Bosch: Legacy, the spin-off of, well, Bosch, is to end after the third season, Amazon Prime Video says.Michael Connelly, who created Hieronymus “Harry” Bosch in his novels and has executive produced both series, is quoted as saying, “I am so proud of what we have accomplished with this show. Ten years ago I asked Titus Welliver if he could stick with Harry Bosch for five seasons, and he said he could do it forever. Well, five became 10, and the character, thanks to Titus, will live forever in the hearts of viewers and in the streaming world as the detective who knows that everybody counts or nobody counts. The good news here is that we have not seen the last of Harry Bosch. As in the books, Bosch is part of the Renée Ballard world, and I can’t wait for the next chapter to open.”
The series follows Harry Bosch (Titus Welliver), a retired homicide detective-turned-private investigator, as he embarks on the next chapter of his career; attorney Honey “Money” Chandler (Mimi Rogers), who struggles to maintain her faith in the justice system after surviving a murder attempt; and Maddie Bosch (Madison Lintz), as she discovers the possibilities and challenges of being a rookie patrol cop on the streets of Los Angeles.
The final, third season will premiere on the streaming service in March 2025, and there will also be a cold case detective Renée Ballard series starring Maggie Q (another Bosch spin-off) in the autumn next year.
Showing posts with label Bosch. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bosch. Show all posts
Sunday, September 08, 2024
Three and You’re Out
This is unhappy news, reported by The Killing Times:
Wednesday, May 03, 2023
This Comes as No Surprise
Season 2 of Bosch: Legacy, the sequel to (or is it spin-off from?) Amazon Prime’s long-running crime drama Bosch, isn’t expected to return to small screens until this coming fall. However, that show—now part of the lineup on Amazon’s ad-supported streaming service, Freevee—has already been renewed for a third season.
“The Season 3 pickup,” explains Deadline, “follows strong ratings for Season 1, which Amazon Freevee says delivered a higher number of viewers than any previous season of the mothership series Bosch.”
Both programs are, of course, based on Michael Connelly’s very popular succession of novels featuring Hieronymus “Harry” Bosch. The TV adaptations find actor Titus Welliver playing Connelly’s Los Angeles cop turned private eye, with Mimi Rogers in the role of Honey “Money” Chandler, a prominent defense attorney who sometimes turns to Bosch for investigative assignments, and Madison Lintz appearing as Harry’s daughter, Maddie, who has now become a rookie police officer.
“The Season 3 pickup,” explains Deadline, “follows strong ratings for Season 1, which Amazon Freevee says delivered a higher number of viewers than any previous season of the mothership series Bosch.”
Both programs are, of course, based on Michael Connelly’s very popular succession of novels featuring Hieronymus “Harry” Bosch. The TV adaptations find actor Titus Welliver playing Connelly’s Los Angeles cop turned private eye, with Mimi Rogers in the role of Honey “Money” Chandler, a prominent defense attorney who sometimes turns to Bosch for investigative assignments, and Madison Lintz appearing as Harry’s daughter, Maddie, who has now become a rookie police officer.
Tuesday, August 16, 2022
Bullet Points: Torpid Tuesday Edition
• Deadline reports that actor Max Martini (The Purge, The Order, NCIS: Los Angeles) “is set for a heavily recurring role opposite Titus Welliver on the upcoming second season of Bosch: Legacy, the spin-off of the long-running Amazon series, on Freevee. … Martini [pictured at left] will play Detective Don Ellis, a hardened vice cop in the LAPD. He’s intelligent and fierce, and not above getting down and dirty with the criminals he polices to get the job done.” Based on Michael Connelly’s best-selling Harry Bosch novels, this Freevee TV sequel finds Bosch (Welliver) having 
retired from the Los Angeles Police Department and set himself up as a private eye. Mimi Rogers plays Honey “Money” Chandler, a prominent L.A. defense attorney who sometimes turns to Bosch for investigative work, and Madison Lintz appears as Harry’s daughter, Maddie, who’s become a rookie police officer. Connelly has already said that Season 2 of Bosch: Legacy will draw on his 2015 novel, The Crossing, for its principal storyline. “In The Crossing,” explains Showbiz CheatSheet, “a defense attorney hires Harry to help find evidence that will prove his client is innocent of murder. While there’s DNA evidence that seems to point to his guilt, the man says he didn’t commit the crime. At first, Harry is reluctant to work with the defense, but after he takes the job and begins to dig into the case, his investigation leads him to look inside the LAPD.” The counsel for the defense in Connelly’s book was of course Bosch’s half-brother, Mickey Haller, but since Haller is now the star of his own Netflix series, I’m guessing—and I doubt this is going too far out on a limb—that Honey Chandler will be the one hiring Bosch on television. Season 2 should debut in early 2023.
• Meanwhile, the Oxford Mail brings word that filming is underway in Oxford, England, on Season 9 of Endeavour, starring Shaun Evans and Roger Allam. “Location trucks have been spotted at the Kings Centre on the Osney Mead industrial estate and it is understood scenes will be filmed … in and around Radcliffe Square,” says the tabloid. It adds: “Filming for the popular ITV detective drama, based on Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse stories, also took place in May in Christ Church Meadow.” The three-episodes of Season 9—Endeavour’s concluding season—may premiere “as late as February 2023.”
• Because I remain a big fan of TV “wheel series,” I can’t help but point you toward this piece, by pop-culture critic Herbie J. Pilato, about McMillan & Wife and the rest of the vintage NBC Mystery Movie lineup. It includes a charming story about how Susan Saint James wound up playing Rock Hudson’s spouse on McMillan:
• For what it’s worth, the UK-based retail site Book Depository has joined Amazon and CrimeReads in posting lists of what it says are “the best books of 2022 (so far).” Among its 20 crime- and thriller-fiction picks are Janice Hallett’s The Twyford Code, Adrian McKinty’s The Island, Louise Welsh’s The Second Cut, and Tom Bradby’s Yesterday’s Spy. Check out those choices and more in other categories here.
• Australian critic Jeff Popple posts his own selections along this same line. His “best so far” choices include John Connolly’s The Furies, Emma Viskic’s Those Who Perish, Michael Robotham’s Lying Beside You, Shelley Burr’s WAKE, and Deon Meyer’s The Dark Flood.
• Drought-provoked water-level depletion at Lake Mead, an enormous reservoir on the Nevada/Arizona border that was created in the 1930s by construction of the Hoover Dam, has revealed still more human remains. The first set (those of a gun-shot homicide victim concealed in a barrel) were discovered on May 1, with two more skeletons found later that same month and then in late July. More remains turned up in early August. As CBS News explains, “The discoveries have prompted speculation that the lake was used as a burial ground by organized crime and gangs from the early days of Las Vegas, which is just a 30-minute drive from the lake.”
• I read about this proposed novel in a recent newsletter from New York City’s renowned Mysterious Bookshop:
• Leave it to Kevin Burton Smith, founding editor of The Thrilling Detective Web Site, to remember that 2022 marks the 100th birthday of the hard-boiled American gumshoe of fiction. He traces that character’s propitious delivery back to the December 1922 edition of Black Mask magazine, which led with stories by Carroll John Daly (“The False Burton Combs”) and “Peter Collinson,” aka Dashiell Hammett (“The Road Home”), both featuring models for the classic shamus we know today. As Smith recalls in the brand-new, fall edition of Mystery Scene magazine, those yarns preceded by only three months the introduction—also in Black Mask—of “the first official hard-boiled private eye,” Terry Mack, appearing in Daly’s “Three Gun Terry.” Smith’s essay, however, is only one of the reasons to grab a copy of the latest Mystery Scene. Among its other attractions are Michael Mallory’s piece about movies based on Vera Caspary’s Laura; Craig Sisterson’s assessment of modern indigenous crime writers; and Oline H. Cogdill’s picks of six authors tipped for greater success in this genre (among them Kellye Garrett, May Cobb, and Gary Phillips). Click here for information about obtaining a copy of Mystery Scene #173.
• Worth checking out, too, is the Summer 2022 issue of Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine, with its excellent cover profile of Javier Cercas, Spanish author of Even the Darkest Night (Knopf).
• Author Max Allan Collins recently sat for an enjoyable video interview with Titan Books editor Andrew Sumner, during which they discussed the soon-forthcoming Mike Hammer novel, Kill Me If You Can. The footage includes, too, Collins’ announcement that he’s “signed with Titan to complete the Mike Hammer Legacy series with two final Mike Hammer novels, to be published in 2023 and 2024. These final two books will, as have all of the books in this series of Collins-completed novels, contain genuine Spillane content.”
• I long ago turned on the comments moderation function for this blog, and it was partly to head off junk messages such as a recent one suggesting readers “buy crystal meth online in Alaska.” The bizarre ad went on to make that dangerous recreational drug sound benign: “It is chemically similar to amphetamine, a drug used to treat attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and narcolepsy, a sleep disorder.” Why anyone would think these sorts of harmful messages are acceptable, or that a blogger like me would simply let them pass into circulation without hesitation? Amazing!
• I’m sometimes sorry that I wasn’t born early enough to sample the wares of coin-operated book vending machines.
• After years of talk about adapting Erik Larson’s outstanding 2003 non-fiction book, The Devil in the White City, as a movie or small-screen drama (actor Leonard DiCaprio bought the film rights way back in 2010!), the TV streaming service Hulu has finally commissioned an eight-episode series starring Keanu Reeves. Deadline notes that Larson’s book “tells the story of Daniel H. Burnham, a demanding but visionary architect who races to make his mark on history with the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, and Dr. H.H. Holmes, America’s first modern serial killer and the man behind the notorious ‘Murder Castle’ built in the Fair’s shadow. This marks Reeves’ first major U.S. TV role. He will also serve as an executive producer.” DiCaprio and Martin Scorsese will also serve as executive producers. The limited series is expected to launch in 2024. Reporting isn’t clear on which of the two leading characters Reeves will play, but I’m assuming a portrayal of Burnham would be more beneficial to his reputation.
• Finally, I continue to be impressed with Curtis Evans’ in-depth features for CrimeReads, the most recent of which recalls author Edmund Crispin (the pseudonym of Robert Bruce Montgomery), creator of amateur detective and locked-room mystery expert Gervase Fen. “Love interest is not what distinguishes Edmund Crispin mystery tales,” Evans remarks, “but rather intelligence, humor, wit, narrative zest and … clever fair-play plotting. Edmund Crispin—let us use this name to discuss Montgomery in his authorial guise—has something of the formidable literary intellect of Michael Innes, yet his humor is earthier, less precious, less an acquired taste, with Innes forever remaining the indulgent don and Crispin the precocious, puckish schoolboy. Despite his small output, Crispin is, in my view, one of the great comedic writers in British detective fiction.”
retired from the Los Angeles Police Department and set himself up as a private eye. Mimi Rogers plays Honey “Money” Chandler, a prominent L.A. defense attorney who sometimes turns to Bosch for investigative work, and Madison Lintz appears as Harry’s daughter, Maddie, who’s become a rookie police officer. Connelly has already said that Season 2 of Bosch: Legacy will draw on his 2015 novel, The Crossing, for its principal storyline. “In The Crossing,” explains Showbiz CheatSheet, “a defense attorney hires Harry to help find evidence that will prove his client is innocent of murder. While there’s DNA evidence that seems to point to his guilt, the man says he didn’t commit the crime. At first, Harry is reluctant to work with the defense, but after he takes the job and begins to dig into the case, his investigation leads him to look inside the LAPD.” The counsel for the defense in Connelly’s book was of course Bosch’s half-brother, Mickey Haller, but since Haller is now the star of his own Netflix series, I’m guessing—and I doubt this is going too far out on a limb—that Honey Chandler will be the one hiring Bosch on television. Season 2 should debut in early 2023.• Meanwhile, the Oxford Mail brings word that filming is underway in Oxford, England, on Season 9 of Endeavour, starring Shaun Evans and Roger Allam. “Location trucks have been spotted at the Kings Centre on the Osney Mead industrial estate and it is understood scenes will be filmed … in and around Radcliffe Square,” says the tabloid. It adds: “Filming for the popular ITV detective drama, based on Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse stories, also took place in May in Christ Church Meadow.” The three-episodes of Season 9—Endeavour’s concluding season—may premiere “as late as February 2023.”
• Because I remain a big fan of TV “wheel series,” I can’t help but point you toward this piece, by pop-culture critic Herbie J. Pilato, about McMillan & Wife and the rest of the vintage NBC Mystery Movie lineup. It includes a charming story about how Susan Saint James wound up playing Rock Hudson’s spouse on McMillan:
Saint James was a prime candidate. Also contracted with Universal, the actress with the unique voice she describes today as “scratchy,” had just completed a three-year run on NBC’s The Name of the Game. One of the producers of that series had written a script for her [Magic Carpet] and, as she remembered, “I was off to Europe to shoot a pilot.”• Kris Calvin, author of the July-released thriller Under a Broken Sky (Crooked Lane), has posted—in CrimeReads—a list of four underrated TV crime series that she says have “the potential to be your next bingeing obsession.” I’m pleased to see the quirky British mystery McDonald & Dodds make the cut, but cannot imagine sitting through all 57 episodes of Mr. and Mrs. North, the 1952-1954 show based on Frances and Richard Lockridge’s books, which I think can be interesting but is likely too old-fashioned for most modern viewers.
But in the middle of filming, Saint James was instructed by her agent to return to the States to meet with [McMillan & Wife creator Leonard B.] Stern and Hudson about a leading role in a new TV show.
“Rock was having lunch with every actress in Hollywood who was in my kind of category,” Saint James said.
The following day, she received a phone call from her agent, who said, “That’s it. Go to wardrobe. You got the job.”
Years later, Hudson joked with Saint James about why she won the role. As she recalled, “He told me, ‘I was gaining so much weight just having lunch with people, so I figured, Let’s just go with this woman because I don’t want to have any more lunches.’”
• For what it’s worth, the UK-based retail site Book Depository has joined Amazon and CrimeReads in posting lists of what it says are “the best books of 2022 (so far).” Among its 20 crime- and thriller-fiction picks are Janice Hallett’s The Twyford Code, Adrian McKinty’s The Island, Louise Welsh’s The Second Cut, and Tom Bradby’s Yesterday’s Spy. Check out those choices and more in other categories here.
• Australian critic Jeff Popple posts his own selections along this same line. His “best so far” choices include John Connolly’s The Furies, Emma Viskic’s Those Who Perish, Michael Robotham’s Lying Beside You, Shelley Burr’s WAKE, and Deon Meyer’s The Dark Flood.
• Drought-provoked water-level depletion at Lake Mead, an enormous reservoir on the Nevada/Arizona border that was created in the 1930s by construction of the Hoover Dam, has revealed still more human remains. The first set (those of a gun-shot homicide victim concealed in a barrel) were discovered on May 1, with two more skeletons found later that same month and then in late July. More remains turned up in early August. As CBS News explains, “The discoveries have prompted speculation that the lake was used as a burial ground by organized crime and gangs from the early days of Las Vegas, which is just a 30-minute drive from the lake.”
• I read about this proposed novel in a recent newsletter from New York City’s renowned Mysterious Bookshop:
Murray Sinclair, best known for his Ben Crandel series, a trio of Los Angeles-based mystery novels set in the criminal underbelly of early 1980's Hollywood, has created a Kickstarter to help fund his next project: F. Scott Fitzgerald: American Spy.You can find out more about Sinclair’s latest endeavor and, if you wish, help fund it by clickety-clacking right here.
What if F. Scott Fitzgerald was recruited by the French Resistance to embark upon a secret mission on the eve of World War II? Through the lost correspondence of Henri Duval, a member of the French Resistance, the historical espionage novel F. Scott Fitzgerald: American Spy tells the story of Fitzgerald’s recruitment by the French Resistance to assassinate the premier of Vichy France on the eve of America's entry into World War II.
• Leave it to Kevin Burton Smith, founding editor of The Thrilling Detective Web Site, to remember that 2022 marks the 100th birthday of the hard-boiled American gumshoe of fiction. He traces that character’s propitious delivery back to the December 1922 edition of Black Mask magazine, which led with stories by Carroll John Daly (“The False Burton Combs”) and “Peter Collinson,” aka Dashiell Hammett (“The Road Home”), both featuring models for the classic shamus we know today. As Smith recalls in the brand-new, fall edition of Mystery Scene magazine, those yarns preceded by only three months the introduction—also in Black Mask—of “the first official hard-boiled private eye,” Terry Mack, appearing in Daly’s “Three Gun Terry.” Smith’s essay, however, is only one of the reasons to grab a copy of the latest Mystery Scene. Among its other attractions are Michael Mallory’s piece about movies based on Vera Caspary’s Laura; Craig Sisterson’s assessment of modern indigenous crime writers; and Oline H. Cogdill’s picks of six authors tipped for greater success in this genre (among them Kellye Garrett, May Cobb, and Gary Phillips). Click here for information about obtaining a copy of Mystery Scene #173.
• Worth checking out, too, is the Summer 2022 issue of Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine, with its excellent cover profile of Javier Cercas, Spanish author of Even the Darkest Night (Knopf).
• Author Max Allan Collins recently sat for an enjoyable video interview with Titan Books editor Andrew Sumner, during which they discussed the soon-forthcoming Mike Hammer novel, Kill Me If You Can. The footage includes, too, Collins’ announcement that he’s “signed with Titan to complete the Mike Hammer Legacy series with two final Mike Hammer novels, to be published in 2023 and 2024. These final two books will, as have all of the books in this series of Collins-completed novels, contain genuine Spillane content.”
• I long ago turned on the comments moderation function for this blog, and it was partly to head off junk messages such as a recent one suggesting readers “buy crystal meth online in Alaska.” The bizarre ad went on to make that dangerous recreational drug sound benign: “It is chemically similar to amphetamine, a drug used to treat attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and narcolepsy, a sleep disorder.” Why anyone would think these sorts of harmful messages are acceptable, or that a blogger like me would simply let them pass into circulation without hesitation? Amazing!
• I’m sometimes sorry that I wasn’t born early enough to sample the wares of coin-operated book vending machines.
• After years of talk about adapting Erik Larson’s outstanding 2003 non-fiction book, The Devil in the White City, as a movie or small-screen drama (actor Leonard DiCaprio bought the film rights way back in 2010!), the TV streaming service Hulu has finally commissioned an eight-episode series starring Keanu Reeves. Deadline notes that Larson’s book “tells the story of Daniel H. Burnham, a demanding but visionary architect who races to make his mark on history with the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, and Dr. H.H. Holmes, America’s first modern serial killer and the man behind the notorious ‘Murder Castle’ built in the Fair’s shadow. This marks Reeves’ first major U.S. TV role. He will also serve as an executive producer.” DiCaprio and Martin Scorsese will also serve as executive producers. The limited series is expected to launch in 2024. Reporting isn’t clear on which of the two leading characters Reeves will play, but I’m assuming a portrayal of Burnham would be more beneficial to his reputation.
• Finally, I continue to be impressed with Curtis Evans’ in-depth features for CrimeReads, the most recent of which recalls author Edmund Crispin (the pseudonym of Robert Bruce Montgomery), creator of amateur detective and locked-room mystery expert Gervase Fen. “Love interest is not what distinguishes Edmund Crispin mystery tales,” Evans remarks, “but rather intelligence, humor, wit, narrative zest and … clever fair-play plotting. Edmund Crispin—let us use this name to discuss Montgomery in his authorial guise—has something of the formidable literary intellect of Michael Innes, yet his humor is earthier, less precious, less an acquired taste, with Innes forever remaining the indulgent don and Crispin the precocious, puckish schoolboy. Despite his small output, Crispin is, in my view, one of the great comedic writers in British detective fiction.”
Thursday, May 12, 2022
In Case You Haven’t Heard …
• I’m fairly certain I have never read any works by Anglo-American author Alice Campbell. But In Reference to Murder says we may all have access to her entire oeuvre.
• The May edition of Mike Ripley’s Shots column, “Getting Away with Murder,” carries news about fresh releases from Tom Bradby (Yesterday’s Spy), Anthony Horowitz (With a Mind to Kill), Jo Spain (The Last to Disappear), and William Shaw (Dead Rich, published under his pseudonym G.W. Shaw); a glance back at the crime novels Ripley touted a quarter-century ago; odd publisher’s freebies; and the results of a poll asking readers to name their favorite Harry Patterson/Jack Higgins novel (other than The Eagle Has Landed).
• In a piece for CrimeReads, Connie Berry, author of the new historical mystery The Shadow of Memory, offers “10 Reasons Why Victorian England Is the Perfect Setting for Murder.”
• The series Bosch: Legacy just debuted last Friday on Amazon-owned Freevee (formerly IMDb TV), but the show—a follow-up to Prime’s Bosch—has already been renewed for a second season.
• The Guardian compares Ian Fleming’s long-forgotten and “much more serious,” 1956 film treatment for his novel Moonraker to the “lightweight” Roger Moore picture brought to theaters in 1979.
• And here’s an unlikely result of global warming. The water level at Lake Mead, a reservoir created by the Hoover Dam and located not far east of Las Vegas, Nevada, “has dropped more than 170 feet since 1983,” says NBC News. As a result, the drinking water supplies of homes, casinos, and farms in the area are at risk—and some disappearances linked to Vegas’ underworld history may finally be solved. In early May, “boaters spotted the decomposed body of a man in a rusted barrel stuck in the mud of newly exposed shoreline. The corpse has not been identified, but Las Vegas police say he had been shot, probably between the mid-1970s and the early 1980s, according to the shoes found with him. The death is being investigated as a homicide. A few days later, a second barrel was found by a KLAS-TV news crew, not far from the first. It was empty.” NBC goes on to quote Michael Green, a history professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas as saying, “‘If the lake goes down much farther, it’s very possible we’re going to have some very interesting things surface. … I wouldn’t bet the mortgage that we’re going to solve who killed Bugsy Siegel,’ Green said, referring to the infamous gangster who opened the Flamingo in 1946 on what would become the Strip. Siegel was shot dead in 1947 in Beverly Hills, California. His assassin has never been identified. ‘But I would be willing to bet there are going to be a few more bodies,’ Green said.”
Dean Street Press is republishing the works of golden age crime novelist, Alice Campbell, beginning June 6th. They’ll be reissuing the first ten of her mysteries initially, with the remainder to follow next year. As the publisher noted, the novels are “not merely excellent detective stories, but atmospheric works of suspense, many set in France.” This is [the] first time these novels have been in print for over seventy years, and are prefaced by an introduction from crime-fiction historian Curtis Evans.The aforementioned Mr. Evans offers the covers from Dean Street’s first 10 Campbell reissues here, plus this look back at classic Campbell dust jackets. A decade ago, he also reviewed her sixth crime novel, Desire to Kill (1934), for Mystery*File. If you’d like to sample Campbell’s work yourself, Juggernaut is due for release on June 6.
Campbell (1887-1955) came originally from Atlanta, Georgia, where she was part of the socially prominent Ormond family, before she moved to New York City at the age of nineteen and quickly became a socialist and women’s suffragist. She later moved to Paris, marrying the American-born artist and writer, James Lawrence Campbell, and ultimately to England just before World War One. Campbell wrote crime fiction until 1950, though many of her novels continued to have French settings. She published her first work (Juggernaut) in 1928 and published nineteen detective novels during her career.
• The May edition of Mike Ripley’s Shots column, “Getting Away with Murder,” carries news about fresh releases from Tom Bradby (Yesterday’s Spy), Anthony Horowitz (With a Mind to Kill), Jo Spain (The Last to Disappear), and William Shaw (Dead Rich, published under his pseudonym G.W. Shaw); a glance back at the crime novels Ripley touted a quarter-century ago; odd publisher’s freebies; and the results of a poll asking readers to name their favorite Harry Patterson/Jack Higgins novel (other than The Eagle Has Landed).
• In a piece for CrimeReads, Connie Berry, author of the new historical mystery The Shadow of Memory, offers “10 Reasons Why Victorian England Is the Perfect Setting for Murder.”
• The series Bosch: Legacy just debuted last Friday on Amazon-owned Freevee (formerly IMDb TV), but the show—a follow-up to Prime’s Bosch—has already been renewed for a second season.
• The Guardian compares Ian Fleming’s long-forgotten and “much more serious,” 1956 film treatment for his novel Moonraker to the “lightweight” Roger Moore picture brought to theaters in 1979.
• And here’s an unlikely result of global warming. The water level at Lake Mead, a reservoir created by the Hoover Dam and located not far east of Las Vegas, Nevada, “has dropped more than 170 feet since 1983,” says NBC News. As a result, the drinking water supplies of homes, casinos, and farms in the area are at risk—and some disappearances linked to Vegas’ underworld history may finally be solved. In early May, “boaters spotted the decomposed body of a man in a rusted barrel stuck in the mud of newly exposed shoreline. The corpse has not been identified, but Las Vegas police say he had been shot, probably between the mid-1970s and the early 1980s, according to the shoes found with him. The death is being investigated as a homicide. A few days later, a second barrel was found by a KLAS-TV news crew, not far from the first. It was empty.” NBC goes on to quote Michael Green, a history professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas as saying, “‘If the lake goes down much farther, it’s very possible we’re going to have some very interesting things surface. … I wouldn’t bet the mortgage that we’re going to solve who killed Bugsy Siegel,’ Green said, referring to the infamous gangster who opened the Flamingo in 1946 on what would become the Strip. Siegel was shot dead in 1947 in Beverly Hills, California. His assassin has never been identified. ‘But I would be willing to bet there are going to be a few more bodies,’ Green said.”
Wednesday, April 20, 2022
Returns, Reinventions, and Reprisals
There are just over two weeks to go now, before the May 6 premiere of Bosch: Legacy, the spin-off series from Amazon Prime Video’s long-running police procedural, Bosch. Like its predecessor, this new production will be headlined by Titus Welliver as Harry Bosch, the Los Angeles police detective turned private eye created by author Michael Connelly. The new show will also star Mimi Rogers as defense attorney Honey “Money” Chandler, and Madison Lintz as Bosch’s daughter, Maddie, who is training as a rookie patrol officer.
Crime Fiction Lover offers a useful preview of Bosch: Legacy, Season 1, noting that it “offers mystery, intrigue and action as the trio face off against the Russian mafia, corrupt corporate suits, street-level psychopaths and even the LAPD. This is a multi-layered look at contemporary Los Angeles—and American society—with plenty of talking points and a load of swerving and twisting storylines to enjoy across 10 hour-long episodes.” The site goes on to explain:
Crime Fiction Lover offers a useful preview of Bosch: Legacy, Season 1, noting that it “offers mystery, intrigue and action as the trio face off against the Russian mafia, corrupt corporate suits, street-level psychopaths and even the LAPD. This is a multi-layered look at contemporary Los Angeles—and American society—with plenty of talking points and a load of swerving and twisting storylines to enjoy across 10 hour-long episodes.” The site goes on to explain:
The theme of legacy plays throughout but comes through most clearly in the main story, which comes from Michael Connelly’s [2016] Bosch novel The Wrong Side of Goodbye. Harry Bosch [now working as an investigator for Chandler] … is summoned to meet Witney Vance (William Devane), the billionaire owner of an aerospace company who is coming to the end of his life. Vance wants Bosch to find out what happened to the girl he got pregnant when he was in college. One of his dying regrets is not standing up to his father, who forced Vance to end their relationship. More than that—could Vance have a living heir? …A new trailer for Bosch: Legacy—which will air on Amazon’s ad-supported streaming service, Freevee (formerly IMDb TV)—is below.
Over to Honey Chandler, powerfully played by Mimi Rogers. She has physically recovered from the gunshot wounds that nearly killed her in Bosch season 7 and now harbours a deep hatred of the man who tried to have her killed—hedge fund finagler Carl Rogers (Michael Rose). When one of the witnesses against Rogers recants his testimony, Rogers walks free which fuels Chandler’s rage. Witness her pumping off rounds at the firing range. Witness her in therapy, swearing her head off and envisaging Rogers’ death. She may be healed in body, but her mind is a different matter entirely.
Thursday, March 10, 2022
Bosch Set to Return in May
File this under Damn Good News: Amazon has announced that its free streaming service, IMDb TV, will begin showing Bosch: Legacy—the sequel to Prime’s long-running crime drama, Bosch—on May 6.
TV Line provides this plot framework for the new series:
TV Line provides this plot framework for the new series:
With Titus Welliver, Madison Lintz and Mimi Rogers reprising their roles as Harry Bosch, his daughter Madeline, and top-notch attorney Honey “Money” Chandler, the offshoot follows Bosch as he embarks on the next chapter of his career as a private investigator and finds himself working with his one-time enemy Honey. “His first job calls him to the estate of ailing billionaire Whitney Vance, where Bosch is tasked with finding Vance’s only potential heir,” per the official synopsis. “Along the way, Bosch finds himself clashing with powerful figures who have a vested interest in the heir not being found. Researching the family tree, he uncovers shocking revelations that span generations, all while billions of dollars remain on the line.”The 10-part first-season run of Bosch: Legacy is based, at least in part, on The Wrong Side of Goodbye (2016), American author Michael Connelly’s 19th novel starring Los Angeles police detective Harry Bosch. Click here to view a trailer for this spinoff series.
Meanwhile, Maddie is following in her dad’s footsteps as a rookie patrol officer and grapples with what kind of cop she wants to be. “Her father—who continues to live by the code that everybody counts, or nobody counts—believes the issue is clear: Being a cop is either a mission or just a job” ...
Thursday, July 29, 2021
Bullet Points: Another Overstuffed Edition
• Let’s have a show of hands: Who remembers Sammy Davis Jr. playing private investigator Larry Miller in the 1969 movie The Pigeon? I would’ve counted myself among the uninformed until the other day, when I happened across that 90-minute ABC Movie of the Week on YouTube. (Watch it here, while you can!) Scripted by Edward J. Lakso (The Mod Squad, Mission: Impossible, Charlie’s Angels) and Stanley Roberts (Mannix, Petrocelli, Police Woman), the teleflick “is great,” according to an IMDb review, “because Sammy … doesn’t take himself too seriously and the dialogue uses a number of clichés from the 60’s. Sammy is searching for a girl who 
doesn’t want to be found. I especially love the scenes between Sammy and Roy Glenn, the veteran actor who plays his dad, a police lieutenant.” Why Wikipedia doesn’t list The Pigeon among Davis’ motion-picture and TV credits, but does include Poor Devil, an awful NBC comedy pilot from 1973, is really anybody’s guess.
• Speaking of forgotten crime-solvers, how about Valerie Bertinelli in the 1990 CBS-TV series Sydney? As Wikipedia recalls, that erstwhile One Day at a Time actress headlined as Sydney Kells, “the daughter of a now-deceased policeman, [who] brings her New York City detective agency (in which she is the only investigator) back to her hometown and her family.” Matthew Perry (later of Friends) held forth as Kells’ rookie-cop brother, while Craig Bierko portrayed an attorney “with whom she shares sexual chemistry.” This spring replacement series lasted only 13 episodes. The best thing about it may have been its opening theme, “Finish What Ya Started,” by Bertinelli’s then-hubby Eddie Van Halen. Clickety-clack right here to watch the main title sequence from Sydney, paired with the introduction to her 1993-1994 sitcom, Café Americain.
• One more YouTube discovery: The Blue Knight, a 1973 NBC mini-series starring William Holden, Lee Remick, Sam Elliott, and Joe Santos, and based on Joseph Wambaugh’s 1972 novel of that same title. It’s been many years since I saw this teleflick with Holden as William “Bumper” Morgan, a 20-year veteran of the Los Angeles Police Department—long enough that I didn’t even remember it was originally broadcast in one-hour segments over four consecutive nights. The production was popular enough to spawn a subsequent series, likewise called The Blue Knight (but on CBS, rather than NBC), starring George Kennedy as Morgan; it ran for two seasons, from 1975 to 1976.
• Oh alright, here’s another: Jigsaw, a 1968 film (“originally made for television,” says Wikipedia, “but shown first in theaters”) starring Bradford Dillman, Harry Guardino, Hope Lange, Michael J. Pollard, and a young Susan Saint James. “After someone places sugar cubes laced with LSD in his cup of coffee,” the YouTube plot synopsis reads, “Jonathan Fields [Dillman] regains consciousness, only to find a woman drowned in his bathtub and flecks of blood on his hands and clothes. Suffering from amnesia, Fields can't think of anyplace else to turn, so he hires Arthur Belding [Guardino], a private detective, to help him find out what happened.” Jigsaw is a remake of 1965’s Mirage.
• Dexter: New Blood, the 10-episode revival of Michael C. Hall’s 2006-2013 drama, Dexter, is now expected to appear on Showtime come November 7. Wikipedia says this show will open “approximately ten years after the original series’ finale.” In the meanwhile, Hall’s Dexter Morgan “has moved to the fictional small town of Iron Lake, New York, hiding his identity under the name of Jimmy Lindsay, a local shopkeeper. He has developed a relationship with Angela Bishop, the town’s chief of police, and has suppressed his serial killing urges. A string of incidents around Iron Lake cause Dexter to fear that the ‘dark passenger’ within him will reveal itself.” The Killing Times offers a 90-second trailer for Dexter: New Blood, which incorporates a version of Del Shannon’s 1961 hit song, “Runaway” (previously employed as the theme for the 1986-1988 NBC police drama Crime Story).
• Almost five years ago, NBC-TV optioned Ben H. Winters’ Edgar Award-winning 2012 science fiction/mystery novel, The Last Policeman, with hopes of creating a series from it. Nothing came of that deal. Now, reports Tor.com, writer-producer Kyle Killen (Awake, Mind Games) is working on a pilot for Fox-TV, based on the same book, the resulting series—to be retitled The Last Police—expected to debut as part of the 2021/2022 season. Deadline explains that this show will follow “a small-town police detective, who, as an asteroid races toward an apocalyptic collision with Earth, believes she’s been chosen to save humanity, while her cynical partner can’t decide what he’ll enjoy more: her delusional failure, or the end of the world itself.” In Winters’ “existential detective novel,” the protagonist was a young male police detective in New Hampshire, one Henry Palace. In 2012, the author suggested that the role go to Jim True-Frost (The Wire, Manifest); no word yet on who might headline Fox’s adaptation.
• This is splendid news, from In Reference to Murder: “The new season of BritBox’s modern cozy mystery series, McDonald & Dodds, premieres on August 3rd. The series follows newly promoted DCI McDonald and veteran sergeant Dodds as they investigate complex mysteries with a web of clues that has everyone guessing who are the real victims and villains. Ahead of the new season, BritBox dropped a trailer, which you can view here.”
• Actress Jessica Walter, who died in March at age 80, has been nominated for a posthumous Emmy Award “for her voice-over work in FX/FXX’s animated comedy series Archer,” according to The Hollywood Reporter. “Walter voiced the toxic matriarch Malory Archer, the abrasive mother of H. Jon Benjamin’s Sterling Archer. She’s being recognized for her work in the sixth episode of the 11th season, ‘The Double Date.’” Should Walter secure this Emmy, it would be the second of her career; in 1975, she won Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited Series honors for her portrayal of San Francisco’s first female chief of detectives in the NBC Mystery Movie rotator Amy Prentiss.
• In the latest edition of her newsletter, The Crime Lady, author and New York Times crime-fiction columnist Sarah Weinman gives us a sneak peek of her latest true-crime book, Scoundrel: How a Convicted Murderer Persuaded the Women Who Loved Him, the Conservative Establishment, and the Courts to Set Him Free.
Due out in February 2022, it tells the bizarre story of Edgar Herbert Smith, who killed a 15-year-old New Jersey honor student in 1957, subsequently contested his case in the media—being given special support by conservative pundit William F. Buckley Jr.—and, after winning a retrial and release, kidnapped and tried to kill another woman, this time in California. “By the time Scoundrel is published next year,” Weinman explains, “more than seven years will have passed since I first began researching and reporting the project. I can’t wait to fill you all in on what that entailed, the voluminous trove of documents and letters I consulted across multiple archives, the people I spoke with, and the strange juxtaposition of criminal justice, conservative thought, and book publishing that connected the crimes and misdeeds of one man who fooled so many into looking past his worst instincts to see what was never really there.”
• The Southern California town of Agoura Hills has selected Lee Goldberg’s Lost Hills (2020), his first novel featuring Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department homicide detective Eve Ronin, as its One City One Book 2021 honoree. “That means,” says Goldberg in his blog, “the local libraries, schools, etc. will be encouraging everyone to read the book and to come to City Hall on Sept. 30th to see me in conversation, buy a copy of my book if they haven’t already … and get their copies signed. Past honorees include Michael Connelly and Dick Van Dyke.” Admission to Goldberg’s Thursday, September 30, appearance will be free, but space is limited and advance registration is required; click here after August 1 to find out more.
• A big change for Britain’s Crime Writers’ Association:
• It sounds as if this year’s Killer Nashville convention, expected to take place in Franklin, Tennessee, from August 19 to 22, is coming along right on schedule. Keynote speakers at this in-person event will be Walter Mosley, J.T. Ellison, and Lisa Black. More information is available here for anyone who would like to participate, but hasn’t yet registered. The full four-day registration will set you back $419.
• “Mystery Writers of America (MWA) is honoring the memory of its 2020 Grand Master, the late Barbara Neely, with a scholarship to new Black writers …,” writes Mystery Scene magazine’s Oline Cogdill. “MWA will annually present two scholarships of $2,000 each. One scholarship will be for an aspiring Black writer who has yet to publish in the crime or mystery field, and another for Black authors who have already published in crime or mystery.” September 30, 2021, is the deadline for applications (available here); a winner will be declared “in the late fall.” Click here for more information.
• Like millions of other Americans, my wife and I have been watching Season 4 of Unforgotten, part of PBS-TV’s Masterpiece Mystery! summer schedule. There are three additional Sunday-night installments yet to come, but already, Crimespree Magazine’s Erin Mitchell has declared Unforgotten, which stars Nicola Walker and Sanjeev Bhaskar as London-based cold-case detectives, “the best show on television.” She continues: “Unforgotten is one of those rare shows that does not tell a story at its surface, doesn’t just lead us on a step-by-step procedural journey. The procedure is there, of course, but the subtlety of the remarkable performances addresses the characters’ motivation to allow us to experience the often painful journey though the case. In that way, the experience of watching it is more akin to reading a book, which is the highest praise I can give a TV show.” A 90-second introduction to Season 4 is embedded below.
• Regé-Jean Page, a popular alumnus of the Netflix series Bridgerton, is set to star as The Saint, aka Simon Templar, in a new film based around that Leslie Charteris-created, “Robin Hood-esque criminal and thief for hire.” Deadline says the forthcoming Paramount picture “will be a completely new take that reimagines the character and world around him.” Author-screenwriter Lee Goldberg, nephew of Saint authority Burl Barer (The Saint: A Complete History in Print, Radio, Television, and Film), opines on Facebook that Page “will make a great Saint, but I hope they don’t stray too far from what we all loved about Leslie Charteris’ books, the George Sanders movies, and the [1962-1969] Roger Moore TV series.”
• With the abundance of resources provided in The Rap Sheet’s right-hand-column blogroll, you can be excused for not noticing when a new site is added. But let me direct your attention to one in particular: The Ross Macdonald Blog. Composed by Neil Albert, author of the Dave Garrett series (The January Corpse, etc.), it’s turning the critical microscope on every one of Macdonald’s novels, in chronological order, beginning with his non-Lew Archer yarns. Albert—who calls Macdonald (aka Kenneth Millar) “one of the three greatest writers in the genre of the hardboiled private eye, along with Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler” (no argument from yours truly)—has been working on this site primarily since the end of last year, and has so far progressed to The Three Roads (1948), Macdonald’s fourth novel. Each book is being considered in detail, over a succession of postings, The Dark Tunnel (1944) and Trouble Follows Me (1946) having each generated 11 entries. (Hat tip to Kevin Burton Smith.)
• Nobody who reads this page regularly should be surprised to hear that I own the 30th-anniversary edition of Mark Dawidziak’s The Columbo Phile: A Casebook, a work originally published in 1989. But now comes word of Bonaventure Press’ Shooting Columbo: The Lives and Deaths of TV’s Rumpled Detective, due out this coming September and written by David Koenig. Although somewhat shorter than Dawidziak’s book (only 248 pages, compared with 410), Shooting Columbo promises behind-the-scenes intelligence about that iconic Peter Falk series, plus “a blow-by-blow account of the making of all 69 classic
mysteries, from the first [figurative] pilot, Prescription: Murder, to the last special, Columbo Likes the Nightlife.” The question is, do I need Koenig’s book on my shelves, too?
• Caroline Crampton hosts the podcast Shedunnit, but she’s also the author of a map and guide called Agatha Christie’s England, from London-based Herb Lester Associates, which years ago produced The Raymond Chandler Map of Los Angeles. Already out in England, and due for a September release in the States, Crampton’s publication focuses on “the real and fictional locations in the Queen of Crime’s canon,” as she writes in her e-mail newsletter. “There are dozens of places included, and for each I’ve researched why and how Christie wrote about them. I certainly felt like I gained a greater understanding of her work in the process of putting the guide together, and if you read it I hope you will feel the same.”
• From the “everything old is new again” department: TV Guide critic Matt Roush recently included this exchange in his blog:
• Bay Area author-photographer Mark Coggins is out with Season 2 of his podcast, Riordan’s Desk. He launched this project in May 2020, at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, with a chapter-by-chapter reading of his seventh August Riordan private-eye novel, 2019’s The Dead Beat Scroll. Earlier this month, he packaged up the final installment of Season 2, a full reading (35 chapters in all) of his 2015 Riordan yarn, No Hard Feelings. And Coggins has already begun reading from Candy from Strangers (2006), his third Riordan mystery. Listen to the complete run of Riordan’s Desk by clicking here.
• Listen up, Bosch fans! “The Everybody Counts Podcast talks Bosch Season 7, Episode 5 and interviews Michael Connelly.”
• Charlie Chan authority Lou Armagno informs us that 92-year-old actor James Hong, who portrayed “Son No.1 to J. Carrol Naish’s Charlie Chan in The New Adventures of Charlie Chan [1957-1958], is to be honored next year with a star on Los Angeles’ Hollywood Walk of Fame. Hong, born in Minneapolis to Hong Kongese parents, and “the last living actor to star as a primary Chan character, either in film or television,” will be the third Chan cast member honored in this fashion; Keye Luke and the aforementioned J. Carrol Naish both won stars before him. Hong’s list of credits extends well beyond The New Adventures of Charlie Chan to include roles in everything from Richard Diamond, Private Eye and Hawaii Five-O to Kung Fu, Harry O, The Rockford Files, Switch, and the 1974 film Chinatown.
• “Edgar Allan Poe: Self-Help Guru”?
• From a patron of The Rap Sheet’s YouTube page: “I’m not making light of the condominium disaster in Florida, but every time a reporter who is covering that story says ‘Surfside,’ this song pops into my head.” Learn more about this other Surfside here.
• The blog maintained by History (formerly The History Channel) recently highlighted what it claims are “the most influential classic shows” from the 1950s, “TV’s “Golden Age.” In the category of crime (click here, then scroll to the bottom of the page), it mentions Martin Kane, Private Eye (1949-1954), Man Against Crime (1949-1954), and Dragnet (1951-1959). But what about Naked City (1958-1959, 1960-1963), Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer (1958-1959), M Squad (1957-1960), Richard Diamond, Private Detective (1957-1960), Decoy (1957-1959), Have Gun—Will Travel (1957-1963), 77 Sunset Strip (1958-1964), Perry Mason (1957-1966), and Peter Gunn (1958-1961)? Today’s younger viewers may be unaware of this, but the ’50s brought us myriad TV detective shows that are still worth watching.
• On the subject of vintage small-screen shows, how about T.H.E. Cat (1966-1967), which starred Robert Loggia as a San Francisco cat burglar named Thomas Hewitt Edward Cat, and spun off a quartet of comic-book adventures?
• Was this really a good idea? You may recall that Deadline reported last year, “James Patterson and Condé Nast are teaming to revive vintage crime fighter The Shadow in a series of books that will also aim to be adapted for the screen.” Hachette Book Group imprint Little, Brown will publish the original series …
The Shadow [aka society gadabout Lamont Cranston], a signature New York vigilante, originated in the 1930s as a series of pulp novels by Walter B. Gibson. A popular radio drama based on the books featured the voice of Orson Welles. In 1994, Universal released a feature film adaptation starring Alec Baldwin.” Anyway, Patterson’s introductory entry in this new series, set in the late 21st century and simply titled The Shadow, came out on July 13, and was greeted with more than a modicum of skepticism. San Francisco tour guide and author Don Herron remarks, “I had thought about giving it a shot, and then I saw the cover [shown on the left]. The only thought I could process was Where the fuck is HIS HAT???”
• Yellow Perils is no more enthusiastic about the book.
• Dashiell Hammett’s first novel, Red Harvest (1929), has inspired a number of cinematic creations over the years, including the 1930 picture Roadhouse Nights and the 2005 neo-noir mystery Brick. But the book, which stars Hammett’s nameless San Francisco private eye, the Continental Op, has never been given a faithful adaptation. It did once come close, however, as a series of newspaper clippings in Davy Crockett’s Almanack of Mystery, Adventure, and the Wild West makes clear. In 1941, the Los Angeles Times carried word of Paramount Pictures decision not to remake its 1935 film based on Hammett’s fourth novel, The Glass Key, but to instead develop a script from Red Harvest. Brian Donlevy was slated to portray the Op, with Paulette Goddard and a young Alan Ladd helping to fill out the cast. Unfortunately, that film was first “postponed” and later abandoned. Hoping to boost Ladd’s Hollywood career, Paramount decided to remake The Glass Key after all. Donlevy was nominally the headliner, but Ladd was the real star of that production, while Veronica Lake replaced Goddard as its distaff attraction.
• Did author Hammett really break the window of a downtown department store in Miami, Florida, during a four-day visit he made to that city in 1934? The Palm Beach Post recalled the story late last year, but it may just be an urban legend.
• Talk about dropping the ball! I realized this week that, while I had reported on nominees for the 2021 Scribe Awards, I never announced the winners. In the category of greatest interested to crime-fiction readers—“General Original Novel and Adapted Novel”—Max Allan Collins and Mickey Spillane’s 12th Mike Hammer novel, Masquerade for Murder (2020), lost out to a video-game-related adventure, Day Zero: Watchdogs Legion, by James Swallow and Josh Reynolds (Aconyte).
• Were I able to attend this year’s PulpFest, taking place in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, from August 19th through 22nd, I would definitely want to be in the audience for “popular culture scholar” Doug Ellis’ presentation, “The Weird Tales of Margaret Brundage.” “Initially disguising her gender by signing her work as M. Brundage, the artist redefined sensuality for the already scandalous pulp market,” observes the PulpFest Web site. “Her work was later targeted by New York Mayor LaGuardia’s 1938 decency campaign. … Margaret Brundage [1900-1976] created 66 covers for Weird Tales between 1932 and 1945, making her the most in-demand cover artist for the fantasy, horror, and science-fiction magazine. Only Virgil Finlay was a close rival.” Ellis’ remarks on Brundage are scheduled for Friday, August 20.
• The best interview I’ve heard with T.J. Newman, the former flight attendant and author of the new thriller Falling (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster), was conducted by Dave Davies on NPR’s Fresh Air program. You can listen to their whole conversation here.
• Powell’s Books, the Portland, Oregon, landmark heralded as “the world’s largest independent bookstore,” is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. As part of the celebration, it has assembled “a curated collection of 50 books from the past 50 years.” I’d be more enthusiastic about this list if—in addition to Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams, and Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future—it contained even one crime, mystery, or thriller novel. No such luck!
• Max Allan Collins mentions in his blog that the 13th Mike Hammer novel he’s “co-authored” with the late Mickey Spillane, is due out from Titan Books in 2022—75 years after the appearance of Spillane’s first Hammer yarn, I, the Jury. This one will be titled Kill Me If You Can.
• There have been so many crime novels backdropped by San Francisco, that Paul French was bound to fail when he determined to collect, for CrimeReads, a representative sample of their diversity. Why, for instance, does he mention Stuart M. Kaminsky’s Poor Butterfly (2012)—the only Toby Peters mystery set in the Bay Area (most of them took place in L.A.)—or Charles Willeford’s one-off, Wild Wives (1956), but completely ignore the oeuvres of Colin Willcox, Stephen Greenleaf, Kelli Stanley, and Bill Pronzini? That said, French’s piece—parked here—is entertaining, and might give you some ideas of things to read as this summer season winds to an end.
• For broader exposure to fictional offenses set in and around San Francisco, consult Randal S. Brandt’s Golden Gate Mysteries wiki.
• And how much fun is this? Blogger Evan Lewis is showcasing the covers, contents pages, copyright information, and occasional lagniappes from every early edition of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. As he explains in this introductory post, “Some months ago, my old friend and fellow book collector Jim Rogers passed away, and left behind a complete run of EQMM from 1941 to 1959. Those mags have now passed into the care of another old friend, Mr. Larry Paschelke, and Larry agreed to let me scan the covers and share them with you here. (Jim, I have no doubt, would have done the same had I asked, but I didn't know he had them!)” Click here to catch up with Lewis’ project in progress.
doesn’t want to be found. I especially love the scenes between Sammy and Roy Glenn, the veteran actor who plays his dad, a police lieutenant.” Why Wikipedia doesn’t list The Pigeon among Davis’ motion-picture and TV credits, but does include Poor Devil, an awful NBC comedy pilot from 1973, is really anybody’s guess.• Speaking of forgotten crime-solvers, how about Valerie Bertinelli in the 1990 CBS-TV series Sydney? As Wikipedia recalls, that erstwhile One Day at a Time actress headlined as Sydney Kells, “the daughter of a now-deceased policeman, [who] brings her New York City detective agency (in which she is the only investigator) back to her hometown and her family.” Matthew Perry (later of Friends) held forth as Kells’ rookie-cop brother, while Craig Bierko portrayed an attorney “with whom she shares sexual chemistry.” This spring replacement series lasted only 13 episodes. The best thing about it may have been its opening theme, “Finish What Ya Started,” by Bertinelli’s then-hubby Eddie Van Halen. Clickety-clack right here to watch the main title sequence from Sydney, paired with the introduction to her 1993-1994 sitcom, Café Americain.
• One more YouTube discovery: The Blue Knight, a 1973 NBC mini-series starring William Holden, Lee Remick, Sam Elliott, and Joe Santos, and based on Joseph Wambaugh’s 1972 novel of that same title. It’s been many years since I saw this teleflick with Holden as William “Bumper” Morgan, a 20-year veteran of the Los Angeles Police Department—long enough that I didn’t even remember it was originally broadcast in one-hour segments over four consecutive nights. The production was popular enough to spawn a subsequent series, likewise called The Blue Knight (but on CBS, rather than NBC), starring George Kennedy as Morgan; it ran for two seasons, from 1975 to 1976.
• Oh alright, here’s another: Jigsaw, a 1968 film (“originally made for television,” says Wikipedia, “but shown first in theaters”) starring Bradford Dillman, Harry Guardino, Hope Lange, Michael J. Pollard, and a young Susan Saint James. “After someone places sugar cubes laced with LSD in his cup of coffee,” the YouTube plot synopsis reads, “Jonathan Fields [Dillman] regains consciousness, only to find a woman drowned in his bathtub and flecks of blood on his hands and clothes. Suffering from amnesia, Fields can't think of anyplace else to turn, so he hires Arthur Belding [Guardino], a private detective, to help him find out what happened.” Jigsaw is a remake of 1965’s Mirage.
• Dexter: New Blood, the 10-episode revival of Michael C. Hall’s 2006-2013 drama, Dexter, is now expected to appear on Showtime come November 7. Wikipedia says this show will open “approximately ten years after the original series’ finale.” In the meanwhile, Hall’s Dexter Morgan “has moved to the fictional small town of Iron Lake, New York, hiding his identity under the name of Jimmy Lindsay, a local shopkeeper. He has developed a relationship with Angela Bishop, the town’s chief of police, and has suppressed his serial killing urges. A string of incidents around Iron Lake cause Dexter to fear that the ‘dark passenger’ within him will reveal itself.” The Killing Times offers a 90-second trailer for Dexter: New Blood, which incorporates a version of Del Shannon’s 1961 hit song, “Runaway” (previously employed as the theme for the 1986-1988 NBC police drama Crime Story).
• Almost five years ago, NBC-TV optioned Ben H. Winters’ Edgar Award-winning 2012 science fiction/mystery novel, The Last Policeman, with hopes of creating a series from it. Nothing came of that deal. Now, reports Tor.com, writer-producer Kyle Killen (Awake, Mind Games) is working on a pilot for Fox-TV, based on the same book, the resulting series—to be retitled The Last Police—expected to debut as part of the 2021/2022 season. Deadline explains that this show will follow “a small-town police detective, who, as an asteroid races toward an apocalyptic collision with Earth, believes she’s been chosen to save humanity, while her cynical partner can’t decide what he’ll enjoy more: her delusional failure, or the end of the world itself.” In Winters’ “existential detective novel,” the protagonist was a young male police detective in New Hampshire, one Henry Palace. In 2012, the author suggested that the role go to Jim True-Frost (The Wire, Manifest); no word yet on who might headline Fox’s adaptation.
• This is splendid news, from In Reference to Murder: “The new season of BritBox’s modern cozy mystery series, McDonald & Dodds, premieres on August 3rd. The series follows newly promoted DCI McDonald and veteran sergeant Dodds as they investigate complex mysteries with a web of clues that has everyone guessing who are the real victims and villains. Ahead of the new season, BritBox dropped a trailer, which you can view here.”
• Actress Jessica Walter, who died in March at age 80, has been nominated for a posthumous Emmy Award “for her voice-over work in FX/FXX’s animated comedy series Archer,” according to The Hollywood Reporter. “Walter voiced the toxic matriarch Malory Archer, the abrasive mother of H. Jon Benjamin’s Sterling Archer. She’s being recognized for her work in the sixth episode of the 11th season, ‘The Double Date.’” Should Walter secure this Emmy, it would be the second of her career; in 1975, she won Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited Series honors for her portrayal of San Francisco’s first female chief of detectives in the NBC Mystery Movie rotator Amy Prentiss.
• In the latest edition of her newsletter, The Crime Lady, author and New York Times crime-fiction columnist Sarah Weinman gives us a sneak peek of her latest true-crime book, Scoundrel: How a Convicted Murderer Persuaded the Women Who Loved Him, the Conservative Establishment, and the Courts to Set Him Free.
Due out in February 2022, it tells the bizarre story of Edgar Herbert Smith, who killed a 15-year-old New Jersey honor student in 1957, subsequently contested his case in the media—being given special support by conservative pundit William F. Buckley Jr.—and, after winning a retrial and release, kidnapped and tried to kill another woman, this time in California. “By the time Scoundrel is published next year,” Weinman explains, “more than seven years will have passed since I first began researching and reporting the project. I can’t wait to fill you all in on what that entailed, the voluminous trove of documents and letters I consulted across multiple archives, the people I spoke with, and the strange juxtaposition of criminal justice, conservative thought, and book publishing that connected the crimes and misdeeds of one man who fooled so many into looking past his worst instincts to see what was never really there.”• The Southern California town of Agoura Hills has selected Lee Goldberg’s Lost Hills (2020), his first novel featuring Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department homicide detective Eve Ronin, as its One City One Book 2021 honoree. “That means,” says Goldberg in his blog, “the local libraries, schools, etc. will be encouraging everyone to read the book and to come to City Hall on Sept. 30th to see me in conversation, buy a copy of my book if they haven’t already … and get their copies signed. Past honorees include Michael Connelly and Dick Van Dyke.” Admission to Goldberg’s Thursday, September 30, appearance will be free, but space is limited and advance registration is required; click here after August 1 to find out more.
• A big change for Britain’s Crime Writers’ Association:
For the first time in its 68-year history, the prestigious Crime Writers’ Association will allow self-published authors to join its ranks. The move comes after the CWA consulted its members, who voted with an 84% majority in favour to accept self-published authors.The news release adds: “Self-published authors wishing to become a CWA member will need to demonstrate a level of professionalism through a simple-to-complete application form. This will be available on the CWA website from 13 September, when the CWA will first accept applications.”
Maxim Jakubowski, Chair of the Crime Writers’ Association, said: “The founding mission of the CWA was to support, promote and celebrate the crime genre and its authors. In the past, we only accepted traditionally published authors into the CWA, as this was the best indicator of quality. The publishing landscape has changed in recent years, and self-publishing has become a route for professional writers, and indeed there are many trailblazers in this field. The time is right to update our membership criteria.”
• It sounds as if this year’s Killer Nashville convention, expected to take place in Franklin, Tennessee, from August 19 to 22, is coming along right on schedule. Keynote speakers at this in-person event will be Walter Mosley, J.T. Ellison, and Lisa Black. More information is available here for anyone who would like to participate, but hasn’t yet registered. The full four-day registration will set you back $419.
• “Mystery Writers of America (MWA) is honoring the memory of its 2020 Grand Master, the late Barbara Neely, with a scholarship to new Black writers …,” writes Mystery Scene magazine’s Oline Cogdill. “MWA will annually present two scholarships of $2,000 each. One scholarship will be for an aspiring Black writer who has yet to publish in the crime or mystery field, and another for Black authors who have already published in crime or mystery.” September 30, 2021, is the deadline for applications (available here); a winner will be declared “in the late fall.” Click here for more information.
• Like millions of other Americans, my wife and I have been watching Season 4 of Unforgotten, part of PBS-TV’s Masterpiece Mystery! summer schedule. There are three additional Sunday-night installments yet to come, but already, Crimespree Magazine’s Erin Mitchell has declared Unforgotten, which stars Nicola Walker and Sanjeev Bhaskar as London-based cold-case detectives, “the best show on television.” She continues: “Unforgotten is one of those rare shows that does not tell a story at its surface, doesn’t just lead us on a step-by-step procedural journey. The procedure is there, of course, but the subtlety of the remarkable performances addresses the characters’ motivation to allow us to experience the often painful journey though the case. In that way, the experience of watching it is more akin to reading a book, which is the highest praise I can give a TV show.” A 90-second introduction to Season 4 is embedded below.
• Regé-Jean Page, a popular alumnus of the Netflix series Bridgerton, is set to star as The Saint, aka Simon Templar, in a new film based around that Leslie Charteris-created, “Robin Hood-esque criminal and thief for hire.” Deadline says the forthcoming Paramount picture “will be a completely new take that reimagines the character and world around him.” Author-screenwriter Lee Goldberg, nephew of Saint authority Burl Barer (The Saint: A Complete History in Print, Radio, Television, and Film), opines on Facebook that Page “will make a great Saint, but I hope they don’t stray too far from what we all loved about Leslie Charteris’ books, the George Sanders movies, and the [1962-1969] Roger Moore TV series.”
• With the abundance of resources provided in The Rap Sheet’s right-hand-column blogroll, you can be excused for not noticing when a new site is added. But let me direct your attention to one in particular: The Ross Macdonald Blog. Composed by Neil Albert, author of the Dave Garrett series (The January Corpse, etc.), it’s turning the critical microscope on every one of Macdonald’s novels, in chronological order, beginning with his non-Lew Archer yarns. Albert—who calls Macdonald (aka Kenneth Millar) “one of the three greatest writers in the genre of the hardboiled private eye, along with Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler” (no argument from yours truly)—has been working on this site primarily since the end of last year, and has so far progressed to The Three Roads (1948), Macdonald’s fourth novel. Each book is being considered in detail, over a succession of postings, The Dark Tunnel (1944) and Trouble Follows Me (1946) having each generated 11 entries. (Hat tip to Kevin Burton Smith.)
• Nobody who reads this page regularly should be surprised to hear that I own the 30th-anniversary edition of Mark Dawidziak’s The Columbo Phile: A Casebook, a work originally published in 1989. But now comes word of Bonaventure Press’ Shooting Columbo: The Lives and Deaths of TV’s Rumpled Detective, due out this coming September and written by David Koenig. Although somewhat shorter than Dawidziak’s book (only 248 pages, compared with 410), Shooting Columbo promises behind-the-scenes intelligence about that iconic Peter Falk series, plus “a blow-by-blow account of the making of all 69 classic
mysteries, from the first [figurative] pilot, Prescription: Murder, to the last special, Columbo Likes the Nightlife.” The question is, do I need Koenig’s book on my shelves, too?• Caroline Crampton hosts the podcast Shedunnit, but she’s also the author of a map and guide called Agatha Christie’s England, from London-based Herb Lester Associates, which years ago produced The Raymond Chandler Map of Los Angeles. Already out in England, and due for a September release in the States, Crampton’s publication focuses on “the real and fictional locations in the Queen of Crime’s canon,” as she writes in her e-mail newsletter. “There are dozens of places included, and for each I’ve researched why and how Christie wrote about them. I certainly felt like I gained a greater understanding of her work in the process of putting the guide together, and if you read it I hope you will feel the same.”
• From the “everything old is new again” department: TV Guide critic Matt Roush recently included this exchange in his blog:
Question: Will some forward-thinking Hollywood executive reboot the George Peppard vehicle Banacek? —Steve O.While I cringe a bit at Roush labeling Thomas Banacek a “private eye” (he was actually a Boston insurance investigator), I applaud his optimism on the matter of resuscitating television’s once-widespread “wheel series” format (about which I wrote last summer in CrimeReads). And Banacek—with its suave, totally immodest lead and supposedly impossible crimes—might, indeed, make for a fun reboot. But who do you think should fill Peppard’s loafers?
Matt Roush: Would a reboot of a 1970s private-eye series really be forward-thinking? I loved the randomness of this suggestion, because there were so many higher-profile spokes of NBC’s “Mystery Movie” wheel: McCloud, McMillan and Wife, and, of course, Columbo. Seriously, though, because Banacek is lesser known, reviving a show and a hero that had a sense of humor about itself wouldn’t be the worst idea. In the bigger picture, I’d like to see a network try the “mystery wheel” format again, rotating its series on a weekly or monthly basis. Something like that could air year-round with fewer episodes per series, and that might be refreshing.
• Bay Area author-photographer Mark Coggins is out with Season 2 of his podcast, Riordan’s Desk. He launched this project in May 2020, at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, with a chapter-by-chapter reading of his seventh August Riordan private-eye novel, 2019’s The Dead Beat Scroll. Earlier this month, he packaged up the final installment of Season 2, a full reading (35 chapters in all) of his 2015 Riordan yarn, No Hard Feelings. And Coggins has already begun reading from Candy from Strangers (2006), his third Riordan mystery. Listen to the complete run of Riordan’s Desk by clicking here.
• Listen up, Bosch fans! “The Everybody Counts Podcast talks Bosch Season 7, Episode 5 and interviews Michael Connelly.”
• Charlie Chan authority Lou Armagno informs us that 92-year-old actor James Hong, who portrayed “Son No.1 to J. Carrol Naish’s Charlie Chan in The New Adventures of Charlie Chan [1957-1958], is to be honored next year with a star on Los Angeles’ Hollywood Walk of Fame. Hong, born in Minneapolis to Hong Kongese parents, and “the last living actor to star as a primary Chan character, either in film or television,” will be the third Chan cast member honored in this fashion; Keye Luke and the aforementioned J. Carrol Naish both won stars before him. Hong’s list of credits extends well beyond The New Adventures of Charlie Chan to include roles in everything from Richard Diamond, Private Eye and Hawaii Five-O to Kung Fu, Harry O, The Rockford Files, Switch, and the 1974 film Chinatown.
• “Edgar Allan Poe: Self-Help Guru”?
• From a patron of The Rap Sheet’s YouTube page: “I’m not making light of the condominium disaster in Florida, but every time a reporter who is covering that story says ‘Surfside,’ this song pops into my head.” Learn more about this other Surfside here.
• The blog maintained by History (formerly The History Channel) recently highlighted what it claims are “the most influential classic shows” from the 1950s, “TV’s “Golden Age.” In the category of crime (click here, then scroll to the bottom of the page), it mentions Martin Kane, Private Eye (1949-1954), Man Against Crime (1949-1954), and Dragnet (1951-1959). But what about Naked City (1958-1959, 1960-1963), Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer (1958-1959), M Squad (1957-1960), Richard Diamond, Private Detective (1957-1960), Decoy (1957-1959), Have Gun—Will Travel (1957-1963), 77 Sunset Strip (1958-1964), Perry Mason (1957-1966), and Peter Gunn (1958-1961)? Today’s younger viewers may be unaware of this, but the ’50s brought us myriad TV detective shows that are still worth watching.
• On the subject of vintage small-screen shows, how about T.H.E. Cat (1966-1967), which starred Robert Loggia as a San Francisco cat burglar named Thomas Hewitt Edward Cat, and spun off a quartet of comic-book adventures?
• Was this really a good idea? You may recall that Deadline reported last year, “James Patterson and Condé Nast are teaming to revive vintage crime fighter The Shadow in a series of books that will also aim to be adapted for the screen.” Hachette Book Group imprint Little, Brown will publish the original series …
The Shadow [aka society gadabout Lamont Cranston], a signature New York vigilante, originated in the 1930s as a series of pulp novels by Walter B. Gibson. A popular radio drama based on the books featured the voice of Orson Welles. In 1994, Universal released a feature film adaptation starring Alec Baldwin.” Anyway, Patterson’s introductory entry in this new series, set in the late 21st century and simply titled The Shadow, came out on July 13, and was greeted with more than a modicum of skepticism. San Francisco tour guide and author Don Herron remarks, “I had thought about giving it a shot, and then I saw the cover [shown on the left]. The only thought I could process was Where the fuck is HIS HAT???”• Yellow Perils is no more enthusiastic about the book.
• Dashiell Hammett’s first novel, Red Harvest (1929), has inspired a number of cinematic creations over the years, including the 1930 picture Roadhouse Nights and the 2005 neo-noir mystery Brick. But the book, which stars Hammett’s nameless San Francisco private eye, the Continental Op, has never been given a faithful adaptation. It did once come close, however, as a series of newspaper clippings in Davy Crockett’s Almanack of Mystery, Adventure, and the Wild West makes clear. In 1941, the Los Angeles Times carried word of Paramount Pictures decision not to remake its 1935 film based on Hammett’s fourth novel, The Glass Key, but to instead develop a script from Red Harvest. Brian Donlevy was slated to portray the Op, with Paulette Goddard and a young Alan Ladd helping to fill out the cast. Unfortunately, that film was first “postponed” and later abandoned. Hoping to boost Ladd’s Hollywood career, Paramount decided to remake The Glass Key after all. Donlevy was nominally the headliner, but Ladd was the real star of that production, while Veronica Lake replaced Goddard as its distaff attraction.
• Did author Hammett really break the window of a downtown department store in Miami, Florida, during a four-day visit he made to that city in 1934? The Palm Beach Post recalled the story late last year, but it may just be an urban legend.
• Talk about dropping the ball! I realized this week that, while I had reported on nominees for the 2021 Scribe Awards, I never announced the winners. In the category of greatest interested to crime-fiction readers—“General Original Novel and Adapted Novel”—Max Allan Collins and Mickey Spillane’s 12th Mike Hammer novel, Masquerade for Murder (2020), lost out to a video-game-related adventure, Day Zero: Watchdogs Legion, by James Swallow and Josh Reynolds (Aconyte).
• Were I able to attend this year’s PulpFest, taking place in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, from August 19th through 22nd, I would definitely want to be in the audience for “popular culture scholar” Doug Ellis’ presentation, “The Weird Tales of Margaret Brundage.” “Initially disguising her gender by signing her work as M. Brundage, the artist redefined sensuality for the already scandalous pulp market,” observes the PulpFest Web site. “Her work was later targeted by New York Mayor LaGuardia’s 1938 decency campaign. … Margaret Brundage [1900-1976] created 66 covers for Weird Tales between 1932 and 1945, making her the most in-demand cover artist for the fantasy, horror, and science-fiction magazine. Only Virgil Finlay was a close rival.” Ellis’ remarks on Brundage are scheduled for Friday, August 20.
• The best interview I’ve heard with T.J. Newman, the former flight attendant and author of the new thriller Falling (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster), was conducted by Dave Davies on NPR’s Fresh Air program. You can listen to their whole conversation here.
• Powell’s Books, the Portland, Oregon, landmark heralded as “the world’s largest independent bookstore,” is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. As part of the celebration, it has assembled “a curated collection of 50 books from the past 50 years.” I’d be more enthusiastic about this list if—in addition to Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams, and Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future—it contained even one crime, mystery, or thriller novel. No such luck!
• Max Allan Collins mentions in his blog that the 13th Mike Hammer novel he’s “co-authored” with the late Mickey Spillane, is due out from Titan Books in 2022—75 years after the appearance of Spillane’s first Hammer yarn, I, the Jury. This one will be titled Kill Me If You Can.
• There have been so many crime novels backdropped by San Francisco, that Paul French was bound to fail when he determined to collect, for CrimeReads, a representative sample of their diversity. Why, for instance, does he mention Stuart M. Kaminsky’s Poor Butterfly (2012)—the only Toby Peters mystery set in the Bay Area (most of them took place in L.A.)—or Charles Willeford’s one-off, Wild Wives (1956), but completely ignore the oeuvres of Colin Willcox, Stephen Greenleaf, Kelli Stanley, and Bill Pronzini? That said, French’s piece—parked here—is entertaining, and might give you some ideas of things to read as this summer season winds to an end.
• For broader exposure to fictional offenses set in and around San Francisco, consult Randal S. Brandt’s Golden Gate Mysteries wiki.
• And how much fun is this? Blogger Evan Lewis is showcasing the covers, contents pages, copyright information, and occasional lagniappes from every early edition of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. As he explains in this introductory post, “Some months ago, my old friend and fellow book collector Jim Rogers passed away, and left behind a complete run of EQMM from 1941 to 1959. Those mags have now passed into the care of another old friend, Mr. Larry Paschelke, and Larry agreed to let me scan the covers and share them with you here. (Jim, I have no doubt, would have done the same had I asked, but I didn't know he had them!)” Click here to catch up with Lewis’ project in progress.
Friday, July 16, 2021
A Few Clues to Bosch’s Comeback
In an effort to avoid stumbling across plot spoilers, I tried not to read anything about the future of Titus Welliver’s Bosch until I’d watched the seventh and concluding season of that TV series, released by Amazon Prime in late June. But having now seen those final eight episodes (and what a treat that experience was!), I hopped forthwith on this piece in the British blog Crime Fiction Lover. It offers at least some details of the still-unnamed sequel already in the works for Amazon’s ad-supported streaming service, IMDb.TV:
Although no premiere date for this continuation series has been announced, Connelly told Newsweek that it shouldn’t be too far down the road. “IMDb will be ad supported so we won’t drop all ten [episodes] at once,” said the author. “I don’t know when but I think it will be sooner. We’ll try and capitalize on the wave of Season 7. A lot of that stuff is above my pay grade and still not decided.”
READ MORE: “Titus Welliver on Bosch’s Last Chapter—and Harry Bosch’s Next One,” by Dan Reilly (Vulture).
After handing in his badge at the LAPD [Los Angeles Police Department], Harry is going it alone as a private investigator in a 10-part series that’s based on The Wrong Side of Goodbye—which just so happens to be a favourite book of Michael Connelly’s and which earned five stars in our review.For those who haven’t read The Wrong Side of Goodbye (and really, it’s difficult to keep up with Connelly’s output, while also enjoying diverse other authors), what did that story entail? Here’s a chunk of Ryan Steck’s review of Wrong Side in The Real Book Spy:
He told Newsweek that the show will find inspiration in the pages of the 29th Bosch novel, which was published in 2016.
“It might be my favorite book because I finally get to the thing that inspired me to be a writer and that was the private eye novels of people like Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald and Dashiell Hammett,” said Connelly.
After being forced to retire from the LAPD where he spent more than three decades as one of the department’s most accomplished detectives, Harry Bosch has found a way to hold onto his badge and gun a little while longer.Joining Welliver on this new program will be Mimi Rogers, once more in the role of civil-rights attorney—and not-infrequent Bosch antagonist—Honey “Money” Chandler, and Madison Lintz returning as Harry’s daughter, Maddie. Welliver explained in a recent radio interview that other players familiar from Bosch will make less regular appearances in the sequel. “It’s a continuing part of the telling of the Bosch universe,” he said, “and I’m sure we’ll pepper that universe periodically with cameos from the characters from the original show.”
The city of San Fernando has a small police force with no budget to expand, so Bosch struck a deal to come on board as a reserve detective working part-time. While he enjoys working with the SFPD, it’s not a paid position. It allows him to keep his foot in the door, solving crimes and using his expertise to put bad guys away, but it doesn’t pay the bills.
To earn a paycheck, Bosch hires out his detective skills as a private investigator. He doesn’t advertise or have an office, and he relies solely on word of mouth from past clients to find new ones. But when a detective with Bosch’s pedigree makes his skill set available, word travels fast. Including to the rich and famous.
Whitney Vance, a reclusive, old billionaire who values discretion, offers Bosch ten thousand dollars to meet with him in secret. It’s immediately apparent to Bosch that Mr. Vance’s living conditions, while extravagant, allow him very little privacy. The billionaire reveals that he has no known next of kin and that he wants to hire Bosch to find out if a past lover might have borne him a child. With his health failing, Vance decides he would much prefer to leave everything he has to his child, even if he’s never met them, rather than to the board of his company.
Apparently, a woman Vance had a relationship with more than sixty years ago had become pregnant. Last he knew, the woman, who might have been an illegal immigrant, was headed to Mexico to have an abortion. The billionaire never saw her again and wants Bosch to track her down and find out if she did, indeed, have an abortion, or if the child was actually born.
Although no premiere date for this continuation series has been announced, Connelly told Newsweek that it shouldn’t be too far down the road. “IMDb will be ad supported so we won’t drop all ten [episodes] at once,” said the author. “I don’t know when but I think it will be sooner. We’ll try and capitalize on the wave of Season 7. A lot of that stuff is above my pay grade and still not decided.”
READ MORE: “Titus Welliver on Bosch’s Last Chapter—and Harry Bosch’s Next One,” by Dan Reilly (Vulture).
Saturday, July 10, 2021
Taking the Leads
• The good folks behind PBS-TV’s Masterpiece Mystery! series have announced their broadcast lineup over the next four months. They report that Season 4 of Unforgotten, starring Nicola Walker and Sanjeev Bhaskar as London-based cold-case detectives, will debut tomorrow, July 11, with the first of six weekly episodes. That will be followed on Sunday, September 5, by a pair of two-hour installments of Guilt, focusing on brothers (Mark Bonnar and Jamie Sives) who try to cover up a hit-and-run accident. On October 3, expect to see the opening episode (of eight) in Season 6 of Grantchester, starring Tom Brittney and Robson Green. And lastly, on October 17, will come the first of six Season 2 installments of Baptiste, starring Tchéky Karyo as French detective (and brain tumor survivor) Julien Baptiste. Click here to find a short trailer covering all of these programs.
• By the way, UK viewers need not wait until October for Baptiste. It kicks off Season 2 in Britain on Sunday, July 18. A preview is here.
• Although there’s no air date yet, the sophomore season of the Victorian-era mystery Miss Scarlet and The Duke, starring Kate Phillips and Stuart Martin, has commenced filming in Belgrade, Serbia, according to The Killing Times.
• This caught me by surprise: “George R.R. Martin is co-executive producing another TV show—and this time, it’s not one based on his own books,” explains Tor.com. “Martin is part of the team behind Dark Winds, a series adaptation of Tony Hillerman’s
[Joe] Leaphorn & [Jim] Chee series. The show is set to star Kiowa Gordon (Roswell, New Mexico) and Zahn McClarnon (Westworld), with McClarnon also producing. AMC has already ordered a six-episode first season.” The site goes on to note, “Dark Winds takes its title from the fifth book in the Leaphorn and Chee series, The Dark Wind, though according to a statement from Martin, the primary source material is Listening Woman, the third book in the series. The show, according to Variety, is ‘a psychological thriller that follows two Navajo police officers in the 1970s Southwest, as their search for clues in a grisly double murder case forces them to challenge their own spiritual beliefs and come to terms with the trauma of their pasts.’”
• I haven’t had time yet to watch the second five episodes of Lupin, the French Netflix series starring Omar Sy. But already Hector DeJean has a (rather mixed) review up in Criminal Element.
• I did, though, see the seventh and final season of Amazon’s Bosch. And it’s hard to argue with Paul Levinson’s assessment that it’s the “best cop drama ever on television,” despite a few hiccups here and there. I shall definitely be watching for the still-unnamed sequel set to appear on Amazon’s ad-supported streaming service, IMDb.TV.
• Speaking of Bosch, the Web site of Australian broadcaster SBS offers this delightful (and much overdue) tribute to Harry Bosch’s most eccentric Hollywood Division colleagues, Detective “Barrel” Johnson (Troy Evans) and Detective Robert “Crate” Moore (Gregory Scott Cummins). Are they that show’s “real heroes”?
• Can I just tell you how much I hate slideshows on the Web? Having to flip through one page after another just to take in an entire feature is usually too much for me to bear; I almost always quit before the end. That said, I did enjoy this rundown of what YardBarker’s Chris Morgan thinks are “The 25 Best Episodes of The Rockford Files.”
• One last TV-related story: At Classic Film & TV Café, blogger “Rick29” looks back at The Delphi Bureau, a 1972 pilot film for the 1972-1973 ABC-TV series of that same name. Both starred Laurence Luckinbill as a reluctant spy with a photographic memory. Clickety-clack here to see The Rap Sheet’s own piece about that short-lived show, which ran as part of the wheel series The Men.
• OK, I lied. Here’s an additional piece—and quite a thorough one—about a vintage television series, in this case the 1962 episodes (Seasons 3 and 4) of The Untouchables. This is Part III of a post series about that Robert Stack-headlined show in Television's New Frontier: the 1960s. Part I is here; Part II can be found here.
• Director-producer Richard Donner, who died earlier this week at age 91, maybe be best known for making flicks such as Lethal Weapon, The Goonies, and Superman. But as The Spy Command points out, he also “directed four episodes of The Man From U.N.C.L.E., three episodes of The Wild Wild West, and two episodes of Get Smart.”
• The San Diego Union-Tribune reports that “Musician-turned-mystery-writer Corey Lynn Fayman took top honors in the 2021 San Diego Book Awards for Ballast Point Breakdown, a wisecracking novel that features a guitar-playing detective, Navy SEALs, and trained dolphins. The book received the Geisel Award, a best-in-show prize named after Ted ‘Dr. Seuss’ Geisel, who wrote many of his best-selling and influential children’s books while living in La Jolla.” Ballast Point Breakdown was released in 2020 by Konstellation Press.
• Meanwhile, PulpFest brings word that Gary Phillips, the creator of Los Angeles private eye Ivan Monk and author of last year’s Matthew Henson and the Ice Temple of Harlem, is among 12 contenders for the 2021 Munsey Award, a prize “named after Frank A. Munsey—the man who published the first pulp magazine. It recognizes an individual or organization that has bettered the pulp community, be it through disseminating knowledge about the pulps or through publishing or other efforts to preserve and foster interest in the pulp magazines we all love and enjoy.” The winner is to be announced on Friday, August 20—in the middle of Philadelphia’s PulpFest 2021 (August 19-22).
• I had missed the unfortunate news, carried this week by In Reference to Murder, that “Perseverance Press is closing its doors after [a] long run. In a statement by Meredith Phillips, originally sent to the Dorothy-L Listserv, she announced that ‘Perseverance Press/John Daniel & Co. will be going out of business soon, with the recent sad demise of John Daniel [in December 2020]. We ended our 22-year publishing history this spring on a high note: the starred PW review for Lev Raphael’s Department of Death.’”
• Mike Ripley’s July “Getting Away with Murder” column for Shots contains notes about long-ago author A.G. “Archie” Macdonell; recycled novel titles; and new or forthcoming works by Peter Lovesey, Graham Hurley, Peter Guttridge, Peter Hanington, and Vaseem Khan. You’ll find all of that—plus more—here.
• The program for this year’s Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival (July 22-25) has been released. So has the list of online events comprising the July 14-17 More Than Malice conference.
• And the dust jacket of Paul Doiron’s new Mike Bowditch novel, Dead by Dawn, confirms that aerial shots of snowy forests really have become a recurring theme on covers these last few years.
• By the way, UK viewers need not wait until October for Baptiste. It kicks off Season 2 in Britain on Sunday, July 18. A preview is here.
• Although there’s no air date yet, the sophomore season of the Victorian-era mystery Miss Scarlet and The Duke, starring Kate Phillips and Stuart Martin, has commenced filming in Belgrade, Serbia, according to The Killing Times.
• This caught me by surprise: “George R.R. Martin is co-executive producing another TV show—and this time, it’s not one based on his own books,” explains Tor.com. “Martin is part of the team behind Dark Winds, a series adaptation of Tony Hillerman’s
[Joe] Leaphorn & [Jim] Chee series. The show is set to star Kiowa Gordon (Roswell, New Mexico) and Zahn McClarnon (Westworld), with McClarnon also producing. AMC has already ordered a six-episode first season.” The site goes on to note, “Dark Winds takes its title from the fifth book in the Leaphorn and Chee series, The Dark Wind, though according to a statement from Martin, the primary source material is Listening Woman, the third book in the series. The show, according to Variety, is ‘a psychological thriller that follows two Navajo police officers in the 1970s Southwest, as their search for clues in a grisly double murder case forces them to challenge their own spiritual beliefs and come to terms with the trauma of their pasts.’”• I haven’t had time yet to watch the second five episodes of Lupin, the French Netflix series starring Omar Sy. But already Hector DeJean has a (rather mixed) review up in Criminal Element.
• I did, though, see the seventh and final season of Amazon’s Bosch. And it’s hard to argue with Paul Levinson’s assessment that it’s the “best cop drama ever on television,” despite a few hiccups here and there. I shall definitely be watching for the still-unnamed sequel set to appear on Amazon’s ad-supported streaming service, IMDb.TV.
• Speaking of Bosch, the Web site of Australian broadcaster SBS offers this delightful (and much overdue) tribute to Harry Bosch’s most eccentric Hollywood Division colleagues, Detective “Barrel” Johnson (Troy Evans) and Detective Robert “Crate” Moore (Gregory Scott Cummins). Are they that show’s “real heroes”?
• Can I just tell you how much I hate slideshows on the Web? Having to flip through one page after another just to take in an entire feature is usually too much for me to bear; I almost always quit before the end. That said, I did enjoy this rundown of what YardBarker’s Chris Morgan thinks are “The 25 Best Episodes of The Rockford Files.”
• One last TV-related story: At Classic Film & TV Café, blogger “Rick29” looks back at The Delphi Bureau, a 1972 pilot film for the 1972-1973 ABC-TV series of that same name. Both starred Laurence Luckinbill as a reluctant spy with a photographic memory. Clickety-clack here to see The Rap Sheet’s own piece about that short-lived show, which ran as part of the wheel series The Men.
• OK, I lied. Here’s an additional piece—and quite a thorough one—about a vintage television series, in this case the 1962 episodes (Seasons 3 and 4) of The Untouchables. This is Part III of a post series about that Robert Stack-headlined show in Television's New Frontier: the 1960s. Part I is here; Part II can be found here.
• Director-producer Richard Donner, who died earlier this week at age 91, maybe be best known for making flicks such as Lethal Weapon, The Goonies, and Superman. But as The Spy Command points out, he also “directed four episodes of The Man From U.N.C.L.E., three episodes of The Wild Wild West, and two episodes of Get Smart.”
• The San Diego Union-Tribune reports that “Musician-turned-mystery-writer Corey Lynn Fayman took top honors in the 2021 San Diego Book Awards for Ballast Point Breakdown, a wisecracking novel that features a guitar-playing detective, Navy SEALs, and trained dolphins. The book received the Geisel Award, a best-in-show prize named after Ted ‘Dr. Seuss’ Geisel, who wrote many of his best-selling and influential children’s books while living in La Jolla.” Ballast Point Breakdown was released in 2020 by Konstellation Press.
• Meanwhile, PulpFest brings word that Gary Phillips, the creator of Los Angeles private eye Ivan Monk and author of last year’s Matthew Henson and the Ice Temple of Harlem, is among 12 contenders for the 2021 Munsey Award, a prize “named after Frank A. Munsey—the man who published the first pulp magazine. It recognizes an individual or organization that has bettered the pulp community, be it through disseminating knowledge about the pulps or through publishing or other efforts to preserve and foster interest in the pulp magazines we all love and enjoy.” The winner is to be announced on Friday, August 20—in the middle of Philadelphia’s PulpFest 2021 (August 19-22).
• I had missed the unfortunate news, carried this week by In Reference to Murder, that “Perseverance Press is closing its doors after [a] long run. In a statement by Meredith Phillips, originally sent to the Dorothy-L Listserv, she announced that ‘Perseverance Press/John Daniel & Co. will be going out of business soon, with the recent sad demise of John Daniel [in December 2020]. We ended our 22-year publishing history this spring on a high note: the starred PW review for Lev Raphael’s Department of Death.’”
• Mike Ripley’s July “Getting Away with Murder” column for Shots contains notes about long-ago author A.G. “Archie” Macdonell; recycled novel titles; and new or forthcoming works by Peter Lovesey, Graham Hurley, Peter Guttridge, Peter Hanington, and Vaseem Khan. You’ll find all of that—plus more—here.
• The program for this year’s Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival (July 22-25) has been released. So has the list of online events comprising the July 14-17 More Than Malice conference.
• And the dust jacket of Paul Doiron’s new Mike Bowditch novel, Dead by Dawn, confirms that aerial shots of snowy forests really have become a recurring theme on covers these last few years.
Wednesday, June 23, 2021
“Everybody Counts or Nobody Counts”
This coming Friday, June 25, will bring the premiere, on Amazon Prime, of the seventh and final season of the popular crime drama Bosch. Energetic efforts by fans to convince Prime honchos to continue the series, which is based on Michael Connelly’s best-selling novels about Los Angeles police detective Harry Bosch, amounted to little. However, plans have already been announced to launch a Bosch sequel on Amazon’s ad-supported streaming service, IMDb.TV.
According to The Killing Times, this latest run of the Titus Welliver-led series “takes its inspiration from novels written 20 years apart—The Concrete Blonde from 1994 and 2014’s The Burning Room, with Bosch and partner [Jerry] Edgar”—the latter played by Jamie Hector—“tackling two separate murder investigations.” It quotes an Amazon press release as saying the show “puts Harry’s famous motto centre stage: ‘Everybody counts or nobody counts.’ When a 10-year-old girl dies in an arson fire, Detective Harry Bosch risks everything to bring her killer to justice despite opposition from powerful forces. The highly charged, politically sensitive case forces Bosch to face a gruelling dilemma of how far he is willing to go to achieve justice.”
“Meanwhile,” explains Radio Times, Edgar “is spiralling after his showdown with Jacques Avril in season six. This strains but deepens Bosch and Edgar’s relationship, as Welliver told EW: ‘I think that will be the big payoff, to see how they work their way through it, unpack that, and it’s a lot of stuff. You know, while there is a healthy dose of action and things going on, I always feel like [Bosch] comes down to stories about people, and the fragility of human nature.’”
If you could use a refresher on Bosch’s history, click here.
READ MORE: “Bosch Season 7 Preview: In a Changed World, How Should We Feel About Police Shows?” by Keith Roysdon (CrimeReads); “TV’s Hero Cops Are Under Scrutiny. But Bosch Knew the System Was Broken All Along,” by Greg Braxton (Los Angeles Times); “A Fond and Fearless Goodbye to Bosch,” by Colette Bancroft (Tampa Bay Times).
According to The Killing Times, this latest run of the Titus Welliver-led series “takes its inspiration from novels written 20 years apart—The Concrete Blonde from 1994 and 2014’s The Burning Room, with Bosch and partner [Jerry] Edgar”—the latter played by Jamie Hector—“tackling two separate murder investigations.” It quotes an Amazon press release as saying the show “puts Harry’s famous motto centre stage: ‘Everybody counts or nobody counts.’ When a 10-year-old girl dies in an arson fire, Detective Harry Bosch risks everything to bring her killer to justice despite opposition from powerful forces. The highly charged, politically sensitive case forces Bosch to face a gruelling dilemma of how far he is willing to go to achieve justice.”
“Meanwhile,” explains Radio Times, Edgar “is spiralling after his showdown with Jacques Avril in season six. This strains but deepens Bosch and Edgar’s relationship, as Welliver told EW: ‘I think that will be the big payoff, to see how they work their way through it, unpack that, and it’s a lot of stuff. You know, while there is a healthy dose of action and things going on, I always feel like [Bosch] comes down to stories about people, and the fragility of human nature.’”
If you could use a refresher on Bosch’s history, click here.
READ MORE: “Bosch Season 7 Preview: In a Changed World, How Should We Feel About Police Shows?” by Keith Roysdon (CrimeReads); “TV’s Hero Cops Are Under Scrutiny. But Bosch Knew the System Was Broken All Along,” by Greg Braxton (Los Angeles Times); “A Fond and Fearless Goodbye to Bosch,” by Colette Bancroft (Tampa Bay Times).
Friday, March 05, 2021
“Bosch” Makes Its Move
Bosch, the oft-lauded Amazon Prime police-procedural series based on Michael Connelly’s novels, is set to return sometime this spring or in early summer for its seventh—and last—season. However, an as-yet-untitled spinoff series is already in the works for Amazon’s ad-supported streaming service, IMDb.TV.
According to The Hollywood Reporter,
According to The Hollywood Reporter,
Titus Welliver, Mimi Rogers and Madison Lintz will continue their roles on the spinoff, and much of the Bosch creative team, including series creator Eric Overmyer and author Michael Connelly, is also involved. …Click here to read that entire Reporter article.
The new series will follow Harry Bosch (Welliver) to the next phase of his career, where he finds himself working with his former adversary, attorney Honey “Money” Chandler (Rogers). The two have a deep and complicated history but work on something they can agree on: finding justice. Lintz will continue playing Harry’s daughter, Maddie.
“I am beyond excited by this and I think the fans that have called for more Bosch will be as well,” said Connelly, who created the Harry Bosch character and executive produces the series. “To continue the Harry Bosch story and see him team up with ‘Money’ Chandler will be more than I could have ever wished for. And to continue our relationship with Amazon and be part of the IMDb TV lineup will ensure our commitment to providing viewers with a high-quality, creative and relevant show. I can’t wait to get started.”
Friday, April 24, 2020
Bullet Points: Staying Occupied Edition
• HBO-TV’s Perry Mason reboot, starring Matthew Rhys as a character closer to Chinatown’s Jake Gittes than to Raymond Burr’s resolute defense attorney, finally has a broadcast debut date—June 21—and a trailer, found here. Plot details about this mini-series are sparse, but it’s supposed to be a Mason origin story, set in 1932 Los Angeles and involving an Aimee Semple McPherson-like celebrity evangelist, that year’s Olympic Games and L.A.’s oil boom, and “a child kidnapping gone very, very wrong.” Filling out the cast will be John Lithgow, former Orphan Black star Tatiana Maslany, Chris Chalk as Paul Drake, and Juliet Rylance as Della Street. The International Movie Database (IMDb) suggests this drama will run to eight episodes.
• Piggy-backing upon that HBO show, The Mysterious Press is reissuing half a dozen of Erle Stanley Gardner’s original Mason novels in e-book format, all with rather handsome noirish covers. Among those re-releases are
The Case of the Lonely Heiress (1948), The Case of the Green-Eyed Sister (1953), and The Case of the Terrified Typist (1956).
• Meanwhile, ITV’s new Van der Valk, a three-episode reboot of the same-named 1972-1992 British crime drama, is set to premiere in the UK this coming Sunday, April 26. The show features Marc Warren (Beecham House, Hustle, Mad Dogs) in his first lead role, as street-smart and unapologetic Amsterdam police detective Simon “Piet” Van der Valk, with Maimie McCoy (DCI Banks, A Confession, Endeavour) playing “Lucienne Hassell, Van der Valk’s highly competent partner who isn’t afraid to ruffle some feathers.” Radio Times says this “appears to be a newly created role replacing that of Inspecteur Johnny Kroon, the naïve assistant from the original series portrayed by Michael Latimer.” Both shows were inspired by Nicolas Freeling novels. Warren’s Van Der Valk will join PBS-TV’s Masterpiece Mystery! lineup sometime this summer, though a specific air date has not yet been announced.
• And The Columbophile ponders the possibility of rebooting Peter Falk’s famous TV detective drama, Columbo. Should a one-off motion picture be made, or might a new series be launched? If the latter, then should the stories be set in the 1970s, or should they be updated with forensics technology and cell phones? Finally, who should occupy the lead role—Mark Ruffalo, perhaps, or Russian Doll star Natasha Lyonne? (Falk once said that the only other actor he could see playing his bumbling L.A. police lieutenant was Art Carney.) “ … I’m not vehemently opposed to a Columbo reboot in a way I once was,” writes The Columbophile’s unidentified blogger, “but would only feel confident if it was set in the opulent L.A. of the ’70s, remained true to the original character’s sex, ethnicity, habits and personality, was a series not a one-off movie, and was suitably supported by a cavalcade of talent. In short, more of the same from when the show was at its peak.” Even I might be OK with it under those terms.
• NoirCon 2020 has been cancelled because of the novel coronavirus pandemic, says The Gumshoe Site. That gathering had previously been scheduled to take place in L.A. from September 10 to 13. “NoirCon is a biennial literary conference devoted to the dark subgenre of fiction and film called ‘noir,’” explains Gumshoe blogger Jiro Kiruma, who adds: “Actually the previous NoirCon, which was supposed to be held in Philadelphia in 2018, was cancelled too, partly due to the passing of its co-founder Deen Kogan in March 2018.” The official cancellation notice, from NoirCon organizer Lou Boxer, is here.
• CrimeReads’ Molly Odintz today surveys the field of crime and mystery novels “set against a backdrop of plague or [that] feature mysterious spreading illnesses. Some,” she explains, “are more relevant to our times than others—after all, COVID-19, unlike some of the illnesses in the following books, is not a psychological malady—but all should help us slowly begin to process the enormity of our current situation (and perhaps help us feel just a bit better about the odds, compared to those of the past).”
• English journalist-author Tony Parsons (#Taken) knows just the sort of story he would like to tell, if Ian Fleming Publications ever commissions him to pen a new James Bond continuation novel. As he writes in the UK edition of GQ magazine:
• Like many of you, I suspect, I am currently watching my way through Season 6 of Bosch, the Amazon Prime TV series—based on Michael Connelly’s police procedurals—that dropped last week. (My opinion so far: This run of 10 episodes is far more interesting than Series 5.) Tied in with that premiere comes Michael Carlson’s new piece about “the way the show’s visuals work to set scenes, and also to set the tone of the whole series.” It appeared originally in Medium, but a version can also be found in Shots.
• Killer Covers concluded its month-long salute to artist Mitchell Hooks last weekend, after rolling out almost 100 paperback covers he created. If you missed out on some of that series, click here.
• Procrastinating from far more important responsibilities, Southern California author Lee Goldberg (Fake Truth) has lately put together humorous short tours of his home office, a couple of which supply answers to viewer questions about whale penises, his James Bond film posters, and more. You can watch them here, here, and here.
• During one of our trips to London, my wife and I made a special visit to Shakespeare’s Globe, a modern re-creation of William Shakespeare’s 17th-century playhouse on the south bank of the Thames. I’d purchased tickets months in advance for a presentation of Romeo and Juliet, and though I was suffering a terrible cold on the day of the show (I’m sure those sitting around us expected me to be hauled away to the nearest hospital at any moment), I insisted on remaining through the entire play. Now you can enjoy the Globe’s Romeo and Juliet for yourself, without running the risk of contracting the novel coronavirus during a plane flight. Literary Hub reports that the Globe “is making past performances of some of their productions available to stream for free through June. From now until May 3, you can watch the theater’s 2009 production of Romeo and Juliet. The rest of the roster includes The Two Noble Kinsman, The Winter’s Tale, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
• By the way, the Bard’s 456th birthday is coming up this weekend, on April 26—the perfect excuse for Literary Hub to arrange a discussion “between five scholars who have devoted their careers situating Shakespeare alongside issues of performance, education, identity, partisanship and more …” Assistant editor Aaron Robertson introduces it as “an essential guide to the possible futures of our collective engagement with theater.”
• Author and educator Art Taylor notes on Facebook that the new issue of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine contains an announcement of which writers and short stories have won that publication’s 2019 Readers Awards. They are, in order of their placement, David Dean (for “The Duellist,” May/June 2019), Paul D. Marks (for “Fadeout on Bunker Hill,” March/April 2019), and—tying for third-place honors—Doug Allyn (for “The Dutchy,” November/December 2019) and G.M. Malliet (for “Whiteout,” January/February 2019). Below, I am embedding the scan of EQMM’s announcement that Taylor featured in Facebook. Click on the image to open a more readable enlargement.
• Before its recent re-release, by Poisoned Pen Press, I’m not sure I had ever heard of The Beetle, an 1897 supernatural horror novel from British writer Richard Marsh. Yet in its day, observes Olivia Rutigliano, it outsold Bram Stoker’s Dracula, published in the same year.
• From Mary Picken, at Live and Deadly:
• Just a quick reminder: Submissions to this year’s Eleanor Taylor Bland Crime Fiction Writers of Color Award contest, sponsored by Sisters in Crime, “are free and open to any emerging writer through June 8, 2020,” says Oline H. Cogdill in the Mystery Scene blog. “The winner will be announced by July 15, 2020.”
• A Shroud of Thoughts blogger Terence Towles Canote has posted a broad recap of the acting credits chalked up by Brian Dennehy during his 43-year career; Dennehy, of course, died last week at age 81. One of my favorite Dennehy appearances was his turn as a comfortably corrupt sheriff in the 1985 western film Silverado, but he’d previously guest starred on such TV series as Serpico, Lou Grant, Cagney & Lacey, and Hunter, and led the cast of Big Shamus, Little Shamus, an extremely short-lived 1979 detective drama (see its opening title sequence here). He would go on to star in the 1994 medical series Birdland and the 2001 sitcom The Fighting Fitzgeralds, as well as in teleflicks such as Perfect Witness (1989), To Catch a Killer (1992), and Deadly Matrimony (1992), the first of six movies in which he played a homicide investigator named Jack Reed. In addition to the aforementioned Silverado, Dennehy featured in big-screeners such as First Blood (1982), Cocoon (1985), Legal Eagles (1986), and Tommy Boy (1995). He won a Golden Globe Award for his role as Willy Loman in the 2000 television film Death of a Salesman, plus two Tony Awards for his stage performances. Canote calls Dennehy “truly a modern-day character actor. Throughout his career he portrayed a wide variety of characters including heroes, villains, and everything in between.”
• Gone now, too, is Andrew J. Fenady, the Ohio-born actor, screenwriter, producer, and author, who may be best remembered by Rap Sheet readers for his two lighthearted detective novels, The Man With Bogart’s Face (1977) and The Secret of Sam Marlow (1980), both starring L.A. cop-turned-private investigator Sam Marlow. Fenady passed away on April 16. He was 91 years old. Long before he created his fictional retro gumshoe, Fenady produced a trio of still-well-remembered TV westerns: The Rebel (1959–1961), Chuck Connors’ Branded (1965–1966), and finally, Hondo (1967), about which Fenady talks in a couple of video clips found here. He continued working on films over the next quarter century, his credits including a 1980 adaptation of The Man with Bogart’s Face and the 1989 TV film Jake Spanner, Private Eye (aka Hoodwinked), starring Robert Mitchum as an aged, cranky sleuth created by L.A. Morse. (See a trailer here.)
• Mystery Fanfare conveys the sad news that Sheila Connolly has died. Blogger Janet Rudolph explains that Connolly, born in 1950, “was the author of numerous novels and short stories: The County Cork Mysteries (8 novels and a novella), The Orchard Mysteries (12 novels), The Victorian Village Mysteries (1), The Relatively Dead Series (6), The Museum Mysteries (7) and two standalones: Reunion with Death and Once She Knew. Her latest book, Fatal Roots, was published by Crooked Lane Books in January.” Connolly has at least one more new novel yet to hit bookstores: her third Victorian Village mystery, The Secret Staircase, due out in May 2021 from Minotaur. FOLLOW-UP: Blogger Lesa Holstine offers her own farewell to Connolly, reposting a piece the author wrote in 2014 “about her love of Ireland.”
• Finally, we bid adieu to Rubem Fonseca, “one of Brazil’s leading literary figures whose flinty, obscenity-laden crime stories were seen as dark metaphors for the rot in Brazilian society,” according to The New York Times. Jose Ignacio recalls in A Crime Is Afoot that Fonseca, a onetime police commissioner in Rio de Janeiro, “started his career by writing short stories, considered by some critics as his strongest literary creations. His first popular novel was [1983’s] A Grande Arte (High Art), but Agosto [1990] is usually considered his best work. In 2003, he won the Camões Prize, considered to be the most important award in the Portuguese language. In 2012 he became the first recipient of Chile’s Manuel Rojas Ibero-American Narrative Award.” Fonseca was less than a month away from his 95th birthday when he died on April 15. (Hat tip to Mystery Fanfare.)
• In Reference to Murder says that the Mystery Writers of America “will be announcing the 74th annual Edgar Allan Poe Award winners via the Twitter handle @EdgarAwards next Thursday, April 30th, beginning at 11 a.m. That’s the same date the winners would have been announced at the honors banquet that was canceled due to the coronavirus.” Here are all of the contenders.
• Shotsmag’s Ayo Onatade chatted recently with former New Zealand lawyer Craig Sisterson, the author of Southern Cross Crime, a guide to the world of Australian and New Zealand crime writing. (An audiobook version of that work will soon be available in both Britain and the States, but the UK print version—originally scheduled for April, has been postponed until September, due to the COVID-19 crisis.) During their exchange, Onatade asked what “fun fact” Sisterson had come across while researching his book. He responded:
• I mentioned in a previous post that Thomas McNulty has launched a YouTube channel on which he talks about vintage books. His latest offering—found here—reintroduces us to MacKinlay Kantor (1904-1977), once “one of America’s best-known and best-selling authors,” but now pretty much forgotten. McNulty’s narrative makes me want to keep my eyes out in the future for used copies of Kantor’s works, and to find a copy of his still-in-print 1955 Civil War novel, Andersonville.
• More than a decade ago, The Rap Sheet posted video of Mark Coggins interviewing fellow crime novelist Joe Gores, the author of 32 Cadillacs, Interface, and the Maltese Falcon prequel Spade & Archer. But just last week, I received an e-note from Coggins, saying that “with so much time on my hands” during the pandemic shutdown, he’d “tackled a project that had been on the docket for years: transcribing my interview with Joe Gores.” You’ll find the welcome results here.
• Otto Penzler has now cracked the top 20 among his choices of “the greatest crime films of all time.” Number 20 was The Conversation (1974), with North by Northwest (1959) capturing the 19th spot. Catch up with all of Penzler’s selections here.
• The Moderate Voice has some rather nice things to say about Margaret Rutherford: Dreadnought with Good Manners, Andy Merriman’s 2009 biography of the English actress who portrayed Agatha Christie’s Miss Jane Marple in a succession of 1960s films. Reviewer Doug Gibson’s choicest tidbit, though, is this one: “During her life Rutherford feared that a family history of unstable behavior would cause her to lose her sanity. Her father murdered her grandpa. As a toddler her mother killed herself. She was raised by her aunt.” Apparently, Rutherford suffered from serious depression.
• Finally, a few more author interviews of note: Nancie Clare speaks with Marcia Clark (Final Judgment) for her Speaking of Mysteries podcast; during an exchange on another podcast, Seize the Way, Harlan Coben (The Boy from the Woods) covers subjects ranging from his writing insecurities to his life as a New Jersey father; Criminal Element’s Steve Erickson fires a few questions at Max Allan Collins about the latter’s latest Mickey Spillane collaboration novel, Masquerade for Murder; and for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Steve Weddle chats with William Boyle about the importance of place setting in Boyle’s books (including his newest, City of Margins).
• Piggy-backing upon that HBO show, The Mysterious Press is reissuing half a dozen of Erle Stanley Gardner’s original Mason novels in e-book format, all with rather handsome noirish covers. Among those re-releases are
The Case of the Lonely Heiress (1948), The Case of the Green-Eyed Sister (1953), and The Case of the Terrified Typist (1956).• Meanwhile, ITV’s new Van der Valk, a three-episode reboot of the same-named 1972-1992 British crime drama, is set to premiere in the UK this coming Sunday, April 26. The show features Marc Warren (Beecham House, Hustle, Mad Dogs) in his first lead role, as street-smart and unapologetic Amsterdam police detective Simon “Piet” Van der Valk, with Maimie McCoy (DCI Banks, A Confession, Endeavour) playing “Lucienne Hassell, Van der Valk’s highly competent partner who isn’t afraid to ruffle some feathers.” Radio Times says this “appears to be a newly created role replacing that of Inspecteur Johnny Kroon, the naïve assistant from the original series portrayed by Michael Latimer.” Both shows were inspired by Nicolas Freeling novels. Warren’s Van Der Valk will join PBS-TV’s Masterpiece Mystery! lineup sometime this summer, though a specific air date has not yet been announced.
• And The Columbophile ponders the possibility of rebooting Peter Falk’s famous TV detective drama, Columbo. Should a one-off motion picture be made, or might a new series be launched? If the latter, then should the stories be set in the 1970s, or should they be updated with forensics technology and cell phones? Finally, who should occupy the lead role—Mark Ruffalo, perhaps, or Russian Doll star Natasha Lyonne? (Falk once said that the only other actor he could see playing his bumbling L.A. police lieutenant was Art Carney.) “ … I’m not vehemently opposed to a Columbo reboot in a way I once was,” writes The Columbophile’s unidentified blogger, “but would only feel confident if it was set in the opulent L.A. of the ’70s, remained true to the original character’s sex, ethnicity, habits and personality, was a series not a one-off movie, and was suitably supported by a cavalcade of talent. In short, more of the same from when the show was at its peak.” Even I might be OK with it under those terms.
• NoirCon 2020 has been cancelled because of the novel coronavirus pandemic, says The Gumshoe Site. That gathering had previously been scheduled to take place in L.A. from September 10 to 13. “NoirCon is a biennial literary conference devoted to the dark subgenre of fiction and film called ‘noir,’” explains Gumshoe blogger Jiro Kiruma, who adds: “Actually the previous NoirCon, which was supposed to be held in Philadelphia in 2018, was cancelled too, partly due to the passing of its co-founder Deen Kogan in March 2018.” The official cancellation notice, from NoirCon organizer Lou Boxer, is here.
• CrimeReads’ Molly Odintz today surveys the field of crime and mystery novels “set against a backdrop of plague or [that] feature mysterious spreading illnesses. Some,” she explains, “are more relevant to our times than others—after all, COVID-19, unlike some of the illnesses in the following books, is not a psychological malady—but all should help us slowly begin to process the enormity of our current situation (and perhaps help us feel just a bit better about the odds, compared to those of the past).”
• English journalist-author Tony Parsons (#Taken) knows just the sort of story he would like to tell, if Ian Fleming Publications ever commissions him to pen a new James Bond continuation novel. As he writes in the UK edition of GQ magazine:
I have always planned to set my own James Bond book after the end of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and before the start of You Only Live Twice. That means the lost days between the murder of Bond’s wife, Tracy, in the final chapter of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service but before the first chapter of You Only Live Twice, which finds our hero out east in a geisha house, given one last chance of redemption by M. That is surely fertile ground for any novelist—between the loss of the love of your life and your last chance to do something right. I even have a title—spoiler alert—Always Say Die. You can almost imagine Adele or Shirley Bassey singing it.• While we’re on the subject of 007, The Spy Command points to new research by espionage-fictionist Jeremy Duns, which confirms that Catch-22 author Joseph Heller worked on a version of the script for Casino Royale, the 1967 movie based oh-so-loosely on Fleming’s 1953 Bond novel of the same name and starring David Niven.
• Like many of you, I suspect, I am currently watching my way through Season 6 of Bosch, the Amazon Prime TV series—based on Michael Connelly’s police procedurals—that dropped last week. (My opinion so far: This run of 10 episodes is far more interesting than Series 5.) Tied in with that premiere comes Michael Carlson’s new piece about “the way the show’s visuals work to set scenes, and also to set the tone of the whole series.” It appeared originally in Medium, but a version can also be found in Shots.
• Killer Covers concluded its month-long salute to artist Mitchell Hooks last weekend, after rolling out almost 100 paperback covers he created. If you missed out on some of that series, click here.
• Procrastinating from far more important responsibilities, Southern California author Lee Goldberg (Fake Truth) has lately put together humorous short tours of his home office, a couple of which supply answers to viewer questions about whale penises, his James Bond film posters, and more. You can watch them here, here, and here.
• During one of our trips to London, my wife and I made a special visit to Shakespeare’s Globe, a modern re-creation of William Shakespeare’s 17th-century playhouse on the south bank of the Thames. I’d purchased tickets months in advance for a presentation of Romeo and Juliet, and though I was suffering a terrible cold on the day of the show (I’m sure those sitting around us expected me to be hauled away to the nearest hospital at any moment), I insisted on remaining through the entire play. Now you can enjoy the Globe’s Romeo and Juliet for yourself, without running the risk of contracting the novel coronavirus during a plane flight. Literary Hub reports that the Globe “is making past performances of some of their productions available to stream for free through June. From now until May 3, you can watch the theater’s 2009 production of Romeo and Juliet. The rest of the roster includes The Two Noble Kinsman, The Winter’s Tale, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
• By the way, the Bard’s 456th birthday is coming up this weekend, on April 26—the perfect excuse for Literary Hub to arrange a discussion “between five scholars who have devoted their careers situating Shakespeare alongside issues of performance, education, identity, partisanship and more …” Assistant editor Aaron Robertson introduces it as “an essential guide to the possible futures of our collective engagement with theater.”
• Author and educator Art Taylor notes on Facebook that the new issue of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine contains an announcement of which writers and short stories have won that publication’s 2019 Readers Awards. They are, in order of their placement, David Dean (for “The Duellist,” May/June 2019), Paul D. Marks (for “Fadeout on Bunker Hill,” March/April 2019), and—tying for third-place honors—Doug Allyn (for “The Dutchy,” November/December 2019) and G.M. Malliet (for “Whiteout,” January/February 2019). Below, I am embedding the scan of EQMM’s announcement that Taylor featured in Facebook. Click on the image to open a more readable enlargement.
• Before its recent re-release, by Poisoned Pen Press, I’m not sure I had ever heard of The Beetle, an 1897 supernatural horror novel from British writer Richard Marsh. Yet in its day, observes Olivia Rutigliano, it outsold Bram Stoker’s Dracula, published in the same year.
• From Mary Picken, at Live and Deadly:
As we wait to hear whether the Bloody Scotland Crime Writing Festival can go ahead (a decision is expected at the end of the month) there is good news around the annual prizes the Festival Awards for Scottish Crime Fiction in the past year.A longlist of McIlvanney Prize nominees is expected on June 23, with finalists to be announced on September 1. A final decision on this year’s winner is anticipated on September 18.
Bloody Scotland is delighted to confirm that The McIlvanney Prize will be going ahead in 2020 with new sponsor, the Glencairn Glass, the World’s Favourite Whisky Glass and the Official Glass for Whisky. The Bloody Scotland Debut Crime Novel of the Year, which was launched last year and won by Claire Askew with All the Hidden Truths, will also go ahead, sponsored by the Glencairn Glass.
The award-winning, Scottish family business Glencairn Crystal, creators of the Glencairn Glass, has always produced the decanter for the winner of The McIlvanney Prize so it was a natural partnership for them to come on board as sponsors of the prizes in their entirety.
• Just a quick reminder: Submissions to this year’s Eleanor Taylor Bland Crime Fiction Writers of Color Award contest, sponsored by Sisters in Crime, “are free and open to any emerging writer through June 8, 2020,” says Oline H. Cogdill in the Mystery Scene blog. “The winner will be announced by July 15, 2020.”
• A Shroud of Thoughts blogger Terence Towles Canote has posted a broad recap of the acting credits chalked up by Brian Dennehy during his 43-year career; Dennehy, of course, died last week at age 81. One of my favorite Dennehy appearances was his turn as a comfortably corrupt sheriff in the 1985 western film Silverado, but he’d previously guest starred on such TV series as Serpico, Lou Grant, Cagney & Lacey, and Hunter, and led the cast of Big Shamus, Little Shamus, an extremely short-lived 1979 detective drama (see its opening title sequence here). He would go on to star in the 1994 medical series Birdland and the 2001 sitcom The Fighting Fitzgeralds, as well as in teleflicks such as Perfect Witness (1989), To Catch a Killer (1992), and Deadly Matrimony (1992), the first of six movies in which he played a homicide investigator named Jack Reed. In addition to the aforementioned Silverado, Dennehy featured in big-screeners such as First Blood (1982), Cocoon (1985), Legal Eagles (1986), and Tommy Boy (1995). He won a Golden Globe Award for his role as Willy Loman in the 2000 television film Death of a Salesman, plus two Tony Awards for his stage performances. Canote calls Dennehy “truly a modern-day character actor. Throughout his career he portrayed a wide variety of characters including heroes, villains, and everything in between.”
• Gone now, too, is Andrew J. Fenady, the Ohio-born actor, screenwriter, producer, and author, who may be best remembered by Rap Sheet readers for his two lighthearted detective novels, The Man With Bogart’s Face (1977) and The Secret of Sam Marlow (1980), both starring L.A. cop-turned-private investigator Sam Marlow. Fenady passed away on April 16. He was 91 years old. Long before he created his fictional retro gumshoe, Fenady produced a trio of still-well-remembered TV westerns: The Rebel (1959–1961), Chuck Connors’ Branded (1965–1966), and finally, Hondo (1967), about which Fenady talks in a couple of video clips found here. He continued working on films over the next quarter century, his credits including a 1980 adaptation of The Man with Bogart’s Face and the 1989 TV film Jake Spanner, Private Eye (aka Hoodwinked), starring Robert Mitchum as an aged, cranky sleuth created by L.A. Morse. (See a trailer here.)
• Mystery Fanfare conveys the sad news that Sheila Connolly has died. Blogger Janet Rudolph explains that Connolly, born in 1950, “was the author of numerous novels and short stories: The County Cork Mysteries (8 novels and a novella), The Orchard Mysteries (12 novels), The Victorian Village Mysteries (1), The Relatively Dead Series (6), The Museum Mysteries (7) and two standalones: Reunion with Death and Once She Knew. Her latest book, Fatal Roots, was published by Crooked Lane Books in January.” Connolly has at least one more new novel yet to hit bookstores: her third Victorian Village mystery, The Secret Staircase, due out in May 2021 from Minotaur. FOLLOW-UP: Blogger Lesa Holstine offers her own farewell to Connolly, reposting a piece the author wrote in 2014 “about her love of Ireland.”
• Finally, we bid adieu to Rubem Fonseca, “one of Brazil’s leading literary figures whose flinty, obscenity-laden crime stories were seen as dark metaphors for the rot in Brazilian society,” according to The New York Times. Jose Ignacio recalls in A Crime Is Afoot that Fonseca, a onetime police commissioner in Rio de Janeiro, “started his career by writing short stories, considered by some critics as his strongest literary creations. His first popular novel was [1983’s] A Grande Arte (High Art), but Agosto [1990] is usually considered his best work. In 2003, he won the Camões Prize, considered to be the most important award in the Portuguese language. In 2012 he became the first recipient of Chile’s Manuel Rojas Ibero-American Narrative Award.” Fonseca was less than a month away from his 95th birthday when he died on April 15. (Hat tip to Mystery Fanfare.)
• In Reference to Murder says that the Mystery Writers of America “will be announcing the 74th annual Edgar Allan Poe Award winners via the Twitter handle @EdgarAwards next Thursday, April 30th, beginning at 11 a.m. That’s the same date the winners would have been announced at the honors banquet that was canceled due to the coronavirus.” Here are all of the contenders.
• Shotsmag’s Ayo Onatade chatted recently with former New Zealand lawyer Craig Sisterson, the author of Southern Cross Crime, a guide to the world of Australian and New Zealand crime writing. (An audiobook version of that work will soon be available in both Britain and the States, but the UK print version—originally scheduled for April, has been postponed until September, due to the COVID-19 crisis.) During their exchange, Onatade asked what “fun fact” Sisterson had come across while researching his book. He responded:
Hmm … before writing the book I was already aware that the history of antipodean crime writing dated back to the earliest days of the detective fiction genre (in terms of novels and short stories). The bestselling detective novel of the 19th century wasn’t written by Wilkie Collins or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, as many might think, but by a New Zealand lawyer who’d moved to Melbourne to further his dreams of becoming a playwright (Fergus Hume, The Mystery of the Hansom Cab).Click here to enjoy this full interview.One of the earliest writers of police tales was Mary Fortune, who wrote dozens from the Australian goldfields in the 1860s. Thanks to the research of the likes of Lucy Sussex, I was already aware of these historic figures.
But what I didn’t know was that the very first Edgar Award given out by the Mystery Writers of America back in 1954, actually went to an Australian. Charlotte Jay (pen name of Adelaide writer Geraldine Halls) won for Beat Not the Bones, a psychological thriller about an Australian woman who travels to New Guinea to uncover the truth behind her husband’s death. Talking to award-winning crime writer Alan Carter recently about that book (he’d come across it during his Ph.D. studies), he described it as “fantastic, radical and well ahead of its time … A vivid, often hallucinatory, gut-punching beautifully written book.”
So, while we’re experiencing an antipodean crime wave in recent years, the currents certainly run long and deep back through the decades and centuries.
• I mentioned in a previous post that Thomas McNulty has launched a YouTube channel on which he talks about vintage books. His latest offering—found here—reintroduces us to MacKinlay Kantor (1904-1977), once “one of America’s best-known and best-selling authors,” but now pretty much forgotten. McNulty’s narrative makes me want to keep my eyes out in the future for used copies of Kantor’s works, and to find a copy of his still-in-print 1955 Civil War novel, Andersonville.
• More than a decade ago, The Rap Sheet posted video of Mark Coggins interviewing fellow crime novelist Joe Gores, the author of 32 Cadillacs, Interface, and the Maltese Falcon prequel Spade & Archer. But just last week, I received an e-note from Coggins, saying that “with so much time on my hands” during the pandemic shutdown, he’d “tackled a project that had been on the docket for years: transcribing my interview with Joe Gores.” You’ll find the welcome results here.
• Otto Penzler has now cracked the top 20 among his choices of “the greatest crime films of all time.” Number 20 was The Conversation (1974), with North by Northwest (1959) capturing the 19th spot. Catch up with all of Penzler’s selections here.
• The Moderate Voice has some rather nice things to say about Margaret Rutherford: Dreadnought with Good Manners, Andy Merriman’s 2009 biography of the English actress who portrayed Agatha Christie’s Miss Jane Marple in a succession of 1960s films. Reviewer Doug Gibson’s choicest tidbit, though, is this one: “During her life Rutherford feared that a family history of unstable behavior would cause her to lose her sanity. Her father murdered her grandpa. As a toddler her mother killed herself. She was raised by her aunt.” Apparently, Rutherford suffered from serious depression.
• Finally, a few more author interviews of note: Nancie Clare speaks with Marcia Clark (Final Judgment) for her Speaking of Mysteries podcast; during an exchange on another podcast, Seize the Way, Harlan Coben (The Boy from the Woods) covers subjects ranging from his writing insecurities to his life as a New Jersey father; Criminal Element’s Steve Erickson fires a few questions at Max Allan Collins about the latter’s latest Mickey Spillane collaboration novel, Masquerade for Murder; and for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Steve Weddle chats with William Boyle about the importance of place setting in Boyle’s books (including his newest, City of Margins).
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