Bullet Points: No AI Content Here Edition

• Albert Finney, Peter Ustinov, Kenneth Branagh, David Suchet, Alfred Molina, John Malkovich, even Tony Randall—over the decades, they have all portrayed Agatha Christie’s most famous fictional private detective, Hercule Poirot, on the large or small screens. But now 33-year-old English actor Edward Bluemel (Killing Eve, My Lady Jane, Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials) is stepping into the role of that fastidious, mustachioed Belgian in Hercule, a BBC/Britbox TV reboot set to start filming in Liverpool, England, this summer and expected to premiere with six episodes in the latter half of 2027. Deadline says “there is a three-season commitment to Hercule,” though that has not been confirmed by either of the production partners. The show is being described as “an intimate study of Hercule the man and an epic portrait of Britain between the wars. The series takes a magnifying glass to three of Christie’s most celebrated stories, while also charting Hercule’s burgeoning friendship with Captain Arthur Hastings, his early encounters with Scotland Yard’s James Japp, and introducing him to one particular nemesis.” Deadline adds that “Responsibility for adapting Christie’s work has fallen to Benji Walters, a relatively unknown writer who has credits on BBC series Noughts + Crosses and spent time developing an adaptation of Brideshead Revisited with Call Me by Your Name director Luca Guadagnino in 2020.”

• By the way, did you know that Christie’s third and probably most famous Poirot novel, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, celebrates its centennial this month? The story was serialized as Who Killed Ackroyd? in the London Evening News between July and September 1925, then released in book form by UK publisher Williams Collins, Sons in June of 1926. (An American edition soon followed.) While Ackroyd—with its deliberate subversion of reader expectations—may not be the perfect place to start in exploring Christie’s extensive oeuvre (instead, try And Then There Were None or a later Poirot tale such as Death on the Nile), it is nonetheless acclaimed for its shell-game plotting and final twist. In his well-respected 1941 study of this genre, Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective Story, American writer-editor Howard Haycraft placed Ackroyd in the 16th spot on his list of “the best and most influential” crime novels in print, right behind Christie’s first Poirot yarn, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920).

• Although the “news” is less than timely, let me just point out that Mike Lawson has won 2026’s Spotted Owl Award for Untouchable (Atlantic Monthly Press ), his 18th novel about Washington, D.C., troubleshooter Joe DeMarco. By my count, this is the third occasion on which Lawson has scored the Owl, an honor handed out annually by the Portland, Oregon-based Friends of Mystery fan organization to what it deems was the Best Pacific Northwest Crime Novel published during the previous year. Also in contention were Marc Cameron’s Deadline, Robert Dugoni’s A Dead Draw, Sam Wiebe’s The Last Exile, Elizabeth George’s A Slowly Dying Cause, James Bryne’s Chain Reaction, Daniel Kalla’s The Deepest Fake, J.A. Jance’s Overkill, Phillip Margolin’s False Witness, and Nolan Chase’s A Lonesome Place for Murder.

• As you have probably heard, Netflix’s The Lincoln Lawyer will end its run after Season 5, which is due for streaming next year. The concluding 10 episodes are “inspired by” Michael Connelly’s Resurrection Walk (2025), the seventh installment in his series about L.A. defense attorney Mickey Haller, played on the show by Mexican actor Manuel Garcia-Rulfo. Netflix supplies this plot description:

Mickey Haller’s world is upended when the half-sister he never knew existed, Emi [Cobie Smulders], comes to him with a plea to help free a wrongfully convicted woman. In a season defined by blood ties and buried secrets, Mickey takes on a grueling habeas petition to overturn a six-year-old murder conviction, but the deeper he digs, the more nefarious the forces arrayed against him become.

Meanwhile, the stakes rise for his trusted team as Lorna [Becki Newton], Izzy [Jazz Raycole], and Cisco [Angus Sampson] step up to tackle high-profile challenges of their own. Having just saved himself from a wrongful conviction in Season 4, Mickey is now determined to set right an enormous miscarriage of justice. But as he unravels a dangerous web of corruption and lies, he must grapple with the fractured legacy of his family—both his chosen family and the family he never knew he had.

Lincoln Lawyer’s departure from its schedule has left Netflix looking for a legal-drama replacement to satisfy viewers. One option might be And Justice for All, a series based on Al Pacino’s powerful, Emmy-nominated 1979 film of that same name. Deadline depicts it as “a gritty look at an idealistic attorney’s flawed life as he struggles to fight a corrupted legal system until he finally snaps.” The program will be scripted by Jeremy Miller and Dan Cohn (That Was Then).

• Concurrently, Lincoln Lawyer creator David E. Kelley is adapting another Connelly work for television, the 2025 novel Nightshade. Deadline says, “The project, titled Welcome to Catalina, is in development at HBO Max under the streamer’s model for drama procedurals intended to return each year with sizable orders and moderate cost. … Written by Kelley, Welcome to Catalina centers on Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Detective Stilwell who has been ‘exiled’ to a low-key post policing [Southern California’s] rustic Catalina Island. But while following up the usual drunk-and-disorderlies and petty thefts that come with his new territory, Stilwell gets a report of a body found weighed down at the bottom of the harbor.” There’s no word yet on when Welcome to Catalina might be welcomed to your big-screen set, but if it proves a winner, there’s at least one other Stilwell story to turn into a screenplay: Connelly’s Ironwood, which reached U.S. bookstores only last month.

• Sherlock Holmes’ arch-rival, Professor James Moriarty, is finally getting a TV series of his own, in which he will demonstrate his previously undisplayed array of sleuthing skills.

• Are these really the 20 greatest film sleuths of all time?

• It’s always great to see Donald E. Westlake’s storytelling mastery recognized, as The Daily Telegraph’s Jake Kerridge does in this recent essay reprinted by MSN. But how fragile is fame, that the headline labels Westlake—who just died back in 2009 (see our tributes here and here)—“The greatest crime novelist you have probably never heard of.”

• And the crime-fiction community has seen other deaths of late. Actress-turned-writer Sheila Keating (née Mitchell), who for almost six decades was wife to the English crime novelist H.R.F. Keating (creator of the Inspector Ganesh Ghote series), passed away on June 4 just short of her 101st birthday. Canadian fictionist Alan Bradley, the author of a dozen books in the Flavia de Luce mystery series (beginning with 2009’s The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie) died on the Isle of Man in the Irish Sea on May 18 at age of 87. Finally, Dennis McMillan, a San Francisco small-press publisher of “the hard-boiled, the noir, and the strikingly unusual,” met his end on May 5 in a Phoenix, Arizona, hospital. Among the authors McMillan published over the years were Kent Anderson, Michael Connelly, Fredric Brown, Leigh Brackett, James Crumley, and Rick DeMarinis.

(Hat tips to In Reference to Murder and Mark Coggins.)

Back to Baker Street

I generally avoid mentioning vintage crime and mystery TV dramas that have suddenly become available online, because they have the tendency to disappear just as quickly. But I cannot resist pointing out here that all 39 half-hour episodes of the 1954 syndicated series Sherlock Holmes, starring Ronald Howard and Howard Marion Crawford, were uploaded to YouTube late last week by the New York-based streaming network FilmRise. As Wikipedia notes, this series “was the first American television adaptation of [Arthur Conan] Doyle’s stories, and the only such version until 2012’s Elementary.”

You can find the whole set here.

Most of this program’s installments were original Holmes and Watson adventures, though a number of its non-canonical tales are said to have been “loosely inspired” by Conan Doyle’s fiction.

Living in the Modern Sherlockian Age

I recently finished reading author and screenwriter Nicholas Meyer’s splendid Sherlock Holmes and the Telegram from Hell (Mysterious Press), his sixth novel starring Holmes and the steadfast Doctor John H. Watson. So when I spotted Sherlock authority Steven T. Doyle’s article, in CrimeReads, looking back at the 1976 release of The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, I had to read it right away. It begins:

For those who weren’t there, who didn’t live through the transition, it may be impossible to understand what it was like. Even for those who were, enough time has passed that perhaps the memory has dimmed under the successive tides of Sherlockian enthusiasm. But the fact is that 1974 is a watershed year in the history of Sherlock Holmes. The Great Detective went mainstream with the debut of Nicholas Meyer’s novel, The Seven-Per-Cent Solution. We now live in a Sherlockian universe permanently transformed by this single volume, a pastiche that inaugurated the modern Sherlockian age.

You can enjoy the complete essay by Doyle (and what a convenient moniker that is!) simply by clicking here.

For Your Entertainment

• Not being an Apple TV+ subscriber, I haven’t yet begun watching Lady in the Lake, the seven-part series based on Laura Lippman’s 2019 novel of that same title. But it premiered last Friday, July 19. The Guardian offers the following plot synopsis:

This is the story of two Baltimore women in the 1960s: affluent white Jewish housewife and mother Maddie Schwartz [played by Natalie Portman] and Black, all-but-single mother Cleo [Moses Ingram] who is working three jobs to try to lift herself and her children out of the life of struggle that otherwise beckons, and away from the temptations and dangers offered by the underbelly of the city.

Their lives begin to converge when a child, Tessie, goes missing at the Thanksgiving Day parade. The indifference of Maddie’s husband, Milton (Brett Gelman), triggers a fury in his long-frustrated wife, who ends up finding Tessie’s body herself and leaving Milton and her son, Seth (Noah Jupe), to start afresh. The only place she can afford on her own is in a Black area [of Baltimore, Maryland] and even that requires faking a robbery of her insured jewellery when she falls behind in rent. As the investigation into Tessie’s murder continues, Maddie’s latent journalistic ambitions stir and she begins to claw her way into the favour of the Baltimore Sun.

Guardian critic Lucy Mangan calls this mini-series “altogether masterly” and “an incredibly sumptuous and fearless aesthetic experience.” She goes on to write: “The whole endeavour is a dense, clever, impeccably written, acted, shot and scored offering that is designed to be consumed slowly, episode by episode, not binged. You may finish each one feeling slightly battered and exhausted—perhaps more impressed than moved, but that’s OK. Give it a few days to bed in and the love will come.”

Lady in the Lake will run through August 23. A trailer is below.



• In Reference to Murder reports that “Michael Mann is making a sequel to his 1995 film Heat and is working on writing the screenplay, which is based on the novel Heat 2 that he co-authored with Meg Gardiner. Mann told the Los Angeles Times that he wants to begin shooting the film by the end of 2024 or the beginning of 2025. Heat followed the conflict between LAPD detective Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino) and a career thief, Neil McCauley (Robert DeNiro), and also starred Val Kilmer as McCauley's right-hand man. Heat 2 will function as both a prequel and a sequel to Heat, jumping between two time periods. Although there's no word official yet on casting, Adam Driver and Austin Butler are rumored to be taking over DeNiro and Kilmer’s roles.”

• Sherlock Holmes once again demonstrates his durability, as Deadline brings more news about the casting of Young Sherlock, a Prime Video series from director Guy Ritchie. The latest recruit is English actor Colin Firth, who is slated to play a character with a mouthful of a moniker, Sir Bucephalus Hodge. He joins previously confirmed cast members Hero Fiennes, Zine Tseng, Joseph Fiennes, and Natascha McElhone. “Written by Matthew Parkhill [and] inspired by Andy Lane’s Young Sherlock Holmes book series, the show re-imagines Sherlock Holmes at age 19,” Deadline explains. “Disgraced, raw, unfiltered, and unformed, he finds himself caught up in a murder mystery at Oxford University which threatens his freedom. Diving into his first-ever case with a wild lack of discipline, Sherlock (Fiennes Tiffin) manages to unravel a globe-trotting conspiracy that will change his life forever.” Filming of Young Sherlock began earlier this month.

• Speaking of Prime, we have finally received word that the crime thriller series Cross—produced by and starring Aldis Hodge—will debut on that Amazon premium channel come November 14. It is based on James Patterson’s long-running succession of novels about Alex Cross, described by Deadline as “a detective and forensic psychologist, uniquely capable of digging into the psyches of killers and their victims, to identify—and ultimately capture—the murderers.” I recall Hodge fondly from Leverage and its sequel, Leverage: Redemption; it’ll be nice to see him back on the small screen. He will be joined on Cross by Isaiah Mustafa, Juanita Jennings, Alona Tal, Samantha Walkes, Caleb Elijah, and others. Ben Watkins, formerly of Truth Be Told and Burn Notice, will serve as the drama’s showrunner.

• Tucked deep in this Variety piece about the influential Hollywood talent agency Independent Artists Group is news that a series adapted from John Connolly’s “beloved novels about the detective Charlie Parker” is in “early development” by Village Roadshow Television. Its producers include Colin Farrell and Bryan Cranston.

• A final TV-related note: Filming of the second season of Peacock’s Poker Face, starring Natasha Lyonne and created by Rian Johnson (Knives Out), began on July 1. Among the guest stars signed to appear in the new episodes, says Variety, are Giancarlo Esposito, Katie Holmes, Gaby Hoffmann, and Kumail Nanjiani. Lyonne directed one of those forthcoming installments.

Bullet Points: Almost Mother’s Day Edition

• The Strand Magazine has gained fame in recent years for unearthing previously unpublished works by well-recognized authors, among them James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, and Shirley Jackson. Its latest issue includes “First Squad, First Platoon,” a story penned in the 1940s by future Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling. As The Guardian explains, this 70-year-old tale “concerns the experiences of American paratroopers in the Philippines towards the end of [World War II].” Serling had fought with the U.S. Army against Japanese forces in the Philippines, and as National Public Radio relates, “First Squad, First Platoon” was “one of his earliest stories, starting a writing career that Serling once said helped him get the war ‘out of his gut.’”

• In its mammoth preview of the finest new TV crime series coming to British screens in 2024, The Killing Times mentioned ITV’s After the Flood. starring Sophie Rundle and Philip Glenister. That program debuted on the other side of the pond in January, and will finally make its way to BritBox beginning on Monday, May 13. Its six episodes, we’re told, are “set in a town hit by a devastating flood. When an unidentified man is found dead in a lift in an underground car park, police assume he became trapped as the waters rose, and as the investigation unfolds PC Joanna Marshall [Rundle] … becomes obsessed with discovering what happened to him. How did he get in the lift and why does no one know who he is? The mystery unfolds across the series while we also see the real impact of climate change on the lives of residents in this small town. The floods threaten to expose secrets, and fortunes and reputations are at stake. But how far will people go to protect themselves?” After the Flood’s first two episodes will drop on May 13, with two more due on successive Mondays until May 27.



• The recent announcement of 18 nominees longlisted for this year’s Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year prize has drawn criticism, due to an absence of books by authors of color. Part of the reason for said dearth, a spokesperson for the Theakston Old Peculier crime writing festival in Harrogate told The Guardian, is that “of the books submitted for the awards this year, just 7% were by known authors of colour ... ‘This year’s longlist is unusual—the longlist for the awards over the last six years have all featured writers of colour—but not something we take lightly.” Author Vaseem Khan, chair of the British Crime Writers’ Association and last year’s Theakston festival programming chair, told the newspaper: “I have seen, first-hand, the efforts the committee has made to bring more writers from minority communities on to the programme. While these efforts have seen more writers of colour being programmed in recent years, we haven’t yet seen as many submitted for the awards. This is something the committee is acutely aware of and is actively working with the industry to find solutions to.” The winner of the 2024 Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel is scheduled to be declared on Thursday, July 18.

• Sherlock Holmes fans are already looking forward to the premiere, in August, of Nicholas Meyer’s sixth novel featuring the great detective, Sherlock Holmes and the Telegram from Hell (Mysterious Press), and Bonnie MacBird’s The Serpent Under (Collins Crime Club), coming in January 2025. Now, In Reference to Murder brings word that “The estate of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has approved a new novel from thriller writer Gareth Rubin [The Turnglass] that will focus on Professor Moriarty, Sherlock Holmes’s greatest nemesis, endorsing Rubin’s book, Holmes and Moriarty, as a worthy successor. ‘Gareth has drawn these characters very well, including Colonel Moran, who is key to this story,’ said Richard Pooley, Conan Doyle’s step-great-grandson. ‘Moran was once described by Holmes as “the second most dangerous man in London,” and he tells half of this new mystery. As Moriarty’s right-hand man, he only crops up in a couple of original Holmes stories, I believe.’” Publisher Simon & Schuster plans to release Holmes and Moriarty in the UK on September 12.

• Iowa author Max Allan Collins says a Kickstarter crowd-funding campaign will be launched imminently in support of True Noir: The Nathan Heller Casebooks, “a fully immersive audio production based on the first book in the series, True Detective. I am writing all ten scripts myself.” The drama will star Todd Stashwick (Star Trek: Picard) as Depression-era Chicago gumshoe Heller. “It’s truly odd returning to True Detective (no relation to the HBO show that came after) for the first time in over forty years (!),” writes Collins. “Also the form is one that has special challenges. The story has to be told in completely audio terms. Its length ultimately will be three times longer than a film adaptation, but still substantially shorter than the 100,000-word novel I’m adapting.” Click here to listen to a “proof-of-concept audio” based on the first chapter of Collins’ 1991 novel Stolen Away.

• Here’s a new book destined to find a place on my shelves: Jon Burlingame’s Dreamsville: Henry Mancini, Peter Gunn, and Music for TV (BearMedia). Spy Vibe quotes a press release as saying:

Henry Mancini (1924-1994) is renowned as the Oscar- and Grammy-winning composer of such timeless standards as “Moon River” and “Days of Wine and Roses,” as well as such memorable instrumental themes as “The Pink Panther” and “Baby Elephant Walk.” But preceding all of them was the wildly popular theme from Peter Gunn, a television series whose soundtrack won the very first Grammy ever awarded for Album of the Year. Award-winning author and journalist Jon Burlingame chronicles the back-story of Peter Gunn and how its music propelled Mancini to fame and fortune, launching a decades-long collaboration with filmmaker Blake Edwards that encompassed nearly 30 movies, from Breakfast at Tiffany’s to Victor/Victoria and beyond.

Burlingame (author of six books including The Music of James Bond and Music for Prime Time) relates the untold story of Peter Gunn and its companion series Mr. Lucky; examines the music Mancini wrote for both series and their chart-topping success as modern jazz albums; and tells how this 1958-61 period in TV history set the stage for one of the most remarkable careers of any American composer in the Twentieth Century.

• With Mother’s Day coming on Sunday, Janet Rudolph has updated her list of associated mysteries for the blog Mystery Fanfare.

• From The Guardian: “Three of the four leading roles in the film adaptation of Richard Osman’s bestselling mystery book [The Thursday Murder Club] have now been cast, with A-listers Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan and Ben Kingsley set to play septuagenarian sleuths in a retirement community.”

• I had forgotten that Apple TV+ commissioned an adaptation of Scott Turow’s 1987 novel, Presumed Innocent, as an eight-part limited series starring and executive produced by Jake Gyllenhaal. But Crimespree Magazine has posted a trailer for it. The show itself will premiere on Wednesday, June 12.

• And British network ITV confirms that the coming 14th season of Vera, the TV mystery series starring Brenda Blethyn and based on popular novels by Ann Cleeves, is going to be its last. The Killing Times says that that new season, to air initially in early 2025, “will comprise two feature-length episodes.”

• Released yesterday: The Spring 2024 issue of Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine. Its cover story looks at the career of best-selling Northern Irish writer Steve Cavanagh, the author most recently of a standalone thriller titled Kill for Me, Kill for You. Other contents include a profile of British crime-fictionist Cara Hunter (Murder in the Family); the early nominees to DP’s “Best of 2024” list; Kevin Burton Smith’ wrap-up of recent private-eye yarns; Robin Agnew’s cozy-crime and historical-crime reviews; Craig Sisterson’s interview with Michael Bennett, author of Better the Blood and Return to Blood; and Mike Ripley’s retrospective on English litterateur Nevil Shute. Subscriptions to Deadly Pleasures are available here.

• Late last month, when I posted the longlists of contenders for this year’s Dagger Awards, sponsored by the British Crime Writers’ Association, I neglected to mention that the CWA had also announced its shortlist of a nominees for the 2024 Margery Allingham Short Mystery prize. Those candidates are:

— “Olga Popova,” by Susan Breen
— “The Pact,” by Kirsten Ehrlich Davies
— “A Quarrel Between Friends,” by Emma O’Driscoll
— “The Ladies’ Tailor,” by Meeti Shah
— “Horses for Courses,” by Camilla Smith
— “Right Place Wrong Time,” Yvonne Walus

Tales submitted to this annual contest must be under 3,500 words in length and follow the spirit of English author Allingham’s rule that “The Mystery remains box-shaped, at once a prison and a refuge. Its four walls are, roughly, a Crime, a Mystery, an Enquiry and a Conclusion with an Element of Satisfaction in it.” This year’s winner will be declared on Friday, May 10, during an evening Daggers shortlist reception at CrimeFest, in Bristol, England.

• I’m very sorry to hear about the passing of Frederick W. Zackel at age 77. In addition to his two decades spent as a teacher of literature, writing, and the humanities at Ohio’s Bowling Green State University, Zackel published a variety of crime-fiction works, beginning with the 1978 private-eye novel Cocaine and Blue Eyes (1978), which was adapted as a TV movie in 1983 starring O.J. Simpson. In this long-ago piece for January Magazine, he recalled how he got start in fiction writing with help from the great Ross Macdonald. Zackel periodically sent me e-mail notes about pieces in The Rap Sheet, and was generous in his encouragement of my efforts to stay apprised of developments in the crime-fiction field. I believe the last time I heard from him, though, was at the end of 2022. He died on December 24, 2023, but it was only a recent note from blogger-author Patti Abbott’s that brought his demise to my attention. Rest in peace, my friend.

• And a moderately less-belated farewell to New York City-reared actor Terry Carter (born John Everett DeCoste), who breathed his last on April 23 at age 95. Although I remember him best for his seven years spent playing Dennis Weaver’s sidekick, Sergeant Joe Broadhurst, on the NBC Mystery Movie segment McCloud, Carter first became widely known as a weekend newscaster—“the first Black TV news anchor for Boston’s WBZ-TV Eyewitness News, where he also became their first opening night drama and movie critic,” recalls Variety. His initial small-screen TV entertainment break came with his casting as Private Sugie Sugarman on the 1955-1959 CBS sitcom The Phil Silvers Show. He went on to guest spots on Naked City, The Defenders, and The Bold Ones before landing his McCloud gig. Carter subsequently took the regular role of Colonel Tigh on the original Battlestar Galactica series, and also appeared on The Jeffersons, The Fall Guy, and One West Waikiki. But his career was not spent only in front of the cameras; as The New York Times notes, “Mr. Carter formed his own production company in 1975 and made educational documentaries. In the 1980s, he expanded into more sophisticated documentaries for PBS, the Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1988, his two-part documentary, A Duke Named Ellington, for the PBS American Masters Series, became the United States entry in television festivals around the world.”

Sherlock’s Problem Child

Imagining a daughter for Sherlock Holmes isn’t exactly a unique idea. South Carolina author Leonard Goldberg has been writing novels about Joanna Blalock, the great sleuth’s daughter, and her companion Dr. John Watson Jr. ever since 2018’s appropriately titled The Daughter of Sherlock Holmes. That series currently comprises seven books.

But now America’s CW TV network has ordered Sherlock & Daughter, an eight-part mystery/thriller drama starring British actor David Thewlis (Harry Potter, Fargo) as Arthur Conan Doyle’s brilliant protagonist. According to The Killing Times, this program will offer viewers an older Holmes, “less confident and out of his comfort zone. The renowned detective finds himself mysteriously unable to investigate a sinister case without risking the lives of his closest friends.” Meanwhile, it introduces us to a young American named Amelia (played by Blu Hunt), who—following her mother’s unexplained murder—learns that her missing father may be Sherlock Holmes.

(Left) Actress Blu Hunt.

“Sherlock battles between his intellect and his emotion when he is confronted with this young woman claiming to be his daughter,” The Killing Times explains. “Despite wildly different backgrounds and attitudes, Amelia proves herself essential to cracking the case as the pair work together to solve a global conspiracy [and] the mystery of her mother’s murder, and find out for sure if she really is Sherlock’s daughter.” Dougray Scott (Batwoman) has been cast as Holmes’ nemesis, Professor Moriarty, in this forthcoming series.

“Of course, given the show’s synopsis,” writes Screen Rant’s T.C. Phillips​, “it is possible that Amelia may not end up being Sherlock’s child at all, but to even consider it a likelihood marks a notable departure from the character’s true origins. Nonetheless, Sherlock & Daughter could potentially be looking to establish [a] unique take on the character and present a Sherlock vastly different to those viewers have met previously.” I can’t tell, reading information about this project online, whether the show is going to be a period piece, or set in modern times. We’ll just have to wait to hear more.

Funny, You Don’t Look a Day Over 169

(Editor’s note: I only rarely repost pieces from The Rap Sheet’s past. But as many readers will today be celebrating the 170th birthday of Sherlock Holmes, I couldn’t resist resurrecting this piece from January 6, 2007. It’s sad that this date is now synonymous with Donald Trump’s incitement of an insurrectionist attack on the U.S. Capitol in 2021. Better that it be recalled as the day on which the Victorian era’s most famous “consulting detective” took his first breaths.)

One of the things that draws me frequently to the blog written by reviewer and aspiring crime-fictionist Bill Peschel is his daily “Reader’s Almanac,” which recalls any significant birthdays occurring on a given calendar date. He notes, for instance, that today—January 6—is the birthday of renowned novelist E.L. Doctorow, delectable “domestic goddess” Nigella Lawson, historian-author Carl Sandburg ... and their fellow Capricorn, Sherlock Holmes.

Huh? you exclaim, before asking: How is it that a character of fiction, cooked up in the late 19th century by Arthur Conan Doyle, a Scottish-born doctor turned author, can have a birthday that thousands of people celebrate every year?

Let me refer you to a Web site operated by the Madison, Wisconsin-based Notorious Canary-Trainers, “an officially-recognized scion of the Baker Street Irregulars,” the worldwide Holmes fan organization (founded in 1934 by American author Christopher Morley). Within their site, the Canary-Trainers feature a page headlined, “Clearing Up a Mystery: Why Do We Celebrate Jan. 6 as Sherlock Holmes’ Birthday?” The answer may seem dubious, even to those who insist Holmes was a real historical figure, merely introduced to the world by Conan Doyle, not created by him. But in celebration of the Great Detective’s birthday, I’ll quote from that page here:

The actual date of [Holmes’] birth is murky at best because the written evidence does not exist or, if it exists, has yet to be found.

For the non-believers, it’s lacking because Sherlock Holmes is a fictional character who was born only in the mind of Arthur Conan Doyle. For the believers, however, the lack of evidence is a testament to the poor record-keeping of such matters in the mid-19th century in rural England.

As one Sherlockian scholar once remarked, as the best evidence, “Mr. Holmes’ obituary has not appeared in the London Times, so he can not be dead.”

For those in the believers’ group, here’s perhaps the key argument in favor of January 6 (as summarized by one of our members, Tom Drucker):

1) The Valley of Fear [1915] starts on the 7th of January.

2) Holmes seems to be a little cranky and out of sorts at the beginning of the story.

3) Why would he be cranky and out of sorts? He must have a hangover.

4) Why would he have a hangover? He must have been celebrating the night before.

5) What could he have been celebrating? Surely it was his birthday.

That argument also is the one made by William S. Baring-Gould, who produced the first annotated Sherlock Holmes collection, plus other writings on Sherlock Holmes.

He also makes a second argument, as follows:

Holmes quotes Shakespeare often, but the only play he quotes twice is Twelfth Night. Twelfth Night is January 6. It must be his favorite because it coincides with his birthday.

By the way, Morley gave the full date of Holmes’ birth as January 6, 1854. Which would have made him 33 years old (five years older than Conan Doyle) when his first adventure, A Study in Scarlet, saw print in Beeton’s Christmas Annual in November 1887. Dr. John H. Watson was then either 34 or 35, depending on your source.

And Furthermore …

It happens almost every time: I publish one of my “Bullet Points” posts, only to realize soon afterward that I left out a few newsy items. So consider this an addendum to yesterday’s wrap-up.

• The Killing Times brings news today that 40-year-old Scottish actor Richard Rankin (The Crimson Field, Outlander, Trust Me) will fill the role of Detective Inspector John Rebus in a new small-screen adaptation of Ian Rankin’s novels, titled simply Rebus. The Nordic streaming service Viaplay, “recently launched in the UK,” has commissioned the forthcoming series. That streamer says Rebus will find its protagonist “at a personal crossroads after a fight with a notorious mobster in Edinburgh. He struggles with the job that is increasingly controlled by business-driven technocrats, while realising that he is living in an unhealthy relationship that he should end and that he has more or less been replaced in the role of father in his daughter’s life by his ex-wife’s new, wealthy husband. Now he must find his new position, both privately and professionally. In a world that is increasingly governed by politics and class differences, he feels that the system is becoming increasingly watered down. And if no one else follows the rules, why should he?” Viaplay will reportedly serve up the first six-episode season of Rebus in 2024.

• This from Deadline: “A second season of smash John le Carré adaptation The Night Manager is in the works at Amazon Prime Video and the BBC, with Tom Hiddleston set to reprise his role as protagonist Jonathan Pine. Under the codename Steelworks, Deadline understands Season 2 will film later this year in London and South America. Although it is yet to be formally greenlit by Amazon and the BBC, we hear that it is set to receive a two-season order.”

• Meanwhile, Season 3 of the ITV crime drama Grace, starring John Simm and based on Peter James’ books about Brighton police detective Roy Grace, will debut this coming Sunday, March 19, in Britain. The stories told in these latest three episodes are drawn from James’ novels Dead Like You, Dead Man's Grip,  and Not Dead Yet.

• The streaming-TV service Peacock has announced that Tony Shalhoub will return to his role as “defective detective” Adrian Monk in a new movie scripted by Monk series creator Andy Breckman.

• During an interview with Crimespree Magazine, in which author Charles Todd talks about The Cliff’s Edge (Morrow), the 13th and last Bess Crawford mystery he composed with his mother, Caroline (who died in 2021), Todd explains that his next novel with be the 25th installment in their series starring Scotland Yard inspector Ian Rutledge. “I am putting quality over quantity so I might not put out a book every six months,” he explains. “As soon as I get one book done, I start on the next one. I will not find another writer to work with me, because no one can automatically pick up where my mom left off. The next Ian book is with my agent, and we will see what happens from there, since my contract is up, but it will go on to some publisher. I am also writing a short story, part of an anthology, based on titles of songs of the entire album, ‘Back in Black’ by AC/DC. Each author wrote a story based on one of these songs.”

• In a Facebook post, author-screenwriter Lee Goldberg draws my attention to a March 28 non-fiction release titled Music for Prime Time: A History of American Television Themes and Scoring (Oxford University Press). Its author is Jon Burlingame, hailed as “one of the nation’s leading writers on the subject of music for films and television.” Library Journal notes in its review of this $35 book that it’s “a revised, updated, and expanded version of Burlingame’s Sound and Vision of 2000 … Burlingame comprehensively documents the themes and soundtracks that have become earworms for many TV viewers … [He] highlights theme song composers such as Nelson Riddle (Route 66), Lalo Shifrin (Mission: Impossible), Neal Hefti (Batman; The Odd Couple), Mike Post (Rockford Files; Hill Street Blues), and many talented but less heralded composers.” Goldberg enthuses: “I've been looking forward to this book for years.” Being another fan of classic film and TV themes, I’ll likely be ordering my own copy.

• Speaking of Oxford University Press, it has just published handsome new paperback editions of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories through its Oxford World’s Classics imprint. For various reasons, says blogger Kate Jackson at Cross-Examining Crime, these reprints “are a great choice if you are looking to upgrade your existing cop[ies] or you are wanting to dig deeper into the canon.”

• If you’re wondering what has become of the blog Bookgasm, you’re not alone. It’s been offline since December—long enough that I was worried whether it was coming back. But according to editor Rod Lott, the dysfunction is only temporary. “Some issue with the SSL certificate,” he informed me in mid-February. Then, just yesterday—with the site still inaccessible—Lott wrote to say: “Since we last spoke, I hired a professional, who confirmed it got hacked. The site has been successfully cleaned of all the malware, as of today. Now it’s just a matter of him restoring the content, which he believes can be done.” I, for one, look forward to celebrating Bookgasm’s return—and seeing all of my links to it from The Rap Sheet operating again.

• And Republican right-wingers in the States are frothing at the mouth about the damage caused by “woke” politics. You’d think they would have come up with a solid definition of the term by now. Instead, says Salon, it’s become a “choose your own bigotry” label.

Almost 170 and Still Going Strong

Unfortunately, January 6 has now become notorious as the date on which, in 2021, followers of defeated Republican president Donald J. Trump launched a violent attack against the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. Better that the date should be celebrated as the anniversary of Sherlock Holmes’ birth, in 1854—169 years ago.

The good folks behind the podcast I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere issued a reminder of the latter occasion earlier today, and in this post, The Rap Sheet elaborated further on the reasoning that has led to January 6 being identified as Holmes’ natal day.

Sherlock Loses His Protections

What would Conan Doyle say? From In Reference to Murder:

A slew of new creative works (music, movies, books) enter the public domain in the U.S. in 2023, including The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, meaning that every Sherlock story will be out of copyright. This is legally important since the Arthur Conan Doyle estate has been suing just about everybody in recent years, even when it comes to certain public domain works. Most infamously, the Doyle Estate went after the creators of the Enola Holmes series, claiming a copyright over Sherlock stories where Holmes was “capable of friendship,” “expressed emotion,” or “respected women,” based on the idea that these character traits are copyrightable. Although the cased was dismissed “with prejudice” (e.g., likely settled), with all Holmes stories now in public domain, such cases will no longer be tying up the courts. Author Cory Doctrow has an overview of the 2023 public domain landscape.

READ MORE: “2023 Public Domain Debuts Include Last Sherlock Holmes Work” (Associated Press).

A Rum Business

Evan Lewis, the man behind Davy Crockett’s Almanack of Mystery, Adventure, and the Wild West, has located an original, six-decades-old comic-book story in which Sherlock Holmes is summoned to solve a murder among the London dockyards. Check it out.

Attention Grabbers

• Deadly Pleasures’ George Easter points me toward a very entertaining, 90-minute podcast discussion of this year’s top crime and mystery novels, organized by Crime Time and with Barry Forshaw serving as master of ceremonies. The “august” panelists are novelist-critic Laura Wilson, Crime Writers’ Association chair Maxim Jakubowski, Shots blogger and critic Ayo Onatade, Daily Telegraph crime-fiction critic Jake Kerridge, novelist-podcast presenter Victoria Selman, and critic-podcast editor Paul Burke. Easter compiled at least most the titles of the recommended books here.

• Thanks, too, to Elizabeth Foxwell of The Bunburyist for drawing my attention to a soon-upcoming exhibition in New York City titled “Sherlock Holmes in 221 Objects.” Among the rarities to be included—all drawn from the “preeminent collection assembled by Glen S. Miranker”—will be “leaves from The Hound of the Baskervilles; four short story manuscripts; original artwork by the British and American illustrators who created Sherlock’s iconic look for readers; a wealth of holograph letters from Arthur Conan Doyle to friends, colleagues, and well-wishers; a fascinating cache of pirated editions; the only known salesman’s dummy for the U.S. Hound; an ‘idea book’ of Conan Doyle’s private musings in which he (in)famously penned ‘Killed Holmes’ on his calendar for December 1893; and a handwritten speech—never before displayed—with the author’s explanation for killing Holmes …” “Sherlock Holmes in 221 Objects” will open on January 21, 2022, at Manhattan’s Grolier Club, and continue through April 16.

• Shoot, I wish I had known, before scratching out this year’s Christmas wish list, that Harlan P. Halsey’s 1874 work Old Sleuth, the Detective: Or, The Bay Ridge Mystery, was being reissued. As Wikipedia explains, “The Old Sleuth, appearing in The Fireside Companion story paper beginning in 1872, was the first dime-novel detective and began the trend away from the western and frontier stories that dominated the story papers and dime novels up to that time. He was the first character to use the word sleuth to denote a detective, the word’s original definition being that of a bloodhound trained to track. He is also responsible for the popularity of the use of the word old in the names of competing dime novel detectives, such as Old Cap Collier, Old Broadbrim, Old King Brady, Old Lightning, and Old Ferret, among many others.” In his new introduction to this classic yarn, journalist Henry Stewart notes:

He’s not, by the way, a sleuth—his name is Sleuth. He lives in New York City, and he’s respected by the police but operates independently; the only times he interacts with official lawmen are when they’ve apprehended him, and he needs discreetly to reveal his identity to get back on the street. He’s a master of disguise; any character in this book might turn out to be him—and often does (maybe a few too many times). One critic called him “two-fisted, handsome, brilliant, strong and tough.” He was inspired by Allan Pinkerton, who soon rushed out his own chronicles of his private-detective career to compete.

I guess I’ll just have to pick this one up on my own dime.

• Shotsmag Confidential reports that Britain’s annual CrimeFest convention “is offering a bursary [or scholarship] for a crime fiction writer of colour to attend its festival next May. The bursary will cover the cost of a full Weekend Pass to the convention and a night’s accommodation at the Mercure Bristol Grand Hotel, and a guaranteed panel appearance. Eligible authors must have published at least one English-language book in traditional print by a British commercial publisher.” Applications are being accepted through January 30. Click here for additional information.

• Spy Command blogger Bill Koenig has compiled a (sadly long) register of people who “contributed to spy entertainment (or at least spy-related),” and died over the last 12 months.

Bullet Points: Oddments and Endings Edition

• First it was former U.S. president Bill Clinton. Now country singer-songwriter Dolly Parton is collaborating with best-seller James Patterson to produce a work of fiction. Titled Run, Rose, Run, and due out from Little, Brown in March 2022, this will be Parton’s first novel. As Literary Hub explains, the yarn follows “a young woman who moves to Nashville to fulfill her dreams of becoming a star while simultaneously hiding from her past … An accompanying Dolly Parton album containing 12 original songs inspired by the book will be released simultaneously on Parton’s label Butterfly Records. ‘The mind-blowing thing about this project is that reading the novel is enhanced by listening to the album and vice versa,’ Patterson told People. ‘It’s a really unique experience that I know readers (and listeners) will love.’” We’ll just have to see about that.

• Lee Goldberg and Joel Goldman have worked on and off over the last seven years—ever since they founded their publishing imprint, Brash Books—to convince South Dakota author William J. Reynolds that he should let them republish his once-popular novels starring an Omaha-based private investigator-turned-writer known only as Nebraska. The effort finally paid off. “We have licensed all six novels in the Nebraska series,” Goldberg tells me. “Our intention is to release them all at once in October in e-book and trade paperback.” The Nebraska Quotient (1984) is the opening entry in that series, but Goldberg sent me the cover art for its 1986 sequel, Moving Targets, displayed on the right. I, for one, look forward to re-reading the whole set!

• Good for Charles Ardai! From Mystery Tribune:

Gun Honey, the new 4-part [Titan] comic book series launching in September 2021 by Charles Ardai, the Edgar and Shamus award winning author and co-founder of Hard Case Crime, is being developed for television by Piller/Segan, producers of Private Eyes, Haven, Greek, Wildfire, and The Dead Zone, and Malaysia-based Double Vision, the production arm of the Vision New Media Group and the award-winning producers behind the acclaimed Asian adaptation of The Bridge.

Featuring interior art by Malaysian illustrator Ang Hor Kheng as well as two covers by legendary movie-poster painter Robert McGinnis (creator of the posters for the original James Bond films), Gun Honey tells the story of Singapore-born weapons expert Joanna Tan, the best in the world at providing her clients with the perfect weapon at the perfect moment. When her new assignment leads to the escape of a brutal criminal from a high-security prison, Joanna is forced to track him down—and to confront secrets about her own past that will challenge her sense of who she is.

Gun Honey will be the second television collaboration between Hard Case Crime and Piller/Segan, who previously worked together to produce Haven, based on the first of three bestselling novels written for Hard Case Crime by Stephen King. Haven ran for six years on SyFy in the U.S. and was distributed in 185 territories worldwide.

• Well, it’s about damn time! After witnessing its release date delayed five times over the last two years—three of those due to the spread of COVID-19—the 25th James Bond picture, No Time to Die, looks to finally be rolling out on September 30 in the UK, and on October 8 in the States. Eon Productions has already announced the film’s world premiere will come on September 28, at London’s Royal Albert Hall. But Bill Koenig of The Spy Command notes that the Bond Web site MI6 HQ “tweeted out that Australia has postponed No Time to Die to Nov. 11 from Oct. 8. Theater lists like this one from an IMAX​ theater carry the Nov. 11 date. Later, MI6 HQ tweeted that New Zealand is also delayed to Nov. 11.” It seems even 007 is powerless against this persistent pandemic.

• Word from In Reference to Murder is that, “Following a highly competitive auction, Amazon Studios has acquired a star vehicle that will have Emily Blunt playing Kate Warne, the first woman to become a detective at the Pinkerton Agency. Based on a script by Gustin Nash, the movie is a propulsive action adventure built around Warne, a real-life female Sherlock Holmes in a male-dominated industry whose singular sleuthing skills paved the way for future women in law enforcement and forever changed how detective work was done.” Writer and producer Nile Cappello supplies interesting background on Warne in this 2019 piece for CrimeReads.

• I mentioned not long ago that Season 6 of Grantchester is scheduled to begin broadcasting in the States on Sunday, October 3, as part of PBS-TV’s Masterpiece Mystery! lineup. British viewers, though, won’t have such a lengthy wait. According to The Killing Times, that historical whodunit will debut in the UK on September 3.

• British actor Martin Clunes is returning for a second series of Manhunt, the ITV-TV crime drama he headlined back in 2019. As before, he’ll portray real-life Detective Chief Inspector Colin Sutton of London’s Metropolitan Police. Radio Times provides this plot synopsis for Manhunt II: The Night Stalker: “Based on a true story, Manhunt series two will see … Sutton pursue a notorious southeast London serial rapist whose 17-year reign of terror left thousands of elderly people fearing for their lives.” Digital Spy says Manhunt II will reach TV screens across the pond sometime this fall.

• Here’s a story I missed earlier in the month: The Showtime network is “in its early stages” of developing a TV series about Depression-era Chicago gangster Al Capone and his most ardent pursuer, Prohibition agent Eliot Ness. “The show will delve into Prohibition-era politics, industrialization, mass media, the immigrant experience, law enforcement and the birth of organized crime,” according to Deadline. “It will show how Al Capone corporatized crime on a level never before imagined, and how Eliot Ness, one of the most revolutionary cops in American history, fought an uphill battle to reform law enforcement, a battle that continues to this day.” This potential drama finds its inspiration in 2018’s Scarface and the Untouchable: Al Capone, Eliot Ness, and the Battle for Chicago, by Max Allan Collins and A. Brad Schwartz. While that all sounds promising, Collins cautions in his blog that Scarface has only been “optioned” for adaptation: “[R]esist holding your breaths ... for the show to appear.”

• Robert Louis Stevenson—wannabe detective-fictionist?

• Bloody Scotland, set this year to be a hybrid festival of on-site events and video presentations, will begin in Stirling, Scotland, on September 17 and run through the 19th. A news release says, “huge names including Stephen King, Kathy Reichs, Karin Slaughter, Lee Child, Jeanine Cummins, Linwood Barclay and Robert Peston” will be available on-screen, while interviewers fire questions at them in front of live audiences. “Meanwhile,” it adds, “pacing the boards in Stirling itself will be the great and the good of the Scottish crime scene, including Val McDermid, Ian Rankin, Denise Mina, Chris Brookmyre, Marisa Haetzman, Lin Anderson, Abir Mukherjee, Craig Robertson, Alan Parks, Morgan Cry, Craig Russell and Stuart MacBride. Plus some big names from outside Scotland: Paula Hawkins, Luca Veste, Mark Billingham, Mick Herron, S.J. Watson, Lisa Jewell, Stuart Neville, Kia Abdullah, E.S. Thomson and Louise Candlish.” Opening-night festivities will feature the presentation of two awards: the 2021 McIlvanney Prize and Bloody Scotland Debut Prize. The full program of convention events, plus ticket information, can be accessed here.

• Speaking of crime-fiction conventions, SlaughterFest—a single-day online event “curated by internationally best-selling author Karin Slaughter”—is scheduled for Saturday, September 4. Click here to see the lineup of speakers. All of the conversations will be broadcast on the Killer Reads Facebook page, which is also where you should go to make your interest in SlaughterFest known.

• Just to remind you, the abbreviated roster of online events comprising this year’s postponed Bouchercon will kick off next Friday, August 27. In the run-up to that date, organizers are reminding everyone that “the hilariously ironically titled This Time for Sure, the 2021 Bouchercon short-story anthology,” is ready for ordering. Edited by Hank Phillippi Ryan and published by Down & Out, the book features tales by such familiar authors as Karen Dionne, Heather Graham, G. Miki Hayden, Edwin Hill, Craig Johnson, Ellen Clair Lamb, Kristen Lepionka, Alan Orloff, Alex Segura, Charles Todd, Gabriel Valjan, David Heska Wanbli Weiden, and Andrew Welsh-Huggins.

• As always, I hesitate to recommend films and TV shows I stumble across on YouTube, fearing they might disappear at any moment. (That’s exactly what happened to “Enough Rope,” for instance, a rare 1960 episode of the TV anthology series The Chevy Mystery Show that introduced Bert Freed as the later-legendary Lieutenant Columbo; it flashed onto YouTube recently, but was gone again before I could alert readers.) Nonetheless, I must draw attention to the fact that Travis McGee, a 1983 pilot for an ABC series starring Sam Elliott and based on John D. MacDonald’s The Empty Copper Sea (1978), is ready for your viewing pleasure here. My opinion of Travis McGee both before and after rewatching it is identical: I like Elliott in this role, and find the flick generally entertaining, but don’t think it accurately captures MacDonald’s “salvage consultant”-cum-sleuth. Steve Scott, who writes the fine MacDonald-focused blog The Trap of Solid Gold, is rather less generous:

I watched it when it was first broadcast, then forced myself to watch it again on videotape, then erased the tape. I recall it as possibly the worst attempt of adapting JDM to the screen, ever. Elliott apparently couldn’t be bothered to shave his bushy mustache, so he looked nothing like Travis. He spoke in his characteristic twang, dropping his g’s and sounding more like a rodeo clown than MacDonald’s melancholy, intelligent hero. The feel of the thing was all wrong, so that even the sections of dialogue and voice-over that were taken directly from the book sounded trite and worn. Writing in The Washington Post, Tom Shales called Elliott “not so much a craggy actor as one great crag; his voice comes up straight from Middle Earth and his countenance is rangy and dry to the point of characterature.”

JDM was not happy with the result either. He called Elliott “an OK actor, but he was swimming upstream.” [MacDonald] was especially angry at the changing of the title. “What did they expect to call the sequel?” he fumed, and labeled the whole project a “mishmash.”

The ratings, however, were apparently good enough to get Warners to green-light a series, but the producers diddled, and by the time they had made up their minds to go forward, Elliott was committed to other projects and unavailable.

Scott offers more background on Travis McGee here.

• Cross-Examining Crime reviews a new book titled Sherlock in the Seventies: A Wild Decade of Sherlock Holmes Films, by Derham Groves (Visible Spectrum), and in the course of it argues that that those offerings were not only varied, but also “weird and bizarre.” Do you remember, for example, 1970’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, or 1971’s They Might Be Giants? How about The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1976), the teleflick Sherlock Holmes in New York (1976), or Murder by Decree (1979)? I don’t know. In my opinion, most of these movies weren’t so “weird and bizarre” as they were ... wonderful.

• Whilst we’re on the subject of Messrs. Holmes and Watson, let me direct your attention to Murder & Mayhem’s selection of nine books that take an unusual approach toward the world of Arthur Conan Doyle’s renowned Victorian investigators.

• On a related note, The Bunburyist’s Elizabeth Foxwell writes: “The new Arthur Conan Doyle Society (spearheaded by George Mason University’s Ross Davies) is devoted to the study and enjoyment of the works of Conan Doyle. It is accepting nominations until November 1, 2021, for the best scholarly writing on Conan Doyle’s works or life that was published in 2020–21.” Any suggestions?

• I didn’t even know there was a Public Library of the Year award, presented by the Scotland-based International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions. Evidently, though, it exists, and has just chosen a winner from among five finalists. The only hint I’ll give, is that you probably live nowhere near this signal institution.

• New York-born actor—and childhood polio survivor—Alex Cord passed away on August 9 at age 88. As blogger Terence Towles Canote reminds us, Cord (originally Alexander Viespi Jr.) “was a particularly talented actor who played a variety of roles. He was the Ringo Kid in the 1966 remake of Stagecoach, Dylan Hunt in Gene Roddenberry’s failed pilot Genesis II, and Archangel on Airwolf. He could play heroes as easily as he could play villains, and was as comfortable in Westerns as he was science fiction or action movies.” My strongest memories of Cord, who was once married to actress Joanna Pettet, come from his starring role in 1973’s Genesis II, which I fervently hoped at the time would generate a series for CBS; unfortunately, that wasn’t the case, and Cord found himself replaced in the 1974 follow-up pilot, Planet Earth, by John Saxon (who died about a year ago). Cord’s other credits included parts on Naked City, Route 66, Police Story, Simon & Simon, and Jake and the Fatman. In addition, he appeared as Angie Dickinson’s ex-husband on the 1982 P.I. series Cassie & Co. (watch that show’s leggy main title sequence here).

• The Reprobate looks back at the “double life” of Clare Dunkel, “one of the biggest glamour models of the 1980s,” who “became an acclaimed author of ultra-violent crime fiction”: the recently deceased Mo Hayder (Birdman, The Devil of Nanking).

• Who knew Russians were so hungry for crime fiction?

• Solicitations and more solicitations: First off, Mystery Readers Journal has put out a call for reviews, articles, and essays having to do with cold-case mysteries, all to be featured in its next quarterly issue. Second, Gerald So is asking for submissions of crime-related poetry to his blog The Five-Two, which is about to begin its 11th year in business; he says he needs them by August 31. And third, Kevin R. Tipple is welcoming guest posts to his own site, Kevin’s Corner. “Topic—pretty much anything goes,” he explains. “While my blog is mainly aimed towards items of interest for readers and writers of mystery and crime fiction, I am open to pretty much anything. I do ask that folks avoid the topics of religion and politics unless either or both directly relate to the work being discussed or promoted.”

• What’s The Private Eye Writers Bulletin Board? Kevin Burton Smith, who cooked up this project for The Thrilling Detective Web Site, explains: “If you’re a private eye writer, and you’ve got something in a private eye vein coming out in the next little while, please let me know via e-mail (or DM me, for you youngsters) and I’ll post the news here. All I ask is that you keep it short, keep it pithy and keep it relevant. If you’re not sure, check out “What the Hell Is a Private Eye, Anyway?”

• Finally, if you haven’t noticed yet, I have added a link from the right-hand column of this page to “The Dick of the Day,” a delightful Thrilling Detective feature that introduces—or reintroduces—detective-fiction fans to familiar or obscure protagonists plucked from the pages of history. Of late, it has spotlighted everyone from Peter Scratch and Mitch Roberts to Jinx Alameda, Nameless (no, not Bill Pronzini’s Nameless), and … Donald J. Trump. Yes, before he was a failed, serial-lying former White House occupant, Trump did gumshoe work in a story River Clegg sold to The New Yorker.

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?”