Bullet Points: Pre-Father’s Day Edition

• If you’re not sufficiently aware of this already, tomorrow night will bring the debut of HBO-TV’s eight-part Perry Mason mini-series starring Matthew Rhys (The Americans). It’s conceived as a prequel to the classic 1957-1966 CBS series of that same name, which cast Raymond Burr as the almost unbeatable Los Angeles criminal defense attorney introduced by Erle Stanley Gardner in 1933’s The Case of the Velvet Claws. HBO’s version, set just one year before that—in 1932—imagines Mason as a down-and-out, heavy-drinking private eye “retained for a sensational child kidnapping trial, and his investigation portends major consequences for Mason, his client, and the city itself.” The character Rhys plays here is actually closer than Burr’s portrayal was to Gardner’s original conception of Mason as (to quote from Otto Penzler’s The Private Lives of Private Eyes, Spies, Crime Fighters and Other Good Guys) a “hard-boiled, two-fisted and noncerebral” advocate for justice. But writers/showrunners Ron Fitzgerald and Rolin Jones have sought to flesh out their protagonist’s back story, as well. The Killing Times explains: “Mason is haunted by his wartime experiences in France and suffering the effects of a broken marriage.” An extended, noir-accented trailer (found here) nicely captures Depression-era L.A., with its recent Olympic Games, its unlikely “evangelical fervor,” the rise of the oil industry, and of course its Hollywood glamour. Vulture calls this new Perry Mason “a simultaneously gorgeous, gritty, and sometimes downright gory period piece filled with fine performances.” John Lithgow, Tatiana Maslany, Shea Whigham, Stephen Root, and Robert Patrick join Rhys in the cast. After disappointing previous attempts to revive Perry Mason (remember Monte Markham’s The New Perry Mason of 1973-1974?), it will be nice if HBO can draw upon what fans like about Gardner’s protagonist, while imbuing his story with greater emotional depth and substance. I’ll be watching with my fingers crossed.

• Scottish writer Lee Randall contributes a useful backgrounder about Gardner to CrimeReads, in which she recalls the lawyer-turned-author’s original intent with Mason: “I want to make my hero a fighter, not by having him be ruthless with women and underlings, but by having him wade into the opposition and battle his way through to victory. … [T]he character I am trying to create for him is that of a fighter who is possessed of infinite patience. He tries to jockey his enemies into a position where he can deliver one good knockout punch.” Yep, that nicely sums up the typical Mason yarn.

• Florida journalist Craig Pittman provides something of a public-service piece to aspiring legal-thriller writers, consulting various attorneys who have become novelists on how one might best compose realistic courtroom dramas. “I would suggest that authors treat courtroom scenes much like any other and not let the legal and technical details override the narrative,” says Alafair Burke, once a prosecutor in Oregon and now a professor at New York’s Hofstra University School of Law. “Too many courtroom scenes read like an intentional display of the research the author conducted to prepare for the scene. Instead, focus on character, setting, plot, dialogue—all the things that drive a good book. If the legal details don’t further a critical aspect of the narrative, skip them.”

• Crimespree Magazine brings word that writer Val McDermid “has unveiled the hotly tipped ‘New Blood’ authors for 2020, showcasing the year’s best breakout crime-writing talent.” Her choices:

— Deepa Anappara, Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line (Chatto & Windus)
— Elizabeth Kay, Seven Lies (Sphere)
— Jessica Moor, Keeper (Penguin)
— Trevor Wood, The Man on the Street (Quercus)

“Since 2004,” explains Crimespree’s Erin Mitchell, “the best-selling Scottish author of the Tony Hill and Carol Jordan series has curated an annual celebration of the most formidable debuts taking the crime and thriller genre by storm, with an invitation to join the line-up of the world’s largest and most prestigious crime-fiction festival: Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival.” Although this year’s festival was cancelled due to the pandemic, Mitchell says McDermid’s 2020 “New Blood” showcase “will be streamed on the festival’s HIF Player on what would have been the legendary weekender on Saturday 25 July 2020.” You should be able to access the audio here at that time.

• I know, I know, it’s the frickin’ middle of June already, but only now am I finally getting around to remarking upon Mike Ripley’s latest edition of his “Getting Away with Murder” column for Shots. Featured among his plentiful subjects this time are: older books he’s taken up reading during the COVID-19 lockdown; forgotten writers Douglas Sanderson (Blondes Are My Trouble) and Peter Leslie (Bootleg Angel); fresh crime fiction by Sharon Bolton, Douglas Lindsay, Barbara Nadel, and Martin Walker; and the end of the line for the Top Notch Thrillers and Ostara Crime imprints, for which Ripley served as editor.

• In Reference to Murder features this tidbit:

Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards announced this year's winners, including in the Mystery Category. The Gold winner was Below the Fold by R.G. Belsky; Silver winner was A Plain Vanilla Murder by Susan Wittig Albert; and Bronze winner was Moonscape by Julie Weston. In the Thriller Category, the Gold winner was The Nine by Jeanne Blasberg; the Silver winner was The Unrepentant by E.A. Aymar; and the Bronze winner was Green Valley by Louis Greenberg. The Guilt We Carry by Samuel W. Gailey was also a Thriller Honorable Mention.

• Congratulations to Joe Kenney for 10 years at the helm of Glorious Trash, one of the best blogs about forgotten (and sometimes best-forgotten) works of paperback fiction.

• What a beautiful selection of vintage B-movie posters, all painted by Albert Kallis. I’m particularly fond of his placards for The Brain Eaters and The Astounding She-Monster, two science-fiction productions released in 1958.

• Like so many other writers, San Francisco-area author Mark Coggins has decided to launch a podcast during the COVID-19 lockdown. It’s called Riordan’s Desk, after his series private eye, August Riordan, and he’s currently reading chapters from his latest Riordan novel, The Dead Beat Scroll (2019). Chapter 15 just went up a few days ago. To listen, look for Riordan's Desk on iTunes or any of the popular podcast directories. Or, to listen from the Web, click here.



• Seeing as we’re now just a little over a month away from the TNT-TV premiere of The Alienist: Angel of Darkness, the eight-episode mini-series sequel to last year’s acclaimed Victorian-era thriller, The Alienist, don’t you think it’s time to watch a trailer for that new production? You’ll find a good one embedded above. Both shows are adapted from crime novels published in the 1990s by Caleb Carr. The Killing Times offers this synopsis of the coming sequel:

In The Alienist: Angel of Darkness, Sara [Howard] has opened her own private detective agency and is leading the charge on a brand-new case. She reunites with Dr. [Laszlo] Kreizler and John Moore, now a New York Times reporter, to find Ana Linares, the kidnapped infant daughter of the Spanish Consular. Their investigation leads them down a sinister path of murder and deceit, heading towards a dangerous and elusive killer.

The promo blurb says that series two will “shine a light on the provocative issues of the era—the corruption of institutions, income inequality, yellow press sensationalism, and the role of women in society—themes that still resonate today.”

This new mini-series is set to drop on Sunday, July 26.

• In other small-screen news, Variety reports that “Amazon is developing a series centered on Lisbeth Salander, the character created by Stieg Larsson for the so-called Millenium books. The project, which is currently titled The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, will not be a sequel or continuation of the story from the books or the films into which they were adapted. It will instead take Salander and place her in today’s world with a wholly new setting, new characters, and a new story. No writer or lead actress is currently attached to the series.”

• And January Magazine recommends that Harlan Coben followers tune in to “a six-part Netflix mini-series based on The Woods, Coben’s 2007 novel,” it’s action transferred from New Jersey to Poland. “The switch creates some real magic: Coben’s terrific storytelling reimagined here with a gritty European sensibility,” January enthuses. Netflix debuted this six-part mini-series on June 12.

• For some reason, Janet Rudolph posted her list of Father’s Day mysteries last month. But tomorrow is actually Father’s Day here in the States, so let’s revisit that collection of titles now.

• As a veteran newspaper guy, I was interested to read this excerpt of a story from The Wall Street Journal about how some struggling local papers “are shutting down their [printing] presses and, to save money for distant corporate owners, printing their daily editions at other newspaper headquarters hours away. The papers still bear the names of the cities where they’re read, but they roll off presses elsewhere, sometimes in different states.” Included with that excerpt is a fabulous scene from the 1952 picture Deadline—U.S.A., in which “crusading managing editor” Humphrey Bogart instructs his press room foreman to start running the giant presses, churning out copies of the broadsheet containing an exposé of a mobster’s misdeeds. “That’s the press, baby. The press,” he tells the doomed hood over the phone. “And there’s nothing you can do about it. Nothing.”

• November 1 is the deadline for essay proposals on the theme of “Historical Crime Fiction,” the focus of a future edition of Clues: A Journal of Detection. The mag’s managing editor, Elizabeth Foxwell, explains that Rosemary Erickson Johnsen (Contemporary Feminist Historical Crime Fiction) will act guest-edit that issue.

• I’m very sorry to learn that Spanish novelist Carlos Ruiz Zafón, best known worldwide for penning 2001’s The Shadow of the Wind, died Friday from colorectal cancer. He was only 55 years old. An obituary in The Guardian notes that this Barcelona-born fictionist “was frequently described as the most-read Spanish author since Cervantes,” and it quotes Zafón as saying “he felt he had ‘no other choice’ but to be a writer: ‘Sometimes people ask me what piece of advice I would give to an aspiring author. I’d tell them that you should only become a writer if the possibility of not becoming one would kill you. Otherwise, you’d be better off doing something else. I became a writer, a teller of tales, because otherwise I would have died, or worse.’”

• Also announced was the demise of Grace F. Edwards, a Harlem mystery writer and former executive director of the Harlem Writers Guild, who passed away on February 25 of this year, at age 87. “Though she began writing at age 7,” recalls The New York Times, “Grace F. Edwards waited until she was 55 to publish her first novel. That book, In the Shadow of the Peacock, was a lush portrayal of Harlem during World War II, a girl’s coming-of-age story set against the race riots of the time. It was a placeholder for the six detective stories she would later write, mysteries set in Harlem starring a female cop turned sociologist and accidental sleuth named Mali Anderson, always with a backbeat of jazz. The first of these, If I Should Die, was published in 1997, when Ms. Edwards was 64.”

• Finally, I offer a sad good-bye to Dennis “Denny” O’Neil. The Spy Command explains that O’Neil was “a comic book writer and editor who [in the 1970s] returned Batman to his dark origins,” following a very lighthearted period “during the run of the 1966-68 television series starring Adam West.” In an obituary of his own, author Scott D. Parker describes O’Neil as “easily one of the people you’d put on the Mt. Rushmore of Batman creators.” Meanwhile, Terence Towles Canote writes that “In addition to his work in comic books, Dennis O’Neil also wrote several novels, including The Bite of Monsters (1971) and Dragon’s Fists – Richard Dragon, Kung Fu Master (with Jim Berry, 1974), as well as novels ... featuring Batman and Green Lantern. Over the years he also wrote several stories and novellas published in such magazines as Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Fantastic Stories, and Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction.” O’Neil died on June 11 at age 81.

• A few author interviews worth your attention: For her excellent Speaking of Mysteries podcast, Nancie Clare talks with both Craig Robertson (Watch Him Die) and Paul D. Marks (The Blues Don’t Care); Steve Powell goes one-on-one with Shelley Blanton Stroud (Copy Boy); Rich Ehisen quizzes Timothy Jay Smith (A Fire on the Island); and MysteryPeople’s Scott Montgomery chats with James Wade about the latter’s new novel, All Things Left Wild.

• Len Deighton enthusiast Rob Mallows relates the tale of his longtime search for “a simple postcard, part of the marketing materials for the first UK edition of SS-GB.”

• My late father and I generally had quite different TV-watching tastes. He was partial to fare such as Hee Haw, The Benny Hill Show, Hunter, The A-Team, and Walker, Texas Ranger, none of which I fancied. However, we did watch The Rockford Files together. In fact, I think I may have introduced him to that 1974-1980 NBC detective series, after enjoying its pilot film. Only later did I learn that my father had been a fan of actor James Garner ever since the late 1950s, when he starred in Maverick. But my point here is that I enjoyed Rockford when it was originally broadcast, and I take just as much pleasure in watching episodes occasionally more than four decades later. So I was a prime candidate to appreciate Nathan Ward’s recent tribute to the show, in CrimeReads. It contains numerous smile-inducing reminders of what the series offered, the first of those being Ward’s fond memory of the 1974 pilot:

The first show did not reek of tough-guy promise. First of all, [Rockford] turned down the job he was hired for not once but twice, and except for his California P.I. license he seemed like just another big affable guy with ordinary problems: an understocked fridge, people hectoring him through his answering machine. His concerns seemed unheroic and, perhaps worst of all, he did not even carry a gun, keeping one only for emergencies in a cookie jar in the kitchen of his house trailer. And when at one point his client asked, a little concerned, “You’re not afraid of him, are you?” he told her the truth, “You’re damn right I am.”

But what grabbed me from the first episode was one hilarious scene: Jim Rockford, tired of being trailed by … [a] muscular killer (William Smith) in a long red convertible, pulls into the Mayfair Music Hall, a Santa Monica venue of vaudeville-era entertainments. The bow-tied bartender greets Rockford and asks “The usual?” as a young woman performs a slow split atop a wire, meaning Jim either comes here often to lose a tail or he likes novelty acts. After his brawny pursuer enters the bar and growls his drink order, Jim heads to the men’s room to prepare his trap. The Mayfair switches to a troupe of dancing poodles as Rockford’s man stalks to the bathroom, where Jim has drizzled hand soap across the floor and retrieved a roll of nickels from his coat pocket, taunting, “You musclebound guys are always overcompensating.” The charge of latency draws a macho scream and a high kick that slides him back onto the soapy tile, where Jim lands a cheap insurance shot. According to Ed Robertson’s history of The Rockford Files, this scene nearly broke the ASI meter when the pilot was tested, and may have made the show. It did for me. By cheating a little, it seemed a clever man could take down a bully. I was hooked.

Ward has much more to say about The Rockford Files here.

• Not to go overboard in promoting recent CrimeReads articles, but here are a few more I have enjoyed: Olivia Rutigliano’s excellent analysis of Inspector Bucket, Charles Dickens’ “devious, hypocritical ‘nice guy’ cop” in Bleak House (1853); Shane Mawe’s profile of Freeman Wills Crofts, once a prolific Irish mystery novelist (The Cask, The 12:30 from Croydon, etc.) and “a contemporary of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, … [whose] reputation has failed to match that of these luminaries”; Chris McGinley’s profile of Virginia Kellogg, who “wrote some of the greatest crime movies in Hollywood's Golden Age,” but is today pretty much forgotten; and Paul French’s exploration of the various books and authors that have helped make Sydney “Australia’s undisputed capital of Noir.”

• Are you a big Ian Rankin admirer? If you, you might be interested to know that the Scottish creator of Inspector John Rebus is the subject of the latest entry in the McFarland Companions to Mystery Fiction series. At more than 400 pages long, Ian Rankin: A Companion to the Mystery Fiction is said to include “alphabetized entries on Rankin’s works, characters, and themes; a biography; a chronology; maps of Rebus’ Edinburgh; and an annotated bibliography.”

• Martin Edwards also recommends H.R.F. Keating: A Life of Crime, by Sheila Mitchell (Level Best). He describes this study of the British author behind Indian policeman Inspector Ganesh Ghote as “affectionate and entertaining” and says it “gives wonderful insights into the ups and downs of the crime writing life,” as well as a few curious bits of triva. “For instance,” remarks Edwards, “one thing I didn’t know was that Harry wrote the novelisation of Neil Simon’s Murder by Death.” The prolific Keating passed away in 2011.

• Thirteen years after The Sopranos ended its six-season run on HBO, creator/writer David Chase has finally revealed the meaning of its last episode’s ambiguous ending.

• And the next time you need a musical pick-me-up, try this.

Noting Those We’ve Lost

While our world suffers through the worsening novel coronavirus pandemic, and the United States alone accounts for almost 60,000 deaths thus far, other people are dying from causes unrelated to this viral scourge. That includes at least five people—see below—who had an influence on crime, mystery, and thriller fiction.

• Various sources report that Maj Sjöwall, the Swedish author who, with partner Per Wahlöö (1926-1975), composed 10 renowned novels starring Stockholm police detective Martin Beck, died earlier today at age 84. It’s said that her demise followed a prolonged illness. Of Sjöwall and Wahlöö, the periodical Barron’s notes:

The duo also penned the series decades before the likes of Henning Mankell and Stieg Larsson made the genre of “Nordic Noir” into a worldwide hit.

“They broke with the previous trends in crime fiction,” Henning Mankell wrote in an introduction to the 2006 English edition of Roseanna. His own Inspector Kurt Wallander series would owe much to Beck three decades later.

Sjowall was “the giant on whose shoulders the titans of modern Scandi crime fiction stand,” Britain’s Daily Telegraph wrote in 2015, in a story headlined “The couple who invented Nordic Noir.”

Both committed Marxists, they went beyond crime fiction, breaking new ground by carrying out a forensic examination of the failings of Swedish society. The modern themes they tackled included paedophilia, serial killers, the sex industry and suicide.

“Through the eyes of Martin Beck and his colleagues, they held a mirror up to Swedish society at a time when the ideals
of the welfare state were beginning to buckle under the realities of everyday life,” Scottish crime writer Val McDermid wrote in the introduction to the 2006 edition of The Man Who Went Up In Smoke.

Rap Sheet correspondent Ali Karim points me toward video of an interview Lee Child conducted with Sjöwall at CrimeFest in 2015. And it’s worth revisiting a profile The Observer did of Sjöwall back in 2009, which recounted how she and Wahlöö came to write the Beck novels, beginning with 1965’s Roseanna. (Hat tip to Mystery Fanfare.)

• English actress Jill Gascoine perished today, too. As Deadline says, Gascoine “played the role of Detective Inspector Forbes for 56 episodes of The Gentle Touch in the early 1980s; it was the first Brit TV drama to center on a female police officer. She reprised the part for [the] spin-off series C.A.T.S. Eyes in 1985-87. Her TV work also saw roles in shows including Z-Cars, General Hospital, Home to Roost, and, after relocating to Los Angeles, the American series Northern Exposure and Touched By an Angel. On the movie side, she appeared in King of the Wind opposite Richard Harris and Glenda Jackson, and the comedy BASEketball.” Gascoine—who had suffered from Alzheimer’s for the last decade—was 83, and had been married to fellow British performer Alfred Molina since 1986. More on Gascoine’s passing is here.

• I am far from the first to mention the demise, on April 24, of Sheila Quigley, the author best known for having penned eight mystery novels set around a fictional estate in the northeast England town of Houghton-le-Spring (Run for Home, Killing Me Softly, etc.). She was 72 years old, explains ChronicleLive, a UK news site, which adds that Quigley was “taken to hospital with complications arising from a toe infection but her shocked family were told her condition had deteriorated rapidly. She was tested three times for COVID-19 but it was ruled out as the cause of her death.” Fellow fictionist Martin Edwards calls Quigley “such a vibrant personality that it is hard to believe she is no longer with us. Sheila’s life story was remarkable,” he explains in his blog. “A straight-talking former factory worker, she secured a £300K deal for her first two books when she was in her 50s, a brilliant achievement that understandably gained national attention.” ChronicleLive says Quigley was once “voted one of Britain’s most popular crime authors of all time,” and “her fictional lead detective, the no-nonsense DI Lorraine Hunt, was voted No.10 in [book retailer W.H. Smith’s] top fictional detectives poll.”

• Also taken recently was Karen Harper, the 75-year-old Ohio-born writer behind dozens of historical novels and mysteries, including nine whodunits set during the time of Elizabeth Tudor (both before and after she was Britain’s queen). In addition, Harper produced half a dozen yarns starring forensic psychologist Claire Markwood (Dark Storm, 2019) and various standalones, the most recent of which—The Queen’s Secret—was just released this month by Morrow. “Karen Harper,” observes Janet Rudolph of Mystery Fanfare, “won the Mary Higgins Clark Award [for her 2005 novel, Dark Angel]. According to author Connie Campbell Berry, Karen died recently of cancer.”

• Finally, we must acknowledge the passing of Ennis Willie, who, says Georgia’s Augusta Chronicle, “wrote 21 hardboiled crime novels between 1961 and 1965, [but] seemed to vanish after that, leading fans to speculate widely about who he really was.” According to the Facebook page Vintage Paperback & Book Covers, Ennis simply “burned out,” after the furious pace of his writing years, “started a printing business and dropped from sight. As he has said, ‘I wanted to be rich and famous, and then I got to be rich and famous … Then I decided I just wanted to be rich.” The Chronicle explains that Willie’s best-recalled protagonist was Sand, “an ex-gangster who always got the better of his adversaries, usually with a bullet.” Sand featured in such works as Sand’s War (1963), Warped Ambitions (1964), The Case of the Loaded Garter Holster (1964), and Code of Vengeance (1965), plus standalones on the order of Vice Town (1962). Willie was 80 years old at the time he breathed his last on April 22.

Bullet Points: Staying Occupied Edition

• HBO-TV’s Perry Mason reboot, starring Matthew Rhys as a character closer to Chinatown’s Jake Gittes than to Raymond Burr’s resolute defense attorney, finally has a broadcast debut date—June 21—and a trailer, found here. Plot details about this mini-series are sparse, but it’s supposed to be a Mason origin story, set in 1932 Los Angeles and involving an Aimee Semple McPherson-like celebrity evangelist, that year’s Olympic Games and L.A.’s oil boom, and “a child kidnapping gone very, very wrong.” Filling out the cast will be John Lithgow, former Orphan Black star Tatiana Maslany, Chris Chalk as Paul Drake, and Juliet Rylance as Della Street. The International Movie Database (IMDb) suggests this drama will run to eight episodes.

• Piggy-backing upon that HBO show, The Mysterious Press is reissuing half a dozen of Erle Stanley Gardner’s original Mason novels in e-book format, all with rather handsome noirish covers. Among those re-releases are The Case of the Lonely Heiress (1948), The Case of the Green-Eyed Sister (1953), and The Case of the Terrified Typist (1956).

• Meanwhile, ITV’s new Van Der Valk, a three-episode reboot of the same-named 1972-1992 British crime drama, is set to premiere in the UK this coming Sunday, April 26. The show features Marc Warren (Beecham House, Hustle, Mad Dogs) in his first lead role, as street-smart and unapologetic Amsterdam police detective Simon “Piet” Van der Valk, with Maimie McCoy (DCI Banks, A Confession, Endeavour) playing “Lucienne Hassell, Van der Valk’s highly competent partner who isn’t afraid to ruffle some feathers.” Radio Times says this “appears to be a newly created role replacing that of Inspecteur Johnny Kroon, the naïve assistant from the original series portrayed by Michael Latimer.” Both shows were inspired by Nicolas Freeling novels. Warren’s Van Der Valk will join PBS-TV’s Masterpiece Mystery! lineup sometime this summer, though a specific air date has not yet been announced.

• And The Columbophile ponders the possibility of rebooting Peter Falk’s famous TV detective drama, Columbo. Should a one-off motion picture be made, or might a new series be launched? If the latter, then should the stories be set in the 1970s, or should they be updated with forensics technology and cell phones? Finally, who should occupy the lead role—Mark Ruffalo, perhaps, or Russian Doll star Natasha Lyonne? (Falk once said that the only other actor he could see playing his bumbling L.A. police lieutenant was Art Carney.) “ … I’m not vehemently opposed to a Columbo reboot in a way I once was,” writes The Columbophile’s unidentified blogger, “but would only feel confident if it was set in the opulent L.A. of the ’70s, remained true to the original character’s sex, ethnicity, habits and personality, was a series not a one-off movie, and was suitably supported by a cavalcade of talent. In short, more of the same from when the show was at its peak.” Even I might be OK with it under those terms.

• NoirCon 2020 has been cancelled because of the novel coronavirus pandemic, says The Gumshoe Site. That gathering had previously been scheduled to take place in L.A. from September 10 to 13. “NoirCon is a biennial literary conference devoted to the dark subgenre of fiction and film called ‘noir,’” explains Gumshoe blogger Jiro Kiruma, who adds: “Actually the previous NoirCon, which was supposed to be held in Philadelphia in 2018, was cancelled too, partly due to the passing of its co-founder Deen Kogan in March 2018.” The official cancellation notice, from NoirCon organizer Lou Boxer, is here.

• CrimeReads’ Molly Odintz today surveys the field of crime and mystery novels “set against a backdrop of plague or [that] feature mysterious spreading illnesses. Some,” she explains, “are more relevant to our times than others—after all, COVID-19, unlike some of the illnesses in the following books, is not a psychological malady—but all should help us slowly begin to process the enormity of our current situation (and perhaps help us feel just a bit better about the odds, compared to those of the past).”

• English journalist-author Tony Parsons (#Taken) knows just the sort of story he would like to tell, if Ian Fleming Publications ever commissions him to pen a new James Bond continuation novel. As he writes in the UK edition of GQ magazine:

I have always planned to set my own James Bond book after the end of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and before the start of You Only Live Twice. That means the lost days between the murder of Bond’s wife, Tracy, in the final chapter of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service but before the first chapter of You Only Live Twice, which finds our hero out east in a geisha house, given one last chance of redemption by M. That is surely fertile ground for any novelist—between the loss of the love of your life and your last chance to do something right. I even have a title—spoiler alert—Always Say Die. You can almost imagine Adele or Shirley Bassey singing it.

• While we’re on the subject of 007, The Spy Command points to new research by espionage-fictionist Jeremy Duns, which confirms that Catch-22 author Joseph Heller worked on a version of the script for Casino Royale, the 1967 movie based oh-so-loosely on Fleming’s 1953 Bond novel of the same name and starring David Niven.

• Like many of you, I suspect, I am currently watching my way through Season 6 of Bosch, the Amazon Prime TV series—based on Michael Connelly’s police procedurals—that dropped last week. (My opinion so far: This run of 10 episodes is far more interesting than Series 5.) Tied in with that premiere comes Michael Carlson’s new piece about “the way the show’s visuals work to set scenes, and also to set the tone of the whole series.” It appeared originally in Medium, but a version can also be found in Shots.

• Killer Covers concluded its month-long salute to artist Mitchell Hooks last weekend, after rolling out almost 100 paperback covers he created. If you missed out on some of that series, click here.

• Procrastinating from far more important responsibilities, Southern California author Lee Goldberg (Fake Truth) has lately put together humorous short tours of his home office, a couple of which supply answers to viewer questions about whale penises, his James Bond film posters, and more. You can watch them here, here, and here.

• During one of our trips to London, my wife and I made a special visit to Shakespeare’s Globe, a modern re-creation of William Shakespeare’s 17th-century playhouse on the south bank of the Thames. I’d purchased tickets months in advance for a presentation of Romeo and Juliet, and though I was suffering a terrible cold on the day of the show (I’m sure those sitting around us expected me to be hauled away to the nearest hospital at any moment), I insisted on remaining through the entire play. Now you can enjoy the Globe’s Romeo and Juliet for yourself, without running the risk of contracting the novel coronavirus during a plane flight. Literary Hub reports that the Globe “is making past performances of some of their productions available to stream for free through June. From now until May 3, you can watch the theater’s 2009 production of Romeo and Juliet. The rest of the roster includes The Two Noble Kinsman, The Winter’s Tale, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

• By the way, the Bard’s 456th birthday is coming up this weekend, on April 26—the perfect excuse for Literary Hub to arrange a discussion “between five scholars who have devoted their careers situating Shakespeare alongside issues of performance, education, identity, partisanship and more …” Assistant editor Aaron Robertson introduces it as “an essential guide to the possible futures of our collective engagement with theater.”

• Author and educator Art Taylor notes on Facebook that the new issue of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine contains an announcement of which writers and short stories have won that publication’s 2019 Readers Awards. They are, in order of their placement, David Dean (for “The Duellist,” May/June 2019), Paul D. Marks (for “Fadeout on Bunker Hill,” March/April 2019), and—tying for third-place honors—Doug Allyn (for “The Dutchy,” November/December 2019) and G.M. Malliet (for “Whiteout,” January/February 2019). Below, I am embedding the scan of EQMM’s announcement that Taylor featured in Facebook. Click on the image to open a more readable enlargement.


• Before its recent re-release, by Poisoned Pen Press, I’m not sure I had ever heard of The Beetle, an 1897 supernatural horror novel from British writer Richard Marsh. Yet in its day, observes Olivia Rutigliano, it outsold Bram Stoker’s Dracula, published in the same year.

• From Mary Picken, at Live and Deadly:

As we wait to hear whether the Bloody Scotland Crime Writing Festival can go ahead (a decision is expected at the end of the month) there is good news around the annual prizes the Festival Awards for Scottish Crime Fiction in the past year.

Bloody Scotland is delighted to confirm that The McIlvanney Prize will be going ahead in 2020 with new sponsor, the Glencairn Glass, the World’s Favourite Whisky Glass and the Official Glass for Whisky. The Bloody Scotland Debut Crime Novel of the Year, which was launched last year and won by Claire Askew with All the Hidden Truths, will also go ahead, sponsored by the Glencairn Glass.

The award-winning, Scottish family business Glencairn Crystal, creators of the Glencairn Glass, has always produced the decanter for the winner of The McIlvanney Prize so it was a natural partnership for them to come on board as sponsors of the prizes in their entirety.

A longlist of McIlvanney Prize nominees is expected on June 23, with finalists to be announced on September 1. A final decision on this year’s winner is anticipated on September 18.

• Just a quick reminder: Submissions to this year’s Eleanor Taylor Bland Crime Fiction Writers of Color Award contest, sponsored by Sisters in Crime, “are free and open to any emerging writer through June 8, 2020,” says Oline H. Cogdill in the Mystery Scene blog. “The winner will be announced by July 15, 2020.”

• A Shroud of Thoughts blogger Terence Towles Canote has posted a broad recap of the acting credits chalked up by Brian Dennehy during his 43-year career; Dennehy, of course, died last week at age 81. One of my favorite Dennehy appearances was his turn as a comfortably corrupt sheriff in the 1985 western film Silverado, but he’d previously guest starred on such TV series as Serpico, Lou Grant, Cagney & Lacey, and Hunter, and led the cast of Big Shamus, Little Shamus, an extremely short-lived 1979 detective drama (see its opening title sequence here). He would go on to star in the 1994 medical series Birdland and the 2001 sitcom The Fighting Fitzgeralds, as well as in teleflicks such as Perfect Witness (1989), To Catch a Killer (1992), and Deadly Matrimony (1992), the first of six movies in which he played a homicide investigator named Jack Reed. In addition to the aforementioned Silverado, Dennehy featured in big-screeners such as First Blood (1982), Cocoon (1985), Legal Eagles (1986), and Tommy Boy (1995). He won a Golden Globe Award for his role as Willy Loman in the 2000 television film Death of a Salesman, plus two Tony Awards for his stage performances. Canote calls Dennehy “truly a modern-day character actor. Throughout his career he portrayed a wide variety of characters including heroes, villains, and everything in between.”

• Gone now, too, is Andrew J. Fenady, the Ohio-born actor, screenwriter, producer, and author, who may be best remembered by Rap Sheet readers for his two lighthearted detective novels, The Man With Bogart’s Face (1977) and The Secret of Sam Marlow (1980), both starring L.A. cop-turned-private investigator Sam Marlow. Fenady passed away on April 16. He was 91 years old. Long before he created his fictional retro gumshoe, Fenady produced a trio of still-well-remembered TV westerns: The Rebel (1959–1961), Chuck Connors’ Branded (1965–1966), and finally, Hondo (1967), about which Fenady talks in a couple of video clips found here. He continued working on films over the next quarter century, his credits including a 1980 adaptation of The Man with Bogart’s Face and the 1989 TV film Jake Spanner, Private Eye (aka Hoodwinked), starring Robert Mitchum as an aged, cranky sleuth created by L.A. Morse. (See a trailer here.)

• Mystery Fanfare conveys the sad news that Sheila Connolly has died. Blogger Janet Rudolph explains that Connolly, born in 1950, “was the author of numerous novels and short stories: The County Cork Mysteries (8 novels and a novella), The Orchard Mysteries (12 novels), The Victorian Village Mysteries (1), The Relatively Dead Series (6), The Museum Mysteries (7) and two standalones: Reunion with Death and Once She Knew. Her latest book, Fatal Roots, was published by Crooked Lane Books in January.” Connolly has at least one more new novel yet to hit bookstores: her third Victorian Village mystery, The Secret Staircase, due out in May 2021 from Minotaur. FOLLOW-UP: Blogger Lesa Holstine offers her own farewell to Connolly, reposting a piece the author wrote in 2014 “about her love of Ireland.”

• Finally, we bid adieu to Rubem Fonseca, “one of Brazil’s leading literary figures whose flinty, obscenity-laden crime stories were seen as dark metaphors for the rot in Brazilian society,” according to The New York Times. Jose Ignacio recalls in A Crime Is Afoot that Fonseca, a onetime police commissioner in Rio de Janeiro, “started his career by writing short stories, considered by some critics as his strongest literary creations. His first popular novel was [1983’s] A Grande Arte (High Art), but Agosto [1990] is usually considered his best work. In 2003, he won the Camões Prize, considered to be the most important award in the Portuguese language. In 2012 he became the first recipient of Chile’s Manuel Rojas Ibero-American Narrative Award.” Fonseca was less than a month away from his 95th birthday when he died on April 15. (Hat tip to Mystery Fanfare.)

• In Reference to Murder says that the Mystery Writers of America “will be announcing the 74th annual Edgar Allan Poe Award winners via the Twitter handle @EdgarAwards next Thursday, April 30th, beginning at 11 a.m. That’s the same date the winners would have been announced at the honors banquet that was canceled due to the coronavirus.”  Here are all of the contenders.

• Shotsmag’s Ayo Onatade chatted recently with former New Zealand lawyer Craig Sisterson, the author of Southern Cross Crime, a guide to the world of Australian and New Zealand crime writing. (An audiobook version of that work will soon be available in both Britain and the States, but the UK print version—originally scheduled for April, has been postponed until September, due to the COVID-19 crisis.) During their exchange, Onatade asked what “fun fact” Sisterson had come across while researching his book. He responded:

Hmm … before writing the book I was already aware that the history of antipodean crime writing dated back to the earliest days of the detective fiction genre (in terms of novels and short stories). The bestselling detective novel of the 19th century wasn’t written by Wilkie Collins or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, as many might think, but by a New Zealand lawyer who’d moved to Melbourne to further his dreams of becoming a playwright (Fergus Hume, The Mystery of the Hansom Cab). One of the earliest writers of police tales was Mary Fortune, who wrote dozens from the Australian goldfields in the 1860s. Thanks to the research of the likes of Lucy Sussex, I was already aware of these historic figures.

But what I didn’t know was that the very first Edgar Award given out by the Mystery Writers of America back in 1954, actually went to an Australian. Charlotte Jay (pen name of Adelaide writer Geraldine Halls) won for Beat Not the Bones, a psychological thriller about an Australian woman who travels to New Guinea to uncover the truth behind her husband’s death. Talking to award-winning crime writer Alan Carter recently about that book (he’d come across it during his Ph.D. studies), he described it as “fantastic, radical and well ahead of its time … A vivid, often hallucinatory, gut-punching beautifully written book.”

So, while we’re experiencing an antipodean crime wave in recent years, the currents certainly run long and deep back through the decades and centuries.

Click here to enjoy this full interview.

• I mentioned in a previous post that Thomas McNulty has launched a YouTube channel on which he talks about vintage books. His latest offering—found here—reintroduces us to MacKinlay Kantor (1904-1977), once “one of America’s best-known and best-selling authors,” but now pretty much forgotten. McNulty’s narrative makes me want to keep my eyes out in the future for used copies of Kantor’s works, and to find a copy of his still-in-print 1955 Civil War novel, Andersonville.

• More than a decade ago, The Rap Sheet posted video of Mark Coggins interviewing fellow crime novelist Joe Gores, the author of 32 Cadillacs, Interface, and the Maltese Falcon prequel Spade & Archer. But just last week, I received an e-note from Coggins, saying that “with so much time on my hands” during the pandemic shutdown, he’d “tackled a project that had been on the docket for years: transcribing my interview with Joe Gores.” You’ll find the welcome results here.

• Otto Penzler has now cracked the top 20 among his choices of “the greatest crime films of all time.” Number 20 was The Conversation (1974), with North by Northwest (1959) capturing the 19th spot. Catch up with all of Penzler’s selections here.

• The Moderate Voice has some rather nice things to say about Margaret Rutherford: Dreadnought with Good Manners, Andy Merriman’s 2009 biography of the English actress who portrayed Agatha Christie’s Miss Jane Marple in a succession of 1960s films. Reviewer Doug Gibson’s choicest tidbit, though, is this one: “During her life Rutherford feared that a family history of unstable behavior would cause her to lose her sanity. Her father murdered her grandpa. As a toddler her mother killed herself. She was raised by her aunt.” Apparently, Rutherford suffered from serious depression.

• Finally, a few more author interviews of note: Nancie Clare speaks with Marcia Clark (Final Judgment) for her Speaking of Mysteries podcast; during an exchange on another podcast, Seize the Way, Harlan Coben (The Boy from the Woods) covers subjects ranging from his writing insecurities to his life as a New Jersey father; Criminal Element’s Steve Erickson fires a few questions at Max Allan Collins about the latter’s latest Mickey Spillane collaboration novel, Masquerade for Murder; and for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Steve Weddle chats with William Boyle about the importance of place setting in Boyle’s books (including his newest, City of Margins).

Bowen’s Last Trip Down the Trail

Peter Bowen, the Montana author behind both the Gabriel Du Pré mysteries and the Yellowstone Kelly historical novels, died from “heart failure after a fall” on Wednesday, April 8. He was 74 years old.

“Bowen was a writer’s writer, respected for his wordsmithing—and his irreverence and sardonic humor …,” says an obituary in the Great Falls Tribune. Born in Athens, Georgia, on May 22, 1945, Bowen attended the University of Michigan, and there “discovered the folk-music world at a coffee house on campus, which he ended up managing for a time, bringing in acts like Tom Rush, Doc Watson and a young Joni Mitchell. He also fell in love with south-side Chicago blues.

“Like his character Yellowstone Kelly, Bowen himself was good at more than one thing. He learned the construction trade to put food in his mouth, and those skills would later serve him well as he fell in love with woodworking. He also would work as a cowboy, a folksinger and a fishing guide while he practiced the craft of writing.

“A big, gruff, shaggy man,” according to the Tribune, “he loved many dogs and a very few people. For years he lived by this river or that in Montana, writing and fishing and enjoying his solitude.”

The paper explains that a 16th and final Du Pre novel is awaiting publication, “pending finishing touches from [his wife, Christine] Whiteside, who also served as Bowen’s editor in recent years. At least three other Montana historical novels await discovery by publishers, including Water Rose, a love story and thriller set in the Prohibition era. Bowen was working on a memoir at the time of his death.”

READ MORE: “In Memory of Mystery Author Peter Bowen, 1945-2020,” by MacKenzie Stuart (Murder & Mayhem).

Bullet Points: Making the Best of It Edition

• London’s Goldsboro Books has announced its longlist of a dozen contenders for the 2020 Glass Bell Award, a prize meant to celebrate “the best storytelling across contemporary fiction.” About half of the books—identified below with asterisks—are obviously or at least arguably drawn from the crime/mystery side.

— Imaginary Friend, by Stephen Chbosky (Orion)
— Darkdawn, by Jay Kristoff (HarperVoyager)
— The Starless Sea, by Erin Morgenstern (Harvill Secker)
— The Lost Ones, by Anita Frank (HQ)
— My Sister, the Serial Killer, by Oyinkan Braithwaite (Atlantic)*
— The Farm, by Joanne Ramos (Bloomsbury)
— Girl, Woman, Other, by Bernardine Evaristo (Hamish Hamilton)
— The Second Sleep, by Robert Harris (Cornerstone)*
— Blood & Sugar, by Laura Shepherd-Robinson (Mantle)*
— Daisy Jones and the Six, by Taylor Jenkins Reid (Cornerstone)
— Nothing Important Happened Today, by Will Carver (Orenda)*
— The Silent Patient, by Alex Michaelides (Orion Books)*

A shortlist of six Glass Bell finalists is expected to be released on May 11, with the winner to be named on July 2.

• In advance of Bosch’s return to Amazon Prime next Friday, April 17, Crime Fiction Lover briefly recaps the last five seasons of that Michael Connelly-supervised police-procedural series.



• This apparently coincidental cover similarity (see above) is sure to create confusion when it comes to ordering books. In the Dark, by Loreth Anne White, was released last December by Montlake Romance. Somewhere in the Dark, by R.J. Jacobs, is set to debut in August, from Crooked Lane. (Hat tip to Linda L. Richards.)

• It had to happen: ThrillerFest XV, which had been arranged for July 7-11 in New York City, has been cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. An e-mail notice from executive director Kimberley Howe says, “We will be providing full refunds to everyone, and you will receive those funds in approximately two weeks, as soon as Cvent (our registration provider) can process our request.” But all is not lost. “To help you avoid ThrillerFest withdrawal,” says Howe, “we will be offering, in July, a virtual conference that you can enjoy from the safety of your own home. This event will include PitchFest, ConsultFest, Master Class, the Debut Author Breakfast, the Thriller Awards Presentation, and other special ThrillerFest presentations. Current registrants will have first dibs to register for these events before others are welcomed to join in the fun (if there’s still space). Details and your chance to sign up will follow soon.”

• As he explains it, about three weeks ago Scottish novelist Peter May (The Blackhouse, A Silent Death) was asked by someone on Twitter whether he had any interest in composing a story set against today’s novel coronavirus scare. At which point May realized, “I had already done just that.” It seems that about a decade and a half ago, at a time when he despaired of his career future, May penned Lockdown, a thriller that imagined a global pandemic of bird flu. Unfortunately, the book was rejected by publishers as “unrealistic” and “unimaginable in present-day London.” May’s outlook on publishing was soon after buoyed by the release (originally in France) of The Blackhouse, and he shelved Lockdown, not expecting it ever to reach readers. Until now. With the novel coronavirus making grim news worldwide, British publisher Quercus is rushing Lockdown into print. It will go on sale in the UK on April 30; its U.S. premiere will be August 18.

• A different book with the same title is coming from publisher Polis in mid-June. Edited by Nick Kolakowski and Steve Weddle, Lockdown: Stories of Terror, Crime, and Hope During a Pandemic is an anthology of short stories that LitReactor says take place “against the background of a nationalized lockdown in response to a (fictional) virus, which mutates rapidly as it jumps from person to person. Cities are under martial law. The skies are clear as all planes are grounded. Some people panic, while some go to heroic lengths to save those they love—and others use the chaos as an opportunity to engage in purest evil. From New York City to the Mexican border, from the Deep South to the misty shores of Seattle, their characters are fighting for survival against incredible odds.” Proceeds from the sale of this collection are supposed to go to BINC, the Book Industry Charitable Foundation, a non-profit enterprise “that assists booksellers in need.”

• Which brings us to this good news: The U.S. branch of Sisters in Crime has accelerated its support program for bookstores. The organization usually awards $500 every month to a deserving shop “to use for promotion, marketing, or hosting book-signing events.” But, it has announced, “in response to the current pandemic, we will be drawing the winners for the rest of 2020—nine winners—on April 16, 2020. We want to get these prizes out while the need is great. The deadline for entry is April 15. All other entry criteria remain the same.” Entry details are available here.

• Meanwhile, author Laurie R. King is holding an unusual auction. The person who contributes the most money will win the opportunity to name a character in King’s 2021 novel (to be set in Transylvania in 1925). Proceeds from this auction go to the Second Harvest Food Bank of Santa Cruz County, California, which King says “is stepping up [during the current pandemic] with drive-by food giveaways serving hundreds of families at a time—families whose breadwinners pick our fruit, clean our rooms, pack our home deliveries, care for our sick.” You have until Wednesday, April 15, to make an auction bid and become eligible for these naming rights. If you simply want to donate to the food bank, you can do so at that same link.

• In case you’re feeling too happy of late, Zach Vasquez suggests you read “The 12 Darkest Endings in the History of Noir Fiction.”

• Easter mysteries to relish over the coming holiday.

• Need some film fun this weekend? Empire of Deception author Dean Jobb picks “10 of the Greatest Con Artist Movies of All Time.”

• Actor James Drury, who died this last Monday at age 85, may be best-remembered for starring in the 1962-1971 NBC-TV western series The Virginian. (Not bad for somebody who was actually born in New York City—nowhere in spitting distance of America’s frontier reaches.) However, he also played Captain Spike Ryerson in the short-lived 1974 ABC drama Firehouse, featured in three episodes of Walker, Texas Ranger, and guest-starred on everything from Bourbon Street Beat, Michael Shayne, and Perry Mason to It Takes a Thief, Ironside, and The Fall Guy. Drury’s lengthy catalogue of credits is here.

• This item comes from In Reference to Murder:

A beloved TV character is coming back: NBC gave a 13-episode series order to a new crime drama series starring Christopher Meloni, reprising his Law & Order: SVU role as Elliot Stabler. The SVU spinoff drama will revolve around the NYPD organized crime unit led by Stabler. Like Law & Order: SVU, headlined by Mariska Hargitay as Olivia Benson, the new drama is set in New York, allowing for potential seamless crossovers with SVU and for Benson-Stabler reunions.

• I’m very sorry to hear that Mort Drucker, the Brooklyn-born cartoonist and caricaturist whose work became so familiar over his five decades of contributing to Mad magazine, died on Wednesday at 91 years of age. Drucker, who “specialized in parodies of movies and television shows” (including The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Perry Mason, Magnum, P.I., and the James Bond flicks), was one of my father’s favorite artists, along with Jack Davis and politics lampooner Pat Oliphant, so there were always a lot of Mads around my boyhood home. “Mr. Drucker’s facility was best expressed in multi-caricature crowd scenes,” opines J. Hoberman in The New York Times. “His parody of the 1986 Woody Allen film, Hannah and Her Sisters, opened with a panel depicting a Thanksgiving dinner that, in addition to most of the movie’s ensemble cast, included caricatures of Mr. Allen’s first wife, Louise Lasser; the film critics Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel; Mayor Ed Koch of New York; and Mad’s mascot, Alfred E. Neuman. His drawing for a 1970 Time magazine cover, ‘Battle for the Senate,’ now in the National Portrait Gallery, featured a pileup of 15 individually characterized political figures, including President Richard M. Nixon and Vice President Spiro T. Agnew. Mad’s takeoff on the MGM retrospective feature That’s Entertainment, published in 1975, required Mr. Drucker to caricature more than two dozen stars.” (Drucker applied the same aesthetic to his poster art for the 1971 Mafia comedy film, The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight.) Let’s give the final word here to Saturday Evening Post art critic David Apatoff, who recalls in his blog: “Drucker was such a humble, gentle soul, I could never quite figure out where he found the drive and ambition to create his hundreds of beautiful stories, decade after decade. The opposite of competitive, he was as generous and open-minded an artist as I’ve ever known. Yet he maintained the excruciatingly high standards to stay up late night after night crafting marvelous drawings, working out likenesses for his caricatures and populating his pictures with details and humor that reflected his abundance of spirit.”

• Scott D. Parker’s obituary of Drucker, in Diversions of the Groovy Kind, features the cartoonist’s parody of the 1972 disaster pic The Poseidon Adventure, retitled “The Poopsidedown Adventure.”

• For its part, Spy Write recalls Drucker’s satirical twist on the 1966 picture The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.

• There’s a new crime-fiction podcast worth sampling: Tartan Noir. As the program’s Web site explains, this hour-long offering will spotlight Scottish crime-fiction writing, and will be hosted “by author and broadcaster Theresa Talbot, who’s joined each week by a special guest (fellow authors, journalists or celebrity fans).” Val McDermid lent her voice and knowledge to the first episode, while on the second, Talbot spoke with Liam McIlvanney.

• Here’s one other podcast recommendation, courtesy of Dave Knadler. In his blog, Dave’s Fiction Warehouse, he extols the “lovely, measured tones” of Phoebe Judge’s voice as she reads classic mysteries. Judge has hosted the podcast Criminal for several years; but since the onset of today’s pandemic, she’s also been reading—chapter by chapter—such famous works as The Mysterious Affair at Styles, by Agatha Christie, and The Hound of the Baskervilles, by Arthur Conan Doyle. You can listen in at Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Let’s hope Judge continues these readings past the time when all of us can resume something approaching our normal lives.

• Way back in 2008, author Mark Coggins contributed a multi-part series to The Rap Sheet about The New Black Mask magazine, a short-lived 1980s revival of the publication that had helped launch the careers of so many well-known crime-fictionists. In Coggins’ assessment of the final, 1987 edition of NBM, he talked about John D. MacDonald, who was that issue’s feature focus and who was interviewed briefly in its pages. What wasn’t included with his article, however, was the full text of Macdonald’s “brusque” exchange with co-editor Richard Layman. But now, Tennessee banker-turned-writer Steve Scott has posted that interview in his MacDonald-oriented blog, The Trap of Solid Gold, for all of us to appreciate.

• Ace Atkins’ next (ninth) novel starring one-named Boston P.I. Spenser will be Robert B. Parker’s Someone to Watch Over Me, scheduled for release (from Putnam) in November.

• Illinois writer Thomas McNulty is behind the book-review blog Dispatches from the Last Outlaw, but it turns out he also has a YouTube channel, McNulty’s Book Corral, on which he talks about reading matters. Some of the episodes have focused on westerns and science fiction, but here he enthuses over Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer novels (and Max Allan Collins’ continuation of that series). And here he focuses on “man-bait paperbacks,” soap-operaish works with romantic themes and “saucy” covers, marketed toward male readers. McNulty must have an outstanding collection of vintage softcovers.

• Elmore Leonard seems to be a popular subject this week, as Craig Pittman celebrates that author’s strong Florida connections in CrimeReads, and Don Winslow writes in Deadline about how he “almost made a movie with Elmore Leonard.”

• Winslow also talks with Thomas Pluck, for Criminal Element, about his fresh-off-the-vine short-story collection, Broken.

• Two more worthy exchanges: Nancie Clare’s chat with Cara Black (Three Hours in Paris) for her podcast, Speaking of Mysteries; and the delightful Hilary Davidson’s conversation with Frank Zafiro about her sixth novel, Don’t Look Down, for Wrong Place, Write Crime.

• If you haven’t been reading the Māwake Crime Review, a Crimespree Magazine feature that regularly showcases “great crime writers and crime novels from beyond the borders of North America and Europe,” you should start. In the latest installment, New Zealand critic-blogger Craig Sisterson turns his gaze upon Japanese contributions to this genre. Part of the column is devoted to an interview with Soji Shimada, author of The Tokyo Zodiac Murders and Murder in the Crooked House.

• I have heard several times over the years that film, TV, and stage performer Tony Franciosa—who starred in The Name of the Game, Search, and Matt Helm—was not popular among some of the people with whom he worked. Author and screenwriter Lee Goldberg recently shared this anecdote on Facebook, confirming such talk:

Tony Franciosa was reportedly a very difficult actor to work with. During the production of Matt Helm, he punched a director. Things got so bad, that Franciosa was written out of the 13th and final episode of the show. The producers must have loathed him because, in that final episode, they covered Franciosa’s face in the main titles with credits! Below are the credits as they appear in the first 12 episodes … and how they appeared in the final one. I’m amazed they got away with it!

• By the way, Goldberg has good news concerning a complete, five-disc French DVD set of Matt Helm episodes. In a March 20 “Bullet Points” post, he cautioned that the discs (with their English soundtrack, but French subtitles) “are unplayable on U.S. DVD players … unless you have a multi-standard DVD player (which I do) or software that allows you to watch it on your computer’s DVD drive.” However, he wrote me earlier this week to say that, in fact, those Matt Helm discs (which he must have ordered for himself) “will play on any DVD player … The picture and sound are great.”

• Columbus, Ohio, isn’t often thought of as a hotbed of fiction, when it’s even thought of at all. However, in his introduction to the new anthology Columbus Noir (Akashic), Andrew Welsh-Huggins—an editor and reporter for the Associated Press, and an occasional contributor to The Rap Sheet—points out why the 14th largest city in the United States offers all of the ingredients necessary to make it “ripe for the attention of crime fiction writers.” Read it all here.

• Terry Zobek takes a deep dive into all the corners of Lawrence Block’s writing career in his new release, A Trawl Among the Shelves: Lawrence Block Bibliography, 1958-2020.

• Spanish blogger José Ignacio Escribano continues to post intriguing mini-biographies of mystery writers in A Crime Is Afoot. Recent subjects include the well-remembered Leo Bruce, Julian Symons, and Anthony Boucher as well as less tip-of-the-tongue talents such as Anthony Wynne, A.E.W. Mason, and Ronald A. Knox.

• With April being National Poetry Month, Gerald So has organized a 30-day celebration of crime-related verse in The Five-Two.

• And a couple of weeks back, CrimeReads posted a critic’s list of 14 “long-ass books”—all crime, mystery, and thriller novels, of course—that might help us while away these mass-isolation times. Now Literary Hub’s Emily Temple takes that same idea and expands upon it, delivering an inventory of what she says are “The 50 Best Contemporary Novels Over 500 Pages.” I’m pleased to see that her choices include Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See, Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke, Don DeLillo’s Underworld, and Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove (a novel I chose as one of the 20th century’s best works). Several of her picks overlap those in CrimeReads (among them Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, and Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries), but she also promotes two other crime-oriented tales: Ian Pears’ An Instance of the Fingerpost and Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games.

Honoring Blackman

Like you, perhaps, I first heard about it from The Spy Command:

Honor Blackman, who made an impression with audiences as Pussy Galore in [the 1964 film] Goldfinger, has died at 94, The Guardian reported. She “died of natural causes unrelated to coronavirus,” the newspaper said.

Blackman’s Pussy Galore was the lead female character in the 1964 Bond film that turned the gentleman agent into a global phenomenon.

She made her mark in his very first scene. Sean Connery’s Bond sees Pussy Galore’s face after waking up from a drugged dart.

“Who are you?”

“My name is Pussy Galore,” she responds.

“I must be dreaming,” Bond says. …

The movie helped launch the 1960s spy craze, Within a year of Goldfinger’s release there were new spy TV shows such as I Spy (relatively realistic spies), The Wild Wild West (spies in the Old West) and Get Smart (comedy spies). Other spy film series, such as Matt Helm and Derek Flint would go into production.

I followed the link from that post to an obituary in Britain’s Guardian, which reminded me that Blackman was “born in east London to a middle-class family—her father was a civil servant—[and] credited the elocution lessons she received as a birthday gift as allowing her to progress in her acting career.

After studying at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, she had small roles in films and TV shows such as Titanic drama A Night to Remember (1958) and the Edgar Wallace vigilante series The Four Just Men (1959-60).

She secured her breakthrough when she was cast in 1962 as the leather-clad crimefighter Cathy Gale in the hit British show The Avengers, alongside Patrick Macnee as the bowler-hatted John Steed. Blackman had to learn judo for the role, and her tough persona allied to then daring costume choices—boots and figure-hugging catsuits—ensured she quickly assumed star status. One of its unlikely results was a hit single, ‘Kinky Boots,’ recorded in 1964 with Macnee, which became a Top 10 hit in 1990.

Blackman’s three-season run on The Avengers (1962-1964) was “ultimately overshadowed by Steed’s more famous subsequent partner, Emma Peel (played to perfection by another future Bond Girl, Diana Rigg), but,” as The Double O Section observes, “Gale’s and Blackman’s place in television history cannot be overstated.

Cathy Gale was television's original badass, leather-clad female spy, paving the way not only for Mrs. Peel, but for Honey West (producer Aaron Spelling was inspired to create the show by Avengers episodes he saw in England, and reportedly first offered the role to Blackman, who turned it down), The Bionic Woman, Alias’s Sydney Bristow, and every other leading lady of espionage to throw an attacker over her shoulder, as well as non-spy heroines like Xena and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Quite simply, there had never been an action-oriented female protagonist on television before Honor Blackman's groundbreaking performance. She changed the game. In part, this was due to Blackman inheriting scripts that had been originally written for another male partner for Steed (following his first season foil, Ian Hendry's Dr. David Keel), which were hastily rewritten for her, but kept the character involved in the action in a way women hadn't been previously on TV. But in a larger part, it was due to Blackman's undeniable and very physical presence: she played Cathy as a woman definitely not to be trifled with! And she learned judo for the role, impressively dispatching stuntmen twice her size on a regular basis on episodes that were at the time taped live. Her obvious talent even led to the publication of a book, Honor Blackman's Book of Self-Defense.

Later in the day, Terence Towles Canote posted a lengthy account of Blackman’s acting career. He recalled, for instance, that she “made her television debut in 1951 in the BBC production Joseph Proctor's Money …” She went on to win recurring roles on Probation Officer and The Four Just Men, and to do guest spots on small-screen series such as The New Adventures of Charlie Chan, Suspense, The Third Man, Danger Man, and The Saint. In 1972, Blackman was cast in “Dagger of the Mind,” an unusual second-season episode of Columbo that sent Peter Falk’s Los Angeles police detective off to work with Scotland Yard in London. Canote adds that in the 1990s “she began playing Laura West in the long-running sitcom The Upper Hand.”

Blackman’s film work stretched beyond Goldfinger to include Quartet (1948), Green Grow the Rushes (1951), The Square Peg (1958), Jason and the Argonauts (1963), Fright (1971), Age of Innocence (1978), Bridget Jones’ Diary (2001), and I, Anna (2012).

“The fact is that Honor Blackman was an enormous talent,” writes Canote. “What she brought to her many roles was more than beauty and elegance, but also intelligence, determination, professionalism, and, when the role called for it, even physical prowess. Much like Cathy Gale and Pussy Galore, Honor Blackman was a remarkable woman in real life, well known for her political activism. Honor Blackman wasn’t simply a talented actress, but she was also a lady through and through”—a compliment she would surely have prized.

POSTSCRIPT: I forgot to mention one other TV crime drama on which I’d seen Honor Blackman perform. She guest-starred, along with Maurice Evans, on a March 1969 episode of The Name of the Game titled “An Agent of the Plaintiff.” Watch a clip here.