Bullet Points: Memories and Merits Edition

• On the very same day, last weekend, that I posted in The Rap Sheet about Steve Aldous and Gary Gillies’ forthcoming release, The Harry O Viewing Companion: History and Episodes of the Classic Detective Series, I received in the mail a copy of a second non-fiction work dealing in part with that very same 1974-1976 TV private-eye drama. This one bears the name Men of Action, and comes from small-screen historian and radio talk show host Ed Robertson. In addition to David Janssen’s standout series, Men of Action—published in both hardcover and paperback by Lee Goldberg’s Cutting Edge Books—encompasses three other classic TV dramas: The Magician (1973-1974), The Untouchables (1959-1963; revived 1993-1994), and Run for Your Life (1965-1968). Robertson explains in his introduction that “the four series chronicled in this book … were all subjects of articles that I wrote for Television Chronicles,” a quarterly U.S. periodical that was published from April 1995 to January 1998. However, he has greatly expanded on his original research and writing, with subsequently gleaned quotes and episode guides added to form a more complete record of the shows’ development, evolution, and critical reception. For those of us who remember these shows well, Men of Action feeds our appetite for intriguing trivia, from Magician star Bill Bixby’s insistence that all the illusions in each show “be filmed in one take, without trick photography”—a time-consuming task—to the decision never to name the fatal malady destined to take down Ben Gazzara’s protagonist in Run for Your Life (“That’s because there is no such disease,” admitted executive producer Roy Huggins). Like Robertson’s previous titles, including 45 Years of The Rockford Files and The FBI Dossier, Men of Action is a must-have for any classic-TV history fan.

• Recipients of the 2024 Historical Writers’ Association Awards were announced last week, and The Tumbling Girl (Gallic), British author Bridget Walsh’s first Variety Palace Mystery, won for best debut novel. Tumbling introduced Victorian music hall scriptwriter Minnie Ward and her partner in crime-solving, private detective Albert Easterbrook. A sequel, The Innocents, reached print this last April.

• In Reference to Murder says, “the winner of the 2024 Pride Award for emerging LGBTQIA+ writers is Lori Potvin of Perth, Ontario, Canada. Potvin's winning novel-in-progress is a work of contemporary crime fiction. According to Potvin, ‘A Trail’s Tears follows the stories of two women who are strangers to each other—youth wellness worker Grace, who's looking for Sonny, a missing Indigenous teen mom, and Anna, a street-smart young woman caught in the trap of human trafficking and desperate to escape.’ Five runners-up were also chosen: Shelley Kinsman of Ashburn, Ontario; Erick Holmberg of Boston, Massachusetts; Emma Pacchiana of Norfolk, Virginia; Langston Prince of Los Angeles, California; and Shoney Sien of Aptos, California.” Congratulations to them all!

• We have already collected opinionated picks of the “best crime, mystery, and thriller novels of 2024” from The Washington Post (here and here), The Daily Telegraph, Amazon, Kirkus Reviews, Audible, and various other sources. Now comes Canada’s mighty Globe and Mail newspaper with its 10 favorites—all by women, oddly enough:

— Blood Rubies, by Mailan Doquang (Penzler)
— The Hunter, by Tana French (Viking)
— The Sequel, by Jean Hanff Korelitz (Faber & Faber)
— Death at the Sign of the Rook, by Kate Atkinson (Bond Street)
— House of Glass, by Sarah Pekkanen (St. Martin’s Press)
— Only One Survives, by Hannah Mary McKinnon (Mira)
— Guide Me Home, by Attica Locke (Viper)
— The Grey Wolf, by Louise Penny (Minotaur)
— One Perfect Couple, by Ruth Ware (Simon & Schuster)
— The Return of Ellie Black, by Emiko Jean (Simon & Schuster)

In addition, two works that have appeared on other crime-fiction “bests” lists are found in the Globe and Mail under best “International Fiction”: The God of the Woods, by Liz Moore (Riverhead); and Creation Lake, by Rachel Kushner (Scribner).

• BookPage has its own “Best Mystery & Suspense” list making the rounds. Here are the editors’ 10 choices:

— A Ruse of Shadows, by Sherry Thomas (Berkley)
— Deadly Animals, by Marie Tierney (Henry Holt)
— Exposure, by Ramona Emerson (Soho Crime)
— Guide Me Home, by Attica Locke (Mulholland)
— Shanghai, by Joseph Kanon (Scribner)
— The Close-Up, by Pip Drysdale (Gallery)
— The Sequel, by Jean Hanff Korelitz (Celadon)
— Things Don’t Break On Their Own, by Sarah Easter Collins (Crown)
— Trust Her, by Flynn Berry (Viking)
— We Solve Murders, by Richard Osman (Pamela Dorman)

• CrimeReads’ Olivia Rutigliano delivers this excellent retrospective on “lady detectives” in Victorian and Edwardian literature.

• Another first-rate CrimeReads offering (originally published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine) is Dean Jobb’s look back at “detective, swindler, accused killer, [and] spy” Gaston Means, “one of the Greatest Rogues in American History.” Jobb, you will recall, is also the author of this year’s A Gentleman and a Thief, which is likely to appear on my own “best of 2024” book list.

• What is it with British TV shows producing Christmas specials, anyway? Death in Paradise and its first spin-off, Beyond Paradise, have already announced holiday-themed episodes. Add to those now Acorn TV’s The Chelsea Detective, which has scheduled a Christmas installment of its own to drop on Monday, December 16. That series, which stars Adrian Scarborough and Vanessa Emme as unconventional police detectives working the upscale thoroughfares of London’s Chelsea neighborhood, will return in 2025 with three more 90-minute episodes comprising the balance of its third-season run.



• Before starring in the better-remembered Dan August or B.L. Stryker, actor Burt Reynolds won his first eponymous TV role in Hawk, a short-lived crime drama that aired on ABC from September 8, 1966, to December 29, 1966—17 episodes in all. “Hawk was historic,” writes Terence Towles Canote in A Shroud of Thoughts, “as the first American television show to centre on a Native American in a modern-day setting (it was preceded by Brave Eagle and Broken Arrow, which were both Westerns).” He goes on to note that Reynolds played

New York City police lieutenant John Hawk, who was full-blooded Iroquois. [Reynolds himself claimed to be of much-diluted Cherokee descent.] Hawk worked as a special investigator for the District Attorney's office. His partner was Dan Carter (Wayne Grice). Bruce Glover played Assistant District Attorney Murray Slaken, while Leon Janney played Assistant District Attorney Ed Gorton. …

Aside from featuring a lead character who was Native American, Hawk was a bit ahead of its time in other ways. The show was filmed on the streets of New York City. Only a few shows before Hawk, such as Naked City and Route 66 regularly shot on location, with most series during the 1966-1967 season still being shot on studio backlots. Hawk also had a grittier, more realistic feel than many police dramas of its time, and in some ways was closer to such Seventies movies as The French Connection (1971), Serpico (1973), and The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974).

If you’re unfamiliar with this early Reynolds series, you can catch at least most of its episodes on YouTube—for now, that is.

• I haven’t even had an opportunity yet to watch the British TV drama The Day of the Jackal, which debuted in the States (on Peacock) earlier this month. But already, The Killing Times says it has been renewed for a second season. Jackal, of course, is a modern take on Frederick Forsyth’s 1971 political thriller of the same name.

• The Bunburyist’s Elizabeth Foxwell brings word that “Penguin Random House will publish a graphic novel version of Raymond Chandler’s Trouble Is My Business (1939) in May 2025 as part of the Pantheon Graphic Library.” The title offering in a 1950 collection of four short Chandler yarns starring Los Angeles gumshoe Philip Marlowe, “Trouble” finds Marlowe being “hired to scare away a disreputable woman from the adopted son of a wealthy businessman,” as blogger Paul Ferry recalls. “He’s no sooner started following this potential gold-digger before he stumbled across the first murder. From there, the bodies just keep piling up—but who’s responsible? Chandler cheekily waves suspects and red herrings in your face, so the reader—as well as Marlowe—hit many false leads before the final pay-off.” Foxwell explains that the graphic-novel version of this tale brings together writer Arvind Ethan David, illustrator Ilias Kyriazis, and colorist Cris Peter. (A concluding note: When published originally in Dime Detective magazine, “Trouble” starred a different Chandler sleuth, John Dalmas, but Dalmas was subsequently swept away to capitalize on Marlowe’s popularity.)

• By the way, if you would like to listen to a vintage radio dramatization of “Trouble Is My Business,” starring American actor Van Heflin, you can do that right here.

• I have added a new podcast to this page’s right-hand column inventory (scroll down to “Crime/Mystery Podcasts”). It’s called Tipping My Fedora, and comes from Sergio Angelini, who from 2011 to 2017, wrote a superior blog of that same name broadly focused on crime and mystery fiction. His new podcast, launched in early October, covers primarily film noir. Episodes thus far have featured British critics Barry Forshaw and Mike Ripley, as well as James Harrison, co-founder of Film Noir UK and director of its first festival, Film Noir Fest 2024; looked back at “William Friedkin’s 1985 dark and dazzling neo-noir, To Live and Die in L.A.”; and previewed the UK Blu-ray release of the 1954 drama Black Tuesday. Click here to access them all.

• Novelist Stephen Mertz, familiar for his “Cody’s Army” and “Cody’s War” novels, his contributions to Don Pendleton’s “Executioner” series, and numerous other books (many of them published under pseudonyms), died on November 5 at age 77. I didn’t know Mertz, but his friend and fellow novelist Max Allan Collins did. He observes that Mertz “had his cantankerous side but was cheerful and fun and funny even at his crankiest, and mostly he was a sunny presence, enthusiastic about writers whose work he loved and himself a dedicated professional. He was also a musician and a good one. He was a radio d.j. at times, and the kind of ideal presence you’d love to have with you pouring from the car radio on a long drive.” The folks at Wolfpack Publishing, who brought several of Mertz’s books to market, describe him on Facebook as “an extraordinary talent” whose “creativity, humor, and passion for storytelling will be deeply missed by his friends, colleagues, and countless fans.” Finally, another of Mertz’s friends, Ben Boulden, has reposted this interview he did with the author in 2016 to honor Mertz’s passing.

• There are many “words of the year” choices made every 12 months, by sources as varied as the American Dialect Society, Oxford University Press, Dictionary.com, and the folks behind the Collins English Dictionary. And while that last group chose “brat” as 2024’s “most important word or expression in the public sphere,” the Cambridge Dictionary folks have gone with “manifest,” after “celebrities such as pop star Dua Lipa and gymnast Simone Biles spoke of manifesting their success.” I can’t say “manifest” has been added in a big way to my own lexicon, but then I’m neither a singer-songwriter nor a champion Olympics performer.

“I’m in a Bit of a Jam Here”

I’m not usually a fan of actor Vince Vaughn. I was appalled by long-ago rumors that he’d assume the role of Hawaii private eye Thomas Magnum in a film version of CBS-TV’s Magnum, P.I. And talk of him replacing James Garner in a movie based on NBC’s The Rockford Files absolutely turned my stomach. To me, Vaughn is synonymous with the big dumb dope roles he’s played in too many cinematic comedies.



That persona, though, seems to fit perfectly with the character of former Florida police detective Andrew Yancy, the protagonist in Bad Monkey, an upcoming 10-part Apple TV+ series based on Carl Hiaasen’s 2013 novel of that same name. As with most Hiassen tales, Bad Monkey is a crazy salad of weirdoes and comic escapades. Yancy has been suspended for assaulting the husband of his lover, Bonnie Witt, and is assigned to work as a health inspector for the state’s Department of Hotels and Restaurants. But, explains Wikipedia, “a severed arm found by a tourist pulls Yancy into the world of greed and corruption that decimates the land and environment in both Florida and the Bahamas.” For much of the series, Vaughn plays a big dumb dope ambling through a sea troubles largely beyond his comprehension.

Aiding him in his investigations, or else abetting his sun-addled shenanigans in this show are performers Michelle Monaghan, John Ortiz, Jodie Turner-Smith, and Natalie Martinez (formerly of Detroit 1-8-7), who plays a major role as Miami medical examiner Rosa Campesino. Bad Money was developed by Bill Lawrence, known for his work on Ted Lasso, Cougar Town, Scrubs, Spin City, and other small-screen series. As I hope is clear from the video clip above, Bad Monkey—set to begin on Wednesday, August 14—looks like great escapist fun.

For Your Entertainment

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

Five on the Fly

I haven’t deliberately been taking time off from blogging this week; it just looks that way. But I’m back with these news bits of interest.

• The PBS-TV series Masterpiece Mystery! announced this week that The Marlow Murder Club, its two-part adaptation of Robert Thorogood’s 2021 novel of the same name, will premiere in the States on Sunday, October 27. The cozy whodunit, which stars Samantha Bond, Jo Martin, Cara Horgan, and Natalie Dew, has already been renewed for a second season. Watch a trailer here.

• Meanwhile, In Reference to Murder brings news that the fourth, “starriest season yet” of Only Murders in the Building, with Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez, will debut on Hulu-TV come Tuesday, August 27. In addition, “a third season of [the] Acorn TV and Channel 5 detective drama Dalgliesh, based on the novels by P.D. James, has begun filming in Northern Ireland …”

• Author-screenwriter Lee Goldberg dropped me a line this morning, letting me know that he has been busy lately uploading to YouTube a couple of older TV series on which he worked. Click here to revisit the 1992-1993, half-hour Fox crime drama Likely Suspects, described by Wikipedia as “an interactive crime drama where the viewer was treated as a rookie partner.” And look over here for the complete run of Murphy’s Law (“including,” says Goldberg, “the unaired/uncut pilot, unaired final episode and unaired spin-off pilot presentation”), a 1988-1989 ABC-TV show starring George Segal as a recovering alcoholic and San Francisco insurance-fraud investigator, with Maggie Han playing his model-girlfriend. “People keep hounding me for episodes of both short-lived crime series,” Goldberg tells me, “so I decided to share them … So far, YouTube hasn't slapped me down.”

• British publisher Joffe Books “is looking for a talented new crime fiction writer of colour, with one of the UK’s largest literary prizes for the winner,” reports Shotsmag Confidential.

The prize invites submissions from un-agented authors from Black, Asian, Indigenous and minority ethnic backgrounds writing in crime fiction genres including: electrifying psychological thrillers, cosy mysteries, gritty police procedurals, twisty chillers, unputdownable suspense mysteries and shocking domestic noirs.

The winner will be offered a prize package consisting of a two-book publishing deal with Joffe Books, a £1,000 cash prize, and a £25,000 audiobook offer from Audible for the first book.

The submission period ends at midnight on 30 September 2024.

• And The Observer’s Tim Adams has filed this delightful piece asking whether “a visit to the Bristol CrimeFest—this year featuring G.T. Karber, creator of the world-conquering whodunnit series Murdle—[can] help pin down why the [crime fiction] genre is booming.”

Bullet Points: Almost Mother’s Day Edition

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Poe Prizes Aplenty

During a ceremony last evening in New York City, the 78th annual Edgar Awards—“honoring the best in mystery fiction, non-fiction and television published or produced in 2023”—were handed out. The event was live-streamed on YouTube.

Best Novel: Flags on the Bayou, by James Lee Burke
(Atlantic Monthly Press)

Also nominated: All the Sinners Bleed, by S.A. Cosby (Flatiron); The Madwomen of Paris, by Jennifer Cody Epstein (Ballantine); Bright Young Women, by Jessica Knoll (S&S/Marysue Rucci); An Honest Man, by Michael Koryta (Mulholland); The River We Remember, by William Kent Krueger (Atria); and Crook Manifesto, by Colson Whitehead (Doubleday)

Best First Novel by an American Author: The Peacock and the Sparrow, by I.S. Berry (Atria)

Also nominated: The Golden Gate, by Amy Chua (Minotaur); Small Town Sins, by Ken Jaworowski (Henry Holt); The Last Russian Doll, by Kristen Loesch (Berkley); and Murder by Degrees, by Ritu Mukerji (Simon & Schuster)

Best Paperback Original: Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers, by Jesse Q. Sutanto (Berkley)

Also nominated: Boomtown, by A.F. Carter (Mysterious Press); Hide, by Tracy Clark (Thomas & Mercer); The Taken Ones, by Jess Lourey (Thomas & Mercer); and Lowdown Road, by Scott Von Doviak (Hard Case Crime)

Best Fact Crime: Crooked: The Roaring ’20s Tale of a Corrupt Attorney General, a Crusading Senator, and the Birth of the American Political Scandal, by Nathan Masters (Hachette)

Also nominated: In Light of All Darkness: Inside the Polly Klaas Kidnapping and the Search for America’s Child, by Kim Cross (Grand Central); Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall, by Zeke Faux (‎Crown Currency); Tangled Vines: Power, Privilege, and the Murdaugh Family Murders, by John Glatt (St. Martin’s Press); I Know Who You Are: How an Amateur DNA Sleuth Unmasked the Golden State Killer and Changed Crime Fighting Forever, by Barbara Rae-Venter (Ballantine); and The Lost Sons of Omaha: Two Young Men in an American Tragedy, by Joe Sexton (Scribner)

Best Critical/Biographical: Love Me Fierce in Danger: The Life of James Ellroy, by Steven Powell (Bloomsbury)

Also nominated: Perplexing Plots: Popular Storytelling and the Poetics of Murder, by David Bordwell (Columbia University Press); Spillane: King of Pulp Fiction, by Max Allan Collins and James L. Traylor (Mysterious Press); A Mystery of Mysteries: The Death and Life of Edgar Allan Poe, by Mark Dawidziak (St. Martin's Press); and Fallen Angel: The Life of Edgar Allan Poe, by Robert Morgan (LSU Press)

Best Short Story: “Hallowed Ground,” by Linda Castillo (Minotaur)

Also nominated: “Thriller,” by Heather Graham (Blackstone);
“Miss Direction,” by Rob Osler (Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, September/October 2023); “The Rise,” by Ian Rankin (Amazon Original Stories); and “Pigeon Tony’s Last Stand,” by Lisa Scottoline (Amazon Original Stories)

Best Juvenile: The Ghosts of Rancho Espanto, by Adrianna Cuevas (Farrar, Straus and Giroux Books for Young Readers)

Also nominated: Myrtle, Means, and Opportunity, by Elizabeth C. Bunce (Algonquin Young Readers); Epic Ellisons: Cosmos Camp, by Lamar Giles (Versify); The Jules Verne Prophecy, by Larry Schwarz and Iva-Marie Palmer (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers); and What Happened to Rachel Riley? by Claire Swinarski (Quill Tree)

Best Young Adult: Girl Forgotten, by April Henry (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers)

Also nominated: Star Splitter, by Matthew J. Kirby (Dutton Books for Young Readers); The Sharp Edge of Silence, by Cameron Kelly Rosenblum (Quill Tree); My Flawless Life, by Yvonne Woon (Katherine Tegen); and Just Do This One Thing for Me, by Laura Zimmerman (Dutton Books for Young Readers)

Best Television Episode Teleplay: “Escape from Shit Mountain,” Poker Face, written by Nora Zuckerman and Lilla Zuckerman (Peacock)

Also nominated: “Time of the Monkey,” Poker Face, written by
Wyatt Cain and Charlie Peppers (Peacock); “I’m a Pretty Observant Guy,” Will Trent, written by Liz Heldens (ABC); “Dead Man’s Hand,” Poker Face, written by Rian Johnson (Peacock); and “Hózhó Náhásdlii (Beauty Is Restored),” Dark Winds, written by Graham Roland and John Wirth (AMC)

* * *

Robert L. Fish Memorial Award: “The Body in Cell Two,” by Kate Hohl (Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine [EQMM], May/June 2023)

Also nominated: “Errand for a Neighbor,” by Bill Bassman (EQMM, January/February 2023); “The Soiled Dove of Shallow Hollow,” by Sean McCluskey (EQMM, January/February 2023); “It’s Half Your Fault,” by Meghan Leigh Paulk (EQMM, July-August 2023) ; and “Two Hours West of Nothing,” by Gabriela Stiteler (EQMM, September/October 2023)

The Simon & Schuster Mary Higgins Clark Award: Play the Fool, by Lina Chern (Bantam)

Also nominated: The Bones of the Story, by Carol Goodman (Morrow); Of Manners and Murder, by Anastasia Hastings (Minotaur); The Three Deaths of Willa Stannard, by Kate Robards (Crooked Lane); and Murder in Postscript, by Mary Winters (Berkley)

The G.P. Putnam’s Sons Sue Grafton Memorial Award: An Evil Heart, by Linda Castillo (Minotaur)

Also nominated: Hard Rain, by Samantha Jayne Allen (Minotaur); Bad, Bad Seymour Brown, by Susan Isaacs (Atlantic Monthly Press); Past Lying, by Val McDermid (Atlantic Monthly Press); and A Stolen Child, by Sarah Stewart Taylor (Minotaur)

The Lilian Jackson Braun Memorial Award: Glory Be, by Danielle Arceneaux (Pegasus Crime)

Also nominated: Misfortune Cookie, by Vivien Chien (St. Martin’s Paperbacks); Hot Pot Murder, by Jennifer J. Chow (Berkley); Murder of an Amish Bridegroom, by Patricia Johns (Crooked Lane); and The Body in the Back Garden, by Mark Waddell (Crooked Lane)

Congratulations to all of the nominees!

Recipients of the 2024 Grand Master and Ellery Queen awards were announced in January. Katherine Hall Page and R.L. Stine were named as Grand Masters. Michaela Hamilton, the executive editor at New York-based Kensington Publishing, was proclaimed this year’s winner of the Ellery Queen Award.

More Reasons to Flip on the TV

All hail The Killing Times, the British blog that today brings us three terrific batches of news about near-future TV productions.

It was more than a year ago now that we brought you word of streaming service Disney+ greenlighting a series based on C.J. Sansom’s popular novels starring Matthew Shardlake, a barrister who solves crimes and seeks to avoid political intrigues in 16th-century Britain. Today we learned that the four-part drama Shardlake, based on Sansom’s first novel, Dissolution (2003), will debut on May 1.

The program casts Arthur Hughes (from The Innocents and Then Barbara Met Alan) as Shardlake, a hunchback lawyer protagonist “with an acute sense of justice and one of the few honest men in a world beset with scheming and plots.” Sean Bean (World on Fire, Snowpiercer) will play Thomas Cromwell, chief minister to King Henry VIII and Shardlake’s employer, while Anthony Boyle (The Plot Against America, Masters of the Air) appears as Jack Barak, who assists Shardlake ... but may also be spying on him for Cromwell.

Here’s The Killing Times’ synopsis of the show’s plot:

Shardlake’s sheltered life as a lawyer is turned upside down when Cromwell instructs him to investigate the murder of one of his commissioners at a monastery in the remote [and fictitious] town of Scarnsea. The commissioner was gathering evidence to close the monastery and it is now imperative for Cromwell’s own political survival that Shardlake both solves the murder and closes the monastery. He leaves Shardlake in no doubt that failure is not an option.

Cromwell insists that he is accompanied by Jack Barak to Scarnsea, where the duo are met with hostility, suspicion and paranoia by the monks who fear for their future and will seemingly stop at nothing to preserve their order.

Here’s a 90-second trailer for Shardlake:



The Killing Times also reports that two more series of The Night Manager, which premiered in 2016 and was adapted from John le Carré’s 1993 novel of the same title, have been commissioned by BBC One. Tom Hiddleston will return to his role as Jonathan Pine, a former British soldier turned hotel night manager who, in the original tale, became involved with illegal arm sales. Adds Deadline: “The Night Manager Season 2 will begin filming later this year and will pick up with Hiddleston’s Jonathan Pine eight years after the explosive finale of Season 1, going beyond the original book ... Additional plot details are being kept under wraps and there is not yet confirmation as to whether [executive producer Hugh] Laurie’s Richard Roper, who was last seen in the back of a paddy wagon driven by arms buyers who were not best pleased with him, will return to star.”

Finally, we have further details about a second Death in Paradise spin-off, Return to Paradise. This show will be set in Sydney, Australia, and feature Anna Samson (Jack Irish, Home and Away) as tenacious Detective Inspector Mackenzie Clarke, “an Australian ex-pat who’s made a name for herself in London’s Metropolitan Police for cracking uncrackable murder cases. When she is accused of tampering with evidence, Clarke returns to Australia, back to the last place she ever wanted to be—her hometown of Dolphin Cove. Having fled the town six years ago, infamously leaving her ex-fiancé Glenn [Tai Hara, also from Home and Away] at the altar, Clarke is not welcome there. But with no other job options, and a unique talent for solving a mystery, no matter how challenging, a reluctant ‘Mack’ joins the team at Dolphin Cove Police Station.” We’ll see whether she settles into her new situation as comfortably as DI Humphrey Goodman (Kris Marshall) did in the previous Death in Paradise offshoot, Beyond Paradise, fresh episodes of which are currently rolling out in the States on BritBox.

Frustratingly, launch dates for Return to Paradise and the sophomore season of The Night Manager have not yet been announced.

Forgotten Crime Flicks: “Gumshoe”

(Editor’s note: Over the last 16 years, The Rap Sheet has posted numerous pieces about “forgotten” crime, mystery, and thriller books. Today we’re trying something different: an article that examines a forgotten crime film. Its author is Brett Mead, a New York-based criminal defense attorney with the firm of Lankler, Siffert & Wohl. In his spare time, he's an amateur historian and cinephile with an ever-in-progress draft of a private detective novel.)

The foundational private eye of fiction is Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op. Wise-cracking, sardonic, preternaturally competent and, yes, a bit of a cipher. Almost as soon as Hammett had built that foundation, however, he started paving over it. In 1934, Hammett saw the publication of The Thin Man, which asks, “what would happen if the quintessential San Francisco private investigator married into New York WASP high society?” That “spin” was hard-boiled detective fiction’s first major act of self-reference: between Sam Spade and the Continental Op we “know” Nick Charles’ background and the kind of dick he was; if we didn’t, it wouldn’t be nearly as funny to imagine him sipping champagne in penthouses with Manhattan gadabouts. This kind of self-reference would play out countless times both in the golden age of noir detectives, and, even more often, in the wide world of neo-noirs that followed. “We know the noir detective story, now let’s put it somewhere else—or put someone else in it.”

One such neo-noir is Stephen Frears’ forgotten 1971 gem, Gumshoe, a film in which the main character could tell you as much about the history of detective fiction as just about anybody. His name is Eddie Ginley and, from the jump, he’s shown as a Hammett obsessive. In Gumshoe’s opening scene, we watch Ginley (played by Albert Finney at the peak of his powers) give his shrink his best Humphrey Bogart-as-Spade impression. The shrink is unimpressed and asks Ginley what he wants to do with the rest of his life. “I want to write The Maltese Falcon and I want to record ‘Blue Suede Shoes,’” he answers. The problem is, it’s 1971 in the film, too, and both have already been done. But that won’t stop Ginley, who informs his shrink that he’s now advertising his services as a “gumshoe” in a local Liverpool rag.

And so begins the (then) latest-and-greatest “spin” on the P.I.: the P.I. as a fanboy and a daydreamer, raised on the classics, and desiring nothing more than to live life as a Hammett character—and who ends up embroiled in a mystery worthy of Hammett as a result. The subtle self-reference of Spade-cum-Charles is now overt. Ginley narrates (and almost as often interacts) in a sort of classic P.I. patois: part Spade, part Philip Marlowe, and a whole lot of Out of the Past’s Jeff Markham (“what’s the pitch?” being Ginley’s go-to verbal tic).

The other characters here mostly play along. Ginley is still holding the torch for his ex, Ellen (portrayed by Billie Whitelaw), who’s far and away the most tolerant of his shtick, even if she has run off with his no-good brother. She likes Ginley’s canned lines and, at one point, obliges him with a song request for “Melancholy Baby” (another Out of the Past reference). Then there’s the parade of heavies, a ring of pro-apartheid gun-runners who indulge Ginley’s detective fantasies by hiring him to knock off the Liverpool-based daughter of an anti-colonial African revolutionary. Like all of his heroes, Ginley may play the cynic, but he’s got a heart of gold. And he’s certainly no gun-for-hire. So he takes it upon himself to unmask a conspiracy that ends up hitting surprisingly close to home.

But not before some hijinks ensue. This is a comedy after all, albeit one with a plot that many straight detective mysteries would do well to imitate. At first, Ginley thinks the hit he’s been hired to carry out is all just a gag. You see, Ginley’s in the entertainment business himself and that’s just the kind of joke “the guys” would play on him. Maybe “Blue Suede Shoes” springs to his mind in the opening scene because it’s the kind of fare they play at Liverpool’s Broadway Club, where Ginley’s employed as a presenter and sometime stand-up comic. He’s a “club-caller” in contemporary English slang. The script, penned by Liverpool’s own Neville Smith, uses that city’s setting and native dialogue just as deftly as it does classic noir language and tropes.

Much of the local color comes through in the Broadway Club itself: from a flashing neon sign which invokes classic noir photography, to a cast of characters that lend the film both humor and verisimilitude. The joint is headed up by Tommy, an old hand in local entertainment circles (he’s 42, but “in the club game, you can multiply that by three”) with an office full of fake photos of him posing with (mostly American) celebrities. “From the kid from Hoboken to the kid from Liverpool” reads a particularly convincing one of Tommy beside Frank Sinatra. “Good, aren't they?” says Tommy. Never mind that Tommy’s wearing the same suit in all the pictures. Then there’s the toothless handyman who Tommy has to implore to put in his dentures so he doesn’t scare off the customers. “How can I?” the man responds. “Me wife’s got ‘em!” At one point, in need of a heavy of his own, Ginley goes to Tommy for a reference. Tommy provides “Joey. He’s muscle. He fought Rommel—and Rommel lost!” When Joey shows up in the next scene, he’s revealed to be a paunchy, good-natured pensioner. Asked by Eddie about his tussle with Rommel, he answers: “Personally, Eddie, I never seen the bugger. I seen James Mason take him off it in a film once. Couldn’t stand it. All them good Germans.” The way the characters talk pop culture is a bit of Tarantino-before-Tarantino, just as the mix of noir and comedy is a bit of Lebowski-before-Lebowski.

These kinds of scenes, which revel in the early ’70s Liverpool milieu, are Gumshoe at its best. The more direct invocations of noir-classics are a somewhat mixed bag. A scene in which Ginley flirts with a London bookshop girl, for instance, is a little too on the nose: it’s a nearly beat-for-beat reconstruction of Bogart’s bookshop interaction with Dorothy Malone in The Big Sleep. A brief heroin-related subplot also ill-serves Gumshoe’s tone, opting for a bit of straight-noir gratuitousness that this movie could have done without. The worst invocation by far of the bygone era of the ’40s noir, though, is a scrap of casual but vicious racism deployed by Ginley against an interloper. To Gumshoe’s credit, Ginley’s racist remarks are neither played for laughs nor to sap the dignity of the film’s lone Black character. The film gives Trinidadian actor Oscar James, playing Azinge, the last word in that exchange—he crumples Ginley with a single punch then straightens out his suit and walks off with a choice dig. And since Azinge turns out to be one of the good guys, Ginley ultimately realizes the error of his ways. Still, to modern viewing audiences, Ginley’s cruel, old-fashioned jabs will prove (rightly) jarring.



Those missteps aside, Finney is Gumshoe’s standout. He narrates, appears in every scene, and even produced the film after a white-hot run of gigs that had made him one of Britain’s most marketable stars. His Ginley is anything but a cipher. He’s a wannabe comedian, a wannabe dick, and a wannabe lover with literary flair and a sense of humor. It’s a stellar performance. The movie also features a neat bit of directing from UK screen legend Stephen Frears, plucked from obscurity to direct here for the first time and who, for all his commendable efforts, wouldn’t be given another chance to helm a film for another 13 years (when he’d get his hands on one more underappreciated crime classic, 1984’s The Hit, starring John Hurt, Terence Stamp, and Tim Roth in a BAFTA Award-nominated role). Aside from the moments when he and cinematographer Chris Menges are ably imitating the best of Huston, Hawks, and RKO cinematography legend Nicholas Musuraca, the film’s aesthetic is a humble and no doubt indie-inspiring look at northern England, similar in some ways to 1971’s Get Carter. And, like Get Carter, you can tell that while Gumshoe was made for cheap, it doesn’t suffer for it.

A cameo by American actress Janice Rule as Gumshoe’s would-be femme fatale is great, as is the performance of Fulton Mackay as Straker, the bungling Scottish hit man whose place, we learn, Ginley accidentally took when he accepted this first sleuthing assignment. Straker is all menace for the initial half of the film, but he quickly breaks down into a comedic standout. That process begins with Ginley giving Straker the slip at Britain’s equivalent of the social security office. In Gumshoe, our hero doesn’t have “ins” with the cops. Instead, he’s got a pal at the unemployment office who’s a bit disappointed to see Eddie advertising for work (“haven’t lost faith in us, now have you, Eddie?”), but who lets him sneak out the back anyways. Straker is ultimately exposed as a fake-it-till-you-make-it heavy perfectly suited to Ginley’s play-acting detective. When Ginley tells Straker his hopes for a payday are sunk in the film’s final scene, Straker answers with his own revelation: Straker’s not a hit man at all. He was just filling in for the real hit man, who fell ill on the appointed day. What’s more, he never even had a gun—his plan for extracting funds from Ginley was to involve no more than “violence of the tongue.” After he and Ginley make nice, Straker asks his new pal to “lend us a couple of quid” before taking his leave.

Herein lies the true cleverness of Gumshoe. It’s a detective story in which everyone self-consciously plays a part they remember from detective stories past. The central mystery is solid and the plot is slick and well-paced, but the comedy’s even better. If, as they say, comedy is about subverting expectations, then Gumshoe does it masterfully. The audience, after all, is nearly as keyed in to detective noir as Ginley, and knows all too well how these things are supposed to go. That just makes it all the funnier when everyone, in turn, emerges as a fraud. There’s no Sam Spade here, not even a Nick Charles. Just “gumshoe Ginley and slyboots Straker” and the “damn, crummy, ramshackle outfit” that tried to shoehorn them into a story where the stakes are as real as in Hammett, but nothing else is.

Pour a Little Sugar on It, Baby!

I must confess to being rather puzzled by recent stories about the upcoming Apple TV+ series Sugar, which will star award-winning Irish actor Colin Farrell as a Los Angeles gumshoe named John Sugar. The eight-part drama has been called “genre-bending” and “a science-fiction drama,” yet nowhere do I see any explanation that would justify such labeling. And a new trailer for the program, which is set to premiere on April 5, does nothing to clear up the matter.



Of the plot, Deadline says it finds Sugar “on the heels of the mysterious disappearance of Olivia Siegel [portrayed by Sydney Chandler], the beloved granddaughter of legendary Hollywood producer Jonathan Siegel [James Cromwell]. As Sugar tries to determine what happened to Olivia, he will also unearth Siegel family secrets; some very recent, others long-buried.” Again, this gives us nary a clue as to why Sugar, created by Mark Protosevich (I Am Legend), is “genre-bending.” Yes, the voice-over narration suggests that the protagonist may not be as much of a “good guy” as he seems; and there are those back-to-back points in the trailer where, first, actress Amy Ryan tells the private eye, “You have secrets,” and then Sugar develops an extreme twitch in his left hand, which leads to his self-scolding whisper, “Not now.” Otherwise, though, Sugar looks like another typical shamus yarn, its scenes blessed by Southern California sunshine but riddled with emotional complexities and sorrows.

I guess we’ll just have to wait until sometime closer to its debut to discover what’s so “unique” about this streaming show.

The End of Soul

Such unhappy news, so early in the day. From The New York Times:

David Soul, a doleful-eyed blond actor and singer who rose to fame portraying one half of a cagey crime-fighting duo on the hit 1970s television show “Starsky & Hutch,” and also scored a No. 1 hit single in 1977 with “Don’t Give Up On Us,” died on Thursday. He was 80.

His death was confirmed ... by his wife, Helen Snell, who did not specify a cause or say where he died. He had been living in Britain since 1995 and became a British citizen in 2004.

A Chicago-born son of a Lutheran minister, Mr. Soul had spent nearly a decade appearing on television shows such as “Star Trek” and “The Streets of San Francisco” before he won his career-defining role as Det. Ken “Hutch” Hutchinson on “Starsky & Hutch,” which was broadcast on ABC [1975-1979]. ... Mr. Soul played the coolheaded Midwestern sidekick to Det. Dave Starsky (Paul Michael Glaser), a savvy Brooklynite. The two tooled around the fictional Southern California burgh of Bay City in a red Ford Gran Torino emblazoned with a giant, Nike-esque swoosh on each side while cracking open cases with the help of their streetwise informant, Huggy Bear (Antonio Fargas).

Soul began appearing on stage as a performer in the mid-1960s. He went on to parts in films such as Magnum Force (1973) and Appointment with Death (1988). Beyond Starsky & Hutch, his TV credits included lead roles on Here Come the Brides (1968-1970), Casablanca (1983), The Yellow Rose (1983-1984), and Unsub (1989), and Soul did guest-star turns on Murder, She Wrote, Poirot, and Lewis. His move to the United Kingdom revived his stage-acting career.

As the BBC’s obituary of David Soul recalls, “he turned down the chance and the lucrative pay cheque to appear on reality television shows, telling the Sunday Times: ‘These days anybody is a celebrity and, frankly, there’s nothing to celebrate.’”

I wasn’t a Starsky & Hutch fan, but I recall my father watching that program religiously (if only for its numerous car-chase scenes). I more enjoyed Soul’s work on the short-lived modern western, The Yellow Rose, and only recently did I catch up with episodes of Unsub on YouTube. The actor always struck me as being professionally refined and insufficiently appreciated. I’m sorry to see him go.

READ MORE: “David Soul, One Half of TV’s Starsky & Hutch, Dies at 80,” by Alexandra Del Rosario (Los Angeles Times).

Spade Can’t Escape His Past

Thank you to Steve Lewis, of Mystery*File, for pointing me toward a new, almost two-minute-long trailer for the forthcoming six-part television series, Monsieur Spade—a much more satisfying version than the briefer trailer released back in early September.

As you will recall from previous posts, Monsieur Spade is set in the South of France in 1963 and initially finds Dashiell Hammett’s famous private eye, Sam Spade (played by Clive Owen), peacefully retired as an expat at age 60. However, the return of an old adversary, the murders of half a dozen nuns, and rumors of a mysterious boy possessing uncanny abilities all conspire to upset his “swell life” and involve him in a fresh—and dangerous—investigation.

Monsieur Spade, which was shot on location in France, will premiere on AMC and AMC+ on January 14. As skeptical as I’ve been about this series, the new trailer makes me hungry to see it.

Bullet Points: Feelings of Fall Edition

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• A welcome Banacek retrospective in T-Magazine.

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

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

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

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

So Much for Spade’s Serenity

Ever since I first wrote about the possibility of Clive Owen starring in a TV series as Sam Spade, I’ve been waiting for further developments. And here they are, courtesy of In Reference to Murder:

Golden Globe, SAG, and BAFTA award winner, Clive Owen, is stepping into the role of Detective Sam Spade, the protagonist of noir writer Dashiell Hammett’s 1930 classic novel, The Maltese Falcon, in AMC Networks’ Monsieur Spade.

The series, which is set in 1963, follows Spade (Owen) as he enjoys a peaceful and quiet retirement in the South of France—until the rumored return of his old adversary changes everything. When six beloved nuns are brutally murdered at a local convent, Spade learns that they are somehow connected to a mysterious child who is believed to possess great powers. Monsieur Spade, which was shot on location in France, will premiere on AMC and AMC+ in early 2024.

The 46-second preview doesn’t reveal much about Clive Owens’ portrayal of his protagonist. But this American-French mini-series was co-created by Scott Frank, of The Queen’s Gambit fame, and Tom Fontana (City on a Hill), so my expectations are pretty high.

Busy Farrell Can Finally Rest in Peace

Particularly during the 1960s and ’70s, actress Sharon Farrell—who was recently reported to have died of natural causes on May 15, aged 82—seemed ubiquitous on American television programs.

Farrell was among the stars of Saints and Sinners, a pretty much forgotten, 1962-1963 NBC drama set amid the New York City newspaper business. She also had a recurring role on the original Hawaii Five-O, playing police detective Lori Wilson, and from 1991 to 1997 featured regularly as Florence Webster on the CBS soap opera The Young and the Restless. Scanning her credits on the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) shows her to have guested on everything from Naked City, My Favorite Martian, and Burke’s Law to The Man from U.N.C.L.E., The Fugitive, The Wild Wild West, Police Story, Kolchak: The Night Stalker, The New Perry Mason, McCloud, Petrocelli, Banyon, and Mrs. Columbo. She later executed distinctive turns on T.J. Hooker and Matlock.

I remember the fetching blonde Farrell best, however, for a few other TV appearances. She occupied two very different roles in The Name of the Game, portraying a swindled blues musician in 1969’s “A Hard Case of the Blues,” and subsequently Sandrelle, a prospective love interest for the time-displaced Glenn Howard (Gene Barry) in the now-famous 1971 episode “L.A. 2017.” In the 1974 NBC pilot movie The Underground Man, based on Ross Macdonald’s novel of the same name and starring Peter Graves, Farrell brought emotion aplenty to her part as the mother of a troubled young woman (Kay Lenz) involved in a child kidnapping. And in “For the Love of Money,” the January 16, 1975, installment of David Janssen’s private-eye series, Harry O, she played the bikini-clad, merry-making girlfriend of a prominent booking agent. No matter what character Farrell inhabited, be it a spunky young roommate on Love, American Style or a machine-gun-toting militant on Police Woman, she delivered nothing short of a captivating performance.

Of course, Farrell didn’t confine herself to small-screen jobs. Her cinematic debut came in 1959’s Kiss Her Goodbye, adapted from the same-named, 1956 couple-on-the-run novel by Wade Miller. In its obituary, Deadline contended that Farrell “is best remembered for the [1974] film It’s Alive, in which she played the mother of a murderous deformed infant.” But she was seen as well in 1969’s The Reivers, 1980’s The Stunt Man, and 1987’s Can’t Buy Me Love. The big-screener that brought her to my early attention was Marlowe (1969), starring James Garner as Los Angeles gumshoe Philip Marlowe. In that Hollywood take on Raymond Chandler’s 1949 novel, The Little Sister, Farrell personated Orfamay Quest, a charmingly naïve but worried girl from Kansas who employs Marlowe to find her missing brother, and lends the picture both humor and a modicum of treachery.

(Above) Sharon Farrell starred with James Garner in Marlowe.

Sharon Farrell was born Sharon Lee Forsmoe in Sioux City, Iowa, on December 24, 1940. Her ancestry was Norwegian, and she was reared in a Lutheran family. As a child, she began studying ballet and went on to tour with the American Ballet Theatre Company, which took her to New York City. She was just 18 years old when she made Kiss Her Goodbye, but had already caught the acting bug. As Wikipedia recalls, Farrell bore a son, Chance Boyer, in 1970 with fellow performer John F. Boyer. Afterward, she “suffered an embolism which caused her heart to stop beating for four minutes. She ended up with serious brain damage that resulted in memory loss and physical impairments. With the help of colleagues, Farrell worked to regain her abilities, including her memory, and resumed her acting career, yet she kept her illness a secret under the advice of friend and actor Steve McQueen, who warned her that if word of her illness got out, her career would be over. Keeping her illness hidden, Farrell worked steadily for decades.” By the way, McQueen was another of the men, in addition to Boyer, with whom she was romantically linked over the years. The Hollywood Reporter’s obit of Farrell says that at one point, she was “involved in ‘a love triangle’” with both McQueen (her co-star in The Reivers) and martial arts legend Bruce Lee (who made quite a showing in Marlowe) “that resulted in Lee and McQueen not doing a movie together.”

IMDb lists Farrell’s final television gig as a January 1999 episode of the U.S. Navy legal drama JAG. More than another decade passed before she accepted (in her early 70s) the part of a grandmother in two episodes of the digital drama Broken at Love. Yet there’s little fear of Sharon Farrell being forgotten, as long her vast wealth of Hollywood work continues to bring her broad-smiling, twinkle-eyed face into homes and theaters around the world.

READ MORE: “Sharon Farrell Passes On,” by Terence Towles Canote
(A Shroud of Thoughts).

WATCH THEM NOW: At least for the time being, 1974’s The Underground Man, the Name of the Game episode “A Hard Case of the Blues,” and the Harry O installment “For the Love of Money”—all featuring Farrell—can all be enjoyed online.