood, the 10-episode revival of Michael C. Hall’s 2006-2013 drama, Dexter, is now expected to appear on Showtime come November 7. Wikipedia says this show will open “approximately ten years after the original series’ finale.” In the meanwhile, Hall’s Dexter Morgan “has moved to the fictional small town of Iron Lake, New York, hiding his identity under the name of Jimmy Lindsay, a local shopkeeper. He has developed a relationship with Angela Bishop, the town’s chief of police, and has suppressed his serial killing urges. A string of incidents around Iron Lake cause Dexter to fear that the ‘dark passenger’ within him will reveal itself.” The Killing Times offers a 90-second trailer for Dexter: New Blood, which incorporates a version of Del Shannon’s 1961 hit song, “Runaway” (previously employed as the theme for the 1986-1988 NBC police drama Crime Story).

• Almost five years ago, NBC-TV optioned Ben H. Winters’ Edgar Award-winning 2012 science fiction/mystery novel, The Last Policeman, with hopes of creating a series from it. Nothing came of that deal. Now, reports Tor.com, writer-producer Kyle Killen (Awake, Mind Games) is working on a pilot for Fox-TV, based on the same book, the resulting series—to be retitled The Last Police—expected to debut as part of the 2021/2022 season. Deadline explains that this show will follow “a small-town police detective, who, as an asteroid races toward an apocalyptic collision with Earth, believes she’s been chosen to save humanity, while her cynical partner can’t decide what he’ll enjoy more: her delusional failure, or the end of the world itself.” In Winters’ “existential detective novel,” the protagonist was a young male police detective in New Hampshire, one Henry Palace. In 2012, the author suggested that the role go to Jim True-Frost (The Wire, Manifest); no word yet on who might headline Fox’s adaptation.

• This is splendid news, from In Reference to Murder: “The new season of BritBox’s modern cozy mystery series, McDonald & Dodds, premieres on August 3rd. The series follows newly promoted DCI McDonald and veteran sergeant Dodds as they investigate complex mysteries with a web of clues that has everyone guessing who are the real victims and villains. Ahead of the new season, BritBox dropped a trailer, which you can view here.”

• Actress Jessica Walter, who died in March at age 80, has been nominated for a posthumous Emmy Award “for her voice-over work in FX/FXX’s animated comedy series Archer,” according to The Hollywood Reporter. “Walter voiced the toxic matriarch Malory Archer, the abrasive mother of H. Jon Benjamin’s Sterling Archer. She’s being recognized for her work in the sixth episode of the 11th season, ‘The Double Date.’” Should Walter secure this Emmy, it would be the second of her career; in 1975, she won Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited Series honors for her portrayal of San Francisco’s first female chief of detectives in the NBC Mystery Movie rotator Amy Prentiss.

• In the latest edition of her newsletter, The Crime Lady, author and New York Times crime-fiction columnist Sarah Weinman gives us a sneak peek of her latest true-crime book, Scoundrel: How a Convicted Murderer Persuaded the Women Who Loved Him, the Conservative Establishment, and the Courts to Set Him Free. Due out in February 2022, it tells the bizarre story of Edgar Herbert Smith, who killed a 15-year-old New Jersey honor student in 1957, subsequently contested his case in the media—being given special support by conservative pundit William F. Buckley Jr.—and, after winning a retrial and release, kidnapped and tried to kill another woman, this time in California. “By the time Scoundrel is published next year,” Weinman explains, “more than seven years will have passed since I first began researching and reporting the project. I can’t wait to fill you all in on what that entailed, the voluminous trove of documents and letters I consulted across multiple archives, the people I spoke with, and the strange juxtaposition of criminal justice, conservative thought, and book publishing that connected the crimes and misdeeds of one man who fooled so many into looking past his worst instincts to see what was never really there.”

• The Southern California town of Agoura Hills has selected Lee Goldberg’s Lost Hills (2020), his first novel featuring Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department homicide detective Eve Ronin, as its One City One Book 2021 honoree. “That means,” says Goldberg in his blog, “the local libraries, schools, etc. will be encouraging everyone to read the book and to come to City Hall on Sept. 30th to see me in conversation, buy a copy of my book if they haven’t already … and get their copies signed. Past honorees include Michael Connelly and Dick Van Dyke.” Admission to Goldberg’s Thursday, September 30, appearance will be free, but space is limited and advance registration is required; click here after August 1 to find out more.

• A big change for Britain’s Crime Writers’ Association:

For the first time in its 68-year history, the prestigious Crime Writers’ Association will allow self-published authors to join its ranks. The move comes after the CWA consulted its members, who voted with an 84% majority in favour to accept self-published authors.

Maxim Jakubowski, Chair of the Crime Writers’ Association, said: “The founding mission of the CWA was to support, promote and celebrate the crime genre and its authors. In the past, we only accepted traditionally published authors into the CWA, as this was the best indicator of quality. The publishing landscape has changed in recent years, and self-publishing has become a route for professional writers, and indeed there are many trailblazers in this field. The time is right to update our membership criteria.”

The news release adds: “Self-published authors wishing to become a CWA member will need to demonstrate a level of professionalism through a simple-to-complete application form. This will be available on the CWA website from 13 September, when the CWA will first accept applications.”

• It sounds as if this year’s Killer Nashville convention, expected to take place in Franklin, Tennessee, from August 19 to 22, is coming along right on schedule. Keynote speakers at this in-person event will be Walter Mosley, J.T. Ellison, and Lisa Black. More information is available here for anyone who would like to participate, but hasn’t yet registered. The full four-day registration will set you back $419.

• “Mystery Writers of America (MWA) is honoring the memory of its 2020 Grand Master, the late Barbara Neely, with a scholarship to new Black writers …,” writes Mystery Scene magazine’s Oline Cogdill. “MWA will annually present two scholarships of $2,000 each. One scholarship will be for an aspiring Black writer who has yet to publish in the crime or mystery field, and another for Black authors who have already published in crime or mystery.” September 30, 2021, is the deadline for applications (available here); a winner will be declared “in the late fall.” Click here for more information.

• Like millions of other Americans, my wife and I have been watching Season 4 of Unforgotten, part of PBS-TV’s Masterpiece Mystery! summer schedule. There are three additional Sunday-night installments yet to come, but already, Crimespree Magazine’s Erin Mitchell has declared Unforgotten, which stars Nicola Walker and Sanjeev Bhaskar as London-based cold-case detectives, “the best show on television.” She continues: “Unforgotten is one of those rare shows that does not tell a story at its surface, doesn’t just lead us on a step-by-step procedural journey. The procedure is there, of course, but the subtlety of the remarkable performances addresses the characters’ motivation to allow us to experience the often painful journey though the case. In that way, the experience of watching it is more akin to reading a book, which is the highest praise I can give a TV show.” A 90-second introduction to Season 4 is embedded below.



• Regé-Jean Page, a popular alumnus of the Netflix series Bridgerton, is set to star as The Saint, aka Simon Templar, in a new film based around that Leslie Charteris-created, “Robin Hood-esque criminal and thief for hire.” Deadline says the forthcoming Paramount picture “will be a completely new take that reimagines the character and world around him.” Author-screenwriter Lee Goldberg, nephew of Saint authority Burl Barer (The Saint: A Complete History in Print, Radio, Television, and Film), opines on Facebook that Page “will make a great Saint, but I hope they don’t stray too far from what we all loved about Leslie Charteris’ books, the George Sanders movies, and the [1962-1969] Roger Moore TV series.”

• With the abundance of resources provided in The Rap Sheet’s right-hand-column blogroll, you can be excused for not noticing when a new site is added. But let me direct your attention to one in particular: The Ross Macdonald Blog. Composed by Neil Albert, author of the Dave Garrett series (The January Corpse, etc.), it’s turning the critical microscope on every one of Macdonald’s novels, in chronological order, beginning with his non-Lew Archer yarns. Albert—who calls Macdonald (aka Kenneth Millar) “one of the three greatest writers in the genre of the hardboiled private eye, along with Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler” (no argument from yours truly)—has been working on this site primarily since the end of last year, and has so far progressed to The Three Roads (1948), Macdonald’s fourth novel. Each book is being considered in detail, over a succession of postings, The Dark Tunnel (1944) and Trouble Follows Me (1946) having each generated 11 entries. (Hat tip to Kevin Burton Smith.)

• Nobody who reads this page regularly should be surprised to hear that I own the 30th-anniversary edition of Mark Dawidziak’s The Columbo Phile: A Casebook, a work originally published in 1989. But now comes word of Bonaventure Press’ Shooting Columbo: The Lives and Deaths of TV’s Rumpled Detective, due out this coming September and written by David Koenig. Although somewhat shorter than Dawidziak’s book (only 248 pages, compared with 410), Shooting Columbo promises behind-the-scenes intelligence about that iconic Peter Falk series, plus “a blow-by-blow account of the making of all 69 classic mysteries, from the first [figurative] pilot, Prescription: Murder, to the last special, Columbo Likes the Nightlife.” The question is, do I need Koenig’s book on my shelves, too?

• Caroline Crampton hosts the podcast Shedunnit, but she’s also the author of a map and guide called Agatha Christie’s England, from London-based Herb Lester Associates, which years ago produced The Raymond Chandler Map of Los Angeles. Already out in England, and due for a September release in the States, Crampton’s publication focuses on “the real and fictional locations in the Queen of Crime’s canon,” as she writes in her e-mail newsletter. “There are dozens of places included, and for each I’ve researched why and how Christie wrote about them. I certainly felt like I gained a greater understanding of her work in the process of putting the guide together, and if you read it I hope you will feel the same.”

• From the “everything old is new again” department: TV Guide critic Matt Roush recently included this exchange in his blog:

Question: Will some forward-thinking Hollywood executive reboot the George Peppard vehicle Banacek? —Steve O.

Matt Roush: Would a reboot of a 1970s private-eye series really be forward-thinking? I loved the randomness of this suggestion, because there were so many higher-profile spokes of NBC’s “Mystery Movie” wheel: McCloud, McMillan and Wife, and, of course, Columbo. Seriously, though, because Banacek is lesser known, reviving a show and a hero that had a sense of humor about itself wouldn’t be the worst idea. In the bigger picture, I’d like to see a network try the “mystery wheel” format again, rotating its series on a weekly or monthly basis. Something like that could air year-round with fewer episodes per series, and that might be refreshing.

While I cringe a bit at Roush labeling Thomas Banacek a “private eye” (he was actually a Boston insurance investigator), I applaud his optimism on the matter of resuscitating television’s once-widespread “wheel series” format (about which I wrote last summer in CrimeReads). And Banacek—with its suave, totally immodest lead and supposedly impossible crimes—might, indeed, make for a fun reboot. But who do you think should fill Peppard’s loafers?

• Bay Area author-photographer Mark Coggins is out with Season 2 of his podcast, Riordan’s Desk. He launched this project in May 2020, at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, with a chapter-by-chapter reading of his seventh August Riordan private-eye novel, 2019’s The Dead Beat Scroll. Earlier this month, he packaged up the final installment of Season 2, a full reading (35 chapters in all) of his 2015 Riordan yarn, No Hard Feelings. And Coggins has already begun reading from Candy from Strangers (2006), his third Riordan mystery. Listen to the complete run of Riordan’s Desk by clicking here.

• Listen up, Bosch fans! “The Everybody Counts Podcast talks Bosch Season 7, Episode 5 and interviews Michael Connelly.”

• Charlie Chan authority Lou Armagno informs us that 92-year-old actor James Hong, who portrayed “Son No.1 to J. Carrol Naish’s Charlie Chan in The New Adventures of Charlie Chan [1957-1958], is to be honored next year with a star on Los Angeles’ Hollywood Walk of Fame. Hong, born in Minneapolis to Hong Kongese parents, and “the last living actor to star as a primary Chan character, either in film or television,” will be the third Chan cast member honored in this fashion; Keye Luke and the aforementioned J. Carrol Naish both won stars before him. Hong’s list of credits extends well beyond The New Adventures of Charlie Chan to include roles in everything from Richard Diamond, Private Eye and Hawaii Five-O to Kung Fu, Harry O, The Rockford Files, Switch, and the 1974 film Chinatown.

• “Edgar Allan Poe: Self-Help Guru”?

• From a patron of The Rap Sheet’s YouTube page: “I’m not making light of the condominium disaster in Florida, but every time a reporter who is covering that story says ‘Surfside,’ this song pops into my head.” Learn more about this other Surfside here.

• The blog maintained by History (formerly The History Channel) recently highlighted what it claims are “the most influential classic shows” from the 1950s, “TV’s “Golden Age.” In the category of crime (click here, then scroll to the bottom of the page), it mentions Martin Kane, Private Eye (1949-1954), Man Against Crime (1949-1954), and Dragnet (1951-1959). But what about Naked City (1958-1959, 1960-1963), Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer (1958-1959), M Squad (1957-1960), Richard Diamond, Private Detective (1957-1960), Decoy (1957-1959), Have Gun—Will Travel (1957-1963), 77 Sunset Strip (1958-1964), Perry Mason (1957-1966), and Peter Gunn (1958-1961)? Today’s younger viewers may be unaware of this, but the ’50s brought us myriad TV detective shows that are still worth watching.

• On the subject of vintage small-screen shows, how about T.H.E. Cat (1966-1967), which starred Robert Loggia as a San Francisco cat burglar named Thomas Hewitt Edward Cat, and spun off a quartet of comic-book adventures?

• Was this really a good idea? You may recall that Deadline reported last year, “James Patterson and Condé Nast are teaming to revive vintage crime fighter The Shadow in a series of books that will also aim to be adapted for the screen.” Hachette Book Group imprint Little, Brown will publish the original series … The Shadow [aka society gadabout Lamont Cranston], a signature New York vigilante, originated in the 1930s as a series of pulp novels by Walter B. Gibson. A popular radio drama based on the books featured the voice of Orson Welles. In 1994, Universal released a feature film adaptation starring Alec Baldwin.” Anyway, Patterson’s introductory entry in this new series, set in the late 21st century and simply titled The Shadow, came out on July 13, and was greeted with more than a modicum of skepticism. San Francisco tour guide and author Don Herron remarks, “I had thought about giving it a shot, and then I saw the cover [shown on the left]. The only thought I could process was Where the fuck is HIS HAT???”

• Yellow Perils is no more enthusiastic about the book.

• Dashiell Hammett’s first novel, Red Harvest (1929), has inspired a number of cinematic creations over the years, including the 1930 picture Roadhouse Nights and the 2005 neo-noir mystery Brick. But the book, which stars Hammett’s nameless San Francisco private eye, the Continental Op, has never been given a faithful adaptation. It did once come close, however, as a series of newspaper clippings in Davy Crockett’s Almanack of Mystery, Adventure, and the Wild West makes clear. In 1941, the Los Angeles Times carried word of Paramount Pictures decision not to remake its 1935 film based on Hammett’s fourth novel, The Glass Key, but to instead develop a script from Red Harvest. Brian Donlevy was slated to portray the Op, with Paulette Goddard and a young Alan Ladd helping to fill out the cast. Unfortunately, that film was first “postponed” and later abandoned. Hoping to boost Ladd’s Hollywood career, Paramount decided to remake The Glass Key after all. Donlevy was nominally the headliner, but Ladd was the real star of that production, while Veronica Lake replaced Goddard as its distaff attraction.

• Did author Hammett really break the window of a downtown department store in Miami, Florida, during a four-day visit he made to that city in 1934? The Palm Beach Post recalled the story late last year, but it may just be an urban legend.

• Talk about dropping the ball! I realized this week that, while I had reported on nominees for the 2021 Scribe Awards, I never announced the winners. In the category of greatest interested to crime-fiction readers—“General Original Novel and Adapted Novel”—Max Allan Collins and Mickey Spillane’s 12th Mike Hammer novel, Masquerade for Murder (2020), lost out to a video-game-related adventure, Day Zero: Watchdogs Legion, by James Swallow and Josh Reynolds (Aconyte).

• Were I able to attend this year’s PulpFest, taking place in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, from August 19th through 22nd, I would definitely want to be in the audience for “popular culture scholar” Doug Ellis’ presentation, “The Weird Tales of Margaret Brundage.” “Initially disguising her gender by signing her work as M. Brundage, the artist redefined sensuality for the already scandalous pulp market,” observes the PulpFest Web site. “Her work was later targeted by New York Mayor LaGuardia’s 1938 decency campaign. … Margaret Brundage [1900-1976] created 66 covers for Weird Tales between 1932 and 1945, making her the most in-demand cover artist for the fantasy, horror, and science-fiction magazine. Only Virgil Finlay was a close rival.” Ellis’ remarks on Brundage are scheduled for Friday, August 20.

• The best interview I’ve heard with T.J. Newman, the former flight attendant and author of the new thriller Falling (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster), was conducted by Dave Davies on NPR’s Fresh Air program. You can listen to their whole conversation here.

• Powell’s Books, the Portland, Oregon, landmark heralded as “the world’s largest independent bookstore,” is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. As part of the celebration, it has assembled “a curated collection of 50 books from the past 50 years.” I’d be more enthusiastic about this list if—in addition to Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams, and Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future—it contained even one crime, mystery, or thriller novel. No such luck!

• Max Allan Collins mentions in his blog that the 13th Mike Hammer novel he’s “co-authored” with the late Mickey Spillane, is due out from Titan Books in 2022—75 years after the appearance of Spillane’s first Hammer yarn, I, the Jury. This one will be titled Kill Me If You Can.

• There have been so many crime novels backdropped by San Francisco, that Paul French was bound to fail when he determined to collect, for CrimeReads, a representative sample of their diversity. Why, for instance, does he mention Stuart M. Kaminsky’s Poor Butterfly (2012)—the only Toby Peters mystery set in the Bay Area (most of them took place in L.A.)—or Charles Willeford’s one-off, Wild Wives (1956), but completely ignore the oeuvres of Colin Willcox, Stephen Greenleaf, Kelli Stanley, and Bill Pronzini? That said, French’s piece—parked here—is entertaining, and might give you some ideas of things to read as this summer season winds to an end.

• For broader exposure to fictional offenses set in and around San Francisco, consult Randal S. Brandt’s Golden Gate Mysteries wiki.

• And how much fun is this? Blogger Evan Lewis is showcasing the covers, contents pages, copyright information, and occasional lagniappes from every early edition of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. As he explains in this introductory post, “Some months ago, my old friend and fellow book collector Jim Rogers passed away, and left behind a complete run of EQMM from 1941 to 1959. Those mags have now passed into the care of another old friend, Mr. Larry Paschelke, and Larry agreed to let me scan the covers and share them with you here. (Jim, I have no doubt, would have done the same had I asked, but I didn't know he had them!)” Click here to catch up with Lewis’ project in progress.

Just Trying to Stay on Top of Things

• For the second year in a row, the Mystery Writers of America will announce the winners of its latest Edgar Allan Poe Awards via a Zoom Webcast. Those ceremonies are scheduled to begin at 1 p.m. EDT on Thursday, April 29. Click here to register as a participant. If you’ve forgotten which books are authors have been nominated for commendation, that information is here.

• CrimeReads’ Olivia Rutigliano tells me something I didn’t know before. As the headline on her story reads, “Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of the Four and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray Were Commissioned at the Same Dinner Party.”

• Tatiana Maslany, who played evangelical preacher Sister Alice McKeegan in Season 1 of HBO-TV’s Perry Mason series, will apparently not reprise that role during the show’s sophomore season. As ComingSoon.net reports, “Maslany’s exit … comes on the heels of [her] officially signing on for the lead role in Marvel Studios’ She-Hulk series, which may have also affected her schedule for Perry Mason. Production on the Disney+ series is expected to start soon.”

• Jason Diamond writes in GQ magazine that Peter Falk’s Columbo series has become “an unlikely quarantine hit.”

• Just a couple of months ago, I observed that the odds against there being a Season 3 of McDonald & Dodds, the ITV-TV crime drama starring Tala Gouveia and Jason Watkins, seemed terribly high. But wonders never cease, and The Killing Times now brings word that a third series of McDonald & Dodds has indeed been commissioned.

• In Reference to Murder says that “James Ellroy, the ‘Demon Dog’ of American literature, is teaming up with the podcast firm, Audio Up, for a five-part podcast series to launch in August. The author of L.A. Confidential and The Black Dahlia will produce and narrate the podcast, titled Hollywood Death Trip, which takes listeners on a nocturnal tour of murder and mayhem in Los Angeles with period music, archival radio, and cinematic sound design.” CrimeReads adds, “the podcast will be released shortly after Ellroy’s new novel, Widespread Panic, which will be published on June 15, 2021, [by] Alfred A. Knopf. Widespread Panic is the third novel in Ellroy’s ‘Second L.A. Quartet,’ following Perfidia and This Storm.”

• How would you like to live in Agatha Christie’s old home?

• Earlier this month, blogger and Mystery Scene columnist Ben Boulden released an interesting e-book titled Killers, Crooks & Spies: Jack Bickham’s Fiction. If you aren’t familiar with Bickham (1930-1997), Boulden notes that he “wrote in every popular genre, except horror and romance (although he did write a few ‘sleaze’ novels for Midwood that may be a touch romantic). He started in Westerns in 1958, and finished with a posthumously published traditional mystery in 1998. Bickham wrote The Apple Dumpling Gang, which Disney translated into a 1975 box office hit. He wrote six espionage thrillers, featuring aging tennis pro Brad Smith, and so much more.” I can’t say I invest much in e-books, but after having come across Bickham’s novels in used bookshops many times over the years, Boulden’s overview of his life and writing career seemed worth having.

Bullet Points: Wonders Never Cease Edition

• This coming Monday, March 1, will bring—from The Bagley Brief Web site—the release of Writer: An Enquiry into a Novelist, Philip Eastwood’s “painstaking reconstruction” of a previously unpublished memoir by English adventure-thriller writer Desmond Bagley (1923-1983). In advance of that, Shotsmag Confidential has posted the foreword to Eastwood’s work, written by Mike Ripley (Kiss Kiss Bang Bang) and establishing Bagley’s stature as one of the Big Three among contributors to the”Golden Age of the British thriller,” the other two being Hammond Innes and Alistair MacLean.

• Can it really be true, at last? According to Deadline,

Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins, a character created by author Walter Mosley, is getting another shot on television after Amblin Television signed up to develop a series.

The production company has closed a deal to adapt Mosley’s stories—Rawlins has appeared in 15 novels and short stories—with The Americans and Amazing Stories director Sylvain White on board to direct the pilot episode and exec produce.

The series, based on the gritty detective novels, will center around Easy, a Black WWII Army veteran turned hard-boiled private eye. The show will be set in 1950’s Los Angeles and will honor the great traditions of storytelling in the detective genre, while also exploring the racial inequalities and social injustice experienced by Black people and other people of color.

Deadline observes that this “is the latest attempt to get Rawlins on to the small screen—[screenwriter-producer] John Wells attempted an Easy Rawlins series at NBC back in 2011 and USA Network also attempted a version seven years before that. The character of Easy Rawlins also previously appeared on screen in the 1995 film Devil in a Blue Dress, which starred Denzel Washington.”

• Back in December I mentioned that the often humorous British crime drama McDonald & Dodds, featuring Tala Gouveia and Jason Watkins as mismatched cops in modern-day Bath, England, would soon return with a second season. Radio Times now brings word that the first of three new two-hour-long McDonald & Dodds episodes will show in the UK on Sunday, February 28, beginning at 8 p.m. Guest stars this season include Rupert Graves, Doctor Who’s Natalie Gumede, and Saira Choudhry. Radio Times provides cursory synopses of each installment’s storyline. It also frets that “these three episodes could be McDonald & Dodds’ last, since DCI McDonald [Gouveia] firmly stated in the previous series that she would only stay in Bath for two years tops.” But hey, we’re dealing here with a work of pure fiction, and if this ITV program continues to pull in audiences, can we not expect someone in charge to contrive a semi-logical excuse for extending its storyline?

• Shortly in advance of the coronavirus pandemic shutting down movie and television production a year ago, British TV channel BBC One announced that it had greenlighted two additional seasons—Series 6 and 7—of the Scottish crime drama Shetland, starring Douglas Henshall. But only now, says The Killing Times, is work on those fresh episodes finally resuming. Beginning in April, it explains, back-to-back series of the show (six episodes apiece) will commence shooting on the subarctic archipelago that gives this prize-winning drama its name. “Both series will be written and created by David Kane (Stonemouth, The Field of Blood), who originated the first series of Shetland and has written on every series since. The islands’ local newspaper, The Shetland Times, reported that producer Louise Say promised ‘absolutely riveting’ and ‘hard-hitting’ storylines.”

• This will likely be worth watching. B.V. Lawson tells us that “Benedict Cumberbatch will star in a limited series update of the classic thriller, The 39 Steps, inspired by John Buchan’s novel, which was turned into the 1935 film classic by Alfred Hitchcock. The TV project of The 39 Steps is being described as ‘a provocative, action-packed conspiracy thriller series that updates the classic novel for our times. An ordinary man, Richard Hannay, becomes an unwitting pawn in a vast, global conspiracy to reset the world order.’”

• Even before TV writer and producer William Link’s death in December, I had been trying to catch up with the proliferation of small-screen movies he developed with his writing partner of 43 years, Richard Levinson. I’ve found a variety of them on YouTube, and bought DVDs of some others online. However, I was in the dark about their 1986 mystery Vanishing Act, until Mystery*File reminded me of its existence. As Steve Lewis relates, it finds “Harry Kenyon (Mike Farrell) … on his honeymoon in the Rocky Mountains after a whirlwind romance in Las Vegas with a woman named Christine Prescott. But their wedded bliss is soon interrupted and Harry reports her disappearance to Lieutenant Rudameyer (Elliott Gould), a New Yorker more interested in eating a corned beef sandwich specially imported from a delicatessen on West 87th Street. It seems to be a fuss over nothing as Christine (Margot Kidder) is quickly found--only Harry doesn’t recognize her and refuses to believe she’s his wife!” At least for the present moment, you can watch that full picture here.

• Shoot! We almost got to watch a Wild Wild West reboot.

• Thirty-nine-year-old Morven Christie (formerly of Grantchester) has quit her role as a detective sergeant family liaison officer on The Bay, making way for actress Marsha Thomason to lead the cast in Series 3 of that British crime drama. Understandably, Christie’s sudden departure has fomented speculation about why she gave up that plum part. The Killing Times thinks it may have a clue.

• Holmes and Watson—villains? That’s just one of the twists in a new, eight-episode horror series debuting on March 26. Writes Olivia Rutigliano: “The Baker Street Irregulars, Sherlock Holmes’s organization of motley street urchins, are going to get their own Netflix series. It’s a dark show, full of supernatural mysteries, but the paranormal activity is not the only modification to the Sherlockian world you know and love. The program, titled The Irregulars, posits that the group is manipulated into solving dangerous supernatural crimes by Dr. Watson (who is evil)—feats for which his sketchy business partner Sherlock Holmes gets all the renown.”

• In Reference to Murder reports that among the among the 25 categories of finalists for this year’s Audie Awards, announced this week by the Audio Publishers Association, are two of potentially special interest to Rap Sheet readers: Mystery and Thriller/Suspense. Below are the five Mystery contenders:

— A Bad Day for Sunshine, by Darynda Jones, narrated by Lorelei King (Macmillan Audio)
— Confessions on the 7:45, by Lisa Unger, narrated by Vivienne Leheny (HarperAudio)
— Fair Warning, by Michael Connelly, narrated by Peter Giles and Zach Villa (Hachette Audio)
— The Guest List, by Lucy Foley, narrated by Chloe Massey, Olivia Dowd, Sarah Ovens, Rich Keeble, Aoife McMahon, and Jot Davies (HarperAudio)
— Trouble Is What I Do, by Walter Mosley, narrated by Dion Graham (Hachette Audio)

The full list of 2021 Audie nominees is here. Winners are to be announced during a virtual “gala” on March 22. The festivities are set to start at 9 p.m. EST, and can be streamed live at this link.

• Blogger Evan Lewis has generously taken the time to dig up, from the deep recesses of the Web, as many publicity materials as he could find related to the 1946 Humphrey Bogart/Lauren Bacall film, The Big Sleep. Look for them in two separate posts, here and here.

• Left Coast Crime already rescheduled its 2021 convention for 2022, due to the worldwide spread of COVID-19. And now Malice Domestic is doing the same. “After careful consideration,” its board of directors declared in a news release, “we have decided to postpone Malice 32/33 to 2022. … Instead of a live event in 2021, we are excited to announce More Than Malice, a virtual (online) festival. More Than Malice will be held on July 14-17, 2021, and will feature special guests, unique panels, and the Agatha Awards. We will have much more exciting information for you in the coming days and weeks.” Everyone who’s currently registered for Malice 2021 should receive an Agatha Award nomination form soon. Keep up with developments by following the Malice Twitter page.

• In CrimeReads, editor Dwyer Murphy ponders that immortal question, Why was Raymond Chandler so venomous in attacking Alfred Hitchcock’s 1951 psychological thriller, Strangers on a Train?

• How did Victorian homes “go from celebrated to creepy?”

• Excellent news! UK author Martin Edwards spent his weeks in pandemic lockdown researching and penning a third Rachel Savernake/Jacob Flint historical mystery (following Gallows Court and Mortmain Hall). He writes in his blog that it should be published “early next year,” with a fourth installment to follow in 2023.

• Only days ago I recommended that readers check out—with warranted dispatch—the complete, one-season run of NBC-TV’s City of Angels on YouTube. Now comes Steve Aldous with a short review of that show’s three-part first episode, “The November Plan.” He remarks: “The promise on show here would occasionally surface over the series’ next ten episodes before it was cancelled due to low ratings just as it was building a head of steam.”

• Why the Titanic’s 1912 sinking still makes for a good story.

• And it’s true: Director Tim Burton is set to shoot a live-action, young-adult series for Netflix about Wednesday Addams, the wonderfully creepy little girl familiar from small- and big-screen versions of The Addams Family. Variety describes Wednesday as “a sleuthing, supernaturally infused mystery charting Wednesday Addams’ years as a student at Nevermore Academy. She attempts to master her emerging psychic ability, thwart a monstrous killing spree that has terrorized the local town, and solve the supernatural mystery that embroiled her parents 25 years ago—all while navigating her new and very tangled relationships at Nevermore.” Tor.com says there is “no official word on the casting yet, but given how sadly awful the last Addams film was (the animated one from 2019, not the gems we got in the ’90s), this might be a slight improvement?”