Collins Brings Back Sam Spade

Iowa crime-fictionist Max Allan Collins has so many irons in the fire right now, it’s hard keeping track of everything. He has a Kickstarter campaign in progress to raise $30,000 toward production of a 10-part audio version of his earliest Nathan Heller detective novel, 1983’s True Detective. (With just three more days to go, the effort has already brought in $25,558!) Beyond that, he and his wife, Barbara Collins, are completing work on Death by Fruitcake, an indie film based on one of the stories in their cozyish “Trash ’n’ Treasures” mystery series (published under their joint pseudonym, “Barbara Allan”). And shooting has wrapped on Mickey Spillane’s Saturday Night in Cap City, a movie Collins co-adapted from “A Bullet for Satisfaction,” one of two non-Mike Hammer novellas he combined in the 2018 Hard Case Crime release The Last Stand.

(Left) The Maltese Falcon (1961), with cover art by Harry Bennett.

Now comes word that Collins will pen a sequel to Dashiell Hammett’s only Sam Spade private-eye novel:

The publisher Hard Case Crime announced Thursday that Collins’ “The Return of the Maltese Falcon” will be released in January 2026, when the Hammett classic featuring Spade, “The Maltese Falcon,” enters the public domain. “The Maltese Falcon,” published in 1930 and known to movie fans for the 1941 adaptation starring Humphrey Bogart, is widely regarded as a model for the hard-boiled detective novel.

“It has been an inspiration to authors and filmmakers, actors and illustrators and musicians—and to me, for the entire 50-plus years I’ve been a novelist,” Collins said in a statement. “Not that writing about the world Hammett created, and those immortal, sometimes immoral characters isn’t challenging—Hammett’s best mystery also happens to be one of the greatest American novels, period.”

When copyright protection ends for a book, anyone is free to use the characters and story line. After F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” entered the public domain, in 2021, new creations included a Tony-winning musical of the same name and a prequel novel, “Nick,” by Michael Farris Smith.

According to Hard Case Crime, Collins’ new book will bring back Spade and Joel Cairo among other Hammett characters, and “a mysterious new femme fatale.” Collins, whose “Road to Perdition” was adapted into a film starring Tom Hanks and Paul Newman, has a long history of working with famous literary detectives. He took over the Dick Tracy comic strip in the late 1970s after creator Chester Gould retired, and he was later authorized to continue Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer series.

“I’m something of an old hand at walking in the shoes of the giants who came before, though I never claim to filling them,” Collins told The Associated Press.

Various authorized Spade projects have been released, including a 2009 prequel, Joe Gores’ “Spade & Archer,” a novel about Spade and his professional partner, Miles Archer. Spade was featured this year in an AMC miniseries, “Monsieur Spade,” starring Clive Owen in a sequel that finds the detective retired and living in the South of France.

Collins has always been quick to list The Maltese Falcon as one of his favorite private investigator novels (as he did for The Rap Sheet years ago), and adds in his blog this week that he has long wished to compose a sequel to that yarn. After four decades spent concocting historical P.I. stories around Nate Heller, who is very much a Spade-like protagonist, Collins seems like an ideal candidate to breathe new vitality into Hammett’s “hard and shifty fellow.”

If I’m still around in early 2026, you can expect to find a copy of The Return of the Maltese Falcon clutched firmly in my hands.

FOLLOW-UP: Collins reports that “Our Kickstarter recently reached its goal of $30,000 and then some—as I write this it’s at $51,071! This is largely due to [director] Rob Burnett’s efforts on YouTube, which include a last-minute Jerry Lewis-style pseudo-telethon that put us over the hump.” Excellent news!

One (More) and Done

I have been reading and enjoying Max Allan Collins’ novels starring Chicago-based private eye Nathan Heller ever since 1986, when I picked up his first entry in said line, True Detective. That book and all 18 of its sequels now hold pride of place on two shelves in my office. Without question, I would read 18 more of Heller’s historical investigations, were Collins able to produce so many. But it appears he will not. He writes in his latest blog post:

I am pleased to announce what is almost certainly going to be the last Nathan Heller novel, The One-Way Ride, which I’ll be writing this year for Hard Case Crime. God willin’ and the crick don’t rise, it will appear in late 2025.

This will, at long last, tell the story of Heller, RFK and Jimmy Hoffa, which takes place in the ’60s but with first and last sections that feature Heller at the end of his career—chronologically the farthest up I’ve gone (other than brief sections of the whatever-happened-to chapters in various of the books).

I both hate and love the thought of doing a final chapter in Heller’s saga. The love part is (a) getting to do another one, and (b) knowing that this saga has a definitive ending. The hate part is that I love to do them and consider Heller my key work (Quarry would disagree, but I’m not giving him a vote).

Several realities are at play here. First, at my age [Collins will turn 76 next month] and with my health issues (which for now I’m keeping in check), doing a massive project like a Heller novel, with its soul-crushing research, is best put behind me. I have several other things I want to do, and speaking of Quarry, I may do more with him. I might also do an occasional Heller short story for the Strand and/or Ellery Queen.

Other factors are the way sales got impacted by the way a UK dock strike screwed up the publication of Too Many Bullets, which I consider to be a major book in the saga. That strike, as I’ve outlined here before, meant the 2022 publication of The Big Bundle effectively got pushed to the first quarter of 2023. That had the novel careening into Too Many Bullets, published early fall 2023, meaning two Hellers were published in one year (effectively). It led to the major trade publications (Publishers Weekly, Booklist, Kirkus and Library Journal) not reviewing Too Many Bullets (and in the past they always have always reviewed the Heller novels). That cost us bookstore and library sales.

And it made getting Hard Case Crime to do another book in the series required a real sales job from me.

When I interviewed Collins back in November, he suggested there might be a second new Heller outing in the future, that one mixing the gumshoe up with Republican Richard M. Nixon’s infamous Watergate scandal. At the same time, Hard Case editor Charles Ardai told me he and Collins had talked about adding Hoffa and Watergate books to the series, and “also, once, about the death of Martin Luther King and a few other topics that might be Heller-worthy.” Those further possibilities now appear foreclosed.

It’s hard for a veteran Nate Heller fan, like me, to accept that Collins might be sending him out to pasture. Especially since this announcement comes in the wake of news that Collins’ 15th Mike Hammer novel, Baby, It’s Murder—written in collaboration with his late friend and Hammer creator Mickey Spillane, and due out in August—will be that detective’s swan song. But 20 Heller novels is a hell of a body of work to cherish. Collins can be damn proud of what he’s accomplished with these yarns.

I look forward to one last ride with Nate, be it one-way or not.

Well, That’s Embarrassing!

From publisher Hard Case Crime’s X (aka Twitter) page:



Click on the image for an enlargement.

The Rap Sheet’s extensive list of new books being released this fall and early winter has been updated to reflect this rescheduling.

Bullet Points: Never a Dull Moment Edition

• Renowned movie and TV composer Billy Goldenberg—who died on Monday, August 3, at age 84—was the son of two musicians and took his first breaths in Brooklyn, New York, in 1936. He began his Hollywood career directing music for TV programs such as Hullabaloo and 1968’s Elvis: The Comeback Special. As Variety recalls, “In late 1968, Goldenberg became assistant to Universal TV music director Stanley Wilson, who assigned him scores for series [such] as Ironside, It Takes a Thief and The Name of the Game. He met [director Steven] Spielberg on Name of the Game and later did the director’s television work, including Night Gallery, Duel and three installments of Amazing Stories in the 1980s.” Goldbenberg wrote the music for 1971’s Ransom for a Dead Man, the teleflick that served as the actual pilot for Columbo, and went on to create the music for “Murder by the Book,” that series’ first regular episode. Among his other crime-drama credits are the themes for Harry O, Banacek, Kojak, and Delvecchio. When asked about Goldenberg’s contributions to the TV mystery field, Gary Gerani, a screenwriter and film historian now working on a documentary about the composer, offered these comments:

Billy Goldenberg certainly didn’t invent crime and mystery TV music. But what he brought to the genre was a perverse, transcendent elegance, something missed even by immortal composers like Bernard Herrmann and Jerry Goldsmith. Having followed his career from the very beginning, I think it’s significant that Broadway-based Goldenberg began his TV-film work with supernatural music (Fear No Evil, Ritual of Evil, Night Gallery). This led his aural ideas and arrangements in a darkly surreal direction … ”romantic mysticism” he called it. It was just a short walk from the demonic investigations of Dr. David Sorell (Louis Jourdan) to the insanely upper-class, full of themselves, larger-than-life villains facing Columbo. And in all of this … beauty. Elegance. Class. Billy was able to find an elegant “inner life" even in the bald-headed, lollipop-slurping countenance of Telly Savalas, his Kojak theme finding something eternal in the man and his city.

What will Mr. Goldenberg be remembered for? The Spielberg collaborations, of course; before John Williams, Goldenberg was Spielberg’s go-to composer, with Duel a very high-profile title on Billy’s résumé. And his Bartok-inspired supernatural music clearly defined the TV-movie flavors of the ’70s. But Columbo, beloved by fans all over the world, is probably the pop-culture property he’s most identified with. [His] Ransom for a Dead Man score was essentially the next step from his more cosmic television movies. This score influenced the “elegant beauty” style of music used in most detective TV shows produced by Dean Hargrove later in the decade, and beyond; even Murder, She Wrote’s harpsichord owes something to what Billy brought to the genre with Ransom. His approach captures the off-center personality of the Columbo episodes themselves far better than Henry Mancini’s [NBC] Mystery Movie theme, which is loads of fun, but clearly doesn’t belong in the same provocative, “perverted melodious” universe as Goldenberg’s creations. So yes, it’s fair to say that Billy Goldenberg’s compositions defined the signature sound of the 1970s mystery movie, and much of what followed in its wake.

Goldenberg collected almost two dozen Emmy nominations during his lengthy career, winning for such small-screen gems as Queen of the Stardust Ballroom (1975) and for miniseries including The Lives of Benjamin Franklin (1974) and King (1978). The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) carries an extensive list of his work.


(Above) The opening scene from Ransom for a Dead Man—with music by Billy Goldenberg—finds a lawyer (played by Lee Grant) assembling a ransom note for her husband (actor Harlan Warde), editing a tape recording to prove that he was indeed snatched, and finally shooting him in their living room.

• Also lost last week: journalist and author Pete Hamill. A longtime, much-admired New York City newspaperman, Hamill also published in The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Playboy, and Esquire. (A variety of his pieces can be read here, with one of his best-known Esquire features available at this link.) On top of all those credits, he penned close to a dozen novels, recalls Jiro Kimura of The Gumshoe Site, “including A Killing for Christ (Little, Brown, 1968), his first novel which was a thriller about a plot to assassinate the Pope in Rome.” Hamill produced, as well, a quartet of action-packed thrillers starring Gotham freelance reporter Sam Briscoe, beginning with 1978’s Dirty Laundry (about which I wrote in CrimeReads) and running through 2011’s Tabloid City. Kimura goes on to note that Hamill’s “mystery short stories include ‘The Men in Black Raincoats,’ first published in the December 1977 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and ‘The Book Signing’ (first published in Brooklyn Noir; Akashic, 2004), which was an Edgar nominee. His teleplays include Laguna Heat (1987, based on the novel by T. Jefferson Parker) and Split Images (1992, based on the novel by Elmore Leonard).” Click here to enjoy New York magazine’s fine tribute to Hamill, who passed away from heart and kidney failure on August 5. He was 85 years of age.

• Like so many other crime-fiction gatherings, Belfast, Ireland’s NOIRELAND International Crime Fiction Festival has had its ups and downs this year. A one-day event had been planned for March 28, only to be postponed until October due to the novel coronavirus. And now … “Sadly, it seems we were a little optimistic!” writes festival manager Angela McMahon. “The risk to public health from COVID-19 is still significant and unlikely to change for some time. As the well-being of our audiences, our authors and our many wonderful volunteers is paramount, we have concluded that in the circumstances we cannot go ahead with NOIRELAND this year.” She promises that tickets will be refunded over the next couple of weeks.

• Also cancelled was this year’s Pulpfest. Nonetheless, organizers announced that the winner of that planned convention’s 2020 Munsey Award is Mike Ashley, “the author or co-author of numerous works related to the pulps, science fiction, and fantasy. … Ashley has also edited many anthologies and single-author collections, often drawing work from the pulps. He is currently part of a team compiling an index to the most important British popular fiction magazines published between 1880 and 1950, including all the British pulps.” In 2003, Ashley’s Mammoth Encyclopedia of Modern Crime Fiction captured the Edgar Award for Best Critical/Biographical Work.

• Plans are quite different for another annual get-together, the Crime Fiction Weekend at St. Hilda’s College, University of Oxford. The two-day conference (August 14-15) will take place entirely online. As publicity committee member Jean Harker says in an e-mail note, “This year’s theme is ‘All Our Yesterdays: Historical Crime Fiction’ … and speakers include Andrew Taylor, Mick Herron, Andrew Wilson, Elly Griffiths, Anna Mazzola, etc.” She adds that “St. Hilda’s alumna and Honorary Fellow Val McDermid will preside over some of the proceedings. There will also be a tribute to Dame Agatha Christie as we celebrate the centenary of the publication of The Mysterious Affair at Styles—and a solve-it-yourself Whodunnit playlet written by Andrew Taylor and acted by a cast of crime writers.” Click here to find the full program. Proceedings are supposed to be recorded and made available to ticket-holders for a month. The ticket price is £30, with a discount available to students. You can register here.

• As the coronavirus lockdown continues, you may be curious to know how retired Edinburgh Detective Inspector John Rebus (soon to return in A Song for the Dark Times) is managing the isolation. His creator, Ian Rankin, answers that question in this delightful scripted video short starring Emmy Award-winning Scottish actor Brian Cox. It imagines Rebus coping with the absence of pubs, the need for exercise, the ubiquity of Zoom communications, and much more. (Hat tip to Randal S. Brandt)

• I’m just in the midst of reading Sam Wasson’s The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood (Flatiron), and here comes news that Ben Affleck is spearheading a film based on that character-rich tale about the making of Chinatown (1974). The Hollywood Reporter says he’ll pen the script and direct the picture, and co-produce with Lorne Michaels, “who initially nabbed the rights to the book.” Let’s hope for the best from this project.

• In other story-to-screen news, The Killing Times brings word that Megan Abbott’s next novel, The Turnout—to be published in the summer of 2021—is already scheduled for television treatment. It says the story “is set in the hothouse world of a ballet school led by the Durant sisters, Dara and Marie, and Dara’s husband Charlie. Their connection is intense, forged by a glamorous but troubled family history. But after they hire Derek, a charismatic, possibly shady contractor to renovate the studio, Marie throws herself into an intense affair with him that threatens their tight bonds and brings forward family secrets until an act of violence overturns everything.”

• Meanwhile, it’s been reported that actress Elisabeth Moss (The West Wing, The Handmaid’s Tale) “will be developing Araminta Hall’s forthcoming Imperfect Women as one of the first projects of her new production company, Love & Squalor Pictures.” Publishers Weekly calls that novel a “heart-wrenching psychological thriller.”

• Netflix has chosen September 3 as the debut date for Young Wallander, its six-episode series inspired by Henning Mankell’s tales of Swedish police inspector Kurt Wallander.

• Here’s a show I didn’t expect: HBO’s The Undoing, a psychological drama starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant. Variety explains,

The six-episode series follows Grace Fraser (Kidman), a successful therapist who discovers that her husband Jonathan (Grant) may be wrapped up in the death of another woman. She must unravel a chain of mysteries to reclaim her family’s life. The limited series, based on Jean Hanff Korelitz’s [2014] novel You Should Have Known, is written and executive produced by David E. Kelley. Susanne Bier, Per Saari, Bruna Papandrea, Stephen Garrett, Celia Costas and Kidman also executive produce. Bier also directs.

The Undoing is slated to start its run on October 25.

• And Netflix is offering images from its adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 Gothic novel, Rebecca, which was already so well filmed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1940. Netflix’s interpretation will premiere on October 21. As Deadline explains, “Lily James and Armie Hammer lead the cast this time out, playing the aristocratic widower Maxim de Winter (Laurence Olivier in Hitchcock’s version) and his new wife (previously Joan Fontaine), with Kristin Scott Thomas as Mrs Danvers.”

• August brings what would have been Earl Derr Biggers’ 136th birthday, were the creator of Charlie Chan still around to enjoy such festivities. (He perished in 1933, aged 48.) To celebrate, Lou Armagno, who blogs at The Postman on Holiday, has compiled a “musical montage” of compositions and musicians associated with Biggers’ Chinese-American detective, the majority of which relate to the 44 vintage Chan films. Among the many things I hadn’t know before: David Raksin, who created music for the 1941’s Dead Men Tell, starring Sidney Toler as Chan, would three years later compose the eerily beautiful score for that film noir classic, Laura.

• Laura seems to be burning bright in the zeitgeist lately. Otto Penzler placed that 1944 Gene Tierney/Dana Andrews picture at Number 6 in his CrimeReads countdown of “The Greatest Crime Films of All Time.” And in Loren D. Estleman’s new, sixth Valentino mystery, Indigo (Forge), his imperfect film detective is presented with the original Laura Hunt portrait painted for that movie.

• Regarding Penzler’s picks, he’s identified his top two—Chinatown (1974) and The Maltese Falcon (1941)—but we’re still waiting to see which motion picture he thinks belongs at the top of the heap.

• In a new interview with Hollywood Soapbox, Hard Case Crime editor Charles Ardai talks about his company’s initial inspiration, forthcoming works by Ray Bradbury and Max Allan Collins, and the importance of original cover artwork for HCC titles.

• Speaking of Hard Case, Entertainment Weekly has revealed the Paul Mann-painted cover of Later, Stephen King’s third contribution to that paperback line (following 2005’s The Colorado Kid and 2013’s top-selling Joyland). Due out in March 2021, Later is described by Ardai as “a beautiful story about growing up and facing your demons—whether they’re metaphorical or (as sometimes happens when you’re in a Stephen King novel) the real thing. It’s terrifying, tender, heartbreaking and honest, and we’re so excited to bring it to readers.”

• When it comes to crime- and mystery-fiction blogs, patience is sometimes rewarded. In July 2018, Brooklyn writer, critic, and musician Cullen Gallagher put up what appeared to be the final contribution to his fine site, Pulp Serenade: an interview with author Paul D. Brazill. Given Gallagher’s previous posting prolificacy, though, I hesitated to delete Pulp Serenade from The Rap Sheet’s blogroll—and now my restraint has been vindicated. Almost a full two years after Gallagher seemed to disappear, he suddenly returned in mid-June with a flood of posts, some of them reprints but others new (such as his reviews of S.A. Cosby’s Blacktop Wasteland and Lawrence Block’s Dead Girl Blues). I don’t know how long his renewed commitment to Pulp Serenade will last, but let’s hope it will not flag any time soon.

• So what’s happened to Reviewing the Evidence? Created in 2001 by Barbara Franchi, it has more recently been managed by Yvonne Klein. However, the last time that site saw an update was back in January of this year. I hope the pandemic has not spelled an end to RTE. I recently sent an e-mail inquiry to Klein, but have not yet received a response. If anybody out there knows about the site’s future, I hope they’ll reveal it in the Comments section at the end of this post.

• This could be interesting. From In Reference to Murder:

Independent publisher Canelo is launching a new crime fiction imprint, Canelo Crime, and has promoted Louise Cullen as publishing director to oversee the list. The imprint will launch with a selection of eight titles, including novels by Rachel Lynch and Nick Louth, due for release on September 24. Cullen is now actively seeking new novels with “bestseller potential” for inclusion in the imprint in 2021 and beyond, with a target of 15–18 new releases next year.

• If you’ve ever wondered what it would like to be in the company of prolific Texas author James Reasoner, click over to this YouTube interview he did with Paul Bishop of Wolfpack Publishing and fellow writer Robert Vaughan. By the way, Reasoner just declared that he’s finished work on his 386th novel. I suddenly feel very lazy …

• Tied to the recent release of Eliot Ness and the Mad Butcher: Hunting America’s Deadliest Unidentified Serial Killer at the Dawn of Modern Criminology (Morrow), which he wrote with A. Brad Schwartz, author Max Allan Collins submits to The Strand Magazine’s blog a list containing “10 Additional Surprising Facts About Eliot Ness.”

• Collins also posted a piece in CrimeReads that answers the question, “Whatever Happened to Eliot Ness After Prohibition?”

• Let me recommend one other story in CrimeReads: Andrew Cartmel’s look back at the “lost classics” of 20th-century hard-boiled author Charles Williams.

• I’m not much for audiobooks, since I can generally read a work faster myself than somebody else can read it to me. However, I have enjoyed listening to Phoebe Judge’s presentations at Phoebe Reads a Mystery, a podcast I first heard about from blogger Dave Knadler. Since the novel coronavirus struck, she’s been recording chapter-by-chapter deliveries of classic works, some of the most recent being Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Anna Katharine Green’s The Leavenworth Case, Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Links, and Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone. While I still shy away from audio versions of new novels, I find that I quite enjoy revisiting books I have already read, transported into another time and place by Judge’s soothing voice.

Bullet Points: Lots o’ Links Edition

• In The Rap Sheet’s last news wrap-up, I noted that Season 4 of Grantchester will premiere in the States this coming Sunday night, July 14, as part of PBS-TV’s Masterpiece Mystery! lineup. Now comes word, courtesy of The Killing Times, that ITV, the British network behind that cozyish historical crime series, has renewed Grantchester for yet another year. “The show’s fifth season,” says The Killing Times, “is set in 1957, the year Prime Minister Harold Macmillan told the British people that they had ‘never had it so good.’ For many of the residents of Grantchester, it really will feel like they’re in a delightful new Eden, but for all the talk of paradise on earth and faith-in-action, Geordie Keating (Robson Green) knows that trouble is never far away.”

• American film director Brian De Palma (Carrie, Scarface, The Untouchables, The Black Dahlia, etc.) will release his first novel—to be published by Hard Case Crime—in March 2020, according to Entertainment Weekly. Titled Are Snakes Necessary?, and co-authored with Susan Lehman, the book is said to be a “‘a blistering political satire’ that doubles as a female revenge thriller.” Hard Case provides this plot brief:

When the beautiful young videographer offered to join his campaign, Senator Lee Rogers should’ve known better. But saying no would have taken a stronger man than Rogers, with his ailing wife and his robust libido. Enter Barton Brock, the senator’s fixer. He’s already gotten rid of one troublesome young woman—how hard could this new one turn out to be? Pursued from Washington, D.C., to the streets of Paris, 18-year-old Fanny Cours knows her reputation and budding career are on the line. But what she doesn’t realize is that her life might be as well …

EW quotes Hard Case editor Charles Ardai as calling Are Snakes Necessary? “not just a great crime story, it’s a sharp, ruthless look at the state of affairs—both political and extramarital—in our turbulent modern era.” That certainly sounds promising.

• Margery Allingham’s renown lives on, thanks i part to a decision regarding the future of an annual short-story competition named after her. This note comes from Shotsmag Confidential: “The Margery Allingham Society has agreed with the [British] Crime Writers’ Association that the popular short mystery competition will run for at least another five years, until 2024. The Society, set up to honour and promote the writings of the great Golden Age author whose well-known hero is Albert Campion, works with the CWA to operate and fund the writing competition that opens for entries in the autumn on the CWA’s website and closes every February.” It was only this last May that the winner of the 2019 Margery Allingham Short Story Competition was announced: Ray Bazowski, for “A Perfect Murderer.”

• Blogger, genre historian, and author Curtis Evans seems more than moderately thrilled by news that Freeman Wills Crofts’ Golden Age mysteries starring Inspector French are the inspiration for a forthcoming TV series. “I have read the script of what is to be the first episode,” Evans explains in The Passing Tramp, “based on a Crofts novel which I write about extensively in my 2012 book about Crofts, John Street, and JJ Connington, and I am excited about the whole thing. Crofts readers will be able to tell just from this article that there are changes being made for the adaptation, changes which will be forthrightly aired here, but I think fans of the book will be pleased, as well as mystery fans more generally.” In a follow-up to that original post, Evans interviews Brendan Foley, the program’s writer.

• With Donald Trump’s outrageous and dangerous “nationwide immigration enforcement operation … targeting migrant families” apparently taking place this weekend—his latest ploy to gin up support among his radical base, no matter the damage it does to families as well as America’s reputation—it seems an appropriate time to point readers toward Oline H. Cogdill’s list of “mysteries that include immigrants in their solid plots.” Included among her choices are works by Ragnar Jónasson, Denise Hamilton, and Dennis Lehane.

• And while we’re on the subject of lists, check out Mystery Tribune’s picks of the “Top 10 Great Brazilian Crime Fiction Books.” Several of those works were composed by two authors well represented on my own bookshelves: Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza and Leighton Gage.

• Oh, and author John Galligan offers this CrimeReads piece identifying “8 Novels You Won’t Find in the Crime Section,” but that nonetheless belong there, given their subject matter. Yes, Jim Harrison’s Brown Dog (2013) is among them.

• HBO has chosen September 9 as the date on which its gritty George Pelecanos/David Simon-created drama series, The Deuce, will return for its third and final season. As Deadline explains, the show “chronicles the establishment of the porn industry in the decidedly pre-Disney Times Square of the early 1970s through legalization, the rise of HIV, the cocaine epidemic and the big business of the mid-1980s, with the changing real estate market about to bring the deadly party to a close.” James Franco and Maggie Gyllenhaal star.

• A premiere date has been set, too, for Stumptown, the ABC-TV detective series I wrote about not long ago. Based on graphic novels by Greg Rucka, this hour-long show stars Cobie Smulders (How I Met Your Mother, Friends from College) as Dex Parios, “a sharp-witted army veteran who becomes a private investigator in Portland, Oregon.” ABC will premiere Stumptown on September 25, at 10 p.m.

• Way to kick a dead man while he’s down! In its newest installment of a series revisiting Edgar Allan Poe Award winners from the past, Thomas Wickersham recalls The Rheingold Route, Arthur Maling’s 1979 “espionage novel without spies.” Wickersham remarks: “It is a pity when a book’s place in history is to languish all but forgotten besides its title on a list of awards. It is sadder still to revisit such a book and find that its place in obscurity is earned.” Maybe, though, as Wickersham himself suggests, The Rheingold Route “was a book of its time.” Back in ’79, Kirkus Reviews was much more generous to the novel, calling it “tautly plotted, distinctively populated, convincingly romantic—perfect material for a Hitchcock film or an all-in-one-sitting late-night read.” Author Maling passed away in 2013.

• The Staunch Prize, launched last year to salute thriller novels “in which no woman is beaten, stalked, sexually exploited, raped, or murdered,” has been criticized recently by authors objecting to organizers’ insinuations that their fiction may bias rape juries and trials. In the UK’s Guardian, prize-winning author Sarah Hilary (Never Be Broken) calls the Staunch Prize “not a prize so much as a gagging order,” and she goes on to say: “Violence against women takes many forms, perhaps the most insidious of which is censorship. We’re discouraged from going to the police in case we’re not believed, taught to expect resistance to our version of events, silenced by shame or fear. This prize reinforces all those negative messages, and ignores the very real good that crime fiction can do by reflecting the violent reality of many women’s lives.” Meanwhile, Edinburgh’s Kaite Walsh (The Unquiet Heart), who was herself raped as a younger woman, opines: “I can’t write about a world without rape because I don’t live in one. I won’t sanitise my writing in service of some fictional, feminist utopia. And while I indulge in fictional universes that let me escape, write the world the way I wish it was, my work lies in marrying my imagination with the ugly truth, challenging myself to explore the friction in the places where they collide. I wanted to write someone whose story didn’t end with rape, or even begin with it—but included it as just another bump in the road that has to be dealt with, worked through and lived with.”

• I wouldn’t normally bother with the right-wing “news” site Breitbart. But Gigi Garner, daughter of the late actor James Garner, recommended this Independence Day Breitbart tribute to her father, which touts his 1974-1980 NBC-TV series The Rockford Files as “the most American television show ever made.” Contributor John Nolte lays out a variety of reasons why he believes Garner’s private eye, Jim Rockford, was “TV’s great American,” including:

He’s a gentleman and chivalrous to the ladies—a real Neanderthal who opens car doors, lights cigarettes, steps into harm’s way to protect them, and yet still treats them as equals.

He’s a reluctant hero who keeps his virtues to a minimum “because they’re easier to keep track of.” In other words, he’s not a pompous virtue-signaler. …

Above all, Jim Rockford is first, last, and always his own man. His independence, his unwillingness to conform to anyone’s idea of how he should live his life, work his profession, or bow to authority is as American as it gets. He doesn’t tell anyone else how to live their life, and as long as you don’t cross that busybody line with him, there won’t be a problem.

Nolte goes out of his way to suggest that Rockford was one of those government-hating “real Americans” Sarah Palin was always spouting off about. I wonder if he realizes Garner was a self-described “‘bleeding-heart liberal,’ one of those card-carrying Democrats that Rush Limbaugh thinks is a communist. And I’m proud of it.”

• OK, a show of hands: Who remembers actor George Kennedy’s 1975-1976 CBS-TV series, The Blue Knight, based on Joseph Wambaugh’s 1973 novel of the same name? I just noticed that five of that program’s two-dozen episodes are available on YouTube. It’s best to watch them now, before they’re scrubbed from the site.

• Registration is already open for readers and writers hoping to attend the 2012 Left Coast Crime convention in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Guests of Honor that year will be novelists Mick Herron and Catriona McPherson. Don’t forget about LCC 2020, either, which is scheduled to be held in San Diego, California.

• In advance of the Veronica Mars TV revival series, which begins airing on July 26 on Hulu, the Web site Vox chooses the best and worst episodes from among the show’s original, 2004-2007 run; the 2014 film based on the program also joins the ranking. When you’re done reading through all of those, look back at Cameron Hughes’ 2008 piece about Veronica Mars, posted in The Rap Sheet.

• Finally, a belated (and posthumous) “happy birthday” to composer Earle Hagan, who “would have turned 100 years old on July 9,” as Variety notes. Among his many contributions to popular culture, Hagan gave us the themes for The Andy Griffith Show, I Spy, The Mod Squad, and The New Perry Mason.

Bullet Points: Thanksgiving Links Feast

• As part of its 2017 “New Talent November” celebration, Crime Fiction Lover identifies five women writers it predicts will become much better known over the coming year. Among them are Australia’s Jane Harper, whose debut novel, The Dry, won this year’s Gold Dagger award from the British Crime Writers’ Association; and American Hannah Tinti, who CFL says showed a “talent for almost old-fashioned, proper storytelling ... in her second novel, The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley [2017].” To keep up with the “New Talent November” series, which will run through the end of this month, click here.

• Deadline brings this news: “Carmen Ejogo is set to star opposite Mahershala Ali in the third season of Nic Pizzolatto’s HBO crime anthology series, True Detective. The new installment of True Detective tells the story of a macabre crime in the heart of the Ozarks and a mystery that deepens over decades and plays out in three separate time periods. Ejogo will play Amelia Reardon, an Arkansas schoolteacher with a connection to two missing children in 1980. Ali plays the lead role of Wayne Hays, a state police detective from Northwest Arkansas.” Sounds good.

• There’s no shortage of Thanksgiving-related mysteries.

• You have to be of a certain age to understand what a big deal David Cassidy—who died this week at age 67—was in the early 1970s. The son of actor Jack Cassidy and the stepson of singer-vedette Shirley Jones, David Cassidy was the teen idol of the time. “With pretty-boy good looks and a long mane of dark hair, Cassidy was every girl’s favorite teen crush,” Variety wrote in its obituary of the New Jersey-born songster and guitarist. His featured role on the popular ABC-TV musical sitcom The Partridge Family (1970-1974), which had him playing opposite Shirley Jones, gave Cassidy immense public exposure, while songs such as “I Think I Love You” made him a chart-topping sensation in his own right. “During an era when the Big Three broadcast networks still had a monolithic hold on pop culture, Cassidy’s picture was suddenly everywhere—not just on the fronts of magazines and record albums, but on lunch boxes, posters, cereal boxes and toys,” recalls National Public Radio (NPR). “He sold out concert venues across the globe, from New York’s Madison Square Garden to stadiums in London and Melbourne.” Following Partridge’s cancellation, Cassidy expanded his acting résumé (which had previously included turns on Ironside and The Mod Squad), making guest appearances on The Love Boat, Matt Houston, and even CSI. His performance as an undercover officer, Dan Shay, in a 1978 episode of NBC’s Police Story titled “A Chance to Live,” scored Cassidy an Emmy Award nomination for Best Dramatic Actor and led to his reprising the Shay role in David Cassidy: Man Undercover (1978-1979), a Los Angeles-set show that lasted only 10 episodes. But all was not well in his personal life. His six-year marriage to actress Kay Lenz (Breezy, The Underground Man), ended in divorce in 1983; he would wed twice more over the years. “In the 2010s,” NPR recalls, “he had a string of arrests on drunk-driving charges in Florida, New York and California. In 2014 he told CNN, ‘I am most definitely an alcoholic.’ The following year, he declared bankruptcy and was charged with a hit-and-run in Fort Lauderdale.” Wikipedia adds: “On February 20, 2017, Cassidy announced that he was living with non-Alzheimer’s dementia, the condition that his mother suffered from at the end of her life. He retired from performing in early 2017 when the condition became noticeable during a performance in which he forgot lyrics and otherwise struggled.” After being hospitalized in Florida for several days, David Cassidy perished from liver failure on November 21.

• Vox has more to say about Cassidy’s life and career.


(Above) The opening teaser and titles from “RX for Dying,” the December 21, 1978, episode of David Cassidy: Man Undercover.

• Lisa Levy looks at our modern “rape culture” and how it’s reflected in crime fiction. In a piece for Literary Hub, she writes:

[R]ape culture is everywhere in crime fiction. It is in every missing girl or woman. It is in every female cop protagonist who is slighted or doubted by her colleagues and her superiors. It’s in every P.I. novel with a woman at its center, as she negotiates a sexually hostile world to do her job. ... If crime fiction is a mirror of society that reveals our deepest and longest held fears, as I believe it is, then rape culture is one of those fears writ large in novels about men who violate women (sexually or otherwise). But it is also subtext in many, many other novels, where women are denigrated, pushed aside, ignored, hit on, groped, and verbally assaulted.

When I set out to look at rape culture in crime fiction, I found it everywhere. To take a very popular example, it’s no accident that the original title of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in Swedish translates to The Man Who Hated Women. One of the hallmarks of that series is heroine Lisbeth Salander’s repeated victimization at the hands of men, including her father and her court-appointed guardian, who raped her repeatedly when she was institutionalized as a child.

• In the blog Criminal Element, Con Lehane writes about his decision to set his latest series at New York City’s iconic 42nd Street Library. His second Raymond Ambler mystery, Murder in the Manuscript Room, is out just this week from Minotaur Books.

• Had Anthony Horowitz not done such a convincing job of capturing the character of British spy James Bond in his 2015 novel, Trigger Mortis, we’d probably not now be hanging on every Twitter update of his work on its sequel. But we’re doing just that, with the latest mere morsel, the latest crumb, the latest speck of information being showcased in The Spy Command. I sure hope Horowitz’s finished work rewards all this anticipation.

• In February of next year, Dynamite Entertainment will premiere a 40-page, one-shot James Bond comic spin-off that “centers on the head of the [British] Secret Intelligence Service (better known as MI-6), Miles Messervy—we know him more famously as ‘M.’” As The Secret Agent Lair reports, “this incarnation of M is rather different from the source material as well as [from Ms] portrayed in the film franchise. Unlike the original Sir Miles Messervy, a full Anglo-Saxon, this version of M is British of African descent, much like Moneypenny herself in the comics as well as the rebooted 007 timeline of the movies.” The blog adds that the graphic novel, titled simply M, will “delve into [Messervy’s] past and his time in the field before his ascension to the head of Her Majesty’s Secret Service.”

• This month marks 15 years since the release of Die Another Day, the 20th James Bond film—and the fourth and final one to feature Pierce Brosnan as Agent 007. Commemorating this occasion, The Secret Agent Lair revisits the poster campaign that promoted that film back in 1997, observing that its imagery was “too flashy for today’s standards, where most action movies get the minimalistic and desaturated artwork treatment—the Daniel Craig-era posters, where the protagonist is set to rather insipid backgrounds, look like a strange cousin in comparison to these pieces. Yet, it is a heartfelt testimony to the days where the 007 films let the drama [run] for a couple of hours, and a cocktail of Martinis, girls and guns were … the order of the day.”

• Speaking of milestones, it was 13 years ago in September that the paperback book line Hard Case Crime was launched, with Lawrence Block’s Grifter’s Game and Max Phillips’ Fade to Blonde being its initial pair of releases. In an interview with small-press publisher Paul Suntup, Hard Case editor Charles Ardai reflects on his company’s history, the process of adding new titles to its hard-boiled catalogue, and the works that helped make it successful. He also reveals why Hard Case’s logo looks the way it does. “Initially,” Ardai explains, “we were going to call the line ‘Kingpin,’ which is why the logo features a crown over the gun. But the day before we went to register the trademark, TV producer Aaron Spelling beat us to the punch, registering it for a TV mini-series about a drug kingpin. So we scrapped the name and came up with ‘Hard Case Crime’ instead. But the logo felt so good and so right that we kept it, even though the crown no longer made any sense.”

• Max Allan Collins gives us an update on the status of his next Nate Heller novel, Do No Harm, which finds the Chicago-based private eye working the 1954 Sam Sheppard homicide case:

The process with Heller has remained largely the same since True Detective back in the early ’80s. I select the historical incident—usually a crime, either unsolved or controversially solved—and approach it as if I’m researching the definitive book on the subject. I never have a firm opinion on the case before research proper begins, even if I’ve read a little about it or seen movies or documentaries on the subject, just as somebody interested in famous true crimes. …

This time I changed my mind about who murdered Marilyn Sheppard, oh, a dozen times. I in part selected the case because it was a more traditional murder mystery than the political subjects of the last four Heller novels—sort of back to basics, plus giving me something that would be a little easier to do, since I was coming out of some health problems and major surgeries.

But it’s turned out to be one of the trickiest Heller novels of all. Figuring out what happened here is very tough. There is no shortage of suspects, and no shortage of existing theories. In addition, a number of the players are still alive (Sam Sheppard’s brother Stephen is 97) and those who aren’t have grown children who are, none of whom would likely be thrilled with me should I lay a murder at the feet of their deceased parents.

• Fascinating. I didn’t know that a film noir had been made from Steve Fisher’s 1941 novel, I Wake Up Screaming. Or that said movie, which was eventually retitled Hot Spot, starred Betty Grable (in a rare dramatic role), along with Victor Mature and Carole Landis. Nor was I aware that Fisher scripted the picture together with Dwight Taylor. I was privy to none of this until I happened across an apparently “unreleased trailer” to I Wake Up Screaming in Elizabeth Foxwell’s blog, The Bunburyist. Now I have to go out and find the full flick. (By the way, this film was remade in 1953 as Vicki.)

• The Lineup selects “35 gripping true-crime books from the last 55 year,” for those moments when you need creepiness in your life.

• Crime Fiction Lover briefs us on the Hull Noir festival, held this month in the Yorkshire town of Kingston Upon Hull (aka Hull).

• As I’ve made clear in a couple of previous “Bullet Points” posts (see here and here), I’m highly skeptical of plans to make a new film inspired by Ernest Tidyman’s succession of novels featuring 1970s-cool Manhattan private eye John Shaft. Nonetheless, Steve Aldous (whose 2015 book, The World of Shaft, is a must-have for fans of Tidyman’s yarns) keeps posting updates on the movie in his blog. Recently, for instance, he offered this synopsis of the picture’s plot: “Working for the FBI, estranged from his father and determined not to be anything like him, John Shaft Jr. reluctantly enlists his father’s help to find out who killed his best friend Karim and bring down a drug-trafficking/money-laundering operation in NYC.” Aldous adds that this film, presently titled Son of Shaft, is due to start production in December. Jessie T. Usher (Survivor’s Romance) has signed up to portray the aforementioned John Shaft Jr. … who is supposedly the child of Samuel L. Jackson’s John Shaft, from the awful 2000 film Shaft … who was, in turn, the nephew of Richard Roundtree’s original Shaft. Got all that?

• It was almost exactly two years ago that I reported on plans by Visual Entertainment Inc. (VEI), a Toronto-based home video/television distribution company, to produce a DVD collection of James Franciscus’ 1971-1972 detective series, Longstreet. Only now, however, is the Web site TV Shows on DVD finally announcing the release of that boxed set. Although Amazon doesn’t yet show Longstreet: The Complete Series as being available for advance purchase, the $29.99 compilation is scheduled to ship on December 1, and will “contain the pilot telefilm and all 23 regular weekly episodes.” (Click here to buy it directly from VEI.) For those of you who don’t remember Franciscus’ fourth small-screen series (following Mr. Novak, which is being prepared for its own DVD rollout this coming spring), here’s TV Shows on DVD’s short explanation of its concept:

Following a bomb blast that leaves him blind and a widower, New Orleans insurance detective Mike Longstreet (James Franciscus) refuses to quit the business. Together with the help of his dog Pax, assistant Nikki [Marlyn Mason] and friend Duke [Peter Mark Richman], Longstreet continues to investigate thefts, kidnappings, and murders. … Bruce Lee made four guest appearances as Longstreet’s martial arts teacher.

• There’s still no word from Netflix on a U.S. debut date for Babylon Berlin, the much-heralded German drama “set in the seamy, steamy, scheming underworld of 1920s and ’30s Berlin.” While Americans wait, though, The Killing Times has begun reviewing each of the eight Season 1 episodes, currently being shown in Britain. So if, like me, you must hold tight in expectation of this program based on Volker Kutscher’s detective novels, at least you can read a little about the series’ unfurling plot lines and characters.

• Another series to watch for: The Indian Detective. Deadline says this show casts Indian-descended Canadian comedian Russell Peters as “Doug D’Mello, a Toronto cop who unexpectedly finds himself investigating a murder in his parents’ Indian homeland. The investigation leads Doug to uncover a dangerous conspiracy involving David Marlowe (William Shatner), a billionaire property developer, while dealing with his own ambivalence toward a country where, despite his heritage, he is an outsider.” Netflix will launch The Indian Detective on Tuesday, December 19. Canada’s National Post >says there are four episodes in Season 1.

• Also from Deadline comes word that the creators of Columbo, the long-running TV mystery series, are suing Universal City Studios for “holding out on profits from the series.” In a 15-page complaint filed earlier this month in the Los Angeles Superior Court, screenwriter/short-story author William Link, together with the estate of the late Richard Levinson, insist they are owed 15 percent to 20 percent of the Columbo profits, and that Universal took four decades to acknowledge “that they were owed profit participation.”

• James Garner, star of The Rockford Files, Maverick, and an impressive catalogue of films, died during the summer of 2014, but only now have I come across a long, beautifully penned tribute to his work, composed by critic Clive James and published in The Atlantic in 2011, at the time the actor’s memoir, The Garner Files, reached bookstores. Here’s part of what James had to say:

Every sane person’s favorite modern male movie star, Garner might have done even better if he’d been less articulate. In his generation, three male TV stars made it big in the movies: Steve McQueen, Clint Eastwood, and Garner. All of them became stars in TV Westerns: McQueen in Wanted: Dead or Alive, Eastwood in Rawhide, and Garner in Maverick. The only one of them who looked and sounded as if he enjoyed communicating by means of the spoken word was Garner. McQueen never felt ready for a film role until he had figured out what the character should do with his hands: that scene-stealing bit in his breakout movie, The Magnificent Seven, in which he shakes the shotgun cartridges beside his ear, was McQueen’s equivalent of a Shakespearean soliloquy, or of a practice session for a postatomic future in which language had ceased to exist.

As for Eastwood, he puts all that effort into gritting his teeth, because his tongue is tied. …

Garner, a quick study who could learn and deliver speeches long enough to make his awed listeners hold their breath to the breaking point, was the only one who seemed to enjoy producing intelligible noise. But Garner, compared with the other two, never really caught on as a big-screen leading man. Though tall and handsome, he was never remote: he had an air of belonging down here with us. As a small-screen leading man, he had done too thorough a job with the 20 or 30 good lines in every episode of Maverick or The Rockford Files to make an easy transition into a putatively larger medium that gave him many times more square feet of screen to inhabit, but many times less to say.

You can read James’ remarks in their entirety by clicking here.

• Finally, because the season is right for it, I want to give thanks to all of you who regularly read The Rap Sheet. You’ll never know how much your attention, loyalty, and comments mean to me.

Hard Case Goes Graphic

Embroiled as I have been in a large project for my Killer Covers blog (more about that shortly), I haven’t been posting here lately as much as I would prefer. Fortunately, though, B.V. Lawson remains hard on the beat. This comes from her blog, In Reference to Murder:

The Guardian profiled the new line of crime comics from Hard Case Crime and Titan Comics. The stellar lineup starts off today with the release of Triggerman, the tale of a convict in Prohibition-era Chicago on a mission to save the girl he left behind, from Walter Hill, director of 1979 cult classic gang movie The Warriors. That will be followed a week later by Peepland, written by crime authors Gary Phillips and Christa Faust (herself a former peep show employee) about the seedy goings-on at 1980s Times Square peep show booths.

READ MORE: “CIS: Christa Faust and Gary Phillips Interviewed”
(Crime Fiction Lover).

Look! A Lost James Bond Adventure

There’s a new piece in my Killer Covers blog about the much-anticipated release (by Hard Case Crime) of Forever and a Death, a previously unpublished novel by Donald E. Westlake, based on his 1990s treatment for a James Bond movie. As Hard Case Crime explains, “The plot Westlake dreamed up—about a British businessman seeking to destroy Hong Kong after being kicked out when the island was returned to Chinese sovereignty—had all the action and excitement, the danger and the sex appeal, of a classic Bond film—but for whatever reason, the Bond folks decided not to use it.”

Oh, and that book’s cover, by Paul Mann, is downright gorgeous!

Bullet Points: Happy Distractions Edition

If you can tear your eyes away from this week’s train wreck of a Republican Party convention in Cleveland, here are some crime-fiction-related items worth your attention.

• Please take a moment today to send good wishes in the direction of Alvin, Texas, author Bill Crider (Survivors Will Be Shot Again), whose 75th birthday is coming up on July 28. He reported in his blog yesterday that his doctor wanted him to “check into the hospital ASAP, as he thinks I might be having kidney failure. This can’t be good.” Crider, whose wife of 49 years, Judy, passed away in 2014, has always come across—in print and in person (on those several occasions I’ve seen him at Bouchercons)—as a fine and funny individual. His recent adoption of three abandoned kittens demonstrated his generosity, as well. Our thoughts are with you, Bill. Get well soon.

• Having gained renown for bringing out hard-boiled paperback crime fiction, Hard Case Crime is now preparing to launch a companion comic-books line in association with publishing partner Titan. “Kicking-off the imprint,” reports Comic Book Resources, “are two new crime series: Triggerman by writer Walter Hill, the acclaimed director of The Warriors, and artist Matz (Body and Soul), and Peepland from crime authors Christa Faust and Gary Phillips and artist Andrea Camerini (Il Troio). Also launching in 2017 is a comic adaptation of author Max Allan Collins’ Quarry, which is currently being developed for television.” News-a-Rama adds that Triggerman—which will debut in stores on October 5, “is an operatic Prohibition-era mini-series,” while Peepland—scheduled to be available a week later—is “a semi-autobiographical neo-noir mini-series with a punk edge set in the seedy Times Square peep booths of 1980s New York City.” In his blog, author Collins explains that “no artist has been selected” for his Quarry tale, “and I probably won’t start writing for two or three months; the graphic novel will likely be called Quarry’s War and will deal more directly with his Vietnam experiences than I’ve ever done in the novels.” It’s been many years since I was a regular reader of comic books, but these Hard Case releases are definitely of interest to me, if only because I know some of the writers involved. Also, the issues I’ve seen boast beautiful covers, one of which is shown on the right.

• By the way, that Collins post I just mentioned also features a new trailer for the coming Cinemax TV series, Quarry. It’s apparently narrated by South Africa-born actress Jodi Balfour, who plays Joni, the ex-wife of Collins’ protagonist—looking quite a bit less glamorous than she did in the Canadian series Bomb Girls, which my wife and I are currently in the process of watching on Netflix.

• Another graphic novel of interest: Last Fair Deal Gone Down (12 Gauge), an adaptation of Ace Atkins’ first story starring Louisiana footballer-turned-sometime private eye Nick Travers. The Crimespree Magazine blog says the artwork dramatizing Atkins’ story was done by Marco Finnegan, who is “a fan of the Travers stories and the genre of crime. You feel the mood and the atmosphere on every page.”

• MysteryPeople also weighs in on Atkins’ graphic novel.

• There are apparently three finalists vying for the 2016T. Jefferson Parker Mystery and Thriller Award: Before the Fall, by Noah Hawley (Grand Central); Orphan X, by Gregg Hurwitz (Minotaur); and The Promise, by Robert Crais (Putnam). The Parker award is given out annually by the Southern California Independent Booksellers Association. It is one of seven categories of prizes sponsored by SCIBA. Winners are expected to be announced during the SCIBA Trade Show to be held in Los Angeles, October 21-22.

• Jose Ignacio Escribano reports in A Crime Is Afoot that “The 2016 Dashiell Hammett Prize—awarded each year by the International Crime Fiction Festival, la Semana Negra de Gijón—has been bestowed to the novel Subsuelo, by the Argentine writer Marcelo Luján.”

• Blogger-editor Janet Rudolph needs submissions to her next edition of Mystery Readers Journal. She says that issue “will focus on mysteries featuring Small Town Cops,” and that she’s “looking for reviews, articles, and Author! Author! essays. Reviews: 50-250 words; articles: 250-1000 words; Author! Author! essays: 500-1,500 words.” The deadline for submissions is August 10. Learn more here.

• Just last month I mentioned on this page that I was very happy to see David Cranmer writing, in the Criminal Element blog, about Isaac Asimov’s trilogy of Elijah Baley/Daneel Olivaw yarns. Yesterday Cranmer completed his critiques of those science-fiction whodunits, posting this fine piece about The Robots of Dawn (1983) to add to his earlier remarks on The Caves of Steel (1954) and The Naked Sun (1957). Good going, Mr. Cranmer!

• This is an interesting development: “Steeger Properties, LLC, is pleased to announce that it has added the most prominent pulp magazine ever published, Black Mask, to its intellectual property holdings. As the periodical where the hard-boiled detective story was created and cultivated, Black Mask’s historical significance in popular fiction is unequaled. … Black Mask rejoins Dime Detective and Detective Fiction Weekly in Steeger Properties, LLC’s holdings once owned by Popular Publications Inc. ... This marks the first time in over 50 years that all three titles [are] owned by one entity.”

• If you need a Caribbean mystery fix, check this out.

• Columbo star Peter Falk, who passed away in 2011 at age 83, will be the subject of this week’s installment of TV Confidential, Ed Robertson’s popular two-hour radio talk show. William Link (who, with Richard Levinson, created that NBC Mystery Movie series) and TV critic Mark Dawidziak will join Robertson on the show, which is set to air from Friday, July 22, through Monday, July 25, on a variety of radio stations. It will later be archived here for your enjoyment.

• It was two years ago yesterday that prolific actor James Garner died at 86 years of age. Quite to my surprise, I am still discovering new films and small-screen productions in which he starred. Just last week, for instance, I finally got around to watching 1997’s Dead Silence, adapted from Jeffery Deaver’s 1995 novel, A Maiden’s Grave, and starring Garner as a hostage negotiator.

• Author brothers Lee and Tod Goldberg have won valuable attention in Palm Springs, California’s Desert Sun newspaper for the fact that they “have pulled off a rare feat by both appearing on the same New York Times Best Sellers list at the same time for different books.” (Yes, I know I mentioned this previously.)

• The real reason Showtime’s Penny Dreadful was canceled?

• I was just thinking the other night about how much I’d like to rewatch last year’s thrills-packed Guy Ritchie picture, The Man from U.N.C.L.E.—which I very much enjoyed at the time of its release—when what should appear in Bill Crider’s blog but this favorable assessment of that flick as an “overlooked movie.” (Crider also offered this trailer.) These stars having thus aligned, I now have The Man from U.N.C.L.E. stored in my TV queue for imminent viewing.

• Sadly, while Ritchie’s U.N.C.L.E. survived the first round of online voting in the 2016 MTV Fandom of the Year awards, it fell out of the running in round two.

• Stephen Bowie presents a superior write-up in The Classic TV History Blog about The Defenders, the often-acclaimed 1961-1965 CBS-TV legal drama, Season One of which was finally released in DVD format last week by Shout! Factory.

• Meanwhile, Ivan G. Shreve Jr. applauds Shout!’s recent release of Lou Grant: Season One. Lou Grant, you will recall, was the excellent 1977-1982 CBS series in which Edward Asner played the tough but thoughtful city editor of the (fictional) Los Angeles Tribune newspaper. He’d previously appeared as Grant on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Lou Grant: Season Two will go on sale in August.

• Again on the subject of TV programs, have you heard about Wayne State University Press’ evolving collection of releases about such memorable boob-tube productions as Have Gun—Will Travel, The X Files, Maverick, The Fugitive, and Miami Vice? This might be something to keep a watch on for the near future.

• Some author interviews worth your attention: Underground Airlines’ Ben H. Winters goes one-on-one with Lori Rader-Day for the Chicago Review of Books; in that same publication, Lauren Sacks quizzes David Baker (Vintage); Todd Robinson (Rough Trade) chats with Crimespree Magazine; writer-publisher Jason Pinter submits to an interrogation by S.W. Lauden; MysteryPeople turns its attention to both Peter Spiegelman (Dr. Knox) and Douglas Graham Purdy (We Were Kings); James Henry, aka James Gurbutt, talks with Cleopatra Loves Books about his new UK release, Blackwater; Mystery Playground fires questions at Terrence McCauley (A Murder of Crows); In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel discusses the old Sergeant Cuff novels with Martin Edwards; and Camilla Way (Watching Edie) stops by for a bit of a palaver with Crime Fiction Lover.

• Seattleite Vince Keenan, the managing editor of Noir City (the Film Noir Foundation’s “house rag”), offers this short but snappy look back at the film and television career or Roy Huggins, the creator of Maverick and the co-creator of The Rockford Files.

• Despite its hype and publishing success, I found Stephanie Meyer’s vampire-themed Twilight series unreadable, so I won’t be buying her forthcoming adult thriller, The Chemist, which she describes as “the love child created from the union of my romantic sensibilities and my obsession with Jason Bourne/Aaron Cross.” But for those of you who are curious to know more, click over to this Omnivoracious post.

• Darn! I wish I could be in Britain this week to watch “BBC 1’s lavish new adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s 1907 novel, The Secret Agent.” (There’s a trailer at the link.) Fortunately, Wikipedia says this three-part mini-series, starring Toby Jones, will cross the Atlantic at some as-yet-unannounced date, courtesy of Acorn TV.

• In The Guardian, Mark Lawson calls Conrad’s The Secret Agent “a prescient masterpiece that has shaped depictions of terrorism and espionage.” It’s hard to argue with that assessment.

• For folks who like lists, try these on for size. Wolf Lake author John Verdon recommends the “10 Best Whodunits” in Publishers Weekly, while Joseph Finder (Guilty Minds) serves up his picks of the “10 Best Movie Thrillers” on the Strand Magazine Web site.

• Among Brooklyn Magazine’s list of “100 Books to Read for the Rest of 2016” are several crime and mystery fiction picks, including Good as Gone, by Amy Gentry, The Kingdom, by Fuminori Nakamura, and Underground Airlines, by Ben H. Winters.

• From In Reference to Murder: “There are plans afoot to bring the Idris Elba-starring crime drama Luther to the big screen. Luther creator Neil Cross indicated that the Luther movie would play as [a] prequel to the series, meaning that some of the characters from early in the show could return, including Luther’s old partner Ian Reed (Steven Mackintosh), and his sidekick Justin Ripley (Warren Brown). Cross added, ‘It will follow his career in the earlier days when he is still married to Zoe [Indira Varma], and the final scene in the film is the first of the initial TV series.’”

• With only two months to go now (yikes!) before Bouchercon 2016 kicks off in New Orleans, Louisiana, conference organizes have made all six of this year’s Anthony Award-nominated short stories available online here for your consideration.

• Finally, because Donald Trump & Co. are still huffing and puffing and blowing themselves up on stage in Ohio, here’s a note of interest from the online Seattle Review of Books: “Would you care to guess what Donald Trump reads? Is ‘not much of anything’ your answer? The good news is, you’re right! (The bad news is: you’re right.)” More about Trump’s anti-intellectualism can be found here.