Bullet Points: There’s Always More Edition

• Having enjoyed Simon Scarrow’s Blackout, a World War II-era thriller released in Great Britain earlier this year, I was overjoyed to hear him tell Crime Time FM podcast host Paul Burke that the book is only the beginning of a series starring German Criminal Inspector Horst Schenke. Regarding the second installment, he says: “I’m busy doing the last bit of research before I start writing it … I know exactly how it’s going to start and where it’s going. … I have no idea how long the series will last, because even though it may be five or six novels across five years of war, but I do have a view of how it might end, and that would be after the war, because I think that’s an interesting time as well.” You can listen to their whole conversation here.

• France’s capital, on the edge of violence, is the setting for Paris Police 1900, premiering on BBC Four in the UK on Saturday, October 9. Variety supplies this plot summary: “The eight-part series kicks off with a scandal: Félix Faure, president of the French Republic, collapsing and dying after being intimately pleasured by his lover Meg Steinheil. As anti-Semitism rages in Paris—a young newspaper seller is viciously beaten by Anti-Semitic League leader Jules Guérin for merely selling the liberal paper L’Aurore, with an article by Émile Zola—a young woman’s torso is found in a suit-case floating down the Seine. Based out of the Paris Prefecture, its police H.Q., Antoine Jouin, an ambitious but principled young inspector, volunteers to investigate—and begin to put together the pieces behind the woman’s death, stumbling on far more evil than a single psychopath.” Despite its title, this English-subtitled series takes place in 1899, as anarchists, nationalists, and anti-Semites—all enraged by the Dreyfuss Affair—threaten the city’s harmony and future. Look to The Killing Times for a terrific trailer. There’s no word yet on when this program might reach American audiences, but it will reportedly come via Netflix.

• BBC One has announced the return of Shetland at an as-yet-unspecified date in autumn 2021. “Soon, then!” enthuses The Killing Times, which provides a first image from Season 6 of that crime drama based on Ann Cleeves’ Detective Inspector Jimmy Perez novels, along with this modicum of news: “The forthcoming new series centres on the doorstep murder of a prominent local figure, a case which strikes at the heart of the Shetland Isles and its people. As Perez and his team uncover a kaleidoscope of motives for the murder, their investigation soon takes a shockingly sinister turn.”

• And this is unquestionably off-topic … but how did I miss word that a second Downton Abbey film is in rapid development? “The eagerly-anticipated Downton Abbey sequel has been given an official title along with a new release date,” Harper’s Bazaar magazine reported in late August. “Downton Abbey: A New Era will arrive in cinemas globally on March 18, 2022, it was confirmed at the Las Vegas CinemaCon last week (via Deadline). An exclusive clip from the film was also unveiled during the event, which features the aristocratic Crawley family preparing for a trip overseas. Jim Carter’s beloved Mr. Carson announces in the footage: ‘The British are coming.’” Deadline adds that this movie will feature “lots of glitz and glamour and jazz, as well as, evidently, a wedding. … The pic’s original principal cast including Maggie Smith, Hugh Bonneville, Michelle Dockery, Elizabeth McGovern, Laura Charmichael, Carter and more have returned for the second film. New additions include Hugh Dancy, Laura Haddock, Nathalie Baye and Dominic West.” The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) page for this release shows that Tuppence Middleton—introduced in the 2019 Downton Abbey big-screener as Lucy Smith, hush-hush heiress and new romantic interest of ex-chauffeur Tom Branson—will be back in New Era, too. Might it be their nuptials we’re to anticipate?

• I did not read Richard Osman’s first novel, last year’s The Thursday Murder Club, nor have I picked up its new sequel. Yet that apparently leaves me among a minority. As The Guardian states, The Man Who Died Twice—released on September 16 in the UK—“has become one of the fastest-selling novels since [British] records began. … It sold 114,202 copies in its first three days on sale … (including pre-orders), according to Nielsen BookScan—a performance which the sales monitor said made it one of the fastest-selling novels since it began to track sales in the late 1990s. Since that time, explains the paper’s books reporter, Alison Flood, “just four hardback adult novels just four hardback adult novels have sold more in their first week on shelves: Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol (550,946 sold in its first week) and Inferno (228,961), J.K. Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy (124,603), and the late Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman (168,455).”

• I mentioned in last week's “Bullet Points” post that author Max Allan Collins has recently been contributing a very handsomely illustrated literary memoir in column form to the Web site of publisher NeoText, with his latest “A Life in Crime” entry focusing on the roots of Road to Perdition. Now it seems that column’s life is to be extended. “Next week,” Collins notes in his blog, “will be part seven and focus on Fancy Anders on the very week of Fancy Anders Goes to War being published. … Initially, this was to end this run of ‘A Life in Crime’ for now, with appropriate installments to be written and appearing in support of future books. But I decided to keep going with these essays right up to the publication of The Many Lives of Jimmy Leighton [co-authored with Dave Thomas, and due out October 25], so three more installments are (as they delicately say) in the can.”


(Above) Bill and Toby Gottfried attend CrimeFest 2018 in Bristol, England. (Photo copyright © by Ali Karim)

• Retired physician and reading enthusiast William Gottfried, who—together with his wife, Toby—became a welcome fixture on the mystery-fiction convention circuit, passed away last night at age 85. From what I can tell via a Web search, Gottfried was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1936; received his medical degree from that same city’s Jefferson Medical College, and became a pediatrician; then eventually moved to Northern California. At the time of his death, he and Toby were living in the Contra Costa County town of Orinda, east of Berkeley. His longtime friend Janet Rudolph, who met Gottfried at the 1985 Bouchercon in San Francisco and later worked with him on other conventions, writes today in Mystery Fanfare:

Bill was a terrific resource for all things mystery and medical. That was a great combination for me, personally, as it was always good to have a ‘doctor in the house.’ And, in case you didn't know, Bill personally saved the lives of several of our mystery friends. Bill was a world traveler, a collector of masks and ethnic artifacts, a gardener, a bird watcher, a scholar. Religion played an important part in his life, and recently during the pandemic, he continued to expand his personal education in a number of fields. He always wanted to learn more, taking classes online and before that in person during his retirement. He also shared information about these courses to make sure others got the opportunity to attend. Bill loved to share his knowledge and his love of many different subjects. …

We had so many things we shared: collecting, mystery, history, maps, religion, art, reference books. If you knew Bill you knew he bought books, often several copies of the same one, much to Toby’s chagrin. But instead of returning the extra copy or two, he gave them to others who would appreciate them.

Even though we were not related by blood, I thought of him as family. … He was brilliant and loving, warm, and unique. But most of all, he will be remembered for his acts of Chesed (Look it up, Bill would say!).

Unlike Janet, I didn’t know Bill Gottfried well. However, I enjoyed chatting with him at two or three Bouchercons over the years, and we were “Facebook friends” (for what that’s worth). He seemed to be as interested as I am in both historical mysteries and older, largely forgotten crime novelists; and we certainly shared a liberal political perspective. My sympathies go out to his family. The Gottfrieds’ son Louis wrote on Facebook this morning that “Right now we are all in state of shock and processing the passing of this great father, husband and grandfather. As we know about funeral arrangements we will let everyone know. Right now we just wanted you to know so you can grieve in your own way. His memory will be for a blessing.”

• Jiro Kimura adds more information about Bill Gottfried in The Gumshoe Site, writing that “He and his wife, Toby, co-chaired the 2004 Left Coast Crime (LCC) in Monterey [California], the 2009 LCC in Hawaii, and the 2014 LCC with Lucinda Suber and Stan Ulrich in Monterey …” In addition, the couple “received the 2008 Don Sandstrom Award for Lifetime Achievement in Mystery Fandom from Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine and the 2015 David Thompson Special Service Award from the Bouchercon committee.”

• Gone now, too, is Samoan-American actor Al Harrington, who died in Honolulu, Hawaii, on September 21 after suffering a “massive stroke.” He had been “a regular cast member on the original Hawaii Five-O series …,” recalls The Spy Command. “Harrington played detective Ben Kokua during the fifth through seventh seasons. Harrington was a local entertainer who was hired by Leonard Freeman, the creator and executive producer of the series. Harrington had played criminals in earlier Five-O seasons.” He later signed up for a recurring role as Mamo Kahike on the 2010 reboot of Hawaii Five-0.

• This sounds like a promising partnership: “Wolfpack Publishing announced the acquisition of Rough Edges Press (REP), an independent publisher started by award-winning author James Reasoner. As Wolfpack’s newest imprint, REP will focus on publishing crime, mystery and thriller novels. The acquisition also includes REP’s existing catalogue of work, including several novels written by current Wolfpack authors such as Robert J. Randisi, Wayne Dundee, Steve Mertz and many others. ... Wolfpack will be announcing new titles to be released under the Rough Edges Press imprint in coming weeks.”

• Les Blatt, New Jersey author of that excellent blog Classic Mysteries, has for months now been complaining about assorted computer issues. So when I noticed that his site hadn’t been updated since mid-July, I e-mailed him an inquiry. He responded thusly: “I'm still struggling with in-your-face Microsoft, and I’m trying to learn a lot of new software at one time. I WILL be back, and sooner rather than later—like most of us, I have WAY too many books awaiting me. So yes, I’ll be back. Soon, I hope! And thanks for checking—which acts as a powerful motive for getting off my backside and back online.”

• The Invisible Event is pretty brutal in its late-to-the-party assessment of Dashiell Hammett’s debut novel, Red Harvest (1929), calling it “a classic because of all the imitators who flocked in to occasionally improve on what Hammett showed them how to do. As a novel in its own right, however, it is unpleasantly unrepentant, glorying in a dismissal of human life in a manner that is tawdry in the worst incarnation of its Pulpish roots. The fascination of disbelief is strong here, and not something I’m keen to revisit any time soon.”

• Meanwhile, Lit Reactor humorously chastises Lee Child for the number of times his characters “shrug” or “nod” or pointedly “say nothing.” I’ll never read Child’s work the same way again!

Bullet Points: Election Anxiety Edition

Like so many other Americans, I have spent the last several days focused on news surrounding the 2020 U.S. presidential race. With any luck, ballot counting will soon near its conclusion, and we’ll have a view toward the final decision—likely in Democrat Joe Biden’s favor—by today. But in the meantime, I am struggling to pull my head out of the political arena and concentrate instead on crime and thriller fiction. Below are developments in that area worth mentioning.

• The ongoing coronavirus pandemic has put both the riches and the shallowness of modern television on vivid display. Over the last eight months, as opportunities for international travel and socializing have tried up, my wife and I have turned to TV series and movies to fill many of our quiet hours. While I’ve appreciated a few new and recent offerings (The Alienist: Angel of Darkness, Vienna Blood, Baptiste, Perry Mason to a lesser extent, and Lily James’ Rebecca remake—critical kvetching aside), I have been more often disappointed. SS-GB, for instance, got off to a rollicking start, only to end inconclusively. Dublin Murders wore poorly on my patience as the abundant troubles besetting its protagonists took center stage; I gave up watching the series halfway through. Rob Lowe’s short-lived British dramedy, Wild Bill, had it charms, but the plots were pretty weak, and potentially interesting secondary characters, such as Anjli Mohindra’s Lydia Price, were never fully fleshed out. Marc Warren’s Van der Valk was character-rich, and I relished its Amsterdam setting, but the episodes weren’t especially memorable. While I enjoyed the Mediterranean island backdrop of The Mallorca Files, that show overplayed its comedy at the expense of original storytelling. And the six-episode Netflix prequel series Young Wallander? Well, it was interesting because it explored hate crimes and racist violence in Sweden, and Ellise Chappell shone brightly as an earnest young immigration advocate; however, star Adam Pålsson was altogether too stiff to lead the cast, and fans of previous Wallander series (such as this one) are unlikely to applaud this modern-day reboot of their favorite Malmö detective inspector. So the following news, from The Killing Times, came as a surprise:

Young Wallander is coming back for a second series.

The Netflix adaptation of Henning Mankell’s celebrated series of novels made its debut on the streaming platform and its expected the second run will debut in 2021. …

It’s expected Adam Pålsson will return as the young detective, but there’s no more word on casting yet.

Evidently, my viewing tastes are not shared by everyone.

• I have higher hopes for a different Netflix crime drama, Lupin, set for release in January 2021. It’s inspired by French author Maurice Leblanc’s many novels and novellas about fictional gentleman-thief and master of disguise Arsène Lupin, who was introduced in Leblanc’s 1907 story collection, Arsène Lupin, Gentleman Burglar. The new TV series stars French actor Omar Sy as polished 21st-century robber Assane Diop, “a man who comes across a mysterious gift—a book about Arsène Lupin, judging by the trailer—that he says grants him wealth and resources, and several lives with which to spend them,” explains Polygon. “That detail, along with a few visual flourishes that suggest a little jumping through time, give the series a supernatural tint (in addition to a slightly meta energy), though we’ll have to wait to see the extent of how strange the series becomes.” Gizmodo adds, “Lupin’s trailer also has a very pronounced James Bond sort of energy to it that promises the series won’t just be a collection of scenes in which Sy tiptoes around museums boosting priceless works of art.”​

• Beyond watching just what’s available on streaming services, I have found entertainment these last several months in a variety of DVD releases. Episodes of Dan August, Longstreet and Peter Gunn have all showed at my house, as have the TV pilot films Mallory: Circumstantial Evidence, a better-than-anticipated Raymond Burr legal drama from 1976; The Judge and Jake Wyler, a 1972 flick starring Bette Davis and Doug McClure, and written by Richard Levinson and William Link; and Jarrett, Glenn Ford’s 1973 audition for a private detective series. I’d long been on the lookout for a copy of that final telepic, since I had vague recollections of enjoying Jarrett when it was originally broadcast. So when I discovered that Web-based video retailer Modcinema had copies for sale, I immediately snapped one up. The story finds Ford playing Sam Jarrett, a boxer-turned-gumshoe in Los Angeles who specializes in cases involving art works of one sort or another. In the pilot, he’s searching for “the Book of Adam and Eve, a Biblical text that predates the Dead Sea Scrolls,” as this review in Mystery*File explains. The concept held promise, and Ford had already demonstrated his ability to lead a small-screen series in the 1971-1972 CBS western-cum-crime drama Cade’s County. The casting looked favorable as well, with Anthony Quayle, Forrest Tucker, Laraine Stephens, and Yvonne Craig all signed on to the project. Furthermore, the script for Jarrett came from Richard Maibaum, who had written the earliest James Bond motion picture, Dr. No, and gone on to contribute to other Bond films. Sadly, the finished product proved far less appealing than I’d recalled. As Mystery*File puts it,

Ford is miscast, Tucker overacts terribly and has some lame line readings, Stephens seems to think she is in a real movie, it all borders on the worst kind of camp …

And it is for all that, fun in a stupid way, because Ford, Quayle, and Craig all seem to recognize how silly the whole thing is and settle in to have fun. They are relaxed, playful, aware there is nothing they can do to save this, but determined to make it as much fun as they can.

I’d call that assessment far too generous. Despite my warm remembrance of Jarrett, watching it again all these years later amounted to a waste of 74 minutes. Much of its plot makes no sense, and other elements are simply ridiculous. It’s no surprise CBS didn’t add Jarrett to its fall 1973 prime-time schedule.

• With the Hawaii Five-0 reboot having finally ended its decade-long run this last April, 40 years after Jack Lord’s original Hawaii Five-O left the airwaves, Bill Koening of The Spy Command chose this moment to revisit—in some detail—Stephen J. Cannell’s unsuccessful 1997 pilot for a Five-O revitalization, starring Gary Busey. His post features a five-minute clip from that movie’s opening.

• The Goodreads Choice Awards are now open for public voting. There are 15 nominees in the Best Mystery & Thriller category, including Rachel Howzell Hall’s And Now She’s Gone, S.A. Crosby’s Blacktop Wasteland, Tana French’s The Searcher, and Stuart Turton’s The Devil and the Dark Water. The first round of balloting will continue through this coming Sunday, November 8. Click here to make your opinions known. Two more rounds of voting will follow this one, with the winners in all categories to be announced on December 8.

• In a piece for CrimeReads, H.B. Lyle profiles Riddle of the Sands writer Erskine Childers, asking, “How did the aristocratic author of English’s first great spy novel end up dead in the Irish Civil War?

• I hate announcing the deaths of people who have influenced the crime- and thriller-fiction fields. Yet each such individual deserves recognition for their efforts. So let’s begin with two recent passings mentioned in The Gumshoe Site. As Jiro Kimura notes, Richard A. Lupoff died on October 22 in Berkeley, California, at the tender age of 85. “The former technical writer was probably more famous as an American science-fiction writer than as a mystery writer …,” he observes, but “in the 1980s, Lupoff started writing mystery series featuring Hobart Lindsey (an insurance claims adjuster) and Mavia Plum (a black homicide detective in Berkeley), starting with The Comic Book Killer (Offspring Press, 1988), and ending with The Emerald Cat Killer (St. Martin’s, 2010). He also created a short story series, featuring millionaire autodidact polymath Akhenaton Beelzebub Chase and his lissome associate, Claire Delacrois, who live [in] Berkeley in the 1930s, and the six cases of Chase and Delacroix were collected in Quintet (Crippen & Landru, 2008).” The science-fiction Web site Locus offers a more detailed account of Lupoff’s publishing career.

• The Gumshoe Site also reports the demise of musician-turned-writer Roxanne Longstreet Conrad, who—under the pseudonym Rachel Caine—penned “Stillhouse Lake (Thomas & Mercer, 2017), the first in the Stillhouse Lake thriller series …, featuring Gwen Proctor, the ex-wife of an infamous serial killer, followed by four more novels ending with Heartbreak Bay (to be published in 2021).” Atop here crime-fiction endeavors, she produced dozens of novels and short stories in the fantasy field, including the Morganville Vampires series and the Weather Warden universe. Conrad/Caine 58 years old when she perished from cancer on November 1.

• Finally, Mike Ripley offers this delightful, if belated, obituary of Alan Williams, who apparently succumbed to COVID-19 on April 21 of this year. “He was called ‘the master of adult excitement,’” Ripley writes in Shots, “‘the first real challenger to Ian Fleming’ and ‘a ruthless, compulsive storyteller,’ though in another era, his famous godfather Noël Coward might have added ‘and he’s a very naughty boy.’” An initial career in journalism, coupled with “an eye for dangerous situations,” led Williams to begin concocting thrillers, his first such novel, Long Run South, reaching print in 1962. “Williams was 27 and seemed set for a long career in thriller fiction,” Ripley continues, “his trademark take on the genre being the ‘Englishman abroad,’ usually young, often a journalist, often randy and usually out-of-his-depth, entangled with villains and spies far more ruthless and violent than the hero, always in exotic locations ranging from North Africa to Iceland, South America to Cambodia. … By the 1970s, a new Alan Williams thriller was a major publishing event …” Nonetheless, the author stopped producing fresh fiction at age 46. He was 84 years old at the time of his demise.

• Back in August, I asked on this page, “So what’s happened to Reviewing the Evidence?” At that time, the 19-year-old Web site had already lain dormant for seven straight months, with no news circulating about its future. And an e-mail inquiry I sent to editor Yvonne Klein had gone unanswered. I feared the worst. Therefore, I was more than a bit surprised, on October 10, to suddenly find a new message on the site from Klein. It begins,

First, my apologies. This is the issue of RTE I had ready to go on the last day of February this year. I didn’t get to upload it as on that very day I found myself in the hospital, from which I did not emerge for some considerable time. When I thought about what to do with it, I felt that it would be a pity to waste all the hard work the reviewers had gone to, despite the months-long delay. The original date was special in a way—it was due to come out on Leap Day, February 29, I think for the first time in our history.

Klein goes on to write: “One more bit of news. After twelve years (or so) of editing RTE, I am stepping back, though not wholly departing. Happily, Rebecca Nesvet, who has long been associated with the site and whose reviews I am sure you have read and enjoyed over the years, has agreed to assume the editorship and will be gradually taking over the responsibilities in the next few months.” She went on to promise that a new issue of RTE would be posted “sometime” in November. Let’s hold her to that.

• Production of The Rap Sheet’s 2020 “favorite crime fiction of the year” feature package is well underway, and I’m looking ahead to a change in my reading habits. As I usually do at year’s end, I start turning to older books and works outside the mystery-fiction field, and digging primarily into those for the next three or four months. My preliminary choices this time range from Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations and Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth to David W. Blight’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Frederick Douglass biography and Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (a 1722 release that I purchased early in this year’s pandemic, but still haven’t tackled). During said interregnum, I shall be poring, too, through Craig Sisterson’s Southern Cross Crime: The Pocket Essential Guide to the Crime Fiction, Film & TV of Australia and New Zealand (Oldcastle). It’s part of a series of fiction guides that has already brought us Crime Fiction: A Reader’s Guide, Historical Noir, and American Noir, all by Barry Forshaw. Sisterson, with whom I worked for several years while helping to judge New Zealand’s Ngaio Marsh Awards, is an enthusiastic genre reader and a spirited writer, which should make Southern Cross Crime a joy to peruse. Although I’ve sampled the output of Liam McIlvanney, Peter Corris, Eleanor Catton (The Luminaries), and Paul Thomas, and have read from the oeuvre of Arthur W. Upfield (the creator of Napoleon “Bony” Bonaparte of the Queensland Police Force), my knowledge of Kiwi and Australian crime fiction remains fairly limited. Just leafing through this new book brings up myriad fictionists with whom I would like one day to be better acquainted—Marele Day, Alix Bosco, Emma Viskic, and Garry Disher among them. The only problem might be acquiring copies of their books; U.S. publishers aren’t in the habit yet of re-publishing Antipodean crime writing as frequently as they do UK titles.

• In January Magazine, Ali Karim has posted an interview between Heather Martin, author of The Reacher Guy: The Authorised Biography of Lee Child (Constable), and the Reacher Guy himself, best-selling author Child. “Their chat,” writes Karim, “gives us a taste for what both have in store for fans of the creator of Jack Reacher, one of most beloved characters of contemporary crime fiction.”

• What a terrific book title for this genre!

• While we must now wait until April 2021 to see Daniel Craig’s final James Bond film, No Time to Die, my recent wrap-up of crime, mystery, and thriller releases includes an assortment of reading choices to keep spy-fiction enthusiasts happy in the interim. One I only just added there is Come Spy With Me, the initial installment in a series created by Max Allan Collins and Matthew V. Clemens, and due out in mid-November from Wolfpack. Collins explains in his blog that this “homage to James Bond and Ian Fleming” had its roots in a different publisher’s rather peculiar proposal to create “erotic novels in which all of the sex was between married people. Married to each other. At the time,” Collins recalls, “I pointed out to them that few married people, particularly if they’d been married a while, did their fantasizing about their mates. But this, the publisher insisted, was a time that had come.” Although that themed project ultimately went nowhere, Collins and Clemens reworked their yarn into Come Spy With Me, a 1960s-set novel starring John Sand, a recently retired British secret agent on whom Fleming supposedly based his man Bond.

• And who says there are no such things as coincidences? On the very same day that Paperback Warrior reviewed Bourbon Street, which it dubbed a “pretty sub-standard” 1953 novel, set in New Orleans and written by G.H. Otis (aka Otis Hemmingway Gaylord Jr.), Mystery*File editor Steve Lewis critiqued a 1954 episode of CBS-TV’s Four Star Playhouse, also titled “Bourbon Street” and also with its action taking place in Louisiana. Lewis says the 25-minute drama, starring Dick Powell and Beverly Garland, “has more going for it than many a shoot ’em up, ultra-violent neo-noir two-hour extravaganza in full color does today. Dick Powell is in full hard-boiled tough-guy mode in this one, as a piano player who has managed to make his way out of the quicksand life of New Orleans, only to return when he learns that the girl he loved has committed suicide.” Click here to watch that whole episode, scripted by Dick Carr (1929-1988), who would go on to write for Richard Diamond, Private Detective, Johnny Staccato, Dan August, The Six Million Dollar Man, and Charlie’s Angels.

A Mystery Miscellanea

• The Killing Times reports that French actress Eva Green (Casino Royale, Penny Dreadful) has been signed to star in a British television adaptation of Eleanor Catton’s Man Booker Prize-winning novel, The Luminaries (2013). “The period tale of adventure and mystery is set on the Wild West Coast of New Zealand’s South Island in the boom years of the 1860s gold rush,” the blog explains. “It’s billed as an epic story of love, murder and revenge, as men and women traveled across the world to make their fortunes.” Variety notes that Green will be appearing in this six-part BBC Two production opposite Eve Hewson (The Knick) and Marton Csokas (Into the Badlands). The Luminaries is set to start filming in November of this year.

• Catherine Turnbull has posted a fine retrospective, in Crime Fiction Lover, on the 2018 Bloody Scotland International Crime Writing Festival, which took place from September 21 to 23.

• If you caught my article in CrimeReads about original Philip Marlowe private-eye stories published since Raymond Chandler’s death in March 1959, you know that I was hesitant to read Lawrence Osborne’s recent Marlowe outing, Only to Sleep, but wound up with a generally favorable opinion of the work. So I was also interested to read the author’s new essay in The New York Times Book Review about how he came to write that novel and how his own experiences as a reporter in Mexico informed his fiction.

• “Burt Reynolds made his share of dogs, which he’d be the first to admit, but in 1981 he released Sharky’s Machine, a rock-solid cop noir about dirty money and easy virtue,” writes SleuthSayers’ David Edgerley Gates. He goes on to call Sharky’s Machine “Burt Reynolds' high-water mark” as a director. Hmm. I guess it’s about time I watched that film, which somehow passed me by.

• Author and former journalism professor Richard Hoyt wrote me recently to announce that he’s trying to crowd-fund the publication of a topical work of black humor called Pussy Bomb: The Rude Truth About President Ronald Strangedick. He describes this outlandish but “hip” standalone yarn as “an expanded, rewritten and updated version” of his 1984 Jim Quint novel, Cool Runnings, which “dealt with the awkward reality that a battlefield or ‘suitcase’ nuke weighing from 10 to 20 pounds—large enough to evaporate Manhattan—can be smuggled in the hold of a cargo ship, in a sailboat, or in the bed of a Ford pickup.” Hoyt also said Pussy Bomb “satirizes the thriller genre, the national security apparatus, and Donald Trump.” Reading the synopsis—available here—is likely to make your head spin, what with its converging plots about North Korea’s efforts to spread nuclear destruction, a humiliated jihadist seeking revenge, and a CIA agent who’s struggling to keep U.S. President Strangedick, “a paranoid narcissist, from going totally off the rails.” You can read the first 50 pages of Pussy Bomb on Hoyt’s Facebook page. He’s set a deadline of Sunday, October 21, to sell 500 “pre-orders.”

• Happy 50th anniversary to the original Hawaii Five-O! The Spy Command reminds us that that “cop show with a spy twist” first aired on CBS-TV on September 20, 1968.

• From The Hollywood Reporter:

Not content with solving murders in Titan Comics and Hard Case Crime’s graphic novels, period detective Minky Woodcock is making the leap to the stage with this week’s opening of a new play based on her first appearance, just as Titan announces details of her upcoming second case.

Created by author, artist and playwright Cynthia von Buhler, Minky—a private detective and rabbit lover in the 1920s—made her debut in the four-issue series The Girl Who Handcuffed Houdini in 2017; the critically acclaimed series, which also won praise from Neil Gaiman, was released in a hardcover collected edition last month.

Now, it’s become a live-action stage play written and directed by von Buhler, opening at Theater 80 in New York City on Wednesday and running through Nov. 10. Really, “stage play” doesn’t begin to describe the show, which takes place over three floors of the theater, with audience members choosing whether to be spiritualists, pragmatists or Houdini’s guests as the action unfolds, with their choice changing what they watch throughout the night.

The next Minky Woodcock comic-books series, Minky Woodcock: They Die Fast on Broadway, is set to go on sale in 2019.

• Reed Farrel Coleman, writing about the connections between alcohol and crime fiction: “When I’m asked about the drinking habits of Chandler, Hammett, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, or whomever, I say that it’s about emotional access. My theory—and it is just that, a theory—is that these men used alcohol in two ways: to either ease the process of accessing their emotions or to self-medicate after the experience. Is there any validity to it? Probably some, but maybe not. What makes sense isn’t always so. It sounds good at speaking engagements and the audiences like it.”

• I always enjoyed Vincent Price’s introductions to the PBS-TV series Mystery!, which he delivered from 1981 to 1989. So I was pleased to find this example online. In it, he not only prepares viewers for Part 3 of Praying Mantis, starring Jonathan Pryce and Cherie Lunghi, but also ponders the definition of what constitutes a “mystery.”

• I’ve never met Bill Cosby, but like so many other people, I am familiar with him from his many television appearances (mostly, for me, in I Spy and The Cosby Mysteries), his co-starring role in 1972’s Hickey & Boggs, and his comedy albums (especially 1973’s Fat Albert). So when I heard on Tuesday that the now 81-year-old performer had been sentenced to three to 10 years in prison for sexual assault, I had a hard time wrapping my mind around the news. Cosby has a long history of sexual assault charges, and I don’t disagree that the evidence required his sentencing; but it was jarring to reconcile his criminality with my appreciation of his acting and my memories of laughing at his comic routines. I wasn’t the only one with such mixed feelings, as I learned by reading this piece in the Los Angeles Times by deputy television editor Greg Braxton.

• Bruce K. Riordan, a federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, chooses his 12 favorite police procedurals from among the myriad such movies and TV shows produced over the last half century. And yes, he includes both Bullitt (1968) and the initial season of True Detective.

• Finally, a few more author interviews deserving of your attention: Martin Edwards talks with Steven Powell of The Venetian Vase about his new historical crime novel, Gallows Court; for Jeff Rutherford’s Reading and Writing Podcast, Ace Atkins answers questions having to do with his latest Quinn Colson novel, The Sinners; Ivy Pochada (Wonder Valley) is the guest on the third episode of the Killing Times Podcast; The Christian Science Monitor chats with Ovidia Yu on the subject of her latest Singapore-set cozy, The Frangipani Tree Mystery; and Crime Watch’s Craig Sisterson quizzes Simone Buchholz, the German author of Mexikoring and Blue Night.

Mystery Morsels

• Happy Canada Day, everyone! Since my maternal grandfather was born and reared in Victoria, British Columbia, I have always felt some affinity toward the United States’ estimable northern neighbor. Today marks 150 years since the Canada we now know became “a single Dominion within the British Empire.” To celebrate this occasion, Crime Fiction Lover has posted a selection of what it contends are “The Best Canadian Crime Novels of All Time.” Consulted on this matter was Montreal resident Jacques Filippi—editor of the still-on-hiatus House of Crime and Mystery—so you’re guaranteed that the 10 highlighted works of fiction (which include novels by John McFetridge, Louise Penny, and even Ross Macdonald) won’t disappoint.

• To learn more about Canada’s crime-fiction heritage, check out a two-part study I did of the matter for Kirkus Reviews a few years back. Part I is here, Part II is here. And don’t miss my 2013 interview with Marilyn Rose, a professor in the Department of English at Ontario’s Brock University and the co-creator of the online database CrimeFictionCanada, or Kevin Burton Smith’s essay “on why crime fiction from north of the border does not receive more attention from U.S. readers.”

• Speaking of Canadian crime … Brian Busby, the editor of Véhicule Press’ noir mystery imprint, Ricochet Books, tells me that The Pyx, the 1959 debut novel from Montrealer John Buell—about the case of “a heroin-addicted call girl” who “dies in a fall from a swanky penthouse terrace”—has been reissued in Canada by Ricochet, and will become available in the States on September 1. Busby has opined that “No Canadian novelist has been so unjustly neglected as John Buell. He was published by Farrar, Straus, he was praised by Edmund Wilson, and he has been out of print for more than a quarter century. I never once heard John Buell's name in the years I studied at Concordia University … the very same university at which he was teaching.”

• London’s small but prominent Goldsboro Books has announced the longlist of contenders for its inaugural Glass Bell Award for Contemporary Fiction. They include at least three books that can be classified as crime/thriller fiction: The North Water, by Ian McGuire (Scribner); Pendulum, by Adam Hamdy (Headline); and I See You, by Clare Mackintosh (Sphere). A roster of finalists is expected by September 1, with the winner to be declared on September 28.

• Uh-oh! The rebooted Hawaii Five-0 is losing two members of its original, central cast—Daniel Dae Kim and the lovely Grace Park—“in a pay dispute,” The Spy Command Reports. “The two ‘had been seeking pay equality with stars Alex O’Loughlin and Scott Caan, but were unable to reach satisfactory deals with CBS Television Studios, which produces the series,’ Variety said. “Kim and Park were believed to be making 10-15% less than O’Loughlin and Caan.”

• It’s July 1—time for a new installment of Mike Ripley’s “Getting Away with Murder” in Shots. This month’s column includes mentions of new or forthcoming books by Simon Scarrow, Bonnie MacBird, Peter Murphy, Michael Connelly, and Holly Seddon.

• Deadline Hollywood reports that the big-screen version of Don Winslow’s The Force (Morrow), his new novel about camaraderie and corruption within the New York Police Department, should be released by 20th Century Fox in March 2019. David Mamet has been charged with penning the screenplay.

• In a fine “By the Book” column for The New York Times Book Review, Winslow explains what kind of works he reads (paper or electronic?) and how he reads them:

Paper, definitely. I have to hold that book, although I actually prefer paperbacks to hardcovers, maybe from the time when I couldn’t afford the latter.

I read several books at a time; they’re scattered around the house like coffee cups, and I read them depending on where I am. I usually read at night because most of my daytime reading is work-related research. The exception is Sunday, when I make it a rule to do nothing but read for pleasure. My wife and I do a four- to six-mile hike, and then I come home, sit outside and read until it’s dark. It’s the best.

• This sounds like a history volume I ought to own.

• We now have two more lists of “the best books of 2017 … so far.” This first one comes from the Chicago Review of Books and includes four works I’d classify as crime, mystery, or thriller: Danny Gardner’s A Negro and an Ofay; J. Robert Lennon’s Broken River; Kristen Lepionka’s The Last Place You Look; and Lori Rader-Day’s The Day I Died. Meanwhile, Powell’s Books’ mid-year round-up mentions only one title that fits neatly into this genre, Peter Heller’s Celine, but its other picks are interesting, as well.

• Finally, Sarah Schmidt, Australian author of the forthcoming historical suspense novel See What I Have Done (Atlantic Monthly Press), finds a spot in Publishers Weekly’s list of “Writers to Watch Fall 2017: Anticipated Debuts.”

Breaking Curls and Cracking Crimes

As The HMSS Weblog reminds me, today is “the 45th anniversary of, arguably, the best television theme of all time: ‘Hawaii Five-O’ by composer Morton Stevens.” The original version of the CBS-TV crime drama Hawaii Five-O, starring Jack Lord and James MacArthur, debuted on September 20, 1968 (and ran until April 4, 1980).

Two (Tentative) Thumbs Up for “5-O”

I think Ryan McGee’s comments in TV Squad about last night’s debut of the rebooted Hawaii Five-O are pretty spot-on:

Making big assumptions about new shows based purely on pilots is a tricky proposition. Sometimes, a show comes out with literal and/or metaphorical guns a blazin’, only to reveal soon after it was only firing blanks. Other shows take time to find their sea legs, not putting their best foot forward, but finding their proper stride down the road.

The reboot of Hawaii Five-O may not suffer either fate: its goals simply don’t seem terrifically lofty in the first place to warrant either a major accomplishment or an epic fail. Above all, it wants merely to entertain, and for its initial hour? Mission accomplished.

Since this show airs on CBS, there might have been quite a lot of people watching tonight who remember the original show. One imagines that more money was spent on this initial episode than perhaps an entire season’s worth of originals. But all that money certainly ended up onscreen, not in an actor’s pocket. Nearly every act of tonight’s pilot featured at least one jaw-dropping stunt or explosion that transcended what one normally expects from television action, and landed firmly into motion-picture quality kabooms. A helicopter shooting bazookas, armored vans used as assault weapons, backflips that would make the U.S. women’s gymnastics team green with pint-sized envy: Hawaii Five-O spared no expense in bringing the wow factor.

Personally, I would’ve been satisfied with fewer pyrotechnics; I don’t need my television shows to look like video games. But I did appreciate the conscientious efforts by composer/conductor Brian Tyler to respectfully re-record the Hawaii Five-O theme. And while I’m hoping that we see more of the lovely Grace Park (playing rookie detective Kona Kalakaua) in bikinis--that alone would keep me watching--I also enjoyed the boyish consociation between Alex O’Loughlin (as Steve McGarrett) and ever-quipping Scott Caan (taking the Danny “Danno” Williams role).

It’s always possible that this premiere episode showed the best of what the new Hawaii Five-O has to offer, and that things will go downhill from here. But for the time being, I’m willing to put Hawaii Five-O on my list of new series worth watching again.

* * *

By the way, for fans of the long-running original CBS series, Randy Johnson has posted the covers from half a dozen TV tie-in novels, two of which were written by Mike Avallone.

Missing No More

A couple of years ago, I picked up on a post written by blogger-critic Marty McKee that talked about a supposedly long-missing Season Two episode of Hawaii Five-O titled “Bored, She Hung Herself.” According to McKee, this is “the rarest of the 284 episodes of Hawaii Five-O that were produced during its 12-season run on CBS. It aired only once--January 7, 1970--and has not been broadcast since.”

So why did that installment of the series pull a vanishing act? It was supposedly because of an early scene in “Bored” that showed a “hippie character ... hanging by the neck without harm for the purpose of meditation.” As legend has it, some not-so-brainy viewer tried to duplicate that exercise, only to kill him- or herself. To avoid inciting any further suicides, CBS reportedly held the episode out of circulation; it wasn’t even included on the 2007 DVD release of Hawaii Five-O: The Second Season.

But as Television Obscurities notes, “the episode is neither lost nor missing but simply unavailable ... I am all but certain that CBS and/or Paramount has a copy somewhere. According to the United States Copyright Office, copyright on the episode was renewed in January of 1997 by CBS, Inc. Furthermore, a copy of the episode has been in the hands of private collectors for some time, apparently from a rather poor quality 16mm print of the episode that includes CBS identification and network bumpers, suggesting it may have come from an affiliate.”

Like others, I don’t recall ever seeing “Bored, She Hung Herself” on the boob tube, but this morning I found on the Web what may be that “rather poor quality” print Television Obscurities mentions. It’s true, the picture isn’t the cleanest or sharpest one could hope for; but in the absence of any better version, it will have to do.

Book ’Em, Bond, James Bond

I’m an unapologetic trivia enthusiast, so could have been guaranteed to latch onto The HMSS Weblog’s new post about connections between the James Bond film series and the long-running U.S. TV crime drama, Hawaii Five-O. Just one link among many:

Jack Lord: played the screen’s first Felix Leiter in Dr. No while also playing Five-O’s Steve McGarrett through the entire run of the series. Rose Freeman, widow of Five-O creator Leonard Freeman, told fans attending a 1996 Five-O convention in the Los Angeles area that Lord was cast only five days before production of the pilot began.

You can read the whole post here. A follow-up post is here. Oh, and there’s even more on the subject here.

Steve McGarrett Is Smiling

It’s time to follow up on a post from earlier this week, which said that the Y-shaped, 45-year-old Ilikai hotel on Hawaii’s Waikiki Beach--made widely familiar by its appearance in the main title sequence of Hawaii Five-O--was destined to close. Apparently the landmark has won a reprieve. As the Associated Press reports,

four dozen employees of the iconic Ilikai hotel won their jobs back Friday when their labor union and the property’s new owner inked a surprise deal. ...

The pact will lead to the hotel’s reopening sometime soon--though neither the local UNITE HERE union nor the Waikiki hotel’s owner, New York City-based iStar Financial Inc., are saying when.

But that didn’t matter to the Ilikai’s employees who jammed into a union hall Friday to hug, eat cake and crack wide smiles less than 24 hours after they worked what they thought was their last day at the hotel.

The Ilikai these days is just one of a number of tall hotels in Waikiki, Oahu’s most popular tourist locale. More recently, the 800-room hotel fell onto hard times when then-owner Brian Anderson sold off pieces as time shares and eventually forced the property into foreclosure.

The Honolulu Star-Bulletin has more on this story here.

Aloha, Ilikai

A familiar piece of Hawaiian TV crime drama history is suddenly endangered. As the Associated Press reports (emphasis mine):

The Y-shaped Ilikai hotel that has graced the Waikiki skyline for nearly five decades and hosted everyone from U.S. presidents to Elvis Presley is closing.

The new owner is ceasing hotel operations of the iconic property after Thursday’s business day because of mounting operating losses.

New York-based iStar Financial Inc., which acquired the hotel for $51 million at a foreclosure auction in May, hasn’t indicated what it will do with the 203 hotel rooms in the 1,000-unit hotel-condo property.

Guests are being relocated to other hotels.

The 30-story Ilikai was considered Hawaii’s first luxury high-rise hotel when it was completed in 1964. It gained prominence in the 1970s when it was featured in the opening sequence of the hit TV series “Hawaii Five-O.”

In that show’s opening (viewable here), star Jack Lord is seen standing high atop the Ilikai.

The Missing

A “lost” episode of the 1968-1980 crime drama Hawaii Five-O? I don’t think I had ever heard of “Bored, She Hung Herself” until reading about it (rather belatedly) in copywriter-critic Marty McKee’s blog, Johnny LaRue’s Crane Shot.

“Bored, She Hung Herself” (sic) is the rarest of the 284 episodes of Hawaii Five-O that were produced during its 12-season run on CBS. It aired only once--January 7, 1970--and has not been broadcast since. It has never been rerun on CBS or in syndication, and CBS/Paramount, regrettably, omitted it from its recent Hawaii Five-O: The Second Season DVD box set.

CBS and Paramount have never revealed exactly why they have censored this episode, although most fans believe it is because of its opening scene, in which a hippie character is seen hanging by the neck without harm for the purpose of meditation. A few minutes later, his girlfriend is discovered hanging from the ceiling in the same noose, but quite dead. Reportedly, someone really did attempt to hang themselves based on what they saw on this episode and was killed.

Only one copy of “Bored, She Hung Herself” appears to exist. It looks like a 16mm print that was sent to network affiliates and contains bumpers, leader, etc. Audio and visual quality is barely watchable, as though the print were projected onto a wall and recorded by a video camera. It also seems to be considered not one of the series’ highlights, although I thought it was quite interesting and stands outside the program’s usual formula.

McKee has more to say about “Bored, She Hung Herself” here. Does anybody out there remember seeing this installment of Hawaii Five-O? It rings no bells for me.

READ MORE: “Missing No More,” by J. Kingston Pierce
(The Rap Sheet).

Ride the Wave

Last month we alerted you to the upcoming (in April) DVD release of what looks to be half of the premiere season of The Streets of San Francisco. Now, word comes that the first-year installments of Hawaii Five-O, starring Jack Lord, are scheduled to hit U.S. store shelves on March 6. Amazon.com says the DVD will contain “all 24 episodes from the 1968 season on 7 discs,” together with “the original [TV] pilot movie, ‘Cocoon’” and a “45-minute retrospective with actor James MacArthur,” who played state police officer Danny “Danno” Williams on the series (and is the only original Five-O cast member still alive, at age 69.)

I was pretty young to be a regular watcher of Five-O when it began in 1968, and by the time that series went off the air in 1980, I was devoted to what I found to be less predictable and more character-driven detective dramas, such as The Rockford Files, Harry O, and Columbo. However, Wikipedia reminds me that Hawaii Five-O left quite a legacy. It was, according to that encyclopedia site, “the longest-running police drama until Law & Order broke the record almost twenty years after Hawaii Five-O ceased production”; and “the term ‘Five-O’”--which was the name of a fictional state police force in the series--“was adopted by American youth culture as a street slang term for the police.” In addition, the CBS-TV show is remembered for its catchy theme music, composed by Morton Stevens and often peformed nowadays by high-school marching bands. And, of course, TV Land recently listed “Book ’em, Danno,” an instruction often heard from Jack Lord’s character on the series, as one of television’s 100 greatest “quotes and catchphrases.”