Friday's "Forgotten" Books: Shroud of Canvas

Isobel Mary Lambot (1926-2001) was from a family of readers in Birmingham, England, but she didn't turn to writing until 1960. She served first in the Women's Royal Air Force then as a teacher before marrying in 1959 a Belgian engineer whose work took him to Third World countries. That was the launching point for Lambot's travels around the world, experiences that would later turn up in her writing—including her Russian-exile Commissaire Orloff who appeared in two novels and was inspired from a period spent in France. In fact, Lambot's very first crime novel was written in Jamaica, and although never published, it connected her with her literary agent.

In all, she published some 20 crime novels, including police procedurals, political thrillers and standalone detective stories based in such locations as Ceylon and the Congo, translated into German, Italian, Portuguese and Swedish under the Lambot name or the pseudonyms Daniel Ingham and Mary Turner. She also had a nonfiction book, How to Write Crime Novels, published in 1992, taught creative writing, lectured to writers' groups and presented "Whodunit" evenings.

She was definitely of her time and the social mores of the day, once saying, "My aim is to entertain, not to preach, but certain moral values underlie my work all the same. I prefer old-fashioned virtues, such as Crime Does Not Pay, while obviously in real life it does! I don't like the permissive society, and make sure my heroines get decently married at the end. If any of my characters leap into bed with each other, it is essential to the plot, and they usually regret it." But she also understood the writing process well, adding that "People write because they want to. It is an inner compulsion. Crime writers write to entertain, to give a little relaxation in a world of stress. It is very hard work." 

Sadly, late in life as a widow she had rapid onset of Alzheimer's disease and after being moved to a nursing home, left one day and was last seen walking into the countryside. As a family member noted, the author's final mystery was like her novels, as a massive search operation was set up with police and volunteers until her body was found against a tree in Yeld Wood. But she probably would have appreciated the funeral—allegedly, as the hearse drove from the Church in Kington to the Crematorium in Hereford, a lone buzzard flew over the coffin and screeched.

Her novels, such as the 1967 Shroud of Canvas, use a plain straightforward style to good effect, weaving character sketches and interpersonal relationships to help build suspense. The main POV protagonist in "Canvas"  is Rosalind, a young widow with a daughter, who had cut all ties with her family during her first disastrous marriage and has recently married a man she's only known for six months, Geoffrey Lennard, founder of a plastics company.

When Rosalind receives a telephone call from Geoffrey's former fiancée whom Rosalind knew nothing about, it sets in motion a series of mysteries and deaths beginning with the murder of the ex-fiancée in the Lennard garden. As evidence and suspicion begins to mount against Geoffrey, Rosalind's newfound happiness is in jeopardy even as she unwaveringly believes in the innocence of her husband. With the help of a surprising ally, Detective Sergeant Barry Thornley, and his boss, Superintendent Longton, Rosaline pursues the truth, dodging the whispers and doubts from the local community admid a backdrop of industrial espionage and power struggles.

And yet...Rosalind does wonder, as this excerpt indicates, although it also shows Lambot's effective sparse style and how she creates conflict:

There was a nightmare sense of repetition. Was she doomed to sit at the breakfast table each morning waiting for an explanation that never came?...She had wandered round the silent house all evening, waiting for the sound of Geoffrey's car, wishing one moment that Sally was not away for the night, glad at another that she was not there to witness her mother's anxiety.

One in desperation, she had phoned the office but there was no reply. Not that it meant anything. Geoffrey could have told the switchboard not to leave him connected with an outside line, so that he could get on with his work in peace...

But the previous evening he had gone to meet Anne...

Shroud of Canvas may date from the late 60s, but it follows true British Golden Age tradition, filled with skillfully placed clues and red herrings alike and ending with a closed circle of suspects gathered together to hear the revelation of the murderer's identity. And of course, in the end, Crime Does Not Pay.

Mystery Melange

Foreword Reviews announced the winners of its INDIES Book of the Year Awards, celebrating outstanding books published in 2025 by small, independent, and university presses, including mysteries and thrillers. The Gold Medal Winner in the Adult Mystery category was A Murder in Zion by Nicole Maggi (Oceanview Publishing). The other finalists include: Silver Medal to Garbage Town by Ravi Gupta (Greenleaf Book Group Press); Bronze Medal to Killer Tracks by Mary Keliikoa (Level Best Books); and Honorable Mention to Dying Cry by Margaret Mizushima (Crooked Lane). The Gold Medal Winner in the Adult Thriller category was The Mean Ones by Tatiana Schlote-Bonne (Creature Publishing); Silver Medal to The Art of Greed by Hans Peter Brunner (Greenleaf Book Group Press); Bronze to Novel Threat by Traci Hunter Abramson (Shadow Mountain Publishing); and Honorable Mention to The Haunting of Emily Grace by Elena Taylor (Severn House).


Submissions for the 2026 PRIDE Award for Emerging LGBTQIA+ Crime Writers are open from June 1 to July 31. Any crime writer can submit their work as long as you have not published more than ten short pieces of fiction OR two novels and you do not use generative AI to write, research, or brainstorm the work. Submissions should include an unpublished work of crime fiction, aimed at readers from children’s chapter books through adults, which may be a short story or first chapter(s) of a manuscript in-progress of 2,500 to 5,000 words. For more information, follow this link.


On their YouTube channel, Crime Fiction Lover recommended 10 cozy mystery series to read for people who love The Thursday Murder Club, and now they're offering a chance to win the first book from each of these series. The entry form is located here. You’ll need to subscribe to their weekly newsletter and answer a cryptic clue question. You can enter until midnight BST on June 30, 2026, with the drawing taking place on July 1.  


If you'll be in the area of Chapel Hill, North Carolina on July 10th, mark your calendar for Hillsborough, North Carolina’s Noir at the Bar, hosted by Tracey Reynolds. Yonder Bar will be the setting for raffles, drinks, and short readings from Eryk Pruitt and more.


Moonstone Press has reissued the books of UK author Dorothy Bowers, once donned the "Queen of the Detective Novel," who published five acclaimed novels before her untimely death from tuberculosis aged 46 in 1948. A Moonstone spokesperson said: “Despite being the only author inducted into the prestigious Detection Club in 1948, and seen by many contemporary critics as the logical successor to Dorothy L Sayers, Dorothy Bowers’ early death resulted in her books becoming out of print for decades. We are delighted to reissue them.” Writing in The Independent in its Forgotten Authors series, modern critic Christopher Fowler described her as "one of the most skillful wielders of the red herring."


Houstonia Magazine profiled the Houston, Texas independent bookstore, Murder by the Book, which has hosted some of the biggest names in crime fiction for more than forty years. Current owner McKenna Jordan says she never planned to buy a bookstore, but “Both my parents were Houston police officers, so crime was kind of all around” and reading was big in her family. Jordan purchased the store in 2009 and in the 17 years since, she and her team have weathered hurricanes, a pandemic, the rise and fall (and rise) of big-box bookstores like Barnes & Noble, the e-reader craze, and Amazon.


Speaking of "weathering," it's heartening to see the people of Ukraine rallying to go about their normal lives as best they can under the constant threat of air raids and bombs. As The Guardian reported, this includes Kyiv's recent literary festival. Visitors flocked to the Kyiv Book Arsenal, and "dressed in their considerable best, they clutched their bags of books bought directly from publishers’ stalls and stopped to hug their friends." Patrons were encouraged to donate books to soldiers, where a donation box had offerings including Ukrainian translations of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, plus a volume by the contemporary poet Halyna Kruk and a recent work about life on the frontline, Please Don’t Be Afraid, by Pavlo “Pashtet” Belyanskiy.


Art Taylor's "The First Two Pages" blog featured Tom Milani discussing “The Briar Patch,” from the new anthology Wish Upon a Crime: Crime Fiction Inspired by Fairy Tales, edited by Michael Bracken and Stacy Woodson.


This week's crime poem up at the 5-2 Crime Poetry Weekly is "Ice Solves the Line Delay Dilemma at Major Airports" by Robert Cooperman.


In the Q&A roundup, Deborah Kalb interviewed Danielle Postel-Vinay (who has written previous books under the name Danielle Trussoni, including The Puzzle Box) about her new novel Murder Most Delicious; Howard Lovy spoke with Michael Maloof about turning his global adventure and tech experience Into award-winning thrillers, including the  Kate Preacher series; Deborah Kalb chatted with Kate Khavari, author of the new novel A Botanist's Guide to Tradition and Treachery, the latest in her Saffron Everleigh mystery series; Writers Who Kill talked to  M. A. (Mary) Monnin, author of the Traveler Mystery series, with books set in Greece, Italy, Bermuda, and soon, Egypt; and Crime Fiction Lover interviewed Robbie Munroe about his series of legal thrillers featuring retired Scottish criminal defense lawyer, William McIntyre.

Let's Have a Conference

There are several crime fiction conferences coming up this month, all of which are in the UK. First up is Shetland Noir, which is returning to the Mareel Arts Center in Mareel on Scotland's Shetland Islands, after a three-year absence. But they're making up for lost time with the participation of several internationally bestselling authors, including Lee Child, Louise Penny, Vaseem Khan, Professor Lorna Dawson, Yrsa Sigurdardottir, and Ann Cleeves. The event has panels, workshops, film screenings, and more from Thursday, June 11 through Sunday, June 14. 

The Hillingdon Libraries Crime Festival is a one-day affair on Saturday, June 13, at the Winston Churchill Theatre in Ickenham, with over fifteen authors scheduled to appear, including  M J Arlidge,  Louise Candlish, Araminta Hall, Tom Hindle, TM Logan, Sarah Yarwood-Lovett, Luca Vesta, and more. The authors will be on hand to discuss their books and writing in various panels, plus there will be signed books available for purchase, a fully licensed bar, and a pizza truck. 

Capital Crime returns June 18-20, in the heart of central London. Over 100 authors and experts will feature over the three-day program of panels, Q&As, book launches, quizzes, and industry networking events, culminating in the Fingerprint Awards, an annual reader-voted awards ceremony celebrating the very best new writing in the genre. Highlights include Lee Child, creator of the globally famous Jack Reacher novels, and his brother Andrew, who has taken up the baton, who will be in conversation with author and journalist Stig Abell. Other featured authors include Elly Griffiths, Abir Mukherjee, T.M. Logan, Vaseem Khan, MJ Arlidge, Chris Brookmyre, Catriona Ward, and Lucy Foley.

On June 20, the British Library will be hosting the 11th annual Bodies From the Library conference celebrating the Golden Age of Detective Crime Fiction (Agatha Christie and her contemporaries). The event includes a program of discussions, presentations, and panels, plua the chance to meet leading experts on classic detective fiction and modern authors whose novels follow in the Golden Age tradition. Although all tickets for this year’s conference have been sold, there is a wait list for tickets that are returned because the person can no longer attend.

Media Murder for Monday

It's the start of a new week and that means it's time for a brand-new roundup of crime drama news:


THE BIG SCREEN/MOVIES

Production has finished on the Birmingham, AL shoot of the Alec Baldwin and Jim Gaffigan high-stakes action thriller, Crosshairs, from filmmaker Mukunda Michael Dewil (Vehicle 19, The Immaculate Room). The story centers on a New York police detective who finds himself trapped on a park bench, holding a bomb, caught in the crosshairs of a hidden sniper—with no way to explain to the responding police force why there is a dead man at his feet. As tension mounts and time runs out, the detective must navigate an impossible situation where every move could be his last. The film co-stars Sydney Park, Kelly Greyson, Michael Sirow, Kate Linder, Jeremy Warner, and Anthony Del Negro.  


Anna Camp (Scream 7) is set to produce and star in Serpent, a psychological thriller adapted from the novel, The Serpent’s Bite, by bestselling author Warren Adler (The War of the Roses). The story follows the harrowing escalation of old resentments and bitter recriminations when an ambitious actress agrees to reunite with her estranged father and troubled brother on a week-long trek through the unforgiving Wyoming wilderness. What begins as a desperate family bonding trip rapidly devolves into savage violence and brutal psychological warfare. Thomas Marchese (Fallen, From Black) will direct from a screenplay he co-wrote with Jessub Flower (From Black).


Amazon MGM Studios has landed worldwide rights to The Kellys, a new action flick to star Arnold Schwarzenegger and Liam Hemsworth, which will be made available for streaming on Prime Video. Hailing from director Brad Peyton and Thunder Road Films, the story follows Jack Kelly, a disgraced NYC cop whose wife, Molly, is taken hostage by terrorists inside an old armory building. Subsequently, Kelly will have to join forces with the people he fears most to save her: his family.


Mason Thames has signed on for an undisclosed role in the Lionsgate John Wick spinoff, Caine, directed by and starring martial arts master and the franchise’s actor, Donnie Yen. Thames joins Yen and Rina Sawayama (who will reprise her role as Akira), and Dacre Montgomery in the cast. The new film will continue Yen’s story arc following the events of John Wick: Chapter 4, as Caine has been freed from his obligations to The High Table. The screenplay is by Mattson Tomlin, writer of the upcoming The Batman Part II.


NOIR CITY: Boston will return to its home at Cambridge's Brattle Theatre, June 12-14, themed around "musicians." Featured films will include early examples of Hollywood noir like Blues in the Night (1941) to jazz-fueled sixties' gems like All Night Long (1962) and A Man Called Adam (1966). Among the real-life musicians appearing onscreen are Louis Armstrong, Hoagy Carmichael, Sammy Davis, Jr., Frank Sinatra, and Duke Ellington. The Film Noir Foundation's latest restoration, The Yellow Canary (1963), will be included in the lineup on Saturday night, June 14, on a double bill with 1945's 64-minute The Crimson Canary. As a bonus film, The Brattle will screen 1957's Sweet Smell of Success (starring Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis) on Monday, June 15 at 8:00 pm.


TELEVISION/STREAMING

The BBC has cast its Poirot in the reboot of the series based on Agatha Christie's iconic sleuth. Edward Bluemel, known for his work in Killing Eve, My Lady Jane, and Sex Education, will play Poirot in Hercule. Aged just 33, Bluemel is the youngest actor to embody the famous Belgian sleuth on screen. The BBC has committed to a three year stint for the series. Per the logline: “The series is an intimate study of Hercule the man and an epic portrait of Britain between the wars. The series takes a magnifying glass to three of Christie’s most celebrated stories, while also charting Hercule’s burgeoning friendship with Captain Arthur Hastings, his early encounters with Scotland Yard’s James Japp, and introducing him to one particular nemesis.”


Private eye shows continue to be a hot commodity, with the latest project being Suspect, a drama series from Hulu that's based on Scott Turow's 2022 novel. Suspect centers on Pinky, a private investigator who searches for evidence to exonerate a female police chief accused of extorting sex from male officers in exchange for job promotions. Suspect is looking to join a wave of other PI shows including NBC's The Rockford Files, a reboot of the 1970s classic; the single-camera comedy Sunset P.I. launching next season; Netflix's A Man on the Inside, starring Ted Danson; ABC's R.J. Decker, headlined by Scott Speedman; and still other PI projects in the pipeline, including a series adaptation of the Adam Brody movie The Kid Detective, also in development at Hulu.


The Intern, described as "a sexy, twisty legal thriller about power, corruption and the true nature of justice," is in the works at Peacock. Based On Michele Campbell’s novel, the story follows Harvard Law student Madison Rivera, who cuts a deal with the DOJ to save her recently arrested brother by infiltrating the chambers of the most powerful judge in Boston, Judge Kathryn Conroy. But what begins as a mission soon veers into obsession and a dangerous game between two brilliant women who are more alike than either will admit. Campbell worked at a Manhattan law firm before spending eight years fighting crime as a federal prosecutor in New York.


ABC is looking to extend its offerings in the legal genre with Holding Court, written/executive produced by Alfredo Barrios Jr. and executive produced by Ross Fineman (The Lincoln Lawyer). The project is a character-driven, one-hour dramedy following a brilliant, stubborn yet book-smart paralegal who teams up with a charismatic, street-smart attorney who barely passed the bar to help run her father’s law firm after his death. The project taps into Barrios Jr.’s background as a Harvard Law-educated attorney who spent five years as a corporate litigator before segueing to writing (Hotel Cocaine, Lyon’s Den, Law & Order, Just Legal, Close to Home, and Justice).


With The Lincoln Lawyer coming to an end, Netflix is looking to add a new legal drama, And Justice for All, a series based on the 1979 movie starring Al Pacino. Written by Jeremy Miller and Dan Cohn (That Was Then), And Justice for All is described as a gritty look at an idealistic attorney’s flawed life as he struggles to fight a corrupted legal system until he finally snaps. Miller and Cohn executive produce with The Lincoln Lawyer EP Ross Fineman. The 1979 movie, written by Valerie Curtin and Barry Levinson and directed by Norman Jewison, starred Pacino, Jack Warden, and John Forsythe.


Actor-comedian Matt Rogers (No Good Deed) has been tapped as one of the title characters in the upcoming second installment of Prime Video's spy drama series, Mr. & Mrs. Smith. He joins recently cast Francesca Scorsese as Mrs. Smith. The first season starred Mark Eydelshteyn (Mr. Smith) and Talia Ryder (Mrs. Smith) in those roles. Mr. & Mrs. Smith is a reimagining of the 2005 New Regency film starring Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie as a bored upper middle class married couple, who are surprised to learn that they are assassins belonging to competing agencies.


Masterpiece PBS has renewed The Marlow Murder Club for a fourth season, which will be based on Robert Thorogood’s novel, Murder on the Marlow Belle, along with new original mysteries. Returning cast members include Samantha Bond (Judith Potts), Cara Horgan (Becks Starling), Jo Martin (Suzie Harris) and Natalie Dew (DI Tanika Malik). The new six-episode season begins with the discovery of a body in the river that is soon linked to the Marlow Amateur Dramatics Society and a homegrown Hollywood star. The team must also unravel the truth behind a man’s sudden death at his mother’s wake, who appears to have died from an allergic reaction, but is there more to it than that? And when the co-owner of a vineyard is found dead, drowned in his own wine, the women work to make sense of this seemingly unmotivated murder. Can the amateur sleuths navigate the family scandals and personal betrayals to unmask the killers in their close-knit community? Series regulars Holli Dempsey, Phil Langhorne, and Tijan Sarr also return for Season 4.


NBC has canceled The Hunting Party after two seasons. NBC sibling Universal Television, the studio behind the crime drama procedural starring Melissa Roxburgh, is expected to shop it to other outlets, possibly Netflix. The Hunting Party, created by JJ Bailey, followed a team tasked with tracking down and capturing dangerous killers.


PODCASTS/RADIO/AUDIO

Sadly, Book Riot's Read or Dead podcast, hosted by Katie McLain Horner and Kendra Winchester, announced that after 9 years of bringing mysteries and thrillers to your ears, their latest episode will be their last. In honor of that milestone, they celebrated their favorite Read or Dead memories in the final installment.


On the latest Murder Junction, hosts Vaseem Khan and Abir Mukherjee chatted with Ben Giles about his autobiography detailing his career in extreme cleaning and found out the answers to such questions as "What happens to a decomposing body?" and "How do you remove the dead whale you just ran into with your boat?"


Meet the Thriller Author spoke with Steph Nelson, who discussed her unconventional path to becoming a thriller author after spending years as a stay-at-home mom and beginning her writing journey during the COVID pandemic; and how reading Michael Crichton, Stephen King, and Riley Sager influenced her transition from horror fiction to psychological thrillers.


On the Poisoned Pen Bookstore podcast, Liz Lawson discussed It Happened One Murder with host John Charles.


Ruth Mancini (The Stranger on the Stairs) and Susan Barrett (All Cats are Grey) discussed how they use real crimes as inspiration for their writing on Crime Time FM.


Authors on the Air welcomed Christine Carbo, who grew up in Florida and Montana, earned a pilot’s license, pursued various adventures in Norway, and after a brief stint as a flight attendant, got an MA in English and Linguistics and taught college-level courses for over a decade. Her books include The Wild Inside and three successive Glacier Mysteries. 


On the latest Spybrary, Shane Whaley welcomed intelligence historian Dr. Dan Lomas of the University of Nottingham for a deep dive into the real world behind espionage fiction. Rather than choosing spy novels for Dead Drop 5, Dan selected five essential non-fiction intelligence books covering the birth of MI6, Cold War tradecraft, official histories, memoirs, and much more.

Sunday Music Treat

Yma Sumac (1922-2008) had a name as exotic as her voice and career. The Peruvian soprano became an international success based on her extreme vocal range, said to be well over five octaves at the height (pardon the pun) of her career. She had a bit of a resurgence in the 1990s, thanks to her song "Ataypura" being featured in the Coen Brothers film The Big Lebowski. Here's Yma singing "Gopher Mambo" (Capitol Records 1954):

 

 

Quote of the Week

 

Friday's "Forgotten" Books: A Night at the Cemetery

A doctor by trade, although better known for his classic plays like The Seagull and Uncle Vanya, Anton Chekhov actually began his literary career writing stories, many of which were in the psychological suspense vein. They were published in a wide variety of periodicals and literary publications, many under the pseudonym of Antosha Chekhonte and mostly written to pay the bills to help put him through medical school. It's not a big a leap as many would suspect—Chekhov worked for a time with police assisting with autopsies in criminal investigations.

Peter Sekirin, who works at the Center for Russian Studies at the University of Toronto, collected 42 of these stories and compiled them into "A Night in the Cemetery," published in 2008. As Otto Penzler pointed out for the New York Sun, these are not mystery stories as may think of them, containing "A lot of drunken behavior, frequently resulting in forgetfulness, which leads to a kind of 'mystery,' as in: What happened? There are occasional policemen, and they invariably leap to erroneous conclusions. Apparent crimes have other, frequently humorous, explanations. Terrors brought on by seemingly supernatural occurrences derive from comical misunderstandings."

Present throughout the collection, even among these early works, are Chekhov's penetrating psychological insight and microscopic views into the absurdity of human nature. His characters here, as in his mature works, are more often than not passive, weak and irrational, although they yearn to make things better or find ways to justify their existence.

In "The Swedish Match," which pokes fun at deductive reasoning, a pair of bumbling detectives find their suspect list growing as they investigate a bizarre murder case after finding "evidence" that the victim was strangled and carried out the window, then later stabbed in the garden to finish him off. The trail leads to the police superintendent's young wife, although not everything is at it seems; in the comically macabre tale, "A Night of Horror," a man finds a pink-glazed coffin in his apartment. His distress only increases as he runs to one friend and then another to find more coffins appearing in apartments.

Other offerings include "A Crime: A Double Murder Case," which is short, but interesting as an early example of noir;  "Thieves," a simple-minded doctor's assistant falls among a temptress and robbers which leads to a personal meltdown as "He realized that it was only due to his lack of opportunity that he had not become a thief or a cheat."; and "The Drama at the Hunt," one of the longest stories in the collection, which revolves around three men who love the same woman, ultimately leading to betrayal, humiliation and murder.

As with all translations, I find it frustrating not to be multilingual so I can read them in the original language (I once tried to teach myself Cyrillic, with less-than-stellar results), wondering about all the subtleties and authorial voice I'm missing. These stories generally show signs of a young writer coming into his own, but even a young Chekhov in translation creates characters who will stay with you.