Bullet Points: Still Hanging in There Edition

• The Strand Magazine is out today with its list of nominees for the 2020 Strand Critics Awards. The contenders are as follows:

Best Mystery Novel:
— Big Sky, by Kate Atkinson (Little, Brown)
— The Lost Man, by Jane Harper (Flatiron)
— The Sentence Is Death, by Anthony Horowitz (Harper)
— Lady in the Lake, by Laura Lippman (Morrow)
— Heaven, My Home, by Attica Locke (Mulholland)
— The Border, by Don Winslow (Morrow)

Best Debut Novel:
— Scrublands, by Chris Hammer (Atria)
— Miracle Creek, by Angie Kim (Sarah Crichton)
— One Night Gone, by Tara Laskowski (Graydon House)
— The Silent Patient, by Alex Michaelides (Celadon)
— Three-Fifths, by John Vercher (Agora)

In addition, authors Walter Mosley and Tess Gerritsen will receive Lifetime Achievement Awards, and Bronwen Hruska of Soho Press will be given the Publisher of the Year Award. Other winners will be announced during a virtual event come September 4.

• Earlier this week, the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers announced the winners of its 2020 Scribe Awards, in seven categories. The only one focused on crime fiction appears to be “Original Novel—General.” And the winner there is Robert B. Parker’s The Bitterest Pill, by Reed Farrel Coleman (Putnam). Competing for that same honor were Murder, My Love, by Max Allan Collins (Titan), and Murder, She Wrote: A Time for Murder, by Jon Land (Berkley).

• While we’re on the subject of literary prizes, let me also acknowledge the recipients of the 2019 Shirley Jackson Awards, which celebrate “outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic.” There were six categories of contenders, but it’s among the rivals for Best Novel that we find the most works of crime fiction. The Book of X, by Sarah Rose Etter (Two Dollar Radio), captured that title, beating out five other books: Curious Toys, by Elizabeth Hand (Little, Brown); Goodnight Stranger, by Miciah Bay Gault (Park Row); Ninth House, by Leigh Bardugo (Flatiron); Nothing to See Here, by Kevin Wilson (Ecco); and Tinfoil Butterfly, by Rachel Eve Moulton (MCD x FSG Originals).

• A third Life on Mars series is a go! First, of course, came the 2006-2007 UK science-fiction police procedural Life on Mars, followed by its sequel, Ashes to Ashes. Now we can look forward to the “third and final installment of the story,” titled Lazarus. The Killing Times says Mars co-creator Matthew Graham plans a four- or five-episode run, and assures fans that all of the principal series stars—“John Simm, Phillip Glenister, and Keeley Hawes among them”—will be returning for Lazarus.

• Also from The Killing Times comes the welcome word that “Clerkenwell Films has picked up the rights to acclaimed Irish writer Catherine Ryan Howard’s third novel, Rewind.

It tells the story of Andrew, the manager of Shanamore Holiday Cottages, who watches his only guest via a hidden camera in her room. One night the unthinkable happens: a shadowy figure emerges onscreen, kills her and destroys the camera. But who is the murderer? How did they know about the camera? And how will Andrew live with himself?

Natalie wishes she’d stayed at home as soon as she arrives in the wintry isolation of Shanamore. There’s something creepy about the manager. She wants to leave, but she can’t—not until she’s found what she’s looking for.

• Brian Busby, who blogs at The Dusty Bookcase, draws my attention to the under-reported demise of Canadian mystery writer Edward O. Phillips on May 30. He writes: “Ted—as he was known—may not be well-known south of the border, though he was published in the United States. In Canada, his debut, Sunday's Child (1981), was nominated for the First Novel Award. His 1986 novel, Buried on Sunday, won the Arthur Ellis Award.” Wikipedia says the author “was best known for his mystery novel series featuring gay detective Geoffrey Chadwick.” An obituary in The Montreal Gazette notes that Phillips, a lifelong Quebec resident, died “of complications from COVID-19.” He was 88 years old. The Globe and Mail offers its own Phillips obit here.

• Variety reports that Ace Atkins’ novels starring Quinn Colson, “a former Army Ranger who returns to his home in rural northeast Mississippi,” and becomes a sheriff, are being adapted into an HBO-TV drama. There are 10 Colson yarns, beginning with 2011’s The Ranger and including the latest entry, The Revelators (Putnam).

• Meanwhile, Oline H. Cogdill interviews Atkins for the Mystery Scene magazine blog. “The plan was to have 10 questions for 10 years of Quinn,” she explains. “Instead, we got a bit carried away.”

• Author Sheila Kohler puts forth the proposition, in the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine blog, that Miguel de Cervantes’ 17th-century yarn, Don Quixote, was the first real crime novel.

• After scouring Ian Fleming’s novels for clues of every sort, William Boyd—who wrote the 2013 James Bond continuation novel, Solo—believes he’s found where British agent 007 lived in London. And it’s not far from the street where another spy-fiction celebrity, John le Carré’s George Smiley, had his own comfortable digs.

• For CrimeReads, Christina Schwarz offers a photo tour of sites familiar from the two years that Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were on the run from law-enforcement officials in the 1930s.

• I remember sitting through the 1990 film Dick Tracy, based on Chester Gould’s comic-strip character and starring Warren Beatty, Al Pacino, and Madonna. The experience was tedious, the script “lousy” (to quote Max Allan Collins, who penned the movie tie-in novel), and the character’s no better than two-dimensional. Early expectations of Dick Tracy generating a movie franchise quickly fell by the wayside. But as Den of Geek reports, there were ideas for what a sequel might be, even if no script was developed. Dick Tracy screenwriter Jack Epps Jr. tells Den’s Mike Cecchini that the follow-up “would have seen a roughly ten-year jump in time, featured an older Junior [the police detective’s adopted son], and put Tracy in the midst of World War II.

“The sequel [would have been] something around munitions and war secrets,” Epps says “I probably would have gone to factories, because I was always amazed at how America turned into this armament industry. We had no weapons manufacturers before the war began, and by the end, we were a juggernaut, turning out planes in two, three days and things like that.”

To be clear, there were no plans to put Warren Beatty in uniform and send Tracy overseas to join the war effort on the frontlines. Dick Tracy 2 would have been strictly a domestic wartime affair.

• Bloggers Dru Ann Love, of Dru’s Book Musings, and BOLO Books’ Kristopher Zgorski have teamed up for a new YouTube venture, BOLO*MUSINGS. It’s been an opportunity, thus far, for them to chat about recent and upcoming crime/mystery novels. The second installment, posted this week, finds the pair discussing a dozen of their favorite works from the first half of 2020.

• Do you remember Vengeance Unlimited, the 1998 ABC-TV crime drama starring Michael Madsen? As Wikipedia recalls, Madsen played Mr. Chapel, “a mysterious stranger keen on serving justice to those who had been ignored by the law. To achieve those ends, Mr. Chapel made use of promised favors from former clients. People in trouble were usually contacted by Chapel with an envelope on their front doorstep containing newspaper clippings related to previous clients, along with the phone number 555-0132. When Mr. Chapel took a case, his demand was simple: either pay a fee of one million dollars, or promise to do a favor at some time in the future—whatever, whenever, wherever and for however long he needed you—then your debt would be paid in full. In the series pilot, it was clear that Mr. Chapel had been doing this for some time, as he called in a number of favors to help his current client.” Only 16 episodes of Vengeance Unlimited were broadcast, and recently a YouTube channel called Pop Zone posted them all. There’s no telling how long they’ll be available, though, before a copyright complaint provokes their disappearance.

Bullet Points: Bursting at the Seams Edition

(Above) A word cloud generated from this post’s text.

Today begins the historic third week of mass-seclusion here in Washington state, and I cannot say that I’m bored yet. If my work situation were more unstable, or if I lived alone, this downtime might be giving me fits. Instead, it has rewarded me with extra hours in which to write (notice how busy The Rap Sheet has been lately with posts), and some wonderfully quiet time for reading. Beyond the many DVD collections of vintage TV series I have at the ready, I’ve been sampling newer shows, among them Vienna Blood (which I found delightful), SS-GB (which I loved … until the bizarrely inconclusive final episode), Dublin Murders (which I gave up on watching halfway through, no longer interested in the redundantly troubled pair of protagonist cops), Star Trek: Picard (which got off to a rocky start but ended powerfully), and Jamestown (which stars a couple of actresses I’ve also appreciated in other productions: Sophie Rundle from Dickensian; and Niamh Walsh from The English Game).

If it hadn’t been so cold and damp in Seattle of late, I would probably have spent more time outside—maintaining the necessary social distance from my fellow humans, of course. As it is, I have managed to walk a few times around the local lake, and I’m seriously thinking (believe it or not) about doing some gardening, should predications hold true of warmer days ahead. I ought to have prepared my front and back yards better before winter clamped down, but was hampered last fall by the inconvenience of several broken bones.

For today, here are a few bits and bobs from the Web that are of likely interest to readers of crime, mystery, and thriller fiction.

• Oh no, it’s come to this! CrimeFest organizers Adrian Muller and Donna Moore have placed at the top of their Web page a note explaining that this year’s convention—originally slated to take place from June 4 to 7 in Bristol, England—has been cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, CrimeFest is in need of financial assistance. “Due to contractual obligations which have already been met,” they explain, “we need to raise emergency funds for the sole purpose of ensuring the continuity of CrimeFest, and next year’s convention, and finding new ways to connect writers and readers to the crime fiction we all love. Whatever you can spare, will make a big difference. And if it is not convenient to donate directly, sharing this plea further will assist us greatly.” Click here to make a contribution via the JustGiving crowd-funding platform. The goal is to bring in £35,000. At last check, £5,470 had been raised already.

• Headliners at this year’s CrimeFest were to have been Lynda La Plante, Laura Lippman, and Robert Goddard. Let’s hope they’re all available in 2021.

• Big-selling American novelist James Patterson, who “has a long history of helping independent bookstores,” is stepping up again to support the cause. He is donating half a million bucks to help indie stores endangered by the novel coronavirus. “I can’t imagine anything more important right now, in terms of the book world, than helping indies survive,” he told the Los Angeles Times.

• Also on the disease front, Elizabeth Foxwell notes, in The Bunburyist, that a dinner ceremony during which new authors are to be inducted into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame has now been pushed back from June 2 to September 14. Among this year’s honorees is Brooklyn-born Anna Katharine Green (1846–1935), author of The Leavenworth Case (1878) and one of America’s first detective fictionists. The delayed ceremony will apparently be attended by Rebecca Crozier, Green’s great-great granddaughter.

• As an aid to all of us folks trapped at home with our fast-declining surplusages of toilet paper and run-amok coiffures, CrimeReads senior editor (and former bookseller) Molly Odintz has begun making recommendations to individual readers of what books they might tackle next. Her first advice-packed post is here, and she promises “an ongoing series.” If you’d like to know what additions the CrimeReads staff might suggest to you, shoot an e-mail request to crimereads@lithub.com. This undertaking follows the “Personalized Quarantine Book Recommendation” series already in progress at CrimeReads’ mother ship, Literary Hub.

• “To help us, and him, through the quarantine,” U.S. screenwriter/comic-book writer Damon Lindelof has begun composing an “exclusive, serialized” mystery story for venture capitalist Dave Pell’s blog, Next Draft. It’s titled “Something, Something, Something Murder,” and we’re told “chapters will update … periodically.”

• Oh, and John Connolly is now two chapters into posting a “Web-exclusive Charlie Parker novella,” “The Sisters Strange.”

• Most of us, when we think of Blake Edwards’ TV endeavors, immediately flash on Peter Gunn, his 1958-1961 private-eye drama starring Craig Stevens. A smaller percentage might recall that he also created the 1959-1960 adventure/drama Mr. Lucky. But I’m willing to wager that few people, save perhaps for those who were adults during the Kennedy administration, still remember Dante, the 1960-1961 NBC Monday-night series starring Howard Duff (the radio voice of Sam Spade) as William “Willie” Dante, an erstwhile gambler who now manages a downtown San Francisco nightclub called Dante’s Inferno. Edwards developed Dante as a recurring character—played originally by film star Dick Powell—on the 1950s CBS anthology series Four Star Playhouse. In the subsequent series Dante, says Wikipedia, Duff’s protagonist “claims to have put his past behind him,” but still keeps on his payroll longtime associates Stewart Styles (played by Alan Mowbray), serving as the club’s maître d’, and a thief-turned-bartender named Biff (Tom D’Andrea). “Every week,” wrote Michael Shonk in his 2013 Mystery*File overview of the series, “Willie would find himself caught in the middle of two or more opposing forces, usually the cops and bad guys. No one believed Willie was going straight, both the good guys and bad guys suspected him to be up to something.” What brought all of this to mind was a more recent Mystery*File post, in which editor Steve Lewis opined on the 22nd of 26 Dante episodes, “Dante in the Dark,” which guest-starred Marion Ross, the future Mrs. Cunningham on Happy Days. Sadly, that isn’t among the handful of episodes available on YouTube.

• Here’s an altogether remarkable resource for fans of vintage TV crime dramas: Uncle Earl’s Classic Television Channel. I can’t tell you who the heck Earl is, but he has amassed a trove of old-time films and small-screen delights. The site’s “Mystery, Detective and Crime Drama” features multiple episodes of series including 77 Sunset Strip, Burke’s Law, Checkmate, The New Adventures of Charlie Chan, Ellery Queen, The Fugitive, It Takes a Thief, Judd, for the Defense, Richard Diamond, Private Eye, Switch, and Mike Connors’ short-lived Tightrope. Oh, expect to find Dante there, too.

• A newsletter received last week from the Web site Modcinema, which sells movies and made-for-TV flicks produced during the 1960s and ’70s, reminded me that U.S. television audiences were offered a Law and Order before the Law & Order we now recall best. I’m talking about the 1976 NBC pilot film adapted from former policewoman Dorothy Uhnak’s 1973 novel, Law and Order. As Lee Goldberg summarized it in Unsold Television Pilots: 1955-1989, that two-and-a-half-hour drama followed “three generations of an Irish American family of NYPD officers. The focal point of the envisioned series would be the Deputy Chief of Public Affairs [played by Darren McGavin], who is in constant conflict with his son [Art Hindle], a Vietnam veteran-turned-beat cop who opposes his father’s way of achieving law and order.” Also featured in the movie: Suzanne Pleshette, Keir Dullea, Jeanette Nolan, and Biff McGuire. It’s only too bad NBC didn’t turn this into a series. You can buy a copy of Law and Order here. At least for the nonce, it can also be enjoyed on YouTube.

• Looking for something else to watch during these low-activity times? Evan Lewis has posted the 1936 film Meet Nero Wolfe in his blog, Davy Crockett’s Almanack of Mystery, Adventure, and the Wild West. Based on Rex Stout’s 1934 novel, Fer-de-Lance, which introduced the characters of Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, this movie stars Edward Arnold and Lionel Stander, with Rita Hayworth (then billed as Rita Cansino, and not even 20 years old yet) playing their client, Maria Maringola.

• Here’s some good news for the many fans of that 2006-2007 UK science-fiction police procedural Life on Mars and its sequel, Ashes to Ashes: The Killing Times reports that co-creator Matthew Graham is talking up “a third and final installment of the story. Graham told fans that he’s expecting all the main stars—John Simm, Phillip Glenister and Keeley Hawes among them—for the installment, and sees it as ‘four or five episodes.’” Graham commented recently on Twitter: “We would never make another Mars unless we really had something to say and could push the envelope all over again. Finally we have something.”

• I had some misgivings about Defending Jacob, William Landay’s 2012 thriller about “the extremes to which parents might go out of love for their children.” But this hew trailer for the Apple TV+ miniseries set to premiere on April 24, reminds me how successfully Landay built up the tensions that course through his plot.

• Mike Ripley serves up his usual smörgåsbord of drollery, idiosyncratic recollections, and reading recommendations in Shots’ April “Getting Away with Murder” column. Covered are subjects ranging from Golden Age mystery writer Evadne Childe and Jacobean “revenge tragedies” to Dean Street Press’ republication of classic detective stories by Christopher Bush and forthcoming works by the likes of S.A. Cosby, Lindsey Davis, Camilla Lackberg, and Mai Jia (“who may be China’s John Le Carré”). Ripley’s column finishes with a comic sign-off appropriate for our disease-ridden present: “Stay safe, Stay Home, Stay Away from Me, The Ripster.”

• Meanwhile, Maxim Jakubowski delivers his latest “To the Max” column in Crime Time. His “Book of the Month” is Joe Ide’s Hi Five, followed by thoughtful comments on Malcolm Pryce’s The Corpse in the Garden of Perfect Brightness, Margarita Montimore’s The Rearranged Life of Oona Lockhart, and other works with shorter titles.

• It’s rather unnerving to go back and watch some of the TV programs that were popular during the mid-20th century, and see just how strange they often were. CrimeReads’ Olivia Rutigliano recently gathered together the plot descriptions from numerous Man from U.N.C.L.E episodes, and found they could be truly “bonkers.”

• Jerry House offers this primer on Paul W. Fairman, a largely forgotten author of both science-fiction and crime-fiction tales. One section that caught my eye: “Probably his best-known work was in Ellery Queen’s A Study in Terror [1966], in which Fairman anonymously wrote the crux of the novel centering on Sherlock Holmes and Jack Ripper, while ‘Ellery Queen’ wrote the framing device.”

• “J.J.,” the blogger at The Invisible Event, has just launched “a Golden Age Detection-focused podcast called In GAD We Trust. With so many people being at home,” he says, “and with so many of us seeking solace in books, I thought I’d take the opportunity to rustle up some GAD-based discussion with my fellow bloggers and enthusiasts, and record the results for your listening pleasure.” J.J.’s first guest is Kate Jackson, from Cross-Examining Crime, who talks about female sleuths. You can listen to their conversation here.

• Incidentally, I’ve added In GAD We Trust to The Rap Sheet’s right-hand-column selection of Crime/Mystery Podcasts.

• Speaking of podcasts, the new episode of Shedunnit is “all about Agatha Christie’s work as a hospital dispenser during both world wars, and how she applied what she learned there about poisons to her detective fiction,” says host Caroline Crampton. “My guest for this one was Dr Kathryn Harkup, science communicator, Agatha Christie fan, and author of A Is for Arsenic: The Poisons of Agatha Christie.”

• An intriguing item, “borrowed” from The Millions:

At JSTOR Daily, Erin Blakemore takes a look at a small publishing trend from the 1840s and 1850s that followed female murderers and gave middle-class women a brief escape from Victorian values. Literary scholar Dawn Keetley studied the “relatively unknown literary form” extensively. “It’s a genre with conventions of its own: a beautiful white heroine who murders her man, then embarks on a crime spree, ‘indulging in everything from sexual promiscuity, drinking, gambling, and dressing as a man to counterfeiting, robbery, infanticide, and serial murder.’ Dime novels weren’t a thing yet—the stories were printed in pamphlets and sold by traveling salesmen. Keetley thinks they were mainly read by middle-class women. Since the stories masqueraded as morality plays, they were seen as appropriate for women readers.”

• Mystery Readers Journal is soliciting stories having to do with Italian mysteries for its next issue. The deadline is April 20. Submission specifics are available here.

• Although No Time to Die’s release has been delayed because of the coronavirus spread, director Cary Joji Fukunaga says work on that 25th James Bond movie is done, with no further changes expected. The Spy Command quotes Fukunaga as saying, “[W]e had to put our pencils down when we finished our post-production window, which was thankfully before COVID shut everything else down.”

• In this excerpt from the Slate podcast Thirst Aid Kit, Bim Adewunmi and Nichole Perkins explore “the potent trope of Unresolved Sexual Tension” as it was exemplified by the 1985-1989 comedy-cum-private investigator drama Moonlighting.

• New York book editor Gerald Howard asks, in this piece for Bookforum: “Do you find it as obvious as I do that Don DeLillo richly deserves to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature? And right away, as in this year?” Yeah, I can get behind that, as well!

• After reading reviews of two novels by Charles Williams in the blog Narrative Drive—this one of The Concrete Flamingo (aka All the Way, 1958), and this other one of The Sailcloth Shroud (1960)—it’s clear that I should be paying way more attention to his work than I have in the past. Opines blogger Andrew Cartmel: “What a pleasure—discovering an outstanding crime novelist who looks destined to become a favourite of mine.”

• The Rap Sheet’s last “Bullet Points” post included a brief mention of New York City’s famous Mysterious Bookshop confronting financial concerns amid the pandemic. Another week’s passage, however, seems to have brightened proprietor Otto Penzler’s outlook on matters somewhat. He writes in the shop’s current newsletter: “For those of you who responded to my letter last week by buying books and gift cards (and it was a surprisingly and gratifyingly large number), my heartfelt gratitude goes out to you at a magnitude that you cannot imagine. Here’s what you did: 1. My entire staff was paid in full until the end of the month; 2. Rent and all utilities are covered through the end of April; 3. Individuals from whom I bought books were paid in full; 4. February bills to major publishers were paid.” To help further, order books from The Mysterious Bookshop’s Web site, or purchase a gift card.

• Of course, it’s not solely independent bookstores in the Empire State that are suffering during our mutual hibernation period. Whichever indie you most frequently patronize (assuming there’s one left in your area at all) could surely use some of your money to keep things afloat during the short term. Buying books and especially purchasing gift cards can help. The point is, you want to make sure those retailers are still in business whenever we are able to patronize them again. We must all do our part.

• Here’s a list of Washington bookstores that continue to serve customers, through various means, while this COVID-19 crisis lasts. Search out similar lists in your own city or state. Books help us thrive; we need to make sure the shops selling them thrive in addition.

• Writing in Literary Hub, Lucy Kogler contends that because bookstores serve ideas and people, they are essential businesses—no matter what lawmakers or others might say.

• OK, I couldn’t resist finding out which fictional character I supposedly best resemble. I read about the Statistical “Which Character” Personality Quiz in Literary Hub. “To play,” explains senior editor Emily Temple, “you choose where you land on a series of spectra. The result is a ranked list of the fictional characters whose personalities most align with yours. It is weirdly accurate—and after taking the quiz, you can contribute to the research behind it by ranking the personalities of characters with whom you are familiar.” Click here to take the quiz. By the way, if you’re interested, the best match for me (78 percent!) was evidently dwarf Tyrion Lannister, from Game of Thrones. As Wikipedia observes, “Tyrion is intelligent, witty, well-read, and shares his father's skill for business and political maneuvering” Not far off the mark. Except for the dwarf part.

• Killer Covers’ salute to paperback artist Mitchell Hooks has been extended for a fortnight. Catch up with all of those posts here.

• Passover, the eight-day Jewish holiday commemorating the departure of Jews from slavery in Egypt more than 3,000 years ago, is slated to take place this year from April 8 to 16. Like most other recent events, Passover plans are likely to be cancelled. But you can still read mysteries with Passover connections.

• Molly Odintz makes a strong case here for why Passover is “by far the most noir of Jewish holidays.”

• New on The Thrilling Detective Web Site: Kevin Burton Smith’s catalogue of “The Best Anthologies of Original P.I. Stories.”

• Cara Black is interviewed in regard to her brand-new novel, the World War II-set standalone Three Hours in Paris (Soho Crime). Concurrently, Elle Marr (The Missing Sister) provides Criminal Element with a list of her five favorite Paris-set thrillers.

• In association with the release this week of Don Winslow’s new short-story collection, Broken (Morrow), U.S. federal prosecutor Bruce K. Riordan has assembled “a list of ten Winslow crime novels that you should read now. Read in sequence,” says Riordan, “they not only chart the author’s evolving vision of crime in America but also the potential for crime fiction to tell stories that capture the intricate webs of corruption, violence and deceit at the heart of the American Dream.”

• Lyndsay Faye conjectures why so many people seem to be turning to crime and mystery novels during our present quarantining.

• Finally, let me bid farewell to singer-songwriter Bill Withers, whose music filled the soundtrack of my youth, and who performed at the presidential inaugurations of both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. “The three-time Grammy Award winner, who withdrew from making music in the mid-1980s, died on Monday in Los Angeles,” according to the Associated Press. Two classic Withers songs are here.

You Send Me

I’ve mentioned a number of times on this page that I used to be a serious TV addict. There was hardly a night in my younger days when I didn’t find something to watch, no matter how marginal the shows sometimes were.

However, during the last few years, my interest in television has plummeted as surely--if not as quickly--as GOPer Bobby Jindhal’s presidential aspirations. The rise of “reality” shows and the equivalent decline of more expensive scripted programming, the wont of networks to retread old programs such as The Bionic Woman, The Night Stalker, and Knight Rider, and unnecessary schedule tinkering by TV execs who won’t let struggling series remain in one place long enough to build up a following have all contributed to my declining interest. So has superior cable-TV programming (Mad Men, Deadwood, etc.).

Nowadays, I’m much more likely to slide a DVD of some classic film or old TV crime drama into the player than I am to switch on whatever ABC, CBS, or NBC have to offer.

However, a few bright spots remain: Life, the consistently quirky Los Angeles cop series starring Damien Lewis and the beautiful Sarah Shahi; Law & Order: Criminal Intent, with Vincent D’Onofrio, Kathryn Erbe, and now ex-Raines man Jeff Goldblum; a pair of USA Network shows, the lighthearted spy series Burn Notice, with Jeffrey Donovan and Gabrielle Anwar (which, unfortunately, ends its second season on Thursday), and Mary McCormack’s In Plain Sight, about the U.S. witness protection program (making its second-season debut on April 19); the sitcom Scrubs; and the time-travel cop drama Life on Mars.

Whoops! Scratch that last one. This morning brought word that Life on Mars--the American version of an extremely popular British series, focusing in this case on a New York City police detective, Sam Tyler (Jason O’Mara), who, after being smacked down by a car, is flung back in time from 2008/2009 to 1973--has been canceled. ABC has announced that Life on Mars “will complete its 17-episode freshman series order with the season finale written as a series finale that will wrap the loose story ends, explain how Tyler got transported back in time and (maybe) bring him back to his own time.”

Bad news. No question about it. Although some critics say that the U.S. adaptation of Life on Mars pales beside the UK original, as one who has never seen the British series, I could hardly care less. I’ve enjoyed this version starring Irish actor O’Mara from the first time I watched it, and I would probably stick with it for two years, three years, or more. Not necessarily because of O’Mara (who was once slated to become television’s new Philip Marlowe), but because of a combination of the performers, the often complicated story lines, and the series’ colorful Nixon-era setting. Harvey Keitel, as Sam Tyler’s boss, Lieutenant Gene Hunt, is a tempestuous marvel of a character, a law-breaking lawman who harbors a warm spot in his heart for the crazy men of his squad. Former Sopranos star Michael Imperioli, as Detective Ray Carling, is foul-mouthed, impatient, and apparently no great respecter or women, yet he genuinely seems to love his stay-at-home wife. And the underappreciated Gretchen Mol (remember her from The Notorious Bettie Page?)--well, as policewoman Annie Norris, she’s pretty much the only one who takes Tyler seriously when he starts babbling about being from the future, and you can see there’s chemistry between them which neither one wishes to acknowledge or fully extinguish.

Life on Mars has been especially interesting, because I remember the 1970s--the pull-tab beer cans, the double-knit pants, the cars, the music, the Watergate scandal. It’s been rather a nostalgic thrill to tune in to O’Mara’s series every Wednesday night, even though I think I like reliving the ’70s from the distance of the small screen more than I did living through that decade the first time around.

I’m going to miss this series, more than just a little bit. Sure, maybe the British version is better (I’ll have to find out, after the U.S. series goes off the air on April 1). But Life on Mars has been a trip of uncommon delights, with some fine acting, a number of interpersonal relationships worth keeping tabs on, and the realization that, as much as Tyler dislikes having been tossed back in time, he’s starting to enjoy the people he finds there. I might just be the first person in line to buy this show on DVD, whenever it is released.

While you still have the chance, dear readers, tune in Life on Mars--Wednesdays at 10 p.m.



READ MORE: Click here for TV Squad’s coverage of past Life on Mars episodes and series developments; “Ashes to Ashes on BBC America,” by Robert Lloyd (Los Angeles Times); “Why Did Life on Mars Work in the UK but Not in the U.S.?” by Seth Stevenson (Slate).

Bullet Points: “Come Monday” Edition*

• We’ve spent a lot of space honoring the late Donald E. Westlake (see here and here). But there’s another Don’s death that draws my attention today, that of actor Don Galloway, who played Detective Sergeant Ed Brown on NBC-TV’s Ironside from 1967 to 1975. He succumbed to a heart attack last week at age 71. What I didn’t know until reading the Los Angeles Times obituary was that “As research for the role [of Brown], Galloway hung out with Los Angeles Police Department officers and often found himself wondering what it would be like to actually be a peace officer ... In 1993, he became a reserve deputy for the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, but he left about a year later when he retired from show business--along with his agent--and they embarked on a lengthy cruise on a private yacht with their families.” Galloway also used to write a weekly column in the New Hampshire Union Leader, in which he expressed his Libertarian views. I heard about Galloway’s demise from TV Confidential co-host Ed Robertson, who reminds me that he talked about Galloway last year as part of a show about Ironside star Raymond Burr.

• From Ben Hunt’s Material Witness blog: “January 19 marks the bicentennial of the birth of Edgar Allan Poe, and to mark the event BBC Radio 3 is broadcasting a series of essays on the great scribe read by five celebrated contemporary writers--Loving the Raven.” The series begins this evening at 11 p.m. in London, with an essay by Andrew Taylor (Bleeding Heart Square). Other contributors are Joanne Harris, Mark Lawson, Kim Newman, and Louise Welch. Episodes of the series should be available through the BBC Radio 3 site.

• The January 2009 update of Kevin Burton Smith’s indispensable Thrilling Detective Web Site is now up.

• Michael Wiley casts his Shamus Award-nominated first novel, The Last Striptease, for Hollywood. By the way, for what it’s worth, I say go with Salma Hayek as Lucinda. Someone with this much sex appeal, can do pretty much anything.

• For the Irish Independent, Declan Burke previews “the bumper crop of crime novels by Irish writers due in 2009.” I’m looking forward most to the Ken Bruen-Reed Farrel Coleman collaboration, Tower (“In the tradition of The Long Goodbye, Mystic River and The Departed, ... a powerful meditation on friendship, fate, and fatality”), Gene Kerrigan’s third novel, Dark Times in the City, and Brian McGilloway’s third Inspector Devlin novel, Bleed a River Deep. This might even be the year I finally read a novel by Alex Barclay, whose work I have somehow missed up to now.

• Maryland writer Kieran Shea (god, I hope I spelled his frickin’ name right this time) is the latest contributor to David Cranmer’s new Webzine, Beat to a Pulp. Shea’s short story, “Backing the Stakes,” can be found here.

• Oh no, another crime-fiction resource book I have to possess!

• In an interview with New York Magazine, talking about his new paperback mystery, Fifty-to-One, Hard Case Crime publisher Charles Ardai says that his story’s heroine, Trixie Heverstadt, was “loosely inspired by Queens-based noir novelist Megan Abbott ... Arriving in the city to find her wayward sister, Trixie survives on pluck and good legs, trading in the Dorothy Parker–esque wit that Ardai ascribes to Abbott.” Meanwhile, Scott D. Parker has posted his very own interview with Ardai, as well as notes on the author’s appearance at Houston’s Murder by the Book.

• How perfect a tribute is this? The city of Albuquerque, New Mexico, is going to name a public library after the late mystery author Tony Hillerman. “It will be only the third of Albuquerque’s 17 libraries to be named after a resident,” explains the Native American Times. “Ernie Pyle and Erna Fergusson are the others.” (Hat tip to In Reference to Murder.)

• Who remembers Lana Wood (sister of Natalie Wood) as Bond girl Plenty O’Toole in Diamonds Are Forever (1971)? CinemaRetro certainly does. (Hat tip to Bish’s Beat.)

• Author and newspaper columnist Eddie Muller is this week’s contributor to Seth Harwood’s crime-fiction podcast, CrimeWAV, reading his short story “Last Call.”

• If you haven’t been paying attention, Sarah Weinman has just concluded an excellent four-part series about historical mysteries, written for The Barnes & Noble Review. Go to parts one, two, three, or four. It’s well worth your time, even though reading all of it might increase the height of your to-be-read pile.

• Mystery Readers Journal is out with its second-in-a-row issue devoted to San Francisco crime fiction. Several stories from this edition are available online, including Randal Brandt’s introductory essay, “The Birthplace of Modern Crime Fiction.”

• In a Bond vs. Bond contest, whose ego will concede first?

• Alexandra Sokoloff (The Price) expounds in her blog about “what makes a great villain.”

• Given the amazing dearth of decent crime shows on television these days, I find it amazing that the old UPN didn’t pick up Nikki & Nora, “a proposed series about a pair of lesbian cops in New Orleans played by Liz Vassey and Christina Cox.” Lee Goldberg shares a clip to show us what we missed. (More on the Nikki & Nora pilot here.)

• One of the few series that’s actually worth watching these days, Life on Mars (the American version, not the preceding British one) gets the pulp cover treatment.

• Speaking of Life on Mars, co-star Gretchen Mol was one of “the sexiest women on television in 2008,” according to the UK-based Dan’s Media Digest. Also making the list: Keeley Hawes (Ashes to Ashes), Mädchen Amick (My Own Worst Enemy), Julie Benz (Dexter), and Amanda Righetti (The Mentalist). But the No. 1 spot goes to Yvonne Strahovski (Chuck). And doubts of her status are dispelled by the video Mr. Dan offers at the conclusion of his rundown.

• The first episode of BBC Radio 7’s reading of Geoffrey Household’s famous tale, Rogue Male, can be heard here. Other episodes will be available throughout the week.

• The USA Network series Burn Notice returns on January 22.

• Chris Pimental’s Bad Things e-zine is live.

• Your Monday load of memorable Dashiell Hammett quotes.

• Janet Rudolph reports in Mystery Fanfare: “At last there’s some good news. The National Endowment for the Arts Report Found Fiction Reading on the Rise. Yahoo! Of course, if you read ONE book a year that counts as reading. But reading is reading, and hopefully this study and the attention it’s getting will send some kind of message to publishers. Hope springs eternal.”

• Joe the Plumber’s 15 minutes of fame have already lasted 14 minutes too long.

• And as if you don’t have enough weird things swimming around in your head, add this to the mix.

* Lest anyone miss the significance of that headline, click here.

O’Mara, “Marlowe,” and “Mars”

This news puts an end to talk about U.S. network ABC-TV resurrecting fictional private eye Philip Marlowe in a new series. Irish actor Jason O’Mara, who had been slated to portray Raymond Chandler’s gumshoe on the show, has instead won the lead role in an American adaptation of the popular British series Life on Mars. As Bish’s Beat reports:

Life on Mars centers on Sam Tyler, a present-day detective who, following a serious car accident, wakes up to find himself in the early 1970s. He’s not sure if he’s actually gone back in time, is in a coma or just crazy, but in working cases in the earlier time period he gets clues to his present-day state. The two seasons of the British series aired recently on BBC America. ABC’s pilot, written by [David E.] Kelley and directed by Thomas Schlamme (Studio 60, The West Wing) was originally considered for the fall. After having difficulty finding someone to play Tyler, however, the producers and ABC pushed the project to midseason. It’s now scheduled to go into production in August for possible midseason consideration. Rachelle Lefevre (What About Brian), who was initially cast as the only female detective in the 1970s department, remains attached to the show.

But here’s the excerpt that may disappoint Marlowe fans:

O’Mara became available for Life on Mars after ABC passed on Marlowe, a pilot updating Raymond Chandler’s iconic detective, this spring. He’s also had a recurring role on ABC’s Men in Trees and starred in the short-lived In Justice during the 2005-06 season. His credits also include The Agency and Band of Brothers.

This news was evidently reported earlier, but I missed it, and I suspect others did, too.

Admittedly, I didn’t have high hopes for ABC’s use of Philip Marlowe, especially since it was planning to “update” the character. But I’d still like to see the Marlowe pilot. Call me a masochist.

READ MORE: “Old Is New Again,” by Lee Goldberg (A Writer’s Life).

End of “Life” as We Know It

This seems to have been a week of endings--for American novelist Kurt Vonnegut, for British mystery writer Jill McGown, and also for BBC TV’s wonderfully retro 1970s cop drama, Life on Mars, which finished its second and last series to great acclaim, with more than 7 million people tuning in to see the final episode.

For those of you not intimately familiar with Life on Mars, its premise was that Detective Chief Inspector Sam Tyler (John Simm), with England’s Greater Manchester Police, was hit by an automobile in 2006 and somehow (the science-fiction aspect of this story was never adequately explained) transported back to 1973. In that latter timeframe, Tyler is a detective inspector working with what was then the Manchester and Salford Police Criminal Investigation Department, under DCI Gene Hunt (Philip Glenister).

Glancing back at the conceits and conquests of this series, TV critic Mark Lawson writes in today’s edition of The Guardian:

Forty years ago, when the TV series The Prisoner captivated viewers with the predicament of a central character trapped in a surreal landscape, there was much public discussion about how the show might be resolved. Newspaper reports from the period reveal a nervous popular joke going that the final scene would cheat the viewers by showing the protagonist waking to find that he had dreamed the whole programme.

The subsequent fattening of channels and thinning of audiences makes such excitement over a televisual dénouement less likely now, but Life on Mars managed to match that speculation with competitive predictions about the eventual fate of DCI Sam Tyler, prisoner in another surreal landscape. Indeed, because theories raised on blogs gain wider currency than those in pubs and buses, the modern show probably achieved a greater weight of theorising than any previous fictional cliff-hanger.

As it turned out, the solution to Life on Mars was a variation--through some narrative footwork which ignored the laws of both physics and theology--on the joke-ending to The Prisoner: the whole series had been a kind of dream, with Tyler waking from a coma and then choosing, supernaturally, to resume it.

But the sheer level of conjecture, on- and off-line, about how the scriptwriters would finally explain why a modern cop had ended up in the 70s--combined with the anticipation of how the American series The Sopranos will conclude its current, final season--are a reminder of the significance of endings and the special problems they raise in television.

Many publishers and bookshop browsers work on the basis of reading the first few pages before deciding whether to proceed, and there is some sense in this because a reader needs to feel invited to the party. But, no matter how good the thrash, we’re unlikely to retain good memories if the host slams the door shut in our face at the end.

Lawson’s full commentary can be found here.

At least the conclusion of Life on Mars means that its writers and producers no longer need to worry that, in order to remain authentic to the series’ time period, 1970s England, they might also reinvigorate some of the racist language and gay-bashing behavior indicative of that era. As BBC News reported late last week:

TV shows such as BBC One’s Life on Mars risk sparking homophobic bullying, according to a teachers’ union.

In Tuesday’s final episode the character DCI Gene Hunt used a series of insults including “fairy boy”.

Chris Keates of the NASUWT believes such language is “worrying” as children may not be taught that using this kind of abuse is wrong.

A BBC spokeswoman said the character is “extreme” and “tongue-in-cheek”.

Despite the foreclosure of Life on Mars, news reports are that the BBC has commissioned a sequel series, Ashes to Ashes, that will follow DCI Hunt as he relocates from Manchester to London in the 1980s. And The Guardian reported a year ago that writer and executive producer David E. Kelley (Ally McBeel, Boston Legal) is developing an American version of Life on Mars, to premiere at some time during the 2007-2008 television season. However, at last check the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) was reporting that production on a pilot for the show “has been put on hold.”

* * *

One other TV-related ending to report: English actor George Sewell, who played a variety of tough-guy roles and British cops over the years, though he might be most widely remembered for having portrayed Colonel Alec Freeman in the science-fiction series UFO, died earlier this month at age 82. As The Times recalls today:

George Sewell’s hardened, craggy features made him ideal casting for world-weary police inspectors or pugnacious criminals. For more than 40 years he was one of television’s most prolific and gifted actors, famous for such roles as Detective Inspector Brogan in Z Cars, Detective Chief Inspector Craven in Special Branch and Colonel Alec Freeman in the cult sci-fi series UFO.

He also had a successful film career, notably appearing as Con McCarty in Mike Hodges’ tough crime thriller Get Carter (1971) with Michael Caine, and he played gritty character roles in Lindsay Anderson’s This Sporting Life (1963) and Robbery (1967) with Stanley Baker. In 1975 he starred in Stanley Kubrick’s award-winning production of Barry Lyndon.

Sewell hadn’t planned to be a performer; he’d worked as a Cunard Line steward and a travel company courier before agreeing to a theater audition.

Spotted at Stratford East by TV producers, Sewell was soon appearing in numerous tough character roles in television in the 1960s, series such as Gideon’s Way, Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), Z Cars, Softly Softly, The Power Game and Public Eye. He appeared in several BBC Wednesday Plays including Ken Loach’s original production of Nell Dunn’s acclaimed working-class drama Up the Junction as well as Peter Collinson’s 1968 film version.

He gained wider fame in the 1970s when he played Colonel Alec Freeman for three years in Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s UFO, the popular sci-fi series in which a secret defence agency protects Earth from space invaders. Although the series was aimed at children, several episodes gained notoriety when they touched on subjects such as hallucination, drugs and sex. Subsequently the series was shown late at night and went on to gain a cult following among students.

Sewell’s most fondly remembered TV role was as the snappily dressed DCI Alan Craven in the ITV police drama Special Branch (1969-74). The series featured investigations by an elite division of Scotland Yard into international crime and espionage and boasted the distinction of being the first British crime drama to show policemen wearing trendy clothing. More recently Sewell played Superintendent Frank Cotton in The Detectives (1993), a send-up of his character in Special Branch.

Additional tributes to Sewell’s career can be found here and here.

I enjoyed George Sewell in many of his roles, but especially as UFO’s Alec Freeman. He, Ed Bishop, and Michael Billington (the last two of whom already died, during the same week in June 2005) live on in my nostalgic mind as Earth’s chief defenders, protecting mankind from alien invasion back in the 1970s. Forget all that Roswell, New Mexico, nonsense--when the aliens attacked Earth, it was England they wanted, not some parched landscape in the American Southwest. If you don’t believe me, click here for the evidence.