A Mix of Monday Mentions

• Although PBS-TV has not yet announced a U.S. debut date for this six-part series, Magpie Murders—adapted from Anthony Horowitz’s 2016 novel of the same name—was released on BritBox in the UK last Thursday. In his short review, British author and Detection Club president Martin Edwards writes: “I certainly wasn't disappointed. On the contrary, I enjoyed the TV version even more than the book. Although the same man wrote both versions of the story, I felt that his use of the flexibility of television worked to the story’s advantage. It also helps that Horowitz is even more experienced in the field of screenplay writing than he is as a detective novelist. Here he is on the top of his game. There is a slight dipping of tension in the fifth of the six episodes, as the pieces of plot are manoeuvred around the chessboard, but everything comes together quite triumphantly in the final instalment.” Watch a trailer for Magpie Murders here.

• Killer Covers celebrates Valentine's Day by significantly enlarging its collection of books with "kiss" in their titles.

• Last year’s 25th James Bond picture, No Time to Die, recently received three Oscar nominations, for best song, best visual effects, and best sound. However, as The Spy Command observes, this is also “the 40th anniversary of Bond’s biggest Oscar moment, the night the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences acknowledged the impact of the 007 film series” by giving Eon Productions co-founder Albert R. Broccoli the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award for lifetime achievement. Bond star Roger Moore presented that commendation, an event you can see again by clicking here.

• The release last week of Kenneth Branagh’s Death on the Nile, the latest film adaptation of Agatha Christie’s 1937 novel, has drawn considerable and not unexpected attention. Ah Sweet Mystery! blogger Brad Friedman counsels Hercule Poirot purists to stop their caviling over Branagh’s cartoon-large mustache and accept that this “interpretation of Death on the Nile has a lot going for it.” In CrimeReads, Marah Eakin (clearly less admiring of the film) recounts the scandals that have plagued its production. Meanwhile, Julia Sirmons writes in that same Webzine, “I hope the film’s release will lead people to read the source text, because Death on the Nile is one of her best detective novels. It has a diabolical, ingenious murder, but it is also one of [Christie’s] most heartfelt and emotional books.”

• This news comes from In Reference to Murder:

After pausing production in 2020 due to the Covid pandemic, Tokyo Vice will land at HBO Max this spring, premiering with three episodes on Thursday, April 7, followed by two episodes airing every Thursday until the season finale on April 28. The series hails from creator and writer J.T. Rogers and stars Ken Watanabe and Ansel Elgort, with the pilot directed by Michael Mann. Tokyo Vice is loosely inspired by American journalist Jake Adelstein’s nonfiction firsthand account of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police beat and captures Adelstein’s (Elgort) daily descent into the neon-soaked underbelly of Tokyo in the late '90s, where nothing and no one is truly what or who they seem. Watanabe will play Hiroto Katagiri, a detective in the organized crime division of the Tokyo Police Department who is also a father-figure to Jake throughout the series as he helps guide him along the thin and often precarious line between the cops and the world of organized crime.

• Author Margery Allingham is now a graphic-novel character.

• The Columbophile looks back at some of the swank and stylish vehicles seen on NBC-TV’s Columbo during the 1970s. “From Cadillacs and [Rolls-Royces] to Corvettes, Jags and even the humble VW Beetle,” it explains, “there are enough four-wheeled beauties to satisfy the cravings of any classic car enthusiast.

• I’m sorry to hear that Entertainment Weekly is disappearing (at least from newsstands, which are themselves disappearing). I subscribed to that magazine for many years, and found it useful in trying to keep up with popular culture. The age of print-magazine profusion—from which I benefited greatly—appears to be ending. I miss having a stack of new mags on my desk and teetering beside my bed. I used to subscribe to more than 20 slick periodicals, many of them regional journals (New England Monthly, Southern, California, Texas Monthly, etc.); nowadays, I receive but one, The Atlantic. It’s not that I am reading more online. Yes, I do now subscribe to the Web versions of both The New York Times and The Washington Post, but as publications shift to electronic transmission alone, I am generally letting them go. Although his doesn’t necessarily make me less informed about straight national news, it does deprive me of less-important feature stories having to do with events, history, and cultural nuances of interest in places where I don’t live. I miss the days when in any given week, I had to set aside time merely to make a dent in my magazine pile, being entertained the whole while.

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.

Campion’s Humorous New Champion

(Editor’s note: The following short review comes from “Michael Gregorio,” a byline behind which hides the husband-and-wife writing team of Daniela De Gregorio and Michael G. Jacob. After penning four historical mysteries featuring early 19th-century Prussian magistrate-cum-detective Hanno Stiffeniis, including 2010’s Unholy Awakening, the pair most recently published Cry Wolf, the opening entry in a new crime series set in Italy’s Umbria region.)

Margery Allingham, one of the queens of the “Golden Age” of British detective stories, died in 1966. Her husband of almost four decades, Philip Youngman Carter, took up the baton for a few years after that, composing fiction starring his wife’s “gentleman sleuth,” Albert Campion, and writing under her name, but then he, too, passed away in 1969. Allingham fans were left in the lurch, so to speak, until author author-critic Mike Ripley stepped bravely into the breach more than 40 years later, having been invited to compose Mr. Campion’s Farewell from notes that Youngman Carter left to the Margery Allingham Society, the members of which were desperate to read more.

No one could have been better suited for the job.

Ripley, better known to his fans as “The Ripster” (the nickname with which he signs each edition of “Getting Away with Murder,” his monthly Shots column), is a truly entertaining writer. Rap Sheet contributor Jim Napier included Mr. Campion’s Farewell among his favorite mystery novels of 2014, describing it as “a delightful, timeless tale.” The new Mr. Campion’s Fox (Severn House), the latest installment in what promises to be a sparkling continuation of Margery Allingham’s series, takes the Ripster one step further into her bygone literary world, producing a classic-style detective yarn that’s exquisitely faithful to the original design, but also great fun to read.

Set for the most part in a tiny village on the Suffolk coast of England, with occasional trips into London’s sometimes seedy Soho district, this novel is peopled by a rich and varied cast of characters straight out of the 1960s. There’s the Misses Mister, for example, two eccentric spinster sisters who own the local brewery, and the lugubrious Mr. Lugg, the beadle, who plunges readers into the mystery involving the disappearance of Vibeke, a Danish au pair girl, and the death of her boyfriend, Frank Tate. Murders there are in these pages, and they can be violent. However, they never overstep the limits of taste established by Margery Allingham and her fellow Golden Age authors--Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy L. Sayers, and their like.

A tight and lively plot is generously seasoned with sardonic quips and humor, as those who have read any of Ripley’s 15 novels about musician-gumshoe Fitzroy Maclean Angel (Angels Unaware, etc.) have come to expect. At the same time, Ripley has to cope in this story with the fact that Allingham’s hero, Albert Campion, has become an old man, and he does so quite cleverly by employing Campion’s (younger) wife, Lady Amanda, and his son, Rupert, to do all the footwork, while the senior Campion’s brain remains as lively as ever. The same goes for his sense of the absurd. What does Mr. Campion wish to have inscribed on his tombstone, for example? “‘Albert Campion. Permanently in the Dark.’ How’s that for an epitaph?”

Mr. Campion’s Fox will delight both longtime Margery Allingham enthusiasts and a generation of younger readers who may not yet be familiar with her work.

Hats off to Mike Ripley!

Bullet Points: PWG, TV, and DVDs Edition

Wow, it seems like forever since I’ve found time to compose a crime-fiction news wrap-up post, but it’s actually only been a little more than two weeks. During that period, I’ve accumulated myriad items of interest, but I’ll offer just a few of them here.

• Today may or many not be the birthday of Sherlock Holmes’ investigative associate and chronicler, Dr. John H. Watson--depending on which sources you believe. I wrote about this in a post for The Rap Sheet years ago, which you can still enjoy here.

• UK critic-author Mike Ripley talks with Duncan Torrens, for Shots, about the work that went into releasing Mr. Campion’s Farewell (Severn House), a novel featuring Margery Allingham’s gentleman sleuth, Albert Campion. As Les Blatt notes in his blog, Classic Mysteries, Farewell is “a continuation of a book begun by Allingham’s husband, Pip Youngman Carter, after his wife’s death. Carter died after writing only a few chapters, and the manuscript was never finished or published. Now, Mike Ripley has completed it, and I believe it has just been published by Severn House in the UK. It’s scheduled to be released in the U.S. on July 1st.” You will find Shots’ conversation with the honorable Mr. Ripley here.

• I’m sorry to learn, from Janet Rudolph’s Mystery Fanfare, that Book ’Em Mysteries in Pasadena, California, will close on April 30 after 24 years in business. Co-owner Barry Martin is quoted as saying, “You reach a point in your life when you feel you’ve accomplished something. We are heartened by our customers who have supported us over the years. Many are more than customers. They’re friends.”

• Oh, no, not again! After going dormant for some months, it looks as if the Webzine Plots With Guns is closing down--but not until after the release of “one last, big issue.” It seems that creator Anthony Neil Smith had a heart attack and was in the hospital for a while, and as he explained on Facebook, “Sean O’Keefe, Erik Lundy, and Gonzalo Baeza, the current editorial staff and braintrust, have also decided it’s time to move on.” Before the band breaks up, though, they’re soliciting contributions to a blockbuster final issue. The deadline for submissions is Thursday, April 10. You may recall that PWG already tried to sign off once, at the end of 2004, with its editors complaining that “we’re tired.” But it was reborn at the start of 2008, and has been turning out fine editions ever since. Let’s hope this latest termination effort is as unsuccessful as the previous one, and that we haven’t heard the last of PWG. Meanwhile, I’ll let you know when the current editors’ close-out issue is posted.

• Lee Child answers some readers’ questions.

• R.I.P., Lorenzo Semple Jr. The screenwriter who developed the 1960s live-action TV series Batman died on March 28 at age 91. Coincidentally, that was only two days before the 75th anniversary of Batman’s debut as a crime-fighting comic-book hero.

• MysteryPeople chats with Steven Saylor about his recently released historical mystery, Raiders of the Nile.

• It’s official! The complete DVD collection of the 1975-1976 ABC-TV series Barbary Coast--about which I wrote here not long ago--is scheduled for release on June 3. Barbary Coast, you may recall, was a not great, but interesting Western-cum-crime drama starring William Shatner and Doug McClure. I’ve already placed an order for the set. I hope the show measures up to my memories of it.

• Meanwhile, I have no recollection of this 1970 legal drama.

• Mystery Scene’s Oline Cogdill bids farewell to two small-screen series, one of which--Psych--ended its eight-year run (really, that long?) last week, while the other--Justified--has a final, sixth season still to come. “The two shows,” writes Cogdill, “could not be more different--one a comic-drama mystery, the other a hard-charging, often violent series--yet each was/is completely satisfying in its own way with realistic characters who drew you in to their exploits, good plots and, especially in Justified’s case, crisp dialogue.”

• And I don’t think my local public-TV station has scheduled broadcasts of Father Brown, the BBC series starring Mark Williams. Which would be worse, if not for the fact that Criminal Element blogger Leslie Gilbert Elman thinks that program “has little in common with its source material” and shouldn’t be held “to any standard of historical accuracy.” Read her full overview of Father Brown here.

Hello to “Farewell”

Well, this is certainly an unexpected development. Les Blatt, who writes the fine blog Classic Mysteries, has filed a post mentioning a new project completed by UK novelist, critic, and Friend of The Rap Sheet Mike Ripley. His post reads, in part:

By coincidence, I also received an e-mail today from Mike Ripley, who writes the monthly “Getting Away with Murder” column for Britain’s Shots eZine, telling me that we are about to get a new mystery featuring Albert Campion, the character originally created by Margery Allingham. Ripley has “completed” the book, called Mr. Campion’s Farewell. Based on a conversation in the Golden Age of Detection group on Facebook, the new book is actually the completion of a book begun by Philip Youngman Carter, Allingham’s husband, but never completed. (Carter did complete an earlier manuscript left unfinished by Allingham, Cargo of Eagles. Curtis Evans reminds us in his blog, The Passing Tramp, that Carter also wrote two Campion books of his own, Mr. Campion’s Farthing and Mr. Campion’s Falcon. (To confuse matters further, the latter may also appear as Mr. Campion’s Quarry.) In any case, Severn House plans to release Mr. Campion’s Farewell in the UK on March 27th, with an e-book and U.S. edition due in June.

I always enjoy Ripley’s writing, so I look forward to seeing Mr. Campion’s Farewell in print sometime soon. Click here to find that novel for sale on the Amazon UK site.

READ MORE: “More About Mr. Campion and Friends,” by Les Blatt (Classic Mysteries); “Philip Youngman Carter: Mr. Campion’s Falcon,” by Rich Westwood (Past Offences).

Making My Rounds

• In Reference to Murder reminds us that tomorrow, January 31, will be the final day of business for Los Angeles’ justly respected Mystery Bookstore, which opened in 1987 and earlier this month announced its decision to close its doors.

They’ll be open all day with bargains throughout the store, but at 6:00 p.m., it’s the official farewell party. You can enjoy what they’re billing as “one last evening with us--and with the many authors who have promised to drop in to join us in celebrating the fun we’ve had and perhaps to shed a tear or two. Food, libation, good company, and great books--new, back stock, and collectibles--on sale.” For every $25 that you spend, you’ll be given a ticket for a drawing to win one of nine gift bags, which include hand-picked books by owners Kirk Pasich and Pamela Woods and other staff, Robert Crais collectibles, and Michael Connelly limited editions.

• This week’s episode of the PBS-TV documentary series Pioneers of Television will focus on classic small-screen crimes dramas, including Mannix, Police Woman, Dragnet, Mission: Impossible, and I Spy. The late Robert Culp and Stephen J. Cannell are both interviewed for this episode, which airs on Tuesday, February 1, at 8 p.m. ET/PT. (Hat tip to Ivan G. Shreve Jr. at Thrilling Days of Yesteryear.)

• Completely ignoring my recent casting advice, producers of the forthcoming Charlie’s Angels “reboot” have finally signed on all three of their new female private eyes: Annie Ilonzeh (from General Hospital), Rachel Taylor (Transformers), and Esquire magazine’s most recent “Sexiest Woman Alive,” Minka Kelly (Friday Night Lights). Robert Wagner is still said to be on tap to portray their never-seen boss, Charlie Townsend. Production on this fall 2011 series, which will be set in Miami rather than Los Angeles, is expected to begin late this spring.

• I’m sorry to see that Sarah Weinman has put her once must-read blog, Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind, on hiatus as she deals with other editorial responsibilities. Fortunately, she’s continuing to blog (though less regularly) in Off on a Tangent.

• And Weinman has a fine new piece in The Wall Street Journal. Her subject is crime writer Margery Allingham (1904-1966), the English creator of “gentleman sleuth” Albert Campion. It’s Weinman’s opinion that, “of the ‘Four Queens of Crime,’ as [Agatha] Christie, [Dorothy L.] Sayers, [Ngaio] Marsh and Allingham were designated back in the day, Margery has the most distinctive voice--which may or may not explain why, even though her books have never gone out of print, she’s never entered the crime-fiction canon in quite the same way.” Read more here.

• I’ve added another worthy new blog to The Rap Sheet’s right-hand column. It’s Little Known Gems, the work of Kentucky writer-reviewer Richard L. Pangburn, who not long ago contributed a “forgotten books” piece to this page about Money, Money, Money (2001), by Ed McBain. Among Pangburn’s recent posts is this one looking back at Ross Macdonald’s 1948 standalone mystery, The Three Roads (which served as the basis for the 1980 film Deadly Companion).

• R.I.P., The Untouchables’ Bruce Gordon.

• Whatever became of the Republicans’ promise to focus on jobs?

• This week’s new short story in Beat to a Pulp is “Massacre Canyon,” by Wayne D. Dundee, featuring his series sleuth, Joe Hannibal.

• I learned from Lee Goldberg’s blog that Zachary Klein, who published a trio of mystery novels back in the 1990s featuring Boston private eye Matt Jacob, recently began writing his own blog. There’s not much there yet, but maybe a little reader encouragement will help.

• Interviews worth your notice: Paul D. Brazill chats up NoirCon organizer Lou Boxer; David Cranmer fires seven questions at Fred Zackel, including some about his most generous teacher, Ross Macdonald; Stephen Jay Schwartz talks with Kelli Stanley about her new novels The Curse Maker and City of Secrets, the latter a sequel to last year’s terrific City of Dragons; J. Sydney Jones goes one-on-one with cozy writer Lorraine Bartlett; and Tina Hall of The Damned Interviews quizzes author and screenwriter William Hjortsberg.

• Speaking of Hjortsberg, the blogs Scientist Gone Wordy and Lazy Thoughts from a Boomer offer parallel reviews of that author’s 1978 novel, Falling Angel, and its 1987 film adaptation, Angel Heart.

• The latest installment of Dick Adler’s online serial novel, Forget About It: The First Al Zymer Senile Detective Mystery, has been posted here earlier this week. A complete archive of the chapters can be found here.

• Word is that Kyra Sedgwick’s The Closer, the TNT-TV show that had been scheduled to go off the air after its forthcoming seventh season (due to begin production this coming spring), will now be extended by half a dozen episodes in order to “introduce both new characters and a new storyline for a spin-off.”

Re-reading Allingham

British novelist Jane Stevenson (The Shadow King), writing in The Guardian, delivers a fulsome tribute to the late crime writer Margery Allingham, creator of detective/adventurer Albert Campion. In one section particularly worth noting, Stevenson opines:

[Allingham] is the least puzzle-minded of great detective-story writers. The question that always interests her most is “why”. Her plotting is a device to express character: why specific people are led to do the things they do, a concern that significantly advanced the genre. One aspect of the enduring appeal of her books is that she was truly interested in how a life which seems monumentally weird from outside can be one particular person’s normality. What “ordinary” means for a dodgy undertaker, perhaps, or a retired chorus girl. It is this capacity for observation which has often made people think of her as “Dickensian”. Dickens invented surprisingly little, but walked about London (he was a great walker), and kept his eyes and ears open.

Allingham, as she moved about in shops, on trains or buses, in the street, did the same. As her books demonstrate, she was a shameless eavesdropper. Fat and friendly, she wandered through life looking innocuous and easy to talk to, and the troubled, the boastful or the just plain weird gravitated towards her. There is a certain advantage for a woman novelist in being middle-aged and overweight. You acquire a curious social invisibility: strangers sometimes carry on in front of you as if you weren’t there; or if they chance to fall into conversation, they talk, on occasion, with a surprising lack of inhibition. Allingham’s uncontrollable weight was a source of anxiety and distress in her life (it arose from a thyroid problem), and she was often sad and anxious, but she kept her griefs strictly to herself. The people she encountered found her charming, sympathetic and jolly, and she made good use of this. She listened, and she remembered--not merely to what people said, but to how they said it. She has as good an ear for the quirks of individual speech as any English novelist, and a great gift for seeing what was in front of her. As with Dickens, the panorama of human oddities she presents reflects reality. I was brought up in London, and I have been much given to mooching about talking to strangers. Over the years, I have encountered not a few London characters who could have come straight out of one of her books.

Wow, Stevenson makes me want to revisit the works of Allingham myself. I think I’ve only ever read The Black Dudley Murder (1929), her first Campion outing, and The Tiger in the Smoke (1952, which was chosen by the London Times as one of the “Best 100 Mysteries of the 20th Century”). And, of course, I caught two or three episodes of Campion (1989-1990), the BBC’s charming adaptations of Allingham’s stories, starring Peter Davison. Evidently, I have been remiss in appreciating this author’s work.

Read the full Guardian essay here.

READ MORE: “The Great Detectives: Albert Campion,” by Mike Ripley (The Strand Magazine).