Pierce’s Picks: A New Home

Five and a half years ago, when I proposed to January Magazine editor Linda L. Richards that I spin off The Rap Sheet--which I’d been writing as a mostly monthly newsletter for January subscribers--as a standalone blog, I promised that I would continue to write weekly crime-fiction book recommendations for the original site. Thus was born “Pierce’s Picks,” the brief, boxed book write-up that has appeared ever since at the top of January’s crime-fiction contents page. (An archive of the last year’s worth of such recommendations is located here.)

This morning, though, begins a new chapter in the life of “Pierce’s Picks.”

As the end of 2011 drew near, Linda told me that she would like to lighten her editorial load going forward, and asked whether I’d be willing to move my weekly book recommendation over to The Rap Sheet. Fair enough. So beginning today, you will find my “Picks” prominently displayed on this page, a new one each Monday, all recommending freshly published books--mostly fiction, but occasionally non-fiction works--of particular interest to crime, mystery, and thriller readers.

First up: Cold Comfort, by Quentin Bates (Soho Crime).

This sequel to last year’s Frozen Assets finds Sergeant “Gunna” Gunnhildur being promoted from her police posting in rural Iceland to Reykjavík’s Serious Crime Unit. She arrives in time to participate in a hunt for escaped convict Long Ommi, whose spree of violent retribution is terrorizing the Icelandic capital--a place still reeling from the ongoing worldwide financial crisis. Concurrently, she is tasked with solving the murder of a TV fitness guru. Powerful special interests and damaging secrets are soon swept into the case, testing Gunna’s determination to find truths, not just easy answers.

Praising Brevity

Last week Spinetingler Magazine announced it would inaugurate a new, possibly annual award competition, this one in the field of novella-writing. Today, that Webzine posts an online survey form on which you can choose your favorite story from among 10 nominees. Works published in 2011 by Ray Banks, Tom Piccirilli, Kio Stark, and Gerard Brennan are included among the contenders.

You have until the end of January to cast your vote here.

German Gems

Authors Peter Temple, Mechtild Borrmann, and Kate Atkinson are among the winners of this year’s Deutscher Krimi Preis (German Crime Novel Prize). For full results, look here.

Bullet Points: Snow Day Edition*

• Less than a week remains now in the submission process for 2012’s Debut Dagger competition, hosted by the British Crime Writers’ Association. The deadline is Saturday, January 21. As the CWA’s Web site explains, “The Debut Dagger is open to anyone who has not yet had a novel published commercially. ... Winning the Debut Dagger doesn’t guarantee you’ll get published. But it does mean your work will be seen by leading agents and top editors, who have signed up over two dozen winners and shortlisted Debut Dagger competitors.” Click here for more information about entering the contest.

• DC Comics is adapting Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo as a two-volume graphic novel, the first volume to be released in November 2012. As Omnimystery News reports, “The story is by Denise Mina and Leonardo Manco with art by Andrea Mutti.” But the real treat, I think, is the cover of that first graphic novel, featuring a powerful illustration by Lee Bermejo. Click on the image at left for a blowup. And clickety-clack here to see Bermejo’s original Tattoo art.

• “The Reichenbach Fall,” the third and final 90-minute episode in the second season of Sherlock, BBC-TV’s updated version of the famous Sherlock Holmes stories, will be broadcast this evening in Great Britain. This same sophomore season of Sherlock is set to show in the States as part of PBS-TV’s Masterpiece Mystery! series, beginning on May 6.

• Meanwhile, Tor.com’s Teresa Jusino takes a look back at the work of Sidney Paget, the Victorian artist who created our enduring images of Sherlock Holmes, Doctor John Watson, and so many other of Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictional players.

• Happy birthday to Muhammad Ali (born Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr.). The former American heavyweight boxing champ will turn 70 years old this coming Tuesday.

• GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich’s 30-minute film attacking Mitt Romney as a “corporate raider” and job killer was pretty damning of the one-term former Massachusetts governor. But a new ad put together by Romney’s latest (faux) rival, Stephen Colbert of Comedy Central, in the run-up to South Carolina’s January 21 Republican primary election, is certainly more clever. As the blog Boing Boing explains, it “points out that Mitt Romney says ‘corporations are people,’ but he also made his fortune as a raider buying up, gutting, and killing corporations. Conclusion: Mitt ‘the Ripper’ Romney is a serial killer.” Watch it here.

• Blogger-author Paul D. Brazill talks with Michael Haskins about the latter’s recent paperback thriller, Stairway to the Bottom.

• In his latest podcast interview, Jeff Rutherford chats with Peter Spiegelman, the author of Red Cat (2007) and Thick As Thieves, one of January Magazine’s favorite crime novels of 2011.

• Rick Mofina tells the Calgary Herald that his new novel, The Burning Edge, “was ‘inspired’ by [a] 1998 crime and other robberies he had covered” as a newspaper reporter.

• Unbelievable! First, The Killing--the AMC-TV crime drama adapted from a popular Danish police procedural--failed, after a strong start and 13 episodes, to reveal who was responsible for the teenager’s  murder at the very core of its plot, turning former fans irate at the prospect of having to sit through a second season of the show to finally learn the answer to that mystery. And now we hear that The Killing will return to AMC on April 1, but that the murderer still won’t be revealed until the Season 2 finale. Do network execs really believe many people are still going to be watching by then?

• Tonight brings the season conclusion of Leverage, TNT-TV’s series about a group of modern-day Robin Hoods led by Timothy Hutton. This episode, titled “The Last Dam Job,” will begin at 9 p.m. ET/PT.

• And one final TV note, courtesy of Omnimystery News: “A&E; plans a prequel series to the classic Alfred Hitchcock thriller Psycho. An original scripted drama titled Bates Motel, the series would be centered on Norman Bates, and provide a back story into how he came to become the character we’ve all seen in the film.”

* Yes, that’s right: Seattleites are in the midst of the city’s first snowfall of 2012, with more of the white stuff expected over the next two days. Yippee!

Coming Up Short

Today marks the 65th anniversary of Los Angeles’ notorious “Black Dahlia murder.” The victim was an unemployed, 22-year-old woman from Massachusetts, Elizabeth Short, whose mutilated corpse was discovered on January 15, 1947, in a vacant lot on South Norton Avenue. Short had last been seen six days before in downtown’s elegant Biltmore Hotel. The murder--which has inspired a great deal of fiction over the decades, including the 1975 TV film Who Is the Black Dahlia?, James Ellroy’s novel The Black Dahlia (1987) and Max Allan Collins’ Angel in Black (2001)--was never solved.

You can find out more about the case here and here.

ALERT: At least for the time being, the teleflick Who Is the Black Dahlia?--which starred Efrem Zimbalist Jr. and Lucie Arnaz, the latter playing the ill-fated Ms. Short--can be viewed in its entirety here.

READ MORE: “The Black Dahlia Murder: The 65th Anniversary,”
by Craig McDonald.

Exit Lines

Reginald Hill (left) and critic-author Mike Ripley attending a mystery writers’ convention “somewhere in [our] happier--and much younger--days,” as Ripley explains.

(Editor’s note: This tribute to the late British novelist Reginald Hill comes from Karen G. Anderson, a Seattle-area resident who for many years wrote about crime fiction for January Magazine. At one time an Apple Inc. writer , Anderson has, for the last decade, “designed, written, and produced innovative online communications for business and consumer audiences.” She currently holds seats on the boards of the Clarion West Writers Workshop and Northwest Folklife.)

Crime-fiction writer Reginald Hill worked in a class by himself. He expanded on a niche created by Peter Dickinson for deeply literary, profoundly psychological, and quirkily creepy crime fiction. Hill, however, used all of those elements in the structure of a police-procedural series starring the unfailingly uncouth, cagey Superintendent Andy Dalziel (pronounced “Dah-ELL”) and his colleague, the perpetually worried Chief Inspector Peter Pasco.

That 24-book series unfolded over 39 years and was always contemporary. Someone who had only a passing interest in crime fiction could read the series and come away with a firm grounding in the social and political history of Great Britain, from the emergence of British feminism, through the Thatcher era, to terrorism and government surveillance technology, to the transformation of urban Britain into a multicultural society. (The series’ final installment, Midnight Fugue [2009], has the son of a Jamaican crime lord making a bid for a seat in Parliament.)

Enthusiastic fans of the crime fiction turned out by Hill’s contemporaries, such as Ian Rankin and Peter Robinson, often shy away from Hill’s own books because of the strong classics component that runs through them. I admit I wrestled with Arms and the Women (1999), based on the Iliad (and sub-titled “The Elliad,” after Pasco’s stridently feminist wife), terming it “dauntingly erudite.”

But while a reader lacking a classical education might struggle to catch the allusions (I’ve often wished for an annotated version), Hill wrote in clear, pungent prose and devised fast-paced plots that carried you right along. And he was an absolute master of dialogue.

He was also a master of characters. I confess I juggled the ambiguities and puzzles in many of his later books simply to find out what would happen to the astonishing Detective Sergeant Edgar Wield, a man as strikingly ugly as he was courageous and soulful.

And Hill contributed some of the creepiest bad guys to contemporary crime fiction--creepy because some of them turned out not to be bad guys at all ... maybe.

The last three books in the Dalziel/Pascoe series were all about death, illness, and the consequences of aging. Hill, who died this last Thursday at age 75 of cancer, was clearly playing with the ideas of lessening powers, and how society treats the ill and elderly. And how people remember the dead. Midnight Fugue sees the feisty Dalziel returning to work after near-death in a terrorist bombing and panicking when he realizes he’s headed off to the Monday-morning staff meeting ... on a Sunday.

Reginald Hill wrote genre books that did the genre proud. If you haven’t read them, and want to, a fine place to start is at the beginning, with A Clubbable Woman (1970), in which Dalziel despairs of ever turning Pascoe, an effete university graduate, into a hard-drinking, rugby-playing copper. It’s an easy read. You could also jump into the series (as I did) with On Beulah Height (1998), which shows Hill in stellar form. In that novel, the literary bits play second fiddle to a rip-roaring plot that makes the most of the colorful and complex secondary characters in this series. My own person favorite is Pictures of Perfection (1994), which focuses on Sergeant Wield. But if you have literary friends who turn up their noses at crime fiction, hand them the quotation-filled Dialogues of the Dead (2001) or Arms and the Women, and smile.

This is a series I read over and over again, the way I read the works of Australian author Arthur W. Upfield and the Maigret mysteries by Belgian-born fictionist Georges Simenon. I’m hoping there’s another book somewhere, perhaps to be published posthumously. I am not ready to say good-bye to Andy Dalziel.

READ MORE: “Reginald Hill Obituary,” by Mike Ripley (The Guardian); “In Memory of Reginald Hill (1936-2012)” (At the Scene of the Crime).

Hill Toppers

Following up on yesterday’s posting about the death of British novelist Reginald Hill, we asked his friend, critic-columnist Mike Ripley, to choose his five favorite books from among Hill’s extensive oeuvre. He replied with the following:

Under World (1988): Set in Yorkshire in the aftermath of the infamous miners’ strikes. I’m a Yorkshireman and the son of a miner, so I took this one personally. Reg got it spot-on, and his humane liberalism shines throughout.

A Pinch of Snuff (1978): The book that brought Reg national publicity because of the subject matter (snuff movies). As ingenious as always and in parts wickedly funny.

On Beulah Height (1998): Infuriatingly clever, close on a masterpiece. Even the title is a clue.

Urn Burial (1973): Writing as “Patrick Ruell,” this is Reg in Michael Innes mode: a fantastical story involving archaeology, mad scientists, and his beloved Cumbrian Fells. Written with zest and outrageous panache, as all his Ruell books were.

The Spy’s Wife (1980): Sadly overlooked in the Hill canon, but a heartfelt, romantic take on the female angle when a British spy is discovered (as they often are) to be a traitor.

“I could go on,” Ripley remarks at the end. That would be fine, except we’d really like to throw this open to The Rap Sheet’s well-read audience. What are the Reginald Hill novels you’ve most enjoyed over the last 40 years? Please make your selections in the Comments section at the bottom of this post.

Oh, Horrors!

It Couldn’t Happen Here ..., the new blog devoted to that horror TV series Kolchak: The Night Stalker, has dug up a 1975 article that crime novelist Stuart M. Kaminsky wrote for Cinefantastique about the Darren McGavin series and its protagonist, “the most unlikely heir to Dr. Van Helsing that one could imagine.”

“For the longest time this was the Kolchak writeup,” remarks blogger John Scoleri. You can read it for yourself here.

Reginald Hill Passes Away

This morning’s Guardian newspaper brings the avery sad news that British author Reginald Hill, who created the Yorkshire-based detective team of Andrew Dalziel and Peter Pascoe, died yesterday at age 75. As the paper’s Richard Lea notes:

Hill charted the ups and downs of his two contrasting sleuths in more than 20 novels published over four decades after his debut, A Clubbable Woman (1970), alongside a substantial body of other crime fiction and thrillers. He won the Crime Writers Association’s Golden Dagger in 1990 for Bones and Silence, and the Diamond Dagger for the series as a whole in 1995.

Writer Ian Rankin, who won the Diamond Dagger himself in 2005, paid tribute to Hill’s great good humour, the intelligence of his writing and the generous advice he gave to young authors.

“I didn’t read crime fiction until I was in my 20s,” Rankin said. “Hill was one of the first British writers I read. His plotting was elegant and his characters were larger than life--once you read about Andy Dalziel he’s never forgotten. I daresay there are shadings of him in my Inspector Rebus--they’re both bolshie and maverick and they don’t look after themselves.”

In a note sent our way this morning by Mike Ripley, a longtime UK books critic who writes the monthly “Getting Away with Murder” column for Shots, he explains:

I knew [Hill] had been ill and in and out of hospital for about eight months (with a brain tumour and breast cancer), but [he] didn’t want to make it too public, so relatively few people knew. ...

The eagle-eyed reader of my “Getting Away with Murder” column may have noticed occasional mentions of “Professor Charles Underhill”--a venerable academic who has devoted his life to finding and cataloguing all the jokes in Scandinavian crime fiction (!) Charles Underhill was one of Reg’s pen-names and it was Reg’s suggestion that this totally spurious character “only communicates in Old Norse these days.”

He had a wicked sense of humour and I will miss him, as he was a loyal friend and great supporter of young crime writers--as I was once.

Ripley adds that his own tribute to Hill will appear in The Guardian tomorrow morning, Saturday.

In addition to his Dalziel and Pascoe novels, which inspired a BBC-TV series (1996-2007), Hill penned five books about Joe Sixsmith, a black private investigator in the Bedfordshire town of Luton, and a series of thrillers published under the pseudonym Patrick Ruell.

Our condolences go out to Hill’s family.

READ MORE: “Reginald Hill, R.I.P.,” by Martin Edwards (‘Do You Write Under Your Own Name?’); “Reginald Hill” (The Telegraph); “Death of an Icon,” by Rhys Bowen (Rhys’s Pieces); “In Memoriam--Reginald Hill,” by Ayo Onatade (Shots); “Farewell, Reginald Hill,” by Barry Trott (Blogging for a Good Book).

The Story Behind the Story: “Favorite Sons,” by Robin Yocum

(Editor’s note: With this 29th entry in our “Story Behind the Story” series, we welcome to The Rap Sheet Robin Yocum, a former crime and investigative reporter who lives in Westerville, Ohio. He’s written two true-crime books as well as the novel Favorite Sons, which was published last year and named the 2011 Book of the Year for Mystery/Suspense by USA Book News. Below, he recalls how Favorite Sons was born.)

In the early 1980s I was the crime beat reporter for The Columbus Dispatch. I became interested in a case involving Johnny Spirko, who had been convicted of murdering Betty Jane Mottinger, the postmistress in Elgin, a speck of a town in northwestern Ohio, home to about 100 souls.

Spirko was no saint, and he had killed before, but I didn’t believe he was guilty of the Mottinger murder. Rather, he was convenient and easy to convict. I began working on a series of stories that I hoped would prove his innocence.* This involved a visit to Ohio’s Death Row, which was then housed at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville.

Following the interview, I took a tour of the Death Chamber, the focal point of which was “Old Thunderbolt,” the then nearly century-old electric chair that dominated the center of the room. (Yes, I sat in it.) Part of the tour included a visit to a small room connected to the Death Chamber. It was rectangular in shape and just big enough for a panel and three men to stand. On the panel were three buttons--red, green, and white, as I recall. On execution days, at the superintendent’s command, three guards would volunteer to push these buttons, only one of which delivered the lethal jolt.

The work was volunteer, but involved extra pay.

I wondered who would volunteer for such duty. When I sat down to write my novel, this singular act was at the center of the story. I pictured a book that would focus on the life of a prison guard, grizzled, perhaps an ex-cop whose temper had cost him his job on the force, who regularly volunteered for such duty. Perhaps he enjoyed his work. Perhaps he just did it for the extra money. I envisioned a friendship developing between the prison guard and one of the Death Row inmates. Over time, the guard slowly--grudgingly--begins to believe the inmate’s claims of innocence. I planned for the book to be titled The Button Man, which was also the prison guard’s nickname.

That is as far as I got before I starting putting words on paper.

My first step was to work out the crime--a murder--for which the Death Row inmate had been wrongfully convicted. I created the fictional Ohio River town of Crystalton, a thinly veiled version of my hometown, Brilliant, Ohio. I also created four central characters who would carry out that homicide, then remain silent while a local ne’er-do-well was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to die.

After four chapters, the crime was complete.

On a sunny June day in 1971, 15-year-old Hutch Van Buren, the book’s narrator, and three of his best friends are hiking the Appalachian foothills west of Crystalton in search for arrowheads, when they are confronted by Petey Sanchez.

Petey Sanchez was a troubled human being, a stewpot of mental, emotional and psychological problems manifested in the body of a wild-eyed seventeen-year-old, who cursed and made screeching bird noises as he rode around town on a lime-green spider bike with fluorescent pink streamers flying out from the handlebars.

When the confrontation was over, Petey Sanchez lay dead in the bushes, a crater in his head where Hutch’s pal Adrian Nash had struck him down with a granite Indian maul. The four boys then conspired to keep their deed a secret and protect Adrian, their friend and the star quarterback of the Crystalton High Royals.

But that is when my plan for the book went astray.

I liked the characters I had created--Hutch, Deak, Adrian, and Adrian’s brother, Pepper. I found a comfortable voice in the narrator, Hutch, and I very much wanted to see what would happen to the boys in the months and years following the crime.

Thus, my novel had to be turned around to meet the new parameters.

Writing the first half of the book was not difficult. I needed to get the boys through high school, while they struggled morally to maintain their grim secret, even after a local ne’er-do-well known as One-Eyed Jack is arrested and sent to prison for Petey’s slaying. The boys are able to justify their silence because Jack is such a despicable character.

The second half of the book, though, takes place 33 years after those four friends graduate from high school. What impact would the lingering secret have on their lives?

Hutch continues to narrate the second half of my novel. However, I couldn’t visualize him as a prison guard, and decided instead to make him a county prosecutor. (I will admit that there is a lot of Robin Yocum in Hutch Van Buren. So maybe I could not visualize me as a prison guard, and therefore did not take Hutch down that path.) I liked the irony of a man with a dark secret--covering up a murder--being a prosecutor with a reputation for sending men to Death Row. In fact, I resurrected the nickname “Button Man” for Hutch Van Buren, because prisoners believe he enjoys seeing the button on the lethal-injection device being pushed. (Ohio had given up the electric chair for lethal injection by the time Hutch becomes prosecutor.) I kept The Button Man as the working title of the book. But I eventually realized it had little meaning with the new scenario, so I changed it to Favorite Sons, which aptly describes this tale’s four main characters--all favorite sons of Crystalton, Ohio.

(Right) Author Robin Yocum

One of the first things I did before I started writing the second half of the book was to create the ending. I struggled with this for several weeks, developing a variety of possible conclusions until I found one I liked. Once I knew how the story would end, I felt comfortable enough to start writing. I know that many authors say they don’t know how a story ends until their characters tell them. That doesn’t work for me. I tried that approach once. I started writing a manuscript with no idea how it would end. It’s about 300,000 words and the damn characters refuse to tell me how it ends! Right now, they’re all at a cocktail party and I’m thinking of having a tanker truck full of napalm crash through the wall of the house. The End.

But, I digress.

With an ending in mind, I felt confident that I could draw a road map to get there. It’s just the way I write. I like things in neat packages.

Although I knew how the book would end, when I finally got there I was still able to throw in a little twist to surprise the reader. In the second half of the novel, Hutch is running for Ohio attorney general, when the wrongfully convicted man from his youth is released from prison. When he shows up in Hutch’s office, the prosecutor learns that his deep, dark secret wasn’t nearly as secret as he believed.

In the long run, changing the direction of this book made it easier to write. I was very comfortable with Hutch’s voice. My years on the crime beat provided much fodder for the story, but so did growing up in little Brilliant, Ohio. There is something about the gritty, industrial towns of eastern Ohio that draws in readers. While Crystalton is fictional, I kept the landscape of the rest of the Upper Ohio Valley. Much of the action takes place in Steubenville, and I included a mention of one of my favorite restaurants, Naples Spaghetti House, and of Steubenville’s favorite son--Dean Martin. Many characters are composites of childhood friends, as well as individuals I knew from the crime beat--criminals and cops alike.

Would I ever return to my original premise for this book? Maybe. However, it would be more likely that I’d write a sequel to Favorite Sons. I like Hutch and believe he could carry another book.

(Author photo by Mike Munden)

* My Columbus Dispatch series on wrongful convictions featured a lengthy story on Johnny Spirko and the bizarre set of circumstances that placed him on Ohio’s Death Row for the August 1982 murder of Betty Jane Mottinger. Other newspapers eventually covered the story, too. In 2008, after he had spent 24 years on Death Row, Spirko’s sentence was commuted to life in prison without chance of parole by then-Ohio Governor Ted Strickland. Spirko is currently a prisoner at the Toledo Correctional Institution.

Power of 10

Author Eddie Muller benefits from an impressive write-up today in the San Francisco Chronicle (a paper for which he once served as crime-fiction critic). The article’s principal hook is that the 10th annual version of Muller’s San Francisco Film Noir Festival--aka Noir City--is scheduled to begin on Friday, January 20, and run through Sunday, January 29. (Details of that event can be found here.)

But staff writer G. Allen Johnson also takes advantage of this occasion to explore Dashiell Hammett’s old apartment at 891 Post Street, in which the Pinkerton detective turned detective novelist wrote several of the books that made him famous, including The Maltese Falcon (1930). Johnson notes that this Post Street flat--which was declared a local literary landmark in 2005--served as the basis for private eye Sam Spade’s apartment in Falcon. He goes on to explain:

For years, the apartment was leased by Noir City festival announcer Bill Arney. When he left for a bigger place, local writer Robert Mailer Anderson took over and has painstakingly been re-doing the apartment exactly as it was when Hammett lived there, complete with vintage refrigerator and the apartment’s original bathtub and toilet.

Although Anderson and Muller are not exactly sure what to do with the place once restoration is complete (open it to the public? private tours? “Right now, it’s kind of like a boys’ club,” Muller chuckled), it’s coming in handy as the Noir City festival celebrates its 10th year. The festival’s poster was photographed here, with Muller and this year’s Miss Noir City, Helena Blanca Stoddard, and why not? Noir City began with an all-San Francisco program in 2003, and that festival’s opening and closing films also open and close this year’s festival: Dark Passage (on Jan. 20) and The Maltese Falcon (Jan. 29).

Click here to read more about those two classic movies. And below is the video teaser for this year’s film festival.*



* The Film Noir Festival’s Web site accompanies that video with the following explanation: “To commemorate its 10th anniversary, Noir City has returned to the source. This year’s poster was created in the San Francisco apartment where Dashiell Hammett, between 1927 [and] ’29, wrote Red Harvest, The Dain Curse, and The Maltese Falcon, laying the foundation for film noir. Ms. Noir City 2012, Helena Bianca Stoddard, portrays The Maltese Falcon’s duplicitous Brigid O’Shaughnessy, in a variation on a scene cut from all filmed versions of the book. When one of the ten $1,000 bills he’s been paid to locate the Black Bird goes missing, Sam Spade demands that Brigid undress to prove she’s hasn't stolen the money.”

READ MORE: “Up in Sam Spade’s Room,” by Thomas Burchfield.

James Bond: 1962 to 2012

This October will mark 50 years since the well-publicized release of the first James Bond spy film, Dr. No, starring Sean Connery. No doubt, the Web (and The Rap Sheet) will host plenty of anniversary commemorations between now and then.

But there are two celebratory videos worth seeing now. The first is this 50th anniversary trailer, which compiles clips from the 22 Bond films available thus far. (The 23rd, Skyfall, is scheduled to premiere in Britain on October 26 of this year.) Meanwhile, this video parody gives some all-too-honest lyrics to the familiar Bond movie theme written by Monty Norman. The latter video is probably not one you want to be screening during work hours.

And Still She Soldiers On

Happy fourth anniversary to Jen’s Book Thoughts, the crime-fiction blog penned by Lorain, Ohio, resident Jen Forbes.

Of Adaptations, Ovations, and Alien Invasions

• Editor Otto Penzler reports on Facebook (of all places) that this coming fall, his Mysterious Press imprint with Grove/Atlantic will publish a book called The Return of the Thin Man. “The great [Dashiell] Hammett scholar Richard Layman and Hammett’s granddaughter, Julie Rivett, have delivered the final manuscript with lots of interesting notes ..,” Penzler explains. The book, he says, will contain “two novella-length stories featuring Nick and Nora Charles (and, yes, Asta) that you’ve never read. They’re really good and the dialogue is even funnier than one would expect.” Sign me up for a copy.

• I’m also excited to hear that cable-TV network TNT is ordering the pilot for a series based on John Buntin’s 2009 non-fiction work, L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America’s Most Seductive City. I loved that book, which dramatizes the real-life confrontations between police chief William Parker and gangster Mickey Cohen, though I can see how it might easily be adapted into just another shallow, violent TV crime drama. Let’s hope director-producer Frank Darabont can resist the urge to dumb down Buntin’s tale.

• Grift Magazine has announced the results of its reader nominations for the Best Books of 2011. (The post’s headline actually says 2012, but that would mean somebody has been handing out crystal balls lately--and I didn’t receive one.)

• Meanwhile, British critic Rhian Davies (aka CrimeFicReader) tries her hand at a 2011 end-of-year meme that’s been spreading around the Web for at least the last month. Although Davies declines to answer questions about the “worst” or “most disappointing” books of last year, she gives John Lawton’s A Lily of the Field rather more than its fair share of touts here.

• Another Best Crime Novels of 2011 list, this one from author-reviewer Kevin R. Tipple. And look to Kerrie Smith’s Mysteries in Paradise blog for a compilation of the book titles most often mentioned in Best of 2011 selections.

• Let’s just say that David Foster, who writes the excellent Permission to Kill blog, is quite a bit less fond of the 1973 film The Long Goodbye than I am.

• On the other hand, Margot Kinberg’s review of The Deep Blue Good-by makes me want to pick up and read that John D. MacDonald novel--the first in his Travis McGee series--all over again.

• GOP presidential hopeful Willard Mitt Romney isn’t fairing well in portraying himself as “a man of the people.” Expect to hear this quote a lot in 2012 campaign ads. There’s more about the attacks on Romney’s business record here and here.

• This books-oriented video is downright delightful.

• If you haven’t been keeping up with It Couldn’t Happen Here ..., a short-run blog devoted to the 1970s TV series Kolchak: The Night Stalker, then you’ve definitely been missing out on some fun material. Yesterday’s focus was on the UFOs-oriented episode, “They Have Been, They Are, They Will Be ...” (see here and here), while today’s posts look at Episode No. 4, “The Vampire” (written by David Chase!), which inevitably refers back to the 1972 Movie of the Week that started the whole Kolchak craze, The Night Stalker.

• American composer Thomas Newman has been chosen to score the 23rd James Bond film, Skyfall. Newman previously created the music for such films as The Green Mile, Road to Perdition, Angels in America, The Good German, and The Adjustment Bureau.

• Somehow, in all of the recent holiday rush, I missed spotting Robert Lewis’ tribute to The Rockford Files, which was posted the same day as star James Garner’s very entertaining memoir, The Garner Files, was released by Simon & Schuster.

• Sony Pictures plans to go ahead with more movies based on Stieg Larsson’s thriller trilogy, even though the recently released, English-language film adapted from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo hasn’t performed as well as expected at the box office.

• Raymond Chandler gives Alfred Hitchcock a piece of his mind.

• Interviews worth checking out: UK wordsmith R.J. Ellory clues us in on his next novel, A Dark and Broken Heart; Victorian crime-concocter Kate Williams introduces us to The Pleasures of Men; Northern Ireland writer Gerard Brennan gives Paul S. Brazill the lowdown on Wee Rockets; Paul Malmont discusses his new, science-fictiony thriller, The Astounding, the Amazing, and the Unknown; and a new video shows Irish author Ken Bruen talking about his work and inspiration.

• The filming of a movie sequel to Fox-TV’s 24 begins this spring.

• And a news release from PulpFest 2012 explains that the convention, which is scheduled to take place in August in Columbus, Ohio, will commemorate “the 100th anniversary of two of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ most famous creations: Tarzan of the Apes and John Carter of Mars. While Tarzan is the better known of the two, John Carter came first, appearing in the novel, ‘Under the Moons of Mars,’ published in the February 1912 issue of The All-Story, a pulp magazine published by the Munsey Company.”

Tensions at the Top

My Kirkus Reviews column this week focuses on Richard Dougherty’s 1962 novel, The Commissioner. That book, which I found surprisingly captivating (so captivating, in fact, that it bolted to the top of my to-be-read pile over the Christmas holiday), was adapted into the 1968 Richard Widmark film Madigan and inspired the short-lived NBC Wednesday Mystery Movie series of the same name.

Check out that Kirkus piece here when you get a chance.

Poll to Poll

We let you know in late December that Spinetingler Magazine has asked readers to nominate contenders for this year’s Spinetingler Awards--the Webzine’s fifth annual such competition. But since there were undoubtedly many other things on your mind at the time, it seems right to post a reminder. The awards categories are:

• Best New Voice (authors with 1-3 books published)
• Best Rising Star (authors with 4-8 books published)
• Best Legends Books (from authors with 9+ books published)
• Best Single-Author Short Story Collection
• Best Multi-Author Short Story Anthology
• Best Crime Comics or Graphic Novels
• Best Opening Line
• Best Short Story
• Best Book Cover

Click here to make your recommendations.

Spinetingler’s Brian Lindenmuth, who’s behind this survey, tells me that he’ll “probably let the poll run until mid-March,” and then announce the final list of nominees on Saturday, March 31. Beginning the next day, April 1, readers will be invited to cast votes online for their favorite nominees.

* * *

Meanwhile, Lindenmuth wrote yesterday in Do Some Damage that “because there were so many strong novellas published in 2011, I would like to announce that Spinetingler will launch a Best Novella award on January 16th. There will be 10 nominees, and a poll that will be open to the public. Voting will take place until the end of the month.

“For now the award will be kept separate from the main awards, because I don’t know if the novella trend will continue. If it does (and I hope it does) then it will be folded into the main awards.”

We’ll let you know when the Best Novella poll opens.

Cover Stories

Although The Rap Sheet’s 2011 Best Crime Novel Cover contest didn’t draw as many votes as last year’s competition, there was lots of jockeying for position amongst the dozen contenders before several finally broke away from the pack to become clear reader favorites.

Coming out on top was Penguin’s mid-2011 paperback reprint of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, novelist John le Carré’s 1974 novel--his fifth to feature MI6 intelligence officer George Smiley. Another, less-interesting edition of that book has since been released by Penguin to coincide with the debut of Gary Oldman’s new film version of Tinker, but it’s the previous edition that deserves the greater acclaim. It’s one in a set of seven Le Carré re-releases carrying illustrations by British artist Matt Taylor. His image of a crowd hastening past the backdrop of London’s Houses of Parliament, with one gent in spectacles observing his fellows, nicely reflects Tinker’s tale, which finds Smiley being recruited to unearth a “mole” concealed deep within the highest ranks of the UK’s Secret Intelligence Service. Yet another of Taylor’s striking Le Carré illustrations will front Penguin’s reissue of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, due out on January 18.

This, by the way, is the first time that a paperback has won Best Cover of the Year honors from The Rap Sheet’s readership.

(Click on any of the covers in this post for an enlargement.)

Not far behind Tinker in the voting was the jacket from The Snowman, the fourth of Norwegian author Jo Nesbø’s books starring loose-cannon Oslo police detective Harry Hole to be published in the United States. It’s another remarkable effort by Peter Mendelsund, an associate art director at Knopf, whose cover for Mr. Peanut, by Adam Ross, took third place in last year’s book covers contest. (If he keeps going like this, he’ll capture the top spot in 2012.) The Snowman was the first in a line of Nesbø covers for Knopf, giving the Hole series a unified and dark look. For Snowman, the designer used torn pieces of paper to create the figure of a snowman against a black background, with the title and author’s name barely squeezed onto those scraps, and an almost incidental splatter of blood conveying the idea that this is a crime novel. Face-out on store bookshelves, this deceptively crude cover really captures one’s eye. Mendelsund has since followed it up with December’s hardcover release of The Leopard, the fifth Hole yarn, which boasts the scraps-made silhouette of a big, lurking cat.

Completing the top-three tier of winners in this year’s race is the Picador paperback edition of Winterland, by Irish writer Alan Glynn. I’m not sure exactly what book designer Keith Hayes hoped to convey with this cover, but I can make a guess, based on the publisher’s synopsis of Glynn’s second novel:

The worlds of business, Irish politics, and crime collide when two men with the same name, from the same family, die on the same night--one death is a gangland murder, the other, apparently, a road accident. Was it a coincidence? That’s the official version of events. But when a family member, Gina Rafferty, starts asking questions, this notion quickly unravels. Told repeatedly that she should stop asking questions, Gina becomes more determined than ever to find out the truth, to establish a connection between the two deaths--but in doing so, she embarks on a path that will push certain powerful people to their limits.

I assume that the jacket photograph of a bottomless and topless building fire escape (a stock image from Eyespy/GettyImages) is a metaphor for Ms. Rafferty’s daunting climb in pursuit of answers. Meanwhile, the protective plastic covering over the building might suggest the difficulty of her accessing clues along the way. Or maybe I’m reading way too much into that novel’s façade ...

If we push on to complete the top-five list of vote-getters, we conclude with a tie between The Adjustment, by Scott Phillips (published by Counterpoint, with a cover design by Michael Fusco) and Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer, by Wesley Stace (published by Picador, with a cover design by Henry Sene Yee--who explains his design process for Charles Jessold here.)

I would like to conclude by thanking my fellow judges--author Linda L. Richards, graphic designer and artist David Middleton, and critic-blogger Kevin Burton Smith--who helped me sift through dozens of interesting crime novel covers over the last 12 months, the same way as they’ve done every year since The Rap Sheet started this contest back in 2007. Without them, and without this blog’s interested and discerning readers, this annual winnowing-out of Best Covers would not be the success it has become.

Let’s hope to find still more captivating book fronts in 2012.

READ MORE: “Under Cover: Peter Mendelsund and The Snowman,” by Monica Racic (The New Yorker).

“Toned-down Hammer”

In his Classic TV History Blog, Stephen Bowie recalls the short but intriguing life of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer (1958-1960), an MCA production starring Darren McGavin. As Bowie writes,

Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer was produced by MCA, the talent agency-cum-TV factory that churned out oceans of half-hour genre series in the late fifties. The shows were pumped out in backbreaking lots of thirty-nine, shot in three or even two days, for no money (the budgets were often well under $50,000 per episode), on the old, cramped Republic Studios backlot in the San Fernando Valley. MCA had sweetheart deals with the networks, especially NBC, but since there was only so much prime time to be colonized, the up-and-coming mini-major also sold shows into first-run syndication. Mike Hammer was one of those--perhaps the only syndicated MCA offering that’s remembered at all today, and a surprising network reject, given the fame that both Hammer and his shrewd, self-mythologizing creator had accrued since their 1947 debut.

You’ll find the full post here.

Bullet Points: First Round-up of 2012

• In addition to its regular episode-by-episode coverage of the 1974-1975 ABC-TV series, Kolchak: The Night Stalker, the new blog It Couldn’t Happen Here ... also recently added three posts about “Universal TV’s Supernatural Sleuths” (access them by clicking here, here, and here). Written by Gary Gerani, those pieces look back at “How Hollywood’s fear factory tried to conjure ‘Mannix in a cemetery’ for network TV.” While I don’t remember most of those series and teleflicks, Gerani was obviously paying closer attention.

• R.I.P., Josef Skvorecky, the Czech author of such novels as Two Murders in My Double Life.

• The HMSS Weblog passes on the news that Bob Holness, “the second actor to have portrayed James Bond” (in his case, on South African radio), has gone to his grave at age 83.

• Humorist Robert Benchley’s 1936 short film, How to be a Detective, receives an airing in freelance journalist William I. Lengeman III’s blog, Traditional Mysteries.

• Speaking of Agent 007, Steven Powell has an interesting post in The Venetian Vase about Terence Young, who not only directed three of the first four James Bond films, but also “worked with British Intelligence during the Second World War.”

• Only one of Jussi Adler-Olsen’s “Department Q” novels has been published in English so far: The Keeper of Lost Causes, which featured on January Magazine’s “Best Books of 2011” list. Yet already, according to Omnimystery News, film and TV adaptations of the Danish author’s first four books in that popular series are being organized.

• One death I missed mentioning in The Rap Sheet’s wrap-up of people from the crime-fiction community who died last year was English author and book reviewer Celia Dale. Fortunately, Martin Edwards notes her passing away on December 31.

• Three recent birthdays worth noting: TV situation-comedy star Danny Thomas would have turned 100 years old on January 6 ... which has also been proposed as Sherlock Holmes’ birthday. And as critic Edward Copeland notes, Puerto Rican-born actor-director José Ferrer--who appeared in numerous films and TV series during his long career (including The Name of the Game, Columbo, Magnum, P.I., and the 1971 pilot film for Banyon)--would’ve celebrated his 100th birthday on January 8, had he not died in 1992.

• British film and stage performer Sean Bean is supposedly in line to play South African Detective Inspector Benny Griessel in a movie adaptation of Deon Meyer’s 2010 thriller, Thirteen Hours.

• Among the nominees for this year’s Independent Literary Awards are five titles from the mystery/thriller shelves:

-- Missing Daughter, Shattered Family, by Liz Strange (MLR Press)
-- The Cut, by George Pelecanos (Reagan Arthur/Little, Brown)
-- A Trick of the Light, by Louise Penny (St. Martin’s Press)
-- The Two Deaths of Daniel Hayes, by Marcus Sakey (Dutton)
-- Fun & Games, by Duane Swierczynski (Mulholland)

Thanks to book reviewer Elizabeth A. White for this news.

• I, for one, am looking forward to watching BBC America’s “first original series ever,” the forthcoming historical TV crime drama Coppers. It’s scheduled to debut this coming summer. Criminal Element and the Los Angeles Times’ Show Tracker blog both offer more information about the program.

• I wish this novel’s story was as cool as its cover.

• Maybe it’s time to read David Goodis’ Dark Passage again.

• This bungled burglary attempt sounds like something Donald E. Westlake might have concocted. (Hat tip to Gary Phillips.)

• Steve Holland’s collection of covers from books by 20th-century English journalist and crime novelist Andrew Garve (né Paul Winterton) makes me want to dip once more into that crop of thrillers. I’d especially like to own the 1966 Pan Books editions of Prisoner’s Friend and The Sea Monks that he includes. Fabulous covers!

• I’m almost ashamed to admit that, for as many times as I have visited Portland, Oregon, over the last 20 years, I have never once visited the supposedly charming East Side establishment, Murder by the Book. I must soon remedy that oversight.

• And though this is off-topic, it’s still worth mentioning. Tonight looks very promising for American TV viewers. The second season of that immensely popular British historical drama, Downton Abbey, will debut at 9 p.m. ET/PT under PBS’ Masterpiece Classic umbrella. And ABC-TV’s much-underrated series, Pan Am, returns at 10 p.m. for the first of at least three more episodes. Since these shows will overlap, may I recommend that you record one and watch the other?

Boosting “Factory” Output

Issue #9 of the Webzine Crimefactory (now apparently two words, Crime Factory) has gone live. Contents include an interview with Scott Phillips; fiction by Ray Banks, Dan O’Shea, and others; true-crime pieces by Matthew C. Funk and Benjamin Whitmer; and Johnny Shaw’s behind-the-scenes look at his book, Dove Season.

By the way, that Webzine is soliciting submissions for use in future issues. “Crime Factory will be running an average of FIVE short stories (maybe one or two more if we really love something, maybe less if we hate it) per issue as of issue 10,” the editors explain. “These stories need to be under 5,000 words. Seriously, we count.” Look for the submission guidelines here.

Wintertime Is Reading Time

You thought your to-be-read pile of crime fiction was already daunting enough? Well, prepare to add a few more titles to that mountain.

In order to put together a recent Kirkus Reviews post focused on what I called the “First Must-Read Crime Novels of the New Year,” I developed a much longer list of mysteries and thrillers due out during the first three months of 2012. It covered English-language works from publishers on both sides of the Atlantic, though I ultimately culled from that rundown only eight U.S. releases.

Rather than let the complete inventory go to waste, I’m posting it here for your consideration. These are all books I think will be worth reading, though there aren’t many human beings who could so much as hope to get through all 145 of them between now and the end of March ... or even by December 31, 2012!

JANUARY (U.S.):

• Agent 6, by Tom Rob Smith

• All I Did Was Shoot My Man, by Walter Mosley (Riverhead)

• The Anatomist’s Apprentice, by Tessa Harris (Kensington)

• The Best Bad Dream, by Robert Ward (Mysterious Press)

• Blindside, by Ed Gorman (Severn House)

• Bloodland, by Alan Glynn (Picador)

• Blues in the Night, by Dick Lochte (Severn House)

• Breakdown, by Sara Paretsky (Putnam)

• The Burning Edge, by Rick Mofina (Mira)

• The Chalk Girl, by Carol O’Connell (Putnam)

• A Charitable Body, by Robert Barnard (Scribner)

• The China Gambit, by Allan Topol (Vantage Point)

• City of the Lost, by Stephen Blackmoore (DAW)

• Cold Comfort, by Quentin Bates (Soho Crime)

• The Confession, by Charles Todd (Morrow)

• The Darkening Field, by William Ryan (Minotaur)

• Dead Low Tide, by Bret Lott
(Random House)

• Defending Jacob, by William Landay (Delacorte Press)

• The Ely Testament, by Philip Gooden (Severn House)

• The Exterminators, by Bill Fitzhugh (Poisoned Pen Press)

• Fifth Victim, by Zoë Sharp (Pegasus)

• Guilty Consciences, edited by Martin Edwards (Severn House)

• The House at Sea’s End, by Elly Griffiths (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

• The Jaguar, by T. Jefferson Parker (Dutton)

• Midnight Guardians, by Jonathon King (Severn House)

• Perlmann’s Silence, by Pascal Mercier (Grove Press)

• Pineapple Grenade, by Tim Dorsey

• A Quiet Vendetta, by R.J. Ellory (Overlook)

• Raylan, by Elmore Leonard (Morrow)

• Send My Love and a Molotov Cocktail!: Stories of Crime,
Love and Rebellion, edited by Gary Phillips and Andrea Gibbons

• The Spy Who Jumped Off the Screen, by Thomas Caplan (Viking)

• Taken, by Robert Crais (Putnam)

• Those Who Love Night, by Wessel Ebersohn (Minotaur)

• Vulture Peak, by John Burdett (Knopf)

• The Way Between the Worlds, by Alys Clare (Severn House)

• What It Was, by George Pelecanos (Reagan Arthur/Back Bay)

JANUARY (UK):

• As Easy as Murder, by Quintin Jardine (Headline)

• Birthdays for the Dead, by Stuart MacBride (HarperCollins)

• The Cold Cold Ground, by Adrian McKinty (Serpent’s Tail)

• A Cold Season, by Alison Littlewood (Jo Fletcher Books)

• Dead of Night, by Barbara Nadel (Headline)

• Death and the Olive Grove, by Marco Vichi (Hodder & Stoughton)

• Death in a Cold Climate: A Guide to Scandinavian Crime Fiction, by Barry Forshaw (Palgrave Macmillan)*

• Death’s Door, by Jim Kelly (Creme de la Crime)

• The Doll Princess, by Tom Benn (Jonathan Cape)

• Finders Keepers, by Belinda Bauer (Bantam Press)

• Good Bait, by John Harvey (William Heinemann)

• The Lewis Man, by Peter May (Quercus)

• Nightmare, by Stephen Leather
(Hodder & Stoughton)

• A Room Full of Bones, by Elly Griffiths (Quercus)

• Siege, by Simon Kernick (Bantam Press)

• Voices of the Dead, by Peter Leonard (Faber and Faber)

FEBRUARY (U.S.):

• Ackroyd: A Mystery of Identity, by Jules Feiffer (Fantagraphics)

• Archive 17, by Sam Eastland (Bantam)

• Available Dark, by Elizabeth Hand (Minotaur)

• The Bedlam Detective, by Stephen Gallagher (Crown)

• Before the Poison, by Peter Robinson (Morrow)

• Blood Relations: The Selected Letters of Ellery Queen, edited by Joseph Goodrich (Perfect Crime)*

• Children of Wrath, by Paul Grossman (St. Martin’s Press)

• The Comedy Is Finished, by Donald E. Westlake (Hard Case Crime)

• A Darker Shade of Blue, by John Harvey (Pegasus)

• Dead and Not So Buried, by James L. Conway (Camel Press)

• Deader Homes and Gardens, by Joan Hess (Minotaur)

• Dead Tease, by Victoria Houston (Tyrus)

• Desert Wind, by Betty Webb (Poisoned Pen Press)

• The Devil’s Odds, by Milton T. Burton (Minotaur)

• Hanging Hill, by Mo Hayder (Atlantic Monthly Press)

• Heart of a Killer, by David Rosenfelt (Minotaur)

• Hunting Sweetie Rose, by Jack Fredrickson (Minotaur)

• Liar Moon, by Ben Pastor (Bitter Lemon Press)

• The Next One to Fall, by Hilary Davidson (Forge)

• Night Rounds, by Helene Tursten (Soho Crime)

• No Mark Upon Her, by Deborah Crombie (Morrow)

• One Blood, by Graeme Kent (Soho Crime)

• The Royal Wulff Murders, by Keith McCafferty (Viking)

• The Technologists, by Matthew Pearl (Random House)

• Trail of the Spellmans: Document #5, by Lisa Lutz (Simon & Schuster)

• Treacherous, by Gary Phillips
(Perfect Crime)

• Wild Thing, by Josh Bazell (Reagan Arthur)

FEBRUARY (UK):

• A Dark Redemption, by Stav Sherez
(Faber and Faber)

• The Fall, by Claire McGowan (Headline)

• The Glass Room, by Ann Cleeves (Macmillan)

• The Golden Scales, by Parker Bilal (Bloomsbury)

• Happy Days, by Graham Hurley (Orion)

• The Killing Room, by Richard Montanari (William Heinemann)

• Kind of Cruel, by Sophie Hannah (Hodder & Stoughton)

• The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 9, edited by Maxim Jakubowski (Robinson)

• Moscow Option, by Jeremy Duns (Simon & Schuster)

• The Murder of Gonzago, by R.T. Raichev (Constable)

• Never Apologise, Never Explain, by James Craig (Robinson)

• No Going Back, by Matt Hilton (Hodder & Stoughton)

• Pantheon, by Sam Bourne (HarperCollins)

• The Queen’s Secret, by Victoria Lamb (Bantam Press)

• A Sentimental Traitor, by Michael Dobbs (Simon & Schuster)

• Tom-All-Alone’s, by Lynn Shepherd (Corsair)

• Uncommon Enemy, by Alan Judd (Simon & Schuster)

MARCH (U.S.):

• An American Spy, by Olen Steinhauer (Minotaur)

• Angelmaker, by Nick Harkaway (Knopf)

• Another Time, Another Life, by Leif G.W. Persson (Pantheon)

• Ashes to Dust, by Yrsa Sigurðardóttir (St. Martin’s Griffin)

• Astride a Pink Horse, by Robert Greer (North Atlantic)

• Blackstone and the Great War, by Sally Spencer (Severn House)

• Blood in the Water, by Jane Haddam (Minotaur)

• Chasing Midnight, by Randy Wayne White (Putnam)

• Clawback, by Mike Cooper (Viking)

• Death at the Jesus Hospital, by David Dickinson (Soho Constable)

• Deception, by Adrian Magson (Severn House)

• Edge of Dark Water, by Joe R. Lansdale (Mulholland)

• Elegy for Eddie, by Jacqueline Winspear (Harper)

• The Girl Next Door, by Brad Parks (Minotaur)

• The Gods of Gotham, by Lyndsay Faye (Amy Einhorn/Putnam)

• Helsinki White, by James Thompson (Putnam)

• Hush Now, Don’t You Cry, by Rhys Bowen (Minotaur)

• The Last Good Man, by A.J. Kazinski (Scribner)

• The Memory of Blood, by Christopher Fowler (Bantam)

• Murder at the Lanterne Rouge, by Cara Black (Soho Crime)

• Nine for the Devil, by Mary Reed and Eric Mayer (Poisoned Pen Press)

• The Piccadilly Plot, by Susanna Gregory (Little, Brown)

• Point and Shoot, by Duane Swierczynski (Mulholland)

• Poison Flower, by Thomas Perry (Mysterious Press)

• The Professionals, by Owen Laukkanen (Putnam)

• Rizzo’s Daughter, by Lou Manfredo (Minotaur)

• Sail of Stone, by Åke Edwardson (Simon & Schuster)

• Stay Close, by Harlan Coben (Dutton)

• Stein, Stung, by Hal Ackerman (Tyrus)

• The Thief, by Fuminori Nakamura
(Soho Crime)

• The Titanic Secret, by Jack Steel
(Gallery Books)

MARCH (UK):

• Asbury Park, by Rob Scott (Gollancz)

• The Black Rose of Florence, by Michele Giuttari (Little, Brown)

• Bloodman, by Robert Pobi (Arrow)

• Dark Angel, by Mari Jungstedt (Doubleday)

• The Devil’s Beat, by Robert Edric (Doubleday)

• The Drowning, by Camilla Lackberg (HarperCollins)

• The English Monster, by Lloyd Shepherd (Simon & Schuster)

• Fault Line, by Robert Goddard (Bantam Press)

• A Foreign Country, by Charles Cumming (HarperCollins)

• Grandad, There’s a Head on the Beach, by Colin Cotterill (Quercus)

• Holy City, by Guillermo Orsi (MacLehose Press)

• Lost Angel, by Mandasue Heller (Hodder & Stoughton)

• Master and God, by Lindsey Davis (Hodder & Stoughton)

• The Namesake, by Conor Fitzgerald (Bloomsbury)

• The Other Child, by Charlotte Link (Orion)

• Phantom, by Jo Nesbø (Harvill Secker)

• Secondhand Daylight, by D.J. Taylor (Corsair)

• Snakes & Ladders, by Sean Slater (Simon & Schuster)

Did I miss anything important? If so, please let us all know about it in the Comments section of this post.

* Non-fiction works

READ MORE: “2012 Australian Crime Fiction Releases” (Fair
Dinkum Crime).