Bullet Points: Feelings of Fall Edition

• We still have a month to go before the U.S. release of director Martin Scorcese’s western crime drama, Killers of the Flower Moon. So for now, we’ll just have to be happy watching the trailer for that picture, featured below. Based on David Grann’s widely acclaimed non-fiction book of the same title, the story—set in the early 1920s—focuses on a succession of bewildering murders of dozens of wealthy members of the Osage tribe in northeastern Oklahoma, following the discovery of large oil deposits under their land. The U.S. Bureau of Investigation (predecessor of today’s FBI) was called in to investigate. Headlining this likely cinematic blockbuster are Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, Lily Gladstone, and Brendan Fraser. Killers of the Flower Moon is set to debut in U.S. theaters on October 20.



• Kenneth Branaugh’s A Haunting in Venice opened in U.S. theaters last week. I haven’t yet gotten around to seeing that big-screener, which is based on Agatha Christie’s 1969 Hercule Poirot novel, Hallowe’en Party, and stars Branaugh as the brainy Belgian sleuth. But based on Olivia Rutigliano’s assessment in CrimeReads, it sounds as if I might enjoy this one more than I did Branaugh’s previous Poirot picture, the scandal-plagued Death on the Nile. Rutigliano calls Haunting “a vibrant tapestry of drama and feeling, fueled by magnetic performances, splendid effects, and some of the best camerawork, lighting, and art direction of the year.” She concludes: “But the grandest, greatest thing about A Haunting in Venice is that it feels firmly tied to its location. Venice is Branagh’s idea, not Christie’s, but it works beautifully with the themes in the script. The camera lingers lovingly on the decaying walls and splintering wood and chipping paints of the once-opulent Venice, a spooky, creamy mysterious relic, itself. With all of this, Branagh has engineered one of the most effusive, hypnotic films I’ve seen all year ...”

• Using A Haunting in Venice as its springboard, the A.V. Club site selects its favorite Christie movie adaptations, including 1963’s Murder at the Gallop, 2022’s Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? (a favorite of mine, too), and 1957’s Witness for the Prosecution. Those 15 write-ups are presented in slideshow fashion; click the “Start Slideshow” link within the artwork at the top of the page to get started.

• For his part, author Martin Edwards has little nice to say about director Peter Collinson’s suspense-deficient, 1974 version of Christie’s renowned And Then There Were None.

• Meanwhile, UK author Cara Hunter (Murder in the Family) muses on the continuing literary appeal of Dame Agatha’s “closed circle crime” narrative trope, which Hunter describes thusly: “A group of apparently random people gathered in some more or less artificial isolation—a train, an island, a ship, a country house—whereupon everything starts to go horribly wrong and they realise, with growing horror, that one among their number is a killer.” As examples of such yarns, she cites Christie’s Evil Under the Sun (1941), as well as eight other books, one of them a work of non-fiction.

• Rounding out today’s Christie-related coverage are two posts playing off the fun new book Agatha Whiskey: 50 Cocktails to Celebrate the Bestselling Novelist of All Time, by Colleen Mullaney (Skyhorse). Both Dave Bradley, in Crime Fiction Lover, and Doreen Sheridan, in Criminal Element, decided to mix up and judge some of this book’s libations for themselves. Nice work, if you can get it …

• The Literary Salon reports that Dennis Lehane’s latest standalone thriller, Small Mercies (published in France as Le Silence), is one of eight novels longlisted for this year's Grand prix de littérature américaine—“a prize for the best American novel translated into French.” The winner is to be announced on November 6.

• As 2023 winds into its fourth and final quarter, Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine editor George Easter is seeing more agreement among his cadre of book critics as to which of this year’s releases will wind up on the mag’s “best of the year” list. He observes that the following 16 novels now appear on multiple lists:

— All the Sinners Bleed, by S. A. Cosby
— My Father’s House, by Joseph O’connor
— Resurrection Walk, by Michael Connelly
— Going Zero, by Anthony Mccarten
— Everybody Knows, by Jordan Harper
— Small Mercies, by Dennis Lehane
— The River We Remember, by William Kent Krueger
— Expectant, by Vonda Symon
— Lying Beside You, by Michael Robotham
— The Detective Up Late, by Adrian McKinty
— The Secret Hours, by Mick Herron
— Independence Square, by Martin Cruz Smith
— Moscow Exile, by John Lawton
— Drowning, T.J. Newman
— Ozark Dogs, by Eli Cranor
— Assassin Eighteen, by John Brownlow

• Sadly, editor Gerald So has discontinued regular updates of his “crime poetry weekly,” The Five-Two, due to an inadequacy of submissions. Its September 4 poem, “‘Something Fishy’ by J.H. Johns, about the recent arrest of a suspect in the Gilgo Beach murders,” was the last published entry, he says. So, a teacher, book reviewer, contributing editor to The Thrilling Detective We Site, and co-founder of The Lineup: Poems on Crime, launched the Five-Two in 2011, bringing readers new crime-related verse each week—52 entries per year. But in 2022, So recalls, “Elon Musk chaotically took over Twitter, upending an important news outlet for the site, and Blogger’s post editor became unreliable in the wee hours, the time I usually worked on the site.” In the future, So says, the blog will be given over to “sporadically” publicizing news about Five-Two alumni.

• I very much enjoyed British crime novelist David Hewson’s complex, four-book series about “Pieter Vos, a rather eccentric detective living a bohemian life in a canalboat” in Amsterdam, and have been disappointed at the utter lack of fresh entries since Sleep Baby Sleep came out in 2017. Hewson, though, is at least celebrating the fact that the original novels are “now back in my hands and available as revised e-book and print editions exclusively on Amazon worldwide. Plus there’s an omnibus e-book edition of all four titles too.”

• Happy 90th birthday this week to David McCallum, the Scottish-born actor who co-starred with Robert Vaughn in the trendsetting 1960s spy-fi series The Man from U.N.C.L.E.

• Here’s a delightful CrimeReads piece about the history of true-crime storytelling. “Long before Stitcher, Netflix, and TikTok, stories of young women being killed were shared through folksongs that were often inspired by real events—just like Lifetime movies,” writes Janet Beard, author of The Ballad of Laurel Springs. “Murder ballads are folksongs that tell the story of a violent crime, usually the murder of a young woman, most often by a lover. These songs were popular throughout the United States in the nineteenth century, though they have become particularly associated with southern Appalachia, where they are an essential part of the region’s musical traditions. Earlier versions of many of the popular Appalachian murder ballads, such as ‘Pretty Polly’ or ‘Silver Dagger,’ can be traced back hundreds of years to England and Scotland, though in their heyday, plenty of homegrown American ballads, like ‘The Banks of the Ohio’ or ‘Tom Dooley,’ made their way around the country, telling the stories of real-life murders in a time before people could tune into Dateline to hear them.”

• R.I.P., James Hayman, author of the McCabe & Savage police procedural mysteries. Mystery Fanfare notes he died on June 15 “after a six month battle with glioblastoma.”

• Following the great time I had at Bouchercon in San Diego earlier this month, I’m giving serious thought to attending the next Left Coast Crime convention, scheduled to be held in Bellevue, Washington, from April 11 to 14, 2024. Getting there each morning would require only a short drive (much longer during rush hour) across Lake Washington from my home in Seattle. But what’s stopping me so far is the registration price: $329, compared with Bouchercon’s $230. Fortunately, I need not commit myself at this stage, though to take advantage of that $329 fee, I must register by December 31; after that the price will shoot up to $349. It’s been years since my last time at LCC—is participation always this pricey?

• A welcome Banacek retrospective in T-Magazine.

• Campaigns by narrow-minded right-wingers to censor books are an insult to the intelligence of readers. Nonetheless, they are relentless. From National Public Radio:

There were nearly 700 attempts to ban library books in the first eight months of 2023, according to data released Tuesday by the American Library Association. From Jan. 1 to Aug 31, the attempts sought to challenge or censor 1,915 titles, a 20% increase compared to the same months in 2022, the organization said. Last year saw the most challenges since the ALA began tracking book censorship more than two decades ago. But the real numbers may even be higher. The ALA collects data on book bans through library professionals and news reports, and therefore, its numbers may not encompass all attempts to ban or censor certain books.

Ideology-driven reading restraints in American schools are an especially pernicious problem, denying students the right to learn the complete breadth and truth of their history, and to possibly expand their perspectives on the world. Again from NPR: “School book bans and restrictions in the U.S. rose 33% in the last school year, according to a new report from the free speech group PEN America, continuing what it calls a worrisome effort aimed at the ‘suppression of stories and ideas.’ Florida had more bans than any other state.”

• And Bookgasm is finally back—sort of. The blog disappeared suddenly last December, the victim of a belligerent hacking. Since then, editor Rod Lott says he’s “fought a constant battle between my URL registrant, site host and site security provider, all pointing fingers at one another, some promising multiple times it would be up within 24 hours.” While a stripped-down version of Bookgasm’s front page is visible at its former location, Lott notes that “The old reviews aren’t accessible at the moment. The good news: They’re not gone; I can click into them on the back end and all the content is there.” Now he just has to figure out how to make everything work right again. “I’m not highly skilled at this thing,” he acknowledges, “nor do I have the allotted free time to devote [to it that] I did when I started this site two decades ago! Bear with me as I get this thing rebuilt.”

Don’t Mess with Texts

As The Spy Command’s Bill Koenig noted this week:

The Washington Post, in an editorial, has come out against revisions to decades-old novels. One of the editorial’s prime examples is Ian Fleming’s Live and Let Die.

The Post’s editorial said such changes are “a threat to free expression, to historical honesty and, indeed, to readers themselves for contemporary editors to comb through works of fiction written at different moments and rewrite them for today’s mind-set, particularly with little explanation of process or limiting principles.” …

“The trend raises uncomfortable questions about authorship and authenticity, and it ignores the reality that texts are more than consumer goods or sources of entertainment in the present ... They are also cultural artifacts that attest to the moment in which they were written—the good and the bad.”

You can read the full Washington Post editorial here.

Bullet Points: Coronavirus-Free Edition

That’s right: It’s taken me two weeks, but I have apparently survived the dreaded COVID-19. I had taken all of the shots and all of the boosters, and yet it still managed to tackle me. The virus manifested in my body mostly as a minor cold, though I did lose my sense of taste, as well. After a negative COVID test yesterday, I look forward to spending some quality time outside of my house!

• Among the festivities marking its “70th Jubilee” this year, the British Crime Writers’ Association will present an exhibition of “memorabilia from its archives,” which date back to the organization’s founding (by prolific author John Creasey) in 1953. Shotsmag Confidential reports that this display “will be part of the Alibis in the Archives crime writing weekend which runs 9-11 June at Gladstone’s Library in Wales, as well as other special events linked to National Crime Reading Month in June.” More specifics to come.

• “Amazon continues its cost-cutting measures apace,” observes In Reference to Murder’s B.V. Lawson. “First it was laying off almost 30,000 staffers, then it was eliminating its newspaper/magazine subscription service, closing the textbook buy-back service, shuttering all of its brick-and-mortar bookstores, and cutting off the publishing house, Westland, which published works of several bestselling authors in India. Now, Amazon is also shutting down the Book Depository online shop that it bought in 2011 …” I’m sad to hear about Book Depository. I’ve ordered a variety of British crime novels from there over the last few years, though most of my UK-buying lately has been through Blackwell’s. Lawson goes on to speculate whether “other [Amazon-owned] book services are under the gun, including AbeBooks, et al.—especially since Kobo just announced it’s opening its Kobo Plus subscription service to the U.S. market, making it a viable alternative to Kindle Unlimited and Audible.”

• Easter is this coming Sunday, April 9, and blogger Janet Rudolph welcomes the occasion with an update of her lengthy list of crime and mystery fiction connected to the holiday. From Laurien Berenson’s Show Me the Bunny and J.M. Griffin’s Hop ’Til You Drop, to Julie Hyzy’s Eggsecutive Orders and Robert Wilson’s fabulous The Blind Man of Seville (which I’d forgotten takes place during Easter), there’s something in that collection to satisfy most tastes.

• And enjoy your påskekrim, everyone!

• The history of that most iconic of 20th-century crime-pulp periodicals, Black Mask, is the focus of a new series from Pulp Flakes blogger Sai Shankar. His fellow blog writer, Evan Lewis (of Davy Crockett’s Almanack fame), notes that Shankar will be “looking into the history of the magazine, reviewing random issues from different editors, and seeing how the magazine changed under them.” You can check out the series’ first installment by clicking here.

• Now, this is how readers ought to be cautioned in regard to older books containing material that may be offensive to modern-day sensibilities! Literary Hub says Britain-based publisher Pan Macmillan’s latest edition of Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell, features an introductory message reading:

Gone with the Wind is a novel which includes problematic elements including the romanticisation of a shocking era in our history and the horrors of slavery.

The novel includes the representation of unacceptable practices, racist and stereotypical depictions and troubling themes, characterisation, language and imagery.

The text of this book remains true to the original in every way and is reflective of the language and period in which it was originally written.

We want to alert readers that there may be hurtful or indeed harmful phrases and terminology that were prevalent at the time this novel was written and which are true to the context of the historical setting of this novel.

Pan Macmillan believes changing the text to reflect today’s world would undermine the authenticity of the original, so has chosen to leave the text in its entirety.

This does not, however, constitute an endorsement of the characterisation, content or language used.

Better this, than recent, ham-handed efforts to strip dubious references and phrasings from classic works by Agatha Christie, Ian Fleming, and Roald Dahl—practices The New York Times says “have drawn intense public scrutiny” and “left publishers and literary estates grappling with how to preserve an author’s original intent while ensuring that their work continues to resonate—and sell.”

• In her latest blog post, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine editor Janet Hutchings provides a number of interesting facts about her publication’s subscription history. Including that, during the mid-1900s era of “more lurid and sexually explicit” cover illustrations, “only newsstand buyers could obtain issues with cover art. Subscribers got plain-type covers.” I would’ve joined the former crowd!

(Above) A trailer for the sophomore series of Dalgliesh.

• Season 2 of the 1970s-set TV drama Dalgliesh, starring Bertie Carver as P.D. James protagonist Detective Chief Inspector Adam Dalgliesh, will premiere on Monday, April 24, on the subscription streaming service AcornTV. The Web site Premiere Date explains that six episodes will comprise this sophomore run, bringing three different James books to the small screen, each of them two parts long. First up will be Death of an Expert Witness; second will come A Certain Justice, debuting on Monday, May 1; and the final adaptation will be of The Murder Room, beginning on Monday, May 8. A third-season renewal of Dalgliesh has already been confirmed.

• Although Season 5 of Unforgotten, now starring Sinéad Keenan and Sanjeev Bhaskar, has already run its course in Great Britain, while American viewers await news of its broadcast on this side of the Atlantic. Yet The Killing Times brings news that this cold-case crime drama has been awarded a sixth season by UK network ITV. Furthermore, series writer Chris Lang discloses that those future episodes will find London detectives Jessica “Jessie” James and Sunil “Sunny” Khan pursuing a murder case “that’ll take them all the way from the wild north Devon coast, to the railroads of Birmingham, Alabama. Yes sir, Unforgotten is heading Stateside.”

• English author Sarah Pinborough is currently adapting her 2022 thriller, Insomnia, into a series for TV streamer Paramount+ . Deadline says the story tells of “successful career woman Emma Averill, who fears she is losing her mind after suffering from sleep deprivation two weeks before turning 40. Her mother had a similar experience at the same age, suffering a violent psychotic breakdown on the night of her 40th birthday. But even as she relives the experience of her mother, Averill believes other forces may be at work. Her mother is hospitalized with a sudden injury, her estranged sister returns without warning, and she feels as if she is being watched. Only by investigating the truth of her painful past, can she find the answers to her present.” Filming on the show is set to commence later this year.

• Finally, I bid an appreciative adieu to Canadian-born actress Sharon Acker, who apparently died at a Toronto, Ontario, retirement home on March 16. She was 87 years old. Acker made her film debut in the 1957 British comedy Lucky Jim, based on Kingsley Amis’ novel of that same name. She went on to roles in the thriller Point Blank and the drama Don’t Let the Angels Fall. But it was the TV field where Acker really grew her career, featuring in shows such as It Takes a Thief, Alias Smith and Jones, McMillan & Wife, Harry O, The Streets of San Francisco, The Rockford Files, Quincy, M.E., and Crazy Like a Fox. She portrayed an alien from an overpopulated planet on the original Star Trek; the wife of an idealistic national legislator in The Bold Ones: The Senator; a widowed love interest for Richard Boone in the Old West mystery Hec Ramsey; and secretary Della Street to Monte Markham’s eponymous defense attorney in 1973’s ill-fated reboot, The New Perry Mason. Variety says, “Her final TV credit came in 1992 with an appearance on The Young and the Restless.” I always found Acker’s performances watchable, even when she was working with mediocre scripts. Hers is a face not soon to fade from my memory.

Censoring Christie

First, it was Ian Fleming’s James Bond thrillers. Now the Queen of Crime’s famous fiction is being bowdlerized in order to comport with “contemporary values.” As Britain’s Telegraph newspaper reports, “Agatha Christie novels have been rewritten for modern sensitivities ... Poirot and Miss Marple mysteries have had original passages reworked or removed in new editions published by HarperCollins.”

The paper spells out a variety of alterations made:

The author’s own narration, often through the inner monologue of Miss Jane Marple or Hercule Poirot, has been altered in many instances. Sections of dialogue uttered by often unsympathetic characters within the mysteries have also been cut.

In the 1937 Poirot novel Death on the Nile, the character of Mrs. Allerton complains that a group of children are pestering her, saying that “they come back and stare, and stare, and their eyes are simply disgusting, and so are their noses, and I don’t believe I really like children.”

This has been stripped down in a new edition to state: “They come back and stare, and stare. And I don’t believe I really like children”.

Vocabulary has also been altered, with the term “Oriental” removed. Other descriptions have been altered in some instances, with a black servant, originally described as grinning as he understands the need to stay silent about an incident, described as neither black nor smiling but simply as “nodding”.

In a new edition of the 1964 Miss Marple novel A Caribbean Mystery, the amateur detective’s musing that a West Indian hotel worker smiling at her has “such lovely white teeth” has been removed, with similar references to “beautiful teeth” also taken out.

The same book described a prominent female character as having “a torso of black marble such as a sculptor would have enjoyed”, a description absent from the edited version.

References to the Nubian people—an ethnic group that has lived in Egypt for millennia—have been removed from Death on the Nile in many instances, resulting in “the Nubian boatman” becoming simply “the boatman”.

Dialogue in Christie’s 1920 debut novel The Mysterious Affair at Styles has been altered, so where Poirot once noted that another character is “a Jew, of course”, he now makes no such comment.

In the same book, a young woman described as being “of gypsy type” is now simply “a young woman”, and other references to gypsies have been removed from the text.

The Telegraph says some of these new, expurgated HarperCollins editions of Christie’s mysteries have already been released, with more to come. The publisher apparently employed “sensitivity readers” to determine what might shock or offend other modern consumers.

All of this is patently ridiculous! Trying to sanitize or dumb down older crime and mystery novels (or any fiction, for that matter) presupposes that modern readers are stupid, that we don’t recognize how terminology and tastes have evolved over the centuries, and that we’re liable to faint or fume, or else be confused by, the presence of outdated slang and comments that would now be deemed belittling. These actions by HarperCollins suggest that it’s listening not to common book buyers, but to a segment of intolerant, over-thinking pearl-clutchers who simply can’t imagine that readers might be able to judge the material before them with discerning and critical eyes. Furthermore, stripping allusions to intolerant attitudes from older works is an attempt to rewrite history, to make people believe those attitudes never existed. And if we forget they existed, we may drop our guard against their foul revival in the future.

Older crime fiction should be read and appreciated as reflecting social tastes and mores that may sometimes be at odds with our own. There’s no need for publishers to try and protect us from our past!

Savor Your Right to Read This Spring

Count me among those who are contemptuous—and proudly so—of book-banning. People who believe that society is better off denying its history, its record of past poor judgments, and its racial and ethnic inequities by censoring reading material are doing themselves and our planet an unforgivable disservice. The only way to fully understand the present and perhaps improve the future is to give voice to all of those who wish to be heard, whether we agree with them or not. Those who are so small-minded as to deny Americans—especially young Americans—the chance to read books by people who harbor different beliefs and different perspectives on the world aren’t protecting anyone; they’re only championing ignorance at a dire cost to enlightenment. “Censorship,” intoned former U.S. Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart, “reflects a society’s lack of confidence in itself.”

Yet parochial bomb-throwers in Texas, Florida, and elsewhere continue to insist there’s no room for writers who might challenge our orthodox view of things, or who might cause children to question the values of their elders. According to Lit Reactor, the free-expression advocates at PEN America found “2,532 instances of book bans between July 2021 and June 2022. This number is staggering, especially when you consider these are just the bans PEN America is aware of—it’s unclear how many challenges and bans there are that haven’t been reported.” Those fervid assaults on literacy are frequently aimed at particular identity groups, “predominantly LGBTQ narratives and characters and people of color—characters and stories,” explains Dr. Tasslyn Magnusson, a writer who’s been tracking book challenges across the United States. “[It goes] back and forth between which is the number one.” Stories pertaining to sexual identity and coming-of-age difficulties are frequently attacked, as well.

A CBS News story from late last year about “the 50 most banned books in America” included no crime, mystery, or thriller titles. However, some such works have come in for ridicule, notable among them being Harper Lee’s To Kill and Mockingbird (1960) and Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (2003). And with censorious right-wingers now in high dudgeon, there’s nothing to prevent them from coming after our favorite genre in the near future. Which would be its own kind of offense, because if there’s one thing crime and mystery fiction does well, it’s to lay bare to scrutiny our culture’s accepted improprieties, deliberate self-deceptions, and moral fractures. At its best, this field of fiction not only entertains, but deftly employs the conventions of criminal investigation to investigate the conventional wisdom of our times.

Fortunately, accounts of criminal and sleuthing escapades are not yet being ripped from library shelves or damned in spittle-spattered effusions on nightly TV news programs. Instead, their numbers are burgeoning. Setting myself to the task of cataloguing what I think will be this genre’s most interesting and distinctive additions, due out this spring on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, I came up with more than 375 titles. And that’s a fraction of the total set to debut.



Numbering among that profusion will be novels by Eleanor Catton (of The Luminaries fame), Joe R. Lansdale, Joyce Carol Oates, Harlan Coben, Andrew Taylor, Samantha Jayne Allen, Don Winslow, John Lawton, Anne Perry, Linwood Barclay, Candice Fox, Ben Creed, Jacqueline Winspear, Jo Nesbø, T.J. Newman, Eli Cranor, Elly Griffiths, and Alan Parks. Keep your eyes peeled, too, for Blind Spots, a speculative thriller from Thomas Mullen, author of the Darktown series; Megan Abbott’s vacation-gone-awry drama, Beware the Woman; Tim Mason’s The Nightingale Affair, his Victorian-era sequel to 2019’s captivating The Darwin Affair; Mark Billingham’s introduction of a brand-new detective in The Last Dance; Small Mercies, a “tumultuous” tale of tensions in 1970s Boston from Dennis Lehane; the sinister Looking Glass Sound, from Catriona Ward, author of The Last House on Needless Street; Martin Cruz Smith’s 10th Arkady Renko mystery, Independence Square; Ivy Pochada’s “gritty, feminist Western thriller,” Sing Her Down; the fourth Rachel Savernake mystery from Martin Edwards, Sepulchre Street; and the U.S. release of Peter Robinson’s 28th—and final—Alan Banks yarn, Standing in the Shadows.

Also awaiting publication between now and the end of May are several non-fiction titles of likely interest to Rap Sheet readers, such as Timothy Egan’s “riveting” Ku Klux Klan history, A Fever in the Heartland, and The Wager, an 18th-century shipwreck-and-savagery grabber from David Grann, author of The Lost City of Z.

Should any of today’s priggish book banners seek to steal my copies of these gems, they’ll have to rip them from my cold, dead hands!

Following my customary pattern with these quarterly lists, I have marked non-fiction releases appearing below with an asterisk (*), while the remainder are novels or collections of short stories.

MARCH (U.S.):
• All the Queen’s Spies, by Oliver Clements (Atria/Leopoldo & Co.)
• All That Is Hidden, by Rhys Bowen and Clare Broyles (Minotaur)
• All That Is Mine I Carry with Me, by William Landay (Bantam)
• The Angel Makers: Arsenic, a Midwife, and Modern History’s Most Astonishing Murder Ring, by Patti McCracken (Morrow)*
• Bert and Mamie Take a Cruise, by John Keyse-Walker (Severn House)
• Birnam Wood, by Eleanor Catton (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Blood on the Siberian Snow, by C.J. Farrington (Constable)
• Bones Under the Ice, by Mary Ann Miller (Oceanview)
• Burning Distance, by Joanne Leedom-Ackerman (Oceanview)
• Chopped, by Dale M. Pollock (Shadowbrook)
• Conspiracy of Blood, by Katarzyna Bonda (Hodder & Stoughton)
• Cost of Deceit, by H. Mitchell Caldwell (Nine Innings Press)
• A Crime in the Land of 7,000 Islands, by Zephaniah Sole
(Black Spring Press)
• Crooked: The Roaring ’20s Tale of a Corrupt Attorney General, a Crusading Senator, and the Birth of the American Political Scandal, by Nathan Masters (Hachette)*
• The Dangers of This Night, by Matthew Booth (Level Best)
• Dark Queen Wary, by Paul Doherty (Severn House)
• Dead Find, by T.F. Muir (Constable)
• The Deadly Weed, by Cora Harrison (Severn House)
• Dead Man Inside, by Vincent Starrett (American Mystery Classics)
• The Dead Will Rise, by Chris Nickson (Severn House)
• Death and Croissants, by Ian Moore (Poisoned Pen Press)
• A Death at the Party, by Amy Stuart (Simon & Schuster)
• A Death in Denmark, by Amulya Malladi (Morrow)
• Death of a Bookseller, by Bernard J. Farmer (Poisoned Pen Press)
• Death Ride, by Nick Oldham (Severn House)
• Death Watch, by Stona Fitch (Arrow Editions)
• Deep Fake, by Ward Larsen (Forge)
• Deliver Them from Evil, by Amanda DuBois (Girl Friday)
• Dr. Gatskill’s Blue Shoes, by Paul Conant (Stark House Press)
• The Donut Legion, by Joe R. Lansdale (Mulholland)
• Even When You Lie, by Michelle Cruz (Crooked Lane)
• The Family Bones, by Elle Marr (Thomas & Mercer)
• Fancy Anders For the Boys, by Max Allan Collins (NeoText)
• A Flaw in the Design, by Nathan Oates (Random House)
• Flux, by Jinwoo Chong (Melville House)
• Force of Hate, by Graham Bartlett (Allison & Busby)
• 48 Clues Into the Disappearance of My Sister, by Joyce Carol Oates
(Mysterious Press)
• Gangbuster: One Man’s Battle Against Crime, Corruption, and the Klan, by Alan Prendergast (Citadel)*
• Gentleman Bandit: The True Story of Black Bart, the Old West's Most Infamous Stagecoach Robber, by John Boessenecker (Hanover Square Press)*
• A Gentle Murderer, by Dorothy Salisbury Davis (Poisoned Pen Press)
• The Golden Spoon, by Jessa Maxwell (Atria)
• Gone Again, by Minka Kent (Thomas & Mercer)
• Good Dog, Bad Cop, by David Rosenfelt (Minotaur)
• The Guilty One, by Bill Schweigart (Crooked Lane)
• Her Deadly Game, by Robert Dugoni (Thomas & Mercer)
• Hiss and Tell, by Rita Mae Brown (Bantam)
• How I’ll Kill You, by Ren DeStefano (Berkley)
• Intrigue in Istanbul, by Erica Ruth Neubauer (Kensington)
• I Will Find You, by Harlan Coben (Grand Central)
• The Kind Worth Saving, by Peter Swanson (Morrow)
• The Last Russian Doll, by Kristen Loesch (Berkley)
• The London Séance Society, by Sarah Penner (Park Row)
• The Lost Americans, by Christopher Bollen (Harper)
• Loyalty, by Lisa Scottoline (Putnam)
• The Maid’s Diary, by Loreth Anne White (Montlake)
• A Mansion for Murder, by Frances Brody (Crooked Lane)
• The Mimicking of Known Successes, by Malka Older (Tordotcom)
• Mission in Malmö, by Torquil MacLeod (McNidder and Grace)
• A Most Intriguing Lady, by Sarah Ferguson (Avon)
• Mothered, by Zoje Stage (Thomas & Mercer)
• Murder in Postscript, by Mary Winters (Berkley)
• The Murder of Madison Garcia, by Marcy McCreary (CamCat)
• Murder Under a Red Moon, by Harini Nagendra (Pegasus Crime)
• Never Seen Again, by Paul Finch (Orion)
• Never Sleep, by Fred Van Lente (Blackstone)
• The New One, by Evie Green (Berkley)
• Night Flight to Paris, by Cara Black (Soho Crime)
• Not So Perfect Strangers, by L.S. Stratton (Union Square)
• Now You See Us, by Balli Kaur Jaswal (Morrow)
• One Extra Corpse, by Barbara Hambly (Severn House)
• Philanthropists: Inspector Mislan and the Executioners, by Rozlan Mohd Noor (Arcade Crimewise)
• Play the Fool, by Lina Chern (Bantam)
• A Praying Mantis, by R.V. Raman (Agora)
• The Protégé, by Jody Gehrman (Crooked Lane)
• The Raven Thief, by Gigi Pandian (Minotaur)
• Red as Blood, by Lilja Sigurdardóttir (Orenda)
• Red London, by Alma Katsu (Putnam)
• Red Queen, by Juan Gómez-Jurado (Minotaur)
• The Refusal Camp, by James R. Benn (Soho Crime)
• The Running Girls, by Matt Brolly (Thomas & Mercer)
• Satellite Boy: The International Manhunt for a Master Thief That Launched the Modern Communications Age, by Andrew Amelinckx (Counterpoint)*
• The Schoolhouse, by Sophie Ward (Vintage)
• Sell Us the Rope, by Stephen May (Bloomsbury)
• Seventy Times Seven: A True Story of Murder and Mercy, by Alex Mar (Penguin Press)*
• The Shoemaker’s Magician, by Cynthia Pelayo (Agora)
• A Sinister Revenge, by Deanna Raybourn (Berkley)
• So Close, by Sylvia Day (Ronin House)
• So Shall You Reap, by Donna Leon (Atlantic Monthly Press)
• Speak for the Dead, by Amy Tector (Keylight)
• Standing Dead, by Margaret Mizushima (Crooked Lane)
• Sunset Empire, by Josh Weiss (Grand Central)
• The Syndicate Spy, by Brittany Butler (Greenleaf)
• A Tempest at Sea, by Sherry Thomas (Berkley)
• Those Empty Eyes, by Charlie Donlea (Kensington)
• Tina, Mafia Soldier, by Maria Rosa Cutrufelli (Soho Crime)
• Tremors in the Blood: Murder, Obsession, and the Birth of the Lie Detector, by Amit Katwala (Crooked Lane)*
• Unfinished Business, by Leye Adenle (Cassava Republic Press)
• Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers, by Jesse Q. Sutanto (Berkley)
• What Have We Done, by Alex
Finlay (Minotaur)
• White Fox, by Owen Matthews (Doubleday)
• The White Lady, by Jacqueline
Winspear (Harper)
• Wolf Trap, by Connor Sullivan (Atria/Emily Bestler)
• Woman of the Year, by Darcey Bell (Atria/Emily Bestler)

MARCH (UK):
• The Anniversary, by Stephanie Bishop (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
• Because She Looked Away, by Alison Bruce (Constable)
• A Bitter Remedy, by Alis Hawkins (Canelo)
• The Black Spectacles, by John Dickson Carr (British Library
Crime Classics)
• The Boys, by Kimberley Chambers (HarperCollins)
• By Way of Sorrow, by Robyn Gigl (Verve)
• The Close, by Jane Casey (HarperCollins)
• The Company, by J.M. Varese (Baskerville)
• Death Comes to the Costa del Sol, by M.H. Eccleston
(Head of Zeus/Aries)
• Dirty Laundry, by Disha Bose (Viking)
• The Dying Place, by Charly Cox (Canelo Hera)
• Eleven Liars, by Robert Gold (Sphere)
• End of Story, by Louise Swanson (Hodder & Stoughton)
• The Favour, by Nicci French (Simon & Schuster)
• Freeze, by Kate Simants (Viper)
• The Girl by the Bridge, by Arnaldur Indridason (Harvill Secker)
• The Institution, by Helen Fields (Avon)
• The Last Highway, by R.J. Ellory (Orion)
• Mother’s Day, by Abigail Burdess (Wildfire)
• Murder at Home: How Our Safest Space Is Where We’re Most in Danger, by David Wilson (Sphere)*
• Murder at Waldenmere Lake, by Michelle Salter (Boldwood)
• On the Savage Side, by Tiffany McDaniel (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
• Operation Chiffon: The Secret Story of MI5 and MI6 and the Road to Peace in Ireland, by Peter Taylor (Bloomsbury)*
• Pay the Price, by Sam Tobin (Hodder Paperbacks)
• A Pen Dipped in Poison, by J.M. Hall (Avon)
• Private Lessons, by Bernard O’Keeffe (Muswell Press)
• Pure Evil, by Lynda La Plante (Zaffre)
• The Running Club, by Ali Lowe (Hodder & Stoughton)
• Shadowside, by Neil Root (Dime Crime)
• The Shadows of London, by Andrew Taylor (HarperCollins)
• Sinister Spring, by Agatha Christie (HarperCollins)
• The Sins of Our Fathers, by Åsa Larsson (MacLehose Press)
• The Spy Across the Water, by James Naughtie (Head of Zeus/Aries)
• Strange Sally Diamond, by Liz Nugent (Sandycove)
• Tomás Nevinson, by Javier Marías (Hamish Hamilton)
• The Translator, by Harriet Crawley (Bitter Lemon Press)
• The Ugly Truth, by L.C. North (Bantam Press)
• Until Proven Innocent, by Nicola Williams (Hamish Hamilton)
• What the Shadows Hide, by M.J. Lee (Canelo)
• Where the Guilty Hide, by Annette Dashofy (One More Chapter)
• The Wrecker’s Curse, by Jo Silva (One More Chapter)
• The Wrong Mother, by Charlotte Duckworth (Quercus)

APRIL (U.S.):
• After He’s Gone, by Katherine Bolger Hyde (Severn House)
• The Alarm of the Black Cat, by Dolores Hitchens (American
Mystery Classics)
• An American in Scotland, by Lucy Connelly (Crooked Lane)
• Before We Were Innocent, by Ella Berman (Berkley)
• Blind Spots, by Thomas Mullen (Minotaur)
• The Body by the Sea, by Jean-Luc Bannalec (Minotaur)
• The Chateau, by Jaclyn Goldis (Atria/Emily Bestler)
• City of Dreams, by Don Winslow (Morrow)
• City Walls, by Loren D. Estleman (Forge)
• Crimeucopia: Strictly Off the Record, edited by John Connor (Murderous Ink Press)
• Cursed Bread, by Sophie Mackintosh (Doubleday)
• Dark Angel, by John Sandford (Putnam)
• The Darkest Game, by Joseph Schneider (Poisoned Pen Press)
• Dead in the Water, by Mark Ellis (Headline Accent)
• The Dead of Night, by Elaine Viets (Severn House)
• Death in the Dark, by Kitty Murphy (Thomas & Mercer)
• Death of a Bookseller, by Alice Slater (Scarlet)
• Dirty Laundry, by Disha Bose (Ballantine)
• Double Exposure, by Colin Campbell (Down & Out)
• Double or Nothing, by Kim Sherwood (Morrow)
• Downfall, by Mark Rubinstein (Oceanview)
• Eat, Drink and Drop Dead, by T.C. LoTempio (Severn House)
• The Eden Test, by Adam Sternbergh (Flatiron)
• A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them, by Timothy
Egan (Viking)*
• Follow Me to Hell: McNelly’s Texas Rangers and the Rise of Frontier Justice, by Tom Clavin (St. Martin’s Press)*
• The Forgetting, by Hannah Beckerman (Lake Union)
• For You and Only You, by Caroline Kepnes (Random House)
• The Fourth Enemy, by Anne Perry (Ballantine)
• Games for Dead Girls, by Jen Williams (Crooked Lane)
• Going Zero, by Anthony McCarten (Harper)
• The Golden Doves, by Martha Hall Kelly (Ballantine)
• The Grave Singer, by Victor Methos (Thomas & Mercer)
• Green for Danger, by Christianna Brand (Poisoned Pen Press)
• Guns, Dames and Private Eyes: The Rivals of Philip Marlowe,
edited by Nick Rennison (No Exit)
• Gutter Road / You Can’t Stop Me, by Robert Silverberg
(Stark House Press)
• Halifax: Transgression, by Roger Simpson (Blackstone)
• Hard Rain, by Samantha Jayne Allen (Minotaur)
• Haunting Pasts, by Trevor Wiltzen (Independently published)
• Heart of the Nile, by Will Thomas (Minotaur)
• Hollow Beasts, by Alisa Lynn Valdés (Thomas & Mercer)
• Hollow Man, by David Mar (Austin Macauley)
• Homecoming, by Kate Morton (Mariner)
• The Housemate, by Sarah Bailey (Polis)
• I’ll Stop the World, by Lauren Thoman (Mindy’s Book Studio)
• Inspector French: Fear Comes to Chalfont, by Freeman Wills Crofts (Collins Crime Club)
• Inspector French: James Tarrant, Adventurer, by Freeman Wills Crofts (Collins Crime Club)
• The Last Heir to Blackwood Library, by Hester Fox (Graydon House)
• The Last Remains, by Elly Griffiths (Mariner)
• Lost in Paris, by Betty Webb (Poisoned Pen Press)
• Mad Money, by Max Allan Collins (Hard Case Crime)
• Mastering the Art of French Murder, by Colleen Cambridge (Kensington)
• More Groovy Gumshoes: Private Eyes in the Psychedelic Sixties, edited by Michael Bracken (Down & Out)
• Moscow Exile, by John Lawton (Atlantic Monthly Press)
• Murder on Bedford Street, by Victoria Thompson (Berkley)
• No Man’s Ghost, by Jason Powell (Agora)
• Not of This World, by Simon R. Green (Severn House)
• Not the Ones Dead, by Dana Stabenow (Head of Zeus)
• The Only Survivors, by Megan Miranda (S&S/Marysue Rucci)
• Ozark Dogs, by Eli Cranor (Soho Crime)
• Panther Gap, by James A. McLaughlin (Flatiron)
• The Partisan, by Patrick Worrall (Union Square)
• The Peking Express: The Bandits Who Stole a Train, Stunned the West, and Broke the Republic of China, by James M. Zimmerman (PublicAffairs)*
• Private Destiny, by Jonathan Gabel (Independently published)
• Red Team Blues, by Cory Doctorow (Tor)
• The Rescue, by T. Jefferson Parker (Forge)
• The Rewards of Treachery, by Rosemary Rowe (Severn House)
• The Rise and Fall of Ava Arcana, by Jennifer Banash (Lake Union)
• The Secret Service of Tea and Treason, by India Holton (Berkley)
• See It End, by Brianna Labuskes (Thomas & Mercer)
• Seven Girls Gone, by Allison Brennan (Mira)
• Shadow of Death, by Heather Graham (Mira)
• Sherlock Holmes and the Unmasking of the Whitechapel Horror, by Frank Emerson (MX)
• Simply Lies, by David Baldacci
(Grand Central)
• Sisters of the Lost Nation, by Nick
Medina (Berkley)
• Small Mercies, by Dennis Lehane (Harper)
• Sons and Brothers, by Kim Hays
(Seventh Street)
• The Soulmate, by Sally Hepworth
(St. Martin’s Press)
• A Spoonful of Murder, by J.M. Hall (Avon)
• Spider, by Azma Dar (Datura)
• Standing in the Shadows, by Peter Robinson (Morrow)
• Sunset and Jericho, by Sam Wiebe (Harbour)
• Symphony of Secrets, by Brendan Slocumb (Anchor)
• There Will Be Fire: Margaret Thatcher, the IRA, and Two Minutes That Changed History, by Rory Carroll (Putnam)*
• This Rancid Mill, by Kyle Decker (PM Press)
• The Tip Line, by Vanessa Cuti (Crooked Lane)
• To Track a Traitor, by Iona Whishaw (Touchwood Editions)
• A Truth for a Truth, by Carol Wyer (Thomas & Mercer)
• The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder, by David
Grann (Doubleday)*
• The Way of the Bear, by Anne Hillerman (Harper)
• We Love to Entertain, by Sarah Strohmeyer (Harper)
• Where Are the Children Now? by Mary Higgins Clark and Alafair Burke (Simon & Schuster)
• Who Cries for the Lost, by C.S. Harris (Berkley)
• With My Little Eye, by Joshilyn Jackson (Morrow)
• You Know Her, by Meagan Jennett (MCD)
• You Should Have Known, by Rebecca A. Keller (Crooked Lane)
• You Shouldn’t Have Come Here, by Jeneva Rose (Blackstone)

APRIL (UK):
• The Acapulco, by Simone Buchholz (Orenda)
• The Birthday Girl, by Sarah Ward (Canelo)
• Blood Runs Cold, by Neil Lancaster (HQ)
• Cast a Cold Eye, by Robbie Morrison (Macmillan)
• The Consultant, by Im Seong-sun (Raven)
• Crow Moon, by Suzy Aspley (Orenda)
• Dark Mode, by Ashley Kalagian Blunt (Ultimo Press)
• Date with Evil, by Julia Chapman (Pan)
• Death at the Terminus, by Edward Marston (Allison & Busby)
• Death Under a Little Sky, by Stig Abell (HarperCollins)
• The Detective, by Ajay Chowdhury (Harvill Secker)
• The Fall, by Louise Jensen (HQ)
• Fatal Legacy, by Lindsey Davis (Hodder & Stoughton)
• Her Sweet Revenge, by Sarah Bonner (Hodder & Stoughton)
• The Hike, by Lucy Clarke (HarperCollins)
• The House in the Woods, by Mark Dawson (Welbeck)
• The House of Whispers, by Anna Mazzola (Orion)
• If We Were Villains (Illustrated Edition), by M.L. Rio (Titan)
• I Know Who You Were, by Nick Curran (Constable)
• A Killer in the Family, by Gytha Lodge (Michael Joseph)
• Killing Jericho, by William Hussey (Zaffre)
• Leave No Trace, by M.J. White (Canelo Hera)
• Looking Glass Sound, by Catriona
Ward (Viper)
• Lost Women, by Neil Humphreys
(Muswell Press)
• The Midnight Conspiracy, by David Leadbeater (Avon)
• The Monk, by Tim Sullivan
(Head of Zeus/Aries)
• Murder at Down Street Station, by Jim Eldridge (Allison & Busby)
• #Panic, by Luke Jennings (John Murray)
• Portrait of a Murder, by Michael Jecks (Severn House)
• The Red Bird Sings, by Aoife Fitzpatrick (Virago)
• The Red Hotel: The Untold Story of Stalin’s Disinformation War,
by Alan Philips (Headline)*
• Rivers of Treason, by K.J. Maitland (Headline Review)
• A Score to Settle, by Caz Finlay (One More Chapter)
• The Sinner’s Mark, by S.W. Perry (Corvus)
• Subject: Murder, by Clifford Witting (Galileo)
• There’s Something I Have to Tell You, by Michelle McDonagh (Hachette Ireland)
• A Traitor Among Us, by Anne Perry (Headline)
• The Trip, by Rebecca Ley (Orion)
• Twice Around the Clock, by Billie Houston (British Library Crime Classics)
• Twin Truths, by Jacqueline Sutherland (Point Blank)
• Viper’s Dream, by Jake Lamar (No Exit Press)
• The Warlock Effect, by Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman
(Hodder & Stoughton)
• Web of Lies, by Paul Gitsham (HQ)

MAY (U.S.):
• The Art of Ron Lesser Volume 1: Deadly Dames and Sexy Sirens, edited by Bob Deis, Bill Cunningham, and J. Kingston Pierce (Independently published)*
• Austin Noir, edited by Hopeton Hay, Scott Montgomery,
and Molly Odintz (Akashic)
• Back to the Dirt, by Frank Bill (FSG)
• Bad, Bad Seymour Brown, by Susan Isaacs (Atlantic Monthly Press)
• Bad Summer People, by Emma Rosenblum (Flatiron)
• Between Two Strangers, by Kate White (Harper)
• Beware the Woman, by Megan Abbott (Putnam)
• The Body in the Web, by Katherine Hall Page (Morrow)
• Broken Light, by Joanne Harris (Pegasus Crime)
• The Cargo from Neira, by Alys Clare (Severn House)
• Central Park West, by James Comey (Mysterious Press)
• Chasing the Black Eagle, by Bruce Geddes (Dundurn Press)
• Citizen Orlov, by Jonathan Payne (CamCat)
• Death of a Stray Cat / An Affair of the Heart, by Jean Potts (Stark House Press)
• The Devil You Know, by Chris Hauty (Atria/Emily Bestler)
• Drowning, by T.J. Newman (Avid
Reader Press)
• Fire with Fire, by Candice Fox (Forge)
• Fixit, by Joe Ide (Mulholland)
• Get Up Offa That Thing: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Songs of James Brown, edited by Gary Phillips (Down & Out)
• The Girl on the Bridge, by Arnaldur Indridason (Minotaur)
• A Hobby of Murder, by E.X. Ferrars (Felony & Mayhem Press)
• The Ice Cream Man, by Big Boy Pete (Stark House Press)
• Independence Square, by Martin Cruz Smith (Simon & Schuster)
• Inspector French: The Affair of Little Wokeham, by Freeman Wills Crofts (Collins Crime Club)
• Inspector French: A Losing Game, by Freeman Wills Crofts
(Collins Crime Club)
• Keep Her Secret, by Mark Edwards (Thomas & Mercer)
• Killing Me, by Michelle Gagnon (Putnam)
• Killing Moon, by Jo Nesbø (Knopf)
• The Last Songbird, by Daniel Weizmann (Melville House)
• The Late Mrs. Willoughby, by Claudia Gray (Vintage)
• The Lie Maker, by Linwood Barclay (Morrow)
• A Line in the Sand, by Kevin Powers (Little, Brown)
• The Lock-Up, by John Banville (Hanover Square Press)
• Love Betrayal Murder, by Adam Mitzner (Blackstone)
• Midsummer Mysteries: Tales from the Queen of Mystery, by Agatha Christie (Morrow)
• The Midnight News, by Jo Baker (Knopf)
• The Mill House Murders, by Yukito Ayatsuji (Pushkin Vertigo)
• Mother’s Instinct, by Barbara Abel (HarperVia)
• Murder at the Bookstore, by Sue Minix (Avon)
• The Nigerwife, by Vanessa Walters (Atria)
• The Nightingale Affair, by Tim Mason (Algonquin)
• Nightwork, by Joseph Hansen (Soho Syndicate)
• Nonna Maria and the Case of the Stolen Necklace, by Lorenzo Carcaterra (Bantam)
• No One Needs to Know, by Lindsay Cameron (Bantam)
• Obelists at Sea, by C. Daly King (American Mystery Classics)
• Only the Dead, by Jack Carr (Atria/Emily Bestler)
• Out of the Ashes, by Kara Thomas (Thomas & Mercer)
• The Overnights, by Ian K. Smith (Amistad)
• The Peacock and the Sparrow, by I.S.
Berry (Atria)
• Playing It Safe, by Ashley Weaver (Minotaur)
• The Private Lives of Spies and The Exquisite Art of Getting Even, by Alexander McCall Smith (Pantheon)
• Red Dirt Road, by S.R. White (Headline)
• Remain Silent, by Robyn Gigl (Kensington)
• Rogue Justice, by Stacey Abrams (Doubleday)
• The Rope Artist, by Fuminori Nakamura (Soho Crime)
• The Senator’s Wife, by Liv Constantine (Bantam)
• Sing Her Down, by Ivy Pochoda (MCD)
• The Sins of Our Fathers, by Åsa Larsson (Mobius)
• Six Ostriches, by Philipp Schott (ECW)
• Something Bad Wrong, by Eryk Pruitt (Thomas & Mercer)
• The Terror in the Emerald City, by D.D. Black
(Independently published)
• Titanium Noir, by Nick Harkaway (Knopf)
• Tomás Nevinson, by Javier Marías (Knopf)
• The Tumbling Girl, by Bridget Walsh (Gallic)
• The Twenty, by Sam Holland (Crooked Lane)
• The Vanishing Hour, by Seraphina Nova Glass (Graydon House)
• Viviana Valentine Goes Up the River, by Emily J. Edwards
(Crooked Lane)
• Where They Lie, by Joe Hart (Thomas & Mercer)

MAY (UK):
• Blotto, Twinks and the Conquistadors’ Gold, by Simon Brett (Constable)
• Children of the Sun, by Beth Lewis (Hodder & Stoughton)
• Coffee and Cigarettes: Scenes from a Crime Writer’s Life, by Ferdinand von Schirach (Baskerville)*
• Cold Fire, by Matt Hilton (Severn House)
• Cult, by Camilla Lackberg and Henrik Fexeus (HarperCollins)
• Don’t Look Back, by Jo Spain (Quercus)
• Double Illusion, by Barbara Nadel (Headline)
• The End of the Game, by Holly Watt (Raven)
• Endeavour: The Complete Series: An Unauthorized Guide to Endeavour, 2012-2023, by Chris Sullivan (Independently published)*
• The Fall, by Gilly Macmillan (Century)
• The Fallen, by John Sutherland (Orion)
• A Game of Deceit, by Tim Glister (Point Blank)
• The Girls of Summer, by Katie Bishop (Bantam Press)
• Grave Expectations, by Alice Bell (Corvus)
• The Guest Room, by Tasha Sylva (Welbeck)
• The Last Dance, by Mark Billingham (Sphere)
• The Last Passenger, by Will Dean
(Hodder & Stoughton)
• The Lazarus Solution, by Kjell Ola Dahl (Orenda)
• The Lost Wife, by Georgina Lees
(One More Chapter)
• The Man in the Corduroy Suit, by
James Wolff (Bitter Lemon Press)
• Medusa and the Devil, by Simon Marlowe (Cranthorpe Millner)
• Murder by Natural Causes, by Helen Erichsen (Muswell Press)
• No One Saw a Thing, by Andrea Mara (Bantam Press)
• Now You See Us, by Balli Kaur Jaswal (HarperCollins)
• Obsessed, by Liza North (Constable)
• On His Majesty’s Secret Service, by Charlie Higson (Ian Fleming Publications)
• Outback, by Michael Davies (Collins Crime Club)
• Salvage This World, by Michael Farris Smith (No Exit Press)
• The Scarlet Papers, by Matthew Richardson (Michael Joseph)
• Sepulchre Street, by Martin Edwards (Head of Zeus/Aries)
• The Serial Killer’s Sister, by Alice Hunter (Avon)
• Sherlock Holmes: The Monster of the Mere, by Philip Purser-
Hallard (Titan)
• Skin Deep, by Antonia Lassa (Corylus)
• The Summer Party, by Rebecca Heath (Head of Zeus/Aries)
• A Thief’s Justice, by Douglas Skelton (Canelo Adventure)
• Thirty Days of Darkness, by Jenny Lund Madsen (Orenda)
• To Die in June, by Alan Parks (Canongate)
• Unsolved, by Heather Critchlow (Canelo)
• The Vanishing of Class 3B, by Jackie Kabler (One More Chapter)
• Welsh Mysteries, edited by Martin Edwards (British Library
Crime Classics)

I’ll do here what I typically do at the conclusion of these seasonal book lists, which is to solicit additional suggestions of must-read crime, mystery, and thriller titles due out over the next three months. This isn’t an invitation to publicists to hit me up with their clients’ underrecognized releases, but rather a call on my fellow genre readers to let me know what they’re looking forward to buying between now and summer. Please drop any further recommendations into the Comments section below.

Purging “Offensive” Content from 007 Novels

Following protests that greeted a decision by children’s book author Roald Dahl’s UK publisher to alter or “remove and update” language in his fiction which some young readers might find offensive (“An exercise in priggish stupidity,” lamented the Sydney Morning Herald), it was only to be expected that similar objections would attend an announcement that Ian Fleming Publications (IFP) has “commissioned a review by sensitivity readers of the classic texts under its control.”

This year we celebrate the 70th anniversary of British super-spy James Bond’s introduction to the world. In April, a new IFP edition of 1953’s Casino Royale, the first Agent 007 yarn, will begin a succession of reissues, all edited to “remove perceived racist content,” as The Book Bond explains. That blog goes on to quote from a report in Variety, which lays out some specific revisions being made, in particular to Fleming’s second Bond adventure, Live and Let Die (1954):

A commonly used pejorative term used for Black people by Fleming, whose Bond books were published between 1951 and 1966, has been removed almost entirely and replaced with “Black person” or “Black man.” In other instances, references have been edited.

For example, in “Live and Let Die” (1954), Bond’s opinion of Africans in the gold and diamond trades as “pretty law-abiding chaps I should have thought, except when they’ve drunk too much” has been altered to “pretty law-abiding chaps I should have thought.”

Another scene in the book, set during a strip tease at a Harlem nightclub, was originally “Bond could hear the audience panting and grunting like pigs at the trough. He felt his own hands gripping the tablecloth. His mouth was dry.” This has been revised to “Bond could sense the electric tension in the room.” A segment in the book describing accented dialogue as “straight Harlem-Deep South with a lot of New York thrown in,” has been removed.

In several of the books, including “Thunderball” (1961), “Quantum of Solace” (1960) and “Goldfinger” (1959), ethnicities have been removed.

IFP contends that many of these changes are in line with what Ian Fleming himself “would have wanted.” Returning to the matter of Live and Let Die, for instance, the company (which has taken over publication of this author’s books and short stories) notes that “The original U.S. version …, approved and apparently favored by Ian, had removed some racial terms which were problematic even in mid-1950s America, and would certainly be considered deeply offensive now by the vast majority of readers.” The Spy Command says IFP will bring “similar standards” to bear on other Fleming yarns: “Racial words ‘likely to cause great offense now, and detract from a reader’s enjoyment, have been altered, while keeping as close as possible to the original text and period.’”

Responses to this latter-day sanitizing have been mixed. Andrew Lycett, author of the 1996 biography, Ian Fleming: The Man Behind James Bond, writes in Britain’s Independent newspaper: “I feel strongly that what an author commits to paper is sacrosanct and shouldn’t be altered. It stands as evidence of that writer’s—and society’s—attitudes at a particular moment in time, whether it’s by Shakespeare, Dickens, or Ian Fleming. … [T]here’s no way Bond’s character in the Fleming books can be modified to make him politically correct. Fleming created a sexist, often sadistic, killer, with anachronistic attitudes to homosexuals, and to a range of people of different nationalities. These stand as evidence of how Britons (or at least some of them) thought at a particular moment in time.”

The Book Bond’s John Cox has a rather more equanimous perspective on this subject. “For me personally,” he says, “I want the original unedited texts. Full stop. … But I also understand IFP’s dilemma. They are marketing these editions to a mass audience and they have to deal with the times we are in. For those who want the unedited texts, you can certainly still find those. And maybe some day the texts will be returned to the original. I'm not sure if these changes will make these 70th anniversary editions more collectible or less so, but they better have some pretty spectacular cover art to overcome the taint that I think these will forever have for Fleming purists.”

READ MORE: “A Bond Is a Bond Is a Bond,” by John Cork (Double-O-Seven Magazine); “Phillip Kennedy Johnson Writes New James Bond for 70th Anniversary,” by Rich Johnston (Bleeding Cool).