• Who should be the next cinematic Bond? With Daniel Craig having departed the role of James Bond following 2021’s No Time to Die, speculation on which actor might next play Ian Fleming’s famous British superspy has revolved at various times around Henry Cavill, Tom Hardy, Idris Elba, Jack Lowden, and even 21-year-old Louis Partridge. CrimeReads’ Olivia Rutigliano has her own suggestion: “Joshua Bowman, the charming English actor who played Krasko on Doctor Who, and Daniel Grayson on ABC’s Revenge.” While I’m not yet on board with Bowman as Agent 007, I heartily endorse her idea that the next movie should be set in the 1950s, pre-Sean Connery. Remember that the ending of No Time to Die makes it pretty ridiculous to resurrect that protagonist for further feats in the 2020s. So why not return Bond to his roots, at the height of the Cold War? “It could be an origination story of the character,” writes Rutigliano, “rather like how Craig’s era rebooted the franchise with Casino Royale and used the Vesper Lynd love story as a consistent anchor for Bond’s choices, across multiple films. This could do something like that, with a nostalgic temporal re-contextualization that could stand out in a franchise that has historically insisted on contemporaneity.” Hey, everyone over at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios and Amazon (which now owns the intellectual property rights to Bond), are you listening?

• Meanwhile, The Spy Command’s Bill Koenig notes that “This year marks the 60th anniversary of Thunderball, the fourth Bond film and the apex of the 1960s spy craze.” He also alerts us to a Bond fan event, Gatherall at Goldeneye, set to take place in Jamaica this coming fall, and mentions that a new, expanded edition of Joseph Darlington’s 2013 book, Being James Bond: Volume One, is coming in August—though there’s not yet an Amazon “pre-order” link to share.

• Do you know the retro film and TV Web site Modcinema? I’ve ordered low-cost, made-on-demand DVD copies of forgotten small-screen features from that enterprise before, but its latest newsletter alerts me to a wealth of new offerings. Among them: the 1972 teleflick Assignment: Munich, which spawned Robert Conrad’s short-lived show Assignment: Vienna; a three-disc set containing all five episodes of the 1978 series Richie Brockelman, Private Eye starring Dennis Dugan; three episodes (including the pilot) of Cool Million, the James Farentino series that was one spoke of the NBC Wednesday Mystery Movie “wheel series” (two additional eps can be found in this set); and Fame Is the Name of the Game, the 1966 made-for-television picture starring Tony Franciosa, which “served as the pilot episode of the subsequent series The Name of the Game.”

• As a longtime follower of Peter Falk’s NBC Mystery Movie series, I’m surprised this February release didn’t hit my radar before now: Columbo Explains the Seventies: A TV Cop’s Pop Culture Journey, by Glenn Stewart (Bonaventure Press). UPDATE: Stewart tells The Columbophile about what inspired him to write this book.

• My suspicion is there aren’t many people around these days boasting solid memories of the 1980 ABC-TV action series B.A.D. Cats. As Wikipedia recalls, that Douglas S. Cramer/Aaron Spelling production starred Asher Brauner and Steve Hanks as “two former race car drivers who joined the Los Angeles Police Department as part of the ‘B.A.D. C.A.T.’ Squad (a double acronym for ‘Burglary Auto Detail–Commercial Auto Theft’).” Then 21-year-old Michelle Pfeiffer appeared on the program too, playing Officer Samantha “Sunshine” Jensen, who “would occasionally lend a hand when a more feminine approach was called for.” B.A.D. Cats didn’t last long; it was cancelled in February 1980 after a pilot (which you can view here) and five other episodes had been broadcast. But as Vintage Everyday observes, the show was an important stepping stone on Pfeiffer’s path to Hollywood renown. A few days ago, that blog posted almost four dozen promotional photos of her from B.A.D. Cats, which it says demonstrated “Pfeiffer’s youthful charm and emerging star quality.” The actress would go on to play a different breed of bad cat in Batman Returns (1992).

• While I greatly enjoyed Netflix’s first two Enola Holmes movies (in 2020 and 2022), based on the middle-reader mysteries by Nancy Springer, I forgot there was to be another. Variety brings the news that its production is already well underway. “The third instalment,” that publication explains, “sees adventure chase Enola Holmes to Malta, where, according to the description, ‘personal and professional dreams collide on a case more tangled and treacherous than any she has faced before.’” As in the previous pictures, Millie Bobby Brown will play Sherlock Holmes’ teenage sister. There’s no release date yet.

• This item comes from In Reference to Murder:

Wallander, the globally acclaimed Swedish detective drama, is getting “a modernized and reimagined reboot” with Gustaf Skarsgård (Oppenheimer, Vikings) playing the iconic role. The first season of the new Swedish-language adaptation will comprise three 90-minute films and will see Kurt Wallander, now 42, recently separated, after two decades of marriage, and estranged from his daughter. On the edge as his life seemingly unravels, Wallander drinks too much, sleeps too little, and carries the weight of every unsolved case.

Penned by bestselling author Henning Mankell, the Wallander novels have sold over 40 million copies and been translated into more than 40 languages. The original Swedish series and film adaptations, which aired between 1994 and 2013, garnered wide international success and were followed by a British mini-series adaptation starring Kenneth Branagh that earned him a BAFTA for his portrayal of the detective.

• Sunday, June 15, will bring the return of Grantchester to PBS-TV’s Masterpiece Mystery! timeslot. Mystery Fanfare has the trailer for Season 10 of that historical whodunit.

• As Saturday Evening Post columnist Bob Sassone writes, “Dragnet’s Officer Bill Gannon (Harry Morgan) was known for the food he ate, which often confused and worried his partner Joe Friday (Jack Webb). Barry Enderwick of the terrific Sandwiches of History decided to try it, at the suggestion of many of his fans.” Watch the video here.

• The small-screen period crime drama Peaky Blinders is coming back! So are the rebooted Bergerac and the Death in Paradise spin-off Return to Paradise (even though I haven’t seen either of their opening seasons yet). And Acorn TV has scheduled the two-episode premiere, on Monday, June 9, of Art Detectives, which “revolves around the Heritage Crime Unit, a [UK] police department hired to solve murders connected to the world of art and antiques.”

• I was a huge fan of Leverage, the 2008-2012 TNT-TV crime caper series starring Timothy Hutton, Gina Bellman, Aldis Hodge, Christian Kane, and Beth Riesgraf. I must have watched every episode four times or more! Yet when that show was revived in 2021 as Leverage: Redemption, with Noah Wyle replacing Hutton, I hesitated tuning in, partly because I wasn’t sure I could believe the “gang” being a decade older and still as active. I think I’ve seen only two episodes of Redemption, and I completely missed the news that it had been renewed for a third season. The first three of 10 new installments aired on April 17, with more to come every Thursday through June 5. I guess it’s time I started catching up! See the trailer below.



• The Web site Geek Girl Authority (yeah, I’d never heard of it until today either) features a review of Leverage: Redemption, Season 3, plus this tribute to my favorite Leverage team member, Riesgraf’s prodigiously eccentric Parker, “truly the world’s greatest thief.”

• Speaking of TV trailers, CrimeReads has posted one for Season 2 of Poker Face, the crime comedy-drama starring Natasha Lyonne as Charlie Cale, “a casino worker on the run who entangles herself into several mysterious deaths of strangers along the way.” That show will return to the streaming service Peacock on Thursday, May 8, with 12 new episodes (two more than were broadcast in 2023).

• And while you are at CrimeReads, enjoy these three other posts that went up there recently: Patrick Sauer’s salute to Tony Rome, the South Florida gumshoe introduced in 1960’s Miami Mayhem by Marvin H. Albert, and a character Frank Sinatra played in a couple of “groovy” films; Christopher Chambers’ case for reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (which celebrated its 100th anniversary earlier this month) as noir; and Scott Montgomery’s look back at the first quarter-century of Stark House Press’ efforts to return to print many hard-boiled authors and novels from the 1950s and ’60s.

• Thomas Pynchon has a new private-eye novel coming in October!

• National Public Radio weekend host Scott Simon interviews film historian Jason Bailey about his brand-new biography, Gandolfini: Jim, Tony and the Life of a Legend (Abrams Press). That book is being promoted as “a detailed and nuanced appraisal of an enduring artist,” Jim Gandolfini, who was apparently quite different from the New Jersey Mafia boss he played on HBO’s The Sopranos.

• Why can’t the United States have nice things like this? The British Writers’ Association and the Reading Agency, a UK charity, have jointly organized National Crime Reading Month (NCRM) in June. “This year,” says a press release, “it opens with an exclusive online panel, The Lives of Crime, featuring bestselling crime authors. On 4 June at 6 p.m., the CWA chair and bestselling author, Vaseem Khan, will host authors Fiona Cummins, Adele Parks, and Penny Batchelor in the free online panel event.” They’ll be talking about “the genre’s universal appeal—from psychological thrillers to cozy mysteries—and how it creates accessible pathways to reading for audiences who might otherwise never discover the joy of books.” (Click here to register.) Beyond that presentation, NCRM will offer “over a hundred local author events and talks that run throughout June across the UK and Ireland, which take place in libraries, theatres, bookshops and online.” A page devoted to keeping track of NCRM events is available at this link.

• I am way behind in reading Paperback Warrior’s occasional “primers” on vintage crime novelists and pulp-fiction characters. The latest entry in that series recalls Kendell Foster Crossen (1910-1981), who “wrote crime-fiction novels under the name of M.E. Chaber, a pseudonym he used to construct the wildly successful Milo March series from the mid-1950s through the 1970s.” Fun stuff! UPDATE: Another such primer has just “gone live,” this one relating the background of Charles Williams, who “authored 22 books and was one of the best-selling writers in the Fawcett Gold Medal stable.”

• Historical mystery novelist Jeri Westerson used to produce a blog called Getting Medieval, offering interviews and articles—only to suddenly delete that journal from the Web, leaving links at other sites broken. She says now that “it was too much work and social media was rising.” Recently, though, Westerson decided to return to blogging. She has subsequently posted several author exchanges of interest. Gary Phillips, James R. Benn, and Rebecca Cantrell have all fielded questions from her. I hesitate slightly to link to these conversations, leery of their also disappearing someday, but transience is unfortunately a Web foible.

• Is this creative or creepy? From The Hollywood Reporter:

BBC Studios, the commercial arm of British broadcaster BBC, and the Agatha Christie estate have teamed up to launch a writing course on education-focused streaming service BBC Maestro taught by Christie herself. Well, to be precise, it is taught by the queen of crime, brought to life by actress Vivien Keene and AI, using the author’s own words.

“In a world first, Agatha Christie—best-selling novelist of all time—will be offering aspiring writers an unparalleled opportunity to learn the secrets behind her writing, in her own words,’ the partners said. ‘Using meticulously restored archival interviews, private letters and writings researched by a team of Christie experts, this pioneering course reconstructs Christie’s own voice and insights, guiding you through the art of suspense, plot twists and unforgettable characters.”

James Prichard, Christie’s great-grandson and the CEO of Agatha Christie Limited, is quoted in The Guardian as saying that the educators and researchers behind this subscription-based video series “extracted from a number of her writings an extraordinary array of her views and opinions on how to write. Through this course, you truly will receive a lesson in crafting a masterful mystery, in Agatha’s very own words.” OK, maybe it’s creative, after all.

• I have given precisely zero thought to what might be the “best crime novels of 2025 … so far.” However, both The Times of London and The Week have already shared their favorites.

• Over at my Killer Covers blog, I’ve written a great deal about the American artist Robert McGinnis this year, both prior to his demise in March (at age 99!), and after. But author Max Allan Collins had his own memories to share, in this post that talks about how he scored an unusual number of McGinnis’ paintings for use on his novels about the hired killer known only as Quarry.

• Can we ever get enough of Belgian author Georges Simenon’s Jules Maigret mysteries? Penguin Books has been publishing paperback versions of them over the last decade, and has brand-new editions set to become available beginning in July. And now the U.S. imprint Picador is joining in the game, launching its own Maigret lineup this month. Over the next three years, Picador says, it too will reissue all 75 Maigrets, plus “thirty of his darker standalone ‘romans durs’ beginning March 2026.” Pietr the Latvian will reach stores on May 6, together with The Late Monsieur Gallet and The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien, all of which originally saw print back in 1931. It may be time to clear some space on your bookshelves!

• This is a terrible loss—at least from my perspective. The annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, which celebrated appallingly bad initial sentences to (fortunately) never-to-be-completed books, is no more. Scott Rice, who, as an English professor at California’s San Jose State University, founded the competition in 1982, says he finds it “becoming increasingly burdensome and [I] would like to put myself out to pasture while I still have some vim and vigor!” The Rap Sheet has posted many of the winners over time, and we’re sorry not to be able to keep up that tradition for decades more to come.

• California author J. Sydney Jones produced half a dozen books in his Viennese Mysteries series, beginning with The Empty Mirror (2008) and ending—it was presumed—with The Third Place (2015). They were complicated and propulsive stories of crime in the Austrian capital that took place during the very early 20th century, had as their leads lawyer Karl Werthen and real-life criminologist Doktor Hanns Gross, and seemed to fare well in the marketplace. However, Jones writes in his blog, “The original series stopped after book six. I had originally planned it for another three to four installments. But other projects came up, other publishers.” The author nonetheless returned to that series during the COVID-19 pandemic, penning a “capstone” titled Lilacs of the Dead Land, which he published in February of this year—a novel that somehow managed to avoid my radar. He calls it “a stirring historical thriller set in Austria shortly after the German annexation, or Anschluss, of March 1938.” As one who very much appreciated his Viennese Mysteries, I’ll want to find a copy soon.

• It should be mentioned that one of those “other projects” Jones embarked upon was a new crime series, set on California’s central coast during World War II and adopting as its protagonist a wounded former New York City police detective, Max Byrns. The second Byrns book, Play It in Between (Werthen Press), debuted in April.

• April 17 brought the presentation, at New York City’s New School, of the 37th annual Publishing Triangle Awards celebrating “LGBTQ+ literary excellence.” During that event, Massachusetts author and creative writing professor Margot Douaihy was given the Joseph Hansen Award for LGBTQ+ Crime Writing for her second Sister Holiday novel, 2024’s Blessed Water (Zando/Gillian Flynn Books). Hansen, you will remember, penned a dozen novels in the late 20th century starring gay death claims investigator Dave Brandstetter.

• Just as “authors hitting the best seller list are approaching gender equality for the first time,” a new independent press in Great Britain proposes to center its business on male writers. Reporting on this development, Lit Hub’s James Folta acknowledges that “female authorship is on the rise, especially recently,” but he adds, “to conclude that men therefore need an urgent champion seems naïve and near-sighted. To look at this trend or, perhaps more accurately, to feel the vibes and conclude that male authors are in danger is pushing it. Male authors going from 80% to 50% of the market is far from a crisis in need of another intervening corrective.”

• And here’s one more instance of a blog rising from the dead. The Stiletto Gumshoe debuted back in November 2018, focusing on crime and mystery fiction and the artwork associated with same. But it went dormant just two years later, with its author, C.J. Thomas, apologizing that “some troubling ‘real-life’ issues need to be wrestled with right now, so there’ll be a break from blogging here for a while. Hope to be back soon …” Soon was not soon at all. When The Stiletto Gumshoe finally disappeared altogether from the Internet (forcing me to substitute links to its posts from The Wayback Machine), I struck it from this page’s lengthy blogroll, too. Then, just as abruptly as it was gone, Thomas’ creation returned! This last April 23, Thomas put up a tribute to Sergeant DeeDee McCall, the role Stepfanie Kramer played in the 1980s TV crime drama Hunter. He has followed that with posts about the 1950 film noir Where Danger Lives, J. Robert Lennon’s new Buzz Kill, French 1980s print ads from DIM Paris, and much more. Welcome back, C.J., I hope you can stick around this time.

Peter Falk in his famous role as Lieutenant Columbo.

This last weekend brought the 16th CrimeFest convention to Bristol, England. Although, much to my regret, I was unable to be there in person, I did play a modest role in its programming.

Two months ago, author and past chair of the Crime Writers’ Association Maxim Jakubowski sent me the following e-mail note:

For the past 10 years or so, I’ve run the Criminal Mastermind quiz at the Bristol CrimeFest. It’s a mystery and thriller variation on a highly popular British TV programme where participants have to answer a set of questions on both a specialist subject and then on general knowledge.

Laura Lippman has agreed to participate and as her specialist subject chosen the Columbo TV series!

I was wondering whether you’d be willing to set these questions, in view of your own expertise and knowledge of the subject? I’d need 20 or so questions by mid-April ranging from easy to more arduous. The questions should be around 2 lines long. Would you be willing?

Now, I can’t legitimately claim to be a Columbo “authority,” not like writers Mark Dawidziak (The Columbo Phile) and David Koenig (Shooting Columbo and Unshot Columbo), or the anonymous Australian author of The Columbophile Blog. But I have written about that long-running series for The Rap Sheet on many occasions (notably here), and did score a lengthy interview with Columbo co-creator William Link back in 2010. Plus, I own all of the episodes (if not the later teleflicks, which I have never thought quite measured up to the original NBC Mystery Movie drama), as well as Link’s 2010 short-story compilation, The Columbo Collection. So I am at least a fan.

After pondering the matter, I finally deciding to take Jakubowski up on his invitation. It sounded like fun, and the opportunity to test the popular culture competence of Laura Lippman—a novelist I very much respect—at a British crime-fiction convention I hope to someday attend was simply too enticing to pass up.

In the end, I sent Jakubowski 21 questions, just to be sure he had enough good ones from which to choose. I arranged them in descending order, beginning with those I thought were the least challenging and finishing with others that might test a real Columbo nerd’s knowledge. My questions were finally posed to Lippman midday on Sunday, as part of this year’s Criminal Mastermind quiz. Joining her as contestants were Stuart Field, creator of the Detective John Steel thrillers, who had volunteered to answer trivia questions about M.J. Craven’s Washington Poe novels; and Zoë Sharp, fielding queries about the Amazon Prime TV series Reacher, which had been submitted by my friend and fellow Rap Sheet contributor, Ali Karim.

(Left to right) Novelists Zoë Sharp, Stuart Field, and Laura Lippman prepare to meet the challenge of this year’s CrimeFest Criminal Mastermind quiz. (Photo © Ali Karim 2024.)

So how did Laura Lippman fare against my trivia test? “Very well—she is a Columbo fan,” Ali tells me. “And she enjoyed your questions, though she did say they were tough (with a twinkle in her eye), as she got most of them correct.” There was evidently some controversy regarding the breed of the Los Angeles police detective’s dog, but Ali suggests that was provoked by Jakubowski trying to pull Lippman’s leg. (It seems the attendees all had a good laugh about it.) In the end, Lippman earned second place in this quiz, behind Zoë Sharp.

Are you curious about your own Columbo expertise? Rather than shove my quiz questions into a dusty corner of my computer, and forget about them, I have decided to post them below. See how many you can answer. The correct responses can be found here.

1: Richard Levinson and William Link co-created the series, but how many of the shows in which Columbo appeared did they actually write?

2: Link said that he and Levinson never had a first name in mind for Columbo. But in a Season 1 episode, we got a quick screen shot of the lieutenant’s LAPD badge, which featured a first name. What was it?

3: Columbo came from a large Italian family. How many siblings did he have?

4: Columbo often arrives hungry at murder scenes in the middle of the night. What snack item does he commonly bring with him?

5: What musical instrument can Columbo play?

6: Columbo once said that his boyhood hero was who?

7: Name the single most featured recurring guest character on the show.

8: What was his dog’s favorite food?

9: In the Season 10 episode “No Time to Die,” Columbo says that he and his never-seen wife were married where?

10: And what was said to be Mrs. Columbo’s favorite piece of music?

11: Columbo episodes generally followed an “inverted mystery” format, showing the crime taking place first and then having Lieutenant Columbo solve it. But there was one episode that reversed that format, and was a genuine whodunit—what was the episode’s title?

12: Peter Falk personally supplied the tatty wardrobe for his L.A. police detective. He purchased the famous raincoat from a store on 57th Street in New York City when he was caught in a rainstorm in 1967. How much did he pay for that garment?

13: Columbo drove a battered and unreliable 1959 (or 1960) Peugeot 403 convertible. Over the course of the show’s 69-episode run—first on NBC-TV, then on ABC—that car sported two different license plate numbers. What was the second one?

14: In only one episode did Lieutenant Columbo let the killer get away with the crime. Which episode was that, and who was its big-name guest murderer?

15: “Forgotten Lady” was one of Peter Falk’s four favorite Columbo episodes. Name one of the other three.

16: Beginning with an ad-libbed performance in the Season 3 episode “Any Old Port in a Storm,” Columbo is periodically heard whistling a traditional children’s song. What is it?

17: It was a love of magic that first brought Levinson and Link together, when they were boys and shopped at the same magic store in downtown Philadelphia. But it wasn’t until Season 5 that they and their writing collaborators finally built an episode around magic. What was the name of that episode, and who played the illusionist?

18: Speaking of that episode, the solution to its crime turned on a once-ubiquitous piece of office equipment. What was that instrument?

19: Columbo’s first police assignment was with New York City’s 12th Precinct. There he trained under an Irish officer who mentored him and who he mentions often. What was that officer’s name?

20: Even before Lieutenant Columbo’s first introduction to TV audiences, in “Enough Rope,” a 1960 Chevy Mystery Show production that starred Bert Freed in the role, Levinson and Link created a prototype for the character in “Dear Corpus Delicti,” a short story they sold to Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine in 1960. What name did they give to their slight, seemingly insignificant police detective in that story?

21: During the early 2000s, Falk was asked by a newspaper reporter which other actor he could have imagined playing Columbo instead of him. Who did he suggest? (Hint: It wasn’t Bing Crosby.)

I don’t how many of these 21 queries “inquizitor” Jakubowski had a chance to fire at Lippman, or which of them she answered without fault. But the big question is, how did you do at this same game? Please let us all know in the Comments section of this post.

• The Columbophile Blog reports that David Koenig, author of the 2021 book Shooting Columbo, will be back in print next month with Unshot Columbo: Cracking the Cases That Never Got Filmed (Bonaventure Press), which “focuses on 19 murder mysteries that never made it to our screens—and outline why we never got to see them. ... [T]he many Columbo stories crafted but never filmed include 1970s tales by ‘murder consultant’ Larry Cohen and a young Brian De Palma, an aborted pilot for Mrs. Columbo that was reimagined for the good Lieutenant, and the legendary last case that Peter Falk desperately hoped would drop the curtain on Columbo’s televisual career.” Yeah, you should know by now that this is on my “preorder” list.

• North Carolina resident Ashley-Ruth M. Bernier, whose short stories have appeared in various magazines, and Audrea Sallis, a South Dakota technical writer hoping to expand her fiction portfolio, have been named as the 2024 Barbara Neely Grant recipients. This scholarship program, named for the late Barbara Neely (creator of the Blanche White mystery series), is designed to promote Black crime-fiction writers. A pair of winners is selected each year—one an already published author, the other a writer just getting started in publishing. More information about Bernier and Sallis can be found here.

• Mike Ripley expands his oft-amusing “Ripster Revivals” series for Shots with this piece looking back fondly at the oeuvre of Walter Satterthwait (1946-2020). Ripley calls him “an American with a passport, who knew how to use it. Not only did his nomadic existence find him living in numerous locations in the U.S., particularly New York, Santa Fe, California and Florida, but in Greece, Kenya and the Caribbean, with frequent visits to Germany, France, Holland and England. Along the way he wrote numerous short stories, a series of classic private eye investigations, a historical series set in the Europe of the 1920s featuring cameos from Arthur Conan Doyle, Harry Houdini, Ernest Hemingway and Adolf Hitler (!), plus stand-alone thrillers and novels featuring Lizzie Borden and Oscar Wilde.”

• The annual CrimeFest convention, held in Bristol, England, has revealed its program lineup for this coming May. In attendance should be crime-fiction stars running from Laura Lippman and Ajay Chowdhury to Denise Mina and Abir Mukherjee. More details are here.

• Perhaps in anticipation of what would have been actor Rock Hudson’s 100th birthday coming up next year (he succumbed to AIDS-related illness in 1985), the celebrity magazine Closer recently profiled Susan Saint James, now 77, who starred with Hudson in the 1971-1977 NBC Mystery Movie series McMillan & Wife. The article begins with Saint James’ statement that “kissing Rock Hudson on the set … never felt like a hardship. ‘We were kissing all the time, and it was fun,” she tells Closer exclusively, calling her late costar “engaging, wonderful, friendly and sexy.’” It goes on to mention Hudson’s “gregarious, upbeat personality” and how he personally welcomed famous guest stars to the McMillan & Wife set. “‘He would send flowers to their trailer, and he’d go over first thing in the morning to say hello,’ recalls Susan, who notes that stars of hit TV series are rarely so gracious. ‘He had this kind of Old Hollywood courtesy and kindness.’”

• Speaking of Susan Saint James, I was contacted not long ago by northern Virginia resident Frank Gregorsky, a non-fiction editor specializing in economics and political history who, in his spare time, pens a free, PDF-formatted Web quarterly called Detective Drama Gems. He’s apparently been doing that—ever so quietly, and with no professional background in his subject matter—since 2020, long enough to have analyzed “roughly four dozen episodes” of vintage American crime and detective TV shows. “I look for plausibility of events; spectacular character clarity; and the power and precision of dialogue,” Gregorsky tells me. The reason he reached out to me was that he’d come across my 2011 Rap Sheet tribute to McMillan & Wife, and had referred to it while producing this enjoyable Gems recollection of “Point of Law,” a 1976 episode of the series—and the last to feature Saint James in the role of Sally McMillan (left), spouse to Hudson’s San Francisco police commissioner, Stewart “Mac” McMillan.

• By the way, I’d love to direct you to previous issues of Detective Drama Gems, but Gregorsky has (sadly) provided no easy way to access them. The first issue, focusing on episodes of Barrie Craig, Confidential Investigator, Hawaii Five-O, and The Streets of San Francisco, can be enjoyed here. But after that, the Web addresses begin with http://www.exactingeditor.com/Detective-Gems-1.pdf, and you must change the number in that address each time to find the next one. There are 13 issues thus far, looking back at installments of everything from The Mod Squad and 77 Sunset Strip to The Name of the Game and M Squad.

• Here’s an episode that seems to have passed from my recollection: “In the final season of Perry Mason (1957-66), the intrepid attorney went behind the Iron Curtain for an adventure.”

• This is good news, indeed. New episodes of Beyond Paradise, the Death in Paradise spin-off series starring Kris Marshall, have just begun to drop on the streaming service BritBox. A Christmas special was shown in December, but only last week did a second ep suddenly appear. Here’s a synopsis: “As a steam train races through the Devonshire countryside, [Detective Inspector] Humphrey [Goodman, played by Marshall] and [Deteetive Sergeant] Esther [Williams, played by Zahra Ahmadi] join the Shipton Abbott Players for a murder mystery rehearsal. Though Humphrey is only playing a detective, things turn from amateur to professional when the actor playing the victim is found dead with a real knife in his back.” Wikipedia says six Season 2 episodes are in the hopper (and began showing in the UK in March). Marshall was my favorite among the fish-out-of-water British detective stars of Death in Paradise, and it’s nice to see him return in this rather different series, which will apparently find Goodman and his fiancée, Sally Bretton (Martha Lloyd) becoming foster parents.

• Meanwhile, American streamer Hulu has decided to end the cruise of Death and Other Details after 10 installments. “Now we’ll never know which poor soul these severed limbs belonged to,” observes Deadline. “Hulu has opted not to renew murder mystery series Death and Other Details for a second season. The news is not really surprising; the visually stylish series starring Mandy Patinkin and Violett Beane had a pretty quiet run, not able to break into Nielsen’s weekly Top 10 streaming ratings.”

• And if you missed seeing today’s total solar eclipse, visible in North America, here’s NASA’s broadcast of that “celestial spectacle.”

Peter S. Fischer, who co-created the CBS-TV mystery series Murder, She Wrote, in addition to scripting episodes of Columbo, Ellery Queen, and McMillan & Wife, passed away on October 30 in a Pacific Grove, California, care facility. He was 88 years old.

Born in 1935, Fischer went on to study drama at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland. After deciding that his destiny was not as an actor, he turned instead to writing. Fischer was 34 years old and living on New York’s Long Island, editing and publishing a sports car magazine, when he decided to try his hand at writing for Hollywood. He sent the script for a tense science-fiction tale to his younger brother, a casting director at Universal Studios, and after some reworking, it became the basis for an October 1971 ABC Movie of the Week feature, The Last Child. That first success convinced him to move to Los Angeles and embark on a television career.

Fischer soon had his hands full contributing stories to ABC’s Marcus Welby, M.D., and Owen Marshall, Counselor at Law, as well as to crime dramas such as Griff, Kojak, Baretta, and Judd Hirsch’s Delvecchio. After turning out several episodes of the underrated, 1975-1976 period whodunit Ellery Queen, starring Jim Hutton and created by Richard Levinson and William Link, Fischer concocted his first script for another, more famous Levinson-Link series, Columbo. He’d subsequently pen five further Columbo installments, among them 1974’s “An Exercise in Fatality” (which cast Robert Conrad as a homicidal health club owner) and “Negative Reaction” (in which Dick Van Dyke played a photographer who did away with his spouse). Fischer developed the screenplay for the 1976 NBC mini-series Once an Eagle; joined Levinson and Link in devising the pilot film Charlie Cobb: Nice Night for a Hanging, which they hoped would generate a western-detective series starring Clu Gulagher (it didn’t); created the 1978-1979 Vincent Baggetta drama The Eddie Capra Mysteries, and wrote all 13 episodes of Blacke’s Magic, starring Hal Linden.

In 1984 Fischer teamed up again with Levinson and Link, this time to launch the Angela Lansbury mystery series Murder, She Wrote. He penned dozens of episodes of that CBS show before it ended its weekly run in 1996, and even created a short-lived spin-off mystery titled The Law & Harry McGraw, starring Jerry Orbach and Barbara Babcock. The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) lists his final small-screen production as the 1997 teleflick Murder, She Wrote: South by Southwest.

After bidding adios to Hollywood, Fischer assumed the role of full-time author. In 2010 he released Jezebel in Blue Satin, the first of 22 “Hollywood Murder Mysteries,” their plots spanning the latter half of the 20th century. The protagonist in those yarns was a studio press agent by the name of Joe Bernardi, but Fischer also incorporated into his plots real-life headliners on the order of Alfred Hitchcock, Humphrey Bogart, Orson Welles, and Robert Wagner. The concluding entry in that series was 2019’s The Man in the Raincoat, which found Bernardi struggling to protect Peter Falk from the publisher of a scandal mag. Beyond his novels, Fischer released an “unauthorized autobiography” called Me and Murder, She Wrote in 2013.

Variety recalls that “Fischer was nominated for three Emmys and two Golden Globes for Best Television Series – Drama throughout his career.” He received an Edgar Award nomination for “Deadly Lady,” the second episode of Murder, She Wrote. And in 2013, the author picked up the gold medal in the Mystery/Suspense category of the Benjamin Franklin Awards competition for his fifth Hollywood Murder Mystery, The Unkindness of Strangers.

The cause of Fischer’s demise hasn’t been publicized.

His passing comes just over a year after Angela Lansbury died in her sleep at her home in Los Angeles. She was 96.

• There are a couple of interesting items contained in author Max Allan Collins’ latest blog post. First off, he says he’s “setting out to do a podcast series based on the Nathan Heller novels. Each multi-episode podcast would take on a single book. I will write these adaptations myself.” Expect to see the announcement of a crowd-funding campaign to get the initial podcast in that series going. Second, despite what Collins has previously termed a “disappointing lack of any support from Greenlight Iowa” to produce a film based on his A Christmas Carol-inspired short story, “Blue Christmas,” the author did succeed in raising $6,375 through an Indiegogo effort (perhaps $13,000+ short of what he says will ultimately be needed), and is in the process of “serious pre-production now.” He reports that actor Gary Sandy, with whom he has worked before, is his top pick to assume the lead role of Jake Marley, and “we are having auditions this week for the rest of the Blue Christmas cast … [T]he shoot is toward the end of October.” Oh, and that same blog post features a quite enjoyable video interview Titan Books’ Andrew Sumner did with Collins about the new Mike Hammer yarn, Dig Two Graves, the 14th Hammer novel he’s penned using material left behind by Spillane, after he died in 2006.

• In time for holiday gift buying: When The Art of Ron Lesser Volume 1: Deadly Dames and Sexy Sirens was first published several months ago, it existed only in hardcover. But now that book on which I worked with Robert Deis and Bill Cunningham boasts a paperback edition, as well. It’s equally beautiful, but $17 less expensive!

• First, some good TV news (from In Reference to Murder): “Masterpiece on PBS has announced the premiere date and released first look images for the upcoming season of Miss Scarlet and the Duke, which returns on January 7, 2024, for its fourth season. In the new season, Eliza (Kate Phillips) has taken over the business of detective agency Nash & Sons, and things are not going entirely smoothly, although help comes from some familiar sources. Outside of work, her relationship with William Wellington, a gruff Scottish detective inspector of Scotland Yard (the ‘Duke,’ played by Stuart Martin) builds towards a looming decision that will shape both their lives.” I’ve much enjoyed this historical mystery series.

• Now the bad news: “The premiere of HBO’s anticipated True Detective: Night Country has been pushed back and is now listed as January of 2024 (the exact day is unknown). In Night Country, when the long winter night falls in Ennis, Alaska, the eight men who operate the Tsalal Arctic Research Station vanish without a trace. To solve the case, detectives Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster) and Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis) must confront their pasts and the dark truths lying underneath the Arctic ice. John Hawkes, Christopher Eccleston, Fiona Shaw, Finn Bennett, Anna Lambe, Aka Niviâna, Isabella Star Lablanc, and Joel D. Montgrand also star.”

• For what it’s worth, Amazon appears to have updated its list of the “best mysteries and thrillers of 2023 so far.” It’s already crowning S.A. Cosby’s All the Sinners Bleed (Flatiron) as this year’s top choice, but also applauds Dennis Lehane’s Small Mercies (Harper), Jesse Q. Sutanto’s Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers (Berkley), Thomas Perry’s Murder Book (‎Mysterious Press), Jacqueline Winspear’s The White Lady (Harper), Charlie Donlea’s Those Empty Eyes (Kensington), T.J. Newman’s Drowning (‎Avid Reader Press), and 13 other works—only a few of which I’ve yet read.

• With the Bloody Scotland crime-writing festival set to begin just two days from now in the central Scottish town of Stirling, take a moment to check out the Nordic Noir blog’s choices of the best events on the festival’s program. Meanwhile, Live and Deadly highlights the ways Bloody Scotland supports writers new to this genre.

• As might have been predicted, opinions are divided on the artistic results here: “A life-sized bronze statue of Agatha Christie has been unveiled in the Oxfordshire town of Wallingford, near where the detective novelist resided for more than 40 years,” The Guardian reports. “The statue depicts the writer holding a book and seated on a bench overlooking the Kinecroft, an area of open grassland. Sculptor Ben Twiston-Davies—who also designed the Agatha Christie memorial in London—said in a YouTube video about the statue that it shows her ‘looking out as if she’s seen a clue for one of her stories.’”

• Southern California author-screenwriter Lee Goldberg is always an entertaining guest speaker, as I was reminded during the recent Bouchercon in San Diego. He demonstrates his humor again in two recent interviews on the subject of his brand-new thriller novel, Malibu Burning (Thomas & Mercer): this one with Murder by the Book’s Sara DiVello, and this other one with Story Blender’s Steven James.

• Another writer who has been receiving widespread attention is UK mystery-maker/TV show host Richard Osman, whose fourth and latest entry in his Thursday Murder Club series, The Last Devil to Die, should be out this week from Viking. The Guardian’s Charlotte Edwardes profiles him here, while The New York Times’ Sarah Weinman composed this story about him for Esquire magazine.

• If you didn’t snag a copy of William Link’s The Columbo Collection 13 years ago, when it debuted, you now have another chance. Publisher Crippen & Landru has announced that the book, which contains 12 original stories featuring television detective Lieutenant Columbo—all written by his co-creator—is back in stock after a long absence. And still available at the 2010 paperback price of $18.

• Finally, a sad note: Eighty-year-old writing teacher/coach, former U.S. Navy cryptographer, and fictionist Les Edgerton died in Fort Wayne, Indiana, on August 31 after “a short battle with COVID 19,” according to his funeral home obituary. With more than 20 books to his credit, including the novels Adrenaline Junkie and The Genuine, Imitation, Plastic Kidnapping, as well as the 2007 writer's resource Hooked: Write Fiction That Grabs Readers at Page One and Never Lets Them Go, Edgerton had been nominated for a wide variety of prizes, from the O. Henry Award to the Edgar Award for Best Short Story. Not long before his passing, he had won the Killer Nashville convention’s Claymore Award with the opening 50 pages of an unpublished manuscript, Francois Roberge—The Fixer.

• British author Kim Sherwood has announced the title of her second Double-0 novel, the sequel to last year’s Double or Nothing. It will be called A Spy Like Me, and will follow “an elite team of MI6 agents [who] must go undercover to unravel a smuggling network funding violent terror.” The current publication date is April 25, 2024.

• Euro Crime’s Karen Meek reports that “the 43 titles that were eligible for the 2023 Petrona Award for the Best Scandinavian Crime Novel of the Year have been entered by the publishers.” Those works include Eva Björg Ægisdóttir’s Night Shadows, Ragnar Jónasson’s Outside, Anne Mette Hancock’s The Corpse Flower, David Lagercrantz’s Dark Music, and Yrsa Sigurdardottir’s The Fallout. The prize winner will be declared online sometime later this year.

• A trailer has been released for the fall film A Haunting in Venice. That picture will mark the third time Kenneth Branagh has appeared in the role of 20th-century Belgian investigator Hercule Poirot (following 2017’s Murder on the Orient Express and 2022’s Death on the Nile). The story, adapted from Agatha Christie’s 1969 novel, Hallowe'en Party, is described by The Hollywood Reporter in the following fashion:

Set in post-Second World War Venice, a retired Poirot is summoned to attend a séance by an old friend, played by Tina Fey, to see if a psychic (Michelle Yeoh) is a fake. When one of the séance guests in the decaying, haunted Venice palazzo is murdered, Poirot steps in to identify the killer, only to face a world of supernatural shadows and secrets. . “Someone is dead. No one shall leave this place until I know who did it,” the former detective tells surprised séance participants now considered suspects in a murder mystery the celebrated sleuth is determined to resolve.

A Haunting in Venice, which also stars Jamie Dornan, Jude Hill, Riccardo Scamarcio, Emma Laird, and Camille Cottin, is scheduled to premiere in U.S. theaters on September 15.

• Although any longtime reader of The Columbophile, that anonymously penned tribute to Peter Falk’s famous Columbo TV series, would undoubtedly be able to name at least some of the site’s favorite (and least favorite) Columbo episodes, it came out earlier this week with an official ranking of all 69. “The Bye-Bye Sky High IQ Murder Case” (1977) took the number one spot, while “Murder in Malibu” (1990) finished dead last, even behind “the dreaded ‘Last Salute to the Commodore’” (1976). Installments from the show made after its 1989 revival on ABC are largely deemed inferior to those included in its initial, 1971-1978 run as part of the NBC Mystery Movie.

• Robert Deis, co-editor of the beautiful new book The Art of Ron Lesser Volume 1: Deadly Dames and Sexy Sirens, is offering a limited-time deal for the deluxe hardcover edition. “While they last …,” he explains in his MensPulpMags blog, readers can purchase that edition “bundled together with an 8”x10” Giclée print of his original cover painting for The Tigress by Carter Brown (Signet, 1967), hand-signed by Ron. You get both together for $60—with free shipping.”

• And rest in peace, Tom Schantz. Together with his wife, Enid (who died in 2011), Schantz founded The Rue Morgue Mystery Bookstore and The Rue Morgue Press in Lyons, Colorado. The pair were also instrumental in establishing the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association (IMBA), “a trade association of retail businesses devoted to the sale of mystery books.” As Mystery Fanfare recalls, “Tom was on the Left Coast Crime Board, and with his wife Enid, co-chaired the 1995 Left Coast Crime in Boulder, CO. Tom was Fan Guest of Honor at LCC in 2013. I’m pretty sure Tom and Enid put on a Bouchercon, too, and he was awarded a Raven [Award] from MWA [Mystery Writers of America] in 2001.” Schantz died on June 6 at 79 years of age.

• It seems that British comedy writer John Finnemore (Cabin Pressure), one of the few people known to have solved the literary puzzle Cain’s Jawbone, has penned “an official sequel” to that work. As The Guardian’s Sarah Shaffi explains, the Cain’s Jawbone murder mystery was originally published in 1934, and was created by Edward Powys Mathers (aka “Torquemada”), the “cryptic crossword compiler” for Britain’s Observer newspaper. Mathers’ puzzle “can only be solved if readers rearrange its 100 pages in the correct order,” says Shaffi. “It became a literary phenomenon after book fans on TikTok discovered it.” About the contents of Finnemore’s sequel—set for release next year—The Guardian provides the following:

A locked room mystery, Finnemore’s new whodunnit hinges on a person found stabbed to death in the study of a complete stranger. The room was securely locked from the inside, but no weapon—or murderer—has ever been found, and the police investigation discovered no credible suspects or likely motive.

The murderer keeps, safely locked in a drawer, a box of 100 picture postcards. If arranged in the correct order and properly understood, these postcards will explain the murder in the study, and nine others that took place the same year. Readers need to re-order the postcards, one side of which features text, the other an image which is also a clue, in sequence to correctly solve and explain the 10 murders.

For now, Finnemore’s book, due out from crowdfunding publisher Unbound, is listed only as Untitled Mystery. However, Shaffi reports that “the title will be revealed to those who pledge during the crowdfunding campaign.” As of this writing, that campaign has 1,061 supporters at various reward levels.

• Crime Fiction Lover reports that the popular ITV-TV crime drama Unforgotten will return to British airwaves on Monday, February 27. This fifth season of the show finds Irish actress Sinéad Keenan stepping into shoes vacated by Nicola Walker, whose character, Detective Chief Inspector Cassie Stuart, was killed suddenly in a car crash at the end of Series 4. (Walker subsequently went on to headline the Alibi network’s Annika, which has been renewed for a second season.) Keenan has been cast as DCI Jessica James, who joins series regular DCI Sunil “Sunny” Khan (Sanjeev Bhaskar) in managing a team of London police detectives who specialize in solving cold cases. Their initial investigation together will, of course, be a “devilishly tricky one,” CFL explains. “During the renovation of a period property in [the West London district of] Hammersmith, a body is found bricked into the chimney. At first, Jessica is sceptical and warns that with its tight resources the team can only afford to investigate cases that have consequences in the here-and-now. After all, there’s the suggestion that the body could date as far back as the 1930s.” As usual, Season 5 will comprise six episodes. The UK blog What to Watch notes that “A U.S. release date has still to be announced.”

• Meanwhile, the ninth and concluding season of Endeavour—a prequel to the long-running Inspector Morse—is scheduled to begin its run on the same British network, ITV, come Sunday, February 26. There will be just three 90-minute episodes this time out, concluding on March 12. Although The Killing Times says Season 9 “plot details are currently embargoed,” Radio Times observes that the program’s “fans are bracing themselves for some sad scenes in the final three episodes, which will reveal how Morse (Shaun Evans) came to be estranged from his crime-solving partner, Fred Thursday (Roger Allam).” The PBS-TV Web site supplies nary a clue as to when this last season of Endeavour might become available to American viewers, but it does offer a brief video that recaps scenes from Evans’ decade spent in the role of Detective Sergeant Endeavour Morse.

• Speaking of Shaun Evans, it appears he will star with Anna Maxwell Martin (Line of Duty) in a four-part ITV adaptation of Delia Balmer’s 2017 true-crime memoir, Living with a Serial Killer. The story, according to Deadline, will focus on Balmer, a nurse “who fell for murderer John Sweeney (Evans) and overcame a horrific attack to provide vital evidence in the prosecution against her former lover.” Using a script by Nick Stevens (The Pembrokeshire Murders), filming on this mini-series is expected to begin next month.

• Season 2 of the HBO-TV series Perry Mason, starring Matthew Rhys, is slated to premiere on Monday, March 6. I haven’t seen much information about what to expect from those eight new episodes, but the Web site FedRegsAdvisor states they’ll be set in 1933—the last year of America’s failed Prohibition experiment—“with the protagonist’s law company taking on civil issues as opposed to criminal justice cases.” After the offspring of a powerful oil company exec is slain cruelly, and Los Angeles’ Depression-era “Hoovervilles” are searched for “the most obvious suspects, … Perry, Della [Street], and Paul [Drake] find themselves at the center of a case that reveals vast conspiracies and forces them to consider what it means to be truly guilty.” A most promising trailer for Season 2 is available here.

• A final TV note: The UK channel BBC One has released early images from Wolf, an upcoming crime drama based on the late author Mo Hayder’s novels about Detective Inspector Jack Caffery. English actor Ukweli Roach will be portraying Caffery.

• Because I have committed myself to attending this year’s Bouchercon, I’ve been on alert for news about that event. Which is why I noticed this generous offer. From In Reference to Murder: “A new Bouchercon Scholarship Award Program has been established to help mystery fans and writers with a financial subsidy. This subsidy covers registration fees for the annual Bouchercon convention, scheduled to be held in San Diego in 2023, as well as travel and lodging costs, reimbursed up to $500.00 (for up to five awardees). Interested applicants will need to write a 300- to 500-word essay on the applicant’s interest in attending Bouchercon and in the mystery genre and be willing to volunteer for no less than four hours at the event. The deadline is May 1st, with scholarship winners announced June 1.” Click here to find applications specifics.

• Nero Wolfe fans will find something extra to like about this San Diego Bouchercon. A banquet in honor of their favorite fictional sleuth has been scheduled for Friday, September 1, at Morton’s Steakhouse on J Street, “a 2-minute walk from the convention hotel, with shuttle rides available.” The cost is $175 per person, and it looks as if attendance is limited to members of the Wolfe Pack literary society.

• Max Allan Collins and James L. Traylor have been scoring plenty of favorable press coverage for their new, first-ever Mickey Spillane biography, Spillane: King of Pulp Fiction (Mysterious Press). That includes a joint interview with the Web site Bookreporter, from which we learn, for instance, why Spillane took a decade-long hiatus from writing after Kiss Me, Deadly was published in 1952. My humble contribution to these kudos is a short critique I posted earlier this week in January Magazine. Here it is in its entirety:

“The chewing gum of American literature” is how crime novelist Mickey Spillane described his books, which typically blended eye-for-an-eye justice with risqué innuendos and granite-chinned philosophizing (“Too many times naked women and death walked side by side”). And boy, did readers eat up his fiction, making his first Mike Hammer private-eye yarn, 1947’s I, the Jury, into a best-seller that spawned a dozen sequels and turned its protagonist into a radio, film, and TV fixture. Spillane developed his own media persona along the way, part-Hammer (he portrayed his Gotham gumshoe in a 1963 film, The Girl Hunters) and part-ham (he spoofed himself in a succession of Miller Lite beer commercials). In this enlightening biography, fellow writers Collins (his friend and posthumous collaborator) and Traylor make the most of their extraordinary access to Spillane’s personal archives, delivering incisive perspectives on his comic-book years, his multiple marriages, his pugnaciousness and wont to embellish the facts of his life, his surprising conversion by Jehovah’s Witnesses, his vexation with Hollywood, and his eventual recognition by peers who’d earlier condemned him as “a vulgar pulpmeister.” This book’s paramount success, though, is in casting Spillane as a trendsetting stylist, who recognized early the value of paperback publication and helped shape late-20th-century detective fiction.

• Until recently, I knew Mark Dawidziak mainly as the author of a fine 1989 TV retrospective, The Columbo Phile: A Casebook. But he is the man, too, behind a new biography that features prominently on my must-have list: A Mystery of Mysteries: The Death and Life of Edgar Allan Poe (St. Martin’s Press). In a CrimeReads extract from that book, Dawidziak recounts the “ongoing fascination” with Poe’s death, in Baltimore, at the tender age of 40—a subject that A Mystery of Mysteries addresses in some detail. Also posted recently in CrimeReads was Dean Jobb’s terrific look back at Poe’s 1843 horror story, “The Black Cat,” and the real-life murder that inspired it.

• Dammit! As I mentioned here last month, I have been looking forward to watching Marlowe, an adaptation of Benjamin Black’s 2014 Philip Marlowe continuation novel, The Black-Eyed Blonde, which debuted in theaters last week. Unfortunately, The A.V. Club’s Ray Greene is rather less than enthusiastic about this Liam Neeson film. As he remarks in a review, “Marlowe has seen it all—he’s a voyeur of the very worst human behaviors, and he’s world-weary to a fault. Liam is just plain weary—laconic, not iconic. Where Bogie and even a comparably aged Robert Mitchum were able to convey Marlowe as a man who at least remembers what caring felt like, Neeson is going through the motions of going through the motions. And the age thing doesn’t help. The only time Neeson’s Marlowe seems truly vulnerable is when he talks about the possibility of regaining his police pension. ‘I’m getting too old for this’ he moans after a fistfight, tempting audience agreement with the very phrase.” I’ll still plump for tickets to Marlowe, but go into it with lowered expectations.

• Thanks to the release of Poker Face on the Peacock streaming service, a 10-part “howcatchem” crime/comedy series that has garnered plenty of comparisons to Columbo, Peter Falk’s iconic L.A. police lieutenant has been enjoying a recent wave of reconsideration in critical circles. In this piece for the Web site of Boston’s WBUR-FM radio, Ed Siegel recalls an interview he had over dinner with Falk in the mid-’80s. In the meantime, Slate’s Cameron Gorman explains how the Internet turned Columbo “into a sex symbol and queer icon.”

• I am dearly hoping that this celebration of crime novelist Peter Robinson’s life and literary endeavors, to be held at England’s University of Leeds in early April, will be broadcast live via the Web. Robinson, you’ll recall, died last October at age 72.

• Tomorrow is Presidents’ Day here in the States—time to pour through Janet Rudolph’s extensive collection of mysteries that guest star or are built around American chief executives. You might also wish to revisit this article I wrote for CrimeReads about novels featuring authentic or imagined U.S. presidents.

• Subjects covered in Mike Ripley’s latest “Getting Away with Murder” column for Shots range from his long-ago stroke to the 1951 espionage film Decision Before Dawn and Steven Powell’s biography of James Ellroy, plus mentions of brand-new works by Stephen O’Shea, Kathleen Kent, David Brierley, Karen Smirnoff, and others.

• Worth checking out as well is the new, Winter 2013 issue of Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine, which is stuffed full of “best crime fiction” choices from the year that just was—selected both by DP critics and outside sources. Among this edition’s other contents are a wrap-up of Depression-era mysteries; reviews columns from such regulars as Ted Hertel, Meredith Anthony, and Kristopher Zgorski; and news that DP has added four contributors to its stable, all refugees from the recently closed Mystery Scene magazine: Kevin Burton Smith, Robin Agnew, Hank Wagner, and Craig Sisterson. Subscribe to this quarterly, or buy the Winter 2013 issue alone, by clicking here.

• And isn’t this interesting. Ramona Emerson’s 2022 crime/horror thriller, Shutter (Soho Crime), has moved up to the shortlist of titles vying for this year’s PEN America Literary Awards. It’s been nominated for both the PEN Open Book Award and the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel. Winners are to be announced on March 2 during an evening ceremony at The Town Hall in New York City.

• Sweet Freedom blogger Todd Mason has just posted the winners of the 2021 Shirley Jackson Awards, in half a dozen categories. Those prizes—handed out in-person on October 29, during a ceremony at the Boston Book Festival—celebrate “outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic.” Not to keep you in suspense any longer: Stephen Graham Jones’ My Heart Is a Chainsaw (Saga Press) captured Best Novel honors.

• There are just a few days left now to nominate books, authors, and television programs in the second annual Crime Fiction Lover Awards competition. Polls will close at noon (UK time) on Wednesday, November 2. Learn more here.

• Just in time for Halloween, CrimeReads carries author W. Scott Poole’s account of how, during the mid-20th century, the FBI investigated actor Bela Lugosi—most renowned for his film role as Dracula—for alleged communist sympathies.

• And William Shatner makes a surprise guest appearance (well, sort of) on The Columbophile. In extended excerpts from the new book Boldly Go: Reflections on a Life of Awe and Wonder (Atria), the now 91-year-old actor reflects on his two roles—both times as the killer, naturally—on the TV crime drama Columbo, first in 1976, when that show was still part of the NBC Mystery Movie, and then in 1994, after it was revived as an element of The ABC Mystery Movie. The blog’s anonymous Australian author introduces Shatner’s recollections thusly: “So, how did Mr. Shatner enjoy working with Peter Falk? How does he feel knowing he’s part of a select group of actors who played multiple Columbo killers? And, most pertinently, what did he make of the ludicrous, colour-changing moustache he was sporting in ‘Butterfly in Shades of Grey’? Was he in on the joke, or an innocent victim of a makeup malfunction? Those questions will be answered below …”

• Former U.S. President Bill Clinton, ex-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and country singer Dolly Parton have all claimed authorship of crime or thriller novels over the last few years, so why not James Comey? The ex-U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York and onetime FBI director was bluntly fired from that latter post in 2017 by Donald Trump amid the worsening scandal over Russian influence on Trump’s 2016 presidential bid. Comey has since delivered speeches and written op-ed pieces for newspapers, but those endeavors were apparently not satisfying enough. So now he has signed with The Mysterious Press, an imprint of Penzler Publishers, to produce a pair of crime novels. As explained this week in a press release,

Central Park West, the first book of a planned series, features an assistant U.S. Attorney whose case against a high-profile mobster is derailed when a shocking turn of events reveals possible ties between the Mafia and the headline-making murder of a local politician. Drawing from the author’s personal experience, this high-stakes legal thriller reveals the detective work, backdoor dealings, and tradecraft involved as the FBI and Department of Justice attempt to build a case against an elusive member of one of the oldest criminal organizations in the world.

“I’m excited to take readers inside fascinating worlds I’ve come to know from my time in government and the private sector,” Comey is quoted as saying. “These stories are fiction, but, inspired by real work I’ve done, they will offer a rarely-seen view of interesting people and institutions. And I’m honored to be doing it with a legendary publisher.” Central Park West is scheduled for release in late spring 2023. There’s no word yet on the plot of book two.

• Literary Hub managing editor Emily Temple surveyed 25 reading lists for this fall season from 22 notable outlets (newspapers, magazines, and some Web sites) in order to come up with a tally of the 72 most-recommended books, fiction and non-fiction. Of those dozens of choices, I believe only two novels—Deanna Raybourn’s Killers of a Certain Age and Richard Osman’s The Bullet That Missed—can unquestionably be defined as crime or mystery fiction.

• The annual Irish crime-writing festival Murder One was launched only in 2018, and for the last two years—ever since the COVID-19 pandemic struck—it has had to be presented exclusively online. Not this year, though. From October 4 to 9, Murder One is scheduling events to take place at the DLR LexIcon Library and Cultural Centre in Dún Laoghaire, just south of Dublin. Among 2022’s scheduled guests will be U.S. novelists Laura Lippman and Jean Hanff Korelitz, English fictionists Ann Cleeves and Mick Herron, Irish writers Catherine Ryan Howard and Brian McGilloway, and Agatha Christie biographer/TV presenter Lucy Worsley. Many of the in-person events will also be live-streamed online. For booking details, click here.

• In Reference to Murder reports that actor Shaun Sipos (Outer Range) “has been tapped as a major lead opposite Alan Ritchson in the upcoming second season of Reacher. From writer and showrunner Nick Santora and based on the novels by Lee Child, the series follows Jack Reacher (Ritchson), a veteran military police investigator who has just recently entered civilian life. In a one-year deal, Sipos will play David O’Donnell, who served with Reacher in the Army’s unit of special investigators and is like a brother to Reacher. While Season 1 was based on the first book in Child’s Jack Reacher series, Ritchson revealed in May on Instagram that Season 2 will follow the eleventh book in Child’s series, Bad Luck and Trouble. David O’Donnell is a prominent character in that book, the only novel in the series he is featured in, which explains Sipos’ one-season deal.”

• Congratulations to the Sisters in Crime organization for 35 years spent “fighting the patriarchy.”

• How does Peter Falk’s Lieutenant Columbo compare with the great Sherlock Holmes? “Despite being a very different character, and harking from an entirely different time and space,” The Columbophile blog opines, “Columbo may be the closest to Holmes of all their peers in terms of mental dexterity. But how much do these men really have in common when making a detailed comparison? Well, despite one being an upper-crust, cynical and occasionally drug-dependent Victorian-era Brit, and the other being from humble Italian-American stock, a grafter who has worked harder than others to get ahead, there is much to connect the two detectives—and those similarities expand way beyond a mutual love of tobacco.” Enjoy the whole story here.

• So much for that dream... In answer to the question, “At what point in human history were there too many (English) books to be able to read them all in one lifetime?,” Randall Munroe, the author of What If? 2, estimates the threshold was passed “sometime before the population of active English writers reached a few hundred,” which would have been right around the year 1500.

• Sadly, my book radar sometimes fails me. For instance, I entirely missed noticing this last July’s release of The Blood Ogre, the latest novel from Craig McDonald, best known for his pulpish Hector Lassiter series. Steven Powell offers this description:

The story revolves around the reputation of two remarkably prolific writers, Lester Dent and Walter B. Gibson. Dent suffered a nervous breakdown and early death in 1959, perhaps brought on by the impossible schedule of churning out Doc Savage novels by the dozen and averaging two million words a year on his typewriter. In his final days, Dent had hallucinations in which he would see and interact with Doc Savage characters. In 1965, Doc Savage and The Shadow novels are enjoying renewed popularity. The Shadow author Walter B. Gibson has a knack for publicity rooted in his parallel career as a magician. People start witnessing a black-clad figure looming around the Greenwich Village house where Gibson penned the final Shadow novel in 1949. Gibson claims it is a ‘living mind-projection’ of The Shadow. But if a hero can rise from the pages of an authors literary output, then what other, more sinister, characters will follow him?

Powell calls The Blood Ogre “devilishly good” and “an affectionate tribute to a bygone era.” Frankly, it’s meta-fictional conceit reminds me rather too much of Paul Malmont’s The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril (2006), a novel I was unable to finish. Nonetheless, I’ve enjoyed McDonald’s books in the past, so will likely look this one up, too.

• Not long before he starred in the high-tech NBC-TV private eye drama Search, actor Tony Franciosa appeared in an unsold pilot for the same network called The Catcher. The weekly program would’ve starred Michael Witney as Noah Hendrix, a former agent with the Seattle Bureau of Missing Persons, who now operates as an investigator chasing runaways and fugitives. I’ve never seen the full pilot, but I did discover a four-minute clip on YouTube that features Franciosa, Witney, Jan-Michael Vincent as Hendrix’s associate Sam Callende, and blues musician Piano Red. See it while you can!

• My, how times—and budgets—have changed! Back in 1968, it was considered extravagant for NBC to fork out $400,000 for every 90-minute episode of the crime-drama “wheel series” The Name of the Game. Compare that with some of today’s most expensive small-screen shows. According to the Internet research company VPN Overview, the Amazon Prime production Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power costs $60 million per installment. The Disney+ programs Hawkeye (2021), The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (2021), WandaVision (2021), Loki (2021), and Obi Wan Kenobi (2022) each budgeted $25,000,000 per episode, while Netflix spends $13,000,000 per episode on The Crown (2016-).

• Have you ever wanted to watch the first, black-and-white, half-hour episode of Jack Webb’s police drama, Dragnet, dating back to December 14, 1951? Well, here’s your chance.

• I didn’t realize, when I applauded the recent revival of The Washington Post’s Sunday Book World section after a dozen years, that its return would coincide with the end of another Sunday Post component I have come to appreciate immensely: the nearly 68-year-old Outlook section of commentary and news analysis. “The decision to retire the Outlook section,” Robert G. Kaiser and Steve Luxenberg explained in its last edition, on September 16, “and to consolidate the paper’s opinion journalism in the editorial department, is a measure of how dramatically the newspaper business has changed in its march from print to digital publication.” Outlook was one of the models I used when I created a four-page editorials section for my college newspaper, and I’ve enjoyed reading it whenever I have been in D.C. since, or have picked up the Sunday Post from a newsstand. Rolling its variety of contents into the Opinions pages is not an unreasonable solution, but it’s also not a happy one for those of us who once traveled directly from the front section of the Post to Outlook.